The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [145]
Crosetti thought briefly of trying to conceal the events just transacted a block away but realized that Agnes Conti distributed information with a velocity that telecom engineers were still struggling to match, and would shortly be phoning to supply the details, real and imagined. He said, “Sit down, Ma.”
They sat in the kitchen, Crosetti had his glass of wine and told his story. Mary Peg heard him out and thought she took it rather well. Actually, she thought, it put her in a somewhat better position than she would have been, given what she now had to relate to her son.
“Ma! What did you do that for?” was Crosetti’s wail. “God! I hate when you pull stuff behind my back.”
“Like stealing your father’s guns and turning my home into an armed camp?”
“That’s not the same thing. It was an emergency,” said Crosetti without enthusiasm. He really wanted to lie down.
“Well, I too thought that some action was required, and since you were unavailable and too busy running away from home, or whatever, to answer messages…”
The sound of a car pulling up in front of the house stopped her short. “Oh, I bet that’s Donna,” said Mary Peg and went to the door. Crosetti poured another glass of wine. As Crosetti drained this, Radeslaw Klim came into the room, freshly shaved in a black uniform jacket and tie, and holding a shiny-peaked black cap.
“Want some wine, Klim?”
“Thank you, but no. I must drive shortly.”
“It’s dark already. They don’t have funerals at night.”
“No, it is not a real funeral. It is for vampires.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, is quite à la mode now, you know, rich young people pretend to be vampires and ride in hearses, and have a party in crypt of a former church. Ah, here is your mother. And this must be the daughter. How do you do?”
Donna Crosetti, or The Donna, as she was known in the family, was a skinny red-haired clone of her mother and an ornament of the Legal Aid Society of New York, a friend of the downtrodden, or a bleeding heart who sprung hardened criminals to run wild in the streets, depending on whether you were talking to her mother or her sister, Patsy. She was the youngest daughter, just a year older than Crosetti himself, and had a more than full measure of the middle child’s sense of cosmic injury, the focus of which had been, from the earliest dawn of consciousness, the slightly younger brother, the Irish twin, the object of hatred and resentment, yet also the creature to be defended from all threats, to the last drop of blood. Crosetti felt exactly the same way and was just as inarticulate about it: a perfect stalemate of love.
Klim introduced himself, shook hands with the rather startled Donna Crosetti, kissed Mary Peg formally on both cheeks, and took his leave.
“Who was that?”
“That’s the new live-in boyfriend,” said Crosetti.
“What?” exclaimed The Donna, who had not been consulted.
“Not,” said Mary Peg.
“Is too,” said Crosetti. “He drives a hearse.”
“At night?”
“Yeah, he says it’s for vampires. How are you, Don?”
“He’s not my live-in boyfriend,” said Mary Peg. “How could you say such a thing, Albert!”
“He is too,” Crosetti insisted, feeling the years slip away in a manner that was unpleasantly quasi-psychotic and comforting at the same time. In a minute Donna would be screaming and chasing him around the kitchen table with a cooking implement in her little fist and their mother would be yelling and trying to stop them and dishing out random smacks and threatening apocalypse when their father got home.
Donna Crosetti glared at her mother and brother. “No, really…”
“Really,” said Mary Peg. “He’s a friend of Fanny’s who’s helping us decipher a seventeenth-century letter Allie found. He was working late on it so I offered him Patsy’s room for the night.”
“Which was three nights ago,” said Crosetti. He wrapped his arms around himself and made kissing noises.
“Oh, grow up!” said his sister. Crosetti stuck his tongue out at her, she rolled her eyes at him and sat down at the kitchen table. Removing a leather portfolio from her capacious bag, she flipped it open with a businesslike