The Inner Circle Page 13

  Turning toward the one window in his room, Nico watched calmly, patiently, as the single bed, wooden nightstand, and painted dresser were replaced by the ancient iron rack of white rose candles, and the wide shatterproof window turned back into the beautiful stained glass window of the church Sant’Agata dei Goti, the church dedicated to Saint Agatha, who never—even when the torturers severed her breast—ever renounced her faith.

  “You don’t look nervous anymore,” the First Lady said.

  “I think I’m excited. Yes. I’m very excited,” Nico whispered to himself.

  “C’mon, Nico—you have a visitor,” the orderly called out as the church again faded and the hospital returned.

  “No. I have more than just a visitor,” Nico insisted as he headed for the day room. God always provided. “I have Clementine.”

  27

  When I was in tenth grade, there was a kid in our class—Weird Warren—who used to be able to bend down his ear, and keep it down, so he’d look like an elf. Most of my classmates did their usual teasing, knighting him with the nickname. But Clementine—she said it so nicely I’ll never forget it—she asked him if he could grant her three wishes.

  Pounding the faded red button with the heel of his palm, the St. Elizabeths guard raises the gate arm, allowing me to drive past the guardhouse. I told him I was here to pick up records for the Archives. With my government ID, it was enough to send me toward the main security check-in and onto the property, a 350-acre piece of land that’s encased by a ring of tall black metal gates.

  As I head up the hospital’s poorly plowed road and scan the parking lot that sits across from the main five-story brick building, Clementine’s cab is long gone. She’s inside, probably already with Nico. I have no idea what her three wishes would be today. But if I had the chance to get even two minutes with my dead dad, I know what at least one of my wishes would be.

  As I kick open the car door in the parking lot, a blast of winter air stings my face, but before I get out I reach down and pull out the copy of Entick’s Dictionary that’s tucked underneath the driver’s seat. Tot’s idea. Based on this morning, Khazei isn’t just asking questions anymore—he’s circling for a kill. I still can’t tell if what he really wants is the book or me, but either way, the last thing we need is to have this lying around the building. Still, that doesn’t mean I can just leave it in the car.

  For a moment, I think about hiding it in my briefcase, but if I do that, I risk security here rummaging through it. No. If this book is as important as we think it is—if Orlando really died for it—I need to keep it close.

  Stepping outside and heading across to the building, I tuck the book under the back of my jacket and carefully slide it into the back of my slacks. It fits—with most of the pages gone, it’s just the covers. I take a fast glance over my shoulder to make sure I’m alone. But as I look up, standing on one of the second-floor balconies is a pale bald man with no eyebrows.

  I strain a smile, even as I pick up my pace.

  He glares down. But his expression never changes. I don’t think he even sees I’m here.

  For a moment, I think about just waiting out here for her. But I don’t slow down.

  As I finally reach the front, the doorknob gives with barely a twist. The cold has definitely eased up, but a pitiless chill climbs my spine. According to Clemmi, this is the mental hospital that holds not just Nico, but also John Hinckley, the man who shot Ronald Reagan. Why the hell’s the front door unlocked?

  I push the door inward, revealing a 1950s waiting room decorated in a pale drab green. Straight ahead, a thin guard who looks like David Bowie circa 1983 sits at an X-ray and metal detector also stolen from the same era.

  “C’mon in—only about half our patients bite,” a woman’s voice calls out. She laughs a silly puffy laugh that’s supposed to put me at ease. On my left, standing inside a thick glass booth, is a second guard—a female guard with a bad Dutch-boy haircut and great dimples.

  “You must be Mr. White, correct?” She got my name from when I checked in at the guardhouse. “Relax, Mr. White. They keep the doors unlocked so that the patients feel they have more freedom. But not that much freedom,” she says with the puffy laugh, pointing at a thick steel door that looks like a bank vault: the real door to get inside.

  “Um… great,” I blurt, not knowing what else to say.

  “So how can we help you, Mr. White?” she asks as I realize she’s one of those people who says your name over and over until you want to eat poison.

  “Actually, it’s Beecher. I’m here from the National Archives. Anyhow, we were thinking of doing an exhibit on the history of St. Elizabeths—when it was run by the government and founded to help the insane… then converted in the Civil War to help wounded soldiers… It’s just a great part of American history—”

  “Just tell me what time your appointment is and who it’s with.”

  “That’s the thing,” I tell the woman behind the glass. “They told me to come over and that I should take a quick tour of the campus.”

  “That’s fine, Beecher. I still need a name to call first.”

  “I think it was someone in Public Affairs.”

  “Was it Francine?”

  “It might’ve been—it was definitely a woman,” I bluff.

  She lowers her chin, studying me through the fingerprint-covered glass.

  “Something wrong?” I ask.

  “You tell me, Beecher—you have no appointment and no contact name. Now you know the population we’re trying to help here. So why don’t you go back to the Archives and set up your meeting properly?”

  “Can’t you just call the—?”

  “There is no call. No appointment, no call.”

  “But if you—”

  “We’re done. Good day,” she insists, tightening both her jaw and her glare.

