Big If Page 21

  Noel had put it bluntly at a lunch in November to discuss Peta’s prospects for a partnership. “Managing these buildings is a crashing bore,” he told her. “It wouldn’t be so bad if the spaces themselves were pleasing or distinctive, but alas we’re talking Kmarts here, we’re talking sneaker stores. I’m almost ashamed to be profiting off such ugliness, except it’s so damn profitable and I’m so damn greedy. And that’s the problem, Peta. You are used to the grand, the exquisite, the historic. You have a gift, there’s no denying it. The question that my family has is, can you handle dull?”

  Peta, eager to make partner, was sure that she could handle dull. She even welcomed dull—it would be a break from the pressures she was feeling, Jens, Kai, and Lauren Czoll. Noel proposed a test, a chance to show the elder Mosses that she could excel at being bored. The Mosses owned an office block in Portsmouth Harborside. The property was called the Dental Building, a two-story box of unconvincing brickface, plexi windows, white vinyl stripping, matching vinyl gutters, a smallish lobby with a potted palm.

  “Manage it for us,” Noel had said. “Manage it sans drama and we’ll make you the next partner in Moss Properties.”

  Peta had been managing the Dental since November. She had rearranged her schedule, carving out an hour at the end of every day to attend to whatever tedium the building might present. She toured the space with the super, Frank Horan, forcing herself to pay attention to Frank’s monologue on pest control and upcoming ventilation maintenance. She read the building files, reviewed the manuals on the water pump, the burglar alarm, the HVAC unit on the roof, and went through the bank statements on the operational accounts until she felt on top of every detail in the place.

  Then the problems started, real tricks on the Realtrix. They started with a little thing, a single roofing nail Peta found in the parking lot one winter afternoon as she was coming in to hold her office hours. She held the nail in the palm of her hand and looked at the pavement. She saw another nail on the ground, then another and another, and realized that the lot was sprinkled with the nails. She told Frank Horan to sweep the lot, and wondered briefly why a roofer would have been in their parking lot, since there was no roof work scheduled.

  Two days later, Frank Horan called her to the roof and showed her the HVAC plant, a big fan-and-pump unit enclosed in sheet metal. Frank pointed to the freon lines, coils up the side of the machine. Peta, squatting by the coils, saw marks like a dog’s jaws on the soft aluminum.

  “Looks chewed,” Frank Horan said appraisingly, “but that’s impossible. No mouth could touch it, man or animal. Freon’ll maim you—it’s so cold, it burns. So maybe it was pliers or a hacksaw or a dull pair of pinking shears.”

  Peta touched the torn aluminum. It was somehow terrible, a common thing destroyed. She looked up at the super. “Frank, what’s going on here?”

  Frank Horan crossed his arms. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Moss.”

  That afternoon, she cornered Noel in his office and demanded an explanation of the curious occurrences at the Dental Building. Noel closed his door and told her the story of a doctor named Soteer, a former tenant at the Dental, an MD-OBGYN, some part of whose practice involved, or had once involved, performing safe and legal abortions at various fully accredited clinics in New England.

  Peta remembered sitting in Noel’s office at Moss Properties. Noel’s office was a comic place (the handsome oaken paneling, the oriental rug, the sea charts and the brass telescope on legs)—it looked like Nelson’s stateroom at Trafalgar—but it wasn’t very comic when he said the word abortion.

  Noel poured himself a coffee at the sideboard. He said, “There’s a war going on apparently. I call it a war, the cops call it a war—you can call it anything you like. Doctors shot, nurses shot, clinics bombed and firebombed. But there’s also a low-level conflict, an endless war of nerves. Protesters haunt the doors of clinics, screaming at women hurrying in. The staff is harassed, every day, everywhere. They are followed to the movies, to the mall, to the dump. Pickets go up at the end of their driveways. Shouting and chanting all night long. Crank calls at five a.m., tapes of babies crying. The buildings themselves are sabotaged. People chain themselves to the doors or chain themselves to cars, which are towed to block the doors. Power is cut, water is cut. Butyric acid is sprayed over the ceiling panels, producing a vomit smell of Biblical intensity. Cutting the phones is a favorite tactic; another is flooding the phones with bogus appointments, booking weeks of doctor time for imaginary patients. Nerf balls in the sewer line create another kind of flood, but the goal is always this: to stretch the nerves until they snap, to make the normal impossible and vice versa.

