by Brian Hodge
Justin nodded. Never thought of it that way, but it had to be true on some level. He could almost hear the chatter of society busybodies, coiffured matrons who viewed the city as if it were a neighborhood of children both unruly and precious. Oh, those Mullavey boys, never seen two boys turn out any more different. That Nathan, such a hellion … but now isn’t that Andrew a saint?
If they only saw the other half. If they only knew.
The dirtiest saint of all.
April caught Ron Babbet in at the Times-Picayune after an hour’s worth of attempts. He could spare her some time at two o’clock. They stood beside the table, embraced in the silent currents of hope. She kissed him once, then went to pass the news on to Moreno.
Then the phone was Justin’s. He dialed the main switchboard for Mullavey Foods, feeling oddly vulnerable in being deprived of direct line numbers. Another layer of his identity stripped away. Perhaps it was only veneer to begin with.
He was transferred up to the executive floor, to then be stonewalled by someone he assumed was Mullavey’s private secretary.
“I’m sorry,” he was told. “Mr. Mullavey can’t be disturbed. If you care to leave your—”
“Interrupt him. He’ll bless you for it.” In no mood for diplomacy. “Trust me, he’ll want to take the call. I guarantee you that. Just tell him it’s his star copywriter from Tampa.”
A harsh sigh of indignation met his ear, a few beats of silence, then she put him on hold without the courtesy of forewarning; touchy. He ticked off a minute and a half, then:
“Mr. Gray?” Mullavey’s voice was a coiled spring of wariness.
“I entertain this fantasy,” Justin said, “that I made your life hell this weekend, you not knowing where I was or what I was up to. Don’t tell me if I’m wrong.”
“I’m not sure I follow what you mean, Mr. Gray.”
“Oh fuck you, A. J., you know damn well what I’m talking about, so drop the act, okay? It’s really wearing thin with me.”
The man’s every word was carefully measured and modulated. He would of course give nothing away, not when he would think there was the possibility the call was being recorded. “Just what is it that you want, Mr. Gray?”
“I want the displeasure of your company later this afternoon. Three o’clock good for you? Change your schedule if it’s not.” Moreno had said to set a time comfortably between the lunch and dinner crowds. “As for where, I’ll let that slide for now. I’ll call you twenty or thirty minutes before and let you know. We need to talk a truce, you and I, and I know right now you’re not going to say a thing that sounds like you’re agreeing with what I have to say, so just keep your mouth shut and listen.”
He imagined Mullavey on the other end of the line, trapped behind his mammoth desk, sweating, loosening his tie, bristling, and the imagery was fuel.
“I’ve got one bargaining chip with you, and I think we should meet just so you can convince me that I don’t have to play it. But keep one thing in mind: I can play it from the grave, if it comes to that. Are you following me?”
From the other end, only silence, and breathing.
“So before I say goodbye for the time being, let me say one word, just one word: media. You like the sound of that word?”
“I think,” Mullavey said, “we can meet.” He sounded like an enraged frog.
“And one more thing. In case you get the urge to talk to your brother, and cook up any ideas at all that maybe you can call my bluff. Well … I’ll have a fairy godmother there. Do you know what a fairy godmother is? And I don’t mean Cinderella stories.”
“You’ve lost me with this line of babble.”
“Ask around. I’m sure you know someone who’s familiar with the term.”
He hung up. Never give a sucker a chance to breathe. Justin crossed into Granvier’s room, where Moreno had cleared his luggage from the far bed and stretched flat out, immobile. His eyes opened and Justin squeezed April’s hand.
“He’s amenable,” Justin said.
Moreno ticked one corner of his mouth into a smile. “Don’t let me oversleep,” he said, and ten seconds later he had dropped off the face of consciousness.
