* * *
—
As promised, Joachim came back to pick Olivia up in time to get to the movie and buy popcorn. She liked it with sugar now, as they did it in France, instead of salt.
“I forgot to ask you what movie it is before I so gallantly offered to be your bodyguard,” he teased her.
“It’s a love story with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro,” she said, as he found a parking space down a side street from the theater and she noticed that he was right. There were gangs of teenage boys cruising everywhere, and little clusters of Gypsies begging and eyeing people’s purses.
“Oh God, I should have asked,” he said. “Isn’t there something violent, or a science fiction movie with robots beheading each other?” She laughed at him.
“I hope not,” she said happily, as she got out of the car. It was nice having someone to go out with. She usually went to the movies alone or didn’t go at all.
Joachim pulled her close to him, so no one snatched her purse, and his broad frame protected her. They got to the theater two minutes later, bought popcorn on the way in, and found two seats together, which was rare on a Friday night. He looked around and saw with amusement that there were a number of older couples seated with one arm around the other. Given the age of the stars, it had attracted an older audience, even older than they were.
“I think I’m too young for this movie,” he complained, as the previews came on.
“Shut up and eat your popcorn,” she told him, and he laughed and put an arm around her shoulders.
“Just so people don’t think we’re strange or don’t like each other.”
“I don’t think they care,” she said, smiling and eating her sugared popcorn. But it felt nice to have a warm arm around her. It made her feel more human and not just like a work machine that went nonstop with no affection to fuel it. She had forgotten what that felt like, it had been so long.
The movie came on then, and Joachim kept his arm around her until the end. He enjoyed the film more than he wanted to admit, and Olivia loved it and said she wanted to come back and see it again sometime.
“You can get the DVD or stream it.”
“It’s not the same as in the theater,” she said, as they walked back to the car. They’d had a nice evening together. He was good company and they were comfortable with each other.
“Do you want to stop and have a pizza? I’m hungry,” he said, as he started the car, and a teenage boy pounded on the hood, and ran away laughing with his friends. “That’s why I don’t want you here alone. Pizza?” She thought about it and nodded. Neither of them had had dinner, just popcorn. There was a pizza restaurant a few blocks from her apartment. They were fancy pizzas, and delicious.
They shared a truffle pizza and talked about work and the movie, and she was sleepy by the time he took her home and dropped her off.
“Have a nice weekend!” she called out to him and waved. “Thanks for the movie!” He had treated her. She was upstairs in her bed half asleep ten minutes later, and he drove back to his mother’s apartment with a smug look on his face, determined to prove that his mother was wrong. He wasn’t in love with Olivia. They were just friends. She was probably the best person he knew and he admired her and wanted to protect her from any harm. And he loved working with her. But that didn’t mean he loved her. He was absolutely certain he was right. She was beautiful and fun to be with and smart, but that didn’t sway him. They were work partners, and she was his boss, and nothing more. He couldn’t wait to tell his mother as he drove home. For once her intuition was way off base.
Chapter 13
When Joachim came home from the movies with Olivia, he heard voices in the living room, and thought his mother had fallen asleep in front of the television. It was late for her to be up, and he walked in to gently get her to her bedroom and stopped in his tracks. She was wide awake, sitting on the couch, and Javier was sitting across from her. His left upper arm was wrapped in a towel soaked with blood, and there was a gun lying on the coffee table in front of him. He grabbed it and stood up the minute he saw Joachim walk in. He pointed the gun at Joachim’s heart, and their mother’s voice rang out strong and clear.
“If you hurt so much as a hair on his head, Javier, I swear I’ll kill you myself. Put the gun down. You don’t shoot your own brother. You’re in my home. Have some respect. You come here after twenty-five years, with a gun? What’s happened to you?” But she could see what had happened. He was an entirely different person. There was nothing left, no morals, no compassion, no humanity. There was nothing he cared about. It was Cain and Abel in the end.
“What are you doing here?” Joachim asked him, walking into the room slowly, not wanting to startle him. Javier’s eyes were wild, with the pain of his wound, and probably because he was on drugs. “I’d been told you were in Colombia,” Joachim said calmly, and sat down next to his mother on the couch. Her eyes were steady as she looked at Javier, but her hand was shaking in Joachim’s. It was deeply emotional for her to see Javier again, and for Joachim too.
“What are you doing here?” Javier spat back at his twin. They still looked exactly alike, one filthy, one clean, same face. “I thought you were a servant in England,” Javier said in a mocking tone. Joachim had no idea how he knew about that, since he had gone to London long after Javier had cut off communications with them. But news traveled both ways. It surprised Joachim that his twin had made inquiries about them. Maybe he was human after all, but he didn’t look it, with his hair a matted mess, a heavy beard, and his arm bleeding in the towel. It was his left arm, and Javier was left-handed, so it would make him a less accurate shot if he fired at either of them, and Joachim didn’t want it to be their mother.
“Why don’t you put the gun away. I don’t think you need it to defend yourself against Mama.” The irony wasn’t lost on Javier, and he shrugged and put it in his belt. If Javier shot anyone, it would be his twin brother, not their mother. “Why are you here?” It was a cruel way to meet after twenty-five years.
