The Edge of Doom (9 page)

“Well,” Kate said, getting up to head for the kitchen and decisions about dinner, “at least I, unlike the woman in your article, would not mind being forced never to see any of my family again. On the other hand, I don’t think I’d care to settle down somewhere in the South or the Midwest. I’m a Northeasterner at heart; and after all, would any southerner or midwesterner want to be plunked down in New York to start life all over again? Of course not.”

“A bit dramatically put, but I’m glad of the conclusion.”

“I don’t condone Jay’s actions whatever they were; if they landed him in the Witness Protection Program, they are no doubt beyond approbation. But I do feel I owe him something for demonstrating that I am not, and have never been, a Fansler. I don’t know how I feel about this discovery of my paternal heritage, but I do know I can at last understand why nothing my family stood for seemed to me desirable. I’m also proud to learn that I went a different way than either becoming the anarchical member of a family who is forced to the enactment of violent insurrection, or someone like Edith Wharton who turns to writing but never abandons the manners of her culture, however much it made her suffer. Me, I just didn’t belong, I knew it, and now I know why.”

“As I keep saying, you might have turned out very much the same as a real Fansler.”

“No, Reed, I’ve decided. Jay made the difference. I can’t think why, if he had never appeared, I wouldn’t have realized that. I guess it’s because the question never came up; because I never really thought about it.”

CHAPTER TEN

. . . he is arrived, here where his daughter dwells.

During the next week nothing whatever happened. Reed and Kate promised each other to resist any temptation to do anything about Jay. As they recognized, the temptation was great to make something happen: perhaps to call Laurence, urging him on; perhaps to try to probe further into Jay’s life. They yearned to set some action, any action, into motion, but bound by their mutual agreement, they abstained. By well into the following week, as a result of this forbearance, they found it increasingly easier to let hours pass without thinking of Kate’s father and his putative criminal career. Kate even stopped obsessing about what such a father meant to her sense of herself. They had even begun to wonder if they might not stagger through the rest of their lives without ever encountering Jay again.

And then, as suddenly as he had disappeared, he reappeared. One morning, when Kate was home alone with Banny, the back doorbell rang. Supposing it to be a delivery or Con Edison to read a meter, Kate opened the door to confront a painter. The back-elevator man explained that this man was working with the company painting the lobby and some of the halls, and he wanted to come in to examine the front hall outside of Kate’s apartment. The painter was slumped against the elevator wall, his body language indicating annoyance at having to examine the hall, at permission having to be asked. Upon Kate’s nodding agreement with this plan, the painter slouched into the apartment.

“Shall I wait?” the elevator man asked.

“Don’t bother,” the painter said. “I’ll walk down. I have to get some measurements.” And with that, the elevator closed.

“This way,” Kate said.

“It’s me,” the painter said. And the slouching painter took off his cap, straightened up, his whole demeanor changed, and Kate recognized Jay.

“It’s an old trick,” he said, “but still a good one. You kind of join up with some outfit that’s doing some work in the house, and try to get past the staff; this fellow is so lazy he couldn’t bother to check me out. And why should he? I’m with the outfit that’s doing the painting. They send different painters around each day—the boss comes to check them and their work out at the end of the afternoon. As long as I avoid him, I’m okay. It has to be supposed that he knows what painters he’s hired, but the painters don’t always know each other.”

Kate stared at him. So many questions crowded into her mind that she was beyond expressing any of them; her astonishment was palpable.

“It’s all right,” Jay said. “Have you a room you don’t use much; one with the shades drawn, or able to be drawn?”

Kate took a moment to register the question. “Well,” she said, “there’s a maid’s room. We don’t use it, except as a sort of attic. In here.” The “maid’s room” opened out of the kitchen. It contained a cot, a bureau, some shelves bulging with unassorted items, and a number of boxes from computers, printers, and VCRs stacked around. There was not much room to move.

“We could throw out most of this,” Kate said. “We also have a bin in the basement where we could put what we want to keep. We just never get around to it. If we got rid of some of these boxes . . .”

“Don’t get rid of anything,” he said. “Don’t do anything unusual. This is fine.” He pulled the drawn shade aside to ascertain that the room looked out on the courtyard, ten stories down. The room across the way also had its shades down.

