Isolated Judgment Page 20

  “I did not mind you,” he said. “I hope you know this. I did not mind you tripping over my heels, Daniel. It was good to have you here.”

  Ludolf sighed, feeling that he had run out of useful things to say to the grave. He patted at his flannel shirt, his gnarled fingers groping around the breast pocket. They came out with a cigarette and a silver Zippo lighter, a black dragon embossed across its surface.

  “I found your cigarettes,” he said around a grin, and lit it after a few faltering flicks of the Zippo’s little wheel. “The lawyers, they took some of your things. But not your cigarettes. The Judge thinks those two will find who did this to you. I am not so certain. I think we both know how this happened, Daniel. Yes? I think maybe you are a young boy who was hiding from something. Is this not the truth of it?”

  The old man’s eyes drifted up to the overhanging branches of elms and beech, their limbs still thick with early autumn leaves tenuously holding on. The wind gusted and a smattering of them were sent spiraling down. Already, Daniel’s grave was dotted with their browning skins.

  “Another storm, I think. That little girl on the Weather Channel is only there because her breasts are heavy and her teeth are very white. But she was not wrong this morning. The wind is going to bury you in leaves today, Daniel.”

  The cigarette smoke tasted wrong—far more acrid and foul than before he had given up the habit years ago. Ludolf coughed into his fist, but did not put the cigarette out. It had seemed fitting to him, somehow, to smoke Daniel’s last few cigarettes while he said his goodbyes to the man.

  You wanted to smoke, he admitted, and took another shallow puff. You always want to smoke when you drink. Daniel is just an excuse.

  He swigged from the bottle and drew cautiously on the cigarette while the wind gusted around him. He strained to hear any sound from the wailing woman of the island, but if she had any intention of resuming her mournful song it would be later, when the wind came in earnest.

  “You visited her, I think,” he said eventually. “You and your ideas about knights and dragons. Your game with the dice you tried to show me. Why does a grown man play at this? I don’t know. But you swished around everywhere with your sword and your fancies filling your head. I think this was when you found her, yes? You found her and the treasures she hid. It’s alright, Daniel. I am not blaming you. They were not your secrets to keep. If you told someone about them, who can blame you now?”

  Ludolf closed his eyes and let a deep, slow sigh work its way through and out of him. He was tired. Most of his life, he had been tired. As a boy, he had weathered the war-ravaged corners of Vienna, always scrambling to stay a step ahead of arrest, murder or starvation. Childhood, homeless and hunted, had been an exhaustion. Even after that, after the Judge had planned and funded Ludolf’s secret journey out of Europe, first to Canada and then to this island, his life had been one of labor. While the Judge ascended through the exalted heights of his profession, Ludolf had toiled to transform the sweeping grounds of the estate into something beautiful and clean.

  Paradise, he knew, was a lie. Where humans dwelled, the world was imperfect. But the island had been his statement against this truth. In isolation with the Judge, he had struggled and strived to make this tiny, insignificant corner of existence a place that would never stir memories of the devastation he had witnessed as a boy. For the most part, he had succeeded. There was nothing in the rich blush of lawn or the sculpted flower beds that reminded him of Vienna. Throughout his long stewardship of the island, the war had been kept far away.

  The lone exception had been the wailing woman. When she rose into the air and howled her forlorn song, Ludolf could not keep the memories at bay. The secrets she concealed in her sleight cavern of quartz were never far from his mind when she chose to announce her seemingly undying grief.

  “I should have kept a better eye on you,” he muttered, and stubbed the cigarette out in the grass. He slipped the crumpled butt into his trouser pocket. A playful grin spread over his face. “You see? That simple. You just put it in your pocket. Not so very hard to remember, eh?”

  From the center of the island, where the Judge’s three-story estate stood, a single gunshot barked. It echoed across the grounds and through the woods, dying away only when the lapping static of the lake met it and pushed it back. Down there, near the beach, Sam answered the gunshot with a series of frantic, challenging yaps.

