Blow Fly

84

"SIT DOWN," SCARPETTA SAYS, as if Lucy is no longer a grown-up.

The lights are out in the living room, and the New York skyline surrounds them with its brilliant possibilities and soaring power. Scarpetta could stare at it for hours, the way she does the sea. Lucy sits next to her on Berger's couch.

"This is a good place to be," Scarpetta says, gazing out at millions of lights.

She looks for the moon but can't find it behind buildings. Lucy is quietly crying.

"I've often wondered, Lucy, what would have happened had I been your real mother. Would you have adopted such a dangerous world and stormed through it so brazenly, so outrageously, so stunningly? Or would you be married with children?"

"I think you know the answer to that," Lucy mutters, wiping her eyes.

"Maybe you would have been a Rhodes scholar, gone to Oxford and become a famous poet."

Lucy looks at her to see if she's joking. She's not.

"A gentler life," her aunt says softly. "I raised you, or, better stated, I attended to you as best I could and can't imagine loving any child more than I did-and do-love you. But through my eyes, you found the ugliness in the world."

"Through your eyes I found decency, humanity and justice," Lucy replies. "I wouldn't change anything."

"Then why are you crying?" She picks out distant planes glowing like small planets.

"I don't know."

Scarpetta smiles. "That's what you used to say when you were a little girl. Whenever you were sad and I'd ask you why, you'd say I don't know. Therefore, my very astute diagnosis is that you are sad."

Lucy wipes more tears from her face.

"I don't know exactly what happened in Poland," her aunt then says.

Shifting her position on the couch, Scarpetta arranges pillows behind her back, as if inviting a long story. She continues to look past Lucy, out windows into the glittering night, because it is harder for people to have difficult conversations while they are looking at each other.

"I don't need you to tell me. But I think you need to tell me, Lucy."

Her niece stares out at the city crowded around them. She thinks of dark, high seas and ships lit up. Ships mean ports, and ports mean the Chandonnes. Ports are the arteries for their criminal commerce. Rocco may have been only one vessel, but his connection to Scarpetta, to all of them, had to be severed.

Yes. It had to be.

Please forgive me, Aunt Kay. Please say it's all right. Please don't lose your respect for me and think I've become one of them.

"Ever since Benton died, you've been a Fury, a spirit of punishment, and there isn't enough power in this entire city to satisfy your hunger for it," Scarpetta talks on, still gently. "This is a good place for you to be," she says, as both of them stare out at the lights of the most powerful city on Earth. "Because one of these days when you're glutted with power, maybe you'll realize that too much of it is unbearable."

"You say that to explain yourself," Lucy comments with no trace of rancor. "You were the most powerful medical examiner in the country, perhaps in the world. You were the Chief. Maybe it was unbearable, that power and admiration."

Lucy's beautiful face is not quite as sad now.

"So much has seemed unbearable," Scarpetta replies. "So much. But no. I didn't find my power unbearable when I was the Chief. I have found losing my power unbearable. You and I feel differently about power. I am not proving anything. You are always proving something when it is so unnecessary."

"You haven't lost it," Lucy tells her. "Your removal from power was an illusion. Politics. Your true power has never been imposed by the outside world, and it follows that the outside world can't take it away from you."

"What has Benton done to us?"

Her question startles Lucy, as if Scarpetta somehow knows the truth.

"Since he died… I still can scarcely bring myself to say that word. Died. "She pauses. "Since then it seems the rest of us have gone to ruin. Like a country under seige. One city falling after another. You, Marino, me. Mostly you."

"Yes, I am a Fury." Lucy gets up, moves to the window and sits cross-legged on Jaime Berger's splendid antique rug. "I am the avenger. I admit it. I feel the world is safer, that you are safer, all of us are safer with Rocco dead."

"But you can't play God. You're not even a sworn law-enforcement officer anymore, Lucy. The Last Precinct is private."

"Not exactly. We are a satellite of international law enforcement, work with them, usually behind the curtain of Interpol. We are empowered by other high authorities I can't talk to you about."

"A high authority that empowered you to legally rid the world of Rocco Caggiano?" Scarpetta asks. "Did you pull the trigger, Lucy? I need to know that. At least that."

Lucy shakes her head. No, she didn't pull the trigger. Only because Rudy insisted on firing that round and having gunpowder and tiny drops of Rocco's blood blow back on his hands, not hers. Rocco's blood on Rudy's hands. That wasn't fair, Lucy tells her aunt.

"I shouldn't have allowed Rudy to put himself through that. I take equal responsibility for Rocco's death. Actually, I take full responsibility, because it was by my instigation that Rudy went on the mission to Poland."

They talk until late, and when Lucy has relayed all that happened in Szczecin, she awaits her aunt's condemnation. The worst punishment would be exile from Scarpetta's life, just as Benton has been exiled from it.

"I'm relieved that Rocco's dead," Scarpetta says. "What's done is done," she adds. "At some point, Marino will want to know what really happened to his son."