Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (4 page)

“Well, knock on wood,” he said, striking the chair arm three times.

“It's just my nature, Daddy,” Cynthia said “that's all.” Then, as she turned her face to the children, she gently patted the back of his hand.

Studying the fiery, opinionated creature to whom he'd given life without planning to, he could still not specify with which of her qualities her husband—any man, for that matter—might have fallen in love. Youth, he supposed, but that had vanished long ago, and anyway, youth was a mask. While it survived, a man could cling to the illusion that his lover's temperament might change, but once it fled, he was left with what had been there all along. Perhaps what Michael had responded to was the challenge of taming her, or—despite the electric tension that ran through her—he had blithely calculated that she seemed the right sort of woman to be his wife and the mother of his children. She was who she was, after all. She liked sex and would be unlikely to stray. It was too much to figure out at the moment.

Just then the doorbell rang.

“Who on earth could that be?” Billy asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Cynthia said.

“Could be carolers,” Emily ventured.

“Could be,” Billy agreed, yet at the door he found not a party of holiday singers but a lone, gaunt figure in a clerical collar. “Good evening,” he said. “May I help you, Father?”

“Would Mr. Claussen be at home?” inquired the priest, without giving his name.

“You'll forgive my surprise. I wasn't actually expecting—”

“No, of course you weren't. I am sorry. Is this your wife?” the stranger asked, glancing at Cynthia, who had come up behind her father.

“My daughter, Cynthia,” Billy said by reflex. It was more, he immediately thought, than he had intended to say.

“How do you do?” the priest responded. “I'd be most grateful if I might have a word with you, sir.” The man appeared to be in his late thirties, Cynthia's age, and Billy wondered what he'd seen in his vocation that had brought such desperation to his eyes. A second later he gestured for the priest to follow him.

When they reached his study, Billy stopped abruptly. Behind him was the six-by-twelve-foot oil painting
The Cavalry Campfire
by Frederic Remington, which his father had given him after his mother's death and the older man's move to an apartment that was too small to accommodate it. “Are you from the local parish?”

“Not really.”

“We're not Catholics. We're Episcopalians, which may not have anything to do with why you're here. What can I do for you, Father?”

The priest hesitated. Then, after gesturing for permission, he closed the single door to the front hall. “Oh, I'm afraid it's too late for anything of that sort.”

“Sorry?”

“You've done just about everything you could do.”

“Forgive me, but I really must ask . . . What I'm trying to say, as courteously as possible, is that we have dinner reservations—a family evening, you understand—and I really must watch the clock.”

“Yes, of course, the clock,” the priest replied, then sat down.

“Why are you here, Father?”

“Not for the reason you think.”

“Are you sure? I may be a bit ahead of you on this one. What sort of donation did you have in mind?”

“One that's bound to surprise you,” the priest answered, removing, from a side holster, the brand-new Walther P99 Compact he'd been given for this job.

“To which cause, may I ask?” Billy inquired, without at first noticing the priest reach inside his suit jacket. “You say you're not local and we're not among your flock—” His first sight of the pistol stopped him short. In the pit of his groin, he felt an immediate convulsion. Its supplier had fitted the weapon with a modified laser sight, whose orange-red pinpoint bounced along the surface of Billy's blue blazer, tracing his left rib cage and lung.

“The cause of justice?” the priest whispered. Billy thought he heard a question mark in this reply and wondered what, if anything, it might mean.

His visitor, moving behind him, motioned for Billy to step forward. Once Billy had complied, the priest slithered alongside him, carefully remaining just beyond reach.

“Justice?”

“Usury is still a crime, Mr. Claussen. You may have made it lawful; you and your like may have managed to pull that one off. I'll be the first to grant you that. But it's still a crime—in the eyes of God! Let me assure you of that.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“
Thirty
percent interest? Then you change the terms of your own free will: double the minimum payment just like that when a man falls sick or his kid does and he's an hour late—or a minute, mind you, on the due date. That's all it takes.”

“I see what you're driving at, but, really, Father—hear me out—you've got it wrong.”

“No, no, no, no, no. You're the one's got it wrong. ‘And Jesus went into the temple of God . . . and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.' Matthew 21:12. It's the only time in the whole Bible when our Lord used force, which never crossed your mind, did it? It crossed Ezekiel's mind—he prophesied it. Listen to me. I had a job in an assembly plant coming to me. But then the job goes overseas. Better for everyone, the big boys say. Only that's in the long run, and we're a long ways from there right now. Our lives will be done before we get there, before we ever see any benefit, which I doubt there'll be. Anyway, the plant shuts down, and where do I end up? In a scrap-metal shop, working like a beast, and for what? I'll tell you what: no future, nothing, and no place nice, a certain number of calories each week, most of them from canned goods, and no health insurance. Where are you without health insurance? You're nowhere. But it goes up each year, cuts into what little else you have. And one day it's so expensive the man that owns the company tells you he can't afford to give it to you anymore. Who knows? Maybe he's telling the truth. Maybe he can't. So all of a sudden you're living at your own risk, and so are the people you love and can't do a damned thing for. Then your wife gets sick, and she's out of work for a while. And your boy gets sick, too. The big C, and he doesn't do so well. You apply where you can for help. You take him where they'll see him. You're the last people they call from the waiting room, where you can't even afford to buy him a drink from the vending machines now that the big corporations have taken them over. So while he's dying, you write yourself one of those checks the credit-card people used to send you with your bill. One hundred, then five hundred, it adds up. But you don't let it bother you in the beginning, because your luck is bound to turn. You hear stories about better jobs someplace else, or someone strikes it rich, wins a few grand in the scratch-off lottery.”

