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PROLOGUE
So listen: You have to accept the coincidence, because nothing is stranger than the truth. It’s March 10, 1968, or 10 Dhul Hijja 1388, in the late morning of the first day of Eid al-Kabir. A Russian woman is in labor in a village near Midelt, Morocco, in a house the color of burnt clay. Her husband, Rufus James Hightower, an American, helps her squat by the bed, says he’ll go get the midwife. How bad is the pain? How long has it been going on? Rufus says. Not bad, not long, she says. She’s lying. She’s been in labor for hours already, since just after midnight, but she doesn’t tell him that. He’s high, and since she hasn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon, she assumes he hasn’t slept, either. He’s just been smoking. But she still wants him here and knows how little it takes to scare him off, even when he’s straight. So she’s grateful that he doesn’t know her well enough to read the tension on her face. He thinks she’s telling the truth. They met each other less than a year ago, got married only after she knew she was pregnant. In the doorway, Rufus turns, holds up a hand—are you sure you’re okay?— and gets a glare.
Outside, the narrow streets are filled with blood.The knife sharpeners have all gone home and there are bonfires on every corner. Two men, obvious friends, are walking down the middle of the street; there’s blood on their machetes, blood on their hands. Three girls play with a sheep’s head before giving it to their parents to roast; they ask it questions like it’s an oracle. When will I be married? Will I ever go to Paris? two of the girls ask. The third girl pretends to be the voice of the sheep, speaking in a bleating monotone. You will marry when you are seventy-six years old. You will go to Paris tomorrow. Then they put the head in the fire, laughing, while the people around them pray.
Rufus finds the midwife behind her house, where she and her family are sacrificing a goat. Her husband has just slit the animal’s throat, and it lies on the stones of the small courtyard. There’s blood pouring out of it, and the midwife is sweeping it into a drain. Soon the butchery will start.
“My wife is in labor now,” Rufus says, in Arabic.
The midwife looks at him. He can tell she doesn’t have any patience for him today. It’s supposed to be her day off.
“It’s her first?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
The midwife shakes her head, turns to her husband. There’s some bickering between them in Berber, which Rufus can’t understand. Then she turns back to him. “Give me twenty minutes.”
Rufus helps her carry her things back to his house, a stack of towels, a bowl for fresh water, a long, sturdy pair of sharp scissors. But they’re too late. At the doorway, he hears a choking wail that doesn’t mingle with the children’s voices or the cries of the livestock dying outside.
“What’s that?” he says.
His wife’s voice from inside, in Russian-tainted Moroccan Arabic. “Your son.”
Within the year, she’ll leave him, after one fight too many. This is not the life I want, she’ll say, then speak in a way she knows is too blunt, but her Arabic, her English, won’t let her do better. I don’t want you. I don’t even want the baby. And Rufus will look down at the child in his arms. I do, he’ll think. More than anything else in the world.
Now it’s 2:47 in the morning on July 2, still 1968, in Cleveland, Ohio. Muriel Hightower, Rufus’s sister, is at the end of a long labor on the kitchen floor of an apartment near University Circle. She’s a stone hippie, and she’s still reeling a little from her father’s death two years before, and what it did to the family. She’s been living in what people will later call a commune, and the family doesn’t hide their condescension now, but they don’t know what it’s like: the Tiny Alice shows, the hang, the talk about how to make things better around here. When the Hessler Street Fair starts up, her lifestyle will get a little more respect, though that’s a year off, and the midwifery movement—Ina May Gaskin and the Caravan and the Farm—is still two years away. But the idea’s been catching on for a while. So the end of Muriel’s labor happens on an old school bus. The midwife has gotten some training from an obstetrician in town who figures she’s going to try to birth babies whether he helps her or not, so he might as well help. The labor’s hard but it’s not complicated. The midwife catches the baby, cuts and ties the umbilical, and puts the baby to Muriel’s chest. Then she delivers the placenta. The baby cries and pees all over his mother. Muriel doesn’t care; she’s so happy to see the boy.
“What are you going to call him?” the midwife says.
She takes a breath. I’m giving him my last name, not his, she thinks. The second male in that thought is the kid’s father, her ex-boyfriend, who split for the West Coast as soon as he learned she was pregnant. She turns her head to the nurse.
“Peter Henry Hightower,” she says. “After his grandfather.”
The family doesn’t find out about the coincidence you have to accept— that Muriel’s brother Rufus gave his son the very same name, for the very same reason—until 1974, when Rufus makes his first visit to the United States since the death of the original Peter Henry Hightower: the Ukrainian kid from Tremont, the self-made man, the patriarch, the charmer; the son of a bitch, the criminal, the sellout, and for the last thirty years of his life, one of the most powerful men in Cleveland.
