“Oh, God!” Anne gripped her husband’s arm. “Jack!”
Kurt’s hands were gripping the back of the couch.
On the screen, the camera was entering the lit, hidden room. The Nazi swastika flag came to fill the screen.
Overvoice, Flynn was saying, “Dear, dear. We found what we didn’t want to find.”
“Son of a bitch!” Kurt shouted. “What right did you have to enter my house?”
Flynn handed Kurt a piece of paper over the back of the couch. “This warrant.”
Kurt looked at it. “Goldston. Judge Goldston. I might have known.”
He dropped the warrant on the couch.
“You’d never have known about the warrant, if we had found nothing.”
The five bombs appeared on-screen.
Overvoice, Cocky said, “These four essentially are ready for detonation. This last explosive device, as you can see, is a work in progress.”
Flynn stood up. “Show’s over.” He smiled at Anne. “Surely, parts of this tape can be readied for submission to
House Pretty
magazine, or whatever it’s called, without any editing at all.”
Beneath his tuxedo jacket, Kurt’s shoulders were visibly flexed.
Tight-jawed, Kurt said to Flynn, “What can you do?”
Anne pulled her husband’s arm. “Jack! Let’s get out of here! This is crazy. This crazy place. This can’t be serious.”
“Me? What can I do?” Flynn answered, “Nothing. I’m afraid your problem is educational, Lieutenant Kurt.” He lit his pipe. “There is nothing I can do to improve your education at this point. At least, not all in this night.”
Anne said, “In fact, my husband has done nothing wrong.”
“He has a right to his opinions,” Cocky said. “But not to run an unlicensed bomb factory.”
Flynn pointed his pipe stem at the display on his desk. “Your husband has been using his position on the Boston Police force with bias.”
Looking up over the back of the couch at Anne, Cocky said, “The bombs you have in your basement, lady, could blow up half the town!”
“Falsifying evidence . . .” Flynn watched them both carefully.
“Jack. Jack!” She tugged her husband’s arm. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.”
Flynn glanced at the clock on the mantel. “I expect the bomb squad is still there, Anne. At your pretty home. Captain Reagan and I thought we would delay you—and your friends—to avoid an unfortunate accident, being as we are, all police together.”
“‘Accident,’” Cocky snorted. “The resistance of you and your friends, Kurt, could blow up all your neighbors, women, children, dogs, cats, and canaries lost in the trees.”
Kurt looked at Cocky. “You two can’t keep me here. I’m black belt—”
“Ah, blather,” said Flynn. “I keep telling you, lad. You’ve got a bad educational problem. You don’t know blather from bombast.”
Flynn had heard the elevator clank down to the first floor, then rise again.
He was expecting people in blue uniforms to enter the office, to arrest Boston Police Lieutenant Detective John Kurt and carry him off to the hoosegow.
Instead, it was Grover, alone, who entered the office.
He carried on both forearms a stack of magazines. The stack reached nearly to his chin.
Grover blinked in the office’s pools of light. “You here?” he asked Flynn.
“All present,” Flynn said. “The ball is over. At least, for some of us.”
An odd glaze had come over Kurt’s eyes.
Standing in the office doorway, burdened with the stack of magazines on his arms, Grover said, “A male nurse from Human Services finally arrived at the Lovesons’ apartment. He says he’s going to file a complaint about me, a cop taking care of a sick old woman overnight. I called Human Services early this afternoon. Finally he showed up at nearly midnight.”
Kurt turned on his heel.
With determination he started to walk toward the door.
His wife followed him closely, as if tethered to him.
Seeing Kurt marching toward him, fists clenched at his sides, Grover continued uneasily. “I thought I had better rescue these magazines. You said you absolutely want them.”
Kurt stopped in front of Grover in the doorway.
Following her husband so closely, blindly, Anne Kurt bumped into him.
Kurt said, “You going to try to stop me from going through that door, Whelan?”
Clearly, Grover had no idea what he was going to do.
He had no idea what was going on.
Bending his knees properly, Grover leaned over to put the stack of magazines on the floor.
Apparently, his head close to the floor, Grover saw Kurt brace his feet on the floor.
And, apparently, thinking he was about to be clobbered, instinctively Grover raised his left forearm over his head.
Knees bent, head down, clearly intending only to stand back, get away from Kurt, Grover sprang up from the floor like a powerful spring unsprung.
Without looking, he raised his left arm as he sprang, in an effort to keep his balance.
The cast on Grover’s left wrist connected with Kurt’s nose with enormous, unintended kinetic energy.
Kurt’s nose was smashed into his head.
Falling backward, Kurt knocked over his wife.
“Good lad, Grover!” Flynn shouted from across the room. “You got the both of them with one blow!”
In her evening gown, Anne Kurt lay spraddled on the floor. Her unconscious husband was docked between her legs. His nose bled profusely on her organdy gown.
In flight-or-fight stance, legs apart, fists and arms raised, still expecting to be attacked, Grover stared at the formally dressed couple on the floor.
“Did I do that?”
Pinned by the weight of her husband’s heavy shoulders and chest on her torso, Anne was trying to wriggle out from under him. Simultaneously, she was trying to wipe the blood pouring from his nose off her party dress.
Kurt was totally coldcocked.
Grover looked at Flynn. “I did that?”
“Indeed you did, Grover. Indeed you did. Well done! There hasn’t been a better use of a cast since Branagh’s
As
You Like It
!”
TWENTY-ONE
Late the next afternoon, Flynn left his house to go for a walk by himself.
He had spent that Saturday midday attending Jenny’s victorious swim meet. For the fifty-eleventh time, Flynn had marveled at how otherwise apparently reasonable people, parents, coaches, other fans at a swim meet, could cheer, holler, scream, stamp their feet encouragingly, shout advice at competing teenagers whose heads were underwater.
