by Jodi Compton
“Yes.”
“You don’t look anything like the sketch on the news, of the woman who took him.”
“That wasn’t me.”
He shook his head. For the first time, I’d genuinely surprised him.
I went on: “Beyond the parts that were in the news, I can’t prove the whole story. Although… can you hold the baby a minute?”
Marsellus looked taken aback, but then he held out his arms. I stood up and gave him Henry, who accepted the change equably. Then, as I had done with Julianne, I pulled down the neckline of my shirt, revealing the scar under my collarbone. I said, “This is what Skouras’s gunmen did to me down in Mexico.”
If he was impressed, it didn’t show on his face, but then Lucius Marsellus had probably seen some shooting scars in his day.
I said, “Do you believe me?”
Marsellus was slow to speak. Then he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I do, but I don’t understand what it has to do with Trey, or me.”
I said, “Mr. Marsellus, it’s fallen to me to look out for this child, but I can’t, not in the long run. Skouras’s men know who I am and what I look like. As long as Henry’s with me, he can be found. And my resources are extremely limited. I can’t start life over in Buenos Aires.”
“Miss Cain, are you asking me for money?”
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t do that.”
It took him a moment, but then he understood. “You want me to take this child?” he said.
I looked him directly in the eye. “I can never repay what I took from you, however accidentally. But this child is the son of a genius father and a beautiful and virtuous mother. I think he might really be something, with the right resources and the right guidance. If Tony Skouras is allowed to raise him, he’ll make this boy in his image, and Skouras is a monster.”
Marsellus said, “Why take this child away from one gangster just to give him to another?”
“His mother would have done anything to keep him from being raised by Tony Skouras,” I said. “Nidia could have gotten money from him for giving up the rights to her child. She could have been set for life. Instead, she fled to Mexico, to live in poverty in some village in the Sierra Madre. Obviously, Adrian told her very bad things about his father. If you read about this man and pay attention, that’s borne out. A picture emerges of a guy who’s spiritually poisoned, a trafficker in human lives, obsessed with money and with winning at all costs.” I paced. “You, on the other hand, despite what you might do in the name of business, have never been impeached in your personal life. You seem to have a good relationship with your mother, your brother and sisters, your nieces and nephews. And you were said to be a devoted… a good…”
“A good father,” Marsellus said.
I nodded. “And beyond all that, this is a good tactical decision,” I said. “Your home is the last place Skouras would look for his half-white, half-Mexican grandchild.”
“And I’m supposed to make it look legitimate how?”
“You have money and connections,” I said. “You can make it look legitimate. Any good attorney could.”
“You’ve thought about this,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But you’re not scared.”
“What?” It didn’t seem to have anything to do with his line of questioning.
Marsellus steepled his fingers, tapping the tips against one another. He said, “Oh, you’re polite enough, and respectful enough, but… I’ve lived a lot of life, Miss Cain, and I’ve seen a lot of fear in my day. It’s not a feeling I’m getting off you.” He paused. “Why is that?”
Before I could answer, Henry began to fuss, his face crimping and reddening. Marsellus looked down at him.
“He’s probably hungry,” I said. “I can give him a bottle.”
“No,” Marsellus said. “That boy’s got a muddy diaper.” He gave Henry back to me. “There’s a bathroom down the hall where you can see to him. After that, come to the first room off the staircase. We can finish our conversation there.”
fifty-three
The room Marsellus had directed me to clearly reflected a woman’s tastes: pale Victorian striped wallpaper, an antique escritoire, wing chairs. When I got there, after changing Henry’s diaper and washing up in the bathroom, Marsellus was standing by the window.
He said mildly, “You should have come and talked to me a year ago.”
“I know,” I said.
He went on: “Trey was a very active child. Almost hyperactive. Me, he’d mind, but I’d seen him disobey his nanny repeatedly, run away from her when she’d told him to stay close to her side. I’d seen him run out into the street before, though he’d been told repeatedly not to. My wife and I were thinking of getting a man to look after him, someone who could take a firmer hand. But Miss Beauvais was a nice girl, and Trey liked her, so we put off that decision.” He paused, looking out the window. “When Trey died, I was very angry. Some of it was at her, and some at you. But a lot of it was at myself, for not doing something earlier.
“I have, like you said, a certain reputation in business. Some of that is deserved. Some of it is rumor and exaggeration. I don’t always discourage that, since with fear comes respect. But a reputation like mine has unintended consequences. It was the reason Trey’s nanny left town in the middle of the night. I assume she was acting on the same incorrect conclusion you later did, though to be fair to you, her disappearance gave you a little more evidence for it.”
Then he said, “The hardest rumors to combat are the ones that are never printed or even spoken in your presence. I know that some people continue to believe I had Trey’s nanny killed, and there’s nothing I can do to fight that.”
I nodded.
Marsellus said, “The advice you were getting in the days after Trey’s death, to give me some space, was that from Cletus Mooney?”
Again I was surprised. He saw it and said, “I didn’t learn about the connection until months after you left town. A business associate of mine used to see you two together in the clubs. You went to high school together, is that it?”
“He’s my cousin,” I said.
