"You're not done. We're never done."
"Maybe, but I'm not looking anymore. I'm giving up. That's what I wanted to tell you. I can't find the file."
"I'm disappointed," he said, and part of him truly was, as he fully released his grip on the gun. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and rubbed it over his mouth, catching a faint whiff of its sweet perfume, oil and cordite. "Really disappointed. But I suppose there is nothing more to be done."
"But there is. You said you knew my father."
"That's what I said."
"I want to hear about him."
"I thought I made myself clear. I would only do that in exchange for my file."
"But it's not your file," said Byrne.
Robert coolly slipped his hand back into his pocket and around the butt of the gun. "It's not?"
"And O'Malley's not your name. And I'm sick of being lied to and pushed around and kicked in the gut. I don't care who you are or what kind of money you can make with the damn file. All I care about is trying to put together the pieces of my past. You said you had something to tell me about my father. I want to hear it."
Robert Spangler felt the pimpled grip of the gun as he stared at the boy in the gazebo, and something broke in him, releasing a sweet line of emotion that dissolved the spurt of fear he had been feeling. This Byrne was just a kid, missing his father, doing whatever he could to get back a piece of him. Robert understood, Robert could feel what the boy felt, Robert empathized. Empathy. This was the one remaining gift of the child within him, the Wonder bread boy, rallying over the dark part of his soul twisted into monstrous form by her will.
"How many years has it been since your father died?" said Robert, his voice suddenly soft, even paternal.
"Fourteen," said Byrne.
"That's a long time."
"More than half my life."
"And you yearn for him."
"I guess."
"It's understandable. Family cuts deep. And whatever comfort it actually provides for us, we want more and more and always more. But know this, young Byrne. In the end it can only lead to disappointment."
"I don't know about that."
"Take my advice, you'd be better off forgetting about your father."
"I just want to know the truth."
"Ahh, the truth. What the hell is that, boy?"
"I don't know, but you told me you have some of it."
"You don't want to hear what I have to say. You only want me to say what you want to hear. But trust me when I tell you that you won't ever get all you want. You'll just grow frustrated and bitter, and you'll end up doing things that will kill the best part of you."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm merely giving you some friendly advice. Be careful what you yearn for, because that which you desire most will either complete you or destroy you, and you don't get to choose."
The boy stared at him for a moment, still in shadow so Robert couldn't see what emotions were playing out on the boy's face. But Robert had done his best to warn him away from a search that could only lead him back into danger. And in the process of reaching out to help a child whose uneasy place in the world was much like his own, Robert had done something good, and he felt good about it, as if he had turned some sort of corner and was freeing himself from her pernicious influence. He was wondering where else this unfamiliar impulse to do good might lead. He was imagining homeless shelters in the city, squalid villages in sub-Saharan Africa in desperate need of wells. His mind was taking flight on wings of selflessness when the boy finally spoke.
"Fuck off," said Kyle Byrne.
"What did you say?"
"I don't need your stinking advice. I'm sick to death of advice. It seems to come from every corner now. Winos I pass on the street shout it out. 'Get your life together.' I've had enough. I thought you had something to say, but it's clear you don't. All you have are your lies and your crappy advice, and I don't want either of them."
"Watch yourself, boy."
"I'm done watching," Byrne said as he started to hobble away. "Go to hell, Mr. O'Malley."
The name was spoken with an overtone of derision, and just like that the wheel turned inside Robert Spangler and the Wonder bread boy was upended. Now on top and in control was the dark part, perhaps the truer part, formed from love and devotion and obeisance to her iron will. And this part of him, Bobby dear, saw not a flailing boy searching for answers, a boy whose troubles he could relate to and empathize with, but instead opportunity to savor the taste of acid one more time, if the prodding was right.
"You want to know the truth, boy?" said Bobby Spangler to the retreating silhouette, knowing with the instinct of a brother how his words would affect the boy and hating himself all the while. "The absolute truth?"