  “Soteer never saw patients or performed procedures at the property. He used the space as a hideyhole, a quiet place to do his paperwork. He was evidently followed there and our address appeared on some nutball wanted-poster website and the harassment began soon afterwards. First it was the roofing nails in the parking lot. Frank Horan swept them up, it was no big deal. One assumes the normal, after all. A roofer has spilled nails, sweep them up, it’s done. This is called sanity, by the way—the habit of understanding life’s little glitches as the unusual result of the usual phenomena. None of the tenants gave it any thought. Except for Soteer. He saw the nails and never came back. What does one conclude? Connected events—nails and Soteer’s disappearance? No, the nails are sloppy roofers and Soteer is just another rent-jumper, which is why God created the two-month security deposit. Then came the superglue in the locks. What does one conclude? Prankster kids. Made sense to me. I never liked kids. When I was a kid, jerking off to pictures of Gore Vidal, I didn’t like me. Now I like me and I still don’t like kids. Then came more nails and more nails. It was raining nails in Portsmouth. So I called my good pal the district attorney. He called his colleagues in the FBI, who recognized the MO. Violent splinter right-to-lifers, they said. So now I gather they’ve destroyed the HVAC. It’s a natural progression, in a sense.”

  Peta said “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “In part because I’m selfish,” Noel said. “In part because—well, selfish covers it, I’d say.”

  “You promised me boring. You’re a bastard, Noel.”

  “I promised you a crashing bore. Just the phrase, don’t you agree?”

  “Roofing nails in the parking lot are not boring.”

  “Not the first ten times perhaps,” Noel admitted cheerily. “Everything is boring, Peta. You just have to give it time.”

  “But Soteer’s gone.”

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “You said he left. They’re harassing the building pointlessly.”

  “Do you mean it’s irrational? What a blazing insight, Peta.”

  “Maybe we could let them know that the guy they’re trying to harass is gone.”

  “How does one do that? Erect a sign, Soteer: Not Here? Or maybe a post to MossProp.com or a mass e-mail to everyone on Earth. Sorry to bother all of you, but we’re realtors proudly serving Rockingham County and the seacoast since 1917, and we’d like a dozen wackos to know that Soteer is not here.”

  “Did he leave a forwarding address? Maybe we could put them on his trail, get them off our backs.”

  “Did I mention these were killers? Really, Peta, show a little spine.”

  “But we’re realtors, Noel. We’re neutral in this thing. We just want to live in peace.”

  “Your cowardice appals me, Peta Boyle. Besides, I thought of that already. No forwarding address.”

  The clock ticked in the office. Noel milked his coffee.

  “As a Moss,” he said, “I’m conservative, of course. I’m quite prominent in several organizations of New Hampshire gay and lesbian conservatives. These are not large organizations, which is nice in a way—we all get to be quite prominent. But it’s odd too, Peta. Because, you see, I love—really love—twenty people in the world. I made a list the other night. I couldn’t sleep, so I made a list. This is what they call middle age. Don�
�t glower at me, darling, I’m busy being wise. One set of the people on my list, Gramps and Dad, my uncles, find my quote-unquote lifestyle choice repugnant. The other set, my lover and our friends, find my Tory politics repugnant. And yet I love both sets, and they love me, and as I grow older I’m increasingly sure of the fact that I just can’t handle coffee in the afternoon. Burns the stomach tubes. God knows why I drink it.”

