Lights Out

13

Eddie awoke in complete darkness. The phone was ringing.

“Tiffany?” he said.

He felt the space beside him and discovered he was alone. The phone kept ringing. The sound came from somewhere on the other side. He crawled across the bed, reached down for the phone, and knocked the receiver out of its cradle.

A telephone voice, small and faint, spoke from down on the bedroom floor. “Hello? Tiff? Is that you? Tiff?”

It was Prof. Eddie could picture him, standing at the pay phone outside the rec room, other cons in line behind him waiting their turn, not patiently. Eddie fumbled for the receiver, got it in his hand.

“Tiffany?” said Prof.

Eddie hung up.

He got out of bed, moved through the darkness toward the kitchen, stepping over something that felt like satin on the way. He bumped into the stove, ran his hand along the control panel to the light switch, flicked it. The fluorescent strip buzzed on, radiating a tremulous blue-white light. It was an old stove; the clock had hands. They said ten to eleven, but Eddie didn’t know if it was day or night.

There was a sandwich on the table and a note beside it. The note read: “Gone to work. Back at noon. Get some rest. You’re going to need it. T. Oh yeah-I’m taking your clothes to the cleaners. Sit tight.” His possessions-the two hundred-dollar bills and the Speedo-lay on the table too.

The sandwich-white bread, peanut butter and jelly-was not unlike a prison sandwich. Eddie opened the fridge. There wasn’t much in it. Ultra Slimfast, a container of yogurt, a pint of milk, two lemons, an unopened bottle of maple syrup. Maple syrup from Vermont. Real. Genuine. Eddie opened it, poured some inside the sandwich. He sat down and ate. Delicious. He filled a tablespoon with maple syrup and had some straight.

The clock on the stove still said ten to eleven.

There was a tiny bathroom off the tiny bedroom, with toilet, sink, and shower stall all jammed together. Eddie had a shower, washing himself with a bar of soap that smelled like a freshly split coconut. After, he opened the bedroom closet. Women’s clothes hung from the bar, women’s shoes were scattered on the floor. At the back lay a cardboard box that had once contained a twenty-four-inch Gold Star TV. On top was an envelope. Eddie opened it, found ten or twelve blue Social Security cards with no names on them. Underneath were Prof’s clothes.

Eddie tried on a blue shirt with yellow parrots, and a T-shirt that read “Rust Never Sleeps-Neil Young 1978,” both too small. There was a pair of black Levi’s he couldn’t get into and baggy corduroys that he could fasten but were four inches too short. He settled for thick gray sweats that looked new-a hooded sweat shirt and drawstring pants with deep pockets at the front and a zippered one in back. Eddie put on Prof’s sweats and a nice pair of wool socks he found at the bottom of Prof’s box, laced on his own sneakers, stuck the Speedo in a front pocket and zipped the two hundred-dollar bills in the back, and sat down at the table to write Tiffany a good-bye note.

What to say? How to begin? Eddie didn’t know. All he knew was that he couldn’t stay. Not when the phone could ring at any time with Prof on the other end. What he’d done was wrong, even though Tiffany had been the one to start. All he had to do to know it was wrong was to put himself in Prof’s position, and he could do that quite easily. Choosing the right words to tell her was the problem.

Eddie sat at the table, a blank sheet of paper in front of him, a pencil in his hand. He doodled. He doodled a flower, a burning cigarette, a bird. A big bird with an enormous wingspan, gliding over a calm sea.

“Dear Tiffany,” he wrote. “I’m-”

There was a knock at the door. Eddie got up, sticking the sheet of paper in his pocket. It was probably noon-it could be anytime at all in Tiffany’s little bunker-and that was probably her. Eddie opened the door.

A woman stood outside, but it wasn’t Tiffany. This woman had thick black hair, red lips, smooth double-cream-coffee skin, and a voluptuous body under her short fur jacket and tight jeans.

“Whoop-dee-do,” she said. “My long-lost high-school graduate.”

He remembered her, remembered that mocking voice, remembered her red convertible in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and the red jelly spurting from the cop’s mouth. But that was down south and now she was here. Meaning? His mind raced to find some meaning.

“Hey, graduate,” she said. “You’re forgetting your manners.”

“Manners?”

“Aren’t you going to invite me in? I don’t want to stand out here-this place gives me the creeps.”

Eddie stepped aside. She walked in. He closed the door.

“What a dump,” she said, looking around. She circled the tiny space like a big cat. Prof’s charcoal drawing lay on the kitchen counter. She examined it.

“Naughty, naughty.”

Then she glanced into the bedroom at the unmade bed, smiled as though amused by some private joke, and said, “So, Mr. Eddie Nye, a.k.a. Nails-are you going to play ball this time, or hard to get?”

“What do you want?” Eddie replied, remembering the way Tiffany had gone into the bedroom soon after his arrival, and how he’d heard her voice mixed in with the TV voices. The prison, so rigid when he was in, reached out elastically when he was out.

“Dyslexic,” said the woman with the double-cream-coffee complexion. “I forgot.” She sat down at the table, brushed away crumbs with her beringed fingers. “We had a date, chico,” she said, mouth smiling, eyes not. “Arranged by a mutual friend. Arranged and paid for, if you’re going to make me spell it out, by this mutual friend. Blink twice if you get it.”

Eddie got it. “It’s the money.”

“Wow. You’re something, you know that? Yes, chico, it’s the money. You weren’t trying to abscond with it, were you, like some little sneak thief?”

Eddie didn’t like that. She could see that, but it didn’t seem to impress her at all. “I didn’t even know it was there till I tried to smoke that cigarette. You and El Rojo or whatever he calls himself are the ones playing games.”

She studied his face for a moment or two, then nodded. “That’s what they thought.”

“Who?”

“It was all a mistake. No rough stuff necessary.”

“Rough stuff?”

“Nothing to worry about. Not necessary.”

The phone rang in the bedroom. Eddie let it ring. The woman watched him letting it, the mocking look in her eyes. It rang for a long time. When it stopped she said: “Have you still got it?”

Eddie unzipped the back pocket of Prof’s sweats and handed her one of his hundred-dollar bills. She stuck it inside her fur jacket.

“I love happy endings,” she said.

“What’s this all about?”

“You already know the answer. Money.”

Eddie didn’t believe that El Rojo would go to so much trouble over a hundred dollars. Some matter of principle was involved, macho Latin bullshit principle or crazy inmate bullshit principle.

“Just money?” Eddie said.

“That’s right,” she replied. “Now how about our date?”

“What date?”

