Tell me we’ll be together forever, he says.
Together, she says.
Promise me, he says.
Forever, she says.
Promise me, he says.
I promise. You and me, Jesse. Together forever. I promise and now you promise too.
I do, he says. I promise.
And so it is asked and answered, promised, sealed. The crucial most difficult steps have been taken with remarkable ease. The rest are mere details. Details, where, according to the sages, both God and the devil reside.
Let’s go somewhere, he says.
Okay, where?
I don’t know. California maybe.
They are lying on the bed, the morning sun is now slanting in the window, a soft cloud can be seen floating by in the distance. His arms are behind his head, the future rolls ahead of my father like a long lazy river to be savored and explored together with this girl, this naked girl in his bed, their love the raft keeping them dry and buoyant.
California sounds nice, she says.
San Francisco, or maybe Los Angeles.
Hollywood? she says.
Sure, Angel, anywhere you want.
Hollywood then. Anywhere, really, so long as it’s away from him.
The cloud drifts across the sun and the room suddenly darkens.
Who is he? he asks.
Nobody.
So why does he matter?
Because of who he is.
And who is he?
He is rich, greedy, grasping, she says. He is a soulless spider. And then she tells my father of how she became entwined in his web.
“Her mother had been sick,” said my father, fighting now for breath as he struggled to explain. But he didn’t have to struggle so hard. As soon as the sick mother was marched to the fore all the other elements fell in behind her. The financial need, the golden opportunity, the lifesaving stream of income, the financial dependence. And once the dependence was settled upon her shoulders like a yoke, the more unusual secretarial requests. The personal letters. The inventory taken side by side on the large dining room table. The late hours. The working dinners. And then the rainy evening, the roads awash. You mustn’t try to go home in this weather. It isn’t safe. I insist you stay the night. I simply insist. And so there she was, tossing awake in the big iron guest bed, as the sounds assaulted her from every side. The lashing of the rain against the windows, the wind scraping the tree limbs across the stone facing, the old house settling down upon itself. And then something different, the creaking of the floorboards, the whispered entreaty, the low whine of the door as it slips open, only the long bony fingers visible at first. “Her mother had been sick,” said my father, which was explanation enough for all that followed, the gasp in horror, the calm voice of age and authority, the tears, the sobs, the ultimate submission as the old man rutted atop her like a bearded billy goat, while she stared at nothing and thought only of her mother, her sick, old mother, and the medical bills that were piling against their door higher and higher with every visit to each new specialist.
My father had always been quick to anger, anger being his natural state, so it wasn’t hard to imagine his reaction, the bile flowing through him at the thought of the old man taking advantage of his love, the old man turning his love into something ugly, something unclean. “I wanted to kill him,” my father said and of that I had no doubts. He wants to smite him as the defilers were smote in the olden days, to stone him to death for what he did to her, to his love.
No, she says. You can’t. No. Let’s just go away.
What about your mother?
She passed away, her illness, she was too weak even with the specialists.
When?
A month ago. Maybe two.
So why are you still with him?
Where was I to go? I had no place else. No place else, Jesse, until I met you.
She would have kissed him then, kissed him hungrily, urgently, sucking the air from his lungs. And I knew how he would have reacted, how her kiss would have dissolved his anger, banished his questions, how it would have stiffened his devotion, I knew all of that without him telling because he and I were of the same blood.
All right, he says, the sweat pouring off of him, her taste like an opiate on his tongue. All right, let’s just go, go away somewhere. Let’s go.
Okay.
To California.
Hollywood?
Sure.
Okay. Yes. Let’s go.
I love you, he says. I’ll love you forever.
Yes, she says. Me too. Yes. But first, before we go away, we have to go back.
To the old man’s house?
Everything I own is there. All my belongings. We have to go back.
Forget them.
All I own is there, and more. He owes me, Jesse, don’t you see? There are unpaid wages… and there is more. He owes me. We can’t get started, she says, we can’t live the way we deserve until we get what he owes me.
“What he owes me,” said my father, from his bed, his voice now merely the softest of whispers riding over his wet sucking breath. “Only what he owes me.”
He was right, my father, once again. He wasn’t getting better. The new antibiotic wasn’t any more efficacious than the old one, and his lungs remained flooded with poison. They would have to try something new, some other wonder drug to cure his infection, though I sensed as I watched him fall into a pained sleep, with the words “What he owes me” on his lips, that there wasn’t any new wonder drug that could cure what was truly ailing him. Maybe I had been right before when I had suggested they pump him full of Iron City beer, because that was what he had been using all these years, I recognized, to keep these memories at bay. But they were coming out now, one after the other, pulled from his throat like a rope of knotted kerchiefs, as if he were some second-rate magician and I an audience of enraptured schoolkids. And as each one passed it left its own virulent strain of bitter disappointment in his blood that no antibiotic could ever hope to destroy.
The only answer was to pull it to the end, to get the entire story out of his gut, to tell it and maybe in the telling to free himself of the past, which was killing him day by day, and which had been killing him, I now believed, since long before I was born.
Chapter 23
“HE’S LATE,” I said.
“He works for the city,” said Beth, sitting next to me in my parked car.
“But he is going to come?”
“On his horse, most likely.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What is up with that?”
“He thinks he grew up in the North Country.”
“North Kensington is more like it. It’s the name of the office that gets to them. Every little boy wants to grow up to be sheriff. But he’s generally reliable. What time is it?”
“Three minutes later than the last time you asked. Why are we still doing this, Victor, if our client is lying?”
“The CEO of our client is lying, true, but there are other Jacopo stockholders to consider. Kimberly, for instance.”
“Ah, now I see,” she said.
“What?”
“And now I see why you agreed to let her accompany you as you look for Tommy Greeley’s killer.”
“I had my reasons.”
“She’s mighty pretty.”
“Yes she is, but that’s not why I find her so interesting.”
“Why then?”
“Because Eddie Dean hired her. And because he seems overly concerned with her opinion of him. That lie he told night before last, I don’t think it was for us. I think it was for her.”
“Is he sleeping with her?”
“Gad, with that face I hope not.”
“He’s dangerous, Victor. And so is that Colfax thug he’s got with him.”
“Where do guys like Dean find guys like that anyway?”