“Did Sonny invite him?”
Therese shrugs. “Just in case. I know my Stefan will want to see us. I always keep his room ready so he can come whenever he wants. And Charlie, he love my stew also. Maybe he come home too, all the boys.”
Vesna stares at me, her tongue moving over her teeth as if hungry to ask me a question about Charlie or her brother. Or maybe she wants another loan. I have a question for her too, about the nature of the mess she cleaned up on Domitian. Before either of us can speak, Duck bundles her hands over her stomach and moans.
“My tummy hurts,” she whines.
“We still have more food to buy,” Therese says softly.
“Can’t I go back with Ian?” She rocks in half-circles.
“I’ll take her. And I can carry some of your groceries.” I grab a few of Therese’s bags before she has time to resist. “Do I need your key?”
“We left it unlocked this morning,” Vesna says. “For Stefan. If he does show up.”
Duck is already galloping down the passage, and I lift the bags to signal good-bye. I chase after my child guide. Her sandals bang like pans on the cobblestones, her hands grabbing fists of air. A few rays of afternoon sun have conquered the clouds, and yellow light slides across the white walls. Duck races ahead, veering through a tunnel, and we arrive on a familiar path.
“Duck,” I call. “Wait up. What happened to your stomachache?”
She scrunches her nose at me as she leans against the dirty brick. “I was acting. I didn’t want to go to the markets anymore.”
“Acting runs in your family,” I tell her.
“Have you seen Mom’s movies? I’m not old enough yet. She says I’ll be too young for some of them even when I’m thirteen.”
“Where is your mom?”
Duck waves her hand to indicate a manicurist or a palm reader. She keeps beside me as we hike the incline. Up ahead a woman stands in a corner archway knocking on a door. It takes me a second to realize it’s Louise. She has on the same black silk blouse and navy trousers she wore my first day on Patmos. But just as I’m about to call her name, the door opens and she steps inside. When we reach the door, I stop. The window beside it is covered in a red curtain.
Duck snatches for my hand, but I’m holding too many bags.
“We have to walk quickly and hold our breath,” she says. “This is the house of the bad man.” The Chicago pedophile. But why would Louise be visiting him? Has she taken over the chore of defending Sonny’s daughter? Louise would be a more intimidating ambassador than Miles. We’re all doing our part to shoulder Charlie’s absence. Duck runs full throttle into the darkness of the alley. When I make my way through it, the door to Charlie’s house is already open.
I set the bags in the kitchen. A giant copper pot is simmering on the stove and releasing a cloud of mussels and squid. I put a jug of goat milk in the refrigerator. The shelves are packed with green cheeses and bagged oysters and warty truffles and black porcelain jars of caviar and a plate of white butter, each square pressed with the seal of a Parisian dairy. A bulk carton of emerald water bottles is open on the floor. When I cross into the sitting room, a pale yellow tablecloth covers a large round table. The china is set around it, silver-white discs with a simple brown line drawn around the rims. Lime napkins are folded on each chair in the shape of sailboats. A bouquet of white irises sits in the center, their petals still studded with slivers of ice. They must be imported. It strikes me that Sonny is spending an unwarranted amount of money on her late-afternoon lunch, reveling in luxuries the way someone does when they’re uncertain how long they will last. I count ten settings. Duck has scrawled names in crayon on paper cards. Sonny, Ian, Miles, Rasym, Adrian, Duck, Louise, Chiara, Lorenzo, and a question mark.
“Mom and I did the table this morning before we all went out,” Duck says proudly as she fidgets at the top of the stairs.
“Who are Chiara and Lorenzo?” I ask.
“Mom’s friends from Rome. They’re supposed to be sailing in on their yacht this afternoon. Lorenzo is figo.”
“And the question mark?”
“In case there’s a tenth guest. I hope it’s Charlie. I miss him.”
There’s no sound in the house to indicate that Stefan has returned. I swap my card with Chiara’s so that I’m sitting next to Louise.
