Exact Revenge

34

I KNOW THAT SOMEONE like Frank Steffano doesn’t get to where he is by destroying just one man. People like Frank are tumors. They feed off everything decent within their reach. They are worse than parasites who fatten only themselves. Tumors like Frank grow stronger and stronger until they can metastasize. They create other tumors that also grow and thrive. Villay. Rangle. Russo. I’m sure there are others.

I hire Vance International, a private investigative and protective agency made from the cream of the Secret Service, the FBI, and all four branches of the military. I put up a five-million-dollar retainer, which gets their attention. They are my diagnostic team.

You would be shocked at how easy it is to invade someone’s privacy. I’m not talking about getting someone’s phone records or financial statements, or hacking into their e-mails. I’m talking about seeing and hearing what goes on in their bedroom and the table where they eat breakfast.

Vance International isn’t bound by any laws. They have employees who are welcomed into Frank and Lexis’s home, into the Rangles’, into the Villays’. It happens to every American on a weekly basis. We open our doors to complete strangers, giving them access to our secret places. Cable TV workers. Appliance repairmen. The guy who delivers the dry cleaning. The more money people have, the more intruders enter their homes.

If that fails, Vance has other ways of getting in. Skeleton keys. Lock picks. Drills and glasscutters. Cameras and microphones the size of a pencil lead are easily inserted into ceilings and walls. Tiny transmitters send microwave digital data to receivers that are connected into fiber lines and fed to monitoring stations that gather everything. Then Vance boils it down to the good stuff.

For six months they chronicle for me not only every symptom of the disease, but its complete pathology.

Am I collecting information because I want to destroy the tumors perfectly, or because I want justification for what I’m going to do? Maybe I’m really not as comfortable filling in for God as I make myself out to be. It makes me sick to be this weak, but I think that’s the truth. Even after everything that’s happened to me, I need something more. A justification to make my judgment. A rationale to dole out my punishment. As if I didn’t already have enough of both.

And, just like I figured, Vance International digs up other ruined lives besides mine. None of them are as bad as what happened to me, though. None of them except one. A girl named Helena. At first, I decide to look for her because she could serve an important role in my plan. But the more I learn, the more I feel as if we are somehow connected through our losses and our pain and I wonder if she might also be able to take the edge off my loneliness.

It’s late summer when I track her down in a men’s club in Fairbanks, Alaska. She’s emotionally battered and bruised and so bitter that she’s almost wicked. I don’t blame her. She was sold off as a prostitute when she was a child. They used her in some movies and then they just used her. She was fifteen when she escaped a flophouse in West Hollywood. It took her a year to steal her way up to Alaska. Someplace she must have fantasized as being safe.

She dances for the oil workers and fishermen during the week, and in exchange, the owner lets her sing with her clothes on over the weekend. She lives in a small one-room cabin that she built herself. She has electricity, but uses an outhouse. The first time I approach her in the club parking lot, she pulls a little 9mm Chief’s Special out of her bag and stabs it into my ribs.

“You ever use that?” I ask.

“You’re goddamn right,” she tells me.

I buy the men’s club and shut it down. It still takes me two weeks to convince her I am for real.

Finally I pack her into my G-V and take her to a flat I have in Knightsbridge in London. It takes four weeks before she realizes that she’s really safe.

She starts to take walks with me and look me in the eye, and when I take her to a Nathan Lane show near Piccadilly Circus, I catch her smiling halfway through the first act. After the show, when she gets out of the limousine and we walk through the alley into Shepherd’s Market, she holds my hand. We have a drink at Ye Grapes, then go around the corner to a Turkish restaurant called Sofra. We sit in a table by the window and eat hummus and skewers of grilled lamb and vegetables.

Her eyes are dark and liquid and deep, framed by long thick lashes that shadow her cheeks when she looks away. Her nose is narrow and straight, long without being big. Her lips are full. She isn’t a tall girl, but her figure is curved and her stomach flat. I lean across the table and let my lips brush gently against hers. She looks down and brushes her dark silky hair back out of her face. A tear falls, spattering the rim of her plate.

“If you could have anything in the world,” I say, “what would it be?”

“Like, really anything?”

“Really.”

Her eyelids flutter as she looks away and out the window at a passing punk with tall spiked hair, leather, and chains.

She sighs and looks down and says, “A singer. A diva.”

“Like Jennifer Lopez?” I ask.

“Like that,” she says, looking back at me.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll take care of it.”

Her eyes stare into mine. One corner of her mouth curls up and in a quiet voice she says, “I think you mean that. I can sing, you know.”

I nod that I know and say, “I wasn’t just watching your body.”

“But it takes more than that,” she says, staring at the small candle that burns in its glass by the salt.

“Just money,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “I love the way you say that.”

“I mean it,” I say.

“I know you do,” she says.

“No one will hurt you again,” I tell her, reaching out and holding her hand in mine. “No one will touch you. I swear to God they won’t.”

That night I am awaked to find her standing beside my bed. She is touching my cheek with the back of her fingers. I draw back the sheets and she slips inside and clings to me tight. I hold her and stroke the back of her head, drifting back into sleep.

In the morning, I lock myself up alone in my wood-paneled study to make some serious phone calls. I raise my voice and the price often enough to get my point across for some immediate results regarding Helena’s career. Then we go for a walk.

The sky is bright blue between the tall white clouds. We pass Buckingham Palace with its sea of red and yellow tulips, gold gilt statues, cascading fountains, and high wrought iron fence. We walk under the towering London plane trees along the lake in St. James’s Park. Ducks dip and splash in the green grasses poking up out of the dark water. The breeze is warm and cinders crunch under our feet. We cross the gritty Horse Guards Parade, and Helena clings to my arm while we stop to watch the Royal Horse Guards change posts in their blue tunics and red plumed helmets.

Soon we’re passing by the bronze lions beneath Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. I reach out and run my fingers along a cold metal mane. The big black cabs swirl around us like miniature bread trucks. When we mount the steps of the National Gallery, I hurry through the columns and go right to the room where van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses takes center stage. I stand in the doorway and freeze. The trees burning like green flames and the brilliant yellow of the wheatfield fill my mind with thoughts of Lester. He would want me to be here, enjoying this painting, helping this girl. I see his smile and the glint in those magnified eyes.

“Are you okay?” Helena asks.

She reaches up and touches the corner of my eye, and I feel the dampness on my skin.

“Just thinking,” I say.

“Can I tell you what happened?” she asks.

“With you?”

“How he got me.”

“Of course,” I say. I take her hand and start to move through the rooms of paintings.

“I was supposed to be with my mother,” she says. “She was an actress from Montreal. She left my father when I was eight and we went back to Canada. I didn’t see him much, but she got a part in an off-Broadway show, so I was staying with him. I didn’t find out until a lot later, after I ran away, but she died in a car accident on that same tour in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was ten.

“My father was a bookie. I didn’t know that when I was a kid, just that he was on the phone all the time talking about games and he always had money around the house and a gun. Actually, when I went to look for my grandmother and found out that she was dead, I also found out about her brother-my dad’s uncle. He had something to do with the casinos down in New Jersey.”

She looks up at me, and I give her hand a squeeze. We stop in front of Monet’s Houses of Parliament, Sunset, dark and forbidding.

“Anyway, I was walking home one night from a friend’s,” she says. “It was winter and raining little pieces of ice. I heard a gunshot half a block from my house and saw people running. By the time I got there, a police car came around the corner and ran into the snowbank. A cop got out and ran into the house.

“At first I couldn’t move,” she says. “I actually wet myself. The cop, he went in with his gun. He was big and he had on a black leather coat with his badge on his hip. It all happened fast.”

We move from the Monet into a room with a special exhibit on Joseph Turner. I see The Slave Ship on loan from Boston and move toward it. It’s the original of the print Lester had hung over my bunk in A block. Carnage and horror in an angry sea. The sun going out on the horizon like the last tail of a gas flame.

“I think I know who he was,” I say.

“I’ll never forget his face,” she says. “My father was on the floor. He was bleeding and there was a gun. That cop, he picked it up and he and my father started to argue. They knew each other. I knew that because they were talking about being partners. And then they started shouting and he shot him. He just put the gun right up to my father’s head. I tried to scream.”

I look from the painting to Helena. Her eyes are shiny and brimming. She wipes them with the back of her hand and her voice breaks.

“Then he took me,” she says. “I didn’t move. I couldn’t. He just picked me up under his arm like some ogre. He dumped me into the trunk of that police car. He said, ‘Pretty little thing.’ Smiling like I was a doll or something, and do you know what I said?”

She laughs. A harsh grating sound like the cries of the ravens at the Tower of London.

She looks at the painting, nods, and says, “‘Policemen are my friends.’ That’s what I said.

“I learned it in school.”

35

I’VE SEEN AN OCCASIONAL TEAR from Helena before, but nothing like this. She starts sobbing loud and hard. People move away from us in ripples. I hug her tight and sit her down on a bench, stroking her hair until she stops shuddering. During it all, a white-haired guard clears his throat and starts toward us, but I back him down with a glare.

She grows quiet and I say, “Better?”

She nods her head and says she’s fine.

“Come on,” I say, taking her by the hand. “I’ve got a surprise.”

We catch one of those big black London cabs back to my flat.

On our way up the elevator, Helena sniffs and looks up at me without raising her chin. I smile and wink. She smiles back and slaps my thigh.

The flat is decorated in antiques, velvet, rich-grained wood in dark hues, marble tops, and swirling gold gilt. The ceiling is a rococo sky with puffy white clouds and feathery angels. A strange collection of men and women are clustered about the furniture near the white marble fireplace. When we go in, they stop talking and turn to stare.

Several teacups clink as they’re put back onto their saucers. A tall thin man with a mustache clears his throat and fiddles with his ascot tie. A round little man in a dark suit with wispy hair and liver lips steps forward with a scowl and in a thick Manchester accent says, “What’s this all about?”

“Helena,” I say, turning to her, “meet Peter Darwin. He’s your manager.”

“Is this really serious?” Darwin says, snorting and choking at the same time.

“No,” I say. “When I said a million up front, I meant two.”

Darwin’s face relaxes and then blooms into a smile.

“Well, well,” he says, opening his arms. “You should have said so. Let me shake your hand.”

We both shake his hand and then I lead Helena into the midst of the others. The tall ascot tie is her lawyer. The chunky pink-haired woman with cat glasses is her clothes coordinator. The effeminate wisp of a man in black with the shaved head and tortoiseshell glasses is her hairstylist. The pretty green-eyed woman in the sweatsuit is her choreographer and trainer. The white-haired black man is her voice coach. And the little old lady with the straight back and the napkin laid out on her lap is for etiquette.

Helena shakes their hands and nods her head. The little old lady tells her to look people in the eye, dear, and Helena sticks out her tongue, then grins at me.

“Just money,” I say to her, then I turn to them. “Thank you all very much for coming. You’re here because you’re the best. Everyone’s getting the same thing. A three-year contract at ten times your normal fees. From what I know about your talents and hers, Helena will be the biggest star the music industry has seen since, who? J-Lo?”

“Honey,” says the hairstylist, “with those cheeks and a few highlights she’ll make J-Lo look like the tramp she is.”

The old lady sniffs.

“You’ve got three months,” I say. “We need an album and an act. I’ve already booked a studio at Warner Bros. to shoot the videos with Joe Pytka. I’ll make my G-V available, so going back and forth will be easier than getting to Scotland. We’ll release the first single in late December.”

Someone whistles and I hear the words “fast track.”

“That’s why you’re getting the big money. So, I had lunch brought in for everyone and then you can get right to work,” I say, leading them to the dining room, where a buffet in shiny silver service waits for us.

Helena leans into me as we fall into the back of the line and says, “This is a joke, right?”

“If you think working your ass off is funny,” I say, kissing her forehead.

“Is that supposed to scare me?”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“You’re right.”

She looks up into my eyes. Hers are burning.

“You’ll be on your own, you know,” I say. “I have work to do in New York.”

“Why not here?” she asks.

I don’t think she realizes it, but she’s gripping my forearm. I pat her hand and say, “I have a job to do. Besides, I don’t want to crowd you.”

“You couldn’t.”

“Maybe not,” I say, “but I won’t.”

“What if I need… or want you?”

“Tell you what,” I say, giving her hand a squeeze before taking it off my arm. “I’ll check in.”

“What are you?” she says. “My fairy fucking godmother?”

“A lot of things are going to change, you know,” I say, lowering my voice.

“That’s bullshit,” she says.

I touch the smooth skin on my face and turn to go.

“What the hell is all this? What about lunch?” she says.

“You need to do this,” I tell her. “Without me here every minute. Then you’ll decide what you want to do.

“No one owns you, Helena. Remember that.”

“You’re goddamned right,” she says, raising her voice and her chin at the same time. “I can do whatever the hell I want. And if I want to give it away I can do that too.”

I nod and step backward and say, “I’d like that very much, but we’ll see.”

