Identical (13 page)

Crully had met Paul three years ago when he was weighing a run for Congress. Crully had made a conditional commitment to a race in California, and ended up having to decline. But he had attended college at Easton, same as Paul, and while still a student, Mark had worked local races here, so he knew the right people to hire now. He welcomed the challenge of a big-city mayor’s race. And he liked Gianis. Straight shooter. Progressive. Could take advice. And believed in more than his own election, although they all believed in that first and foremost. Paul understood the metrics-how many volunteers, how many dollars. The guy, Clooney, who was running finance, gave Paul ten names to call before he went to sleep, and he’d have his cell out and the list in his hand as soon as the car door closed when they finished an event. Often, he’d be done by noon and ask for ten more. He didn’t whine about needing to see his wife and kids-everybody on the flipping campaign needed time with their children or girlfriends-and he didn’t come out of a church whispering about what a narcissistic asshole that preacher was. He knew you didn’t find shy types in the pulpit. This thing with Kronon was the first time Gianis seemed to have lost his usual discipline. He was acting scared was what bothered Crully. You could never win scared. Everybody-the press, your opponents, your staff-felt it. A leader always acted like a leader. Paul seemed anguished by this whole deal with his brother.

“This is out of control,” Gianis said. Crully watched Paul stare out the window at the big buildings and crowded streets of the city he hoped soon to govern. “And what do you want me to do about this?”

“What do you mean, what do I want? You do the obvious thing. Cooperate. Stick out your chin and say, ‘I’ve got nothing to fear. He can have my prints. He can have my spit.’ This isn’t about what happens in the courtroom. You’re fighting a war of impressions. I’ve said that before.”

“We don’t want that test. We’re not going to get good results,” Gianis said.

Crully thought his heart had stopped.

“What the hell does that mean? Are your fingerprints there? Or your DNA?”

Gianis revolved toward Crully, his mouth crimped sourly.

“What do you think, Mark?”

“So what do you mean ‘bad results’? That’s a good result, isn’t it, if your shit isn’t there? I’d roll up my sleeve and ink a fingerprint card in front of two dozen cameras. And I’d do it today.”

“I can’t do it today.”

“Why?”

“I need to talk to my brother. I need to talk to Sofia. This is hard on my kids. I need to prepare them all.” Gianis continued to roll his tongue around inside his mouth as he turned back to the window. He removed his glasses, as he did frequently, to rub at the lumpy bridge of his nose. “And the bad result, in case you haven’t figured this out, Mark, is that Yavem won’t be able to tell whose DNA it is, and Hal and his ad team will twist that as proof I could be the murderer. And the only thing I’ll have is what I had to start, namely saying I didn’t do it. This thing is a trap.”

Crully took some time. Gianis had a point.

“This whole suit is becoming a train wreck,” Gianis said. “You told me I had to sue, just to make a statement, and that the lawyers would tie everything up until the election.”

“Yeah, and you told
me
there was nothing to worry about. Now Kronon’s got you lying to the cops. And your sad-sack ex-girlfriend, who has the fact you ruined her life just about tattooed on her forehead, is saying you told her your brother was innocent. Don’t fuckin blame this on me. The ex, hell hath no fury, OK. But the cops?”

“I forgot about it.”

“Well, that was unfortunate,” Crully said.

“I didn’t lie to the cops anyway. Not that it makes any difference.”

Crully hadn’t talked with Paul about any of this in detail, and he wasn’t sure he cared to now. Even when shit came bubbling out of the earth like a clogged septic field, he never went back to the candidate to ask about the hot little thing on the side or the no-bid deal for a big contributor. Because he wanted to be able to tell reporters with a straight face that there was no truth to the charges, so far as he knew.

“You didn’t lie to the cops?” asked Crully. “How is that? You told the cops that you and your brother were out drinking beers over the river when it happened. And your brother pled guilty to the murder, so unless Cass had a chat with Einstein and conquered the laws of space and time, he wasn’t with you when the woman was killed. Right?”

Gianis assumed that agonized look Crully hated and gazed through the window again, shaking his head unconsciously at the magnitude of the complications.

“I never told the police we were together all night. They must have misunderstood me. I said that after the picnic we went out to the Overlook and had a few beers.”

“Do we want to go with that? A misunderstanding? Will Cass back that up?” They had said nothing in response to Kronon’s commercials, citing the ongoing litigation. Ray had filed a good motion with Judge Lands, asking him to set ground rules: Could the parties talk or not? It was a complicated issue, apparently, because Paul was a lawyer and legal ethics prohibited attorneys from making statements outside of court about a case while a lawsuit was pending. Judge Lands had scheduled a hearing for next week.

“Of course Cass would back it up.”

“And your brother didn’t tell you he’d killed the Kronon girl by the time you spoke to the police, right? So you didn’t recognize the significance of the timing.”

“He’s never told me that, frankly.”

“He didn’t tell you he was going to plead guilty?”

“Of course he did.”

Crully felt himself squint. “Are you splitting hairs?”

“You could say that, I suppose.”

Gianis was hiding something. That was the real problem. You could bad-mouth the press, and the campaign finance laws, and say politics was all flimflam, and be right 90 percent of the time, but hard truths, big truths about candidates, often emerged in campaigns. It was like performing brain surgery with a jackhammer. But it was getting clearer every day that there was something Gianis wasn’t telling.

“Look,” said Crully. “Is there anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Come on, Paul. Who the fuck am I, Carnac? I don’t want to have to figure out the right question. You know what would sink the ship. Is this ship sinking?”

“No.” Gianis slowly turned back to face Mark. Paul had those mystical black Greek eyes, so dark you couldn’t really see into them. “You want to hear me say it?”

Crully didn’t know for a second. “Yes,” he said finally.

“I didn’t murder Dita Kronon. I didn’t have a goddamned thing to do with it.”

A good politician was always a decent actor, so Crully had learned to take everything with a grain of salt. He knew a guy whom Clinton had dragged into a quiet corner in the White House so POTUS could assure him, strictly between them, that he’d never even coveted Monica Lewinsky. But Crully couldn’t help himself: He believed Paul and felt relief wash through his entire upper body.

“My brother thinks we should dismiss this lawsuit,” Gianis said.

“Fuck,” Crully said. “You can’t dismiss the lawsuit. It’ll be a disaster. It will look like you’re guilty.”

“I’m not saying I agree with him, Mark. But I take his point. It’s just a tar baby, this thing. Unless we agree to that test and hit the bull’s-eye. But it’s 199 out of two hundred we don’t. It’ll all get murkier. You’ll forgive me, but I should never have listened to you guys.”

“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.