Текст книги "Blood And Bone"

Автор книги: William Lashner

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

It had been days now, and the phone hadn’t rung. His gambits had worked as perfectly as he could have hoped, there would be no need for any more violence. Robert Spangler should have been pleased. And yet.

And yet he kept staring at the phone, feeling a strange, almost erotic desire, as if he were a high-school boy waiting for a call from the one girl in school he knew would put out. It was an inexpensive black and silver thing, that phone, decidedly low-tech, but as it lay silently on his desk, lying helpless on its back, he couldn’t tear his gaze from its smooth flanks and delicate keys.

He wondered if it was still working, and so, for what seemed the umpteenth time, he called the number with his other phone, his landline phone. This was a minor breach of his precautions, creating a link in a chain that could lead back to him, but he couldn’t help himself, so worried and excited and fearful was he. After a moment the cheap phone shivered to life and rang with a jangling jangle, and it was as if the call were coming not from his phone but from an independent part of his soul, a frightening part, the part that had grown to like the taste of acid.

He remembered the first time he had tried hot and sour soup at a Chinatown restaurant. It was the most unpleasant thing he had ever tasted, a thick, bilious combination of vinegar and heat. After a few spoonfuls, he gagged and pushed it away. But that night he had dreamed of the soup and couldn’t wait to order it again. And again. And now the vile taste of violence, a contradictory combination of power and subjugation all in service to her iron will, had left him with that same perverse craving.

Answer it, this frightening part of his soul called into his ear in a voice startlingly similar to her own craven caw. “It’s just the ring from my test call,” he whispered to himself. Answer it, you never know, came the reply. Do it. Now. Obey me. Now.

And in that voice was all that frightened him most. Not that the phone would ring and he might have to kill that boy; killing was merely an unnecessary task he had done before and could do again when necessity reared its fearsome head and stared at him with those ice-blue eyes. What frightened him was the part of him that wanted it to ring, wanted to be forced to confront that boy and hold the boy’s head down in a pool of water as he thrashed and then panicked and then calmed. Or point the gun at the boy’s chest and blast a hole in the boy’s heart. Or to place a gun to the boy’s head and blow his brains across the room. These first two he had done already in furtherance of her will, the third was still only a delicious possibility.

No, no, that was wrong, not what he meant at all. A horrifying possibility. Horrifying. Because this Kyle Byrne was just a boy, an orphan, missing his father, trying to recapture a little of what he had lost. Yearning for love and acceptance, that was all. And who knew better than Robert Spangler what it was like to yearn for just those things, or the price that such yearning could exact? Who could be more sympathetic to what the boy was going through? And yet, still, he couldn’t help but stare at the smooth, dark skin of the phone as it lay on the television console, couldn’t help but hope for the ring that would signal a problem and send him off into the night seeking the peculiar satisfactions of a bowl of hot and sour soup.

Oh, God, what had he become, what had she made of him? He didn’t want to be a monster. He wanted to be the boy running out of his house with a peanut butter on Wonder bread sandwich. That boy played and laughed and dreamed sweet dreams, and yearned only for the taste of Coca-Cola in his mouth. That boy would grow up to have a family of his own, make peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder bread for his son. That boy had possibilities.

But that was before, before she made her leap and started whispering to him that maybe he could follow her path, calling him “Bobby dear,” importuning him, making him an instrument of her deepest desires and her unearthly will. And in the process turning a part of him into some sort of a fiend who gloried in the taste of blood. Except he didn’t feel like a fiend, which comforted him a bit. But then maybe fiends didn’t ever feel like fiends, maybe that was what was so fiendish about them.

That was why the phone had become for him something of an obsession, as it reclined before him, open and easy, waiting for the ring that would force him to rise and send him into action. Its ring would be like the sweetest note of her sweet voice, reaching out to take hold and caress the monster she had created. Would he reject its blandishments and prove his utter humanity? Or would he let the monster respond to her caress, to arise and swell and march into the world to seed its darkness? Only the phone could give him that answer.

So he stayed close, sleeping with the phone resting on the empty pillow beside him, bringing it to the lavatory with him or taking it out to lunch. Or now, in the early-evening hours, sitting across from where it perched on the television, sitting in a deep easy chair, naked and alone, staring at the phone with hope and fear all at once, as if that cheap piece of disposable plastic held the very fate of his soul in its silicon chip. Hour after hour. Sitting. Staring. Waiting for the decision.

