Jack grew impatient. He grabbed my left arm and pulled me toward him.
I rushed in, much faster than he anticipated; he stumbled backward. I grabbed his right wrist, jamming his hand — and the pistol — down, against the door jamb. I held on with all my strength, pointing the gun away from us.
Brian ran the last few steps to us and clocked Jack with the empty ice bucket. It wasn’t enough to drop Jack, but it was enough to make him turn his head. Brian stepped out, got the angle, and punched him in the head.
Jack went down then. I stood on his wrist and took the pistol. I carefully removed the magazine. Only when I confirmed there was no round in the chamber did I feel like it was safe to exhale.
That’s when the shaking started in earnest.
The ruckus drew the attention of all the people who had been asleep nearby. Someone finally called the manager; even if I hadn’t the Turkish to explain, the sight of me holding the gun and Brian sitting on Jack Boyle’s back was enough to bring help. The manager called the police and Lale, who eventually called the museum.
In the room, we confirmed Steve was really dead. I recognized the red and purple blotches on Steve’s face and neck as evidence of suffocation. I told Lale, who conveyed this to the police, explaining I worked with the police at home sometimes.
Confronted with this evidence, Jack broke down and confessed. He and Steve had fallen out when Steve announced that he was getting cold feet. Jack panicked and smothered him with the pillow, which left the telltale hemorrhages — and the bleeding scratch on Jack’s arm.
My professional skills and habits had been helpful on this vacation after all.
“How did you guess it was Jack?” Lale asked, afterward. She had dealt very efficiently with the police and the museum representative, and was very glad to have restored the artifacts — and her reputation.
“He kept saying he was only interested in the food on the trip,” I explained. “That he was only peripherally interested in the history. Someone who’s that historically disengaged doesn’t just know that the character of Ozymandias was based on Ramses, or even if he does remember it from studying the poem—” Here I glanced at Brian. “You don’t drop terms like ‘Nineteenth Dynasty’ casually. I might have been able to put Ramses before or after Tut, but I wouldn’t have remembered the dynasty easily, and I’m a professional. He knew more about the history than he was letting on.”
“So, they decided to steal the artifacts,” Brian said, “because Steve knew from having been on this stop on another tour that they’d bring out the objects for display?”
I nodded. “The plan was for them to travel as if they were strangers. Using the excuse of his illness, Steve snuck out of the hotel and triggered the alarm at Jack’s signal, sent by text. Steve, in disguise, took the objects from Jack when we were being crowded by the other group at the cooking demonstration. They had intended to smuggle them out incorporated into a cheap beaded souvenir necklace.”
With all the official procedure, we were fortunate to make it to the airport in time to catch our flights home later the next day.
I helped Eugene with his bag, and while waiting for Brian to go to the men’s room, saw Harold Campbell waiting for his flight to New York.
“Good trip,” he said, jiggling his lighter.
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Up until the end, anyway.”
“Oh, no. No, no,” he said, looking surprised. “I mean, it was really sad that someone died, but really, all the excitement was just an extension of the trip. I figure you teach the stuff, seeing the sites for you is already in your blood. But for me, it’s the people. I tell people I want to see other places to see how people live. But you learn just as much from the crowd you go around with. We’re not going to the circus, we are the circus.
“You can go anywhere in the world you like.” He found a cigar and stuck it in his mouth, unlit. “But people are still the best show in town.”
Copyright © 2012 by Dana Cameron
The Void It Often Brings with It
by Tom Piccirilli
Tom Piccirilli is the author of more than twenty novels, including The Last Kind Words, which received a starred review from Booklist and was called “perfect crime fiction” by best-selling author Lee Child. He is the recipient of two International Thriller Awards and four Bram Stoker Awards, and has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award, the World Fantasy Award, Mystery Readers International’s Macavity Award, and Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire.
Professor Chadwick wants us to call him Hal, and Hal is telling us again why he’s a genius. His voice has the mocking quality of arrogance even while he’s trying to sound humble and compassionate. The rest of the class, especially the freshman girls, are hanging on his every word as he leans back against his desk, sleeves rolled up halfway, tie loosened, dimpled chin pinched between thumb and forefinger, azure eyes bleeding sincerity.
“All great literature,” Hal says, “is about love or the absence of love. In my novels I write about the truth of love. Its pain, its dulcet desolation, and the void it often brings with it. That’s my power. That’s my gift.”
The girls practically coo as they daydream about Chadwick babies and Chadwick money. Cocktail parties on the balcony of an Upper East Side penthouse apartment. The beach house in the Hamptons, the French maid Fifi with downcast eyes, the chauffeur Franz who always tips his cap. The red-carpet premieres, the cable entertainment-show interviews. The Real Housewives of Academia.
Hal has managed to parlay three of his bestselling novels into major Hollywood deals. Unlike the other professors here, Hal isn’t losing sleep, desperate for tenure. He doesn’t need to lean against a desk and behave in a nurturing manner, attempting to mold our young eager minds. He’s doing it, he says, so he can give back. Sometimes he says he’s paying it forward. Back or forward, I don’t know, but I’m in awe of his people skills.
Jerry the Jock, who came in hoping for an easy “C” so his GPA wouldn’t drop below 2.0 and he could stay on the football team, has started a novel. It’s about an overbearing father rabbit forcing his bunny son to fatten up on corn beef hash and become a linebacker when the baby bunny would rather be a figure skater.
It’s called I Never Tackled Hard Enough for My Father: A Fable.
He read a chapter of the bunny book today and Hal actually commended Jerry for his sensitivity. The jock’s eyes got a little smoky. The guy sitting behind him patted him on the back. The girls murmured appropriately.
I’m failing the class. I don’t participate enough. I refuse to critique my fellow students. I flop on the in-class exercises. My writing doesn’t contain enough of an “emotional and personal component,” Hal says. I write about dark things without enough poetic resonance to connect to the reader. Hal says I’m full of literary fireworks without any grounding in realism. He doesn’t like my sword-and-sorcery tales. He doesn’t enjoy my dark fantasy pieces about witches and midnight sacrifices. He smiles sadly at my crime stories about good men forced to do bad things because of debt, stupidity, and beautiful women.
He suggests I start more simply, with a plot centering on the worst day of my life. I hand in a twelve-thousand-word novelette about a goblin king lost in a hospital looking for the maternity ward so he can steal children and repopulate his underground realm.
The girl sitting in front of me is Beth Moore. I’ve been crushing on her for six weeks, since the beginning of the semester. She walked into Creative Writing 102 and turned her gaze on me, and we both knew, right then, that I was already infatuated with her and would do nothing but stare at the side of her face all semester long. She wasn’t going to speak to me or look in my direction or encourage me in any way. We both understand that the great literature of my life is going to be about the absence of love.