Chapter 17
The Detective's Basement
Detective Lorne Pratt left the card game at ten minutes to two, three hundred and forty dollars richer, humming.
He came out of the side door of the Anvil with his coat over his arm and a toothpick between his teeth, a short, heavy, florid man of fifty-five with a gray brush cut and a belly that strained the buttons of a good white shirt. The alley behind the club was dark and wet. A single lamp burned over the door, and under it the rain fell in long gold threads. He stopped and turned up his collar. He fished in his pocket for his keys. Then, with the large complacent sigh of a man who has been told, correctly, that he is sure to be forgiven, he set off down the alley toward the place where he had left his car.
He did not hear the man behind him.
Damen had been in the doorway of the next building for three hours. He had stood in the cold with his back against the brick, in a long black raincoat that Varga's people had found him, with a dead man's gray suit under it, and the revolver in his right pocket, and he had not moved. The rain had run off the brim of his hat. A cat had come and sat at his feet, and left. He had watched the players arrive, one after another: a judge, a lawyer, a fat man in a tracksuit who owned a string of laundromats. A harbor pilot. A priest. The detective had come last, in a battered gray Chevrolet, at five to eleven, with a pat on the shoulder for every man at the door.
Now he walked, and Damen walked behind him.
It was a thing he could do. He had done it for eleven years. There is a way of following a man so that the man does not know, and it has nothing to do with silence. It has to do with rhythm. You match his step. You breathe when he breathes. You let your footfall fall exactly on his, so that his ear, which is listening for a second sound, hears only one. In the mouth of the alley, under the last lamp, Damen put his left hand around the back of the detective's neck, and pressed his thumb into the nerve below the ear.
"Evening, Lorne," he said.
The man went rigid. A shudder ran through him, from the scalp to the heels. The toothpick fell from his lip.
"Don't turn round."
"Who is—"
"I'm going to take your gun. You're going to let me. Then we're going to walk to your car, and you're going to drive me home."
"I've got a badge."
"I know. It's in your left breast pocket. I won't hurt it."
A pause. A thin hot breath. The detective's voice, when it came, was quite different, high and stifled and queerly boyish. "Knox," he said. "Oh, Christ. Knox."
"Yes."
"They said you were dead."
"I've heard," said Damen.
He lived in Redfield Heights, in a gabled brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a lawn like a billiard table and a wrought-iron fence. It stood in a row of others like it. It was the kind of house that a policeman buys with more money than a policeman has, and Pratt had never troubled to hide the fact. There was a basketball hoop on the garage, though he had no son. There was a rose garden. In the front window, behind a lace curtain, a lamp burned.
His wife was away, visiting her sister in Tampa. He had said so at the card game. He had said it loudly, with relish, over a hand of cards. The house to myself, he had said, for ten whole days.
Damen had listened from the alley.
They went in by the kitchen. He pushed the man ahead of him, with a hand on the collar, across a bright new expanse of granite, past a refrigerator the size of a wardrobe, and down a carpeted flight of stairs into a long, warm, softly lit basement. It had been fitted out as a music room. There was a baby grand piano, black and gleaming, with a lace runner. There were bookshelves filled with sheet music. On a stand by the window stood a small honey-colored violin in an open case, and beside it a framed photograph of a thin, solemn, freckled girl with her hair in two plaits, holding a bow like a scepter.
"Sit," said Damen.
"You don't want to do this."
"Sit."
"I've got a family. I have a daughter. You don't touch her. You don't say her—"
"Sit down, Lorne."
The detective sat. He sat on the piano bench, heavily, with his hands on his knees, and the sweat stood in beads along his gray hairline. He had been pale in the alley. In the warm light he was the color of tallow. He kept looking at the stairs, and at Damen's raincoat, and at the dark mouth of the revolver, now held low and easy at the level of his belt.
Damen did not look at the photograph.
He did not look at it deliberately. He walked once round the room, in the long raincoat, with his splinted arm held against his chest, and let his eyes pass over the things in it: the music stands, the shelves, the dim framed prints, a child's drawing pinned to the corkboard of a house with a smoking chimney. He stopped beside the piano. On the closed lid, between a metronome and a glass vase of silk roses, stood a small pyramid of black walnut with a gilt pendulum and a key on the side. A beautiful old thing. An antique. A girl's.
He reached out, and touched the key.
"Does she practice here?"
"Don't."
"Every day?"
"I'm asking you, as a man—"
"Yes or no."
"Yes!" The word cracked. "Yes, every day. When she's home. It's only the summers. She's at school, at the Whitmore, in Vermont. She's twelve."
