42

Mexico City, 1953

He walked out on the roof, heading for his brother’s tiny adobe penthouse. Nothing had changed much in the past three days, he noticed—but then he doubted if anything up on El Ranchito had changed much in the past three years. The cushioned deck chairs were neatly arranged around the bright-striped umbrellas, and middle-aged American women were lying in two of them. Their hair was freshly done, and the bottoms of their two-piece suits were pulled up high over their belly buttons, and their legs and arms and torsos were already baked to a deep brown. As he walked past he could see them sneaking looks at him over their red and blue drinks, and their copies of Look and Collier’s. They appeared new to the roof, and Tom could only wonder if they had seen his brother yet, and if he had seen them.

“Have you eaten anything yet? Pishta’s just settin’ up for lunch.”

His brother greeted him at the door, wearing the same blue shirt, gray slacks, and loafers without socks he’d been wearing that first afternoon. His face was ashen, and he looked almost stricken, Tom thought, grasping the doorjamb like he was trying to hang on after a physical blow.

“I’m fine, Charlie,” he said. “All I want is a word with you.”

“You know she’s gone, Tommy,” he said, staring off into the middle distance. The words came tumbling out of his mouth like broken teeth, and Tom listened although he had no patience for it anymore. “She was just here. She told me that’s it, she’s leavin’ me for good.”

“I’m sorry, Charlie.”

“She told me she doesn’t love me anymore, and it’s all over. She’s going to Reno and file for a divorce. Nevada! Why—when she’s already in goddamned Mexico? Jesus, the papers will have a field day with it, Tommy! I thought for sure she’d come back, sooner or later, Tommy, I surely did. But now that’s all done, she doesn’t love me after all—”

“I know, Charlie.”

“I asked her if there was somebody else, and she said it was none of my damned business anymore! Can you get over that one? D’ya know who it is, Tommy? Is it that goddamned bullfighting ponce, that Chu Chu? One of her big Acapulco friends? That Princeton fella—”

“Yes, Charlie. I know who it is.”

They walked up to Chapultepec, through all the familiar, cheerful chaos of the streets. The calliope wheeze of the roasted-corn stands, and the men selling balloons and sweet potatoes and sections of honeycomb. The boys scrambling after them to sell them lottery tickets, and copies of La Prensa and El Universal, or carting along their shoeshine boxes, or simply begging with their hands out, running beside them saying over and over again, “Por favor, mister, por favor.” The fashionable young people streaming out of their offices to the cafés for lunch, and the construction workers whistling and calling out merrily to women from the many holes they were tearing in the ground, and the streams of the gawking white-clad peasants that never seemed to stop coming, and he could see very well now how his brother might consider it all an acceptable substitute for New York City.

They walked and walked, neither of them daring to say a thing. Striding swiftly down the broad, leafy sidewalks of the Paseo de la Reforma, until it began to rise. Following it more slowly then, up a steep hill toward what looked like a medieval hodgepodge of a castle at the peak. Tom feeling the wonderful, clear air turn thin in his lungs as they climbed, a sense of something almost like exuberance radiating through him, that he knew enough by now to put it down to the lack of oxygen to his brain.

You have to be careful up here.

They were passing through a huge, rambling park. All around them were streams and manmade ponds, gracious walkways and little benches. Clumps of well-dressed families and less well-dressed tourists moved by them, veering off at signs for a zoo, or the presidential palace, the different museums.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Charlie said beside him, huffing, turning to look back down at the city. Red-faced now, but still talking, always talking, but not saying a thing. “It’s a sacred spot. They were building Toltec temples up here more than seven hundred years ago—”

“Were they now.”

“It’s been a fortress, a military academy, a palace for kings and presidents—”

They walked on a little while more and came to a shockingly stark, modern memorial—six white pillars with black eagles nailed to them, surrounding a contemporary pietà. A fierce-looking woman holding a dying boy in her lap. Her head was turned away, toward another boy who stood staunchly by her side, as if demanding to know why he wasn’t dead, too.

