The Cavanaugh Quest (35 page)

“Tim, Marty, Blankenship, Rita, Carver, Kim,” he repeated angrily, eyes straight ahead. “I don’t know who’s doing all these new killings, they’ve nothing to do with me …”

“What about the old killings? What did they have to do with you?”

His head snapped toward me.

“What the hell do you mean, old killings? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You said something about these new killings … that implies there were some old ones—”

“New, recent—Jesus, you sure know how to piss me off.”

We were almost to the top.

“Somebody else is more pissed off than you are,” I said. “Somebody else is killing people … unless you are the killer.”

“Okay, Cavanaugh, I don’t care if your father is an old friend, I’ve had it with you. I’m telling you—”   His teeth were grinding and a vein pulsed in the block of his large square forehead. “I’m telling you, drop this whole thing—just drop it. I’m not asking, I’m telling. There are ways to make you drop it but I don’t want to do that if I don’t have to—just use your common sense. It’s none of your business. None of your business.” He scowled at me.

“Well, if it isn’t Primal Man doing his club-waving number … Once the paralysis leaves my lower limbs, I shall run and tell my daddy … Honest to God, you make me sick. What are you going to do, send goons on bulldozers up to my floor and then scrape me up and dump me in a corner?”

“Mister, you’re not too far wrong …”

“What I can’t figure out is why you and Goode aren’t worried about getting killed. It doesn’t make any sense—”

I never finished that simple thought and never got what would have doubtless been another threat because one of Crocker’s cat jockeys came running toward us from the top of the hill, yelling Crocker’s name, telling him to hurry.

I went with them and what I saw was a delirium tremens attack come to life in the sunshine, indescribable, terrifying, hypnotizing. On the top of the hill and on the other side, the earthmovers had dropped their blades and scraped the roof off a civilization of rats. I’d heard about such things but only half believed them, but it was real. The earth, the beautiful green park, had been cut open like a Washington Avenue abortion and several of the superficial tears had collapsed inward, leaving abscesslike craters on the surface of the grass. And the abscesses were moving, trembling, quivering as we watched. A stench rose in almost palpable columns from the openings and the wind carried it like epidemic disease in all directions. The quivering became, at closer look, with our hands over our mouths and noses, the twitching noses and plump scurrying bodies of brown rats whose lives were being nastily interrupted. Not many at first, just a few, maybe forty or fifty brave enough to dare the sun’s awful brightness and the terrifying, unexpected blasts of wind, both foreign to a subterranean world.

Moving quickly, the man with the machine closest to the crest of the hill slid dirt down over the opening and with a god-awful grinding of gears and thrashing of threads, he dug his blade down and began to push toward the rats. But the crust of earth over the rat colony was too fragile. Slowly but very surely the grass surrounding the huge yellow machine began to grow scraggly fissures as it sagged inward, leaving the man and the countless pounds of yellow steel alone like a mechanical island surrounded by rats and putrescent refuse. The rats looked myopically from their lunches, took a squint or two, and began to burrow backward into their hill; some daring fellows scampered toward the machine, making squeaking sounds. The driver looked over at us, saw that no suggestions were forthcoming, and climbed slowly down from his perch. He made the mistake of trying to run to safety. After three strides his boot and then his leg up to the knee smashed down through the next layer and as he tried to brace himself to pull the leg out, his hand descended on the head of a large, somnolent-seeming rat who awoke with a terrified start and clamped its teeth into the peculiar white hand which had attacked him. The man screamed and as he jerked his hand into the air, the rat came with it and in a paroxysm of horror the man looked up and saw the brown thing with its long, serpentine tail swinging and whipping in the air, teeth sunk deep into the flesh, hanging on for dear life, and the screaming rose an octave, as the man desperately swung the arm, hand, and rat, all three of which were now being covered with spraying blood. In time the rat, choking on flesh and blood, let go to avoid suffocation and took an amazingly large chunk of the hand with him. The victim, struggling in the pulsating sea of garbage and rats, got his leg free of the hole and slowly, bloodily, dragged himself out of the mess. Two rats were attached to his leg and ankle, and Crocker kicked them off, frantically yelling into his walkie-talkie, trying to make himself understood. “Rats, an infestation of them,” he cried into the machine, commanding his men to call the fire department and sanitation department for help.

