The woman with the knitting needles shook them in the direction of the car. “She was a bitch, wasn’t she? Total bitch!”
Her friend agreed. “Worse bitch than Ms. Skippings!”
The knitter weakly smoothed the thin white curls of her hair. “That was nice of you,” she told Annie. “Who do you have here?”
It took Annie a second. “Oh, you mean staying here? I’m visiting my father.”
The knitter squeezed Annie’s arm with sharp bony fingers. “That’s nice of you.” She smiled. “What’s his name?”
“Jack Peregrine,” said Annie. “No, I’m sorry, I mean, Ronny Buchstabe. My father’s Coach Ronny Buchstabe. Do you know him?”
“No. I have a daughter.”
Another old woman pushed to the front. “I have two daughters.”
The woman with the knitting wasn’t interested. “Where’s the dog, the white dog?”
“Here he is!” shouted a man sliding toward them by means of a walker. Malpy was trotting beside him, his tail a brisk flag not of surrender but of salutation. He’d suffered no damage to his pride from being flung to the grass; in general, he forgot assaults as soon as they were over. Happily the old people circled him. The little dog began busily showing off his back-leg dancing trick in exchange for everything edible they could scrounge from their hoarded rations—bits of banana and apple, Junior Mints, corn chips.
Out of bougainvillea blossoms at the far corner of the building Annie saw Rafael Rook poking his head, like a swimmer in an Esther Williams production number. By complicated gestures he telegraphed her to join him but to leave Malpy behind.
The old people were glad to keep the Maltese while she went inside. The dog was a bouncy, licking, yapping scrap of life, a distraction from dying, and if Annie had asked them instead, “How would you like to be as young as I am and madly in love?” they could not have assented more heartily.
“His name’s Malpractice,” she explained. They found this hilarious, having been subjected to so much of it themselves. “Malpy. Don’t give him seafood.”
Raffy returned her purse to her. “Pardon, pardon,” he whispered as he led her behind the Dumpster at the rear of the building. “But discretion is the better part, if you take my meaning.”
“Raffy! You can’t just run off with my purse!”
“I had to use your phone. A family emergency.”
Automatically, she checked inside the small black Coach bag for her wallet. It was there. “You knew that man and woman in the Mercedes.”
“Not to speak to.”
“Well, that much was obvious since you ran away.”
“Happiness eludes them. Certain people could definitely use a little less caffeine, up the dosage on their serotonin, aromatherapy, maybe spend quality time on a nature walk or even a cat, little bird even—”
“You ran to the bushes.”
Raffy lowered his voice as if he could be overheard. “With that man, I tell you the truth, the bushes are not a bad plan. I am a naked newborn sitting on a shark’s molars in comparison to that man, who is not a nice man, any more than Castro was the Second Coming the way he convinced my Uncle Oswardo he was. That’s Feliz Diaz.”
Annie shrugged.
“Feliz Diaz. There are many people in Miami, when he says vote they vote; go throw rocks, they go. When he says buy that, they buy that. So on. The ace of aces. I heard in Little Havana, he blew a man’s hand off with a Beretta 92FS for misdealing the cards. There was talk of the incident on the street for years.”
Annie interrupted him. “Is the woman with him involved with my father?”
Rook gestured uncertainty. “I doubt it.”
“I feel like I’ve seen her before.”
Raffy shrugged evasively. “Annie, I swear, I’m a prop, I swell a scene, I’m a man of plastic packing bubbles. All I know is, Jack asked for my help: ‘Raffy, send this FedEx to my daughter; make this phone call, pick me up off this curb, and drag me into a hospital.’ Nightly I read the ‘Swan of Avon,’ to whom he introduced me in our prison cell in Cuba, for which I can never sufficiently thank him for I hate ingratitude worse—”
“Please don’t start talking Shakespeare.”
“The complete works from one volume at Costco. The Poet has a way of putting things nobody could improve on. ‘Lady, you are not worth the dust the rude wind blows in your face.’ That’s what I say to the puta that knocked those old ladies down. Could you say better than that? Could I?”
