Nightjack (23 page)

He shut his eyes and tried to remember. He must’ve heard it at some point on the ward. Perhaps Dr. Brandt had mentioned it in group therapy. He pressed himself and asked the others for help. The kids shouted. Vera. Angie. Nipple Jones. Freddie “Double Tap” Freeman. Lucy. Caramel Skankie. Siobhan. Katie. Yokahama Yolanda. Duchess Crotch Stink. Pookie.

Katie. Katie, that was it.

“It wouldn’t be wrong, you know,” she said, reaching down to stroke him. “The two of us making love. We’re both alone. No matter who else hangs onto us, or wants to take over, or tries to shove us aside, we’re still alone. There’s no need to go through the world like that. I don’t want to go through life like that, it’s nothing but torture.”

“Pia—”

“Don’t be afraid, Will.”

“I’m not afraid and my name isn’t Will.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s okay. Do you want me to give you one?”

“No, I don’t think so. What did you do to Cassandra Kaltzas, Pia?”

“First tell me who you are.”

That one stopped him. “I’m...the In-between man.”

“In-between what?”

He watched the moon in her eyes. Nothing came to him. Finally a voice, not his, said, “The sins on the left hand and the sins on the right.”

“You just mean you’re not Pacella and you’re not Jack. You’re the edge of the coin.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You aren’t going to let Jack loose to cut me up, are you? No matter what I do?”

“No.” He drew her closer and kissed her, hard and wanting.

She pulled away viciously, hissing. She got out of bed and headed for the door. The moonlight receded, following her in a heavy white tide that left him in deeper darkness. Over her shoulder she snarled, “What the fuck good are you to me?”

Then she was gone.

He looked down and the knife was in his hand.

twenty-two

The ferry to Voros reminded him of the ferry crossing from Port Jefferson, Long Island to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Pacella and Jane would cross the Sound and spend the day driving around the antique shops looking at colossal, centuries old furniture with high five-figure price tags.

If he had the money he might pick up a music box for her or something else small. A salt & pepper shake set from 1920, a dollhouse piano he could set on his fingertip that cost eighty bucks. Pacella might buy a carved meerschaum pipe stained by ten thousand pouches of tobacco. Even these small mementos of history made him feel vaguely connected to a greater world he didn’t really belong in.

The tourists heading to Voros exhibited a contained enthusiasm, as if afraid to show too much excitement in front of the locals. Pace let the sea wind blow in his face and tried not to imagine what would’ve happened if Pia had actually wanted to love him last night instead of only wanting to die.

Hayden said, “We could still probably skip out, you know. Make a run for it.”

Pace started to answer and Faust cut him off. “There’s no going back, at this point. Don’t you feel that now? The draw forward?”

“We don’t have to go back to New York. We can hide in Athens. Who the hell could find anybody there? You could stick the whole Red Chinese Army behind the stacks of garbage. We could form our own
bouzouki
band. Pia could dance. Or we could become fishermen. Sponge divers. These people never sleep and never work. I say we fit right in.”

Stroking his beard into a finely-crafted point, Faust said, “I think I’m beginning to look forward to meeting our unseen host.”

“Me too,” Pia said. “It’s time to finish this.”

“But what is this?” Hayden asked. “I’m still unsure what it
is
.”

“
This
.”

“Yeah, but what is it?”

“This thing we’re in.”

“Which is?”

“Stop bothering me, Hayden, or I’ll stab you in the nuts and kick you overboard.”

Hayden looked mildly hurt. Faust said, “Pia, your disposition is getting markedly more miserable.”

“Imagine that.”

No one asked Pace’s opinion on anything, so he didn’t offer it.

Faust leaned into the breeze and said, “I enjoy the water. I find it calming. There’s almost a sweetness to the air, isn’t there?”

Swaying her hips as if she might begin dancing again, Pia touched him lightly between the shoulder blades. ”What’s the long green spinach, Faust?”

“Excuse me?”

“The lettuce that got you whatever you wanted. In the clubs, the restaurants, all the joints up and down the strip. Park Avenue. The Gold Mile. Philly’s Main Line. The lettuce that would stick to their sweaty knees. The long green spinach.”

There was apparently no domino effect going on in Faust’s head, one memory toppling forward into another. Her words didn’t mean anything to him, even though they were his own. “I don’t know, Pia.”

They passed fishermen in the harbor, children in brightly painted green and yellow dinghies calling to the tourists and wanting to dive for coins. Pia threw some and the young boys disappeared like dolphins.

The ferry docked at the Voros port and they walked down the beach to an inlet where the charters and sailboats were busily going out.

The guy they chartered the boat from was also a handsome Greek youth. He also had a fishing blade stuck in his belt, and he was also named Stavros. Pia ignored him. This Stavros asked to be paid in drachmas because he had a friend who could still get a very high exchange rate. No wonder Vindi had given Pace the outdated money instead of only euros. He’d known the sailing men would prefer the obsolete notes.

“How long will it take to get to Pythos?” Pace asked.

This Stavros spoke with the same proper diction as the other Stavros. “In my boat, which was also the boat of my father, it is no more than an hour east of us. Not many go there, but I believe I can find it again. I have not visited for almost five years, a time when I went diving beneath the island.”

“Beneath it?”

“Yes. There is a pit at the south end of the village, a large hole that goes directly through Pythos. During the war, the Germans invaded and tried to drive their vehicles down the road around the pit. They’d fall in and vanish. When I was sixteen, friends and I would go diving to salvage in the reefs. Many Nazi weapons and armor are still in the depths. There is good money in such items, even rusted and damaged. Many tourists buy them for their collections.”

