by Robert Lane
“I said,” Kathleen said, interrupting my binge in which I was thinking of anything other than what I needed to focus on, “are we reprising our signature night here? I believe you got the eight-ounce, and I opted for lobster tail, and then we split.”
“Perfect.”
“You seem distracted.”
The bartender, in a black jacket and bow tie, arrived with the prize, and I sampled the Bordeaux. I gave him a nod, and he filled Kathleen’s glass and then mine to the appropriate level. We ordered, and he expertly spread black napkins like placemats in front of us. Silverware and water with lemon followed. All set up. Nice and neat. I made a strategic decision. Tell her after dinner. No way was I going to step in front of surf and turf.
Dinner was a waste.
While Kathleen babbled about God knows what, all I could think about was my entry point. We were into the second bottle, and that was stupid as hell. Sinatra’s “Hello Young Lovers” sneaked out of the speakers. I bet the Big Boy in the sky got a snicker out of that. I know what he thinks of me.
“What I like about lobster,” she said, as Bow Tie cleared our dinner plates, “is that it necessitates eating butter.”
I tabled my wineglass and faced her. How should I tell her? Five years in the army had left me with this: be brief, be bold, be gone.
She said, “Let’s take a walk. I—”
“I need to tell you something.”
“What?” Normal voice. No idea what was coming. The bombers are overhead, and in Dresden the little children sleep.
“While on our trip,” my voice sounded distant to me, “I received a message, an assignment.” Her eyes were focused now. I felt bad for her. What a pretty picture we had, and look what I was about to do. I hoped it wouldn’t go down that way, but I knew I’d been kidding myself. I do that sometimes—live within my delusions. The problem with that is you have no say in when reality kicks down the door, blows the roof, flattens the walls, and nukes the illusions you’ve built to keep it away.
I went in fast. “I was assigned to kill an assassin, an evil man who has killed many.”
“You didn’t tell me?”
Be brief.
“I didn’t want it to spoil or interfere with our plans.”
“OK.” She moved her head back. Just a bit. The first step. “That’s wrong on so many fronts I don’t even know where to start. When was this?”
Bow Tie asked if we wanted dessert, and I waved him off. He sauntered down to the end of the bar where a blue sports coat sat with a toothpick in his mouth and a drink in his hand.
Be bold.
“London. Kensington Gardens. While you slept.”
“Jake, you’re serious?”
“I am.”
She leaned back into me. “Why didn’t you—”
“That’s not the story.”
“Not the story?” she ricocheted back at me. “How can that not be the story?”
“The man I was supposed to kill was disguised as a cardinal. I was given his precise location. After we returned, I was informed that the man I killed, who was exactly where the assassin was supposed to be, was in fact a real cardinal. We have no idea why he was there or what he—”
“You killed a cardinal, a Catholic cardinal?”
I nodded.
Her hand flew to her mouth. She froze for a few brief seconds before she unleashed. “Oh my God. I read about him. You? It was you?” She recoiled away from me as if I carried the next plague that would wipe out a third of humanity.
I didn’t know what to say; in the event she’d missed the pertinent point, I added, “I had no idea. Someone set me, set us up. I’m engaged now in finding what went wrong and completing the assignment.”
“It was you?”
“Keep your voice down. I was set up. Some—”
“Oh God, Jake.”
She brought her arms tight across her body and slumped in her chair as if her power cord had been yanked out. Kathleen was always a lady at a table, erect with a straight back. It seemed odd, her mentioning my name while self-hugging. As if the very connotation of me had metamorphosed into something ugly and foreign. I had decimated her evening, and the look on her face and what it did to me were things I was unprepared for. I didn’t recall seeing such pain or disappointment in the cardinal’s eyes as he lay dying, and that man had taken a bullet.
Words cast from lips cause more damage than bullets fired from guns. Take it from me. I’m proficient in both. We discover, at the strangest and most unpredictable times, the atomic particles of truth that implode and rearrange our world.