36

I REALLY DON’T WANT to interfere with Helena’s progress. And I really am busy with my own plans. Still, we speak almost every day and she keeps me up to date. While her version of things and Darwin’s aren’t quite the same, in a little over two months her first single starts right off at number seven.

Since she’s filming a video in Los Angeles when I get the news, I grab my plane and head out there for a visit, promising her dinner at Chez Nous. We land in Burbank earlier than expected, and instead of going to Hotel Bel-Air, where Helena’s staying, I have the car take me directly to the studio on the Warner lot where they’re already shooting the video for her next single. During the ride, “Love to Hate You” comes on over the radio and the DJ makes the appropriate fuss over the hot new artist named Helena.

I tap my foot as I listen and drum my fingers on my leg. Buildings and the trunks of palm trees glowing orange in the late-day sun whiz by on North Hollywood Way. The lot is snuggled up next to the back side of the dusty green Hollywood Hills. The limo passes through the gates after only a brief stop. We go by French Street, where Bogart met Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca and come to a stop in front of a studio the size of an airplane hangar. The doors are open partway and they’re wheeling a helicopter inside on a massive dolly.

Darwin is waiting and opens the car door. His face is flushed and beads of sweat have broken out on his forehead even though the shadows are long and cool.

“She’s fucking lost it,” he says.

“Easy,” I say. “What happened?”

“Money is money, but this is too much,” he says, his face pinched. “Put a fucking gun in my ribs. You believe that?”

“What’d you do?”

“Me? She won’t fix her hair. Won’t wear the costumes put out. Won’t stop cursing like a sailor. She’s a mean bitch, I’ll tell you. Makes Ozzy Osbourne look like he came out of charm school.”

“What’d you do?” I ask.

“I just told her,” he says. “One top ten single isn’t shit. You know that. I told her if they can’t see her tits, they turn the channel.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have said that.”

“Tits are tits. This is the record business.”

I press my lips tight and look at him in his flowery silk shirt. He’s much more respectable in a tie.

“I’ll talk to her,” I say, pushing past him and walking into the dark cave of the studio.

“Not now,” he says, catching up. “They’re almost ready to shoot.”

An enormous man with long stringy blond hair and a face as big as a shovel is down on the floor in the middle of it all with a camera on his shoulder. Joe Pytka. He shouts directions, and every time he barks a ripple passes through the brightly lit set. There are fifty people milling around, some of them in tall canvas chairs clustered around a monitor, servers behind a catering table complete with a roast beef under a heat lamp, but most of the people are hurrying to and fro with lights and electric cords and power tools. The helicopter is suspended from a crane now and its rotors are twirling lazily.

There is a girl with Helena’s proportions hanging out of the open door of the helicopter with a wind machine blowing back her long brown hair. A stand-in wearing a low-cut purple dress and lots of cleavage.

After a minute, without removing his eye from the camera, Pytka shouts for Helena. There is a flurry of activity in the back corner of the set. Young men and women wearing headsets and carrying clipboards suddenly part and from behind a curtained area Helena emerges with a makeup woman dusting her face, the hairstylist fussing, and the little old lady glaring up at her and running her mouth.

Helena doesn’t see me, but she makes a beeline for Pytka and, standing over him with her legs set apart, says, “I’m wearing this.”

She’s dressed in faded jeans and a snug purple T-shirt.

“Goddamn it,” Pytka says, struggling upright. “We’re already two hours behind.”

“You said the color had to be right,” she says. “Now I’ve got your goddamned color.”

“The hair color certainly isn’t right, but that’s not my fault,” the bald hairstylist says with a hand on his hip.

“Who the fuck asked you?” Helena says, turning on him.

He wilts. The little old lady presses her lips tight and closes her eyes.

“Darwin!” Pytka bellows.

“See?” Darwin says to me. “See?”

He waddles toward the director with his hands raised.

“Helena,” I say.

When she sees me, her face lights up. She runs and jumps and wraps her legs around me, kissing my face until I can’t help smiling.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Shooting a video,” she says, kissing my lips and climbing down.

She takes my hand and squeezes it.

“We’re at number seven.”

“You pulled that gun on Darwin?” I say, making my face stern.

“Oh, he’s an ass,” she says, tugging at me. “Come look at this trailer. It’s a star trailer.”

She’s smiling, but I can see the water in her eyes. I let her pull me outside the studio. Her trailer is around the corner. She’s talking to me fast, telling me about songs and clothes and the people that she’s met. I stop her on the steps.

“Helena?”

Her face crumples up and two tears streak down either cheek. She gives her head a quick shake.

“I’m sorry,” she says, then turns and runs around the back of the trailer.

By the time I get there, the engine of her yellow Boxster is racing and the car takes off with a screech. I run back to the front and jump into my car.

“Follow her,” I tell the driver. My driver is excellent and we keep up. It’s after the rush, so the thick flow of traffic is moving steadily. She’s not trying to lose us, but she’s not stopping to talk either. She takes 134 out to the 405 and all the way down to Manhattan Beach as the sun drops into the Pacific. She parks the car right next to the stairs to the beach, hops out into the hazy dusk, runs out along the wooden walkway, and disappears. My heart hammers inside my chest. A blood-red sun smolders beneath the smoky purple clouds. It’s as if she’s been swallowed up.

I jump out before the car has even stopped. When I reach the stairs, the warm salty smell of ocean laced with dead sea-things hits my face. Helena is halfway to the water, and when I call her name it’s swept away by the breeze. I run through the sand, kicking my shoes off as I go to increase my speed. When Helena reaches the water, she goes straight in.

When she’s ankle deep, she drops to her knees.

She starts to splash water up onto her face. When I reach her, she’s crying hard.

“This shit,” she says, furiously rubbing her cheeks and eyes, smearing the heavy makeup and making a mess of her face.

The surf rolls and crashes, sloshing water up over the waist of her jeans. I kneel beside her and hold her to me, clutching her head to my chest. She shudders and the red is gone from the sky by the time she stops. A star flickers and an airplane blinks, crawling toward Asia.

“Don’t you want this?” I ask after a time.

“I used to come here when I was a girl,” she says in a whisper, looking out at the night. “There was this old whore. I hated her. I think she did it to make me feel how small I was, come here at night and see the stars. The ocean.

“She’d stand there with her arms crossed and I could always smell her cigarette, even though the breeze goes the other way.”

“I told you,” I say. “That’s all gone now.”

“I’m so dirty,” she says.

“You never did anything wrong,” I say.

“I did so much.”

“They did it, not you,” I say. “Stop blaming the victim.”

“I know everyone is trying to help,” she says, “but I can’t stand them telling me what to do. What to wear. My body.”

“It’s an act,” I say. “It won’t change you. Your voice is beautiful. They said it in Rolling Stone, but that’s not enough. It’s a business. Your look. How they sell the act.

“Come on,” I say, lifting her up out of the water.

“You’re wet,” she says, flicking the water off her fingertips into my face and giggling.

“Can you behave yourself?” I say, holding her arms.

A wave crashes.

“Will you still take me out to dinner to celebrate number seven?”

“After we dry off.”

“Okay,” she says. “Then I might.”

37

BERT CALLS ME from the airport and tells me they’re here. I choose a black suit, white shirt, and burgundy tie from the closet, checking myself in the mirror. My hair is short now, a wild mess of gel and dark blades. The fashion in L.A. My skin is bronzed, the result of mixing my mother’s Mohawk blood with lots of sun. Dark eyes stare back at me, nearly empty except for a distant glimmer. Water at the bottom of a well.

I might be fifty or I might be twenty-five, and since I’m much closer to the former, the corners of my lips curl up into a smile.

In New Orleans, outside the Omni Royal Hotel, I sit with my legs crossed on a cast-iron bench nestled in a bower of red geraniums. It isn’t more than ten minutes before a long black car pulls into the brick-paved circular drive. Out on the river, a freighter blares its horn. Closer by, a carriage horse clops along on the street. The humid Louisiana air is thick with the smells from a nearby bakery tainted by last night’s leavings of garbage, spilled beer, and horse dung.

Two young men get out of the limo. Allen Steffano, Lexis’s boy, is tall and angular with brown eyes and a face that is so similar to his mother’s that my stomach turns cold. His friend Martin Debray is in his mid-twenties. Debray is a friend of the Steffano family and a surrogate older brother to Allen. He is freckle-faced and redheaded. Built lean like Allen, only not as tall or as muscular.

The two stretch and blink up at the bright midday sun, then slap each other high five, excited like the rest of the visitors to be at the Super Bowl. Allen tells the captain that the bags are in the back, then takes out a pair of sunglasses. His black T-shirt is skintight and his jeans are baggy and frayed at the bottoms. His moccasins go for $345 a pair.

The captain takes a twenty and gets back to work, slowly shaking his head.

Allen has wavy dark hair. He’s lean, but with wide shoulders and the thick upper arms of an athlete. Up close I see his eyes are shot through with shards of yellow. As if he senses the intensity of my gaze, they meet mine, and I look away.

While they check in, I cross the lobby toward the elevators. When they get on, so do I.

“Excuse me,” I say, looking at Debray. “Are you with the NFL?”

“Not me,” Debray says, smiling and shaking his head.

“But we’ve met, right?” I say. “Seth Cole.”

“No,” Debray says, shaking my hand. “I don’t think…”

“In London,” I say, cocking my head and snapping my fingers. “That’s it, Debray, right? Martin Debray. At the Dorchester Hotel. Oh, you were pretty messed up, but I’d lost my wallet somewhere in their bar and you paid my bar tab. I was already checked out. Had to catch the first flight out. God. Small world.”

He brightens and says, “That’s where I stay.”

“Well, thanks again,” I say. “Talk about embarrassing.”

“Not a problem,” Debray says. He sees me looking at Allen. “Oh, I’m sorry, this is Allen Steffano.”

I shake Allen’s hand and say, “Listen, I’ve got some passes to the commissioner’s private party tonight at House of Blues. Any interest?”

They look at each other and their mouths drop open.

“The NFL commissioner?” Martin says.

I nod and, taking the tickets out of my suit coat pocket, I say, “Lots of players will be there. A few of the owners. How about if I meet you there at ten and buy you back a couple drinks?”

Martin looks at Allen and smiles. He looks back at me and says, “Great.”

“Sounds good to me,” Allen says.

I make a show of extending my wrist so they can see my gold Cartier watch and say, “Great. Ten, then. I’ll find you.”

That evening, I have dinner with Woody Johnson-the owner of the New York Jets-at Commander’s Palace, where the New York Strip steak is as thick as my fist. The truth is that after the crap I ate for twenty years in jail, I can’t get enough of the taste of rare meat and red wine.

It’s just past nine-thirty when we stoke up cigars for a short stroll down Prytania Street to close the deal. The air is cool, and the smell of tobacco smoke is refreshing after a day of the swampy New Orleans humidity. When we’re finished, I raise my hand and a long black Humvee rolls up to the curb, appearing from nowhere. Bert hops out of the back wearing a tuxedo and opens the door. Woody stares and shakes his head at me, saying he’ll walk back when I offer to drop him off.

Five hundred dollars got us a motorcycle escort for the night. Behind the cop’s spinning blue light, we slice through a Quarter swollen with traffic and milling with drunken sports fans, making it to House of Blues by ten.

I see the boys standing at the bar drinking and swiveling their chins around like bobblehead dolls at the star players and the girls decked out in tight tops with bare midriffs. I greet them with warm handshakes and order another round. The drinks haven’t arrived before the commissioner-who’s standing close by-breaks off his conversation with Falcons owner Arthur Blank to introduce me to his wife, Jan.

“It looks like Seth is going to be the new owner of the Jets,” he says to his wife.

Allen looks like someone just tossed a drink in his face. The commissioner introduces Arthur Blank and his wife, Stephanie, who grabs Michael Vick. The boys’ eyes are wide and they set their drinks down on the bar and stand up to shake hands. Small talk, and then we’re alone again.

Allen says, “You’re buying the Jets?”

“It’s not official, yet,” I say, sipping a Heineken.

“He’s buying the Jets,” Allen says to Martin.

“Allen plays at SU,” Martin says, pointing at his friend with a bottle of beer. “He wants to be Chad Pennington.”

“I love the Jets,” Allen says, his eyes shining.

“To the Jets,” I say, raising my glass and touching it to their bottles of beer. I have to force myself not to stare at Allen’s face. The nose, the shape of the eyes. All Lexis.

Santana croons from the stage and the crowd hoots and cheers. Music and smoke swirl together, soaking up the beams of flashing colored lights. Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. We talk in shouts above the music.

“You really play?” I say, looking into his eyes and not at his face.

“Quarterback,” Allen says, looking right back at me.

“He’s got a chance to be the starter this year,” Martin says, raising his bottle and clinking it against his friend’s.

“What are you studying?” I ask.

“Well, I’m gonna go to law school,” he says, “but right now I’m actually studying painting.”

“Painting to law school?” I say. “That’s different.”

“My dad wanted me to study finance,” he says. “Finance and football. He was pissed when he heard, but my mom calmed him down. Anyway, I get to paint for four years. Then I either make it in the NFL or it’s law school. Something useful.”

