Identical

  Paul put a small digital recorder on the table and turned it on.

  Hal’s eyes ran back and forth to it.

  “I told you this would stay between us,” Hal said.

  “Right. But I’d rather not pat you down for a wire or try to figure out if this room is bugged. I’ll have my own copy, in case you ever go back on your word.”

  Hal’s look darkened. Paul wasn’t sure Hal was a secure-enough guy to deal with the open distrust, but he was the one who’d asked for the meeting.

  “I’ll just get to the point,” Hal said. “I wanted you to know that I’m going to pull all those ads about you. I told the agency to get them off the air, even the ones where we’ve paid for the time already.”

  Paul nodded, trying to show no other reaction. There was a “but” coming.

  “I suspect Georgia will appreciate that,” Paul said. “I saw her a few weeks ago, and she thinks her hair looks like it was done by the serial killer in No Country for Old Men.”

  “Nobody tricked her.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “She wasn’t lying, was she?”

  Paul moved a hand to suggest that wasn’t worth a response.

  “What can I do for you, Hal?”

  Kronon had a heavy, unhealthy look. He was heading into his late sixties now. His hair was fleeing and age was overtaking him quickly. Zeus looked like a movie star at Hal’s age. Those recessive genes were a bitch.

  “I’m considering making a public statement,” Hal said.

  “You’ve already made a few.”

  “This one will say I’m convinced you had no role in my sister’s murder.”

  Paul’s heart spurted, much as he wanted to contain his reaction. They would have a chance, if Hal did that. He still wouldn’t bet on himself—too many voters just had a bad taste in their mouths at the mention of his name, and some by now were unsettled by the thought that his identical twin, a person with the same DNA, was a killer, even if he wasn’t. But still. They might crawl back to second by the time of the first election in two weeks.

  “That’s a rather substantial change of heart,” Paul finally said.

  “Well, we’ve learned some stuff.”

  “Like?”

  “That it was your mother’s blood in my sister’s room. Not yours or Cass’s. Lidia’s fingerprints are there, too. I have the report from Dickerman in my pocket, if you want to take a look.”

  Paul inhaled a few times to still the combination of fear and rage that flushed through him.

  “How in the hell did you get my mother’s fingerprints?”

  Hal shrugged. “I already told you. The Internet. Everything’s out there.”

  Paul took a second. The last thing he could tolerate was Hal Kronon in the role of wise guy.

  “What do you want, Hal? I know you want something in exchange.”

  “Nothing complicated. I want to know what happened,” Hal said. “I’ve spent twenty-five years sure you and your brother shorted my family on the truth. So I’d like to hear the whole story. And if you tell me, assuming it’s true, I’ll make that statement.”

  “Who decides if it’s true?”

  “Me.”

  Paul smiled.

  “I don’t know what happened, Hal. I wasn’t there.”

  “But you know what you’ve been told.”

  Paul thought for a second. This was always a tale like the shell of a snail, whorls on whorls, and one that he’d known for a quarter of a century could never be shared. Back in the day, his mother always repeated a Greek proverb. ‘He who reveals his secret, makes himself a slave.’ Hal Kronon was the last person in the world to whom he’d make himself or his family a slave, especially after the sacrifices of the last twenty-five years.

  “I’m not talking about that with you, Hal. And if I did, you wouldn’t believe me anyway. But I’ll tell you this one thing as a favor. Even today, I’m not sure who killed your sister. And I never have been. All I know for certain is that it wasn’t me, and that I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “That’s all I have to say, Hal.”

  “You’ll lose the election.”

  “Thanks to you.” Paul was in fact increasingly at peace about losing. He’d turned fifty nearly a year ago. This was a good time to pull back and think about his life and what he really wanted, instead of capitulating to momentum, like a kid flying downhill on a sled. He was sick of meetings like this, with people begging or bullying, or trading favors. He’d longed for power for some good reasons, but also because that was what his mother always wanted for them, and because after Cass’s guilty plea, he felt more obliged than ever to redeem their lives. But he’d done it and discovered power was a trap. You controlled less than you thought, and got beaten on like a piñata, and never escaped watching eyes, except at home. He could stand losing. The one who would be inconsolable was Cass. Paul wondered for a second if Cass would have taken Hal’s deal. Probably not. But Cass wasn’t here.

