“His girl? No, Mr Jimmy. Yes, I am his . . . I was his daughter. Daughter.
Doch
’. Not
prostitutka
.”
He turned red at the same time I figured out “
kurtizánka
”. I’m not a violent man, and I have never been the kind of “chivalrous” lout who hits people in protection of anyone’s reputation. It surprised me greatly to discover that I had backhanded Jimmy. It surprised me more to discover that he was still standing. This did not bode well. Even someone twice my mass and a half-metre taller should have the grace to collapse when I whack them that hard. His blush faded, while the left side of his face remained an angry red where my hand had struck. He flexed his own oversized hands, dropping umbrella and overcoat just as twin rugby tackles at waist and ankles spread him flat on the dewy grass.
Christian Hail, captain of 1989’s most feared ball team for miles, was breathing heavily, grass stains on his too-tight grey suit. There was a grim smugness to his expression as he sat on Jimmy’s chest, going slowly through the much larger man’s pockets. Michael and Manny Caruthers each held one massive leg, while Edmond Arrigakar, younger brother of my first steady girlfriend, pinned Jimmy’s head and shoulders.
“He’s got a piece! The fucker’s got a piece! What kind of idiot thug brings a cannon to a blessed funeral?”
“Watch how you pull on the man’s gun.”
Cecilie watched the portly ex-ballplayers tugging a tiny, elegantly chromed weapon from Jimmy’s waistband.
“That’s the safety you just turned off. You’re pointing a loaded, cocked pistol at your mate’s knee, Manny.”
Cecilie took the weapon from Manny’s shaking fingertips. She yanked a lever on the top, tapped a rounded black clip out of the handle and tossed both into her purse.
“What the fuck was Dad doing for these goons, and when
did you
turn into a pugilist?”
I had no answers. More of the old team was showing up, comfortingly boisterous now that they had a more familiar task. Someone passed me a flask. Fog hid time’s work on the living as we stood among the dead. They let Jimmy stand, resembling cygnets around a limping, lumpy swan as they marched him away.
When I squinted, I could just make out clusters of unfamiliar mourners trying not to stare at us through the fog. My hand hurt.
“Whaddya say we hijack the lawyer’s limo and see if they’ll give us a lift home?”
Mimicking Jimmy’s gesture, I thrust out an arm for Cecilie to hold. She took it gratefully, managing not to lean on me too hard as her heels poked plugs in the graveyard turf. I still held the flask. I wanted to get home and get properly soused so I didn’t have to think about what my dad had been working on, or about my sister absently, happily stroking the pistol in her purse.
She wasn’t going to let me have a quiet drink.
“So while you were defending my honour, had it occurred to you to wonder how I paid for law school?”
It was my turn to blush. I looked up at the roof of the car, wondering how many bugs would be standard issue for a lawyer’s limo.
“You didn’t have to . . .”
“No, I probably didn’t have to. I could have done less interesting things for less money. I did have a choice. I still do.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Bollocks. You want to lecture me about being foolish and reckless and mad.”
“Not now I don’t. You’ve taken all the fun out of it. What are you going to do with this hard-earned new law degree, miss?”
Cecilie beamed. “Nothing, probably. I don’t half hate law.”
I thought about getting out and walking home. I thought about her girlfriend’s mouth. I thought about the glimpse of elaborate gartered and stockinged thigh my sister’s gown displayed, and I thought a lot about the Christian notion of hell. If it existed, maybe I’d see my father there.
“Mr Gryn retained us in the early eighties when his clientele began to ask him for jobs that were not entirely, er, within the realm of traditional printing practice. We helped him to find offshore locations for that aspect of his business, and to keep his dealings within the legal frameworks that those nations required. The environments to which he moved proved a phenomenal source of new work for an artist of his abilities, and soon we were handling a few million pounds of business traffic every month. You two (and Ms Gryn’s mother, should we succeed in tracking her down) are the sole heirs of a fortune that far exceeds the GNP of Chile for last year. Do you understand?”
I did not understand. Cecilie seemed to.
“We’re rich, bro. Filthy, stinking rich.”
“Huh?”
Cecilie was already asking the important questions. “What’s the current legal standing of our father’s enterprise?”
“Perfectly legit. We had a visit from two Dutch government agents a couple of years ago over suspicions your father’s enterprise was printing passports, but . . .”
