Life Expectancy

hundred twenty-two thousand five hundred, and that's my final offer. I must have this special boy. He's my last chance, my best chance, to create another like me. The blood of aerialists is concentrated in him as never before."
        As Vivacemente's tucked and tightened face tried to express the operatic emotions that raged in him, I half expected it to crack at every corner and peel up from the bone.
        He pressed his hands together as if in prayer, and he began to beseech Jimmy instead of bullying him: "If I had known in 1974 or any time during the years immediately after that Natalie had given birth to twins, that you had been given to the baker and his wife"-the word baker issuing from him with the acidic disdain of a blue-blood snob"I would have come for you, I swear. I would have bought you back or rescued you one way or another. I always get what I want. But I thought I had only one son and that the vicious Beezo had fled with him."
        Icily, Jimmy rejected this bizarre protestation of fatherly love: "You aren't my father even in the sense that you might call yourself the spiritual father of everyone in your troupe. Punchinello and I aren't in your troupe, and we're not your sons in any sense. We're technically your grandsons, God help us. But I don't accept even that relationship. I deny you the right to be my grandfather, I refuse you, I renounce you, I repudiate you."
        The beseeching hands that had been pressed together abruptly separated.
        They formed into white-knuckled fists.
        Although Vivacemente had no sense of humor, he had a rare capacity for hatred, which sharpened his eyes into knife points and which expressed itself unmistakably in the tightly screwed features of his carved face.
        The old man's voice was hypodermic, his words poisonous: "Konrad Beezo never had a child with any woman he ever laid with. He was the husk of a man, sterile."
        With a jolt, I remembered-and I'm certain Jimmy did, too-Konrad Beezo in our kitchen, the Porter Carson identity cast aside, just before he shot me. He wanted Andy as recompense for our sending Punchinello to prison, as "something for something." He hadn't known that Jimmy was Punchinello's twin, hadn't realized that Andy might be of his bloodline. He just wanted quid pro quo, his "makeweight." When I had asked Konrad why he didn't lie down with some desperate hag who might have him and make a baby of his own, he flinched from my words and could not meet my eyes. Now I knew why.
        This venomous filth before us, this walking worm in a scarlet robe, drew himself to his full height and with demented pride said, "I wanted to concentrate the aerialist genes as they had never before been concentrated. And my dream was conceived in the biblical sense.
        But she fled me for Beezo, and denied me what was mine. Natalie was my daughter, but I am your grandfather and your father."
        Whoa.
        Having adjusted to the creepy discovery that he was Konrad Beezo's son and Punchinello's brother, poor Jimmy-sweet Jimmy-now had to get his mind around the even creepier idea that he was still Punchinello's brother but was in fact Vivacemente's son and grandson, the product of incest.
        Move over, Johnny Tillotson. The hits just keep on coming. ovement at the perimeter of the tent drew our attention. From outside, the muscle-bound brute with the cobra eyes stepped into the main entrance and stood there with his legs wide apart, looking as if he could deflect a runaway elephant. He was armed with a shotgun.
        Another man spookily like the first-except that he had keloid scars across his face and neck, as if he had been cobbled together by Victor Frankenstein-appeared in the performers' entrance. He, too, held a shotgun.
        Three others had slipped under the sidewall canvas where it hung loosest between stakes. They were spotted around the big top, beyond the footlights, in shadows but visible. I suspected they had weapons, too, but I couldn't see them well enough to be sure.
        "And so you see," Vivacemente continued, "your son Andy is my Natalie's grandson. He is also my grandson and great-grandson. My dream has been delayed one generation, but now it will come to pass. If you don't sell me young Andy for four hundred twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars, I will kill the two of you. I will kill Rudy and Maddy, and I will take all three of your children at no cost to me