“How can you not want to catch this guy?” I said, and I made a little bit of awkward desperation slide into my voice.
“It’s not my job,” he said. “And it’s not your job, either, Dexter. If you think this guy is going to check into this hotel, tell the cops. They got plenty of guys they can use to stake it out and grab him. You just got you, buddy—and don’t take this wrong, but this could be a little rougher than you are used to.”
“The cops will want to know how I know,” I said, and I regretted it instantly.
And Chutsky picked it up just as quickly. “Okay. So how DO you know?” he said.
There comes a time when even Disingenuous Dexter has to place at least one or two cards faceup on the table, and clearly it had arrived. And so throwing my inborn inhibitions out the window, I said, “He’s stalking me.”
Chutsky blinked. “What does that mean?” he said.
“It means he wants me dead,” I said. “He’s made two tries already.”
“And you think he’s about to try again? At this hotel, The Breakers?”
“Yes.”
“So why don’t you just stay home?” he said.
I am not really being conceited when I say that I am not used to having all the cleverness on the other side of a conversation. But Chutsky was clearly leading in this dance, and Dexter was several steps behind, limping along on two left feet with blisters blossoming on heel and toe. I had walked into this with a very clear picture of Chutsky as a real two-fisted man, even though one of the fists was now a steel hook—but nevertheless the kind of gung-ho, over-the-top, damn-the-torpedoes guy who would leap into battle at the merest suggestion, especially when it concerned getting his hook on the man who had stabbed his true love, my sister Deborah. Clearly, I had miscalculated.
But this left a very large question mark: Who was Chutsky, in fact, and how did I get his help? Did I need some cunning stratagem to bend him to my will, or would I have to resort to some form of the unprecedented uncomfortable unspeakable truth? The very thought of committing honesty made me tremble in every leaf and branch—it went against everything I had ever stood for. But there seemed no way out; I would have to be at least marginally truthful.
“If I stay home,” I said, “he is going to do something terrible. To me, and maybe the kids.”
Chutsky stared at me, then shook his head. “You were making more sense when I thought you wanted revenge,” he said. “How can he do anything to you if you’re at home and he’s in the hotel?”
At a certain point you really have to accept the fact that there are days when you have not brought your A game, and this was one of them. I told myself that I was most likely still suffering from my concussion, but my self answered back that this was a pitiful and now overused excuse at best, and with much more self-annoyance than I could remember experiencing for quite some time, I pulled out the notebook I had taken from Weiss’s car and flipped it open to the full-color drawing of Dexter the Dominator on the front of The Breakers Hotel.
“Like this,” I said. “If he can’t kill me, he’ll get me arrested for murder.”
Chutsky studied the picture for a long moment, and then whistled quietly. “Boy howdy,” he said. “And these things down here around the bottom …?”
“Dead bodies,” I said. “Fixed up like the ones that Deborah was investigating when this man stabbed her.”
“Why would he do this?” he said.
“It’s a kind of art,” I said. “I mean, he thinks it is.”
“Yeah, but why would he do this to YOU, buddy?”
“The guy that was arrested when Deborah was stabbed,” I said. “I kicked him hard, right in the head. That was his boyfriend.”
“Was?” said Chutsky. “Where is he now?”
I have never really seen the point in self-mutilation—after all, life itself is on the job and doing really well at it. But if I could have taken back that word was by biting down hard on my own tongue, I would cheerfully have done so. However, it had been said and I was stuck with it, and so, floundering about for a small chunk of my formerly sharp wit, I found a little piece of it and came out with, “He skipped bail and disappeared,” I said.
“And this guy blames you because his boyfriend took off?”
“I guess so,” I said.
Chutsky looked at me and then looked down at the drawing again. “Listen, buddy,” he said. “You know this guy, and I know you gotta go with your gut feeling. It’s always worked for me, nine times out of ten. But this is, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Kind of, really thin, don’t you think?” He flipped a finger at the picture. “But anyway, you were right about one thing. If he’s going to do this, you do need my help. A lot more than you thought.”
“What do you mean?” I asked politely.
Chutsky smacked the drawing with the back of his hand. “This hotel,” he said. “It isn’t The Breakers. It’s the Hotel Nacional. In Havana.” And seeing that Dexter’s mouth was hanging open in a most unbecoming way, he added, “You know, Havana. The one in Cuba.”
“But that’s not possible,” I said. “I mean, I’ve been there. That’s The Breakers.”
He smiled at me, the irritating, superior kind of smile that I would love to try sometime when I wasn’t in disguise. “You didn’t read your history, did you?” he said.
“I don’t think this chapter was assigned. What are you talking about?”
“Hotel Nacional and The Breakers were built from the same blueprint, to save money,” he said. “They’re virtually identical.”
“Then why are you so sure this isn’t The Breakers?”
“Lookit,” Chutsky said. “Look at the old cars. Pure Cuba. And see the little golf-cart thing, with the bubble top? That’s a Coco Loco, and you only find ’em there, not Palm Beach. And the vegetation. That stuff on the left? You don’t see that at The Breakers. Definitely only in Havana.” He dropped the notebook and leaned back. “So actually, I’d say problem solved, buddy.”
