Red, White and Dead Part 31

52.

I nside, the galleria was mostly dark, lit eerily with red security lights dotting the exits. We followed Elena through the grand hall. Maggie swiveled her head as we walked, squinting at the artwork, at the gold, at the frescoed ceiling three stories up, murmuring, "Jesus, this is unbelievable."

Elena said nothing. She was wearing the same outfit she'd had on this afternoon on the train-taupe linen slacks and a matching jacket. But the linen was sagging and creased. She kept clenching her hands into tight fists.

When we got to Princess Isabelle's apartments, Maggie made more murmurs of appreciation. The door to Elena's office was already open, sending a block of light into the apartment. She stopped and gestured for Maggie and me to step inside. Once there, she slid the door closed and waved her hand at the light blue chairs under the windows. Silently, Maggie and I sat there, while Elena took a seat behind her marble table-desk.

Maggie looked at me as if to say, You want me to try and talk to her or do you have it?

I shook my head and looked at Elena. She had clearly been crying. She pursed her mouth together now, as if stopping more cries from erupting.

"What happened to him?" I said gently.

"He was killed. Apparently. I cannot believe it."

"By who?"

Elena swallowed hard. Her eyes looked too wide. The whites surrounding her irises were too thick, frozen in shock.

"Elena, are you okay?" I asked.

"Of course." Her voice was automated, her eyes alarmed yet vacant.

I was on the edge, near crying for the dad I'd almost had. But seeing Elena, I was reminded that she was the one who'd grown up with him. She was the one who'd known him so long, for her whole life, even when the rest of us didn't know he had a life. For her this had to be so, so, so much worse. I couldn't fathom it.

My phone rang as we sat there but I just stared at Elena, not knowing what to say or do. I'd thought, somehow, that once I found her, she would be the one to fill in the blanks, the one to make the next action happen.

But nothing was happening except the faint sounds of horns and occasional sirens from outside.

My phone rang again. Then again. I opened my purse and glanced at it.

The call log read Mom three times.

My mother was not a call-three-times-in-a-row kind of girl, especially when I'd just spoken to her. I narrowed my eyes and looked at the screen. And then she called again.

"Izzy," she said when I answered. Her voice was breathless. "It's Charlie. He's disappeared. He's...he's been kidnapped."

53.

"C harlie has been kidnapped?" I asked.

The words. .h.i.t the room like a small bomb. Elena, whose eyes had been staring blankly, suddenly came to life.

Maggie's mouth fell open, and she stared at me. Then she nodded at the phone. "Let us hear this."

I put the phone on speaker. "Mom, tell me what's happened."

"He was at work. Some men were outside. They were doing something outside. They saw the men. They told Charlie to go. He went outside..." My mother, always calm even in the most stressful and tragic situations, was running at the mouth.

I heard voices in the background, then one of them, a woman's voice, said, "Give me that. Izzy," I heard then, "it's Bunny."

Bunny Loveland was my family's housekeeper when we first moved to Chicago. Upon finding herself a suddenly single mom, my mother hired her, thinking, apparently, that since Bunny looked like a grandmother she would probably act like one. But this book would not be judged by its cover. Bunny was about as sour as they came, but the thing was, she was honest as h.e.l.l, a trait I'd come to appreciate, even if her opinions usually felt like a punch to the throat. And eventually Bunny grew protective of us. The last time I'd seen her was a few months ago when I found her outside my condo smacking around some journalists who were hounding me.

"Bunny, what's going on?"

"I heard about Charlie on the radio. So I came right to the house. Your mother is having a rough time."

"Well, I'm glad you're there."

"Yeah, yeah. Anyway, here's all we know. There were two rowdy a.s.sholes-" Bunny did not share my goal of trying to stop swearing "-and they were f.u.c.king around outside the station. Your brother was sent out to calm 'em down."

"Who where they?"

