Surrender, New York

  I moved over to glance at the photo he was studying, which had been taken in Wadi Rum, near the Gulf of Aqaba in Jordan, which was a fairly famous tourist destination despite its being in the middle of very little save relentless, and relentlessly contested, desert. The picture showed two people with their arms around each other, standing amid a fairly fearsome group of al-Huwaytat Bedouin tribesmen. The first Western figure was dressed in khaki gear, the other in much darker clothing, and both wore Bedouin kaffiyeh—the traditional headdress that today can get you instantly detained at almost any American airport—wrapped around their necks. The young woman Derek was pointing to was dressed in the khaki, and she was indeed quite beautiful, with somewhat frizzy golden hair and Gaelic features, as well as loads of native jewelry bedecking her wrists and ears; the figure beside her was shorter, and carrying her trademark leather jacket over one shoulder.

  The problem being that Derek was pointing at the wrong person. “No,” I told him. “That’s Diana Forbes. She used to live here, too, but she died. That”—I pointed at the second figure—“is Clarissa.” A boyishly styled but still pretty woman in her twenties: such had been my great-aunt at the time. She wore her dark hair slicked back, a striking look known by many names, Clarissa preferring DA for “duck’s ass”; and there was not a bangle, bracelet, or earring to be seen on her.

  Derek’s eyes went wide as he stared at the picture. “Whaaat…?” he noised, at which I realized that, because of my immersion in matters pertaining only to the case, I had forgotten to prepare him for this; indeed, I had forgotten to prepare any of the members of the Kurtz household for the full realities of life at Shiloh.

  “I’m sorry, Derek,” I said. “I ought to’ve told you. My great-aunt is a lesbian. The woman you see her with, Diana, was her ‘longtime partner,’ as the phrase goes. They backpacked over much of the world together, and then, when my great-grandfather died—you remember, the lunatic who brought the JU-52 over from Germany—Clarissa decided that she had to take over the farm and keep it going, which was tough, because my great-grandfather had let a lot of things get pretty run-down. But even with all that work to be done, and even knowing what kind of reception they could expect in Surrender, Diana came along to live here with Clarissa, and they were together until the end. Diana actually died upstairs—breast cancer.”

  “She’s dead?” Derek murmured. “Geez, that’s sad…” He continued to stare at the photo. “She really was pretty…” It was hard to determine whether he was attracted to the image of Diana because his mind was spinning some romantic or even sexual fantasy around it—and Diana really had been quite a stunning woman, especially at the time that that photo in particular had been taken—or if it was a kind of a maternal call that he was answering: for Diana—with whom I’d grown up, during the weekends, vacations, and summers I spent at Shiloh, and most especially during my periods of recuperation after my surgeries and treatments—had been a wonderfully tender and caring human being, qualities that tended to radiate out even from her photos.

  “Yes, she was,” I answered, continuing to observe the young man’s reactions. “Mind you, Clarissa was quite pretty, herself. It’s just that—”

  “It’s just that she looks like a guy in these pictures,” Derek answered, innocently enough. “I mean, they teach us about tolerance and all in school, what we’re supposed to say and think about gays and lesbians, but we don’t really have many.”

  “You may have more than you think,” I said, aware, through my work, of the rough official estimates of actual teen and young adult homosexuality—and the various responses to it by parents—in Burgoyne County.

  “Could be,” Derek answered with a nod, going back to the entrance into the hall and studying the other photographs anew. “But we sure ain’t got any that are this—what do you call it?”

  “You call it butch, is what you call it.” Derek and I turned to see Mike standing shirtless in his doorway, with a pair of charcoal suit pants covering his lower half. He was speaking in little more than a whisper, for all his desire to shock Derek: he knew that Clarissa could be almost anywhere, and that a crack like that, if overheard, would earn him a serious dressing-down, if not a smack from the rattan stick (actually a camel crop, a memento of her traveling days) that she usually carried. “So you found out the big secret about Miss Clarissa Jones, eh, Derek?” The kid nodded silently. “Yeah, well, trust me, things only get weirder, the longer you stay up here.”