“Why would you say that?” I said, irritated both at his attitude and at the lack of any sense in what he said.
Chutsky smiled. “It’s just too hard for an American to get over there,” he said. “I don’t think he could pull it off.”
A small nickel dropped through the slot and a light went on in Dexter’s brain. “He’s Canadian,” I said.
“All right,” he said stubbornly. “So he could go down there.” He shrugged. “But hey—you maybe don’t remember that things are sort of tight down there? I mean—there’s no way he gets away with anything like this—” He smacked the notebook with the back of his hand. “Not in Cuba. The cops would be all over him like …” Chutsky frowned and thoughtfully raised his bright silver hook toward his face. He caught himself just before he put the hook into his eye. “Unless …” he said.
“What?” I said.
He shook his head slightly. “This guy’s pretty smart, right?”
“Well,” I said grudgingly, “I know HE thinks so.”
“So he’s gotta know. Which maybe means …” Chutsky said, politely refusing to finish a sentence with anything resembling a noun. He fumbled out his phone, one of those larger ones with the bigger screen. Holding it in place on the table with his hook, he began to poke rapidly at the keyboard with a finger, muttering, “Damn … okay … Uh-huh,” and other bright observations under his breath. I could see that he had Google on the screen, but nothing else was legible from across the table. “Bingo,” he said at last.
“What?”
He smiled, clearly pleased with how smart he was. “They do all these festivals down there,” he said. “To prove how sophisticated and free they are.” He pushed the phone across the table at me. “Like this one,” he said.
I pulled the phone to me and read the screen. “Festival Internacional de Artes Multimedia,” I said, scrolling down.
“It starts in three days,” Chutsky said. “And whatever this guy does—projectors or film clips or whatever—the
cops will have orders to back off and let him do his thing. For the festival.”
“And the press will be there,” I said. “From all over the world.”
Chutsky made a gesture with his hook that would have been putting a hand palm up, if only it was a hand. Of course, hooks don’t have palms, but the meaning was still clear. “Things being what they are,” he said, “it gets coverage in Miami just like it was in Miami.”
And it was true. Miami got official and unofficial coverage of everything that happened in Havana—with more detail than we got about the happenings in Fort Lauderdale, which was right next door. So if I was implicated in Havana, I would be convicted in Miami, with the added bonus that I could do nothing about it. “Perfect,” I said. And it was—Weiss had a free pass to set up his awful project, and then collect all the attention he so desperately craved, all in one gift-wrapped holiday package. Which did not seem like it could possibly be a good thing for me. Especially since he knew that I could not get to Cuba to stop him.
“All right,” Chutsky said. “It might make sense. But why are you so sure he will go there?”
It was, unfortunately, a fair question. I thought about it. First of all, was I really sure? Casually, not wanting to startle Chutsky in any way, I sent a careful, silent question mark to the Dark Passenger. Are we sure about this? I asked.
Oh, yes, it said with a sharp-toothed smirk. Quite sure.
All right then. That was settled. Weiss would go to Cuba to expose Dexter. But I needed something a little more convincing than silent certainty; what proof did I really have, aside from the drawings, which were probably not admissible in a court of law? It was true that some of them were very interesting—the image of the woman with the six breasts, for example, was the kind of thing that really stuck in your head.
I remembered that drawing, and this time there was a nearly audible clang as a very, very big nickel dropped.
There had been a piece of paper wedged into the binding at the page in question.
It had listed airline flights from Havana to Mexico.
Just exactly the kind of thing you might like to know about if, for example, you thought you would need to leave Havana in a hurry. If, just hypothetically, you had just scattered some unusual dead bodies around in front of the city’s flagship five-star hotel.
I reached for the notebook, fished out the flight schedule, and flipped the paper onto the table. “He’ll be there,” I said.
Chutsky picked up the paper and unfolded it. “Cubana de Aviación,” he read.
“From Havana to Mexico,” I said. “So he can do it and then get out in a hurry.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Uh-huh, could be.” He looked up at me and cocked his head to one side. “What’s your gut telling you?”
Truthfully, the only thing my gut ever told me was that it was dinnertime. But it was obviously very important to Chutsky, and if I stretched the definition of gut to include the Passenger, my gut was telling me that there was absolutely no doubt about it. “He’ll be there,” I said again.
Chutsky frowned and looked down at the drawing again. Then he started nodding his head, slowly at first and then with increasing energy. “Uh-huh,” he said, and then he looked up, flipped the flight schedule to me, and stood up. “Let’s go talk to Deborah,” he said.
Deborah was lying in her bed, which should not really have been a surprise. She was staring at the window, even though she couldn’t see out from her bed, and in spite of the fact that the television was on and broadcasting scenes of unearthly merriment and happiness. Debs didn’t seem interested in the cheerful music and cries of bliss coming from the speaker, however. In fact, if you were to judge strictly from the look on her face, you would have to say she had never felt happiness in her life, and never intended to if she could help it. She glanced at us without interest as we came in, just long enough to identify us, and then looked back in the direction of the window.
