He reaches. "No- I don't know."
"Don't touch me, Errol, you don't know? You mean you might be? Jesus Christ, Nathan had his little senoritas and now you have me, and you've passed me on like frat brothers, passed me on like a little trophy."
"Claire, this isn't about us."
"It's all about everything. It's all a web, a trap. I've waited and I've waited, hoping all the shit would just vanish. And my god, Errol, you want a baby?" She throws out her hands. "You wanted to bring a child into this? You carry around that inhaler all the time, but I'm the one who can't breathe. Why don't you just hang my head on your wall-"
She turns away, waving as if at fire. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm sorry I said that. I know you haven't talked to Nathan in years, not until you saw him yesterday. I know you gave him up. And now Isabel-I'm going to be sick."
Her shoulders bobble. He refuses to run and steps around her and wraps her in, stilling her, his chin on the crown of her head.
"Do you think he can kill?" she asks the air. "He's your, what, your brother for god's sake-"
"I don't know that, I don't know-"
"Of course you do. He is. He has to be. It's the only thing that makes sense now. That nothing at all makes sense. What twisted life is this?"
She turns now, faces him head on. "Did he do it, Errol? Did he do it?"
Santos lifts his eyes to the mural painted on the dome above, helmeted justice atop her horse-drawn chariot, in all her various guises: muse, gatekeeper, executioner.
"Yes.
The prisoners go like dreamers, following a yellow line painted on the floor out the long corridor to a caged school bus with RIKERS ISLAND Scrawled on ripped cardboard in the window. Through the beams of klieg lights pass cyclones of paper and hail and rain. The water on his face is warm and granular, smelling not of the sea but faintly of musty loam, as if whole acres of farm have been scraped up in the Midwest and carried here.
A hand grabs Nathan as he is about to step aboard and pulls him out of line. A guard says, "You're gone."
Wrists pinned in plastic cuffs, Nathan follows him in. Another guard approaches with a pair of snips and frees his hands and leads him to the property desk. There in a cage of wire mesh sits an old friend in a cop's uniform, a ham sandwich before him in creased waxed paper.
A clipboard comes through the slot. "Sign here, Mr. Stein."
"Thanks, Harry."
The sandwich comes through. "I expect you haven't had your lunch.
I'm okay."
"You're welcome to share with me if you like."
"No, no. Thank you, though."
Harry takes back the clipboard and considers Nathan. "I don't know why a guy in your position would put himself in jail."
"It's a living."
Harry considers his sandwich. "How's your father?"
"He didn't come down?"
Harry shakes his head. He slides through the slot a zip-lock pouch. "Well, there you go, then."
Nathan holds it up. His life in a plastic sandwich bag very much like the one they sell goldfish in. One Rolex watch. Four prescription vials. Various coinage and rubber bands, one pair shoelaces. His beeper, his cell-phone. He removes the bundles of hundred-dollar bills and weighs them in his hand.
"Want to count that?"
Nathan purses his lips.
"You ought to count that."
Nathan slips the bundles in his inside pocket. "No one came by for this?"
"Now you know I couldn't do that."
"Of course you couldn't." They exchange a smile.
Harry leans forward over his sandwich. "And I didn't," he adds.
Nathan slips on his watch. "So if my father didn't come down, who sprang me?"
The property man shrugs. "Someone from your office. Very good-looking. You have a new secretary? She said your people called your accountant."
"My accountant?" He has never had a need.
"She brought down your tax returns. Isn't that all they wanted?
Nathan holds his breath. He hasn't filed a return in three or four years.
"What did she look like?"
"Chinese, or Japanese, or something. Great legs."
Nathan squints at the ceiling. "One of Chang's?" he considers.
"Whose?"
Nathan waves his hand. "No, never mind." He bends and snakes his shoelaces through their eyelets and crosses them and ties them. "Okay," he tells himself. He brings up twelve messages on his beeper, Serena, Serena, Amparo. What was Regina Nunez saying about her? Errol Santos. And now Chang. He erases them all. "Okay."
Harry says, "No need to hurry away."
Nathan eyes the wire cage. "I'd better go."
As he gets to the door Harry calls out. "You watch yourself, now. You know what I'm saying."
