Saboteur: A Novel Read online

  Copyright 2016 by J. Travis Phelps

  All Rights Reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  The following story is true.

  Proof is forthcoming.

  G.C.

  Chapter 1

  A Very Strange Man

  The thunder and lightning crashed with a wail and his wife who lay next to him sat up in the bed. Through the blanket he could see the light play across her worried face, revealing that she had not slept. As always, when he was not well she had watched over him. But tonight her worries had been near hysteria. He had slept poorly while the fever had worked through him, watching silently as the shadows danced across the ceiling of their bedroom. There was a light sweat still on his brow and the sheets were soaked through. Finally, the fever had given way. He had fallen into dreams he could not remember. As always, even an hour of uninterrupted sleep refreshed him. Now he peered sideways through the sheets, almost like a child, feeling momentarily protected. He was no child though. His body ached palpably all of the time.

  “Go back to sleep,” he said trying to calm her. “I have to get up soon anyway.”

  She glared at him, swiping her hand across his forehead and for a moment he felt truly as a child must when a parent comforts them. He thought of his own mother now gone for so many years. One look from her had always made his fears evaporate. He allowed himself to indulge the emotion only momentarily, peering out through the canopy of the blanket, finally rolling himself away to the edge of the bed.

  “You will work today then, even after all I have said?” she said with irritation. “Please don’t go; just this once.”

  “No,” he answered, “I will eat and come back to rest as you wish.”

  “Look there,” he said, his face suddenly becoming animated, “the light is breaking through,” he said.

  And through the window they both could see a beam of sun. The low clouds blew speedily past, seemingly headed to some faraway place, as though time were of the essence.

  He walked silently down the hall to his bath stopping only to catch his reflection in the mirror. It was a jolt. He had become old. His eyes were now permanently rimmed in a red that no sleep could erase. His hairline gone, only wisps of curls still clinging to his ears; there was nowhere left to comb it for protection, for artifice. When had it happened? In Spain? No, earlier. It was too late to care. He looked at himself and as he had for years, and started to make exaggerated and ludicrous expressions at himself in the mirror. Each expression ever more ridiculous: an old man chewing gumless at his food, an old man smiling proudly, then aghast with horror, then his tongue wagging in mockery, but always an old man. These expressions were all meaningless now. He felt almost none of those things any more. Every emotion had quotation marks. But the faces made him laugh inside. The only place left for him really.

  “Fuck you, old man!” he said to his reflection. “No, fuck you!” he shouted and it was funny because in real life he almost never swore. He burst into laughter, but then tears came without warning. They leaked. Emotions came over him suddenly and for reasons he could hardly explain. A condition of old age, not real feelings mind you.

  His eyes would stay red for days now, but it felt good and wise to let some of whatever it was out. He thought of his younger friends and how they would talk behind his back.

  “The old man is turning to crust,” they’d mock, “outlived his usefulness.”

  They had said worse no doubt. He stared at the scar near his throat, a gift from the war. Wouldn’t it have been better to die there so many years before? He thought of the blood he had seen so many times pouring from other men. He secretly thought it was a sign of weakness to bleed. He had never even once considered that anyone could kill him. And no one ever could. Sometimes he had almost strangely longed for it, but none would release him, as he had for them. It was unadulterated intimacy to take a man’s life with your own hands. You had to love people to kill them, and that he had. It was possible that no one had ever delighted in people more. The raw intimacy of a slaying was the pinnacle of that love and there were a great many men he had made better through the killing. He had completed their lives in a way that no other act could. It was the very last thing you could give a person. He had never killed without feeling the sweetness in life though, the deliverance. It was beyond poetry, beyond books, and even sex. Yet, if given the choice he would never have killed anyone. He sometimes fantasized about turning himself in. But to whom? To men lesser than himself, who were guilty of far worse crimes? That would never do. It didn’t matter now. He wiped his face hoping it would improve; but he only looked more disheveled, more pitiable.

  He wouldn’t work today then. The worst of his fever had already broken and as always was in retreat. No sickness could take him; that much he knew. He endured illness quietly, barely letting out a moan no matter how wretched he became. The business would be a bore and today that was indeed too much, for his vanity at least. Still, at home there would be no books to read either, not that he had not already read anyway, and no company that could bring him delight, nor a concerned wife, nor woman or man, nor food no matter how well prepared. He thought of running away for just a moment and in his chest came an erratic purring. To start over. Where to? There was nowhere to go. He had been looking in the mirror for maybe thirty seconds now, no more. The agility of his mind sometimes astounded even him.

  “Where are you going to go old man, huh?” he said to the mirror.

  A knock came at the door jolting him.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, I am terribly sorry to interrupt you.” It was his servant Apollon. “I wonder if I may have a word?”

  Abandoning the mirror, he slid his head through the doorway slowly while pulling the bottom half of his face down, “Yeeeeesssssssss?” It was the expression of an imbecile. Apollon, after all these long years, never quite knew how to respond to his jibes.

  “Sir, your nephew is at the door.”

