Ancient of Days (22 page)

“Remember,” she cried over the music, “don’t take one unless you believe—”

“Believe what?” a male student shouted.

“Unless you believe you’re immortal! And if you take one, don’t let it pop!”

“Why the hell not?” shouted the same young man, who had cleared a path to the end of the runway.

Pam replied, “Because if you let it pop, you’ll die.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“This is your soul. If you let it pop, you’ll die within three days.”

“Bullshit!”

David Blau came to the end of the runway, lifted his cluster of balloons, and told the entire bistro, “It isn’t bullshit. Whoever accepts one of these, but fails to care for it and lets it pop, well, you’ll blow away on the wind as if you never existed.”

The theatricality of this speech did not deprive it of effect—just the opposite. It clearly frightened some of those who had come forward for balloons. David had uttered a formula, and that formula produced the desired result: an explosion of superstitious doubt in people who ordinarily took pride in their hardnosed pragmatism. Even I found myself believing David’s weird formula. Some folks backed away, others shoved forward to replace the faint-hearted. T. P. had no doubt. He wanted a balloon.

“Hunh,” he said, almost toppling from RuthClaire’s arms. “Hunh, hunh, hunh!”

“Go get him one,” Caroline Hanna urged me.

Pam Sorrells had just about given out all her balloons, while the black man who had shot out the bobbing souls of the cardboard hominids was distributing his dwindling supply on the runway’s opposite side.

“That’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “Bilker’ll get him a balloon.”

“No, ma’am. I got other work.”

“I’ll do it, then,” Caroline said.

“You’ll get an elbow in the lip,” I warned her.

Almost miraculously, a punkette with a cottony white scalp lock and no eyebrows appeared at our table. A frail creature in a vest lacing across her midriff, she extended her arms to T. P., who went to her as if she were an old and trusted friend. RuthClaire gave the kid to the newcomer as much to relieve the pressure on her arms as to humor T. P. “I’ll get him a b’loon,” the girl growled, screwing up one eye to look at my godson at such close range. “Friend a mine round there’s got one awready. He don’ want it. I’ll give it to your nipper. Be rat back.” She sounded as if she had a mouthful of cornmeal. Half stupefied by surprise, half grateful to her for calming the baby, we watched as she backed away to fetch the “b’loon” from her friend. She scarcely seemed to move her feet.

Then Bilker awoke: “Hey, wait a minute!”

“I think it’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “She seemed familiar. She’ll get Paulie a balloon and bring him back in a better temper.”

“I’d better go after her,” Bilker said.

Something in me was belatedly alerted to the situation’s queerness. “Look, Bilker, you stay with RuthClaire and Caroline.
I’ll
go after her.”

“What’s the matter?” Caroline grabbed my arm. Patrons near the end of the runway engulfed the white-haired girl, and the balloons floating above the crowd were no more useful as markers than clouds.

“I think I know her,” I said, shaking free. “That’s what’s wrong.” I plunged past Bilker, rebounded off a Tech student heading for the stage, squirmed through a gap, and, my heart pounding mightily, sidled around the end of the runway. Spotlights continued to rake the club’s interior, and behind me RuthClaire cried in anguish, “
Paulie
!”

Beyond the runway, I broke into an open area, but T. P. and his abductress had already vanished. They might have taken any of four or five different routes, but I headed for the nearest exit, a heavy door to the far left of the stage. I slammed its push bar, opening it on the intimidating whirr and rumble of the expressway. An automobile was heading down the hill past the front of the club, but it was hard to believe the punkette had trotted through the alley and climbed into that vehicle so quickly. I ducked back inside Sinusoid Disturbances, and the door wheezed shut on its pneumatic retards.

Bilker was at my side. “She got away?”

My helpless look said all he needed to know.

“Shit!” he said. “It’s a kidnapping, a goddamn kidnapping.”

“Maybe not. This place is crazy. She could turn up again in a couple of minutes.”

“Yeah,” said Bilker. “And the Rooskies could unilaterally disarm tomorrow.” His hand inside his coat, he scanned the crowd for one face in a shifting mosaic of faces. “Friggin’ donkey brain.”

“If I’m a donkey brain, you’re its butt. You let RuthClaire hand the kid over.”

