I draw out the words slowly. "I am not a victim." My voice wavers around its edges like fire. "There's a difference between being victimized and being a victim. I'm not a sideshow for character disorders." My tone sears. "I haven't become what he wanted to turn me into"_of course, I mean Chandonne_"even if he'd had his way, I wouldn't be what he tried to project onto me. I would just be dead. Not changed. Not something less than I am. Just dead."
I feel Marino recoil in his dark, loud space on the other side of his huge, manly truck. He doesn't understand what I mean or feel and probably never will. He reacts as if I slapped him across the face or kneed him in the groin.
"I'm talking reality." He strikes back. "One of us has to."
"Reality is, I'm alive."
"Yeah. A fuckin' goddamn miracle."
"I should have known you would do this." I get quiet and cold. "So predictable. People blame the prey not the predator, criticize the injured not the asshole who did it." I tremble in the dark. "Goddamn you. Goddamn you, Marino."
"I still can't believe you opened your door!" he shouts. What happened to me makes him feel powerless.
"And where were you guys?" I again remind him of an unpleasant fact. "It might have been nice if at least one or two of you could have kept an eye on my property. Since you were so concerned that he might come after me."
"I talked to you on the phone, remember?" He attacks from another angle. "You said you was fine. I told you to sit tight, that we'd found where the son of a bitch was hiding, that we knew he was out somewhere, probably looking for another woman to beat and bite the shit out of. And what do you do, Doc-tor Law Enforcement? You open your fucking door when someone knocks! At fucking midnight!"
I thought the person was the police. He said he was the police.
"Why?" Marino is yelling now, pounding the steering wheel like an out-of-control child. "Huh? Why? Goddamn it, tell me!"
We knew for days who the killer is, that he is the spiritual and physical freak Chandonne. We knew he is French and where his organized crime family lives in Paris. The person outside my door did not have even a hint of a French accent.
Police.
I didn 't call the police, I said through the shut door.
Ma 'am, we 've gotten a call about a suspicious person on your property. Are you all right!
He had no accent. I never expected him to speak without an accent. It never occurred to me, not once. Were I to relive last night, it still would not occur to me. The police had just been at my house when the alarm went off. It didn't seem the least bit suspicious that they would be back. I incorrectly assumed they were keeping a close eye on my property. It was so quick. I opened the door and the porch light was off and I smelled that dirty, wet animal smell in the deep, frigid night.
"Yo! Anybody home?" Marino yells, poking my shoulder hard.
"Don't touch me!" I come to with a start, and gasp and jerk away from him and the truck swerves. The ensuing silence turns the air heavy like water a hundred feet deep, and awful images swim back into my blackest thoughts. A forgotten ash is so long I can't steer it to the ashtray in time. I brush it off my lap. "You can turn at Stonypoint Shopping Center, if you want," I say to Marino. "It's quicker."
Chapter 2
DR. ANNA ZENNER'S IMPOSING GREEK REVIVAL house soars up-lit into the night on the southern bank of the James River. Her mansion, as the neighbors call it, has large Corinthian columns and is a local example of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington's belief that the new nation's architecture should express the grandeur and dignity of the ancient world. Anna is from the ancient world, a German of the first order. I believe she is from Germany. Now that I think about it, I do not recall her ever telling me where she was born.
White holiday lights wink from trees, and candles in Anna's many windows glow warmly, reminding me of Christ-mases in Miami during the late fifties, when I was a child. On the rare occasion when my father's leukemia was in remission, he loved to drive us through Coral Gables to gawk at houses he called villas, as if somehow his ability to show us such places made him part of that world. I remember fantasizing about the privileged people who lived inside those homes with their graceful walls and Bentleys and their feasts of steak or shrimp seven days a week. No one who lived like that could possibly be poor or sick or regarded as trash by people who did not like Italians or Catholics or immigrants called Scar-petta.
It is an unusual name of a lineage I really don't know much about. The Scarpettas have lived in this country for two generations, or so my mother claims, but I don't know who these other Scarpettas are. I have never met them. I have been told we are traced back to Verona, that my ancestors were farmers and railway workers. I do know for a fact that I have only one sibling, a younger sister named Dorothy. She was briefly married to a Brazilian twice her age who supposedly fathered Lucy. I say supposedly, because when it comes to Dorothy, only DNA would convince me of who she happened to be in bed with on the occasion my niece was conceived. My sister's fourth marriage was to a Farinelli, and after that Lucy stopped changing her name. Except for my mother, I am the only Scar-petta left, as far as I know.
Marino brakes at formidable black iron gates and his big arm stretches out to stab an intercom button. An electronic buzz and a loud click, and the gates slowly open like a raven's wings. I don't know why Anna left her homeland for Virginia and never married. I have never asked her why she set up a psychiatric practice in this modest southern city when she could have gone anywhere. I don't know why I am suddenly wondering about her life. Thoughts are odd misfires. I carefully get out of Marino's truck and step down on granite pavers. It is as if I am having software problems. All sorts of files are being opened and closed unprovoked, and system messages are flashing. I am not sure of Anna's exact age, only that she is in her mid-seventies. As far as I know, she has never told me where she went to college or medical school. We have shared opinions and information for years, but rarely our vulnerabilities and intimate facts.
It suddenly bothers me considerably that I know so little about Anna, and I feel ashamed as I make my way up her neatly swept front steps, one at a time, sliding my good hand along the frigid iron railing. She opens the front door and her keen face softens, She looks at my thick, crooked cast and blue sling, and meets my eyes. "Kay, I am so glad to see you," she says, greeting me the same way she always does.
"How'ya doin', Dr. Zenner!" Marino announces. His en- thusiasm is overblown as he goes out of his way to show how popular and charming he is and how little I matter to him. "Something sure smells mmm-mmm-good. You cooking for me again?"
"Not tonight, Captain." Anna has no interest in him or his bluster. She kisses both of my cheeks, careful of my injury and not hugging me hard, but I feel her heart in the light touch of her fingers. Marino sets my bags inside the foyer on a splendid silk rug beneath a crystal chandelier that sparkles like ice forming in space.
"You can take some soup with you," she tells Marino. "There is plenty. Very healthy. No fat."
"If it don't got fat, it's against my religion. I'm gonna head out." He avoids looking at me.
"Where is Lucy?" Anna helps me off with my coat, and I struggle to pull the sleeve over the cast, and then am dismayed to realize I still have my old lab coat on. "You have no autographs on it," she says to me, because no one has signed my plaster and no one ever will. Anna has an arid, elitist sense of humor. She can be very funny without so much as a hint of a smile, and if one is not attentive and quick-witted, he will completely miss the joke.