Annie was struggling to connect the face she’d just seen with the memory of Sam’s crying at the kitchen table. Then abruptly it came to her—the family portrait on Georgette’s bedroom wall of Georgette’s father and his sister. She said, “I think that woman was my neighbor’s aunt, from my home town. I think she’s a woman named Ruthie Nickerson. Do you know that name? Ruth Nickerson?”
Raffy looked puzzled. “Why would she be your neighbor’s aunt? She belongs to Diaz.” Raffy looked furtively at his watch. “We’ve got to go.”
He pulled her around behind the Dumpster, past a pile of garbage bags and up some stairs to the Golden Days rear landing, the door of which he propped open with his sneaker.
“Why can’t we walk in the damn front door?” she asked him.
“Shhhh.”
A pretty Latina woman in a nurse’s uniform suddenly appeared in the doorway, her finger to her lips.
“Chamayra!” Raffy embraced her with unexpected fervor. She pushed him away, her finger again pressed urgently against her lips. Then without a backward glance she walked ahead of them.
They hurried along a maze of concrete corridors and up staircases that took them to the third floor, which seemed to be the ward for patients near the end of their lives, whether they knew it or not, and most seemed not to. There was no one this elderly or this ill in Annie’s life and until this moment she had never found herself inside such a ward. On the landing she had to squeeze by a wraith of an old woman with blue veins and wild white hair, who beat her head against the dinner tray on her wheelchair and whimpered that she wanted her mother. When Annie, picking up a fallen plastic cup, said hello, the old woman grabbed and kissed her hand.
They passed an old man with huge purple feet leaning on a walker and talking furiously to a mirror. He told the mirror that his son had stolen his shoes so that he couldn’t get back to the office.
Finally Chamayra signaled to Raffy that they should wait in the corridor, that she’d return for them.
Annie looked into rooms in which the old were staring without interest at car chases on outmoded televisions hung from concrete ceilings. When she said hello, some smiled gratefully; some stared blankly through her. She wondered if Sam had put her mother, Grandee, in a rest home like this and if so, how had someone as loving as Sam borne doing so?
Beside her, Raffy sighed. “Youth’s a stuff.” He pointed at a room where two men sat slumped, patient, on the sides of their beds. “Nobody believes that this sad destination could possibly be our own. But it’s as true as dirt.”
Shifting her father’s jacket, Annie turned around to the Cuban. And for the first time she looked deeply into his eyes, which were warm and, oddly, it occurred to her, not unwise. “Occasionally, Raffy, you make sense.”
His high-boned face rounded with pleasure. “Gracias. I do have some personal thoughts on our human history, but the Bard provides a more concise and poetical summation.” He blinked as if to block out knowledge. “I don’t know, should I laugh or cry, because frankly, Annie, what a world, what an awful world. ‘Robes and furr’d gowns hide all.’” He tugged at his ponytail with both hands. “Lear found that fact out in stormy weather. If you look around you, and most don’t, the world breaks your heart…” He glanced at her shyly. “Chamayra says I talk too much.” With his small graceful fingers, he made a time-out signal, then slit his throat, zipped his lips, lowered an invisible bag over his head and tied an invisible string tightly around his neck and hanged himself.
They l
aughed together quietly.
“Shhhh!” Chamayra appeared on the staircase and motioned for them to follow her.
Midway down a hall of closed doors, Chamayra stopped at a room where a card identified the patient within as “Coach Ronny Buchstabe.” With a tap on the door, she told Annie, “Good luck,” then gave her hips a shake at Raffy and walked in an efficiently provocative way down the hall, vanishing around a corner.
“See you tonight,” he called after her.
Her head reemerged and she put her finger to her lips.
“Sorry,” Raffy called.
Annie’s hand touched the door. “My dad’s in here?”
“Now, Annie, don’t let it show, all right? About the cancer. He doesn’t want to talk about it.” With a careful look both to left and right, the Cuban pulled her in through the door and quickly shut it behind them.
With its blinds closed and lights out, the bare frugal room was in shadows and very still. Motionless on the utilitarian bed, tilted up at an angle, lay a thin man, with his wrist attached to an IV drip and an oxygen feed clipped to his nose. The palms of his hands were bandaged.