“Madre de dios. The date that’s paid for.”

Eddie laughed. He was laughing a lot all of a sudden. “We didn’t sign a contract,” he said. “I’ll let you wriggle out of it.”

The woman wasn’t laughing. “You’re not very bright, for a high-school graduate. There’s no wriggling out where our friend’s concerned.”

She paused to let this sink in. Eddie thought of their long-faced friend in the prison library pushing away the bloodied Business Week with distaste, and tried unsuccessfully to see the danger in him. Then he remembered how those liquid brown eyes had reminded him of maple syrup, and felt a tiny wave of nausea.

“So let’s roll,” the woman said. “I’ve got a car outside.”

Eddie didn’t want to go on a date; on the other hand, he had to get out of Tiffany’s apartment, and a car was waiting. He turned over the sheet of paper with the doodles on it and wrote, “Thanks.” What else? Didn’t he owe Tiffany some explanation? Then he remembered her phone call, the one that had brought this woman. Maybe he didn’t owe her anything.

Meanwhile the woman was on her feet. “There’s nothing to say-don’t you know that by now?” She dropped an envelope on the table. It was a thin-papered envelope; Eddie could see that there was money inside. “Let’s roll,” said the woman.

Eddie tore up the note, tossed it in the trash, and followed her out the door. They walked down the dark basement corridor, through the entrance hall, outside.

It was night. Late night, to judge from the quiet. Eddie was wide awake and disoriented at the same time. The state had regulated his sleeping patterns for fifteen years; now that he was on his own they were falling apart.

“God, you’re slow,” said the woman, crossing the street toward a silver sedan. She unlocked the door and they got in. “Ow,” she said, reached into her waistband, pulled out a gun, and laid it on the seat between them. “These things are so uncomfortable.” She started the car and zoomed away from the curb without looking. Eddie fastened his seat belt.

“Don’t trust my driving?” she said, speeding up.

“I don’t trust anyone with a gun.”

She laughed. “You’re going to be a very lonely guy.”

She drove into a tunnel, emerged by a river, cut down a side street and double-parked outside a club called L’Oasis. The clock on the dashboard read two-ten, but twenty or thirty people who had given some thought to what they wore were waiting to get in. The woman went straight to the head of the line where a big man wearing sunglasses stood with folded arms. He smiled when he saw her.

“Well, well,” he said. “Sookray. The night is young.”

“Bullshit,” said the woman. “And I’m freezing my ass off out here. Let me in.”

The door was an elaborate affair of leather and studs. The big man swung it open, saw Eddie coming and held up a hand.

“He’s with me,” Sookray told him; and Eddie, in Prof’s gray sweats, followed her inside.

They climbed over a furrowed sand dune and down to an oasis-date palms, soft breezes, a pool of still water. Chairs and tables ringed the pool. Beyond lay the casbah, with a bar at the bottom and a restaurant behind the battlements on top. There was a minaret too. An oil-smeared man wearing Ali Baba pants stood in it, swallowing fire.

Sookray sat at an empty table, kicked off her shoes, dipped her feet in the water. She patted the chair beside her. Eddie sat.

“Care for a swim?” she said.

“Had one.”

A harem girl appeared with champagne. Sookray sent it back. The harem girl returned with a different brand.

“Salud,” said Sookray, raising her glass.

Eddie drank. It was bliss: more than the equivalent of Holesome Trail Mix, infinitely more. His mind returned at once to the dinner at Galleon Beach.

“We can have sex later, if you want,” Sookray said. “It’s all paid for.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“Really. I don’t mind. You’re kind of attractive, except for that shaved-head shit. I just hate that look. You might as well wave your cock around, you know?”

Caviar came next, followed by a spicy pie made with pigeons, and other dishes Eddie didn’t know. He ate every scrap. Then there was more champagne. Music played, very loud. People danced on the battlements.

“Dance?” said Sookray.

Eddie shook his head. He had a good buzz going, but he was still too sober to want to shake around up there in gray sweats, next to all those fancy people. He refilled their glasses instead.

After a while the music stopped. The dancers returned to the restaurant, the bar, the tables around the pool. One of the dancers approached theirs.

He was a fat-faced man in a dark silk suit. He sat down uninvited and patted his forehead with a white handkerchief. A big diamond nested on his hairy pinky. Sookray took her feet out of the water and put her shoes back on.

“This is Senor Paz,” she said. “Mr. Nye.”

Senor Paz nodded but didn’t offer his hand. He took out a cigar, cut off the end with a gold cutter, lit up with a gold lighter.

“Having a good time, Mr. Nye?” he asked after he had the cigar burning nicely.

“Till Rommel rolls through with his panzers.”

The corners of Paz’s mouth turned briefly up.

“Is that the new band?” Sookray asked. “I heard they were hot.”

Paz ignored her. “Enjoy,” he said, waving his hand around the oasis. “It will all be gone tomorrow, nothing more than an alcoholic dream.”

“Why is that?” said Eddie.

“Business. We do a redesign every two years. Frankly, it can’t come too soon. I’m so sick of climbing that dune I cannot tell you. We’re going with virtual reality next time. The name will be either Synapse or Neuron, I can’t decide.”

“Do you run the place?”

“Own it, actually. Although I’m a surgeon by profession, training-and inclination.”

Sookray frowned. Paz noticed and said, “You don’t look well, my dear. Would you like to rest for a while? Some aspirin, perhaps?”

“I’m fine,” said Sookray, sitting up straighter.

“Good. More champagne, then.” He snapped his fingers. A harem girl arrived at once. “Champagne,” he said. “Krug Grande Cuvee.” She went off. “The only champagne worth drinking,” he said to Eddie. “For a man. All the rest are just fizz, suitable for women and children.” He looked at Sookray. She looked down.

The harem girl arrived with new glasses and a new bottle. She popped the cork and poured. Paz covered his glass when she came to him. He rose and knocked a cylinder of cigar ash into the pool.

“Glad to have met you, Mr. Nye. And glad we’ve cleared up our little misunderstanding.” He started away.

“Who is we?” Eddie said.

Paz stopped, turned, smiled. “And especially glad it was just that-a misunderstanding.” He went away.

Eddie emptied his glass. “He’s right.”

“About what?” said Sookray.

“Krug. It’s the best.” He refilled his glass. Two days ago-or was it three? — he’d been eating shit and drinking swill. Now he was eating caviar and drinking the best champagne in the world. A thrill went through him, strong and physical: he felt his freedom through and through. It made him want to move.

“Who are the Panzers?” asked Sookray.

