The Silver Bear Read Free Page B

fare.
    I buy two coffees from a Greek delicatessen and climb the stoop to a loft apartment above the neighboring bakery. I am buzzed in before I can even juggle the foam cups and press the button. Pooley must be at his desk.
    “You brought me coffee?” He acts surprised as I hand him one of the cups and sit heavily in the only other chair in the room. “You thoughtful bastard.”
    “Yeah, I’m going soft.”
    I hoist the case onto his desk and slide it over to him.
    “Archibald’s?”
    “Yep,” I answer.
    “He give you any problems?”
    “Naah, he’s all bluster. What I want to know is: who’s he working for?”
    This catches Pooley off guard. Ours is a business where certain questions aren’t asked. The less you know—the fewer people you know, I should say—the better your chances of survival. Middlemen are as common as paper and ink, another office supply, a necessity to conduct business. They are used for a reason: to protect us from each other. Everyone understands this. Everyone respects this. You do not go asking questions, or you end up dead or relocated or physically unable to do your job. But those seven letters at the top of the page changed the rules.
    “What?” he asks. Maybe he hadn’t heard me right. I can’t blame him for hoping.
    “I want to know who hired Archibald to work as his go-between.”
    “Columbus,” Pooley stammers. “Are you serious?”
    “I’m as serious as you’ve ever known me.”
    This is no small statement, and Pooley knows it. We go back nearly twenty years, and he’s seen me serious all my life. This breach of professional etiquette has him jumpy. I can see it on his face. Pooley is not good at hiding his emotions, not ever.
    “Goddammit, Columbus. Why’re you asking me that?”
    “Open the case,” I say.
    He looks at it suspiciously now, as if it can rise off the table and bite him, and then back at me. I nod without changing my expression, and he spins the case around and unhinges the snaps.
    “In the envelope,” I urge when he doesn’t see anything looking particularly troublesome.
    He withdraws the envelope and slides his finger under the flap as I did. When he sees the name at the top of the page, his face flushes.
    “You gotta be shitting me.”
    Like I said, Pooley is practically my brother, and as such, is the only one who knows the truth about my genesis. When I was thirteen and he was eleven, we were placed with the same foster family, my sixth in five years, Pooley’s third. By then, I could take whatever shit was thrown my way, but Pooley was still a boy, and he had been set up pretty well in his last home. He had an old lady for a foster mother, and the worst thing she did was to make him clean the sheets when she shit the bed. Not a particularly easy job for a nine-year-old, but nothing compared to what he had to survive at the Cox house after the old lady passed away.
    Pete Cox was an English professor at one of the fancy schools outside Boston. He was a deacon at his church, a patron at the corner barbershop, and an amateur actor at the neighborhood theater. His wife had suffered severe brain damage four years prior to our arrival. She had been in the passenger seat of a Nissan pickup truck when the driver lost control of the wheel and rolled the truck eleven times before it came to rest in a field outside Framingham. The driver was not her husband. The last person who could substantiate their whereabouts was the clerk at the Marriott Courtyard Suites . . . when they checked out . . . together.
    Subsequently, his wife occupied a hospital bed in the upstairs office of Pete’s two-story home. She was heavily medicated, never spoke, ate through a tube, and kept on living. Her doctors thought she might live another fifty years, if properly cared for. There was nothing wrong with her body, just her brain, jammed in by the door handle when it broke through her skull.
    Pete decided to take in foster children, since he would never have children