In the Night Season (15 page)

She waited.

“Reuther’s a very big-time guy, okay? Used to work for Interpol, and like that. A once cop—you know? And—well, what the hell. Why not? It was like this: I was stationed in Germany, working computers for this company based in LA. And—and I’m sitting on this assembly line, talking to this guy about these—you know what a microchip is?”

“No.”

He shook his head, this time with a small, snickering laugh. He was the type of man who enjoyed having the advantage of superior knowledge. “It’s these little things that computers run on. They
are
the computer, okay? And—and so this company’s making them—expensive, top-of-the-line technology: high-end workstation stuff, and video-compression chips, these new graphics-rendering engines for virtual reality. There’s this revolution in immersive virtual reality. You know anything about computers?”

“No.”

“Virtual reality? Ever heard that? Your son must’ve mentioned that to you—it’s the coming thing in video games.”

“No,” she said.

“Well,” Travis went on. “This is state-of-the-art stuff, hot off the line. Hell, they hadn’t even put it out on the market yet. And they had all this quality control, you know, and security badges,
and stuff. Because new-wave microchips are always worth a lot of money. More than twenty-five hundred dollars apiece on the legal market. Well, I was pretty good at getting around security. I’d been trained in the army. So one night I break into the place and take some of the chips. A whole lot of them—more than twelve hundred—no bigger than a saltine cracker. Unmarked, untraceable. Real easy to move around and hide, once you pack them right. And each one’s worth twenty-five hundred bucks—well, a little more than half that on the black market. But we had a couple of parties interested, you see? We were gonna get near-market value, because these—types—didn’t have the technology and wanted to use them to make a bunch more of their own. So it was perfect. We’d got ourselves the best thing to steal. Except getting it to where we could settle with our—we’ll call them bidders—turns out to be a little more complicated. These are Pakistanis and Japanese, with no love of us, or of each other. So it was a matter of getting Reuther’s help bringing them over, and your hubby’s help keeping them safe.”

She looked at him.

He nodded. “Jack was the guy we sent them to over here. There was this guy we knew in the army. Bobby Rickerts. Jack knew him pretty good. Rickerts was supposed to be arranging things with the other parties. The bidders.”

“I never saw or got an inkling of any of this,” she said. “You’ll just have to believe me.”

“You know how much money we’re talking about?”

“I don’t care,” she told him.

He said nothing for a time, humming low to himself.

She observed the countryside, which she did not yet recognize specifically. She searched for a landmark, something to place herself.

“Put your head down, goddammit.”

She did so. “My husband wouldn’t be a part of something like what you’ve just described,” she said.

“He didn’t even hesitate. His cut was going to be a hundred-seventy thousand dollars, and he didn’t even hesitate.”

“Well then—” she paused, stifled a sob, swallowed.

“Well then, what?”

“What did Mr. Bishop—what was his—how did he—”

“Oh, Mr. Bishop. He dead.” Travis laughed. “You ever read
Heart of Darkness
?”

She said nothing.

“Mr. Bishop. He dead.” The laugh came again.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Please.”

“It’s literature, you know. I’ve done a little reading.”

“I wasn’t asking you about literature, you—” She was trying to stop crying. “You—”

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t call names.”

To her own astonishment, she held on.

“That business was all Bags. Billy boy. My excitable younger brother. What happened with the—the black guy. That got me, too, when I found it. Bags is a little high-strung, and he’s been getting worse. The guy must’ve got on his nerves.”

“Why did you wait until now to come here?” she said.

“We had this nice bidding situation. Even had some Indians and Russians interested for a little while. But it would’ve been sooner. I mean there’s time pressure now, because the technology is changing all the time, and the value’s sort of sinking. Billy and I messed around and got ourselves arrested and sent to the farm for a few months. And then we thought we’d have plenty more of the damn things, too. Didn’t see no sense in taking any unnecessary risks. But then the authorities were starting to get wise, and we started seeing the value of what we’d already brought over. But then we got put away and that was a complication, too. Bags ain’t fit for the life of a thief. If he was, I never would’ve had to think of approaching old Jack. But we just couldn’t trust Bags alone here. And Jack knew Rickerts.”

