Czytaj książkę: «Relentless»

Chapter 1

This is a thing I’ve learned: Even with a gun to my head, I am capable of being convulsed with laughter. I am not sure what this extreme capacity for mirth says about me. You’ll have to decide for yourself.

Beginning one night when I was six years old and for twenty-seven years thereafter, good luck was my constant companion. The guardian angel watching over me had done a superb job.

As a reward for his excellent stewardship of my life, perhaps my angel—let’s call him Ralph—was granted a sabbatical. Perhaps he was reassigned. Something sure happened to him for a while during my thirty-fourth year, when darkness found us.

In the days when Ralph was diligently on the job, I met and courted Penny Boom. I was twenty-four and she was twenty-three.

Women as beautiful as Penny previously looked through me. Oh, occasionally they looked at me, but as though I reminded them of something they had seen once in a book of exotic fungi, something they had never expected—or wished—to see in real life.

She was also too smart and too witty and too graceful to waste her time with a guy like me, so I can only assume that a supernatural power coerced her into marrying me. In my mind’s eye, I see Ralph kneeling beside Penny’s bed while she slept, whispering, “He’s the one for you, he’s the one for you, no matter how absurd that concept may seem at this moment, he really is the one for you.”

We were married more than three years when she gave birth to Milo, who is fortunate to have his mother’s blue eyes and black hair.

Our preferred name for our son was Alexander. Penny’s mother, Clotilda—who is named Nancy on her birth certificate—threatened that if we did not call him Milo, she would blow her brains out.

Penny’s father, Grimbald—whose parents named him Larry—insisted that he would not clean up after such a suicide, and neither Penny nor I had the stomach for the job. So Alexander became Milo.

I am told that the family’s surname really is Boom and that they come from a long line of Dutch merchants. When I ask what commodity his ancestors sold, Grimbald becomes solemn and evasive, and Clotilda pretends that she is deaf.

My name is Cullen Greenwich—pronounced gren-itch, like the town in Connecticut. Since I was a little boy, most people have called me Cubby.

When I first dated Penny, her mom tried calling me Hildebrand, but I would have none of it.

Hildebrand is from the Old German, and means “battle torch” or “battle sword.” Clotilda is fond of power names, except in the case of our son, when she was prepared to self-destruct if we didn’t give him a name that meant “beloved and gentle.”

Our friend and internist, Dr. Jubal Frost, who delivered Milo, swears that the boy never cried at birth, that he was born smiling. In fact, Jubal says our infant softly hummed a tune, on and off, in the delivery room.

Although I was present at the birth, I have no memory of Milo’s musical performance because I fainted. Penny does not remember it either, because, although conscious, she was distracted by the post-partum hemorrhaging that had caused me to pass out.

I do not doubt Jubal Frost’s story. Milo has always been full of surprises. For good reason, his nickname is Spooky.

On his third birthday, Milo declared, “We’re gonna rescue a doggy.”

Penny and I assumed he was acting out something he had seen on TV, but he was a preschooler on a mission. He climbed onto a kitchen chair, plucked the car keys from the Peg-Board, and hurried out to the garage as if to set off in search of an endangered canine.

We took the keys away from him, but for more than an hour, he followed us around chanting, “We’re gonna rescue a doggy,” until to save our sanity, we decided to drive him to a pet shop and redirect his canine enthusiasm toward a gerbil or a turtle, or both.

En route, he said, “We’re almost to the doggy.” Half a block later, he pointed to a sign—ANIMAL SHELTER. We assumed wrongly that it was the silhouette of a German shepherd that caught his attention, not the words on the sign. “In there, Daddy.”

Scores of forlorn dogs occupied cages, but Milo walked directly to the middle of the center row in the kennel and said, “This one.”

She was a fifty-pound two-year-old Australian shepherd mix with a shaggy black-and-white coat, one eye blue and the other gray. She had no collie in her, but Milo named her Lassie.

