Sacred

  I thought of the mother. Inez. Bought at fourteen by a man who thought anything was for sale. And unfortunately, he was usually proven right. What kind of life had she had in that big house with that crazed megalomaniac?

  One in which, I guess, her only refuge was in taking pen to paper and writing about the life she’d led before that man had come and taken her away. And who to share her most precious inner world with? Her daughter, of course, as trapped and soiled by Trevor as she was.

  “Please,” Desiree said. “Will you help me?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She reached across and took my hand. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Her thumb ran up the inside of my palm. “No,” she said. “Really. I mean it.”

  “I do, too,” I said. “Don’t mention it. Really.”

  “Are you and Miss Gennaro…?” she said. “I mean, have you been…for very long?”

  I let the question hang in the ten inches of space between us.

  Her hand dropped away from mine, and she smiled. “All the good ones are taken,” she said. “Of course.”

  She leaned back in her chair and I held her gaze and she didn’t look away. For a full minute, we looked at each other in silence, and then her left eyebrow arched ever so slightly.

  “Or are they?” she said.

  “They are,” I said. “In fact, one of the last good ones, Desiree—”

  “Yes?”

  “Dropped off a bridge the other night.”

  I stood up.

  She crossed her legs at the ankles.

  “Thanks for the coffee. How’re you getting to the airport?”

  “I still have a car Jay rented for me. It’s due back at the downtown Budget tonight.”

  “You want me to drive you and drop it off?”

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, her eyes on her coffee cup.

  “Get dressed. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Angie was still sleeping so deeply I knew the only alarm clock that could wake her would be a hand grenade. I left her a note, and Desiree and I went out to her rented Grand Am and she drove toward the airport.

  It was another hot, sunny day. Same as every other one I’d seen since arriving. At around three, I’d learned from experience, it would rain for half an hour, and things would cool for a bit, then the humidity would steam off the earth to follow the rain, and it would be brutal until sundown.

  “About what happened back in the room,” Desiree said.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “No. I loved Jay. I did. And I barely know you.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “But, maybe, I dunno…Are you aware of the pathology of many incest and sex abuse victims, Patrick?”

  “Yeah, Desiree, I am. Which is why I said to forget it.”

  We pulled onto the airport roadway and followed the red signs for the Delta terminal.

  “Where’d you get your plane ticket?” I said.

  “Jay. He bought two.”

  “Jay was going along with this?”

  She nodded. “He bought two,” she repeated.

  “I heard you the first time, Desiree.”

  She turned her head. “You could be back here in two days. Meanwhile, Miss Gennaro could get some sun, see the sights, relax.”

  She pulled up at the Delta gate.

  “Where do you want to meet us in Boston?” I said.

  She stared out the window for a moment, her hands on the wheel, fingers tapping lightly, her breathing shallow. Then she rummaged through her purse, distracted, and reached in the back for a mid-sized black leather gym bag. She wore a baseball cap over her hair, turned backward, a pair of khaki shorts, and a man’s denim shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Nothing special, and she’d still put cricks in the necks of most men she passed on the way to her plane. As I sat there, the car seemed to shrink around us.

  “Ahm, what did you ask me?” she said.

  “Where and when tomorrow?”

  “When are you arriving?”

  “Probably tomorrow afternoon,” I said.

  “Why don’t we meet in front of Jay’s condo building?” She got out of the car.

  I climbed out, too, as she took another small bag from the trunk and closed it, gave me the keys.

  “Jay’s building?”

  “That’s where I’ll be lying low. He gave me a key, the password, the alarm code.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What time?”

  “Six.”

  “Six it is.”

  “Great. It’s a date.” She turned toward the doors. “Oh, I almost forgot, we have another date.”

  “We do?”

  She smiled, hoisted her bag onto her shoulder. “Yeah. Jay made me promise. April first. Fail-Safe.”

  “Fail-Safe,” I said as the temperature of my body dropped twenty degrees in the sweltering heat.

  She nodded, her eyes crinkling against the sun. “He said if anything happened to him, I was supposed to keep you company this year. Hot dogs and Budweiser and Henry Fonda. Isn’t that the tradition?”

  “That’s the tradition,” I said.

  “Well, then it’s set. A done deal.”

  “If Jay said so,” I said.

  “He made me promise.” She smiled and gave me a little wave as the electronic doors opened behind her. “So it’s a date?”

  “It’s a date,” I said, giving her my own little wave in return, beaming my best smile.

  “See you tomorrow.” She walked into the airport, and I watched through the glass as her ass swayed gently as she passed through a crowd of frat boys, and then turned down a corridor and disappeared.

  The frat boys were still watching the space she’d occupied for all of three seconds as if it were blessed by God, and I was doing the same.

  Get a good look, guys, I thought. That’s as close to flawless as some of you will ever encounter. Never, probably, was there a creature created who could match her spirit of relentless near-perfection.

  Desiree. Even her name stirred the heart.

  I stood by the car, smiling from ear to ear, probably looking like a complete idiot, when a baggage porter stopped in front of me and said, “You okay, man?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “You lose something?”

