Sparse applause. The band picked at their shirts. Eddie Young led the way into an old standard. When the bridge came to an end the drummer and keyboardist backed down, settling their pitch. The youth's hands snapped to life like a ma'orette's. In one fluid motion the mouthpiece neared, the teeth struck. No one was prepared. The entire club was overcome, as though everyone a eaten the same thing at once. The boy was terrifying, working the changes fluidly, as though he'd begun practicing his finger movements on the spindles of his crib. Nathan pictured his own saxophone in dissembled pieces, the neck wrapped in the chamois cloth, the strap rolled away, the reeds tucked in their paper sleeves, all of it entombed beneath clothes and tennis racquets in a back closet at Claire's. He reminded himself that he still burned with the flames that everyone-the great New York lawyers, his instructors at the Manhattan School of Music, the audition jury at Juilliard-once spoke of as a kind of genius. When Claire used to whisper: How fine you were, how wonderfully you played. Together-what a team!-they were wonderful.
They were wonderful. How fine.
And where did it go? Where did the music go? Where did Claire go? Then it was years later and Nathan hadn't picked up the saxophone, and when he did one day on a whim the instrument was a small strange animal stiff and lifeless in his hands, and he put it down, his affections for it like old teenage love, leftovers from the first great meal of his life left too long.
Nathan has changed out of his suit. He stands before the french doors as before, though now in a blue blazer and light gray turtleneck, garnished with a nautical motif. A burgundy leather portmanteau hangs from one hand, his attache case from the other. After the New Haven he had fully intended to bring Isabel back here for a nightcap and then out to East Hampton. Schreck could have handled the arraignments, Ruth the pleas. Somewhere he changed his mind. Somewhere he wanted to show her where Milton used to take him. Coney Island, capital of night. Somewhere it went wrong. She sobbed loudly. A car door slammed, but whose? Her flight along the boardwalk, her heels catching between the slats-
Outside now Barton has gone. Snow crosses the blue security light in the garden, a single beam of frost drawn through the night, daring Nathan to cross or stay. He is conscious, here and there, of new aches.
"Baron, come."
But outside on the stoop, Nathan and dog both are stopped by the sight of Oliver Schreck standing across the street. Snow has collected on his shoulders, salted the toboggan hat on his head, dusted away his tracks as if he has been there always, like a stanchion pile-driven into the sidewalk. Though Nathan believes he's caught Schreck clapping shut a cellular phone.
He leads Baron toward his car. Schreck, his feet ripping free of the snow, heads him off: "Nathan."
Baron begins to growl.
"Oliver, what are you doing here?"
"Good dog, good."
"How did you know about the apartment?"
"What are you talking about? Nathan, what the hell happened?"
Nathan's arm, as if of its own accord, waves behind him. The apartment, it seems to say, will explain it all. "This address-"
Schreck eyes Baron warily. "I've been here before what do you mean? I was-you invited me, Nathan. You let me, you know, use it. Once or twice. You don't remember?"
With a glance toward Schreck, Nathan feels a peculiar embarrassment, that sense, almost, of indecency that he has been Schreck's partner, his confederate in forgotten adventures. In the snow, wrapped and hatted like a child, the prick looks so vulnerable and friendly. "Oliver, I'm in a hurry."
"Where to?"
"Rikers Island. We talked about this."
"Don't go.”
"Not to see Johnny. It's Amparo-"
"Don't. Nathan, it's Isabel, didn't you hear?"
"Hear?"
"They found her, buddy boy," he says mournfully. "She's dead."
Nathan can't read him. Did Schreck think he was breaking the news, or just confirming the obvious? His own face a mask, Nathan considers him as something he might buy, a display of clothing in a window. But he can't afford it. "I don't know what you're talking about," he says, letting Baron in the car.
Schreck cocks his head. "Why are you lying?"
A cab pulls up and Ruth emerges and settles in the snow beside Schreck, her bulk swaddled in red wool. They stand together, a mismatched pair sending off their child to college, or the prom. They exchange a glance that registers strangely with Nathan: is it worry or pride? Ruth and Schreck have exchanged only venom and vitriol, nothing remotely civil since law school. Not until now. Or so he thought.
