Two If by Sea (52 page)

“Why do you want me there?” Frank asked, and with all his might, he willed Harry—Harry or anybody—to step out into the silent street, to come out for the newspaper, or a delivery, or a breath of air. “What good will I do?”

“It's obvious. I told you. The confidence you inspire. The hope that puts aside the fear. To lessen the chance that the little kid will shut down mentally. You'll promise him that Daddy will come and get him so he won't be afraid.”

“He'll be afraid. And you know he can stop you.”

“No, he can't stop me.”

“Why? Are you not human?”

Louis sat back slightly in his seat, using his right hand to smooth his gray pants, which Frank studied: they were made of a wool so fine that the fabric puckered and draped like silk. If Frank had dared to chance it, that was the moment he would have shoved open the door and dived out, just as Louis prophesied. But even in his reflective posture, Louis's hand on the gun was steady, pointed correctly and directly at the vulnerable lower globe of Frank's head. “If you asked my parents, they would have said no, I was not human. You can't ask them because they're dead, although this isn't a movie, and I had nothing to do with that. There is no Mycroft to my Sherlock, or to my Moriarty . . . if you will. I'm one of a kind. But whatever I am or am not, the boy's ability, powerful as it is, has no effect on me.”

“Do you know why?”

“I don't really know. From what I understand of child psychology, children are solipsistic, something you can ask your lovely wife about one day when the two of you are discussing philosophy. I think they believe until a certain age that what they want is also good,” Louis said. “It's possible that other people identify with that notion. I can't explain what I've never felt.”

“What if he realizes you were asking him to do wrong?”

“Well, he would have to do it anyway.”

“It might not work.”

“We would explain to him what would happen to Mommy and Daddy and little Colin if he chose not to do what we asked him to. And if he still resisted, well, sadly, then he would be of no use to us anymore, unless we were able work with him as I worked with the young woman you knew as . . . well, I don't know what name you knew her by. But she came to learn that her childhood instinct for self-preservation as the utmost goal was quite correct and she usually acted accordingly.”

Linnet.

“But she sometimes failed with people like Ian,” Frank said quietly. “There was something left in her.”

“Fortunately for me, there seem to be no other people like Ian, but in a word, yes, she failed.”

“And you let her die, even though you raised her from a child.”

Louis sighed. “That would also be something my parents might have said, but in reference to a dog or a cat. In fact, she was very talented and I did, as you know, give her a second chance, not even a year ago.” Louis sighed again, deeply. “This whole business has been a strain. I'm glad it's over, sincerely. I'm ready to get going to your place now . . .”

Frank turned to face him, for a moment disturbing Louis's aim. Someone of lesser mettle, knowing he was up against a larger, younger man who had been police, would have been unnerved. Louis only blinked. “What's so important that you need Ian to get it for you?”

“You are buying time. But I have a little time. What I want is something . . . like me. Like a very good recycled material, I leave a very small carbon footprint. And so do the things I want. In short, they are things you never really see in ordinary life.”

“Like?”

“Oh, some mundane things, a magnificent grade of opiate, currency, of course . . .”

“But you could get that other ways.”

“That, probably yes. But other things require a delicacy. Perhaps a lesser version of something like van Gogh's
Poppy Flowers
, or a pre-Columbian figure, or the bas-relief face of a Persian king no bigger than your two hands, from the fifth century BC,” Louis said. “What do people do with these things that they pay me millions to bring to them? I don't know. I certainly don't care. They would never tell anyone my name even if they knew it. They can't display their prize. Perhaps they look at it occasionally. Perhaps they feel that thrill that can only come from possession of the one thing that is like no other thing. Power. Which brings us to Ian.”

“You don't need Ian.”

“I don't need the millions of dollars either. I want them. And Ian made my vocation easier, when it could often be difficult, and sometimes dangerous. I was able to work with Ian for such a short time, just a few months. And who knows what lies ahead for him? Who knows what he could cause people to do, with the proper training? With the proper incentives? Perhaps not art objects, but mineral resources. Perhaps governments. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. It's early days yet for Ian.”

