by Lisa Unger
Out of sheer exhaustion, not a lack of anxiety or urgency, I lay on the plush down of Jack’s bed as he threw things into a large duffel bag—jeans, underwear, some old clothes of mine from a night I’d spent here after a party, a pair of sneakers I’d left after the last time we ran in Central Park together. When I closed my eyes I saw the dying stranger in Central Park. I saw my ruined home. Jack left the room for a minute and came back with a shaving kit.
“I packed you a toothbrush.”
“We’re not going on vacation.”
“You can’t travel overseas without luggage. It looks suspicious.”
Jack was ever the pragmatist; I always feared his reading of my novels. “I don’t get it,” he’d say. “How did she get from here to there?” Or: “How did he find her in that huge crowd?” Or: “What’s her motivation for doing what she did? It doesn’t make sense.”
He liked the linear progression, the logical course of events, motivations so obvious that they didn’t brook questions. I liked the illogical leap in time and tense. Meaning that the nuts and bolts—how the window got unlocked or what vehicle was used to transport my character from this scene to that—bored and annoyed me.
It’s the essence, the energy of character and action that moves me. I don’t want to tell how the vase found its way to the ground. Was it dropped? Was it thrown? I just want to show the shards, glistening and sharp, on the marble floor. Because that’s life. We don’t always act out of logic. Things can’t always be explained. Sometimes we don’t know how the vase got there, just that it has shattered, irreparably.
“Let me ask you something,” Jack said. He zipped up the duffel and moved it over toward the door. Then he returned to sit at the foot of the bed. “What’s this about?”
“We’ve already had this conversation. You know what it’s about.”
“Is it justice you’re looking for? Or revenge? When and if you find him, how exactly do you plan to dole that out?”
I didn’t answer, just stared at the ceiling. He wasn’t looking for an answer. This was his way. Just put it in your pipe and smoke it, he’d say.
“Or is it just about the why and how, Isabel? Is it just about the knowing, the understanding that you need?”
I still didn’t feel compelled to answer.
“Because I’m your friend. I’m with you. I’ll buy the tickets. I’ll get on a plane and go with you wherever you need to go. But let’s make sure it’s for the right reasons.”
“What makes a right reason?” I asked.
“Something that, when bad things happen and it all goes to shit, is still worth all the trouble. Something that means enough to risk everything you’re risking right now.”
I looked at his profile, the crooked ridge of his nose. He seemed tired to me suddenly. I looked around the room and noticed that it was another minimal space, like his office. Just the low platform bed, covered in expensive linens. The walls were white, the floor hardwood. Where was all his stuff? His magazines and dirty clothes, his photographs and unpaid bills? I remembered his dorm room from NYU—a pigsty of staggering proportions. When did he become so neat, so anti-clutter?
“My father didn’t leave a note,” I said. We’d never really talked about this element of my life, though of course he knew. And it had come up again and again in my fiction. He was a careful reader. He probably knew my issues relating to my father’s death better than anyone, including myself. For Jack, I was an open book.
“Okay, Isabel,” he said softly. “I get it.”
“You don’t have to come with me.”
“I know that.”
He moved over to the door and, with effort, I lifted myself off his bed.
“You have to do one thing before we go. Nonnegotiable,” he said. “Two things, actually.”
“What?”
“One: Call your sister. And two: Write down everything you didn’t tell that detective and e-mail it to him. Let him know you’re on his side. It might work in your favor. It might even help you get what you want—answers.”
I thought about arguing, but I could tell by the look on his face that he was unmovable on these matters. Also, a small part of me still recognized a good idea when I heard one. I did what he asked. I left a message for my sister, surprised to get her voice mail. And I wrote a long note to Detective Crowe, telling him everything I had learned, including my husband’s real name and mentioning the e-mail I’d had from Camilla. Then, whether it was the right action or not, for the right reasons or not, Jack and I left for the airport.
