The Postcard (20 page)
“I said where he’s resting,” said Dobbs. “Not where he’s dead.”
“Bay Pines Veterans’ Hospital,” said Mrs. K. “It’s where Nick is —” She suddenly squinted around through her glasses. “Dang! Here comes security!”
“They run us off always,” said Scully.
“Hey, you!” came a shout, then the sound of footsteps. “Are you geezers out there again? The estate is closed!” Then softer: “Unit Three, requesting backup. Unit Four —”
“It’s Lori! Let’s scram off !” said Marcia Chalmers.
“Scat!” yelled Dobbs.
“In my mind, I’m alweady awound ze corner!” said Punch.
We raced to the blue sedan and piled inside. It was actually very roomy. We tore away at top speed, laying rubber — as if there was any left to lay! — on the winding drive. We screeched around the visitors’ center, then sliced over the grass and under the gatehouse arch, chased by a couple of whirring golf carts and the shouts of the estate security.
We hurtled through the streets of Sarasota, groaning and shrieking like a herd of elephants and parrots, then careened onto the highway north to St. Petersburg.
“He-he!” cried Heinrich. “Ze old bomp, she still gots it!”
When we were safely tooling along the highway, Scully turned to me. “About Marnie,” he said, “that something fishy was going on, we knew. Before she got it, the old man wanted to see all her mail. Lots of postcards. Very fishy.”
“Oh, that reminds me,” said Mrs. K. She opened her purse, took out a stack of old colored postcards, and gave them to me. There must have been fifty or more of them. It was a collection of all the sights in St. Petersburg.
“Wow,” said Dia. “What a stash! My dad would love to check these out.”
“Nick sent your grandma many over the years,” Mrs. K said to me. “I kept them all for her. But that one . . .” She tapped the card of the Hotel DeSoto still in my hand. “That was the first. She’d never part with it.” The woman smiled sweetly at me, but with a faraway look in her eyes, as if she was remembering something from long ago.
By the time we screeched into the parking lot of Bay Pines Veterans Hospital, barely half an hour remained before visiting hours were over. A large new hospital was surrounded by a kind of wandering campus of older Spanish buildings and lush, green lawns with very tall pine trees and oaks and palms. Bay Pines was like heaven, a resort, even, except for the sick people. Older men and women, mostly men, from Vietnam and Afghanistan and the Gulf Wars, I guessed, were taking the night air in the park outside the main entrance. Many were in chairs, some had canes. Some younger men stayed to themselves, staring out with vacant looks, while others laughed in small groups.
Dobbs sighed. “Emerson can’t leave here anymore. Malaria from Japan did in his lungs and ticker. Can’t see outta one eye, and the other’s no telescope, either. All that running and jumping over the years didn’t help. Life finally caught up with him. He has me do his roundabout work for him.”
“You still gots it, too!” said Heinrich Punch as we rolled into the wide circle in front of the entrance.
Dobbs tipped his beret to the little German. “Emerson’s living under another name. Nicholas Falcon, if you can believe it. Don’t ask me how he pulled that off or where he got the identification papers or the photo ID. I haven’t the faintest.”
“Oh, I can’t imagine, either. A complete mystery,” said Mrs. K. Her sly look reminded me that Dad had said she used to work for the city, and, of course, she took all kinds of photographs.
Scully stopped just short of the ramp and slapped the deed on the seat next to him. “With what’s left of this, we’ll plan our next job. A new assignment is that which the long arm of Oobarab seeks now,” he said. Then, scratching his bony chin, he looked off into the distance of the pines as if he could see for miles.
“For me alsho,” said Mr. Stimp, nudging his very tall companion in the side. “We need to shtretch out. Find what’sh new.”
“Und now ve go!” said the German. “Auf viedersehen, kinder!”
“Toodles!” said Marcia Chalmers, smiling and waving her purple veil.
With that, the sedan spun half a squishy doughnut and shrieked away. I wondered whether I would see that beat-up old car or its passengers ever again. After all that had happened, I hoped I would.