“There are plenty of useless lawyers,” I say. “Not enough good painters, though.”

Allen cocks his head to one side and says, “You sound like my mom.”

I keep the drinks coming fast, and after an hour we’re all best friends. The boys are going to join me for the game tomorrow in my box on the fifty-yard line. The drinking becomes a small unspoken contest with me the loser. Finally, Allen is swaying. Martin’s eyes go in and out of focus and he looks at his bottle and mouths the words on the Budweiser label to himself.

I look at my watch. Midnight. When I look up, I see her. A woman moving through the crowd attracting the attention of every man within twenty feet. Her hair is long and straight. Brassy blonde. It’s hard to decide which is more impressive, her figure or her golden face with its powder blue eyes and red lips. She isn’t tall, but wears a pair of white pumps that match her snug satin dress. She stops when she sees Allen, and stares. A smile pulls back her delicate lips to show perfect white teeth.

When the girl turns and disappears into the crowd, Allen grins at me. I nod and he staggers after her. Another girl sits down next to Martin. He raises his head and dives in. Bert appears and I tell him to take Martin and his new friend back to the hotel. I leave by the back, my shoes clanging softly on the wrought iron stair that takes me down into the brick alley. I jog for two blocks before I spot the white dress. Allen is right there with her, stumbling to keep up. His head bobs and his hands dance in the space between them. She laughs at him in a high-pitched chirp, then touches his cheek. He takes her arm and they keep walking. I follow, staying on the other side of the street and half a block back.

They plunge into the mob on Bourbon Street, but the girl’s dress is like a beacon. They go up one block then leave the throng, turning down St. Peter. By the time I reach the turn, they are at the dark end of the street, a bad and dangerous place where the blight of the battered Creole cottages is disguised by the starlight. The din of Bourbon Street is almost distant now and what was only a moment ago the sound of celebration has taken on a fiendish quality. Mad laughter. Breaking glass. Trumpets and grating shrieks.

A dull breeze rattles the leaves overhead. Shadows stir and begin to spill from the porches and out into the street. Dark shapes of men materialize and close in a loose ring around Allen and the girl in the white dress. Perfectly orchestrated.

I stop in my tracks to watch.

38

THE HALL ON THE TOP FLOOR is long with red carpet and gold trim around the doors. Laughter floats out from behind a door. A tray of chicken wing bones and an empty beer bottle rests outside another. Allen has a suite of rooms down the hall from me. Debray is passed out in his own room, the girl already gone. Allen lets his arm slip from my shoulder and he falls onto his own bed, rolling face up. He smells like alcohol and his eyes shine up at me.

“My father says, ‘I always have to bail you out,’” Allen says in a slurred voice. “But you bailed me out this time.”

“Happy to do it,” I say, grunting as I pull off his shoes.

“That was some stuff,” he says, his hands chopping at the air, sound effects squirting through his lips until they roll into a merry chuckle. “Bruce Lee stuff, right?”

“Something like it,” I say, backing away from him, feeling for the door.

“And now I owe you a life,” he says, holding a fingertip up in the air, his eyes directed toward the crystal fixture over the bed and losing their focus. “That’s how they do it over there in Japan or whatever, you know. A life.”

I tell him I know, and then say good night. His eyes are already closed when I let myself out into the hall.

Bert is standing at the bar in my suite with a beer in his hand.

“Everything go well?” he asks.

“Clockwork,” I say.

When I ask him what he’s doing, he looks across the broad living room at my bedroom door. It’s closed and I left it open. Bert shrugs, but he’s smiling.

“What?” I say.

“Not telling,” he says. “Can’t.”

I cross through the overstuffed furniture and grab the brass lion head handle, turning it. Inside it’s dark, but as my eyes adjust, I see the shape of a woman in front of the open tall glass doors that lead out onto the balcony. I feel my heart tighten. Moonlight spills through and a breeze moves the ghostly curtains, making me think for an instant that it’s my imagination. Helena has been in L.A. finishing up another video and wasn’t supposed to have arrived until tomorrow. Her first single went to number one in its second week and never came down, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when she was asked to sing at halftime of the big game.

I step softly and feel the breeze on my face as I reach out for her bare shoulders. She’s straight-backed in a white silk slip. Her hair is different now, wavy and glowing with highlights, even more beautiful than before. Since I’ve only seen her occasionally over the past few months I’ve been able to marvel at her rapid evolution since our talk on the beach.

Frilly lace borders the swell of her breasts and the soft upper regions of her legs. I moisten my lips and put them to the groove between her collarbone and neck. The tangy scent of a perfume I told her I liked sends a charge from my nose down through the center of my chest.

Without looking, she finds my fingers and laces her own tight between them. When she sighs, I feel her shudder.

“What’s wrong?” I say in a whisper, dragging my lips up her long neck to the bottom of her ear. “Nervous about tomorrow?”

She shakes her head no and says, “You kiss me and you hold me and then it always stops. Don’t you want me?”

She even speaks differently now. Her words are soft but clearly enunciated with the timbre of a flute. My hands feel a sudden chill. My muscles tighten. That ache in my chest.

“Is it because of what they did to me?” she asks quietly. “Or is there someone else?”

“What they did is done,” I say. “That’s another life. A bad dream.”

“Someone else?”

“It’s not like that.”

“But there is someone,” she says, turning to me now and clasping her hands around my neck. “Something. It’s in New York. I can feel it, but I don’t care.”

She sniffs. Tears are spilling down her cheeks.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” I say, holding her close.

“I want this.”

She takes my hand and leads me away from the window and the moonlight and under the canopy of the high bronze bed. We kiss and on her tongue I can taste the salt from her tears. Her fingers work quickly to unbutton my shirt and plunge inside, sweeping softly up under my arms, stripping my upper body. Bumps rise on my skin in the small breeze from the open doors, but wherever her hands are I’m warm.

I pluck the straps free from her shoulders and roll the silk slowly down her torso, brushing the curves with my nose and lips, breasts, stomach, hip. The slip falls to her feet in a wavy pile. I kneel, dabbing my tongue so that a small tremor runs through her frame. She clenches my hair close to the scalp and shudders.

When I rise her hands find my belt. Undone, my pants and shorts fall to the floor-partners to her slip-and our naked bodies mesh together, feeding off each other’s warmth in the night air. Helena grasps my shoulders and climbs my torso, shimmying up with her long muscular legs. Velvet around my lower back. When I lower her onto the bed, we’re already one.

She lets out a small groan and it casts my mind loose to swim in an electric sea.

39

HELENA AND I DON’T TALK about last night, but the sun seems to shine brighter, the chicory coffee seems to taste less bitter, and the voices of the busy city around us seem to ring. After making love again, we have a late breakfast on the terrace, then spend some time doing tourist things. The streetcar out to Tulane. Antique shopping on Royal. A visit to Faulkner’s old apartment. Café Du Monde. All with Helena under a broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses to avoid attention.

At three we’re back in the room, making love and taking a short nap before she has to leave to get ready for the show. After she’s gone, I sit on the terrace with my feet up on the iron railing and a cup of café au lait on my lap. I’m not really thinking. I’m just feeling the warm air and the close comfort of belonging to someone after all the emptiness. I close my eyes.

How could I describe this to Lester? I think maybe a Renoir. The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette.

I draw a deep breath and let it go.

Bert clears his throat behind me and I turn my head slow enough so that I can feel the warmth of the sunshine moving across my face.

“They want to know when we go,” he says.

I look at my watch and say, “I lost track. I’ll get a shower and change and we’ll go in, say, forty minutes.”

I see his face and say, “What now?”

Bert shrugs and folds his arms across the barrel of his chest.

“There was this farmer south of the reservation-down by Malone-who raised a bunch of pheasants,” he says. “The whites would come up from Utica and Albany and go on hunts. They’d put the birds out and spin them around so when they came back later with the dogs they’d still be there.”

I narrow my eyes at him and crimp my lips.

He shrugs and says, “I just never thought it was that much fun. That’s all.”

“You still have to shoot straight,” I say, taking my feet from the railing, the afternoon now gone.

The lobby swarms with beaming chatty people. A real holiday. Allen and Martin are no exception. They slide into the limo after me, grinning stupidly and scrambling to pull bottles of Abita beer from the ice chest. Bert rides backward facing me. The boys sit sideways on the long seat across from the bar. Their talk is fast and pitched. Who will win and by how much. How much they bet. Overs. Unders. Point spreads. Even Bert takes a fifty out of his wallet and answers Debray’s bet on who will be the first team to score.

The only person in the whole city who sees tonight the same as me is Helena. A business opportunity. Her CD is already platinum with two number one music videos. The halftime show will throw gas on the flames. And if I shoot straight, I’ll infiltrate the lives of my enemies in a very personal way.

The limo moves slowly along the teeming streets behind a motorcycle cop, and people crane their necks to see inside. Allen offers me a beer and I take it. He’s talking to me.

“-much did you bet?”

“I’m not big on it,” I say, taking the beer and clinking the mouth of the bottle against his. “When I win, I don’t really enjoy it and when I lose it makes me sick.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m not all that big on it, but it pays the bills in my house.”

“How’s that?”

“My dad is in the casino business.”

“Really?” I say, letting the word hang.

“Yeah,” Allen says, then turns to Debray. “I don’t know how you think Atlanta won’t score first with Michael Vick.”

They launch into a debate where words are fired back and forth between big mouthfuls of beer.

Bert is doing a bad job of holding back his smile.

“Missed,” he says quietly, cracking open fresh bottles of beer.

When the glowing spaceship form of the Superdome comes into view, even with our escort, the limo is forced to a crawl.

At the first lull in their talk I lean forward and say, “Hey, before I forget, let me get you guys’ numbers for when I get to New York.”

They both say sure. Debray hands me a card and I jot down Allen’s numbers on the back.

“We’ll have to get together,” I say. “I don’t really know anyone.”

“Kidding, right?” Allen says.

I force a smile and say, “No. I haven’t spent much time there. I bought the team more as an investment.”

Allen turns to Debray and says, “Can you imagine him doing funnels with Benny Cohen?”

“I know at least one certain blonde who would be all over him,” Debray says, the freckles around his wrinkled nose dancing up and down as he snickers.

“The last people you’re going to want to meet is our crew,” Allen says.

The two of them laugh and Bert joins in, looking at me from the corners of his eyes. He makes a gun with his fingers and fires it into the air.

“When the Jets sale hits the papers,” Debray says, “people are going to be taking numbers and getting in line to meet you.”

“We’ll be lucky if you remember us,” Allen says.

“Of course I will,” I say, taking out my Palm Pilot. “You know what? Let’s set up a lunch.”

“Well, I’m in school,” Allen says.

“When do you get back?”

“Middle of May.”

I look down and scroll through the calendar.

“How about June tenth?” I say. “It’s a Thursday.”

Allen shrugs and says, “Sure.”

“Le Cirque all right? One o’clock?”

“Okay,” Allen says. “We’ll be there if you will.”

“I will,” I say. “It’s in the book. And don’t underestimate the people you know. It’s always better to meet people through someone you know.”

“We just don’t know that many people,” Allen says.

“You already mentioned one important person I’d like to meet,” I say.

“Who?”

“Your father.”

“That’s easy,” Allen says. “When big mouth here tells everyone what happened last night, my mom and dad are going to want to meet you anyway.”

“Good.”

I look over at Bert. His finger gun is out again, but the boys are looking at me, and neither one of them can see it. He points it at the back of Allen’s head, closes one eye, and lets his thumb drop.

40

I HAVE A LOT TO DO in four months’ time, but money is like industrial grease, and things, even big things, slide into place. On the tenth of June I check my watch as I step up to the wrought iron gates and into the courtyard outside Le Cirque. It is five minutes to one and I slow my pace and stop to admire the brass poles and the zebras and the bold circus colors so that when I walk through the door on the second floor, the big hand is on twelve.

The room is wood-paneled and trimmed with crown molding carved by hand a hundred years ago. At the long, linen-covered table in the center of the room, Allen and Martin’s faces turn toward me in obvious surprise. Even the black-tied waiters look expectantly at me. There is an uncorked bottle of champagne on the table and Martin is filling his glass.

Allen jumps up from his chair and says, “Seth. I told him.”

“Unbelievable,” says Martin with a dumb smile.

“I told you,” Allen says, grasping my hand and looking me in the eye. “Means what he says and says what he means.”

To me he says, “I wouldn’t let him eat. I said you’d be here.”

“I’m not late,” I say.

“He always is,” Allen says, nodding at his friend. “I told him twelve-thirty so he’d be here on time.”

“I’m sitting right here, you know,” Martin says, raising his glass. “And who could blame me? I was telling Allen that it wouldn’t surprise me if you turned out to be a phantasm that we both imagined.”

“No,” I say, “I’m very real.”

“There was nothing in the papers about the Jets,” Martin says. “I told everyone and they said I was crazy. I guess it didn’t go through?”

