Giovanni's Gift (32 page)

I put the photographs back into the desk, tried to arrange them so they appeared to lie there haphazard, just as before. I listened hard and heard nothing, and was persuaded by the silence to open yet another drawer.

Here were receipts, business documents, phone bills, that sort of thing. None of this much interested me, but I found myself sifting through the papers, anyway. Who did Helen write checks to? Nothing very unusual; to the gas company for propane, the electric company for the power that would allow the lights to shine were I to come to my senses and shut this drawer and hurry downstairs to the kitchen, having turned the lights on there, where I might rather innocently sit and await Helen's return rather than continue with this folly.

Then my eye caught a glimpse of something unexpected. Graham Tate's name printed on a series of documents; mortgage receipts, they appeared to be. The amounts were substantial, at least from my purview, and though my fingers went cold and numb at the vision of his name here in the house of Helen Trentas—for what could this mean but that she had been hiding from me the extent of her involvement with Tater—I continued to lift sheet after sheet of these bank statements, and gazed in disbelief even as I began to realize that I was probably standing in the second-floor bedroom of a house owned not by Helen Trentas—nor left to her as part of the estate of the late Giovanni Trentas—but by Graham Tate. The omnipresent Graham Tate, the omnivorous Tate. Here he was again. I pushed the drawer shut and went slowly downstairs, sat on the couch facing Sam the stuffed eagle. The wind at the windows whistled, calmed, then whistled anew. My mind raced similarly, went blank, raced. When I laid my head back into the pillow of the sofa, I remembered seeing an eagle during a family excursion to salt marshes on Long Island, a few hours east of New York City, near Sag Harbor; remembered the sight of the bird whose wingspan was tremendous and head imperial, as it flew steadily across the low sky, carrying the fish it had just caught in its talons. The fish faced forward, its tail jerkily wagging and snapping. It was a vast fish, with mouth jutted open and a look of shock registered there. Sleek, with its silver sides caught in the claws and spurs of the fisher bird. Prey and predator journeying toward their final wrestle in the nest where chicks equipped with their own beaks and claws would render the fish into mutilated strands of meat and skin, fin and bone. And before I closed my eyes, I gazed at Sam and knew he'd made many similar kills during his brief time on earth—just a fact of nature, as Helen might say, in that same calm voice she used when telling me about trapping bear. But the remembrance bothered me, just as the witnessing had, back near the salt marshes of that boyhood junket. I felt a curious kinship with the stupid twitching fish. What a ludicrous fate he suffered. Or was it? Maybe he'd been in an ecstasy, soaring toward his ruin. Maybe it beat being caught in a yellow tide and washing ashore poisoned, or cannibalized like most in the deplorable food chain, condemned by fate for being slower or smaller than the next.

Despite my uneasiness, my concern about being here uninvited, despite my memory of that eagle and her hostage, and of these new dismaying discoveries upstairs, I nodded off to sleep, there on the sofa, as the wind went on blowing.

My awkward nap wouldn't last long. Soon Helen was standing over me, a smile awry on her lips. “Burglar,” she said.

I yawned, stretched casually as I could, smiled back with the words, “Caught me.”

“Breaking and entering now, are we.”

“It was a crime of passion, and also it was cold out. Punish me as you see fit.”

“Don't think I won't,” she said, smile gone as she sat beside me, fluently wrapped her arms around me, kissed me with a kind of rough levity. “Your cheeks are cold,” I whispered; but they weren't cold for very long, neither of us was cold for long, as I found my way inside her there on the davenport, while the first grains of what would begin as a light shower percussed against the window, grains that would develop into fine hail, then settle into a steady drizzle driven by capricious gusts.

“So tell me the truth,” Helen said, as we gathered ourselves up and faltered toward the kitchen. “Did you snoop around before I got here? Truth now.”

It would be easier to trap a tempest in a bottle than describe the next moments, such a chaos of subtle lies her questions evoked, even as she surprised me with goads, like, “Closets are the best places to look for things people don't want you to find, the backs of closets, and under stuff at the backs of shelves. Only mediocre cat burglars look in people's drawers. Nobody hides important stuff in drawers; too obvious.”

