“August fifteenth,” I said when Victor’s voice mail answered. “And then he leaves the country for a few months.”
Victor called back before I even got to our side of the street.
“Café Rouge,” he said. “Seven-thirty.”
6
There’d been an orange alert that morning, and the streets were empty and full of police. “Biochemical waste found on the steps of the Capitol,” flashed on the news every few minutes. “Don’t drink the water from the tap.” We had not been drinking tap water in Washington for years—dangerous levels of lead, bacteria. Pregnant mothers filling up on the required eight glasses of water a day formed protest groups when they discovered they’d been responsible for passing dangerous levels of lead into their unborn babies from the tap. Every front porch in our neighborhood was lined with bottles of spring water.
There were often alerts in Washington, usually orange or yellow, very occasionally red, and people would go home, sometimes walking three or four miles to avoid the subway. They’d leave their offices, call their families on the cell phones they always carried, shut the front doors to their houses, pull down the blinds. The television was on in many homes even in the day during an alert.
We paid attention to orange.
Driving downtown, I was conscious of a solitary man walking the empty Connecticut Avenue just before rush hour, his head bobbing back and forth, checking the avenue. I was alert to trouble, too, although none of us in the Frayn family was actually afraid when the warnings came. The worst had already happened to us.
I did find myself thinking of my family with a sudden wave of loneliness—Julia home for the first time in weeks, talking and talking. Lisha, contained in the glass jar of her small body, picking at her food.
Driving Connecticut Avenue to Foggy Bottom, I rehearsed what to say to Victor. He’d be at the back of the café, his head against the wall, tapping the table with a pencil or his finger—something he always did, a sign of impatience or irritation or worry. I’d weave through the tables glancing at the other customers as if I were looking for friends, an expression of extended boredom on my face.
But boredom was not what I was feeling. I was on a balance beam between laughter and tears, uncontrollable laughter gathering in my throat. It was clear to me with an approaching hysteria that on August 15—soon, very soon, a matter of weeks—Victor and I would deliver my brother’s murderer to the law.
The mind, even the rational mind, is a curious thing, the way it grips the tracks once it’s on a course. I think I understand now how a soldier in a war zone, an ordinary boy from a loving family, can fall into step and discover in himself the capacity to kill.
Victor was sitting in the booth where we’d first met, wearing Steven’s blue shirt and jeans. He seemed especially glad to see me.
“Hello,” I said, heat rising in my body.
He reached over, took my chin in his hand and kissed me on the lips.
It was the first time he had kissed me.
“Now we order champagne.”
He motioned to a waiter carrying a tray of beers and chips.
“Champagne?” he asked.
“No champagne here, buddy,” the waiter said. “Beer or wine.”
“Wine?” He looked at me.
“White,” I said.
He toasted me when the waiter brought the wines. “A celebration in anticipation of our August fifteenth victory.” He downed his wine in a swallow. “So we’re ready for action.”
“Do you know what plans we’ll have when Benjamin comes?” I asked.
“For now the plans are up to you.”
“It’s a long time to keep these songs going back and forth,” I said.
“But you’ve done it brilliantly.”
His chest was broader than Steven’s had been, so the buttons on my brother’s blue shirt were pulled, his chest fuzzy like Steven’s, with thick, curly hair, and his arms dark with black bristles. It gave me a chill to see him in my brother’s clothes, as if I’d been caught in something shameful. If Julia knew I had taken them, she would kill me.
He reached over, taking Milo’s musical score from my hand. “This sappy letter from him is more than I could have hoped for,” he said. “How’s this music?”
“Sort of wild and exciting. Jumpy music. My uncle Milo says it’s excellent.”
“We’ll play the game by ear,” he said, amused at himself. “Benjamin’s hooked—that’s clear—and when he does arrive in Washington, you’ll figure a way to meet him.”
He rolled over the words in an easy fashion, but I was sure his body, like mine, was an explosive.
“This is how I see things happening for the next few weeks.” He passed the letter back to me and, leaning across the table, pressed my palms together between his hands. “You keep these love songs going on with the two of you so he’ll be urgent to see you when he gets here.”
I could tell he was looking at me, but my head was down, watching his hands around mine, conscious of his rapid breathing.
An internal disturbance, like a sudden arrhythmia, upset my equilibrium, passed through my skin with the sizzle of an electric current. I felt myself slipping away.
“And you’ll arrange to meet as soon as he arrives, say for coffee, maybe even dinner. Suggest Capitol Hill. It’s near his father’s house.”
Victor looked across the room, and I followed his eyes, which were fixed on an abstract painting, squiggly red and black worms crawling across the canvas hanging on the wall just to the right of me.
“So you’ll call and tell me where and when you’re meeting him,” he said. “And I’ll appear. Just a coincidence, he’ll think. I’ll be a friend coming into the restaurant, stopping to say, ‘Oh, hello, Sophia.’ You’ll introduce us, say I’m an engineer, nothing about Steven, and then you’ll excuse yourself and leave me at the table with Benjamin while you go to the bathroom.”