"Apparently, they were Cubs fans. Idiots." Bunny didn't partake in the Sox versus Cubs debate that split apart the Chicago population. She thought they both "sucked tomatoes," whatever that meant. "Or they were dressed like Cubs fans," she said. "One had a tattoo on his neck that was a red letter A or some c.r.a.p. It was that guy who grabbed Charlie around the neck and hauled him away. If I find that f.u.c.ker, I'm going to-"

"A tattoo on his neck?" I thought of Ransom, chasing me through the Nature Museum. In that moment, my concerns and questions about my father disappeared. All I cared about was Charlie. "Do we know anything about where they took him?"

"Nope," Bunny said. "All we know is he was working, he was asked to go outside and then they s.n.a.t.c.hed him. No sign of him since." There was a faint beeping sound. "Izzy, they're getting another call. Might be those idiot cops. We'll call you back."

She hung up.

I sat staring at my phone. I looked up at Elena. Her eyes were narrowed, confused.

I looked at Maggie, stunned. "That guy who chased me through the museum with Dez Romano-his name was Ransom, and he had a tattoo on his neck. A red letter A with a circle around it."

"So this thing..." she said, "this abduction isn't random?"

We heard a click, and the office door behind me slid open.

"It's not random," a man's voice said.

I turned. All I saw at first was gray hair, green eyes, copper gla.s.ses. I looked down. He was wearing boat shoes.

They were scuffed.

And then he spoke again. "Happy birthday, Boo."

Part III

54.

C harlie looked around the room. He never wore a watch, and there were no windows, but he was pretty good at figuring out the pa.s.sing of time, and he thought that he had been in that room for about five or six hours now. He'd been sitting or standing in the room, studying it, for all that time. There was nothing else to do. There was no furniture. The walls were made of brick, the floor concrete. He walked to a wall and looked at the ceiling, studying it again. A fluorescent strip illuminated the room, but it was too high to reach without something to step on.

He sat on the floor and thought about his mother. He hoped she hadn't learned that these guys, whoever they were, had hauled him in here. She didn't do so well in a crisis, and there certainly was nothing she could do for him now. h.e.l.l, it seemed there was nothing Charlie could do for himself. He'd tried to get out of the room for the first hour or so he was here, but with no window, no furniture and the door bolted tight, there wasn't much effort to be made.

Charlie crossed his legs, deciding to practice his meditation. Really, what else was he going to do? He pondered for a long while why these guys had grabbed him, why he was sitting here in this windowless room. No one came to visit him. No one gave him any information. And so, he decided to just accept what was. He had been kidnapped, he guessed, and now he was in this brick room. Surely it would all work out. It always worked out for Charlie.

The door opened. A man he'd never seen before stepped inside. He was a handsome man in his midfor-ties. He wore his dark black hair with lots of product in it and a black suit that looked, to Charlie's admittedly inexperienced eyes, to be expensive. Under the suit, he wore a mint-colored s.h.i.+rt along with a gray-and-ivory patterned tie. His expression was feral. Charlie had never before used the word feral, but that was exactly the word to describe it.

Charlie waited for the man to speak. He seemed to be doing the same thing-he stood with his arms crossed, staring at Charlie and leaning against the door. It occurred to him that maybe the man had been taken, also.

"Did they get you, too?" Charlie asked.

The man didn't respond. Charlie was pretty sure this guy wasn't a fellow kidnappee. (Was that even a word? Was that what they called someone who'd been kidnapped? He reminded himself to look it up in the future.) Charlie eyed the door. If he could get around the guy...

"Don't even think about it," the guy said.

Ah, Charlie thought, a kidnapp-ER.

Charlie studied the guy back. Who was he? What did he want?

But Charlie didn't get much further than that in his thoughts.

Like a tiger, the man took three quick steps and was at Charlie's side. At the same time, he raised his left hand and-whack!-hit Charlie with the back of that hand.

Charlie heard the crack, felt himself bite into his lip.

"Jesus!" Charlie yelled, cupping his cheek.

