Under Radar (21 page)

“The woman you married already had two children.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I see their pictures on the wall. You ended the crime before you were married, but the girls are as old as the crime. The older one, certainly.”

“Yes. Rosalie, my wife, was a widow. It's a terrible story. Her husband died in Jamaica.”

“An accident?”

“Something like that.”

Tom said nothing.

“No, not something like that. I'm being evasive. He murdered a man while they were on vacation. No one has ever been sure of what happened or why. He went to jail and died there.”

“How?”

“He was killed in a fight. After he died, the man who brought me into crime introduced me to his widow. He said I could be good for her.”

Now Tom wasn't sure if he was alive anymore. Had the prison reported his death after the fight in which he broke his nose? But this didn't make sense. Or maybe when everyone was released from the prison, there had been a fire and a riot, and all that he recalled of those days was a memory from death. Maybe he really was dead.

No. I'm alive, and I'm sitting here. When we were released from prison, was the word sent back that I was dead, to avoid a problem with the family or any kind of diplomatic trouble? Or had Rosalie told David Cohen that her husband was dead?

That was it. The world shifted to allow room for this piece.

Why did Rosalie love criminals? Because Tom and David were both men with an unplaceable sense of balance and power, moral strength, though it came from the immoral? Because an unredeemed piece of creation waited for Rosalie's help, and with Tom's refusal to accept his wife's love, the grid of destiny brought her to a man with courage equal to his guilt? From a lawyer to a doctor, from the betrayer of justice to the betrayer of healing?

All of this was braided and invisible.

“Hire me,” said Tom.

“What will your job be?”

“I'll protect you. I'll continue to protect you. I'll monitor your security.”

“Come to dinner. I'd like you to meet my family. Would you do that?”

“Yes.”

Climaxes happen because something becomes intricate. Why, and when, do you make a mistake when you play the piano? What makes something difficult is not just the problem of dexterity. Have you ever noticed that even the simplest pieces give you difficulty towards the end? The music stretches out, and we anticipate the climax. The pleasure of the end scares us. We strain for release and block out the moment's sensations. We meet that place or point where the piece expands, where the music fulfills itself only by the way we tolerate the surge of feeling called for by a condensed run of notes, and we contract. But it isn't the difficulty that stumps us, we fail the challenge of emotion. If you don't realize that, you'll get used to the wrong notes.

Tom rode a private elevator to the roof of the hotel, where David Cohen lived in a secret glass house. Even the guests on the penthouse floor below were ignorant of the universal above them.

David Cohen looked upon Tom with an ancient affection, with fellowship, with pleasure. “You're going to be very good for me.”

“I hope so. I hope this will be good for both of us.”

“Of course it will. Here, let me introduce you.”

Cohen brought Tom into the living room, from which the hotel grounds were hidden behind a hedge growing in large planters. The hedge admitted a view only of the ocean. Behind them, there was mountain. Rosalie and the girls were there, standing, waiting.

“Rosalie, I'd like you to meet my friend, Lyle Monaster.”

Rosalie extended a hand. Where she had once been sucked dry by her first husband's ruminations and the weight of the two children, in the ten years since a stupid murder in a waterfall, love had resolved her distress. She was radiant now, calm and gracious. No one would want to harm her.

“Hello, Lyle.”

“My pleasure,” said Tom. He turned to the girls, such poised young beauties.

“This is Perri, and her sister, Alma.”

“It's a pleasure to meet you,” said Perri.

They shook hands. Her fingers were long, her nails were shaped and polished red, her hair was thick, she wore Tom's dead mother's pearls. Perri's hand was warm, and yes, still slightly damp.

“And this is Alma.”

“And what a pleasure to meet you, Alma,” said her father, for the first time in ten years.

“Welcome to our house,” she said, also offering her hand. The touch was unfamiliar, but the hand was strong.

“You have a very strong hand,” he said.

“I'm a gymnast.”

“How wonderful.”

Cohen, satisfied with his friend's manners, offered a drink.

“I'll have a glass of wine, please. Red wine.”

This was his first drink since before he'd been to Jamaica, but it was time now, it was right.

Cohen nodded to his bartender, who poured drinks for everyone.

“Lyle is going to be working with me,” said Cohen. “He's a specialist in security, but I suspect we'll find more for him to do than checking that the locks are working.”

“Where are you from, Lyle?” asked Rosalie.

“My father was in the foreign service. We moved around the world. I'm American, but I've never really lived there until now. Mostly I've traveled.”

“How exciting.”

“What was your favorite place?” asked Perri.

“Jamaica.”

A silence opened.

