Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [11]
“You must be tired—from your grief and from your flight.” Pio smiled gently. “And from a confrontation with the police you were hardly prepared for. From our view necessary perhaps, but not very hospitable. I would like to explain what has happened and what is happening…. Just the two of us, Mr. Addison… . A quiet place at the end of the street. Do you like Chinese?”
Harry kept staring. Good cop, bad cop. Just like in the U.S. And right now Pio was the good one, the friend on Harry’s side. It was why Roscani had led the questioning. But it was clear they weren’t quite done with him and this was their way of continuing it. What it meant was, bottom line, he had no choice.
“Yeah,” he said finally, “I like Chinese.”
6
“MERRY CHRISTMAS from the Addisons”
HARRY COULD STILL SEE THE CARD, THE DECorated tree in the background, the posed faces smiling from it, everyone wearing a Santa Claus hat. He had a copy of it somewhere at home, tucked in a drawer, its once bright colors slowing fading, now almost pastels. It was the last time they were all together. His mother and father would have been in their mid-thirties. He was eleven, Danny eight, and their sister, Madeline, almost six. Her sixth birthday came on January first, and two weeks later she died.
It was a Sunday afternoon, bright and clear and very cold. He and Danny and Madeline were playing on a frozen pond near their home. Some older kids were nearby playing hockey. Several of them skated toward them, chasing after the puck.
Harry could still hear the sharp crack of the ice. It was like a pistol shot. He saw the hockey players stop short. And then the ice just broke away where Madeline was. She never made a sound, just went under. Harry screamed to Danny to run for help, and he threw off his coat and went in after her. But there was nothing but icy black.
It was nearly dark when the fire department divers brought her up, the sky beyond the leafless trees behind them a streak of red.
Harry and Danny and their mother and father waited with a priest in the snow as they came across the ice toward them. The fire chief, a tall man with a mustache, had taken her body from the divers and wrapped it in a blanket and held it in his arms as he led the way.
Along the shore, a safe distance away, the hockey players, their parents and brother and sisters, neighbors, strangers watched in silence.
Harry started forward, but his father took him firmly by the shoulders and held him back. When he reached shore, the fire chief stopped, and the priest said the last rites over the blanket without opening it. And when he had finished, the fire chief, followed by the divers still with their air tanks and wet suits, walked on to where a white ambulance was waiting. Madeline was put inside and the doors were closed and the ambulance drove off into the darkness.
Harry followed the red dots of taillights until they were gone. Finally he turned. Danny was there, eight years old, shivering with the cold, looking at him.
“Madeline is dead,” Danny said, as if he were trying to understand.
“Yes… ,” Harry whispered.
It was Sunday, January the fifteenth, nineteen seventy-three. They were in Bath, Maine.
PIO WAS RIGHT, Ristorante Cinese, Yu Yuan, on Via delle Quattro Fontane was a quiet place at the end of the street. At least it was quiet where he and Harry sat, at a highly lacquered back table away from the red-lanterned front door and spill of noontime customers, a pot of tea and large bottle of mineral water between them.
“You know what Semtex is, Mr. Addison?”
“An explosive.”
“Cyclotrimethylene, pentaerythritol tetronitrate, and plastic. When it goes off it leaves a distinctive nitrate residue along with particles of plastique. It also tears metal into tiny pieces. It was the substance used to blow up the Assisi bus. That fact was established by technical experts early this morning and will be announced publicly this afternoon.”
The information Pio was giving him was privileged, and Harry knew it, part of what Pio had promised. But it told him little