“Interesting guy,” Marsellus said. “Lotta people curious to see what kind of work he’ll be doing when he’s thirty.” He looked out the window again, then back to me. Finally he said, “This is a very big thing that you’re asking me to do.”
“I know,” I said.
“What are you going to do if I say no?”
“Stay hidden as long as I can, fight if I have to fight,” I said. “I know this is a big thing I’m asking, a lifetime, really. But I think this baby’s going to be something special. I think he’ll have things to give you, not just you to him.”
Marsellus was quiet a long time. I resisted the urge to jump into the silence with more selling points.
Finally he said, “Trey is buried next to my father in Inglewood Park Cemetery. Go apologize to him, like you have to me, and then we’re square.”
“You’ll take the baby?”
“Yes,” he said. “I will.”
In the first-floor entryway, Marsellus’s man took out the clip to my SIG and reloaded it for me, then handed it back.
Marsellus had accompanied me down, Henry in his arms. He said to me, “What are you going to do about Skouras? Do you expect to be able to hide from him forever?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly.
“I won’t protect you from his people. You and I are square, but I don’t owe it to you to start a war with an organization like his.”
“I know,” I said.
“Good luck, then,” he said. Then he turned to his driver. “Please take Miss Cain wherever she needs to go.”
fifty-four
The quickest way out of state would have been to get to southern Nevada, or to Arizona. The roads in that direction were also more lightly traveled than those going north, which was a good thing when you were driving a stolen car, like I was-I’d had Marsellus’s driver take me back
to where I’d left it, apparently unnoticed and untagged. I’d get rid of it as soon as I could afford to.
All in all, I really didn’t want to get on the 101 north. More than that, I didn’t want to go into San Francisco. It was Skouras land. But I had to. Most of what was in my room over Shay’s office I didn’t need, but there was the small matter of my new driver’s license, which I’d arranged to have mailed there; I wasn’t going so deep underground that I wouldn’t need that. Then there was my Wheelock’s Latin, and inside that was my birth certificate and my only photo of my father.
So in Oxnard I got off the road and made a phone call. Shay didn’t sound happy to hear my voice, but I had paid him his rent in full, so he didn’t have a lot of grounds on which to act aggrieved.
“Has anyone been around looking for me?” I asked him, trying to sound casual.
In Gualala, I’d unwisely identified myself to Quentin as a “one-hundred-thirty-five-pound bike messenger.” There weren’t that many messenger services in the city. If Skouras’s guys had wanted to, they could have narrowed it down.
“Looking for you? No,” Shay said. “You’re not in trouble with the cops, are you? Jesus, that’s all I need.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not that. But I’m thinking, can you maybe grab a few things, and I can meet you somewhere else? Like your place?”
It was hard to imagine Skouras’s men staking out my place long-term, but as Serena would have told me, it’s paranoia that keeps you alive.
“You can’t just go and get what you want?” he demanded, irritated.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I can’t.”
“Fine,” he sighed, sounding exasperated. “Tell me what you need and I’ll get it.”
“Thanks. It’s not much, I promise,” I said.
fifty-five
Shay had given me directions to an address at the edge of the Haight. Parking was easier than it should have been, but then, it was two days until Christmas. Some of Shay’s neighbors were likely out of town, traveling to visit relatives. The many darkened windows around me testified to that.
But at Shay’s place, a tall, narrow Victorian, light glowed behind the closed blind of the front window. I climbed the front steps and rang his doorbell.
Shay answered his door dressed in jeans and a sweater.
“What’s up?” I said. “Thanks for doing this.”
“Hailey,” he said, inclining his head for me to step inside. “Come on back.”
I followed him across the smooth polished wood of a short entry hall. When we entered the living room, I saw figures on the periphery of my vision and turned sharply to recognize them: Babyface and Quentin.
I went for the SIG, but not fast enough. A third guy stepped out of the shadows and grabbed me, twisting me around into a rigid and painful hold.
Quentin swaggered forward. His dark-blond hair was freshly cut and his face was bright with enjoyment.
“Well, look who it is,” he said. “It’s Staff Sergeant Henry Cain’s daughter, Hailey.” He smiled widely. He’d been imagining saying that for some time now.
I looked at Shay. “You bastard.”
I would have liked to think that Shay hadn’t done this willingly, that they’d braced him and threatened everything he held dear, but he didn’t have the strained look of someone whose home and life had been invaded. Instead, his eyes were hooded, the guarded expression of guilt.
“Was it money?” I asked.
He shrugged. “If you give these guys what they want, you’ll come out of this just fine.”
“No, I won’t, Shay,” I told him.
Quentin had called it, long ago in Gualala: You’ll be dead by Christmas. That was two days from now, and all signs suggested I was not going to live that long. In the words of the first Bridge suicide: This is as far as I go.
Babyface said to Quentin, “Go get the car.”
fifty-six
It was morning on the Gulf Coast, maybe around ten or so. My little bar and grill was out at the end of the pier. The waters of the Gulf looked a lot like the Pacific. A gentle breeze, which should have been tangy and salt-scented, jangled the clear glass bulbs strung along the roofline, the ones I’d light up tonight when we were open for business.
