The Edge of Doom (10 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

They looked in on Jay from time to time, but he slept, as the old saying goes, like the dead. Kate and Reed ate dinner, but hardly felt able to return to their studies at the other end of the apartment from the maid’s room. Theirs was an old apartment, built in the days when everyone who could afford to live there had at least one sleep-in maid; thus these apartments built in the twenties or earlier each had a maid’s room. It was small, with an attached small bathroom, and in the years since World War II no one but Fanslers and their ilk had household help who hung around for more than a few hours, let alone overnight. A maid’s room now served other purposes.

Occasionally, a child occupied it, but that was rare. Usually, as with Kate and Reed, it served as an “attic.” Some who had redone their kitchens had broken down walls and included the maid’s room in their enlarged, modern, magazine-worthy cooking environment. Then there were those in large, rent-stabilized apartments, clinging to the low rent, who secretly, and illegally, housed lodgers in their maid’s room to expand their shrinking income. Whether any other maid’s room had ever harbored a man running for his life Kate doubted. Meanwhile, she and Reed found it impossible to get down to work, and so they hovered—in the living room, the kitchen, the hall. Kate took Banny out for a walk; they returned to find that Jay was still asleep. Reed was still hovering.

“We can’t spend the night like this,” Reed said. “I think we had better wake him.”

“We could sleep in shifts,” Kate said.

“The fact is, we could ignore him. He’s not likely to leave the room; we can just let him sit there. After all there is a bathroom and running water.”

“But would we sleep very well?” Kate asked.

“The hell with it,” Reed said. “Let’s wake him.”

They knocked on the closed door of the maid’s room, not wanting to walk in on him unannounced, though it occurred to them both that such courtesy seemed slightly comical under the circumstances. But there was no answer to their knock. Reed opened the door and peered in.

“He’s still sound asleep; I’m going to wake him.”

“Then what?” Kate asked.

“Then he can start talking.”

Reed had to shake Jay, who woke suddenly and leapt up in fear. Then the knowledge of where he was returned to him. “Sorry about that,” he said to Reed. “I haven’t had so extended a sleep in, well, quite a while. I must have felt safe, because I was certainly out cold.”

“Why don’t you wash up?” Reed said. “And then Kate and I would like to talk to you. Are you willing to try the kitchen if we lower the blind?”

“Do you usually lower it?”

“No, we don’t usually lower it.”

“Then let’s sit in here, if you can put up with it.”

“Are you really suggesting, or fearing, that whoever is after you is so intent and so observant that even the lowering of a shade that is usually up would signal something?”

“I can’t tell how much he’s able to watch, of course,” Jay said. “But he’s capable of anything. Killing me is his only aim in life; he has no other. It has become his obsession. He may decide I must be here because I’m not anywhere else, but I think this is safe enough for now if there’s no indication of my presence.”

Reed, leaving Jay to use the bathroom facilities, reported this conversation to Kate, who was making coffee. When Jay beckoned to them from the small room that, for now at least, was his, or so it seemed, Reed and Kate entered, Kate carrying yet another tray with a coffee pot, cups, and a plate of ginger cookies.

Jay took it from her and placed it, sideways, in the center of the cot. “Why don’t you sit at one end?” he said to Reed. “I’ll sit at the other, with our legs out as far as they can go, and Kate can sit in the chair and put her legs on the cot between us when we remove the tray. Does that suit you?”

And so they settled themselves. Kate at first was content to sit in the chair with her feet crossed, drinking her coffee, but after a while she was glad of the chance, when Jay had moved the tray onto a box, to stretch her legs across the center of the cot.

“We are all three too tall for this caper,” she said. Reed and Jay were both tall men, and Kate was tall for a woman, or at least for a woman of her generation. They grew women bigger now, she had noticed, which was, in her opinion, a good thing. One might not play basketball, but it must be pleasant to know that one could.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do about you,” Reed said to Jay, “but while we’re all hiding out here like burglars caught on the premises, why don’t you begin the story of how you got here?”

