“Why?” says Lily.
“I have a storage shed there for my costumes. We lined a crate with plastic. We took Katrina from the bag. We wrapped her in scarves and laid her in the crate. We filled it with ice. We looked at each other. Wally hugged me. ‘Now what?’ he said.”
He falls to his knees and weeps. Lily and I help him up and lead him away from the ash. It is evidence. There will be fragments—bone slivers, teeth. A puzzle in miniature. We sit with him along a rock wall. At first, Garcia didn’t know what he’d do with the body. He and Wally kept her on ice for a few days while he scrolled the web, reading about ancient burial rites and cremation and funeral pyres in India and Nepal. He thought it purification of skin and bone—just what he wanted, her perfect body to become one with the elements, not cut up for clues beneath fluorescent lights. He wanted her redeemed. He smoked another cigarette and told us a link to a Rolling Stone article led him to the death of Gram Parsons. I knew the story. Lily didn’t. It’s part of music folklore. Parsons was a country-folk-soul singer, a cosmic boy wonder who dressed in rhinestones and found refuge in the high desert. He wrote songs here and kept an entourage that gathered and flowed—misfits with angel voices. He OD’d at the Joshua Tree Inn in 1973. His body was put in a casket and taken to LAX. Hours later, his manager, Phil Kaufman, and another man showed up drunk. They stole the casket, drove it back to Joshua Tree, and set it on fire in the dirt and rock.
“It’s what Parsons wanted,” said Garcia. “He had told Kaufman once he wished to be cremated and have his ashes spread. Kaufman remembered. I didn’t know about Parsons until after we took Katrina from the morgue. That’s odd, isn’t it? What happened is so alike. Maybe it’s this place. The earth and sky. I feel the pull of it, don’t you?”
“I’m not as mystical, I guess,” says Lily.
“They didn’t do a very good job with Parsons,” I say. “Not all the body or the coffin burned. It was a mess.”
“Wally and I made a better fire,” he says. “We built a pyre of dried wood, and Wally had a special-effects accelerant. We sat in the night and watched sparks buzz through the air, like little stars. Wally said that. We drank tequila and smoked a joint. I cried, and Wally held me. The flames played against the rock. Katrina started vanishing. Little by little, we watched the fire swallow her. We stirred the ash. No one saw. No one came. We drove away before dawn.”
“How do you know Katrina wanted that?” says Lily.
“I knew.”
“Sounds like it’s what you wanted,” she says.
“For her. It was all for her.”
“You’re psycho,” says Lily.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” he says, his words coming broken and slow. “You can’t. Some days, I can’t either. I thought her sacred. There was no space between us. I had never had that with anyone. I didn’t want to think of her differently. Of her decay. Is that so crazy? Maybe it is. Maybe I’m crazy.” He takes a long hit on his cigarette; the ember lights his face. “I’m tired. I haven’t slept. Can I sleep now?”
He sleeps against the rock. I stay with him. Lily drives to the main road and calls for a forensics team. It is first light when they arrive in white suits, walking around the blackened ground, raking ash for bits of her. Garcia wakes and stands, shivering in the desert winter. He steps toward the men in white suits and stops. He watches them. I stand beside him. The circle is gray-black, but it will return to the color of clay and dirt, become as it was before, as if a fire never happened, and a soul was never set free. In a million years, no one will ever know. Lily stands on the other side of Garcia. We take his arms and lead him toward the car. He looks back one more time. He whispers something, but I don’t hear. He turns, and we slip through boulders as the sun crests a hill and light splinters across the land.
Chapter 37
Ortiz sits in Demitasse by the big glass window he likes.
“What a nut job,” he says.
“I guess they had a connection,” I say.
“The human mind, huh, Carver. One scary shit show. Little
Antonio Garcia won’t be designing costumes for a while. Black-man’s gone. In the wind.”
“I almost get it,” I say.
“What?”
“Garcia’s obsession. Devotion. All those faceless mannequins in his loft. He dressed them like he was God. But it all went blurry on him. He had thousands of sketches of Katrina in a closet. In his mind, he couldn’t get her right. She was more divine than his talent. That inspired him in a weird way. Always a line off. A slight flaw in how he drew her.”
“So he wasn’t God.”
Mariella brings espressos. Ortiz stirs in a sugar and sips.
“Speaking of obsessions, how’s that going?” I say, nodding toward Mariella.
“I told you, it’s not like that. I just like knowing she’s here.”
“Whatever.”
“You know about the DNA match, right?”
“I saw the report this morning.”
“Katrina was Orlov’s daughter.”
“I think he knew.”
“What must that be like? A whole life coming out of the past at you.”
Ortiz folds his hands, leans closer to me.
“Listen,” he says, “I’m taking a few months off. I’m feeling it, you know? I gotta recharge. Me and the wife rented a place in Costa Rica. I’m going to fish and drink and watch nothing happen. No dead people. No brass or bullshit politics. I’m just going to be. There’s a village and a little church. Looks like a good place.”
