13. Loaded #2
“The photographs survived, and for eight days I assumed they were worthless, because photographs of an object are not the object, and I no longer have the object.” She takes a breath. “I kept looking anyway. This is the part where I am going to be careful with my language.”
“Be as careful as you like.”
“The emergency injector recovered at the scene. It came in with the body, it was photographed at intake from six angles under scale, and I have been looking at those six photographs for three days.” Something clicks on her end, a pen.
“I obtained the dispensing record from his pharmacy through the district attorney’s office.
I have the manufacturer’s specification sheet for that exact model, which they emailed me in nine minutes when I telephoned and asked, because it is not a secret document. And I have compared the two.”
“And?”
“The unit in my photographs is not the unit that pharmacy dispensed.”
The library gets very quiet.
“The outer casing is correct. Same housing, same orange cap, same label with the correct lot number printed on it. What is not correct is the body. In the manufacturer’s unit there is a single seam where the barrel meets the base.
In my intake photographs there are two, and the second one sits about four millimeters up.
In the third and fifth photographs, where the light comes across it, you can see that the barrel is partitioned. ”
“Two chambers,” I say.
“Two chambers, in a device that has one. I want to be exact: I cannot analyze what was in them, because the object is gone, and I will write that in the amendment in the plainest language I have.” Her pen clicks again.
“But your brother-in-law took a breath after that injection. Four hundred people watched him take it. Whatever was in the first chamber did what epinephrine does. And then his heart stopped, chemically, with a contraction band pattern, and nothing on any panel.”
“The second chamber.”
“That is my inference and it will be labeled as an inference. And one more thing, because you will want it. I described the seam work, hypothetically, to a man I trust who builds autoinjectors for a living. He said hypothetically it is beautiful bench work, weeks of it, and that nobody fires a one-shot device cold. Somewhere, at some point, this was built more than once, and tested.”
“There is a bench,” I say. “Somewhere there is a workbench and a practice article.”
“That is your trade, signora, not mine. Mine ends at the seam.” A pause. “That device could not deliver itself. It required a person to uncap it and put it into his leg and hold it there for ten seconds.”
Lorenzo has not moved since she started talking. He is standing with both hands flat on the back of a chair and his knuckles have gone the color of the wood.
“Thank you, Doctor,” I say. “File it. Send us the amendment when it is signed. Do not put this in an email to anyone.”
“I have not put anything in an email since the sixteenth.” The dishwasher clicks over. “Take care of yourselves. I mean that in a way I do not usually mean it.”
The line goes.
I stand at my end of my husband’s grandmother’s table and put the whole thing together out loud, because if I do not have something to build I am going to come apart in a room with a witness in it.
“He did not need to get near Giulio,” I say. “He never had to touch a cup, or a plate, or a vein. He needed one thing in a pocket, and he needed the pocket, and he needed to know which one, and he needed something else that most people would call the safest assumption in the world.”
He does not ask. He stands there with his hands on the chair and waits, because he knows I will finish it.
“He needed to know that when your brother went down in a church, somebody who loved him would run.”
Lorenzo takes his hands off the chair.
“That device was not built to be swallowed or breathed or drunk. It was built to be gripped, and uncapped, and driven into a man’s thigh by somebody who could not stand there and watch.
” I hear my own voice arriving somewhere colder than I planned.
“It was built for whoever got there first and would not hesitate. It was aimed at you the way a rifle is aimed, and the only difference is that a rifle does not have to be loved.”
He sits down. He does not do it well.
I stand in a library at 11:40 a.m. on a Monday with a dead woman’s shoeboxes open in front of me and finally see the shape of the person we are hunting.
He does not kill people. He has men for that, and he burns them afterward, in rooming houses and hospices and kitchens with the radio on. What he does is find the thing a person cannot help doing, and then he builds the machine around it.
My father could not help being a man of custom, so he was loaded with custom, four hundred thousand dollars and a tradition his grandfather kept, and pulled three times over nine years.
Lorenzo could not help going over an altar rail, so he was loaded with rescue.
And I could not help being what I was made into at twenty-four, a beneficiary inside a covered class, so I was loaded with marriage and fired four times, and I am the only one of the three of us who was reloaded on purpose.
“Valeria.” He is looking at the table. “Say the thing you are not saying.”
“There is no thing I am not saying. That is your side of the aisle.”
He takes that.
We work.
He goes down to the far end of the table and pulls the 2001 correspondence toward him, and I stay at my end with the schedules and Renata’s marginalia, and Nonna sends down sandwiches at 1 that neither of us eats, and Fabrizio calls at 2 from the terminal about the Monday manifests and Lorenzo tells him the house is quiet.
At 4:15 p.m. the sun comes around onto the table between us, nine feet of it, and neither of us has crossed it.
Somewhere in the long silent hours I notice the thing he has not done, which is say aimed at me, not once, all day, though Kelleher handed it to him and I built it into a rifle in front of his face.
I notice it, and I do not credit it, and I go back to 2001.
He turns a page.
I watch his hands do it, the hands I have had in my hair and around my wrist and flat on my throat since the morning his brother died, and somewhere out there a person sat down with a calendar and a pharmacy record and studied those two hands before I ever touched them, and built a thing to fit them, and used them, and gave them back to me clean, and the worst part of my day is not the lie he told me at dawn.
It is that they are still loaded.