No matter what anybody says, no matter what statistics and epidemiological studies suggest and intellectual gurus pontificate, the only constant anymore is change. Human beings today commit more murders, rapes, pedophilia, kidnapings, hate crimes, acts of terrorism and just plain dishonest, dishonorable, self-serving sins against all forms of life than the free world has ever seen. Benton obsesses about it a lot. He has plenty of time to do so. Max thinks Benton, whose name he does not know, is a wacko intellectual snob, probably a professor at Harvard or MIT, and a humorless one at that. Max does not catch the occasional irony or dry-ice wit that Benton was known for when he was known, and he is known by virtually no one anymore.
Max no longer speaks a word to him, just takes his money and makes a big production of counting Benton’s change before shoving it and a slice of cheese pizza or a soda or a bag of Cracker Jacks to the “Scheiße Arsch.”
He talks about Benton every chance he gets.
“The other day he buy a pretzel,” Max told Nosmo King, the delivery man whose mystical-sounding name is the mundane result of his mother seeing No Smoking divided into No Smo king when double doors parted as she was being rolled into the delivery room to give birth to him.
“He eats his pretzel there”—Max stabbed his cigarette toward a canopy of old oaks—“and schtared up like some schzombie at that schtuck kite”—pointing the cigarette again and nodding at the tattered red kite high in the branches of an oak tree—“like it some schientific phenomenal or a schymbol from God. Maybe a UFO!”
Nosmo King was stacking cases of Fiji bottled water inside the Café Esplanade kiosk and paused, shielding his eyes from the sun as he followed the line of Max’s cigarette up to the wrecked kite.
“I remember how that used to piss me off as a kid,” Nosmo King recalled. “Get yourself a brand new kite and five minutes later it’s hung up in power lines or a fucking tree. That sure is life. One minute things are moving along good, the next, the wind blows your ass to ruination.”
Dark preoccupations and shadows from the past are what Benton feels and sees, no matter where he is or what he does. He lives inside a steel box of isolation that depresses and frustrates him so profoundly that there are moments, hours, days and weeks when he does not care about anything, has no appetite and sleeps too much. He needs sun and dreads winter. He is grateful that this early afternoon is polished so brightly that he cannot look across the Charles or up at the intense blue sky unless his eyes are blacked out, as they usually are, by sunglasses. He casually turns away from the young athletes who rule the river, pained that half a century has passed and he is no longer consumed by courage and conquest but by nonexistence, powerlessness and irrevocable loss.
I am dead, he says to himself every morning as he shaves. No matter what, I am dead.
My name is Tom. Tom Haviland. Tom Speck Haviland, born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on February 20, 1955, parents both from Salem, Massachusetts. A psychologist, retired, sick of listening to people’s problems, Social Security number yada yada yada, unmarried, homosexual, HIV-positive, like to eye gorgeous boys eying themselves in the mirrors at the gym but don’t pursue, don’t strike up conversations, don’t cruise gay bars or date. Ever, ever, ever.
It is all a lie.
Benton Wesley has lived with falsehoods and exile for six years.
He walks to a picnic table and sits on top of it, rests his arms on his knees, tightly laces his tapered fingers. His heart begins to beat rapidly with excitement and fear. Decades of a well-meant pursuit of justice have been rewarded by banishment, by a forced acceptance of the nonexistence of himself and all he has ever known. Some days, he can scarcely remember who he used to be, as he spends most of his time living in his mind, distracted by and even content with reading philosophical and spiritual books, history and poetry, and feeding the pigeons in the Public Garden, around the Frog Pond, or wherever he can blend with the locals and tourists.
He no longer owns a suit. He shaves his thick, silver hair to the scalp and wears a neatly trimmed mustache and beard, but his body and bearing belie his attempt to look sloppy and older than his years. His face is tan but smooth, his posture military-straight. He is fit and muscular, with so little body fat that his veins run under his flesh like slender tree roots pushing through soil. Boston has many health clubs and places to jog and run sprints, and he is relentless about fitness and staying light on his feet. Physical pain reminds him that he is alive. He does not allow himself patterns for when and where he runs or works out or shops or eats in restaurants.
