Jericho Iteration

13

(Friday, 1:07 A.M.)

“Which exit do I take?” Farrentino asked.

The light rain had become a steady downpour, but through the darkness and drizzle I could make out the familiar landmarks of Webster Groves from the interstate. The sign for the Shrewsbury Avenue exit was coming up. “This one will do,” I said.

The detective nodded as he swerved into the right lane. “I take it your ex isn’t expecting you,” he said, following the long curve of the ramp as it led up the street overpass. “Are you sure it’s okay for me to be dropping you off?”

“I guess it’s okay,” I replied as I pointed toward the left; he waited until a street cleaner ’bot rumbled through the intersection, then turned onto Shrewsbury. “She’ll let me in, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That’s what I’m asking.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Worst thing a cop can do is get caught in the middle of a domestic quarrel. Y’know that when cops get injured in the line of duty, it’s most often while breaking up a household fight? I damn near got my left ear sliced off with a vegetable knife that way, back when I drove a cruiser.”

The intersection of Big Bend was coming up, and I pointed to the left again. “That’s not going to happen here,” I said. “For one thing, she’s not really my ex. I just call her that.”

“Separation?” He lighted his cigarette while making the turn, catching the green light just as it was turning yellow. A blue-and-white passed him in the opposite lane; he flashed his brights at it, and the officer driving the cruiser gave him a brief wave. It was the only other vehicle on the street, despite the fact that Webster was one of the few neighborhoods in the city that wasn’t under dusk-to-dawn curfew. “Sometimes it’s better that way,” he went on. “Why did you guys get separated?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“It’s my job. Besides, I’m just asking …”

His voice trailed off as if anticipating a reply, but I didn’t answer immediately. It had been a few months since I had last visited this neighborhood, and I wanted to look around. Webster Groves had ridden out the quake pretty well, at least in comparison to the parts of St. Louis that had been built on sandy loam or had been undermined by the tunnels of lost clay mines. Some homes had collapsed, a couple of strip malls had fallen down, but overall this quaint old ’burb of midwestern-style frame houses hadn’t been significantly damaged. I didn’t even see any ERA patrols.

“Go a few more blocks, then turn right on Oakwood,” I said.

“Okay.” Farrentino was quiet for a few moments. “Not going to talk about it, are you?”

“Talk about what?”

He shook his head. “You’re going to have to trust somebody sooner or later, Gerry,” he murmured. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that you’ve got your hand stuck in a hornet’s nest. Either you talk to me, or you talk to the colonel or McLaughlin, but eventually you’re going to have to talk to somebody.”

It was true; he knew it, and I knew it. I was treading on hot coals now, and there were damned few people I could count on to get me through this firewalk. Before I could commit myself either way, though, there were a few questions that still had to be cleared up in my own mind. Stopping by for a visit with Marianne, even in the middle of the night, was the first step.

“I’ll let you know, Mike,” I said as he took the turn onto Oakwood. “Right now, all I want to do is get home.”

Home was an old, three-story Victorian on a quiet residential street, a one-hundred-twenty-year-old former farmhouse that had been renovated at least three or four times since the beginning of the last century. Marianne and I had bought the place shortly after we had moved back to St. Louis; if I had known the city was going to get socked by a quake, I might not have signed the mortgage papers, but to my surprise the house had only swayed during New Madrid. The house next door, which was only half as old, had fallen flat, but by some quirk of nature our place had survived, suffering only the loss of the carport and an oak tree in the front yard.

In that respect alone, we had been lucky. The house had made it through the quake; it was the family living inside that had been destroyed.

After Mike Farrentino dropped me off at the curb, I trudged up the walk and climbed the stairs to the front porch. A downstairs light was on, but the upper floors were darkened. Security lamps hidden beneath the porch eaves came on as soon as I approached the door; I still had a key, but I figured it would be polite if I touched the doorplate instead.

“Mari, it’s me,” I said. “Will you get up and come let me in?”

There was a long pause. I turned my face toward the concealed lens of the security camera and smiled as best I could, knowing that she was rolling over in bed to check the screen on the night table. Probably half-asleep, maybe knocking away the paperback thriller she had been reading just before she turned off the light. Unshaven, haggard, hair matted with rain, and wearing drenched clothes, I realized that I must resemble the bad guy in her latest novel.

“Gerry …?” Her voice sounded fuzzy with sleep. “Gerry, what the hell are you doing here?”

“It’s a long story, babe.” I ran a hand through my hair, brushing it away from my face. “I’m sorry I woke you up, but-”

“Are you drunk again?” Her voice, no longer quite so sleepy, was tinged with irritation. “I swear to God, if you’ve been drinking, you can-”

“I’m not drunk, Mari, I promise you. It’s just …” I sighed, half-closing my eyes. “Look, I’m really tired. I’ve just had a helluva night and I can’t go back to my place, so just please let me in, okay?”