“Complete the assignment?” she said. “Do you believe what you just said? Do you even hear your words?”
“It’s what I—”
“While I slept?” She shook her head.
“It’s what I do.”
“During your run?”
“I had no say in the time.”
“No say in the time? What about the deed?”
“It was an accident.” I was tossing shit at the wall.
“Accident? What kind of comment is—”
“Listen, kid. I’m in the real world. I don’t live in books.”
Her eyes narrowed as if I were out of focus and she was straining to see me. “Oh, great. We’re back to that?” She straightened up and unwrapped her arms. “I’ve got to move. I need a moment.” She stood, shoved her stool back, and pounded off to the ladies’ room.
What the hell was I doing? My last comment was a dagger. Kathleen held a PhD and taught literature at a local college. I had advised her once, when she rightly questioned my profession, to go back to her books if she couldn’t stand the heat. It had been a crude and crass remark, and now I’d laid it down again. But I was ticked. Didn’t she know I felt remorse for my act? It was on me. A smidgen of sympathy would have been nice, and I hadn’t gotten a crumb from anyone. Words. They will fuck you six ways from Sunday. They should give you a certificate when you complete an English class. You are now licensed to kill.
I took the opportunity to hit the head myself. When I washed my hands, I didn’t look up—I wasn’t a virgin.
I was waiting for her when she returned. I could tell by her gait that everything had changed. She didn’t sit. She placed her hands on the back of her stool. She’d been crying, although she tried not to show it. I know that look. It’s not something you forget, especially when you’re the source.
“The cleaning crew,” she said, and then I really knew my boat was going down. “They were part of it, right? I mean, they were taking everything out of our flat and—”
“I wanted—”
“Don’t.” She shook her head like a schoolmarm addressing a child who knew better. “I need some time.”
“I know—”
“No. Listen.” She placed her hand on my left shoulder. “We’ve come so far, so fast. But I need to slow it down, Jake. Your world…we’re alike in some ways, yet so hopelessly…so frighteningly different in others.”
“You know I didn’t—”
“Oh, babe. I know.” She brought her hand up over the left side of my face. “But you did. Your job…” She withdrew her hand and shook her head. “That is so stupid. It’s not a job. It’s your life. It’s who you are.”
I wanted to plead my case, but what if I didn’t have one? What if the best thing for Kathleen Rowe was that she never saw me again? I stared into her hazel-green eyes and congratulated myself on allowing a lobster to die in vain.
“Kathleen.”
“No. Do—”
“The book remark. You know—”
“That hurt, Jake. I don’t know why you do that when you know it hurts. It’s as if, down deep, you think your life is superior to mine—but look what you do. My books are looking pretty nice compared to your story. I like my books. I like them just fine. I—I’ve got to go.”
She turned and started to walk.
I said, “Shakespeare, isn’t it? Love with the mind?”
S
he stepped back toward me. She raked her hand through my hair like it was a distant object, her eyes following her hand. “Such a beautiful mind.” She brought her other hand up against my cheek and nailed her eyes to mine. She pivoted and strode out the door, nearly breaking into a run, but not before I caught a shudder in her slender shoulders.
All those years I spent in the army, and it was Kathleen who was brief, bold—and gone.
CHAPTER 9
Nothing, with the exception of partying until four in the morning in Rome, interferes with my morning exercise. That includes a hangover, hurting the one out of seven billion people I care for more than the rest of the asylum combined, and enough booze in one evening to meet my weekly quota.
I ditched the pool at the pink hotel and swam in the gulf for thirty minutes. That was followed by a three-mile, barefoot run on the beach in record-slow time. My body felt like a busted-up coconut, and I was fortunate that my insides stayed there. I washed off under the outdoor shower at the hotel and let the semicool water carry the heat from my skin. The lounge chairs on the front row of the boardwalk were covered with towels and magazines that staked territorial claims for the day. A man sat in one with a coffee to his side and a newspaper spread before him. He battled the gulf breeze for control of the paper.
