Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations.
– THOMAS JEFFERSON
San Ignacio , Belize
SAN IGNACIO IS A BEAT OLD frontier town, the capital of Belize ’s wild west and the gateway to Guatemala. Its narrow streets, crowded with colorfully stuccoed buildings and lined with open sewers, wind haphazardly up the sharp hillside on which it has grown. It is a city built for logging and the gathering of the sap of the sapodilla tree, which is processed into chewing gum, and though chewing gum is now largely synthetic and logging no longer takes place, the city still has the feel of a logging town, unpredictable and good-natured.
I am staying at the San Ignacio Hotel, just down the hill from a set of Mayan ruins with the comforting name of Cahel Pech, which means the place of ticks. My hotel is an old colonial outpost with a fine swimming pool. From the balcony of my room I can see the thick jungle that chokes the hills surrounding the city. I sit on the balcony and stare at the wild green of the jungle and wonder what the man I am seeking is doing right now, wonder how much he is enjoying his wealth in this tropical swelter. He has a fortune at his disposal, the whole of the Wergeld Trust, as he so brazenly let me know by the name on his account at the Belize Bank, but instead of hiding out in Paris or Rome or on a boat docked alongside a hidden cay in the Caribbean, he has come to the jungle. It was wise of him, I guess, in planning for his infinite future, to try to grow accustomed to the heat.
I am close to him now, closer than I truly believed I would find myself when I left the United States for this country. I felt his proximity on the top of El Castillo in the ancient Mayan ruins of Xunantunich and went out to confirm it on the streets of San Ignacio. The Belize Bank branch on Burns Avenue was a whitewashed building, trimmed in turquoise, just across from the New Lucky Chinese restaurant. While Canek Panti waited outside, I spoke to the assistant branch manager on the second floor. I like assistant branch managers, they are usually so willing to please without wanting to disturb their bosses, but this one was no help. “I am unable by law to tell you anything about that account, sir,” he said, and no importuning, no playacting, no flashed American dollars would change his mind. I was puzzled that no one in the bank recognized the picture, but then, I figured, he had had a servant do his banking. He must trust his servant an awful lot if he trusted his servant to do his banking.
We checked out a joint called Eva’s on the main strip of the city, a blue-painted shack, where, Canek told me, foreign travelers and expatriots congregate. I sat at a table under a slowly spinning fan and ordered a black bean soup called chilmoles and a beer. The Belikin was good and cold and the soup was good and hot, loaded with stewed chicken, a white hard-boiled egg bobbing on the surface, and the owner of the place, an expat Englishman named Bob, was talkative. He tried to book me on a river trip or in a tourist lodge in the jungle, but all I wanted to know was if he had seen the man in the photograph. “Never,” he said, “and most of the visitors who come through town end up stopping here.”
“Any word,” I asked, “of a foreigner who has set up a ranch in the jungles nearby?”
“Not someone who hasn’t come through here. Most of the ranch owners take lodgers and use us to help book their places. But it’s a big jungle, mate. If you wanted to get lost you’d have no problem getting lost here.”
After Eva’s, Canek left to make arrangements to stay with people he had in the area. I had hired him as my guide, at ninety-five dollars a day for as long as I was in the west, and he seemed pleased by the arrangement, as was I. A friend in foreign places is rare, and one you can trust, as I trust Canek Panti, is even rarer. And who better to guide me through these jungles than a Mayan? Alone now, I took a walk around town. There were few beggars in San Ignacio, no one on the street trying to peddle me dope, and I enjoyed the walk despite the heat. I showed my photograph to storekeepers, to passersby, to the old folk sitting in the town circle at the mouth of the bridge, but no one recognized the man I am hunting. I asked the mobs of taxi drivers I saw on every corner with no better luck. I even thought to check out the waiters at my hotel. There is a restaurant overlooking the pool and it is a rather nice place that is rumored to serve the best steaks in Belize and if someone wanted to slip out of the jungle for a cocktail and a hearty meal this is where he would slip, but they all examined the picture, one after another, and shook their heads.
While on my walk, a car with speakers on top trailed a huge colorful placard through the city’s streets. The placard was advertising the Circus Suarez, in town for one night only, with its prime attraction: “7 Osos Blancos Gigantes.” The lady at the hotel told me that people were coming from all over the Cayo to see the circus and that children were being asked to bring in stray dogs to feed the seven polar bears. The circus tent was raised just up the hill from my hotel and I walked the grounds before the circus was to start, searching the waiting mob for the face of a killer. I searched until the crowd surged madly through the tiny entrance of the tent. I didn’t go in myself. I felt enough out of place in Belize as it was; I didn’t need to see seven polar bears doing tricks in the heat of Central America.
As I walked back down the hill to my hotel, walking along a shallow open sewer, I saw something sitting in the thin stream of excrement. I stepped closer. It was a frog, a huge frog, muscular and still, as big as a head, sitting silent, breathing darkly, staring back at me with deep menace. I spun around quickly, filled with an urgent panic, certain I was being followed. There was no one there.
The next day was market day in San Ignacio. Canek had volunteered to go off to the outlying farms to show around the photograph, so I strolled the market alone. It was set up in the middle of a dirt plaza not far from the river. Ragged trucks from the outlying farms were displaying their fare, forming an alley in the shape of an L, and buses had come bringing shoppers from all over the Cayo. Men in hats, cowboy hats or dirty baseball hats, were sitting on the covered beds of their trucks or sitting on plastic pails or standing before sacks of rice, sacks of beans, piles of cucumbers, boxes of tubers, cartons of eggs, melons and onions, peppers and carrots, black beans, pumpkin seeds, shoes, cabbages, more shoes. Women sat on the ground in front of herbs spread out on empty canvas bags. The men and women were talking Spanish or the strange language I had heard Canek speak with the ferryman, Mayan. Across a stone wall were stretched yards and yards of used clothing. I stared at everything as if my eyes were hungry, the fruits, the people, the blazing colors, showing the photograph, getting smiles but no positive response. Until a handsome young man with a round face and a mustache nodded his head in recognition.
He wore a wrinkled white long-sleeved shirt and grayed jeans and sandals and tightly slung around his shoulder was the strap of a bag, with only a piece of sheepskin to keep it from digging into his shoulder.
“You recognize him?” I asked.
He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.
“Where did you see him?”
He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.
“Do you speak any English at all?”
He answered in Mayan and nodded his head.
“Can I buy you a Belikin?” I said, stressing the name of the beer and lifting my hand as if I was chugging.
He answered in Mayan and nodded his head and smiled warmly. He walked with me to Eva’s, where the owner served us up two beers and brought his cook from the back to act as my translator. His name was Rudi, the man from the market said, and his story was intriguing as all hell.
He had been working on his family’s farm when a man, not a foreigner, came up to the house in a truck and said he needed to buy a great deal of supplies. Rudi sold the man what he could from his farm and went with him in the truck to the other farms in the area to purchase the rest. For what he couldn’t buy at the farms he went to the same market where I had found Rudi and bought sacks of rice, sacks of beans, crates of chickens, piles of assorted vegetables and roots. When the whole load was put into the truck the man offered Rudi one hundred Belizean dollars, about fifty dollars American, to help him deliver the produce. Together, Rudi and the man drove the truck to a spot on the Macal River, just past one of the jungle lodges, where an old wooden canoe with a motor was beached and tied to a stake. Rudi and the man loaded up what they could on the canoe and began to motor south, up the river. It was a long trip upriver and often Rudi and the man had to get into the water and walk the canoe through mild rapids. Finally, the man guided the boat to the riverbank beside a pile of big rocks and beneath a giant kepak tree, bigger and older than any Rudi had seen by the river before. The man told Rudi to unload the produce onto the bank while he carried it, load by load, up to the site. Rudi was ordered not to leave the river under any circumstances and when the man gave the order he fingered the intricately carved handle of his machete. The man then hefted a sack of rice and disappeared up a path into the thick jungle. He was gone for twenty minutes before he returned for another load. It took an hour to unload the first boat and three boatloads to take the entire contents of the truck up the river. On the last of the three trips upriver, when the boat was approaching the pile of rocks and the giant kepak, Rudi saw a man staring out at them from the jungle, a foreigner. He was there for just a moment before he disappeared but Rudi had seen him clearly. And the face he had seen peering out of the jungle, he was sure, was the face in the photograph.
Canek and I spent the next day making arrangements, finding a canoe, getting together any supplies we might need. Tomorrow we are going onto the river, searching for the pile of rocks and the great ancient kepak tree that will lead me to my quarry. Canek tells me that kepak is the Mayan word for the cottonwood tree and that the Mayans believe that when the last of the cottonwoods die, all life in the rain forest will be destroyed. The tree seems a fittingly dire symbol for the man I am hunting. He bought the destruction of Jacqueline Shaw and Edward Shaw for his own vile purposes and now it is time for me to start making him pay. He’s there, I know it, on the river, and I know he knows I know it. Of the people to whom I showed the picture, someone knows someone who knew to get in touch with him, I am sure. He could have killed me had he wanted to long before I arrived in San Ignacio, but he wants me to come. Maybe his new jungle life is lonely and he wants the company. Or maybe he needs someone to whom to crow. He is expecting me and I won’t disappoint him. I am very close now to collecting my fortune, I am sure. And if he has other ideas, if he intends for me to be another victim, I figure I’ll be perfectly safe as long as I’m with my friend, my guide, and my protector, the honorable Canek Panti.
My arms and face are covered with mosquito bites. On the balcony of my hotel room I examine those I can closely in the sun, wondering which of the swollen swaths of flesh contain the squirming larvae of the botfly the nun had so kindly warned me about on the flight into Belize. I wonder if the man I am chasing knows how to suffocate the beefworm with glue and Scotch tape or instead lets it grow within him, like he let the evil inside him grow and fester. I know now the root of that evil, I have seen the ledgers in which it was documented in even rows of precise numbers. Some crimes are forgotten the moment they are perpetrated and it is as if they had never occurred; some crimes live on forever. The tragedy of the Reddmans was that the crime in those ledgers was of the latter. It is still alive, still virulent, still cursing the perpetrator’s heirs a century after its commission.
THE OLD LEDGERS WERE SPREAD out on our conference room table, cracked open and releasing a finely aged mold into the air. The numbers inside were inked by hand and showed the day-to-day operations of the E. J. Poole Preserve Co. for the years up to and beyond its purchase by Claudius Reddman and the change of its name to Reddman Foods. These were the books Caroline had found behind the secret swinging panel in the library at Veritas and the accountant was now hard at work, I expected, letting the numbers in the ledgers tell him the story of how Claudius Reddman had managed to wrest control of the company from Elisha Poole. It was the very day of Edward Shaw’s funeral, a day of ostentatious mourning and the false tears of heirs. Oh, what a cheery scene that would be. With Edward dead, there was nothing for Dante to gain by killing Caroline anymore, so she had left her seclusion to attend the funeral, though I still had concerns for her safety. She asked me to join her, but I declined. I had stirred the Reddman family pot enough, I figured. Today was a time to leave them to the misery of their present while we uncovered the sins of their past.
While Yitzhak Rabbinowitz, of the accounting firm of Pearlman and Rabbinowitz, worked on the books with Morris, I occupied myself with the piles of paperwork generated by the District Attorney’s relentless prosecution of Commonwealth v. Peter Cressi. I doubted I would still be on the case after the abdication of Enrico Raffaello, and I thought of just bagging the whole thing, but my malpractice carrier liked me to actually do the work required on my cases, so I was responding to the government’s requests for discovery, the government’s motions in limine, the government’s suggested jury instructions. At the same time I was busily drafting my own motions to suppress whatever I could dream up even the flimsiest reasons for suppressing. The arguments were rather weak, I admit, but they all passed my baseline standard: the red-face test. Could I stand before a judge and make the argument without my face turning red from embarrassment? Barely, but barely was enough to satisfy the ethical requirements of the Bar Association and so for suppression I moved.
At about three in the afternoon I stretched at my desk and strolled over to the conference room to check on the accountant’s progress. I expected to see the two men elbow-deep in ancient volumes, following the figures in the ledgers with their fingers, tap tap tapping numbers into calculators spouting long ribbons of white awash with damning sums. What I saw instead was Yitzhak Rabbinowitz and Morris Kapustin sitting together at the end of the table, feet propped, as relaxed and carefree as a couple of cronies swapping tales over coffee at the deli.
“Victor, come over, please,” said Morris, waving me in. “Yitzhak, he was just telling me about our mutual friend Herman Hopfenschmidt.”
“So I tell him,” said Rabbinowitz, “I say, Herman, with your business such a success and with what you have in the bank, and I know how much it is because I’m your accountant, you still throw around money like a man with no arms.” Yitzhak Rabbinowitz was a tall, broadly built man, bald with a bushy gray mustache. He wore a sport coat and a short-sleeved shirt so that his hairy forearms stuck out from the sleeves, one wrist adorned by a gold Rolex, the other by a flashy gold and diamond band. He leaned back in his chair as he told the story, gesturing wildly, his words coming out slightly wet. “Be a tsaddik, I say. Give a little. Beside, someone in your tax bracket, you could use the deductions. Give a little, Herman, I say, give till it hurts. So what does he do? He clutches his chest and says, ‘It hurts, it hurts.’ ”
“That Hopfenschmidt, he’s always been a chazzer,” said Morris, nodding. “He still has the first dollar he ever stole.”
“I say, Herman, that’s not funny. Not funny. So how much can I put you down for? Ten thousand? Frankle, he gave ten thousand last year and you earn twice as much as Frankle. And Herman says, ‘It hurts, it still hurts.’ I say, five then at least. Even Hersch with his one dry cleaning store, he’s giving five thousand and you earn ten times as much as Hersch. Think of all the children you’ll be helping, Jewish children, who can’t afford even a chicken neck on Shabbos. What does Herman say? ‘It hurts, it hurts.’ I say, all right, one thousand, but that’s the minimum I’ll accept and he says, ‘But you don’t understand, Yitzhak, it hurts, it really hurts.’ Next thing I know he falls off his chair. Splat, right on the ground. He was right, it did hurt. He was having a coronary.”
“For real?” said Morris.
“Of course. Would I joke about such a thing? He’s at Einstein as we speak. As we speak.”
“Some chazzers, they’ll do anything to keep from giving.”
“Mr. Rabbinowitz,” I said, interrupting. The Reddman books were sitting at the other end of the table, forlorn and alone.
He looked up at me and smiled. “Call me Yitzhak, please, Victor, now that we are working together.”
Working? “Well then, Yitzhak, I was just wondering how we are doing on the books. Have you found anything yet? I’m sort of in a hurry on this.”
“It’s going very well, Victor. Very well, and almost we’re ready to show you some things. Not quite but almost.”
“You want maybe some coffee, Yitzhak?” asked Morris.
“Yes, that would be terrific,” said Rabbinowitz, smiling at me. “Cream and sugar, Victor, and don’t be stingy with the sugar.”
“Anything else?” I said flatly.
“A doughnut or a pitsel cake, would be nice. Anything for you, Morris?”
“Just a water, my stomach still is not what it should be.”
“You know your problem,” said Rabbinowitz to Morris. “Too much fiber. It gives gas.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“A coffee with cream and extra sugar,” I said. “A pitsel cake and water.”
“You’re very kind, Victor. Thank you,” said Rabbinowitz. He turned his attention back to Morris, as if I had been dismissed. “So as soon as we’re finished here I’m going over to give Herman a visit up at the hospital. Coming so close to his Maker, maybe it will have softened him up. I tell you, Morris, it was a miracle, really. I think now I can get from him the ten.”
“Sit down, Victor,” said Yitzhak Rabbinowitz when I came back from the Wawa with the coffee and an Entenmann’s cake and a bottle of mineral water. “We’ll show you now what we found.”
“You’re ready?”
“It was rather clever, but not so very well hidden. I’m surprised that Poole didn’t catch it himself. The key was learning when it was that this Reddman started keeping the books.”
“We think we have it now,” said Morris. “We were forced to match the handwriting in the earlier journals with some letters we found in the books and from later journals, after he bought control.”
“Kapustin here was a big help,” said Rabbinowitz, “which surprised me, really, because generally he is absolutely useless.”
“Don’t be such the cham,” said Morris. “You, you’re less than useless. The last stock he convinced me to buy, Victor, it didn’t split, it crumbled.”
“Tell me something, Morris,” said Rabbinowitz. “If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t you ecstatic?”
“Are you guys finished with your vaudeville,” I said, “because the day is short, the task is great, the workmen are lazy…”
Rabbinowitz looked at Morris, who looked back and shrugged.
“He doesn’t find us entertaining,” said Morris. “I’m surprised because I find us very entertaining.”
“Sit down, Victor,” said Rabbinowitz, putting on a pair of half-glasses. “Sit down and we’ll show you what we found.”
I sat at the conference table and Rabbinowitz placed two of the books in front of me. One was a heavy old ledger, the other was smaller, and when he opened the books an ancient scent erupted, something mildewed and rotted and rich with must. The pages in each book were yellowed and cracking in the corners, some of the numbers were obliterated by time, but the handwriting in those entries that remained legible was careful and precise.
“This is the disbursement journal and the general ledger for 1896,” said Rabbinowitz. “Before Reddman started doing for himself the books.” He pointed out to me the meaning of the various entries in the disbursement journal and then went to a long list of figures for January. “These are the amounts paid to specific suppliers each month. We used the amounts in this book as baseline figures. Maybe you’ll notice, Victor, that the monthly amounts paid to each supplier, they stay about the same, adjusted seasonally. More produce was bought in the late summer and fall when the harvests came in so more was paid out then, but everything went up roughly proportionally with each of the farmers.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“The monthly totals in the disbursement journal were posted at the end of the month to the general ledger. If you also notice, at the back of the general ledger, there is a final trial balance for the year. Assets of course equal liabilities and everything seems in order. All stock at the time, as listed in the general ledger’s stock register, was owned by E. J. Poole. Stockholder equity, in less sophisticated times a rough measure of the value of the company, was surprisingly high for such a business. All in all, I would have to say that the E. J. Poole Preserve Company was well and tightly run in 1896.”
Rabbinowitz took two more books from the pile, the disbursement journal and general ledger for 1897, and placed them in front of me. The same hand had made the entries in these books, though a little less precisely. Rabbinowitz again went through the monthly entries in the disbursement journal, comparing the amounts paid each supplier with that paid the year before. Everything seemed in order, the monthly totals were duly posted to the general ledger, and the trial balance at year’s end again showed a healthy company, all the shares of which were still owned by Elisha Poole.
He then placed the books for 1898 in front of me. As of March of that year the handwriting of the entries changed. “This is when, as best as Morris could tell, Reddman started keeping the books.”
