The Fisher Boy (32 page)

“Ah, yes, the family Babineaux. Edward survived a few hours at Cape Cod Hospital, before dying of smoke inhalation. But his mother is doing just fine, she’s in custody.”

I saw the pitiful image of Edward, connected to tubes and blinking machines, in an intensive care unit all bone-white tile. Arthur’s treasure, with his hard body and fragile lungs—of course the smoke had overwhelmed him. Despite his treachery and deception, I felt pity for Edward and guilt for my hitting him that day in my apartment.

“I accused him of ransacking my apartment,” I said. “Someone had searched it. Moved all my furniture.”

“Yes, the street children, the panhandlers. Sent to Provincetown to spy on you. Since you’d been asking so many questions. They found a mysterious towel, hidden under your bureau. Covered with a substance resembling blood, so they stole it to be tested in their lab. The substance turned out to be tar, tar from the beach.”

After all my worry that that stain was Ian’s blood, blood from the horror on the breakwater. “Did any of those children survive? Those children they’d turned into slaves?”

“There are a small number of survivors, mostly children, ironically, of the lowest caste. They were locked in Royall’s old ice house, in the woods. There are fifteen survivors, out of a total of ninety-four residents of the Truro compound. That figure includes the two arsonists captured in the National Seashore. Twenty-six people were arrested in Stark, at the prep school, St. Harold’s.”

“Edward Babineaux warned me about the Golden One,” I said. “He warned me I was in some sort of danger.”

“At that point, he was probably projecting,” Jason said. “He knew he was in danger himself.”

“Why did the Enforcer let Edward go? The Enforcer—the man you knocked out to free us—”

“Emmanuel Costa. He survived. He’s talking now, talking a lot.”

“Did he really rape Edward, then let him go?”

“Oh, yes, Edward’s rape story was true. Costa confirmed it. It was a friendly reminder of how Edward should accommodate their target, Arthur Hilliard. Edward had tried to run away from Truro, but Costa caught him, hitchhiking. Edward’s assignment, given after his capture and assault, was to find a moneyed gay man to somehow blackmail. That’s why he showed up on Arthur’s beach; he’d probably gotten wind of his big party. But Arthur had no dark side, no secrets, he was just too respectable to blackmail. And Edward took a liking to life at Arthur’s, so he resisted Costa’s pressure to move on. That’s when Costa dropped Eberhardt on Arthur’s doorstep.”

“Eberhardt?” I said.

“The racing driver?” said Roberto.

“Edward’s dog, named for the racing driver,” Jason said. “Tied with a ribbon—not red, by the way. Costa killed the dog to remind Edward how he could end up. If he didn’t toe the line. Costa was the phantom phone caller, too, calling for Edward to shake down Arthur or come back. Those calls Edward answered nights at Arthur’s.”

“The cult was so desperate that blackmail became a potential as a source of revenue?” Roberto asked.

“Sure, the cult was in trouble with the IRS, so the street children’s spare change and other small scams got to become fairly important.” Jason inspected one of the White Gull’s singed muffins, then put it back on the china plate. “Edward was afraid to return to Truro empty-handed, so he fled to the Christian Soldiers. In the end, though, he went back to the fold.”

“And left us to die at that steam bath,” I said. “If you hadn’t come along—”

Jason cut short my compliment. “Saving you two blew my cover. I had to leave the compound that very evening. Had to haul my ass out of there because of you.” He picked up the same charred muffin he’d just rejected, then set it down. “Fools rush in.”

We blushed, Roberto and I. No wonder Almeida avoided this guy.

“But I rescued a girl they’d tied to their Tree of Life. There were others I couldn’t help, that girl they found dead in the Province Lands the next morning. Killed by pesticide poisoning.” He shook his head. “They kept the worst things hidden. Even from their followers, even from me.”

I remembered the blurry figures running behind the misty glass in the greenhouses.

I said, “Despite all he saw, despite all he knew, Edward went back.”

“When the chips were down, his first loyalty was to the cult. It was really…all he had.”

“But it had driven his brother, Clark, insane.”

