The Killing Circle (17 page)

To kill the time, I check back on the Comment page at www.patrick.rush.com. Once more, it mostly shows the same obsessives debating the finer points of
The Sandman
’s plotlines, unearthing inconsistencies, along with differing personal impressions of the author (“He signed my book and asked if I was a writer too. And I AM! It was like he READ MY MIND!!” vs “actually saw PR on queen street the other day, trying (but failing) to look like a ‘normal guy’, walking with a bag of groceries(!?) pretentious twat!”).

I’m about to log off when the cursor finds the day’s most recent entry. Another bulletin from
therealsandman
:

One down.

Angela gets back to me. She has to work late tonight, but can meet me later on. For some reason I insist it be at her place (which she reluctantly agrees to). After she hangs up, I realize I need to see wherever she lives in order to make sure she’s real.

I’m set to arrive at Angela’s around eight, which gives me time to put in a call to the only number other than hers I have from the circle. Len.

“The police just left,” he says, skipping over hello, as though only a day sits between now and our last conversation instead of years. “Did you hear what happened to Petra?”

“I heard. Was the man you spoke to named Ramsay?”

“I was too freaked to really listen. Kind of a funny guy.”

“Yeah?”

“Like funny strange and funny ha-ha at the same time.”

“That’s him.”

I would walk to Len’s apartment in Parkdale but the heatwave has once again broken the temperature record it set the day before, so I head west along King in the Toyota with the windows down. I turn left toward the lake, into one of the blocks of stately family homes long since cut up into dilapidated rooming houses. Len’s building looks even worse than the others. The paint peeling off the porch in long curls.
The front windows obscured by pinned-up flags, tin foil and garbage bags in place of blinds.

Len has the attic flat. The side entrance is open as he said it would be and I climb up the narrow stairs past the suffocating assaults of hash smoke and boiled soup bones and paint thinner seeping out from under the doors.

Rounding the corner to the last flight, I look up to see Len waiting at the top. The big doofus stooped in the doorframe, spongy with sweat but otherwise looking relieved to see me.

“It’s you,” he says.

“Were you expecting somebody else?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

Len’s apartment is a single room. A small counter, hotplate and bar fridge in one corner, a bare mattress on the floor, and the only natural light coming from two windows the size of hardcover books, one facing the street and the other the yard. The severely sloped ceiling drops on either side from a beam that cuts the space in half, which allows Len to stand straight only when situated in the middle of the room. On the walls, movie posters bubbled with moisture.
The Exorcist
,
Suspiria
,
Night of the Living Dead.
The floor strewn with laundry that smells of a battle between deodorant and old socks.

“Have a seat,” Len offers, scooping a pile of paperbacks off a folding chair. It leaves him to sit cross-legged on the floor. An over-heated kid ready for storytime.

“So, how have you been?”

“Okay. Not writing much. I haven’t been able to think straight for a while now. It’s hard to write spooky stuff when you’re living spooky stuff.”

Over Len’s shoulder, stacked atop makeshift shelves made of milk crates, I notice my book. The cover tattered, the pages within fattened by greasyfingered rereadings.

“I couldn’t sleep for a week the first time I read it,” Len says, following my gaze.

“Sorry.”

“No need to be. The best parts weren’t yours.”

“No argument there.”

Len glances at the door, as though to make sure it’s locked. All at once the haggard, skittish look of him reveals he’s been cooking away up here far longer than is healthy.

“When was the last time you went outside?”

“I don’t like to go out much any more,” he says. “It’s like when you have a sense that you’re being watched, but when you turn there’s nothing there? I have that all the time now.”

“Did you tell Ramsay about it?”

“No. It’s a secret. A
secret agent
secret. You tell and you’re dead.”

“I know what you mean.”

“He asked about you.”

“What did he want to know?”

“If you had any relationship with Petra outside the circle. What I thought of you.”

