“David Cohen.”
“Lyle Monaster,” said Tom.
“Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re from Hollywood.”
“No.”
“I was told you want to use the Palace as a location for a movie.”
“Let me show you something.” Tom laid out everything from his new portfolio, the photographs of the hotel room and all of the receipts.
Cohen looked first at the receipts and then the photographs. He reacted calmly. Of course Tom’s manner and face belonged to a man deserving respect, but still, he had just dealt a puzzle.
“Lyle,” said Cohen, “I think you’re trying to help me.”
“I’m trying to show you something.”
“You’re from the security company.”
“No. I work alone,” said Tom.
“Tell me what all of this means.”
Tom thought of Jan Dodge’s last words to him, about the fairy tales and the precious objects that have meaning only as each solves a problem in the story.
“These are pictures of a room I broke into using a stolen key. These are receipts for meals and clothes that I charged to someone’s room. I haven’t stayed here. I just walked in from the beach.”
“Why did you do this?”
“It’s my business.”
“You’re not telling me everything.”
“No.”
Cohen called his secretary. “What do I have next?”
She listed his appointments.
“Call them and reschedule. Tell them I’m sorry. Don’t explain.” When he finished with his secretary, he asked Tom, “Now what?”
“Your security is excellent. The amount of money you’d have to spend to prevent this kind of theft is more than you would lose without my help.”
“But what about the cost to public relations?”
“Well, that’s always the problem, isn’t it?”
“And you’re still not telling me who you really are.”
“Why do you suspect me?”
“I don’t,” said Cohen. “Actually, I feel very close to you.”
“I’m glad for that.”
“I don’t believe what you’re telling me about yourself, but I trust you. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Lyle?”
“I think so.”
“What is it about you? People tell you everything, don’t they?”
“Some do.”
“More than some.”
“You’ve committed a crime, haven’t you?”
“I don’t know how to answer that question.”
“Yes, you do. Tell me the truth.”
“I’m here to prevent crime.”
“Crime that’s too small for me to bother pursuing but enough to hire you to stop it, yes? You didn’t learn about this kind of crime in a book, did you?”
“I studied.”
“You studied on the job. And you’ve been in jail.”
“How does it show?”
“You’re as clean as a nun. That’s how I know. Men out of prison are often beautifully clean.”
“Were you in jail?”
“Close enough. I’ll ask you again. Have you ever committed a crime?”
Tom said nothing, not to hide the truth but to give Cohen a taste of unsettling silence.
“Never mind,” said Cohen, “I see that you want me to go first. Fine, then. Here’s my story. I used to be a doctor. Not many people know this. This was fifteen years ago. I had finished my residency, in orthopedics. Someone approached me and asked if I wanted to make a lot of money quickly. I asked him how he dared to approach me this way, and he said that I was the type who said yes. He described the situation to me, and it made sense. So I said yes, because I knew that just to be chosen by this man meant that I was already guilty.
“He set me up as one piece of a large insurance fraud. None of us—and we were doctors and lawyers—knew the full extent of the crime, we all knew a few others in the conspiracy, but only the leader, the man who selected us, had the whole picture.”
“And your wife, did she know?” Tom nodded to the wall of pictures.
“I wasn’t married then.”
“Does she know now?”
“Yes, she knows everything. I told her everything.”
“Were you arrested?”
“God, no.”
“You said you’d come close to jail.”
“If I’d been arrested, I would have been convicted. That’s close. But I wasn’t arrested. I prospered. I made millions. Not then, but from the investments. The man who organized this made it a condition of the conspiracy that we stop after we had reached a certain amount of money. When that milestone passed, the thing ended. None of us could carry on alone, because none of us knew how all of it worked. My job was to provide reports of broken bones. Someone else filed claims with insurance companies. I never even knew which insurance companies were paying. I think he was working with someone inside a company. Any of us might have attempted a crime like this, but none of us had the nerve to do more than our small part. Now you know.”
“What is it about the photographs I took and the meals I stole that made you want to tell me your story?”
“I don’t know. I just did. I felt that if I hadn’t, you’d have found out anyway.”
“So you carry the guilt.”
“For a long time, my bad feelings about what I’d done overwhelmed me. Not the terrible paranoia of being arrested. The statute of limitations has passed, and the organizer died.”
“He died?”
“He had a bad heart. He came to see me, I referred him to a specialist.”
“So now you’re free.”
“Not really. I’m not a doctor anymore. I couldn’t practice medicine after the scam wrapped up. I tried, but having used my art for crime, I couldn’t retrieve it for its original purpose. I couldn’t trust myself with my patients, with the choices I had to make, to help them. I didn’t believe my diagnoses. I was acting the part of the doctor. I was trained in surgery, but I couldn’t make the incision.”