“They were hot in their day,” Eddie replied. “How about that dance?”

Sookray shook her head.

“I thought it was paid for.”

“If you insist,” she said.

Eddie gave her a closer look: he’d only been joking. He saw that the mockery had gone out of her eyes; they were dull and tired. Her body too had lost its vitality. She sagged in her chair.

“I don’t insist,” Eddie said.

Sookray smiled at him, a little smile, almost shy. “You can come home with me, if you keep it a secret.”

“A secret from who?”

Sookray’s eyes darted in the direction Paz had gone but she replied, “Just a secret in general.”

Eddie smiled back. “Forget it.”

“You don’t want me?”

“It’s not that.”

“Because I’m a whore.”

“No,” Eddie said, although that was probably part of it. The rest of it had to do with Paz; and El Rojo.

“How do you know El Rojo?” Eddie asked.

Her eyes narrowed and all at once were wide awake. “Who said I knew him?”

“He’s our mutual friend, remember?”

Sookray said nothing.

“What’s his relationship to Paz?” Eddie looked around. “Does El Rojo own this place?”

Sookray bit her lip. “I don’t feel very well,” she said. “Do you mind if I go to the bathroom?”

“Of course not.”

Sookray left. A harem girl arrived with more Krug.

“I don’t think we ordered that,” Eddie said.

“Drink up,” said the harem girl. “It’s all on the house.”

Eddie drank up. Soon-at least Eddie thought it was soon-a beautiful woman-at least Eddie thought she was beautiful, although he wasn’t seeing too clearly-asked him to dance and he said yes. He wanted to dance with Sookray, but more than that he wanted to dance.

Eddie and the woman went up on the battlements and danced. He forgot about Sookray. He and the woman-she had platinum hair and taut skin everywhere but under her chin-drank another bottle or two of champagne. After that they set out across the sand. They rolled around on the dune for a while. There was some kissing, some more champagne. A crescent moon floated over the desert and the sky filled with stars. The shadow of a huge bird passed overhead. The oasis grew darker and darker, the moon and stars brighter and brighter, the music louder and louder. The bass boomed through the earth with a seismic beat.

“I’m free,” Eddie shouted into the woman’s ear; taking up where he’d left off fifteen years before, having fun on the sand and winning races in the water.

She laughed hysterically. “Me too. We’re both free, free as the fucking wind.” She bit his ear.

14

Eddie awoke at the base of a date palm, his face in the sand. He felt like someone who had been wandering in a real desert: head pounding, mouth parched, cells desiccated.

He was alone. Sookray and Paz, the harem girls and the fire eater, the crescent moon and the skyful of stars: all gone. The dancers were gone too, and the music was over. The only light, an orange glow, came from inside the casbah. The only sound was the trickling of water. Eddie rose, steadying himself on the date palm. It tipped over and fell to the sand with a soft papier-mache crunch. Eddie followed the trickling sound down to the pool.

The pool was round, with irregular edges that might have been found in nature, and muddy banks. The trickling sound came from a fountain in the shape of a silver breast that hung over the other side. Eddie walked around the pool, stuck his finger into the flow and tasted the water. Unlike the date palm, the water was real; cold and metallic, but drinkable. Eddie lowered his head and drank.

And felt a little better almost at once. He stripped off the sweats. Two or three cigarette butts floated in the pool, but it smelled clean. Eddie lowered himself in. The water came almost to his waist, just deep enough. He pushed off and began a slow lazy crawl.

The movement and the coldness of the water got his blood going. The fog of alcohol lifted from his mind, and the headache soon went with it. Eddie swam back and forth across the pool until he grew tired of making all the turns. Then he climbed out, dried himself with a cloth napkin from one of the tables, dressed. Time to go. He walked over the dune and onto the flat stretch of sand that led to the studded leather door.

It was locked. Locked from the inside, like a cell.

Eddie went back across the sand, past the pool, into the casbah. He entered a bar called Le Chameau Insolite. It had whitewashed walls, Persian rugs, plush divans, mosaic tiles. Behind the bar was a swinging door on which hung a calendar where the year was 1372. Eddie pushed through it, into a stainless-steel kitchen of his own era and civilization.

A man in coveralls was piling green-plastic garbage bags on a trolley. He saw Eddie and said: “Are you the new guy?”

“No.”

“Then where the fuck is he?” The man waved his hand through the air, accidently striking the trolley. The bags slid off and tumbled on the floor.

“That’s all I fuckin’ needed,” the man said, giving the nearest bag a murderous kick with his work boot. Lobster tails and champagne bottles sagged through the hole he made. The phone on the wall started ringing. He snatched at it, barked, “What is it?” listened for a few seconds, cried out, “That’s what he always says,” and banged down the phone. He glanced down at the garbage bags, stopped himself from kicking them again, turned to Eddie.

“Wanna make a quick twenty bucks, buddy? Or thirty?”

“Doing what?”

“My job. I’ve got to do some other asshole’s.”

The job: bagging the night’s garbage, piling it on the trolley, wheeling the trolley out the kitchen, down a long hall, into a freight elevator, up to a loading bay, out to a gray-dawn street. It took three trips. When Eddie returned from the last one, the man, now dressed in a tuxedo, was on the phone again.

“All done,” Eddie told him.

Without looking at him, the man offered a twenty.

“What happened to thirty?” Eddie said.

“Jesus,” said the man. “No, not you, him,” he said into the phone, adding a five. “Everybody wants everything,” he said. He raised his voice. “Not you, I said. Him. Him. Him.”

Eddie took the bills, zipped them into his back pocket next to the hundred, and left, out through the loading bay. “Out there you got to earn it,” Dr. Messer, Director of Treatment, had warned. He was making it hand over fist.

A cold wind was snapping at the tops of the garbage bags and blowing scraps down the street. This wasn’t the same street where Sookray had double-parked the night before, but a narrower, meaner one, lined with soot-covered buildings. Eddie raised the hood on his sweatshirt, tied it tight, and walked off with the wind at his back.

After a few blocks he came to a used bookstore. It had a faded sign, a dusty window, and a bin of twenty-five-cent paperbacks outside. Eddie paused and went through them. Westerns, science fiction, horror: all faded and yellowed, as though the paper were in the process of recycling itself. At the back of the bin, behind a copy of We the Savage Reapers, he came to a slim volume with a red-and-black cover. Monarch Notes: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Eddie took it inside.