“She’s feeling kind of low,” Chutsky muttered to me. “Happens sometimes after you get chopped up.” From the number of scars all over Chutsky’s face and body, I had to assume he knew what he was talking about, so I just nodded and approached Deborah.
“Hey, sis,” I said, in the kind of artificially cheerful voice I had always understood you were supposed to use at an invalid’s bedside.
She turned to look at me, and in the deadness of her face and the deep blue emptiness of her eyes, I saw an echo of her father, Harry; I had seen that look before, in Harry’s eyes, and out of those blue depths a memory came out and wrapped itself all around me.
Harry lay dying. It was an awkward thing for all of us, like watching Superman in the throes of Kryptonite. He was supposed to be above that kind of common weakness. But for the last year and a half he had been dying, slowly, in fits and starts, and now he was very close to the finish line. And as he lay there in his hospice bed, his nurse had decided to help. She had been deliberately and lethally increasing the dose of his pain medicine and feeding on Harry’s death, savoring his shrinking away, and he had known it and told me. And oh the joy and bliss, Harry had given me permission to make this nurse my very first real live human playmate, the first ever I had taken away with me to the Dark Playground.
And I had done so. First Nurse became the very first small drop of blood on the original glass slide in my brand-new collection. It had been several hours of wonder, exploration, and ecstasy, before First Nurse went the way of all flesh, and the next morning when I went to the hospice to report to Harry, the experience still filled me with brilliant darkness.
I came into Harry’s room on feet that barely touched the ground, and as Harry opened his eyes and looked into mine he saw this, saw that I had changed and become the thing that he had made me, and as he watched me the deadness came into his eyes.
I sat anxiously beside him, thinking he might be at some new crisis. “Are you okay?” I said. “Should I call the doctor?”
He closed his eyes and slowly, fragilely, shook his head.
“What’s wrong?” I insisted, thinking that since I felt better than I ever had before, everyone else really ought to cheer up a little, too.
“Nothing wrong,” he said, in his soft, careful, dying voice. And he opened his eyes again and looked at me with that same glazed look of blue-eyed emptiness. “So you did it?”
I nodded, almost blushing, feeling that talking about it was somehow embarrassing.
“And after?” he said.
“All cleaned up,” I said. “I was really careful.”
“No problems?” he said.
“No,” I told him, and blurted out, “It was wonderful.” And seeing the pain on his face and thinking I could help, I added, “Thank you, Dad.”
Harry closed his eyes again and turned his head away. For six or seven breaths, he stayed like that, and then, so softly I almost couldn’t hear him, he said, “What have I done … Oh, Jesus, what have I done …”
“Dad …?” I said. I could not remember that he had ever spoken like this, saying bad words and sounding so very anguished and uncertain, and it was very unsettling and absolutely took the edge off my euphoria. And he just shook his head, eyes closed, and would say nothing more.
“Dad …?” I said again.
But he said nothing, just shook his head a few more painful times and then lay there quietly, for what seemed to me like a very long time, until at last he opened his eyes and looked at me, and there it was, that dead-eyed blue gaze that had moved beyond all hope and light and into the darkest place there is. “You are,” he said, “what I have made you.”
“Yes,” I said, and I would have thanked him again, but he spoke.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, “it’s mine,” and I did not know then what he meant by that, although these many years later I think I have begun to understand. And I still wish I could have done or said something then, some small thing that would have made it easier for Harry to slide happily into the final dark; some carefully crafted
sentence that made the self-doubt go away and let the sunlight back into those empty blue eyes.
But I also know, these many years later, that there is no such sentence, not in any language I know. Dexter is what Dexter must be, always and evermore, world without end, and if Harry saw that at the end and felt a final surge of horror and guilt—well, I really am sorry, but what else is there? Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth—it’s just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation. Believe me, I am very much an expert in what dying people do. If I were to catalog all the strange things that my Special Friends have said to me as I helped them over the edge, it would make a very interesting book.
So I felt bad about Harry. But as a young and awkward geek of a monster, there was very little I could have said to make it easier on him.
And all these years later, seeing the same look in Deborah’s eyes, I felt the same unhappy sense of helplessness wash over me. I could only gawk at her as she turned away and looked at the window once more.
“For Christ’s sake,” she said, without looking away from the window, “quit staring at me.”
Chutsky slid into a chair on the opposite side. “She is a little cranky lately,” he said.
“Fuck you,” she said without any real emphasis, tilting her head to look around Chutsky and keep her focus on the window.
“Listen, Deborah,” he said. “Dexter knows where this guy is that hurt you.” She still didn’t look, just blinked her eyes, twice. “Uh, and he was thinking that him and me might go get him actually. And we wanted to talk to you about it,” Chutsky said. “See how you feel about it.”
“How I feel,” she said with a flat and bitter voice, and then she turned to face us with a pain in her eyes that was so terrible even I could feel it. “Do you want to know what I really feel?” she said.