David Cohen met Tom's eyes with a question, but also with trust.

“We've been there. It's not our favorite place,” said Rosalie.

“I'm sorry. People have different experiences wherever they go.”

Alma asked him, “Why did you like it?”

“I heard a story there. Wherever I go, I hear stories, but this one was so mysterious that I could never quite forget it or ever quite understand it. Let me ask you, why don't you like Jamaica?”

“My first husband died there.”

“This was very clumsy of me.”

“You didn't know.”

“I did, though. David mentioned it earlier, but your daughter asked me, and I wasn't thinking clearly enough to give a different answer.”

“You told the truth.”

“I could have just as easily said Paris or the Red Sea at dawn and spared you the pain. I'm sorry.”

“What was the story?” asked Rosalie.

“Should I tell it?” Tom asked.

“My husband died a long time ago,” Rosalie said. “David has been the father to my daughters. What happened then, when my husband, well, you must know.”

“David said he killed someone.”

“Yes. We don't know why. So perhaps a story about Jamaica is what we need to hear now, if you'll tell it.”

Cohen supported Rosalie's bid. “My family is strong. Don't be afraid.”

“I'm hungry,” said Tom. “Perhaps we should eat first, and then you can tell me about yourselves, and after dinner, I'll tell the story.”

As they walked to the dining table set outside in the garden, Tom stopped at a wall with pictures of the girls.
There was Alma, the gymnast, on a balance beam, on the uneven parallel bars, on a vault. And there was the picture of Tom and his girls, the last picture of them together in happiness, taken by Rosalie in Jamaica, Tom between his daughters, leaning over to fit the frame. Tom pretended to study the picture of Alma on the vault.

“How old were you when you started?” he asked her.

“When I was seven. That's late, but I caught up.”

“You're good.” He turned from the wall.

“I try.”

Tom remembered the way she had taken such pleasure in dancing with the singer at the Montego House. And here she was standing on her hands, her legs spread wide. There was a compulsion in her that he never could have stopped. What had Barry Seckler done but recognize in the little girl her dream of performance?

They sat at a round table, with Tom between Rosalie and Perri. He was given the honored position, facing the ocean.

Perri had finished high school but had not yet applied to a university. She was working for David Cohen in the office, learning the hotel business.

“But you'll finish college?” asked Tom.

“Yes, I expect to. But I don't know when or where.”

This is the effect of my disappearance. She depends on the stepfather because she misses me. She's afraid to leave home.

“And Rosalie. Do you work?”

“I work with a few charities. I volunteer.”

Why did no one recognize him? Because I am not so angry anymore. Because I am not the center of the world anymore.

“We're stuck with life, aren't we?” asked David Cohen.

“That means I should tell my story,” said Tom.

“Yes,” said Rosalie.

Tom inhaled the air of this family. He thought of the witch who predicted his punishment. If he found her, he would thank her. Perhaps I should look for her. And then he opened his mouth, and listened to a story the hanged man told him, that he only just now remembered.

“In former days, when the children of Solomon were threatened by an evil decree, the Ras Tafaris would take the staff of Judah into the desert, to a special place, and there they would recite a certain prayer and make an offering to the Holy One, Blessed Be He. And the disaster would be averted. And when the staff of Judah disappeared, the Ras Tafaris would go to that place in the desert, and even without the staff, they still knew that certain prayer. And they would say the prayer, and the disaster would be averted. And when the special place was lost but the prayer was still known, they would recite the prayer and beg for help from the Holy One, Blessed Be He, and the disaster would be averted. Now the staff of Judah is gone. The path to the special place has been covered by sand. The prayer has been forgotten. But we still have the story. Tell the story.”

After Tom finished the brief tale, his listeners held the silence.

Rosalie spoke first. “Thank you,” she said. “I don't expect that any of us fully understand your story, but I don't think we have to right away.”

“No,” said Tom. “It takes time.”

...

Perri and Alma, wounded early in their lives, wanted only happiness for their mother, who worked so hard to make them strong. They were too young to make sense of everything this white-haired man with the broken nose had to tell them, but when they harkened to his advice and followed his suggestions, life was easier for them. Rosalie went to him often, and the girls would see them walk together on the beach, talking, always talking. Their stepfather accepted the stranger completely. In time they loved him, too, their mother's curious friend.

They listened to him tell her one night that the purpose of the gift of life is the discovery of our purpose. It would take a long time, or a short time, for that purpose to be known.

“One could fulfill one's purpose,” they heard him say, “and live a long time after.”

Their mother asked, “And then?”

He answered quickly. “And then you tell the story.”