All the Dead Yale Men (20 page)

So, Pia came home the next weekend, just like always, and
waited for Miller. Why didn't he call? He usually called every day when she was in New Haven, but she hadn't heard from him. Pia stayed in her room, stretched out on her bed, and on the computer she had some old rock and roll, which was like the music that she must have heard at some retro club she and Miller went to. She had her cell phone on the nightstand, and as she waited in her room, her ear turned toward the distant sound of traffic on Brattle Street, she seemed to be somehow shrinking, getting more pale, more withdrawn. I asked her if she wanted to row, since it was so warm for early March, but she just looked at me and shook her head. The only thing we could do was cook, and I looked up new recipes. In the kitchen we made shrimp with fresh ginger, red snapper with brown butter and capers, with a dry white wine. She looked, for a moment, like herself as she peered over a small skillet, watching the lemon pulp dissolve, but when her phone rang, she took it out and flipped it open, like someone with switchblade. Then she closed it again, disappointed, and turned back, with a sort of resignation, to the pan where the butter had almost burned.

Pia and I went to the movies and sat in the dark. There, at a silly romantic comedy, the tears made shiny rills on her cheeks, the silver quality of them all the more obvious because of the light that came from the screen. Then she pulled herself together, blew her nose, and bucked up. We drove home and then sat in my study, where she had a drink and said, “How could anyone do that? You know, just disappear? Not even a good-bye.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Is that what Miller did?”

She looked at me. Then she took down a copy of Thucydides and flipped through it, going from one year of the war to the next, and sometimes she stopped and read a little something out loud, dwelling on those occasions when someone on the Peloponnese or someone in Athens had someone assassinated,
as though this was an indictment of some kind. One of these men, who had been killed, stabbed outside a temple, was described as “pestilent.” Then she closed the book and went upstairs, where at night she got up and walked the halls, making the old boards creak. It was like a sound of regret, one perfectly modulated by time.

The next weekend, Pia went to the house where Miller had a room but his things had been moved out. The landlady had been threatening him with eviction for a month, and when he stopped coming around, she moved his clothes, old sweaters, and blue jeans with holes in them, a couple of Bose radios that didn't work, a TV with no knobs on the front into the cellar with the dust and rats. The landlady said she'd keep them until Miller paid what he owed. She was even going to paint the room, she said, and get a nice young woman to move in. In the evening, Pia ate the food I made her, and then she went upstairs to listen to her music and sit with her cell phone.

In Braintree, Stas wore a new black shirt with his black jacket, and his skin condition had improved.

Yana typed at the Mac. The lists of car parts scrolled by on the screen, and next to them there were pictures of brake shoes, carburetors, fuel pumps, hydraulic pumps, air bags. The air was heavy with that scent she wore, which seemed so much like the steppes.

Yana scrolled down the lists of auto parts.

“So,” said Stas to me. “How are things?”

“All right,” I said.

“How's your daughter?” he said.

“Better in some ways. Worse in others,” I said.

“That's always the way. You just can't win. But,” he said, “what about that guy she was hanging around, that lowlife from Harvard Square? Is he still in the picture?”

“No,” I said.

“See,” he said, “everything comes to the patient guy. It all works out. You want a burrito?”

The driveway of my house was quiet. A light was on downstairs in my study and one was on upstairs, too, in Pia's room. Otherwise the place was dark. It had always seemed, when Pia was growing up, that the place was warm, that even in the dark it still glowed with domestic certainty, like a rock that had been in the sun all day and was still hot hours after twilight. It didn't look that way: just dark and a little cold. Now, in March, the fog came in some nights and the house seemed to be suspended in shreds of mist.

Pia came downstairs when I was in my study. She wore an old bathrobe of mine, and she had her hair in a ponytail. No slippers, and she tucked her long feet under herself as she sat in a leather chair on the other side of the desk.

“I want to ask you something,” she said.

“What's that?” I said.

I looked away, though. She went right on staring.

“I want the truth,” she said.

“From me?” I said. “When have you ever gotten anything but the truth?”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “Not anymore.”

The poison, like the presence of dry ice, was working through the house: doubt and suspicion. I bit my lip, if only because while the poison was spreading, I still had plenty to resist it. After all, if I looked into my heart there was plenty there: goodwill, love, the desire to be honest, and yet it all seemed to be wrapped up in that cold fog, that stinky mist from the river. How to get clear of it, to get back to what we had had before?

“You want something to eat?” I said.

“No,” she said.

“How about some shrimp and garlic, sautéed in butter with a little french bread to dip in it? Some sliced tomatoes. Maybe a little lemon sorbet for dessert?”

“No,” she said.

We sat there. The house ticked. Outside, in the distance, a car went by on Brattle Street with a long, shrill honking; I guess a drunk had been in the street or an old man or old woman, lost in the fog.

“I've been thinking,” she said.

“About what?”

“You,” she said.

“What about me?”

She shrugged.

“I want the truth,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “If I can give it.”

“Did you have anything to do with Aurlon?” she said.

“Like what?”

“With his disappearing?” she said.

“Me?”

“Did you have one of your cop friends scare him?”

“No,” I said.