The shadow of the boy stopped and turned and faced what Bobby had become.
"The truth is, your father was a rogue of the worst stripe. He cheated on everyone and everything. But there's more than just sexual peccadilloes to stain his name. He violated his professional responsibilities and sold out his clients and his most firmly held beliefs for a sackful of gold. Which means he was a thief as well as a rogue, leaving desolation and violence in his wake, violence that continues to this day. Laszlo Toth was killed for your father's sins, and let me promise you, the killing isn't over yet."
"You're lying."
"No I'm not, boy."
"Prove it."
"I don't have to. You'll prove it for me. And the proof of everything I say is in that file. Find the O'Malley file and you'll find your proof."
The boy didn't respond. He just stood there, as still as the shadow of a tree, and then turned again and hobbled off.
"Call me when you find it," Bobby shouted to the retreating figure. "And we'll have a celebration of the holy truth."
CHAPTER 24
KYLE BYRNE WAS PISSED. He was a little drunk, too, which accounted for the way the 280ZX was swerving as he punched the radio's buttons looking for something with some snap, but more than anything he was pissed.
He was pissed at that creepy fraud O'Malley for talking crap about his father, who Kyle was sure was neither thief nor scoundrel, despite the illicit circumstances of Kyle's own birth. He was pissed at Tony Sorrentino for sating his anger against Kyle's father by turning loose his goons and sheathing Kyle's body in pain. He was pissed at his best friend, Kat, and at Bubba Jr. and at Skitch and that Detective Ramirez and all the other well-meaning blowhards who thought it was their right, nay, their obligation, to tell Kyle how badly he had screwed up his life. As if Kyle weren't fully aware of exactly where his wrong turns had been taken and the prices he had paid for each. And Kyle was pissed at the radio, where all he could find were American Idol rejects or teenage emos or oldies that were a hit before he was born.
But most of all he was pissed at himself for caring. He had announced to the cop and that fake O'Malley that he was through, and he had been telling the truth. He'd been to enough funerals, buried enough old men. And now he had been bounced around like a soccer ball, with the promise of more to come. He was so ready to put it all behind him. His father had died long ago, his father's funeral had been a fiasco, it was time to bury him for good.
Except some questions in this life needed to be answered, some doubts needed to be quelled, and for Kyle these were the questions and these were the doubts. And so here he was, driving like an angry fool west from the city, smack into his past.
He hadn't been back to the old neighborhood since he lost the house. Which was an interesting and accurate way of putting it. Perhaps only Kyle could lose a house, like others lost their sunglasses or keys. Even though it was already dark, he recognized the landmarks as if they were great monuments in a capital city. That was the school yard where he'd first played T-ball; that was the field behind the Wawa where he'd pitched the Red Sox to their second straight Little League championship. There was Kat's street, where she and her family were right now chowing down on broiled eel.
And there was his elementary school—Jesus, it looked small. He had played basketball on that outdoor court every summer of his youth, had sledded down that hill during every snowstorm with Kat, had kissed Melissa Dougherty in the trees above the playground.
And then the turn, as familiar a bend as his elbow. And then the street, her street, and then the house, her house. He stopped the red car right in front and stared for longer than he thought possible. The tour of his childhood markers had served to transform his anger into sentimental remembrance, and now, here, while remembering her, he fought against the tears.
It was a little Cape Cod, the smallest house on a crowded block. There was a For Sale sign on the unkempt front lawn that had once been lush. The paint was peeling where it had always been perfectly maintained. The flower beds were overgrown where once they'd been covered with an explosion of blossoms and swarms of white butterflies. The house's condition was sad enough in itself, but what was actually bringing tears to Kyle's eyes was the absence that lived in the house as surely as it lived in his heart.
On soft summer nights, she would sit on that front porch, rocking back and forth on her rocking chair, smoking and staring out into the night as if waiting for something brilliant to come her way.
Waiting for him.