  “What’s so weird about being a lesbian?” Derek asked, with that same artlessness.

  “Nothing,” Mike said. “In New York City, that is. In Surrender—you have to admit, it’s a little bit strange.”

  “Oh,” Derek noised. “You mean ‘weird’ like unusual, then? Not like it’s a sick thing, like they used to say in the Baptist church that my mom sometimes dragged me to.” He turned back to the photos, still enraptured, even as the beginnings of rage came into his voice: “Dragged me when she wasn’t too hungover, that is. Right up until she broke just about every rule in the Bible and left her own kid on his own…”

  Mike and I exchanged a look of both shock and grim satisfaction at our continued success: we had taken the young man out of his familiar environment, and his usual defenses were crumbling. Yet he kept staring at the photos, seemingly unaware of what he had said.

  “But, Derek,” Mike said, quietly and engagingly, “you’ve got Lucas and Ambyr, right? They’re taking care of you.”

  The young man’s voice at that moment became so deliberate, so peculiarly ingenuous, that it was chilling: “Not…the same…thing…” he murmured.

  “But they don’t ever hold your living with them over you, do they?” I asked carefully.

  “Don’t have to,” the boy answered. “It’s already over me. And it ain’t like they can move it. But I’ll get out from under it, one day. One day—it’ll be my turn to go…”

  It was a moment with the young man that I could only have hoped for when I suggested that he come to the house; and best of all, I had Mike there as a witness—

  But we were interrupted at just that instant: the swinging door into the kitchen suddenly opened, revealing Annabel. Each of us jumped a little at her arrival, prompting her to say, “Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were all standing right there—excuse me. But, Trajan, dinner will be ready in about half an hour, and you know how your aunt is about cocktails, so you may want to gather your guests up.”

  “Thanks, Annabel,” I said, smiling but knowing that the moment with Derek was now irretrievably dispelled. And, as if to seal the deal, Annabel went over and stood by the kid, looking at the photograph with him as she wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Isn’t it a lovely picture?” she said to Derek.

  “Yeah, it is,” he replied with a nod, once again and completely returned to his usual “slow,” innocent state—not through calculation, but simply because he had returned from whatever strange and more forthcoming place his mind had been visiting.

  “We were just discussing how many gay and lesbian citizens Surrender actually has, Annabel,” Mike said, quickly pulling on a blue polo shirt. “Care to make a wager?”

  Annabel blushed deeply, but she did not shy from the question—mostly because she did not shy from much, which was why she had lasted forty years at Shiloh, arriving when my great-grandfather died, running things throughout my own and then Diana’s cancer, enduring my great-aunt’s terrible period of adjustment, and finally lasting through Mike’s and my entrance and a return to something like peace on the farm. “Well,” she said, “I know that it’s unusual; but I also know that there’re more than most know of. Yes, indeed…” And then she went back through the kitchen door, having stated her point and needing to stick to my great-aunt’s unalterable timetable.

  “See?” Derek said, although to whom he was trying to prove his point was unclear. “Just ‘strange’ as in unusual, maybe—and maybe even not that unusual.”

  “Isn’t that what I s
aid?” Mike asked collegially. “It’s certainly what I meant. Trust me, Derek, there is nothing weird or sick about lesbians. Why, some of my best friends are lesbians.”

  “Like who?” I droned.

  “Well,” Mike defended, “let me put it this way: I wish some of my best friends were lesbians—”

  “Just knock it off, will you?” I said, lowering my own voice as I increased its urgency. “We don’t have time for your rich fantasy life, right now. Annabel said when we came in that you’d been going on about something in your room, and that Clarissa could hear your voice through the door and the walls, though I hope not what you were actually saying. So what’s that all about?”

  “Oh, shit, I almost forgot! Given the, uh, moment, here,” he said, inclining his head toward Derek, who had returned to being enraptured by the initial photo that he had seen on the wall. “Will you excuse us for just a second, Derek? I gotta bring my ignorant partner, the esteemed doctor, up to speed on a couple of points.”

