On the Old Town boardwalk after dark I strolled alone along the waterfront, hands in my pockets, eyes at my feet, or following the lights aboard slow-moving ships on the Potomac River—all the while remembering my father. The man’s behavior had always been erratic, even from a loving child’s point of view.

My father would disappear for days at a time. And he’d return disheveled, reeking of body odor and booze, warning us that the communists were coming, or warning of other strange and fearful things. One day he’d disappeared altogether.

It wasn’t until years later, after my own diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, that I finally understood him. The disease had gripped my father too. It’d seized me through him.

When a child’s parent has schizophrenia that child has a fifteen percent chance of suffering from the same disease. Children who don’t have a schizophrenic parent have only a one percent chance. And that disparity in odds was the main reason why I’d become a dad at a relatively old age. It’d been a tough decision making Ellie. And her sibling to be.

My father must be dead. He surely must be dead by now. Or institutionalized somewhere.

I felt ashamed that I hadn’t found out, one way or another, long ago, what had become of my old man. I’d always been afraid of what I might find, afraid to learn what my own fate might be.

If my father is alive, I reasoned, then the old man just might’ve seen me on television, seen some old interview I did about the assassination attempt on President Cooper—the History Channel shows a documentary every year—and then, somehow, some way, he might’ve learned enough about me to make that phone call.

But if my father is so addle-brained as to suggest that his son kill John Helms, then how did he manage to obtain my private cell phone number?

Given my own psychiatric history, and the remarkable week I’d been having, I knew it was far more likely that the phone call—and the warning I’d received—had originated in my own, sickening mind. Yet I kept straining my cerebrum for alternative explanations.

Could some strange person—sane or insane—have made the call? Claiming to be my long-lost father? If sane, why? If insane, why not?

I headed back to the hotel. At the entrance to the lobby I halted briefly to allow a crowd of people in formal dress to pass by me on their way out. One in this group, or at least straggling behind it, was a matronly, cigarette swinging lady in a gold evening gown, who whispered in my ear as she passed by.

“Don’t call Doctor Shields, honey, he’ll lock you up.”

I froze. Then I swiveled around. She was walking away as if she hadn’t said a thing to me. “Ma’am!” I said. “Ma’am!”

Her high heels came to a stop. She peered coldly over her shoulder. “Do I know you?”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life. But you whispered to me just now . . .”

“I did?” Amused, she faced me. “What did I say?”

“Something . . . something you couldn’t possibly have said.”

She cackled. “Sounds like me, all right. But it wasn’t me, honey.” She winked, turned, and strode away. I watched her go, puffing warped circles of smoke into the night air. I saw her veer off from the group, heading toward Mount Vernon Avenue alone. The woman certainly showed a lot of bare back for a sixty year-old.

I proceeded directly to the hotel piano bar. On my way, I ran through the entire incident with that woman, from the beginning . . .

I didn’t mix her up with anyone else, did I? No. That voice! I can still hear her throaty whisper in my ear. “Don’t call Doctor Shields, honey, he’ll lock you up.” How could she have said that to me? How in the world?

I decided that I’d misinterpreted some words. Yeah, that’s it. The ear can play tricks. That woman, who’d seemed a little tipsy, come to think of it, had probably let something slip out in a whisper—something risqué, no doubt, something that, on second thought, she had not wished to repeat, especially not aloud. And whatever it was, I’d heard it wrong. The ear can play tricks.

I sat down on a barstool near the piano and recalled being in Shanghai, China on a business trip three years earlier and overhearing a gentleman on a cell phone speaking loudly in Chinese. I don’t know a word of that language, it all sounds like gibberish to me, but suddenly and inexplicably a string of his Chinese words struck my ear as English words. I’d thought that I’d heard the man say: “You have to see my hot ass!” It’d been kind of difficult explaining to my Chinese hosts why I’d begun laughing so hard.

“Scotch on the rocks,” I said to a huge bartender who’d approached me. “Twist of lemon.”

Then I drank.

In fact, I drank and drank.

“Okay, okay,” I said to the bartender a couple hours later. “Maybe you’re right, maybe I’ve had . . . enough.” The bartender was serious about cutting me off this time, anyway. He had my bar tab in his hand. I signed the Pope’s name to it.

He crossed it out, crossed himself, and insisted that I sign my own name and indicate my own room number. I complied. He left me. I sucked on ice I’d swallowed from the bottom of my glass. My tongue felt too big. Like a damn beaver tail. I thought if I kept sucking on the ice it would shrink back to normal size.

I knew it was getting late, but I wasn’t really tired. Which was strange. The meds I took made me extremely drowsy when I drank too much. At least it usually did.

I checked my watch. How the hell did it get to be almost midnight? It’s almost midnight and I still didn’t know what to do about . . . me.

There was only one other customer left in the bar, and he’d been sneaking peeks at me, sneaking peeks every other minute or so. Either that, I thought, or it’s just my imagination.

The man got up to leave. He headed out in my direction, peeking at me again. Then staring. I stared back. The man was middle-aged, in his mid to late fifties. He wore a dark gray flannel suit. He was only about five foot five or six with a husky build and a large Roman nose.

I heard a tapping noise, and when I’d located the source, thought to myself, Well, la-dee-dah, he’s got himself a fancy walking cane . . . Oh, oh, oh, that’s because he limps.

The man halted right in front of me, took a quick glance at the bartender, who was drying shot glasses over by the sink, then stared at me again. Leaned in a little. A little too much.

“Save yourself,” he whispered. “Kill John Helms.”

“What did you say?”

“Kill John Helms,” he repeated.

Then he was off, his cane poking the wooden floor again, and I couldn’t believe that I’d just heard that. But this time I knew I had.

No tricks of the ear this time.

I knew—I absolutely knew!—what I’d heard.

I bolted off my stool.

I tapped the man on the shoulder from behind. The man halted. I didn’t wait for him to turn, I spun him around until we were standing face to face. I held the man by the lapels of his suit jacket. Pulled him close.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Please, sir!” said the man. “Let me go!”

“I heard what you said, Mister. I heard you loud and clear. You told me to kill John Helms.”

“I did no such thing! You’re drunk!”

“You’re lying!” I reached around behind him, grabbing an ass cheek in each hand, searching for the man’s wallet. It wasn’t back there.

I dipped a hand inside the man’s suit jacket. Found it. Snatched it. Opened it.

“What do you think you’re doing!” said the man. “Bartender! Oh, Bartender! Help me!”

I read aloud from a Maryland driver’s license. “ ‘Bernard Alan Simpson.’ ” The man’s attempts to retrieve the wallet I fended off with my forearm. “ ‘15 Warfield Road, Columbia, Maryland.’ ” I handed back the wallet. “Never heard of you. What are you doing down here in Alexandria, Virginia at this late hour, Bernard Alan Simpson? It’s a good hour’s drive home. Who sent you here to screw with my mind?”

Bernard was frightened, I realized, just as a hand clamped down on my right shoulder. Hard. Then it was my turn to be spun around.

I found myself staring at the bartender’s neck: a tree trunk with a black bow tie at its base.

“Alright, buddy, come along with me.”

The bartender gripped me roughly, just above the elbow, and jerked me toward the hotel’s elevator.

“Time to sleep this off, up in your room.”

“If only I could,” I said. “If only I could.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Ten