Jumper: Griffin's Story Read online

  The clerk delighted in helping her with the transaction and came out of his booth to direct her to the right platform for the Paris express. I bought a southbound ticket for Saint-Nazaire on the Bay of Biscay.

  I had this picture of me standing on the platform, watching her train pull away, but I wasn’t paying enough attention when I purchased my ticket—mine left first. She walked me to my platform, held me for a moment, hard, as if to take an impression with her flesh, an indented memory. Then she kissed me, on the mouth, a grown-up kiss that brought the blood rushing.

  “Be careful—sois prudent!” And then she was walking away, her shoulder bag slung, her large suitcase trailing behind on its wheels.

  I rode the train as far south as Redon and jumped away, from the space between the cars.

  The papers said the helicopter was abandoned in Mexico, just over the border near Highway 2, the route to Tijuana. There were no cars reported hijacked but there was also no sign of the fugitives.

  Apparently the police theory was drugs. Drug smugglers killed the INS agents and Sam Coulton and Consuelo Monjarraz y Romera. And they fled back into Mexico.

  Sam’s funeral was in El Centro, Consuelo’s in La Crucecita. I didn’t go to either. What could result but more death?

  And not the right victims.

  I tried to jump to Phuket, not my usual place out on Ko Bon island, but an alley near the market in Chalong, but I couldn’t recall it well enough.

  I jumped my dinghy to the island instead and sailed over, and, when I got there, I spent fifteen minutes sketching the spot.

  My plywood wall of sketches began having another purpose. If I wanted to return regularly to a place, I’d record it. Maybe photographs would’ve worked but when you sketch a place, you really look at it.

  And I tried to sketch Mum. Then Dad.

  Couldn’t.

  It wasn’t memory—their faces were as clear as the day they—well, they were clear. But I couldn’t see through the tears and my hands shook. It’s hard to draw when your hands want to make fists.

  It was the same with Sam and Consuelo, though I managed a head and shoulders portrait of Alejandra.

  I tried another drawing of Mateo, as I’d last seen him, half in the water, half out, on the beach at Isla la Montosa. That I managed with some degree of accuracy.

  I knew it was accurate—I had his driver’s license. I also had his bag, which had held a gun—an odd gun.

  I’d fired it in the desert, at a limestone outcropping, and it put two spikes into the stone with a cable taut between them. When I touched the cable it shocked the shit out of me, numbing my entire arm.

  There were five more cartridges in the bag, all identical. The gun folded open at the breech, like an old-fashioned shotgun. I fired one more and it, too, shot out cable and two spikes. I didn’t touch it this time. I put the bag back in my Hole.

  I tried to relax, to do nothing, but when I did, I found myself wandering down to the end of the cave and turning on the flood that lit my villains’ gallery. There were only four sketches. I thought there should be more.

  I knew they were in London—they’d tried for me twice there, so I figured that was the place for the experiment. I bought two cheap video cameras and placed them on tree limbs in the corner of Hyde Park near the Tube station. I started them recording, walked out in the middle of the green, and jumped home to the Hole.

  I returned in five minutes and left again. At ten minutes I returned, and stayed.

  There were two of them, you could tell, their car came to a screeching halt in the bus lane on Kensington Road. They spread out, one coming up the main path from Queen Elizabeth’s Gate and the other one cut around west, past the Boy and Dophin Fountain. They hadn’t spotted me yet—I was standing next to the Rose Garden—and so it wasn’t that obvious when I jumped.

  I waited until they’d passed my cameras, then jumped away, west up the park toward Knightsbridge Station. They should’ve felt it, I hoped.

  I walked across the street and into the station. After five minutes, a westbound train came through and I stepped aboard but got off, next stop, back at Hyde Park.

  I strolled back casually, my eyes open for the two guys in green overcoats, but I didn’t see them. I picked up the cameras and then jumped away, from the same spot I’d used before, by the Rose Garden.

  One of them was blond with a receding hairline and a bald spot in back. He had almost no eyebrows and he looked familiar, but only vaguely, and I thought that perhaps he was the one who had attacked me on the stairs at the Elephant and Castle Tube stop.

