Gideon (18 page)

After that, Simon drove him to Kourou, where Marcel pitched his hammock amids the thousands of mosquitoes and got a job in construction.

It was a good job, adding on to a building. Why they needed it bigger, Marcel didn’t understand. it was already enormous. Right on the water. But he did what they wanted. And Simon was right: They paid cash. A lot of it. Which meant the work probably wasn’t legal, not completely, but that was all right with Marcel. It was always so difficult for him to find a job, he didn’t care if what he did was legal or not. He could not be very particular.

Marcel could not read.

Not a word. Not a letter. Not even his own name.

But he was big and strong and worked like the devil himself. He carried, he hammered, he walked on high spaces where no one else would walk.

That’s what you did if you could not read your own name.

It was seven kilometers from Marcel’s hammock to the construction site. Sometimes Simon drove him, sometimes he walked. Today he was walking, even though it had been five days since they had last needed him. Three weeks straight he’d worked, even Sundays, often into the night. Then they’d told him to stay away. Not forever. Just a few days. But Marcel was impatient. Five days was long enough without pay. If he went back today, maybe they would need someone to go on a high place where no one else would go.

The mosquitos woke him before dawn. Even though work never started until eight o’clock, he decided he would start his walk. It would be cooler than walking under the morning sun. And he knew a nice, shady spot under the pipes and planks where he could take a nap in peace. Even the mosquitos didn’t know about this spot.

When he got to the construction site, all was quiet. Nothing seemed changed. The same tools were left outside, resting on the same bricks. The same wheelbarrows were on their sides. The same flies buzzed in the same circles.

But one thing was not the same.

There was something new, something Marcel had never seen before except in the movies. He had not known such things really existed outside of the movies. What he saw was beautiful, he thought. And Marcel was happy now. He liked working for men who could make such a beautiful thing. These men would use him again and pay him well, of that there was no doubt. Well enough to get back to his beloved Haiti. He might even stay at the hotel and tell a fucking German to bring him a mai tai.

Marcel was tired from his walk and lack of sleep. He went to his secret spot, where he rested and waited for the other workmen to come. When he fell asleep, he was still thinking of the Germans and how he’d give them a tip when they carried his delicious drink to him.

It was the noise that woke him.

At first he thought it was the roar of a terrible animal, but no animal was so terrible as that.

Then he thought:
An earthquake
. Then:
A volcano
. And then:
It is God. He is coming back to destroy this shithole and all the buzzing little mosquitoes who live in it
.

The noise was so loud he couldn’t stand it. He screamed for someone to come save him from this wrathful God, but he could not hear his own voice.

He could hear nothing but the noise.

Then he saw it. And he knew what was happening. It was not God destroying the world.

It was man.

Marcel started to run. But as he ran he began to feel the heat, enveloping him, sucking him into it.

He stopped running.

Stopped screaming.

He just stood and stared, and the beauty of what he saw made him cry. The thing was rising up into the heavens, and maybe this
was
God, because he was crying the way he had always known he would cry when he came face-to-face with his maker.

This was the last thing Marcel Rousseau thought as the flames engulfed him, incinerating him almost instantly, melting his body as if it were nothing more than a thin strip of plastic tossed into the midst of an inferno.

Within seconds there was no skin, no bones, no hair. By the time the noise stopped, there was nothing left of the itinerant day worker but a tiny pile of charred ashes, already beginning to scatter in the face of the soft, fetid breeze coming in off the water.

From the
New York Mirror
on-line:

AUTHOR SOUGHT IN NOTED EDITOR’S SLAYING New York City, July 10 (Apex News Service)—Police investigators today identified their prime suspect in the brutal slaying early Tuesday morning of prominent publishing figure Margaret Peterson. He is believed to be Carl Amos Granville, 28, a struggling author who they say recently had unsuccessful dealings with the victim over a novel he had recently completed.

Mr. Granville’s whereabouts are presently unknown, and the NYPD is engaged in an all-out search for him.

Mr. Granville is also wanted for questioning in connection with another murder that occurred in his apartment building on West 103 Street yesterday. The body of Antoinette Cloninger, a 23-year-old aspiring actress from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was found by the building’s superintendent last night. She had been shot twice in the face from extremely close range.