At least at the beginning the rats were hesitant about venturing out; they sent their scouts as far as the edge, where the grass firmed up, but soon they would hurry back to their comrades beneath the carpet of green covering the park. Finally we completely abandoned the hill, as the birds had done before us, gagging with the lingering fetid stench. Crocker was beyond my reach now, conferring with his operations manager, public-relations executives, and fire-department officials. I talked with a sanitation-department officer while we waited.

“Well, it had to happen eventually, I guess,” he said, worried but excited. “We knew they were there, of course, they had to be, their infestations are as old as the country. Lots of rats were brought in from Europe—funny, Norway was one of the biggest suppliers of rats to this country. You Norwegian?”

“No,” I said.

“Whew.” He laughed, anxious to inform me. The wounded man had been taken into the trailer. “You gotta be careful around here, what you say about Norwegians and Swedes. Anyway, I was in New York studying the rat problem they’ve got—more rats there than people—my God, you wouldn’t believe what they’ve got … alligators and crocodiles and beavers and rats and who the hell knows what else lives in the sewers, probably things we don’t even know about, mutants … Central Park’s full of rats like these here, big, eighteen inches, weigh two or three pounds, came over from Norway in 1775. They like tunnels, construction sites, sewers, parks where people leave food—now, that’s what you got here, this park’s probably a hundred years old, more or less, and these rats, generation after generation, have probably lived here all that time—just beneath the surface, bringing in garbage to eat, burying the passing generations, Christ, no wonder it smells like it does, particularly on a hot day … No, you got yourself a pretty sizable rat population here by now …”

“So what happens now?”

“Well, we’ll have to kill ’em one way or another, won’t we? Course, some of ’em we’ll just drive out into the neighborhood and there are terrible risks there, rabid rats are pretty damned mean … but we can’t just leave ’em, can we? I mean, this construction’s gotta go on, so we gotta get ’em the hell out of here, don’t we?” He sighed, pushed his glasses up on his snub nose, and ran a hand through thinning sandy hair. “Well, I’m sure as hell glad it’s not my problem. We usually use warfarin to kill ’em over the long haul—it’s an anticoagulant rat poison—though in time they build up an immunity to it—then you got yourself a superrat, and they are really tough. There are some rats the scientists just ain’t quite sure how the hell to kill. Pretty thought, ain’t it?” He chuckled bleakly. “I suppose we’ll wind up going after them with chemicals, pump something into the hill and hope it stays in the hill and doesn’t kill everybody who lives hereabouts.” He looked at me solemnly and laughed abruptly. “There’s always fire and water, too. Remember the Black Death? The bubonic plague? Wiped out whole goddamn countries in olden times … That was rats. Well, I’d better report for duty here … This is gonna take days, I expect.” He shook his head. “Think of it, the plague … Now, how the hell would the Chamber of Commerce handle that one? Play hell with the Quality of Life boys, hunh?” He thought that was wonderfully amusing.

I stayed until the middle of the afternoon; it was like watching a military operation and the television crews arrived and every so often several men would wheel canisters up the hill. The temperature passed ninety, and hundreds, then thousands of people began to line the streets, numbly, quietly watching. There was nothing funny about it. They lived on the edges of the park, many of them, and rats weren’t something you laughed at. From time to time a shriek would come from the crowd as a rat began to move down the hill toward the people. Beaters moved them back up, but if the rats had gotten moving
en masse
toward the people, there’d have been a lot of dead bodies in the aftermath, little brown ones and big white and black ones. I stayed until I just couldn’t take the heat and the increasing putrescence and the dull faces of the crowd anymore. The whole thing was too much for me.

Ole Kronstrom called me a few minutes after I climbed into my shower; twice in one day, very possibly a new American League record for right-handed overweight critics. He wondered if he could stop by for a chat in half an hour. I scrubbed the smell of rats for about twenty minutes, doused myself with Yardley, and received him wrapped in my terry-cloth robe, drinking a Pimm’s Cup, trying to forget the little brown things digging in for the gas attack on the North Side.

