Blood Money

26

As Jane drove west out of Chicago on Interstate 90, her constant glances into the rearview mirror and her careful appraisals of each car that appeared beside her gave her a chance to study the women that she was trying to impersonate. That one ahead and to the right had probably dropped somebody off in the city—a husband at work, a child at school—and she was driving her Land Rover back to the suburbs. Jane read the frame around the license plate: Valley Imports, Elk Grove Village. Jane pushed a bit harder on the accelerator to pull closer to the woman. The hair looked almost exactly like Jane’s. A lot of women with babies cut their hair to keep little fingers from tangling in it. As Jane drew abreast of the woman, she could see a child strapped in a car seat behind her.

Jane pulled ahead. She had to keep looking for danger, not finding new ways of telling herself it was gone. She had verified that the changes she had made had lowered her profile—made her look like a million other women—and proving it to herself over and over was pointless. She was doing what she had decided to do, and she had known exactly what the risks would be before she had made the choice. There were lots of people who had been dazzled by the sums of money the Mafia took in, and had concocted some clever scheme to divert some of it. There were skimmers and embezzlers and hijackers and con men, young members of gangs who got into grown-up rackets without considering who had been making all that money before they were born. The graveyards of big cities were full of them.

The half disguise she had assumed was not bad, but it was best in situations like this: if all anyone could see were brief glances from a distance, she was difficult to distinguish from the people around her. At close quarters, she was still Jane. She spent a few seconds thinking her way through the rest of her original itinerary, and decided it was not good enough. They had her picture, they knew that she was mailing letters. The only way to fight them was to try to do it quickly.

Jane stopped at mailboxes in Hoffman Estates, Elgin, Rockford. From there she took 39 south until she came to a tollway rest stop just west of De Kalb. After she had mailed her letters she filled the gas tank, spent a few minutes rearranging her boxes of letters in the Explorer to bring the next ones up to the front, and went into the little store to buy a pile of road maps.

Then Jane began to drive. She kept moving across the long, straight highways, always just fast enough to cheat the speed limit a little but not enough to be pulled over by the highway patrol. She drove to Moline, crossed the bridge over the Mississippi into Iowa, and stopped in Davenport, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids. She turned west again on Route 30 and reached Ames at six, then went south to Des Moines. She didn’t stop for dinner until she had approached the southern edge of the city.

She ate quickly, spent five minutes moving the next boxes of letters to the front of the Explorer, collapsed the empties and stuffed them into a Dumpster, then drove onto Interstate 35. She reached Kansas City after dark, and found a big central post office just west of the junction with Interstate 70. She was fairly confident that even the most thorough search for her wouldn’t include any surveillance of closed post offices, so she drove up, dropped her mail in the box outside, and headed for the entrance to Interstate 70.

She stopped in Columbia, reached St. Louis just before dawn, and slipped into the city just ahead of the wave of commuters. She made five stops on her way through St. Louis, and as the traffic around her began to crowd and slow, she got back on 70 and crossed the Mississippi again into East St. Louis.

Jane’s nervous energy was beginning to leave her after the night of headlights on nearly empty highways. She considered her options. She didn’t feel ready to settle into a hotel, because it would take too much time, so she pulled off the big highway, made her way back to the park with a little patch of green grass and shady trees she had seen from the road, parked the Explorer, climbed into the back seat, and slept.

When she awoke, it was to the sound of voices. She lay still and listened for a second, then verified that they were the voices of children. She raised her head and looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was noon, and there were other cars in the lot. As she got back into the driver’s seat, she could see that there were three families at the picnic tables, the parents laying out food and drinks, the children running around in that aimless way they did after they had been confined in a car—first chasing one another, then rushing back, then just running. Jane backed out of her parking space and headed for the interstate.

The noon sun was bright, the day was clear, and the stops were far apart. She stopped at Vandalia and Effingham to mail letters, then followed Interstate 70 into Indiana at four o’clock.

She stopped just over the border at Terre Haute, then at Indianapolis, then Fort Wayne. She ate in a truck stop, where she knew there would be little competition for the ladies’ room. She locked the door, washed herself as well as she could, and worked on changing her appearance again.