"I know."
Pratt's face changed.
It went suddenly slack. The eyes widened, the mouth opened a little; the large damp fingers on his knees began, very slowly, to tremble. He looked, for the first time, at the thing in Damen's expression, and what he saw there was not anger. It was a look of terrible, empty, impersonal patience, like the face of a man waiting at a bus stop for a bus that had been scheduled long ago and would, he knew, arrive.
"Please," said Lorne Pratt.
Damen lifted the pendulum arm, and set it swinging.
The sound was very small. A soft regular wooden tock. It filled the basement like a heartbeat, from corner to corner, and the gilt weight swung on its rod, left, right, left, in the lamplight, as steady as a drip.
"They call me the Metronome," said Damen. "Do you know why?"
"I've heard it."
"Tell me."
"You never hurry." The man's voice was whispering. "You never miss. You come at the same time each day and you leave at the same time, and you don't stop for anything, and you don't make a mistake. They say that when you walk into a room, it's like someone's started a clock."
"That's near enough."
"They say you don't enjoy it."
"No."
"They say you do it because it's right. Because it's the next thing."
"Yes," said Damen. "That's the part I'd like you to understand."
Tock. The pendulum swung.
"I am going to ask you a series of questions. I am going to ask them one at a time, at the speed of that clock. I will wait for the answer. If I do not get one before the next beat, I will cut off a piece of you." He said it without emphasis, in his usual flat even voice. He took from his pocket a short black knife, the one he had taken from Vance's boot, and laid it on the lid of the piano beside the roses. "I will begin with the smallest. I'd like to avoid reaching the larger ones. I have a daughter, too."
Tock.
"You're bluffing," whispered the detective.
"Am I?"
Tock.
"You're a family man. I looked you up. You're, you've got a wife, you've got a little girl, you're not a—"
"Where is Joseph Calloway?"
"What?"
Tock.
"I—" The man's mouth worked. His eyes fixed on the knife. "I don't know a Joseph—"
Damen picked up the knife.
He did it without haste. He walked round the end of the bench, and took the large damp hand from the detective's knee, and spread it flat on the piano lid. He placed the point of the blade at the first joint of the little finger. He looked at the pendulum.
Tock.
"Pier Six!" It came out in a shriek. "Cold storage! The big yellow warehouse, on the north side! In the freezer! The old cold room, it's not working, they keep him in the, in the office!"
"Thank you."
"For God's sake, I've told you!"
"Yes." The blade did not move. "That was the first question. It was worth a finger. You've bought it back." Damen lifted the knife a quarter inch. "The second is: how many men does Mercer have at the cannery?"
Tock.
It took forty minutes.
It was a strange thing, and a terrible one, and afterward Damen would never be able to tell exactly what had happened in that room. He knew only that it had been very quiet. The pendulum had swung, left and right, the sweet wooden beat filling the basement, and the man on the piano bench had answered. He had answered in a whining, pleading, babbling rush. He had given names, and numbers, and addresses, and the make of a car. He had wept. He had begged to be allowed to call his priest. Twice, he had hesitated, a half second too long; and Damen had laid the blade against the back of the broad hand and pressed down, and the room had filled with a high, thin, keening sound that was a long time dying.
He had cut him twice.
It was not much. A thumb joint, to the bone. The tip of the ring finger. He had bandaged them himself, afterward, in the kitchen, with a dishtowel and tape, in grim silence, and the man had sat in a chair with his shattered hand in his lap and stared at the wall.
He had learned a great deal.
He had learned that Mercer commanded forty-three men, of whom nineteen were at the cannery at any hour, in three shifts, and that the rest were scattered across the Docks in rented rooms. He had learned that the Table, the seven who ran the Group under Strand, had been told on Friday that the old man would not live past Christmas, and that two of them had already begun to sound out the others. He had learned that the Table's seventh seat, the chair at the head, had never been filled in his lifetime; that Strand referred to it only as the Chair, and spoke of its occupant as of a figure in a dream; that nobody, nobody, in forty years, had ever claimed to have seen him.
And he had learned a thing about Wren.
"She's flagged," Pratt had said, in a breathless sob, with the pendulum swinging. "Since Friday. It's a BOLO. We put it out as a stolen-prescription thing. A nursing student, a pharmacy theft, twenty thousand in Oxycodone. It's nonsense. Mercer asked me to. It means that any cop in the state who sees her can pick her up and hold her for twenty-four hours without a lawyer."
"And then?"
