The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Page 24

  The package was a rectangular box no larger than a deck of playing cards, wrapped neatly in brown paper. Rafael slid it across the table following the dessert course, extracted fifty euros from a wad in his pocket, and pressed the money into her hand. “The rest when you return,” he said. He nodded at someone behind her, and when she looked up a man who had been sitting at the bar when they came in was standing by her side. “My friend will walk you to the address.”

  She felt unsteady as she stood. Perhaps she’d had slightly too much wine. Rafael’s friend said nothing, only nodded to her and set off for the door.

  “Goodbye, Zoë,” Rafael said. He winked at her. She looked back as they left the restaurant, and he was speaking softly and urgently into a cell phone.

  Zoë held the package in both hands. It was curiously light. She was worried that it might be fragile, and it was certainly important; Rafael’s friend kept glancing at it as they walked. She wondered if it could possibly be jewelry—a blood diamond? She wanted to ask, but she feared the question was indiscreet, and he seemed to be a man not given to talking. Her feet were cold and wet in her sneakers. At least the tide had receded. They were in a corner of Venice that seemed all but deserted, buildings pressed close on either side of the street. Night had fallen, and the streetlamps were few and far between, pools of light spilling over cobblestones and walls.

  “Here,” Rafael’s friend said. It was the first word he had spoken to her. They had stopped before a narrow stone building. He rang the doorbell and was gone almost instantly, sliding into the shadow of a nearby doorway. She knew he hadn’t gone far, but she felt acutely alone on the silent street. The graveyard stillness of a city without cars.

  The man who opened the door was very old, stooped and blurry-eyed in an impeccable black suit. It seemed to Zoë that he couldn’t see her very well.

  “I have something for you,” she said. “A message from Rafael.”

  He considered this for a moment before he stepped back to let her enter. She found herself in a dimly lit foyer, wall-mounted lamps casting shadows on the walls, a black lacquered sideboard with a potted white orchid gleaming in the half-light. She was painfully aware of how dirty her clothes were, how ragged and wet. He closed the door behind her.

  “Here,” she said, and tried to give him the box, but he shook his head and gestured for her to follow him. She thought about turning and slipping back out into the street, leaving the box by the orchid and running away, but she was seized by curiosity. She wanted to see what came next. She wanted to do the job correctly and return to Rafael for the other fifty euros. It had perhaps been a mistake to leave her backpack with him, in retrospect. The wine she’d had with dinner was wearing off quickly.

  The butler moved slowly down the hallway before her, his thinning hair soft and wispy at the back of his head. She wondered who he was, if he had a family, if he knew Rafael. Her shoes were making embarrassing squelching noises on the carpet. He opened the last door on the right and she stepped into a long, low room, a study. There was a massive black desk at one end, chairs and a sofa at the other. A man in his early thirties sat in an armchair reading La Repubblica. Everything about him looked expensive, from the high shine of his shoes to his carefully tousled hair. His shirt was pink. He made a show of folding his newspaper unhurriedly when he saw her, but she noticed that his hands were shaking.

  An older man was walking away from her, and she had the impression that he’d been pacing. He pivoted sharply when the door closed behind her, but said nothing. The butler had retreated into the hall.

  “Hello,” Zoë said, but the two men only looked at her. “I have a message from Rafael,” she said.

  She held out the box. The older man came toward her, and she saw the strain he carried, bloodshot eyes and slumped shoulders, a two-day beard. His suit was expensive, but his collar was in disarray, he’d pulled his tie loose, nails bitten to the quick. He took the box from her hands and held it for a moment as if weighing it. She watched the color leave his face. He set the box on a low marble coffee table before the man in the pink shirt, sank down into the sofa, and closed his eyes.

  The man in the pink shirt glanced at Zoë. He unwrapped the box carefully and removed the lid, pulled back the layer of gauze within. He let out a strangled sound in his throat.

