Holden-Bryant wouldn’t look at her now, but she nodded her head. “When Jack finally broke it off with me and told me he was moving, I knew what was going on. I knew exactly what he was doing. He was following your mother, the woman he really loved. And leaving me... alone.”
“He wouldn’t have told you the details, surely,” said Blum. “How did you find out what you needed to tell Bruno?”
“Jack told me nothing. And he stopped drinking and stopped making calls from the apartment. I don’t think he ever suspected me, but he was just taking an abundance of caution. But he did make a big mistake. He had gotten a phone call that made him rush into his home office and check something in his safe. Our relationship was on the ropes, but we were still sharing the apartment, and I was trying to turn it around. Now, normally when I was there, he would shut and lock the door when he went into his office. But he was in such a hurry he left the door ajar. This allowed me to spy on him from the doorway when he was opening his wall safe, and I learned the combo. I checked it periodically while we were still living together. One day, when it was clear he was leaving town, I waited until he was gone, and then got into the safe and found a letter in there that had been sent to him by someone at his agency. It was all there. Andersonville, Georgia. Tim and Julia Pine and their two lovely daughters, Atlee and Mercy. I got that info to Bruno, and I guess he told his brother about it, because I suppose, by then, his mob connections had dried up. I believe he died shortly after he got that information.”
“But not before he got that info to his brother.” Pine paused. “Did you ever hear what happened to us back in the late 1980s?” she asked.
“I don’t really recall.”
“But you didn’t tell anyone what you had done?”
“And put myself in prison? No, I didn’t do that.”
“I read a letter that Bruno had written to his brother, Ito, complaining about his unfair treatment. As if a man who had killed scores of people had a right to complain. He basically guilt-tripped his law-abiding brother, Ito, to come after us. Ito almost killed me, and he took my sister and she’s never been seen since. My father killed himself, and my mother has vanished. I don’t know if she’s dead or not. So if your goal was to destroy my family, you succeeded. You wiped us out. As far as I know, I’m the only one left.”
Holden-Bryant put a hand to her face and sobbed quietly into it. She said shakily, “I’m sorry, Atlee. I never imagined—”
“Sure you did. You told a murderer where to find us. What exactly did you think was going to happen?”
Holden-Bryant dried her eyes on her sleeve and looked at Pine with a sober expression. “I guess, in a way, exactly what did happen. I guess it would be absurd and trivial and even cruel to say that I’m sorry for what happened, though I sincerely am.”
“Did you ever meet with Ito Vincenzo?” asked Pine.
“No, I never even knew he existed until you mentioned him.”
“You’re sure you never communicated with him?”
“Never.”
“When did you and Jack officially break up?”
“When he moved down to Georgia. There didn’t seem to be a point to continuing.”
Pine rose and handed her a card. “If anything else occurs to you, please call me.”
She took the card. “I know what you must think of me.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think of you. It’s far more important what you think of yourself.”
Holden-Bryant pulled a tissue from a box on the nightstand and sniffled into it. “Well, right now, I don’t think much of myself at all.”
“Okay.”
“Will Jack be all right?”
“It seems that he will, yes. He’s lucky to be alive, actually. As am I.”
“You really just found out about his being your father?”
“Yes.”
“It must have been a shock.”
“Everything about this has been a shock.”
“I hope you find your sister.”
Pine didn’t respond to this.
“Will... will you tell Jack about what I did?”
“Not unless I have to, no.”
“I appreciate that.”
Pine didn’t answer. She was already headed to the door. A moment later she was gone.
Holden-Bryant looked at Blum, who still stood next to the bed. “I guess love makes fools of us all,” she said.
“Oh, I think we do a pretty good job of that all by ourselves,” said Blum. She looked around. “Well, at least you have all this... to keep you happy. Aren’t you lucky?”
She walked out and closed the door softly behind her.
Chapter 39
Puller had just finished a six-mile run at Quantico, keeping pace with a couple of long-legged Marine recruits still in their teens. He returned to his “new” apartment, since the other one was still a crime scene, took a shower, and was about to put on civilian clothes when his phone buzzed.
It was a text from his brother.
Tonight twenty hundred, ANC, Remember the Maine. Salt. Four bars and a star.
Anyone not knowing the brothers, or the military in general, would be hard-pressed to decipher this message. But it made perfect sense to Puller, up to a point.
He checked his watch. He would have just enough time because he needed to make a stop first. He went to his closet and pulled out his set of dress blues. It was for the meeting tonight, though it wasn’t exactly required. But it was also for where he was going right now.
For a long time the Army had stuck with dress greens and dress whites. But now blue was the thing. It was the color of America’s two greatest military home-turf victories. The bluecoats against the redcoats in the Revolutionary War. And the Union blue against the Confederate gray in the Civil War.
Why mess with success?
He checked his row of ribbons to make sure they were all where they were supposed to be — the military allowed no margin for error there — picked up his dress cap and headed out after allowing AWOL to give him the once-over and purr his approval.
He drove to the VA hospital and was escorted to the memory care unit. Along the way he saw and saluted soldiers sitting in wheelchairs, lying on gurneys, and roaming the halls using walkers. They had all served their country well and honorably. Now they were here, the last deployment of their careers: a nursing home provided by Uncle Sam.
The escort left him, and Puller tapped on the door to the room. He waited for a moment and then entered.
The space was small, and held very few things, chief among them a bed with an old man in it. That old man was Puller’s father and namesake. John Puller Sr.
It used to be that his father, upon seeing Puller, would bark out, “XO, what are you doing here?”
Puller was not his father’s executive officer, or XO, but he had played along with it because the doctors said it was probably for the best.
That was then.
That was no longer the case. Now was very different from then.
His father lay curled in the bed. Once six three, he had been robbed of several inches by age and bad health. He was bald except for small pockets of hair the color of clouds strewn around his scalp. His clothes these days were not combat fatigues or dress blues. They were hospital scrub pants and a white T-shirt, where curly white chest hair poked out from the front.
Puller came around to the side of the bed so he could face his father. He stood there flagpole straight and looked down at the man who had helped create him, giving him half his DNA and other attributes, some good, some not so good.
“Reporting in, sir,” said Puller, a bit half-heartedly. He did not expect an answer. The last five times he had come to visit his father, the man had never even woken up.