I said that I didn’t know how to use a pistol, and he said he would show me. He took the instrument from its hollow in the old green velvet and made me hold it, explained to me what type of pistol it was and how it worked, all its constituent parts. He showed me how to take it apart and clean it—the imperative of cleaning a pistol properly, of making sure that an object so precise and lethal as a gun remained in absolute pristine condition, not a speck or a smudge to affect its reliable performance—until, I suppose, I managed to satisfy him.
The next day he woke me at dawn and drove me across the East River to a field on the remote outer fringes of Queens County, where he showed me how to fire the thing, and while I was no sharpshooting prodigy, it turned out I had a steady hand and a good eye, and by the time the sun crept high enough to touch the telephone wires that stretched across one corner of the field, he again wore that expression of satisfaction, or maybe relief, and made me unload the pistol by myself and pack it back correctly into its case.
He didn’t say much on the way home. It was November, and the wind was cold on our faces, so that you couldn’t operate your mouth without great muscular effort. But in Brooklyn we stopped at a coffee shop and had breakfast, and Father said something, into the smoky silence, that shocked me. He said, in reluctant, gruff words: “Your mother would be proud of you.”
And that was the only time we ever spoke of her.
As a result, whenever I hold that pistol, or think about that pistol, I think of my mother, or rather the memory of my mother accompanies the pistol. Also the taste of coffee, the damp, greasy smell of that Brooklyn shop, frying bacon. And my father, looming over all.
Speaking of looming. There’s Samuel, planted a few yards away, made monstrous by the swinging lantern, staring in shock at the pistol in my hand. He says, You can’t be serious, as if he really means it, as if he doesn’t think a woman with a pistol knows her business.
“Of course I’m serious,” I say.
And I think my mother would be proud of me.
They say there are numerous sharks off the Florida coast, man-eaters. Maybe it’s true. Florida still seems like such an exotic place to me, like the Antipodes, dangerous, sharp-fanged creatures lurking in its swamps and waterways, brimful of poison and malice. And I’ve always thought how ignoble they were, those poisonous lurkers, hiding inside the tranquillity of the water where nobody expects them, and then—snap! Not what you’d call honorable.
On the other hand, as I now perceive, the sharks and the alligators and the snakes have to eat, don’t they? And we each destroy our necessary prey in the manner offered to us by Nature. We do what we must to survive in this harsh and bitter universe.
Still, the universe, or at least that infinitesimal fraction of it laid out before us now, seems anything but harsh and bitter. The air is dark and warm, the automobile’s engine drones in our blood. The headlights slide across the twists and snarls of the mangrove on either side, while ahead of us the gray road blackens into shadow.
We pass a small signpost, indicating that the beach lies half a mile ahead, and Samuel brings the car to an easy stop. Sets the brake, switches off the headlights, cuts the engine, and for a moment there is nothing to see, nothing to hear except the faint roar of the surf, moving in rhythm with my breath. The whir of insects. Samuel finds my lap and wraps his hand over mine. His palm is dry and strong. I feel as if we’re in a womb, waiting to be born.
“It’s awfully dark,” I whisper. “How are you going to make your way?”
“I’ll manage.”
“That’s where he made his fortune, you know. Carl Fisher. He invented the first really practical headlight for cars. The Prest-O-Lite.”
“Fisher? That chap in Miami Beach?”
“Yes. Clara’s great friends with them. The Fishers.”
Samuel makes a noise of assent that suggests he isn’t nearly so fond of the Fishers as his sister is. How strange, to be whispering about headlights and tycoons at a moment like this. He leans down to the floorboards and finds the electric torch, which he lights for an instant or two, under the protection of the dashboard, just long enough to check his watch.
“I should start,” he says.
“I should come with you.”
“No!” His voice rises. Then, back to a whisper: “No. For God’s sake. Stay here with the motor. Be ready for when I return. We’re going to have to bolt out of here like lightning, do you understand? Can you still drive?”
“Of course.”
“As soon as I leave, get behind the wheel. If you hear anything, start the engine. Not the headlights, just the engine. I’ll move as fast as I can. If you see anyone other than me, just leave. Drive straight on back to the hotel and pretend you’ve never left. Clear?”
