Ed King (46 page)

“This is so much fun. Thanks for including me.”

“Just call,” said Ed.

Fifteen minutes later, with his directives executed, Ed dialed the McElvoy residence again and said, “It’s Toby Dahl. Your daughter just called you about me.”

Both McElvoys must have been on phones again, because the next thing Ed heard was the female voice he recognized from his last call saying, “Reggie?” That voice was not intrepid now, but softly interrogatory and polite.

Reggie said, “Okay, Lydia,” and hung up. Then the former Mrs. Cousins let a beat pass and said, “You can call me Lydia, too. I’m so sorry we’ve had a misunderstanding about solicitation.”

“Did your daughter tell you about me?”

“Tina explained things very, very clearly, as she always does. Very clearly.”

“Tina?”

“Christina. My daughter. She’s always clear.”

It sounded, to Ed, less like maternal pride and more like an observation about a grown child’s neurosis, or, at best, a blend of both. It also sounded like one of those safe, defensive, bland observations designed to stave off depth. Ed joined in: “Very, very clear, I found. Tina was absolutely wonderful,” he said. And then he remembered who Tina was, and how he’d stalked her.

“Well intended. Always well intended.”

“I could feel that,” said Ed. “Her very good intentions. With some people, that’s clear. I’m so glad. I’m really glad. And, look, I have no concerns about our … misunderstanding. Which was my fault. I didn’t explain myself clearly. The way solicitors make end runs around the Do Not Call Registry, I’m exactly like you. Vigilant.” He wanted to say “hypervigilant,” but thought better of it and went on. “So,” said Ed. “So your daughter explained things. So you know who I am. Or how I relate. You have a feel for why I’m calling you tonight.”

“A very good feel. I’m afraid I do. Apparently, my former husband, Walter, is your father—is that right?”

“Apparently.”

“Let me just say first that that’s not a bad gene pool. Three of Walter’s people are centenarians. He has an aunt who is 106. I don’t think many of the men lose their hair, so you’re in luck there as well. Tina told you about Walter?”

“Yes,” said Ed. “Briefly.”

Ed heard a noise like “humph” from the other end of the line, then, “It’s really too bad you’ll never have a chance to meet him. Your father—did she say he was an actuary? That’s another thing that I think is genetic among certain Cousinses. They’re math whizzes. I don’t have that myself. Walter had this party trick he did. He could find square roots. Someone would throw out a number, and Walter would give the square root right away. That was his skill set. Numbers. Math. He was really pretty gifted when it came to math. The sad thing is—what did he do with it? Walter just tended to get sidetracked.”

“Sidetracked?”

“By infidelity,” said Lydia, “to put it bluntly.”

“I don’t want to take all of your time,” said Ed. “But the thing I don’t know is, who was my mother? I really wish I knew who she was. That’s why I’m calling. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Here we come to the interesting part,” said Lydia. “I think I might know the answer to your question, but I have to inquire about something first. How old are you, Toby?”

“I’m fifty-four.”

“So you were born in … ’63. What month?”

Ed thought back to the files he’d seen in Portland and said, “April.”

“April,” said Lydia. “August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April. You see? I know my months.” A rueful chuckle followed, aimed, thought Ed, at aging. “Well,” said Lydia. “It all adds up. You were conceived in the summer of 1962. Where was Walter in the summer of ’62? Walter was taking advantage of a girl we’d hired to help with looking after the children. I’m going to venture that that girl is your mother. In fact, that girl wrote me a letter years later confessing to her involvement with Walter, and telling me she’d had a baby by him. It looks to me like that baby must be you. And maybe this is strange of me to say, but this is good news for you, really good news, because your mother is one of the richest people in the world. You might have just landed on a gold mine.”

Ed couldn’t speak at first. For the first time in his long pursuit of answers, he wasn’t sure he wanted more. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to look. But all of that was fleeting. Of course he wanted to look. He wanted to go all the way to the end, whatever it was—the truth, nothing less. With this in mind, he shut his eyes and asked, “Who was my mother?”

“Diane King” was the answer. “Married to Ed King. Ed King, the King of Search.”

