Hard Fall (19 page)

Trains had their drawbacks as well. They were tediously slow, and in America, poorly serviced and uncomfortable. Disenchanted black people waited on you with complete contempt. The sleepers were inadequately small and poorly ventilated. The food tasted like warmed-up wet cardboard.

Kort had spent three days on the train, an opportunity to plan and rest. Despite this down time, or perhaps because of it, he had grown progressively more tense as the days had dragged on, a runner before the marathon.

Kort rode a taxi several miles from Washington's Union Station train terminal and then disembarked near, but not at, a Metro subway entrance. He reached the Metro, rode it two stops, changed to the other side and rode one stop back, alert all the while for surveillance of any sort. He took a room in a former colonial mansion, now a bed-and-breakfast, a room that had been reserved in the name of Kevin Anthony. David Anthony was a thing of the past. His room offered an unobstructed view of the two streets on the building's perimeter, and three avenues of escape. The proprietor's wife, who ran the desk, was a handsome woman in her fifties, graying hair, glasses, and a rigid posture. She explained the rules in a sweet but businesslike voice: breakfast served from seven to nine; alcohol was available in the evening hours, five to ten o'clock, at an extra charge; no unregistered overnight guests; two keys, one for the front door, one for the room. Lost keys cost twenty-five dollars. No music after ten; room phones would not allow direct-dial long-distance calls, but phone company credit card calls were possible through the telephone company operator; towels were changed daily, sheets every other day unless otherwise requested; all the rooms had window air conditioners and guests were requested to switch them to the Energy Efficient mode during the daytime hours when the room was not occupied. “Let's see,” she said, checking her red leather-bound book with its tabular columns, “we received a wire transfer for the deposit. Thank you,” she added, looking up. “And the balance will be paid by … credit card?”

“Cash,” replied Mr. Kevin Anthony, producing a series of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. One of the beauties of automatic tellers and international cash systems was that a single plastic card gave one instant access to funds. His red Cirrus card—a dedicated ATM card—allowed him to withdraw up to one thousand dollars in cash a day, six days a week. His remaining three Visa cards each had twenty-thousand-dollar credit limits. Now in phase three of his operation, the David Anthony card would be retired. Michael had seen to the accounts—thankfully
before
his arrest. Money was the least of Kort's problems.

He spent the holiday weekend familiarizing himself with the empty city and its impressive Metro subway system. Tuesday at noon, wearing his own face and his own short hair, he stood on the corner of K and 21st, awaiting her. Perhaps it was his fatigue that made him remember, perhaps the sound of the police siren as it passed, perhaps the nagging realization that it could happen again—he could be arrested anywhere, at any time. Such was the nature of his life. It bred paranoia and suspicion in him. Whatever its cause, he found his memories as unavoidable as the truth; glimpses of his own history, they were bound to repeat themselves. He had relived this a hundred times in the last five years, like the recurring nightmare it was.

It is five years earlier, his wife and child barely cold in the ground.

He returns to his home—his sanctuary—in a state of numbness, not bothering to switch on the lights. He imagines blood on his hands, though there is none. He thinks of Lady Macbeth. His movements seem slowed and dreamlike—a castaway's vision of love. He passes a table that holds a photograph of his wife taken only weeks before the birth, while she was still in the glow of pregnancy.

He carries his deed as a beast of burden carries his load: painful but resigned to his calling. The police will come for him any minute. He is as certain of this as he is that he murdered the man. He holds no remorse. The space within him that remorse might occupy is instead filled with both a keen sense of justice and the hollow ache of loneliness. Being all alone in the world is the real hell. He is neither proud nor ashamed of the murder. He is satisfied. Pouring the vodka into the glass, he briefly perceives himself as the hooded executioner, the man who learns to accept his actions.

After many hours and many drinks the morning light comes. It paints itself in harsh geometric patterns. Fears, like shadows, play on the walls of his thoughts.

Briefly, he relives the event.