Leading Annie to the bedside, Raffy leaned over and whispered to the prone figure, “Jack? You awake, Jack? I got her. Here she is.”
Slowly the head turned, the eyes opened and looked at Annie. Years, decades, flung away and memory rushed in. She had known those facetious green gold-specked eyes from the beginning of her life.
“Annie…”
“…Dad?”
Chapter 33
Skylark
Jack Peregrine’s face was bruised, his cheek and lip swollen and cut, his color flat white. His breath was so shallow it was slow to fill the next words. “…Raffy, look, what a beautiful woman…”
“Absolutely,” agreed the young Cuban as he moved away from them to stand near the window, out of which he kept nervously looking.
Jack Peregrine raised himself with effort. His taped palms had the look of someone about to pull on boxing gloves. “Beautiful. You’re just gorgeous.”
Annie stepped aside so the slanted light didn’t strike her. She tried for irony but couldn’t keep sorrow from her voice. “So, Coach Ronny, what’s wrong with you? Are you ill or did somebody beat you up?”
He made an effort at a grin. “Like the Ringo Kid said, ‘There are some things a man just can’t run away from.’” Slowly he wriggled his fingers. “A man can try but some times he’s just not fast enough.”
“What happened to your hands?”
He held them out to her. “You should see the rest of me. Raffy saved the day.”
The Cuban returned to the bedside to corroborate. “He was lying there, blood everywhere, and I leaned down and he whispered, ‘Raffy!’”
“I thought I was yelling, ‘Raffy!’ If he hadn’t dragged me off the sidewalk and gotten me in here to Chamayra, I’d be dead.”
“Inevitable,” Raffy agreed.
“Or worse,” her father said. “I’d be in jail. Somebody across the street had watched these guys kicking me to the curb and called 911. We saw the squad car arrive.”
“We were hiding right out there by the dumpster, waiting for Chamayra to let us in before the bastards came back or your poor dad bled to death. The cops looked around but they didn’t see us.” Raffy kissed his cross then returned to the window where he banged his back ferociously against the wall. “Those bastard s.o.b. pingitas! They would chainsaw the fingers off Elton John.”
Her father gestured at his friend’s bandage. “What happened to your hand?”
“Her dog bit me,” Raffy explained. “It’s okay. I can still play. She’s got your metal case, Jack. And she’s got the emerald. And she knows the codes.”
Jack smiled. “Good girl.” He nodded at the Cuban who excused himself; he’d keep watch by the door.
Annie arched her Colbert eyebrow at her father. “Even s.o.b.s have reasons for what they do…So, did ‘these guys’ have any particular reason to kill you?”
Jack smiled. “Ah, you were a skeptic before you could walk and you’re still a skeptic.”
She shook her head at him. “This isn’t skeptical; it’s a real question: Wouldn’t sitting in jail be preferable to being kicked to death?”
He shrugged, a frail version of his old nonchalant style. “For some people it’s heights, for some it’s rats, for me it’s jail. Sorry I skipped out on you in St. Louis but I couldn’t take the chance.”
“Hey.” She mimicked his shrug. “Nothing new.”
He moved in the bed as if adjusting to pain. “Thanks for bringing the King. Sorry I couldn’t fly with you.”
She told him the plane was now in the Hopper lot at the St. Louis airport. The engine had died on her while she was landing.
He murmured so quietly she had to bend over his pillow to hear him. “Thanks for trying.”
“You’re welcome. Thanks for the card at the Admirals Club. A little soupy.” She pulled the crumpled flowery To My Daughter birthday card from the flight jacket.
He shook his head, looking baffled. “I didn’t leave this at the Admirals Club.” He read it aloud. “‘Annie. Wrong to get you involved. Stay out of this. Go home. Love you.’ I didn’t write this. Who told you I did?”
“The receptionists at the Admirals Club. Well, they said an old woman brought it in and told them someone had asked her to leave it at the Admirals Club for me.”
He looked concerned. “An old woman?”
Annie let out a breath. “Don’t try. You know you wrote it. Who else?” She put the card in her purse.
