All the Dead Yale Men (24 page)

The Bulgarian said, with an accent that seemed sort of generic European spy, “You ready?”

“You ready?” Tim repeated to me.

I held my grandfather's field-grade L.C. Smith shotgun.

“I mean for the birds. You aren't going to be ready for this other thing.”

The Bulgarian went into the blockhouse.

“Pull,” said Tim.

A hard shot right away, a passing one to the right so you have to swing away or against the right hand. The clay pigeon flew in that line like a line drawing. The bird disappeared in a puff of smoke, like the flak my father had described to me. Tim pushed another green hull into the port.

“So, why are you curious about this guy out there in Braintree. Stanislav Ivakina, right?”

Of course he knew the name.

“Yeah,” I said.

“So,” said Tim. “What are we looking at here?”

“Domestic violence,” I said.

“Pull,” said Tim. Another bird, a hard shot, straight to the right, vanished in the flak-like smoke. He took another green shell and tossed it up and down, up and down. Then he put it back in the pouch and turned those blue eyes toward me. They were at once oddly fatigued and utterly blank.

“Frank,” he said. “I've been a cop for thirty years. And I've been lied to by guys who beat their wives to death with an iron, by wives who put d-CON in their husbands' hamburgers, by kids who raped a ten-year-old girl, by men who put bodies into furnaces, by mobsters who dropped bodies out there in the Atlantic. And you know what, Frank? After all those years, you learn something.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So what do you learn?”

“If someone is lying to you,” I said.

He put the green hull into the shotgun and said, “Pull.” The bird disappeared in that pigeon-colored smoke.

“Now, you can tell me all kinds of things, Frank,” he said. “But if you think you can say you're interested in this guy in Braintree because he's pushed his girlfriend around and have me believe it, then you better remember who you're talking to. So, let's cut the bullshit, Frank. You know what I'm like? A sex therapist. I've seen it all. Every fucking thing you can imagine. So, don't tell me any lies, Frank. It just pisses me off.”

The Bulgarian sat in the blockhouse, just glad to be under cover.

“Pull,” said Marshall.

Dead center: like magic, just a little smoke, which drifted away. The field looked like the back of a failed pottery factory in Rumania.

“It's personal,” I said.

“Hmpf,” said Marshall. “That's the first honest thing you've said.”

My ears rang with the shot. The puffs drifted away and I thought of my father as he came in low, so they couldn't hear him, those men around a general's headquarters in the desert.

“I'm close to retirement, Frank. I've got a nice little place in New Hampshire where my wife likes to grow flowers. Snapdragons, delphinium, astilbe, hollyhocks. It's nice to sit out there when the fireflies are in the flowers.”

“I'll remember that,” I said.

“So, here's your friend Stanislav. Guys like him don't start out at the end of the spectrum. Chopping guys up and putting them in Glad bags to put out in the landfill. They sort of work up to it. But it happens fast. We haven't got enough to indict this guy, but he's on the move. Won't be long. And, of course, we're always a little behind. That's the hard part. Keeping up to date.”

The Bulgarian said from the blockhouse, “Are you done?”

“Pull,” said Tim.

The bird disappeared in that puff of black smoke.

“You want me to pick this guy up and take him someplace and have a talk, you know? We can go up against him hard. Maybe in some room downstairs in a suburban precinct. I'm not saying like the bad old days with a phone book, but let me tell you, that was a piece of work. Around the kidneys. When they start pissing blood, why you'd be surprised how they want to talk. It's not the blood. It's the fear. So, even though I'm looking forward to those fireflies in the snapdragons, I'll talk to this guy. You want me to do that?”

“No,” I said.

“What's he got on you, Frank?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“There you go again,” said Marshall.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I'm on my own.”

“That's right. You're on your own, then,” said Marshall. “You poor son of a bitch.”

“Do you have a daughter?” I said.

“Sure, I do, Frank. My little patty-cake,” he said.

“What would happen if she suddenly thought less of you? A lot less. Like some kind of scum?”

He put a green hull into the port, closed the action, and just stood there, the barrel over that gritty landscape, which was a perfect combination of dump and cheap graveyard.

“I'd do a kervork,” he said. “A first-class Dutch job. But I'd do it so my wife got the insurance. You want help with that?” He touched the barrel of his shotgun. It wasn't too hot. “So it looks like an accident? So your wife gets the money?”

“We'll see,” I said.

“Pull,” said Marshall.

That flak- and pigeon-colored smoke appeared.

“After thirty years on the job, Frank, you realize what your job really is. It's to see how things are connected, underneath, not where you can see it. Like poetry, see? Do you read Yeats?”

“Yes,” I said. “I read Euripides, too.”

“What does he have to say for himself?” said Marshall.

“Cleverness is not wisdom,” I said.

“Hmpf,” said Marshall. “Maybe.”

Another explosion like flack.

“So, we got something else. What do you make of this?” Marshall said. “A lot of people from out of town are ending up dead. Why would someone bring someone to Boston to get rid of them? Why not do it in Florida or Arizona or wherever these people came from? Just think of the money that's being wasted on airfare and car rentals. It doesn't add up.”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“Pull,” he said. We stood in the aroma of burned gunpowder and that black flak.

This man, said Tim, sold stolen car parts in the South that he got from the Northeast, from Boston and Hartford, New York and Passaic, and he had come north for what was supposed to be a vacation and to do a little business. Firm up connections. Maybe he brought to Boston a list of what he needed: air bags, fuel injection, DVD players, parts for Audis and German cars and Volvos, which parts cost a fortune if you import them. The usual stuff, said Tim.

