by Thomas Perry
“Does anybody else know you’re his father?”
Bernie winced. “I’m not his father. The one who was there every day was his father—Mickey Ogliaro. I’m a man he never met. The one who took his mother’s virginity in a hotel in Miami when she was too young to know any better, and got her to kill herself when she was old.”
Jane said, “Bernie, what do you want?”
“He’s all I have left. I have to provide for him. If I could give him all the mob’s money, I would do it. But how can I? If a man like Vincent suddenly appears on the horizon with more money than most states have, what happens? There’s no good way to have that kind of money all at once. He would set off all the trip wires the government has set up to catch untaxed money. And what would he do if he had it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do, because he’s no different from the others. He’d try to make himself boss of bosses. He would get himself killed.”
“What do you want?”
“Save my son.”
“What does saving him mean?”
The old man stood up and went to the door. “It means figuring something out.”
Jane watched him disappear, then heard his footsteps receding down the hallway. She sat still for ten minutes, thinking about what she had heard, her eyes turned, unfocused, toward the clock beside the bed. Slowly, she remembered that the red numbers on the digital display meant something. It was late, and she had to sleep. She turned off the lights and lay on the bed.
For a few minutes, her mind was agitated with strange images, things that had been waiting in the back of her memory to jar and clash and keep her from sleep. She fought them by concentrating on Carey. She pictured him in the living room of the house, just going off to work. This time he was a little late—the digital clock said so—and his long legs took the distance across the carpet in fewer steps than he could have in real life, when she was awake. He stopped and smiled at her, then closed the door, and Jane passed into deeper sleep.
Suddenly, her breath caught in her throat. The water. She had left the bathtub running. How could she have been so stupid? Jane ran up the stairs to the second-floor landing. She could feel the smooth, curved wood of the railing on the palm of her hand as she grasped it to make the turn up the hallway. She rushed into the bathroom and reached for the faucet, but it was already turned off. The water was high in the tub, but it was still and glassy.
She gazed down into it, and she realized that the white she was seeing wasn’t the bottom of the tub. The water was cloudy, and it seemed to extend downward for a long distance. She touched it with her hand, and she found she could make a swirl in it, like smoke, but it was still not clear. She reached deeper to dispel the illusion, but she couldn’t feel the bottom of the tub. Jane sank to her knees and leaned downward. She submerged her arm to the elbow, then the bicep, and finally to the shoulder, but the bottom wasn’t there.
Her fingers brushed against something, and she jerked back and withdrew her arm. She rose to her feet and backed away. She could tell that the thing she had touched had been coming up, and that it was big. In a moment she could make out the shape rising from the depths. It wasn’t merely floating to the surface, but somehow forming, coalescing as it rose closer, the chalky white particles adhering into the body of a man.
First the nose, then the forehead and cheekbones, the eye sockets still filled with the milky liquid came up, and then the head tilted and the shoulders emerged. His hair was blackening, the long strands on the sides slicked back by moisture and gravity, and he blinked to clear his eyes. He stood up, the white water pouring out of the sleeves and down from the bottom of his sport coat.
“Danny?” said Jane. “Why?”
His shoulders gave a twitch, and he reached to tug at his cuffs, the left one first, just as he had when he had put on his coat in the hotel room. He reached up to his collar and lifted his chin to adjust the necktie. She could see the four ugly holes in his shirt, where the bullets had hit. He stared at her. “You saw me die. I’m part of you now.”
Jane’s eyes stung with sadness and regret. She had not been able to do anything but watch, and hide. “I’m so sorry, Danny. I’ve been telling you that at least once an hour since it happened. Did you hear me?”
He shrugged. “Who was listening? When you’re dead it doesn’t matter what anybody says about it. You’re just dead. I don’t feel anymore. I slipped up, so I’m meat. You know that’s the way it works. You live until you make a mistake.”
“Why are you here, Danny?” asked Jane.
“It’s your turn now,” Danny said.
“I’m going to die?”
Danny shrugged. “Maybe. It’s what you’re for.”
“That’s it?”
“Somebody falls, and somebody else steps into the line to take his place. I’m down, and your turn has started already.” His dark eyes assumed a concerned look. “Don’t let them make their move before you’re ready.”
“But I don’t even know what’s going on.”
He scowled. “Don’t give me that crap. You know the only thing that matters. The world is a place where good and evil fight. It’s no different from what your father and his father taught you: Hawenneyu the right-handed twin creates, and Hanegoategeh the left-handed twin destroys. Everything that happens is part of their fighting.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Better than you’ve been doing,” he said contemptuously. “Until now you’ve been running these little errands—taking some loser to a safe place. Just moving pieces around on the board. Tonight you’re close to something very big.”
“What is it?”
He sighed. “What is this? Have you been asleep all day? Does the name ‘Bernie’ ring a bell? You know—the old man in the room down the hall from you with a brain full of money?” As he spoke, Danny took his index finger and poked at one of the holes in his shirt. “Tomorrow he could look like this, and Frank Delfina will already be putting the money into play.”
“Money? That’s what’s important?”