"And then there's this matter of Krivit," Schreck says. His voice has lowered an octave, matured. As though one of the Oliver Schrecks is an act. This Schreck, that Schreck. "Are you working on the brief?" he says flatly.
How does he know? Why does he know? Why does he care? Who is Oliver Schreck? These thoughts pass through Nathan's mind like little grace notes. "I told you, I didn't take the job," he says.
"Milton's worried," Schreck says.
"Milton's worried. This is nothing. Next to Riverside Drive this isn't peanuts."
"He wants you to take care of Krivit. Krivit's doing a lot for you. Milton just wants you to finish it off, you know, follow through with things. He wanted me to pass that along."
"Krivit's doing a lot for me?" Nathan glances at Ruth, but she is looking down at her feet, embarrassed, ashamed, or both. Nathan settles on a different thought altogether: Escape. It's late," he says, and shuts the door.
Car and dog are one. The silvery hair is everywhere, woven into the seats and carpet. The paneling oozes dogsmell and rainy runs throu h the East Hampton woods. Beach sand sprinkled under the dash. The damp and sinewy pointer, his legs planted firmly in the back well of the vehicle, drapes himself over the front seat and rests his paws on Nathan's shoulders. His tongue now and again sneaks a swipe around Nathan's cheek into his eye; his hot breath in Nathan's ear; panting jowls resting on the top of Nathan's head. Like a person he demands attention, and when refused, takes it anyway.
It is eleven o'clock. And Nathan doesn't understand, anything, it seems. Quickly, like an addict hurrying the hit, he feeds a CD to the dashboard, then floats away on the streetlight's amber glow, the night before him stretching out like a rolling sea on which one sets sail primarily to be disoriented and lost.
But beeper then phone go off one after the other.
"Dominicans, Serena. It was Dominicans, not Puerto Ricans."
Still, he is relaxed. It is the music, the swell of spontaneous inspirations, emotional tremors. He leaves the silent phone on the dash and digs through a pile of bagel wraps and coffee cups, res cuing a remote control for a stereo six inches away. He points, fires, cocks his head, listening, and his hand lifts off the wheel, as if of its own accord, to conduct the grim opening strains of Don Carlo.
"No look, Serena, it's not that I'm just in a car. I'm sitting in traffic look… Who? I told you I'm with Oliver… No. Really. My partner. Yes I have a partner. Oliver."
Nathan blithely holds the phone toward the dog. "She doesn't believe me," he says. "Say something."
The dog pricks his ears, cocks his head. Nathan's eyes fall on the empty passenger seat, and for a moment he wonders why someone-he wonders who-isn't actually there.
In the rear-view mirror, the red sedan has pulled out thirty yards behind him. Its headlamps swing wide, then lock on the mirror. Nathan stops along the curb. The sedan stops half a block back, idling in the middle of the street. The two figures smoke steadily in the darkened car, the fringes of their hair and collars glowing behind the glass.
Nathan brings the phone to his ear, in case they might want to talk, but he hears only crackling silence and slips the phone into his pocket. His car creeps from the curb. "Isabel," he whispers. Baron barks at enemy apparitions, ghosts of dogs and figments of dog imagination, at nothing, anyway, that Nathan can or will ever imagine. In this city a thousand million lights come on, a thousand million lights go off. Passenger
s on the woollen sidewalks tip into the snow, clutching at hats and scarves. But Nathan feels in the air a sense of black conspiracy, as in a cove full of boats slowly turning together before a storm. Turning, as the winds shift, toward him. He accelerates past an office tower, the illuminated news aloft passing around the corner of the building, news of mass slaughter in Burundi, an orphanage bombed in Sarajevo, fortytwo Dominican illegals drowned in a boat disaster, the Knicks' afternoon loss to the Celtics in Boston, of, suddenly, nothing, snapping off into muteness, as if something-the world, his own capacity for information-has come to an abrupt end, and there is news of nothing at all.
