The Throat (81 page)

I waited for
him to explain how he had survived.

"Once things
got hairy, I ordered everybody into this bunker, with firing slits
raised above the ground. Two tunnels. It was a good system. It just
didn't work against that many men. They pounded the shit out of us.
They fired a grenade in through one of the slits, and that was pretty
much that. I wound up flat on the ground with about a dozen guys lying
on top of me. I couldn't see or hear. I could hardly breathe. All the
blood almost drowned me. Finally, some guy got in through the tunnel
and emptied a clip into us. Two, I think, but I wasn't really counting."

"You couldn't
see him."

"I couldn't
see anything," he said. "I thought I was dead. The way it turned out, I
caught a round in my ass, and I had some grenade fragments in my legs.
When I realized I was still alive, I crawled out. It took a long time."
He picked up his fork and stared at the fried bit of potato again
before putting it back on his plate. "A hell of a long time. The
tunnels had collapsed."

I asked him
if he remembered Francis Pinkel.

John almost
smiled. "The little twerp who worked for Burrman? Sure. He came in the
day before the shit hit the fan, gave us an hour of his precious time,
and climbed back into the helicopter."

According to
Runnel's mysterious informant, Pinkel had visited Lang Vo on the day of
the assault. It made more sense as John told it: the assault on John's
camp would have taken at least a day to coordinate.

"Well," I
said, "the twerp reported sighting an A Team under an American officer
after he lifted off."

"Really?"
John raised his eyebrows.

"Do you
remember Tom Pasmore asking if anyone might have a reason to want to
injure you?"

"Pasmore?
He's just living off his reputation."

I said I
didn't think that was true, and John snorted in contempt. "What if I'd
offered him a hundred thousand? Don't kid yourself."

"But the
point is, can you think of anyone with a grudge against you?"

"Sure," he
said. He was beginning to get irritated again. "Last year I flunked a
kid out of graduate school because he could hardly read. He has a
grudge against me, but I don't think he'd murder anybody." John looked
at me as if I were being deliberately simpleminded. "Am I wrong, or is
there actually some point to this?"

"Did you ever
think about the name of Fee Bandolier's corporation?"

"Elvee? No. I
never thought about it. I'm getting a little tired of this, Tim." He
pushed his plate away and poured more wine into his glass.

"Lang Vei," I
said. "Lang Vo."

"This is
nuts. I ask you a question, and you give me gobble-dygook."

"Fielding
Bandolier enlisted in the army in 1961."

"Great."

"Under the
name Franklin Bachelor," I said. "I guess he has a thing about
initials."

John had been
raising his glass to his mouth. His arm stopped moving. His mouth
opened a little wider, and his eyes turned cloudy. He took a big gulp
of the wine and wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Are you accusing me of
something?"

"I'm accusing
him, not you," I said. "Bachelor is resourceful enough to have made it
back to the States under someone else's name. And he blamed you for his
wife's death."

Anger flared
in John's eyes, and for a second I thought he might try to strangle me
again. Then I saw a curtain of reflection pass across his face, and he
began to look at me with a growing sense of understanding.

"Why would he
wait all this time to get his revenge?"

"Because
after he came into your bunker and emptied a couple of clips into the
bodies, he thought you were dead."

"So he wound
up back here." He said it flatly, as if this was to have been expected.

"He's been
living in Millhaven since 1979, but he had no idea that you were back
here, too."

"How did he
find out that I was alive?"

"He saw your
picture in the paper. He killed Grant Hoffman two days later. Five days
after that, he tried to kill your wife. His father murdered people at
five-day intervals, and he was just following the pattern, even writing
the same words."

"To make the
murders look like they were connected to the old Blue Rose case."

"When April
began writing to the department about the case, he went into the files
and removed his father's statements. And moved his notes out of the
Green Woman, in case anyone else got curious."

"Franklin
Bachelor," John said. "The Last Irregular."

"Nobody knew
what he really was," I said. "He had a lifetime of pretending to be
someone else."