“Wrong,” Jason said. “Clark was ill long before the family became involved with the cult. Their refusal to allow him access to his medication for schizophrenia undoubtedly contributed to his death, in that when he was expelled from the compound, he wandered into Provincetown, and, confronting the exhibit on Royall—with its photographs of familiar landmarks like the buildings and the pond and the rune stone—he went berserk. And the title of one picture didn’t help. He attacked the art and the museum staff, then he was arrested and killed himself in jail.”

“Did you see Clark that day, the day I saw you going to Scents of Being, the day Clark went crazy at the museum?”

“No,” Jason said. “I didn’t see Clark, and, as far as I know, he didn’t see me. Of course, Commercial Street, all of Provincetown, is awfully cozy.”

“Did Edward know Ian before this summer?” I asked.

“Possibly. Through the cult.”

So Edward being in Ian’s bedroom might actually have been planned. At the St. Harold’s memoriam party. They might have arranged some sort of meeting that I’d unknowingly sabotaged.

“You went to Ian’s funeral,” I said to Jason. “I saw you.” Thanks to Gaston, Suki Weatherbee’s Senegalese husband, outraged by Jason’s hair.

“I was sent by the cult,” Jason explained. “They were worried about the Drummonds. They wanted me to listen, to see if the family connected the cult to Ian’s death. Given the bad blood between them.”

“It was you at our show, too. Wasn’t it?” I said. “You were the guy posing as an agent. At our second show at Quahog. With just the two of us.”

“Negative.”

“So who was it? The Provincetown police?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You’re got a fan, Mark. Deal with it,” Roberto said.

“And the fundamentalists had nothing to do with anything that happened here this summer?” I said.

“Not directly,” Jason said, “other than sheltering Edward. But they set the stage for Alexander to murder Ian and be confident everyone would label it a hate crime. They shook things up, put everyone on edge. As did the street people, of course.” He smiled. “By the way, old Thomas Royall got his revenge of sorts. Against those pseudo-Vikings who despised him.”

It was thanks to the brothers Babineaux and their mother’s penchant for wild mushrooms. Last year, Edward and Clark had been collecting wild mushrooms when they uncovered human remains in the woods, on the grounds of the Truro compound. The remains were skeletal, buried without clothing or belongings of any kind except for a small animal’s tusk set in silver on a chain. Foul play was obviously involved; the victim’s skull had been crushed. The cult instructed the Babineaux brothers to keep this secret, because, with an IRS audit and past troubles with the police about gunfire and shoplifting and so forth—a body on the premises was the last thing they needed. But Clark was always more rebellious than his younger brother: he telephoned the police, who kept his identity secret. The discovery of the body was the perfect pretext to get authorities into the compound and then invite the FBI to infiltrate the cult, via Jason posing as a drug dealer in search of enlightenment. “They were racist enough to buy the stereotype. Of course, the dreadlocks helped. We, the Bureau, were also investigating the group on kidnapping charges involving an Ohio girl. And there were allegations of child abuse long before, in those toxic dumps they had the nerve to call greenhouses.”

It was ironic that DNA testing proved the skeleton had nothing to do with the site’s current residents. The victim had been murdered long before the Master was even born. “The skeleton was Thomas Royall’s,” Jason stated.

I stopped drinking my orange juice. Mrs. Babineaux had mentioned this murder during our tour; I’d assumed it was slander, nonsense. I said, “But Royall supposedly drowned.” He’d become the target of anti-German hysteria on the Cape after the Kaiser’s U-boat had shelled Chatham. He’d supposedly killed himself because his colony was collapsing; his clothing—sandals, a robe embroidered with runes—had been found on a beach in Truro.

It was planted there, they now believed. Jason said Royall’s utopia had been seething with resentment over the special treatment accorded their leader’s favorite, Gilbert Dyer, the model for
The Fisher Boy
.

Eventually, Dyer became Royall’s companion in the physical sense, violating Royall’s own rule that the colony remain celibate. Dissension flared in the ranks, resulting in fights and acts of vandalism. Royall and Dyer clashed when Dyer seduced a sculptor. Royall clawed Dyer so severely he grew whiskers to hide the scars.

