Graveland: A Novel Page 14

  But who’s to say, maybe the problem is solved.

  He pictures his precious girl, his Lizzie—little bit mousy, little bit mouthy—off somewhere with her shy, brainy, idealistic boyfriend, the two of them, what … going at it like jackrabbits?

  Is that it? Is that all?

  Does Deb know, and didn’t want to tell him? Didn’t want to point out that it’s actually none of his business?

  With what it’s costing him, Frank could get worked up about Lizzie cutting school for a week, but … that’s not going to happen.

  Academically, she’s doing fine.

  He wants her to be happy, too, though. And if she is, well and good, who’s he to interfere?

  You’re only young once.

  He stares into space for a while. When he refocuses, he realizes that both Sally Peake and Claudio Mazza are staring at him.

  * * *

  Walking along the High Line, toward the exit at Thirtieth Street, Lizzie feels sick to her stomach. She also feels sort of hollowed-out, and paralyzed.

  Not to mention scared.

  She wonders if, when she gets back to street level, she shouldn’t just keep heading toward midtown. Because then she could stop by the law firm where her mother works. She could submit herself to that, and all it would entail—the machinery of the law, the machinery of her mother’s disapproval.

  She doesn’t know which machinery would be worse.

  Although they’re both pretty much unthinkable, really.

  Like every other option she’s come up with in the last three hours. Which is how long she has been out and about in the city, wandering aimlessly, having hot flashes, hallucinating (as good as), and dry crying.

  When she saw it—the clip, the footage from outside the Herald Rygate—fuck, it was like getting whacked on the head with a baseball bat. Because at first she had to piece the story together, the references and images, which were all rapid-fire, all seemingly random and out of sequence, it wasn’t breaking news anymore, but an aggregate, a mosaic, an accumulated and already absorbed narrative.

  Jesus, listen to her, she sounds like fucking Julian.

  But now she understands. That’s the difference. Now she gets it. And she’s been going over it all, the past week, reassembling it in her head, reinterpreting every word spoken, every testy exchange, every weird glance and inexplicable mood swing. Now she understands why Julian was so unhappy about her tagging along—the politically illiterate pain-in-the-ass girlfriend that his brother couldn’t bear to be separated from even for a lousy few days.

  How could she have been so stupid?

  Actually, she knows how. Because go over the signs, go over the timeline, and it all fits … even if it doesn’t make any sense, even if it doesn’t connect on an emotional or a gut level, even if it’s literally unbelievable—the idea that Julian could plan and carry out an operation of this magnitude. But go over the footage, study those two familiar, spectral figures, the way they move, the body language, and suddenly it all makes perfect sense.

  To her at least.

  But don’t ask her to explain it.

  She walks down the steps of the cutoff to Thirtieth Street and keeps going. She crosses Tenth Avenue and heads for Ninth.

  She’s wearing jeans and a sweater, but there’s a chill in the air, and it’s probably going to get chillier. Also, her feet are sore. She left the apartment in a hurry, not giving any thought to what she was doing, certainly not to what shoes she should wear.

  She brought her phone, but the damn thing needs to be charged.

  She has maybe twelve dollars and some loose change in her pocket. She’s hungry, but won’t go in anywhere because the thought of having to deal with people makes her feel even more nauseous than she’s already feeling.

  At Sixth Avenue, she turns left and heads uptown.

  So far she has covered most of downtown, the East Village, SoHo, Tribeca, and the West Village. Then she made her way up to Gansevoort Street, where the High Line starts.

  There’s a lot to process in what has happened, no question about that, and she’s in a daze, but there’s also something nagging at her, tugging at her, some other level of this that she’s resisting.

  What is it?

  Block after block passes, and her mind refuses to settle. When she gets to Forty-second Street, she wanders into Bryant Park, finds an unoccupied bench, and sits down.

