Surrender, New York

  “I take it you’ve been feeding his treats to that cat of yours,” Clarissa said, watching Terence do his mad little dance, but telling him to be quiet as soon as he began yapping: an instruction he obeyed, returning to her feet as I took the chair next to hers.

  “Nothing of the kind,” I quickly lied. Then I leaned over to lightly kiss her cheek, which had been made rough less by age than by years in exotic climates. “How are you, old girl?”

  That brought me a quick smack across the head with a rolled-up copy of The Wall Street Journal, one of three newspapers—the others being The New York Times and the Albany Times Union—that she had delivered to her post office box and read thoroughly every day. “That’s about enough of that kind of wise-assery,” she said, taking up the pack of Camels on the arm of her chair. Sticking one of the nails in her mouth, she took out an old pipeline lighter and lit it, offering the flame first to me. “I take it you’d like a light? Although I wish you’d knock it the hell off. Isn’t one leg enough?”

  “Apparently not,” I said, pulling out one of my own cigarettes and accepting her light, then watching as she took a deep drag of her own, which was held between nicotine-stained fingers. “Besides, may I remind you that osteosarcoma is overwhelmingly a congenital cancer?” She let out an avoiding, dismissive blast of smoke from her mouth and nostrils, then pressed her point:

  “So—are you going to tell me why there’s a rather large bullet hole in one of those machines you made me buy? Or are we going to pretend that it didn’t happen?”

  “Well, I could tell you what I know, Clarissa,” I answered, “but it isn’t much, and I think you’d get more information by talking to the kid who explained it to me. The one I told you about last night, Derek Franco. I’d like you to talk to him, anyway, see what you think. Some form of autism, would be my guess. Whatever the case, I need to know if the things he says can be relied on.”

  “Franco…” Clarissa mused, glancing up from her paper. “I’ve been trying to place the name ever since you mentioned it. I had some contact with his parents, can’t remember what. A town meeting, maybe. He’s better off without them, though, I can tell you that.”

  “Well, he is without them,” I answered. “I’m not even sure his legal name is Franco, anymore—not since all this disappearing and adopting business.”

  That made her slap the Journal down in her lap in tightly controlled anger. “How does that happen? How is it happening? What is wrong with this society, that people ‘throw away’ their own children?” She lifted her paper again. “This country has changed, in the last fifteen years…”

  “There was a time when you desperately wanted it to change,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, when it needed changing!” she declared. “When that fool Nixon was in the White House talking about kikes and niggers and fags!” Sighing, she added, “And who knows? That day may be approaching, again.” She got her outburst under control. “Oh, hell. So what do you want me to try to get out of this boy? Since you aren’t yet ready to tell me the truth about what happened Sunday night.”

  “I can’t tell you all of it, Clarissa, until you talk to Derek,” I insisted. “Because I simply don’t know the truth, and I think he may—but he isn’t telling me.”

  “And what makes you think he’ll tell me?”

  “Well,” I gambled, “we were walking through the back hall, just now, and he became quite impressed by the pictures of you and Diana. I think he developed a kind of a crush on her.”

  Clarissa paused, glanced at me quickly, then sniffed away any sentimentality and stated, “That’s very discerning of him.”

  “And I think he was quite fascinated by you, too—in a different way, of course.”

  “Naturally.”

  “So—maybe you could start there, build on that, construct something of an intimate relationship, move on to the gunshot, and then—who knows what?”

  Clarissa put her paper down slowly and turned to me. “Do you ever stop using that psychological training of yours to manipulate people? Or has it become like breathing, at this point?”

  “You’ve got some right to complain,” I mumbled, preparing for another assault. “Where do you think I got my start?”

  That netted me a long stare, as she deliberately blew smoke in my face. “I beg your pardon?”

  I decided to ignore the question, and said: “Will you try?”