“Actually,” I say, looking at my watch, “I sign the papers at four o’clock today. We agreed to keep it confidential until then.”

Allen is beaming.

“Told you about that too,” he says.

In my pocket, I keep an emerald the size of a walnut. After we eat, I take it out and pop a powerful little mint into my mouth, offering one to Allen and Martin.

“What kind of a case is that?” Allen asks, removing a mint with his fingertips.

“It’s one of three identical stones,” I tell him. “At one time they were the crown jewels of the grand sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Each one priceless, actually.”

“You’re kidding,” says Martin.

“No,” I say.

“What happened to the other two?” he asks.

“One I used to finance the down payment on the Jets,” I say, looking straight at him. “The other I used to buy enough shares of EMI to get a seat on their board. And this one?”

I snap it shut, shrug, and turn it over in my hand before slipping it back into my pocket. “I just liked the idea of being able to take something that valuable and turning it into… well, really, a piece of junk.”

“Junk?” Allen says. “You just said it was priceless.”

“Was,” I say, taking it back out and holding it up between my finger and thumb. “But it’s not a crown jewel anymore. It’s empty inside and it has these little hinges. When you take the core out of something, it stops being what it was.”

“And it’s worthless? That’s incredible.”

“It’s not worthless to me, though,” I say. “I like it this way. It’s functional.”

I look down the table. They are leaning forward so they can see my face.

“Any interest in the concert tonight?” I ask.

“Helena?” Martin asks, sitting up nearly straight. “No tickets. That thing sold out before it was announced… But I see by the look on your face that you’ve got a box. At the Garden. Am I right?”

“You’re both welcome.”

“You got any of those same girls from Vegas that you had in the box at the Super Bowl?” Martin asks.

“Jesus,” Allen says, rolling his eyes.

“Allen has to be careful,” Martin says. “Dani Rangle has a ring through his nose.”

I smile at Martin and say, “Not this time, but I might be able to arrange for you to meet her dancers.”

“Goddamn,” Martin says, his face growing red like his hair. “Talk about fine things. I’d take any one of them.”

The five backup singers for Helena are also dancers whose bodies have earned them cover space and photo spreads in magazines like Maxim and FHM.

“Martin,” I say, “speaking of Bob Rangle’s daughter, I’d like to meet him. I’m looking for a fund to invest in. I heard you work with him.”

“That’s easy,” he says. “I’ll talk to him and set it up. Soon?”

“Sometime over the next couple weeks,” I say, rising from the table. “Something casual.”

“How about the Hamptons?” Martin says as we walk down the stairs. “They’re out there every weekend. We could have lunch.”

I tell him that’s good and stop at the door to thank Allen for lunch.

“Are you going uptown or down?” he asks.

“Up,” I say, “to the NFL offices. I was going to walk. Do you need my car?”

“No, not this time,” he says. “But if you could take one minute, my parents’ place is right on the way.”

My stomach twists.

“You said you’d meet them,” he says, looking at me as he holds open the door.

We step out into the sunlight and the sound of a blaring fire truck. My plan was to meet Frank on my own ground, but I put on my sunglasses, turn my face toward his. Over the sirens I say, “Sure, let’s go.”

The apartment takes up the entire top floor of an old stone building that faces Park Avenue. In a massive circular foyer, columns of polished black granite rise to the vaulted ceiling. High above, the shadows of trees from a rooftop garden flicker down through a dome of leaded glass. The white marble floor is shot through with veins of red, reminding me of animal fat. Between the radius of columns are either vaulted doorways or recessed alcoves where the broken marble busts stand on four-foot-high Ionic pedestals.

I see a noseless Caesar, then a shadow fills the adjacent doorway. Frank has grown big. His feet look almost dainty in their shiny leather pumps. A fat man in a glossy suit coat. The three-hundred-pound mark looks like a distant memory.

The jowls of his face spill out over the edge of his stiff white collar, and their color matches his blood-red tie. His dark curly hair is swept back and sleek from a gel that disguises much of the white. His eyes seem to have receded into his head like licorice jelly beans sunken in dough. His mouth is the same, still small and fat, and he still holds his chin high. He blinks at me before stepping forward and extending a hand with gleaming manicured nails.

I’m suddenly light-headed. A thin sheen of sweat rises to the surface of my skin. I can see my hands sinking into his fleshy neck and me wringing the life out of him. I feel confused, maybe even afraid. My mind drifts for a second, but my hatred is an anchor.

“Mr. Cole,” he says in a gruff tone that has taken on a hint of Brooklyn. “I’ve been waitin’ for the chance to say thanks for helpin’ out the kid.”

The air fills with a hint of cigar smoke, peppermint, Cool Water cologne, and the inky smell of fresh money. I hesitate before taking his hand, and when I do, my eyes are frozen on his, looking for some sign of recognition.

“My pleasure,” I say, gripping his hand and trying to focus the rapid pounding of my heart into the tendons of my forearm. My words come out like an ice machine dumping its cubes. I could cave in his skull with the bronze figurine of a centaur resting on the closest column. “He’s a fine young man.”

My mouth is dry and my throat tight, but Frank’s pale blue eyes relax.

“You got that right,” he says with a slight nod. “Best thing I’ve got going. Plays quarterback for Syracuse. Did he tell you? I guess you know about the game. Buying the Jets, right? My casinos make a mint off the NFL.”

“It’s an investment,” I say, “but I know every team likes to draft hometown players when they get the chance.”

“Good,” Frank says with a chuckle, then he slaps Allen hard on the back and grabs him by the upper arm to give him a little shake. “But you’ll have to negotiate with me if you want this guy.”

“You’re an agent?” I ask.

“I am,” he says.

Allen’s face is flushed and he looks at the floor where the toe of his shoe follows a bloodline in the stone.

“Cool under pressure,” Frank says, mussing his hair like he’s ten. “Just like his old man… All right, gotta go. We’ll have to get together.”

Allen watches his father leave, then he turns to me and shrugs.

“I’m sorry he’s so busy,” he says.

“No,” I say, “don’t apologize. A guy like your dad has important things going on. Believe me.”

Allen studies my face and I stare flatly back at him.

“I know you’re in a hurry too,” he says after a blink. “Come on. I’ll let you go, but I promised I’d introduce you to my mom.”

Allen leads me through a great room with deep-cushioned couches and chairs and a marble fireplace I could almost stand up in. The walls are hung with oil paintings-copies, but good ones-and heavy velvet drapes. Over the mantel is a full-length portrait of Lexis standing on a cliff overlooking whitecapped water.

Her figure is straight and streamlined, draped in a deep blue dress that matches her eyes. Her dark hair is being blown back. The sky is roiling with sunbeams and charcoal clouds. Her lips are pressed together, unsmiling, and she stares off.

Allen sees me looking and says, “That’s her. My dad surprised her with that painting. It’s a John Currin. She hates it.”

“Very pretty,” I say.

“She’s quiet,” he says, “but she’s great.”

We leave the big room and walk down a long wide hallway.

“She doesn’t usually let anyone in her studio,” he says. “But when I told her about you and asked if it was okay, she said yes.”

He stops in front of a heavy wood-paneled door, gently raps his knuckles, and then swings it open.

41

LIKE THE REST OF THE APARTMENT, the ceilings in the studio are twenty feet high. The walls are crowded with framed canvases, reminding me of the Vatican Museum. It must be everything she’s ever painted. I see one work that I recognize from my past life. It’s finished.

Tall arching windows face Park Avenue on the opposite side of the room. At the far end, Lexis stands just out of the sunlight at an easel. Her back is to us, hair up with the wisps of gray. She’s dressed in tan capri slacks, flat shoes, and a man’s dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

Next to her easel a small table is cluttered with tubes of paint and a wineglass, nearly empty and smudged. She stares at the blank canvas in front of her. In one hand is a brush without any paint. Her other hand hangs limp at her side, and when Allen calls softly to her, she makes no indication that she’s heard him.

We cross the room and she is startled by his touch. Allen introduces us. She smiles, but when she takes my hand, the color leaves her cheeks. Her fingers are bony and chilled. Her eyes work their way around my face before she looks into mine.

She drops my hand and says, “Allen says you’re new to the city.”

“I found a place on Fifth Avenue, not too far from the Met,” I say, handing her a card with my home phone number on it. “I’d like to have you and Frank over for dinner sometime. Why don’t you let me know when you’re free?”

“Of course,” she says, clutching the card in her hand and bending it.

She squints her eyes at me and angles her head. Her mouth opens as if she’s going to say something. I look away to study her empty canvas.

“Well,” I say, holding out my wrist to look at my watch. “It was a pleasure, Mrs. Steffano.”

“Just Lexis,” she says in a small voice.

“Lexis. Okay.”

I touch the skin on my face and feel the smooth texture where surgery has built it up and pulled it taut. Allen sees me out. On the street, he thanks me.

“She appreciates what you did,” he says. “I told you she’s just quiet.”

“Allen,” I say with a dismissive wave, “we’re friends, right? She’s very nice.”

“She is,” he says with a broad smile that reminds me more of the Lexis I knew than the one I just saw. “See you tonight.”

I turn and concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. It’s as if my legs are asleep and I can barely feel the concrete beneath my feet. She is still beautiful. Older. Sad. But the color of her eyes is the same. Those high cheekbones. And as much as I hate her for what she’s become, the urge to just hold her felt so heavy in my chest that I thought I was going to fall over.

I shake my head and breathe deep. There is a Starbucks around the corner and I go inside and sit down. It takes a few minutes before I get back to myself. But I think of my father and Lester and also of Helena and everything is soon clear again.

I march up Park Avenue through the bustle to the NFL offices. It takes hours of signing papers, but Woody Johnson seems relieved to be free from his football team. Even as a non-sports fan I know that the pressure on the owner of a sports franchise in New York is unique.

The home I bought is one of the original Fifth Avenue uptown mansions, built in the late 1800s by the robber barons of the time, like Frick, Morgan, and Vanderbilt. After an interview about the team with Ira Berkow from the New York Times, I have dinner by myself in the second-floor dining room. Three stone-faced servants hurry in and out. Helena is already at the Garden.

Outside the French doors, I can see the sun as it drops down behind the trees of Central Park. It grows cool enough outside so that moisture beads up on the edges of the glass. I chew mechanically and swallow my lumps of meat without any real pleasure. After a mouthful of wine, I set down my napkin and step out onto the balcony. The smell of fresh tree bark reminds me of another life, when I would turkey hunt as a boy, sitting motionless in the sea of new green leaves, straining my ears and scanning the gray dawn between the silver and black trunks of the trees for a flicker of movement.

I take a cigar from my pocket, and Bert appears like a genie with a wooden match that he strikes up with his thumbnail.

“Thanks,” I say. I can see the ghost of my breath and I put my cigar to the flame.

“My grandmother used to say that winter always breathes its one last breath in June,” he says before the match goes out and his face is lost in the shadow of a tall potted arborvitae. “You want a coat?”

I look away from Bert and across Fifth Avenue. Beneath their crown of new leaves the tree branches are an inky web. It’s impossible to know where one tree ends and the next one begins.

“I don’t get cold,” I say.

“You don’t get hot either,” he says. “Like the water snake.”

I exhale a plume of blue smoke with a slow nod.

“My grandmother always said to me that every man has the spirit of an animal,” Bert says after a pause. “That when our spirits travel from one life to the next, they remember where they were in the last life.”

“I don’t know,” I say, inhaling so that the end of my cigar glows. “I remember my last life pretty well and I wasn’t cold-blooded.”

“What, a running deer?” he asks. “Like your totem?”

“No,” I say, “a white man.”

A cab jams on its brakes and the driver lays on his horn before he roars off down the street, swerving after a black Town Car. After that, I can hear the rattle of Bert’s breathing above the splash of the fountain out front. Then the lights change and the next wave of traffic sweeps past. The clouds are heavy and low, their gray bellies lit by the city’s amber glow.

“She’s an amazing woman,” Bert says.

“Who?”

“Are there two?”

“Helena?”

“I mean more than just because she’s on those posters all over the bus stops,” Bert says.

“I know that,” I say.

“Then who’s the other one?” he asks.

“I saw Allen’s mother today,” I say after a pause. “I knew her in that past life.”

“You knew all of these people.”

“Yes and no,” I say. “Now I really know them.”

I turn to look at Bert, but he’s gone, and for a moment I wonder if he was there at all.

I go up to my bedroom on the third floor and change into slacks and a thin cable-knit black sweater, then take my limousine to the Garden. The boys are in the box and full of themselves. Helena is magnificent. After the show, we worm our way through the concrete tunnels into the vaulted green room, where I introduce them-wide-eyed-to Helena and the five dancers that accompany the show. After turning over my limousine to Allen and Martin and the dancers for the night, I get inside the long black car waiting for Helena and we go back to the Fifth Avenue mansion.

Helena showers and I strip off my clothes and wait in the dark for her on the bed. When she comes back, her long hair is wet and she’s wearing a red slip. I gently pull it up over her head and run my hands the length of her lean muscular torso.