When Mrs. K, Chester Dobbs, Dia, and I walked through the front doors, the nurses at the desk barely raised their heads. “Hey, Dobbsy,” they chimed, and waved us right in.
All during the short elevator ride, my stomach was doing flip-flops. Emerson Beale! Alive! What would he be like, after all? I knew who he was now. Dia was right about me hoping for it. But I had yet to even whisper the word to myself.
I think Dobbs, Mrs. K, and Dia hung back as we approached his room because this was special for me. I looked at each of them, then pushed the wide door open and walked in.
There he was: a man as thin as a stick, his clothes hanging off him, a few wisps of white hair combed across his mottled white head. He was propped up in a chair by the window, surrounded by pillows, connected to monitors and IV drips, slowly tapping the keys of a laptop. He stopped for a moment to look out the window, and I wondered if he had seen the blue sedan in the driveway.
I breathed out. “Mr. Beale . . . Nick . . . sir . . .”
He turned, and a white face stared at me, one eyelid closed. He was wrinkled and weathered and smaller in a way I hadn’t imagined from the stories. I could see what I thought were the scars of his war wounds lining his cheeks and jaw and around his eyes, whitened beyond white, but maybe those were just the signs of age. I wasn’t sure anymore if that part of the story were true. It seemed then as if a light went on inside of him.
“You’re Jason,” he said in a low voice, straining to smile.
I could sense Dia in the hall behind me. I felt a sob in my throat, but kept it down. “Yes.”
“You found the postcards.”
“Uh-huh.” I pulled the first one from the Hotel DeSoto from my pocket. He laid the computer on the bed and took it from me.
“I sent this to your grandmother to tell her I was still alive,” he said, as if the big story was right there on the tip of his tongue. “An old mystery writer’s trick —”
“My trick, if anyone’s listening,” Dobbs grumbled from the hall.
Emerson held the card up to the ceiling light, ran his fingers over the little twinkle of light as I had done, and made a sound to himself. “I guess I always thought you had to be smart to figure this out.”
“Smart?” I said. “I don’t know about smart. My mom calls me a smartmouth.”
He laughed. It was a bigger, warmer laugh than I would have thought possible from someone so frail and old. It filled the room. “Works for me.” He patted the bed. “You must have a lot of questions. Have a seat.”
I sat on the edge, catching a glimpse of Dobbs and Dia standing quietly in the hallway now.
“That was some story,” I said. “How much . . . was . . . well, I mean, the elephants, the tiger? Was any of it, you know . . .”
“How much was true?” he said with a smile. “I ask myself that question a hundred times a day. Agnes, Marnie, your grandmother —
she
was true. My trying to get to her was true. Now that she’s . . .” He trailed off, then started again. “Now that she’s gone, I guess it’ll be true again, my trying to reach her.”
I tried to smile but couldn’t. Did he mean he was going to die soon? I wanted to know everything. I was full of questions, and I began to ask them.
“Why was Fang — her father — so crazy about hiding her, and so crazy about keeping you away?”
“Two reasons,” he said, as if it pained him to remember them, but also as if he were remembering them all the time. “One is because of the accident.”
The first reason, it turned out, was simple. I think. Quincy Monroe and his daughter were flying his experimental helicopter thing. They lost control and crashed into Tampa Bay. She was hurt. Not only in her body, but because of loss of oxygen, in her mind, too. Monroe blamed himself. He had, in fact, caused it, felt guilty, and vowed to spare no expense to help cure her. He took her to clinics all over the world. But even as Emerson Beale told me this, I began to hear the mystery of Nick and Marnie coming out in his words, and to understand the second reason.
The two giant palms that gave the place its name were eerily still. The white sands spread out before us, then vanished under the black water.
“Nicky,” she said, the evening sun kissing, reddening her face before it dropped away into the Gulf. “You n-n-need to know what happened in the autogyro that day.”
I pressed her hand palm to palm with mine. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said.
“I do,” she said. “After I got your postcard and read the story in the hotel, and kept coming back to it, I knew I had to find you. My life was empty without you in it. Nothing m-mattered but finding you, Nicky.”
