Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Sara felt the water closing over her head. She hated herself for wanting to be free of him, for her weak and desperate hope that he would not try to contact her. She thought she might be in the clear after checking Facebook one last time before bed that same Wednesday night. Then on Thursday morning she had twenty-seven new posts on her wall, and they were all from him. The final one was a photo of her, taken on the sidewalk outside her building, in which she was wearing the clothes she wore yesterday.

She took down the posts and blocked him. He’s only trying to scare you, she said to herself; but guess what, it was working. She went to the front door, and a good thing too — her mother had forgotten to lock it. It must be nice, Sara thought tearfully, just to live in your own little bubble, without it occurring to you that something bad might happen to you or to anyone else.

Helen, meanwhile, lost more and more confidence in the situation in Rensselaer Valley. The fact that she communicated with Ben mostly by text, since she still felt a surge of anger and embarrassment whenever she spoke to him, naturally contributed to the clipped and ominously terse quality of his status reports to her. Still, the situation could only be decaying. You just could not take two men of that nature, ask them to do nothing, go nowhere, talk to no one but each other, and expect that request to be honored indefinitely; but that’s what she had done, that was her only plan. What r we waiting 4? was one of his last messages, followed a minute later by Literally? They were waiting for proof of Bettina’s continued existence on this earth, proof that was turning out to be maddeningly, alarmingly, expensively elusive. That night Helen nervously floated with Sara the notion that she might take another quick trip up to Rensselaer Valley after work on Friday, just for an hour or two, to check on Hamilton. She made it clear that there was no need for Sara herself to come; but Sara insisted that she would.

Ben had taken the risk of leaving Hamilton by himself once or twice by then, just to go to Bonifacio’s office for a couple of hours, and there hadn’t been any incident. He wasn’t a bad guy, Ben thought. A little self-absorbed, maybe. In the evenings they watched TV and drank. On their fourth night together, a Friday, there was a good old-fashioned, window-shaking thunderstorm, and about ten minutes later the cable, installed earlier that day, went out.

“That’s it,” Ben said. “It’s a sign. We have got to get out of here. I am trying so hard to do this for Helen, but it’s too much, it’s too open-ended. They are going to find us dead together in here and no one will ever know why.”

“You know, that brings up an interesting point,” Hamilton said. His eyes were glassy. “You two are divorced, right? I’ve never been divorced myself, but doesn’t it sort of mean you don’t have to do what she tells you anymore?”

Ben turned off the hissing TV. “It’s complicated,” he said. “I owe her something. I’m not sure even this is going to pay it off, actually.”

“What did you do?” Hamilton asked somberly.

Ben had an idea. He swirled the ice cubes in his glass. “I’ll tell you what I did,” he said, “if you tell me what you did.”

Hamilton considered it. “Okay, man,” he said. “Only fair. But you may regret asking. It may raise the stakes for you a little bit.”

“All right,” Ben said. He was excited now; he figured Hamilton had maybe slept with some producer’s girlfriend, like in The Godfather . “But not here. Seriously, we need a change of venue.”

“No bars,” Hamilton said warily. “I don’t mind saying or doing something stupid in front of you, but if we are out I’ll get recognized, and then we’re both screwed.”

Ben nodded. “Plus the nearest real bar is probably in New Castle, which is like ten miles from here, and if I get nicked for DWI again, it’s back to jail for moi.” Hamilton’s eyebrows rose. “Okay, I have an idea. It’s a little offbeat, but safe, at least. It doesn’t matter where we go, you said, right?”

“I think you were the one who said that, but yeah, it doesn’t matter to me.”

“Anywhere but this house. Okay. Do me a favor and go grab the vodka.”

Ben drove into town at about fifteen miles per hour and parked in the lot behind the hardware store. They stumbled up the steps and he opened the door with his key. “This is where I work,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, there’s ice. I’m going to turn on the light, count to three, and then turn it off again, because it would not be cool if anyone were to see us up here. Ready?”

He flicked the switch, and together they took in the tiny office, which, like any office, looked unfamiliar and slightly malicious when empty: the cheap, pocked desk, the noisy filing cabinets, the chair pulled up to the window so he could rest his feet on the sill, the water-stained curtains, the potted plant. Realizing he’d forgotten to start counting, Ben slapped at the switch again and they returned to darkness, a degree or two darker than before. “Now I forget where the chair was,” Hamilton said.

Ben’s cellphone chimed again, and he jumped. Without looking at the incoming number — he knew it anyway — he turned the phone off.

Helen had been trying to reach him for more than an hour, ever since she got out of that day’s meeting — another stalemate — with the Catholics; she’d dialed Hamilton’s number as well, but he rarely answered his phone even under the best circumstances. Her next call was to the accursed Hertz outpost near her apartment. She had a premonition something was wrong. Her messages and texts left no room for misunderstanding in terms of the need to check in with her right away: if Ben didn’t reply immediately, her last message had said, she was going to assume the worst and head up there. She picked up the car, called Sara to tell her to be ready in half an hour, and then drove to the pay phone outside Carl Schurz Park to make one more call that had been on her mind.

Not only had there been nothing in the papers or on the Internet about Hamilton Barth’s disappearance but she had actually come across a Hollywood Reporter item that claimed he had been at a gallery opening three nights ago in Venice Beach. They were good, those people, but if they were already going to the trouble of planting items, they must have been in a full-blown panic. Hamilton’s agent was someone named Kyle Stine — she’d looked it up — and with a prepaid phone card she’d bought at Duane Reade, she called his office from the lonely pay phone.

“No,” she had to say to three different people, “I’m not calling for information about Hamilton Barth. I’m calling with information about Hamilton Barth. Please just give that message to Mr. Stine, and I’ll hold.” Hold she did, for almost ten minutes. She could see the doorman behind the glass wall of the building across the street, sitting at his desk, in the glow of the security-camera monitors.

“This is Kyle Stine,” said a hostile voice.

Helen swallowed. “I’m a friend of Hamilton’s,” she said quickly, “and I know you probably haven’t heard from him in a while, and I just wanted to let you know he’s fine—”

“Where is he?” Stine said, in a tone whose attempt at calm could not have been more frightening.

“I can’t tell you that,” Helen said, “but I can tell you that he’s okay, he’s perfectly safe—”

“What the fuck do you mean, he’s safe?” the voice thundered. “Who is this? Listen to me. You tell me where you have him right now.”

“He’s fine,” Helen said. “He will be back in touch when he’s ready.”

“Do you have any notion of the interests you are fucking with? What, have you kidnapped him or something?”