Leviathan (37 page)

I learned nothing more after that. Eight months passed, and when Iris and I returned to Vermont at the end of June, I had all but given up on the notion of finding him. Of the hundreds of possible
outcomes I imagined, the one that seemed most plausible was that he would never surface again. I had no idea how long the bombings would last, no inkling of when the end would come. And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it—which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever. The struggle was to accept that, to coexist with the forces of my own uncertainty. Desperate as I was for a resolution, I had to understand that it might never come. You can hold your breath for just so long, after all. Sooner or later, a moment comes when you have to start breathing again—even if the air is tainted, even if you know it will eventually kill you.

The article in the
Times
caught me with my guard down. I had grown so accustomed to my ignorance by then that I no longer expected anything to change. Someone had died on that road in Wisconsin, but even though I knew it could have been Sachs, I wasn’t prepared to believe it. It took the arrival of the FBI men to convince me, and even then I clung to my doubts until the last possible moment—when they mentioned the telephone number that had been found in the dead man’s pocket. After that, a single image burned itself into my mind, and it has stayed with me ever since: my poor friend bursting into pieces when the bomb went off, my poor friend’s body scattering in the wind.

That was two months ago. I sat down and started this book the next morning, and since then I have worked in a state of continual panic—struggling to finish before I ran out of time, never knowing if I would be able to reach the end. Just as I predicted, the men from the FBI have kept themselves busy on my account. They’ve talked to my mother in Florida, to my sister in Connecticut, to my friends in New York, and all summer long people have been calling to tell me about these visits, worried that I must be in some kind of trouble. I’m not in trouble yet, but I fully expect to be in the near future.
Once my friends Worthy and Harris discover how much I’ve held back from them, they’re bound to be irritated. There’s nothing I can do about that now. I realize there are penalties for withholding information from the FBI, but under the circumstances I don’t see how I could have acted any differently. I owed it to Sachs to keep my mouth shut, and I owed it to him to write this book. He was brave enough to entrust me with his story, and I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I had let him down.

I wrote a short, preliminary draft in the first month, sticking only to the barest essentials. When the case was still unsolved at that point, I went back to the beginning and started filling in the gaps, expanding each chapter to more than twice its original length. My plan was to go through the manuscript as many times as necessary, to add new material with each successive draft, and to keep at it until I felt there was nothing left to say. Theoretically, the process could have continued for months, perhaps even for years—but only if I was lucky. As it is, these past eight weeks are all I will ever have. Three-quarters of the way into the second draft (in the middle of the fourth chapter), I was forced to stop writing. That was yesterday, and I’m still trying to come to grips with how suddenly it happened. The book is over now because the case is over. If I put in this final page, it is only to record how they found the answer, to note the last little surprise, the ultimate twist that concludes the story.

Harris was the one who cracked it. He was the older of the two agents, the talkative one who had asked me questions about my books. As it happened, he eventually went to a store and bought some of them, just as he had promised to do when he visited with his partner in July. I don’t know whether he was planning to read them or was simply acting on a hunch, but the copies he bought turned out to have been signed with my name. He must have remembered what I
told him about the curious autographs that had been cropping up in my books, and so he called here about ten days ago to ask me if I had ever been in that particular store, located in a small town just outside of Albany. I told him no, I hadn’t, I’d never even set foot in that town, and then he thanked me for my help and hung up. I told the truth only because I saw no purpose in lying. His question had nothing to do with Sachs, and if he wanted to look for the person who had been forging my signature, what possible harm could come of that? I thought he was doing me a favor, but in point of fact I had just handed him the key to the case. He turned the books over to the FBI lab the next morning, and after a thorough search for fingerprints, they came up with a number of clean sets. One of them belonged to Sachs. Ben’s name must have been known to them already, and since Harris was a crafty fellow, he wouldn’t have missed the connection. One thing led to another, and by the time he showed up here yesterday, he had already fit the pieces together. Sachs was the man who had blown himself up in Wisconsin. Sachs was the man who had killed Reed Dimaggio. Sachs was the Phantom of Liberty.

He came here alone, unencumbered by the silent, scowling Worthy. Iris and the children were off swimming in the pond, and it was just me again, standing in front of the house as I watched him climb out of his car. Harris was in good spirits, more jovial than the last time, and he greeted me as though we were old familiars, colleagues in the quest to solve life’s mysteries. He had news, he said, and he thought it might interest me. They’d identified the person who’d been signing my books, and it turned out to have been a friend of mine. A man named Benjamin Sachs. Now why would a friend want to do a thing like that?

I stared down at the ground, fighting back tears as Harris waited for an answer. “Because he missed me,” I finally said. “He went away
on a long trip and forgot to buy postcards. It was his way of staying in touch.”

“Ah,” Harris said, “a real practical joker. Maybe you can tell me something more about him.”

“Yes, there’s a lot I can tell you. Now that he’s dead, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

Then I pointed to the studio, and without saying another word I led Harris across the yard in the hot afternoon sun. We walked up the stairs together, and once we were inside, I handed him the pages of this book.

In every corner of the world, on every subject under the sun, Penguin represents quality and variety—the very best in publishing today.

For complete information about books available from Penguin—including Penguin Classics, Penguin Compass, and Puffins—and how to order them, write to us at the appropriate address below. Please note that for copyright reasons the selection of books varies from country to country.

In the United States
: Please write to
Penguin Group (USA), P.O. Box 12289 Dept. B, Newark, New Jersey 07101-5289
or call 1-800-788-6262.

In the United Kingdom
: Please write to
Dept. EP, Penguin Books Ltd, Bath Road, Harmondsworth, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 0DA
.

In Canada
: Please write to
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2
.

In Australia
: Please write to
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, P.O. Box 251, Ringwood, Victoria 3134
.

In New Zealand
: Please write to
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland 10
.

In India
: Please write to
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Panchsheel Shopping Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017
.

In the Netherlands
: Please write to
Penguin Books Netherlands bv, Postbus 3507, NL-1001 AH Amsterdam
.

In Germany
: Please write to
Penguin Books Deutschland GmbH, Metzlerstrasse 26, 60594 Frankfurt am Main
.

In Spain
: Please write to
Penguin Books S.A., Bravo Murillo 19, 1° B, 28015 Madrid
.

In Italy
: Please write to
Penguin Italia s.r.l., Via Benedetto Croce 2, 20094 Corsico, Milano
.

In France
: Please write to
Penguin France, Le CarrÉ Wilson, 62 rue Benjamin Baillaud, 31500 Toulouse
.

In Japan
: Please write to
Penguin Books Japan Ltd, Kaneko Building, 2-3-25 Koraku, Bunkyo-Ku, Tokyo 112
.

In South Africa
: Please write to
Penguin Books South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Private Bag X14, Parkview, 2122 Johannesburg
.