“Any indication of why?” I asked.
“None,” said Morris, “but you might have noticed that Poole’s handwriting, it had started to deteriorate. We think maybe that might indicate a reason.”
“Any extra monies started being paid directly to Reddman?” I asked.
“No,” said Rabbinowitz. “That, of course, was the first thing we checked. Reddman, he received only modest raises all along until he finally bought the company outright. He started as an apprentice tinsmith and, even though he took on more responsibility, his pay remained rather miserly. But I want to show you something here.” He pointed to an entry in the disbursement journal for payments made to a farmer named Anderson. “Notice here that shortly after Reddman started doing the books, the disbursements to Anderson jumped up slightly in proportion to the amounts paid to the other farmers, just a few hundred dollars, but still an increase.”
“Maybe Anderson started expanding his output.”
“That of course is possible,” said Rabbinowitz, who immediately turned to the back of the general ledger. “But notice, in the trial balance sheet for that year, stockholder equity didn’t rise even though sales had actually improved.”
“Interesting,” I said.
Rabbinowitz brought out the disbursement journal for 1899 and dropped it on top of the other books, dust rising when it fell. I sneezed and then sneezed again. Morris handed me a tissue while Rabbinowitz showed me the disbursement entries, month by month, for 1899. Everything seemed stable until we got to June. Rabbinowitz tried to turn the page to find July but I grabbed hold of his wrist.
“What’s that?” I asked
“I told you he’d notice it,” said Morris. “He’s no yutz.”
“An unexplained jump in the amount paid to this Anderson,” said Rabbinowitz with a flourish, as if we had discovered a great scientific secret. “Fifteen hundred dollars more than you would expect to see for that month.”
“Any supplier decrease its payable in a similar amount?” I asked.
“Good question,” said Rabbinowitz. “And the answer, it is no.” He took me through the book page by page, showing that the increase was maintained for every month through the whole of the year. “Almost ten thousand dollars by year’s end. Now I want to show you two things in the general ledger.” He brought out another volume and paged to the trial balance at the end of the book. “First, shareholder equity dropped by about ten thousand dollars at year’s end, approximately twenty percent.”
“Almost the exact amount of the unexplained bonus paid to Anderson.”
“Exactly right,” said Rabbinowitz. “And look at this in the stock register. Eighteen ninety-nine was the first time Reddman started buying shares of stock from Poole. He bought five shares, or five percent of the company, for six thousand dollars.”
“Where did a tin cutter with a pittance of a salary get six thousand dollars?” I asked, even though by then I figured I knew the answer.
“What we guess, Victor,” said Morris, “is that this Reddman, he volunteered to take control of the books so that he could slip his friend Anderson a little bonus and get for himself a kickback. For some reason he figured he could get away with even more and then he hit on the idea of using the money to buy the company outright, so he raised the payoff and started buying stock. The beauty of it for him was that while he was stealing from the company, the company was losing profits and its value was decreasing, making the price he was to pay less and less. I bet he was able to convince Poole that he was doing him such a favor because of how terrible the company, it was doing.”
“So, in effect,” I said, “Reddman was stealing from Poole and using the money to buy Poole’s company. Very clever.”
“Clever, yes,” said Rabbinowitz. “For a thief.”
The other volumes showed the same thing, inexplicably large payments to Anderson, weakening shareholder equity, increasingly large purchases of stock by Reddman that would have been impossible on the salary he was listed as receiving in the books. By 1904, Reddman owned forty-five percent of the stock.
“How did he get the rest?” I asked.
“He apparently took out a loan, mortgaging his stock holdings and the stock he was going to purchase,” said Morris. “He used the money to buy the remaining shares held by Poole in 1905.”
“A leveraged buyout,” said Rabbinowitz. “Like something out of the eighties, the nineteen-eighties. This Reddman he was a thief, yes, but a thief ahead of his time.”
“And listen to this, Victor,” said Morris. “Right after Reddman, he bought all the stock, the sale of pickles it went meshugge, more than tripling in one year. Almost as if someone was keeping production low to maintain unprofitability until the entire stock of the company could be bought at a bargain price.”
“So that’s it,” I said. “Poole was right all along. Reddman stole the company right out from under him.”
“So it would seem,” said Morris.
“If it was so easy for us to see it, how come Poole didn’t figure it out?”
“That’s a mystery,” said Morris. “To solve such a mystery it will take more than looking in books.”
We sat for a moment in silence, the three of us. There were still questions to be answered, of course, and there was nothing in the books that would convince a jury of anything beyond a reasonable doubt, but it was pretty clear to me. Everything about the Reddmans was based on a crime and it was as if that crime, instead of disappearing into the mists of history, had remained alive and virulent and had infected the Reddman house and the Reddman family and the Reddman legacy with a crippling rot.
“Two more things you should know, Victor,” said Morris. “First, I tried, as soon as Yitzhak started growing suspicious, I tried to find out if there might be records from this farmer Anderson for us to look at. A farm he owned, in New Jersey, in Cumberland County. Through old newspapers I had Sheldon look until he found it. Very disturbing.”
“What?” I asked.
“The farmhouse it burned down in 1907, with three dead, including this Anderson.”
“My God,” I said.
“And something else, Victor,” said Rabbinowitz. “We are not the first to go through these records and discover what it is we have discovered. I could see traces of another’s journey through the same books, old pencil marks, old notations, old notes stuck in the pages. Someone else, they took the very same route we took through the numbers. Your friend Morris, he thinks he knows,” said Rabbinowitz.
I turned and looked at Morris.
“One of the notes,” he said. “The writing it matches.”
“Matches what?”
“I’m no handwriting expert,” said Morris, “but the letters ‘s’ and ‘t,’ they are very close and the ‘g,’ it is identical.”
“Matches what?”
“The pages of the diary we found in the box,” said Morris. “She who wrote the diary, she too knew about what this Reddman had done. He was her father, no? What it must have been like for her to find out that everything she had was purchased by a crime. I shudder, Victor, shudder to even think about it.”
AFTER RABBINOWITZ LEFT for the hospital to visit his good friend Herman Hopfenschmidt, I decided to take a spin around Eakins Oval and along Kelly Drive, past Boathouse Row, to one of the sculpture gardens planted along the banks of the Schuylkill. It was now late afternoon and I sat on a stone bench, just in front of a statue of a massively muscled man groaning forward, a representation of the Spirit of Enterprise, and watched the scullers bend with their oars as their shells skimmed across the river’s surface like the water boatmen I had seen on the pond at Veritas. I had needed to get away from the office, to sit among the silent sculptures on the river’s edge and watch the sun dip into the west and think about what I had learned that day. Morris had offered to trail along and I hadn’t minded. I found having Morris around made me feel better, though I couldn’t really say why. But Morris knew enough to stroll quietly among the statuary for a while and let me be.
I had been told that beneath every great fortune lies a great crime but it was still a shock to be confronted with the truth of that maxim so vividly. If I had wondered before what it was that had turned the Reddman family so brutally wrong I needed only to learn the origin of its wealth and power. I didn’t yet understand the instrument of the family’s undoing but I had little doubt that the tragedies that erupted in its history had their root in Claudius Reddman’s deception of and thievery from Elisha Poole. And the question that inevitably sprung to mind was, in light of the fortune gained and the tragedies incurred, whether or not it was worth it.
I was hip-deep now in Reddman excretion and I couldn’t help but imagine myself bobbing for my own little coins. I had been promised the five percent from Oleanna if I could clear her and her people of the murder and get the insurance death benefit paid. I had been promised a kickback from Peckworth, the used undergarment procurer, for any reduction I could wile from his street tax. Then there was the wrongful death suit I would file on behalf of Caroline Shaw against whoever it was who had ordered the murder of her sister and probably her brother too, a suit I would bring just as soon as I determined who had hired Cressi, and as soon as Caroline signed the fee agreement I so desperately wanted her to sign. And of course, it was undeniable that I was sleeping with an heiress, even if Kingsley’s vasectomy made her only an ostensible heiress. It didn’t take a practiced gigolo to know where that could lead. Yes, there was a lot of coin adrift in the Reddman muck to be snatched between my teeth.
“Do you know what his last words were before he died?” I asked Morris after he wandered over to the stone bench and sat beside me.
“Who now are we talking about?” said Morris.
“Claudius Reddman. His dying words were, ‘It was only business.’ ”
Morris sat there for a moment, shaking his head. “Such words have justified more crime than even religion.”
“Did you ever want to be rich, Morris?”
“Who is rich? As the scholar Ben Zoma once said, ‘He who is content with his lot.’ ”
I looked up at him, at the calm expression on his face, the expression of a man who seemed truly content with his life and at peace with his place in the world.
“So you never wanted to be rich?” I asked.
“What, you think I’m meshuggener,” said Morris. “Of course I wanted to be rich. I still do. Give me a million dollars, Victor, and see if I turn it down. Give me two, maybe. Give me thirty over six years with a signing bonus like a baseball pitcher and see if I push it away. Believe you me, Victor, I won’t push it away.”
“That’s good to know,” I said, and turned back to the water. “I was getting worried. What would you buy?”
He thought on that for a moment. “There was a man in Pinsk,” he said finally, “who used to make the most perfect shoes in the world. I never saw a pair mind you, but I heard of them from someone whose cousin had actually held a pair in his very hands. Soft like a woman’s skin, he said, and as comfortable as a warm bath. I always wanted a pair of shoes from the man in Pinsk. Of course this was before the war. I don’t know now what happened to him, he is probably dead. Pinsk was not a good place to be a Jew during the war. But I have heard rumors now of a man in Morocco whose shoes, they say, are close to those of the man in Pinsk.”
“You could buy anything you want and what you’d buy is shoes?”
“Not just any shoes, Victor, not the scraps of leather you wear on your feet. These shoes are a mechaieh, they are the shoes of a king.”
“So you want to be rich so you can buy a pair of shoes,” I said, nodding to myself. “I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. At least you know.”
“Yes and no. With such shoes, Victor, when could I wear them? Not every day, they are too precious for everyday. I would wear them only on the Shabbos maybe, and not even every Shabbos, because even then they would wear out too soon. I would spend more time taking care of them than wearing them, I think, waxing the leather, polishing, keeping them stretched and warm. Such shoes would be more burden than anything else. As Hillel said, ‘The more flesh, the more worms. The more property, the more anxiety. The more wives, the more witchcraft.’ ”
“That sounds like Dylan, except for the part about the witchcraft.”
“Yes, your Bobby Zimmerman, I think he read Hillel.”
“I can think of lots of things to buy,” I said. “A Ferrari. Armani suits. A house with skylights. A set of golf clubs, those Callaway Big Bertha irons and woods, the ones that go for over a grand and have a sweet spot the size of Montana.”
“You play golf?”
“With a set of Callaways I’d maybe break a hundred. But you know what, Morris? It’s not the stuff, really. I just want to be rich. I want the kids who beat me up in high school to see my picture in the paper with the caption, ‘Victor Carl, millionaire.’ I want all the girls who turned me down to know what they missed. Being rich is like living in a state of grace and that’s what I want.”
“Money can’t buy that, Victor. Only righteousness. As Rebbe Yoshe ben Kisma once said…”
“I don’t want to hear from any more dead rabbis, Morris.”
He turned his head to stare. Even though he was shorter than me by a foot, it felt as if he were looking down at me. “These men were very smart, Victor. The things they could teach us both.”
“No more dead rabbis. Tell me, Morris, what you think about all the money you and I don’t have.”
“What I think? You want to know what I think, Victor? Are you sure this is what you want to hear?”
I nodded, though something in his voice gave me pause.
“Well then. I think that money it is the goal of cowards. Money is what you end up wanting if you don’t have putz enough to stand up and decide for yourself. Money is what they want you to want so that you will work for them every day of your life and buy what they sell and fill your house and your soul with their junk. It is for those without the courage to decide for themselves. For people like our friend Beth who are seeking truths, I have nothing but respect. But for those who are taking the easy way out and bowing down to the graven image of the dollar that they plaster on the television and the movie screen simply because that it is what they are told they want, for them I have only disgust.”
I was startled by his words. I had never seen Morris so angry. Generally he was a genial guy, Morris, but it was if there was something about me that had been bugging him for a while and now he felt free to expound upon it because I had insisted. I regretted asking him but I was fascinated too, it was like a cover had been whisked off the old josher and I was seeing something ferocious inside.
“Take your thief Reddman, for example,” he continued. “What kind of man would do all he did just for money? What had he become? I tell you what he became, an idolater, substituting money for the true King. What did the Lord tell Moishe on Mount Sinai when he gave him the two tablets and the commandment that thou shalt have no other gods before me. Shmot, Chapter Twenty, verse five. He said that those who bow down and worship a graven image, the sins of the father, it shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them, that is what He said. You tell me if this, it did not come true with this Reddman and his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
I stared at him and felt a chill just then rippling along my spine. It was as if I were in the middle of a biblical prophecy brought to life by the crimes of Claudius Reddman. I had been shown with utter clarity the cause and I was walking through the ruin-strewn landscape of the result. All that remained in shadow was the instrument of His will.
Morris looked at me and suddenly his face eased and he smiled. With a shrug he said, “So that is what I think, Victor. But it is just one man’s opinion. Alan Greenspan, he knows more than I ever will about money, maybe he thinks differently, I don’t know.”
A long shell with eight rowers and a coxswain slid by on the river in a smooth series of rushes. The coxswain was jerking back and forth with each stroke as she yelled and the eight rowers were following her commands with perfect timing, leaning forward as one, pulling back as one, becoming a single self under the sway of the coxswain’s voice. We sat in silence for a while, Morris and I, watching the boat, listening to the uneven notes of a lonely bird somewhere in the sycamores lining the river’s edge. Across the peaceful flow of the water I could see the helter-skelter madness of the Schuylkill Expressway.
“I’m in trouble, Morris,” I said.
“I know.”
“More trouble than you could imagine. I’m in the middle of something very dangerous that I don’t understand and can’t control.”
“Such is life for us all. Tell me, Victor, can I help?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said, and then I told him how.
It was dark when I came back to my apartment that night. First thing I did after I stripped off my jacket and tie was to place another call to the 407 area code to see if Calvi had yet come off his boat. There was no answer, there wasn’t even an answering machine. I stayed on the line for a desperately long time, long enough to realize that Calvi wasn’t ever going to help me, and then I hung up. The instant I replaced the handset my phone started ringing. It happened so quickly it was eerie, as if my call had been chased all the way from Florida. I let it ring for a moment and felt my heart speed its beat with fear and then I answered it.
“I have to get out of here,” said Caroline.
I let relief slide through me and then asked, “How was the funeral?”
“Funereal.”
“I’ll bet. Didn’t you drive?”
“They picked me up, but they want me to stay the night and I can’t. It’s unbearable.”
“I’ll be up in forty-five minutes,” I said, “but I won’t pick you up at the front of the house. Remember I told you I spoke to your father?”
“Yes,” she said in a whisper, as if her conversation was being overheard.
“He said he saw a light in the garden last week.”
“So?” she said. “We were there, then. Remember?”
“Yes we were. But he also said he saw a light in the house that had been deeded to the Pooles.”
“Why would anyone be in that old wreck?” she asked.
“Exactly,” I said.
I HID MY CAR IN A GROVE of bushes outside the entrance of the great Reddman estate. I took my backpack out of the trunk and made my way across the low bridge that forded the stream and through the wide-open gates with their forged vines and cucumbers and their now sardonic wrought-iron legend: MAGNA EST VERITAS. Past the two great sycamores I turned left, away from the driveway, and skirted clockwise around the hill. What remained of the moon was rather dismally lit but the big house was full of light. I could hear the tinkle of glasses and the hum of voices. It seemed rather festive at Veritas that evening, considering the circumstances. But if Edward Shaw had been a blood relative of mine I might have been rather festive too.
It was too chilly a night for the black tee shirt and jeans I was sporting and I shivered as I picked my way through sparse trees, always keeping to my right the lights of the house and to my left the quiet sluicing of the stream that surrounded the property like a noose. It was taking longer than I had expected to make my way around the grounds and I started to rush until I found myself stepping into the margin of a dense wood. Only shards of the moon’s light survived the canopy above and I had a hard time seeing what was now in front of my face. I stepped away from a branch that slapped my outreached hand and walked straight into the trunk of a tree, smacking my forehead. I hadn’t intended to use a light so soon, not wanting anyone to spot me prowling about the grounds, trespassing like a common thief when what I really was was a lawyer on the make, but the scrape with that malicious tree was enough to convince me to pull a flashlight out of my pack and click it on.
An animate circle of tree trunks immediately sprang into existence, surrounding me. The white light of my lamp slipped past the trees closest to me before dying in the night. I had the sensation of being in the middle of something that went on forever, only able to discern the first ring around me. I took a moment to regain my bearings, the gurgle of the stream to the left, the hill and the house to the right, and then continued on my way, my path weaving here and there to avoid the black furrowed trunks blocking my way, until I entered the clearing, thick with tall grasses, that surrounded the gray and decrepit Poole house. I quickly turned off the light and was stunned by what I encountered.
Fireflies sparked around the old ruin of a house, hundreds and hundreds of them, little fingers of light that swept low in the grass or high about the porch roof and the first-floor windows of the house, flashing in a slow seductive dance. There hadn’t been any fireflies on the hill leading to Veritas, or in the woods, but here they were gathering as if for some incantatory purpose of their own.
I held my breath for a moment and listened.
Just the desperate call of crickets and the hoots of a few scattered birds.
I stepped back into the darkness of the wood, leaned against a tree trunk, and waited.
Caroline came about fifteen minutes later, scrambling around the pond through the woods and into the clearing, looking around, searching. She was chic in black – black dress, black pumps, black lipstick, black motorcycle jacket covering her shoulders like a cape. As I watched her walk up to the house I thought of all the things I hadn’t told her yet, how her great-grandfather was a crook, how her grandmother knew it, how her father wasn’t her father. I would tell her most of it eventually, I figured, but not all of it and not now. I pushed myself off the tree and stepped toward her. She started when she saw me emerging from the darkness of the woods.
“Oh, Victor, you scared me for a moment. What are we doing here again? God, I can’t believe there’s anything of interest in this old wreck. I explored it all when I was younger and it was pretty dilapidated then. It must be completely falling apart by now. What did my father say he saw here? He must have been imagining it, God knows he…”
I walked up to her as she spoke and put my finger to her moving lips, quieting her immediately. I leaned my mouth to her ear and whispered.
“I don’t know who was here when your father saw the light but I don’t think it wise we let them know we are taking a look. That’s why I wanted to do this at night. Did you tell anyone you were coming here?”
She shook her head.
“Did anyone see you leave? Did Nat?”