This journey into his past was all about his father, but there was no avoiding his mother in the process. The trajectory of her entire adult life had been bent by his father's gravitational field. She had fallen in love with him at a tender age, had been impregnated by him, had set up her house and her schedule to suit his whims and inclinations, and after his death she had lived the rest of her life in some sort of bemused tribute to that early love that had altered her life so. Before Liam Byrne's death, she would sit on the porch, waiting on the possibility that he would choose this night to visit his son and then share cocktails with her on that very porch. And later, long after his funeral, she would sit on that selfsame porch, as if she still were waiting, as if that youthful love were strong enough to cheat death itself.
"He was going to leave his wife," she told Kyle one night on that porch, a few years after his father's funeral. She was smoking and staring out into the darkness, that distant smile on her face, as if her life were a cosmic joke that she was just on the cusp of understanding. "He was moving in here. We were all going to be together again."
"Did he tell you that?" said Kyle.
"In his way."
"Did he tell her?"
"I'm pretty sure."
"What makes you think so?"
"He told me once she would never let him leave. I guess she proved him right."
"Mom?"
"Isn't it your bedtime?"
"I'm fourteen."
"My big, big man. Go to bed, Kyle."
"You don't think . . ."
"You're right, Kyle. I don't."
There was something fierce in her ability to avoid his questions. She was a competent typist, a devoted mother, a fine cook and a brilliant gardener, but most of all she was a cipher. He had always believed that his mother was fooling herself about his father's moving back with them. It was the saddest memory he had of her, it made everything else in her life seem just as delusional. But suddenly, now, that very conversation seemed to harbor not delusion but maybe something akin to the truth.
The fake O'Malley had said that his father was supposed to have taken the file cabinet to his home. Yet his father's wife knew nothing about it. It didn't make sense, until the day after Kyle's strange meeting with O'Malley at the gazebo, while Kyle was sitting in front of Kat's TV, watching the baseball game and downing his traditional Father's Day case of Yuengling beer, when he remembered his mother's comment about his father telling her, in his way, that he was coming to live with them.
What would be his way? He'd bring something to the house, something to store, something most valuable. Something too heavy for him to handle alone.
"Uncle Max," Kyle had shouted over the phone after he'd thought it through but before driving out to the old neighborhood. He was shouting because he had reached his Uncle Max at the Olde Pig Snout, and the game was on and the television was blaring. "I got a question."
"What?"
"A question. I got a question for you."
"Who is this? Kyle?"
"Yeah, it's Kyle."
"Yo, Kyle, how you doing? Wait a second. Hey, Fred, turn the sound down a sec, I'm talking to my nephew." The smooth voice of Harry Kalas dimmed. "Okay, go ahead."
"You ever help my father move anything into my mother's house?"
"When?"
"I don't know, not long before he died. I'm talking something heavy, like a file cabinet."
"Like a file cabinet?"
"No, you're right, not like a file cabinet. It would have been a file cabinet. Did you ever help him move a big brown file cabinet into my mother's house?"
There was a pause from Uncle Max's end of the line, where Kyle could still hear the game slipping away from the Phillies' bullpen. It was illegal now to smoke in Philly bars, but Kyle heard his Uncle Max light a cigarette and take a drag.
"Your mom called me," he said finally. "Asked for a favor. I had the truck then for my work with the funeral homes, and everyone was always calling me to help them move. That's why I quit and got rid of the thing, I was getting too damn helpful. But I still had it then, and she called, and what was I going to do? Say no to my little sister?"
"How come I don't remember it?"
"We did it one night when you was at that Chinese girl's house."
"She's Korean."
"You don't say? And all this time I thought she was Chinese. Funny how easy it is to—"
"Uncle Max."
"Okay, okay. Your mom, she didn't want you to know, and she made me promise never to tell. She didn't want you getting no ideas about it meaning something."
"Though she got them herself, didn't she?"
"She was my little sister, and I loved her, Kyle, I really did, but I never understood a thing about her. We even had to hide it once it was inside the house."
