You ’d be turning into the thing you despise most.
You would become them.
It isn’t completely true and Gilrein had said so at the time. Ceil countered that it was true enough to be the only point that mattered at the end. But Gilrein couldn’t stop himself from arguing that there is a distinct difference of motivation. Kroger and Oster kill for money and power and ideas and the rush of sadism that comes from slaughtering the weak and the different and the innocent. But the monster who went after the killers was acting on another impulse, was responding from a sense of retribution and righteousness, of cold, Old Testament justice. The monster was trying to end the slaughter, not perpetuate it.
But the problem with monsters, Ceil had said, in a voice that still, in memory, sounds both disappointed and resigned, is that they always come to love the process and forget the reasons for their actions.
He comes to the clearing at the end of the orchard and looks up at the farmhouse. And again he calls up his dead wife’s voice. Ceil had once said that the best place to hide a book, any book, would be among other books. Gilrein can no longer remember the context of the discussion in which this was spoken. He can’t even think of why they would have been worrying the question in the first place. But his instinct says that Ceil was right and immediately his plan is to jam Alicia’s story on some shelf of Brockden’s library, then get on a highway before Kroger and Oster can make their moves. Because he knows that he just doesn’t have the abilities he would need to become the eradicating monster. That he’ll never have those abilities and that he should be thankful for that deficiency.
He enters the house and stands in the kitchen trying to calm himself, trying not to telescope, not to think beyond the next few actions: plant the book, grab a few belongings, and drive away. Everything else can be sorted out later. He walks under an archway and into the first-floor library, heads for the stairwell in the center of the room, feels around until he grabs a banister and starts up the spiral. He has no idea why he wants to hide the book up in the chapel.
When he gets to the top, he heads for the stacks opposite the stairwell. He lifts his free arm, lets his hand run along the spines that rest on a shelf set at eye level. At some point he simply stops and forces two volumes apart, creates a tight space, a gap in the line of leather bricks. Then he begins to insert Alicia’s story into the gap.
It’s a tight squeeze and it gives him a vague but uneasy feeling. And that’s when the lights go on and he turns to see August Kroger. Kroger is standing at the mouth of the aisle. And Wylie Brown is gathered in his arms, tape across her mouth and around her wrists and the huge, glinting blade of a buck knife pressed against her throat.
“Bring it here,” Kroger says.
Gilrein stands still, Alicia’s book hovering in the air.
Kroger lifts the knife from Wylie’s throat to her cheek and runs it along the surface of the skin as if brushing dust from a fragile artifact.
“Stop it,” Gilrein says, trying to keep his voice even. “You can have it.”
He takes a step forward and both Raban and Blumfeld swing into sight from the left and right side walls of the book stacks. Raban has an automatic in each hand. Blumfeld is leveling a Calico machine pistol, which he now rests on his shoulder as he extends a free hand to accept the book.
“Let her go,” Gilrein says, looking past the meatboys to Kroger.
“You,” Kroger says, “do not use this tone of voice with me, taxi-boy.”
“I’ve got your book—”
“Exactly, Mr. Gilrein, my book. My property.”
Blumfeld takes a step forward, but Gilrein doesn’t release the book.
“Take the knife away, let her go, and I’ll hand it over.”
Kroger looks to Blumfeld with raised eyebrows. He moves the tip of the blade back to Wylie’s neck as he stares down the aisle and says, “Mr. Gilrein, you are embarrassing yourself and you are annoying me. There are two guns pointed at your head and I have a knife at the woman’s throat. Now you give me my property or I will slice her open. And then we will deal with you.”
“It’s just a goddamn book,” Gilrein says.
“You did not read it, did you?” Kroger asks and it sounds like a genuine question. “All the time it was in your possession and you never opened it?”
Kroger shakes his head like someone’s disappointed father.
“You are a banal people,” he says in a lowered voice. “You did not even look inside. Do you know what that says about you?”
Gilrein tries to focus on Wylie’s eyes. He says, “You know you’re not the only one looking for it. You think you can really beat Hermann Kinsky on this?”
“Kinsky is an old man in dirty pajamas. His glory days are over. And this book means nothing to him.”
Gilrein makes himself say it.
“What does it mean to you, Kroger?”
“It’s a scrapbook,” the voice unfazed, maybe even amused, “of my former career.”
Everyone stays silent as the words take hold and when Kroger is satisfied with the impact of his announcement, he says, “Now give me my book.”
“And then you’ll let us go?”
Raban and Blumfeld actually turn and smile at each other, then the Censor of Maisel says, “No, Mr. Gilrein, then I kill you for being the weak and illiterate worm that you are.”
And as Gilrein starts to respond, Stewie Green steps into the aisle behind him and fires half a dozen rounds into Raban before Blumfeld can even raise the Calico. Then Green jumps back around the corner of the stacks, but Blumfeld begins returning fire anyway and Gilrein throws himself on the floor as the books on either side of him start to pop and burst and the echo of the assault takes on a ridiculous volume. Gilrein starts a spastic elbow-crawl to the end of the aisle. Blumfeld finally releases his trigger and flails backward until his spine is pressed against the end of the shelving. Kroger is squatting with his back against the far wall with Wylie pulled in front of him as a shield against a suspected blitz.
Gilrein pulls his Colt. Blumfeld repositions and tilts the gun down at him. Gilrein rolls around the corner into the next aisle as a crater is blown into the floor. He gets to his feet, starts to run for the end of the aisle when Danny Walden appears in front of him with a sawed-off extended, braced low for firing.
Gilrein goes back to the floor.
The sawed-off explodes, misses Blumfeld at the opposite mouth of the stacks. Blumfeld returns the fire and blows up Walden’s chest, then sights down on Gilrein. Gilrein gets off a single round, which goes high. He escapes the aisle just before it’s sprayed with assault fire, runs toward the stairwell, breaking into the open to try and get to the opposite bend of the room, buy himself a margin of distance and time to figure out just how many people are in the library and where they’re positioned.
But halfway across the floor, Stewie Green pokes out of a stack aisle and lets two blasts fly in Gilrein’s direction. Both charges burrow into century-old vellum and leather. Instead of diving for cover, this time Gilrein stops, extends arms and fires the last four rounds in his cylinder. One of them catches Green in the face and throws him over onto his back. An arm jerks upward, the hand quivers as if reaching for something, then falls back onto the chest.
Running for the nearest aisleway, Gilrein instinctively reaches into his pocket to reload and comes up empty. He thinks about going back for one of Raban’s automatics, but he hears movement along the outer rim of the wall, someone coming at him from the right side.