IN MY SEAT I fidgeted and squirmed, unable to relax or get comfortable. The hours stretching ahead of me seemed endless, a river I would never cross. I kept waiting for the pretty flight attendant to look at me with a frown, then go and pick up a phone somewhere and make the call. Maybe on some level I wanted this to happen. But she only smiled and brought me a glass of champagne that I downed in two swallows.
“Easy,” said Jack. “That head injury has you loopy enough.”
I lifted my glass and the attendant was quick to refill and I was quick to drain that as well. Jack didn’t bother with any more warnings; he just leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
All I had was my husband’s given name, the name of a town outside of Prague, and the vaguest idea that it was to that place Marcus might return. I thought of the last kiss we shared, the horrible scream I heard, the woman S preening on the Web site. I thought of the dying man and his last whispers. But even with all of this swimming in the dark waters of my mind, the two glasses of champagne helped me to drift into a troubled sleep. I dreamed of my father.
Imagine a tunnel of stones
Dark, insinuating, a leap of walls.
Walk through it, without blinking.
—JAMES RAGAN, “CROSSING THE CHARLES
BRIDGE” FROM The Hunger Wall
21
They took the ride to Queens in silence, each of them lost in their thoughts. Grady kept replaying his call with Sean, hope battling despair. Maybe the call had caused trouble, and if there was trouble already, maybe that would work in his favor. Or maybe Clara would just hate him again, hate him for being such a baby; whatever weakness had impelled her to call would be cemented over with her anger.
They emerged from a slow crawl through bumper-to-bumper traffic in the Queens Midtown Tunnel, inexplicable at that hour, and were cruising down Queens Boulevard. A twelve-lane, in some areas sixteen-lane, main thoroughfare affectionately known as the Boulevard of Broken Bones because of the high rate of pedestrian deaths, it was one of the longest streets in Queens. It was modeled after the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, but to Grady it had none of that romantic aura of lost grandeur that the Concourse had, where magnificent old buildings had grayed with neglect, sagged with disappointment and sadness at the deterioration of a once-great neighborhood, modeled after the promenades of European cities. Queens Boulevard was just a thriving urban center with gigantic apartment high-rises, chains and independent businesses lining the roadway. It was New York, but somehow energetically apart, somehow its own thing, minus any of the glitz and glam of Manhattan. It was just Queens. They passed a gun shop and a liquor store, a flurry of fast-food joints, a Cuban hole-in-the-wall.
Grady pulled the Caprice into a spot across the street from a large warehouse building that bore the address he’d found on the Internet. He’d expected something garish with bright lights and lines down the block, a “gentleman’s” club maybe, with cars lining the street and all the typical losers you find at such a place—the frat boys looking to party, coming off the train in packs, raucous, self-conscious; the rich guys taking a night off from their marriages, pulling up in Hummers; the pervs, quiet and badly dressed, waiting with hands in pockets.
But the block was relatively quiet; most of the businesses—a copy shop, a pet store, a men’s big and tall—were all gated for the night. Every few minutes a cab would pull up—once with a group of a gorgeous young girls dressed to the hilt, the next an old man in a black w
ool coat, the next two young guys in business suits carrying sleek black laptop cases. They all disappeared behind a plain black door, opened from the inside by someone who stayed out of sight of the street.
“She was a working girl, wasn’t she?” Jez said out of nowhere.
“What makes you say that?”
“I don’t think a woman would come to this place if she wasn’t in the industry—a dancer, a higher-end call girl. According to her credit report, she wasn’t employed, but that SoHo apartment? A nice one-bedroom in that neighborhood? A couple grand a month, at least.”
“Maybe our faux Marcus Raine was giving her money,” said Grady.
She nodded. “Maybe. But why else would she come here?”
“Maybe she came here to meet someone.”
“Yeah, like a john.”
“Maybe,” he admitted.
“Well, let’s go in and take a look around, ask a few questions.”
He felt the phone in his pocket vibrate. He pulled it out to see that he had an e-mail message from Isabel Connelly. He almost didn’t recognize her name, he was so accustomed to thinking of her as Isabel Raine. The subject line read: “Some things you should know.”