Penny and I loved her the moment we saw her. Somewhere a gerbil and a turtle would remain in need of a home.

In the next three years, we never heard a single bark from the dog. We wondered whether our Lassie, following the example of the original, would at last bark if Milo fell down an abandoned well or became trapped in a burning barn, or whether she would instead try to alert us to our boy’s circumstances by employing urgent pantomime.

Until Milo was six and Lassie was five, our lives were not only free of calamity but also without much inconvenience. Our fortunes changed with the publication of my sixth novel, One O’Clock Jump.

My first five had been bestsellers. Way to go, Angel Ralph.

Penny Boom, of course, is the Penny Boom, the acclaimed writer and illustrator of children’s books. They are brilliant, funny books.

More than for her dazzling beauty, more than for her quick mind, more than for her great good heart, I fell in love with her for her sense of humor. If she ever lost her sense of humor, I would have to dump her. Then I’d kill myself because I couldn’t live without her.

The name on her birth certificate is Brunhild, which means someone who is armored for the fight. By the time she was five, she insisted on being called Penny.

At the start of World War Waxx, as we came to call it, Penny and Milo and Lassie and I lived in a fine stone-and-stucco house, under the benediction of graceful phoenix palms, in Southern California. We didn’t have an ocean view, but didn’t need one, for we were focused on one another and on our books.

Because we’d seen our share of Batman movies, we knew that Evil with a capital E stalked the world, but we never expected that it would suddenly, intently turn its attention to our happy household or that this evil would be drawn to us by a book I had written.

Having done a twenty-city tour for each of my previous novels, I persuaded my publisher to spare me that ordeal for One O’Clock Jump.

Consequently, on publication day, a Tuesday in early November, I got up at three o’clock in the morning to brew a pot of coffee and to repair to my first-floor study. Unshaven, in pajamas, I undertook a series of thirty radio interviews, conducted by telephone, between 4:00 and 9:30 A.M., which began with morning shows on the East Coast.

Radio hosts, both talk-jocks and traditional tune-spinners, do better interviews than TV types. Rare is the TV interviewer who has read your book, but eight of ten radio hosts will have read it.

Radio folks are brighter and funnier, too—and often quite humble. I don’t know why this last should be true, except perhaps the greater fame of facial recognition, which comes with regular television exposure, encourages pridefulness that ripens into arrogance.

After five hours on radio, I felt as though I might vomit if I heard myself say again the words One O’Clock Jump. I could see the day coming when, if I was required to do much publicity for a new book, I would write it but not allow its publication until I died.

If you have never been in the public eye, flogging your work like a carnival barker pitching a freak show to the crowd, this publish-only-after-death pledge may seem extreme. But protracted self-promotion drains something essential from the soul, and after one of these sessions, you need weeks to recover and to decide that one day it might be all right to like yourself again.

The danger in writing but not publishing was that my agent, Hudson “Hud” Jacklight, receiving no commissions, would wait only until three unpublished works had been completed before having me killed to free up the manuscripts for marketing.

And if I knew Hud as well as I thought I did, he would not arrange for a clean shot to the back of the head. He would want me to be tortured and dismembered in such a flamboyant fashion that he could make a rich deal for one of his true-crime clients to write a book about my murder.

If no publisher would pay a suitably immense advance for a book about an unsolved killing, Hud would have someone framed for it. Most likely Penny, Milo, and Lassie.

Anyway, after the thirtieth interview, I rose from my office chair and, reeling in self-disgust, made my way to the kitchen. My intention was to eat such an unhealthy breakfast that my guilt over the cholesterol content would distract me from the embarrassment of all the self-promotion.

Dependable Penny had delayed her breakfast so she could eat with me and hear all of the incredibly witty things I wished I had said in those thirty interviews. In contrast to my tousled hair, unshaven face, and badly rumpled pajamas, she wore a crisp white blouse and lemon-yellow slacks, and as usual her skin glowed as though it were translucent and she were lit from inside.