  I shook my head. “Found something.”

  “Well, good for you,” he said and walked off.

  Good for me. Yes. Bad for Desiree.

  You were so, so close, lady. And then you blew it. Blew it big time.

  PART THREE

  FAIL-SAFE

  32

  About a year after I finished my apprenticeship with Jay Becker, he got kicked out of his own apartment by a Cuban flamenco dancer named Esmeralda Vasquez. Esmeralda had been traveling with the road company of The Threepenny Opera when she met Jay her second night in town. Three weeks into the run of the show, she was pretty much living with him, though Jay didn’t think of it that way. Unfortunately for him, Esmeralda did, which is why she was probably so irate when she caught Jay in bed with another dancer from the same show. Esmeralda got her hands on a knife, and Jay got his hand on his doorknob and he and the other dancer got the hell out of Dodge for the night.

  The dancer went back to the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, and Jay came knocking on my door.

  “You pissed off a Cuban flamenco dancer?” I said.

  “It would appear so,” he said, placing a case of Beck’s in my fridge and a bottle of Chivas on my counter.

  “Was this wise?”

  “It would appear not.”

  “Was this, perhaps, even stupid?”

  “Are you going to rag on me all night or are you going to be a good lad and show me where you keep your chips?”

  So we ended up sitting on my couch in the living room, drinking his Beck’s and Chivas and talking about near castrations at the hands of women scorned, bad breakups, jealous boyfriends and husbands, and several simila
r topics that wouldn’t have seemed half so funny if it weren’t for the booze and the company.

  And then, just as the conversation was running dry, we looked up and noticed the beginning credits to Fail-Safe on my TV.

  “Shit,” Jay said. “Turn it up.”

  I did.

  “Who directed this?” Jay said.

  “Lumet.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “I thought it was Frankenheimer.”

  “Frankenheimer did Seven Days in May,” I said.

  “You’re right. God, I love this movie.”

  So for the next two hours we sat, rapt, as President of the United States Henry Fonda clenched his jaw against a coldly crisp black-and-white world gone mad, and a computer foul-up caused the U.S. attack squadron to pass the fail-safe point and bomb Moscow, and then poor Hank Fonda had to clench his jaw some more and order the bombing of New York City to placate the Russians and avoid a full-scale nuclear war.

  After it was over, we argued about which was better—Fail-Safe or Dr. Strangelove. I said it was no contest; Strangelove was a masterpiece and Stanley Kubrick was a genius. Jay said I was too artsy. I said he was too literal. He said Henry Fonda was the greatest actor in the history of cinema. I assured him he was drunk.

  “If only they’d had some sort of supersecret code word to call those bombers back.” He settled back into the couch, eyelids at half-mast, beer in one hand, glass of Chivas in the other.

  “‘Supersecret code word’?” I laughed.

  He turned his head. “No, really. Say ol’ President Fonda had just spoken to each squadron pilot privately, gave them each a secret word only he and they knew. Then he could have called them back after they crossed the fail-safe line.”

  “But, Jay,” I said, “that’s the point—he couldn’t call anyone back. They’d been trained to think any communication was a Russian trick after they passed fail-safe.”

  “Still…”

  We sat there watching Out of the Past, which had followed on the heels of Fail-Safe. Another terrific black-and-white movie on Channel 38, back when 38 was cool. At some point Jay went and used the bathroom, then came back from the kitchen with two more beers.

  “If I ever want to send you a message,” he said, his tongue thick with liquor, “that’s our code.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Fail-safe,” he said.

  “I’m watching Out of the Past now, Jay. Fail-Safe was a half hour ago. New York is blown to smithereens. Get over it.”

  “No, I’m serious.” He struggled against the couch cushion, sat up. “I ever want to send you a message from beyond the grave, say, it’ll be ‘fail-safe.’”

  “A message from beyond the friggin’ grave?” I laughed. “You’re serious.”

  “As a coronary. No, no, lookit.” He leaned forward, widened his eyes to clear his head. “This is a rough business, man. I mean, it’s not as rough as the Bureau, but it’s no cakewalk. Something ever happens to me…” He rubbed his eyes, shook his head again. “See, I got two brains, Patrick.”

  “You mean two heads. And Esmeralda would say, you used the wrong one tonight, which is why she wants to cut it off.”

  He snorted. “No. Okay, yeah, I got two heads, sure. But I’m talking about brains. I got two brains. I do.” He tapped his head with his index finger, squinted at me. “One of them, the normal one, is no problem. But the other one, that’s my cop brain, and it never shuts off. It wakes my other brain up at night, forces me to get out of bed and think about something that was bugging me and I didn’t even know it was. I mean, I’ve solved half of my cases at three o’clock in the morning, all because of this second brain.”

  “It must be tough getting dressed every day.”

  “Huh?”

  “With those two brains,” I said. “I mean, do they have different tastes in clothes and whatnot? Food?”

  He shot me the bird. “I’m serious.”

  I held up a hand. “Seriously,” I said, “I sorta know what you’re talking about.”

