Noah's Turn (17 page)

“Guilt.” Noah typed the word on a blank Word document page. Then he typed, “The purgatory of self-loathing.” He felt guilt for his lies and his jealousy and his competitiveness, but for some reason guilt was not a factor in his murder. McEwen was dead. Gone. His wife had hated him and wasn't suffering. They had had no children. McEwen had no siblings. For all Noah knew his parents were dead, and if they weren't he suspected that there hadn't been a great deal of love in the family. You don't turn out a son like Patrick McEwen with nurturing and love. Noah's absence of guilt interested him. Perhaps the evil feel no guilt. But how evil was he? Was evil something real, something scientifically quantifiable, or a religious idea with no objective truth? He wasn't Charlie Manson or Ted Bundy. He knew them only from the outside, from history and the news. From the outside they were the embodiment of evil, but from their inside looking out, they may feel no differently about their murders than Noah felt about his. Was there
an irreconcilable duality in every murder? He wasn't in the mood to go any further, so he drank his beer and vodka and fell asleep.

Noah got a call from his bank that his account had gone beyond its $2,500 overdraft and could he take care of this. He called his local branch and asked for a meeting with the bank manager. She was about thirty-five, blonde, attractive and had no wedding or engagement ring. She wore a white spandex top under a short, tight baby blue cardigan with black, tight bell-bottom pants. She moved around the bank from her office to the tellers, signing transaction approvals and generally taking care of business in a calm, polite, no-nonsense way. What was wrong with this picture? Why no ring? Did she have no time for men as she moved up the bank's corporate ladder? Why this small bank? Was she just passing through on her way to the top? Or was she exactly what she looked like—attractive, unattached and lucky to have this kind of job? Noah pulled out the only currency he had left as she took notes in her small, unadorned office. His well-born middle name.

“My name is Noah Chandler Douglas. I don't think you have the middle name on your records. I don't like to use ‘Chandler.' It has a strangely pretentious sound. My mother was a Chandler. Her family built one of the largest iron-mining industries in the country, starting back in the mid-1800s. Unfortunately, I didn't inherit their ruthless approach to the dollar, therefore I'm sitting here with you.” He said all of this with an apologetic grin. “I'm a writer, and some writers, like myself, don't open their mail and have no clue about the state of their finances.”

“What do you write?” she asked with genuine curiosity.

“Movies, TV and I'm in the middle of a novel right now.”

“Any movies I have seen?”

“Oh, God, maybe when you were drunk.” She laughed. She drank. This was all encouraging. Had Noah accidentally scored while he was doing nothing more than trying to worm his way out of a financial spot?

“What can we do about this overdraft?”

“I wouldn't bet a dime on my novel,” he laughed with the right amount of self-deprecation to put her at ease. “But I just made a deal to write thirteen episodes
of a TV series, a political satire. I'm waiting for my first cheque. I feel so weird talking about money like this. ‘Waiting for a cheque.' My ex-wife used to take care of all of this. I was like the child in the family. I must admit, in terms of money I don't spend a lot, but everyone has always had to come in behind me and clean up because I have never understood how to balance a bankbook.” Noah shut up and sat back. He liked his description of himself as the child in the family. He thought that a certain type of woman likes to mother men, and this bank manager could be that type. Perhaps even a nurturing dominatrix, he thought.

“How much time do you need?”

“Two weeks tops. Is it possible to extend my overdraft by another $2,500? If you check your records, I've been at this branch for the last fifteen years.”

Noah could sense that indecisiveness was not her style and the amount wasn't astronomical. Without a beat she smiled.

“Let me take care of it. I'll watch for your show.”

“Do you have a card?”

She handed him her card.

They exchanged cordial goodbyes and Noah left wondering if she would sleep with him. But he put this
out of his mind when he calculated how many lies he would now have to juggle and the energy it would take.

The arrest in the McEwen killing made the front page below the fold. The student had been charged with murder and was in jail pending a bail hearing. By noon Noah was dead drunk. He fell asleep on his couch and didn't wake up until the evening, when the phone rang. He couldn't tell what time it was when he answered and tried his best to sound wide awake. A cousin on his father's side of the family had just given birth to twins, and her mother was on the other end insisting that he come to a brunch in her honour. He was still too disoriented and hungover to come up with a quick lie that would get him off the hook so he accepted.

Noah hung up and looked at his watch. It was seven o'clock. He had no plans for the rest of the night or tomorrow or the day after. He usually felt depressed when he woke after sleeping all afternoon, and the stupidity of drinking early in the day multiplied the intensity. He couldn't tell whether he was hungry or not but knew that he had to re-establish some schedule
He went down for a slice at the pizza joint across the street. “A slice and a drink for $5.” That was all he could afford if he was going to keep himself in booze. The extension of his overdraft by $2,500 wasn't going to last long.

The pizza made him feel like drinking beer and the evening air was warm, so he forced himself into the shower then went down to the pub with the window bar, ordered a cold pint and a double vodka and watched the pedestrians pass. Hibernia wasn't around, and he was content to sit alone at his window seat and let the alcohol do its work. Two hours later he wandered back up to his apartment and fell asleep on the couch. He didn't wake until close to noon the next day. This cycle kept up for a few days until it dawned on him that he was now in hell, or at least as low as one could go on earth, and he was in some way living with it.