A bell tinkled as he went in. The store was dark and narrow, lined with books from floor to ceiling. A boy stood on a stepladder at the back. Half-a-dozen books lay on the top step, waiting to be shelved, but the boy, balanced on the ladder, had his nose deep in another one: The Codebreakers. He didn’t seem to have heard the bell.

The floor creaked under Eddie’s feet. The boy heard that and looked up from his book. The sight of Eddie made his eyes widen; afraid simply of his size and appearance.

Eddie held up the book. “I’d like to buy this,” he said, trying to make his voice sound gentle.

The boy climbed down off the ladder. He was short and thin, almost scrawny, and wore a skullcap.

“Twenty-five cents,” he said.

Eddie gave him the five-dollar bill. The boy went to the desk at the front of the store, opened a drawer, and got change. He handed it to Eddie. Perhaps the fact that Eddie had turned out to be a customer rather than a hold-up man gave him the courage to say, “We’ve got the genuine article for a dollar, if you want it.”

“The genuine article?”

“The poem. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ Paperback, but in good condition. What you’ve got there is just a crib.”

“I know the poem already.”

The boy blinked. “You know it?”

Eddie recited the first thirteen stanzas. For a few lines he was hesitant; then the story took over, using his voice but passing through him without any act of his own will. All fear, and even some of the shyness, left the boy’s eyes. Eddie stopped after

And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

As green as emerald.

Not that it seemed a good place to stop. But it reminded Eddie of the ice on the river in his hometown, and broke the flow of the poetry through him.

“So what do you want the Monarch for?” the boy asked. His voice cracked.

“I’ve got some questions.”

“Like?”

Like. Eddie recalled his unsuccessful discussion with Ram Pontoppidan, but he tried again. “Like why he shoots the albatross in the first place.”

The boy didn’t laugh at him. Instead he looked worried. “You won’t find the answer to questions like that in the Monarch.”

“Why not?”

“Because they just want to make sure you pass the test.”

“So?”

“Questions like that aren’t on the test.”

“What kind of questions are on the test?”

“Show how Coleridge uses repetition in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ to reinforce theme. That kind of thing.”

Eddie knew he could think of many examples of repetition in “The Mariner”-“Day after day, day after day / We stuck, nor breath nor motion / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean”-came to mind right away-but he didn’t know what the theme was, wasn’t even sure of the definition of theme. It was quiet in the bookstore; the books might have been silent living things, like plants.

The boy spoke: “It’s about penance and redemption, right? I mean, he’s not exactly subtle about it.”

“Who isn’t?”

The boy looked surprised. “Coleridge.”

Another pause. Eddie had given a lot of thought to the Mariner’s motives, but none to the poet’s. He said: “Penance for killing the albatross?”

“Yes. But it didn’t have to be an albatross, or killing at all, for that matter. It could be anything. The albatross is just a device, the MacGuffin.”

“The MacGuffin?”

“Like in Psycho-the fact that the motel guy was abused by his mother or whatever it was. The secret that gets the plot going; useful, but not the reason you keep watching.”

“Killing the albatross is just a device?”

The boy nodded.

Didn’t that make the whole question of why the mariner did it irrelevant? There had to be more to the story than that. The boy was smart, much smarter than he was, but Eddie wasn’t buying his explanation. He gazed out the dusty window, closing in on the thought that would show the boy he was wrong. Outside two men went by in a hurry. One was Eddie’s employer in the tuxedo. The other was Senor Paz.

Eddie went to the window, looked down the sidewalk. The two men turned onto a busy street at the end of the block and disappeared in the crowd. For a moment Eddie had the crazy thought that they were looking for him. He’d drunk all that champagne, eaten caviar, and hadn’t paid a bill. But there hadn’t been a bill, had there? It was all on the house. Eddie relaxed.

The boy was sitting at the desk, tapping at the computer keyboard. After a few moments, the printer whined on, un-scrolled two or three pages. The boy tore them off, handed them to Eddie.

It was a list of reference books on “The Mariner.” “These might help,” the boy said. “They’re all in the library.”

Eddie took the list, looked down at the boy. He had hollow cheeks, pimples, a wispy mustache, didn’t even seem healthy. Eddie liked him more than anyone he’d met in a long time.

“How come you’re not in school?” Eddie said.

All the talk had relaxed the boy. He blurted, “Are you the truant officer?”

Eddie laughed. “Do I look like a truant officer?”

The boy started to answer, stopped himself.

“Go on,” Eddie said.

The boy licked his lips. “You look like a hit man.”

“A step up from the truant officer,” Eddie said. But he stopped laughing.

The boy saw that and quickly gave the straight answer. “No school today. It’s a holiday.”

“It is?”

“Purim,” the boy said.

“I don’t know that one,” Eddie said.

“Esther saving her people,” the boy said. “We bake these to celebrate.” He picked up a bowl containing three-cornered pastries and offered one to Eddie.

Dry, and tasting of poppy seeds: not nearly as good as Ram’s Holesome Trail Mix. Eddie ate it; he didn’t want to hurt the boy’s feelings. He was a smart boy, good with books; good at finding information.

“I’m looking for someone,” Eddie said.

“To bump off? Sorry.”

“You’ve been seeing too many movies.”

“I don’t see any movies. I’m not allowed.”

“Why not?”

“Bad influence.” The boy smiled to show he thought the restriction was silly but he wasn’t chafing under it; a nice smile that made him seem stronger, less undernourished. Eddie pictured him for a moment in jail; the image turned his stomach.

“Maybe I could help,” the boy said.

“How?”

“I’ve got access to all sorts of directories.” He sat at the computer. “The phone book is primitive compared to what this can do. What’s the name?”

“J. M. Nye. And Associates.”

“Type of business?”

Eddie wasn’t sure. They tried stockbroker, tax adviser, financial consultant, investment counselor. It took fifteen minutes.

The boy read from the screen. “J. M. Nye, president, Windward Financial Services.” The address was a suite in the Hotel Palazzo. “Very upscale,” said the boy, giving Eddie the printout.

“What do I owe you?” Eddie said.

“Nothing.”

Eddie found himself wishing he had some Holesome Trail Mix to give him. But he didn’t, so he just said, “Thanks,” and walked to the door. He opened it, letting in a cold gust of wind, then paused.

“I’ve got an idea about the albatross,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It doesn’t ask anybody for anything.”

“Go on,” said the boy; there was excitement in his eyes.

“That’s why he kills it.”

“Very Christian,” the boy said. He thought. Eddie watched him. The wind blew into the bookstore. After a minute or two, the boy shook his head and said, “The text doesn’t support your theory.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s just the MacGuffin. Sorry.”

