MAD JACK, MADDER ROSE
Chapter 1
Two days' patience. That's all it takes. I've found a place in Miami that suits my northern predilections. That is to say, by local standards, the condo is practically armor-plated. My contact in the company, the one with real-estate connections, said they were all month vacuuming the residual coke out of it after a half dozen chunks of the former owner- the few bits that the alligators left- were found in a local canal. But Bobby tends to exaggerate. In reality, the place smacks of imported money. Some old rich guy who wanted to soak up some sun before he kicked off. Whoever he was, punk-level druglord or ex-airline pilot or former CEO, whatever, he had the sense to install storm windows and a storm door. That's all I wanted: not to blow away the first time the windspeed climbs above eighty m.p.h.
It has a nice view, too, from the second floor. Western aspect, high sweeping sky, a wide swath of deep blue ocean. Beautiful. To me, open water always seems the stuff of possibilities. The view is rendered even better with Lisa blocking part of it. The boxes with the books beat the boxes with the lamps, still stuck in traffic somewhere in a delivery truck, and she's sorting while she unpacks, reading spines in the late-afternoon light from the balcony. I haven't brought the whole library down from Chicago. Just enough to make me feel grounded. Like she does.
She's all lean curves and legs, ash-gray t-shirt and jeans, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and a little more red than brown in the late-afternoon sunlight. She's examining the books with a mix of amusement and dead-serious concentration. Smiling to herself just enough to awaken her dimples. Armed with a pair of screwdrivers, flathead and Phillips, she's assembled, on her own, three bookshelves, while I tackled the hardware for the computer desk, the dresser, the second half of the entertainment center. What I had for furniture in Chicago pretty much stayed in Chicago; I wanted fresh stuff here. We took the bed for a test-drive last night. Before that, the sofa. Notorious on the forty-inch TV.
It's the tail end of Saturday afternoon. Three nights ago, Wednesday, I stayed at her place. Last-minute mixups. The security guys from the company couldn't make it in to finalize the setup in the condo until Friday. Which was okay. It gave me a chance to get the pressing.
She doesn't wear much jewelry. Necklaces she usually won't bother with, though the ones I've seen are uncomplicated and tasteful; her earrings, she likes to say, all seem to end up as single twins. She has maybe a half-dozen rings, that I've seen. Class rings, high school and college; a couple in silver or white gold. Pretty simple. I made a wax pressing of the simplest one on Thursday morning. Six-fifteen a.m. Right before she got up to get ready for work.
She woke, as usual, right before the alarm rang. I was already back under the comforter beside her. The pressing-case was in the front right-hand pocket of my jeans, folded over the chair across from the bed. She showered. We showered. She had time for toast and coffee, and then she was off to the Lux. I was off to meet with the security guys at the condo. That afternoon, I took the wax pressing to a jeweler's.
Let's call it ring seven. Size seven, too. Nothing predestined about it. Nothing starry-eyed or lucky. No guesswork, either: the jeweler sized it from the little circular moat in the wax. Like rings one through six, it's nothing fancy. A small, good-quality diamond, a dark, brilliant sapphire to complement it. I took it to her apartment Thursday afternoon while she was still at the Lux. One word on the square: Someday?
All day Friday, while the company's security team was still crawling around the new place with cordless drills and spools of wire, she didn't say a word about either the ring or the note. Twenty minutes ago, on top of the computer desk, edged under a reader's copy of The Saint in Miami, I found the same square of paper I had left for her on Thursday. On the flipside, away from Someday?, was written
Yes
She said she's afraid to wear it here. The ring. Just for now, with all the boxes and the sheeting and plastic bags and other packaging getting swept up and mashed together and taken out for the recyclers. Just for now, she has it hanging on a piece of white cotton twine around her neck, under her gray t-shirt.
Above her heart.
Two days' patience. That's all it took. Two days to go from Someday to Yes. I now know the travel-time to heaven. I've just spent six hours bolting and screwing hardware into for-now furniture, and it's been the best six hours of my life.
