The tears came as abruptly as Ellen’s had earlier. Billy suddenly sobbed and fell forward on his arms and O’Farrell sat in helpless indecision, wanting to go around the table and hold him and stop the tears but pulling back against halting the outburst with kindness before it all came out. He compromised, reaching across for Billy’s outstretched arms and stroking his hand. It was a long time before Billy looked up, and when he did, his eyes were red-rimmed and his nose was running. O’Farrell gave him a handkerchief and Billy wiped himself. His mouth moved, unsurely forming the words. At last, broken-voiced, he said, “I’ve kept it all. The money I mean.”
“I heard,” O’Farrell said, still anxious not to block the flow.
“It would have been sixty dollars, today.”
So at ten dollars a delivery, he hadn’t lied about the five previous deliveries. “Yes,” O’Farrell said.
“Wanted a hundred,” Billy said. “There’s three months, to Mom’s birthday, so I guess I would have gotten it easily. She hasn’t had anything new, not for a long time. I was going to give it to her on her birthday so she could have something new. Hadn’t worked out a way to say how I’d gotten it, but I’d have thought of something, by the time. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. Honest.”
“I know that,” O’Farrell said thickly. “We’ll find something for Mommy, you and me, for her birthday. Okay?”
“Okay,” the boy said.
“They’re not your friends, Billy. Not these guys for whom you’ve been carrying packages.”
“I know that, really. They pretended to be, but when they said about Mom, I knew they weren’t.”
O’Farrell went from hot to cold. “What did they say about Mom?”
“That they knew where we lived and that they’d make her ugly—like me, said Rick; he’s got a big scar right over his nose—if I told her what I was doing, if I told anyone what I was doing. If I got caught, I was to say it was just an errand and that I didn’t know what it was and there was nothing wrong. That I wouldn’t get into trouble.”
“Was Rick the guy who took die stuff when you got off or who gave it to you near die school?” coaxed O’Farrell.
“He gave it to me, showed me first time how to put it in my backpack.”
“By himself?”
“No, he—” Billy stopped, looking pebble-eyed at his grandfather.
O’Farrell held the child’s hands tightly across the table, to reinforce what he said. “He can’t hurt you; none of them can hurt you now. I won’t let them.”
“They said.”
“They were trying to sound big. Important. It wasn’t true.”
The child stared across the table, his mouth a tight line, and O’Farrell could feel the fear shaking through him. “Have I ever told you something that wasn’t right? Wasn’t true?”
It was still some time before the boy spoke. “Guess not,” he said.
“So trust me now, Billy.”
“Felipe,” blurted the boy, looking down into his lap again, as if he were ashamed. “There was a man called Felipe. Sometimes he stayed in the car.”
“Was it a big car?” O’Farrell asked, imagining a block-long Cadillac with chrome and fins.
“Like Mom’s,” Billy said. “Gray too.”
“Just Rick and Felipe? Never anyone else?”
Billy shook his head.
“You ever hear their other names?”
The headshake came again.
“Remember anything else about them?”
The third headshake began and then, an afterthought, Billy said, “There was a ring.…” He extended his left hand, isolating the index finger. “Here, like a big bird. It was black and had its wings out. Rick said he might give it to me one day.”
“What about the man you gave the stuff to? He have a name?
“Boxer,” said Billy, not hesitant anymore, actually smiling in recollection. “Had a nose all squashy, like a boxer’s. He was different from the others. He was funny. Said that’s what he was doing when he was late sometimes, playing hide-and-seek.”
He probably would have been, literally, O’Farrell decided, watching from some vantage point to ensure Billy wasn’t under observation and that it was safe to make the pickup. “He have a car?”
“A bike!” Billy said enthusiastically. “A racing bike with lots of gears and drop handlebars. Blue. He let me touch it once.”