My chest heaved. “Marnie . . .”
“Father refused to hear of it, of course. He forbid me to see you. He would never tell me why until that day in his autogyro. I demanded he explain it to me. Daddy said your father . . . your father suspected that he ch-cheated him and others. Of millions. That Daddy destroyed their savings, everything they had. He said you meant trouble. You would discover the truth. We argued, fought terribly. I said things. Daddy . . . struck me. He couldn’t believe he had d-d-done it. Then, as if he saw n-no other way out, he let go of the controls. I screamed. Nick, the gyro plunged. We hit the Bay hard. The crash threw me, they say. I don’t remember. My spine was . . . damaged. I was under the water for a long time.” She turned to me. “Thinking about you, of course. What else was I going to do?”
She laughed then. I cried and kissed her.
“Nick, I was under for three minutes. Only you, your face . . .” She held my cheeks in her hands and kissed me. “You kept me alive in my watery tomb.”
Marnie breathed in the blue air, saying nothing for a while. “I was in a coma. Four months. Daddy survived, but seeing me there, knowing he was to blame, he vowed to spend his whole empire for me. He hated you, tooth — blamed you for poisoning me against him, for trying to take me away, for being who you were, tied to his . . . his . . . crimes. Daddy was a lonely man. His mind turned d-dark that day over the Bay, Nick. As black as swamp water.”
I held her.
There was nothing more I could do but hold her.
Nothing.
Slowly, the hospital room formed around us again. My cheeks were wet. “So that’s why Monroe hated you so much? Because of your father?”
“Hate?” he said. “I don’t know what it was, but I don’t think it was hate. It was something inhuman. My father had mortgaged everything to buy a few hundred acres. For us, for our future, he told my mother. He held onto them after the collapse of the land boom, held on through the Depression, hoping their value would come back, only to find everything stolen from him in one of Monroe’s land grabs. His heart couldn’t take it. My father died not ten yards from the big house on Beach Drive, planning to do who knows what. Monroe knew that there were a thousand Raymond Beales out there, men like my father who lost everything, and he feared that if I got too close to the family, his vast web of swindles would be exposed. Knowing what kind of person he was only made me want to take Marnie away from him sooner. Being with your grandmother was like . . . Jason, you wouldn’t believe how truly beautiful she was.”
“I read the story. I can guess.”
He searched my face, then lowered his voice so I had to lean closer. “There was a scandal,” he said. “Your grandmother and I. We finally did get together. That part of the story wasn’t made up. Her spine was damaged in the accident, but she could bear a child, and did. Your father.”
And I knew it. A lump grew in my throat. “So . . . you . . . really are . . . my grandfather?”
His hand, cold as it was, took mine and held it tight. “Yes, Jason. If I did anything right at all, it was loving your grandmother. She was Marnie, of course, but so much more. She was
alive.
”
I liked hearing about her as she was so many years ago. It was like those postcards. As Randy said, they showed you things that weren’t there anymore. But in a way, that made them seem more real. Nick and Marnie’s story was like that, too. There was something beautiful, magical about the two of them together. I couldn’t think of Grandma and Emerson without thinking about the story, and the story drove me right back to thinking about them. If I was confusing the two, everyone else seemed to have, also. It was almost impossible not to.
Taking a breath, his chest heaved and calmed. “By the time your dad was in school, Monroe was a sick man, nearly penniless himself, having spent millions on her treatments. In his darkness of mind, he sent for me. I went to him.”
Fang heaved himself down behind the desk in his office at the Hotel DeSoto, as dusty and funereal now as Miss Havisham’s wreck of a parlor. He was long out of the big house now, out of nearly everything, while Marnie was in Austria, or was it Peru? Burma? In a few minutes, it wouldn’t matter where.
He scanned me with that hole of an eye socket, then opened his cigarette case and pulled out a folded postcard. “She never saw this,” he murmured. “What does it mean? What do they all mean?”
I stared at the fat man, his face pouring sweat off it like a wax dummy in the sun. Only there wasn’t any sun. Everything was dark. We were dark, too. I said nothing.