  Sighing, she lifted her paper again. “I swear, if you hadn’t inherited my eye color, I would believe you had been left here by Gypsies…”

  “Well, you never know—I suppose some Gypsies must have green eyes.” I lifted myself with my arms and leaned over to give her another kiss. “Thanks, Clarissa. This will help immensely.”

  “Stop doing that,” she said, feigning annoyance and rubbing her cheek. “And I take it that what this will ‘help’ with is the little démarche on New York that you’re apparently planning in the next few days?”

  This time, I was the one taken aback. “Now, how the hell…?”

  “Your partner,” she replied with a smug smile. “He evidently thinks that the walls of this house are made of concrete—and he’s been chattering away with someone in the city about a missing collection of antiques of some kind, and mumbling to himself about how it will give you a place to start when you go there. Given the nature of the case, I assumed you’d be moving on the tip soon.”

  “Hmm,” I noised. “Yes, Michael often forgets that he doesn’t live in a housing bunker in Queens anymore. The nitwit. But I can explain all that to you later.”

  “And you will—that and much more.” Clarissa snapped her paper fully open with both hands and didn’t turn as she said, “Because I’ll tell you something, Trajan—that ‘political meeting’ I went to last night? It wasn’t a political meeting at all. It was several of my more trusted friends in the county government, and one from the Governor’s Mansion, explaining to me just exactly how much you and Michael have been pissing certain people in law enforcement and the county and state governments off. They urged me to talk you out of carrying on with what you’re doing. And, depending on what I hear from you all this evening, I may have to try to do that. Shiloh is supposed to be yours, one day, Trajan—and I’d hate to see it go to those preppy siblings of yours because you screwed up and got your head blown off. Clear?”

  I let out a deep, heavy breath. “Clear,” I said.

  “All right, then. Go and get the boy, now,” Clarissa continued. “Leave us alone while you gather the rest of your band in the living room for drinks. Well? Go on!”

  Grinning, I got to my feet and started back through the doorway to the living room.

  Michael and Derek had by now made it to the photos on the piano, most of which had been taken in places other than those in the hallway, since they dated to the period after 1967, when the Six-Day War had turned much of the “romantic” Middle East into a perpetual battleground. Indeed, I think the fact that there had ever been a time when such places had been considered exotic or alluring was even more foreign and fascinating to Derek—a child and victim of the post-9/11 era—than it was to me. And so I understood the look of wide-eyed wonder with which he beheld the images of two women whose lifestyle marked them, after all, as technically damned in most of the locales they had visited, moving as freely as if they had experienced no censure at all: which, in the main, they had not, a fact that spoke as much to their charm and force of character as it did to anything else.

  “I hate to break this little party up, fellas,” I said to Mike and Derek, as they leaned on the piano with their backs to me. “But we’ve got to round up the other two and gather in here for drinks.”

  “I can go get them!” Derek made a move toward the back hallway; and once again, I had that peculiar feeling that he was seeing through my little charade.

  “That’s all right, Derek,” I said. “Mike and I have got to lock the JU-52 up for the night, anyway.”

  “Well, then,” the kid maneuvered q
uickly, “I can at least come with you, can’t I?”

  “You could, but you could also do me a favor, if you would.”

  “A favor?” Derek asked, reverting to his default attitude of suspicion.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “A favor. See, my great-aunt is kind of a big shot in local politics, but she doesn’t know, as most of them don’t seem to know, very much about the whole ‘throwaway children’ thing. And she wants to. Plus, she doesn’t want to say anything impolite by mistake, once Ambyr and Lucas get here. So—do you think you could take a few minutes while we do what we need to and tell her about what happened with your folks and Lucas’, and with Ambyr—all that stuff? It would mean we don’t have to cover it during dinner, when it might be slightly more embarrassing.”

  “Oh.” Derek was clearly relieved, having likely thought the favor I was going to ask would involve something more onerous; that, and he enjoyed being treated as an adult. “Yeah, I guess I could do that much, anyway.”

