The Broken Ones (37 page)

“Remember the fire?” Oscar asked.

Stuart nodded morosely. “That was a shame.”

“Take us forward to it.”

The image changed speed, time lapse now: the figures whirred as
quickly as dragonflies, little more than blurs. Night brightened to day, and shadows stretched one way, shortened, then lengthened the other. Night. Day. Night. Day. Night. And a sudden furnace flare of brilliant orange.

The image froze. The pretty little two-story building now resembled a black mask with billowing orange ribbons gouting from the eyes of its windows and the door of its mouth. It was night, but the camera automatically adjusted for flames as bright as daylight.

“Back it up,” Oscar said.

Stuart pressed more keys, and the flames began to suck back into the building, getting smaller. Soon there was just a glow coming from inside the top right window, and women in dressing gowns and scanty clothes and next to no clothes ran in odd, crane-awkward steps back up the stairs and into the building. The glow of fire stopped. The red-lit sign came back on.

“Slow it,” Oscar instructed.

Keys tapped. The images slowed.

A man reversed into the brothel doorway, head down. Cars reversed up the street. One reversed up, disgorged a fat man with a walking stick, then kept reversing. A large woman with short-cropped hair rolled with a docker’s gait back up the stairs and into the red glow. A dark sedan reversed up, slightly forward of the brothel entrance, and its headlights extinguished.

“Slower now,” Oscar said.

The passenger-side door of the sedan opened and a small figure eased himself back out of the car. He walked backward across the footpath, carrying something carefully with both hands. His head was down. He stepped backward not up the stairs to the brothel but down the lane beside it. Oscar felt a strange shiver of certainty wash over him.

That’s him
.

“Play it forward,” Oscar said. “Real speed.”

Stuart hit a key.

Each frame lasted three seconds. An empty lane, all shadows. Then a shadow within the shadows. The man emerged onto the street, backlit by the brothel’s lights. Onto the footpath—he wore a pea jacket and dark pants, his face turned to the dark sedan parked at the curb. At the car door, he lifted the object gingerly onto the car roof and looked up the street, presenting the camera with his profile and his silver ponytail.

“Stop,” Osar said.

Stuart hit a key.

Oscar leaned in toward the screen.

The object on the car roof was wrapped in string and brown paper, but its vaguely humanoid form was clear. The idol.

“Can you zoom in?” he said.

Stuart waggled his round head. “About fifty percent.”

He reached for a mouse and clicked it on the face of the man with the ponytail. Another click, and the image zoomed instantly in.

The picture was pixelated; the light was low, the man’s face was lit mostly by reflection from the brothel’s sign in the car’s glossy flanks. But Oscar could make out his face. An older man, sixty or sixty-five but trim and well kept. A small goatee. Dark pixels suggested lines up each cheek. Eyes level and looking carefully up the street as he kept a grip on his precious idol. It was a face that Oscar had never seen in the flesh, and yet it was familiar. He’d seen it before.

He turned to Stuart. “Can you print that?”

Stuart nodded. “It’ll take a few minutes to warm up.”

He hit a couple of keys, and somewhere in the dark room machinery hummed alive.

Oscar watched the screen, eyes locked on the ponytailed man.

“Can we move while it’s printing?” Oscar asked.

“Sure.”

“Reverse us, please. Triple speed.”

The ponytailed man walked his disturbing parcel backward down the lane. A girl in a puffy pink anorak and bare legs reversed her way back into the brothel. A thin young man in stovepipe jeans emerged from the brothel door and chicken-walked back down the street. A dog wandered into the corner of the frame, sniffed around, wandered out. Then the man with the ponytail emerged back-first from the alley and reversed, empty-handed, to the black car. He hesitated, looked up and down the street, then eased himself into the sedan. Its lights blazed and the car reversed out of frame. Two girls, arm in arm, walked back into the brothel. Another figure emerged from the lane, walking backward into the street.

“Slow.”

The procession of images went to normal speed, a frame every three
seconds. The woman reversed to the footpath, then started to move in slow circles, looking up and down the street, waiting for someone. She had long hair in cornrow braids, black lipstick, a silver necklace, and the biggest earrings Oscar had ever seen.

Florica, Oscar thought.

She checked her watch, then reversed back down the lane. Unless she’d disappeared through a back entrance, she’d never come out; her burned bones were somewhere under the ash.

The printer began a staccato zip-zipping.

“Thank you,” Oscar said.

He heard a metallic click and turned to face Stuart.

The little man was holding the big pistol. Its hammer was cocked back. Oscar was unsurprised.

“How do I know you won’t tell anyone I’m here?” Stuart said.

Oscar watched him. “You don’t.”

The gun shook a little in Stuart’s hand. Large-caliber revolvers were, Oscar knew, quite heavy.

“I don’t want to lose all this,” Stuart said.

“I love what you’ve done with the place.”

“I think I could keep this going for years.”

“Could do.”

“So why should I take the risk and let you go?”

Oscar shrugged. “I might be missed.”

Stuart shook his head. “You don’t look like the kind of guy people miss. In fact”—his little mind was ticking—“I’d be surprised if anyone knows you’re here.”

Oscar nodded and stood. “Then I’ll go about my business, and you can make up your mind.” Oscar turned his back on the other man and went across to the AV rack where the printer was. He felt the eye of that enormous pistol staring, and his skin crawled. “Killing’s not like you see in the movies, Stuart. It’s messy, especially with a rhino gun like that. Slug’s as wide as your thumb. No matter where you shoot me, it’s going to punch through and take a whole lot of cargo with it. Hit me in the head and you’ll be picking skull and teeth out of your ceiling all weekend.” He picked up the print of the ponytailed man from the printer tray. He turned and faced Stuart. “Hit me in the chest and you’ll be finding bits of spine in the room next door. Either way, you’ll need
new carpet; there’s a good six liters of blood in a man my size, and that cannon there would let most of it out. And then you have to get rid of the body.”