In continuous guerrilla assaults the rain and snow combine forces. The wind juggles it all back in a swirling stew of grit and road grease. Overhead the sky is the color of bruise, a vertical massing of purple and blue eddies. The storm that came all at once yesterday afternoon and just as quickly seemed to pull apart must be traveling in a circle: the real onslaught is upon us.
There is no sign of Ruth. None of Milton. So no one has met him. He squints through the headlight glare at the line of cars idling across the street. Drivers slump in the windows. Passing gypsy cabs beaten and pitted like discarded tins. A riderless city bus kneels by the curb, its wipers swinging at the hail.
His eyes stop on the red sedan at the curb. His two friends are standing a few steps from the car, their collars up against the cold. One gives him an almost friendly nod, as if Nathan's imprisonment-his short brush with safety-had been a little prank they'd all enjoyed together. One actually gives him a wave, and Nathan feels a sudden nervousness at this sign of intimacy, as though it suggests more intimate moments to come. His being in jail was obviously an inconvenience to somebody. Now Nathan is back in play.
He thinks food, to go with the simplicity he sees now in everything, and turns up his collar and pivots left, toward the Stadium, and quickens his pace. Though he knows he is thinning by the minute the rollicking of his body feels heavy. His thighs drag. The flat stretch of sidewalk grows steeper. His wet clothes are plastered to his legs and back, but the cold is still vague and distant, as if he has sunk into a kind of anesthetized drunk. Still, he hugs himself, and, with a vacant pleasure at life's little things, strolls on. The neighborhood around the courthouse a blur of brick and pigeon-stained facade and window holes blinded with sheets of plywood, speechless in asking the question, Why does anyone live here? This underside of a universe that contains grand boulevards, parks, monuments, opera houses, seas. Traffic lights that twirl like toy lanterns. He heads toward the illuminated globes for the C and D lines, watching the speeding clouds through the tracks of the El above. At the subway entrance, an unmanned cargo van sits parked at the curb, its side panels asking ARE YOU SAVED YET? A pair of pink cherubs with wings hover in profile, facing each other across a sliding side door airbrushed with gold leaf to depict pearly gates. The quarterpanel offers to make, free of charge, Nathan's travel arrangements to the beyond, 1-800-FLY-HOME.
He teeters at the top step, peering down into the subway, propped by the dank air blasting up at him and the icy rain at his back, taking measure of his options. He makes a mental note: call Planetarium Travel about ticket to Roatdn, one-way. Though for this trip out to the house he needs only his car, his bag, the dog. They will be downtown at his office. If Schreck didn't give them away. Or take them himself; the pictures float by: Schreck sitting behind his desk, Schreck walkin Baron, sleeping in his bed, driving his car, eating dinner with Mom and Dad, the son they never had; standing on Claire's step, ringing her bell. A tasty thought: could that have been him calling her this morning? Would it have been him? There has been no consistency to his self-deceptions, why should there be a logic to the cast of his deceivers? Why can't they all-all his people, all his lies-know one another? Why don't they? But they must.
All around
him crowds are heading for the subway. But there is something peculiar. They are all young women, Dominicans and Hondurans-Nathan overhears them as they pass-either pregnant or cradling fresh babies or with small children in tow. They seem to come mostly from the direction of the storefront Good News Chapel and Prayer Hall behind him. Nathan follows them down.
Before the token booth, the crowd has drawn around a huge black man in a white judo suit cinched with a black belt. Between the women and the martial artist stands a ring of white teenagers, mostly blond, the boys dressed in ironed khakis and argyle sweaters and the girls in the candy-striped dresses of Connecticut WASPS. The tallest boy holds before him a stack of five stubby planks.
The martial artist rolls his sleeves. "This isn't going to get it, no!" he booms. He makes a sweeping gesture back behind them and up the subway stairs and out into the streets above. "No, this just isn't going to do it. Friends, this isn't where it's at. The power of God, friends, the power of baptism, surges through my arms, my legs, my feet. It's here, it's here-"
Leaning back and lifting his right leg, the black-belt preacher uncoils at the stack of planks and halves it with his heel with a sharp crack that matches a peal of thunder overhead. His assistant displays the shattered wood to the audience like a game-show hostess.
