Because It Is My Blood

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “Balanchine, Anya. Barber, Scarlet.”

  “Natty and I love you. Leo loved you, too—”

  Scarlet put her hand over my mouth. “Oh, please, please, please stop! I don’t want to cry any more tonight. I’ve existed in a permanent state of tears for the last two years.”

  The bus arrived at Scarlet’s stop. Between the combined volume of her skirt and belly and the height of her heels, Scarlet was having trouble getting up out of the seat. I stood and offered her my hand.

  * * *

  Late that night, after the party, Win came over to the apartment. We’d just seen each other but I suspect his main reason in coming over was because he could—he was now officially over eighteen, which meant that city curfew didn’t apply to him. We went into my room, so that we wouldn’t wake Natty, who had already gone to bed. We were both hungry but there wasn’t much to eat in the house. Win noticed the mongrel bar of chocolate on my dresser. “What’s this?”

  I told him I had bought it in the park. “You can have it if you want but it might be terrible.”

  I went into the kitchen to get water. For a second, the tap wouldn’t start running and an awful breathy banging sound came from the pipes. I wondered if this would be the day the water ran out. But, finally, the water started.

  When I got back to my room, I found Win studying the chocolate. He had taken off the jacket, and he was holding out the gold foil–wrapped bar. “Look, it’s not Balanchine,” he said. “The paper looks like it is, but underneath it’s something else.”

  “Yeah, I thought that might happen,” I said. “I bought it in front of Little Egypt. The jacket was off, so I thought it would probably be some generic brand underneath.”

  “It’s not generic.” Win held out the foil-wrapped bar so I could read it: BITTER SCHOKOLADE, HERGESTELLT FÜR BITTER SCHOKOLADEN GMBH, MÜNCHEN.

  “At the funeral, someone was saying that they were the perennial fourth-place chocolate family in Germany,” I said quietly. “Mickey’s wife’s family actually. You remember Sophia…” Sophia Bitter Balanchine. Sophia M. Bitter Balanchine. Sophia Marquez Bitter Balanchine. The former Sophia Marquez Bitter, who Theo’s oldest sister hadn’t liked. Sophia Marquez Bitter, who had once been engaged to Yuji Ono …

  Everywhere I had been, she had been first.

  Bitter Chocolate under a Balanchine wrapper.

  Who would have had the ability to orchestrate supply-wide poisoning?

  Who would have had the ability to execute a three-country hit?

  Who would Yuji Ono have protected over me?

  I dropped the bar on the floor. Because it was thin and stale and cheap, it broke into several pieces.

  It was obvious. I had been so stupid.

  Again.

  I had to sit down.

  “Annie, are you all right?” Win asked.

  I was about to lie: to tell him I wasn’t feeling well and that I’d see him tomorrow; walk him to the elevator; then, I’d go back into my room, close the door, and puzzle this out alone. But the truth was I hadn’t done that well with this method—that is to say, solitude. Win knew plenty of appalling things about me, and he was still here.

  I took a deep breath. “What if Sophia Bitter was the one who arranged the Fretoxin poisoning? That was about the time she came to New York to marry Mickey. And Theo’s sister says that Sophia was once engaged to Yuji Ono.”

  Win nodded. “But Jacks confessed to it, didn’t he?”

  “No one really believes he did it, though,” I said. “I think someone in the family convinced him to confess because he was going to jail for shooting the district attorney’s son.”

  “Right, him,” Win said. “He who thought he was going to prom. Him.”

  “Him—you.” I paused to kiss him on the mouth. “The point is, Jacks would have had to go to jail either way. So it could have just as well been someone else.”

  Natty came into the kitchen. She was wearing her pajamas and rubbing the sleep out of the corners of her eyes. “If Bitter Chocolate is really the fourth-place chocolate company in Germany,” Natty said, “maybe Sophia thought she could improve their standing by expanding the business into America. Listen—she marries Mickey, just to get close enough to destroy the Balanchines. Or at least, to take over the business herself.”

  “When did you wake up?” I asked her.

