Pete Hamill - Forever

He reached for the three balls and stood up and slowly began juggling them. “I was raised by… an uncle,” he said, spitting the words through jaws tightening in concentration. “He was a wonderful… man… who had been orphaned himself… and went off with a troupe of buskers instead of going… to school…. He taught me how—to do this .”

The balls moved more swiftly now, and Cormac thought: I’ve come to kill you, you idiot, and you’re making an entertainment. He felt a twinge of sympathy, imagining the earl when he was twelve. “I loved… that man,” the earl said. “Loved… him.” And Cormac told himself: Stop! Remember the day! Remember the diamond glinting in the light, the dead eyes, the man urging Patch forward. Remember the shot, and the shouts that followed: Finish him off! Sweat blistered the older man’s brow. His mouth tightened in concentration.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Cormac said. “Try to remember, please. It was a bit more than a year ago. On a road in Ireland. You and your men stopped an Irishman and told him to surrender his horse. He refused. And you killed him.”

Now the earl understood. The balls slowed in the air, and one at a time he snatched them into his right hand. He gazed at Cormac, as if considering using them as weapons, then laid them on the desk beside the posters.

“You’re talking about that fool. Patch.”

“No: You made it happen, sir. I was there.”

“The man refused to obey a law .”

“A law that didn’t apply to him. My father wasn’t Catholic.”

“He was Irish, wasn’t he?”

“But not Catholic.”

“Yes, but—”

A feathery sound on the balcony. And now Kongo was there, eyes alert, silent in Indian moccasins. Carrying a canvas shroud. The earl’s eyes widened and he backed up under his mother’s portrait, hunching like a small boy trapped.

“Do you recognize this African, sir?” Cormac said.

“I don’t know any Africans, except those who work on the grounds here.”

“You should meet this one. Your company kidnapped him and brought him here in manacles.”

The earl began speaking more quickly, the words bunching. “You’re talking outofa profound stupidity. Forwhat you’ve already-done, you’llsurelyhang, unless I plead for your wretched life!”

Thank you, Cormac thought. I was beginning to pity you, and you’ve shown me your true face. Thank you. Thank you. The earl saw Kongo spreading the shroud upon the carpeted floor, as if preparing a ceremony. “Sit down,” Cormac said, pointing at the earl with the sword. The earl obeyed, searching for a posture, for an attitude that might save him, then sagging into the chair. Cormac placed a bare foot upon the earl’s polished desk and leaned closer, the sword a thrust away from his ruffled chest. For the first time, the earl had doom in his eyes. He glanced at the door as if expecting rescue, but there was no sound from the hallway. Kongo picked up the sign, eased around to the door, and listened. He shook his head. No sound. Not even breathing. Cormac took his foot off the desk and came around closer to the earl. Kongo approached a second door, leading to what they knew from the house map was a bedroom.

“What do you want?” the earl whispered. “What in God’s name do you want? ”

“I want you to take that pen and a sheet of paper and confess that you had my father killed for a horse.”

“Of course,” the earl said. “Gladly.”

Nerves twitched in his face, which was runny with calculation. He picked up a goose quill, pulled a sheet of paper closer, dipped for ink, and began to write. He finished. Signed it with a flourish. Cormac leaned forward to lift it from the desk, and the earl lunged for the pistol. He gripped the barrel, then forced open the lock, prepared to shoot. Cormac slammed the flat of the sword across his brow, and his grip loosened. Cormac pried the gun loose of the earl’s grip and tossed it to Kongo.

“That was stupid,” Cormac said.

“I’m sorry,” the earl said in a beaten voice. A thin line of blood lay open on his brow.

“No, you’re not.”

“Go ahead and shoot me,” the earl said. “But remember: one shot from that gun and I’ll have ten men in this room.”

“Yes, and they’ll find you with a hole in your head.”

The earl’s eyes were now brimming, moving to the ceiling, to the doors, to the portrait, and back to Cormac.

“Please, just leave,” he said, while Cormac read the note. “I won’t pursue this if you just leave now. Here, I’ll give you some money.” He played with a key in a locked desk drawer. “Not enough for the terrible thing that happened to your father. But—”

“Nothing changes with you, ever,” Cormac said. “You tried to pay for my mother’s death too. Do you remember that? She died under the wheels of your coach. In the mud.”

The earl looked doomed. He opened the drawer as if fumbling for money, mumbling broken words, sweating harder, and then there was another pistol in his hand.

Cormac rammed the sword into his heart.

The earl’s surprised eyes opened wider, and so did his mouth. Cormac jerked the sword free, blood spread across the ruffled shirt, and the earl’s face hit hard upon the desk. Jesus God, Cormac thought: I’ve done it. I’ve done what I came to America to do. I’ve completed the terms of the vow. Jesus God: I’m free.

Then Kongo touched his arm. “Quick,” he said. “We go.” Together, they laid the earl’s body in the shroud (his face whitening, his eyes wide). The blood was flowing now, slopping on Cormac’s hands, puddling and staining the shroud. They closed the open end around his head, tied the lumpy bundle with ropes, and lifted it together. “Quick,” Kongo said again. Cormac could feel the leaking blood as it sloshed within the shroud. He and Kongo moved its dead weight to the outside stairs that would take them to the deck and the river. Cormac heard himself panting, and for an instant he saw images of shrouded bodies on greased planks falling into the sea.

From the distance, he heard muffled shouts. As in Kongo’s plan, a fire had begun in the barn. To distract the earl’s men. To cover their flight. “Quick,” Kongo said. “Quick.” Cormac turned for a final look at the earl’s study, at the desk, the posters, the juggler’s polished balls: and saw the room’s second door open.

A woman stood there, horror on her face.

She was big with child.

Bridget Riley.

All the way here from across an ocean, from the damp earth of Ireland, from the smoke of a lost, gutted mansion: Bridget Riley herself. Cormac stepped toward her and she backed up. Kongo had his back to the doors, listening to the muffled sounds of alarm. He raised the pistol and aimed it at her. “No ,” Cormac said. “Don’t kill her.” Kongo’s eyes were cold and impatient. Bridget took in the bloody sword, the pistol, the lumpy shroud, and understood what had happened.

“Don’t scream, Bridget,” Cormac said.

“Who are you?” she said, a trill of terror in her throat.

“You know me. We rode together through Ireland. And here you are, Bridget, still the earl’s whore, living in another Big House.”

“Good God,” she whispered.

“And now carrying the earl’s bastard,” Cormac said.

The noise from outside smothered her sudden wracked and hopeless weeping. Horses were whinnying. Men shouted. A distant bell was ringing.

“Don’t kill me.”

He could hear Mary Burton, another soul far from home, pleading in the same way: to him, or to Kongo, or to others who had the power to let her live or make her die. For a fraction of a moment, Mary and Bridget merged, their faces, bodies, masks, wombs. As if they were sisters. His contempt for Bridget, for the earl’s whore, for the woman who had told him her sorrowful story in Ireland, smashed against his pity. Pity for her. For the child she carried. Then he thought: If she’s carrying the earl’s child, I must kill it, and her too. To make certain that I’ve gone to the end of the line. But suppose it was a girl child? Suppose…