June was deep in sleep, her kit opened, the miniature syringe carelessly dropped on the bed beside her. When he checked her neck for a pulse-her skin was blue-tinged and quite cool to the touch-she didn’t stir and he had to press hard to find it. He lay back down in the bed and tried to go back to sleep but he couldn’t and so had wandered the streets of the cruddy airport town, looking for another drink. It was a hard-surfaced, unadorned settlement of low-slung concrete slab buildings, the ground floors of shuttered storefronts topped by shuttered residences above. Nothing was open, not even the gas stations, and then nothing seemed alive besides, no lights or voices or sounds of any insects or birds. It was a gritty, modern place with electrical wires sprouting everywhere from the ugly, featureless façades and the sickliest trees he’d ever seen, and with its air laced with the stink of jet fuel he felt he was in a fitting place, the kind of forlorn hole where someone like him might choose to crawl in and cover himself with dirt.
Was this Nicholas like him? Was he truly nearby? June had shown him an old school picture on the plane, and though he merely glanced at it (he had folded himself against the window seat in the most miserable mourning, walling himself off with a dozen little liquor bottles), the momentary flash of the creased photograph was enough to convince him of his paternity: the boy featured the same squared line of jaw, the prominent, gently angled brow, even the mouth, which was not quite Hector’s but rather his father’s, those full, ever-risible lips of Jackie Brennan. He suddenly realized how obtuse he’d been, plain dumb to the fact that June wasn’t solely asking for his help but aiming to bring the two of them together before she was gone. Was it a final, sentimental gesture? The wish of a dying mother, of not leaving her son completely alone in the world? She was losing her grip for sure but even she couldn’t possibly believe that connecting them now would be beneficial to Nicholas in any way. With Hector she was just saddling the young man with an unnecessary drag on his psyche. Slowing him down.
If he had any fatherly instinct at all it was that he ought to warn the boy of his presence, scare him off for good as if he were some stray dog you couldn’t afford to feed. Of course he had never come close to wanting children of his own and had no feelings either way for Nicholas; but a curiosity was steadily gaining on him, too, even as he was trying to dispel it, a wonder about this elusive, apparently criminal person whose bloodlines were drawn from a most unfortunate pairing. Was he as diamond hard as June? Was he a misfit like Hector, some self-incarcerating soul? Or was he, like anybody else, desperately yearning to be discovered again, by any good stranger or beloved? It might be as simple as that. But of course a flat-out fear, too, was afflicting Hector as he turned down the dusty, unfamiliar side streets, the thought of actually facing Nicholas raising alarms in his heart, not simply for the awkward talk they would have to suffer through but the specter of something infinitely more disturbing: the prospect of his failing yet another person, even in the smallest way, someone else he should honor or protect or love better than he ever could.
Back at the hotel he had found June vomiting onto the floor between the twin beds, which they’d pushed apart as far as the room allowed, barely a foot. It was just watery mucus and he cleaned it up. When he wiped her mouth with a hand towel she batted at him from her medicated half-sleep and Hector had to calm her, though simply folding her arms seemed to cause her pain. Her feet were terribly swollen, distended into hideous, red-purplish bags. The flight had finally caught up with her. Yet despite her condition he kept seeing her differently, as the lean, angular child he once knew, the unflaggingly angry, aggressive, icily silent girl who wouldn’t let anyone touch her or get too close. Everybody at the orphanage was wary of her and kept their distance, even the toughest boys, not wanting to risk a hard shove or even a kick in the groin. One day she’d taken on two of the bigger boys at once, breaking the middle finger of one and nearly scratching out the eyes of the other; the memory of it was clear enough that Hector unconsciously reclined gingerly on his bed, so as not to make the springs creak and disturb her. And though he could have easily taken all her identifying papers and the large sum of money she’d given him and let her die there anonymously and be done with it he was amazed by her ceaseless, spearing will to persist, a life force that her physical distress was somehow sharpening rather than blunting. He was awed by the way she could push herself, ignore her obvious wretchedness, and apply herself like a tool.
The next morning she was miraculously improved, her cheeks no longer the light slate color, her movements as she quickly repacked her bag steady and efficient, like any woman leaving on a business trip. They had a breakfast of tea and stale rolls (June took only the tea) and flagged a taxi to the rental-car office and soon enough they were on the road, headed north, June reading the map for them. Hector was driving and they made it to Livorno by noon, but it proved to be a worthless trip. Directing them was a dossier of documents from Clines’s contact in Rome, but they were following a trail that seemed to Hector a pathetic, frayed yarn.
It turned out they’d gone to Livorno because someone with a name similar to one of Nicholas’s aliases had been was arraigned there recently on check-kiting charges, but when they got there nobody at the courthouse knew anything or could even find a file on the man. The court officer who was contracted to deal with them was on vacation. June put it down to the confusion of the aliases and the language difficulty, but Hector was not convinced; Clines’s contact in Rome, a talkative fish-mouthed fellow with an Australian accent to his English, struck him instantly as a crook and a liar, the sort who maybe specialized in swindling old people and women, and after June paid what he said he’d been promised, he offered up the name of a court officer in Livorno, assuring that a sizable bribe to him would erase the indictment.
There was little point in going back to Rome, for the contact there was probably gone, too. After staying a night in Livorno they went to the medieval town of Massa Marittima, a place where her son had briefly worked in a fancy antiques shop after leaving London. They found the shop, but it was no longer an antiques store; it had changed hands recently and was in the midst of being renovated as a tourist shop, and the Czech construction workers could tell her nothing. But they got lucky: it was only because June had suddenly craved something sweet, a gelato-the one thing she felt like eating anymore-that they stopped at the stand on the other side of the tiny cobbled street and struck up a conversation with the English-speaking counter girl. June asked if a young man had worked there and the girl said that an Asian-British man named Nicky Crump had indeed worked in the shop.
June gasped that this was sure proof; Crump Antiques had been the name of her shop early on, after the original owner, before she changed it to just Fine Antiques, Nicholas himself scraping off the old name and painting the new one on the glass panel of the door in matte gold and black lettering. When June showed her the old school picture the girl had at first hesitated, scrunching her nose, but when June pressed her she agreed that it was he. Apparently Nicky Crump had told her when he learned the shop was closed that he was heading to Siena, as there were a good number of antiques shops there. The girl was gentle and bookish and not unattractive and seemed to want to say something else, maybe that she had liked him, but before she could June had whisked them away, saying they should move on, move on.