“I never heard of him. Or you. We were married for almost thirteen years—”

“You think I’m making all this up?”

She let the tears come now.

“Okay, that’s all the crying,” he said.

She couldn’t stop it.

“Come on,” he said. “Cut it out. It’s annoying.”

She felt the car slow to a stop, and when she tried to sit up his hand closed, hard, on the back of her neck.

“Okay?” he was saying. “You gonna stop now?”

“I’ll stop, I’ll stop,” she said, rasping.

After a time he let go, and the car started moving again. The quiet seemed to lengthen. The muscles of her back contracted in a spasm. She straightened a little, breathed out, then drew herself down, attempting to be absolutely still.

A moment later, wanting to keep him talking, she said, “What did you do to—to—” She couldn’t get it out.

“What?” he said impatiently.

“Get arrested?”

He said, “Oh, that. Well, it’s true I can’t control Billy like I used to. He got into it with this guy in a bar in Annapolis and ended up knocking a cop around, too, and I had to step in and help him out. We got a year apiece. A year apiece, and when I think what they could’ve got us for, it’s funny. But we were on best behavior and after five months we got assigned to this halfway house in Montgomery County.” He laughed. “We just walked away from it. And Reuther—fucking Reuther was waiting for us, of course.”

“I don’t get it. My husband was a contractor. He built houses and sold them.”

“He did computers in the army, right. I worked in the same section with him. And he got to know Rickerts. Rickerts has the resources to get rid of everything at top dollar.”

“I don’t believe this,” Nora said. “I don’t.”

After a period of time, she sat up again.

They had come down out of the hills and had entered Route 66. She glanced furtively back to see what the road had been. It looked like the Grand Meadows exit. She couldn’t be certain. They went along Route 240, heading into the little town with its shops and its road sign with all the distances painted on—the mileage to cities in Florida and Maine and California and so on, the thousands of miles to the Far East. They turned right and went on through the central cluster of streets and up the incline, the low hill, which then slowly
descended, along Steel Run Creek. Soon they were circling the big end of Bishop’s farm, coming around to the turnoff to her house. She saw the house off in the distance as they made the turn. The road was stitched with shade, and the morning had become still brighter, the sun showing the rich white, billowing folds of the tall clouds that were drifting off to the west. The house looked like itself. As they pulled into the drive she saw what was visible of Ed Bishop’s place—the curve of the roof—and her stomach turned over under her heart. It was so quiet. She got out of the car, and Travis did, too. He seemed the slightest bit wary. He looked up and down the road. “Okay, what we do—we play this very calm and straight.” He stepped close. “We got lots of time to look around. Anybody sees us, I’m an old friend of your husband’s, visiting from out of town. Helping you go through his things. That’s the truth, so it’ll be easy to say. And let’s see—anybody wants to know where your boy is, he’s on the road south with his grandfather. They’re—visiting Civil War battlefields. And they haven’t got in touch. They left two days ago. Got it? He didn’t go to school the last couple days anyway.”

She stopped. “His grandfather? What have you—what are you—”

“Got it?” he said, squeezing her arm.

“Yes.”

“Repeat it.”

She did so. She could tell by the small tremor in his voice that he was nervous. She saw the big slope of his shoulders, the powerful arms, the cords of muscle in the neck, and felt damp under her skin.

“You didn’t know the boy hadn’t been going to school, did you?”

She glanced at him, but gave no answer, attempting to remove all expression from her face.

“Forging notes from teachers and faking homework. Right? Probably forging your signature, too. I think he’s on his way to a life of crime.”

Still, she kept silent.

“Okay, look,” he said. “We play it nice and cool. And when we find what we’re after, we get out. That simple. Anybody calls, you handle it exactly the way I said.”

Inside the house, there was a chair sitting out in the hallway—the only thing out of place. “I have to change,” she said. “I have to wash my face.”

He smiled. “You look like hell, it’s true.”

“Please,” she said.

“I ain’t gonna do anything. When the time comes, I won’t have to.”