Your children can have this power, they can all be saved this very day, the preacher says. "You will need the strength to flee the clutches of the Antichrist. Because he is among us, friends. You have all heard it. That is why I am here, running from the storm in the bowels of this great city. I pledge to you on my faith he will make himself known on Christmas Day and will mark for doom all those guilty of disbelief and all those unsprinkled with holy waters. Look at the storm over our heads. I'm telling you the born and the unborn and the almost dead-it don't matter to the Antichrist. All those unbaptized will suffer and burn beside him in Hell."
The preacher is grinning. The teenagers, their eyes twinkling with love, are handing out pamphlets. As if in exchange the parents offer up their babies. Those merely pregnant eye with dismay and panic their swollen bellies.
"You. What about you. Are you saved?"
Nathan looks at the preacher, who had picked him out and peers at him over the crowd.
The preacher answers himself: "No."
Nathan rests both hands on his chest in false modesty. "I'm Jewish," he says, and almost chokes on the excuse. It's half a lie, the bigger half. He'd be a fallen Jew if Jews actually fell; but here they remain working the earth, working it hard.
The preacher points. "This one isn't saved," he cries, as if it isn't obvious, Nathan and his soaked clothes and stubbled jaw and filthy hands. "He thinks because he's a Jew that makes him ineligible." He makes a motion and a girl in a blue print dress comes forward with a porcelain bowl of water. "Friend, don't miss the point. The Lord doesn't care what you are."
"I think He would," Nathan replies softly.
The preacher glares and makes it simple: "Come beside me if you want to be saved."
Nathan gives his head a shake.
"If not you, then who?"
It is a good question. Nathan considers Claire but, figuring news of this gift in her honor would get back to her, does not want to add to her resentment. Willfully, he draws a blank.
But the preacher is patient. He'll wait. He has all day, all eternity. And it must be obvious Nathan is trying. Then a solution does actually strike him. "A friend," Nathan finally says.
The preacher's grin widens. "Born or unborn?"
Nathan steps by, twisting through the crowd and the phalanx of purebred angels and stops toe-to-toe with the preacher. He is reminded of his moment in the sun on his bar mitzvah morning, standing beside the rabbi staring out at the tuxedo sea, the gangster faces imported for the day by Milton, drug lords and porn kings, assistant district attorneys and even a pair of judges, as on those Thanksgiving mornings a truce called, battle lines forgotten for a holy importance. Sunbeams crashing down like piano chords from the stained-glass synagogue windows. His mother swaddled in pastel gauze. His father-he still can't see the fat face hidden behind his glasses, behind a carpetbagging smile. Soft-focus rite of man. Entrance into adulthood's blood cult.
The preacher dips a ladle in the water and lifts it high and Nathan raises his hands to ward it off.
"Not me," he insists.
The preacher, not missing a beat, closes his eyes, bends his head at a solemn angle and, genuflecting slowmotion over the empty space beside Nathan, begins, "In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost-"
The others mouth the words to themselves, and Nathan is alone amongst them. But not entirely alone. There are the hanging stalactites overhead. Nathan feels more in common with them than the flock gathered around. More even than with the empty space beside him, the empty shell of his potential.
Something hits Nathan all at once. jealousy. Envy. He glares at the empty spot, as if at an old friend about to leave, and before he can stop himself he ducks under the preacher's ladle and away, catching a drop of water on the back of his neck, which he fingers then smears on his cheeks and his lips, where it might do him some good.
Fruitlessly he shoves through the bulletproof plexiglass toward the subway collector the only kind of bill he has, a hundred, for a single token. But the collector refuses old Ben with an officious shake of his head, so Nathan stands at the turnstile in his wrinkled turtleneck and soiled blazer with nautical insignia and herringbone slacks like a gentleman farmer who has lost his way, without a small denomination to his name, rocking on his feet, asking mothers pushing carriages and even their children in tow for change of a hundred. Crazy stares, wild looks. A new brand of beggar, harbinger of times to come. He falls for long minutes and eventually hangs his head and seems to drift into a restless snooze. Far off, the subway trains rumble through, the horns blowing like trumpet blasts while the preacher one by one works his way through the crowd of children and embryos until the last one standing in the tunnel is Nathan himself. Someone puts in his palm a token then turns the hand over to examine the festering wounds, then quickly drops it. Nathan opens his eyes. It is one of the biblecamp teenagers, a pudgy boy with a cherub's head, staring at him nearsightedly through horn-rimmed glasses. The remains of a sweet grin hangs off his droopy mouth. Something made him frown. Nathan looks at his own hands and finds wounds there he doesn't remember, circles in his palms like bloody blisters.
