The Caveman's Valentine (30 page)

The breathing stopped.

Then again he heard Sheila’s irritated voice, but this time it was far off, another room of the house.

Then he heard a click and an echo—the extension had been picked up.

“Daddy?”

Women when they’re sleepy sound like five-year-old girls, like little girls that you used to bring home from the neighbor’s in your arms, and you could have sworn they were dead to the world, but when you set them down in the bed, at the last minute they reach up to give you a dry good-night kiss.

Romulus said, “Hey there, Cap’n. Need a favor. The owner of that little videotape—he wants it back bad.”

The gun barrel showed up in the corner of his eye. The No-face murmured to him, “No explanations. Just tell him to make the drop.”

Had she heard that?
Listen, Lulu. Listen to this.

He said, “So, Cap’n, if you’d kindly just bury that treasure for me.”

“Daddy, what are you talking about?”

“Yeah, well I know it’s kind of late in the night for this
pirate
thing, but it’s important to these guys that you do it now. Bury that treasure where we decided. Then clear out.”

“Bury the treasure? Daddy, did I hear someone with you—”

“You sure did, Cap’n. You heard right. I’m sorry, but it’s got to be now. You’ve got to do it, and then get your ass out of there. Right?”

The voice behind him: “Hang up.”

Romulus turned.

“What?”

“I said hang up the phone.”

“Daddy, who
is
that?”

“Thanks, Cap’n. I won’t ask you anything else ever again. Ever. That’s a promise. You know, I’m kind of crazy but I do keep my promises.”

T
he car was not the old death car. Leppenraub was too smart to use the same old death car. The car was a big tacky American boat.

Romulus rode in the back with the big No-face. The boss drove.

He had Ravel’s
Bolero
on the tape deck.

There was no other car in sight. The FDR Drive was bright, lit up like a movie, and the tacky car was the star, and Ravel was the theme music.

Romulus said—and it was the only thing he said on that drive:

“Hey Leppenraub. Ravel sucks. Would you turn it down? It’s my dying wish.”

The silent No-face ignored him.

So he was forced to do his thinking to the tempo of Ravel’s simpering.

Ah, but so what? He didn’t have any thoughts anyway.

Just a slender wild hope.

That by some miracle he had gotten through to Lulu—that she understood he was talking about the little playground on Ward’s Island, the sandbox where he’d played pirate with her when she was a little girl. And that despite his thousands and thousands of earlier wolf cries maybe she had heeded this one, and she might be waiting for him at that playground and he’d see her from the pedestrian bridge, from far off, and he could shout, warn her. And of course they’d kill him but she’d have time to get away.

Was that crazy or what?

But it was the best show in town.

And for now all he could do was keep playing it over and over inside his head So he wouldn’t have to watch the other show. (
Lulu decides her father has really lost it this time, and she shrugs and goes back to sleep. A few hours later, she hears a knock on the door.
)

T
here wasn’t another soul on the pedestrian bridge.

He was crossing it with the big No-face. The silent one had silently elected to hang back with the car.

It used to be that homeless men would loiter here, on this bridge. Till one Hallowe’en when a posse of punks from the East River Projects had come through on a wilding spree. One victim they’d bludgeoned to death. Some others they’d played slash ’em, forget ’em. There was this poor guy on the bridge, they’d told him to jump in the water. Jump in the water or we’ll slit your throat. Six of one, half dozen of the other. The man demurred. Slash ’em, forget ’em.

So now people kept off this bridge at night, and Romulus and the No-face were all alone here.

Below, the dark, heavy muscles of the river. Overhead, a string of bridge lights and a blotter sky. The moon was gone.

Romulus looked across to the shore at the end of the bridge. On the right, the little playground.

But Lulu wasn’t there.

That was that.

Leaving only one way open. He’d have to scare this guy into killing him—not knocking him out or otherwise subduing him but a clean
kill
—and well, once the Caveman was dead, there’d be no point in molesting the Caveman’s daughter, right?

Wasn’t that right? He had never been good at this kind of reasoning but it seemed orderly enough.

