Hope to Die

I find things for T J to do, legwork and desk work, and try to keep him out of harm's way. That's usually not hard- my work's not terribly dangerous- but he took a bullet once, and it didn't seem to dull his enthusiasm. He helps Elaine at her shop, where his ma

Elaine, on learning how he was spending his free time, had offered to pay his way through school. The idea horrified him. Twenty-five, thirty thousand a year so he could sit in the same classrooms and listen to the same lectures? And all so he could parrot it all back to them and wind up with a diploma? Where was the sense in that?

On the way to the subway, I said, "Ivanko or Ivanov, it's really the same name. One's Russian and the other's Ukrainian, but they're both just fancy ways of saying Johnson."

"Why I like this job," he said, "is I be learning something every day."

"Uh-huh. It's Kristin, right?"

"Say what?"

"That she figures set the whole thing up. The daughter, her cousin. Kristin. That's who she's looking at, isn't it?"

"Well," he said, "it ain't Jane Austen."

SIX

Years ago, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, there were two artists, husband and wife, whose popular success was exceptional, if brief. Their name, if I remember correctly, was Kean. He painted waiflike children with enormous eyes, and she painted waiflike pubescent girls, similarly big-eyed. It seemed to me that her paintings had an erotic element lacking in his, but my judgment may be subjective, and a pedophile might have seen it the other way around.

The Keans had a few spectacular years, with young couples all over the country buying reproductions of their paintings and hanging them in the living rooms and finished basements of their suburban starter homes. Then something happened- Woodstock, maybe, or Altamont, or the Vietnam War- and all the folks who'd been buying the Keans' work and marveling at the way the eyes followed you all around the room suddenly decided the stuff was pure crap, trite and saccharine and mawkishly sentimental.

Down came the Keans, banished to attic crawl spaces, eventually donated to church rummage drives or trotted out for garage sales. The artists disappeared from view. Elaine's guess was that they'd changed their names and started painting sad clowns.

Over the past few years, she'd snapped up every thrift-shop Kean she saw, and we now owned forty or fifty of them, all tucked away in her locker at Manhattan Mini Storage. They'd cost her from five to ten dollars apiece, and she was sure she'd get ten or twenty times that when the time was right.

"Two years into the next Republican administration," she said, "and I'll sell out overnight."

Maybe, maybe not. The point is that Lia Parkman could have modeled for Kean- the wife, the one who painted teenagers. She had the long Modigliani neck, the slim hips, the attenuated fingers, the straight ash-blond hair, the translucent skin, and, inevitably, the enormous eyes. And she had that waif quality, the aching vulnerability that had sold the paintings in the first place and then turned them so cloying in a few years' time.

She was waiting for us in a corner booth at the Salonika, a Greek coffee shop not unlike the one we'd just left. She had a cup of tea in front of her, the tea bag pressed dry in the saucer, a wedge of lemon floating in the cup. There was a book on the table next to her teacup, library-bound, with its title and author and Dewey decimal number stamped on the spine. The Reign of Terror, by Bell. A pair of eyeglasses with perfectly round lenses rested on top of the book.

T J introduced us and slid into the booth opposite her. I sat down next to him. She said, "I tried to call you."

He took his cell phone from his pocket, looked at it, put it back. "Didn't ring," he said.

"I said that wrong," she said. "I didn't actually try to call, because I didn't have your number with me. But I wanted to call."

"Whatever you wanted to say," he pointed out, "you can just tell me, 'cause here I am."

"Well, that's it," she said. "What I wanted was to save you the trip. I made a mistake, T J."

"And now you wish you never said what you did."

She nodded. "I think it was the shock," she said. "And maybe this"- she tapped the book- "had something to do with it. Robespierre, Danton, the Committee of Public Safety. Everybody going crazy and acting out."

"Marat takes a bath," T J said, "and she goes and stabs him."

"Charlotte Corday. Anyway, I was horrified by what happened to Aunt Susan and Uncle Byrne, and I guess I couldn't accept the obvious explanation, that burglars chose their house at random and killed them because they picked the wrong time to come home." Her eyes found mine. "It just seems so arbitrary, Mr. Scudder. You don't want to believe things happen like that, just out of the blue, for no reason at all. But I guess they do, don't they?"

"You were overwrought," I said.

"That's right."

"And shocked, and deeply saddened. So it's not surprising your mind produced an alternate scenario, one in which things happened for a reason."

She was nodding, grateful to me for helping her out.

"Tell me about it," I said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your scenario. Let's hear it."

"But it's ridiculous," she said. She might have said more, but the waitress was hovering. By now I was hungry enough to order a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee. T J said he'd have the same but make it a bacon cheeseburger with a side of fries, and make them all well-done, the burger and the fries both, and instead of the coffee a glass of milk'd be good, or did they happen to have buttermilk? They did, and he said that's what he'd have.

He never gains an ounce, either.

Lia started to say she was fine with the tea, then changed her mind and ordered the spinach pie, the appetizer, though, not the full di

"It's ridiculous," I prompted.

"Oh. Well, it really is. I don't think I should even say it out loud."

"Because it's not fair even to think such things, and saying them is worse."

"That's right."

"On the other hand," I said, "we came all the way uptown, and there's food coming, so we'll be here awhile. And we might as well talk about something."

"I wanted to call you- "

"But you didn't," T J said, "and even if you did, we probably would have come anyway."

This surprised her. "Why?"

"To make sure it was what you really wanted," I said, "and that nobody was holding a gun to your head."

"You think- "

"I don't think anything. I'd have come uptown to get some idea what to think. That's generally worth an hour and a couple of subway tokens. But it's beside the point, because you weren't able to call us and here we are, and we might as well cut to the chase. You think your cousin set up your aunt and uncle."

"But I don't think that. I told you- "

"I know. You don't think it, but you did, even if you'd like to pretend you didn't. It's just a thought, Lia. Best thing you can do with it is bring it out into the open."

"Otherwise it'll go bad," T J said.

She took a breath and nodded and picked up her teacup, and this time she drank from it before setting it back in its saucer. "She inherits everything," she said.