laid too many traps already.”
In that moment, feeling the kindness beneath Gold’s acuity, Adam did not wish to answer. “True enough,” he said. “But for which one of us?”
Gold shook his head-a little sadly, it seemed to Adam. But when Adam stood, Gold clasped him by the shoulders. “I always liked you, Adam, and admired your promise. If you need me again, please call. This time I want you to escape this place unharmed.”
When Adam arrived home, the light in the guesthouse was on.
Adam found Teddy painting something new-the still life of a fried egg in a pan, perfectly rendered, the illusion of dimension lent by a shadow beneath the yolk. Without looking up, Teddy said casually, “I was cooking the other morning, and this came to me. Breakfast as art.”
His brother had such gifts, Adam thought, and deserved so much better than life had given him. “You shame me, Ted. Until now I thought breakfast was food.”
Teddy laughed. “You always were a philistine, Adam. Though you were good at sailing boats.” He turned to look at his brother, and then his face changed, reflecting what he saw on Adam’s. “Isn’t this past your bedtime? It’s morning in Afghanistan.”
“That’s why I’m up.” Adam sat across from him. “Tell me what happened that night.”
Teddy’s careless voice did not match the wariness in his eyes. “Dad fell off a cliff. I thought you knew.”
For a moment, Adam felt the undertow of Gold’s all-too-good advice. Then he said harshly, “Enough fencing, Ted. Tell me what I don’t know.”
Teddy’s forced smile stopped at the corner of his mouth. “That sounds like a riddle, doesn’t it? Only you can know what you don’t know.”
“Then I’ll tell you what I do know.” Adam’s speech became staccato. “The cops believe you were there that night. They also know about the call to your ex-lover, who revealed that your childhood fantasy of giving Dad a shove persisted well into adulthood. He seems to lack our bond of loyalty. But then he never met our father, did he?”
Hunched on his stool, Teddy had turned pale. “How did you learn all this?”
“That’s my concern. I’ve got the name of a lawyer, and you damn well need to hire him.”
“With whose money?”
“Mine, for now. No matter how this mess turns out, one of us will have some.” Adam lowered his voice. “You’re my brother, Ted. I don’t know what our mother knows, but she won’t hear this from me. For everyone’s sake, don’t tell her anything more than she knows already. If it helps, you can pretend she’s me.”
Teddy stared at him. “What’s happened to you, Adam?”
“Life.”
Teddy shook his head. “‘Life’ is what you used to be full of-our father’s energy, our mother’s core of optimism. Now you’re watchful, and cold as ice. So you tell me something for a change. What the fuck is it that you do when you’re not with us?”
Even while fearing for himself, Adam saw, Teddy also feared for him-why he seemed so different, and what might happen to him now. Expelling a breath, he said, “All right, Ted-the truth, between brothers. It’s true I work for Agracon. It’s also true that I ask farmers who grow poppies for the Taliban to grow something else. What I’ve lied about is that my work isn’t dangerous. It could get me killed or kidnapped in a heartbeat. Knowing that will change you quick enough.
“‘Watchful’? You bet. The Afghans suspect any American-no matter how well intended-of being a spy. That means the friendly tribesman you meet may be setting you up for decapitation. I like my head right where it is. So I take nothing on faith, and believe nothing and no one completely. In that sense, our father trained me well. As for ‘cold,’” Adam finished evenly, “in my work that’s a synonym for ‘nerveless.’ To survive, you have to divorce your brain from your emotions. So if you don’t like who I’ve become, too bad.”
To Adam’s surprise, tears sprung to Teddy’s eyes. “That’s not what I’m saying, you fucking moron. I’m afraid for you.”
Adam touched the bridge of his nose. “That makes two of us, Teddy.”
“So don’t go back there, for chrissakes.”
“I have to,” Adam responded. “Survive for six more months, and I’m out. I plan on leaving upright. Good enough?”
Slowly, Teddy nodded.
Adam looked him in the face. “There’s also something about an insurance policy. Whatever it is, tell your lawyer.”
Teddy’s eyes went blank, and then he nodded. “I promise I’ll call him, Adam. All you have to promise in return is to get out of Afghanistan alive.”
“Don’t ask for much, do you?”
“Seems like a lot to me,” Teddy replied. “Six months from now, I want to be sitting in Mom’s house, looking at you across the dinner table. That’ll mean that we’ve all survived him.”
There was nothing more for Adam to say.
That night he awakened from his nightmare, sweating, still seeing his father’s face on his shattered body. He could not escape this, Adam realized, nor did he believe that he could keep his promise to Teddy. All that mattered to him now was that Teddy keep his.
Seven
At dawn, Adam took the first Cape Air flight to Boston, and met Dr. Lee Zell for coffee at the bar of the Taj hotel.
The two men sat at a table by the window. Across Arlington Street, students and tourists and nannies with strollers wandered through the Public Garden or sat beneath willow trees enjoying the flowers, the lush green grass, the swan boats on the pond. But the specialist Ben’s doctor had referred him to seemed edgy. Though esteemed as a neurosurgeon, Zell looked younger than Adam expected, with thinning brown hair and dark liquid eyes that conveyed a nameless discomfort with the man across the table-perhaps, in part, because he so deeply resembled the doctor’s now-dead patient. Abruptly, Zell said, “I know you’re entitled to ask about your dad’s treatment. But I’m not anxious to be sued.”
“I’m not here for that,” Adam said flatly.
“Still, let’s be direct. Given that he’s disinherited your mother, her quickest route to financial recovery is a wrongful death suit against his doctors-”
“Wasn’t he a dead man?” Adam interrupted. “No matter what you did?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“Then you can relax, Doctor-dead men lack earning potential. My father’s demise didn’t prevent him from writing another ten novels, or even one. Just how long did he have?”
Zell bit his lip. “With the most sophisticated treatment,” he said slowly, “thirteen months or so. But that’s not the path your father chose.”
This surprised Adam. He sipped his coffee, then said, “I’m chiefly interested in how the disease affected his cognition and mental acuity-”
“Can I ask why?”
“As executor, I’m charged with carrying out his wishes. That will is being contested-by my mother, as it happens. I’m obligated to find out why he concealed his cancer, behaved bizarrely, and left his estate to a woman he’d just met.”
Zell seemed to relax a little, and his expression changed from wariness to regret. “I saw him only twice-the first time six months ago, the second two weeks later. He’d complained to his doctor on Martha’s Vineyard about migraine headaches that impaired his ability to write. So I checked his reflexes, which were normal, and determined that his physical condition was that of a man twenty years younger.” Zell smiled a little. “Your father said he wasn’t interested in dying. So he’d worked like hell to keep himself vital.”
Adam could imagine this; even in his forties, his father could hear death’s footsteps. The thing about dying,
