Under Radar (7 page)

Rosalie asked them to pose for a picture. The snapshot is on a wall somewhere, even today; Tom between his daughters, leaning over to fit the frame.

Tom then let go of the girls and walked to the ledge. Barry Seckler kicked through the water and stood beside him, certain that the castigation of the night before, in his view justifiable though unnecessary, was over, and that the trip today had brought the men into a friendship that might last. Tom said to him, “What you did to my daughter.”

“What?” asked Seckler, who looked hard into Tom's eyes, seeing, Tom was sure, how sad and remote they were, and then how dangerous.

Tom mumbled, “What you did to my daughter. You should not have made her dance.”

“I thought we were over this.”

“No.”

“Come on, man, it was a mistake. I told you that. She's fine. Look at her.”

Tom put a hand on Seckler's arm. Seckler now saw in his eyes the mournful resolve of an error gone too far for restoration. Tom thought, I can die here. This can kill me, too.

Tom pushed Seckler to the edge. Tom had the advantage; his foot was braced against a rock, and Seckler was slipping in the swift-moving water.

“Don't do this,” said Barry.

“What?”

“I think you want to kill me.”

“I don't know what else to do.”

“I can help you.”

“It's too late.”

Seckler cried out, “Help! He's killing me! Help me!” He sounded like what he was, a man about to die, a man frightened for his life, a child.

“This is for my daughter,” said Tom.

Later, someone would say that from the next step up the falls, the two men looked like friends having fun; what had been desperate was seen as exuberant pleasure.

Barry Seckler dropped forty feet, breaking open his head. As he fell, everyone watching heard his anguish, the
agonal cry of a man knowing that at the end of this, his children would lose their father.

Debra Seckler grabbed her children and pushed them away from the edge. In fractions of seconds, up and down the line of tourists, the word went out that something terrible had happened.

Rosalie, Alma, and Perri saw what happened. They had never seen Tom fight before.

It was understood that this was a murder and not an accident.

There he was, dead in the water. The difficult climb up the rocks from that pool was harder going down. Debra could not find a hold, and kind people lifted her away from the rocks and lowered her, passing her along from hand to hand. Those who touched her would remember their meticulous intention, only to help her, and the reward of a sensation of intense honesty.

Barry was face down. Debra, beside him, asked for help, and from a watchful crowd of young Jamaican men, two stepped forward, and then all, and they turned him over. The cracked side of his head seeped blood. She lifted his head out of the water and cupped a hand and washed the wound with water. She looked up and met Tom's eyes. Tom was surrounded by Jamaicans and tourists.

She kissed her fat dead husband's lips, and cried to him, and sang. Tom couldn't hear the song over the water.

Tom hated everything, the sullen beauty of the falls, the easy way that the tropics delivered clarity. Tom
thought: I never understood the world until now. I never understood the danger of evil until now.

I was a good man who did one thing wrong. Then he thought, More than one.

...

Children cried, “Daddy!” The voices of his daughters, the voices of Rita and Adam Seckler, who were in the lower pool. Tom leaned over the edge of the cliff to get a better view, but then the men crowding around him pulled him away, fearing that he would jump.

I won't jump, he could have told them, but who would have believed him, and why be reasonable now? He could toss them an apology like a chunk of meat, watch the apology rise and fall on a parabola of their anticipation and then disappointment at such a meager offering. Better to stay silent and keep them entertained by their fantasies of what he should or might do now that they had him on the way to prison.

All of this happened at once: James the driver was called by the river guides. James brought a woman from the ticket booth who gently coached the Seckler children away from the body and led them to the side of the river, where others lifted them out of the water. There was a policeman in the water, his pants rolled up, and someone gave him a video camera. The policeman, and others, watched the playback on the camera's screen, and Tom understood that they were looking at him pushing
Barry Seckler to his death. At the same time, Rosalie, with the girls beside her, cried out, “Why, Tom, why?”