He wondered again if the phone was still operational. Maybe it needed to be recharged. Maybe something was interfering with the signal. He couldn’t help himself. He lifted the handset off his landline and redialed the number.

The cell phone rang.

He hung up.

The phone kept ringing.

And ringing.

He dialed again and was sent straight to voice mail.

The phone still rang.

He stood up, stepped to the desk, picked up the cell phone, checked

the number. Not his own. He pressed the talk button. “Hello,” he said. “Hello.”

He listened for a moment, and then, from deep inside, a voice he didn’t recognize slithered like a snake from his throat. “So,” it said, this other voice, sibilant and foreign. “It is you. How nice that you called, Mr. Byrne. Shall we meet once again?”

CHAPTER 23

ROBERT HAD PICKED the spot long before the call came in. Someplace remote and yet still covered with the noisome noise of traffic, someplace that seemed public but in fact could be very private, someplace where the danger was well hidden.

He arrived early, parked on the other side of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, crossed at the light, and walked up the traffic ramp that led to the art museum. It was late enough so that the museum was closed, and an array of shadows covered the landscape. He stayed within the lines of darkness as he climbed down the broad staircase to the arcade flanked with the statues of Revolutionary War heroes and then cut to the left at the wide traffic circle. He walked through the grass and past the great columned buildings of the Fairmount Water Works, closed now due to the hour, and headed to a grand gazebo that rested on the very edge of the Schuylkill River.

The rise where the museum now sat, which used to house the eighteenth-century reservoirs that supplied the city its water, acted as a shield to the rear of the gazebo. The Schuylkill River was at its front, with the sounds of water rushing over a low dam, and traffic on the expressway on the river’s far bank, blanketing the site with a continuous muffled roar. On the left was a bend in the river, on the right a small grove of trees blocking the well-lit but deserted row of boathouses. To Robert’s eye it was an almost perfect place for murder.

He cased the area for a moment more, before slipping into the shadow about a hundred feet away from the gazebo, where he could scan the parking lots and roads surrounding the area. He didn’t yet know how the night would turn, he didn’t yet know which part of himself would take control of the encounter with the young Byrne. He was terrified at the probability that he would be forced to use violence, and thrilled, too, and frightened at the thrill, and ashamed of the terror. The only thing he could trust was the solidity of the gun in his pocket.

He leaned against a wall and waited. And waited. He waited up to the time that had been set for the meeting, and then beyond. He let his sharp incisor bite into his tongue and draw blood as he waited.

A silhouette appeared out of the trees in the direction of the boathouses. It looked to be the right size, this silhouette, but something was wrong. It was making its way to the gazebo as if it were the shadow of a wreck of an old man, hobbled and limping. With a crack pipe and a fresh chunk of escape, no doubt. The meeting time was now long past, and Robert was beginning to doubt that Byrne would show, but Robert still needed to get rid of the old man. He pulled a ten out of his wallet, gripped his gun, and made his approach.

“You want to earn some money, old man?” he said in a hoarse whisper to the hobbling silhouette.

“I’m not that old,” said the silhouette with a grunt. “O’Malley?”

Robert’s hand tightened around the gun. “Byrne?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened to you, boy?”

“I fell into a hole,” said Byrne.

“Be more careful next time.”

“There won’t be a next time.”

“There’s always a next time. Go on to the gazebo. We’ll talk there.”

Robert followed the boy as he limped toward the river. Byrne was taking small steps and was bent at a strange angle, as if his ribs had been savaged. Someone had done a job on him already, which was good. There wouldn’t be any question of Byrne fighting back when things turned nasty. Robert gave his gun a caress as they entered the gazebo. The structure smelled furry and sickly at the same time, as if wet diabetic rodents had pissed on its walls. The din of the river hurtling over the dam grew loud enough to swallow a shot. If a body flipped over the dam, at this time of night it might not be found until it floated by the navy yard at the southern tip of the city.

“Do you have my file?” he said.

“No,” said Byrne.

“But you found it, right?” said Robert as he slowly pulled the gun from his pocket.

“No.”

