“There’s always a first time. And considering that the madame has her musician, maybe she knew he had his own caso, who knows how it started. He isn’t bad looking, and maybe — “
“Shut up.”
Injured this time, Cida told him, “I’m not responsible for his comings and goings. This wasn’t my idea.”
The gunman muttered into his cellular, listened for a moment, then pushed down the antenna and put the phone into his jacket pocket.
“Get the kids.”
“What do you mean?”
But he wasn’t looking at Cida. He was looking at the brothers, who were heading toward the stairs.
“What are you talking about?” Cida asked, grabbing the nearest shoulder. “They didn’t do anything. They’re babies. What’s he going to talk to them about?”
The gunman came up behind her and twisted her arm behind her back.
“You’re hurting me!”
“Worse than that if you don’t shut up.”
The brothers disappeared up the stairs as she struggled. “They’re babies. This hasn’t got anything to do with them. They never did anything.”
When the brothers came back, each held one of the boys with a hand clapped hard over his mouth. All Cida could see were blue eyes over bent knuckles.
“You’re smothering them!” she screamed. “You’ll kill them.” Flailing at the gunman.
“Shut up!” he told her.
Cida reeled from a slap on the face, but was able to spin free and try to grab Evan, kicking the nervous brother’s leg and trying to pull the hand away from her baby’s innocent mouth.
“You leave him.”
But a searing jerk at her scalp made her reel. He had her by the hair, and pulled her off balance before throwing her to the floor. Tennis shoes kicked at her chin, her breasts, her belly.
“Babies,” she whimpered, and saw retreating tenis as she passed out.
23
Todd didn’t know where to start, what to do. Coming in, he’d found Cida on the floor. He found a pulse, then pivoted while still on his haunches to reach for the phone.
The boys! He sprang toward the stairs, pounding up before telling himself to be quiet, they might be there. He knew they weren’t there. He saw rumpled yawning sheets in the darkness, then threw on the lights to be sure. Telephone. Call the police.
Bad idea. He pounded into the bathroom to wet a cloth, then ran downstairs again to wipe Cida’s face. She moaned. Was she bleeding? Indelicate to look. Necessary. Blood and a belly quivering with labour. What was she? Seven, eight months?
She moaned, “Zinho.” An unattached diminutive. Bébézinho? Although at least she was starting to come around.
“Cida, listen to me. You’ve got to tell me what happened.”
“Malandros.”
Which he’d always thought meant layabouts, lazy and unthreatening, when Doutor Eduardo was anything but. Why had he bothered to ask what happened? Hadn’t he known exactly what was happening the moment he’d seen the girl on the floor? But why did the old man take the boys? Why hadn’t he blown up the bloody plane instead? Doutor Eduardo was losing his grip. He’d let so much time elapse that Todd hated to think how many copies of the document he’d distributed. Safety in numbers: he’d given a copy to everyone he trusted. Obviously to one who shouldn’t have been trusted. How in God’s name could Todd get back all the copies? And with them, the boys?
“Mamaiiiii,” Cida moaned. Of course, the mother. Again Todd reached for the telephone, then fumbled in his pocket for his address book. After which he paused, thinking who the mother worked for.
The mistress will help you.
He didn’t have much choice.
“I’d like to speak to Senhora Tânia, please. Senhor Austen.” Amazing how calm he sounded.
“Yes, hello?” Tânia answered lazily.
“It’s Todd Austen calling.”
“Yes, they told me.”
He paused. “Can I trust you, Tânia?”
“Yeah, sure,” she answered. Was she tired or drugged?
“I’ve got Cida badly beaten up here. And your uncle has my boys.”
In no more than a heartbeat, her voice changed completely. “This can’t continue,” she said.
“Idiot. Veado. Who said you could tell them to bring the kids?”
“Our man wasn’t coming home. So now we do a simple trade. Much neater plan, when you think about it.”
“You think about whose plan it was,” Seu José replied.
“If it works, he’s happy. And I say it works.”
Powell walked toward the stairs to the second floor, where the children were being held. “I’ll just look in on them. Make sure the arrangements — “
“You don’t get a step closer,” said Seu José, whose great-grandson no longer liked fishing, or anything else his helpless family tried.
Cida’s mother and the driver took the girl to the hospital, planning to tell the doctors that she’d fallen downstairs. So many women had falls, even in houses without staircases, that the doctors were likely only to roll their eyes, do what was necessary, maybe rest their heads in their hands and quietly curse the world. God protect the girl from the persistent inquiries of a zealot, Tânia thought, and looked across the room at Todd.
“I can’t get all the copies back,” he repeated. “People have probably made copies of the copies by now.”
“Of course they have. He must want something else.”
“I can’t tell him where it comes from originally because I don’t know.”
“So you had helpers.” Tânia pursed her lips and tilted her head to one side. “For a start, he probably wants to know who they are.”
“But he’ll kill them. At least one of them. My God, or the boys if I don’t tell. Why couldn’t they just have taken me?”
