Corsican Honor

by William Heffernan

“Ah,” Fairchild said, stroking his chin for effect. “Then I take it Moran and Walker here are providing you with expert research.”

  Alex saw Jody stiffen; her smile faded.

  “Well, the viper speaks,” Marley said.

  “Tut, tut. We must not lose our sense of humor.” Fairchild glanced at Alex and Jody. “Neither must we lose our sense of reality,” he added.

  Alex reached out and laid his hand on Fairchild’s shoulder. The gesture was friendly, and his smile matched it. His finger and thumb moved to the pressure point in the trapezius muscle and he squeezed firmly.

  Fairchild let out a yelp and sank to his knees, the left side of his body numbed with pain.

  Alex bent, placing his lips close to Fairchild’s ear. “And we must never lose our manners,” he whispered. “If you ever do again, I’ll cripple you, you simpering little bastard.”

  He took Fairchild’s elbow and began raising him to his feet. “Are you drunk, man?” he asked. “Let me help you.”

  Fairchild staggered back, his face red and horrified, the feeling only now returning to his arm and shoulder and side. “You barbarian,” he shouted. “You cretin!”

  “And you must never forget it,” Alex said softly. He shook his head, his eyes sad. “I think you definitely should stay away from the sherry,” he said.

  Others had turned to stare, and Winston Cambridge, the college president, was making his way toward them.

  “What’s wrong here?” Cambridge asked, looking from Fairchild to Alex to Marley. He seemed confused and embarrassed.

  “He assaulted me,” Fairchild snapped, jutting an angry chin toward Alex.

  Alex shook his head. “I think my colleague has had too much to drink. He stumbled, and I caught him.”

  “Definitely too much,” Marley confirmed.

  “This is outrageous,” Fairchild ranted. His jowls and lips were quivering, and had he been a different sort of man, Alex might have thought he was about to attack him.

  Cambridge held up a hand to both men. “Let’s just separate and put this aside,” he said. He turned to Fairchild. “Why don’t you go to the bar and get your drink, and we’ll talk later.”

  Alex turned to Jody as Cambridge directed his attention to him. “I think we should go,” he said. “This is embarrassing.” He turned back to Cambridge. “Thank you for a lovely evening,” he said.

  Cambridge momentarily closed his eyes, then nodded. Alex and Jody headed for the door.

  “Did you wear a coat?” Alex asked.

  “No, I did not,” she said. Her voice was cold. “It’s summer.”

  “Mmm,” Alex said as he opened the front door.

  “A minute, Alex.” It was Cambridge coming up behind. He smiled at Jody. “Could you give us just a private moment, please?” he asked.

  Jody went out and closed the door, and Alex turned into Cambridge’s weary smile.

  “Jesus Christ, Alex,” he began. “I know the man’s an ass, but I simply can’t have you assaulting people—especially fellow faculty—in my home, or anywhere on college property.” He watched Alex shrug helplessly, indifferently, he thought. “I’ve made a great many allowances for you over the past years, and I’ve made them because I was told to.” Cambridge was nearly whispering. “Somehow my predecessor allowed your presence here to be tied into some government grant money this college very much wants and very much needs. But, damn it, man, I cannot have this type of thing going on in my own home. It is embarrassing, to say the least. And if Fairchild brings you up on charges before the faculty senate, there isn’t a helluva lot I can do. Do you understand that?”

  “He was drunk,” Alex said. “I have witnesses.”

  “Thank God you do,” Cambridge said. “This time. But if it happens again, it won’t be believed. Witnesses or not.”

  Cambridge slumped his shoulders and pulled on his rather long nose. He was a pleasant man, with all the physical dignity and personal ineptness of most college presidents. He simply wanted things to go smoothly.

  “I’ll see it doesn’t happen again,” Alex said. He winked at Cambridge.

  Cambridge shook his head, and Alex turned and joined Jody outside.

  “What did he want?” she asked. “Are you going to be brought up on charges?”

