by Teri White
And think.
He’d sort of thought that Andy was getting his life together at last, up until the night he was the wheelman in an armed robbery where somebody ended up getting killed. Even though Andy didn’t have anything to do with actually pulling the trigger, he took a fall anyway.
They never found out who actually started the brawl in the prison shower room, or why. Because of his contacts, Robert did know who struck the blow that sent Andy into this coma from which he was never going to emerge. And someday that guy would pay. Someday.
Robert pushed all of that out of his mind before he got mad. Anger like that was useless. He went back to his chair by the bed. He’d stay until the tape was over. Then he had to drive out to Santa Monica and talk to a man about some trouble he was in.
2
Beau Epstein pushed the swinging door open with his shoulder and went into the john. A fast leak before lunch.
There were already three boys gathered in the bathroom. They were perched on the sinks, sharing a joint. None of them spoke to Beau when he came in. He balanced his books on the one available sink and stepped to the urinal.
Beau stared at the graffiti-covered tiles and tried to ignore the snickers from the boys behind him. According to his grandfather, the all-wise and all-powerful Saul Epstein, it just took time for a newcomer like Beau to fit in. Just as it took time for him, back in the Paleolithic Era or whenever it was when he came over here from Russia. A poor immigrant boy trying to start a new life.
Beau couldn’t see any connection.
Saul was a great one for stories of how hard he had to work to make himself over into the man he was. Beau listened to all the stories, because if you were eating a man’s food and sleeping under his roof, you had to be polite. But he didn’t bother to tell the old man that he didn’t want to fit in with the creeps here at Paynor Academy. On the contrary, he was determined to do whatever he could to set himself apart.
One of the ways he did that was to continue dressing pretty much the way he always had, mostly ignoring the designer jeans and trendy shirts that had been purchased for him. Instead, he wore his ragged old khakis and faded, shrunken T-shirts.
Not the usual attire for Paynor Academy, a school that tried to educate the choicest pick of the Beverly Hills-Brentwood crop of adolescents.
Most of the clothes he had came from the American Baptist Mission back home. Along with the wrong way of dressing, his faults included hair that was too long for the neoconservative mood at Paynor these days. Even his shoes did not escape criticism; the handmade leather sandals would have looked more at home at Woodstock.
Behind him, there was more whispering and then a muffled laugh. What had to be his books hit the floor with a loud crash. The sudden noise stopped his heart for one endless moment. Until he realized that no one was firing an American-supplied M-16 in the boys’ john.
He zipped his trousers carefully and stepped back to the sink. His books lay scattered on the floor. First he washed his hands and dried them on a coarse paper towel. Then he knelt and started to gather the books.
“Sorry about that,” one of the boys said. Beau thought his name was Scott.
Beau didn’t say anything.
Scott held out the remains of the joint. “Wanna hit?” he offered.
Beau just shook his head as he finished stacking the books.
All three of them snickered. “What’s the matter?” Scott said. “Fucking nature boy doesn’t do drugs?”
Beau stood. “It’s not that,” he said with a shrug. “I’m just not used to the shitty quality of the grass you poor bastards have. Back home, we only smoked the good stuff.”
He smiled and left the bathroom.
Beau still wasn’t used to being an orphan.
He didn’t even like the word very much. Orphan. It sounded like something out of a book by Charles Dickens. All he needed was a bowl of gruel.
It just felt so strange. Sort of like having a black hole open up in the pit of his stomach. And it wasn’t even that he was a kid, for Chrissake. He was fifteen, although sometimes he felt more like ten. Sometimes, he knew, he acted like that, too.
But what the hell; he was an orphan, right? Maybe he was entitled.
No one sat with him in the cafeteria.
Lunch was one of the really bad times of the school day. After having spent almost fourteen years of his life living in a Central American village, the total population of which was about three hundred, this room, filled daily with almost that many teenagers socializing over tofu burgers and Dove Bars, could be pretty overwhelming.
He just tried to eat and get out as quickly as he could.
But sometimes, in the middle of the rushed meal, it would all come back to him in a sudden, sickening flash of memory. He would stop eating and withdraw to a private place deep inside his own mind. The mingled smells of steam-table food and unrestrained youthful hormones were replaced by the far more familiar damp-heat odor of the jungle; the sound of rock music blasting from half a dozen radios was lost in the memory of sudden gunfire and the screams of frightened people.
It had been just an ordinary day. Nothing to make it any different from a thousand other days. The village where they lived was just trying to go on as it always had, despite the increasing troop activity in the countryside. His parents and all the other adults seemed to think that they could ignore the conflict between government and rebels.
Jonathan and Rachel, of course, supported the rebels. They were old-time rebels themselves; why else would they have fled their own country in the sixties and never returned?
They seemed to think that the government was going to let Santa María do as it wanted.
It was stupid to think that way, and such stupidity now left a bitter taste in Beau’s mouth. Sometimes he blamed his parents for not telling him what a shitty place the world really was, them and their damned peace-and-love garbage. Maybe that had worked back when they were young, but no more. Not today. Could they have really been so dumb? Why the hell hadn’t they prepared him for real life?
