“Nobody tricked her.”
“I’m sure.”
“She wasn’t lying, was she?”
Paul moved a hand to suggest that wasn’t worth a response.
“What can I do for you, Hal?”
Kronon had a heavy, unhealthy look. He was heading into his late sixties now. His hair was fleeing and age was overtaking him quickly. Zeus looked like a movie star at Hal’s age. Those recessive genes were a bitch.
“I’m considering making a public statement,” Hal said.
“You’ve already made a few.”
“This one will say I’m convinced you had no role in my sister’s murder.”
Paul’s heart spurted, much as he wanted to contain his reaction. They would have a chance, if Hal did that. He still wouldn’t bet on himself-too many voters just had a bad taste in their mouths at the mention of his name, and some by now were unsettled by the thought that his identical twin, a person with the same DNA, was a killer, even if he wasn’t. But still. They might crawl back to second by the time of the first election in two weeks.
“That’s a rather substantial change of heart,” Paul finally said.
“Well, we’ve learned some stuff.”
“Like?”
“That it was your mother’s blood in my sister’s room. Not yours or Cass’s. Lidia’s fingerprints are there, too. I have the report from Dickerman in my pocket, if you want to take a look.”
Paul inhaled a few times to still the combination of fear and rage that flushed through him.
“How in the hell did you get my mother’s fingerprints?”
Hal shrugged. “I already told you. The Internet. Everything’s out there.”
Paul took a second. The last thing he could tolerate was Hal Kronon in the role of wise guy.
“What do you want, Hal? I know you want something in exchange.”
“Nothing complicated. I want to know what happened,” Hal said. “I’ve spent twenty-five years sure you and your brother shorted my family on the truth. So I’d like to hear the whole story. And if you tell me, assuming it’s true, I’ll make that statement.”
“Who decides if it’s true?”
“Me.”
Paul smiled.
“I don’t know what happened, Hal. I wasn’t there.”
“But you know what you’ve been told.”
Paul thought for a second. This was always a tale like the shell of a snail, whorls on whorls, and one that he’d known for a quarter of a century could never be shared. Back in the day, his mother always repeated a Greek proverb. ‘He who reveals his secret, makes himself a slave.’ Hal Kronon was the last person in the world to whom he’d make himself or his family a slave, especially after the sacrifices of the last twenty-five years.
“I’m not talking about that with you, Hal. And if I did, you wouldn’t believe me anyway. But I’ll tell you this one thing as a favor. Even today, I’m not sure who killed your sister. And I never have been. All I know for certain is that it wasn’t me, and that I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“That’s not enough.”
“That’s all I have to say, Hal.”
“You’ll lose the election.”
“Thanks to you.” Paul was in fact increasingly at peace about losing. He’d turned fifty nearly a year ago. This was a good time to pull back and think about his life and what he really wanted, instead of capitulating to momentum, like a kid flying downhill on a sled. He was sick of meetings like this, with people begging or bullying, or trading favors. He’d longed for power for some good reasons, but also because that was what his mother always wanted for them, and because after Cass’s guilty plea, he felt more obliged than ever to redeem their lives. But he’d done it and discovered power was a trap. You controlled less than you thought, and got beaten on like a piñata, and never escaped watching eyes, except at home. He could stand losing. The one who would be inconsolable was Cass. Paul wondered for a second if Cass would have taken Hal’s deal. Probably not. But Cass wasn’t here.
He webbed his hands tightly before he spoke, hoping to contain his anger.
“You know, Hal. I need to be honest. You have a lot of nerve. You’re pulling those ridiculous commercials off the air? Great. You think I don’t realize your lawyers have advised you that if you leave them up now, knowing all this, that I can re-file for defamation and clean your clock? Those ads always were a bunch of malicious lies, and you’ve been promoting them for months. Which is the real point. Any decent human being, having learned what you have, would come here to say one thing: ‘I’m sorry. I’m going to the top of the ZP Building to scream to the world that I was wrong and that I’m sorry.’ Instead, you’re trying to hold me up, and to get me to sell out my family as the price of what even a modest respect for the truth should require you to do anyway.”
Hal leaned over the table, coming perilously close. Paul could feel the heat of his breath when he spoke, and took in the beefy odor of his person beneath his cologne.
“You talk to me about respect for the truth?” Hal asked. “Your family has been hiding it for decades. My parents lived with Dita’s death every day until they died. And I realized all along that none of us knew what really happened. And you think I owe you something, out of duty or honor? Excuse me, but somebody in your family killed my sister.”
“Somebody in my family went to prison for twenty-five years. And frankly, as I told you before, even today I don’t know what happened. Maybe nobody in my family killed your sister.”
“Then why did Cass plead?”
“We’re done with this conversation.” Paul stood up and grabbed his recorder. “I think your political views, Hal, are goofy. I always have. And I think your tactics are low. But I always thought you had some limits, that in your own cockeyed way you were a decent guy.”
Ever a baby, Hal looked for a second like he was going to cry. Then he stiffened himself with a comforting truth.
“You’re done for,” he told Paul. “You’ll never be mayor.”
Paul answered from the door.
“So what?” he asked.
IV
27
Dita Kronon sheds her wet clothes and heaps them on the floor, where Tula, the maid, will deal with them in the morning. After grabbing a short pool robe from her closet, Dita crashes on her bed and clicks the TV remote. She told Greta she might slide by for a drink at 10:30, but she’s shredded now that she’s down from the ’lude, and Cass will be here by midnight.
It’s been a long day already. She nearly did a dance when the rain sent all those shrieking greaseballs back to where they came from. Her parents are all the time telling her to embrace her heritage, but she has been explaining to them since she was about twelve that she is an American. Period. She’s called Dita because that was as much of Aphrodite as she could pronounce at the age of two, but she’s clung to it, rather than be known by a name so foreign and weird.
Hal, naturally, loves all of the Greek stuff, but he was born over there and still speaks the language. He’s into all the rigmarole at church, the pained figures on the walls and the incense and chanting and the priest shoveling out the so-called Holy Gifts to everybody in the room from the same fucking spoon, all of which to her feels like a really bad Halloween party. But Hal is a dork, who sometimes seems to embarrass her parents simply by breathing. Dita loves him anyway. Whenever she gets ready to marry somebody, she might look for a man a little like Hal, at least somebody as devoted and kind.
But she won’t marry anyone right now, which she’s been explaining to Cass for weeks. She’s gotten herself into a bad thing with Cass. She met him Memorial Day weekend at the club, where he was working as a lifeguard for pocket money, while he waited for the police academy to start.
‘Watch this,’ she told Greta, as soon as she found out who he was. The whole concept was to see the look on his face when she told him her name. She’s gone out with plenty of guys, even done a few, purely on a bet or because it will make a good story. She was wearing a two-piece her parents had forbidden her to put on at the club under any circumstances, and she motored over to where Cass could see her, and smiled up to the chair while she squinted in the sun. And of course, as soon as it was his turn to climb down, he came over. He was good-looking, you had to give him that, very hunky, all that great Greek hair. That was one thing she liked about being Greek. The hair. And the food. That, too.