by Linda Stasi
As Mom was packing up all the stuff I’d managed to accumulate—my toiletries, pajamas, and clothes, none of which I ever wanted to see again—the door opened and I heard, “Ready to take your son home?”
I turned around. It was Pantera. I grinned at him. “Yes, I’m so ready to take our son home.” He put his arm around me and for a moment we looked like your average, normal family: mom, dad, baby, and grandma.
For a long moment I stood there soaking up the miracles in my life: my Terry, who was never supposed to have been possible in the first place—a miracle baby who became again, at only six months old, a miracle survivor; my mother, who was impossibly loyal and competent no matter what kind of insanity she faced and no matter what I had put her through; Yusef Pantera, the man I loved more than I thought it was possible—but whom I’d also sometimes hated in equal measure—a man I know I’d seen die fifteen months earlier in a building collapse.
A few minutes later Dad came into the room with Terry’s stroller/car seat, and we strapped Terry in. My big Italian family had a procession of cars waiting: my father and brother in one; Mad Dog and Dona in the next; and a black All City SUV with a driver, waiting for my mother, Terry, Pantera, and me. Donald didn’t show up because, well, he finally must have gotten it through his head that Terry really wasn’t his son.
There also were three cop cars and an unmarked vehicle with a few plainclothes cops riding shotgun, probably with shotguns following. What a way to stay anonymous!
Loath as I was to do it, before I got into the car, I posed for a few news photographers outside the hospital—somebody had leaked our exit. But these were my colleagues, and I was, after all was said and done, one of them.
Somehow Pantera was never in any photo that ran anywhere. Never even got caught in one lousy “get” on any site anywhere. Not on Instagram, Facebook, nor Twitter. No-where! The man was good. At what, I still wasn’t sure, but he was good at it anyway.
The whole entourage—minus the cops who were stationed outside—barreled into my apartment, never thinking for a moment that my little nuclear family might want to be alone at home for the first time. We’d been through hell, but we were on our way back. The Judsons were dead, Father Paulo and Mr. Engles were dead, the fedora man was missing, and so were the missing pages of Judas. At least we were alive, and Terry was home safe—I hoped, at least—forever.
But no one made mention of any of this, nor did they mention the fact that the apartment down the hall was very conspicuously sealed off with yellow crime scene tape. Gramma, who’d been mysteriously missing from the hospital that morning, was already in my apartment and had prepared a huge feast for upward of one thousand guests: veal cutlet parmigiana, eggplant parmigiana, lasagna, meatballs, and just in case there wasn’t enough, sausage and peppers.
Terry was already used to a million people around so he took the whole raucous fiesta in stride and fell into a deep sleep in my arms at the table. Gratefully, I put him down in his own little crib—which I’d dreamed about.
It got better. Roy showed up mid-meal and we drank to everyone’s health and well-being.
After the meal and before the cannolis, I threw them out. I sent Mad Dog home with a goody bag the size of a pro baller’s locker. I handed Dad the still-tied-with-string box of cannolis from Caffe Palermo, aka the “Cannoli King of Little Italy,” joking, “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”
I closed the door behind them and leaned back against it with a giant sigh. “Good to be home!” I said.
“Good to be home,” Pantera repeated, taking me into his arms. I looked up at him and smiled.
He took my face in his hands and kissed me, his mouth open, his tongue exploring the inside of my mouth. I responded as hungrily as a woman who hadn’t been fed in years. He pushed me against the door and began slowly unbuttoning my shirt, kissing every inch that was exposed with each button. It was excitingly, excruciatingly slow. He tore off my old white broadcloth shirt and moved the straps of my bra down onto my shoulders and down my arms with the tips of his fingers, unhooking the back and tossing it onto the floor.
Then thrusting himself against me and kissing me hard, he began unbuttoning my jeans just enough so that he could put his fingers inside. I was nearly exploding—and I was still half dressed—and he was still fully dressed!
I began to pull off my own jeans when he stopped me. “No,” he said. He continued exploring me until I screamed with pleasure—unable to be quiet, and afraid the cops outside would start banging on the door!
He finally removed my jeans and slowly slid off my panties.
He stepped a micromillimeter away from me and pulled off his own shirt and pants. For the first time—and only the second time in our lives—we were naked together. I slipped off his eye patch, and was surprised to see that he really wasn’t missing an eye. It was just stitched up and healing. From what? Who knows?
With his mouth on mine he whispered, “I love you, I love you, I love you, Russo.”
“And I love you, Pantera.”
I wrapped my legs around him, and we made crazy, passionate love against the door, on the couch, on the sink, and finally again in bed. As we were making love, I climbed on top and said, “I wish you were me.” He looked at me quizzically.
“Why?”
“Because I want you to know what you feel like,” I said.
He rolled me over and said, while moving very slowly, “You mean like this?” Oh yeah.
Life was good. Life was very good. I wrote my story—leaving out the secret that was in the lost pages. I did say that the only disciple that Jesus loved and trusted—besides His wife, Mary Magdalene—was Judas. That the only being that He trusted with the esoteric knowledge of the universe was Judas. I didn’t say that Jesus told him—in code—that all life sprung from the star system Sirius. That Jesus planned His own end on Earth. That Jesus charged Judas, His most beloved, with the ultimate secret, the ultimate task: with His own resurrection.
