A Person of Interest (50 page)

It was true he had grown bulkier, but by way of stored power. The thick chest and arms of someone who maintained his own woodpile, yet the hunched shoulders of someone who read by poor light. Or who ticked his own sinister clocks.

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“A queer paradox of the hermit’s existence: we live in a state of expectancy. Keep the hordes at the foot of the mountain, but what if an elegant Martian descends from the sky? Or a friend from the past. I have tea, nothing Japanese, sadly, just bitter Lipton’s and a fruit distillate called Red Zinger. I had just, before Marjorie bore you to me, poured a glass of my apricot wine, and it stands there untouched as if hoping to lure Elijah.”

The face almost completely concealed by leonine hair and tremendous gray beard, but the eyes—although Russianized somehow by proximate hair—still the avid, self-satisfi ed eyes Lee recalled, though he wouldn’t have thought that he could. The eyes hurtled to him from a vault, on the wings of the jacket.

“Lewis isn’t here,” Lee said—telling himself, reprimanding himself, wringing the jacket with fury.

“Lewis? My God: Lewis
Gaither.
I’m astonished Mnemosyne yields the name. You weren’t expecting a full class reunion, I hope?” Whitehead laughed with delight. “Lewis
Gaither.
I wonder where he ended up. As I remember, a Christ-hyping dimwit. They can be the most dangerous people, but he seems not to have managed to do any harm.”

“You killed Hendley,” Lee blurted.

“The ‘Minister of Information’? Yes. Not one of my prouder experiments. I don’t like them to linger and suffer: that is barbaric. But it brought us together.”

Perhaps this was what Lee required, the repugnant suggestion of fellowship, or perhaps it was just that they heard something, a vague engine noise briefly mixed with the sound of the rain.

“That can’t be Marjorie again,” Whitehead mused. “Don’t tell me you’re the posse comitatus after all.”

Lee had only stepped over the threshold into the cavelike and flickering room, cramped and dark as a mouth, which he now strobo-scopically grasped was enclosed on all sides by bookshelves, exotically floored by a miscellany of overlapping mats and pelts, enlivened by examples of handmade furnishings that conformed cleverly to the space—a hinged worktable, a hinged single bed—and centered snugly on the woodstove, the room’s ardent heart, in the pulsating light of which towered a miniature city of boxes and cans, cartons, cylinders, spools of wire, plastic bottles and jugs, lengths of pipe, squares of
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screen, jars of matches, narrow towers of small blocks of wood almost touching, with their pinnacle points, the stalactite-like pendants that hung here and there from the ceiling, the hacksaws and hand drills, an upside-down forest of tools; he absorbed these impressions instanta-neously, his mind’s shutter held open, as he turned for the door, half an arm’s reach away, and plunged through it, skidding down the two moss-slickened steps, belatedly rejecting the houndstooth jacket and then tripping over and trampling it into the mud. A weak, limited glow seemed to mark the far side of the clearing. Lee felt one knee fail beneath him but was still thrashing forward, the sluiceway of rain blinding him, he had smacked into something—

Arms seized and bundled him into a car, some kind of tall sport-utility vehicle. He saw the eerie green glow of a dashboard display, varying concentrations of darkness, heard doors slam and felt the see-saw movements of a three-point reversal—

“Had to wait till the pickup left,” a voice near him was saying. “He went in and came out. Yeah, I have no idea. You’re breaking up, wait a sec.”

From far away Whitehead was calling, “Who is that? Who’s there?”

Then they were crashing down the narrow declivity, the tree branches snapping like fireworks. Surprisingly soon, they were back to the tranquil rain hiss of the two-lane paved road.

“Are you injured?” a new voice was asking. “What happened in there? Are you injured? Can you tell us what happened in there? What were you doing in there anyway? What’s your name?”

“. . . No idea, no, I don’t. . . . Yeah, I don’t. Heard, not saw. Tell them sit tight, I guess.”

“Can you talk? What’s your name?”

“. . . like a bat out of hell. Doesn’t seem to be injured.”

“What’s your
name,
sir?” The dome light snapped on, an explosion of brightness. Lee gasped and sheltered his eyes. From beneath trembling palms, he saw three men, one driving, one craned around from the front seat, one in the back beside him, all of them wearing brownish green, hunterlike clothing, caps with flaps, lace-up boots, bulky vests. The man beside Lee was holding a rifle, its end pointed out the back window.

