Open Chains

by D. F. Bailey

  As they sauntered forward, Eve tipped a hand to the row on her right. “Here?”

  Finch nodded and they settled in the fourth row. An empty row separated them from the relatives and close family friends huddled together opposite the lectern and the urn. After a moment, the two honor guards entered the room and stood next to the table. When they were in position, an army chaplain appeared from behind a draped entrance to their left. She wore a navy-blue dress uniform with a narrow deck of medal ribbons over her left breast. On her right breast a name tag identified her as “Stark.” Her jacket lapels bore matching silver crucifixes. She stepped up to the lectern with confidence, swept her eyes over the congregation and put on an endearing, sympathetic smile.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Mary-Jane Stark,” she began. “We are gathered here today to pay tribute to a man whose service to this country is now complete. Antonio Lorenzo Turino is about to take his place at his last post.” She glanced at the urn and turned to the people in the front row. “But we know Tony was much more than a soldier and patriot. He was a son, brother, nephew, uncle….”

  Her tribute lasted another ten or fifteen minutes, an indeterminate period that carried Finch into a distant reverie — back to the day of his son’s funeral. A place shrouded in the fog of memory and fantasy, his love, joy, misery and guilt. The sort of dreamscape where he failed to distinguish what actually happened with myriad other could-have-beens. He replayed the questions he’d so often asked. What if Buddy’s Little League baseball game had been scheduled for a different time? On a different day? At a different baseball diamond? Or what if Bethany Hutt had been sober? The array of possibilities seemed infinite. But only a single combination of all those possible times, places and circumstances had aligned to govern Buddy’s fate. A seven-year-old child. Gone in one moment. That was reality. Once again the dry tears burned Finch’s eyes.

  Chaplain Stark finished her benedictions and walked to the row of mourners before her, and one by one, shook their hands. A light murmur hummed through the room.

  Finch shook his head as if he were trying to shake off the memories.

  “I’ve got to hit the washroom.” He turned to Eve. “Can you find the uncle?”

  “Yeah. Of course.” She studied him for a moment, then strolled to the front of the room.

  Finch filled the bathroom sink with warm water, cupped his hands together and splashed it over his face. Then again, and once more. His face dripping, he rubbed his fingers against both eyes simultaneously. Suddenly the dam he’d been holding back broke open and real tears flooded from his eyes. Again he splashed some water over his face and as he leaned over the sink he began to sob. After a few moments of quiet weeping he wadded some paper towels together and wiped them over his cheeks. He studied his face in the mirror, paid close attention to his eyes and the crows’ feet that branched toward his ears. He tried to blink them away. It had no effect. Shit, if this doesn't add ten years to you, he muttered to himself, nothing will. All right then, time to move on. And not a word of this to Eve.

  He found her talking to an elderly couple in the service room. The chaplain had disappeared and the honor guards marched next to the doorway in a formal display that suggested it was time for the mourners to move on. The urn still sat on the oak table, and for a moment Finch wondered who would place it in one of the hundreds of interment blocks outside the building.

  Eve caught his eye. “Will, this is Tony’s uncle and aunt. Thomas Costello and his wife, Tammy.”

  “Will Finch.” Finch shook hands with them. “I’m very sorry for your loss. I didn’t know Tony well, but” — he paused not sure how to continue, and let his comment fade.

  “Thank you.” The uncle coughed into his fist. “Please. Just call me Tom.”

  He looked older than Finch had guessed. Sixty-five, maybe seventy.

  “We raised Tony after his parents passed on,” Tammy put in. Her hair was tinted with blue highlights and shaped into a cloud that floated above her forehead. “Since he was nine years old.”

  “That must have been a challenge,” Eve said.

  “It was. We had five kids of our own to manage. Then came Tony.” The corners of Tom’s lips rolled downwards. The lines around his mouth sank below his razor-trimmed mustache, an old-school style popularized in the 1930s by Errol Flynn, David Niven, and William Powell.