  “Now. You two are loud. Hi, Win,” she said.

  “Natty, my gal,” Win greeted her. “The question is, did Mickey help her, or will this be news to him, too?”

  “And also, did she arrange to have Leo killed?” Natty added. “And did she try to kill Annie and me?”

  “Aside from Yuji Ono, I think she was the only one who had the reach to arrange such a hit,” I said.

  Natty sighed.

  “What are we going to do?” Win asked.

  We. It was presumptuous of him, but I felt better all the same. “I’m not sure yet,” I said. If she really was the one who had killed Leo, I might need to do some very hard things. But like Charles Delacroix had said, first I needed to make sure. And I needed to find out who her conspirators had been. Also, while it was pleasant to have Win and Natty to go over things with, I wasn’t ready to admit to them that I might need to kill someone. “I’m going to visit Jacks,” I said. “He might have some information and he’s been bothering me to come see him for months.”

  I kneeled down and picked up the broken pieces of the Bitter Chocolate bar and threw them into the trash. I took the gold-foil wrapper. I was about to put it in my pocket when Natty took it from me. She folded it in half so that it was squarish and then she folded it several more times. When she handed it back to me, the paper had taken the form of a small, gold dragon.

  “Hey, where’d you learn that?” Win wanted to know.

  “Genius camp,” she told him.

  So you see, I thought. It hadn’t all been for nothing.

  XV

  I GO TO RIKERS

  THERE WERE NO VISITING HOURS at Rikers Island on Mondays and Tuesdays. I didn’t go on Wednesday either, because the visitation schedule was determined by last name. After some research, I determined that Jacks’s day was Thursday. I also read an exhaustively detailed dress code: among other things, no swimsuits, ripped or see-through clothing, spandex, hats, hoods, or uniforms. It also stated that “visitors to Rikers must wear underwear.” (NB: There had not been the remotest chance that I wouldn’t.)

  The prohibition against uniforms put me in mind of the fact that I was no longer a student at Holy Trinity. Life had been so much easier with a uniform. As I was dressing that morning, it occurred to me that I would need to come up with a new uniform for myself. But, what? A uniform was meant to reflect your station in life. I was no longer college-bound or even a student. With a long list of offenses under my belt, I was not likely to become a criminologist. I was no longer an inmate at Liberty. I was no longer a cacao farmer. I was no longer my brother’s keeper. Or my sister’s either. Natty seemed increasingly able to keep herself.

  At the moment, I was nothing more or less than a girl with an infamous last name and a vendetta or two.

  But what to wear for avenging my slain brother?

  I had to take two different buses to get to Rikers, and then I had to register, and finally I was led into a room with tables and chairs bolted to the floor. I would rather have visited Jacks behind a plastic screen with a phone like you see in those old movies, but I guess my cousin wasn’t considered dangerous enough to merit such precautions.

  I sat down, and about ten minutes later, Jacks was brought into the room.

  “Thanks for coming, Annie,” he said. My cousin’s appearance was much altered since the last time I’d seen him. He had shaved his head. His nose had clearly been broken in multiple places, though it was healed for the moment, and one of his cheekbones had a disturbing flatness to it. He also had fresh stitches above his eyebrow. “I’m not the pretty boy I used to be, eh, cousin?”

  “You were n
ever that pretty,” I said though I could not help but pity Jacks. He’d always been so vain about his appearance.

  Jacks laughed, and he sat across the table from me.

  I had things I wanted to know from him, of course, but the best way of dealing with Jacks was to let him talk.

  “You finally came,” he commented.

  “You’ve only been begging me to for months,” I said.

  Jacks shook his head. “Nah, that’s not why you came. No one loves Jacks. You’re probably still holding a grudge ’cause I shot your boyfriend. You just want something.”

  I looked at the clock. “What could you possibly have that I want?”

  “Like I wrote. Information,” Jacks said.

  True enough. “Your father’s dead,” I told him.

  “Yuri, yeah, I heard. Who cares? That man was no type of father to me.”

