Free Blood of My Brother by James Lepore Page A

promised her purity on many occasions. Otherwise how could she feel so evil, with such sickness in her heart? How could she be chosen to do a thing like lay in love with someone like Senor de Leon, who was old and smelled of cigars and whose thin lips seemed always to be wet with saliva?

    “But you have already seen me,” she said, raising her beautiful eyes to meet Herman’s, hoping to find in them a reprieve from the vast emptiness that had so suddenly replaced all of her childish dreams and longings and complaints. “I would rather marry you.”
    “You will not marry Senor de Leon, Isabel.”
    “I know. I meant . . .” She could not find the words for what she meant, embarrassed, and shocked, that she had mentioned marriage.
    “After tonight you will have sex with Rafael a few more times, and then no more. Soon, but not too soon, you will have sex with other men, at my command, and only at my command. You will live here for a while, but eventually you will have your own place. You will have beautiful clothes and money, all that you may need. You will work for me, and I will pay you and protect you. As long as you do as I say, you will come to no harm, you will have a good life, far better than most orphan children ever dream of. But if you defy me, or try to run away, I will find you and you will be hurt. Your face will be cut and your body. You will be killed.”
    Isabel took advantage of the one defense available only to children and the simpleminded: she put aside her pain, locked it away, and released the key into the cosmos. Herman—he was no longer Uncle Herman—had done her a favor, and on some unconscious level of her being, she knew that he had. He had allowed her to anesthetize herself against the deep wound that Rafael was about to inflict. Afterward, when the anesthesia wore off, she would find a way to deal with her new life. She would survive. She did not know—what child does?—that someday someone would pluck her cast-off key from the seemingly haphazard currents of the universe, insert it into her heart, and unlock her many secrets, down to the last one.

    “Do you understand?” asked Herman. He had been intensely searching her face, thinking perhaps that she would cry, but she had already retreated into herself. She saw that he was pleased, and it occurred to her that there was safety in such retreat, survival.
    “Yes.”
    “One last thing.”
    “Yes.”
    “Rafael will expect you to be surprised, unprepared. He does not know that I have spoken to you as I have. You must act accordingly.”
    Isabel stared into Herman’s face and nodded, and by that nod, she made her alliance with evil, but what else could she do? Had not Herman betrayed Rafael in this small respect in order to help her ? And would not this knowledge be an advantage to her someday, when she began to fill the place where her soul—now lost forever—used to be?
    There was a knock, and the door that led to the kitchen and back rooms of the apartment swung open and Stefan entered the room. Dressed in the simple black suit, white shirt, and thin black tie of a livery driver, stalwart, of few words, Stefan gazed at his watch and said, “It is six thirty, senor, senorita.”

13.
    2:00 PM, December 5, 2004, Newark
    It was good to see that the yellow crime scene tape, in the form of a large X , had finally been removed from Danny’s office door. “No Danny,” it said to Jay every day as he passed it on the way from the elevator to his own office. No Danny. No smiling face. No voice of irrational reason in a world filled with posers and bullshit artists of every stripe. No Danny.
    The door was not locked. Inside, Jay first saw the three cardboard boxes sitting on his friend’s cheap metal desk, then scanned the fifteen-foot-by-fifteen-foot one room, one closet office, and saw that Dan’s pictures and college diploma were still on the walls, and his books still on the two small book-cases that flanked the desk. One of the