  “So early?”

  “Yes indeed sir.”

  Apollon’s face drew up in a look of concern.

  “He is not alone, sir; there is another man with him, a very strange man.”

  Chapter 2

  The Good Professor

  If there was one thing Professor Noah Downy despised it was lecturing in these damned auditoriums. They always reminded him of his own school days, wasted in crowds of other lost students just passing the time. Even worse, it was utterly impossible for him to get the feeling in a place like this. The feeling was the moment, the instant when everything was settled, when he conquered his audience, when they submitted to him. It did not always happen of course, but it was next to impossible with a crowd of this size, in such a room. He was at best a tour guide in a place like this, pointing to glass cases full of dead mummies and artifacts. Here lies Rameses, now a skeleton like the rest of us, so mortal. So boring. He was at his best when he forgot he was teaching and just started talking. He thought silently of his early years as a part timer, running from campus to campus just trying to cobble together a living. It was better back then in some ways, when his classes were always small and intimate. He could get the feeling easily. It was absolute exhilaration for him. He could make people swoon with his storytelling; it was the only thing in life that truly came easily to him. Downy wasn’t your usual academic though. He never spoke in platitudes and suffered mightily in the company of pretentious intellectuals, which was pretty much all of them. He preferred to be direct, clear. Most days the company of fellow academics was more than he could stomach. It was his only complaint about the job really. Today, in his History 301, though, he was busy injecting the story of how Mark Antony and Cleopatra, despondent over t
heir pending defeat and probable execution, had started their own drinking club called “The Royal Academy of Outstanding Livers.” Most didn’t catch the double meaning until he announced that he had briefly been a member of the club in college himself. It was an old joke made up on the fly when he had needed to wake a sluggish afternoon class. He hated retelling jokes, but even real comics recycled material didn’t they, and today he was definitely too tired and knew the feeling wasn’t going to come anyway. Looking around the room he realized many of his students were probably already hung over, or headed that direction, since the college weekend always started a day early. It never ceased to amaze him that on exams students could remember almost nothing of importance about Mark Antony’s political career, but always remembered that he was a terrible drunk. He had thought of making it a test question, briefly.

  Today though, it was all Cleopatra and she was an easy sell. The young female co-eds in the audience really lit up, and the boys too. The questions were always the same. What did she really look like? Had she really committed suicide by cobra? He took pains to clear up many of the myths about her.

  “The only reliable likeness of her was a picture on an old coin face minted during her lifetime,” he explained. “The pronounced hook of the nose was hardly beautiful, not classically anyway, which must have meant her powers of seduction--her mind--were the real work of art. She spoke five languages.”

  Every plain Jane in the room plucked up their antennae at once. You could almost sense their relief.

  “You could be marginally hot and still end up a Queen in the first Century,” he explained. The young women in the room grimaced at the expression ‘marginally hot’ as the boys all went wild with laughter. He hadn’t meant it as a sexist comment. He marveled at how little things had changed between the sexes. It was still a girl’s job to be beautiful, but the homeliest of boys considered themselves absolute judges and jury over such matters.

  “The story that she simply committed suicide was probably a necessary fiction,” he went on to explain. “With the ever ambitious and utterly ruthless Augustus waiting to take Egypt and her fabled riches, Cleopatra’s continued existence was the greatest and only threat left to him. His soldiers may well have put her to the sword. She was a loose end that had to be sewn up in any case.”

  A hand went up breaking his concentration. He knew the face and hand already. McGuire. It would undoubtedly be a dull comment.

  “Yes, Mr. McGuire?”

  “Wouldn’t death by a sword be really painful and like--messy?”

  Downy considered this brilliant inquiry with a slow rub of his chin, while other members of the class snickered.

  “Mr. McGuire you raise a serious concern here. Let me think on it a fortnight and get back to you.” McGuire’s hand shot up a second time, this time more slowly.

  “Uh, how long is a fort--?”

  Before Downy could answer, everyone burst into laughter. Kevin McGuire followed suit; he really liked to hear himself ask questions more than he cared to think about whether or not they made any sense.

  “But I do get your point, Kevin, definitely not as poetic as death by cobra, is it, which is why I am suspicious of the myth making elements of such a story--the cobra of course being a symbol of both royal power and immortality for the Egyptians.”

  Downy had a way of making people feel good even at their dumbest moments. He could also rescue a class from a pointless comment.

  As the laughter finally died down to a murmur, a voice came from the back of the auditorium.

  “It is quite a beautiful way to die as a matter of fact, elegant even. Killing meant something in such a time. It was a hero’s trade. Now it is merely a common, wholesale slaught--.”

  The voice was low and clear, but trailed off. People turned in their chairs, somewhat taken aback by the interruption. Downy couldn’t find the face out of the crowd.

  “I am sorry, professor, to interrupt your beautiful rendering please continue.”