  I froze them on the little television screen at various points and sketched them.

  His companion shaved his head, but he had dark stubble and bushy dark eyebrows and ran to fat—kind of jowly. Either of them could’ve been the one who’d tried at Embankment Station, when they’d snagged the two women instead—didn’t see them that time. They both were Sensitives. They’d snapped their heads around the minute I’d jumped. You could see it on the tape clearly.

  Must be a thankless job when your quarry can just jump away in an instant.

  Then I remembered the circumstances of my first encounter. Maybe it’s not so hard, when your quarry is an inexperienced child. Maybe they didn’t have to hunt adult jumpers. Maybe the spent their time killing nine-year-olds instead. Or younger.

  Now that would make it easier.

  I had no sympathy.

  I was irritated with the London police and with myself a bit, too. I should’ve stayed longer—as it was, the tape showed that when I jumped, the two guys had dashed back to their car to speed up Kensington after me. Not only did they not get towed or clamped, they didn’t even get a ticket.

  Their sketches went up on the board as London Blond and London Baldy, along with Post-its for the city and notes about where I’d seen them.

  It was weird, but after I’d done this, I was able to draw a brief sketch of Sam, leaning forward, like he did on the edge of his living room couch.

  Huh.

  I wanted to see Alejandra, very much, but I’d insisted she just disappear, on her own, so I wouldn’t know. So I couldn’t betray her accidentally. Hopefully she’d discovered that she had enough money to buy a new identity—that was my hope.

  I’d warned her about using her own passport—told her what happened to me in Portsmouth. She said she understood. She said not to worry. I pulled out the big gun. I told her, “Consuelo would be very angry with you if you were to come to harm.”

  I took a train south from Rennes, first to Bayonne, then on to Hendaye, across the Rio Bidasoa from Spanish Hondarribia. I skipped the border, using my binoculars to see across the river, then jumping to a walkway on the far bank.

  Bienvenido a España.

  The locals wouldn’t mind my travel—they considered both sides Basque—but they probably would disagree with the “Welcome to Spain.” I sat in the old quarter and sketched the wall and the castle. When the place had seeped into my bones, I walked to the train station and purchased a ticket for Madrid for the next day.

  I jumped to the Hole from one of the narrow alleys.

  I was exhausted but I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about Alejandra. After tossing and turning, I got up and took a fresh sketchbook over to the table, turned the lights on, and drew her.

  I drew her nude, as I’d seen her under the shower in the jungle above Baha Chacacual. I sketched for two hours. The memory was better than the sketch, but it was still the best drawing I’d ever done.

  Then I was able to sleep.

  The next day I talked a lot, on the train, finding interesting variations in the accent and once getting in trouble when using taco, which apparently means “swear word” in Spain. So much for lunch.

  Because of a service problem on a train in front of us, it took six hours to get to Madrid. When I looked at the map, it surprised me that it took only that long, but going back to the scale, I realized Spain was smaller than the state of Texas.
r />   I was still exhausted, though, from the travel and the talking and the pretending to smile—that was the most tiring. I jumped away as soon as I’d made a quick sketch of the platform itself, with the city skyline prominent.

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  MY NAME IS GRIFFIN O’CONNER. I AM THE CHILD OF ROBERT AND HANNAH O’CONNER, MURDERED ON OCTOBER 3RD,19——, IN SAN DIEGO, CA. THE ACCOMPANYING SKETCH IS OF ONE OF THE THREE MEN (AND ONE WOMAN) INVOLVED IN THEIR MURDER. HE WAS ALSO SEEN IN LA CRUCECITA, OAXACA, MEXICO, ON NOVEMBER 13TH, 19——, AND NEAR THE RUSSELL SQUARE TUBE STOP IN LONDON, ENGLAND, MARCH 3RD, 200—. ON MARCH 16TH, 200—, HE WAS INVOLVED WITH THE MURDER OF SAM COULTON AND CONSUELO MONJARRAZ Y ROMERA AND SIX INS AGENTS IN SOUTH-CENTRAL SAN DIEGO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA. HIS NAME IS “KEMP” AND HE HAS A PRONOUNCED ENGLISH (BRISTOL AREA) ACCENT

  SINCERELY,

  GRIFFIN O’CONNER, MARCH 29TH, 200—

  CC: SAN DIEGO POLICE DEPARTMENT

  FBI, SAN DIEGO FIELD OFFICE

  SAN DIEGO COUNTY SHERIFFS DEPT

  NEW SCOTLAND YARD

  I reduced the sketch to half a page—I’d drawn a full-face and profile view to go with it—and put a nice inky thumbprint beside my signature, so they’d be able to prove it was really me.

