Downbelow Domino, Chapter Six
March 28th, 20086.
“Should I tell you who you are?” Katrine asked. “Or should we leave that alone.”
He glanced at her over the blue can of soda. “I think you better tell me what you think you know. If you tell me, we deal with it and put it away. If you don’t, it just sits there and makes us both uncomfortable.”
They were sitting in the garden, feeling the noon sun beat down as they drank Dirty Water — a local soda that was sort of like melon-flavored Sprite — and ate chacareros, Chilean sandwiches that she drove to the city to get when she found out he hadn’t had one before. Grilled steak, green beans, some kind of thick hot sauce, and avocado spread on cornmeal bread: it was a weird combination, but good, and the pile of green beans nearly disappeared in the strong flavors around them, leaving just a garden-ish greenness behind, and a crunch.
The second night had gone better than the first, and it had been more sober. He didn’t cook, he ordered pizza, finally getting around to trying the delivery places in the area, just like a normal person would: the places that brought food to your house without wondering why. They’d lucked out, ending up with an extra-large Greek-style pizza: thick sauce the color of stop signs, acres of gooey mozzarella singed to old ivory, lumps of meatballs and briny black olives. They chased it with beer instead of Scotch, watched a Red Sox game she got as passionate about as anyone he’d seen, and had sex that was neither acrobatic nor time-filler.
He always felt like he had to get his money’s worth with a hooker — like he had to have them as many ways as possible, like that’s what he was paying for. They’d spent a lot more time on sex than he would have if she were just some girl, but still, he took it down a notch. When he was in college — old enough to have called someone his girlfriend, young enough not to have meant anything by it — he’d called that kind of thing “girlfriend sex.” Comfortable, nonfrantic, the kind of sex you couldn’t recite a play-by-play of afterwards. Not because you were drinking, not because it blurred into a haze of pussy, but because it just wasn’t trying to kick the moon.
They’d slept in too late for breakfast, and then she’d gotten the sandwiches. Now here they were, and had she been thinking about this the whole time? “Who he was,” et cetera?
“You’re Sebastian Finch,” she said. “Right? I mean, it wasn’t going to take me long to figure out. You may not be a Kennedy, but my family’s lived in Massachusetts since the molasses flood, you know? I think I recognized the Finch before I recognized the Sebastian.”
“You wouldn’t be the first.” He sighed. “How much?”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“How much do you want to keep quiet?”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m not getting pissed at you. Let’s just settle it. How much? It’s okay. I’ve done things like this before. Let’s just get to the numbers.”
“Sebastian, for Christ’s sake, I’m not blackmailing you.”
He didn’t say anything, just sipped at his soda and looked at the flowers. Usually what would come next, or in a few minutes, maybe even the next day, would be, “Oh, by the way, I’m having some money problems,” or “Boy, I was looking at this car…” Most blackmailers didn’t even think that’s what they were doing.
She kept waiting for him to respond, and at last just shrugged. “Well, you can’t pay me if I don’t ask for anything, so I guess we just leave it hanging there.”
“Sorry,” he said. He had no doubt she’d name a price eventually, but if she wasn’t willing to cut to it, he couldn’t force her. “Family habits. We’re not new to this.”
“Yeah,” she said. “All right. I know. And I mean — that was your sister, right? Jennifer Lightman was your sister?”
The fact that she wasn’t sure which Finch he was, not really, would’ve made him smile if not for the mention of Jennifer. “Yes. She still is. I mean, she died, but she didn’t leave the family.”
Katrine nodded faintly. “How did it happen? I mean, I’m sorry, but — well, you know, news, in one ear and out the –”
“Yeah.” Actually, that was a little strange for him, he was used to being around people famous enough that they made a point of knowing his family’s news stories. “Her husband David, he had a brain tumor. He went a little nuts, thought World War III was about to go off or something, and he dragged her down into some kind of fucked-up ’survival bunker’ he’d cooked together for Y2K. There was an explosion because of some of the chemicals he was keeping there. Refrigerants, fuels, things like that. She died. He didn’t, not for another year. She was twenty-two years old. Do you remember now?”
“I remember,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
“Devilbitch,” she murmured to herself, and he started.
“What?”
She blushed, and put fingertips to her mouth — like someone would do in a movie, except it was a perfectly unconscious, unaffected gesture, that only lasted a moment. “It’s — oh fuck. It’s this thing I say sometimes. Sorry. Look, I can go.”
“No, there’s no reason to. It’s okay. And you’re not done with your sandwich anyway. What the hell does ‘devilbitch’ mean?”
“It’s — okay. I was in the city a couple years ago … God, I’m totally going to fuck this story up! I was in the city, and there was this guy who was putting flyers up all over Kenmore Square, passing them out to the college kids, they fucking loved it. ‘It’s almost as good as Dr Bronner,’ one of them said, so I picked one up, to see what the fuss was about … and it’s this giant picture of a cock. A photograph.”
