Finn just stares.
“I know a great deal,” I say, very carefully. “About a lot of people. I’ve kept quiet about it all until now. And I just need a small reason, a little bit of goodwill, to keep quiet forever.”
“Goodwill?” He tries to ash his cigarette in the tray, ends up knocking the mess to the floor. We cough. “If you spill even half of that, the only goodwill you’re likely to get is a sap to the back of the head.”
“Funny, but I wonder if Valentine would say so. He’s been commissioner for a long time. Longer than anyone else has managed to stomach the job. He’s famous enough, and ambitious. If Dewey can make a run for Albany, why not Valentine, eventually? He’d just have to wait his turn. That is, if he could maintain his reputation as the ‘world’s best cop.’ Nothing would put him on the hot seat quite like another Seabury commission, poking around the bank accounts of his reformed police force.”
Finn swallows. “All he’d have to do is send you straight to Sing Sing: another dirty cop exposed.”
“While the rest of the rank-and-file take to drinking, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or do I mean black book?”
“What the hell are you after, Patil?”
“We’re at war now. That changes things. You know Valentine. Duty above all. It looks good for his reputation to have officers in the ranks. We need every able-bodied man to serve his country, isn’t that what they’re saying?”
He leans back in his chair. Chews the dead end of another cigarette. Cautious relief has made him wobbly at the waist. “That may be.”
“So you ship us off. All of us questionable cases, the ones injudicious enough to find ourselves in some mobster’s little black book. Send us over there and Valentine gets a big publicity boost for his contribution to the war effort. Even better, we’re no longer a liability to him. Or you could string me up as an example. That might be the end of it. But Dewey wants one last big victory as DA. He likes Valentine, but he’s more ambitious than loyal. A big Seabury-style investigation of the police might be even better, as far as his prospects are concerned, than yet another gangster arraigned on charges that won’t stick.”
“Dewey wouldn’t—”
“Wouldn’t he? It would be a big deal, Finn. Bigger than ’35. Probably bigger than the Seabury commission. A hurricane can uncover a great deal of old dirt.”
Finn closes his eyes as though in pain. “You won’t talk to Dewey?”
“Not if you drop the charges against Phyllis and Alvin.”
“We need someone to pin this on.”
“Craver. Let it end with him. I go off to war with the rest of the bad apples and Valentine’s political path is strewn with roses.”
Finn snorts. “Even easier for a stray bullet to get you in the Pacific.”
“But you wouldn’t order it.”
“Jesus, kid, what kind of pull do you think I have?” He laughs, a little too high, a little too fast. “Or that I’d want to do it anyway, you goddamn bastard.”
We arrange it. He says it might take a few days to go through. It might not work at all—Valentine still has to agree. But I know that it will. Because I can feel the hot whisper of Victor’s curse. I’ll haunt you. But I have volunteered to wade waist-deep in all the bloody hell that he promised me.
Pea is waiting for me when I get home. Knees drawn up by the fire, eyes on a book she isn’t reading.
“I made a deal,” I say. “I’m getting drafted and you and Alvin go free.”
“That’s what this has been, all this time? You were drafted?”
“Yes. And then I…”
“Well?”
“I had a dream. A second dream.”
“You’ve always been this good at lying to me, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you lie about loving me?”
“Plenty.”
“Is that right?”
“Anytime I pretended that I didn’t.”
“Marry me, then,” she says, after a few strained seconds.
I laugh. “Sure, Pea.”
15
I saw Trent in the city that day. He told me he was worried. There were rumors that the angel was going to get someone that night. Someone who had crossed Victor.
I told him not to worry, that the angel was with me, in my house upstate. I was going back to see her right now. Trent was supposed to have gone into protective custody a month ago, but Valentine had demanded harder evidence, enough to set up a sting.
“I’m off the case,” I told Trent. “But don’t worry. I’ll talk to my superior about you when I’m in town again.”
Pea was gone by the time I got back. She had left a note. Three words.