“The monument to Los Niños Héroes,” Charlie told him, mopping at his ruddy face with a handkerchief. “The Boy Heroes. They were cadets here, when it was a military academy. Just kids. When General Scott’s marines stormed the hill, one of ’em struck the flag and wrapped himself in it, then jumped off the cliffside. The other five jumped with him. Heroes forever, dead for God and country, and that goddamned fool, Santa Anna.”

They sat on a bench by the monument, facing down into the genial whirlpool of the city, Charlie gesturing vaguely again. Tom knowing it was time but still letting him talk. Wanting his brother to talk on forever.

“And meanwhile, down there somewhere,” he said between huffs, gesturing vaguely with one hand, “down there were the San Patricios, the Saint Patrick’s Brigade. Waitin’ on their scaffolds for the flag to rise.”

“So you’ve said.”

“They worked those guns like the devil, knowing they’d all be hung if they ever got caught. Shot any Mexican troops who tried to surrender, but they still got took. Can you imagine it? Thirty men, standin’ there in those carts, hands tied behind their backs, nooses around their necks.”

He wiped some sweat off the back of his neck with his handkerchief and shook his head.

“And why did they cheer, Tommy? That’s what I’d like to know. Why did they cheer when they saw the Stars ’n’ Stripes go up, and they knew they were going to die?”

“I can’t say, Charlie.”

“Was it relief just to finally get out of the sun that morning an’ be done with it? Was it the heroism of their former comrades, their former fellow Americans, storming the fortress? Or was it just a big fuck-you?”

“Charlie, I have something to tell you—” he tried to begin, but Charlie interrupted him.

“Loyalty is a complicated business, a very complicated business, Tom—”

“Charlie, it was me who was with Slim,” Tom told him straight out. “It was me who slept with her, before she even was your wife. I don’t know about anything she’s done down here in Mexico. But we were together, in Florida and up in New York, and I’m deeply ashamed of it. I wish it had never happened, but that don’t mean that it didn’t.”

He told it to him, forcing the words out, and sat and watched his brother’s face as it changed from incredulity to shock, to anger and then bewilderment. Charlie opening and shutting his mouth two or three times, before he finally stood and walked off behind the monument, staring down the steep cliff into the trees below, where once the Boy Heroes had gone over the side. Tom walking right behind him, pursuing him closely but saying nothing, the silence between them drifting into unbearably long minutes.

“Was that everything you wanted to tell me?” Charlie asked him at last, in a small, ominous voice.

“No, Charlie, it wasn’t.”

“Fire away, then.”

He turned to face Tom, the city at his back. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his slacks, and there was a look on his face not quite like anything Tom had ever seen on him before—bitter, and hurt, and grieving, but spiteful as well. The face that was exactly what he wanted.

“I know it was Jack McGrath in the Rats Suite that night,” he said. “And I know it was you who put him there.”

“What? What’s that?” Charlie asked, shaking his head like a fighter who had just been jabbed a few too many times in a row.

“The night Abe Reles went out the window. McGrath was the one who went in an’ did it. And it was you who sent him there.”

“This is a nice one-two, Tommy, I tell you that,” Charlie said bitterly, half turning from him, jingling some change in his pocket. “This one of your prosecutor’s tricks? Something your Mr. Hogan taught you? You tell your brother you put the horns on him, then hit ’im with the accusation—”

“It’s not an accusation. It’s the truth.”

“Who told you that? Not McGrath—”

“Allie Tannenbaum, for starters—”

“That little punk?” Charlie said contemptuously. “He’d put an ice pick in his mother’s neck, if it meant he could go to the movies that afternoon.”

“He’s got no reason to lie. And he was there, as an accessory. They all threw him out together.”

“How can you buy a story like that? It could’ve been anyone. All the cops up there—”

“The cops were asleep. It was McGrath who went in, put the whole thing together. It could only be somebody like the Old Man. Somebody with his authority. Somebody who could make the rats do it—and make sure they kept their mouths shut.”

