Mr. X (55 page)

On the other hand, Frenchy had trailed me to the rooming house. Maybe he had set the fire and discovered that he had killed the wrong person. Where Fish crossed Mutton, I came to a halt beside a burned-out street lamp and looked back at a dark,
dimensionless well that could have hidden a dozen men. A few cars swished along Word Street. In a nearby lane, a man hawked up sputum. I heard no other sounds, but the back of my neck still prickled.

Fish Lane intersected Raspberry and Button before meeting the fifty feet of Wax leading to Veal Yard. On an ordinary night, this distance would have been no more than a short, not uninteresting walk; with the specter of Frenchy La Chapelle lurking behind me, it felt like a wasteland. I quickened my step and moved into the next length of the narrow lane.

A nearly inaudible sound like a footfall came from behind me. If I had been walking along Commercial Avenue in daylight, I don’t think I would have heard it. In the confines of Fish Lane, the little sound made me spin around. I could see only empty buildings and the dull reflection of starlight on the cobbles. Joe Staggers had not stopped looking for me, I remembered.

I ran the rest of the way to Raspberry, darted across the intersection of the lanes, and raced toward the hovering gray haze marking the crossing of Fish and Button. Although I could not hear footsteps at my back, I
felt
the approach of a pursuing figure. I shot across Button and heard another delicate footfall. My heart nearly burst. I raced up the lane and glanced over my shoulder a second before I swung into Wax.

I don’t know what I saw. The image vanished too quickly for me to be certain I had seen anything at all. I thought I saw the tails of a dark overcoat whisking into an unseen passage. At the time, I could think only that the old adversary I called Mr. X had just slipped out of sight. My blood turned to glue. When I could move again, I sprinted down the fifty feet of Wax Lane, clattered into Veal Yard, and burst through the front door of the Brazen Head. A bald night clerk with a hatchet tattooed above his right ear looked up from a paperback.

I tried to imitate a person in a normal state of mind as I walked across the lobby. The night man kept his eyes on me until I started up the stairs. I came to the second floor, pulled out my key, and opened the door to room 215. A lamp I had not switched on shed a yellow nimbus over the end of the bed and the worn green carpet. Seated beside the round table with his ankles crossed before him, Robert closed the covers of
From Beyond
and smiled at me.

78

“Old Dad was a pretty lousy writer, wasn’t he? Don’t you get the feeling he
believed
all this stuff?”

“I hope you didn’t set that fire.”

“Why would I?” Robert said. “Any fatalities?”

“One. An old man named Otto Bremen.”

“I don’t suppose anyone is going to miss him very much.”

“I was supposed to die in that fire, and you know it.”

Robert cocked an ankle on his knee, dropped his chin into his hand, and gazed at me with an expression of absolute innocence.

“You knew the building was going to burn down. You said it was a good thing I moved out.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Couldn’t you have told me what was going to happen? You let a man die.”

“I wish I had twenty-twenty foresight, but it isn’t that specific. I knew you’d be better off out of there, and that’s as far as it went.”

I sat on the other side of the table. Irritatingly, Robert adjusted his chair and resumed the chin-on-hand, elbow-on-table posture. “You set me up to meet Ashleigh.”

“The sweetie must have been thrilled by those documents.”

“Yes,” I said. “When you want to put them back, they’ll be in Toby Kraft’s office safe.”

“You don’t want me to call on our little friend?” Robert was grinning. “Hatch won’t check his hiding place for a couple of days. He’s too secure to get worried.”

“Why should you give a damn if Stewart Hatch goes to jail?”

“Brother dear,” he said, “do you suspect me of manipulation?”

Because right and left had not been reversed, the face across from me was as strange as it was familiar, and the strangeness contained a kind of rawness I thought other people had always seen in me.

“I suspect you of manipulation, yes,” I said. “And I resent it. Enormously.”

Robert took his hand from his chin and uncrossed his legs in an elaborate display of concern that suggested that I had missed the point. He placed his forearms on the table, knitted his hands together, and sent me a glance agleam with irony, as if to say that he and I had no need for such games.

“Can you honestly say you’re not
enormously
attracted to Laurie Hatch? Haven’t you had fantasies about marrying her?”

“You make me sick.”

“Even someone like me would appreciate occasional access to a fortune.”

“Laurie doesn’t get any money if her husband goes to jail. You should have done your homework.”

Robert straightened up and took his arms off the table. “Let’s examine what happens if Stewart is convicted. Approximately twenty million dollars fall into the hands of little Cobden Carpenter Hatch. His mother has discretion over the entire sum. I know this goes against your puritanical instincts, but if you follow your own desires and marry Laurie, the rest of your life will be extraordinary.”

“Unfortunately, it already is,” I said.

“Doesn’t perfect freedom appeal to you?”

“Marrying for money doesn’t sound like freedom to me. Just the opposite, in fact.”

“Then forget the money and marry for love. You even like her son. In fact, you love him, too. It’s perfect.”

“How do you come into this arrangement?”

“You would agree to one condition.”

“Which is?”

