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“What was it he was holding?”

He nodded. “You.”

“What about me?”

“You look more like your mother than your father,” he said.

Then I got it. “You’re a lying son of a bitch,” I said.

“You look a lot more like her. I know. I see your father in the mirror every morning.”

I laughed at him. “You’re crazy, or you think we are. Or are you just wisecracking again?”

“It’s true,” he said.

Bill said, “What the hell’s going on?”

I said to Kapp, “He didn’t get it yet. When he does, he’ll take you apart. You better say fast you were lying.”

“I wasn’t lying.”

“It was the wrong ploy,” I insisted. “Bill has a big thing about honor.”

Kapp said, “We ought to sit down over a bottle of imported and talk. We’ve got a lot to fill in, the both of us.”

Bill said, “Goddamn it, for the last time, what’s going on?”

“Kapp says we’re half-brothers. We shared a mother, only Willard Kelly wasn’t my father.”

Bill’s eyebrows came down. “Who does he say is your father?”

“If he’s smart, he’ll change his story.”

“I say it’s me,” said Kapp, “and it’s true.” He was mad at us.

Bill raised his shoulders and took a step and I tripped him. I said to Kapp, “He’s going to kill you now, I swear to God he is. And there isn’t a thing I can do about it.”

Bill was struggling to his feet, and Kapp backed away to the wall, talking fast, mad and scared both. “Your mother was a two-bit whore out of Staten Island, a goddamn rabbit. She sucked Will Kelly into marrying her, with the first kid. The second was mine. I know it, because she was at my cabin on Lake George for six months and she only went back to Kelly because I told her to.”

Bill was on his feet and I was hanging on his arm. Kapp spat words at us like darts. “Edith got exiled to a burg upstate with Will Kelly and orders to behave and never come back to the city. She couldn’t stand it. She was there a year and she stuck razor blades in her wrists.”

Bill threw me away, and I bounced off a tree-trunk. I shouted, “Tell him you’re lying, or you’re a dead man!”

Kapp flamed at me. His eyes were on fire. “And you’ll have another dead father to revenge, brat!”

Bill swung a fist like knotted wood. Kapp tried to lean inside it, but he was too slow. It caught him behind the ear and dropped him on his face in the weeds. Bill bent over, reaching to pick him up again.

I came up and clubbed Bill with the Luger. He went down on his knees. Kapp crawled away downslope, and Bill fell on his legs. I rolled him over, freeing Kapp’s legs, and Kapp crawled up a tree trunk to a standing position and stood hangdog, his arms around the thick trunk.

I stood in front of him, holding the Luger by the barrel. “Don’t stop talking,” I said.

“Not now, boy, I’m an old man.”

“Stop playing!”

He shivered, and leaned his forehead against the bark. His eyes were closed. “All right,” he said. “But give me a few seconds. Please.”

I gave him the seconds. When he raised his head, there were fine lines from the bark on his brow. He pushed his lips over in a weak smile. “You’ve got her looks, boy, but you’ve got my guts. I’m glad of that.” I didn’t say anything. He shrugged and let the smile fade out, and said, “All right. Her name was Edith Stanton. She came out of Rosebank on Staten Island in ’34. She went with Tom Gilley a while. He made her pregnant, but he aborted her with some right hands to the stomach. Then she floated around, here and there, with one or another of a bunch that mainly knew each other. This was still just after Repeal, and we were all trying to get organized again. She came across Will Kelly, and he fell for her. He was the only one’d ever held a door for her since Staten Island, and she liked it. Then she got pregnant again, by him this time, and suckered him into marriage. But she didn’t like staying home with the kid all the time, and she got to hanging around with the old bunch. Kelly stayed home and changed diapers. I think he’s waking up.”

I turned and looked. “We’ve still got a few minutes,” I said.

“All right. It’s like this, some women come to life with motherhood. I never paid much attention to Edith at all before, but when she started hanging around again she was different. No, she
looked
different. Tougher, maybe. More basic. I don’t know what it is, it happens to some women. I took her home. She was a rabbit, but there was something interesting in her besides that. I don’t know how to explain it.” He was getting nostalgic.

“I don’t even care,” I told him. “Get on with it.”

