The Lovers

“What’s going on, Charlie?”

“What do you mean?”

“We watch the news. We saw what happened at your old home, and we heard about Jimmy. They’re co

I could feel the water starting to move. I stepped back and watched it disappear down the sink.

“Did your father have anything to say about it?”

“He seemed sad about Jimmy. They used to be friends.”

“Any idea why they fell out?”

She looked away. “I don’t think my father liked the way Jimmy lived his life.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“No, I guessed it for myself. You still haven’t answered my question. What’s going on?”

I turned to her, and held her gaze until she looked away.

“Damn you,” she said.

“Like I told you, I’d appreciate a few minutes with Eddie.”

She wiped a hand across her brow, her frustration palpable. “He’s awake, but he’s still in bed. It’ll take him a while to get dressed.”

“There’s no need to go to that trouble. I can talk to him in his room. It won’t take long.”

She still seemed to be debating the wisdom of allowing me to see him. I could sense her unease.

“You’re different today,” she said.

“From?”

“From the last time you were here. I don’t think I like it.”

“I need to talk to him, Amanda. Then I’ll be gone, and it won’t matter Z> &l heif you ever liked me.”

She nodded. “Upstairs. Second door on the right. Knock before you go in.”

My tapping on Eddie Grace’s door was answered by a hoarse croak. The drapes were closed in the room, and it stank of illness and decay. Eddie Grace’s head was supported by a pair of large white pillows. He wore blue-striped pajamas, and the dim light somehow accentuated the pallor of his skin, so that he seemed almost to glow where he lay. I closed the door behind me and looked down on him.

“You came back,” he said. There was a hint of what might have been a smile on his face, but there was no joy to it. Instead, it was a knowing, unpleasant thing, an expression of malevolence. “I figured you would.”

“Why?”

He didn’t even try to lie.

“Because they’re coming for you, and you’re scared.”

“Do you know what was done to Jimmy?”

“I can guess.”

“He was carved up. He was tortured and then killed, all because he kept his secrets, all because he was a friend to my father and to me.”

“He should have picked his friends more carefully.”

“I guess so. You were his friend.”

Eddie laughed softly. It sounded like air being forced from a corpse, and smelled just as bad. It brought on a fit of coughing, and he gestured for the covered plastic cup on the bedside locker, the kind that little children used with a raised, perforated lip from which to drink. I held it for him as he sucked from it. One of his hands touched mine, and I was surprised by how cold it was.

“I was his friend,” said Eddie. “Then he had to tell your father and me about himself, and after that I cut him loose. He was a faggot, barely a man. He disgusted me.”

“So you cut him off?”

“I’d have cut his balls off if I could. I’d have told everyone what he was. He shouldn’t have been allowed to wear that uniform.”

“So why didn’t you?” I asked.

“Because they didn’t want me to.”

“Who didn’t?”

“Anmael, and Semjaza, although that wasn’t what they called themselves, not the first time they came to me. I never found out the woman’s name. She never said much. The man was called Peter, but later I found out his true name. He did most of the talking.”

“How did they find you?”

“I had weaknesses. Not like Jimmy’s. I had a man’s weaknesses. I liked them young.”

He smiled again. His lips were cracked, and his remaining teeth were rotting in their gums.

“Girls, not boys,” he continued. “Never boys. They found out. That’s what they do: they find your weaknesses, and they use them against you. A carrot and a stick: they threatened Zp>

“Anmael wanted to know where she was. I didn’t ask why. I found out where Will had stashed her on the Upper East Side. Then Anmael died, and the woman disappeared. They kept moving Caroline Carr around after that, your father and Jimmy, but they did it quietly. I told Semjaza to follow Jimmy, because your father trusted him more than anyone else. I thought that they just wanted to follow her, maybe steal the child. I was as surprised as anyone when they killed her.”

It was strange, but I believed him. He had no reason to lie, not now, and he was not seeking absolution. He spoke of it as if it were an event that he had witnessed, but in which he had played no direct part.

“When Will came back from Maine with a baby boy, I was suspicious. I knew all about his wife’s medical history, about the problems she’d had conceiving, and carrying, a child. It was all too neat. But by then I’d fallen out with Jimmy. I was still on good terms with your old man, or I thought I was, but something changed between us. I suppose Jimmy must have spoken to him, and he chose Jimmy over me. I didn’t care. Fuck him. Fuck ’em both.

“I heard nothing for maybe fifteen years. I didn’t expect anything else. After all, they were dead, Anmael and the woman, and I’d found ways to keep myself satisfied without them.

“Then a boy and a girl showed up at my place. They sat outside in a car, watching the house. I was bowling, and my wife called me, told me she was worried. I came home, and I swear I knew it was them. I knew before they even showed me the marks on their arms, before they started talking about things that must have happened before they were born, conversations that I’d had with Anmael and the woman before they died. I mean, it was them, in another form. I didn’t doubt it. I could see it in their eyes. I told them what I believed about the boy Will and his wife were raising, but they already seemed to have their own suspicions. That was what had brought them back. They knew that the boy was still alive, that you were still alive.

“So I helped them again, and still you wouldn’t die.”

His eyes closed. I thought he might have drifted off to sleep, but then he spoke, his eyes still shut.

“I cried when your old man killed himself,” he said. “I liked him, even if he did cut me loose. Why couldn’t you just have died back in that clinic? If you had, then it would all have ended there and then. You just won’t die.”

His eyes opened again.

“But this time it’s different. They’re not kids hunting you, and they’ve learned from their mistakes. That’s the thing about them: they remember. Each time, they’ve come a little bit closer to succeeding, but it’s urgent now. They want you dead.”

“Why?”

He stared at me, his eyebrows raised. He looked amused. “I don’t think they know Zloshei,” he said. “You might as well ask why a white blood cell attacks an infection. It’s what it’s programmed to do: to fight a threat, and neutralize it. Not mine, though. Mine are screwed.”

“Where are they?”

“I’ve only seen him. The other, the woman, she wasn’t there. He was waiting for her, willing her to come to him. That’s the way they are. They live for each other.”

“Who is he? What’s he calling himself?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“He came here?”

“No, it was while I was still in the hospital, but not so long ago. He brought me candy. It was like meeting an old friend.”

“Did you feed Jimmy to him?”

“No, I didn’t have to. They knew all about Jimmy from way back.”

“Because of you.”

“What does it matter now?”

“It mattered to Jimmy. Do you know how much he suffered before he died?”

Eddie waved a hand in a gesture of dismissal, but he would not meet my eyes.

“Describe him to me.”

He indicated once again that he needed water, and I gave it to him. His voice had grown hoarser and hoarser as he spoke. Now it was barely a whisper.