Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
Three weeks after he burnt Wilkins to the ground, Anthony was back on the grounds, explaining his incendiary device to a distinguished group of civil servants.
"So," the fire chief summed up, after Anthony told his story, "If your flashlight hadn't dislodged the door frame, the fire wouldn't have started until midnight, shifting the suspicion to Mr. Levy."
"That was the plan," Anthony responded cheerfully.
"Happens to the best of us," Big Ed Flannagan commiserated.
"All's well that ends well," contributed Superintendent Rodriguez.
Detective Plinchard bit back his own comment, seeing that the Chief of Police was patting Anthony fondly on the head. "This little rat is going to put us all on the map," he had told Plinchard, when he informed him of the deal. "Not to mention all of the embarrassment he saved some very important people in this town by burning that dump down." Plinchard thought about the Criminal Justice degree he'd spent six years in night school for, and how full of shit all of his professors had been.
Anthony had made a deal with the DA to turn state's evidence and testify against O'Flahthery, if they ever caught him. In a deal negotiated by his uncle Pete, he was given full immunity from prosecution in connection with the fire and his actions while working for PDC. Neither of them had seen the point of filling in the DA on his moonlighting activities. The articles bearing O'Flahthery's fingerprints were accepted as a show of good faith, despite his trying to frame Eric in the same package.
"It just demonstrates how much stress he was under," his uncle claimed. "This ex-CIA character was threatening his life. He only started the fire in order to anonymously draw attention to the illegal activities taking place, and thereby to end them."
No one in the DA's office actually believed Anthony's uncle any more then they normally believed lawyers bringing them deals, but there was a lot of pressure to wrap the case up. The mayor, the school superintendent, and the city's entire legal department were thrilled that Wilkins had been demolished. Despite the Mayor's earlier statements to the press, the city had already signed an agreement with Wilkins accepting unconditional transfer of the property. The agreement was to have taken effect three days after the fire, and the city's lawyers had been unable to figure out a way to break it. This explained why they weren't practicing corporate law themselves.
Calling the site a 'muni-disaster' area, and in stronger language, 'the South Bronx come to Springfield', the mayor pushed through an emergency bond to finance an immediate start to the cleanup and to begin plans for the new high school. The legal eagles assured him that they could recover costs in a suit against Wilkins and its insurer on one end, and from the state and the Feds on the other. Big Ed had just growled and said, "As long as it's not coming out of my pocket."
For the first few hours after Anthony's return to grace, the DA had hoped to keep the deal secret, at least until getting grand jury indictment of the officers of the Peace Dividend Corporation. Anthony had arrived on a midmorning flight, halfway through the window between when the morning papers are printed and the evening news comes on. The secret lasted until the evening news.
"Our lead stories tonight," announced Tammy Childs on Channel 26, as she stepped out of the leased news van in a choreographed sequence. "DA cuts secret deal with Anthony Bovine, the Wilkins arsonist. Grand jury impaneled to investigate the Peace Dividend Corporation for illegal transport, handling and disposal of hazardous waste." She was halfway to the front door of the Channel 26 building now, the camera man retreating expertly in front of her. "Also, descendants of local Native American tribes seek federal award of King Philips Fort, now part of Forest Park, as reservation land. Casino deal pending. More details after this." They cut to a commercial just as the cameraman caught his heel on the doormat and fell through the open door.
Two miles from the nearest a television, Eric regained his balance after tripping on a root and continued running along the river. He was on the middle part of his course, a section of Northampton's 5K cross country course, across from the Smith Agricultural School farm. Eric's route from downtown Northampton took him across the Smith campus, through the woods behind the gigantic Northampton State Mental Hospital, now abandoned, down to the river, and back again. He was pushing himself a bit, keeping under a seven minute mile pace over the broken terrain, trying to clear his mind from the attacks of the past two days.
On Monday, he and Connie had been strolling casually on Main street, trying to decide which ice-cream boutique to blow Connie's check in. Eric was keeping to the street side of Connie as they walked, a bit of etiquette he had learned from his tenth grade English teacher. The behavior was apparently rooted in the horse and buggy days, when the streets were full of manure, and the job of the male was to act as a walking shield to keep the stuff off the female. The early October air was unseasonably chilly, but clear and still, what his twelfth grade physics teacher called ideal weather for sound waves. On that evening, the lessons of his public school education canceled each other out nicely.
As they sauntered along, his brain had sifted out from the covering street noise the nearly imperceptible hiss of fast approaching rollerblades. Somehow he had intuited the evil purpose behind the approaching sound before even swiveling his head. He shoved Connie into a crowd of people while simultaneously twisting and ducking under the lowered stiff arm of the charging skater, who was moving at least twenty-five miles an hour. The man was launched into the air, coming down on his protective head gear almost fifteen feet away. Incredibly, he struggled to his feet, and moved off down a side street with unsteady strides.
"We'll get you, you fascist bastard," he cried over his shoulder.
Eric was shaking off the shock and considering pursuit, when Connie grabbed him by the wrist. "Push me into a crowd," she tried too sound angry and failed. There was a catch in her voice, and Eric saw that she was fighting to keep from crying.
"Nothing happening here," he addressed the crowd, "Just some crazy skater." He pulled Connie into the doorway they happened to be across from. It turned out to be his bank, so he fed his card in the slot, and pulled her inside. "It's O.K. Con," he held both her hands together, unsure of what to do. He'd never seen her looking weak before. "It's O.K.," he repeated.