“No?” He felt a slap of disappointment and a surge of relief all at once. He slipped the gun back into his pocket. “Then why did you call?”

“To talk to you.”

“I said I’d talk only if you found my file.”

“I’m not finding your damn file,” said Byrne.

“But you looked.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“My father’s law office. The office of his shady real-estate partner.”

“What about his home? He was supposed to have taken a file cabinet to his home.”

“I checked out his widow’s house, although you got there before me. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t at any of those places. But in the process of searching, I’ve been arrested, insulted, beaten, and I’ve accomplished nothing except adding a dose of blood to my urine. I’m done.”

“You’re not done. We’re never done.”

“Maybe, but I’m not looking anymore. I’m giving up. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I can’t find the file.”

“I’m disappointed,” he said, and part of him truly was, as he fully released his grip on the gun. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and rubbed it over his mouth, catching a faint whiff of its sweet perfume, oil and cordite. “Really disappointed. But I suppose there is nothing more to be done.”

“But there is. You said you knew my father.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I want to hear about him.”

“I thought I made myself clear. I would only do that in exchange for my file.”

“But it’s not your file,” said Byrne.

Robert coolly slipped his hand back into his pocket and around the butt of the gun. “It’s not?”

“And O’Malley’s not your name. And I’m sick of being lied to and pushed around and kicked in the gut. I don’t care who you are or what kind of money you can make with the damn file. All I care about is trying to put together the pieces of my past. You said you had something to tell me about my father. I want to hear it.”

Robert Spangler felt the pimpled grip of the gun as he stared at the boy in the gazebo, and something broke in him, releasing a sweet line of emotion that dissolved the spurt of fear he had been feeling. This Byrne was just a kid, missing his father, doing whatever he could to get back a piece of him. Robert understood, Robert could feel what the boy felt, Robert empathized. Empathy. This was the one remaining gift of the child within him, the Wonder bread boy, rallying over the dark part of his soul twisted into monstrous form by her will.

“How many years has it been since your father died?” said Robert, his voice suddenly soft, even paternal.

“Fourteen,” said Byrne.

“That’s a long time.”

“More than half my life.”

“And you yearn for him.”

“I guess.”

“It’s understandable. Family cuts deep. And whatever comfort it actually provides for us, we want more and more and always more. But know this, young Byrne. In the end it can only lead to disappointment.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Take my advice, you’d be better off forgetting about your father.”

“I just want to know the truth.”

“Ahh, the truth. What the hell is that, boy?”

“I don’t know, but you told me you have some of it.”

“You don’t want to hear what I have to say. You only want me to say what you want to hear. But trust me when I tell you that you won’t ever get all you want. You’ll just grow frustrated and bitter, and you’ll end up doing things that will kill the best part of you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m merely giving you some friendly advice. Be careful what you yearn for, because that which you desire most will either complete you or destroy you, and you don’t get to choose.”

The boy stared at him for a moment, still in shadow so Robert couldn’t see what emotions were playing out on the boy’s face. But Robert had done his best to warn him away from a search that could only lead him back into danger. And in the process of reaching out to help a child whose uneasy place in the world was much like his own, Robert had done something good, and he felt good about it, as if he had turned some sort of corner and was freeing himself from her pernicious influence. He was wondering where else this unfamiliar impulse to do good might lead. He was imagining homeless shelters in the city, squalid villages in sub-Saharan Africa in desperate need of wells. His mind was taking flight on wings of selflessness when the boy finally spoke.

“Fuck off,” said Kyle Byrne.

“What did you say?”

“I don’t need your stinking advice. I’m sick to death of advice. It seems to come from every corner now. Winos I pass on the street shout it out. ‘Get your life together.’ I’ve had enough. I thought you had something to say, but it’s clear you don’t. All you have are your lies and your crappy advice, and I don’t want either of them.”

“Watch yourself, boy.”

“I’m done watching,” Byrne said as he started to hobble away. “Go to hell, Mr. O’Malley.”

The name was spoken with an overtone of derision, and just like that the wheel turned inside Robert Spangler and the Wonder bread boy was upended. Now on top and in control was the dark part, perhaps the truer part, formed from love and devotion and obeisance to her iron will. And this part of him, Bobby dear, saw not a flailing boy searching for answers, a boy whose troubles he could relate to and empathize with, but instead opportunity to savor the taste of acid one more time, if the prodding was right.