It was great to be a young suburban matron driving her SUV around during the daytime, but it wasn’t daytime anymore. Tonight she wasn’t going to be driving across long, sparsely populated stretches. She knew that in some of the areas where she was going tonight, suburban matrons were going to be scarce. She tucked her short hair up under her baseball cap, put her thin windbreaker on over a loose sweatshirt, and laced up her running shoes. She evaluated herself in the mirror. She didn’t look like a man, precisely, but she was as tall as many men, and on a dark city street, her silhouette wouldn’t scream out, “What am I doing here alone?” She slipped her wallet into her back pocket like a man, and wondered how they could stand the way that felt. But when she stepped back from the mirror far enough to see herself at full length, she was pleased. It disguised the female shape of her backside pretty well, if she kept the windbreaker down to her hips.

She walked out to the Explorer and drove off to pick up Interstate 69. She reached the Michigan border at nine, then stopped in Battle Creek, Lansing, and Flint, so it was after midnight when Jane abandoned Interstate 69 and turned onto Interstate 75 toward Detroit.

Jane was premeditated and methodical, because time mattered. At each stop she walked quickly with her head up and her eyes scanning, dropped off her mail, and hurried back to the vehicle. Each time she left a freeway, she memorized the exit she had used to leave it and drove back the same way to the entrance ramp. She spent the night making the circuit of the cities around Detroit.

Jane had driven all day and most of the night after nothing more than a nap on the back seat, and she was feeling exhausted and dirty. She had once hidden a runner in Ann Arbor, and tonight her memory of the city made it seem like a good place to stop for what remained of the night. The University of Michigan was about half the population, so in the summer it probably wouldn’t be difficult to find a vacant place to sleep. Her Wisconsin license plates would not be a problem, because university towns were full of cars from other states.

Jane got off Interstate 94 at State Street and headed north toward the university campus. She found a mailbox after only two blocks, mailed her letters, and began to watch for the right sort of motel. As she crossed Huron Street, she saw one that seemed right. It consisted of a big building in front for the reception area and a restaurant and, behind it, several smaller buildings shielded somewhat from the noise of the highway, where people could park their cars outside their rooms.

Jane stopped in front of the main building and walked toward the lighted glass doors, where she could see a small lobby. She reached for the handle of the glass door and stood still. Just inside the door was a bulletin board. In the middle, among the advertisements for band concerts, dry-cleaning services, and restaurants, was the picture of Jane. This time the block letters above the telephone number said, GRADUATE STUDENT MISSING.

Jane turned on her heel, walked back to the Explorer, and drove out onto the street to continue north. When she reached Highway 23, she turned east again toward Detroit. When she stopped at an all-night station in Plymouth to fill the gas tank, she knew that there was only one solution to her problem. She had to go on.

Jane got back into the car and drove, but within fifteen minutes she regretted it. She had begun to sense a light-headed, vertiginous feeling that told her she wasn’t going to be able to stay on the road much longer. Every time she turned her head to glance at the mirrors, she would see flashes of light, and images that almost had shapes but didn’t have time to solidify before she blinked them away. The next stage would be when they acquired firm, unchanging outlines, and that would mean she had fallen asleep and begun to dream.

She rubbed her eyes and slapped her cheeks hard, so they stung for a few seconds, and stared ahead at the long, dark highway. It was a short run down to Toledo, no more than sixty miles of straight, flat freeway, but it seemed endless to her now.

When she reached the outskirts of the city, she could see that the light was already beginning to change. The sun would be coming up above the other end of the lake in less than an hour, and she would be driving straight into the glare. She was going to have to find a place to rest. She watched the exits until she began to see tall buildings. When she saw a sign that said CONVENTION CENTER, she took the next exit and drove south on Monroe Street. The kind of place she wanted would be in the center of the city, where visitors came to do business and cars were parked underground or in parking structures. She found a big Holiday Inn near the convention center and parked two floors down in the garage beneath it. When she picked up one of her gray suitcases and prepared to go inside, she noticed that one of the boxes of mail was visible, with the letters in plain sight. She quickly covered her boxes of mail with the carpet, and locked the Explorer. She had just seen the proof that she had not stopped too soon. Her life depended on alertness and premeditation, and she had long ago lost her edge.

When Jane entered her room and locked the door, she gave herself permission to feel the two days of exhaustion. It took a great deal of discipline for her to carry her suitcase to the stand near the bed. She stripped off her clothes, turned down the bed covers, then felt an irritated, fussy reluctance to lie down between the clean white sheets. She had been on the road for days without a bath. Could it have been since Milwaukee? She walked into the bathroom, ran the shower, and scrubbed herself. Then she closed the drain and let the shower fill the tub. She lay back in the hot, soothing water for a time, listening to the silence. She let her head submerge, and felt her short hair floating around her ears, then lifted her face just above the surface with her eyes still closed.