“I have business here. It’s a new market for us.”
“Are you married? Do you have children?” Liese asked him, struggling for normalcy. She wanted to reach out and touch her son, but she didn’t dare. He looked like a wild animal ready to strike. Joachim was deceptively calm, watching his every move.
“No, Mama,” Javier answered her, sounding like her son again. “I don’t have kids, or a wife.” It was an absurd question in the circumstances, but she wanted to know. A long, long time ago, he had been her baby, and would be until the day he died. “Do you have whiskey?” he asked Joachim in a rougher tone. Joachim decided not to argue with him, walked away, fished a bottle out of the cupboard, and handed it to him. Javier turned the cap with his teeth to open it, let the blood-soaked towel fall, and poured whiskey over the bullet wound in his arm. It was nasty looking and Liese cringed. He wrapped it in the blood-soaked towel again.
“One of your new business associates must have gotten pissed off at you,” Joachim surmised. “That looks ugly.”
“I can’t go to a hospital,” he said roughly.
“No, you can’t,” Joachim agreed.
“We have doctors. I can see one tomorrow if I need to.”
“You can’t stay here, Javier. It’s too dangerous for Mama, if someone finds you here. Whoever did that will try again.” Whoever did it had been aiming for his heart. Joachim wasn’t afraid of his twin, he was soaking up the look of him. As it always had been, it was like looking in the mirror, except there was something missing. As his own mother had said about him, no heart. He didn’t look happy to see them, or moved by their mother, who was an old woman now. She had been middle-aged, in her fifties, the last time he saw her. Now she was eighty-one, but the fire in her eyes was the same, and her spirit was just as strong.
“Where will you go?” she asked him, still his mother. She did
n’t want Javier to die or be killed, no matter how bad he had become.
“I’m staying here,” he said belligerently to Joachim.
“No, you’re not. You’re not safe here. I spent five very unpleasant hours in the airport in New York, where they thought I was you. You’re on the No Fly List in case you didn’t know. You’re barred from the United States.”
“I don’t care. I never go there. Why did they think you were me?”
“They have your picture and your name in their computers, they thought I was using an alias.”
“Why did you go there?”
“My boss took me to work. She didn’t enjoy being interrogated for five hours either. So they know where our mother lives, they know who I am, and they know a lot more about you than I do. If anyone knows you’re in France, they’ll come here and kill you. Either your business associates, or the police.” Javier thought about it then stood up. He pulled out the gun and pointed it at his twin again.
“I could take you with me as a hostage, for safe passage.”
“I don’t think they’d care. I’m expendable, to get you. They want you badly. Our mother lost one son, she doesn’t need to lose two. You have to go.” Their mother didn’t argue with Joachim. She knew it too. Every minute he stayed there, they were all at risk. The police might even already be on their way, or the bad guys Javier knew, who wanted him dead.
Javier took a swig of the whiskey and walked across the room. He stood inches from the brother he had once shared a womb with. They had been like one person with one heart while they were growing up. But the heart had been Joachim’s, not Javier’s. He knew that now just looking at him. “I cried for you every night for ten years,” Joachim said to him, and Javier made a sound like a low growl. “And then I stopped, because I knew you weren’t there anymore.”
“I never was. You didn’t know me. You never knew who I was. I wasn’t you, the perfect little boy, kissing everyone’s ass and getting good grades in school. I’m not like you.” That they all knew. “I’m important now, while you’re a servant to the rich.” Joachim didn’t try to answer him. There was nothing left to say. “I spit on you,” Javier said with a murderous look in his eyes and spat at his brother’s feet.
“I loved you,” Joachim said quietly, “and Mama still does.” Javier glanced back at her and she was crying as she watched them.
“If you tell the police I was here, I’ll come back and kill both of you,” he said to the room in general, and then with his right hand, he opened the door, walked through it, slammed it behind him, and disappeared down the stairs. Joachim knew instinctively that he would never see him again. And what they had just seen was a ghost. A man in the final stages before someone killed him, either his enemies or his associates. A man like Javier had no friends, not in his world. None of the normal rules of humanity applied.
Joachim put the chain on the door after Javier left, but he knew that they could shoot it off if they wanted to get in. He gently took his mother to her bedroom and tucked her into her bed. Her cheeks were still wet with tears as she looked at Joachim. “They’ll kill him. Maybe that would be easier for us all. He looks like a hunted animal.” Joachim nodded, he couldn’t disagree with what she said, or tell her she was wrong.
He sat on the chair in her room all night while she dozed and woke with a start periodically, and then drifted off again. He wanted to be near her in case Javier came back. But he didn’t think he would.
The police rang the doorbell at eight the next morning. It was Saturday and Joachim was already up. They knew Javier had been there, and wanted confirmation from Joachim, and he didn’t deny it. He said he and his mother had no idea where Javier was going, he didn’t say. Joachim said that they hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years until last night, and he had held a gun on their mother until Joachim got home, and then on him. The police knew he was wounded. They said it had happened when a delivery went wrong and an informant had tipped off the police. He lived in a hard world, on the razor’s edge, at the edge of the abyss at all times.