“Why do you like to stand up?” she says in an amused whisper.

“So I can get three-dimensional,” I say. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

“Front and back,” she says. Her teeth gleam in the dim light spilling out from the bathroom.

She turns away from me, arches her back, and pulls me close, reaching behind her and snaking a naked arm around my neck. She twists her head around and our mouths find each other.

After, when we’re slick with sweat, I lay breathing heavy with her cheek on my stomach. When I ask her if she’s tired, the only response is a soft snore. I stroke her hair, still damp from the shower but full now and slippery smooth.

I ease out from under her, cross the thick oriental rug to my closet, and pull on a pair of jeans. Wearing a dark T-shirt and driving shoes, I step softly down the sweeping spiral stairs, running my hand along the smooth marble banister. A small table lamp outside the library dimly lights the hall on the first floor. The weight of the bronze door handle is cool and it clanks when I turn it to let myself out into the night.

Past the fountain and the white lights mounted on the stone gateposts, the park across the avenue is like ink. I smell the cigar before I see the orange dot of its glow. The image takes me back to the night I delivered Roger Williamson’s letter. My heart skips a beat and the hair rises on the back of my neck. I walk toward whoever is standing there looking at my home.

As I cross the street, I can begin to make out the enormous shape of the smoker standing in front of the low stone wall that marks the edge of the park. When the cigar glows orange again, my foot is on the curb and I see the round cheeks and narrowed eyes of my friend.

I exhale and say, “You’re up late.”

“There’s lots of things going on in there, you know,” he says, swinging his chin over his shoulder at the murky park. “Bad things. Good things too. I like to walk in there, but not on the path.”

“I bet you scare the hell out of people.”

“They don’t see me,” he says, drawing on his cigar. “I’m an Indian. You’re the one who should be sleeping.”

“Come on,” I say, and turn to walk up the sidewalk toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “When you’ve been where I was, you don’t like to waste time sleeping.”

“Did you get done what you had to tonight?” he asks, stepping along beside me.

“Allen and his friend were impressed,” I say. “Especially when they saw Helena.”

“She’s impressive,” he says. “I’m surprised you let her run around all over the place the way she does.”

“She’s a star, Bert. That’s what they do. Go on tour.”

“You ever see the way she looks at you whenever she gets ready to leave?” he asks.

“I see her.”

“Like she’s waiting for you to stop her.”

“Why would I do that?” I say.

He glances at me, then jams his hands into the pockets of his coat. The cigar ember glows, then he exhales.

“Isn’t just walking like this wasting time?” he asks.

“This is living,” I say. “Especially if you’ve got another one of those Cubans. You hear that wind in the trees?”

“Here,” he says, digging into the front pocket of his jean jacket.

We stop under a wrought iron streetlamp and he lights me up. I draw in the rich smoke and let it linger in the back of my throat before exhaling and watching it hurry away.

We smoke while we walk, not saying a word until we reach the steps of the massive museum. Bright lights shine down on the towering columns and the colorful banners above, each the size of a tractor-trailer. One announces the contents of an Egyptian tomb, another the czar’s Fabergé eggs, and the third a Rembrandt exhibit.

“Can you imagine trying to break into this place to steal a painting?” I say.

Bert looks the building over from end to end, then up and down with a wrinkled brow. The ember of his cigar flares and he exhales a plume of smoke.

“You’d have to think big,” he says finally.

I nod and say, “I knew a guy who thought big.”

“What happened to him?”

I shake my head and say, “In the end it killed him.”

I start back toward the mansion and we walk for a while before Bert says, “Is it gonna kill you?”

“No,” I say, taking the cigar out of my mouth. “I’m not the one you have to worry about. But there are some people out there who’ll think just getting killed is a pretty good deal.”

42

“I’M GOING FOR A JOG,” Lexis said to her maid. She was dressed in a velour sweatsuit and sneakers with her hair tied into a ponytail.

The girl nodded without looking up from her work. Instead of taking the elevator, Lexis quietly opened the door to the stairs, looked behind her, then started down. She let herself out through the maintenance door in the back and jogged down the alley. When she came to the street, she looked before turning right and heading toward the stench of the Third Avenue subway station.

On the platform, she watched the stairs. When the number five train came, she waited until the last second before getting on, the doors nearly closing on her foot. She stood swaying in the car, scanning the faces until she got off on 77th Street. Traffic was heavy. The last remnants of rush hour. Even the sidewalks were crowded with people, and it was a slow-going jog until she reached the park. She snaked her way south, staying off the main paths, looking over her shoulder from time to time.

Tree leaves rustled overhead in a sweet breeze. A duck quacked on the Pond, taking off into the dusk, and its sound echoed off the stone face of the wall bordering 59th Street. Lexis looked behind her at the shadows that had grown thick. She knew Frank liked to keep an eye on the people who were close to him. When she swung her head back around, a jogger coming the other way startled her.

The Plaza Hotel showed its white face through the trees, illuminated by lights that made its green roof practically glow. Lexis smelled the horses and thought of the times she’d taken Allen for long carriage rides through the park. They’d take one every birthday until he turned fifteen and brought a girl of his own. A tradition between the two of them. She thought of others. Reading before bed at night. Museum exhibits on Saturday afternoons. Early breakfasts at E.J.’s while Frank slept in.

A young carriage driver wearing a stovepipe hat looked down from his white carriage and rattled his leather reins.

Cornell Ricks’s long stooped back jumped out at her. He sat at the Oak Room bar, bent over a martini, stirring it absently with a straw, and glancing to his right and left. In front of him on the dark wood was a bowl of mixed nuts. Like most of the people, he was dressed for business. His suit was gray and the thick burgundy and blue stripes of his tie were punctuated with a Harvard pin.

“Thank you for coming,” Lexis said, when she was directly behind him.

His pale cheeks flushed and she felt her stomach knot up.

“I’m sorry for the secrecy,” she said.

“Not at all. Please,” he said, sliding his stool over her way. “Sit.”

Lexis looked around at the crowd and said, “Do you think we could get a booth?”

“Of course,” he said. He made his way to the hostess and bent over, speaking into her ear for a moment. She nodded and took two menus, pushing through the crowd and seating them in a leather booth right away. What light there was seemed to be absorbed by the dark wood panel that surrounded them.

“I bring the governor here when he’s in town,” Cornell said to Lexis with a toothy smile as they slid into the booth. “So I’m good for business.”

Lexis forced a smile, but it quickly faded. Cornell leaned over the dark wood table and she could smell the gin.

“So, what can I do?” he asked in a throaty voice.

“I know Frank is a very big contributor,” she said, looking down at her hands and nodding to herself.

He nodded right back and said, “And that’s why I’m here.”

“Can you help me, though?” she said, looking up and lowering her voice. “Without saying anything?”

“Like… a favor that Frank doesn’t know about?” Cornell said.

“Yes.”

He leaned back and, smiling, said, “In politics, when someone wants you to have a cup of coffee it’s because they want to ask you something easy. A drink lots of times will mean something shaky. But then you’re not in politics, so I wasn’t sure.”

“Everything with Frank is shaky,” she said. Her hands were cold and damp and she slid them between her legs and the leather seat. The murmur of conversation around them was interrupted by a woman’s high-pitched cackle.

“Not you, though,” he said. “You’re not shaky. You’re just the mystery.”

“There’s nothing so mysterious,” she said, biting the inside of her lower lip and raising her chin.

“I didn’t mean anything,” he said, raising his hands before he took another drink.

“Of course I can help you,” he said.

Lexis drew in a breath and let it out slowly. When she was finished, she spoke in a rapid burst of words.

“There was a man we all knew. Frank. Bob Rangle. Me. It was twenty years ago. He got life without parole for killing a woman. A stripper. I want to find out what happened to him. Where he is. If he’s still even alive. Can you do that and tell me?”

“That’s it?” he said.

“Yes. That’s it.”

“What was his name?” Ricks said.

“His name was Raymond White,” she said. “It was 1984. Up in Syracuse.”

Ricks shrugged and said, “That’s not even hard. If he got life without parole, he’s sitting in a jail somewhere.”

Lexis pinched her lips and nodded. “Just make absolutely sure-”

Ricks held up his hand and said, “Please. The governor trusts me for a reason. Any information I get is just for you.”

43

UPSTATE NEW YORK in the summer is beautiful in many ways. Its waterfalls and the cool clear water of its lakes. The ancient mountains that make up the tail of the Appalachian chain. Rolling fields of yellow wheat, emerald alfalfa, and rustling stalks of corn. Vineyards. Stone mansions. Lonely farmhouses with ancient shade trees and towering views. But to me, none of it is more impressive than God’s view.

As my G-V banks to the north in its approach to the Syracuse airport, I can see the glimmering copper strips of the Finger Lakes stretching west toward Buffalo as they reflect the setting sun. I can see Ontario, the big lake with its oceanlike tides and its icy depths, perfect for cooling the nuclear reactors that pump out plumes of white steam into the blue sky. And from here, through the sleepy orange haze, the quilted farm fields and the carpet of hardwoods in full bloom look like the perfect place for a giant-or God himself-to lie down and nap for a century.

I turn to Bert and see him craning his neck for a view of something outside the window on the other side of the plane.

“What are you looking at?” I ask.

“Home,” he says. “I think.”

“It’s out there,” I tell him.

“Like a rabbit pen,” he says, shifting his massive frame in the leather seat and wrinkling his nose. “We used to own it all.”

“You’re talking like a white man,” I tell him. “Maybe you shouldn’t have cut your hair.”

Bert feels the blunt ends of his black hair that now falls no farther than his collar.

“You know what I mean,” he says. “I know no one can own the land, but if anyone is going to say they own it, it should be the Akwesasne.”

“Speaking of our people,” I say. “Tell me about our brave friend Andre and the reformed Russo. You said you had news about the two of them, but we never talked about it.”

“Because you were busy,” he says, slitting his eyes, “like a chief getting ready for war, a chief who keeps no counsel but his own.”

“Bert,” I say, “I think you’re jealous.”

Bert scowls and says, “I just liked it better when it was you and me and not all these white men in suits with briefcases and sunglasses and those wires sticking out of their ears.

“That’s how we lost all this,” he says, stabbing his big nose toward the window. “Our chiefs took counsel with the white man’s spies.”

Bert talks like this when he gets worked up. Sometimes I think he’s playing the part of a culture he only knows through old whispering voices.

“I thought you said I’m keeping no counsel but my own,” I say, fighting back my smile.

“Well, you’re not keeping mine,” he says with a sharp nod, folding his thick arms across his barrel chest.

“Okay, medicine man,” I say, “tell me the tale of Andre the dog leg and give me your counsel.”

Bert looks at me from the farthest corners of his eyes and says with a note of satisfaction, “Your plan to reform the white snake you call Russo was like a fart in the wind. He took the money you gave him and did he fix his hotel or pay his loan? No, he did just what you asked him not to. He put together a drug deal to get every kid from the Thruway to the Canadian border high for the life of a crow.”

“What’s the life of a crow?” I ask.

“Seven years,” he says. “Don’t interrupt my Native American clichés. Anyway, it gets better. He brings Andre into the deal.”

I smile.

“Andre?”

“Yeah, and they set up a buy from some downstate Haitians, but the deal goes sour and Andre ends up blowing away both of the Haitians. Well, the police know Russo isn’t the shooter because Russo took a bullet from the same gun in the leg himself, but they’ve got him for the drug deal and an accessory and he’s out on bail until the trial.”

“And Andre?”

Bert shrugs and says, “He’s up on the reservation. He’s fine so long as Russo keeps his mouth shut. The Akwesasne is a sovereign nation. You know that. He won’t get sold out by our people. We only sell out when it comes to our mountains and our lakes and streams.”

I nod and pour myself a can of seltzer over some lime and ice while I digest this news.

“See,” Bert says, “your own counsel. That’s all.”

“I want to see Andre,” I tell him. “I think I have a job for him. See if you can get a hold of him and have him come down to New York.”

“I don’t know if he’ll leave.”

“Send him some money and promise more. Andre always wanted to be rich and famous,” I say, looking back out the window as we begin to descend. “He wants to be a rock star, remember? Tell him what I did for Helena. Tell him I have a deal for him… He’ll come.”

As we approach the airport, I can’t help myself from searching out the quarry my father worked for so many years. It’s there. A gaping wound in the earth. Small yellow machines crawl in and out, like maggots except for their trails of billowing dust that glimmer in the late-day sun.

There is a black rental Cadillac waiting for us on the tarmac. I drive to an office building in downtown Syracuse. Instead of going in the front, we walk around back into the shadows of the building by the Dumpsters. Mr. Cooper, the agent from Vance International, is middle-aged with dark wiry hair, a crisp white shirt, and a dark blue suit. He is standing and waiting outside by the door in the glow of a single halogen light. He flips shut his cell phone and shakes our hands.

“He should be-” the agent starts to say, but before he can finish, the door swings open and a wiry old Mexican appears with a bag of trash.

