Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Arrested—” she could not catch her breath “—for—”

“For a crime he did not commit. He’s been cleared.”

“Where— where —”

“I don’t think you should see him just now—”

“Where!”

He grabbed her shoulders with a force that took even him by surprise. “Katrina — I am telling you this because I do not wish to repeat my mistake of so many years ago.”

She went pure white, and her hair was already dank with sweat; he had a vision of her as one of Edward’s Kabuki puppets.

“Oh, Father …”

She shivered in his arms like a stranded person airlifted from a great height.

He stroked her and softly spoke. “He will not leave this time. He is not … wild. He is — he is not Marcus —but — well, I’m not sure who he is. And I’m not sure he knows, either. Harry and Ruth have seen him; it was because of Ruth we were able to track him down.”

“Did he … did he mention me?” It was all she could think to ask.

“Katrina — I’m not sure how … intact he is.”

“Have you seen him?”

He shook his head adamantly. “Only Samson. Marcus didn’t remember him. Or didn’t let on.”

“Is he still in jail?”

“He’s been released. I’ve put him somewhere under guard, for his own sake. The doctors are tending him now; he has lived his life on the streets and bears the scars. Though he seems quite pleased and grateful to be free.”

She licked the sweet salt of tears from her lips and grew strangely calm. “Father,” she uttered. “I wish it were all a dream … I’m like Tull now! Suddenly, I don’t know anymore. I know how I was when I came to see you that day at work — so crazed . But now —now I’m not sure I even want him to be here—”

He took her shoulders again, but this time it was his gaze alone that held her. “You mustn’t say it, Katrina — mustn’t even think it. You will face this man, I’ll help you. Listen to me! Long ago I told you my grandson would come into a piece of intelligence and that it would be your duty to be candid. That, you were: with a dignity that absolutely floored me — took me marvelously by surprise. You will face this man with the courage you’ve shown since you faced Toulouse. You will face your husband, Katrina! And settle the books once and for all.”

At that moment — and if here we do lapse into genre, it is hoped we can be forgiven — she fainted dead away.

†It would not be the first time that a criminal, living or dead, was “tripped up” in like fashion, and will likely not be the last; though one can be sure that this history’s done with the knotty device. While admitting such an artifice to be a hardy staple of the mystery genre in days gone by, the author would hope that while there is plenty of mystery in our tale, there is less genre too.

In comparison to Marcus’s previous lodging, the Hotel Bel-Air — though more an antacid pink than Red House — was most congenial (at least it was no Big House). He occupied a large series of rooms and was never left alone.

He even cooked for the men who guarded him, wearing a dainty, ill-size apron about his waist for the task. He made a mean pomegranate sabayon — the color of which resembled the aforementioned bismuthal lodgings — that when poured over mille-feuille pillows melted in the mouth like stardust.

The entourage of healers was vast: psychotherapists and physicians, nutritionists and body-workers, barbers and manicurists and of course the hulking men in well-tailored suits who stood at the door with tiny earpieces, as if covertly auditing the drone of a bureaucratic god. He did not find the circumstances at all oppressive, and actually marveled at the suite’s wallpaper and chintz, which though not topflight had the effect of reminding him of patterns designed by that distinctive genius with whom he once shared such affinity and ardor, and from whom he felt himself sadly receding each fallish Californian day, days marked less by chill and chimney smoke than by the sight of the hostelry’s storybook swans.

For after a week had passed, Louis Trotter, at the urging of his son-in-law’s mental-health supernumeraries, declared it a fine idea for him to stroll the grounds with the men in suits as chaperons. Tourists and other passersby must have thought him to be a King Nerd who had bottomed out à la Brian Wilson when, in fact, Marcus’s world had gone from “lockdown” sandbox to oysters indeed.

The education — or re-education — of Mr. Weiner proceeded with uncommon speed. He had always been an apt pupil, but now that it was his own life he was studying, he did his homework with especial rigor, unclouded by hallucination. †

With the case happily resolved, the detective was allowed to come and go as he pleased, and the expansion upon their already cordial bond was mutually healing. They made small talk and took their meals by the patio or pool. Out of the blue, Marcus spoke of wishing to visit the new cathedral downtown before it was filled with “tiresome” parishioners; he had a fondness for empty churches. Along that vein, he unleashed an impassioned filibuster on “the preservation of ancient buildings,” radiantly evoking St. John’s in the Wilderness — his sanctuary in the early fugitive days of his Adirondack unraveling. Just as Samson was wondering if he should delve into that episode, Marcus himself brought up the arrest, even referring to the detective’s “official” visits those many years ago.

“No Twin Towers that,” he said, with gentle irony. “The woman — the one who said I struck her? Crazy as a loon! I never raised a hand to a woman in my life! Beaten by a ‘john,’ she was. But I was in terrible shape — oh, terrible. Wasn’t I, Sam? Oh good Lord.”

“How did you wind up there, anyway? I thought you’d hardly visited Twig House before the wedding.”

“How? Don’t know. Some things — a lot of things — are just lost. We did go there once or twice; the lakes always had a strong and lovely pull. Tear o’ the Clouds … been up there, Sam?”

“Not in a long while.”

“Perhaps because it was Essex County — I have ties there, you know. Across the Atlantic.” He brought himself up. “Or had ties, should I say. I’m losing some of those old ties,” he said, with a wink of apprehension.

So they sat or sunned or strolled among the swans, talking of this and that: a bit about Mr. Trotter and the twenty-four-cylinder, $3 million, quarter-million-ton, two-stories-high earthmover he’d bought, with tires that dwarfed a man — and a bit about Dodd — and a bit about the movie world and popular culture — but never a word of their shared true love. Sometimes they watched television, an activity interrupted by the hilarious regularity of Marcus’s “Oh, good God!” outbursts. Once, a film featuring his old client Tom Hanks and a bulldog came on through the satellite dish and Marcus was riveted. “That’s Tom,” he said. “By God, that’s Tom, isn’t it?” He said it over and over. “But the story — it’s mad, isn’t it? But charming! But absolutely mad.” (He was still determining what and who was crazy, and when and if it was all right to say or be so.) At night, while the men in suits sat before the droning tube, he lay on his bed staring at the letter from Gilles, exhausted — there was so much to do, and yet it seemed he’d forgotten how to do anything . A torrent of thoughts and schemes and projects rushed to his head, just as they had in the William Morris mind-set of old. But he was sorely paralyzed; and could not go marathon-walking, even if he had a mind to.