“How did you do that?”
“Shut up and turn around,” I said, motioning with the Glock.
He slowly turned his back toward me.
I said, “Get on your knees.”
Still standing there, he said, “You cannot do this here.”
I tapped him hard on the back of his head with the Glock. It staggered him. I said, “Shut up and kneel.”
He went down on his knees. I stepped close behind him, gripped the back of his collar in my left fist, laid the nozzle hard against the base of his skull. I said, “Apologize to her.”
He spat on Haley’s grave.
With a roar, I pistol whipped him. He rolled to the ground. I was astride him, the fabric of his shirt bunched in my left fist, the Glock in my right hand aimed at his face. In the fall his sunglasses had fallen off. As he lay there blinking up at me, my finger tightened on the trigger.
He said, “It does not matter. I have done my duty.”
It interested me a little. I said, “What duty?”
“I saw you talking to those men. I told Comandante Valentín you would betray us to the junta, and you did. But it does not matter, understand? Because the Comandante knows. I told him what I saw you do, and now I am ready to die for my people.”
He turned his yellowed eyes away from me and looked up toward the sky.
“Hail Mary,” he said, “full of grace, blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Hail Mary, full of grace…”
I breathed in deeply as he prayed. I let the breath out slowly. I thought of what I knew to be true. This man hadn’t actually hurt Haley. She was beyond that now. This man had his own burdens. He didn’t know that Haley had been my wife. And there were no crows above me. There were no ashes but the ones I carried in my head.
I decided not to soil the rolling ground above Haley with the man’s blood. I did my best to remember what is noble. What is excellent. I eased off the trigger. I threw the gun as far as I could. I stood. I straightened my suit jacket and turned toward the car.
Behind me, Castro offered thanks to the mother of God as I walked away from Haley and from death.
12
I drove aimlessly for hours. I spoke to Haley as if she were in the seat beside me. I spoke to Jesus, too. Actually, I yelled at him a little. I had a few hard questions, but he didn’t seem to have the answers. Ever since I had begun to come back to myself in the hospital, Jesus hadn’t been as real to me as Haley, and even she no longer answered.
When there was no place left to go, I pulled up to the gates of El Nido. They swung open majestically, and I followed the long driveway, parked Haley’s Bentley in Haley’s garage, and walked across the property to Haley’s guesthouse, where I went into the bathroom and threw cold water on my face and drank from my cupped palm.
When I looked at my reflection in the mirror, there were ashes on my forehead. I told myself the ashes weren’t really there, but I bent over the sink again and washed them off anyway.
I changed out of the suit into a pair of dark blue cargo shorts and a white polo shirt. I slipped into a pair of flip-flops and went outside again. I crossed the grounds toward the water. There, between a stand of eucalyptus and the seawall, I found the bench where Haley used to sit to watch the sunset, and over it the arbor Teru had erected with violet bougainvillea. I sat where Haley once sat. I said, “Happy birthday, baby.”
I remembered we had planned to spend that very day in Italy, on Lake Como, at a place she owned on the water, which I had not yet seen. She had loved the water. She had spoken about a powerboat she kept there—an old wooden Riva, sparkling with varnish from its torpedo stern to its plumb bow, with bright-red leather upholstery and a white Bakelite steering wheel. She had promised we would water-ski along the lake and take the Riva out into the middle around midnight every evening to drift with the engine off and lie on our backs and stargaze.
I pictured her and me alone between the Alps and Bellagio, lying on a sunpad on the stern of the motorboat, me flat on my back, her leaning on one elbow beside me tracing the hard ridges of my abdomen with a lazy fingertip. I saw her leaning down, her moonlit hair a blond curtain all around our faces, her lips touching mine, gingerly at first and then urgently, as if she had to draw me deep into herself or die trying.
The sun went down on Newport Beach. I sat in the dark awhile; then I stood up and went inside the guesthouse and sat in the dark some more.
After a while, there was a knock at the door. I got up, turned on a light, and opened the door. Teru and Simon came in. Simon had a bottle of Glenlivet in his hand.
I said, “The twenty-five?”
He said, “Of course.”
Haley had stocked nothing but the best.
I went into the kitchen and came back with three water glasses. We sat down together at the dining table. Simon removed the cork from the bottle and poured generously.
Teru lifted his glass, his Asian eyes welling up. “To her,” he said.
We drank a birthday toast.
Simon lifted his glass. “And to your recovery, sir.”
“Hear, hear,” said Teru.
We drained out glasses. Simon refilled them. We drank another glass, and then another. Then we began to talk of life and love and good and evil and all the things that matter most.
At some point in the evening, I said, “Simon, you know I was a gunnery sergeant before they demoted me.”
“Yes, sir. Miss Haley informed me of that fact.”
“Did you know gunnery sergeants don’t like to be called ‘sir’?”
“Indeed, sir?”
“It’s because we wouldn’t want to be mistaken for officers. Officers don’t usually know what they’re doing, you understand, and we always know what we’re doing. When men call us ‘sir,’ it doesn’t conform to our sense of self. It toys with our identity.”
“Am I to infer that this concern has survived your transition to civilian life?”
“You are.”
“Very good…Mr. Cutter.”
I sighed. He watched me silently. I said, “ ‘Mr. Cutter’ is my father, Simon. I don’t like him much. Besides, when you call me that, it makes me feel old.”
“What appellation would you prefer, if I might ask?”
“Why not Malcolm?”
“Oh dear.”
“You used to call me Malcolm.”
“There has been a change in circumstances, and one does hesitate to employ a Christian name when addressing one’s employer.”
“I’m not your employer.”
“I am distressed to hear it. One had hoped to be compensated for one’s services.”
“Okay, I guess I will be paying you, now that you mention it. At least until I can sort out this inheritance thing. But that doesn’t make me your employer. Not really. And even if it did, we’re not in England, Simon. Butlers don’t say ‘sir’ all the time over here.”
“Alas, I believe the practice is falling from favor even in the United Kingdom.”
“One must adapt.”
“Just so. However, one suspects certain standards should still be maintained.”
Teru looked back and forth between us, grinning.
I said, “I have standards too, you know. I have a typical American’s sense of egalitarianism. And if you keep insisting on this ‘sir’ business, then my sense of egalitarianism will require me to do the same to you. Then we would be ‘siring’ each other at every opportunity, and that would be ridiculous.”