isolated movement; the eyes remained watchful and without warmth. It was the
kind of smile that bureaucrats shared with shopkeepers. “That your Nissan
Altima?”
“Thinking of a trade,” Janson said.
Jed looked slightly pained, a merchant asked to give to charity. “We get a lot
of those cars. I like ’em. Got a weakness for ’em. Be my undoing. Lots of people
don’t particularly care for those Japan cars, especially hereabouts. How many
miles you got on it?”
“Fifty thou,” Janson said. “A little more.”
Another wince. “Good time for a trade, then. Because those Nissan transmissions
start making trouble once you reach sixty. Give you that for nothing. Anybody’ll
tell you the same thing.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Janson said, nodding at the patent lies of a used-car
salesman. There was something almost endearing about the spirited way he upheld
the stereotype of his trade.
“I personally like ’em, mechanical troubles and all. Like the look of ’em,
somehow. And repairs ain’t a problem for me, because we’ve got a repair guy on
call. If what you’re looking for is reliability, though, I can steer you toward
one or two models that’ll probably outlast you.” He pointed toward a maroon
sedan. “See that Taurus? One of the all-time greats. Runs perfect. Some of the
later models all loaded up with special features you never use. More useless
features, more stuff to go wrong. This one, it’s fully automatic, you got your
radio, your A/C, and you’re good to go. Change the oil every three thousand
miles, gas up with regular unleaded, and you’re laughin’. My friend, you are
laughin.”
Janson looked grateful as the salesman fleeced him, taking the late-model Altima
in trade for the aging Taurus and asking for an additional four hundred dollars
on top. “A sweet deal,” Jed Sipperly assured him. “I just have a weakness for an
Altima, kinda like Butch and his Raggedy Ann. It’s irrational, but love’s not a
thing to reason about, is it? You come in with one of those, of course I’m gonna
let you waltz off with the nicest car on the lot. And anybody else would say,
‘Jed, you’re crazy. That piece of Jap tin ain’t worth the hubcap on that
Taurus.’ Well, maybe it is crazy.” An exaggerated wink: “Let’s do this deal
before I change my mind. Or sober up!”
“Appreciate your candor,” Janson said.
“Tell you what,” the salesman said, signing a receipt with a flourish, “you give
me another fiver and you can have the damn dog in with it!” A long-suffering
laugh: “Or maybe I should pay you to take it off my hands.”
Janson smiled, waved, and as he got into the seven-year-old Taurus heard the
sibilant hiss of another screwtop Budweiser being opened—this time in
celebration.
The doubts Janson had as he traveled intensified upon his arrival. The area
around Millington was down-and-out, struggling and charmless. It simply did not
feel like an area that a billionaire would have chosen for a country retreat.
There were other towns—like Little Washington, off 211, farther north—where the
soul-destroying work of entertaining tourists had overtaken whatever local
economy had been left. Those were museum towns, in effect—towns whose white
shingled barns were crammed with doubly marked-up Colonial Homestead china and
“authentic” milk-glass salt-shakers and “regional” beeswax candles crated in
from a factory in Trenton. Farms were converted into overpriced eateries;
daughters of woodworkers and pipefitters and farmers—those who sought to stay,
anyway—laced themselves into frilly “colonial”-style costumes and practiced
saying, “My name is Linda and I’ll be your waitress this evening.” The locals
greeted visitors with manufactured warmth and the wide smile of avarice. What
kin ah do you for?
That green tide of tourism had never reached Millington. It didn’t take Janson
long to size up the place. Though scarcely more than a village, it was somehow
too real to be picturesque. Perched on a rocky slope of Smith Mountain, it
regarded the natural world as something to be overcome, not packaged and sold
for its aesthetic value. There were no bed-and-breakfasts in the vicinity. The
nearest motels were utilitarian, boxy affiliates of downscale national chains,
run by hardworking immigrants from the Indian subcontinent: they did just fine
by truck drivers who wanted to crash for the night, but had little appeal for
businessmen in search of “conference center” facilities. It was a town that was
dark by ten o’clock, at which point the only lights you could see came from
dozens of miles down the valley, where the town of Montvale sparkled like a
flashy, decadent metropolis. The biggest single employer was a former paper
plant that now produced glazed bricks and did a side business in unrefined
mineral byproducts; about a dozen men spent their working hours bagging potash.