“You drive an Audi,” he said. “Don't you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Parts expensive?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Like how much does a power steering pump cost?”

“$2,891.89,” I said.

“$2,891.89?” he said. “Hmpf. Handy the way you have that number.”

Tim looked over at me: not suspicious, not curious, just that lingering glance from a man who had been a cop for thirty years.

So this guy from Miami, said Tim, brought his wife along with him, a heavyset woman with bleached hair and a tan that looked more like a leather coat that had been left out in the sun too long, and his kids, too. They all wanted to go to the amusement parks in New England. They called it the Six Flags tour. They rented a car and went from one amusement park to the other. The guy from Miami sat in the parking lot and read the
Daily Racing Form
with a pint of scotch and a hot dog he got from the concession stand while the wife, even though she weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, went with the two teenage boys on the roller coaster and the Gravity Defier. He waited in the
parking lot of the aquarium in Boston, his
Daily Racing Form
spread out over the steering wheel, and someone came to the window and shot him. Didn't open the door. Didn't go over the body. Didn't do anything like that at all. It took a while, but the police were able to arrest two men, each of whom had bad skin and who had a long list of minor and not-so-minor violations. Eastern Europeans. It was pretty obvious that they had done it, especially since one of them had been stupid enough to keep the gun that had been used.

“I've never seen anything like these guys,” said Tim. “Smug, you know, like they've got nothing to worry about. They said they had friends. What do you think?”

That same look: he had seen everything there was to see, and so it wasn't curiosity, just a sort of running through the catalogue of possibilities. Sort of like dreaming with his eyes open.

Tim faced the rubble of that field.

The Bulgarian brought us two bottles of beer and one for himself and then sat on the overturned bucket and faced that landscape.

The Bulgarian picked up a handful of the dirt next to the bucket and let it sift through his fingers, just like the yellow loam of the graveyard where my father's ashes were buried. I was left with the memory of those bloody feet in Poland, wrapped in rags, the blackness of the bore of the pistol that a German guard in a coat had put against my father's cold head, those moldy papers that my father had left to disguise the fraud he had pulled off and for which he obviously wanted my forgiveness, and the memory of that funeral dirt as it slipped between my fingers. Now, when I needed to reach across that gulf between us, I was faced with silence. I picked up some dirt, too, and let it sift away. I was left with the smell of gunpowder, so much like flak, and the litter on the ground was like the cigarette wrappers and condoms in the
pigeon shit that was the last thing Cal had touched before falling away, a skydiver in a business suit.

When you drive to think things over, just to be behind the wheel of a car, as though having your hands on a machine gives you a grip on some difficulty, you don't really think of a place you want to go. You just drive. And so I found that the Tobin Bridge was green as it ever had been, sort of pale, like insect killer in a glass jar. The cars went by when I pulled over, next to the spot where Cal had waited in that scum of guano and fast food wrappers, bits of Styrofoam and sticks from ice cream bars, and other items people threw from cars, parking tickets, bills, advertisements. The wind blew, but even so the river still had that stink of diesel and salt air, chemicals and garbage. The two hollows in the guano where we had sat were still there, not yet completely filled in with bird shit and junk. The gulls hung in the air. I got out of the car and stepped closer. The wind carried that harbor aroma and I came closer yet. Down below, where the bridge went above some houses before it crossed the water, the streets were cluttered with debris. Further out the haze seemed to be waiting. The metal of the bridge was cold.

A cop turned on his red and blue lights and stopped behind my car.

“What are you doing out here?” he said.

“Just thinking,” I said.

“No kidding,” said the cop. “This isn't the place for thinking. Let's see some ID.”

I took out my wallet.

“Well, Mr. Mackinnon, if I were you, I'd go home. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm going to be late.”

•
  
•
  
•

In the evening, with the Audi in front of the house (with its new hydraulic pump no longer leaking like my father's cars), I sat in the golden light of my study. I ran my fingers across the spines of the books. Thucydides, Livy, Xenophon, Herodotus, all said the same thing: nothing, once started, just disappears. Be careful what you start, these books seemed to say, as a chorus, since you never know how it is going to end, and when it does, it's usually not what you wanted. Xenophon, Thucydides, and the rest liked to show how the machine of history grinds, not only fine, but with perfection, as though some beautiful and frightening thing decides to show itself in the details of malice. And then, if you are alert, one day you find the machine has turned your way.

FLOWERS ARRIVED ONE
afternoon in June at our house in Cambridge, sent to Pia from an address near the law school. Card included.

“Who's this Robert person?” said Alexandra.

She gave me the card. I thumbed the edge and put it back in its green plastic holder.

“He was with her at the funeral.”

“Oh,” said Alexandra. “Him.”

She said this as though it explained everything.

Pia had rented an apartment in Cambridge, not far from the law school, but she took her time in furnishing it, and sometimes she came home to our house from IKEA or Target, the plastic bags like a hump an ant carries after finding a sugar bowl. Then she'd ask if she could have some towels, some sheets for a double
bed she had bought. Sometimes she didn't come home at all, and Alexandra and I were left with the modern lifeline: her cell phone. I learned to text. So, I sent a note to Pia, my big thumbs hitting the wrong letters on my Droid X. “Flowers for U here. Can U pick up?”