I use the two months it takes my face to recover from surgery to enhance the knowledge Lester has already given me about moving rare and missing works of art and jewels. I meet buyers from Japan, Germany, France, England, and Indonesia. I get some credit cards going and some brokerage accounts too.
I send Bert back to New Jersey to rent a modest house close to where my paintings are stored. I have a stop to make that I want to do alone. I get off the plane at Syracuse with my head held high, confident I won’t be recognized. My eyes will always be the same liquid brown as Raymond White’s, but the skin around them has been tightened. My chin is broader than his was and my nose is smaller and straighter.
To return before my surgery would have been stupid. The same thing goes for trying to contact my father. I’m sure Raymond White is still a wanted man and not enough time has gone by for the authorities not to be keeping an eye on the only person in the world who he was connected to.
As I approach the airport security doors, I look up and see the camera. I swallow my spit and quickly take my wallet from my suit coat pocket and look down at it, pretending fascination with its contents as I pass by the screening station and through the doors. I slide the wallet back inside my coat and look around at the crowd of people waiting for family and friends who have arrived on the same flight I was on. It’s a lonely feeling to see their eager faces and have their eyes slip right on past me.
I am downstairs and standing in line at the Hertz counter when I see two uniformed police walking toward me. Their faces are set in concrete and they are scanning the terminal. When the one with the brown crew cut meets my eyes, he taps his partner and they head my way. My heart jumps and my muscles go tense. I look around. There are enough people milling about that I think I could get out of the building, but where I’d go from there, I have no idea. I would have to jack someone’s car. It would end in a mad chase, probably with a bullet in my spinning head. Before I can act, they are here.
“Excuse me,” the crew cut says, “are you Seth Cole?”
“Yes.”
The cop smiles in a knowing way and says, “Thought so. You dropped your wallet upstairs.”
He is holding the wallet out to me. I reach out and take it. They stare at me with their smiles fading. When I finally sense the tension, I thank them, and thank them again. Their smiles return. They nod and they walk away.
I rent a Cadillac and drive out to my father’s. In the weeds that have grown up around the mailbox is a crooked Realtor’s sign. I grip the wheel and speed up the hill with rocks clattering off the undercarriage as I search the trees for the lines of the house. There are no vehicles in the driveway, and a blanket of leaves from last autumn has been piled up into the corners of the porch. A torn window screen wafts gently in the breeze.
It’s a warm day for October. Indian summer. My armpits sweat, and I sniff at the unfamiliar scent of mothballs in the stuffy air. I peer through the window and the spiderwebs. None of the furniture is familiar. Broken children’s toys are scattered about the dirty floor. My spirits are lifted though when the roar of a blast soars over the treetops from the direction of the quarry. I jump down off the steps and speed around the hill, the Cadillac trailing dust in the heat.
The old office trailer is sunken and buried in a sea of saplings and high grass, but down in the quarry I see men in lime green hard hats moving about. The old payloader lies with its back broken in a rusted heap beside the road, but I see fresh yellow equipment crawling like monstrous beetles up ahead. It’s obvious there is money being made here, and it’s not at all unlikely that my dad finally moved out of the woods.
I don’t see him, or Black Turtle, but there is a man with plans spread out over the hood of a Chevy pickup who is obviously in charge. Yellow foam plugs peek out of his ears. His hair and mustache are powdered with stone dust the way my father’s always were. He stares up at me from behind his safety goggles and frowns.
“This is a hard hat area,” he says. “Who are you?”
“I’m…” I say, frozen and sick at how close I came to calling myself Raymond White, “looking for Kevin White.”
“Who?” the foreman says, his powdered eyebrows knitted.
A gray bearded man in overalls and leathery skin comes around to my side of the pickup and says to the foreman, “The guy used to own this place. Remember? Guy who froze to death?”
“You got me,” the foreman says, tilting back his lime green hardhat and dabbing at his brow with the back of his hand.
My head feels hollow and I hear a sound like waterfalls. I’ve lost my sense of standing upright.
“Hey, fella. You okay?”
“You sure?” I ask. “Did you know him?”
“Not really,” the older man says. “Just remember it in the papers back in, I don’t know, 1990 or something, about him having his power cut off middle of January. Didn’t pay his bills, they said. Power company took hell for it anyway…
“I remember because guys used to kid each other when we first started working this place,” he says, nodding his head toward the rusty hulk on the road above us. “There was an old Indian who used to come around-”
“Black Turtle?”
“Yeah, I think that was it. He died too, not long after. Anyway, he said you could see that Kevin White guy’s ghost on that old payloader sometimes after dark. Well, that got them all going. You know how rock guys are.”
“Rocks in their heads, half of ’em,” the foreman says.
“They say it’s not a bad way to go,” the older man says. “Say you start feeling real warm and then you just kind of go to sleep.”
I hear him, but my eyes are on the payloader, broken and flaky. The air above the seat glimmers and I squint my eyes, looking for his shape. But it’s only the heat from the brown metal and the weeds, making tracks for the cooler regions of the blue sky. I wish my hatred had a vent like that.
My father is gone. Even his ghost.
32
THE SNOW IN UPSTATE NEW YORK is piled high by the time I return. It’s taken me that long to turn Lester’s stash into a massive portfolio of cash and stocks and bonds. Bert is driving me in a black Lincoln Navigator and he has to use four-wheel drive from the minute we leave the Thruway. The slush from the morning’s snow is four inches deep. At my feet is a suitcase with a million dollars in cash as well as a street-bought Smith amp; Wesson.357 with a silencer attached.
Bert’s hair is cut short now and he wears an expensive tan shearling coat that makes him look even bigger than he already is. I wear a black leather trench coat, even though it’s not as warm. It matches my driving gloves and looks good with the full black beard and mustache I’ve grown. My hair is still long, but slicked back tight to my head. Paul Russo will be the first person I’ll meet up close, in the light, who really knew Raymond White.
Byrd’s, the same place that rented us the party boat last summer, rents snowmobiles in the winter. Bert has called ahead, and two red-and-black machines that look like they came out of Star Wars are waiting for us in the middle of the plowed lot. The sky is bitter and bleached and the sun shows through in only a pale yellow wash. The same old guy comes outside with his smoky breath trailing him. He gives us helmets to use, and I see him staring at the Ferragamo shoes on my feet.
“You going like that?” he says, nodding toward the shoes and the pant legs of my suit.
I don’t know what he’s looking at. He’s got a Valvoline cap on his head and his nose and ears are red like beets from the cold. I ease the helmet down over my slick hair and get onto the snowmobile. Bert loads up two overnight bags and my briefcase on the back of his snowmobile, then shells out the cash for the machines. I rev my engine until he’s mounted up, then we shoot across the street and out onto the frozen lake.