15

The boy told Eddie how to use the subway. It was easy. You sat in a metal box packed with unhappy people. Eddie was an expert. The motion made it almost pleasant. He opened his Monarch Notes, and on a coffee-stained page found this:

There is no explanation at all given of why the Mariner chooses the person he does to hear his story. In fact, the poem is full of actions and events that are left unexplained; indeed one may say that a principal theme in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the ambiguity and ultimate mysteriousness of motive. The central crime of the poem, the Mariner’s killing of the Albatross, is a crime capriciously committed.

Eddie reread the paragraph twice. The boy had been right: he wasn’t going to find the answer in the Monarch. Two things bothered him. One: Why should motives be ambiguous while consequences were so clear? That made it impossible for him to accept the Monarch’s explanation of the killing. Two: He didn’t know the meaning of capriciously. He thought he had figured it out from the context but wasn’t sure, and therefore wasn’t sure he understood the passage.

Eddie turned to the woman beside him. She was reading a book called Violence and Seduction: The Praxis of Patriarchy.

“Excuse me,” Eddie said. She’d have the definition on the tip of her tongue.

The woman looked at him.

“Can you tell me what capriciously means?”

She got up and moved to the other end of the car.

Wearing Prof’s sweats with his lost-and-found Speedo, the Monarch, the boy’s printout, and $124.75 in the pockets, Eddie walked into the Hotel Palazzo. He’d learned a little from his visit to L’Oasis, enough to understand this was just another stage set. But there was nothing papier-mache here. The make-believe was as real as it could be, and the play promised to run forever.

Richly dressed people sat around the lobby in chairs almost as finely covered as they were. A Japanese woman in a black dress played the violin. Waiters glided by bearing trays of glittering glasses. Everything was lit with a golden light. A perfect world.

No one seemed to notice Eddie. Maybe they thought that just by being there he was perfect too, a millionaire returning from a morning jog, on his way upstairs where a wardrobe full of finery awaited. Eddie, in the role of the jogging millionaire, walked to the elevator as though he had a right to be there and rode up to the ninth floor.

He stepped into a hall that smelled of flowers. Sounds were muted, the carpet creamy and thick. As he moved along it, Eddie forgot how to play the jogging millionaire; he degenerated quickly into someone else, some lesser character, not even up to his own level, a short-of-breath character with a heart beating too fast and too light, like some cheap over-wound tinny thing. A character who was light-headed when he reached his brother’s door.

There was no sign saying Windward Financial Services, nothing but a number and brass knocker. Eddie stood outside the door in that hushed hall that smelled like a garden in spring, the sole sound the pulse in his ears. He faced the thought that had risen in his mind, demanding recognition: turn back. Eddie knew that turning back was the right thing to do. Fifteen years was too long, those fifteen years especially. The building itself sent the message. Leave it, leave town, leave the past completely: Eddie knew that with certainty. But his hand went to the knocker anyway, raised it and knocked. The tinny thing inside him was under the control of something more powerful than logic.

Ten or fifteen seconds passed. Maybe no one was inside, maybe the bookstore boy’s information was wrong, maybe-

The door opened. On the other side stood a big man in a pinstripe suit. He wore half glasses, had graying hair, a fleshy face, a thickened body. It took Eddie a few moments to see Jack somewhere inside him.

“Yes?” Jack said.

“Jack.” There was mist in the air all of a sudden, blurring his vision, the way it had blurred as the white station wagon drove him out of prison. None of that, Eddie told himself, and made it go away. “Jack. It’s me.”

Jack took off his half glasses and stared. “Oh, my God.” He covered his heart. “Oh, my God.”

And next? Eddie was ready for a handshake, an embrace. Neither happened. Jack looked over his shoulder. At a coffee table in the room behind him sat a blond woman in a gray-flannel suit, a little coffee cup in her hand; there was a French name for it that Eddie couldn’t remember. She was straining to see who was outside.

“Eddie. Jesus.” Jack turned to the woman. “One second, Karen,” he said. Then he stepped out into the hall, half closing the door behind him.

Jack glanced up and down the hall. He had a little pouch of fat under his chin. “You’re not…”

“Not what?”

“On the lam, or anything?”

On the lam. Was this an attempt to speak the language he thought Eddie’s? The tiny and archaic phrase measured the enormity between them. Eddie almost laughed. “I’ve paid my debt to society,” he said with a straight face. As long as they were going to talk silly.

Jack got it. He smiled. Jack had changed a lot, but his smile was the same: a flash that promised fun, lots of it and slightly dangerous. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

Then came the embrace. They threw their arms around each other. Jack was still big and strong, but now there was some softness to his body. He shook a little. Eddie realized Jack was crying. Walking down the hall he’d been close to crying too. Now it was an impossibility.

They separated. Jack held him at arm’s length. “You look good, Eddie.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you?”

“All right.”

“You’re in shape.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you?”

“All right.”

“God, I’m glad to hear that.” Jack looked into the room.

“Have I come at a bad time?” Eddie asked.

“So what’s new?”

Jack laughed. Eddie didn’t.

Jack wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ve got a client, that’s all. Come in, if you don’t mind waiting in the bedroom. I’d get rid of her, but I’ve been trying to sew this deal up for months. It won’t be long.”

“I can come back, if you like.”

“Come back?” Jack said. “Bro!” And he wrapped his arm around Eddie’s neck in that old familiar lock, half dragging him into the room.

“Karen,” he said, letting Eddie go. “I want you to meet someone very special to me-my brother, Eddie. Eddie, Karen de Vere.”

“A pleasure,” the woman said. She wore tortoiseshell glasses; behind their lenses her eyes were cool blue.

“Eddie’s just dropped in from out of town,” Jack said. “Rather unexpectedly, but that’s Eddie.” He moved Eddie toward the bedroom. The Monarch fell out of Eddie’s pocket. The woman leaned forward in her chair to see what it was. Eddie stooped to pick it up.

“Where do you live, Eddie?” the woman asked.

Jack was watching him. “Upstate,” Eddie said.

“Whereabouts?” said the woman. “I’m from upstate myself.”

Buffalo? Syracuse? Were those considered upstate, or did the term refer only to the towns near New York? Eddie wasn’t sure. “Albany,” he said.

“I’ve got a lot of friends there,” the woman said. “I grew up on a farm near Troy.”

Jack said: “It’s a small world.” Then, to Eddie: “We won’t be too long. Help yourself to the minibar. Within reason.” He smiled, to show the woman that it was a joke, and Eddie was a bit of a character.