  Ludolf did not stir. Even while the gunshot was still dwindling in the air, he only sipped his pint and stared at the grave before him. “I don’t blame you, Daniel. You mustn’t let this worry you. Rest easy, if you can. I don’t know that this is possible, though. I think maybe you had secrets buried, too, yes? Nobody stays here on this island without them. I hope yours weren’t so very bad. But I...I think maybe they were, Daniel. I think your bad secrets snuck in and took their revenge. Yes?”

  A second gunshot reverberated from the house, and again Sam could be heard yowling from down on the beach. The wind gusted. Leaves kicked and somersaulted through the clearing. Ludolf sipped his whiskey.

  “It does not matter.” The old man sighed, and lit another cigarette. “Whatever secret you were hiding...it does not matter anymore. Today the island gives all its secrets back, I think. This is not so bad a thing. I’m tired, Daniel. Maybe it is good not to labor anymore.”

  He fell silent after that and waited. That morning, as he fiddled with one of the headlights on the golf cart down at the edge of the dock, he had spied the little boat and the man who piloted it. Ludolf had paused in his work and squinted across the blue gulf between him and the craft.

  His hearing was not what it had once been, so he never heard the muffled pop of a bullet racing its way through Chief Fish’s head, tumbling on through the bottom of the boat and into the lake. His eyes? His eyes were sharp, even as old as he was. He saw the dark shape heaved up onto the lip of the boat, and when it tumbled heavily into the water, Ludolf knew what it was. He knew what it was, and he knew what it meant: The past had finally come to the Wailing Isle. The cache of treasures had been stolen from the wailing woman’s little cavern, carried away into the world, and now the world had followed it back to Ludolf and the Judge.

  He coughed against a lungful of smoke, drained the pint dry. And waited.

  * * *

  Issabella watched Darren run a finger along the row of mailboxes in the lobby of the three-story apartment building. When his finger stopped, a triumphant grin spread across his face.

  “Bingo,” he whispered. “Come on, kid.”

  He started bounding up the stairs.

  “Wait.”

  Darren stopped three steps up and peered over his shoulder at her.

  “R. Gillespie. That has to be her, Izzy.”

  “I know. But wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Um, for it to maybe occur to you that this is dangerous. You threw a hundred dollars at Tuck to follow them here. Theresa’s still sitting in the limo wondering what the heck is even going on. And you’re ready to charge up there without a second thought.”

  “I thought we agreed to go and talk to them.”

  “We did. But what if they don’t want to? I mean, what if—”

  From above them, someone made a show of loudly clearing their throat. They both pivoted and stared up the flight of stairs. Standing on the landing to the second floor was a pretty young woman with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans.

  Rebecca, Issabella realized, seeing the face again in the badly drawn pornographic pose she’d taken from Daniel Prosner’s room.

  “Hi,” Rebecca called down to them.

  For an awkward moment, no one spoke. Then Issabella grabbed hold of herself and took one step closer to the staircase.

  “Hi,” she answered.

  “Were you two follo
wing us in a limo?” Rebecca said.

  “Was it that obvious?” Darren asked.

  “Pretty obvious, yeah.”

  Issabella eased past Darren until she was on the step above him. Rebecca didn’t move. She looked worried.

  “We’re not here to cause any problems,” she said. “My name is Issabella and this is Darren. Is there somewhere we can talk for a little bit?”

  * * *

  When the stranger with the white, swept-back hair and bushy eyebrows appeared at the other side of the little clearing, Ludolf saw that the man had been shot in the stomach. A dark, spreading stain was visible on the front of his lilac jumpsuit. As he lowered himself down into the grass on the opposite side of Daniel’s grave, the stranger grimaced and grunted in pain. One of his hands held a gun, loosely trained in Ludolf’s direction. The other hovered less than an inch over the wound, as if it wanted to clamp down on it but knew that any contact would bring agony.

