"It means I don't want you around anymore."
"We had a deal!"
"You've got your story."
"I've only got half of it!"
"You've got all you're going to get. Forget the rest."
"We were going to find out who your mother was! The story's not complete without it!"
At mention of his mother that strange look in Stevens's eyes deepened.
"Sorry about that. You'll have to go with what you've got. Or better yet, drop the whole thing."
"Not on your life, you son of a bitch! This is my ticket off the Express! You're not robbing me of it!"
"Good-bye, Gerry."
He slammed the door shut.' Furious, Becker gave it a kick, then hurried back through the gate to his Beetle, so angry that he could barely keep from screaming. And then he recognized Stevens's strange look for what it was.
He's afraid of me!
Becker took an immediate liking to the notion. He could not remember another time in his life when someone had been afraid of him. It gave him a good feeling, powerful.
There could only be one reason for Stevens's reaction: He had discovered something in his past he didn't want made public. That had to be it.
Gerry Becker promised himself that one way or another, he was going to ferret out that something.
4
"Jim?"
No answer.
The house seemed empty. Carol had sensed that the moment she stepped through the door, yet she had called out, anyway.
So quiet. Dust motes glowed and swirled in the late-afternoon sun slanting through the front windows. Carol looked around for a note. When she didn't find one, she went directly to the phone to call the Hanley mansion.
She was angry. She'd had just about all she could take now. This should have been a great day. She'd sent a very happy and grateful Mr. Dodd home with his daughters today—he was going to stay with Maureen, Catherine taking him on weekends—and she would have been high as a kite if not for Jim's secretive, erratic behavior.
She was about to dial when she heard a rustle from the study. A single step, a craning of her neck, and she saw him in profile as he sat on the convertible sofa.
He was staring off into space. He looked so lost, so utterly miserable that she wanted to cry for him. As she started forward she saw his eyes close and his head sag back against the cushion. His breathing became slow and rhythmic, the tension eased from his face. He was asleep.
Carol watched him for a few minutes. She didn't have the heart to awaken him. For the moment, at least, he had escaped whatever demons were pursuing him.
And then she saw the source of those demons—the journals from the safe, lying on the cushion next to him. Her first impulse was to grab them and find out for herself what could upset him so, but she hesitated. What if he woke up and found her sneaking out of the room with them? What would he think then about her respect for his privacy?
But damn it, this affected her too!
She tiptoed over to the sofa and gently slid the books off the cushion. There was a bad moment as she was lifting the pile away from him when the smaller black one almost slid out of her hands and onto Jim's lap, but she steadied it and slipped from the room without waking him.
She took them to the bedroom and, with trembling fingers, began flipping through one of the gray journals.
5
Gerry Becker pulled into the curb across the street and about fifty feet up from the Stevens place. Earlier he had followed Jim on his walk back from the mansion, resisting the urge to gun the engine and run him down. That would end this whole shitty deal. He could close his exclusive article with an obituary.
But that would leave too many unanswered questions.
So he had driven around for a while after Stevens's wife had come home, and now that it was good and dark, he was back. He had decided to sit here in the cold and watch the house until it looked like everyone was tucked in for the night. Then he'd be back at the crack of dawn with a thermos of coffee, watching, cruising, not letting Stevens out of his sight, waiting for a slip, waiting for him to give something away.
He lit a joint, wrapped himself in the wool blanket he had brought along, and watched the lit windows. He knew his chance would come if he hung around long enough. And he was sure it would be worth the wait.
6
It had been hours and Jim was still sound asleep. Probably his first sleep since Monday morning. A good thing, too, because Carol wasn't getting anywhere. She shook her head in frustration as she pored over another of the gray journals. There was too much here. And with no idea of what she was looking for, she could spend all night deciphering the crabbed handwriting without learning a thing.
She opened up the black journal to the middle and gasped at the salutation on the first page of text. Instinctively she knew she had found what she sought.
She began to read.
Eleven
January 6, 1963
Dear Jim—
It's your 21st birthday. I'm going to spend the next few days writing this letter to you. It's a letter I pray you never get to read.
But if you have this in your hands, it means that something has gone dreadfully wrong.
I'm sorry about that.
You were never supposed to learn about yourself. You were supposed to lead a normal, happy, productive life, and then maybe—maybe—after I was long gone and after you had died a natural death, what you are about to learn would be made public.
But if you are indeed reading this, it means I'm dead and so is Derr, and that all my plans have gone awry.
That's why I'm writing this. To set the record straight. In the locked-away journals you will find the same story unfolding on a day-to-day basis in far greater detail but with little or no perspective. (Backthen, if T d had the perspective I have now, I can't imagine that I would have gone so far.) This letter will give you the whole story in a nutshell.
What you are about to read will strain your credulity to the breaking point. If you do not choose to believe it, that is fine with me. Take these journals and this letter and burn them now without reading any further. Your secret will be safe. But since I know you better than anyone, I'm sure you will never settle for that. I know you will search and dig and chase and harry until you have all the answers.
That, after all, is just what I would do.
It started for me in 1939.
I'm sure the government had been mulling the idea for a few years before that. You didn't have to be Jewish to be uneasy about Hitler's saber rattling during the thirties, and his endless harangues about a Thousand-year Reich led by a purebred Aryan Master Race. They were upsetting to a lot of people in this country, myself included. The topic of eugenics (a term that has fallen out of usage these days but which refers to the improvement of the human race through selective breeding) was much on my mind then and, I imagine, the subject of not a few conversations at State Department cocktail parties.
Somewhere along the way the idea of researching the possibility of breeding a perfect (or, at the very least, superior) American soldier began to brew. It probably never would have amounted to anything if I hadn't written a letter to President Roosevelt on the subject in the summer of 1939, and if Hitler had stayed within his own borders.
I don't want to toot my own horn too much here, Jim, but I was quite a fellow in my heyday. I was born in 1901, so that meant I was not yet forty at the time, but I'd already made a fortune (and this was in the Great Depression, mind you) off my patented diagnostic procedures for commercial labs. I also had caused quite a stir among the biologists of the time with my papers on genetic manipulation through selective breeding and my private experiments on the in vitro fertilization of primate ova.