  I made five copies, four to send, one to put up on the board, and posted the three in San Diego, at the downtown post office on Horton Plaza, and the other in a post box outside the Epping Tube station, the very last stop on the Central line.

  I went back to Mont-Saint-Michel at sunrise, jumping to the causeway, then sat and waited. If they were watching Cousin Harold they might feel me arrive; I doubted they were. But if they had stationed someone here, well then, they’d probably be along directly.

  I just wanted to know.

  I wasn’t tired—I’d been shifting my operating time more to Greenwich zero. When you wake up in a sealed cave, it doesn’t matter what the local sunlight is doing. I did tend to use the Kinko’s in San Diego a lot but that didn’t really matter, most of them were open twenty-four hours a day.

  When no one arrived desperately looking for a jumper, I walked the rest of the way across the causeway to the island. The tourist buses hadn’t started arriving yet and the ones staying locally were still snug in their beds.

  I received an odd look or two from the few locals who were out, but they responded with nods or smiles to my unsmiling “bonjour.” I wanted something hot to drink, coffee preferably, but the tourist cafés weren’t open yet so I found a nook and jumped to San Diego, and bought a muffin and a very large latte from a Starbucks that was about to close, then went back.

  The shadows of the low morning sun threw the stonework of the spire into sharp relief and I used that, sketching the tower and the spire above from the courtyard outside the abbey. I stood up to stretch when a voice said in badly accented French, “No! Retorner, si vous plait.” Then, immediately, in American English, “Where did you get Starbucks?”

  I turned. A redheaded teenaged girl in an enormous black coat sat cross-legged on the stones about ten feet back near the entrance of the courtyard, a large-format sketchbook propped in her lap. The coat was tucked under her rear and legs, and she wore fingerless gloves and black-rimmed glasses, comme Elvis Costello. She was older than me, but still a student, I suspected. She hadn’t settled into her body yet—not the way Alejandra had.

  “Why shouldn’t I move?” I asked her, ignoring the question about the coffee.

  “You were part of the scene. I mean, I wasn’t going to include you but then you didn’t move for the last twenty minutes so I decided I should include you and I really like the way I got your hair and the drape of your coat so you really need to sit back down.” She said this very emphatically, with a rush at the end and a stab of her forefinger at the bench where I’d sat.

  I raised my eyebrows and she added with a suddenly nervous smile, “Please.”

  “Very well, à votre service, mademoiselle.” I sat back and took up the sketchpad again. “How’s that?”

  “Turn a little more to your left—that’s it. Are you done sketching? I mean, you can go on sketching but I’m drawing you as you were looking up at the spire, the sketchpad in your lap, right?”

  “I’ll just look up, then—I’m done with the sketch.” I could’ve worked on it more, but the shadows were vanishing as the sun rose higher, and part of drawing is learning when to leave off.

  I was a little angry with myself. I’d been sketching for two hours, at least, and though I’d been vaguely aware of people coming and going, I hadn’t been paying attention. What if it had been Kemp?

  Well, it wasn’t. I drank from the now cold latte but returned to the pose.

  “You never said where you got the Starbucks,” she said. “I thought they weren’t in France.”

  I knew they’d been in London for a year or two but really didn’t know about France. “Don’t know. I got this one in San Diego.” I started to look around to see how she’d take that but she stopped me.

  “Be still—I’m working on your ears: You’re from the States? You sound like a Brit. Long way to bring a paper cup. Why bother?”

  “My parents moved around,” I said, answering the first question. I decided right then to get a travel mug, to avoid this problem in the future.