It is not presently known how or if the two murders are related. But, according to police sources, fingerprints were found in Ms. Cloninger’s apartment that match fingerprints found throughout Mr. Granville’s apartment. And those same fingerprints were found on an item of statuary in Margaret Peterson’s apartment. Police have not yet confirmed that the prints belong to Mr. Granville, who has no previous police record.

According to police sources, Mr. Granville showed up unannounced at the Fifth Avenue editorial offices of Apex Books yesterday afternoon, demanding money for a book deal he claimed to have made with Ms. Peterson. Apex publisher Nathan Bartholomew, who declined to meet with him, says that no such deal ever existed.

“This was not our first contact with Mr. Granville,” said Mr. Bartholomew. “Maggie Peterson rejected his novel in May. I have her rejection letter right here, taken from her file. She called the novel ‘fragmented and disjointed’ and said that the author ‘did not have the voice or, I’m sorry to say, the insight to carry off an admirably ambitious attempt.’ In other words, she said no. But he’s one of those guys who just won’t take no for an answer.”

Shortly after receiving the rejection letter, said Mr. Bartholomew, Mr. Granville accosted the late Ms. Peterson at the funeral of his literary agent, Betty Slater, where he was abusive toward her and behaved in a threatening manner. “Maggie was very upset when she returned to the office that day. She described him to me as ‘delusional’ and ‘greatly agitated,’ ” Mr. Bartholomew said. “And I can personally vouch for that, after what happened yesterday when I refused to see him.”

What happened yesterday, recalled Mr. Bartholomew, was that Mr. Granville interrupted the publisher’s lunch at the famed midtown restaurant the Four Seasons, insisting that Apex had entered into a contract for two books with him. When confronted with evidence to the contrary, Mr. Granville became violent, grabbing the publisher by the throat and threatening to get the truth out of him. The restaurant staff tried to subdue the irate would-be author, but Mr. Granville could not be quieted. The suspect bolted from the restaurant and down the street on foot before the police arrived. After the incident, Mr. Bartholomew was taken to the hospital for treatment of scratches on his neck and bruises on his arm.

Although Mr. Bartholomew as had no further contact with him, the veteran publisher is under police protection, and additional security has been added throughout the Apex office building.

“It was a scary experience,” stated Bartholomew, clearly distraught. “He’s strong and physically imposing and clearly thinks the whole world is suddenly out to get him. If I hadn’t been so frightened, I would have thought it was sad. I really hope they find him soon, because he’s dangerous. This is obviously a deeply, deeply disturbed young man.”

Police are also questioning a witness, Mr. Seamus Dillon, of Douglaston, Queens, a limousine driver who works for the car service often used by Ms. Peterson. Mr. Dillon positively identified Mr. Granville as a man he saw loitering outside Ms. Peterson’s building when he dropped her off there several weeks ago.

Ms. Cloninger, who was Mr. Granville’s upstairs neighbor, was employed as a waitress at Son House, a blues bar in the Chelsea area. She was acquainted with Mr. Granville, a coworker told police. Mr. Granville had visited her there when she was working recently. The two appeared to be “extremely friendly,” according to the coworker, and they left together at the end of Ms. Cloninger’s shift.

Mr. Granville is a 1992 graduate of Cornell, where he starred on the basketball team and edited the literary magazine.
New York Magazine
senior editor Rain Finkelstein, a Cornell classmate who has hired him to write occasional freelance articles in the past two years, described Mr. Granville as “a real all-American boy. The kind you’d take home to meet Mom. Clean-cut. Easygoing. I find all this really hard to believe.”

She did, however, go on to characterize him as “a man on a mission. It was clear that what he really wanted more than anything in the world was to be a novelist. It was like a holy crusade with him. I guess when the crusade failed, he just went off the deep end.

* * *

Amanda Mays could not believe it. Not one word of it.

Carl Granville dangerous? Carl Granville a
murderer
? Her Carl? The man who used to brush her hair so gently, so sweetly, after a shower, then softly kiss her shoulders? Who would squeeze her fresh orange juice in the morning? The man who sat in his seat sobbing for then minutes at the end of
Babe
? Okay, so he was a bit immature. Stubborn. Unrealistic. Infuriating. A great big blond mistake of a man for any self-respecting professional woman to fall in love with. A man whom she lay awake at night wishing she could flush clean out of her system—if only Drano would show some mercy and invent such a product. Carl was all of those things, to be sure. But a murderer? No way. Besides, she’d seen him talking to Maggie Peterson at Betty’s funeral. She’d driven him home. He hadn’t been agitated. Just his usual boyish, jovial, impossible self.

