Bitter Truth

15

Belize City, Belize

LAST NIGHT I DREAMT I went to Veritas again. I woke up sweating and shouting from the dream in my room at the guest house in Belize City. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t force myself back to sleep. It is morning now and I have sat up all night in my underwear examining the contents of my briefcase, reviewing my mission. There are documents relating to bank accounts and bank records and the flow of great sums of money. There are documents from the State Department in Washington to present to the embassy here. There are pages from the diaries of a dead woman and a letter from a dead man and last night, when I read them together, I felt the same shiver roll through me as rolls through me whenever I read them together, which is often. They are the plainest clues I have as to what curse it was that actually afflicted the Reddmans, those and a carton of ancient ledgers that are still in my office in Philadelphia. The full truth will never be learned, but the man I seek in Belize has much of it, along with my share of the Reddman fortune.

Belize City is a pit, and that is being kind. Antiquated clapboard buildings, unpainted, weathered, streaked with age, line the warrens of narrow streets that stumble off both banks of the rank Belize River. Laundry hangs from lines on listing porches, huge rotting barrels collect rain-water for drinking, the tin roofs citywide are rusted brown. The city is crowded with the poor, it smells of fish and sewage and grease, the drivers are maniacs, the heat is oppressive, the beggars are as relentless as the mosquitoes. It is absolutely Third World and the food is bad. My guest house is right on the Caribbean but there is no beach, only a grubby strip of unpaved road called Marine Parade and then a cement barrier and then the ragged rocks that break the water’s final rush. It is dangerous, I am told, to walk in certain sections at night and those sections seem to change with whomever I talk until the map of danger has encompassed the whole of Belize City. Still, last night I put on my suit and took hold of a map of the town and a photograph from my briefcase and walked west, away from the Caribbean, into the dark heart of the city to see if anyone had seen anything of the man I am stalking.

The night was hot, the air thick, the streets as unenlightened as poverty. Cars cruised past, slowly, like predators. Pickup trucks veered by, teenagers jammed into the beds, shouting at one another in Creole. Guards stared somberly from behind chained gates. A rat scurried toward me from an open sewer, halted and sniffed, scurried back. I stopped at two nightspots, three hotel bars, a wooden shack of a club that overlooked the Caribbean, black as fear in the night except for the relentless lines of iridescent froth dying on the rocks. I had been told the shack club was habituated by lobstermen and sailors and I had wanted especially to visit it, wondering if my prey was sailing on a luxury yacht somewhere off the Belizean cayes. In each joint I bought for myself and whoever was nearby a bottled beer with a Mayan temple on the label, a Belikin, and made what conversation I could. When I showed the picture I tried to see if I could detect anything beneath the denials and the shaking heads, but there was nothing, a whole night of nothing, though I had known from the start that I was trawling bait more than anything else.

Back in my room, I took off my clothes and turned the fan to high and lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the moving air to cool my sweat. I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep only to awake with a shout a few hours later when I dreamt of Veritas.

Now the dawn is just starting to ignite. I lie down again and try to sleep but it is impossible. I watch the sun rise yellow and hot out of the ocean and feel its burgeoning heat. I shower in cold water and think of cool Alaskan glaciers but am already in a sweat by the time I tighten my tie.

When I reach the Belize Bank on Regent Street I am exhausted from the heat and my lack of sleep. I have already visited the quaint white clapboard American Embassy, like a Southern manse dropped in the middle of the Third World, and had a long talk with a junior official named Jeremy Bartlett about my problem. He was freshly scrubbed and amiable enough as he listened to my story and examined my documents but there is something about State Department personnel that leaves my teeth hurting. There must be hundreds of English majors hidden in the basements of embassies all over the world, toiling away at ingenious, long-winded ways of saying, “There’s nothing I can do.” I took his card and asked for one tiny favor and he looked at me awhile and I left before he could find a new way to say no.

After the embassy, I crossed the swing bridge to the southern part of the city and visited a Belizean lawyer with whom I had been in contact. His office was across the street from the Supreme Court building and above a tee shirt shop. He gave me a long explanation of Belize ’s robust asset protection laws, which left me feeling doubtful, but then he told me of his uncle, who was a clerk of the Supreme Court and who could manage anything with proper incentive. I wrote out a check and signed certain documents and paid certain fees and picked up certain other documents. Then it was on to the bank.

The Belize Bank building on Regent and Orange streets is almost modern, with a bright jade-green sign. It presides at the head of a rather ragged business district, its white cement and dark marble facade standing out like a shiny penny against the general disrepair of the rest of the city. In the bank I ask to speak to the assistant manager and am taken to a desk on the second floor. The man I talk to is older and distinguished, with gray hair and a proper British accent. His suit is pale beige and perfectly pressed. His face is powder dry; mine glistens, I am sure, with my sweat.

“I need information about a bank account,” I say.

He smiles officiously as I explain my situation and show him the judgment and the documents I have evidencing the flow of money. He reminds me of a State Department employee as he spends five minutes explaining to me that there is nothing he can do. “We must respect the privacy of our customers,” he explains rather patiently. “Our country’s asset protection laws give us no other choice.”

“So I have heard,” I say, “but the man I’m seeking is a murderer.”

“Well, I suppose murderers have their rights, too,” he says.

“There is a warrant for his arrest in America.”

“But this isn’t America, sir. I am truly sorry but our hands are tied.”

I look at him and his bland smile and I sigh. “My government is very interested in finding this man,” I say. “We know you are cooperating on a number of money-laundering issues with our people and we would be very grateful, and it would go a long way to easing the pressure you must now be feeling, if you’ll cooperate on this matter too.”

He nods, his polite smile intact. “We are always willing to cooperate with legitimate requests from your government’s law enforcement agencies.” His emphasis on the word legitimate is very precise.

“Not every request can go through official channels,” I say. “Not all officials can be trusted. Discretion here is of the utmost importance.”

“If I could review your credentials.”

“Credentials can be dangerous,” I say.

“But you can understand, sir, how certain we must be that all requests are legitimate.”

“Yes,” I say. “I understand completely.” I reach into my jacket and pull out Jeremy Bartlett’s card. “Why don’t you phone Mr. Bartlett at the American Embassy and ask him discreetly about whether or not cooperation with my request might be advantageous to your situation?”

He takes the card and looks at it for a moment and then excuses himself and leaves for a private office, closing the door behind him. That morning I had asked Bartlett that if anyone called hinting about my status not to dissuade him of his misconceptions. Bartlett in all likelihood will tell the assistant manager he has no idea who the hell I am and I will be sent packing, as I would have been sent packing anyway, but there is always the chance.

The assistant manager returns and gives me a tight smile. He leans over the desk and says softly, “I have talked to Mr. Bartlett at the embassy.”

I stare up at him impassively.

“You understand that disclosure to us of the beneficial owner of any account is not required under Belizean law, so the information is most probably of no use.”

I purse my lips and nod, while continuing to stare.

He turns his head to the side for a moment and then back to me. His voice now is even softer. “The account in which you are interested is in the name of a Mr. Wergeld. The listed address is a post office box in Switzerland. The money was withdrawn last month from our branch in San Ignacio, on Burns Avenue. That’s all I can tell from our records.”

I nod and pull the photograph from my jacket pocket. He looks at it for a moment and then shakes his head.

I stand and thank him for his service.

“We hope this will take care of the Carlos Santera matter your people have been giving us so much difficulty about.”

“I’m sure it will,” I say, before turning and walking out of the bank. I shouldn’t really have doubted Bartlett. I had merely asked a State Department employee to obfuscate with innuendo, which is sort of like dropping a bloody leg of mutton in front of a shark and asking it to chew.

On my way back to the guest house I walk past Battlefield Park, where a mess of locals sit on benches and spit. A droopy-eyed man leaves the park and jogs to catch up with me. He hectors me about how I should get to know the Belizean people. I stop and look at him. He gives me a yellow-eyed smile and offers me drugs. I shake my head and ignore his shouts and curses as I continue up Regent Street to the swing bridge that will take me over the Belize River and into the north side. I loosen my tie, I take off my jacket and trail it over my shoulder. Men on bikes too small for them circle around me. I feel slow and tired in the heat. On the bridge, the sun reflects off the water in an oppressive strip of light. The heat has a presence, it feels dangerous. Sweat drips into my eye and burns. I wipe it away but it keeps flowing. I turn right at the ramshackle yellow post office, pass a Texaco, and take a turn to where I think lies the sea. I am not sure exactly where I am but once I reach the sea I can follow the water’s edge back to my guest house. I find myself in a narrow alleyway behind a row of warehouses fronting the river. I walk alongside a low wall of red-washed rusted tin, with a sign that reads “QUEENS BONDED WAREHOUSE NO. 1.” I think I am alone in the alley when a man suddenly steps in front of me. He is wearing filthy loose pants and a flowered shirt.

“You want some coke, amigo?” he says, his voice thick with accent.

I shake my head. “Thank you but I’m not thirsty.” I move to my left to step around him. He steps to his right and blocks my way.

“You make joke.”

“Oh. I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry. No thank you.”

“Maybe you want some ganj?” He puts two fingers to his lips and pretends to inhale deeply. “Finest ganj in Belize. Or girls even, we got girls. I have sweeter than you’ll find at Raoul’s.”

“No, no thank you.” I step to my right and he steps to his left, blocking me again.

“Then maybe you just give me some money, amigo? Just that? For an American that is nothing.”

I step back and swing my jacket under my arm holding the briefcase. I reach into my rear pocket for my wallet when I feel another hand grabbing for it. I spin around and find a second man there, in cutoff shorts and a Michael Jackson tee shirt, grinning at me. “Drugs?” he says, his accent thicker than the first. “You American, no? You must want drugs.”

“I don’t want anything,” I say loudly as I back away from both men. I feel confused in the heat. My mind has slowed beneath the press of the sun. The second man grasps my arm and yanks me back. My jacket spills to the ground. The man holding onto me starts grabbing again for my wallet.

“How much you want to give us, amigo?” asks the first man. “How generous are you today?”

I try to shrug my arm loose but it stays in the second man’s grip. He reaches for my wallet and I spin, avoiding his grasp. My briefcase slams into him. I spin the other way and my briefcase hits him solidly on the opposite side. I had not intended to hit him with my briefcase but I’m glad that I did. I begin to spin once again, to hit him with my briefcase once again, when I see something flash shiny in the first man’s hand and I stop. The second man reaches into my rear pocket and slips out my wallet and I let him, stilled into paralysis by the heat and the sight of that shining in the first man’s hand. The second man lets go of me and begins to go through my wallet and I wish for him to take what he wants, to take it and leave and leave me alone, that’s what I am wishing for when I hear a voice from behind.

It is loud and in Spanish and I don’t understand it but the two men attacking me do and they immediately halt. The three of us turn to see who is speaking.

It is a young man with dark blue pants and a red Chicago Bulls cap. His tee shirt is printed with the words “ LAS VEGAS.” He has short black hair and a silver earring and a round dark face, a peasant’s face, his cheekbones broad and sharp. He says something again in Spanish and the first man replies harshly.

The young man in the Las Vegas shirt says something else, says it calmly, this time in Creole, and there is a wild silence for a moment. The young man cocks his head to the left and suddenly the two men run, past the young man, back up the alley, the way I had come, and are gone. The young man walks right up to me, reaches down, picks my jacket and wallet off the street, and hands them to me.

“I am sorry for how they behaved,” says the young man in slightly accented English. “Some in this city are too lazy to find honest work.”

“Thank you,” I say. I’m still shaking from the sight of that blade in the first man’s hand, shivering and sweating at the same time. With trembling fingers I rifle through my wallet and pull out a twenty and hand it to the man.

He looks up at me and for an instant there is something hard and disappointed in his face. “Don’t do that. I am not a beggar.”

“I am just grateful,” I stammer. “I didn’t mean…”

“I work for my money.” He is stern and noble for a moment more and then he smiles. The smile is wide and seems to come from somewhere deep in his chest. When he quickly turns serious again I want to see the smile once more. “Where are you staying?” he asks.

“At a guest house by the sea.”

“I’ll walk you back.”

“You don’t have to,” I say, but I’m glad that he does.

He walks through the alleyway slowly, his back straight, his gait even, and I struggle to slow down enough to stay by his side. As I quiet my step, I find myself calming. “I’m Victor Carl. From the United States.”

“Pleased to meet you, Victor,” he says. “I’m Canek Panti.” He says his name so that the accents are on the second syllable of each word.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Canek. I didn’t mean to insult you. I am extremely grateful. What kind of work is it that you do?”

He shrugs as he walks. “I run errands, paint houses, whatever there is. I have access to a car so I also do some taxi work and guide travelers around Belize.”

“Interesting,” I say. “Do you know a place call San Ignacio?”

“Of course,” says Canek. “It is in the west, near the border.”

“The Guatemalan border?”

“Yes.”

I think on that a moment. I have read enough news reports of the CIA’s activities in Guatemala, and the missing Americans, and the never-ending civil war, to be nervous about that country. “It just so happens, Canek, that I need to go to San Ignacio on business. Can you take me there?”

“Of course.”

“How much would that cost me?” I ask.

He thinks for a moment. “One hundred and twenty dollars American for the day.”

“That will be fine,” I say.

He doesn’t smile at that, he just looks seriously down at the ground as we walk, as if he is somehow disappointed. I figure he figures he should have asked for more and he is right. He could charge whatever he wants and I would pay it gladly in gratitude for what he did for me. At the end of the alleyway the pavement turns and opens up to the sea. Sailing boats are moored by ragged docks, others are moored bow to stern in the middle of the river; boats speed out of the river’s mouth toward the Belizean cayes. We walk together along the water’s edge and stop at a small park next to a red and white lighthouse. A pelican, brown and fat and haughty, floats by, its wings extended against a gentle current of sea air. From the lighthouse there is a view across the sea to the southern part of the city. The white buildings lining the far shore gleam in the sun and suddenly the city doesn’t seem such a pit. I spin around slowly and look. There is something about Belize City I hadn’t noticed before. It is old and rickety and full of poverty, yes, but it is beautiful too, in a non-Disney way, a gateway to true adventure, as if a last haven for swaggering buccaneers remained alive in the Caribbean. Canek, already acting as the guide, waits patiently as I take it all in and then we continue on together, around the ocean’s edge and up Marine Parade.

“You must bargain,” says Canek, finally, as we walk along the unpaved road that fronts the sea. “I say a hundred and twenty, you say seventy, and from there we find a fair price.”

“I thought your price was pretty fair as it was.”

“It is high,” says Canek. “Most taxis will charge eighty-five to San Ignacio. The bus is only two dollars. Let’s agree on a hundred dollars American.”

I walk without saying anything for a bit, pondering everything carefully, and then say, “Ninety.”

He gives me his brilliant smile again. “Ninety-five,” says Canek Panti, “and I will allow that to include a guided visit to Xunantunich, the ancient ruins beyond San Ignacio.”

“Done,” I say. “We have a deal.” By now we are at the end of Marine Parade, standing in front of the tidy white porch of my guest house. “Tomorrow morning?”

“I’ll be here at nine,” he says.

“That will be perfect. I’m suddenly very thirsty,” I say, wiping sweat again from my brow. “Can I buy you a drink, Canek?”

He glances up at the guest house for an instant and then shakes his head. “No, I’m sorry, Victor, I have now to get the car ready for our trip. It needs first some work, but I will be here tomorrow at nine, on the spot.”

We shake hands, solemnly, as if we had just agreed on the next day’s headline in The Wall Street Journal, and Canek walks off, hurrying more now. I wonder in just what shape his car is in that it needs so much work but, surprisingly, I am not worried. The Caribbean shines like an emerald in the late sun. The guest house, on its stilts, seems more quaint than I remember it to be, prettier and whiter. I have met an honest and honorable man. Inside, I know, I can get a bottle of cold water and a bottle of cold Belikin and sit at a table on the veranda and rehydrate beneath a spinning fan. All of it is almost enough to make me forget what it was that led me to Belize City, almost but not quite. I think on the man I am hunting and I think on all he has committed and on the secrets he is hiding and think again on last night’s dream of Veritas and even in the midst of the heat I shudder.

16

LAST NIGHT I DREAMT I went to Veritas again. I was at the base of the long grassy hill just inside the great wrought-iron gates with the forged design of vines and cucumbers that barred the entrance to the drive. The moon was bright and cold, the grass devoid of all color in the darkness. Behind, a stream swept past, its black water swirling around heavy, sharp-faced rocks. Two massive sycamores stood side by side, sentries at the base of that hill, and I stood between them, looking up the long sweep of grass to the stone portico that guarded the formal front of the great Reddman house. The wind was fragrant with the soft scent of spring flowers, with lilacs, with the thick grassy smell of a perfectly manicured lawn. Rolling down from the top of the hill, stumbling uneasily down like a drunken messenger, came the sound of music, of violins and trumpets and snappy snare drums. There were lights shining high over my head, there was the sound of gaiety, of laughter, of a world drinking deep drafts of promise. Veritas, on the crest of that hill, was alive once again.

I began to walk up the hill toward the party. The music, the laughter, the light in that dark night, I wanted to see it, to be a part of it all. I was in jeans and a tee shirt and as I got closer and began to hug my bare arms from the cold I wondered where was my tuxedo. I owned one, I knew that, and mother-of-pearl studs and a cummerbund, but why wasn’t I wearing it? I patted my pants. No wallet, no keys, no invitation. Where was my invitation? Where were my pearls? I felt the sense I feel often of being left out of the best in this world. I thought of turning back but then the music swept down for me. I heard a car engine start, coughing and sputtering like something ancient, I heard the neighing of a horse, I heard voices that sounded like guards. I dropped to my knees and began crawling, hand over hand, up the steep hill.

My knees slid over grotesque fingers of roots that jutted from the soil. Pebbles embedded themselves into the flesh of my palms. I heard the faint buzz of beetle swarms infesting the lawn. I thought about stopping, about letting myself go and rolling down the hill, but the music grew louder and swept down once more for me. The violins drowned out the buzzing of the insects and the laughter turned manic. My jeans ripped on a stone, my palms bled black in the moonlight, but I kept moving toward the joy, reaching, finally, the encircling arms of the front portico’s stairwell that would take me to it. On the wide swooping steps that led up to the house I crouched and slowly climbed, steadying myself with a hand on the step above my feet, my blood smearing black on the stone. I could hear distinctions in the voices now, hearty men, laughing women. Snatches of conversation flew over my head as I rose to the top of the stairs. A group, standing outside on the drive that circled the surface of the portico, seemed not to notice me as I slipped across. I was certain the guests would see me but they didn’t; even as they turned to me they looked right through me. They were handsome, pretty, they laughed carelessly, they were sure of their places in the world and I realized that for them, of course, I would not exist. I stood, slapped the dirt off my ripped pants, walked past the group to one of the large bay windows to the right that studded the grand ballroom wing of the house.

It was a party like every party I had never been invited to. Fabulously dressed women, men in white tie and tails, champagne and butlers with tiny foods and dancing. The women wore gloves, they had dance cards, the men waltzed as though they actually knew how to waltz. The celebrants stood straight and showed white teeth when they laughed. I pressed my nose to the glass. I watched their revelries and felt again what I had felt in high school and college and through my career as a lawyer, the sheer desperate pain of wanting to be inside. But where was my tuxedo, where was my invitation? I was no longer in tee shirt and jeans. I was now wearing a navy blue suit, black wing tips, a tie from Woolworth’s, but still it was not enough. A pretty girl in a white dress walked by without noticing me stare at her with great longing through the window. And then I recognized him, standing tall and grand in the middle of his ballroom, recognized him from the pictures and the histories, from the portrait on the billions and billions of pickle jars. Claudius Reddman.

He was an imposing figure, with a deep chest and arrogant stance and perfectly trimmed white beard. His eyes bulged with power, his pinprick nostrils flared, his mouth stretched lipless and wide, and he was alive and in his certain glory in that room. His three young daughters, on the threshold of their womanhood, stood with him for a moment before breaking away as if on cue to their separate fates. The eldest was small and frail, her pale hair tight to her skull. She coughed delicately into a handkerchief and sat on a chair by her father’s side and watched the party with a wrenching sadness. The youngest, tall and buxom, slipped from the room with a man far older than she and stood with him on the portico, talking intimately, smoking. She was the only woman in the whole of that party who was free enough to smoke. The middle child, with flowers twined in her hair, was now dancing with a strong young man, dancing beautifully, gracefully, her head lying back, pointing her raised toe. There was a drama to her movements as she swooped around the dance floor, greedily carving space for herself and her partner among the other dancers until the floor was cleared of all revelers but the two. As she spun in his arms she turned her head and stared at me and for the first time in the whole of that night I was noticed. Her mouth twisted into an arrogant smile. Her pale blue eyes glinted. Her head whipped back from the force of her ever more ferocious spins; her mouth opened with abandon; the lights of that great room bounced off the whites of her teeth with a maniac’s glee.

“My grandmother was one of three children, all girls,” said Caroline as we drove slowly through a crashing rain toward Veritas. “The fabulous Reddman girls.” Caroline laughed out loud at the thought of it. “The Saturday Evening Post did a spread about them when my great-grandfather’s pickles were becoming all the rage. Three debutantes and their fabulously wealthy father. Men came from all over the East Coast to court them. My great-grandfather threw lavish balls, sent invitations to every young man in Ivy at Princeton, in Fly at Harvard, in Scroll and Key at Yale. They should have had the most wonderful of lives. Hope, Faith, and Charity. I suppose my grandfather named them after the virtues to guard them from tragedy but, if so, he failed miserably.”

A bolt of lightning ripped open the black of the sky; the lashing rain raised welts on its own puddles. My Mazda hit a pool of black water, slowing as the undercarriage was assaulted by a malicious spray. I had picked up Caroline outside her Market Street building with the rain just as thick. She had been a dark smudge waving at me before she opened the door and ducked inside the car. She dripped as she sat next to me, but there was something ruddy and scrubbed about her. Even her lipstick was red. She seemed almost as nervous at seeing her family as I was.

“The first daughter, Hope, died just before my father was born,” continued Caroline. “Consumption we think, it was the glamorous way to expire then. Grammy always told us how wonderfully talented she was on the piano. She would play for hours, beautiful torrents of music, for as long as she had the strength. But as she grew older she grew more sickly and then, before she turned thirty, she faded completely away. Grammy cared for her until the end. Apparently, my great-grandfather was devastated.”

“The death of Hope.”

“Faith, the middle girl, was my grandmother. She married, of course, to a Shaw, with much charm and fading fortunes. He was of the Shaw Brothers Department Store, the old cast-iron building at Eighth and Market, but the store was doing badly and he married my grandmother for her money, so they say, in an attempt to save the business. From everything I’ve heard he was a scoundrel until the war, when his heroism came as a shock to everyone. Through it all, my grandmother loved him dearly. She was widowed young and spent the rest of her life caring for her son and grandchildren, mourning her husband.”

“How did your grandfather die?”

“It was an accident.”

“A car accident?”

“No,” said Caroline. “My grandmother never remarried, never even dated. She stayed at the house and tended the gardens with Nat and took care of the house and the estate.”

“Nat?”

