Thalo Blue (33 page)

Out of that nonsensical month or so, he concocted what he thought was an ingenious plan.

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Walter Whitman, the originator of Oliver’s firm, had been a partner in name only for the last six years or so. He was eight years older than Sebastion’s dad. And he hadn’t been seen by any underlings and not by the other partners—since a month after he arbitrarily made Oliver Redfield the full-fledged third in the triumvirate. That decision besmirched the mood of Merridew, possibly because it allowed Oliver more than simple shareholder dividends—and possibly because of larger, unspoken faultlines. At that point Oliver finally had a real stake in things. At that point he started working even harder, staying even
later
.

After years of lower positions, watching others succeed where he only seemed to fail, he was finding the respect and cash he felt he was due.

Walter, they say, as rumor mills in any-sized company will churn out, was suffering from Alzheimer’s. His mind, according to the mill, was now a blank canvas, stretched and filled with paint. But it possessed no harmony, it was muddled, and there were no pictures visible in the color.

But he lived on, and he still collected his dues.

In the meantime, John Merridew took over main operational duties of the firm. Not, according to Fish, that there really
were
any.
A company like ours,
he once said
, pretty much runs itself. The top dogs are out playing golf and sipping Black Velvets at the girlie clubs. They are redundant and they know it. But they wouldn’t phase
themselves
out, would they?

In addition to a still-visible inequality, there was also a large tension between Oliver Redfield and John Merridew. If either entered a room and the other was present, a palpable distaste would rise in the air. Sebastion always wondered if he was the only one who saw and now he knew it was actually real, not just perceived, though his finger still couldn’t rest on the exact source or nature of it.

Naw, I’ve seen it for a while
, Fish said after Sebastion had brought it up.
But then, I’ve been studying Merridew since I arrived in this stink-hole. I wanted to see if he would squirm a little when I walked about with my nose in the air. After all my pop’s got his bell rung, doesn’t he?... But, no, never. Merridew is always the coolest of cukes.

So
, Sebastion said then, trying to be cool about it all himself,
What does your dad have on him?

Fish cleared his throat.
Damned if I know. Never told me. The two used to go to whore parties together. Maybe that’s it. But everybody does that...

I could find out
—
if it’s really burning your balls. The old man’s got a wall-safe in his house. But he’s mostly out on the boat these days. Says he’s retired.

Sebastion considered for a moment, then said,
Fish, if you bring proof of whatever your dad knows that would have Merridew squirming in his executive-class leather chair, I’d pay you.

Jeez, Red. You don’t have to pay me. I’d bring it for free.

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And Fish delivered! From his father’s safe—his father, a man who had made his money on interesting real estate deals beginning more than thirty years before—he brought to Sebastion color photos of Johnny Merridew in some far from innocuous poses. Along with the aging patriarch’s white and pink flesh were the visible skin-tones and body parts of several unknown and clearly too-young-to-consent boys. One photo even showed Merridew wearing a
St. Vincent’s School for Boys
tartan-patterned tie wrapped like a bandana around his forehead. With one arm in the air, he straddled the closed-eyed boy from behind and Sebastion could almost hear Johnny’s Home-on-the-range Ride’em Cowboy bark. In all the pictures, the expressions on Merridew’s face—not looking too many years younger than he was now—were always contortions of pain and pleasure. Sebastion wondered how much of his dad’s money had paid for these
trysts
.

By day John Merridew was a thriving partner in a financial firm, fielding and quashing only whispered accusations of skimming. But by night, he was degrading the masses, one young soul before the next, one set of shadow strings at a time. Oh yes, big business and all manner of world politics were the same: a set of dazzling fabrications. The bigger fish were at the top of the food chain and size was decided, in that faux mirrored world, like all things—as though the contenders each took their turn dancing with a beautiful woman. Those that danced the best, threw the biggest prizes, and held the tightest strings, were those given the highest cards. And with those cards, they held the lives of countless others—suspended, teetering.

Sebastion’s judgment was heated, jumbled and thick. He was tired and strung out on shades of gray. He eyed the pictures Fischer had brought and in an instant, his thinking turned evil. His face became a haunted mirror of John Merridew’s contorted photo expressions and in his glimmering eyes there was an eerie reflection that looked like delirious delight.

Let the dance begin.

IV. Sums and Differences; Melody and Hush

There’s room for error. There’s always room for error.

The Thief knew countless ways to pull his victims from their lives without binding them up in the costly litigation of death. He had been doing this for a long time and knew that there were a multitude of successful means: traumas, blunt objects, and that ever useful standby—
water
.

But a different contrivance, used long ago for the first time, became both the marker at the end of the old ways and a starting line drawn on the cusp of a new era. It was the first of its kind in the Thief’s repertoire and, for many reasons, still stood as a perfect model of what could be done with the appropriate weapon. It began unlike most, certainly unlike the loud and proposterious events of the last while. Back then, there were no mistakes, no desperate yanks. In the early days, there was no such thing as Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Back then, it had all been deliberate.

Back then it had all been part of the hunt.

Thief met a sturdy young guitar player near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. That boy was not more than nineteen at the time—and,
yes
, boy
was just the exact proper term, wasn’t it?
He had a gift, this kid, and would have been idolized one day if only he could find the right management and a band with egos small enough to endure the shroud of his own. Then on top of marketing and touring, he needed to kick the nasty heroin habit. Thief had since come to learn that life on the road was no kind of living; it was the hardest, especially with the monkey on your back.