A smaller factory, a little farther out, specialized in decorative millwork. The
downtown diner, at Main and Pemberton Streets, served eggs and home fries and
coffee all day, and if you ordered all three, you got a free tomato or orange
juice on the side, though it arrived in something little bigger than a shot
glass. The gas station had an attached “foodmart” with racks of the same
cellophane-wrapped snacks available everywhere else on the U.S. roadways. The
mustard in the local grocery store came in two varieties, French’s yellow or
Gulden’s brown: nothing coarse-grained or tarragon-infused burdened the
condiment section of the chipped enameled shelves, no moutarde au poivre vert
within township limits. Janson’s kind of place.
Yet if the decades-old accounts were accurate, there was a vast estate hidden
somewhere in the hills, as private a residence as you could hope for—legally as
well as physically. For even its ownership was completely obscure. Was it really
conceivable that “Novak”—the mirage who called himself that—was nearby? Janson’s
scalp tightened as he mulled the possibilities.
Later that morning, Janson entered the diner at the corner of Main and
Pemberton, where he started a conversation with the counterman. The counterman’s
sloping forehead, close-set eyes, and jutting, square jaw gave him a slightly
simian appearance, but when he spoke he proved surprisingly knowledgeable.
“So you’re thinking of moving nearby?” The counterman splashed more coffee into
Janson’s cup from his Silex pot. “Let me guess. Made your money in the big city
and now you want the peace and quiet of the country, that it?”
“Something like that,” Janson said. Nailed to the wall behind the counter was a
sign, white cursive lettering on black: Kenny’s Coffee Shoppe—Where Quality &
Service Rule.
“Sure you don’t want someplace a little nearer to your high-class conveniences?
There’s a Realtor lady on Pemberton, but I’m not sure you’ll find exactly the
kind of house you’re looking for around here.”
“Thinking of building,” Janson said. The coffee was acrid, having sat on the hot
pad too long. He gazed absently at the Formica-topped counter, its pattern of
loose-woven cloth worn to white in the middle of the counter, where the traffic
of heavy plates and cutlery was heaviest.
“Sounds like fun. If’n you can afford to do something nice.” The man’s drugstore
aftershave mingled unpleasantly with the heavy aroma of lard and butter.
“No point otherwise.”
“Nope, no point otherwise,” the counterman agreed. “My boy, you know, he had
some dang-fool way he was going to get rich. Some dotcom thing. Was going to
middleman some e-commerce gimcrackery. For months he was talking about his
‘business model,’ and ‘added value,’ and ‘frictionless e-commerce,’ and
flapdoodle like that. Said the thing about the New Economy was the ‘death of
distance’ so that it didn’t make no difference where you was. We was all just
nodes on the World Wide Web, didn’t matter whether you was in Millington or
Roanoke or the goddamn Dulles corridor. He and a couple of friends from high
school, it was. Burned through whatever was in their piggy banks by December,
was back to shoveling driveways by January. What my wife calls a cautionary
tale. She said, just be happy he wuddn’t on drugs. I told her I wuddn’t so sure
about that. Not every drug is something you smoke, sniff, or shoot up. Money, or
the craving for it, can be a drug just as surely.”
“Getting money is one trick, spending it’s another,” Janson said. “Possible to
build around here?”
“Possible to build on the moon, people say.”
“What about transportation.”
“Well, you’re here, ain’t you?”
“I guess I am.”
“Roads here are in pretty good repair.” The counterman’s eyes were on a
spectacle across the street. A young blond woman was washing the sidewalk in
front of a hardware store; as she bent over, her cutoffs hitched a little higher
up her thigh. No doubt the highlight of his day.
“Airport?” Janson asked.
“Nearest real airport’s probably Roanoke.”
Janson took a sip of coffee. It coated his tongue like oil. “‘Real’ airport?
There another kind around here?”
“Naw. Well. There used to be, back in the forties and fifties. Some sort of tiny
airport that the Army Air Force built. About three miles up Clangerton Road, a