The Last Policeman

EPILOGUE

I’m rolling on a ten-speed bicycle down the sun-washed sidewalks of New Castle, New Hampshire, in search of Salamander Street. The sun is up there slipping in and out of patchy cloud cover, the breeze is warm and kind and salt-smelling, and I decide, what the heck, and I take a right and coast down a side street toward the water.

New Castle is a small and charming summer town out of season, with the chained-up souvenir shops, the ice-cream-and-fudge place, the post office, the historical society. There’s even a boardwalk, running for a quarter mile or so along the beach, a handful of happy beachgoers out on the dunes. An elderly couple hand in hand, a mom tossing a Nerf football with her son, a teenager sprinting, trying to get a bulky box kite up and off the ground.

A path from the far end of the beach leads back to the town square, where a green lawn surrounds a handsome dark-wood gazebo festooned with bunting and American flags. It looks like there was a small-town celebration last night, and it looks like there’s going to be another one tonight. A couple of locals are wandering into the square, even now, unpacking brass instruments and making small talk, shaking hands. I chain up my ten-speed bike by an overflowing garbage can surrounded by paper plates, uneaten bites of funnel cake drawing happy lines of ants.

There was a parade in Concord last night, also, and there were even fireworks launched from a barge in the Merrimack, bursting majestically and sparkling around the golden dome of the state house. Maia, we now know, is going to land in Indonesia. They can’t or won’t name an impact spot with a hundred percent certainty, but the vicinity is the Indonesian archipelago, just east of the Gulf of Boni. Pakistan, with its eastern border just four thousand kilometers from the impact site, has renewed its promise to blast the rock from the sky, and the United States has renewed its objections.

In America, meanwhile, across the country, parades and fireworks and celebrations. And, at a suburban shopping mall outside Dallas, looting, followed by gunfire, ending in a riot; six people dead. A similar incident in Jacksonville, Florida, and one in Richmond, Indiana. Nineteen people dead at a Home Depot in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Four Salamander Lane does not look like the headquarters of any kind of institute. It’s a little Cape Cod–style single-family residence, old wood painted in blue pastel, close enough to the water that I can smell the salt breeze, here on the front steps.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I say to the tremendously old woman who answers my knock. “My name is Detective Henry Palace.” It’s not, though. “Sorry, my name is Henry Palace. Is this the Open Vista Institute?”

The old woman turns silently and goes into the house, and I follow her, and tell her what I want, and at last she speaks.

“He was an odd duck, wasn’t he?” she says, of Peter Zell. Her voice is strong and clear, surprisingly so.

“I actually never met him.”

“Well, he was.”

“Okay.”

I just figured it couldn’t hurt to find out a little more about this file, this last claims investigation that my insurance man was up to, before he was killed. I’ve had to return my department-issued Impala, so I just biked out here, broke out my mother’s old Schwinn. It took me a little over five hours, including a stop to eat my lunch at an abandoned Dunkin’ Donuts at a highway rest stop.

“An odd duck. And he didn’t need to come here.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” She gestures to the file I brought, which rests on the coffee table between her and me, three pieces of paper in a manila folder: a claim, a policy, a summary of supporting documents. “There was nothing he asked that he couldn’t have asked me on the phone.”

Her name is Veronica Talley, it’s her signature on the files, hers and that of her husband, Bernard, now deceased. Mrs. Talley’s eyes are small and black and beady, like doll’s eyes. The living room is small and tidy, the walls lined with seashells and delicate seaweed still lifes. I am still seeing zero evidence that this is the headquarters of any kind of institute.

“Ma’am, I understand that your husband committed suicide.”

“Yes. He hung himself. In the bathroom. From the thing—” She looks irritated. “The thing? That the water comes out of?”

“The showerhead, ma’am?”

“That’s right. Excuse me. I’m old.”

“I am sorry for your loss.”

“Shouldn’t be. He told me he was going to do it. Told me to go for a walk along the water, talk to the hermit crabs, and when I got back he’d be dead in the bathroom. And that’s how it happened.”

She sniffs, appraises me with her tiny hard eyes. Bernard Talley’s death, I know from having read the papers on the table between us, netted her one million dollars, personally, and an additional three million for the Open Vista Institute, if there is such a thing. Zell had authorized the claim, released the money, after his visit to this place three weeks ago—though he had left the file open, as if he might have been intending to come back, follow up.

“You’re a bit like him, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re like your friend, the one that came out here. Sat right there where you’re sitting.”

“As I said, ma’am, I never knew Mr. Zell.”

“Still, you’re like him though.”

There are wind chimes hung right out the back window, behind the kitchen, and I just keep still for as second, listen to their gentle crystal tolling.