The boy and the Theif—though Thief was calling himself something different back then—met on the street, nothing more than two Frisco vagrants with a cigarette and a story to share. They had a communal high as early morning waves hit Hyde Street Pier’s barnacle-sluiced posts in the distance. Fish Alley was empty of tourists that early and the Thief fought the urge to take him immediately. It would have been pointless. He didn’t
need
him. And the anger in the Thief, that which he had dealt with for a long time by then, was not enough to overpower his sense of reason. He liked the boy. And, in fact, he was intrigued with him, was curious about what he could do with the six strings of an electric guitar. He followed him and his girl to gigs in Oakland and Salem, then up to Tacoma, where his own demons found him again.

He was called Clutch, that boy. Sometime after their last meeting the Thief looked deep into him and saw his nick name being christened by that girlfriend of his, as she rode with him on the back of his motorcycle. She had been a shapely thing, doting and easily jealous, with strawberry blonde locks glowing and flowing. She had sat with her hands held around the chest of his buckled leather bomber and her chin on his right shoulder. She watched his hand move when he changed gears and liked the noise it made, the slender rev of power between her legs. When they slowed enough for him to hear her voice over the engine she asked him what the sound was at those moments.

It’s the gears changing
, he said.

What makes it do that?
she asked him.

The clutch.

He took the name and it became a part of him. Just as the drugs had. The boy that everyone began calling Clutch had track marks up and down both arms. He was strung out most nights that he could score some product, but he could still play like a son of a bitch. He was in deep though, and nearly all of his money went into the habit. He just couldn’t kick it. And the worst part is that he didn’t want to.

The girl, Strawberry, died in a motel room on the highway near Tacoma where she and the Thief waited for Clutch to return after a show. And though her death would have eventually come by way of that rubber surgical tube tied at her elbow, it came instead at the hands of men.

A chunk of black tar had been cooking on a scrap of tin can over a candle’s flame. She had been sitting at the table babysitting it, waiting for it to liquefy. Scatty and enchanted that it was finally ready, she was just tightening the death-band around her arm when a pair of headlights flared in the motel room window. The men from whom she and Clutch had stolen their latest hit had come up from Salem looking for them. She was dead soon after they arrived. And so was the Thief. But he could still hear the buzzing in his head so he knew there was some time. The buzzing had been bad that night, had made him think this might even be the last. At that point he
needed
Clutch.
And
, Thief thought,
talent be damned
. He was goint to
take
what he needed. He was nearly weeping at the dizzy view of the Thunderbird by the time he made it to the club. He found Clutch just coming off stage to applause, still loud and percussive.

Clutch staggered down the back steps of the venue tasting the metal of a pick between his lips, smiling a little. Just as he had gotten to his bike, unlocked a stowbox and reached for his fix, he looked up to see the Thief, staggering, and bloodied from a gaping wound in his head.

Thief took his young friend by stabbing him in the base of the skull with his own syringe—one filled with morphine from a stash in the motorcycle’s saddle compartment. Thief gave him three full shots but after the first, Clutch’s body was lazy and drawn, limp and cooperative. It would take EMTs twenty minutes with the defibrillator paddles to get a steady rhythm.

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It had been a tough struggle at the precipice that night, the toughest for Thief in his whole tenure. That boy, already pent up on enough substance to kill him twice, still did not want to go.

But he did. They all do. It’s only a question of stronger wills. Perhaps he could have won out if he had wanted the music bad enough.

And perhaps not.

In back of the club, while a crowd still chanted for an encore, Clutch had been found by the bass player, convulsing, his eyes rolling back in his head. He was lying on the wet, post-rain asphalt of the parking lot, among spent needles. Beside him, the Thief, who had been going by another name then, lay dead. Empty.

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The Thief had wanted to rest at that point—without that buzz and without police and without looking for what he had always been looking for. But taking Clutch didn’t provide that. At least not at first. He had no money and no advanced gigs booked. He didn’t even fully own that bike yet. Adding to that, there were police at the motel asking about the dead girl and another type of blood found on the bed sheets.

He found himself fleeing down the highway on the silver-black bike, selling the guitar and spending that money on dwindling hits of smack and morphine, as he fought the addiction wracking his new body. The comedown was horrific, far worse than Katie Becks’ bloody face staring up at him from the sidewalk would be a few years later. On the road following his time with Clutch and the girl, he had found himself with heightened fevers, filmy recollections of the world from under piled blankets and views of cracked ceilings from filthy motel tubs where he loosely floated in murky water.

From that one—from Clutch
and
the strawberry blonde girl—he learned about the clingy grip those kinds of drugs had. And he learned about their value. He learned how he could use them. And he would put that understanding to an extremely good end.

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Maybe God does it the old-fashioned way, like everybody else. Maybe He carries a two-chamber derringer with one round left.

Maybe God is a gun-toting thief in the night.

Sebastion wanted to say all that,
wanted
to, but didn’t.

With his permission, his request really, Malin had gone to the house in Vaughan to get, not his paints, but his book. She had brought it back to North York, to his hospital room on that Friday afternoon. He was still in bed, but had been up and walking around most of the morning. Feeling was back in his bones. He had a shaky strength but things were progressing. At least physically.

In his mind, though, he couldn’t lose that irrepressible flash of white, the face of the man in the maroon shirt and how he had almost, it seemed, traded points of view with him for a moment. He saw all this
stuff
in that moment. And
stuff
was about as close to a word for describing it as he could come. It was this pile of different things, like a scattered junk drawer most people have—like the one his own mother had. There are a million little pieces of the past in there and when a stranger looks through it he can only surmise what they all represent.

But the person who collected it all sees it like it really is: a gathering of still images, brought up from the past as though they are reality. And when Sebastion thought about the Maroon Man’s mind—what he had seen for those brief moments when he looked through it at himself—he saw stacks of still photos. And laying beneath them, it felt like there was an eternal...
what?
Sadness? Betrayal? Something like that, he supposed.