The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Tonight, Petey,” she says.

  “I need to see Curly first.”

  She glares. “How long?”

  “A day.”

  “Two hours.”

  “Okay. Okay. Two hours.”

  He’s back in three. She’s just shaking her head at him.

  “I came this close to leaving without you,” she says.

  “I couldn’t find him. Also, I got a little lost,” he says. His first impulse is to smile, but then she looks at him in a way he’s never seen before. Did I just lose her? he thinks. Will she ever love me again? Concerned, all of a sudden, about the future of his heart. Not hers. He tries to kiss her, but she pushes him back.

  “Are you crazy?” she says. “We have to go. Now.”

  But they’ve already waited too long. There are two cars on either side of the block, idling. Three men each inside. They all watch Petey and Madalina come out of her building; their eyes follow them to Madalina’s car. She gets in on the driver’s side, Petey on the passenger side. She starts the car, turns east. One car pulls out so it’s in front of them. The other comes up behind. They wait until they’re on a smaller street, just a couple blocks from the road that skirts the river. Then the car in front stops short, the car in back pulls up quick. Petey sees what’s happening a second before Madalina does, and reader, he does something then that will be almost impossible for him to live with afterward. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t give Madalina any warning: Before she can stop the car, he opens the door, jumps out, and is off, down an alleyway, into the dark. Two of the thugs who see him bolt run after him, but they can’t find him. They have Madalina, though. She doesn’t so much scream as shout. You sons of bitches. You fucking animals. She lunges and bites one of them when he gets too close, hard enough to take out some of the muscle at the base of his thumb. His hand won’t work right ever again after that. Then she spins around, digs her nails straight across a second man’s face. Those stripes will still be on him when he dies. But there are four of them and one of her.

  Madalina’s alive after that for longer than you might think, but not much longer. Too long for what they make her live through. They’ve got a truck parked on the outskirts of the city, rigged up to be a mobile operating room. When she sees the inside of it—the table, the straps, the set of tools, the coolers and ice lining the wall—she knows what they’re going to do. She defies them to the end, screaming, cursing, kicking, turning every shock of pain into anger, until at last they have to shoot her to finish the job.

  Chapter 6

  Sylvie is in her garden, hands in the soil, clearing out the overgrowth from last year before it comes back, when she spots Muriel’s car on the gravel driveway. Driving a little faster than usual, she thinks. She stands and claps most of the dirt off her hands, wipes the rest of it onto her gardening apron. Walks through the garden to meet the car at the front door of the house. Watches Peter get out on the passenger side, give the house a quick, cool appraisal. No more gaping at the wealth like he did years ago. The boy in him is just about gone, she thinks. There’s no fooling him anymore.

  “Peter,” she says. “So nice to see you.”

  “Hi, Aunt Sylvie.”

  “You’re grown up now. It’s just Sylvie. I’d give you a hug but I’m a little dirty. Why don’t both of you come inside? Then give me a minute to change.”

  The parlor overlooking the lake looks the same as it did when Peter was there as a child, as a teenager. Just older. Faded flowers on the upholstery, a web of cracks in the ceiling, the paint pocking outward, chipping away. Sylvie comes back downstairs, goes in the kitchen to make tea. Muriel’s going on about things that happened in the parlor when she was a child. A fight between her parents over a family dog. Her father saying the dog was too small. It’s not a real dog, he said. It’s half a dog. Her mother wanting to keep it. Another time they were having a party, and she spilled raspberry sauce all over the carpet, and the stain wouldn’t come out. It looks like we shot someone in here, her father said. Her mother just putting on a smile and shaking her head. You shouldn’t say things like that around the children. Loving the whole man, but hating so much about him. A game of pirates among all the siblings, even Jackie, that broke a leg on the couch after it was boarded one too many times. The very same couch Peter’s sitting on right now; if he were to push on the armrest closest to the kitchen door, he could still make the leg creak. Muriel thinks she knows what Sylvie’s going to tell him after she leaves—though she doesn’t know the half of it—and she wants to give him this one simple idea, that they are family, still, no matter what. She hopes that it survives after Sylvie’s finished.

  “A lot of ghosts in this house, Peter,” Muriel says.

  “Memories, Muriel,” Sylvie says. A tray in her hands, tea and small sandwiches. Correction in her voice, swathed in so much gentleness, but there’s no mistaking the hardness underneath. “Memories. We can’t be ghosts if most of us are still alive.”

  That’s Muriel’s cue to go; she doesn’t have to look at the tray to know that there’s only enough for two on it. She makes a small show of how busy she is, how many errands she has to run. She’ll be back before dinner, would that be all right?

  “I’ll call you,” Sylvie says. Shows her to the door. They give each other a long hug on the threshold, Sylvie patting Muriel’s back. Muriel thinks Peter can’t hear them from the parlor. Sylvie knows he can.

  “It’s never going to be all right,” Muriel says. Muffles a sob on Sylvie’s shoulder.