"Tell me his
name," John said.

"Paul
Fontaine," I said.

John repeated
the detective's name, slowly, his voice rising at the end. "I can't
believe it. Are you sure?"

"The man I
saw in Ohio put his finger right on Fontaine's face," I said.

The telephone
went off like a bomb, and I jumped no more than a foot or two.

The answering
machine cut in, and we heard Alan Brookner's conversational bellow,
raised about 10 percent above its usual volume. "Goddamn it, will you
answer the phone? I'm sitting here all alone, the whole city's going
crazy, and—"

John was
already on his feet. Alan's voice clicked off as soon as John picked up
the receiver, and from then on I could hear only half of the
conversation. John was being placating, but to judge from the number of
times he said, "Alan, I can hear you" and "No, I haven't been avoiding
you," placation did not occur. "No, the police haven't been in touch,"
he said, and moved the receiver a few inches from his ear. "I will, I
will," he said. "Of course you're worried. Everybody's worried." He
moved the receiver away from his ear again. Then: "I know you don't
care about what everybody else does, Alan, you never have." He endured
another long tirade, during which my guilt at not having visited Alan
Brookner increased exponentially.

He put down
the receiver and did a brief mime of exhausted patience, wobbling his
knees and shaking his hands and his head. "He assured me that he was
going to call again. Is that startling news? No, it is not."

"I guess
we've been ignoring him," I said.

"Alan
Brookner has never been ignored for five whole minutes at a time." John
came back into the living room and collapsed into his chair. "The
problem is that Eliza goes home at five o'clock. All he has to do is
eat the dinner she has warming in the oven, take off his clothes, and
go to bed. But of course he doesn't do that. He has a couple of drinks
and forgets about dinner. He watches the news, imagining it will be
about himself and his daughter, there can't possibly be any other
topic, the concept is ridiculous, and when he sees burning buildings
and gunmen flitting through the fog he imagines that he is in
danger"—John paused for a deep breath—"because it cannot be possible
that what's on the news is not directly related to him."

"Isn't he
just alarmed?"

"I've known
him a lot longer than you have," John said. "He's going to keep on
calling until I go over there." He looked up at me with a speculative
gleam. "Unless you go. He adores you."

"I don't mind
visiting Alan," I said.

"You must be
some kind of frustrated nurse," John grumbled. "Anyhow, what do you
say? If we're going to take a look inside Fontaine's house, this is the
night." He made a third attempt at eating the home fry on his fork, and
this time got it into his mouth. Chewing, he challenged me with a look.
I did not respond. He shook his head in disgust and polished off the
last of the veal. Then he slugged down a mouthful of wine and kept his
eyes on me, trying to provoke me into agreement.

"God, Tim, I
hate to say this, but I seem to be the only guy around here who's
willing to see a little action."

I stared at
him, and then I began to laugh.

"Okay, okay,"
he said. "I spoke out of turn. Let's see how bad it is before we make
up our minds."

We settled
onto the couch in the living room, and John flicked on the television
with the remote. Looking more distressed than I had ever seen him, his
hair slightly rumpled, his conservative tie out of plumb, Jimbo
appeared on the screen, announcing for the hundredth time that the
members of the Committee for a Just Millhaven had appeared at City
Hall, led by the Reverend Clement Moore and accompanied by several
hundred demonstrators, demanding a meeting with Merlin Waterford and a
reconsideration of their demands. The mayor had sent out his deputy
with the message that unscheduled appointments had never been and never
would be permitted. The delegation had refused to leave the building.
Arden Vass had sent in police to disperse the crowd, and after demands,
counterdemands, and speeches, a teenage boy had been shot and killed by
an officer who thought he had seen a pistol in the boy's hand. From a
jail cell, the Reverend Clement Moore had issued the statement that
"Decades of racial injustice, racial insensitivity, and economic
oppression had finally come home to roost, and the fires of rage will
not be banked."