That somewhere, somehow, right now, someone was figuring out the secret to resurrection because I’d given it to him.
My story on The Standard’s Web site went viral—and there wasn’t a country that didn’t pick it up and herald it front page and home page. I turned down interview requests from 60 Minutes, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, VICE, Newser, The New York Times International Edition, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, Today, CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, you name it—for the time being. I told them all—and after I filed my story, I told Bob, too, that I wanted to spend time alone with my family. I didn’t know if I meant the three of us or just Terry and me.
The next few days were spent in a complete dream state. When Terry napped we made love. We ordered in, we cooked, we watched movies, and sometimes we’d talk around how one day he’d have to take care of the “situation,” i.e., the man in the fedora. We never talked about how he’d take care of the man-in-the-fedora situation, however.
On the third night Pantera made French onion soup and a rustic cassoulet. “So wait,” I said, eating so fast it was like I’d never tasted food before, “you can make a girl scream like you do, have the body of Death, the brain of Carl Sagan, and you cook? What next? Do you sing opera, too?”
“Only on special occasions. But you’re not so bad yourself. You can do that thing that you do, that I can’t do, that drives me insane.”
“Really! And what’s that?”
I was expecting him to praise some sex trick I thought I’d mastered. He said instead, “You can write.” I hit him playfully over the head with my napkin and he ducked.
“Did I ever tell you I hate the French?” I teased. We laughed until we squirted Bordeaux out of our noses.
The dream couldn’t last—could it?—but we enjoyed it like it would be forever.
Then my doorbell rang. I opened it and one of the building’s security guards was standing there. Beyond him, I could see a tremendous commotion in the hall.
“Ms. Russo! Ms. Russo! You gotta see this.”
I grabbed Terry and Pantera and I ran down the hall. What I saw will live with me forever. The maintenance men were cleaning out the Judsons’ storage closet, which they’d rented on our hall. Apparently no one had thought to tell the police and the police hadn’t thought to ask whether the couple had any other units of any kind in the building.
Inside the storage room, which is ceiling height and probably six-by-six-feet wide, was a standing refrigerated unit. I assumed, knowing the Judsons, that they’d put in a large wine refrigerator. But when a security guard opened the door, I screamed and turned Terry toward my chest.
It was the perfectly preserved body of a teenaged boy! He was dressed exactly as the wax boy had been—in bell-bottoms, a printed shirt, a Nehru jacket, and boots. His hair was shoulder length and he was wearing aviator sunglasses and holding a transistor radio. This was no wax boy, though. It was the preserved corpse of Makenson! Raylene’s dead son. They had not just made and stored the full-sized voodoo wax figure of him, but had mummified the real boy as well.
“Oh my God,” I cried out, clutching Terry. “That’s why they were so desperate for the…” I caught myself before I said “resurrection” out loud. Raylene had wanted to bring her boy back to life—and was willing to sacrifice mine to do it. Her voodoo grandmother’s secrets for raising the dead didn’t do it, so she met a rich man and together they devoted their lives to giving her the one thing all his money actually could buy: resurrection.
The hall once again started filling with cops.
I could see Detective Barracota barreling out of the elevator first, shooing all the neighbors away. “Nothing to see here, folks.” That had to be the biggest lie ever to come out of the mouth of, well, anyone. Ever.
“Jesus God Almighty on the Cross,” Barracota exclaimed when he got to the storage unit. “Now I’ve seen it all.”
I explained everything I knew about Raylene’s dead son. But I left something out. I didn’t tell him that the man in the fedora now had in his hands the secret to resurrect anyone at any time.
“I think you deserve some good news for a change, Ms. Russo. And I’ve got some.”
“OK, anything’s good news after that, Detective.”
“Suffolk P.D. believes they got the Gilgo Beach Killer. Some old sicko doctor who lives out there.”
Relief washed over me even as I had an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps somehow Pantera was behind this. For me. But would he nail an innocent man?
“Congratulations on Roy being exonerated,” Pantera said calmly once we went back to the apartment.
“Yes. Great news,” I said suspiciously. Then, “But you know … even that good news doesn’t undo the other. The lost pages, the manuscript in the hands of a maniac. I know what I’ve done can’t be undone. I foolishly just wanted a few days to pretend that it could.”
“It’s not what you’ve done, baby, it’s what I need to do.”
Trying to reassure myself, I said, “But we have time, right? It will take years to interpret, let alone to create the formula—even if the man in the fedora does now have the Voynich Manuscript as well. He can’t have those resources.”
“But he’ll make a deal with people who do. Terrorists or God knows who.”
“They’d have to know how to interpret the formula, too.”
His look said it better than words: terrorists have all the money in the world to find whatever they need.
Acevedo paid plenty for just a chance at the prize. But since those days the stakes had changed. It wasn’t even the same game any longer.
And so, my idyll stopped abruptly. Back to reality.
I had to live with the reality of what I’d done to save my son.
But could I?