  There’s a simple, recurring question here: How could she not have seen what was going on? Was she blind? Lizzie’s understanding of the situation up to now has been that Julian is the radical in the Coady family. He’s involved with various protest groups and firmly believes in direct action—city marches, shutting down bridges and ports, so-called black bloc rampages, that kind of thing. He also believes, at some level, in the use of actual physical force. She hasn’t given much thought to this, but if she does, what comes to mind? Pushing, shoving, shouting stuff like “Fuck the cops.” Maybe throwing stones or broken bottles. All of which leads, of course—according to Alex—to police brutality, tear gas, pepper sprays, Tasers, stun grenades. And beyond that to mass arrests, trumped-up charges, surveillance, infiltration, raids. And then, inevitably, on to more cycles of resistance.

  But if Julian is the radical activist in the family, then what is Alex? The armchair strategist? Lizzie isn’t sure, because Alex plays his cards very close to his chest, even with her.

  Lizzie’s understanding of the situation this week in particular was that Julian had asked Alex to come down and help him organize some big street protest that was in the offing. She wasn’t surprised that Alex agreed, because she knew that Alex would do anything for Julian. But she also knew from experience not to ask too many questions, and was content instead to imagine the two of them—it’s preposterous now, she realizes—hand-cranking out leaflets on a small printing press, or unpacking bulk consignments of Anonymous masks.

  But then Alex asked her to come as well. She was into it at first, a mix of flattered and intrigued, but that was when her exposure to Julian hadn’t extended beyond a single face-to-face meeting over a pizza, a few Skype calls she happened to be in the room for, and Alex’s many stories about him.

  Five days of the real thing has pretty much taken the shine off those.

  But Lizzie’s focus in all of this is not—and never has been—on Julian. In a way, he’s the mad, fucked-up older brother in the background, like a secondary character out of some sitcom that got canceled after its first season. No, the focus for Lizzie, obviously, has always been on Alex—innocent, whispery, logical, weirdly sexy, on-the-fucking-spectrum Alex.

  And Alex doesn’t get canceled, not lightly.

  Which is when it hits her. Like a second whack of the baseball bat.

  That thing that’s been nagging at her.

  Within a minute, Lizzie is on her feet, digging into the pocket of her jeans for the crumpled-up ten and two ones. Walking along Forty-second, she looks back over her shoulder. Sixth goes up, right? And Fifth down.

  She’s not a native here, not anymore.

  She approaches the front of the New York Public Library, the steps, the stone lions. She’ll get a cab downtown, as far as the meter will take her, and walk the rest.

  She has no choice now. She has to go back. It would be an act of disloyalty not to, and as the cab whittles down through the midtown cross streets, below Fourteenth, down to Washington Square Park, and over to Broadway, she realizes she doesn’t feel sick anymore. She’s not anxious, or scared, either.

  She doesn’t know what she is.

  But one thing she does know—as she gets out of the cab, surrendering her twelve bucks, with fifteen or so blocks outstanding, and as she replays that clip in her head—one thing she alone knows, and knows for sure.

  It wasn’t Julian, it was never him.

  The shooter? Okay, outside the Rygate, the potential shooter—but the shooter on Columbus Avenue? The shooter in Central Park? She’s prepared to lay even money now, not that
she has to, because it’s just come to her, in a flash, from the clip, the woolly hat, the gray hoodie, which was which.

  Who was who.

  The shooter wasn’t Julian.

  The shooter was Alex.

  * * *

  Ellen comes out of the library with a name.

  Julian Robert Coady.

  It was actually pretty easy. Five minutes of sweet-talking her way into a temporary reader’s pass, forty minutes of flicking through a pile of Atherton Chronicle back issues, and then another twenty, twenty-five minutes online, cross-referencing names that appeared in the paper with names from the college radio station’s website—specifically from the page for its headline talk show, What Up?