“How long after this stopped did you quit?”
“It was a few years. By then, some investments I made started to grow. The market was good in those days. I looked for a business, one thing led to another, and I bought a few hotels. Now I have ten. This is the flagship. We lived around the country for a while, but now we’re here, my family and I. I give a lot to charity,” said Cohen. “This doesn’t atone for my crimes, not completely, but it helps.”
“The woman you married already had two children.”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I see their pictures on the wall. You ended the crime before you were married, but the girls are as old as the crime. The older one, certainly.”
“Yes. Rosalie, my wife, was a widow. It’s a terrible story. Her husband died in Jamaica.”
“An accident?”
“Something like that.”
Tom said nothing.
“No, not something like that. I’m being evasive. He murdered a man while they were on vacation. No one has ever been sure of what happened or why. He went to jail and died there.”
“How?”
“He was killed in a fight. After he died, the man who brought me into crime introduced me to his widow. He said I could be good for her.”
Now Tom wasn’t sure if he was alive anymore. Had the prison reported his death after the fight in which he broke his nose? But this didn’t make sense. Or maybe when everyone was released from the prison, there had been a fire and a riot, and all that he recalled of those days was a memory from death. Maybe he really was dead.
No. I’m alive, and I’m sitting here. When we were released from prison, was the word sent back that I was dead, to avoid a problem with the family or any kind of diplomatic trouble? Or had Rosalie told David Cohen that her husband was dead
?
That was it. The world shifted to allow room for this piece.
Why did Rosalie love criminals? Because Tom and David were both men with an unplaceable sense of balance and power, moral strength, though it came from the immoral? Because an unredeemed piece of creation waited for Rosalie’s help, and with Tom’s refusal to accept his wife’s love, the grid of destiny brought her to a man with courage equal to his guilt? From a lawyer to a doctor, from the betrayer of justice to the betrayer of healing?
All of this was braided and invisible.
“Hire me,” said Tom.
“What will your job be?”
“I’ll protect you. I’ll continue to protect you. I’ll monitor your security.”
“Come to dinner. I’d like you to meet my family. Would you do that?”
“Yes.”
Seven
Climaxes happen because something becomes intricate. Why, and when, do you make a mistake when you play the piano? What makes something difficult is not just the problem of dexterity. Have you ever noticed that even the simplest pieces give you difficulty towards the end? The music stretches out, and we anticipate the climax. The pleasure of the end scares us. We strain for release and block out the moment’s sensations. We meet that place or point where the piece expands, where the music fulfills itself only by the way we tolerate the surge of feeling called for by a condensed run of notes, and we contract. But it isn’t the difficulty that stumps us, we fail the challenge of emotion. If you don’t realize that, you’ll get used to the wrong notes.
Tom rode a private elevator to the roof of the hotel, where David Cohen lived in a secret glass house. Even the guests on the penthouse floor below were ignorant of the universal above them.
David Cohen looked upon Tom with an ancient affection, with fellowship, with pleasure. “You’re going to be very good for me.”
“I hope so. I hope this will be good for both of us.”
“Of course it will. Here, let me introduce you.”
Cohen brought Tom into the living room, from which the hotel grounds were hidden behind a hedge growing in large planters. The hedge admitted a view only of the ocean. Behind them, there was mountain. Rosalie and the girls were there, standing, waiting.
“Rosalie, I’d like you to meet my friend, Lyle Monaster.”
Rosalie extended a hand. Where she had once been sucked dry by her first husband’s ruminations and the weight of the two children, in the ten years since a stupid murder in a waterfall, love had resolved her distress. She was radiant now, calm and gracious. No one would want to harm her.
“Hello, Lyle.”
“My pleasure,” said Tom. He turned to the girls, such poised young beauties.
“This is Perri, and her sister, Alma.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” said Perri.
They shook hands. Her fingers were long, her nails were shaped and polished red, her hair was thick, she wore Tom’s dead mother’s pearls. Perri’s hand was warm, and yes, still slightly damp.
“And this is Alma.”
“And what a pleasure to meet you, Alma,” said her father, for the first time in ten years.
“Welcome to our house,” she said, also offering her hand. The touch was unfamiliar, but the hand was strong.
“You have a very strong hand,” he said.
“I’m a gymnast.”
“How wonderful.”
Cohen, satisfied with his friend’s manners, offered a drink.
“I’ll have a glass of wine, please. Red wine.”
This was his first drink since before he’d been to Jamaica, but it was time now, it was right.
Cohen nodded to his bartender, who poured drinks for everyone.
“Lyle is going to be working with me,” said Cohen. “He’s a specialist in security, but I suspect we’ll find more for him to do than checking that the locks are working.”
“Where are you from, Lyle?” asked Rosalie.