Again, another pause, a little longer this time. For the first time since I had asked Farrentino for a lift out here, a disturbing notion crossed my mind: perhaps she was not alone tonight. I hadn’t shacked up with any other women since the beginning of our separation, as tempted as I had been from time to time. The thought had never seriously occurred to me, nor had Marianne told me about any new men in her life. Yet things could have changed; she might have some young bohunk in bed right now, a little lost puppy she had picked up at one of the nearby Webster University hangouts.

I stepped away from the camera to check the end of the driveway next to the house. Only her car was parked there, a power cable running from its battery port to the side of the house. Of course, that alone meant nothing. Postmen walk by every day, and so do joggers in tight nylon shorts.

I heard locks being buzzed open, then the door opened a few inches. “Gerry?” I heard her say. “Are you out there?”

“Right here.” I quickly stepped away from the porch railing. Even when she was practically somnambulant, with her shoulder-length hair in knots and wearing a ragged terrycloth robe, Marianne was one of the most beautiful women I have ever met. Husbands are usually blind to the imperfections of their wives, of course, but that wasn’t the case with Mari; my eyes didn’t lie, and she was still good looking. Thirty years of ofttimes hard living had treated her well; she still looked much the same as she did when I had met her in college. She had regained her figure not long after Jamie’s birth, and even though there were the first hints of gray in her dark hair, she could have passed for twenty-four.

Not that she was in any mood for compliments. “Gerry, what are you doing here?” she repeated. “For chrissakes, I just went to bed … and what are you looking at the driveway for?”

“Just seeing how the car’s holding up,” I said quickly. “You renewed your plates, didn’t you?”

Her expression became puzzled. “You didn’t come all the way out here to check my renewal sticker,” she said. “What’s going on, Gerard?”

She called me Gerard. When she used my full first name, it usually meant she was pissed off. No wonder; for Marianne, getting a full night’s sleep was a serious business, and woe be to the friend, relative, or former spouse who woke her out of bed after eleven o’clock. “I’m sorry if I caught you at a bad time, babe,” I said, “but I need three things from you.”

She let out an exasperated sigh and sagged against the door frame. “Let me guess,” she said. “One of them is money, and the second is sex. What’s the third? The car?”

It might have been funny if it wasn’t true. When we had agreed that a separation was probably the best thing for both of us, after I had moved to a motel and before I had found a new job, those were the three favors I most commonly called to ask of her: wheels to get around in, a ten or twenty to tide me over till the next paycheck, and a quick roll in the hay because I was so damn lonely and because I still believed sex would heal all the wounds. All three she had agreed to, at one time or another, until she hardened her heart and told me that I was on my own. Hell, the only reason why we still hadn’t become officially divorced was because neither of us could afford lawyer bills right now.

“Hey, if you want to have sex with me and give me some bucks and the car in return-” I began, and she started to slam the door in my face until I pushed my hand against the knob. “Wait, I’m just kidding. Seriously …”

Again the sigh as she opened the door again. “Seriously what?”

Now was no time to bullshit my wife, even if she hated my guts. “I need a place to crash,” I said. “Just for tonight, I swear … and I need to use the computer.”

“Uh-huh.” She gazed at me indifferently. “A bed and the computer. Yeah. What else?”

“Hey, I can sleep on the couch-”

“Damn straight you’re going to sleep on the couch,” she replied. “What’s the third thing, Gerard?”

I hesitated; this was probably the biggest favor of all. “The third thing is no questions asked.” I took a deep breath. “I’m in trouble, kiddo. Big trouble.”

“Oh, Christ.” She sighed as her eyes rolled upward. “You’re running from the cops, aren’t you?”

I almost broke down laughing. “Babe, a cop gave me a lift out here-”

“Uh, huh. Sure …”

I raised my hands. “Believe me, Marianne, if this was going to get you in any trouble, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’m not in trouble with the cops.” Not technically, anyway, I thought. “All I need is the couch,” I went on, “and to use the office computer for an hour or so. I don’t want your money, I don’t want to sleep with you, and I’ll call a cab bright and early tomorrow morning. Okay?”

She sighed again, closing her eyes as if she was carrying the burdens of the world on her shoulders. “Jeez, Gerry, why can’t you go bug John for this?”

Because John is dead, I almost blurted out, but I held my tongue. Telling her would only have prompted all the questions I wanted to avoid, and it was far safer for her to remain ignorant. I was lucky that she obviously hadn’t seen the late news on one of the local TV stations or hadn’t yet received a call from Sandy Tiernan.

“Please,” I said. “Just do it for me, okay?”

She gazed at me for another moment, then she pushed the door open a little wider and stepped aside. “All right,” she said. “But remember … you’re sleeping on the couch.”

