“Then what is it about?” I asked. I was up against an unscalable wall of therapy textbooks, where the grouting of small talk was scraped away and discarded.
“This place has firemen, bankers, housewives, storekeepers, and rock stars,” she said. “They have failed marriages, jobs they hate, drugs, drink, anorexia, phobias about cheese. You name it.”
She shut her eyes tight. “For some people here, it’s about replacing existing things with new things. For me, it’s about filling a space. I’m trying to fill the void left by Jefferson Trust, JJ, other stuff.” Shelooked at me. “Anyway, I’m trying to find things over which I can exercise some control.”
“And are you finding those things?”
She looked up at one of the high windows for a moment. “I don’t know. But this seems a good place to start.”
Carol’s expression then gave way to what I took to be one of sympathy. “I saw the news, Fin. In here, we’re discouraged from letting the outside world in, during the early stages, at any rate. But I saw it. Saw you. How are you coping?”
Coping? It wasn’t about coping anymore. It was about fighting. Destroying the destroyer, or be destroyed.
“They killed my father, they launder money for NRIs, they . . .”
Carol held her hand to my lips, stemming the torrent of desperate words. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking. “I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t really want to know: about your father, about Mendip, Askari, the Ketans. Any of them. Knowing about them won’t help me. I had a Detective Manelli in here, asking about JJ. About you. You were right, Fin. I told him the truth—all of it—but he didn’t want to listen. He’s convinced you owned the car, that you and I add up to more than a couple, and that you’re using me. He was quite sympathetic, but the truth for him is built on a different foundation. Maybe he’ll go away, maybe he won’t. At the moment I’m not sure if I really care. We’re supposed to focus on our own truth in here.” She stood up.
My truthwasher truth, I wanted to declare. But, more than anything, I wanted to share with her what had happened to my mother. I badly needed that moment of vented grief. But as I watched Carol’s face crumple, I wondered if that would be possible in the near future. Hers was a managed, professionally orchestrated isolation. She was being allowed to disintegrate and reassemble herself under laboratory conditions.
And the truth for her was that she still had a mother.
Carol wiped her face with both palms. She looked so wretched. “And don’t ask about us.Please.”
She started to walk away but stopped and turned to me, then looked around the room: at the other residents, the high windows, the poems and pictures on the wall.
“I don’t know if this is the right place,” she whispered. “More of a space to get better in, than a place that makes you better.”
“I always thought of you as someone who didn’t need to get better,” I said.
“We all get sick sometimes. The trick is to know when you need the pills or just a place to hide.”
I was suddenly conscious of the avid attention of the coffee-slurping audience. I wanted to tell the man to piss off.
“You’ve been here before but you’re back,” I managed calmly. “The things that happened didn’t go away, did they? This place won’t make anything go away.”
“I talk to the therapists and, you know something: So little of my distant past seems to inform my present. Sometimes I think that’s all they want to work with, that and the pills.” She smiled. “In many ways, my childhood is too boring to account for how I feel right now.”
“There’s enough contemporary material to make up for any shortfall in early life. The world has irretrievably changed for us both, Carol. You don’t need a therapist to tell you that. And I think you already know it.”
Carol sat down again. “I just want the fear to go away,” she murmured. “It hangs over all of us. It hung over JJ like a cloud.”
“What frightened JJ so?” I asked. “He had everything and lost it all, his mind included. What drove him to madness? Don’t get me wrong, Carol, you drive me crazy, could drive any man crazy, but I don’t think you made JJ the way he was.”
“I never knew where I was with him,” she said. “His moods, his double life—me in one half, Miranda and two kids in the other.” She frowned. “Except that it wasn’t a double life, it was a triple life.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He didn’t start out with the name Carlson. Carlstein was the name he was born with.”
“Why did he change it, did he tell you?”
“He never talked about it. Someone else told me.”
“Who, Carol?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, shifting uneasily. Whoever it was frightened her.
“Everything matters,” I said.