“Nat wasn’t there,” she whispered. And then I smelled it.
“You’ve been drinking.”
She leaned back and looked at me defiantly. “Family tradition at funerals.”
“Another of your situations?”
“Funny how having your brother incinerated can set you back.”
I looked her up and down and noticed something on the inside of her arm, a patch of white gauze. I turned the flashlight on and pointed the beam right at it. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“What the hell are you doing to yourself?” I said, certain that she had gone past alcohol into something more virulent.
She took a step back.
I followed her and reached for the gauze, ripping it off.
“Oh, Caroline,” I said with a sad sigh. “What are you doing to yourself?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, taking the gauze with its tape back from my hand and trying to reposition it on her arm. “Everyone’s doing it.”
“Oh, Caroline,” I said again and then I couldn’t say anything more. Her arm had been branded, a circular sun with regular curved rays pouring from it had been burned into her flesh and the skin around the sun was swollen red and proud. Tattoos were no longer permanent enough for her, I supposed.
“It’s my body,” she said with a practiced defiance that let me know she had said those very words many times before.
“Yes it is,” I said.
“Are we going in or are we just standing here all night?”
“Will you be able to handle this?”
She closed her eyes and swayed a bit before nodding.
“All right,” I said, “but keep it quiet.”
With the flashlight in one hand and her elbow in the other, I walked with her slowly, through the dips and turns of the fireflies, toward the house. A short flight of steps led to a sagging porch of gray timber, singed at the edges by fire, and on to the front door. These were the steps, I assumed, where Faith Reddman Shaw had first discovered the Poole daughter reading to Faith’s son, Kingsley. The wood creaked and bowed beneath our feet as we climbed. Caroline tripped slightly on the steps and fell into me. I pushed her straight again.
On the porch, I flashed the light briefly to the left and the right. The porch was empty of furniture, a few of the timbers had rotted completely through. One of the upright railings was charred black. Of the window on the left side of the door, two of the panes were smashed and the others were yellowed and brittle. The window on the right was boarded with plywood. A swift motion caught my attention and I aimed the beam of light at it. First one frog leaped from the porch, and then another. Cobwebs floated like ghost streamers from the railing and the roof, but the front entrance was free of them. I pointed that out to Caroline before we stepped to the door. There was an old rusted mortise lock and when I pressed down on the latch with my thumb it wouldn’t budge.
“Locked?” I said.
Caroline shrugged. I leaned my side into the door and gave a shove and quick as that it creaked open. We glanced at each other for a moment and then stepped inside.
We entered directly into a large parlor room, thick with swirls of dust, scattered dead leaves, cobwebs hanging like gauze in the corners. It was cold inside. I flashed the light on an old couch, the color of dirt, sitting across from a stone fireplace. Judging by its appearance the couch hadn’t been sat upon in a decade.
“I can’t believe this is still here,” said Caroline, softly, stepping toward it and rubbing her hand across a filthy arm. “Franklin and I cleaned up this room a bit and made fires here sometimes. We brought a rug in and sat by the hearth.”
I shined the light at the fireplace. There was a small pile of coals, gray with dust. A dead mouse nestled among the remains of a fire. There was nothing on the floor before the hearth but leaves.
“The rug’s gone,” I said.
She shrugged. “It was long ago.”
I cast the beam around the walls. A floral print wallpaper faded almost to brown, bare except for something over the mantelpiece. I stepped closer. It was a drawing of a man, a rather primitive drawing, faded and on yellow paper, tacked to the plaster above the fireplace like an ironic family portrait. The man in the picture was bald and the lines around his mouth were evident but it was done in a young person’s hand. The face of the man, I realized, was somehow familiar.
“Do you recognize him?” I asked.
She walked up to it and stared.
“I think,” she said, “he looks like the man in the photograph we found, with the tense-looking wife.”
“That must be Elisha Poole,” I said. “Probably drawn by his daughter.”
“This wasn’t here before,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it was and I didn’t notice.”
Off the parlor was the kitchen, a large room with a few cabinets and a large wooden table. Two rickety chairs lay strewn upon the floor. There was an old wood-burning stove with disks of metal atop for burners, the stove where the Poole daughter stirred the broth for her mother while Faith Reddman Shaw watched, entranced, from outside. Pots and pans, blackened by fire, were scattered on the floor about the stove, covered with webs and leaves. A cement sink with one faucet stood by the wall, its weight resting on a rusted metal frame.
“Cold and cold running water,” I said. I stepped to it and turned the knob. Nothing.
“What exactly are we looking for, Victor?”
“I don’t know,” I said softly. “But I feel something here, don’t you? Something cramped and desolate.”
“It just feels old and cold.”
An archway from the kitchen led to another room, mostly empty, with a fireplace. It must have been the dining room but there were no tables or chairs, only a massive wooden breakfront. The upper doors of the breakfront were lined, where one would expect glass, with a pleated yellowed fabric. I tugged the doors open. The shelves, covered with a browned paper, were entirely empty. The lower part of the breakfront held three rows of drawers and the drawers I could pull open also contained nothing but the same browned paper. The top middle drawer, designed for the most valuable serving pieces, was locked, but that too was probably empty. It was doubtful the Poole daughter would have taken the china but left the silver.
“I suppose she took everything she wanted and could carry out,” I said, “and abandoned the rest.”
“I think she just wanted to get the hell out of here,” said Caroline Shaw too loudly. “Who wouldn’t?”
“Shhhhhhh,” I said.
At the far end of the dining room was an entranceway that led off to a narrow set of stairs. I followed the beam of light and started climbing. Slipping slightly, I grabbed hold of the banister and it tore off in my hand with a shriek. The banister slammed into the wood flooring and slid nosily down the stairs, plaster cascading behind it. I jumped as if I had been goosed. I turned around and Caroline was smirking at me.
At the top of the stairs was a hallway. In the beam of light I could see four doorways, three of them open. Across from us was a small room with a listing wooden bed frame. When we stepped in something scurried across the floor and disappeared. On the wall were tacks, spiking remnants of yellowed paper into the plaster. The floor was filled with tumors of dust and crumpled bits of white stuff and there was trash piled in one of the corners. The window was covered with plywood.
The next room was a bathroom with a wooden floor and an old toilet. The sink was ceramic and cracked and there was one faucet. Beyond the bathroom was another room completely bare of any useful furniture, in its center a heap of broken chairs and shattered china. A doll without its head rested atop a rocking chair with only one rocker. Across the hall was the door that was closed.
Without waiting for me, Caroline went to that door and shoved it open. I followed her inside. This room too had a fireplace and there was a mattress on the floor and an old transistor radio, circa not 1923 but 1979. On the wall to the right, its sole window covered with plywood, hung a poster with a grinning, multicolored skull above the legend “STEAL YOUR FACE!” and another showing a leather-jacketed greaser with a pair of sneakers hanging from the neck of his guitar. Bruce Springsteen? The Grateful Dead?
“I guess old Mrs. Poole was ahead of her time,” I said.
“This was our room,” said Caroline softly. She picked up the small black-and-gray radio and turned it on, but nothing happened. “It’s still tuned to WMMR, I’d bet. Oh God.”
“What was this room before you and Harrington took it over?”
“I think it was Mrs. Poole’s bedroom,” she said without turning to me. “I seem to remember there was stuff in the closet.”
I looked at her for a moment, standing still, with the dead radio cradled in her arms like a baby, and then I stepped quickly to the closet door and pulled at it. It was stuck at first, swollen shut, but I gave it a good yank and it opened up for me with a shriek from the hinges.
Inside, moth-eaten, shabby with age, like skeletons of their former selves, were dresses, some still hanging, some slumped to the floor, their frills darkened, their colors washed out by the white light of the flashlight and their age. Which of these dresses, I wondered, had she worn on the night of the ball when she so publicly refused Claudius Reddman’s offer to dance? Well, he sure as hell deserved the rebuke.
With two fingers I lifted up the dresses from the floor, finding nothing but old shoes underneath. There was a shelf above the bar and I stood up on my tiptoes to look at it. Hats and shoes, the leather cracked, and a pile of rags in the corner. I jumped up and grabbed at the rag pile and pulled them down. Dust flew and I sneezed loudly. When I stopped sneezing I noticed now, in the corner, a little wooden box. I jumped up again and snatched it. With a little work I was able to lift off the lid.
“Photographs,” I said.
Caroline emerged from her reverie and we sat down together on the mattress, their mattress, to look at the pictures.
They were old black-and-white photographs, many with curly edges. There was a pretty young woman sitting on the ground, her head tilted suggestively, a long string of pearls knotted beneath her breast, and then the same woman sitting on a stoop, her hair long and young, a sly, sensual smile.
“Any idea who she is?” I asked.
“It looks like the woman that was next to Elisha Poole in the other pictures,” said Caroline.
“It does, doesn’t it,” I said, and it did, but it also didn’t. There was nothing sour in this young woman. “It must be Mrs. Poole, you’re right, but look how young she is. And in this one she’s almost laughing.”
There were other photographs of the woman, more formal photographs, posed in a studio, going back in time until there was one of her as a young girl, with her parents, the girl wearing a frilly dress, like an angel’s, button leather shoes, the serious smile of the very young. And there were pictures of a brash young man with wavy hair, leaning dramatically against a post, or clowning at the beach. On the back of the picture at the beach was written in a fading ink, “Elisha, Atlantic City-1896.”
“Look how handsome he was,” said Caroline. “Who would have imagined? I guess he was something before he became a bitter old drunk.”
“They’re all something before they become bitter old drunks.”
We kept going through the pictures, shining the light carefully on each, examining them one by one. There were pictures of the woman and the man together, laughing, in love, ready to conquer the world. In one picture there was an old man with his arm around Elisha. Elisha was leaning away, as if to gain some distance. The old man’s eyes were half open, one was blackened from a brawl, his nose was large and venous, teeth were missing from his mouth. “Elisha and his father,” was written on the back. And there was one that brought a gasp from Caroline.
“That’s my great-grandfather,” she said.
A young Claudius Reddman, in a vested suit, high collar, bowler hat cocked low over his bulging eyes, standing side by side a young Elisha Poole, their arms linked, a great blocky building behind them.
“That must be the before shot,” said Caroline.
I said nothing, only stared, feeling the life and camaraderie in the picture, the linked arms, the burgeoning possibilities. They had been friends. I hadn’t counted on that but here was the proof. They had been friends; did that make the betrayal any deeper? Is it more acceptable to swindle a stranger than a friend? Or can a friend more clearly understand that he is only doing to his pal, his buddy, his comrade-in-arms, what his comrade-in-arms would do to him had he half a chance? Could it have been that Elisha, in paying his friend what Yitzhak Rabbinowitz had described as a miserly wage, had a hand in his own financial destruction? “It was only business,” had said Claudius Reddman and I couldn’t help but wonder if he hadn’t learned his business practices from his dear and valued friend Elisha Poole.
So engrossed were we in the pictures that we didn’t hear the front door open or the creak of someone walking through the parlor and the kitchen and the dining room. So engrossed were we that we didn’t hear a thing until we heard the soft even footfalls rising up the stairs.
I STUFFED THE PHOTOGRAPHS back into the box and the box into my pack and clicked off the light. Darkness covered us. And in the darkness an uneven wiggle of shadow impressed itself upon the air around the door. A candle? Yes. I grabbed hold of Caroline and whispered in her ear, “Absolute silence.”
The footsteps continued to climb, step by step. The light causing the uneven shadows became ever more prominent. The intruder reached the top of the stairs and hesitated.
Slowly Caroline and I crawled together off the mattress to a corner of the room where someone glancing in the doorway wouldn’t so easily spot us. I crouched into a ready position and hefted the flashlight in my hand. It was as heavy as a billy club. We waited.
Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. I heard something and was about to tell Caroline to be quiet once again when I realized it was my breath, coming out in gulps. Sweat blossomed on my forehead, sweat trickled down my sides. I couldn’t stop thinking of what Kingsley Shaw had said, that his mother was alive in the Poole house and waiting for him. Was it she holding the candle, rising up the steps? Whoever it was, I was certain, whoever had climbed those stairs was the murderer who had been stalking the Reddmans. And now Caroline and I were cowering in the corner like two targets. My heart jumped in my chest. I willed whoever was coming to turn around, to step down the stairs, to just go away and leave us alive.
And then the steps began again. Toward us. The uneven flicker of light growing. The intruder stopped at one door for a moment and then moved on and stopped at another and then stopped before our own.
I grabbed tighter to Caroline and held my breath. Go away, I thought, we’re not here, nobody’s here.
A hand with a white candle slid through the doorway and then the arm, black-sleeved, and a man’s shoe.
I clicked on the light as soon as the head appeared, aiming the beam at the figure’s face. It whited out for an instant before we could recognize who it was.
“Franklin?” said Caroline.
“Get that out of my face,” said a calm Franklin Harrington.
I scrambled to my feet and sent the light sprawling against the far wall. His face, now lit only by the candle held below it, flickered in ominous shadow.
“Jesus, Franklin, what are you doing here?” asked Caroline, now also standing.
“I saw you go out the back of the house and I was worried about you,” said Harrington, “so I followed. Little did I know you were coming here to tryst with your new boyfriend. And in our old room, yet. Trying to bring back the magic?”
“Shut up,” said Caroline. “You’re being a bastard.”
“So what are you two up to?” he asked.
“Archaeology,” I said.
He turned his attention to me, his eyes dark sockets of shadow in the candlelight. “Digging for mummies?”
“No,” I said. “Pooles.”
He stared at me for a moment before smiling. “Curiosity,” he said, with a lighthearted warning in his voice that wasn’t lighthearted at all. “What is it about the Pooles you want to know, Victor?”
“Mostly,” I said, “I want to know if there are any still alive.”
“And so you came here, to their old haunt, to snag yourself a Poole. Don’t you think you’re a little late? Maybe seventy years too late?”
He circled around the room, examining it by candlelight.
“Ahh, the memories,” said Harrington. “I can truly say some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in this room. But you knew, didn’t you, Caroline, that before this became the scene of our childhood romance, long before, this was Mrs. Poole’s bedchamber? After her husband hanged himself and your great-grandfather deeded her this house, which she accepted only because she had no choice, no other place to go, she spent months in bed in this room, never rising, only weeping.”
“She had her reasons, I figure,” I said.
“Her husband’s suicide was a blow, yes,” said Harrington, as surely as if he were discussing a ball game he had played in a few years back. “She would have killed herself, too, except for her daughter. But even before his death, she had given herself over to mourning. Her husband would lose himself in drink and she would spend her days castigating him or cursing Claudius Reddman to the heavens, blaming their misfortunes on him.”
“How do you know all this, Franklin?” said Caroline.
“I’ve made a study of the Pooles. They’re fascinating, really. A family cursed by luck. Did you know that the grandfather, Elisha Poole’s father, lost everything he owned in the depression of 1878? Ten thousand businesses failed that year, including his. He owned three buildings on Market Street, owned them outright, but mortgaged the buildings to buy shares in a gold mine in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory from a drinking buddy. Fortunes in gold were being dug out of the ground daily then, but not from that mine. With the depression, his tenants couldn’t pay the rents and he couldn’t pay his mortgages. He lost the buildings and spent the rest of his life drinking in celebration of his misfortune. Just like his son, who complained so bitterly about your great-grandfather.”
“Maybe he had his reasons,” I said.
“What reasons, Victor?” said Caroline. “What are you trying to say?”
“Only what you suspected, Caroline,” I said. “Those records you found behind the panel in the library, the accountant looked them over today. They show pretty clearly that your grandfather stole the company right out from under Elisha Poole.”
She didn’t respond, she just blinked at me for a moment, as if she was having trouble processing the information.
“Should I show you the rest of the house?” said Harrington, without even a hint of surprise at what I had said. “Maybe we should start with Emma’s room.”
He strolled out into the hallway and back to the room with the listing bed and the tacks in the wall. Caroline and I tilted our heads uncertainly at each other and then followed. His candlelight bathed the small room in a flickering yellow.
“Emma came to this house of despair when she was five,” said Harrington, the tour guide. “Walked four and a half miles to the public school each day. Cared for her mother through her long bouts of melancholia and then through her final sickness. Though rather unattractive, she idolized the famous beauties of her time, cutting their pictures from the papers and tacking them onto these very walls, Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Irene Castle. And despite it all she remained rather cheerful and good-natured, until the end of her time here. Then even she lost her battle and turned to bitterness to keep her going.”
“How do you know all this?” said Caroline.
“She moved her mother permanently down to the parlor after a crushing stroke to make it easier to carry the old woman to the porch on warm days and allow her some fresh air. She moved herself out of this room into her mother’s room, which was bigger and had better light. It was in that room, our room, Caroline, that she fell in love and then fell pregnant.”
“Who was her lover?” I asked.
“Does it matter? I think she still believed in love then but just a few weeks before her delivery date her mother died, the deed to the house expired, and she moved out, deserted and alone. She had the baby in an asylum for unwed mothers outside Albany.”
“How do you know all this?” said Caroline. “Tell me, how?”
He turned to look at Caroline, the shadows on his face dancing from the candlelight. “She told me so herself,” he said.
“Who told you?” demanded Caroline.
“Emma,” he said. “She told it all to me.”
He spun around, walked out of the room, and climbed down the stairs. I started shaking from the cold as I watched him go. I turned to Caroline and we stared at each other for a moment before hustling out to follow. We caught up to him in the parlor.
“Franklin, dammit, what are you talking about?” said Caroline. “Who told you all this?”
“Mrs. Poole, Emma’s mother, died right here,” said Harrington. “In her last breath she cursed once again Claudius Reddman, who was still then alive in the big house on the hill. There wasn’t much left to curse; his lungs were tumorous and he medicated himself into a stupor with laudanum every night to keep his whole body from shaking, but that didn’t stop her. She cursed your great-grandfather, Caroline, and all his progeny, much like her husband had fifteen years before. This was just after your grandfather was shot dead by his son, just a few days after actually, and, with one Reddman daughter missing and one Reddman daughter dead, it looked like the curses were all coming true. I wonder if she died at least a little happy, seeing tragedy so visibly visited upon her enemies. Think about what it is to live a life where your only joy is someone else’s tragedy, think of that, Caroline. She was ruined all right, but not by your great-grandfather, no matter how much he stole from that family.”
“Stop it, Franklin,” said Caroline. “Just stop it. I don’t want to hear anymore. In all these years, how come you never told me any of this before?”
“I didn’t think you were interested in anything but your own disasters.”
“Oh, just go to hell,” she said. She walked over to the fireplace and looked up at the old drawing of Elisha Poole tacked above the mantelshelf. “What do you mean she told you so herself?” she asked quietly.