O’Farrell recalled that a lot of the houses in Evanston were unfeiuxu; a bicycie, capable of cutting through backyards from house to house and street to street, was a better vehicle than a car in many pursuits. “You never called him anything else but Boxer?”
“Nope.”
“What sort of person was he? He have any rings or stuff like that?” O’Farrell felt exhausted; damp from perspiration and aching in his shoulders and legs.
“He wasn’t American,” Billy said flatly. “Neither was Felipe. It wasn’t the same as us when they talked. And Boxer had a picture on his hand.”
“Whereabouts?” O’Farrell pressed.
Billy offered his left hand, the middle finger outstretched. He pointed near the knuckle and said, “A flower, just there. Red.”
It was enough. O’Farrell decided; it had to be enough. If he were exhausted, how must Billy be feeling? He said, “You’ve been very good.”
“You pleased?” The child smiled uncertainly, eager for die praise.
“Very pleased,” O’Farrell said.
“Can we go home now? I don’t want to stay here anymore. I don’t like it here anymore.”
“I’ll see,” O’Farrell said.
McMasters and the girl were waiting directly outside the door. O’Farrell closed it carefully and started, “Okay, the suppliers …” but McMasters raised his hand, stopping him. “I watched it live, in the control room. You did damned well.”
O’Farrell was impatient with the praise but didn’t show it. He said, “He wants to go home.”
“I heard that, too.”
“So what about it?”
“It can’t end just like this.”
“But can he go home, now!”
“I think he needs to,” McMasters agreed. “And whatever happens, I think he’s going to want help from a child psychiatrist. He’s one scared kid.”
“What about the descriptions? Enough for any identifications?”
McMasters studied him curiously and then said, “Not yet; there’s a lot of work to be done.”
O’Farrell was caught by the tone of McMasters’s voice, just as the other man had recognized the meaning in his. O’Farrell said, “And if you had an identification, you wouldn’t tell me?”
“Personal vengeance and vigilante stuff are for the movies, Mr. O’Farrell.”
It’s as good a description as any for what I do, for Christ’s sake! O’Farrell thought. He said, “I didn’t mean anything like that.”
“My mistake,” McMasters said, clearly not believing it was.
O’Farrell collected Billy, and then Jill and Ellen, and they rode home strangely embarrassed, no one able to find any conversation. O’Farrell tried baseball talk, but Billy didn’t respond. In the apartment there were the sleeping arrangements to make, moving the bedding, which gave them some activity, and at dinner O’Farrell decided to get the clouds out of the way. He did so entirely to and for Billy’s benefit, openly talking about drugs and the child’s part in what had happened but making it sound as if Billy had knowingly acted like some undercover agent, exaggerating McMasters’s reaction to the information the boy had finally provided. Ellen and Jill caught on to what O’Farrell was doing and openly praised the boy, and Billy started to relax, even smiling occasionally. O’Farrell was intent on everything the boy said, for any scrap of additional information, but there was nothing.
O’Farrell was ready for the going-to-bed request, agreeing at once that he should be the one to take Billy, and Ellen behaved like it was the expected thing. The story was predictably about some galactic exploration but Billy
clearly wasn’t interested.
“They won’t come, Rick and Felipe, during the night!”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I’m just sure.”
“How long are you staying?”
“A few days.”
“Who’s going to look after us when you’ve gone?”
“I’ll work it out.”
Billy insisted on holding O’Farrell’s hand between both of his and several times opened his eyes, accusingly, when O’Farrell tried gently to withdraw. It was an hour before O’Farrell got away. The dinner things were cleared and Jill and Ellen were sitting side by side on the couch, like hospital visitors waiting for a diagnosis they didn’t want to hear. O’Farrell told them everything, and Ellen began to cry when he got to the reason for Billy saving the money, the threats that the men had made, and McMasters’s thought that Billy might benefit from seeing a psychiatrist.
“Well?” O’Farrell demanded.
Ellen looked uncomprehendingly up at him, red-nosed and wet-faced. “Well what?”
