The Bright Spot Read online

  Lu didn’t seem to think it mattered one way or the other. “If he’s trying to kill us, then we’ll find him and stop him. Whoever it is knows where to find us here. I say we send word to Murph and head south. We can spend the night at ReCreation in Dee’s car, talk to Wally when he comes in. By this time tomorrow we can be in the eighteenth century without a ’ware worker in sight. Like Bea used to say, ‘It’s like chess—you can make a move, or you lose, but you can’t get off the board.’ What do you say?”

  What could I say? When she started quoting her mother, she was unstoppable. And besides, this way I got to run away and still play the hero. That was more my kind of role. One of the guys still standing when the curtain drops.

  “Why not? I’m sure you and Dee can talk Wally into just about anything. You through with my leg?”

  “For now.”

  “Thanks, Lu.”

  She gave me a kiss. “You’re welcome, sweet darlin’.”

  WHERE’S THE ART?

  14

  That the future may learn from the past.

  —JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER JR.’S MOTTO FOR COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG

  I DRESSED WHILE LU HEATED UP SOME BEANS. Every few minutes, I checked out the front window. The big lights still burned, all their equipment was lying where they’d set it down, but there wasn’t anyone working under the lights, not yet. It would take time to round up a new crew, roust them out of bed, and haul them over here. The cops were still flying around shining their lights up and down the alleys. The crowd at Murphy’s liked to get flashlights and shine them at the cops, just to fuck with them. Whenever the copter noise waned, you could hear there was quite a party going on four doors down.

  I tried calling Murphy, but he didn’t answer, and a message seemed risky. I sent him the photos and an account of the attacks on me and Dee to the address he gave me, which turned out to be a hobbyists’ site for vintage remote-control toy boats. I also threw in the clipping, along with a blowup of the relevant portion of the photo. He was a trained detective. He could figure it out. I signed it Gilligan.

  The easiest way to send him the diner scene was for me and Lu to play it at the kitchen table with Dee sitting cross-legged on the counter as audience and technician. We used the cam on the terminal, so the quality wouldn’t be that great, but it would be better than those old videotapes. When we finished our lines, Dee was snuffling and dabbing at her eyes.

  Lu returned from her tearful exit, and I took her arm in character, then signaled cut. No sense walking out the door. There wasn’t a whole lot of nothing out there. Our recording would be full of cop noise as it was. If any of us on the ground made that much racket, they’d throw us all in jail.

  Dee turned off the cam and burst into applause. “You guys are really, really terrific.”

  “Thanks,” we said, and took a little bow, or two, as Dee continued to gush. We couldn’t help ourselves. We had absolutely nailed the scene, even better than the first time. Something about the evening we’d spent had perfectly prepared us to play Jim and Galatea. She’d really sobbed. My lips were still wet with her tears, and I felt blessed. I sent the scene to Murphy and burned a copy.

  But something about holding it in my hand in a little disk, all final and complete, made me question the whole scene again. Something about it just didn’t ring true.

  So I asked Dee to play critic—and the worst sort at that—a literary critic: “If Lu and I weren’t so good,” I suggested, “if you just had the script, the lines, is there anything that doesn’t seem right, that doesn’t seem like it belongs?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “When he starts naming all those guys? That was really cold. It seemed ... too mean. It gave me the creeps. He didn’t seem like the type for that.”

  Lu nodded her agreement. “Yeah. That’s always struck me as a little out there.”

  “Me too,” I said. “His wife never heard of any of them—not a one. How many guys could the two of them know his wife wouldn’t know too? Or at least heard mentioned. And does it strike anyone as odd that he’s married, and they’re supposedly discussing her lovers?”

  “Guys’ll do that,” Dee said.

  Lu nodded her agreement again.

  “Okay, so they will. But I still think this whole thing’s about something else—Dumfries told me as much—and most of it’s smoke, like you said, Lu— except the names. He’s got to get the names said.”

  “You think it’s a code?”

  “It has to be. They must’ve known they were being watched, recorded. The scene was just cover. So what do you think?”