  He burped lightly and went on: “It seems to me the central question is: when does life begin? I’ve given this question some thought lately. Strenuous, nonironic, pro bono thought—unusual for me, but then so are roofing nails in my parking lot. It comes down to a sub-question: what is life? In one sense, my life began the day I was born. In another sense, it began on the afternoon of July the tenth, 1970—my junior year abroad, his name was Jacques. I saw him on the channel ferry, Peta—I saw him and I knew a truth about myself. I’ll spare you the details of our week in Amsterdam, poignant though they are. Life, living, being human in your skin, is something one comes into over time—with effort or by accident, a meeting on a ferry—or never, as the case may be. But life, breath, pumping blood, is obviously something else. When does that life begin? The best answer I’ve come up with is: I don’t remember. One day I was here, conscious of myself, a Moss and son of Mosses in New Hampshire. Before that—well, all I have is rumor in the end.”

  He put the coffee down. “I don’t think we’ll be posting any notices or sending any e-mails to the world. I don’t think we’ll be doing much of anything, Peta, except what we always do. Because, you see, it’s my goddamn building, my family’s goddamn ugly building, and that is why you are going to keep it open. That is why you will sweep the nails and de-Nerf the pipes and take whatever extraordinary steps are necessary to run an ordinary, boring, mid-market office block in Portsmouth.”

  So the siege began. During Peta’s first week as the Dental’s manager, Frank Horan found epoxy in the locks when he came in. He drove up the street to call an all-night locksmith from the phonebook. After making the call, Frank discovered that two of his tires were flat from roofing nails. He changed the tires as the tenants were arriving, parking in the lot, ruining their tires, demanding to know why their keys weren’t working. There were seven tenants at that point, a lawyer, an accountant, another lawyer, a dentist, a psychiatrist, a speech pathologist, and a Web designer. Each tenant had customers arriving with their problems, a toothache or a lawsuit, a stutter or a lisp, a web to be designed, a delusion to be cured, and these clients didn’t need tire punctures too. That night, Noel authorized a nine-thousand-dollar anti-vandal fence. The gates were padlocked each night at dusk, unlocked at seven-thirty.

  In Peta’s second week as manager, the padlock was sawed off, nails scattered, and the door locks glued again. She got a new lock for the gates, heavy-duty tempered steel (uncuttable, the locksmith said—you’d need a welder to get it off). Frank came in two days later, found the gates secure, the padlock uncut, and a second lock, behind the first, also tempered steel, equally uncuttable, and Peta had to call a welder to get the building open. The tenants were frantic, waiting for the welder as their customers arrived. A patient of the dentist, moaning from the pain, begged him to pull a molar on the sidewalk. A patient of the shrink, a struggling agoraphobe, had a good cry by the dumpsters.

  In Peta’s third week as manager, the Web designer found a Nerf ball in the sewage line. Several people found the Nerf ball more or less together, flushing toilets on both floors, flushing again, as people do. The wastewater overflowed, soaking the carpets. The smell was pungent for a time, shit and wet acrylic. Peta had to call the plumber, a radio-dispatched carpet-cleaning crew, and the police. Noel was determined to fight on. They put cameras on the building, in the lobby and the hall. They put spotlights on the fences, codepads on the bathrooms, and new alarms on all the outside doors. The psychiatrist complained that his patients were unhappy and regressing. Noel responded by hiring a guard dog to stay overnight. The dog attacked the lobby palm and left scary paw marks on the glass of the front door. They got a different dog and a few nights after that, the lawyer on the first floor, working late on a brief, was mauled outside the bathroom. He hired the other lawyer to sue the building and the psychiatrist moved out.

  Over Christmas, they lost power—someone cut the line. Over New Year’s, someone shot the floodlights with a pellet gun, put a new lock on the gates, and threw nails over the fence. Noel made the move to the armed guards. The guards sat around the lobby, pistols on their hips, reading fishing magazines. Peta dealt with the guards, the dog guy, the police, telephone security, the power company, and—most strangely—a man who answered his phone, “Threats.”

  This man was Brian Ryan, U.S. Secret Service. Peta never fully understood why the Secret Service cared about the Dental Building. As near as she could figure, Brian Ryan was an anthropologist of threats, doing his fieldwork, building up some file in the sky. Peta reasoned that the agents needed to know the local terror scene, who was active, who was quiet, who was up to what. Even so, there seemed to be a big connection missing, two ends with no middle, misdirected Nerf attacks (her end) and a real threat to life and limb (Agent Ryan’s). Peta tried to ask Brian Ryan about the missing middle, but he kept saying it was all routine. Well, it wasn’t her routine, goddammit. Later, however, it became almost routine, roofing nails and sewage in the halls. It was as Noel had promised: even terror becomes boring if you give it time.

