Relentless Read online

“Yes, speaking.”

  The caller sounded anxious, harried: “A lot of people think I’m dead, but I’m not.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “So many others are dead. Most days, I wish I were with them.”

  “Who is this?”

  “John Clitherow.”

  I had never met the man or spoken with him on the phone, but I had corresponded with him, exchanging perhaps a dozen long letters. He had written novels that I much admired.

  More than three years ago, he told his publisher he wished to cancel the remaining book on his contract. He intended never to write again. In publishing circles, the assumption was made that he had a terminal disease and wished to keep his struggle private. I wrote him again, but he did not reply. I’d heard that he and his family—his wife, Margaret, and two children—had moved somewhere in Europe.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you on your land line,” he said. “Too dangerous for me, maybe for you, too. Do you have a cell phone?”

  I picked up my cell from the desk. “Yes.”

  “If you’ll give me the number, I’ll ring you back. That’ll be safer for both of us. No matter who he is, what he is, he can’t listen in as easily to a cellular call.” When I hesitated, he said, “Your metaphors are damned well not ponderous.”

  That reference surely had to be to the Waxx review of One O’Clock Jump.

  I gave him the cell-phone number, and after he repeated it, he said, “I’ll call you shortly. I just need to change locations. Give me ten minutes.”

  He hung up, and so did I.

  After staring at the computer for a moment, hardly recognizing the words that I had so recently written to my British editor, I got up and closed the shades at all three windows.

  As I finished lowering the last window shade, my third line rang. According to the caller ID, my agent, Hud Jacklight, wished to speak to me.

  Because of the timing, I assumed this call and Clitherow’s were related, and I picked up.

  “One word,” Hud said. “Short stories.”

  “Those are two words.”

  “Best American. You know it?”

  Disoriented, I said, “Know what?”

  “Short stories. Best American. Of the year.”

  “Sure. The Best American Short Stories. It’s an annual anthology.”

  “Every year. Different guest editor. Next year—you.”

  “I don’t write short stories.”

  “Don’t have to. You select. The contents.”

  “Hud, I don’t have time to read a thousand short stories to find twenty good ones.”

  “Hire someone. To read. Everyone does. Winnow it down for you.”

  “That doesn’t sound ethical.”

  “It’s ethical. If nobody knows.”

  “Besides,” I argued, “the guest editor is always someone who writes short stories.”

  “The publisher and me. We’re pals. Trust me. Very prestigious.”

  “I don’t want to do it, Hud.”

  “It’s a literary thing. You’re a Waxx author. Got to do literary things. Be part of the ‘in’ crowd.”

  “No. That’s not me.”

  “It’s you.”

  “It’s not me.”

  “It’s you. Trust me. I know you.”

  “Don’t try to arrange it,” I warned him. “I won’t do it.”

  “You’re up there now. One of the elite.”

  “No.”

  “You can be in the pantheon.”

  “I’m going to hang up now, Hud.”

  “The American literary pantheon.”

  “Good-bye, Hud.”

  “Wait, wait. So forget short stories. Think—the great one.”

  No matter how much you want to terminate a Hud Jacklight call, astonishment and horror and curiosity often compel you to keep listening.

  “What great one?” I asked.

  “Think The Great Gatsby.”

  “What about it?”

  “Who was the guy? The author?”

  “F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  “Wasn’t it Hemingway?”

  “No. Fitzgerald.”

  “I guess you would know.”

  “Since I’m one of the elite.”

  “Exactly. I’ll talk to them.”

  “Who?”

  “His estate. You’ll write it. The sequel.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You can do it, Cubster. You’re pure talent.” I could not believe that I heard myself bothering to say, “The Great Gatsby doesn’t need a sequel.”

  “Everybody wants to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “What happened next. To Gatsby.”

  “He’s dead at the end of the book.”

  “Bring him back. Think of a way.”

  “I can’t bring him back if he’s dead.”