Beau became aware that someone was staring at him. He looked up, his eyes darting around the room nervously. Two girls at the next table giggled. Beau frowned in their direction, which only made them giggle harder. So he flipped them the finger.
Damn, they wouldn’t even let a person eat his lunch in peace. Beau bent over his food again and took a bite.
The tuna sandwich almost gagged him as the memory of that day a few months ago in Santa María returned with sharp-edged clarity.
Just about everybody who lived in and around the village was gathered in the square that hot afternoon. It wasn’t, as the government troops thought (or later claimed to think, anyway) a sinister gathering. The main topic under discussion was simply what they might do to avoid getting caught up in the escalating struggle between the nervous authorities and the rebels.
The attack came without warning.
Beau and several other boys had taken refuge from the afternoon sun by lying under a convenient pony cart. Stretched out on their bellies and talking idly about two girls across the way, they had a clear view of the scene as the camouflage-clad troops appeared from nowhere and began to hail machine-gun fire on the crowd. Beau saw both his parents die. Not surprisingly, they were holding on to one another when the bullets struck. It seemed weird that his first thought was one of familiar stabbing jealousy that, once again, Rachel and Jonathan seemed so complete within themselves. He knew, had always known, that while they loved him, they had never really needed him to complete their relationship. Even while dying, they thought of each other, it seemed, not of him.
In the next instant, of course, Beau realized that his parents were dead. He was an orphan and the black hole inside his gut appeared for the first time. Beau tried to be brave, so that Jonathan and Rachel would be proud of him. But sometimes he felt like a scared little kid again. A lost and lonely kid.
When he’d caught the first glimpse of the huge mansion o
n the hill, Beau thought that the stranger he was on his way to meet—to live with—must surely reside in a hotel. But no, the house and the parklike setting that surrounded it all belonged to Saul Epstein.
As did the gigantic black limousine in which a bedraggled Beau arrived from the airport.
It had all been pretty damned scary. And it wasn’t much better now.
Beau sat at one end of the vast oak dining table and his grandfather presided at the other. Just the two of them in the huge room. Harold, who worked for the old man, served them dinner. There were candles on the table and the silverware gleamed ferociously as the two of them ate rare roast beef and oven-browned potatoes. The food, as usual, was very good. Also, as usual, there was very little conversation. At least, there wasn’t once Saul got past the point of why the hell Beau couldn’t put on a damned tie for dinner. Or, at any rate, some goddamned shoes.
It was all just so much noise by now. Beau liked it a lot better on those nights when Saul was out and he could eat in the kitchen with Harold and his wife Ruth. Nobody bitched about what he was wearing then.
Although Beau was not really aware of it, there were very few people in the city of Los Angeles who would dare to defy Saul Epstein over even something as insignificant as proper dinner attire. Saul was about the last of the old-style movie moguls, but he was one who still had power. The studio he had formed decades ago and continued to run with undiluted authority made a profit most years. Not that it mattered much to him. He had enough money already.
Beau poured more gravy over his food. He had never met his grandfather before that day about four months earlier, had only been vaguely aware that he even existed. Jonathan never liked to talk much about his past. The estrangement between Saul and his only child—caused by politics, a son’s rejection of the career his father had chosen for him, and a marriage that was, in the old man’s eyes, unsuitable—that estrangement ran deep and never ended.
“Some more beef?” Harold offered.
Beau shook his head. “Thanks anyway.” He liked Harold, who had picked him up at the airport and who, with Ruth, tried to make him feel welcome.
What Beau had still not been able to figure out was why his grandfather had sent for him in the first place. Had even, in fact, pulled strings and enlisted the aid of the American Embassy to demand that Beau be immediately dispatched to California. Given the choice, Beau would not have left. He would have done what his friends were doing and joined the rebels. To hell with stupid pacifism. Look where that kind of thinking had got Jonathan and Rachel. But the choice was never offered to him.
After a couple more minutes, Harold cleared away the plates and disappeared into the kitchen to get dessert. Beau tapped the edge of the table and whistled softly.
Saul glared at him and then seemed to struggle for a mild tone when he spoke. “School will be out next week,” he said, lifting his wine goblet. He took a tidy sip. “Have you given any thought to what it is you might like to do over the summer?”
Beau frowned, pretending to think about it. He picked up his own goblet and took a swallow. Saul was of the traditional school that believed a young man should learn to drink at home. Therefore, Beau was allowed one glass of wine each night with dinner. He didn’t like it as much as the homebrewed beer he and his friends used to sneak back in Santa María. He swallowed more wine and then brightened. “I could travel,” he said.
Saul might have been old, but he was no dummy. “No,” he said sharply. “You may not go back to that place.”
Beau was having a hard time adjusting to life within a dictatorship. Rachel and Jonathan had always run things as a democracy, in which everybody got a vote, even Beau. He drank some more wine. “So why even bother to ask me what I want?” he said. “What I say doesn’t seem to matter a damned bit anyway.”