This wasn’t possible. This
couldn’t
be possible.

But there it was, jumping out at her from the screen of her office computer.

Amanda had first learned about it when she saw it on TV earlier that morning. She was up at five A.M., as always, wired and ready. She never slept past five. Too many stories working. Too much to do. She’d fired up the coffeemaker and flicked on the early morning roundup on Apex’s All News Network. She’d stretched out on the living room carpet and begun her regular morning regimen of tummy tucks, butt burners, and positive thoughts.

She loved her house. She was renting a converted brick carriage house that was out back of the colossal Georgian mansion on Klingle Street in Kalorama. The mansion belonged to the former U.S. ambassador to Brazil. She had two big bedrooms, a gourmet kitchen, skylights, her own patio, a garden. She adored her garden. Herbs. She could barely believe it, but she was growing herbs. She loved D.C. It had all of the energy and pulse and power of New York, but here she could live and breathe. She was one block from the National Zoological Park. Two from St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The office was less than twenty minutes away. And that was another thing—she was crazy about her job, too. Yes, she was happy here. She was totally and completely happy here.

That’s what Amanda was thinking as she lay there contorted on the floor, groaning and grunting, when suddenly a man’s photograph flashed up on the TV screen. The man looked eerily familiar. It took her a second to realize why.

It was Carl’s photograph up there on the screen. An old photo of him from his playing days at Cornell. And the announcer was saying that he was the primary suspect in the murder of Maggie Peterson. She watched, transfixed, as they showed a close-up of a letter Maggie had written, rejecting Carl’s novel. They interviewed the publisher of Apex Books, who talked about Carl physically assaulting him in the Four Seasons. And they’d already begun digging into Carl’s background—his solitary ways, his obsessive desire to become a successful writer. Jesus. They were making it sound like she’d once been in love with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Flabbergasted, she had logged onto her computer and surfed every news service she could find. Nothing more had come over any of the wires yet. No details. Trembling, her heart racing, she threw on a sweater and a pair of slacks, ran her hands through her unruly mass of red hair, wishing more than ever that she had the nerve to hack it all off. She jumped into her aging Subaru, yelled at it to please, please, start—it did, thank God—and floored it down Connecticut Avenue. At Dupont Circle she veered off onto Massachusetts Avenue and took the turn onto Fourteenth on two wheels. The
Journal’s
offices were across from Commerce. By the time she got to her desk, she’d found this latest story on the Apex news wire, confirming that it was so.

Carl Granville was wanted for murder. They were searching for him. He was missing. Missing and presumed guilty.

But how could this be? How?

Amanda took a sip from her fifth cup of coffee of the morning. She stared out through her glass partition at the newsroom, which was just beginning to awaken. It was still not eight o’clock. As deputy metro editor, Amanda was “against the wall,” which officially meant she had a small glassed-in office next to the metro editor’s large glassed-in office. Unofficially it meant she was on a fast track to the national desk, provided she didn’t screw up or make any power enemies in management. For now, she had no window, half of a secretary, and her babies.

One of her babies was asleep on Amanda’s couch, her long legs sprawled over the upholstered armrest. Shaneesa Perryman had one shoe on; the other was lying several feet away, as if she’d kicked the first off, exhausted, then didn’t have the energy to bother with the second one. A cherry-red sweater was drawn up to her neck, substituting for a blanket. Shaneesa was Amanda’s favorite. She’d come to the States from Jamaica thirteen years ago, when she was ten years old, and still had a touch of saucy island lilt to her voice. Her family didn’t have a dime and she’d done her time in the projects, using her brain and her personality to help her escape. Shaneesa was fearless, funny, almost six feet tall, and could do things with a computer that Bill Gates hadn’t even dreamed of. When she stirred, her unfocused eyes took in the room. For a moment she looked a though she didn’t know where she was. Then her face softened when she spotted Amanda’s concerned expression.