  “There, there,” Sylvie says. “We’ll find out where Petey is.” She comes back to the parlor looking the same as she did when she left—none of Muriel’s tears, or even Henry’s caution—and Peter, there on the couch, realizes that maybe Sylvie, who never seems to leave her house, to interact with the world in any real way, is the toughest one in the family. Tougher than Muriel, than his father. Tougher even than Henry. As if her brothers and sisters have done so much because Sylvie lets them.

  She sits on the sofa across from him, back straight. Picks up her tea and takes a sip. Then looks at Peter and doesn’t blink.

  “Now,” she says, “you and I both know Petey’s in a lot of trouble.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how that means you are, too.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She shakes her head, looks up at the ceiling. “Oh, Rufus, Rufus,” she says. Then back at Peter. “We have a lot to talk about. A lot. But business first, yes?”

  Yes? She lets that last word fly on purpose, lets the accent come out, the transformation begin. To Peter, it’s as if the room has darkened, and Sylvie’s calm moves from solace to menace. All those things she knows but doesn’t say. The people she could destroy, Peter thinks, just by telling someone else what they told her. Just by speaking.

  “First of all,” she says, “Petey’s in Ukraine. Or at least he was as of a few days ago. Maybe he’s somewhere else now, but I’d bet he hasn’t gotten far. I’m sorry you came all this way, because if you were hoping to find him, I can’t imagine he’s come back here. What he’s involved in, Peter, is about as bad as it gets.”

  Peter takes a breath, and then asks.

  “How do you know?” he says.

  Sylvie glances toward the window, as if to make sure that nobody else is there, though she knows they’re alone. “Because, Peter,” she says, “I am involved myself, and have been for decades. I took over from your grandfather before he was dead. Do you want specifics?” She’s expecting him to say no. But he nods instead.

  “I don’t know whether I should be proud of you or think you’re an idiot,” she says. “Once I tell you, you don’t get to go back, do you understand?”

  “Tell me,” Peter says.

  “Fine. It begins with money laundering—the same amateur bullshit your stupid cousin started with—but moves quickly to financing, and a lot of it. On
the domestic side of things, it’s not so bad. It’s graft, extortion, real estate swindles, bribes. A little drugs. A little prostitution.”

  A little prostitution? But Peter holds himself together. “What about the international side?”

  “Ah yes, Eastern Europe. Well, there things are uglier. You hear some big-shot investment bankers saying it’s like the Wild West over there? It’s way wilder than that. The shackles on the market—the market for everything—are off. The animals are loose. Buying the government and industry, what they used to call the commanding heights of the economy, is just the beginning of it. It ends in drug running, arms deals, a flood of weapons from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics to just about everywhere else in the world. Human trafficking.” She waits a second to say the last thing. “Organ harvesting.”

  She can tell Peter’s shocked. She keeps going. “I got in early and made the right friends,” she says, “friends on all sides of every deal, and Peter, I have made a fortune, more than I ever thought possible, though you’d never know it to look at how I keep this place up, I know. Must keep up appearances as an aging dowager, someone who’s not sure what she’s doing. And I’ve been keeping it for other things. Perhaps, as it turns out, this thing.”

  She takes a sip of tea. “Your cousin got in later and is, to just put this in plain English, a dumb fuck. The dumbest fuck. He’s gotten us all in more trouble than I can contain. I tried, but I can’t do it. It started just because Petey fell in love with a woman who was connected to journalists, researchers, people who were investigating the activities that he himself was involved in.”

  “That seems like a flimsy reason to want someone dead,” Peter says.

  “It does, doesn’t it,” Sylvie says. “But life? It has a different value over there right now. And Petey should have known that. But he didn’t, so he handled the situation very badly. If he wanted a girlfriend so much, he should have checked up on her before he decided to get involved, or at least very soon after, and he should have dumped her as soon as he found out what her past was. But he didn’t. Then, when they came for her, he should have had the good sense to die with her—I’m sorry, does that sound harsh? It’s the game they’re playing, Peter, and nobody forced your cousin to join in. If he had just let them kill him then and there, for his mistake in letting some journalists, and therefore the authorities, get too close, we would all be able to go about our lives. But he didn’t, and because they don’t know where he’s gone and don’t trust him to keep his mouth shut, at all, they’re not taking any chances. They’re coming for all of us now, it seems. Which means I only have a couple of moves left.”

  Peter’s scalp is blazing; the hair on his neck and arms is standing up. It pulses through him in wave after wave.

  “Do you want something to drink?” she says.

  “I want to call the police,” Peter says.

  “For what?” Sylvie says, and Peter flinches inside. It occurs to him that he’s just threatened a dangerous criminal. Then realizes that Sylvie’s just asking; she’s way too smart to have told him anything she doesn’t want him to know. “There’s no case yet,” she says. “Right now, all there is to the authorities are people who have been lost track of. They’re not considered missing yet. There are Petey and his girlfriend in Ukraine.” She softens. “I don’t even know her name. Then there’s a friend of Petey’s, Curly, whom no one has seen in a few days. He’s missing here, in Cleveland. I suppose you would be missing too, Peter, if anyone were sure you existed in the first place.”