“How d’ya know it wasn’t just them, on their own initiative?” Charlie continued to bluster, although his heart was obviously not in it, the words as dispassionate as if he were asking directions to the zoo from one of the passing tourists. “You know what a piece of filth Reles was. I ever tell you what he did to this girl? How you can let them libel a man like Jack McGrath—”

“He’s gone now, Charlie.”

“What? The Old Man?” Charlie’s mouth hung open, wobbling a little from side to side. “Never the Old Man! We were just talkin’ about him the other day—”

“He’s dead. It happened just before I came down.”

Trying to talk to him one more time, the morning he started down to Atlanta to see Tick-Tock Tannenbaum in his lampshade store. It was just before they took him into surgery, an oxygen mask clamped down over his face. The Old Man grinning back at his desperate questions as they literally wheeled his gurney down the hall. Unsure if the smile really was from the drugs, as the interns assured him. As unsure as he was about the final words McGrath did croak out, when he pulled the mask off just before they pushed him through the swinging doors: “Always another . . .” he rasped. “There’s always . . . another . . . one . . .”

“I got the wire in Atlanta, right after I saw Tannenbaum. He never made it off the operating table.”

“I see. So you’re willin’ to besmirch the name of a dead man, a man who can’t defend himself—” Charlie started in.

“Nobody’s besmirching anyone. It’s not the Old Man I’m concerned about.”

“So why—”

“Because he was in there for you, Charlie,” Tom told him. “It took me a good long time to figure that one out, Mrs. O’Kane’s idiot son. But God help me, I did it. He’d do anything for you, he had done anything for you, ever since you walked a beat together out in Red Hook.

“That’s why he was there that morning, too,” Tom continued, standing face-to-face with his brother now, his voice low and intense, against the occasional passing tourist. “That’s why he was there before we were. In his best dress uniform, making sure everybody got their stories straight, and no reporter and no outside doctor got a good look at the body before he was ready.”

“He was the straightest cop there ever was—”

“That’s right. He never took a dime for himself, and he drove all the child molesters out of Brooklyn just like Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, and he never owed anything to anyone in this world.”

Tom paused for breath in the thin air, and to let his words sink in.

“But he loved you like a son, Charlie. He’da done anything for you.”

“Ah, this is just nonsense!” his brother said scornfully, waving a hand in the air and turning his back on Tom, then walking away in a little circle before he came back. A few of the tourists turning their heads before they returned to their camera sites. Snapping the pietà, snapping the black eagles on the white pillars, and the flapping flag, and everything else there was to snap.

“Pure speculation, and the word of a killer! It’s a whole lotta nothin’!”

“This isn’t,” Tom said, pulling out the photocopy he had made, of the little piece of paper from the medical examiner’s report. The scribbled line in the margin. Reading: Withhold information by order of DA.

“It’s from Dr. Robillard’s report.”

Charlie snatched the paper up when Tom handed it to him, glaring at it angrily, then crumpled it up and stuck it deep in his pocket before he turned away again.

“That’s evidence, Charlie—the original, I mean. Safe back in Frank Hogan’s office,” he said softly.

His brother said nothing, only continued to stare down into the chaos of the city.

“I know what you were doing in Frank Costello’s apartment, Charlie,” he went on. “Neddy Moran told me about it. He told me about everyone who was there—including Bill McCormack. He told me what they wanted, and what you said.”

“Another felon’s testimony,” Charlie said weakly.

“Ah, Charlie, you couldn’t deny Neddy Moran if you wanted to, not now,” Tom told him, disappointed by this answer, too—even though he had thought it would not be possible to be any further disappointed by Charlie O’Kane. “You’re joined to him as surely as Peter was to Christ, and it won’t do you any more good to foreswear him.”

“That was ten years ago I went up to Costello’s place, Tom,” Charlie told him, his voice tense. “I couldn’t tell you myself what exactly I said in that room—”

“But I imagine you’d remember the gist of it.” Tom sighed.