He just had to rush the bastard, lunge so suddenly that the guy would panic and blow him away. And up here on this bridge, with the guy walking just a few paces behind him, this was as good a place as any.

But he couldn’t do it. The lunge didn’t seem to be in him. Where were the Moth-Seraphs? All he needed was a little burst of anger. Where the hell are you, Seraphs, when for once I can use you?

“Move it, fuckhead.”

He kept walking.

They came to the end of the bridge. The ramp led left, then right, then they went down some steps and they were at the water’s edge. An old pin-oak tree, and under its spreading limbs, the simple playground.

No-face cast his eyes about anxiously.

“This is it?”

“This is it.”

“So where’s your fucking treasure?”

Romulus nodded at the sandbox.

Said No-face, “Get it.”

Romulus stepped to the edge of the sand.

Now?

Just turn around and jump. He’s
got
to panic, he’s got to make this my grave. That’s all I have to do. I can do it now. Screw the Seraphs. Just turn around—

There was an
X
marked in the sand.

Someone had scratched it out with a shoe tip.
X
marks the spot.

He knelt before it, and dug, and found a plastic shopping bag.

No-face took it from him. It was tied with a bread-bag tie. No-face untwisted the tie with his teeth. He kept one hand in his pocket, holding his gun. He tipped the bag. A videocassette fell into the sand.

Said No-face, “What’s
this
shit?”

“What does it say?”

But Romulus could see perfectly well what the box said. In bright letters it said
The Adventures of Cap’n Crunch.

“You trying to fuck with us?”

Then Lulu stepped out from behind the pin-oak tree. Romulus, still kneeling in the sand, was looking right at her, but No-face had his back to her. She came and stood ten paces behind No-face and leveled her pistol at him.

“Freeze! Police! Put your hands over your head!”

No-face glanced back at her. He let the bag go, and it fluttered into the sand. He said:

“I got a gun pointed at your daddy’s brains, bitch. So be careful you don’t spook me.”

Then, slowly and steadily, he drew the gun out of his pocket. He held it two feet from Romulus’s skull. He turned to face Lulu. He said:

“Don’t either of you
fucking move
! Now drop your gun, bitch.”

Romulus said, “Kill him, Lulu.”

“Want to see his brains, bitch? I said
drop your fucking gun!”

Lulu held her stance, but her hands trembled and her eyes were full of terror.

Romulus said, “Lulu. Don’t drop the gun. Kill him. If you drop the gun, he’ll kill both of us.”

No-face said, “No fucking way! I know you’re a cop—think I’m going to kill a fucking
cop?
I got nothing to do with this fucking shit! I was doing this for pocket money! I just want to get the fuck out of here! Drop your gun and I’ll run like hell.”

“Don’t listen to him, Lulu!”

But she
was
listening. She was wavering. Her eyes flicked to the ground, came back up. She was letting his lies work into her.

“Oh Jesus. Lulu,
kill
him! Let him shoot me! I’m a dead man anyway. Lulu, do
what I say!
I’m your father, do what I say!”

“He’s your father, bitch—you want to kill
your own father?
Drop the gun.”

Then Romulus saw the strength go out of her arms. She was slowly lowering her pistol.

And in an instant she would toss it down and then there would be no more discussion, just dying.

But still, Romulus thought, there was that one way open to him.

All he had to do was reach. Reach up quick, Romulus, flash your arm out and take hold of the pistol barrel and hold on tight, and remember to keep on holding even after the eruption of pain and absolute light and absolute dark, just don’t let go and if you’re lucky before you lose everything you’ll get to hear the sound of Lulu filling the fucker with bullets—and it’ll be a wonderful gift-music, and you can compose a split-second March of the Great-Uncles to wrap around it, fiddles and flügelhorns, but you have to do it
now.
Now.

If you’ve ever been worth anything.

Now, while her arm is still dropping, before she tosses her pistol down.

If you’ve ever deserved anyone’s love or honor.

If you’ve held on to an ounce of your divinity, you’ll unfreeze yourself, wink at that pistol’s little black eye, reach, and take hold of death.