  “They’re always bringing Dracula back.”

  “Dracula’s a vampire.” “There’s your twist. Gatsby’s a vampire.”

  “Don’t you dare call Fitzgerald’s estate.”

  “You’re at a golden moment, Cubbo.”

  “I hate The Great Gatsby,” I lied. “The pantheon. If you’ll just go for it.”

  “I have to hang up now, Hud.”

  “We gotta exploit the moment.”

  “Maybe we don’t have to.”

  “I’ll keep thinking. About opportunities.”

  “I’m in pain here, Hud. I have to go.”

  “Pain? What pain? What’s wrong?”

  “I have to go. It’s a prostate thing.”

  “Prostate? You’re only forty.”

  “I’m thirty-four, Hud.”

  “Even worse. Hey. Not cancer. Is it?”

  “No. Just an urgent need to pee.”

  “Thank God. I’ll keep thinking.”

  “I know you will, Hud.”

  I hung up.

  Usually, after such a call from Hud Jacklight, I raced to Penny to share the details. Sometimes, that was the end of the workday for both of us, regardless of the hour. We could not get focused again.

  Hud negotiated exceptionally good deals for his clients. I won’t say that was his saving grace, but it was my excuse.

  With John Clitherow’s promised call due at any moment, I was finally convinced of something I had suspected for a long time: God has a sense of humor, and because the world is wondrous, He expects us to find reasons to smile even on the darkest days.

  When the cell phone rang, the voice of Hud Jacklight still ricocheted through my mind, no doubt destroying brain cells the way free-radical molecules damaged body tissue and accelerated the aging process if you didn’t have enough antioxidants in your diet.

  John Clitherow said, “I’m calling you with a disposable phone. I don’t dare have anything in my name anymore. I’ll throw this away and use a different disposable as soon as I hang up. This will most likely be the only call I can make to you, so I’m pleading with you, Cullen, for God’s sake, don’t write me off as a crank.”

  “You’re not a crank,” I said. “You’re a brilliant writer.”

  “I haven’t written a word in over three years, and if five minutes from now I don’t sound like a crank, then I’m doing a piss-poor job of getting the gravity of the situation across to you, because the truth is crazier than a rabid monkey on methamphetamine.”

  “I’ve had some experience of crazy truths,” I said. “Go on.”

  “When Waxx’s review of your new book appeared on Tuesday, I didn’t see it. I only read it a few hours ago. Been trying to get your number ever since. You didn’t take his criticism to heart, I hope. It’s the bile and vomit of an envious and ignorant man, the stench of which he thinks he has disguised with mordant wit, except that his mordancy is no sharper than a sledgehammer and his wit is not wit at all but the raillery of an intellectual fop, a popinjay who wheezes when he thinks he pops.”

  Survival instinct told me to trust John Clitherow. But though I needed to know what
he had to tell me—and perhaps already knew— I was loath to hear it.

  Therefore, in light of recent events, I remained wary, hesitant to say anything against Waxx, lest he be orchestrating this moment, sitting beside Clitherow and listening to my every word. Paranoia had become my default position.

  I said only, “Well, he’s entitled to his opinion.”

  “He has no opinions, not of a considered and analytic nature. He has an agenda,” Clitherow said. “And the first thing you must not do is respond to him.”

  “My wife told me to let it go.”

  “A wise woman. But letting it go might not be enough.”

  “The thing is, I didn’t exactly let it go.”

  Clitherow barely breathed two words in such a way that they were less an expression of dismay than a prayer for a hopeless cause: “Oh, God.”

  Obeying instinct, I told him about lunch at Roxie’s Bistro the previous day—and the moment in the men’s room.

  When I informed him that the critic had spoken one word, he repeated it before I could. “Doom.”

  “How did you know?”

