The City (The City 1)

“Yes, Jonah, there is no other choice.”

“Well, maybe there is.”

“No, there is not.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am quite certain. And so are you.”

I couldn’t meet his steady eyes and continue to pretend there might be another option, but when I looked away from him, even then I couldn’t maintain that pretense. “All right. Okay. You’re right. But … oh, man, this is going to be a bloodbath.”

He frowned. “Surely you do not believe that your mother, the kind of good woman that she is, would resort to violence?”

“No, sir. I was just … exaggerating. I guess … fear gets my imagination running. I have a big imagination.”

“If it gives you some comfort, I assure you that I will do my very best to help your mother understand that your reasons for so often deceiving her were for the most part honorable and otherwise attributable to the foolishness of youth.”

I returned his frown to him. “Thanks. I guess.”

“Now I should be going.” He rose from the chair, adjusted his shirt cuffs, his coat, his tie, his display handkerchief, and when he looked like he belonged in a magazine ad, he smiled at me. “I must tell you, Jonah, that in spite of the anxiety and the stress that it sometimes occasioned, I did enjoy this adventure that we have been through together.”

I said, “Me, too,” and meant it.

He bowed to me, and I bowed to him.

He held out his hand, and I shook it.

I almost threw my arms around him and hugged him tight, but I didn’t know what he would think of that, whether it might embarrass him. And so I restrained myself. One more thing eventually to regret.

“I will most likely call regardless of whether or not it is the time of the day when you are alone.”

“Yeah. I know. I understand.”

He went down the steps, along the walkway, and turned left on the sidewalk, making his way back to the bus stop on the main avenue.

As I had watched Miss Pearl until she moved out of sight in the opposite direction on Wednesday, so now I watched Mr. Yoshioka. As he dwindled into the summer heat, I realized that at some point in the past several months, I had stopped thinking of him as a small man, that every time I saw him, he seemed to have grown taller.

I cleaned off the porch table, washed the glasses we had used, put the four remaining cookies in a plastic bag, and concealed them in my nightstand to avoid explaining where I’d gotten them. One last deception.

68

We would eventually learn that in the same hour as Mr. Yoshioka visited me, Setsuko Nozawa tried again to reach Mr. Tamazaki at the Daily News. She learned he was on holiday and would return on Monday. He had believed that her report to him had been complete, and she had thought so, too, until the crazy professor popped up like a nutty Sid Caesar character on that old Your Show of Shows. The new information she acquired would be of value to the reporter, but since all of this had to do with events that occurred years earlier, she imagined it would be no less valuable to him on Monday than it would be now.

We couldn’t know then that the coming Monday would be the day when so many lives would be changed forever—or ended.

Elsewhere in Charleston, Illinois, at the stately Georgian home of Dr. Jubal Mace-Maskil, the professor hadn’t risen from bed until past noon. Although sober, he felt queasy. He felt also as if he’d been thrashed, but his mind was clear.

Eventually we would learn in great detail everything Dr. MaceMaskil thought and did during those days. In time, when interrogated by the police, against the advice of his attorney, the professor proved to be a talkative self-dramatizer motivated nearly as much by self-pity as by a sense of his historical importance to the utopian movements of his day.

Now sober, he considered the illegal substances that he had consumed the previous day, and upon reflection, he understood where he had gone wrong, what wicked combination of drugs had cast him into an abyss of paranoia. When he heard of Mrs. Nozawa’s visit to the Alumni Affairs Office, he had leaped to the ridiculous conclusion that Lucas was about to be revealed as a murderer for hire. Actually, the boy was just a murderer, as he didn’t always kill for money. In fact, he had refused to charge his beloved mentor for the elimination of the tiresome Noreen Wallis Mace-Maskil, formerly Noreen Wallis Norville, of the Grosse Pointe Norvilles. “You’ll just owe me one,” Lucas said when refusing payment, which had delighted Jubal until, as time passed, he’d begun to wonder what that “one” might entail.

He had thought Lucas was committed to the Cause—Jubal always capitalized the word in his mind—but in the four years since the boy graduated, he’d spent much of his time adrift, distracted by carnal pleasures. Oh, now and then, Lucas got up to something worthwhile—a train derailment, other bits of sabotage, an unsuspecting policeman executed with a point-blank round to the back of the head—but considering his sharp mind and potential, he was an underachiever.

Lately, Dr. Mace-Maskil had become concerned that Lucas might be less interested in the Cause than in taking enormous risks largely for the thrill of it. After all, he had shot the policeman outside of a Chinese restaurant, on a busy street, where there were potential witnesses, taking advantage of an unanticipated opportunity. With lightning cunning, he calculated the line-of-sight issues, determined that a blind spot existed, shot the cop, thrust the pistol into the coat pocket of a wild-haired, disoriented homeless man, shouting, “I got him, I got the bastard, help me here!” When a few men joined him in the effort to subdue the terrified bum, he used the confusion to fade out of the scene. He thought himself superior, of Nietzsche’s master race, and on a regular basis, he seemed to need to prove his supreme nature by taking an outrageous risk and getting away with it.

When Lucas derailed a train or shot a cop on a public street for the thrill of it and to prove his superior nature, instead of taking the time and care to plan a more significant operation that could be pulled off with much greater confidence that no evidence would lead to the perpetrators … Well, such recklessness also put the professor at risk. He’d taken some years to realize that if Lucas were arrested and convicted of just one murder, he might negotiate an adjustment in his sentence by ratting out others whom those in power would delight in persecuting. Like Dr. Jubal Mace-Maskil. The ?

??one” that he owed his former student might prove to be his own destruction for the purpose of shaving a few years off Lucas’s sentence or to buy the boy certain prison privileges that he might not otherwise receive.