“Nazi memorabilia.”

“Yes. We could have been rich but we dealt with a deceptive antiquities dealer.”

Porpoises swam alongside the boat as Stavros confidently handled the large outboard motor. Pia and Faust sat back and laughed like children as the waters frothed. Hayden asked, “Are those marlin?”

“Dolphin,” Pace said.

“Naw, maybe tuna.”

“They are dolphin,” Stavros said. “Do you not know dolphin when you see them? Don’t you visit them in your ocean parks and watch them do flips and pretend to laugh and walk on the water? Did your parents not take you there?”

“My father would lock me in the crawl space when he got drunk,” Hayden said. “And slide me cans under the door like I was a cat. I’d have to smash them open on the concrete and pull back the lids with my teeth. I hate tuna.”

“Me too,” Pace said, surprised that it was true. “Somebody wanted me to go work in a cannery where I would’ve spent the rest of my life jamming tuna into cans while the fucking fish stared back at me.”

Hayden appeared perplexed. “Is that how they do it?”

“Forget it.”

“No, seriously, I’d like to know. You just grab it with its head and eyes and everything and just smash it into the can?”

“Forget it.”

The sun burned brightly. Their skin began to redden but no one had thought to bring sunscreen. Faust’s scar was hard and red as a ruby.

Stavros looked over at the porpoises and grinned in the sunlight. The ocean was a cobalt azure with a blazing sheen. There was no land in sight. If the little boat capsized or the motor failed, they’d all go straight to the bottom. Except Stavros who could probably swim for days without tiring.

The kid turned with a seductive smile and leaned toward Pia. “They say that dolphins are the ghosts of drowned sailors. They swim beside the boats because they remember what it was to be fishermen.”

“You sound like you believe it,” she said.

“Because I do. I must. My father and grandfather and two uncles died at sea during storms. They are here to protect me from the same fate. It may only be a delightful legend to outsiders, but to us, this is truth. They know I am of their blood, they show their love and guardianship by swimming beside me.”

“I would’ve thought you’d feel guilty.”

Stavros peered into Pia’s lovely face, still giving her the sexy smile. His curly hair drifted across his exotic features. “Guilt? How do you mean?”

“You know, that they all drowned out there in the ocean trying to make enough money to feed and clothe you and put a roof over your head. If I went down like that, you better believe I’d be pissed at the little shit I had at home who didn’t appreciate a damn thing I’d ever done. Working until my hands were blistered every day, burning from the salt. You know? I mean, can you imagine the last thing your father must’ve thought while he was going under the waves, sinking deeper and deeper while the pressure built in his head and he clawed for the surface, the ocean filling up his throat and his belly, I mean, he was probably wishing he could’ve been a sheepherder instead. All alone on a mountain somewhere, safe with his sheep. But no, he had to fish, just so his whiny, snotty kids could have shoes and crayons. Your whole life knowing your father is dead because of you.”

Stavros held onto the shaft of the motor and blinked rapidly at Pia. His breath came in bites and his chest worked harder and harder.

“Well, it’s true,” she said and turned away.

Pace said, “Stavros, listen to me—”

“I do not wish to talk to you people anymore,” the kid said. “I do not consider this a pleasant conversation. I have met many friendly tourists but you are strange and very unlikeable. I am filled with sorrow that I allowed you to charter this boat, which was also my father’s boat. I will not return for you, you must make other arrangements.”

“All right.”

The next thirty minutes went by in silence. Pace took out the knife and fondled it, running the edge of the blade at an angle over the meaty part of his palm. His hands were so strong that the blade, as sharp as it was, couldn’t easily cut him.

He could feel Jack and many others circling just beneath the surface, like sharks, waiting to chew him to pieces and take him down to the bottom. He realized, the more this knife meant to him, the more purchase it gave Jack.

The dazzling Grecian morning like a flaming cathedral.
Are you cured
?

Pace thinking, I’m not stepping aside for anybody else. I’ve got too much left to do. But I need to do it on my own terms. Not Pacella’s, not Jack’s, no one else’s. Just mine, whoever the hell I am.

He took the knife and held it over the starboard rim of the boat and let it go.

Princess Eirrin, ten thousand-year-old sorceress and heir to the Atlantean throne, eased her head back and her gills opened as she breathed above the waves. She slid to Pace and pressed herself against him. He sucked air through his teeth because her chain mail was so cold on his heated skin.

The ten-mile-deep trenches in the ocean depths rumbled with the force of her mystic spells. A dolphin leaped twenty feet out in front of the bow of the boat.

Stavros said, “I have not seen that occur for a long time. They do not venture that close because of the motor.”

“Maybe Dad wanted to say hello,” Hayden said. “Wanted to see how you were making out.”

“Do not mock me, sir.”

“Not me, man. You go to a Knicks game with a bunch of mongoloids and you learn never to mock
anybody
. You like the Knicks?”

Princess Eirrin’s lidless eyes turned on Pace and tears dripped across her blue cheeks. She placed her webbed hand against the side of his face and said, “If you ever need your fetish returned, then my knights of the deep shall retrieve it for you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” he told her.

“If your trials ever become too great and you need your weapon, call on me and it shall be yours once more.”

“Thank you, but I still have it.” He lifted his hand and showed her.

He’d tried to drop the blade and it looked like it had gone into the water, but here he was still holding it.

Faust said, “In the sky, toward the west. There’s something coming this way. Is that a plane?”

It took a minute to make out the sound of the propeller over the boat motor. A black shape dropped lower and lower, as if it might buzz close enough to knock them into the water. It was a helicopter. It swept by maybe a hundred feet directly overhead and continued on in the direction they were heading.