  “It might be a code, but a code for what?”

  “Judging by what’s been going on, maybe a code to mess with ’ware workers. Maybe that’s what Salvador figured he would have to sell.”

  “But Salvador had the recordings. If the conversation is a code, he’s already got it. What did he need to go through all this for?”

  “He might need Dumfries to break the code, or use it, or say it, or whatever. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Certainly not for Salvador, since he ended up dead. So you think Dumfries killed him?”

  “Maybe. Especially if he found out Salvador was trying to screw him. But like Dee just said, he didn’t seem like the type.”

  “You never know with some guys,” Dee said.

  I don’t know why I felt like defending the old guy— sticking up for my character’s character, I guess—but I pointed out we didn’t need to pin anything on a broken-down old man just yet. He was the leading suspect, but there must be plenty of bad guys willing to kill Salvador to get their hands on something like that. “Like Salvador said, he was taking all the risks.”

  “Salvador was an asshole,” Lu said.

  Dee nodded her agreement, and she didn’t even know the guy.

  On that note, we started packing. Lu called into the bedroom, where I was stuffing dirty clothes into a heavy-duty plastic bag, the good luggage. “I almost forgot. Dell’s boy left you something when they brought Dee over. It’s on the bed.”

  “His name’s Clinton,” I called back. How old did you have to be around here to get your own name? There was a big envelope on the bed with Nick written on it. I could see how it’d been forgotten in the excitement. It looked like homework—the smart kid turns in another A+ assignment. Big deal. I had a look.

  He’d found out everything I’d found out about Dumfries and Kennemeyer at William and Mary—with all the details filled in—dorm room numbers, cast lists of productions they were in together, clubs they belonged to, but nothing after the war. The kid certainly knew how to sift the bones of the Web.

  And then he outdid himself. Attached was a page of explanatory text and some photos, copies of a death certificate and a military ID. Clinton had a hunch about the way Galatea sat at that diner table and, given the dates, thought to check military sites, particularly war casualties. Not by name, but by face, using the photos to look for a match. At first, he’d demanded high confidence and found nothing. When he lowered his standards, he got an eighty percent match with a Marine in special ops named Lenore Chapell, missing in action during the siege of Cairo. Presumed dead, likely loaded with heavy-duty covert operations ’ware, and all the dates fit. She disappeared a year before Galatea turned up dead. Could be just another coincidence, a near miss, except for one thing.

  I was staring at Lenore Chapell’s photo when Lu appeared in the bedroom door. “Nick, what is it?”

  I compared Lu to the forty-year-old photo. I wasn’t search software, but I knew Lu’s face with the highest confidence. Her match to Lenore was in the high nineties at least. Genes will tell. Lu looked more like Lenore Chapell than Galatea Ritsa did. Lenore might’ve had an injury that altered her appearance a little—she was a soldier—or cosmetic surgery when she took the name of Galatea. Lenore and Galatea were the same person with slightly different faces. Lenore and Lu were born forty years apart and looked like identical twins.

  “Lu, how come you never talk ab
out your father?”

  “Don’t we need to hurry?”

  “This is important.”

  “Is this still part of our truth telling?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Okay. I don’t have one. When I kept nagging Bea about my father, she finally told me the truth. I’m not her child. She broke her arm and couldn’t work. She was desperate for money. She carried me as a surrogate mother. The couple who hired her gave her this house and some money, set her up with a doctor, then disappeared during her last trimester. She never could find them, though they’d made arrangements for all the medical bills to be paid, and she still had the house. She assumed they must’ve died in a plane crash or something. She raised me as her daughter.”

  “I think you need to take a look at this.” I handed her the envelope Dell’s boy had dropped off, and she sat down beside me on the bed.

  Lu read everything twice, looked at the photo of Lenore Chapell for a long while—she would look at it often in the weeks to come—and slid it back into the envelope and closed the little brass clasps. One of them was already about to break off. I took her hand, and we sat there on the bed, waiting for a cue, too stunned to speak.