Rufus comes back to Cleveland in 1974 for the wedding of his and Muriel’s older sister, Sylvie, at the house in Bratenahl where they all grew up, and where Sylvie still lives. They’re on the back lawn that drops down to the lake, a long stretch of grass full of wildflowers, from the shoreline to the top of the rise, where the mansion runs from one wall of the estate to the other. All the windows are lit, and in the last light of the day—the sun went down a half an hour ago—the house looks like a distant city. Sylvie’s set up wide white tents, floors on low risers, gaslights on metal stands. A big band plays 1940s swing and the Motown of a few years ago, brings out the middle generation and their parents, the swarm of kids always. The oldest ones there, old enough to be grandparents—the ones who know all the stories now, or at least think they do, and can’t be shocked by anything anyway—sit at the back tables with colorful cocktails. Sylvie’s dress is a light gray to match her husband’s hair. The husband, Michael Rizzi, is sixty-two years old, twenty-six years older than she is, and was a close associate, business and otherwise, of her father’s until the day he died. None of the siblings was aware that Michael and Sylvie even knew each other until they announced their engagement, and now all of Rufus’s brothers and sisters are bonded in polite confusion: Muriel, of course, with her husband—Terry, whom she met and married not long after Peter was born—and her three children, the youngest just a baby; Henry, the eldest son, and his wife with their only daughter, Alex; and Jackie, twitching, on the arm of uncle Stefan, their father’s brother. Rufus notices the siblings are all seated at different tables and smiles. That’s Sylvie all over. Understanding why they all might not want to talk to each other for long, even eight years after their father’s funeral; giving them the chance to avoid having to pretend that they get along.
Rufus still has the thick mustache he had the last time they saw him, wears loose linen clothes, slicks his hair back with oil, but puts his son—a black-haired boy with bright hazel eyes like a German shepherd—in a shirt and shorts he bought in Higbee’s in downtown Cleveland the day before. Though nothing can hide that his boy isn’t from Ohio. His skin is far too tan for the sun Ohio gets, his haircut is all wrong. He’s an alien in this place.
“Jesus Christ, Rufus, you look like Lawrence of Arabia,” Henry says. “Who’s the kid? Is he yours?”
“Of course he’s mine,” Rufus says.
Henry laughs. “Don’t act like you’re insulted. What’s his name?”
“Peter. I named him after Dad.”
Henry looks across the reception toward Muriel and her oldest boy, a dirty blond, clean and sharp in a powder-blue suit the same cut as his stepfather’s.
“Same middle name, too?” he says. “Yep,” Rufus says.
“You’re kidding.”
“No,” Rufus says.
“Unbelievable.”
“What?”
“You really need to stay in touch more.”
By the end of the reception, there have been at least a dozen conversations about how the two boys are almost opposites. Muriel’s boy moves from table to table asking everyone how their wedding is going. He dances with Sylvie, with his mother, with Jackie. A great-uncle gives him a bite of his cake, and the boy returns the favor. Here, have a bite, the kid says. I can’t eat all of this. Rufus’s boy, meanwhile, climbs on the tables, then hides under them. He runs off to the shore of the lake and someone has to drag him back. They find spoons in his pockets before he leaves, walking with his head down, clinging to his father’s leg. It’s no surprise, Muriel says, her baby on her hip, the way Rufus is raising him, dragging the boy halfway across Africa and back, no mother, no home to speak of. She’s a long way from her hippie days by then, but she’s not trying to be mean to her brother; she’s concerned about the boy and can’t help herself. Bet he’s slept outside more often than he’s slept in a bed. Yes, she says, one of these boys is going to be real trouble. She’s right about that, dear reader; she’s just pegged the wrong boy. And Rufus never comes back to America again.
Okay so far? Because whenever trouble’s visited this family, it’s been big, and the kind that comes along in 1995—that snares first one boy, then the other, and then the rest of them, in some way or another— leaves a chain of corpses from Cleveland to Moldova. But it’s also conjuring some of the old Peter Henry Hightower’s dark magic, calling up his ghost to build empires again, hold together and destroy everyone around him. Looking back, it’s easy to see how it all fits together, to feel that stale air of inevitability, to forget that at the time it was all open promise—always was, still is now. Those two ideas, of infinite possibility and singular doom, held in direct tension: If America doesn’t have a lock on it, at least we’ve done it best in all the world so far, and it’s a small part of what makes us great and terrible, from the first days of religious and political radicals making profits and slaughtering the natives to our final days, whenever they may be, but which are always coming sooner than we think.
Still with me? Good. Let’s go.