“But how will I know what’s happened? How will I know . . . ?”
I can’t say it.
“Because I will find you and tell you,” Samuel says. “I’ll see to it myself. I promise you, Virginia, I’ll finish this for you.”
You might think he whispers this sentence with passion, but he doesn’t. He speaks with as much passion as a man promising to bring home meat for dinner, and I remember that he’s a soldier, that he’s gone into battle, that he once spent years inside a German prison and then escaped. And I remember the nature of what he’s promising—to kill his own brother, partly for his own sake but mostly for mine—and of course you must steel yourself for a thing like that. As dangerous and wicked as Simon is, he shared a cradle with Samuel, they’re twins. And maybe Samuel isn’t going to strike down his twin by the force of his own hand, but the result’s the same. Simon’s going to die tonight, and Samuel is going to make sure he dies.
Though the air is thick and warm, not the slightest breeze off the water, I start to shiver a little. To tremble. I haven’t been myself in so long; I haven’t been strong and healthy in so long. I can’t separate the sickness of the past month from whatever it is I’m experiencing now. Samuel hears the chatter of my teeth and asks if I’m all right, and I tell him yes. Just anxious.
His palm appears on the side of my face. “Don’t be anxious. I’ll see this through.”
“Yes.”
“When it’s finished, when I’m back—”
“Don’t say it.”
“But you know.”
“Yes.”
His face is close to mine; I can feel its warmth. “I’m no good at this. Not like Simon.”
“I don’t want you to be like Simon.”
“If I could, I’d show you. I’d make you mine this moment.”
The shock of those words sends me into a kind of daze. I remember what Clara said, that Samuel is somehow in love with me, and the idea—making love to Samuel, the act of intercourse with Samuel, the act of intercourse with anyone at all—is so strange and perverse and alluring that my stomach heaves. His mouth hovers next to mine, but he doesn’t kiss me. I have the feeling he’s waiting for me to say something, to give him permission, and that if he kisses me he might actually do the thing he’s just suggested. Here in the dark, in the quiet, hastily and without any wooing: just copulation, brutal and primitive, the way soldiers do before they go into battle. Or afterward. And there is a corresponding urge in my belly to play my own part in this age-old transaction, to open my lips and my legs and allow him a warrior’s rights, the way his own beautiful Fitzwilliam ancestress opened her lips and her legs to her king. (How strange that I should recall that story, at such a moment.) But this is my husband’s brother, about to stain himself with my husband’s blood, and I find that this urge in my belly, this daze in my brain is more like nausea, more like shame absorbed into physical symptoms.
“Not yet,” I whisper. “Not like this.”
He lifts his head away and opens the door of the car. “Remember what I said.”
“Yes.”
He slips quietly out of the car and shuts the door in such a manner that the sound stays put, like a cough suppressed in your throat. I clamber
over the gear box into the driver’s seat and look up to whisper good-bye, but he’s already gone, gulped up by the teeming Florida night, and I have nothing to do but wait.
I thought I had memorized the territory around Simon’s house on Cocoa Beach when I came here yesterday afternoon, squinting in pain at the sun. I sketched out the dirt road and the edge of the mangrove, the placement of the dunes and the other solitary houses, the exact number of steps between the road and the stone fountain in the center of what had once been Simon’s courtyard (where the Ashley gang are to lie in wait), and the possible positions where Mr. Marshall and his men might station themselves: the watchmen stalking the predators.
But the darkness disorients me. I become aware of the stars, and the skin of black ocean at the horizon, boiling with phosphorescence. As the minutes pass and nothing else emerges, no shapes resolve from the shadows, charcoal on midnight, not the mangrove nor the beach nor the nocturnal beasts that surely prowl and scurry over the earth around me, I begin to lose myself. I’ve forgotten the effects of a blackness this intense, so thick you feel as if you’re pushing it aside at every breath. How are you supposed to know your distance and your direction in a soup like that? Only the ocean saves me, the crests of the waves, the foam that returns just enough light to the universe, just enough sound and fury that I can at least find east, and if I can find east, I can find west, north, and south.