“Were they?”
“No, Ms Gryn, the last of that side of the operation was phased out for good in 1991, on our advice. On paper it never actually happened and the only records we retain are those that keep people like Jimmy on their best behaviour.”
“You were there? By the grave today?”
“Our representatives were. They may not know firearms, but they have other skills.”
Out the office window of Hannaford & Locke, I watched as two tugs dragged an oversized barge too far starboard in the twisting, narrow waters beneath Burnsey Bridge. The barge hit a piling and the entire bridge tilted alarmingly. A semi on the bridge skidded across two lanes and stopped with the cab dangling over the water. I couldn’t see the driver. As I watched, cranes, ambulances and a flittering black helicopter arrived at the scene. My sister crossed and uncrossed her legs beside me. The stockings were pearl-grey fishnet, with at least six elaborate catchments for garters.
“Mr Gryn? Graham? Are you all right?”
“Just fine, thanks. A little distracted is all.”
“Of course, Mr Gryn. Trying times, and a great deal of information to take in.” Indeed. Cecilie put her hand on mine.
“I think my brother could use a drink. I know I could. Do you people keep any whiskey here?”
My father’s oily solicitors didn’t bat an eye between them. Nor did they offer us a choice of whiskies, as some younger employees of newer firms might have. The heavy crystal goblets they produced brimmed with a liquid that had too much peaty, potent golden musk to have been created by mortal hands.
I signed something that acknowledged our commitment to keep seeking CeeCee’s mom and to set aside a third of the assets in her name, excluding the house but including a property in Scotland we’d never seen or heard of. I signed a dozen more documents, handed the sheaf of paper back across the desk, and looked back out the window. Then they gave me the whiskey.
Mr Locke smiled in a thin, careful way. “I’ve met Ms Flowers. It will be my deep and abiding pleasure to locate her and hand her the keys to her ah, new Scottish castle.”
“Castle?!”
“Yes, ma’am. Parts are in poor repair, but it’s doing well for a fourteenth-century structure. Do you wish to reconsider ceding ownership to your mother?”
CeeCee looked at me. I shrugged.
Cecilie cleared her throat and sat up straight. “No, when you find her, it’s hers. But a castle? Really? Wow. How? Oh, never mind. Weirdness.”
There was a tiny alarm clock tattooed in green on her inner thigh, with thin, coiled black cables running up from it towards . . . I drained my whisky and looked out the window again.
The helicopter had left. My stomach didn’t like me. I didn’t like me. I wanted more whiskey, but Cecilie walked me out of the office, hailed a cab and held my tired head to her shoulder for most of the ride home. I had this doomed, horrible premonition about walking back into the house, but she walked me up, under Mom’s ashes, past her door, past the bathroom, and tucked me in to my nest in the library.
“Sleep it off, Graham. You did good. Thanks for being there, big brother.”
The Cecilie I grew up with would never have said that. I slept. I dreamed. Time passed, as it will.
At some point they took me out to get fitted for a tux. I spilled curry and whisky on it at a strange wake. The whole room was full of fawning strangers and distant cousins who reminded me how their names were spelled. None of the respect for the dead you might expect at a funeral, but none of the raucous reminiscence by actual friends and family a real wake would have. I might have made an inappropriate comment or two. At the point when I tried to start fisticuffs with a guy who could have been Jimmy’s larger twin, my sister’s silent partner cut suddenly between us and steered me into a beige alcove of the bland, “pub-style” chain restaurant in which the whole ill-conceived event occurred.
I stared. “Are you bonking my sister?”
“Absolutely. Are you too blotto to be out in public?”
“Unquestionably. How come you never talk? What’s your name?”
“Pauline.”
“Really?”
“Really. I swear on a stack of original Batman comics.”
“All right then, Mr Pauline. How do we get out of this benighted place? Where’s CeeCee?”
“She’s in her car, waiting with Izzy.”
“Whose car? We’re Gryns. Nobody’d give us a licence!”
Pauline cracked a small smile full of sharp-looking teeth. “They assigned you guys a car, a driver and a bodyguard, but even together they wouldn’t be wide enough to stop that ambulant mountain you were insulting. Come back to the house. All your relatives are gone . . . and there’s more whiskey.”