“Do you want an outline or details?” Jay asked.

“Outline first, details later, if required,” Reed said.

“I take it you both know about the Witness Protection Program.”

“Not a great deal. Just what we read in the magazines and newspapers,” Reed said. Kate suspected he knew a bit more than that, but nodded to affirm his statement.

“Then I won’t start there. I’ll start with a crime I committed, or helped to commit, in the late 1950s or thereabouts. It was art theft. We broke into a small museum and stole a painting.”

“We?” Kate asked.

“There were three of us. My friend, whose plan it was, me, and the man who is now trying to kill me.”

Jay seemed to be waiting for a response, and was rather at a loss when none came. And what response could he have expected us to give, Kate asked herself. She found this whole situation so bizarre that almost nothing Jay might say could make it more so. This man, her father, into his seventies, a man her husband considered capable of many and assorted criminalities, huddled with his newfound daughter and her husband in a small, back room, speaking of how he had committed a theft.

“Go on,” Reed said.

“Let me diverge from the outline for a moment. I loved your mother”—he faced Kate—“as one is supposed to love only in romances and old-style movies. Remember that you mentioned
Brief Encounter
to me that day by the pond?”

“I remember. That film must have been made very long ago; it’s not even in color.”

“Around the time you were born, I think, or a year or two earlier. I also saw it revived. You remember the story?”

“They meet in a railroad station, fall in love, and then part in the railroad station.”

“They fall in love forever; at least, he does. When they must part because they’re both married, he says to her: ‘I will love you all my life,’ or words to that effect.”

“So you mentioned when we sat by the pond. And there’s a good chance he will love her all his life, since they will never meet again,” Kate said.

“What a cynic you are.”

“I’m not the least cynical. But perhaps we had better postpone this discussion.” Reed looked as though he might explode if this sideline on love was not short-circuited.

“Most people doubt that kind of love,” Jay said. “Anyway, just accept for the moment that leaving your mother changed my life, changed how I looked at things, how I judged them.”

“So stealing art was justified because you had lost your love,” Reed said. His tone was harsh.

“Not stealing any art. I don’t think I would have considered any other crime, certainly not another art theft. But I had this friend, and he had lost his love, too.”

“Under similar circumstances, arousing your sympathy?” Reed asked.

“Not similar, no. His passion was for a painting.” He paused, as though expecting an interruption, but none came.

“It was a painting both he and his mother had loved; it had hung in their living room, where she could see it from the chair she always sat in. He remembered, as a very small child, sitting with her while she told him the story of the painting. Inspired by Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
, it portrayed Prospero revealing to Miranda the story of how they had come to be shipwrecked on that island. The painter, my friend said, had caught the relationship between father and daughter in a way that seemed to him, when he was a child, to picture the bond between his mother and him. Anyway, his parents divorced, his father walked out, blaming his mother for the destruction of him and, he said, his son, and he had taken the picture and sold it, either out of revenge or for what money it could bring. When my friend was grown, and his mother had become ill, he hired someone to find the picture for him, if possible. His mother said it had been painted in the nineteenth century by someone well-known, if not exactly famous, which seemed to suggest it might turn up somewhere. In fact, it turned up in a small—well, hardly large—museum in San Francisco.”

“And your friend persuaded you to help him steal it,” Reed finished for him.

“Yes, that’s it, more or less. That’s the outline. There are more details.”

“Let’s hear a few of the details of the theft. I take it you succeeded.”

“Yes, we did. The third man—the one who now wants to kill me—thought we might as well take a few more pictures while we were at it, but my friend and I dissuaded him. We got away with my friend’s mother’s picture. He was able to return it to her, to her great delight.”

“I assume he didn’t tell her the details of where and how he had retrieved it.”

“I think he just said he had found it by a lucky accident. She didn’t press him for details; she simply cried for happiness. When she died some years later, my friend mailed it back to the museum we had stolen it from; anonymously, of course.”