Robert leaned back and spread his arms. “To share it with me. Once every couple of months, you go out on an errand, and I come back in your place. Eight hours later, twelve hours later, we do the same thing in reverse. No one would ever know, Laurie and Cobbie least of all.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Let it sink in. Your wife would have no idea she was sleeping with two men instead of one. The time will come, as it does in all marriages, when you’ll find it convenient to leave the house undetected. And we’d be carrying on a family tradition. Our great-great-grandfathers did it all the time.”

“Right up to the time when Sylvan killed Omar,” I said.

“You’re kidding. I never heard that.”

“So it would be in the family tradition for you to kill me and get everything for yourself.”

“I don’t
want
it!” Robert said. “Ned, remember who I am. I am not domestic. The idea of living with one woman, tied to a schedule…. I’m not really a human being, after all. I’m pure
Dunstan
. We weren’t supposed to be like this, we were supposed to be one person, but we were separated in the womb, or on the night we were born, I don’t know, it happened anyhow, and I couldn’t harm you in any way, I
can’t
. I need you. Besides that, ordinary human life makes me want to puke. How could I want to settle down with Laurie Hatch?”

“You haven’t needed me so far,” I said, though Robert’s assertion had moved me.

“Why do you think I came to Star in Naperville and told her you should leave college? When you insisted on going back, why did I make sure someone would look out for you? Or meet Star in front of Nettie’s house and tell her you were in danger?”

“Maybe you do need me,” I said. “I need you, too, Robert. But I am not going to marry Laurie Hatch so you can buy Armani suits and gold Rolexes. Even if she would agree to marry me, I have no idea who she really is.”

“Are you going to let a small-town Daddy Warbucks like Stewart Hatch poison your mind? You don’t give a shit about her background. Look at ours! It only means you have more in common with her than you thought.”

This notion had already occurred to me.

Robert leaned toward me again. “Ned, you’re already half in love with Laurie Hatch. It’s karma.”

“If I don’t know what to think about Laurie, I really don’t know what to make of you.”

“Imagine how I feel about you. Yet in some way we are the same person, after all. And you might stop to consider that my life has been much more difficult than yours.”

“How would you know anything about my difficulties?”

“That’s a fair question, but you are more or less human, and I’m scarcely human at all. Do you think that’s been easy for me?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“But aren’t you grateful for what you’ve learned in the past two days? And that we came together like this?”

I wanted to say,
No, all of this sickens me
, but the truth spoke itself. “Yes.”

Robert smiled. “At the right moment, you always say ‘Yes.’ ”

This unexpected allusion to my recurring dream gave me the beginning of an idea. “You must have paid a visit to New Providence Road.”

I had taken him unawares. “Where?”

“Howard Dunstan’s old house. The one Sylvan reconstructed with the original stones from Providence.”

“That place is bad luck. It’s like black magic, it’ll eat you alive.”

“It’s where you always wanted me to go,” I said.

Robert gathered himself before once more regarding me with what appeared to be absolute sincerity. “You’re talking about the dreams you used to have. They were
dreams
. I wasn’t in charge. You were. That’s how dreams work—you’re saying something to
yourself
.”

“How do you know what my dreams were about?”

“We were supposed to be the same person,” he said. “It’s not surprising that we should have the same dreams now and then.”

I wondered what would have happened if Robert and I had been born into the same body and felt a disorienting rush of emotions, a kind of swoon made equally of attraction and repulsion. I heard Howard Dunstan say,
We flew from the crack in the golden bowl. We are smoke from the cannon’s mouth
. We had flown through the flaw in the bowl and been ripped from the pockets of fallen soldiers—it was as good as any other explanation for the joy, equal to but more powerful than the fear that accompanied it, flooding through me.

“Whatever you are, you’re my brother,” I said. “It’s even more than that. You’re half of me.”

“I fought this.” Robert shivered in his chair. “You have no idea.” He turned his head away before looking back with a quantity of feeling that equaled mine. “I despised you. You can’t imagine my resentment. I hardly
knew
our mother. You got to
live
with her, at least off and on, and when you couldn’t, she visited you. She sent you birthday cards. I didn’t have any of that. Robert was stuck away in the shadows. Star had to protect her little Ned. We only met once.”

A recognition with the force of a locomotive moved into me.

“Yes?” Robert said.

“It was our ninth birthday. Something happened. I got sick the day before.”

“No kidding,” Robert said.

“I didn’t get there in time. Wherever it was.”

“You almost got me killed,” Robert said.

“I had a fever, and I couldn’t get out of bed. Star came into our room. I thought I was safe, because my seizures usually hit me in the middle of the afternoon. She was standing next to my cot…. Where were you? Where did I go?”

“That year, it was the Anscombes,” Robert said. “Or so they called themselves. They took me in because their own kid died.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “You were in Boulder.”

“Until then, I could always feel him sniffing me out in time to get away. That year, you picked the wrong day to get sick, and I didn’t feel anything.”

Inside my head, Frank Sinatra sang the word
Fight
at the top of a beat and hung back for a long, stretched-out moment before coming in with:

and on the downward curve of the phrase, everything I had chosen to forget came flooding back to me.

“I was you,” I said.

79