  He became agitated and spoke faster, words spilling from him in anxious torrents: “Cullen, for three years, I’ve continued to read the bastard’s reviews, missed only a few. He’s as inelegant and as jejune when he praises books as he is when he drops his hammer on them. But what he says about your One O’Clock Jump is the first time he’s been that vicious since he assaulted my last book, Mr. Bluebird. He uses several identical phrases in both reviews. He says of you, as he said of me, that you are ‘an extremist of the naïve’ and that you’re incapable of understanding that humankind is ‘a disease of the dust.’ He said of us, separately, that we mistakenly believe ‘it is easy to be solemn but hard to be frolicsome,’ which indeed I do believe, and which I’m sure you believe, a belief supported by the fact that for every thousand solemn novels that thud into bookstores, there’s just one that is both meaningful and frolicsome, that has a sense of wonder, that is astonished by the universe and life, that knows regardless of the vicissitudes of existence, we were born for freedom and for joy and for laughter. Cullen, there are another half dozen things he said of me that he says of you in the identical language, in the same tone of scorn and near outrage. And this makes me afraid for you, very afraid for you and everyone you love.”

  So rapidly and urgently had he spoken that while I followed all he said, I did not fully grasp the darker implications of his words or why, sentence by sentence, his anxiety curdled into anguish.

  John Clitherow paused only to take a deep breath, and he resumed before I could ask a question: “I wrote Waxx’s newspaper, a response to the review of my book. Wasn’t an angry word in it. I kept it brief and humorous—and only noted a couple of the many errors of fact in his summary of the plot. Five days later, my wife and I came home from an evening at the theater. Laurel, the baby-sitter, was asleep on the sofa, and the kids were safe in bed. But after Laurel had gone home, I found my letter to Waxx’s newspaper in my study. It was the original that I had mailed, now pinned to my desk by a knife. The blade of the knife was wet with blood. In the low lamplight, I had seen our cat sleeping on the office sofa, and now I saw the stain under her, and she was not sleeping. Right then the phone rang, and though the caller’s ID was blocked, I took the call. He said only, ‘Doom,’ and hung up. I’d never heard his voice, but I knew it had to be Waxx.”

  Because I was on the cell, no phone cord tethered me to the desk, and I rose from the chair. Sitting, I could not draw a deep breath, for I felt as though a passive posture invited an attack. Movement was imperative, being ready to respond, being watchful.

  “He’s been here,” I told Clitherow, “but I can’t prove it.”

  I described Waxx’s bold intrusion the previous afternoon, when he had toured the house with such nonchalance that it seemed as if he operated under the misapprehension that our home was a public establishment.

  The note of anguish in Clitherow’s voice phased into something colder, what seemed to me to be an icy despair. “Get out of there. Don’t spend another night.”

  Pacing, I quickly told him about the critic’s second visit, the Tasering in the lightless bedroom.

  “Go now,” he said. “Right now. Go somewhere you have no previous connection, somewhere he can’t find you.”

  “That’s more or less the plan. My wife must be almost finished packing. We—”

  “Now,” Clitherow insisted. “You can’t prove he Tasered you. I can’t prove he killed my mother and father, but he did.”

  The air seemed to have thickened, offering such resistance that I came to a halt.

  “I can’t prove he killed Margaret, my wife, but the sonofabitch did. He did. It was him.”

  As he spoke, I stepped out of my study, into the foyer, from which I could see the hallway that served all the ground-floor rooms.

  “I can’t prove he killed Emily and Sarah….” Clitherow’s voice broke on Emily and faltered to a halt on Sarah.

  He’d had two daughters. Both under the age of ten.

  Although much journalism has become advocacy in our time, I read various sources of news for the challenge of sifting the facts from the deceit and the delusion. So many people close to a novelist as well known as John Clitherow could not have suffered untimely deaths without exciting the nose for blood that still can wake a beguiled reporter to recognize genuine injustice. But I had seen nothing about this storm of homicide that tore his life asunder and blew him into hiding.

