But suddenly, presented with this glittering apparition from a life he’d left far behind, that was what he desperately wanted. A moment of escape; thirty seconds of the past. “They’re going to hang me, Ari. Tell me one of your rotten jokes.”

“They aren’t going to hang you.” He suddenly looked tired. “Fraud isn’t a capital offense.”

Cyril tapped his straight into the ashtray at the center of the table. Another luxury Aristide’s cash had bought. “We both know exactly why I’m here.”

It put a peculiar look on Ari’s face that piqued Cyril’s curiosity. An atrophied muscle, that, and it ached like one. “Ari?”

But he shook the question off, and shed the strange expression that had crept across his face. “I read an interview with your attorney,” he said. “In which she wondered why the nation felt the need to punish a man who already suffered agonies of guilt every waking day. Is that true?”

Cyril flicked his burnt-down straight into the ashtray and sat back, arms crossed. “What do you think?”

There was a pause before he said, “I hardly know.” And then another. “Lillian says you don’t want to be saved.”

“If Frye’s judges don’t put me on the scaffold, it’ll be at least twenty-five years. Probably life. Do you think that’s what they want from me?” He waved a hand as if to indicate a mob of angry citizens. “They don’t want a gavel and a sentence. They want a corpse.”

“And you want to give them one.”

“They deserve it. And I don’t want to spend my life in prison.” He said it casually, but perhaps that was the very reason Aristide reacted as he did.

“This is nothing but a lazy suicide,” he snarled, grinding his cigarette savagely into the tray. “You’ll ruin your sister, and you’ll ruin me. Why don’t you save us all the trouble and expense and end it now?”

Cyril looked up, shocked at Ari’s anger, his suggestion. “Don’t think I haven’t stood on that ledge a thousand times.”

“Then why haven’t you jumped?” And now Cyril could hear it, underneath the fury: pain, and pleading. “Surely if you haven’t killed yourself by now, you have some reason. What’s kept you from pulling that trigger?”

Not much. Not nearly enough. And yet, “I don’t get that luxury. I owe too much. If they hang me, at least my death’s a kind of payment.”

“Swineshit. Who’s better off once you’re at the end of that rope? This whole circus isn’t selfless; it’s selfish. You can’t even do the deed yourself.”

Something in him, which had been bending beneath a great weight for too long, finally snapped. He stood so suddenly his chair fell backward. “Would you rather I did? Do you want me to?”