Authors: R.J. Ellory
Evelyn looked away. She was silent for some time. When she turned back there were tears in her eyes, heavy and swollen. She blinked, and those tears rolled down her cheeks. She took a tissue from the pocket of her housecoat and touched it to her eyes.
‘How did she die, Evelyn?’ Harper asked.
Evelyn smiled, a sense of nostalgia and pain evident in her expression. ‘She died lonely and afraid, John, lonely and afraid.’
‘But how?
How
did she die?’
Evelyn looked away once more, away towards the window. The mid-morning light was flat and clean, the sky clear. It gave the room a still and monochromatic atmosphere. She looked like a ghost of herself, a woman caught in the middle of something that could not have been worse had she tried.
‘Whatever the truth is—’ Harper began.
Evelyn waved his words aside. ‘The truth is the truth,’ she said
quietly. ‘It is not the truth that scares us, John, it’s the way we believe others will take it.’
‘So tell me,’ Harper said. ‘Tell me how she died.’
‘It was a Sunday . . . twelfth of October 1975. I don’t even remember where you were, maybe out with Garrett or something. You were seven years old, you had your own way of dealing with Anne’s episodes—’
Harper frowned. ‘Episodes?’
‘That’s what me and Garrett called them, Anne’s episodes.’
‘Like crazy stuff?’
Evelyn shook her head. ‘She was in a bad situation, John, a real bad situation. She knew about your father, she knew what he was doing. Walt was around as well. Walt was friends with Garrett . . . not serious friends, more like acquaintances. They had the time of day for one another, you know what I mean?’
Harper nodded. He shifted in his chair. He felt nauseous from smoking.
‘But that’s beside the point,’ Evelyn said. ‘We’re talking about Anne, right?’
‘Right, Ev, talking about Anne.’
‘So I was out somewhere, maybe went to the market or something. Anne was upstairs, had come to stay with us for a few weeks but ended up staying the better part of a year. She had her own room, you had a smaller room down the hall, and she used to sleep in in the morning. She always had a helluva time getting up, your mother.’ Evelyn smiled. ‘Anyway, I came back. The place was quiet, real quiet. I figured she’d maybe got out of bed, got dressed perhaps, gone out somewhere . . .’ Evelyn hesitated, sat motionless, silent, looking back at Harper for some seconds. ‘She was in her room.’ She glanced upwards, up towards the ceiling. ‘She was up there in her room . . .’
Harper felt his breath catch in his chest.
‘I knew something was wrong when I reached the landing.’
Harper wanted to move, felt he had to, but at the same time such a thing seemed utterly impossible.
‘I went along there like I was walking towards—’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what I felt, John . . . something like fear, something like a premonition. Whatever it was I knew there was something behind her door that I didn’t want to see, and then
when I got there, when I tried the handle and it was locked . . . it was then that I knew.’
‘Knew what?’
‘I knew . . . hell, John, I knew she’d killed herself.’
Harper didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Held his breath for seconds, minutes perhaps. Tears filled his lower eyelids, rolled lazily down his cheeks. He did nothing to stop them.
‘I don’t know what she took; I could see that she’d taken something.’ She paused. ‘I remember,’ she said, and looked at Harper. ‘You were out, out somewhere with Garrett, and when you came back I stayed downstairs with you while Garrett went up and covered her over. I had opened the door to her room with another key, and then I waited downstairs until you came home. I told you she was sleeping . . .’
‘Why, Ev . . . why?’
‘Why did she kill herself?’
Harper shook his head. ‘Yes . . . no . . . hell, I don’t know, Ev. Christ almighty.’ He closed his eyes and leaned his head backwards. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Tell you? I don’t know, John. I meant to tell you. I meant to tell you about your father, especially after your mother died, but I could never bring myself to it.’ Evelyn smiled. She wiped her eyes with the tissue. ‘I held onto the idea of telling you for so long. Garrett used to fight with me about it, said that it wasn’t right for a child to grow up not knowing the truth about his own parents. And you know what I used to tell him?’
Harper shook his head. It was an involuntary response to a question; he really had no idea what he was thinking, no real understanding of what he was hearing.
‘I used to tell him to give me a little longer, give me a few more months, a handful more weeks. I used to tell him that I just needed a little more time to make you feel as if you had a family with us.’