And then he felt the Seraphs swarm. All at once they rose up from their multitudinous nests, legion upon legion of them, beating their ragged wings and darkening the whole vault of his consciousness with their fury, and Stuyvesant in his tower across the river felt them and sent down a green-gold-red-black blast of utter destruction, but there were too many of them, they had too much momentum, they kept coming. They hurled themselves against the selfish light of Romulus’s fear, and they put that light out. And then there was nothing but smoke and soot and the beating of their wings, and the fear of death was utterly extinguished, and he did what he had to do.

His arm flashed out.

A
t that instant No-face must have had his eyes on Lulu’s surrender, because Romulus’s reaching took him by surprise. He saw it in the corner of his eye, and quickly turned his no-face to Romulus, and pulled the trigger—but too late. Romulus’s hand slapped against the barrel and knocked the gun’s aim off. Romulus heard the blast, and heard the bullet whistle past his ear. Then he heard another shot—this one from Lulu’s gun.

No-face yanked his pistol barrel free of Romulus’s grasp, and swung it toward Lulu, but her gun went off again.

Then No-face lost his grip.

His pistol flew away from his hand and hit the pavement of the playground and skittered to the base of the swing set. No-face reached after it. He looked like a desperately thirsty man reaching for a skinful of water. He fell to his knees and his head dipped to the sand, kowtowing.

Romulus rose and came toward his daughter. She was still in stance. She was furiously in stance, and terrified, and barking orders to a dying man.

Romulus looked down at No-face. No-face was trying to lift his head. There was a hole in his neck and blood poured out onto his jacket, and he put his hand over the wound. The blood spouted through his fingers. His faceless head moved, he seemed to be looking all around him as though searching for something he’d lost.

He turned his no-face up to the pedestrian bridge and he murmured, “You fucker. You fucker.”

And Romulus looked up, too, and he saw what the dying man was seeing.

The other No-face.

The silent one—up on the bridge with his pistol drawn and aimed.

Romulus cried to Lulu:

“The bridge!”

He leapt at her, smothered her body in his own, and they went down together, and even as they fell he heard the shot. They hit the soft playground pavement and his hand was under her and his huge chest was on top of her head. More shots. His eyes were shut. He was bellowing, bellowing to black out the noise of the shots raining down on them. One two three four five six.

Then there were shots right at his ear. He opened his eyes. Lulu was shooting back. She was peering out from beneath her father’s shoulder blade and firing cooly toward the man on the bridge.

The shots stopped. There was no sound left in the dark but Romulus’s own bellowing. Lulu squirmed out from under him, and shouted above his roaring:

“Daddy!
It’s all right! He’s gone! It’s all right!”

He shut up and looked at her. Then at the empty bridge. A far-off echo of running footsteps. He looked back at Lulu, who had risen and was kneeling by the No-face in the sandbox.

Romulus looked over across the river at Stuyvesant’s tower. It was dark now, pitch black. There was a smear of last moon in the clouds.

“Lulu. I’m confused. Help me out with this. I don’t understand. Why are we still alive?”

She didn’t say anything. She was bent over the body of the No-face.

Romulus said, “I don’t understand. Did he
miss
us?”

She told him quietly, “He wasn’t aiming at us, Daddy.”

Then Romulus saw the No-face lying on his side and half of the man’s head was gone, and he was bleeding from half a dozen wounds.

Said Lulu, “He was finishing off his partner here.”

She looked all around her. “Is that all of them, Daddy?”

He nodded.

He lay there and stared up at Stuyvesant’s tower.

“But why didn’t he kill
us,
Lulu? He could have, easy. Why not? You’re alive, I’m alive. How did this happen?”

She knelt beside the No-face, breathing deeply, still looking all around her. “You complaining, Daddy?”

“No, but I would like to know. How in the world does it happen that we’re still alive?”

He lay on his back and thought about it.

And then suddenly a tumbler fell into place, and he did know.

E
ver seen this face before?”

Romulus looked through the snapshots. There wasn’t much face to see. One whole and staring eye, one whole cheekbone, the cleft of the chin—the rest wasn’t face at all.

