“You don’t want to get the sun on those burns of yours,” he cautioned me.
“They’re healing, Dad. Don’t worry about it.”
“Still can’t tell me what happened?”
“Secret stuff. Sorry.”
“Goddamned oppressive interfering government. If a son can’t even tell his own father how he ended up with burns all over his mush . . .”
“Just like you never told me the truth about what happened to Mom.”
He looked at me over his half-glasses. “You know about that?”
I nodded. “Let’s just put it this way . . . what I was doing in England, that was connected with that. And a debt got repaid. That’s all I can tell you.”
“I see. Well, as a matter of fact, I don’t see.”
He sipped his champagne and orange juice for a while. Then without another word he got up from his chair and went into the living room. It was cool in there, with a draft that stirred the zigzag-patterned drapes. Most of the ornaments and pictures were familiar to me from the house in Mill Valley, although there were quite a few photographs that I didn’t recognize.
Dad sat down at the piano and started to play.
“ ‘
Who made doina?
The small mouth of a baby
Left asleep by his mother
Who found him singing the doina
.’
Remember that one? Your mother loved that one.”
On top of the piano stood a framed photograph of a handsome-looking woman in a smartly pressed US Army uniform. One hand was raised to shield her eyes from the sun. The other was holding the collar of a glossy-looking bloodhound.
“Who’s this?” I asked my father.
He carried on playing—very softly, his wrinkled hands barely touching the keys, as if he were remembering the music in his mind, rather than listening to it. “That? That’s Margot Kettner. Friend of your mom’s, during the war.”
“That’s a bloodhound. A man-trailer.”
“Really? I wouldn’t know. All I know is, Margot Kettner and your mom, they were very close.”
“I never heard her mention any Margot Kettner.”
“More than likely you weren’t listening.”
I put the photograph back on top of the piano. “No, Dad, you’re right. I probably wasn’t. You know me.”
I settled down in Kenwood Hill, Louisville, under the name William Crowe. They gave me a new social-security number and a new bank account and even a new passport. I started up a freelance business consultancy, pretty much along the lines of the work I had been doing before I was sent to England.
I made friends, I joined a couple of local charities, I played golf at Quail Chase. I dated a few women, and with one of them (a vivacious redhead called Mandy Ridgway) I had a long and serious relationship that almost went as far as marriage. Somehow, though, I could never bring myself to make the commitment. Every time I thought about marriage I thought about my Kit, lying on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, and the possibility that I might be called on to use it again.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” said Mandy, one September evening in 1961, as we sat in Stan’s Fish Sandwich on Lexington Road, eating rolled oysters.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s always like there’s something on your mind. Something private. Something that’s worrying you.”
“Such as what?”
“You tell me. But wherever we go, you’re always looking around you, like you’re checking everybody out. Look—you’re doing it now. You’re not looking at me, you’re looking over my shoulder.”
“Sorry. It’s a bad habit, that’s all. Guess I’m just nosey.”
She reached across the table and held my hand. “There’s something else, too. A couple of times lately you’ve been talking in your sleep.”
“Oh, really? Don’t tell me I’ve been calling out another woman’s name.”
“Not unless ‘Duca’ is a woman.”
The next morning, I opened up my mailbox and found a plain yellow envelope in it, postmarked Washington, DC. Inside was a compliments slip from MI6 in London, and a picture postcard of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, with an improbably blue sky.
The postcard was dated June 12, 1961, so it had taken nearly three months to reach me. Presumably it had been vetted by MI6 and then by US counterintelligence before it had been decided that it was harmless, and that they could send it on.
The writing was loopy, in smudged purple ink. “
Dear Jim, Even after all this time I still think of you. I am so sorry for the way things turned out. Poor Bullet died late last year. I would love to know how you are. Yours, Jill
.”
I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach, very hard. I sat down at the kitchen table just as Mandy came in, tightening the belt of her robe. “Jim? Are you OK?”
“Sure. I’m fine.”
“I was thinking maybe we could go to Shakertown today. You’ve never been, have you? It’s really fascinating.