Then the Chatham shelling occurred on July 21, 1918, and local thugs attacked the colony, destroying some kilns and looms. The next day, both Royall and Dyer vanished. It appeared that Royall had drowned himself, despondent that his utopia was unraveling. Dyer was discovered three weeks later, dead of a morphine overdose, in a flophouse in Boston. “Lost, it was thought, without his mentor. We now know better. Re-reading Dyer’s suicide note in light of discovering Royall’s body makes it plain that Dyer bludgeoned Royall to death.

Pathologists were able to certify the skeleton belonged to Royall by matching DNA extracted from the bones with a blood sample taken from a relative of the painter in Wisconsin. The authorities had kept this information quiet so as not to alert the media and jeopardize their case against the cult. Jason added, “History repeated itself on that property. The theme of internecine warfare.”

So why had he mentioned that body to me, that night at the Truro compound, in the chill room with the fire in the fireplace? Abruptly Jason lost his hipster cool, his FBI hubris. Like an actor losing concentration on stage. He mumbled something about “unfortunate” and “procedure” and “these things happen,” then at last bit into the burnt muffin he’d been toying with yet again. I gathered his confiding about the body had been an error. He changed the subject: “You remember when my beeper went off? That was the Provincetown police. With the news of Chloe Hilliard being kidnapped. At first we thought she was in Truro, in an outer building, hidden away. The cult had such an awful record with small girls.”

“Why would anyone get involved with such crazies?” Roberto asked.

“The cult offered answers to the lost, a sense of belonging, spirituality of a sort. Its message of eco-reverence coupled with Norse flavorings was not totally ridiculous. Not totally. Unfortunately, with its pesticides and stores of TB and Ebola, it violated its own theology. And creating that serf caste of abused female children, that was unconscionable, unconscionable.”

“Some men in the cult were castrated,” I said.

“And some women sterilized,” Jason said. “Anyone who’d earned a Nordic name who subsequently lapsed by breaking the rules forfeited the right to propagate by going under the knife. They were all made ‘clean.’

“The cult had benign beginnings, in a yoga group in western Massachusetts called the Circle of Harmonic Peace. That’s what Theo Babineaux, Edward’s father, joined.

“Lucas Mikkonen sought out the Circle after a nervous breakdown at MIT. He stayed involved with them right through earning his doctorate and starting a biotech firm with four of his classmates.

“Mikkonen was fired from that company when he admitted he’d been falsifying data. Then the Circle became his life. He sank more and more money into the organization, eventually assuming total control.

“When he chanced upon the old Royall property, it appealed to his Norse heritage, hoax of a rune stone and all. It was the perfect place to become the Master—to isolate his followers and scheme against his classmates, now millionaires, biotech’s big
wunderkinds.

“Then Mikkonen met Ian at his mother’s shop, returning a doll Duncan Drummond had stolen. For Ian, ill with lymphoma, Mikkonen was a confidant spiritual mentor—and a convenient customer to buy some land at his old prep school. So Mikkonen bought the property, then discovered the bog lily prevented his bringing in the bulldozers. He felt cheated, he felt had. Ian probably had made an honest mistake. It doesn’t appear he knew about the plant.

“Then things in the cult were going woefully wrong. Mikkonen’s health was breaking down due to diabetes and obesity. The IRS was auditing him, the red ink was flowing. Gradually, Emily Babineaux, his accountant, and Emmanuel Costa, her lover, took control of the cult in very elegant, very quiet palace coup. All but invisible to the Master’s flock.

“By that time, Mikkonen was a virtual prisoner. Revered but imprisoned. Indispensable but immobile. Like the queen in a termite colony.”

“Emily Babineaux began targeting a new enemy—not Lucas Mikkonen’s biotech rivals, but the HMO she blamed for her husband’s death. For misdiagnosing his pancreatic cancer. She earmarked the same germs for new enemies, on the date Master had chosen for his debacle, the autumnal equinox—the beginning of fall.”

