Mission Flats

Table of Contents

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Epub ISBN 9781409094425

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Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers

PRINTING HISTORY

Bantam Press edition published 2003 Corgi edition published 2004

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Copyright © Bill Landay 2003

The right of Bill Landay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections
77
and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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Corgi Books are published by Transworld Publishers, 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA, a division of The Random House Group Ltd, in Australia by Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd, 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, NSW 2061, Australia, in New Zealand by Random House New Zealand Ltd, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand and in South Africa by Random House (Pty) Ltd, Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa.

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William Landay was born and raised in Boston, where he now lives with his wife and son. A graduate of Yale University and Boston College Law School, he served for six years as an assistant district attorney before turning to writing.
Mission Flats
is his first novel.

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material:

Bracton: On the Laws and Customs of England, Volume II,
translated and with revisions and notes by Samuel E. Thorne. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1968, 1977 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

‘I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover’ by Harry Woods and Mort Dixon. Copyright © 1927, renewed. Published by Callicoon Music, Olde Clover Leaf Music, and Warner-Chappell Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

‘Shattered,’ words and music by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Copyright © 1978 EMI Music Publishing Ltd. All rights for the U.S. and Canada controlled and administered by Colgems-EMI Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

Author’s Note

As any Bostonian will tell you, there is no place called Mission Flats. Nor, to my knowledge, is there a Versailles, Maine. Where actual places are mentioned, I have cheerfully altered details whenever necessary, according to the needs of fiction. For the rest, the usual warning applies: The incidents and characters depicted here are purely products of the author’s imagination.

Prologue

On screen, a woman lounges on a rubber float, her face toward the sun, fingertips trailing in the water. The float is shaped like a doughnut. It turns in lazy circles. The beach is in frame, on the left. The woman is pregnant; the madras shirt over her bathing suit does not disguise her distended belly. She lifts her head and faces the camera, and her mouth forms the words ‘Stop it! Turn that thing off! Look at me!’ The camera shakes, apparently with laughter. The woman rolls her eyes and shakes her fist, the silent-movie gesture for frustration. Soundlessly she says to the camera, ‘Hi, Ben,’ then she joins in the laughter before laying her head down again to drift some more.

The woman is my mother, and the baby in her belly is me. It is early summer, 1971. I will be born a month later.

This little eight-millimeter film (it ran two or three minutes, tops) was among my mother’s prized possessions. She kept it in a yellow Kodak box tucked under the brassieres and stockings in the top drawer of her bureau where, she thought, thieves were not likely to look. There were not many thieves in our town, and the few we had were not interested in grainy old movies of pregnant women. But Mum was convinced of its value, and every now and then she could not resist burying her hand in that drawer to feel for the box, just to be sure. When it rained, she would lug out a twenty-pound Bell & Howell movie projector and show the movie on the living-room wall. She’d stand by the wall, point to her belly, and announce, with vestiges of a Boston accent, ‘There you ah, Ben! There you ah!’ Sometimes she got wistful and teary. Over the years, I guess we watched that clip a hundred times. It still runs in my head, familiar, my own Zapruder film. I don’t know exactly why my mother loved it so much. I suppose that to her it documented a transition, the moment of equipoise between girlhood and motherhood.

I’ve never liked the film, though. There is something unsettling about it. It shows the world before me, the world without me, and it is a world complete. There is as yet nothing necessary or inevitable about my creation. Nobody has met me, nobody knows me. I don’t exist. A woman – not my mother, but the woman who will become my mother – waves and calls me by name, but what is it she is calling to? She is expecting me, in every sense of the word. But it is a fragile expectation. Events branch and divide and multiply, and she and I may never meet. And what of her? Who is this extinct woman to me? Not my mother certainly, nothing as real as that. She is just an idea, a pictogram on the living-room wall. She is my conception.

It has been thirteen months since my mother died, and I have not bothered to check on that little reel in its yellow reliquary. Maybe someday I’ll find it and the movie projector, too, and I’ll watch the film again. And there she will be. Young and laughing, alive and whole.

I suppose that is as good a place as any to begin this story – with that pregnant, pretty young woman at the lake on a hot summer day. There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.

Another moment, five and a half years later. 1:29
A.M.
, March 11, 1977.

A Boston police cruiser inches along Washington Avenue in a neighborhood called Mission Flats. Grit crunches under the tires: sand, ice. An elevated railway straddles the road. Phosphorous light. The cruiser stops in front of a bar called the Kilmarnock Pub, a shadow-hunching structure with neon signs in the windows.

Inside the cruiser, a policeman – his name is not important – uses the butt of his fist to clear condensation from the driver’s side window, then he studies the neon signs.
GUINNESS, BASS
, a generic one with the promise
GOOD TIMES.
Last call at the Kilmarnock was twenty-nine minutes ago. Those signs are usually turned off by this time.

Now, consider this policeman. If he does not chance upon the bar or if he does not notice those neon signs, none of what follows would ever take place. At this moment, any number of different courses – an alternate history, a hundred alternate histories – remain open to him. He can simply ignore the signs and continue his prowl along Washington Avenue. After all, is there really anything suspicious here? Is it all that unusual for a bartender to forget to switch off a few lights at closing time? Alternatively, the officer can call in a request for backup. A bar at closing time is a tempting target for stickup men. It is a cash business, all that money still in the register, the doors still unlocked. No guards, just bartenders and drunks. Yes, maybe he should do that, maybe he should wait for backup. This is Mission Flats, remember; around here it pays to be cautious. But then again, a cop working the midnight-to-eight shift could check on fifty businesses before he clocks out. He can’t very well call for backup every time. No, in this case there is no reason for our policeman to do any of those things. He will make the right decision and yet – how to explain what follows? Bad luck. Coincidence. Innumerable random branchings and sequences have brought him to this place at this time. It is the end of one story, or several, and the beginning of another story, or several.