  That got a smile out of Derek, whose eyes stayed on the photo. “Sure, Mike. I’ll be right here.”

  Then Mike grabbed my arm and pulled me into his train wreck of a room, closing the door. An iMac was sitting on a small desk under the window, and a printer alongside it was busily churning out an e-mail that filled the screen of the computer. “I don’t know about you, L.T.,” he whispered, “but that kid is starting to give me the distinct creeps. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but—we have tapped into something that I hope we don’t end up wishing we’d left alone.”

  “Yeah, I know the feeling,” I answered, just as quietly. “But it’s forward motion, you have to admit that. And I assume you’ve made some of the same on your own?”

  “Some? Ha! I got you a frickin’ gift, kid.” He snatched the page out of the printer and handed it to me. “Direct from the detection gods to the Sorcerer of Death.”

  I was too confounded by his excitement to argue the stupid nickname one more time. “What the hell is it?” I asked, although I had already perceived the letterhead of some kind of “memorabilia emporium” in New York, which made my heart begin to race. “I hope it’s good enough for you risking being overheard by Clarissa—”

  “Go on, look more closely,” Mike said, still smiling. Unable to wait for me to figure it out, he quickly divulged: “That is our target, or at least the initial one. It’s the name and address of the guy that Latrell stole those jerseys from.”

  I kept staring at the paper, seeing that it was indeed a reply to a request Mike had made concerning information about a collection of basketball jerseys that Mike had told the company he had reason to believe were missing and might have been stolen. It culminated with a name, telephone number, and address in Manhattan: an expensive if garish address. “No fucking way,” I murmured, feeling the beginnings of a sense of excitement. “But how…?”

  “Like I told you, I called Pete, and asked him to use his phone to get as many pictures as he could of both sides of the authentication documents that the BCI has—and he did it, then texted the pictures to me. Apparently it wasn’t even that hard, Mangold’s bunch’re busy grilling the hell out of those two freaks from down in Heinsdale—”

  “Jimmy and Jeanette Patrick,” I said.

  “Yep—and there’s more. Pete just called me, which is the conversation Clarissa must have heard, though it wouldn’t have made any sense to her.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “Whatever, motherfucker—the point is, even I couldn’t help getting excited—seems like the pair were picked up last night, on schedule; Steve and Pete were called in on the bust, and watched the BCI tear just about everything that might have information on it or in it out of their house. Pete, knowing what we’d told him, went over the whole place, after that; didn’t find anything weird, then left with Steve. But later, Steve decided to post Pete on the scene, which’d been all taped up, just in case. So there was a period of about maybe three or four hours where nobody was there—supposedly. Then I get a call just a little while ago—Pete’s still down there, and he’s shitting bricks, but he won’t say about what, even though he’s on his personal cell and not calling over official communications. So I figure, What the fuck?, but all he says is that he needs us to get down there tonight, and the sooner the better, because he doesn’t know who’s going to show up when.”

  “Or,” I said, considering the matter, “who exactly may be watching the scene from where. Which means…” I tried to arrange all that I’d just been given and all that already lay before us for that evening in my head. “Which means that we do indeed have to get down there tonight.”

  “What about dinner?” Mike asked, trepidation bleeding through his words. “We bug out on this, and Clarissa will have our asses. Plus we’ve got them all here, already.”

  “Dinner, we do,” I stated certainly. “We’re just going to have to give her the edited version, and hope she can still find out something on her own.” I studied the piece of paper before me for a few more seconds. “You’re sure this is genuine?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” Mike answered, pulling on a dark grey jacket that matched his pants. “Told them I was a PI; hell, one of the guys had even heard of me—me, dickhead, not you. ‘Apprentice’ my ass. Come on, let’s get them all rounded up and get a drink—I, at least, have fucking earned it.”

  “Yes, you have,” I answered. “But listen to this, first: I just found a bullet hole in the roof of the Prowler that Lucas, Marcianna, and I were riding in the other night.” Mike’s hand, which had been on his doorknob, came off it, as his face went straight with sudden alarm. “Yeah,” I went on. “On top of that, it turns out our friend Derek is something of a firearms savant—and he figures it was the same caliber bullet that the State Police snipers use.”