“You want to know the truth, boy?” said Bobby Spangler to the retreating silhouette, knowing with the instinct of a brother how his words would affect the boy and hating himself all the while. “The absolute truth?”

The shadow of the boy stopped and turned and faced what Bobby had become.

“The truth is, your father was a rogue of the worst stripe. He cheated on everyone and everything. But there’s more than just sexual peccadilloes to stain his name. He violated his professional responsibilities and sold out his clients and his most firmly held beliefs for a sackful of gold. Which means he was a thief as well as a rogue, leaving desolation and violence in his wake, violence that continues to this day. Laszlo Toth was killed for your father’s sins, and let me promise you, the killing isn’t over yet.”

“You’re lying.”

“No I’m not, boy.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t have to. You’ll prove it for me. And the proof of everything I say is in that file. Find the O’Malley file and you’ll find your proof.”

The boy didn’t respond. He just stood there, as still as the shadow of a tree, and then turned again and hobbled off.

“Call me when you find it,” Bobby shouted to the retreating figure. “And we’ll have a celebration of the holy truth.”

CHAPTER 24

KYLE BYRNE WAS PISSED. He was a little drunk, too, which accounted for the way the 280ZX was swerving as he punched the radio’s buttons looking for something with some snap, but more than anything he was pissed.

He was pissed at that creepy fraud O’Malley for talking crap about his father, who Kyle was sure was neither thief nor scoundrel, despite the illicit circumstances of Kyle’s own birth. He was pissed at Tony Sorrentino for sating his anger against Kyle’s father by turning loose his goons and sheathing Kyle’s body in pain. He was pissed at his best friend, Kat, and at Bubba Jr. and at Skitch and that Detective Ramirez and all the other well-meaning blowhards who thought it was their right, nay, their obligation, to tell Kyle how badly he had screwed up his life. As if Kyle weren’t fully aware of exactly where his wrong turns had been taken and the prices he had paid for each. And Kyle was pissed at the radio, where all he could find were American Idol rejects or teenage emos or oldies that were a hit before he was born.

But most of all he was pissed at himself for caring. He had announced to the cop and that fake O’Malley that he was through, and he had been telling the truth. He’d been to enough funerals, buried enough old men. And now he had been bounced around like a soccer ball, with the promise of more to come. He was so ready to put it all behind him. His father had died long ago, his father’s funeral had been a fiasco, it was time to bury him for good.

Except some questions in this life needed to be answered, some doubts needed to be quelled, and for Kyle these were the questions and these were the doubts. And so here he was, driving like an angry fool west from the city, smack into his past.

He hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood since he lost the house. Which was an interesting and accurate way of putting it. Perhaps only Kyle could lose a house, like others lost their sunglasses or keys. Even though it was already dark, he recognized the landmarks as if they were great monuments in a capital city. That was the school yard where he’d first played T-ball; that was the field behind the Wawa where he’d pitched the Red Sox to their second straight Little League championship. There was Kat’s street, where she and her family were right now chowing down on broiled eel. And there was his elementary school—Jesus, it looked small. He had played basketball on that outdoor court every summer of his youth, had sledded down that hill during every snowstorm with Kat, had kissed Melissa Dougherty in the trees above the playground.

And then the turn, as familiar a bend as his elbow. And then the street, her street, and then the house, her house. He stopped the red car right in front and stared for longer than he thought possible. The tour of his childhood markers had served to transform his anger into sentimental remembrance, and now, here, while remembering her, he fought against the tears.

It was a little Cape Cod, the smallest house on a crowded block. There was a For Sale sign on the unkempt front lawn that had once been lush. The paint was peeling where it had always been perfectly maintained. The flower beds were overgrown where once they’d been covered with an explosion of blossoms and swarms of white butterflies. The house’s condition was sad enough in itself, but what was actually bringing tears to Kyle’s eyes was the absence that lived in the house as surely as it lived in his heart.

On soft summer nights, she would sit on that front porch, rocking back and forth on her rocking chair, smoking and staring out into the night as if waiting for something brilliant to come her way.

Waiting for him.

