Eve was in tears. It was hard to make sense of what she said. She’d hoped, she’d hoped, but it wasn’t him. The call that woke her wasn’t him. She’d checked with her service, checked the caller identification. It was Daniel Octave—but she had no idea what he wanted at 3:30 A.M. She’d hoped it was Ila. She’d been down to the marina and there was a boat missing—a skiff. The harbormaster had been on his hands and knees across his doorstep vomiting when she arrived. She’d put him in a taxi. It was too late—she’d known it would be—but how terrible to watch the sun come up.
“I thought Daniel Octave was dead,” Bad said. Then, “Is Dawn home?”
“Yes. Don’t come here,” Eve said, firm although she was still crying. “She’s asleep. I haven’t told her.”
“Do you have binoculars?” Bad said. Then, “Wait—tunnel.”
He held the phone to his chest for the duration of the tunnel and then put it back to his ear to issue instructions. Eve was to go to where she had a view of the sea—one of the elevated places in the old town that looked seaward—and she was to look for the boat. “Take your phone and call me,” Bad said.
The diving instructor’s boat had a high bridge, and a cabin below the deck. The diving instructor motored out of Menton’s harbor at the maximum legal speed while Gino and Bad changed into their wet suits. The morning was warm already, and Bad left his suit unzipped, its arms knotted above his waist. Gino passed him a flotation vest, and Bad put it down on the deck. Gino put his on—the one with the radio clipped to its shoulder. Gino switched the radio on and checked it with his friend, who was at the wheel, his legs planted, leaning back as if the little ripples juddering the boat as it picked up speed were a steep sea. The instructor turned around and gave Gino a thumbs-up and spoke at his own shoulder. Bad heard Gino’s radio cough and splutter and a short conversation in two languages, mostly si and oui—or rather the she and way of the Rivieras. Gino signed off and scratched his nose on the radio’s stubby aerial. He said his friend had wanted to know the protocols of this operation. “I told him maintenance of confidentiality.”
“Thanks,” Bad said.
Gino said the boat had a marine emergency medical unit. It had oxygen, a defibrillator, airway ventilation equipment, a Stryker cot—better than a nasty old Stokes basket—and vac suction. “And body bags,” Gino finished.
Gino wanted Bad to tell him what to expect.
Bad told Gino that he couldn’t tell him how many minutes it was after the event. But did Gino remember the blisters on the woman? That was photosensitivity. The guy they were going to find had the same allergy. He had gone out in a boat to expose himself—not just to jump into the sea.
Gino closed his eyes. He turned into the sea breeze and it twitched his cropped hair. He said he understood why a person would release himself from suffering or trouble. But when he was called out because someone had set himself on fire—
“Yes,” said Bad. “Wanting not just to die, but to suffer.”
“I hate that,” Gino said. He said that his friend also had budgeting concerns.
“No problem.”
Eve called again. There was a haze of early-morning condensation over the sea. A thin veil. She could make out three small boats through it. But only one boat was still; the others seemed to be going places.
Bad had her sight off Capo Mortola to work out roughly where the motionless boat was. “You should be able to see us now,” Bad told her. A moment later: “Please, Eve, you have to pull yourself together.”
Gino was looking at him. Gino thrust out his lower lip and drew a line down his cheek from the corner of his eye.
Bad nodded—yes, she was crying.
“Tell her to look for a person in the boat. He may have kept his options open and got under cover.”
Bad passed this on. And he mentioned the diving instructor’s budgeting concerns.
“I can pay,” Eve said. “That’s my one perpetually open option.”
A moment later Bad told her to stay on the phone, then said to Gino, “She can’t make out much through the haze.”
Gino talked on the radio to his friend at the wheel. He and Bad leaned out either side of the boat and faced forward.
The haze was scarcely substantial; it only seemed to soften the horizon. Bad could smell it, though, a notional layer of freshwater above the salt. He tried not think of Ila, then had him in his head, vivid, slight, silent, dry, deadly. “God!” Bad said, to himself and Gino. “This will finish me off.” Then he laughed. He put the phone to his ear—asked if Eve could see them and how near they were.