  The paper is a weekly and doesn’t have an online edition, but it didn’t take Ellen long to familiarize herself with the layout and to identify likely page locations where strong political views might be expressed. She also started from a year ago, more or less around the time of that blog post with the comment thread that threw up the “ath900” handle. She got through over fifty issues—a quick riffle, literally, for each one—before coming across anything of interest. This turned out to be a semi-regular column called “The Eyeball” that railed pretty consistently against the bankers and their gigantic criminal conspiracy. Nothing unusual in that, of course, it’s practically a new art form—indignation porn, you find it everywhere—but the tone here was quite peculiar.

  The byline on the articles was Caligula.

  In one of them, reference was made to an academic called Farley Kaplan, who had apparently given an interview the previous week on a small local cable news show, the Stone Report, in which he stated that “leading bankers should face a firing squad.”

  When Ellen went online and did a trawl of names on the WKNT website—guest lists, program hosts, production assistants—she quickly came across the name Farley Kaplan again. He appeared on an edition of What Up? a couple of months after the Eyeball piece and did a ten-minute interview in which he expanded on his firing squad comment.

  What Up? is a half-hour show that goes out on Saturday afternoons and covers political and environmental stories mainly culled from alternative media sources. Ellen pulled the Kaplan interview from the archive and listened to it. It was standard stuff, with the firing squad remark definitely coming off as facetious rather than sinister, but toward the end of the ten-minute slot he did repeat it, adding that there should be enough bullets to go around “for a representative from each of the three Wall Street crime syndicates, investment banking, hedge funds, and private equity.”

  Ellen was still trying to process this when the presenter signed off by thanking Kaplan for coming on the show, and also “our sound engineer, the Chronicle’s legendary Caligula, for enticing him to come on.”

  It didn’t take Ellen more than a couple of keystrokes to establish that the What Up? sound engineer around that time was one Julian Robert Coady.

  Was Coady the guy? Was he ath900? Was he one of the shooters?

  Maybe, maybe not, but as she emerges from the library, Ellen has a keen sense that she’s on to something, certainly that she has something to work with—names (Coady, Kaplan) and possible places to check out (the WKNT office, the residence halls here at Atherton, wherever the Stone Report operates from).

  She decides her next stop should probably be the Administration Building, but as she’s crossing the main quad in front of the library, she spots Geek Girl and her posse occupying a bench on the east side, under a maple tree, all of them looking in her direction.

  “Hey there,” Geek Girl says, and waves.

  Ellen stops, shakes her head, and walks over.

  “What, you guys have nothing better to do,” she says, “no classes to go to?”

  The Smart One holds her hand out, indicating the now-sundrenched quad. “What could be better than this?”

  “Besides,” Geek Girl says, “we’re intrigued.”

  Ellen looks at her, holding her gaze, saying nothing.

  “You know.”

  “Do I?”

  “A reporter on campus, a real reporter. There must be something … afoot.”

  “Afoot?”

  “Yeah, you like that?” She pauses. “Newspaper girl.”

  This chick is something else. Ellen has been hit on by women before, but not—as far as she can remember—by a twenty-year-old, and not outside the dim and noisy confines of a bar.

  “I don’t work for a newspaper.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” the Smart One says, holding up her phone. “Parallax magazine. I Googled you.”

  “Yeah, well,” Ellen says, deciding she might as well get started here. “Whatever. But listen. Speaking of newspapers, do any of you guys actually read the Chronicle?”

  This is greeted with a collective hoot of derision. Bulldozing through it, Ellen adds, “‘The Eyeball’? Caligula? Ever hear of those? It’s a … column.”

  But from two years ago, she suddenly remembers.

  So pretty unlikely.

  This is confirmed by a few head shakes and some murmuring.

  “Julian Robert Coady?” she tries, throwing it out there.

  A silence follows, and then, “That’s weird.”

  This from a girl standing at the back. She’s short and pale, gothy, impossibly young-looking.

  “Why so?”