“What will you say to him?” I asked.
“I’ll shoot the breeze for a while, and if you stay away five to ten minutes, no longer, that will give me the time to ask significant questions.”
“Like what kinds of questions?” I asked, a flicker of doubt in Victor, rising, catching in my throat.
“I’m good at leading questions, searching for the answer I need to hear. That’s the kind of work I do for DTT.”
“And then we’ll turn him in, yes?”
At one moment he was leaning toward me, my hands in his, and then he dropped my hands, pushing away from the table, on his face a look of such blackness that it spread across the table, as if a boulder had fallen between us, and for the first time since I met him that morning in the library, I was uneasy.
“We will turn him in, won’t we? Isn’t that what you said?”
He seemed not to be listening, not to hear me, and I reached over, grabbed his arm.
“V?” I started to get up.
Something was happening in my body, like a heart attack, but it wasn’t a heart attack. My mouth was dry, my heart beating in my throat, a sense of overwhelming doom sweeping over me as if I were going to die.
In the artificial yellow light shining through the green shades of the fixtures at Café Rouge, Victor’s face was reptilian, his eyes cold and wet, disappearing into his head, and I stood up, my legs shaky.
“I’m feeling sick,” I said.
In the ladies’ room, I splashed cold water on my face and checked the mirror. I was pale, my pupils dilated, sandpaper in my throat. I leaned against the wall next to the towel dispenser, closing my eyes.
I heard the door open, footsteps across the tile floor.
A woman who had been in one of the stalls touched my arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, opening my eyes. “I don’t feel very well.”
I had seen this woman the first time I’d met Victor. She’d been sitting at a round table in the middle of the room, her back to us. What I remembered especially was
her steel-gray hair, long enough to sit on. They were friends, Victor had told me. Her name was Rosie, and he had met her at DTT, and they’d been having coffee at the long table at Café Rouge the first time he’d seen Steven.
She had an angular face and violet eyes so close together she appeared cross-eyed, like the blue point Siamese cat Milo had brought with him when he moved in.
“Have I seen you before?” She opened her bag, reached in and pulled out a tin of aspirin and some Tums. “I have seen you.” She handed me the pills, reaching into her bag again. “Here’s Valium . . . well, something like Valium. You seem a little slippery in the eyes.”
I put the Valium in the pocket of my jacket.
“I’ve seen you,” I said, taking deep breaths. “Your name is Rosie.”
“Vanessa,” she said. “Your face is familiar, but I don’t think we’ve met.”
She had taken out a comb and was running it through the long strands of gray hair.
“You’re here with that good looking stocky guy who I used to see a lot. I come to the Café Rouge pretty much every night, but I don’t know his name.”
She leaned over the sink checking a blemish on her forehead.
“Victor,” I said, my mind cranking slowly through the contradictory news I was getting.
Victor had lied to me. This woman was not Rosie. They were not friends. She didn’t even know him, except by sight. And why would he bother to lie? I asked myself.
What did it matter to me, the identity of a stranger?
“His name is Victor Duarte,” I said.
“I wouldn’t have thought he was a Victor. I thought of him as Bud. Cliff. Sonny. Names like that.”
The woman was wetting her comb.
“He has such large hands,” she said, combing her bangs straight down on her forehead. “I remember he used to come here a lot with that law student who was killed in April. And after that he stopped coming until I saw him here with you. Do you remember the law student?”
She turned with her back the mirror.
“He was assassinated,” she said. “At least that’s what they called it in the newspaper.” She put her makeup back in her purse, took out a small pack of sugar, opened it and sprinkled it on her tongue. “Energy!”
I leaned against the wall. It crossed my mind that I was in the process of dying, that some chemical change was taking place and my body was floating downstream, out of my control.
There was something I needed to ask her, but already I knew the answer.
“Are you a member of DTT?”
I was running out of air.
“DTT.” She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
I felt myself sinking to the ground. The next thing I remember, the door to the bathroom was propped open and I was lying on the floor and the gray-haired woman was holding a small paper bag over my mouth and nose.
“You hyperventilated,” Victor said, walking to my car with me. “Tension, the woman in the bathroom told me. She said she gave you a Valium and you put it in your pocket.”
“I don’t want a Valium.”
“Are you okay to drive home?”
“Fine,” I said. “The woman’s name is Vanessa.”
“Rosie,” Victor said firmly. “Rosie St. John. I’ve known her forever.”
An injured animal responds to danger with a rush of adrenaline and is capable of enormous strength, which can propel him to safety if he doesn’t die of the injury.
Random incidentals from Biology I, sometimes whole sentences pinned to a single moment, ran through my mind that summer.
“No Valium. I’ll be fine,” I said.