“You coming back?”
“Might go native; who knows?” He laughs.
“It’s a good move. It’s been getting to you.”
He doesn’t say anything. He raises his hand for two more espressos.
“Azadeh still pissed at you?”
“She’ll get over it,” I say.
“A friend of mine at the FBI says she keeps watching Orlov’s unfinished movie.”
“Case got to her.”
“Zhanna?”
“Like Blackman.”
“Never see her again.”
“Or if we do, we won’t know it.”
“I wonder how many passports that broad has.”
“Killed her own niece.”
“They live in a different world.”
Lily pulls up in my car and parks.
“Never saw her in a dress before,” says Ortiz. “Nice.”
She comes in and sits with us.
“We better get going. Flight’s at one.”
“You taking him to the airport?” says Ortiz. “Make him Uber.”
“I like driving his car,” she says.
“Clutch still pop?” says Ortiz.
“Fixed it,” I say.
“Give my best to Maggie and your mom,” he says.
“I’ll be back in a few days. Send me a postcard from paradise.”
We leave Ortiz. He lifts his hand for a third espresso. Mariella nods.
“I like you in a dress,” I say. “Special occasion, you dropping me off at the airport.”
Lily smirks, shifts to third. We hit the 110.
“I gotta do laundry,” she says. “All my pants are dirty.”
I reach over, touch her hair. Just for a moment.
“When you getting back?” she asks.
“Three, four days. Maybe longer if . . .”
“Is that what Maggie thinks? Time to put her in a home?”
“She doesn’t want to. She’s tired. She wants me there. She wants us both to decide.”
“I’m sorry, Carver.”
“Mom was beautiful. She was my protector.”
We slide onto the 105. Traffic’s light. The sky is broken, winter gray. LAX comes up fast. I pull my bag from the back.
Lily gets out. She comes around and holds me. Kisses me.
“I’ll pick you up.”
“I’ll get an Uber.”
“Carver, I’m picking you up.”
She drives away, her black hair in the breeze.
Chapter 38
The snow falls hard. I hold my mother’s hand by the window. I think of her when I was a boy, running on the beach, taking the train with me into New York. How rich and special we felt. The way she twirled in the house when a song she liked came on the radio, and how she’d sit in the kitchen with my father, tending his bruises and cuts with bandages and iodine on mornings after a fight. I can see him wincing and smiling at her in a language known only to them. I remember when we buried him. She squeezed my hand as we stood over the grave. It meant I was not alone. I squeeze her hand now, tight. She doesn’t squeeze back. She doesn’t speak. She tilts her head toward me, this unrecognizable man who has somehow found his way into her room, and back to the window. Frail and gray. The woman who bore me, the first voice I heard. We sit and watch the snow as dusk falls over Boston. Maggie makes dinner downstairs, the light clatter of forks and spoons, the hiss of radiators. I wipe away a tear.
“It’s worse.”
“Yes, Sam,” says Maggie.
“She didn’t eat.”
“She eats a little sometimes.”
“She’s so light,” I say.
“It was good you kissed her forehead when we put her to bed. You never know what she might remember. What might spark.”
The dinner plates are still on the table. A soft yellow light glows over the sink. Maggie stands, looks out the window.
“The snow must be three feet in that alley. It’s still coming down.”
She opens the fridge.
“Let’s have a beer, Sam.”
“Maggie’s ritual.”
“I’ve switched to IPA.”
“You told me.”
She slides me a bottle and a glass.
“Your father never liked anybody to pour his beer. He said it ruined it. I didn’t agree with him ever, but he was right about that.”
She sits.
“It might be time for a home, Maggie.”
“Let’s not think about that tonight. You just got here.”
“Yes, but we have to face it. It’s not just her mind, but her body. She seems barely able to move around.”
“We will face it, Sam.”
“You’ve done it all. I haven’t helped much.”
“Yes, you have. You come when we need you. We talk on the phone all the time. You’ve been here.” She pours her beer. “You like IPA?”
“I do,” I say.
She closes her eyes, lets the first sip spread through her.
“That was some case you had,” she says. “That poor ballerina. Just imagine.”
“I have.”
“I feel bad for the spy too.”
“Orlov.”
“He was a sad man, I think. All those lives. Imagine the stories he could tell. You’re too young, but that was quite a time. A clear time. Things mattered more. Of course, back then we didn’t know as much about how the world worked. But we knew there were two sides, and we were on the good one. I’m not so sure anymore.” She looks into her glass. “I can see him the way you described, watching his movie. What was the actress’s name?”
“Juliette Binoche.”
“I must have seen her in something.”
“What are you reading now?”
“A poorly translated French mystery.”
Maggie is older than my mother. She wears her silver hair long, wild, like a girl who won’t accept age—not in a vain way, but in an act of defiance, of which she has many. She is tired. Her blue eyes aren’t as quick; her voice is still playful, but at times it fades. She reaches over and pats my hand. She did that when I was a boy. She’d wink as if we were conspiring, taking me into her confidence as we set out for the harbor, eating ice cream and making up stories about the tall ships and the man at the newsstand who had a glass eye and ran numbers for a Southie mobster.