Oscar stepped forward. The little man’s stubby finger was on the trigger. The gun remained aimed at Oscar’s chest but was shaking: the huge muzzle wavered an inch side to side. Oscar slowly reached and took the big pistol and uncocked the hammer.

“Don’t feel bad,” Oscar said as he tucked it into the small of his back. “I don’t know if I could shoot a man, either.”

“Are you going to arrest me?” Stuart asked quietly.

Oscar clapped him on the shoulder. “Stuart, you only pointed a gun at me. You’re one of the nicest people I know.”

Oscar hurried to his car, excited.

Stuart had spoken about being arrested.

Now Oscar remembered where he’d seen the ponytailed man.

The key was where it had been hidden for the past thirty years: beneath a potted maidenhair fern beside the newel post of the back stairs. Oscar unlocked the downstairs door and smelled damp rot and mold. Most of the water had drained away, leaving only dark puddles around the concrete washtubs and in a low corner. Out of habit, Oscar flicked on the bare suspended lightbulb. It remained dead. He went to the workbench and carefully lifted the box of newspaper clippings outside into the sunlight.

In a few moments, he held the clipping he was looking for.

The yellowed newsprint had a halftone photograph of Sandro Mariani leading away in handcuffs a laughing young man. There was no caption, no body copy—only the headline reading “Killer Remanded. Full Story page 5.” In the black-and-white picture, Sandro Mariani was Oscar’s age now, making the clipping around thirty years old. Although the crim’s hair was short and dark, and the hair of the man who carried the wrapped idol from the fortune-teller’s door was ponytailed and gray, one thing was clear: they were the same man.

Chapter
26

I
ntravenous tubes, catheter tubes, oxygen tubes. Looms of wires. Spots of blood on bandages holding cannulas and on the white sheets near the elbows. Despite the web of conduits, Sandro was asleep. It seemed strange to Oscar that this withered person, this barely alive thing, had dominated his mind for nearly thirty years. Quietly terrifying; terrifyingly quiet—then explosive.

Oscar had seen his father in action only once. At sixteen, Oscar knew Sandro’s work shifts, and had caught the late-afternoon train into the city and crossed Roma Street to police headquarters. By then the desk sergeants knew him well enough to wave Oscar through the back corridors to the adjoining watchhouse. In the watchhouse drive, a standard unmarked cop sedan was parked, engine running, and he recognized Sandro’s partner, Vic Pascoe, a man with features so rough and hard you were glad to look away from them. Pascoe was helping out of the car a young man whose huge arms and bare back were a forest of tattoos: grinning skulls and nude women and wolves. The felon’s wrists were handcuffed, and Oscar could just glimpse Sandro through the sedan’s rear window, his face seemingly suspended in reflected orange clouds. Suddenly, Vic Pascoe was on the ground and the tattooed man was running. Where he thought he’d get to, Oscar didn’t know—the gates at the top of the drive were ten feet high and frosted with razor wire. Oscar was standing between the escaping felon and the gate. Then the felon’s eyes turned to him. Oscar could see the difference machine in the man’s head take him in, add him up, and spit out an answer: if Oscar got in his way, he’d kill him. Oscar was so startled that he froze. An instant later, the tattooed man’s eyes widened in surprise as his feet left the ground. Sandro Mariani had moved so quickly that
Oscar hadn’t seen him. He pulled the bigger man down and put his knee on the felon’s blueprinted neck. Sandro’s open hand waited in the air above the man’s nose like a hawk on a thermal, ready to strike. He regarded the tattooed felon with an expression that looked to Oscar like mere curiosity.

“Take me home.”

The dry voice pulled Oscar back into the present.

Behind the clear plastic mask, Sandro’s mouth was a hyphen. He opened one eye. Oscar was shocked at how sunken it looked: a dull thing held loosely in ash-gray flesh.

“How are you, Dad?”

Sandro licked dry lips. “Take me home.”

Oscar shook his head.

“Your mother would take me home,” Sandro whispered. His eye roved over Oscar’s face, disappointed.

“She’d tell you to grow up,” Oscar said.

Sandro took a few breaths. Each was short and laborious.

“They want to cut me open,” he said. Every word was an effort. He drew an unsteady finger down his sternum. “
Fft
. Like a corpse.”

“They’re going to fix your heart.”

“Henh. What’s the point?”

Oscar looked at the lines on the heart monitor: weak ripples, like misty raindrops on a pond. “We want you to get better.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me.”

Sandro rolled his head a little and opened the other eye, too, fixing Oscar with a stare. A cynical, unhappy stare. “Don’t”—he caught a breath—“lie.”

Oscar blinked. “It’s not a lie.”

Sandro’s eyes closed, and his breathing steadied. Slow, shallow breaths. Just as Oscar was convinced that he was asleep, he spoke again. “Did you. Find them?”

“Who?”

The old man’s eyes remained closed. “Your. Real. Parents.”

Oscar stared.

He’d run away at fifteen. He tracked down the foster homes he’d lived in ten and more years earlier. He visited maternity hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, cemeteries. At every turn, he was stymied by the
same thing. He was only fifteen. His legal parents were Sandro and Vedetta Mariani. Come back when you’re eighteen. Oscar slunk home, penniless, thin, smelly. Despite Oscar’s overtures over the next twenty years, despite Vedetta’s whispers in her husband’s ears, Sandro never forgave him for this act of betrayal.