Sharon’s black hair glistened in the misty rain, and I saw clearly how it was shot through with gray, how her face was now a scrimshaw of subtle wrinkles. We’d all gotten older together, me and Mike and Sharon. But the world was moving at a thousand miles a minute. I felt a wave of love and sadness. I pulled her
into me and hugged her. She cleaved close to me, and I could feel her tears on my neck.
“Time to get you out of the rain,” I said, holding my arm up. In a few seconds, a yellow cab pulled over.
***
I buttoned up my trench coat and walked, happy to be surrounded by the tall buildings and the lights. The detached scholar in me absorbed Sharon’s news with equanimity, while the edgy David was thrilled. A few couples walked by covered by umbrellas. Men and women. Women and women. Men and men. Better to muse on the many wonderful varieties of love in a beautiful city. The windows of an art gallery shimmered in the night, well-dressed patrons inside laughing and drinking wine. The narrow, crowded streets of Chinatown beckoned on one side. The towers of the financial district rose above me. Sharon was right, I could see myself here.
I turned onto a darker sidestreet and heard voices singing. Singing well. They seemed weirdly out of place on a deserted sidewalk. I recognized the grand nineteenth-century hymn, written before modernity and doubt: “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” A church hulked against the street, its stones black from age and soot. But a stained glass window was brilliantly lit, and it let out the voices of the choir practice inside. It took me a moment to realize that one of the voices was closer, coming from a darkened portal into the church. My eyes adjusted to a raggedy man standing against the sooty stones. He had a beautiful voice. “’Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all who breathe away,’” he sang to the street.
At his feet was an upturned hat. I pulled out a bill and dropped it in. I walked on slowly, letting the rain mend my desert skin, hearing the voices fade.
When I got to the lobby, the desk clerk handed me a message. It was from Vince Renzetti.
Chapter Nineteen
What is it about old photographs? Did they always look old? On a shelf at home, my grandmother and grandfather look out at me from a sepia print. He wears a thin tie and suit coat, she a simple, light-colored blouse. He is blond, with a wide, sensual mouth. She is black Irish, her eyes brooding and intelligent. Both wear serious expressions-the style of the day, and, as Grandfather told me much later, a style that helped conceal the dental problems that were rampant then. Those days were 1910, and Grandmother and Grandfather were newlyweds, twenty and twenty-four years old respectively. And of course that photo was the leading edge of technology of that day. They didn’t sit for the photographer in dusty territorial Arizona knowing that many decades later they would look like a museum piece to their grandson, who lived with everyday miracles such as jet travel, air-conditioning, biotechnology, and computers.
I reminded myself of this as I sat in Vince Renzetti’s parlor and took in a lifetime of old photos that sat on tables, shelves, and walls-everywhere that didn’t house a plant. He was one of those men who were told “You haven’t changed a bit!” at reunions. So he was instantly recognizable in the Army Air Corps officer’s uniform of World War II. Same in the photo with J. Edgar Hoover, both men wearing double-breasted suits and expressions of straight-mouthed seriousness. And another picture showing him with a young man who had a thin nose and an earnest Kentucky face: John Pilgrim. They were walking with their hands on the arms of a fleshy-faced guy who tried to look away from the camera.
“That was just after we were assigned to Phoenix, in 1947,” Renzetti said, noticing me noticing the photo. “Everybody wore suits, ties, and hats back then. Even the bad guys.”
He sat in a straight-backed chair opposite me, drinking green tea. This day he wore a blue blazer and red and white rep tie. Outside a screen door the weather was chill and rainy. Inside, it was uncomfortably warm and smelled vaguely of dill and Williams LectricShave.
“I’ve checked you out, Mapstone,” he said in the booming master-of-ceremonies voice. “You worked as a sheriff’s deputy when you were young. Then you got your Ph.D. in history and taught for fifteen years. When you failed to gain tenure, you went back home to Phoenix. You got a job from your old partner, who was the chief deputy.”
“Now he’s the sheriff,” I interposed.
“You use the historian’s techniques to solve old cases,” he went on. “Very innovative.”
Renzetti’s eyes never left me. His hands didn’t move from the teacup he held in his lap-no gesticulating Italian-American stereotype in Vincent Renzetti. His posture was relaxed and businesslike. Only his sentences, short, chopped, conveyed any sense of energy or agitation.
“You were raised by your paternal grandparents,” he said. “Why?”
“My parents died,” I said, trying to force down a feeling that we were playing a game of personal manipulation, maybe just as he played it as a G-man. “They were in a small plane.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and a little warmth took his voice down a few decibels. “My wife and child are dead, too.” He motioned to a shelf of family photos, a black-and-white of a fair-haired woman with merry eyes and a wide, glistening forehead, and a color photo of what seemed like her clone in long hippy hair-a daughter. But he offered no explanation.
“I gave my life to the Bureau,” he said. “I don’t regret it. Most of the time.”
And he told his story. He was a kid from San Francisco, North Beach, born in 1919. His parents came over from Naples before the Great War. His father, who couldn’t read or write, delivered milk with a horse-drawn wagon. But young Vincent was forced to stay in school. He went on to Cal-Berkeley. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Air Corps, and flew P-51 Mustang fighters in Europe. He didn’t say it, but I noticed a Silver Star pinned on the uniform of the young officer in the photo. After the war, he went to law school and then joined the FBI. He was a rookie when he came to Phoenix.
“My point is that I’ve decided to take a chance on you, Mapstone,” he said. “The Bureau was good to me. I’ve had a good career, and a good life. The only thing I regret is what happened to John Pilgrim.”
He sipped his tea and I watched, afraid even to breathe.
“Nowdays, I read these stories about a special agent who was passing secrets to the Russians. Another one who was selling information to the Mafia. Then the agents who warned about terrorists, and they were ignored. That hurts, personally. It makes me wonder why I stayed silent all those years.”
The room grew large with expectation. Outside the screen door, I could hear soft rain, and beyond that, a siren. I asked quietly, “Did Pilgrim kill himself?”
“No, hell no,” Renzetti said, his nostrils flaring. He set the teacup aside and shook his head in short, exasperated jerks. “That’s just nonsense. John loved life. He loved everything about it. Maybe too much.”
“So why…?”
“Why? Because John was a maverick. Because John made his bosses look bad when he solved cases his own way. Because they didn’t know what the hell happened, and saying he was a suicide tied a neat little ribbon around it. Even if that ribbon was only for internal consumption. Look, the Bureau probably told you John was a head case of some kind, that he was sent to Phoenix to get one last chance. That’s bullshit. He was a top agent. He was sent to Phoenix to trap a spy.” He sipped his tea and watched my reaction. “That’s right. The Soviets had moles at Los Alamos. People working on the nuclear program. All this has come out the past few years, Moscow releasing documents, American papers declassified…”
“The Venona documents.”