As I entered the room, she was serving blueberry pancakes, and I said, “You look scrumptious. I could pour maple syrup on you and eat you alive.”

“Cannibalism,” Milo warned me, “is a crime.”

“It’s not a worldwide crime,” I told him. “Some places it’s a culinary preference.”

“It’s a crime,” he insisted.

Between his fifth and sixth birthdays, Milo had decided on a career in law enforcement. He said that too many people were lawless and that the world was run by thugs. He was going to grow up and do something about it.

Lots of kids want to be policemen. Milo intended to become the director of the FBI and the secretary of defense, so that he would be empowered to dispense justice to evildoers both at home and abroad.

Here on the brink of World War Waxx, Milo perched on a dinette chair, elevated by a thick foam pillow because he was diminutive for his age. Blue block letters on his white T-shirt spelled COURAGE.

Later, the word on his chest would seem like an omen.

Having finished his breakfast long ago, my bright-eyed son was nursing a glass of chocolate milk and reading a comic book. He could read at college level, though his interests were not those of either a six-year-old or a frat boy.

“What trash is this?” I asked, picking up the comic.

“Dostoyevsky,” he said.

Frowning at the cover illustration, I wondered, “How can they condense Crime and Punishment into a comic book?”

Penny said, “It comes as a boxed set of thirty-six double-thick issues. He’s on number seven.”

Returning the comic to Milo, I said, “Maybe the question should be—why would they condense Crime and Punishment into a comic book?”

“Raskolnikov,” Milo solemnly informed me, tapping a page of the illustrated classic with one finger, “is a totally confused guy.”

“That makes two of us,” I said.

I sat at the table, picked up a squeeze bottle of liquid butter, and hosed my pancakes.

“Trying to bury the shame of self-promotion under cholesterol guilt?” Penny asked.

“Exactly.”

From across the dinette, Lassie watched me butter the flapjacks. She is not permitted to sit at the table with us; however, because she refuses to live entirely at dog level, she is allowed a chair at a four-foot remove, where she can observe and feel part of the family at mealtimes.

For such a cute dog, she is often surprisingly hard to read. She has a poker face. She was not drooling. She rarely did. She was less obsessed with food than were most dogs.

Instead, she cocked her head and studied me as if she were an anthropologist and I were a member of a primitive tribe engaged in an inscrutable ritual.

Maybe she was amazed that I proved capable of operating as complex a device as squeeze-bottle butter with a flip-up nozzle. I have a reputation for incompetence with tools and machines.

For instance, I am no longer permitted to change a punctured tire. In the event of a flat, I am required to call the automobile club and get out of their way when they arrive.

I will not explain why this is the case, because it’s not a particularly interesting story. Besides, when I got to the part about the monkey dressed in a band uniform, you would think I was making up the whole thing, even though my insurance agent could confirm the truth of every detail.

God gave me a talent for storytelling. He didn’t think I would also need to have the skill to repair a jet engine or build a nuclear reactor from scratch. Who am I to second-guess God? Although…it would be nice to be able to use a hammer or a screwdriver at least once without a subsequent trip to the hospital emergency room.

Anyway, just as I raised the first bite of butter-drenched pancakes to my mouth, the telephone rang.

“Third line,” Penny said.

The third is my direct business line, given only to my editors, publishers, agents, and attorneys.

I put down the still-laden fork, got up, and snared the wall phone on the fourth ring, before the call went to voice mail.

Olivia Cosima, my editor, said, “Cubby, you’re a trouper. I hear from publicity, the radio interviews were brilliant.”

“If brilliant means I made a fool of myself slightly less often than I expected to, then they were brilliant.”

“Every writer now and then makes a fool of himself, dear. What’s unique about you is—you’ve never made a total ass of yourself.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Listen, sweetheart, I just e-mailed you three major reviews that appeared this morning. Read the one by Shearman Waxx first.”

