"Mr. Katz," he said, across the width of the canal, "I was wondering you would like to come by for a glass of tea."
Sam saw lips move. He swept off his headphones and stuck his hearing aid back in. "What?"
Cherkassky repeated his offer.
For a moment Sam was too excited to answer. An invitation! A glass of tea! He would get inside, get to know these Russians. He would find things out, be of help to Aaron, and even Bert would be impressed.
"Yes," he said at last. "With pleasure."
Excited, puffed up with purpose, he rose. In a trance of newfound usefulness, he walked straight through the tiled house and out the door. It never occurred to him to leave a note where he was going.
Chapter 44
When Bert got home the sun was down, and though there was still a multicolored gleaming in the sky, the day had lost the power to penetrate indoors, and the tiled house was dark. Bert called out, "Sam? ... Sam ..." But even before he'd heard the grimly answering silence, he knew that Sam was gone.
He turned on a lamp. It threw a meager and depressing pool of yellow, and he turned on another. He went from room to room, flipping every switch, and at some point he realized that the hand that held his dog was trembling. It was trembling not so much with fear as with shame. It had been his mission to look after Sam, to keep him out of trouble. He'd abdicated that responsibility in favor of a selfish preference of his own. Now Sam could be lost and wandering somewhere, could have blundered into something he'd never figure out, could be lying at the bottom of the Gulf. Bert had failed him, failed himself. What was left in the world when one old man couldn't look out for another?
He put his dog down on the floor. Dejected by contagion, the chihuahua dragged its paws across the mosaic pathway then curled up in a heap.
Bert went to look outside. The patio was lavender in the dusk. Half a glass of seltzer and Sam's cheery yellow Walkman were sitting on the table; there was something dreadful in the way they'd been left behind. Bert walked down the small lawn, felt his stomach knotting as he neared the still canal. He half expected to see a body there, face-down, bloating, white hair streaming out like weeds. But in the failing light he saw nothing in the water except a smudged reflection of the sky. Across the way, the gray house of the Russian was entirely dark and silent.
With burdened steps Bert walked up through the yard and back inside. The lamplight seemed grainy and sulfurous and horrid after the velvet outdoor glow. He paced; the dog tracked his pacing with its dry and scaly nose. He tried to think of some way to undo his dereliction, to redeem his falling-short. Search the streets? Blunder after him? Alone, his chance of finding Sam was slim to none, and he came to understand that he only compounded his fault with each moment that he stalled.
At length he did the thing he least wanted in the whole wide world to do. He went to the phone to call Aaron, and to tell him that, because of his own negligence, his father had gone AWOL.
"I'm sorry," said Bert, when Sam's son had arrived. "I'm sorry."
Aaron bit his lip. It was a habit of Suki's he was already picking up. He put his hand on the old man's arm. He wasn't quite sure if he did it to offer comfort, or forgiveness, or if it was a distant way of touching his own father. "No apologies," he said. "Let's just figure where he might've gone."
Bert sat down on the sofa. His dog splayed out across his lap and the dreary light from a rented bulb was washing over them. "He got really taken up, obsessed like, with the neighbor just across the way."
"Across the way?" said Aaron. "I thought that Markov—"
"Markov lives around the corner," Bert explained. "Much bigger house. Fancy. But Markov, we're not so sure he's the boss no more."
Aaron said, "I don't think I—"
"'S complicated," said Bert, and, wearily, he started standing up again. It took a while. When he was sure of his balance, he said, "Come on, I'll explain things as we go."
They went through the tiled doorway, Bert holding his chihuahua like the chihuahua was a loaf of bread. Outside, fronds hung limp and black. Crickets rasped; the sound rose to a crescendo, then abruptly stopped, precise as any orchestra. During the lull, Bert said, "The guy across the way, he could be the real boss maybe. Fits a certain pattern, like. Your old man, somehow he picked up on it."
They were walking toward the bridge that went over the canal. Aaron's legs were twitchy yet leaden, his steps awkward as they tried to adapt to Bert's resolved but plodding pace; and in some way this lack of flow, this trudging heaviness, connected with the stricken understanding that his father might be dead. Walking should be easy; suddenly it wasn't. Nothing was easy. With the loss of a father came a terrible exposure, a shocking grasp of one's nakedness, of one's secret but perennial unreadiness as a person in the world. Past forty, well-to-do, new lover of a lovely woman, Aaron suddenly felt green, unformed. He struggled to remember something, anything, that he knew with confidence of life. Nothing came to him. He said to Bert, "So what's the pattern?"