“His brother,” she said at last. “I thought he could be left out of the picture.” Some of the dots edged toward each other. The old hippy with a ponytail, the one at the funeral. Perhaps he was the unspoken shadow, the one Raj couldn’t name, the guard on the door for JJ, the higher authority Askari spoke of. “He was the devil on JJ’s shoulder, laughing at him, mocking him,” she continued. “Rebuking him for a cowardice that wouldn’t allow JJ to live with the weight of history. But Conrad Carlstein really didn’t care about being Jewish; to him everything was a joke, particularly religion. The world was a toy and JJ bankrolled his playroom. JJ paid for everything; his clothes, his house, his cars, everything. And all he could do was mock JJ by way of thanks.”
Conrad Carlstein. My mother had said “Stein.” Conrad Stein. The German Jew. She had never been good with names, they scrambled her head. But her naming of names had been good enough to identify another member of the Gemini Club. He was the shadow, the source of the fizz on Ernie’s cigarette—the fear.
“What’s the matter, Fin?” Carol asked.
“How well did you know Conrad Carlstein?”
“I don’t think anyone really knows Conrad,” Carol said. “On the rare occasions that JJ talked about him, he simply said that Conrad was old blood, blood he needed to wash out of his own veins. I don’t think JJ ever managed it, though. Conrad was always a presence, somehow. He treated JJ like he was dirt, like it was him that underwrote everything, rather than the other way around. He acted like he owned JJ.”
So, JJ couldn’t wash his family out of him. Why did that feel familiar?
“Did JJ ever mention the wordGemini?”I asked.
“No,” Carol said. “JJ didn’t read horoscopes and he was a Virgo anyway. What are you getting at?”
“A club. At Oxford, with Askari and Mendip and one other.”
One other. An American. On a Fulbright. McIntyre?
Jim McIntyre, for sure.
Carol said: “Conrad never mentioned anything about Gemini or aclub. But I only met him three or four times. He didn’t come out much, he said that everything these days could be done via e-mail: eating, business, thinking, sex, everything. I went to his house once—with JJ—a small place on Long Island. JJ owned it, of course.”
“JJ didn’t own anything when he died,” I said. “Remember?”
Carol’s hands rode over her face, a comfortless cosmetic-smearing massage. I wanted to hold her, clean her face with a washcloth, tell her she didn’t need makeup.
“Who knows what JJ did or didn’t own,” she said wearily. “Who knows what was real about him. All I’m saying is that JJ hated going to Conrad’s house. I remember: He told me not to say much, drink a lot and get drunk, do anything so I’d forget the place. He was scared of it, scared of Conrad too. The evening was weird, a dinner on the deck looking out over Oyster Bay, JJ quieter than I’d ever seen him, Conrad talking about philosophy, religion, sex. Not like he took it seriously, though; everything he said poured scorn on belief, passion, love. And he saved his cruelest words for JJ, said I should get rid of him, that he was a loser. Then JJ got stoned. Out of it. And Conrad moved in on me.”
>
Carol’s face creased in puzzlement. “He really thought he could, you know: with his own brother lying semiconscious nearby. It was like nothing was taboo for him. This was a man for whom sacrilege was the only sacred thing. But he was smart, observant,sensitiveeven; his conversation proved that much. He must have sensed I hated him, but still he put his face close to mine. I could feel his breath, smell the wine. He even took the band off that stupid ponytail and shook his hair loose, like a vamp limbering up for the clinch.”
“So you fought him off,” I said. She’d be good at that, tucking a man’s tail between his legs and pulling hard.
“If you like, but maybe not in the way you think.” The memory of that evening seemed to grip her, bewitch her, lash her to the end of her last statement. “I was smart enough to realize that he was a very dangerous man,” she continued at last. “Outright rebuff carried too many risks. That was my judgment.” She paused, waiting to see if I would challenge her assessment. I just nodded.
“Submission was out of the question too.” A small echo of thedetermination she must have shown that night sounded in her voice.
“So I let him believe we were unfinished business,” she added.
“Wasn’t that even more dangerous?” I said.