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“Speak English?” demanded the man in the front passenger seat.

Lee was still heaving for breath. His heart smashed his rib cage. He was soaked to the skin, he had a pain in his knee, he was shaking so much it seemed possible he was in shock. “Lee,” he ejected with effort.

Instant darkness again as the dome light blinked out.

“Says his name’s Lee,” the voice said. A beat later the voice said in surprise, “Oh, no shit?”

There was definitely something wrong with the seats of the car: they had lost all their springs, or their backs rose at too sharp an angle.

Whatever it was, it enforced an uncomfortable senile posture, pressed the ribs to the guts, wrung the abdomen, crumpled the spine; he was forced to curl up like a fetus yet ached from decay.

He was sobbing. He pressed his hot face against his cold hands.

“. . . possibly injured,” the distant voice reevaluated.

Whoever was driving was speeding, or at least the night seemed to rush awesomely past. The rain had grown viscous; it battered the roof of the car like many thousands of handfuls of mud being constantly hurled. The car swung through a turn, moved more slowly, then came to a stop. His elbows pressed onto his thighs, his face onto his palms. These conjunctions seemed eternal and unalterable. Doors unlatched, the dome light blazed on, doors slammed, the dome light was extinguished, doors were forcibly unhinged again, the dome light reignited—he perceived it with no more interest than he might have sensed changes in weather from the depths of a vault. A familiar voice said, “Tell them to meet us in the room. And I want some hot tea. Not that shit that the restaurant serves. Get the stuff that I brought, it’s on that chest-of-drawers thing on the left when you come in the door.

Yeah, you’ll get the
water
from the restaurant. Make sure it’s boiling.

And a chicken soup and the burger and fries. Medium. No, say me-dium rare. They overcook everything.”

Lee sat up, hugging himself. His clothes were drenched. The air pouring into the car felt much colder. His cap was gone; he wasn’t sure when he’d lost it.

“Okay,” the familiar voice said. “Can you stand up, Professor? Take my arm if you need to. The room’s just this way. You’re going to have a hot shower and put on dry clothes and drink some hot tea and eat dinner. The Woodsman’s food isn’t half bad, but I’m afraid there’s no
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sushi.” Jim Morrison laughed as he led Lee along. Morrison was wearing crisp camouflage slacks and a sweatshirt that read eddie bauer. He looked every inch the rich dilettante hunter, enjoying a wifeless vacation.

“It’s reassuring to see you here,” Morrison added. “I bet it’s an interesting story. But first the shower and dry clothes and dinner. I’ll be waiting outside.” He’d steered Lee through the door of a room. There was a made-up bed, western-themed amateur paintings. Lee crept to the bathroom, his mind echoing with the series of tasks that had been laid before him—shower, dry clothes, and dinner—and locked himself in.

The water pressure was good, and the temperature scalding.

Cocooned in a geyser of heat, he had the vague sensation, not unpleasant, that his flesh was being cooked. Donald Whitehead did not recede so much as succumb to suspension, his fi gure dangling in his rough-hewn doorway, his baroque words of greeting unlaunched on his tongue. Somewhere the path forked. Where had Lee stumbled? What wrong turn had he taken?

A loud thumping. “Professor!” Jim Morrison called. “Doing okay in there?”

He had fallen asleep, or perhaps he had fainted, tipped against the wet tiles.

When he was finished, he cracked open the bathroom door as slightly as he could. The room was empty, but some clothes had been left on the bed. Lee drew them onto himself almost unconsciously, like a sleepwalker. The boxer shorts ballooned around his groin. The pants had to be rolled several times at the cuffs. He drew the belt all the way through the buckle, to the innermost hole.

He was slumped on the end of the bed when a tactful knock came at the door, like the doctor’s when one has been forced to strip naked and put on a stiff paper gown. Morrison entered bearing a plastic tray with a bowl of soup and a hamburger on it, and he was followed by another man bearing a tray with a plastic teapot and two cups on it, and that man was followed by so many additional persons, mostly men but some women, all dressed in brand-new hunting togs, that the room was soon full.