  “Mr. Finch, Eve said that you met Tony.” Tammy’s voice conveyed a note of hope, as if he might provide some insight into their nephew’s death. “Can you tell us anything?”

  Finch realized that he’d been half dreaming since he’d driven through the gates of the cemetery. Time to dig in. Always answer a question with a question. “Did you talk to the police up there?”

  Tom nodded. “I flew up on Monday.” He glanced away and tucked his hands in his pockets and looked back at Finch. “They had me identify the body.”

  “That’s rough. I had to do that once, too.” Finch tried to offer a smile. “Did you speak to the coroner?”

  “Just by telephone. He still hasn’t issued a formal statement, but said there was nothing suspicious involved. Likely he’ll file a report in the next few days.” He shrugged as if all this was simply another set of unforeseen chores that a long life had imposed on him. “Then I thought of calling the VA.”

  “Actually, that was my idea,” Tammy put in as she wove a linen handkerchief between her fingers.

  Tom acknowledged this with a nod. “And thank God, too. You know, everyday you hear some ungrateful bastard in the news tear a strip off the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.”

  “Tom, please,” Tammy cut in. “This is Tony’s funeral.”

  “But the VA handled everything.” Tom blinked as if this was all that was required to dismiss his wife’s interruption. “The cremation. The public announcements. All of this.” His hand slipped from his pocket and gestured toward the lectern and urn on the table.

  A blonde woman in her thirties approached them. She clutched a shoulder bag against her hip. “Mom? Dad? Jenny, Frank and I are going to drive back now, okay?”

  “See you at the house?” Tammy asked.

  “At five, right?”

  Finch noticed that they all spoke in questions. As if the future offered nothing but uncertainty.

  Tammy nodded and turned to Eve. “This is our eldest, Darleen,” Tammy said. “And Jenny, Frank, Ralph.” She waved a hand as if she realized that listing the names of her family members would only lead to more tears now that Tony had departed. “The whole clan plus husbands, wives, and kids,” she added. “We’re all here to say good-bye. One last time.” She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes and turned away.

  Everyone took a few steps toward the doorway except Tom, who plunged his hands into his pockets to anchor himself in place. “So can you tell me anything I should know?” His face was haunted by an imploring look, the hope that Finch might be able to relieve his suffering.

  “Not much, I’m afraid.” It was Finch’s turn to bury his hands in his pockets. “He came to visit me on the Saturday night. It was late, so I invited him to come for breakfast on Sunday morning. I suggested that he check into the Mayne Island Resort, which I guess he did.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  Finch was about to say, Not at all, but settled for a distraction. “We were in Iraq at the same time. Oh-three through oh-five.”

  “Yeah.” Tom nodded with an oblique look. “Iraq changed him.”

  “It changed a lot of us,” Finch said to suggest that he and Tony shared a special bond. “Tell me something, did you know this friend of his? Fuzzy?”

  “Just met him the day before they left for Canada. To go fishing.” His voice rose with a hint of cynicism. “The guy left his baseball cap at our house. Never came back for it.” He paused, somehow amused by the memory, then added, “Did you know Fuzzy?”

  “No. Never met him.” He glanced away, then turned back to Tom. “Did Tony fish a lot?”

  “N
ever a day in his life. Sure, he was a soldier — but a fisherman? No.” Tom looked completely lost, as if his nephew had slipped into a fog and couldn’t find his way out. It had been up to Tom to ensure Tony’s welfare and safety, but now that had become impossible.

  Finch had more questions, but he didn’t want to appear aggressive. He drew a hand over his face and glanced at Eve. She nodded once, a sign to press on.

  “So this guy, Fuzzy. Did you get his real name?”

  Tom rolled his shoulders and curled his lips in a pronounced frown. His face suggested that he had no idea.

  “Any guess where he is now?”

  He let out a bleak chortle. “That’s what the Canadian cops want to know.”

  “The RCMP? How did they know about him?”

  Tom blinked and took a step backwards. “Because I told them. Look … why all the questions? What’s this about?”