This journey into his past was all about his father, but there was no avoiding his mother in the process. The trajectory of her entire adult life had been bent by his father’s gravitational field. She had fallen in love with him at a tender age, had been impregnated by him, had set up her house and her schedule to suit his whims and inclinations, and after his death she had lived the rest of her life in some sort of bemused tribute to that early love that had altered her life so. Before Liam Byrne’s death, she would sit on the porch, waiting on the possibility that he would choose this night to visit his son and then share cocktails with her on that very porch. And later, long after his funeral, she would sit on that selfsame porch, as if she still were waiting, as if that youthful love were strong enough to cheat death itself.

“He was going to leave his wife,” she told Kyle one night on that porch, a few years after his father’s funeral. She was smoking and staring out into the darkness, that distant smile on her face, as if her life were a cosmic joke that she was just on the cusp of understanding. “He was moving in here. We were all going to be together again.”

“Did he tell you that?” said Kyle.

“In his way.”

“Did he tell her?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He told me once she would never let him leave. I guess she proved him right.”

“Mom?”

“Isn’t it your bedtime?”

“I’m fourteen.”

“My big, big man. Go to bed, Kyle.”

“You don’t think . . .”

“You’re right, Kyle. I don’t.”

There was something fierce in her ability to avoid his questions. She was a competent typist, a devoted mother, a fine cook and a brilliant gardener, but most of all she was a cipher. He had always believed that his mother was fooling herself about his father’s moving back with them. It was the saddest memory he had of her, it made everything else in her life seem just as delusional. But suddenly, now, that very conversation seemed to harbor not delusion but maybe something akin to the truth.

The fake O’Malley had said that his father was supposed to have taken the file cabinet to his home. Yet his father’s wife knew nothing about it. It didn’t make sense, until the day after Kyle’s strange meeting with O’Malley at the gazebo, while Kyle was sitting in front of Kat’s TV, watching the baseball game and downing his traditional Father’s Day case of Yuengling beer, when he remembered his mother’s comment about his father telling her, in his way, that he was coming to live with them.

What would be his way? He’d bring something to the house, something to store, something most valuable. Something too heavy for him to handle alone.

“Uncle Max,” Kyle had shouted over the phone after he’d thought it through but before driving out to the old neighborhood. He was shouting because he had reached his Uncle Max at the Olde Pig Snout, and the game was on and the television was blaring. “I got a question.”

“What?”

“A question. I got a question for you.”

“Who is this? Kyle?”

“Yeah, it’s Kyle.”

“Yo, Kyle, how you doing? Wait a second. Hey, Fred, turn the sound down a sec, I’m talking to my nephew.” The smooth voice of Harry Kalas dimmed. “Okay, go ahead.”

“You ever help my father move anything into my mother’s house?”

“When?”

“I don’t know, not long before he died. I’m talking something heavy, like a file cabinet.”

“Like a file cabinet?”

“No, you’re right, not like a file cabinet. It would have been a file cabinet. Did you ever help him move a big brown file cabinet into my mother’s house?”

There was a pause from Uncle Max’s end of the line, where Kyle could still hear the game slipping away from the Phillies’ bullpen. It was illegal now to smoke in Philly bars, but Kyle heard his Uncle Max light a cigarette and take a drag.

“Your mom called me,” he said finally. “Asked for a favor. I had the truck then for my work with the funeral homes, and everyone was always calling me to help them move. That’s why I quit and got rid of the thing, I was getting too damn helpful. But I still had it then, and she called, and what was I going to do? Say no to my little sister?”

“How come I don’t remember it?”

“We did it one night when you was at that Chinese girl’s house.”

“She’s Korean.”

“You don’t say? And all this time I thought she was Chinese. Funny how easy it is to—”

“Uncle Max.”

“Okay, okay. Your mom, she didn’t want you to know, and she made me promise never to tell. She didn’t want you getting no ideas about it meaning something.”

“Though she got them herself, didn’t she?”

“She was my little sister, and I loved her, Kyle, I really did, but I never understood a thing about her. We even had to hide it once it was inside the house.”

“From me?”

“No, that was your father’s doing. He said he needed to safeguard it from someone. Toth, I assumed. But that file cabinet was so damn heavy it near gave me a hernia. You know, I never had no problem with my back until I wrestled that sucker into the basement, and since then I been no good for nothing.”