“I imagine I would that,” Charlie admitted, pacing away and back again, hands in his pockets.

“It all fits together—save for one thing,” Tom recited. Starting back on that morning, at the Half Moon Hotel.

“The man Reles was going to send up next was Albert Anastasia, the enforcer the Camardas used to police their docks. King Joe Ryan’s docks—Bill McCormack’s docks. That couldn’t be allowed to happen, it would’ve threatened everything—ripped the whole town open.

“So—you send Jack McGrath in to see the little man gets thrown out the window. You even had the other rats in there already, to help him do it. Tell me, were they planted for that very purpose in the first place? Or did McCormack just get to them once they were already inside—bribe them, threaten them?”

“This is ridiculous,” Charlie protested.

“Not that it much matters,” Tom continued. “The other rats—Bernstein, Mickey Sycoff, Tick-Tock—they provided the muscle to get Reles out that window. They did what was needed. A few months later, you have Neddy Moran pull Anastasia’s card from the police wanted files. What did that matter, either? You had no case against him.”

“There wasn’t, goddamnit!”

“No—not with your lead witness murdered,” Tom said, unflinching. “It’s a done deal. And in return, Bill McCormack and his friends meet you in Costello’s apartment, and say they’ll make you mayor.”

“Sure,” Charlie said bitterly. “You’ve fit it together all very neatly, with me as the monster in the middle. Do ya really think I’m a monster, Tommy?”

“No, I don’t, Charlie. That’s why we’re havin’ this conversation—”

“Really? I thought it had to do with you sleeping with my wife. I seem to recall it started out like that.”

“What I want to know is why,” Tom said, as calmly as he could. “Why did you do it? Was it because you wanted to be mayor so much? You didn’t need those bums—they needed you. So why, Charlie? Because you’re not a monster. Why did you do it? Did you think you really needed McCormack? Did you think you really needed those fools to run the city—”

“They’re not fools!” Charlie barked. “And of course I needed them. They’re smart men—”

Tom snorted. “They’re half smart, Charlie. You know that. Somewhere, God help ya, I’m sure you know that. They’re all very clever, your Big Crowd, but they haven’t a vision in their heads that extends beyond a monument to themselves and the smell of a dollar.”

“What the hell did it matter? What the hell does any of it matter?” Charlie said, looking back at Tom from the edge of the cliff a few feet away. “And all over Abe Reles! That human turd! What did it matter if he went out the window, instead of on the hot seat—”

“It mattered. And you know it mattered,” Tom said, cutting him off again. “So why, Charlie? You could’ve got yourself elected mayor anyway. Why would you let yourself be used like that? God help me, it’s the one thing I can’t figure out—”

“You want to know why?” Charlie said, turning suddenly and walking back to him, talking fast and loose now, a crooked grin on that raw face.

“I put in with them because I had to,” Charlie told him. “I wasn’t free to go off and play working-class hero, like you and your communist priests—”

“They had somethin’ on you,” Tom said, suddenly comprehending, a stray current of sympathy swelling up in him, along with the shock. “Of course. Oh, Charlie. They had something on you all along. But what—”

“It was your friend, you know,” Charlie said, grinning his awful, sickly grin in Tom’s face, the bright, clear, Mexican day all around them feeling increasingly surreal. “You remember: Peter Panto?”

“Panto? What about him?”

“Who do you think gave him his guarantee? Huh? Why d’ya think he got in that car that night?”

Tom felt numb and cold, standing out in the sunlight.

“It was you,” he repeated dumbly. “You told him it was safe. You got him in that car that night.”

“Sure,” Charlie said, his voice quick and lucid now—quicker and sharper than Tom had heard it since he’d been in Mexico, he realized. “A guarantee from the next district attorney of the borough. A sitting judge, a hero cop—who better? The brother of the man who believed in him like no other. I told him it would it’d be safe, and he believed me, and got in the car. And then he was dead.”

