Maria stopped praying with her knuckle rosary and resorted to a long swallow of wine.
“Three hundred and ninety-six of the dead were children under the age of ten,” Jacob continued. “A passenger train was tumbled off the tracks, killing twenty. Another train with tank cars got smashed around, and oil spilled across the flood waters, ignited, and all these people clinging to floating debris were surrounded by flames, no way to escape. Their choice was being burned alive or drowning.”
“Dessert?” Agnes asked.
Over generous slices of Black Forest cake and coffee, Jacob at first held forth on the explosion of a French freighter, carrying a cargo of ammonium nitrate, at a pier in Texas City, Texas, back in 1947. Five hundred and seventy-six had perished.
Mustering all her hostess skills, Agnes gradually turned the conversation from disastrous explosions to Fourth of July fireworks, and then to reminiscences of summer evenings when she, Joey, Edom, and Jacob had played cards—pinochle, canasta, bridge—at a table in the backyard. Jacob and Edom, paired, were formidable competitors in any card game, because their memory for numbers had been sharpened by years of data gathering as the statisticians of catastrophe.
When the subject shifted to card tricks and fortune-telling, Maria admitted to practicing divination with standard playing cards.
Edom, eager to learn precisely when a tidal wave or falling asteroid would bring his doom, fetched a pack of cards from a cabinet in the parlor. When Maria explained that only every third card was read and that a full look at the future required four decks, Edom returned to the parlor to scare up three more.
“Bring four,” Jacob called after him, “all new decks!”
They wore out a lot of cards and kept a generous supply of all types of decks on hand.
To Agnes, Jacob said, “Likely to be a sunnier fortune if the cards are bright and fresh, don’t you think?”
Perhaps hoping to discover which runaway freight train or exploding factory would smear him across the landscape, Jacob pushed aside his dessert plate and shuffled each deck separately, then shuffled them together until they were well mixed. He stacked them in front of Maria.
No one seemed to realize that predicting the future might not be a suitable entertainment in this house, at this time, considering that Agnes had so recently and horribly been blindsided by fate.
Hope was the handmaid to Agnes’s faith. She always held fast to the belief that the future would be bright, but right now she was hesitant to test that optimism even with a harmless card reading. Yet, as with the fifth place setting, she was reluctant to object.
While Jacob had shuffled, Agnes had taken little Barty from his bassinet into her arms. She was surprised and discomfited to discover that the baby was to have his fortune told first.
Maria turned sideways in her chair and dealt from the top of the four-deck stack, onto the table in front of Barty.
The first was an ace of hearts. This, Maria said, was a very good card, indeed. It meant that Barty would be lucky in love.
Maria set aside two cards before turning another faceup. This was also an ace of hearts.
“Hey, he’s going to be a regular Romeo,” said Edom.
Barty cooed and blew a spit bubble.
“This card to mean also is family love, and is love from many friends, not just to be kissy-kissy love,” Maria elucidated.
The third card that she placed in front of Barty was also an ace of hearts.
“What are the odds of that?” Jacob wondered.
Although the ace of hearts had only positive meanings, and although, according to Maria, multiple appearances, especially in sequence, meant increasingly positive things, a series of chills nevertheless riffled through Agnes’s spine, as if her vertebrae were fingers shuffling.
The next draw produced four of a kind.
Whereas the lone heart at the center of the rectangular white field inspired amazement and delight in her brothers and in Maria, Agnes reacted to it with dread. She strove to mask her true feelings with a smile as thin as the edge of a playing card.
In her fractured English, Maria explained that this miraculous fourth ace of hearts meant that Barty would not only meet the right woman and have a lifelong romance worthy of epic poetry, would not only be showered all his life by the love of family, would not only be cherished by a large number of friends, but would also be loved by uncountable people who would never meet him.
“How could he be loved by people who never meet him?” asked Jacob, scowling.
Beaming, Maria said, “This is to mean Barty will to be some day muy famous.”
Agnes wanted her boy to be happy. She didn’t care about fame. Instinct told her the two, fame and happiness, seldom coexisted.
She had been gently dandling Barty. Now she held him still and kept him close to her breast.
The fifth card was another ace, and Agnes gasped, because for an instant she thought it was also another heart, an impossible fifth in a stack of four decks. Instead: an ace of diamonds.
Maria explained that this, too, was a most desirable card, that it meant Barty would never be poor. To have it follow four aces of hearts was especially significant.
The sixth card was another ace of diamonds.
They all stared at it in silence.