“What?”
“Swear to God. It’s a black and white photograph of a cock, only not white because it’s on pink paper, so … a black and pink photograph. And all around it, before it was photocopied, is this handwriting, explaining that ‘cussing destroys the world.’ That’s a quote. I’m gonna get most of it wrong, but that was the headline, it was like all capitals except the e. ‘Cussing destroys the world.’ And then in this tiny, meticulous handwriting — you know how when you’re in fourth grade or something, you try to learn how to write so it looks like typed letters? With the serifs and everything?”
“Jesus. Yeah, I did that, I didn’t know it was a thing.”
“It totally is, everyone does it. Anyway, in this little serif handwriting, there’s this polemic about ‘cussing’ and how half of it ‘trivializes the body of Man and his Sins’ — fuck, shit, cock, you know — and the other half ‘denigrates and impetuates God and his glories’ –”
“Impetuates?”
“That’s what it said. I know, I got no idea. I guess, like ‘is impetuous towards.’ Anyway, like Goddamn and damn it and holy Jesus fuckwad and all, things like that, taking the Lord’s name in vain, they do too much damage.”
“Okay. My mother said pretty much the same thing, only not as extreme.”
“Sure, yeah.” Katrine leaned forward, and grinned. “Only then, see, the guy has alternatives for you. New swears. Instead of ‘oh fuck,’ you can say, ‘Glory to heaven!’”
“Oh yeah, that’ll catch on.”
“And instead of ‘goddamn’ or ‘damn it’? ‘Devildamn’ and ‘devilbitch.’”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I’m so not. Ever since, it’s been like — sometimes ‘devildamn’ or ‘devilbitch’ will just pop out of my mouth. Like the way you’ll remember the Macarena, out of left field.”
“Devilbitch,” he said.
“Glory to heaven,” she said, and they both burst out laughing, blue soda spilling everywhere.
#
“So,” she said after awhile, maybe picking up on that ease. “Are you ever going to give me a tour of this place, Sebastian? It’s called Domino, right? I saw it on the door when I got back with the sandwiches. At night –” she grinned, “– it looks like it just says DO NO.”
“Huh,” he said. “Do no what, I wonder? Anyway — no one calls me Sebastian, just so you know. They call me Castle. My middle name. And listen, Katrine … it’s okay, when we’re here and all, but you have to understand just how important it is that you do not know this. You do not know who I am. You do not know my family. Do you understand?”
“I’m a call girl, Castle, I know how to be discreet.”
“More than discreet. Be empty of it. It’s dangerous information to have, for both of us.” He’d wondered why Jonathan had kept him in Massachusetts and decided it was because that’s where he trusted his power best. The risks he’d take with the Finches’ local celebrity — most of which would be mitigated by putting Castle out here in the burbs — were cancelled out by Jonathan’s capacity for dealing with those risks.
But that capacity was high-caliber and high-velocity. The Finch family motto, Jonathan had told him repeatedly — it was a saying his uncle was overfond of, a humorless double entendre suitable for a T-shirt if he wore them — was “strike first or strike last.” Striking last could mean biding your time, of course, gathering your strength and unleashing a final, fatal blow. Or it could mean waiting too long — losing your moment — and dying.
Castle preferred his father’s maxim of moderation, which he only heard from him once — and wasn’t sure, in retrospect, if it was something Jacob Finch had lived by, or something he wished he’d known: “Show neither neck nor teeth.” Never give in. Never submit. Never surrender. But never approach with aggression, either. Never act from anger.
It would oversimplify too much of the world, and all in it, to reduce the brothers to those epigrams — which is maybe what Castle loved so much about doing so.
“Anyway,” he said. “This is the garden, obviously.”
“And you don’t know why it’s in the house? That’s still so weird.”
“Maybe it makes up for the neighbors’ houses blocking the view of the lake now. I have a feeling that wasn’t the case originally — they all look newer than Domino. And besides, compared to the rest of the house? The garden’s about par.” He explained about the “mirror image” symmetry of the floorplans, down to the backwards books in the living room.
“No fucking way!” she said, delighted. The more at ease she became, the younger she seemed. She claimed to be 30, but he doubted she was a day over 24, and even that would be pushing it. Just a kid. She might honestly be the best piece of ass in Massachusetts, but she was still just a kid. “Show me!”
So he brought her to the reversed living room, and she stood there in the doorway, one foot canted slightly, arms crossed, frowning until light smoothed her forehead. “Wow,” she said. “All the furniture fits. I mean, it’s not just arranged as a reflection — the carving on the legs of the coffeetable is reversed, too.”