“This is Mr. Orroyo,” Cooper says.

I extend my hand. The old man looks up at me and blinks before taking it. His hands are small and gnarled.

“Thank you for talking to us,” I say. “Mr. Cooper says you worked for Dean Villay at his lake house.”

Orroyo shifts the bag of trash from one hand to the other and nods.

“He knows he’s not going to get into any trouble, right?” I ask Cooper.

“He’s fine,” Cooper says. “I talked to him.”

“Mr. Orroyo?”

“Sí,” he says looking down at his feet. He lets go in Spanish and Cooper begins to translate.

“He worked for Villay,” Cooper says. “And saw him that night.”

“The night his wife drowned?”

Orroyo looks at me and nods.

“He hit her?”

Orroyo nods and winces and lets it fly.

“He heard her scream,” Cooper says. “He hit her many times. With a baseball bat. Then he put her in the sailboat and dragged it out with the powerboat. When he came back, the sailboat was gone.”

“And he wasn’t alone?”

Orroyo talks and Cooper says, “No. She was with him.”

“His new wife?”

Cooper talks to the old man, listens, and says, “Then she was the girlfriend.”

“And you’ve got the bat?” I say to Cooper.

“It was buried in the garden right where he said,” Cooper says. “The blood type matched. We’ll have to exhume her body to do a DNA.”

I turn to the gardener and say, “I’m not blaming you, Mr. Orroyo, but can you tell me why you didn’t tell this to the police?”

Orroyo looks puzzled and Cooper translates.

He nods at Cooper and looks up at me with his small dark eyes and rattles the bag as he talks.

“He told me already,” Cooper says. “He wasn’t there to talk. He was there to work. Cut grass. Plant flowers. Work, not talk. That’s what he does now. He works. He doesn’t like this talk…”

Orroyo lifts the top off the Dumpster and heaves his bag in, letting the top fall with a crash.

“Does he know we found him because of the ten-thousand-dollar check Villay wrote him after the wife died?”

“Sorry, Mr. Cole,” Cooper says with a shrug. “He’s sticking to that story. Says it was a bonus for good work. He says it’s the American way.”

Cooper slips Orroyo an envelope that I know is full of cash, and without looking at me the old man goes back inside.

“Here’s the lab report on the bat along with the police report and the coroner’s,” Cooper says. “Says she was caught up in the rigging. There was a strong south wind that night and it banged the boat and the body up against the stone break wall there in town for quite a while. Could be why they didn’t suspect anything if he caved her head in.”

I take the envelope from him and pull out the reports, examining them under the bluish light.

“I don’t know what kind of a witness he’d make,” Cooper says, jerking his head at the door. “I think you’ll need him, though, to make the connection to the bat, but it was tough just to get him to do this.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “He won’t have to testify.”

“Oh,” Cooper says. “The way you had us put this thing together, I thought you were going to try to have it prosecuted.”

“It’ll be prosecuted,” I say, stuffing the papers back into the envelope. “He’ll prosecute himself.”

Cooper gives me a funny look. I thank him and we leave.

44

I GET ONTO 690 West and we leave the city, skirting Onondaga Lake. When I was young it was the most polluted body of water in the world. If you stood on top of the soda ash cliffs you could smell the raw sewage swirling in the shallows. The worst part was what you couldn’t see. A lakebed festering in a stew of mercury- and PCB-contaminated muck.

I read they’re rehabilitating it. Dredging. Capping. Treating the sewage. Sucking out the poison with wells and pumps like it was a big snakebite.

The sun is well gone and the pink-and-burgundy glow in the west reflecting off the choppy water makes it blood red. I roll down my window and sniff the air. Nothing.

Bert looks from the water to me and says, “They say you can fish in it now.”

“Not me,” I say.

“Me neither,” he says. “Not to eat. Hey, you missed it.”

We drive under the overpass that leads to Skaneateles.

“There’s a place I want to see on the way,” I tell him.

We get onto the Thruway and off at Weedsport, then drive into Auburn. The prison glows in a bath of halogen light, and I crane my neck as we roll past. I cross the bridge and pull into the parking lot across from Curley’s Restaurant. When I get out, Bert follows me. I walk toward the grim fortress, crossing the bridge where Lester was killed. Below, the water babbles through the rocks. I can smell the weeds growing thick on the banks. Above the sheer forty-foot wall, the shape of a guard shifts from one side of the glass tower to the other. He puts one foot up and leans out over the yard with his arms folded on the railing.

It could easily be the same guard who killed my friend. Lester’s words ring out in the warm night.

You could have a nice life for yourself. Isn’t it enough to be free?

I listen to the water and feel the open night all around me. I have a beautiful woman who loves me and I’m rich beyond reason. I run my hands along the top of the broken wall, my fingers finding the cool smooth stones pushing up through the irregular concrete.

Lester’s words repeat themselves in my brain and in a whisper I say, “Yes. It should be.”

“You do some time here or something?” Bert says in his low rumble.

I nod, staring at the wall. Then I look at him and say, “And why would I take the chance of doing more?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

We cross the street, hustling out of the way of a sagging pickup with a bad muffler, and duck into Curley’s. The hostess-a heavy young blonde with Viking braids and thick lips-smiles and nods to us as we push past toward the bar. People are three and four deep, but Bert muscles in and reaches over several heads to take a pair of Molson Golden bottles from the bartender.

The beer fizzes in my mouth. My stomach is empty and it goes straight to my brain, easing the tightness in my chest. I repeat Lester’s words to myself and shake my head. When I feel someone’s elbow in my back, I move closer to Bert. Whoever is behind me takes up the space I gave and I get another elbow amid an eruption of laughter.

I spin around with my hand up, ready to repel whoever it is with a shove until I see three uniforms. Guards from the prison blowing off steam. The blue stubble on the cheek of the one who elbowed me makes my stomach sick. He turns to glare and my whole body goes numb. Bluebeard.

He says, “You got a problem?”

“You do,” Bert rumbles, pushing past me and bellying into Bluebeard, “if you don’t get some manners.”

When Bluebeard’s eyes leave me I realize he doesn’t know me and the fear eases. To him I’m just a tourist, someone soft who can be intimidated.

“This guy’s shoving me,” Bluebeard says, his voice now more of a whine, and he steps back from Bert looking up.

Bert shakes his head and turns away. Under his breath he says, “Asshole.”

Even when Bluebeard and his friends melt back into the crowd I can see his dark eyes and feel the stubble of his face against my ear. My sickness turns quickly into hatred, then boils to a rage, and I have to leave. I burst through the doorway into the night and suck in the air and the weedy smell. Lester was wrong. It’s not enough to be free. Exact revenge is every bit as valid on the outside as it was on the inside.

By the time Bert and I get to Skaneateles, it’s dark. People in shorts with sweaters tied around their necks stroll down the sidewalks. Wrought iron streetlamps glow much the same way they did when this place was a stop on the Pony Express. Ahead is Shotwell Park on the tip of the lake, a narrow green lawn between the street and the water. People have their blankets spread under the big hardwoods so they can listen to an old-fashioned brass band that’s set up in the big white gazebo. Boats filled with families bob on the water, anchored up close for the show.

Just before we reach two-hundred-year old Sherwood Inn I slow down and make a right on West Lake Street. Bert shifts in his seat.

“Aren’t we staying there?” he asks, nodding at the inn.

“Up here,” I say.

Bert goes silent.

Gingerbread houses and tall turn-of-the-century clapboard mansions line the street. Ahead, the road darkens and bends to the right. I slow down and a small groan escapes Bert when I make a left between two stone posts whose wrought iron gates stand open to welcome us. While the other homes on the street are illuminated with accent lighting, we drive up a winding way under the black shadows of soaring maple trees with only the murky hint of a mansion up ahead.

“It’s his house, isn’t it?” Bert says.

“Whose?” I say calmly as I stop the car and turn out the lights. Its crested mansard roof and Second Empire tower cut a jagged silhouette against the night sky. The ancient trees, gnarled and rustling, lean over us and the windows. Empty pools of darkness stare down. The porch sags at one end, and even in the night you can see the peeling white paint on the trim.

“My grandmother used to tell me about the Wendigo,” he says. “You ever hear of that? The bird spirit that swoops down on people at night and carries them off? The Wendigo drags his victims across the tops of trees until their legs are nothing but bloody stumps.”

On the side of the house a loose screen door raps its frame in the gentle breeze. Its rusty springs softly groan.

“It’s a lake house.”

“It’s too dark,” he says. “If you don’t believe in spirits, man, I do.”

Bert leans my way in the dark front seat. I can see the big round surfaces of his cheeks in the green glow of the digital clock.

“This is where he killed her, right?” he says.

“So?” I say.

Bert exhales loud and slumps down in his seat. A firefly blinks across the pitch-black space in front of the windshield, and I’m conscious of the smell of new car leather and carpet shampoo.

“I can feel her,” Bert says.

Bert is breathing heavy now, and in the clock’s glow I can see the growing patch of fog on the windshield. The loose door’s hinge continues to squeak.

“Good,” I say, opening my car door. “Come on. We’re spending the night. You need to get over it.”

“Why is that?” Bert asks, his hands braced against the dashboard as if we’re going to crash.

“Tomorrow morning, I have a contractor meeting us at seven and another guy to put in some electronic equipment. We’re going to fix this place up,” I say, “and I want you to stay here and make sure it gets done fast. A month at the most. I want a staff and a good cook.”

“Like some plumbing or something?”

“No,” I say. “A total renovation. I have the plans.”

“Never happen in a month.”

“You pay ten times what it usually costs. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred. People do anything if you offer them enough money. You’ll get it done.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“I’m going to have some guests,” I say, “and I want everything just right… for their homecoming.”

45

BEING A CONGRESSMAN wasn’t enough for Bob Rangle. I suspect he never felt like all the people whose backs he had to scratch ever really respected him. He wanted to be one of the ones being scratched. Now he is.

Rangle turned his connections on Capitol Hill into money on Wall Street. Hedge funds. High-risk. High-profit. Profitable enough to attract a second wife named Katie Vanderhorn. Old-money New York. Lots of invitations to all the right events. High on family name, low on family money.

Katie Vanderhorn-who still goes by her own name-has an unusual fondness for Allen’s friend and my new acquaintance Martin Debray. Debray apparently has a good relationship with Rangle as well as the missus, because it’s a phone call from Debray that lands me on the Rangles’ deck overlooking the ocean in East Hampton.

“Do you work for Rangle?” I ask Debray as I adjust my sunglasses and sit down in a large rattan chair facing the ocean surf. I can taste salt on the morning breeze and it cools my bare legs. Sea grass rustles out over the dunes under sunlight broken and scattered by the puffy white clouds. Beyond them, the sky is the palest blue. It’s pleasant here now, but the redwood decking that surrounds the pool and the cedar railings have been baked gray by a brutal summer sun.

“No,” he says with a feigned smile. “Not at all. We work together sometimes. I actually manage an equity fund for Chase and sometimes Bob will bring investors in.”

“So you’re introducing me as a professional courtesy,” I say.

“As a friend,” Debray says, sitting down across from me and crossing his legs with a smile.

“I appreciate it,” I say.

“The best business I’ve ever done was out here in the Hamptons,” he says. “You develop relationships out here, and that’s what business is all about, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s about results,” I say.

Debray is looking over my shoulder. He bumps his smile up a notch and jumps to his feet.

“Seth,” he says, taking an auburn-haired middle-aged woman by the arm, “this is Bob’s wife, Katie Vanderhorn.”

I stand and take her hand before looking into her yellow eyes.

“My pleasure,” I say. “I’ve heard so much about you, Ms. Vanderhorn.”

“I know a Cole family,” she says, “from Boston. Are you a Boston Cole?”

She has the high cheekbones of a fashion model, but the skin has been pulled back tight on her face. It’s shiny and smooth, unlike the loose wrinkles in her neck. She keeps her pointed chin in the air and her back straight. Her auburn hair is full and long and she’s dressed in a robe that hangs open to expose a fancy gold one-piece bathing suit and an impressive chest that also looks like it’s been under the surgeon’s knife.

“You wouldn’t know my family,” I say. “They were originally from Belgium. My great-great-grandfather was a minor noble who found a way to put the family money aside for four generations.”

“An unusual way to maintain a family name,” she says.

“Yes,” I say, “but an interesting and effective way to produce incredible wealth.”

“Money, money,” she says. “You sound like Bob.”

“I think you’ll find I have manners too,” I say. “I hope so. People say even a sliver of reputation with you will leave me welcome anywhere in New York.”

She sniffs at this, splays her fingers, and looks down at her nails.

“Martin tells me you bought the Jets,” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “I thought that if I was going to live in New York, I should own a team.”

“I happen to like tennis,” she says with a limp smile. “I understand you and Bob are talking business? I’ll let you two go then.”

“I hope you’ll join me for dinner sometime with your husband?” I say.

“I’m old-fashioned that way,” she tells me. “If Bob says we’re having dinner, then we’re having dinner.”

