Bring Me Children Read online

  Copyright © 1992 by David Martin

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Martin, David Lozell

  Bring me children / David Martin.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82425-7

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A72329B7 1992 813’.54—dc20 91-52685

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  … that great sea, whose ebb and flow

  At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore

  Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.

  —SHELLEY

  CHAPTER 1

  After walking three hundred feet into the earth, three hundred feet along a descending stone passageway — naturally formed but resembling a miniature subway tunnel — he stops in total darkness to unbutton his overcoat. The cave’s year-round temperature of 54 degrees feels warm relative to the March weather outside. He waits until his breathing regulates and he has stopped sweating, then continues on with confidence because although this man carries no light — and this underground blackness is absolute — he knows his cave by heart, knows exactly where he’s going, how to get there, and what he’ll do when he arrives. He reviews it all in his mind, sees the route clearly, keeping his left hand on the corridor’s wall, cradling in his right arm a well-bundled infant, moving easily through the dark. He’s done this before.

  Five years ago he spent an entire month living alone in this cave, mapping its inches with his hands, its passageways with the careful shuffling of his feet, memorizing each boulder and every rock overhang, contemptuous of cavers with their fetish for light. They never enter a serious cave without three independent sources of illumination: carbide lamp, flashlight with batteries fresh from the package, and candles to be lighted with waterproof matches. But to travel a cave like this, blind, that’s a challenge he considers worthy — to see it in your mind, to know, as he knows right at this moment, that the chamber is exactly one hundred and forty-three steps away. This will be the fifth child he’s delivered to that chamber in the past five years.

  “Not too much farther,” he tells the infant, who at the sound of the man’s voice stirs within her blankets.

  Five acts of absolute faith, each requiring certain ritual, tremendous risk, meticulous planning — and resulting in enormous profit.

  When the baby cries, the man places the bundle up on his shoulder, patting her back and speaking in a soothing voice. “Almost there.” He continues walking as he speaks, the fingers of his left hand trailing along the cool damp limestone wall. Fifty-two more steps. He’s able to count them off even as he talks to the infant, even as he thinks of other things.

  After she becomes quiet again, the man continues more quickly along this familiar route, hurrying through a maze of stone and darkness, no longer needing to touch the corridor walls, ducking at precisely the right moment to miss a low-hanging shelf of rock, slowing only when he finally enters a large cavern that is cathedral-like in its immensity and its quiet: the chamber.

  In the center of this cavern is a crevice twenty feet wide, twice that long, a hundred feet deep. The man has dropped rocks down that crevice and knows what’s at the bottom — an underground lake, perpetually cold and home perhaps to blind, white fish.

  “There, that wasn’t such a bad trip, was it?” he asks the infant as he probes with a finger to find her warm face within the folds of the blankets.

  Feeling that finger on her cheek, the baby turns a hungry mouth.

  Chuckling, he allows the infant to suckle his fingertip. Then he asks in a gently teasing voice, “What’re you getting from that finger, hmm? What? Nothing, right? Absolutely nothing.”

  The man slides one foot in front of the other until he finds the crevice’s very edge. He moves along that irregular edge, counting steps consciously now, touching boulders he uses as guideposts, finally locating a pathway that leads across the crevice, a natural rock bridge that varies in width from five feet down to less than two. He steps onto that narrow path.

  Here’s the tricky part. If his feet slip off either side of this limestone bridge, if he allows himself to imagine too vividly his precarious position, on a thin ribbon a hundred feet above a perpetually cold lake …

  But the man’s powers of concentration are considerable. He slides his feet forward, moving out into the very heart of that rocky yawn before carefully lifting one foot to tap around with the toe of his shoe, searching until he finds a small domed boulder — roughly the size of a footstool — in the middle of the bridge. Holding the child firmly in his right arm, he kneels and moves his left hand over the boulder’s rounded top. “Nothing!” he shouts, his voice a mixture of triumph and anger.

  The sudden loudness of his voice startles the child into crying.

  One hand supporting the infant’s head, the other at her bottom, the man places her gently upon the footstool rock. She’s crying harder, working her arms free of the blankets.

  He waits a moment and then stands, backing up now, slowly making his way off the bridge.

  Because the baby is hungry and because the hard, round top of the rock is uncomfortable, her crying quickly elevates to an angry shrieking. She is trying to roll over on her stomach, the bundle of blankets slipping as she squirms.

  Having stepped off the bridge, standing well back from the crevice’s edge, the man cannot see the infant in the blackness of this cave, but he knows precisely where he left her, knows how many inches she has to maneuver.

  The louder she shrieks, the angrier he becomes. His hands have tightened into fists. Rage is causing him to tremble.