  Finch knew the conversation had reached an impasse. “Sorry, Tom.” An embarrassed smile crossed his lips. “I didn’t mention that I’m a news reporter. Sometimes I talk to people as though I’m in the middle of an interview. Hazard of the job, I guess. Believe me, you’re not the first person to notice.” He was genuinely contrite, ashamed to intrude on Tom’s grieving with this bare-faced interrogation.

  “Reporter, huh?” Tom drew a long breath. “All right. I got questions, too. I guess we all do. Maybe the coroner’s report will fill in some blanks. Hopefully. And once the coroner gives the all-clear, my son’s got to get up there and drive Tony’s car back home.” The look on Tom’s face revealed that it was all too much. “What can you do?” he asked, and shook Finch’s hand, then walked toward his wife who waited at the door.

  Finch looked at Eve and said, “I guess we should go.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  While she made her way to the toilets Finch watched the two honor guards lift the urn and seal it in a box that had been stowed behind the lectern. They proceeded with a measured formality, as if this was the last tribute they could offer to a fallen comrade.

  When Eve and Finch stepped through the front door of the service building, they saw Tom and his wife drive past the cemetery gates in a black Nissan Sentra. Only two cars remained in the parking lot. They climbed into Finch’s RAV4 and he turned the ignition. As they coasted toward the cemetery exit, they drove past a series of concrete columbariums. Designed to hold the urns of cremated soldiers, the mausoleums looked like ground-level bunkers to Finch. On both sides, every bunker held eight rows and six columns of closed stalls. Every stall was sealed by a bronze plaque inscribed with the name, rank, birth- and death-dates of a deceased soldier whose remains lay within the enclosure. The bunkers stood together in three side-by-side tiers. Dozens of these tiers stood in groups labelled “Courts” — Court A, Court B, and so on. He imagined that the ever-expanding courts could store the ashes of an endless number of the dead.

  “I guess this is where they’ll put Tony,” Eve said as the car slipped past the columbariums.

  “Yeah, somewhere in there,” Finch said. The midday cloud cover had evaporated and the fall sun glinted through the windshield. Finch put on his sunglasses. For a moment he tried to calculate the scale of the project surrounding them. Six by eight by two by three. Two-eighty-eight urns per bunker, he figured. Which meant over two thousand dead in each court. Multiplied by an alphabet full of courts. Add in the legions of solitary grave stones in the middle distance, and it amounted to a metropolis of ghosts.

  “Somewhere in there,” he repeated, and they drove away in silence.

  ※

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “There was no second car,” Eve murmured, half-talking to herself. They'd been driving in silence — her mind churning — then the idea struck her about fifteen minutes after they passed the last exit for Vacaville on Route 80.

  “What do your mean?” Finch pulled into the left lane to pass a semi-trailer loaded with hay bales.

  “Remember when we left the cemetery? There were two cars left in the parking lot. One for the pastor. One for the two honor guards, right.”

  “I guess.” Finch didn’t see her point.

  “So the two guards must have driven there together then.”

  “ ’Fraid I’m not getting this.”

  “Remember last Sunday afternoon. Before we walked out to Bennett Point. We drove over to Mayne Island Resort and we saw Tony’s car. It had California plates with a Golden State Warriors sticker on the bumper. Remember? There were just five cars in the parking lot. That was the same car that Tony drove up to the cabin on Saturday night, right?”

  “A Ford Tempo.”

  “Right. And it was still parked in the lot on Monday morning when I drove down to the ferry dock.”

  He took a moment to navigate around a line of eight cars, all of them signaling an exit into Fairfield.

  “You sure?”

  “Just believe me, okay. I checked.” Her voice had an impatient edge.

  “All right. Makes sense. My guess is that the RCMP probably couldn’t access a towing service on the island until mid-day on Monday. At the earliest.”

  “Okay, that means that Tony and Fuzzy drove to the island together.”

  “We already knew that. From what his uncle said, they were supposedly going fishing.”

  “No, listen. It means Fuzzy and Nine are the same person.”

