Chance (24 page)

Chance had fallen to thinking about his patients and how it was with them—the light they hadn’t seen, the horn they hadn’t heard, the blind alley, the sleeper wave, the mutating cell—boned beyond all recognition in the blink of an eye, and not a cloud in the sky. He’d never been on a field of battle but he’d seen something about the frailty of things and was willing to concede the big man had a point.

“So then,” D said. He was absently using one hand to pop the knuckles of the other. “We ready to talk numbers?”

T
HE NUMBERS
looked like this. Five large bought Blackstone’s computer, ten a beating, if for nothing else than the principle of the thing. Twenty made Blackstone go away.

“That would be five thousand we’re talking about?” Chance had asked. He was thinking it best not to have even heard about the others.

“It’s what you were
trying
to do with that bit about going to the DA, you stop and think about it. Slow boat to China, you want my opinion, but let’s say you did get next to someone over there . . . you’d still have to have something to give them. You didn’t, it would be your word against his and you wouldn’t want that.”

It was true, Chance thought, he wouldn’t. “I’d like a night to sleep on it,” he said.

“Take ten nights. But here’s the deal with that. This guy’s shown you what he can do. My take . . . he’s still hoping to back you off. He’s probably not going to do anything more till he sees what you do. Which is pretty much one of two things, show him your ass and make sure he sees it, or man up and call his bluff.”

“I’ve got a little time then, in your opinion?”

“I’ve got something I’d like to give you.” D went to a bookshelf
he’d made of blocks and one-by-sixes. He returned with three books.

Not surprisingly, one was by Friedrich Nietzsche. “I’ve read the Zarathustra,” Chance said.

D nodded and put the book aside. “No one’s born a warrior, and no one a slave. We become what we are.”

“Yes . . . life as a literary exercise. To what extent do we write our own script or allow it to be written by others? It’s an interesting question.”

“Let’s face it,” D told him. “The guy had balls. Go big or go home.”

Chance assumed they were still talking about Nietzsche. “You’ll have the money by noon tomorrow,” he said suddenly. “The five large.” A no doubt superfluous clarification but he was feeling that he’d just run a mile at altitude.

Somewhere between the warehouse and his apartment a new and somewhat more acceptable way of looking at all of this presented itself. How was hiring D so different from hiring a private detective? While it was true that Chance had never done so himself, it was equally true that others had, and many of
them
professionals like himself, upstanding citizens. And while D was not exactly a
licensed
private investigator he was certainly a capable man, a retired military combatant with training few could match. It was almost, Chance thought, as if he’d chosen the course of prudent behavior after all.

It was shortly thereafter that he reached home amid a fog so dense he’d not seen the Oldsmobile’s hood ornament in more than a mile, nosed into the underground, and climbed the stairs to his apartment, where a number of items were lying in wait. One was a small envelope with his name on it taped to the locked steel door that led to his stairs. He opened it on the spot. There was a scrap of paper inside with the words
Scaredy-cat
written on it in what he took to be a feminine hand, this and a small troubling spot it was impossible not to interpret as blood
.
There could be little doubt as to the identity of its author. His eyes searched the street but there was little to be seen in the hopeless fog. At some distance an invisible homeless person had begun to bang
at a steel lamppost with what sounded like a steel pipe. Chance let himself into the stairwell and went up. A second message waited on his answering machine. It was from Carla announcing that Nicole had a boyfriend and had apparently already spent a night with him, away from home and without permission. There was a third message from his tax attorney telling him that the IRS had come up with a number. It was big, the attorney admitted, but at least there was a number. And finally there was a note from Big D sent via e-mail to Chance’s computer, the same that contained Raymond Blackstone’s lecherous porn.

Battle is a joyous thing. We love each other so much in battle. If we see that our cause is just and our kinsmen fight boldly, tears come to our eyes. A sweet joy rises in our hearts. . . . This brings such delight that anyone who has not felt it cannot say how wonderful it is. Do you think that someone who feels this is afraid of death? . . . He is so strengthened,
so delighted, that he doesn’t know where he is. Truly, he fears nothing
in the world. —Jean de Bueil, 1465

“My God,” Chance said to no one in particular, the fleeting sense of euphoria so recently experienced having by now pretty much deserted him altogether. He was staring into the small mirror attached to the medicine cabinet where he’d gone in search of a suitable pharmaceutical cocktail with which to knock himself out. “See poor Alice.” He was making new friends and they all knew where to find him, as from the fogbound street the invisible homeless person continued to announce his or her presence, authoring their own script no doubt and he guessed that soon enough someone would call the appropriate authorities, and that the appropriate authorities would come, much as they’d come for that other crazy whose cries might yet be heard, even through the mists of time, on the Piazza Carlo Alberto in the city of Turin, because that was the thing about the proper authorities . . . rightly or wrongly . . . they were never as far away, or as proper, as one might like.