Then with a quick glance at Debray, she slips away and out across their private boardwalk toward the beach where someone has already set up a towering blue-and-white-striped cabana.

Debray’s eyes linger on her bare legs and a perfectly tucked bottom before he turns to see me looking at him and goes red. A voice from the direction of the house makes us both turn.

“Ah, you met my wife.”

It is Rangle, his face sharper than ever. His big dark eyes, barely separated by that pointed nose; great wealth has made him complacent. He has a little mustache and his hair has been dyed as if he tried to match his wife’s, but instead of auburn, it’s a strange swirl of orange and black. The top of his head is covered with a flap of the stuff, combed over from his right ear. The long fingers of his left hand are clutched in the right. Next to him is a dish.

“Martin,” Rangle says, “introduce your new friend to Dani, will you?”

“Of course,” Debray says, then introduces me to the young college girl who I know is Rangle’s daughter from his first marriage. She is short with dark hair and a body that’s curvy and tight.

The girl looks me up and down as she takes my hand. There is a hungry flicker in her dark eyes and a smile that shows just the tips of the small pointy teeth she inherited from her father. She slips out of her robe, throws a little arch in her back, and struts over to a deck chair. There is a small black spider tattoo poised above the crack in her bottom. She sits and begins to oil her brown stomach.

“She’s a sophomore at Penn,” Rangle says, grinning so hard in his daughter’s direction that the corners of his eyes disappear into a web of wrinkles and his teeth gleam in the sunlight. “All A’s, and boys lining up like jets over La Guardia.”

“Oh,” I say. “I thought Martin said she was going with Allen Steffano.”

Rangle’s elation fades. He looks at me with half a smile and says, “You know young girls. Engaged to one man one day and marrying another man the next…”

I feel my face get tight and I tilt my head, studying Rangle hard. For a moment, I feel more like the mouse than the cat, but that can’t be.

“Don’t get me wrong, Allen’s a good kid. But I think I’ve raised a girl who knows the importance of reputation. Allen’s father has done well, but he’s a long way from Katie’s Christmas party list.”

His good girl looks over at me, smiles, and crushes her lower lip with her teeth.

“I understand the mother is a little odd,” I say.

“A painter,” he says with a nod. “Very pretty, though. But let’s sit down and have a drink before lunch.”

“Daddy,” says the girl, using her hand as a visor against the sun, “I want a drink. Would you?”

“Of course, kitten,” Rangle says.

He asks us to sit and he hurries behind the teak bar to mix her a screwdriver, then he hurries across the deck to deliver it into her hands. His pale thin legs protrude from his khaki shorts and move with the awkward gait of an insect. The daughter rewards him with a kiss on the cheek. Debray is smiling as if this is par for the course.

When Rangle returns with bottles of Chimay Belgian Ale for the men, I swallow a mouthful before saying, “I’m pretty direct, Bob. I know you make money, and I want to invest some with you or I wouldn’t be here. I have a hundred million I want to move, but… what do you think of the Russian stock market?”

“The Russian?” Rangle says, his bony fingers clenching the beer bottle. “Do you have people there?”

“If I didn’t,” I say, “I wouldn’t want to invest in it.”

Rangle’s beetle eyes dart to Debray and back.

“Why me?” he says, twisting his fingers.

“I need an American,” I say. “Someone with a big fund. Someone respected. Someone who isn’t afraid to use the information that’s available to him. I see you’ve done well in U.S. treasuries and I’m assuming that it’s no coincidence that Martin has an older brother who works closely with Alan Greenspan at the Fed.”

“I trade on instinct,” Rangle says with a smile, opening his arms, palms up.

“I prefer to trade on information,” I tell him without smiling back. “If you’re not interested, neither am I. Thanks for the beer.”

I take a sip and get up.

“Seth, Seth, Seth,” Rangle says, taking my arm. “Please. Sit. Don’t be so damn… Of course I’m interested. We just need to talk about it. I’m interested. We’re both interested, aren’t we, Martin?”

“Yes, we are,” says Debray.

At lunch, Katie and Dani join us and I tell them all about Andre Kaskarov, a Russian prince whose family escaped the revolution and survived by guile and ruthlessness in Belgium. The mention of royalty gets even Katie’s attention. Andre, I explain, was educated in the American embassy in Brussels from an early age. His father envisioned a new Russia where opportunity between East and West would create incredible wealth to go along with the Kaskarov family’s noble lineage, and he returned to Moscow with his family in 1991.

“A real prince?” Rangle asks, his eyes agleam.

“There are lots of them,” I say with a shrug. “A prince in Russia isn’t like the prince in England, but they’re still nobles.”

“Of course I’d love to meet him,” he says. “I think Katie would too, and Dani. We should have dinner.”

Dani forces a smile and raises her glass of chardonnay at me.

“I’ve got a lake cottage upstate,” I tell Rangle. “I understand you’re from up that way. Skaneateles, it’s called. Bill Clinton told me about it.”

“The president?”

“Former president.”

“I was in Congress during his first term,” Rangle says. “I didn’t know you were involved in politics.”

“No, just power,” I say. “Anyway, I’d like to have a small dinner there and an overnight. It’s a beautiful place. I guess you know. We’ll fly up and back on my G-V. Andre loves it there. We could mix some business.”

“With pleasure,” Rangle says, looking across the lunch table from his daughter to his wife. “My motto.”

Before the coffee comes, I excuse myself to use the bathroom. I’m directed down a long oak hallway to a small marble temple with gold fixtures. After I wash my hands, I grab the doorknob. It’s stuck and I hear a giggle through the wood. The door pushes in suddenly, and there is Dani with her pool robe open and her top off, wearing a peach thong. She closes the door behind her and drapes her hands around my neck, swaying.

“Aren’t you seeing someone?” I say.

“I’m a debutante,” she says, smirking. Her words are slurred. “We don’t have the same rules. I like to play.”

“I know someone you’ll like to play with,” I say. “I’d hate to ruin it for him.”

“You won’t ruin it,” she says. “It likes a lot of attention.”

I grip her wrist and tug her toward me, then right past. In a blink she’s standing inside the bathroom by herself, scowling and huffing. I pull the door shut and walk away.

46

THE TOP FUND-RAISER for the president of the United States joins me for breakfast at my home in New York City. We sit in the dining room overlooking the park. He’s a fiery congressman from Buffalo who speaks in bursts of words with his hands flying into the air like a fighter throwing a series of uppercuts. When he starts in on the importance of the upcoming elections and of maintaining control of both the House and the Senate, I hold up my hand.

I tell him the deal: five million dollars to the RNC for them and the ability to make recommendations on the upcoming Supreme Court nomination for me. Before he can protest, I assure him that all I want is input. I don’t care if my candidate is the ultimate selection or not, just that the president is willing to listen.

Breakfast is over. He tells me he’ll need clearance and rises from the table.

I stand too and shake his hand, then I slip a bank check out of the breast pocket of my blazer and hand it over to him. He looks at the number and a small smile creeps onto his face.

“I’ll call you,” he says.

“By the end of the day, if you don’t mind,” I say, and see him downstairs to the door. The day outside is warm and bright and the sky is pure blue above the full bloom of the trees in the park.

I look at my watch. There’s time for a workout before I see Andre, and I think it will do me good, ease some tension. I don’t want to end up choking him. By the time I get into the shower, my limbs are trembling from weight lifting, katas, and the heavy bag.

The peaceful emptiness of physical exhaustion keeps my temper from flaring at the sight of Andre’s sneer and his jutting chin. He is sitting in jeans and a T-shirt with his leg slung over the arm of a leather chair in my library. Bert stands off in the corner by the shelves of leather-bound books. His hands are clenched by his sides, his eyes half-lidded and directed at Andre.

“Pretty fucking nice setup you two clowns stumbled into,” Andre says, looking around until his eyes come to rest on me. “What happened to your face?”

I ignore him and move into the high-backed chair behind my desk. I fold my hands together and look at him until he snorts.

“So, loon-man, Bert tells me you can get me a recording deal, and the truth is, I ain’t got too many options these days, so here I am.”

In a low rumble, Bert says, “When the hawk flies, the mouse does well to stay in its hole.”

“Hey, fuck you and your grandmother,” Andre says.

I hold up my hand and Bert stops in his tracks.

“I have a job for you,” I say to Andre. “Helena goes on another tour starting in November. If you do the job, you get to open for her on tour. If you’re good, I’ll get you a two-CD deal with Virgin.”

Andre’s big dark eyes are gleaming and he says, “Whose fucking skull do I kick in?”

“It’s easier than that,” I say. “All you have to do is get a haircut, live like a prince, and be nice to some friends of mine.”

“What, some fag stuff? I don’t do that shit. What do you mean, prince?”

“No, there’s actually a girl involved. It would be very helpful if she were to become interested in you.”

“Some dog-face?”

“Believe it or not,” I say, taking an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Dani out of the top drawer of my desk and handing it over to him, “I think you’ll actually like this. But I’ll pay you.”

“So what’s the fucking catch?” he asks, glancing down at the picture and squinting his eyes at me.

“Part of the deal is that you don’t ask questions, Andre,” I say. “That should sound familiar enough to you.”

“Yeah, well you’re not Bonaparte,” he says, eyes flashing, teeth clenched tight.

“That’s right,” I say. “Look around. This is a long way from bingo. This is New York City. Big things can happen here. A record career is something I can create by snapping my fingers. Does that interest you, or do you want to go back to bingo?”

“This is some weird shit, man,” he says, running a hand through his hair. “Why me?”

“Because you’re perfect for the job,” I say, “and I know what makes you tick.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Money,” I say. “Fame. Things I can give you, and I know you’ll do a lot for them. Kill if you have to, right? I just want you to play a part. You’re Prince Andre Koskarov.”

“What the fuck…”

I explain his role. I give him some tapes to trump up an accent. I hand him a folder with his history in it. I can tell by his face that this appeals to his creative side. His eyes glow when I push a bankbook and a wallet stuffed with cash and credit cards across my desk along with the keys to a ten-room flat on Central Park West.

“Don’t have too much fun,” I say. “It’s just as easy for me to take it all back, and I want you to do your homework. I’ve hired an acting coach to work with you for a few weeks. Be good.”

“And why should you trust me? I’d sell out my own mamma.”

“I like risks,” I say. “Besides, I’ve got friends and you’ve got a warrant. Don’t forget that. Not ever.”

Andre is vicious, but he’s not dumb. I know it won’t be long before he’s ready to meet the parents. I send him on his way and pick up the phone to arrange for a significant shift in the price of an oil company that trades on the Russian market. By four-thirty, Rangle’s hedge fund is up seventy-eight million.

Also, I can’t get Bluebeard out of my mind. The sound of his voice. The feel of that razor stubble on my neck. As a favor on the side, my Russian friends agree to send someone upstate to Auburn. They have a lively heroin trade and a good man to plant enough of it in the trunk of Bluebeard’s car to put him away for fifteen years. I think that will help him see the error of his ways.

I get a call just before five. The president would be happy to hear my recommendation and give it the highest consideration as long as I understand he has to do what’s in the best interest of the country. I ask one last favor: Someone in the president’s office needs to call Judge Villay to let him know that the president is interested in my advice and that he can expect a call from me.

The influence of power on some people still amazes me. I let Villay wait three days-giving him time to whip himself into a frenzy of uncertainty and excitement-before I call. He talks to me like I’m a long-lost friend. I invite him to bring his wife to a small dinner at my lake house upstate in Skaneateles the following week, and he says he can’t wait.

“I used to have a place on Skaneateles Lake, gosh, fifteen years ago,” he says. “Have you eaten at Krebs?”

“No, but I’ve heard about it.”

“Are you on the east side or the west?”

There is a strain in his voice.

“I think east,” I say.

He clears his throat and says, “So you get the sunsets. My place was on the west side. Actually, it belonged to my first wife’s family.”

“I can’t believe more people don’t know about it,” I say. “The first time I saw it-that aqua green color-it reminded me of the Caribbean.”

“We used to drink the water straight out of the lake,” he says. “I don’t know if they still do.”

“They do,” I say. “Haven’t you been back?”

“No. That’s kind of my past life.”

“Great,” I say. “There’s nothing like the old days.”

47

WHEN I WAKE UP, I am sweating. My spine is rigid and my fingers are clenched. I open my eyes and realize where I am. Sometimes, in that moment between being asleep and awake, I think I’m still in the box. I turn my head into the feather pillow to wipe away the dampness. The sheet and pillowcases are combed cotton.

I don’t like to sleep. Not just because I sometimes forget I’m free, but because I have already lost so much time. I inhale the smell of the tall pines whispering outside my window and wonder if any of my weekend guests will appreciate the smell and sound of those trees as much as I do. I wonder if Lexis still would, or if the cesspool she’s chosen to live in has deadened her senses.

I push her from my mind and get out of bed. I do my pull-ups on the doorframe, working my arms until they’re numb. Now I’m sweating and ready for a run. As I descend the carved wooden staircase, I run my hand over the smooth shiny railing, admiring the work. The foyer has newly laid tile and a crystal chandelier the size of an armchair that throws bite-size prisms of light across the face of the oil paintings on the paneled wall.

