Don’t Bring Him Back

Erol called while I was putting batteries in the dead.

The little speaker fit beneath my cuff. With my hands resting on a table, I could make a widower hear his wife calling from the hallway. Most people supplied the words themselves. I gave them something to listen to.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“You said tomorrow yesterday.”

“Then we’re in agreement.”

He let that sit. Through my windshield, beyond the wrought-iron gates, Katherine Kovalenko’s house glowed against the wooded slope. The property overlooked the reservoir, though at that hour you could only see the lights along the opposite shore. A fountain ran beside the driveway. October leaves had collected around the mouth of the stone fish.

“Eighteen thousand, Clyde. Nine tonight.”

Erol had stopped taking my bets on Sunday. I’d spent the fourth quarter explaining that the quarterback was injured, as though my bookie owed me an apology. By Monday, he was asking which of my possessions I owned outright.

“I’m with a client.”

“Good. Ask her if she wants to meet anyone recently deceased.”

He hung up before I could tell whether that was a joke.

I checked my teeth in the rearview mirror and pressed the gate buzzer.

***

Katherine wore a cream blouse, dark trousers, and a wedding ring large enough to account for several of my recent mistakes. She watched me wipe my shoes twice before admitting me.

“You’re younger than I expected, Mr. Abernathy.”

“It’s tiring work. I try to take care of myself.”

I was forty-six and had eaten dinner at a gas station.

She led me through a kitchen smelling of roast chicken into a dining room with twelve chairs. Only one place had been set. Beyond the windows, bare branches moved against the glass. The room was warm enough that I regretted the waistcoat.

Roman Kovalenko watched us from a silver frame on the sideboard. Broad face, close-cropped hair, one hand resting on his wife’s shoulder. I recognized him from the articles. A trucking business in Elizabeth. Two former employees who had disappeared. A third who withdrew his statement. Roman himself had been found in his car behind a warehouse, shot through the back of the head.

“He was a good man,” she said.

I hadn’t asked.

“The newspapers made him into something else. Those people didn’t know him.”

“And you did.”

She straightened the photograph. “Thirty-one years.”

That was usually my opening. Thirty-one years meant holidays, children, an empty side of the bed. But Katherine was watching my briefcase.

“What do you need?”

I asked for something he had handled often. She fetched a squat crystal glass with a chip along its base and poured two fingers of clear liquor into it.

“He always used this one. I bought him a whole set, but he liked this.”

“A sentimental man.”

She almost smiled. I asked about their dinners, his friends, things he liked to say. These conversations mattered more than anything that happened after the candles were lit.

“May our enemies know nothing and our neighbors keep quiet,” she said. “He said it in Ukrainian. At every dinner. As though we hadn’t heard it.”

“You miss that.”

She looked at the empty glass beside her plate.

“I miss knowing what happens next.”

I understood that better than she could have known.

My fee was fifteen hundred. When she went to get the envelope, I taped a second speaker beneath the sideboard and angled my little folding mirror toward Roman’s chair. A candle reflected behind your own face could produce remarkable effects if you stared long enough. I encouraged people to stare.

Katherine returned with cash.

“We’ll begin by inviting your husband to join us.”

“Don’t bring him back.”

I paused with the envelope in my hand.

“I only want to ask him something.”

“Of course.”

I put the money away before she could reconsider.

***

For the first twenty minutes, Roman was as cooperative as the rest of my clients’ relatives.

I described a man who had difficulty expressing tenderness. Katherine nodded. I mentioned an unresolved disagreement. She looked down. When I said he had suffered very little, her shoulders relaxed.

“He wants you to stop blaming yourself.”

“Did he say that?”

“Very clearly.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “He wasn’t nearly so forgiving when he was alive.”

She reached for her drink.

“Ask him where he put the gold.”

I kept my eyes closed.

“Sometimes they communicate symbolically.”

“He always was a coward,” she said.

“Something’s coming through,” I said. “No, not yet.”

“Bars. In two blue toolboxes.”

The refrigerator started in the kitchen. I could hear the fountain outside and, beneath the table, the faint buzz of my phone.