Billy recognized the temper that so often lurked beneath the surface composure of losers, who lacked confidence, lived on a diet of Chinese whispers, traded in the inflated, counterfeit currency of half-truth and exaggeration. He studied the man in the clerical collar, looking for the right way to block or tackle, to disarm him without having the gun go off in the process. But the man was too far away. Billy said, “How did you find this house?”

“You made it so easy.
Architectural Digest,
simple as that,” the priest announced, removing a few quarter-folded tear sheets from his jacket pocket. “‘W. V. Claussen, Bragged Himself to Death.' How's that for an obituary?”

“You think I'm another one of those country-club guys, don't you?” Billy asked.

“Whatever, I couldn't say. I think you're lucky and careless with the people who aren't. That's all that matters.”

“Lucky, sure, I don't deny that. But is that my fault? I'm not careless, Father. We've done a lot of good. We've brought liquidity to—I mean, we've put funds in the hands of—millions of people who would not have had them otherwise. And most of them have been responsible with their privileges, and their lives have been better, less rocky, and more comfortable because we've been there.”

“And the rest you addict? We're the same people we always were, sir, but so are you. Don't you think we know that? You're the company store. Only now you've got the whole country, practically, under your thumb.”

“That's unfair.”

“We're not irresponsible, Mr. Claussen. Mark my words, you son of a bitch, we're nothing like irresponsible. Whatever we are, it's only what you've made us by insisting on your pound of flesh.”

Billy looked through the windows at the dark sky of the solstice. “What do you want? Please understand. I am very sorry your son has died.”

“I didn't say he was dead—not yet.”

“Again, I'm sorry,” Billy said. “If you need help—”

“I can assure you I don't. I've already found that.”

“Good, I'm glad.”

“From someone who understands the situation—what ‘being fair' means—much better than you ever could.”

“We're not as different as you think,” Billy told him. “You don't know me well enough—”

“I know what I've been shown in
Forbes
magazine and the
Wall Street Journal
and
Architectural Digest.
” The priest fisted the tear sheets.

Billy examined him, searching for any insight he might be able to put to use.

“Grandpa,” Emily called. “Come on, or we'll be late.”

Billy hesitated. He regarded the priest, especially the Walther upon which he kept an unshakable grip. It would not, he realized, be visible from Emily's vantage point even were she to open the door. That was helpful, for she was still too young to conceal her panic. “I'll just be a minute,” he called back.

“Or else I'm coming in to get you.”

“No,” Billy admonished her.

“I am. You can't stop me.”

“Emily,” he said sternly. “Don't!” To the priest, he added, “Never mind my granddaughter. We can work this out. Whoever's helping you, I'm pretty sure I can better their offer.”

The priest hesitated, then gave a thin, dismissive smile and shook his head. As Billy appraised him, he was clearly a man willing to chance his soul: a desperate, ineffectual, but dangerous man who would have to be outmaneuvered physically rather than with words. Even flattery was bound to fail at this point, Billy decided, which was unfortunate, because he was an expert at flanneling those from whom he wanted something. Here, however, his instincts told him that the wrong words might as easily provoke as placate his assailant. He would have to do that, of course, but at an instant of his choosing.

Something else bothered him. The disconnect between the man's weapon and clothing, between his diction and disguise, between the misery he had described and the vocation to which, if only in dress, he pretended, suggested that there must be more to the story. Could the man with the gun be aiming it on behalf of someone else? And if so, who was it who might want Billy dead, and why? He supposed, like most successful men, he had accumulated detractors. Yet from childhood he'd been among the anointed ones, a hail-fellow-well-met, courteous, if sometimes insincerely, to just about everyone. His success was to have been expected, not resented.

The priest asked, “How would you better the offer?”

“Well, first I'd have to know what the offer was, wouldn't I?” Billy asked. “I take it there was an offer. I mean, someone sent you here?”

“I don't believe that's any of your business. And I wouldn't describe it as an offer, more a meeting of the minds.”

“Now we're beginning to get somewhere,” Billy said, and turned to look at this room he loved.

“Keep facing the outside,” the priest said sharply.

“I'm sorry. I don't want any trouble.”

“Like I said, you should have thought of that a long time ago, before you decided to become a predator.”

Now it came to Billy. Instantaneously, a blizzard of detail cohered into the only plausible explanation of what was happening to him. If he was right, he had no choice but to fight for his life, and the sooner the better. If he was right, the man beside him had come not out of vengeance, nor for retribution, but to silence him. Or perhaps the man himself had been tricked into coming, turned into a contract killer for the same people who had unnerved Billy and caused him to abandon the deal of a lifetime.

No doubt there would be many removes between the priest's anger and the real motive for this assault, but, deciding he had no choice other than to make one last attempt to cut through them, Billy said, “Hear me out, Father, please. I know this sounds mad, but you are being used, and not for the purpose you think.”

“Used? That's for sure—by you. I've been used
by you.
Let's be honest!”

“Not by me, by whoever sent you here. There's more going on here than you can possibly know, Father, but then you're not really a priest, are you?”

“Give the man a prize.”

“Grandpa,” Emily called again. “Stuart won't get off of his computer.”

“Get off, Stuart,” Cynthia demanded from somewhere inside the house. Billy could not discern where, but her voice was shrill and carried.

“In five minutes,” Stuart pleaded.

“Now,” Cynthia said. “How many times
—
”

“Three minutes,” Stuart bargained, in a whine.

“Grandpa,” Emily insisted.

“Get off the computer, Stuart!” Billy shouted. “I'll be right there.” But he kept his eyes on the priest. “It won't stop with me,” he said in a lower voice. “Once you've done what they want you to, you'll be next. After that, the killing will just go on and on, but you won't be here to worry about it, will you?”

“Nice try,” the man said, “a real nice try. So I guess you're a very imaginative guy. That's a shame.”