I had to—
A line, drawn in blood, to separate the halves of my life.
—but the woman was already screaming in the bathroom. But a man’s head was already thumping against the back wall. Then the body of a smaller woman. A series of grunts. A gasped question. There passed a moment without any sound at all. I panicked and shot the lock.
Pea was curled beside Trent’s half-naked body. One knife was in the wall, the other buried in his chest. Her fingers slipped in the blood that coated the hilt. Her eyes were wide and black. They stared at Trent’s slack and stubbled jaw.
“But tell me why you did it?” she whispered.
My erection dimmed very slightly. I pretended I didn’t hear her. I opened the bathroom door and hit Maryann in the back of the head with my gun handle. She slid to the floor without even seeing me.
Pea let me drag her away from Trent—from the body. She was limp in my arms. She stared at him and asked, again, the question that I refused to hear. I collected her knives and cleaned off any places that looked like they might hold fingerprints. My colleagues would know who did this, but they wouldn’t be able to pin it on her. Not any better than they had those twenty other similar murders.
I took her to the apartment that I kept in the city. Steam filled the tiny bathroom as I filled the tub. It spilled out of the little high window that opened onto the shaftway. I wondered if someone else would smell the blood. If they would know it. If they would care.
Not the way I cared.
I undressed her like a wax doll. Like my fingers were hot coals. My desire was my enemy. Pea was my enemy. The thing that she was—I couldn’t love her without hating everything I had ever believed about myself. She climbed into the tub after I led her there. She flinched at the heat of the water. She lowered herself to her shoulders, then her chin.
“It’s a sunset, Dev,” she said to the water. She ducked her head under. The water sloshed pink over the edge. It soaked my pants, my bloodstained sleeves. I would never undress in front of her again. This was the last time I would ever see her naked.
I started crying. The tears splashed where her hair floated on the surface of the steaming water. And when she emerged to take a gasping breath, she looked at me. For the first time since killing Trent, she seemed to see me.
“What did he do?” asked the woman. “Why did I—Dev, why did Victor tell me to kill him?”
“I’m sure you know,” I told the woman. Because I hadn’t heard. I hadn’t seen.
“But Dev,” she said. She raised a hand to touch my tear-streaked face. I flinched back. “But Dev, why are you here?”
“I couldn’t leave you back there. But this is the end of it.”
The woman was silent. She touched her throat with one clean, wet hand. She looked at me, and then at that hand, like she hardly recognized us both. Then she was crying. “The hands,” she said, “I did it because Red Man showed me … the hands … Dev, don’t do this, please—”
“You know exactly who you work for,” I said. And I stood up. And I left her there, a woman, a killer that I used see around town, a sweet dame with a lethal edge. But I never let it catch me, did I? I got the better end of that deal, didn’t I? She was the killer—I might have loved the sight of that woman streaked with another man’s blood, b
ut I’d kept my own sainted hands clean, clean, clean.
The thing that she was—I couldn’t love her—I loved her like crazy—I would shutter my heart to her, keep myself in close darkness.
There would be no more revelations. No more holding my despised pieces to the light and finding them, improbably, precious.
16
Pea’s hair is wreathed in holly, gilded with snow. Wet curls fall onto her forehead and around her freckled ears. She is wrapped to her neck in a red mink coat. Beneath it she wears a dress of yellowed ivory that belonged to her mother. The candlelight dances across her face in shifting bands of yellow and blue.
“Lord it’s cold out here,” says Tamara, warming her hands on her third mug of cider. “We’re done, right? Are we done?”
Pea laughs so hard she sways into me. The officer of the peace, having just concluded the ceremony, looks mildly scandalized.
“Sure, Tammy,” Pea says. The hands gripping mine are warm and strong and so sure. She’d catch me if she could.
“Just hold on,” I say. “We’re not quite done.”
Pea raises her eyebrows.
“We are married, right?” I ask the justice, just for effect. Walter and Alvin snort with laughter.
