Nightjack (17 page)

Cavallo’s false front totally collapsed and he went on the defensive, angry and self-righteous. He waved his arms, the thick fingers covered in rings fluttering in the air. “I couldn’t be there, it wouldn’t look right! I was in Atlantic City for the weekend, I had to be seen, don’t you understand? I did not do this thing, I was not even there!”

“Maybe you weren’t there, but you did it.”

“You don’t know, Will! I did everything! Everything to keep
Emilio’s
alive in this economy. My dream, and they took it all away! Taxes, they increase my rent, the licenses, all the kickbacks—the people I have to pay. Everybody getting a piece of me and my dream—”

Pacella, grinning a little like Jack now, the killer seeping through. “Sing me a sad song, Emilio, tell me your troubles.”

“
Vaffanculo
, talking to me like that!” The fat man had to make a last try of it, lumbering to his feet, driving his fists down into the table. It should’ve been a powerful blow, but Cavallo still thought he might get out of this and he didn’t want to scratch the table top. The wine in Pacella’s glass hardly rippled. “Damn you, it was not my fault, Will! It was supposed to happen after midnight, after everybody finished up and had gone home. Nobody was supposed to get hurt! I loved Jane! I loved her! I loved them all!”

“Who was the torcher, Emilio?”

“I don’t know that! I asked Joe Ganucci for a favor, he set everything up. He owned a couple’a points on the place. It went through his consigliere. But that one, he’s dead.”

“So’s the Ganooch.”

Finally, Cavallo started catching on. His eyes brimmed with understanding, realizing who he had to be talking to, what was happening now. What was about to happen.

“No. No, Will.”

“Yeah, Emilio.”

“It—it—”

“Yeah.”

“It’s been you, Will?”

“Yes.” Pacella felt a wonderful warmth flood through his belly.

“You...
Beltrando
, you’ve been doing those things to the syndicate guys? The capos? Carving them up like that? Taking their hearts? Their kidneys?”

Pacella wanted to say, No, not me, Emilio, what we have here is a fractured psyche that allows for the release of tension and frustration via disassociation and yet keeps the primary personality intact, at least for the time being. A psychological mechanism that allows the mind to split off traumatic memories or disturbing ideas from conscious awareness.

He said, “Yes, it’s been me.”

“How could you do this? How could you do any of this, Will? With the knives? Snapping necks? Cutting open the...
dio mio
! You’re a schoolteacher!”

“Sometimes.”

Pacella, one of the many Pacellas, moved fast now, lithely leaping onto the dining room table and easing himself over it. Pressing Cavallo back down into his chair, the chair against the wall, the picture of Jesus and his bleeding, broken, thorn-entwined heart bearing down.

It wasn’t quite Pacella’s voice anymore. The timbre was off, the tone pulled taut like it was ready to snap. “Please think, Emilio—think extremely hard now. Put some effort into it. I want a name.”

“I don’t know, I swear, on the eyes of my children! I don’t—”

“Shh, think about it a second. Who is the torcher? They must’ve told you something, given you a clue.”

“No, nothing like that!”

“A favor, just do me a favor, Emilio, all right? Just a hint.”

Jack was thinking about the eyes of children, staring back at him from a little jar.

The fat old man struggled to get out of the chair but was unable to move because there was a hand like iron pressed against his chest. His jowls flapped as he started to mewl. He saw the edge of the knife reflecting the chandelier light, so bright that he couldn’t even look at the blade in Pacella’s fist. He had to turn his face away. “
Madonna mia
! Will, it wasn’t my fault. You have to believe me. I loved Jane! Like my own child, like my daughter. You know this!
Dio mio
, I’d do anything for her!”

Showing all his teeth, Pacella’s voice was almost gone, little more than a high-pitched shrill cry. “
You shouldn’t say things like that, Emilio
.”

“Jesus Christ!
Dio
!
Jesu
!”

The blade Jack used at the time was the six inch hunting knife topped with a gut hook. Jack liked the way it moved through flesh—not too easily, you actually felt the ripping and shredding as you cut sideways, yanking at the muscle and tendon. He had fun aiming the arterial spray up into the compassionate face of Christ above, until the forlorn nailed god was dripping with red ribbons.

fifteen

Are you ready
?

Pace woke at dawn and walked downstairs, expecting Vindi or other men to be standing in the living room. There weren’t any.

Instead, a black leather briefcase sat in the foyer, just inside the front door. It contained their passports, other identification and paperwork, tourist maps of Athens, five thousand Euros, and fifty thousand drachmas. Altogether that was more than fifteen grand Vindi had handed over.

Kaltzas wanted them to be tourists for the afternoon, have a good time, before heading on to Pythos. There were instructions on where to find his private jet, and what to do when arriving in Athens. The best places to eat, the most hospitable
tavernas
. Where to catch the ferry to Voros and its scheduled departures. Where to rent a boat.

While he was studying the contents of the case he must’ve had another attack of aphasia because when he turned the others were at the kitchen table having breakfast. He didn’t know where Pia had learned to cook so well, but she’d made a full meal of pancakes, eggs, hash browns, orange juice, everything you think about when you imagine having breakfast with your family when you’re a kid. Your brother stealing your bacon, your Dad reading the paper but keeping a watchful eye. Sissy with a doll in her lap, trying to feed it toast.

It had never happened this way, but it was truer than anything that had ever happened to you.