“Oh, brother,” he said.
“What is it?”
He held the screen up so Jez could lean her head in, and they read Isabel’s e-mail together.
WHAT GRADY FOUND interesting about people was that most of them didn’t hide well. Of course, people like Kristof Ragan were different; they slipped out of the skin they were in, wrapped themselves in a cocoon, and emerged as a different creature altogether. But most people found it difficult to stray from the places that were familiar to them, the people they knew. They might be smart enough not to go back to their primary residence, but they’d hole up with friends, or sleep on their aunt’s couch. They’d return to their favorite bar after a few days, thinking no one would look for them there.
He almost wasn’t surprised to see Charlie Shane, the Raines’ missing doorman, sticking a dollar bill in a blond strippers’ G-string while she lowered her bejeweled, gravity-defying breasts to eye level. He and Jez were about to leave, had shown Camilla Novak’s and Marcus Raine’s picture around to blank stares and pressed lips, quick shakes of heads, some frightened shifting eyes. Meanwhile, they’d been trailed, not inconspicuously, by two ridiculously pumped, thick-necked goons.
Jez looked nervous, as if she sensed some danger he did not. She tugged on his shoulder and he leaned down so that she could yell in his ear over the music.
“We should get out of here, call for backup and get this place shut down for a few hours. We might get more cooperation.”
On a T-shaped stage naked women of all shapes and sizes flaunted their goods to a hypnotic trance beat. Their mouths smiled but their eyes were empty, high or otherwise elsewhere. Some of them looked so young, too young to be here, still had that creamy fresh cast to their skin, that soft innocence about the mouth.
Grady always hated places like this. He liked a dancing naked female body as much as the next guy, but he battled an urge to run around with bathrobes, cover these girls up and take them home to their mamas. Of course, their mamas were probably in worse shape. You didn’t wind up on a pole without a lot of help from your family.
Watching a redhead deftly move out of reach of a groping hand, Grady thought of Clara. How long had it been since he’d made love to her? What did Sean say, nearly two years since she’d walked out the door? A year of legal separation following that. Not counting their breakup fuck—that sad, slow final hour they shared after leaving the attorney’s office. He’d convinced her to have coffee with him, and they wound up back at the new place she shared with Sean, a spacious two-bedroom in the Fifties, with a terrace and nice views, that he had no idea how they could afford. He took great pleasure in having her one last time in a bed she shared with her new boyfriend. He’d have pissed on the sheets when he was done if he could. She’d thrown him out afterward, turning from passionate, weepy, and nostalgic to angry as soon as the afterglow dimmed.
“I can’t believe how I let you manipulate me. Still! Even after we’re divorced.”
“There’s no divorce in the eyes of God. You’re still my wife.” He was only half kidding.
“Get out, Grady.”
“Come on, Clara. You know there’s still something. Don’t do this.”
She strode naked over to her bag, her perfect heart-shaped ass jiggling pleasantly with her stride. She fished out the papers, turned and held them up, utterly unself-conscious of her teardrop breasts and flat brown middle. “It’s done. Signed, sealed, delivered.”
“I’m yours.” He finished the verse, trying to be funny. But the words fell flat and sad on the ground between them.
“Go.”
*
HE WAS ABOUT to agree with Jez that they should shut the place down, when he saw Charlie Shane, the dirty old man, pressed up against the stage. He pointed and saw Jez’s face brighten as she reached to put a hand on the weapon at her hip. She wouldn’t need it; she could subdue the likes of Shane with one arm. But he knew she liked the feel of it; it gave her a notion of security.
They approached Shane from behind, pushing through a throng of salivating weirdoes. They each put an arm on him and he spun from the stage. His face registered surprise and alarm, then he bent at the waist and knocked through them, causing Jez to stumble back hard into the stage. He saw her knock her head. But they both gave chase, the crowd parting. Someone started to scream at the site of the gun Crowe drew from his hip. Not that you could legally shoot a fleeing suspect in New York State. Still, it tended to stop people in their tracks.