Santos leans solitary and lamplit against his car, sucking his coated teeth. In the shelter of this block the snowflakes swirl softly. Across the street the address Nathan left for him on his message service stands dark save a single window, on the ground floor, dimly lit behind a thick curtain. A figure passes before it, passes again. Someone small, someone's child. Three stoops down an old man spends this cold night in a doorway in bewildered repose.
Santos is considering giving up as Nathan's car stops and Nathan himself climbs out. "Cold enough for you?" Santos says.
"What-?"
"It's Errol, Nathan."
Nathan takes a step toward him, looking about, hesitant.
"You told me to be here," Santos says.
"Of course."
"I didn't realize you had an uptown place, too."
"I lost track of the time."
"This is a terrible day to do that."
"I know, I'm sorry-about Isabel. It's-" His hands move slightly with the wooden smile he manages. "It's unspeakable. I don't know what to say. I don't see you once in five years, now twice in one day. But over this-"
Santos shifts a little on his feet and watches him. "You know why I called. It wasn't for you to express your grief."
Nathan just looks.
"You sent the flowers," Santos says carefully.
“l did?”
"It was your father."
Nathan shrugs. "He doesn't do anything. Maybe his secretary-"
Santos pinches his eyes. "Jesus Christ, Nathan, just do me the fucking courtesy."
Nathan looks away and Santos lights a cigarette, points to Nathan's wrist. "Tell me about the scratches."
"Is this an investigation, Errol? Are you interrogating me?"
"It is what it is. Answer the question."
“Is it your investigation?"
"Answer me."
"Because if it's not, you won't be able to use a thing."
Santos watches the cigarette smoke spiral and unwind in the snow. The rope pulls through his chest, the knot in his lungs tightening. He reaches for the bulge in his coat pocket but looking at Nathan leaves the inhaler alone. "Just tell me about the scratches."
“It was a cat."
Santos looks back at the car. All the windows have fogged. The ghost-shape of the dog hovers in the rear, nosing the glass, his huge pink tongue pulsing. "You hate cats."
Santos doesn't mean to, but he feels it coming-reaching up, he touches his eyes with the balls of his fingers. Then he grabs Nathan. "What the fuck did you do? She was my sister."
"You don't know what you're saying," Nathan says.
Santos presses a finger into his own chest. "Who are you talking to here? She was like the others, and the others, and the others. It's not like I've forgotten anything. You think I'd forget all that sick shit? I know, Nathan. I know you were with her last night. "
"I was, but we saw Figaro at the Met. We had dinner at Gambone's. We went up to the New Haven."
"Jesus, all your haunts. You were working her over, giving her the business.
"I know what this looks like, but I have nothing to hide."
"Don't" – Santos lets the shout out into the night, but it dies in the snow, falls at their feet -"Lie to me." He pulls Nathan down a step. Their breath mingles and coils and Santos can smell it in him, sweet death at the edges. No one's but his. "You don't exactly look like an innocent man."
"We both know it's not how someone looks, Errol."
Santos says, his voice giving way, "This is no time to be playing lawyer. I'm talking about my sister. You never had a secretary you didn't fuck."
A strange smile crosses Nathan's lips. "And she's been my secretary for four years. What finally brings you out tonight?"
Santos breathes. "What-?" His arms drop like a stricken puppet's. "She's dead, Nathan."
"I've known for hours."
The tightness has spread from Santos's chest to his arms now, his hands. "Maybe you've known longer than that."
"You're no saint, Errol," Nathan says. "None of us are. But you've done well. I'm sure Claire would say so."
"Nathan, my god-"
"Of course I see the romantic predicament you two are in. I'm not angry about you and Claire. In a way I was glad it was you."
Santos runs his hands over his face. "How do you do it? How do you make everyone want to kill you, and then want to save you?"
"We're tied together, Errol. We grew up together. You don't kill your friends."
Santos drops a step back. "There's a point when you do. There's a point when you have to, when they're the only ones worth killing.
"And worth dying for," Nathan adds.