I keep my eyes on Len as he selects what to reveal. He doesn’t seem the sort of man who can stand too much pressure, so I do my best to apply some in my stare.

“I told him you were my friend,” he says finally.

“That’s it?”

“I don’t
know
anything else.”

“Aside from the source for my book.”

“Aside from that.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t tell him about it.”

“Who else have you spoken to?”

“Petra called. Angela, too. She told me about Conrad’s accident. Even Ivan came round just the day before yesterday. All of them scared shitless.”

“Not William?”

“Are you kidding? The day that guy looks me up it’s time to move.”

All at once, the stifling heat in the room closes in on me. There isn’t half enough air for two sets of lungs to live on, and Len is getting most of it anyway, panting like an overfed retriever.

“Angela told you about Conrad’s accident?”

“I told you she did.”

“But did she tell you that anyone
else
was in the car when he died?”

“
Was
there someone else?”

“No. No, there wasn’t,” I say, banging my head on the ceiling when I stand. “Sorry, but I’m late for another meeting.”

“Who with?”

“Angela, actually.”

“She must be pissed with you.”

“Apparently she’s decided to let it slide.”

Len scratches the islands of beard along his jawline.

“I want to show you something,” he says.

Len uncrosses his legs and rolls over the floor to the milk-crate shelves. His thick fingers plow through the piles of comics, digging down into the wreckage of toppled towers of books. By the time he finds what he’s looking for his T-shirt is black with perspiration.

He scrambles over on hands and knees to where I’m standing and hands me a book. A literary journal I have heard of,
The Tarragon Review.
One of the dozens of obscure regional publications that print short stories and poems for readerships that number as high as the two figures.

“You in this?” I ask, expecting Len is trying to show off his first appearance in print.

“Check out the table of contents.”

I read every title and author on the list. None of it rings a bell.

“Look again,” Len urges. “The names.”

The second time through I see it. A short story titled “The Subway Driver”. Written by one Evelyn Sanderman.

“San-der-man. Sand-man. See?”

“Are you saying Evelyn wrote this?”

“At the back,” Len says, excited now. “The Contributors’ Notes.”

The journal’s last pages feature short biographies of the volume’s writers, along with a black-andwhite photo. At the entry for Evelyn Sanderman the following paragraph:

Evelyn is a traveller who is fascinated by other people’s lives. “There is no better research for a writer than to get close to a stranger,” she tells us. This is Evelyn’s first published story.

Next to this, a photo of Angela.

“When was this published?”

“Last year.”

“And why do you have it?”

“I subscribe to
everything
,” he says. “I like to follow who’s getting published and where. It feeds my jealousy, I guess. Some mornings it’s the only thing that gets me out of bed.”

Len is kneeling before me now, looking crazed with the heat, the rare visit of human contact. The sharing of a plot twist.

“Can I borrow this?”

“Go ahead. I kind of want it out of here anyway,” Len says, eyes ablaze with the narcotic rush of fear.

“The Subway Driver” is good. The critic in me insists on getting this said upfront. A totally different voice from the one who told the story in Angela’s journal. This time, the narrative tone is
chillingly anesthetized, a man transported through a crowded urban environment, unnoticed and hazy as a phantom. But there are also moments of heartbreaking despair that cut through to the surface. Not Angela’s voice at all, or any other strictly fictional creation. It’s because the voice belongs to someone real. To Ivan.

As the title partly suggests, “The Subway Driver” is a day in the life of an unnamed man who speeds a train through the underground tunnels during the day, and scratches at chronically unfinished stories at night. What really takes me by surprise, though, the revelation that leaves me shaking in the front seat of the Toyota where I’m parked outside Len’s rooming house, isn’t this blatant borrowing from the biography Ivan presented to us during the Kensington Circle’s meetings, but the private backstory, the tragic secret I assumed he had shared only with me.

