by R.J. Ellory
The bestselling author of A Quiet Belief in Angels and City of Lies is back, this time with a story packed full of mystery, betrayal, and one unassuming woman’s shocking family history.
Annie O’Neill has it all: a cozy Manhattan apartment, a beautiful bookshop, and a network of supportive friends. But at the heart of her life is a hole—a place vacated by her father when he died in her childhood. So when a mysterious man named Forrester enters the shop and claims to be her father’s oldest friend, she jumps at the chance to discover more of her own past. But Forrester’s not being free with the answers she needs: he’s much more interested in telling her a story about a ruthless ganglord and a fifty-year-old betrayal. A betrayal that, she will realize far too slowly, has something very much to do with her.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Saints of New York
A Quiet Vendetta
A Quiet Belief in Angels
A Simple Act of Violence
The Anniversary Man
City of Lies
Bad Signs
A Dark and Broken Heart
Three Days in Chicagoland
Candlemoth
Copyright
First published in hardcover in the United States in 2015 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],
or write us at the address above.
Copyright © 2004 by Roger Jon Ellory
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-1126-6
ISBN 978-1-4683-1225-6 (e-book)
Contents
By the Same Author
Copyright
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
About the Author
Beyond the writing of a book, there are those who make it happen.
In this case, the usual suspects are as follows:
My agent, soundboard and co-conspirator, Euan Thorneycroft.
My assistant editor, compadre and text-buddy, Nicky Jeanes.
My editor, my friend, the modest genius, Jon Wood.
And to Robyn Karney (aka Thelma),
for her balanced eye and faultless precision.
To all those whose words captivated my imagination:
Raymond Chandler
William Carlos Williams
Walt Whitman
Jerzy Kosinski
Rene Lafayette
Anita Shreve
William Gay
Stephen King
Tim O’Brien
and an unnamed hundred more …
To my wife and son, constant reminders of all that makes life worth living.
My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots?
Everybody has roots.
William Carlos Williams – ‘Paterson’
ONE
The sound from the street was bold, bellying up against the breeze like a bright colored streamer, and from the sidewalk vents the smoke and steam crawled like tired ghosts from the subway below. It was early, a little after eight a.m., and from the boulevards, from the junctions and corners and storefronts, people emerged to meet the world as it surfaced from sleep.
Manhattan came to life, here on the Upper East Side. Columbia University, Barnard College and Morningside Park, bordered to the west by Hudson River Park, to the east by Central, and then the West nineties and hundreds, roads that skipped out in parallel lines – a mathematician’s archipelago. Here was academia – the students and bookshops, the Nicholas Roerich Museum, Grant’s Tomb and The Cloisters – and wrapped around it the smell of the Hudson River, the sound of the 79th Street Boat Basin and the Passenger Ship Terminal to the south.
Amidst these things was the haunt of freshly baked bread and donuts, frosted sugar and frying bacon; the sound of bolts being drawn, of voices merging one into another like the murmur of thunder somewhere along the horizon; the rumble of traffic, of cars, of wagons, of delivery vans bearing fresh fruit and ham hocks, newspapers and cigarettes and new-drawn churns of cream for the coffee houses and delicatessens: all these things, and more.
And into this ripe medley of life’s small pleasures, rough edges, and sharp corners a young woman walked past the steps that climbed from the tunnels below, her movements swift and deliberate, her windswept hair clouding her face, her hand clutching her coat up around her throat against the bitter fists of wind that seemed to lunge at her from behind doorways, from around corners. Her skin pale, her features aquiline, her lips rouged with aubergine, she hurried forward until she reached the junction between Duke Ellington and West 107th. Here she paused, glancing left and right and left again like a child, and stepped from the curb, hurrying across the hot-top to the other side. Here, almost unnoticeably, she paused again and, turning left, she made her way along a sidestreet to a narrow-fronted bookstore. Pausing there in the doorway she searched her coat pockets, found keys and leaned into the lee of the frame to unlock the door. Once inside she turned on the lights, flipped the sign and hurried into the back room where she filled a coffee jug with water. She switched on the antique percolator, filled the glass reservoir, set the jug beneath, and with the deft motions that came from endless repetition, lined the bowl beneath the reservoir with paper and coffee grounds and slid it home. She removed her coat, tossed it nonchalantly onto a chair beside a small deal table, and made her way back to the front of the shop.