“Trade places with you,” I said as I twisted the shower handle. His reading glasses were halfway down his nose.
“Come again?” His eyes shot up to mine.
“Nothing.”
I dried off with a towel, pulled on a T-shirt, and tried to justify my existence. Like a song stuck in my head, all I could think of was last night’s closing scene. I didn’t like the way Kathleen had sprinted out the door. Confident. Purposeful. Marching out of one life and into a new one. No, sir. I did not like that at all.
Kathleen’s scar came into my mind. You can see a scar. I prefer that; you know where you stand. Words leave ghost scars—unseen and omnipresent. Bound to reappear down the road at the most unpredictable moments.
I threw my towel in the dirty hamper and thought it would be nice if I could do the same with my troubles. My phone rang. Binelli.
“What do you got?”
“You just don’t learn, do you?”
“What do you got, please?”
“Why are you interested in Paretsky?”
“You’re not in my cir—”
“Retained to erase him, aren’t you?”
“Apparently me and half the armed forces.” I recalled the colonel’s testament that it was Garrett’s and my job, no one else’s. Total fabrication. “I need to know whatever you can find. My agency gave me a set of docs. I know it’s not one big, happy party with everyone bobbing for apples, cheering at the kids’ soccer game, and doing their neighbor’s wife.”
“Might be your lucky day.”
“How so?”
“Paretsky was our responsibility until we turned him over.”
“Why’s that my lucky day?”
“‘Might,’ I said, and, like you, I don’t think the competing agencies get stars by their names. I wouldn’t be surprised if we retained some pieces of information. Something that might give us a leg up in our effort to locate him. Make us the heroes. Increase our funding.”
“So young. So cynical.”
“The way of the world.”
“He’s killing innocent people and—”
“Gear it down. Why do you think I cooperate with you?”
“What do you got?” I sat down on an unclaimed blue lounger. Behind me a deliveryman unloaded cases of beer cans at the beach bar. Its steel curtains wouldn’t rise for another two hours.
“Nothing, now. But I’m having lunch with a woman today who may know more than what we put in the file. I’ll give you a ring later. Here—”
“You called just to say—”
“Do you have any friends?”
I stood up and walked past the hot tub, where a rotund man reclined in a frothy sea of bubbles. “I’m listening.”
“We believe there are two men. Paretsky and another. Is this news to you?”
“Tell me.”
“That’s what my lunch date is for. Some branches think Paretsky’s a lone wolf. We don’t concur. It’s information that even if we did pass along—and we really do cooperate more than you think—whoever received it might disregard it if it didn’t parallel their own intelligence. We share intelligence, but the next guy might toss bits and pieces into the recycle bin. There’s no shortage of arrogance on the Beltway. Are you chasing just Paretsky?”
“As far as I know.”
“I’ll be back.” She disconnected.
The hotel has facilities that allow me to use it like a country club. I changed in the locker room and fixed a cup of Colombian. They hadn’t gotten any bananas in for the day, and that knocked my mood down a few notches. I jumped in my truck and headed back to my house.
The aroma of coffee and bacon greeted me when I entered through the garage door. Morgan sat in a cushioned chair, reading a stack of stapled papers.
“When did you dock?” I said.
“Two a.m. Calm seas the whole way. Angelo gives his best.”
“You tell him he can have Hadley back?” I plopped down beside him.
“Hadley Three. He didn’t ask. I told him she was good for you.”
A coffee mug and beer can sat on the wood side table to his left. Morgan drank half a beer every morning and threw the other half away. He claimed the distaste for it kept him from drinking until later in the afternoon. He’d seen too many lives ruined by alcohol, including that of his father, who never said no to a bottle. Morgan called alcoholism the Caribbean flu. Like a flu shot, he was convinced, a little live virus every morning kept it away.