Saul sighed. “You’re very much like your father, aren’t you?” he said. It was practically the first time in all the weeks Beau had been there that Saul had mentioned Jonathan.
Beau toyed with the dessert spoon, sliding it up and down on the white linen tablecloth. “I’m not so much like him,” he said softly. “Jonathan was pretty naive. Right up until he died.”
Saul’s lips thinned.
Harold returned and served them chocolate mousse. Nobody spoke until he was gone from the room again. Saul tasted the mousse. Then he said, “I imagine you must miss them a lot.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Beau used the curved bottom of his spoon to make canyons in the thick chocolate. It was several minutes before he spoke again. “The thing is,” he said carefully, “I feel like I’m all alone. There just isn’t anybody out there.” He glanced up, but there was no expression that could be read on his grandfather’s face. Beau stuck the spoon into his mouth and licked it clean. “What’s funny,” he went on at last, “is that I’ve always sort of felt this way. Even before they died. Because they had each other, see? They didn’t need me much. But the difference is that I just never had to think about it much before.”
Saul looked at him for a moment. “You know, Beau,” he said, “I’m here for you. I’m family.”
“Yeah, I guess. But it’s not the same.”
“If we both try, maybe it could be.”
Beau stared at him. “How come you hated my mother?”
“I didn’t,” Saul protested.
“Jonathan said you did. He said that was one reason we never came back here. Because you hated Rachel so much.”
Saul shook his head. “I didn’t hate her. I didn’t like what happened to Jonathan after they met. He dropped out of school, threw away his future. She got him all excited over things that he never cared much about before. Like the war. I didn’t hate Rachel. But I hated what she turned my son into.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s sort of like the same thing, isn’t it?”
After a moment, Saul just sighed and shook his head. “That was all a long time ago,” he said. “How much can it matter now?”
Beau shrugged. He bent his head over the table and began to eat the mousse quickly.
3
1
It had been a real zero of a day.
Most of his time had been spent chasing around after that bastard in Santa Monica, another man who seemed constitutionally unable to keep his word on a business arrangement. There seemed to be a lot of that going around these days, and while Robert was glad for the work such behavior brought him, it did sometimes make him wonder just a little about the moral climate in the country. Why the hell were people so reluctant to accept responsibility for their own actions?
On a sticky day like this one, when the air quality outside had to rival that which would be found, he imagined, in an equatorial garbage dump, there were a lot of things Robert Turchek would rather have been doing. But because he was a man who believed in doing the job he was being paid to do, he spent hours chasing an irresponsible asshole named Berg through the bars, porn flicks, and fast-food restaurants of Santa Monica and its environs.
His mood after such a day was not good. If he didn’t have strict orders from LoBianca about how he wanted Berg handled, Robert would have been very tempted to shoot the bastard on sight.
As soon as Robert walked into the McDonald’s, he spotted his prey sitting alone in a rear booth. Instead of going right over to him, however, Robert stopped at the counter and ordered a Quarter-Pounder with cheese and a large Coke. Then he carried his tray back to where Berg was sitting bent over a ledger. Trying to figure his way into the big time, probably. Berg didn’t seem to understand that some people were destined for greatness and some for the manure pile.
Berg was definitely headed for deep shit.
If he hadn’t been so pissed off about the miserable day that Berg had put him through, Robert might have found the whole thing a little pathetic. But the way he was feeling at the moment, he didn’t give a damn if the man had a dying mother and six hungry brats to support.
Berg was a dead man who didn’t have the sense to stop breathing.
Robert set the tray down onto the table with a crash. Berg, startled, looked up quickly from his avid study of the figures in the ledger. Although they had never met, a sick sort of look crossed his face when he saw Robert standing there. It was as if he knew immediately that something was up and that it wasn’t going to be good. It had probably been a long time since anything good had happened to Berg. Of course, he deserved all the shit, because of being so stupid and trying to play in the same ballpark as the big boys.
Robert didn’t say anything. He just sat down opposite Berg and opened the slightly moist Styrofoam box. He took out the cheeseburger.
Berg set his pencil down carefully. Its end had been chewed nearly clear through to the lead. There were tiny flecks of yellow paint around Berg’s mouth.
Robert swallowed the first bite of his sandwich and then took a long gulp of the Coke. It felt good going down his parched throat. He smiled. “Mr. Berg,” he said then, “you’re a very hard man to find.”
“I didn’t know anybody was looking.”
Ah, good. Berg had decided to play it tough. That made Robert very happy, because a guy who wanted to show his balls at a time like this was just asking for trouble. Especially if he couldn’t even hope to back up the belligerent attitude with action. Robert didn’t think that the skinny, balding Berg could. The only amazing thing was that the dope had summoned up the chutzpah to try and cross LoBianca in the first place. “I’ve been looking,” he said after another bite.
“So who the fuck are you, anyway?” the tough guy said.
Robert didn’t answer right away. He was thinking that maybe he should have ordered some french fries, too, but he didn’t feel like walking all the way back to the counter. Which was exactly why he hated restaurants without waitresses. “My name is Turchek,” he said finally. “Robert Turchek.”