He sighs. “As the state can make you, Mr. Patil.”
“Well, then,” I say. I dip her into a kiss that is mostly a joke until our lips touch. We kissed for the first time more than a decade ago. Her back against a tree in the North Woods, her hair still wet from the shower I watched her take. She tasted like strawberry ice cream and cigarettes. She asked me what I was thinking. And she still wears it, that skirt of hands.
She blinks rapidly when I pull her upright amid the catcalls and whistles. Walter’s camera nearly blinds us with the flash. The muscle by her jaw trembles.
“Everything all right?” I ask. She’s fainted once since the massacre. At least this time I caught her. It has something to do with the baby, with the struggle of bringing into the world whatever power that child has.
But Pea shakes her head softly. “She’s fine. Let’s go inside.”
Pea’s nephew Tom plays clarinet as we pass, a sweet “Begin the Beguine” that we clap to while Tamara and Pea laugh their way through the one verse they remember. Tammy holds on to my other side to keep from tripping in the snow, or just to feel my heat.
Inside, the women have laid out the meal they spent the last two days preparing. The feast would overwhelm Christmas, and be equal to my grandmother’s Diwali. Roast ham and turkey and beef, vegetables from the garden that Pea had pickled and canned and frozen, now baked and stuffed and pureed into soups and sauces and other unidentifiable delicacies. There are collard greens and sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas mashed and fried with peanut oil. A little apart from the rest sits a dish of yellow potatoes and a basket of brown, bubbled flatbread. A memory of my grandmother’s kitchen here in this faraway place: potatoes cooked with mustard seeds and turmeric and a dozen other hard-to-find spices. My favorite dish as a child. I turn to Pea when I see it.
“I called your mother.” A faint grimace passes through her smile. “She found the recipe for me. She’s put the rest in the mail, every one your grandmother wrote down while you all lived in India. She has ordered me to take care of you.”
“Ah,” I say. “Will you?”
Something fierce sweeps across those dark eyes. “Just come back, Dev. Just come back.”
“Aunt Pea, can we eat now?”
Pea lifts Ida onto her hip and tugs on one of the bright silk ribbons at the end of her braids. “Of course, honey. Walter, will you carve the turkey or should I?”
Walter carves. I uncork a few bottles of wine to compensate for our rapidly dwindling stores of cider. Ida asks her mom if she can have some, since her brother has a mug. While Gloria attempts with fading patience to explain why Ida is still too young, Alvin offers to show Ida the family of deer that have wandered into the backyard.
“Thank you,” Gloria whispers, and Alvin smiles shyly. He seems more reserved now. Watchful. I don’t imagine his anger will ever leave him—it hasn’t left me—but he is drained of that desperate ferocity. Relieved of the burden of the hands, it is no longer his duty to make it right, only to make do.
“Shame what happened to that boy,” Gloria says quietly.
“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Mae says. “He’s a fighter, always has been.”
“Like his mother?” I pass her a glass of wine. Gloria goes to join her daughter by the window.
Mae’s red eyes crinkle at the edges, but the smile doesn’t reach her mouth. “Like all of us. Not a one here that doesn’t have his problems.”
I wonder what Mae makes of the summary dismissal of charges that came through a week before. Would she have let her son go down for the murders she committed? Or would she have turned herself in, eventually?
“And you, Mae? Are you still thinking of killing me?”
She stills momentarily. Then her chin dips. “They always said you could tell when someone wanted to hurt you. But they say a lot of things about saint’s hands.”
“Someone did, that morning I saw you and Pea at River House. I never could figure that out—whose hatred had been strong enough to pull me out of my bed, but only that once? But now I’m betting it wasn’t Bobby Senior.”
“How would you know? Could’ve been. He was a big man, full of malice. He could have fit you in.”
“Did he fit you in?”