A police car
had been overturned and set on fire on North Sixteenth Street. Homemade
incendiary bombs thrown into two white-owned businesses on Messmer
Avenue had spread through the neighboring buildings, and fire fighters
responding to the emergency had been fired upon from rooftops across
the street.

Behind
Jimbo's face, a camera showed figures running through the fog carrying
television sets, piles of suits and dresses, armloads of groceries,
mufflers, running shoes tied together by their laces. People trotted
out of the fog, waved steaks and halogen lamps and cane-backed chairs
at the camera, and disappeared again into the haze.

"Damage is
presently estimated at the five-million-dollar level," Jimbo said. "For
a report on some other disturbing aspects of the situation, here is
Isobel Archer, live from Armory Place." Isobel appeared on the near
side of a solid line of policemen separating her from a chaotic mob.
She raised her voice to be heard over chants and howls. "Reports of
isolated fires and incidents of shooting have begun to come in from
other sections of the city," she said. A faint but distinct noise of
breaking glass made her look over her shoulder. "There have been
several accounts of drivers being dragged from their cars on Central
Divide and Illinois Avenue, and several downtown merchants have hired
private security firms to protect their stores. I'm told that gangs of
armed rioters are traveling in cars and shooting at other vehicles.
Lone pedestrians have been attacked and beaten on Livermore Avenue and
Fifteenth Street Avenue." She winced at loud gunshots from somewhere on
the far side of the line of police. "At this point, I'm told that we
are moving to the top of police headquarters, where we may be able to
show you something of the scale of the destruction."

The anchor's
stolid face appeared again on a split screen. "On a personal note,
Isobel, do you feel in danger yourself?"

"I believe
that's why we're going to try to get to the roof," she said.

Jimbo filled
the entire screen again. "While Isobel moves to a safer location, we
advise all residents to draw their curtains, stay away from their
windows, and refrain from leaving the house. Now. This just in. There
are unconfirmed reports of arson and random gunfire in the fifteen
hundred block of Western Boulevard, the twelve hundred block of
Fifteenth Street Avenue, and sections of the near west side near the
Galaxy Shopping Center. And now, Joe Ruddier with a commentary."

Mouth already
open, eyes flaring, cheeks blazing, Joe Ruddler's irate, balloonlike
visage zoomed onto the screen. He looked as if he had just charged out
of a cage.
"If any good comes out of this, it
ought to be that those uninformed,
soft-headed idiots who babble about gun control will finally come to
their senses!"

"This is the
ideal time to take Fontaine's house apart," John said. He went into the
kitchen and came back with his glass and the rest of the wine. A little
windblown and out of breath, Isobel Archer appeared on top of police
headquarters to point at the places where we would be able to see
fires, had we been able to see them.

"This place
is going to look like San Francisco after the great quake," John said.

"The fog
won't last that long," I said. "It'll be gone by about midnight."

"Oh, yeah,"
John said. "And Paul Fontaine will turn up at the front door, tell us
he found Jesus too, and apologize for all the trouble he caused me."

Alan Brookner
called back around ten o'clock and held John on the phone for twenty
minutes, ten of which John spent with the receiver a foot away from his
head. When he hung up, he went straight into the kitchen and made a
fresh drink.

A smiling
young black face filled the screen as Jimbo announced that the teenager
killed by a police bullet in City Hall was now identified as Lamar
White, a seventeen-year-old honor student at John F. Kennedy High
School. "White seems to have been unarmed at the time of his shooting,
and the incident will be under departmental investigation."

The telephone
rang again.

"John, John,
John, John, John, John," Alan said through the answering machine.
"John, John, John, John, John, John."

"You ever
notice how they always turn into honor students as soon as they're
dead?" John asked me.

"John, John,
John, John, John…"

John got up
and went to the telephone.

Jimbo said
that Ted Koppel would be hosting a special edition of "Nightline" from
the Performing Arts Auditorium tomorrow night. A police spokesman
announced that all roads and highways in and out of Millhaven were to
be blocked by state troopers.