Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (9 page)

“Just a few more minutes, Grandpa. It’s not even dark yet. Can we listen to some more Benny Green?”

And she sat back there in the lassitude of a full, complete day, listening to Benny’s slow, sweet piano, feeling a little guilty she wasn’t scrubbing pots, scouring floors, or sorting sheets in a big house nearly a thousand miles away. And she did fall asleep there in the big chair, and her grandfather carried her upstairs to bed, resting a slender sprig of new jasmine on the pillow next to her.

*

Mercedes woke with a gasp and a small cry, folding over herself in the big bed. She clutched at her stomach, but the phantom pain had flickered away before she could be sure it was real. Her disorientation lasted a few seconds more, before she could remember where she was. The unfamiliar slant of the ceiling above her and the alien position of the window lent her a disjointed feeling. She swung her feet to the floor and sat up in the dark, further surprised to find herself still in her clothes from the night before.

She dreaded dreaming about her parents. She was a little girl again, standing in front of their big new house in Palo Alto, the house they’d moved into just after her mom and dad had received their last, big raises together at the lab. Everything was identical to the day they’d moved in except that she was too young by several years. That was how her dreams usually went.

Mercedes the child stood on the front step, clutching her stuffed cat doll, and watched as smoke and clouds roared over the house, seemingly just a few feet above the peak of the roof. In the sudden twilight, she’d noticed that there were no lights on in the house. She ran from window to window, and from door to door, but the big house was as black and unrelenting inside as a tomb.

In the dream, a heavy ache had suddenly blossomed in her middle, and when she woke up and saw the canted, shadowed ceiling above, she’d thought for one irrational second she’d awakened inside that stark, black house of her dream.

She rolled toward the lighter rectangle of darkness that marked the window, and pushed it open. The fresh, slightly chilly air washed over her pale face; fingered through the sweat-damp hair at the base of her neck. A tiny, white light winked into existence out in the night. It blinked twice at her, then grew in intensity before subsiding to a thin beacon.

Mercedes reached for the lamp, then decided against it. The backlit hands of her watch showed it was only a few minutes after four o’clock. In the darkness she found her suitcase and put on her light denim jacket. Mercedes needed to get out of that bedroom, get out of her grandparents’ house, if only for a few minutes.

Her head was almost clear by the time she eased out the front door. Not even locked, she noticed with a smile. Her white sneakers were silent on the black pavement. Mercedes made her way toward the little light she’d seen come on over the dark slanting roofs of the subdivision. It was a beautiful neighborhood, compact and green. Broad, tree-lined streets like you’d expect to see in a Norman Rockwell painting. Everything hushed. She realized she felt like she needed to whisper.

When she reached the park a few blocks away, Mercedes aimed for the broad, manicured fields where soccer was played, and for the flat baseball diamond instead of the clustered trees. Even if nobody locked their doors in Forge, it went totally against Mercedes’ grain to even consider strolling through the patches of dark green dimness where the feeble park lights stood eclipsed.

The light was coming from the pool on the hill at the center of the park. As Mercedes drew closer, she saw that someone had set a spotlight on the top of the platform, and had angled it and taped it so that it shone down in a slanting, elongated strip of incandescent light on the water below. Someone was swimming.

Lap after lap his stroke never slowed. Instead of gripping the rough gutter at the pool’s edge to haul himself around, the young man did a quick flipturn, somersaulting with barely a splash and tapping his feet on the wall just long enough to rocket back in the opposite direction. Mercedes almost walked on past the park, but then realized the young man was swimming alone. What an idiot. If something were to happen to him, like a cramp or if he hit his head on the wall—great. Mercedes had had enough of babysitting for one day; she didn’t need this. Better to walk on, she told herself, maybe think further about the meaning of her dream.

But as she passed the single small pickup truck in the parking lot, she found herself turning and walking to the front entrance of the pool building. If he’s locked himself in, she thought, there’s nothing I can do.

To her chagrin, the door stood wide open.

This is dumb, she thought, walking through the darkened dressing room. Just an embarrassment to herself and whoever this was who’d decided to take a moonlit, excuse me,
spotlit
swim in the middle of the night.