We walked up the steps to the parking garage, his arm around my waist. I was aware of an accumulating fear, and I wanted to get home.
He opened the door to the car, and I got in, and he climbed into the passenger seat, folding his arms across his chest.
“Drop me at the Foggy Bottom Metro if you feel okay to drive home,” he said.
I turned the key in the ignition.
I could feel him looking at me as I paid the ticket and pulled onto Twenty-first Street. I couldn’t see his expression, didn’t have a sense of how he saw me now and whether he sensed what had just happened between us, whether it mattered.
“I have evidence that Benjamin killed your brother, and he may even have been acting on orders. I know I can ask him the kinds of questions that will force him inadvertently to tell the truth.”
“And then we’ll go to the police?” I asked.
“One thing at a time.”
“I thought the whole point was to turn him in.”
“Once we know he did it,” Victor said. “We can’t jump to conclusions.”
“But as soon as we know?”
“We’ll call the police,” he said. “Your role has been as a decoy, like one of those wooden ducks hunters put in the water to lure the real ducks, and you’ve done beautifully.”
I didn’t react. I have always been slow to react, by nature porous, like a sponge, and it wasn’t until much later that I began to understand the full measure of what I had agreed to do, of what I had done.
Victor got out of the car and leaned in the open window on my side, his hand on my arm.
“Drive safely,” he said.
Everyone was in bed when I got home, except my father, who was in the hangar. My mother’s car was gone, so she must have returned to the glass factory after dinner. I opened the fridge, took out the remains of a roasted chicken and pulled off pieces of white meat, leaning against the kitchen sink, eating out of weakness, not hunger. I took a bunch of grapes, saltines and a glass of wine back to Steven’s room.
In bed I turned out the light and lay awake. A full moon over the trees in the backyard lit the shadeless room. Sometime after midnight the light in the hangar went out, so my father must have gone to sleep.
I got out of bed, turned on the light, took some paper and a pen out of Steven’s desk drawer and climbed back under the sheets, propped by pillows.
Dear Steven,
Today is July 12. You’ve been dead three months, and it never occurred to me until today that I could write to you. It’s not a question now of whether you read what I have written but of whether I write it in the first place.
I have these questions:
Did you ever know a man called Victor Duarte?
Were you friends?
Were you with HIM when you used to disappear?
Did you ever meet Benjamin Reed?
Do you have any idea who killed you?
I wanted to think your death was an accident, although there is evidence now that it was not. Someone knew where we lived and came with the blue Department of Justice flag the night before you died.
All of my love forever, C
P.S. I don’t expect to hear from you, but I suppose I wouldn’t be writing if I didn’t believe that something could materialize by way of truth. A long time ago, we had a funny talk about the fearless birds in the Galápagos, and remembering it tonight, I decided to write.
I must have fallen asleep just as I finished the letter. When I woke up, I was still sitting against a mound of pillows, the lamp on beside my bed, my letter to Steven facedown on my stomach.
THE LIFEGUARD CHAIR
The first time we went to the Galápagos, I remember in particular the birds. Lying on my back, the sun high overhead, I rested my head on Steven’s leg. The birds were all over me, nibbling at my lips, sitting on my shoulder, examining strands of my hair, languishing on my stomach cleaning their wings.
“Why don’t they fly away like normal birds?” I asked my father.
“Because they have no reason to be afraid of us,” he’d replied. “There are no predators here.”
Steven, bored with the long boat trip and the turtles and the endless walks with guides and their tedious information, was outraged at the birds.
“I want to force them to be afraid of me,” he said.
“You can
do that if it’s important to you,” my father replied. “You can easily prove to them that you’re the enemy, and they’ll stay away from you.”
This morning, a Tuesday, my seventeenth birthday, and Steven has forgotten to say happy birthday, although it’s already seven o’clock and he is leaving for university. He is standing by the door ready to go, his lacrosse stick and helmet slung over his shoulders. Surely his mind is on a woman at school.
“Remember the Galápagos?” I ask, hoping to delay him.
Steven smiles, that amazing smile, full of light, as if it has been ignited from within.
“Those idiot birds drove me crazy,” he says.
He struggles through the back door with all of his equipment and his backpack, and just before he closes it, he leans his head in.
“Happy birthday, gorgeous.”
C.F., age 17
Blue-footed Booby, Galápagos
VII.
SYMBIOSIS
1
July 21
Dear Sophia,
I’m a reasonable man. A little abstracted and obssessional. My hair too long, my jeans threadbare, my living room floor a closet for the number of clothes I have dropped on there.
But my brain is arranged in file cabinets, the drawers marked for every occasion except this one.
Another thing. I’m the only son of a conservative politician from a small town in the Midwest, and I learned early with such a legacy to defend my heart.
This epistolary folly is insane, I tell myself.
And then I sit down at the piano to compose a sonata for advanced composition, and what comes to mind?
A Student of Living Things Page 16