Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  Belov’d Reptil: This litten Hart will not be makin You hapy but it is my Hart and Your Hart, too, and is belongin in your Pokket deep. Daniel is gude and also vurry deep, but he is not my Firfisle, no. Firfisle-mine, I Love You. But kinsidder the Worlt I live in. Forever this Hart. Whatsoever else I am, I am Yours.

  20

  Restaurant Firfisle had been open almost five years the night Mr. Perdhomme came in with his sidekick, the man Dad had called Kaiser, the killer. And just when life had come to seem so, so simple: a restaurateur, his staff, the food, former lovers safely distant, everything present tense, the first periods of weeks on end since the murders that he did not see the blooming petals of blood, that he didn’t think of his folks, the black hole in the barrel of that gun. It all came rushing back: Dad’s cupidity, Mom’s frustration with him, his mounting lies, the pressure she put on him.

  Mr. Perdhomme. His coldness as he dared sit in my restaurant and eat my best food. And Kaiser’s face in younger then older iterations, his preternatural calm whether shooting people to death or ordering wild-mushroom sausages, the way the two of them, far from remorseful, had put themselves directly in my path, right in my realm, confident they held all the knives.

  A kiss Mom had given me when I was nine, a kiss on the forehead after a forgotten disappointment, but the kiss very much alive, the only kiss I can recall her giving me. And Dad, always with the mauling hugs.

  The lights stayed on at the High Side those next few days, thousands of chandelier bulbs lighting dozens of windows. Simple facts: Mr. Perdhomme and Kaiser had been Sylphide’s guests. And though I hadn’t seen her for several years, she’d sent the two of them to Restaurant Firfisle, where, wisely or not, I’d treated them like kings. Irrefutable conclusions, stuff even Jack would have to credit, which I wrote on a guest check that night:

  1) Kaiser and Perdhomme know each other.

  2) Dad was about to testify about the crimes of Dolus.

  3) Perdhomme ordered Dad’s death to save his own skin.

  4) Kaiser carried it out, and I was there.

  5) Sylphide knows both men.

  6) Her skin must have needed saving, too.

  7) Sylphide has told them where I am.

  8) Kate’s intuition about her is much better than I want to believe.

  9) Perhaps Kate’s intuition should be trusted more.

  10) Headline in Friday’s Times: “Dolus Object of Massive New Probe.”

  11) Perdhomme’s old crimes will come to light in such a probe.

  12) I was a witness to one of the most violent of these crimes.

  13) I am in trouble.

  The next morning, a bright Sunday, I seethed and paced, circular rumination like I hadn’t committed since I didn’t know when, couldn’t get it straight in my head what I’d say when I went over there to confront the great ballerina, couldn’t get it straight in my head that a couple of decades had passed since the disaster, that I was not a pure and invincible seventeen years old, worked my station at Firfisle in a cloud so ugly that Etienne asked me if I was sick, put his hand to my forehead.

  And I’m sorry to say I slapped the hand away, left the restaurant in a typhoon, stayed up all night brooding, planning: I would confront Sylphide in the morning. Monday early I was out on Dad’s famous brick patio glowering across the pond.

  But I’d blown it. If I’d read the Times Magazine when it arrived on Sunday, things might have been different. But, as always, I’d saved the whole thick paper for Monday, my one morning off. Long, adoring article about Sylphide’s work in South America, a tour down the spine of the Andes, a series of benefits for Dabney’s foundation, still called Children of War. She and her new husband were to leave Monday after a dawn press conference at Bradley Field in Hartford, where the foundation’s private jets were based. Gone before I could get my answers.

  Old anger returned, stale fear, long-expired fantasies of revenge. And worse yet, fresh trembling. Obviously, I was to be killed. I thought to call my sister, the only possible confidante and advisor, but Jack would murder me before Perdhomme and Kaiser got their chance—I couldn’t bring Kate in till I’d come to some plan Jack couldn’t dent with his condescension. I knew what he’d say: Call the police, call the D.A. in Danbury. He’d even offer to drive me up there.

  But I knew that route. If I went to the authorities with this quarter-century-old complaint, nothing would happen. Or, even if some dedicated public servant took an interest, all I would succeed in doing would be tipping off Perdhomme, who’d just have to press Kaiser to kill me sooner.

