What was my task? Right. Wallet. Outer zipped pocket of the satchel was where I kept it. But it wasn’t there. I felt no panic for some reason. I checked the main front pocket inside but then remembered I wore a money belt.
My shirt was already untucked. I frowned. Normally, I wasn’t that sloppy. Stop caring about little things, and soon enough, the big things are totally undisciplined.
There it was. Beneath my shirt. My money belt. I found the pouch, withdrew cash, counted out fifty-five dollars, and handed the cash across the hood.
“Seventy-two dollars,” he said, holding out a grimy palm for more.
“For some reason, fifty-five sticks in my mind,” I said. “That’s all you get. If you want a tip, I’m happy to offer one. Don’t call someone ‘Gramps’ if you want a tip.”
“Didn’t expect one after that little senile routine you just pulled. My tip? If you’re young enough to actually have a day job, keep it. Your acting is horrible.”
He slammed the door and tried to squeal tires as he floored it.
The spring in my step was gone. I was tempted to drop the diamond ring into a sewer grate. Laura didn’t deserve what I was becoming.
Laura Jansen had grown into an exquisitely beautiful woman. It was not the fragile beauty that some women managed to magnify, becoming porcelain and brittle like fine china held together with invisible glue.
At breakfast, she wore a long blue dress of expensive material. It radiated the warmth of her eyes. She wore her hair short. Not gray. Not platinum. Not blond. But an ageless blend, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if that was the color that was natural for her.
Grace Kelly. It’s a reference that you need to be as old as I am to understand, but who today in Hollywood has effortless elegance without haughty superiority? Laura didn’t deserve what I was becoming, and I certainly didn’t deserve her. But my heart still soared at her presence.
At the restaurant table, she looked over a cup of tea at me. She spoke with the curve of a smile on lips that I longed for with the heat of an adolescent. We’d been together only a few days since her arrival in America. Long enough to share our histories, the events that had happened over sixty years. But we’d yet to approach what really mattered. It would have been unseemly to rush it, and I hoped she was enjoying the slow journey as much as I was. Eventually, however, she or I would get to the question neither of us had asked; sixty years ago, I had not shown up on the evening we agreed to elope to America.
“Your daughter is a lovely woman, Jeremiah.”
“Yes,” I said.
“She and I had a lovely conversation this morning.”
“She and I had a conversation this morning as well.”
“I hope you don’t mind. I called your room to see if that would be all right to introduce myself to her properly, but there was no answer.”
“Had I answered,” I said, “I would have merely warned you that she likes to ask questions.”
“She did,” Laura said, setting her cup down on the saucer, without a hint of china clinking against china. “She started by telling me that she was born six months after a civil service marriage in front of a judge.”
“Ah.”
“I understood what she was trying to tell me. That it was a loveless marriage. Was it?”
“I made the best of it,” I said.
Laura let out a long sigh. “That’s what I told her about mine. She asked me if I had pined for you.”
“Mawidge,” I said. “Twue wuv.”
Laura giggled. “My favorite movie. English, with Dutch subtitles. But I had learned English by then.”
I’d already made a note in my journal to watch the movie so I could understand what was meant by those words. Mawidge?
“And did you?” I asked. “Pine?”
“I told her that Holland is a small country,” Laura answered. “I explained to her that my family was among the pampered elite. Early on, because those were different times, I knew it was unthinkable to marry outside of my class. I told her that I had been ready to leave all of it and begin with nothing in America. With you. Then she pointed out I had married someone else. Someone at the outer edges of Dutch royalty. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I made the best of my life.”
“So,” I said, “she asked the natural question after that.”
“I told her on the night we were going to elope, you did not appear where we had agreed to meet. And that you had disappeared from Amsterdam, so eventually, I married the man that it had been determined I should marry. Then, when my husband passed away, I flew to America. To find out why you had abandoned me when you had promised otherwise.”
Here it was. The question we had avoided.
“I was in a jail cell,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Is this a pattern?”
“An attorney hired by your parents gave me a choice. Stay and face murder charges. Or take his offer to bail me from the jail and accept his help in fleeing the country.”
The memory was never far from me. Like all the old memories, it remained clear. I could find myself in my armchair in my condo, staring at a cup of near-cold coffee, returning to the present from the dank, still waters of a canal in the gloaming of an evening in the fall of 1949. I would still have the smell in my nostrils—a whiff of cat urine from the alley where I’d finally found Pietje near the canal. I would still see the pale gleam of the man’s face as it had rolled once, then twice, in the water below the bridge, as if a carp had been at the surface and bellied itself to the air in throes of death.
The scene itself on the bridge had been brief, anger rushing through me with the force of a nova. Beneath the single light at the entrance to a cheap hotel, a street girl had smiled with blackened teeth at the description of Pietje and given me directions.
Pietje, by then, was beyond caring about anything except how to find just one more pipe. The opium had wasted him horribly, his own teeth black, his eyes jaundiced, and his hair as stringy and dirty as his clothes. He was a wild and feral teenager, living the life of an ancient addict.
I had reached the bridge in time to see Pietje standing in the center, by the iron rails, accepting a pipe from an older teenager.