I held my breath. Waxx was the senior critic for the nation’s premier newspaper. He was feared, therefore revered. He had not reviewed any of my previous novels.

Because I didn’t subscribe to that newspaper, I had never read Waxx. Nevertheless, I knew he was the most influential book critic in the country.

“And?” I asked.

Olivia said, “Why don’t you read it first, and then we’ll talk.”

“Uh-oh.”

“He favors boring minimalism, Cubby. The qualities he dislikes in your work are the very things readers hunger for. So it’s really a selling review.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Call me after you’ve read it. And the other two, which are both wonderful. They more than compensate for Waxx.”

When I turned away from the telephone, Penny was sitting at the table, holding her knife and fork not as if they were dining utensils but as if they were weapons. Having heard my side of the conversation with my editor, she had sensed a threat to her family, and she was as armored for the fight as the Brunhild whom she had once been.

“What?” she asked.

“Shearman Waxx reviewed my book.”

“Is that all?”

“He didn’t like it.”

“Who gives a flying”—she glanced at Milo before finishing her question with a nonsense word instead of a vulgarity—“furnal.”

“What’s a flying furnal?” Milo asked.

“A kind of squirrel,” I said, fully aware that my gifted son’s intellectual genius lay in fields other than biology.

Penny said, “I thought the book was terrific, and I’m the most honest critic you’re ever going to have.”

“Yeah, but a couple hundred thousand people read his reviews.”

“Nobody reads his reviews but geeky aficionados of snarkiness.”

“You mean it has wings?” Milo asked.

I frowned at him. “Does what have wings?”

“The flying furnal.”

“No. It has air bladders.”

“Do yourself a favor,” Penny advised. “Don’t read the review.”

“If I don’t read it, I won’t know what he said.”

“Precisely.”

“What do you mean—air bladders?” Milo asked.

I said, “Inflatable sacs under its skin.”

“Has any review, good or bad, ever changed the way you write?” Penny asked.

“Of course not. I’ve got a spine.”

“So there’s nothing to be gained from reading this one.”

Milo said, “It doesn’t fly. What it must do—it must just float.”

“It can fly,” I insisted.

“But air bladders, no wings—it’s a squirrel blimp,” Milo said.

“Blimps fly,” I said. “They have an engine and a big propeller behind the passenger gondola.”

Milo saw the weakness of my contention: “Squirrels don’t have engines.”

“No, but once it inflates its bladders, the furnal kicks its hind feet very fast, like a swimmer, and propels itself forward.”

Lassie remained poker-faced, but I knew that she had not been convinced by my lecture on the biology of the flying furnal.

Milo wasn’t buying it either. “Mom, he’s doing it again. Dad’s lying.”

“He’s not lying,” Penny assured him. “He’s exercising the strong and limber imagination of a fine novelist.”

“Yeah? What’s the difference from lying?”

As if curious about her mistress’s reply, Lassie leaned forward in her chair and cocked her head toward Penny.

“Lies hurt people,” Penny explained. “Imagination makes life more fun.”

“Like right now,” I said, “I’m imagining Shearman Waxx being attacked and killed by a flying furnal with rabies.”

“Let it go,” Penny advised.

“I told Olivia I’d call her back after I read the review.”

“Don’t read it,” Penny warned.

“I promised Olivia I’d call her.”

Mouth full of pancake, Penny shook her head ruefully.

“I’m a big boy,” I said. “This kind of thing doesn’t get to me. I have to read it. But don’t worry—I’ll laugh it off.”

I returned to my study and switched on the computer.

Rather than scroll through Olivia’s e-mail on the screen, I printed out her opening comment and the three reviews.

First, I read the one from USA Today, and then the one from the Washington Post. They were raves, and they fortified me.

With professional detachment, I read Shearman Waxx’s review.

The syphilitic swine.