“There’s a lamp somewhere,” Kate said.

“No lamp. No light must show. The thing is, Kate, I’d like to hang out here for a day or two. They’ve already determined I’m not here, which makes it a good place to lie low.”

“Won’t the back-elevator man wonder why you didn’t leave?”

“No. He’ll assume I walked down as I said I would. Anyway, he’s a lazy fellow. If we can manage not to arouse his curiosity, he won’t bother about me. Is it all right if I stay then?”

Kate pulled herself together. She thought of calling Reed, and then remembered that he was in court and would not be available.

“Have you something, anything, to eat?” he asked. “And some water? I’ll stay in here. It’s even got a bathroom; better than I could have hoped.”

“Are you saying you can’t come into the kitchen?”

“Better not. I don’t want anyone to catch even a glimpse of me through a window. A piece of bread would do.”

“I’ll make you a sandwich. Anything to drink besides water?”

“Coffee would be welcome, but I don’t want to bother . . .”

“You want to hide out in our apartment, which is probably some sort of federal crime, but you don’t want me to bother making a cup of coffee. Well, I’ll make the sandwich and the coffee; I’ll bring them to you in here. But there is a price: I want some sort of explanation; I want to know what the hell is going on with you.”

“It’s a bargain,” Jay said. “But please, Kate. I haven’t committed a criminal offense; I’m not a criminal under any law. I wouldn’t have burdened you in this way, except that someone is trying to kill me. I may decide to let him kill me, but I thought well, if I hide out with Kate, at least I can explain all this. I gather Reed has been doing some detecting, having spotted the lacunae in my résumé. And I thought it was such a clever résumé.”

Kate went to make the sandwich and to put up the coffee. She felt that she could use a cup herself. Banny, who always monitored the doors, back and front, when anyone rang, sat looking at Jay calmly, but steadily. The slightest of rumbles had risen in her throat when he entered the apartment; these had now subsided.

Kate brought a tray with the sandwich, the coffee pot, two cups, and a glass of water into the maid’s room. It was an extremely odd place to be holding a conversation, but Kate had every intention of holding it. Jay had spotted a folding chair behind some boxes and opened it. “Chair or cot?” he asked Kate.

“Chair,” Kate said. She put the tray on the cot next to Jay, and poured the coffee. He drank the whole glass of water without pausing, and then began eating the sandwich; his hunger was evident. Kate sipped her coffee. They sat with their knees touching as, Kate thought, in some old-time spy movie. She picked up one of the large cartons and heaved it on top of another, which allowed her to move her chair back an inch or so.

Dramatic sentences began to drift into Kate’s mind, such as: he gave me life and now he might kill me; can anything be said for having a criminal as a father? how much is owed a father, particularly one you haven’t seen for fifty or so years? She uttered none of them, banishing them from her thoughts. “Start at the beginning,” she said.

“What is the beginning?”

“When you left my mother.”

“I could start there. But I think what you want to know now is why I was in the Witness Protection Program, why I left it, and why I’m in danger now. That’s not quite the story of my life, but it’s a good bit of it.”

“All right,” Kate said. “Tell me that story.”

“After I left your mother, for the next twenty years, life was just as the résumé reported it, with one significant exception, to which I’ll come eventually. Let’s skip over that for now. I went to architecture school, just as the résumé said. I worked on odd construction jobs. I started an architecture firm with a partner, the man who is still my partner, though he knows nothing of all this. He knows I took a leave but not what for or anything about it. We worked on the restoration of historic buildings. As you know, we started in New York but soon moved west, to my great relief. Not only because I was farther from your mother, but because restoration work in New York City can get really nasty.”

“How’s that?” Kate asked. Nothing, Reed would have said had he been there, could keep Kate from asking for information, even under the most extraordinary circumstances.

Jay did not seem to find the question strange. “Well, say there’s an historic building that needs to be rebuilt; it’s in a stage beyond disrepair, definitely in need of attention. The owner, constricted on every side by the Landmark Commission—a very good organization, by the way, organized when the great old Penn Station was torn down without a thought in the 1960s, I think—where was I? The owner asks and gets permission to add a few stories to his old building, on which he is spending a fortune. Now come the folks in brownstones next door who fear a shadow will be cast on them by the extra stories. In fact a shadow will be cast. So the poor architect is bombarded on all sides, by the owner, by the neighbors, by the Landmark Commission. It’s not so bad in other cities.”