  It seemed hard to believe that he could feel so little for his own father. “Back in September, you said that Natty and I were in terrible danger, and maybe you know that since then there have been attempts on both our lives and Leo is dead.”

  “Leo is dead?” Jacks shook his head. “It wasn’t supposed to go down like that.”

  “What wasn’t? What do you mean?”

  “I had heard”—Jacks lowered his voice—“that someone in the Family was going to try to take you and your sister down. That way, there’d be no one from the Leonyd Balanchine side left to interfere in the business. No one was going to touch Leo though. Leo was gone to wherever you sent him. Leo was out of the picture.”

  “Who, Jacks? Say who you mean.”

  Jacks shook his head. “I … I’m not sure. Okay, see, here’s the thing. See, I didn’t poison everyone.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Really?” Jacks paused in surprise. “And I didn’t mean to shoot your boyfriend either. What I said to you last year was true. I only wanted to wound Leo so that I could take him back to Yuri. But the unlucky thing that happened was me shooting your boyfriend. Because I would have served a couple of months if I had just shot Leo, but … Well, you know how it went down.

  “So, Yuri had Mickey come to me. He said, ‘City Hall wants a name to attribute to the Balanchine poisoning so that the Family can put it behind them.’ And I took the fall.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  “Mickey said he’d take care of me once I got out.”

  “But what does that have to do with Natty and me?”

  Jacks rolled his eyes. “So I said, ‘What happens when I’m out and Anya Balanchine and her sister are grown women? What stops them from shooting me right between the eyes in payback for all these things I’ve done?’ And Mickey said he would handle you.”

  Jacks didn’t know anything about Sophia Bitter. “Jacks, that’s what you wanted to tell me? That doesn’t mean Mickey was going to shoot me! I think he intended to partner with me.”

  “But you said there were attempts on you and your sister. So…”

  “What about Mickey’s wife?”

  “Sophia, nah. I doubt she was involved. She’s just a woman.”

  “That’s sexist.” I stood up. Talking to Jacks had always been a waste of time.

  “Wait! Anya, don’t go! Now that you mention it, the first time I met Sophia Bitter was right around the poisoning.”

  I slowly returned to the chair.

  “She’d arrived in New York maybe a week or two earlier. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but maybe you’re right. Maybe Mickey’s cover-up was to protect her.” Jacks’s pale face was turning pinkish. “Maybe that pizda is the whole reason I’m in here!” He asked me what proof I had that Sophia Bitter had been involved and I told him about the wrapper and the fact that she had been one of the few people with knowledge of my siblings’ and my whereabouts.

  “She couldn’t have done it alone,” Jacks said. “She had to have had a partner.”

  I knew who the obvious choice was. “Yuji Ono?”

  “Sure, him. But I mean someone on the inside.”

  “Her husband.”

  This conversation was going in a circle.

  “Yeah, but the thing is, Annie, and maybe you don’t get this, the poisonings hurt Mickey as much as anyone. He was next in line to run Balanchine Chocolate. The poisonings made everyone think he and Yuri were both weak.” Jacks ran his fingers through his invisible hair. “What about Fats? No, Fats would never. He loves chocolate too much. And he loves you kids. What about that lawyer who works for you?”

  “Mr. Kipling?” I asked.

  “No, Simon Green.”

  That was the last name I’d expected to hear Jacks say. “How do you know Simon Green?”

  “I met him years ago at the compound when he and I were both kids.”

  “At the compound? Where are you going with this?”

  “Nothing. Just maybe I’m not the only bastard in this family.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Haven’t you ever suspected?”

  “Suspected what?”

  “That Simon Green is, maybe, related to Yuri. Or even to your father. And if that’s true, can you trust—”

  I stood up and smacked Jacks across his ugly, broken face. I was strong from those months of manual labor, and I felt something in his cheek crumble under my hand.

  A guard ran over to me and pulled me away from Jacks. At that point, I was asked to leave Rikers Island.

  “It’s okay, Anya! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any disrespect to your father,” Jacks yelled desperately at my back. “I can’t stay here! You know I didn’t have anything to do with the poisoning, and I shouldn’t be in here. You’ve got to help me. I’m gonna die in here, Annie! You can ask your boyfriend’s father to help me!”