“Ah, the brother’s keeper,” Pietje said, his voice dreamily high-pitched and mocking. “Yet again you find me. Doesn’t this crusade tire you? I can promise, it certainly tires me.”
“Pietje …” I could not find any words.
“Where are my manners?” Pietje said. “Johannes, this is my only remaining family member, Jeremiah. I refuse to call him brother. I’ve done my best to lose him, but you have heard about bad pennies. Jeremiah, this is Johannes. He truly is like the brother I never had. Never judges me, always keeps me happy. With him around, never am I short of the bliss of poppy.”
“Pietje …” Again, trying to find something to say. Close to a bridge farther down, at another cross street, well in the shadows, was a light splash in the water of the canal. A fish, maybe. Or someone dumping something out of one of the houseboats.
I had begged. Cajoled. Threatened. Promised money. Anything to get Pietje away from the underbelly of Amsterdam.
I turned my anger on the man beside Pietje. “Go away!”
I advanced, motioning with my hands like I was shooing at pigeons, and raising my voice. “Go! If you dare give my brother—”
Johannes laughed. “You really are the judge and God that he claims you to be. How long is it going to take for you to understand that you are no longer his brother?”
Both of them began to cackle.
“He needs help!” I said to Johannes.
“From you?” Pietje said. “Like you helped Mother?”
Pietje swayed as he cackled again. “You thought I didn’t know? Every night I try to forget. And now I have help from my friend to help me forget.”
Pietje put his arm around Johannes, at the waist.
“No!” I shouted. “You don’t understand!”
From a houseboa
t below came a circle of light, catching the two of them squarely in a tableau.
“Shut the noise,” came a bellow. “I’ll call for police.”
I ignored the shout. I reached for Pietje, to pull him away from Johannes, but Johannes reacted by swinging at me.
It was truly a nova of anger. A bright explosion of cold rage, and I returned his blow with all the frustration that had been bottled inside me. It was a punch that hit Johannes along the side of the jaw, snapping his head back, and his body followed the momentum. Johannes hit the railing waist height and plummeted.
There was a thud of impact against the hull of the houseboat, then the splash.
The man on the houseboat put the beam on the water, finding Johannes in time to see the rolling. Once, twice. The face of Johannes like a belly of a carp each time before disappearing into the water.
Frozen, I watched from the bridge as the man used a fishhook to search in the water. The canal water was shallow. Johannes could have stood in it. If he was alive. It didn’t take long for the man on the houseboat to snag clothing and pull Johannes to the edge of the boat.
Then he turned the beam squarely on me again, painful against my eyes, and I realized that Pietje was clawing at my face, ripping my skin with jagged fingernails.
In the light of that beam, I grabbed each of Pietje’s frail wrists, needing little strength to hold off my brother’s rage. We could see each other clearly because of the light from the houseboat.
“This is how you solve problems,” Pietje said, his voice flat. “Am I next?”
“No,” I croaked.
“Run,” Pietje said. “Run. I will not protect you from the police. They will hear from me how you killed.”
I found myself in the restaurant again, Laura’s eyes gentle as she tilted her head listening to my story.
“I fled jail,” I said. Pietje died an addict’s death within months of my abandonment. “I thought the solution was to go to America first, then have you join me as soon as possible. I sent letters. And letters.”
She nodded. “At first, I did not receive them,” she said. “My family, and the man I married, I see now, made sure of that.”
“Here, in America,” I said, “I had the freedom to turn my back on the mechanics trade that had been decided for me in Holland. I worked and worked, saving money to go to architect school. That was a dream I did fulfill. But I still waited. So long I waited for an answer, believing that I would always wait. One weekend, in an act of carelessness and weakness, I shamed myself with a secretary from the office that I knew adored me. I married her, because that’s what a man should do. Then waiting was something I could no longer do.”
“I waited too,” Laura said. “You know that. We had promised to meet, and I waited. Each night at the time you had promised and the place you had promised, I waited. Until I could no longer wait. One letter, finally, reached me. A servant was careless, I suppose. I was ready to break my engagement. Then my fiancé told me he had a friend in the police, and that he’d learned something about you but had never wanted to tell me in case it destroyed the image I had of you. He said you’d killed a man and let your brother die of a drug overdose that was likely a suicide. He said that because I was engaged to be married to him, he had wanted to protect me by protecting you.”
Laura gave me a tight smile of sadness. “There were papers I found after my husband’s death. The attorney who arranged for your bail was not from my family, but his. The man you believed had died, did not.”
That hit me with the impact of a hammer. I groaned.
Laura reached for my hand. “When I learned from my husband that he knew you had fled the country for killing a man, I felt a joy that I didn’t dare reveal. You hadn’t abandoned me. I love you. What happened on the bridge is nothing that you could have prevented. If you had stayed, any jury would have found you innocent. How I wish it could have been different. But at least we know the truth now. And it’s not too late. For us.”
I trembled. I should have been relieved that I was innocent of murdering a man in a moment of rage. I should have rejoiced that this amazing and wonderful woman had just declared love for me, that we had a chance to begin again. This was the moment to pull the ring from my pocket.