“Ma’am? WIll you tell me about the Institute? I would like to know what all that money will go toward.”

“That’s just what your friend wanted to know.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not illegal. We’re a registered nonprofit. 501(c)3, whatever it’s called.”

“I’m sure.”

She doesn’t say anything else. The wind chimes go again, and then a drift of parade music, tubas and trumpets from the gazebo, warming up.

“Mrs. Talley, I can find out in other ways if I must, but it would be easier if you could just tell me.”

She sighs, stands up and shuffles out of the room, and I’m following her, hoping we’re going somewhere so she can show me, because that was pure bluff—I have no real way of finding out anything. Not anymore.

The money, as it turns out, has gone in large part for titanium.

“I’m not the engineer,” says Mrs. Talley. “Bernard was the engineer. He designed the thing. But the contents we chose together, and we solicited the materials together. We started in May, as soon as it became clear that the worst was a real possibility.”

On a worktable in the garage is an unadorned metal sphere, a few feet in diameter. Mrs. Talley tells me the outer layer is titanium, but that is only the outer layer: there are several layers of aluminum, levels of a thermal coating of Mr. Talley’s own design. He had been an aerospace engineer for many years, and he felt certain that the sphere would be resistant to cosmic radiation and to damage from space detritus, and it could survive in orbit around Earth.

“Survive for how long?”

She smiles, the first time she has done so in my presence.

“Until humanity recovers sufficiently to retrieve it.”

Packed carefully inside the sphere are a brick of DVDs, drawings, rolled-up newspapers in glass cases, and samples of various materials. “Salt water, a clump of clay, human blood,” says Mrs. Talley. “He was a smart cookie, my husband. A smart cookie.”

I go through the inventory in the little satellite for a few minutes, turning over the odd assemblage of objects, holding each thing in my hand, nodding appreciatively. The human race, human history, in a nutshell. While putting the collection together, they had contracted with a small private aerospace company to do the launch, scheduled it for June, and then they’d run out of money. That’s what the insurance claim was for; that’s what the suicide was for. Now the launch, says Mrs. Talley, is back on schedule.

“Well?” she says. “What do you want to add to the capsule?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Why do you ask that?”

“That’s what the other man wanted.”

“Mr. Zell? He wanted to put something in here?”

“He did put something in there.” She reaches into the accumulated materials, shifts through and removes an innocuous manila envelope, thin and small and folded over. I hadn’t noticed it before. “I actually think this is why he came up here, to tell you the truth. He pretended that he needed to investigate our claim in person, but I had told him everything, and then he showed up here anyway. Came up here with that little tape, and then he asked, kind of mumbling, if could he put it in here.”

“Do you mind?”

She shrugs. “He was your friend.”

I lift the small envelope and shake out what’s inside: a microcassette tape, the kind that was once used for answering-machine messages, the kind on which senior executives would make their dictations.

“Do you know what’s on it?”

“Nope.”

I stand there looking at the tape. It might take me some effort to find something that could play this tape, is what I’m thinking, but I could definitely make it happen. At the station house, in one of the storerooms, there were a couple of old answering machines. They might still be there, and Officer McConnell could maybe dig one out for me. Or I’m sure I could find a pawn shop, or maybe at one of the big outdoor markets they’re having down in Manchester now, every week, big public-space flea markets—I could find one, play the tape. Be interesting, if nothing else, just to hear his voice—be interesting—

Mrs. Talley is waiting, watching me with her head at an angle, like a bird. The little tape rests in my palm like my hand belongs to a giant.

“Okay, ma’am,” I say, slipping the tape back into the envelope, laying it back in the capsule. “Thanks for your time.”

“Okay.”

She walks me to the door and waves goodbye. “Watch yourself on the steps, there. Your friend slipped on the way out, banged up his face pretty bad.”

I unchain my bike from the green central square of New Castle, now crowded with merrymakers, and start out for home, the joyful clamor of the parade fading behind me until it sounds like a music box, and then is gone.

I ride along the shoulder of highway 90, feeling the breeze in my pant legs and up the sleeves of my coat, wavering in the wake of the occasional delivery truck or state vehicle. They suspended mail delivery last Friday, with a rather elaborate ceremony at the White House, but private companies are still delivering packages, the FedEx drivers with armed heavies riding shotgun. I have accepted an early retirement from the Concord Police Department, with a pension equal to eighty-five percent of my full salary at the time of retirement. In total, I served as a patrol officer for one year, three months, and ten days, and as a detective in the Criminal Investigations Unit for three months and twenty days.

I go ahead and take my bike right down the middle of I-90, ride it right along the double yellow lines.

You can’t think too much about what happens next, you really can’t.