Harper opened his eyes. He looked at Evelyn; she looked away abruptly, uncomfortably.
‘I used to convince him that before too long you would start to think of me and him as your parents. That’s what I used to tell him. He told me I was crazy, that you would never see us that way, and I s’pose he was right, wasn’t he, John?’
Harper opened his mouth to speak.
Evelyn raised her hand. She shook her head and smiled. ‘That’s not fair. I shouldn’t have said that.’
Harper was speechless. He wasn’t expected to answer the question, but it didn’t change the fact that it had been asked. It seemed to hang in the room like a ghost.
‘Anyway, that’s what I used to tell him, and I managed to keep him from telling you himself, and then—’
‘He died too.’
Evelyn nodded, bowed her head. Her hands were twisting together, the tissue rapidly disintegrating under the assault. ‘And then none of it mattered. Anne was dead. Edward was gone. Garrett killed himself.’ Evelyn looked up. ‘And it was just you and me, John, you and me against the world.’
‘Why did she die, Ev? Why did she kill herself?’
Evelyn’s eyes widened. She looked momentarily surprised. ‘It isn’t obvious now?’
Harper shook his head.
‘To get away, John, to get away from Edward Bernstein and everything he represented. That’s why she killed herself, John. Finally, after everything that happened, it was the only way she could escape.’
Something about the smell of the water. A couple of weeks before, Duchaunak had been up at the Fire Boat Station and it had been exactly the same. Rank, fetid, corrupt almost. Something about the odor that stayed in his nostrils, hung on his clothes for some considerable time afterward. Combined now with the coppery taint of blood it tightened his throat, made his stomach turn.
Not the kind of job for a normal person
, he thought, and watched as Don Faulkner stepped around the lake of blood and leaned closer to the battered form of a man.
A handful of seconds, really no more, and then Faulkner stood up straight, turned and nodded at Duchaunak. ‘It’s him alright, Frank.’
‘Sure?’
‘No question. Come see for yourself.’
Duchaunak stepped around the blood, reached out, and took Faulkner’s hand so as not to lose his balance, and then he too was squatting beside Micky Levin, a man he’d known almost as long as he’d known Edward Bernstein. There was no doubt really. No doubt of who it was. It had been more wishful thinking on Duchaunak’s part. These people – violent, brutal, utterly beyond redemption – were nevertheless the people that consumed the vast majority of his time. In essence they were his extended family. To lose one was to lose yet another person who somehow existed on the same wavelength, and whichever way Duchaunak looked at it it seemed an injustice. Ultimately, if all of them died or were incarcerated, then he would be alone. Duchaunak smiled to himself.
‘What?’ Faulkner asked.
Duchaunak shook his head.
‘You smiled at something.’
‘Nothing, Don . . . just a thought.’ Duchaunak stood up. ‘So what do we have here?’
‘Apart from blunt trauma, massive blood loss, and a dead Jewish gangster?’
‘Apart from that.’
‘I think we have the beginning of your war.’
Duchaunak opened his mouth to speak, but was cut short by the shrilling of his cellphone. He took it from his pocket.
The conversation was brief, terse almost, and the expression on Duchaunak’s face darkened like some incipient storm. Less than a minute and he closed the phone and returned it to his pocket.
‘We got a meeting with the man,’ he said quietly.
‘Aah hell,’ Faulkner said. ‘What the fuck now?’
Duchaunak stepped back and started to walk away from Micky Levin. ‘I don’t know, Don, I don’t know.’
‘Well, what are we going to do about Micky?’
‘Let the uniforms handle him. They’ll have someone down here shortly, someone from Homicide.’
Even as the words left Duchaunak’s lips a dark sedan came hurtling down towards the pier.
‘What’d I tell ya?’ he called out, and Faulkner hurried after him, unwilling now to share any words with the assigned Homicide Unit.
They made it away from the scene before any such challenge took place, and turning, looking back over his shoulder as the car pulled away, Don Faulkner wondered if it really could get as bad as he thought.
‘You’ve seen this before, right?’ he asked Duchaunak.
Duchaunak shook his head. ‘Not here, no. Chicago, maybe ten years ago, something like that. Early nineties, hadn’t long been in the Department. Was a war, territorial thing primarily.’