  I was on my own.

  I dressed in my best old Miami suit, tied a good knot in a narrow tie, combed my hair back with a spot of petroleum jelly, brushed out the ponytail, a tough look on an imposing man, but not good enough as armor went. So, in a box of Dad’s things down in the basement I found his sap, a little lead-filled leather truncheon ungentle men of his generation often carried into nightclubs, say, or kept in the glove boxes of their cars. It sagged in my pocket like a spare penis—surely part of the weapon’s allure for old Nick. At the Westport station, no faltering, none of that Dad stuff, I left my car at a meter, plenty of coins, and got on the train. From Grand Central I marched up Park Avenue, entered the familiar lobby of the Dolus building, marched past the security desk to the executive elevator bank. I would slug Perdhomme across the temple as soon as he recognized me. He’d drop and I’d hit him again, put a knee on his back, jerk his head up sharp to the side, break his neck, something I was plenty strong enough to do. What did consequences mean to me? I’d break his neck and leave him lying there, see to the dancer later.

  But of course no elevator came: a keycard was required. And that left me to approach the guard, a scrawny lifer: “Here to see Perdhomme,” I said.

  “Sir?” the guard said.

  And I repeated it: “Perdhomme.”

  “What company sir?”

  “Dolus, of course. This company. What company do you think?”

  “Dolus Investments? They left the building in 1971, sir.” He went into a drawer in his stand, pulled out an index card. “They are now based in Dallas, Texas, sir. We have an eight-hundred number, sir.”

  I fondled Dad’s sap in my pocket, impotent, useless thing, fell into a period of darkness like I’d never known: his killers had nearly made a killer out of me.

  I BEGAN AGAIN to wonder if I was following Kate down the road to decompensation. Perdhomme’s visit, the connection to Sylphide, the appearance of Kaiser, it all seemed to have affected my personality, like some pure form of stress someone had packed in a pipe and made me smoke. I had violence in my hands, my heart. Etienne thought I had every right to go nuts, treated me gingerly while I obsessed. But these were not magnificent thoughts, quite the opposite. I’d battled for years with Kate over Sylphide’s supposed involvement in the murder of our parents, over the connection of those killings to the killing of Dabney Stryker-Stewart. To have Crazy May proved even slightly right required some serious rewiring of all the processes of my heart and mind.

  I had to tell Kate about the visitation. And Jack, too, I had to tell Jack. RuAngela and Etienne were keen on that: no more denial from Jack. We needed to make a plan with him and Kate, get all of us on the same page, the extended family finding a way to bring Perdhomme and Kaiser to justice. Sylphide, too, Etienne kept reminding me (speaking of denial!), my dancer, who’d apparently choreographed more things than I’d ever known.

  October again, and that clear, slanting sunlight over the Sound. I got in the kitchen early the second Saturday, tuned the radio to NPR, which I’d be allowed to listen to until the prep crew came in at eleven—their smashy music after that. Morning Edition came on, and after a lot of worried talk about the economy, there was an item about the new Tenke Thorvald Dance Company. I listened like an owl in a tree—dead still, that is, turning my head, blinking my eyes—a long interview between Scott Simon and Conrad Pant, who was still Sylphide’s manager: the great international t
reasure and her troupe would be at Lincoln Center for a week in mid-October, huge retrospective celebration of Sylphide’s career.

  By the time Etienne arrived, I was shattered, pacing the kitchen, trying not to be sick. “Kaiser and Perdhomme,” I began, but that’s not what I meant to tell him. Try again: “Sylphide, bro. She’s coming to town! They’re coming to get me.”

  E.T. nodded soberly, stalwart chef, big cleaver in his fist. No words necessary: We would prevail. Simple superiority. It was time to talk to my sister, all right. No more messing around. He said, “You know how Jack and Kate are always trying to get me on that sailboat?”

  “You would do that for me?”

  “It’s just a sail, Lizard. Proximity, close. Kate contained. And Jack has to listen to every word you say.”

  “You sound like Olulenu.”

  “I’ll have your back, and I’ll back you up. When I’m done leaning over the rail, that is, bumbaclot.”

  “Fuckery,” I said.

