She looked at me as if I’d startled her from a reverie. “I believe it’s true in general,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “But I don’t care about in general. I only care about Russell Costigan. And, in truth, at the moment, I don’t even care about him, only about where he is.”
“If I had to guess,” she said, “I’d guess he’s in Connecticut.” I nodded. “They have an arms manufacturing facility there, which includes a testing and training site. And it is very secure. Russell loves hide-and-seek, if his hiding place is safe.”
“Where in Connecticut,” I said.
“West of Hartford, near a town called Pequod.”
“What’s the name of the company?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if it goes under Transpan, or they have a subsidiary name.”
“Did they have labor trouble a few years back?”
She shook her head again, impatiently. “I don’t know. I paid as little attention to the family business as I could. Russell didn’t have that much to do with it either. He did some lobbying in Washington for a time. Or that’s what he called it. It was mostly having parties and going to other parties and having lunch at Sans Souci. I think his father sent him there to keep him occupied. His mother loved it. `Rusty deals with the government,‘ she’d say.”
“Rusty?”
“Grace calls him that. Have you seen her?”
“Yes.”
“She’s incredible,” Tyler Costigan said. “She is a fat little dumb woman. She must be sixty-five and still talks baby talk, and she jerks those two men around any way she wants.”
“No other kids?”
Tyler Costigan smiled. “Just Rusty,” she making the R sound almost like a W.
“Probably an adorable baby,” I said.
“In many ways he’s an adorable man,” she said. “Except…” She leaned her head back, thinking of how to say it. “Except he hasn’t got any…” She took a breath and made an aimless gesture. “He hasn’t got any realness. He’s funny and fun and warm and loving, but if anything gets too hard he moves on. He’s never loved a great love. Unless it was Grace, whom he now hates.”
The sun must have moved behind something, off window left, and the room was much dimmer. “Maybe that’s why the whores. They don’t require what he doesn’t have, or doesn’t know how to offer. If any of the whores start to want it he can move on.”
“Russell is probably Susan’s first affair,” I said. “She’s not a whore.”
She smoothed her skirt again although there wasn’t a wrinkle in it. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s a way for me to dehumanize them.”
“I understand that,” I said.
said.
“But if I were a man,” she said, “I imagine you wouldn’t let me say it.”
“No,” I said. “If I didn’t need your help, I wouldn’t let you say it.”
She sat a little straighter and leaned slightly back as if to look at me better. She smoothed her skirt again over her thighs, her legs still curled beneath her.
“You’re very clear, aren’t you, on what you want.”
“Yes,” I said.
We were silent. “Life is surely difficult,” she said. I didn’t say anything.
“Why must it be so hard,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me. She was watching the afternoon gather into evening out over Lake Michigan. I looked at it too. “Why must love be so hard?” she said. She turned her head from the window and looked quite sharply at me. She leaned forward slightly over her smoothed skirt, her hands still resting on her thighs. “Do you know why?” she said.
“Original sin,” I said.
As I came out of Tyler Costigan’s building a maroon four-door Pontiac slid up along the curb beside me. The doors, front and back, opened on the sidewalk side and a guy got out of each of them. The one who came from the front wore a gray glen plaid suit and a black shirt open at the neck with the collar points spread out over the lapels of his jacket. He was taller than I am and had his slick black hair combed straight back in even waves. The guy from the backseat wore designer jeans and stack-heeled boots and a shiny brown leather jacket with a short mandarin collar. There was a strap on the collar in case a typhoon hit. He had a brown beard trimmed very short, and short brown curly hair. A block up the street a gray Plymouth swung around the corner onto the drive and idled by the curb.
The man in the suit said, “Get in the car, we want to talk with you.” His partner with the curly hair stood to my left. His jacket was unzipped.
“You from Costigan?” I said.
The guy in the suit said, “Mm hm,” and jerked his head at the open back door of the Pontiac.
“What do you want to talk with me about?” I said.
“We want to talk with you about fucking around where you got no business fucking around.”