“Old Nat, the gardener. He’s been with the house forever. He’s really the family caretaker, he supervises everything. My mother’s interests lay outside the house and my father cares even less, so it is all left to Nat. He’s probably busy tonight.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes, when it rains, the lower portion of the property floods. There’s a stream that flows all around the house, leading to the pond.”

“Like a moat?”

“Just a stream, but during heavy rains it overflows the road into the gate.”

“What happened to Charity?”

“Aunt Charity. She ran away.”

“It’s hard to imagine running away from all that money.”

“No it isn’t,” she said. “That’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

She pressed my car’s lighter and reached into her purse for a cigarette. As she lit it, I glanced sideways at her, her face glowing in the dim red light of the lighter. What was it like to grow up weighed down by such wealth? How did the sheer pressure of it all misshape the soul? I would have loved to have found out firsthand, yes I would have, but looking at Caroline, as she inhaled deeply and mused wistfully about the grandaunt who escaped it all, for the first time I wondered if all I had wished to have been born to might not have been such a blessing after all.

“Charity was sort of a fast girl,” said Caroline.

“I haven’t heard that expression in a while.”

“These are all my Grammy’s stories. Grammy said that after her sister disappeared she had guessed that Charity had gotten pregnant and would return in half a year or so, saying she had been abroad, or something like that. That’s the way it was done. But there was apparently a bitter fight between Charity and my great-grandfather, that’s what Grammy remembered, and then Charity was gone. Grammy used to sit on our beds at night and tell us strange and fascinating tales of a traveler in foreign lands, overcoming hardships and obstacles in search of adventure. Grammy was a natural raconteur. She would weave these beautiful, brilliantly exciting stories, and the heroic traveler was always named Charity. It was her way, I think, of praying that her sister was well and living the life she had hoped for when she left. Of all of us, really, only Charity has been able to rid herself of the burden of being a Reddman.”

“And, unfortunately for her, the Reddman money. Any word ever about the child?”

“None. I’ve wondered about that myself.”

“Anyone ever make a claim to her share of the estate?”

“No, the only known heir is my father. Turn here.”

I braked and turned off the road into a paved lane so narrow two cars could pass each other only with scratches. Foliage grew wild on the sides of the road and the trees, boughs heavy with rain, bent low into my headlights as if in reverence to Caroline as we passed. The rain thickened on the windshield so that I could barely see, even with the wipers, and there was a steady splash of water on the undercarriage of the car. I slowed to a crawl. I hoped there were no hills to go down because I figured the brakes were too soaked to stop much of anything.

“Tell me about your childhood,” I said.

“What’s to tell? I was a kid. I ran around and fell a lot and skinned my knees.”

“Was it happy?”

“Sure. Why not? I mean, adolescence was hell, but that’s true even in the best-adjusted families, though no one ever accused us of being one of those. We’re all in tonight, which is a rare and oh-so-delicious treat, so you can judge for yourself. My brother Bobby, my brother Eddie and his wife, Kendall, and my mother. There may be others, too. My mother has a need to entertain and though most refuse her invitations now, there are always a few parasites who can be counted on to grab a free meal.”

“We should figure out what to tell everyone about me.”

“We should. I’ll say you were a friend of Jacqueline’s and that she introduced me to you. But you shouldn’t be a lawyer – too obvious.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a painter,” I said.

I was waiting for Caroline to dub me a painter when instead she screamed.

A huge figure, shiny and black, lumbered out of the woods and stood in the rain before my oncoming car.

I slammed on the brakes. The car shuddered and slid sideways to the left as it kept humming toward the figure. It looked like a tall thin demon waving its arms slowly as my car slipped and skidded right for it.

“Stop!” said Caroline.

“I’m trying,” I shouted back. I had the thought that I never really knew what it meant to turn into the skid, as I had been forever advised in driver’s ed, and that if a clearer instruction had been implanted in my brain I wouldn’t be at a loss at that very instant. As a row of thick trees swelled in the headlights, I twisted the wheel in what I hoped was the proper direction. The car popped back to straight on the road and then veered too far to the left. I fought the wheel again and locked my knee as I stood on the pedal. With a lurch the brakes finally took hold. The car jerked to a sudden stop and stalled.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” said Caroline.

I said nothing, just sat and felt my sweat bloom. With the wipers now dead, the rain totally obscured the view through the windshield.

When I started the car again and the wipers revived I could see that my front bumper was less than a foot from the shiny black figure. It was a man, clothed in a black rubber rain slicker and cowl.

“Oh my God, it’s Nat,” said Caroline. “You almost hit Nat.”

The man in black stepped around the car to the driver’s side. I unrolled the window and he bent his body so that his dripping cowl and face loomed shadowy through the frame until Caroline reached up and turned on the roof light. Nat’s face was long and gaunt, creased with deep weather lines. His eyelids sagged to cover half his bright blue eyes. Circling his left eye was a crimson stigma, swollen and irregularly shaped. There was no fear on his face and I realized there was no fear in the way he had held his body as my car headed right for him, just a curious interest, as if he had been waving his arms not to ward me off but to increase the visibility of my target.

“You need to pump those brakes, young man,” said Nat in a dry friendly cackle.

“I wanted to turn into the skid but I couldn’t figure what that meant,” I admitted.

“Can’t say as I’m sure myself, but that’s what they say, all right. How are you, Miss Caroline?”

“Fine, thank you, Nat. This is a friend of mine, Victor Carl.”

“Welcome to Veritas, Mr. Carl.”

“Isn’t this a marvelous rain, Nat?” she said.

“From where you’re sitting, maybe. Stream’s rising.”

“Can we make it up?”

“For a little while, still. But you won’t make it down again, not tonight. Not without a boat.”

“Maybe we should turn around,” I said.

“Your mother’s been expecting your visit, Miss Caroline,” said Nat.

“What about her cats?” asked Caroline.

“They’re in the cage in the garden room for the evening.”

“Vicious little things, her cats. And they pee everywhere. She knows I hate them, why can’t they just stay in Europe?”

“Your mother’s quite attached to them,” said Nat. “It’s good to see her attached to something. I left the front gate open for you.”

“Well, I suppose it will be all right once the rain lightens,” said Caroline. “And we could always stay over.”

“Plenty of room,” he said. “But if you’re going up you should be going before the stream rises any further. Already there’s a puddle where the bridge should be. Master Franklin was going to be late so I told him not to bother.”

“I need to go to a funeral tomorrow,” I said.

“Rain’s supposed to stop tonight,” said Nat. “There won’t be any trouble leaving in the morning.”

“Let’s go, Victor,” she said.

I smiled at Nat and did as I was told. In my rearview mirror I could see him watching us leave, glowing red, dimming as he fell farther away from my rear lights into the misty depths of the rain.

I followed the road onward, leaning forward so I could see more clearly through the wet darkness. After a turn left and a bend right we came in sight of two towering black gates, opened enough to let a single car through. Studding both gates were gnarled, spidery vines sprouting great iron cucumbers. On the left gate, wrought massively in iron, were the words MAGNA EST, and on the right the word VERITAS. Before the gate was a black puddle that spread ten yards across the road, its surface pocked by rain, its depth impossible to determine. I stopped the car.

“It’s just the stream,” she said. “It’s not too deep yet.”

“Are you sure? This isn’t four-wheel drive. My drive’s only about a wheel and a half.”

“Go ahead, Victor.”

Slowly I drove forward, the road sloping down, sending my car deeper and deeper into the water. I kept looking down at the floor, wondering when the water would start seeping through, kept listening to the engine, waiting for the sputter and choke as the motor drowned. The water looked impossibly deep outside my window, the car so low I felt I was in a rowboat, but then the front tilted up and the car pulled higher and soon we were out of the overflowed stream, through the gates, past two huge sycamores, driving up the long driveway to the house.

The trees and overgrowth had given way to a wide flat hillside that seemed to spread forever in the darkness. The drive pulled higher and the hillside lengthened and I realized I was driving through what must have been a vast piece of property, stunning, I was sure, in its size and depth even though I could see only the narrow strip illuminated by my headlights. And then a crack of lightning confirmed my suspicions and my eyes couldn’t take in its entire breadth before darkness once again clasped shut its jaws and the sky growled and my vision was reduced to the thin strip lighted by my car. Atop the hillside was a glow, yellow and dim, a glow that strangely grew no brighter as we approached. The driveway curved away from the light and then back again and suddenly Veritas came into view. I drove around the drive as it circled tightly across the top of a wide stone portico, whose steps led down the hill which our car had just climbed, and parked in front of the house

“Charming,” I said.

“We call it home.”

What they called home was a massive Gothic revival stone structure with dark eaves and predatory buttresses and strangely shaped bay windows with intricate stained glass. Wings and dark additions had been slapped on with abandon. Dull yellow lamps lit the great front door, giving the carved wood a sickly look, and thin strips of light leaked weakly out some of the windows on the first floor, though a whole huge wing of windows to the right was dark as if in blackout. The second floor appeared deserted except for a window under one of the eaves at the far left end, where I saw a light stream for a moment before heavy curtains were dropped to block its exit. I gaped with amazement at the monstrosity before me, and that’s what it was, truly. Misshapen and cold, I could imagine it as one of those demented boarding schools for the blood spawn of the insanely rich. I had always wanted my fine home on a hill in the Main Line, sure, but not that home.

“Come on in,” she said, as she opened the car door.

“Is it haunted?” I asked.

“Of course it is.” She jumped out of the car, dashing through the rain, until she was protected by an archway over the front door. I joined her. Before she could reach the knob that worked the buzzer the heavy wooden door opened with a long creak. A tiny maid with a tightly wrinkled face stared at us both for a moment, as if we were intruders, before guiding us into the center hall.

It was a poorly lit space, cavernous, two stories high, leading to a dark hanging stairwell at the rear. There were huge arched beams overhead, like ribs, and dark maroon wallpaper on the walls, the seams peeling back. A piece of furniture sat squat in front of the stairs, round like a tumor, its four seats facing hostilely away from one another. A chandelier lit the space with an uneven, dingy light; three of the bulbs were out. I felt, with those arched ribs above and the tumor of a circular couch, that I was in the belly of a some huge malignant beast.

“Hola, Consuelo. Como estas?” asked Caroline.

The maid, without smiling, said in a lightly accented voice, “Fine, thank you, Miss Shaw.”

Caroline gave Consuelo her raincoat and I did the same. I hadn’t noticed before, but underneath Caroline’s raincoat had been a tight black cocktail dress that was obviously not thrift-shop quality. She was wearing stockings with black lines down the back and her black heels were high and glossy and sharp and the stud in her nose held a diamond. Caroline had dressed for the family; her spirit of rebellion only went so far.

“Donde está ma familia?” she asked.

“They’re all in the great room,” said Consuelo. “With the guests. They held dinner for you.” She let her impassive gaze take me in and added, “I’ll set another place.”

“Road’s out, so expect some overnights this evening.”

“I’ve already taken care of it. I’ll set up another room for your friend.”

“Gracias, Consuelo,” said Caroline as she grabbed my arm and led me deeper into the beast’s belly.

“Pretty good Spanish,” I said.

“That’s all I know. Hola and Como estás and Gracias. The fruits of four years of high school Spanish. Pathetic.” She gripped my arm ever more tightly as we approached a double doorway at the end of the hall. “Are you ready?” she asked gravely, as if I were about to enter a wax museum of horror.

“I guess so,” and before I had even finished saying it she had swept me through the doors.

It was a huge formal room, ornate plaster ceiling, walls covered with wood and studded with portraits of the wealthy dead, furniture with thin legs, a huge pale blue oriental rug. I could tell right off it was a fancy room because the fabrics on the differing pieces of furniture didn’t match one another and there wasn’t a plastic slipcover in the place. From the ornamental facing of the fireplace a gloomy plaster head stared out with blank eyes and above the mantelshelf was a portrait of an angry man in a bright red coat, a hunting coat. He had a brisk white beard and great goggling eyes and a familiar face and it didn’t take me long to recognize him. Claudius Reddman. A clot of people held drinks in the center of the room, leaning back and chatting. Others were standing by a huge blue vase from some ancient Chinese dynasty that had prospered for thousands of years for the sole purpose of providing the great houses on the Main Line with huge blue vases. Before I could take it all in Caroline, still clutching my arm, said in a voice loud enough to silence their conversations:

“Sorry we’re late everybody. This is Victor Carl. He was a dear friend of Jacqueline’s. He’s a painter.”

All eyes turned to gaze at me in my very painterly black wing tips and blue suit and green tie. And just as they were all giving me the up and down Caroline pulled me close and leaned her head against my shoulder and added:

“And in case you’re interested, yes, we’re lovers.”

17

18

BREAKFAST WAS WAITING in tarnished silver chafing dishes arrayed on a black marble sideboard in the Garden Room. Consuelo had met me at the base of the stairs and asked, without inflection, how my night had been before directing me to the morning’s regalement. I had been the last to rise that night and I was evidently the first to rise that morning and I had awakened alone.

The Garden Room was an exotic monstrosity, warm, humid, circular, with a grand Victorian glass dome, the panes of which were sallow and sooty and edged dark with fungus. Huge jungle plants, sporting leaves as big as torsos, stood among weedy stalks topped by tiny face-shaped blooms. Behind the jungle plants stooped pale-barked trees, gnarled and stunted. Meat-red flowers drooped from clumps of green sprouting from the crooks of tree trunks, the flowers’ dark mouths yawning in hunger. The place smelled as if fertilizer had been freshly laid in the huge granite pots. I wouldn’t have been surprised if General Sternwood had been there to greet me in his wheelchair, but he wasn’t, nobody was, except for two black cats locked in a large wrought-iron cage. When I approached, one cooed invitingly while another snarled before hurling itself right at me, slamming its face into the iron bars. I guessed they were playing good cat bad cat.

Sunlight glared through the dirty windows. The storm had passed that night just as Nat had predicted. In my suit and day-old shirt and socks and underwear I stepped to the food-laden sideboard. I was ravenous and all too ready to set to, despite the Garden Room’s offal smell. I took a plate and lifted the silver cover off the first of the warming trays.

Eggs, runny and wet like snot, with chips of black mixed in, either chunks of pepper or something else I didn’t want to guess at. In the next were potatoes, wet and hard, swimming in some sort of green-colored oil. In the next, French toast slices with the consistency of cardboard and a reservoir of syrup, slick with the prismatic surface of motor oil. In the last, white slabs of uncooked fat surrounding shivery pink slivers of trichinosis. I put my plate back and looked around for something to drink.

I examined six china cups before I found one crackfree and clean, released a splash of coffee from the urn, and found my way outside to the rear patio and a perfect spring morning. The sun was risen, the damp of the night before was lifting in sheets of fog, the air was filled with the fresh scent of newly soaked loam. A bird heckled. To my right, a large stone wing stretched perpendicular to the rest of the house, its windows covered with white sheets to keep out the sun. An old ballroom, I figured. A few of the windowpanes were cracked and it looked as if it hadn’t been balled in decades. As I examined it I took a sip of the coffee; it spilled into my empty stomach with an acidic hiss. I looked around and found a rusting white cast-iron chair and placed my cup and saucer onto its seat. Then I walked off into the rising fog to explore the grounds.

Behind the house, halfway down the backside of the hill, was a long rectangular pool, surrounded by what looked like a swamp. The water in the pool was a dark algae green and it appeared to be spring-fed because the water had risen in the storm to flow over the top of the pool, flooding the ground beside it. There was no cement or wooden platform around the pool for sunbathing or relaxing with a tall drink of lemonade, just the swamped grass.

I walked around the pool and headed still farther down, to a small pond almost at the base of the hill. This was the pond, I assumed, where Caroline’s grandfather had thrown his Distinguished Service Cross. Why had he ditched it? I wondered. Caroline had offhandedly promised that if I found out she’d sign my fee agreement and I intended to hold her to the promise. The pond was murky, overgrown with weeds and lily pads. As I approached, the ground grew quaggy beneath my shoes and a swarm of gnats flew into my face and hovered. I heard a sucking sound as I lifted my foot and I stopped walking and searched the water for any sign of life beneath its surface. Other than some water boatmen skimming over the top on their long legs, I saw nothing.

I moved around the pond until I reached a tree that had died and fallen into the edge of the water directly opposite the house, and it was by the tree that I noticed, with a small shock, a thousand eyes.

Frogs. The water around the branches of that tree teemed with them, hundreds and hundreds of them. They climbed one atop the other, forming layers of frogs, feet resting on heads, heads beneath bellies, all breathing their dangerous quiet breaths, their eyes open and staring, hundreds and hundreds of them, layers of them, piles of them, a plague of frogs. Slick green, the color lightening about their lower jaws, they were not large frogs, some still had tails and each of their bodies was no bigger than a thumb, but the eyes that stared at me were a malevolent yellow and they climbed one atop the other to get a better look at me, hundreds and hundreds of them, piles of them, slick green silent thumbs with eyes.

Above them, atop the hill, stood Veritas, broad-shouldered and arrogant even in its decrepitude, the mist still rising about it. I had the fanciful notion that each of the frogs was spawned by a sin transgressed by those who had once occupied that house. A thumb on the scale to cheat a customer, a thumb licked as money is counted falsely, a thumb in a competitor’s eye, a thumb atop a secretary’s breast, a thumb to cap a handshake to seal an agreement to cheat a partner of his fair share, a thumb jerked to the door to fire the sole support of a family of seven, a thumb rubbed gently across the subject’s lip at the end game of a seduction, a thumb that cocks the hammer of a shotgun or grasps the last nail to be driven through the lid of a coffin. Which of those frogs, I wondered, was sired by Claudius Reddman’s buyout of Elisha Poole before he introduced the pressure-flavored pickle that was to make him a rich and much-honored man? Which of those frogs was fathered by whichever sin it was that caused Caroline’s grandfather to toss away his decoration for exceptional gallantry? Which of those frogs was begot by Kingsley Shaw’s patricide? Which of those frogs was engendered by the murder of Jacqueline Shaw?

And which of those frogs, I also wondered, sprang to life as a result of my midnight fornication with a situationally drunken Caroline Shaw, youngest heir to the Reddman fortune? I had been fantasizing about screwing her all that night, admittedly, but sexual fantasies are the natural segues between my more practical thoughts, delirium over that secretary or that lawyer or that middle-aged judge wearing whatever she is wearing beneath that hot black robe, no more meaningful than the sluice of chemicals and flash of electricity in the brain that generated the imaginary idyll in the first place. There is no harm in fantasizing, no awkward moments after, no fluids to deal with, no vicious little microbes to wonder incessantly about, no ethical rules to consider. But what had started as a run-of-the-mill fantasy had twisted its way into reality and though I had not actively sought it, I had participated with a canine eagerness that seemed free and vibrant in the darkness of that bed but seemed now like nothing more than a crass exploitation of a young drunken women in a fragile emotional state for purposes of my own pleasure and enrichment. And it hadn’t even been any good.

I swung my leg at the pile of frogs and a handful jumped off to the right. I followed them with my gaze as they dived into the water and then lifted my eyes to see, in a secluded grove of trees, the ruin of a house. It was Victorian and gray, not the clean gray of a rehabbed bed and breakfast but the tired gray of weathered wood long neglected. The foundation had shifted and the building sagged with the sad weariness of a tragedy whose story no one remains alive to tell. Some of the windowpanes were shattered, others were boarded with plywood, itself weathered to gray, and the lower part of half the house was charred on the outside by some sort of brushfire. It must have been an old caretaker’s cottage, I figured, situated as it was so far down the hill from the main house.

While climbing back up to the main house my attention was drawn to a large bosky grove to the right of the pool. It looked to be untended and its setup completely haphazard but as I approached, I noticed a definite shapeliness about it. While each of the individual plants had a disordered look, the general shape had corners and lines, as if those bushes were once part of a wall of hedges that had long gone untrimmed. The plants were wild vicious things, the leaves spiked, the branches studded with a profusion of pale thorns, some more than an inch long. I walked around the grove until I saw a spot in the wall of green that was less dense than the rest and appeared to have been closed off only by the most recent growth. I looked left and right, spotted no one watching, glanced up at the porch, saw that still it was empty, and reached my hand into the opening. I pulled my hand back again, inspected it, and then stepped right on through.

I found myself on a pathway bright with sunlight and wildflowers. The grass was high and the pathway was narrow, with thorny branches thrusting like spears across the gap, but still there was plenty of room for me to walk after brushing away the errant stalks. I followed the pathway around a corner until I found an archway of green that led to another pathway. The flowers were random, full of lovely yellows and violets and a few lurid reds. Two birds serenaded one another in the morning light. A cardinal hopped from one bush to another. It smelled like a different world, all fresh and ecstatically fragrant, full of life, the very opposite of the must-ridden house or the mucky pond below.

I knew where I had sneaked myself into, of course. This was the maze of hedges and flowers that had been described to me by Grimes, the dentist, in his mournful soliloquy at the Irish Pub. He had described it as immaculately tended, but it had apparently not been touched in many many months, not since, I would guess, the death of Caroline’s sweet widowed grandmother, Faith Reddman Shaw, Grammy, who seemed to have a hand in many of the goings-on in that house. I followed the maze like a rat looking for cheese, ducking into almost completely covered entrances, under archways of branches, moving ever toward the middle, until I stepped, as cautiously as a heathen in a church, into the clearing Grimes had described so vividly.

The sun was brightest here and the plants had seemed to mutate into wild stalks of color. Flies fell upon my neck. The statue of Aphrodite was there, on her tiptoes, reaching up to the heavens, but now it appeared she was being held down by a thick hairy vine that cloaked the base of the statue and wrapped itself like an arm around her rear leg. The bench across from the statue was also covered with a vine, but this one sported bright orange flowers. Between the two was an oval covered with high grasses and stalks of weedy green not yet brought to flower. I stepped around the oval toward the statue, feeling some dark presence beneath my feet as I walked, and pushed away the handsized vine leaves covering the base until I could see the stone in which was deeply engraved the word “SHAW.”

I felt something on my foot and jerked it away suddenly, seeing a frog hop into the surrounding bushes. Another frog leaped by. I turned and saw two more come bounding like little flashes of light from the entrance arch and then a boot.

I backed away, almost ducking behind the statue, but before I could hide the boot’s owner came into view and smiled at me in an unsettling way from beneath a wide straw hat. “A little sightseeing, Mr. Carl?” cackled Nat.

“I didn’t mean to,” I stammered, backing away. “I wasn’t…”

“You’re allowed,” he said, and his smile warmed to genuine. The spot around his left eye glowed a lurid red. “It’s just a garden.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, trying to recover my breath.

“You should have seen it when it was tended. I spent half of each of my days maintaining it to Mrs. Shaw’s specifications. She was a demon for pruning. The elder Mrs. Shaw, I’m talking of now. Not a bloom out of place, not a weed. ‘Take off every shoot whose value is doubtful,’ she taught me, ‘and all you have left is beauty.’ It was a masterpiece. Yep. Some magazine wanted to do a spread, but she wouldn’t have strangers stomping through it with tripods and cameras.”

I looked around at the weeds and the vines pulling at the statue. “Why’d you let it go?”

“This is the way the elder Mrs. Shaw, she wanted it. ‘Just let it go when I die, Nat,’ she told me.” His voice took on a strange power as he imitated hers. “ ‘Let the earth take it back,’ she told me. So that’s what I’ve done.”