The Fall,
of course, the day they all talked of.

“Emily Babineaux was not known as the treasurer within the cult, although that was certainly what she became—and more. She’d been given a new nickname for her way with the dollar. And with the IRS agents conducting the audit. Before her marriage, she’d studied art education, so she could have suggested the nickname herself.

“Her subjects in Truro called her the Golden One.”

Chapter Forty-three

Arthur Hilliard’s garden was flourishing. Thanks to his defying the ban on outdoor watering, it was thick with daisies, hollyhocks, and chrysanthemums, all competing for our attention. On the terrace overlooking the flowers and Provincetown Harbor, Arthur was grilling tuna steaks bloody as any beef while Roberto and I stood watching.

“I don’t like chrysanthemums,” Roberto announced. “They’re too September.”

“Labor Day happens,” Arthur said. He was elated, and with good reason. His Swim for Scholars, held yesterday and dedicated to Ian’s memory, had gone…swimmingly, raising $80,000 toward college scholarships for deserving students at Provincetown’s high school. Roger Morton was absent, a patient at Ashdown Farms, the exclusive Connecticut clinic, being treated for an eating disorder. It was this and not something organic that had been wasting his body all these months.

“I’m donating my reward money for your finding Chloe to our Swim for Scholars Program, Mark,” Arthur informed me. “Didn’t think you’d mind.”

Arthur wasn’t observant enough to know that I’d welcome his check. He just assumed everyone had money, that it was something you’re born with, like ears. So my reward that summer was staying alive, my new life with Roberto, and, eventually, recognition on stage. Reward enough.

Standing in Arthur’s garden, I recalled his earlier parties, especially the one this past Memorial Day weekend, beginning a summer that would fill so many graves. I remembered the unlucky
Vasa
, the bone-white Swedish tall ship in the harbor, and Ian swilling his Heineken and Edward serving his fragrant tureens of bouillabaisse. Ian had been right about one thing: we live in an imperfect world, “full of mosquitoes and people who dump trash in national parks.” But that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from attempting to improve it, in our persistent, incremental ways.

“When are they coming?” Arthur was asking. “They’re late.”

Minutes later, “they” appeared: Miriam, Chloe, and, of course, Alicia. The anxiety of the summer had chiseled away Miriam’s weight so that she looked spare, rationed, even more intense—and she was choosing more conservative clothing, like this mauve silk dress. She gripped Chloe’s hand so tightly the little girl winced. You’re my niece, more or less, I kept thinking of saying; you’re the only Drummond I’ll ever love. But I left those words until much, much later.

The greatest change the summer had wrought was in Alicia. Gone were the mohair sweaters and barrettes. She was wearing a dust-gray jogging suit for our little celebration, although she’d retained her mustard seed charm. She had left the Christian Soldiers, “left but not renounced.” With Miriam’s help, she’d recognized her relationship with Karl, the manager of their Provincetown office, as abusive and co-dependent, so, when he’d resigned his position to work for a conservative think tank, she’d used the occasion to cancel their engagement, deciding to think about becoming Unitarian. Or Catholic or Church of the Nazarene. The Christian Soldiers would linger in Provincetown until Thanksgiving, dispensing abstinence literature and Hollings Fair’s book on parenthood,
Spare the Rod
; then they would depart, having garnered as much publicity as possible, overshadowed as they were by Ian’s slaying and the maelstrom that followed. Hollings Fair decided to concentrate on anti-evolution crusades in the West. He sold his office on Commercial Street, which was occupied successively by businesses selling Cuban food, hemp hammocks, and pewter knickknacks—knights, Merlins, dragons. No business would last there longer than six months. Rumors persisted about supernatural phenomena driving tenants away, but a cable TV crew that staked out the building with psychics, cameras, and bugging devices came up empty.

“Chloe!” I called to her. “It’s so nice to see you!”

She didn’t answer. Like her mother, she’d lost a good deal of weight. Being woeful cooks, her kidnappers had fed her little but Ritalin-spiked Cream of Wheat, to keep her quiet.

