The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [55]
“At any rate,” Reggie continued, “that’s all I have right now. The investigating officers will probably want to interview you at some point. I mentioned that you were a friend of his.”
“That’s fine,” I said apprehensively.
“Good, then. I gotta run. You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah. I might sit here awhile, though.”
“No problem. We still getting together with Gallegos tomorrow morning?”
With everything else going on, it had slipped my mind.
“Sure,” I said, not wanting to postpone. “Meet at the diner?”
“Nine o’clock. You talk to Claire and Kate yet?”
“No. I’m waiting for the right moment.”
I left unsaid that just then, I couldn’t imagine when the right moment might be.
Dinner with Claire and Kate and Phil was a challenge. I didn’t mention Alex’s death, not wanting to cast a pall on the evening. I decided to tell them the next morning, before they had a chance to read about it in the paper.
Phil sat in Kyle’s old seat at the dining-room table. The good news for the evening was that he wasn’t shy. He got started on the year he’d spent traveling and told story after story about Third World misadventures, making Claire and Kate laugh. I smiled along as best I could. Claire had a second glass of wine and then a third, something she almost never did. Seeing her animated made my heart ache with nostalgia. Midway through dinner, I caught Kate looking at me with concern, which made my heart ache for a different reason. She was too young to be so finely attuned to unhappiness.
I quickly lost a game of Risk after dinner and retired to the bedroom, leaving the three of them to scheme cheerfully toward world domination at the kitchen table. I was dozing fitfully when Claire came to bed. She reached for my hand in the dark and pressed it to her breast. I unbuttoned the neck of her chemise slowly, desiring her but careful of her mood. She knelt upright and pulled the chemise overhead with a single fluid gesture, and then shifted sideways to straddle me. We made love silently, her head burrowed against my chest.
Afterward, I held her in my arms, my body spooned tightly to hers. I kissed her neck and tasted salt. Her breathing had slowed, but I could tell she was still awake. I felt like crying. I didn’t want to lose her as well.
“I was offered a job today,” I said.
“By who?” she asked sleepily.
“A Russian guy named Narimanov. He’s a big oil tycoon, with operations all over the world. It would be doing pretty much the same thing I’m doing now but working for him exclusively.”
“I thought you liked working with Alex and Walter.”
“It’s a lot more money,” I said, wincing at the mention of Alex.
“Do we need more money?”
“Not really,” I said. The last seven years had been good to me financially. I braced myself for the plunge. “But it got me thinking. Kate’s going to be off to college next September. There’s no reason for us to be tied down here. Maybe we should spend a year in Paris or Rome. You always told me there’s a more robust classical music scene there, and you already speak a little French and Italian.”
She stiffened slightly.
“Or somewhere else,” I added quickly. “I was just thinking a change might be good.”
“I already have a job, at Sloan-Kettering.”
“It’s a tough place to work,” I said, pushing for her to confide in me. “You never think about leaving?”
She shook my arm off her shoulders and edged away from me.
“Claire?”
“It’s late,” she said. “We’ll talk another time.”
I lay in bed next to her, tears starting from my eyes. It felt to me as if she was already gone.
17
The Turtle Bay Diner had smudged plate-glass windows that wrapped around the corner of Forty-sixth and Second, and twin plastic signs announcing the name on both façades in faded sea green script. It looked like a neighborhood place, the kind that had been there for twenty or thirty years, and that nobody who lived or worked outside a five-block radius of it had ever noticed. I was reaching for the door handle when I heard Reggie’s voice.
“Hey.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw his battered