He leaned forward and told me point-blank: “A doctor has surfaced. Another doctor. Marnie has little left as it is, but may die unless she gets to his clinic in Tokyo.”
“You’re mad. You’re the one who’s killing her. She’ll die with you hovering over her, caging her in,” I said. “She needs to fly away from you and your . . . your prison —”
He bared his teeth. His fat hand reached back as if to haul off and clock me one. But he let it fall. His face fell, too. With the weight of sorrow drawing him down, he began to talk. “You don’t know what it’s like. Her mind . . . every day . . . the damage is worse. She lost her heart, her memories, because of that accident. She doesn’t know you anymore —”
“She does,” I said.
“Her mind . . . ,” he repeated, then stopped, as if telling me any more would exhaust him. His one eye began to weep.
Fang seemed nearly human then.
“Soon, there will be nothing left,” he continued, panting with every move of his hands. “Neither of this dynasty, nor of me. Nor of Marnie, unless I do something —”
“Your dynasty was the cause of the argument in the autogyro,” I said. “It was the cause of Marnie’s injuries, and now you’ve lost it all to pay for your crimes. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Soon, I will be dead,” he said, ignoring me. “Sleeping the big sleep. I want you — you — to promise me you’ll continue her treatments when I’m gone.”
“Me?”
He groaned in his throat. “I can’t trust my own smart lawyers. Their noses smell only money. I need someone . . . someone who will not fail to pay the ravenous bills for her care.”
“How can I do that?” I said. “I’m only a writer.”
“With this.”
He pulled open a drawer and slid his hands in. It wasn’t a gun he pulled out, but a couple of sheets of paper.
“What is it?” I asked.
His face was pale like frozen fish.
“You talk of ironies?” he said. “It’s a deed to land more valuable than your father ever dreamed of. The income is more than enough to care for her after I die. Take care of that . . . love child of yours, too, but especially my daughter. My Marnie!”
While he wept, I picked up the deed and read it. The land under the Gandy Bridge on both sides was his, leased to the county. No wonder Oobarab was going to tie me under the bridge. It was their backyard. The income from the lease brought millions. It would pay for Marnie, and for our son.
But the terms of the deed were pure Fang.
Human? My father was right. He had no soul. No heart at all beat in that fat chest.
“Why? What did it say?” I asked him.
Emerson shifted in his chair. Night had fallen on the city behind him.
“The deed forbade me to have any contact with Marnie or our son,” he said. “If I did, his lawyers would release false documents about crimes I was supposed to have commited. I would be jailed, the deed would be canceled, and your grandmother would be thrown without a cent on the mercy of the state. The same would happen if I married her, even after he died. Not only that, it committed me to silence about his crimes. If and when she died, the land would become the property of the Order of Oobarab.”
“They told us it belonged to them now,” I said.
“In this way,” he went on, “Monroe’s terrible hatred would continue after his death. His lawyers on one side, vigilant to the suspicion and contempt he had for me, Oobarab always watching me on the other. I guess I was weak, I should have fought it, but I loved your grandmother, saw her ebbing away every day, and I felt I had no choice. He trusted no one, but in a strange way, he trusted me. Whatever else he thought, he knew I loved her. So I had to let her go, and your father along with her.”
Laughing, Fang watched me sign the deed, then put his fat palm out.
“It is done,” he said.
When I didn’t take his hand, he grabbed mine, opened its palm and slapped his on it, as if sharing blood with me. “Palms together, twins in our pact!”
I staggered to my feet, the devil’s deed in one hand, his sweaty palm in the other.
He laughed a cold laugh, flicking his eyes at the papers that burned my fingers. “You don’t know how sick it makes me to give that to you . . . you . . .”
He turned away, too disgusted to speak another word. And I realized that as much as he loved his daughter, he despised me more.
The room came back to us. “Year after year went by. Marnie spent seven years in Tokyo. The old man clung to life into his nineties. His agents got old with him.”
“They’re back together again, maybe to stay,” I said, and he seemed to like that. “But why did you hide the deed? Was the Secret Order after you?”