  “He just wanted to compliment me on an article I’d written,” Alex said. He slipped his arm around her and started down the sidewalk.

  “You haven’t written any articles,” Jody said.

  “He thought I had,” Alex said. “I didn’t correct him. It would have been rude.”

  “God forbid you should be rude,” Jody said.

  They walked in silence for several minutes.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Jody finally said. “The man’s an idiot, and he hates you. You just gave him ammunition to use against you.”

  “You’re right. I should have shot him instead.”

  “Now you’re being an ass.”

  “Thank you. And all this time I thought I was defending your honor.”

  “I can defend my own honor, if and when I think it needs it.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “Please do.”

  They continued in silence again.

  “I suppose this means I don’t get laid tonight,” Alex said at length.

  Jody laughed, and placed her head against his shoulder. They began to walk more crookedly.

  “Oh, Alex, I don’t understand this need you have for self-destruction. You have so much. There isn’t a graduate student here who wouldn’t trade places with you in a minute.”

  “It’s because they all want your body,” Alex said.

  “Stop ignoring what I’m saying!”

  Alex let out a long breath. “Let’s just go home,” he said. “I’m tired, and I have an eight o’clock tomorrow.”

  Jody knew the subject was closed. For now. She’d try again tomorrow.

  Jody was just getting out of bed when Alex returned from his eight o’clock class. She looked especially beautiful, he thought, when she was rumpled and tousled with sleep. He smiled at her and went to the kitchen for coffee. His hangover hurt like hell.

  Jody followed him into the kitchen and sat in a high-backed wooden chair, her legs tucked beneath her. She was wearing a silk pajama top that was his, and nothing beneath it. The material clung to her despite its too large size.

  “I want to talk about last night,” she said.

  Women always wanted to talk about last night, Alex thought. Or last week, or last year.

  “Sure,” he said, taking a heavy hit on his coffee.

  “And I want to talk about us,” she said. “About why I can’t seem to make you happy.”

  “You do make me happy,” he said. “You make me happier than any woman ever has.”

  It was a lie, but he wanted it to be true. His wife, Stephanie, had brought him the most happiness he had known. And also the greatest unhappiness. Stephanie, who had rotted and withered in her grave without even the benefit of revenge.

  “I want to believe that,” Jody said. “I know I’m good for you. I know I make you happy in bed, and I know I can make you laugh, and that you can relax with me.” She hesitated. “Sometimes.” She looked down at her hands in her lap, then hugged herself. “But there are other times, and then I think, I can’t help him because he’s as afraid of happiness as he is of unhappiness. He doesn’t trust it. He thinks it will betray him. He thinks that everyone, and everything, at any level, will betray him someday. And what I’m trying to tell you is that I won’t.”

  Alex looked around the kitchen, trying to ignore Jody’s words. It was warm and comfortable, just like the rest of the small house. He had bought it four years ago, when he had finally realized they had lied to him, that the promises they had made to him would never be kept. That this was it. This was what his life was and would be, and he had better adjust to it. But he couldn’t.

  “Talk to me, Alex.”

  He wished he could. He
placed the coffee cup on the counter, and placed his hands on either side of her face. She was beautiful. And lovely. She was just like Stephanie had been when he had first met her, even the same age. What was it now? Fifteen years ago. And she was right. He didn’t trust the happiness she made him feel. He knew it would evaporate one day, all in one, sudden moment that was just somewhere down the road, waiting.

  “The poet says that nothing is forever,” he said. He smiled at her.

  “The poet’s full of shit, Alex. They always are. It’s what they do. They put things on paper and make us believe they’re real. But the only thing that’s real is what’s right here in front of us. What’s in our lives.” She looked up at him, and he could feel the tenderness, the caring come off of her.

