Carnival of Shadows (31 page)

Travis did have just one drink, and he did not stay long at the Tavern. When he left, he was pensive. He walked back to the McCaffrey Hotel, but instead of going inside, he sat in his car for a while. He asked himself if there was something here that he did not wish to know about. He also thought of the question Larry Youngman had asked him, whether he himself had lost someone, and that it had been neither his mother nor his father that had come to mind, but Esther. The Bureau psychologist had asked him about Esther, and—as always—he’d skirted around the question. But it was there now, and it could not be avoided.

The deterioration of his relationship with Esther—perhaps inevitable due to their respective ages, the inherent difference in their attitudes, the simple fact that they could not, by definition, enjoy many of those public aspects of togetherness that seem such a necessary part of an intimate relationship—seemed to accelerate most noticeably once Travis had resumed his education. He had wanted to study beyond a college graduation, but there seemed to be reasons upon reasons to prevent this. Money initially and then a seeming lack of support from the Nebraska State Welfare Department. Howard Redding—he who had been so diligent in his efforts to locate a guardian for Michael—died suddenly and unexpectedly at his desk on a warm Tuesday in the spring of 1944. Howard Redding was forty-one years of age, and something just burst in his brain. Technically, it was known as a subarachnoid aneurysm. Howard had been suffering from mild headaches for a while, and on the morning of Tuesday, May ninth, he sensed a strange weakness in the right side of his face. He attributed it to tiredness, the fact that he had been working long hours, but it was not tiredness at all. A few minutes after eleven a.m., the aneurysm ruptured and leaked blood into a membrane that covered Howard Redding’s brain and spinal canal. On the same day that the Soviet army finally captured Sebastopol, ushering in the final year of the Second World War, Howard Redding passed away quietly and without drama at his desk. It was two hours before anyone found him.

Howard’s replacement, a younger man by the name of Christopher Macklin, was all too keen to follow the rules, color inside the lines, dot the
i’
s and cross the
t’
s. Cutbacks were the order of the day, some due to the war effort, impinging now even on the mighty and seemingly infinite resources of the United States, others due to the fact that Nebraska governor Dwight Griswold’s first term was coming to an end, and his reelection campaign was focusing on economy and full employment. Less money was available for fewer things, and somewhere near the very bottom of the list of priorities was the funding of an education for delinquents.

So Travis had been home a great deal. He found work—odd jobs in construction and munitions production, but he was not happy, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Just three days after General Alfred Jodl signed the instrument of unconditional surrender in a small red schoolhouse in Rheims, Travis turned eighteen years of age. Esther Faulkner was three months shy of thirty-six. Their relationship had become strained and tense, something that both of them had noticed during the previous months. They still slept together, they still ate together, but that sense of indivisibility, that sense of unity that the world could not impinge upon or influence, had become as fragile as an egg. Perhaps this
affaire de corps et coeur
had been a lie from the start, but neither of them would have believed such a thing. Perhaps, for Travis, it had been nothing more than the firework display of first love, his virginity swept away by a woman of experience. Perhaps, for Esther, it had been the last desperate grasp at a youth now passed by, a wholehearted and yet futile chance to find something truly special in an otherwise mundane and ordinary life. Whatever the reason for its inception, whatever the reasons for its demise, it was suffering a slow and agonizingly awkward death in that small Grand Island house through the latter part of 1945 and the early months of the subsequent year.

In June of ’46, Michael told Esther he was leaving. It was a Tuesday evening, and she was seated in the kitchen when he returned from work.

“I have to go,” he said, his tone so matter-of-fact and unremarkable.

“I know you do,” she said, and there in her eyes was some sense of philosophical resignation. She uttered those four words as though they had been on the very tip of her tongue for as long as she could remember and yet had not found the right moment to express them. This seemed inevitable, almost as if some complicit agreement had been made for such an eventuality, and yet it had taken this much time to bring it to its natural and inescapable conclusion.

