The Palace Thief (12 page)

“How long have you been here?”

She put her hand on the blankets over my ankle. “Not long. I was watching you.”

“Was I snoring?”

“You sleep like an angel.”

“Clive says I snore.”

“Well, you don’t.”

I lay back down. She hummed a few notes. “William,” she whispered, “have you told your parents about me?”

“No way.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Well, I think your mother knows. She looks at me like she does.”

“Sandra,” I said. “There is no way in the world that my mother knows about you.”

She smiled in the moonlight. Then I heard her shoes drop onto my area rug, one then the other. “I
told
you I was clairvoyant,” she said.

“About what?”

“About this. I knew this would happen.” I smiled, and suddenly she was lying next to me, on top of the blankets. She
draped her arm over my chest. “You’re sweet,” she said, “for not telling them.”

“Thanks.”

“You smell like your brother.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Well, he learned it from me.”

She giggled, then we both went silent, and it took her a long time, lying there looking at the moonswept walls with me, listening, I think, to my breathing, before she turned her head abruptly and kissed me on the lips. Then she turned away again. “Really—” she said. “That was sweet.”

I thought for a while, then turned and kissed her back, harder, and in another few moments let my hand move to her shoulder. At certain moments I could not help thinking about how I would describe this to Billy DeSalz when I saw him:
She smelled like oranges
, and
her lips were as soft as margarine
. Finally she pulled away. “Oh, don’t,” she whispered, closing her eyes, “Not yet, William. Don’t ruin it.”

When she had gone, I rose and went into the bathroom. Sleep had deserted me. I brushed my teeth with Clive’s Ultra Brite and smoothed a palmful of his shaving cream onto my cheeks. I turned on the hot water and ran his razor underneath it, then stroked it back and forth on my face in smooth, decisive zags. The mirror steamed and I cleared a blotch in its center, where I tried to see myself in the way I must have looked to Sandra. “Hello, sweetheart,” I said in a low voice, leaning forward into the regathering mist. “My name is Ariel Sheshevsky.”

That day I began looking for Clive’s dictionary. I looked in his room, the basement, and the backyard; I considered his character,
then checked in unlikely places, like the middle of the bookshelves in the living room and underneath the silverware tray in the kitchen drawer. Then I decided that perhaps it would be in an unlikely form and not in an unlikely place—inside a book of matches, say, or recorded on one of his tapes. I combed through his wallet. I poured out all the bottles of vitamins in our medicine cabinet. At his desk, I sifted through his roach clips, his lighters and cigarette cases, his guitar picks, his articles on home cultivation and Grow-Lites, and his smoke bottles and water pipes made in shop class. From behind his bookshelf I retrieved his envelope of love poems from Sandra, which were all from Shakespeare, written out in her cramped hand. But there were no new ones, and I had read the old ones many times before. All I could find of his new language was a torn scrap of paper among the poems that said, in pencil,
“bar, baratsag, barki,”
and on the other side, in calligraphy,
“We must teach them what they do not know.”

On a Sunday morning in April, in Columbus, Clive won the western Ohio finals. From there he would move on to the States. That afternoon for lunch we ate leg of lamb, his favorite, and afterward our father went upstairs to practice brainteasers with him. I washed the pans and then dried them, and finally went to the living room to study geometry. When I could resist no longer, I went upstairs to join them.

They were sitting on his windowsill,
The Moscow Puzzles
open between them, and our father was gazing at something in the corner of the pane. I came in and cleared my throat.

“I was just looking at the moldings around the window here, William,” he said. He looked up. “Have you ever noticed them? They are made of a number of intricate pieces.”

I looked. “Congratulations, Clive,” I said. “I dried the dishes for you.”

“Thanks, William.”

“Clive’s taught me a few words,” our father said suddenly.
“Agghgeny,”
he said, and looked at him.

Clive nodded.
“Servoos,”
he said.

“Allat,”
said our father. He looked out the window again.
“Bayosh, birkahoosh, diznaw,”
he recited, staring out the glass.

Clive winked at me. “Little brother,” he whispered, “The old man has just tried a doob.”