Jane awoke with a start, and sat up. The water sloshed in a wave toward the end of the tub, then rolled back toward her. She had fallen asleep. She climbed out, used the big, fluffy towels to dry herself, then the hair dryer and comb on her hair. The short hair dried much more quickly than she had expected it to: maybe it wasn’t so bad.

At last she climbed between the sheets, turned off the bedside lamp, and closed her eyes. The images of the past two days crowded one another behind her eyelids: the lines on a long road coming into being just beyond the range of her headlights, already brightening and streaking toward her like projectiles.

Jane knew that she was in a dream, because the trees around her seemed to form in some instant just before she looked at them. They would change and move to arrange themselves in better order, like a crowd of soldiers falling into line.

Jane was running. She picked out the narrow trail between the trees, keeping her eyes high enough to see the next twenty feet so her mind would record the high spots and obstacles and plant each stride safely while her eyes focused ahead to see that much more of the trail. She used an enormous amount of concentration, because of the ones who were tracking her.

Each stride had to be longer than the ones that they were taking, and the rhythm of her feet hitting the ground had to be more rapid than the pace they were making. They were far enough behind her so that she could not hear them, and they were back beyond seeing in the thick forest. She knew that every time the path curved, the trees would appear to close behind her.

The one concern she had was that the sun had gone down. The light that filtered through the leaves above her was not reaching the path in bright, moving shafts anymore, and it was getting difficult to keep up her speed. The dark would have been comforting if she could have simply crawled into the thick brush and hidden, but she could not. All she could do was keep moving.

Just as the darkness fell, she saw the woman. The woman had thick black hair that was not like Jane’s, because it had a bit of a curl to it, and Jane’s was long and straight. Her skin was smooth and creamy white, and she was wearing a white silk dress that Jane recognized. It had belonged to Jane’s mother once, before Jane was born, and she had worn it for a photograph with Jane’s father that still stood on the mantel. To Jane it stood for all old-fashioned dresses.

The woman was standing perfectly still in the middle of the path, looking directly at Jane. She turned and walked through the low plants to the right, and Jane knew she was supposed to follow. The woman stepped through a thick barrier of bushes, and Jane tried to step through after her, but the opening the woman had found was gone. Jane fought her way through, scratching her arms and legs on the branches that rustled and snapped.

Jane came out the other side and stopped. At first she thought she was in the large clearing she had been expecting: thickets didn’t grow in the shade of the tall forest trees, but in places where the trees had fallen. The space was more than that. It was a lawn. There was a big swimming pool with water that glowed from submerged lights, then a row of tennis courts, and a big old hotel. Dim lights on the ground floor shone through French doors, and Jane could see men in dark suits and women in bright, thin summer dresses dancing. After she had noticed them, she began to hear the music, a faint, melodious sound of a band from the 1940s.

The woman was on the lawn, and Jane stepped closer to her. When she reached a distance of five feet, the woman turned and Jane stopped. “You’re a ghost.”

The woman shrugged. She was very young—little more than a teenager—and the quick, playful movement of her graceful body made Jane feel heavy and tired from her run. “I’m a woman, like you.”

Jane suddenly knew her. “You’re Francesca Giannini. You’re Vincent Ogliaro’s mother.”

The woman smiled. “Not yet,” she said. “Not for at least nine months.” She half-turned and pointed at the building across the lawn. “Tonight, I’m only twenty. I’m upstairs there—the fifth floor, third window from the right.”

“How—”

“I’m asleep, dreaming. My father brought me here on the train. He’s up in the private banquet room with his friends and his enemies and a bunch of soldiers. The women and children are asleep.”

“I’m in your dream, and you’re in mine?”

Francesca Giannini said, “There are things you can’t know, and things you can. Hawenneyu the right-handed twin makes things—women who are smooth and fresh and beautiful. Hanegoategeh the left-handed twin makes time count, so it wrinkles and bends us and takes our strength. Hawenneyu gives us love to replenish the world, so living in time won’t matter to us. Hanegoategeh separates the lovers, so the love turns into pain.”

“That’s you,” said Jane.