Outside, I stretch for a few minutes. A male bluebird boasts from his treetop and swallows twitter and swoop in the pale light. I start in an easy lope down the curving drive and look back up through the thick old maples at the gleaming yellow house flanked by blue spruce. The white trim around the lancet-arched windows and the new slate mansard roof is crisp and clean.

Out on the blacktop road, a colorful troop of cyclists passes me, drafting one another up the long country hill. To my right, a tractor rumbles across a field, spraying manure. The smell turns my stomach, but at the top of the next rise, the wind from the south brings me a face full of fresh lake air and I can see for twenty miles to the south end. Out on the water a handful of triangular sails glides back and forth in the dawn.

I love to run without stopping. Sweating. Free. Gliding like the boats. Soon the sun turns the sky from red to pink, then white before it rises in a blinding ball. I am numb. The sound of my breathing and the steady stream of sweat seem far away. When I reach Mandana, a small hamlet halfway down the lake, I turn back. Bert has seen to it that the staff has breakfast waiting for me at the small linen-dressed table on the back porch. Even though he is cleanly shaven and neatly dressed, there are bags under Bert’s bloodshot eyes.

“Bad night?” I say.

He glares at me and says, “You expect me to sleep good here?”

“What about soaring with the spirit of the night?” I say. “Isn’t that what your grandmother used to say?”

“The night sky in this place is too thick with crows,” he says. “I’ll sleep tomorrow night. If it comes.”

I take a sip of coffee and say, “Our guests haven’t even arrived and you’re ready for it to end.”

Bert sits down across from me and puts a napkin in his lap before taking a piece of grilled salmon off the serving plate and eating it with his fingers like a bear.

“I just hope that you don’t go so far down this river of darkness that you can’t get back,” he says, looking steadily at me without blinking his big dark eyes. “Because you know where that river goes.”

“I think with the money I have,” I say, taking a bite of toast, “that I can buy a boat with a motor.”

“Even a boat with a motor can’t go up a falls,” he says.

“I thought you hated the man,” I say.

“I do hate him,” he says. “I’d like him dead, but I wouldn’t invite him to stay at my house before I killed him. Besides, I don’t think you should mess with the spirits, man. Make them angry.”

I look at my watch and say, “Speaking of angry spirits, Mr. Lawrence should be here by now.”

“You better hope the real spirits don’t get mad,” Bert says.

“They’re okay with it. I checked,” I say.

I smell the smoke from a cigarette. A moment later, a man in dark slacks and leather jacket with long red hair rounds the corner of the house. He waves without speaking and tosses what’s left of his butt down on the grass, grinding it with his toe. Chuck Lawrence was recommended to me by Vance. He’s a former government employee. Very smart. Very connected. Very effective.

Chuck and I go upstairs to the guestroom where the Villays will be staying. Chuck holds out his palm. In his hand is something not much bigger than a pin. He points to a spot high up on the wall.

“I inserted one just like this right here,” he says. “It’s a projection filament. I took off the baseboard and put the transmission unit in the wall. There’s another one over here that’s a camera so you can see what’s going on. There’s a speaker here and a microphone there.

“I’ll do the same thing in their house tonight,” he says. “I just wanted you to see that you really can’t detect it. They’ll have no idea. Come on, I’ll show you how it works.”

He draws the shades in the room and turns out the lights, shutting the door behind us. We go into my master suite, and Chuck sits down at the desk. He opens the laptop that’s hooked into the ISDN line and boots it up.

“I can call it up from my computer too. Everything is transmitted digitally,” he says. “Like a cell phone. The guy who put the artistic part of it together is a special effects genius out in Hollywood. You said spend whatever it takes. What till you see how good this looks.”

He shows me what the images will look and sound like, then gives me two small vials.

“Green is for him,” he says, closing up his computer. “Red for her. One drop on each of their toothbrushes. Just one, and remember, green for go, he’ll be the one up all night. She gets red. Stop. She’ll be out of it.”

“And you’ve got their maid in Hewlett Harbor all set?” I ask.

“Took some doing,” he said. “I had to go all the way to a quarter million, but we’ll be watching her and she knows it, so we should be fine. Now, they’re definitely out of there tonight, right?”

“Yes,” I say. “And if something happens, I’ll call you right away.”

“I’ll be in and out in a couple of hours,” he says, “so, as long as they’re on that airplane this afternoon, we should be fine.”

“I like it, Chuck,” I say. “I like it all.”

He shakes his head and says, “This one’s different, I tell you that. Could have had the guy terminated a lot quicker and a lot easier.”

“Too easy,” I say.

48

I FIND BERT on the back porch leafing through Travel amp; Leisure. “Find anything interesting?” I ask. “Not that you care,” he says, “but there’s a dude ranch out in Montana that I’d like to visit someday.”

“We have to get to the airport.”

“You don’t want me to get them by myself?” he asks, getting up.

“No,” I say. “I want to give them a proper greeting.”

Bert purses his lips and slowly shakes his head, looking away from me and down toward the water.

We take the black Suburban to the private airport in Syracuse. The day is warm enough for Bert to put on the AC. The G-V is landing as we pull into the terminal, long and gleaming white with its super-size engines and its upturned wingtips. It streaks past, then taxis quickly around, meeting us out on the tarmac. The pilot hurries out and hands down my guests while one of the ground crew pulls the suitcases out of the plane’s cargo hold and places them in the back of my truck.

Rangle’s wife, Katie Vanderhorn, is first off in a cloud of perfume. I take her hand and kiss her cheek, then say hello to the former congressman himself. Allen Steffano and Dani Rangle step down to join us. Finally, the Villays appear in the cabin door. His curly blond hair has faded to the color of frozen butter over the last twenty years, but the odd tears in his pupils still give him that faraway look. He steps down and grips my hand firmly, showing his white teeth and introducing his wife, Christina, who is lean and creamy-skinned with lustrous black hair. She looks like a model from Victoria’s Secret and stands two inches taller than her little husband. Her big eyes are looking past me when she offers a limp hand. On her face is a small frown.

“Christina swore she’d never come back to Syracuse,” Villay says. “Hates it here.”

“I like the city,” she says, offering a small smile.

“Well, I’m honored that you’re willing to indulge me,” I say with a slight bow. “I think you’ll like it. My lake house has been completely remodeled. You’ll think you’re at the Four Seasons.”

“Until I go outside and smell some farmer spreading manure,” she says. “Oh, don’t mind me. I’m sorry. I’m almost as excited about this Supreme Court appointment as Dean.”

“We’re a long way from that,” Villay says. “But even the possibility was enough to get her to come.”

“You’re a lawyer as well, I understand?” I say to her.

“Bankruptcy,” she says. “Latham amp; Watkins.”

“Excellent. Well, this is Bert and we should get going.”

When we get off the interstate and onto the Thruway, it is Villay who says, “I thought we were going to Skaneateles.”

“There’s some construction on the bypass,” I say, “and it’s actually quicker to take the Thruway and get off at Weedsport.”

“I think that’s a lot longer,” Villay says, but he shrugs and closes his mouth and looks out the window.

The drive is pleasant enough. Rangle and Villay don’t try to hide the fact that they know of each other and there’s no tension between the two of them. If they were co-conspirators, their acting would be brilliant. For a moment, I am swamped with a sensation of uncertainty, as if my mind has been bent by prison, my reality imagined. But I remind myself that although they both are guilty of destroying me, neither knows about the other.

For his part, Bert is quiet. His eyes are blank and his face sags like a glob of dough. The only sign of his hatred for Villay is the way his fingers clench the steering wheel.

From Weedsport, we go south. When we crest the hill of State Street in Auburn, I can see the guard towers. My stomach twists and I can hear a sound like waterfalls in my ears. It isn’t until we are right alongside the looming walls that Rangle’s wife asks, “What is that thing?”

“Auburn Prison,” Villay says, before I can answer. “The worst of the worst. Mass murderers. Rapists. Maximum security.”

“It’s actually a landmark,” I say. “Bert, drive around the wall.”

Bert crosses the bridge where Lester lost his life. I look down into the Owasco Outlet at the water glinting in the sunlight. We go right on Route 5, separated from the south wall by the outlet. Everyone looks at the long gray canker rising up from the center of the town.

“Imagine,” I say, “we’re only seven miles from the most pristine and exclusive waterfront in the state.”

“The Hamptons are farther than that,” Rangle’s wife says.

I look in the back to see Rangle nodding with a smug smile, beaming at his wife’s comment.

“Of course,” I say.

We pass the powerhouse and turn right again on Washington Street where the road runs right smack beside the west wall.

“How high is it?” Allen asks, craning his neck.

“Forty feet,” I say.

“My God,” Villay’s young wife says in disgust, and no one speaks until we are on our way out of town.

When we get into the village of Skaneateles, Bert turns right on West Lake Street. Villay goes bolt upright and grabs the back of Bert’s seat. When I look back at him, his yellow eyes are wide and the skin on his tan face is pulled tight.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“To the house,” I say.

His hand is on his young wife’s leg and she is clutching it as if he’s not squeezing her hard enough.

“But you’re on the east side,” he says, forcing a smile. “That’s what you said.”

“Oh, I don’t really know,” I say with a shrug, not taking my eyes off of him. “East, west, I don’t pay too much attention.”

“You said the sunsets. You get the sunsets. I said that and you said you did.”

“Did I?” I say, raising my eyebrows and glancing at Bert as if he might know. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it mattered.”

“No,” he says, eyeing his wife. “I’m just…”

As his voice fades, tension fills the truck. No one speaks.

“Pretty homes,” Rangle’s wife says with a sigh. “I suppose if I’ve got to be here, this is the right street.”

“That place belonged to Teddy Roosevelt’s sister,” I say, pointing to the classical white monster on the hilltop between the lake and us.

We’re almost there now and I wonder if Villay will feel anything close to the shock I experienced on the night I was to be given the party nomination twenty years ago. Bert begins to slow and I hear Christina Villay suck in a mouthful of air as we turn into the two stone gateposts and start up the winding drive. The big yellow Second Empire house appears through the trees, and a small moan escapes Villay. I look back. His and his wife’s faces are frozen and their bodies have gone rigid.

“Are you all right, Christina?” I ask.

“I’m… I think carsick. The motion.”

Bert pulls to a stop in front of the house.

“Let’s get you out,” I say, jogging around to Villay’s side of the truck. I open the door and Villay slides out. I hold out my hand to his wife. But she isn’t moving.

“I’ll… just… sit here for a few minutes,” she says, staring straight ahead. Her creamy complexion has a green cast and her teeth are clenched.

“Honey, come on,” Villay says, wedging in beside me and taking her arm. “You’ll be all right.”

She snatches her arm free and glares at him. “You let me go!”

Dani gets out on the other side, looking away. She pushes the seat forward. Allen, Rangle, and his wife slip out of the truck and make their way to the front steps, where they pause to look back at the scene.

“She’ll be all right,” Villay says to me, wide-eyed. “She’s not feeling well. Please, you all go on in. I’ll stay with her for a minute.”

I shrug and turn to the others, pointing up the steps. Bert is unloading the luggage from the back.

“Come on,” I say, “I’ll show you to your rooms and you can change before lunch if you’d like. Bert will take care of the bags.”

“I’ll get mine,” Allen says. He hurries back, pulls his bag out of Bert’s hands, and takes Dani’s too.

I apologize for being old-fashioned, but tell them since I didn’t know how they normally do things that I’ve prepared separate rooms for Dani and Allen. I show them to their rooms and ask them to make themselves at home. Lunch will be at one and until then they can either head out on the lake with me for some fishing or relax down on the dock or on the back porch.

“I have a woman, Verna, who’ll be down in the boathouse giving massages for anyone who’d like one,” I say. “She’s the best there is. Hands like an ironworker.”

Allen asks if he can do anything to help. I tell him just have a beer down on the dock and that I’ll meet him there to go fishing in a few minutes. On my way downstairs, I pass Bert coming up.

“Still there?” I ask.

He looks back and grunts. When I walk out onto the porch, Villay and his wife are shouting at each other. When they see me, they stop and stare. Villay runs a hand through his curly hair and forces a smile.

“Your room is the first one on the left when you go upstairs,” I say with a smile that suggests it’s perfectly normal for them to be acting this way. “I’ll be down at the dock. We’ll hold the boat for you, Dean. I think you should join us and throw a line in the water. Christina, just ask one of the girls if you need anything. And I’ve got a masseuse down at the boathouse if you’d like a massage.”

“Thank you,” Dean Villay says. “I’m sorry. Christina’s feeling better. We’ll be there soon.”

I nod, then go back into the house. My bedroom suite takes up the entire south end of the house, and from the sitting room, I peer out behind the curtains at the two of them, watching their hands stab the air as they bare their teeth. Finally, ten minutes later, they embrace and then Villay helps his wife down out of the truck.