City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

Alisha turned around, put her hands on her knees, and yelled, “I ain’t no guys!”

  The stereo of lights went quadrophonic, and the falling snow pulsed with visual feedback as a fleet of black SUVs pulled down the block, a caravan of police cruisers behind them.

  Vehicles skidded to a halt. Doors opened. Men in fur-rimmed parkas emptied out into the storm.

  Whitaker stepped out of the static and said, “Hello, everyone,” in way of a greeting. She smiled at the kids, but you didn’t have to be James Lipton to see the stink in her performance. “Dr. Page, you and I have some work to do.”

  Lucas turned back to the house, and Erin’s unhappy shadow filled the doorway. She flashed in the red-and-white Lite-Brite display, and it did little to soften her features.

  Lucas turned and ushered the kids up the steps. “Sorry, guys. This will have to wait.” He looked down at the dog, then turned to one of the overcoated clones who had spilled from one of the SUVs. “Since I am the only one who can do what I do, you get to walk the dog. Don’t forget to pick up his poop. Here’s a bag,” he said, and he handed off Lemmy’s leash and a Saks shoe bag from his pocket. The agent looked like he was about to complain when Lucas hit him with, “You say one word and you people can simply fuck right off.”

  The agent took the leash and the bag.

  “And rub his feet if they get cold,” he called after him.

  Then he turned to Erin, who had corralled the kids behind her in the doorway, and mouthed the words I’m sorry.

  Erin nodded like she didn’t believe him and slammed the door loud enough that Whitaker looked back.

  When Lucas got in the Navigator, Whitaker asked, “How did that go?”

  “Pretty good; you should see her when she’s pissed.”

  Whitaker smiled and pulled out.

  After a few minutes of cutting through the maze of snow-filled streets, she cracked the silence with, “I have a kid. A boy. Stan, the Little Man.” Her voice carried a cadence he hadn’t heard in it before.

  Lucas didn’t really care. As far as he was concerned, Whitaker was part of the problem. She had ruined the vibe at home twice in one night, and he wasn’t in a forgiving mood. He didn’t say anything even though she probably expected him to.

  “He stays with his father. Mostly. I get my two weeks with him in the summer. And every second Christmas. I get along with my ex. It’s not like I sneak into his apartment and hold a gun to his skull while he’s sleeping.” She glanced over and smiled. “At least not anymore.”

  She had a kid. Great. Huge accomplishment. She had been married. So were a lot of people. He could have asked how old the boy was or about his favorite comic. He could even have asked what caliber pistol she pressed to her ex’s head on those special evenings. But he wasn’t interested. “Where are we going?”

  The question killed Whitaker’s big personal moment.

  “A corrections officer was shot on Rikers.”

  “A guard?”

  “A corrections officer.”

  “Do prison guards have social justice warriors on their side now? Like the guy at the supermarket tripping over himself to make sure the aisles are clear for me when I walk in wearing shorts after the gym? How about people mind their own fucking business.”

  Whitaker nodded. “You’re right. Fuck ’em. All of ’em.” She paused. “Just who am I cursing at, specifically?”

  With that, Lucas smiled, if only a little. “I guess I am a little prickly.”

  “Gore Vidal was a little prickly. You, my friend, are mean. There’s a distinct difference.”

  The reference was an odd one coming from an FBI agent. The bureau was a preppy gun culture to its core, but its employees were all college graduates; Lucas wondered what Whitaker’s major had been. Five minutes earlier, he would have gone for ass-kicking, but after the Gore Vidal comment, he was leaning toward a liberal arts major.

  “I have a BA in political science and an MA in anthropology,” Whitaker said, once again answering the question before it was asked.

  “That’s a pain in the ass,” Lucas offered flatly. “And you should stop it.”

  “You’re not the first person to say that.”

  “I’d like to be the last.”

  “You’re not much fun at parties, are you?”

  “I don’t go to parties.”

  “If you were nicer, maybe you’d get invited to some.”

  Lucas leaned back in the big expanse of the leather seat, and the side-view mirror lit up with the fleet of flashing lights behind them. He wondered if Erin would get any sleep. And if she did, would she be a little less angry with him tomorrow?