“It seems a shame.”

“That it does, yep. Every once in a while I come with my shears and get the urge to straighten it up, some. To prune. But the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was one who liked her orders carried out to the letter. It was the least I could do for her to honor her wishes. It was her place, you know. She’d been coming here ever since she was a girl. Built it up herself.”

“What was she like, Nat?”

“The elder Mrs. Shaw? Quite a woman, she was. Like a mother to me. Brought me here when I was still a boy and made sure I was taken care of ever since, almost like I was one of her own. She’s done more for me and mine then you’d ever imagine, Mr. Carl. Can’t say as she was the gentlest soul I’ve ever met.” He squatted down and pulled at a long piece of grass, wrapping it about his hand. “Nope, I could never say that. But deep in her heart she wanted to do good. N’aren’t too many like that.”

He stood and strolled over to the statue and kicked roughly at the base.

“She’s laying right there,” he said. “In some special urn of hers. Her ashes mixed up with her husband’s. I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Carl. She loved him more than she loved anything else on this good earth. That kind of love coming from a woman for a man, she’s got to have more than a little good in her.”

“How did he die, her husband?” I asked.

Nat’s blue eyes looked into mine and he smiled as if he knew that I knew the answer, though how he could I couldn’t know. “It was before my time. But I’ll say this, the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was probably right to let this place go. Sometimes what’s buried should remain buried. No good can come from digging up the dead. Come along, Mr. Carl, I’ll show you out. The way it is now, it sometimes gets tricky and you might end up here longer than you’d expect.”

He winked at me before turning and starting back. I followed him, through the arched entranceway of the clearing, along passageways, through the narrow opening, thorns grabbing at my suit jacket, until we had returned to the wide lawn. The sun was bright now and there was no mist left. Nat took off his hat and wiped his head with his forearm. “Getting hot. You had best go on up and get your eggs.”

I heard something from the patio. Some of the others were there now, Kendall, waving at me energetically, Caroline, in sunglasses, with a drink in her hand. I turned away and looked down the hill, beyond the pond to the wooded area in which sat that old weathered and burned Victorian house. From here I couldn’t see any of it, blocked as it was by the foliage, but I could feel it there, listing in its sad way.

“There is a house down there beyond the pond, in those trees,” I said. “Who lived there?”

“You did get around, didn’t you, Mr. Carl?” said Nat. “Feeling a bit frisky this morning, I suppose.” He turned toward the relic. “That was the caretaker’s house. Mrs. Shaw’s father, he deeded it for the whole of her life to the widow Poole. She lived there with her daughter until the widow Poole, she died. Then it reverted back to the estate.”

“What happened to the daughter?”

Nat, still looking down the hill, his back to me, shrugged. “She up and left. Rumor was she died in an asylum New England way. She was supposed to be demented. Caught the pox, or some such fever, and gave up the ghost. The whole family Poole sort of just withered away. I guess that’s the way of it. The good Lord’s always pruning, trying to get it right at last.”

Before I could respond he started walking away from me, down the hill, toward the pond with all those frogs.

“You remember what I said about leaving the buried be, Mr. Carl,” he said without turning. “Some patches of this earth are better left unturned.”

19

IT WAS A TOUCHING LITTLE SERVICE for Jimmy Vigs at the funeral parlor on North Broad Street. The rabbi spoke of the joy that Jimmy Dubinsky had given to his family and his friends, of the sage advice and prompt service he had given his clients, of his generous spirit in running the charity bingo events at the synagogue. A tall straw of a man with flighty hands stood up and spoke of how Jimmy was always there for him in his times of deepest need, when the fates conspired against him and OTB was closed. He was a giver, said the man, and he gave without complaint, so long as the call was laid in time. Anton Schmidt, a tie beneath his leather jacket, looking almost like a yeshiva student in his wide fedora and evident sadness, talked in soft halting sentences of Jimmy’s fairness and kindness and his facility with numbers. And then the son spoke, a young heavy man, just in from the Coast, the spitting image of poor dead Jimmy, talking of how his dad was the greatest dad in the whole wide world, always taking him to the ball game, watching sports with him on television. The son spoke of the joy they had in traveling together, father and son, to Vegas, to watch a Mike Tyson fight, and here the son choked up a bit and grabbed tightly onto the lectern before continuing. His father had taught him how to play craps, he said through a blubber of sobs, how to handicap the horses. He would remember his father, he said, for the rest of his life.

Jimmy would have liked it. And with the over and under at seventy-five and the higher than expected turnout in the chapel, Jimmy would also have liked that the over pulled through. But even with the turnout, when I arrived a little late and went to sign the guest book I wasn’t surprised to see it totally devoid of names. I was the only mourner willing to be identified.

The rabbi started reading the Twenty-third Psalm and, right at the part about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, Earl Dante slid into my pew, jamming his hip into mine. With the yarmulke neatly on his head and the white rose pinned to his lapel he could have been mistaken for the owner of the joint. Like I said before, he had that kind of face.

“Glad you could make it, Victor,” he said in his slurry voice. “We were counting on you to show.”

“Just paying my respects.”

“There was a rumor that the feds were tapping Jimmy’s phones at the end. Any truth to it?”

“How would I know? I’m just the lawyer.”

“Always the last to know, right, Victor?”

“That’s right.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “I have you down as a pallbearer. When they turn the bier around we need you to go on up and grab a handle.”

“I can’t believe there aren’t six men who were closer to Jimmy than me.”

“There are,” said Dante, leaning forward in preparation to stand. “But it will take more than six to carry Jimmy off to his final reward. There’s a limo for the pallbearers that will ferry you to the cemetery. They’ll need you there too.”

“I wasn’t planning to go to the cemetery,” I said.

He looked at me and sucked his teeth. “Take the limo.”

When it was time to wheel the coffin out, there were ten of us jockeying for position at the handles. From the other side of the coffin I caught Cressi grinning at me. “Yo, Vic,” he mouthed, bobbing his head up and down. Anton Schmidt was also there, red-eyed beneath his thick glasses. Then, with the rabbi silent and the mourners standing, we walked beside the coffin on its journey out of the chapel. At the side door, with the hearse waiting, its back door swung wide, we all tightened our grip on the handles and heaved. The coffin didn’t budge.

“Put your backs into it,” said the guy from the funeral home. “Ready, one, two, and three.”

We were able, with much grimacing, to lift the coffin and, each of us taking tiny steps, carry it, amid groans and curses, to the hearse, where it slid through on rollers to the rear of the cold black car.

Our limo was long and gray and just as cold as the hearse, though we didn’t have as much room to stretch out as did Jimmy. I sat shotgun, with the window to the back open so I could hear the conversations of the other men jammed shoulder to shoulder inside the rear benches.

“That was a very moving service,” said one of the men in the back.

“I thought the son was touching, just touching,” said a second. “When he talked about Tyson it almost brought tears.”

“If you see a McDonald’s or something,” said a third man to the driver, “why don’t you pull over. I could use a little lunch.”

“What kind of slob are you, Nicky, we’re burying a man here.”

“He’d a understood.”

“We can do drive-through,” said a different man.

“I have to follow the hearse,” said the driver.

“So tell the hearse to go too. Get an extra value meal for Jimmy. Like a gesture of respect, you know. One last stop at them golden arches.”

“Too many stops at the golden arches,” said Anton Schmidt softly, “that’s why he’s dead.”

“What, he got wacked at a McDonald’s?”

We drove up Broad Street to the Roosevelt Extension of Route 1 and then hit the Schuylkill Expressway, west, to get us to the cemetery. Buzzing past us were a horde of speeding cars and vans, swiping by each other as they changed lanes with a frenzy. I turned around and over the heads of the pallbearers I saw the long procession of cars, their headlights lit, following us slowly, and I imagined them all lined up at the McDonald’s drive-through, each putting in its order for fries and Big Macs.

“Maybe there’s a party or something after,” said Cressi. “Hey, Victor, your people, they throw wakes after they bury their dead?”

“We sit shivah,” I said. “That’s where we visit the families and say Kaddish each evening.”

“Kaddish, all right,” said Cressi. “I used to date a Jewish broad. You’re talking booze, right?”

“That’s Kiddush, which is different,” I explained. “Kaddish is the prayer for the dead.”

“I thought I’d see Calvi at the ceremony,” said someone else.

“Probably has gotten too fat to leave the pool down there.”

“Last I heard, the fuck had prickly heat.”

“You dated a Jewish girl, Cressi? Who?”

“That Sylvia, what lived in the neighborhood, remember her?”

“Stuck up, with the hats and the tits?”

“That’s the one.”

“You dated her?”

“Sure.”

“How far you get?”

“You think I dated her for the conversation? I want conversation I’ll turn on the television.”

“Why’d she go out with a bum like you?”

“What do you think, hey? I got charm.”

“You got crabs is all you got.”

“You ever tell your mother you were dating some Jewish girl?”

“What are you, a douchebag?” said Cressi. “My mother would have fried my balls for supper I’d had told her that.”

“With a little garlic, some gravy and mozzarella, they’d probably taste all right.”

“Yeah but such small portions.”

General laughter.

“Hey, Victor, about this shiver?” said Cressi.

“Shivah.”

“They have food?”

“Usually.”

“Well then, after the burial, I say we do some shivering.”

“But if you pass a McDonald’s before that…”

At the cemetery, we strained our backs lugging the heavy metal coffin from a hearse to the cart and then pushing it over the uneven turf to the hole in the ground. As we shoved our way into places around the hole, like a crowd at a street show, a man from the funeral parlor handed out yarmulkes and little cards with prayers and then the rabbi began. The rabbi spoke a little about one-way journeys and the son sobbed and the rabbi spoke some more about ashes and dust and they lowered the casket into the hole with thick gray straps and the son sobbed and then a few of us who pretended to know what we were doing said Kaddish for James Dubinsky. I read the transliteration of the Hebrew on the little cards they handed out so I don’t know if my words counted, but as I read yis-gad-dal v’yis-kaddash sh’meh rab-bo, as I struggled through the faintly familiar pronunciation, I thought of my grandfathers, whom I had helped bury, and my grandmothers, whom I had helped bury, and my father, who was coughing out the blood in his lungs as he got ever closer to that hole in the ground, and I hoped with a strange fervor that my words were doing some good after all.

The rabbi tossed a shovelful of dirt onto the wide wooden lid of the coffin, some pebbles bouncing, and then the son, and then the rest of us, one by one, tossing shovelfuls of dirt, one by one, and afterward we walked slowly, one by one, back to the road where our cars waited for us.

“It’s a sad day, Victor.” A thick, nasal voice coming from right next to me. “Jimmy, he was a hell of a guy. Hell of a guy.”

“Hello, Lenny,” I said. “Yes, Jimmy was something.”

The nasal voice belonged to Lenny Abromowitz, a tall barrel-chested man of about sixty, with plaid pants and the nose of a boxer who led with his face. He had been a prize-fighter in his past, and a professional bruiser, so I’m told, who did whatever was required with that brawn of his, but now he was only a driver. He wore a lime-green jacket and white patent leather shoes and, in deference to the somber occasion, his porkpie hat was black. And as he walked beside me he draped one of his thick arms over my shoulder.

“Haven’t seen much of yas, Victor. You don’t come to the restaurant no more?”

“I’ve been really busy.”

“Ever since the Daily News put those pictures on the front page, people they don’t come around so much as before.”

“Oh, were there pictures?” Of course there were pictures. The Daily News had rented a room across the street from Tosca’s and stationed a photographer there to capture exactly who was going in and going out of the notorious mob hangout, plastering the pictures on a series of front pages. Politicians and movie stars and sports heroes and famous disc jockeys were captured in crisp blacks and whites paying court to the boss. Each morning everyone in the city wondered who would be the next cover boy and each evening the television news broadcasts started with pointed denials of any wrongdoing by that day’s featured face. The only ones who weren’t impressed were the feds, who had rented the room next to the Daily News’s room and were busy taking pictures of their own. As would be expected, since the front-page series, Tosca’s business had been cut precipitously.

“Yeah, sure there was pictures. Front page. Surprised you missed it.”

“I read the Inquirer.”

“Hey, Victor, let me give you a ride back to the city.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll go back with the limo.”

“Take a ride with me, Victor.”

“No really, it’s taken care of.”

His hand slid across my shoulder onto my neck and squeezed, lightly sure, but still hard enough for me to know how hard he could squeeze if ever he wanted, and with his other hand he reached over and gave my head a few light knocks with his knuckle.

“Hello, anybody home? Are you listening? I think maybe you should come and take a ride with me, Victor. I’m parked over there.”

We crossed the road with the hearse and the limousine and the other cars and kept going, across a field of tombstones with Jewish stars and menorahs and torah scrolls carved into the stone, with names like Cantor and Shure and Goodrich and Kimmelman, until we reached another road, where, down a ways, was parked a long white Cadillac.

We approached the passenger side and Lenny opened the rear door for me. “Hop on in, Victor.”

I gave him a tight smile and then ducked into the car. It must have slipped my mind for a moment, what with all the wiseguys at the funeral and the sadness of the pebbles scudding across the top of the coffin and the words of the Kaddish still echoing, but Lenny was not just any driver, and his invitation of a ride was less an invitation than a summons. When I entered the cool darkness of the car’s interior my eyes took a second to dilate open and I smelled him before I saw him. The atmosphere of the car was rich with his scent: the spice of cologne, the creamy sweetness of Brylcreem, the acrid saltpeter tang of brutal power waiting to be exercised.

Slowly, the car drove off along the cemetery road.

20

“I THOUGHT IT BEST IF I PAID my respects from a distance,” said Enrico Raffaello, sitting next to me on the black bench seat in the rear of his Cadillac. He was a short, neat man in a black suit and flowered tie. His hair was gray and greased back, his face cratered like a demented moon. His voice was softly accented with a Sicilian rhythm and a genuine sadness that seemed to arise not from the surface mourning of a funeral but from a deep understanding of the merciless progression of life. Between his knees was a cane tipped with a silver cast of a leopard, and his thick hands rested easily atop the crouching cat. “Jimmy was a loyal friend and I didn’t want to ruin his day.”

“I think that was wise,” I said.

“Did you like the service?”

“It was touching. The son especially.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard. I arranged for it to happen like that.”

“Flying him in from L.A. was very generous.”

“That is not quite how I arranged it. You see, Jimmy was not a diligent family man. He hadn’t seen his son in years and the son refused to come after what Jimmy had done to his mother. Jimmy was wrong in how he handled his wife, granted, but that was no reason for a son to show such disrespect for his father.”

“So how did you get him here?”

“I didn’t. Such rifts can be wide and deep and I am not a psychologist. I hired an actor instead.”

“That was an actor?”

“I told him I wanted some emotion. This actor, he said that crying was extra. I could have wrung his fat neck, but I am a sentimentalist, so I paid.”

“I never knew you were such a soft touch.”

“I’m getting too old, I think. It is one thing when my colleagues die, that is the natural order of things. But when the new generation start dying from natural causes and I’m still around, there’s nothing but a weary sadness. Maybe they are right. Maybe it is time to loosen my grip on the trophy.”

He sighed, a great sad sigh, and turned away from me to look out the window. We were just heading out the gates of the cemetery, turning into traffic. Lenny was breathing through his mouth as he drove. Though it had become a warm sunny day outside, with the darkened windows and the cool of the air conditioning it felt like fall.

“Have you found out anything from Pietro?” he asked still looking away.

“I wish you would let someone else do this.”

“Tell me what you know,” he snapped.

“Cressi wasn’t working alone,” I said. “He had to check the details of the arrangement with someone else before agreeing to the purchase of the guns. I’ve made some inquiries to area Mercedes dealers, no one reported stolen cars. I also talked with the ATF about the group to whom Peter says he was going to sell the guns. White supremacists, skinheads. Those brothers who butchered their parents up in Allentown were members. ATF has been watching them for years and says they do buy guns, but not in quantity. They’re too strapped for cash to even mail their newsletters out. I don’t believe he was going to resell them.”

“Then what were they for?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He sighed again and lifted a hand so he could examine his fingernails. “I believe I can trust you, Victor, and that is good. You are my scout. Like in the old cavalry movies, every general needs a scout to find the savages.”

“I hope I’m not the only one.”

“I’m being betrayed from within. I’m ready to step down, to retire to New Jersey and paint flowers, like Churchill, but I won’t be pushed out by a Judas.”

“Who do you think it is?”

Raffaello shrugged, his shoulder rising and falling as gently as a breath.

“Dante wanted me to report directly to him,” I said. “That is not our arrangement.”

“He is overeager perhaps, but a good man.”

“How did he rise so fast?”

“He is the eye in back of my head.”

“Maybe he needs glasses.”

“Do you have any reason to doubt him?”

“No, but I don’t trust him. What happened to Calvi? I thought I could trust Calvi.”

“We had a disagreement.”

“Over what?”

“What do you think this is about, Victor, the cars, the secrets, the deals, the threats? It’s all about money, rivers of money. We drive around in our Cadillacs and people give us money. When they don’t, we get a little rough and then they do. I keep the peace because that way we make more money. I distribute what we get fairly so everyone will stay in line and we’ll make even more money. It’s fun, sure, and we eat well, but we’re not in it for the pasta or the fun, we’re in it for the money. Now the animals who are against us, they want more than their share and to get it they’ll do whatever they need to, commit whatever crime they have to. It would be no different if we were selling cars, or canned goods, or cannoli, we’d still have the same fight. Just the tactics would be different and there would be more survivors. They want me gone so they can control the city and decide who gets what and once they control the city they’re going to milk it dry. And then it will grow too ugly to even imagine.”

We were on the Schuylkill Expressway again, going east, toward the city. We were in the center lane and all about us cars were surging and changing lanes and halting abruptly as another car got too close. Lenny was driving remarkably steady, never rising above fifty-five, acting as if we were being followed by a cop car at all times, which we very well might have been. A red convertible pulled even with us to the right, the driver’s blond hair flying behind her like a dashing scarf, before she rammed her way ahead.

“What about Calvi?” I asked.

“Calvi became unreliable. He hated everybody, trusted no one, and everyone hated him back. He had risen beyond his abilities and he knew it, but he wouldn’t step down. And then we discovered he was taking more than his share, so I was forced to step him down.”

“How did you find out?”

“Like I said, I have an eye in the back of my head.”

“Have you ever wondered why if you got rid of Calvi you still have trouble? Have you thought maybe that Calvi wasn’t the problem? That maybe it’s that damn eye in the back of your head that is the problem?”

“Be my scout, Victor. Find out who is behind Pietro and I’ll call in the cavalry to take care of the betrayer.”

“And then I’m out. Completely. No one so much as even walks in my door or calls my number.”

An old white van, its side rusted out with holes, slid up on the left of us, passing the Cadillac, before slowing down again. The van fell back behind us as a station wagon slowed in the left lane before cutting sharply in front of our car and then in front of a bus before exiting.

“That’s the deal, yes,” said Raffaello. “But before that can happen you must find out what I need to know. I try to govern with reason, Victor. I’m a peaceable man at heart. But I know for certain when reason battles strength it is strength that will win. You tell me who the traitor is and I will show you strength. Tell me who the traitor is and I will cut out his tongue and mail it to his wife.”

Outside, on our left, the white van again pulled up to our side and this time from one of the rusted holes stuck a black metal tube. There was a puff of smoke and a fierce whine and the window next to Enrico Raffaello’s face suddenly sprouted crystal blooms of glass.

21

THE CRY OF METAL being torn apart. A shriek of brakes. A shout. The white van shooting ahead of us and then coming back as if on a string. A twist of the wheel. A force slamming me into the door and then down off the seat. The scream of twisting steel. A shout. A shattering of glass. A splash of cool crystals on my neck. A shout. A hand in my face and a voice telling me to shut up. An explosion beneath us and a wild series of bumps. A jerk forward. The shriek of breaks. The grind of the engine and a force pushing me further into the floor. A shout. A shout.

“Shut up already, Victor,” said Raffaello. “Just please shut up.”

“What? What?”

“Just shut up and calm down. We’re getting off the highway.”

A loud acceleration. A flash of a green hillside and then a jerk upward and to the right.

“Superb, Lenny. Absolutely superb. Did you see anything?”

“The window was blacked,” said Lenny with an utter calm. “Couldn’t see a thing, Mr. Raffaello.”

“That’s fine. We’ll find out soon enough. You were superb.”

“I slammed the hell out of them,” said Lenny, “but I couldn’t see who they was.”

“What? What happened?”

“What do you think happened?” said Raffaello. “The bastards they tried to whack me. You can sit up if you want. They’ve gone past.”

I sat up cautiously. The rear windows were all cracked and pitted with holes. Through the cracks I could see we were speeding off the highway, not bothering to stop at the stop sign before swerving violently to the left and onto a city street. The ride was terribly rough, even for a Philadelphia street, so I figured a tire must have blown. Lenny was searching the rearview mirror as he sped along. The car door on Raffaello’s side was fluffed with spurts of coffee-colored foam.

“We need to let Victor off now, Lenny.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Raffaello. I’ll slow us down under the bridge.”

“I don’t want to get out.”

“It has started, Victor. It doesn’t do either of us any good for you to be with me right now, you understand? When Lenny slows you will jump out of the car.”

“But no. No. I can’t.”

The Cadillac eased slower just a bit and edged to the side as it slipped under a cement bridge.

Raffaello leaned over to open my door. As he leaned I saw him wince. The left side of his suit was wet with blood.

“You’ve been hit. You’re bleeding.”

“Get ready to fall,” he said as he clicked down the lever.

“I can’t do this. They’re probably following us. They’ll run right over me.”

“Then be sure to roll,” he said as the door yawned and I saw a primitive mural of cars in traffic pass and beneath that the rush of black asphalt.

“Wait!”

“We’ll be in touch,” said Enrico Raffaello before he shoved me out of the car.

A sledgehammer bashed into my shoulder, a pile of rocks fell all at once along my side, claws scraped at my face as my head was pummeled. A line of pain edged into my back and then I was up, over the curb, lying splayed on a narrow cement walkway just beyond the cover of the cement bridge. I picked my head up as a set of tires sped inches from my left hand, which lay in the street, pale and still like a dead fish.

I pulled it back and scooted to my knees and tried to figure out where I was. It all looked vaguely familiar. The stone tunnel to my left, the traffic lights, the banners on the poles. A ludicrous bouquet of balloons. Wait a second, balloons and banners? Over there, by that parking lot, gingerbread kiosks and barred entranceways and a great green statue of a lion pride at rest. Suddenly I knew. Lenny had pulled off the expressway at the Girard Street exit and left me just outside the front entrance to the Philadelphia Zoo.

When I figured out where I was I also realized that the murderous white van must also have known the Cadillac’s escape route. It would give chase, along with any other vehicles that were tagging along to finish the job. No doubt they’d come right up this road, looking for whatever they could to kill off and what they’d find, if I stayed there, on my knees, like a scared penitent, would be me.

I stood and did a quick inspection. My jacket was ripped at the shoulder and blood was leaking through the white of my shirt. I wiped thin lines of blood from the scratches on the left side of my face. The right knee of my pants was slashed and through the opening I could see jagged gashes from which bright red oozed. Move, I told myself. Where? Anywhere, you fool, just move.