“When I was eighteen,” said Harrington. “It was the spring while I was waiting to hear from Princeton. Your grandmother sent me to her. Emma was living in the Cambium, in the very same apartment where Jacqueline died. Your grandmother was supporting her, paying the rent, paying for a nurse to care for her. She didn’t live long after my visit, almost as if she were waiting for me to come to her before she died.”
The chill I had been feeling the last few minutes grew ferocious. I couldn’t tell now if it was the temperature or the dawning realization. “Why would the Poole daughter be waiting for you?” I asked.
“Because, as I found out that day, I’m her grandson,” said Harrington.
Caroline spun around at that and spit out, “Fuck you!”
“Through my father,” continued Harrington. “Although I didn’t know it at the time, that was why Faith took me out of the orphanage and brought me to Veritas, why she provided for me and paid for my education. For the same reason she was taking care of Emma. Because we were both Pooles. It was Faith who discovered that you and I were lovers, Caroline, which is why she finally introduced me to my grandmother.”
“And that’s why we could never be together?” said Caroline. “Tell me, you asshole, is that why?”
“The tragedy of the Pooles,” said Harrington, “was not that their business was stolen from them by your great-grandfather. The tragedy of the Pooles was that they allowed themselves to be tragic. They defined themselves by what the Reddmans had taken from them, by what the Reddmans had become. I was never going to let that happen to me.”
“We were in love,” groaned Caroline.
“I thought I’d leave and be done with it all when I found out,” said Harrington. “But I let your grandmother put me through Princeton, sort of as a recompense. I figured why not, and then I let her put me through Wharton, and then when I was offered the job at the bank, it was naturally advantageous to have her trust accounts under my aegis, and pretty soon I was neck-deep in Reddman money, so it didn’t quite work out like I had thought. But I wasn’t going to join the family, Caroline, at least not that. That I would never do.”
“You said you loved me.”
“I did.”
“And you never told me.”
“I didn’t know until that day.”
“And you didn’t tell me then.”
“How could I?” said Harrington, a soft pain in his voice. “You were a Reddman and I was a Poole. How could I…”
“Did you ever think, Franklin, did you ever consider that by leaving me you became just as much a victim as the rest of them? Did you ever think of that, you asshole?”
He didn’t have a chance to answer before she was out the door.
Harrington and I both acted as if we were going to go after her, but then our eyes met and we stopped. I felt for an instant like an old-time gunfighter, waiting for the man standing across from me to make his move.
“Did you hire Jacqueline’s killers?” I asked finally.
“You didn’t listen to a word, did you?”
“If you didn’t, who did?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s your father?”
He looked at me for a moment. “He’s long gone,” he said. “He passed away from us years and years ago.”
“Any other Poole relatives you know about?”
“None.”
“Who’s Wergeld?”
“That’s the name of the trust I told you about.”
“Who’s the beneficiary?”
“I don’t know.”
“You come back here often?”
He looked around and shrugged. “Not in over ten years,” he said.
We stared at each other a moment more, our hands twitching as if we really did have guns on our hips. I nodded my head to the wall above the fireplace where the primitive drawing of Elisha Poole was tacked. “You put that up?”
He looked at it for a moment. “No,” he said.
“You know she’s right, of course. If you loved her and let her go just because she was a Reddman and you were a Poole, you’ve given in as badly as your grandmother and your great-grandparents.”
“What the hell do you know about it?”
I thought on that for a moment. “You’re right,” I said. “Not a thing.”
On our way to the door I stopped and told Harrington I had left something in the house. He looked at me gratefully, as if it were a cheap ploy to allow him some time alone with Caroline. I nodded and slipped him half a smile and let him think what he was thinking as he walked out to her alone.
It was a cheap ploy, yes, but not to give him time alone with Caroline. When he left I turned and walked through the kitchen to the dining room and the massive breakfront with the one drawer locked. Under the beam of my flashlight I took out my wallet and extracted the ornate key with the bit like a puzzle piece attached to the shank, the key we had found in the metal box, in the envelope marked “The Letters.” Slowly I inserted the key into the lock in the drawer. It slipped in as though the key and the lock were made one for the other, which they were, because without much effort the key turned, the bolt dropped, the drawer slid open.
Inside were packets of letters, each yellowed and brittle, tied together with pale ribbons that had once held color but no longer. One by one I stuffed the bundles into my pack. Among the letters was a small book of scaling brown leather. I opened it to the title page. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I took that too. Beneath everything was a heavy old envelope, tied shut with a string. The words on the outside, written with a masculine hand, read: To My Child on the Attainment of Majority.
I stuffed the envelope into my pack with the rest of the stuff and headed out the door.
I WANTED TO TALK on the drive home, I was so excited I was bursting with talk. The whole chilling story of the Reddmans and the Pooles was coming clear and more than ever I was certain that the sad entwining of the fates of those two families was at the heart of the plague that was presently afflicting the Reddmans. We were close, so close, to figuring it all out and to taking the first steps toward retribution, as well as toward a lucrative lawsuit. I wanted to talk it out, desperately, but just as desperately Caroline wanted silence.
“Are you all right?” I asked after three of my conversational gambits had dropped like lead weights in a pool of silent water.
“No,” she said.
“What can I do?”
“Just, just shut up,” she said.
Well at least she knew what she wanted.
So, as we drove in silence out of the Main Line and toward the city, I considered to myself what we knew and what we still needed to learn. Claudius Reddman had stolen the company from his friend Elisha Poole, had embezzled sums which he used to buy up a portion of the stock, and then, after reducing the company’s value with his thievery and through production holdbacks, had purchased the balance of the shares for an amount far below their true value. In the process of making his fortune he had ruined his friend, driving him to drink, to poverty, to suicide, and Reddman knew all he had done, too, because right after Poole’s death, either out of guilt or a misplaced magnanimity, he brought Mrs. Poole and her daughter to live in the shadow of his wealth and grandeur, in the shadow of Veritas. Is it only a coincidence that shortly thereafter tragedy began to stalk the Reddmans?
Charity Reddman was murdered and buried in the plot behind the house, alongside the statue of Aphrodite. Who killed her? Was it Christian Shaw, disposing of his inconvenient lover, as Caroline believed, or was it maybe Mrs. Poole, wreaking her husband’s revenge? And the Reddman tragedies didn’t stop there. Hope Reddman died of consumption, which might have been poisoning instead. Christian Shaw was killed by his son with a shotgun blast to the chest. Claudius Reddman’s lungs filled with tumors and his muscles grew wild with palsy. How much of this tragedy was just the natural order of things and how much was bad karma and how much was directly caused by the Pooles? We as yet had no answer and probably would never find one, but if we only reap what we sow then Claudius Reddman’s harvest was appropriately bountiful. But it hadn’t ended with his death.
Somewhere along the line, it appeared, Faith Reddman Shaw sought to make amends. We knew that she had examined her father’s old journals and discovered his crime. Was it after this discovery that she found Emma Poole and brought her to the luxury apartment in Philadelphia to live out her life? Was it then that she found Harrington, Emma’s grandchild, lost in an orphanage, and brought him to the estate to be raised as one of her own? Was the purpose of the Wergeld Trust to ease her family’s conscience? Conciliation, expiation, redemption she had said she was seeking, and it appeared she had been seeking it actively. But still all this had failed, somehow, to stem the curse, because someone had hired Cressi to kill Jacqueline and probably Edward too. Their deaths might be all tied up with Edward Shaw’s gambling debts, true, both killings ordered by Dante to collect on his loan, but after visiting the house of Poole I suspected it had more to do with the ugliness of the Reddman past than anything in the present. So who was ordering the killings? Harrington, the only known surviving Poole? Robert Shaw, knocking off his siblings to increase his inheritance with which he could play the market, showing himself as ruthless in matters of business as his great-grandfather? Kingsley Shaw, carrying out the deranged commands of the voice of the fire? Or was it maybe Faith Reddman Shaw herself, coming back from the dead as her son had claimed, sacrificing her grandchildren one by one as bloody final acts of reparation for her father’s crimes?
Something Caroline had said nagged at me. “Where was Nat tonight?” I asked. “You said he wasn’t there.”
“He wasn’t. I don’t know where he was.”
“Was he at Jacqueline’s funeral?”
“Of course.”
Nat, the estate’s gardener and caretaker, was missing. It was not like Nat to miss a Reddman funeral. More than anyone he seemed to know the family’s secrets and I wondered if perhaps his knowledge had proved deadly. A shiver crawled through me just then and I had the urge to stop the car and spin it around and return to Veritas. He was there, I would have bet, in Faith Reddman Shaw’s overrun garden, lying there now just as peacefully as Charity Reddman, the two of them stretched before the statue of Aphrodite, with the mingled ashes of Faith and Christian Shaw ensconced in its base. There was a killer on the loose and its thirst knew no bounds and I was certain now that Nat had also suffered its vengeance. I would have stopped the car and turned around and checked on my certainty myself except that whoever had done it was still there, waiting, waiting for us.
“I want to go someplace where no one has ever heard of the Reddmans,” Caroline said, breaking her long quiet. “Someplace where I can drink wine all day and let my hair grow greasy and no one would ever notice because the whole countryside is full of greasy drunks. France maybe.”
“Last time it was Mexico.”
“Well this time I mean it.” She took out a cigarette, lit it with my car’s lighter; the air in my Mazda grew quickly foul. “It’s all gotten way out of control. I’m through.”
“What about the one good thing in the Reddman past you’ve been looking for? How can you give up before you find it?”
“It’s not there. There’s nothing but cold there. All I want is to get as far from it all as I possibly can.”
“It’s getting worse, Caroline. Whatever is happening to your family is growing more and more brutal.”
“Let it. I’m getting out.”
“So that’s your answer, right, run away. Sure, why not? Running is what you’re best at. Quit on our investigation just like you quit on your movie.”
“Who told you that?”
“Kendall.”
“She talks too much.”
“You have your story pat, don’t you? A happy childhood, a loving home. If something went wrong in your life then it could only be because you were a failure, unworthy of the love of your mother, your father, of Harrington. That’s why you trashed your movie before it was finished, why you flit from interest to interest, from bed to bed. You do everything you can to maintain your comfortable self-image of failure. It’s the one thing you truly can control. ‘Look at the way I branded my flesh, Mommy. Aren’t I a screw-up?’ ”
“France, I think. Definitely France.”
“What then could be more terrifying than learning that maybe it’s your family that is screwed up to hell, that maybe your home wasn’t so loving, that maybe you’re not to blame for everything after all. What could be more terrifying than realizing that success or even love might actually be possible for you.”
“Give it a rest, Victor.”
“Look, I don’t want to find the answers more than you do. I was doing just fine before you came along. You’re the one who says she needs saving. The answers we’re finding could give you what you need to save yourself, but you have to do some of the work too. You tell me it’s hard, well, sweetheart, life is hard. Grow the fuck up.”
“Hide out in France with me, Victor.”
I thought about it for a moment, thought about all I had wanted at the start of everything and suddenly I felt a great swelling of bitterness. “It must be nice to have enough money to run from your life.”
She took a deep drag from her cigarette. “Trust me, Victor, it’s no easy thing being born rich.”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s hard work, but the pay is great.”
“You don’t know.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Come to France with me.”
“What about the lawsuit?”
“Screw the lawsuit.”
“We’re so close to figuring it out.”
“Is that what it’s all been about? The lawsuit? Is everything we’ve gone through together just that?”
I glanced at her cool face in the green glow of the dashboard’s light. What I noticed just then was how childlike she was. “I like you, Caroline, I care for you and I worry about you, but neither of us ever had any illusions.”
After ten minutes of silence, which is a heavy load of silence, she simply said, “I have some things to pick up at your place, Victor, and then, please, just take me home.”
I parked on Spruce, not far from my apartment. I took my pack from the car and Caroline and I walked together up the dark street. In the vestibule, while I was unlocking the front door, I sniffed and raised my head and sniffed again.
“Do you smell that?”
“It smells like a garbage dump on fire,” she said.
Acrid, and deep, like the foul odor of burning tires. I opened the door and stepped inside. The smell grew.
“What is that?” I said. “It’s like someone forgot to turn off a stovetop.”
As we climbed the stairs the stench worsened. It was strongest outside my door. I went on a bit and sniffed the next doorway.
“Dammit, it’s my apartment.”
With fumbling fingers I tried unsuccessfully to jam the key into my lock, tried again, finally got it in, twisted hard. I felt the bolt slide. I grabbed the knob, turned it, and threw open the door. Smoke billowed, with a fetor that turned my stomach. I flicked on the light. The air was hazy with the noxious smoke and through the haze I could see that my apartment had been trashed, tables overturned, a bureau emptied, cushions from the couch thrown about. I dropped my pack upon the mess and rushed around the room’s bend to search for the fire in the kitchen. When I made it halfway through the living room and finally had a clear view of the dining room table I stopped dead.
Peter Cressi was sitting at the table, leaning back calmly in the miasma, the metal box we had exhumed from Charity Reddman’s grave in front of him on the red Formica tabletop. Coiled on top of the metal box was a fat black cat. One of Cressi’s hands was casually scratching the fur along the cat’s back, the other was holding an absurdly large gun.
“We was wondering when you was gonna get back here, Vic. I mean what kind of host are you? No matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find yous liquor.”
Caroline rushed out from behind me. “Victor,” she said, “What is it? What?” and that’s all she said before she stopped, just behind me, so that Cressi, had he wanted to, with that gun and a half of his, could have taken us both out with one shot.
“Well, look who’s with Vic,” said Cressi. “Isn’t this convenient? We was looking for you too, sweetheart.”
The sight of Cressi pointing that gun at me was arresting enough, but it wasn’t he alone that had chilled my blood to viscid. Sitting next to him, elbows on the table, a small pile of ashes resting before him on the Formica like a charred sacrifice, was the source of the nauseating smoke polluting my apartment. It was an old man with clear blue eyes, hairy ears, a stogie the size of a smokestack smoldering between his false teeth.
Calvi.
“CALVI,” I SAID.
“Who was you expecting?” said Calvi, the cigar remaining clamped between his teeth as he spoke. “Herbert Hoover?”
He was a thin wiry man with bristly gray hair and hollowed cheeks and a bitter reputation for violence. The word on Calvi was he talked too damn much, even with that voice scarred painful and rough by decades of rancid tobacco, but Calvi didn’t only talk when there was a more efficient way to communicate. Once, so the story went, he had drilled a man who was skimming off the skim, drilled him literally, with a Black & Decker and a three-quarter-inch bit, drilled him in the skull until the blood spurted and the dumb chuck admitted all and pled for mercy. The downtown boys, they laughed for weeks about that one, but after that one no one dared again to skim the skim from Calvi.
“I heard you called,” said Calvi. “What was it that you wanted, Vic?”
I glanced at Cressi, pointing his gun now at my face, and realized in a flash that I had been all wrong about everything, had trusted wrong and suspected wrong and now was face to face with the man who was behind all the violence that had been unleashed in the past few weeks. Calvi had returned to Philadelphia to wrest control of the city from Raffaello and the one man who could pull me out of what it was I had fallen into, Earl Dante, knew exactly how wrong I had been.
“I just called to say hello,” I said. “See how the weather was down there.”
“Hot,” said Calvi. “Hot as hell but hotter.”
“So I guess you’re up just to enjoy the beautiful Philadelphia spring?”
“I always liked you, Vic,” said Calvi. “I could always trust you, and you want to know why? Because I always understood your motives. You’re a simple man with a simple plan. Go for the dough. The world, it belongs to simple men. I send a guy to you I know he stays stand up and does his time with his mouth shut. No question about it because you know who is paying and it ain’t him, it’s me. And you know what, Vic? You done never let me down.”
“How’s my case going?” asked Cressi. “You got it dismissed yet?”
“That was a lot of guns you were buying, Pete,” I said. “And the flamethrower doesn’t help. But I’m moving to suppress the tapes and whatever else I can.”
“Atta boy,” said Peter.
“You know why I’m here, don’t you, Vic?” said Calvi.
“I think I do.”
“I want to apologize about you being in the car with that thing on the expressway. It couldn’t be helped. But you understand it was only business. No hard feelings, right?”
“Could I afford hard feelings right now?”
“No,” said Calvi.
A gay, friendly smile spread across my face. “Then no hard feelings.”
“You’re exactly what the man, he meant when he said the simple will inherit the earth,” said Calvi. “Let me tell you, when my turn comes, it will be very very profitable. And you, my friend, will share in those profits. Do we understand each other?”
“Yes,” I said.
“So I can count on you?”
I looked at Cressi with his gun and smiled again. “It sounds like a lucrative arrangement.”
“Exactly what I thought you’d say. And I’m taking that as a commitment, so there’s no going back. Now I understand you’ve been in touch with that snake Raffaello.”
“It was only because he was checking up on me after the thing with the car,” I blurted. “I don’t know where he is or what he is…”
“Shut up, Vic,” said Cressi with a wave of his gun and I shut right up.
“We need to meet, Raffaello and me,” said Calvi. “We need to meet and figure this whole thing out. Can you set up this meeting for us, Vic?”
“I can try.”
“Good boy, Vic,” said Calvi. “We’re not animals. If we can avoid a war all the better.”
“I think that’s what he wants too,” I said. “He told me he’s ready to step aside as long as there’s no war and his family is guaranteed safety.”
“He’ll turn over everything?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Everything?”
“So long as you give the guarantees.”
Calvi took the cigar out of his mouth for a moment and stared at it and for the first time a smile cracked his face. “You hear that, Peter,” he said. “It’s done.”
“It’s too easy,” said Cressi, shaking his head.
“I told you it would be easy,” said Calvi. “This never was his business. He was a cookie baker before he came into it. He never had the stomach for the rough stuff. He had the stomach he would have killed me rather then let me slink off to Florida like he did. I ain’t surprised he’s on his knees now. You’ll set up the meeting, Vic.”
“Now?”
“Not yet,” said Calvi. “I’ll tell you when. Sit down.”
“Why don’t you let her go while we talk,” I said, gesturing to Caroline, still standing behind me, quiet as a leg of lamb. Her face, when I looked at her, was transfixed with fear and I couldn’t tell just then if she was more terrified of the sight and size of Cressi’s gun or of the cat lying atop the metal box.
“She stays,” said Cressi.
“We don’t need her to speak to Raffaello,” I said.
“She stays,” said Calvi. “No more discussion. Sit down, missy. We all got to wait here some.”
Cressi gestured with the gun and I pulled out two chairs from the table, one for Caroline and one for me. Carefully I placed her in the chair to the left and sat in the chair directly across from Cressi. Calvi was to our right and the metal box from Charity Reddman’s grave was on the table between us. The black cat jumped off the box and high-stepped to the end of the table, sticking its nose close to Caroline’s face. Her body tense and still, Caroline shut her eyes and turned her face away.