“I’m not sure. It could be—I mean, he looks some like a man I saw a couple weeks ago. Guy who hustles drugs down on First and Ninth.”

“Bingo,” said Jack Cork.

They were sitting in one of the little windowless interrogation chambers in the precinct house.

Cork asked, “But you didn’t know him?”

“Uh-uh. His partner, Eel, that’s Matthew’s pusher—him I talked to. I just got a glimpse of this one, from across the street.”

“Right. We’re looking for Eel.
This
one they called Shaker. Real name was Robert Jackson. Bright guy, you know? Or anyway semibright. Graduate of PS 140. Spent a year in Queens College—yes he did, would have been a brain surgeon, too, but first they canned him for peddling shit on campus. Six arrests, two convictions, four months in the hole. Going nowhere. Not what you would call a big cheese in the drug world. Neither mover nor shaker, just another asshole in the parade. Running a little garbage, here and there, waiting to get burned out or dead.

“You know, Caveman, when I was a kid I had this friend that used to catch flies right off the wall. He’d pull their heinies out and put a little twirl of toilet paper in the wound, and those flies would buzz around with that banner flapping away behind them, you get this?—and they’d just spiral down”—Cork made a spiral in the air—“down . . . down . . . till they ran out of gas. Real tragic, but nobody felt particularly sorry for them. Now I’ve forgotten why I told you that story. Oh, yeah. Robert Jackson. Guys like Robert Jackson remind me of my friend’s flies.”

Romulus asked, “Have you found his connection with Leppenraub yet?”

“I’m sorry, do my stories bore you? No. Nothing so far. But we got people asking. We’re checking out everything you gave us. Talking to all of Leppenraub’s known boyfriends. Got the police in North Carolina to search Mrs. Peasley’s place. Nothing. And nothing she’s telling us is of much use, either. FBI’s checking to see if anybody’s turned up missing in Charlotte.”

“FBI?”

“You got it. The mightiest law enforcement agency in the mightiest republic in the history of the world, at your service. No story of yours too crack-brain that we won’t check it out. You’re a man of great power, my friend.”

“I’m not powerful.”

“No? Well, all I know is, you could turn my life into a nightmare in a hurry.”

“
I
could?”

Cork scowled, lowered his voice. “You may have noticed, on your way in, a pack of vermin out on the sidewalk? Critters that look sort of like jackals and sort of like sewer-ooze? If you wanted to, Caveman, you could go down there and give them the whole story. They’ll take your picture, they’ll stick mikes in your face, they’ll put you on the six o’clock news. They’ll give you headlines big as cathedrals. They’ll make your cave into a national monument. And they’ll make me look like the evilest great Satan who ever lived because I never listened to your sage advice. Do you want to do that, you want to talk to the press?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sure, your choice is you can do me a favor and keep quiet for a while.”

Cork checked Romulus’s expression. Romulus gave him nothing, waited patiently. And Cork went on:

“See, what the press knows now is this: They know who died, they know he was wearing some kind of mask, they know he abducted a homeless man and this man got a call through to his daughter, who’s a cop, and the cop found them and there was a shootout. Everything else is
pending investigation.
They’re going nuts. You go out there and take a look at them. They’re biting people. This is juicy stuff and we’re giving them
pending investigation.
And the name
Leppenraub
hasn’t come up yet. Once Leppenraub gets into this, it’ll be like opening night for
Gone With the Wind.
That’s why I want to keep him out of it. Till I’ve talked to all his boyfriends, till I find out what Robert Jackson was doing the last few weeks.”

“Right.”

“Right? You’ll keep quiet? It’s that easy?”

“Right. You want a favor. You want me to seal my lips? Be happy to.”

“Wow. Thank you.”

“Naturally I expect a little something in return.”

“Hey fuckhead, you don’t shake down cops. Supposed to be the other way around.”

“I’m not asking much.”

“Uh-huh.”

“All I want is the autopsy report on Andrew Scott Gates.”

“Oh Caveman. Caveman, Caveman. You drive a hard, mean bargain, you son of a bitch.”