  Just me looking exactly like the young James Dumfries might be a coincidence. Both of us looking exactly like Jim and Lenore could only mean one thing, as far as I could see. At least I didn’t have to ask myself anymore why the Bright Spot grew up in a home for boys, wondering who his parents were and why they didn’t want him. Lu and I didn’t have any parents, not really. We were clones. Copycats. Born actors. I had no doubt it wasn’t just fate that had thrown us together. It looked like we were made for each other. Now appearing in a life near you. Jim and Galatea II. We were a fucking sequel.

  We were the secret weapon people would kill for, and we didn’t even know how we worked. Whatever Jim and Galatea were up to then, I was guessing, we were supposed to be up to now. They should’ve known better. Sequels always have plot problems. I looked up over my head. There was silence. The cops had flown away. It was time to get the hell out of here.

  With nothing to pack, Dee had taken my place at the front window, working on her third cup of coffee. She called back to us. “Hey, guys, there’s workers showing up. Maybe we should go.”

  Lu looked around the room. “I was born here,” she said. “Bea died here. Time to move on, wouldn’t you say?”

  We hurried down the alley to Dee’s car and loaded up, with plenty of help from the crowd at Murphy’s. The place was packed with folks, buzzing with what had happened right here in our neighborhood. The party had spilled into the alley, and we were caught up in the swirl of it even as we were throwing things into the car. I took the offered Icehouse.

  Nobody bought the sleeper cell story. No conscious human being, terrorist or not, would line up to climb into a backyard with Mr. Lester’s dogs to get their asses chewed off. They had to be running ’ware. Lyndon, one of the first on the scene, claimed to recognize the one Mr. Lester shot from the crew the other night. Nobody knew any of them personally. They’d been subcontracted from a paver out of Michigan. The guy who was shot was from Ypsilanti. But if it could happen to those guys, it could happen to them, far away from home and dead, with the last thing they remembered, just going to work, doing the ’ware.

  There was lots of talk of not going to work in the morning. Those who did would be pretty hungover, not that they’d notice until after their shifts, when they came here to Murphy’s to drink a few beers and talk about not going in to work in the morning. But where else were they going to go?

  I took Clinton aside and gave him a copy of everything I’d sent Murphy.

  “Was the stuff I dropped off helpful?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that one. If ignorance was bliss, this kid was no help at all. “Yeah. It was great. I’d especially like to know anything at all you can find out about Lenore Chapell. We’re not exactly sure where we’re going to be. I’ll call you.” I got his phone number.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s bugged,” he said.

  “I think you can count on it. Just don’t use my real name.”

  We made some quick goodbyes all around. Nobody wanted to admit we might not see each other again. Nobody asked where we were going. They knew we were on the run. We asked Sylvia to keep an eye on the place and piled into Dee’s car. Everybody called out, “Good luck.” When the cops came around, they’d all sing the same tune for us. L’il Lu who? Nicholas Bainbridge? Never heard of the fucker. I knew just how they felt—or at least how they would pretend to feel. I had a growing list of questions for whenever I met my maker, an event, in my case, not necessarily supernatural.

  We spent the night in Dee’s car, parked around the corner from ReCreation with the security set on its most lethal, paranoid settings. Woe to the bird who flew too close, the cat hoping to nap on the warm hood. We were comfy, however. The inside was configurable to a room about the size of our bedroom, but plusher, with all the amenities. I listened to the two women snoring in the dark, sleeping it off, and entertained myself with the 360-degree night-vision display and weapons options menu. I was a man. I didn’t need any fucking sleep. I had firepower. Hell. I was too scared to sleep.

  I was surprised to find out there was a raccoon living in the neighborhood, but he didn’t seem to be packing any heat. If he knew how close he came to being blown away, he might start, or swear off city trashcans forever.

  Wally pulled into the ReCreation lot at six in the morning, and I shook Lu and Dee awake. “It’s showtime,” I said.

