Read The Old Boys for Free Online

“Who’s in and who’s out?”
    Everybody was in.
    “Let’s meet again tomorrow to task this thing in a little more detail,” I said. “My house at seventeen hundred hours.”

8

    The next morning, I was making myself a toasted cheese sandwich for lunch when Zarah tapped on the kitchen window.
    “How did you know I was in the kitchen?” I asked after letting her in.
    “I smelled the toasted cheese sandwich,” she replied. “Have you got an extra one?”
    I had made two. I gave her the extra sandwich along with a dill pickle and a glass of iced tea. We ate while seated at my tiny kitchen table. Zarah and I knew little of each other and we hardly talked as we ate, but the meal was companionable. She was a beautiful woman, maybe thirty years old—about the same age now as her grandmother had been when Reinhard Heydrich first fell for her. One could see the monster’s point.
    I felt a certain awkwardness, but that had nothing to do with her looks. Zarah had not attended her father’s funeral. Needless to say this had done nothing to intensify Stephanie’s love for her stepdaughter, and I had been hauled off into a corner to make sure I was fully aware of just how outrageous Zarah’s conduct was. I tended to agree, but what did I know about Zarah or her reasons?
    I said, “You were missed yesterday.”
    “So Stephanie has told me.”
    Shewas impassive, controlled. It was remarkable how many glimpses of Paul one saw in Zarah, considering that she had known her father personally for only five or six years. Although I don’t know the details, arithmetic suggests that she was conceived sometime around the last day of her parents’ marriage. Her late mother, who was as neurotic as she was gorgeous—had she been born a rung or two further down the Kentucky social ladder, she might well have become Miss America—took revenge on Paul by concealing their child’s existence from him. He knew nothing about Zarah until, as Stephanie put it, Helen of Troy knocked on the door one day and identified herself as his child. DNA tests confirmed this, but looking at her and remembering her father were enough of a paternity test.
    “That’s why I’ve come to see you,” Zarah said. “I didn’t go to the funeral because I think it was a sham. If my father is dead— and there is no evidence that he is—those were not his ashes that were buried at Arlington.”
    “You know that for a fact?”
    “No. But if he were dead, I would know it and believe it.”
    “But you don’t.”
    She shook her head.
    I said, “Neither do I. I’m no soothsayer, but I don’t believe that Paul’s death has been proved.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the man I know is too adroit to let himself be killed before he had the answer he was looking for.”
    I paused for a moment to give her a chance to reply or ask a question, but she seemed to sense that I had more to say and she waited for me to say it.
    “However,” I said, since the floor seemed to be mine, “I think you should be careful. Your father has spent his life in pursuit of a mother whom the rest of the world has believed to be dead for almost sixty years.”
    “But who may be alive after all.”
    “So your father believed, and for all we know he was right. Butthere’s no more evidence that Lori Christopher is living at ninetyfour or whatever than that Paul is dead.”
    Zarah changed the subject. “May I ask you something?”
    “Certainly.”
    “If Ibn Awad is alive and is threatening the same kind of action for which you were ordered to kill him before, how does that make you feel?”
    “Incompetent.”
    “You want to correct the mistake.”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Why?”
    “I made this mess. I should clean it up.”
    “Alone? Without help?”
    “Your father has helped me. He gave me information and something I can sell to finance the operation.”
    “Yes, the Hicks. He told me.”
    “He told you?”
    “He left a letter for me.”
    She handed me a sheet of paper,