“I see. Do go on.”

“There we were, established in the West, a firm with an excellent reputation, and undertaking interesting work in restoration when, sometime in the Seventies, I cut loose.”

“You left the firm?”

“Call it, as I did, a leave of absence. I wanted some time to look around and think; as a partner, I continued to get some income from the firm.”

“Were you married by then?”

“No. That came later. The problem was, I had been involved in a crime, well, a kind of crime. I can’t explain the reasons to you now, and I’m not sure I could have done a very coherent job of explaining them then. I became the accomplice of an art thief.”

Kate stood up from the folding chair, which was already making her feel cramped. Jay started to get up also, but she pushed him back onto the cot. “Is this some nonsense I’m supposed to listen to with innocent belief? Are you making all this up as you go along?”

“Am I indeed? A rational question. I thought I knew why at the time, but in retrospect it’s as unbelievable to me as it obviously is to you. It’s connected to Shakespeare in a way. I think I better stand up, too. No, I won’t stand up with you; I think I might stretch out on the cot. Would that offend you? I haven’t had much sleep lately.”

“Go right ahead,” Kate said. “The cot may not be long enough, and it’s certainly not very comfortable. We used to keep it for use when nieces and nephews unexpectedly turned up to spend a day or two.”

Jay stretched out on it, his head lying flat, his feet dangling over the bottom of the cot. Kate waited with what she considered commendable patience, then turned to ignite him with another question.

He was asleep. She looked at him. His was a sleep of extreme exhaustion; it might continue for hours. She thought of covering him with something, and then decided that she would not offer a single further indulgence. She had probably gone too far already in letting him fall asleep in their maid’s room. She closed the door of the room and left him to it.

When Reed came home she went to greet him in the hall. It occurred to her that since the advent of Jay, she and Reed had taken to waiting for each other in the hall, a clear sign that the even tenor of their lives had been disrupted.

“What now?” he said, before she spoke.

“He’s here.”

“Who?”

“Jay.”

“What do you mean,
here
?”

“Here, in the apartment. Actually, in the maid’s room, which he is determined not to leave even for a moment. He’s fallen asleep.”

“Kate, are you out of your mind?”

“Don’t start huffing and puffing until I tell you what happened. I was more or less trapped. Well, I could have dialed 911, but failing that, I had no other recourse.”

Reed sat down on one of the chairs in the hall and seemed to lose himself in unhappy contemplations.

“What on earth are we going to do?” he asked.

“Well, I rather thought we would hear him out. He started telling me about getting into a life of crime—art theft, apparently—but simply sank into sleep the minute he stretched out on the cot. He’s very tired.”

“
He’s
very tired. Kate, you do realize that harboring a criminal is a felony, among other things. I know he’s your father, but do you want to go to jail for him, or worse, have to testify against him?”

“Why don’t we sit down in the living room and talk about this calmly?”

“Calmly! You’ve never advised calm in your life. You’re always the one I have to pacify. I hate what this whole damn business is doing to us.”

“Let’s talk about it. If you insist on calling the police or the FBI or the Witness Protection Program or whomever, I’ll go along with it. But let’s chew it over first. How about a drink?”

“I hope you didn’t offer Jay a drink.”

“He doesn’t drink, remember? Oh, no, you weren’t there. The first time I met him—which feels like a century ago—he said he didn’t drink. His mother was an alcoholic, he said. He asked for coffee. Not then, I don’t mean, just now. Then he asked for tea.”

“I don’t believe his mother was an alcoholic. I don’t believe he had a mother. Were it not for DNA, I wouldn’t believe he had the smallest connection with you. Did you know that men now can get on the Web and send in their specimens and that of their children to find out if the children are really theirs?”

“Reed, please sit down. We will settle what to do about Jay one way or the other in a few hours, when he wakes up, or when we wake him. Meanwhile, I can’t help feeling a drink might lessen the tension, temporarily at least.”

To her relief, Reed smiled. Kate didn’t doubt that it was his knowledge of the law, particularly criminal law, that was troubling him so profoundly. But for the moment for her, she had to admit to herself, curiosity was winning out over fear. For the moment.