Eddie went into Jack’s bedroom. He heard the woman say, “He sounds just like you.” The door closed behind him.

Except for all the electronic equipment, Jack’s bedroom reminded Eddie of a movie he’d seen in the inmates’ rec room, a movie where a bitter couple lived in luxury and said nasty things to each other. And then there was the equipment: four computer terminals, three phones, a printer, and what he assumed to be a fax machine; even as he watched, it dropped a sheet of paper into a tray. He glanced at it: all numbers and abbreviations, incomprehensible to him.

Eddie looked out the window. Jack had a view of Central Park. The landscape was brown, with a few gray patches of snow here and there. Rain was falling again, billowing past in long curving patterns. Down below, dull-colored people beetled along like characters in a computer game.

Warm and dry, all city sounds muffled, Eddie watched them for a while. This was nice. He opened the minibar, found beer and wine and a carton of orange juice at the back. “Not from concentrate. Shake first for better taste.” He sat in a gilded chair, shook the carton, drank from it. Delicious. One of the computer screens flashed a message about Vestron dividends. The fax machine slid out another sheet. Eddie got up and looked at it. This one was from the Mount Olive Extended Care Residence and Spa in Darien, Connecticut. “Dear Mr. Nye: Please call re your account.” Then came another fax full of numbers and abbreviations.

A copy of the Financial Times lay on the couch. Eddie picked it up and started reading. In this room it began to make sense. Eddie recalled El Rojo poring over Business Week. He and Jack could probably have found a lot to talk about. Eddie couldn’t imagine Jack at the steel table in the prison library, but he could easily picture El Rojo in a room like this. El Rojo probably had whole houses like it in Colombia, or on the Riviera, or some other fancy place Eddie had encountered in his reading. That would make living in that cell in C-Block all the more unbearable. Eddie recalled the picture of El Rojo’s son, the dead shot in the cowboy outfit-Gaucho, wasn’t it, and hadn’t he had some other name too? — and found himself admiring El Rojo’s stoicism, his self-control. Of all the inmates Eddie had known, he’d had the most to lose; and he’d lost it.

At that moment, Gaucho’s real name came to him: Simon. After the Liberator.

Jack entered the room. “What’s that?” he said.

Eddie realized he’d spoken “the Liberator” aloud. “Nothing.”

Jack had a check in his hand. He stuck it inside his jacket pocket, gazed at Eddie, shook his head. “This is something,” he said. “Really something. I’m having trouble believing it’s true. That you’re here, and everything.”

“Me too.”

Jack laughed. “The same old Eddie.”

“No.”

“No, of course not. Sorry. How are you, really?”

Before Eddie could reply, the fax produced another document. Jack went over, scanned it quickly-more than quickly, almost with the speed of a character in a silent movie-checked the other faxes in the tray, checked the computer screens, turned.

“Hungry? I’m going to order up some lunch. Or do you want to go out?”

Eddie wasn’t hungry. The bookstore boy’s little three-cornered pastry had somehow filled him up. “Whatever you like,” he said.

“Let’s eat in,” Jack said. “Give us more time. There’s so much I want to ask you. This is just so…” Words failed him. He smiled helplessly, then flipped Eddie a menu and sat down at the desk. “Just one sec.” He began tapping on a keyboard.

“What are you doing?” Eddie asked.

“Hedging.”

Eddie studied the menu. Many choices, many foreign words, prices he wasn’t prepared for. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

“Pasta salad okay?” Jack asked, reaching for the phone. It buzzed before he could pick it up. He answered, listened, then rose and began pacing back and forth as far as the phone cord permitted, as though it were a leash. “That wasn’t our agreement,” he said. “They’re asking the impossible.” He listened, paced. “You’d better not be,” he said, his voice rising. Eddie could hear a tiny voice protesting on the other end. Jack hung up.

He glanced at Eddie, stopped pacing, composed himself. “Everything you’ve read about those pricks is true,” he said. “Just like bloodsuckers except they do it for pleasure. The money has nothing to do with it.”

“What pricks?”

“Wall Street pricks.” Jack snapped off his tie. He quickly undressed down to boxer shorts and knee-length socks, threw open a huge closet full of clothes. His body had grown top-heavy, his legs thinner. They were trembling slightly. He selected a new shirt, new tie, new suit, all of which looked almost identical to what he’d had on before, and began putting them on. Eddie followed every move, fascinated as a neophyte allowed in the master’s studio; or like a boy watching his father.

“Got to pass on lunch,” Jack said, knotting his new tie in a quick fluid pinwheel of navy and crimson. “Just order up whatever you want. Or call Hector, he’s the concierge. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He hurried through the bedroom door, came right back. “It’s great to have you here,” he said. “Just great. We’ll celebrate tonight.” He left, returned again. “Sorry I have to run off-I’m so excited about this I can’t tell you.” He went, came back once more. “Don’t bother answering the phone-the machine’ll take it.” Then he was gone.

Eddie sat on the gilded chair in Jack’s bedroom. He didn’t order food because he wasn’t hungry, didn’t drink from the minibar because he’d drunk too much at L’Oasis, didn’t go out because he was afraid he might have trouble getting back in. To make himself useful, he picked Jack’s suit off the floor and carried it to the closet. He folded the pants, hung them on a wooden hanger, slid the jacket on top. He was about to hook the hanger over the rail when he remembered the check Jack had stuck in the inside pocket. He reached for it out of curiosity, just wanting to see.

It was a check drawn on the Banque de Geneve et Zurich, made out to Windward Financial Services, signed by Karen de Vere. The amount was $230,000. Eddie put it back.

The phone rang. Eddie didn’t pick it up. A voice said: “Mr. Nye. This is the billing department. Please call to discuss your account at your earliest convenience.” Eddie returned to the closet and looked at the check again.

He went into the sitting room, sat down on the couch where Karen de Vere had been. The cushions were still warm from her body; very slightly, but he could feel it. There were a lot of papers spread out on the coffee table. Some bore the letterhead of Windward Financial Services, some were the prospectuses of companies listed on the stock exchange, some had nothing on them but more numbers and abbreviations. Going through them, Eddie discovered a glossy brochure with Jack’s picture on the cover.

Jack was standing in front of 222 Park Avenue: the number was visible behind him. His hair was a little darker and thicker, his face a little darker and thinner, and he was smiling his smile. Eddie opened the brochure and began reading.