  He webbed his hands tightly before he spoke, hoping to contain his anger.

  “You know, Hal. I need to be honest. You have a lot of nerve. You’re pulling those ridiculous commercials off the air? Great. You think I don’t realize your lawyers have advised you that if you leave them up now, knowing all this, that I can re-file for defamation and clean your clock? Those ads always were a bunch of malicious lies, and you’ve been promoting them for months. Which is the real point. Any decent human being, having learned what you have, would come here to say one thing: ‘I’m sorry. I’m going to the top of the ZP Building to scream to the world that I was wrong and that I’m sorry.’ Instead, you’re trying to hold me up, and to get me to sell out my family as the price of what even a modest respect for the truth should require you to do anyway.”

  Hal leaned over the table, coming perilously close. Paul could feel the heat of his breath when he spoke, and took in the beefy odor of his person beneath his cologne.

  “You talk to me about respect for the truth?” Hal asked. “Your family has been hiding it for decades. My parents lived with Dita’s death every day until they died. And I realized all along that none of us knew what really happened. And you think I owe you something, out of duty or honor? Excuse me, but somebody in your family killed my sister.”

  “Somebody in my family went to prison for twenty-five years. And frankly, as I told you before, even today I don’t know what happened. Maybe nobody in my family killed your sister.”

  “Then why did Cass plead?”

  “We’re done with this conversation.” Paul stood up and grabbed his recorder. “I think your political views, Hal, are goofy. I always have. And I think your tactics are low. But I always thought you had some limits, that in your own cockeyed way you were a decent guy.”

  Ever a baby, Hal looked for a second like he was going to cry. Then he stiffened himself with a comforting truth.

  “You’re done for,” he told Paul. “You’ll never be mayor.”

  Paul answered from the door.

  “So what?” he asked.

  IV.

  27.

  Dita—September 5, 1982

  Dita Kronon sheds her wet clothes and heaps them on the floor, where Tula, the maid, will deal with them in the morning. After grabbing a short pool robe from her closet, Dita crashes on her bed and clicks the TV remote. She told Greta she might slide by for a drink at 10:30, but she’s shredded now that she’s down from the ’lude, and Cass will be here by midnight.

  It’s been a long day already. She nearly did a dance when the rain sent all those shrieking greaseballs back to where they came from. Her parents are all the time telling her to embrace her heritage, but she has been explaining to them since she was about twelve that she is an American. Period. She’s called Dita because that was as much of Aphrodite as she could pronounce at the age of two, but she’s clung to it, rather than be known by a name so foreign and weird.

  Hal, naturally, love
s all of the Greek stuff, but he was born over there and still speaks the language. He’s into all the rigmarole at church, the pained figures on the walls and the incense and chanting and the priest shoveling out the so-called Holy Gifts to everybody in the room from the same fucking spoon, all of which to her feels like a really bad Halloween party. But Hal is a dork, who sometimes seems to embarrass her parents simply by breathing. Dita loves him anyway. Whenever she gets ready to marry somebody, she might look for a man a little like Hal, at least somebody as devoted and kind.

  But she won’t marry anyone right now, which she’s been explaining to Cass for weeks. She’s gotten herself into a bad thing with Cass. She met him Memorial Day weekend at the club, where he was working as a lifeguard for pocket money, while he waited for the police academy to start.

  ‘Watch this,’ she told Greta, as soon as she found out who he was. The whole concept was to see the look on his face when she told him her name. She’s gone out with plenty of guys, even done a few, purely on a bet or because it will make a good story. She was wearing a two-piece her parents had forbidden her to put on at the club under any circumstances, and she motored over to where Cass could see her, and smiled up to the chair while she squinted in the sun. And of course, as soon as it was his turn to climb down, he came over. He was good-looking, you had to give him that, very hunky, all that great Greek hair. That was one thing she liked about being Greek. The hair. And the food. That, too.