  The box contained a human ear. It had been washed clean of blood and it was small and waxy, blue-white, a porcelain seashell with a pink stone earring in the shape of a rose still attached to the earlobe. As she stared, the man in the pink shirt put his hand on the other man’s shoulder and murmured something to him. The older man was still for a moment, as if it took two or three heartbeats for the words to absorb, and then he began a slow downward movement that reminded Zoë of a marionette being lowered on its strings; he slumped forward on the sofa until his head was nearly at his knees, curling in on himself; he pressed his hands to his face and began silently weeping.

  The man in the pink shirt sat still for a moment, looking at the ear. He carefully replaced the gauze, set the lid back on the box, carried it away to the far end of the room, and put it high on top of a bookshelf. Zoë stared at him, waiting, trying to guess what might happen now. His face was expressionless when he turned to her.

  “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  He opened the door and ushered her out into the dim corridor. When she glanced back into the room, the older man hadn’t moved. The back door of the building opened into an empty courtyard, houses silent all around them. She breathed the cool air and thought about running—but where could she go? The courtyard was enclosed, and anyway, they were already in motion, the man in the pink shirt holding her arm. He was leading her to a wooden door in the far wall, their shadows moving black over the cobblestones. Light escaped here and there through the cracks between shutters. She could hear a television somewhere, voices rising and falling, canned laughter. When she stepped through the wooden door she found herself on the edge of a canal, water lapping near her feet. The man in the pink shirt stepped through behind her and closed the door. Something caught the light just then, the quick sharp gleam of a gun in his hand. She wasn’t sure where it had come from.

  There was no one else by the canal, and the buildings on the other side were dark. He took her arm again and they walked together, an unhurried stroll down the length of cobblestones with the water rippling black beside them. The slight pressure of the handgun against her ribs. She felt strangely detached, a sleepwalker in a long dream. Her thoughts wandered.

  Once in Michigan she’d been held up at gunpoint. This was when she was dealing coke to art school students, and she knew it was dangerous, but no transaction had ever gone bad before and her guard was down. She knew as soon as she walked into the apartment that everything was wrong: the squalor, the way the girl sitting on the sofa was staring at her, the cigarette burning in an overflowing ashtray, the way the door closed just a beat too quickly just as someone said her name—Zoë, I’m real sorry about this, we’re just going to take the money and the coke, no one’s going to hurt you—and then she’d heard the click of the safety catch. Okay, she said quietly. Okay. She raised her hands. The colors of the apartment were florid, a fever dream of red and purple and orange, and she found herself staring at the curtains and trying not to look at the girl on the sofa, who smelled bad when she leaned in close to pull the wad of money out of Zoë’s jacket pocket, and then later out on the street, unharmed, she’d felt so alive, so giddy that she started laughing even though she’d just been robbed and snow was falling through the haze of streetlights; she looked up and she felt it, felt it fall on her face—

  “I told Rafael that if he did this, I would kill the messenger,” the man said softly. He sounded apologetic, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes when she glanced at him. His grip tight on her arm, their footsteps quiet on the stone promenade. Time was moving very strangely. She felt
that perhaps she’d always been walking beside him.

  “But I didn’t know what was in the box.” She heard her own voice as if from a long way off.

  “It is a request for payment,” he said. “It’s an escalation. It’s a message that demands a reply.”

  “Whose ear is it?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

  In Greece she bought a postcard of her village by the sea, the little place where she was living with the white buildings and the church and the endless light, and she sat on the beach at the end of a difficult day and wrote a note to her brother: Jon, it’s Zoë. I’m sorry for your worry and I just wanted you to know I’m still alive, I hope you’re alive, too, I wish I knew you better, I’m sorry we were never close—

  “We’re close now,” the man said. They were nearing a dead end. A boarded-up restaurant with a wide awning that reached across the width of the promenade, where once there must have been café tables shaded from the sun, and on the other side of the awning the promenade ended in a brick wall. They stepped into the awning’s ink-black shadow, and Zoë realized that they were all but invisible to anyone who might be watching from a window, now that they’d passed out of the light.

  She’d had a dog when she was little, Massey, a cocker spaniel with ears like silk who quivered with joy when she came home from school, and when it rained they splashed in puddles together—

  “Here,” the man said.