Bilker looked at me with malevolent contempt. “Who said I was talkin’ about you?” Someone had kidnapped Tiny Paul, and we were at loggerheads over a matter of no consequence. Even Bilker understood that. He grabbed my arm and dragged me back to the table where RuthClaire and Caroline were waiting. T. P. might be lost (for the time being, if not for good), but he had no intention of compounding his failure by letting someone else abduct RuthClaire.

“What happened? What’s going on?” The women spoke almost in unison. Bilker mumbled something about our having lost the girl’s trail, and RuthClaire, glancing back and forth between her bodyguard and me, clutched my lapels.

“You know who it was, don’t you?”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” I said, “but I think it was Nancy, with her eyebrows plucked and her head partly shaved. You know, little Nancy Teavers, Elvis’s wife.”

Bilker spent the next thirty minutes charging through the crowd at Sinusoid Disturbances, buttonholing people to ask if they’d seen a skinny female carrying a kid in white shorts. He barged into the restrooms—the women’s as well as the men’s—to identify the startled occupants of the toilet stalls. His efforts were unavailing, but he kept trying, as if single-minded persistence would make T. P. reappear.

I telephoned the police, who sent a squad car and notified the offices of several other area law-enforcement units. The cops who came interviewed RuthClaire, Caroline, and me while Bilker continued to play detective on his own. The older of the two policemen did all the questioning. His nametag said Crawford. He was a stocky man with a forehead furrowed by years of occupational squinting and skepticism. So he could hear our answers, he questioned us on the sidewalk out front. His partner, meanwhile, descended into the pandemonium of Sinusoid Disturbances to look under the rocks that Bilker had not already turned over.

Aboveground, Crawford pursued his interrogation: “She was a waitress in your restaurant in Beulah Fork?”

“Once upon a time.”

“Why would she kidnap the Montaraz child, Mr. Loyd?”

I told Sergeant Crawford about the Ku Klux Klan involvement of Nancy’s late husband, E. L. Teavers. I told him how Adam had wrestled E. L. into the vat of an abandoned brick kiln in Hothlepoya County. That was all it took. Crawford recalled the story. Every city cop and backwoods deputy in Georgia knew it. He took a note.

“Revenge? You think her motive’s revenge?”

“I don’t think she planned this herself,” I said. “At the West Bank, she was a sweet, hardworking kid. She liked me. She liked RuthClaire. Somone’s gotten to her.”

“Who?”

“Craig Puddicombe, to put a name on him.”

“Oh, God.” RuthClaire slumped into me. “I handed Paulie over to her. I
put
him into her arms.” She began to cry.

“On some level,” I said, “you recognized Nancy. She took T. P. from you, you didn’t foist him on her.”

“I might as well have wrapped him up in a box and mailed him to her doorstep.”

“Look, you’d been entertaining T. P. all evening. The subliminal-recognition factor made you trust the girl in spite of her getup. You befriended her after E. L.’s death, you certainly didn’t expect her to betray that friendship.”

“I wasn’t thinking about
any
of that!” RuthClaire cried in frustration.

“That’s my point. It all worked on you subconsciously. Stop blaming yourself for somebody else’s villainy.”

Crawford tapped his pen on his notepad. “Puddicombe vanished after that brick-kiln business. His picture’s in every post office in the Southeast, but nobody’s seen him since.”

“Nancy Teavers has.”

“What makes you so sure?” Crawford eyed me from under his furrows. “For all we know, Mr. Loyd, the kid could be living in Acapulco.”

“For all we know, he could be sitting down there in Sinusoid Disturbances with a Mohawk haircut and a safety pin through his cheek. Nancy would have never planned something like this by herself. But Craig may’ve convinced her that this is how to pay back Adam and RuthClaire for E. L.’s death—even if he did bring it upon himself.”

“Adam has to be told,” RuthClaire said. “He has to know.”

Curious patrons, wraiths from the pit, had gathered around us to gawk and eavesdrop. At last, though, David and Evelyn Blau came out to us through these bizarre figures—with Bilker Moody and Crawford’s young partner right behind them. Mireles, the second cop, approached Crawford. “The ticket seller says the kidnapper—the female punk you described—began showing up for Fire Sine Fridays in June.”

“Alone?” said Crawford.