‘Bad?’
Duchaunak nodded. ‘Bad enough.’
‘You think we’re going to get such a thing here?’
Frank Duchaunak looked towards his left, out of the window into the Lower West Side. ‘Think it’s going to be worse, Don,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘Honestly, I think it’s going to be worse.’
*
Callbox near The Regent. Sol Neumann stands shivering while some fat guy gesticulates and shouts at someone on the phone. Eventually the fat guys maneuvers himself out of the box and rolls away down the sidewalk. Neumann leaves the door open. Fat guy left his body odor inside. Neumann dials a number, waits patiently.
‘News?’ he asks.
He frowns, starts to shake his head. ‘Look,’ he says, his voice firm, assertive. ‘There isn’t any fucking time for such things. You find him now. You go out there and find this black motherfucker right fucking now, you understand? It ain’t difficult. There’s people who know him. He lives in New York. He has family here—’
Neumann falls silent as he’s interrupted.
‘No, no fucking way. You listen to what I’m saying. I just saw Mr Marcus and we have hours. You understand what I’m telling you . . . we have
hours
. You get whoever the fuck you need and get out there and walk the fucking streets until you find this McCaffrey. That’s all there is to it. I’m calling back in two hours and there better be some fucking word on this asshole, okay?’
Neumann doesn’t wait for a reply. He slams the receiver back on its hook and barges out of the callbox. Seems to him that threats – implied or direct – work better than bonuses.
Cathy Hollander stands on the steps of the house. A quiet shadow of madness haunts her, follows her wherever she walks, waits for her around corners and reminds her that it is still there when she reaches it. It is a shadow that has been accompanying her for some considerable time. She wonders when this will end, and then reminds herself that she must not think such thoughts. Such thoughts lead only one way, and it is not a way she can afford to take.
She takes the last two steps, reaches up and presses the buzzer. She can hear it echo within. The sound of footsteps, a woman’s footsteps, and then the door opens and Walt Freiberg’s wife stands there smiling. She looks so much older than Cathy remembered her.
‘Hello dear,’ she says. ‘Come on in, Walt said you were coming over.’
Cathy takes a deep breath and crosses the threshhold.
‘You’ll be staying for lunch?’
Cathy says nothing.
‘Of course you will dear,’ Eleanor Freiberg says gently. ‘Let me take your coat.’
After that word –
escape
– had left Evelyn’s lips there was silence in the kitchen on Carmine Street.
Perhaps, beyond the window, the world had ceased its revolutions. Perhaps not.
The world, whatever it was, whatever it might have represented, seemed to change in Harper’s mind. Its metamorphosis was swift and irreversible. Where he’d once held a memory of his mother he now possessed an awkward and distorted nightmare. Where there had been no father, no visible memory, no recollection at all, he now faced a brutal and unforgiving reality that he could not step away from no matter how hard he tried. What was once there was now absent; what was once absent now crowded against him like a vast and unrelenting wall of emotional pressure.
‘You want a drink?’ Evelyn asked. Her tone was gentle, almost sympathetic.
Harper looked up. He tried to smile. The muscles in his face did not respond well. He felt that his expression conveyed only pain and confusion.
Evelyn leaned forward and placed her hand over his. Her skin was warm and soft, the skin of someone old. ‘I’ll get you a drink,’ she said, and rose quietly from her chair.
Evelyn busied herself with glasses, a bottle of brandy, and when she returned to the table Harper found the thought he wished to express. The words did not follow and he experienced little more than abject hollowness.
Evelyn shook her head slowly as she sat down. ‘Don’t even try to think about it,’ she said. She poured brandy into both of the glasses, slid one across the table to Harper.
He lifted the glass and as the brandy touched his lips he inhaled sharply. The aroma of the spirit cleared his nostrils,
produced a burning sensation behind his eyes. He drank it down in one go, waited for the warmth to fill his chest.
He set the glass on the table and Evelyn refilled it.
‘Everyone survives,’ she said.
Harper smiled weakly, shook his head. ‘No they don’t.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean, Evelyn, yes. But sometimes you reach a point where you wonder if surviving could ever be enough.’
‘Or if just surviving is all you will ever do?’ she said.