Monterey Bay(63)

“Quick,” he said. “The knife.”

But the parade was already upon them, the hill ablaze with lanterns, the saint’s waxen face glowing within the confines of her bower, a book in one hand, a human skull in the other. Tino Agnelli was at the head of the procession. Arthur was behind him, his head shaved bare. Her father was last in line, walking slightly apart from the crowd, coatless despite the gathering cold. The air was full of smoke.

“Inside,” Ricketts said, taking her arm. “Before it’s too late.”

They ran back into the cannery. She leaned against him. For the first time, she noticed the vast difference in their heights. He was so short, he could fit his head snugly beneath her chin without bending or crouching.

“I did a bad job, Wormy,” he said, reaching for her forehead.

And when he reopened the scar with the knife, the cut wasn’t made on her skin. It was made on the seafloor beneath her, the earth splitting itself along a famous fault line: the one that, according to centuries of seismological fantasy, would break California free from the rest of the jealous landmass and send it floating off into the night.





The next morning, she walked to the wharf.

The waiter in the parlor car had been wrong. The town was still recognizable, but disappointingly so, like a beautiful woman without her makeup. It was only when she reached the doorway of the old Agnelli warehouse that things took a more hopeful turn. Unlike the rest of Monterey, this building had thrived since her departure. The single window had been scrubbed clean, the corrugated metal walls painted white, a crimson awning stretched over the entrance. Inside, there was no darkness, no statue, no sardine cans, no henchwomen. Instead, it was bright and tidy and outfitted in a way that was clearly meant to evoke the Agnellis’ homeland but looked like a caricature of it instead: ropes of garlic sagging from the rafters, a gaudy mid-Crucifixion portrait of Jesus and the Virgin Mary staring down at her in gory benediction, tables covered in red-and-white-checked tablecloths, candles weeping streams of wax onto basket-bottomed Chianti bottles. The barman awoke with a jolt when he heard her enter. As for Tino, he was there just as he had promised in his note: sitting at a large table near the kitchen, flanked by his brothers, his chin in his hands as if presiding over the world’s most anticlimactic Last Supper.

She studied him before approaching. Like the town itself, he had been eroded by the intervening years, but not necessarily disfigured by them. The primary difference was his nose, which was a good deal longer and narrower than she remembered and more emphatically wide nostriled. He had taken to wearing his dark hair slicked back from his forehead, which, in addition to highlighting the sharpness of his features, made the prematurely thin patches around his temples look as if they had been spray-painted there. He was still impossibly slim and spotlessly dressed. Even in this moment of what she assumed to be repose, he looked coiled and skeptical, thrumming with the exact same quiet, dissatisfied energy he had possessed as a boy.

When he saw her, he raised his small, bony hand in the resigned manner of a forcibly dethroned potentate. She waved back.

“You received my correspondence,” he said as she reached the table, the brothers tracking every inch of her approach.

“It’s a restaurant now,” she replied.

“To feed all the tourists.”

A lone cannery whistle blasted in the distance, its sound fuzzy and dilute, as if it had traveled across the distance of years instead of the distance of physical space. In her memory, Tino had been someone she had once known well, but now that she was actually in his presence again, she realized her mistake. She had never really known him at all. She had once put her future, and her father’s, in the hands of a stranger.

“Tourists?” she asked. “But the town’s a disaster.”

“Interestingly enough, they seem to like it that way.”

One of the brothers said something in Italian. Tino glared at him and stood.

“Come,” he said to Margot, gesturing at an empty table in the restaurant’s farthest corner. “So we won’t be interrupted.”

“Thank you. I’m fine right here.”

Tino shrugged and reclaimed his seat. Margot sat across from him and removed a box of cigars from her handbag and offered one to each of the brothers in turn. When all of them declined, she selected one for herself and lit it.

“Thank you for agreeing to this,” she said, taking a puff and trying to summon an unburdened smile. “The location you suggested is certainly appropriate, even if the hour is unusual.”

“Habit, I guess.” His eyes traced the smoke as she exhaled it. “It was my mother’s custom to eat with the crew after the night’s haul. I continue to honor the tradition, even though there’s nothing much left to can.”

“Where is she?”

“She passed away. Shortly after your father.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You are?”

“I don’t suppose I could get a beer.”

“Of course.”

He nodded at the barman and made a series of quick gestures. The barman filled a glass, and when he brought it to her, she took the longest sip she could manage without gulping or coughing.

“You’ve changed,” Tino said. “Rumor had it you were the only one who ever went to Ricketts’s lab and didn’t emerge blind drunk.”