“She isn’t sure. It’s dark in there. The girl always paid her cover and went on in.”

“She just came on Fridays?”

“The ticket seller only works three nights a week, which helps pin it down. She remembers her coming especially for Fire Sine Fridays.” Mireles flipped open a notepad of his own. “The only time the suspect ever spoke, the ticket seller says, she asked if . . . uh, the Blau Blau Rebellion was doing a gig.”

“A
gig
?” said David Blau distastefully.

“When she found out they weren’t,” Mireles added, “she didn’t bother to pay the cover. She left.”

“A fan,” Evelyn Blau said. “There’s loyalty for you.”

“And she came alone?” Crawford pressed.

Mireles had a thin, sallow face with eyes as brown as Hershey kisses. “It’s like I said, Sergeant, she was careful to
appear
to be alone.”

Bilker said, “I found a guy who’d seen her with somebody.”

Sirens wailed. Traffic on the nearby expressway and the bass notes thrumming through the nightclub made the whole hill quiver like a drum skin.

“One of the yahoos who kep’ yellin’ during y’all’s show,” Bilker said. “He got concerned when I told him what happened to Paulie. He said the freak that took him would sometimes sit at a table with a bearded fella.”

“More,” Crawford demanded.

“He tried to play it cool-punk, like—but he couldn’t quite get it on, the look and all—cowboy boots ’n’ jeans instead of tennis shoes and pleated baggies. Like a guy with an eight-to-five job whose boss would can him if he ever showed up lookin’ freaky.”

“Craig Puddicombe,” I said.

“
I’ve got to go see Adam
.” RuthClaire dug her fingernails into my wrist.

“Somebody needs to go back to your house,” Crawford said. “There may be a telephone call. That’s almost always the next step, the telephone call.”

“Not if the motive’s revenge,” RuthClaire said. “They may just kill him.”

“Not too likely,” Crawford said. He explained that a kidnapping usually pointed to a less gruesome motive, like extorting a ransom. If Paulie’s abductors had merely wanted to kill him to punish his parents, they could have shot him from ambush. They could have run him and his guardian down with a car. They could have set off a bomb on the porch. Instead, they’d staged a crime requiring some knowledge of the kid’s mother’s movements, some fairly elaborate disguises and subterfuge, lots of patience, and an entire bistro basement full of luck. Tonight, everything, including Adam’s confinement in the Emory hospital, had come together for them. It was even possible that the accidental conjunction of all these elements had provided the couple an irresistible opportunity to act on impulse. Now, though, they’d try to cash in. Crawford staked his reputation on the inevitability of a telephone call demanding money and outlining a sequence of steps for delivering the ransom.

Caroline, who had held RuthClaire’s arm throughout this spiel, spoke up: “You’re not being clear, Sergeant. Do you think the kidnappers planned the whole thing in excruciating detail, or just got lucky and took the main chance? It seems to me that their initial motive might tip their ultimate behavior.”

“I’m not being
clear
, miss, because I’m not a mind reader. Maybe they planned everything in ‘excruciating detail’ for some other night, but got lucky this evening and jumped the gun. Same difference, as I see it. They’re gonna ask for money.”

There was more discussion. Bored now, the hangers-on on the sidewalk began to drift away. Vehicles eased along Spring Street and our own little alley in deference to the squad car at curbside. The night smelled of engine oil and abused asphalt. Neon streaked the floodlit edges of the sky.

The Blaus agreed to take RuthClaire home. Bilker would ride with them. Caroline and I would go to Emory Hospital to break the news of T. P.’s abduction to his father. The police would send detectives to the Montaraz house, both to protect its occupants and to monitor the kidnappers’ unfolding extortion strategy. If twenty-four hours went by with no break in the case, the FBI would soon play the most prominent role. Meanwhile, Crawford and Mireles would keep following up leads here at the nightclub. Elsewhere in Fulton County—as in DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett—sheriff’s patrols and municipal police forces would set up interlocking dragnets.
Interlocking dragnets
. That sounded good, but I reminded myself that no one knew what kind of vehicle Craig and Nancy had at their disposal. Surely, Puddicombe had not been able to keep E. L.’s pickup truck for the past year without incurring arrest. On the other hand, maybe he had changed its tag, jacked up its body, pin-striped its hood. I gave Crawford a description of the truck as I remembered it—a brief already on file with the GBI—and he in turn had it radioed around the greater metropolitan area. (Any white-haired young woman gunning through Avondale Estates in a Ram Charger would provoke immediate suspicion.)