Tom could see the staircase again, out at that miserable Jersey farmhouse. All of it so carefully arranged to leave him paralyzed with terror at the end. The car speeding off into the darkness, leaving him alone there. Panto walking up those stairs, the lamb to the slaughter. Knowing even as he did that it was a trap. Knowing but still going up there. Holding on to the promise Charlie had given him, from his own mouth . . .

“Someone that fine. You let that happen to him, someone that fine.”

“Aye, I did, Tommy. That’s the monster I am.”

“So it’s all been so much obfuscation. All of it, since the moment I got down here. All the poetry, and playin’ the tour guide, an’ mourning after the good old days, an’ Daniel Boone. All the self-pity, and the booze, an’ the tears over the wife who left you. When in fact you never gave a tinker’s dam what happens to any of us.”

“Ah, it’s not like that, Tommy!”

He felt as though he needed to sit down now. The fight, the strange rawness seemed to go out of his brother at the same time. Charlie looking away again, speaking softly and dispiritedly now.

“I didn’t mean to, Tommy,” he all but pleaded. “He played me perfectly—”

“Who did?”

“McCormack, of course. Remember how I told you, maybe that I just wasn’t that smart? Well, I wasn’t joking.”

The remains of him, the band of that silly hat. Leaking out of the soft, gelatinous earth, with the smell of chicken shit everywhere . . .

“How?”

“McCormack told me he wanted to make the peace. He told me he was losing money every day on his docks, he just wanted it all settled, he didn’t care which way. He came to me, Tommy, and asked me to arrange it.”

“Arrange what, exactly?” Tom asked, trying to concentrate.

“A parley. A truce, a sit-down. He said he was afraid that things were getting out of hand on the piers. He said he was afraid something would happen to Panto, to that priest. To you—”

“Don’t tell me this was you trying to save your little brother!” Tom snapped.

“I’m just tellin’ ya you what he said,” Charlie continued sadly. “He said he just wanted everything to run smoothly. He wanted to set up a meeting. Panto, the Camardas, Anastasia. King Joe Ryan. With me there to preside over the whole thing, and make it kosher.”

“And you went for it,” Tom said, covering his face with his hand.

“Aye, I did, Tommy. God help me, I fell for it. Oh, I thought you’d be so pleased!”

“Jesus, Charlie, how could you?”

“That poor boy came to see me, and I gave him my word of honor, face-to-face, that it would be all right. How was he not to trust that, Tommy?”

Charlie next to him, pleading with him, his hands out. His eyes welling with tears.

“The next DA, tellin’ him everything’s all right,” he went on. “His men were gettin’ desperate by then, you said that yourself. They needed a deal, and he came to me in my chambers at the courthouse and asked, ‘Is it okay? Can I trust it?’ And I looked at ’im, that poor boy, so much like you. With his beautiful girl, and all his courage and his honesty. Like a saint he was—like somethin’ outta history. And I told him, ‘Yes, yes, it’s all right. Trust me, it’ll be fine.’ I told him not to tell anyone else, either, we wanted it all to be secret. That’s how well McCormack set it up. Not the press. Not even you, Tommy—not even you.”

“Not that it would’ve made any difference,” Tom said slowly. “For I would have told him he could trust you, Charlie.”

“I thought it was for real, Tommy,” Charlie said urgently, sitting down next to him again. “You’ve got to believe me on that, at least. I thought the deal was on the up-an’-up, I swear to God!”

“Did ya, Charlie? Did ya really?” There was a taste like rusted iron in his mouth.

“On my life, Tommy. On Claire’s immortal soul. McCormack, I waited with him all that night. He rented a suite up in the Roosevelt Hotel—oh, he thought of everything! A whole suite, up on the ninth floor, with enough chairs for ten men. A room in the back. So no one would see, he said, because publicity is the death of negotiations. There was a bar set up, and nice white linens on the table, and everything ready!

“And there I sat, and waited like an idjit. And waited and waited, while Bill McCormack ordered himself up a nice, bloody steak, and ate it right in front of me. He ate up every bite, then soaked his bread in the blood, and licked his fingers. And then he looked at me an’ said, ‘I don’t believe those boys are coming,’ as easy as that!”