April set out, alone, at a quarter past one, driving the rental several blocks to catch the Jackson Avenue ferry across the river. She drove out of the terminal and onto Jackson, rolled through decaying slums until she exchanged blight for aged splendor — the Garden District, such a difference a few blocks could make. Her small tourist’s map she only had to refer to twice, and with three blocks to go, she parked along a Washington Street curb, to walk the rest of the way up to the Lafayette Cemetery. Wanting the time alone, this city beneath her feet instead of her tires, so that she could let it speak to her of secrets and centuries, and talk her out of going home hating it for what a pair of its ignominious sons had done to her, to her husband, to strangers.
Chilly, with drizzle spitting from a sky that had begun the day without color, gradually deepening to slate. By the time she reached the Coliseum Street gate of the cemetery, some resonant chord of its inhabitants was beginning to touch her where pragmatism never could; it was almost as if they were apologizing. This necropolis, surrounded by whitewashed walls, where lay the bones of people she could never know, in chambers of weathered stone, and bricks whose edges were now as rounded and porous as bread loaves. They entombed their dead above ground here, so as not to pollute the water table — more by custom now than necessity — and something about that seemed very right to her. A visit to a loved one’s tomb might bring more comfort than standing above some former hole in the ground ever could, knowing the dust of their essence was just beyond that stone wall, as if in the next room.
When her day came for such timeless slumber, she liked to think of her resting place as looking like this.
Beneath wetly threatening skies, among the few quiet visitors to this city of bones, she thought of Moreno. Fascinating in his terse way, such walls around him. The few glimpses into his past they had been given were like peeks through chinks in armor. He seemed the type of man who wore his past like a Kevlar vest: out of sight and cinched for maximum protection.
Did he have anyone at home? There was care within him, and loyalty. How difficult it would be to live with a man who would pack up and fly to the aid of strangers at a telephoned summons. And yet, undeniably, how thrilling.
Footsteps behind her, and she turned, into the awkward moment of two strangers sizing each other up from hasty verbal sketches.
“April?” he said.
“I am if you’re Ron.”
He smiled, and they shook hands, briefly. Shuffling for a moment beneath a thickening drizzle that neither of them seemed willing to acknowledge.
“Did you ever get to talk to Elaine?” She felt a peculiar obligation to maintain the illusion born last week on the phone.
“No,” he said, bemused and stoic behind round glasses beading with rain. He was a few years older than she, mid-thirties perhaps, and she’d noticed a band of paler skin around his ring finger when they’d shaken, like an old scar.
“Let’s walk.” She started down a row of mausoleums, many crowned with crosses and urns, all of them darkening with runoff. “I’ve sat around enough the last few days.”
Ron Babbet caught up to her side, fists jammed into the pockets of a long taupe coat that flapped about his knees. Water dripped from his unruly black hair. Silent for several paces, waiting for her to break her own silence.
“You know those jokes,” she said, “that start out ‘I’ve got good news and bad news’?”
He said that he did.
“I’m wanting to dump into your lap probably the biggest story you’ve ever been given. Annnnd, the bad news is … I’m going to beg you to sit on it for as long as I live.”
He sputtered a quick laugh, then a longer one. “Okaaaay. For the sake of argument, I’ll assume you’re planning on a long and healthy life.”
“That’s what I’m counting on.” She l
ooked at him with a hopeful smile and rain beading from her nose. “I don’t know you, you were just a name to me, and a voice a week ago. But you’re the only person I know of with any media connections around here, to get beyond somebody’s bullshit PR. That’s what I need.”
“And why’s that so important?”
She wrinkled her nose. “It’s going to sound melodramatic as hell … but I need that to save my life. And my husband’s.”
On went the tale, selected highlights, beginning with an admission that she had been less than honest last time when giving motives for needing faxes from his employer’s clip files. The truth this time.
“Can you prove this?” He whipped off his glasses and wiped the lenses furiously on his shirt.