Can’t I?
My hand hurts. The thick bandage applied by the doctor is now just a slender wrapping of gauze atop the neat sutures—eight of them—holding my flesh together. I cradle the right hand with the left and close my eyes, and it’s too peaceful, too sacred, as if a human tragedy isn’t about to play out—isn’t right this moment playing out—a quarter mile away. On the beach. Simon’s beach. Simon’s house, and at this mere echo of his name in my head, a tremor strikes my chest, a blow of anguish. I bend over, sobbing, thinking of Evelyn, of how we made Evelyn, Simon and I, and now I have destroyed the father of my daughter. Evelyn, who never even knew him, and the Château de Créouville, the courtyard there, and the smell of Simon’s cigarettes. The fountains dancing on the canals of Versailles. The tulips that thrust from the earth on my wedding day. The taste of Simon’s skin. And I cannot push them away, cannot cleanse myself of these impressions, which are part of my flesh, the molecules of Simon invading the molecules of Virginia, and I have killed him. I have destroyed him. And he is my husband, he is the father of my daughter.
I spill, somehow, from Samuel’s Ford and stagger down the road, toward the beach. It’s too late, I have made the most awful mistake, he is wicked and only wants to deceive me, only wants my money, but I can’t let him die. Cannot return to a world in which Simon does not exist. His molecules are my molecules; his wickedness is mine. Let him have my money. Let him have what he wants, but let him live. For God’s sake. He is Evelyn’s own father. And my throat revolts, my hand throbs in fear, but I cannot bear him to die. To die. His skin torn. His blood in the sand. By my hand.
Except I’m too late.
I know this, as I plunge through that darkness, that terrifying absence of light, except for the glimpse of ocean ahead. I know I have already set this train in motion, that I can’t stop the inevitable crash ahead, and still I push forward, desperate now, wanting to reverse the flow of time, to send the earth spinning in the other direction so I can take it all back, return to the beginning, and that’s when the gun cracks the air, a single shot and then a whole volley, rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat, the familiar deadly cadence of a Thompson submachine gun, and out of the blackness before me emerges a bouncing yellow light, a shadow behind it, a figure, a person, a man, and I can’t see his face but as I stop, feet planted in the dirt, I know who it is.
The beam of his flashlight catches my chest an instant later. He skids, checks. The beam jolts to my face, and I cry out at the sudden blindness, and Simon says, “Virginia!”
Only a yard away. Alive. Slight glint where his hair should be—maybe the starlight. The lurid yellow glow of the flashlight illuminating his features like a monster’s.
“Simon!”
He starts forward and snatches my arm. “Come with me!”
“No!”
“Now!”
I struggle free and reach for my pocket, and Simon swears foully and takes me around the waist, hoisting me over his shoulder, making me scream in agony as my injured hand strikes his back.
But my other hand. My left hand. Contains the gun.
The Ford’s only a short distance up the dirt road, maybe fifty yards. Simon carries me along, almost at a run but not quite, and my torso slams against his shoulder and the muscles of his back, while I wriggle my left arm helplessly, trying to maneuver the gun into some sort of position, some angle by which I can strike him. But his bones are too hard, his arm too heavily braced around me, and instead I just pound the gun against his kidneys, over and over, thinking if I could just get him to drop me, drop me, and then Simon makes a noise of joy, sees the Ford probably, and the next thing I’m swinging through the air to land over the passenger door, crosswise into the seat, my head bouncing against the cloth.
“Sorry,” he grunts, and jumps in after me.
I don’t know how I scramble upward, brain sloshing in its case, dizzy and sick, but I do. I scramble upward. My left hand grips the gun and brings it shaking up to the level of Simon’s ear and I say, STOP! I’LL SHOOT!
He turns his head and says, What the devil.
“Get out of the car.”
“Virginia! My God. It’s me, for God’s sake! It’s Simon!”
“Get out. Now.”
“Don’t be stupid. They’re right behind me.”
“I’ll shoot.”
“No, you won’t. You won’t shoot me. You can’t.”
