22
“Pardon me, sir. Are you Mister Fletcher?”
“I am.” The young man dressed entirely in white said, “One of our patients, Ms. Faoni, has expressed a wish to meet you. Would you mind?”
Fletch smiled. “Not at all. Where is she?”
“In her room. She’s been concentrating on her weight problem, but …” The young man shrugged. “Will you follow me, please?”
“Sure.”
Fletch followed the young man through the corridors of Blythe Spirit’s second floor. Fletch now knew the place had been built as the estate of a Wisconsin timber baron.
Cindy and Roger had met Fletch at O’Hare International Airport at about one-fifteen. Together they had driven in the Global Cable News van the 112 miles from Chicago to Forward, Wisconsin.
Roger drove at first, while Cindy, who would do the on-camera work on the television feature describing Blythe Spirit’s therapy for those suffering food addictions, studied the material faxed to Fletch on both the problems specific to food addiction, and Blythe Spirit itself. Fletch had studied the material on the airplane from Nashville to Chicago. Together, in the backseat of the van, they worked on the script Fletch had drafted on the airplane.
After Cindy had absorbed the material, she drove the van. She said driving relaxed her.
They were warmly greeted by the staff of Blythe Spirit.
Staying off camera, Fletch helped Roger set up the exterior shots. Once inside, he helped both Roger and Cindy set up the interview locations, helped those to be interviewed, administrators, staff, and two or three willing patients, understand what was wanted from them, helped Cindy and Roger understand what points in particular the interviewees wished to make.
When Fletch was summoned to Crystal Faoni’s room, Cindy was just about to begin an interview with a patient in the sunroom on Blythe Spirit’s second floor.
There was little or no need for Fletch from that point forward.
To get to Nashville Airport in time, Fletch had skipped breakfast. He had eaten an apple in the car. There was no time for him to eat anything at the airport. Nothing but drinks had been offered on the airplane. He had not wanted to delay Cindy and Roger at O’Hare Airport by stopping to eat.
It was late afternoon.
Fletch was very hungry.
He did not know how to ask the staff of Blythe Spirit for food.
As they approached the door to Room 27, the young man in white slowed and spoke quietly to Fletch.
“If you can understand, sir, to ensure her privacy, Ms. Faoni has expressed the wish that she remain behind a curtain while she meets with you. You do understand, don’t you?”
“A curtain?”
“Some of our patients are more sensitive about their condition than others are.”
“Okay.”
Fletch’s stomach growled.
THE ROOM INTO which Fletch was shown was a perfectly pleasant bedroom. The king-sized bed and its side table were lower than usual. Two upholstered chairs had uncommonly wide seats. There were paintings of farm scenes on the beige walls. The outer wall was a sliding glass door onto a small balcony.
The privacy curtain hanging from a rail around the bed had been run back. It pretty well concealed the space on the other side of the bed. The curtain was a white plastic, very like a shower curtain.
Through the opaque curtain, backlit through the glass door, Fletch could see only the outline of a large bulk covered with white material. There was a globe on top of the bulk. The globe had neatly parted dark hair.
It took Fletch a moment to realize he was seeing a seated figure, a person.
From behind the curtain, a voice said: “By my calculation, Fletch, it has taken you less than forty-eight hours, since your first meeting Jack, to find me, and to penetrate my ultimate line of defense.”
The voice was that of Crystal Faoni.
“Hello, Crystal. I wish I could say it’s nice to see you.”
“It really wouldn’t be, you know.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“I heard your voice. I watched you in the courtyard through the window.”
“You still didn’t have to invite me in for a visit.”
“I had figured you would do something to get to me. I wasn’t sure whether I would see you….”
“You expected me?”
“I know you.”
“Yes. You do.”
“You arrived with a camera crew from Global Cable News.”
“Yes.”
“Clever. I’m sure the owners and administrators of Blythe Spirit are delighted by the publicity.”
“They’ve been most cooperative. So why did you decide to invite me to your room?”
“Once I saw you … You were counting on that, weren’t you? … You’ve changed little. Are you sitting?”
Fletch realized he had the advantage. She was backlit by the fading light in the window behind her. The attendant had closed the door behind Fletch. He could see her amazing outline. She couldn’t see him at all. “No.”
“Sit down. Please.”