"From me?"
"No, that was your father's doing. He said he needed to safeguard it from someone. Toth, I assumed. But that file cabinet was so damn heavy it near gave me a hernia. You know, I never had no problem with my back until I wrestled that sucker into the basement, and since then I been no good for nothing."
From within the 280ZX now, through teary eyes, Kyle stared at his old house, gone to hell, and the top of the basement wall under the porch, behind which, he was certain, stood his father's file cabinet. Somewhere inside would be the O'Malley file, with a boatload of trouble on every page. But if you looked deep into Kyle Byrne's heart, you would see it wasn't really the O'Malley file he was after. For Kyle, the common concerns of the common world, which prized money and power over all things and was seeking mightily that selfsame file for venal ends, held little sway. But still his heart raced at the possibility of the file cabinet's being somewhere in his old basement. Because he couldn't help the feeling that inside that heavy brown cabinet, along with the useless detritus of his father's legal career, somewhere, in some mislabeled file, scrawled in his father's hand, would be the closest he'd ever come to discovering the very meaning of his life.
CHAPTER 25
THE DISCUSSION DID NOT go very well.
Of course, these discussions never went well anymore. In the beginning, when Robert was still the young and pliant striver, the glorious surroundings and the note of promise in their intercourse left him with a great, hopeful energy that was almost sexual in its power. He couldn't wait to see her again, the way his skin warmed as she caressed him with the gaze from her pretty eyes, the way their dreams seemed to mesh into a single glorious enterprise that would carry them both higher than individually they could ever have imagined. But as they had aged, and the mansion had deteriorated, and the promise in his life had withered, their encounters had taken on an indifferent brutality. If he did her bidding, then she mer
ely took it as her due, with nary a word of gratitude. But if he failed to carry out her wishes to the letter, even if they hadn't been clearly communicated, then the whole inequality of their relationship was thrown into bitter relief by the vituperative nature of her rebuke.
"That's why you'll never amount to anything. You don't have an ounce of initiative. But what else could have been expected? You're a Spangler, and the Spanglers never had initiative. A clan of belching crotch scratchers, all of them. It's a wonder that any of you ever get off the toilet in the morning."
"I determined it wasn't to our benefit to kill him," he had told her.
"I'll determine what is to our benefit," she said, her voice a drip of liquid nitrogen. "You've spoiled things enough already. Once you set him on the trail, it was inevitable that he would have to be dealt with."
"I just wanted to be sure he didn't have a copy, like Laszlo."
"It didn't matter if he had it or not, he would find something. His father was greedy as a hyena, the son will be no different. Blood always tells. It's why you've been such a disappointment to me."
"If he was killed so soon after Laszlo, someone would draw the connection."
"Who, the police? That pair of fools at the funeral? Perfectly adequate for servants, maybe, but not as detectives. I hardly think those two will be swift enough to catch on. If you'll just do as I tell you, it will all work out as we hope. There are grand things afoot. I won't have the boy get in my way."
"What exactly do you want?"
"I want the boy gone. I want you to take care of him like you took care of the father. I will not have that Irish piece of trash confounding me from the grave."
"The boy's not so easy to find. He doesn't have a set place to stay anymore. He lives out of his car."
"Oh, Bobby dear, I'm sure you'll find a way."
And he had, yes he had. Bobby dear had found a way. The call had come in just a few minutes ago, from one of the spies he'd set up throughout the city. This was from one he had contacted in the boy's old neighborhood. I'm looking for the Byrne boy. You remember him. He used to live across the street. He drives a small red sports car now, an old Datsun. I have something quite valuable to give him, but I can't seem to locate young Byrne. If you see the car, could you just give me a call? I'll make sure you're amply rewarded. That's all it took these days to create a spy. And the spy had let him know that the boy's car was stopped right at the moment on his old street, that the boy was right at the moment in his car and staring at his old house. Now, about that reward . . .
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