  It took another moment for the implications to sink in. “In which case he planned to kill me before he tagged up with Tony.”

  She nodded her head. “But only after Tony led the way to you. Through me,” she added.

  Finch’s fingers tightened on the wheel. He felt his stomach churn again. “Look, we’ve already talked about that. The only thing we can change is what we do next, okay?”

  She pinched her lips together and gazed through the window at the ever-changing shifts in the flow of traffic.

  “Remember what Tony said. ‘There's trouble coming at all of us.’ Us. Me, Tony and J.R.” Finch drew his lower lip between his teeth as he considered what to do next. The answer was obvious. “We’ve really got to find J.R.”

  “Yeah. And stay one step ahead of Ten.”

  ※ — FIVE — ※

  ON SUNDAY MORNING Eve and Finch slept in. They’d made love the night before, the first time since Finch had returned to the city from Canada. Eve thought of it as “compassion sex” — to be clearly distinguished from “make-up sex.” Make-up sex required some sort of predicate (a fight, an argument, or for some couples a stray gaze at an attractive stranger) that had to be resolved. Sometimes make-up sex began with an apology, or a bouquet of flowers. For some people a contrite smile would do. And make-up sex always concluded with fantastic, exhausting, Olympic-class passion. She’d known a couple who enjoyed make-up sex so much that fights became an essential part of their relationship. Not for her and Will, of course. But for others, fighting defined their sexual foreplay.

  Compassion sex, on the other hand, was predicated on suffering. It didn’t matter what the injury might be — physical, spiritual, emotional — or who the victim was. Husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, gay, straight, queer, transgendered. Where there was suffering, she knew compassion was the remedy. Compassion sex required tenderness and a slow burn that rose in intensity until the pain was alleviated by the bliss of sexual healing.

  And last night, she told herself, was all about tending to their wounds. They’d purged the deaths of Tony and Nine, the austere funeral, the loss of the Turino family. They’d absolved their own guilt and fears, their weariness, too. Their love-making became a long dream of quiet ecstasy. When they were done, Eve waited for an hour, then drew Will into her again and again until he drifted into a sleepy exhaustion. Now, in the mid-morning light, she eased his head against her shoulder and let him sleep like that, comforting him with her body. She enjoyed the moments of tenderness as much as she craved their spontaneous nights of athletic intimacy. Loving Will — both t
he wild romps and the tender sweetness — exceeded her wildest teenage fantasies of what a loving relationship might hold. Was it really possible? Yes. Was it real? Again, yes.

  Her only concern was that one day it all might end. But not today, she whispered to herself. She kissed his forehead, then let him sleep while she showered and then slipped downstairs to prepare breakfast. In the kitchen she found her Baba Eve’s recipe for shakshuka printed on a three-by-four inch index card in her tiny, perfect handwriting. Eve was not a sentimental woman but the small, wooden box of recipes was among the few mementos that she’d kept from her namesake grandmother. That and her tattoo.

  Baba Eve had been a Birkenau survivor and a year to the day after she died, Eve had the serial numbers — B25634 — tattooed on her left forearm, the same place they’d been scratched into her grandmother’s skin. After her journey to America, determined to bury her past life, Eve Asimov married a gentile in 1948. The couple had a baby girl, Kelly, who married a Catholic Irishman, Jonathan Noon — Eve’s mother and father. When Jonathan was killed by a faulty forklift at the naval yard, Kelly went to work as a telephone switchboard operator for AT&T. Eve’s after-school care — and that of Eve’s younger sister Megan — fell to Baba Eve. It was Baba Eve who drilled her life lessons into her granddaughters. One lesson stood above all others: “Never let anyone dominate you.” Those five words inspired Eve to inscribe the death-camp tattoo into her arm. B25634. An alphanumeric brand never to be forgotten.

  She prepared the shakshuka with four eggs. After she heard Finch finish his shower she toasted four slices of rye bread to accompany the meal. Finch appeared at the table just as she finished buttering the toast and serving up their Americanos.