  But she had to know he didn’t really have a choice in doing this. It was how he was wired, and there was no undoing it. And like any immutable personality trait, it could be traced back to his origin.

  He had started life out with as few advantages as can be found in the wealthiest country in the world. He never knew his mother, and what he did know he got from the adoption files years later, well after he had grown into a man, by which point she was dead.

  His mother had been an upstate farm girl who had come to the big city to find her future. She had probably started out with typical ambitions involving a job, a nice apartment, a husband, and a few other basic hopes. But whatever had fueled her dreams of a life in the city eventually gave way to the reality of bad decisions, and she gave Lucas up for adoption when he was eight months old.

  He started out with statistically bad luck in not finding a family while still a baby, and the lost window of opportunity destined him to years of playing musical chairs at a series of foster homes. He was a bright boy, but the people he passed his time with were not equipped to look for attributes above the usual; like everyone else, they were just trying to get by. But a small gift from a social worker changed the course of his life.

  It was a month before his fifth birthday, and Lucas was at his eighth foster home. The Pottses were middle-of-the-road working-class people from Nyack who believed a little in God and a lot in hard work; John Potts was a barber and his wife, Rose, was a full-time mom who did laundry for other people. They were uncomplicated, kind, and served watermelon every day in the summer. They grew them out back and enjoyed watching the kids go at them with that particular relish that disappears with age.

  Lucas shoehorned into the household, by now adept at keeping his head down, eyes averted, and mouth shut. He was old enough to know that the routine wouldn’t win him any friends, but, more important, it was less likely to earn him slaps, punches, or worse.

  By the time of the first-month inspection, Lucas had already found a rhythm in the house. It wasn’t a particularly exciting place, but the Pottses were good people who didn’t make him feel unimportant. They had a lot of magazines with all kinds of hairs—from short and red to long and gray—hidden in the pages; an occupational hazard for a barber who brought old magazines home from work. Lucas flipped through them, absorbing the photos and wondering how the text worked.

  This particular visit was different from the previous ones in that the lady, a handsome black woman named Miss Odia Clark, asked him questions. They spent time together on the porch of the little postwar bungalow. It was a cool fall morning, and the garbage can by the curb was filled with watermelon rinds and some broken wooden seats from the swing set out back that Mr. Potts had replaced with new ones, painted a glossy red.

  Miss Clark asked him if he was hungry or if he had any bruises or if he had any chores, and he gave her carefully tailored answers, at least as carefully tailored as a five-year-old is capable of. She recorded his responses in her notebook, and Lucas realized that she was creating text by hand—just like in the magazines. He was fascinated by her writing—it was an activity he had never seen before in any detail.

  Lucas asked her questions about the letters, so she gave him a very quick lesson that was basically no more than a rundown of the ABCs followed by the numbers, using her fingers to explain one through ten. He a
sked about addition and subtraction, two concepts he had already labeled as bigging and littling in his limited lexicon. It was not a long lesson, but those few precious moments that Miss Clark took from her too-busy day were the most important of young Lucas’s life. When she was done, he asked to borrow her pen and proceeded to write out a math problem that he had been lacking the scientific vocabulary to complete. When he was done, he asked if he could have the page, and Miss Clark tore it out for him. But not before looking at it. Then she gave him a notebook of his own, along with the first compliment of his life. She also gave him a blue Bic.

  Miss Clark had a talk with Mr. and Mrs. Potts at the kitchen table while Lucas sat in the living room, working in his new notebook. He didn’t think he was in trouble, but he wasn’t certain. If life had taught him only one lesson so far, it was that people did not all react the same way. There was always a chance that he was in trouble, and he hoped they weren’t hitters.

  After Miss Clark left, Mr. and Mrs. Potts stood over him in the living room. Mr. Potts had his hands on his hips and slowly shook his head as if he had just won a set of Greek encyclopedias. “So, what you wanna learn?” Mr. Potts innocently asked, stretching his abilities on teaching to the breaking point.

