Роберт Паркер - Sixkill

“Yes,” Bob said.

“I never thought of that,” Zebulon said.

“No reason to,” Bob said.

“You know my father?” Zebulon said.

“Yes.”

“You like him?” Zebulon said.

“No,” Bob said.

“I didn’t like him so much, either, I guess.”

“No need to,” Bob said.

“You’re supposed to love your father,” Zebulon said.

“If he’ll let you,” Bob said.

“And how come they named me Zebulon?”

“After Zebulon Pike,” Bob said.

“Who’s he?”

“Famous explorer,” Bob said. “Discovered Pikes Peak.”

“Where’s Pikes Peak?”

“Colorado,” Bob said.

“Famous white explorer?”

“Yes.”

“So how come they named me after some white person?”

“Don’t know,” Bob said.

“How come not a famous Cree person?”

“I don’t know,” Bob said.

“How come they drank all the time?”

“Don’t know,” Bob said.

“Why’d my father run off?”

“Don’t know.”

“How come you don’t know anything?”

“Know we’re here,” Bob said. “Know we got to deal with that, and not a lot of stuff we got no way to deal with.”

“Least your white-person name is easy to say.”

“Easier than Zebulon,” Bob said.

“Well,” Rita said as we drove back to Boston, “that went well.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever seen you take offense before,” I said.

“Can’t remember it myself,” Rita said. “What did he do to offend you?”

“Asked me if I’d had sex with you.”

“And you were ashamed to admit you hadn’t?” Rita said.

“No, it was the way he asked,” I said.

“Yes,” Rita said. “There’s such contempt.”

“He’ll be tough to defend,” I said.

Rita nodded.

“Everyone on the jury will hate him,” I said.

“I’d probably try to avoid a jury trial,” Rita said.

“We could dump him,” I said.

“Nothing would please me more, but we won’t,” Rita said.

“Neither one of us?”

“Neither one,” Rita said. “You know it and I know it.”

“I might,” I said.

“Nope,” Rita said. “It’s ego. We both think we’re the best there is at what we do.”

“Well, yeah,” I said.

“And we both want to know what happened in that hotel room.”

“True,” I said.

“It’s what we do,” Rita said. “Plus, you have this gallop-tothe-rescue fixation.”

“Like I was telling you,” I said. “I would never dump Jumbo.”

“I admire that in you,” Rita said. “But since we have both called him an asshole and stomped out of the room, how are we going to go about this?”

“How about Zebulon Sixkill?” I said.

“I don’t like talking to him,” Rita said. “He scares the hell out of me.”

“Was he around that night?” I said.

“I assume so,” Rita said. “He always is. They had a twobedroom suite in the hotel. Before the studio tried to hide him out here.”

“You know he was there?”

“Says he was in the living room,” Rita said. “Watching television.”

“Maybe I’ll talk to him,” I said.

“How you going to get him alone?”

“Maybe I won’t,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have to talk with him in front of Jumbo.”

“Won’t Jumbo tell him to throw you out again?”

“Might,” I said.

“Doesn’t Zebulon Sixkill scare the hell out of you?” Rita said.

“He does,” I said. “But I’ll try to work around it.”

“Actually, it was a silly question,” Rita said. “We both know you’re not afraid of him.”

“No?” I said.

“You should be,” she said. “But you’re not.”

“Why do you suppose that is?” I said.

“Because you’re heroic?” Rita said.

“That would be my thinking,” I said.

i split a pizza with Matthew Lopata in the atrium at the Holyoke Center, across from Harvard Yard. He was a seriouslooking twenty-two-year-old mid-sized kid with dark hair cut short.

“My parents think me going to Harvard is like I got elected God,” he said.

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Pretty much everybody does okay, if they get in, unless they drink themselves to death.”

“You graduate this year?” I said.

“Actually,” Matthew said, “I graduated last year.”

“Cum laude?” I said. Just to be saying something.

“Of course,” he said. “You know what percentage of last year’s class graduated cum laude?”

“Ninety-something,” I said.

He looked a little surprised.

“That’s right,” he said.

“Must be the combination of highly intelligent students with great teachers,” I said.

“Sure it is,” Matthew said.

“You’re in grad school now?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Economics.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I know, the dismal science.”

He took a bite of pepperoni pizza from the narrow end of a slice.

“So how’s school?” I said.

“Everybody thinks Harvard is so hard. It’s no harder than anyplace else. All you got to do is study.”

“Which you do,” I said.

“Enough to get by,” he said.

“It engages you,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Economics is pretty interesting. I mean, the whole deal with money. Money is something we’ve made up, you know, because barter is clumsy... It’s smoke and mirrors.”

“I’ve always suspected as much,” I said. “Can we talk about your sister?”

He was quiet for a moment, looking down at the pizza. Then, without looking up, he nodded.

“Good,” I said. “Tell me about her.”

“Like what?” he said.

“You decide, anything comes to mind.”

“She was a good kid when she was little,” Matthew said. “Hell, she was always a good kid, but she was an awful mess, too.”

He was still looking at the pizza.

“How so?” I said.

“My parents,” he said, and shook his head. “My old man treated her like she was the carnival queen and captain of the cheerleading squad. My mother...” He raised his eyes from the pizza and looked at me as the conversation began to engage him. “My mother treated her like she was an ugly little slut that would fuck every guy she met.”

“Which one did she buy into?” I said.

“Both,” Matthew said.

It was a rainy day in Harvard Square, so the foot traffic through the atrium from Mass Ave to Mount Auburn Street was heavier than it might have been if the sun were out. A lot of people were carrying umbrellas, which most of them furled inside. I had always thought that Cambridge, in the vicinity of Harvard, might have had the most umbrellas per capita of any place in the world. People used them when it snowed. In my childhood, in Laramie, Wyoming, we used to think people who carried umbrellas were sissies. It was almost certainly a hasty generalization, but I had never encountered a hard argument against it.

“She promiscuous?” I said. “If the word still has meaning.”

“Some,” Matthew said. “And she was, ah, you know, bubbly and cute.”

“Vivacious,” I said.

“Yeah,” Matthew said. “Vivacious. Worked hard as hell at it.”

“She wanted to be popular?”

“More than anything.”

“Maybe valued for what she was?”

“If she ever knew,” Matthew said. “They really messed her up.”