But I wouldn’t have an opportunity to let slip Dante’s word to Derek Manley. Manley had disappeared, just as Earl Dante had said, and I was pretty damn sure he wasn’t ever going to be found. In that alley, after the big squeeze, he had as good as spelled it out for me: his hopeless financial and penal situation, the sickly son needing expensive care, the insurance policy that could take care of everything. A peculiar sort of heroism for a peculiar sort of man. So no, I wouldn’t be passing Dante’s word to Derek Manley, and so yes, Dante would be disappointed in me. Just add it to the list.

I was in the middle of something, of which I didn’t have the first clue. I had gotten on the wrong side of a State Supreme Court justice, whose wife had developed an unhealthy interest in me. The guy who was supposed to pay my inflated bill was flat broke. Kimberly Blue was in some sort of trouble that I couldn’t quite figure. My peter was petering. My cable was out. The next day I was due in Traffic Court to defend my license against a series of malicious attacks by the city’s police force. My very existence was turning quickly to crap.

And to top it off, as my father fought for his life while struggling to tell me his sad lovesick tale, both his health, and his story, were about to take a serious turn for the worse.

Chapter 40

AND THEN A doorway of shelves in that treasure room swings away, swings open. And there, in the opening, the hidden doorway, darkness streaming in from behind him, stands the old man. Tall, thin, his hair brushed back, his back only slightly bent by age, his eyebrows raised in mock surprise. And he’s smiling, smiling with the eyes of a fox, smiling at all his little treasures, his golden statuettes, his jade fetishes, his pearls, his coins, her, smiling at her, my father’s love, smiling at her as if she were merely another one of his trinkets that had only temporarily been misplaced.

He takes a step toward her and my father is at him like a panther, driven forward by his love and his rage. The old man’s ropy neck is in my father’s fist, the old man’s crooked back is slammed so hard against the shelving that a crouching jade dragon is hurled to the ground and smashes in a dazzling blossom of green.

Don’t touch her, my father growls.

I wouldn’t dream of it, gasps the old man, his accent purebred Brahmin.

His sly smile, dropped only at the onset of the attack, returns. My father loosens his grip on the old man’s neck.

I was merely admiring the coin, the old man says. A very rare twenty-dollar piece. Saint Gaudens. 1907. Ultra-high proof. The most beautiful American coin ever minted. Only twenty-four were struck, twenty remain in private hands. I own four. He looks beyond my father at the girl. You always had exquisite taste, he says.

I was well taught, she says.

Do you mind, the old man says to my father, tapping lightly on my father’s wrist.

My father is puzzled at the calmness of the conversation. There is no shock on the old man’s face at seeing the two of them in his treasure room, no threats of arrest from the old man, no howls of abuse from her. A brittle civility holds sway. He lets the old man go, steps back, slinks into the corner, subdued as much by the old man’s accent as by the actual nature of the relationship playing out before him. Whatever has gone on in this house, he realizes, she has not told him the half of it. And whatever is to come, the old man’s accent has marked with utter clarity their respective positions in the world, the old man’s and my father’s, has shown all the old man can offer to this girl and all that my father never could.

My father’s voice as he recounted the scene to me was faint, barely discernible through the oxygen mask and beneath the rasp of his breath. His blood oxygen level couldn’t fight its way above eighty-seven percent and his respiratory rate was in the mid-twenties. He was weaker than I had ever before seen him in his life. Nothing was working, the new drug wasn’t working, death was coming, and he was struggling mightily to beat the scythe as he told me the story. He didn’t have the strength to set the scene, to lay in all the details, so I was forced to do that for myself, but by now I had been so captured by the story, and by his burning desire to tell it, that it was not a burden to listen to his faint words and provide for myself the details of the conversation between the old man and the girl my father loved.

I knew you’d come back, the old man says.

Just for what I’m owed, she says.

And what do you believe is that, dear girl?

She gazes around the room, her eyes full of light. She scans past my father as if he were a ghost, while she takes in all the riches on the shelves. She looks down at the coin in her hand. She returns the coin to its small velvet sack, places the sack back in the box, closes the lid. Atlas with his burden stares balefully out at her.

Maybe just this, she says, placing her hand on the box. This should be enough.

I daresay it would, says the old man. That one coin is near price-less. The entire set is beyond imagining. More than one fortune has gone into acquiring what is in that box. Nora has asked for you. You didn’t say good-bye.

How is she?

Her arthritis, well, you know. She hobbles through her day but is ever cheerful. She is making her famous duck tomorrow evening. Such an event, all the flame and pageantry. It was always your favorite. You must join us.

I can’t, she says.

Just one last time. Please. For Nora’s sake. To say good-bye.

She glances at my father. No, she says.

Her glance is quick, furtive, but the old man catches it with all its import. He turns to my father. So this is the one.

Yes, she says.

Our motorcycle man. Well, he certainly is big enough.

He loves me.

I don’t doubt that. And you, my sweet. Do you love him back?

Her jaw rises, there is a quiver in her voice as she says, Yes. I do.

And that is why you can’t share one last meal with me, one last evening to pass our good-byes, one last chance to share brandy by the fire, to kiss gently as the phonograph plays the Verdi you so much admire, to hold hands as we ascend together the stairs, one last time to spread the satin sheets on your soft featherbed.

Go to hell, she says.

My dear dear sweet. He mows lawns for a living.

Our love is enough.

Obviously not, or you wouldn’t be here. But if that is what you want, then go. My blessing on you both, he says even as he steps forward to the table, grabs hold of the box of coins, snatches it away from her hand, and clutches it to his chest. Go, he says. But know that when you leave here, you leave with nothing. Let your lawn mower man take care of you from here on in. The two of you will be quite happy, I am sure, in your penniless love.

You owe me, she says.

Who owes whom? Go back to what you were when I found you, in your cheap clothes, chewing your gum, so very proud of your stenography.

She steps forward and slaps him.

And the old man laughs. He laughs, laughs his Brahmin laugh, his jaw tight, his laughter loud, mocking, carrying in it all the solid self-certainty of his class.

She hits him with the bottom of her fist, first the one then the other, she hits him on the shoulder, on the chest, she hits him again and again, hits him with all her fury, even as the old man continues his assaultive laughter.

It is then, only then, that my father feels able to intrude upon their scene. The same thing in the laughter that so infuriates her sends a calm into my father. He knows where he belongs, he understands perfectly his place, finds a comfort in that knowledge that his son will never know. The truth is in the very Brahmin accent that intimidated him just a few moments before. Except he doesn’t want anything that the world of this room, this house, this man has to offer. My father has already gotten all he ever wanted, his lover, his one true love. It was a mistake to come here, he knows, a mistake from the start. But he also knows, with a sense of relief, that it is over, that whatever she had come for is gone and it is now time to leave. He steps forward with his own calm, takes hold of her from the waist, pulls her back, away from the old man, who is now shielding himself with the box.