I cantered past the balloon guy and across a narrow road that encircled the zoo and then, with a stiff side step, I passed the lion statue and headed for the open gate between the kiosks.

“That will be eight-fifty,” said the young woman in the ticket window after she eyed my tattered jacket and the blood that had seeped through the shoulder of my shirt. She had a wide mole on her cheek that creased when she smiled. “But if you want to buy a membership now, you can apply today’s admission charge to the forty-dollar total.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s a tremendous deal. You get free parking anytime you come and free admission all year long. If you just want to fill out this form.”

“Really, no thank you,” I said, handing her a twenty. As she counted out my change I looked behind me. Nothing suspicious, nothing at all, until I spotted the nose of a long black Lincoln sniff its way slowly down the same road Lenny had taken the Cadillac. I rushed through the gate and into the zoological gardens before the woman could give me back my change.

I galloped across the wide stone plaza with the fountain in the grand iron gazebo, past the statue of the elephants, into the rare animal house, a long semicircular corridor flanked by cages. Fruit bats, to my right, scurried across their caged ceiling like a puppy motorcycle gang in black leather. Naked mole rats, pale pink and toothsome, huddled together in a warren of tunnels to my left. I glanced quickly behind me as I walked through the interior. Owl-faced guenons, marmosets, colobus monkeys with fancy black-and-white furs. It was mostly empty of viewers, the rare animal house at that time of the day, a few kids in strollers with their mothers. I stopped for a second to listen. The screech of a monkey, the rustle of the bats. The place smelled of dung and the musk of simian sweat. Two tobacco-colored tree kangaroos humped on a branch high in their cage. I was about to start moving again when I heard a door swing open and the tap of running feet.

I couldn’t see who was coming because of the curve of the wide corridor, but I knew enough not to want them to see me. There was an exit to the left marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and I darted to it, but the handle wouldn’t turn, as if the door knew exactly who I wasn’t. I looked back down the corridor, still saw nothing, and started running, past the mongoose lemurs from Madagascar, running to the far door, the sound of the footsteps gaining. Just as I hit the first of the double doors a herd of schoolchildren stampeded in, followed by their teachers. They pushed me back, drowning out the sound of the following steps with their excited baying. I found myself unable to wade through the waist-high gaggle and as the kids streamed by, I stopped and turned to face whatever fate it was that was chasing me.

The woman from the ticket window.

“Sir,” she said, her mole creasing with a smile, holding up two bills in her fist. “You forgot your change.”

I forced myself to take a deep breath. Even as I trembled, I stretched my lips into a smile. “Thank you,” I said softly, “that was very kind.”

“Here you go.”

In her outstretched hand was a ten, a one, and two quarters. I took the one and the quarters and said, “Thank you, you can keep the rest.”

“I can’t do that sir. Really, I can’t.”

“Think of it as a tip,” I said, “for restoring my faith in human nature.”

She blushed and her mole creased considerably and she tried to protest but I raised a hand.

“Thanks a lot,” she said. “Really, that’s great,” and finally she spun around to leave. Then I, with my faith in human nature restored, stepped slowly from the building, searching about me all the while for the men who were trying to kill me.

There was nothing suspicious on the wide brick walkways. Huge Galápagos turtles, safe in their shells, stared passively as I hurried by. Emus strutted and hippos wallowed and a black-and-white tapir lumbered about, looking suspiciously like a girl I used to date. At the rhino pen I leaned on the fence and watched a mother rhino and her calf. I was jealous of their great slabs of body armor. A girl in a purple dress stood on the tips of her Mary Janes and slipped her golden elephant key into the story box. A voice poured out.

Throughout Africa and Asia the rhinoceros is being hunted almost to extinction. For centuries certain cultures have believed the rhinoceros horn, blood, and urine possess magical and medicinal power.

While leaning on the bars and listening to the lecture, I slyly looked back along the path. As I did I spotted a figure at the top of a rise and my breath stopped. A beefy man in a maroon suit, looking around with a fierce concentration.

Scientists estimate there are only fourteen hundred greater one-horned Asian rhinos remaining in India and Nepal .

I didn’t know him, and I wouldn’t have recognized him except for the suit. Maroon suits are rare enough, but that shade was simply radiant in its repulsiveness, and not easily forgotten. I had seen it just that morning, at Jimmy Vig’s funeral. Its owner was one of the downtown boys for sure and not, I was sure, here to commune with nature. I froze and let my breath return in tiny spurts.

To help preserve this endangered species the Philadelphia Zoo cooperates with other zoos in a program called a species survival plan.

I waited, watching the man in maroon from the corner of my eye, and when he turned around to wave at something behind him I ran for the nearest building and rushed inside the doors.

I was in a wide, modern corridor, with huge plate glass windows fronting scenes of natural glory. Massive tortoises stared; a gray anaconda slept. A monitor, half submerged in a jungle pool, observed me with carnivorous eyes. At the end of the wide hallway were two huge windows with the superstars of the Reptile House, the alligator, squat and fierce, and the crocodile, pale and patient and hungry. Where the corridor made a sharp turn to the left I stepped away from the great predators so that while I was hidden, a view of the doors I had come in was reflected for me in the alligator’s window. Just be calm, I tried to tell myself, wait patiently and let him pass the building by as he searches the rest of the zoo. Better waiting and hiding then darting around the zoo’s maze of walkways like a zebra on the loose. Slow and patient, like my friend the crocodile, I told myself, while the bruiser lumbered past and disappeared. I evened out my breathing and the lump in my throat had almost dissolved when off the windowed front of the alligator’s cage I saw the door open and a flash of maroon.

I backed away until I hit a large wooden cube in the middle of the corridor. I slipped around it into the desert alcove. The windows here were smaller, like terrariums studded into the wall. Rattlesnakes, coachwhips, skinks, lots of skinks. I passed the Gila monster and then, using the wooden cube as a shield, I made my way into the older section of the building, toward a second set of doors. The atmosphere turned slippery and green. I backed my way to the far exit, past ropy snakes and tiny poisonous dart frogs and a North American bullfrog, staring at me with passive eyes that seemed to discount my fear. Your legs look mighty tasty, you bastard, I thought as the bullfrog sat comfortably on a synthetic log and watched me sweat. With the wooden cube still acting as a screen, I turned and made fast for the far doors, trotting then running then sprinting, sprinting too fast to stop when the doors opened and a figure, blackened by the light streaming in from behind, stepped through.

I ran right into it, bounced off as if hitting a wall, sprawled backwards onto the floor. The figure took one step toward me. When I recognized Peter Cressi looking down at me I quailed.

“Yo, Vic,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”

Behind me I heard steps.

“Geez, what happened wit’ you?” said Cressi as he eyed my tattered condition. “You crawl into one of the cages? Did some gorilla take a shine to you?”

I staggered up and immediately felt a hand fall onto my shoulder. I spun around. The beefy boy in maroon was grinning at me. He was missing a tooth. “Dante said we’d find someone here and he was right.”

I spun around again and stared at Cressi.

“Quite a thing what happened with that van,” said Cressi. “Quite a thing. To think such a thing like that could happen in this day and age.”

I tilted my head in thought while still staring at Cressi. “How’d you find out about the attack, Peter?”

“Dante, he told us and sent us on over.”

“And how’d he find out about it?” I asked.

“How do you think?”

“You tell me, Peter, dammit.”

My anger and fear all balled together and went directly to the muscles in my arms and in a tremendous shot of energy I slammed my hands into his chest, pushing him back against the doors.

“How’d he know, Peter?” I said. “Tell me that, you bastard.”

Again I pushed him back, this time so hard he hit his head on the glass.

“How’d he know unless he set it up? And you set it up with him. You bastard. Why the hell are you trying to kill me?”

I meant to slam him again but before I could two arms slithered fast as cobras around my shoulders and behind my neck and suddenly I was lifted off the ground.

“You bastard!” I shouted.

“Whoa, Vic,” said Cressi, giving me a strange look. “You’re going ballistic on us. Quiet yourself down or Andy Bandy here is going to have to quiet you for me. We don’t want no scenes in such a public place.”

Still struggling while held aloft, I said, “How’d you find out?”

Cressi gave me a look and then reached into his jacket and I stopped kicking as I waited for what I knew was coming. But what he pulled out of his jacket was a cellular phone.

“Lenny called Dante from the cell phone in the car once they dumped you. Dante sent me over to check out you was okay. We was only trying to take care of you is all.”

With that, Andy Bandy loosed the iron snakes around my shoulders and neck. Once again I dropped in a sprawl onto the ground.

“Pull yourself together, Vic,” said Cressi. “I’m not used to seeing you squirm like a slug such as you’re doing here. It’s enough to get me thinking, you know. It’s not a good thing to get me thinking, pal. It ruins my whole day.”

He reached into his pants pocket and jiggled what was in there for a moment before pulling out a small peppermint swirl wrapped in cellophane. He lifted his hand and with a quick squeeze he squirted the candy into his mouth before tossing the wrapper to the side.

“I can understand you being all shook up and all, but I hate to see you down there afraid of me.” The peppermint candy clicked in his teeth as he spoke. “What do you think I am, an idiot? You’re my lawyer. What kind of idiot would hurt his own lawyer?”

He leaned over me, but I found myself unable to look him in the face. Instead I was staring at something else, something I couldn’t yet understand the significance of, cringing and sniveling on the floor as I was, numb with fear of the two men standing over me. I couldn’t yet understand the significance but still I couldn’t stop staring, as if somewhere within me I knew the truth, that what I was staring at from the floor of the Philadelphia Zoo’s reptile house was the first loose thread in the eventual unraveling of the darkest secrets of the Reddman demise.

22

CRESSI AND ANDY BANDY drove me home and waited for me to enter the vestibule before they drove away, waited as if I were a schoolboy dropped off in the middle of the dark. “You want I should stay around some and keep an eye out for you, Vic?” had asked Peter from the front seat of the Lincoln. “No,” I had answered. The problem with Peter guarding my back was that I would have had to turn it to him and I didn’t trust him far enough for that. So I went into my apartment alone and stripped off my ragged suit and took a shower and put on a new white shirt and a relatively fresh suit and tightened my tie and looked at myself in the mirror. Then I loosened the tie and took off the suit and took off the shirt and the shoes and the socks and went to bed. It was now early afternoon and there was much work to be done at the office but still I went to bed.

I get this way, I guess, after I stare death in the face and she laughs at me. The fierce whine that had slid by my head in that car was death’s chortle, there was no doubt about that, and I had all but accepted her embrace when Andy Bandy held me aloft and Cressi reached into his jacket for what I was certain was a gun. But then death had slipped away for the moment, satiated, so it would seem, by the acrid scent of fear secreted by my endocrine system, satisfied with having reminded me once again of exactly what I truly was. I know people who look at the stars and say the night sky makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t believe them when they say it. When I look at the stars I don’t shrink but grow, filled with the perverse certainty that the whole of the universe has been put here solely for my amusement and enlightenment. But face to face with the grinning mask of death I know the truth. I am a randomly formed strand of DNA no more significant than random strands of DNA that define the leaf of grass upon which I tread or the cow whose charred muscle I gnaw. I eat Chinese food and crap corn and sweat through my socks and stink and the same DNA that gave me this nose and this chin and my ten fingers and ten toes has also sentenced me to oblivion. It directs my arteries to clog themselves with calcified fat, it directs my liver to wither, my kidneys to weaken, my lungs to spew bits of itself with every cough. And in the face of this utter randomness and planned obsolescence I can’t even imagine mustering enough energy to get out of bed and to walk the streets, to dry clean my suits, to return my library books, to vote for judges whose names I can’t pronounce, to act my part as if any of it really matters.

So for the whole of that afternoon I lay with my head beneath the covers, shivering, though I wasn’t cold, smelling the dried sweat of the fifty nights it had been since I last had laundered my sheets, trying and failing to come up with a reason to get out of bed. As if the smell of fifty nights of my dried sweat was not reason enough. Trying and failing until the phone rang.

Should I answer it? Why? Who could it possibly be that would matter at all? The answer was that it could be no one. I let it ring almost long enough for my machine to answer it, but maybe four hours of smelling old sweat was enough, because I peeked my head out of the covers, picked up the phone, and, with a little high-pitched squeak of a voice, said into the receiver, “Yes?”

“Did you hear what happened on the Schuylkill Expressway today?” said Beth in a gush. “A van with a hole bored into its side slid up to Raffaello’s Cadillac and shot it all to hell. It’s all over the news. Somehow the Cadillac got away. Raffaello is recuperating in some unnamed hospital, they won’t say, but can you imagine? Everyone’s talking about it. On the Schuylkill Expressway. Everyone wants to know who was driving the Cadillac. Apparently it got away even with one of its tires blown to pieces. The driver’s an absolute hero. I want him driving for me. Amazing. I think, Victor, it’s time to find ourselves another class of clientele, don’t you? Where have you been anyway?”

“I’m feeling a little under the cosmic weather, so to speak,” I said. Beth didn’t need to know I was part of it all. No one needed to know, no one ever needed to know, which was exactly why Raffaello had pushed me from the careening Cadillac.

“Are you all right?” said Beth. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No. Did they say on the news who did the shooting?”

“They have no idea. Just that there is apparently an internal dispute of some sort. The authorities are all mystified. You sound terrible. Do you need some soup or anything? Have you eaten?”

I had to think about that for a moment. It had been a day and a half, really. I had a quick lunch yesterday afternoon, but then there had been the repulsive offerings at Veritas and I hadn’t had time for an edible breakfast before Jimmy Dubinsky’s funeral. I wondered if my deep existential soul searching was less a result of my brush with the grinning mask of death than mere sugar depletion. Maybe there did exist a surefire solution to all our deep metaphysical dilemmas-a Snickers bar. “No,” I said. “Not for a while.”

“Let’s do dinner.”

“You sound obscenely cheery.”

“I’ve been going to that place in Mount Airy you wanted me to look into. The Church of the New Life. We should talk about it.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Interesting as hell,” she said.

We met at a restaurant on a deserted corner in Olde City. Beth had suggested a retro diner off Rittenhouse Square but all I could think of was its wide plate glass windows. I didn’t want to be behind wide plate glass windows just then, so I suggested this place well off the beaten track, and on the other side of the city from my apartment, and she had agreed. Café Fermi was a pretentious little restaurant with a pickup bar and bad art and an ingenious menu one step above the chef’s ability to deliver. I took a cab to the funeral parlor and picked up my car and still got there ahead of her. I ordered a Sea Breeze and drank it quickly to give myself a brave front. I went through a basket of bread while waiting. Beth arrived with a strangely serene smile on her face. A guy on his way out bumped her slightly and she just turned that smile on him.

She sat down and looked at me closely and put a hand on my cheek. “What happened to your face?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

She squinted. “That must have been some blade. How was James’s funeral?”

“Touching.”

“They said Raffaello was coming back from the cemetery when they shot up his car.”

“Oh yeah? I didn’t see him there. You hungry? Let’s order something. How does the veal look?”

She rubbed her thumb along the cuts on my cheek. “They didn’t say exactly who was in the car with him.”

I just shrugged and was surprised to feel tears well behind my eyes. I was about to lose it, but I didn’t. I held it in and looked away. I blinked twice and twice more. I raised my hand for the waitress and by the time she came it was all back inside where it belonged and I was once again as dry-eyed as a corpse.

Our waitress was a tall leggy woman, wearing all black, with heavy earrings and some demented metal objet d’art on her blouse to make it clear how au courant she was and we weren’t. “Yeah?” she said, and I didn’t like the way she said it, like we were disturbing her evening.

“We’re ready to order.”

“Sure,” she said, “I’ll be right back,” and then she shuffled off to serve someone more important.

“Is it just me,” I said, “or was she rude?”

“She has a tough job,” said Beth, which was very unlike her. Beth had the marvelous ability to take umbrage at even the mildest slights in our slighting culture. It derived directly, I think, from her natural optimism. She was a generous tipper, generally, but when a waiter was rude or a bartender nasty it was fun to sit back and watch the sparks fly. She was not the type to say, “She has a tough job,” not the type at all.

“What are you,” I asked, “in love?”

“No,” she laughed.

“All right. Tell me about the kooks in Mount Airy.”

“They’re not kooks,” she said quickly and quietly.

“Aaah,” I said slowly. “I begin to see.”

“Begin to see what?”

“Tell me about Mount Airy.”

Her head tilted as she stared at me and I could see something working its way in her eyes and I flinched from the expected tongue lashing but then that strange smile arose and all was once again serene.

“Well they’re not a cult, or anything like that,” she said, fiddling with her silverware. “They’re just a lot of nice people trying to find some answers. They believe that the voices of the spirit and of the soul are always there to tell us the secret truths of our existence, but we need to learn how to hear them. We need to somehow cut through the murk of our omnipresent reality and learn to listen and see in a spiritual way. The purpose of the Haven is to teach us how.”

“Okay,” said the waitress with a roll of her eyes. She had slinked upon us as silently as a predatory cat. “You said you were ready.”

“We’ve been ready,” I said. “I’ll have the Caesar salad and the veal in the apple cream sauce. Is the veal any good?”

“I haven’t gotten any complaints,” said the waitress.

“A ringing endorsement. And another Sea Breeze.”

“I’ll just have the bean chili,” said Beth.

“They have that Texas ribeye I thought you’d like,” I suggested.

Beth made a face, an I-don’t-eat-red-meat kind of face. I had seen that face on many women before but never before on Beth.

“Aaah,” I said slowly once again. “I do see.”

“You see what?”

“Go on about your new friends.”

“What they’re trying to gain is a way to see into the spirit world, what they call initiation into the temple of higher cognition, where they drink from the twin potions of oblivion and memory.”

“The twin potions of oblivion and memory,” I said, nodding. “And this is not a cult.”

“Not really. They teach a series of practical exercises that will help you climb up the twelve-step path to initiation. You can do it with them or on your own, with proper knowledge. There’s some chanting and incense, sure, but no magic. And no Kool-Aid. Just a natural way to a higher wisdom. Twelve steps with explicit instructions for each step. There’s actually nothing so unique about it. They’ve been doing it for centuries in the East. This is just a way for the Western mind to train itself.”

“And I assume you’re in training.”

“As part of my cover, of course.” She fiddled with a packet of Sweet’n Low. “But I will admit it seems to speak to a certain void I have been feeling. Maybe even what we talked about before, the something I had been missing.”

“Wouldn’t a few dates be more practical?”

“Shut up, Victor, you’re being an asshole.”

I was, actually. I didn’t know if it was the vodka talking or an outgrowth of my false brave front or the feeling I had that the last bastion had fallen, but I didn’t like to hear about Beth’s voids or her search for spiritual meaning. I could always count on Beth to stay rooted in the real world. Her idealism had nothing to do with any mystical esoterica, just the realization that we had a job to do and let’s get to it. And if her job was helping the disadvantaged it was no big thing. I never thought I’d see her groping for meaning in the spirit world. That was for mixed-up losers who couldn’t make it on their own and wanted an excuse. That was for hipsters too cool to accept the Western way in which their minds moved. That was for phony shamans in orange robes, not for Beth.

When my drink came, plopped in front of me without ceremony, I took a deep gulp and felt the bitter sweetness of the juice and the cut of the vodka. “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry,” and I was. Beth was the last person who took me seriously, I think, and for me not to take her seriously was a crime. “Tell me about the twelve steps.”

“I don’t know them all yet, but I’m trying to learn. The first step is just wanting to find meaning. It’s walking in the door. The second is understanding that the answers are all around us, both internal and external, but in the spiritual, not physical world. To access that world we are required to develop new ways of seeing, to develop our spiritual eyes.”

“The creep who came into our office and threatened me said I was a two.”

“Gaylord. He’s one of the teachers. A sweet man, really.”

“Sweet enough to remember cutting my head off with a broadsword.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You must have deserved it in your past life,” she said, “and as far as I can tell not much has changed.” It was good to see her laugh.

“Well, at least I’ve been consistent through the ages.”

“That’s nothing to be so proud of. Your level refers to the steps you have mastered on your way up the ladder. Practically anyone who enters the Haven has satisfied the first two steps or they wouldn’t be there, so it’s no great honor to be a two. It is on the third step that the exercises begin. You have to prepare your mind for the journey and you do that by learning devotion. You take the critical out of your thinking, you clear your mind of the negative, you fight to see the good in everyone and everything you come in contact with.”

“That rules me out. My one true talent is seeing the negative in everyone and everything.”

“You should try it, Victor. It’s rather refreshing. One result of being completely uncritical, I’ve found, is that I stop surrendering myself to the outside world, stop chasing one sense impression after another. Instead I try to take each sense impression as a unique gift and orient myself by my response to its singular beauty. I don’t rush to see a hundred flowers, hoping to find the prettiest, but examine one completely, uncritically, and feel my inner self responding to it. It is that response which is most enlightening. Respecting our own responses to sense impressions is the first step to developing an inner life.”

“I can’t manage my outer life, what am I going to do with an inner life?”

“Why so defensive, Victor?” she said with a condescending smile. “No one’s saying you shouldn’t keep eating animal flesh and watching Matlock reruns and chasing all the money you want to chase. You should do as you like and be happy. I, on the other hand, am practicing devotion.”

“And that’s why you’re so sweet to our rude waitress.”

“I can’t let my inner life be disoriented by minor annoyances in the physical realm. Only benevolence will lead to spiritual seeing.”

“I’d rather chase the money.”

“And do you think being rich will make you a complete and satisfied person?”

“Maybe not, but at least I’d be able to dress better.”

“You’re no different than the rest of us, Victor. We all see ourselves as this dissatisfied thing, this ego, looking outside ourselves for just that one other thing that will make us complete. That job, that lover, that pot of money. Even enlightenment, as if that too is a thing we can grab hold of to complete what needs completing. There is always something, we believe, that will make us whole. But if you take a finite thing, like body and mind, and look for something outside it to make it complete, something like money or love or faith, what you are seeking is also just a finite thing. So you have a finite thing reaching for the infinite by grabbing for some other finite thing and you end up with nothing more than a deeper sense of dissatisfaction.”

“So what’s the answer?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t trained myself to see it yet, but it’s out there, it has to be. I think it starts with changing our conception of ourselves.”

It all made more than a little sense and I had to admit that some of what Beth was saying resonated with what I had been feeling that very afternoon while hiding beneath my sheets. I thought for a moment about pursuing it further with her, to see if maybe there might be some answers there for me, thought about it and discarded it. Maybe I was succumbing to the same impulse that made it so hard for me to ask directions when I was temporarily misplaced on the road, or to ask for help from my father, but I figured I’d rather suffer in existential limbo than give myself over to a bunch of chant-heads, as Caroline had so finely described them.

“In the course of your spiritual search, Beth,” I said, “did you happen to find out why, maybe, your sweet teacher Gaylord and his muscle threatened me?”

“The group is building a spiritual center in the suburbs,” she said softly. “In Gladwyne.”

“Funny, isn’t it, how even in the spiritual realm it all comes down to real estate. Henry George would be much gratified.”

“They collect dues and hold fund-raising events, but there is also talk about a benevolent soul who left a great deal of money to Oleanna.”

“Jacqueline Shaw, and the five-million-dollar death benefit on her life insurance policy.”

“I think we can assume that. It appears when that money from the policy arrives it will finance the new building. Until then the group seems nervous to discuss it.”

