“You...” John said. “You actually see me sitting here in front of you?”
“You’re my son, my blood.”
John felt her claim on him. This drunken passion somehow daunted his intelligence.
“My entire life I missed you, mom.”
“I only left New York when you were sixteen, baby.”
“But even before then you’d be gone in the morning and dad would be so sad that I couldn’t make him smile.”
“I’m a terrible human being.”
“And still I love you more than anything.”
“I’m going away for a few days,” Lucia told her son seven weeks, three days and thirteen hours after she’d miraculously reappeared in his life. “I need to go see Filo.”
“Why doesn’t he come here?” John asked, trying to push down the panic in his chest.
“It’s that if the FBI is watching thing,” Lucia replied. She was dicing onions in his third-floor kitchen.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Three days.”
“Could I come?”
“You have that president’s lecture.”
“Oh... right.”
“But Filo would like to meet you one day,” she said. “He’s a very busy man too.”
“Busy doing what? I thought he’d retired from being a crook.”
“He did... he has. Now he works for charities and public groups.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” John asked wanting to keep the conversation going.
“I told you that he’s had plastic surgery and his name was changed. As long as he’s no place anybody is looking for him it’s okay.”
“What is his new name?”
Lucia looked at her son a moment, her eyes filled with tears from the pungent onion.
“I better let him tell you that,” she said. “You know just a name could put him away for life, maybe get us both killed.”
“Oh... okay. I’d really like it if you stayed until after the lecture, mom. Then we could go together.”
“Next time.”
Heartbreak was a familiar feeling, even older than the guilt over the death of Chapman Lorraine. He remembered clearly when his father was in the hospital and his mother sent him away.
“It’s okay, honey,” Lucia cooed. “I’m never leaving you again.”
“Except to go see Filo.”
“Only for a few days.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
The next afternoon was the first time he considered calling Carlinda. The apartment felt empty. He could say that he wanted to discuss Carlinda’s paper. Instead he turned to the lecture he was supposed to give the next day — History: The Art of Living with Death. Pencil in hand he sat before a stack of blank paper. He promised himself that if he didn’t write anything by seven he’d call Carlinda.
At 6:51 his landline rang.
“Hello?”
“Hello, John.”
“Marte?”
“You sound surprised.”
“No, no. I just... It’s nothing. What can I do for you?”
“Colin was called away to Chicago overnight,” she said. “And I don’t want to eat alone. What are you and Rosa doing?”
“My mother had to go to LA for a few days.”
“Oh. Then you’re alone too. Why don’t we meet at that French restaurant in town?”
“La Reine?”
“That’s it. Seven-thirty?”
“So what you’re saying is that you have been studying history your entire life,” Marte Crespo-Luckfeld said after ordering frogs’ legs as an appetizer and mushroom pasta for the main.
Marte was a handsome woman in her late thirties, with delicate russet-color skin, and eyes a shocking crystalline blue. Her face was long and sympathetic while her mouth was set with determination that John had not remembered from their previous meetings.
“I guess,” he said, “at least from the time I could read long words.”
“But there seems to be something missing.”
“What do you mean?”
Marte gazed at him. In her eyes, on her lips there seemed to be lodged a question. “Colin has told you that he... we belong to a unique and very confidential organization,” she stated.
John became very still.
She smiled and nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “You are right not to answer. The Platinum Path is destined for a glorious future but with this ambition come danger and death.”
At that moment a waiter came with her frogs’ legs and John’s onion soup.
When the server was gone she said, “You are on the radar of the senior officials.”
“Why?”
“They need young and vital leadership: men and women who are willing to act regardless of law, love or outmoded ethics.”
“And they think I’m lawless, loveless and amoral?”
“Be prepared to answer the call.”
John sat up that night thinking about people watching him from synthetic shadows.
“Was that a threat?” he asked the walls and then fell fast asleep.
In the morning John concentrated on the talk he was slated to deliver. Truth, for the historian, was like sand: seemingly whole from a distance but on closer examination it broke down into particles so fine that their forms and natures, not to mention their incalculable number, were beyond human comprehension.
He ascended the stage at Deck Rec auditorium wondering at the previous hour or so: the shower and the dark blue suit over a yellow T, the long walk in strong sun and the hot wind against him. On the way he’d said hello to students and faculty members, strangers and the gardener — Ron Underhill.
“Professor Woman.”
“Mr. Underhill.”
“How are you today, sir?”
“Going to give a talk about how the architecture of human certainty is built on graveyard soil.”
The older man smiled and nodded. “I heard about that,” he said.
“You did?”
“They put out a weekly announcement so the staff can avail themselves of what the school has to offer.”
“I didn’t realize that,” John said.
Underhill gave John a big smile. One of his two front teeth was missing.
Looking out over the mostly full auditorium John thought about Underhill. He was a bright man and completely, it seemed, his own.
Carlinda was in the third row in the rightmost tier of pews. Seeing her John decided on the construction of the talk he’d give.
President Luckfeld and Marte were front and center. Colin nodded at John and smiled. Marte was smiling too.
The digital clock on the back wall read 1:58. John felt the sweat from the hot sun turn cold under the air-conditioning. The IT specialist Talia Friendly, wearing khaki overalls, gave him a thumbs-up.
The spectators were still greeting each other when John said aloud, “We don’t really learn from history.”
People stopped their talking and dropped into seats.
“Take the thumbs-up gesture,” he said making the sign with his left hand. “In ancient Rome, at the gladiatorial games in the Colosseum and Circus, that gesture was a death sentence for the loser. It meant to give an upthrust with the sword and end his life. Thumbs-down meant to sheath your sword and let the conquered live. This is as close as we can get to a fact. Thumbs-up is bad, thumbs-down is good. But will you, now that you know the truth, change the way you sign? Of course not. You’re not communicating with Latin sign language in twenty-first-century America. You know what the gestures mean today and that’s that. We know what is true and will die to defend that truth.