“A game!” Duck demands. Now that my hands are free, she’s quick to intercept one, leading me down the flight of stairs. The bedroom doors are closed along the hallway, and she drags me down another flight, where storage crates mix with surplus furniture, bins filled with beach and garden gear, and minor marble statues, presumably less consequential for being anatomically complete. A pipe must be leaking because a drip of water has formed on the plaster ceiling and there’s a tiny puddle on the terra-cotta tiles. Duck opens a stained-glass door to pull me into the back garden. Spiderwebs hang in the thornbushes, and white stars of jasmine shield the entrance to the tiny shrine. Duck watches as I battle the overgrown branches to peer through its window. I can’t control the hunch that Charlie might have been hiding in this backyard bunker all along. Could it be that simple, that obvious? But whatever I expect to find in the shrine isn’t there—only rusted candelabras and blasted mosaics, household saints varnished with grime. I’m sorry, Charlie. I haven’t helped you at all. I haven’t even filed a missing person’s report.
“Marco Polo,” Duck declares. “You hide in the house. And when I say Marco, you say Polo.”
“Isn’t that played in a swimming pool?”
“We don’t have one,” she replies sadly. “Houses up here aren’t allowed to have them. Except for Iranian pools, you know, covered with a roof.” Duck is already a specialist on island code. “I keep my eyes closed. I only get seven Marcos. After seven, if I don’t find you, you win.”
“You don’t want to hide first?”
“I like finding. Go! I’m counting down from sixty.”
I dutifully return to the house. Some childhood tingle envelops me, the fear and thrill of being hunted, the search dependent on the searcher’s patience. I climb the steps to the second floor and open the door to the master bedroom. I hear Duck in the garden, forty-seven, forty-six, forty-five . . . One half of the bed has been slept in, the dented next to the undented pillow. I slide open the mirrored closet door. The whiff of lavender and metal hits me, Charlie’s smell. His shirts and coats are spaced evenly on the hangers, and his shoes cup the darkness on the floor. How long does the scent of a person last in a weave of fabric? What’s the life span of their trace? I can’t bring myself to sit in Charlie’s closet, wrapped in his belongings while I wait to be discovered. I reach for the sleeve of a seersucker jacket, but stop myself from bringing it to my nose. Sonny’s jewelry is spread out on the dresser, the gaudy turquoise earring matching the one in my cabin, the black hand-carved queen standing sentinel-like among streams of silver and gold. A jar of face scrub announces that its ingredients are made of the finest ground-up mountains.
I move into the hallway and linger in front of Duck’s room. She might deem that hiding place an invasion of privacy. Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen . . . I knock on Rasym and Adrian’s door before entering. I briefly try to squeeze under their bed, but suitcases block any successful concealment. Plus there are condom wrappers scattered on the brick. Three, two, one, zero. Ready or not. Now I risk utter failure, standing dumbly in the middle of a room. It’s a game for children, but I’m panicking, savoring the panic of nearly being found and the ridiculous need to win. To prove to a seven-year-old that I’m capable of vanishing too.
“Mar-co,” she calls from the garden.
“Polo.”
I hear her tug on the handle of the stained-glass door. I race into the hallway. I consider hiding under the upstairs lunch table. But Duck is already on the stairs, and my footsteps would be detectable. I hurry toward Stefan’s room.
“Mar-co.”
“Polo,” I murmur faintly, trying to sound far away.
I turn the knob onto the darkness. The curtain is drawn over the window. Papers litter the floor, contracts and documents in English and Arabic. A laptop sits open on the bed, its screen dark. Around it are empty vials and empty emerald water bottles. As I walk up to it, I notice a photograph lying on the keyboard of two boys side by side in their suits. It’s the photo of Charlie and Stefan I found on the morning I arrived.
“Mar-co.”
“Polo.”
I tap my finger on the computer’s space bar, and the screen brightens. A short text is written in a Word document, the cursor blinking after the last word.
I’M SORRY, DAD. I CAN’T HANDLE IT. I CAN’T MAKE YOUR SINS MINE. WE HAVE DONE TOO MUCH DAMAGE AND THERE’S NO WAY TO ERASE OUR NAME. SYRIA WAS ONE DEAL TOO MANY. I HOPE I’LL BE FORGIVEN.