  Pale and wan, the stranger’s wrinkled face looked flu-stricken, though Ludolf knew it was the bullet that had done it. He’d seen faces like that before, when he was led from one apartment to the next, forced to point out where the families hid. While the soldiers joked and jabbered in the aftermath, Ludolf would stare at their handiwork, at the faces of thin, frightened people shot to pieces. Some would linger while their bodies bled out. Those were the faces he could not drown out of his mind with whiskey or the passage of time—those suffering the shocked, sickly pallor of near-death.

  This was the face that stared at him now from across Daniel’s resting place.

  “That dog,” the man wheezed. “He ain’t going to run up here and sink his teeth in my balls, is he?”

  Ludolf looked off in the direction of the beach where he had last heard Sam’s yowling answer to the twin gunshots.

  “No,” he admitted. “Sam is a puppy in his heart. He harms nobody.”

  “A dog’ll eat a dead man, though. I seen that in the war, more’n once. So I guess there’s that to look forward to.”

  “I won’t permit him that.”

  The man chuckled, then winced against the pain it brought. There was blood on the grass under him now, and Ludolf was confident it wouldn’t be long. The abdomen was a complicated cavern. One kind of shot might prove survivable. Another might mean a quick death. Still another might mean lingering agony. He had seen all varieties.

  “You think you’ll be around to stop him?” the dying man said, and wagged the pistol in the air between them. “That’s pretty damn optimistic, buddy.”

  Ludolf plucked the last of Daniel’s cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit it with the black dragon Zippo. He snapped the lighter shut, leaned forward and placed it on the rectangle of dirt.

  “In what war did you see these dogs that eat dead men?” he said once he was settled back.

  “There ain’t but one war. And it’s been going since the beginning, I figure.”

  Ludolf allowed himself a bleak smile around his cigarette.

  “Dying men make for poor philosophers,” he said.

  “I guess you seen me coming on the lake.”

  “I did.”

  “And you rushed on up and told that cripple about it.”

  Ludolf bristled at the insult, but forced his indignation down. This, all of this, was nothing more than history catching up to the man who had planned and funded Ludolf’s escape from Europe as a boy. Resenting this man’s use of the word cripple for the Judge wasn’t worth the bother. It would change nothing.

  Instead, he blew smoke and nodded his head in agreement.

  “I did tell him,” he said. “I also retrieved his pistol from his study. One of his many antiques. A little weapon, with room for only one bullet. I loaded it. I cocked it. And then I put it in his hands. I pulled his blanket over his hands and I said my farewells to my very good friend. This is how you found him, I think. With my gift to you beneath his blanket, yes?”

  The pompadoured man stared at him for a while in silence. His bushy eyebrows seemed to have taken on a life of their own. They dipped and rose and waggled on his forehead without conscious intent, as if the wound in his belly had broken the parts of him that controlled his expressions. Amid the shifting map of his face, only the resignation in his eyes stayed constant and true.

  “You just killed yourself, saying that to me,” he whispered.

  “I think I was dying anyway, no?”

  “Your very good friend, huh? You two a couple of funny boys? Holed up out here so you can prance around without nobody knowing?”

  Ludolf blew smoke and let his silence be all the answer he would give. This wasn’t a man who deserved answers, or truth. He was just an instrument. Somewhere, he knew, out in the world was a descendant of the horrors of Vienna. That man or woman had aimed this stranger at the Wailing Isle as surely as Ludolf had secreted the pistol under the Judge’s blanket. If Ludolf owed any truth to anyone, it was to that unknown soul who had sent death to the island. But that was not a meeting that was ever going to happen in this world.

  “I guess what I don’t get...” the stranger began, then stopped to wheeze and draw shuddering breaths in through his nose. His pallor had dipped to a ghostly white and his eyes were glassy. Ludolf watched the wavering gun in the man’s trembling hand, and noted the spreading pool of blood beneath him. Not long now.

  “Go on,” he said, once the wheezing subsided.

