Because It Is My Blood (26 page)

A guard ran over to me and pulled me away from Jacks. At that point, I was asked to leave Rikers Island.

“It’s okay, Anya! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any disrespect to your father,” Jacks yelled desperately at my back. “I can’t stay here! You know I didn’t have anything to do with the poisoning, and I shouldn’t be in here. You’ve got to help me. I’m gonna die in here, Annie! You can ask your boyfriend’s father to help me!”

I did not turn around because a guard was pushing me toward the exit. Even if I had been physically able to turn, I wouldn’t have.

That was the problem with Jacks. He would say anything. Daddy used to say that people who would say anything could be ignored entirely.

But what had Daddy known? Now that I was older, I was starting to wonder how much of what he’d told me had been fortune-cookie crap.

Look how successfully Jacks had injected poison into my mind.

Daisy Gogol was waiting for me outside the visitors’ building.

On the bus ride home, it wasn’t that cold but I began to shiver.

“What is it, Anya?” she asked.

I told her that the man I had gone to see had said something insulting about my dead father.

“This man—obviously, he is a criminal,” Daisy said.

I nodded.

“And a liar?”

I nodded again.

Daisy shrugged her enormous shoulders. “I think you are safe to dismiss him.”

Daisy put her heavy arm around me, pulling me toward her spectacularly muscular bosom.

She was right. What Jacks had implied about Daddy couldn’t possibly be true. I didn’t want to ask Mr. Kipling about it. I didn’t want to have to repeat it. I didn’t want my sister ever to have to hear it. I wanted to erase it from my brain. I wanted to put it in the section with all the stuff I’d learned for school that I was never going to need: Hecate’s lines in
Macbeth
and the Pythagorean theorem and the subject of Daddy’s fidelity. Gone, all gone.

(NB: If I had a daughter, the first advice I’d give her would be that willful ignorance is nearly always a mistake.)

*   *   *

When I got up to the apartment, I needed something to do to occupy my mind or at the very least, my hands. I decided to sort through Imogen’s belongings. She didn’t have much—books, clothing, toiletries—but I figured her sister would probably want them. Had it been Natty, I would have wanted her possessions.
(What had happened to Leo’s things?)

In Imogen’s nightstand, I found the copy of
Bleak House
Natty and I had given her for her birthday. How long ago that seemed.
Bleak House
was quite a lengthy novel, and Imogen was only about two hundred pages in. Poor Imogen would never find out what happened at the end of the story.

I was about to toss Imogen’s handbag into a box when I noticed a leather-bound book inside. I opened the cover. The book was the diary Natty had mentioned. It was so like Imogen to keep a paper journal. I didn’t want to snoop on her, but I also wanted to know what her last months had been like. She had always been a good friend to me, and well, I missed her.

I flipped through the pages. Her scrawl was familiar—a tiny, feminine slant.

This particular diary started about two years ago. She mainly detailed what she was reading. As I was not a reader, I found the whole thing rather boring. And then, an entry from a little over a year ago, February 2083, caught my eye:

G. getting sicker every day. Asked Mr. K. and me to help her die.
And then several weeks later:

It is done. G. sent the kids to the wedding. Mr. K. cut power to the building for an hour. I upped G.’s drugs so she wouldn’t be in any pain & I held one of her hands & Mr. K. held the other & finally her eyes closed & her heart stopped. R.I.P., Galina.

I threw the book across the room, and when it landed, I could hear some of its delicate pages tear. Imogen Goodfellow had helped Nana commit suicide! And “Mr. K.” could only be my Mr. Kipling.

I tossed the diary into a canvas bag and then I left the apartment and started walking down to Mr. Kipling’s apartment. The sky had been a menacing gray all afternoon, but the evening had made good on that threat and a truly hard rain had begun to fall. Neither I nor Daisy Gogol, who had insisted she come with me, had brought umbrellas, and we were drenched by the time we reached Mr. Kipling’s apartment at Sutton Place.

I rarely visited Mr. Kipling at his apartment. Most business could wait until the morning. I asked the doorman to call up but he recognized me and waved me toward the elevator. Daisy Gogol decided to stay in the lobby.

Mr. Kipling’s wife, Keisha, answered the door. “Anya,” she said, holding out her arms to me. “You must be freezing. You’re soaked through. Come in. I’ll get you a towel.”