  “Well,” the girl says, not making eye contact with Ellen, “I just got this text from a friend of mine, Alicia? It seems you’re not the only one around here asking questions today.”

  Everyone turns and looks at her, waiting for more.

  “Well?” Geek Girl says. “Spill it, Morticia.”

  Morticia flips her one and then says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “Lizzie Bishop’s old man is here. He’s looking for her, and … no one can find her.”

  “What?”

  “Everyone’s talking about it. Texting, tweeting.”

  There’s a collective grab for phones.

  Ellen stands there, watching them all juice in. She gives it a few moments. After the first couple of message tones, she says, “So, what has this Lizzie what’s-it got to do with … Julian Robert Coady?”

  The Smart One looks up from her phone. “Lizzie’s going out with Coady’s brother, a guy called Alex.” She pauses, consulting her device again. “And no one can find him either.”

  Ellen’s heart skips a beat.

  Alex … and Julian. Two brothers? One of them a radical-minded student at Atherton from a couple of years back, the other one still at Atherton, but currently missing?

  Caligula and ath900?

  The Atherton T-shirt?

  She stands back now, swaying slightly from side to side, looking on as the girls work their phones, foreheads all screwed up in concentration, fingers hopping and dancing like they’re in some demented jazz ensemble.

  So this story, the shooting of Wall Street bankers? Has she just fucking cracked it? That’s the way it seems, but she has to keep her nerve here. Because what she’s got is still based on speculation. She needs to go one more round and come up with some concrete evidence.

  There is a fresh wave of message tones.

  “My friend Trish?” Geek Girl says, looking up from her phone. “She spoke with Sally Peake. That’s the RA in Lizzie’s house. She says they’ve been gone since last Friday.”

  Ellen nods along. Each new thing.

  “But apparently,” the Smart One says, “Lizzie did tell her roommate she was going, and that’s why no red flag was raised.”

  “So … do we know where they went?”

  A pause, and then a ripple of shaking heads.

  Ellen considers this for a moment. “The girl, Lizzie,” she says. “Her dad. Is he still here?”

  Morticia gets on the case, clickety-click.

  “So,” Geek Girl says, “you going to put us on the payroll?”

  Ellen smiles. “I just might. You guys have been a real help.”

  “Wow.”

&
nbsp; “What?”

  “She smiles.”

  A moment later, Morticia’s phone makes its pinging sound. As she’s reading the message, she raises her arm and points. “He’s over that way,” she says. “Other side of the VLA. In front of the Admin Building. Talking to someone. They’ve been there for over half an hour.”

  Ellen leans forward. “And under surveillance the whole time? Jesus, have you guys thought of applying for jobs with the NSA?”

  “Not too much happens around here,” the Smart One says. “This is an event.”

  A couple of minutes later, Geek Girl and Morticia accompany Ellen as far as the front of the Science Building, where they meet another girl, a Morticia clone, who points out Lizzie Bishop’s father.

  He’s about fifty yards away, on a tree-lined pathway between the Admin Building and the parking lot. From here he looks mid-forties or so. He’s slim, medium height, and casually dressed. He’s talking to an older man. The older man is holding a leather satchel and has an academic look to him.

  “Anyone know his name?”

  “I think it’s Frank,” the new girl says.

  “And the guy he’s talking to?”

  “Don’t know,” Geek Girl says. “I’ve seen him around. He’s an associate professor of … something.”

  “Something? Nice. Is that what you’re studying?”

  “I’ve taken courses in it.”

  The Morticias trade eye rolls.

  A little more time passes, and they just stand there, the four of them—in silence now—watching the two men.

  “Okay,” Ellen eventually says, glancing around. “You know what? Why don’t I take it from here?”

  Geek Girl pouts. “We’re being dismissed?”

  “The next phase of the operation might be a little delicate. I don’t want to scare him off.”

  But as she’s saying this, Frank Bishop and the associate professor of something shake hands and separate. Bishop heads for the parking lot.