“Is it?” asked Francesca. “The brothers fight. One is right-handed and the other left-handed, like images in a mirror. Each anticipates what the other’s next stratagem will be, and constructs the counterattack before it begins. The first can predict the counterstroke, and changes his tactic ever so slightly, or does the opposite. It’s like reaching your right hand to the surface of the mirror: the left hand of your reflection rises to meet it. They’ve been fighting this way since the beginning of the world, so time folds, and things that happened fifty years ago and others that are happening now are the same instant: attack and counterattack conceived simultaneously.”

Francesca Giannini paused, and her bright black eyes seemed to change subtly to be older, to grow cunning and predatory, the way Jane had imagined her. “You think I spent my life embracing Hanegoategeh, the left-handed. Maybe I was just Hawenneyu’s trick on his brother. Maybe I was put here tonight”—she indicated the big, ornate hotel—“as a stratagem.”

“Why? So Bernie Lupus would meet you, and fall in love? That’s how he was—will be—trapped into spending his life hiding money for the Mafia.”

Francesca shrugged. “Maybe that’s what happened. And maybe the opposite. Maybe it was so Bernie would spend a lifetime collecting it, and then someone—I—would love him enough to set him loose alive with the money.”

“How do I know?”

Francesca Giannini shook her head sadly. “All we can know is what you always knew. Everything that happens is part of the fighting.”

“Which one did this?”

Francesca shrugged. “Hawenneyu makes a man who can remember everything he sees. Hanegoategeh makes him poor and hungry. Hawenneyu sees that he’s taken in and fed by strangers. Hanegoategeh has already ensured that the strangers will be a tribe of cannibals. Hawenneyu gives one of the cannibals a young daughter.” She held out her white dress and twirled for Jane.

Jane said, “So beautiful. A man who could never forget would—”

“Would never forget,” interrupted Francesca. “I’m wearing this dress in my dream because I’ve already laid it out to wear when I wake up tomorrow. That’s when Bernie and I will meet.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, like a sigh of pleasure, then let it out. “Later on I’ll age, as Hanegoategeh wanted. Maybe I’ll do savage things, the way he wanted. But it was Hawenneyu that made Bernie so that he will remember me exactly this way forever.”

“But what am I supposed to do?” asked Jane.

Francesca shrugged. “I’m just a twenty-year-old girl. I suppose you should do what you think is best.”

“But this whole story—everything any of us has been doing—it’s all yours: your son, your lover, your death, your friends, your enemies.”

“I can only see the little spot on the earth my eyes can reach for the brief time when they’re open. Maybe that’s why you’re here: because the story is longer than one woman’s life. Maybe we were both part of Hawenneyu’s trick to fool Hanegoategeh into collecting money for the poor and the sick. Maybe your whole trip was designed to keep you away from Carey, so he would work late and be at the hospital to operate on somebody and save his life. Maybe it was all so that Rita would be killed in one place instead of another. For all I know, it was just so you would transport the Ford Explorer from Milwaukee so it will be wherever you leave it. But be careful. You’re making mistakes, and time moves so fast.”

Jane awoke, her heart beating in a frantic rhythm and her eyes wide. She looked around her, and it took her a second to remember why she was in a hotel room. She lay there for a minute deciphering the sounds in the hallway. When she had satisfied herself that the two sets of heavy male footsteps were just a bellman taking a new guest to a room near the end of the hall, she sat up and looked at the clock. It was two-thirty in the afternoon.

Jane showered and dressed in a good pair of slacks, a clean blouse and jacket. She had lunch in the hotel restaurant and thought about what she had done so far. Somehow, somewhere early in this, she had made a mistake. She had only been mailing letters for three days when the man in Seattle had tried to grab her. For all this time, she had put off thinking clearly about it.

From the moment when she had first noticed the large numbers of men watching the airports, she had been afraid that one of them would be someone who had seen her before. When the man had approached her in Seattle, he had seemed to step into her fear and give it a tangible form. She was willing to believe that he might recognize her even though he didn’t look familiar to her. Later she had seen the drawings, and they had seemed to explain everything. But they didn’t.

Jane had ignored the fact that the men in Seattle had been stalking another woman first. She had looked a little bit like Jane, but the biggest similarity was that she had been mailing letters. It was possible that one of the men had recognized Jane, and it was possible that by then they knew someone must be mailing letters to charities. But how could they have connected those two facts? Had something been wrong with the first batch of letters?