“No?” she said. “They didn't take him downstairs someplace and let him have it with a phone book? Isn't that the usual thing? Wouldn't that get him on the first bus out of town? Or do you have something more high-tech than phone books?”

“No,” I said. “I don't do that. No one I know did that.”

Her eyes were so piercing I felt the touch of them, like the point of a pin on my face.

“If I ever find out that you did,” she said, “or if you had anything to do with making him disappear, I promise you'll regret it.”

I swallowed. The house ticked.

“I won't take betrayal,” she said. “Not from my father. You understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

She started crying, and when I went around the desk she pushed me away.

THE TISSUE ON
the physician's examination table was like the paper of toilet seat covers found in airport bathrooms. Stiff, crinkling, and obviously sterile, as though the germs were just waiting to take a whack at you. I always had this physical in the middle of March to see what the winter had done to me.

The diplomas on the wall were from Berkeley and the University of California Medical School, and so I was able to take a little comfort that where education was concerned, I didn't go to the medical version of a junkyard, surrounded by barbed wire in Braintree, as though in Uzbekistan, but to the medical ghetto in Boston, out by Brigham and Women's Hospital. My doctor, Michael Stevenson, came in, the tape of the electrocardiogram in his hand: a starched lab coat, cheeks recently shaved, hair precisely trimmed, skin at dermatological perfection. He glowed.

Now, though, with that strip of the electrocardiogram in his hand, he looked into the distance.

“How did your father die?” he said.

“Stroke.”

“That makes you the last of the line,” he said.

“I have a daughter,” I said.

“Is she going to have kids?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“So?” I said. “What's the verdict?”

“We've been friends for a long time, Frank,” he said.

“That doesn't sound too good,” I said.

“Some irregular heartbeats,” Dr. Stevenson said, “according to a study in
The New England Journal of Medicine
, are related to specific emotional states. For instance, when a man or a woman has had an unfortunate affair, a particular irregularity may show up in the heart. Or if you're concerned about someone you love, the rhythm may show up, too.”

“That's what I've got?” I said.

“To fix it, we do what's called an ablation,” he said.

“What's that?” I said.

“We burn the part of the heart that's causing the problem,” he said. “We do it by going in through the artery in the groin.”

“You mean you're going to stick a toaster filament in my leg and push it into my heart and then fry it?”

“If the arrhythmia doesn't go away. Who are you worried about, Frank?”

The paper wrinkled when I moved a little, just to have something to do.

“We don't want to wait too long,” said Dr. Stevenson. “The heart has a memory. It starts doing something and it doesn't forget it.”

I put on my clothes.

“Otherwise, you're fine,” said Dr. Stevenson. “Make a follow-up appointment on your way out. We'll keep an eye on this . . . ”

“Maybe my heart will forget . . . ,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. I guess you're still upset about that case. The one that was overturned on appeal.”

“I think about it,” I said.

“Maybe you should take up a hobby,” said Dr. Stevenson.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounds good.” I buttoned my shirt. “Have you ever read Thucydides?”

In my study, at home, I poured myself a drink and pushed the play button on the answering machine, and Stas said, with the keys of Yana's computer clicking in the background, “Hey, Frank, come on out to see me. I want to talk something over.”

The barbed wire at the top of the fence was spun in perfect spirals, like DNA. That's how Stanislav must have seen this place, like a camp on the taiga.

The samovar was hot and the office, with its wooden walls and the odd blue light from that carport roofing, had the bitter scent of tea. Yana was paler than before, and her skin was almost transparent in its delicacy. She pushed her heavy hair to one side as she looked over her shoulder at me and smiled. Then she went back to typing and scrolling through the images of auto parts on the computer: transmissions, clutch housings, air bags. She spent a lot of time looking at air bags.

The tap on the samovar made a little trickling sound, like a leaking boat, as Stas filled a cup and passed it over.

“Frank,” he said. “Well, I was wondering when you were going to come see your friends.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He knocked a pile of repair manuals for Audis and BMWs off a chair and shoved it in my direction.

“You know, Frank, you should learn to put a sugar cube
between your teeth when you drink. It makes it sweeter. Doesn't it?” he said to Yana. An air bag was on the monitor, but she said, “Yes. Sweet is nice. If you can get it.”

“Yeah, getting sweet is always hard,” said Stanislav.

“What do you want?” I said.

“You're not sitting down,” said Stanislav.

I sat down. The tea was hot and bitter.

Stanislav spoke to Yana, who shrugged, picked up her jacket, and said to me, “I've got an errand.” Then she glared at Stas.

She put on her jacket and went out the door, into the muddy earth, and up to the gate and by the rolls of barbed wire at the top of the fence.

“Let's talk things over. Like friends, so no one gets hurt.”

“Who's going to get hurt?” I said.

“You,” said Stas.

He said this as though it was a fact of life. There are birds and bees and ants and when they get together, the boy and the girl ants . . . The irregularity in my chest was a small tick, or so it seemed, although it was hard to be certain if it was there or not. Maybe the ghost of a click.

“You know the heart has a memory?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Stas. “Pushkin says something about that . . . It's a Russian thing.”

The tick came and went. Or was it just irregular?

“I never asked you for anything,” said Stas.

“What would you ask?” I said.