“But you went to her hotel room a lot,” says Roz. “I know it for a fact!”
“It’s not what you think,” says Larry.
“You realize she’s dead?” Roz says, playing her ace. “I just came from there, they just fished her out of the fountain!”
“Dead?” says Boyce. “,’Of what? A self-inflicted snakebite?”
“Who knows?” says Roz. “Maybe somebody threw her off the balcony.”
“Maybe she jumped,” says Boyce. “When lovely woman stoops to folly, and finds too late that men betray, they jump off balconies.”
“I just hope to God you had nothing to do with it,” says Roz; to Larry.
Boyce says quickly, “He couldn’t have, he was nowhere near her tonight. He was with me.”
“I was trying to talk her out of it,” says Larry. “She wanted money. I didn’t have enough, and I could hardly ask you for some.
„
“Talk her out of what? Money for what?” says Roz. She’s almost yelling.
“For not telling you,” says Larry miserably. “I thought I could keep it secret. I didn’t want to make things any worse—I thought you’d been upset enough, because of Dad, and everything.”
“Judas Priest; for not telling me what?” shouts Roz. “You’ll be the death of me!” She sounds exactly like her own mother. All the same, so sweet, Larry trying to protect her. He doesn’t want to come home and find her flopping around on the kitchen floor, the way he did before. “Boyce,” she says, more gently, “have you got a cigarette?”
Boyce, ever prepared, hands her the package and flicks his lighter for her. “I think it’s time,” he says to Larry.
Larry gulps, stares at the floor, looks resigned. “Mom,” he says, gay.”
Roz feels her eyes bugging out like those of a strangled rabbit. Why didn’t she see, why couldn’t she tell, what’s the matter with her anyway? Nicotine grabs at her lungs, she really must quit, and then she coughs, and smoke billows from her mouth, and maybe she’s about to have a premature heart attack! That’s what she’ll do, fall to the floor in a heap and let everyone else deal with this, because it’s way beyond her.
But she sees the distress in Larry’s eyes, and the appeal. No, she can handle it, if she can bite her tongue hard enough. It’s just that she wasn’t prepared. What’s the right thing to say? I love you anyway? You’re still my son? What about my grandchildren?
“But all those bimbos you put me through!” is what she comes out with. She’s got it now: he was trying to please her. Trying to bring home a woman, like some kind of dutiful exam certificate, to show Mom. To show he’d passed.
“A man can but do his best,” says Boyce. “Walter Scott.”
“What about the twins?” Roz whispers. They are at a formative stage; how will she tell them?
“Oh, the twins know,” says Larry, relieved that he’s got at least one corner covered. “They worked it out pretty fast. They say it’s cool.” That figures, thinks Roz: for them, the fences once so firmly in place around the gender corrals are just a bunch of rusty old wire.
“Think of it this way,” says Boyce affectionately. “You’re not losing a son, you’re gaining a son:’
“I’ve decided to go to law school,” says Larry. Now that the worst is over and Roz hasn’t croaked or burst, he looks relieved. “We want you to help us decorate our apartment:”
“Sweetie,” says Roz, taking a deep breath, I’d be glad to.” It’s not that she’s prejudiced, and her own marriage wasn’t such a terrific argument for heterosexuality, and neither was Mitch, and she just wants Larry to be happy, and if this is how he plans to do it, fine, and maybe Boyce will be a good influence and make him pick his clothes up off the floor and keep him out of trouble; but it’s been a long day. Tomorrow she’ll be genuinely warm and accepting. For tonight, hypocrisy will have to do.
“Ms. Andrews, you’re the glass of fashion and the mould of form,” says Boyce.
Roz spreads her hands wide, raises her shoulders, pulls down the, corners of her mouth. “Tell me,” she says. “What are my options?”
Men in overcoats come to visit. They want to know a lot of things about Zenia. Which of her three passports is real, if any. Where she actually came from. What she was doing.
Tony is informative, Charis vague; Roz is careful, because she doesn’t want Larry involved. But she needn’t have worried, because none of these men seems to be the least interested in Larry. What they are interested in is Zenia’s two packed suitcases, left neatly on the bed, one of them with eleven little plastic bags of white powder in them, or so they say. A twelfth bag was open, beside the phone. Not nose candy either: heroin, and ninety per cent pure. They look out from their immobile faces, their eyes like intelligent pebbles, watching for twinges, for hints of guilty knowledge.
They are also interested in the needle found on the balcony, they continue, and. in the fact that Zenia died of an overdose before even hitting the water. Could she have been trying the stuff out, without knowing the unusual strength of what she was buying, or selling? There were track marks on her left arm, although they looked old. According to the overcoats, there have been more and more overdoses like that; someone is flooding the market with high-octane product, and even the experienced aren’t prepared.
There were nobody’s fingerprints on the needle, except Zenia’s, they tell her. As for her swan dive into the fountain, she could have fallen. She was a tall woman, and the sheet-metal balcony railings were really too low for safety; standards should be improved. Such a thing is possible. If she’d been leaning over. On the other hand, the heroin could have been a plant. It might have been murder.
Or it might have been suicide, Tony tells them. She would like them to believe this. She tells them that Zenia may not have been a well person.
Of course, say the men in overcoats politely. We know about that. We found the prescriptions in her suitcase, we traced the doctor. Seems she had a fake health card as well as some fake passports, but the disease itself was real enough. Six months to live: ovarian cancer. But there was no suicide note.
Tony tells them there wouldn’t have been: Zenia was not really the note-writing kind.
The men in overcoats look at her, their small eyes glinting with scepticism. They don’t buy any of these theories, but they don’t have another one, not one that holds water.
Tony sees how it will be: Zenia will prove too smart for the men in overcoats. She will outfox them, just as she’s always outfoxed everyone else. She finds herself being pleased about this, elated even, as if her faith in Zenia—a faith she didn’t realize she had—is being vindicated. Let them sweat! Why should everyone know everything? It’s not as if there are no precedents: history teems with people who died in unclear ways.
Still, she feels honour-bound to report the conversation about Gerry Bull and Project Babylon, although it’s not merely honour that impels her: she hopes very much that if Zenia was murdered it was by professionals, rather than by anyone she knows. The men tell her they are retracing Zenia’s steps, as best they can, via her plane tickets; she has certainly been in some very odd places in the last little while. But there’s nothing conclusive. They shake hands and depart, asking Tony to call them if she hears anything else. She says she will.
She’s left facing the unlikely possibility that all three of Zenia’s most recent stories—or parts of them, at least—may have been true. What if Zenia’s cries for help really were cries for help, this time?