“Because,” she said, “there’s something fishy about you.” The Gray Man was amused.
“What’s it like, being a hit man?”
“That’s a funny way to put it.” But really, the Gray Man found that he didn’t want to talk about his work. Not because he was ashamed of it — he was the best that he knew of — but because he was not defined by it. It wasn’t what he did in his spare time. “It pays the bills. But I prefer my poetry.” Maura had ordered herself one of those small birds that was served looking like it had walked onto the plate under its own steam. She seemed to be doubting that decision now. “Your Old English poetry. Okay, I’ll bite. Tell me why you like it.” He did. He did it as well as he could without telling her about where he had gone to school or what he had done before publishing his book. He mentioned he had a brother, but quickly backtracked and moved around that part of the story.
He told her as much as he could about himself without telling her his name. His phone was buzzing against his leg, but he let it ring.
“So you are only a hit man to pay the rent,” Maura said. “Do you not care about hurting people?”
The Gray Man considered. He didn’t want to be untruthful.
“I do,” he said. “I just — turn that part of my brain off.” Maura pulled one of the legs off her tiny bird. “I don’t sup pose I have to tell you how psychologically unhealthy that is.” “There are more destructive impulses in the world,” he replied.
“I feel fairly balanced. What about you and your ambition?” Her eyes widened in surprise. “What makes you say that?” “The game you were playing that first night. When you were guessing the cards. Practicing. Experimenting.”
“I just want to understand it,” Maura said. “It’s changed my entire life. It’s a waste if I don’t know as much as I can. I don’t know if I’d call it ambition, though. Oh, I don’t know. It has done its damage. . . . So, you mentioned a brother.”
She somehow managed to link the word brother to damage. He felt as if she had already divined the nuances of their relationship. “My brother,” he said, and then he paused and regrouped.
Very precisely, he replied, “My brother is very intelligent. He can create a map of a place if he’s driven through it once. He can do great sums in his head. I always looked up to him when I was a child. He invented complicated games and spent all day at them.
Sometimes he would include me, if I promised to follow the rules. Sometimes he’d take a game like chess or Risk and apply those rules to the entire neighborhood. Sometimes we built forts and hid in them. Sometimes he found things in other people’s houses and hurt me with them. Sometimes he trapped animals and did things to them. Sometimes we dressed in costumes and put on plays.”
Maura pushed her plate away. “So he was a sociopath.” “Probably, yes.”
She sighed. It was a very sad sigh. “And now you’re a hit man.
What does he do? Is he in prison?”
The Gray Man said, “He invests other people’s money in SEP accounts. He will never be in prison. He’s too intelligent.” “A nd you ? ”
“I don’t think I would do well in prison,” he said. “I would rather not go.”
Maura was quiet for a very long time. Then she folded her napkin and put it aside and leaned to him. “Does it bother you that he’s made you this way? You know that’s why you can do this, don’t you?”
Any part of the Gray Man who had been bothered by this had died a long time before, burned with matches and gashed with scissors and picked at with straight pins, and when he looked at her, he didn’t disguise that deadness in him. “Oh,” she said. Reaching across the table, she laid her palm on his cheek. It was cool and soft and entirely different, somehow, from what the Gray Man had expected. More real. Much more real. “I’m sorry no one saved you.”
Was he unsaved? Would he have ever ended up any other way? Maura called for the check. The Gray Man paid for it. He’d left two bites of salmon on his plate, and Maura used her fork to steal them.
“So we’ll both have fish breath,” she said.
And then, in the dark next to the Champagne Travesty, he kissed her. Neither of them had kissed someone else in a while, but it didn’t much matter. Kissing’s a lot like laughing. If the joke’s funny, it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you last heard one. Finally, she murmured, her hand in his shirt, fingers tracing ribs, “This is a terrible idea.”
“There aren’t terrible ideas,” the Gray Man said. “Just ideas done terribly.”
“That’s also a psychologically unhealthy concept.” Later, after he’d dropped her off and returned back to the Pleasant Valley Bed and Breakfast, he discovered that Shorty and Patty Wetzel had been trying desperately to call him all through dinner to let him know that his rooms at the bed and breakfast had been ransacked.
“Didn’t you hear us calling?” Patty asked urgently. The Gray Man recalled the buzz of his phone and patted his pockets. His phone was missing, however. Maura Sargent had stolen it while they were making out.
In its place was the ten of swords: the Gray Man slain on the ground and Maura the sword driven through his heart.
29
You aren’t sleeping,” Persephone said as she woke Blue, “so would you come help us?”
Blue opened her eyes. Her mouth was pasted shut. A fan in the corner of the room rotated back and forth, drying sweat on the backs of her knees. Persephone knelt on the edge of her bed, draping a crimped pale cloud of hair around Blue’s face. She smelled of roses and masking tape. The sky outside was black and blue. “I was.”
In her tiny voice, Persephone pointed out, “But you aren’t now.” There was absolutely no point in arguing with her; it was like fighting with a cat. Also, it wasn’t strictly untrue. With an irritable stretch, she kicked Persephone off her bed and tossed off her sheet. Together they padded down the midnight stairs into the musty glow of the kitchen. Maura and Calla were already there, hunched over the table like a pair of conspirators, heads close together. The fake Tiffany lamp above them painted the backs of their heads in purple and orange. The night pressed in the glass door at their back; Blue could see the familiar, comforting silhouette of the beech tree in the yard.
At the sound of Blue’s footfalls, Maura looked up. “Oh, good.”
Blue gave her mother a heavy look. “Do I have time to make myself some tea?”
Maura flapped her hand. By the time Blue joined them at the table with her cup, all three women were drawn over a single object, one blond head, one brunette, one black. Three people but one entity.