“You see, Todd, I would have expected they would. This is why I’m puzzled. Taking the babies requires too much back-and-forth. It would be far easier to get what they wanted from you in person.” Tânia pursed her lips again, this time half humorously. “Not easier for you, of course. But there is a greater degree of elegance in the more direct approach. By making it so complicated, they’ve brought in a number of variables. Me, for example.”
The ransom call would come through soon enough, but Tânia knew Todd was right in trying to anticipate what they’d ask. She was also certain it had something to do with the origin of the document. When collecting his antiques, his art — regrettably, none modern — her uncle insisted on a super-human record of provenance from dealers. She’d heard this called just another example of his controlling nature; also an urge to pick the wings off flies. Clearly, it was another chance to parade his knowledge. But Tânia also recognized, as perhaps no one else could, a second son’s obsession with succession and legitimacy. At her father’s funeral, she’d felt battered by his mournful exultation as he repeated, “The head of the family now.”
Before this, there was what she’d learned during those embarrassing afternoons with her dying mother, who had insisted on being arranged in her enormous creamy bed dressed in yards and yards of even creamier lace, the French scent never quite disguising the sweet smell of terminal cancer, her gay laughter throwing both the fear and the fever into even brighter relief. Her mother had been a delicious young woman; spendthrift and exuberant, a teasing, conspiratorial friend to her friends and a burning candle to men. She was precious, vivacious, so very loved and shallow. How agonizing it had been to be her rawboned, clever daughter, all nose and clavicles, hunched over to protect herself — unsuccessfully, as it turned out.
Her mother had talked about little beyond sex and intrigues, with her daughter as much as her girlfriends. She’d even burdened Tânia with the excruciating knowledge that her father had formerly exhausted her in bed. And Tânia’s uncle:
/> “Well, and to find out your aunt Leonie wasn’t a virgin when he married her! But what did he expect? Both the money and that? My dear! Would he honestly have got her otherwise?”
And so his endless, scourging suspicion about his children’s paternity (in the case of the third girl, probably warranted.) How odd it was, that her uncle was most convinced of the legitimacy of his illegitimate son Eric, having had cause to be certain that Tânia was a virgin when he’d first entered her bed. What a proud turkey cock he’d been, marrying her off when she was pregnant to an available cousin — homosexual, as Tânia hadn’t recognized at the time, but oh! such a beautiful boy, of whom she’d been so fond, poor child, poor children. He’d tried, but the marriage he had hoped would shelter him only led to endless, undermining titters about his cuckold’s horns, a veado’s horns; about the counterfeit paternity. In this way her uncle managed to muddy the waters around Eric’s birth so there had been no public scandal, but no important doubt either of his own precedence.
“I imagine my uncle plans to prove your document is a forgery,” Tânia said.
“A forgery?”
“Then it wouldn’t matter how many copies you’d circulated, it could never be used.”
Todd shook his head. “Everyone who knows anything about these things says it looks genuine.”
“And will feel very disillusioned with you, my dear, when someone comes forward admitting that he forged it.”
Todd thought for a minute. “Your uncle could arrange that anyway.”
“Believably. A trail of proof. Provenance,” she said. “Please understand I know what I’m talking about.”
“I do,” he said gently, glancing away, so that Tânia felt her old girlish shame at being the object of gossip. But perhaps he’d also glanced away when they’d tittered to him. Todd Austen was a gallant man and Holly a little fool. Yet Tânia had been so much worse than a fool she could hardly reproach Holly.
“Well,” she said.
“I don’t know if I should tell you I saw your son with your uncle up in Amazonas a couple of days ago.”
“That too,” she said, and closed her eyes. “Well.”
When the telephone finally rang, Todd was indeed asked for the names of those who had given him the document, and told he would have to deliver the original to a designated location at a later time.
“I’ll meet you with the document and the information you want, but only in exchange for the children.”
The man on the telephone seemed to repeat what he’d said to someone behind him. He was just a voice, an anonymous conduit.
“You don’t get the children until the sources check out.” More whispering. “Which you give me now.”
“You don’t get anything until I have the children.”
A consultation. “You get tonight to think about it.”
“No, don’t — “
Dial tone. Todd leaned his forehead on the receiver.
“What do we do now?” he asked. “Phone your uncle?”
“My uncle left São Paulo last night to meet my aunt in Paris. But there are other calls we have to make. Starting, I’m afraid, with Holly.”
24
She hadn’t even looked at Jay after the phone call. Once she’d hung up, she sat on the hotel bed, staring out the window at the twilight sky. From their room they could see the Beagle Channel. A depth of cold water, thrown out of focus by the retreating grey light. As she raked her nails through her hair, Jay tried to sit down beside her.
“Don’t touch me,” she said, darting off the bed and backing away from him, her arms outstretched to protect herself.
“It’s all right, Holly,” he said soothingly, slowly walking toward her.
“It’s not,” she said, and when he’d backed her into the wall she lunged at him, beating his chest with her fists; pummelling as hard as she could while he tried to grasp her forearms. “You get away from me. You shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”
“It isn’t your fault, Holly. It’s not,” he soothed, getting a strong grip on her wrists and forcing them back against the wall. Her chest heaved. “It’s not your fault, Holly. It just isn’t.”
