Years! I am sure you understand that we do not want the publicity of our arrival in any way damaged by bad news, Mr. Wy-eth.'
'I'll have to talk to my client.'
'Yes. You see, we have to get moving on the construction of our vineyard. We have financing lined up, we have a planting schedule, we are about to build the first two barns. We have to get the land ready. The vines get planted in May, but there's a lot to do before that. The land has to be tilled and raked, graded and fertilized, thousands of posts put in. For the variety we wish to grow, we have a two-week window to plant the vines, so that the roots go deep enough to take the summer heat- otherwise we wait another year, Mr. Wy-eth. So we need Mr. Rainey's help soon, very soon.'
'I will talk with him.'
'We would like him to take us to the place on the land and tell us just what exactly we may find under the soil. I want him to point to a spot in the ground and say dig here and you will find whatever it is that he is hiding from me. We do not want to plant vines and then find out we have to tear them out.'
'That's reasonable.' I bit my roll, but it might as well have been my fist.
'We know a lot about Mr. Rainey already, we know he grew up there. I have tried to call him, I have been goddamn fucking polite.'
I didn't doubt this.
'I would like an answer in one day, please.'
'I'll see what I can do.'
'Yes,' he said. 'Or you will see what we can do.' He pulled something from his breast pocket. 'Here,' he said. 'I believe this is yours.'
He handed me the same old business card I'd given the cop the night before.
'That is yours, no?'
Yes. The lettering, so neat and formal, the name and address, my name, my title, all my old phone numbers, four of them and e-mail, all the signifiers of a former life. The sight of the card made me sick. I'd handed it to the policeman late the night before, a hundred miles away, and here it was again? How? Marceno, like any good businessman, might already have an understanding with the local police department, may even have asked them to keep an eye out for trespassers, and when called and told about the interaction, had one of his minions drive out to retrieve the card.
'I have something else for you, Mr. Wy-eth.'
'Yes?'
He looked at Miss Allana. She reached down to her feet- slowly, keeping her back straight and legs crossed- and retrieved a large purse, from which she pulled a legal-size manila envelope. Marceno took the envelope, opened it, and slid out two documents. Even across the table I could tell it was a lawsuit.
'Please deliver this to Jay Rainey.' He handed me one of the documents. 'And this copy- this copy is for you.'
I skipped my eyes over the first page. I was named as a defendant.
'Wait-'
'If he gives us a good answer, we will tear it up.'
'Listen, I'm not-'
'You were Mr. Rainey's legal representation in his deal with Voodoo LLC.'
'But I'm not involved in-'
'And according to the local police, you accompanied Mr. Rainey out to the land last night. Trespassing, I should add.'
Marceno stood, as did Miss Allana, and they left without further word. He was going to take her to a hotel or apartment and spend some time with her beautiful sea-creature mouth and I was going to spend some time with a lawsuit. A great steaming plate of tandori chicken landed in front of me, but I slid it aside and lifted the first page of the document. There it was, Jay and I both named as defendants, allegations of fraud, misconduct, misrepresentation, and whatever else they could dream up, the amount being sought nothing less than ten million dollars. Some junior associate at a third-string law firm had pumped out the language. It's easy; you get an old suit, change the names and addresses, doctor up the wording. It was just a bluff, a device meant to get one's attention. Yes, meant to make the acid creep up your throat, meant to remind you that mistakes are costly and dread very cheap indeed. But even such trumped-up attacks have a way of quietly sucking the sauce out of people; they are expensive to win and disastrous to lose, they become part of your psychic history, they snap your life onto a grid of legal filings and motions and court calendars. But worse than that, I feared the unknown connection between Herschel, his frozen eyes lifted to a dark heaven, and Marceno's orderly wrath. Old black farmhands with sixty years' experience don't end up on bulldozers in the middle of a snowstorm without their socks on.
Was the next part luck? Not quite. Mostly a guess as I stood out on the street, wind against my cheeks, angry with Jay and a little scared, the lawsuit rolled thick as a magazine and jammed in my pocket. It was, after all, a Thursday night in February, and Jay had circled all the Thursday night games on the girls' basketball schedule I'd found in his car the night before. Plus, he'd said that very afternoon that he had an important appointment in the evening. No, it wasn't much of a deduction, but still it took me a while. I flagged down a cab near the Plaza Hotel. The school was only twenty blocks away, and I knew it well, for it was one that Timothy might have gone to when he'd gotten older.
The school's gym stood around the corner from its main entrance and I could hear the cheers roaring out of the high, lighted windows. I stepped past the guard without making eye contact, walked down a corridor of pewter trophies, many of them fifty or eighty years old, and into a small, old-time gym. It was packed with parents. They looked tired and quite prosperous, many of them clearly on the way home from the office, dragging briefcases, caught in the whirling time-squeeze of parenthood and work. These were people with jobs and marriages and lunches scheduled months into the future; I used to be one of them and I hunched a bit, as much out of shame as from the worry I might see someone I knew. You never can tell whom you're going to run into in these places and it was quite possible I'd encounter fathers or mothers of Timothy's old friends, or even people who knew Wilson Doan. This thought nearly made me turn around, and I was glad to be dressed in a suit, as if that might protect me from something.
The home team was losing by nine points. I found a seat in the bleachers. Time was running out- eight minutes left in the fourth quarter. The girls on the court were sweaty and red-faced and excited; most of them had breasts or the beginning of breasts and they fussed with their hair and uniforms, but by the standards of the world, they were children. I scanned the crowd for Jay, and after a minute spotted him on the far side of the gym, in the section reserved for rooters from the other school. He sat on the top bleacher next to the wall, bent over.
Something in me recoiled. Perhaps it was the avid lean of Jay's big body. He was peering intently through a small pair of binoculars, but not, it seemed, following the game. The ball was passing back and forth in front of him, the girls shrieking, the coach hollering directions. But the binoculars didn't move. Then he put them down and opened a small notebook. He scrawled a few sentences, presumably in the same slanting block letters he'd written on the back of the slip of stationery, closed his eyes, and then wrote a little more. I was watching an act of worship. He folded the notebook into his breast pocket and lifted the binoculars again.
I considered going over to Jay, but realized I might learn more if I watched him from across the court. Maybe he knew one of the girls on the court. Maybe he was a sexual predator stalking one of them. Maybe Allison would be interested to know. The game progressed. The gym was warm and I loosened my coat. The visiting team looked like it would win by about a dozen points. The coach hollered, the crowd cheered. One of the home-team girls fouled out.
'Substitution,' called the announcer, a nasally teenage boy in a coat and tie. 'Coming in, number five, Sally Cowles.'
A girl stepped forward from the scorer's table and ran onto the court to a smattering of polite applause. She was tallish and leggy and a little awkward in her baggy jersey and shorts, but she took her position on the floor quickly. Cowles, Sally Cowles. This had to be the daughter of the Englishman we'd met that morning, no? I had not seen the photo on Cowles's desk well enough to make the match. She looked about fourteen, still very much a girl, breasts not yet developed, her body more up and down than curving. But her large eyes and well-formed face promised beauty. I glanced back at Jay. Now his binoculars followed the action of the game, the action of the girl, I