She rounded on me, her hand sweeping away the copy ofVogueI’d forgotten still lay on my lap. “You weren’tthere,”she hissed.
The coffee-slurping resident moved toward us and picked up the magazine and handed it to Carol. “Other folks may want to read this,” he said quietly. “We should take care of the things we’ve got.”
He turned away from me and leaned over Carol. “You coming to group? I don’t think this guy is helping you any.”
“Later, Harley.” She patted his arm. “I’m okay. Really.”
Harley grunted, thrust his hands into his dressing gown pockets, and wandered away from us.
“Unfinished business,” I whispered to myself and then out loud: “And did Carlstein resurface to tie up loose ends? Dot thei’s, as it were.”
Carol’s gaze followed Harley, her lips relaxing into something approaching a smile. “Harley sells cars and thinks a customer drove off with his soul in the glove compartment. That’s a metaphor for him, he doesn’t believe that’s what actually happened. We don’t have Napoleon or Jesus Christ in here. But Harley’s got problems that only the Wizard of Oz can fix, including the fact that he’s in love with me.”
Everyone was in love with Carol, it seemed.
She reached down to retrieve a flyer advertising a depilatory cream that had fallen from the magazine.
I gently pulled the flyer from Carol’s hand. “You were saying about unfinished business. How did you finish it, how did you close?”
“That evening was the last time I saw Conrad before JJ’s funeral. He called a few times; he must have found my number from somewhere—JJ wouldn’t have told him and I’m not in the book. He got my e-mail address too. Anyway, he left voicemails and e-mails, continuations of what he’d said at the Oyster Bay house. He said he was patient, that he would have me in the end.”
“So it isn’t really unfinished business at all,” I said.
Carol flipped through the pages ofVogue,shiny stylized perfection.
“I suppose not.”
“JJ once said he couldn’t cut free because there was a guard on the door,” I said. “Mendip squeezes more and more on his little inhaler, his breath harder and harder to find. Even Askari suggested he owed allegiance to someone, some shadow—and it wasn’t Ganesh. Everyone is frightened and has found a different way of expressing it. But maybe the source is the same bogeyman for all of them.” Only McIntyre sought to falsify the theory. Smug, smart, unassailable. Fearless.
And yet the theory was attractive, deserved to be spoken out loud: “I think they fear Carlstein; he has some kind of hold over them that keeps the Gemini Club intact. Jesus, what did those creeps get up to in the Dreaming Spires?”
Carol didn’t seem to be listening. “When my insurance is up and I have to leave here, I may go back to college, do something entirely different. Somewhere else—where they don’t know me, can’t associate me with what happened on the FDR Drive. That’s the worst thing: the dead people, the names on the wall. It’s not like I want to shout my innocence; I want to shout my guilt, even if it’s guilt by association. I could put up with anything: losing my career . . .” She paused. “Losing you, even. But, Christ, those names, when I think of them my mind freezes and it’s then I feel I’ve lost everything, including the will to live.”
“But you know that you bear no responsibility for what happened on the FDR,” I protested.
“Do I know that, Fin? Do I? I told JJ that I was seeing you and moments later he . . .” Her voiced trailed away.
“You know perfectly well that there were other things,” I said.
She didn’t reply.
We were silent for a while, the clack of the receptionist’s switchboard vying with the stewing hiss of a near-empty pot of coffee on a hotplate.
“And you?” Carol asked at last. “What will you do?”
Let events take their course? Wait for Manelli to pounce? Watch the chart of plaintiffs and defendants breed like some amoebic creature whose only reason for living is to replicate, to beget an exponentially engulfing infestation? Feel Carol slip from my grasp?
No.
“Assert my rights,” I said. “The right not to be hurt. The right not to be regarded as a lead inSlaughter on the FDR. My work, my clients. You. Everything. I want it all back.”
Carol touched my hand. “I think those rights are in abeyance for a while,” she said gently.
I felt anger well in me. “I don’t have a therapist, Carol.” Fear sparked, fear that Carol might get up and leave me right then and there.