He dropped her arms when she seemed quieter, and she slapped him across the face.
“It’s not my fault, either,” he said, rubbing his stinging cheek..
“So whose fault is it?” she asked. “Whose fault do you think it is these assholes have my children?” She glared at him, hands clenched, quivering.
“Offhand, I would say the fault lies with the assholes. You don’t kidnap children. There’s just no excuse.”
She dropped her arms. “It’s true,” she said. For a moment they were in calm and reasonable agreement. Holly saw them as two ships lying close at anchor, mirrored in steely water and still, peaceful, separate. Also ready to sail away from each other, an inevitable progression, not sad. Then she remembered her children.
“It’s all my fault,” she cried, and collapsed against him in agony.
Holly spent the night alternating between hysteria, useless phone calls to Rio and feverish, misdirected efforts to pack. She refused to take a sleeping pill, but Larkin put a couple in her coffee and she passed out on the sofa. When she woke up, she heard him pleading into the telephone.
He seemed to be trying to get her a flight out of Ushuaia that afternoon. The flights were all booked, but he was trying for a seat in disjointed Spanish that she could only half understand. Something about Rio, children, an accident. She thought he was saying the children had been hurt in a car accident. Two children; he seemed to be emphasizing the number as if this made it worse. Would it have been better if they’d taken only one of the boys? She began losing herself in the horror of the question, then pulled up when she realized he was talking as if they were his children too. He was telling some sad story about their children having been in a car accident after he and Holly had slipped away on vacation. Now both boys were in hospital, sobbing for their mother. Holly felt like shaking him. It was all a performance. Levering herself up, she saw him rhythmically punch the air, getting the beat right for his flat-footed male upset. Even the quaver in his voice was modulated. How could she ever have trusted him? He was making a performance piece out of the terrible fate of her children; a piece with such dramatic promise, so elemental — sentimental — that Holly could imagine him recording it in his hateful little scribbly notebook, then reworking and refining it until he could achieve a rare display of ironic pathos onstage.
When he finally hung up, she asked him, “You don’t think you’re coming with me, do you?” and stood up.
He looked over at her and sucked his cheeks. “Holly,” he said finally, “I just managed to get you the first flight out of here this afternoon, even though they insisted they had no seats available for the next five days. And yes, I got a seat for myself. I don’t particularly want to stay here. I never had any plans to come here in the first place, as far as that goes. But I also thought you might want some help.”
Holly closed her eyes, trying to calm down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I suppose you had to pump it up. Of course you did.” She dropped back on the couch and rubbed one foot against the other. “So itchy,” she said. “Last night, my legs felt so itchy that I literally couldn’t stand it. I don’t think I can stand it; my mind’s just racing. Everything looks so sharp out the window it’s almost cutting my eyes. I think I’m on the edge of going crazy.”
Coming over, Larkin said kindly, “That’s what your friend Darwin said about this place. Strange, isn’t it? What lasts.”
Holly half laughed, half sobbed. “I don’t know what I’ve done to my children. I don’t know anything. All I want in the world is to go home. I want this whole thing never to have happened.”
“Well, it did.”
Holly didn’t know how he could be so cruel. She stared up at him, and slowly realized he thought she meant their relationship. Poor man. He looked distant as he worked out the next steps.
“You are going home, aren’t you, Holly?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I have to, Jay. Go home. For good, as they say.”
He sat down and tried to put his arms around her, but Holly didn’t want him to.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shrugging to get loose.
“Progressing backwards, aren’t we?” He got up to walk over to the window, looking so bitter that Holly hated herself. It was true, the affair never should have happened, but she was glad it did. Now she knew what it was like to play the great artist. The great male artist, randy as Pan. Time to invent a female version, wasn’t it?
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “Or I was. A sorry creature, I’m afraid.”
“Stop it.”
Holly went to stand beside him, leaning against his shoulder until he put an arm reluctantly around her, then held her close, breathing through her hair. It was a wintry summer evening, gossamer and grey. She loved him, although she was a little disappointed in herself because of it. They would have been happy together, popular, and second rate. There were worse fates, of course, and it seemed likely she was going to live one.
“We’ve got to finish packing,” she said.
This time she was calm and he was clumsy, unable to shut his suitcase over jumbled clothes.
“Fuck!” he yelled, punching it closed. Then he shook his head and smiled, his blue eyes clearing. “I’m sorry too.”
It was a long trip. It was past midnight when they got to Rio and could stumble stiff-legged out of the plane. Holly was surprised when Larkin piled all of their luggage onto one cart, following her through the opaque arrivals door where Todd was waiting, poor man, poor men. Let him wait just a moment longer.
“Good-bye, Jay,” she said, extending a hand.
“I hope it goes well,” he said. “I’m sure they’ll be fine.”
He kissed her cheek, glanced at Todd, and took his suitcase from the luggage cart, walking toward the airport taxi counter, where Holly lost sight of him in the crowd.Turning, she asked her husband, “Is there any news?”
Drink the Sky Page 25