Lawrence Block: The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Bech had made a pilgrimage to the blue-green skyscraper near the river to make sure a suicide leap was feasible. Its towering mass receded above him like giant railroad tracks — an entire railroad yard of aluminum and glass. The jutting semicircular petals of its balconies formed a scalloped dark edge against the clouds as they hurtled in lock formation across the sere-blue late-summer sky. It always got to the pit of Bech’s stomach, the way the tops of skyscrapers appeared to lunge across the sky when you looked up, like the prows of ships certain to crash. The building was fifty-five stories high and had curved sides. Its windows were sealed but the balconies were not caged. Within Bech a siren wailed, calling Aldie out, out of his cozy claustral nest of piped-in, faxed, E-mailed, messengered, videoed cultural fluff and straw — culture, that tawdry, cowardly anti-nature — into the open air, the stinging depths of space, cosmic nature pure and raw.

NON-BEING IS BLISS, Bech told Robin to make the Trojan horse spell, and SELFHOOD IS IMPURITY, and, at ever-faster intervals, the one WORD JUMP.

JUMP, the twittering little pixels cried, and jump you twit or JUMP YOU HOLLOW MAN Or DO THE WORLD A FUCKING FAVOR AND JUMP.

“I can’t believe this is you,” Robin told him. “This killer.”

“I have been grievously provoked,” he said.

“Just by reviews? Henry, nobody takes them seriously.”

“I thought I did not, but now I see that I have. I have suffered a lifetime’s provocation. My mission has changed; I wanted to add to the world’s beauty, but now I merely wish to rid it of ugliness.”

“Poor Aldie Cannon. Don’t you think he means well? Some of his columns I find quite entertaining.”

“He may mean well but he commits atrocities. His facetious half-baked columns are crimes against art and against mankind. He has crass taste — no taste, in fact. He has a mouth to talk but no ears with which to listen.” Liking in his own ear the rhythm of his tough talk, Bech got tougher. “Listen, sister,” he said to Robin. “You want out? Out you can have any time. Walk down two flights. The subway’s a block over, on Broadway. I’ll give you the buck fifty. My treat.”

She appeared to think it over. She said what women always say, to stall. “Henry, I love you.”

“Why the hell would that be?”

“You’re cute,” Robin told him. “Especially these days. You seem more, you know, together. Before, you were some sort of a sponge, just sitting there, waiting for stuff to soak in. Now you’ve, like they say on the talk shows, taken charge of your life.”

He pulled her into his arms with a roughness that darkened the fox-fur glints in her eyes. A quick murk of fear and desire clouded her features. His shaggy head cast a shadow on her silver face as he bowed his neck to kiss her. She made her lips as soft as she could, as soft as the primeval ooze. “And you like that, huh?” he grunted. “My becoming bad.”

“It lets me be bad.” Her voice had gotten small and hurried, as if she might faint. “I love you because I can be a bad girl with you and you love it. You eat it up. Yum, you say.”

“Bad is relative,” he told her, from the sage height of his antiquity. “For my purposes, you’re a good girl. So it excites you, huh? Trying to bring this off.”

Robin admitted, “It’s kind of a rush.” She added, with a touch of petulance as if to remind him how girlish she was, “It’s my project. I want to stick with it.”

“Now you’re talking. Here, I woke up with an inspiration. Flash the twerp this.” It was another scrap of Buddhist death-acceptance: LET THE ONE WITH ITS MYSTERY BLOT OUT ALL MEMORY OF COMPLICATIONS. JUMP.

“It seems pretty abstract.”

“He’ll buy it. I mean, his subconscious will buy it. He thinks of himself as an intellectual. He majored in philosophy at Berkeley, I read in that stuff you downloaded from the Internet.”

She went to the terminal and pattered through the dance of computer control. “It went through, but I wonder,” she said.

“Wonder what?”

“Wonder how much longer before they find us and wipe us out. There are more and more highly sophisticated security programs; crackers are costing industry billions.”

“The seed is sown,” Bech said, still somewhat in Buddhist mode. “Let’s go to bed. I’ll let you suck my thumb, if you beg nicely. You bad bitch,” he added, to see if her eyes would darken again. They did.

But the sniffers were out there, racing at the speed of light through the transistors, scouring the binary code for alien configurations and rogue algorithms. It was Robin, now, who each morning rushed, in her terry-cloth bathrobe, on her pink-sided bare feet, down the two flights to the loft lobby and brought up the Times and scanned its obituary page. The very day after her Trojan horse, detected and killed, failed to respond, there it was: “Aldous Cannon, 43, Critic, Commentator.” Jumped from the balcony of his apartment on the forty-eighth floor. No pedestrians hurt, but an automobile parked on York Avenue severely damaged. Wife, distraught, said the writer and radio personality, whose Web site on the Internet was one of the most visited for literary purposes by college students, had seemed preoccupied lately, and confessed to sensations of futility. Had always hoped to free up time to write a big novel. In a separate story in Section B, a wry collegial tribute from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

Bech and Robin should have felt jubilant. They had planted a flickering wedge of doubt beneath the threshold of consciousness and brought down a media-savvy smart-ass. But, it became clear after their initial, mutually congratulatory embrace, there above the breakfast-table confusion, the sweating carton of orange juice and the slowly toasting bagels, that they felt stunned, let down and ashamed. They avoided the sight and touch of each other for the rest of the day, though it was a Saturday. They had planned to go up and cruise the Met and then try to get an outdoor table at the Stanhope, in the deliciously crisp September air. But the thought of art in any form sickened them: sweet icing on dung, thin ice over the abyss. Robin went shopping for black jeans at Barneys and then up in the train to visit her parents in Garrison, while Bech in a stupor like that of a snake digesting a poisonous toad sat watching two Midwestern college football teams batter at each other in a screaming, chanting stadium far west of the Hudson, where life was sunstruck and clean.

Robin spent the night with her parents. She returned so late on Sunday she must have hoped her lover would be asleep. But he was up, waiting for her, reading Donne. The day’s lonely meal had generated a painful gas in his stomach. His mouth tasted chemically of nothingness. Robin’s key timidly scratched at the lock and she entered; he met her near the threshold and they softly bumped heads in a show of contrition. They had together known sin. Like playmates who had mischievously destroyed a toy, they slowly repaired their relationship. As Aldie Cannon’s wanton but not unusual (John Berryman, Jerzy Kosinski) self-erasure slipped deeper down into the stack of used newspapers, and the obligatory notes of memorial tribute tinnily, fadingly sounded in the PEN and Authors Guild newsletters, the duo on Crosby Street recovered their dynamism. Literary villains of Gotham, beware!

Born in Buffalo, Lawrence Blockhas lived in New York City most of his adult life — although, like Keller, he gets around a lot. His fifty-plus books range from the urban noir of Matthew Scudder to the urbane effervescence of Bernie Rhodenbarr, and include four volumes of short stories. A Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Block has won a slew of awards, including four Edgars.