“What, missy, you don’t like my cat?”
Caroline, face still averted, shook her head.
“She has a thing about cats,” I said.
“It’s a good cat. Come on over, Sam.” The cat sniffed a bit more around Caroline and then strolled over to Calvi, who stroked it roughly beneath its neck. “I named it after a fed prosecutor who’s been chasing me for years. I named it Sam, after the fed, and then took him to the vet to get his balls cut off. Very therapeutic.”
Cressi laughed.
“While we’re waiting,” said Calvi, “maybe we can take care of some unfinished business.”
Cressi leaned forward and lifted the lid off the metal box. “Where’s the rest of the shit what was supposed to be inside here?”
Caroline, her face still tense with fear, looked up with surprise. “What are you talking about?”
“Whatever it is I’m talking about I’m not talking to you,” snapped Cressi. “Vic knows what I’m talking about, a smart guy like him. Where’s the rest of it, Vic?”
“I don’t understand.”
Cressi reached into his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. “A certain party what had been paying us for our services has requested we recover this here box and its contents, which are listed right here in black and white. The photographs and documents about some trust and old pieces of diary, they’re in here, all right. But the piece of paper, it lists other stuff that ain’t and so maybe you know where that other stuff, it went to, Vic.”
“Who’s the certain party?” I asked, wondering who would be so interested in the contents of the secret box of Faith Reddman Shaw.
“Not important.”
“It’s important as hell.”
“Give him what he wants, Vic,” said a scowling Calvi, his voice ominously soft. The cat’s black fur pricked up and it jumped off the table. It hopped to one of the couch cushions on the floor and curled on top of it. When it was settled it watched us with complete dispassion. “Give him the hell he wants and be done with it.”
“There’s a doctor’s invoice of some sort,” said Cressi, reading from the list.
I looked at Cressi and his gun and nodded. “All right,” I said. I stood and went over to the corner and found my briefcase among the scattered contents from the closet, the case’s sides slashed, its lock battered but still in place. I opened the combination and took out the invoice and handed it over.
Cressi examined it and smiled before placing it in the box. “What about some banking papers that are also missing?”
“They’re not here,” I said. “But I’ll get them for you.”
Cressi slammed the butt of his gun on the table, the noise so loud I thought the monster had gone off. Caroline inhaled a gasp at the sound of it. “Don’t dick with me, Vic.”
“I don’t have it here. I swear.”
“Where is it?”
“I’ll get it for you,” I said, not wanting to tell them anything about Morris.
“Go on, Peter,” said Calvi, staring hard at me through the smoke of his cigar.
“A three-by-five card with certain alphanumeric strands, whatever the fuck that is.”
“Also someplace else,” I said.
Cressi glared at me. “What about this key it says here?”
I reached for my wallet, took out the key that had opened the breakfront drawer at the Poole house, and handed it over. Cressi examined it for a moment.
“How the fuck I know it’s the right key?”
“It’s the right key,” I said.
“Is that it?” said Calvi.
Cressi nodded and put the list back in his jacket.
“It’s very important, Vic, now that we’re partners,” said Calvi, “to keep this party happy. It’s not so cheap making a move like we’ve made here. You just can’t bluff your way through. Even with a cookie baker like Raffaello, you have to be ready for war, and war’s expensive. This party’s been our patron and we keep our patron happy. You’ll get the rest of that stuff for us after the meeting.”
“No problem.”
“Good,” said Calvi. “I think, Vic, you and me, we’re going to do just fine together. You and me, Vic, we have a future.”
“That’s encouraging,” I said. I was referring to the fact that I might actually have a future outside the range of Cressi’s gun, but Calvi smiled as if he were a recruiting sergeant and I had just enlisted.
“You want a cigar?” said Calvi, patting at his jacket pocket.
“No, thank you,” I said as kindly as I could.
“Now we wait,” said Calvi.
“Where’s yous liquor?” said Cressi. “We was looking all over for it.”
“I don’t have any,” I said. “Just a couple beers in the fridge.”
“We already done the beers,” said Cressi. He turned to Calvi. “You want I should maybe hit up a state store?”
“Just shut up and wait,” said Calvi.
Cressi twisted his neck as if trying to fracture a vertebrae and then leaned back in silence.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
“It’s need to know,” said Calvi. “You think you need to know?”
I shook my head.
“You’re right about that,” said Cressi.
And so we sat at the table, the four of us, Calvi leaning on his elbows, his head in his hands, sucking on his stogie, Cressi, Caroline, and I asphyxiating on the foul secondhand smoke, none of us talking. The cat licked its fur atop the cushion. Every now and then Calvi sighed, an old man’s sigh, like he was sitting by the television, waiting to be called to the nursing home’s evening program rather than waiting to set up a meeting to take control of the Philly mob. I could feel the tension in Caroline as she sat beside me, but she was as quiet as the rest of us. I laid a comforting hand on her knee and gave her a smile. The silence was interrupted only by Calvi’s sighs, the scrape of a chair as we shifted our positions, contented clicks rising from the throat of Sam the cat, the occasional rumble from Cressi’s digestive tract.
Our situation was as bleak as Veritas. Someone had paid Calvi to kill Jacqueline and Edward and, now, to get the contents of the box. Who? Who else had even known that I might have it? Nat had learned we were digging. Had he told someone? Was that the reason he was missing? Was that the reason he was murdered, too, because he knew about the box and someone was determined that no one would ever know? Whom had he told about our nocturnal excavations? Harrington, the last Poole? Kingsley Shaw? Brother Bobby? Which was Calvi’s patron, ordering Calvi to kill Reddmans for fun and profit while building up his war chest? And why did the patron care about a box buried in the earth many years ago by Faith Reddman Shaw? Unless it wasn’t buried by Faith Reddman Shaw. And whoever it was, this patron had also paid to kill Caroline, or else why would Cressi have been searching for her, and once the bastards killed Caroline they would have no choice, really, but to kill me too. I was the man who knew too much. Which was ironic, really, considering my academic career.
A peculiar sound erupted from Cressi’s stomach. “I must have eaten something,” said Cressi with a weak smile.
“It’s hot down there,” said Calvi, and I thought for a moment he was referring to Cressi’s stomach but he was off on a tangent of his own. “Hot as hell but hotter. And muggy, so there’s nothing to do but sweat. What did that snake think I was going to do, learn canasta? What am I, an old lady? You know when they eat dinner down there? Four o’clock. Christ, up here I was finishing lunch at Tosca’s around four o’clock and waiting for the night to begin. At four o’clock down there they’re lining up for the early birds. They’re serving early birds till as late as six, but they line up at four. And lime green jackets. Explain to me, Vic, sweating in a restaurant line in lime green jackets.”
“I understand Phoenix has a dry heat,” I said.
“White belts, white shoes, what the hell am I supposed to do down there? Golf? I tried golf, bought a set of clubs. Pings. I liked the sound of it. Ping. Went to the course, swung, the ball went sideways. Sideways. I almost killed a priest. What the hell am I doing playing golf? I went fishing once, one of them big boats. Threw up the whole way out and the whole way back. The only thing I caught was a guy on the deck behind me when a burst of wind sent the puke right into his face. That was good for a laugh, sure, but that was it for fishing. You know, I been in this business all my life. Started as a kid running errands for Bruno when he was still an underboss. You stay alive in this business, you do a few stints in the shack, your hair turns gray, you’re entitled. Up here I was respected. I was feared. Down there I was a kid again, surrounded by old men with colostomy bags on their hips and old ladies looking to get laid. I was getting high school ass up here, down there ladies ten years older than me, nothing more than bags of bones held together by tumors, they’re eyeing me like I’m a side of venison. They got walkers and the itch and they want to cook for me. Pasta? Sauce Bolognese? Good Italian blood sausage? Shit no. Kreplach and kishke and brust. You ever have something called gefilte fish?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What’s with that fish jelly that jiggles on the plate? Whatever it is, it ain’t blood sausage. I hate it down there. It’s hell all right, hot and steamy and the sinners they wear lime green jackets and white belts and eat pompano every night at four o’clock and play canasta and talk about hurricanes and bet on the dogs. ‘Welcome to Florida,’ the sign says, but it should say ‘Abandon hope all of yous who fly down here.’ What the hell made Raffaello think he could send me there to sweat and die?”
“So that’s why you came back?” I said.
“That’s right,” said Calvi. “That and the money. You sure you don’t want a cigar?”
I shook my head.
“Never understood why you’d drop a fin for a cigar when you could buy a perfectly good smoke for thirty-five cents.”
“You got me,” I said.
“I’ll be right back,” said Calvi, placing the cigar on the table so the end with the ash hung over the edge. He stood and hitched up his pants. “I gotta pinch a loaf.”
He ambled through the living room mess and into the bathroom. The cat followed, sneaking between his legs just as Calvi shut the door on himself. As soon as we heard the first of his loud moans, the bell to my apartment rang.
“That must be them,” said Cressi. “Can I just buzz them up?”
“No,” I said. “You have to go down the stairs and open the vestibule door.”
“What kind of shithole is this you live in, Vic?” said Cressi as he stood up and slipped the long barrel of his gun into his pants, buttoning his jacket to hide, though not very convincingly, the bulge. “And you a lawyer and all. You expecting anyone?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, though I wondered if maybe Morris or Beth had come by to check on me.
“Let’s hope not for their sakes,” said Cressi, as he started around the table and toward the door, the pistol in his pants turning his walk into a sort of waddle. He stopped for a moment and turned to us.
“Don’t either of yous move or you’ll piss the hell out of me.”
Then he turned again and disappeared around the bend of the living room.
“WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?” asked a frantic Caroline as soon as we were alone.
I turned to her and put my finger on her mouth and whispered. “You came to me because of my connections with the mob. Well, there’s a battle going on for control of the organization and, somehow, I’m in the middle of it.”
“Who are they?” she asked, whispering back. “Those two men?”
“They’re the men who killed your sister and brother.”
“Oh, Jesus Jesus Jesus. I’m scared. Let’s get away, please.”
I took hold of her and stroked her hair. “Shhhh. I’m scared, too,” I said, “but it will be all right. I took care of some things.”
“They knew who I was. What do they want with me?”
“I don’t know,” I said, lying, because I was pretty certain that what they wanted with her was for her to be dead.
“Why did he want the stuff in my grandmother’s box?”
“I don’t know, except maybe it’s not your grandmother’s box after all.”
“I thought about what you said, in the car.”
“That’s good, Caroline, but we have a more immediate problem. We have to get you out of here.”
“I know I need to change things, but it’s harder than you think. You don’t reorganize your life’s story like you reorganize your closets. You need something to reorganize it around. What is there for me but the horrors of our past?”
I took her face in my hands and I looked at her and saw the struggle playing out on her features, but then the toilet flushed and a terror washed the struggle away with a consuming bland fear. I jumped from my chair and went to a kitchen drawer, slid it open with a jangle of stainless steel, pulled out a small paring knife. As I slammed the drawer shut I dropped the paring knife, point first, into my pants pocket. Then I went back to the table, took hold of her shoulders, and leaned over her.
“You’ll have a chance to get away,” I whispered. “Sometime. Keep your eyes open. Keep alert. I’ll give you the sign. When I do, run. All right?”
She was staring at me, her eyes darting with panic. The water started running in the bathroom sink as Calvi washed his hands.
“All right?” I asked again.
She nodded her head.
“Now pretend to smile and be brave.”
I let go of her and turned to sit on the tabletop. I was sitting casually, an arm draped over the pocket to hide the outline of the knife, when Calvi came out of the bathroom, shaking his hands. The cat ran out of the doorway ahead of him and jumped onto a cushion. Calvi looked around with suspicion. “Where’s Peter?”
“My bell rang,” I said. “He went to answer it.”
Calvi went back to the table, sat in his seat, picked up his cigar from the edge where he had left it. He sucked deep. “Good,” he said, exhaling. “They’re here.”
Cressi came back, not leading Morris or Beth by gunpoint, as I had feared, but with three men, apparently allies. Two I had never seen before, they wore dark pants with bulges at the ankles and silk shirts and had sharp handsome faces and slicked hair. The third I recognized for sure. The long face, the wide ears, the crumbling teeth and bottle cap glasses and black porkpie hat. It was Anton Schmidt, the human computer, who had kept Jimmy Vig’s records in his head.
Anton Schmidt, his hands in his pockets and his mouth pursed open to show his rotting teeth, stopped still when he saw me. “I didn’t know you were with us, Victor.”
“It looks like everything’s changed,” I said.
“Not everything,” said Anton. “The same rules, just a different opponent.”
“How’s your chess?”
“I’m seeing deeper into the game every day.”
“Good. Maybe your rating will rise,” I said.
So Anton Schmidt was now with Calvi, and might have been all along. Of all the people in that room, me included, Anton, the chess master, was by far the smartest. Calvi was more powerful than I had thought if he had Anton doing his planning. Maybe Raffaello was right to step aside.
“Everything ready, Schmidty?” asked Calvi.
“The Cubans are in, waiting for orders. I sent them over the bridge where the bus won’t attract any attention. They’re at a diner in New Jersey.”
“They got good diners in Jersey,” said Cressi. “Tell them they should try the snapper soup.”
“We’ll know in a few minutes,” said Calvi.
Schmidt leaned over and spoke a few lines of Spanish to the two men, who nodded grimly and shot back some words of concern. Schmidt answered their questions and then turned to Calvi.
“Let’s do it,” said Calvi.
I had two phones in the apartment, a portable in the bedroom and one by the couch with a cord long enough to reach the table. I sat at the table with the corded phone, the line stretched taut from the outlet. Schmidt sat next to me and next to Schmidt was Calvi with the portable handset. Cressi sat across from us, his gun out of his pants and back in his hand. Caroline was sent to the bedroom, the door guarded by one of the two Cubans. Before she shut the door, Sam the cat scampered in after her. From behind the closed door we heard a shout.
“She has a thing about cats,” I said.
“Make the fucking call,” said Calvi.
I dialed the number I had memorized from the Rev. Custer message.
“It’s Victor Carl,” I said into the phone when it was answered. “Let me talk to him.”
“Who?” said the voice at the other end.
“Just shut up and put him on or I’ll rip off your face.”
Cressi broke into a big smile. Calvi and Schmidt remained expressionless. After a few moments of dead quiet I heard his voice.
“Hello, Victor,” said Raffaello. “What have you heard?”
“I’ve been approached about a meeting,” I said flatly.
“Who? Tell me who?”
I looked over at Calvi as he listened on the portable. He nodded.
“Walter Calvi,” I said.
“That bastard, that shit-smoking bastard. Is Cressi with him like we thought?”
Calvi nodded.
“Yes,” I said.
“Who else, Victor? Tell me who else.”
Calvi shook his head.
I looked at Anton Schmidt and said, “I don’t know who else. That’s all I’ve seen.”
“Dammit, that bastard. How strong are they, Victor, tell me.”
Calvi nodded. I looked at the Cubans and thought of the bus in New Jersey. “Strong,” I said. “They’re ready for a war.”
Raffaello sighed into the phone. “Did you tell them my offer?”
“Yes.”
Calvi looked at me and mouthed, “I want full control.”
“They’ve agreed to your proposal so long as you turn over full control,” I said.
“Of course. That is what this is all about.”
Calvi mouthed something else. “And you’ll have to leave the city,” I said.
“I understand. But he agrees no reprisals, no war, and he’ll guarantee my safety and my daughter’s safety?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“All right. When is this meeting to take place?”
I put my hand over the mouthpiece as Calvi conferred with Schmidt. “Tomorrow morning,” said Schmidt. “Five-thirty. Before the city awakes.”
I relayed the message.
“Fine,” said Raffaello. “That’s fine. We’ll meet at Tosca’s.”
Calvi shook his head. “The old RCA building in Camden,” said Schmidt into my ear. I repeated it into the phone.
“I’m too old to go to Camden,” said Raffaello. “No. It must be on this side of the river. Packer Avenue Marine Terminal, South Gate.”
Anton Schmidt shook his head and whispered in my ear. “The Naval Shipyard,” I said. “Pier Four.”
“That’s interesting,” said Raffaello. “Good neutral territory, the Naval Shipyard. But how are we going to get in? There are guards.”
“The Penrose Avenue gate will be open and unguarded,” said Schmidt.
“That Calvi he’s a rat-fucking bastard,” said Raffaello after he heard what I relayed, “but at least it’s not one of those Young Turks who don’t respect the traditions. Calvi I can trust to keep his word. Tell him tomorrow morning, five-thirty at the Naval Shipyard, Pier Four, is acceptable. Tell him I will leave town that afternoon. Tell him after all these years the trophy, it is finally his.”
“So,” said Calvi after Raffaello had hung up, “it’s exactly as you said, Vic. We’re all going to make so much money it will bring tears to our eyes.” He turned to Schmidt. “Is that the place we wanted?”
Schmidt nodded. “Get me a piece of paper.”
I found him a yellow pad and Schmidt quickly sketched a pier sticking out from a straight shoreline.
“This is Pier Four,” said Anton Schmidt. “It reaches out into the Delaware River. Docked on either side of the pier are two old Navy ships, mothballed for future use. Between the two ships is a giant hammerhead crane. We’ll have our men here, here, and here.” He placed X’s on either side of the pier, where the ships would be, and an X in the middle of the pier, where the hammerhead crane sat. “If we set up the meeting so you confront Raffaello here,” he said, placing two circles on the pier between the crane and the shore, “then during the whole of the exchange you’ll both be covered.”
“Who will be with the Cubans?” asked Calvi.
“Domino and Sollie Wags will be on the deck of this ship here, Termini and Tony T will be on the ship there, and on the crane will be Johnny Roses, keeping an eye on everyone.” These were all names of minor mobsters, generally known as the most vicious and impatient of the Young Turks, who had apparently switched allegiances to Calvi to hasten their rise. “With our men set up like I say, we’ll dominate the center.”
“That’s good. I don’t want no trouble until I get what I came for.”
“Raffaello’s a man of his word,” I said. “There won’t be trouble.”
Calvi looked at me and sucked deep from his cigar and let loose a stream of smoke that billowed into my face, leaving me in a spasm of coughs. “You’re dead right about that, Vic,” he said. “There won’t be no trouble.”
“The crossfire here,” said Anton, “could wipe out a division.”
“There won’t be no trouble at all,” said Calvi. “Now we need a signal, so everyone’s on board at the same instant. What’s Spanish for ‘now’?”
“Ahora,” said Anton, rolling the “r” like a native.
“A-whore-a,” said Calvi. “Good. That’s the signal. A-whore-a. When I say a-whore-a I want all hell to break loose.”