  Leaning on Derek’s shoulder with my free arm once again, I turned him to the doorway to the porch. “Okay, then, let me just introduce you, and then we’ll see how it goes.”

  As I let the kid walk ahead of me toward the brightly lit French doors, the sunset blurring the lines of his silhouette, it seemed to me that he might be passing into another world; which, when Clarissa greeted him with a firm handshake and a smile, I realized that he was, given the town he’d grown up in. I might have been a strange character to Derek; but Clarissa represented, for all practical purposes, another race of beings, although the careful work Mike and I had done to exploit his attraction to the photos inside and particularly to the captivating image of Diana made certain that this was a species—unlike, say, Marcianna—that Derek now felt no uneasiness about; one that, on the contrary, he would immediately trust.

  “Nice work, L.T.,” Mike said. “And me, too, of course. Not to mention Clarissa. The kid’ll be putty in her hands.”

  He gave me a pat on the back, one that I found disturbing rather than satisfying. “Was it such nice work, Michael?” I asked.

  “Well,” he answered, moving to the defensive, “we proved our point, didn’t we?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “We proved our point, all right—the point that those throwaway kids probably walked into their final situations with their eyes open and smiles on their faces.”

  “But—this isn’t the same, L.T.,” Mike protested, “Derek has a family, he’s got Lucas and Ambyr.”

  “He’s got a family,” I answered, still angry, mostly with myself. “But they’re not his family—not even those two, no matter how much they want to be. No, Mike. That boy bears watching; because whatever the four victims fell for, he might just fall for it, too. Anyway…Let’s get the others, before I start feeling any shittier…”

  Which I soon ceased to do, harsh as that may sound. But Mike, I soon remembered, had supplied us with the concrete first step we needed for our attack on those members of the world’s “new” wealthy who embody the same approach to impoverished and lost children that old money has always displayed; a desire to make use of them, in this case in very intimate if as yet still (to us) unproven ways. Our trip to New York would, I had no doubt, clarify just what those ways were, but first we would require a sponsor, which was a large part of the reason for my wanting Lucas and Derek present for dinner: we were going to have to get not only Clarissa’s blessing, but her financial backing, so that we could move among the people we were targeting with complete credibility.

  Thus Mike and I, after making sure all was well within the JU-52, hurried Lucas and Ambyr along toward dinner, Ambyr once again locking her arm onto my free one, and Lucas once again describing everything to his sister, as we approached and then reentered the house. It was a task made all the easier for the kid to perform with real excitement because he was himself so amazed by all the things he came across. I will admit that I had never truly appreciated just what a beautiful home Diana and Clarissa had created out of an already stately, if idiosyncratic, one until I heard Lucas describing every detail of it: the colors of walls, moldings, curtains, floors, rugs, the textures of them all, the antiques that remained from the Colonel’s time and the artifacts brought home from all over the world by my great-grandfather and then by Diana and Clarissa. There were a few hiccups—“She’s a dyke?” Lucas exclaimed in a voice that was close to being too loud, after he’d seen the first of the photos of Diana and Clarissa and had them explained to him—but all in all, things went well; Ambyr’s excitement was just as great as Lucas’, and was expressed by her holding my arm tighter with hers, or at times even wrapping both her two around my one, so that her body pressed against mine, further heightening reactions that had seemed to have gone from my life forever.

  Once we were all in the living room, exploration having come to an end, we found that Annabel had set out a tray with Clarissa’s usual ice bucket and bottle of Talisker, along with smooth crystal glasses and a smaller container of crushed ice in which sat two bottles of Genesee beer: Clarissa’s standing rule was that kids of fifteen should be allowed one or two beers on social occasions, while young ladies of twenty could be given the good stuff. Lucas, ecstatic at this enlightened approach, quickly informed his sister that she couldn’t do anything about it, because it wasn’t her house and she didn’t make the rules, here; to which Ambyr replied that one beer was fine, so long as he drank it slowly, rather than getting so suddenly hammered that he acted like an idiot all through dinner. This agreement struck, we sat on the matching olive suede couches that faced each other in front of Colonel Jones’ massive fireplace, the mantel pillars of which had been fabricated from two 12-pounder Napoleon Model 1857 cannon, the principal field pieces of the American Civil War. Pyramids of shot for each stood at their bases; and upon these items Lucas waxed especially rhapsodic to his sister, especially after he’d had a couple of deep pulls off his bottle of Genesee. As for Ambyr, one Talisker and I felt her head resting on my shoulder, as if she had finally reached the sort of place she had long dreamt of calling home. Only Marcianna’s absence disturbed her, to which I said that she would soon meet Terence and understand all.

