“I am not. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with being tough. Pop’s tough, isn’t he?”
“No,” April answered. “He’s very nice and sweet,” and she put her head against his chest and smiled. He looked down at her face, the dark black hair and brown eyes that were Teddy’s, the widow’s peak clearly defined even at the age of five, and then glanced at his son, amazed again by their absolute similarity and yet their total difference. There was no question that they were twins and therefore something more than simply brother and sister—their coloring was identical, the shapes of their faces, even the expressions they wore. But somehow April had managed to inherit—thank God—the beauty that was Teddy’s, and Mark had retained this beauty only as a subtle undercoating to a facade that was more closely patterned after his father’s.
“What’d you do today?” Mark asked, and Carella smiled and said, “Oh, the same old thing.”
“Tell us, Daddy,” April said.
“No, you tell me what you did instead.”
“I busted two of Mark’s models,” April said, and giggled.
“See, Pop? What’d I tell you?”
“Dinner!” Fanny called from the kitchen.
Carella rose with April in his arms and then swung her out to plop her onto her own bed. He pulled the blanket to her chin and said, “January night, sleep tight,” and kissed her on the forehead.
“What’s that, Daddy?” April said.
“What’s what, honey?”
“January night, sleep tight.”
“I just made it up,” Carella said.
He went to Mark’s bed, and Mark said, “Make up another one.”
“All’s warm, all’s dark,” Carella said. “Sleep tight, dear Mark.”
“That’s nice,” Mark said, smiling.
“You didn’t make one with my name in it,” April said.
“Because I couldn’t think of anything that rhymes with April,” Carella answered.
“You thought of something that could rhyme with Mark.”
“Well, Mark is easy, honey. April is very difficult to find a rhyme for.”
“Will you find one for it?”
“I’ll try, honey.”
“Will you promise?” April asked.
“Yes, I promise,” he said. He kissed Mark and pulled the blanket to his chin.
“No, just under my nose,” Mark said.
“Okay. Here we go.” He pulled the blanket higher.
“Just under my nose, too, Daddy,” April said.
He tugged on her blanket, kissed her again, put out the light, and went into the kitchen.
“What rhymes with April?” he asked Fanny.
“Don’t bother me with your riddles,” Fanny said. “Go sit down before your soup gets cold.”
During dinner, he told Teddy about the old man they had found in the basement. She watched his mouth as he spoke, stopping him every so often to ask a question, but for the most part simply watching him intently and trying to understand everything he said, listening carefully for details. She knew her husband very well, and she knew that this was not the last she would hear of the old man who had been slain with an ax. She knew there were husbands who left their work in the office, and she knew that her own husband had vowed a hundred times or more never to bring the sometimes filthy details of police work into his home. But each time his resolve would last a week, ten days, two weeks at the most, and suddenly he would begin talking about a particularly disturbing case, and always she would listen carefully. She listened because he was her husband, and she was his wife, and if he’d happened to be in the peanut industry, she would have listened to facts and figures about peanut oil and peanut butter.
Her husband’s line of work was criminal detection.
So she listened to him as he talked about an eighty-six-year-old man who had been found in the basement of a building with an ax in his head, and she listened as he told her of all the mother-son combinations he had met that day, listened as he told her of the demented Mrs. Lasser and her son who never left the house, told her of the positive identification from a police photograph, told her of the way Mrs. Lasser had begun laughing hysterically when she looked at the glossy identification photo of her dead husband, the ax still protruding from his skull, told her what Anthony Lasser had said about his father’s friends, a group of Spanish-American War veterans who called themselves The Happy Kids. She listened with her eyes and her entire face. She asked questions with her silent lips and her rapidly moving hands.
Later, when the meal was finished, and the dishes were done, and the twins were sound asleep, and Fanny had left the house for the night, they went into their bedroom and stopped talking.
January 4 was a Saturday, but police departments do not know Saturday from Tuesday, nor for that matter Christmas from St. Swithin’s Day. Carella met Hawes at 8:30 in the morning, and together they drove again to New Essex where they hoped to talk to some of the members of the late George Nelson Lasser’s club, the group of Spanish-American War veterans who were known as The Happy Kids. The day was as bleak and foreboding as the day before had been. Carella was driving one of the squad’s battered sedans, and Hawes seemed only half-awake on the seat beside him.
“Get in late last night?” Carella asked.
“No, not too late. We went to a movie.”
“What’d you see?”
“The Locusts,” Hawes said.
“Oh, yeah? How was it?”
“Well, it made me kind of itchy,” Hawes said. “It’s about these locusts that start an uprising, you know. Against the human race.”
“Why do they do that?”
“Well, that’s a good question,” Hawes said. “In fact, the hero is asked that question about six or seven times in the picture, but all he can say each time is ‘I wish I knew.’ I’ll tell you the truth, Steve, I wish I knew, too. All those locusts crawling all over everybody without any reason. It was very scary.”
“They just decide to kill humans, is that it?”
“Yeah. Well, there’s a story besides. I mean, it isn’t all about locusts killing people. There’s a love story, too. Sort of.”
“What was the love story about?”
“Well, it’s sort of about this girl who gives the hero two crickets in a cage. For his hearth, you see. You know, crickets on the hearth.”
“Yeah,” Carella said.
“Yeah, they make a pun about it, in fact. Instead of ‘hearth,’ they say ‘heart.’ Crickets on the heart.”
“That’s pretty funny,” Carella said.
“Yeah,” Hawes said. “So she follows this guy all the way to Kweichow Province—”
“To where?”
“Kweichow Province. That’s in Communist China.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Yeah, she follows him there with the crickets in the cage, which he wanted as a gift for his aging Chinese nanny. She’s very old—she’s played by this woman who usually plays old Russian ladies, I forget her name. Anyway, that’s why he wants these crickets—it’s a little complicated.”
“Yeah,” Carella said.
“Christine thought it was the crickets who were the ringleaders.”
“Of the locusts?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe so,” Carella said.
“You think so? How could crickets communicate with locusts?”
“I’m not sure. How do they communicate with each other?”
“They rub their front legs together, I think.”
“Maybe it’s the same with locusts.”
“I don’t think the crickets had anything to do with it,” Hawes said. “I think they were just a plot device. To get her to China.”
“Why’d they have to get her to China?”
“Well, hell, that’s where all the locusts are, Steve. Also, it gave them a chance to ring in a very pretty Chinese girl—what’s her name? You know her, she’s in all the things where they need a Chinese girl. She turns out to be an old girlfriend of the hero’s. She’s teaching in a Catholic mission which the locusts attack near the end of the picture. They eat the priest.”