“I hope you don’t mind company while we talk?” Agent Morrison said.

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25.

SOMETIME IN THE COURSE OF THE NIGHT, THE RAIN

turned to snow. Even during Lee’s ride down the mountain, the change was occurring. The heavy strings of rain that had framed Marjorie had lost speed, devolved into stiff soup, approached ever clumsier, sloppier mire, and then at the apex—or nadir—of this process, as if at the touch of a wand, all began to reverse, to fl ow
up,
to become weightless.

Snow.

It wasn’t such an unusual thing at this altitude, a snowstorm in May. It wasn’t usual, no. Not unusual either. It happened. Every once in a while.

The man who had voiced these laconic analyses was very long and narrow, with huge hands and shaggy white hair, but if not for the hair he might have looked Agent Morrison’s age, even younger. The hair was a strange foreign growth on his head. He must be only in his late thirties, or early forties at most. He wore a plaid work shirt that, unlike Agent Morrison’s, looked soft and faded with washing, although it was still stiffly bulky, because of a thick quilted lining. Lee could see the lining where the man’s cuffs were unbuttoned and turned back at his bony, red wrists. The man was sitting in one of the room’s two mustard-colored chairs, at its brown wood-grain laminate table. Agent Morrison, in his too-new-looking wilderness clothes, sat in the other.

A third man, who had not even tried to appear to be rustic, was lying across the end of the other bed, perpendicular to the normal direction.

Lee could see only the soles of his wing tips and the limp cuffs of his slacks, darkly stained with moisture.

Lee himself was rolled up at the head of the other bed, the one nearer the window, at the foot of which were the table and chairs. At some point during his long and confused conversation with the room-ful of people, he had grown so light-headed with fever and so incapable of speech from his chattering teeth that eventually he’d been lifted, like a sack of potatoes, and matter-of-factly inserted beneath the bed’s covers, and this was where, after an unrestful dreamscape, people letting themselves in and out, loudly talking, even using the foot of his
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bed to sit down—he would bounce as if floating on turbulent seas—he had awoken, he didn’t know how much later. A gray light had been struggling into the room. For a long time, he’d listened, not with any intent to eavesdrop but only because he had felt so abraded as to have been made unbearably porous, unable to shield himself from the sounds. The overnight babble of voices reduced to just three, whose owners he saw when with effort, and briefl y, his eyes fl uttered open.

Agent Morrison, the prematurely white-haired man, and the pair of wing tips.

“EOD flying in . . . the Team Leader . . . a tactical entry . . . bomb
techs . . . damage radius . . . decent assessment . . . clear out neighbors . . . SWAT launch . . . maintain radio contact . . . Would we need
Hostage Rescue? Your call, but I don’t think there’s time for those people
to get here. . . .”
The voice of the man wearing wing tips had been rambling and droning eternally; Lee dozed and awoke and dozed again to its unending stream.

“He’s not going to have anyone in there,” the laconic voice broke in, sounding slightly annoyed. “That place is barely big enough for him to fit. Ask your professor.”

“He awake?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’ll need a doctor for him.” Wing Tips yawned.

“It’s just a fever. He’ll sweat it out.”

“At that age pneumonia’s a danger. My dad almost died from it two months ago.”

“I didn’t know that, Tom. I hope he’s doing all right now.” This was Agent Morrison’s voice.

“Old age is a bitch. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.”

“And you don’t need to clear out the neighbors, because there aren’t any neighbors. Just that little log cabin a quarter mile down that your three guys were using.” White Hair again, audibly testy.

After a few silent moments, Agent Morrison said, “Why don’t you tell us your take on it, Dave? This is your turf. You know him.”

“I’m just local yokel,” Dave demurred with sarcasm. “I’m not Task Force.”

Another pause, slightly shorter. “You’re saying we don’t need Hostage Rescue.”

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“I’m not saying what you need and don’t need, I’m saying what you can and can’t do. You can’t launch your SWAT people from the neighboring place because there isn’t a neighboring place. There’s an eight-foot-square cabin where your three guys have been freezing their tails off. The only reason they haven’t got frostbite is because they’ve been sitting on top of each other.”

“SWAT’ll have to hike in,” Agent Morrison admitted.

“Crunch, crunch,” Dave replied.