“No. Not to anybody’s satisfaction. The computer disk is all we have, and … well, you try going to anyone who knows the law and see how far a disk alone will get you.” April pushed her hair back from her forehead, felt the dampening strands fall heavily upon her shoulders. “We came up here to try turning him in, and to help Christophe Granvier, and it backfired in our faces. It’s all been for nothing. Absolutely nothing, every bit of it. They’ll get away with it and there’s nothing we can do. All we want is to go back home with enough insurance left behind so they’ll leave us alone. That’s the very best we can hope for.”
There was such defeat in the admission. Her stake was less personal than Justin’s, but in the moment she understood how much this all had truly meant to him. That he hated losing every bit as much as she did was only part of it. The rest, maybe most, was some sort of vindication for his life, whether he realized it or not. She bit her lip, hard, to keep that shared sense of failure from seeping from her eyes. She had years to share his misery, but only moments with which to buy those years.
“Ron, I know I have no right to ask this of you,” she went on, “to put this kind of responsibility on you. It’s like dangling a carrot in front of you that I’m hoping you can never reach. But it’s like this: If you went ahead with it, pushed for this story here or wherever else you might try, if Mullavey has too many friends at the paper, and if it comes out … then they’ve got nothing to gain by leaving us alive.”
“And what you’re leaving unsaid, of course, is that if I went ahead with it, without your murders as part of the intrigue around it all, I’d be on a big shit list, too.”
April nodded. “That’s part of it. We depend on each other.”
He groaned, but not entirely humorless. “Well, thank you very much,” he said, and yanked his glasses off again to thrust them into a shirt pocket. Raised his arms at his sides to let them fall in futility. “What the hell. Yeah. Yeah … I’ll do it.”
He spoke with such grumbling frustration that she knew she could trust him. A Judas would have sounded eager to comply.
April reached into a pocket and handed him the disk, and the final printout of the Caribe production schedule. “The software is Microsoft Works, for Apple. Just in case you ever need to open it up.”
He looked at them for several beats, then put them away. Shook his head. “This is cruel. This is really cruel.”
“I know it is.”
A little of Justin rubbing off for a moment, how she could cement this further: Last week I watched my husband threaten to kill his coworker if the man betrayed him … and I’m not entirely sure he was bluffing. But no, such a tactic would lodge in her throat. She had witnessed — and participated in — enough brutal duplicity to last her a lifetime. She would add no more in the form of veiled threats to someone who had agreed to help.
“But thank you,” she said instead, and rose on tiptoe to kiss Ron Babbet’s cheek.
April’s call came less than ten minutes before Moreno was wanting to leave, and Justin had to fight to turn loose of the receiver, of her. But now wasn’t the time for tender distractions. He had to go fuck with a guy’s mind in half an hour. He told her he loved her and let it go at that.
Ten minutes later he was riding beside Moreno in his car, neither inclined to say much. Moreno bypassed the ferry, whipped around to cross the river on the bridge, small map over his leg.
“You don’t like this any more than I do, do you?” Justin said once they were across the river.
“Like what?”
“Letting him go. Bargaining our lives and calling it even.”
Moreno’s arms tensed on the wheel, knuckles going pale. “What makes you say that? I just want to work out a peaceful solution.”
“I saw your reaction Saturday, when Granvier told us how Mullavey and his brother boated in the Haitians. I saw you. That got to you, didn’t it? It was more than standard moral outrage. It really crawled under your skin.”
Moreno chewed at his lower lip, wouldn’t look at him. “So what if it made me want to kill them. Lots of people I’ve wanted to hurt and never have.” He checked his watch, drumming impatient fingers on the wheel, and when Justin held his peace, the silence seemed to grow too loud. “Peasants … I’ve got a lot of respect for them. Not just the Haitians. Anywhere. I did two tours in Vietnam, Special Forces, and there were times we relied on the peasants almost more than we did each other. You can’t watch somebody make a complete life for themselves, out of nothing, and not feel something for them. You can’t … can’t watch someone who lives in a hut take rice away from his kids and himself and offer it to you, and not feel some kind of gut-level respect. You can’t.”
And here we bitch if the cable goes out. Maybe he was romanticizing, but it still seemed as if there were something inherently noble in the agrarian life. Although doomed.