I fixed Ole Kronstrom a glass of iced tea and we sat in the cool, dark living room. I sat at my desk as I always did and Ole sat where Kim had sat the night before. It seemed longer ago than that but it was less than a full day. Ole squeezed his lemon slice and took a long drink; his hand hid the glass. He wore a seersucker jacket, a bow tie, and gray slacks, the picture of someone who wasn’t about to be done in by the heat. I asked him what I could do for him.

“I’m a little hesitant about getting into this,” he said softly, having a hard time looking me in the eye. “I don’t want you to think I’m being presumptuous or protective … or just plain nosy. I abhor people who are any of those things. But I’ve spoken with Kim today and she had a good deal to say about you …” He took another long nervous drink, insofar as he could possibly reflect a case of nerves in his stolid, white-haired presence.

I’d known this was coming; it was inevitable. No matter how you cut it, I was muscling in on his girlfriend, whether he thought of her as his daughter or Ann-Margret. It didn’t really matter what their relationship was; since I’d turned up, it was less. Less friendship, less companionship, less everything and he was too nice a man to just bear down on me, threaten muscle as Crocker had done. I watched him set his iced tea down and fumble with his tobacco pouch and pipe. If he asked me to stand back from Kim, I wasn’t going to be able to do it. So what the hell could I say?

“What was it she had to say?”

“It was very personal,” he said, stuffing tobacco into the bowl of a battered old pipe. “It amounts to the fact that she has grown very close to you, at least by her standards. You know by now that she is not free and relaxed with anyone, but particularly not with men. You and I aren’t really concerned with her rationale, not at the moment. But you see, she feels …” He stopped and lit the tobacco, drawing softly and slowly. “She feels a sense of guilt—about me, that is. She has a very peculiar conscience, she cannot bear the idea of betrayal, the business of using other people … And she’s afraid her feelings about you—and they are by no means clear and simple—will make me feel that she has used me.” He puffed again, dotting the air before him with clouds of blue smoke.

“What do you think?” I asked. “About the whole thing.”

He massaged the pipe with his huge hands, smiling to himself.

“I’m concerned about Kim. She is, in fact, the only real concern I have in life. I want things to go well for her, she’s had a very difficult time in many ways, and she’s the kind of person—and they’re quite exceedingly rare, in my experience—who lives very deeply, whose emotions are so tender and raw to the touch that they must be almost hidden, even from herself …” He looked up at me, had no trouble connecting with my eyes this time. “I can see that you’re worried, Mr. Cavanaugh, worried about what I’m going to say about you, about your effect on Kim—”

“It had crossed my mind,” I said.

“I understand your interest in Kim. I don’t know if it’s wise on your part, I don’t know if you’re up to coping with such a person … but I always respected your father and I enjoyed our discussion the other day. The important thing, of course, is not that you are interested in Kim. What is significant is that, at least to some degree, Kim returns your interest … and I would say
interest
is the precise word. Her attitude is one of interest, no more than that—perhaps a feeling that you are a sympathetic person, someone who seems to want to understand her.” He sipped some tea, evidently more relaxed now. “She’s still frightened of you. And she’s terribly frightened of herself, her reactions to you. She’s both drawn toward you … and repelled by what you represent—a possibly intimate relationship. She’s not ready for that …”

“I know,” I said.

“And you must realize that she may never be ready for what most of us might think of as a normal relationship between a man and a woman. Can you cope with that?”

“I’m not awash with confidence, no. I’ve not been overly lucky with women. They always turn out to be more complex than I am. But, yes, I want to reach into her, get hold of her from the inside. I lie in bed at night and I wonder, is it an ego thing? Do I want to do it because it’s hard to do? I really don’t know …”

“Well, all I wanted to do was set your mind at ease so far as I’m concerned. She’s like a daughter to me, not a captive. I’ve given her what I could, she’s given me a daughter’s love and companionship … but I’m not interested in sealing her off. She was concerned about what I might think and perhaps you were too—there’s no need to be. But be careful. That’s just a friendly word of caution.” He leaned back and sighed, relieved, and I fixed him another iced tea. He didn’t seem inclined to leave and mentioned that Kim had told him about the events of the night before.