“Everything is important to the brothers because they use it as a weapon. Hawenneyu makes a little boy. Hanegoategeh gives him a virus. Hawenneyu strengthens his body to give him immunity, and Hanegoategeh makes the virus mutate into a plague and sends the boy off to kill eighty thousand people. Hawenneyu has made sure one of the eighty thousand is a man who would have started a war and killed eighty million.”
“But you haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do.”
“Look at the configurations and make a choice.” His voice was quick and urgent. “Do something before things change again.”
“I don’t know enough, can’t see enough all at once to know what’s happening,” she said. She hit on a simple strategy, a way of sorting it out. “Is Bernie telling the truth?”
Danny looked at her without appearing to have heard. “Money is a weapon,” he repeated, and Jane awoke.
6
At dawn, Bernie Lupus opened his eyes. A ray of sunlight had entered the dark hotel room. He knew that much. It took him a moment to see the figure standing beside the curtain. “What? What’s going on?” he whispered.
“I came to talk while Rita is still asleep,” Jane said. “I don’t think it would do her much good to hear us talk.”
Bernie put on his glasses, looked around the room, then took them off again. He eased himself out of bed, wearing a pair of boxer shorts and an undershirt. He picked up his clothes and walked stiffly into the bathroom.
When he emerged, he said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
She kept her steps at Bernie’s pace. The stiffness seemed to leave him gradually as he moved his limbs. When they reached the door that led to the parking lot, his strides had grown longer, and he stood straighter. Jane walked with him away from the motel toward a little plaza where the stores seemed to be closed. The morning sun glinted off the windows with such strength that his face was lighted by the glow. He said, “It’s
going to be a hot day here.”
“The car is air-conditioned.”
He squinted at her. “Who’s going to be driving it?”
She said, “That depends on what we say now.”
“So you’ve been thinking about it.”
She returned his squint. “I’m always thinking. That’s why I’m not dead. What about you? How are you planning to stay alive—on the money you’re holding for the families?”
Bernie shook his head. “I wouldn’t touch it with somebody else’s hand. I told you, I have money of my own from the old days.” He looked at her in amusement. “Danny bought me a couple of nice suits, but I never even tried them on. I always wear this coat. Here, feel it.”
Jane touched his arm, and felt a thick padding. She squeezed it, and recognized the crinkle. “Cash?”
Bernie nodded. “I had a couple hundred thousand lying around the house one time, so I started sewing hundreds into the lining, just in case. I brought some more in envelopes for expenses.”
“Is it enough to last you for the rest of your life?”
“I sure as hell hope not.”
“I mean if nothing happens to you.”
He held the hem of his coat out a few inches. “Feel this.”
Jane touched the hem, and felt hard, round pellets between her thumb and forefinger. “What am I feeling?”
“Diamonds. They’re all more than two carats and less than five, all flawless. None of them are hot, either. I had somebody buy them years ago in Amsterdam, right after they were cut.”
“You can’t sell diamonds on any street corner.”
“No, but they’re worth the effort. I’ve seen women no bigger than you carry a few million bucks on them without working up a sweat. And I got a few million more in my head. I used to deposit it in accounts under the name Milton Weinstein. I can get all I want by writing checks against it … if I can keep remembering the account numbers.”
“Tell me more about your memory problem.”
He walked in silence for a few steps. “It’s not bad yet, but it’s like a fire. You look at it and say, ‘Hey, it’s a little fire.’ But they grow. I’m still about ninety percent. Bits of the other ten keep coming back. I get little flashes, and if I’m quick I can read parts. The mind is a weird little mechanism. You’d think that what’s gotten cloudy would be the old stuff—sheets of paper I saw sixty years ago, wouldn’t you? But it isn’t. It’s only the most recent stuff.”
“That’s too bad. The ones who gave you money sixty years ago won’t be coming to ask you to account for nickels.”
“I should have expected it,” he said. “When my grandfather got old, he used to tell me stories about when he was a kid in Poland. After seventy years, he could tell you the weather on some particular day, the flowers that grew along this muddy road where he walked, exactly what people said to him, and what they were wearing. But he couldn’t tell you what he had for lunch an hour ago. What gets erased is short-term memory.”
“Have you added up how much you still remember?”
He shook his head. “It would be a full-time job to keep track. When you’re hiding money, you’ve got to put it in a lot of different places. If a government accountant sees a hundred thousand someplace, he keeps looking down the list. If he sees a hundred million, he says, ‘Let’s find out who this guy is.’ Pretty early on I had to start putting some in foreign countries, real estate, precious metals. It must be ten billion by now, but it could be twenty.”
“Billion? With a B?”
“Yeah. It would be worse, except that even in the old days I only saw a small part of the take. These guys liked to have most of their money where they could reach it. And I lost customers, too. There were fathers who trusted me, and sons who didn’t. The amounts got bigger each year, but they were a smaller and smaller part of gross receipts.” He paused. “You must have come up with a counterproposal.”
“Not exactly,” she answered.
“Why not?”
“My interest in this is Rita,” said Jane. “You’re an unexpected complication.”
