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Jacques moved forward, splitting the sea of men, to look into the stranger’s eyes. “You’re safe here, friend,” he said.
The man in the heap of clothes looked up to see Jacques approach, and a look of terror came over his dirty face. He threw himself backward, and the men behind him wrangled him down to constrain him. “You!” shouted the man in a voice hoarse as a whisper. He then began to quietly laugh.
“Careful, Jacques,” said Nico. “He’s a madman. No telling what he’ll do.”
“Friend,” said Jacques consolingly to the Weirdo. “Why have you come here?”
“Where? Am I anywhere?” asked the man, between fits of high-pitched laughter.
Someone from the back of the room said, “He’s crazy. Listen to him.”
“Quiet!” Jacques shouted to the room. “We are the Chapeaux Noirs, comrades. Enemies of the elite, friends to the downtrodden. Allow this man to speak.”
But the man didn’t so much speak as mumble in a syntax that seemed nearly alien, graced as it was with quick fits of laughter and strings of melody. “Yes, yes,” said the man. “Let the man speak, yes, yes. Tra la tra la. To speak of old times. To speak of new times and old times.”
“How did you get in here?” asked Jacques through this burble of nonsense.
“Through the under, under through. By way of the night and the light. To find my children. To find my long-lost children, tra la tra la,” said the man.
“See?” said one of the men behind him. “He’s followed the kids in. We’ve given away our location.”
Elsie edged forward; for all the dirt and matted hair clinging to the Weirdo’s face, for all the pile of clothes he had huddled about him, for all the smell that was emanating from the poor, wretched thing, there was something vaguely familiar about him.
“Please,” continued Jacques, stepping closer to the quivering man. “We mean you no harm.” He reached out and pushed aside a wisp of the man’s long, oily hair to get a better look at his eyes; just then, Elsie could see that the same vague recognition had overcome the elder Chapeau Noir as well.
“Hello, Joffrey,” said Jacques.
It was true: Crouched there, held fast by the men around him, was none other than Joffrey Unthank himself, the proprietor of the Unthank Home for Wayward Youth and the children’s former guardian and overseer. Elsie could see that his goatee still outgrew the rest of his beard, bereft of its once well-trimmed shape. The pile of scavenged bedding he had collected over his shoulders fell back to reveal a dirty argyle sweater-vest below. “It’s him?” asked Nico.
Michael and Cynthia both wormed their way through the crowd and looked down on the sad man with surprise. “It’s him, all right,” said Michael, barely containing the anger and disgust in his voice.
“
A serendipitous day, indeed,” said Jacques. He watched the huddled figure of Joffrey Unthank as one would a frightened animal.
Michael knelt down by Jacques’s side and stared at Joffrey. He took a deep breath and said, “You stink, Mr. Unthank. Do you remember me, Mr. Unthank? Michael Denison. My parents were killed in a plane crash, and I ended up in your little home. I manned the steam furnace. Do you remember?”
Joffrey’s dazed eyes became dewy, and they darted back and forth, searching Michael’s face. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said in a whisper. “How do you do again. Tra la la.”
“I broke the nozzle on the furnace and you made me Unadoptable, do you remember? Took me into your office and stuck a needle in me and sent me out into the woods.” Michael’s voice was overcome with emotion, and it quavered as he spoke. “I swore that if ever I saw you again, I’d tear you limb from limb.”
“Oh yes, child,” blubbered Unthank. “Oh yes, oh yes.”
Michael’s hands reached out and touched the cheek of his former boss, his former captor, and his hands shook.
“Don’t do it, Michael,” said Cynthia Schmidt, coming up from behind and laying a hand on his shoulder.
Instead, Michael pursed his lips and spat a bright glob of phlegm at the sad man, hitting him directly below his right eye. A stain of white skin appeared, the moisture having cleaned away a spot of the filth that covered the man’s face.
Just then, Joffrey began to cry. Deep heaves of sobbing, punctuated by more weird laughter, came from the man, and tears dripped down from his nose. Michael stepped away from him, a look of revulsion on his face.
“What’s happened to him?” asked Elsie, who was standing at her sister’s side. She’d only once seen an adult man cry who wasn’t on the TV; it had been her dad, after her brother’s disappearance. This was different, though. This bout of crying seemed to come from a further-off place, a stranger place.
“I don’t know,” responded Rachel. “He’s crazy, I guess.”
“Serves him right,” said Cynthia. “That place was like a prison. It’s a crime what he did to us.”
Jacques had put his arm around Unthank and pulled his sobbing head into the crook of his shoulder. “There, there,” said Jacques, a consoling parent. “Cry it out, Joffrey. It’s true, my old friend. My old partner. You’ve done terrible, terrible things. Not just to these children: Oh, no—though that was a very serious misstep—worse, you’ve corrupted yourself and your own mind in your search for satisfaction, despite the costs. You’ve lost track of the man inside in your restless need to create things, to amass stuff, to have power. It is the disease of desire, my friend. And it has rotted your soul to the very core.”