He could see it, too: Charlie pacing about the dim, shabby room while McCormack finished his meal. Doing his best not to catch the man’s eye—to spy the glint of knowledge there.

“I could barely believe what I was hearing. But there was a phone call,” his brother was saying, “and he picked up the phone, and said a few words, then he turned to me as calm as ever, an’ said, ‘There’s a problem, Charlie.’ And then I knew that he’d played me all along an’ that poor boy was dead.”

“Why, Charlie? Why didn’t you stop it then?”

“Because how could I, Tom?” Charlie said, his voice shaking. “How could I go out of that room, and tell everybody I was the biggest fool in the world? How could I tell them that I killed that boy?”

“Because you had to, Charlie—”

“And he was smart, Tommy! Oh, he was smart as the devil! He never threw it in my face, never admitted he planned it all. He just went right on, playing the game—making out they’d set him up, too. He told me, ‘You see, we can’t stop now, Charlie. You see what these boys are like? Completely lawless! That’s why we’ve got to get you elected DA,’ he told me. He said, ‘You’ve got to clean up this city, and I swear to God, I’ll help ya do it.’ He said, ‘You can’t quit now, Charlie, you’ve got to make sure that poor boy didn’t die in vain.’ Invoking his name even then, with his corpse not cold in the ground!”

“And you went for it?” Tom asked him.

“I had to, Tommy. He was right: If I didn’t, then what was it all about? What did that boy die for? And he was true to his word, McCormack—at least at first. All of a sudden, there were witnesses comin’ forward all over the borough. All those years, nobody had put together a capital case on a mob hit. But we sent seven men up to the Dance Hall. We broke the back of Murder, Inc.—”

“Didn’t ya see he was still playin’ you?” Tom said, interrupting him. “Didn’t you see that, even then? Sure, you got to clean up a few loose operators. Men makin’ too big a noise, men not under anyone’s control. That just consolidated his own power, made sure you got some headlines at the same time. But they were nothing.”

“They were notorious murderers, Tommy!”

“Men are murdered every day down at the docks, Charlie, quick and slow. You got to send a few killers up to the hot seat. But McCormack got you to raid the Camarda locals, instead of Lehman’s man. Didn’t he, Charlie? Thanks to you, he made sure those books were never found.”

“What choice did I have by then—”

“It all ran like clockwork, Charlie, didn’t it? All those witnesses comin’ in, testifying against this or that gunman. You saw to it that they all got put in with Reles. We were goin’ crazy, searchin’ the roofs around Coney Island for snipers, when he had his men inside the whole time. By the time Reles went to finger his man, Anastasia, Bill McCormack already had his hand around his throat. Thanks to you, again.”

“It was already too late by then, Tommy,” his brother said, slumping forward on the bench beside him, looking down at the ground. “I couldn’t go back on him, or he’d see to it the Panto story came out. And what did it matter, Tommy? What was Abe Reles anyway?”

“You mean,” Tom said, turning slowly to look at him, “what was Peter Panto compared to you?”

His brother was quiet for a moment, before continuing in a thick, flat voice that sounded as if he were still trying to convince himself of something. “McCormack told me if he couldn’t run the docks, it would be chaos. He said they’d throw out King Joe. Harry Bridges and his reds would come in from the coast, tie up the whole port, and it would all be my fault—”

“Oh, yes. King Joe Ryan: the indispensable man.”

“Reles had to go, Tommy. I had no choice. I told the Old Man, and he said he’d take care of it. He always looked out for his boys—”

“I’ll bet he did,” Tom said, balling his hands into fists and running them over his thighs. Shutting his eyes for a moment, in the vain hope that it would all go away. “So you sent the best cop in New York in there to see that Reles died, and a vicious killer walked free, and peace reigned once more on the New York waterfront.”