  I blink once at her, then once at David Bowie. But as I turn to leave…

  The steel door that leads upstairs opens with a tunk.

  “—sure it’s okay to go out here?” Clementine asks as she walks tentatively behind a man with salt-and-pepper buzzed hair and chocolate brown eyes that seem too close together. At first, the gray in his hair throws me off—but that bulbous nose and the arched thin eyebrows… God, he looks just like the video on YouTube.

  Nico. And Clementine.

  Heading right for me.

  * * *

  28

  Mr. Laurent, your next appointment’s here,” the girl called out from the front of Wall’s Barber Shop, a long narrow shop that held seven barber chairs, all in a single row, with Shoeshine Gary up near the front door and local favorite James Davenport cutting hair in chair one.

  Laurent glanced at her from the very last chair in the back, but never lost focus on his current—most vital—client.

  “I should get back. It’s late,” Dr. Palmiotti said from the barber chair.

  “Don’t you go nowhere. Two more minutes,” Laurent said, pressing the electric razor to the back of Dr. Palmiotti’s neck. Cleaning out the tater patch—that’s what Laurent’s grandfather used to call cleaning the hair on the neck. The very last part of the job.

  “So your brother…” Laurent added, well aware that Palmiotti didn’t have a brother. “If he needs help, maybe you should get it for him?”

  “I don’t know,” Palmiotti replied, his chin pressed down against his chest. “He’s not that good with help.”

  Laurent nodded. That was always President Wallace’s problem.

  This close to the White House, nearly every business had at least a few hanging photographs of local politicians who’d helped them over time. Since 1967, Wall’s Barber Shop had none. Zero. Not even the one from Newsweek, of Laurent cutting President Wallace’s hair right before the Inauguration. According to the current owner, in the cutthroat world of politics, he didn’t want to look like he was taking one side over the other. But to Laurent, the blank walls were the cold reminder that in Washington, D.C., when it
all went sour, the only person you could really count on was yourself.

  “Just be sure to say hello for me,” Laurent said, finishing up on the doctor’s neck. “Tell him he’s in my prayers.”

  “He knows that. You know he knows that,” Palmiotti said, trying hard to not look uncomfortable.

  Laurent wasn’t surprised. Like most doctors, Palmiotti always had a tough time with faith. Fortunately, he had an easy time with friendship.

  With a tug at his own neck, the doctor unsnapped the red, white, and blue barber’s apron and hopped out of the chair in such a rush, he didn’t even stop to check his haircut in the mirror. “You’re a magician, Laurent. See you soon!”

  But as Palmiotti was paying the cashier, Laurent looked over and noticed the hardcover book with the bright red writing—A Problem from Hell—that was still sitting on the shelf below the mirror.

  Palmiotti was at the cashier. There was still time to return it to him.

  Instead, Laurent opened the drawer that held his spare scissors, slid the book inside, and didn’t say a word.

  As usual.

  29

  You’re anxious,” Nico says to Clementine as he leads her past me and heads for the door that’ll take them outside. Clementine nearly falls over when she sees me, but to her credit, she doesn’t stop. Just shoots me a look to say, What’re you doing here?

  I turn back to the glass guard booth, pretending to sign in.

  If I remember my history—and I always remember my history—when Nico took his shots at the President, he said it was because of some supposed ancient plan that the Founding Fathers and the Freemasons had hatched to take over the world.

  Exactly.

  He’s crazy enough. He doesn’t need to be more crazy by me confronting or riling him.

  “There’s no need to be nervous,” Nico continues, reading Clementine’s discomfort.

  He shoves open the front door and steps out into the cold. As the door slams behind them, it’s like a thunderclap in the silent room.

  “Th-That was—You let him walk out the door!”

  “… and he’ll walk right back in after his visitor leaves,” says the guard behind the glass. “Our goal is curing them, not punishing them. Nico earned his ground privileges just like anyone else.”

  “But he’s—”

  “He’s been incident-free for years now—moved out of maximum security and into medium. Besides, this isn’t a prison—it’s a hospital. A hospital that’s there to help him, not punish him. You gotta let a man walk outside,” she explains. “And even so, we got guards—and a fence that’s too high to hop. We see him. Every day, he does custodial work in the RMB Building, then feeds the cats there. By the way, Beecher, they still got that copy of the Magna Carta at the Archives? That stuff is cool.”

  “Yeah… of course,” I say as I try to walk as casually as possible to the door.

  The guard says something else, but I’m already outside, searching left and right, scanning the main road that runs across the property. In the distance, there’s a guard walking the perimeter of the black metal gates that surround the hospital’s snow-covered grounds. Ahead and down to the right, the concrete walkway looks like a squiggle from a black magic marker that slices through the snow. The plowed path is lined with trees and holds so many benches, it’s clearly for strolling patients.

  Nico’s at least four steps in front of her, his left arm flat at his side, his right clutching a brown paper supermarket bag. He walks like Clementine used to: fearlessly forward as he follows the thin pedestrian path. Behind him, whatever confidence Clementine had—the woman who plowed just as fearlessly into the President’s SCIF—that Clementine is once again gone. From the stutter in her steps… the way she hesitates, not sure whether she really wants to keep up… I don’t care how far people come in life—or how much you prepare for this moment. You see your father, and you’re instantly a child again.