Bilker told me where he’d parked my car. When I got the directions straight, Caroline and I told the others good night and walked arm in arm down the sidewalk and through an alley to a crumbling asphalt terrace. A smelly Dempsey Dumpster occupied most of this space. Bilker had left the Mercedes beside the dumpster with two wheels on the terrace and two on the alley’s broken cobbles. No one else had even considered contesting the spot. Ignoring the effluvia from the trash bin, I pulled Caroline to me and kissed her full on the lips. She broke away.

“Men have all the innate romance of doorstops.”

RuthClaire had said something like that to me back in December. I wrinkled my nose and looked around. “Not exactly the Moulin Rouge, is it?”

“Paul, please don’t fantasize a friendly fuck later tonight. I’m not ready for it. Even if I had been, this kidnapping would’ve changed that.”

A friendly fuck, I thought. Now there’s an expression RuthClaire would have never used. But hearing it spoken had an effect the reverse of what Caroline intended—it excited me. Maybe I was a bleary-eyed lecher for whom dirty talk is an aphrodisiac. Dirty? A single four-letter word of hearty Anglo-Saxon origin? Maybe, instead, I was a macho bigot who believed “bad language” was the province of males only. Me, macho? A bigot, maybe—but not a muscle-flexer. More than likely, I was simply unused to hearing “bad language” on a woman’s lips. The cultural upheaval of the past two decades had passed me by. I was a forty-seven-year-old southern gentleman only now getting straight the distinction in nuance between
shacking up
and
living together
.

“Look,” Caroline said, “my car is still in front of the Montarazes’. Tomorrow when you and RuthClaire visit Adam, one of you can drive my VW and leave it near the sociology building.” She handed me her keys. “I
would
like to see you again. It’s just that this isn’t the time, Paul. I can’t believe
you
think it is.”

“Life’s short, Miss Hanna. This proves it.”

“Ah, another disciple of the
carpe diem
approach.” Her voice took on a brittle edge: “You think they’ll kill him?”

“They may.” My knuckles whitened as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Puddicombe may, at least. It’s hard for me to believe Nancy’d go along with him on that score. I don’t know what he did to entice her up here, to get her to go punk—but they do share a common pain.”

“The fact that Teavers died.”

“Right. Her husband. His friend. I thought Nancy was free of that taint, though. I thought she’d managed to work through it all unscathed.”

What Caroline answered struck me as a sorrowful rebuke: “People who work through everything unscathed are rare. There may be nobody like that at all, only good pretenders.”

“Maybe so.”

“Could we trust an unscathed person, Paul? He—or she—wouldn’t be human.”

I looked at her sidelong. “The trouble is, you can’t trust a scathed person, either. You can’t trust anybody.”

“No,” Caroline murmured. “You can’t trust anybody.”

We rode for a time. Then I began to speculate on the kidnapping. Puddicombe had been hiding out for a year, eluding the police and plotting revenge. On the night of E. L.’s disappearance into the brick kiln, he had probably lit out for Alabama in his buddy’s truck. There, after ditching the vehicle, he had lain low, probably with the active aid of fellow Klan members. Maybe he had left the Southeast completely, striking out for the Rockies or the California coast. But if he had, he had almost certainly acquired another car. Teavers’s pickup would have been a red flag to every highway patrolman between Opelika and Amarillo. Or maybe he had simply disguised himself—by growing a beard, say—and ridden the bus.

Eventually, though, Puddicombe had returned from his fugitive exile, migrating as if magnetized to Georgia’s capital city. In Atlanta, after all, it would not have been hard for him to find work as a dishwasher or a garage mechanic. The biggest threat to his job would have lain in the likelihood of someone from Beulah Fork catching sight of him, but if his work had kept him, so to speak, backstage, that likelihood would have been a skimpy one. On the street, a beard and sunglasses would have preserved his cover. To trip himself up, he would have had to run a traffic light or neglect paying a bill. And so far, Puddicombe had avoided those kinds of trip wires.

“How would he have involved Nancy?” Caroline said.