“What’s the story on this Oleanna?”

“A very powerful woman, apparently. I haven’t had the honor of meeting her yet, but she is the only true seer in the group.”

“A twelve, I suppose.”

“She’s beyond twelve, so they say, which means her powers are beyond the noninitiate’s capacities to understand.”

“So this Oleanna exercised her powers to kill Jacqueline in order to finance her spiritual palace in Gladwyne.”

“It’s possible, of course, and it’s what I figured you’d figure,” she said. “But it doesn’t really jibe. These people truly seem to be after something nonphysical. They seriously believe in karma being passed along through recurrent lives. I can’t imagine them killing for money.”

“That’s the difference between us,” I said. “You can’t imagine them killing for money and I have a hard time imagining anyone not being able to kill for money, so long as there’s enough of it at stake.”

“Your cynicism will be a definite handicap as you climb the ladder of spiritual seeking.”

“Well at least it has some use. So you’re rising?”

“Step by step. I’m now a three.”

“A three already? Once again you outpace me. What’s the next rung?”

“Level four,” she said. “Finding an inner peace through meditation.”

23

THE SHRIEK OF SKIDDING TIRES sliced through the dark stillness of my room and I jerked to a sitting position, a cold sweat beading on my neck. It was the middle of the night but I wasn’t sleeping. Maybe it was being in a Cadillac riddled with bullets just that afternoon, maybe it was the vision of Beth climbing her mystical ladder step by step and leaving me behind, maybe it was the coffee I had taken with my dessert. “Decaf is for wimps,” I had said, and not being a wimp I had taken a second cup, but whatever it was I was lying awake, under the covers, shivering, letting a raw fear slide cold through my body, when the sound of the skidding car skived the night quiet.

I leaped out of bed and searched Spruce Street from my window.

Nothing.

I spun around and paced and bit and threw myself on the couch, remote control in hand. I spent twenty minutes watching an Asian man explain how I could become as lavishly rich as he by sending him money for a pack of cassettes that would teach me to purchase real estate cheap and put cash in my pocket at the settlement table. I knew how he was getting rich, by suckering desperate insomniacs like me into sending him money, but I severely doubted that I would profit too. Except there were testimonials, all of them convincing as hell, from people I imagined to be stupider than me, and I was seriously debating whether to pick up the phone and make the call that would change my life when I decided instead to masturbate. I tried that for a while but it wasn’t quite working, so I looked in the refrigerator for something to eat. There was nothing to eat but there was a beer, so I drank that, but it was old and not any good and left a bad taste in my mouth. I opened a Newsweek and then tossed it aside. I picked up an old Thomas Hardy paperback I had bought for a dime off the street and had been meaning to read, but who was I kidding? Thomas Hardy. I flicked on the television again and watched babes in tights hump the HealthRider and tried to masturbate again but again it didn’t work. I turned off the television and paced around some more. Then I decided I would follow Beth up her ladder and try to find some inner peace through meditation.

I had of course tried meditation in college, in an undergraduate sort of way, with an exotic redhead, a senior yet, braless, in tight jeans and a low-cut orange crepe peasant shirt. She had explained to me the whole transcendental thing while I had stared transfixed at her breasts. We were kneeling on the floor. We were probably high. David Bowie was probably playing in the background. I remember the soft warmth of her breath on my ear when she leaned close, one breast brushing my arm, and whispered to me my mantra. It was “Ooma” or “Looma” or something like that. When I crossed my legs and made O’s with my fingers and repeated “Ooma” or “Looma” over and over again, I tried, as she had instructed, to force all thoughts from my mind. I generally succeeded, except for thoughts of her breasts, which I thought about obsessively the whole of the time my eyes were closed. “Ooma, Ooma, Ooma,” or “Looma, Looma, Looma.” I imagined her breasts from beneath my closed eyes, all thick and ripe and mysteriously scented. I ran my tongue across my lips as if I could taste them. Sweet, like vanilla wafers in milk.

I don’t think I had quite the right attitude for proper meditation in college and it hadn’t worked for me: I neither fell into a meditative trance that night nor got closer to those marvelous breasts than my feverish imaginings. But I was not closed to the idea of meditation and could see no other nonpharmacological solution to my restlessness. So I sat on the floor in front of my couch and crossed my legs and checked the digital clock and closed my eyes and did as Beth had instructed me over dinner that evening. It was two twenty-three in the morning.

I concentrated on my breathing, in, out, in, out, and tried to keep my mind blank of any thoughts other than of my breathing, in, out, in, out. A vision of the white van slid into my consciousness and I slid it out again. I thought about the decrepit remains of Veritas and the venous piece of mutton I had been served and how disgusting all the food had been and I wondered how anybody could have eaten anything in that place and then I realized I was thinking about that when I should have been thinking about nothing and I pushed the thoughts away and went back to my breathing, in, out, in, out. The darkness beneath my lids looked very dark, out, in, out, in, and I remembered how Caroline had felt in bed, how her muscles had slackened and her eyes had glazed even as she was telling me to go on and how kissing her was like kissing a mealy, flavorless peach. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. It was two twenty-five. I closed my eyes, in, out, in, out. A thought about a woman hanging from a tapestry rope started to form and shape itself until I banished it and kept concentrating on my breathing, in, out, in, out, and the darkness darkened and a calm flitted down over my brain. I opened my eyes and saw that the clock now read two forty-six. I closed my eyes again, in, out, in, out, in, out, and slowly I directed my consciousness to pull free from my body, stretching the connection between the two, stretching it, stretching it, until the spiritual tendon snapped back and my consciousness was loose, free to float about the room on its own power.

“The point of the early stages of meditation,” Beth had said, “is to view yourself with the dispassion of a stranger in order to gain perspective on your life. Only with the perspective you gain by placing yourself in a position to observe your life from afar can you dissolve the niggling concerns of the here and now that keep you from hearing the true voices of your spirit.” That was why I had directed my consciousness to escape from my corporeal self, so I could dispassionately see what I was up to. Of course it was all self-directed, and most certainly delusional, but with my eyes closed I imagined my consciousness moving about the room and examining the contents with its own vision.

The seedy orange couch. The framed Springsteen poster. The empty Rolling Rock bottle on the coffee table beside the television remote control. The little washer-dryer unit, the dryer door open and half filled with pinkish-hued tee shirts and socks and boxer shorts. Three-day-old takeout Chinese food cartons on the red Formica dining table. I tried to send my consciousness out of the room, to take a Peter-Pannish tour of the city, but I couldn’t lift it through the ceiling. It could gaze out the window at the desolately lit scene on Spruce Street, but it couldn’t go through the glass. I tried again and again to hurl my consciousness through the ceiling, trying to gain the faraway perspective Beth had told me I needed, but my consciousness simply would not go. And then, almost of its own volition, it turned around and looped low until it was face to face with my body.

Crow’s feet, deeper than I ever thought possible, gouged out from the corners of the eyes. The scabs on the cheek were like the scrapes of hungry fingernails. The brown hair short and spiky, the neck too long, the shoulders too narrow. A white tee shirt hung from the shoulders as loose as if from a hanger. Where was the chest? The boxers were striped and only a shade paler than the bony knees. I was trying to view my body with the tranquility of an observer, as Beth had advised, but it was hard to keep down the dismay. Didn’t that stack of bones ever exercise? I went back to the face and tried to find some thought or emotion playing out on its features, but it was as inanimate as wax. I couldn’t even tell if the body was breathing, it looked more like a corpse than corpses I had seen.

I wondered what would happen if I opened my eyes just then. Would I see my consciousness staring back at me or would I have a clearer vision of the body I was now inspecting? Or would my consciousness, caught outside my awakened body, simply flee, leaving the body there as still and as lifeless as a salami? I started to back up again, to gain more perspective. The body seemed to shrink in both size and significance. I flew back until I was hovering over the dining table, as far from the body as I could get in that room. The whole scene, the sad, nondescript apartment, the mess, the stiff waxy body with its pale legs crossed on the floor, the detritus of loneliness scattered all about, the whole scene was pathetic. And then I noticed something in the body’s right hand.

I flew around the room, just zipped around for the sheer pleasure of it, before drawing close to get a better look. The hand was open, as if presenting an offering. Lying on the palm was a cellophane candy wrapper, one end twisted, one end open, and printed on the wrapper’s side in red and green were the words: MAGNA EST VERITAS.

I opened my eyes.

The light in the room forced me to blink away the hurt as I stared down at my right hand. It was open, just as I had seen it with my eyes closed, but now it was empty. My ankles hurt, I realized, from sitting cross-legged for too long. The cool blue numbers of the digital clock now read three thirty-one. I pushed myself to standing and walked around a bit, let the stiffness of my legs dissipate. I thought of that wrapper I had imagined my consciousness seeing in my opened hand and I started shaking. When I had calmed myself enough to sit and dial I called up Caroline Shaw.

With a voice drowsy with the remnants of a deep and most likely disturbing sleep, she said, “Victor, what?”

“I need to see you.”

“What time is it? What? Victor? Okay. Okay. Wait.” I heard her grope for a cigarette, the click of a lighter, the steady soft breath of an inhale. “All right, yes. You can come on over, I guess. I’ve been thinking about you too. It was nice, wasn’t it?”

“No, not now,” I said. “Tonight. Let’s have dinner tonight.”

“I wanted to talk to you this morning but you just ran away. I saw you on the lawn with Nat but then you were gone.”

“I had to be somewhere.”

“But it was nice, wasn’t it? Tell me it was nice.”

“Sure, it was nice.”

Another inhale. “Your talent for romance is overwhelming.”

“We’ll have dinner tonight, all right?”

“I’ll make a reservation someplace wildly expensive.”

“That’s fine. But make it for three.”

She laughed a dreamy laugh. “Victor. I wouldn’t have imagined.”

“I want your Franklin Harrington to join us,” I said, and her laughter stopped.

“I don’t think so.”

“I need to talk to him.”

“I think that’s a terrible idea, Victor.”

“Listen to me, Caroline. I believe I know who killed your sister. Now I need your fiancé to help me figure out why.”

24

I SPENT MUCH OF THE NEXT MORNING inside my office, door closed, reading the news reports in the Inquirer and the Daily News about the shootout on the Schuylkill Expressway. The information was sketchy. The white van had been found deserted in Fairmount Park. Police were still searching for clues as to the identity of the hit men but there were still no suspects. Authorities had confirmed that Raffaello was inside the Cadillac when it was attacked and was now in a hospital in serious condition, but no one, for obvious reasons, would say where. The police would state only that Raffaello and the unidentified driver of the car were both cooperating. There were reports, though, of another occupant, a white male, tall, thin, in a blue suit, who may have fallen from the car near the zoo. My skin crawled as I read about the mysterious figure stumbling his way across the street. The sighting was made by a balloon vendor outside the zoo entrance but the police apparently were discounting the story. Still, it worried me, and I pored over the reports nervously looking for any other information.

After I had read the papers, twice, I began playing catch-up at the office, returning phone messages, responding to letters, filing motions to continue those matters that I didn’t have time to deal with just then, freeing up my afternoon and the many days to follow. I was, in effect, putting off the whole of my practice while I pursued my ill-starred quest for a chunk of the Reddman fortune. When I cleared my calendar for the next week, I took a deep breath, grabbed a file, stuffed it in my briefcase, and sneaked out of the office, heading for Rittenhouse Square. Before my dinner meeting with Caroline Shaw and Franklin Harrington I had some things I needed to check on.

Rittenhouse Square is a swell place to live, which is why so many swells live there. It is the elegant city park. There are trees and wide walkways and a sculpture fountain in the middle. Society ladies, plastic poop bags in hand, walk their poodles there; art students, clad all in black to declare their individuality, huddle; college dropouts looking like Maynard G. Krebs walk by spouting Kierkegaard and Mr. Ed in the same breath; hungry homeless men sit on benches with handfuls of crumbs, luring pigeons closer, ever closer. It is a small urban pasture, designed by William Penn himself, now imprisoned by a wall of stately high-rises jammed with high-priced condominiums: The Rittenhouse, the Dorchester, the Barclay. It was the Cambium I was headed for now, a less imposing building on the south side of the park, hand-wrought iron gates, carved granite facings, million-dollar duplexes two to a floor. A very fashionable place to die, as Jacqueline Shaw had discovered.

“Mr. Peckworth, please,” I said to the doorman, who gave me a not so subtle look that I didn’t like. I was dressed in a suit, reasonably well groomed, my shoes may have been scuffed, sure, but not enough to earn a look like that.

“Who then can I say is visiting this time?” he asked me.

“Victor Carl,” I said. “I don’t have an appointment but I expect he’ll see me.”

“Oh yes, I’m sure he will,” said the doorman.

“Do we have a problem here?”

“No problem at all.”

“I don’t think I said anything funny. Do you think what I said was funny or is it just the way I said it?”

“I did not mean in any way to…”

“Then maybe you should stop smirking and get on the phone and let Mr. Peckworth know I’m here.”

“Yes sir,” he said without a smile and without a look.

He called up and made sure the visit was all right. While he called I looked over the top of his desk. The stub of a cigar smoldered in an ashtray, a cloth-bound ledger lay open, the page half filled with signatures. When the doorman received approval for my visit over the phone he made me sign the ledger. A few signatures above mine was a man from UPS. “All UPS guys sign in?”

“All guests and visitors must sign in,” he said.

“I would have thought they’d just leave their packages here.”

“Not if the tenant is at home. If the tenant is at home we have them sign in and deliver it themselves.”

“That way stuff doesn’t get lost at the front desk, I suppose.”

The doorman’s face tightened but he didn’t respond.

While I waited beside the elevator, I noticed the door to the stairs, just to the left of the elevator doors. I turned back to the doorman. “Can you go floor to floor by these stairs?”

“No sir,” he said, eyeing me with a deep suspicion. “Once inside the stairwell you can only get out down here or on the roof.”

I nodded and thanked him and then waited at the elevator.

Peckworth was the fellow who had seen a UPS guy outside Jacqueline Shaw’s apartment when no UPS guy should have been there. He had later recanted, saying he had confused the dates, but it seemed strange to me that anyone would not remember the day his neighbor hanged herself. That day, I figured, should stick in the mind. On the elevator I told the operator I was headed for the eighth floor. It was an elegant, wooden elevator with a push-button panel that any idiot could work, but still the operator sat on his stool and pushed the buttons for me. That’s one of the advantages of being rich, I guess, having someone to push the buttons.

“Going up to visit them Hirsches, I suppose,” said the operator.

“Are the Hirsches new here?”

“Yes sir. Moved in but just a few months ago. Nicest folk you’d want to meet.”

“I thought there was a young woman living in that apartment.”

“Not no more, sir,” said the operator, and then he looked up at the ceiling. “She done moved out.”

“Where to, do you know?”

“Just out,” he said. “So you going up to visit them Hirsches?”

“No, actually.”

“Aaah,” he said, as if by not going to visit the Hirsches I had defined myself completely.

“Is there something happening here that I’m not aware of? Both you and the doorman are acting mightily peculiar.”

“Have you ever met Mr. Peckworth before, sir?” asked the operator.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well then that there explains it,” said the operator.

“I guess I’m in for a treat.”

“Depends on your tastes is all,” said the operator as the elevator door slid open onto a short hallway. “Step to your right.”

I nodded, heading out and to the right, past the emergency exit, to where there was one door, mahogany, with a gargoyle knocker. A round buzzer button, framed with ornate brass, glowed, but I liked the looks of that knocker, smiling grotesquely at me, and so I let it drop loudly. After a short wait the door opened a crack, revealing a thin stooped man, his face shiny and smooth but his orange shirt opened at the collar, showing off an absurdly wrinkled throat. “Yes?” said the man in a high scratchy voice.

“Mr. Peckworth?”

“No, no, no, my goodness, no,” said the man, eyeing me up and down. “Not in the least. You’re a surprise, I must say. We don’t get many suits up here. But that’s fine, there’s a look of desperation about you I like. My name is Burford and I will be handling today’s transaction. In these situations I often act as Mr. Peckworth’s banker.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well come in, please,” said the man as he swung the door open and stepped aside, “and we’ll begin the bargaining process. I do so enjoy the bargaining process.”

I entered a center hallway lined with gold-flocked paper and then followed Burford into another, larger room that had traveled intact from the nineteenth century. The room was papered in a dark maroon covered with large green flowers, ferocious blooms snaking their way across the walls. There was a dark old grandfather clock and a desk with spindly animal legs and an overstuffed couch and thick carpets and dark Gothic paintings of judges in wigs with a lust for the hangman in their eyes. Thick velvet drapes framed two closed windows, the drapes held to the wall with iron arrows painted gold. The place smelled of not enough ventilation and too much expensive perfume. On one wall was a huge mirror, oval, sitting like a giant cat’s eye in a magnificent gold-leaf frame.

Burford led me to the center of the room and then, as I stood there, he circled me, like a gallery patron inspecting a sculpture he was interested in purchasing.

“My name is Victor Carl,” I said as Burford continued his inspection. “I’m here to see Mr. Peckworth.”

“Let’s start with the tie,” said Burford. “How much for the tie? Is it silk, Mr. Carl?”

“Polyester, one hundred percent,” I said. It was a stiff black-and-red-striped number, from which stains seemed to slide right off, which is why I liked it. Wipe and wear. “But it’s not for sale.”

“Come now, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “We are both men of the world. Everything is for sale, is it not?”

“Yes, actually, that’s been my experience.”

“Well then, fine, we are speaking the same language. Give me a price for your one hundred percent polyester tie, such a rarity in a world lousy with silk.”

“You want to buy this tie?”

“Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“One hundred dollars,” I said.

“A tie like that? You can buy it in Woolworth’s for seven dollars, new. I’ll give you a profit on it, though, seeing that you’ve aged it for us. Let’s say fifteen dollars? Who could refuse that?”

“Is Mr. Peckworth in?”

“Twenty dollars then.”

“I didn’t come here to haggle.”

“Thirty dollars,” said Burford.

“Let me just talk to Mr. Peckworth.”

“Well, forget the tie for the moment. Let’s discuss your socks. Tasty little things, socks, don’t you think? So sheer, so aromatic.”

“One hundred dollars,” I said.

“The thing about socks,” said Burford, “is you take them off, sell them, and all of a sudden you look more stylish than you did before. See?” He hitched up one of his pants legs. A bare foot was stuffed into a tan loafer. “Stylishness at a profit.”

“One hundred dollars.”

“That’s quite high.”

“Each.”

“Did you shower today, Mr. Carl?”

“Every day.”

“Then they wouldn’t quite be ripe enough for the price you are asking. But that tie, that is special. We don’t see enough man-made fibers these days. You don’t happen to have a leisure suit somewhere in the recesses of your closet, do you?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Fifty dollars for the tie, but no more. That is the absolute limit.”

“Seventy-five dollars.”

Burford turned his face slightly and stared at me sideways. Then he took a thick roll of bills out of his pants pocket, licked his thumb with pleasure, and flicked out three twenties. He fanned the bills in his hand. “Sixty dollars. Take it or leave it,” he said, smiling smartly.

I took the bills and stuffed them in my pocket.

“Come now, come now,” said Burford. “Let’s have it. Don’t balk now, the deal’s been done, money’s been passed. Time to pay the piper, Mr. Carl.”

At the same time he was demanding my tie he stepped aside, a smooth glide slide to the left which I found peculiar. What that smooth step did, I realized, was clear my view of the large oval mirror so that I would be able to watch myself take off my tie. There was something so neat about that glide slide, something so practiced.

I turned toward the mirror and gripped the knot of my tie with my forefinger and started slipping it down, slowly, inch by inch. “Now that you’ve bought my tie, Mr. Peckworth,” I said to the mirror, “I have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

For a moment I felt like an idiot for having spoken to a mirror but then, over an intercom, I heard a sharp voice say, “Take the tie and bring him here, Burford,” and I knew I had been right.

Burford stepped up to me and held open a clear plastic bag. “You’re such a clever young boy, aren’t you,” he said with a sneer.

I dropped the tie in the bag. “I try.”

Burford moved to the desk, where a little black machine was sitting. I heard a slight slishing sound and a thin waft of melting plastic reached me. “Yes, well, I would have paid you the seventy-five. I’ll take you to Mr. Peckworth.”

Peckworth was in a large garish room, red wallpaper, gold trimmings, the ceiling made of mirrored blocks. He was ensconced on a pile of pillows, leaning against steps that ringed the floor of what we would have called a passion pit twenty years ago. There were mounds of pillows and a huge television and a stereo and the scent of perfume and the faint scent of something beneath the perfume that I didn’t want to identify. On one wall was a giant oval window looking into the room in which I had taken off my tie, a two-way mirror.

“Sit down, Mr. Carl. Make yourself comfortable.” Peckworth was a slack-jawed bald man with the unsmiling face of a tax auditor, looking incongruous as hell in his pink metallic warmup suit.

I looked around for a chair, but this was a passion pit, no chairs, no tables, just pillows. I sat stiffly on one of the steps and leaned back, pretending to be at ease.

“I hope you’ll excuse the entertainment with the tie,” said Peckworth in a sharp, efficient voice. “Burford sometimes can’t help himself.”

“I hated to part with it for sentimental reasons,” I said, “but he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Peckworth didn’t so much as fake a smile. “It is nice to be able to mix business and pleasure. Unfortunately, we’ll lose money on the tie, but you’d be surprised how much profit we can earn from our little auctions. The market is underground but shockingly large.”

“Socks and things, is that it?”

“And things, yes.”

I imagined some room in that spacious luxury duplex dedicated to the storage of varied pieces of clothing in their plastic bags, organized impeccably by the ever-vigilant Burford, their scent and soil preserved by the heat-sealed plastic. The reheating directions would be ever so simple: (1) place bag in microwave; (2) heat on medium setting for one minute; (3) remove bag from microwave with care; (4) slit open bag with long knife; (5) place garment over head; (6) breathe deep. Follow the directions precisely and the treasured artifact would be as fresh and as fragrant as the day it was purchased. That’s one of the things I loved about Philadelphia, you could learn about some foul new pleasure every day of the week.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Carl?”

“I’m a lawyer,” I said.

“Oh, a lawyer. Had Burford only known he would have negotiated a better deal. I think he mistook you for a man of principle.”

“I’m representing the sister of your former neighbor, Jacqueline Shaw.” That was technically a lie, but it wouldn’t matter to Peckworth. “I wanted to ask you some questions about what you saw the day of her death.”

“Nothing,” he said, turning his slack face away from me. “I already told the police that.”

“What you originally told the police was that you saw a UPS man in the hallway the day of her death. Which was interesting since no UPS guy had signed in that day. But later you changed your story and said you saw the guy two or three days before. The change conveniently matched the guest register at the front desk, so the police bought it. But the change of memory sounded peculiar to me and I wanted to ask you about it.”

“It happens,” he said. “I’m older than I was, my memory has slipped.”

“This man you saw, can you describe him?”

“I already told that to the police.”

“So you shouldn’t mind telling it to me.”

“Tall and handsome, broad shoulders, dark curly hair. His brown shirt and slacks, I remember, were impeccably pressed.”