Diane was gone. Here she’d said that she was going to bed, that she didn’t feel well and was going to bed, and now their bed was empty instead—the bed where for years they’d … Impossible, wasn’t it? Impossible! Impossible! That couldn’t be, could it—incest? No more than patricide could possibly be. Ridiculous, thought Ed. Patricide and incest! Then he called Security, in search of Diane, who’d left the compound at six-forty with a small suitcase. A driver had taken her to Boeing Field, and there she’d boarded one of the Gulfstreams for a flight that would bring her to their English castle. Guido Sternvad was Diane’s pilot. Their plane was currently over Manitoba. “Get them on the phone,” Ed commanded, and then he was sitting in front of his computer talking to Guido, his blathering nemesis. “Guido,” he said, “put Diane on.”

“I can’t,” answered Guido. “Sorry.”

“Guido, not now, no more of your weirdness. I don’t have time for games right now. This is an emergency. Put her on.”

“I’m sorry,” repeated Guido. “I really am, sir. I’d do it if I could. I honestly would. But I’m not in command of Mrs. King.”

“Guido!” Ed screeched. “I’ll give you a million dollars, this minute,
today
, if you put my wife on the telephone.”

“I’d love to help,” Guido replied earnestly. “But what can I do? I can’t put Mrs. King on.”

“Just listen for once, Guido. Do what I say. Tell her I
have
to talk to her
now
. Tell her it’s me. Me. Ed. Tell her it’s me. She’ll get that.”

No answer. Ed waited with his head in his hands. “Married to my mother?” he kept asking himself. “Killed my father and married my mother? Is this someone’s idea of a joke?” “Guido,” snapped Ed. “Will you hurry up already?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. King,” Guido shot back, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t wait for an answer. Mrs. King is
not
going to get on the phone with you, not now, or in five minutes, or in ten—not at all. Not in the foreseeable future.”

“Guido!” Ed yelled. “Just tell Diane I—”

“I’d do it if I could. I really would. I would pass your message to Mrs. King. But I can’t. It’s impossible. I’m sorry.”

“Come
on
, Guido, shut up—
please
! I’ve got enough problems already without
you
. Just put Diane on the radio.”

“Can’t,” repeated Guido.

Ed felt his rage surge past what was bearable. That forever irritating bastard Sternvad! So
full
of himself! Such a loser! Such a jerk! Guido was going to pay for this—for defying Ed’s orders and thwarting his will. “Hey,” said Ed, “when you get on the ground in England, you’re axed. That’s it for you. You’re off my payroll. Play with somebody else’s head! You’re fired, Guido. It’s over.”

“Yes, sir,” said Guido. “I understand.”

Then, for the second time in eight hours, Ed found himself hurling toward Boeing Field in a Pythia helicopter—although on this trip, in the evening dark, with the power out, and dense, low cloud cover, flooded Pugetopolis was invisible beneath but for pockets of light made by generators. Harborview Hospital was starkly bright (“Funding from Pythia,” thought Ed, “saves the day”), and because of that it was possible to discern that torrents of water were flowing down Yesler Way and James Street, passing under I-5 and cascading at high speed toward Puget Sound. What was this flood about anyway? Ed wondered. Vast money spent on earthquake retrofits throughout Pugetopolis’ infrastructure, and what is it that happens, instead of buildings falling? Instead of Mount Rainier burying the city under ash? What finally catches Seattle by surprise? A summer flood, as if Seattle were Bangladesh. Completely unheard of, unprecedented, unexpected. And apparently the calling card of global warming, which even the King Foundation couldn’t halt in its tracks, despite throwing four billion dollars at it.

The chopper closed in on Boeing Field, which was struggling, Ed saw, to repel the rising deluge. Despite the help of pumps and sandbags, it was still too close to the Duwamish Slough, a dredged trough now spread across its plain to the point where the runways stood barely clear of
drowning. The inbound flights were FEMA’s, he guessed; outbound were locals retreating to drier climes. Anyone who could afford to do so was leaving. The world was going on with its desperate business while Ed was going on with his.

Ed’s chopper circled wide of air traffic and set down where his Gulfstream awaited his arrival—angle-parked, obsequiously, to shorten his walk to it by maybe five yards. His maintenance crew—men, right now, in rubber boots and rain slickers—had the running lights on and the gangway down, everything topped off and ready to roll, but as Ed hurried from his chopper to his plane, his crew chief told him that water, for the moment, was preventing his pilot from showing up in a timely way. What did Mr. King wish to do? Did he wish to have his pilot fetched by chopper? “Do whatever you want,” barked Ed. With that, he boarded and punched the button on the wall, pulling up the gangway behind him. Why not? He’d go solo to England, get the truth from Diane, on the grounds that there was no reason not to in a situation as urgent as this one. Killed his father and married his mother? Time to get to the bottom of this. Determined, he settled in the cockpit and entered his flight data, then looked up to see a gaggle of airplane mechanics, from just inside the cover of the hangar, leering in his direction as if at someone nuts. Ed gave them an exaggerated, mock-crazed, double thumbs-up, pulled on his headphones, and rotated the nose wheel. “Boeing ground,” he said, as he’d learned to from Guido, “this is 555 Echo Kilo at Pythia Hangar One, ready to taxi. Destination YLW”—YLW was Kelowna, B.C.—“where right now,” added Ed, in the name of authenticity, “it’s dry and eighty-one—got me?”