He squinted at it, but had never particularly noticed one way or the other, so would take her word for it. “Now check out the books. It’s really kind of weird. I mean — this was all done way before computers would make the printing easy, you know? I don’t know how much that would’ve cost, but I know it’s a lot, for what doesn’t seem like more than a subtle and elaborate decoration.”
“Not even a flashy one,” Katrine murmured, flipping through one of the books. “It’s not like a gold-plated bathtub or something. Hell, you don’t even have more than the one bathtub –”
“Don’t –” he started to say don’t ever use the bathtub, which he couldn’t seal back up until the housing inspector had come and gone, but she gasped and cut him off.
“Oh now that is fucking cool,” she said. “Devildamn is that cool. Check this out.” She held the book up. Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass. “After the part where she goes through the mirror?” she said. “Which is like — right at the beginning? The rest of the book is written in regular printing. Non-reverse, whatever, normal. Until she goes back to the real world.”
“Christ,” he said. “This was pretty well thought out.”
“Well yeah!” she said, looking closer at some of the books. “I mean, wouldn’t it be? If you’re going to the trouble of making a bookshelf full of unreadable books for the sake of decoration — you’d want to pick the books out pretty carefully, wouldn’t you?” She gave him an eye. “I thought you guys were always like that.”
Us guys, he thought. Rich people. “I just figured they’d gone with the books in the other living room.”
She nodded. “Did they?”
“Hell, we can find out, if you want. I know at least some of them are the same, because they’re the first ones I noticed. I haven’t actually catalogued.”
“Babbitt, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, The Wasteland — okay, I can now officially read ‘the’ backwards without thinking about it — A Young Lady’s Guide To Comportment, Pilgrim’s Progress, The Arguments For Temperance — these were real fun people, Dav– Castle. Well, but they’ve got some old magazine, too, G-8 and His Battle Aces. The Man With the Blue Guitar, The Cat Who Went To Heaven, Cad– oh hey, I read this one, Caddy Woodlawn! We read that in fifth grade. I didn’t realize it was that old.”
Castle grinned. “I think I read that one, too. I don’t remember a damn thing about it. That was a — what was it, Caldecott?”
“Oh yeah, the award, no, Newbury. Caldecott’s for picture books, I think.”
“Newbury, yeah. We always read Newbury winning books when I was that age, Ophelia insisted. Or classics, before they had the award — not Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, but we could read Sherlock Holmes because it taught us about ‘world cultures and deductive reasoning.’”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Ophelia?”
“Family tutor. Educational overseer, I guess. It was her job — still is — to make sure that if any Finch children showed promise in things like piano, ballet, languages, whatever, that they go to the right school for it. And she was in charge of our education until junior high, and had a pretty heavy hand in it after that too.”
“That’s fucked up, Castle. What did you show promise in?”
“Spanish, penmanship, and demolitions.”
“Demolitions?”
“I put a cherry bomb in her toilet. She was a real bitch. One of the first women I slept with, though. I wonder if she would have been fired if my mother had found out.” That hadn’t been girlfriend sex at all. She’d been fucking money, he’d been fucking experience, both of them fucking the forbidden — the kind of thing that could go on forever but never did. It didn’t end, it just stopped.
Katrine had stopped paying attention, though, and had a far-off look that faded as she murmured something to herself and then cleared her eyes. “You know what, though? The book, the Alice book. That doesn’t really fit, to put the looking-glass parts forwards. It’s clever, but it doesn’t actually work, unless they’re backwards on the other side of the house.”
He nodded. “Let’s check that when we’re over there, then? To satisfy your curiosity. But you know, it’s not the only thing that wouldn’t fit the reflection: there’s the garden on one side, and the kitchen on the other, for one thing. And the gatehouse, for another.”
Speak of the Devil and shame the Lord: the bell rang, signaling that a delivery had arrived in the store. “Doorbell?” she asked. “I can make myself scarce, head out the back or something.”
He shook his head. “No, just a grocery delivery. C’mon along if you want, may as well get it in case there’s anything frozen.”
She didn’t say anything, just followed him across the house and down the corridor. He deliberately didn’t pay any attention to the stairs leading down to the basement that led to the uninspected downbelow: he just drew her attention to the delivery nooks.
“Here we go,” he said, ticking off the items on the list the delivery man included in the order as he double-checked it. “Two bottles of wine, chicken, a slab of bacon, potatoes, shallots, tarragon, marjoram, thyme, garlic, butter, more coffee, and some New York Super Fudge Chunk.” There was a mail delivery, too, with Teddy’s package of books.
“Nice,” she said. “All I get delivered is pizza and Chinese. So what’s the deal here?”
He hefted the sack and led her back towards the kitchen so he could put things away. “Coq au vin. If you want to stay for dinner tonight? Or you know, I can put it aside for — whenever.”