I walked into the foyer, where I dripped all over their marble floor.

After a minute, Keisha returned with a towel and Mr. Kipling.

Mr. Kipling’s face was concerned. “Anya, what is it? Has something happened?”

I told him that I needed to speak to him alone. “Yes, of course,” Mr. Kipling said. He led me into his home office.

One wall was covered in pictures. Mostly, they were of his wife and daughter, but there were pictures of my father and mother, and me, Natty, and Leo, too. I noticed one or two of Simon Green.

I took Imogen’s journal out of the bag and set it on his wooden desk.

“What am I looking at?”

“Imogen’s journal,” I said.

“I didn’t know she kept one,” Mr. Kipling said.

I told him that I hadn’t known either. “She says things in it”—I paused—“things about you.”

“We were friends,” Mr. Kipling said. “I can’t know what you’re talking about unless you tell me.”

“Did you and Imogen kill Nana?”

Mr. Kipling sighed heavily and put his balding head in his hands. “Oh, Annie. Galina wanted us to. She was suffering so much. She was in pain all the time. She was losing her mind.”

“How could you do that? Do you know what Nana’s death led to? Leo getting in the fight with Mickey at the funeral, and Leo shooting Yuri Balanchine, and Leo getting shot himself. And me having to shoot Jacks. And me having to go to Liberty. And everything. Everything terrible that happened began with Nana’s death!”

Mr. Kipling shook his head. “You’re a smart girl, Annie. I think you know it started long before.”

“What do I know? I know nothing! I’ve been in the dark for a year now. You left me that way.” My face was flushed and my throat was raw. “You betrayed me! Nana and Imogen are probably in Hell! And you are going there, too!”

“Don’t say that. I would never betray you,” Mr. Kipling insisted. “The truth is, I worked for Galina before I worked for you. How could I deny her?”

“You should have come to me.”

“Your nana wanted to protect you. She didn’t want you involved.”

“She wasn’t in her right mind. She didn’t know what she wanted. You said so yourself. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Annie, I love your family. I loved your father. I loved Galina. I love you. You must know that I did my best. That I did what I thought was right.” He moved around his desk to put his arm on my shoulder but I shook him off.

“I should fire you,” I whispered. My voice was husky, and I was on the verge of losing it altogether. I’d been yelling at people all day.

“Give me a stay of execution. Just this once,” Mr. Kipling pleaded. “I love you, Annie. I love you like my own flesh and blood. There are other lawyers, maybe even better ones. But your business is not business to me. Your business is my life and my very heart. Your father was the best man I have ever known, and I promised him I would take care of you in any way I could. You know this. If ever I betray you again, even inadvertently, you have my permission to fire me immediately. God as my witness, I will fire myself.”

I turned to look at Mr. Kipling. He was holding his arms out wide, a gesture of beseeching. I moved closer to him, and I let him embrace me. For a variety of reasons, I could not bring myself to mention Simon Green.

XVI

I ATTEND CHURCH

A
SIDE FROM FUNERALS,
I had not been inside a church since Christmas Eve. At first, I had had perfectly good reasons for my truancy—hiding, Liberty, house arrest—but even after I was free, I found that I didn’t want to return. It is probably too strong to say that I had lost my faith but I can’t think of another way to describe it. I had been pious for so long, and where had it gotten me? Leo was dead, and faith-wise, I might as well have been seasick in a cargo ship in the middle of the Atlantic.

(So, why was I going to church that Sunday? Did I hope to rekindle the dying embers of my faith? No indeed, readers.)
The reason I was going to church was decidedly ungodly. I hoped to run into Sophia Bitter. I had decided that Charles Delacroix, my foe, was right. The best way to settle the question of Sophia’s involvement was to put it to her directly. Even if she lied to me, that lie would tell me something. And she couldn’t try to kill me in a church.

Natty had told me to wake her so that we could go to church together, but I didn’t want her or anyone else with me. I set out early so that I could walk down to St. Patrick’s instead of taking the bus.

I did not pay attention during the service. From the balcony, I had spotted Sophia Bitter. She sat about halfway toward the front and was wearing a red hat with a spiderlike ornament. Mickey was not by her side.

As soon as Mass was over, I ran down to the gallery to talk to Sophia Bitter.

“Sophia,” I called.

