And what was it-luck? Fate? A fine-tuning of the music of the spheres? He couldn't say, and all his life he'd remember the moment, because when they came up on the first exit, right there, as if it had been parked purposely in front of the family restaurant with a FOR SALE sign scrawled on the side window, was a Bordeaux-red Mercedes, dealer plates attached.
Four
MADISON SLEPT the whole way to Sacramento, past San Quentin and over the bridge, through Richmond, Vallejo, Cordelia and Vacaville, the hot chocolate gone cold, the éclairs untouched. He'd kept the music low so as not to wake her-a reggae mix he'd downloaded himself, mostly Marley, built around live and studio versions of “Rebel Music,” a tune he couldn't get enough of-and that was a real onus because he felt so loose and liberated, so purely on fire, and he wanted to make his new top-of-the-line Bose speakers just burn with it. But Madison asleep was infinitely preferable to Madison awake, and he restrained himself. And though he wanted to open the car up, see what it could do, he kept to the inside lane and held it at seventy-there'd be plenty of open road on the way down to Vegas and across the high desert, heading east. He saw himself for a moment then, a snapshot of the future, purpleedged clouds closing over the claws of the hoodoos and the dead dry mountains, Natalia asleep with her head in his lap and Madison silent in back, the beat driving the speakers and the unbridled horses under the hood all pounding in unison. Who was that masked man? Was that a jet or just thunder?
He was feeling good. Better than good. He laid a hand on Natalia's thigh, where the skirt rode up over the dark silk of her stockings. “You know what I want to do, first thing, when we get there?”
She was reading a magazine, her hair thick and shining as she bent over it, her features alive. “What you always want to do?” she said, giving him a coy sidelong glance.
“That's for tonight.” He slid his hand down, gave her knee a squeeze. “No, I want to go straight to the pool and then the hot tub and the sauna, sweat a little, and then get a rubdown-a massage, twin massages, you and me. How's that sound?”
Her smile was for him and him alone, the sharp perfect cut of her lips, down-dwelling and in-dwelling, pure invitation, pure lust. “Will we not eat first?”
“And then cocktails,” he said, running on ahead of her, “early cocktails, maybe even a piña colada or something in the massage room, dress for dinner, of course, best place in town, and then over to Stateline to hit the blackjack tables.”
“And Madison? What of Madison?”
A glance to the rearview mirror: a pickup there, half a dozen cars behind that, spread out across the roadway, a big off-white eighteen-wheeler gearing up to pass on the left. “Oh, hell-I don't care, we'll load her up with videos and get one of those in-hotel babysitters. We're celebrating, right? No expense spared? This is a vacation, baby, and we'll make it last as long as you want-”
“Yes,” and the smile began to fade though she tried to keep it intact, “and that will be when we arrive in a new home, yes, a house in the forest, a house all to ourselves-and Madison is enrolled for her school. That is when the vacation will finish.” She paused, glanced beyond him to the road and addressed her words to the windshield: “It is a nice house?”
“You've seen the pictures, are you kidding me? It's class, pure class. Two acres, it sits on. With a pool. And a built-in bar.”
“Nicer than the condo?”
“You kidding? It's like an estate.”
“And this option to buy?” He watched her lips as she formed the words; she always homed in on the central proposition, infallibly. “You will exercise it if I like the place-“we” will exercise it, yes? In my name too?”
She was making her bid, and he couldn't blame her. He didn't mind. Sure, why not? He'd need to turn over the profit on the condo, anyway, and he had a few things going, this scheme Sandman had outlined for him, for one thing, and he might get lucky at the tables-in fact, he knew he would. He could feel it, the whole trajectory of it, up, up and up. He couldn't lose. And there was the car-he'd get clear of that, pick up another one. Two cars, a new Z-4 for her, and something for him too, not a Mustang, though-and not a Harley either. “Right,” he said. “Yeah, of course. And you're going to love the shopping-there's no place in the world like Manhattan.”
“Not even Jaroslavl?”
“Well, I don't know. Is that the place with twenty million people and Bergdorf's and Macy's and Tiffany's and the Diamond District?”
She was grinning. She shook her head. “I don't think so.”
“Grand Central. The Empire State Building? Le Cirque and Babbo and the Oyster Bar?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head till her hair swung free, side to side, “no, I don't think so.”
He loved this kind of banter, loved to see her like this, all the shrewd compacted energy of her wired to the moment, smiling, loose-limbed, beautiful. And content. Content, for once. He felt his cock stir. He wanted her in bed.
“Tell me about Bergdorf's,” she said.
The Mercedes hummed, the sun painted the highway before him on into the distance. He was aware of Bob Marley, faintly delineating his rage under the sweet fractured musicality of her voice as she shifted from one subject to the next, from Manhattan to drainage problems with the basements of old houses to the cat she wanted to get-a Bengal cat; had he ever heard of the breed? Just four generations out of the wild. A beautiful animal. Exquisite. And maybe she'd get two of them, a male and female, to breed them, and she'd send a kitten to Kaylee and maybe one to her brother in Toronto. FedEx. Did they FedEx live animals?
He felt the pulse of the music, nodded, touched her, kept his eyes on the road. And before he knew it they hit the turnoff for Tahoe.
He didn't realize Madison was awake until he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the etiolated little kernel of her face centered there. She was sitting up, perched on the edge of the seat, straining the limits of the seat belt-which he'd insisted on fastening while she was asleep. There was a red crease on one side of her face and her hair looked like something washed up out of the sea. For the moment she was recalibrating, wearing that dazed and disoriented look of children everywhere when they climb up out of the caverns of sleep, but he knew that it was just a matter of time before the whining started in. He was no child psychologist and he couldn't begin to imagine what it must have been like with the last jerk Natalia was attached to, but the kid seemed excessively needy, a complainer, a whiner. Not at all like Sukie. Sukie was a stalwart. Even as a baby she settled into herself, slept through the night, ate when she was fed and gurgled at the mobile over the crib for hours at a time. She walked early, talked early, knew how to entertain herself, and right from the start seemed to understand that adults sometimes needed a few minutes of peace in their lives. But not Madison. She wanted and wanted and wanted. Just like her mother.
Maybe ten seconds passed before she started in. “Mommy, I have to pee,” she announced, her voice reduced to its doleful essence. Of course she had to pee. He understood that, he was no monster, but he'd been hoping to make it as far as Rancho Cordova, to the hotel there, for lunch, and once he got going he didn't like to stop. And once they stopped she'd be hungry-and, perversely, and just this once, not for éclairs, because they were warm now and mushy-and they'd wind up eating some third-rate roadside crap and he could forget about the filet he'd had on his mind for the past half hour. He cranked the music a notch and watched the road as Natalia swung round in the seat.