He loves Hell. And now, finally, he is back there.
Downtown, up on the street, Nathan ducks through an old familiar door. A narrow space with a long, empty floor and empty stools. The barroom deserted, the jukebox with its old 45s dark. The ceiling mottled with the blue light of a mute TV.
"Cy," he says.
An old man rises from a stool at the far end of the bar. He rests on Nathan's shoulder a liver-spotted hand. "Haven't seen you in a while. Hit that door, will you?"
Nathan shuts the door, letting in a distant noise from far below, of surging water, or subterranean ruin. "Business slow?"
"You and your father are neck deep in shit."
"I wouldn't know."
Cy looks at him, then cracks a sly grin. "Just do me the favor, when you get the little fucks off keep them away from my place."
"They're Harlem kids, Cy," Nathan says.
Cy shakes his head. "Here, there, they don't care." He touches Nathan on the shoulder. "You all right, son?"
Nathan pouches his cheeks, unsure. "Maybe a little drink. Scotch rocks."
He leans back, elbows cocked on the bar. Faded jerseys of dead ballplayers hang from the rafters. Maris. The Mick. Posters announcing the fights of boxers long retired. The warning click of an approaching train, then the screech and groan of fatigued metal. Gusts of icy rain drum the windows. Everything in the bar shifts at its joints, loosened like a fighter's teeth by the years of blows. The noise outsi 'de grows to a roar but no train appears, then the roar fades, come and gone like a ghost, and Nathan glances nervously at the
door, feeling less sheltered than he expected.
"Say," Cy says down the bar, "that girl they're talking about, the one that drowned out at Coney Island. She isn't yours is she?"
Nathan twirls his glass in the yellow barlight.
"I just saw her last week. It's a terrible shame."
Nathan lifts his head.
"She was with your father," Cy says. "Carrying his briefcase. Looking pretty chummy. She was quite a dish. Your father always had taste." Cy nods his head toward the TV. "Well now, how about them apples."
Nathan looks up to the screen to find his own pale eyes peering back at him, his own chin hidden there under all that fat. On the TV on the wall, Milton's face is bearded by a clutch of microphones.
Cy aims the remote and turns up the sound. Milton has lowered his own volume, chosen solemnity for his emotion du jour.
"I have no problem with representing Kevin Williams," he is saying. "Everyone has a right to a fair trial."
Another question. This case so obviously not about just a mugging. The kids used bottles, they used a bat.
Milton looks at his questioner with the intensity of a man actually listening. "The facts are cloudy," he is saying, for the thousandth time, Nathan believes. The five thousandth. Nathan mouths the words along with his father: "What are facts? What do we know about what really happened? What will we ever really know? Kevin Williams is a pathetically abused kid. Everything about this case is still speculation at this point. Representation for the disadvantaged-it's what's made this country great."
Other questions, other words, and Nathan finds himself, head up with the desperation of a little boy, nodding over and over in agreement. The mountainous man is great, impressive, the best, and Nathan, deciding on an emotion as on a stuffed toy on a shelf, would buy pride if only he could afford it.
"He's a good one, your father," Cy says. "Wish he was mine."
"You need a lawyer?"
Cy shrugs. "I figure we all do."
But then something pricks Nathan, some idea, some piece to a puzzle he has not known he is assembling. The Williams case is monstrous, extraordinary, and nothing at all about the rape of a Madison Avenue executive. How good it is for his father. How good it is for his person. And how good, suddenly, for this news of Isabel, to have lost someone so close to him. The Santos family was so loyal; Isabel a second-generation secretary. And to have lost her so viciously, so coincidentally now. How human it will make Milton, how big, how vulnerable, how moral, how intensely, intensely real.
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