“I have found a room,” Michael said.

“Yes.”

“Not far, a few miles away. I have enough money saved to be able to rent it for a while. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I think you’ll be happier without me around.”

“Yes,” Esther replied, but she did not necessarily believe this.

Michael sat down across from Esther. He reached out and took her hand.

“Do you think what we did was a mistake?” she asked him.

“No. Do you?”

A tear emerged in slow motion from her eye and rolled lazily down her cheek. “I don’t believe in mistakes,” she said. “Mistakes are for other people.”

“I don’t want to remember this with sadness, Esther.”

“Then don’t.”

“I don’t want you to remember it with sadness, either.”

“I won’t,” she said. “I will remember it for what it was.”

“And what was it, Esther?”

“Probably the last real love affair I will ever have.”

“I don’t believe that. You are young, and you like people too much to be alone.”

“My mind is old,” she said. “My heart is old. I am tired of forgiving people for the stupid things they do.”

“You will find someone,” Michael said. “Or someone will find you.”

“Go,” she said. “The sooner the better. I knew this would happen. I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame myself, and there’s no use trying to figure out who did what or who was wrong. It just is.”

Michael squeezed her hand. “I will always love you, Esther.”

“And I will always love you, Michael,” she replied, and she closed her eyes and did not open them until he had left the room.

Travis packed up his things and departed that evening. The house was empty when he finally closed the door and walked down into the street. Esther had already left. She had gotten dressed up in her finest and taken a bus to Hastings. She found a bar on Wintergreen Street and drank herself into a hotel room with a stranger called Eugene. When she woke the following morning, her head like a cracked gourd, Eugene was gone. She could barely recall his face, and she had never known his surname. Again, as with her first sexual encounter with Michael, she did not feel cheap or disgraceful or ashamed. She felt lost, a little confused, and a great deal uncertain. It had been a bad day, but there had been worse in her life, and she had recovered from them. How much of herself she would now recover she did not know and could not predict. She seemed to be losing small fragments of her identity with each passing year. This was perhaps just the nature of things. Perhaps you ended as you began—with nothing at all.

Travis existed in solitude but for the day-to-day requirements of work. It was then that he enlisted in the army, perhaps to give his life some structure, some sense and purpose. Perhaps it was merely to have his mind filled with something other than questions. He did not believe in fate, but he believed in the errant and fickle nature of life. Life could not be predicted and controlled, not as people believed. What you felt one day was not what you felt the next. He did not doubt that he loved Esther, would always love her, but something vital and intrinsic and personal had changed. Was this growing older? Was this what becoming a man was all about? Learning not how to love, but how to love less? Learning not how to feel, to emote, to engage, to connect with people, but how to withdraw, disconnect, retreat into a reality that made sense to oneself, irrespective of whether or not such a reality made sense to anyone else? To accept what one was, well, that seemed to be the hardest task of all. To stop pretending that you were something you were not took courage and a degree of honesty that most people did not possess.

In those few final weeks between leaving Esther and boarding the bus for Fort Benning, Georgia, the dreams returned with a vengeance. The shadow, the cracked and arid field, the crow that laughed. And now the dreams were followed by headaches, and the headaches seemed strong enough to burst his head like an overripe melon. He experienced three or four such dreams, maybe even more before he finally left Grand Island, and they always followed the same theme. The overriding emotion within them was fear. This was no nail-biting, sweating, terrified fear; this was no screaming from the room; no abject horror; no frantic escape from some nightmarish vision of desperate evil. No, nothing like that at all. This was a creeping, insidious, malevolent sense of possession that seemed to pervade and permeate everything he thought, everything he felt, everything he was. This was a fear that came not from without, but from within. And thus he knew, if nothing else, that this was a fear from which he could not escape.