Six aces in a row, thus far consecutive as to suit. Agnes had no way of calculating the odds against this draw, but she knew that they were spectacularly high.
“Is to mean he is to be better than not poor, but even rich.”
The seventh card was a third ace of diamonds.
Without comment, Maria set aside two cards and dealt the eighth. This, too, was an ace of diamonds.
Maria crossed herself again, but in a different spirit from when she’d crossed herself during Edom’s rant about the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. Then, she’d been warding off bad fortune; now, with a smile and a look of wonder, she was acknowledging the grace of God, which, according to the cards, had been settled generously on Bartholomew.
Barty, she explained, would be rich in many ways. Financially rich, but also rich in talent, in spirit, intellect. Rich in courage, honor. With a wealth of common sense, good judgment, and luck.
Any mother ought to have been pleased to hear such a glowing future foretold for her child. Yet each glorious prediction dropped the temperature in Agnes’s heart by another few degrees.
The ninth card was a jack of spades. Maria called it a knave of spades, and at the sight of it, her bright smile dimmed.
Knaves symbolized enemies, she explained, both those who were merely duplicitous and those who were downright evil. The knave of hearts represented either a rival in love or a lover who would betray you: an enemy who would deeply wound the heart. The knave of diamonds was someone who would cause financial grief. The knave of clubs was someone who would wound with words: one who libeled or slandered, or who assaulted you with mean-spirited and unjust criticism.
The knave of spades, now revealed, was the most sinister jack in the deck. This was an enemy who would resort to violence.
With his ringleted yellow hair, coiled mustache, and haughty right profile, this was a jack that looked as if he might be a knave in the worst sense of the word.
And now to the tenth card, already in Maria’s small brown hand.
Never had the familiar red Bicycle design of the U.S. Playing Card Company looked ominous before, but it was fearsome now, as strange as any voodoo vèvè or satanic conjuration pattern.
Maria’s hand turned, the card turned, and another knave of spades revolved into view, snapped against the table.
Drawn one after the other, two knaves of spades didn’t signify two deadly enemies, but meant that the enemy already predicted by the first draw would be unusually powerful, exceptionally dangerous.
Agnes knew now why this prognostication had dismayed rather than charmed her: If you dared to believe in the good fortune predicted by the cards, then you were obliged to believe in the bad, as well.
In her arms, little Barty burbled contentedly, unaware that his destiny supposedly included epic love, fabulous riches, and violence.
He was so innocent. This sweet boy, this pure and stainless infant, couldn’t possibly have an enemy in the world, and she could not imagine any son of hers earning enemies, not if she raised him well. This was nonsense, just a silly card reading.
Agnes meant to stop Maria from turning the eleventh card, but her curiosity was equal to her apprehension.
When the third knave of spades appeared, Edom said to Maria, “What kind of enemy does three in a row describe?”
She remained fixated on the card that she had just dealt, and for a while she didn’t speak, as though the eyes of the paper knave held her in thrall. Finally she said, “Monster. Human monster.”
Jacob nervously cleared his throat. “And what if it’s four jacks in a row?”
Her brothers’ solemnity irritated Agnes. They appeared to be taking this reading seriously, as though it were far more than just a little after-dinner entertainment.
Admittedly, she had allowed herself to be disturbed by the fall of the cards, too. According them any credibility at all opened the door to full belief.
The odds against this phenomenal eleven-card draw must be many millions to one, which seemed to give the predictions validity.
Not every coincidence, however, has meaning. Toss a quarter one million times, roughly half a million heads will turn up, roughly the same number of tails. In the process, there will be instances when heads turn up thirty, forty, a hundred times in a row. This does not mean that destiny is at work or that God—choosing to be not merely his usual mysterious self but utterly inscrutable—is warning of Armageddon through the medium of the quarter; it means the laws of probability hold true only in the long run, and that short-run anomalies are meaningful solely to the gullible.
And what if it’s four jacks in a row?
At last Maria answered Jacob’s question in a murmur, making the sign of the cross once more as she spoke. “Never saw four. Never even just I see three. But four…is to be the devil himself.”
This declaration was received seriously by Edom and Jacob, as if the devil often strolled the streets of Bright Beach and from time to time had been known to snatch little babies from their mothers’ arms and eat them with mustard.
Even Agnes was briefly unnerved to the extent that she said, “Enough of this. It’s not fun anymore.”
In agreement, Maria pushed the stack of unused cards aside, and she peered at her hands as if she wanted to scrub them for a long time under hot water.