To Frank's horror, the street was as resolutely quiet as it had been when he'd first approached Harry's. Later, people would stroll out for tea and fresh pastries, a late breakfast, or a bite after church. Now the only people out were farmers, or people going to work at the kind of places that never closed, like hospitals. Claudia would be leaving soon. Well, she would have been leaving soon.

Dad, are you coming home
?
There are people down there in the garden.

He wished he could answer, and say,
Run, Colin! Run, Colin, and keep going, even if Ian can't keep up.

His phone chimed. Claudia. It was a text that had not come through, five or ten minutes old. There was no decent reception.

I need to leave for WORK.

Then, seconds later, there came another.
Frank
.
Come right now
.

Louis said, “Have they relayed the message that you're to come right now?”

“Yes,” Frank said.

None of this was a ruse. He should not have expected a ruse.

Louis said, “Oh, there's a bread truck. A
lorry
. Time for us to be off.”

Frank started the car and floored it, intending to smack into the front of the bread truck, hard, on Louis's side, but Louis lowered the gun and reached up for his breast pocket. What was in there could have been a business-card case, or a European cigarette pack, but Frank was pretty certain that it was a radio.

“Frank,” Louis said. “You persist in thinking I'm trying to run some kind of game here.” So Frank drove slowly, but not too slowly. He was not, and had never been, a speedy reactor, though, for twenty years, he had relied on logic and good instincts to keep himself out of mortal trouble while putting himself in its way for the sake of others. If it hadn't been for the radio in Louis's pocket, he would have driven hard, off the road on Louis's side. But the element of surprise was so unlikely that it was not even theoretical. To wonder about it would be like banking on coincidence.

Frank pulled into his own home, his circle drive, and got out with Louis at his side.

His heart squeezed when he heard Sally barking wildly. Then came two gutty whooshing sounds, in quick sequence, and Sally didn't bark anymore, but he heard Claudia crying. A lean, dark-haired man in dark work pants and a windbreaker came around the side of the house and greeted Louis with a nod. Together, they walked up toward the barn and the paddocks.

Wearing her gray flannel work skirt and a long red sweater, Claudia stood next to the small paddock, a huge baby bottle near the toe of her boot where she had dropped it. Another slender young man, this one collegial and natty, leaned on the fence a few feet from Claudia. His was a shotgun that he cradled gently. At the corner where the fences met lay the terribly small, bloodied mat of fur that had been Sally. In a moment of crackling clarity, Frank recognized him as the guy who'd stood outside Gate A-2 in the Brisbane Airport the day he'd taken Ian to the United States, the young man in tortoiseshell glasses. Quickly, Frank averted his face, but before he could, he saw the guy make the same connection.
So far? So early? So soon?

Claudia said, “Frank, don't let them take Ian.” Stepping forward, Frank put his arms around his wife. Peripherally, he could see the boys' small, white faces in the frame of their bedroom window, but he did not look up at them. “Don't let them take Ian.”

“We're not going to discuss this, the way people would do in a film,” Louis said. “I want you to go into the house and bring Ian down here. Don't bother with any of his clothing unless he has something he specially loves. Then Frank will explain to him that I'm only taking him for today to London, not back to the tree house or anywhere else.”

Frank said, “No.”

The young English-professor fellow leaned over the fence and fired into the soft ear of the baby colt All Saints, and the little horse crumpled, a window blind with cut strings. Glory Bee and the other colt shrieked and pelted to the other side of the paddock.

Ian was suddenly there, tears all over his dirty face. “Be happy,” he said to the professor, who smiled gently and swung the gun back on Claudia. Frank glanced up covertly and prayed that Colin was not on his way down. The other man with Louis turned away, toward the low fence and gate that bounded the house from the road.

Colin, run, Frank thought. Don't look back.

They would all die, he thought, trapped in a foolish vise caused by bad timing on his part and exceedingly good timing by men of bad intent.

