“All right,” Jessie told him. “I’m here because Pat and Kate were seen in Vermont soon after they disappeared.” She told him about Buddy Boucher. “And there was another man with them.”
“Another man?”
Jessie found herself crossing the room, parting the curtains, looking out. She saw dead leaves blowing across the parking lot. “Senator Frame?” she said.
“Yes?” His voice was quiet and gentle.
“Were you given solid proof that your son died in Viet Nam?”
There was a long pause. Jessie turned. His face was very pale, much like the color of Mount Rushmore itself. “What do you mean?” he asked.
Jessie took a deep breath. “Is there any way he might have survived? Might still be alive?”
The water level rose again in his eyes. “I hope you have a good reason for putting me through this, young lady.”
Jessie fought off the urge to say, “I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sorry enough to stop herself from going on. “I don’t have proof,” she said. “But it’s the only explanation for what’s happened, unless you know for sure that he’s dead.” She told him about the words on the blackboard and Gerald Brenner’s passport.
Senator Frame’s eyes dried as she spoke, but his complexion stayed chalky. “I don’t know for sure,” he said when she had finished. “There was no … body, if that’s the sort of thing you mean. But it was all confirmed by the Pentagon. Besides, all those stories of MIA’s in jungle prison camps over there are just bunk. I’ve seen the intelligence reports.” He sat down in the easy chair, rather heavily. He stared at his shoes, thick-soled walking shoes made of rich, supple leather. “But it’s possible. I guess. It’s possible.” He looked up at Jessie. “Have you told the police about this?”
“Not about your son. That all came later. The police thought it was routine divorce warfare, or Pat on a toot.”
Senator Frame nodded.
“You and your wife disapproved of Pat, didn’t you?”
“I had no opinion.”
“Your wife, then.”
“‘Disapprove’ would be going too far. In any case, it’s irrelevant now. Is anyone helping you, Ms. Shapiro?”
“Not exactly.”
“You have help then?”
“One or two friends.” She thought of Barbara and added, “The names wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
“Here or back home?”
“Both.”
“You wouldn’t have any friends in Washington?”
Jessie hesitated.
“A man named Keith, for instance?”
“No.”
He was watching her very closely, like a human lie detector, she thought. Then he bared his teeth again. “You have a friend in Washington now, Ms. Shapiro.”
“Thank you, Senator Frame.”
“Ed. Really. All my friends call me Ed.”
“Ed.”
“And may I call you Jessie?”
“Yes.”
“A lovely name. Biblical.” He rose and held out his hand. “And how appropriate. The Bible is full of miracles and this would be a miracle. To see my son again, I mean. A miracle. Here’s hoping.”
She shook his hand. His skin was cold, almost as cold as Ivan’s after the dive in Little Pond. “What are you going to do now? Call in the FBI?”
He frowned. “Not yet, I think. First we’ll have a long talk with the army. We’ll go from there.” He took a card from his pocket and wrote a number on it. “We’re at the cabin on Mount Blackstone till the Monday after Thanksgiving.” He drew a map on the back. “Call if you need me.” He went to the door, then stopped and turned. “But don’t say anything to Alice.” Another misty weather system moved across his eyes. “I don’t want her heart broken again.”
He paused to let his words sink in. He was still pausing when the door opened and hit him in the back. He whirled. It was Bela, carrying a loaded tray. The next moment the tray was on the floor and a gun in Bela’s hand. It happened so quickly Jessie wasn’t sure where the gun had come from. He pointed it at the senator’s chest. The senator backed away, into the easy chair. Jessie thought he was going to dive behind it.
“Who the hell is this?” Bela snapped at her, his eyes on the senator.
“Put that away,” Jessie said. “The man is a U.S. senator.”
“I don’t care if he’s President Roosevelt. My orders were no one in, no one out.”
Jessie saw the senator’s eyes flicker in her direction. “He’s trying to help, Bela.”
“Be quiet,” he said to her. And “Out” to Senator Frame.