  “Nah.” He waved his hand. “You’re still too green. But you will know. Someday. This second brain, man, it’s a pisser. Say, you meet this person—a potential friend, a lover, what have you—and you want this relationship to work, but your second brain starts working. Even if you don’t want it to. And it sets off alarm bells, instinctual ones, and you know deep in your heart that you can’t trust this person. Your second brain’s picked up on something your regular brain can’t or won’t. Might take you years before you figure out what that something was—maybe it was the way the friend stuttered over a certain word or the way the lover’s eyes lit up when she saw diamonds even though she said she couldn’t care less about money. Maybe it was—Who knows? But it’ll be something. And it’ll be true.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I am, but that doesn’t mean I’m not speaking God’s truth. Look, I’m just saying, I ever get whacked?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not going to be by some mob ice-man or scumbag drug dealer or somebody I’d smell a mile off. It’s going to be by someone I trust, someone I love. And maybe I’ll go to my grave trusting them. Most of me.” He winked. “But my second brain, I swear it’s a bullshit detector, and it’ll tell me to set up some sort of safeguard against this person, whether the rest of me wants to do it or not. So, that’s it.” He nodded to himself, sat back.

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “What plan? You haven’t said a thing that’s made sense in at least twenty minutes.”

  “If I ever die, and someone who was close to me comes up to you and says some bullshit about having a message about Fail-Safe, then you know you got to take them out or take them down or generally fuck up their shit in a big way.” He held up his beer. “Drink on it.”

  “This doesn’t involve slicing our thumbs with razors and mingling the blood or anything, does it?”

  He frowned. “Don’t need that with you. Drink.”

  We drank.

  “But what if it’s me who sets you up for a hit, Jay?”

  He looked at me, one eye squinted shut. “Then I’m screwed, I guess.” And he laughed.

  He refined the “message from the grave,” as I called it, over the years and beers in between. April Fools’ Day was added as a second joke on the person or persons who might hurt him and then try to befriend me.

  It’s such a long shot, I used to tell him. It’s like placing a single land mine in the Sahara Desert and expecting a particular guy to step on it. One guy, one land mine, a desert three and a half million square miles.

  “I’ll take the odds,” he said. “Might be a long shot, but that land mine goes off, people are going to be able to see it for miles. Just remember that second brain of mine, buddy. When the rest of me’s in the ground, that second brain might just send you a message. You make sure you’re there to hear it.”

  And I was.

  “Take them out or take them down or generally fuck up their shit in a big way,” he’d asked me all those years ago.

  Okay, Jay. No problem. My pleasure.

  33

  “Get up. Come on. Get up.” I threw back the curtains and the hard sunlight poured into the room, filled the bed.

  Angie had somehow managed to turn herself completely sideways on the bed while I’d been gone. She’d kicked the covers off her legs, and just a slim triangle of white sheet covered her bottom as she looked up at me through bleary eyes, her hair hanging in her face like a tangle of black moss.

  “Ain’t you just the Romeo in the morning?” she said.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.” I grabbed my gym bag, started stuffing it with my clothes.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “There’s money on the dresser, it was swell, but don’t let the door hit my butt on the way out.”

  I dropped to my knees and kissed her. “Something like that. Come on. We’re in a rush.”
>
  She rose to her knees and the covers dropped away and her arms slid over my shoulders. Her body, soft and warm with sleep, crushed against my own.

  “We sleep together for the first time in seventeen years, and you wake me up like this?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “yes.”

  “This better be good.”

  “It’s better than good. Come on. I’ll tell you on the way to the airport.”

  “The airport.”

  “The airport.”

  “The airport,” she said with a yawn and stumbled out of bed and went into the bathroom.

  The forest greens and coral whites, pale blues and burnt yellows dropped away and turned to square quilted patches as we rose into the clouds and headed north.

  “Run this by me again,” Angie said. “The half-naked part.”

  “She was wearing a bikini,” I said.

  “In a dark room. With you in it,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you felt how?”

  “Nervous,” I said.

  “Whoo,” she said. “Wrong, wrong answer.”

  “Wait,” I said, but I knew I’d signed my death warrant.

  “We made love for six hours, and you still felt tempted by this little bimbo in a bikini?” She leaned forward in her seat, turned, and looked at me.

  “I didn’t say tempted,” I said. “I said ‘nervous.’”

  “Same thing.” She smiled, shook her head. “Guys, I swear.”

  “Right,” I said. “Guys. Don’t you get it?”

  “No,” she said. She raised her fist to her chin, squinted so I’d know she was concentrating. “Please. Elucidate.”

  “All right. Desiree is a siren. She sucks men in. She has an aura, and it’s half innocence, half pure carnality.”

  “An aura.”

  “Right. Guys love auras.”

  “Okeydoke.”

  “Any guy gets around her, she turns this aura on. Or maybe it’s on all the time, I don’t know. But in either case, it’s pretty strong. And a guy looks at her face, her body, he hears her voice and smells her scent, he’s a goner.”