An alarm began to sound inside me.
"You gotta admit it's interesting timing that Senator Lord delivers this letter to you from Benton and now all of a sudden we're over here going to Interpol… "
"Let's don't do this." I cut him off as my stomach tightened and my heart began to pound.
"You gotta hear me out, Doc," he replied. "In the letter Benton's saying for you to stop grieving, that everything's all right and he knows what you're doing right this minute..:' "Stop it!" I raised my voice and threw my napkin on the table as emotions began crashing in on all sides.
"We got to face it" Marino was getting emotional; too. "How do you know… I mean, what if the letter really wasn't written several years ago? What if it was written now…?"
"No! How dare you!" I exclaimed as tears filled my eyes.
I pushed back my chair and got up.
"Leave," I told him. "I won't be subjected to your goddamn UFO theories. What do you want? To make me live through this hell all over again? So I can hope for something when I've worked so hard to accept the truth? Get out of my room."
Marino. pushed back his chair, and it fell over as he jumped to his feet. He snatched his pack of cigarettes off the table.
"What if he's fucking still alive?" He raised his voice, too. "How do you know for a fact he didn't have to disappear for a while because of some big thing going on that involves ATF, FBI, Interpol, shit, maybe NASA, for all we know?"
I grabbed my wine, my hands shaking so badly I could barely hold it without spilling, my entire existence ripped open again. Marino was stalking the room and gesturing wildly with his cigarette.
"You don't know it for a fact," he said again. "All you saw was burned-up bone in a stinking black fire hole. And a Breiding watch like his. So fucking what!"
"You son of a bitch!" I said. "You goddamn son of a bitch! After all I've been through; and then you have to…"
"You're not the only one who's been through it. You know, just because you slept with him doesn't mean you fucking owned him."
I took quick steps toward him and caught myself before I slapped him hard across the face.
"Oh, God," I muttered as I stared into his shocked eyes. "Oh, God."
I thought of Lucy striking Jo, and I walked away from him. He turned to the window and smoked. The room was overcast with misery and shame, and I leaned my head against the wall and shut my eyes. I'd never come even close to violence with anyone in my life, not anyone like this, not someone I knew and cared about.
"Nietzsche was right;" I muttered in a defeated way. "Be careful who you choose for an enemy because that's who you become most like."
"I'm sorry," Marino barely said.
"Like my first husband, like my idiot sister, like every out-of-control cruel, selfish person I've ever known. Here I am. Like them."
"No, you ain't."
My forehead was pressed against the wall, as if I were praying, and I was grateful we were in shadows, my back to him, so he could not see my anguish.
"I didn't mean what I said, Doc. I swear I didn't. I don't even know why I said it."
"It's all right."
"All I'm trying to do is look at everything because there's pieces that aren't fitting right."
He walked over to an ashtray and stabbed out his cigarette.
"I don't know why we're here," he said.
"We're not here to do this," I said.
"Well, I don't know why they couldn't have exchanged info with us through the computer, over the phone, like they always do. Do you?"
"No," I whispered as I took a deep breath.
"So it started sneaking into my thoughts that maybe Benton… What if there was something going on and he had to be a protected witness for a while. Change his identity and all that. We didn't always know what he was into. Not even you always knew, because he couldn't always tell you, and he would never want to hurt us by telling us something we shouldn't know. Especially not hurt you or make you worry about him all the time."
I did not answer him.
"I'm not trying to stir anything up. I'm just saying it's something we should think about," he lamely added.
"No, it isn't," I replied, clearing my throat and aching all over. "It's not something we should think about. He was identified, Marino, by every possible means. Carrie Grethen didn't just conveniently kill him so he could disappear for a while. Don't you see how impossible this is? He's dead, Marino. He's dead:"
"Did you go to his autopsy? Did you see his autopsy report?" He wouldn't let it go.
Benton's remains had gone to the Philadelphia medical examiner's office. I had never asked to review his case.
"No, you didn't go to his autopsy, and if you had, I would have thought you were the most fucked-up person I've ever met," Marino said. "So you didn't see nothing. You only know what you've been -told. I don't mean to keep hammering you with that, but it's the truth. And if anyone wanted to cover up that those remains weren't his, how would you know if you never took a look?"
"Pour me some Scotch," I said.
32
I turned toward Marino, my back against the wall as if I didn't have the strength to stand on my own two feet.
"Man, you see how much whiskey costs over here?" Marino commented as he closed the door to the minibar.
"I don't care."
"Interpol's probably paying, anyway," he decided.
"And I need a cigarette," I added.
He lit a Marlboro for me and the first hit punched my lungs. He presented me with a tumbler of straight single malt on the rocks in one hand, a Beck's beer in the other.
"What I'm trying to say," Marino resumed, "is if Interpol can do all this secret shit with electronic tickets and ritzy hotels and Concordes, and no one ever meets a soul who's ever talked to whoever these people are, then what makes you think they couldn't have faked everything else?"
"They couldn't have faked his being murdered by a psychopath;" I replied.
"Yes, they could have. Maybe that was the perfect timing." He blew out smoke and gulped down beer. "Point is, Doc, I think anything can be faked, if you think about it."
"DNA identified…"
I couldn't finish the statement. It brought images before me I had suppressed for so long.
"You can't say the reports were true."
"Enough!"
But the beer had crumbled what walls he had, and he would not stop his increasingly fantastic theories and deductions and wishful thoughts. His voice went on and on and began to sound far away and unreal. A shiver crept over me. A splinter of light glinted in that dark, devastated part of me. I desperately wanted to believe that what he was suggesting was true.
When 5:00 A.M. came around, I was still dressed- and asleep on the couch. I had a hammering headache. My mouth tasted like stale cigarettes and my breath was alcohol. I showered and stared for a long time at the phone by my bed. The anticipation of what I had decided to do electrified me with panic. I was so confused.
In Philadelphia, it was almost midnight, and I left a message for Dr. Vance Harston, the chief medical examiner. I gave him the number to the fax machine in my room and left the do not disturb sign on the door. Marino met me in the hall, and I said nothing to him but an inaudible good morning.
Downstairs, dishes clattered as the buffet was set up and a man cleaned glass doors with a brush and a cloth. There was no coffee this early, and the only other guest awake was a woman with a mink coat draped over a chair. In front of the hotel, another Mercedes taxi awaited us.
Our driver this day was sullen and in a hurry. I rubbed my temples as motorcycles sped past in lanes of their imagination, weaving between cars and roaring through many narrow tunnels. I was depressed by reminders of the car crash that killed Princess Diana.I remembered waking up and hearing about it on the news, and my first thought was we tended to disbelieve that mundane, random deaths can happen to our gods.There is no glory or nobility in being killed by a drunk driver. Death is the great equalizer. It doesn't give a damn who you are.The sky was dusky blue. Sidewalks were wet from washing and green garbage cans had been set out along the streets. We bumped over cobblestones at the Place de la Concorde and drove along the Seine, which we could not see most of the time because of a wall. A digital clock outside the Gare de Lyon let us know it was seven-twenty, and inside feet shuffled and people hurried into Relais Hachette to buy papers. I waited behind a woman with a poodle at the ticket counter, and a sharp-featured, well-dressed man with silver hair jolted me. He looked like Benton from a distance. I could not help but scan the crowd as if I might find him, my heart throbbing as if it couldn't survive much more of this.