  Lucas’s focus shifted from Mr. Potts to his wife, then back. Then he lifted his arm and pointed out the window at the only constant he knew: the sky.

  That night, as Lucas was getting ready for bed with the other children, Mr. Potts came to get him. He packed a sweater from Lucas’s little bag (he had accumulated a handful of personal items at this point, all hand-me-downs). Then Mr. Potts ushered the boy out to the car and drove him off into the night. As he had done so many times before, Lucas waved bye-bye to another house.

  Mr. Potts drove Lucas far out of town in the big Country Squire station wagon. He helped him out of the backseat, and Lucas stood there in the dark, worried, wondering what was happening as Mr. Potts set up the two lawn chairs. Lucas had never been out in a field at night before, and it wasn’t until he became an adult that he understood how hard Mr. Potts had tried to help. He wasn’t an academic, and he most certainly wasn’t an astronomer, but he opened two lawn chairs, bundled Lucas up in his sweater, wrapped him in Mrs. Potts’s old quilt, and handed the boy a pair of binoculars and a tattered astrology—not astronomy—chart torn from an old National Geographic magazine. (Lucas still had that chart, taken from the August 1970 issue—it was titled A Map of the Heavens, and it was framed and hung over his desk in his office at home.) “So you can see them stars,” was how he put it, and he gave Lucas a quick rundown on how to adjust the focus on the cheap binoculars.

  Mr. Potts sat down beside him, handing the boy a bag of peanuts and a little metal thermos filled with hot chocolate. “Let me know if you need anything,” he said, and he plugged the tiny transistor earpiece into his head, piping in a ball game from Dodger Stadium.

  Lucas sighted through the binoculars and played with the knob until the sky overhead came into focus, a silent symphony of lights. He had never used optics before, and the newfound power amazed, delighted, and humbled him.

  He sifted through the barrage of information, methodically mapping the sky in a manner he would never understand. He memorized the patterns, embedding constellations into a mental library where one image connected to—and was relative to—all others.

  When Lucas finally put the binoculars down, his fingers had frozen up, his nose was red and cold, and Mr. Potts was dead asleep beside him, head back, snoring. The sun would soon be up.

  On the drive back, he fell asleep, and when they got home, Mr. Potts carried the boy inside, then showered, changed his clothes, and went off to work.

  And that was where the notebooks began, a habit that he would carry with him the rest of his life.

  When Miss Clark came to visit the following week, she asked Lucas if she could borrow his notebook. As a bribe, she offered him two empty new ones—and they were thick!

  Miss Clark showed his star notebook to her brother-in-law, a science teacher at the Rufus T. Firefly High School on Staten Island. He refused to believe that anyone younger than a graduate student would be able to put such a journal together. He made a copy and sent it to a friend who taught physics at Columbia. More incredulity. More questions. More curiosity.

  Then one night just after Halloween, a car pulled up in front of the home. It was a long silver automobile with big bug-eye lights driven by a man in a uniform. The car was almost as long as the front yard, and when the vehicle stopped, a ripple of excitement went through the children. As in any foster home, most of the kids had been in the system long enough that they all ran to comb their hair and do their best to look like well-behaved little people. Lucas stood at the window and watched the driver get out and open the back door. Lucas expected a king to step out. But a small man who looked stranger than anyone he had ever seen emerged from the interior.

  Mr. Potts seemed to be expecting him, and they sat in the living room for half an hour while the children played outside (and Lucas worked in one of his notebooks). The driver stayed with the car, smoking cigarettes and polishing the chrome with a quiet patience.

  After a while, the Pottses and the man came outside to watch the children. Lucas could sense their focus directed at him. The man was small and wore a well-tailored suit in dark purple. But the thing that struck little Lucas as his most idiosyncratic feature was his hair—it was wild and bushy, growing into a big bushy beard that covered most of his face and made him look like a Muppet—the one who played the drums.

  Since Lucas wasn’t sure as to how he should behave, he sat quietly in the shade of the tree, working out one of the “sky problems,” as Mr. Potts called them. To Lucas, these problems were nothing more than maps that moved, and he was happy that he finally had a way to record them. He wondered if the social worker would bring his other notebook back—she had promised to return it. But he knew that people didn’t always keep their promises. Not even adults.