He turns to his right as his keen peripheral vision catches the lumbering form of Pete Marino strolling in his direction. Benton’s breath catches. He is electrified by anxiety and joy but does not wave or smile. He has not communicated with his old friend and former colleague since he supposedly died and vanished into what is called a level-one protected-witness program designed uniquely for him and jointly controlled by London’s Metropolitan Police, Washington and Interpol.
Marino settles next to Benton on top of the picnic table, checking first for bird shit as he taps an unfiltered Lucky Strike from a soft pack and lights up after several sparked attempts with a disposable lighter low on fluid. Benton notes that Marino’s hands are shaking. The two men are hunched over, staring out at a sailboat gliding away from the boathouse.
“You ever go to the band shell here?” Marino asks, overcome by emotions he strangles in his throat with repeated coughs and loud sucks of smoke.
“I heard the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July,” Benton softly says. “You can’t help but hear them from where I live. How are you?”
“But you don’t come down in person.” Marino does his best to sound normal, just like the old days. “Yeah, I can understand that. Me, I probably wouldn’t, either, all those mobs of idiots, and I hate mobs of people. Like in the malls. It’s gotten to where I can’t take shopping malls no more.” He blows out a large volume of smoke, the unfiltered cigarette trembling in his thick fingers. “Least you ain’t so far away you can’t hear the music, pal. Could be worse. That’s what I always say, could be worse.”
Benton’s lean, handsome face does not register the volatile mix of thoughts and feelings inside his hidden places. His hands betray nothing. He controls his nerves and facial expressions. He is nobody’s pal and never has been, and acute grief and anger heat up powerfully. Marino called him pal because he doesn’t know what else to call him.
“I suppose I should ask you not to call me pal,” Benton comments in a bland voice.
“Sure. What the fuck.” Marino shrugs, stung.
For a big, tough cop, he is overly sensitive and takes the world personally. His capacity for interpreting an honest remark as an insult wearies those who know him and terrifies those who don’t. Marino has a temper from hell, and his fury knows no bounds when he is sufficiently pissed off. The only reason he hasn’t been killed during one of his outbursts is that his physical strength and survival skills are mixed with a strong dose of experience and luck. Even so, chance is never favorable forever. As Benton takes in every detail of Marino’s appearance, he entertains the same worries from the past. He’s going to be dropped by a bullet or a stroke one of these days.
“I sure as hell can’t call you Tom,” Marino counters. “Not to your face.”
“Be my guest. I’m used to it.”
Marino’s jaw muscles flex as he smokes.
“You taking care of yourself better or worse since I saw you last?” Benton stares down at his relaxed hands between his knees. His fingers slowly toy with a splinter he picks off the picnic table. “Although I think the answer is obvious,” he adds with a slight smile.
Sweat rolls down Marino’s balding head. He shifts his position, conscious of the 40-caliber Glock pistol strapped under his huge left arm and his desire to snatch off his bowling team windbreaker. Beneath it he is soaking wet, his heart beating hard, the dark-blue nylon absorbing sunlight like a sponge. He exhales a cloud of smoke, ho
pes it doesn’t drift in Benton’s direction. It does. Right in his face.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. I can’t call you Tom.”
Marino ogles a young woman in spandex shorts and sports bra trotting by, breasts bobbing. He can’t get used to females running around in bras, and for a veteran homicide detective who has seen hundreds of naked women in his day—most of them in strip joints or on top of autopsy tables—he is surprisingly awed when he sees a female so scantily clad in public that he knows exactly what she looks like naked, right down to the size of her nipples.
“My daughter ran around like that, I’d kill her,” he mutters, staring at the retreating pumping buttocks.
“The world is grateful you don’t have a daughter, Pete,” Benton remarks.