He learned a lot about his brother: how he was the president and founder of Windward Financial Services, one of the top-ten small financial consultancies in the nation, according to Crain’s New York Business (1990); how before that he had been the president and founder of J. M. Nye and Associates, a private investment firm that had specialized in trading high-yield bonds in the eighties, and had been acquired by a Belgian conglomerate (1988); how he had houses in Connecticut and Aspen; how he and his wife were skiers and golfers; how he’d graduated from USC with a degree in engineering.

Eddie stopped right there. He checked the graduation date: three years after the summer at Galleon Beach, which was when Jack would have graduated had he stayed in school.

But he hadn’t, had he? He’d left during his freshman year. Maybe he’d gone back, somehow made up the work he’d missed, graduated on schedule. Then Eddie recalled that Jack hadn’t left USC, exactly. He remembered the letter he’d found in Jack’s cabin at Galleon Beach, remembered what he hadn’t understood at the time and had almost forgotten: Jack had been expelled, permanently.

Meaning what? He didn’t know; didn’t know enough about how the world worked to even guess. He flipped on the TV. Wile E. Coyote lost his balance and fell off a cliff.

16

Although he had never been to France, Eddie dreamed he was in a French cafe. The elements of the dream: a little cup of the type Karen de Vere had held in her lap-in his dream he remembered it was called demitasse; snails dripping with garlic butter; blue smoke. He smelled smoke-even as he smelled it wondering if the smell had triggered the dream: didn’t dreams pass in seconds? — and opened his eyes.

It was dark. He lay on the couch in the sitting room of Jack’s suite at the Hotel Palazzo. The night glow of the city came through the window. The only other light was a red cigarette end moving back and forth along the opposite wall.

“Jack?”

The tiny red light was still. “Did I wake you?”

“What time is it?”

“Late. Sorry.”

“No problem. Did you sort out whatever it was?”

“Partly.”

The red light began moving again, back and forth.

“Do you live here, Jack?”

“It’s where I lay my weary head.” No mention of Aspen or Connecticut.

Eddie sat up. The smell was irresistible. “Got another cigarette?”

“You smoke?”

“Trying to quit. It’s prong one of my three-pronged plan.”

There was a soft smack on the coffee table-the cigarette pack; and a softer one-the matches. Eddie lit up.

“I give up,” said Jack.

“About what?”

“Prongs two and three.”

“Steam bath, which I haven’t had yet. And take nothing with me.”

“Did you?”

“I took my sneakers,” Eddie said. But he knew the break hadn’t been as clean as that. There was El Rojo’s hundred dollars, for starters. That had led to Sookray and Senor Paz. Then there was Prof’s charcoal drawing. That had led to Tiffany, who was in contact with Sookray. He hadn’t made a clean break at all; his old community reached out for him.

“Still wear a ten?” Jack asked.

“Yeah.”

“There’re boxes of tens around here somewhere. Jogging, tennis, loafers, Christ knows what else. I’ve got this personal shopper, don’t ask me why. Take what you want.”

The red-tip glow kept moving, back and forth.

Eddie said: “You got rich.”

Jack made a sound, half laughter, half choking on cigarette smoke. “Rich? What’s rich?”

“This place. Boxes of shoes. Personal shopper, whatever that is.” A check for $230,000 left in a jacket on the floor.

“That’s not rich, Eddie. Rich is never having to worry about money. Never having to think about it. Just living in it, like the air you breathe.”

“Is Bobby rich?”

“Bobby?”

“Falardeau. He says he’s set for life.”

The red light stopped, brightened, moved on.

“You went home?”

“Yeah.”

“Saw Bobby?”

“And Vic.”

“What made you do that?”

“Bobby I ran into. Vic… I don’t know.”

“He’s a pathetic drunk.”

“The whole town’s kind of pathetic now.”

“It was always pathetic. How about a drink?”

“What’s BCC?”

“Mining and metals.”

“They fired Vic.”

“That’s such a loaded word,” Jack said. “I wish people would stop using it. Firing’s just an expression of socioeconomic forces. You can’t fight forces like that. All you can do is get on their backs and ride them.”

“I’ll tell Vic that the next time I see him.”

Jack laughed again, this time without choking. “How about that drink?”

“Okay.”

The red light went out. Then came bumping sounds and clinking sounds.

“You like Armagnac?”

“What is it?”

“Cognac, but snobbier.”

“That’s me.”

Jack appeared in the pool of pink-orange night glow, sat across the table with brandy snifters and a bottle. His half glasses were up on his forehead; there were deep pockets under his eyes, garish pits in the city light.

“Bobby’s set for life, all right,” said Jack as he poured, “but I wouldn’t call him rich. He could have been rich, but he didn’t have the balls.”

“Didn’t have the balls?”

“To hold out for what he could have gotten. I wasn’t surprised. You remember how he was in the pool.”

“I raced him yesterday. One-hundred free.”

“You’re kidding.”

“His problem was technique, not character.” But even as he said it, Eddie wasn’t sure.

“That means you beat him.”

Eddie didn’t say anything. Jack brought the snifters together with a ping, handed one to Eddie. “Bobby in good shape?”

“He still works out in the pool.”

“Maybe. But he must have had delusions. Look at you. I wouldn’t stand a chance either.”

“I never beat you, Jack. Not in the free.”

“Let’s leave it like that.” Jack raised his glass. “Here’s to you, bro.”

They drank. Eddie didn’t know about the snobby part. He just knew the Armagnac was good, and said so.

“A present from Karen, actually. She brought it back from Paris.”

Eddie thought of his French cafe dream right away. “She’s a client?”

“Right.”

“What does she do?”

“Manages a family trust.”

“Her family?”

“One half of it. The poor half. They came over with Peter Stuyvesant and split in two. Her half sat on their little acre for three hundred years. The other half started General Brands.”

“Is she good at it?”

Jack smiled. “Good enough to come to me.” He took another drink.

“What do you do, exactly?”

“Investment research. Analysis. Counseling.”

“You invest the money for them?”

“Some clients have commission accounts with me, yes. Others pay a straight fee, plus a percentage bonus if earnings targets are reached.”

“How did you learn all this stuff?”

“Picked it up on the fly. That’s how everyone does it. They may tell you different, but it’s the only way.”

“So you didn’t go back to school?”

“School?”

“After Galleon Beach.”

Jack’s eyes went to the papers scattered on the table; at least Eddie thought they did: the light wasn’t good enough for him to be sure.

“I did, in fact.”

“USC?”

Jack nodded. “But that’s not where I learned this business.”

“Did you swim?”

“Swim?”

“At USC.”

“No.” There was a silence. “I got bored with it. All those hours in the pool. I wasn’t really that good.”

