Galilee (60 page)

    It seemed he'd met a woman whom he'd first taken to be some kind of apparition, she was, he said, so perfect in this ghostly place, so beautiful, so graceful. Her name was Olivia, and she was apparently so charmed by Nickelberry, and he so enamored of her, that when she invited him halfway across the city to meet a friend of hers, he went.

    By the time he came back to see me he had not only met this friend, who goes by the strange name of Galilee—

Rachel stopped reading, as though struck. She looked up. The crowd was wild around her. The singers were up from their table, reeling around, the unlucky focus of their attentions still sitting, dumbfounded by drink. Danny had secured a glass of brandy, along with something for himself, and was working his way back toward Rachel's table, but he was having difficulty weaving between the partiers. Before he could catch Rachel's eye, she looked back at the journal, half expecting the words she'd seen there to have disappeared.

But no. They were there:

—this friend who goes by the strange name of Galilee—

It couldn't be the same man, of course. This Galilee had lived and died in an earlier age; long before the Galilee she knew had been born.

She had a few seconds before Danny reached her. Long enough to quickly scan the next few lines:

—but had tasted some generosity of his which had changed him in a fashion I cannot quite describe. He said to me that we had to go together to meet this man, and that when we'd met I would feel to some measure the hurts I had suffered in this city undone—

“What are you reading?”

Danny was setting the drinks down on the table. Holt's words were still in Rachel's eyes—

—the hurts I had suffered in this city—

“Oh it's just an old diary.”

“Family heirloom?”

“No.”

—undone—

Danny sat down. “Your brandy,” he said, pushing the glass in Rachel's direction.

“Thank you.” She picked up the brandy and sipped. It burned a little against her lips and on her tongue. “Are you all right?' Danny said.

“Yes, I'm fine.”

“You look a little shaken up.”

“No . . . I'm just . . . these last few days . . .” She could barely put a coherent sentence together, she was so distracted by what she'd just read. “I don't want to seem rude—” she said, making a concerted effort to be articulate. The sooner this conversation was over, the sooner she'd be back with the journal, finding out what awaited the captain. “I've just got a lot on my mind right now. This is what I found at the apartment.” She handed Danny the envelope containing letters and the photographs. He glanced round to see if anybody was looking his way, and then, a little tentatively, reached into the envelope and slid out the contents.

“I didn't count them,” Rachel said, “but I assume it's everything.”

“I'm sure it is,” Danny said, staring down at the evidence of his romance. “Thank you so much.”

“What are you going to do with it all?”

“Keep it.”

“Just be careful, Danny.” He glanced up at her. “Don't talk to anybody about Margie. I wouldn't want . . . you know . . .”

“You wouldn't want me to be found in the East River.”

“I'm not saying—”

“I know what you're saying,” he replied. “And thank you. But you don't have to worry about me. Really you don't. I'm going to be fine.”

“Good,” she said, draining the last of her brandy. “Thank you for the drink.”

“You're going already?”

“Stuff to do.”

Danny got up, and somewhat awkwardly took her hand. “I know it's a cliché,” he said, “but I don't know what I would have done without you.” He looked, suddenly, like a lost twelve-year-old. “You took some risks, I know.”

“For Margie . . .” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, with a sad little smile, “for Margie.”

“You keep well, Danny,” Rachel said, hugging him. “I know there's good things ahead for you.”

“Oh?” he said doubtfully. “I think the best times went with Margie.” He kissed her on the cheek. “She loved us both, huh? So that's something.”

“That's a lot, Danny.”

“Yeah,” he said, trying to put on a little brightness. “You're right. That's a lot.”

A
bout the time Rachel caught her cab back uptown, and opened the journal to pick up Captain Holt's story where she'd left off, Garrison was pouring his fourth Scotch of the night, slipping the bottle down beside the high-backed armchair set before his dining room window. He wasn't alone in his liquored state. Mitchell was sitting in front of the fire, which he'd insisted be lit, in a worse state of intoxication than he'd been in since law school. Two maudlin drunks, talking of how their women had betrayed them. They'd poured out their hearts tonight, as liberally as they'd poured the Scotch: confessed their indifference to the labors of the marital bed, and their weariness with their adulteries; promised that their only loyalties lay with one another, and that whatever betrayals there might have been, they were a thing of the past; and most significantly, debated in detail how their dealings had to be handled from now on, now that they knew how isolated they were.