“It was just the way of it, Tom!” Charlie cried out in frustration. “It’s the things powerful men do that binds them together. It’s blood on the hands that builds trust—”

Tom cut him off. “It was just melodrama, Charlie, didn’t you get it? Star witnesses coming forward, dramatic trials. And the whole time, you playin’ the perfect part of the district attorney. It was all something outta the movies, a bunch of shadow play.”

“That isn’t so, Tommy. I made choices—”

“The choice you could’ve made was to walk away, once the war came. You could’ve gone off and done any damned thing you wanted, and been free of it. Let them find another patsy—if they could. But you couldn’t by then. Could you? You couldn’t leave it alone. You loved what you saw up on the big screen, and in the newspapers. You thought you could be the hero mayor, too.”

“I thought I could do some good, Tom. They were all workin’ on me to be mayor by then—Spellman, McCormack, Moses, Tammany. Even the Roosevelts—”

“Don’t forget Frank Costello.”

“There was nobody else possible. McCormack told me they wouldn’t accept Hogan. If I didn’t run, some mob stooge would be mayor—”

“Like Vinnie Impellitteri?”

“It’s easy enough for you to say, isn’t it? Well, no man ever ran a great city with his hands clean—”

“No, I understand it now,” Tom told him. “You would become one of them. Another indispensable man, just like all the others. Another superman the City couldn’t do without.”

“You can mock it, Tom. But that’s the way the world works. You would never accept that, Tommy—”

“The way of the world, Charlie, is that a good man gets a quicklime grave in a chicken farm in New Jersey. While the Bill McCormacks order a living human being thrown out of a window, then go to Mass each day for the photographers,” Tom told him, standing up. “How fortunate for us all that’s the way of the world. Otherwise we have to consider the possibility that we had somethin’ to do with it.”

Charlie stood up with him, pulling himself to his full height, as regally as possible. He was still a little taller, Tom saw, but now he couldn’t stand all the way up, his back hunched, in the manner of old men.

“I guess you’re just a little monster, then, Tommy? Sleeping with your brother’s wife—not such a great crime. Is that how you justify it?”

“I don’t,” Tom told him. “It was the worst thing I ever did, and the way things turned out, I’m probably going to pay for it the rest of my life. But I never told myself it was the way of things. I never told myself it was anything but what I wanted, and that it was wrong.”

“So what becomes of me?” Charlie asked him. His voice was sardonic, but Tom could see, to his dismay, the real anxiety still in his eyes. “Are you gonna haul me back to New York in irons after all? It’s up to you, Tommy. If you really think I should, I’ll go back and face the music. I’ll go back and tell the truth, the whole truth.”

“That’s hard to do,” Tom told him, “when you’ve already told so many lies.”

“What the hell do ya mean by that?” Charlie said, but Tom was already beginning to walk away, down from the monument to the Boy Heroes, and all the flags.

“Don’t worry, I’ll find my own way back,” he called over his shoulder. Charlie took a step after him, then stayed where he was, balling and unballing his fists.

“Hey, Tom, how d’ya like me now?” he called after him, the passing tourists staring blankly and moving away. “How d’ya like your big brother now?”

 

He took his time walking back to the hotel, and when he got there he didn’t go in right away but lingered in the Alameda, the leafy park across the street, where he bought some peanuts from another small, shoeless brown boy, and fed the pigeons while he sat and tried to think. At last when it started to get dark he went up to his room, hoping against hope that he would open the door and find her there.

But as he expected, the room was empty save for his luggage—a couple of small travel bags, and the typewriter case that smelled of ink and old felt. He opened the case, unlatched the sleek, green Smith Corona portable, and placed it on the little desk.

It was then that he saw the note there. No room number, no telephone. Not even signed, but clearly in her hand. It read simply: “When you finish your report, leave it at the front desk.”

He read it over twice, simple as it was, then nodded and sat down at the desk. He slipped a piece of the Hotel Prince’s stationery from the shallow desk drawer, beside the Bible, and rolled it into the typewriter. Then he began to write, pecking with two fingers at the elegant, light-green letters stamped on the thick, dark-green keys.