The house was a little cleaner than it had usually been before I moved out, yet otherwise everything was much the same. She hadn’t changed the living room furniture or taken any of the prints from the walls; although she had removed our wedding photos, there were still baby and toddler pictures of Jamie on the fireplace mantel. Marianne let me grab a Diet Dr. Pepper from the fridge, then went upstairs to gather some sheets and a spare pillow from the linen cabinet while I retreated to her home office.

The office was located in the rear of the ground floor, in what had been a den before we had put in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Before the quake hit, we had shared that space; she had used it during the day to telecommute to her insurance company’s home office in Kansas City, and when she was through at five o’clock it became my study for the writing of the Great American Unreadable Novel. I noticed that she had removed my books and mementos from the shelves, but I didn’t want to make an issue of it. Right now, I was interested in only one thing.

I found the plastic CD-OP filebox on a small shelf beneath the desk; the particular disk for which I was searching was contained in a scratched, often-opened case marked FAMILY. Marianne must have been looking at it often; it was at the front of the box, in front of the business disks. I pulled out the case and opened it, and after switching on the computer and opening the REVIEW window, I slipped the disk into the optical diskette drive.

Starting shortly after we became engaged, Marianne and I had videoed almost everything we did, using a camcorder one of her relatives had given her at the bridal shower. Hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, summer scenes on Cape Cod, strange little home movies when we were both full of wine and creativity, the wedding day ceremonies, and the honeymoon trip to Ireland … we had recorded everything, and stored the bits and bytes on CD-OP for replay on our computer as an electronic family album.

We had gotten bored of the novelty after a while, and thus there were large chronological gaps on the menu until Jamie was born, when we had rediscovered the camcorder and started making the inevitable baby pictures. As a result, the submenu screen showed a lot of filenames marked JAMIE.1, JAMIE.2, JAMIE.3, and so forth, one for each birthday he had passed. Yet there was one piece of footage in particular, lodged in JAMIE.6, that I now needed to see.

After we had moved back to St. Louis, there had been a rash of kidnappings in the city. Children were vanishing from schoolbus stops and playgrounds and shopping malls, rarely to be seen again by their parents, and then sometimes not alive. The police never caught the evil bastards who had stolen these kids, and only God knows what happened to the ones who were not found, but Marianne and I did what the local authorities suggested parents should do: videotape their kids in advance, so that the footage could be used to identify lost children should the unthinkable happen to them.

It had taken me a while, but something about the weird phone call I had received just before the ERA soldiers broke down the door of my apartment had jogged an old memory. After I opened the VIDEOVIEW window on the computer screen, I moused JAIME.6 and the REPLAY command; it took me only a couple of minutes to find the footage I remembered shooting of him, just a few weeks before he was killed.

And now here was Jamie, very much alive and well, sitting in his child-size rocking chair in the living room. He was wearing blue jeans and his favorite St. Louis Cardinals sweatshirt; just a cute little kid, both bored and embarrassed to have his dad making yet another video of him.

My voice, off-camera: “Okay, kiddo, what’s your name?”

Jamie, pouting, wishing to be anywhere but here: “Jamie …”

Me again: “And what’s your last name?”

Jamie looks down at the floor, his hands fidgeting restlessly on the armrests of his chair: “Jamie Rosen, and I’m six years old …”

My voice, prodding him gently from behind the camera: “That’s good! Now what’s your mommy’s and daddy’s names?”

His face scrunches up in earnest concentration, the child who has only recently learned that his folks have names besides Mommy and Daddy: “My daddy’s name is Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … and Mommy’s … my mommy’s name is Marianne Rosen …”

Me, playing the proud papa: “That’s good, Jamie! That’s very good! Now, can you tell me what you’re supposed to do if a stranger comes up to you?”

Jamie dutifully recites everything I had just told him: “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, even if they ask me if I want a present, and I can … I’m supposed to run and get a p’leaseman or another grownup and tell them to take me to you, and …”

There. That was it.

I froze the image and marked its endpoint, then I moved back to the beginning of the video. When I had reached that point and marked it, I opened the menu bar at the top of the screen and selected the EDIT function. Another command from the submenu caused a window to open at the bottom half of the screen, displaying a transcript of the conversation.

I then began to work my way through the transcript, highlighting certain key words. It took me a few minutes, but when I was through I had a couple of lines I had pieced together from the videotape. I took a deep breath, then I moused the line and tapped in commands to verbalize those lines.

Jamie’s voice reemerged from the computer, speaking something he had never said in life, but which I had heard over the phone earlier that night:

“Rosen, Gerard … Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … can I talk to you, Daddy?”

And on the computer screen, Jamie’s reedited face was exactly the same as I had seen it on the phone.

“Gerry, what the hell are you doing?”

Startled, I jerked away from the keyboard and spun around in the office chair to find Marianne standing in the doorway behind me.

