Lights Out

Wearing Prof’s sweats with his lost-and-found Speedo, the Monarch, the boy’s printout, and $124.75 in the pockets, Eddie walked into the Hotel Palazzo. He’d learned a little from his visit to L’Oasis, enough to understand this was just another stage set. But there was nothing papier-mache here. The make-believe was as real as it could be, and the play promised to run forever.

Richly dressed people sat around the lobby in chairs almost as finely covered as they were. A Japanese woman in a black dress played the violin. Waiters glided by bearing trays of glittering glasses. Everything was lit with a golden light. A perfect world.

No one seemed to notice Eddie. Maybe they thought that just by being there he was perfect too, a millionaire returning from a morning jog, on his way upstairs where a wardrobe full of finery awaited. Eddie, in the role of the jogging millionaire, walked to the elevator as though he had a right to be there and rode up to the ninth floor.

He stepped into a hall that smelled of flowers. Sounds were muted, the carpet creamy and thick. As he moved along it, Eddie forgot how to play the jogging millionaire; he degenerated quickly into someone else, some lesser character, not even up to his own level, a short-of-breath character with a heart beating too fast and too light, like some cheap over-wound tinny thing. A character who was light-headed when he reached his brother’s door.

There was no sign saying Windward Financial Services, nothing but a number and brass knocker. Eddie stood outside the door in that hushed hall that smelled like a garden in spring, the sole sound the pulse in his ears. He faced the thought that had risen in his mind, demanding recognition: turn back. Eddie knew that turning back was the right thing to do. Fifteen years was too long, those fifteen years especially. The building itself sent the message. Leave it, leave town, leave the past completely: Eddie knew that with certainty. But his hand went to the knocker anyway, raised it and knocked. The tinny thing inside him was under the control of something more powerful than logic.

Ten or fifteen seconds passed. Maybe no one was inside, maybe the bookstore boy’s information was wrong, maybe-

The door opened. On the other side stood a big man in a pinstripe suit. He wore half glasses, had graying hair, a fleshy face, a thickened body. It took Eddie a few moments to see Jack somewhere inside him.

“Yes?” Jack said.

“Jack.” There was mist in the air all of a sudden, blurring his vision, the way it had blurred as the white station wagon drove him out of prison. None of that, Eddie told himself, and made it go away. “Jack. It’s me.”

Jack took off his half glasses and stared. “Oh, my God.” He covered his heart. “Oh, my God.”

And next? Eddie was ready for a handshake, an embrace. Neither happened. Jack looked over his shoulder. At a coffee table in the room behind him sat a blond woman in a gray-flannel suit, a little coffee cup in her hand; there was a French name for it that Eddie couldn’t remember. She was straining to see who was outside.

“Eddie. Jesus.” Jack turned to the woman. “One second, Karen,” he said. Then he stepped out into the hall, half closing the door behind him.

Jack glanced up and down the hall. He had a little pouch of fat under his chin. “You’re not …”

“Not what?”

“On the lam, or anything?”

On the lam. Was this an attempt to speak the language he thought Eddie’s? The tiny and archaic phrase measured the enormity between them. Eddie almost laughed. “I’ve paid my debt to society,” he said with a straight face. As long as they were going to talk silly.

Jack got it. He smiled. Jack had changed a lot, but his smile was the same: a flash that promised fun, lots of it and slightly dangerous. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

Then came the embrace. They threw their arms around each other. Jack was still big and strong, but now there was some softness to his body. He shook a little. Eddie realized Jack was crying. Walking down the hall he’d been close to crying too. Now it was an impossibility.

They separated. Jack held him at arm’s length. “You look good, Eddie.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you?”

“All right.”

“You’re in shape.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you?”

“All right.”

“God, I’m glad to hear that.” Jack looked into the room.

“Have I come at a bad time?” Eddie asked.

“So what’s new?”

Jack laughed. Eddie didn’t.

Jack wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ve got a client, that’s all. Come in, if you don’t mind waiting in the bedroom. I’d get rid of her, but I’ve been trying to sew this deal up for months. It won’t be long.”

“I can come back, if you like.”

“Come back?” Jack said. “Bro!” And he wrapped his arm around Eddie’s neck in that old familiar lock, half dragging him into the room.

“Karen,” he said, letting Eddie go. “I want you to meet someone very special to me-my brother, Eddie. Eddie, Karen de Vere.”

“A pleasure,” the woman said. She wore tortoiseshell glasses; behind their lenses her eyes were cool blue.