She turned unhurriedly, like she was dancing a waltz. At eye level, I could see the hat wasn’t a spider but two crimson bows sitting atop each other. “Anya,” Sophia greeted me. “How lovely to see you. Forgive me. I was on my way to confession.” Sophia moved closer to me and kissed me on both of my cheeks. Her lips were warm and sticky with lip balm. I asked her where Mickey was and she said that since Yuri’s death, he’d been going to his father’s church if not skipping Sunday Mass altogether. “Well,” she said, “I must get in the confession line.”

I asked her if something weighed particularly heavy on her soul.

Sophia cocked her head to the side and smiled a little. She paused to look me in the eyes, which I made sure to keep friendly and blank. “This is humor, yes?”

I made my voice as light as a butterfly. “Cousin Sophia, the strangest thing happened. I was on Museum Mile, and a man was selling chocolate. Of course, I asked him if he had Balanchine Special Dark. It’s my favorite, you know. And since Nana died and Jacks went to prison, no one ever brings it by the apartment.” I paused to look at Sophia. Her expression was as empty as my own, but I thought I saw her pupils dilate slightly. What had Dr. Lau said about dilated pupils? “So, I bought this bar and I forgot all about it until my boyfriend, Win—you remember him?—wanted chocolate. But when he took off the Balanchine wrapper, you’ll never guess what was underneath. It was a Bitter chocolate bar. I thought, ‘Bitter. That’s Cousin Sophia’s family. How strange that a Bitter bar should end up under a Balanchine wrapper.’”

Sophia opened her mouth to speak, and for a second, I even thought she might have a perfectly logical explanation for what had happened. Other churchgoers were passing us by. She closed her mouth decisively. She smiled more broadly than before. “All this honey,” she said with a snort.

“What do you mean?”

“All this honey. There must be a bee, Anya.” Sophia adjusted her ridiculous hat and then she appraised me with narrowed eyes. “So, we are seeing each other for the first time,” she said. Sophia took off her gloves. “What a relief this is. Of course, I am aware of the oversight that you speak of. It has happened before. The workers are supposed to take off both layers of Bitter wrapping but they’re lazy, Anya. Sometimes they forget.”

“But why are you passing off Bitter chocolate bars as Balanchine?”

Sophia didn’t answer my question. Instead she made a funny clucking sound with her tongue, almost like the sound of a rattlesnake’s tail.

“Did you arrange to have Natty and me killed?”

Sophia said nothing.

“Did you kill Leo?”

“A car bomb killed Leo. That is what Yuji Ono says. And I had nothing to do with that.”

I tried to control my voice. “So you did arrange to have Natty and me killed?”

“What if I said that I had only arranged to have
you
killed? Would the insult be less? You are a silly girl, Anya Balanchine. Yuji Ono spoke so highly of you, and I have found you nothing but disappointing.”

“I don’t care if you like me. I just need to know whether to kill you or not.”

Sophia let her bottom lip fall into an expression of mock horror. “It is Sunday, Anya. We are in church!” She paused. “No one died except Leo, so maybe you could take what happened as a warning.”

“What about your own cousin? Theo is very sick.”

“He shouldn’t have tried to intervene. I have always hated that side of my family, and they have always hated me.” It couldn’t have been true. Why would they have been so kind to me, who they had been led to believe was Sophia’s friend? “But all this is in the past, Anya. What are you going to do now? If you kill me, that would be a waste of your efforts. My relatives from Germany will come for you and Nataliya, and we Bitters will make you Balanchines look like bunny rabbits.”

She put her arms around me and whispered in my ear, “I had nothing to do with Leo’s death. That was my husband. He is sentimental and an idiot. When you didn’t agree to marry Yuji, Mickey took the opportunity to find out from Yuji where Leo was and he had him killed.” Sophia took a step away from me, then she moved back in to kiss me on the mouth. “What a waste. Yuri Balanchine was an old man, and Leo wasn’t bothering anyone in Japan.”

“I don’t understand. Why kill any of us? None of us are active in Balanchine Chocolate.”

Sophia laughed. “Do you know what the problem with Balanchine Chocolate is? Not that it is organized crime but how very
dis
organized your family is. There is no reason that a company as disorganized as Balanchine Chocolate should enjoy such dominance in this market. Do you have any idea how difficult it has been for me? I thought if I married your cousin, I’d have some chance to get everything running again…”