  For Mike and me, however, there was always the proverbial and disturbing ticking clock: whatever else we needed to do during this dinner, we also needed to stay relatively sober and get down to Heinsdale as soon as we could…

  Eventually Derek appeared from the front porch, looking quite happy and even rather pleased with himself: whatever Clarissa might say about my abilities to manipulate people psychologically, she truly was the past master, and she had evidently done quite a job on him. As he immediately snatched up his own beer and joined Lucas at the fireplace, I excused myself from Ambyr’s side and rose to intercept Clarissa, who followed Derek into the room in a few minutes, ambling at an uncharacteristically slow pace toward the scotch bottle. I knew this was because she had some message she wanted to give me, so I lit a cigarette and stood close as she pulled out one of her Camels, took the light I offered her, and then murmured to me, in a very urgent tone:

  “I don’t know exactly what that kid is hiding, Trajan—but it’s important, and it’s weighing him down. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he experiences some kind of nervous breakdown within the next few days…”

  We would talk more of this later, I knew; but for now, I simply turned to Mike, who had been watching us both, and nodded very certainly. Clarissa, meanwhile, went to fill a crystal tumbler full of ice and Talisker. This she downed fairly quickly, before spending some time talking with Lucas and Ambyr and then saying that it was time to get to the table. Right after she’d made this announcement, however, she asked Lucas if he would guide his sister to the dining room, as she needed to discuss some family business with me while we went in. I knew this to be an absurdity, because Clarissa and I never had any family business to discuss. My great-aunt disliked the rest of my family even more than I did: her antipathy toward my father had been rooted in his doing no
thing at prep school and then his Ivy League college save go out for sports and drink, but it had reached critical mass when he had failed to get me to a qualified oncologist in time to not only save more (or perhaps all) of my leg, but also avoid the kind of nightmarish experiences that I had been enduring that summer. For this, Clarissa had never forgiven him; and after my final boyhood surgery, she’d made it known that the rest of my family—including my brothers and sister, who were, in the end, quite similar in tastes and personalities to my father—were no longer welcome at Shiloh, allowing me my first experience of self-esteem.

  None of which explained what she might want to discuss with me that evening before dinner, unless it was more about Derek; but her look told me that this was not so. We moved more slowly than the others across the living room and toward the candlelit dining room, one side of which opened onto the porch. Clarissa said nothing in the time it took us to reach the arched partition between the two rooms, while I, in my vanity, began to think that perhaps she had simply wanted to walk in with me, and reached out with my arm to take hers, only to be slapped away as if I were a mad dog.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “You know how it pisses me off.” As I let my free arm drift back to my side, Clarissa whispered on: “Although I understand why your brains are so scrambled that you’re acting like an idiot. I’m just glad I was here to impartially confirm how much trouble Derek is in.” Pausing to watch as Lucas described our dining setting to Ambyr, my great-aunt at length concluded, “She’s quite a beautiful girl, isn’t she? And smart. Very smart.”

  “Yes, she is,” I answered without thinking; then, catching myself, I jibed, “Why, do you want me to put in a good word?”

  That got me not a slap but a closed fist in my arm, and a painful one, at that. “No, you little changeling,” Clarissa said. “Don’t be crass. Besides, I wouldn’t dream of interfering with destiny.”