All that noise in a confined, tile environment had left Flynn’s ears ringing.
A mile from home, ringing the doorbell of Anthony Capriano’s condominium, Flynn heard through the door a recording of a Paganini violin concerto being turned off.
The door opened.
“Mr. Flynn?”
Flynn had telephoned ahead, asked if a visit from him would be welcome that afternoon.
Through the open door, Flynn’s nostrils instantly were assaulted by the smells of Italian cooking.
“Mr. Capriano.”
The smile in the strong old face was wonderful. “You don’t know people call me Mr. Anthony?”
They shook hands as Flynn stepped through the door.
“Let me help you with your coat.”
At age seventy-nine, Anthony Capriano seemed far more physically fit than his two sons, Tony and William. His shoulders were broad and still full. His arms looked like they could still heft half a cow without strain.
His stomach was a great deal flatter than his sons’.
His eyes were as bright and lively as his grandson’s.
While Mr. Anthony was hanging up Flynn’s coat in a hall closet, Flynn looked around the living room.
As a widower, Mr. Anthony had found a convenient place to live, however anachronistic it was.
A glass window running along one whole wall threw too much light on the heavy, dark furniture and rugs of the room. It caused the dozens of framed photographs in the room to glare from almost every angle.
Clearly this was the living room of a widower who had given up his family home, but not much of his family furniture: a mahogany gate-legged table where probably babies’ diapers had been changed and family parties held, a massive couch where guests had slept and teenagers sprawled, stuffed armchairs where he and his wife doubtlessly had sat and loved and argued and laughed and cried and ruled the family.
Certainly Mr. Anthony had not given up many framed photographs of the family. They seemed to fill every inch of wall, every table surface.
There were wedding photographs of Mr. Anthony and his wife, photos of their parents, of their children, Tony and William and a third son as toddlers in Easter suits, in First Communion suits, in Little League Baseball uniforms, football helmets, military uniforms; pictures of their weddings and children; pictures of cars then new, the interior of the butcher shop through the years.
“It is proper and correct that you should visit me, Mr. Flynn.” At a heavy buffet table, Mr. Anthony poured out two generous glasses of red wine. “I hope the smell of my cooking does not bother you.”
“I’m enjoying it.”
“Good!” Mr. Anthony placed Flynn’s glass of wine on a table beside the chair he expected Flynn to use. “I am expecting a very young couple for dinner.” He sat in a heavy, brown, upholstered chair which probably had been his personal chair most of his adult life. “My grandson, Billy.” Smiling again, he showed rows of apparently perfect teeth. “And your wonderful daughter, Jenny.” He saluted Flynn with his wineglass. “I compliment you and Mrs. Flynn on your daughter.”
“And I you on your grandson.” Flynn raised his glass, then took a taste of his wine.
Savoring his red wine, Mr. Anthony said, “Jenny promised to bring her violin with her tonight, play for me again. I enjoy her playing, of course. But watching her face while she plays is an even greater treat. She concentrates so. Wrinkles her nose. Her blue eyes grow huge when she is going through a difficult passage. When she’s done with a difficult passage, she sticks out her lower lip and tries to blow her hair off her damp forehead.”
Flynn laughed. “I didn’t realize you know Jenny so well.”
“Oh, yes. Billy has brought her here often. I chide her since I discovered she knows nothing of Paganini. Before you arrived I was dusting off some recordings of Paganini, to play for her while we eat.”
“My fault, I’m afraid. I’ve been thinking Paganini too difficult for her. Perhaps not.”
“Italian. You knew she was coming here tonight?”
“Not really. I knew she was to dine with the Capriano family. I thought she meant Billy’s parents.”
“Just the three of us. I met Jenny at a family dinner at my son’s house, of course. Billy usually stops in to see me three or four times a week. You don’t like your wine? Good Italian red wine?”
“It’s very good. I never drink.”
Mr. Anthony nodded. “Then you were good to join an old man in our mutual salute.” He pronounced salute in Italian. “I understand people find my manners a little old-fashioned. Jenny seems to respect them.”
“Of course.”
Mr. Anthony sipped his wine. “I hope I’m not wrong. You are here as Jenny’s father, not as an inspector of police?”
“More than either,” Flynn answered, “I’m here as a seeker after truth and wisdom.”
Mr. Anthony’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Oh?”
“Tell me, please, why did you nail your grandson’s ear to the tree?”
Mr. Anthony looked even more surprised. “You know about that?”
Flynn smiled.
“Of course! You must be the one who rescued Billy!”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No. He wouldn’t. Obviously, I knew someone had rescued him.”
“Last Sunday evening Jenny found Billy in the cemetery, his ear nailed to a tree. She came and got me. And tools.”
“Did Billy tell you it was I who nailed his ear to the tree?”
“Absolutely not. He convinced me he was ready to rip his ear from the tree rather then tell me or Jenny who nailed him there.”
“So?”
“When I realized only Thursday he was nailed to a tree in the Capriano family plot . . .”
“Yes.” The rhythm of Mr. Anthony’s speech became almost operatic. “Let him stand there, surrounded by the graves of his ancestors, his great-grandparents, his grandmother, the place where I will be buried, his father and mother. Let him consider his place in this world, in the Capriano family. Let him consider the standards, values by which we all have lived. Let him consider his disgrace in the face of family. Let him think about himself, make the decision right then and there as to what his standards and values are, whether he is a member of the Capriano family or not!”
“And rip his ear from the tree?”
Mr. Anthony shrugged. “Or live with us all forever with his shame.”
“Shame for what? What disgrace? What did Billy do?”