Cheating at Solitaire (48 page)

“We can take the cat,” he said. “We can even take him to Australia if you want to. I don't mean to separate you from the cat.”

“Okay,” Marcey Mandret said. “You can go back to saying yes. He's lost it.”

2

There were times when Carl Frank honestly thought that the majority of human beings should be prevented by law from viewing any kind of popular entertainment. Viewing it, or reading it—in Carl Frank's world, books were not thoughtful histories of America's role in the post–World War II reconstruction of Europe or insightful analyses of the iconographic elements in Caravaggio's
Death of the Virgin
. Books were like movies, and like television, and all three were engaged in an orgy of conspiracy theories and simple hyperbole that left nothing of reality untouched. Look at it, Carl thought, climbing carefully along the boardwalk as it started to get rocky and badly cared for. Look at the people, the otherwise sensible people, who believed that Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal led by Lyndon Johnson or that the Twin Towers came down on September 11 because George W. Bush had the CIA blow them up. Reality wasn't good enough for them anymore. The messy, stupid pointlessness of it didn't ring true. Maybe that part predated popular entertainment. It seemed to him that people had always preferred conspiracy theories to reality. That was why religions were so popular. No, it isn't a matter of chance and circumstance that you're here on this earth, or that your five-year-old child died of leukemia, or that you lost your job when the plant moved manufacturing operations to Taiwan. No, it isn't chance and circumstance at all, it's a plan, a vast cosmic plan, and you're a very important part of it.

The boardwalk here was really awful. It was true in Oscartown as it was true everywhere else that the rich got better
treatment than the poor, even when it came to public services. Someone ought to come out here and do a good job of snow removal and then sand and paint the thing, and replace the rotten boards. He thought about Gregor Demarkian, and his head hurt. Did a man like that, a man who had worked with presidents, who had headed up one of the most important sections of one of the most important law enforcement bodies in the world, did that man really think that movie producers sent henchmen around to murder prop boys and second assistant grips when they got in the way of finishing a motion picture? What about a bad motion picture? There was a story about G. Gordon Liddy that Carl had heard just after he left college. He had no idea if it was true, but it was a perfect illustration of what was wrong with everything and everybody these days. The story went like this: In the last days before the Watergate mess had unraveled, when the break-in was still secret but didn't look as if it would be for long, Liddy had shown up at the White House and asked to talk to Halderman and Erlichman. “All right,” he was supposed to have said, “I know how this works, and I'll make it easy for you. I'll be on the corner of K Street and Connecticut at twenty minutes after midnight tonight, and I won't do a thing to stop you from taking me out.”

Carl remembered hearing that story the first time and thinking how funny it was, thinking that it summed up Lid-dy's goofiness even if it wasn't true. Life was just not like that, and sane people knew it, but nobody seemed to be sane anymore. Why ever would someone like Michael Bardman, who could eat the cost of a failed minor movie out of his own checking account, bother to pay somebody to murder somebody like Mark Anderman? You could say anything you wanted about Michael Bardman—and Carl had said a lot of it; in some ways, the man was a loon—but he was the most important producer in the history of movies, and not just movies in Hollywood. He was practically a force of nature. It wouldn't hurt Michael Bardman's career if Arrow Normand went down in flames, or even if the movie did.
There was a difference between not wanting a failure and needing not to have one.

The boardwalk had come to an end. Carl looked up and around himself. He was in an area of small, low houses, the kind that looked, from the road, as if they were too low to stand up in. Here and there he saw a pickup truck parked in a drive next to one. He couldn't see any proper garages. There was a lot of snow, and a lot of what seemed to be random items piled up on porches that didn't look long for this world. People fished here, not for relaxation, but for money. People chopped cordwood and cleared other people's driveways and mowed lawns when the fishing wasn't good. People used whitewash instead of paint. Carl could remember houses like this. They existed on the edges of every small town in rural America, existed and not much more. He found the sign that said Bellwether Road and counted down from it until he reached number 6. The ocean was here, right here. It came right up to the back doors of half these places, and yet none of them would ever be described as “waterfront property” in any real estate brochure. It was funny how that worked.

He stepped off the boardwalk onto Bellwether Road and was very careful of his shoes, which were not made for wading through the snow. People like Michael Bardman had a certain amount of responsibility for the way everybody was acting these days. They made the movies that used conspiracy theories as their foundations: the ones where the crop circles really were made by mysterious aliens; the ones where Kennedy really was killed by Lyndon Johnson's undercover dirty-tricks operators; the ones where everything you see and everything you know and everything you do is just code for something else, something darker, something more sinister, something secret. Maybe it had always been like this in one way or another, although he doubted it. He was fairly sure that, at least for his parents' generation, there had been times when most people would have rejected this kind of thinking in favor of living in the mundane day to day. Entertainment had simply become so big a part of everything,
so integral a part of everybody's day-to-day lives, that nothing else felt real anymore. Carl's professors in college would have called it the “narrative instinct,” although Carl didn't think it was an instinct. Lately, though, he'd understood what they'd meant better than he had when he'd first heard them. Human beings were narrative animals. They liked stories. Their brains were hardwired to think in stories. Nothing sounded true to them if it didn't fit into a story. The Michael Bardmans of the world made it possible for people to live in stories, all day, all night, all of their lives. It took training and practice to learn to think logically. Nobody who spent his life at the movies was ever going to get that far.

“Then we turned the entire country into a high school,” Carl said out loud, “and nominated our own popular crowd.”

