Liam looked up sharply at the rebuke in his son’s voice. “Your mother understood.”
“She was a good sport, you mean.”
“Here we are, in the eternal struggle, father and son battling over the affections of the mother. Oedipus redux. It would be unnatural any other way. But your mother, boyo, she doesn’t need your defending. She never needed anyone. It’s what attracted me to her in the first place. To be the center of her world seemed a rare thing, worth more than diamonds. But it’s hard to sustain a relationship with someone so self-contained. I tried, yes. For a bit, after you were born, I even moved in, did you know that?”
“She told me.”
“Yes. An interesting time. But it didn’t work. She found someone else to love, someone else to stand at the center. She pushed me away for another.”
“Go to hell.”
“No, son, it’s true.”
“Who, then? Who did my mother fall in love with?”
“You don’t know?”
“No. I don’t.”
“It was you. We don’t need to battle, because you are already triumphant. She loved you so much there was no room left for me. She loved you, boyo.”
“You don’t need to tell me that.”
“Of course I don’t. That’s another thing we have in common. We both loved your mother and were loved by her, in succession, I think. But you won out.”
“And you went back to your wife.”
“She took me back, yes. We had a difficult relationship, but we both gave each other things that we needed. So she put away her anger and took me back. But there were conditions, which made it hard for me to get away to see you.”
“I missed you all the time,” said Kyle, the words slipping out unbidden, as if spoken by the twelve-year-old kid still inside him.
“I know,” said Liam Byrne. “It was a difficult thing for me to stay away, more difficult than you could imagine. I understand you still have issues with your old man. I deserted you, not once but twice. But I am your father, and you are in a time of dire need, and here I am. I saved you once this morning, and we’ll work through the rest of it together. Some of that must matter, don’t you think?”
Kyle stared at his father and wondered why all their conversations turned into him whining and his father explaining. They were caught in an eternal cycle of Kyle’s longing and disappointment. But maybe it was time to stop fighting and doubting and trying to get the apology he seemed so desperately to need. Maybe it was time just to accept that his father was here, now, and to see what the future held for the two of them. Forgiveness? Atonement? Redemption? Love? It was all possible, wasn’t it, as long as Kyle’s father was still sitting in front of him at Ponzio’s?
“I suppose,” said Kyle.
“Good. Now can we get back to the matter at hand before the forces arrayed on either side lop off our heads?”
“Sure.”
“We’ll talk more about dealing with the senator later. I have plans. Definite plans. But I didn’t like what happened this morning, didn’t like it at all. I’m not willing to leave you at the mercy of Sorrentino, that Italian degenerate. The senator can wait until tomorrow. It’s time we take care of my old partner now.”
“Why don’t we just give him the file? It’s what he wants, and it will take him off my back and screw Truscott at the same time.”
“Because he is a scoundrel of the worst stripe,” said Liam. “Because he will care nothing about caging a criminal but instead will trade it for cash and include you in the bargain. You’ll never be safe if he has the file, and that I can’t allow. No, we have to take him out of the picture once and for all.”
“How?”
“Ahh, that’s the question. How indeed? But I know for certain we need to go right at him. There is no use waiting around for him to act. Always keep the initiative, always stay one step ahead. I learned in law that if I waited for the other side’s filings, I’d get buried.”
Just then Liam Byrne’s features froze in startled recognition of someone in the restaurant. He quickly averted his face as an older man in a sweater, hunched and limping, shuffled by. And then the old man stopped, and then the old man turned around. His face was a haggard droop of flesh, but his eyes were curiously alert as they stared at the back of Liam Byrne’s head.
“Liam?” said the old man.
“No, I’m sorry,” said Liam Byrne, without turning around. “My name’s Marvin.”
“Did you have a brother named Liam? Or a cousin?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, but you’re the spitting image of someone I used to know.”
Liam Byrne twisted in the booth to stare straight at the man and give a warm, untroubled smile. “Handsome fellow, I suppose,” said Liam in a broad midwestern accent.
“He would have been,” said the man, “if he hadn’t died many years ago. It was the strangest thing, though, because I could have sworn you were he.” The old man turned to look at Kyle, blinked twice as if in recognition, looked again at Liam. “It’s uncanny.”
“One thing we know about the world,” said Liam, turned back now and winking at Kyle, “is that coincidences happen.”
“Yes, I suppose,” said the old man, his face screwed up in puzzlement. “I’m sorry to disturb your dinner.”
“Not a problem,” said Liam, “not a problem at all. I’m often mistaken for the dead.”
When the old man had walked on and sat at his table at the far end of the row, Liam let out a breath.
“That was close,” he said. “We ate in New Jersey so I wouldn’t be recognized, and then Johnstone has to walk into this very restaurant. I had a number of cases with him back in the day. He worked for the insurance companies. A moral failing, if you ask me. But even as he recognized me right off, I barely recognized him at all. He is ancient.”
“It happens,” said Kyle flatly.
“But his face did get pale, didn’t it?” said Liam, starting to laugh. “I could see the blood rush away as he thought he recognized me. Like he had seen a ghost.”
“He had, hadn’t he?” said Kyle.
“Yes,” said Liam, who reached up and scratched at his mop of gray hair, as if scratching out an idea. “Indeed he had.”
CHAPTER 41
SKITCH SAT WITH KYLE in Liam’s rental car as both stared at the empty sidewalk outside Tiny Tony’s Ticket Brokerage. Kyle’s father wasn’t in the car with them because he insisted that no one know about his return. And Skitch was in the car because he was a crucial element of Kyle’s father’s plan to get Tiny Tony off Kyle’s back for good. A plan that, Kyle would be the first to admit, was suicidally insane. But he was here as a matter of trust: He had decided to trust his father, and his father had said about the plan, “Trust me.”