doesn’t make Anna or her family, including Luke, shady.”
“Well, the blond hair, the blue eyes. He sure as hell fits the part.”
“Don’t say things like that, please.”
“When you look the other way you’re just as guilty as the sons of bitches that do it,” he says. “Nazis lived in the Zenners’ ritzy castle while thousands of people were being tortured and murdered right down the road, and Anna’s family didn’t do shit.”
“What should they have done?”
“I don’t know,” Marino says.
“A mother, a father, three young daughters, and a son?”
“I don’t know. But they should have done something.”
“Should have done what? It’s a miracle they weren’t murdered, too.”
“Maybe I’d rather be murdered than go along with it.”
“Being held hostage in your own home by soldiers who are raping your daughters, and God only knows what they did to the little boy, doesn’t exactly mean you’re going along with it.” I remember Anna telling me her terrible truths, the wind gusting fiercely and flinging dead branches and brittle brown vines across her backyard as I sat in a carved rocker and felt fear pressing me from all sides.
I could barely breathe as she told me about the schloss that had been in the family for centuries, near Linz, on the Danube River. Day in and out, clouds of death from the crematorium stained the horizon above the town of Mauthausen, where there was a deep crater in the earth, a granite quarry worked by thousands of prisoners. Jews, Spanish Republicans, Russians, homosexuals.
“You don’t know where Guenter Zenner got all his money,” I hear Marino say, as I look out at a bright morning and am dark inside, reminded of nights in Richmond at Anna’s house during one of the most harrowing periods of my life. “Fact is, Guenter was already rich before he went into banking. Him and Anna inherited a shitload of money from their father, who had Nazis living in the family castle. The Zenners got rich off Jewish money and granite quarries, one of them a concentration camp so close they could see the smoke rising from the ovens.”
“These are terrible accusations,” I say to him, as I stare out my window.
“What’s terrible is what Luke reminds you of,” Marino says. “A time you don’t need to be dwelling on now that things are good. Why the hell do you want a reminder of those old days when everything was fucked up and you were blaming yourself for Benton being dead or at least thinking he was, blaming yourself for everything, including Lucy? She doesn’t want it, either. She doesn’t want you getting all hung up again about her and how it’s somehow your fault.”
“I wasn’t thinking about such things,” I reply, but now I will, since he’s managed to remind me.
Lucy’s early days at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility in Quantico have not been foremost on my mind for a very long time, but he has conjured up the Lucy from back then and the reminder isn’t a happy one. A troubled teenager whose computer skills were savant-esque, she almost single-handedly created the FBI’s Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, CAIN, while falling in love with a psychopath who nearly destroyed all of us.
I got her that FBI internship, I remember saying bitterly to Anna as we sat in her living room close to the fire with the lights out because I’ve always found it easier to talk in the dark. I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt.
Didn’t quite lead to what you intended, did it?
Carrie used her. . . .
Made Lucy gay?
You don’t make people gay, I said, and Anna the psychiatrist abruptly got up, the firelight moving on her proud fine face, and she walked away, as if she had another appointment.
“I know you don’t want to hear it.” Marino keeps talking. “But I’m going to point out that you hired Luke in early July and this dinosaur lady disappeared barely six weeks later from the very area where they’re extracting the oil his father’s invested in.”
The entire region of northwest Canada is dependent on natural gas and oil production, he says, and if the completion of that pipeline gets blocked, Luke’s father probably stands to lose a fortune—a fortune that would be inherited by Luke.
“All of it,” Marino says. “He’s the only one left. And we know the e-mail with the cut-off ear and maybe Emma Shubert in the jetboat was sent to you from Boston, from Logan. Where the hell was Luke yesterday at six-thirty p.m.?”