“No,” Agnes said, shaking loose the grip of irrational fear. “Wait. This is absurd. It’s just a card. And we’re all curious.”
“No,” Maria warned.
“I don’t need to see it,” Edom agreed.
“Or me,” said Jacob.
Agnes pulled the stack of cards in front of her. She discarded the first two, as Maria would have done, and turned over the third.
Here was the final knave of spades.
Although a cold current crackled along the cable of her spine, Agnes smiled at the card. She was determined to change the dark mood that had descended over them.
“Doesn’t look so spooky to me.” She turned the knave of spades so the baby could see it. “Does he scare you, Barty?”
Bartholomew had been able to focus his eyes much sooner than the average baby was supposed to be able to focus. To a surprising extent, he was already engaged in the world around him.
Now Barty peered at the card, smacked his lips, smiled, and said, “Ga.” With a flatulent squawk of the butt trumpet, he soiled his diaper.
Everyone except Maria laughed.
Tossing the knave onto the table, Agnes said, “Barty doesn’t seem too impressed with this devil.”
Maria gathered up the four jacks and tore them in thirds. She put the twelve pieces in the breast pocket of her blouse. “I buy to you new cards, but no more ever can you to be having these.”
Chapter 32
MONEY FOR THE DEAD. The decomposing flesh of a beloved wife and an unborn baby transmuted into a fortune was an achievement that put to shame the alchemists’ dreams of turning lead to gold.
On Tuesday, less than twenty-four hours after Naomi’s funeral, Knacker, Hisscus, and Nork—representing the state and the county—held preliminary meetings with Junior’s lawyer and with the attorney for the grieving Hackachak clan. As before, the well-tailored trio was conciliatory, sensitive, and willing to reach an accommodation to prevent the filing of a wrongful-death suit.
In fact, attorneys for the potential plaintiffs felt that Nork, Hisscus, and Knacker were too willing to reach an accommodation, and they met the trio’s conciliation with high suspicion. Naturally, the state didn’t want to defend against a claim involving the death of a beautiful young bride and her unborn baby, but their willingness to negotiate so early, from such a reasonable posture, implied that their position was even weaker than it appeared to be.
Junior’s attorney—Simon Magusson—insisted upon full disclosure of maintenance records and advisories relating to the fire tower and to other forest-service structures for which the state and the county had sole or joint custodial responsibility. If a wrongful-death suit was filed, this information would have to be divulged anyway during normal disclosure procedures prior to trial, and since maintenance logs and advisories were of public record, Hisscus and Knacker and Nork agreed to provide what was requested.
Meanwhile, as attorneys met on Tuesday afternoon, Junior, having taken leave from work, phoned a locksmith to change the locks at his house. As a cop, Vanadium might have access to a lock-release gun that could spring the new deadbolts as easily as the old. Therefore, on the interior of the front and back doors, Junior added sliding bolts, which couldn’t be picked from outside.
He paid cash to the locksmith, and included in the payment were the two dimes and the nickel Vanadium had left on his nightstand.
Wednesday, with a swiftness that confirmed its eagerness to make a deal, the state supplied records on the fire tower. For five years, a significant portion of the maintenance funds had been diverted by bureaucrats to other uses. And for three years, the responsible maintenance supervisor filed an annual report on this specific tower, requesting immediate funds for fundamental reconstruction; the third of these documents, submitted eleven months prior to Naomi’s fall, was composed in crisis language and stamped urgent.
Sitting in Simon Magusson’s mahogany-paneled office, reading the contents of this file, Junior was aghast. “I could have been killed.”
“It’s a miracle both of you didn’t go through that railing,” the attorney agreed.
Magusson was a small man behind a huge desk. His head appeared too large for his body, but his ears seemed no bigger than a pair of silver dollars. Large protuberant eyes, bulging with shrewdness and feverish with ambition, marked him as one who’d be hungry a minute after standing up from a daylong feast. A button nose too severely turned up at the tip, an upper lip long enough to rival that of an orangutan, and a mean slash of a mouth completed a portrait sure to repel any woman with eyesight; but if you wanted an attorney who was angry at the world for having been cursed with ugliness and who could convert that anger into the energy and ruthlessness of a pit bull in the courtroom, even while using his unfortunate looks to gain the jurors’ sympathy, then Simon Magusson was the counselor for you.
“It isn’t just the rotten railing,” Junior said, still paging through the report, his outrage growing. “The stairs are unsafe.”
“Delightful, isn’t it?”