Not Shane. He threw a terrified glance behind him, and at the sight of the gun seemed to pick up speed toward the door. Crowe reached out a hand and was just inches away from having Shane by the collar, when he felt the ground come up to meet him fast, and then he was on knees and elbows on the floor. He lost his grip on his Glock and the thing skittered away from him between the feet and ankles of the crowd gathered round. Someone had tripped him. He looked behind and saw one of the goons smiling.
He retrieved his gun and was about to get to his feet when Jez scrambled over him. He looked up at the door to see Shane exit and Jez follow. He was on his feet and out the door quickly, in time to see Jez disappear into an alleyway.
She was flying and he was already breathing hard. Luckily, he didn’t have far to run. By the time he reached them, Shane was on his face in a puddle of black filth, sputtering and yelling. Jez was on his back, with his arm twisted up behind him.
“You. Stupid. Motherfucker,” she was yelling, adrenaline and anger making her red and loud. She tugged on his arm and he released a girlish scream.
“Okay, easy,” he said, coming up on them, pulling the cuffs from his waist. He grabbed Shane’s other arm and cuffed him. He pulled Jez to her feet and kept a heavy foot on Shane’s back. He pulled the cell phone from his pocket and called Dispatch for backup. They were so closing that shithole down for a few hours.
He saw that Jez’s eye was red and the skin split and bleeding at the cheekbone. There was going to be a huge shiner; he could tell by the way the skin was already bluing beneath the red.
“He hit me,” she said, incredulous. “He got a hit in on me. That out-of-shape old man.”
“Okay, Kung Fu Mama. Breathe. Relax.”
“I don’t believe it. I turned the corner and he was waiting for me. I ran right into his fist.”
“But who’s on the ground now in a puddle of piss? You win.”
She nodded, walked a breathless circle, hands on hips.
“I want a fucking lawyer!” screamed Shane as Grady recited his rights. “Unnecessary force!”
“Shut up, Shane,” said Grady calmly, pushing hard with his shoe on Shane’s back. “Really. Please shut up.”
The wail of sirens was sudden and loud, seeming to come from nowhere, drowning out the sound of Shane screaming about injust
ice and the violation of his various rights.
BY THE TIME they let him stew in it, wet and covered in the black filth from the alley floor, he was less passionate. They seated him in an interrogation room, cuffed to the table for the better part of two hours, promising him a public defender. Meanwhile, they tended to Jez’s injury, dealt with paperwork, went over and corroborated the information sent to them by Isabel Raine, checked Charlie Shane’s criminal history, came up with some theories of their own. By the time they reentered the room where they’d left him, Shane seemed thoroughly broken; whatever alcohol might have been in his system had worn off. He was just a sad old man in a lot of trouble.
“Where’s my lawyer?” he asked when they entered, without lifting his eyes from his hands folded in front of him.
“On his way,” Grady lied. “If that’s the way you want to go. I’ll tell you what, though. In spite of the list of charges—obstruction of justice, fleeing custody, assaulting an officer—we’re just not that interested in you. You’re more or less worthless to us.”
Shane didn’t look up and didn’t respond, but Grady could tell he was listening.
“We’re interested in the man you knew as Marcus Raine.”
Grady thought he saw Shane jump a little at the sound of the name but he couldn’t be sure.
“Did you know there are security cameras in the lobby of your building?” Jez lied. “We know you let people in to trash the Raines’ apartment. You tell us who those people are? And you’ll have your face back in underage tits before the sun comes up.”
Without his crisp uniform and smart cap, with a five o’clock shadow, reeking of booze and cigarettes, Shane seemed to have aged fifteen years since they saw him at the Raines’ building. Grady saw that his hands were covered in angry patches of raw, red skin, that his scalp was peeling, his nose red from regular boozing. His knee was pumping like a jackhammer; he was scared. Good news for them. Grady cobbled together a little story from the information they got from Isabel Raine. Some of it was true, some of it made up, like all good fiction. He’d see where it got them.