If he could let Ian go with Louis, he might save Claudia and Colin. Or the mild young man that had shot down the newborn colt might turn back from the vehicle and pop all of them in parting. Patrick would summon the police, but Louis would have melted away with Ian and the others slipping identically back into the box of human life like a tube of glass alongside many others. Given Louis's disdain for mess and his confidence in his own camouflage, there was a chance they would simply go—or shoot to wound Frank or Claudia and then go. If he gave Ian up to them, Frank could console himself in the untruth that Ian could be found. He would never see Ian again. Ian would be like dead. But he would not be dead. The money was not on misplaced heroics.

Kneeling, Frank said, “I know you're scared of him. But Dad wouldn't let you go unless I could come and get you. You'll only go to London and get one box or some papers for this man, and then he'll leave you . . . Where will you leave him?”

“At Paddington Station in the Rose Cup, at ten tonight,” Louis said, as if this all were real. “Like the bear.”

“I'll already be there at Paddington Station with Mommy and Colin. You won't see us, but we'll see you. We'll come right to you and we'll catch you up and bring you home.”

Ian didn't speak. His lips shut tightly, he studied Frank's face.

Claudia said, “Frank, wait . . .” but the young man in glasses jabbed Claudia fiercely in the side with the stock of his shotgun. She sat down hard in the mud.

“I'm a little scared, Dad,” Ian said.

“Don't be scared,” Frank told him.

“Do you promise I shouldn't be scared, Dad?”

“I promise.”

“He killed the baby horse.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you're letting them take me away, Dad?”

“I wouldn't let them take you away for overnight . . .” Frank glanced down at Claudia, then up at the loaf of hill between Stone Pastures and the Gerrick farm, Windward. Distantly, he saw Shipley Gerrick and one of his boys preparing or plowing soil, rumbling along toward him in Gerrick's proudest possession, his nine-thousand-pound John Deere tractor. Someone else drove the smaller tilling machine with its mouth of blades. If only he had a flag. Frank picked Ian up and asked Louis if he could get Ian's booster out of his own Land Rover.

“Of course,” Louis said.

Go slow, Dad. Go really slow.

“The belt is stuck,” Frank said. “My hands are shaking. Claudia, help me.”

Getting up, she walked over to Frank, her shoulder touching his. They pretended to pull at the clasp on the seat belts. “It's too old,” Claudia said. “It hasn't got the right kind of releases.”

“I'll do it,” the young professor said. “I had a kid.” Nodding to Louis for permission, he momentarily propped the gun against the side of the Land Rover, and stepped between Claudia and Frank to lean into the backseat. Frank could hear the big tractor now, and the bumping whine of the harvester, and, additionally from behind him, some other kind of heavy, rolling machinery.

Louis glanced up just as four trucks rounded the gate and pulled into the drive, blocking the cars. The dark, lean young man reached for his gun as Ian whispered, “Please, be nice.” The man tried to look away. Frank heard the gun hit the gravel.

“What's going on here, Frank?” shouted Tom Ross, who drove the fifth truck. He got out, lightly swinging a mallet. The Gerrick twins piloted the huge tractor around the garage.

Louis, suddenly seeming confused, looked around and shook his head as if an insect bothered him. “What did you say?”

“I said who are you!” It was broad, ruddy Peter Shepson, striding toward Louis like Friar Tuck. “You've no place here.” He struck Louis with one broad hand and the older man stumbled. “We got . . . word to come, Frank.”

Wiley Mitchell, the American writer, joined them with his girlfriend, who carried her shotgun in the crook of her arm. “We called the police in Wherry, Frank,” he said. “They're on the way. Who are these assholes?”

The professor dropped the car seat and skipped into the first few steps of a run. The author's fiancée cocked her gun. “Stop, please,” she said to the back of his head. The professor stopped, and raised both hands slowly. “Just get on your knees,” she said. “Don't move.”

“Were you a police officer?” Frank asked.