She looked around the room, a room not unlike some narrow closeted library, the ceiling-high bookshelves racked from left to right with not so much as breathing space in between, and in no order, and with no formality, and discounting any such thing as alphabet or barcode, these books, these battered hand-worn, dog-eared, musty-smelling books, challenged her with their totality of words, with their myriad silent voices, with the pictures that each paragraph and sentence, each phrase and clause inspired. These were her words. Her books. Her life. Here on Lincoln Street, in the backyard of nowhere special, she had created a brief oasis of sanity. Her name was Annie O’Neill. She would be thirty-one come November. Sagittarius. The Archer. With her hair a rich burnished auburn, her features clear and concise, her eyes almost aquamarine, she was beautiful, and single, and often a little lonely. She wore open-necked blouses and cumbersome sweaters, const
antly tugging the sleeves up above her elbows and revealing a man’s wristwatch, given to her by her mother. The watch had belonged to her father, and it was too big, and the leather strap was drawn to its tightest hole, but still that watch ran up and down her forearm like a mischievous child. Her eyes were sometimes clouded and quiet, other times bright and fierce, and her temperament unpredictable – often mellow, sometimes challenging and thunderous and awkward. She read poetry by Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman, and prose too – Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Shapiro’s Travelogue For Exiles. And other things, many things, and though not all the books that lined the shelves, perhaps a thousand of them, or two, or five.
This was Annie O’Neill’s world and few people came here, the majority because they did not know of it, others because they did not care, because they were rushing to some other place that bore greater importance than the written word. And there were things that did not belong here: vanity; ostentation; falsity; cowardice; greed; superficiality.
And there were things that did: love; lust; magic; definitiveness; compassion; empathy; perfection.
Idealistic, passionate, decisive – fingers grasping for life in handfuls too broad to be held – Annie O’Neill wished for something. Something unspecific, but dangerous. She wanted to be loved, she wanted to be touched, she wanted to be held. She desired; she longed; she ached; she hurt.
These were her feelings, her emotions, her thoughts. These were the unfolding patterns of her unsettled and brooding life. These were her colors, her deliberations, her emptinesses.
And this was Thursday morning, a Thursday in August towards the closing chapters of an uncharacteristically cold summer, and even as she considered her life she knew she was an anachronism, a woman out of time, out of place. For this was the beginning of the twenty-first century, and she knew, she knew, that she didn’t belong here. She belonged with Scott Fitzgerald, with Hemingway and Steinbeck, with To A God Unknown and The Outsiders. That was where her heart could be found, and she struggled with this, struggled with each new dawning day as she went about the business of her narrow life, turning in ever-narrowing circles and centrifugally spiralling away into the hollowness of solitude.
Something had to change. Something had to be made to change, and she was pragmatic enough to realize that she herself would be the fulcrum of any change. Such changes did not come unprecipitated, nor did they come through divine intervention. They came through decision, through action, through example. People changed with you or they stayed behind. Like Grand Central. You took the train, the 5:36 for Two Harbors, nestling there beneath the Sawtooth Mountains where, on a clear day, you could almost reach out and touch the Apostle Islands and Thunder Bay, and those that walked with you came too, or they did not. And if not, they were content to stand and wave, to watch as you rolled away soundlessly into the indistinct distance of memory. And if travelling alone you packed only sufficient for your needs and did not burden yourself with things too weighty, like lost loves, forgotten dreams, jealousies, frustrations and hatred. You carried with you the finer things. Things to share. Things that weighed next to nothing but held the significance of everything. These were what you carried, and in some small way they also carried you.
Annie O’Neill would often think such things and smile, alone with her thoughts.
The coffee was ready. She could smell it from the front. She went out back, washed a cup in the sink in the corner, and took a small carton of cream from the refrigerator, upended the last half-inch into a cup, and filled the cup with coffee. She stayed a while in the back room, and only when she heard the bell above the door did she venture once more into her world within worlds.
The man was elderly, perhaps sixty-five or seventy, and beneath his arm he carried a brown paper-wrapped bundle tied with string. His topcoat, although heavy and once expensive, was worn in places. His hair was silver-grey, white over the temples, and when he saw her he smiled with such warmth and depth Annie couldn’t help but smile back.
‘I intrude?’ he asked politely.
Annie shook her head and stepped forward. ‘Not at all … how can I help you?’
‘I don’t wish to disturb you if you are busy,’ the old man said. ‘I could perhaps come back another time.’
‘Any time is as good as any other time,’ Annie said. ‘Are you after something specific?’
The old man shook his head. He smiled once more, and there was something about the way he smiled, something almost familiar, that put Annie at ease.
‘I’m just visiting,’ he said. He stood for a moment surveying the store, glanced once or twice at Annie, and then turned to look again across the racks and shelves that surrounded him.
‘You have an impressive collection here,’ he said.
‘Enough to keep me occupied,’ she replied.
‘And to serve the needs of those whose taste runs beyond the New York Times bestseller list.’
Annie smiled. ‘We do have some odd and unusual items here,’ she said. ‘Nothing too rare or intellectual, but some very good books indeed.’
‘I am sure you do,’ the man said.
‘Was there something you were hoping to find?’ she asked again, now somehow slightly uneasy.
The man shook his head. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ he replied.
Annie stepped forward. She had the unmistakable sense that she had missed something.
‘And what might that be?’ she asked.
‘It is a little difficult …’
Annie frowned.
The man shook his head as if he himself were questioning what he was doing there. ‘In all honesty, I have come for no other reason than reminiscence.’