  Then from his right fist he sticks out a stiff thumb and jabs it into the dark above his head — as if trying to thumb someone in the eye. “Well?” he asks.

  Then shouts it. “Well?”

  He’s waiting for an answer as the baby continues screaming from the top of that rounded boulder in the center of that narrow path in the middle of that deep crevice.

  But the only answer he gets is the one he supplies himself.

  “Nothing!” the man shrieks. He repeats it again and again — “Nothing! NOTHING!”— with his head thrown back, both fisted hands in the air, his outraged howl
ing competing for volume with the baby’s crying until the two of them are joined in a single awful, echoing crescendo.

  He’s muttering all during the return trip, pausing only when he’s near enough to the cave’s entrance to feel the outside weather, pausing to listen. He can still hear her. She’s lasted much longer than any of the others. He continues on to the entrance and stops there, waiting. Then her crying abruptly ends and the cave reassumes its silence, the man confirming her fate in a low and acid voice — “Nothing” — as he steps out into a March that is bitter with cold.

  CHAPTER 2

  No longer recognizing the truth when he hears it, John Lyon sees little point in joining the debate played out in front of him, a producer and an editor arguing about the wording for a twenty-second piece on the national debt.

  “Three minutes to air!”

  The producer and editor come to an agreement, certain words struck, phrases changed — rearranging grains of sand on the beach, Lyon thinks.

  Sliding the pages toward him, the producer asks, “Okay with you, John?”

  “Sure,” he replies without having read either the original version or this newly edited one.

  The producer and editor exchange looks: His Lordship can’t be bothered. They think Lyon is haughty because he’s overly enamored of his background, coming as he does from Old Money and private schools. But Lyon’s aloofness is in fact his protection. His family was like the huge, many-turreted house in which he grew up: pristinely white and forbidding on the outside but crumbling and wormed-through at its very center.

  As the producer and editor wait for Lyon to say something, he refuses to look at either of them and they eventually move off, the editor saying, just loudly enough for Lyon to hear, “No wonder he doesn’t have anything going for him here at the network.”

  What John Lyon does have going for him at age fifty — eight years writing for newspapers, eleven years with local stations, ten years at the network — is a reliability that approaches the absolute. Able to take over any assignment no matter how late he’s brought in, no matter how little preparation he is given, on camera Lyon is un-rattle-able, a rock.

  He’s been called in to read the news this particular Sunday afternoon because an ambitious young field correspondent who was supposed to fill in for the vacationing anchor suffered an attack of appendicitis just thirty minutes before the broadcast was to begin. By the time Lyon was contacted and limo-rushed to the studio, there were only eight minutes to air — but here he sits behind the anchor’s desk, his makeup being applied, sipping coffee, waiting for the final clean copy to be printed out, and looking for all the world as if this is just another day of the office.

  “Do you know who you remind me of?”

  He’s never worked with this makeup person before but Lyon knows what she’s going to say. William Holden. People have always commented on the resemblance but more so in the past five years. Lyon usually expresses surprise, claiming he doesn’t see it himself. He is, however, secretly pleased, not because Holden was considered handsome, but because Lyon admired the innate dignity which that actor brought to the roles he played.

  “Bill Holden,” the woman says.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. My mother did makeup in Hollywood and I met him once when I was a little girl. Tragic the way he ended up though, wasn’t it? Fell down drunk, hit his head, they found him with his pants around his ankles. Or was that Errol Flynn?”

  “Two minutes to air!”

  When the clean copy is handed to him, Lyon reads it over and then stares into camera one, barely seven feet from his face. But something about one of the stories bothers him. Lyon flips back through the pages and then calls a producer, Nancy Greene, over to the desk.

  “Are these figures right?” Lyon asks, pointing at the copy.

  Hell of a time to be asking, Greene thinks as she leans near Lyon’s shoulder to read. “Yeah, unfortunately they are. More than a thousand children killed each year in reported child abuse cases, with another thousand — three each day — estimated killed in cases that go unreported.”

  Lyon is still troubled.

  “In the unreported cases,” Greene explains, “cause of death is usually listed as accident or illness. You die under unusual circumstances as an adult, you get an autopsy. But a lot of states, especially in the South, order an autopsy in only one out of three children’s deaths.”

  “One minute!”

  Seeing that Lyon is still frowning, the producer asks, “Okay?”

  “No,” he replies sarcastically, “it’s not okay that two thousand children a year are murdered in this country.”

  She flushes red. “I know that’s not okay, John, what I meant was —”

  Still looking down at the copy, he holds up a hand, dismissing her.

