The Fifth Descent of Lexi Montaigne Read online

  “What?”

  They turned back to their screens. As she was packing up her chaos of notes a young woman came over and fidgeted. “Can I help you?” Lexi asked.

  “Um, you know, I don’t want to pry or anything, but perhaps you should make sure you sleep at home.” The girl stared down at her Jimmy Choo shoes.

  Lexi stood. “There’s no rule that says I can’t fall asleep here.”

  “No, but screaming is frowned upon, and who was that man going through your stuff?” She turned and scampered when Lexi’s jaw dropped.

  Did I scream? What man? What was Miss Jimmy Choo talking about?

  Rain splashed on her as she left the building and crossed the lot. Inside the truck, the steady heartbeat of raindrops on the windshield filled her ears. She liked this kind of drizzle; it was soothing, erotic, like a long slow orgasm.

  She was staring at the old box on the passenger seat when the squeal of tires caught her attention. Wipers flicked on. She stared through the thin windshield waterfall. A red blur sped through the water slogged lot. Lexi squinted and looked beyond the red blur. “Is that . . .” She thought it was Linnux’s white Caprice, but it was too far away to be sure.

  How long had she slept? The day was dark and seemed a cloud of obscure memories as she drove through the streets in her rust limned Dakota. Pedestrians ambled along under umbrellas and cars screamed over pavement. All passed in a vague mask of colors, equipoise under the guise of speed and indifference.

  Every few seconds her attention wandered over to the box as she both hoped that Linnux would find nothing and feared he would discover that Gramps had been right all along. What would be worse?

  A horn bleated. Lexi swerved, all her focus abruptly brought to bear on the road. After veering away from the car she drove through a red light, made it safely and slowed down, but the deed had been done and someone had noticed.

  The red-blue lights swirling behind were perfectly visible despite the downpour, and after pulling over Lexi placed the box on the floor of the cab, covered it with her coat. She sat there, stunned and confused by her own actions. What did she care if the police saw the box?

  “You know you passed through the red light back there, miss.”

  Lexi couldn’t tell if it was a question. Knowing police officers, she handed him the license and registration in silence. As he recorded the information the officer kept stealing glances into the cab. Finally he smiled, handed her the ticket and walked back to his cruiser. As he walked, a red Camaro drove by, tinted windows, chrome rims.

  Lexi tried to see who was driving, but the darkness made this impossible. She started the Dakota and made for home. The tired old truck bogged down audibly as she slowed to make the turn onto Lewiston. Just like her, the truck tended toward lethargy on humid rainy nights.

  She was juggling research folders, the box, mail and keys when she noticed that the door was open a crack. Did I forget to close it this morning? She didn’t think so. No, she was sure she had locked it—it was habit after all. She stared at the doorknob, specifically the keyhole. There were no conspicuous marks. No signs of forced entry on the jamb either.

  Once inside she kicked off her shoes. All was quiet.

  For some unfathomable reason she didn’t want to set the box down. So she carried it from room to room, checking for . . . what? What do the spooked check for, spooks? No spooks appeared. Satisfied, she locked the door and sat down at the desk.

  Rain pitter-pattered on the roof as Lexi made a cursory search of her e-mail. One was headed URGENT with a return address of ‘Boetie and Ferber Lawyers’.

  Vaguely familiar. On recollection she dropped her hands. “No.”

  She clicked and read:

  Dear Alexis Montaigne,

  Forgive the formal nature of this report. I regret to inform you that your grandfather perished on Monday the twelfth at approximately 11:11 A.M., from natural causes. I am sorry for your loss. As Virgil’s estate lawyer it is my duty to meet with you, and I strongly insist that we meet as soon as possible. During his final days Virgil met with me on numerous occasions, to discuss many matters, one of which was you. Call me as soon as you receive this letter. My Regards, Etienne Boetie, B.A.

  “He’s gone, Satan. Gramps is gone.” She stroked the cat’s back and waited for the tears to come. None did. Something’s wrong with you, a darkness in her dungeon accused. “It was his time.” She stared at the box as anger grew inside.