‘Reminiscence?’
‘Well … well, as I said it’s a little difficult after all these years, but the reason I came down here was because I knew your father –’
The old man stopped mid-flight as if he’d anticipated a reaction.
Annie was speechless, confused.
The man cleared his throat as if in apology for his own presence. ‘I knew him well enough to take books,’ he went on. ‘To read them, to pay him later.’
He paused again, and then he laughed gently. ‘Your father was a brilliant man with a brilliant mind … I miss him.’
‘Me too,’ Annie said, almost involuntarily, and was gripped by a sudden, quiet rush of emotion at the mention of her father. She paused a moment, gathering herself perhaps, and then walked a little further into the shop.
The old man set down his package on a stack of hardbacks and sighed. He looked up, up and around the shelves from one wall to the next and back again.
He stretched his arms wide, a fisherman telling tales.
‘This was his dream,’ he said. ‘He seemed to want nothing else but what he possessed here … except of course your mother.’
Annie shook her head. She was having difficulty absorbing everything that she was feeling. A sense of absence, of mystery, and a sudden reminder of a huge hole in her life which, even at this moment, she was trying desperately to fill with half-forgotten memories. Her father had been dead more than twenty years, her mother more than ten, and yet in some way her memories of her father were stronger, more vivid, more passionate. In that moment she could almost see him. Right now. Standing where the old man was standing with his worn-out expensive topcoat.
‘How did you know my father?’ Annie asked, the words clawing their way up out of her throat. There was tension in her chest as if she were fighting back tears that had long since been spent.
The old man winked.
‘That, my dear, is a very long story …’
Annie O’Neill’s mother had listened to Sinatra. Always. The mere fact of hearing his voice so often as a child had enchanted Annie O’Neill long before she saw his films or read his biographies. And she couldn’t have cared less who the world believed he was. She didn’t care that Coppola called him Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather, or that he introduced a girl called Judith Exn
er to both Sam Giancana and John Kennedy, or that he underwent extensive investigations regarding his alleged involvement with the Mafia … man, he could sing. From the first bars of ‘Young At Heart’ or ‘I’ve Got The World On A String’, whether the orchestra was led by Harry James, Nelson Riddle or Tommy Dorsey, even if it was Take #9 or Take #12 with Frank’s irritated demands left intact on the master, it didn’t matter. A man could sing like that, didn’t matter if he’d been the one behind the grassy knoll smoking a cigarette and waiting for The Man to come to town. Hoboken, New Jersey, 12 December 1915, the world was given a gift from God, and God deigned to leave him here long enough to enchant a million hearts.
And it was to Frank that Annie O’Neill would go when she felt she was losing herself inside the anonymity of her own life. And it was within the timbre and pace of his voice that she would find some small solace; find refuge in the mere fact that this had been a love she had shared with her mother. Inside her third-floor Morningside Heights apartment – four rooms, each decorated with care and consideration, each color labored over, each item of furniture selected with a complete ambience in mind – she would sequester herself from reality and find her own reality that was so much more real.
It was from this same safe haven that she had ventured that August Thursday morning, a walk she made each and every working day, and it was within those ten or fifteen minutes that she would habitually re-design her life into something more closely approximating her desires. For all the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who passed her in the street, it was nevertheless a lonely walk, a methodical passage from one foot to the next with little of consequence in between. And in arriving she would see much the same people. There was Harry Carpenter, a retired engineer who’d once worked down at the Rose Center for Earth & Space: a man who talked endlessly of his Spiderman comic book collection, how he’d found a mint copy of The Amazing Spider-Man, March 1963, #14 of July ’64 when The Green Goblin first appeared and, to cap it all, a #39 from August ’66 when Norman Osborn’s real identity was revealed. Harry was perhaps a little lost, sixty-seven years old, his wife long since gone, and he trawled through the shelves and selected books that Annie knew he would never read. And then there was John Damianka, a lecturer from Barnard, a kindred spirit in some sense. John and Annie had been neighbors an eternity ago, and when she’d moved to Morningside John had kept right on visiting like it was something that would happen for the rest of their lives. Once upon a time, sitting on the stoop, they had talked of life’s inconsequentialities, but now he came to the store, and however well he might have seemed there was always something about him that reminded Annie of the quiet sense of desperation that accompanied all those who were lonely. He talked endlessly of the trials and tribulations of finding a decent girl these days. I don’t need Kim Basinger he would say, I just want someone who understands me … where I’m at, where I’m coming from, where I’m going. Annie held her tongue, resisted the temptation to tell him that it might be a little easier if he knew those things for himself, and she listened patiently. Irony of it all, he would say, is that the only letters people like me receive are Dear John letters. He would laugh at that, laugh each time he told her, and then he would add: But you know, the only girl that ever dumped me by mail called me J.D. And that was how it began. Dear J.D. So the only real Dear John letter I ever got wasn’t a Dear John letter at all.