This delighted the crowd. A voice from the hill added in mockery, “Why, Tom, why?”

The people around him also wanted to know. “Why did you push that man, sir?”

“I'm sorry,” Tom said again. It was too complicated. He might have said, “He made my daughter dance. He asked my daughter to dance, and who knows when the degradation of what happened to her will work its way into action? Should I wait thirty years, and if she turns into a junkie, should I track him down and kill him then? You don't know that she wasn't ruined by what happened last night.” But he couldn't say this. It wasn't the knight in armor on the horse. It was neoprene boots with felt soles. It was the video camera with the thing on the side where you look at the picture. The thing, the little screen, and bad sound. The viewing-screen thing. That's what it was.

The crowd's sound lost its definition. The men guarding Tom opened a breach in their wall around him to let the police through. The men closest to Tom took his hands and pulled on his arms, as though a white man in a bathing suit could be dangerous.

But I am dangerous, thought Tom. I just killed a man. This thought impressed itself heavily with the advent of the police, dropping Tom to his knees, and the men around him yanked him to his feet. He dropped again, hurting his knees on the rocks in the cold water.

I'm scared, thought Tom. I am now frightened to death. I have never been so scared of anything in my life. And I am making a fool of myself in front of the policemen. In America, the police would have asked the men holding Tom to let him go. They would have threatened the volunteer guards with nightsticks, but this was not America, Tom knew that, this was a place where a crowd could hold a man and hurt him, pull his arms hard when he falls to his knees, and the police would allow it. Klaxons sounded. Tom liked the two-note call, it reminded him of movies with the French resistance and the alarm made when the gestapo arrives. In movies, the message of the Klaxon is death. In Jamaica, this Klaxon brought an ambulance and a gurney, and the men who rolled Barry Seckler's enormous body onto a stretcher. They couldn't expect the stretcher to hold his weight, but it helped. Four men to each side, floating him into deeper water, where they could slip the litter beneath him. Tom would have liked to watch the rest of the effort, but he was taken away to the riverbank.

“What is your name?” a policeman asked him.

“Tom Levy.”

“And where are you from?”

“America.”

“And where are you staying in Jamaica?”

“The Montego House.”

“These people say that you pushed that man over the falls. I saw the videotape. It looks as though you did. Can you tell me what happened?”

“I'd like to speak to a lawyer.”

“Last night at the Montego House, you had a bad word with this man. Why? What happened last night, Mr. Levy?”

“He made advances at my daughter.”

“Could you explain what you mean?”

“He made my daughter dance.”

“Did he touch your daughter?”

“He made her dance like a whore.”

...

Rosalie stood alone in the water with Perri and Alma. No one was helping them. Somewhere, someone gave relief to Debra Seckler and her two children, but no one there even knew that the killer's wife watched the arrest of her husband.

The police pulled Tom to the hillside, where the crowd had flattened the bushes and grasses. His feet slipped, and he fell on his face. He was covered in mud, he was filthy, and the police were filthy, too, and mad about it. Tom saw Rosalie. “Rosalie, Rosalie, I'm sorry.”

She kept moving with the girls and would not look back, she would not let him turn her into a pillar of salt. Little Alma looked back, and so did Perri. He would have raised a hand to let them draw comfort and hope from a confident gesture, but his arms were bound.

The police lifted Tom and handed him up the hill to more Jamaicans, the poor men who wanted only to
work, and even this unpaid labor answered their needs for effort with purpose. Tom gave himself to the men who lifted him, and let his body help them by now holding a leg stiff, now tilting his head away so a hand could better wrap around the back of his neck.

Fog over everything. Too much pleasure in the obscurity of the day. This is what I asked for. This is what I came here to do. I have erased so much of my life that I am blind. There is only the rushing sound of the waterfalls, which could be just the sound of the blood in my ears. There is temperature, the afternoon heat, with a pledge of rain, with a thin slice of electricity in the taste of the air. There is gravity, because I am not floating away. But there is nothing to see.

