“Blatz?”
“From Wisconsin.” Valentine smiled. “I went to school in Madison and got a taste for it.”
“My dad taught at UW,” said Finn, taking a swallow of beer. She bit a chunk out of the bagel and chewed, staring across at Valentine as he sat down across from her.
“That’s right.” Valentine nodded. He drank from his bottle and ignored the sandwich on the tray in front of him. “That’s where I met him.”
“How did you meet him?”
“He was my anthropology prof.”
“When was this?”
“Late sixties, early seventies.”
“He must have been young.”
“He was. So was I-even younger.” He laughed.
Finn took another bite of her sandwich and another swallow of beer. She looked around the room at the furniture and the art, thought about the piece of New York real estate she was sitting on top of, thought about Valentine. It was all so tiring. Her head began to whirl. Overkill.
“You didn’t buy this place selling old books, Mr. Valentine.”
“It’s Michael, and that sounds like a passive-aggressive statement, Ms. Ryan.”
“I’m really not a fan of dime-store shrinkology. You do more than sell books and do research.”
“Yes.”
“You’re some kind of spook, aren’t you?”
“Spook?”
“Spy.”
“No, not really.”
“And my dad, what was he?”
“An anthropology professor.”
“When he died they shipped his body back to Columbus for the funeral.”
“Yes?”
“It was a closed-coffin funeral. I didn’t really think about it much back then. I was just mad that I’d never get to see his face again.”
Valentine said nothing.
“But later, a lot later, I started thinking about all the places he’d been-always politically unstable, always dangerous-and then I wondered why he had a closed coffin when he supposedly had a perfectly innocent heart attack.”
Valentine shrugged. “He died in the jungle. Maybe it took time to get his remains back to civilization.”
“Or maybe he was missing his fingernails, or maybe he was tortured, or maybe it really wasn’t my father’s body in that coffin at all.”
“You’re saying you think your father was a spy?”
“I’m from Columbus, Ohio. I’m what my teachers used to call a linear thinker. Straight lines, you know-line up the facts like dominoes and see where they take you. In this case my mother gives me your phone number, you’re definitely no stodgy old bookseller and you used to be a student of my dad’s… probably more than a student. Is my analysis wrong? My boyfriend gets murdered, I get attacked, my ex-boss winds up with a dagger stuck into him and you don’t turn a hair… Michael.”
“You sound just like him.”
“Who?”
“Your dad. He used to count facts off on his fingers like that too.” He smiled. Finn looked down and realized what she’d been doing with her hands. She flushed, remembering her father at the dinner table, explaining something, his hands playing over each other, one finger on another. When he ran out of fingers the lecture was usually over.
Finn closed her eyes, suddenly exhausted. What she really wanted to do was find a bed and fall into it for the next month or so. How long had it been, twenty-four, thirty-six hours? Something like that. Like a bolt of lightning. Like driving in a car one second and finding yourself wrapped around a telephone pole the next. Life didn’t happen this way, or it wasn’t supposed to. She’d done all the right things, got good grades, brushed her teeth from side to side as well as up and down, played well with others, colored inside the lines, all of that, so this just should… not… be… happening.
She opened her eyes.
“I don’t want any more bullshit, Michael. I’m not playing games, and I’m not playing Holmes and Watson. This is my life-or maybe my death we’re talking about. Murder. I want the truth. And I want to know just who the hell you are.”
“You may not like it.”
“Try me.”
“Do you know anything about your grandfather-your paternal grandfather?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“A great deal.”
“He was some kind of businessman. My father never talked about him. He was Irish, obviously.” She sighed. “This is all ancient history.”
“Ancient history is what we are and where we came from. You know the old saying ‘Those who forget history-’ ”
“ ‘Are doomed to repeat it.’ ”
“Lots of people know the quote, but do you know who said it?”
“No.”
“A Spanish philosopher named George Santayana. He was born in the middle of the nineteenth century and died in 1952. Your grandfather actually met him once.”
“You always go the long way to get home?”
“Your grandfather was born in Ireland but his name wasn’t Ryan. It was Flynn, Padraic Flynn- which figures, because Flynn in Gaelic is O’Flionn, which means red-haired.”
“Jesus wept,” Finn groaned. “You mean my name is really Finn Flynn?”
“He changed it legally when he left Cork in a bit of a rush. He was part of the Easter Uprising in 1916 and had to get out of town. He came to Canada and he wasn’t in business. He was a bootlegger. He got rich by taking rowboats full of booze across the Detroit River from Windsor.”
“This is all very interesting, but where’s it leading?”
“When he got to the American side of the river he met up with my grandfather, Michelangelo Valentini. He changed his name too. He called himself Mickey Valentine but everyone called him Mickey Hearts. He was famous for a while, like your grandfather. Patrick Ryan retired after Prohibition and moved to Ohio. Mickey Hearts was gunned down in the seventies gang wars in New York. After that, Gotti and his freaks took over.”
“Okay, so we both come from criminal backgrounds-if it’s true, which I’m beginning to wonder about any of this. Just what is your point?”
“The point is neither my grandfather nor yours wanted their children growing up criminals. For them it was rooted in the necessities of poverty. For their children there was the freedom of education. They both went to Yale, you know. During the war my father worked for the judge advocate general and your father worked for the OSS.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Finn, “but I still don’t see what it has to do with Crawley’s murder or my boyfriend, Pete’s.”
“I’m beginning to think it has a lot to do with it, at least peripherally.”
“So finish your story.”
“After the war my father went to work for the CIA and your old man taught anthropology-which meant, in the early days, the fifties and early sixties, he did a lot of traveling, mostly to Southeast Asia and Central America. He even looked the part-horn-rimmed glasses, bald, red beard, big smile, tweed jacket with elbow patches… he even smoked a pipe. Nobody paid any attention to him. He wrote papers on the Hmong and the Montagnards in Vietnam and Cambodia before most people could find the places on the map. He also correctly predicted the revolution in Cuba and pointed out Fidel Castro as a potential problem several years before he came to power.”
“You’re saying he was a spy.”
“No. Not officially, but my father enlisted him as a freelancer-one of the best in the business-and your dad, in turn, recruited me. He was an information specialist on a human scale. I broadened out into history and… other specialties.”