Schmidt turned to the Cubans and gave them instructions in Spanish. The only word I caught was ahora, a number of times, ahora from Schmidt and then ahora repeated by the Cubans with smiles on their faces.
“I’ll call Johnny Roses on the cell phone,” said Schmidt, “and set it all up. They’ll be on site in an hour.”
“Good work, Anton,” said Calvi. “We’re going to do great things together. You’re going to be my man in Atlantic City. Together we’re going to rule the board-walk.”
Schmidt nodded, a small smile breaking through those pursed lips. Then he went off to the corner with his cell phone.
“What about the girl?” I said.
“Forget about the girl,” said Calvi. “We’re taking care of her. She’ll stay right here while we wait, what could be safer?”
What indeed? I stood up and headed away from the table.
“Where you going?” asked Cressi.
“I’m going to the pot, do you mind?”
“Well, hurry up, ’cause I gotta drop a load myself.”
I walked across the living room, the dark stares of the Cubans following me, and stepped into the bathroom. As soon as I closed the door I locked it and dropped down to the seat on the toilet and shook for a bit. Then I stood and went to the sink and ran the water cold and washed my face and let it tingle for a moment before I dried it with a towel. I took the towel I had just used and stretched it across the crack at the bottom of the door. There was a window in the bathroom, and I thought for a moment of climbing out and jumping, but the window was small and the fall was three stories and Caroline was still imprisoned with Sam the cat in my bedroom. So what I did instead of climbing out the window was reach for the light switch, turn it off, and then click it on three quick times, on again for three longer times, and then three short times again. On the last short burst of light I heard a banging on the door that scared the absolute hell out of me.
“Get the fuck out of there,” yelled Cressi through the door.
“What’s the matter?” I shouted back.
“I told you I gotta go.”
“Give me a break. I’m still on the pot.”
It was a good thing just then I was already in the bathroom.
THE PHILADELPHIA NAVAL SHIPYARD rises rusted and desolate on the southern tip of Philadelphia, a flat slab of land that reaches out like a claw into the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. Surrounding the yard, like funeral pyres, refinery stacks shoot the flames of burnoff into the sky, scorching the air with the thick rotted smell of sulfur. Thirty thousand blue-collar heroes used to march to work each day into the yard, bringing their hard hats and lunch buckets and cheerful profanities, before the government closed it down and sent the work to Charleston or Norfolk or Puget Sound and the workers to unemployment. Now the furnaces are cool and the machine shops quiet and the dry docks empty of all but the pigeons, who leave their marks like avian Jackson Pollocks on the wide flat-bottomed gashes that once held the proudest ships in the fleet: the Arizona, the Missouri, the Tennessee. There was one last gasp for the naval yard, when a German shipbuilder looked to set up shop there, but the governor played it badly and the German took his toys and went away and the shipyard now is left to rust.
We were in a black Lincoln, driving south on Penrose Avenue, toward the bridge that would take us to the airport, but instead of going straight over the bridge we turned left, onto a deserted four-lane road that I had passed a hundred times before, never knowing where it went. Well now I knew; it went to the rear entrance of the Naval Shipyard. I was sitting in the middle on the front bench of the Lincoln, with Cressi driving and Calvi beside me. Wedged into the back were Anton and Caroline, with the two Cubans at either window. I had hoped there would be a chance for Caroline to bolt as we made our way from the apartment early in the morning but Cressi, his gun back in his pants, hovered as protectively over her as if she were his sister at a frat party, so Caroline was still with us when we reached the car. Cressi literally threw her in the backseat and put the Cubans on either side as guards.
We approached the rear gate. It was unguarded and seemingly shut tight. A sign warned against unauthorized entry and cited the applicable provisions of the Internal Security Act. Another sign warned that the site was patrolled by Military Working Dogs. Cressi stopped the car just in front of the gate and Calvi stepped out. He walked to the chain that held the gate closed and gave the chain a yank. It unraveled with a slinking hiss. Calvi slid the gate open and Cressi drove us through. While Calvi shut the gate behind us and got back in the car I looked out the side and saw the signs to the now abandoned Navy Brig.
Slowly we drove along the shipyard’s deserted streets, littered with empty work sheds, unused warehouses, desolate barracks. None of us said a word as we drove. Whatever work was still being done at the yard hadn’t yet begun for the day and whatever guards were supposed to have been patrolling with the Military Working Dogs had conveniently chosen some other beat to pound. We passed a tractor-trailer parked by the road, its back open, the trailer empty. We passed four garbage trucks parked one after the other, their cabs dark. We drove beneath a soaring elevated section of Interstate 95 and then over a bridge, with giant green towers to lift the span vertically and allow approaching ships to enter. As we passed over the bridge, to the left we could see the reserve basin, holding dozens of mothballed gray-painted ships, frigates and cruisers and supply ships and tankers, a veritable fleet. I felt just then as intrusive as a Soviet spy during the Cold War.
We drove straight until we reached a huge deserted dry dock, surrounded by green and yellow mobile cranes, and turned left, past a vacant parking lot, past shuttered warehouses, the streets and the lots all criss-crossed with railroad tracks. As we drove I looked to my right and saw a startling sight, battleships, a pair of battleships, huge and empty, their sixteen-inch guns lowered to horizontal. I could just make out the name of the one closest to shore: Wisconsin. Past still more warehouses and then another dry dock, the sides of this one not vertical but tiered and its bottom red with rust. At the edge of this dry dock we turned right and stopped the car by a long low building and waited. In the Delaware River, right in front of us, were two naval cargo ships, the sharp edges of their prows pointing straight at our car. I didn’t know what we were waiting for, but I knew enough not to ask. The windshield steamed over from our breaths. We sat in silence until the cell phone in Schmidty’s jacket beeped. He opened it, listened for a moment, and shut it again.
“It’s all in place,” he said.
“Time to claim the trophy,” said Calvi.
Four car doors opened and we climbed out of the Lincoln. Cressi took his huge gun from his belt, slapped open the cylinder, closed it again with a flick of his wrist. Anton pulled a small semiautomatic from his boot and chambered a round. The two Cubans unstrapped assault weapons from beneath their pant legs, flipped opened the skeleton metal stocks, and locked them in place. They both took two long clips from their pockets, each fitting one into his weapon and the second into his belt. Calvi reached into the glove compartment of his car and took out a revolver, checking it carefully before sticking it into the pocket of his long black raincoat. The sound of oiled metal clicked about us like a wave of wasps.
“Do I get anything?” I asked.
“You ever shoot a gun before, Vic?” asked Calvi.
“No,” I said.
Cressi snickered.
“Then forget about it,” said Calvi. “I don’t need you shooting my foot off. The girl stays in the car and I want one of the Cubans with her. She is not to leave the car under any circumstances, is that understood?”
Caroline looked at me with panic and I tried to calm her with a quiet motion of my hand. Anton gave directions in Spanish and one of the Cubans took hold of her and pushed her back into the car.
“What are you going to do with the girl?” I asked.
“We’re taking care of her,” said Calvi, slamming her door and shucking his shoulders.
“Maybe I should be the one to guard her,” I suggested.
Cressi stared at me for a long moment. “Don’t go weak on me now, Vic. You’re coming. It’s time for you to earn your place in the new order of things. Got it?”
I nodded sheepishly.
“Good,” said Calvi. “Where or whether you stand at the end it’s up to you. Got it?” He turned to face the others. “You boys ready?”
There were nods and more well-oiled clicks.
“Then let’s get it done.”
We stepped into the street and lined up five wide before we started walking toward the cargo ships. Anton Schmidt, with his thick glasses and his porkpie hat cocked low, then Walter Calvi, with his bristly hair and his long black coat, then me, trembling uncontrollably, then Peter Cressi, his Elvisine features tight and his eyes lethal, and then the Cuban, his face impassive and the assault rifle calmly held in front of him like a tennis racket at the ready. Side by side we walked.
“What’s going to happen to the girl?” I said to Calvi as we continued to walk.
“Forget about the girl, we’re taking care of her.”
“It’s over. You don’t need to kill her any more.”
“What are you, an idiot?” he said just as we were about to reach the river. “I told you we was taking care of her, not killing her. Her father is paying us to protect her, which is what the hell we’re doing.”
I didn’t have time to respond to that revelation before we reached the wharf at the river and wheeled about in line to the left so that, still five wide, we were walking now toward Pier Four. I glanced to the side and saw the Lincoln, saw the Cuban leaning against the front fender, watching us go, saw Caroline’s silhouette inside, saw it all before a wall from a warehouse blocked the view. I turned my head and all thoughts about Kingsley Shaw and his pact with Calvi fled as I saw what lay ahead of us.
Aircraft carriers. Two of them. As big and as imposing as anything I had ever seen before. Aircraft carriers. Great gray fortresses sitting heavy and still in the water, their high flat flight decks towering over the pier between them. Aircraft carriers. Jesus. When Anton Schmidt had mentioned two old ships on either side of the pier I had imagined two little gray putt-putts, not aircraft carriers. They loomed ever more huge as we walked closer to the pier and I could make out the names painted on their gray paint. Forrestal, read the one closest to us, its sharp prow and flat deck pointing toward the shore, and the ship docked on the far side of the pier, its bow pointing to the center of the river, was the Saratoga. I seemed to remember something about the supercarrier Forrestal burning off the coast of North Vietnam, killing more than a hundred sailors, and now here it was. The Forrestal and the Saratoga. I was still gawking when we reached the pier and wheeled around once again, this time to our right, maintaining our line as we began our walk onto Pier Four itself.
The two aircraft carriers rose huge on either side of us, their flight decks reaching beyond the cement surface of the pier, and right between them was the massive hammerhead crane, rising twice as high as the carriers’ flight towers, the crane standing between them like a guard, rusted and decrepit, more than twelve stories high with a huge red-and-white trailer on top. Parked before the crane was a white Cadillac, its side turned toward us. And just in front of the car, standing in the shadows of the great naval vessels, four men all in a row, waiting.
We kept walking, straight down the pier, toward the four men and the Cadillac. I looked up at the jutting decks of the aircraft carriers on either side of us. There was nothing to see. Anton Schmidt’s ambush was well hidden. As we moved closer I could identify the four figures before us. Enrico Raffaello stood at the middle of the car, a black cape around the shoulders of his tan suit, leaning on a cane gripped in his left hand, a black leather satchel in his right. On one side of him was Lenny Abromowitz, Raffaello’s driver, sartorially splendid in yellow pants and a green plaid jacket. On the other side of Raffaello, in a black suit, standing erect as a pole and perfectly at ease, was Earl Dante. Beside Earl Dante was his weightlifter bodyguard.
When we were fifteen yards away from Raffaello, Anton Schmidt told us to stop and we did. We stared at them and they stared at us and something ugly hung in the air between us.
“Buon giorno, Gualtieri,” said Raffaello in a voice that echoed from the gray metal hulls of the boats surrounding us. “I’m saddened that it is you, old friend, who has betrayed me.”
“You should never have sent me off to Florida,” said Calvi.
“I thought you’d like the ocean,” said Raffaello. “I thought the salt air would act as a balm on your anger.”
“It’s hot. Hot as hell but hotter. And you know when they eat dinner down there? Aaah, forget about it. Don’t get me started on Florida. Is that it in the bag?”
“As I promised.”
“I will care for it with honor and devotion. I want you to know, Enrico, that I have nothing but respect for you.”
“That is why you shoot up my car on the Schuylkill Expressway and start a war against me?”
“It was business, Enrico, only that. Nothing more. Nothing personal.”
Raffaello stared hard at him for a moment and then he shrugged. “Of course. I understand.”
“I knew you would,” said Calvi. “You are a man of honor. Lenny, your performance in the car after that thing on the expressway was exemplary. It would be a privilege to have you drive for me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Calvi,” said Lenny in his thick nasal voice, “but I got granddaughters living in California, not far from Santa Anita. If you’ll allow, I’ll retire along with Mr. Raffaello.”
“As you wish,” said Calvi. “Get the bag, Anton.”
Anton, with his hands in the pockets of his long black leather jacket, walked slowly toward Raffaello. As he approached, the weightlifter, his pinched nose flaring, took a step forward. Dante put a restraining hand on the weightlifter’s arm and he stepped back. Anton halted before Raffaello and stared at him for a moment. Then his gaze dropped with embarrassment. Anton reached down for the black leather satchel in Raffaello’s hand. Raffaello stuck out his jaw and shook his head even as he let go. Anton Schmidt, with bag in hand, backed away a few steps before turning around. He brought the black bag straight to Calvi. Without looking inside, Anton opened it.
Calvi examined the contents for a moment before reaching into the bag and pulling out what at first looked to be a small metallic sculpture two feet high. The metal was dented and scratched but it had been cleaned and polished so that it gleamed even in the morning shadow. The dark wooden base of the object supported a large brass cup atop of which crouched the figure of a man, his front knee bent, his rear leg straight, his right arm hoisting a shiny metal ball. A bowling ball? I realized only then that this was a bowling trophy. Calvi held the trophy high, examining it as if it were a priceless jewel, and his face glowed with a satisfaction as bright as the polished brass. Then he placed the trophy back into the leather bag. Anton closed it. With the black satchel tightly in his grip, Anton regained his position at the end of our line.
Calvi took a cigar and a gold lighter from his inside jacket pocket. He flicked to life a flame and sucked it into the tobacco until a plume of smoke was born. “And so it is done,” he said.
“I have a home in Cape May,” said Raffaello. “I was planning to retire there and spend the last years of my life painting the ocean in all four of its seasons.”
Calvi sucked on his cigar for a moment before saying, “Too close.”
Raffaello nodded and gave a grudging smile. “I understand. You need freedom from my influence. You are showing your wisdom as a leader already, Gualtieri. Maybe I’ll go to Boca Raton, in your blessed Florida.”
“Too close,” said Calvi.
“I have relatives in Sedona, Arizona. The desert too can be magnificent on canvas.”
“Too close.”
“Yes,” said Raffaello, nodding again. “This country is maybe too small for us together. I have not been to Sicily since I was a boy. It is time I return. The light there, I remember, was unearthly beautiful.”
Calvi took another suck at his cigar and let the vile smoke out slowly. “Too close.”
“Tell me, Gualtieri. What about Australia?”
“Too close.”
Raffaello leaned toward Calvi and squinted his eyes as if peering at a strange vision. “Yes, now I see. Now I understand fully.”
“You should have killed me when you had the chance, Enrico,” said Calvi. He took a step forward and raised his arms and shouted as if in invocation to the heavens, “A-whore-a!”
I cringed from the fusillade I expected to thunder down upon the four men and the Cadillac but instead of thunder there was a towering silence.
Calvi looked up to the decks of the carriers, first to his left then to his right, again raised his arms and shouted, “A-whore-a!”
Nothing.
Calvi turned to Anton, who shrugged. Peter Cressi, next to me, stepped back and stared up. The Cuban looked around, dazed.
“Now, you idiots!” shouted Calvi. “Now!”
A sound, a dragging scraping sound, came from the flight deck of the Saratoga to our left and when we looked up we saw someone, finally, but he wasn’t standing, he was falling, slowly it seemed, twisting in the air like a drunken diver, spinning almost gracefully as he fell until his body slammed into the cement surface of the pier with a dull, lifeless thud, punctuated by the sudden cracking of bones.
Another scraping to the right and a body rolling off the deck of the Forrestal, like a child down a hill, rolling down down, arms flailing, legs splitting, back arching from the fall and then the cracking thud, followed by another, softer sound from the body returning to the pier after its bounce. And even before that second soft sound reached us with all its portent, another scraping and another body falling, the feet revolving slowly to the sky and the head dropping until its dive was stopped by the urgency of the pier and this time there was no bounce.
From the left another body, from the right another, this one hitting not cement but water, and from the hammerhead crane behind the Cadillac still another, all falling lifeless to the street, with thuds and cracks like chicken bones being broken and sucked of their marrow, or into the river with quiet splashes, and soon it was raining bodies on Pier Four and in the middle of this storm of the macabre, Raffaello, still leaning on his cane, said in a soft voice that cut like the tone of a triangle through the strains of death, “You’re right, Gualtieri. I should have killed you.”
Suddenly a pop came from the hammerhead crane behind the Cadillac and the Cuban’s throat exploded in blood and he collapsed to the cement like a sack of cane sugar. Before I could recover from the sight another shot cracked through the sound of breaking bodies and Anton Schmidt lay sprawled on the pier beside Calvi, the black satchel still gripped in his pale hand.
After the two shots the sounds of falling corpses and breaking bones subsided and there was a moment of silence on Pier Four.
Calvi reached a hand into his raincoat before shrugging. “Maybe the thing on the expressway, it was a bit much, hey, Enrico?”
“You could never have handled the trophy, Gualtieri,” said Raffaello. “You’re too small. You’re a midget. Even on top a mountain you’d still be a midget. But think of it this way, you greedy dog. Whatever hell we’re sending you to, at least it’s not Florida.”
Before Calvi could pull the pistol out of the raincoat, gunfire erupted from the Saratoga and the Forrestal and the crane and Calvi’s chest writhed red as if a horde of vile stinging insects were struggling to escape the corpse as it fell.
I couldn’t even register all that was happening right next to me on the pier before I felt an arm wrap with a jerk around my throat and a gun press to my head. The arm tightened and I was pulled backward.
Peter Cressi, his breath hot and fast in my ear, shouted, “You take me then you’re also taking Vic.”
I was so stunned by the maneuver it took me a moment to realize I couldn’t breathe. I started yanking at the arm around my throat but it was like steel.
“Pietro, Pietro,” said Raffaello, shaking his head. “You never were the brightest, Pietro.”
“He’s a lawyer,” shouted Dante. “A fucking lawyer. You think you can threaten us by taking as a hostage a lawyer?”
Cressi stopped backing up. The arm around my throat tightened. I could feel the blackness starting to expand in my brain even as the gun barrel left my temple and pointed at the Cadillac. I stopped scrabbling at the arm and went limp as I reached into my pants pocket and gripped the handle of the pairing knife. With a last burst of conscious energy I pulled it out and jabbed it as hard as I could into the forearm squeezing my neck.
There was a scream, whose I wasn’t then sure, and I dropped to the pavement, grappling at my throat and letting out a constricted wheeze as the scream raced away from me. Then there were two shots and the whine of angry bees over my head. The screaming suddenly stopped. I heard still another thud of death and the scrape of Peter Cressi’s monster gun skidding freely along the cement of Pier Four.
On my knees, on the cement, my hands still at my throat, I looked up and saw Earl Dante, smiling his evil smile, pointing a gun straight at my head, the smoke still curling upward from the barrel in a narrow twist. And as if that sight wasn’t scary enough, from out of the corner of my eye I saw a dead man rising.
