The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery Page A

gathering their information on who’s dealing with whom, trying to build up an organization in their files that matches the one in the world. Their desks, not far apart from each other, are piled with pictures and printouts—we’re just at the beginning of the point where everything goes electronic—and now and again Guarino, who’s better at finding things than Easton is, gives her a tap on the shoulder: What do you think of this? And Easton, who’s better at making the connections than Guarino is, gives whatever he’s holding a good stare. Starts to talk. They must be involved. I’d say this is some kind of code, except they don’t seem to work that way. They’re catching up, figuring out how the new crime organizations work.But here’s the discouraging thing: The organizations don’t ever seem to end. The connections lead only to more connections, all over the world. They jump from country to country, never-ending webs of people and currency that involve as many rackets as the agents can think of, from money laundering and loan-sharking to arms dealing and human trafficking. If there are real lines between them, the agents can’t see them; they have no idea what the structures of these things look like on paper, let alone who’s running them. So they keep having the same little confrontation between them. Look, it’s okay, Guarino says. We can still use RICO to get them, right? We just define the organization how we need to. He’s trying to move the case forward, put some guys away. But Easton doesn’t want to do it that way. That’s not the organization, then, she might say. It’s just something we made up. We can do it that way, but it doesn’t change anything. We never get the guys who matter. Sometimes she hauls out the tired old analogies to hydras, to octopuses—you know, cutting off one tentacle when there are a hundred more, and the one you cut off grows back anyway—and Guarino just shakes his head. They both know what the problem is: They’re hacking apart the facts to make a story, and that their story’s got a lot of truth in it is beside the point. Maybe that truth’ll be enough to do the job, to serve some kind of justice, to do right by the people who’ve been wronged. But the people left out of the story—the victims and the perpetrators—are going to notice what’s been done. They’ll see the places the story doesn’t touch, and know that there, it’s open season.
    Curly’s friends, his family, his mother, are calling each other more and more, getting more frantic with every call. Have you seen him? He didn’t go somewhere without telling us, did he? He wouldn’t do that. Where is he? It feels like a prophecy coming true. He was such a good kid, just a little wild, but that wildness led him somewhere they couldn’t follow, and they lost him. How could that ever end well? For the Hightower clan, though, things are a bit more complicated. Muriel’s been too afraid of her son for a couple years to ask what he’s been up to, too used to him being gone for months to know that he’s in trouble. Jackie doesn’t talk to anyone but herself. And Sylvie doesn’t say anything. She’s known for thirty years that her best chance of surviving in her family, and keeping her family alive, is to embody her mother’s spirit most of the time, friendly, steadfast, quiet. To observe and wait, and act only when she thinks she can make things better. Then her father comes out of her, and man, watch out.
    Henry and Rufus are another story. They both have so much of their father in them. The same fire, the same shrewdness, the same cynical understanding of laws as things to be manipulated, skirted, ignored when necessary; the same quick separation of laws from morals and values. The same desire to take care of the people closest to them, the Old World instinct