“No shit. Especially if she got my looks. Probably would’ve ended up some dyke professional wrestler.”
“I don’t know about that. Rumor has it, you used to be quite the hunk.”
Benton has seen photographs of Marino when he was a uniformed cop for NYPD in the long-ago days of his fledgling career. He was broad-shouldered and fine-looking, a real stud, before he let himself go to hell, unrelenting in his self-abuse, as if he hates his own flesh, as if he wants to kill it off and get it out of his way.
Benton climbs down from the picnic table. He and Marino start walking toward the footbridge.
“Oops.” Marino smiles slyly. “Forgot you was gay. Guess I should be more sensitive about queers and dyke wrestlers, huh? But you try to hold my hand, I’ll tear your head off.”
Marino has always been homophobic, but never as uncomfortable and confused as he is at this stage in his life. His conviction that gay men are perverts and that lesbians can be cured by sex with men has evolved from clear as air to dark as ink. He can see neither in nor out of what he believes about people who lust for their own gender, and his cynical, ugly comments have the flat ring of a bell cast in lead. Not much is plain to him anymore. Not much seems unquestionably true. At least when he was devoutly bigoted, he didn’t have to question. In the beginning, he lived by the gospel according to Marino. Over recent years, he has become an agnostic, a compass with no magnetic north. His convictions wobble all over the place.
“So what’s it feel like to have people think you’re . . . you know?” Marino asks. “Hope nobody’s tried to beat you up or nothing.”
“I feel nothing about what people think of me,” Benton says under his breath, conscious of people passing them on the footbridge, of cars speeding below them on Storrow Drive, as if any person within a hundred feet of them might be watching and listening. “When’s the last time you went fishing?”
MARINO’S DEMEANOR SOURS as they follow a cobblestone walk in the shade of double rows of Japanese cherry trees, maples and blue spruce.
During his most venomous moods, usually late at night when he is alone and throwing back beers or shots of bourbon, he resents Benton Wesley, almost despises him for how much he has damaged the lives of everyone who matters. If Benton really were dead, it would be easier. Marino tells himself he would have gotten over it by now. But how does he recover from a loss that didn’t happen and live with its secrets?
So when Marino is alone and drunk and has worked himself into a rabid state, he swears out loud at Benton while crushing one beer can after another and hurling them across his small, slovenly living room.
“Look what you’ve done to her!” he rails to the walls. “Look what you’ve done to her, you fucking son of a bitch!”
Dr. Kay Scarpetta is an apparition between Marino and Benton as they walk. She is one of the most brilliant and remarkable women Marino has ever met, and Benton’s torture and murder ripped off her skin. She stumbles over Benton’s dead body everywhere she goes, and all along—from day one—Marino has known that Benton’s gruesome homicide was faked right down to the autopsy and lab reports, death certificate and the ashes Scarpetta scattered into the wind at Hilton Head Island, a seaside resort she and Benton loved.
The ashes and bits of bone were scraped from the bottom of a crematorium oven in Philadelphia. Leftovers. God knows whose. Marino presented them to Scarpetta in a cheap little urn given to him at the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, and all he could think to say was, “Sorry, Doc. I sure am sorry, Doc.” Sweating in a suit and tie and standing on wet sand, he watched her fling those ashes into the wind of a hovering helicopter piloted by Lucy. In a hurricane of churning water and flying blades, the supposed remains of Scarpetta’s lover were hurled as far out of reach as her pain. Marino stared at Lucy’s hard face staring back at him through Plexiglas as she did exactly what her aunt had asked her to do, and all the while, Lucy knew, too.
Scarpetta trusts Lucy and Marino more than anyone else in her life. They helped plan Benton’s staged murder and disappearance, and that truth is a brain infection, a sickness they battle daily, while Benton lives his life as a nobody named Tom.
“I guess no fishing,” Benton goes on in the same light tone.
“They ain’t biting.” But Marino’s anger is. His fury bares its fangs.