IT WAS ANTON SCHMIDT, rising to his knees, still holding onto the black leather bag with one hand, feeling around the cement of the pier for his glasses with the other. I stared at him in amazement, waiting for a bullet to take him down again as he found his glasses and then his hat and stood, dusting himself off. His thick glasses finally on, he looked around and saw me kneeling on the cement, with Dante’s gun trained at my face. He prudently backed away.
“I received a call last night on my private number,” said Raffaello. “It was from a Morris something-or-other.”
I started to yammer about Calvi coming at me in my apartment and my having no choice but to go along when Raffaello silenced me with his words.
“You gave my private number to a stranger,” he said softly. “You involved a stranger in our business.”
I pressed my palms to the ground and pushed myself to standing. “Morris is absolutely trustworthy,” I said. “I would trust him with my life.”
“That’s exactly what you did,” said Raffaello.
I almost sagged back to the ground with fear before I saw Raffaello smile and Dante lower his gun.
“This Morris person,” said Raffaello, “he told me that you had signaled him that this meeting was a betrayal. That was very brave of you to get out such a signal. As you can tell, I had matters already well in hand.” He nodded toward Anton Schmidt. “But still, such loyalty as you have shown, it touches my heart. Of course Earl, he is disappointed. He so wanted to kill you.”
Dante shrugged as he put away his gun.
“What happened here never happened,” said Raffaello.
“It’s a bit messy for that, isn’t it?” I said, gesturing to the street of corpses.
“It will be taken care of. You are to leave now. Our agreement is satisfied. Simply finish what you must finish and then you and Earl will meet to settle what needs to be settled and then you are free of us. Word of this may get out, Victor, but let’s hope not from you, or Earl will no longer be disappointed.”
He turned weakly toward the car. I noticed now that Lenny was holding onto his arm, as if even simply standing for Raffaello was a struggle. Anton Schmidt, with the black leather bag, and Dante and the weightlifter walked around the car. The doors opened and they entered the Cadillac while Raffaello was still maneuvering toward his door. I hadn’t realized before how serious his injury had been from the firefight on the Schuylkill. It wouldn’t be long before the trophy passed to Dante. Well, he could have it.
Just as Raffaello was about to step into the car he stopped, and turned again toward me. “Your friend, this Morris,” said Raffaello. “He seemed an interesting man. It is a precious thing to have somebody who you trust so completely. Maybe someday I will meet this friend. I suspect we have much in common. Do you know if he paints?”
“I don’t, actually.”
“Ask him for me,” said Raffaello before dropping into his seat in the car. Lenny closed the door behind him, entered the car himself, and started the engine. The Cadillac turned toward me, wheeled past, and slowly left Pier Four.
I followed it out with my eyes and then, for the first time since we began our walk down Pier Four, I thought about Caroline in the car with that Cuban. I started running.
Off the pier I turned left and sprinted to the dry dock where I turned right and ran along its edge to where we had left the car and then bit by bit I slowed myself down until I stopped and spun in frustration.
I spit out an obscenity.
The four garbage trucks that I had seen parked on the side of the road with their cabs empty now passed me by and turned left at the wharf on their way to Pier Four, their cabs no longer empty, men in overalls hanging onto the backs. The cleanup was about to begin, but that wasn’t what had set me to cursing.
What had set me to cursing was that the black Lincoln that should have been parked right there where I stood was gone.
“PSSSST.”
I twisted around.
“Psssst. Victor. Over here.”
It came from down the way a bit, from behind one of the green and yellow cranes that tended to the dry dock. I walked cautiously toward the sound.
“Victor. You can’t know how relieved I am to see your tuchis, Victor.” Morris Kapustin stepped out from behind the crane. “Such shooting I haven’t heard since the war. I was so worried about you. What was it that was happening there?”
“Where’s Caroline, Morris?”
“I left her with the car, of course. With Beth. How was I to know what it was that was happening, who was shooting who or what?”
When I came up to him I didn’t stop to say anything more, I just reached down and gave him a huge hug.
“Couldn’t you maybe just thank me instead of this hugging business,” said Morris, still tight in my grip. “Me, I’m not the new man they are all talking about.”
“You saved my life.”
“I did, yes. But such is my job and really, really, it wasn’t much. Just a phone call and following such a car as that through the gate, it really wasn’t much. It was your friend, Miss Beth, who did most of it. I gave her the job of watching your apartment. It was getting late and I was tired and I needed some pudding. Rosalie, mine wife Rosalie, she made for me last night some tapioca. So Beth is the one you should be hugging. Now let go already, Victor, before I get a hernia.”
I released him and looked down to the wharf, where the garbage trucks had disappeared on their way to the pier. “This is a dangerous place to stay.”
“This way,” he said, leading me across a street and through an alleyway between warehouses. “I hid the car as best I could.”
“What about the man who was with Caroline?” I asked.
“What was I to do? I didn’t know what I was to do so what I did is I put him in the trunk. I figured later we’ll figure out what is to be done with him.”
“But he had an automatic assault rifle.”
“Yes, well, a rifle in the hand it is powerful, but not as powerful as a gun at the head, no? So the rifle, now, it is in the river and the man he is in the trunk.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.
The Lincoln sat in a small parking area behind a deserted factory building, the engine still running. Morris’s battered gray Honda rested beside it. Caroline and Beth were leaning together on the side of the Lincoln. When Beth saw me she ran up to me and hugged me and I hugged back.
“Are you all right?”
“I think so.”
“What happened?”
“I survived is what happened. And we’re going to need to find ourselves a new clientele.”
I looked over to Caroline, still leaning on the car, looking at me, her arms wrapped so tight against her chest it was a wonder she could breathe.
“How is she?” I asked softly.
“Shaken,” said Beth. “Tired. Mute.”
I let go of Beth and walked hesitantly up to Caroline.
She looked at me for a long moment and then took two steps forward and put her arms around my neck and kissed me.
“Is it over?” she asked in a voice as soft as a whisper.
“That part at least.”
“What now?”
“I have something more to show you, back at the apartment.”
“I’m still shaking.”
“Just this one thing more.”
“I haven’t slept.”
“It’s back at my apartment.”
“Let’s just pretend it’s over, everything is over. Please?”
She looked at me with pleading eyes but I just shook my head. I didn’t tell her just then what was most pressing on my mind, not there, in the middle of the Naval Shipyard, with the bodies being thrown into the garbage trucks from a pier just a few hundred yards away. I didn’t tell her what Calvi had said about her father, how he was Calvi’s patron, the one who had paid for Jacqueline’s death and for Edward’s death and for the retrieval of the box and for her protection. I didn’t tell her that, not there, not yet, and I wasn’t sure I ever would. I just told her we needed to see something at my apartment and that she should get into the car.
Morris had hot-wired the Lincoln’s engine, which was why it was still running. He and Beth had followed us to the Naval Shipyard in Morris’s Honda but it was Caroline and I who followed Morris and Beth out, alongside the dry docks, back across the lift bridge that forded the mouth of the reserve basin, under I-95 and through the gate to Penrose Avenue. Morris took a right onto Penrose and then another right onto Pattison and we followed that to the Spectrum, where the Flyers win and the Sixers lose. Morris stopped the Honda right in front and I stopped behind him. The sign said “TOW AWAY ZONE,” which was fine by me. Let the car sit in a police lot while they tried to figure out what had happened to its owner. I pulled apart the wires to kill the engine, wiped down the steering wheel and door handles to obliterate my prints, and flipped up the inside lock of the trunk. The Cuban leaped out and, without saying a word, ran, arms pumping like an Olympic sprinter. Raffaello might have had different plans for him, but I didn’t work for Raffaello anymore.
As soon as Caroline and I entered my apartment I opened all the windows to air the place out. The metal box still sat on the table. As I was putting the cushions back on the sofa, Calvi’s black cat, Sam, leaped from underneath a lamp. I had forgotten it was still there. It no longer had a master, it no longer had a home. It stood between Caroline and me and inspected us, haughty, still, in its impoverishment.
“It’s an orphan now,” I said. “What are we going to do with it?”
She lit a cigarette and looked down at it for a while and then, giving it a wide berth, she walked around it and into my kitchen. I thought she might be looking for a cleaver to butcher it to death but what she took out instead was a can of tuna fish from my pantry and a carton of milk from the fridge. She set out two bowls onto the floor. The milk clumped like loose cottage cheese when she poured it but the cat didn’t seem to mind. Caroline stood back and watched it eat from afar and I watched her watch it.
“I never thought I’d see you be nice to a cat,” I said.
“After what we’ve just been through, the little monsters seem almost benign. Almost.”
When we were both showered and dressed in fresh clothes, me in jeans and a white tee shirt, her in a pair of her leggings and one of my white work shirts, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup, we sat down together on the couch, leaning into each other, as if both of us at that moment needed the physical presence of the other. Thinking of her as she fed the cat, the first act of kindness I had ever seen from her, I wondered, maybe, if after everything, maybe, we might actually be right for each other. Maybe we could make whatever was going on between us work. We were both lonely, I knew that, and we were together now and maybe that was enough. And she was stinking rich, so maybe that was more than enough. We sat quietly together, not so much embracing as leaning one on the other, watching the cat as he sat near our feet and licked its paw. Then I reached down and pulled my pack onto my lap.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” I said, drawing from the pack the bundles of letters I had found in the locked drawer of the breakfront. “I found these at the old Poole house.”
“All right.”
“I think we should read them.”
“All right.”
“We can do this later if you want.”
“No, let’s do it now.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to run away anymore?”
“Of course I want to run away. I’m desperate to run away. But wherever I ran I’d still be a Reddman. I can’t control who I am, can I?”
“No.”
“And I can’t control who wants to kill me because of it, can I?”
“Apparently not.”
“It’s funny what you learn at the wrong end of a gun. You told me the men who killed my sister and brother are dead, but we still don’t know who hired them. Maybe the answer is somewhere in these letters.”
“Maybe.”
“And maybe the one good thing I’ve been looking for is in there, too.”
“Maybe.”
She waited a moment, looking down at Sam the cat, steeling herself. “Or maybe it’s just more shit.”
“Probably.”
She waited a moment more and then, hesitantly, she reached for one of the bundles. She untied the old ribbon carefully and looked through the letters, one by one, before passing them, one by one, to me. “These are love letters,” she said. “From an Emma.”
“They must be from Emma Poole. Who are they to?”
“They are each addressed ‘To My Love,’ without a name,” she said. “Listen to this. ‘To feel your hand on my face, your lips on my cheek, to feel your warmth and your weight surround me, my darling, my love, my life can hold no more meaning than this. You swear your devotion over and over and I place my fingers on your lips because to speak of the future leaks the rapture from our present. Love me now, fully and completely, love me today, not forever, love me in this moment and let the future be damned.’ ”
I took one of the letters she had passed to me and began to read aloud. “ ‘If we are cursed with this passion, then let the curse torch our souls until the fire consumes itself and is extinguished. I fall not into happiness with you, my beloved, for that is impossible for cursed souls such as we, but instead in your arms I rise to the transcendent ecstasy of which the great men sing and if it be necessarily short-lived than still I wouldn’t treasure it any less or bargain even a minute’s worth for something longer lasting but tepid to the touch.’ ”
She dropped the letter in her hand and picked up another. “ ‘Glorious, glorious, glorious is your breath and your touch and the rich warm smell of you, your skin, your eyes, your scar, the power in your legs, the rosy warmth of your mouth. I want you to devour me, my love, every inch of me, I lie in bed at night and imagine it and only delirious joy comes from the imagining. Lie with me, now, this instant, wait no longer, come to me and lie with me, now, your arms around me, now, your mouth on my breasts, now, the wild smell of your hair, now, your teeth on my neck, now, devour me my love my love my love devour me now.’ ”
I stared at Caroline as she read the words and was not surprised to see a tear. At least some of what she was feeling I felt also. I moved closer to her and put my arm around her.
“Who are the letters to?” I asked.
“They don’t say, as if she was purposefully hiding his identity. But whoever it was we know how it ended.”
“Yes, we do,” I said. Whomever Emma Poole had written these paeans of love to had been the one to impregnate her and desert her, to leave her alone as she nursed her dying mother while her stomach swelled.
“Get rid of them,” she said as she grabbed the letters from my hand and threw them on the floor. The cat leaped away for a moment and then jumped onto the sofa next to Caroline, who barely flinched. “I can’t bear to read them. I feel like a voyeur.”
“These were written more than seventy years ago,” I said. “It’s like looking through a powerful telescope and seeing light that was emitted eons ago by stars that are already dead.”
“It’s not right,” she said. “Whatever she felt for the man who deserted her it has nothing to do with us. The emotions were hers and hers alone. We’re trespassing.”
“There’s another letter,” I said. “It’s not from Emma.” I reached into the pack and pulled out the letter entitled: To My Child on the Attainment of Majority.
She hesitated for a moment and then took the envelope. She unwrapped the string that bound the envelope shut and pulled out a sheaf of pages written in a masculine hand. She quickly looked at the last page to find the signature.
“It’s from my grandfather,” she said. “It’s written to my father. Why was this letter with the others?”
I shrugged my ignorance.
She read the first lines out loud. “April 6, 1923. To my child. By the time you read this I will be dead.”
She looked at me and shook her head but even while she was shaking her head she trained her gaze back onto the letter and started reading again, though this time to herself. When she was finished with the first page she handed it to me and went onto the second. In that way I trailed behind her by a few minutes, as if my telescope was a few hundred light seconds farther away from the source of the dead star’s light than hers, and my emotional response similarly lagged behind.
It is hard to describe the effect of that letter. It solved mysteries that spanned the century, resolved questions that were lingering in our minds, threw into even greater highlight the terrors that stalked the Reddmans and the Pooles. But even with our out-of-synch emotional responses a peculiar reaction took place between the two of us, Caroline and me, in our separate worlds, as we read the letter. Slowly we drifted apart, not just emotionally, but physically too. Where we had been leaning upon one another when we started reading the letter, our sides and legs melded as though we were trying to become one, as the words drifted through us we separated. First there was just a lessening of pressure, then a gap developed that turned into an inch and then into a foot and then into a yard and finally, while Caroline was sobbing quietly, Sam the cat curled in her lap, and I was reading the last lines and the bold signature of Christian Shaw, Caroline was leaning over one arm of the couch and I was leaning over the other, as far apart as two could be on one piece of furniture. Had the sofa’s arms not been there I fear we would have tumbled away from each other until we slammed like rolling balls into opposite walls.
What caused this fierce magnetic repellence was not any great puzzle. What had come between Caroline and me so strongly in that moment was what had never been between us and the letter was the most vivid confirmation of that yet. Christian Shaw’s letter to his child gave us something that was completely unexpected in this tale of deception and betrayal and murder and desertion and revenge, it gave us an unexpected burst of hope. The letter gave us hope because what Caroline Shaw had believed to be a fiction had been shown to be real, alive, transforming, redeeming. The hope was unexpected because who could have thought that in the middle of the cursed entwining of the Reddmans and the Pooles we would find, like a ruby in a mountain of manure, a transcendent and powerful love.
April 6, 1923
To My Child,
By the time you read this I will be dead. My death will have been a good thing for me and richly deserved, but doubtless hard on you. My father too died when I was young. He was a stern man, I’ve been told, a harsh man, prone to fits of violence. But as he died before I could remember anything about him, I imagine him as a fine and gentle man. I imagine him teaching me to ride. We would have hunted together. He would have given me his rifle to shoot. I imagine him finer and more gentle with me than the real man ever could have been. It is from this imagining that I feel the great gap in my life. I would not mourn him so keenly had he just once reached from his grave and slapped me on the face.
I have been the worst of scoundrels, the lowest of cowards. I take no pride in these facts, nor utter shame. It is simple truth and you should know the truth about your father. You may have learned that I was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for my brief adventure in the army but do not be deceived as to any heroism on my part. The medal resides in the silt at the bottom of the pond beneath the Reddman estate, Veritas, where I threw it. It is home among the frog excrement and the rotting carcasses of fish. I joined the army to escape what I had made of my life. Do not think that war is glamorous or good, child, but I welcomed it as a friend for what it was, another way to die.
In May of 1918 I led a counterattack from a trench near a village called Cantigny. It was raining and fog was rising. The muffled sounds of war were unbearably close even before the Germans attacked. It was our first battle. The Germans advanced in a wave of ferocity and we beat them back with rapid fire. It was a magnificent and ugly thing to see. Young German men fell and cried out from the mud where they fell and we maintained our fire. Then the runner brought orders for the counterattack.
I wasted no time. I was first over the top. How many trailed my wake and died I cannot know. Shells with a soft sickly whistle dropped and fell gently to the ground. The fog rose thick and green. My eyes burned. My lungs boiled. The Germans we had shot writhed red in the sucking mud. They cried out from the vile green fog through which I charged. I charged not for honor or for Pershing or for France. I charged for death. The artillery, louder now, frightful, our own, rained down like a blessing from on high. We succeeded in running the Germans from their lines in Cantigny and I succeeded, too, in my personal mission. Scraps of metal from the great Allied guns, spinning through the air like locusts with shark’s teeth, sliced their welcome way into my body. I tried to lift my arms in gratitude but only one would rise and I fell face first into the mire.
Two stretcher bearers found me. I begged them to let me sleep but they ignored me and lifted me from the mud. The ambulance raced me to a mobile surgery unit where the doctors saved my life and took off what was left of my arm. Within half an hour they were cutting apart the next poor wretch. I was shipped off to Number 24 General Hospital, Étaples. It was in Étaples, on the northern coast of France, that I met Magee.
Number 24 General Hospital swarmed with wounded. Germans filled whole wards, so packed even the floors were crowded with their stretchers. Cries of “Schwester, Schwester,” rushed down the hallways. Other wards were stocked with our troops, the mangled, the maimed, the sufferers of trench fever, relatively cheery despite their feverish chills. Many in my unit hadn’t loused themselves, hoping a bite would send them to just such a ward. Because of the crowding, the sisters had cleared offices to hold patients and I was placed in one of those.
The small room held beds for three soldiers. My lungs were scarred from the gas. I could barely breathe. The stitches in my shoulder had grown infected and the nurses drained pus from the swelling each day. Still, I was the healthiest of the three roommates. The man to my right was swathed in bandages and never spoke my entire time in Number 24 General Hospital. He was fed by the sisters and moaned quietly in the late of night. Every once in a while the doctors would come in and cut off more of his body and bandage him up again. The man to my left had a gut wound that oozed red and then green and then, as he shouted through the night, burst and his insides slid out of him and with a quiet relief he died. They brought a stretcher for him and covered him with a flag. I struggled to stand as they carried him out, which was the custom. That evening, in the low light of dusk, they brought in someone new.