  Mike’s expression of concern blended, at that point, with bewilderment. “What the fuck?” he whispered. “You think the state cops would actually get involved in trying to hit one of you?”

  “No, not really,” I answered. “But somebody could’ve been trying awfully hard to make it look like they were.”

  “Jesus…” Mike stood staring out the window over the desk for a moment. I knew he was thinking that whoever had been shooting at us was likely tied up in Gracie Chang’s “accident,” as well; and I was therefore reassured when he suddenly said, “Well, if we didn’t hit ‘pause’ for Gracie almost getting killed, we certainly can’t hit it for this kind of bullshit. Not with a lead like this. Fuck ’em, you go deal with Clarissa, and I’ll entertain Derek while you check her mood. And get my drink.”

  “Right,” I answered, turning to leave the room, but then remembering that I still had the printed e-mail in my hand. I started to hand it back to Mike, who moved to take it; then I held it up, gave him a small smile, and said, “This was nice work, Dr. Li.”

  “Damn right it was,” he declared.

  “Just watch how much you drink,” I said. “We’re going to need our wits about us, later…”

  Mike got Derek to continue hanging out in the hallway and to go on studying and discussing some more of the photographs on the walls, and then in the rooms beyond. Not that Derek needed much urging to hang back: whatever he’d heard about me before he’d first wandered up Death’s Head Hollow with Lucas, he’d apparently heard some distressing things about my great-aunt, as well (although not, at that point, about her sexuality), and he preferred to wait until he had the backup of his guardian and foster-brother before he made her acquaintance. Unfortunately, I couldn’t permit that: moving quickly to prepare Clarissa to encounter Derek alone, I made my way through the dining room, with its high, grey-green wainscoting and series of extremely valuable antique sideboards interrupted by Aubrey Beardsley prints (which would have been merely hackneyed, had they not been real), then crossed through the living room to the narrow French doors that led out onto the porch, going past Diana’s old Steinway grand piano, which was crowded with more pictures taken during the couple’s journeys. I
paused, finally, taking a moment to straighten my attire a bit, until I heard Clarissa’s voice, which was deep and resonant, despite how many unfiltered Camel cigarettes and belts of scotch she had gone through in her life without managing to kill herself:

  “All right, Trajan—get out here and try to explain why I shouldn’t shut down this operation, since it’s already come close to getting you, along with a valued state employee, killed…”

  {iv.}

  I gave up the battle to make myself any tidier than I already had or could; instead, I grabbed a shot of scotch from a nearby sideboard, downed it, then pulled out my watch as I stepped onto the porch. “Really, Aunt?” I said. “I’m here a full fifteen minutes early, and I don’t get at least a little credit?”

  Clarissa was seated in one of a group of old, barn-green Adirondack chairs that lined the west side of the porch, her face to the setting sun. I rarely studied any of the various collections of photographs of her that were around the house before these little meetings of the minds of ours: such could sometimes cloud debate with emotion. But on this evening, perhaps because she was awash in the sunset, or perhaps because she was wearing a light, black leather jacket much like the one that she had had slung over her shoulder in the photo from Wadi Rum, it occurred to me how little she had changed over the years—and most of that little had taken place during the ten years since Diana had finally succumbed to her cancer. That tragedy had caused stern, grey-white streaks to appear in the hair that she continued to wear short and combed straight back, and had wizened the skin around her brows, eyes, and mouth rather suddenly, or what had seemed to me at the time to be suddenly; but her green eyes were still penetrating, and her small frame was still remarkably agile. A checked shirt, black jeans, and a pair of old deck shoes completed her appearance, each a tiny variation on what she could be found wearing almost every evening; and at her feet was the (if pressed I will concede) undeniably amiable little ball of white fur, Terence, who—less out of habit than because my jacket pocket was giving off a distinct aroma—rushed over and began panting and pawing at my knees.