A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (26 page)

Why couldn’t Lou see that, feel it? He’s not a shallow man. He
could
see it, but the brokerage job had deteriorated into such a disaster, had sucked so much vinegar out of his system, that it had deflated his ego somehow. And with Sherm Wellington flashing his wallet all the time, it had built up a kind of pressure. Lou had to do something totally crazy just to hold his head up. So he put his personal stamp on the annual Mantoloking thing and dazzled Sherm and all the rest of them. It was fun, yes; but it was something Sherm Wellington would do, not Lou Christopher.

She slid out of bed and roamed through the dark house. Beyond the kitchen window, the shadows of the trees played across the backyard.

Oh, it was good to see Lou happy after the long drought that followed Fort Dix. How could the transition to civilian life have been anything
but
difficult after a twenty-five year Army career? They’d expected it, but real life always takes you by surprise. And it had been worse than anything they had anticipated. This confident, competent man reduced to begging for accounts over the telephone. Well, it wasn’t really begging even though it must have felt that way.

Position is so important to a man like Lou. It shouldn’t be. They both acknowledged that it’s the little things in life that are the most precious: their grandsons, Jory and Kirk. But when Lou was at the top of his game, as a colonel, all the way up the ladder actually, it was like an infusion of oxygen. It affected everything. He smiled. He laughed. He loved. Eons ago, it seemed.

This new gift, this account, represented a fresh shot of juice into Lou’s system; a joyous return to the good times. With every passing day, he seemed to invent a new reason for it; a justification that, deep down, they both knew was fallacious. His judgment had gotten all twisted up.

The light inside the refrigerator fell out onto the floor as she opened the door, reached for the leftover broccoli, and then picked at it with a fork.

She’d played her part in it, too. It wasn’t all on Lou. She’d allowed the drought to wring the juice from them both. And deep within her, she knew the truth was that she—yes—actually, crazily wanted him to foul up, wanted him shrunken and vulnerable so that she could justify her purpose by bringing him out of it. It was an ugly, alien thing that just grew up around them right from the first day, scarring them almost like those ghastly wounds in Lou’s thighs. She hated that in herself, but it was an impulse that just came up out of some dark place within her.

Restless, she sank into the couch in the den, took up the
Atlantic Monthly
, thumbed through the pages, and then threw it down.

What was the reason for Lou getting the account? It was right in front of her. Had to be. Something that stares you right in the face. If she could just clear away the fog of wishful thinking—that “quality guy” junk. Never believed it anyway. Okay, here is this guy—this old guy to somebody like Buck—this Army guy pining for the old days, wearing disappointment like an old shirt…

This Buck woman wants something and she decides to use this old guy. Old guy? What did that make Maggie? Grandma Moses? Not on your life. Well, she couldn’t exactly bound up to the net during doubles any more... Still, sometimes they looked. Young Officer Tomlin had.

Clear the fog, girl.
Think.
Think tough. Think Buck. See Lou for what he is. You want something and you can use Lou to get it. Lou or somebody like Lou. An aging ex-Army man. What else?

Cut to the marrow of it. To Buck, Lou was a fair-to-middling broker. Admit it. Just another nonentity down there in Paramus, busting his chops on two-thousand-dollar accounts. Not the phenom that Buck herself was. Limited; in imagination, guts, drive. Just not a player. Never would be. It was ironic, really. In his own mind, Lou was a player again, finally. A mover, he said. For him to say that...

She slid back into bed, pulled the cover over her, arms outside and straight along her sides. On her back, eyes on the ceiling, she continued her reverie.

Lou never lies; except when he does.
He’s lying now. Lying to me. Why?
Take it step by step.
He’s lying to me because he thinks I won’t like whatever it is and I’ll make a big fuss about it. We hate fusses. Or I’ll question his judgment. I’ll correct him. Haven’t done that in a very long time, but it only takes one time. Or I’ll cry. We hate crying. Means he’ll have to fix it, whatever it is that’s wrong; have to change his plans to fix it. Why would I cry?

Buck. An affair. No. Candlewood Lake could not have happened if he were diddling Buck. Never. No, it had to be something about the money. What was it he said that night?

He’d mumbled it into the pillow. She’d been out of it, half asleep. “Something weird happened, Mag,” he’d said. “Something weird.” What could that mean? After he’d had a chance to think about it some more, he wouldn’t talk about it. Weird to Lou would mean shocking to her; out of left field. What? Right on the heels of the new account—a payback, a
quid pro quo
?

Okay, two parts: One, Lou’s treading water as a broker; his ego’s hurting. Two, he’s an old Army guy. So, you throw something his way to pump up the ego—the account, the money—and you get what you want in return; the Army part. But what? Something weird, shocking, bizarre.

Buck, she’s got it all. What more could she want? Power? She already has it. More power? Maybe. Politics.
There!
What was it again? Bliss’s campaign she was working on?

The lying. What exactly was the lie? Something about what he’s doing over the next couple of days. Doesn’t a lie always have some little element of truth in it, so that to him it doesn’t seem like such a big lie? But then, once the little part, the truth, is planted, the lie starts growing, like crazy, a fifty-pound pumpkin sprouting from a seed. So what is the little part? The big part?

Start with the conference. Suppose he’s not really at a conference. It’s something else. That’s the lie. And the little part, the seed—the truth? The actual location, maybe? Not really Arden House, but near it, up north of here, a place you could drive to in less than an hour? Yes! . The image of heaving orange flames— Bear Mountain Bridge—leapt into her consciousness.

