William Lashner - Past Due

“Very interesting, Victor.”

“Except you knew that last part already, because I told it all to your vice president of external affairs.”

“Did you?”

“There’s a famous line in the play that troubles me, when the ghost of Hamlet’s father says – where is it?” I paged back through the play, being careful to touch only the gold gilt on the edge of the pages. “Yes, here. The ghost says, ‘Murder most foul as in the best it is.’ Even assuming that murder for revenge is the best kind of murder, it still is characterized, even by the ghost who is urging it, as being most foul.”

“Obviously he’s not referring to the killing of his own killer.”

“Obviously?”

“Maybe you should go home and read it again.”

“I returned my copy to the library. May I borrow this?”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes, be my guest.”

“Babbage. Ever hear of a man named Babbage?”

His frozen face didn’t change, but he hesitated a moment before he said, “Cabbage?”

“Babbage.”

“No. Can’t say that I have.”

“He was the man whose testimony drove a stake through the heart of Tommy Greeley’s organization and would have put Tommy in jail. Babbage died just a few weeks ago. Heart attack.”

“Pity.”

“Although,” I said, tapping my head, “a clump of hair was missing, so the heart attack might have happened while someone was in the process of interrogating him quite forcefully. Maybe the same way Joey Parma was interrogated quite forcefully.”

“I hardly think so.”

I nodded, stepped back and then forward again. “But why does he dither? I’m talking of Hamlet again. If killing the king is so obviously the right thing to do, why does he hesitate? There is a moment when he no longer has any doubts about what his uncle has done, and he spies the murderer kneeling, and he unsheathes his sword, but he can’t bring himself to use it.”

“Because the uncle was praying, Victor. You must not have read the text very carefully.”

I started looking through the play, turning a page, scratching my head.

“Give the book to me,” he said as he grabbed it away. He licked his thumb and paged through the volume until he found the scene he was looking for. He traced his finger down one page and then the opposite and then tapped the line in victory. “Yes, Hamlet doesn’t want to kill his uncle when his uncle’s thoughts are turned toward God. He says, ‘A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven?’ He decides to wait, so that he can catch him in a more compromising position and send him to hell. See?”

He turned the book toward me, pointed at the line. I took the book and started to read the section and then stopped. “Okay,” I said. “I see.” I laid the silk marker in the page and then closed the book. “Maybe you’re right. Or maybe Hamlet is rationalizing because a part of him, the best part of him, doesn’t want to do it at all, knows it is wrong, knows a bloody revenge can end only in his own physical and moral destruction.”

“What is that, Victor, the Quaker interpretation?”

“Or the author’s, because that’s pretty much what happens to our hero. I mean, it’s not a tragedy simply because Hamlet dies in the end, is it? Hamlet at one point describes himself as ‘crawling between heaven and earth.’ It seems to me he’s split, one side wants to kill, but the other side yearns for something better, finer, more spiritual, maybe more moral. I wonder if it is that split which causes his hesitation.”

“The man killed his father, Victor. The killer deserved to die. What would you have him do?”

“Use the law, maybe.”

“But the killer was king. The law wasn’t available to Hamlet.”

“Then let God and conscience take care of it.”

“Which means doing nothing. Sometimes nothing is not an option. He had to do something. He had a duty to do something.”

“Duty? And who imposed such a duty? A ghost, covered head to toe in armor.”

“The ghost of his father.”

“The ghost of a murderous pirate, of a criminal, the ghost of war, the ghost of violence. If Hamlet had a duty, it was to remain true to the best part of himself, the part that loved art, that loved Ophelia, that worshiped life, not death.”

“You simply don’t understand. You can’t understand.”

I stopped, stared. It was as if an emotion was struggling to form itself in the lifeless flesh of his face, something dark and bitter and wholly personal.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Maybe I’ll never understand the play the way you can. What happened to your face?”

His features smoothed back toward their bland frigidity, as if what I had seen had been merely a phantom of emotion overlaid on lifeless wax, and he turned away slightly. “There was an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“It is time for you to go.”

“I don’t know if you noticed, but I was out of town. Paid a visit to the Shoe City of the World. I visited Tommy Greeley’s mother. Sad lady, but I did see something extraordinary. In her china hutch, saved as if they were presents from a god. Twenty bottles of gin. She gets one each year on Christmas.”

“Charming.”

“And I also visited an old friend of Tommy’s, a man named Jimmy Sullivan. He gave me something he had been saving all these years.”

Eddie Dean cocked his head slightly, as if waiting for some revelation.

“Some sort of tool chest that Tommy had given him to hold,” I said.

“How intriguing. Maybe you should hand it over to me for safekeeping.”

“It’s pretty safe where it is. I know who betrayed Tommy Greeley.”

“For certain?”

“For pretty damn certain.”

“Tell me, Victor. Tell me who.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Not until I get the answers I’m looking for.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know who killed Joey Parma.”

“That again. I can’t help you. I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

“Truly, I don’t.”

“Okay.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find out. So how do you think it turns out in the end? The play, I mean.”

“Oh, pretty well, I would say. The father is avenged, the king is dead.”

“Yes, but so is Hamlet, and his mother, and his love, and all that his father had won with blood on the battlefield is turned over once again to his enemies.”

“A warning against indecision.”

“Somehow I don’t think so.” I lifted the Shakespeare volume, said, “Thanks for the book,” and then headed past him, along the long wall of bookshelves. As I passed a specific collection of volumes I stopped. I pulled one out, looked at it. It was part of a set, all in fine leather bindings, the collected works of Alexandre Dumas.

“By the way,” I said, “the Dumas novel you loved as a child, the one that gave you the greatest reading experience of your life, that wasn’t The Three Musketeers, was it?”

“No,” said Eddie Dean.

“It didn’t come to me until just now. The Count of Monte Cristo’s faithful and devoted servant was named Jacopo, wasn’t he?”

“If you say so.”

I turned, faced him as I slid The Count of Monte Cristo back into its place. “See, here’s the problem with using literature as a guide for life, Eddie. From everything I’ve learned about him, it’s pretty clear that Tommy Greeley was not the innocent and noble-hearted Edmund Dantes. And Alura Straczynski, I can tell you with utter certainty, is not the fair and loyal Mercedes. And Hamlet, well, in the end what can you say except that our pal Hamlet, despite all his evident talents and depths, was a careless son of a bitch who royally screwed the pooch.”