“You’ll need to turn right a bit.”
“Starboard,” Bad said.
“Yes, starboard, maybe five degrees,” Eve said, catching on—a quick study. Bad heard her saying something to someone with her. He asked, “Who is that?”
She didn’t answer at once, then explained it was a concerned neighbor. “I’ll cry quietly now,” she said.
The instructor shouted down to Bad and Gino. He pointed with one hand, his other moving the wheel. The boat turned. Gino came across to where Bad stood, and they craned together. The haze became visible once they could see what it had previously obscured.
The white hull of the upturned boat seemed to slide out from under the place where the sky’s blue was just a little smeary.
The instructor closed the throttle right down and the launch coasted slowly on toward the upturned hull.
Bad heard a voice. A croak. Someone calling.
Bad pushed his arms into the sleeves of his wet suit, left the vest, and dived into the water. He struck away from the launch as it turned to idle, its bow wave following him and washing up the back of his neck. Bad stretched out into his fastest crawl. He swam around the boat and stopped, treading water.
Daniel Octave was wearing a life vest. He was afloat, with one palm flat against the water-beaded plastic of the hull.
Bad said, “I thought you were dead.”
The launch cleared the boat, coasted around, and stood off only a few feet, its engine making Bad’s whole body buzz.
Gino leaned over the side and said, “Buongiorno.”
Father Octave was clumsily trying to get a grip on something he had under his hand.
Gino told Bad to get the guy to swim to him and they’d bounce him into the launch.
Bad moved closer to Daniel and saw the end of the plastic tube that Daniel was holding against the side of the upturned boat and clear of the water. It was the same sort of tube that had been hanging from the crook of Daniel’s needle-pierced arm when Bad had discovered him unconscious on a pew in the Chapel of the Gray Penitents.
Bad went right up to Daniel, touched his tired face, and said, “Hang on, just a moment.”
Bad dived, turned over in the water, and saw Ila, under the boat, the other end of the tube in his mouth, his hair transparent, skin red and blistered in some places, his form framed by a glistening skin of trapped air.
Bad surfaced. He swam back to the launch, fixed his eyes on Gino, and asked for a body bag. “There’s a body under the boat.”
Gino stared at Bad, his face totally blank. He was making a great effort to understand.
The diving instructor left the bridge, clattered down its metal stairs, and began waving his arms in Daniel Octave’s direction.
Bad ignored him.
Gino asked, carefully, if it wasn’t the usual practice to get the survivor out of the water first, then recover any bodies? To recover them and then bag them?
“Yes. You know that as well as I do,” Bad said. “As well as he does.” He pointed at the diving instructor. “Nevertheless, give me one of the body bags.”
Gino pushed past the diving instructor and found a body bag. He dropped it down to Bad. Bad held it over his head to unzip it, then swam back to the upturned boat. He told Daniel that he could let go now.
Daniel dropped his end of the plastic tube and pushed away from the hull. He swam slowly to the launch. Bad saw Gino l
ean over the side and put out a hand to Daniel.
Bad dived. He submerged the body bag, wrestled the air out of it, and carried it under the upturned boat. The plastic tube, full of water now, drifted down past Bad.
Bad spread the body bag as much as he was able, holding it open for Ila, who pushed down from his nest of trapped air and swam into the bag. He did it with dexterity, didn’t fight it or tangle in it, but let it envelop him. Bad wrapped Ila, then turned in the water and swam down another few feet to find the zipper and draw it up.
Bad had to breathe. He kicked up, the open end of the bag clutched in one fist. The weight of the bag—its deadweight—delayed him. The surface hung above his face for long seconds; then he broke it, took a breath, and put his head back down to see, to close the zipper.
Bad dragged the body bag the few feet to the launch. He turned the body feet-down and head-up in the water and, as he’d been trained, bounced it until Gino and the instructor were able to haul it up.
