Requiem For a Glass Heart (4 page)

He nodded to her. “Thank you for the drink,” he said. She detected no note of irony.

She closed the door behind him, relieved, thinking she had narrowly escaped a disaster.

S
HE WAS ON THE
S
OUTHWEST
F
REEWAY WHEN SHE BEGAN TO
cry, suddenly and without warning, a hemorrhage of tears that threatened to extinguish the anger that she had carried like a torch in her stomach as she fled the restaurant.

What appalled her the most as she pressed her car onto the freeway was that she immediately had believed what Griffin Younger had said about Tavio. She hadn’t even questioned his revelation, because it had carried the conviction of its context. Griffin drunkenly had blurted it out as an unthinking mistake. He had not meant to give away Tavio’s infidelities, but his own sorrowing fury at Tavio’s foolishness had brought the truth out in a curse, a verbal fist-shaking at Tavio’s licentious ghost.

Instantly she knew that all of them had lied to her— Griffin, Tavio’s partner; Lund, Tavio’s and Griffin’s superior; and Ennis Strey, her own squad supervisor, who surely must have known all along. God, maybe he had even known about Tavio for years. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they had lied to her in the name of that age-old masculine fidelity that superseded everything and that Tavio himself apparently had found more binding than his fidelity to her.

Goddamn them all, she thought, and that was when she began to cry, the tears springing out of a livid, stuttering rage
that encompassed all of them at once, tears of frustration and shock and pain like none she had never known. In that one brief moment of Griffin’s gin-beclouded confession, Tavio, her most intimate other self, suddenly had become a stranger.

After Tavio’s death Gate had taken a leave of absence, and her sister had come from Charleston and stayed with her for nearly two weeks, during which Gate had completely isolated her anguish in a desert of dry-eyed silence. She hadn’t cried, not a tear. She simply had sat mute, staring out the window at nothing at all for days on end. Her appetite vanished. She lost weight. She got a sore throat that wouldn’t go away. Every normal emotion dried up in her, shriveling to extinction. It had been a bleak two weeks, a period that seemed, in retrospect, hallucinatory.

Then one morning she woke early, just as the day was lightening the sky outside the windows, crawled out of bed, and put on a pot of coffee. She drank it alone, her ravaged digestive tract rumbling at the sudden assault of the black brew that she believed signaled her resurrection. When her sister woke up, Cate told her to pack her bags because she had booked her on an eleven-thirty flight back to Charleston.

That very day she began a diet regimen that was intended to rehabilitate a physical system completely disordered by two weeks of fasting and gut-wrenching inner turmoil. She began an exercise program. She called a real estate agent and listed the house that she and Tavio had managed to acquire by pooling their salaries. By the end of the week she had moved into a condominium on a secluded street in north Tanglewood, her adrenaline-driven recovery owing more to a denial of her emotions than a healing of them. The following Monday she was back at work.

The determined euphoria of her miraculous recovery had lasted five weeks, then it proved to be fool’s gold and she had hit bottom again. Unexpectedly. After that she began a slower, more sobering and genuine climb back, a thoughtful struggle with her grief that had involved psychological counseling. The process had been incremental and less dramatic than her own version of “putting it all behind her,” but it had enabled her to rebuild her life, and it had lasted.

But nothing was ever the same again. She had been in her late twenties when Tavio had stepped into her life, and she was almost in her mid-thirties when he stepped out of it. Not
only was nothing ever the same, it never had been. If the psychological counseling had done anything for her, at least it had taught her to take Tavio off the pedestal on which she had placed him the instant he was gone. It was a natural overcompensation, believing that no one could ever be as wonderful as the person who had been lost, especially when that loss was a sudden blind stroke of fate, a single, unjust sweep of Death’s scythe. Counseling had helped to put that in perspective.

But she had not been toughened to the point that she could deal with what Griffin Younger had coughed up from his inebriation.

So she cried, plunged suddenly into an eye-stinging blur of humiliation and anger that forced her off the expressway at the first exit and into a business plaza, a deserted boulevard, its grassy median awash in a downpour of isolated, cloudless rain from a sprinkler system. She hurriedly pulled to the side of the boulevard, ignoring the scrape of her wheels against the curb as the car lurched to a stop. Wrapping her arms around the steering wheel, she dropped her head on her arms and wept as the water drifted over the car in sheets of soft, stippling whispers that almost killed her.

Startled by her pager vibrating at her waist, she raised her head and stared at the wet windshield. She had no idea how long she had been sitting there. She looked at the pager. The number was Strey’s, and there was no way she could put it off. She picked up the telephone from the seat beside her and dialed. As it rang she wiped her cheeks with her hand, wiped the tears on her dress.

“Strey.”

“This is Cate.”

“Hey, kid. Where are you?”

“I’m, uh, on my way home, Southwest Freeway.”

“Okay. Listen, I’ve got to talk to you. Something’s come up, and it can’t wait until tomorrow.”

She hesitated. “You talked to Younger.”

This time Strey paused. “Goddamn. Yeah, I did. When did he get in touch with you?”

“Today. Called me at work.”

“I see. Well, damn.” He paused. “I’m sorry, Cate. I don’t know. Griffin’s a mess.” He paused again. “But Gate, that’s not what this is about. Can I meet you at your place?”

“Yeah,” she said, holding her forehead in her hand as she looked at the water on the windshield. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

When Strey buzzed her from the front gate, she pushed the button to open it, and a few minutes later he was ringing the doorbell. When she opened her door he was standing there on the patio amid the palms, wearing an old polo shirt with part of the collar turned up, part down, the tail out over a pair of blue jeans. He wore deck shoes without socks, and his fifty-five-year-old face was a little pinched around the eyes from too little sleep, lately interrupted.