With cruel clarity, and bitter irony, I remembered that I couldn’t remember how to find money to pay the taxi driver. The ring remained in my pocket. I would not propose. For Laura, marriage to me would be like putting her in a prison.
“Rachel is trying to arrange for she and I to meet with Georgie early this afternoon,” I said.
Her brief pause before answering told both of us that the moment had been offered and that I had declined.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Laura said with polite neutrality. “And, of course, I will be hoping for the best for you.”
FORTY-SIX
As we settled in for the discussion with Wyoming Senator Michael Knight and the attorney who represented him, I doubt Rachel was impressed by the physical setting of the Capitol Hill office where she had insisted on the meeting. Not compared to where she worked.
I’d been in her Century City office, knew exactly what kind of impression it gave to clients, measured in terms of the fee she billed them per hour. The view of the Malibu mountains through the floor-to-ceiling windows from the corner suite on the top floor of the tower; the original artwork on the walls; the photos of her shaking hands with politicians who were high powered enough to be recognizable years—maybe decades—after the posed shots that were the privilege of those who made generous enough campaign donations; the gleaming deep brown of furniture that most assuredly did not come from Ikea.
As a former architect, I could also guess at what it had cost her to give that kind of impression; the infighting and maneuvering with partners, the endless evening hours devoted to her computer, and the lack of family photos anywhere in the office. Her partners could display the warm and fuzzy arms on shoulders of children and spouses, photos that fooled nobody into believing a Beaver Cleaver existence. Rachel was three years, at most, from the expiry of any kind of biological ability to have a child, and she had chosen a career.
I suspected that when a new client was led into her office, with the secretary offering coffee in a china cup, the client would pause and evaluate—whether consciously or not—exactly what this visit was going to cost. The smart ones knew that whatever they paid, it would be a worthwhile investment. Nobody came to Rachel with simple and easy-to-solve problems. They needed a shark, and most often were sharks themselves.
I was glad she was going to be my shark for this meeting. We had both agreed I wouldn’t speak. It wasn’t the time or place to say what I wanted to say to the senator; nor did I want to reveal any weakness that would be exposed if I was unable to answer a question because of short-term memory loss.
Rachel had told me before the meeting that she hadn’t cared where it would take place.
Instead, she’d wanted to establish control. If they had wanted to meet on Capitol Hill, she would have insisted on the conference room of Knight’s attorney, Justin Davey. Since they’d requested the conference room of Knight’s attorney, her demand had been Capitol Hill.
The senator’s inner suite, like the outer offices where a prune-faced woman had registered our signatures, had a fifties dinginess to it; desks with yellow varnish, dull beige walls long due for fresh paint. It felt Cold War era, complete with photographs of Eisenhower and Nixon. No Democrat presidents, I noted. Wyoming was not a liberal stronghold. For proof, all I needed to see was the portrait-sized photo of Charlton Heston with a hand on the shoulder of a much younger Michael Knight.
Now, the paunch and wrinkles were more developed, the roundness of Knight’s face blurred, and his goatee gray and wispy. Same paisley bow tie, bland suit jacket, and matching pants, as if long ago he’d taken to heart someone’s marketing advice on how to brand a politician.
Knight ignored me. It was like showing contempt to an ant. Boots don’t no
tice where they step.
He was staring at Rachel with an intensity of one of the hawks that swept the skies of his home state. I hoped she would not be fooled by the Colonel Sanders charm that Knight obviously put forth as public image.
Knight was probably waiting for her to speak. They had already exchanged the necessary pleasantries that fooled no one. I guessed that Rachel had no intention of breaking the silence. Although she was outnumbered, she wasn’t intimidated; she’d had a lifetime of facing me down.
The silence lengthened.
As to which person in the room would first break this silence, my bet was on Justin Davey, who looked like he was working too hard at rolling back a decade, going with a facial grooming for the French élan that had been in fashion for the Three Musketeers movies back in the eighties, and which I’d seen on a poster for a movie, Metal Man, Iron Man, or some name like that. Expensive suit, bad tailoring.
While Knight’s focus was on Rachel’s eyes, I’d caught more than a few glances from Davey at Rachel’s calves and the part of her thigh exposed by how her skirt slid up her legs when she sat. That angered me, but Rachel had told me ahead of time that there was no sense in having a biological weapon unless it was used with art.
Knight coughed, and that broke the staring match.
“Rachel,” Davey said, “the senator is a busy man. Perhaps you could get right to the point of the vague threats you used to set up this meeting?”
He was choosing to ignore me too. Since Rachel had let both of them know ahead of time that I would be with her, he was probably heeding Senator Knight’s instructions.
“Ms. Prins is how I expect to be addressed,” Rachel told Davey, with the scornful coldness reserved for a man who had made an indecent proposal.
I hid my smile. This was going to be a street fight, only Davey didn’t know it.
I’d been in office politics. A response to an aggressive opening gambit like this was typically one of three things: Apology. Or embarrassment. Or aggression in return. It was a gambit that gave her an early chance to rattle her opponent, and a way to get a read on the situation.
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