Ground, wryly, sent him to Runway One Three East. When the tower cleared him for his rainy takeoff—on what seemed to be a causeway in a lake—Ed gulped once, inched forward the power levers, and throttled up with his left hand on the tiller, until, at eighty knots, he released it per Guido and, trembling, tightly seized the yoke. Scary, but anyway smoothly gaining ground speed. “Here we go,” he thought, and left the earth.

There were a few bumps as he passed through the layer of low rain clouds, but nothing unfamiliar or troubling. Ed raised the landing gear and, rubbing his chin, presided over his array of glowing instruments while they took the plane to fifty thousand feet and pointed it toward
Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K. Heading, 34 degrees. Flight speed, 460 knots. Distance, 4,071 nautical miles. Flight time, 8 hours and 13 minutes. Visibility—as far as he was concerned, fantastic, because the heavens were grandly on display. The tower let him know he was off his heading—37.25 for Kelowna. He acknowledged, turned, then waited twenty minutes before killing his transponder and resetting for Carlisle. Now he was the merest blip on distant screens, hardly noticeable unless someone looked closely. Above, there was only the moon and stars; below, there were only clouds.

In control and feeling good about his takeoff, Ed called Guido on the satellite phone. “I’m not that far behind,” he said. “Tell Diane I really need to talk to her. I—”

“Thought I was off your payroll, boss.”

“Not yet,” replied Ed. “When you’re on the ground in Carlisle. Right now I’m actually still paying for your services. Right now you’re at my beck and call, Guido. My wish remains your command.”

“Roger,” answered Guido. “Remember ‘Roger’? ‘Roger’ means I’ve received your message. Only that—received—nothing more.”

“Shut up, Guido. I don’t need a lecture. What I need to know is—what the hell is going on here? What’s the story? What’s this all about? And to know
that
, I need Diane. Right now, Guido. Not later, now. Not when
you
decide to put her on the phone. Look, Guido, you’re driving me nuts. Do you understand that? You’re
nobody
and somehow you’re driving me nuts. I’m tired of you. I’m sick of your weirdness. I’ve had it with your disrespect. Who do you think you are, God? I—”

“God’s a tough one,” Guido replied briskly. “Anything with three letters is limiting creatively. So actually, Ed, I prefer ‘the gods.’ Now,
there’s
some substance. Something to work with. ‘The Gods’ gets you ‘Ghosted.’ ‘Shed Tog.’ ‘Get Shod.’ And names! ‘The gods’ gets you names! Ted Hogs. Ged Tosh. Ed Goths. Ed Ghost. Ed—”

“This is what I mean. I—”

“Hey, your company—Pythia, right? ‘Ah, pity,’ that’s what I get. Or—”

“You’re deranged, Guido. All this word play—it’s compulsive, sick, obsessive, meaningless, a
complete
waste of time, a waste of a life! What—”

“Compulsive! I love that word! ‘Compulsive’ is so loaded with really great potential! Splice ovum. Plum voices. Pelvic sumo. Voice slump. I—”

“You call yourself a pilot? You—”

“Pilot? Tough one. First I get ‘lip to.’ You know, as in ‘give lip to.’ Then I get ‘I plot. ‘You know, as in ‘I make up the events of a story,’ or ‘I conspire against you.’ Want Chinese names? Li—”

Ed hung up. But within seconds his phone rang: “Me, Guido,” he heard. “It’s me again, Guido Sternvad. Guido with something important to say. Something you forgot to ask about, Ed. And that’s that pretty soon, fairly soon,
really
soon, you’re going to come to a huge line of thunderclouds. Dangerous thunderclouds. Life-threatening clouds. I recommend you head around them. You’ll lose time, but do it. Go around.”

“Shut up, Guido. I’m not even listening.”

“Don’t go over. Under any circumstance. Those cloud tops are plus fifty thousand feet. You can’t do over forty-five—got that? Air’s too thin. You’ll stall.”