“What are you reading?” I said. A twin-engine dual console went by with three men in it. A battalion of fishing rods sprang victoriously out of the rocket launchers attached to the back of the hardtop.
“The file you sent me on Cardinal Giovanni Antinori.” He took a sip of his beer and pushed the can away. “Want breakfast? I made extra.” He got up.
“Refill, too.” I handed him my Styrofoam cup. “And a bottle of water.”
He returned with a bottled water in his cargo shorts pocket, my coffee in one hand, and a plate of peppered eggs and still-warm bacon in the other. He handed me the goods and then took his seat. He’d dropped a record in the Magnavox, and Bobby Darin’s voice competed with the screech of the osprey that likes to defecate on my boat. I’d just completed my collection of Darin albums and had been contemplating whom to conquer next. Didn’t matter now.
“Speaker’s still out,” he said.
“I know.”
“It’s going to be hard to find anyone who knows vacuum tubes. Want to try and tackle it ourselves?”
I took a long drag from the bottle. The Magnavox was a 1961 floor-model record player and radio with twelve-inch side woofers. It was stuffed with vacuum tubes and weighed in at around three-hundred pounds. I put the water down and picked up my coffee. “I’ve got other issues.”
“So I heard.”
Did he know? “Kathleen?” I said. It came out harsh, even bitter. I had never spoken her name in that manner. “I thought you didn’t get in till two?”
“She left a voice mail. I called her after my meditation.”
“She up this early?”
“Never went down.”
That’s what she gets for walking out on me. “Tell you everything?”
He placed his coffee on the dusty glass table and turned to me. His hair was in a ponytail, a moon talisman hung around his neck, and he wore a sun-bleached, crew-neck T-shirt. No pocket.
“One never knows, but in the spirit of your question, yes.” Morgan held my eyes in a steady gaze. Although I was used to him now, when we had first met—he walked in the door without knocking, confiscated a beer from the fridge, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself—his intensity took me by surprise. He is fully engaged with
a person when listening. A quote from David Augsburger hung in his boat’s cabin: “Being listened to is so close to being loved that most people can’t tell the difference.” I thought that was about as thick as it flowed, but I’d been beginning to reevaluate a few things in my life. No rush. Don’t want to bite off more than I can chew. Maybe a new thought every year or so.
“The cardinal?”
“Everything.”
The bad speaker kicked in, and Darin went up a dozen decibels. “Look over those pages and photographs,” I said. “See if you can find anything that might give me a clue as to why Antinori was in Kensington Gardens that morning. He must have come across Paretsky—that’s the assassin who was supposed to be there. But how and when, I don’t know. If I did, it could help lead me to Paretsky and—”
“As well as explain why, assuming he had a choice, the cardinal wanted to die. That’s the real mystery, isn’t it?”
Morgan rarely interrupts people. The speaker went out. Darin went down, and I stood up. “Let me know what you think.”
“I think you should apologize to her.”
“Really? In case something got lost in translation, I had no idea the man was not who he was supposed to be.”
“About what you said about going back to her books.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” But I knew. Knew that it was everything.
“When we lived on a sailboat,” he picked up his coffee and glanced at me, “on more than one occasion we cruised into uncharted waters, battled unpredictable weather, and brandished firearms to keep pirates off the deck.” He took a sip. I almost interrupted but hit the brakes. “A lot of inherent danger living on the seas, but my father never warned against it. He never even told me to be careful at the helm; to the contrary, he urges curiosity and risk taking.” It wasn’t unusual for Morgan to refer to his deceased father in present tense or to mix the tenses when referring to him.
“But my father treats words as delicate creatures, pieces of fine crystal to be passed between people. The only thing he tells me to be careful of is words. Imagine that. All that uncertainty, danger, unknown ports, thieves, not to mention the often angry and unpredictable Poseidon, but words are the only things that he advises I exercise caution with.”