“I want direct, honest answers.”
“About what?”
“About a lot of things. Let’s try drugs first.’”
Her lips quivered afresh but Ellen didn’t break down. “No!” she said. “How many times have I got to say no!”
“Until I’m satisfied,” O’Farrell said.
Ellen opened her mouth to speak but then apparently changed her mind about what she was going to say. She said, very quietly, “No. I don’t do cocaine! No, I don’t do crack! No, I don’t deal. No, I haven’t turned my son into a runner! There! Satisfied?” It was very difficult for her to hold on and Jill reached out to her as she had in McMasterss office, in support.
“What about the day-care center?” O’Farrell persisted relentlessly.
“You knew about that!” Ellen said defensively. “Thousands of single parents use the system. It works. Don’t look at me as if I’ve done something wrong!”
“How long has he been there by the time you collect him?”
“Usual time.”
“What’s usual time?”
“I told you about the extra work, when we had the first scare at the school,” Ellen said. “Billy was always okay at the center until I collected him.”
Jill pulled away from their daughter. “It took them long enough to realize he was arriving late.”
“But they did realize it,” Ellen said. “And as soon as they did, they told me.”
“How about another direct, honest answer?” O’Farrell challenged. “Tell me, directly and honestly, how much Patrick’s caught up with the payment arrears. And how promptly the regular amounts have come in?”
Ellen gave a helpless shrug. “He promised,” she said.
“He hasn’t paid up a goddamned cent, has he!” O’Farrell said.
Ellen shook her head, not looking up at her father.
“For God’s sake!” Jill said, finding something at last to be angry instead of sad about. “What’s wrong with you! You’re working full-time and extra when you can—and you let him get away with this?”
“That’s going to stop, right here and now!” O’Farrell said. “I’m going to sort everything out with Billy and I’m going to sort everything out with that bastard ex-husband of yours.…” He stopped, caught by a sudden thought and remembering Billy’s bedroom pleas. He said, “You called Patrick, about the drugs business?”
Ellen nodded. “Before you. He said he had some important appointments running through until well into the evening, that he’d get over if he could. I guess he couldn’t. This new job is pretty demanding … worrying.…”
“I just can’t believe this! I just can’t believe I’m hearing this—” Jill Mailed to protest, but O’Farrell took over, careless of interrupting his wife and careless, too, of the fury he was supposed never to feel.
“Billy was pretty worried today, too, holding my hand and pleading not to be hurt. You’re more than a damned fool. Don’t you realize you’ve actually neglected Billy, letting Patrick off the hook like you have?”
There was a listless shoulder movement from their daughter. “I guess,” she said.
O’Farrell was gripped by a feeling of helplessness, helplessness and impotence. Abruptly he -stood and announced, “I’m going out for a while. A walk.”
“But …” Jill started.
“I need to get out.”
There was a chill coming off the lake and O’Farrell set out toward it, knowing there was a lakeside walk through a park but thinking after two blocks that in the darkness he didn’t know how to find it. He turned back toward the township, knowing he could really have found the park if he’d wanted, knowing, too, why he’d changed his mind. Evanston wasn’t big; sprawled awkwardly, with a mall he knew he couldn’t reach tonight on foot, but definitely not big. Boxer was an identifiable enough name, if it were how the man was normally known. Foreign accent and a broken nose and a red-flower tattoo on his left hand. And a racing bicycle, although O’Farrell guessed that was reserved for pickups, not nighttime cruising. Sufficient to go on: to look at least.
O’Farrell reached the main highway, running parallel with the railway line, and began to walk its full length, taking in the side roads when he came to them. At restaurants he checked through windows, on the pretext of reading the menus, and he went into every bar he came to, for the first time in months using a drink to justify his presence rather than because he needed it. Drink in hand, he walked around them all, looking, and at one tavern—one of the ones he thought most likely because there was live music and everyone was young, far younger than himself—there were some sniggers and someone behind the bar asked if he needed any help. O’Farrell chanced asking for a man called Boxer and got headshaking blank-ness in reply.
