Michael Dibdin: Dark Specter

While she was still laughing, Merlowitz suddenly demanded, “OK, what did the guy do wrong?”

Feeling put on the spot, Kristine shrugged. Merlowitz smiled and answered his own question.

“He broke the oldest rule there is in this business. Never ask a witness a question if you’re not sure what answer he’s going to give.”

“Maybe we should worry a little less about the rules and a little more about justice,” Kristine replied, nettled by his condescending tone. “If the jury system means anything at all, it means ordinary people working out the truth for themselves.”

Paul Merlowitz closed his eyes.

“Kristine, Talmudic scholars teach that every verse in the Torah has forty-nine different interpretations, each equally valid. Truth isn’t some commodity you buy at Fred Meyer. We’re talking about an exercise in damage limitation. The best we can hope to do is to recognize and control our ignorance.”

And to make a damn good living off of it, thought Kristine as the first course arrived. But she didn’t say anything, and the lunch had passed agreeably. When she mentioned the Wallis house, Paul-punctilious as ever-had promised to see what he could do. As she watched him noting down the details with his Mont Blanc pen, Kristine had felt a stab of pain at the contrast between his organized, methodical efficiency and her own sketchily improvised existence. Paul Merlowitz would never have wasted his time agonizing over something he couldn’t control the way she had with the Dale Watson fiasco. If he had a failure, as even he must occasionally, he would forget it and move on.

Trying to shake these gloomy thoughts, she rooted around in her beach bag for something to read. She had brought a novel along, but wasn’t making much progress with it. Eventually she found a copy of the local paper they had given her at the motel, or “Inn” as the place called itself. Besides the expense, another good reason for not staying longer was the management’s attempts to give the place what they imagined to be an upscale feel. Every item on the menu came “complemented” with something or “served on a bed” of something else. If she hadn’t had to look after Thomas, Kristine would have taken her chances at a bar in the hard-bitten logging community a few miles down the road.

The best thing about the newspaper was that it had no time for such ingratiating gentility and mock cosmopolitanism. The tone was that of the reader board she’d seen at a cafe in Hoquiam on the drive over: WE DON’T SERVE ESPRESSO. The lead stories concerned a crisis in the logging industry, the ongoing political fight about the threat to the habitat of the spotted owl, and a controversial proposal to upgrade the coast road by building a short cut through an Indian reservation. Buried on an inside page were short items off the wire about the situation in Bosnia and the Republicans’ proposals for balancing the budget.

On page 6, in a border around a huge ad for a local furniture store, she found a follow-up piece about the shoot-out among that religious cult on the San Juans. Kristine had been following this vaguely-it had been big news for a few days-but she found it hard to get interested. It sounded like one of those Waco-style things, or that guy in Guyana who got all his followers to kill themselves. You knew these people were out there, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with real life. She felt sorry for the children who’d been dragged into it, but apart from that it was like the drug cartels or the Mafia. Let them kill each other off as much as they wanted. It just saved the taxpayers money.

Kristine raised her eyes from the paper. Someone else had said that to her recently. Of course, it was Dick Rice, talking about the shoot-out in Atlanta. Well, it was cynical, no doubt, not the kind of thing you could admit to in public, but nonetheless true. Ideally criminals should be brought to trial and sentenced according to the law, but in practice the police were overextended, the jails bursting and the streets unsafe. Despite Paul Merlowitz’s Talmudic wisdom, anything that helped even the score was welcome as far as she was concerned.

She returned to the story. Two women who had escaped from the blazing building were said to be cooperating with the authorities. The police didn’t seem to be giving much away at this stage, beyond saying that the killings had been the result of a power struggle for control of the cult. One other survivor, a man, had initially been detained but then released pending further inquiries. Forensic work was continuing, but was hampered by the fact that none of the victims had as yet been identified. It wasn’t even clear how many people had been living on the island in the first place, let alone who they were.

Kristine Kjarstad folded the paper up and stuffed it back into her beach bag. It was time to forget all about stuff like this and just veg out. She should make it a rule not to read the paper or watch the news, maybe not even answer the phone once they got home. The good weather was supposed to hold up through the next week. She would just lounge around the yard, maybe do a little gardening, bask in the sun and try to forget all about the violence that her work brought her into daily contact with. She needed to put things in perspective, to get centered again. And when her vacation time was up, she would go back healed and strong, ready to tackle the cases that came her way one by one, not obsessing about any of them, no longer feeling that it was her business to solve the problems of the world singlehanded.

She checked her watch and called Thomas, who turned, eyeing her warily.

“ V?r sa god!” she called, using her mother’s Norwegian expression for calling people to the table.

“Whaaaat?”

“It’s time for lunch, darling.”

“Aw, Mom!”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“But we’re just killing these guys!”

“All right, five minutes.”

Shrieking their delight, Thomas and his new friend got to work with the seaweed whips again. Their delirium reminded Kristine of her confrontation with Eric when she picked up Thomas on her return from Atlanta. Her ex-husband had objected to two aspects of his son’s life. The first was an “apparently uncontrolled amount of time spent playing video games,” in excess of the norms laid down in a parents’ guide to the subject he had bought and insisted on her reading too. The second concerned Thomas’s current “obsession” with toy guns.

Eric had brought up all the usual arguments on this subject, from the need to teach children not to see violence as the solution to their problems, to the undesirability of reinforcing gender stereotypes. In theory, Kristine agreed with all this. The trouble was that her mother had bought the gun in question for Thomas’s birthday after taking him to Toys ‘R’ Us and hashing out at some length exactly what he wanted. It was an air-driven model which fired a brightly colored foam dart, and he and Brent had had endless fun chasing each other around the backyard with it.

It was all very well for Eric to remind her that the Parenting Plan in their divorce decree included a stipulation that toys would be chosen by both parents in consultation. He didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day business of looking after Thomas, and for that matter didn’t want to. What he wanted, and what he thought he’d found, was a way to extend his control over areas of Kristine’s life which he was no longer able to influence directly but could continue to manipulate through their son.

She got to her feet, shook the sand out of her towel and put it in her bag.

“Thomas!”

Seeing her poised for departure, he contorted his face into a pathetic mask. Kristine almost gave in, then decided that it was time for her to demonstrate some control too. Taking her son by the hand, she led him over to the red Jeep. The other child’s parents had come back from their run and were now relaxing over a power snack of carrot juice and tofu. For a moment Kristine found herself sympathizing with the author of that yuppie-bashing reader board in Hoquiam, but she would gladly have kissed up to the biggest nerd in the world if Thomas got on with his kids.