That brought him back. He said, “For a while, in ’38, there was some trouble. Baltimore was where heroin and that came into the country. There was a kind of dispute, Chicago and us, as to who was going to run Baltimore. So I went up to a private place on Lake George. I had two boys with me, two I could trust. And Edith. I told her come along and she came. We were there six months, and nobody touched her but me. She came back pregnant. She named the kid Raymond Peter Kelly. That was a private joke between her and me. I owned the cabin as Raymond Peterson.”

Bill moaned. I said to Kapp, “We’ll finish the conversation in the car. Come on.”

“All right.”

He took a step away from the tree and fell down. He looked up at me, shame etched on his face. “There was a time a workout like this would’ve meant nothing,” he said. “Not a thing. Not a thing at all.”

“I believe you.”

I switched the Luger to the other hand and helped him up. He leaned on me and we went back up between the cabins and around to the Mercury. I looked at him. He wouldn’t be running anywhere. I said, “I’ll be right back. You won’t have to go over this part again.”

He nodded. I opened the back door and he sagged onto the seat, his feet hanging out onto the blacktop, his head leaning sideways against the seatback. I turned away from him and went back and found Bill coming up, one arm straight out beside him holding the cabin. His face was square gray stone.

I stood in front of him. I said, “Bill, I want you to know something.”

He said, “Get out of the way.”

“There’s an old man up at the car. If you kill him for telling the truth, I’ll shoot you down for a mad dog. What did you do when they told you Ann was dead? Punch the guy who brought the news?”

He said, “Go to hell.”

I stepped aside. “You can’t stamp out facts with fists,” I said. “Your father was a crook’s shyster. My father is sitting in the car up there. Our mother wasn’t the kind they have in the
Ladies Home Journal.
”

He let go the cabin and went down on his knees and started to cry with his hands hanging straight down at his sides. I went back to the Mercury and said to Kapp, “He’ll be along pretty soon. He won’t do anything any more.”

“Good.” He nodded. His eyes were half-closed, his hands were limp in his lap. The swollen hand looked worse. “I’m tired,” he said. He pushed his eyelids open more and studied me. He smiled. “You’re my only child, do you know that? The only child I ever fathered. I’m glad to look at you.”

I lit us cigarettes.

September is a good time of year way upstate. I stood beside the car and smoked and looked around. The cigarette smoke was thin and blue in the air. The mountains over us in the west were half in the green of summer and half in the browns and reds of fall. The lake, seen down past the cabins and the tree trunks, was blue and deep and cold. I could smell it. Far away over it was Vermont, dark green.

I didn’t look at Kapp. I didn’t know how to fix my face to look at him. It wasn’t as though I’d been an orphan all my life. I already had a father. Kapp had blood claims, but he was a stranger.

After a while, Bill came up into sight from between the cabins. He stood there, not looking our way, and got a cigarette for himself. He fumbled badly with it, as though his fingers had swollen. Then he came over, slow and heavy, and got silently behind the wheel and started the engine.

I didn’t know who to sit beside. The front seat still made me geechy, but I didn’t want Bill to think he was being cut out. Kapp knew it, and grinned at me. “Sit up front with your brother. I want to stretch out, I’m tired.”

I got in and slammed the door. Bill gazed out the windshield and mumbled, “Back to the hotel?”

I said, “Might as well.”

We drove back to Plattsburg. Kapp said he wanted a drink. Bill went upstairs, walking away with his shoulders hunched, and Kapp and I went across the lobby and into the bar. It was called the Fife & Drum. The glasses were painted red, white and blue to look like drums. Because of the Revolutionary War.

Kapp said, “I haven’t had a drink in fifteen years. What’s a good Scotch?”

I shrugged. “I don’t buy good Scotch.”

The waiter stooped and murmured, “House of Lords?”

“Good name,” said Kapp. “Got a ring to it. Two doubles, on the rocks.”

The waiter went away. I said, “You were in jail more than twenty years. They let you have liquor the first five?”

He winked. “I should of gone to Sing Sing, boy, but I had connections. And there was a time when Dannemora was a little easier. Not like a Federal pen.” He made a sour face. “It is now.”

The waiter came back, went away.

Kapp raised the glass, tasted it, made a face. He coughed. “I forgot. It’s like starting new, it’s been so long. Remember how lousy it tasted the first time?”

“You want a mix?”

“A what? Oh, a set-up? Not me, boy. Not Eddie Kapp.” He got out a new cigarette, working one-handed. His left hand looked terrible. I held out my zippo and said, “I’m sorry what I did to you.”