  They had stopped by the brick wall. Zoë turned to look at the canal, all rippling moonlight and black. Darkened buildings rising up on the far side, moored boats. What was strange was that she wasn’t frightened. She could hear nothing outside of herself but the sound of the man in the pink shirt breathing beside her, the movement of water. Both of them were waiting, but especially her.

  “Step forward,” the man said softly, “toward the water,” and she inched toward the canal until her shoes were at the very edge. She felt the metal against the back of her head, the click of the safety catch being released. There was an instant when it seemed that nothing had happened, but then the moonlight expanded and became deafening and there was only pure sound, the gunshot flashing into blinding light—

  Her brother making a snow angel in the playground—

  Massey chasing a squirrel in the grass—

  “It’s cancer,” the doctor said, and Peter gripping her hand so tight—

  Prom night in Ann Arbor, the headlights of cars pulling up in front of the auditorium, the slippery tightness of her green silk dress—

  Blue ice shadows on the Beaufort Sea—

  “You have a fever, sweetie, no school for you today,” and a cool hand on her forehead, her mother’s voice—

  “Stand up,” Peter murmured. His hand on the back of Zoë’s head, where the bullet had entered her. “Stand up, my love. Let me look at you.”

  DENNIS MCFADDEN

  The Ring of Kerry

  FROM New England Review

  As a girl, Eena one day heard someone make mention of the Ring of Kerry. To her childish mind then, a title so grand could never be given to a thing so ordinary as a route for tourists to traipse; a magnificent name such as that could only be fit for a splendid piece of jewelry, a ring that might grace the finger of a queen. Even after the mundane truth became known to her, there was always a spot set aside in her heart for the real Ring of Kerry, the genuine, golden, gem-laden article of fabulous beauty and imponderable worth.

  And so the first time she laid eyes on her grandmother’s ring, there it was. “You should have seen the thing, Mister,” she told Lafferty. They were in the bed of her room above the restaurant, she with the sheet up to her chin to hide the flatness of her chest. She was a stray, a mutt, skinny as a reed, unruly red hair immune to the brush, ears that stuck out like the handles on a jug, and brown eyes so big they could occupy her face entirely. Thin light from the cloudy afternoon squeezed through the blinds of the window, and he could hear the warble of a tin whistle from the Commodore Pub across the street. “The grandest thing I ever seen,” she said. “Fine, delicate carvings, little circles and twirls all around it, they might have been etched there by the angels. Lovely emeralds like clusters of green stars, and gold thick and shiny as the icing on a cupcake.”

  “The Ring of Kerry,” said Lafferty. “Old, was it?”

  “Ancient. My great-great-grandda discovered the thing one day in the bog when he was gathering turf for his fire. In a rotted old leather packet, as though it had been hid there long ago and somehow forgot.”

  “Whatever become of it?”

  “That’s the thing of it, Mister. My grandda buried it with her.”

  He caught his breath. “In the ground?”

  She nodded. “Like the bloody Egyptians. He said how she loved it, her only treasure in the world, and he buried the bloody thing with her in her grave.”

  “Surely someone would have...”

  She shook her head. “He told no one, you see. Folded her hands just so.”

  “He told you.”

  “I was a lass on his knee. Forever talking about the Ring of Kerry. And doesn’t he let it slip out of himself one day when he was well in his cups.”

  At that moment the possibility had already unfurled itself before him. He could persuade her to go away with him, to retrieve the ring from the grave of her granny, and they’d run off together, just the two of them. He could do it, he was certain, easy as persuading a flea to hop, for he was aware of his own powers of persuasion with members of the gentler gender, attributable largely to the sincerity of the dimple on his chin.

  But would it be right? He was not keen to use the innocent young thing for his own greedy gain. She was a waitress, or tried to be. After his meal at the Sugarshack Restaurant, the first time in the spring he’d ever laid eyes on her, she’d followed him out into the street. “Wait, mister,” she’d called. Ever since, he’d been Mister. “Wait—you’re after leaving your money on the table in there.”

  “Why, that’s yours,” Lafferty had said. “That’s your tip.”

