John wanted to ask, “What more can I say? I’m telling you everything.” But he did not voice his confusion.
“I can offer second-degree manslaughter,” Lars said to Forché. “That’s the best I can do. Fifteen to twenty.”
“There are extenuating circumstances,” she said.
“There’s also the concealment of a body and flight.”
“He didn’t know he was being sought.”
“He called Lieutenant Van Dyne from Florida. He taunted her.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“You want to leave it up to the jury? In court it’ll be a murder charge.”
“Let me speak to my client.”
“I’ll take whatever he’s offering,” John told Nina once they were alone.
“We might win this in court,” she argued.
“I killed him and I’m guilty,” John said. “I will not allow my chance at repentance to become legal sophistry.”
“Prison is no picnic, John.”
“Neither is a lifetime of guilt.”
John accepted Lars’s offer.
“We will go in front of a judge tomorrow,” the prosecutor told the lawyer and accused.
“That’s a record,” Nina said.
“Judge Halloran would like to clear his docket. His daughter is getting married in California next week and with a confession this case is open-and-shut.”
“What time should we be there?” Forché asked.
“Early. Eight in the morning. If Professor Woman is lucky he’ll be on his way to prison before dinnertime.”
30
John started awake early the next morning. Bright blue digits on a clock next to the bed read 3:03. He could recall no dream, just a sudden shock of fear. After a minute or so he remembered the appointment with the judge later that morning. The image of Andre with the side of his face cut open came to mind. This was to be John’s future. He would be raped, slashed, beaten and locked away. He’d have to resist becoming either a victim or a predator in the process.
This constant flutter of fear is what woke him: a pulsating moth, the size of a kitten, trying to break free from the cage of ribs.
He’d admitted his guilt to ADA Lars because he wanted to answer for his crime. But now he worried that if he went to prison he might do it all over again, and again. He knew he was a killer when Pete Tackie barged in, when Andre declared John’s body and soul his property, like Columbus in the New World or Hitler and his endless annexations. He would, like any true patriot, kill the would-be conqueror trying to colonize him.
Naked, he climbed out of bed and walked down the short hall to the kitchen. Lucia had left him a jar of chunky peanut butter, cherry preserves and cinnamon-swirl raisin bread — his favorites when he was a child. He bit into the sandwich thinking about twenty-four-hour lockdown; the smell of disinfectants; and the gaping, almost bloodless, six-inch wound down the side of Andre’s face.
John realized in the early morning, standing naked in his mother’s kitchen, that going to prison was tantamount to sealing himself in the wall with Chapman Lorraine. Maybe he should run. There was still time. Filo Manetti told Lucia that he didn’t care about the bail money. John had the gangster’s friend’s number. He could leave the country. He spoke Spanish and French; he’d been to Martinique.
Maybe Cuba.
John went to the red wall phone he’d used as a child to tell his father good night those evenings he stayed with Lucia.
He put his hand on the receiver. That’s when the phone rang.
His recoil from the strident sound was so violent that John felt a muscle tear in his right shoulder blade. He gasped and choked — a convict caught in the middle of an ill-considered escape attempt.
The phone kept ringing, wave after wave of clanging alarm. Danger! Danger! There was no voice mail service and the caller would not give up.
Before answering John counted seventeen rings but there had been more.
“Hello?”
“John?” a familiar voice asked softly.
“Who is this?”
“Am I speaking with John Woman?”
“Yes. Now who is this?”
“Service Tellman.”
John came suddenly to consciousness. The convulsive fear, the retreat to his mother’s kitchen, even the making of his favorite childhood sandwich — all this occurred in the stupor at the tag end of a fearful sleep. But now his awareness was crystalline.
“Service Tellman is dead,” John said, the option of flight still bright in his mind.
“That’s what the world thinks.”
“And you’re saying he’s not?”
“I’m not.”
“Playing possum?”
The phantom chuckled in John’s ear.
“Only the dead are beyond reproach,” he said.
“Oh,” the once and future professor mused. “So you’re saying that you martyred yourself and yet survived; the cake-and-eat-it-too school of philosophy.”
“People need something to aspire to and, as Lear tells us, there is a stench to all things mortal.”
“Sainthood?”
“Human potential, as you know, far outstrips human nature,” the caller said by way of agreement.
“I’ve never heard it said quite like that,” John replied. “But you’re right of course. Parishioners close their eyes and imagine standing side by side with the Deity. But when the prayer is done they find themselves barefoot in pig shit up to their knees.”
“You’re one of the few professors at NUSW who were truly aware that the acquisition of knowledge, the process of learning, is an end in itself.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m calling to offer you membership in the upper echelon of the Platinum Path.”
“No.”
“You refuse?”
“I don’t believe that you are who you say. How can I accept an offer that cannot be made?”
“Why would I lie?”
“Maybe you’re an old friend of Chapman Lorraine.”
“And Lucia Napoli? Filo Manetti?”
“Your voice is familiar. Do I know you?”
“There’s already a question on the table, Mr. Woman. Or would you prefer to be called Professor?”
“You’re serious?”
“I am Service Tellman,” the voice said, “leader and founder of the Platinum Path, calling to invite you into our ranks.”
“I thought you had to be rich and famous or powerful to be considered for that berth.”
“Fame has never been a criterion. And you are powerful.”
Imagining these last words coming from his father John said, “Thank you.”
“Then you accept membership?”
“Even if you were qualified to offer it, I’m going to jail.”
“We have members everywhere,” the man calling himself Service Tellman said, “even in prison. Jose Velázquez is a foot soldier on the Path.”
Before, when he first got up, John was still mostly asleep. Then, when he heard the dead man’s name spoken in a voice so tantalizingly familiar, he came to consciousness — a man awake in a world he knew. But when that voice uttered a name that no one outside Rikers should have known, John’s mind opened wide. Abruptly a world he couldn’t imagine came fully into being, like Athena emerging from Zeus’s brow or the atomic bomb exploding over Nagasaki.
“Is this a trick?” Cornelius Jones asked.
“We would like to think that we’re the biggest trick ever pulled,” the voice said. “We’re attempting to rejigger destiny by changing the direction of the soul. We have men and women all over the world. There are professors and billionaires, movie stars and gardeners in our ranks.”
“Ron Underhill,” John stated.
“Yes.”
“You’re running a worldwide conspiracy while watering the cacti of the southwest?”