“I don’t see what this marijuana’s supposed to do, William,” said our father.

“You tried it, Dad?”

“Yes, I did, sailor.” He winked at Clive. “Look out, Sheshevsky!” he said. Then he looked up from the window and shrugged his shoulders. “Bombs away,” he said. I sometimes wish he had been a different man.

“Bongs,” said Clive.

Clive reached behind his leg, pulled out his water pipe, and handed it to me. He tamped down the bowl with the end of the lighter and pressed the flame to it as I sucked; I held the smoke in my cheeks, then pretended to draw it into my lungs. I held it in my mouth until I couldn’t anymore, then blew it out slowly and took another hit. Finally I walked over and stood next to the windowsill, where our father put his arm over my shoulder and stretched his foot across to Clive’s shin. We looked at the moldings for a time, and then out the window, and our father tapped his fingers to Clive’s riffs. “Interesting,” our father finally said, “you didn’t inhale, William.”

“Sure I did.”

“He never has,” said Clive.

*  *  *

At dinner that night our father opened another bottle of wine that Colonel Byzantian had sent us. In the letter that our father read aloud as he poured glassfuls for our mother and himself, the Colonel included the history of his grapevines, which needed the exact climate and soil found in only two regions of the world. “That is why I have come here,” he wrote, “for soil this color. Too many years on ships and you forget the taste of women and wine.” Instead of “sincerely,” or “love,” the letter ended with, “In the earth we shall find the hidden source.” Our father repeated this phrase, draining his wine, then went to the cabinet and took down a glass for Clive.

“Well,” he said, after he had filled it and another for himself. “Here’s to the champion. And here’s to the hidden sauce.”

“Source,” said our mother.

Our father winked at me, drained his glass again, repoured it, and pretended to look back at the letter. “I see that you’re right, dear,” he said. “Well,” he yawned, leaning back in his chair, “My wife is right, and I only have one son left.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then our mother said, “What is that supposed to mean, Simon?”

“Why, I don’t know,” he answered, swishing the wine in his cheeks. “It surprised
me
, too. It just came right out.” He swallowed the wine, smiled at Clive and me, then drank again. “Too many years on ships, I guess.”

“You’re drunk, Simon,” said our mother.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” he said.

But that evening after dinner his words returned to me. I was in the living room puzzling through my geometry when I suddenly realized that Clive was the one he was talking about, not me. Clive was the one he considered his only son. I heard guitar scratchings from upstairs, the churn of the dishwasher in
the kitchen, and the broadcast of the Cleveland Symphony in our father’s office. I had always assumed that something was wrong with my brother, that something in him was dangerous and perhaps shameful, and that my parents and I were allied to repair it, but now, on the living room couch, I first thought of it another way, that I was the one they loved less; that Clive was aloof in order to escape their love, and that I was zealous in order to win it.

I was in the middle of a difficult problem about river current, which I had read over and over. I turned to the hint section at the end of the book and glanced quickly at the schematic diagram of a raft in a river, then turned back again and did more figuring. Outside, Mario Ceref from down the street was kissing a girl under the streetlight; his hands moved down to her hips. Clive had shown me how to do this exact sort of problem a couple of weeks before; the knowledge of mathematics resided inside him like an instinct, the way it resided in our father, and I felt a quick sadness again in my chest. But I made it disappear. From upstairs I heard Clive’s steps on the floor joists, then his window sliding open and the tap of his feet as he sat on the sill-seat and bumped them against the house; I stared out the window and waited for his marijuana ash to fall in front of me onto the lawn. Down the block the girl had walked away from Mario Ceref, who was now pretending to kiss the lightpole.

I went back and knocked on our father’s office. “It’s me, captain,” I said.

He was leaning back at his desk, and when I walked in he lost his balance in the chair and nearly toppled. I steadied him with my hand and went to the corner of the room, where I looked out the window onto our deck. The radio was playing W-104 again.

“Yes, sailor?” he said after a few moments.

“I thought that was cool, what you said the other day about grades.”

“I thought you might.”