My thumb lifts the safety catch. “Out!”
“Virginia, it’s me. It’s Simon.”
“I know who you are.”
“Christ,” he says. “Virginia, no. It’s me. It’s Simon.”
And for a second or two I believe him. The flashlight is off. He hasn’t switched on the ignition, hasn’t turned on the headlights. His head is just a smudge, the glossy curves of his eyeballs catch only the tiniest glint from the hazy stars above us. I can’t see his face; I can only hear his voice, quiet and deep and doctorly, the way it used to reach me in bed, during our rendezvous in France, when we shared words in the middle of the night, and the absence of light and vision seemed to bring us into an even deeper communion than the acts of love we had just committed, in such fervor, during the hours before. He smells of cigarettes and the pungency of the ocean and his own peculiar perspiration, and such is the power of scent on the animal mind, the power of primal recognition, I want to plunge my hands around his waist and kiss his stomach, his chest, his neck, his mouth, his everything.
I suppose he senses this instant of weakness. He always did. He touches my shoulder and then wraps his hand around the side of my face, his thumb lying along the bend of my cheekbone and his fingers finding the tenderness under the curve of my skull. “Virginia, it’s me. It’s Simon. For God’s sake, you’ve got to trust me, you’ve got to give me that gun right now.”
And then: “Please, Virginia. Darling. My wife. Have mercy.”
I lift the gun to the back of his head and slide my shaking finger to the trigger.
The air shatters around us, a bang of unearthly noise, and Simon slumps onto my chest. For an instant I think I’ve done it, I’ve shot him, and a hysterical scream rises in my throat.
But a pair of arms looms over my head and grips Simon by the shoulders, tossing him into the air and onto the dirt at the side of the road.
“Thank God,” says Samuel, landing in the seat beside me, and without the slightest pause he starts the engine and grinds the gears, tearing the dirt, spinning the wheels, while I grip the side of the door and hold on for dear life, back up the road to the wooden bridge across the Indian River, while the sound of g
unfire fades into the mangrove behind us.
Samuel takes me not to the hotel but to the Phantom Shipping Company offices. I ask him why we’re here, in a stunned, quiet voice I don’t even recognize, and he says we’ll be safer here. What about Evelyn? I ask, and he says he’s going straight over to the hotel, right now, and he’s going to bring her and Clara to the offices, too, and then we will drive out through the night to Maitland. We’ll be safe there.
Safe, I say. Safe from what? Simon’s dead.
Just safe, he says. Away from all this.
I must look a little pale, because he pours me a glass of brandy from his office and makes me drink it all down, a waterfall of fire, pooling in my stomach. I set down the glass. He asks if I want a blanket, and I say I’m all right, I just need to lie down for a moment. He takes me to the sofa in his office and says I can rest there. He’ll be back as soon as he can. He’ll lock the door, just in case.
All right, I say, and I close my eyes.
The sofa is soft, the brandy is warm. I have the strangest feeling that I’m floating, drifting quietly to the ceiling, watching my sleeping body from above. Somewhere, just out of reach, hovers the horror of the evening, the reality of what has just occurred, but I can’t quite grasp it. My head is too blurred. My bones too wispy. I can’t seem to feel a thing. Just the cushion under my cheek, the brandy fire simmering in my stomach, the weight of my eyelids like a kind of paralysis, creeping over me, minutes ticking away in a grotesque rhythm until one of them—the minutes, the snitch of seconds on the clock—strikes an electric charge in the center of my chest.
Evelyn.
I leap upward. Heart pounding in my ears. Evelyn. I need Evelyn.
It’s all right. Samuel has gone to fetch her. To fetch her and Clara, and we will drive to Maitland together, where we will be safe.
But there is something missing in this idea, some giant hole I cannot name, and into this void pours such a panic as I have never before experienced. I brace my hand on the arm of the sofa and haul myself to my feet, wavering, trembling from every pore, thinking, Don’t be silly, Simon’s dead, we’re safe now, and that’s when I realize I’m clutching something in the crook of my elbow, something soft.
Cocoa Beach Page 33