Bad scrambled on board unassisted. He dropped down onto the body bag and its contents, lay across Ila until he could muster some speech.
In the short moments he lay there Bad felt the black plastic heat up in the sun.
“I’ll take him below,” he said to Gino and the instructor.
He saw that they were looking at him fearfully, Gino distressed, the instructor disgusted. Bad waved them off. He got up and began to drag the bag. Daniel Octave came to his assistance. Together they dragged Ila down the steps—bump, bump, bump—into the cabin.
Daniel Octave sat down on the floor, in a puddle of seawater, and struggled out of his life vest. His brown skin had a green tinge—he was exhausted.
Bad knelt on the cabin’s bunk to pull the curtains across the windows. The light came yellow between their regular pleats.
Bad hunkered down beside Daniel and unzipped the top of the body bag.
Ila raised himself on one elbow from the seawater puddled in the black plastic. His hair sizzled as water ran out of its thickness. His eyes followed Bad as he pushed back on his heels and staggered to his feet. “Thank you, Bad,” Ila said.
Bad backed off. His feet hit the bottom step and he climbed up it. He ducked his head because of the low ceiling but still stared at them—Daniel and Ila.
They were watching him with very different expressions. Ila looked grateful. Daniel seemed to want to say he was sorry for something.
Bad told them to send him a postcard from Corsica. Then he turned his back and went on deck.
Eve walked slowly away from the sea and along the Via Appio to her house. She kept the phone pressed to her ear.
Bad asked about Dawn, and Eve, without any insulating civility left to her, could only tell him what it would hurt him to hear. She told Bad that Dawn thought he’d come back. Dawn hoped, like those in exile hope to be allowed to go home.
Bad told Eve he’d come to understand that, in Dawn, he’d found the right woman. He thought for a while it was her glamour he loved, her life, her intoxicating stories and lovemaking. He was in awe of all that. Her life seemed to prove things he’d felt he’d needed proven. He was in “the hero business”—as his girlfriend would say—because he wanted to cheat death, to intervene, to defuse time when it began to tick down toward bloody calamity. He’d seen Dawn go over the edge of a fifteen-meter pitch and had felt the thud when she hit the bottom—then, eight years later, he’d run into her, running, like a deer. It filled him with awe. But, in the end, Bad had fallen in love with Dawn Moskelute herself, her nerve, her sense of fun, her warm heart.
He couldn’t choose her life. He’d thought he could and had begun grieving, for the big things, like his family; for the little things, like plans he and Gino had to go into business together—Industrial Abseiling: for those hard-to-reach places. He had begun to mourn for the things he couldn’t even imagine giving up, like the sun he was sure cast its light into every corner of his consciousness. Whenever he thought about that he realized that in choosing Dawn’s life he would, in fact, be choosing to become one of another species.
“That’s just too weird,” Bad said, rather weakly.
Eve walked on through the still, clinging air. The sun seemed only to have warmed the water vapor, not dispersed it. The air felt like the possibility of autumn, a hint of it, in high summer.
But it wasn’t just that—Bad said—the things he’d have to give up. It was the thing he realized he’d have to accept—the possibility of being a murderer. “I’m not especially ethical,” Bad said. “Only forewarned. Those kids, those classmates of mine, died violently. I saw what that meant. I saw the blood, and I saw their parents afterward trying to live with what had happened, and to live without them. I can’t sign on somewhere I might cause deaths. In the chapel, when I saw Father Octave lying so still on that pew, I thought Tom Hilxen had killed him. It hit me then—I mean, I saw it all. I can’t put myself in that position. I’m probably a bloody pacifist, too,” he finished. He sounded exasperated.
Eve stopped at her gate and rested her head on its bars. She told Bad that if she repeated all this to Dawn it would probably only make Dawn love him more.
“I don’t want her to love me more. I want her to be all right.”
Eve thought Bad was crying. But then he laughed and said, in a muffled, embarrassed way, that he was wrong about Daniel Octave anyway.
“I know. He was coming around when we left him,” Eve said. “Poor man.”
