Blood Makes Noise (30 page)

He caught his foot on a kneeling bar, fell hard to the stone, and his cheek rested cold on the cardinal’s grave and he didn’t—couldn’t—rise, and the blood from his foot ran in small eddies through the chiseled words
Ciordana Prap Pro Sacerdotibus
. He crawled forward, dragging his forehead on the stone, leaving a snail’s trail to the sacristy door, where the floor turned to terra-cotta, where he pulled a phone down with a crash from the table and dialed the only number he knew in Italy.

“
Pronto
?”

“Gina.”

“Michael?”

“Help me.”

O
n Christmas morning Michael walked on Lake Michigan. The coldest afternoon in a generation, and the horizonless gray table seized suddenly at the shore, stiffened, and went white silent a mile out.

Children came down to its edge to taunt its lifelessness, to slap hockey pucks among the frozen sailboat moorings, to stare out at the wonder of it. For freezes happened on Erie, on Huron, but never on deep Michigan. To see it conquered like this brought the entire city to its shore.

Where Michael began to walk.

Past the hockey games and breakwater, where the freeze beneath him was the conviction of granite. Out beyond the hand-off voices of children, first into stillness, then into the battleground of ice and water, lake and winter, its howls rumbling in his bones. Further out the water clenched at different levels, creating pressure ridges that exploded as craggy mountain ranges. Michael scaled them, slid down their backs. He didn’t understand exactly what drew him out here, so far alone, only that he was nine, bursting with it, and he had to see it, speak with it, climb its whitened heights.

And he saw wonders for himself alone, and his lake did speak to him and the sound was history breaking.

He struggled up the tallest mountain of ice, not half a day old, stood on its forming pinnacle, thrust out his arms, and declared, “I am nine years old and I am master of all I see.”

The ice boomed in reply, endless, but there was another sound now, a new one of low cracking. Michael squinted at the shimmering expanse, past seagulls stomping the dead lake angrily…

And saw the freighter.

An iron smudge near shore, lumbering for Gary, cutting the lake in a dirty slice.

Cutting off Michael.

He watched it, geared so low it vibrated windows on Randolph Street, tried to believe, to work out a way it wasn’t dividing him from the city, murdering him. And Michael slid down the zippered ice-mountain and began to run. On the way out his steps had been sure, confident. Now, in a mad desperate lunge to beat the freighter to shore, he slipped, stumbled, and tore his hands on razor shards of frozen lake.

And the harder he fought the ice, the more it conspired against him as he went down and down again. It was only when he surrendered, accepted that the freighter would cut him off forever, that the ice began to deliver up purchase. The moment he tried to dominate it, the lake’s frozen back turned on Michael and drove him down until he once again submitted, accepted, and the lake would once again lift him, push him, slow the freighter…

It was like that, here on the sacristy floor. When he fought the fog, it closed over and smothered him. When he let go, gave it run, the fog thinned and he could move a little in one pointless direction or another.

The phone receiver howled off the hook, jumbled up somewhere near him. At some point he twisted up in its cord and snapped it off.

He had no idea how long he’d been there, tried to measure time in the growing puddles of his blood. The tile floor ate without prejudice the heat from any part of his body that rested against it, and he had begun to shiver and chatter and it felt absurd…

“Hold still.”

“Gina?”

“I’ll get help.”

“Gina…”

The face seemed bigger than he remembered. Darker. Its voice nervous and unsure, and it was the priest of this trampy church, not Gina, hovering above him.

“Please. Stay still.”

“Gina.”

“You are very sick.”

Fluorescence. Stiff cotton coats hard on his cheek. Dreamy voices, none of them Gina.

Till one is.

And across the years, the blood loss, the lactate stabilizers pumped into him, it’s the same. And nothing, nothing about him is the same, and he can hear it when she speaks his name.

“Michael.”

“I’m sick.”

“You’re a mess.”

“Do they have guns?”

“You are in a clinic.”

“Do they have guns?”

“No, Michael.”

“Take me away.”

“They are going to move you, Michael. To a bigger hospital. This is only a small town.”

“You have to take me.”

“You’re hurt, Michael.”

He reached up blindly, crushed something in weak fingers, and drew it close. Dark-blonde hair. “If I stay here I die…If I stay here I die…”

Repeated till his strength failed and his sight clouded milky lead. “If I stay here I die…”

In the end they just walked out.

She gave him her shoulder so he could limp. Put him in the backseat so he could lie down, drove slowly because the curves hurt, to her town, where she eased him to bed, half-conscious, and shot him up with painkillers, because she had these things.

He begged her, over and over in his delirium, to go back and get the truck. She asked him why, and he only repeated that she had to get the truck…She had to get the truck…

Feeling that he was stable enough for her to leave, Gina drove to the poverty town, and the truck was where Michael had crashed it, soaked with blood the local police assumed was from the accident. No one from the hospital had apparently told them their patient had a bullet hole in his swollen ankle, and so the truck remained unmolested outside the church.

There was no one in the piazza, and Gina simply drove the truck away. She parked it in her garage and sat up with Michael as he slept, dreamless.

The next day he woke, looked at her, said he was sorry. Gina nodded. Told him not to move too much. It was the same house from so long ago. The same room, and the room had changed little. She was quieter than he had remembered. Measured, as she carefully tested his shot ankle. She wore her hair to the shoulder, pushed behind her ears, and her eyes were still deep brown but steadier than memory. She was Gina and she wasn’t, and he could only imagine what she thought of the wreckage stirring now in her childhood bed.