40
Because it had been planned well in advance, and because I didn’t want to upset my parents before I actually needed to upset my parents, we proceeded with the plans we’d made for our first night out as though nothing had changed.
My parents, as arranged, came over to babysit. It was to be my first time away from Terry for more than a few minutes since the day he was rescued.
It was too late to cancel the evening out, and I felt I owed my parents one good night with the baby. And frankly, I just couldn’t deal with the conversation about what I’d done—not yet.
I had gotten us a table at Rao’s—a big score. On any other night, I would have been proud to show off my own “juice” in my town to my man.
Pantera had taken me to his joints in Montségur and Carcassonne in France last year, and I had wanted to take him to my New York hangouts now that he was here.
But real life has a way of happening, as they say, while we’re busy making plans.
My friend Frankie Pellegrino (aka “Frankie No” because he said “no” to everyone who tried get a reservation at the legendary Rao’s), called me with an impossible table opening. Rao’s is a tiny restaurant in East Harlem on 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue. It’s old-time Italian, and it’s such an impossible reservation to get that occasionally one is auctioned off for charity. I once saw a Rao’s reservation-only (food not included) go for fifty thousand dollars at a charity auction.
Pantera and I got there at eight and our table was waiting. Frankie broke into tears and kissed me over and over. “My darling baby … and how is baby Terry? And how are you?”
We kissed and hugged and cried. Finally, Frankie said, “And who is this handsome gentleman?” eyeing Pantera suspiciously.
I introduced them, knowing full well that telling Frankie the name of my mystery man—that man whose identity everyone wanted to know—would never be spoken outside of this place ever. We were there, the reservation had been made, and my parents had come to babysit, so for a few hours I decided to try to forget what I’d traded for the life of my son—and worse, what the devastating consequences could be.
I would deal with it the next day and the day after that and probably every day that I lived after that, in fact.
We settled into our booth and ordered like we were just a regular, happy couple.
We had the seafood salad, lemon chicken, and pasta with red sauce and meatballs. At one point I said to Pantera, “Hey, buddy, gimme five bucks.”
He grinned and handed it over. Five bucks gave me ten songs on Rao’s jukebox with songs that hadn’t changed in twenty-five years. At least. I first hit, “My Girl” knowing for sure that Frankie would sing it. He didn’t disappoint, and in fact came right up to our table.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Pantera, and took my hand and gestured for me to stand so we could sing together, “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day. When it’s cold outside, I’ve got the month of May. Well, I guess, you’ll say, what can make me feel this way? My girl. Talkin’ ’bout my girl…”
By the second chorus the whole place had joined in, and I caught Pantera grinning out of the corner of my eye, with that stupid gap between his teeth. How I loved him at that second.
I plopped back down on the bench of the booth and we ate and drank too much, pretending things were the same as they were when we’d gotten up that morning. But they weren’t and so the conversation eventually had to—and did—take a turn for the serious.
As espresso was served, Pantera said to me, “You know … I can’t let this matter go unsettled.” I bit the side of my lip, trying not to cry.
“Yes, I realize that, and I love you for it. I also hate you for it.”
“I can’t leave the pages loose to wander the world.”
“But whoever the Judsons were in league with—the man in the fedora—has already got his hands on those secrets! It’s already too…” I was grasping at straws. “You said it would be all right. Did you lie to me just to give me a few days of peace?”
“I’ve never lied to you. And I will never lie to you.”
“But you have lied to me before. You let me think you were dead.”
“You assumed that I was dea
d and I let you assume that because you—you and Terry—are everything. But because of who I am, you would never be safe. So let’s not have that conversation. I can’t do it again. I can’t and I won’t.”
“That’s not enough—saying it isn’t enough anymore! I need to know what happens now. What are you planning to do? What happens to us?”
He didn’t answer, so I asked again, just as just the tenth song that I’d queued up on the jukebox came on. It was a real oldie—1962—Barbara Lynn’s “You’ll Lose a Good Thing.”
Pantera took his finger and wiped away a tear just forming in my eye, and grabbed my hand and brought me to my feet. “Not now.” We stood close to each other, and I reluctantly put my arms around his neck. He gently took my right hand in his and brought our hands close in.
“Old school, remember?”
“Old school. I didn’t forget.”
The words to Barbara Lynn’s song this time were as ironically apt as the words had been back in Carcassonne when we’d danced to the song of his choice.
“If you should lose me, oh yeah, you’ll lose a good thing…”
I melted into him and we danced slow and easy while the tears rolled down my cheeks. “I love you, Russo,” he whispered, his hands in my hair, his breath on my cheek. This time I didn’t say anything back. I couldn’t. I wiped my tears on his chest. I didn’t want anyone to know.
When the song finished, people in the restaurant began whistling and hooting. “Hot!” one guy yelled. No one had any clue about what was going on between us. They just saw two people mad for each other dancing the way they all wished they would one day with someone they were that crazy about.
No matter that all hell was about to break loose in the world, when we were pressed against each other, swaying to the old R & B tune, it was still magical. How could everything be so wrong with two people so wild for each other?
We got back to the table and finished our espressos in silence, just staring at each other. He took my hand and squeezed it.
