she was wearing a white silk dress that Jane recognized. It had belonged to Jane’s mother once, before Jane was born, and she had worn it for a photograph with Jane’s father that still stood on the mantel. To Jane it stood for all old-fashioned dresses.
The woman was standing perfectly still in the middle of the path, looking directly at Jane. She turned and walked through the low plants to the right, and Jane knew she was supposed to follow. The woman stepped through a thick barrier of bushes, and Jane tried to step through after her, but the opening the woman had found was gone. Jane fought her way through, scratching her arms and legs on the branches that rustled and snapped.
Jane came out the other side and stopped. At first she thought she was in the large clearing she had been expecting: thickets didn’t grow in the shade of the tall forest trees, but in places where the trees had fallen. The space was more than that. It was a lawn. There was a big swimming pool with water that glowed from submerged lights, then a row of tennis courts, and a big old hotel. Dim lights on the ground floor shone through French doors, and Jane could see men in dark suits and women in bright, thin summer dresses dancing. After she had noticed them, she began to hear the music, a faint, melodious sound of a band from the 1940s.
The woman was on the lawn, and Jane stepped closer to her. When she reached a distance of five feet, the woman turned and Jane stopped. “You’re a ghost.”
The woman shrugged. She was very young—little more than a teenager—and the quick, playful movement of her graceful body made Jane feel heavy and tired from her run. “I’m a woman, like you.”
Jane suddenly knew her. “You’re Francesca Giannini. You’re Vincent Ogliaro’s mother.”
The woman smiled. “Not yet,” she said. “Not for at least nine months.” She half-turned and pointed at the building across the lawn. “Tonight, I’m only twenty. I’m upstairs there—the fifth floor, third window from the right.”
“How—”
“I’m asleep, dreaming. My father brought me here on the train. He’s up in the private banquet room with his friends and his enemies and a bunch of soldiers. The women and children are asleep.”
“I’m in your dream, and you’re in mine?”
Francesca Giannini said, “There are things you can’t know, and things you can. Hawenneyu the right-handed twin makes things—women who are smooth and fresh and beautiful. Hanegoategeh the left-handed twin makes time count, so it wrinkles and bends us and takes our strength. Hawenneyu gives us love to replenish the world, so living in time won’t matter to us. Hanegoategeh separates the lovers, so the love turns into pain.”
“That’s you,” said Jane.
“Is it?” asked Francesca. “The brothers fight. One is right-handed and the other left-handed, like images in a mirror. Each anticipates what the other’s next stratagem will be, and constructs the counterattack before it begins. The first can predict the counterstroke, and changes his tactic ever so slightly, or does the opposite. It’s like reaching your right hand to the surface of the mirror: the left hand of your reflection rises to meet it. They’ve been fighting this way since the beginning of the world, so time folds, and things that happened fifty years ago and others that are happening now are the same instant: attack and counterattack conceived simultaneously.”
Francesca Giannini paused, and her bright black eyes seemed to change subtly to be older, to grow cunning and predatory, the way Jane had imagined her. “You think I spent my life embracing Hanegoategeh, the left- handed. Maybe I was just Hawenneyu’s trick on his brother. Maybe I was put here tonight”—she indicated the big, ornate hotel—“as a stratagem.”
“Why? So Bernie Lupus would meet you, and fall in love? That’s how he was—will be—trapped into spending his life hiding money for the Mafia.”
Francesca shrugged. “Maybe that’s what happened. And maybe the opposite. Maybe it was so Bernie would spend a lifetime collecting it, and then someone—I—would love him enough to set him loose alive with the money.”
“How do I know?”
Francesca Giannini shook her head sadly. “All we can know is what you always knew. Everything that happens is part of the fighting.”
“Which one did this?”
Francesca shrugged. “Hawenneyu makes a man who can remember everything he sees. Hanegoategeh makes him poor and hungry. Hawenneyu sees that he’s taken in and fed by strangers. Hanegoategeh has already ensured that the strangers will be a tribe of cannibals. Hawenneyu gives one of the cannibals a young daughter.” She held out her white dress and twirled for Jane.
Jane said, “So beautiful. A man who could never forget would—”
“Would never forget,” interrupted Francesca. “I’m wearing this dress in my dream because I’ve already laid it out to wear when I wake up tomorrow. That’s when Bernie and I will meet.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, like a sigh of pleasure, then let it out. “Later on I’ll age, as Hanegoategeh wanted. Maybe I’ll do savage things, the way he wanted. But it was Hawenneyu that made Bernie so that he will remember me exactly this way forever.”
“But what am I supposed to do?” asked Jane.
Francesca shrugged. “I’m just a twenty-year-old girl. I suppose you should do what you think is best.”
“But this whole story—everything any of us has been doing—it’s all yours: your son, your lover, your death, your friends, your enemies.”
“I can only see the little spot on the earth my eyes can reach for the brief time when they’re open. Maybe that’s why you’re here: because the story is longer than one woman’s life. Maybe we were both part of Hawenneyu’s trick to fool Hanegoategeh into collecting money for the poor and the sick. Maybe your whole trip was designed to keep you away from Carey, so he would work late and be at the hospital to operate on somebody and save his life. Maybe it was all so that Rita would be killed in one place instead of another. For all I know, it was just so you would transport the Ford Explorer from Milwaukee so it will be wherever you leave it. But be careful. You’re making mistakes, and time moves so fast.”
Jane awoke, her heart beating in a frantic rhythm and her eyes wide. She looked around her, and it took her a second to remember why she was in a hotel room. She lay there for a minute deciphering the sounds in the hallway. When she had satisfied herself that the two sets of heavy male footsteps were just a bellman taking a new guest to a room near the end of the hall, she sat up and looked at the clock. It was two-thirty in the afternoon.
Jane showered and dressed in a good pair of slacks, a clean blouse and jacket. She had lunch in the hotel restaurant and thought about what she had done so far. Somehow, somewhere early in this, she had made a mistake. She had only been mailing letters for three days when the man in Seattle had tried to grab her. For all this time, she had put off thinking clearly about it.
From the moment when she had first noticed the large numbers of men watching the airports, she had been afraid that one of them would be someone who had seen her before. When the man had approached her in Seattle, he had seemed to step into her fear and give it a tangible form. She was willing to believe that he might recognize her even though he didn’t look familiar to her. Later she had seen the drawings, and they had seemed to explain everything. But they didn’t.
Jane had ignored the fact that the men in Seattle had been stalking another woman first. She had looked a little bit like Jane, but the biggest similarity was that she had been mailing letters. It was possible that one of the men had recognized Jane, and it was possible that by then they knew someone must be mailing letters to charities. But how could they have connected those two facts? Had something been wrong with the first batch of letters?
Jane took the elevator to the garage and opened the tailgate of the Explorer. She unzipped the first suitcase. She picked out a pile of letters with a rubber band around them. The return addresses were all in Ohio, and the zip codes were in sequence. No, she thought. If it were that kind of mistake—a letter put into a mailbox in the wrong state—it might not be noticed even by the charities, let alone come to the attention of criminals.
It could be something wrong with the letters themselves, but they weren’t all alike. She had written most of them herself, and Henry had read all of them before they were sealed. Maybe one of the checks had told somebody something, but the only way she could think of to find out what it might be was to talk to Henry. And how would the families know so soon? It had to be something that an ordinary person could pick up at a glance. And a person like that—any outsider—would be unlikely to see anything but the envelope. She would just have to look at the envelopes again.
