Keith Thomson - Once a spy

A glance at the inside of Drummond’s wrapper was all he needed. In sketching the Device, even in this crude fashion, Drummond had effectively drawn his own death warrant, and possibly his son’s.

Pitman pushed a frayed lapel to his lips. Into a microphone concealed by a dirt-caked button, he said, “I’m afraid our roof is leaking.”

Charlie and Drummond crossed busy Bedford Avenue to Prospect Place, where Drummond lived. In the dwindling sunlight, the stucco homes looked like they were built of muck. This, Charlie thought, was the Brooklyn that Manhattanites had in mind when they wrote off the whole borough as depressing. Drummond’s melodyless humming was a fitting sound track.

“We still have a few minutes before the bank closes,” Charlie said, thinking of Grudzev. “I wouldn’t mind getting them to cut a check for the Holiday Ranch deposit.”

Drummond halted abruptly in the middle of the crosswalk.

“As a backup, just in case Geneva doesn’t pan out,” Charlie quickly added.

Drummond stared down Prospect Place. Any second the light on Bedford would turn, releasing a stampede of cars and trucks.

He was fixated, Charlie realized, on the gas company man lumbering out of a house halfway down the block. The distance and shadows made it impossible to tell whether it was Drummond’s house or a neighbor’s.

“What’s the gas man doing here?” Drummond said.

“Something to do with gas?”

“They’re never here this late.”

Drummond leaped onto the sidewalk and ran toward the gas man.

More paranoia, Charlie thought. He ran too, for fear that Drummond would keep going and wind up in Cleveland.

The gas man shot a look up the block at Drummond, and at once turned and strode in the opposite direction.

“Wait!” Drummond shouted.

The gas man didn’t look back. Either he hadn’t heard, or, Charlie supposed, he’d had his fill of addled seniors haranguing him about soaring utility rates. He disappeared around the far corner onto Nostrand Avenue.

Charlie reached Nostrand just after Drummond. Of the two, oddly, only Charlie was panting. “I guess you forgot sixty-four-year-olds can’t run like that,” he said.

Drummond didn’t reply, instead taking to prowling the block like a bloodhound. This part of Nostrand was solely residential. There was no vehicular traffic now and just a half-dozen pedestrians, none of whom wore the gas company’s distinctive baggy white coverall. Drummond peered into shadowy doorways, the gaps between parked cars, even behind clusters of trash cans.

“He probably just went inside one of the buildings,” Charlie said, hoping that would be the end of it.

“It’s easy to find a parking space around here,” Drummond said.

Charlie took it as a non sequitur. “So?”

“It’s strange that he had no truck.”

It was a decent insight, Charlie thought, particularly given Drummond’s condition. The gas men drove everywhere, and if they couldn’t find a spot within a short waddle of their appointment, they double-parked. If somebody gets blocked in for a couple minutes, their pragmatism dictated, them’s the breaks. Yet there had been no gas company truck parked on Prospect Place, and there was no truck parked here or driving off.

“Still, there’s a ton of good reasons he wouldn’t have his truck,” Charlie said. “Like, at his last stop, it got blocked by the phone company truck.”

“What got blocked by the phone company truck?”

“The gas man’s truck.”

“Oh,” Drummond said. “I hope we’ll have as nice a day tomorrow.” He turned and strolled back toward his block.

When Drummond had first come charging onto Nostrand, the gas man-really, Dewart-was on the sidewalk, just fifty feet away, one of the six pedestrians. On rounding the corner, he’d whipped off his coverall and slung it into a trash can. Underneath he had on a black running suit that fit snugly over his slender frame. The tight knit cap, which he yanked from a pocket, compressed his thick hair, transforming the shape of his head dramatically, and even more so when seen from behind-Drummond and Charlie’s vantage point. His intent was to appear to them, and to anyone else, as no lumbering gas man but, rather, as a trim yuppie en route to a jogging path in Prospect Park.

In fact he had visited Drummond’s house on matters pertaining to gas. Before leaving, he lowered the thermostat to fifty-six. He figured Drummond would raise it when he returned home, at which point, on the opposite side of the readout panel, the thermometer coil and the mercury switch would rotate, sending current through the mercury and energizing the relay to the furnace two stories below. The burner would light a small amount of fuel, generating hot gas to warm the air in the house. The burner would also light the wick that was held in place, as of a short while earlier, by a nylon sleeve the size of a cigarette. The wick would set fire to a great deal of additional gas. Upon inspection, the resulting explosion would pass for a leak resulting from ordinary wear and tear. As the saying goes: Anybody can kill someone; it takes a professional to make someone die an ordinary death.

The house smelled to Charlie of his childhood: industrial-strength cleanser. As ever, the place had all the warmth of a chain hotel-no framed photographs, no bowling trophies, none of the knickknacks usually found in a home. The closest the old man ever came to decorating was shelving books in alphabetical order by author.

The only thing new was unopened correspondence, stacks of it, all around. After Drummond went to bed, Charlie nosed through it. He found numerous memos from Perriman Appliances, where Drummond had been placed on long-term disability leave. Charlie also found three unpaid utility bills. Adding them to his sudden awareness that the house was freezing, he figured he’d solved the mystery of the gas man: The guy had been here to cut the old man off.

Charlie climbed upstairs. Tiptoeing past Drummond’s bedroom and to the end of the narrow corridor, he checked the thermostat.

Fifty-six.

So much for the gas man theory. On this cold night, Drummond must have lowered the heat. Charlie cranked the thermostat to seventy-five.

On the way back to the stairs, he paused at the doorway to his old room. The only remaining mementos of youth were the scale miniatures his father used to bring back from sales trips to D.C. Dust made it appear snow had fallen on the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. Charlie again felt the chagrin of the birthday when he tore off the gift wrap, hoping for a PlayStation joystick, and found a Washington Monument.

His recollection was cut short by a gunshotlike crack that rippled into the night, leaving the mirrors and windows upstairs abuzz. He froze, until hearing the creak of floorboards in Drummond’s bedroom.

Drummond had gotten out of bed in response to the cold, Charlie pieced together, then heaved open his bulky, spring-loaded window, which sounded like a gunshot.

Charlie stepped into Drummond’s bedroom. In robe, pajamas, and slippers, Drummond stood at the wide-open window, gazing at the dark patch of a backyard a story below. Charlie joined him. There was nothing to see but the swing set Charlie’s mother had given him, now just three rusty legs and a rusty crossbar.

Charlie said, “It’d probably be best to shut-”

The blast, which must have been heard for miles, made it feel as if the house jumped its foundation. Cupboards banged open. Doors jumped off their hinges. Drawers flew. Glass shattered.

A mass of bluish-red flame surged up the stairs, through the door, directly at Charlie. He was burning hot before it was upon him. He thought he would be incinerated.