More than anything, he hoped that the deep and inescapable sense of emptiness that existed within him, an emptiness occasioned by his separation from Esther, would somehow subside and disappear with time. As if that decision was now the precedent against which all future decisions would be made—those to leave instead of staying, those of distance instead of closeness, those to stay silent instead of speaking—and he, Michael Travis, a man with no real country, would somehow and forever be a stranger to the world.

Esther had been the only one to really understand what had happened to Janette Travis. She had been the only one there at the end. And if Michael had stayed, if he had been brave enough to understand what she had done, then his life might have been something completely different altogether.

Such was the burden of the one left behind.

Seated in the car outside the McCaffrey, it was these things that occupied his mind, as if the seams between past and present were somehow disappearing.

Even as he saw Slate turning the corner at the end of the road, he thought of the letter Esther had left for him, tucked there inside
The Grapes of Wrath
on his bookshelf in Olathe.

He knew—perhaps more than anyone—that he was here in Seneca Falls because of Esther Faulkner.

He also knew that when he returned, he would have to take that letter and read it.

26

Travis did not get out of the car as Slate approached the McCaffrey Hotel from the direction of the bank. He merely watched as a procession of people followed him—Chester Greene, Gabor Benedek, the Bellanca brothers and Akiko Mimasuya. The Bellanca brothers were dressed identically, and—even as he watched—Benedek hoisted Chester Greene up onto his shoulders. They were passing out flyers, and people were taking them, and folks were coming out of stores to fetch handfuls of the things. Those handbills were even being tucked behind the wipers of parked cars.

The little procession went on, and though there was something small-town and provincial about it, Travis was aware of another thing entirely. There was a sense of anticipation surrounding these strange, anachronistic people, as if how they looked was nothing to do with
who
they were.

Travis watched them head off down the main drag. To his knowledge, they did not know he was there, and no one looked back. He opened the door and stepped out.

“Good for the town.”

Travis turned to see Sheriff Rourke standing there with the flyer in his hand.

“Brings people here, gets them spending money, and we can always use people coming here and spending money. And folks are appreciative that you gave them permission to open up again tonight.” Rourke took off his hat and walked around to the side of the car where Travis was standing.

“So,” he said, “how goes it with your dead feller? Any the wiser as to who he was and what the hell happened?”

“Not a great deal,” Travis replied.

“Heard he was some sort of foreign killer, maybe?”

“The telephone game, Sheriff.”

“So he wasn’t no killer, then?”

“We cannot be sure as yet.”

“Heard he had the names of all of his victims tattooed all over his body in some secret language.”

“You saw the body, Sheriff Rourke. There were no names tattooed on it, and there is no secret language.”

“Idle minds are the devil’s playground, right?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“So I’ll let you get on, then.”

“Well, that’s why you requested our assistance, Sheriff Rourke.”

Rourke frowned. “I didn’t request any federal assistance, Agent Travis.”

“I’m sorry?” Travis asked, frowning.

Rourke shook his head. “That’s why I figured you guys for being so sharp, so on the ball, you know? I didn’t make any official request. I guessed you’d heard about it through the grapevine, so to speak. Or maybe one of the other sheriffs had informed you… those that I sent the photo of your dead guy to.”

“So you didn’t file anything? You didn’t call anyone?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

Travis paused. His first reaction was to call Bishop, but he stayed his hand. If an official request had not been put in, he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. It was a simple communication breakdown, in and of itself of no great significance. Perhaps Rourke was right with his second assumption, that one of the other sheriffs had asked for help. Or perhaps…

“So you’ll be coming to see them do their show tonight, I hope,” Rourke said, interrupting Travis’s train of thought.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Travis said.

“Good ’nough, Agent Travis. Well, I best be gettin’ on. Places to go, people to see an’ all that. You have a good day now.”

“The same to you, Sheriff Rourke.”

Rourke left him standing there beside the car and headed off down the street toward the Tavern.

