Milo said, “Tell it like it is, Ted. Wasn’t that an axiom you once lived by?”
The flush had returned to Dinwiddie’s complexion and his thick forearms were lumpy with tightened muscle. He was sweating heavily. I realized I was sodden. All four of us were.
Dinwiddie tugged at his mustache and lowered his head like a bull about to charge. I smelled confrontation. Said to the boy: “We’re not your enemies. Once in a while the papers do get it right. We know what you’ve been through, son. The running. Looking over your shoulder. Never knowing who to trust- that’s got to be hell. So no one’s saying anyone in your shoes could have handled it any better. You did exactly what you had to. But what you know can be useful- to get rid of the evil that remains. Draining the whole swamp. Terry Crevolin’s agreed to talk, and he’s not exactly Mr. Idealistic. So how about you?”
The boy said nothing.
I said, “We’re not going to force you- no one can. But how long can you go on like this?”
“Lies,” said a brittle voice from the doorway.
A very small old woman, wearing a gray-and-pink print shift and over that, despite the heat, a coarsely woven porridge-colored cardigan. Beneath the shift, bowed legs encased in supp-hose ended in flat sandals. Her face was wizened and sun-spotted under a halo of white frizz. Big dark eyes, clear and steady.
I wasn’t surprised by her appearance. Remembering Latch and Ahlward’s reaction when I talked about their plucking her off the street and disposing of her body.
Blank stares from both of them. No smirking, no jumping to take the credit…
Just a look.
My educated guess…
But something did surprise me.
Steady hands in one so tiny and old. Gripping a very big shotgun.
She said, “Cossacks. Lying bastards.”
Clear eyes. Too clear. Something other than mental clarity.
Beyond lucidity. A flame that had burned too hot for too long.
Ike said, “Grandma, what are you doing! Put that down!”
“Cossacks! Every Christmas a pogrom, raping and killing and giving the babies to the Nazis to eat.”
She aimed the weapon at me, held it there for a while, shifted it to Milo, then to Dinwiddie. To Ike, then back to Dinwiddie.
“Come on, Sophie,” said the grocer.
“Back or I’ll blast you, you cossack bastard,” said the old woman, eyes jumping from one imaginary foe to the other. Hands shaking. The shotgun vibrating.
Ike said, “Grandma, enough! Put that down!”
Loud, a little whiny. A teenager protesting unfair punishment.
She looked at him long enough for confusion to finally settle in.
“It’s okay,” said Dinwiddie, pushing down with one hand in a calming gesture and taking a step forward.
Her eyes shot back to him. “Back! I’ll blast you, you goddammed cossack!”
Ike called out, “Grandma!”
Dinwiddie said, “It’s okay,” and walked toward the old woman.
She pulled the trigger. Click.
She stared down at the weapon with more confusion. Dinwiddie put one hand on the walnut stock, the other on the barrel, and tried to wrest it away from her. She held on to it, cursing, first in English, then louder and faster in a language I guessed was Russian.
“Easy does it, Sophie,” said Dinwiddie as he carefully pried her fingers from the gun. Deprived of it, she began shrieking and hitting him. Ike ran to her, tried to restrain her, but she struck out at him, continued to curse. The boy struggled with her, absorbing blows, taking pains to be gentle, tears streaming down his face.
“Unloaded,” said Dinwiddie, handing the shotgun to Milo as if it were something unclean. To Ike: “I took out the shells last time I was here.”
Ike gaped at him. “Where? Where’d you put them?”
“They’re not here, Ike. I took them with me.”
Ike said, “Why, Ted?” Talking loud to be heard over the old woman’s invectives, his tall body canopied over her tiny sweatered frame. Trying to contain her with his spidery arms while fixing his attention on Dinwiddie.
Dinwiddie held out his hands and said, “I had to, Ike. The way she is- how she’s gotten. You just saw that.”
“She didn’t even know how to use it, Ted! You just saw that!”
“I couldn’t take a chance, Ike. She was so much worse the last time, so… you know that’s true. We talked about it- your worries. I didn’t want anything to happen. It’s obvious I was right.”
The boy’s face was a battlefield. Comforting calm for the old woman warring with the pain and rage of betrayal. “What about our protection, Ted! Our arrangement? Where did that leave us? Tell me that, Ted!”
“It was a judgment call,” said Dinwiddie. “What could I do? I couldn’t take a chance she’d-”
Ike stamped his foot and began shouting. “We need pro-tection! Shotgun protection! I know what a shotgun can do- I saw what a shotgun can do. That’s why I asked you for a shotgun, Ted, not some stupid metal tube that clicks and blows air! You got me a shotgun because that’s what I needed, Ted! Now you pull it out from under me without- How could you do that, Ted!”
The words rushing out, followed by short, harsh breaths. Fugitive panting. Fugitive eyes.
His passion had silenced the old woman; she’d stopped struggling, was looking up at him with the innocence and bafflement of an infant on a first outing.
Dinwiddie shook his head, turned away, and rested his elbows on the counter. One of his hands brushed against a package of pasta. He picked it up, looked at it absently.
Milo inspected the shotgun. “This thing’s right out of the box, never been fired.”
Silence filled the kitchen, choking it, draining the air of oxygen.
“Such a good boy,” said the old woman, reaching up and touching Ike’s cheek. “The cossacks come, you protect your bubbe.”
“Yes, Grandma.”
“Yes, Bubbe.”
“Yes, Bubbe. How are you feeling?”
The old woman shrugged. “A little tired, maybe.”
“How about a nap, Bubbe?”
Another shrug. She took one of his hands in both of hers and kissed it.
He escorted her through the doorway.
Milo began to follow.
Ike turned around sharply. “Don’t worry, Mr. Detective. I’m not going anywhere. Can’t handle going anywhere. Just let me take care of her. Then I’ll come back and you can do whatever it is you want with me.”
We waited for him in the living room. Knotty-pine panels, working fireplace under a fieldstone mantel, brick-a-brac that had once been meaningful to someone, hooked rug, overstuffed chairs, tree-stump end tables, a couple of trophy fish on plaques over the mantel. Next to them, a snapshot of a beaming white-haired boy holding an enormous trout. It brought to mind the shot of the two children I’d seen in Dinwiddie’s office. But this one was black-and-white, the boy’s clothes two or three decades out of fashion.
Below that, a shot of a heavyset man in wading boots, his arm around the same boy. A string of fish hanging from the other arm.
Dinwiddie saw me looking, “We used to come up here a lot. Dad owned lots of the land around here. Bought it up after the war, thinking he’d combine growing with selling, avoid the middleman, become serious-rich. A couple of cold years killed off the profit margin in citrus but the mortgage stayed the same. The big outfits could wait it out but it dampened Dad’s enthusiasm, so he sold a lot of his acreage to the Sunkist co-op. We continued to come up for a couple of weeks each year and fish, just the two of us. Lake Piru used to be jumping with rainbows and bass. Last few years the rains have been weak and everything’s dried up- they’re not releasing anything out of the Fillmore hatchery until they can be sure the survival rate’ll be high. I’m sure you saw that, coming over the Santa Clara. The dry beds.”