“An error!” his victim had dared to claim, his eyes begging forgiveness as Kort towered over him where he lay in his bed. Forced to drink the very waste his factory discharged, this time in full concentration, he vomited twice before a yellowish foam cemented at the corners of his lips and his nose began to run like a child's. Kort forced a third glass down him, and then it had been only a matter of minutes before it burned through his internal organs. He groped for air; his face turned a disturbing blue; his eyes enlarged. When he clearly had no fight left in him, no hope, Kort had left him—for death is only truly frightening when it appears you might yet escape it. Let the doctors come. Let the seed of hope be planted as an ambulance rushes the man away to stomach pumps and blood tests and toxicology reports. Let him hope, and let that hope be denied. Let him drink from the cup of hope only to vomit again.

The radio had confirmed it: The founding chairman of EisherWorks Chemicals was dead before Kort had completed the long drive home.

He thinks of the knock that will come to the door any minute and the years of darkness and confinement: the payment that is expected of him for this deed.

The rising sun just brushes the windowsill in a bright rectangle of mustard orange. After a few hours it becomes a trapezoid, and then the opposing jamb is flooded in a late afternoon brilliance that forces him to look away. At this same moment he also looks away from the deed for the first time. He flirts with the dangerous thought, the possibility, that the police may not come. It is at once both heady and intoxicating. He finds himself delirious with hope.

He does not avoid the guilt, he confronts it. An act born of premeditation, there is no choice but to accept responsibility for the murder. The last glint of sunlight leaves the smooth surface of the window frame, a spark snuffed out. An entire day has passed. The haze in the room gives way to darkness, and once again the consequences of his deed overwhelm him. The vodka bottle goes empty. So does his stomach. These fleeting hours seem an unexpected dividend. Certainly the knock will soon come, just as the sun will return to the windows.

He has been reared to believe they will come. He
expects
it. But what if they should not? What if by some divine act this murder went unaccounted for? What then?

The heels of the first day are nipped by the budding of the second, and so again with the third. By the dawning of the fourth day the pit of fear gives way to hunger and he eats quietly and alone. The phone has not rung. No knock has come upon the door. He is no longer frightened by his isolation, his loneliness, but quelled by it. These hours are as peaceful a time as he can recollect. He eats precious little, but he eats, finding sustenance.

By the fifth day he is cleaning up after himself. His act of only days earlier is now much more unreal than he ever imagined possible, as if someone else had committed the deed while he was but a witness. Order returns to a life where none was imagined possible, so convinced was he of his arrest. The shower water goes cold, but is not noticed. He takes a seventy-minute shower, devoted entirely to the sensation of the pressure streaming down upon his scalp, to the numbness of his head and the quieting of his thoughts. It is in the shower he finds his sanctuary within his sanctuary, and where, over the next two days, he devotes a majority of his time, no consideration of water temperature. His thoughts and his guilt are carried away down the drain.

Sleep does not come. He tries warm milk, earplugs, blindfolds, and music. He tries reading, counting, praying, and masturbation. Then it's back to the cold shower water that rains down on his head carrying his fears along with it. He justifies his deed. He dares to allow himself a glimpse of freedom. Every waking moment is perceived as freedom and therefore too sacred to sleep through.

He no longer takes food for it requires preparation and he can't think that far in advance. There is only the recent past—the murder—and this immediate moment for him. His hunger goes unnoticed, except for the insomnia; he fails to connect the two. His sustenance comes from alcohol, though try as he might—and he
does
try—he can't find intoxication. He finds headaches, he finds himself urinating often, he finds his bowels loose and violent. He finds another crack of light seeping through one of the pulled blinds and corrects the situation. He pins blankets over the windows, and when he runs out of blankets, he seals off several rooms, blocking them with furniture so he won't make the mistake of going inside and disturbing himself with sunlight. It is as if by blocking out the light, he has stopped time, has blocked out the world, has hidden away where They can't find him.

His beard grows, and his hair becomes oily and filthy despite the endless showers. He takes to cleaning his fingernails with a green plastic party toothpick. He can barely see his nails in the dark, but he cleans them all the same, cleans them until the skin beneath them bleeds.