Jane took the elevator to the garage and opened the tailgate of the Explorer. She unzipped the first suitcase. She picked out a pile of letters with a rubber band around them. The return addresses were all in Ohio, and the zip codes were in sequence. No, she thought. If it were that kind of mistake—a letter put into a mailbox in the wrong state—it might not be noticed even by the charities, let alone come to the attention of criminals.

It could be something wrong with the letters themselves, but they weren’t all alike. She had written most of them herself, and Henry had read all of them before they were sealed. Maybe one of the checks had told somebody something, but the only way she could think of to find out what it might be was to talk to Henry. And how would the families know so soon? It had to be something that an ordinary person could pick up at a glance. And a person like that—any outsider—would be unlikely to see anything but the envelope. She would just have to look at the envelopes again.

She began to flip through the stacks of letters, then set each one aside. Each had been stamped, each had a plausible return address bearing a zip code in sequence with the others near it, and each was addressed to some charity.

It was ten minutes before she found the letter with no return address. It was stuck among the letters to be mailed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At first, Jane considered letting it go, but she glanced at the address: Ann Shelford, FSP, Box 747, Starke, Florida 32081.

Jane put the rest of her stacks of letters into their suitcases. She calmly placed them in order to match her new itinerary, and zipped them up. She took the single letter, closed the tailgate, and got into the front seat. Then she opened the envelope.

The print style was the one Jane had stared at for a month, from the laser printer in Santa Fe. It had been slipped in with the letters Jane had picked up in Chicago, so that it wouldn’t have a Santa Fe postmark.

“Dear Mama,” it began. Jane felt a twinge of discomfort at what she was doing, and an enormous sadness. “Things are going pretty well for me now. I’m still living in the house out in the country with that friend I told you about.” Jane’s heart stopped for a second, then began to beat harder. She reminded herself that the “friend” must be Bernie. She could have told her mother about him as long as a year ago. Jane forced her eyes back to the letter.

“She and I have a lot in common, and we get along fine. We both like being outdoors, and traveling, and nice food. Now and then we drive into town and eat at a restaurant in a hotel called Eldorado. I’ve been trying to keep track of what I taste, and see if I can piece together the recipe. Maybe by the time I see you again, I’ll be able to cook something fancy for you. I don’t mean to make you jealous. She’s sort of like a big sister, not like a mother or anything.” Jane felt the sadness growing. Rita was a child, and she obviously had been lonely and scared, so she had created a fantasy complete with a Jane who was the way she wished Jane was. Jane’s guilt was getting worse, too. She wasn’t sure whether she had even told Rita yet, but she couldn’t think of a way that Rita could see her mother again for the next few years.

“I hope things are going okay for you. I know jail can’t be pleasant, but be patient, and maybe they’ll let you out early. I can’t come visit you like I used to, but I think about you and send you good thoughts. Well, I should get this into the envelope, because my friend is going out to mail some other things. I just wanted to write to you again right away, so I could tell you that things are better. I’m afraid my last letter might have made you feel worried.”

Jane whispered, “I don’t know, but it makes me feel worried.” She tried to collect her thoughts, but it was difficult because there were too many questions. She drove the Explorer out to the street and kept going until she saw a pay telephone attached to the front of a convenience store.

Jane dialed the telephone number of the house in Santa Fe, then pumped quarters into the slot until she had matched the toll. The telephone rang once, twice, three times, and her mind formed a picture of Bernie and Rita. They would be standing in the living room with the telephone between them. One of them would reach down to pick it up, and the other would say, “No. Don’t. Nobody knows we’re here.” “It could be Jane or Henry.” “If she was going to call, she would have told us.” “Maybe she didn’t know.” “It could be somebody making sure we’re in the house so they can come and kill us.”

The telephone rang fifteen times, but nobody picked it up. Jane closed her eyes and stood beside the building, thinking. They could be dead already, killed by people who had read Rita’s first letter. When the telephone had rung twenty times, she hung up. Jane heard a click, and her quarters came tumbling down into the cup at the bottom of the telephone.

As she walked back to the Explorer, she realized that the decision had been made. If there was an earlier letter, probably it had been among the ones she had mailed in California or Arizona, or maybe the first batch that Henry had mailed. There was no question that the families would have someone in the Florida State Prison reading Ann Shelford’s mail. Just one detail in the letter she had read—the name of the Eldorado Hotel—would be enough. There was no way to know what Rita had put in the earlier letter. If they were alive, she had to pull them out.