“Shut your face. Tell me about Kelly. Your brother. He doesn’t look like the type to be here.”

“They killed his wife, too.”

“Hah? His wife?” He sat back and nodded at me and grinned. “That means they’re scared,” he said. “Scared of old Eddie Kapp. That’s good.”

“We found a guy said there was some kind of syndicate trouble brewing in New York. That that was why they killed my—my father. Why they killed Kelly.”

“Take it easy. You think of him as your father, call him your father. He was a lot more your father than I was, huh?”

“You were in jail.”

“That’s the truth.” He swallowed some more Scotch. “I’m getting used to it,” he said. Then he watched himself tap ashes into the tray. “About your mother,” he said. “I don’t want you to get me wrong, what I said before. Edith never worked in a house, nothing like that. She wasn’t ever a professional.”

“Let’s forget about that.”

He got mad. He glared at me. “She was a good girl,” he said. “She gave me a good son.”

I had to grin. “Okay.”

He grinned back at me. “Okay it is, boy. And I’ll tell you something, they’re out of their heads. They’re panicky. I can look at you two and there’s no question which one of you is Will Kelly’s boy. No question. But there’s always the chance, always the chance. They’re panicky, they’re afraid of the chance. They’ll even go for the kid, you wait and see.”

“Do you think so?”

“You wait and see. Hah!” He sat back again, smoking like a financier, his eyes gleaming in the dim light of the bar. “We’ll give them merry hell, boy! Who wants Florida?”

“The Seminoles.”

“They can have it.” He leaned forward fast. “You know what I was going to do? I figured I was an old man, washed-up, ready to retire. I wrote my sister—frigid-faced bitch, but I didn’t know anybody else in the world—I told her leave that bum she’s married to. We’ll live in Florida, I’ve still got plenty stashed away, with an extra twenty years’ interest on it. See? Old Eddie Kapp, washed-up, retired to Florida for the sun and the cheap funeral. With my
sister.
”

He ground out the cigarette. “Family, family, family, that’s always the same damn thing.” His voice was low and grim and intense. “With the mob, with you, with me. Always the same damn thing. I was ready to spend the rest of my life with my sister. Think of it, with my sister. I hate her, she’s a hypocrite, she always was.”

“I met her,” I said. “She’s just frustrated.”

He grinned. “Careful, boy, you’re talking about your aunt.”

I laughed. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“I tell you, I’d given up. Tony and The French and all the rest, they were writing letters to me. Come on back when they spring you, Eddie, we’re ready to roll. We’re just waiting on you, Eddie, and we move in. Yeah, the hell with all that. That’s the way I figured it, I was an old man, time to retire. And just the one relative in all the world.” He curved a grin of pain. “It’s family, it does it every time. Where’s the damn waiter? I’m getting the taste back.”

We re-ordered and it came, and Kapp went on: “I’ll tell you about family. Listen, when I saw you—who knew what you were or what you wanted? Twenty-two years ago it looked easy. When this baby here is in its twenties, I’ll be out again, and he’ll be at my side. See? But by now, who knew? You were Kelly’s kid, not mine.” He drank, inhaled cigarette smoke, grinned, winked at me. “Then I saw you, boy. Raymond Peter Kelly. Keep the Kelly, who cares? I saw you, and I knew you were mine.” He got to his feet, looking around. “Where’s the crapper?”

He had to ask a waiter. I sat and thought about him. I thought,
He copulated with a married woman named Edith Kelly and impregnated her and she produced me.
I could believe and understand that. I thought,
He is my father.
That was something else again.

He came back and sat down. He finished the second drink and we ordered thirds. They came and he went on talking as though he hadn’t stopped. “This thing about family, now,” he said. “It’s an important thing with a lot of people. All kinds of people. And I’ll tell you a group of people it’s important to, and that’s the people make up the mob. Particularly in New York. You don’t think so? Hard cold people, you think. No. There wasn’t a two-bit gun carrier on the liquor payroll didn’t take his first couple grand and buy his old lady a house. Brick. It had to be brick, don’t ask me why. It’s in the races, national backgrounds, you know what I mean? Wops at the national level, mikes and kikes at the local level. Italians and Irish and Jews. All of them, it’s family family family all the time. Am I right?”