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What would the post card say?
Dearest Mum,
Greetings from the Broward Correctional Institution. Wish you were here.
Love always,
Rose
I am here, ostensibly, in a two-woman cell in one of the higher-security housing units of the good ship Broward, deep in the sticky bowels of the swamp known as Florida, because I tried to blow up the Lux Atlantic, Lisa Reisert's precious hotel. In so doing, I tried to blow up the eponymous Miss Reisert. By extension, as they seem to be figuratively as well as nauseatingly actually attached at the hip, I attempted to vaporize Lisa's precious Jackson Rippner, as well as, in the bargain, give or take, approximately five hundred insignificant others. But that's hardly worth mentioning. In reality I am here because the company has yet to decide my fate. Never mind the tectonically slow workings of the underfunded, overly stuffed meat grinder that is the United States legal system: when John and Claire Carter determine what is to be done with me, their will will very much be done.
Never mind, either, that, technically, I am no longer in the company's employ. Like the parties to any decent bad relationship, we'll never be truly over one another.
At three p.m., they come for me. Two of them, late thirties, beefy and male, in deep blue uniforms, black bulletproof vests. A truncheon raps the bars near my feet. I'm lying on the lower of two bunks, reading an old paperback copy of Enderby, which I found two days ago, with surprise bordering on shock, in the prison library.
"Come on, Wheeler."
I know enough not to ask what they want, let alone try a touch of humor ("But, Jim, 'Rosemary' is so much prettier."): they're quick with the submission holds, nearly as quick with the pepper spray, and with a healing broken arm I'm in no shape to give them the mutilation they so deeply deserve. I mark my place and get up. On the bunk above mine, pale-faced Morris keeps her dark eyes in their dusk-gray bags locked on the cell's writing desk and the flickering tiny screen of her precious portable television. She seems to believe that if she looks away from it, it will vanish.
Just as I'm about to.
At four o' clock, I am seated in the back of a passenger van in motion. There are no windows; by the variations in our motion, I estimate we are traveling at highway speed. We sway in unison on the black vinyl that covers the thin padding of the bench seats. The van's side doors are across from me. Steel pull-handles. The doors swing out when opened. I can't reach them, though, or the double doors at the van's rear, to my left. Two reasons. Four, really: the two men to my left and right, cradling machine pistols in their laps. The two men across from me, to the left and right of the doors, likewise armed. And the fact that my ankles and wrists are shackled to the wall and floor of the van. If I tried to run, I would have to take it and all its black Ford tonnage with me. The fracture in the humerus of my left arm is now five weeks old and mostly healed, though it still aches and I still fear to move it incautiously. They didn't fear to move it when they shackled me.
Which means they're taking me to be killed. Indicator two of two.
Indicator one: the fact that I wasn't expecting a transfer. The company arranges those only for boys and girls who have been good. Boys like Jackson Rippner, bless his arse-kissing heart. For me, the "t" word will be something other.
Transferred, no. Terminated.
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An hour ago, in Warden Stratton's office, I asked: "Transferred where?"
Warden Stratton was conserving her words today. Likely, her teenage fuckup of a son had managed yet another mishap with school, a girl, or the family car. "Somewhere up north."
"I'm within my rights to inquire."
"The confidentiality is for your protection, Wheeler."
I had no privileges to lose. "Fuck you."
"We'll see that your personal property is packed and sent."
"I want to speak to my lawyer. Now."
"He'll be in touch when you reach your destination."
Proof positive: if my lawyer would be waiting, I was being sent to hell.
The van is windowless, but at least they haven't black-sacked my head. I tend to become claustrophobic when blindfolded. The van lurches, and the steel wall behind me knocks against my skull.
