this fear, its only possible subject, our only shared and immutable bond. "Danny's gone," she said.
We sat on the sofa while the detectives interviewed us. "On a school day," Victoria said, "Danny gets up at seven. He sets his alarm at bedtime, and sometimes, when it wakes him in the morning, he turns it off and goes back to sleep-not very often, but sometimes-and I have to go in and get him up. This morning the alarm just kept ringing, and when I went in, the bed was empty, and I thought he might be in the bathroom, but he wasn't. He wasn't anywhere in the house."
To someone who didn't know her, my ex-wife might have appeared calm, purposeful, in control, the slight tremor in her folded hands understandable enough. But I could see the care with which she answered every question, as though each word, the order of each word and its cautious articulation, might restore the world to sanity, might, by its intense rationality, restore our son. She would not break down; she would not show emotion. To do such a thing would be to collaborate in Danny's disappearance. She would not, by hysteria, acknowledge its reality.
This I knew of Victoria, and my heart ached for her, as it ached for myself. And Danny? Does a five-year-old get up in the middle of the night and walk out into a snow storm, leaving his winter coat in the closet? Or does someone come for him, silently, in the middle of a ghostly storm, enter the locked house without any signs of forced entry, and walk away with the boy without awakening his mother, just down the hall and a light sleeper, always restless. How often, in our marriage, in the years we lay beside each other, had Victoria come awake at the sound of midnight rain, tree branches shaken by a wind, a car passing on the street at three in the morning? I'd wake, oblivious to the noises that had roused her but attuned to Victoria and called awake by
her wakefulness. That seemed a long time ago, in a distant, implausible past.
When I left Victoria, it was to accompany the detectives back to my apartment. I was aware that I was a suspect-or at least an obligatory part of the investigation-and I wasn't surprised or offended by this. How often had an ex-husband, frustrated by circumstances that kept him from seeing his child, simply grabbed the kid and run? They weren't going to find Danny in my apartment, but I guess, if I had spirited him away in the dead of night, I could have stashed him with a friend.
I answered all their questions. Most of the questions were asked by the shorter cop, a black man with high cheekbones and a formal way of speaking, the word "sir" punctuating his sentences with sibilant force. The other officer was taller, older, white and balding, and I noticed he would occasionally interrupt to ask a question his partner had already asked. I guess he was interested in what my answers would sound like the second time I gave them.
After they had been gone a couple of hours, I glanced out the window and saw three uniformed cops out back. A female officer, dark, Hispanic, held the taut leash of a German Shepard as it nosed around the back of the dumpster and then moved out across the vacant lot that separated the bar from the rest of the strip mall. Only then did I realize that I might be suspected of something worse than kidnapping my own son. They might be looking for his body.
And why not? You read the papers; these things happen. Some enraged psycho wants to make his ex-wife regret leaving him, and he knows the way to her heart, he knows how to do real damage.
I made it to the bathroom in time to vomit in the toilet, retching up Victoria 's coffee, something in my skull rumbling. Something big, monstrous, had broken free and was lurching around on the deck of a world so fucked-up that the worst stuff, the unthinkable, had a hundred, a thousand, precedents.
I lay on the bed for a while, and then I got up and went down to the bar. Evil Ed saw me and brought me a beer.
"You need to lawyer up," he said. I was impressed: advice from Evil Ed!
"Thanks," I said. "But I didn't
do anything. I don't have anything to hide. And Danny-" I stopped. Water rushed into my eyes, violently, as though I'd been shoved under a river and was being held there, breathless. I marshaled my paltry resources, gulped the beer.
Evil Ed shrugged and mopped the counter with a grey cloth. "You notice I don't ever take a drink? Might be you are bringing yourself bad luck, swallowing it right down your throat."
"What are you talking about?"
"They got this old Chinese saying goes like this: 'First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man.'"
"I still don't know what you're talking about."
"I guess you don't." Evil Ed slapped his palm down on the counter. Beneath it was a white envelope. He took his hand away, revealing my name on the front of the envelope, printed crudely with what looked like black crayon. "This was here on the counter when I opened this morning. I don't know what's inside it, and I don't want to know, and I should have handed it on to the cops when they were talking to me earlier today, but I didn't. It's yours. You do what you like with it."
I took the envelope and turned it over. It was sealed, and too light to contain anything more than a sheet or two of paper. I looked at the front again. All caps: SAM SILVERS.
I turned away from my unfinished beer and went back up to my room. I lay on the bed, my heart beating fiercely. I was afraid to open the envelope. Should I call the police? Perhaps it was a ransom note, and in opening it I'd destroy evidence. Forensics could do wonders, right?
Should I call Victoria? But that would be the same as calling the police; Victoria trusted authority. And I did not. I was raised on media tales of law enforcement agencies that bungled kidnappings, hostage situations, terrorist confrontations. Too often the innocent died with the guilty.
Hands trembling, I tore open the envelope and pulled the single sheet of paper free. A ball-point pen with blue ink had printed words whose letters jumped above and below the baseline, investing the sentences with a childish energy.
This is what I read:
I have solved your child support! If there is no child there can be no support of a child and no need for these moneys of which your wife makes you pay and pay! Ha! I am very clever you must agree. This is bragging, but it is so. All your worries are overboard! I hope to talk to you sooner. -D.T.
I walked around the room, sneezing. My body ached, an aggressive pain, as though I'd been injected with poison. My throat was on fire. I was not feeling well. But that wasn't the problem, except to the extent that this flu-thing might keep me from thinking clearly. Why, for instance, hadn't I said anything to the police about Derrick Thorn? Did I really think it was a coincidence that he had shown up at the zoo? Did I think he was harmless? Did his crooked diction make him somehow childlike, did an innocence of English syntax indicate moral innocence? Hardly.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to recall what I'd thought and said to the detectives. I shook my head to clear it, which made the room waver like an undulating funhouse mirror. At Victoria 's… the thought of Derrick Thorn had not
once entered my mind. It was as though I'd completely forgotten the man's existence. Surely he was too strange to forget. I tried to picture him now, to bring him into focus by an act of will, but all I could see was his stout, pear-shaped body, a silhouette in the Reptile House, his face in shadow, his words… something about Danny… about child support.
How would I describe him to the police? A fat man in black who might, or might not, be sporting purple lipstick and false eyebrows? Wait, Evil Ed must have seen him. Sure. He brought us drinks. He came to the booth with the drinks.
I ran downstairs, too fast, slipping, saving myself from a sudden dive forward by snagging the wooden railing just in time. I stumbled into the bar. Evil Ed was at the opposite end of the bar listening to Rat Lady, who appeared to be wearing a bathrobe.