After all these years.
Howley turns from the window and goes back to his desk.
Because his feeling is that Vaughan’s power belongs to a different era, and that these last twitches of its corpse cannot and should not be allowed to distract from Oberon business going forward.
Frank keeps the gun-along with an old pocket watch of his father’s, a couple of fountain pens, and a folder of documents and photos-in a large brown padded envelope. He keeps the envelope under his mattress. Not exactly a high-tech security system, but so what. He used to have a safe when he lived in the apartment in the city, and they had one in the Carroll Gardens house, too, one that was bolted to the floor.
And this is what he has now.
A fucking padded envelope.
He pulls it out from under the mattress and spills its contents onto the bed.
The watch, pens, and other items he ignores. They each in their way have the power to lure him into what would become a vortex of memory and emotion, especially the photos, but he can’t let himself get near any of that stuff now. He picks up the gun, turning it in his hands as he walks away from the bed. It’s a.40 caliber semiautomatic pistol, a Glock 27, Gen 3. It’s got a standard nine-round magazine in it, with a small extension to improve grip.
He’s used it at a firing range, plenty of times, but not for a few years.
He slips it into his jacket pocket.
The concealed-carry handgun of choice.
Or so he was told when he bought it.
He takes it out again and puts it on the kitchen table beside his keys.
He didn’t sleep well last night, if at all, and now he feels really tired. His head was full of the stuff he’s been reading about since he got back here on Saturday-an indiscriminate, unfiltered feed of Wikipedia entries, blog posts, PDF files, and quarterly reports. Halfway through yesterday he lost all sense of what he was doing, but he couldn’t stop, and just continued reading. By the time he lay down he knew that he’d reached saturation point. He also knew that no amount of information was going to make any difference to what he thought or to what he was going to do.
He looks over at the laptop on the couch.
Is there any point in taking it with him?
Not really.
It’s too late for all that now… checking stuff, cross-referencing, verifying. None of it made sense to him at the time anyway. He was just stalling.
He goes into the bathroom and checks himself again in the mirror. He straightens his tie. He looks respectable, as if he’s about to attend a meeting or make a presentation.
He flicks his wrist up to check the time.
10:38 A.M.
He feels like screaming.
He turns away from the mirror, leaves the bathroom, and goes into the kitchen. He gathers up his keys, and the gun, from the table and puts them into his jacket pocket.
He looks around the apartment one more time, and leaves.
It’s early in the day, and he’s got plenty of time-too much time-but he can’t stay around here, in the apartment, in West Mahopac, any longer. So he gets in the car and hits the road.
If it comes to it, he can spend the afternoon staring up at the ceiling of his room at the Bromley.
After a shower and some breakfast, Ellen opens the House of Vaughan file and picks up where she left off. She started reading it late last night, having delayed for nearly twenty-four hours, and now she really wants to finish it. As Jimmy Gilroy said the other evening, the book is succinct-just over two hundred pages-but it covers a lot of ground. Not only the story of James Vaughan himself, it’s also about his father and grandfather, and consequently could be-and probably should be-four times as long. Someday it may well be, but the brevity of this current version gives it an urgency and punch that Ellen has rarely seen in a standard biography.
But she can see where the problem might lie. While House of Vaughan possesses the energy of really good investigative journalism, that’s not what it is. It actually is history, in that it doesn’t deal with any of the shit that’s happening right now, or tell us who the James Vaughan of today is. Another aspect of the book that’s challenging, and perhaps willfully so, is that it is written in reverse. It moves backward in time, taking us from the early 2000s right back to-she thinks, she hasn’t gotten that far yet-the late 1870s. It’s as though Gilroy were hacking and chopping his way through the decades, through dense fields of inexplicable effects, looking for some ultimate and explicable cause-some original sin that would explain all the others. He clearly subscribes, at the very least, to the notion that a good understanding of the present requires a forensic dissection of the past-which is fine, but at the end of the day, unless James Vaughan himself emerges from the gray shadows of his anonymity and agrees to become a judge on American Idol, then not that many people are going to be interested in reading a book about him.
Ellen is interested, but that’s because she’s both a news junkie and a history nerd. She sees the connections to her own work and the work she did with Gilroy. She’s also fascinated to learn about Vaughan’s personal tragedies, stuff she’d never heard before-how his third wife (of six), the mother of his two children, died in a car crash thirty years ago; how his only son, an aspiring musician, died of a heroin overdose a couple of years before that; how his older brother was killed in Korea.
What surprises her, though, and what seems to be emerging as the central theme of the book, is the number of key moments in recent history where one or another of the Vaughans seemed to play a role, either at the heart of things or on the periphery, but always there, always involved, and how this recurring role, this active participation, tells us something about the… the secretive, conspiratorial, and frankly compromised nature of our…
She looks away from the screen.
Of our what?
She was going to use the D word, wasn’t she? Weary now, and jaded-jaded because she’s back here again, back at this point, the point she inevitably reaches with so many of the stories she covers-Ellen gets up from her desk and walks over to the window. She stands there for a while looking out onto Ninety-third Street.
These last few days her thoughts have been yo-yoing between Jimmy Gilroy and Frank Bishop, and it’s happening again now-an easy, natural transition from one to the other, only this time the contrast is sharper, and more unsettling. Jimmy has had a tough time over the last year and a half researching and writing this book. He told her the other night about some of the obstacles Vaughan’s people had put in his way, how he’d been intimidated by lawyers, hounded by private investigators, had his accounts hacked, even been physically threatened. But the fact is, no one asked him to do it, to get involved. Frank, by contrast, has had an infinitely tougher time over the last week and a half, and none of it by choice. Yet there is common ground. The two men share something.
Ellen turns and goes back to her desk. She picks up her phone.
They share an obsession-a feverish need, albeit for different reasons, to understand what it is about money and power that gnaws away at the human soul. Jimmy’s obsession is borderline, on the cusp between professional and certifiable, whereas Frank’s is over the line, no question about it.