  Driving up the interstate, chewing her dry aspirin, Peta was talking on the cell phone to her secretary, Claus. Claus was a fine secretary, Prussian and efficient. Noel had met him on a cruise ship to St. Bart’s.

  Claus said, “And how is Lauren?”

  “She’s impossible,” said Peta. “Get a pen. I need a listings search—”

  “Again?”

  “Just get a pen. We need Greek Revival, sea views, humidor, gazebo, and a music room, fretted ironwork a definite plus. Also a self-mulching garden.”

  “What is a self-mulching garden?”

  “I don’t know, just search for it. Any messages?”

  Claus read from a pad. “The VP’s campaign called, a rude man named Tim. He wants to confirm you as a volunteer for tomorrow morning.”

  “Call him back, confirm it.”

  “Agent Ryan called at ten. Is he that new cute boy who works at Impact Realty?”

  “No. What did he say?”

  “Please call. Want his mobile number?”

  “I have it,” Peta said.

  “Also Jens. He was at the house, Santasket Road.”

  “Why wasn’t he at work?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “He didn’t say it wasn’t.”

  “Goddammit, Claus, what did he say?”

  “Nothing. He said the place looked fine.”

  Nothing and more nothing—this was Jens the last few months. Peta rubbed her temples. She knew that he had fallen behind on his latest project, Monster Todd, and that he left his office for long stretches during the workday. He called her sometimes from the road, either to attack her for coddling the wealthy or to apologize for a past attack, a cycle of attack and regret, itself a form of self-attack, which only led to more attacks on her.

  She said, “I’m sorry, Claus—I’m a bit wound up today. Do the listings search. If you find something good, set up a showing ASAP. Let’s find a fucking house for Lauren Czoll.”

  She was coming to the beaches exit. The cars were doing seventy, a few feet from each other. A FedEx van was braking in her lane, slowing to a stop. She tried to pull around, but there was a Honda on the driver’s side, braking to a stop. Ahead, she saw cars slowing, brake lights going red, or already stopped, a line of shimmer to the crest of the next hill. She cut into the breakdown lane and tried to nose her way up to the next exit—it was just ahead—but others had the same idea, a blue SUV, a black pickup, two guys on motorcycles, moving till they slowed and finally stopped.
She thought about backing up in the breakdown lane to the beaches exit, but even as she put the car in reverse other cars, coming north, filled the lanes behind her, slowing to a stop, and Peta was sealed in, stranded between exits.

  She said, “Fuck.” She looked through her bag for Voices of the Rain Forest. She tried to untie the string, finally had to bite it. She called Brian Ryan’s mobile.

  “Threats.”

  “Agent Ryan? It’s Peta Boyle from Moss Properties in Portsmouth.”

  “Ms. Boyle,” Brian Ryan said. “Thanks for calling back.” The voice was smooth and young-official with a western twang. “Any new developments at the Dental Building? It’s just routine. We like to keep abreast.”

  “Yes of course,” said Peta, who had grown to loathe and fear this word routine, the way the cops and guards and agents used this word. She told Brian Ryan that there were no new developments, everything was normally abnormal at the Dental, as before.

  “There’s something I don’t get,” she said.

  Brian Ryan said, “What’s that?”

  “I don’t get how my routine relates to your—routine. I don’t get the connection between the Dental and whatever it is you’re looking for.”

  “Oh, I doubt there’s a connection,” Brian Ryan said. “We track eighty thousand threats a year from Beltsville, Ms. Boyle. The vast majority are blips and nothing more.”

  “Blips?” said Peta. What the hell was he talking about?

  “They’re nothing, they lead nowhere, they don’t connect to anything. Still, the only way to know for sure is to act as if they lead somewhere, do your follow-up beforehand. We can’t afford to wait until the ball drops. Are you in Portsmouth now, ma’am?”