In fact, and of course, he has, some part of him has always done just that, up in the barn loft of Wormland as he slept or maybe in the Checker when he thought he was just concentrating on the phrasing as Imogene Wedgewood sang “Chinese Boxes.”
He looks down at the Inspector, focuses on the old man’s mouth, and makes himself say, “What truth is that?”
Lacazze manages what could be a smile if not for the fact that the musculature of his lips is decaying.
Gilrein steps forward, reaches down, and pulls Lacazze to standing.
“Why am I here?”
The Inspector lowers his voice to show indulgence and says, “Like all neighborhood mayors, the Lord knows the value of his middlemen. You’re here to confess me in His absence.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That,” the Inspector says, “is because you haven’t heard the story yet.”
And he reaches down to his desk, grabs hold of the soaked newspaper, pulls it up, and plasters it against Gilrein’s chest. Gilrein takes hold of the paper and moves a step backward.
“Did you know,” Lacazze says, moving around the desk and taking a seat on the interrogation stool, “that prior to her death your wife had become a very secretive woman?”
Gilrein tries to listen and read at the same time. Droplets of fresh pus have stained the front page of the paper, making it slightly translucent, the words on the next page close to visible, the ink on the title page almost bleeding into the unreadable.
But he can still make out the paper’s title:
WORD MADE FLESH: A JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC COSMOLOGY
And he can still make out the headline of the lead article:
SIX MILLION GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTS: THE HOLOCAUST AS
LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT
BY ANONYMOUS
Someone has crossed out “by Anonymous” and below it, written in sloppy block letters, written with a finger, using blood and pus as a handy ink, are the words
BY BLIND HOMER LACAZZE
“Ceil came to disappoint me in the last week of her life, Gilrein.”
Gilrein looks across the desk at the Inspector, all kinds of meanings suddenly sliding into place.
“You wrote this, didn’t you?” holding up the tabloid.
But Lacazze is already locked into monologue.
“Ceil betrayed me. In the way only a lover can. She desecrated the bond. In time, all things would have been made known to her. It was impatience that killed Ceil.”
Gilrein drops the paper to the floor and stares at the old man.
“She went behind my back. She began to investigate old problems. Without knowing the history. Without understanding how the Methodology had evolved. Pride is what killed our Ceil.”
“You were Blind Homer,” Gilrein says softly.
“She gave me no choice. If she had just left Sonia alone—”
“The Tung belonged to you.”
“If she had just left Sonia alone, there would have been time—”
“You’re Blind fucking Homer.”
A pause, and then the smug expression that Lacazze knows will push his rival over the divide.
“In the—”
But before Lacazze can finish the sentence, Gilrein pulls his piece and fires twice. The first bullet takes the Inspector in the groin. The second goes into and through the throat, knocks Lacazze off the interrogation stool and onto the floor, rolled on his side.
Gilrein waits for the rush of panic and adrenaline but it doesn’t come. He stares at Lacazze, waits for the Inspector to cry out or move. But everything remains still. Completely motionless and almost silent but for the fading echo of the gunshots.
This is the final criticism.
And Gilrein’s response is to exit the precinct house. To exit this city as soon as he can. To leave the putrefying body in the chamber. As a sign. A language that is as close to pure as he can possibly imagine.
28
Gilrein parks on the fire road at the rear border of the Brockden Estate. He reloads the Colt, gets out of the Checker, walks around the taxi and opens the trunk. In the moonlight he looks in at this vault of grimy remnants that testifies to his father’s life: the mismatched tools, the burlap sack filled with oil rags and dozens of lengths of rope, the khaki duffel still loaded with an emergency change of clothes, and the wooden crate, glossy pine, studded with knotholes and packed with brittle, worn-out paperbacks. They are all western novels, brief adventures in the bloody lives of moral cowboys. Stories of frontiersmen who dispensed a perfect and lasting brand of justice.
Shoving the crate to the side, he grabs the paper sack that contains Alicia’s book. There is a density to the bag, a sense of compressed weight that tells you it holds more than someone’s lunch. He unrolls the top of the bag but does not look inside. Instead, he eases his hand in, slowly, as if he were blindly reaching for a cobra. And he touches the cover of the book, strokes it once, feels the buttery coolness of the binding and recoils immediately. He withdraws his hand and closes the bag, tucks it under his arm and eases the trunk back into locking.
He heads for the orchard, cutting through to the rear of the main house, moving in a moderate jog, looking through the line of dead trees, trying to see if there are any lights on inside.
He doesn’t have a plan so much as a schedule of movements. A plan implies a progression toward completion and resolution. Gilrein thinks that’s just too much to hope for. He’ll settle for distance and time to sort through the confusion of the past few days.
He needs to make sure the farm is secure. He needs to leave a short note for Frankie and Anna. Something about moving his life forward. Putting the past away. Some kind of comforting lie that will allow them to forget about a bothersome friend. The idea right now is to simply gain some space. To evacuate the city, leave it to Kroger and Oster, to their creatures and their unique methods for discerning information and disposing of witnesses, techniques that involve blowtorches and pharmaceuticals, customized screwdrivers and tall buildings, steroid-fed guard dogs and all the horrible secrets of human anatomy. Procedures refined by years of studious experimentation, cold and precise observation of the limitless ways the fear response can be prodded, manipulated, turned against a weaker and ultimately help less victim.
Given the needed abilities — the power, the money, the political sanction, the access to large tracts of private burial ground— Gilrein thinks that what he’d most like to do with the rest of his small life, from tonight forward, from this moment, walking through this barren orchard, is to spend his days methodically eliminating individuals like Kroger and Oster from the planet. To eradicate their existence. To wipe out not just their careers of terror and control, not only their physical presence, but to exterminate any sign that they were ever here, to grind away even the most minute trace of their being from the collective memory of Quinsigamond.
Isn’t this both the best and the worst you can do? Somehow erasing all evidence of a person’s existence is so much more heinous than simply executing her, involving, in some not fully explainable way, a darker and more hideous human impulse. Who could hate this much, at this level of energy and expense, with this breadth of control, wanting to author not just history but reality itself, wanting to make over the universe in the design of one’s own unique and egomaniacal imagining?
He’s at least intelligent enough to know that this would transform him into the kind of monster that even the most ruthless of the neighborhood mayors only dream of being. But how large a sacrifice would that be, becoming the killer angel of all things wicked and cruel? Maybe in the landscape that this city and its people have arrived at, there’s a need for exactly this kind of definitive monster. A beast not just of destruction, but of obliteration. It’s not a new argument. He’s had it before with Ceil and maybe he played devil’s advocate just a second too long, even after she’d spoken the forced cliché that should have changed the course of their discussion.