“I know it's no good looking back . . .” Mitchell slurred.

“No it isn't . . .”

“But I can't help it. When I think of the way things were.”

“They weren't as wonderful as you remember. Memories are lies. Especially the good ones.”

“Were you never happy?” Mitch said. “Not once? Not for an afternoon?”

Garrison grunted as he thought about this. “Well now you mention it,” he said finally. “I do remember that day I dumped you in the yard with the fire ants, and you got bit all over your ass. I was pretty damn happy that day. Do you remember that?”

“Do I remember—”

“I got beaten black and blue for that.”

“By Poppa?”

“No, by mother. She never left it to George when it came to something important, because she knew we weren't scared of him. She beat me within an inch of my life.”

“You deserved it,” Mitchell said, “I was sick for a week And you didn't give a shit.”

“I didn't like that you got all the attention. But you know what? When I was moping around, pissed off that you were being pampered, Cadmus said to me:
see what happens if you make people sorry for someone?
I remember him saying that, plain as day. He wasn't angry with me. He just wanted me to understand that I'd done a stupid thing: I'd made everybody lovey-dovey with you. So I didn't try and hurt you after that, in case you got the attention.”

Mitchell got up and went to fetch the bottle from Garrison.

“Speaking of the old man—” Mitchell said, “Jocelyn told me you kept him company last night.”

“I sure did. I sat by his bed for a few hours when they brought him back from the hospital. I tell you, he's tough. The doctors didn't think he was going to come home.”

“Did he tell you anything?”

Garrison shook his head. “He was raving most of the time. It's the painkillers they've got him on. They make him delirious.” Garrison fell silent for a long moment. “You know what I started to wonder.”

“What?”

“If we took him off the medication . . .”

“We can't—”

“I mean just took his pills away.”

“Waxman wouldn't allow that.”

“We wouldn't tell Waxman. We'd just do it.”

“He'd be in agony.”

A tiny smile appeared on Garrison's face. “But we'd get some straight answers from him, if we had the pills.” He shook his fist, as though it contained the means to Cadmus's comfort.

“Fuck . . .” Mitchell said softly.

“I know it's not a very pretty idea,” Garrison said, “but we don't have a lot of options left. He's not going to hang on forever. And when he's gone . . .”

“There's got to be some other way,” Mitch said. “Let me try talking to him.”

“You can't get anything out of him. He doesn't trust either of us any more. I don't think he ever did. He didn't trust anybody but himself.” Garrison thought on this for a moment. “Smart man.”

“So how do you know all this stuff exists?”

“Because Kitty told me about it. She was the only one who ever talked to me about the Barbarossas. She'd seen the journal.”

“So at least the old man trusted her.”

“I guess he did. At the beginning. I guess we all start out trusting our wives . . .”

“Wait,” Mitch said. “I just had a thought—”

“Margie.”

“Yeah.”

“I'm there before you, brother.”

“Cadmus liked her.”

“So maybe he gave her the journal? Yeah. Like I say, I'm there before you.” He slid deeper into his seat, cocooned in shadow. “But if she had it, she certainly wasn't going to tell me about it. Even with a gun waved in her face.”

“Have you searched your apartment?”

“The police already went through it, top to bottom.”

“So maybe they took it.”

“Yeah, maybe . . .” Garrison said, without much confidence. “Cecil's trying to find out what they lifted from the place while I was locked up. But I can't see why they'd remove something like that. It's no use to them.”

Mitchell sighed. “I'm so sick of this,” he said.

“Sick of what?”

“All this shit about the Barbarossas. I don't know why we don't just forget about 'em. If they were such a fucking problem, the old man would have done something about them years ago.”

“He couldn't,” Garrison said, sipping on his whisky. “They're too powerful.”

“If they're so powerful why have I never heard of them?”

“Because they don't want you to know. They're secretive.”

“So what have they got to hide? Maybe it's something we can use against them.”

“I don't think so,” Garrison said, very quietly. Mitchell looked at him, expecting him to say more, but he kept his silence. Several seconds passed. Then Garrison murmured, “The women know more than we do.”

“Because they get serviced by that sonofabitch?”