  “But I’m here.”

  “I know that, honey.” She’s getting a little meaner again now. “But almost no one else does. Just your family and whoever’s been put on the case of tracking you down since you left Spain in such a hurry.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Well,” Sylvie says, “if I were you, the first thing I’d do is find your father. If they can’t find you, they’ll go after him to try to get to you. You might as well be a step ahead of them, to give Rufus time to get ready.”

  Now Peter doesn’t say anything.

  “What?” she says. Then the ice-cold criminal who was just sitting there, the one who rules an empire of carnage, disappears, and the aunt, the one who gardens and makes tea, comes back. “Oh. Oh, Peter. How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  He still doesn’t know what to say.

  “You know where he is, right?”

  “Yes,” Peter says.

  “That means they know where he is, too.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” he says. He knows he’s out of line as soon as he says it. Sylvie gives Peter a look that makes him wish she’d shot him instead. It might have been better that way.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “You’re sorry?” she says. Now she gives him a tiny smile. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a Hightower man say that. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.”

  She takes a sip of tea. “You know that a few men with guns visited your uncle Henry last night?” she says. “Oh, don’t worry, he’s all right. But he’s all right because he convinced them that you weren’t there. Which is why you should leave tomorrow. I can’t protect you from the people I think are coming for you, at least not here. I think you can stay here tonight. Please do. But be out by morning. Get to your father.”

  “How much does he know about this?”

  “Not everything,” Sylvie says. “But enough to know what kind of trouble we’re in.”

  “About that,” Peter says. “You said you only have a few moves left. What are you going to do?” he says.

  She looks at the ceiling, and the expression on her face, so cold, capable of such manipulation, makes Peter as scared as he’s been since he left Granada.

  “Tell me again why we aren’t just calling the police,” he says.

  She turns to him, her voice sharp. “We are, Peter. Just not quite yet. Because I want to fix this. Fix it for good.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She smiles. “You’ll find out.”

  In the morning, she gives him a stack of bills—don’t argue with me, just get to the airport, she says—and calls Muriel.

  “Drive fast,” Sylvie says to her. Peter’s in the car already.

  “This is going to ruin us,” Muriel says.

  “Muriel, honey. We’re already ruined.” She doesn’t have to say what she means; Muriel wants to act hurt for bringing it up, but thinks better of it and nods. Because for all the children of Peter Henry Hightower, the past is always crashing into the present. Like I said before, it’s what binds them all together and what drives them apart. Over the years, each of them has thought that’s a little unfair, that what happened before can still affect them so much, when they can’t go back and change it, and none of the five siblings have been able to talk about it. But over dinner and after it, before Peter’s left, Sylvie’s told him everything. All the things his grandfather did, and how the family staggered away from his death. By now, dear reader, you should know it too. Ready?

  It’s 1966. The riots are over in Hough, but the National Guard hasn’t pulled out yet. Everyone’s waiting for Cleveland to catch fire again. Peter Henry Hightower, the first, the benefactor, the rat bastard, has been dead for a week. A tiny funeral. A burial. Not in Lake View, where the Van Sweringens ended up, along with James A. Garfield, Eliot Ness, John D. Rockefeller, and those poor kids from the Collinwood school fire, all in a mass grave together. Not in the Ukrainian Catholic cemetery in Parma, either. No, in accordance with his will, he’s put down in Riverside Cemetery, as close to Tremont as he can get. Next to his mother, in the plot he bought for them all years ago. An uncommon sunny day, one of the twelve of the year. The hospital’s visible through the trees, just across the highway; the traffic is far enough away to sound like the ocean, like wind. It’s an unassuming grave, no more elabo
rate than the stones around it. A man coming home to his people, whether they want him or not. The priest says the prayers right, has some nice words to say, almost as if he knew the guy, but he admits that Peter Henry Hightower didn’t make it to church very often in the twentieth century. Just three of his children are there—Muriel, Sylvie, and Henry, who flew out to see his father pass. Rufus said he would make it, but he didn’t, and they think it’ll all just be too upsetting for Jackie to be there, though in hindsight, maybe they should have let her come. Michael Rizzi, Sylvie’s future husband, accompanies the family; four men no one in the family knows are also there, who don’t say a word. They stand on the other side of the grave while the priest speaks. Put their fingers to their lips, then to the coffin, before they lower it down. Then there’s Stefan, Peter Henry Hightower’s brother, whom Henry doesn’t recognize; he hasn’t seen him in decades, though Stefan’s been caring for Jackie for years. But Stefan recognizes him at once, him and everyone else. He tells them how good it is to see them all, then stands on the plot next to where Peter Henry Hightower is buried, where he knows he’ll be soon enough.