The President of the Paradox Club
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Richard had asked. “You don’t have to bring it to the club at all.”
“The club should know,” Harry said. “Maybe not all the specifics, but the club should know.”
“You haven’t told me all the specifics,” Richard said.
There was a long silence as Richard swirled the brandy in his glass. “Will you go back this summer?” he finally asked. “To the lake?”
“You know I will.”
“I’m not teaching summer classes this year, so if you wanted some extra company…”
“You might need to keep an eye on the club after next week’s meeting,” Harry said. “And on Pilgrim 3.”
“It’ll blow over. You’ll go to the lake for the summer and by fall everyone will forget about it.”
“I doubt that,” said Harry, setting his glass on the desk and leaning across its expanse to look Richard in the eyes. “You will have to keep up the fight. Trust me, Richard, until the day you die you will have to keep up the fight.”
“With you to help me, of course.”
“I’m not the president,” Harry said. “After next week I could be persona non grata. And besides, I might not always be around.”
“You’re younger than me, Harry.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
“Planning on doing something stupid on that island this summer? Because if so, I’d like to talk you out of it. And if I can’t do that, I’d like to be a part of it.”
“Marie has trouble sleeping,” Harry said, obviously eager to change the subject. “Things have been…strained between us.”
“It’s been a hard year.”
“She says she doesn’t want to go to the island this summer, but she’ll come around.”
“You could always take me instead,” said Richard. “I could help with any projects you have in mind.”
“Look after the club, Richard,” Harry said, standing and draining his snifter. “You look after the club and let me worry about what goes on at the lake.”
Richard had intended to do just that—to look after the club.
And after the fire he had intended to look after Marie, too.
But it hadn’t worked out that way. Marie blamed Richard for what happened at the island almost as much as she blamed Vivian and Tess, and she shut them all out of her life as completely as she could.
After the fire, Richard had left Wisconsin and taken a job at Columbia so he could be close to the club.
Over the past ten years he had kept reaching out to Marie.
She had shut the door in his face or hung up on him more times than he could remember. He’d never even spoken to Tess.
In the first couple of years, Vivian sent him a message once in a while: a postcard with a perfunctory greeting or a Christmas card—just enough to let him know that she and Tess were safe.
Richard had wanted to visit Vivian, to see her and Tess, but Vivian said it was safer if he stayed away.
Richard wondered if she also didn’t want to be reminded of the days before the fire when they had all been so close.
And, considering the increasing hold on the Paradox Club exerted by Pilgrim 3, she was probably right about the safety issue.
He had finally convinced Vivian to accept a bimonthly phone call of five minutes or so, but she never put Tess on the line.
He wished he could do more for Harry, but at least he kept up his efforts to suppress the influence of Pilgrim 3 at the club.
Then, eight months ago, he had been on his usual thrice-weekly run in Riverside Park when he had stumbled and fallen.
He hadn’t inflicted any serious damage, but two cracked ribs and some frightening-looking facial bruising left him wincing in the mirror a week later, at which point he came to a decision.
Richard was a seventy-two-year-old man living alone in a fifth-floor walkup.
It had snowed two days ago and turned frigid last night; it was twenty-one degrees outside and there were frozen slush pools on every street corner.
He was having flashbacks to childhood winters in Sterling, Kansas.
In his hand he’d held a brochure for the Waves Beachside Retirement Community.
In Florida the temperature was seventy-five.
Richard had announced his retirement that afternoon, finished out the academic year, and packed his bags.
He knew that Pilgrim 3 would be not-so-secretly celebrating his departure from New York, but he had been careful to give himself eyes and ears inside the Paradox Club.
When he had joined the club almost forty years ago, he couldn’t have kept tabs on its inner workings from a thousand miles away.
But in the age of instant communication, nothing would happen in the halls of the Paradox Club that the president wouldn’t know about within minutes.
And New York was just a plane ride away if his presence should be required.
In his first four months at the Waves, Richard had taken up croquet and tennis.
He had read a stack of spy novels. He had learned to play bridge and mah-jongg.
He had taken to writing long rambling letters to Vivian.
He had even had a brief affair with a younger man.
To all the other residents of the Waves, Richard Pollard appeared as retired as they come.
They had no idea that he received almost daily dispatches from the Paradox Club.
They had never even heard of the Paradox Club.
Richard took a sip from his pina colada, shifted in his chair to keep his legs in the shade, and opened his copy of The Enigma Affair.
He looked not at the text, but at his bookmark—a strip of yellowing paper with two dates written on it in Harry Maxwell’s handwriting: June 17, 2005, the night of the fire, and October 14, 2015, ten days from now.