Flashback

Across the street from the old modernist art museum where his mother used to take him was the newer postmodernist annex to the art museum. Nick actually remembered the name of that architect—Daniel Libeskind. The titanium-and-glass structure was all shards and points and angles, looking like a smashed chandelier or shattered Christmas-tree star. That building had gone up in the first decade of this century and Nick remembered all the self-congratulatory whoop-de-do about the structure—how it put Denver back on America’s architectural map (as if that would matter at all in the dark decades after the Day It All Hit The Fan)—but the leaping up and down in joy had abated somewhat when the city had discovered that a) the inside of a broken Christmas decoration was a lousy place to try to show art and b) every angle and surface that could leak did leak and always would.

Wait, some of this bullshit I was remembering could help. What was it?

He ran his little Molly Bloom batch of free associations backwards like an old reel-to-reel tape, the way he’d taught himself to do, and found it.

The picture-frame windows on the old windows were useless because of the new buildings that had grown up to block the views.

He was still trying to solve this case using the old frames that were out of date. Something he’d stumbled over in the past week—some new thing that had grown up to block the old view—held the answer. It was there. He just couldn’t see it yet.

Nick turned on the fine four-wheeled G.M. appliance, checked the smiley-face and leaf-sprouting interfaces to make sure the gelding had actually started, noted that even though he’d hardly driven the thing it now had only nineteen miles left in its daily charge, and let the piece-a-shit glide down the hill toward the west.

There were only a dozen or so cars in the Six Flags Over the Jews parking lot. Nick knew that it was ridiculous to check for his Camaro SS escape vehicle—K.T. would have needed the Star Trek transporter teleportation doohickey to beam one here from the impound lot in this short of a time—but he looked anyway. No vehicles parked the wrong way or by themselves to the south.

He found Danny Oz smoking a cigarette—regular, not cannabis—and drinking coffee in a mostly empty mess tent under the rusting Tower of Doom. Oz didn’t seem surprised by the early-morning repeat visit.

“Coffee, Mr. Bottom?” asked Oz, gesturing toward the big urn on a counter. “It’s terrible but strong.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’ve thought of more questions.” Oz had been writing with a pencil in a small book of blank pages, but he set that aside.

“Not really,” said Nick. “At least not officially in terms of the investigation. That’s over.”

“Oh, did you find Keigo Nakamura’s killer?”

“I’m not sure,” said Nick, knowing how absurd that sounded. No matter. It was true. “I just had some free time and I wondered, Mr. Oz…”

“Danny.”

“I wondered, Danny, how you might describe Keigo’s demeanor and attitude when he interviewed you.”

Oz was silent for a minute and Nick was sure that he hadn’t understood the question—Nick wasn’t sure that he understood what he’d been asking. He was about to rephrase it when the Israeli poet spoke.

“That’s interesting, Mr. Bottom. I did notice something about Mr. Keigo’s demeanor and mood that day.”

“What?” said Nick. “Depressed? Worried? Apprehensive?”

“Triumphant,” said Oz.

Nick had been ready to write in his little notebook but now he lowered his pencil. “Triumphant?”

Danny Oz frowned and sipped his coffee. “That’s not quite the correct word, Mr. Bottom. I’m thinking of the Hebrew word menatzeiach, which probably most closely translates as ‘victorious.’ For no good reason other than my years of observing human beings as a poet, I had the distinct impression that Keigo Nakamura thought that he was on the brink of some triumph… some victory. A victory of epic… one might say ‘biblical’ proportions.”

“He was close to finishing his documentary on us Americans and flashback,” said Nick. “Is that the kind of triumph you might have detected?”

“Perhaps.” Oz was silent a long moment. “But I felt it was more a sense of having been victorious in some great struggle.”

“What kind of struggle? Personal? Bigger than personal? Something on his father’s scale of success or failure?”

“I have no idea,” said Oz and shrugged. “We’re in the area of totally subjective impressions here, Mr. Bottom. But I’d take a wild guess and say the young man felt victorious in some battle that had been both personal and larger than the mere personal to him. Corporate, perhaps, or political. But definitely something larger than himself.”

Nick sighed. “All right. Speaking of totally subjective impressions, I have two questions for you that don’t really relate to the investigation at all.”