“I think they get more than that,” Garrison said.

“I want to kill the fuck,” Mitchell replied.

“I don't want you trying anything,” Garrison said calmly. “Do you understand me, Mitch?”

“He fucked my wife.”

“You knew you'd have to let her go to him sooner or later.”

“It's bullshit . . .”

“It won't happen again,” Garrison said, his voice colorless. “She was the last.” He looked out at his brother from the cleft of the chair. “We're going to bring them down, Mitch. Him and all his family. That's why I don't want any personal vendettas from you. I don't want them getting twitchy. I want to know everything there is to know about them before we move against them.”

“Which brings us back to the journal,” Mitchell said. He set his glass on the sill. “You know maybe
I
should talk to Cadmus.”

Garrison didn't reply to the suggestion. He didn't even acknowledge it. Instead he drained his whisky glass, and then—his voice no more than a bruised whisper—he said: “You know what Kitty told me?”

“What?”

“That they're not human.”

Mitchell laughed; the sound hard and ragged.

Garrison waited until it died away, then he said: “I think she was telling the truth,”

“That's fucking stupid.” Mitchell said. “I don't want to hear about it.” He bared his teeth in disgust. “How could you fucking believe a thing like that?”

“I think she even took me to the Barbarossa house, when I was a baby.”

“Fuck the house,” Mitchell said, swatting all this irritating talk away. “I don't want to hear any more! Okay?”

“We've got to face it sooner or later.”

“No,”
Mitchell said, with absolute resolution. “If you're going to start talking like this, I'm going home.”

“It's not something we can hide from,” Garrison said mildly. “It's a fact of our lives, Mitch. It always has been. We just didn't know it.”

Mitchell paused at the door. Sluggish and befuddled with drink, he couldn't raise any coherent counter to what Garrison was saying. All he could say was: “Bull. Shit.”

Garrison went on, as though Mitch hadn't spoken. “You know what?” he said. “Maybe it's for the best. We've run our course the way we are. It's time for something new.” He was talking to an empty room now; Mitch had already left. Still, he finished his thought. “Something new,” he said again, “or maybe something very old.”

G
arrison didn't sleep that night. He'd never needed more than three and a half hours' rest a night, and since Margie's death that number had gone down to two hours, sometimes just one. He was running on fumes, of course, and he knew it. He couldn't go on denying his body the rest it needed without paying a price. But with his fatigue came a strange clarity. The conversation he'd had with his brother tonight, for instance, would have been unthinkable a few weeks before: his mind would have rejected the ideas he'd espoused as surely as Mitchell had done. But now he knew better. He was living in a world of mysteries, and out of fear he'd chosen to ignore their presence. Now it seemed to him the only way forward was to reach out and touch those mysteries; know what they were, know what they meant; let them work whatever changes they wished upon him.

Mitchell would come to share his point of view in time. He'd have no choice. The old empire was receding into oblivion: the old powers dying, the old certainties going with them. Something had to replace those powers, and it wouldn't be a democracy of love and truth; of that Garrison was certain. The new age, when it came, would be just as elite as the one passing away. A chosen few—those with the will to live superior lives—would have the wherewithal to do so. The rest, as ever, would live and die in futility. The difference lay only in the coinage of power. The age of railroads and stockyards and timber and oil would give way to a time in which power was measured by some other means; a means which he as yet had no language to describe. He felt its imminence as he sometimes felt things in dreams; a knowledge beyond the scope of his five senses; beyond measurement or even materiality. He did not know where his appetite for such possibilities came from, but he knew it had always been in him. The day Grandma Kitty had told him of the Barbarossas he'd felt some sleeping part of his nature awaken. He could remember everything about that conversation still. How she'd stared at him as she spoke, watching every nuance of his response; how she'd touched his face, her touch kindlier than he'd ever had from her before; how she'd promised to tell him secrets that would change his life forever, when the time was right. Of course she'd been the one to tell him about the journal, though he'd pretended to Mitchell he wasn't certain this was so. There was a book, she'd said, in which the way to get into the heart of the Barbarossas' land was described; along with all that had to be endured on that road. Terrible things, she'd implied; horrors that would drive a soul to insanity if they weren't prepared. That was why it was essential to have this book: the information it contained was vital to any endeavor concerning the Barbarossas.