  I did not turn around because a guard was pushing me toward the exit. Even if I had been physically able to turn, I wouldn’t have.

  That was the problem with Jacks. He would say anything. Daddy used to say that people who would say anything could be ignored entirely.

  But what had Daddy known? Now that I was older, I was starting to wonder how much of what he’d told me had been fortune-cookie crap.

  Look how successfully Jacks had injected poison into my mind.

  Daisy Gogol was waiting for me outside the visitors’ building.

  On the bus ride home, it wasn’t that cold but I began to shiver.

  “What is it, Anya?” she asked.

  I told her that the man I had gone to see had said something insulting about my dead father.

  “This man—obviously, he is a criminal,” Daisy said.

  I nodded.

  “And a liar?”

  I nodded again.

  Daisy shrugged her enormous shoulders. “I think you are safe to dismiss him.”

  Daisy put her heavy arm around me, pulling me toward her spectacularly muscular bosom.

  She was right. What Jacks had implied about Daddy couldn’t possibly be true. I didn’t want to ask Mr. Kipling about it. I didn’t want to have to repeat it. I didn’t want my sister ever to have to hear it. I wanted to erase it from my brain. I wanted to put it in the section with all the stuff I’d learned for school that I was never going to need: Hecate’s lines in Macbeth and the Pythagorean theorem and the subject of Daddy’s fidelity. Gone, all gone.

  (NB: If I had a daughter, the first advice I’d give her would be that willful ignorance is nearly always a mistake.)

  * * *

  When I got up to the apartment, I needed something to do to occupy my mind or at the very least, my hands. I decided to sort through Imogen’s belongings. She didn’t have much—books, clothing, toiletries—but I figured her sister would probably want them. Had it been Natty, I would have wanted her possessions. (What had happened to Leo’s things?)

  In Imogen’s nightstand, I found the copy of Bleak House Natty and I had given her for her birthday. How long ago that seemed. Bleak House was quite a lengthy novel, and Imogen was only about two hundred pages in
. Poor Imogen would never find out what happened at the end of the story.

  I was about to toss Imogen’s handbag into a box when I noticed a leather-bound book inside. I opened the cover. The book was the diary Natty had mentioned. It was so like Imogen to keep a paper journal. I didn’t want to snoop on her, but I also wanted to know what her last months had been like. She had always been a good friend to me, and well, I missed her.

  I flipped through the pages. Her scrawl was familiar—a tiny, feminine slant.

  This particular diary started about two years ago. She mainly detailed what she was reading. As I was not a reader, I found the whole thing rather boring. And then, an entry from a little over a year ago, February 2083, caught my eye:

  G. getting sicker every day. Asked Mr. K. and me to help her die. And then several weeks later:

  It is done. G. sent the kids to the wedding. Mr. K. cut power to the building for an hour. I upped G.’s drugs so she wouldn’t be in any pain & I held one of her hands & Mr. K. held the other & finally her eyes closed & her heart stopped. R.I.P., Galina.

  I threw the book across the room, and when it landed, I could hear some of its delicate pages tear. Imogen Goodfellow had helped Nana commit suicide! And “Mr. K.” could only be my Mr. Kipling.

  I tossed the diary into a canvas bag and then I left the apartment and started walking down to Mr. Kipling’s apartment. The sky had been a menacing gray all afternoon, but the evening had made good on that threat and a truly hard rain had begun to fall. Neither I nor Daisy Gogol, who had insisted she come with me, had brought umbrellas, and we were drenched by the time we reached Mr. Kipling’s apartment at Sutton Place.

  I rarely visited Mr. Kipling at his apartment. Most business could wait until the morning. I asked the doorman to call up but he recognized me and waved me toward the elevator. Daisy Gogol decided to stay in the lobby.

  Mr. Kipling’s wife, Keisha, answered the door. “Anya,” she said, holding out her arms to me. “You must be freezing. You’re soaked through. Come in. I’ll get you a towel.”