Travis half-expected Edgar Doyle and Valeria Mironescu to appear, but there was no sign of them. He considered driving out to the carnival site, to make his presence known, to share a few words with Doyle about Doyle’s assumption regarding the reopening of the carnival, but he decided against it. In some instances, maintaining a degree of distance contributed more to one’s sense of jurisdictional control than wading in and interfering. He would let Doyle believe what he wished to believe, and if it became necessary to assert his authority once more, then he would do so without hesitation.

The fact of the matter was that he wanted to see these people at work; he wanted to see what it was that had the people of Seneca Falls in a state of electrified expectation.

Travis crossed the street to the hotel, and as he reached the sidewalk, Doyle appeared from the reception area. He was alone, and he wore a knee-length black velvet cape, a wide-brimmed hat, and in his hand he carried a twisted wooden cane.

“Agent Travis,” he said matter-of-factly. “I have come with a personal invitation to our little performance this evening, and then afterward, if it suits you, a little dinner with myself and Valeria.”

“I will be at the carnival,” Travis said. “However, I will be there in an official capacity, Mr. Doyle, as would be expected under the circumstances, and though I am appreciative of your invitation to dinner, I am going to decline. I am sure you understand why and that it will not be taken as a personal slight.”

“Not at all, Agent Travis, not at all.”

Doyle did not move on. He stood there looking at Travis, his expression neither one thing nor another.

“Was there something else, Mr. Doyle?”

“Did you ever hear of a man called Harold Blauer, spelled B-L-A-U-E-R?”

“I can’t say I have, Mr. Doyle. Who was he?”

“Oh, he was just a tennis player. No one special. I just wondered if you knew of him.”

“No, I am not so much the sports enthusiast, Mr. Doyle.”

“Oh, I wasn’t asking you in reference to the fact that he was a tennis player, Agent Travis.”

“So, why ask?”

Doyle opened his mouth to speak and then glanced back as Valeria Mironescu appeared from the entranceway of the hotel.

“Ah, my dear. Agent Travis and I were just passing the time of day.”

“Agent Travis,” she said, smiling. “A pleasure to see you, as always.”

“And you, Miss Valeria.”

“Well, we have a great deal of work to do,” Doyle said, “as I am sure you do, Agent Travis. We shall see you later this evening, then.”

“You shall. Mr. Doyle,” he added, nodding politely, “and Miss Valeria.”

“Bring your round head this evening,” Valeria said, and winked. “Leave your square head behind.” She laughed, almost mischievously, and then the pair of them walked away, arm in arm, across the street and past Travis’s Fairlane.

Travis watched them go, uncertain as to what she was implying by her final comment.

Travis went on up to his room, took a shower and put on a clean shirt. He made a note of the name Doyle had mentioned. Harold Blauer. Where had he heard that name before?

He considered taking some time out to begin his report, the single report that would be filed with Bishop when the case was finally closed.
When
was the operative word, not
if
. And when he did write that report, everything needed to be cut and dried, every
i
dotted, every
t
crossed, and perhaps that report would find itself on Mr. Hoover’s desk. If not the director himself, then possibly Mr. Tolson.

This evening would be nothing more than an opportunity to see these individuals in their own environment and was not altogether invalid in better understanding how they thought, how they operated, how they behaved. You wish to catch a wild animal, then you better understand its natural habitat. That was the entire ethos of the work he had been undertaking with Unit X in Kansas. Get inside the mind of the criminal, and the criminal becomes an understandable and predictable creature.

Perhaps Doyle believed Travis naive, unschooled and unfamiliar with the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of the human condition. Well, if that was the case, then Doyle was in for a surprise. He had to be alert for everything, for this was where Doyle and his people would show the faces that they wore for the world. Perhaps one of them would let something slip. Perhaps Travis would see something that opened up a further line of investigation. Close to four days, and he had nothing but a tattooed Hungarian killer with no past, no present, and most definitely no future.

Hoover, Tolson, Warren, Bishop, Section Chief Gale aside, Travis himself could not let this investigation die a quiet and lonely death in the middle of nowhere.