“You mean you’re a lawyer, or an FBI agent?”
“Lawyer,” she said. “My husband was the FBI agent. He got to do the glamorous stuff, and I sit in an office.”
“Was. You’re divorced.” He tried again.
“No such luck,” she said. “Jim died of cancer about a year ago.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” He noted the way she said it. It would be better if he could be alive. She loved him, or had reached the stage where he had a rosy glow around him and she was telling herself that she did. But she was in luck; she was going to be one of those widows who didn’t last long after her husband died.
“Don’t be,” she said. “Everybody loses somebody; if it’s not a husband it’s parents, grandparents. And we had the kids. I’m lucky.”
He nodded. “That’s a nice way to think about it.”
“You sound like you think I’m deluding myself.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Wolf said. “I meant it. We don’t have a whole lot of choice about certain things, and death is one of them. But you do have a choice about how you think about it.”
“That’s true. But I’ve thought about it in a lot of different ways, and I think this is the right one—not because it’s the most useful, but because it’s the most accurate. Most of the time I don’t feel sad. I just miss him.”
Wolf wasn’t really listening now. Something strange was happening. From his seat at the end of the table he could see a red glow through the curtains. It was the brake lights of a car pulling up in front of his house across the street. After a second or two the lights went out. He hadn’t seen any headlights. He listened for the thumps of doors slamming so he could count them, but he couldn’t pick up a sound. “Tell me about him,” he said. “I mean, if it doesn’t bother you.”
It was strange the way he focused his eyes on some point beyond the wall, almost like a blind person. Maybe he was remembering something of his own. There was more to him than she had thought. “Well, we had fun together.…”
“You mean he had a sense of humor.”
“Not exactly. I mean, he did, but it was sort of an FBI agent’s sense of humor. I know it’s not fair, but they’re in a mostly male sort of world, so most of the jokes are inside jokes, and the ones that aren’t are kind of simple. Somebody famous once said that the difference between men and women is that women don’t like Falstaff.”
What the hell was she talking about? He still hadn’t heard the doors. He tried to concentrate. “I thought it was The Three Stooges.”
She grinned. “That was a different famous person.”
He hadn’t heard the doors, but a car went by on the street, and he saw that for just a second the brake lights went on as it passed his house. “Maybe so.”
“I guess what I mean about Jim was that he had a capacity for fun. The way we got together was that ten years ago we were each assigned to the same case. It was a bad case, and the outcome was awful. Afterward I took six months in Europe. One morning, really early, I was asleep in my hotel when the concierge woke me up to tell me I had a visitor. It was Jim. We hadn’t been dating or anything; he simply showed up.”
It must be the police. How could they have followed him here from the parking structure without him seeing? Why hadn’t they just grabbed him as he had pulled into his driveway? He realized that some reaction was expected, but he hadn’t heard any of it, so he smiled.
“Then later, about two years ago, he came home one day with three tickets for a flight to London.”
“A flight to London?”
“That’s right. He did it because it had been eight years since the first time.”
“Very nice,” he said. “That is fun.”
“He was always doing unexpected things like that. When I say he was an FBI agent, you probably picture a fullback with a big neck. He wasn’t. In fact, he looked enough like you to be a relative. He was perfectly normal, about your size, and had an intelligent look in his eyes. He had a perfectly good law degree, and we always talked about going into practice together someday.”
Was it possible that she had somehow identified him? Maybe she was going on like this to give her people time to surround the place. She would go out to the kitchen again to get more coffee, then slip out the back while the SWAT team came bursting in through every door and window. No, she had actually made herself feel sad. He wanted to look out the window at the people across the street, but he couldn’t take the chance. “Here,” he said. “Let me help you take the plates and stuff.” He picked up a plate and the glass serving dish with the torte on it and stood up. He decided that if she was conning him he would crack the serving dish on the edge of the counter and bring it across her throat.
As they walked to the kitchen, he had to think of something to say. “It’s too bad the kids were so young. They didn’t get to see much of him.”
“I know,” said Elizabeth. “I think it’s going to be hardest on Jimmy. He’ll remember him a little bit. Then there’s all that stuff the psychologists put in their books to scare mothers.…”
“What stuff?”
“About little boys needing men to identify with.”
“I wouldn’t take that too seriously.”
“I don’t know. I find myself stuck being a combination of the strong, domineering mother and the cold, distant father.” She looked at him mischievously. “I run into the product a lot professionally.”
She couldn’t see that he had stepped sideways through the door because she was looking the other way. He surveyed the kitchen, but there was nothing. The place looked like the kitchens he remembered seeing on television when he was a kid, with curtains on the window over the sink and a lot of cookie jars and salt-and-pepper shakers that looked like fish and fruit and little people in rows on the shelf. It was also a mess. There were pots and pans and knives and spills on the counter, and even a couple of slippery spots on the floor where something had dripped while she was cooking the kids’ dinner. Eddie’s kitchen had looked like an operating room in a hospital, with a gleaming stainless-steel cutting table in the middle of the floor that he had bought from the same wholesaler he dealt with at the butcher shop. But Eddie had been a rotten cook, so they had eaten at diners whenever they could think of an excuse.
He followed her back to the dining room for another load of dishes. He had to get a look out that window. “Did you take any pictures of England?”
“Sure,” she said. “But you don’t want to see them.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Jim took almost all of them, so it’s Elizabeth and Jimmy in front of this and Elizabeth and Jimmy in front of that.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
She shrugged. “You have to promise that as soon as you’re bored you’ll stop looking. They’re what you might call priceless family treasures. That means we’re always in focus, but the monuments and cathedrals aren’t. I put them away in Jimmy’s closet because I knew that someday he and Amanda will want to look at them.”
“If it’s too much trouble, don’t bother. I just thought that sometime I might like to go there. I’ve never been out of this country.”
“I don’t mind showing them to you. It’s just that looking at pictures of somebody else’s vacation is sort of a yawn.”
“I promise not to.”
Carmine Fusco sat in the dark in the living room of the house where the Butcher’s Boy had parked Martillo’s car. He had been sitting in a comfortable chair to the side of the door and about fifteen feet away from it, but now he was restless and he stood up. Imagine a man like that living in this kind of a house for all these years. It was going to be an embarrassment to Mr. Vico if anybody found out that the Butcher’s Boy had been living quietly in the Washington suburbs for ten years.