Scott Turow - Identical

“OK. Blame me. You want to, go ahead. But you can’t dismiss now. You dismiss and I have to quit.”

Gianis tilted his chin down so he could give Mark a hard look. “Threat?” he asked.

“Call it what you want. We have to play this out in court and hope for the best. Maybe Lands imposes a gag order and makes Hal take his ads off the air.”

“He won’t. I wouldn’t if I were the judge. You can’t let a politician file a lawsuit and silence his critics. And Du Bois Lands is a good lawyer. I used to work with him.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Crully. His heart perked up. “Why didn’t somebody tell me that?”

“Because it’s a long story,” Paul said. They were at the Metro Club and Paul opened the door, but before he slid across the seat, he patted Crully on the shoulder and smiled for the first time on the trip. A real smile. “Buck up, Mark. It’s actually a great day.”

“It is?”

“My brother gets out of prison.” He looked at his watch. “In fact, he’s out.”

At 8:30, the correctional officers would have fingerprinted him in the administrative center, to be sure they were releasing the right guy, and let him put on the old blue jeans and the sweatshirt in which he’d surrendered. Hillcrest looked like a ranch in a cowboy movie, surrounded by a low white fence. Not even barbed wire. They called it the Honor Camp, meaning there wasn’t anyone in there who hadn’t figured out he’d do really hard time if he was caught after running off. This morning the guards would have shot the bolts on B gate, which was opened solely to release prisoners and receive deliveries from sixteen-wheelers, and swung the two sides wide. And his brother would have walked out on the frozen dirt road alone. Sofia had left before six to drive him back.

Kim and Marty, the interns, were already under the Metro Club’s green awning. The constant pedestrian rush had ground the ice and snow of a few weeks ago into a charcoal mush that had limed over in a few stubborn clumps that still clung to the cement with the tenacity of a living creature. How much salt could the walks stand, he wondered, before they pitted and would need replacement? He’d never wondered about that in his life, but it would be a preoccupation if he became mayor. Every screw and nut in the structure of the Tri-Cities would be his concern.

His cell vibrated just as he reached the two aides. It was his personal handheld, not the mobile from the campaign. He thought it might be Beata, who’d called once already, but he hadn’t found the kind of complete privacy even a whispered conversation with Beata required. The number was blocked.

“Paul Gianis,” he said.

“Says who?” his brother replied. The two of them both laughed like seventh graders, laid out by some idiotic joke. His brother was on Sofia’s cell, on which the number was always withheld so she could talk to patients on her own schedule. The twins hadn’t had a phone conversation in God knew how long, probably close to twenty years, when their dad died. The lines inside the facility were all recorded and they therefore preferred to talk face-to-face.

“All OK?”

“A-OK.”

“So,” he said, “we’re free.”

“We’re free,” his brother answered.

“I still wish we’d been together.” Cass’s release date, an item every prisoner could remember instantly even if it was eighty years off, had always been January 31, 2008. But somehow Corrections had recalculated it as today in the course of the pardon and parole hearing.

“We talked about it. Couldn’t blow this breakfast off, not when the group set the date four months ago. But I’ll see you for dinner?”

“Still the plan.”

They hung up. He was crying, of course, and groped under his topcoat to get his handkerchief out of his back pocket. The thought of sitting down to a meal with his brother, sleeping under the same roof for the first time in twenty-five years, still seemed beyond easy imagining. They had made no extended plans for the future, purely out of superstition. The idea, as it had been for a quarter of a century, was to get through it, all the way to the end, one day at a time.

Twenty-five years. The immensity of the time settled on him. He could remember the guilty plea, and the day a month later, right after Paul’s wedding, when Cass’s sentence started. Both events retained in his mind the clarity of things that had happened last week, and that of course made the passage of time seem less consequential, especially now that they’d survived it. But twenty-five years was a literal lifetime for each of them when the sentence began. Saying good-bye at that gate, he’d had no idea how he would ever bear it. A year after Cass’s time inside started, he was still jarred every day by the reality that he couldn’t just call his brother, and his heart sparked when he woke up Sunday mornings, anticipating their visits. You had to be a twin, an identical twin, to understand how cruel their forced separation had seemed to each of them.

And now it was over. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, still not sure he’d regained his composure. The penetrating cold reached all the way up to his sinuses. Then he set one foot in front of the other and entered the club. His life, he realized, in the elemental way he had known it at its beginning, had started again.

Cassian,” says Zeus, showing off as usual, by utilizing the name Cass was given at birth. “So pleased you are with us. Did I see your mother? I must say hello.”

Zeus delivers a tight handshake, briefly summoning all his power and charm as he levels his black eyes. Behind him, Hermione, Dita’s mom, thin and simple like a piece of blank paper, passes by without the pretense of a smile. She has little use for Lidia-and Mickey-and thus for Cass.

Zeus is warmer, although he would never stand to see his treasured daughter with a cop, whatever Zeus might be required to say in public these days. But Zeus is a fake. His genial manner can bloom into bouquets of compliments, but the man Cass occasionally sees with a glass of whiskey in his study is insular, calculating and dark.

Dita is fearlessly outspoken about everyone else in her family. Her mother is “a twit,” consumed by appearances, and she calls her bawdy Aunt Teri, who most people think is responsible for Dita’s own outrageous manner, “entertaining.” As for her older brother, Hal, Dita sees him as basically clueless, but loves him nonetheless.

Yet about Zeus, she says very little. Love and loathing. You can almost hear it like the hum of power lines whenever she is around her dad. Dita says her father has told her one thousand times in private that Hal takes after his mother while she is more like him, an observation Dita clearly relishes. But the looks she aims at her father’s back roil with contempt for his unctuousness and grandiosity and limitless ambitions.

In his white suit, Zeus this afternoon more resembles a pit boss in Vegas than a political candidate, leaving aside his stars-and-stripes tie. Pausing to greet other guests, he is nevertheless headed toward Lidia, who is beside Nouna Teri, with her bleached hair, stiff as straw, and her piles of jewelry. Like his brother, Cass is faultlessly attuned to the nuances of his mother’s moods, and even at fifty feet he catches the baleful look with which Lidia registers Zeus’s approach.

Neither Paul nor he fully understands his parents’ grief with the Kronons. Now that Dita’s dad is on TV so often, Cass’s father, Mickey, won’t turn on the set, even to watch the Trappers. It’s mystifying because their elder sister, Helen, insists that before they were born, Zeus was regarded as the family’s savior. In the mid-1950s, Mickey was so totally disabled by a leaking mitral valve that he could not work, and Teri prevailed on her brother to hire Lidia in his office. She remained there for two or three years until she was pregnant with the boys and the invention of the heart-lung machine allowed Mickey to have valve-replacement surgery. With Mickey good as new, Papou Gianis helped their father open a grocery. Paulie and Cass worked there from the time they were five, when they began stocking shelves, and Cass still recalls the day his father, who always held his temper around customers, threw his white grocer’s apron from the cash registers to the dairy case and yelled out that the store would be moving. He was furious about his lease, which was now held by Zeus, who’d bought up most of the commercial property in the old neighborhood.