  Cass is a good person, for sure, nicer, smarter, funnier than she expected. And it always thrills her when a guy falls as hard as he has, even though it also seems to paralyze something inside her. Cass truly gets a lot about her. He understands what she’s doing at Jessup, how deeply she connects with her clients, these beat-up kids who everybody wants to act normal after there hasn’t been a single normal fucking thing in their lives. But Cass seems like he’s on this big mission with her, as if he’s such a prize that she’ll like herself better, just because. And with all his good intentions, Cass is becoming a pest.

  She is pondering all of this, when, like a ghost, Mrs. Gianis steps out of Dita’s bathroom. Her heart turns to a fist for a second, while she assures herself that she’s not tripping. Dita grabs her robe around her and pulls herself up on an elbow.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I came in from the rain and the washrooms downstairs were occupied.”

  “That was four hours ago.”

  “Once I was here, I realized that I should take the chance to speak to you, Dita.”

  Dita is the only person in the house who can lock her door. Her mother found one of those tarnished old brass skeleton keys and gave it to Dita when she was thirteen, telling her to turn the key every night. That was a very, very fucked-up period around here, which nobody ever speaks about, and which Dita does her best not to recall. Every now and then, especially when nightmares wake her, memories float back at her, shapes in the darkness and the sensation of weight upon her and the suffocating aroma of her father’s cologne, and the severe look from her dimwit mother when she handed Dita the key, as if it were all Dita’s fault. But her room as a result has always been Dita’s sanctuary. Once she turns the key, neither of her parents will do any more than timidly knock, which is why she loves to ball Cass—and several before him—right here. And also why Lidia’s presence is so wrong.

  “Well, I was fucking standing outside for about six hours.”

  “We need to talk privately. Like two adults. And I was afraid, Dita, if I asked you to do that, you would never agree.”

  She is right about that, for sure. Dita has more need of a third tit than a heart-to-heart with Mrs. Gianis.

  “So you broke into my bedroom instead? I think you better go.”

  “I need to talk to you about Cassian.” In her silly floor-length muumuu, Mrs. Gianis has crept close to Dita’s bed. Her long fingers are webbed in front of her heart, in an aspect of prayer.

  “Sorry, Lidia. That’s none of your business.” The Gianises are old-world and Dita knows calling Mrs. Gianis by her first name will seem impudent.

  “I need to ask you, Dita, to stop seeing him.”

  “Ditto. MYOB.”

  “Dita—”

  “Look, Lidia, right now I’m just fucking your son, so don’t worry about it.”

  Mrs. Gianis slaps her. Hard. Dita’s cheek erupts in pain, almost as if it’s been skinned. The old woman has advanced on Dita so quickly she barely has had time to react, and in the process of drawing back, or maybe in recoil from the blow, she’s whacked the back of her skull against the mahogany headboard. In the meantime, Lidia has retreated at least twenty feet, obviously shocked at herself, and is suddenly crying, an act that seems as unlikely as if a stone statue were standing here shedding tears.

  “Oh my God,” she keeps saying. Lidia had been doing her in-charge thing, her favorite routine, but now the old lady has lost it and grown frantic. She presses a hand to her forehead, like it will hold in her brain.

  “I am pleading with you to act like an adult, Dita. To listen to me.”

  Dita tenderly touches her cheek and tells Mrs. Gianis to fuck herself.

  “You cannot marry Cass. Or, God forbid, have his child.”

  “‘God forbid’? Is that this old crap? The Gianises against the Kronons? You and your feuds. My father always says your family are like hillbillies.”

  “He never said that.”

  “I’ll call him down here.”

  “He would not speak about me or my family that way.”

  “‘Just a bunch of sheep-fucking hillbillies.’ That’s a quote.”