“You were.”

“I wasn’t going to get any better, then.”

I was.

Jack lit another cigarette. It glowed in the space between them.

“How did you manage?”

“College? It’s not so tough, Eddie. Like high school, except you get laid more.”

“I meant without a scholarship.”

Jack took a drag. The red tip brightened. “Waiting tables, loans, scrounging, the usual.”

Someone screamed, faint and far away, down in the park.

“Did Bobby tell you how to find me?” Jack said.

“I saw your letterhead at Vic’s. Your old letterhead.”

Jack refilled their glasses. Eddie’s didn’t need refilling, but Jack poured anyway. He swirled the liquid in his glass, staring into the tiny whirlpool he’d made.

“What happened to J. M. Nye and Associates?” Eddie said.

Jack made a sound, not a laugh, more like a snicker. “It was an eighties thing. The climate’s changed.”

“How?”

“Like the ice age.” He took another drink, a big one, as though to fend off the cold.

“So Windward Financial Services is something different?”

“Leaner. I don’t know about meaner. We were mean from the get-go.”

“You’re talking about the associates?”

“Right.”

“Who are they?”

Jack shrugged. “What you’d expect. It doesn’t matter. They’re gone.”

“You’re on your own?”

“Thank God.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because now I don’t have to worry about a bunch of fuck-ups fucking up. One of my beloved associates is still in the hoosegow.”

Hoosegow. One of those words that was supposed to be funny. Eddie didn’t find it funny at all. He said nothing.

Jack misinterpreted his silence. “He didn’t do anything sinful,” he said. “In this business the line between making a killing and breaking the law can be very fine.”

“So people can end up in the hoosegow just by accident.”

There was another silence, much longer than the last. Jack laid down his drink. He put his hands together, almost in the attitude of prayer; his fingernails glowed pink-orange in the light flowing through the window.

“I’m sorry, bro,” he said.

“For what?”

“For not… keeping in touch. It was inexcusable. But-” His voice broke. “-I couldn’t stand to see you like that. That goddamn visitor’s room. That was hell, Eddie. I won’t forget it till my dying day.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Yes, you do. I took the easy way.”

“What do you mean?”

There was wetness on Jack’s face. “It was easier to forget,” he said. He picked up his glass and drained it. “To try to forget.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“No, I’m not.” Jack took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

He drank more Armagnac. So did Eddie.

“Eddie?”

“Present.”

“How are you? Really.”

The phone rang. Jack answered it. “Send it up,” he said. Then he turned to Eddie. “I want you to stay here. I mean that. As long as you like. Don’t worry about anything, anything at all. Understand?”

“Sure.” He understood the concept of not worrying. He was free. What was there to worry about?

“Do you need any money?” Jack asked.

“Got some. I’ve been making it hand over fist.”

“Here.” Jack laid some bills on the table.

“No, thanks.”

“Just take it. Get yourself some clothes. See the sights. I’m not going to be around tomorrow.”

“No?”

“Business trip.”

“Where?”

“Nowhere interesting. We’ll come up with a plan when I get back.”

“What kind of plan?”

“To get you back on your feet.”

“I’m on my feet.”

“I know. I can’t tell you how impressed I am.” Jack poured more Armagnac. “But what do you want to do, Eddie? Or is it too soon to say?”

Eddie thought it over. “Go for a swim.”

Jack laughed. “Same old-” He cut himself off. His eyes were pink-orange in the light. Someone knocked on the door.

Jack went to it. A bellman held out a silver tray bearing an envelope. Jack took it and returned to the couch.

“You can swim anytime you like at my club,” he said. “Although that wasn’t what I meant.”

“Is it too late to get into junk bonds?” Eddie said.

Jack smiled his smile. “They’re making a comeback already.” He had one more shot of Armagnac, then rose, stretching. “You can sleep on the pullout,” he said.

“I’m fine here.”

“Pullout’s more comfortable.” Jack went into the bedroom.

Eddie finished what was in his glass, put it down. His eyes rested on the envelope the bellman had brought. It wasn’t sealed. He peeked inside, saw a plane ticket, slipped it out. Jack was taking a return flight to Grand Cayman, first class.

“All set,” Jack called.

Eddie went into the bedroom. Jack was spreading a quilt on the pullout. He gave the pillows a little pat and went into the bathroom.

A few minutes later they were in their beds. The pullout was comfortable, but Eddie couldn’t sleep. He lay in it, feeling the Armagnac tingling inside him. He’d had too much, on top of too much the night before, and nothing for so many nights before that. The room began to spin, just a little. He watched it spin for a while, listening to Jack’s breathing. He knew that sound.

He spoke. “What happened to Fearless?”

“Confiscated.” Jack replied immediately, wide-awake.

“How did Packer take that?”

Eddie heard a little laugh. “Brad? I don’t think he cared much by then. The bank owned the boat anyway.”

“It did?”

“Sure. Packer was just a nobody with a two-bit dream. The world’s full of Packers.”

Eddie had only met one, and Galleon Beach hadn’t seemed two-bit to him. The room spun a little more.

“Did you ever go back?” he said.

“Back where?”

“To Galleon Beach.”

“Why would I have done that?”

“It was a nice place.”

“It was a dump, Eddie. You’d be disappointed now. Some things only work when you’re young.”

Eddie knew that last part was true. That was what was killing him.

“Did JFK ever turn up?” he said.

Pause. “If he had, we’d have gotten you out.”

“He must be somewhere.”

“He could be dead. And even if he isn’t, does it matter anymore? You’re here. From now on things are going to be good for you. I’ll see to that.”

Eddie said nothing. He heard Jack roll over.

“Big day tomorrow,” Jack said. “Better get some sleep.”

A big day for you, maybe, Eddie thought. He stared at the ceiling. It was moving. He listened to Jack’s breathing, that same breathing he’d heard when they shared a bed in their little room.

“Do you remember Mom?” he said.

“A little.”

“What was she like?”

“Who knows?” There was a long silence before Jack said, “Christ, Eddie, we were living like shit the whole time.”

“No, we weren’t.”

“You’re wrong.”

But Eddie knew he was right, knew now what living like shit was about. There was another silence. It went on and on. Eddie occupied himself with the tingling of the Armagnac, Jack’s breathing, and the slowly spinning room. Time passed. Then Jack spoke once more, soft and gentle.

“Good night, Sir Wentworth,” he said.

That brought the mist to Eddie’s eyes, but of course no one could see, so it was almost all right. He pretended to be asleep.

Good night, One-Eye.