  “I can’t promise you it’s forever. That’s something you have to work at. Something you have to struggle to keep getting, to keep giving. But I can promise you I’ll never take you for granted. I’ll never say to myself, Oh, that’s just Alex, and I belong to him, and he belongs to me, and he’ll always be here when I want him or need him. And I’ll never decide you’re not exciting to me anymore just because you’re always here. And I won’t con myself into believing that someone else can give me the excitement I stopped letting myself have with you. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  He nodded. He didn’t believe it, but he nodded. He understood how she wanted it to be.

  He also understood he was fucking up her life. He didn’t think he had with the others. He had been a fling with them, even if they hadn’t realized it at the start. He had been an exciting, romantic tryst with a professor. With what they themselves wanted to be. And he had used them too, until they had grown tired of him and decided to get on with their lives.

  And he was using Jody as well, even if he loved her. But he wasn’t in love with her. It was impossible not to love her. But it was also impossible to be in love with her. At least for him.

  “I don’t know if I can give you what you want, Jody. I just don’t know. I want to. But there are …” He shook his head. “There are things that have happened in my life I just can’t shake. It’s not you. It’s me.”

  “Tell me about them. Talk to me about them.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” He tried to smile again, but could not. “You can understand events in people’s lives, and you can try to understand what it was like. But the best you can do is understand what it would have been like for you if it had happened to you. And that’s not the same. It’s never the same for two people. It just can’t be.”

  “But at least I’d know. And that would be something.”

  She was right. He owed her that much. And so he told her. Standing there in the kitchen, in a silly, quaint, little Vermont house, he told her everything. And it must have had as much reality for her as if he’d told her he’d come from another galaxy.

  When he finished, she just stared at him.

  “And you still want to kill this man,” she said.

  He shook his head. “No. I still have to kill him.”

  She looked down at her hands. They were back in her lap now, and they felt as though they were trembling, but they weren’t.

  “I believed what you said. About your wife being killed in an accident. I didn’t know.”

  “I wasn’t lying to you. I just couldn’t tell you the truth,” he said. “There’s not much difference. But there is a difference.” He looked around the room again. “I don’t want you to tell anyone about this. It’s not that I care what these assholes around here think. It’s just that you don’t break agreements with these people. Even if they break them with you. They don’t forgive that. And they don’t forget. They come after you, and they punish you.” He noted the concern on her face. “I don’t mean with a gun. There are a lot of other ways they can screw up your life. And they’re happy to do it.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.” Her voice was soft, quiet. He could barely hear her. Just.

  She looked up at him. Hopeful. “But if they don’t help you, you can’t do it, can you?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Jody stared at her hands again. And so you keep dying inside because you can’t do what you believe you have to do. And if you do it, you die outside. Dammit, you’re not a young man, Alex, she told herself. You’re a middle-aged professor of English, no matter what you were ten years ago. And you can’t go off hunting killers and expect to survive. And you don’t believe you can survive if you don’t. But you’re wrong. I know you’re wrong.

  “You were right. I can’t feel anything you feel inside. I wish I could, but I can’t. But I’m glad you can’t go.” She stared at him. “Don’t hate me for that, Alex. I can’t help it.”

  He took her face in his hands again. “I don’t.”

  She smiled. “You know, I wanted to make love to you when I came out here. I wanted to make you happy that way. I still do, and it’s not because of what you told me. I just find myself wanting you all the time.”

  He smiled at her. “I don’t know if I can. This is a pretty serious hangover I’ve given myself. I don’t know if the old wizzer will snap to attention. It might just roll over and lay there and say, Go away, leave me alone, let me die in peace.”

  “No, it won’t,” she said. “I’m very good at raising the dead.” She came to him and placed her mouth against his and allowed her body to melt against him.

  She drew her head back and smiled at him. “How’s the old wizzer now?” she asked.

  “It’s a miracle,” he said. “It lives yet again.”

  “I know,” Jody said. “It’s made its presence known.”