Cork opened a drawer, pulled out a little gift-wrapped package, and tossed it on the table. The card read “Belated Happy Birthday, Daddy.”

“Your daughter asked me to give this to you. Officially I don’t know what’s in there. Privately I expect it’ll bore you to tears. Whatever it is, get rid of it after you’ve read it, OK?”

“OK. Thanks.”

Said Cork, “Anything else I can do for you?”

“Yes, one little thing.”

“At your beck and call, crack-brain.”

“I need a ride.”

“Sure. Where to?”

“Gideon Manor.”

“Caveman. Listen to me. You’ve done good work. You deserve the thanks of all Gotham—but now it’s time to turn this over to the pros. Let us break this mother open. You know what I mean?”

“Right,” said Romulus. “I know what you mean. You mean you still don’t think Leppenraub is behind this.”

They confronted each other.

Romulus said: “Bingo?”

Finally Cork shrugged. “Look. I’m not telling you he’s
not
guilty. Like I say, we’re checking it out. But OK, you want to know what I think? I think you and Matthew Donofrio, you were always shooting your mouth off about this videotape. This precious videotape. So a guy like Robert Jackson, he’s always got his eye on the main chance, and he and his buddy Eel hear the rumors, and decide if they could get hold of that tape, they could turn it into cash. A lot of cash. So they go to work. Neither of them are what you’d call subtle. Naturally they screw up. What do you think?”

“Sounds reasonable.”

Said Cork, “Well,
I
like it, you know, ’cause it doesn’t involve a lot of fucking clues.”

“Also it doesn’t involve accusing the most famous photographer in the world of murder.”

“There’s that. There is that. It’s a low-hairiness solution, yeah, that has its appeal.”

He grinned.

Said Romulus, “And your theory is, all you have to do now is find the partner, find this Eel guy, and get him to confess?”

“Caveman, you are astonishing. I mean your sanity is fucking astonishing. What’s happened to you?”

“Shock therapy. You’ll take me up to Gideon Manor? Tomorrow morning?”

“Oh, please. Who do you want to talk to, anyway?”

“
I
don’t want to talk to anybody. I want
you
to. I want you to have a chat with David Leppenraub’s sister.”

C
ork arranged for Romulus to spend the night up at the little shelter run by the Franciscans on Broadway and 112th.

It was a high-rent, man-on-the-move-up shelter. Everyone was a
guest,
everyone slept in his own cubicle. Every cubicle had a crucifix above the bed. Light poured in through the transom. Romulus sat up in bed and read the ME’s report.

As Cork had warned him, it was not delicious reading. The ME was a squeamish man, and he’d tried to bury the truth under an avalanche of jargon. Scotty he diminished to “the decedent.” The boy was no longer beautiful, he was only a “well-developed white male whose appearance is consistent with the reported age of 20.” The ME noted the blizzard of “ice crystals in the blood,” the skin condition “suggestive of hypothermia”—but he did not dwell on these troubling details. He tried to emphasize the positive. He found to his delight that “the periorbital spaces are free of extravasated blood or edema.” Furthermore he was pleased to announce that the “sclerae are anicteric, with bulbar and palpebral conjuctivae that are free of petechiae.”

He went over Scotty with a fine-tooth comb and noted his smallpox vaccination, a birthmark on his shoulder, a few needle tracks in his left arm, some lacerations and abrasions that were minutely described, but no other significant marks.
No evidence of
trauma.
Nothing to fret about. Oh, if it weren’t for those pesky ice crystals,
decedent
could have gotten up and downed a double cheese-burger.

Those ice crystals. The cold of that night.

On such a fine spring evening as this, Romulus could no longer remember the feel of that cold. He dredged up a dim image of sitting in the cave under a mountain of blankets. Shivering like an old washing machine. He had that image. But the way it had
felt
?—this had flown.

And he thought that if we could only remember, conjure, imagine the feel of suffering, surely we would stop inflicting it.

It seemed a good, pious thought for such a place as this.

He desperately missed his cave.

He picked up the ME’s report and read it again.

Nothing had changed. The sclerae were still anicteric. Decedent had that birthmark on his shoulder. No other significant marks. No evidence of trauma.