"It's my fault," she spit the words out. "If I hadn't pushed you into writing those poems, all of this never would have happened."
"Oh, stop it," he replied curtly, "The Ant would have set me up anyway. Not to mention the fact that I wanted to write those poems." Some guy tried to open the door but Eric waved him off angrily. To his surprise, the guy moved on. "Besides, no one can be responsible for the acts of lunatics, if not the lunatics themselves."
She kicked the wall under the night deposit box angrily, and grimaced at the pain. "Come on," he grabbed her arm, happy to see that she was just angry now. Angry, he could deal with. "Let's go get a couple of those five dollar ice-cream cones and eat them in the park." She resisted his pull for a moment, then yielded, and their evening had proceeded more or less as planned.
He jerked his thoughts back into the present to decide which branch to take at the fork. The right branch added a half-mile loop around the hay field, and a nasty climb up to the high trail before coming out to the road. The left was grassy and wanted wear, not too mention shorter. It went more or less directly out to the road, where he could cut through the community vegetable gardens and back onto the hospital grounds. He took the path less traveled by.
The second attack had been potentially more dangerous then the first, but fortunately he was alone at the time and had been able to hide it from Connie. It happened on the U.Mass campus, during the long walk from the library to his Antenna Theory class. His guard was down and later it seemed to him that the attack could have been spontaneous. One minute he was striding quickly along, lost in his thoughts, and the next, he was on his hands and knees, watching a green spandex-clad biker with a broken pump in his hand pedaling frantically towards the dorms. There was no yelling this time.
Eric picked up the broken half of the pump, and ran all the way to the campus police headquarters. The super lightweight construction of the pump had saved him a broken shoulder, where the blow had landed. The biker had correctly passed him on the right side, in accordance with the campus traffic rules, so he had wielded the pump in his left hand. The police speculated the assailant was right handed, and had been trying for his head. It was a major violation of the conduct code. They wasted half his afternoon asking questions, then offered to provide an escort for him at all times on the campus. When he refused, they made him sign a waiver, stating that they had both offered and encouraged him to accept their protection.
Another root reached out and grabbed his foot, causing him to stumble for the second time in a five minute span. He resolved to stop dwelling on the attacks, it was too distracting. Anyway, it was all over now. According to his conversation with Colin that afternoon, Anthony had turned himself in, admitted setting the fire, and exonerated Eric. If Colin was right, and he usually was, Connie would be seeing the story on the news at her sister's just about now. He turned past the gardens, now peopled with withered stalks and dried up vines. The pumpkin crop was still out, along with a sprinkling of other late bloomers, but most of the participants were strictly tomato and cucumber farmers; the glory vegetables.
After a hundred yards or so on the asphalt roads of the mental hospital, he came to the woods trail that cut through to the Smith playing fields. The sun was almost down, but enough light diffused through the trees to let him visualize his foot placement. About halfway up the trail, where the woods gave way to a corner of one of the hospitals parking lots, he saw a bird watcher, sporting enormous binoculars. No, maybe he's a security guard, Eric thought. Hard to be sure in the waning light and without his glasses to boot, but the figure was holding what looked like a cell phone. Eric gave a friendly wave, knowing the guards could hassle him for trespassing if they wanted to, and turned his attention back to running. At the last moment he hesitated, spotting the light reflecting off a garish purple blob taped oddly to the side of a tree another fifty feet up the trail.
The explosion lifted him off his feet dumped him on the downhill slope, where he rolled another couple yards before fetching up against a pine. When he came to, it was completely dark, and deathly quiet but for the ringing in his ears. He cried out for a moment, thinking he was blind, but then he saw some stars through the trees, and a haze of light in the eastern sky, from the night lights on the Smith field. He started to stagger to his feet then collapsed, feeling violently sick. He would have thrown up if there had been anything in his stomach. When he first saw the flashlight beams dancing around the hill, he froze. Then he reasoned that it had to be the police, and called out "Over here."
His voice sounded funny, as if he had simply hummed the words instead of saying them, but the beams rapidly converged on his area, and in a moment he was illuminated like an actor on stage. Using the tree for a support, he pulled himself to his feet again, remaining upright this time. In a matter of minutes, a paramedic team was trying to convince him, with hand signs, to lie down on a stretcher. That's when he finally realized why no one had returned his calls, he was deaf. He sank limply onto the stretcher.
When they carried him out of the woods to the ambulance, the parking lot bright with headlights and roof mounted lights on the cruisers, a state policeman held up the paramedics for a moment, and thrust a pad in his face. Eric thought the cop looked familiar, Wolinski, he remembered.
"Can you read," was written on the pad.
"No," Eric replied in his head. "Can you hear me,"
"Yes," Wolinski wrote, "Who are you."
"Eric Levy," he replied and gave him Carol's phone number. "Ask for Doctor Carol Weinberger, Carol," he stressed again. He didn't want Connie to start screaming at someone on the phone.
Eric could tell that the paramedics were getting impatient, and they loaded him into the ambulance, even as Wolinski was scribbling frantically. Eric craned his head around to see what was written. "Do I know you," was the message on the pad.
"You ought to know me, you bastard," Eric tried to shout, "You gave me a two hundred dollar ticket." The door had already closed, but Eric saw the paramedic in the jumpseat shaking with laughter. Eric didn't hear a thing.