  LONG ISLAND SOUND was sharp with whitecaps, the air over it so dry that I could see the treetops of Long Island itself, seventeen or more miles away, the horizon lifted by shimmering mirages. Etienne had insisted on two life jackets, wore one of my Dolphins jerseys on top, looked like a bird-legged linebacker. Kate hadn’t seen his gams before and kept giggling appreciatively—they were shapely and smooth as a teen girl’s, also like a comic book, a hundred small and colorful tattoos.

  “Your butt is so fucking cute,” she kept saying, never so cheerful as around E.T., pinching at him as I pushed him onboard from the dinghy, never this cheerful in years, auspicious.

  “What a morning,” Jack kept saying. And he was right. Gorgeous. Crisp, clear, breezy, promise of a hot afternoon, the last sail of the year, early October: murder weather.

  Jack showed E.T. where to sit, where to put his hands, and E.T. held on white-knuckle tight though we weren’t yet off the mooring. I sat across from him in the big cockpit, held his knees to keep him from vibrating right out of the vessel. Kate leapt nimbly to the bow and unfurled the jib. It filled with a snap, the whole boat jerking to life.

  “We’re going?” Etienne cried.

  “We’re sailing,” Jack said calmly. He maneuvered through the tight harbor over a swiftly incoming tide, real expertise. Kate kept busy, quickly unsnapping the mainsail cover, dropping it at our feet for me to fold and stow, stood ready at the sheets. Jack watched her every move fondly, critically. The two of them had been together twenty years, it occurred to me. He was in his late fifties by then, fit and irenic, same as ever except for the graying temples, the increasingly handsome face. E.T. watched Kate more warily: what if she did something wrong and everything exploded and we ended up in the drink? I set the jib and trimmed it and trimmed it again to Jack’s instructions as we made the end of the large breakwater just opposite their house on Drixel Point.

  Deep Song was a 1950s-vintage Concordia yawl, a sweet old wooden vessel painted midnight blue, teak planking, mahogany deck trim, length on deck just under forty feet, fast, elegant. Kate pulled at the lines to unfurl the main, a great flapping of canvas and squealing of pulleys as the sail climbed the mast. Jack pointed out the brails and spars, the hand-sewn seams, a man in love, a long-term relationship.

  “But we have a motor? Just in case?” Etienne asked fervently. “I mean, how do we get back in if the wind’s blowing out?”

  Jack didn’t betray any amusement. He said, “We’ll tack in. But just in case, Cookie, we have the original Gray motorworks four-cylinder engine.” We splashed out of the river and into a freshening wind, the sails and lines suddenly tightening, the boat heeling. “Goat Island,” Jack said, and pointed across a perfection of waves backed by blue sky, a pile of rocks out there.

  Kate slipped into the cockpit with us, sat close by Jack on the teak bench, her legs stretching toward me. In her tankini she looked like a surf babe stuck in a boat with a radically progressive senator and his bodyguards, ready to leap onto her shortboard and fly. I’d dug out my own old pair of swim trunks and tugged them on at the docks—what Kate did I’d do, though I was already freezing. My own legs, still powerful (as I wouldn’t have hesitated to point out), were pale as underground asparagus and covered with goose bumps.

  Jack brought Deep Song about, threw us tight to the wind. We quartered the swells, booming and shuddering progress. Etienne shrieked in exhilaration, water sheeting over the bow: “That’s right, mo-fo, that’s right, that’s right!”

  Jack laughed hard—something you didn’t see often—and Kate laughed hard—something you didn’t always want to see—and Etienne laughed and shrieked and the laughter was funny and made us laugh all the harder and Jack held the tiller and we all shouted and cheered, the boat fleeing into the next trough blind, cresting with a lurch to a view of the world in spray and spindrift, hilarious hiccups and snorts of laughter.

  “We’d better all of us get into vests,” Jack chortled.

  “What!” Etienne shouted, bang into the next trough.

  Kate struggled below, handed up orange life jackets, handed up a fleece for me, Jack’s wool sweater, a towel for Etienne. We fought our way into the life jackets even as we shot up into the sky, alive.

  JACK EASED INTO a sandy cove on a very small island somewhere off Long Island, a beach well configured for wading. Jack had been right—you don’t get seasick when you’re part of the ocean. Etienne was fine. We had about an hour and a half of tide by Jack’s calculation, long enough for a leisurely lunch.