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Sink-or-swim-Saturday, they call it. Lisa and Cynthia. The guy who's the replacement for backstabbing ass-rat Eric Janssen at the Lux is working his first Saturday night as lead receptionist. Cynthia and Jeff Anderson, the junior doorman at the Lux, stop by to have a look at the new place. Sincere apologies abound: they would have come earlier, to help shift boxes and furniture, but they both had to work. By eight, glowing like a pair of kids on a Norman Rockwell Life cover, they're off to the movies. I suspect that both Cynthia and Lisa have given the new guy their cell numbers. I find myself frowning: I feel I know his name. Like an itch at the nape of my neck.
"Dave Huxley-?" I say, half to myself.
"I know; I thought it was weird, too." Lisa smiles at the quizzical look on my face. "David Huxley? Bringing Up Baby. Cary Grant, remember-?"
"Oh." Reassured, for the queen of Turner Classic Movies I remove my frown. "That's right."
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The plane is late, departing. We meet it on the tarmac, a white Mitsubishi twin-jet. They let me walk as carefully as I need to up the wheeled stairs; given the shackles on my legs and the clumsiness they bring, I'm unlikely to be mistaken for Elizabeth Taylor or Natalie Wood. I glance toward the cockpit in hopes of seeing something that will indicate our course or destination; the guard behind me sees me looking and jabs me in the shoulder of my bad arm. I don't give him the satisfaction of a flinch.
Seated, we wait. Me chained. No one speaks. I pick out the youngest, the most vulnerable, of the guards, and I commence staring at him. I stare until he breaks eye contact. I stare until he's staring stoically straight ahead. I stare until he's staring uncertainly at the toes of his black tactical boots. Then I look away.
By the time we take off, the sun has set. I cannot tell which way we are going. No one comes by with a rumbling metal cart of drinks and snacks. Flying is getting shittier by the second these days. I close my eyes and go to sleep. Always sleep when you can, my mother likes to say.
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Enough moving-in for one day. Lisa and I make ourselves a housewarming dinner. Salmon steaks and couscous. White wine, salad, steamed asparagus. She's leaning over the table, laying out plates and napkins and flatware. As I hover in the background, battling discreetly with the cork in the bottle of chardonnay, she says, casually:
"The memo you left earlier; I replied; I just wanted to confirm."
"Memo-?" It hits me, just as the cork pops loose. "Oh, right. Right-"
She straightens, watching me. I set the bottle and the corkscrew on the sideboard. From my front right pocket I take one of my utility Spydercos, an old, early model Delica. I open it one-handed, using the thumb-ring, as I go to her.
She looks at me without fear. Nothing but affection and intelligence in her lake-gray eyes. I can see the steady pulse in her throat, the subtle rise and fall of her breasts as she breathes.
I reach to the side of her neck with my empty hand and lift clear the ring I left for her Thursday afternoon. She didn't show it to Cynthia and Jeff. I think I can guess why: there are nerves, and there's Cynthia lighting up half the eastern seaboard because she's with her beau, and then there's Cynthia emitting a shriek only dogs can hear. We both smile as I cut the twine. I carefully slide the ring free; I unlock and refold the Delica and put it back in my pocket. Then I put the ring on the third finger of Lisa's left hand.
"Marry me," I say. I hold her hand and look in her eyes. "Please marry me, Lisa."
In response, she takes my face in her hands and kisses me on the lips. Slowly. Time lingers with the contact, that kiss and then another. This is a moment of demarcation for us, and she wants to make it last. Suspense trembles through me, a temblor passing along my spine. She's being thorough, though. Taking her time. She draws my lower lip gently between both of hers. I take her by the hips, move closer.
She kisses me once more, lightly. She looks into my eyes and says: "Yes. Yes, Jackson, I'll marry you."
I kiss her. "Just confirming, right?"
She nods.
I tip my forehead to hers, suddenly, quietly giddy. Suddenly in awe. We've officially become us. She smiles, and it's almost as if we're back at Ikea, standing in that showroom blazing with lighting fixtures.
"Mm hm. Confirmed."
She slips her arms around my neck. I put mine all the way around her and pull her close. The next kiss is like a shared solar flare. Just as I'm thinking that maybe the salmon will have to wait, the phone rings.