“I see. Not a single fish. And bowling? Last I remember, you were second in your league. The Firing Pins. I believe that was the name of your team.”
“Last century, yeah. I don’t spend time in Virginia. Only when I get dragged back down to Richmond for court. I’m not with their PD anymore. In the process of moving to Florida and signing on with the Hollywood PD, south of Lauderdale.”
“If you’re in Florida,” Benton points out, “when you go to Richmond, it’s up to Richmond, not down to Richmond. One thing you’ve always had is an amazing sense of direction, Pete.”
Marino’s caught in a lie, and he knows it. He constantly thinks of moving from Richmond. It shames him that he doesn’t have the nerve. It is all he knows, even if there is nothing left for him in that city of old battles that continue to rage.
“I didn’t come here to bother you with long stories,” Marino says.
Benton’s dark glasses glance in his direction as the two of them continue their leisurely pace.
“Well, I can tell you’ve missed me,” Benton comments, a splinter of ice in his tone.
“It ain’t fucking fair,” Marino hisses, his fists clenched by his sides. “And I can’t take it no more, pal. Lucy can’t take it no more, pal. I wish you could be a fucking fly on the wall and see what you done to her. The Doc. Scarpetta. Or maybe you don’t remember her, either.”
“Did you come here to project your own anger onto me?”
“I just thought while I was in the neighborhood I’d point out, now that I got your attention, that I don’t see how dying can be worse than the way you live.”
“Be quiet,” Benton quietly says with flinty self-control. “We’ll talk inside.”
IN AN AREA OF BEACON HILL lined with proud old brick homes and graceful trees, Benton Wesley managed to find an address to suit his present, peculiar needs.
His apartment building is ugly beige precast with plastic lawn chairs on balconies and a rusting wrought-iron fence that encloses a front yard, overgrown and depressingly dark. He and Marino take dimly lit stairs that smell of urine and stale cigarette smoke.
“Shit!” Marino gasps for breath. “Couldn’tcha at least find a joint with an elevator? I didn’t mean nothing by what I said. About dying. Nobody wants you to die.”
On the fifth landing, Benton unlocks the scratched gray metal door to apartment 56.
“Most people already think I did.”
“Shit. I can’t say anything right.” Marino wipes sweat off his face.
“I’ve got Dos Equis and limes.” Benton’s voice seems to mimic the flip of the dead-bolt lock. “And, of course, fresh juice.”
“No Budweiser?”
“Please make yourself comfortable.”
“You got Budweiser, don’t you?” Pain sounds in Marino’s voice. Benton doesn’t remember anything about him.
“Since I knew
you were coming, of course I have Budweiser,” Benton says from the kitchen. “An entire refrigerator full of it.”
Marino looks around and decides on a floral printed couch, not a nice one. The apartment is furnished and bears the dingy patina of many threadbare and careless lives that have come and gone. Benton probably hasn’t lived in a decent place since he died and became Tom, and Marino sometimes wonders how the meticulous, refined man stands it. Benton is from a wealthy New England family and has always enjoyed a privileged life, although no amount of money would be enough ransom to free him from the horrors of his career. To see Benton living in an apartment typically occupied by partying college students or the lower middle class—to see him with a shaved head, facial hair, baggy jeans and sweatshirt, and to know he doesn’t even own a car—is unimaginable to Marino.
“At least you’re in good shape,” Marino remarks with a yawn.
“At least, meaning that’s the best you can say about me.” Benton ducks inside the old white refrigerator and emerges with two beers.
The cold bottles clank together in one hand as he opens a drawer, rooting around for a church key, as Marino calls any gadget that flips the cap off a beer.
“Mind if I smoke?” Marino asks.
“Yes.” Benton opens and shuts a cabinet door.
“Okay, so I’ll go into fits and swallow my tongue.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t smoke.” Benton walks across the dim, shabby living room and hands Marino a Budweiser. “I said I minded.”
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