It is the end of the alcohol that leads him to her medicine cabinet and the treasures he finds within. Never had he known what resources lurked behind her hinged mirror. In the dim light of the bath, it is her face he sees in the glass, not his; his tears on her face. Behind the mirror are a variety of recent medications for a woman unable to confront her situation, a new mother unable to cope with the deformed child that has come from her womb. A child deformed by the chemical discharge of an EisherWorks factory some three miles away. Seeing this array of prescriptions, he flirts with the thought that these took her life, not her. That these were in control, not her. But it is impossible to escape the truth: She killed their child with these drugs, and then she killed herself. They are never coming back, either of them. Kort goes off to visit them.

He greedily consumes the pills in varying combinations, delighted by the bone-dry throats, quivering limbs, and various stages of numbness they inspire. He embarks on voyages of introspection so dark that he wonders if he has gone blind, only to find it is a form of induced sleep so deep and distant that he cannot claw his way out. The small, disfigured, asexual infant is disgorged from her womb and caught by the trembling, gloved hands of a doctor at once afraid, but pretending to be otherwise.

It gets so that he cannot pass by the medicine cabinet without a handful. And so it is that he is alternately in the chair, shivering cold from his nightmares, and in the shower, shivering cold from the water.

The only warmth comes from deep within him as he recollects with some pride his deed.

He sleeps, off and on, for the better part of the next seventy-two hours. He awakens and takes a ten-minute shower, stopping when the water runs cold. Control has miraculously returned to his life. He cleans house and prepares himself a hot, nourishing meal from frozen foods. This meal won't stay down, but the next one does, and the one after that. Slowly, the blankets come down from the windows. Light returns into his life. The furniture is moved from the blocked doors. He shaves. He presses his trousers, dons a coat, and ventures outside to clear the stoop of the newspapers and mail that have collected. Then, frightened, he returns inside and locks the door like a paranoid old woman.

The frozen food is the next supply he drains. He exhausts it, still too frightened—of what he's not exactly sure—to venture out past the porch. Freedom has come, and somehow the area beyond his own door represents a test of that freedom he now has no desire to lose. It is a cherished, treasured entity, this freedom. They still haven't come for him! Has it been a week, two, three? He has lost track.

Days later, a knock comes on the front door.

Heat flashes up his spine and the hairs on the nape of his neck stand erect. His hands go clammy. His right hand is shaking and his knees feel weak.

Then he thinks: It's just a delivery, a solicitor of some sort. It's nothing. But secretly he knows who it is; who it must be.

“Police, Mr. Kort. Please answer the door. It will spare us both. I don't wish to make a scene and kick your door in, and you don't wish to repair it.” The voice waits. Kort looks around. There must be someplace to hide. He can't think straight. His feet won't move. Some spittle runs from the corner of his mouth. He wipes it off on his sleeve and thinks what a pitiful murderer he is. He should be plotting a way out, not trembling like an idiot. “Please,” comes the voice.

That's all it takes: Kort reaches out and turns the doorknob.

The man is big. He is alone. He holds the doorway like a sentry. Sunlight flames from his shoulders. He speaks. He even shows his identification, but Kort hears only the one word, a word mixed in with all the others:
Inspector
.

Kort considers what it would take to kill the man. There's only one of him. Invite him in. Make it happen. Get far, far away. Is it possible.

“It is not what you're thinking,” the man says. “Believe me, I know what you are thinking. I have done this before, Mr. Kort. You have not. To every problem there is a solution, to every solution, negotiation. At least in my business.” He steps through the door and presses close to Kort as he swings the door closed. “Open some windows, please. It stinks in here.” When Kort doesn't move, the man repeats, “Open some windows, please.” He walks past Kort and does it himself. Kort is standing, staring at the front door. Just on the other side of that door …

“I am conducting the investigation into the murder of Joseph Eisher. Would you like a cigarette?” Kort reaches out and accepts one from the man, who then lights it for him. It is this taste he always remembers. “I am here to arrest you for that murder.”