The senator moved past him, looking at Jessie. There was no smile now. “You haven’t been quite truthful with me, Jessie.”
“Out,” Bela said.
“She’s right,” Senator Frame said to him. “I do happen to be a senator, and this kind of treatment—”
“Out,” Bela said, no louder than before, but more sharply pronounced. The reedy voice, the Hungarian accent, the gun—all now combined to make Jessie see Bela in a new light. He could be dangerous.
The senator saw that too. He went through the doorway, half-turning so he could keep his eyes on Jessie. “I didn’t think you had this sort of friend. Where do you suppose his orders—”
Bela slammed the door on the rest of his question. He locked it and drew the bolt. Then he parted the curtains and looked out. Senator Frame was climbing into a big jeep, the kind that seemed more suburban than military in origin. He drove away.
Bela turned to Jessie. The gun was still in his hand, loosely held now, but pointing in her direction. “Leni used to do things like this too,” he said. “Stupid things. That’s how come she got killed.”
“That man was a United States senator, not a killer,” Jessie said. Her voice rose in anger, and she made no attempt to rein it in.
“So?” Bela said. “The guy who shot Leni was a Hero of the Soviet Union. It makes no difference.”
“God damn it,” Jessie shouted. “I don’t give a shit about Leni. I want my daughter back. That’s all.”
Bela glared at her. His face slowly reddened, as though he had caught fire deep inside. For a second or two, Jessie thought he might shoot her.
But he lowered his eyes and put the gun away. Then he knelt and picked her breakfast off the floor.
34
“Your wife has nice tits,” Bao Dai said.
They were on the mattresses: Bao Dai squatting, Zorro curled like a fetus, the little girl asleep.
“What are you talking about?”
“Tits. Nice ones. I had a little feel. Your wife’s.”
“I don’t have a wife. I’m divorced. I told you. Anyway, she’s in California.”
Bao Dai smiled and shook his head. “I had a little feel. How could you walk away from tits like those?” He stopped smiling. “But you were always good at finding tail, weren’t you?”
No answer.
“I asked you a question.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t be modest. You had a nose for it. Right? Poontang—you know what I’m talking about.”
No answer.
“Was your wife a good fuck?” Bao Dai tried to remember his last erection, not a puny little stirring, but a hard-on. He couldn’t. All he could remember was Corporal Trinh’s yellow cock and what Corporal Trinh did to him in the Year of the Pig, or maybe before that, in the year of some other animal. “I asked you a question.”
“What?”
“Was your fucking wife a good fuck?”
“Why are you asking these questions?”
“Don’t raise your voice at me.”
“Why are you asking these questions?” (Quieter.)
“I told you—I felt her tits. You don’t believe me?”
No answer.
Bao Dai got up and splish-splashed across the room. He took the key out of his pocket and held it up. 1826 House, read the plastic tag. And a number: 19. “She’s here, all right. She thought I
was you.”
That struck Bao Dai as very funny. He laughed. The girl stirred.
“Where is she?” Zorro asked in a whisper.
That was a good question. Bao Dai looked at the room key, rubbed it and put it away. “Does she like to drop acid?”
“No. Why?”
“I’ve got some. Feel like dropping acid?”
“No one drops acid anymore.”
Bao Dai felt like hitting him in the face. But that was too easy. Instead he stepped back and said, “I missed everything, didn’t I?”
“I feel badly,” Zorro said. “I told you—if you let us go, I’ll do what I can to make it up to you.”
“Let’s start now.”
“What do you mean?”
“By starting over.”
“Starting over?”
“Yeah. We’ll go on a trip. Two trips. A real one and the other kind.”
“Where?”
“Bethel.”
“But why?”
“That’s square one. Where else do you start over?”
No reply. What could you say to logic like that? Bao Dai went upstairs to say good-bye. Ma was in the kitchen. “That smells like good pie, Ma. What is it? Apple? Rhubarb? Banana Republic? Just joking, Ma.”
“Rhubarb,” said Ma. “Your favorite.” Worried eyes. “Is everything all right?”