He had never been hit before, had never been in a fight. Charlie always considered himself a pacifist, even when he was a kid. It was Izzy who got into fights on the playground, arguing with people who tried to bully him and then eventually smoothing things over with words. Lucky for him, Charlie grew tall and soon most people simply didn't bother him.

But this man was not scared of him. In fact, as Charlie gripped his cheek and licked the blood away from the side of his mouth, he noticed that the man was snarling, looked as though he wanted Charlie to fight so he could dish out some more.

Charlie opened his mouth to ask, Why am I here? but before he could form words, the man's arm shot out and-whack-he once again bashed Charlie's face with the back of his hand.

The man winced this time, squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his hand, but his face cleared quickly. "That's for your sister, Isabel," the man said. "And I got lots more of that."

Charlie said nothing, which made the man sneer.

"I'll be back with your phone, kid," he said, "and then you and me..." The guy pointed at Charlie, then at himself. "We're going to write some messages. Maybe a text, maybe an e-mail."

The man turned and left the room. Charlie could hear the door being bolted from the outside.

He licked the inside of his mouth again. The blood streamed in earnest now. There was nothing in the room to stop it. There was nothing he could do to stop any of this.

55.

T here he was. There he was.

Seeing him was like stepping into some altered universe. I was eight years old and thirty at the same time. I was in Italy and also in Michigan on the lawn behind our house when my mother told us he was dead.

It was one thing to wonder if he was alive, it was yet another to have him truly standing in front of me. My father. After all these years.

"It's...It's...It's." I stopped. People always say I was at a loss for words. I had never understood that so well-so very, very well-until now. Finally I managed, "You. It's you."

Sometimes it's tough to see your friends and family age. It's surreal, though, to have someone immortalized, eternalized, forever in a certain body, a certain form and face, and then to see them twenty-two years older. It wasn't that he looked so terrible, but it was bizarre, like watching a flower bloom or a canyon form on fast-forward at high speed.

He was a handsome man in his late fifties, his hair a salt-and-pepper gray instead of chestnut brown like Charlie's or Elena's. He was still trim and lean, but he seemed different than I remembered, more refined. His dark blue slacks were slimmer cut-Italian tailored, I realized. He wore a white s.h.i.+rt and an olive linen blazer that had breast pockets, as well as regular ones. He looked very much like a man who had lived in Italy for many years.

I looked down at his feet again. "You still wear boat shoes."

He followed my gaze, seemed at a loss for words himself, then we both looked up, locked eyes. His eyes were like those of someone much older. They were the kind of eyes seen in photos of people who have lived through a terrible war-they were open too wide, they'd seen too much, and they were a little dead to that world that remained in front of them.

He nodded at Grandma O's necklace around my neck. "You wear that well."

I couldn't stop staring at him, this man with the copper gla.s.ses and the boat shoes. Christopher. I couldn't call him my father. I'd been calling him that in my mind forever. But now, seeing this man standing in front of me, I realized I didn't know him. My father was the man I knew twenty-two years ago, the man I knew in my memories.

"But the body in your office..." I managed to say.

The silence in the room crackled. My skin tingled. The thoughts in my brain careened.

Christopher and Elena looked at each other. Elena started to weep. I glanced at Maggie, who was blinking madly, her mouth slightly open. Seeing Maggie, usually so bossy and full of advice, now silent made everything even more serious somehow.

I turned to Christopher and Elena. "Who was that body in your office? Was that another faked death?" My voice was loud and surprisingly angry. I hadn't seen that emotion bubbling up.

Everyone stared at me; the air bristled around us.

"Whose...body...was...in...the...office?" My voice was demanding now, the voice I used when a witness on the stand wasn't cooperating.

But Christopher was not your typical witness. He stared at me with his green eyes under those round copper gla.s.ses. His eyes were unblinking, almost in shock, and yet there was something else behind them. It looked like pride, directed at me.

He glanced at Elena again, as if in a silent question. Like Charlie and me, they didn't seem to need words.

Elena threw her shoulders back and opened her mouth. "It was Maurizio."

"Your husband, Maurizio?"