don’t have much choice,’ Mitch said. Sam helped him negotiate a corner and stabilize himself on the crutches. Mitch found his keys and opened the door. The small, low-ceilinged flat had bare concrete walls and hadn’t been heated for weeks. Mitch squeezed into the bathroom and realized he would have to take his craps from a certain angled altitude; the cast didn’t fit between the toilet and the wall.
‘I’ll have to learn to aim,’ he told his father as he came out. This made his father grin.
‘Get a bigger bathroom next time. Spare-looking place, but clean,’ Sam commented stuffed his hands in his pockets.
‘Your mother and I assume you’re coming home with me. We’d like you to.’
‘I probably will, for a while,’ Mitch said. ‘I’m a bit of a whipped puppy, Dad.’
‘Bullshit,’ Sam murmured. ‘Nothing’s ever whipped you.’
Mitch regarded his father with a flat expression, then swiveled around on the crutches and looked at the goldfish Tilde had given him months before. She had provided a little glass bowl and a tin of food and had set it on the counter in the small kitchen. He had cared for it even after the relationship was over.
The fish had died and was now a little raft of mold floating on the surface of the half-filled bowl. Lines marked the levels of scum as the water evaporated. It was pretty gruesome.
‘Shit,’ Mitch said. He had completely forgotten about the fish.
‘What was it?’ Sam asked, peering at the bowl.
‘The last of a relationship that almost killed me,’ Mitch said.
‘Pretty dramatic,’ Sam said.
‘Pretty anticlimactic,’ Mitch corrected. ‘Maybe it should have been a shark.’ He offered his father a Carlsberg from the tiny refrigerator beside the kitchen sink. Sam took the beer and swallowed about a third as he walked around the living room.
‘You got any unfinished business here?’ Sam asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Mitch said, carrying his suitcase into the ridiculously small bedroom with bare concrete walls and a single ceiling light fixture of clear ribbed glass. He tossed it on the sleeping mat, squidgied his way around on the crutches, returned to the living room. ‘They want me to help them find the mummies.’
‘Then let them fly you back here,’ Sam said. ‘We’re going home.’
Mitch thought to check the answering machine. The little message counter had gone to its maximum, thirty.
‘It’s time to come home and get your strength back,’ Sam said.
That sounded pretty good, actually. Go back home at age thirty-seven and just stay there, let Mom cook and Dad teach him how to tie flies or whatever Sam was into now, visit with their friends, become a little kid again, not responsible for anything very important.
Mitch felt sick to his stomach. He pressed the rewind button on the answering machine tape. As it whirred back onto its spool, the phone chimed and Mitch answered.
‘Excuse me,’ a tenor male voice said in English. ‘Is this Mitch Rafelson?’
‘The very one,’ Mitch said.
‘I just tell you this, then good bye. Maybe you recognize my voice, but … no matter. They have found your bodies in the cave. The University of Innsbruck people. Without your help, I assume. They do not tell anybody yet, I don’t know why. I am not joking and this is no prank, Herr Rafelson.’
There was a distinct click and the line went dead.
‘Who was it?’ Sam asked.
Mitch sniffed and tried to relax his jaw. ‘Fuckers,’ he said. ‘They’re just messing with me. I’m famous, Dad. A famous crackpot chucklehead.’
‘Bullshit,’ Sam said again, his face sharp with disgust and anger. Mitch stared at his father with a mix of love and shame; this was Sam at his most involved, his most protective. ‘Let’s get out of this rat hole,’ Sam said in disgust.
Kaye made Saul breakfast just after sunrise. He seemed subdued, sitting at the knotty pine table in the kitchen, slowly sipping a cup of black coffee. He had had three cups already, not a good sign. In a good mood – Good Saul – he never drank more than a cup a day. If he starts smoking again …
Kaye delivered his scrambled eggs and toast and sat beside him. He leaned over, ignoring her, and ate slowly, deliberately, sipping coffee between each bite. As he finished, he made a sour face and pushed the plate back.
‘Bad eggs?’ Kaye asked quietly.
Saul gave her a long look and shook his head. He was moving slower, also not a good sign. ‘I called Bristol Myers Squibb yesterday,’ he said. ‘They haven’t cut a deal with Lado and Eliava, and apparently they don’t expect to. There’s something political going on in Georgia.’
‘Maybe that’s good news?’
Saul shook his head and turned his chair toward the French doors and the gray morning outside. ‘I also called a friend of mine at Merck. He says there’s something cooking with Eliava, but he doesn’t know what it is. Lado Jakeli flew to the United States and met with them.’
Kaye stopped herself in the middle of a sigh, let it out slowly, inaudibly. Walking on eggshells again … The body knew, her body knew. Saul was suffering again, worse even than he appeared. She had been through this at least five times. Any hour now he would find a pack of cigarettes, inhale the hot acrid nicotine to straighten out some of his brain chemistry, even though he hated smoking, hated tobacco.
‘So … we’re out,’ she said.
‘I don’t know yet,’ Saul said. He squinted at a brief ray of sun. ‘You didn’t tell me about the grave.’
Kaye’s face flushed like a girl’s. ‘No,’ she said stiffly. ‘I didn’t.’
‘And it didn’t make the newspapers.’
‘No.’
Saul pushed his chair back and grabbed the edge of the table, then half-stood and performed a series of angled push-ups, eyes focused on the table top. When he finished, having done thirty, he sat down again and wiped his face with the folded paper towel he was using as a napkin.
‘Christ, I’m sorry, Kaye,’ he said, his voice rough. ‘Do you know how that makes me feel?’
‘What?’
‘Having my wife experience something like that.’
‘You knew about my taking criminal medicine at SUNY.’
‘It makes me feel funny, even so,’ Saul said.