Her arms were crossed in front of her robe; she had a look of horror on her face, as if she had just caught me trying on a pair of her panties. Maybe reality was worse than that; after all, she had just discovered me in the act of editing one of the last tangible memories of our son.

I lay back in the chair, letting out my breath as I rubbed my eyelids between my fingertips. “Part of the deal was that you wouldn’t ask me any questions,” I murmured. “And believe me, if I told you, you’d just think I was crazy.”

“I already think you’re crazy,” she replied, her voice harsh with anger barely kept in check. “Leave Jamie’s video alone. I mean it …”

Before I could do anything, she stalked across the room and began to reach for the computer. “Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands over the keyboard. “I’ll get out of this, so long as you answer one question for me.”

She stopped and stared at me, not pulling her hands away. “What is it?”

“Did you load this disk into the hard drive?” I asked. “This file in particular?”

Marianne blinked, not quite comprehending the question at first. “Yes,” she said at last, “I did. I wanted to preserve the disk. This was the last video we made of him and-”

“And do you still leave the computer on all day?”

She shrugged. “Of course I do. My clients have to talk to the expert system when I’m gone. You know that.” She peered more closely at me. “What’s going on here, Gerard? Why were you editing the-?”

“Never mind. Go ahead and restore the video.” I withdrew my hands from the keyboard and pushed the chair back from the desk. Marianne gave me one last look of distrustful confusion, then she bent over the keyboard, using the trackball to undo the work I had just done. It didn’t matter; I had all the answers I needed.

Some of them, rather. Just as I had managed to piece together a message in Jamie’s own words, so had someone else. The video was stored on the computer’s hard drive and Marianne left the computer switched on during the day, so that her clients could ask questions of the computer’s expert system. It was therefore possible for a good hacker to access the JAMIE.6 file through the root directory and edit together the phone message I had heard earlier that night. By the same means, it was also possible for them to recreate my own voice; a good hacker with the right equipment would be able to mimic my voice, since my vocal tracks were recorded on this and many other CD-OP files Marianne had stored in the computer.

But why go to such extremes? If the culprit had been trying to get my attention, why imitate the voice of my dead son … or my own, for that matter? If anything, it was a sick prank, tantamount to calling up a grieving widow and pretending to be the ghost of her late spouse. Yet this was the second time in as many days someone had used a computer to send mysterious messages to me, and the technical sophistication necessary to do this went far beyond the capability of some twisted little cyberpunk trying to spook me.

In fact, now that I thought about it, how would some pimplehead even know to call into Marianne’s computer? Its modem line was listed under her company’s name, not hers or mine, and very few people were aware that Gerry Rosen even had an estranged wife.

It made no sense …

Or it made perfect sense, but I was unable to perceive the logic.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

Marianne’s question broke my concentration. She had finished saving the file and was exiting from the program. I looked at her as she switched off the computer, ejected the disk from its drive, and slipped it back in its box.

“Yeah, I miss him.” I stuck my hands in my jacket pockets, suddenly feeling very old. “He was the best thing that happened to us … and I still can’t believe he’s gone.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” Marianne put the box away, then leaned against the shelf next to the desk. For the first time since she had let me into the house, she wasn’t playing the queen bitch of the universe; she was my wife, commiserating the passage of our son from our lives. “God, I’ve even kept his room the same, thinking somehow there’s just been some awful mistake, that he wasn’t on that train after all …”

The train. Always the train …

“He’s gone, Mari,” I said softly. “There’s no mistake. There was an accident, and he died … and that’s all there is to it.”

She slowly nodded her head. “Yeah. That’s all there is to it.” She stared at the floor. “Tell me you just wanted to look at him again, Gerry. Tell me he isn’t mixed up in whatever trouble you’re in.”

She raised her eyes and stared straight at me. “This isn’t part of some story, is it?”

I knew what she meant. I had lost one newspaper job because I had been trying to stop kids from dying; I had thrown myself on the sword in order to save some youngsters I had never really known, the children of complete strangers, because that had been part of a story. Yet when the time had come for me to protect my own child, I had not been available. Jamie had perished without ever seeing his father’s face again because Daddy had been too busy with his career to do anything but buy him a train ticket to eternity.

The accusation in her eyes wasn’t fair, but neither is the timing of earthquakes against MetroLink schedules. Or death itself, for that matter.

When I didn’t answer her question, Marianne lowered her head and began to walk out of the office. “I’ve made up the living room couch and told the house to wake you up at eight,” she said. “That’s when the coffeemaker comes on. There’s some sweet rolls in the fridge, if you want ’em …”

“Okay, babe. Thanks for everything.”

She nodded again and began to head for the stairs. Then she stopped and turned back again. “And by the way … there’s nobody else upstairs, if that’s what you were wondering. G’night.”

And then she left, heading back to her bedroom before I got a chance to ask her how she managed to pick up that mind-reading trick of hers.