  “You have very distinctive ears,” she said.

  I blushed. “They stick out like the handles on a sugar bowl.”

  The girl laughed. “That’s … sweet.”

  “Ha. Very funny.”

  “Couldn’t tell it by you. Well—I’m done. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  I raised my eyebrows again and she blushed.

  “Sketches!”

  We sat on the bench. My first impression of her coat was correct—it brushed the top of her shoes and the sleeves were rolled back once so as not to swallow her hands—a man’s coat, large.

  I handed her my sketchbook, open to the morning’s work. She seemed surprised, then pushed hers toward me. I guess she’d meant it when she said “show,” not “handle.”

  She was working with charcoal pencils and a kneaded eraser on nice coarse paper. More impressionistic than a study, but she was right—with just a few strokes she’d captured the way my hair was sticking up in back and the way my anorak folded as the hem rested on the bench. The tower with its spire and the courtyard walls rose nicely, too; the proportions were good and the shading of the morning light hitting the upper spire was very nice.

  Looking at mine she said, “How many days have you been working on this?”

  “Just this morning.” I looked over at it. Mine was much more of a study, more detailed, more photorealistic, less heart. “I was here at sunrise.”

  She pointed at the stepped arches in the lower tower and the crenellations where the slate roof tiles met the granite. “It’s illustration quality—I mean, I’d wouldn’t be surprised at all to find it in an architecture magazine or The New Yorker.”

  My ears—those large sugar-bowl-handle ears—burned. “Yes, but it took me two and a half hours.”

  “This is the sort of thing that takes some people days. What’s your name? I want to be able to say I met you back in the day.”

  “Ah, well, Griffin. That’s my name.”

  “Griffin?” She held out her hand, palm up, as if coaxing a timid animal out of a cave.

  “Griffin O’Conner.” Hell, I said it. It’s not as if she’d be asking Interpol about me, right?

  She extended the hand farther, taking mine. “Nicetameetcha! E. V Kelson, As in Elaine Vera Kelson, but if you want me to answer, call me E.V, okay?” She gave my hand a firm shake, then dropped it. “So, where are you staying? We’re at the Auberge Saint-Pierre.”

  She hadn’t given me back my sketchbook and was now holding it up at arm’s length, comparing it with the spire itself.

  “I was staying with a friend’s cousin in Pontorson, but I’m leaving today.” Both literal truths. Ultimately a lie.
/>   “Oh? Me, too. We did Paris, now five days in London. What about you?”

  “I’ll be going back home. Uh, who is ‘we’?” She looked at me blankly and I clarified, “The ‘we’ who’re staying at the Auberge Saint-Pierre.”

  “Ah, the French Club. Trenton Central High School, New Jersey. There’s eight girls, two boys, our teacher, and four parent chaperones.”

  “Ah. And do they know where you are?”

  She glanced sideways at me. “Why? You planning on kidnapping me?”

  I tilted my head to one side as if I were considering it, then shook my head regretfully. “I’ve got a bag job at noon, and two snatch-and-grabs for two-thirty. I couldn’t possibly fit you in. But there’s always coffee. If that would be all right with your chaperones.”

  “Well, yes, sort of, they know where I am—that is, on the Mont, sketching. I’m supposed to meet them back by eleven for checkout.” She looked at her watch. “In two hours. If I don’t get lost.” She stood up promptly. “Coffee. I know where they’ll serve café au lait and croissants. Found it by accident—then we can walk a bit, I’m stiff from sitting.”

  She took one last look at my sketch, and we exchanged books.

  E.V hated New Jersey, having moved there the previous summer from upstate New York. Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother a middle school art teacher whose jobs were always iffy as art funding was always the first thing cut. E.V’s older brother, Patrick, was a freshman at Princeton and she had a large dog of indeterminate breed named Booger. She wanted to go to the School of Visual Arts in New York City when she graduated in two years. Her current boyfriend had asked her not to go on this trip simply because he needed her to go to a party and he was now her ex-boyfriend. “Though, to tell the truth, he was on the way out before that. He thought my cartoons were cute and he wanted me to draw him in the nude.”