"And then a call comes in. And a car arrives." The man had looked up with swimming eyes. "I swear to God, Knox, that's all I know. They wanted her quietly. In the system. Nobody's supposed to get hurt."
"Where is she?"
"I don't know."
"Tick," said Damen.
"I don't know! She isn't at her apartment. They've been, twice, two of Mercer's, with a warrant. She hasn't been seen since Friday morning. The girls she lives with said she packed a bag and left a note. They said she'd gone to see a friend." The detective was crying openly. "Millbrook's a big place. She could be anywhere. Please. Please. I swear on my daughter's life."
Damen stopped the pendulum.
He did it with two fingers, laying them on the swinging weight, and the sound ceased. The basement was suddenly vast and quiet. He heard the refrigerator hum upstairs, and the tick of the radiator, and the quick high sob of the man on the bench.
He did not look at the photograph on the piano.
"Don't swear on her life," he said, "to me."
He found the thing at half past three, in the study upstairs, in a locked drawer.
It was a notebook. A small, black, cheap one, held shut by a rubber band, kept in a hollowed dictionary at the back of a shelf; the sort of thing that a man like Lorne Pratt kept for the day he might need it. He took it to the kitchen table and sat under the hanging lamp and read it. Twenty years of entries, in a cramped sloping hand. Dates, sums, names. A coded record of every payment he had ever received from the Group, and every favor he had done for it. He turned the pages slowly. Against the bright sound of the refrigerator, against the dark window, he read what was in effect the confession of a man's life, and found that it did not move him at all.
In the back, on a loose sheet folded in four, was a list.
Seven names. Beside each a title and a number. J. Harlan, Judge. C. Boyd, Commissioner. M. Reyes, Harbor Board. Beneath them, in a different ink, a note, scrawled across the bottom of the page in capital letters: THE EXCHANGE. TUES. MIDNIGHT. NET LOFT. HE COMES ALONE.
Damen sat for a long time without moving.
Tuesday, he thought. Midnight.
He's already told Pratt the terms.
He folded the page and put it in his coat. He sat a moment more. Then he rose, and went to the door of the kitchen, and looked back along the length of the house, through the dim hall, to the head of the basement stairs. A thin yellow light came up them. In it, he could see the end of the piano, and the case of the violin, and a small framed photograph with a pair of plaits.
Twelve years old.
He thought of a child in a bathtub under a pillow. A small hand held up in the glare of the lights, five fingers spread. He thought, with great clarity, as one thinks of a stranger: What have I just done?
He had used a metronome. He had stood in a girl's music room and used her instrument to terrify her father. He had known it would work, and he had done it, with a cold practiced precision that he had not known he still possessed. Not in anger. Not even in need. He had done it because it was the efficient thing. And somewhere in the middle, with the blade on the man's finger and the little gilt weight swinging in the lamplight, he had felt a thing so familiar and so awful that he had nearly dropped the knife: an easy, level, bottomless calm.
It's like putting on an old coat, said the voice. It still fits.
That's not the worst thing about it.
What is?
That you're good at it, said the voice, quite gently. That you've always been good at it. That it was never the job you hated. It was being seen.
He stood in the kitchen with the paper in his hand. Then he walked down the stairs, past the piano, and bent over the man on the bench.
Pratt looked up. He was gray. His maimed hand lay in his lap in its rag, and his lips were blue. He did not flinch.
"Here's what you'll do," said Damen. "You'll take your wife's car and drive to Vermont. You'll collect your daughter from school and take her to your sister-in-law in Tampa. You'll stay there. You will not call the station. You will not call Mercer. You will not call anyone." His voice was quiet. "If you do, I'll know. And the next time, I won't use the knife."
"I'll go."
"You'll go tonight."
"Yes."
"And Lorne."
"Yes?"
"If I ever hear you've gone back," said Damen, "I will come and sit in this room again. And I will start the clock."
He turned. He went up the stairs without looking back, through the quiet kitchen, out into the cold wet dawn. The rain had stopped. A pale bar of yellow lay along the eastern rooftops. A blackbird, somewhere in the Heights, was beginning, tentatively, to sing.
He stood on the lawn in the long black coat with the hat pulled down over his eyes. Behind him in the house a car door slammed, an engine caught, tires screeched on the drive. He did not turn. In his pocket, folded in four, a list of seven names lay against his hip, and a time, and a place, and a single sentence.
He comes alone.
And in the long, quiet, golden stillness of a Monday morning, with fifty-eight hours left to run, the Metronome began, at last, to walk.