“What happened then?”
“I took you home, where I cleaned you up, while Anna fixed you something to eat,” Max replied. “You remember how my wife always wanted to feed everyone. Anyway, you’d calmed down by then, and gone back to being a little boy. A very frightened little boy, I might add. It was Anna’s idea to take you to the police in the hopes you might identify the men who’d stolen your parents away. Which was exactly what I did.”
The cards were snapped in a fan. They had shrunk to half their size. Another fan, and they shrunk to the size of a matchbook. Then, like a puff of smoke, they were gone.
“But why did you do that, Max?” he asked pleadingly. “Didn’t the fact that I’d killed six men weigh on your decision? I was a dangerous little boy. Shouldn’t you have taken me to a hospital instead?”
Max opened his hands and the deck of cards miraculously reappeared. Seeing them made Peter swallow hard. The cards had been there all along, perhaps up Max’s sleeve, or someplace else, but hiding in plain sight nonetheless. So simple, yet it had fooled him.
“You had killed before, you do know that,” Max said.
“The burglar at our apartment. He died?”
“Of course he died. I mean, before that.”
Someone could have knocked him over with a feather.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he stammered.
“So you don’t know the truth, then.”
The truth. Peter had been waiting a long time to hear the truth. Max rose from the bench and motioned for Peter to rise as well.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
40
Down at street level they went to a hidden Italian eatery called Pepe Giallo, its motto, “Feeding the Starving Artists since 1997.” For a restaurant in New York to be Italian, it not only had to serve authentic Italian fare, but had to be run by Italians with accents and rude manners. Pepe Giallo had all those things. A host led them to a small courtyard in the back with rustic redbrick walls and a murky skylight. Tossing a pair of menus on the table, he walked away.
“I’m not hungry. Let’s go someplace else,” Peter said.
“Nonsense, you’re always hungry, even though you manage to never gain weight,” Max said. “Food will make you feel better. Try the roasted eggplant. It’s wonderful.”
An indifferent waiter took their drink orders. When he was gone, Max glanced at a couple sitting nearby. Deciding they were not a threat, he leaned forward and said, “I once read a quote by Ernest Hemingway that stayed with me. Hemingway said that memoirs are fiction. People reinvent their pasts to suit them. We take out the things we don’t want repeated, and embellish the things we do. When it comes to the past, there is no such thing as the truth.”
“Is my past fiction?” Peter asked.
“Yes. Part of your family’s past is fiction.”
“So this includes my parents.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“How bad is it?”
“I never planned to tell you, if that’s what you mean.”
Peter removed a bread stick from the basket, broke off a piece. Did he really want to hear dark things about his family’s past? Milly’s accusation that he ran away from his problems didn’t seem such a bad idea right now.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Max wiped his hands with a cloth napkin. Bunching the napkin up, he extracted a full glass of water, complete with ice cubes and a slice of lemon, which he triumphantly placed in front of his bug-eyed student. Fooled again, Peter thought.
“You flashed. Do it again,” Peter said.
“I did no such thing,” Max thundered. “Admit you’re fooled!”
“All right, you fooled me. Bravo.”
A thin smile crossed Max’s face. “Listen carefully to what I have to say. This will be upsetting at first. Once I explain certain things, I think you’ll understand. Okay?”
“Sure, Max.”
“All right, here we go. You were raised to believe that your mother and father left London and came to New York because they were being threatened by the group of evil psychics called the Order of Astrum. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“That is not the actual reason your parents left England. The real reason they left is that their precious son killed a man in Hyde Park, and they were running from the law.”
“I did what?”
“Please let me tell my story without interruption.”
Peter could feel the blood draining from his head. “Sure, Max, whatever you say.”
“Thank you. Here’s what happened. Your parents lived in London and taught at a small college. Each Sunday when the weather was favorable, they packed a picnic and went to Hyde Park, where they allowed you to play while they read books. It was one of their favorite things to do. One Sunday in the early spring, your parents were going about their usual routine when your father realized you had disappeared. He grew alarmed, and went searching for you. Several minutes passed before he found you behind a thick hedge a hundred yards from where your parents had been sitting. You were in a daze, and barely speaking. Lying on the ground was a man with blood pouring out of his nose and mouth. The man’s neck was broken and he was dead. Your father gathered you in his arms, and asked you what had happened. And you said, ‘I killed him, Father. He was going to hurt us.’”
“Who was he?”
“Please, don’t make me get ahead of myself.”
“Sorry.”
“On the ground beside the dead man was a lead pipe. Your father couldn’t be sure if the man had been holding the pipe, or if it had been lying there. Your father rushed you home, where your mother gave you a bath, and wiped the blood away.”
“Why didn’t they call the police?”
“Your parents knew you were different in many ways, and did not always understand the things you did. That night, after you were put to bed, your parents talked it over. They couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to harm them. After all, they were college professors, and led dull, uneventful lives. If the man in the bushes had wanted to rob them, he wouldn’t have gotten much money. And if he’d wanted to hurt them, why?
“The next day, the story hit every newspaper in London. Scotland Yard was looking for you, and claimed to have a rather vague description of what you looked like provided by an old woman who’d been bird-watching in the park. Your father saw the newspapers and panicked. If the police found you, he was afraid they would have stuck you into a mental institution. He had to protect you, and convinced your mother that they needed to leave London, and quickly.”
“So they left because of me.”
“That’s right. Your father knew there was more to the story, and felt certain he’d figure out the rest eventually. Your parents came to New York, where they took jobs at Hunter College and went about their lives. Then the unthinkable happened.”
“I killed again.”
Max nodded gravely. “Six months to the day, to be exact. It happened at night. You were in bed, and your parents went to see a newborn in a neighbor’s apartment. When they returned, your mother went to check on you, and found you covered in blood.”
Peter stared at the table, thinking he might be sick.
Max squeezed his arm. “It gets better,” he said.
“How can this story possibly get better?” he half whispered.
“Because now you’re going to hear the truth.”
His head snapped. “Which is what?”
“While your mother tended to you, your father went onto the fire escape outside your bedroom. Finding more blood, he followed it down to an alley. It was there that he found your victim, who’d been beaten around the face and had died from loss of blood.”
“How awful.”
“Stop flogging yourself. I said it got better, didn’t I?”
“Sorry.”
“The man in the alley reminded your father of your victim in Hyde Park. Both men were physically large, in their early thirties, and rough looking. That bothered your father, yet he was still unable to make the connection. He decided to move the body before someone discovered it, and called me for help.”