“No, I mean — not tonight, we’ll talk that out later — I mean what’s up with the grocery delivery? You don’t seem that lazy.”
He gave her a sour grin and shook his head, hoping to just — laugh it off somehow, without answering. Waited just long enough to see that wouldn’t do. “You know how the deadly rich are. Why spend all that time under unflattering lights when I could be whiling it away with my call girl?”
“Uh-huh.” She crossed her arms, canted a foot again, and although she could be showing off the inner curve of her thigh as it crept from the edge of her short shorts, it was more likely that this was her stop-fucking-with-a-fucker pose. “Listen, if you want, while you’re putting the groceries away, I can go checklist the books like you were talking about.”
“Yeah? That’d be great, actually. There’s a notebook there on the end table in the first living room, if you want.”
“I noticed,” she said. “A Moleskine. I used to have a poet client, those things aren’t cheap.”
“You know us rich folk.”
He chopped the chicken up while she did her thing: put the back and wing tips aside to make stock, the drumsticks and wings for who knew what, and started marinating the breasts and thighs in a little wine and olive oil, with tarragon and garlic he crushed with the side of the knife. Getting all Julia Child up in the bitch.
The chicken would keep until the next night if Katrine was able to come back for dinner. If not, well, nothing wrong with making a nice meal for yourself. Or fuck, he could always call someone else. Maybe that’s what he’d do. He hadn’t had anyone in mind when he placed the order, after all — he’d done that over a week ago, and had been waiting on the tarragon and mushrooms, both of them imported from Provence.
“Hey,” Katrine said, coming back Moleskine in hand, looking some blend of amused and curious. “Did you notice the order of the books is mirrored, too?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I hadn’t checked, but I thought so.”
“So there are two discrepancies, if you don’t count a few books here and there in the wrong place, which for all I know is your fault, or the realtor’s or something.”
He leaned against the counter, in front of the package from Teddy, which he’d just opened when she came in. “The plot thickens. All right, kiddo, hit me.”
“That costs extra. Okay, check this out? There’s no Looking Glass on the straight side. There’s a scrapbook instead. Or a diary, I’m not sure which. And on the reverse side? No Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.”
“Alice in Wonderland?”
“No. Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Was there a third book? Anyway, it’s an old-looking book, hand-written, and it’s only on the straight side. There’s nothing in its place on the reverse.” She held up two books, one of them the Alice book — tattered along the spine, clearly hand-stitched, with a disproportionate drawing of Alice on the cover, one that didn’t look anything like the illustrations he remembered from the Alice books he read as a kid. The other was the diary-or-scrapbook, also old, one of those thick leatherbound personal journals with the pages that didn’t line up flush at the edges. There was probably a word for that. Teddy would probably know it.
“Huh,” he said, and pulled a chair up to the table in the service nook. “Let’s take a look.”
“One thing first,” she said, slinking between his arms and into his lap while he opened the diary. The handwriting was an old style he recognized, it was the way Ophelia wrote: that was one of the strange tics of an upper class “accent,” so to speak, the pride some people took in preserving older styles of … well, everything. The loops were frequent but constrained, as though the flourishes were prescribed. “Okay, Daddy-O?”
“You got it, kitten. What’s up?”
“About tonight. I have a client tonight. I have a lot of appointments that were made ages ago, and I’m going to continue to have appointments made. That needs to be clear. You can buy my time, but not my loyalty. My loyalty isn’t for sale. You can hire me to fuck you, you can hire me to be nice to you, you can hire me to keep you company. You can’t hire me to like you.”
“You don’t like me?” he asked, surprised. It came out more timid, more boyish, than he’d like.
“I’m not saying I don’t. I don’t know you much, Castle. I don’t dislike you. You seem like a nice guy who’s got some problems. My life’s been full of nice guys with problems, so that doesn’t really tweak me one direction or the other. I’m saying, whether I do it or I don’t, you can’t hire me to. I’m never gonna be your friend. I’m like the stewardess you make small talk with. The maid you flirt with. The groupie you fuck. Right? You aren’t in my life. And I can’t be yours.”
“I’m not asking –”
“And I’m saying, the answer would be no. Okay? That’s all. Now, you can afford a lot of my time, but just on GP I’m gonna keep some of it away from you. I’m not going to be here tonight. I can come back tomorrow night. It’ll cost twice as much.”
“And why’s that?” he asked, as she reached down and squeezed his cock.
“Because that’s how much I’m charging you. You need to remember that, and I need to remind you, because money doesn’t mean much to you — you’re like my other rich clients, paying for my time doesn’t prevent them from buying anything else. It makes them think about it differently. You need to remember that I’m like the cop in an investigation where you’re a witness. We can get along famously, but we can’t be friends, and I will fuck you over if that’s what it takes to solve the crime.”
She gave his cock another squeeze before sinking to her knees and unbuttoning him.