Mae bares her teeth. “Never even occurred to him. Not until he saw the light at the end of his own gun.” She puts a hand on my elbow. “My boy had a purpose. God gave him that gift and until those white men took it away, it was my duty to protect him however I could. He did his best. I know he did. But he was too young…” She looks away. Gets a hold of herself. “He had secrets in him he needed to get out. Other powerful men he could bring down with just a touch. Junior told me one of those men at the party might have hired you and Phyllis for a hit.”
“So you’d have killed us, just in case? But then Pea somehow convinced you otherwise.”
Her stare is straight ahead. “I would have done anything to protect that gift.”
“But not the boy?”
“Them both—”
“And what were you protecting when you helped Craver turn the groundbreaking into a funeral pyre?”
“That,” she says, as full of holy fire as Craver had ever been, “was to make things right.”
I let out a long sigh. “But they aren’t, are they, Mae?”
Her eyes grow red and glassy. “The Lord giveth and he taketh away, Dev. It’s better for Alvin. I know it. I just wish … I wish I’d gotten Bobby Junior. I wish that dream had come to me instead.”
You don’t, I think. But for all I know, with that deep fury in her eyes—maybe she does. Maybe the hands are a joke on all of us—just enough to make us wonder, and never enough to change.
“And now?”
“I’m done. What’s happened to Alvin … it’s long past time. Let the bank take the land and we’ll move to Poughkeepsie, we have family there. We can be regular, like we were before.”
I nod, but I wonder what Alvin will think. Bell family sins hurt her longer, and perhaps worse. But she was not their only casualty. And it’s Alvin who guards the secrets.
In the dining room Gloria clinks her glass amid laughing cries for the groom. Mae and I share one last look, a tense understanding, and then I rejoin the others.
Pea takes my hand. “Walter’s promised me a dance.”
“Walter can dance?” I rub her fingers between my own.
“That’s what I said!”
Gloria raises her glass for the toast. We all quiet. Pea is tense beside me. Gloria came with her husband, who has never liked Pea and doesn’t seem inclined to like me any better. But she is soft-spoken and unoffensive, with a quietly moving reference to their parents and their brother, long departed. I’m astonished to realize that she is happy for us. That most of th
e people standing around our dining room table this Christmas Eve are happy for us—delighted, counting Tamara.
We eat until we can hardly stand, then dance until we collapse. Pea tries a lindy with Walter, who is nearly as terrible as we feared. Tamara laughs until she has tears in her eyes.
“Walter, Walter,” she says, hugging him when the song is over, “I think that’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Walter, ever so faintly red, just smiles and squeezes her shoulder.
I dance with Gloria and Mae and Tamara and Ida. Pea dances again with Walter, then Alvin, then Tamara just for the competition. My feet throb with sympathetic blisters watching them go. Dessert comes out of the oven. We’re somehow all hungry again. Ida falls asleep by her pie. Pea carries her to bed, but the rest of the family slip upstairs soon after. The music still plays. We holdouts tap stockinged feet to the rhythm as we open up bottles of a 1935 Bordeaux that Walter gave as a wedding present. We argue politics: the war, the Japanese, our tactics, Roosevelt, Hitler, when we’ll all come back home.
No one mentions that I’m to be shipped with a Negro unit in a week’s time; no one mentions Tamara’s beau, set to fly transport runs in the Pacific. In the midst of a heated discussion over the draft expansion, Pea turns to me with something I’d call panic if it weren’t so happy.
“What was your grandmother’s name?”
“Kate?” I slide my hands along her rib cage. Too easy to find even beneath the aged silk and lace of her wedding dress.
“No,” she says, “the other one.”
The one who made me batata bhaji and poori and cool drinks with yogurt and mint and rose petals. The one who loved me when my father loved me. Before I met death. Before I killed a man. Before I learned of blood and desire and their cost.
“Durga,” I say, and Pea’s breath catches.
“That’s her name. So you’ll know when you write.”
Pea’s lips are stained red with wine and her cheeks are bright with blood. I kiss her softly. “Just going out for some air,” I say.
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