At points in the main narrative, the Ivancharacter reflects on the accidental (or not) fall of his niece down his sister’s basement stairs. The same event he related to me standing at the urinals in the Zanzibar. Even some of the details, the very phrasings (as best as I recall them) make their way into Angela’s text.

Her name was Pam…I watched her run off down the hall and start down the stairs and I thought
That’s the last time you’re ever going to see her alive…
One of the old kind,
y’know? Like a comb except with metal teeth…That’s how a life ends.
Two
lives. It just happens.

She must have learned Ivan’s secret on her own. He
told
her.

And she used it. Used him.

The address Angela gave me included a security code number for her condominium in one of the tall but otherwise nondescript towers of grey metal and glass that have weedishly cropped up around the baseball stadium. I would never have known how to ring her otherwise, as her number isn’t listed next to Angela Whitmore, but Pam Turgenov. The name of Ivan’s dead niece.

Once she’s buzzed me in I take the elevator up, each blinking floor number to the twenty-first ratcheting up the rage within me. Flashpoints bursting into flame.

She is a liar.

A threat to me.

To Sam.

And then:

It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my book. She has taken my old life away from me.

I’ve never felt this way before. This angry. Though anger seems to have little to do with what I’m feeling now. It’s too soft, a mood among moods. This is
physical
: an electric charge crackling
out from my chest. A clean division between a thinking self and an acting self.

Angela left her door open. I know because when I take a running kick at it, the handle crunches into the plaster of the interior wall.

The acting part of me lunges at her.

The thinking part takes note of the cheap furniture, the curtainless picture windows looking west over the lake, the rail lines, the city’s sprawl to the horizon. The day’s heat hanging over everything.

Angela might have said something before I slammed into her but it made no impression. No words escape her lips now, in any case. It’s because I’ve taken her by the throat. My thumbs pressing down. Beneath her skin, something soft gives way.

Then I’m lifting her up and throwing her on to the sofa. Straddling her hips. Putting all my weight on to my locked arms so that they stop any sound coming from her.

Screaming into her with a voice not my own.

I don’t know what you want. I don’t know who you are. It doesn’t matter. Because if I see whoever you’ve got tailing me anywhere near my house or my son again, I’ll fucking kill you.

Her body spasms.

You getting this? I’ll fucking
kill
you.

I keep my grip on her throat and feel Angela’s body yield beneath me. I already
am
killing her. There is a curiosity in seeing how the end will show itself. A final seizure? A stillness?

It’s you.

I’m letting her go. That is, I must have let her go, as she appears to be making an attempt to say something.

“I thought you were too…
simple.
But that’s the kind of person who does this sort of thing, isn’t it? The blank slate.”

“It’s not
me.
”

“You didn’t know what you were doing just now. You were a different person. Maybe that person is the one who killed Petra.”

Angela struggles to stand. Moves away from me without taking her eyes off my hands.

“
I’m
the one being followed,” I say.

“You nearly
strangled
me!”

“Because you’re fucking with me. My son.”

“Fuck you!”

The exhaustion hits us both at the same time. Our feet dance uncertainly under us, as though we are standing on a ship’s deck in a storm.

“Just answer me this. If you’re so innocent, why are you hiding behind someone else’s name?”

“To stay away from him.”

She tells me how she’s seen him from time to time. Ever since the Kensington Circle stopped meeting. Someone who would appear across the street from the building where she worked, her different apartments over the years, watching through the window of a restaurant as she ate. Always in shadow. Faceless.

It was the Sandman who forced her into changing her name, her appearance and her job
before
she learned of Conrad White and Evelyn’s accident. Afterward, it only let her disappear that much more easily.

“Did disappearing involve sending out stories under pseudonyms?”

“Pseudonyms?”

“Evelyn Sanderman. Pam Turgenov. Who else have you been?”

Angela crosses her arms. “’The Subway Driver’.”

“And very fine it is. Though not entirely yours.”

“What you did, you did it to be recognized.”

“That’s not true.”

“No?”

“I did it to have something that was mine.”