Probably a letter, I told her. He would have written only once, and he would have stipulated a meeting somewhere between Atlanta and Beulah Fork. At a roadhouse or a small-town cafe, he would have pressed his case, playing on Nancy’s submerged bitterness and arguing the need to bring about E. L.’s posthumous vindication. Initially, she may have resisted these arguments, but at later rendezvous, each new meeting arranged at the one before, she would have begun to relish the idea of avenging her late husband—maybe not by killing anyone, but by bringing E. L. back to life as a worrisome force in the Montarazes’ undeserved paradise of love and success. Indeed, she and Craig may have fallen in love. Once, after all, E. L. and Craig had been as close as brothers, and somewhere in the Bible it was written that a man ought to wed his brother’s widow to protect her person and champion her causes.

“You know the Bible?” Caroline asked.

“Only by hearsay. The same way Puddicombe would know it. In Beulah Fork, distortions of it contaminate everyone’s thinking, mine included. We have a bountiful legacy of high-minded misquotation.”

“You think they’re lovers?”

“If not lovers, sweethearts. In this day and age, probably lovers.”

“Why so certain?”

“Nancy’s only eighteen. She was widowed at seventeen. Most of her school chums have moved from Beulah Fork, or married, or both. When she told me she was leaving the West Bank, she said it was to ‘seek her fortune.’ Male chauvinist pig that I am, I took that as a code word for husband. She was bored, lonely, and vulnerable. Why wouldn’t she fall in love with Craig?”

“Or he with her?”

“Right. Craig was E. L.’s twin in a lot of ways, and Nancy is a pretty little girl, or was, anyway. They’re both probably fighting to make sense of events and attitudes they haven’t handled all that well by themselves.”

“Nancy was doing all right, wasn’t she?”

“Until Craig contacted her again.”

“Do you think they’ve been following RuthClaire and Adam around, waiting for an opportunity like tonight’s?”

“Looks like it.”

“Then tonight had to be a dream-come-true for your . . . well, your Puddicombe Conspiracy. Everything fell into place. Nancy was able to walk off with Paulie as easily as a kid steals an apple from a produce bin. Doesn’t that strike you as—” she hunched her shoulders, shivering in recollection— “weird?”

“But everything didn’t fall into place. Bilker came along. You and I came along. They had to make some of their own luck, and they did that. Nancy’s costume, her choice of the balloon handout as the best time to approach us, their goddamn perfect getaway.” I took a quick glance at Caroline. “What are you trying to imply? That there’s something fishy about this business?”

“Paul, please don’t take this wrong—”

“God save me, take
what
wrong?”

“I don’t know RuthClaire. I don’t know Adam. For that matter, I really don’t know you. It crossed my mind—just briefly—that this might be a, you know, a publicity stunt. To promote their art and David Blau’s gallery.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Look, Paul, I know it’s backasswards and egotistical, but for a moment I was afraid I was being made sport of.”

“Sport of? What do you mean,
sport of
?”

“Not after the police arrived. And not really before, either, but nothing that happened at the club seemed real. I felt like an outsider, someone not getting the joke.”

“What cynicism! Five minutes ago you were berating me for hoping for a friendly fuck on the same evening my godson gets abducted!”

“Paul, I was confessing a doubt I had, not leveling an accusation. You’re turning this into something it isn’t.”

I was thoroughly confused. Our conversation had gone off the rails with her plea not to take her next remark wrong. Had I taken it wrong, or had she impugned RuthClaire and Adam’s integrity as artists and parents? I thumbed an antacid tablet out of a roll in my pants pocket and slipped it under my tongue.

“Take me home, Paul. You don’t need me at the hospital. Adam doesn’t need me there, either. I’m sorry this has happened—deeply, deeply sorry.”

I took her home, to an apartment complex on Clifton, not far from the Emory campus. My attempts to get her talking again met with monosyllabic rebuffs. She had wounded me by taking potshots at my friends. I had wounded her by calling her to account for her meanness and vanity.

Caroline’s apartment building had pinkish stucco walls, gables with casement windows, and rustic Tudor trim. I parked beside the walk to her front porch, but before I could even undo my seat buckle, she got out. Then she leaned back down and gave a harsh barking little laugh.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was about to tell you how much I enjoyed the evening.”