The City of Mirrors
Page 31

He rose on his elbows and turned toward her. “Sara, we’ve been through this. You know we can’t.”
She kissed him, long and tenderly, then drew back to meet his eyes. “Actually,” she said, “that’s not exactly true.”
* * *
12
Ten moves, and Caleb had Peter completely boxed in. A feint with a rook, a knight cruelly sacrificed, and the enemy forces swarmed over him.
“How the heck did you do that?”
Peter didn’t really mind, though it would be nice to win once in a while. The last time he’d beaten Caleb, the boy had had a nasty cold and had dozed off midway through the game. Even then, Peter had barely eked out the victory.
“It’s easy. You think I’m on defense, but I’m not.”
“Laying a trap.”
The boy shrugged. “It’s like a trap in your head. I make you see the game the way I need you to.” He was setting up the pieces again; one victory was not enough for the night. “What did the soldier want?”
Caleb had a way of changing the subject so abruptly that sometimes Peter struggled to keep up. “It was about a job, actually.”
“What kind?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not really sure.” He shrugged and looked at the board. “It’s not important. Don’t worry about it—I’m not going anywhere.”
They were listlessly moving pawns.
“I still want to be a soldier, you know,” the boy said, “like you were.”
From time to time, the boy brought this up. Peter’s feelings were mixed. On the one hand, he had a parent’s intense desire to keep Caleb away from any danger. But he also felt flattered. The boy was, after all, expressing interest in the same life he had chosen.
“Well, you’d be good at it.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Sometimes. I liked my men, I had good friends. But I’d rather be here with you. Plus, it looks like those days are over. Not much need for an army when there’s nobody to fight.”
“Everything else seems like it would be boring.”
“Boredom is underrated, believe me.”
They played in silence.
“Somebody asked me about you,” Caleb said. “A kid at school.”
“What was the question?”
Caleb squinted at the board, reached toward his bishop, stopped, and moved his queen one space forward. “Just, what it’s like, you being my dad. He knew a lot about you.”
“Which kid was this?”
“His name is Julio.”
He wasn’t one of Caleb’s usual friends. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him you worked on roofs all day.”
For once, Peter held Caleb to a draw. He put the boy to bed and poured himself a drink from Hollis’s flask. Caleb’s words had stung a little. Peter wasn’t truly tempted by Sanchez’s offer, but the whole thing had left a bad taste in his mouth. The woman’s manipulation was transparent, as it was meant to be—that was the genius of it. She had simultaneously aroused his natural sense of duty and made it clear that she was not a woman to be messed with. I’ll have you in the end, Mr. Jaxon.
Just you try, he thought. I’ll be right here, reminding my kid to brush his teeth.
—
They were reroofing an old mission close to the center of town. Empty for decades, it was now being converted to apartments. Peter’s crew had spent two weeks dismantling the rotted belfry and had begun to strip off the old slates. The roof was steeply pitched; they worked on twelve-inch-wide horizontal boards, called cleats, anchored by metal brackets nailed into the sheeting and spaced at six-foot intervals. A pair of ladders, lying flush with the roof at the ends of the cleats, acted as staircases connecting them.
All morning they worked shirtless in the heat. Peter was on the uppermost cleat with two others, Jock Alvado and Sam Foutopolis, who went by the name Foto. Foto had worked construction for years, but Jock had been there just a couple of months. He was young, seventeen or so, with a narrow, acned face and long greasy hair he wore in a ponytail. Nobody liked him; his movements were too sudden, and he talked too much. It was an unwritten rule of the roofing crews not to remark on the danger. It was a form of respect. Looking down, Jock liked to say stupid things like “Wow, that would hurt” and “That would most definitely fuck a person up.”
At noon they broke for lunch. Climbing down was too much trouble, so they ate where they were. Jock was talking about a girl he had seen in the market, but Peter was barely listening. The sounds of the city drifted upward in an aural haze; from time to time a bird floated past.
“Let’s get back to it,” Foto said.
They were using pry bars and mallets to chip out the old tiles. Peter and Foto moved to the third cleat; Jock was working below them to the right. He was still talking about the woman—her hair, a certain way she walked, a look that passed between them.
“Will he ever shut up?” Foto said. He was a thick, muscular man, his black beard sprinkled with gray.
“I think he just likes the sound of his own voice.”
“I’m going to throw his ass off this roof, I swear.” Foto glanced up, squinting into the sun. “Looks like we missed a couple.”
Several tiles remained along the ridgeline. Peter slid his bar and mallet into his tool belt. “I’ll go.”
“Forget it, lover boy can do it.” He yelled down, “Jock, get up there.”