“How are the cataracts?”
“Better,” she says.
“Hey, I wanted to ask you. What happened to Billy Connor? I saw something in the paper.”
“That was a scandal. All those years, just a quiet man. His wife died back in the nineties. Pretty woman, always happy.” Maggie sips. “Then I pick up the Globe one day, and there’s Billy being led out of his house. They say he embezzled more than half a million dollars over thirty years. A little here, a little there from the Sunday collection. Never got too greedy. Just enough not to be missed. But then they got onto him. An altar boy saw him one day. The parish didn’t know what to do. No one could believe it.”
“He’s got to be in his eighties.”
“Parish doesn’t want him to go to jail,” she says. “No one’s decided yet what will happen.”
“You read about people like that all the time.”
“The ones you don’t notice are always up to something.”
“Maggie’s wisdom.”
She smiles. “It’s true, Sam.”
Maggie sits back and pours the last of the bottle into her glass. I’m tired. I go to the sink and splash my face. The snow falls heavy, the alley smooth and white, uncharted. When I was a boy, I’d sit at my bedroom window and watch the snow. I’d see shapes in it: faces, animals, creatures from my imagination. They’d form and swirl away. One night, as my mother and father slept, I dressed and sneaked out the front door into a snowfall. No one was out. I walked to the wharf and watched the snow descend across the black harbor as if it were falling from one dark sky into another. The boats were tied in their slips; snow gathered on sterns and prows. I tilted my face to the sky and stood as quiet as a statue, feeling cold crystal turn to water. I felt my place in the world there, amid the boats and creaking wood. I stood until my toes were numb. I made a boy’s prayer inside me and walked home as the yellow lights of snowplows and cinder trucks flashed in the street. An army on the move. I wondered about the men who drove them, shadows breathing ghosts onto windshields, and what they did when dawn came. Was there a secret place they went? Our house was quiet when I got home. I peeled off my hat, coat, and boots and went back to bed, pulling the covers tight, feeling cold and warm at the same time, looking to the window, the snow still falling, and imagining myself an explorer returned from a secret land. I decided never to tell anyone of that night. It was mine.
My phone rings. Azadeh.
“I have to take this, Maggie.”
I step out to the back porch.
“She’s dead, Carver.”
“Who?”
“Zhanna. One perfect bullet to the head. Old school.”
“Where?”
“Vienna.”
“Who did it?”
“That could be a long list,” says Azadeh.
“What are you thinking?”
“Russian intel. Her sister. A lover. Us, but I don’t think so. We wanted to keep an eye on her.”
“Any intercepts?”
“No.”
“Never thought she’d get it like that,” I say. “She stayed one move ahead.”
“There’s always someone more ahead. Could be maybe your friend. Stefan.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He arrived in Vienna the day before,” says Azadeh.
“They make contact?”
“Don’t know.”
“He loved Katrina.”
“Enough to matter?”
“No idea.”
“He got played by Zhanna,” says Azadeh. “Everyone did. Maybe he got pissed.”
“Where’s he now?”
“South Sudan.”
“The case isn’t solved, but the guilty are
dead.”
“Take it as a win. A lot of shit gets sorted out on its own. I’m texting you the picture. Sweet dreams.”
The photo glows on my phone. Zhanna sits at an open window in a dress. Her high heels are off and scattered to the side, as if she’d had a long day and was taking in the night view. Her head is tilted to the left, a small bloom on her temple. I hold the photo closer and wonder how she would have appeared if we had met again. What she would have said in that devious hymn of a voice. I admired her cunning, how she turned your weakness to her vanity. She was a thousand secrets. I’m glad someone put her down. I stare at her as the snow falls around her, so small in my hand. I breathe in the cold. I am not a boy anymore, but he is out there, beyond the alley light in the distant, dark white.
I open the door and step back into the kitchen.
“Everything okay, Sam?”
“Just work. All good.”
Maggie opens the fridge. She holds up two bottles.
“It’s still early,” she says.
She slides me a new glass.
“I was thinking the other day, Sam. I should have traveled more when I was young.”
“You got around.”
“I never got to Tunis or Sarajevo.”
“Not high on a lot of lists.”
“Those are the best kind of places.”
“I’ll take you one day,” I say. “We’ll make a big trip.”
“I would have held you to that once,” she says, running a finger down her glass. “I went out with a man years ago who promised to take me skiing in the mountains outside Sarajevo. He had maps and brochures. But the war happened, and we never made it. He was an engraver. A kind little muscular guy with narrow eyes.”
“What happened to him?”
“He moved to Albany and married.”
Maggie stands.
“Oh, Sam, I almost forgot . . .”
She walks into the dining room and back.
“Here,” she says. “Sara left this for you.”
“Sara?”
“The nurse I told you about. The one who helped with your mother.”
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