  “Tip?” she’d said, her freckles all up in a bunch.

  There were other considerations as well. His wife, Peggy, for example. The degree of their estrangement notwithstanding, they were still man and wife, and for all the cause he might have given her, she’d never once betrayed him. Lafferty drew the line at betrayal.

  And there was a man, Lafferty had learned, an abusive man by the name of Ray, from Dublin, a criminal of some sort, though the exact nature of his criminality remained a bit of a mystery. What Eena was was on the run from him, which would account for how she’d ended up in godforsaken Kilduff, in the heart of County Nowhere. Ray was in Portlaoise Prison, she’d told him, and Lafferty, aware of the high-security nature of the place, concluded that he was not your garden-variety shoplifter.

  Destiny struck one day late in the summer when Jelly Roll in the eighth at the Curragh came in at fifty to one. There was no reason on God’s green earth he ever should have, and Lafferty never would have given the horse the time of day, but Eena liked the name. She was fond of strawberry jelly. Lafferty’s turf accountant, Mickey G, was suspicious and reluctant, his nose bright red with worry, but he forked over the tidy sum, and Lafferty headed off to fetch Eena for a proper celebration. The timing was serendipitous, as Peggy was off on her monthly shopping trip to Dublin with her girlfriend Judy, leaving Lafferty free to borrow her little brown Ford, Peggy being reluctant to lend it. She was fiercely possessive of the thing, owing no doubt to the time Lafferty’d borrowed it, unbeknownst to herself, and the unfortunate incident with the innocent donkey. Eena was reluctant to miss her shift at the Sugarshack, displaying what Lafferty considered an unreasonable degree of loyalty toward the pitiful place. “Tell ’em your granny passed away,” he said. “You won’t be lying at all.”

  He knew of a place in Naas, not far from Dublin, scarcely more than an hour’s drive, a place called the Oyster Tavern, where he’d celebrated a similar stroke of good fortune
a number of years before with Peggy. It seemed proper and poetic. Eena wore a pair of high heels and a cocktail dress, the likes of which he’d never seen on her before, the likes of which he was surprised she possessed. She looked like a schoolgirl dressed up for show, and she was giddy as a schoolgirl, forever wanting to peek at the big wad of bills Lafferty had stuck in his pocket, wanting to touch it and smell it, the brown eyes of her filled with the wonder. In possession of a small fortune they were, high on the wings of escape, and her dear old dead granny having played a part—Lafferty allowed the notions to entangle themselves, just as he knew Eena was doing, and sure enough, nearly to Naas, doesn’t she come out with it.

  “Mister,” said she. “If we could think of a way to get the ring up out of my granny’s grave, we could go to the Oyster Tavern anytime we pleased.”

  He’d been waiting the months for her to suggest it. “And how might we go about that?”

  “Why, we’d have to dig it up, I suppose.”

  Lafferty pulled in the reins on his smile, which was chomping quite fierce at the bit. “But wouldn’t that be... I don’t know... sacrilegious?”

  He glanced away from the road to see her eyebrow go up. “Oh, I don’t think so, Mister,” said she. “Only a wee desecration is all.”

  They laughed. She’d come far since the spring, when she’d been incapable of deciphering his humor at all. The deal was all but sealed. All that remained was for Lafferty to decide how best to accommodate the matter of Peggy. Betrayal was not his currency, but there were degrees of betrayal, and accommodations could often be reached, given the right rationale.

  The Oyster Tavern was a splendid old stone edifice with a doorway of dark heavy oak and, inside, a grand dining hall with beams in the ceiling, a magnificent stone fireplace at the far end. Crisp white linens, waiters in black jackets, and the finest steaks within a hundred miles of Dublin. Candles on the tabletops, music in the air. They settled in to study the menu, Eena hanging on his every word and wisdom, just as she always did, full of trust, safe in his hands. Lafferty was up to high living when he had to be, and he ordered a rare Merlot, had it opened by the table to let it breathe. He couldn’t escape her eyes in the candlelight. He held her hand on top of the tablecloth, where it squirmed like a tiny bird.