“As if they had just come out of the box.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

I opened my briefcase and took out a file. Inside was a folder with eight small black-and-white photos arranged in two rows and glued to the cardboard. The photos were head shots, all of men between twenty-five and thirty-five, all with dark hair, all facing forward, all aiming blank stares at the camera. It was a photo spread, often used in lieu of a lineup in police investigations. I stepped down onto the base of the passion pit with the photo spread. The ground tumbled when I stepped on it and then pushed back. It was a giant water mattress. I fought to remain upright while I stumbled over to where Peckworth reclined. Standing before him, maintaining my balance steady as she goes, I handed the spread to him.

“Do you recognize the UPS man you saw in these photos?”

While he examined the photos I examined his eyes. I could see their gaze pass over the photos one after another and then stop at the picture in the bottom left-hand corner. He stared at it for a while and then moved his eyes around, as if to cover the tracks of his stare, but he had recognized the face in the bottom left-hand corner, just as I suspected he would. I had received the spread in discovery in one of my prior cases and that figure on the bottom left had a face you wouldn’t forget, dark, sculpted, Elvesine. A guy like Peckworth would never forget the likes of Peter Cressi or his freshly pressed brown uniform. I wondered if he had made him an offer for the uniform instantly upon seeing it on him.

Peckworth handed me back the spread. “I don’t recognize anyone.”

“You’re sure?”

“Perfectly. I’m sorry that you wasted so much of your time.” He reached for the phone console beside him and pressed a button. “Burford, Mr. Carl is ready to leave.”

“Who told you to change your story, Mr. Peckworth? That’s what I’m really interested in.”

“Burford will show you out.”

“Someone with power, I bet. You don’t seem the type to scare easy.”

“Have a good day, Mr. Carl.”

Just then the door behind me opened and Burford came in, smiling his smile, and behind Burford was some gnomelike creature in a blue, double-breasted suit. He was short and flat-faced and impossibly young, but with the shoulders of a bull. I must have been a foot and a half taller than he but he outweighed me by fifty pounds. Look in the dictionary under gunsel.

“Come, come, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “It’s time to leave. I’m sure you have such important things to do today.”

I nodded and turned and made my careful unbalanced way across the great water mattress. When I reached the wraparound steps leading to the door I turned around again. “An operation like this, as strange as it would appear to authorities, must pay a hefty street tax. Probably cuts deeply into your profits.”

“Let’s go, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “No time for nonsense. Time to leave. Everett, give Mr. Carl a hand.”

The gunsel skipped by Burford with an amazing grace and grabbed hold of my arm before I could grab it away. His grip was crushing.

“I might be able to do something about the tax,” I said. “I have certain contacts in the taxing authority that might be very grateful for your information.”

Everett gave a tug that nearly separated my arm from its socket and I was letting him pull me up and out of that room when Peckworth said, “Give us a minute.”

After Burford and Everett closed the door behind them, Peckworth asked me, “What could you do about it?”

“How much are you paying?”

“Too much.”

“If the information proves as valuable as I expect, I might be able to convince my contacts to reduce your tax substantially.”

“Is that so? And do we even know who is in charge after yesterday’s dance macabre on the expressway?”

“I’m betting the old bull holds his ground.”

“And if he does, and you get me the break you say you can get me, what do you get out of it?”

I was about to say nothing, but then realized that nothing wouldn’t satisfy the suspicions of a man like Peckworth. There had to be an angle to it for him to buy in. “I get twenty percent of the reduction.”

“That seems steep.”

“My normal contingency fee is a third, but I’m giving you a break out of the goodness of my heart.”

Peckworth nodded and said, “I understand.” They always know you have an angle when you say you’re doing something out of the goodness of your heart. “You must understand something, Mr. Carl. We don’t choose the things that give us pleasure in this life, we only choose whether or not to pursue them. I have chosen to pursue my pleasures and with the money I earn in my side enterprise I am able to do just that. But the life is more precarious than you can imagine and those thugs are killing my cash flow.”

“Well, that’s the deal,” I said. “Take it or leave it.”

He thought about it for a moment, I could tell, because his brow knitted.

“I had some visitors,” he said, finally. “Two men, one very well dressed, short and dapper. The other a stooge in an impossible maroon suit. They suggested that I was mistaken as to the date I saw the UPS man outside Miss Shaw’s door. After they explained it all to me I realized that I must have been.”

“Did they give you their names?”

“No, but they did give me the names of a few of my suppliers.”

“You mean from the auctions.”

“Yes.”

“And that troubled you.”

“Yes.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Were these suppliers maybe under a certain legal age?”

“Never underestimate the delicate piquancy of the young, Mr. Carl.”

“So suddenly the entirety of your pleasure quotient was at risk.”

“Exactly, Mr. Carl. You’re very quick for a lawyer.”

“Any idea who these men were, or who they represented?”

“None, but I knew enough to step away. There is an aroma that follows particularly dangerous men.”

“And the stooge smelled bad, huh?”

“Not the stooge, Mr. Carl. They are a dime a dozen. Beside being monstrously strong, Everett is very loyal and can handle those that come my way with relative ease. It was the well-dressed man, extremely handsome, with even white teeth and groomed gray hair. There was something frightfully languorous about him, but even that languor couldn’t hide the scent of danger he carried.”

“What did he look like, an accountant?”

“Oh no, Mr. Carl. If he was anything he was a funeral director, but one who never had to worry about supply.” He leaned forward and said, “If your friends can lower my tax and take care of these men for me, Mr. Carl, you can take your full one third.”

“That’s very generous of you,” I said. I reached for the door and then stopped reaching and turned around. “Bottom left picture was your UPS guy, wasn’t it?”

“There was a brutality to his native good looks that I found unforgettable.”

“Mr. Peckworth, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but for someone who has chosen to pursue his pleasures with such devotion, you don’t seem so very happy.”

“Mr. Carl,” he said, with a straight, stolid face, “I’m so happy I could burst.”

25

EVERETT LUGGED ME THROUGH the apartment and spun me into the hallway. Burford blew me a kiss before he closed the door. A fond farewell, I’m sure, but I was glad to be left alone in the hallway. I didn’t take the elevator down, instead I went into the emergency exit. The stairwell was ill lit and smelled furry. The door hissed slowly shut on me. When I tried to open it again I discovered, as I had expected, that it was locked.

I started climbing up the stairwell, twisting around the landings as I rose. I tried each door on my ascent and discovered each to be locked, until the last. This one I opened, slowly, and found myself on the roof. It was flat and tarred, with assorted risers here and there, and a three-foot ledge all the way around. Scattered about were plastic lounge chairs, which I imagined were used by bare-chested sunbathers on hot summer afternoons. The knob on the outside of the door wouldn’t turn, but all those melanoma seekers would need a way to get back inside once the sun dimmed. I searched the floor and found a wooden wedge, well worn, which I jammed into the crack. With the door stuck open I stepped onto the roof.

I wasn’t really concerned with the roof of the Cambium. What I wanted to see were the surrounding roofs. The building fronted on the park and one side bordered on Nineteenth Street, as the road continued its way south after being interrupted by Rittenhouse Square. Behind the Cambium was a building three flights shorter, so that was probably out. But to the side opposite Nineteenth Street was another fancy-pantsed doorman building, whose roof was roughly the same level, separated only by a six-foot gap. The drop between the two was deadly enough, but six feet was not too long a jump for an athlete with a brave heart. Too long for me, of course, as I was no athlete, which I learned painfully enough in junior high gym class, and my heart was more timorous than brave, but not too long for a committed gunman out to kill an heiress, for my client Peter Cressi.

It was the cellophane candy wrapper Cressi had tossed out in the Reptile House of the zoo that clued me, of course, one end open, one end still twisted, just like the wrapper Caroline had found behind her sister’s toilet. It took a dose of meditation for my unconscious to show it to me because to my conscious mind it didn’t make any sense, Cressi killing Jacqueline Shaw. He had nothing to gain. But others did, others who may have been hunting for a fortune. Maybe Eddie, maybe Oleanna, maybe some other legatee in line for a great deal of money with one or more of the heirs to the Reddman fortune dead. There was someone, I figured, who had enough to gain from Jacqueline’s death to pay for it. And that someone paid enough to allow the killer to purchase a hundred and seventy-nine fully automatic assault rifles, three grenade launchers, and a flamethrower from an undercover cop. This was where Cressi’s money had come from, I now was sure. He had probably run into whoever wanted to do the killing while shaking down Eddie Shaw for the half-million Eddie owed Jimmy Vigs. He had been nosing around, harassing Eddie, harassing his relatives, making his presence known, when an offer was made. And then, after the offer and an acceptance and a meeting of the minds, Peter Cressi had dressed in a UPS outfit and gone to the roof of that building over there and jumped the six-foot gap and rushed down the stairs of the Cambium to knock casually on Jacqueline’s door with the words, “UPS, ma’am.” And after the door was opened and Peter had entered and done his lucrative wet work, he had gone into the bathroom to straighten up, to smooth back his hair, to tuck in his shirt, all the while with Jacqueline hanging there, twisting from the chandelier, probably still moaning out loud. And to freshen his breath, of course, Cressi would pop into his mouth one of the mints he had boosted from Tosca’s and, from force of habit, toss aside the wrapper, just as he had tossed aside the wrapper at the zoo. Sweet Peter.

Dante was in it with him, that was clear too. It was Earl Dante who went to cover Cressi’s tracks after Peckworth had spotted Cressi outside Jacqueline’s door. It was Earl Dante who had convinced Peckworth to change his story and so it must have been Earl fucking Dante who was directing Cressi as Cressi hired himself out as a hit man to get the bucks to purchase the guns that would allow Dante to win his war against the boss. What a little scab, that Dante. He had picked me as a pallbearer and probably advised Raffaello to have a chat with me, all the while knowing there was a white van with a hole in the side waiting to slide up to the Cadillac and blast away. What a murderous pus-encrusted little scab.

I only had one question left now, as I backed away from the edge of the roof and stepped toward the open door. Who, I wondered, had left the little wedge of wood in the door crack for Peter Cressi before Cressi made his leap?

I went back down the stairs, checking each door all the way down. On the third floor the door opened, even though the knob wouldn’t turn. The latch was taped down, as at the Watergate the evening Nixon’s hoods were discovered by the night watchman. Someone moving surreptitiously between floors, I guessed, a little hanky-panky that the elevator operator had no business knowing. It wasn’t much of a tape job, but it was all that was needed and I was sure that whoever had left the wooden wedge had done the same type of tape job to let Peter into the eighth floor. I ripped the tape off the lock with a quick jerk, just as Cressi must have done on his way back up from Jackie’s apartment.

When I came out of the emergency exit in the lobby, the doorman gave me a look. I guess he was wondering what I was doing in the stairwell. I guess he was wondering where I had left my tie.

“Nice building,” I said.

He nodded and said nothing.

“I hope you’re not still sore about how I spoke to you earlier. I had never met Mr. Peckworth before so I didn’t understand.”

“Everything, it is fine, sir,” he said with a formality that let me know everything, it was not fine. I would need to build some bridges with the doorman.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

His eyes slitted. “Roberto,” he said.

“You like cigars, Roberto?”

He tilted his head at me. “A good cigar, sure, yes.”

“You like them thick or thin?”

“You can tell much about a man, I’ve found, by the cigar he smokes.”

“Thick then, I take it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I walked across Rittenhouse Square and then east to Sixteenth Street and down to Sansom. A few steps east on Sansom Street I walked into the Black Cat Cigar Company. It was like walking into a humidor, warm and dry and redolent of fall leaves. “I need to buy an impressive box of thick cigars,” I told the stooped gray man with an unlit stogie in his teeth.

“How impressive?” he barked.

“Oh, about a hundred dollars impressive,” I said. “And I’ll need a receipt.”

Roberto took a bowie knife out of his pocket and slit open the seal on the box. He held up one of the thick and absurdly long cigars and rolled it in his fingers, feeling the texture of the tobacco. He smelled it carefully, from one end to the other and back again. With the knife he cut off a piece of cellophane and licked the end of the cigar as if it were a nipple and then licked it again. He finally smiled and put the cigar back into the box.

“I have a few questions I’d like you to answer,” I said.

“Surprise, surprise,” said Roberto.

“Jacqueline Shaw, your former tenant. I represent her sister.”

“And you think you can buy me with a box of cigars. You think my honor can be bought so cheaply?”

“Of course not. They’re yours, whether you help or not. And I wouldn’t call them cheap. I just felt bad about how I snapped at you before and wanted to make amends.”

He pursed his lips at me.

“Now, in addition to that, I do just happen to have some questions about Jacqueline Shaw.”

“I’ve already told the police everything.”

“I’m sure you did, Roberto. And Detective McDeiss has even provided me with a copy of your guest register for the day of her death. What I’d like to know is whether anybody ever went up to her place without signing in?”

“All guests and visitors must to sign in.”

“Yes, so you’ve already told me, Roberto. But I noticed Mr. Grimes didn’t sign in that day.”

He stared at me stiffly. “He was living there.”

“Yes, but I figure he wasn’t a listed owner of the co-op so, technically, he was a guest. What I want to know, Roberto, is who else could pop up to her apartment without signing in.”

He hesitated a moment, stroking the smooth top of the box with his fingers. “These are Prince of Wales, fancy cigars just to make up for a harsh word.”

“I have an overactive conscience. And like I said, they’re yours whether you help or not. All I’m trying to do is figure out exactly what happened the day of her death.”

I smiled. He examined my smile carefully, searching not for the insincerity that was surely there but for the glint of disrespect that was not. “Well, Mr. Grimes could just walk in,” he said finally, his right hand on the box of Macanudos as if it were a Bible. “And since it was a family place, her brothers, Mr. Edward, Mr. Robert, and her sister, were allowed up whenever they wanted. Mrs. Shaw of course went up often.”

“The mother, you mean.”

“Yes, and the grandmother, too, before she died. She used to come visit the old lady who lived there before, years and years ago. Mr. Harrington, too, came frequently. He paid the maintenance fees each month to me personally, gave out the Christmas tips. And the gardener would come up to take care of her plants. She had many plants but she wasn’t very good with them.”

“Nat, you’re talking about.”

“That’s right. With the red eye. A quiet man, but he always smiled at me and said hello.”

“You told all this to the cops?”

“They did not ask.”

“All right, the day of Jacqueline’s death, who came up and didn’t sign in?”

“I didn’t start work until twelve that day. The only one I remember coming in was Mr. Edward. He seemed to be in a hurry, but he left before Miss Jacqueline arrived.”

“You sure of that?”

“Oh yes, I remember. He rushed in very harried, like he was being chased. I told him Miss Shaw was not home but he insisted on checking for himself. I opened the door for him on the way out and he didn’t even nod at me.”

“Did you tell that to the cops?”

“They did not ask.”

“You said it was an old family place?”

“Yes, the Shaws had it for as long as I’ve worked here. The old cripple lady was in it and then it was empty for a while before Miss Jacqueline moved in. The family only recently sold it, after the unfortunate accident.”

“It’s funny how many hangings are accidental. Is it a nice place?”

“Very.”

“Well lucky for the Hirsches, then. One last thing. Any of your tenants besides Jacqueline belong to some New Age religious group out in Mount Airy?”

“How the tenants pray is none of my business. I’m just the doorman.”

“Fair enough.” I winked. “Enjoy the smokes, Roberto.”

“Yes, I will. You come some afternoon, we can savor one together,” he said, as he stepped from behind his desk and opened the door for me.

“I’d like that,” I said.

I walked again through Rittenhouse Square and down to Walnut. I headed east for a bit and then quickly turned on my heels and headed west. I saw no one behind me similarly turn. I darted into a bookstore on Walnut, just east of Eighteenth. As I browsed through the magazines I checked the plate window and saw nothing suspicious. Then I took the escalator to the second floor and went to an area in the rear, by the mysteries, and found the phone. With the receiver in my hand I swung around and saw no one paying the least bit of attention to me, which is just the way I liked it. I dialed.

“Tosca’s,” said a voice.

“Let me talk to table nine,” I said, roughing up my throat like I was Tom Waits to confuse the guys at the other end of the tap.

“I’m’a sorry. There’s no one at’a table nine right now.”

“Well when you see the man at table nine again tell him the scout needs to talk to him.”

“I don’t’a know when it will be occupato again.”

“Tell him the scout knows where the money came from and who’s behind it all,” I said. “Tell him I need to talk to him and that it’s urgent,” and before he could ask for anything more I hung up the phone.

It was as I was walking out of the bookstore that I spotted the late edition of the Daily News, whose front-page photograph instantly set my teeth to clattering.

26

I PAID THE FOUR BITS, folded the tabloid in half to hide the front, and took the paper straight to my apartment. I locked the door behind me. I pulled the shades down low. I flicked on a lamp by the couch and unfolded the paper beneath the artificial arc of light. Staring up at me was the picture that had shaken me so when I first glimpsed it in the bookstore. It was a picture of a man, stretched out on his back like an exhausted runner, a dark shadow slipping from beneath his head. The man’s mouth appeared to be laughing and at a glance it might have seemed a cheery picture except I knew the man and he was not much drawn to laughter. What seemed to be laughter was really a twisted grimace and the shadow was not a shadow and the man was no longer a man but now a corpse.

Dominic Volare, an old-time mob enforcer with strong ties to the boss. They had clipped him when he left his favorite diner in South Philly, waited as he leaned down to stick his key in the door of his Cadillac, rushed at him from behind, blasted him in the back and the neck, leaving only his face nicely unmarred for the picture. I had played poker with Dominic Volare, lost to him, been frightened by him, but he had never hurt me and had actually done a few favors for me along the way. I had thought him retired and now, I guess, he was.

There was a story inside linking the Schuylkill Expressway attack on Raffaello to Dominic’s murder and to another hit, just as deadly, if less photogenic. Jimmy Bones Turcotte, massacred in his car, a Caprice, the windows blown to hell by the fusillade that took with it his face. I didn’t know Jimmy Bones, had never had the privilege of standing in court beside him and saying “Not Guilty,” but I knew of him, for sure. He was another longtime associate of the boss. It was getting dangerous just then, I figured, to be a longtime associate of the boss, especially in or around your car.

The headline above Dominic’s death mask on the front page said it all: WAR!

It was on, yes it was. Dante’s battle for the underworld had begun in earnest and no one was safe, especially not a nickel-and-dime defense lawyer who had been roped into scouting for one side or the other. I turned off the light and thought about fleeing, maybe to Fresno, where mobsters in the movies always seemed to flee, Fresno. Or I could just cower in my apartment until it passed. I’d be all right, I had a television and a freezer for my frozen dinners and there was that Thomas Hardy book I had been meaning to read. I could hide out until it all blew over, lose myself on the bleak heaths of Hardy’s Wessex, I could, yes. But I wouldn’t. I had things to do, a fortune to hunt, and no slick-haired tooth-sucking loan shark like Earl Dante was going to push me off my path. What I needed was advice, serious advice, and there was only one man I trusted who knew enough of the ins and outs of the family business to give it to me.

With trembling fingers I dialed the 407 area code and then information. It was a shock to actually find his number there, as if all he was was another retiree, waiting by the phone for calls from his grandchildren. “Be there,” I whispered to myself as his phone rang. “Please to hell be there.”

“Yes?” said a woman’s voice, squeezed dry by massive quantities of cigarettes.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m looking for Walter Calvi.”

“He no here now.”

“I need to speak to him, it’s very important.”

“He’s gone two, three days, fishing.”

“Fishing? I didn’t know Calvi fished.”

“Big fish,” she said. “From a boat.”

“When will he be back?”

“Two, three days.”

“Can you give him a message for me?”

“He’s fishing,” she said.

“Can you give him a message for me? Can you tell him Victor Carl called and that things are going on up here and that he should get in touch with me?”

“Okay,” she said. “Victor Carl.”

I gave her my number and she repeated it to me.

“Could you tell him it’s important?”

“Nothing more important down here than big fish,” she said. “Except maybe cleaning the air conditioner and feeding the cat. But I tell him, okay?”

I hung up the phone and waited in the dark of my apartment for a while, waited for the light outside to grow dim, waited for Calvi to get his butt off his boat and tell me what to do. At least it had turned out all right for him, I guess. He was sitting on some boat off the Florida Keys, snapping marlins from the cool Atlantic waters, while the rest of us were stuck up here ducking Dante’s bullets. Of all the deals that were handed out Calvi got the best, for sure. I just hoped he would get his butt off that boat in time to tell me how to get one for myself.

When it was time I quietly left the quiet of my apartment, stepped down the stairs, looked both ways along the now dark street. Cautiously I slipped out onto the sidewalk. I passed my car and left it there. After what had happened in Raffaello’s Cadillac, and seeing what I had seen in the paper, I wanted nothing to do with cars for a while. I walked along Spruce, then down through the park at Nineteenth, and over to Walnut, to restaurant row. It was time, I figured, for me to do some fishing of my own.

27

“HOW’S THAT GROUPER, CAROLINE?” asked Franklin Harrington, with a surfeit of politeness.

Caroline was leaning back in her chair, arms crossed, moodily separating the pale flakes of fish with her fork. She wore her leather jacket and black jeans and combat boots and would have looked terribly out of place among the well heeled and well coifed except that Harrington, in his perfectly pressed Ralph Lauren, covered for her. “Succulent,” she said, her voice dry and devoid of enthusiasm.

“Terrific,” said Harrington, who had instinctively taken on the role of the host, either through the dictates of good breeding or his unbridled arrogance, I couldn’t yet figure. “And your crab cakes, Victor?”

“Trayf,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s the Jewish word for succulent.”

“And I thought that was shiksa,” said Caroline, with a sly smile, as she reached for her wineglass.

“Trayf is broader than that.” I explained. “Not all trayf are shiksas, though shiksas are surely the most succulent trayf.”

“Well then why don’t you just go right ahead and order the shiksa,” said Harrington.

Caroline spit out her mouthful of Chardonnay.

Welcome to the lifestyles of the rich and the Yiddish.

We were in the Striped Bass, a gaudy new restaurant on Walnut Street, more stage set than anything else, with palm tress and rattan chairs, with marble pillars three stories tall, with the kitchen open so the diners can see their fish’s firm flesh being pan-seared. It’s not enough to just eat anymore, restaurants are now theme parks. Ride the gingered seafood fritto misto. Thrill to the bite of clam fritters with Asian slaw. Test your courage with the raw Malpeque oysters and your manhood with the hunk of burning blackened sea bass. The Striped Bass served only seafood, that was the hook, but it was more show biz than anything else, no different than the Hard Rock Café and Planet Hollywood, though many steps up in class and price. Instead of hamburgers, mahimahi with arugula pesto. Instead of fajitas, sautéed Maine lobster with somen noodles. Instead of gawking teenagers, gawking adults, wondering who was rich enough or famous enough to be at the chef’s table that night. And despite this burden of atmosphere the food was actually brilliant. Reservations at the Striped Bass were taken months in advance, but guys like Harrington had their ways, I figured, and so there we were, Caroline sulking, Harrington as gratingly pleasant as a cruise director, and me, who had convened this awkward congregation, waiting for the appropriate moment to unload my questions.