He’d rolled back one of the plastic insulation covers, and thick steam boiled up in his wake. There was a grace to his long, sharp strokes, and the smooth rotation of his shoulders bespoke an economy of movement common to those who spend most of their summers staring at the bottom of a pool. Mercedes sat on a folding chair and watched him swim. He cut precisely down the middle of the bright pathway delineated by the light above him. Mercedes noticed his hands entered and left the water at exactly the same angle each time.

Against the rhythmic patterns of the young man’s strokes, Mercedes realized she could hear—music? It was a muffled, throbbing beat, interspersed with jangling guitar. She looked for nearly a minute before noticing the source of the garbled, almost inaudible tone. There at the edge of the water, next to a digital clock, lay a small MP3 player wrapped in a ziplock bag and duct tape. A thick cord ran from the bag into the water. Now I know this guy’s an idiot, she thought. Headline: Illegal swimmer electrocutes self with digital audio player, Death by U2.

At the far end of the pool, he stopped, bobbing slightly as his own wake caught up with him. Before Mercedes could think of an excuse for being on the deck with him at four in the morning (‘Excuse me, sir, I was looking for my pet octopus, Oscar.’ Or, ‘Pardon me, didn’t notice you were here?’) he gripped the edge of a diving block and drew himself out of the water. At the edge of the light, the young man looked more unreal; unearthly. He snatched up a small box and stood on the block. As he curled his toes over the edge and flexed his arms down around the block, the light shone down on his wet skin and limned him in platinum fire. He looked perfect. Half silver and half black. He tucked his head and tightened down into a racing start, and the grooves appeared again across his back. Pockets of smooth shadow.

Mercedes had never been so fully, completely aware of another human being in her entire life. A pearly, feathery sheen shimmered across him as he inhaled, then, as he evenly blew the air out, shimmered back again. Water dropped from him like glittering bits of diamond.

He leaned forward, then erupted from his racing start, body tensing and releasing in a wonderful arch that carried him across the water and then down into it. He’d flung his head up as he dove, and Mercedes was sure he’d seen her.

A low beep issued from the digital clock at the edge of the pool, and the yellow-green numbers began marching up from zero.

Mercedes smiled, realizing she’d been holding her breath. She stood, and watched as he rippled like a shadow beneath the surface. He came up after nearly half the length of the pool, swimming breaststroke, gathering great armfuls of water to himself and pushing them behind with a powerful, sweeping kick. There was more strength than grace in his stroke, but Mercedes couldn’t help but notice the sinuous symmetry in his reaching arms and bending shoulders. Four laps, and his speed increased with each. As he rebounded from the wall nearest her, Mercedes stood and walked along the edge of the deck, keeping pace with him.

At the far end he gave one last lunge, then reach-slammed into the gray pad affixed to the wall. Breathing hard, he twisted in his wake and looked to the digital clock. “Ah, man,” he exhaled. He slipped his goggles off and glared at the clock again, muttering to himself.

Mercedes smiled. “Not fast enough?”

He still looked toward the clock. “Not quite, no. I’ve got to shave off another two-and-a-half seconds, at least; maybe if I pop my start more, instead of leaning out, or hold the streamline off my turns. It’s a shortcourse meet, so–hey!” His eyes snapped up, and he gulped air. “What–who are you doing here?”

His astonishment nearly made her laugh aloud. “Huh? Could you repeat the question?” As he hauled himself from the water she handed him the towel she’d found. “You left the door open, and anyway, you’re not supposed to swim alone. What kind of lifeguard are you? I’ll bet you didn’t even shower before going in.”

The young man started to say something, then blinked at her. He took a step back. Mercedes liked his dark eyes; they seemed to twinkle-glitter in the half-light, and she could tell he was thinking at a tremendous rate. He wiped the water from his hand, then extended it.

“Let’s try that again. My name’s Jack.” White, straight teeth on the horizon of his smile.

Mercedes took his hand firmly. It was softer than she had expected. “Nice to meet you, Jack.”

And that was the first time she met Jack Flynn.

Miklos

Washington D.C.