Maggie sat upright, flung the cover to the side, and swung her feet to the floor. By the lighted dial on the clock on her bedside table, she saw that it was a little after midnight. Three minutes later, she was dressed and raising the garage door. A heartbroken and whining Trude clawed at the back door, begging to go along with her. Inside the Subaru (she would never even get into that stupid Lexus again), the darkness banished every pin of light along with every fleck of indecision still roiling in her blood.

Fever raged in her cheeks, down along the sides of her jaw, and onto her neck. She was alone on the streets of Glen Rock and out on Route 17, heading north, toward the Thruway and Bear Mountain Bridge.

It was cold in the car. She couldn’t tell if the opaque buildup of condensation on the windshield was outside or inside. She turned on the wipers. Inside. She flipped the toggle for heat. Her breath rode the air in a thin wisp of steam.

Lou wasn’t transparent to her, just translucent. When he was in trouble, he never came out with it without prodding; but once the cork was popped, it all came out like thunder. Starting all the way back at Fort Benning.

He’d told her he wasn’t long for the Army; that there’d been a flap of some kind and he was getting booted, even though he wanted to stay. He told her all about it: the patrol in the jungle, disobedience of orders (but for a good reason—the best. They couldn’t just sit there waiting for the NVA to pounce. They could hear them out there, all around them, during the night.) The best defense was a good offense. Any football player knew that.

He’d been a hero; a word he couldn’t force from his own lips. Heroes are only those who were with the worms now. He’d rescued Tom Holt. Been shot up himself. Received the Silver Star. Very few got that ribbon. It meant something.

She’d discretely brought it up with her father, who was a lieutenant general. Quietly, but firmly. Couldn’t he look into it? See if something could be done? Lou was such a good man. Didn’t the Army need people like him? It seemed like such a small error in judgment; maybe not an error at all, just self-preservation.

Dad had looked into it, got hold of Readfield, talked it all over. And in the mellowing that comes with distance from the actual terrain, Hank softened his position and withdrew his letter of reprimand. He actually liked Lou, just couldn’t tolerate disobedience when men’s lives were at stake. But at the end of the day, as they say, he wouldn’t mind having the lieutenant under his command again sometime. Of course, being called by a lieutenant general on Lou’s behalf had had something to do with it, too.

It was warm in the car, finally. Lou was right; it was fruitless to turn on the heater when you first crank the car; there’s no heat in the system yet. On the New York Thruway, the Subaru’s high beams swept along the roadside far ahead of her. Somewhere high on the hills to her right was Arden House. She drove right on by it.

It wasn’t as if Lou got into hot water all the time; it was very rare, but he did get into it. There was that part of him, that rebelliousness and lack of convention, that she could see in his eyes from the first. And why was that attractive? She didn’t know. He would always have trouble. He would always need someone. She could see that and she loved it. She didn’t know why.

She swung off the Thruway at the first tollbooth, turned onto Route 6, and climbed over the mountains toward Palisades Parkway. Water gleamed on the cliffs on the right side of the road. Still not another car in sight. In five minutes, she was at the Bear Mountain Circle, through it, and headed for Fort Montgomery. She drove over the Popolopen Bridge, stopped, and parked just beyond it. She got out of the car and walked back to look at Bear Mountain Bridge.

Emergency generators flooded the span with light. Trucks and repair crews crowded the roadway. The lights were functioning, but the evidence of the blast was clear: cables and girders blackened in the center of the span, like the roadway itself. A platoon of men was awash in foam as sweeper trucks scrubbed the pavement.

It was one o’clock in the morning. The wind blew through her coat and whipped around her bare legs. A chill rose all the way up to the middle of her back. High above the bridge, on the other side, she saw a bright, green beacon; and down at the level of the water another light, a white one. Her breath barely escaped her lips before a freezing blast of air swept it away. Tears welled and overflowed onto her cheeks.

She went to the rail of Popolopen Bridge and looked into the darkness of the gorge below. She leaned out as far as she could and looked down as far as the ink would allow. She turned and followed the line of the gorge, up and away from that place, beyond the hills and the trees, out to some cold, rocky place she knew existed.

She whispered, “Lou... Are you out there, darling? Out there somewhere? Come home to me, Lou. I love you.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Maggie slid behind the wheel of the Subaru and flicked on the heater switch again. It was cold on the Popolopen Bridge. She grabbed the brim of her hat and tossed it into the back seat. She let the heat wash over her face. It was one A.M.. She glided quietly into Fort Montgomery and turned immediately onto Mine Torne Road. A rocky ledge loomed on the right, a dark gorge on the left. The fog sponged up the beams just in front of the car as she negotiated the curves in the road. Then, suddenly, a man was in her path, his reflective raincoat gleaming orange. He waved her to the side. Two olive drab military police cars blocked the way ahead.

“Would you mind stepping out of the vehicle, ma’am?” the MP said, opening the door.

“What’s the matter, officer?” Mag asked, as she swung her feet out to the blacktop.

The man ducked into the car and lit up the back seat with his flashlight. He reached to pull the trunk latch release. Another man dressed in orange probed the trunk with his long, black flashlight.

“There are some fugitives out here in the woods, ma’am. We’re just making sure you’re not transporting them.”

Maggie pulled her coat tight around her to fight off the chill wind. They had killed her lights; and with the trees towering over the road, she could barely see. She clasped her hands in front of her and looked up into the night beyond the arching branches.

“What kind of fugitives, officer?” she asked.

“There could be several men out here. And one woman. That’s all we know.”

“The business at the bridge? I’ve been listening to the radio.”