“His mother was, I fear, a more trusting soul than we,” Reed said. “But we did not know your friend. Might we, unlike her, press for a few more details?” Kate listened to this exchange with a feeling of suspension, able neither to believe or disbelieve, to doubt or to refuse to doubt. She left it to Reed to move the story along as he saw fit, planning to return for more specificity here or there if she should want it.

“How did you bring it off? The theft of the picture, I mean. Are museums always so lacking in proper security?”

“In fact, as I learned then and since, most of them are. The most famous art theft in America is that of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.”

“I remember,” Kate said. “They stole paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer and others.”

“I followed that robbery with great interest, as you might imagine, having been in the racket myself,” Jay said, with what was probably meant as irony. “The lack of security was astonishing, but not atypical by any means. The guards were low-paid, and too easily persuaded to let in the crooks, posing as policemen. None of the art stolen had an alarm attached that would have sounded when the paintings, or whatever, were removed. The stolen art was not insured, which meant that there was no insurance company to undertake the retrieval or offer large rewards. And so on. That was in 1990, and the stolen paintings and other objects have never been recovered. The attempts to find the art have all ended in frustration.”

“But what can anybody do with art that famous once he’s got it?” Kate asked. “It can’t be sold, it can’t be exhibited. Is there always some eccentric millionaire who paid for the theft and who then keeps the stolen painting, or whatever it is, in a secret room where he gloats over it alone and unobserved?”

“Thefts are not necessarily for money,” Jay said. “The
Mona Lisa
was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by a madman who worked as a cleaner in the museum. They did get it back in time, though.”

“I look forward, indeed I eagerly look forward, to the day when we can discuss the whole subject of art theft,” Reed said. “For the moment, however, before my legs cramp up and we all are afflicted with severe muscle spasms, might we get to the reason why you are hiding out here? We can fill the lacunae in later, if need be. Why, if possible in a sentence, is this man trying to kill you?”

“In a sentence?” Jay asked. “Hard to put in a sentence. Let me see. This man is trying to kill me because I testified against him and sent him to prison. When he got out, which he ought not to have done, he set about looking for me. Decades of rage have left him obsessed and with no other aim in life. I’ve opted out of the Witness Protection Program; you don’t get a second chance at that. So either he will kill me or—what? I won’t stay here long. Just long enough to think of something. Believe me, Reed, Kate. When I set about becoming reacquainted with my daughter I didn’t know that that man had got out of prison. I would never have approached you had I known. I’m sorrier about all this than I can say—but those must seem empty words to you.”

Reed stood up, and Kate stood once he had. “Go back to sleep,” Reed said. “We’ll look in on you in the morning.” He and Kate maneuvered themselves into a position to leave, having folded up the chair and recovered the tray; it was then that they noticed Banny lying next to the doorway to the maid’s room.

Kate laughed, Banny’s presence having provided relief from the tension. “Well,” Kate said, “if Banny didn’t even try to get in here with us, you’ve got to know how crowded it was.”

In their bedroom, Kate asked Reed if he felt any less animosity toward Jay after what they had heard.

“Perhaps,” Reed said. “The question is whether or not I believe him. The story is probably true, more or less, but his motives for helping to steal the picture remain a little cloudy.”

“He’s my father,” Kate said, “and I do foolish things. As Hamlet wisely put it for our purposes, ‘I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.’ You have to admit, that’s marvelously apposite.”

Reed decided to ignore the reference to Kate’s or Hamlet’s mother. “Because I believe you, Kate, and know you to be honest, am I to believe him? Lear had dishonest daughters.”

“Lear was a fool who chose not to believe the only honest daughter he had.”

“I do balk at the idea of you having a criminal for a father, a real criminal, even with the excuse of losing his only love. Still, the father of his friend had no right to take the picture.”

“I think you might chance trusting him, at least until he is proved altogether dishonest. ‘We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us.’ That, on the other hand, was Hamlet’s advice.”