I hear the tick of a faucet. A pair of shorts, underwear, and a T-shirt are carefully folded by the bathroom door. When I step onto the red marble, liquid laps around my shoes. Stefan’s eyes are open, staring up in the flooded tub. He’s naked, motionless. His body is as white as a bar of soap with stray hairs stuck to it. One hand is folded at his chest, and the other has fallen against his thigh. He’s submerged in thirty inches of water, but he feels as far away as a strange country inaccessible by hands or helicopter.
“Mar-co.”
“Duck, stop! Don’t come in!” I sprint from the bathroom in time to find her dancing in victory from the hall.
CHAPTER 15
Suicide leaves too much to imagine and very little to do. But even a burned-out life gives off heat, and, for the two hours I sat in the upstairs living room slumped in the medieval chair, I felt the cooling star of Stefan’s body radiate through the floorboards. Inspector Martis sealed himself off in the bedroom, and I watched as one by one the lunch guests arrived to be greeted with the news. Like watching sightseers eaten by a lion.
Rasym returned to the house just as I was dragging Duck by the arm up the stairs. I didn’t know where the phone was, and Duck didn’t know the number for the police. Rasym grabbed the cordless house phone and disappeared down the steps, his whimpering breaths receding as I led Duck onto the balcony.
The parade of grief that followed was interrupted only by the phalanx of officers and the island’s doctor. He wore a short-sleeve linen shirt with O’s of sweat bleeding from his armpits, and he swung his black leather case loosely at his side, as if relieved that he was too late to be called upon to use it. First Therese appeared, then Sonny, both turning white and shaking, moans of no’s and what’s and not possible’s, as if each decided separately not to believe. Therese broke down in the kitchen, until Christos arrived to take her back to their house. Christos’s voice was a frantic baritone. He gazed at me before he left, his eyes wet, his chest weighted by his wife, and on his face was a look of innocence I had never seen on him before.
“I can’t . . . I can’t understand,” he shouted. “Why no one tell me Stefan here? Why no one tell me? How he dead?”
Louise. Miles. The dark-blond Italian couple armed with champagne and flowers. Sonny sat with Duck on the balcony, calling hotels to find a room for the night, all of which were booked. Rasym, between check-ins with the officers, was also on the phone—to his father in Nicosia, to Mr. Konstantinou’s assistants in New York, to Stefan’s staff in Dubai, and around and around in a carousel of sympathy and arbitration. He must have texted his boyfriend and told him to stay away because Adrian never showed. Louise cleared the table of the plates, the seating cards, and the silverware. All that was left were the irises hovering above their puddle of ice.
I wanted to mention Charlie. I wanted to say his name out loud, some simple declaration like, “Charlie is Stefan’s brother,” but I didn’t. And no one else mentioned Charlie either, out of respect or fear, but I was sure we were all thinking of him and maybe waiting for him to appear too. Miles drifted onto the balcony, sat down in one of the metal chairs, and offered Sonny his arms.
“I’m going back to the cabins,” I told Louise as she continued cleaning, picking up stray glasses, stacking two magazines, the green Bible, and the oversize atlas on the coffee table, beating the sofa pillows back to life. I was jealous of her busyness.
“I’ll stay a little longer, just in case Sonny needs anything.” She looked at me, crazy, and glanced at Rasym, who was on his phone in the corner conducting a hushed argument with a New York attorney. “Stefan’s father is still unconscious. Can you imagine him waking up in the hospital to hear that his son is gone?”
Which one? I thought.
Hours later, greased in moonlight on the cabin patio, I am still asking myself that question. Which one? Or is it both?
I try Charlie’s cell phone. It goes directly to voice mail. The battery must have died long ago. This is Charlie. You know what to do. But I don’t. I stare at the open bottle of vodka and my empty glass. Far below along the beach, against the gleaming waves, teenagers are screaming in each other’s arms.
I want to believe in suicide. I want to believe Stefan had that strangling vine growing inside of him on my visit to his rented room. But nothing about his promises to clean up Konstantinou Engineering suggested a man waylaid with guilt. There’s another answer, the best friend I can’t find. Charlie could have waited for the opportunity to do away with Stefan before he discovered the truth and spoke. The problem with the missing is that you can dream any crime on them.