She told him, with her help, to get up. As he swung his legs slowly over the edge he asked, “Are your parents still out of town?”

“Careful,” she said, but he bumped his foot on the plank floor anyway and the pain was white thunder clear up to his jaw.

She eased him across the hall into another room that, to his surprise, had been converted into a small medical treatment space. Gina lowered him onto a raised, stainless steel examination table, asked him to lie down, and it was cold and too small for him.

“Curl up,” she suggested.

“It’s too small.”

“It’s made for dogs.” He didn’t understand. “I’m a veterinarian, Michael. Curl up.”

He obeyed, and she began taking off the bandage. Michael watched his foot, purple and swollen, oozing juices clear, juices yellow, juices red.

“They left the wound open. That’s normal. They were probably concerned about contamination from the bullet. The blood flow helped wash away foreign fragments. I’ll sew it closed now.”

“Have you done this before?”

“People shoot dogs too.”

She took out a length of sterilized thread.

“Did the doctors call the police?”

“If not they certainly have now.”

“That means I’m wanted, Gina. By the police. By…everybody.”

“I know.” She pumped the wound with lidocaine, and the first tugs of the suture were a dull, tearing sensation. “You said it in your sleep.”

“What else did I say?”

“Lots of things. Were any of them true?”

“Were they awful?”

“Worse.”

“Then they were true.”

She put him in her childhood bed, lit a small coal fire in the grate, and opened the windows to the mountain breeze. He hunkered in the blankets, and she told him to sleep.

“Did you talk to me? When I was asleep?”

“Yes, Michael.”

“About yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Was it awful?”

“No. But it wasn’t the truth, either.”

It’s dark and Michael wakes to a shutter creaking. He gets up and limps to the phone in her living room. The codeine’s worn off and with each downhill pump of his heart the foot backstops a thud of agony. He lifts the phone from its cradle, keeps his foot above his heart on the back of a chair, because that seems to help, and dials a Madrid number. The line hisses, and the ring on the other end is sleepy, but not the voice answering, for it never sleeps.

“Michael.”

“Hector.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m alive.”

“What happened?”

“I just wanted to talk to a friend. Are you still my friend, Hector?”

“Of course.”

“Why does the US government have a warrant out for me, Hector? Why does every Carabinieri here?”

“I can find out, Michael. Has there been any sign of the Montoneros?”

“Oh, one or two.”

“Is She safe?”

“She’s with me.” Hiss crept over the line, far off, like wind on the moon. “I’m alone in this, aren’t I?”

“Was it ever any other way, my son?”

“I’m going to do this. But not how we planned. No highways. No safe houses. My way.” You could hear a breeze, probing the house. “It’s cold here.”

“Are there stars?”

“They are not my friend.”

“I’m your friend, Michael. And I’ll be waiting for you.”

He hung up, limped back along the wall toward his bed. Stopped first at the examination room and rifled the drawers till he found the amphetamines. Stuffed them under his mattress, because the trip would be long, because he was hurt…just because.

H
e read the telex again, looking stupidly for a nuance he might have missed, but it was a telex and the message was clear:
no
.

No
to floating the loss.
No
to delaying the payment of the futures.
No
to extending the line.
No, no, no
. The registered letter beside it was longer, flowery in a way only New York legalese can manage, direct even in its evasiveness: it was gone.

All of it.

Oh, there’d be fire-sale recoveries, pennies on the dollar, globs of meat pulled from the feeding frenzy that had followed, but it was only tailings, for the stake in main had resolutely gone down with the ship.

Otto Spoerri spread the telex and registered letters out like roadkill and reached for his glass, but it was empty, so his hand drew a bottle from the desk and filled it. It was a nice desk, one of the finest here, because he was family.

He sucked a bolt, traced its burning journey. The nice desk faced the nice wall of Brazilian rosewood covered in nice portraits of un-nice men, all of whom were his ancestors. He disliked their gaze on the best of days and this was not the best of days.

The office was nice but not the nicest, because another man now sat there, a man to whom he, and these paintings, were not related. A man who knew utterly the inventory of each item in Otto’s office but two: the letters before him and the Luger Otto had stuck into his own mouth this morning but hadn’t fired, dried saliva still on the barrel.

The Luger he kept at his side, but the letters and telex he tore into strips and burned in an ashtray.

His father lay dead a decade now, but the family crime was now run by a man not family but more son than he.

The secretary stuck her head in, concerned at the thick haze of burned paper. “Herr Spoerri?”

“Get out.”

She did. He drank.

The same gene pool that humiliated him also gave him a vague portfolio, if not trust, at the bank for life. For that, for a chance to honorably claim his birthright from a dead man he loathed, Otto Spoerri had taken a chance. The kind of chance his father, or grandfather, would have taken.

And lost.

It had been a sure thing, an absolute money-maker for the bank, and he couldn’t even remember how now.

Otto had taken, against every Swiss banking law known, deposit funds to do it. Millions. And they wouldn’t miss it at first, but there would be an audit soon enough and then the man in the nicest office to whom he was not related would disgrace Otto—perhaps imprison him—and so, though the bank carried his name, the Luger seemed to speak it louder. He had already tasted it once, its tang still in his mouth, when the other piece of paper had arrived.

It was not flowery nor a telex nor much but a phone number. He had burned it, but not before calling, and after a brief conversation had set the Luger aside. For now…

He swayed on the way out of his office, and the secretary avoided his gaze. Fuck her.

The bank was quiet so near lunch, and the reps were trying to look busy, pretending not to notice him pass, adjusting their ties, straightening creases. He despised them.