The arms of the chair in which Fletch sat were too far away from his body to be useful. Could he have lost that much weight since that morning? “Thank you. I seem to remember a time when you and I fell through a curtain very much like that one.”
“I remember, too. We were wet, and we were naked, and it was wonderful. That reporter came into the bathroom—what was her name?—and found us on the floor struggling to get out from under that damned shower curtain.”
“Freddie Arbuthnot, who I thought was an impostor.”
“We were laughing. I was afraid you’d use her interrupting us as an excuse to stop. You didn’t.”
“No. I didn’t. She went away.”
“You never were easily embarrassed.”
“Is Jack my son?”
“What do you think?”
Various images went through Fletch’s mind: the back of the lanky young man dressed in wet, muddy prison denims in his study, looking away from him, the quick flash of his eyes; an hour later finding him cleaned up in the study, as shiny as a new penny; his sitting in the morning sunlight on the top rail of the corral; his fiddling with the knobs of an electronic console in the dusk at Camp Orania; his crouching over the body of the man he had killed the night before; his repeating what Fletch said through the station wagon window just before Fletch left the encampment. “Yes.”
“He is.”
“People mark a certain physical resemblance.”
“Mental, too. He’s as curious as a cat. In spirit, he’s you all over again. Do you find him witty?”
“Witty? Half.”
“Do you like him?”
“Depends.”
“You love him.”
“Crystal, why didn’t you ever tell me we have a son?”
“How angry are you about that?”
“Very.”
“Why?”
“It might have been nice. You know: son and Dad; Dad and son. Birthdays. Football.”
“Having a kid is a lot more than birthdays and football, Fletch.”
“Did you think me entirely irresponsible?”
“How many times have you been married? Three?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever have kids with any of your wives?”
“You never really knew my wives. I mean, you did know me. We weren’t grown up. I have no idea why I married Linda, Barbara.”
“You believed in the old institutions, you used to say.”
“Yeah.”
“In a time and a place when you yourself were changing the old institutions more than you knew. We all were.”
“Technology changed them more than anything we did. The bicycle. The car. Radio, television, telephone, the computer. The pill. Time and spatial relations, human relations were changing more and faster than ever before. We struggled to keep up. Most of us failed, I guess.”
“You never had kids with your wives, did you? So I should snatch a kid from you, and surprise you with it? How would you have felt about that?”
“I might have liked it.”
“You married some East European princess. I read you called her Annie Maggie. Did you love her?”
“Yes.”
“Would you have had a child by her?”
“She was pregnant when she was assassinated. I thought only we and one doctor knew about it. It may have been the reason she was assassinated.”
“Oh, God. Sorry, Fletch.”
“Life is long; life is short.”
“I did you a big favor, Fletch.”
“How’s that?”
“If you had raised a son, he would have rebelled against you, dissented, probably become the opposite of everything you are and everything you stand for. Sons do that.”
“Some sons, I guess.”
“Your son would have. I’m certain your son would have. Not knowing you, Jack adores you.”
“Sure.”
“He does. He’s enormously curious about you. He has scrapbooks of newspaper clippings about you. I had to consider putting him in therapy when Princess Annie Maggie was killed, he was that upset. He’s read your book on Pinto, Edgar Arthur Tharp, Junior, so many times, I think he’s worn out a dozen copies.”
“Really?”
“I think he’s memorized every line of it.”
Fletch recollected the faddy little argument Jack had given him about Pinto.
Crystal said, “He insisted on going to your college.”
“He went to Northwestern?”
“Only because you went there.”
“Crystal, you filled him up with silly stories about me.”
“Sure. A mother who doesn’t encourage respect for the father in her son loses the son. Also loses the father. Some things never change. I told him stories about how many times and in how many ways you dodged picking up that Bronze Star. He pestered me for years trying to figure out how he could pick up your Bronze Star for you, get ahold of it. He probably will figure it out yet.”
Fletch asked, “Whose name is on his birth certificate?”
“Oh, my.” Fletch wondered what would be the next thing he would eat, and when.
“That’s right.”
“His name is John Fletcher Faoni?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s John?”
“You wanted more of Irwin Maurice maybe?”
“No.”
“There was no John. Don’t be funny.”
“Your office says John Fletcher Faoni is spending the summer in Greece.”