Usually, Nathan is slippery, his eyes skipping along the surface of things, skidding, his hands fidgety. But now he seems to still, his eyes focusing, leveling at Santos a steady stare. "There's something you don't know."
His breath thin and thinner. Santos looks at Nathan warily. "Tell me one thing I don't know."
"You don't want it."
"I want it."
"You'll have to talk to Ellie."
"My mother would be happier dead right now. She's in no condition. What does my mother have to do with this?"
"You won't ask her?"
No.
Leaning, Nathan whispers something in Santos's ear. Santos coughs into his fist, his chest hard as wood. His heart thuds, getting hot.
As Nathan speaks, Santos raises and lowers his arm two or three times, trying to compose the news out of the air. Then a headache, sudden, blinding. Squeezing the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, he feels the weight of the whole of the city behind him, the permanent daylight, the trace lamplight, the lightning beyond the clouds. At night in this city, around every corner everyone a potential murderer, everyone a potential murder. Santos sees how he used to wake as a boy in the night in terror of the uninvited ghouls that crouched in the dark corners of his room. The imagined gargoyles and demons that dropped from incandescent webs. He sees his parents and their one boy and two girls and the stretches of angry silence that sent them to opposite ends of a small apartment. He sees the last time he and his sister touched: adults outgrown in their childhood home she ripped the phone out of his hands for no reason at all and he pinned her shoulders to the wall. A spat that lovers might have. Fighting the hideous urge to kiss her. Calmly, she threatened to scream, Rape. And then she did scream it. She took a breath, looked at him, her eyes full of mischief, then screamed it again. His glare dimmed and his hatred softened and he considered the line between lust and indifference and the fact of their blood relation, and he released her. She screamed a third time, at first he thought for the hell of it. Though she seemed to mean it. She was shrieking, tearing at her hair, as if she saw someone else in him, someone worth running from. And maybe he was, someone to run from. He sees her coming at him with a pair of scissors and he sees himself fighting her off, flinging her across the bed and turning and running away, and boarding the downtown bus he leaned his head against the plexiglass and closed his eyes. Remorse in his throat like a hot cinder. He hadn't seen her since, until today.
Somehow did he know?
Because of Isabel's green eyes? Because he couldn't bear to see her again, because he wrote them both off-her and Nathan together, Nathan because of what he'd become, Isabel because of what she'd always been? He'd
understood that of course he'd be able to have, possess, love, neither of them. They shone in a secret constellation in which he was some imploded, snuffed star, at the center of which, drawing everyone in, unseen, menacing as a black hole, hovered Milton Stein.
The day he said goodbye to them all he rode the bus and walked the Brooklyn Bridge to Claire's apartment and for the first time, with hardly a word between them, they made love; as though she understood as well as he, as though she had been waiting for him, or half expecting him. It was blind sex fueled by a lusty terror of the truth. They were both Nathan's dupes, patsies, and foolishly Santos believed he was making Claire an offer of reconciliation, to generously fill the void left by Nathan with something better, at least something honorable. He would love her as she deserved to be loved. But he was only filling himself. The spic apprentice. And he knows now that he was thinking he wouldn't miss a sister he had coveted for unnatural reasons but may never have actually had. And he was thinking that those things we go out of our way not to ask we know to be true.
All that we have done, Santos sees now, all that we do, is no longer a question of rehabilitation. It is, like everything, merely a question of outlasting the consequences.
Winded, buried in worlds of his own making, he squats in the snow like an ape, his back to Nathan, crying openly. "God help you," he says.
He hears the heavy door behind him swing open then closed. A lock turns. Nathan's footsteps fade down a hallway. Santos grips the iron banister and hoists himself up and turns and steps down to the sidewalk, and with a drunk's meticulousness crosses the street through a circle of spotlit snow and fades into the dark other side.
Inside, the lamps are off. The dark smells like a sleeping child, warm pungent. Outside, Santos's car pulls away and fades down the street.
A low light comes on against a far wall. Nathan quickly steps through a doorway. Another, distant lamp comes on: an unmade bed, a nightstand littered with prescription vials; an IV propped in a corner; a black brassiere draped over the back of a chair.
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