  As they step out onto the pathway, I stick by the entryway of the building, making sure there’s at least half a football field between us. But as I take my first step out and my foot crunches against some thick chunks of snow salt, I swear on my life, Nico flinches.

  He never turns. He doesn’t glance over his shoulder to investigate. But I remember the news footage—how he has hearing and eyesight more acute than the rest of us. That’s why the military first recruited him for sniper school.

  I stop midstep.

  Nico keeps going, marching his purposeful march, clutching the brown bag, and glancing just slightly to make sure the clearly uncomfortable Clementine is still behind him.

  Leaving the entryway, I take it slow, always careful to use the nearby trees for cover. On my far left, the guard is still patrolling the gates. As I reach the beginning of the path, he spots them too.

  It’s not hard to see where he’s leading her. The thin black path curves downhill toward another 1960s-era brick building. Throughout the wide campus, it’s the only thing that’s plowed. Even I get the message: This path is the one place patients are allowed to walk.

  The farther they get, the more they shrink. I still can’t tell if they’re talking, but as they finally reach the front of the building, I’m all set to follow. To my surprise though, instead of going inside, Nico points Clementine to the wooden benches out front.

  Taking the seat next to her, Nico puts the brown bag between them. Even from here, I can see Clementine scootch back, away from the bag. Whatever he’s got in there… my brain can’t help but imagine the worst.

  That’s when the cats start arriving.

  A gray tabby races out of the building, followed by a chubby black one. Then two small matching orange kittens, followed by what must be their mom. There’re half a dozen cats in total, all of them heading for the exact same spot: straight to the bench. Straight to Nico.

  On my far left, the guard is still down by the perimeter fence, but he hasn’t moved much. This is clearly Nico’s routine. From the brown bag, Nico sprinkles the ground with whatever food he has inside. Feeding the cats. The woman behind the glass said it’s one of his jobs. But the way Nico leans down to pet them—scratching tummies, necks, between ears, like he knows each of their soft spots—he isn’t just feeding these cats.

  He loves them.

  And the way they rub against Nico, weaving infinity loops around his legs, they love him right back.

  Sitting up straight and settling into his stiff, alien posture, Nico won’t look at anything but the cats. I can’t read lips, but I can read body language. Fidgeting next to him, Clementine looks even more awkward than he is, and from her hand movements—she scratches her wrist, then her neck, like there’s something living beneath her own skin. Back at the Archives, she couldn’t even look at Nico in the old assassination video. It’s only worse here. No matter how ready she thought she was, she’s not ready for this. Until…

  He suddenly rises from his seat, standing erect.

  The cats startle at the sudden movement, then settle back around his feet. Before Clementine can react, Nico looks at his watch and starts walking to the far side of the building. He’s calm as ever. He makes a quick hand motion, asking Clementine to follow.

  No, don’t go with him—!

  She pauses, searching around. She’s definitely smarter than that. She needs to be—she knows who she’s dealing with. But she can’t help herself. A few cats trail him like the Pied Piper. A few others, including two tuxedo cats—black, with white bib and feet—start to groom themselves, then walk away, aloof. Clementine needs to decide which cat she’ll be.

  It doesn’t take long. She’s wondered about this man for nearly thirty years. She takes a few hesitant steps… then scratches the back of her neck… then follows.

  Nico turns the corner and…

  They’re both gone.

  I give them a moment to come back. Thirty seconds to see if they return.

  Still gone.

  There’s no reason to break the emergency glass. Maybe he�
�s just getting more cat food.

  I search for the guard back by the fence. He’s gone too.

  I look around, but there’s no one else. I can run back to the main building, but by the time I get there, God knows where Nico will be. More important, if something happened to Clemmi, it’d be my fault.

  Tot called history a selection process that hands us situations we should never be able to overcome.

  He’s right. I can’t overcome this. Nico’s a trained monster. A killer. A destroyer.

  I can’t do this.

  I can’t.

  But I have to try.

  Running full speed, I race down the concrete path. With each step, my feet slap the pavement, splattering puddles of slush.

  As I pass the front of the building, I spot the blur of my own profile in the reflection of the glass doors. The tuxedo cats are milling around, looking bored as they ignore me. I even see Nico’s and Clementine’s footsteps where the snow isn’t melted yet. They can’t be far.

  At the corner of the building, I make a sharp left and…

  Nothing.

  A long alley of browning snow, a rusted Dumpster, and just beyond the Dumpster, an empty golf cart that—

  Mrrow.

  Cat. That’s one of the cats.

  I crane my neck.

  There. In the back. The tabby one.

  I’m already halfway there as its tail disappears around the back of the building. As I fly past the Dumpster—

  Pfuump.

  A thick forearm rams my neck, hitting like a baseball bat and clotheslining me so hard, my feet leave the ground.

  Keeping his forearm at my throat, Nico shoves me backward by my neck until I crash—hard—onto the freezing concrete. The back of my head hits first, and a flash of bright stars blinds me on impact.

  “What’re you doing!? Are you crazy!?” Clementine shouts at Nico.