  If Waxx had visited our house only once, if I had not been Tasered, I might not have believed Clitherow’s claims. His story was cogent, his narrative voice convincing; yet the high body count—and the consequent implication that Waxx was not merely a sociopath of epic proportions but instead virtually a fiend—was flamboyant in a way that his novels never were.

  Recent events reminded me, however, that truth is paradoxical, that it is always stranger than fiction. We invent fiction either to distract ourselves from the world—and thus from the truth of things— or to explain the world to ourselves, but we cannot invent truth, which simply is. Truth, when we recognize it, always surprises us, which is why we so seldom choose to recognize it; we abhor profound surprises and prefer what is familiar, comfortable, undemanding, and pat.

  I didn’t know John well enough to feel his grief as sharply as perhaps I should have, or to grieve properly for him. I had never met him except through the mail, and I had not even seen photos of his wife and daughters.

  Inhibiting grief, of course, my growing apprehension not only darkened my mind and heart but also inspired a physical agitation that drove me into the hallway—then to the sidelights flanking the front door, in expectation of seeing a black Cadillac Escalade in the street.

  In lieu of pity, I felt a nervous sympathy for John, and when I tried—inadequately—to express my condolences, I did so with a commiseration as tender as compassion but more remote and hopeless.

  I don’t think he needed or wanted commiseration. He had lost too much to be able to take consolation from anyone’s sympathy.

  John listened only until he regained his composure. In a voice fractured but not shattered, he interrupted me, speaking with greater urgency than ever: “Waxx has resources that seem supernatural. You can’t overestimate his capabilities. He doesn’t give you breathing room. He keeps coming back and back, and back. He’s relentless. Kill him if he gives you the opportunity, because killing him is your only chance. And don’t think going to the cops will help. Funny things happen when you go to the cops about Waxx. Right now, for God’s sake, just run. Buy yourself time. As soon as you can, abandon your car, don’t use your credit cards or cell phone, don’t give him any way to find you. Get out of there. Get the hell out of there. Go!”

  He terminated the call.

  I keyed in ⋆69, with no expectation that he would answer but with the hope that this call-back function would display his number. If he did not discard his
disposable phone in favor of another, as he said that he would, I might be able to reach him later, when we were safely away from the house.

  He proved to be as cautious as he had urged me to be. He could not be reached by ⋆69, and no number appeared on the screen of my cell phone.

  Turning away from the front-door sidelight and the view of the street, heading toward the stairs, I shouted, “Penny! We gotta go!”

  Her reply came from the ground floor, from the back of the house.

  Off the kitchen, in the laundry room, I found her with a pile of luggage. She was pulling a big wheeled suitcase into the garage.

  I grabbed two bags and followed her. “Something’s happened, it’s worse than we thought.”

  She didn’t waste a precious second asking what the something might be, but instead muscled the suitcase into the back of the Ford Explorer.

  In a crisis, she functioned more like a Boom than a Greenwich, very much the daughter of Grimbald and Clotilda, working quickly but calmly, confident that she would be well out of the zone of destruction when the end of the countdown came.

  Other luggage had already been loaded. With the bags remaining in the laundry room, the cargo space of the SUV would be packed from end to end and side to side.

  “We need to travel light,” I said, as Penny headed back toward the laundry room. “What is all this?”

  Materializing beside me as I shoved two more suitcases into the Explorer, Milo said, “Stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Important stuff.”

  “Your stuff?”

  Suddenly cagey, he said, “Could be.”

  He wore black sneakers with red laces, black jeans, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt on the chest of which, in white block letters, was the word PURPOSE.

  Already, Penny returned, pulling another trunk-size suitcase with wheels.

  “Where’s Lassie?” I asked as I hurried toward the laundry room.

  “Backseat,” Penny said.

  I fetched the last two bags and brought them to the Explorer.

  “There’s one more thing upstairs,” she said.

  “No. Leave it.”

  “Can’t. I’ll be just a minute.”

  “Penny, wait—”

  “You can close the tailgate.” She dashed from the garage into the house.