  Wally was delighted to see us, especially Dee. “I write in the mornings,” he told her, as if he were giving her a fascinating glimpse into the writer’s life. Dee and Lu both were enthralled with the writing process and begged him for more. They laid it on so thick, I thought surely he’d see through it, but Wally never saw through bullshit. He just dove right in. It took them maybe fifteen minutes for him to have the great idea of shooting on location in Williamsburg with Dee in the role of Galatea Ritsa! That Wally was so clever!

  Buck, meanwhile, had been lapping the loft with a fit of the zooms, until I finally tackled him and demonstrated the lapdog gene.

  “Let me hold him,” Wally pleaded, and made a big fuss over what a wonderful dog he was. In no time Wally had dreamed up a role for Buck as well—Patriot, a clever Revolutionary War spy dog, who, to help him in his work, had acquired the ability to speak English. “I’ll do his voice!” he announced gleefully. I feared for poor Buck having to sit still for some long-winded Wallyisms, but as long as he was in a lap it shouldn’t be a problem.

  We offered to go to Williamsburg immediately and get the ball rolling, and Wally set about booking us rooms on his terminal, with ReCreation picking up the tab.

  Stan was the next to show up, and he and Dee hit it off immediately. They seemed to enjoy being tall together, and they knew all their bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments by name, which gave them plenty to talk about. To my surprise, the usually diffident Stan volunteered to join us.

  “I could help you find your way around,” he said. “I used to wrestle in Hampton Roads. I know the area pretty well. Around the college there.” He ducked his head with a slight touch of embarrassment. I gathered the wrestler had dated college girls. If Mom and Dad only knew. Dee thought Stan joining us was a terrific idea.

  So it was agreed, the five of us (counting Buck) were riding down to Virginia in Dee’s car to make the arrangements for Billy and the Big Guy to shoot the eighteenth century on location. By the time Gary showed up, we were already booked in at the Liberty Lodge— the cheapest place Wally could find close to the colonial section—and packed to go. Once Gary saw Dee and Stan together, he was all for it. He poked Wally in the ribs and pointed at the two of them. “Chemistry,” he said, slapping the back of his right hand against his open left palm. “Chemistry.”

  Our feedback had shown a growing desire to tempt the Big Guy. Already, in response to ever-incre
asing numbers for “Would like to see more of BG?” Stan routinely had his shirt torn from him in the early stages of the mayhem, and in a recent episode, most of his pants as well. He took more showers. He worked out. The plot twiddled its thumbs during these peep shows, however, and now the adolescent girls who constituted most of this feedback weren’t content just to ogle and twiddle. They wanted some action. They complained there was no chemistry between BG and the various villainesses Brenda and her bad-wig collection played, and Gary often spoke of the need for chemistry—with no biology, of course. Nobody screws was still the rule. Unsatisfied lust prompted ratings to swell, the theory went; satisfaction soon led to detumescence. It was chemistry, Gary maintained, that would get us past this poised patch into pounce or whatever it was that came next.

  Wally was certain he’d found the catalyst for this chemistry in Galatea Ritsa—Dee’s character, that is. She was no ordinary evildoer bent on corrupting Young William. Oh no. She was after Big Guy as surely and relentlessly as Delilah went after Samson. And without BG to come to the rescue, Billy would be as helpless as the jerk who played him, standing outside ReCreation, screaming after us as we drove away, while Wally excitedly explained he’d soon be riding to Virginia for a whole new story about Freedom! You could see the excitement in William’s eyes, the curses on his lips. Soon, very soon, if not already, he would start talking about his sacrifices. I was definitely in the right car.

  We were on the road in time for the dawn’s early light. Well, the dawn’s late light maybe, but still plenty early. The eastern sky was a red smear. I closed my eyes, but there was carnage still playing there, innocent people torn apart by dogs and cars. How did sleeper cells ever get any sleep?

  Dee had to be tall to play opposite Stan—so they could see eye to eye, at least when she was standing on tiptoe and he slumped a little. He’d slump a lot if necessary, pick her up if she asked him. They had no trouble seeing eye to eye lounging in Dee’s car, chatting all the way to Virginia. Lu and I were pretty quiet. We had a lot to think about.