“We got information that he was killed in a gunfight last night,” the police officer told Joachim, but he said they didn’t believe it, and neither did Joachim. Even Liese said she was sure he was still alive. He and his cohorts had put out the word to get the police off his trail, but it hadn’t worked.
“Call us if you hear from him again,” they said, and Joachim agreed. They had cooperated fully with the police.
“He won’t contact us.” Joachim was sure of it. “I don’t know why he came here. Maybe for one last look at his mother. I think he knows he’s a marked man. Everyone’s after him, even his own people.”
“That’s how it always ends with them. The only one safe is the man at the top, and he’s not it,” the chief detective said, and Joachim nodded.
“I want protection for my mother. Here in the building or just outside to watch who comes in. I have to go to work during the week, and she goes to work too. I want someone here for her at night.” The detective promised to arrange it by later that day.
Joachim stayed with his mother all day. They stayed in the house, and he told her about going to the movies with Olivia the night before, putting an arm around her, and nothing had happened, so she was wrong. She looked at him in exasperation and shook her head.
“Then you’re either a zombie or a fool.” But she was too wrapped up in thoughts of her other son to worry about Joachim’s love life or lack of it.
They saw it on the news that night at eleven o’clock, and this time they believed it. It had happened an hour before and was breaking news. Javier had been shot and killed by one of the SWAT teams from the drug unit. He had been supervising the unloading of a boat in Toulon with five hundred tons of heroin in it. The entire shipment had been seized, and nine men had been killed, one of them a member of the SWAT team. Javier had been the first man down. In his world, he was a hero. To the rest of the world and his family, he was a lost soul.
Liese felt a shiver run through her as she watched it. And this time she knew it was true. She sat silently watching the news report on TV, and held Joachim’s hand, as the tears slid down her cheeks and fell on her bleeding heart.
* * *
—
Olivia had seen it on CNN too. They described the men and showed photographs of the more notorious ones. She saw Javier’s photograph come up, the same one she’d seen with Joachim at the airport in New York. She knew that it was another grief for them, for Joachim and his mother. She turned off the television and said a prayer for his mother.
Joachim called Olivia on Sunday night, and told her that he wouldn’t be able to come to work on Monday, and possibly Tuesday as well. He had some appointments at the chateau that he said he would cancel. She knew why he wasn’t coming in. It wasn’t hard to figure out.
“I’m sorry for your mother. How is she?” He knew then Olivia had seen it on the news.
“The way she always is. Strong, wise, loving. He showed up here on Friday night while we were at the movies. He held a gun on her. He’d been shot. He wanted to stay here, and I told him he couldn’t. They might have come here and possibly shot all of us. He must have gone to Toulon last night. Someone had bungled a shipment on Friday night and he got shot. But the big shipment was due last night in Toulon. Five hundred tons. He was handling the operation. One of the SWAT teams killed him as soon as the ship docked. They’re going to let me collect his body tomorrow. I want to make the arrangements, so my mother doesn’t have to. She shouldn’t have to deal with that. He was a different person from the boy we knew. He was filled with venom, and hate. It’s ugly to see. I’ll come to work as soon as I can. Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest. We’ll do a service for him on Tuesday.”
“I can manage,” Olivia said calmly. As he listened to her, he knew what he had to do. He had thought the same thing after New York and should
have done it then.
He told Olivia he’d call her when he could.
Joachim wore a black suit, white shirt, and black tie when he went with the undertakers to collect his brother at the morgue. The police had taken all the photographs of the body that they needed. There was no need for an autopsy to determine the cause of death. Joachim was having him cremated and had arranged for a small graveside service the next day, performed by a priest they didn’t know. His mother hadn’t been to church in years. She said she had her own agreements with God, and they understood each other.
Joachim refused to look at his brother’s remains in the casket before they cremated him. There was nothing there he wanted to remember. The identification of the body had been made by the police, and it was certain, with fingerprints from Interpol to confirm it. Joachim sat quietly with his mother that night. She was peaceful. She knew where her son was and she had nothing to fear for him anymore. She had been mourning him for years, and so had Joachim.
On Tuesday afternoon, they went to the cemetery together. She wore a black dress and a hat, and they stood together, as the box with his ashes was lowered into a small grave. It was marked with a simple cross, and later there would be a plaque with his name.
The service only took a few minutes. The priest said a prayer, they each threw a handful of dirt into the grave, and then the priest shook Liese’s hand. He told Joachim what a brave woman she was, and he didn’t know the half of it. She was braver than anyone could have imagined. She left a single white rose on her son’s grave, and then they went home and she cooked the dinner that had been Javier’s favorite meal as a child. It was her tribute to him, as a boy, not the man he became. Joachim remembered it perfectly. She used to cook the same dinner for them on Sunday nights. Rice and beans and pieces of chicken and spices. Sometimes it was the only time all week that they had meat, and very little of it for three people. And it tasted the same when he ate it. But this time it had the bitter taste of loss and regret added to it, which was all too familiar to his mother. Joachim had no tears left for his brother. He had shed them all years before. The cord that had bound them had been severed. He was free of him at last.
The Butler Page 17