Right now I was at work at a big tin sink like you saw in fish markets, the kind with a white cutting board on the side. The surface of the cutting board had the shallow marks of many knives in it. I was cutting into a catfish with the boning knife I’d once held on Serena. Occasionally I washed away the catfish’s blood with an extendable hose that could be pulled out from the faucet, but there was always more. The smell of blood obscured that of the ocean.
I scraped viscera over to one side, kept slicing. My hand hurt a little bit, the little finger that Babyface had broken. I’d thought it was healed, but now it stung.
“Hey, sugar.”
CJ’s long arms slipped around me, and he put his face down into my hair, the way he used to when we’d gone dancing together.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“What are you making?”
“Catfish. You wanted me to learn to fix something Cajun for you. This was just caught.” I nudged my chin at the choppy ocean. “Out there.”
CJ said, “Catfish is a river fish.”
My hand, holding the knife, shook a little. “Then it’s swordfish,” I said, and suddenly it was.
“Are you sure they catch swordfish around here?”
“Why are you making this so hard?” I demanded, slapping the knife down. “It has to be something, CJ. I need something to explain the smell of the blood.”
Scent was the hardest sense to re-create in memory or imagination. I wished I could create the smell of salt water for this, but I couldn’t. I smelled only blood. This was a fragile fantasy, too ready to fall apart.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” he said.
“I am, too,” I said.
I turned around to look at him, the wind playing with his reddish-blond hair and the material of his loose white shirt. He was wearing undoubtedly expensive sunglasses with lenses that looked smoked, like something from the Victorian era. He seemed at ease, unhurt, and I was happy, too, because whatever happened to me, CJ was safe in his vita felix.
I put my arms up around his neck and drew him to me. “I’ve been so stupid,” I said, murmuring against his neck.
“How?” he asked.
There was a chaplain at school who used to favor that passage from Ecclesiastes, with the refrain All is vanity. And it was, my whole life. Not just the past few months, running around pretending I could be the protector of innocent girls and newborn babies, imagining I could thwart Skouras and his whole machine, but even before that, my dream of being a second lieutenant in the Army, of commanding my own troops and making the world a little safer. All of it, vanity.
How many of the stupid, glory-seeking things I’d done had been to burn up the frustrated energy of not being able to have him? What a bloody fucking waste. So what if some of his genes were some of my genes? Who the hell cared? Now I was going to die, far away, having protected him but never fully loved him.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Shhh,” CJ said. “Baby, it’s all right. I’m going to help you.” He cupped his hands under my jawline and kissed me, then his hands went to my shoulders, gently pushing me down.
I went with what he wanted, kneeling and pushing up his shirt and rubbing my cheek against the skin of his flat stomach, then unhooking his belt and pulling his faded Levi’s down. My hands left streaks of blood on his bare thighs but it didn’t bother him, or me. I took him deep in my mouth.
“That’s it,” he said, leaning back against the railing of the pier. “Good girl.”
CJ’s hands, the ones that cupped my nascent breasts at thirteen, now spread through my hair and against the bones of my skull. “Everything’s all right, baby,” he said.
The lightbulbs swayed in the wind, and I closed
my eyes and concentrated on his rhythm.
“Hailey,” he said, “Hailey, I love you,” and his hands tightened convulsively in my hair as he finished.
And suddenly I was on the floor, my face against dirty, industrial-gray carpet, coughing and choking. The fantasy broke up because when Quentin finished making me give him head at gunpoint, he pulled me off him and shoved me unceremoniously facedown on the floor. I hadn’t been able to break my fall because my hands were cuffed behind my back.
Jack Foreman had said that Skouras sold off his line of X-rated movie houses years ago, but maybe he couldn’t get rid of all the holdings, because here I was, in the projection booth of a long-closed theater. There was a big rectangle of carpet missing where the projector had been wrenched up to be sold off. But there was still an editing table in the back. From my position on the floor, I could see the drying blood that had dripped off the edges of the table, and a little more on the carpet.
That was why, in the fantasy, my once-broken finger had been stinging so badly. I no longer had a once-broken finger. Babyface had taken it off with a pair of tin snips, while one of his two helpers held my arm in place. They hadn’t bandaged it. It had clotted and stopped bleeding on its own, but that had been the main part of the torture: watching my hand spurt blood and not being able to put pressure on it. Humans are hardwired to do almost anything to keep our blood in our bodies where it belongs. The pain of losing a finger had been secondary to that psychological drive to do anything, anything, to make the bleeding stop.
I wasn’t strong. I’d actually said, “Marsellus,” while I was watching my hand spurt blood. None of them had understood it. Babyface said, “What?,” and before I could repeat myself, I’d heard an inner voice say, You got up. You got up and walked.
And it was true. In Mexico, Skouras’s men had taken me off the road to shoot me, far enough away that I wasn’t supposed to have been found and helped. They’d left me there. At some point after, I’d opened my eyes and seen the rising moon, and somehow, with two holes in me, I’d gotten up and staggered to the road’s edge, because that had been the only way I was going to live.