6PM

Gary Gledhill loosened his tie as soon as he crossed the threshold and closed the door at his back. There were always more reporters. Some days crossing the street from the Capitol to the Dirksen Building was as close to a marathon as he could come after 13 years in office. After today’s farce in the Senate, the newsboys and-girls hadn’t let up.

So what if the administration was funneling more money into the Central American and Caribbean projects? Did that idiot from the
Post
expect him to stop and explain the math every time?

His staff was all at lunch. Gledhill found the sandwiches and Aquafina in the little refrigerator under one corner of his desk, and planted them next to the stack of the afternoon’s reading material. His newer office was smaller than the old, chilly rooms in the Hart building but even so, the senator found it harder to keep track of paperwork. At least he didn’t have to walk past that horrible Mountains and Clouds sculpture in the Hart atrium anymore.

There was a brief he needed to go over before the day was gone, a situation paper on the Caribbean emailed to him earlier in the day by someone’s aid over at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Gledhill liked the CSIS situation reports, they always felt less watered-down, less secondhand than info passed to him by the State Department. This one was more money for Cuba, essentially. No matter what economic strategy Gledhill and his office proposed, the island would never really be self-sustaining. Miguel Espinosa had only held office 4 years, and everyone expected him to create money from thin air. Cuba was still Cuba. Baseball players and cigars, another beach on which Americans could cook themselves and spend money. It was always the money—almost always. Odd how most people forgot that it was Espinosa himself who’d come to attention for his economic juggling—the
Post
called it compassion--in 1998, thanks to a tropical storm. He’d been the junior bureaucrat responsible for Cuba forgiving the 50 million dollar’s worth of foreign debt that Honduras owed when that country was devastated by Hurricane Mitch, even though the countries were both rivals at the time.

Why did one country’s mercy invariably cost the U.S. hard cash?

The economist leaned into his desk, stretched his back—better do those exercises for the sciatic, like he was supposed to—but he sat and began reviewing the proposed changes to the Afganistan aid package. A good warmup to his work on the Cuba file, the far larger stack on his desk.

Gledhill didn’t simply love his work, he let it nourish him, feed his passion like only anonymous service could, to those who understood it. He spoke to his two children—both in the throes of college—every night, but he saw them rarely. The work, you see, the work. He’d have time for them when the work was done.

The outer offices were so quiet, he almost didn’t hear his office door open. Gledhill mentally placed a bookmark on the column of numbers and glanced up at the solemn stranger.

A question on his lips, Gledhill gasped as the spare, grey man raised a weapon, the sharp intake of breath covering a whispering report. He felt a hot-then-cold sting at the base of his throat, almost like a touch of a cool hand, and shot to his feet—

—and fell, all muscles unclenching at once, into his chair.

Gary Gledhill struggled to breath as the tall stranger approached the desk. The intruder didn’t even bother to close the door, even though broad daylight streamed through the hallway behind him.

I should be able to see that light, he thought, but even keeping the thought coherent was effort. Below his throat, his body rebelled. Shards of glass, no, ice in his veins.

Another figure entered the room. A woman, by the sound of her voice. “Anything we missed?”

The first man, now a collection of grey angles to Gary, spoke from somewhere close. “No. The rest of the staff knows better than to disturb his work. The wife passed away eight years ago. No . . . intern. He’s logged in; get the package.”

The subordinate went to work on the computer as Gary’s chair was moved away from the desk. Something slowed the chair, and he realized his slack heels might be touching the carpet.

The credenza, and pictures of his kids, swam into view briefly, then Gary’s face was caught in a steel vice; no a hand, and he found the original intruder staring into his eyes.

His face was sharp and strong and utterly empty of anything. Sharp cheekbones framed by long, lank hair the color of dust. In another life, Gary might have remembered his face from somewhere, but that didn’t matter now. The face spoke. “Isn’t it nice? Isn’t it liberating, the lack of feeling?” A wisp of curiosity. “Are you afraid?”

Gary struggled to speak, to want to speak.

“Could you be trying to pray?” The face drew nearer, the voice lower, chiding “Why?”

Gledhill found himself, his sense of self, tattering away. He edged his eyes past the ghostly features over him and focused on the pictures of his son, his daughter, and his wife.

His breath ebbed, thinned, trickled away.