He nodded. “I never thought of myself that way. I guess I’d better get used to it, though, now that Danny’s dead. Keeping me out of sight would have been a good deal for him. He would have been a very rich man.” He turned his head a little and held her in the corner of his eye. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I think I can take Rita to a safe place and teach her to live quietly for long enough so they don’t find her. I can’t guarantee that I can keep you from being found, but I can make it very difficult.” She looked at him to judge his reaction. “I think I can arrange something that will help your son without making him too strong.”
“You want something in return,” he said. “What is it?”
She walked on. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have a general idea that appeals to me. I’ll tell you what’s on my mind. I’ve always been careful to stay out of the Mafia’s way. There’s never been any question that if I ever happened to attract their notice, there wouldn’t be anything left of me. And I never had any illusion that I could do them noticeable harm, so I never thought of how to go about it. One of the families you’ve been helping happens to be looking for people I’ve made disappear in the past few years. I won’t say who, and I won’t say which family. It occurred to me that I would like it if the families were weaker. My friends would be that much safer. And I would be too.”
“So you want to hurt the Mafia. How?”
“I want you to take all of their money and donate it to charities.”
“What?”
“That’s my price.”
“That’s your price? Ten billion dollars?” He grinned at her, but his expression slowly changed. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You don’t want any, you just want to give it away? I didn’t think anybody would be able to hear what I had to say last night, then go to sleep and not wake up thinking about being rich.”
“You wanted a way to help Vincent without giving him enough to get himself killed. It happens to coincide with what I want: I don’t want any of the rest of them to have it either.”
Bernie laughed, looked at her, then laughed again, a high, rheumy hoot that ended in a cough.
“I guess that means no,” said Jane. She held out the keys to the car. “You’d better take these now, because I’ve got a plane to catch.”
Bernie drew his hands back and stuck them into his pockets. “I didn’t turn down your deal. Just let me think for a minute. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it, either. Once in a while I would say to myself, ‘What I ought to do is screw these guys and give it all away.’ But it’s not easy. It’s a tough thing to do with that much money. It means dreaming up lots of tricks.”
“I saw somebody do something like it once,” said Jane. “I know how hard it is.”
“And you have a way to take care of Vincent?”
“We can offer him a way to be comfortable for the rest of his life without taking any risks. Whether he agrees or not is up to him. It’s the best I can do … or at least, the most I’m willing to do.”
“It would have to come from my money,” he said. “Nothing from them.”
“Of course,” said Jane.
Bernie walked along for a few seconds, thinking. Finally, he shrugged. “It’s probably the best either of us can do.”
“You’ll consider it?”
“You think I’ve got to go through a pile of other offers before I decide?” he asked. “I’ll do it.”
“Good,” said Jane.
“You don’t sound as though you mean it,” said Bernie. “Honey, I think you’ve got to open up just a little more.”
She looked at him. “It’s what I think should happen. It’s not what I want to do. It takes time, and it’s dangerous.”
“Ice cream,” announced Bernie.
“What?”
“Homemade ice cream. You got to crank a machine to get it, it’s got raw eggs so
it’s the biggest source of food poisoning. It’s full of fat and sugar, so it’ll give you strokes and heart attacks. If you eat it too fast, you can actually freeze some nerve in your head and go blind.” He smiled. “Tastes good, though.”
Jane smiled back at him. “Tastes very good.”
They turned around and walked back toward the motel. As they came into the hallway, Bernie touched her arm. “Wait. Have you figured out what we do with Rita?”
“That’s something I’ve wondered about since you turned up,” said Jane. “What’s your interest in her?”
Bernie looked down at the carpet. “I guess it’s another crummy thing that happens when you get old. When your body gets soft and weak, your mind does the same thing. You get sentimental about whatever it is that makes people alive. Some skinny little kid who moves quick and doesn’t seem to be affected by gravity is a kind of miracle. She has so much of it that she kind of throws it off around her like heat and light. It kind of kept me going.” He gazed at Jane as though he had not seen her before. “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do you know anything about her?”
Jane gave her head a little shake. “She told me some of her story. I knew I didn’t have time for more of it if I was going to get her out of there.”
Bernie said, “She’s not as delicate as she looks. Just the opposite—sort of like a little animal. A raccoon, maybe. Ever try to keep one out of your garden?”
“I’m a big-city girl,” Jane lied. “I buy my vegetables frozen.”
“I had a bodyguard years ago, right after they built my place. He was right from Sicily, and they thought he’d be good because he didn’t know anything. He planted a bunch of grape vines, I guess because he was homesick. But the place was right where a raccoon used to live. The new house doesn’t faze her. She wants those grapes. You put in a fence, she climbs it. You put up a bit of wire on top, she shimmies through. You electrify it, she climbs a big tree nearby and drops into the middle of the vineyard, then digs under to get out. If you put in a moat, she swims it. You stay up all night watching for her, then the second you doze off she’s back. There’s a maddening persistence there, but it’s not stupidity. She just puts up with what she has to, because she’s going to survive, no matter what. She’s going to keep coming at you until you get tired and go away, or you put a bullet into her. Seeing her die would be a shameful thing. Besides, she’s the best friend I’ve had since Sal Augustino.”