  “Why hold on to it all?” the man said. “What’s the fucking point? You steal all that from them Jews and you just sit on it forever? What the hell good did that do you?”

  Ludolf was very still. He felt the long years rising up in him, and he knew that there would be some truth between him and this dying instrument after all. He would say it now, push the words into the air, even if it meant nothing. His name might always remain as a black mark on the lists of those who hunted the wretched perpetrators of that crime against a people. But he would say the truth, just once, before the world ended.

  “You saw his home,” he said.

  “Who? The Judge in there?”

  “Yes. You saw the history he kept in his halls? The suits of armor? The books and photographs? The paintings and statues and little golden trinkets? You saw all these things that fill his home?”

  The stranger nodded weakly, struggling to keep his eyes on Ludolf like a child obstinately fending off sleep.

  “Nothing more than that,” Ludolf said, and stubbed the butt of the cigarette out in the grass. He slipped it in his pocket, and almost smiled at the rectangle of raw earth stretching between them. “Trinkets for a rich man. He prized them. They were the price I paid to come here to your States. I was given a home, and in return I carried to him more bits of history to store in his. Nothing more than that. He wanted them because they could be had. I agreed so that I would be safe here. You understand me, yes?”

  The man listened and his face grew slack. His bushy eyebrows settled limply down over his eyes, and Ludolf knew the tether that kept him here in this world was quickly fraying away. The pool of blood under the man had spread out until it was staining the dirt at the edge of Daniel’s grave.

  “You were a soldier then,” Ludolf said.

  “Seven years,” the man answered in a wispy breath that still managed to convey his pride. “Three in the shit. Time of my life, buddy boy. Time of my life.”

  “I know men such as you. Men such as you marched me into the homes of frightened people when I was a little boy. I spit on you. I spit on your war. Do you understand that?”

  It was enough to bring the man around. His weak, wavering hand found the strength and purpose to rise up. He shot Ludolf Bohm through the throat with the first bullet. The second bullet shattered the old groundskeeper’s jaw and severed his spine. Ludolf fell sideways, dead, and the last bullet punched into the tree b
ehind him.

  * * *

  “Michael’s...broken. He won’t say how.”

  The little stretch of playground in the middle of the apartment complex was paltry and untended. It consisted of a swing set with two broken swings dangling limply from their chains, a big sun-bleached metal turtle and a sandbox full of weeds and cigarette butts. A graffiti-carved picnic table squatted nearby, and that was where Rebecca had led the three of them to sit and talk.

  “He hasn’t said anything?” Issabella asked. Darren was sitting beside her, both of them watching the young woman across the table. She looked pained and tired.

  “He tells me not to worry,” Rebecca said with a hand to her head. “He’s a big kid, really. He tries to keep everything away from me that might make me upset. Mostly, that’s a nice way for a guy to be. Don’t you think?”

  “It is,” Issabella agreed.

  Rebecca nodded in agreement and brushed a stray strand of hair out of her eyes.

  “So you guys are lawyers,” she said. “Does that mean he’s in bad trouble?”

  “He might be,” Issabella answered. “But not with us. We’re defense lawyers.”

  “Defense. Like...criminal?”

  “Exactly like that, yes.”

  “Oh, God,” Rebecca moaned, and put her face in her hands. “What did he do?”

  Darren put on a reassuring smile and said “We’re not his lawyers, Rebecca.” Then he frowned and folded his hands together in front of him. “I guess that wasn’t as reassuring a thing to say as it sounded in my head.”

  Rebecca stared at him in bewilderment, then at Issabella. The worry on her face made Issabella want to reach out and fold her hands over the girl’s. So she did. She cupped them in hers and squeezed gently, leaning forward enough that Darren seemed suddenly cut out of the conversation.

  “Rebecca,” she said softly, “we need to talk about something that might be painful.”

  “I don’t...what? Okay. What are we going to talk about?” Her expression became guarded.

  Again to his credit, Darren silently stood up. Issabella glanced up at him, and favored him with a grateful smile.