“I see why she likes you, Pauline. Common sense and clear priorities.”
“Naw, it’s probably my good manners and small hands. Step this way.”
The driver didn’t speak, but he got us home in eighteen minutes and his limo smelled of fresh cedar.
I stared out the window, which meant watching the reflection of my sister and her double making out while Pauline stared out the other window. The bodyguard’s name was Fidel. He checked the house from top to bottom and gave us his number before departing. Pauline and the girls skipped upstairs.
I headed to the kitchen in search of liquor. I wished for a Chicago whore and a pot of coffee. The bed creaked. I wished for a less active imagination. It was hard to decide between beer and whiskey, so I chose both. After my first two beers and midway through my first triple shot, Pauline came downstairs. I didn’t stare or fall over, but I did choke a little. Pauline wore combat boots, a grin, and more piercings than I was aware one small body could accommodate. It was oddly embarrassing to be staring at the shaved, multiple-pierced pussy lips of a person I had defaulted to treating as male. I redirected my gaze upwards.
“You’re adjusting to the temperature in Abercrombie?”
“No, I’m cold as fuck, but your sister figured this would get your attention.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you come upstairs, I can get under a blanket with a hot-water bottle and you can get your dick sucked. Again.”
I wondered if conversations before my dad died had made more sense, or if that was just an error of memory.
“You’re down here naked to offer me head on Izzy’s behalf?”
“No, Graham, I’m offering my own mouth, which is reasonable skilled and salivating a little bit at the prospect of being wrapped around your big, juicy meat.”
“What if I turn out to have a soft, tiny wiener?”
“Come upstairs. I’ll work on the softness
and
I’ll show you how I know it’s not tiny.”
“What if I like how stiff your nipples are right now? What if I’d like some of your mouth right here?”
Pauline knelt and crawled towards me. Crew cut. No visible tattoos. More muscular definition than on any body I had previously seen in real life. Tiny, pointy tits pierced by vertical bars and rings placed horizontally. Big brown eyes. I watched those eyes approach. I looked into those eyes as Pauline quietly, deliberately began to massage my balls through my trousers with a strong tongue. When my sister’s no-longer-quite-so-androgynous companion turned, stood and walked upstairs, I followed.
On the second floor, I got to the door of my sister’s bedroom and hesitated.
“Don’t worry, Graham. Come on in. It’s just you and me.”
“How about we go up to the library?”
“No, I promised to show you how I know your dick size. Besides, my hot water bottle’s in here.”
Pauline sat on the distended rubber bubble and pulled up Gran Amble’s quilt. I thought about personal pronouns. I thought about unzipping my pants and standing on the bed. This last thought carried me to action, and I found myself looking into the cupboard nestled in the crook of my sister’s ceiling while Pauline got energetically to work on my cock. The cupboard housed CeeCee’s volleyball trophies, a stack of my old girlie magazines(!) and two exhaust vents from the adjacent bathroom. One vent curved up and through the roof, one stopped midway to the ceiling and ended . . . in a mirror. The water bottle squished and gurgled. The floor creaked. The bed creaked. Pauline sucked back another inch and the bathroom light came on.
“You’re kidding!”
They weren’t. Pauline choked a little. The reflection was inverted, and it took me a second to realize what I was seeing. Their backs were to the bathroom vent, and I had a crazy moment of realizing how hard Izzy and my sister had worked to emphasize their similarities. Even next to each other, the resemblance was striking. CeeCee was bustier and wore more ink. Izzy was more muscular and had a more upright posture, but their hair was identical, their asses were the same generous roundness and their gestures moved at the same even pace as they stripped off each other’s bra. It was obviously a well-rehearsed show. I was watching their regular routine, something they did for money, for strange men. I tried to step away from the vent, but Pauline grabbed my ass and kept me in place, in mouth, in range to see my sister undressing from above. The implications of this view were starting to sink in. Pauline passed me a bottle.
I was not going to think about CeeCee watching me come all over her panties, year after year. I was not going to think about her watching me sitting on the john jerking it to these very same magazines that were now inches from my nose, their pages still stuck together. Whiskey burned my throat on the way down. Pauline’s throat was hot, too. I leaned into the heat. CeeCee grinned up at me. Pauline choked again, and I wondered if I was going to weep or come.