  The box cringed under the cold hands clasping it in a vice-grip. It felt sure there would be no loss of energy this time. And sure enough it felt itself thrust into an aluminum tomb and shoved deep inside.

  Lexi went back in the house, called Mr. Boetie.

  “Yes,” Etienne said, “but it should be in person, how about I come over tomorrow?”

  Lexi heard the faint overture of fear tinge the lawyer’s voice. “Ah, sure. Ten o’clock I guess. But what—”

  “I will explain everything tomorrow, Alexis, miss Montaigne. I’m sorry. Goodbye.”

  With the profound emptiness that shadows death, Lexi sat up late, pondering recent events and wondering after the urgency in Mr. Boetie’s voice. Sleep didn’t find her until one.

  When the knock on the door woke her, Lexi’s face was a mold of the desk; faint wood grain imprinted in pink lines like incipient wrinkles. Rubbing her face, she answered the door and found a hoary-headed little man standing on her stoop. “Mr. Boetie?”

  The little man let himself in, brushing past her. Usually such antics would have been assuaged with hard words and harder jabs, but sleep still held her in its thrall. She let him pass. “Care for some coffee?” There was no feigned grace in the words this time.

  “I must insist that you keep what I am about to say between us. Trust no one.” He set his ugly tawny briefcase down on her desk and plumbed its depths.

  Lexi rubbed sleep from her eyes and sat down, watching him with equal parts curiosity and humor. “Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “I thought he was mad, Alexis, all these years I was convinced of it.” Mr. Boetie removed a thin wooden box from his briefcase. For the first time he looked directly at her. “I dare say you remember me, from when your father passed. His death was also . . .” He looked past her, his expression changing sharply. “Did you lock the door?”

  Lexi raised her hands. “All right, you know what? You’re starting to scare me. Gramps was a little off his old rocker, we both know that. But what—”

  Mr. Boetie ran to the door and locked it, staring through the curtain. Lexi looked on wide-eyed, waiting. A thunderclap shook the windows and they both jumped. It had come even more unexpectedly than thunder usually does, as the day was mostly sunny.

  Mr. Boetie shuffled back to the desk where he handed Lexi the clasped box from his briefcase. She flicked back the cute brass snap and opened it, revealing a gray key.

  “That belongs to a storage facility called Everything Fits. It’s on Bank Street. Virgil said that everything you would need to begin could be found there. He called it his trove. I dare say he mentioned it to you?” The little man leaned in close and whispered, “Don’t tell anyone about it. Whatever is in there, keep it to yourself. I have seen things lately, little things; cars where they don’t belong, papers on my desk, shuffled; lights on when I could have sworn I’d shut them off. It’s hard to believe, I know, but he was right, about everything. Good luck, Miss Montaigne.”

  At the door he stopped and turned. “One more thing. If you see a man under a trilby hat or some kind of fedora, white or black, run.” With that the little old lawyer departed.

  Lexi looked at the key as Satan jumped onto the desk. “Is madness contagious, kitty boy?”

  She tried working on her book, on a chapter called Kinesics, for a few hours, but accomplished little as her thoughts kept returning to the oak box—and now to this dratted key as well. She was typing the line—‘and when he hesitates to answer the question, you should understand that one of two th
ings is occurring: he is either trying to manufacture an answer, or, he is trying to decide if you will be hurt by the truth. To ascertain which, you must’—when the phone rang.

  Her heart skipped a few beats. “God you’re pathetic.” She picked it up. It was Simon.

  “How did you know?” she asked thirty seconds later.

  “I have my sources,” Simon said. Lexi clenched unconsciously. Simon only gave vague answers when he was lying. But she couldn’t fathom why he would lie about how he knew Gramps was dead. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” Lexi shrugged. “It’s just . . . there have been some strange things happening.”

  “Like what?” Simon’s voice was all business now.

  Lexi hesitated, remembering Mr. Boetie’s warning.

  “Probably nothing. When are you coming back?”

  “A few days. There’s been a series of break-ins on the west side of Buffalo. They have me doing damn knock-and-interviews. Perfect waste of talent. So when’s the funeral?”