In the dark window I watched his reflection as he puckered and unpuckered his lips behind me, then shook his head ponderously. “Dad,” I said quickly, “What would you say if I got into trouble?”

“What kind of trouble?”

I paused. “Big trouble.”

He narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. “You won’t, sailor.”

“How do you know?”

He raised his eyebrows. “How do I know? I just do.” He stood and came up next to me at the window. “Character is fate,” he said, looking out into the yard. “Heraclitus said that, two thousand years ago.”

“What if I changed my character?”

He laughed. “You won’t,” he said. “That’s the point.”

The deejay announced the hour and put on “Walk on the Wild Side,” and our father and I stood looking out the window into the garden. The night was moonless. In the light from the Cubanos’ house we watched a raccoon from their yard appear atop our back fence, scrape for its balance, then scamper down onto our grass, first its forelegs, then its hind ones, like a pelt-covered Slinky. It ambled across to the bin that held our garbage cans. “Hmmm,” said our father, “expensive taste—it likes anchovies.”

“Thank you, Ohio Mutual.”

He tousled my hair, and I felt better. The raccoon reached its paws up to the latch, knocked it back and forth, then gave up and climbed back over into the Cubanos’ yard. Our father switched off the radio. “All these creatures,” he said, “going about their business.”

“What a noble creature is man.”

He smiled. Garbage cans clattered onto the Cubanos’ patio, floodlights came on, and the raccoon bolted down their driveway. In a moment Mrs. Cubano came outside in her bathrobe, and our father swiftly turned off the light. “Shhh,” he whispered.

We stood there. Across the way, she was picking up the trash and dropping it back into the can. Her breath clouded the air, and she pulled her robe tighter. Then she sat down on the deck rail and lit a cigarette. She smoked it gazing up into the sky, and after a few moments she looked around, shook her hair out so that it fell down her back, then put her hand on the belt of her robe.

“Pull,” I whispered.

Our father smiled at me. “Don’t move, sailor,” he said. “We could lose all reconnaissance.”

She looked across at our house.

“Stealth is utmost, captain.”

We watched, still as trees. After a time, she stood, tightened her robe, threw her cigarette butt into our yard, and walked back into the house.

“Oh, well,” said our father.

He turned on the radio again. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” was playing. “You know, captain,” I said, “Clive wouldn’t have been interested in that.”

“In what?”

“In what we just saw.”

He rubbed my head. “He’s not a sailor,” he said.

“That’s it,” I said. Across the way, the light in the Cubanos’ kitchen came on. “Dad,” I said, “What were
you
like in high school?”

“What was
I
like?”

“Were you a screw-off? Did you care about your grades?”

“We were at war in those days, William.” He went to his desk, took out his key ring, tossed it in the air and caught it. “In geometry,” he said, “we learned bomb trajectories. Yes, I cared about my grades, William. Then I went to war.”

“You can be smart without being smart,” I said.

He nodded at me.

“Clive, William,” called our mother. “Dessert! We’re having pie.”

I turned to the door, but he didn’t move. He switched the dial back to the classical music station, then looked out the window. The raccoon had appeared again at the end of the Cubanos’ driveway. “You’re a sailor,” he said. “With you, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

The music welled and the raccoon climbed back up onto their porch. “Do you recognize the composer?” he asked.

“Beethoven?” I said. “No, wait a minute. Haydn?”

“No, Albinoni. Listen to this. Listen to the passion of the cellos.” He turned it up, and when the strings came to a crescendo, his eyes closed.

“Dad,” I said. “I’ve been stealing things.”

He opened his eyes again. “Oh,” he said. “I think I understand.” He gestured out the window. “See that deck, William?”

“Yes.”

“That deck cost me sixteen hundred dollars.”

“I know that, commander.”

“Well, how do you think I earned that money?”

I pointed at his insurance file. “That,” I said.

He looked serious. “Well, then, you must also know that what I said to you about grades was incorrect. Your grades are about as important as anything gets.” He shook his head again. “Grades are all an employer has to judge you by. You know
that, William, don’t you? That what’s right is right? That it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease? You know, don’t you, that these crazy times are going to pass?”