But the old face was back, the one on the couch in the Tribeca apartment, the one that could grab every floating particle of data and understand it at every level.
“Proof of my innocence is out there,” I continued. “In time it will emerge: the careless signature, the crony that talks too loud, a paper trail that leads back to JJ and the Gemini Club. It has to, a lie that big has to reveal itself in the end. But by then I will be ruined, in jail, or dead. I need a short cut, a way to get my would-be destroyers to turn on themselves or reason that I’m more use alive and rehabilitated than dead or ruined.”
“That’s like saying you’d be rich if only you had a pile of money,” Carol said dryly.
I ignored her.
Stashed in a drawer, stored on a computer disk, under a mattress. Somewhere, the Gemini Club had left its stain, its imprint, the must and rumple of a slept-in bed. The NRI scam was too large not to cast its shadow, make its presence felt. Its size impliedinfrastructureand a frame occupied space; it had bulk, mass. There was the order-routing agreement, the sale and purchase agreement, the whole fucking Badla deal. Big stains.
But all of that was inaccessible to me right then. All I had was a stupid Victorian book by Rudyard Kipling and Ernie’s letter to Terry Wardman—I didn’t have that even, I had to get it off Terry first.
I needed to tap a new seam. In the Netherland Antilles, maybe? No—just more whispers and smoke. Casually sneaking into Schuster Mannheim or Mendip’s room at the Regent for a rummage was a fantasy. At Clay & Westminster, perhaps: in Keenes’s office, or on the computer system someplace. Maybe.
Or in Carlstein’s lair, the black hole at the center of Gemini. In terms of astronomy and astrology, the analogy was off the mark, maybe—I didn’t know what or where Gemini was in the night sky—but still it felt right, an authentic sense of the pull of a spinning vortex.
What had Carol just said? Carlstein didn’t get out much. Everything via e-mail.Everything.Damindra Ketan’s observation about Sunil Askari came back to me:the modern scourge of e-mail.One of Askari’s two overriding obsessions, the other being my father. Maybe Askari hated e-mails so much because they were instruments of control wielded by
Carlstein.
Then there was the Huxtable file at Askari’s office, the one with which I’d failed to exinguish Raj. Full of e-mails. With numbers on them.
“Carlstein’s house,” I said. “His computer, his e-mails.” I thought momentarily of the portcullis of passwords ready to slice down on trespassers. So what—if necessary, I’d take the bloody thing back with me to Terry’s place and work on it there.
“Don’t even think about it,” Carol said. “He’ll be there; he only seemed to come out to torment JJ, like some night animal. Now JJ’s gone, he has no reason to go on the prowl.”
Then another carrot was needed to get him out.
“I can’t go while he’s in the house,” I said.
“At least you’re smart enough to grasp that much,” she said.
An orderly strolled over to us.
“Sorry to break in on you folks,” he said cheerfully. “Dr. Trent wants a word with you, Carol.”
I was glad to see her face darken with disappointment. She turned to me. “The guy’s in charge of my brain. I gotta go.” She kissed me on the lips, her eyes shut, like she was savoring her last ever moment of intimacy.
I was about to say that she didn’t have to go anywhere unless she wanted to. No. Some progress had been made, I reasoned. Give it time.
She backed up. “I guess you won’t be staying in your apartment if it looks anything like mine. Where will you be?”
“I’m staying with Terry Wardman, an associate at Clay & Westminster.”
“Give me his number,” she said.
I wrote it on the flyer for the depilatory cream, adding the number for Terry’s cell phone, the one I’d picked up from his hall table a couple of hours earlier.
“How long are you going to be here, Carol?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ll call you.”
I watched her graceful body disappear into the shadows of a hallway at the other end of the room.
“You’re Fin Border.”
I turned around to find that Harley had sat down next to me. He stroked an envelope against the grain of an incipient beard on his blotchy middle-aged face. His other hand was dug deep into the pocket of a red pinstriped bathrobe.
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