“He isn’t. As you know, he is now at a camp in Alabama.”
“Some camp. Crystal, there never has been a John Fletcher Faoni in any federal or state prison in the United States. We checked.”
“Yes and no. No and yes. He was in the federal prison in Tomaston, Kentucky, five weeks. As a plant.”
“A plant.”
“As soon as he escaped from the prison, all records of his having been there were to be expunged immediately.”
“He never shot a cop, or shot at a cop?”
“Of course not. Cop killing is one of the crimes that most impresses The Tribe.”
Fletch snorted. “Pink Cadillac convertible. I knew the little bastard didn’t know how to load a .32. Who arranged for him to enter the prison, and why?”
“I did.”
“Goddamn it! You helped arrange for a handsome kid like that to spend time in a maximum-security federal prison? Have you no idea what could have happened? What probably did happen to him?”
“How the hell do you know?”
“Jack is expert in a very esoteric form of the martial arts.”
“Big deal! Some of those guys—”
“Besides,” Crystal said, “he plays the guitar nicely.”
“So goddamned what?” Fletch also wanted to shout at Crystal, I’m hungry! He didn’t dare.
“Lots of people helped in the arrangements, Fletch.”
“Like who?”
“Jack Saunders,”
“Saunders? He’s retired.”
“He’s still meddlesome. The Attorney General of the United States. I’ve made a lot of friends since you last knew me.”
“Friends?”
“Jack is, and always has been, determined to follow in your footsteps.”
“I tried to get into prison once, do a story. No one would let me.”
“This is a special case. There’s a real need for what he is doing.”
“Like what?”
“Jack went to Boston University’s School of Journalism. He spent a lot of time with Jack Saunders and his wife. Jack, that is Jack Fletcher—”
“Jack Fletcher Faoni.”
“So his name is backwards. Jack wanted to do his master’s thesis on The Tribe. Secret organization though it is, he had come across it in the universities, in the streets. In fact, they tried to recruit him. Your dear old editor, Jack Saunders, suggested he treat it as a story, do it right, as something that could be published, something useful.”
“We discussed it.”
“You and Jack Saunders?”
“Jack Saunders and I.”
“You didn’t discuss it with me. For whom is he supposedly doing this story?” Maybe Fletch could find a steak somewhere, on the way back to the airport, a rare steak….
“Do you think it is anything that might interest Global Cable News?”
“I see. I was conned.”
“Oh, I think anyone would be happy to have this story. Looks like you’ll have to negotiate for it.” Crystal laughed. “Then I happened to be having a conversation with the Attorney General.”
“Of the United States.”
“He got back to me, and asked to see Jack. The idea of using Jack appealed to him. There had been a plan to send a young FBI agent into the prison. Inmates in a maximum-security prison would spot a trained agent in a blink of an eye. After meeting with Jack, the AG was certain Jack could carry this off. Jack gets the story rights.”
“Uh-huh!”
“There is this man, Kris Kriegel—”
“We’ve met.”
“He’s very intelligent, apparently.”
“He’s a jerk.” Fletch looked around the room. There wasn’t even water to drink, to fill up his stomach.
“In jail for murder.”
“Yes. Was.”
“Using his civil rights as a federal prisoner, he organized and took control of the white supremacist movement, established what is called The Tribe, in every federal and state prison in this country. Race riots were happening in the prisons with increasing frequency. They were becoming more vicious. Kriegel had contacts, more than that, position and authority not only in the supremacist movement outside the prisons, in this large country, but also in similar movements in Europe, Africa, and around the world. He was organizing a worldwide movement from his jail cell! They couldn’t take his civil rights away from him without giving him publicity. They moved him from prison to prison, but that only made things worse, increased his contacts with the prison population, made him more powerful. They knew if they put him in solitary under some pretext, the whole prison system would explode. He was becoming impossibly dangerous. Jack was really on to something.”
“So?”
“So it was arranged for Jack to go to prison to win Kriegel’s confidence, arrange his escape, and to stay with him, and to find out everything he could about his contacts, the organization, the Tribe, his plans….”
Fletch shook his head. “Strooth, it’s a hell of a story, if I do say so myself. Hell of a master’s thesis. But couldn’t the kid just have written about the First Amendment like everybody else?”
“Jack’s not like everybody else. He’s like you.”