I don’t get home until the middle of the night and there she is waiting for me, sitting on one of the overturned milk crates I keep on the porch for chairs: my baby sister in a long skirt and a light jean jacket, the strong bitter smell of her American Spirits. Houdini is giving her the evil eye from behind the other milk crate, teeth bared, trembling, thinking somehow that he’s invisible.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I say, and I rush up toward her, leaving the bike in the dirt at the bottom of the porch steps, and then we’re hugging, laughing, I’m pressing her head into the bones of my chest.

“You total jerk,” I say, when we pull apart, and she says, “I’m sorry, Hen. I’m really sorry.”

She doesn’t need to say any more, that’s all I need to hear, in terms of a confession. She knew all along what she was doing, when she begged me, in tears, to help spring her husband.

“It’s okay. To be honest, I guess I’m rather impressed, retrospectively, with your cleverness. You played me like a—how did dad used to say it? Like an oboe? Something?”

“I don’t know, Henry.”

“Sure you do. Something about an oboe, with a bonobo, and—”

“I was only six, Henry. I don’t know any of the sayings.”

She flicks the butt of her cigarette off the porch and pulls out another one. Reflexively I scowl at her chain-smoking, and reflexively she rolls her eyes at my paternalism—old habits. Houdini gives a little tentative woof and pokes his snout out from under the milk crate. Officer McConnell has informed me that the dog is a bichon frisé, but I still like to think of him a poodle.

“So all right, but now you need to tell me. What did you need to know? What information did I unwittingly provide for you by worming my way into the New Hampshire National Guard?”

“Somewhere in this country there is a secret project under construction,” Nico begins, slowly, her face turned away from mine. “And it’s not going to be somewhere obvious. We’ve narrowed it down, and now our goal is to find the seemingly innocuous facility where this project is taking place.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Can’t tell you. But we have information—”

“Where’d you get the information?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Come on, Nico.”

I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone. I’m arguing with my little sister, like we used to over the last Popsicle, or over her boosting my grandfather’s car, except this time we’re fighting about some preposterous geopolitical conspiracy.

“There is a certain level of security in place to protect this project.”

“And, just so I’m clear, you don’t really believe that it’s a shuttle to take people to the Moon.”

“Well,” she says, draws on her cigarette. “Well. Some of us do believe that.”

My mouth drops open, the full ramifications of this thing—what she’s done, what she’s doing here, why she’s apologizing—all of it only now sinking in. I look at her again, my sister, and she even looks different, a lot less like my mother than she used to. She is thinner than before, and her eyes are sunken and serious, not an ounce of baby fat to soften the hard lines of her face.

Nico, Peter, Naomi, Erik—everybody hoarding secrets, changing. Maia, from 280 million miles, having her way with us all.

“Derek was one of the saps, huh? You were on the inside, but your husband really thought we were escaping to the Moon.”

“He had to. He had to believe he had a purpose in riding his ATV onto the base, but he couldn’t know the real purpose. Too untrustworthy. Too—you know.”

“Too stupid.”

She doesn’t answer. Her face is set, her eyes gleaming now with something familiar, something chilling, something like the aggressive religious types in Police Plaza, like the worst of the Brush Cuts, rousting their drunks for the thrill of it. All the true believers batting away the reality of all of this.

“So, the level of security you mentioned. If that had been the real facility, the place you’re looking for, I would have found him, what, in shackles?”

“No. You would have found him dead.”

Her voice is cold, brutal. I feel like I’m standing here with a stranger.

“And you knew he was going to be taking this risk when you sent him in there. He didn’t know, but you did.”

“Henry, I knew it when I married him.”

Nico looks off into the distance and smokes her cigarette, and I’m standing here shivering, not even because of what happened to Derek, not because of this crazy science-fiction madness that my sister has let herself become involved in, not even because I was unknowingly dragged into it, too. I’m shivering because this is it—when Nico takes off, tonight, we’re done—I’m never going to see her again. That’ll leave me and the dog, together, waiting.

“All I can tell you is that it was worth it.”

“How can you say that?” I’m remembering the last part of the story, too, the botched jailbreak, Derek left behind, left for dead. Expendable. A sacrifice. I pick up my bike, heave it onto my shoulder, and walk past her to the door.

“I mean—wait—do you want to know what it is we’re looking for?”

“No, thank you.”

“Because it’s worth it.”

I’m done. I’m not even angry, so much as exhausted. I’ve been biking all day. My legs hurt from my ride. I’m not sure what I’m doing tomorrow, but it’s late. The world keeps turning.

“You have to trust me,” says Nico to my back, I’m at the door now, the door is open, Houdini is at my heels. “It’s all worth it.”

I stop, and I turn and look at her.

“It’s hope,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. “It’s hope. Okay.”

I close the door.