“It’s a good one. Maybe now it won’t hurt so much…you know, when we all die together.”
CHAPTER 37
Inside, we planned our next move. Erin and Koko had put their bags near the bottom of the museum ramp. Koko had hung her clothes over the rail and crawled into her bag, and she watched us sleepily from the floor, occasionally piping in with an opinion while the two of us stood there and talked. We all hated to quit Charleston with Burton’s journal still in limbo. Erin wanted another try at Archer on her way out of town, but that struck me as risky with little to be gained. “Something might well be gained,” she said, “if Archer told us what happened to the journal.” At this point I had to doubt if Archer had ever planned to produce Burton’s journal, no matter how much money Lee was able to throw at him—he had come up empty, with new conditions or half-baked reasons to stall, every time. Erin couldn’t believe that. “Lee has done nothing but defend Archer and praise him to the rooftops. What would Archer gain by taunting his oldest friend? What would be the point if he’s not going to sell us the book anyway? Now he’s alienated Lee, they can’t even speak to each other, and what good does that do him?”
Well, Archer was a prick: at least we could all agree on that. “Maybe he’s secretly hated Lee all these years for being born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” I said. There were plenty of precedents both in history and literature for such unholy relationships. One party is undercut and sabotaged for years without ever dreaming that his so-called friend is behind it all. If that were true, the only mystery, aside from the enigmas of a black heart, was why Archer would let his secret out now instead of any other time. Koko said, “Maybe Lee found out what Archer really thinks and Archer no longer had any reason to hide it.” Erin shook her head. “No, I’m sure Lee would’ve told me that.” Since we were into wild ideas, it was also possible that Archer had never had the book at all, or maybe Dante had taken it from him if he had. But if Dante now had it, he’d probably have been on the first flight back to Baltimore. He’d want to dispose of the goods first, get what money there was to get, and settle old scores later. So I thought, with no facts to go on, but at that point I wasn’t sure enough to bet on anything.
Erin hated to give up on Archer. “I’ll do it your way but I don’t want to forget why I was sent here. I would still feel better if I could see him once more, even if he doesn’t do anything but have me thrown out again.” What worried me about this was that the hospital was such an obvious place for someone to set up a watch and catch us coming or going. I had plans for Dante, but I wanted them to unfold on my timetable, not his: I needed to live long enough to put them in motion and see how they went. In the end we were all just talking. Always in the back of my mind was the possibility that Dante knew exactly where we were, and whatever was going to happen would be on his schedule after all.
Our only hard decision was that we were done with Charleston: there was nothing more for us to find here. If things went well and we could get away in the morning without being seen, I had at least some reason for optimism. We’d retrieve my rental car and head north to Florence; from there to Charlotte, and on to Denver. Koko didn’t see why she needed to go to Denver. “We’ve got to stick together for now,” I said, and Denver was my home base. “You can stay with me,” Erin said, “as long as you need to.” “Good,” I said. If we made it that far, I had to feel good about our prospects. Then I could go on offense. We left it at that and I went back up to the entryway where I had stashed my sleeping bag.
The sight of it gave me no craving for sleep. I was in one of those dark moods, bone-tired but still wide awake, and for a long time I sat outside on the edge of the battery with my legs dangling, watching the sky and listening to the air. I thought of Libby and I under-stood how she could come to love this place. Ultimately it would get on my nerves—I am too much a product of my time and this is undoubtedly one of my failings, among many. I can go like Erin on long sabbaticals in the mountains, but at some point cabin fever sets in and I need to hunker down in civilization’s dirty places, go book hunting around the fringes of Denver, talk to someone, mix it up with crazies, go to a party of book lovers at Miranda’s, or just sit in a bar with an old pal. My life went from the nearest pockets of the sublime to the most distant reaches of the ridiculous, and I didn’t know if that was my ideal or if I could even guess what an ideal was. But in any other time, in limited doses, I would love it here.
A rumble of thunder sounded far away in the east, but soon it got quiet again, with only the wind and the sea in my ears. I closed my eyes and at some point I found myself thinking of Vince Mar-ranzino. Vinnie: that told me how long ago our mutual history had been. He didn’t seem like a Vinnie to me. That sounded too much like a gangster’s nickname, and no matter how much I had learned about him via newspapers and our own departmental intelligence, I still thought of him as a kid named Vince, not a Vinnie-hood. I heard his voice out there with the ghosts of Battery Wagner: How do ya really like this book racket of yours, Cliffie? Just a wisp of him there in the harbor, then he was gone. A whisper to the wisp: that’s all it would take and a man would die in Baltimore.
I took out my notebook and wrote a short message: Hey Vince. Go see a man named Dante in Baltimore and we are all squared up in the hereafter. Vince would understand, and I could die knowing that if I had to.
I folded the sheet and wrote his name on the outside. I put in his Osage Street address and put the paper in my shoe. Once the probes and the postmortems were over, the cops would see that he got the message.
If Dante got to me, he’d be killing himself.
“Now it’s real,” I said to nobody.
* * *
I lay in my sleeping bag outside the museum door and stared at that crack in the sky. It was beginning to fuzz over now as the cloud cover fattened and spread. I felt a drop of rain, thought I should move inside, but I only moved deeper into my bag. Sleep was impossible but that didn’t matter. Once we were in the car heading north, Erin could drive and I’d catch up then.
I thought these things and the time was heavy. At some point I fell asleep, but not for long. I am good with time and I opened my eyes knowing it was somewhere near three o’clock. I wiggled out of my bag and sat up straight. Some noise, some fleeting thing out there where the wind blew, had wafted around my head. It had shifted from an easterly blow to southwesterly, and suddenly I felt an alarm go off under my heart. I told myself it was nothing but that hunch; not even the sound I thought I had heard had any true substance or source in this black world. My practical nature said I had been dreaming, that’s all it was, I had come out of the dream thinking of Dante and those guys in the boat, there was no reason to make that connection, it was just a case of nerves. But it wouldn’t go away, and now I got completely out of the bag and stood on my tiptoes looking out toward Morris Island.
Dante. I saw his face swirling through the dark in various shades of clarity. He was certainly insane, and that, combined with his other charms, made him far more dangerous than any thug I had ever faced as a cop. I had humiliated him in front of his men—that was another part of the case against me—and I had done a lot of damage to his face. His bruises would look worse day by day until they began to get better, and by then it wouldn’t matter anymore. After a week of staring at his own black-and-blue face in the mirror, who could tell how crazy he’d be? He would have a score to settle and in his mind there could be none bigger, ever, and the longer it went unresolved the angrier and more dangerous he would be. This was strictly a guess: How reckless could he be? What was he going to do, scale the wall and kill everyone on this island just to get me? That would be the act of a real madman, but it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. It depended on the depth of his hate versus the degree of his own survival instinct. I fiddled with a mathematical formula—Dead Janeway equals Perp’s Survival over Perp’s Hate squared. Maybe by now his hate would be at the fourth or fifth power, or the fiftieth power, all but obliterating even his instinct for self-preservation. In that case, anything could happen. Madmen have been known to walk into certain death to get at the object of their loathing. Dante would have covered himself as well as possible, and maybe that would be enough. Who else knew of his connection to us? There would be half a dozen cronies back in Baltimore who’d line up and swear that he had never left town, he had been there among them, having dinner in full view of a dozen witnesses, at the very moment when this strange carnage began, six or seven hundred miles away. I had nothing to do with it, he would say, and the cops would have the job of proving that he had. But they wouldn’t have to prove it to Vinnie Marranzino, and in death I’d have my victory. A damned hollow one, but I was glad, on this side of death, that I had it.