No—the cellar was leakier than ever, but Ma didn’t like to think about worrisome things, so Bao Dai just said, “Sure.”
“I meant …” Ma began softly, but Bao Dai didn’t hear. His attention had suddenly been drawn to the old crucifix, on the wall where it had always been. Maybe the paint was a little more faded, but he could still see the five red trickles. The crucifix got all mixed up with Pa’s lash, and Corporal Trinh, and the Year of the Pig. His mouth felt dry, his throat constricted.
He swallowed. “Go to the hardware, Ma.”
“The hardware?”
“I need nails.”
“What for?”
“Just fixing a hole, Ma. Six-inchers’ll do.”
“Will that stop the flooding?”
“It better.”
Ma returned with nails and a bouquet of flowers. Then she went out again, taking the flowers with her. Bao Dai brought Zorro upstairs to the phone. He took out the room key. The phone number was on the back.
“Let’s have a little party.”
“What do you mean?”
“Call her. Make the arrangements.”
“I won’t.”
“What’s wrong with a party? I have the right to get to know her a little, don’t you think?”
“I won’t do it.”
Bao Dai took out the whalebone knife and held the point lightly against Zorro’s ribs. Not too lightly. He felt a trembling in his fingers, wrapped around the handle. Zorro felt it too, and his eyes filled with fear. “You will. See, if you don’t …” Bao Dai pointed the knife at the floor, toward the basement below, and gave it a little twist. “First her, then you. But I don’t want to do that.”
“You don’t?”
“Of course not. If things go well at the party, I might even let you go away somewhere.”
“All of us?”
“Sure.”
“I mean me, the girl and Jessie?”
“Jessie?”
“My ex-wife.”
“That’s her name?”
“Yes.”
“I like it.”
“But is that what you mean? The three of us?”
“You want it in writing?”
“No.” Zorro’s eyes were still afraid. He wasn’t nearly as brave as Corporal Trinh. “Do you mean it, that’s all.”
“Sure,” Bao Dai said again and handed him the phone.
But there was no answer in room 19.
“Let’s hit the road,” said Bao Dai. “We’ll try later.”
35
“‘Krund,’” said Bela.
He was sitting in the easy chair, a folded copy of the local paper in his lap. He’d been staring silently at the Jumble for some time. Jessie had been staring silently at her breakfast. Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, smoked trout—all mixed together now and cold. Jessie didn’t want to eat. She sipped from the dented orange juice carton and tried to think of something to say to Bela. She’d just about given up when he raised his eyes from the paper and said, “‘Krund.’”
And she replied, “‘Drunk.’”
“‘Drunk,’” Bela repeated. He filled in the blanks. “It fits.”
Peace was restored. Bela’s anger had passed like a sudden squall.
“What about ‘frashter’?” he asked.
“‘Frashter’?” “Frashter” was tougher. “May I see?”
Bela handed her the paper. She gazed for a while at “frashter.” Then she moved on to the other words: “juraif” and “nymiost.” She couldn’t get them either. The cartoon clue showed a frightened bagpiper with ghosts materializing from his pipes. The caption read: “What the pied piper paid.” “Frashter.” “Juraif.” “Nymiost.” The pied piper. Jessie played with the letters. She got nowhere.
“This is impossible,” she said.
Bela didn’t answer.
Jessie looked up from the puzzle. Bela was asleep, his head sunk on his chest. His hair was very white and so fine she could see his pink scalp through it.
Jessie turned the page. She read an article about turkey prices. She read Doonesbury. She checked the personals column; it was empty. Her eyes wandered down the last page. They stopped at a very small headline near the bottom.
SERVICES FOR LOCAL WOMAN
Funeral survices for Doreen Rodney, late of Bennington, Vt., will be held this morning at eleven A.M. at the Church of St. Mary in North Adams, Mass. Burial will take place in the North Adams cemetery.
“Bela?” Jessie said quietly.
He didn’t stir.