He felt better after he'd heard the sound of his own voice. He wished there was somebody around here, even though it meant he would have to be more careful doing what he had to do. It was true, what he'd said, about high school. First they made the stories the most important things, and then they made the people who acted out the stories the most important things, because those people would have to be. The paparazzi didn't chase Arrow Normand and Marcey Mandret because they were idiots or because the editors of the tabloids were terrible human beings or even because the public was stupid. The paparazzi chased and the editors published and the public paid attention because these were the people who defined the stories that defined their lives. And defined was the right word, Carl thought, picking his way carefully over a little mound of snow and ice that cut across the road with no way to go around it. Stories were how people defined themselves as well as each other and the world they lived in. Identity was a story. In very traditional societies, the stories were myths and legends. In very religious societies, the stories were religious ones. In this society, the stories were at the movies, and on television, and in music videos, and without those stories the whole damned thing would fall apart. He'd spent a lot of his time in college rolling his eyes,
wondering how anybody could spend his time worrying about this kind of bullshit, but now he saw that it wasn't bullshit at all. It was the most important thing. “Identity narratives,” his professors had called them, and that was what he had spent his life doing. He had spent his life in the care and maintenance of the only identity narratives most Americans would ever know.

“Probably most people in the world,” he said, aloud again. His voice echoed slightly, and the street felt uncomfortably still. Here was a narrative for you: a man alone on a strangely deserted street, where things seem to be moving just out of sight, in the shadows, a man destined to meet evil face-toface before he even knows what hits him. It was not a terribly inventive narrative. Some version of it had probably existed forever, since long before human beings knew how to write things down. Maybe all narratives had existed forever. That was why people couldn't walk through cemeteries without getting the creeps, and couldn't stay long in an empty house without putting on some music or the tele vision. Maybe all narratives started in raw emotion, the kind of raw emotion people were helpless to control. Maybe they started in the conviction that being alone was so awful a thing, it was better to deny that it could ever be true.

He found the mailbox that said “Bullard” and looked up and down the street again. He might as well not have bothered. There was nobody here. He wondered where all the people were. They couldn't be off on vacation, or at jobs in Boston. In either case, their houses would be better than these were. Besides, it was obvious that the houses on this street were not shut up for the winter. He looked around yet again. Maybe there were people here, but out of sight, behind curtains, lurking at windows. If anyone was here, he would know that Carl Frank did not belong, that he had no right to be trying the door at one of these houses. Would it matter? There was only the one town policeman. The state police had other things on their minds.

Carl walked up onto the front porch. It was a wide front
porch, but the wood was old. Something would have to be done about the porch floor soon or Jack Bullard would find himself falling through it. There were planters hanging from hooks in the porch ceiling. The plants inside them were dead. There was an old glider up against the porch wall just outside a row of small windows. The glider was broken, and the fabric that had been used to cushion it was torn.

“He doesn't take care of his place,” Carl said, out loud again, because he really couldn't help it. He tried the door and found it locked, but not locked in any serious way. He jiggled the handle a couple of times and felt the door rattle in its frame. He gave it one good push with the side of his hip and it popped. He wondered if there was a problem with theft in this neighborhood. Idiotic as it had always seemed to him, theft was a big problem in poor neighborhoods. There were thieves—apparently, thieves who couldn't count—who preferred to steal from poor people rather than rich ones. Maybe it was laziness. Maybe poor people's houses were just easier to break into than rich people's houses. Maybe fewer people cared.

He stepped into the living room and looked around. The house was full of stuff. There were things piled everywhere, not important, not expensive, but plentiful, as if Jack Bullard spent money for the sake of spending money. Maybe he did. Carl knew very little about him, except that he wanted to be a celebrity photographer and he'd spent a lot of time following Kendra Rhode and Arrow Normand around. Well, a lot of people did that. That wasn't unusual.

He picked his way through the old furniture and the boxes full of things that had never been used and made his way into the kitchen. The kitchen looked much more lived in than the living room did. It was obvious that somebody had been using the stove. There was a coffee cup on the round kitchen table, still half filled with coffee. If this had been summer instead of winter, the coffee would have gone to mold.

Carl turned around, and looked, really looked. There
were cabinets, but the ones that were open seemed to be half empty. There was a sink full of dishes. They may have lain there, dirty, for weeks. There was the stove and the refrigerator and the sink. He opened the refrigerator and then the freezer. That was an old writer's trick, from the days before digital, when a single manuscript copy might be all you had. You put it in the refrigerator when you weren't working on it, because that would save it if the house burned down. There was nothing in the refrigerator but old food, almost all of it rotting and gone to mold.

Carl went to the line of cabinets and opened one. There were a couple of plates, a couple of coffee mugs of the same kind as the one on the table, a couple of small bowls. He opened the next one and found what had to be two dozen boxes of family-size beef Rice-A-Roni. He went to the next one and hit pay dirt: regular folders, accordion folders, loose photographs, documents held together by paper clips. There would be order to this mess that Jack Bullard would understand without thinking about it, but for Carl it was just a mess, and it would stay that way. He took out the three largest accordion folders and dumped them onto the kitchen table.

He would not kill anyone for Michael Bardman, or for a movie, and nobody would. By and large, people were just people. They did the small and usual things, and the really big ones, like homicide, were outside what they could work up the imagination to conceptualize. Violence didn't even occur to most people most of the time, and the people to whom it did occur on a regular basis generally had too little control of themselves to hold a job for a week, never mind to launch and carry out a conspiracy that required the suborning of presidents. Carl Frank didn't want Mark Anderman dead. He did n't even want Steve Becker dead. He just wanted Jack Bullard's pictures of the wedding, so that no matter what came out in the press, he'd have the upper hand for damage control.

“It's as simple as that,” he said, out loud again, just to hear the sound of his own voice. He wasn't talking to him
self this time, though. He was talking to Gregor Demarkian, even though Gregor Demarkian would never hear it.