  In the back row sat a man wearing a floppy tourist hat like the ones you could find for sale in almost every gift shop in Southern California. His dark features were offset by two almost piercing black eyes and even at a distance Downy could tell there was something unusual about him. The way he held his chin upward with a look of wild amusement or disbelief, he couldn’t tell which. Something in the man’s manner of speech sparked a note of caution. It was too formal. Weirdo groupies of history abounded in his classes unfortunately. There was the reincarnation crowd. He had met more than his fair share of those who claimed to intimately know the details of Cleopatra’s life because they in fact were Cleopatra in a previous incarnation. It was an occupational hazard unfortunately. His students used the interruption to start for their bags and he realized he had spoken well past the allotted time.

  He yelled as they departed: “Don’t forget to read pages 198 through 260 covering the period of the proscription of leading Romans, including Cicero and be kind to your liver--” Most had already disappeared though, so he simply waived his arms, “Have a nice weekend.”

  Today, it was he who would surrender. He looked through the crowd for the brown-faced man, but couldn’t find him in the melee. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a student still sitting in her seat. Her stare lingered as she packed her things very slowly.

  He tried not to notice her legs as she uncrossed them to sit up, “Professor, my father used to say your take on Cleopatra’s death was pure speculation, not history.”

  He paused, squinting to confirm what his eyes couldn’t believe.

  “Your father was a rigid, un-imaginative old Irish bastard, young lady; and God do I miss him. Come here.”

  He was beside himself with joy to see her. His eyes unexpectedly watered. The girl before him was none other than Samara Lee Patterson. He recognized her immediately, but had completely forgotten she might be there. The last time he had seen her she was barely a teenager. He had called her Sam then. She had loved his storytelling and sat at his feet like a young disciple, hanging on to his every word. She, in turn, had loved making strong, dark coffee for him and her father while they talked endlessly in the garden. It had been an ongoing contest to see how dark she could make it. She would arrive at his side like a servant and offer it to him in her hilarious, mock British accent: “A glass of mud for the distinguished gentlemen?”

  They had their inside jokes as well. He had taught her when she was just a kid the first and most important rule of archeology, which was, “always watch your step.” She’d burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, seeming to understand even at such a tender age that this was sound advice in most cases.

  He could never forget the look on her face when he had decided to leave that final summer at Charlies. She had been so angry she wouldn’t even come out of the house to say her last goodbye. If he had only known then how little time he and Charlie had left together, he would have stayed. So here she was, finally on her way to college after a few years of ‘playing the world traveler,’ as her mother had described in the email. She had her father’s eyes, a deep coral blue, and like him, they were full of desire, mischief. For a moment he thought he could feel Charlie peering out at him. It bothered him. This was the man who had insisted that Downy must teach and that he should write, even when he had insisted no one gave a shit about history anymore, if they ever did. Noah Downy’s books had certainly proven that wrong. He had practically watched Samara grow up and now he couldn’t believe she was sitting in his own classroom, nor that his dear friend, her father, was really gone five whole years now.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he suddenly saw the man in the floppy hat walk past the door in the back of the room. His head was down, but he looked sideways in a flash. He tried not to break his concentration with Samara.

  “Come by our place as soon as you get settled in,” he heard himself saying. “Naomi would love to see you; she simply won’t believe it.”

  He realized he had made the invitation
out of absolute fear of the way she was looking at him. She was positively beautiful and knew it. His mind wandered to all those beautiful busts of the Persian princesses he’d seen in Alexandria, each forever set in marble. He sometimes imagined they might come to life, speak to him. They had nothing on Samara Patterson. The sooner his intentions were clear, the better. She seemed to wince a little at the mention of his wife Naomi. Was it a sign he had been right to feel the attraction and to try to interrupt it? He was imagining things of course and chided himself silently.

  “We should get coffee, Mr. Professor,” she said playfully, “something with mud in it, as I recall?” She slipped effortlessly back into the old accent and he laughed out loud, throwing his hands to his face. He wanted to hug her again, but was afraid of the feeling.

  He could already see that coffee turning into a beer, then a second, just as he had done a million times over with Charlie, when they had been drinking buddies. But then the boundaries would disappear. He decided instead to put Samara Lee Patterson in a glass display case with a warning sign that read, “Daughter of a Dear Old Friend, ABSOLUTELY OFF LIMITS.” Samara looked at him a bit crossly and it seemed to him she could sense what he was thinking.

  She smiled at him almost disappointedly and insisted, “Coffee soon, you and me. I’ve really been looking forward to seeing you ya' know.”

  As she walked away, he feigned no principles and simply watched. The view only made matters worse. Goddamn, he hated being a grown up sometimes.

  Chapter 3

  The New Guy

  In October, San Diego was quite simply the perfect place to be. Endless days of dreamy blue sky and warmth at a time when most states were experiencing the first chills of fall. It was crisp and clear, but in Southern California the frigid winter simply never arrived. It would be Nick Sullivan’s first year off the East Coast and the beginning of a job he was sure he’d hate. San Diego? Ok, every city had crime, fair enough, but he had hoped to end up in New York or even Chicago. That was full time work for a real detective. So this was his punishment then. This was how a career fizzled; and all for what?