Miriam hugged me, whispering, “Thank you again,” as Chloe broke away to hide in a hibiscus bush. “Chloe,” Miriam called to her, “Mark is the good man from the boat, you know that. The bad man is gone and the police have arrested the bad woman.” Sallie was actually out on bail, under sedation herself, with her family in Gloucester.

“Chloe, all my goldfish have been asking for you,” Arthur told her, as she peered between the stalks of the hibiscus bush like some frightened forest creature.

“I owe you all the biggest apology in the world.” Miriam directed her attention toward Chloe, as if her gaze itself sustained the child’s very existence. “I just couldn’t tell the truth about…Chloe’s father because Ian was so dismissive after she was born. He’d just laugh and belittle the whole situation. ‘My little transgression,’ he called her. Empathic as always…The police told me they had the kidnap suspects under surveillance without specifying who they were. They were watching Sallie and Alexander for two days, the whole time they were living on that boat. The police were about to move when the Truro thing broke.” Miriam squeezed my shoulder, the sore shoulder, of course, and said, “Thank you for saving my little girl’s life…Uncle Mark.”

A bee shopping through the hibiscus drove Chloe back toward her mother. She buried her head in the folds of Miriam’s dress. Then Arthur produced Chloe’s favorite beverage, a bottle of cold cream soda. Refusing it twice, she gave in the third time but didn’t want her Krazy Straw: “That’s for little kids,” she asserted. “She’s grown up a lot,” Miriam said. “She’s had to. But the psychiatrist says she’s coping as well as can be expected.”

“No tall ship for this party,” I remarked to Arthur as I scanned the choppy water of Provincetown Harbor.

“The Scandinavians have gone. All of them,” said Arthur.

“I’m going too,” Miriam announced.

“What?” several of us said.

“I’m selling,” Miriam said, “my shop, my house. Everything I own in Provincetown.” It wasn’t just the traumas of this summer; it was that “Augustitis” was hitting her Junes, year after year. “And Chloe won’t go near my shop, and I don’t blame her. She thinks every customer has come to take her away.”

I pulled my present for Chloe from its recycled paper bag. “Look, Chloe,” I said. I tested the title: “Look what Uncle Mark has brought you.” It was a rubber crab that emitted wheezy squeaks.

“Oh, honey, isn’t that crab adorable?” Miriam said.

“It came from the ecology store,” I said.

“I’ve seen those,” said Alicia, newly environmentally aware. “Those toys are manufactured from old bottles and wrecked cars.”

Which did not endear the crab to Chloe at all, who took it gingerly, as if wary it might pinch…

…The last guest didn’t come until after we’d eaten. She arrived in her “experienced” Cadillac, her “one bourgeois indulgence,” she always called it. Its battered bumper was adorned with a new sticker. “I’m a friend of Bill W.,” it read.

My mother wore a shift the color of orangeade and a hat of matching Italian straw. To my surprise, she was not alone. “This is Subash,” she said of her solemn companion. “Subash Malik.”

“From the meetings,” Subash said, as if all of us should know what that meant. He was a rotund man, probably from the subcontinent, with gray hair and a Wild West moustache waxed into ends as sharp as dental pics. “Your mother is a one-in-a-million lady,” he told me, pumping my hand exactly three times.

It wasn’t really a statement I could repudiate, so I just nodded.

“Subash teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard,” my mother said. “He just got tenure.”

Subash beamed. “And what talent your mother has. Between her artwork and her musicianship, she’s just amazing, just incredible.” Lightly, he touched my mother’s arm, and I felt ludicrously possessive, like a jealous toddler. “What a view,” Subash said, loosening his Harvard tie. “It’s straight out of Joel Meyerowitz.”

“One of the few straight things around here,” Roberto said.

Subash laughed then shook hands with the rest of my companions, concluding with Chloe. “…And I’m pleased to meet you, young lady. What is the name of your pretty spider doll?”

Chloe giggled and squeezed the crab so that it squeaked.

I introduced my mother to my friends. Roberto I left for last: “And this is my partner, Roberto Schreiber.”