“One of the four legs of the tower is dangerously fractured where it’s seated into the underlying foundation caisson—”
“Lovely.”
“—and the undergirding of the observation platform itself is unstable. The whole thing could have fallen down with us on it!”
From across the vast acreage of the desk came a goblin c
ackle, Magusson’s idea of a laugh. “And they didn’t even bother to post a warning. In fact, that sign was still up, inviting hikers to enjoy the view from the observation deck.”
“I could have been killed,” Junior Cain repeated, suddenly so horrorstruck by this realization that an iciness welled in his gut, and for a while he wasn’t able to feel his extremities.
“This is going to be an enormous settlement,” the attorney promised. “And there’s more good news. County and state authorities have agreed to close the case on Naomi’s death. It’s now officially an accident.”
Feeling began to return to Junior’s hands and feet.
“As long as the case was open and you were the sole suspect,” said the lawyer, “they couldn’t negotiate an out-of-court settlement with you. But they were afraid that if eventually they couldn’t prove you killed her, then they’d be in an even worse position when a wrongful-death suit finally went before a jury.”
“Why?”
“For one thing, jurors might conclude that the authorities never really suspected you and tried to frame you for murder to conceal their culpability in the poor maintenance of the tower. By far, most of the cops think you’re innocent anyway.”
“Really? That’s gratifying,” Junior said sincerely.
“Congratulations, Mr. Cain. You’ve had a lot of luck in this.”
Although he found Magusson’s face sufficiently disturbing that he avoided looking at it more than necessary, and though Magusson’s bulging eyes were so moist with bitterness and with need that they inspired nightmares, Junior shifted his gaze from his half-numb hands to his attorney. “Luck? I lost my wife. And my unborn baby.”
“And now you’ll be properly compensated for your loss.”
The popeyed little toad smirked over there on the far side of his pretentious desk.
The report on the tower forced Junior to consider his mortality; fear, hurt, and self-pity roiled in him. His voice trembled with offense: “You do know, Mr. Magusson, what happened to my Naomi was an accident? You do believe that? Because I don’t see…I don’t know how I could work with someone who thought I was capable of…”
The runt was so out of proportion to his office furniture that he appeared to be a bug perched in the giant leather executive chair, which itself looked like the maw of a Venus’s flytrap about to swallow him for lunch. He allowed such a lengthy silence to follow Junior’s question that by the time he answered, his reply was superfluous.
Finally: “A trial lawyer, whether specializing in criminal or civil matters, is like an actor, Mr. Cain. He must believe deeply in his role, in the truth of his portrayal, if he’s to be convincing. I always believe in the innocence of my clients in order to achieve the best possible settlement for them.”
Junior suspected Magusson never had any client but himself. Fat fees motivated him, not justice.
As a matter of principle, Junior considered firing the slit-mouthed troll on the spot, but then Magusson said, “You shouldn’t be bothered any further by Detective Vanadium.”
Junior was surprised. “You know about him?”
“Everyone knows about Vanadium. He’s a crusader, self-appointed champion of truth, justice, and the American way. A holy fool, if you will. With the case closed, he has no authority to harass you.”
“I’m not sure he needs authority,” Junior said uneasily.
“Well, if he bothers you again, just let me know.”
“Why do they let a man like that keep his badge?” Junior asked. “He’s outrageous, wholly unprofessional.”
“He’s successful. He solves most of the cases assigned to him.”
Junior had thought most other policemen must consider Vanadium to be a loose cannon, a rogue, an outcast. Perhaps the opposite was true—and if it was, if Vanadium was highly regarded among his peers, he was immeasurably more dangerous than Junior had realized.
“Mr. Cain, if he bothers you, would you want me to have his choke chain yanked?”
He couldn’t remember on what principle he’d considered firing Magusson. In spite of his faults, the attorney was highly competent.
“By the close of business tomorrow,” said the lawyer, “I expect to have an offer for your consideration.”
Late Thursday, following a nine-hour session with Hisscus, Nork, and Knacker, Magusson—negotiating in conjunction with the Hackachak counsel—had indeed reached acceptable terms. Kaitlin Hackachak would receive $250,000 for the loss of her sister. Sheena and Rudy would receive $900,000 to compensate them for their severe emotional pain and suffering; this allowed them to undergo a lot of therapy in Las Vegas. Junior would receive $4,250,000. Magusson’s fee was twenty percent prior to trial—forty percent if a settlement had been reached after the start of court proceedings—which left Junior with $3,400,000. All payments to plaintiffs were net of taxes.