O
F
D’
S
other books, the ones Chance came home with, one was entitled
The Virtues of War,
by Steven Pressfield. It was a novel of Alexander the Great, as told by the great man himself, and Chance saw that D had underlined certain passages. The willingness to die and out of that a sanctification for the willingness to kill scored well, as did any passage celebrating the glory of combat and what the book’s author took as the “seminal imperative of mortal blood.”

The second book,
Ignore Everybody
by Hugh MacLeod, was a collection of cartoon drawings accompanied by aphoristic observations on the nature of creativity, principally on the willingness to carve out one’s own path, a celebration of the road less traveled. Somewhere near dawn, Chance put the books aside to sleep fully clothed, albeit fitfully, on his living room couch, his reading lamp still on.

He woke to the din of traffic beyond his window and drove directly to his bank, where he withdrew five thousand dollars in cash, Big D’s fee and no second guessing allowed, before arriving late to the office. One might say it was becoming a pattern.

“How did it go?” Lucy asked. “Any more on who sent you that stuff ?”

It took him a moment to realize she was asking about the lecture and the mysterious package she had forwarded to the hotel. He’d been thinking about what he had just done, Big D on the case, this and the
“seminal imperative of mortal blood, as ineradicable within man as in a wolf or a lion, and without which we are nothing.”

“That bad?” she asked.

It occurred to him that he still had not answered. He was stopped between her desk and his office, in full view of Jean-Baptiste’s prideful, demented woman absolutely lost in thought. “Nothing new on the package,” he told her. “As for the lecture . . . let’s just say I was feeling a bit distracted.”

“Was?” Lucy asked. He supposed she was alluding to his present condition but chose to ignore the comment. He was thinking about sleep deprivation and wondering if that was how it had started when it started before, so long ago with the red-haired dancer. There
had
been a drug-fueled run to Martha’s Vineyard, just the two of them, on the family money, days on the road. He could remember that much. He went to Lucy’s desk where he took up a pen and began to write. What he wrote was the name of Jaclyn’s former therapist. “Let’s see what we can find out about her,” he said. “She was in the Bay Area somewhere, now deceased.” With D set to begin surveillance, Chance thought it time to look into the fate of Myra Cohen and the records she was sure to have kept.

Lucy gave him a long look. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Anything you can find. Was she a partner? Are the offices still there? Maybe something about the cause of death.”

Lucy nodded but he could feel her watching him as he crossed to his office, where he passed the morning alternately reading about Alexander the Great and napping at his desk, each instance now accompanied by some intrusive recollection of the Tenderloin, a man’s face sheared off at the edge of a city Dumpster. He took this as indicative of post-traumatic stress, the glory of battle eluding him altogether.

His first call of the day was to his wife. There was not much to add to her original message. Nicole had a boyfriend and that was all she knew. She’d never met him. She hadn’t a name. He was supposedly older and lived somewhere in San Rafael. She’d learned all of this from Shawn’s mother, who’d heard about it from Shawn and thought Carla should know.

“What’s Nicole have to say?” he asked.

“She won’t talk to me about it. I don’t know what to do.”

“Where is she now?”

“At school.”

“And when was this, that she spent a night?”

“The night you left.”

“Where were you?”

“I was here, right here.”

“And you never heard her leave?”

“She’s getting sneaky, Eldon. I don’t like it.”

“Nor do I. I told her to stay close. She said she would.”

“Well,” Carla told him. “There you have it.”

Chance said he would talk to her.

“That’s just great,” Carla said and hung up. Accusations and words left unsaid—there
was
a reason they were no longer together.

His second call was to Janice Silver. Appointments had been arranged and he was eager to discover how it was all working out, a couple of weeks by now having passed.