“I didn’t have a mother as willing and weird as you are! You arranged for the kid to go to prison!”
“We all did. It was what Jack wanted. He had an ulterior motive of his own, you see. Stop clucking!”
“I’m not clucking.” It was getting dark outside and Fletch’s mind was settling on pizza. “I’m expostulating.”
“Listen to me! It was arranged that if he did not succeed immediately in attracting Kriegel, Jack would be out of there in six hours.”
“Out of prison?”
“You’re forgetting something. In prison, once he had Kriegel’s attention and support, no one would dare touch him. Not in any way. Jack was as safe as if he were at home in bed.”
“Horseshit.”
“Nothing happened to him.”
“You know that?”
“I do.”
“So what was his ‘ulterior motive’?”
“You can’t figure that out?”
“Maybe. Tell me.”
“To meet you. On your own turf. To do as you used to do. Still do, I guess, if I view my GCN correctly. And to do it to you.”
“Do it to me.”
“He didn’t want to approach you as a slavering kid. He didn’t want to meet you as a pedestrian while you were on horseback. He wanted to meet you while he was working on his own big story, see if he could suck you into it, see if he could make you go along with him, if he could interest you in what he was doing, in him. Apparently he did, at least to some extent. He wants your respect, too. Surely you can see that.”
“You’re a weird mother.”
“I have one other suspicion regarding his motivations.”
“What?”
“I think he was scared shitless by what he was doing. I think he wanted you with him.”
Fletch remembered Jack standing by the car last night. He had something to say. He didn’t say it.
Did Jack know the truth between father and son could only be bridged by the mother?
What Jack did say was, “Trust me.”
And Fletch had answered something like he would store the request.
Now Fletch knew who Jack was.
And he knew something, specifically and generally, about what Jack wanted from him.
Fletch exhaled two lungfuls of breath.
“I haven’t …” Fletch cleared his throat. “I haven’t much experience … at responding to situations like this.”
Crystal asked, “You want to know what Jack thinks of you now, Fletch?”
“No.”
“He thinks you’re senile.” Crystal laughed. “He says you forget all the stories I tell about you.”
Fletch looked sharply at the curtain. “You couldn’t know that, Crystal, unless he’s talked to you, recently.”
“He called this morning. From Camp Orania.”
“He took a chance telephoning from there, didn’t he? And how come he can get through on the phone to you and we couldn’t?”
“He’s my son. He knows the appropriate password. And you don’t.”
“You could have saved a hell of a lot of bother.” I’m hungry!
“Jack says he’s doing very well. He’s videotaped the camp and everyone in it. He spent the night copying all of the files out of The Tribe’s computer system, files from around the country and around the world. This afternoon, he was to attend some kind of a planning meeting. That must have been interesting.”
“He told you about making everybody puke while Kriegel was speaking?”
“Oh, yes.” Crystal laughed. “Shades of his father.”
Fletch did not ask if Jack had told his mother that the night before he had killed a man, to save the lives of Carrie and Fletch.
“Stop selling him to me,” Fletch said. “I’ve got the point.”
“Last night he even discovered a list of people targeted for assassination by The Tribe. Guess what.”
“What?”
“Your name’s on it.”
Fletch thought. “I suppose it would be.”
“Irwin Maurice Fletcher.”
Fletch sat forward in the oversized chair. “Those sons of bitches know Jack’s my kid.”
“Do they?”
“He’s in danger!” Fletch jumped up. “I put him in danger! Shit! End of story! To hell with Blythe Spirit! Goodbye.”
Fletch left Crystal’s room.
IN A MOMENT, he returned. He leaned against the doorjamb. “Crystal, what are you doing here?”
“Slimming,” she said.
“Jack tells me you’ve been coming here twice a year for years. And you’re still slimming?”
“This time they’re recommending I stay here, maybe, for good.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m sick, Fletch. I’ve got a problem.”
“You realize you referred to your being incommunicado here at Blythe Spirit as your ‘ultimate line of defense’?”
“Okay. I did. So what?”
“Ultimate line of defense against what? Me? Jack? Living? Why do you need it?”
“You know all about addictions now? You got a better idea?”
“Always.”
“Tell me.”
“First: trust us.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Second: lower the food thermostat in your head.”
“Oh, Fletch. What do you know?”
“I know I’ll be back.”