I hadn’t liked Harrington when we first met at the bank and I still didn’t like him. There was an air of false importance about him, a sense that what he said actually mattered. He had been somebody’s blue-eyed boy for too long. He needed to be stepped down a peg and I was just the guy, I figured, to do the stepping. I wanted to be sure, by the end of the night, after all was said and done, that he knew I had screwed his fiancée, and even though I hadn’t liked it much, he didn’t need to know that. Class divisions as clear as those between Harrington and myself always bring out my best, or at least my most petty.

I took a forkful of crab, swirled it in the mustard sauce, and swallowed. It was too good. Harrington was working on his swordfish. Caroline was still flaking her grouper with the tines of her fork, showing no inclination to eat despite the thirty bucks her fish cost. It was almost getting beyond awkward, so I thought I’d lob in the first of my little bombs and liven things up.

“Who,” I asked nonchalantly as I picked at my crab, “was Elisha Poole?”

Harrington looked up from his plate with a sharp surprise on his face. He glanced at Caroline, who rolled her eyes with boredom, and then back at me. “What do you know about Poole?”

“Bobby told me a little when I was at the house the other night.”

“Yes,” said Harrington, his pale cheeks darkening, “I heard you were there.”

I smiled a competitive little smile. One of the evening’s goals, at least, had been scored. “Bobby told me that his great-grandfather had bought the company from Poole just before he started pushing his pressure-packed pickles and that, later, Poole claimed he was swindled. Bobby said that Poole had cursed the whole family for it.”

“So that explains everything,” said Caroline. “I rather like the idea that we are cursed. It’s more comforting than knowing we screwed it up ourselves.”

“Everything Bobby told you is correct,” said Harrington. “It was Poole ’s company before Claudius Reddman bought it, one of a score on the docks canning produce. Poole was a tinsmith and started the company by tinning tomatoes and corn brought over from New Jersey. Claudius was first hired as an apprentice tinsmith but soon took on other responsibilities.”

“When did you learn all this, Franklin?” asked Caroline.

“I find it prudent to study the history of any family whose wealth I administer.”

“How did Reddman end up buying the company if he was just an apprentice tinsmith?” I asked.

“We’re not sure,” said Harrington, “but it appears that Poole liked his drink and as Claudius was able to handle more and more of the business side of things, Poole spent more time with a bottle. Poole ’s father was a notorious drunk, apparently, and so it was only a matter of time before it caught up with the son.”

“Can you get us more wine, Frankie,” said Caroline. “I’m suddenly thirsty.”

I gave Caroline a glance as Harrington snapped for a waiter and ordered another bottle.

“As Poole ’s drinking grew worse,” said Harrington, “Reddman started taking control of the company. Bit by bit he purchased Poole ’s stock, paying cash for the shares. The company wasn’t earning much in those days and Poole was finding himself falling into debt and so he took the money eagerly.”

“Where did the cash come from?” I asked.

Harrington shrugged. “There’s the mystery. But just before the company expanded production of its soon to be famous pickles, Reddman took out a loan to buy the rest of Poole ’s shares. By that time the company was in the red and Poole was apparently only too ready to sell out. It was quite the gamble for Claudius Reddman, taking a loan to buy a profitless company.”

“But it paid off, didn’t it?” I said. “Reddman became a wealthy man, an American industrial giant, and Poole was left to hang himself.”

“That’s right,” said Harrington, turning his attention back to his fish. “ Poole ended as an embittered old drunk who had pissed away his chance for a fortune, that’s one way to view him. Or, if you take his side, he was an honest, trusting man, swindled by an avaricious swine who built his own fortune off the carcass of Poole ’s life work.”

“Who is left to take his side now?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“Who is around who still thinks Poole was swindled?”

“I don’t know,” said Harrington. “The Pooles, I suppose.”

“Are there any?”

The sommelier came with another bottle of wine, red this time, and poured a sip’s worth into Harrington’s glass. Harrington tasted it and nodded at the waiter and then said offhandedly, “I would think there are.”

“Where?” I asked.

“How should I know?”

“What about the daughter,” I said, “who lived in that house by the pond at Veritas with her widowed mother? You know the place, right?”

Caroline and Harrington glanced at each other and then away.

“Can you imagine her,” I continued, “living in that sagging little hovel, all the time looking up at the great manor house that her father had told her should have been hers? Do you ever wonder what she was feeling?”

“Probably gratitude that great-grandfather had given her a place to live,” said Caroline, who proceeded to empty her wineglass in three quick gulps before reaching for the bottle.

“Did you know Caroline was a Republican?” asked Harrington with an ironic smile I wouldn’t have expected from a banker.

“Somehow I don’t think Poole ’s daughter was gratified at all,” I said. “Have you ever seen that Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World? That’s what it must have been like for her, staring up with longing at the large house on the hill. Can you imagine it? She lived there until her mother died, in the shadow of that huge stone house. How twisted must her tender little psyche have become? That she ended up in an asylum is no wonder.”

“Who told you she ended up in an asylum?” asked Harrington with a curious puzzlement.

“The gardener, Nat. I asked about the old cottage on the other side of the pond and he told me.”

“How the hell would Nat know anything about her?” asked Caroline. “This is all ancient history. Jesus, has it gotten cold or something?” She swallowed a gulp of wine. “Can’t we talk about a cheerier subject than the Pooles, for God’s sake. Victor, you’re the mob lawyer, tell us about the mob war that’s in all the papers. It even made the Times. What about that attack on the expressway?”

“Amazing,” said Harrington.

“What happened to your face anyway, Victor?” said Caroline. “It looks like you were in a fight with a cat and lost.”

“I wonder if she had any children?” I said.

“Who?” asked Harrington.

“The Poole daughter.”

“Jesus, Victor,” said Caroline. “Why are you so interested in the goddamned Pooles? It’s enough to drive a girl to drink. Pass the wine.” I couldn’t help but notice that she was now completely ignoring her grouper and had begun to drink like, well, like a fish. I guess our conversation about her family had turned this into what her therapist would have called a situation.

“I’m intrigued by the whole of your family history, Caroline. You asked me to find out if Jacqueline was murdered. Well, after looking into it, now I’m sure that she was.”

“Is Victor acting as your lawyer?” asked Harrington, bemusement creasing his face. I found it interesting that he was more surprised that I might be lawyering for Caroline than that I believed Jacqueline was murdered.

She gave a half smile rather then attempt to describe our peculiar legal relationship.

“So that explains the check and the visit to Veritas.”

“You thought what?” said Caroline. “That he was a gigolo, maybe? Victor?”

“You also wanted me to find out who killed her,” I continued, ignoring Harrington’s laughter. “I think I now know who.”

“What?” said Harrington, his laughter dying quick as a scruple in a bank. “Who, then?”

“That’s not important right now,” I said.

“Of course it is,” said Harrington. “Have you told the police?”

“The evidence I have is either inadmissible or would disappear before a trial at this point. I’ll need more before I go to the police, and I’ll get it, too. But the guy who killed her was hired to do it, I believe, paid. Just like you would pay a servant or a bricklayer or a gardener. And so the question I still have is who paid him.”

“And you suspect the answer is in our family’s history?” asked Caroline.

“I’m curious about everything.”

Harrington was staring at me for a moment, trying, I suppose, to guess at exactly what I was doing there. “You know, Caroline,” said Harrington, still looking at me, “I knew Victor was a lawyer, but law was not the game I thought we were playing here. Silly me, I thought you brought me here just to show off another of your lads.”

“I announced him as my lover at the house just to get mother’s goat,” said Caroline.

“And you succeeded. She was apoplectic.”

“Thank God something worked out right.”

“Well, then, let’s have it out,” said Harrington. “Are you, Victor?”

“Am I what?”

“Caroline’s lover.”

I glanced at Caroline and she reached for her wine and there was an awkward silence.

Harrington laughed, a loud gay laugh. “That was clear enough an answer. Now, I suppose, I must defend my honor.” He patted his jacket. “Damn, you can never find a glove when you need one to toss into a rival’s face.”

“Shut up, Franklin.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right, Caroline. I’m being rude. Don’t worry, Victor, what you and Caroline do after school is fine by me. All I want is for Caroline to be happy. Truly. Are you happy with Victor, Caroline?”

“Ecstatic.”

“Terrific then. Keep up the good work, Victor.” He turned back to his swordfish and lopped off a thick gray square. “Any help you need keeping her happy, you let me know.”

Caroline emptied her glass and let it drop to the table. “You’re a bastard, you know that.”

“Maybe I’ll order some champagne to celebrate.”

“A goddamn bastard. And you want to know something, Franklin. Victor’s amazing in bed. An absolute acrobat.”

I couldn’t stop my jaw from dropping at that.

“Well then, instead of the champagne I’ll call for the check, get you both back to your trapeze.”

“You’re too heartless,” said Caroline, her arms now crossed tightly against her chest, her chin tilted low.

“I wasn’t the one who invited us all out to dinner together.” Harrington picked up the bottle and said nonchalantly, “More wine, Victor?”

“Am I missing something?” I asked. “It sounds like I’m in the middle of an Albee play.”

“Yes, well, the curtain has dropped,” said Harrington, putting down the bottle. He looked at Caroline and the arrogance in his face was replaced by something tender and vulnerable. It was as if a tribal mask had suddenly been discarded. The way he looked at her made me feel small. “You have to understand, Victor, that I don’t care for anyone in this world as much as I care for Caroline. I couldn’t love a sister any more than I do her. She caught a bad break, getting born a Reddman. Any normal family and she’d have been a homecoming queen, happy and blithe, and she deserves just such blind happiness, more than anyone else I know. I’d die to give it to her if I could. I’d rip out my heart, bleeding and raw, and present it to her on a white satin cushion if it would turn her sadness even for a moment.”

Caroline’s sobs broke over the last few words of Harrington’s speech like waves over rock. I hadn’t even known she was crying until I heard them, so entranced I was by this new Harrington and his proffer of love. Caroline was hunched in her chair, thick mascara tears streaking her cheeks, and there was about this jag nothing of the rehearsed dramatist I had seen when she collapsed in the street with her gun that first day I met her. Whatever strange thing was between Caroline and Harrington, it cut deep. She was about to say something more, but she caught her lip with her teeth, tossed her napkin onto her plate, stood, and walked quickly away, toward the ladies’ room.

“She’s an amazing woman,” said Harrington after she had gone.

“Yes.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t hurt her,” he said, picking up his knife and slicing into a dinner roll.

“I may be wrong,” I said, “but I don’t think she’s in the bathroom crying over me.”

He sighed. “No.”

“What are you, gay?”

Harrington’s face startled, and then he laughed, a warm guttural laugh, charismatic and comforting. I watched him laugh and I couldn’t help but start laughing too. “No,” he said when he finally calmed and had wiped the tears from his eyes. “But that would have been so much easier.”

While we were waiting for Caroline’s return, Harrington, now under the assumption that I was Caroline’s lawyer as well as her lover, explained to me the intricacies of the Reddman demise. The family’s entire share of Reddman stock was in one trust, controlled by Kingsley, Caroline’s father. While the bulk of the dividends remained with the trust, a portion was designated for division to Kingsley’ heirs, the four children. When an heir died, each survivor’s share of the designated division increased proportionally. Upon Kingsley’s death, the shares in the trust were to be divided equally among the surviving heirs.

“How much?” I asked. I knew the general numbers, but I still liked hearing them.

“Right now, with three heirs, each share is worth about one hundred and forty-five million dollars, before taxes, but the share price has been rising so it may be more.”

“Uncle Sam will be happy with his cut.”

“Both Eddie and Bobby are considering moving to Ireland permanently to defray taxes.”

“And they say patriotism is dead. It’s funny though, talking about so much money, but I thought it would be more.”

“Yes, well, over the years many of the shares have been sold, to pay the expenses in maintaining the house and other properties, and a large stake has been put into a different trust, pursuant to the direction of a former trustee.”

“Which trustee?”

“Caroline’s grandmother.”

“And who are the beneficiaries of that trust?”

“I don’t know. It is not being run by our bank and the documents are sealed.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not a one.”

“I heard a rumor that Charity Reddman, Caroline’s grandaunt, ran away after she became pregnant. Any possibility that the trust could be for the benefit of the child or the child’s heirs?”

“Possible, I guess. But you can’t honestly suspect some mysterious heir of Charity Reddman of being responsible for Jacqueline’s death.”

I shrugged. “Tell me about the life insurance policies.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Five million, term, on each heir, premiums paid by the trust. The beneficiary of the policies was designated by the trust as the surviving heirs.”

“So if one killed off another,” I said, “that one would get a third of five million?”

“That’s right.”

“Nice motive,” I said, thinking of Edward Shaw and his gambling debts. “Except I was under the impression the money from Jacqueline’s insurance went to her church.”

“Yes. Jacqueline changed the beneficiary just before her death.”

“Did her brothers and sister know?”

“She wanted me to keep it quiet, so I did.”

“And so when she died her brothers and sister were in for a nasty surprise.”

“Some were none too pleased,” admitted Harrington. “And neither, of course, was the insurance company. It was ready to pay the death benefit but now it’s holding off payment until all questions of Jacqueline’s death are answered.”

I was surprised at that, wondering who had raised the questions with the insurance company, but before I could follow up, Caroline returned. Her eyes were clean of mascara and red, her face was scrubbed. She looked almost wholesome, about as wholesome as you can look with a diamond in your nose. She didn’t sit, instead she placed a hand on my shoulder.

“Take me home, Victor.”

Harrington stood immediately. “Don’t worry about the check,” he said.

Out on Walnut Street, as I raised my hand for a cab, I couldn’t help but ask, “What is going on between you two?”

“Have you ever been in love, Victor?”

I thought about this for a little bit. “Yes.”

“It wasn’t any fun, was it?”

“No, not really.”

“Just take me home and fuck me, Victor, and please please please please please don’t say another word until you do.”

28

HER PLACE WAS ABOVE an abandoned hardware store on Market Street, just a few blocks west of the Delaware River. It was a huge cavernous space supported by rows of fluted cast-iron pillars, easily more than three thousand square feet. It had been a sweatshop of some sort in its more productive days and must have been a brutal one at that. Plaster scaled from the walls leaving them mottled and psoriatic. The ceiling, warped and darkened by leaks, was a confused configuration of wires and old fluorescent light fixtures and air conduits. Here and there patches of the ceiling’s metal lath showed through where huge chunks of the plaster had fallen to the floor of roughened wood, unfinished, dark, splattered with paint. The windows were yellowed and bare of adornment, staring forlornly out onto the street or the deserted lot next door. The bathroom was doorless, the shower a cast-iron tub with clawed feet, the kitchen one of those stainless steel kitchenettes that looked to have been swiped from a motor home. Piled in one of the corners on the Market Street end were scraps of metal, old bed frames, chairs, evidence of a failed rehab. The loft smelled of wet plaster and dust and sorrow.

There was a couch in the middle, lit by a ceramic lamp on an end table, and there was a love seat that matched the couch and a coffee table to prop up feet and place drinks when entertaining. It looked to have been bought at a place like Seaman’s, the whole setup, and it would have been at home in any suburban split level, but here, in the midst of this desolation, it seemed so out of place it was almost like a work of art, commenting wryly on the easy comfort bought at places like Seaman’s. And then, beneath an industrial light fixture that hovered over it like a spy, there was the bed, a king-sized sleigh bed, massive as a battleship, carved of dark mahogany. Red silk sheets covered the mattress. The comforter, a masculine gold and green paisley, was twisted and mussed atop the silk. Four long pillows, covered in a golden print, were tossed here and there across the bed. And tossed among the pillows and the twists of the comforter were Caroline and I, on our backs, staring up at that spy of a light fixture and the ragged ceiling beyond, following with our gazes the rise of her cigarette smoke, naked, our bodies at right angles one to the other, not touching except for our legs, which were still intertwined.

“Tell me about her,” said Caroline.

I immediately knew which woman she was asking about. “There isn’t much to tell, least not anymore.”

“Was she pretty?”

I knew which woman she was talking about and I knew why she was asking and the reasons were so sad I couldn’t help but answer her. “She was very pretty and very decadent and very vulnerable. When I met her she was with someone else, someone very powerful, which made her wildly attractive to me and so far out of reach she wasn’t even worth fantasizing about.”

“What was her name?’

“Veronica.”

“How did you two get together?”

It was a funny-sounding question, like you would ask about high school sweethearts or an innocent pair of newly-weds, not two depraved lovers like Veronica and me. “I don’t know, exactly. It was a time of my life when I was full of desires. I wanted money and success, I wanted to be accepted and admired by my betters. I wanted to be the guy I saw in the GQ ads, the smiling man-about-town in those society photos. I wanted to be everything I could never be. And for a while, most of all, I wanted Veronica. Then, like a dream, I had a chance for everything, the success, the wealth, the entree into a world that had kept me out just for the sheer joy of it. And I had a chance at her too. In the blink of an eye we were sleeping together and she had become more than a desire, she had become an obsession.”

“Was it as marvelous as you had imagined?”

It was, actually, the sex was beyond glorious, overwhelming all my better intentions, and soon nothing had seemed to matter but the sex, except I didn’t want to tell Caroline that, so I answered her question with another question. “Is anything ever as marvelous as we imagined?”

“Never,” she said, “never, never, never.”

I couldn’t help but wince a bit at that.

“And then it all turned bad,” I said. “Everything I thought I was being offered was a lie, everything I thought I wanted was a fraud. Everything I knew for certain was absolutely wrong. And finally, when I put myself on the line, she betrayed me. That was the end. I thought I was in love, and part of it was that, I think, but it was also that for the times I was with her I felt I was on the verge of becoming something else, and that was what I had been most desperately seeking all along. I still am, I guess. I’ve thought about it a lot since she disappeared from my life and it doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense, but then I guess obsessions never do.”

“You want her back?”

“Nope. Well, maybe, yes. I don’t know. Yes. Even still. But all that other stuff I wanted, they can blow it out their asses. I don’t want their success, I don’t want their admiration or their acceptance. Last thing I ever want is to slip on my tux and make nice with high society.”

She reached out her arm and slid a finger up my side, from my hip to my armpit. “So what is it that you want now, Victor?”

“Just the money,” I said, rather cruelly, and then it was her turn to wince.

But I was troubled enough about my whole burgeoning extracurricular relationship with Caroline Shaw that I wanted to keep certain things clear, and they were. Absolutely. The reason she was asking about the time I was in love, I was sure, was because while there we were, naked in bed, our legs intertwined, my condom, pendulous with fluid, already tied off and disposed of, the sweat still drying on our overheated bodies, fresh from making whatever it was we had been making, the one thing missing had been love. Its absence was as chillingly palpable as a winter’s fog.

I had brought her home as she had requested, and escorted her upstairs, as propriety required, but I had decided not to take her up on her belligerent invitation to screw. It wasn’t just that I wanted her as a client more than anything else and as a client any coital relationship would be highly suspect in the eyes of the bar, not the corner bar, where my reticence would have been laughed at, but the legal bar. And it wasn’t that it had not gone so well that night at Veritas, because I knew that the first time is often disappointing and no indication of the wonderful fruits to be reaped from regular and intense practice. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to get caught in the middle of whatever tortured mess lay between her and Harrington because, well, I have to admit that only served to make her all the more attractive. No, the problem here was that there was something venal about my interest in Caroline Shaw and while I didn’t mind that in the usual lawyer-client relationship, where venality properly belonged, having it manifest itself in command performances in the sack, as part of my effort to get her signature on a contingency fee agreement, gave me the unwelcome, though not wholly unfamiliar, sense of being a whore. I had enough of that in my day job, I didn’t need it at night too.

So I had intended to pull away, but she had insisted on pouring me a drink, single malt whisky she had said it was and whatever it was it was pretty damn good and thank you, ma’am, I’ll have another. And as she drew closer to me on the Seaman’s couch I had intended to pull away, but then she took off her boots and tucked her pointed stockinged feet beneath her and curled next to me on the couch in that feline way she had. And I had intended to pull away but she leaned close to me and tilted her face to me and her eyes glistened and her mouth quivered with a sadness so damnably appealing that I couldn’t help but bend close enough to her that our lips almost brushed. Oh I had intended to pull away all right, I had intended intended intended to pull away, and then in the middle of all those good intentions what I found myself pulling was my tie off and my shirt off and her jeans off and my shoes off and her stockings off and my pants off and my socks off, hopping ludicrously around as first one fell and then the other, and the next thing I knew, as if just thinking it had made it so, she was spread-eagled and naked beneath me and I was sucking on a golden ring while I rolled her right nipple between my teeth.

Beside the multiple hoops in her ears and the stud in her nose there were rings on each nipple, there was a ring in her belly button, there was the rose tattoo on her ankle and the butterfly tattoo on her neck and a tattoo of a snake crawling dangerously up her hip. On each shoulder blade were rows of tattooed gashes, as if some giant cat had pounced upon her back with its claws extended. For a moment, as I worked on her breasts, first one nipple, then the other, letting my tongue lick each and caress each and then pull at its ring with a languorous tug, first one then the other and then back again, I could feel a slight tremble rise through the softness of her skin. I pushed her grandfather’s medal to the side and buried my face between her breasts before dragging my lips down, over the belly ring and down, until she arched her back and the magnificent musk of her shortened my breath with involuntary want. And then with the swiftness of a light being clicked off it happened again as it had happened before and I lost her.

“It was strange,” I said to her afterward, when we were lying face up on the bed. “Your friend Harrington. First time I met him I thought he was the biggest prick in the world. But tonight, I sort of liked him.”

She turned away from me, onto her stomach. Her butt was as round and as fresh as a melon. “ Franklin ’s a charmer.”

“You two have a peculiar engagement,” I said, reaching instinctively out to touch that butt and then thinking better of it and pulling my hand back before I actually did. “He finds out we’re sleeping together and asks, with all sincerity, if he can help. It was the strangest…”

“He’s a real charmer, all right,” she said, reaching over to the night table, smashing out her cigarette, pulling another out of the pack, fiddling with the lighter, holding up a flame.

I waited a beat before I asked, “What is it with you two?”

“Old wounds.”

I stared up at the ceiling and waited as she took a couple drags on her new cigarette. She took a few drags more and I waited still. She didn’t want to tell me, I could feel it, but I lay quietly on my back, certain that eventually she would. And then she did.

She had known Franklin pretty near all her life, she told me. Grandmother Shaw had found him at an orphanage, one of her special charities, and decided to take responsibility for the young foundling and give him a chance in the world. She was very special that way, her grandmother was, said Caroline. Very giving. She couldn’t give enough, especially to Franklin. She gave him clothes, toys, he had his own room in the servants’ section. It was always clear that he was different from the rest of the family, of course. How could that be avoided? He was expected to help Nat in the gardens while the Shaw children and their guests played freely in the house and he always had chores, but he often ate with the family and went on vacations with the family when the family, all but Caroline’s father, left Veritas for the Reddman house by the sea. In almost every way possible, Grandmother Shaw treated him like a member of the clan.

“So long as he helped Nat in the garden,” I said.

“Yes, well everything has its price, doesn’t it? It was a pretty good deal for Franklin, considering Grammy paid his way through Episcopal Academy and then Princeton.”

“He looks like a Princeton man.”

“He’s grown into the part.”