“Is that so,” as neutral as I could manage.

“Or else they put things there hoping they'll be discovered.”

“I see.”

“If I had to guess—”

“You don't—”

“If I had to guess, I'd guess you were one poor burglar.”

“I'm not the thieving kind.”

“Sure you are, everybody is.”

“I don't think you are, for instance.”

“Naive.”

“Look, why are we talking about this? I didn't steal anything, and if you have something to hide, why not just tell me what it is, and that would save us the trouble of playing word games.”

“I just missed you this morning at the stables. They said you were talking with Willa.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

“Grant—you want some tea?”

“Whisky, more like,” I said.

She filled two glasses neat with Scotch whiskey, handed me one, then said, “Let's run away to Rome.”

“Anywhere but Rome.”

“I don't care where, just away.”

“Cliché. I'm naive and you manufacture clichés—quite a pair.”

Hours later, when we sat at the St. Clair together, drinking with the fervor of sailors on brief leave, I confessed. I told her I had looked at photographs in her desk drawer. Not in the closet, I assured her, nor elsewhere in the house. I couldn't fess up to seeing the Tate documents, so it was a quasi-confession, but still, both of us were surprised by the burst of honesty. And rather than chide me, she said, “You're a decent guy, Grant.”

“Not that decent.”

She said, “Decent enough.”

We were in a booth, sitting close side by side, holding hands, sometimes kissing. This was our
coming out,
I supposed, and we didn't have to wait long before Noah and Milland Daiches walked in together, saw us, then sat at the bar, heads inclined with fraternal familiarity, speaking or softly laughing, bemused or amused, I couldn't tell which. Helen, rather than growing tacit or shy, became even more animated than before. “Tell me about the photos, burglar. What did you learn about me?”

“That you were in Italy, and stop calling me burglar.”

“Visiting cousins and second cousins and twelfth cousins twice removed, yes. What else?”

“What else?” I echoed. “Nothing really. It's embarrassing to talk about it. There was a photo of you when you were young at one of the Labor Day feasts.” I wanted to ask about the woman with the gaucho hat, but when we glanced up Milland Daiches was standing there. “Buy you two a round?”

“No, thanks,” Helen said at the same time I said, “Thanks.”

Milland sat across from us, having shouted the word “Round” to the bartender, and slurred, “Rotten out, boy. Good night for bein' inside with friends. Looks like we all got the same idea. Helen's got herself a boyfriend, looks like.”

“Shut up, Milland.”

“So now, Grant. Mr. Tate says you'll be comin' to work with us.” It was apparent Milland had already indulged before he and his brother came to the Clair.

“Is that true?” Helen turned to me, horrified.

“He offered me work. I didn't take him up on it.”

“You will, though. Tha's what Tate says.”

Milland thanked the man who brought over the drinks clutched together in both hands. After he left, I said as calmly as I could, “If that's what Tate says, then you can be sure I won't.”

“We'll see, boy. Tate says you're broke, says he'd pay better than anybody else around here. Says you will.”

Helen said, “Milland, you heard Grant. If he doesn't want to work for Tate, he isn't going to.”

“First of all, I'm not broke,” I lied. “And second, how would Tate know whether I was broke or not, anyway?”

“He's smart, Mr. Tate. Knows things.”

We've all had too much to drink, I thought. “What else's he know about me?”

“Tate prob'ly knows the way your asshole's put in.”

“You're an idiot, Milland,” Helen said with disarming evenness.

Not looking at her, he muttered, “You don' even know how smart I am.”

“Oh yeah? What makes you so smart?”

“Nothin' you'd want to know,” he said, still smirking at
me
rather than Helen.

“What sort of work you guys do, anyway?” I asked.

“Whatever needs to be got done.”

“Let me rephrase. What is it exactly that needs to get done around here that you boys do? Just say, like, if I went to work for Tate, what sort of work would I be doing?”