From within the 280ZX now, through teary eyes, Kyle stared at his old house, gone to hell, and the top of the basement wall under the porch, behind which, he was certain, stood his father’s file cabinet. Somewhere inside would be the O’Malley file, with a boatload of trouble on every page. But if you looked deep into Kyle Byrne’s heart, you would see it wasn’t really the O’Malley file he was after. For Kyle, the common concerns of the common world, which prized money and power over all things and was seeking mightily that selfsame file for venal ends, held little sway. But still his heart raced at the possibility of the file cabinet’s being somewhere in his old basement. Because he couldn’t help the feeling that inside that heavy brown cabinet, along with the useless detritus of his father’s legal career, somewhere, in some mislabeled file, scrawled in his father’s hand, would be the closest he’d ever come to discovering the very meaning of his life.

CHAPTER 25

THE DISCUSSION DID NOT go very well.

Of course, these discussions never went well anymore. In the beginning, when Robert was still the young and pliant striver, the glorious surroundings and the note of promise in their intercourse left him with a great, hopeful energy that was almost sexual in its power. He couldn’t wait to see her again, the way his skin warmed as she caressed him with the gaze from her pretty eyes, the way their dreams seemed to mesh into a single glorious enterprise that would carry them both higher than individually they could ever have imagined. But as they had aged, and the mansion had deteriorated, and the promise in his life had withered, their encounters had taken on an indifferent brutality. If he did her bidding, then she merely took it as her due, with nary a word of gratitude. But if he failed to carry out her wishes to the letter, even if they hadn’t been clearly communicated, then the whole inequality of their relationship was thrown into bitter relief by the vituperative nature of her rebuke.

“That’s why you’ll never amount to anything. You don’t have an ounce of initiative. But what else could have been expected? You’re a Spangler, and the Spanglers never had initiative. A clan of belching crotch scratchers, all of them. It’s a wonder that any of you ever get off the toilet in the morning.”

“I determined it wasn’t to our benefit to kill him,” he had told her. “I’ll determine what is to our benefit,” she said, her voice a drip of liquid nitrogen. “You’ve spoiled things enough already. Once you set him on the trail, it was inevitable that he would have to be dealt with.”

“I just wanted to be sure he didn’t have a copy, like Laszlo.” “It didn’t matter if he had it or not, he would find something. His father was greedy as a hyena, the son will be no different. Blood always tells. It’s why you’ve been such a disappointment to me.”

“If he was killed so soon after Laszlo, someone would draw the connection.”

“Who, the police? That pair of fools at the funeral? Perfectly adequate for servants, maybe, but not as detectives. I hardly think those two will be swift enough to catch on. If you’ll just do as I tell you, it will all work out as we hope. There are grand things afoot. I won’t have the boy get in my way.”

“What exactly do you want?”

“I want the boy gone. I want you to take care of him like you took care of the father. I will not have that Irish piece of trash confounding me from the grave.”

“The boy’s not so easy to find. He doesn’t have a set place to stay anymore. He lives out of his car.”

“Oh, Bobby dear, I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

And he had, yes he had. Bobby dear had found a way. The call had come in just a few minutes ago, from one of the spies he’d set up throughout the city. This was from one he had contacted in the boy’s old neighborhood. I’m looking for the Byrne boy. You remember him. He used to live across the street. He drives a small red sports car now, an old Datsun. I have something quite valuable to give him, but I can’t seem to locate young Byrne. If you see the car, could you just give me a call? I’ll make sure you’re amply rewarded. That’s all it took these days to create a spy. And the spy had let him know that the boy’s car was stopped right at the moment on his old street, that the boy was right at the moment in his car and staring at his old house. Now, about that reward . . .

The spy shouldn’t worry, she’d have her reward: a crushing case of guilt when that curtain-twitching old biddy heard the sirens and looked out her window.

For Bobby was going to kill Kyle Byrne, yes he was. Not just because he had been ordered to kill him. And not just because part of Bobby was hungry for the taste of acid and the boy had shown him disrespect at the waterworks. But also because he sensed that she was wrong, finally, that the connection would be made and the whole enterprise would blow up in their faces and this final act would be the end of all the discussions for all time, the final revenge of the Spanglers.