  Gritting her teeth and growling under her breath, Greene heads for the control room where she finds the pace running at its usual level of hysteria, one feed from San Francisco — slated for use in the second half of the newscast — not even in yet. Greene walks over to stand behind the senior producer, a perpetually worried man who glances at the monitor showing Lyon’s placid face and wonders if anything at any point in Lyon’s life has ever given him the nervous sweats. This afternoon, however, the senior producer is particularly grateful for Lyon’s icy demeanor.

  Lyon pulls his suitcoat down and tightens his tie. He can’t stop thinking about the story on murdered children. Jesus, such filth out there. Six children a day murdered by their parents or their parents’ friends or by relatives or baby-sitters — and half of those deaths not even reported as murders? A horror show. Lyon doesn’t have any children of his own, never married. A week after he turned fifty, just three months ago, his best friend, Tommy Door, died and now …

  Lyon shakes his head. Why the hell am I thinking about all this when I’m going on camera in a few seconds? He looks at the people running around on the set, all of them so damn frenetic, so self-important, overly ambitious, and … But Lyon also forces that thought to drift away unfinished. He has noticed lately a tendency in himself toward bitterness, which he finds unattractive and makes a conscious effort to curb.

  “Thirty seconds!”

  Lyon repeats the straightening of his suitcoat, the tightening of his tie — and then once more stares into camera one. But his famous face is no longer placid.

  In the control room, producer Nancy Greene is staring at a monitor showing that face, Lyon’s expression causing her stomach to tighten. She stands there with the fingers of one hand nervously tapping her lips.

  Two years ago Greene had a six-week affair with Lyon. She instigated it and she ended it, no closer to understanding Lyon at the end of those six weeks than she was at the beginning. Most of the men she’s slept with eventually revealed to her a personality distinctive from the one they used out in the world. A hard-charging cynic in the office turns out to be surprisingly sentimental and timid with his lover. Or just the opposite, a shy man in public becomes aggressive or even violent in bed. John Lyon, however, never yielded any secrets. He made love the way he reads the news: proficiently but without ever putting his heart into it. Greene never did see behind his facade, concluding finally that there was no facade: Lyon is icy through and through.

  Why then does his face look so strange right now, almost anguished? Or is it her imagination? She grabs a nearby shirtsleeve and indicates the monitor. “Does he look all right to you?”

  “Like the iron man he is,” comes the technician’s distracted reply.

  Like he’s about to cry, Greene thinks. She’s tempted to open Lyon’s Interruptible Feedback and ask him if he’s okay, but if this causes a disruption right here at the beginning of the broadcast and Lyon turns out to be all right, Greene will spend the rest of her career working on public service programming.

  Her stomach tightens all the harder and her fingers tap all the faster when Lyon is given the cue, camera one’s red light coming on, the newscast launching —
Nancy Greene listening carefully for a catch in Lyon’s voice but hearing only the modulated tones of a consummate professional.

  As he continues reading the news she continues watching his eyes. Am I going crazy, Greene wonders, or are they really filling with tears? Something is catching the studio lights and causing those blue eyes to glisten. Why hasn’t anyone else noticed? Too busy doing their jobs. Nothing I can do about it now, Greene decides.

  Two minutes and thirty-three seconds into this Sunday June 24 afternoon newscast, toward the end of that item about the national debt, John Lyon becomes consciously aware of it himself: he’s going to cry. This sudden realization astonishes him into silence. Lyon pauses and looks dead into camera one, his normally viewer-comfortable face put out of kilter by the queerest of expressions.

  The silence causes people on the set and in the control booth to stop what they’re doing, most of them thinking at first that there must be a problem with the sound system. But then they look at Lyon or at monitors showing Lyon’s face and see that the reason they don’t hear anything is that Lyon isn’t speaking.

  In the control booth, the senior producer screams the question that’s on everyone’s mind: “What the hell’s wrong with him!”

  Nancy Greene is the only one with an answer. “He’s going to cry.” Now everyone is looking at her with fierce expressions, as if it’s all Greene’s fault. She shrugs.

  Then Lyon ends that strange six-second pause, shakes off the queer expression, and finishes the item about the national debt. On the set and in the control booth a collective breath is released.

  Lyon himself, however, remains horribly aware that the urge to cry has not left him. It is, in fact, growing stronger and, with a sense of on-the-air panic that is new to him, Lyon realizes that very shortly it’s going to happen, really happen — he is going to bust out crying right here, on camera, on live network television. Lyon doesn’t know what to do about it except soldier on and hope against the inevitable.

  Exactly two minutes and forty-four seconds into his newscast, Lyon begins reading the piece about the number of children under the age of nine who, experts say, are murdered each year but whose deaths are officially listed as caused by accidents or illnesses — an average of three each day.