  Mr. Potts brought the man over to the shade of the big tree and introduced him as Mr. Teach. He seemed nice and asked Lucas some questions. They spoke for a few moments, then he said good-bye and that he hoped to see Lucas again sometime.

  A few days later, when the children had forgotten about the visit, Mr. Teach returned in the big silver car. Before he was even out of the vehicle, Mr. Potts called Lucas over and, with tears in his eyes, gave the boy his binoculars as a present. Mrs. Potts hugged him, kissed him, and bundled him into his coat before bringing his little suitcase to the door. And Mr. Teach took him away. To meet an old lady who lived on top of a hotel.

  36

  The Upper East Side

  The Grand Cherokee had been parked on the street for an hour now, and the heat radiating through the metal skin melted the snow coming down into an uneven camouflage. The vehicle was lopsided, one of the back wheels jacked up on a block of ice left by a plow. Two men sat inside, sipping coffee and dialed into the silent zone out of habit. The snow on the windshield melted, giving the occupants a fragmented water-dappled view of the brownstone across the street. But they didn’t use the wipers.

  Someone in the house began snapping the lights off, one room at a time; no doubt little ones being put to bed. First the main floor, then the second, and finally the third—life support cycling down in increments.

  Detective Michael Atchison finished the last of the coffee and slipped his cup into the holder before cracking his knuckles in a series of moves that looked like he was changing fingers. He finished the exercise with a stretch that had all his muscles twanging in opposite directions.

  Atchison’s partner, Detective Alex Roberts, sat in the passenger’s seat, repeating a similar set of adjustments with the extra moves of cracking his neck and jaw. Then he took a deep breath and nodded.

  Atchison fired up the engine and pulled out into the street with a little more gas than he wanted, revving the engine with that particular growl native to winter. No one noticed them pull
into the alley behind Lucas’s house.

  37

  Rikers Island

  The long arm of the bureau had reached the island well before Lucas and Whitaker arrived in the black multi-SUV centipede. The prison was under double lockdown; one for inmates, enforced by employees; one for employees, enforced by the bureau. Every light in the complex was on, and the falling snow felt like a witch’s curse focused on the island.

  The usual sign-in process was forgone in lieu of expediency: the SUVs were waved through the big double-gated sally port and directed to the loading bay. The on-site coordinator was in the midst of issuing passes. There were approximately thirty bureau people already there.

  Lucas stepped out into the concrete hangar, and the double doors ratcheted down, sealing the space with an ear-pressurizing clang. He slipped his sunglasses on and took a deep breath, setting his internal controls to work mode.

  Whitaker came around, and one of the field agents walked over from the dispatch desk already set up. “Whitaker, Dr. Page, this corrections officer will show you to the crime scene,” he said, forgoing any form of a greeting and ushering them past the briefing point after handing them security passes.

  A corrections officer named Dominguez who wore sergeant’s stripes speed-walked beside them, giving a quick procedural drill. “Please keep your passes on you at all times. We’ve got all corridors leading to the yard locked down, but don’t move around by yourself. If you need to move between here and there—to get your equipment, make phone calls, that sort of thing—have one of the corrections officers with you. Do not put anything down that you might miss if it were to disappear. You shouldn’t see any inmates who aren’t in their cells, but if you do, do not give them anything. Since you’re law enforcement, I’ll forgo the usual emphasis that I mean anything.” Dominguez then went silent.

  The interior resembled a Cold War Iron Curtain airport, circa 1961, but in need of more repairs. Accelerated decay seemed to be built into the genetics of the prison, and it was impossible to miss the architectural progeria that rusted metal, ate concrete, and chipped paint much faster than in the outside world. The general taste of defeat was hard to miss, even with the holiday ornaments Scotch-taped up here and there. There was a red-and-green foil banner above the entrance to one of the wings that read Mer y Ch is mas. The building was the saddest place Lucas could remember, save one.