What in the name of Christ did he imagine he was doing! The question came in a bar just beyond the railway bridge over the Chicago road, a shabby place where the regulars examined him like the intruder he was, resenting his examination of them. What would he have done if there’d been someone here—or anywhere else—matching Billy’s description? The tattoo was pretty distinctive but not unique, and the broken nose certainly wasn’t. Was it enough evidence to justify killing a man, which is what he’d set out to do? What about the usual, professional criteria? Personal vengeance and vigilante stuff are for the movies. Was that what he would have done, dragged the man into some darkened parking lot and beat a confession from him, just like they did in the movies? And then killed him? Killed someone? Hadn’t that been the agony, over the last few months, not wanting to kill anyone? Hadn’t that been what he’d told Lambert? The demands flurried like snow through his mind and like snow blocked up, so that he couldn’t separate question from answer and more often couldn’t find answers to the questions.
O’Farrell left his drink and hurried from the bar, as if he had something to be guilty about, which he supposed he had in thought if not actually in deed. The apartment was in darkness when he got back. He groped his way through it without putting on the light, not wanting to awaken anyone. He undressed in the dark, but as he was lowering himself cautiously beside Jill, she said, “I’m not asleep.”
“I didn’t mean to be so long.”
“Did you find him, the supplier who got Billy to carry the stuff?”
“No.” O’Farrell detected the movement and then Jill’s hand took his.
“Would you have tried to kill him, if you’d found him?”
“I wanted to,” O’Farrell said.
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Jill said. “These people are very vicious. You’d have probably gotten hurt yourself.”
It was the nearest she’d come openly to questioning his manhood. She wouldn’t have believed him capable, of course.
TWENTY-SEVEN
RIVERA DECIDED it was time he emerged from his period of mourning. He accepted that there were some who might consider it premature but he was unconcerned; he was an amba
ssador, a public servant and such people were expected to cope with grief better than ordinary people. Conversely there were others who might consider him brave, trying to rebuild something of an existence after the shattering experience.
Objectively Rivera recognized that he had taken a chance going to the Gavroche with Henrietta so soon after it happened, but they’d gotten away with it; there had been no recognition and therefore no resulting newspaper comment.
Tonight was different. A thoroughly acceptable public-affair: how better to emerge gently from a period of grief than at a charity premiere at Covent Garden? Then a diplomatic function or two, more public appearances. Followed by the acceptance of some private social invitations to which he’d delayed replying.
From his customary vantage point Rivera saw the arrival of the diplomatic delivery and turned back into the room to receive it, hoping after the care with which he had planned the evening that no personal communication would delay him. He was at once alarmed by the size of the wallet but just as quickly relaxed: the Foreign-Ministry material could as easily have been enclosed in the general pouch to be processed first by secretaries. It was all the accreditation and documentation for the international assignment of which the Foreign Ministry had already advised him in the promised letter, a conference in Madrid to reinforce trade links with Latin America, despite Spain’s presence within the European Community.
There was nothing else, so he was actually ahead of time now, because the arrangement was for him to go direct to the opera house from High Holborn. Idly Rivera flicked through the instructions. There was a general policy document to guide him, from Havana, and two other, more detailed guidance papers from the Trade Ministry. Arrangements had been made for him to stay at the official residence of the ambassador to Spain, whom he remembered as a tiresome man constantly boasting of a close friendship the Che Guevara that only he seemed able to remember. Rivera was expected two days before the commencement of the conference and particularly to attend every official Spanish ceremony, because Cuba wanted to strengthen its ties with the Spanish-speaking country that formed part of Europe.
Rivera descended to his new car and his escorts, nodding absentmindedly at the assembled men, his mind remaining occupied by what he’d just read.
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