  Lexi hadn’t even thought about that. “I have a deadline coming up. I’ve almost got the outlines for every chapter . . . but that doesn’t matter. What’s wrong with me? I’ll call the mortician tomorrow. God this is depressing.” She sighed.

  “Hey,” Simon said, “whatever happens, you can talk to me. See you later, sexy.” There was that higher tone in his voice again.

  “Did you hear that, Satan? He said ‘whatever happens.’ What does that mean?”

  Satan didn’t care. He just wanted to be caressed.

  Chapter 5

  1941

  Blackness slowly eased, giving way to a gray world. Echoes and drab walls informed Virgil he was in an interrogation room.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Montaigne,” a smooth voice cooed at the border of hearing. “Try to relax, we just have a few questions for you and then you’ll be on your way.”

  Virgil raised his head and squinted. The man must be behind me. There was a cup of water before him on the steel table, one of those fluorescent tin cups that contribute their metallic tang to whatever is inside. He reached for it and was attacked by the clanging of metal chains clasped to his wrists, bolted to the table. He sighed and grabbed the drink, forced to pull the chains taut against flesh. Frigid water doused mental cobwebs.

  “Ask away.”

  “You worked for Mr. Dorl, is this correct?” the disembodied voice asked.

  How thrilling to be the center of attention. “If you are going to start there, then this will take till Christmas,” He took another swig of tin-tinged water. “Get to the point.”

  “What can you tell us about the chemicals used inside Batavia Primary?”

  “Not much,” Virgil said, pleased that he could say this in good conscience. “The delivery trucks didn’t come during the day. I never saw any labels or shipment orders.”

  “It speaks truth,” another, deeper and apathetic voice said.

  “You were employed for eight years as a batch blend operator, is this correct?”

  “No,” Virgil leaned back. Chains clanged. “I began work at BP in ‘33 as a sprayer. In ‘38 I was transferred to the fifth level, the Batch Blend.”

  “You admit to having access to the various chemicals in BP?”

  Virgil nodded but was asked to respond verbally. So, I’m being recorded, he surmised. “Yes, for four years I’ve had access to the chemicals in the factory.”

  “And can you name these chemicals for us?”

  The air was unnaturally still, even for an enclosed room, but now it acquired a stifling density. The lights glaring on him didn’t help. “No.”

  “Are you refusing to cooperate in a police investigation, Mr. Montaigne?”

  Virgil laughed, almost startled by the sound. “We all know this is not a police investigation. The police don’t storm into civilian homes and knock their owners out without a word. You guys are G-men, from the Bureau of Investigation. Tell me, why is the government interested in Dorl?” His heart was pulsing like a steam engine, wump-wump-wump-wump but he didn’t care.

  This was exhilarating. A real life adventure, almost as good as a Tom Swift.

  The room was silent as the temperature rose. A fleeting fear that he would be left alone in this sweltering room coursed through his mind, but the disembodied voice returned. “Tell us the names of the chemicals used inside Batavia Primary and you can go home.”

  “Hey! I didn’t say I wouldn’t help,” Virgil’s voice was shrill as he tried to bend over enough to wipe sweat from his brow. “I don’t know what the chemicals were. They were only labeled by number.”

  Someone sighed behind him and he heard the other voice whisper, “It speaks the truth.”

  The familiar flavor of cigar smoke wafted over to Virgil as the interrogator spoke. “Very well then. You were a mixer for five years. Surely you became familiar with the various tint, scent, texture and reactions of the chemicals? If we brought in an apothecary do you think you could conclude what was used?”

  “Conclude?”

  “Surmise. Ascertain. Guess.”

  Virgil sighed. Wanted to agree. That was when he understood: the heat made him pliant, he wanted to help, to do whatever it took to be free of this room. Clever. “Fine.”

  He was left there in the white-walled greenhouse. Long hours passed before the chemist finally arrived with a large wooden case which he set on the table. Virgil leaned forward as the chemist opened the case, piano hinges creaking and glass vials of various tinctures tinkling.