“Well”—drawn out long, Milland's attempt to create suspense— “next week we gonna be workin' up by you people, widenin' out that road to Lewis. Want to get that done afore the snow flies.”

Helen interjected, “What did you mean by that before?”

“Huh?”

“When you said nothing I'd want to know is what makes you so smart. What did you mean when you said that?”

“Didn't mean nothin',” he smiled.

Milland did truly seem half-witted, I thought, though he had managed to provoke in me precisely the dismay he must have intended, with his unreluctant comment about the creek road. Tate was, if nothing else, blatant in his prideful display of power and ascension. Was he really going to drive his crew right up to Ash Creek's gate? Yes, I answered my own question; why not? Did it have to do with land and development and all that? Yes, again, I thought; but that must have been a small convenient element in his larger purpose, which I finally began to understand as having much more to do with rivalry, jealousy, personal revenge, the usual human stuff, the pitiable motives that fester at the unquiet center of nearly all folly. Wars have been waged over such matters. Murders have been committed over much lesser disputes.

Milland was saying, “Sometime there's things for some people to know and for other people not to, and that's all.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You wanna know what I'm talkin' about?”

This was more or less shouted at Helen, though he continued to look at me. Milland was a touch walleyed, irises chaste brown but whites ambered by time, and drink.

And then Noah was suddenly there with us, saying hello to all, sitting beside Milland, who became instantly silent, even childishly sullen, I might have thought, contemptuous—but of whom, and why? Noah asked how I'd been, nodded to Helen, and inquired about my aunt and uncle. “I think Henry ought to let me come up there, spend a couple of nights maybe in that studio of his, see if we can't bring this business to an end.”

“I doubt Henry'd ever go along with anything like that,” I said, watching Milland, just as he'd watched me while speaking to Helen; his mood had shifted so abruptly from the high spiritedness of his cryptic intimidations to what now seemed to be muted ire. Fascinating, even a little frightening. Noah had his arm over his brother's shoulder, I noticed. This was not the first time the older brother had been forced to jump in and save the younger from making an outrageous mistake, I thought. It wasn't difficult to imagine them as a pair of kids, their faces hewn and hard even in their youth, nor to draw a mental picture of the elder with his arm cast over the shoulder of adolescent Milland, steering him off the field, say, where a group of tough boys had gathered to watch a fistfight between the Daiches boy and some youngster who was about to cream him with a flurry of knuckles for having opened his big mouth, said something that wasn't supposed to be said. Even then, Milland must have been a bit like this, I believed. Such a fantasy made me like Noah a little more than I already did. But also made Milland more murky to me— murky, ambiguous, unintelligible—than ever. What was he capable of, this man? Besides, I didn't like the way he leered at Helen.

Noah and Helen exchanged a few words, nothing I could hear, as my head was saturated not only by too many drinks but, now, with one overwhelming idea. Not an idea that was new to me this evening, but one which, in the wake of Milland's provocations, had become wholly compelling. When Noah said it was nice to see both of us, and that he and Milland would leave us alone—he turned to Milland, shook him a couple of times as if to awaken him from a coma, and said, “These two have better things to do than sit here talking with a couple old dogs like us”—I reached over and shook his hand, then extended my hand to Milland, too, though he rose and left without having noticed. They had hardly withdrawn from the booth before I whispered to Helen, “You think I'm a burglar, well, I got an idea that'd prove you right.”

Helen looked at me with eyes that suggested she was returning from another world altogether. I was reminded of the first day I met her, when she'd stared at the sky while we were sitting in the cemetery. Just as I did then, I kissed her, and afterward she asked me what was I talking about.

“Tate's office,” I said. “He's arrogant enough to have a bad security system.”

“How d'you know?”

“I happened to look, don't know why. Was up there, and you see, I happened to look around on the way out. Wasn't sure why then, and now I know why. There's something up there in a file, I just know it. I don't like it when people take it upon themselves to know my private business, and seems to me, best way to respond?—you just know their private business
right back at them.
”