The orderlies propped him up on five pillows in the bed. They raised him by tape and webbing, which passed under his torso and was attached to the bedposts. The orderlies didn’t joke like they normally did as they worked. The patient smelled of rotting meat and rancid oil and the stench of him flooded through the room. He already seemed more dead than the soldier with the gut wound. Before they left, the orderlies placed a canvas screen between his bed and mine. For three days the sisters came and woke him to feed him soup or change his bedpans. The rest of the time he slept. The only sounds in the room were the soft moans of the soldier to my right and the creaking of the webbing beneath the new patient’s torso and my own shallow wheeze.
One morning, before the sisters came into our room, I heard a soft voice. “Hey, buddy, scratch my arm, will you? My right arm.” I sat up, unsure from which of my roommates the voice had come. “Scratch my arm, will you, buddy, it’s itching like hell.”
The voice, I realized, was coming from the new man. I tilted myself out of bed, struggled to my feet, and walked around the screen. When the soldier came into view I stopped and stared. For a moment I forgot to breathe. He was an absolute horror. The arm that he wanted me to scratch was gone, but that was not all. His head was facing the ceiling and I stared at the side of his face, but he had no profile. His nose had been shot off. The entire top part of his face, including his eyes, had been mauled. Fluid leaked clear from his bandages. Of his limbs, all that remained was his left leg. His swollen lips shook uncontrollably as he breathed. The smell of rot rose thick and noxious about him.
“What about it? Scratch my arm, will you?”
“The surgeons took off your arm,” I said. “Like they took off mine.”
“Then how come I still feel it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I feel mine too.”
“What else did they take off me, hey, buddy?” he asked.
“Your other arm,” I said. “And your right leg.”
“I knew my eyes were gone,” he said. “But I didn’t know the rest. Funny thing is the left leg is the only one I can’t feel. How’s the face? Do I still got my looks?”
I examined his mangled features and knew I should feel pity but felt none. “They blew off your nose,” I said.
“Ahh, Christ. No eyes, no arms, no leg, no nose. The bastards.” He took a deep breath. “Don’t that beat it just to hell. Hey, buddy, can you do me a favor? Can you get me a glass of water?”
On the windowsill a pitcher and glasses were set out. I poured water into one of the glasses. I brought the glass to his swollen lips. He choked on the water and coughed as I poured it in. Much of it ran down his chin.
“Thanks, buddy,” he said. “Hey, can you do me another favor and scratch my side, my left side? It’s like I rolled around in poison ivy down there.”
I put the glass down on a table by his bed and stepped toward him to scratch his side. He gave me directions, higher or lower, and I followed them. His skin was scabby and dry.
“That feels great,” he said. “Hey, buddy, one more favor. How about it? Will you kill me, buddy? Will you, please? Anything I got is yours, buddy, if you’ll just kill me. Please, please, buddy. Kill me kill me kill me won’t you kill me, buddy?”
I backed away from him as he spoke. I backed into the wall. He kept pleading until a nurse came into the room with a pot of water and cloths.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Visiting,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said. “Corporal Magee is very ill. He needs his rest.”
I went back to my cot as she began to wipe down Magee’s torso with a wet towel.
Corporal Magee was quiet for much of the day, sleeping. Later, when we were left alone by the sisters, he started up again. “Hey, buddy. Will you kill me, buddy, will you, please?” I told him to shut up, but he kept on begging me to kill him.
“Why should you get to die,” I said, finally, “with the rest of us stuck here alive?”
“What are you missing?” he asked.
I told him.
“Just the arm, are you kidding?” he said. “I had just an arm gone I’d be dancing in the street with my girl, celebrating.”
“Leave me alone,” I said.
He was quiet for another day, for two maybe. I couldn’t stop thinking about him lying there beside me like that. Even when they came in to cut some more off the mute soldier to my right I thought of Magee. When he started in again, begging me to kill him, I said, “Tell me about her.”
“Who?”
“Your girl. You said you have a girl.
“I don’t got nothing anymore. The Huns they blew her away with the rest of my body.”
“But you had a girl.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m asking.”
He was quiet for a long moment. I thought he had gone to sleep. “Her name,” he said finally, “is Glennis. The prettiest girl on Price Hill.” He told me about her, how pretty she was, how kind, how gay, and in the telling he also told me about his life back in Cincinnati. He worked as a typesetter on the Enquirer. He went to ball games at Redland Field and himself played second base in Cincinnati’s entry in the Union Printers’ International Baseball Federation. He went to church and helped with collections for the poor. Nights he spent at Weilert’s Beer Garden on Vine Street or sitting with Glennis on her porch on Price Hill. As he spoke of his good and honest life before the war I felt a bitter taste. He told it all to me and then, after the telling, he complained that it was gone. Once again he asked me to kill him.
“No,” I told him. “You don’t deserve to die.”
“I don’t deserve to live like this.”
“Maybe not, but I won’t kill you.”
“Well, the hell with you,” he said.
Later that week the colonel came to give us our medals. There was a little ceremony in my room and I stood while an aide gave the colonel the box and the colonel extracted the cross with the eagle’s wings reaching high and pinned it onto my pajamas. “For outstanding gallantry in the battle of Cantigny,” he said. The sight of the dark metal and the red, white, and blue ribbon made me sick. Magee was given a written commendation from his commanding officer for his bravery at Cantigny. I learned there that he had been in the wave of soldiers following me in my mad counterattack.
Two nights later he began begging me again.
“No,” I said. “We’re all stuck here, why should you break out and not the rest of us?”
“I’d kill you if I could, buddy. I swear I would.”
“But you can’t, can you?”
“Blame me for that, why don’t you, you son of a bitch.”
“You just have to suffer then along with the rest of us.”
“Tell me all about your suffering, buddy. Tell me how terrible it is to see. Tell me how repulsive it is that you have a hand to feed yourself. Tell me how horrible it is that you are free to walk the corridors whenever you want. From where I’m lying, you’ve got nothing to die about.”
“Shut up,” I said. I was angry. Bitter and angry and furious at him for his innocence. “Shut up and I’ll tell you what I have to die about and you’ll be glad as hell you’re not me.” And so I told him what I had never told another soul, and what I am telling you, my child, as a slap from the grave.
My family owned a fashionable store on Market Street in Philadelphia. We were always of money but while I was at Yale the store found itself in financial distress. My father died when I was an infant and it was up to my uncle and me to save the store. My uncle fought with the bank. I decided on an easier route and became engaged to a woman whose father was a vicious businessman but extremely wealthy. My fiancée’s father agreed that after the wedding he would buy a portion of the business, satisfy the banks, and save the company. The woman I was to marry was pretty and proper and harmless enough. It seemed to be an amicable enough business transaction.
While planning for our wedding, I surprisingly found myself in love. Unfortunately I fell in love not with my fiancée but with her younger sister and she loved me back. By then, of course, arrangements had been made and to explain my infidelity to the father would have ruined any chance for the family company to survive. I had no choice but to go through with the wedding. Even so I hadn’t the strength to give up my love and, inevitably, she found herself pregnant.
In the one truly brave act of my life I determined to run off with the younger sister and endure the wrath of both our families. It was but a few days before the wedding that we arranged to meet in the back of her house. But first, she told me, she needed to tell her sister, my fiancée, to explain to her everything. It was raining that night, and dark. I waited on the porch of the old caretaker’s cottage at the bottom of the hill, unoccupied that night, for my beloved to come for me with her suitcase. Finally, I saw a female figure descend the slope. My heart leaped with excitement, but it wasn’t the younger sister coming for me. It wasn’t the younger sister at all.
My fiancée stepped noiselessly toward me in the night. A rain cape was swept about her shoulders. She clasped her hands before her. In the darkness her face seemed to glow with an unearthly dark light.
“My darling,” she said. “There has been a terrible accident.”
With utter dread I followed her up the hill. The rain streamed down my face. Water soaked into my shoes. My coat was useless against the deluge. I followed my fiancée to the spot on the rear lawn, beside a statue of Aphrodite, where she had planned that we would be married. There was a plot of freshly dug earth to be planted with flowers for our wedding. Atop the plot was the younger sister, my beloved, sprawled beside the suitcase she had packed only that night for our elopement. The blade of a shovel had sliced through her neck and into the soft ground. The shovel’s wooden handle rose like a marker from the bloody earth.
I fell to my knees in the dirt and wept over her. I reached down and hugged her bloody garment to my chest. I placed my cheek on the dead girl’s belly and felt the cold where there had once been two precious lives.
While I was weeping my pretty and proper fiancée explained to me the scandal and the ruin that would erupt if the world learned of my affair with the younger sister, of her pregnancy, of the horrible accident and the woman’s death. I could still save my family’s business, she said, save myself from the scandal, save the younger sister’s memory from disgrace. I could still save myself, she said, from a life of poverty. It took me no more than ten minutes to decide. I wrapped my beloved in my coat and dug a grave with the shovel, the shovel, the shovel, I dug a grave with the shovel and buried the suitcase and my beloved beneath mounds of wet black earth.
I was married in a ceremony I don’t remember for all the brandy. My bride and I left for Europe the next day on a great ocean liner for a four-month journey that I don’t remember. The only sights I sighted in Europe were the bars and the pubs. When we returned to Philadelphia I found a gentlemen’s drinking club where I could hide from my wife and houses where I could consort with my fellow whores. We had a son, my wife and I, borne of deception and anger and violence, and after that I had nothing to do with either. Life in Philadelphia had grown far too bleak to bear. And as a topper, as should have been expected, my dear father-in-law sold off the family business from underneath us, taking another fortune for himself and ruining my uncle in the process. When the opportunity to join the army and die in France arose I jumped for it, joining the first recruiting march with uncharacteristic gusto. In my first battle, at the first opportunity, in my first counterattack, I leaped over the trench and charged into the heat of the enemy’s fire. How cursed was I to survive a hero.
I told all this to Corporal Magee at Number 24 General Hospital and he remained silent for the whole of the telling. “If I had an arm,” he said finally without a hint of rancor, “just one arm, I’d do you the favor of killing you. But I wouldn’t trade with you for all the eyes in China.”
My fever broke the night I told my story to Magee. The infection in my stump began to subside. I could breathe more deeply, as if a dead body had been removed from my chest.
Magee and I became close friends. His wounds had stopped their slow ooze and his rotted smell had all but disappeared. He would tell me more about his good life in Cincinnati. I would read out loud to him from the newspapers, about Pershing’s eastern advance, or from the occasional letter sent by his girl, Glennis. I would also faithfully transcribe his lies about his condition in his letters back to her. “The doctors expect I’ll be good as new within a few months. Make sure they keep my job open for me at the Enquirer because you and I are going to celebrate my return in grand style.” I read to him from the Bible. I thought the suffering of a good man would ease his torment but the Book of Job was not what he wanted to hear. He preferred a more active hero, so I read to him of Samson. “Let me die with the Philistines,” Samson begged of the Lord and Magee liked that part best of all. When the sister came in with his meals, I would take his tray and, resting it on his bedside, feed him.
At odd moments we would discuss spiritual subjects. He was a lapsed Catholic, a follower of the Socialist Eugene Debs, and I was at best an agnostic, and so our discussion had no formal bounds. We talked of death, of life, of reincarnation as preached by the theosophists. He wanted to come back in his next life as the second baseman for the Cincinnati Reds. I wanted to come back as a dog. Together we fought to make sense of what had happened to us. He was a good soul with a ruined body and I was a ruined soul with a relatively healthy body. We both found in this irony much to wonder at. And through our discussions, and in our time together, I came to a strange understanding of my life.
There were moments in the night when I doubted I was still alive and only by calling out to him, and having him answer, could my corporeal existence be proven. Magee was my mirror, without him I could not be certain of my own existence. And my mirror began to show me a shocking truth. He often complained of cramping in his hands when he had no hands. He spoke of things he saw though he had no eyes. I similarly could feel my arm as solid as before even as I knew it had been cut off by the surgeons. Illusions all. I began to wonder, was the bed upon which I lay similarly an illusion, was the hospital in which I was being treated, was the war in which I was maimed, was this cursed certitude I held of my own tortured uniqueness? In the night, in the thick of the dark, as I felt my mind empty of all but the rasp of my breath, I could feel something swell and grow beneath me, something unbelievably huge, something as great as all creation. It is impossible to explain what this something was, my child, but I knew it was more than everything and that Magee and I were part of it together. We were like two leaves side by side on the branch of a great sycamore, separate and unique only if we ignored the huge mottled trunk from which our branch and a thousand like it protruded. As two leaves on the same tree, Magee and I were inextricably linked and in that I found great comfort. His goodness was part of me. My evil was shared and thereby diluted. And sometimes, at night, I could feel the linkage grow, as if my existence was flowing through my connection to Magee, reaching out to every other soul, every other thing on the earth and in the heavens. In those nights, I felt myself absolved by the totality of the universe. It was through this linkage that I came to the understanding of my life you may find so strange. Just as a sycamore thrusts out leaves, so this universe thrusts out humanity. Our individuality is mere illusion and we remain, all of us, always, part of the great tree of creation, just as it remains part of us. These are the truths I learned, my child, alongside Magee in Number 24 General Hospital, Étaples, and which I pass on, now, to you
The doctors came in twice a week. They looked at the charts clipped to our beds and discussed our cases as if we didn’t exist. One was old and tall, one was old and short. They bickered among themselves in French. After many weeks they told me my lungs had scarred over sufficiently and my infection had subsided and it was time to send me home. The coughing, they said, would never leave me but would do me no harm. They assured me I would be fine. They told Magee that there was nothing more they could do for him and that he too would soon be home. Our departures were scheduled for the following month.
As soon as they left, Magee began. “Hey, Shaw, will you do it now, please, buddy, now. I can’t have Glennis see me like this. You’re all I got. Have pity on me, Shaw, please, and kill me.”
I told him to save his breath, that now that I knew him and loved him I could never hurt him, but he didn’t stop. His begging was fierce and pathetic. One afternoon, while he was asleep, I wrote Glennis a letter of my own. I described to her Magee’s goodness and bravery and the wisdom in his heart. I also detailed his physical condition, his blindness, his ruined face, the loss of his limbs, his complete physical helplessness. Money would not be a problem, I assured her, as I had access to great sums of money to provide for Magee’s comfort, but he would need someone to care for him exhaustively. I gave it to the sister to mail while he remained asleep.
The days leading to our departure passed. We kept the windows open all day because of the heat. From outside came the sounds of a world spinning along its busy way, disastrously unaware of our injuries. I read the Samson story to Magee again. From the papers I read to him of Germany’s imminent collapse. Glennis’s letters, the ones that passed my own in transit, grew cheerier as the war news brightened. His old job was waiting for him. Christy Mathewson had lately left from managing the Reds to join the army in France. She couldn’t wait to feel his arms around her once again.
“She’s a sweet girl,” said Magee. “A good girl. She deserves better than this.”
“There is nothing better,” I said.
Five days before they were to take us out of the hospital for transport to the boat, her response to my letter arrived
Back from the war, a one-armed cripple, I took long lonely walks around Veritas. I taught my son how to shoot and gave him my father’s gun. The gun is a wide-barreled monster and it will be many years before he can handle it properly, but he clutched it like a rare and precious thing. He once asked me about the war and I told him only that it was a thing of death, not glory. One day I caught him in my room, admiring my Distinguished Service Cross. I snatched it from his hand. I bade him to follow me down the slope to the pond. “This is what this medal is worth,” I told him and then I slung it to the middle of the water. It dropped to the bottom where it deserves to remain for all eternity.
When I felt healthy enough, I took a train to Pittsburgh and then another up to Cincinnati. From the station I rode a cab to the western rise of the city, to Price Hill. Glennis was waiting for me in a trim brick house. Her parents served me a meal of schnitzel and beans and a vinegar potato salad. Her mother cut my schnitzel for me and they talked of their great admiration for Magee. After the meal I met with Glennis alone in the parlor. She was a pretty girl, freckled and red-haired, Magee had been right about that at least. I gave her his tags and his stripes and the commendation from his commanding officer for his bravery at Cantigny. She couldn’t respond, red-faced and misty-eyed from shame. The last I gave back to her was her response to my letter. “He died before it arrived,” I told her. “He never knew.”
At that point she broke into tears and flung her arms around my neck and wept. I patted her on the back and comforted her with false words. I had planned to confront her with her betrayal but some surprising streak of goodness caused me to reassure her instead. As she hugged my neck I realized the cause of my reversal was Magee himself. We had truly become one. He had imparted to me his goodness and had diluted my evil. Just as she cried on my shoulder at her loss, I cried from my gain. Without Magee, my child, I would never have had the capacity to love your mother.
You must be certain that I love your mother, deeply and truly and with all my body and spirit. I saw your mother for the first time in many years during one of my walks. She was standing on the very porch on which I had waited for word of my young beloved nine years before. She showed me a book I had given her when she was a girl. She read to me that day and every day thereafter. There is to her a forgiving grace that I found only in one other soul, in Magee. And, through my love for your mother, I feel the same sense of linkage with the universe that I felt lying in the bed beside his. Many times I wished death had taken me from this life but I was spared, I think, only so I could love your mother. It is the truest thing I have ever done. If I were to believe that I was born to a purpose, that purpose would be to love her fully and completely and unequivocally. If I have done it poorly then that is due to my own weakness rather than any defect of hers. To say that I would die for her is a poor honorific. I would live for her, to love her, to be with her through the rest of my days. You, my child, are the noble egg of that love.
Your mother is tending to your grandmother now. Your grandmother has not long to live and when the tending is over we shall leave from Veritas, together, quickly. We shall take my son and escape from all our pasts. You will be brought into this world well away from this cursed place. The doctors were wrong, my lungs would not be fine as they had promised. I grow progressively weaker. I spit up specks of bloody tissue with each cough. I am dying. I can feel the force of death upon my face just as Magee felt the force of my pillow upon his. As I granted his last wish in Number 24 General Hospital, Étaples, it was I who was reciting Samson’s last words, “Oh Lord God, remember me, I pray Thee, and strengthen me, I pray Thee, only this once.” I may not live long enough to explain all this to you and so I write this letter. I would die now, willingly, were it not for your mother, whose love I cannot bear to leave, or were it not for the joy I receive from my son and from my thoughts of you.
Remember my evil so you won’t mourn for me, my child. Remember my love for your mother and carry it always close to your heart. Remember the man who gave me the power to accept your mother’s love, for he and I will forever be a part of you, the man for whom your mother and I both agreed you would be named, Corporal Nathaniel Magee.
With all our love,
Christian Shaw