“My father was in the foreign service. We moved around the world. I’m American, but I’ve never really lived there until now. Mostly I’ve traveled.”
“How exciting.”
“What was your favorite place?” asked Perri.
“Jamaica.”
A silence opened.
David Cohen met Tom’s eyes with a question, but also with trust.
“We’ve been there. It’s not our favorite place,” said Rosalie.
“I’m sorry. People have different experiences wherever they go.”
Alma asked him, “Why did you like it?”
“I heard a story there. Wherever I go, I hear stories, but this one was so mysterious that I could never quite forget it or ever quite understand it. Let me ask you, why don’t you like Jamaica?”
“My first husband died there.”
“This was very clumsy of me.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I did, though. David mentioned it earlier, but your daughter asked me, and I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to give a different answer.”
“You told the truth.”
“I could have just as easily said Paris or the Red Sea at dawn and spared you the pain. I’m sorry.”
“What was the story?” asked Rosalie.
“Should I tell it?” Tom asked.
“My husband died a long time ago,” Rosalie said. “David has been the father to my daughters. What happened then, when my husband, well, you must know.”
“David said he killed someone.”
“Yes. We don’t know why. So perhaps a story about Jamaica is what we need to hear now, if you’ll tell it.”
Cohen supported Rosalie’s bid. “My family is strong. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m hungry,” said Tom. “Perhaps we should eat first, and then you can tell me about yourselves, and after dinner, I’ll tell the story.”
As they walked to the dining table set outside in the garden, Tom stopped at a wall with pictures of the girls. There was Alma, the gymnast, on a balance beam, on the uneven parallel bars, on a vault. And there was the picture of Tom and his girls, the last picture of them together in happiness, taken by Rosalie in Jamaica, Tom between his daughters, leaning over to fit the frame. Tom pretended to study the picture of Alma on the vault.
“How old were you when you started?” he asked her.
“When I was seven. That’s late, but I caught up.”
“You’re good.” He turned from the wall.
“I try.”
Tom remembered the way she had taken such pleasure in dancing with the singer at the Montego House. And here she was standing on her hands, her legs spread wide. There was a compulsion in her that he never could have stopped. What had Barry Seckler done but recognize in the little girl her dream of performance?
They sat at a round table, with Tom between Rosalie and Perri. He was given the honored position, facing the ocean.
Perri had finished high school but had not yet applied to a university. She was working for David Cohen in the office, learning the hotel business.
“But you’ll finish college?” asked Tom.
“Yes, I expect to. But I don’t know when or where.”
This is the effect of my disappearance. She depends on the stepfather because she misses me. She’s afraid to leave home.
“And Rosalie. Do you work?”
“I work with a few charities. I volunteer.”
Why did no one recognize him? Because I am not so angry anymore. Because I am not the center of the world anymore.
“We’re stuck with life, aren’t we?” asked David Cohen.
“That means I should tell my story,” said Tom.
“Yes,” said Rosalie.
Tom inhaled the air of this family. He thought of the witch who predicted his punishment. If he found her, he would thank her. Perhaps I should look for her. And then he opened his mouth, and listened to a story the hanged man told him, that he only just now remembered.
“In former days, when the childre
n of Solomon were threatened by an evil decree, the Ras Tafaris would take the staff of Judah into the desert, to a special place, and there they would recite a certain prayer and make an offering to the Holy One, Blessed Be He. And the disaster would be averted. And when the staff of Judah disappeared, the Ras Tafaris would go to that place in the desert, and even without the staff, they still knew that certain prayer. And they would say the prayer, and the disaster would be averted. And when the special place was lost but the prayer was still known, they would recite the prayer and beg for help from the Holy One, Blessed Be He, and the disaster would be averted. Now the staff of Judah is gone. The path to the special place has been covered by sand. The prayer has been forgotten. But we still have the story. Tell the story.”
After Tom finished the brief tale, his listeners held the silence.
Rosalie spoke first. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t expect that any of us fully understand your story, but I don’t think we have to right away.”
“No,” said Tom. “It takes time.”
...
Perri and Alma, wounded early in their lives, wanted only happiness for their mother, who worked so hard to make them strong. They were too young to make sense of everything this white-haired man with the broken nose had to tell them, but when they harkened to his advice and followed his suggestions, life was easier for them. Rosalie went to him often, and the girls would see them walk together on the beach, talking, always talking. Their stepfather accepted the stranger completely. In time they loved him, too, their mother’s curious friend.
They listened to him tell her one night that the purpose of the gift of life is the discovery of our purpose. It would take a long time, or a short time, for that purpose to be known.
“One could fulfill one’s purpose,” they heard him say, “and live a long time after.”
Their mother asked, “And then?”
He answered quickly. “And then you tell the story.”
Under Radar Page 16