Two high beams cut up the hill and disappear around the bend. I hear the motor lumber up the final ascent. A tiny silver car glides onto the driveway. I walk through my room and down the front steps. Rasym slams the driver’s side door, and I wait for the passenger’s side door to open, searching the windshield for the blur of Louise.
“She’s staying with Sonny and Duck tonight on Domitian,” he says. “Sonny asked her to.” Rasym’s had a grueling afternoon, but the hours of phone calls and strategizing seem to have invested him with a new vitality. He stares at me with his jawline hardened, as if ready to weather a few trivial commiserations before he gets to the reason for his visit.
“I’m sorry about Stefan,” I say anyway. His thin lips eke out a pained smile. “When you spoke to him the other day, did you get the feeling he was depressed?”
“Not everyone puts their troubles on a billboard.” Rasym’s eyes flicker over the cabins. Perhaps he’s looking for a sign of Charlie. “He wasn’t in his right mind, that much is clear. Stefan and I weren’t that close.” He crosses his arms, irritated by the need to explain. “What I mean is, we didn’t speak much about personal matters. Still, I wouldn’t have guessed he’d end up doing something like that.”
“Me neither. If anything, when I spoke to him, he seemed thirsty for the future, ready to make his mark on the company.”
“Exactly,” Rasym agrees, leaning rigidly against the car hood. I can tell he wants to leave but is determined not to. He takes a few dry breaths and studies me. “Obviously this isn’t an easy time for the family. My father wanted to fly in, but I told him I could handle things here. A lawyer is on his way from Athens, a representative in case the situation gets ugly.”
How much uglier could it get? One son dead, the other missing, and a father who is still comatose in a hospital bed eight thousand miles away.
“Did the police confirm it was a suicide?” I ask.
Rasym stares at his shoes as he pinches his nose. He’s unpracticed in asking strangers for favors. The Rasym cut from family power yesterday did not anticipate the Rasym today charged with it. It occurs to me that he no longer has to exist under the mantra be nice to Stefan, in order to keep the money flowing. Maybe that’s why he told Adrian not to come back to the house this afternoon. His boyfriend might have witnessed a disturbing transformation, the erratic butterfly back into the prudent, green-eating caterpillar.
“Inspector Martis is asking that you stop by the station tomorrow morning,” he says. “You were the one who discovered the body. I suppose he just wants to check with you before the death certificate
is processed and we can send Stefan back to Nicosia for burial.”
“Okay.”
Rasym drops his hand and stares up at me, stares or glares, his eyes squinted as if snow blind.
“There’s something you need to do for me. For us.” He starts over, lightening his tone. “There’s something I need to ask you to do for my family. For Charlie if not for the rest of us. Did you see Stefan’s computer on the bed?”
“Yeah. I read the note.”
Rasym winces. “Ian, listen to me. There is no note.”
“But there—”
“I erased it. I erased it before the police arrived.” He grips the car behind him, as if for the reassurance of a warm machine. “I had to. If it got out that Stefan killed himself because of his involvement with Konstantinou Engineering that would be the end of the company. It would basically be seen as a confession of guilt, and the media would take those words and run. Not just the end, but also a public investigation. That thing he wrote about Syria, as if the crisis there has anything to do with us! Can you imagine how that would read in the world? I spoke to my father, and we agreed it should be deleted. We were doing what’s best for the family. I told you, Stefan wasn’t in his right mind.”
Rasym reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pouch of tobacco and rolling papers. I’ve never seen him smoke before, and it strikes me as a habit he purposely picked up to model himself after his favorite cousin. His fingers shake as he threads the tobacco across the seam of white.
“But doesn’t that note verify it was a suicide? The police might—”
“The police might what?” he repeats as a dare. “The island police? I told them Stefan had been depressed. It’s an open secret in the family that he took those pain pills for years. They’re running a toxicology test. Even that incompetent island doctor is capable of drawing blood. It will prove he was high on painkillers. There’s little question that his death was self-inflicted. But it doesn’t have to be ruled a suicide. Suicide is another declaration of guilt.”
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