“Come in,” she said, turning away from the door. She had had time to wash her face and run a brush through her thick, unruly henna hair. But she knew she looked frumpy, that her dress looked like it had been wadded up at the bottom of a musty clothes hamper for a week. She imagined that she looked pretty much the way she felt, which was shitty. The room was dark except for a small lamp near the sofa that she had turned on when she walked through the room as she came in. She sat down at the opposite end of the sofa and folded one of her bare feet up under her.

“What’d he think I was going to do, kill myself?”

Strey walked over to an armchair and sat down. “He was worried about you. He was so drunk it took him a while to get the story out. He said you made a pretty good scene in the restaurant.”

“Did he tell you why?”

Strey nodded.

She looked at him. “You knew about this?”

“I knew how Tavio got killed, yeah.” Strey was just under six feet, compact, athletic. The short-sleeved polo shirt revealed the muscles in his arms, and he carried himself like a man ten years younger. He had straight dark hair that was thinning a little in the front and graying at the temples. For the past five years he had been Cate’s squad supervisor, and he was one of those rare men who had no pretensions. What you saw was what you got, which meant that you always knew where you stood with him and didn’t have to play games. He didn’t much like games. While he wasn’t a stickler for rules, he didn’t flout them and seemed to operate in large part on simple, sound common sense. And he expected the same from his agents. He liked agents who worked hard—
slackers were transferred out in a snap, even after the word came down from Washington that that old trick was going to have to stop. He just flat out wouldn’t put up with them, and he had enough pull with old buddies above him to see to it that he didn’t have to.

“Why the hell was I given that goddamn false report, Ennis? What really happened?”

He looked at her a moment, his head tilted a little, thinking. Then he nodded and looked her straight in the eye.

“The report was correct exactly as you read it, Cate. Except for how Tavio died. He wasn’t killed in an ambush, he was in bed with a woman. Lund changed that and that’s all. He thought he was doing you a kindness. He didn’t see why you needed to know that.”

Cate stared at him, her red and puffy eyes unblinking as she swore to herself that she would not allow another tear. Certainly not now.

“The minute Tavio had suspicions that he’d been compromised,” Strey went on, “he got a message to Griffin and told him that he thought he’d been made and that he was coming in to talk. They agreed to meet in Rome—”

“I read all that, Ennis,” she said.

“Yeah, okay. Well, all of this happened very quickly, within eight to twelve hours, from top to bottom. He was in Salerno when he called Griffin. He also told Griffin that he was going to stop in Naples …”

“To see this woman.”

Strey nodded. “Griffin begged him not to. Griffin had never liked …that woman. Didn’t trust her.” He paused, shook his head. “The next thing Griffin knows, the Naples
carabinieri
were calling him in the middle of the night, ten hours before he was supposed to meet Tavio in Rome.”

Silence.

“And the woman?”

Strey shrugged. “Gone.”

“Who was she?”

“Nobody knows. Nobody ever met her. Griffin’s dislike was based on the little bit Tavio had told, him and on the obvious security risk. Even so, he covered for Tavio. He just let it slide, holding his breath. Naturally, they now think she was connected. Maybe she was even the one who turned him over.”

“Jesus Christ.” Gate had turned her head away; she couldn’t speak. The little lamp cast a feeble light; darkness was very close by.

“Ennis.” She cleared her throat. “Did he have a reputation for this?” She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

“There were rumors,” he said. “But Christ, Gate, you ought to know better than anybody how people talk about the undercover guys.”

“Don’t …” She stopped, got a grip on her temper, dropped her voice. “Don’t patronize me.
Did
he have a reputation?”

There was a moment when she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, and then he said, “Yeah, Cate. He had a reputation for liking women.”

She felt as if he had reached into her gut and grabbed a handful of her intestines. Nausea crawled at her throat again, along with the horrible knowledge that she wasn’t going to wake up from this.

“While we’re being honest here,” Strey said, “I think you’d be making a terrible mistake if you let this wipe out everything else about the man’s life. This is only a part of what he was all about. In fact, a small part. I don’t expect you to understand this, not at first anyway, but those women, they didn’t—”

“Oh, God, Ennis, don’t say it—not any of that condescending crap.”

“No, listen to me.” Strey sat forward in his chair, leaning toward her. “What you thought you had with Tavio, you
did
have with Tavio. Those women, they didn’t enter into the picture. I’m not making excuses for him. I’m just telling you the way it was. If we’re talking truth here, then let’s look at all of it, let’s look it right in the face. Tavio had learned to divide himself into parts—that’s why he lived as long as he did, that’s the terrible reality of how those guys survive—and the part that he gave to you, that he saved for you and shared with you, was the best he had. He didn’t have that with anybody else, and what he got from you, and needed from you, he couldn’t get from anybody else.” He stopped and looked at her. “That’s the way it was. I’m not saying it’s easy to deal with, I’m not saying it’s right, but nothing can change it, either. Not cursing him or hating him, not even all the grief in the world.”

Cate looked at him, at the shallow light of the small lamp softening his face.

“I don’t know how—honest to God, I just don’t know …” She sighed heavily. “It … Damn him anyway, Ennis. I can’t help it.”

They talked a little longer, and after a while she thanked him for coming, assured him she was going to be all right, and told him to go on home.

But Strey didn’t move; he just stared at her.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I told you, Cate, this really wasn’t the reason I needed to see you. It’s something else.”

She forced herself to listen to him, to bring her mind back from the shadowy hollows it had wandered into.

“Listen,” he said, sitting back now, studying her. “I’ll be honest with you. I wanted to talk to you about another undercover assignment.”

“Undercover.”

“Yeah, but it’s something that, you know, you’ve got to hit the ground running, and … I don’t know how you’re feeling right now, if you think you can do that. Even if you wanted to.”