Actually, I have an unnatural craving for a slice of their lemon pie. I hope I’m not pregnant.”
“Not today, Mandy, OK? Something just came up.”
She came over and sat on my lap and kissed my ear. “I certainly hope so,” she said, suggestively.
It was Jill herself who opened the front door. Her hair was different, flicked up like a tulip, and she was wearing a tight white sweater and a russet-colored tweed skirt. She looked even more beautiful than I had remembered her—dark-skinned, with those dark feline eyes, and those full, suggestive lips.
“
Jim!
” she said, in total shock, and clapped her hand to her mouth.
“Hey, I got your postcard,” I told her, holding it up. “I thought of writing back—but then I thought—nah, I’ll come over to see you instead.”
She rushed out of the doorway and threw her arms around me and kissed me. I felt like I was in one of those ridiculously romantic TV commercials. But she felt so good, and she smelled so good, and she seemed to be so delighted to see me, that I really didn’t care.
“Oh God,” she said. “I thought I was never going to see you again.”
“Oh, yeah? I hope you didn’t think you could keep me away that easy.”
“Why don’t you come inside? Mummy and Daddy are both out for the day. When did you arrive?”
I followed her into the house. Outside the living room window, a gardener was raking up beech leaves from the lawn and burning them on a bonfire. There was a melancholy smell of smoke in the air.
“Would you like a cup of tea? Or a drink, perhaps?”
I took hold of her hands and looked at her. I couldn’t believe how gorgeous she was. What’s more, I couldn’t believe how excited she was to see me, after more than four years. After all, I was forty-three now, while she couldn’t have been much older than thirty-one.
“I could murder a beer, if you have any beer.”
“I think Daddy’s got some Mackeson’s.”
We sat together on one of the flowery-covered couches. “Are you still married?” she asked me. “You’re not wearing a wedding ring.”
I told her about Louise, and she nodded seriously. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But maybe it was all for the best.”
“Maybe. What about you? Nobody swept you off your feet yet?”
“Not the way that you did.”
“I’m flattered.”
“I’m not flattering you, I’m telling you the truth. I’ve never been able to get you out of my mind.”
I sipped my stout. There was something in her intonation that made me think:
This isn’t just about sexual attraction. This is something more
.
“I suppose there was some unfinished business between us,” I said, warily. “A few loose ends that needed to be tied up.”
“I know what happened to Duca,” she said.
“So they told you.”
She reached out and gently stroked the twisted burns on the left side of my neck. “You were very brave,” she said. “There aren’t many men who would have the courage to face up to a creature like that.”
I didn’t say anything, but watched her eyes.
“You’re different from other men. That’s why I couldn’t forget you. That night we slept together . . . I
felt
it. And then, when I saw you and Duca together . . .”
“What happened, Jill? What happened that day in the surgery? What did Duca do to you?”
She turned her face away, in profile. “Nothing. He didn’t do anything.
It
didn’t do anything.”
“But afterward, you were dizzy, and you were sick. Duca must have done something. Did it cut you? Did it scratch you? Did it inject you with any of its blood?”
“I was frightened, that’s all. I was suffering from shock. I didn’t have any experience of Screechers, not like you. I simply couldn’t take any more.”
“OK,” I reassured her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give you the third degree. It was just that I was worried about you.”
“I know,” she said. “But you didn’t have to worry. And you don’t have to worry now, ever again.”
I stayed in England for another five weeks. Jill and I saw each other nearly every day. We went walking in the parks, we visited the National Gallery, we sat in pubs talking to each other as if it would take a whole lifetime of talking for us to catch up.
We made love, in my hotel room, with the gray afternoon light falling through the net curtains, and the sheets twisted beneath us. Afterward she would lie next to me and stroke my back with her fingertips, so lightly that my nerve endings tingled. I could have stared at her all day, with her broad, angular shoulders, and her huge rounded breasts, and her nipples that crinkled like raisins.
One morning, though, I realized that this couldn’t
continue. It was a dream, not reality, and I couldn’t ask her to spend the rest of her life in a dream.
“I have to go back to the States,” I said.
“That’s all right. I’ll come with you.”