Other than Lisa, possibly three people have the number for my new land line. I assume it isn't the leader of the security team calling to say they've left behind a toolkit, or Paul Miller checking to see if my cable is working. I let go of Lisa and pick up the receiver on the third ring. "Yes, John?"
From Chicago, John Carter asks: Am I interrupting anything, Jackson?
"Do I really need to answer that?"
We have a lead on your party line, he replies.
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We taxi to a halt at the commercial airport of a nameless northern city at ten-eighteen p.m. I see the time on the digital watch on the wrist of one of the guards as I'm loaded directly from the tarmac into another windowless black van. I have neither the time nor the illumination with which to identify the airport at which we've arrived. I see nothing but the gray square bulk of a terminal building two hundred yards off. Boxy umbilicals unmated to planes, the dark mouths of cargo doors. In the distance, to my left, I see a city, nothing but a grumbling line of blacker moss at the black horizon, pricked with light. I think I can smell the ocean.
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Another bumping ride in a black windowless Ford. At our destination, we disembark directly at a sally-port. I'm introduced to it from the inside: a drive-in tunnel, steel doors at either end, walls of old red brick patched and reinforced with concrete. It's cold, or colder than Florida; I'm reminded how quickly we Northerners unadjust to brisk temperatures. We enter the building through a third steel door, my four escorts and I; inside, I'm passed, with a packet of paperwork, to two armed guards. They're uniformed in blue; my boys are in black. As my four file back out, I catch the eye of the youngest and wink. He looks away.
My new guards flank me as I stand before the desk of the intake officer. R. Crippen etched on his magnetic-clasp name-tag. We watch him check over my documents, the light from the fluorescents shining off the deforested dome of his skull. He reaches to his right, for a blank form in carbon-paged triplicate, and begins to write in cheap blue ballpoint. I lean an inch or two closer and read, upside-down, the header at the top of the form:
GOTHAM ASYLUM FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE
"I've never heard of this place," I say. He doesn't respond. I'm not merely trying to make conversation with good Mr. Crippen: never, either at university or in our crim-psych courses at the company, have I seen a single reference to a madhouse by this name. Not in the States, not in the former Soviet Union, not in the dark wilds of eastern Europe.
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Crippen kindly keeps things simple for me: I'm not asked to sign a single form. My intake guards return to their posts at the sally-port, and two female guards armed with truncheons, mace, and forearms the size of trans-Atlantic telecomm cables walk me through a dun-yellow concrete hall to the second-stage intake area. I am stripped and searched. Then I am allowed to shower. Important, this. It makes an impression. Allowed to shower. Not showered. Not shoved against the masonry wall whilst slipping on the filmy concrete underfoot and blasted with a hose. And there's hot water, too. Really, truly hot. I can't help myself: I close my eyes against the spray stinging my face and sigh as the heat seeps into my aching left arm and shoulder.
While I wash, the guard team takes my clothes. They box themselves into a black corner cam's gleaming eye and watch, corporeally unpresent, while a matron, tall and gaunt and uniformed in black, her dusty hair cropped around her fiftyish face, waits while I change into a jumpsuit of institutional gray and a pair of canvas, rubber-soled slippers. My manners so far must have impressed my keepers. The matron walks me, alone, to my new digs. Of course, cameras are everywhere. I sense there must be something else as well. Something truly hideous with which to reward the would-be escapee. That sense, coupled with the simple fact that I don't yet know the layout of the facility well enough to plan an effective flight, keeps me walking quietly straight ahead, with Matron at my elbow. She doesn't offer her name, and I don't ask.