She walked through to her bedroom and he followed. She brought a pair of jeans out and put them on under the dress, then pulled it over her shoulders, and quickly got into a blouse. She put socks on and tennis shoes.

“Love to watch a lady go about keeping herself covered,” he said.

She edged past him and hurried through to the bathroom, where she ran water over her face and buried it for a few protected-feeling instants in a clean terry cloth towel. In the kitchen, she indicated the broken pane in the back door. “What about this?”

“Yeah. I’ll have to do something about it.”

“I don’t even know where to start looking,” she said. She hoped to keep him focused on the task at hand.

He said, “Where did Jack keep things?”

“He wasn’t like that,” she told him. “We didn’t have any secret—” She stopped. “I didn’t think there were any—”

“Where’d he work?”

“In the basement.”

“Come on.”

She led him down—remembering with a painful sick twinge what had happened with the fat man last night. The sound of Travis behind her on the stairs, in that closed-in space, the proximity of him, made her woozy. There was all his talk about crimes he hadn’t been caught or punished for. It was as if these acts, whatever they might be, should be grafted to him somehow, on his skin. In the slovenly features of his gross brother. And the terrifying thing was how ordinary they both looked: men obviously fixed in one social strata—the kind whose very appearance announced what sort of music they listened to, and what kind of car they might want to drive, what their attitudes would be on problems involving politics, or sociology; or the relations between women and men—except
that these two had dull, flat green eyes and the demeanor, really, of big, headlong schoolboys. Young men who were easily entertained and liked to laugh. And Travis was evidently a man who had some education, too.

“What a mess,” he said, standing in the center of the basement.

She took part of a plastic cover off an old typewriter. Dust flew. He lifted a box of books and began emptying it on the dusty cement floor.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she said. “There’s no cartons down here.”

“Look for a piece of paper with a number on it—phone number, box number, bank, anything like that.”

Together they went through the desk, a big antique rolltop, with a hundred little drawers and compartments—old bills, old letters, plans to houses, some sketches, a pad of legal paper with a series of numbers written across the top. “Is that a combination?” he said.

“I don’t know what it is.”

“Let me have it.”

She gave it to him.

He held it close in the dimness. “Looks like a combination.”

“I don’t know.”

“Anything padlocked, that you know of?”

“No.”

He tore the page from the pad and put it in his shirt pocket. “Might find something later, you never know.” He paged through the rest of the pad, then put it back on the desk. “Nothing else.”

She had brought some ledger pages out of one of the drawers.

“What’re those?”

“Account pages,” she said. She handed them to him. It was all columns of numbers. He only glanced at them. She went back to rifling the drawers, pulling out old checkbooks, out-of-date magazines, cut-out pages of newspapers—Jack had saved everything on the Gulf War.

In a corner of the room, stacked against the wall, Travis found some panes of glass. “Look at these,” he said.

“My husband—broke—broke the door once in a fight with me,” she said and felt as though she had given away a part of herself. She sat in the chair at the desk and put her head in her hands. “I don’t know.”

“You guys fight a lot?”

The anger came rushing back; there was something almost hopeless about it, a giving in. “Fuck off,” she heard herself say.

“Hey, I’m a friend of the family. I told you how I feel about a woman talking that way.”

“I won’t talk about my marriage,” she said.

“Okay. So he broke a window. And he bought some panes of glass for the next time? He had plans to break it again?”

“He was a builder. He bought things in lots. I don’t know.”

“Well, this is a happy thing,” Travis said. “This makes me think we’re gonna get through all this. You keep looking, and I’ll go replace the pane in the door.”

She didn’t move from the desk. Perhaps five minutes passed. She heard him walking around up there, overhead. Finally she started sifting through the papers on the desktop. She stood and opened all the smaller compartments, most of which were empty. She felt as if she were prying. In the years of their life together there had been a mutual respect between them concerning some personal matters: their intimacy had never extended so far as to include, for instance, opening each other’s mail, or intruding on the other’s area of responsibility regarding the house, the business, and Jason. Jack had kept the accounts and managed the money.