“Yes—well—I think you might find he’s come all the way around,” Bad said. Father Octave went out in the boat with Ila. It was he who’d kept Ila alive. Bad could see now that he and Father Octave had been traveling in the same direction for a long time—he had got there first, but Daniel Octave got there finally. Daniel Octave was a better candidate. He’d already renounced the world and was—Bad said—part of a secret society already, so eminently suited to joining a secret family.
“I wanted to,” Bad said. Eve was sure he was crying now. Tears of grief and frustration. “I loved you. Dawn and you. Both of you.”
Eve told Bad he could come back and be brotherly; he could try that.
It wouldn’t make any difference, he said; he couldn’t be with them. Being with them meant accepting the possibility of being a murderer or—if he was only brotherly, as Eve was sisterly—being an accessory to murder.
Eve said, “You’re being all-or-nothing.”
“This is all-or-nothing. Some things are.”
Eve listened to him weep. It seemed to hurt him physically. He didn’t know how to do it without a wrenching struggle. After a time he said, “Give Dawn my love,” then, deep and swallowed, “my sunshine. Yes—give her my love,” he said. “After all, what am I going to do with it?”
“Industrial abseiling?” Eve said.
He laughed. Then he told her, “Goodbye,” quiet and tender, and ended the call.
Eve was sitting by her sister’s bed when Dawn woke. It was early for Dawn, and she fought her way out of her sun-induced stupor, moaning and thrashing. She’d clearly sensed that something was wrong. She broke out of sleep and sat bolt upright, blinking at Eve. She said, “What’s the matter?”
Eve asked her sister to lie down again and then told her everything. That they had nearly lost Ila. That he was waiting out the daylight in a body bag in the cabin of a boat moored at the marina in Menton. He’d meant to be caught out but hadn’t been able to go through with it. Or he’d been prevented, because he wasn’t alone; he’d taken Father Octave out with him. Bad had rescued both of them—Ila from under the upturned boat.
Eve finished her explanation and sat staring at her sister. She felt shattered.
Dawn shuddered; she shook herself. She said, in a little voice, that she needed Ila to live.
“I know. I thought I’d lost you both. Or he’d condemned me to having to watch you blunder about making terrible mistakes and having no means to make a nest. God.” Eve was shaking, too. “I want Ila to live. Martine didn’t deserve him.
She didn’t deserve him to die for her.”
Dawn said, “Yes, that’s right. Though,” she growled, “I won’t be biting any goddamned Jesuits. No more bodiless, body-hating celibates. No.” Dawn took a deep breath and subsided. She stroked Eve’s arm and made a soothing sound, a motherly humming. She said, “The trouble with you, Eve, is that you think everything is over for you. Ares is dead and so you’re only an unhappy spectator in matters of love. You think you’re all in the past. You’ve been taking comfort in Ila because he’s like the past, like an archive; even his appetite is archived. But you’ve just discovered that you don’t want Ila to actually be in the past. And then there’s Martine. You’ve been so worried about how Ila feels, having lost her, that you haven’t considered how you feel. How mad at her you are. How, basically, she’s left you holding the baby. Well,” Dawn said, “this is what I feel about Martine. This honors her, and might help you. I’m not like Martine, and Ila, and you. I can’t think about my soul. I have to be a pilgrim, and simply set out walking. I’ve set out after Martine, with you, and with Ila. And with Bad—because he’ll come back.” Dawn’s face, pillowed on her glossy variegated hair, was glowing and serene. “I do know you don’t want him to come back,” she added. She squeezed Eve’s hand.
“No, I don’t. I want him to be a better man in a more ordinary life. That’s what I want to see. Except I won’t see it. I just have to have faith that it will happen without me there to witness it.”
“He’ll come back,” Dawn said. “That’s fate, not faith. How can he be better than our story?”
Bad was late for his flight. He’d spent some time at Heathrow changing his tickets for the second leg of his journey. When he came down the aisle at the rear of the plane it was already pushing back from the gate and the cabin crew were closing all the overhead lockers.
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