Noah remembered an incident with a Holocaust survivor when he was living in the college dorm in his first year. He had become friendly with a Jewish guy who had the room across the hall. The guy's father came to help him move out at the end of the year, and Noah lent a hand carrying the heavier stuff down to their van. It was a hot day and he and the father took a break and
cracked a couple of cans of Coke. The father, who was around sixty, had strong Steve Garvey forearms covered with white curly hair. He had the physique of one of those men who could survive almost anything but might drop dead from a heart attack without warning. On the inside of his left arm was a faded tattoo of six numbers. Noah was nineteen and a product of an Anglican private-school education. He had no idea what the tattoo meant. The father could see Noah looking at the tattoo and almost casually said, with a slight Middle European accent, “It's from Auschwitz.” He took a drink from his Coke and continued. “It's hot in this place. I bet they turned off the air conditioning the last day of classes.” There was something about the man's ease and his modern manner that allowed Noah to ask what he thought was a touchy question. He wanted to know if he could ask the man about the camp. He had heard about it for most of his life but had to confess that he knew nothing about it. He had certainly never met anyone who had survived it or been this close to someone who had lived through such a significant event. The father was more than willing to answer his questions, and their conversation went on for at least a half-hour as they drank two more Cokes and rested while Noah's
dorm-mate packed books and papers into cardboard boxes. One comment from the father always stuck in Noah's mind and he now recalled it. “At first you're scared every minute because they can kill you whenever they want,” the father had said. “In the ovens, or for no reason, they can take their gun and shoot you in the head. Once I woke up to find the man who slept in the same wooden bunk with me dead in the morning. He was alive at night and dead in the morning. A dead body lying there beside me. The months pass and—in my case it was years—your brain does something. You stop being afraid. You don't get brave. There was no bravery, no heroes. These are human things. Remember, there were no humans. The Nazis took that from us when we arrived. You stop being afraid, no matter what goes on around you. This is where you live, this is where you are going to die and you get used to it.”

Noah lay awake on his bed staring at the ceiling and wondered if he would ever become used to it.

He put on his one pair of khaki shorts and a faded Lacoste polo shirt, took public transit as close as it could
get him and walked the rest of the way to his aunt's house deep in the city's original WASP neighbourhood. Everything here was over three million, one of his cousins said as he handed Noah a glass of sangria. They were standing in the backyard, where most of the guests had gathered. Noah took the horrible drink with pieces of fruit floating in it because the day was hot and he had already fortified himself with six ounces of vodka before leaving his apartment. The cousin who had given birth to the twins walked around the yard holding one in each arm like two riding trophies, showing them off to admiring family and friends. Noah and a young couple looked down at them and smiled. “They're very cute,” Noah said. “You have two, I don't have any. Can I have one?” He got a bit of a laugh and wondered how hard they would have laughed had he said, “I didn't know you had
Siamese
twins.”

Noah's aunt, the proud grandmother, approached and thanked him for coming. “What are you up to these days?” she asked with a smile as inviting as consommé soup at room temperature.

“There it was, like clockwork,” he thought. “The family question.”

“I'm writing.”

“TV?” his aunt asked. She seemed to be slightly better informed than most of his relatives.

“No, a novel.”

“That's wonderful. Really, a novel?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask what it's about?”

“The Second World War. A lot of it's historical and I have to do a ton of research. But it's very educational.”

“I can imagine it would be. Why don't you have a bite to eat?” She spotted two newly arrived guests and excused herself.

Noah finished off the disgustingly sweet sangria and headed to the bar situated under a giant maple in search of a gin and tonic. He had the bartender pour him a triple gin and moved to the food table, where he stuffed himself on cold poached salmon and potato salad. This was the first decent food he had eaten in days. He was sorry that he hadn't brought a backpack, because bottles of gin and Scotch were lined up on the grass next to the bar and he could easily have taken one or two. He moved back to the bar for another gin and tonic, and while the bartender poured it he found himself standing beside two men he didn't recognize who were discussing what they'd read in the papers about
the McEwen murder case. The men were in their mid-to late thirties and sounded like lawyers. One of them said that the accused was from a good family and that they would likely get Martin Silverstein, the top criminal lawyer in the city. From what they knew about the case, they agreed that the prosecution had a strong case and that Silverstein had lost his last three cases and that his reputation was based more on self-promotion in the media than on real talent. Had he been, Noah thought, a mass or serial killer rather than a “one-shot wonder,” these two would be high on his hit list. They were the perfect demographic: self-satisfied, privileged, successful and wrong. He was drunk and tempted to interrupt their smug, self-congratulatory legal bullshit. “You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. The student didn't do it, I did it. And if you think the prosecution has a good case, you should go back to fucking law school!” But instead Noah walked away, downed half of his second triple gin and tonic and dropped into a lawn chair beside a very old woman who was sitting it out on life's bench.