“You can’t. I’m sorry.”
“But why not? I want to stay with you forever!”
“You can’t, Jill. It’s too dangerous. You shouldn’t even be here with me now.”
“But you destroyed all the Screechers, didn’t you?”
“Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. One thing’s for sure—I didn’t manage to dispose of Duca’s body. Not only that, Duca went into the harbor, and Screechers are always revived by water. The Belgian resistance made that mistake during World War Two. They shot Screechers and threw them into the River Scheldt. They might just as well have given them the kiss of life.”
Jill sat up, naked, and put her arms around me. “I’m not frightened. I want to come with you.”
I looked at her closely. She was absolutely flawless, and I was in love with her.
“All right,” I said, at last. “So long as you know what the risks are.”
We were married at Kenwood Heights Christian Church on Saturday, April 28, 1962. It was a bright, warm day, and pink cherry blossoms blew over us as we left the church.
I saw a man in a long dark coat standing on the opposite side of the street as we climbed into the wedding car. His face was white and he looked strangely two-dimensional, more like a black-and-white photograph than a real person. I looked at him and he looked back at me, but there was no way of telling if he was a Screecher or nothing more than a curious passerby. But who wears a winter overcoat, on an April afternoon, in Louisville?
The years came and went, and we lived the kind of life that most everybody lives in Louisville—playing golf, eating out at Mike Linnig’s Place, going to Churchill Downs in May and betting against the crowd. I was William Crowe and Jill was Jill Crowe and we were happy. We bought a black Labrador and called him Ricochet.
In March, 1965, Jill gave birth to Mark. He was a quiet, introspective boy who always preferred playing on his
own, but he was very clever, and by the time he was eleven years old he could play the piano as well as his grandfather.
I’ll never forget, though, that summer morning in 1977 when he came into my study and stood there for a long time, saying nothing, and the way that the sun shone red through his ears reminded me of Ann De Wouters’s little boy, kneeling in front of the window in Antwerp, all those years before.
He looked so much like Jill—dark-haired and almost too pretty, for a boy.
“What am I?” he asked me. Not “
who
am I?” but “
what
am I?”
I looked up from the papers on my desk and smiled at him in amusement. “You’re a twelve-year-old boy. Haven’t you looked in the mirror lately?”
“No, but what am I?”
I leaned back in my chair. “You’re an American. But you’re part Burmese, and part Romanian, and part Irish.”
“I feel as if I’m something else.”
“Something else like what?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“Well, tell me what it’s like, this feeling.”
He frowned. “It’s like being alone. It’s like being different. It’s like being inside somebody else’s head.”
I ruffled his hair. “You’re growing up, that’s all. You’re a boy now, but there’s a young man inside you, trying to get out.”
But I remembered his words three years later. It was just past 11:00 in the evening. I was sitting in the armchair
in the corner of our bedroom, trying to finish the cryptic crossword that I had started earlier that day, and cooling off after my shower. Jill was sitting in front of her dressing table brushing her hair.
“Do you know what I’d like to do for my birthday this year?” she asked me. “I’d like to go to Mexico.”
“You know I hate Mexican food. All those beans. All those burritos.”
“Molly and David went to Mexico and they loved it.”
“OK,” I said, dropping my newspaper on the floor and standing up behind her. “If you want to go to Mexico, we’ll go to goddamned Mexico.”
I kissed her on top of her head. But it was then that I thought: she’s going to be forty-nine years old next birthday. Forty-nine years old and she doesn’t have a single gray hair or a single line on her forehead. In fact, she looks exactly the same as she did when I flew back to England in 1961, eighteen years ago.
“What’s the matter?” she said, looking at me in her dressing table mirror. “You look like something’s bothering you.”
“Nothing, no.” But then I thought: her figure is just the same, too. She has no cellulite on her thighs, her stomach is flat, her breasts are still big and firm. I had seen men turning around to look at her in the street, and I had always taken it for granted that they were looking at her because she was so attractive. But supposing they were wondering what a woman who had the face and the figure of a thirty-one-year-old was doing with a gray-haired man of sixty-one?