The police pushed Tom into the backseat of a car.

“Open your eyes, please, sir,” said one of them.

Tom obliged. It made no difference. His eyes worked but to no purpose. All of his opinions, theories, and field notes, the murky half-toned ideas that float on the periphery of language, all of this rushed away from him, chased off the property by a barking horde of mistakes. He saw road and trees and the sea between the trees and past the road, and the romance and pity of the place meant nothing, either version of the island equally valid and equally pointless.

At the Ocho Rios police station, they gave him dry clothing, a blue prison shirt and blue pants. He was put into a cell, alone.

A new man came into his life, shining, dark, confident, with merry eyes, a man of patience and authority. “I am Captain Dekker of the police.”

“Tom Levy.”

“Well, well, well, Mr. Levy. So you have a fight in the falls, and the man dies. You pushed him, and we have this on videotape. What were you thinking, Mr. Levy?”

“I made a mistake.”

“Yes you did.”

“No. No, no, no, no, no. I should have killed the singer.”

...

Seven months later, Tom Levy was in prison in Kingston, sentenced for the rest of his life.

The trial was short, nine days. His parents sat behind him in the courtroom and paid his lawyer well, but Tom offered no defense.

His family came for a last visit when the trial was over, Rosalie with the girls and his mother and father and his sister. He was allowed to hug them. No one could say anything that made sense. His mother and father, who had once been so specific, spoke to him in generic bromides. “Why, Tom, why?” But what else could they say? As he stood there, answering, “I don't know,” not wanting to explain himself anymore, he stared at them and forgot what they looked like.

His sister spoke to him privately. “You don't know the damage that you've done. I couldn't even tell you what I feel. The world has exhausted all analogies.”

“You could try.”

“No.”

“It might be a kindness. I need charity.”

“No. You need to say that you need charity. Charity, for you, Tom, is another bead in your chain of little strategies. I've been watching you since you were five. You, Tom, are an undercover agent.”

“And who runs me?”

“I did not call you a spy, because spies are powerless messengers, single-purpose demons or angels turned on and off as the need for them requires.”

“Undercover with what agency of what government?”

“The world of crime. You're an ambassador from the world of crime.”

“Undercover agent or ambassador?”

“Did I say ambassador?”

“Yes.”

“Then, Tom, I'll stay with both opinions, agent and ambassador together. The agent hides while the ambassador enters through the front door, and the agent leaves without turning his back. He can never reveal his true purpose. The ambassador presents his papers. You're the assassin who got caught. You're on trial for the murder of a man you didn't know.”

“I knew him.”

“This murder was not your first evil deed. I saw you falling into crime when you were a little boy. It hurt you more not to steal than it hurt the other boys. You wanted to steal money from Mom's purse, rubbers from Dad's drawers.”

“How did you know?”

“Moses killed an Egyptian. It says in the Bible that he saw an Egyptian beating up a Hebrew, and when he looked this way and that and saw no one, then he killed the Egyptian. Sometime later he found two Hebrew slaves fighting, and he told them to stop, and they said, ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to kill us the way you killed the Egyptian?' You didn't know I was watching, but I was there. I know you.”

“Will you look after Rosalie and the girls?”

“Of course I will. I love them. I'm going to spend as much time with the girls as I can, and I'm going to do right by this side of the family. I'm going to help Rosalie make a new life, help her find a job, and find a good father for the girls.”

...

During the trial, remanded to the district's small jail, protected, a little, by his American passport but knowing that prison was certain, Tom looked hopefully, even eagerly, ahead to an ecstatic boredom, a concentration of misery made enlightening as the resolving experience of
his life. After three months in the Spanish Town Prison, around the bay from Kingston, to his surprise and disappointment, the day of his sentencing was not, he feared, and never would be, the division between before and after. Prison, in the beginning, was just the next place he went to after the place he had been before. Some days were good, some days were bad.