I assume no one with an advanced degree and not just a temperature will see me until Monday. Without a word, Matron leaves me in a new private cave of greenish-gray brick and chipping plaster. There's an old porcelain-bowl sink, a toilet. An empty bookshelf, a steel-frame cot bolted to the wall. A window ten feet up the wall opposite the cot, just below the ceiling, a one-foot square of barred and dirty wired glass. A small table and one wooden-frame chair- which strikes me as odd, given the chair's heftability, its potential for being moved nearer the promise of escape via the window or, more spiritually, via suicide-by-light-fixture. Then I discover that the chair, like the table itself, is bolted to the floor, well out of reach of the ceiling lamp, a steel cage inside which the light from the too-small bulb seems to be trapped.
I lie back on the cot. The mattress is three inches thick, if that, but at least no springs jut up between my ribs and vertebrae. Springs would mean steel; steel would mean the potential for a shank, a shiv, a lock-pick. Or, again, suicide. A solid punch to one's own carotid, and one can bleed out in as little as three minutes. Couldn't have that in a respectable asylum for the criminally insane, now, could we? Blood in terminal quantity can make a hell of a mess. I fold my good arm under my head and look up at the cold moonlight coming through the wired window.
It's been a long day. I find myself drifting; I let myself go. I'm seconds away from sleep when the door-lock rattles.
I sit up. The door opens. It's Matron, flanked by two men in white-smocked uniforms who look to be straight out of On the Origin of Species.
"Dr. Crane will see you now," Matron says.
It must be nearly midnight. I blink away surprise and sleep in equal measure as I get up. "But of course."
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It's always so easy in the movies, even in the oldies Lisa loves so much, finding a lead. Ironically, things take longer in the cyber age. But Paul Miller and his counter-hackers in Chicago have gotten a whiff of the person or persons who, under the direction of Rosemary Wheeler, hijacked my and Lisa's phone service and e-mail six weeks back. Now Carter says it'll be more secure if we discuss the hijackers in person, and of course he's right. Here the old rules still apply: it's a million times easier to check the walls for eyes and ears than it is to assure the security of a single phone line. Miller, John says, has me booked on an eleven p.m. flight out of Miami.
"Us," Lisa says, as I get off the phone. She's been listening. Her eyes have never left my face.
"You don't have to come," I say.
"Yes, I do." She caresses my cheek. "It's my life, too, now, remember?"
I pick up the phone and dial Miller's private number. "I'll be needing a second ticket for tonight's show, Paul," I say, and hang up.
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Corridors of power. Corridors of insanity. The primates to my right and left don't share Matron's trust: they've each got me by an upper arm, death-grips from their gorilla's fingers, with no bloody regard for skin, muscle, or healing bone. En route to the administration wing, we pass through a hallway of heavy metal doors. Bolt-holes and tray slots. Beyond, moaning, muttering, an occasional broken howl. The walls here are gray-green bordering on nausea. The jumpsuit I'm wearing someone else has worn before. The fabric hangs heavily on my shoulders. The weave has been worn smooth and soft by washings and rewashings in hot water. Ill-rinsed. Bleach lingers in a ghostly burn against my skin. They've given me baggy knickers but no brassiere. I suspect my own clothing, not just the prison orange in which I arrived, is long gone. Not just my clothing: all of my things. I doubt the rules regarding personal property apply in an insane asylum. What good are the trappings when you're about to be turned inside out?
We pass through a reception-cum-security area and a locked, windowed door beyond. Beyond that, the walls smooth out. Plaster, parchment-colored. The floor beneath our feet is brown speckled linoleum, very old, slick with wax.
At a stereotype, we stop: a paneled oak door, the finish gone dark and sticky. A knurled brass doorknob, likely antique. To the left of the door, a polished brass plaque. It says
Jonathan Crane, DPM
The hulk on my left raps the door with a gorilla's knuckles.
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Quick dinner, quick packing, a quick shower. Just enough time to catch the red eye. And then it's delayed. Irony meets deja vu. In the concourse of Miami International Airport near our departure gate, Lisa and I find a lounge open after-hours. We park ourselves in a booth, order drinks. Cranberry juice for me, Perrier for her. The wall next to us is nearly all window. From where we're sitting, we can see the mechanics servicing our plane. Figures in overalls move with worker-ant efficiency in and through an off-white pool of light beneath the primer gray of the MD-80's underbelly.