That was all.

And what Romulus was looking for—that was still missing. Now where in the world, he wondered, could it have gotten to?

The valentine. That heart-shaped brand that Matthew had said he saw on Scotty’s butt. OK, maybe to the ME just a tattoo. But still, how in hell could you report the birthmark, the smallpox vaccination, this little flaw and that little zit, and leave out a glaring red, heart-shaped tattoo on decedent’s buttocks?

Unless you had some powerful reason for leaving it out . . .

H
e woke up once in the middle of the night when the man in the cubicle next to him had a coughing fit. He woke, and the realization that he was still alive—that he hadn’t been killed in that sandbox—came to him as a shock. It flooded him, it terrified him, his heart skipped a beat, it was so strange and huge he thought he was having a heart attack.

He calmed himself by reciting the names of all his great-uncles and great-aunts.

I
n the morning he awoke refreshed and full of fire. Cork picked him up and they cruised northward. Cork started out grumpy, whining about missed appointments, but they stopped for breakfast at a diner in Yonkers and after that he was in a better mood.

They talked. They discovered that they had been born in the same year. Two months apart, two miles apart. They griped about the flight of time. They griped about cold things that girls had said to them in high school. They found that they were both youngest children. Romulus said he thought it was because he was a youngest child that he had never felt himself anything but a kid, that the image returned by mirrors always looked incomprehensibly aged to him, et cetera.

Cork said, “I know exactly what you mean, my friend.”

Cork said that at the ceremony when he was promoted to lieutenant, his mother, right in front of everybody, had knelt and retied his shoelaces for him because she thought they were too loose, he might trip over them.

They agreed that George Steinbrenner, not content with plucking, oiling, and spit-roasting the Yankees, was also secretly in control of other sports franchises, among them the New York Mets and the New York Knicks, the New York Giants, and the South Korean Olympic boxing team.

They pulled off the Taconic Parkway at Peekskill Hollow Road, for gas. Romulus borrowed Cork’s credit card and called Information, got the number for the only Reynolds in Gideon Manor. He called the number and asked the woman who answered if he could speak to Darcy. He waited.

“Hello?”

“Cassandra?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“The guy from Walter’s bar. The black guy who played piano.”

“Romulus! Hey man. What’s up?”

“Not too much,” he told her.

“Easy living?”

“That’s about it. What I’m doing, I’m trying to put a puzzle together. Thought maybe you could help.”

“I love puzzles. I’m in kind of a hurry right now, but—”

“Hot date?”

“Lukewarm.”

“Another lapse in judgment?”

She giggled.

Said Romulus, “Well listen, what I want to know, it’s real quick—”

“OK.”

“Scotty Gates was your boyfriend.”

“Mm.”

“When you knew him, now here’s my question—did he have a heart-shaped tattoo on his butt?”

She laughed. “A what?”

“A heart-shaped tattoo.”

She laughed some more.
“Scotty?”

“I take it he didn’t.”

“No, but it’s really weird you ask me that.”

“Why?”

Another spasm of laughter. She couldn’t stop laughing.

B
y the time Cork came ambling out of the little country grocery, happily and dreamily peeling down the wrapper of a Mars bar, Romulus was back in the car waiting for him. They got back on the Parkway, and Cork munched at his candy and told Romulus about the antique roses he was trying to grow in his little backyard. Romulus discoursed on the difficulties of cultivating squash along city highway embankments.

With a few words, Cassandra had given him the missing piece. The heart of the puzzle. So that now in all the chaos of landscape rushing by—the blossoming apples, the nook-and-cranny drumlins—Romulus saw nothing but coherence, golden-crowned coherence.

He said, “This used to be the Leatherman’s country. Up around here.”

A hundred years ago, he told Cork, there was a man who wore an astounding suit made from bits of leather sewn together, and who lived in caves up here north of the city. Walking from cave to cave, living by begging. Never speaking a word to anyone—begging by gestures. His circuit of caves was a hundred miles around and he traveled that circuit on a schedule so rigorous that farmers along the route knew exactly when to look for him, and they always had a little something for him.