A smile creased the sun-hot skin of my face. The glare illuminated the backs of my eyelids. I realized I much preferred talking to him with my eyes closed. He unnerved me too much otherwise.
“You sound pretty certain of yourself,” Baars said, his voice taut.
“Occam’s razor, Professor. You know the drill. All things being equal, the simplest explanation is generally the best.”
I could hear the breeze whisking through the willows in the near distance. Somewhere, a small radio piped the blues. The taint of driveway dust hung in the air.
“If all things are equal… ”
My smile broadened. I could feel the sun across my lips, close enough to kiss.
“So you tell me, Counsellor, how many initiates have you banged?”
I turned to appraise his answer and saw old-man horror-the signs of a body that had lost faith in its structural integrity. He seemed to shrink and to age at once. Fawk. You would think I had just kicked his dialysis machine or something.
“Only Jennifer,” he said in a hollow voice.
Liar, I smiled.
I got up, made to show myself the way out. Amanda Bonjour came crashing up through my memory: “The whole thing is a murderous con! ”
“Mr. Manning!” Baars cried. “Do you really think that this-what we have built, and more importantly what we have discovered-is as small and as sordid as… as what? A libidinous ego trip?”
A Gallic shrug. “Isn’t everything?” I replied.
I paused before rounding the courtyard threshold, spared him one final glance. I could see anger crawling into the gap his confidence had left behind. He even held one fist out, not in defiance. If anything, he seemed to be miming the act of seizing something-a bug, a coin, or even a wisp of smoke-from the open air.
“She’s dead, Baars. You know that.”
“No, Mr. Manning. Quite the contrary… What I know-know, Mr. Manning-is that mankind conquered death long, long ago.” I lay on the hard board that was my motel bed, eyes fixed on the dust- furry blades of the ceiling fan above me. And I also sat carefully in my office chair, watching Amanda and Jonathan Bonjour struggle with what always should be a simple question and yet somehow never is.
“He wants to know whether the cult was just an excuse to escape us,” Jonathan Bonjour said.
“Troubled,,”Amanda said stiffly. “Troub- “
“Not abusive,” Jonathan Bonjour interrupted. “There’s troubled and then there-”
“I’m sure Mr. Manning re-” Amanda began, her face slack with something-something.
“I just didn’t want him to get the wrong idea! “
A pause directed at me. A request for confirmation, reassurance- certainly not more questions. “Andwhat idea wouldthat be, Mr. Bonjour? “
“Jon slapped her,”Mrs. Bonjour said in a clear, broadcasting tone. “The last… fight we had. Jon slapped… her. “
“I… ah…” A fat thumb wiping tears. “I… I don’t know what to say. “ A hand raised as a hood. A breath squeezed to the limit of manly self- restraint.
“Jonny blames himself,” Amanda said.
That clinched it. Hearsay or not, Jonathan Bonjour was a lying fat fuck. And what choice did he have? Even the best of us are moral cowards at the best of times. And this guy was a lawyer, which meant he had cashed in his ethical chips a long, long time ago. He spent his every day wringing advantage out of ambiguity.
The only real question was how far would he go.
“I have one last question-for you specifically, Mr. Bonjour. Your law firm regularly contracts private investigators, does it not? “
A moment of shock. Not because I had guessed his profession-what I had thought originally-but because he suddenly understood that he had inadvertently grabbed a steak knife-me-when what he really wanted was to spread some more butter.
“I’m not sure I understand.. “
“Stufflike this… personal stuffwith consequences that are, well, as big as you can imagine… such stuffrequires trust. Why wouldn’t you go to people you know? “
“This wasn’t Jonny’s idea,” Amanda said. But it was his idea. He might have led her to it, rubbed the back of his neck and complained about how so-and-so had fucked up this-or-that, hemmed and hawed until, inevitably, she suggested they go with someone else.
“Even still…”
Jonathan Bonjour literally squirmed. How could I have missed that?
“No offence, Mr. Manning, but my opinion of your profession is rather… jaded…” Fucking lawyers.
“And?”
“Well, let’s just say that I’ve come to that opinion through long experience. “
“But it’s not just that,” Amanda quickly added. “You see… Jonny’s already gone down there, asking questions and all, and the people are… well, more like you.. “
Fawk… The implications of this were just beginning to soak through my deductive hide.
“Like me? “ I replied, smiling. “You mean socio-economically disadvantaged.”
“We thought that you might be able to talk their, uh, language. “
“My ad in the Yellow Pages that bad, huh? “ They both laughed. Only one of them sincerely. Had Bonjour hired me because I smelled like a reliable fuck-up? I could see it all. His wife was jamming him to do something, throw some of that morally dubious cash around. And I-apparent loser that I am- was exactly what he thought he needed: a way to go through the motions of finding his daughter, all the while ensuring she would never be found…
Becausehe had murdered her? His own daughter?
Now that was a big pill to swallow, even for a veteran popper like me.
The funny thing was, the longer I whiled away the afternoon poking and prodding everything I had seen and heard, the more Xenophon Baars returned to the fore. As impressive as he was in real time, he was proving to be a persistent fuck in my memory as well.
Again and again, no matter how hard I struggled to focus on the implications of this latest twist, “Quite the contrary… What I know- know, Mr. Manning-is that mankind conquered death long, long ago…” would rise into the thicket of possibilities…
No such thing as death. Fawk.
But why would I find the idea so despicable? I mean, aside from the fact that it so obviously catered to human fear and vanity-like the things we’re typically inclined to believe.
If you’ve ever been dumped by someone you loved, then you know the feeling, the tooth-tight, eye-alert, ear-pricking buzz of needing something to be true. Somehow Baars, as insane as he was, had managed to leave me with that beehive of sensations. For the first time in my life I realized that I needed death to be absolute-as final as video review, as irreversible as a frontal lobotomy. I needed it the way composers need silence.
I know it terrifies you, but then you’re pretty much normal. This is me we’re talking about. How could someone like me not look at it as a sanctuary, a promise?
Death… The one thing that does not repeat. Unnerved, I called the motel office and asked for Molly’s room. I had heard her bumping around, so I knew she was back from whatever.
When she picked up, there was a curiosity in her voice: like me and most everyone else, she was accustomed to talking exclusively on her cell when on the road.
“The motel phone?”
“Ah,” I said in a faux dismissive tone, “I was feeling old-fashioned… You know, romantic.”
“Don’t you worry about germs? You know, phone germs?”
“I pulled a condom over the talking end.”
She graced me with one of those drowsy, late afternoon laughs. “What’s up, Disciple? How was your day at the infamous Compound?”
Something plucked me in the gut. I get caught like this all the time, striking inappropriate tones at inappropriate moments.
“A cataclysmic revelation.”
“Woooo,” she drawled. She was warming to my verbal game playing. “Do tell.”
“Jennifer Bonjour was sexually abused by her father.”
A pause, then, “Ooof” The thought occurred to me that her sunny New England upbringing hadn’t been so sunny after all. Even people without skeletons have at least a bone or two in their closets. Erections have a way of fucking things up.