“Oh, I’m so happy to meet you!” my mother said. It had been Roberto’s idea to invite her to this barbecue specifically to jump-start our relationship. “You’ve both been through so much. Yet you look so placid and domestic.”

Arthur again became the host. “You used to sing here, a while back,” he said to my mother. Chloe was dipping her crab into the little fishpond.

“‘A while back,’ you’re being awfully kind,” she laughed. “I sang in a little dive called Jubilee’s. Dark, smoky, and terribly authentic.”

“Jazz,” Arthur said.

“She was very good.” I said that because it was true, and at that moment, I needed truth more than anything on the planet.

Roberto was staring at my mother, the way I must have stared at his father.

“I’d gone to the New England Conservatory,” my mother told Arthur. “But I was a little racy for them.”

“And you brought Mark to Provincetown when he was all of…ten?” Arthur asked.

“Eight,” my mother said. “And when we visited the museum, Mark was just
entranced
by
The Fisher Boy.
”

“They found Royall’s bones in Truro,” I said. “Buried on the grounds of that awful commune.”

“Good heavens,” my mother said. “Years ago, people used to joke that Truro considered Provincetown very scandalous. But now Truro is making up for lost time.” She turned toward me. “We should do the same. Do you mind,” she asked the others, “if I borrow my son for a few minutes?”

“We’re just friends for now, Subash and me,” my mother said, out on Commercial Street. “You know, it’s silly, but, years ago, I worried about getting married because I thought you might be jealous.”

“Never.”

“He’s a wonderful man. Erudite, brilliant, cheerful as all get out. His wife died of a heart attack five years ago. That’s when he began having a problem.” Then she said it: “Drinking. Like me. He has a summer place in Annisquam. I met him at AA in Gloucester.”

Which explained his “meetings” reference and the bumper sticker on her car. Saying congratulations didn’t seem to fit, but I hugged her, there on Commercial Street. I was able to do that.

“Joining AA was my prayer of thanks. For your making it through this nightmare of a summer. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to being holy.”

We walked toward the dunes, away from the crowds and restaurants and shops because my mother said she needed a little privacy. “That’s no reflection on your friends—especially on your wonderful young man. Another wonderful young man.”

Between the houses and trees, we could catch glimpses of the ocean, of the water that had almost received my corpse. I thought of Alexander Nash, whose body, partially devoured by bottom dwellers, had washed up on Nemaskett Beach, where it was found by clam diggers at low tide. I would think of Alexander—dead instead of me—for the rest of my life.

“I remember staying here at the Wharf,” I said. “That time you sang at the club.”

“You used to look out to sea. From that pier.” She was folding her big sun hat in her hands, squeezing it so roughly I thought she might damage the straw. “I shouldn’t have encouraged you to look out to sea. It was wrong, it was dishonest. Duncan Drummond offered to marry me. He offered to leave Janet and more or less elope. But by then I’d seen the kind of husband he was, the indifferent kind of father he’d become, and I didn’t want to be more indebted to him than I was. His children—Fulton and George—seemed pretty damaged, and poor Janet had just had Ian. A clean break…just seemed preferable. The irony is—one reason I refused to marry Duncan was his drinking. That and his compulsive philandering.”

I had to say it. Was that my Drummond recklessness? “But you let them buy your silence. And you told me those lies—”

“I guess I thought…a good lie was better than the bad truth. Sometimes people just make mistakes.”

We had come to the place where the street met the water.

“You’ve turned out fine, Mark,” my mother said. “God knows this summer was a test. Saving that little girl—”

“The Talmud says that if you save one man, you save the world. According to Roberto.”

“You saved me, too,” my mother said. “That talk in the kitchen was my wake-up call. To get it together, to get sober.”

Momentarily, we glanced at the breakwater, at the line of granite snaking toward the dunes of Herring Cove Beach. A cold wind, full of autumn and football and encroaching winter darkness, blew goose-bumps onto our skin. The wind seemed to scour the sky of sea birds, and the water assumed a cobalt-blue cast.

She said, “Let’s take a different route back,” and we turned away.