  We spread blankets on the fine sand, and deftly Etienne laid out a middle-eastern feast on good paper plates: fol mudamas and kerba-kum, hummus and spiced baked nuts, baby house-pitas and eggplant tapenade, sweet tea, shocking little pickles, candied squash blossoms stuffed with curried rice and onions, pink linen napkins from the restaurant. I’d contributed tiny, spicy mushroom pastries filled with a cranberry chutney. “Eat counterclockwise for fertility,” E.T. said. “Clockwise for wealth.”

  “What does random get you?” my sister said.

  “Random for eternal life,” our chef said.

  Of course we all chose that, just dove in. When we were beyond stuffed he laid out sweets: sticky pistachio squares, chocolate and chilies, a chilled mango soup served in fresh little wooden bowls: nice.

  Jack and Kate went off to explore the island, not much to see, a lot of rocks, a lot of trees, the pilings from an old fishing weir. They disappeared over the height of land, a faint path. Kate just looked good: healthy and happy and strong and wise.

  “You got your speech?” E.T. said.

  “I’ll keep it short,” I said, and reviewed it in my head: Perdhomme and Kaiser—the actual Kaiser—had dined at Restaurant Firfisle. Kaiser, the killer, a man I’d seen up close but who’d never been sought by the police (the poor court-appointed guard, badly wounded, reported that Dad had said “Hi, sir” to the shooter and not “Kaiser,” and the guard’s word, being professional, was strongly valued over mine, all his testimony deposed bedside at the hospital in Danbury). There was no physical evidence to connect Perdhomme to any crime, was the D.A.’s lament, no eyewitness to anything but a contract killing that might have been paid by anyone, and professional murderers very hard to trace. My mother? She was merely collateral damage in a war among criminals. I’d played this particular loop of tape in my head a million times, difficult to find the OFF button. But now we had Kaiser. And we had Perdhomme. And we had Kaiser and Perdhomme as a unit: same room together, same table at my restaurant, same car, same destination, High Side.

  Etienne took my two hands, looked into my eye. “Remember, no mention of Sylphide. You concentrate on what we know. We don’t let Kate distract you. We don’t let Jackie shut you down.”

  “And don’t call him Jackie, not to his face.”

  “He call me Cookie, mon! He gonna be Jackie.”

  Lying back on the blanket in the nice hot sand, trying to relax, I went over it yet again despite myself. Kaiser and Perdhomme, Perdhomme
and Kaiser: in court, the defense had taken me apart, played me as the pitiable teenage kid. Dad’s phone calls with Perdhomme, my best shot, had been dismissed before I could recount them: hearsay. The tape recordings I’d seen him make were nowhere to be found. Nothing about the High Side was deemed allowable; there was no connection to be made between the High Side and our side. Dad’s shoes were just shoes.

  The mâitre d’ from Les Jardins was asked by the defense counsel to describe the shooter. “Très tall,” he said. “Zhoulders énorme. Hands, énorme! Ze hair? Très long. Comme les dieux mythologique!” Not the shooter I had seen, not Kaiser, not the shooter I myself had just described to the court, not by a mile. Silence in the gallery.

  Perdhomme’s attorney pointed at me: “Is this our man?”

  The look on the mâitre d’s face—whoa—he’d gotten confused somewhere deep in his traumatized psyche, had plugged me into the shooter’s role. The gallery, heavily stocked with Dolus ringers, broke into derisive laughter. Everyone knew the tenuous case against Perdhomme had just been blown. And there I was, not saying half of what I knew, represented and closely advised by the same lawyer Dad had been assigned, the corpulent McBee, who we should have known was on the take, rumpled guy like that driving a vintage XKE, laughing privately with the opposition at every recess. It only occurred to me many years later that someone in Dad’s legal inner circle had to have told someone in the killer’s circle the name of the restaurant Dad had picked for his freedom meal. Who else but McBee? He’d had no questions for Kate, who took the stand for all of three minutes and ranted about Dabney’s death, how it was all connected, how innocent civilians were dying in Vietnam, how Dabney had stood against all that, sad heads shaking all around the room: No more questions, Your Honor. She had to be hushed by the judge as she launched into Nixon, and then Sylphide.