  The chemist spent two hours asking countless questions and jotting little notes on his legal pad. Virgil was honest the entire time, but a question in the back of his mind grew; why does the government care what Dorl used? When the chemist finally stood and knocked on the door, bringing in the interrogator, Virgil asked the question.

  A few minutes later the interrogator placed his hand on Virgil’s shoulder, still standing behind him, and said, “You asked why we are so interested in Mr. Dorl. This is why.” He dropped the Batavia Daily News on the table. It was dated December 8, 1941. Big bold type letters: JAPAN STRIKES PEARL HARBOR. ROOSEVELT DECLARES WAR.

  “You see, Mr. Montaigne,” the voice said as a chill overcame the heat of the room. “Mr. Dorl’s factory collapsed and Dorl himself vanished the day before Japan attacked. The government does not take such signs as mere coincidence.”

  That still didn’t explain all the questions about chemicals.

  The interrogator snapped his fingers and a shadow spilled over the floor. It was long and lean and prosaic as far as shadows go, save for the suggestion of a hat—likely a trilby—as outlined by the shadow. A guard stepped in and threw a bag over Virgil’s head before spraying something through the mouth hole. Blackness enveloped him once again.

  He awoke in his wing back chair, the blackness dispelled as recollection of the paper reemerged. He got up, stumbled into the kitchen for a few gulps of water before running out to the newsstand. The air was still. Sirens wailed in the distance, sounding more like the memory of sirens, the sound blackbirds mimic. Eddie the newsstand man was not his usual cheerful self. He made no jokes about the dominance of the Yankees, nor did he playfully needle Virgil about his bachelorhood.

  His hope that what he’d heard was merely the product of a mental fog, proved false, as he learned when he read the paper. “We are at war,” the newsstand guy said as though it were a mantra. “Can you believe it? First Batavia Primary falls, all those jobs lost, and then Japan attacks. I think God is pissed at us.”

  Virgil spent the rest of the day circumventing Batavia, speaking with his former co-workers. To his intense dismay he learned it had occurred to precisely no one that Dorl might have something to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  “Maybe that’s why he never showed himself to us,” he pointed out to Plato at home that night. “He was planning to leave this entire time, planning for eight years. My God, did I help mix chemicals for a terrorist?”

  He passed the
next few weeks in a vodka-fueled rage, making drawings of men under trilbies and jotting down every detail from random memories about the Bureau interview. When he finally assumed a level of sobriety, Virgil realized that the best way to find answers was to become a police officer. His long search for Dorl had begun.

  Chapter 6

  Lexi turned to the Yahoo home page, scrolled through the different icons until something caught her eye. It was the same picture she had seen at Gramps’, that of the blurry man entering a warehouse. Beside the image was an icon about the Orion Meteoroid. She clicked on the one of the blurry man, with the legend: Entrepreneur Opens Manufactory.

  She scanned for interesting lines, passing swiftly over the ones about large donations and revitalization of the old Buffalo steel mill. There was no mention of the entrepreneur’s name, or of any tentative date for an interview. But a sign on the revitalized site indicated that the factory would be operational by the end of the month. And that was it, the whole ball of wax.

  There was nothing more about the entrepreneur on the web, just as there was nothing on Mr. Dorl. She looked over at Satan sitting on the edge of the desk. “Look at me, just like Gramps.”

  In response the cat brushed the key off of the desk with his tail. It clanged against the wood floor, scaring him away. Lexi retrieved it. Stared at it. “Screw it.” What could possibly be in the storage facility that she hadn’t already heard from Gramps a thousand times?

  “You better stay here, kitty-boy.”

  The afternoon had that heaviness that precedes a rainstorm, the muggy stench of recycled water. Lexi was careful to lock the door before heading out. In the truck, as Lex drove west, from the city to the town of Batavia, Beethoven conducted the Adagio molto.

  Rain pelted the windshield during the second movement and as Lexi drove darkness seemed to swallow the miles behind. While the city of Batavia seemed to her conceited, too big for its britches with all the big name box stores and franchise and the perpetual construction delays attendant to sudden growth, the town was still quaint.