“That may require another session.”

“Twenty thousand if you get me an answer tonight.”

I opened my eyes.

“There’s no guarantee.”

“Then there’s no twenty thousand.”

I sent Erol the address beneath the table. Come collect. I’ve got it. Then I turned my phone facedown.

We understood each other now. I asked her to concentrate on the mirror while I adjusted the candle behind it. Its reflection caught her face and the vacant chair beyond her shoulder.

“Roman,” I said. “Your wife needs your help.”

The chair creaked.

I felt for the control in my pocket. My thumb hadn’t touched it.

Katherine sat forward.

“Roman?”

I pressed the button once. From beneath the sideboard came the soft breath I had recorded in my bathroom that afternoon.

“Turn that fucking thing off,” a man said.

The voice came from the mirror.

For a moment I thought Erol had found a way to call through the speaker. Then I saw Katherine’s face. Her mouth had fallen open, and the hand holding her glass was perfectly still.

I switched off the transmitter.

“He always puts on a show for company,” the man said.

The empty chair remained empty. In the mirror, someone sat in it.

He wore the blue shirt from the photograph. His hands rested on the table, broad and pale, a dark line of dirt beneath each nail. His head leaned forward slightly, as though the collar hurt his neck.

I turned around. There was nobody in the chair.

“You see him?” Katherine whispered.

I nodded before remembering I was being paid to make this happen.

“Yes. Naturally,” I said.

In the mirror, Roman reached for his glass. The glass on our table scraped across the wood.

***

I had spent twelve years explaining death to people. I now discovered I knew nothing about it.

Roman lifted the glass in the reflection. Beside Katherine, the real glass remained on the table, but the level of liquor dropped.

“Budmo,” he said.

She raised hers. Habit, perhaps. Her bracelets knocked against the rim.

“You look well,” she said.

Roman reached behind his head. His fingers came away wet.

“Do I?”

She drank.

I looked beneath the table for a projector. There were her shoes, my briefcase, a fallen napkin. I had researched Roman, but someone could have researched me. Erol knew people. Twenty thousand would get me to sit through almost anything.

“The gold, Roman,” she said. “Where did you leave it?”

He looked at me.

“You couldn’t find anybody cheaper?”

“I tried.”

That one hurt.

“The gold is at the bottom of the lake, Kateryna.”

She set down her glass.

“What do you mean, at the bottom?”

“I took the boat out. There was an accident.”

“An accident?”

“These things happen.”

“That was nearly four point three million dollars.”

Until then she had spoken so quietly I’d leaned toward her. Now she was standing.

“You told me you put it somewhere safe. Which lake?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Her eyes moved toward me.

“We should speak privately.”

I would have welcomed that. I started closing my briefcase.

“Sit down, Clyde.”

Roman hadn’t raised his voice. My knees bent anyway.

Katherine said, “They were still in the warehouse on Thursday.”

“I took them out Thursday night.”

“No.”

“You were there?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps somebody gave you bad information.”

She gripped the back of her chair. “Andriy watched you lock them in the office.”

Roman’s face changed very little. He lowered his glass, taking care to set it on the coaster.

“Andriy.”

“He worked for you.”

“I remember. He was sitting behind me in the car.”

The fountain stopped outside. In the quiet that followed, I heard water draining through a pipe.

“Why were you speaking to Andriy, Kateryna?”

She picked up her drink, found it empty, put it down.

“He said you were leaving.”

“So you had him shoot me?”

“I told him to take the boxes.”

“From a locked office.”

“You would never have let him.”

She said it with the old irritation of someone explaining why a repairman had needed a key. Then she seemed to hear herself.

Roman looked toward the window. For several seconds he appeared merely tired.

“Thirty-one years,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“You remember what I used to say about an enemy?”

“You said so many things, Roman.”

“He should live long enough to understand his mistake.”

“I was your wife.”

“Then you should understand more quickly.” He leaned toward her. “You ate at my table.”

“I cooked everything on it.”

He turned back to her.

“You should have asked me for money.”