  CHAPTER

  31

  Palm Beach, Florida, 1990

  They had gathered in a meeting room at The Breakers, the luxurious oceanfront hotel that American robber baron Henry Flagler had built in 1925 in imitation of many of the great palaces of Europe. The meeting room was on the mezzanine and faced the sea, and the design, with its vaulted windows and large murals and ceiling panels, made it seem like the well-preserved chamber of a Renaissance palace. It was, in fact, an exact copy of a room in the Ducal Palace in Venice. A room stolen and duplicated by the New York architect Leonard Schultze, on direct orders from old Flagler himself. The entire hotel, in fact, was one great theft of brilliance—exact copies of various rooms in numerous palaces—from the finest minds of Renaissance architecture.

  Piers Moran sat at the head of a long, narrow table, the windows and sea at his back. The room had been swept only an hour earlier by CIA technicians, and had been deemed secure from any monitoring devices.

  “The Pisani brothers have been virtually stripped of political influence in Marseilles,” Piers said. “It’s a temporary situation. They simply backed the wrong horse in the recent elections, and they’re paying a temporary price for it. They’ll recover in time, but that doesn’t change the fact, or make them any less vulnerable at the moment.”

  “So they’ve got a shooting war on their hands.” It was Walter Hennesey, the man who had replaced Piers as assistant DDO more than ten years before. He spoke in support of Piers, not questioning him, and did it through a cloud of pipe smoke that hovered in front of him like a blue haze.

  “Indeed,” Piers said. “And they don’t have the police as a buffer.” He drummed his fingers on the table. He looked down at his hand, noted a liver spot on its back, frowned at it. “Normally, the opposition would be picked up upon entering the city, or if not, harassed unmercifully once they were there. As we all know, it’s impossible for an invading force to operate on foreign soil without some local cooperation.” He pursed his lips. “In this case, the police are simply turning a blind eye, and the Pisanis find themselves under attack for the first time in almost twenty years.”

  “Certainly they have the manpower to handle it.” It was Hennesey’s number two, a man named Batchler, a thin, reedy man with a sharp voice and a coarse manner, whom Piers considered far too sure of his own opinions. “
What about the other factions in the milieu?” he asked.

  “They’re being held back by Francisci. He’s either allowing the Colombians to do his dirty work for him, or he’s joined forces with them,” Piers said. “We’re simply not certain.”

  “Who is this Montoya character?” The fourth man was Christopher Baldwin, head of the CIA’s French desk.

  “He’s the top man in the Medellin cartel,” Hennesey said. “And he has the personal resources of a small country.”

  “But if he’s like most of these South American grease-ball gangsters, he wouldn’t know the difference between the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe,” Baldwin said. “I can’t see him understanding the nuances of France well enough to operate there. So he can’t be sending in a bunch of greaseball shooters who don’t even speak the language. So who’s doing it for him? Francisci?”

  Piers shook his head. “Francisci’s just holding back, waiting. For now anyway.” He stared at Baldwin, who was short and overweight and balding, one of the new breed of CIA executives who didn’t even bother to keep himself fit anymore, he thought. Soft-minded as well, he suspected. He resented the new blood they had been forced to bring into the operation he had begun forty years ago, but there had been no choice. Especially not now.

  “He’s got Ernst Ludwig running the European end.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his hand-tailored suit coat. “Seems the Russians did as we asked ten years ago. They packed Ludwig off to South and Central America and set him up with the sundry revolutionary forces they supported there.” He smiled derisively. “Now the Nicaraguans are gone, the Salvadorans are suing for peace, the Chileans were never there in the first place, and old Fidel is sitting at home in Cuba, holding onto his ass and praying he’s not next.” He tilted his head to one side, indicating a fait accompli. “So Ludwig, being the resourceful bastard he is, has sold his services to Montoya. And Ludwig knows how to operate in Europe better than anyone.”

  “I don’t understand this move into Europe at all,” Batchler said. He raised a hand. “I understand the interest in expanding the cocaine market there. It’s ripe for it. But why try to push the Pisanis out? Why not simply work through them?”