'I don't know....' Hilary said doubtfully. 'I don't like it, but I don't exactly know why. It's just too ... cliched ... too trite ... too romantic. Damn. None of those is the word I want. I can't think how to say it. I just sense that Katherine would not have handled it like that. It's too ...'
'Too smooth,' Tony said. 'Just like the story about Mary Gunther was too smooth to please me. Abandoning one of the twins like that would have been the quickest, easiest, simplest, safest--although not the most moral-- way for her to solve her problem. But people almost never do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way. Especially not when they're under the kind of stress that Katherine was under when she left Rita Yancy's whorehouse.'
'Still,' Joshua said. 'we can't rule it out altogether.'
'I think we can,' Tony said. 'Because if you accept that the brother was abandoned and then adopted by strangers, you've got to explain how he and Bruno got back together again. Since the brother was an unregistered birth, there'd be no way he could trace his blood parentage. The only way he could hook up with Bruno would be by coincidence. Even if you're willing to accept that coincidence, you've still got to explain how the brother could have been raised in another home, in an altogether different environment from Bruno's, without ever knowing Katherine--and yet have such a fierce hatred for the woman, such an overwhelming fear of her.'
'That's not easy,' Joshua admitted.
'You've got to explain why and how the brother developed a psychopathic personality and paranoid delusions that perfectly match Bruno's in every detail,' Tony said.
The Cessna droned northward.
Wind buffeted the small craft.
For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two- hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.
Then Joshua said, 'You win. I can't explain it. I can't see how the brother could have been raised entirely apart from Bruno yet wind up with the same psychosis. Genetics don't explain it, that's for sure.'
'So what are you saying?' Hilary asked Tony. 'That Bruno and his brother weren't separated after all?'
'She took them both home to St. Helena,' Tony said.
'But where was the other twin all those years?' Joshua asked. 'Locked away in a closet or something?'
'No,' Tony said. 'You probably met him many times.'
'What? Me? No. Never. Just Bruno.'
'What if.... What if both of them were living as Bruno? What if they ... took turns?'
Joshua looked away from the open sky ahead, stared at Tony, blinked. 'Are you trying to tell me they played some sort of childish game for forty years?' he asked skeptically.
'Not a game,' Tony said. 'At least it wouldn't have been a game to them. They would have thought of it as a desperate, dangerous necessity.'
'You've lost me,' Joshua said.
To Tony, Hilary said, 'I knew you were working on an idea when you started asking Mrs. Yancy about the babies having cauls and about how Katherine reacted to that.'
'Yes,' Tony said. 'Katherine carrying on about a demon--that bit of news gave me a big piece of the puzzle.'
'For God's sake,' Joshua said impatiently, gruffly, 'stop being so damned mysterious. Put it together for Hilary and me in a way we can understand.'
'Sorry. I was more or less still thinking aloud.' Tony shifted in his seat. 'Okay, look. This will take a while. I'll have to go back to the beginning.... To understand what I'm going to say about Bruno, you have to understand Katherine, or at least understand the way I see her. What I'm theorizing is ... a family in which madness has been ... sort of handed down like a legacy for at least three generations. The insanity steadily grows bigger and bigger, like a trust fund earning interest.' Tony shifted in his seat again. 'Let's start with Leo. An extreme authoritarian type. To be happy he needed to totally control other people. That was one of the reasons he did so well in business, but it was also the reason he didn't have many friends. He knew how to get his way every time, and he never gave an inch. A lot of aggressive men like Leo have a different approach to sex from the one they have toward everything else; they like to be relieved of all responsibility when they're in bed; they like to be ordered around and dominated for a change--but only in bed. Not Leo. Not even in bed. He insisted on being the dominant one even in his sex life. He enjoyed hurting and humiliating women, calling them names, forcing them to do unpleasant things, being a little rough, a little sadistic. We know that from Mrs. Yancy.'
'It's a hell of a big step from paying prostitutes so they'll satisfy some perverse desire--to molesting your own child,' Joshua said.
'But we know he did molest Katherine repeatedly, over many years,' Tony said. 'So it mustn't have been a big step in Leo's eyes. He probably would have said that his abuse of Mrs. Yancy's girls was all right because he was paying them and therefore owned them, at least for a while. He would have been a man with a strong sense of property rights--and with an extremely liberal definition of the word 'property.' He'd have used that argument, that same point of view, to justify what he did to Katherine. A man like that thinks of a child as just another of his possessions--'my child' instead of 'my child.' To him, Katherine was a thing, an object, wasted if not used.'
'I'm glad I never met the son of a bitch,' Joshua said. 'If I'd ever shaken hands with him, I think I'd still feel dirty.'
'My point,' Tony said, 'is that Katherine, as a child, was trapped in a house, in a brutalizing relationship, with a man who was capable of anything, and there was virtually no chance that she could maintain a firm grip on her sanity under those awful conditions. Leo was a very cold fish, a loner's loner, more than a little bit selfish, with a very strong and very twisted sex drive. It's possible, even likely, that he wasn't just emotionally disturbed. He might have been all the way gone, over the edge, psychotic, detached from reality but able to conceal his detachment. There's a kind of psychopath who has iron control over his delusions, the ability to channel a lot of his lunatic energy into socially-acceptable pursuits, the ability to pass for normal. That kind of psycho vents his madness in one narrow, generally private, area. In Leo's case, he let off a little steam with prostitutes--and a lot of it with Katherine. We've got to figure that he didn't merely abuse her physically. His desire went beyond sex. He lusted after absolute control. Once he'd broken her physically, he wouldn't have been satisfied until he'd broken her