The airport is too quiet. "Tell me about you and Rosemary," Lisa says. "What was she to you, Jackson? What is she?"
I turn my glass slowly on its coaster, and I feel myself locking down. As if shutters are closing between my eyes and my soul.
Only for a moment, though. For a moment only.
So elemental as to seem ridiculous: the idea that I could share my body with the woman sitting across from me, trust her in the most intimate physical ways possible, in nudity, in sex, in sleep, even in sickness, and not share with her anything she might want to know about me. Ridiculous that the body should be more honest than the mind.
She prompts: "You and she were pretty hot and heavy once upon a time, weren't you...?"
Her tone is patient but droll, too. I smile slightly at my glass. "If I tell the truth, will I be sleeping on the couch for the next two weeks?"
"That depends."
I meet her eyes. "On what?"
She looks back at me as directly as she ever has. "On how hot and heavy the truth really is."
We have time. The ants are still swarming beneath our Boeing. I take a sip of juice while I decide on a starting-point.
"Mad Jack, madder Rose," I say. "That's what Carter used to call us."
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A three-count follows the knock. Then a voice calls, male, quiet, second-tenor-to-baritone:
"Come in."
Primate the second reaches far enough out of the primordial ooze to operate the antique doorknob. He opens the door, and we enter a semi-dark office. The age of the door follows us in. The walls all around are lined with heavy, packed wooden bookshelves. The air smells of varnish and must.
Across from us, in the periphery of the pool of light cast by a brass desk lamp, a man sits facing us. "You and Mr. Tate can leave us, Mr. Mowbry."
He speaks without looking up. He's slight and brown-haired, and a good charcoal suit very poorly tailored is bunching at the points of his thin shoulders. He's hunched like Bob Cratchit over his desk. There's a flatpanel monitor to his left, but the screen is dark. He's writing by hand in a college-sized notebook bound in what looks like black leather. The pen he holds is too large: it looks almost like a log gripped in his bony fingers. Pretentious as well: Mont Blanc. Deadly, too: You can put the tip of a standard stick-pen through someone's temple. A Mont Blanc can puncture the forehead. That's the thickest part of the human skull.
I once saw Jackson kill someone that way. Youth and arrogance. We were in the Czech Republic, and he was showing off. "Don't even need the fucking knives." He panted as he spoke. Excitement, not exertion. Certainly not fear or revulsion. He wiped the pen clean on the mark's shirt, the bits of brain smearing like feta cheese and raspberry compote on the white weave of the cloth. He gave me the pen. "Souvenir," he said, smiling. I still have it.
Or I did, in my life prior to institutionalization. My Mont Blanc is silver. Doctor Crane's is black.
"Doctor." Mowbry proves to be the primate on my right. He nods, and he and Tate back like elephants out of the room. Like they're leaving the presence of a trainer in the circus. I sense the memory of physical punishment in their heavy, careful motion. I feel, too, the bruises forming on my upper arms, and I wonder how their larynxes will feel, crushed between my fingers.
I'm not playing along. When the door closes behind me, I say: "I may have delusions of grandeur, Dr. Crane, but I'm not crazy. What the hell am I doing here?"
He looks up, and shock jolts through me.
He looks exactly like Jackson.
Or not.
Pretermitting the initial fact that he's wearing a pair of self-consciously stylish silver-rimmed glasses, he's like Jackson damaged if not broken. Jackson as seen in the warping of a cheap mirror. Jackson if his pieces didn't fit together quite as they should.
He looks at me with Jackson's eyes. Only his are, if anything, colder. A bit watery, too. Weak. Others might well stop at the chill, but I know his eyes and I know his type: I see before me a spindly boy who's been shoved one too many times into doorframes and lockers, and who's been trying desperately all his life to hide his humiliation. "Good-" He half-frowns, half-smiles, glances at the clock on his desk. "- morning, Miss Wheeler. Have a seat, won't you?"
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