As a boy, she said, he was wild, hyperactive. He seemed to always be angry, charging here and there for no apparent reason, a handsome little towhead bursting with energy. He was the only real friend she had at the house. Her father was never there for her, hiding from the world and his family in his upstairs bedroom; her mother was so preoccupied with being a Reddman she had nothing left to give to her youngest daughter. Brother Edward was too busy looking for trouble to be interested in his little sister. Brother Bobby was shy and bookish and sister Jacqueline moped about melodramatically, wearing long flowing gowns, carrying her dog-eared copy of The Bell Jar everywhere. But Franklin was wild and full of some exciting anger that drew her to him. Whenever he wasn’t working they were running off together like wolves, the best of friends.

“How did Grammy feel about that?”

“You don’t understand my grandmother. She wasn’t a snob at all. If anything, she encouraged Franklin and me to play together, at least when we were young.”

They liked the same sports, hated the same people, read the same comic books. They watched The Love Boat on television every Saturday night, religiously. They both thought the Beatles were overrated, that Springsteen was the boss. They agreed that Annie Hall was the most important movie ever made. They were almost a perfect match, which is why it seemed so natural, so inevitable, when they first started having sex.

“Out there on the ancestral moors. How old were you the first time?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen? That’s statutory.”

“He’s only two years older than me.”

“When I was fifteen I hadn’t even slow-danced with a girl.”

“It was absolutely innocent. We were absolutely in love. We decided we were going to be married, so why not, though we swore not to tell anyone.”

“Grammy wouldn’t have approved you messing with a servant, I guess.”

“She never knew, no one ever knew. It was Franklin who insisted it be an absolute secret, and I understood. He was never quite sure of his place among all us Reddmans.”

They’d hide out together in the old Poole house down by the Pond. They brought in a mattress, sheets and blankets, a radio. They turned that ruin of a house into a love nest and whenever they could get away that’s where they’d run. They read books, poetry, reciting the lines to each other. They listened to the newest songs on WMMR. They made love in cool summer evenings to a cricket serenade. They experimented with each other’s bodies.

“When I was fifteen,” I said in amazed envy, “I wasn’t even experimenting with my own body.”

“Cut it out,” she said. “It’s not a joke. I shouldn’t be telling you.”

We lay in the bed for a while, quietly. Our legs were no longer touching.

“So what happened to you two?” I asked finally.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I still don’t know,” she said.

Somehow their secret was discovered. They never knew by whom or how, but they had no doubt. Someone had sneaked into the old Poole house and rummaged through their things. They could feel a chill when they were together, as if they were being watched. And then one night, when he was eighteen, Franklin disappeared. No one knew what had happened or where he had gone, he had simply vanished. A letter came for him from Princeton. Caroline opened it anxiously, recklessly; he had been accepted, but there was no one to tell. She searched for him, called all their friends, checked out all their places, found not a trace. And when he reappeared, finally, after months and months, reappeared without explanation, he was somehow different. Whatever had been wild about him was gone. The anger in him that she had loved so much had disappeared. And when she finally got him back to the Poole house and demanded he tell her where he had been, he sat her down and told her it was over. Forever. That though he loved her with everything in his soul they would spend the rest of their lives apart. She clutched hold of him and cried and begged to know what she had done but he wouldn’t answer. He just stood and left and never went back into the house and never slept with her again.

“And there was no explanation?”

“None.”

“Any ideas?”

“None. At first I thought he might have a disease that he didn’t want to spread to me, or that he might be gay. I announced our engagement publicly, a childish attempt to force him to change his mind, and he didn’t disabuse anyone of the notion, so the expectation remains in the family that we will be married, but he hasn’t touched me since. He can barely stand to look at me now. Franklin has other women, I know that. What I don’t know is why he’d rather be with them than with me. But desertion seems to be the pattern, doesn’t it? My father hides from me in his room, my one true love flees from me.”

“Do you regret anything now?”

“I regret everything now, but not that. It was the finest, purest time of my life. The last innocent period where I still believed in the myth that life was a thrilling adventure and everything was possible and there was true happiness to be found in this world.”

“What do you believe in now?”

She inhaled from her cigarette and let it out slowly.

“Nothing,” she said finally. And I believed her. It was in the dead look in her eyes, in the body piercing, as if to gore a great emptiness, in the tattoos, as if to scrawl onto her body some evidence of faith. It was in the way she drank in her situations, intently, the way she smoked, with the incessant dedication of a suicide, the way she held herself, like an actress searching in the wings for a line because she had none of her own. And most of all, it was in the way she screwed.

After she had clicked off into passivity I didn’t give up trying to bring her back. I kissed the flesh behind her ear and rubbed her crotch with my thigh and took hold of her hair. Though at Veritas I had been expecting something more, I wasn’t surprised this time when she left me alone in her bed with her body. But despite how I tried to revive her, she was gone, to someplace calm and innocent, to someplace full of youth and love, to someplace I could never follow, leaving me with only her flesh and my heightened desire. So what else was there to do? I caressed her pale flanks, indelibly marked in the green ink of her tattoos, sucked at her neck, dragged my tongue across the rough skin beneath her arms. Her mouth, newly rinsed with Scope, tasted as minty and new as a newly minted hundred-dollar bill and I grew ever more excited despite myself. To have sex with Caroline Shaw, I realized whilst astride her, was to peer into Rockefeller’s soul.

She lay there quietly for me, eyes open, saying not a word as I did what I willed with her. Her very passivity spurred me, her eyes staring at me, rich and blue, challenging. I straddled her and turned her around so those rich eyes were away from me and I entered her, pumping hard, pumping furiously, filled with anger at her stark passivity. And in the moment that I came, my teeth clenched in release, it was as if Mammon itself opened up its secrets to me and I started to grasp its dark power. It is utter emptiness, a vessel formed of nothing, filled with nothing, believing in nothing, an emptiness into which we are urged to pour our most essential truths. And what spurted out of me was not love nor compassion nor charity nor even need, what spurted out was all my wanting and my coveting, all my deep yearning for anything that anyone else might ever have, all my darkest ambitions for prestige and power and glory and ultimately what? Godhood? God help me. That was the next-to-worst part of screwing Caroline Shaw, the part that brought to light the ugliest shadows of my crippled soul.

The worst part was that I liked it.

“Do you think all that crap about Elisha Poole and my great-grandfather might have something to do with Jacqueline’s death?” asked Caroline.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Harrington seemed interested enough.”

“He did, didn’t he?” She took a drag from her cigarette. “I had a strange feeling in the restaurant when you and he were discussing this thing about Poole. It was more like a déjà vu than anything else, but I felt it. It was like there weren’t only three of us at the table anymore, there was someone else, sitting with us, casting a coldness over everything.”

“A ghost?”

“No, a presence, maybe just a memory. But it made me shiver.”

“Who? Your grandmother?”

“Someone else, someone strange to me. It was almost like my great-grandfather was there, listening to us talk about him. Is that weird?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was just a draft.”

“Whatever it was, it was really cold.” She took another drag and then stubbed out her cigarette right on the table’s surface. “I think it’s time I learned the truth about my family’s history. I think I want to know everything that happened, from the very beginning to what is left of us now. I want to know if it was always rotten or if there was a moment of brightness before it turned.”

“Conciliation, expiation, redemption,” I said.

“Yes, I want to know about that too. Especially the redemption.”

“You might not like what you find.”

“I don’t care. What could I ever learn that could make things worse for me?”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive, as long as you’ll do it with me.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want. You’ll see it through to the end, won’t you, Victor? You won’t desert me like every other man in my life, will you?”

Perhaps it was all part of the masculine ego rush that comes after hard sex, accentuated by the glimpse I had caught of the dark truths in my soul, but just then I didn’t feel like every other man. Just then I felt within me a strange and unique power, not only to do financial good for myself but to do good for Caroline, too. She had said before that she wanted to be saved; maybe the truths I would unearth in her family’s past could provide the first crucial steps toward her salvation. It was a maybe, only a maybe, but a maybe could warrant a hell of a lot. As a lawyer I had gotten pretty damn good at self-justification.

“I won’t desert you,” I said. “I’ll see it through.”

“So where do we start?”

“I have an idea, but you’ll think it crazy.”

“No I won’t.”

“Forget it,” I said. “It’s too wild.”

She turned over on her stomach and drew her fingers lightly across my chest. “What is it, Victor? Whatever it is, no matter how insane, we’ll do it, I promise.”

“Anything?”

“I promise.”

“Well, what I think we should do next,” I said, sitting up and looking straight into those rich, blue eyes, “is dig up your grandmother’s garden.”

29

THE VAST STRETCH OF LAWN within the iron gates of Veritas was a sea of blackness, the windows of the mansion were dark. I parked the car on the upsweep of the driveway so as not to wake anyone who might have been in the house. It was a pitchy night, the moon was new, and in the expanse of sky that spread over the estate the stars peered forth like a million frog eyes. Caroline led with the flashlight as we made our way quietly around the house and to the rear gardens. In my right hand was a shovel we had just purchased from Home Depot for $9.99, a long-handled discount jobber with a sharp blade of flawed steel ready to chip at the first pebble. In my left hand was a kerosene lantern I had dug out of my closet from among my camping gear. We had stopped at a gas station to fill it with unleaded but I had misjudged the process and had drenched my pants with gasoline. Along with the fear of self-combustion was the dry sour smell that followed me wherever I moved.

As we sneaked around the ballroom side of the house, I tripped over a stone and cracked my shin. I let out a short sharp cry. Caroline turned the beam of her light into my face.

“Shut up,” she whispered fiercely, a shadow behind the blob of light. “If you can’t be quiet we’ll just forget it.”

“I’ll be quiet,” I said quietly. I rubbed my shin. “I just fell. Get that light out of my face.” I pushed myself back to standing. “Let’s go.”

“This was a bad idea,” she said, her inquisitor’s light still blaring in my face. “We should forget it.”

“You said you wanted to dig into your family history,” I said. “That’s just what we’re doing. It’s your house. I don’t know why you’re so jittery.”

“You don’t understand my grandmother. She wanted her garden left alone and she was not one to be defied.”

“She’s dead, Caroline.”

“If there’s anyone with the power to control this world from her grave, it’s my grandmother.”

I was surprised to see how nervous Caroline had become. When I first mentioned the idea a few nights before she seemed amused by it, as if it were a prank as harmless as toilet-papering a house or leaving a burning bag of manure on a doorstep. But as I explained my reasons she grew more and more apprehensive. She was afraid Nat would find out, or her father, or her mother, or Consuelo. It was clear that for a woman who claimed she believed in nothing, she found much in the Reddman family to fear, including her dead grandmother. She had insisted she would only go along if we were silent and did our best to replace the torn-up garden, all of which I had agreed to.

“I’ll be quiet,” I said. “Just stay close, I don’t know the property as well as you do.”

Side by side now, we followed the distorted oval of light on the ground. It led us across a side porch, around the swampy pool, to the giant square of untrimmed hedges looming large and mysterious in the night.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“I’m sure,” I said, though in the presence of those living walls I was not so positive as I sounded. Maybe I was just catching some of Caroline’s fear, or maybe there was something inside those thorny walls that resonated at the low pitch of horror, but whatever it was, as I approached the secret garden I felt more and more uneasy about what we were about to do.

We moved around those great walls until we arrived at where the entrance to the maze should have been. In the flattening beam of the flashlight it was hard to see any gaps. There was an irregular dark line of an opening at one spot. I put down the lantern and stepped up to the uneven line. When I reached through I felt something bite my hand. I snatched it back and found a thorn embedded between my forefinger and thumb.

“Damn it,” I said as I yanked it out with my teeth. “These thorns are lethal. That’s not it.”

“Maybe over there,” she said.

She was pointing the light now at a ragged vertical line that looked just like the last ragged vertical line in which my hand had been attacked. I reached in again and this time felt nothing impeding my hand once I got past the first layer of scraping branches. I pulled out my hand and turned around to look at her. She was almost cringing. Behind us, like a huge black bird extending its wings, crouched Veritas. Not a light was on inside. I picked up the lantern, whispered vague encouragements to Caroline, and slipped through the narrow opening, feeling the scrape of the spiny leaves on my arms and neck. Caroline squeezed through right behind me.

In the darkness, the pathways seemed narrow and malevolent. I remembered how bright and fresh they had been when I entered in the daylight, how the birds had sung and the butterflies had danced, how the smell of wildflowers had suffused the atmosphere with a sweet freshness, but we were no longer in the daylight. The air was thick with moisture and smelled of rot, as if whatever had been infecting that dinosaur of a mansion seeped out from the stones and mortar and wood, under cover of darkness, to taint everything within its reach. We followed the pathways from one entrance to another, searching for our way through the maze. I wondered if this was how rats felt. I slashed the shovel into the ground as I walked, using it like a walking staff. Finally, after a few wrong turns and a few dead ends and a few moments of blind panic when there appeared to be no way out, we entered upon the very heart of Grandmother Shaw’s private garden.

Caroline didn’t go beyond the arched entranceway, halting there as if kept out by the type of invisible fence used to restrain dogs. From the entranceway she flicked the flashlight’s circle of light around the area. The statue of Aphrodite, struggling against hairy arms of vine, was to our right; the bench, its orange blossoms closed in the darkness, was to our left. The oval plot at the center that had been populated with violet lilies and pale yellow jewelweed when Grimes had visited was now overgrown with thick grasses that were strangling the few perennials that had survived.

I placed the lantern on the ground and kneeled before it. “Put the light here,” I said.

The circle of light jerked around the little garden and landed on the kerosene lantern. There was a tiny button on the side which, when I pulled, extended itself into a pump. I jacked the pump back and forth, priming the lantern. Then, when the pressure made the pumping difficult, I lit a match and turned a knob to the highest level and heard the sweet hiss of the pressurized fuel escaping. As I slipped the match under the glass windshield the inside of the lantern exploded into fire, which, after a few seconds, centered with a fury on the mantle. The white-hot flame blanched the scene for a moment before our eyes adjusted to the harsh light and long shadows.

I took the lantern and hung it from one of the arms of Aphrodite. Then I took the shovel, stepped through the weeds in the garden’s central, oval plot, and, right in the middle of the oval, jabbed the shovel deep into the earth. As I levered the shovel’s blade upward the roots of the weeds and flowers snapped and groaned until the shovel’s load of dirt and weed pulled free, revealing bare black earth beneath. I tossed what I had dug to the side and jabbed the shovel into the groaning earth once more.

It was not as crazy an idea as it sounds, digging up that garden. When Grimes, Jacqueline Shaw’s fiancé, had told me in the Irish Pub of his audience with Grandmother Shaw in that very same place, I had been left with the distinct impression that there was something hidden in the ground there. “Treasures are buried in this earth,” Grammy Shaw had said, “keepsakes, mementos of a better time. Everything of value we place here.” It had sounded figurative at best, but it had left me with an uneasy feeling, accentuated by her explanation of how, when the vapors of her gas plant burned, it was as if the spirits buried in that earth were igniting. On my first visit to that garden I had almost felt it beneath my feet, a presence of some sort, something dark and alive. And then Nat, the gardener, who seemed to know more than anyone else of the Reddman family’s secrets, Nat, trailing frogs like a twisted Pied Piper, Nat had come upon me in that overrun oval and told me that Grandmother Shaw was right to order that this place should remain untended and allowed to turn wild. “Sometimes what’s buried should remain buried,” he had said. “No good can come from digging up the dead.”

There were no shortage of suspects for Jacqueline Shaw’s murder. Peter Cressi had killed her, sure, and somehow I would make sure he paid the price, but, financially speaking, pinning the death only on Peter did nothing for me. There had to be someone who paid him to do it, who arranged for the roof and stairwell doors to be open as he slipped down and performed his UPS impersonation, someone with assets on which I could collect once I filed and won my civil suit. Was it the Church of the New Life, that bogus cult of rehashed New Age excretion that was scheduled to reap a cool five mil from Jacqueline’s death and tried to threaten me off the case? Or was it Eddie Shaw, pressured by the mob to pay up his debt, his arm shattered, his life threatened? He had been at the Cambium that afternoon, having flown in just for that purpose from North Carolina, looking for Jacqueline, so he had said, in perfect position to wedge the roof door open, to tape back the automatic lock on the stair shaft door, setting up Cressi’s murderous visit. How he must have howled when he found out there was no insurance money coming to him. Or maybe it was Bobby Shaw, the diffident sexually confused stutterer, whose life was devoted to increasing the value of his fortune, or Harrington, who also had access to Jacqueline’s building and was refusing marriage to a Reddman for some unknown reason.

There were enough suspects in the present to keep me busy, sure, but I wasn’t digging up Grandma Shaw’s garden just to find for Caroline the truths buried in her family’s history. Something strange was at work here, something old, something hidden deep within the story of the Reddmans. Everything seemed to center around that crazed relic, Grammy Shaw, with her twisted face and one good eye, controlling the destiny of her entire dysfunctional family. Grammy had brought Nat and Selma and Harrington into the clutches of the Reddman family; Grammy had diverted great sums of money into a secret trust for some unknown purpose; Grammy had decreed that the garden was to grow wild and be left untouched. I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever secret Grammy had been trying to hide she had buried in this garden. I could have respected her wishes, sure, the rich old hag with half a face, but protecting her secrets wasn’t going to get me any closer to my hard-earned share of her fortune. “No good can come from digging up the dead,” had said Nat, the gardener. But it wasn’t my dead.

I was three feet down when I heard the clang of my shovel against something hard and metallic. Behind me was a heap of dirt and ripped-out plants. The air was filled with the smell of old earth being turned. I had been digging out the heart of the little oval garden for almost an hour now, digging an area about eight feet long and four feet wide, trying to keep the floor of the pit level, like an archaeologist searching for pottery shards through strata of time. It was hard going, all except for one patch. I had stripped down to my tee shirt in the warm night. My hands slipped along the shiny surface of the new shovel’s handle and had started to blister, forcing me to grip the wooden shaft awkwardly, so as to keep the tender portions from continuing to rub. My muscles ached and my back was only a few strains from spasm. In my few breaks, Caroline had dug a bit, but without much enthusiasm or progress, so it was mainly up to me. Without a pickax, I was forced to chop at the dirt with the shovel to loosen the packed earth before I could scoop it up, all except for the one patch I mentioned before. It was a small area roughly in the middle of the garden where the dirt was softer. I thought about just digging there, but I didn’t want to miss anything, so I kept at the whole of the pit. Still, it was no surprise that, when I heard the clang of metal against metal, it came from the loosely packed center.

When I first heard the clang I wasn’t sure what it was, my blade had already sparked against a few rocks, but then I clanged again and Caroline let out a small gasp, and then another, one for each time I wracked my shovel against the metal. It didn’t take me long to figure out the rough rectangular dimensions of the object and to dig around it until my shovel could slip beneath and then to leverage it up out of the earth.

It was a box, a metal strongbox, dark, with rusted edges. There was a handle on the top, which I pulled, but it broke away quickly, weakened by rust and decay. I grabbed the box from beneath the sides and lifted. It was heavy and it smelled richly of old iron. When I gave it a tender shake I could feel its insides shift. The primary weight was the box itself, I could tell, for what had shifted inside had been relatively light. There was a lock integrated into the body of the metal and then another lock, an old rusted padlock, holding together two bars welded onto the top and the bottom. With the box in my arms, I stepped out of the pit and brought it to Caroline.

“You ever see this before?” I asked.

“No,” she said, backing away from it as if it were a cat. “Never.”

“I can’t believe there was something actually here.”

Staring, as if transfixed by the sight of that box, she said, “My grandmother put that there.”

“Looks like it.”

“Open it,” she said.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Knock it open,” she said. “Now.”

As I carefully laid the box on the ground I glanced up at her. She stared down at the box as if it were something alive that needed killing. I took a breath, raised the shovel, and slammed the edge into the lock. It held. I raised the shovel again and slammed it again, and then again, and each time the padlock jumped in its frame and then sat back again, whole and tightly shut. I went at it a few times more, waiting for the padlock to explode, but they don’t make things like they used to because they used to make them pretty damn well. The padlock held.

I swore as I swung futilely, the clangs of the shovel against the metal rising above the night calls of the crickets.

“You’re making too much noise,” she said.

I stopped, leaned over to gasp for air, turned my face to her. “You wanted me to open it. I don’t think asking it nicely to unlock itself is going to work.”

“You don’t have to be nasty.”

“We’ll take it with us,” I said. “You want me to fill in the hole?”

“Not yet,” she said. “There might be something else down there.”

“What else would be down there?”

“I don’t know, but we’ve gone this far.”

She took the shovel from me and hopped into the hole. She was trying harder now than before, as if some weakness of resolve had been strengthened by the sight of that box, by the knowledge that there were indeed secrets to be unearthed, but even so she was still making little progress. This far down the earth was hard-packed. I didn’t expect she’d find anything else, but it was boring just to watch.

“Let me try,” I said.

I stepped in the hole and took the shovel and ignored the pain in my hands as I went at it. A half an hour later my hair was wet with sweat, my tee shirt was soaked through, my hands were bleeding where the blisters had rubbed off. I was just about to give up when I jabbed the shovel into the earth and the ringing of the metal blade was strangely muffled. I tried it again and again heard the same soft sound.

“What’s that?” I said.

I cleared as much dirt as I could and saw a piece of something rising from the packed earth, something folded and soft. I looked up at her as she stood over me and I shrugged.

“It’s a piece of canvas or something,” she said. “It almost looks like a sail.”

“What’s it doing there?”

“Who knows,” she said.

I scraped some more around it and cleared the dirt away. A long ridge of a darkened fabric was rising from the floor of the pit.

“I’m going to pull it to see what it is,” I said.

The fabric was thick and still strong within my fingers. Pulling at it was like pulling at time itself. Nothing moved, nothing budged. I jerked and pulled and made no progress. I moved around to get a better grip and started yanking again. Nothing, no shift, no budge, nothing. Caroline jumped down and took hold and helped me pull, but there was still no movement, still nothing – and then something. The ridge of cloth lengthened, dirt started shifting. A dark smell, ancient and foul, slipped from the ground.

“It’s coming,” I said. We pulled hard and yanked again and more of the cloth started coming free.

“On the count of three,” I said as we both tightened our grips. “One, two, three.”

I put my weight into it and yanked back, pressing with my legs against the dirt, and Caroline did the same and suddenly the cloth gave and there was a cracking sound and we both fell flat onto our backs and that ancient ugly scent covered us like a noisome blanket.

Caroline was the first to scamper up and so I was still on my back when I heard her breath stop as if blocked by a chunk of half-chewed meat. I looked up at her. Her hands were pressed against her face and her eyes were screaming even though her throat was making not a sound.

I pulled myself to my feet and took hold of her and shook her until she started breathing once again. While she was gasping for air she pointed to the other side of the pit and I looked to where she was pointing and there I saw it, lit by the white light of the lantern, and my breath caught too.

A hand, its fingers outstretched, reaching out of the ground from among the folds of what looked now to be an old cloth coat, reaching up to the unblinking stars, a human hand but not one that had seen the softness of the sweet night sky for scores of years. It stuck out of the dirt, pointing up as if in accusation, and from the white light of the lantern came the gleam of a gold ring still riding a finger of bone, the flesh and muscle having long been devoured by the foul creeping life that prowls the loam for death.

The first thought that came to my mind upon seeing that skeleton hand with a ring on its finger was that maybe now it was time to call in my private investigator, Morris Kapustin.