She stood up. Blue Rodney was Pat’s sister. He’d been giving her ten thousand dollars a year since 1971. Wasn’t it possible that he would go to her funeral?
Jessie gazed down at Bela’s baby-fine hair, his pink scalp. No one in. No one out. He wasn’t likely to agree to an expedition to North Adams, not without a lot of discussion, and it was already 10:30. She put on her jacket, left a note on top of the Verdi book—“Back at one, gone for a walk”; a little breezy, perhaps, but she didn’t like being a prisoner—and slipped out the door.
North Adams was separated from Morgantown by a short drive and two hundred years of barely making it. Jessie parked in front of the Church of St. Mary at five to eleven. It was a small, faded white building with an army-navy store on one side and a vacant lot on the other. The advertised sermon for Sunday was “Thanksgiving in a Thankless World.” Jessie went inside. No one was there but an old red-nosed man sweeping up.
“The Father moved it to ten,” he explained. “So’s he wouldn’t miss the game.”
The old man directed her to the cemetery. It lay at the end of a road that went by a gas station and a junkyard. The grass needed mowing and the paths needed raking. Jessie walked along one of them, past gravestones so weathered that the names of the dead had vanished along with the rest of them.
She met the priest coming the other way. He was an old man, older than the caretaker at the church but not quite as red-nosed. He wore a white surplice and muddy shoes and in no way resembled the rabbi with the paisley tie. But he checked his watch with the rabbi’s same hurried gesture as he went by, and Jessie thought of Barbara and a spiffier graveyard in a spiffier part of the country.
As though some heavenly bylaw were in force, all colors were shades of gray: the sky, the earth, the tombstones, the lone woman at the end of the path. Pat wasn’t there. Neither were the aging, long-haired mourners she had half-expected. There was only the gray woman at the end of the path. Now Jessie saw that she was holding a bouquet of yellow gladioli. The flowers glowed like a sun in an empty corner of space.
Jessie approached the woman. She stood beside a
partially filled hole in the ground, looking down at the newly turned earth. A gravestone lay in a wheelbarrow nearby. “D. Rodney” was etched in the marble.
The woman heard Jessie coming and looked up. “They’re on a break,” she said.
The woman wore a thin cloth coat and a kerchief printed with palm trees; wisps of gray hair curled out from its edges. She had the hoarse voice and wrinkled skin of a lifelong smoker. But Jessie didn’t notice much of that at first; what she noticed were the woman’s brilliant blue eyes.
“I’m late,” Jessie said.
“That’s all right,” the woman replied. “Nobody came. It’s all been so sudden. I guess the news didn’t have time to get around. Because Doreen had friends. Lots of them,” she added, in case Jessie thought of arguing. “Are—were you a friend of hers?”
“I knew her,” Jessie said. “What about you?”
The woman’s eyes had prepared her for the answer, but it still shocked her when it came. “I am Mrs. Rodney. Doreen’s mother.”
Jessie was silent, but not because she had nothing to say; her mind worked frantically to put her thoughts in order. The woman was Pat’s mother; her own ex-mother-in-law; Kate’s grandmother. Yet Pat had always said that his parents died in a car crash before he went west. Either he’d been lying or, perhaps, he and Blue weren’t full brother and sister. Pat’s eyes were blue, but not the startling China blue of this woman and her daughter. Jessie tried to remember any hint from Blue that she and Pat were less than full siblings and couldn’t.
What was the right approach? Jessie had no idea. She plunged ahead: “Do you have a son named Pat?”
Mrs. Rodney squinted at her. “Why do you want to know that?”
“Is it true?”
Mrs. Rodney’s fingers tightened around the stems of the flowers. “You never did tell me who you were.”
“My name is Jessie Rodney.”
“Rodney?”
“I was married to Pat for five years. We have a daughter.”
Mrs. Rodney sucked her lips into her mouth and bit down on them hard. She didn’t speak.
“I can see that this comes as news to you,” Jessie said. “Your existence is news to me. Pat told me you’d died in a car crash.”
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