“I did. You cheap fuck.”

My phone vibrated against my thigh. I almost answered it. Erol was alive. I had never appreciated that about him.

***

Katherine reached across the table and folded the mirror shut.

I let out a breath. The room seemed to warm around us. She stood with both palms resting on the tabletop, staring at the little leather case.

“Open it,” Roman said.

She backed away.

The voice was muffled now. Something struck the inside of the case hard enough to move it an inch.

“What have you done?” she asked me.

“I don’t know.”

“You brought him here.”

“I’ve never brought anybody anywhere.”

Another blow. The little brass clasp bent outward.

I pulled the speaker from my cuff and laid it on the table. “This is what I do. I ask questions. I look things up. There’s another one under the sideboard.”

She stared at the speaker.

“You said he forgave me.”

“I say that to everybody.”

The clasp snapped. The mirror opened slowly, its support scraping over the wood.

Roman was standing behind Katherine’s reflected chair.

“Clyde,” he said. “We can help each other.”

He bent out of sight. When he straightened, he was holding a blue metal toolbox. He set it on the reflected table and lifted the lid.

The bars were smaller than I expected. Neatly stacked, their edges caught the candlelight. He picked one up between his thumb and fingers.

“You don’t have to find them. I’ll give them to you.”

Katherine moved closer despite herself.

“You said they were in the lake.”

“And you said you loved me.”

Roman pushed the bar toward us. The mirror bulged as though a hand were pressing against thin rubber. A gold corner emerged, followed by two pale fingertips. He laid the bar on our table.

It landed with a heavy, ordinary sound.

I picked it up. Its weight pulled at my wrist. One end was cold enough to hurt.

***

“Half the gold,” Roman said. “Hold her here, and it’s yours.”

“And if I don’t?”

He looked at the speaker beside my hand.

“You invite the dead into rooms for a living. I’ll come to every appointment.”

Katherine watched me turn the bar in my hand.

“Clyde. Look at me.”

I did.

“He told you it was in a lake. Now he says he’ll give it to you. You think dying made him honest?”

“You had him killed.”

“Yes. And now you’ve met him.”

The gate buzzer sounded.

My phone lit up. Erol: I’m outside.

“Someone I owe,” I said.

Katherine hurried to the wall panel and pressed the button.

“Then let me pay him.”

Roman watched her return to the table. I took her wrist.

“All of it,” she whispered. “Help me, and you can have all of it.”

She could promise me anything. Roman had put gold in my hand.

When Erol entered, Katherine called him over.

“He’s threatening me. Break that mirror and I’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars.”

Erol looked at me, then at Roman’s reflection. He turned toward the empty chair. His hand went inside his jacket.

“What the fuck is this, Clyde?”

“Put that away,” Roman said.

Erol backed toward the doorway.

I held up the bar.

He stopped.

For several seconds nobody spoke. Then Erol came close enough to take it. He turned it beneath the chandelier, rubbing his thumb over the stamped lettering.

“How much?”

“Two toolboxes,” I said.

“Where?”

Roman lifted a second bar.

Erol looked from the gold to Katherine. She shook her head.

“My debt comes out first,” he said. “Then we split what’s left.”

I nodded.

Katherine pulled free of me.

“Please,” she said.

She was looking directly at me now. She had stopped negotiating.

I caught her wrist again.

Erol took the other.

In the mirror, Roman stood behind her. His fingers settled beneath her jaw. Katherine’s heels scraped the floor, and her bracelets cut into my palm as she struggled.

“Hold her,” Erol said.

I tightened my grip.

Her reflection went still before she did. That was the worst part. I could see what was coming, and I kept holding on.

When it was over, we lowered her beside the chair.

Roman passed the gold through one bar at a time. Erol wiped each with a dinner napkin before putting it in my briefcase.

“We’re square,” he told me.

Across the table, Roman raised his glass.

“May our enemies know nothing.”

Erol closed the case.

“And our neighbors keep quiet,” I said.

Katherine’s hand rested against my shoe. I moved it so I could get the briefcase out.