“I know Christophe thinks they got a better life here,” said Moreno. “Maybe they did. But they’re the last people on earth that should be exploited.”
Justin nodded, couldn’t fault him there. “That rice. Did you eat it?”
Now, finally, Moreno looked at him, glaring with the will of one who has resolved to never lie to himself.
“Yes.”
April drove the last blocks in Gretna in a downpour. Once parked in the motel lot, she was a slight, solitary figure in the rain, treading her own pace while all about was a mad dash beneath tented newspapers and umbrellas tilted against the onslaught.
She was drenched by the time she knocked on Christophe’s door, and he met her with a towel. She had forgotten to take the key to their own room.
Inside, April toweled off the worst, then moved through the connecting doors into her own bathroom, to peel away the damp things, leaving them in a soggy pile while gathering more terrycloth towels to wipe away her part in this day. She slipped into dry clothes and left her hair to air dry, and she could not sit out these next fated hours alone.
Christophe smiled as she entered, almost seemed to expect her.
“Would you like some coffee?” he asked.
“Please.”
Christophe appeared happy for something to occupy his hands. He had brought a small water boiler, electric, fill it up and plug it in. His motions were lulling as she curled into the chair near the door. Outside, the rain pounded away in late autumn melancholy, all the louder for the silence of the room. Christophe seemed to never watch TV, and perhaps he was on to something. His calm was infectious; the rain could no longer soak her, but its voice could whisper lullabies that transcended language.
“When did they leave?” she asked.
“Just past two-thirty. Ruben hoped to get there early, and have Justin call Mullavey along the way.” Christophe stood beside the dresser, peering into the water. “He is very determined. Your Justin, I mean.”
She nodded, tucking her chin atop drawn knees, feet tingly warm in heavy socks. She had raided Justin’s luggage for them.
“He is,” she said. “When he finds something he cares about.”
“I wish he had worked for me.”
April smiled toward the floor, wryly. “You may want to keep our number handy. I think he’ll be looking for a new job soon.”
Christophe tinke
red with two of the cellophane-wrapped cups left earlier by the maid, then his luggage. He pulled out a box of his own coffee bags. Not that she feared contamination, old ghosts coming home to haunt, but still, here was the catalyst behind everything.
He was either a mind reader or his peripheral vision was phenomenal. “You don’t mind, do you?”
She smiled. “No.” How would Dr. Gurvitz put this? Drink that which you fear most. Aversion therapy.
Christophe poured the boiling water, steeped a bag into each cup, and April met him halfway to take hers. Curling back into the chair, and if it wasn’t quite as aesthetically comforting as wrapping her hands around a fat ceramic mug, it would do nicely. No atheists in foxholes, and no bad coffee while waiting to hear if she was now the Widow Kingston-Gray.
Christophe moved to the window, parting the curtain and peering into the heart of the downpour. She tried to watch him without being obvious. That he was a survivor was apparent only at third or fourth glance, when you realized he would not stand atop his trials as if they were conquered mountains, but instead, pick through their rubble even as they fell upon him. Such a trait seemed infinitely more rare.
“It’s like this around Port-au-Prince, in the rainy season.” He stood mesmerized by the sight. “For hours and hours. Hillsides will collapse into mudslides. It is not wise to be downstream of a cemetery. At times the mud pulls corpses free of their tombs, and they flow down with the mud.”
She saw it in her mind’s eye, black arms and legs, animated by an indifferent nature, left in a jumble like so many broken branches.
“No coffins?” she said.
“Oh, coffins, yes.” Christophe nodded out the window. “When they first were entombed. But undertakers, they sometimes bribe the cemetery keepers to let them come back and steal the coffins, so they might sell them again.” He let the curtain fall. Looked at her and shrugged, as if to ask, What can you do? He left the window and sat on the bed with his coffee, leaning back against the headboard.
“What will you do next, Christophe?” She had to know.