  “Dita, Cassian is your father’s child.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Lidia reacts as intensely and unpredictably as before, throwing her hands wide in rage and striking a pane of the French door. The resonant thump of bone against the glass sets off a cascade of remarkable sounds, a shriek from Lidia, and a pop like a muffled gunshot as the window breaks, followed by the wind-chime tinkling of the shards showering onto the concrete balcony outside. Lidia is looking down in amazement as blood bubbles from the back of her wrist. That sight, which Dita hates, as well as what Lidia has said—that her father, Captain Wanderdick, fucked her, too—is dizzying to Dita. It seems to unravel the loose knot that holds the different parts of her together. She needs to scream and she does.

  “Get out!” Her head is starting to hurt as much as her cheek. “Get the fuck out of here! Or I’m calling the police.”

  Crazed and overwrought, Lidia moves one way, then the other, dashes to the bathroom and reappears with her arm wrapped in a towel. She starts to speak, but Dita grabs the phone beside her to dial the cops.

  Crying fiercely, Mrs. Gianis struggles with the door. A little star of blood has already reached the outer layer of the towel swaddling Lidia’s forearm. Finally Dita tells her to turn the key.

  Once Dita hears the front door slam, she dials the phone in her hand. It keeps ringing until she gets Cass’s answering machine, on which she leaves a message.

  “You better get your ass over here. Your fucking mother just beat the crap out of me, and I’m totally going to call the police.” Dita is astonished to find herself crying, perhaps only over the indignity. One thing is for sure—she is done with Cass and his lunatic family. She touches the back of her head. The fucking bump is starting to swell.

  28.

  Changing Partners—May 14, 2008

  The Kindle County Tribune

  WEDNESDAY MAY 14, 2008

  Local Roundup

  Just When He Thought It Couldn’t Get Any Worse: Gianises Split

  The office of state senate majority leader Paul Gianis (D—Grayson), 50, who last month failed to qualify for yesterday’s runoff election to become Kindle County’s chief executive, announced late Tuesday that the senator and his wife of nearly 25 years, Dr. Sofia Michalis, had agreed to divorce. Dr. Michalis, 49, who heads the Reconstructive Surgery Department at University Hospital, plans to marry the sen
ator’s identical twin brother, Cass. Cass Gianis was released from the penitentiary on January 30, after completing a 25-year sentence for the 1982 murder of his girlfriend, Dita Kronon.

  It has already been a turbulent period for Senator Gianis. He was the initial favorite in the mayoral race and led by as much as 20 points in some early polls. His slide followed an intense negative advertising campaign funded by the real estate mogul Hal Kronon, CEO of ZP Properties, headquartered in Center City. Kronon alleged that Senator Gianis also had a hand in the murder of Dita Kronon, Hal Kronon’s sister, charges Gianis furiously denied. Days before the April election Kronon pulled his advertising off the air without explanation, but the change came too late for Gianis, who missed the runoff by about 3,000 votes. Following his loss, Gianis endorsed yesterday’s winner, North End councilman Willie Dixon.

  Disclosure of the Gianises’ impending divorce seems to have been timed in the hopes it would be lost amid election coverage, but the news became the subject of comment, much of it humorous, across the country, where the effect of Hal Kronon’s ads on Gianis’s campaign has already attracted substantial attention. The Tribune’s Seth Weisman, who frequently writes about Kindle County’s political oddities in his nationally syndicated column, commented immediately on his blog.

  “At least Paul has a chance to retire his campaign debt now,” Weisman wrote. “Who wouldn’t buy a ticket to that Thanksgiving dinner?”

  On the sofa in his sun-room, Tim read the Tribune item over at least three times. His first thoughts were for Sofia, who, Tim felt, would be devastated to find herself the subject of scandal. He watched as much as he could stomach of the smirking coverage of the divorce on the morning news program, then finally called Evon about 9.

  “I was just going to pick up the phone,” she said. “Hal’s already airborne, asking if this could have anything to do with Dita’s murder.”

  “I can’t see how. Can you?” Tim had never told Evon he suspected Sofia had sewed Lidia’s wounds the night of the murder. There was no way to prove it. And his loyalty to Sofia made him reluctant to see her put through Hal’s wringer.