Frowning, he insisted, “Does it sound like me?”
“How would I know?” She tossed his jacket on the bed. “Here’s your jacket. So is it mainly criminals who’re after you or mainly the Miami police or the St. Louis police or what?”
He sounded preoccupied, his thoughts still on the birthday card. “People get in a rut; they keep doing what they’re paid to do. Could be anything; happens to be me they’re after.”
She told him she’d just gotten an anonymous call from a woman, a warning to keep away from him.
He looked even more worried. “What do you mean? What did she say?”
“She asked me if I was Annie Goode from Emerald, and when I said I was in Miami, she said, ‘Don’t let Jack drag you into something that can get you both in real trouble.’ Meanwhile, what is everybody doing with my new cell phone number anyhow? Where did you get it—Sam?”
“Yes,” he said. “Sam.”
“Well, please stop passing it around. Who is she, this woman that called?”
He kept shaking his head softly against the pillow. “No idea. What did she sound like?”
Annie thought a moment. “…Like cigarettes in a black and white movie.”
“Ah,” he said. Then he shook his head.
The hospital room had nothing personal in it. She opened its closet but there was nothing inside, no clothes, no suitcase. Walking to the foot of his bed, she told him, “Talk. Here I am. What do you want?”
He grinned wanly at her. “So you found the courier case?”
Yes, she’d found the courier case in the panel in the rear of the King of the Sky; it was back at the hotel. What was in it?
He said matter-of-factly, “A sixteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary.”
Her eyebrow lifted. “Sure.”
“Remember, I used to tell you about her. La Reina Coronada del Mar?”
“Sure.” She gestured in Raffy’s direction. “I guess that’s why you and Raffy bought that Cessna Amphibian plane for your company La Reina. So you could go visit the Queen in Cuba. By the way, that Cessna’s registration number, N678ST, is part of your password.”
Jack gave her the smile that as a little girl she had worked so hard to earn; the reason she would try to get all the numbers right, win the prize, the A-plus. “How’d you find that out?”
“A friend in the FBI.” She studied him a while. “Can you really even fly a p
lane?”
“I love to fly.” Quietly he quoted, “‘To a skylark, the earth is scornful.’ Have I got that right?” He pressed his fingers at his temple. “Terrible when you can’t remember the poetry you loved. Remember when we used to—”
She interrupted him, holding up a warning hand. “Where’s your Cessna now?”
“In Key West, parked in a lot at the Key West airport.” He rubbed at his bandages. “On hold.”
“Repossessed?”
“Sort of. You know Key West?”
Annie had both trained and taught at Naval Air Station Key West on Boca Chica. She’d even led a practice mission to “bomb” the Marquesas “Patricia” Target, a hulking shipwreck just west of that base. Was that what he wanted, she asked, for her to fly the Cessna somewhere for him?
“Exactly right,” he told her.
Raffy inserted himself into the conversation, lifting his thin shoulders to Annie in supplication. “We need help. Even if Jack had his hands, which he does not, there is unfortunately now a new problem. The police are watching the Cessna like foxes.”
She looked at her father’s bandaged palms; it was true that piloting wouldn’t be easy with those injuries. Moreover, his face looked blanched, his lips thinned by pain. Was it the beating he’d suffered or had she been wrong to doubt that he was dying of cancer? “Is there a doctor I can talk to here?”
“The best time’s in the morning.” He gestured at his bruised face and made an effort at the old lovely grin. “A mess, huh? I had some…” He rubbed his forearms against the sides of his head. “Some treatments.”
“What kind of treatments?”
Raffy pulled her aside. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”
Her father nodded. “Result is, I can’t remember things. Isn’t that something? I used to be able to recite whole scenes, whole acts.”
“Hamlet, start to finish more or less,” testified Raffy.
Her father reached under his pillow and took out a small envelope. From it he shook out two large rectangular green stones. They looked to be cut like the emerald she’d brought with her. Impatiently he gestured at her and spilled them into her palm. “They go in the Queen of the Sea’s crown, okay? Believe me, they were a bitch to recover. But that’s what I get for burying bones.”
The Four Corners of the Sky Page 26