Now you imagined having breakfast with your wife, who swept past you moving from the stove to the sink, the floors shining, the kitchen windowsill filled with sunflowers. Your tow-headed son chattering on about his model cars, his video games, baseball cards. Lovely baby girl with a new doll in her lap, trying to feed it toast. Your dreams were pedestrian but honest. Your anguish common, your insanity only average. Jane asking you how much work you’d done on the book last night.

Six pages, it was going good. They’re already pretty clean, just need another pass to tighten up some dialogue, clear out a couple of fragments.

Pia spun from the oven and told Pace to sit. He ate quickly, listening to Faust and Hayden discussing torture. The Greeks liked to do dramatic things like putting a guy inside a large metal bull and then making a roaring fire under it and roasting him alive. Funky stuff like chaining somebody to a cliff side and letting the birds chew him to death. But besides that, it seemed like the Greeks preferred straightforward murder. Ramming a sword diagonally through a man’s collarbone to chop him almost entirely in half. Plunging a spear through somebody’s guts. No prisoners, no waiting around, clean your blade and get on with your day.

Sitting about a foot too far from the table, Dr. Brandt stared at them, a mixture of loss and shame inscribed across her radiant features. This lady, never one thing on her face, always fifty different emotions working her over.

“If you don’t practice your smile,” Pace said, “you’ll forget how it’s done.”

Dr. Brandt only frowned further.

Pia said, “Should I leave the dishes for the lady who cleans the house? That might be rude, but maybe she’ll be glad to do them. To see there were people in the house again. It’s the kind of thing my mother would have liked.”

The mother who had chased her around the neighborhood with a shovel, who had brained her sister, and drank the Drano.

“This is the kind of thing we should be worried about right now?” Hayden asked. “You didn’t hear us talking about the Brazen Bull? They cook you alive in it!”

Faust sounded resigned, like he just wanted to get it over with. “More likely we’ll be disemboweled and our entrails will be burned in a pyre as a sacrifice to the oracles.”

“All of our organs?” Pia asked.

“The preference seems to be for livers and lungs.”

“I’d rather not part with them.” Saying it almost happily while she cleared the table, sticking plates in the sink. “If the choice were mine to be made.”

Nightjack thinking he had never had lung before, wondering about the consistency, whether to cook it with oil or butter.

“Nothing like that’s going to happen,” Pace said.

“Then what?”

“I don’t know, but nobody’s going to burn up your entrails.”

“You hope.”

“I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

No one appeared to believe him much. They headed for the door, this leg of the journey becoming something both too large to deal with and also too small.

With her bottom lip protruding into a little girl pout, Dr. Maureen Brandt’s demeanor at once appalled and excited Pace. He gazed deeply into her face and saw all the varieties and versions of Maureen Brandt, the amendments and modifications and revisions she had gone through long ago and minute by minute.

The inflated ego casting judgment, always reflecting disappointment. The hunger for authority and domination over others, the willingness to call someone else insane. The drive to actually help, to cure, to alleviate distress and misery. Her failure in the world to find a man she could not consume or eclipse. The kinkiness that led her to hump the bound.

“Don’t go,” she said. “None of you should go.”

All four of them turned to look at her, waiting for more, but there was nothing else.

“Kaltzas never threatened you,” Pace said. “He bought you off, didn’t he? That’s why you signed all the reports saying I was stable and deserved to be released. He needed you to get me out. Isn’t that right?”

“You’re in cahoots!” Hayden shouted.

“No,” she answered.

“Smack her in the mush! Make her eat paste!”

Her face of devastating glory. It was easy to forgive such painfully open beauty. Something inside Pace’s chest seemed to expand. A sob nearly broke free. Moments occur that are larger than they should be, with a meaningfulness that isn’t apparent until much later.

“It’s okay, Maureen. We don’t blame you.”

“I do!” Hayden shouted.

“Me too,” Pia said. “You arrogant, condescending bitch. I’m getting one of Jack’s knives and I’m going to cut her tits off.”

Pace stepped closer to Maureen Brandt until the others faded behind him, blocked from view. “I’m sorry you got caught up in it. You’re a lousy psychiatrist, but you did try to help us. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“Will, listen to me. There are things you need to know.”

He waited, and again, there was nothing else. She was a woman heavy with pregnant pauses and faltering purpose. He’d met a lot of sad people and she was more depressed than any of them.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He couldn’t help himself. He could never help himself. He swept her into his arms, pressed his lips cruelly to hers, thinking of her on top of him in the white. Even as she began to respond and leaned into him with a selfish groan, she broke the kiss and stepped away. He shook his head sadly and walked out the door.

The others followed him to the stolen truck. While they arranged themselves inside, Pace muddied the plates.

He got in and felt a bulge in his back pocket.

He found several torn pieces of notebook paper, taken from Hayden’s million-page letter to his mother:

Rudy Road. Rue the Day. Get it? Another of your bad jokes. That’s why the book will never be published. Nobody ever liked your jokes. It’s one of the reasons why you’re all alone, tied to a bed.

The truck was full of noise and querulous voices, arguing in a dozen tongues. Something like a tentacle reached over and pinched at the back of his hand.

On another sheet, in the same ornate handwriting:

Ignore the previous. You’ve got too many ghosts already, don’t take on any more. Your friends are inept but you need them. Cassandra is on Pythos along with your fate. Go to her
.

And then, a last shred of paper:

If you listen to that shit you deserve what you get, you stupid fuck.

PART II

The Portents of Gravitas