We Are Here

by Michael Marshall

  But still.

  I locked the window and we went back to bed. I don’t know who went to sleep first, but we were both awake, listening for sounds on the roof, for quite some time.

  We walked quickly over to Chelsea, retracing in reverse our steps from Catherine’s the night before. It was a nicer walk this time—except for being cold and cloudy—but there was no denying we were tense.

  “I realized something,” I explained as we hurried west along 14th. “The two occasions on which I or we saw someone started in totally different locations—the Westside Market and outside the girls’ school—and at different times on different days of the week. It may have been the same person, it may not. But there’s a constant I should have noticed right away.”

  “The way they were dressed?”

  “Yeah, well, that too—but that’s not notable if it’s the same individual both times. I’m talking about the fact that I lost her/him/them in the same place. Somewhere along 16th.”

  Kristina frowned. “That’s not much.”

  “It’s all we’ve got,” I said. “And this is now our problem, not Catherine’s. Someone was outside our window last night. I want something done about that.”

  We arrived on 16th Street without a plan. We walked along the north side and back on the south. Houses. Cars. The church. Trees. All in midafternoon mode with no one around. We stood halfway along the street for ten minutes. A car holding a woman and a child drove down the road and out the other end. Kristina was getting cold and cranky.

  “If I pass out with all the excitement, leave me where I fall.”

  “You were the one talking about setting up a detective agency. When I was a lawyer I dealt with private investigators, and this is how their lives are. You go somewhere and wait. For hours.”

  “So their life sucks. But this is a nice street, John. We loiter here, someone’s going to call the cops.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Going home. Going for a beer. Going to Hawaii. Pretty much any sentence showcasing verbs of movement in a nonmetaphoric sense.”

  I heard the sound of a door opening and turned, looking as bland as possible in case it was an eagle-eyed local making sure we weren’t casing out their house. Thirty yards up the other side of the street, the door on the right-hand side of the church was now open. The man I’d seen the previous afternoon stood in it, talking to someone inside.

  “It’s the priest,” I said. Kristina was frank about not finding this an arresting development.

  After a moment the man closed the door and trotted down the stairs. He let himself out the gate and closed it before setting off at a brisk pace.

  I gestured to Kristina.

  “What—we’re going to follow the guy?”

  “No,” I said. “You are.”

  “Say again?”

  “I spoke to him yesterday. He’ll recognize me. You’re going let me know where he goes.”

  “John, he’s a fucking priest.”

  “He was here when we lost that girl.”

  She started walking reluctantly. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  She rolled her eyes but got on it, scooting up the street after the priest’s disappearing back.

  I walked back to take a look at the church. The central portion was three stories high, the width of two of the houses that lined the rest of the street. The ground level held a row of small windows with darkness beyond, suggesting that they fronted office space or storage. The two stories above had bigger glass, though they still looked to have been designed with little more than a protractor and ruler and as if to withstand impact rather than to inspire spiritual fervor. On either side stood a staircase leading up to a wooden door at the left and right extremes of the second level. All of it looked dusty and city-grimed and weightily functional.

  I let myself in through the gate and walked up the steps on the right. I knocked on the door, which was heavy and large and made of wood. Nothing happened, so I knocked again, this time using the brass knocker.

  After a minute I turned the handle and pushed. The door swung open to reveal a short, tidy corridor with a wooden floor and white walls and an area on the left designed to hold coats. At the far end was another door.

  “Hello?”

  I stepped inside. I called hello once more, then opened the second door. I wandered into a big room that tapered upward toward a pointed roof with exposed beams. The walls were paneled too, somber paintings dotted here and there. It was dark and gloomy and gothic without anything in the way of richness, the domain of a faith that didn’t pander to its audience by adding unnecessary pizzazz. Rows of battered chairs sat facing a single one, which faced back the other way. Behind this was a plain altar, surmounted by a simple metal cross. An unloved-looking upright piano stood to the side.

  Turning, I was confronted with the street-side wall. There was a notice board with sheets of paper thumbtacked to it. Three big Palladian windows and five smaller ones above. The glass in each was a different shade of muted—blue, green, pale red, pale purple. Each had been protected from street-side vandalism by close-fitting sheets of chicken wire. As a spectacle of light it would not make you want to glorify anybody’s name unless you’d already been of a mind to do so.

  My phone rang. It was Kris. “Where are you?”

  “Heading back along 15th. He went into a deli. Came out with a bottle of water. Do you think that’s significant? Should I get a picture with my spycam?”

  “Kris …”

  “Okay, okay.”

  She hung up. I wandered out into the middle of the room along the aisle between the two groups of chairs. I noticed a plain, narrow door at the end, behind the altar and painted the same color as the wall. It seemed likely that it led to the lower level. I considered finding out but decided that would be taking this too far, especially as there was presumably somebody still in the building. Also … I have no strong views for or against organized religions, but their structures possess a certain psychic weight. If you’re alone in a church they can make you feel you shouldn’t be. Church doors are often left open, but that’s for the faithful to come in and do their thing. I was not faithful and I wasn’t here in the hope of finding God or even myself. I’d seen—or thought I’d seen—the priest stopping to exchange words with someone on his way out. That person must still be here. If they appeared and asked my business, I didn’t have an answer.

  As I was bringing my phone up to call Kris off the chase, it rang again in my hand. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. This is a waste of—”

  “Get over here,” Kris said. “Union Square.”

  “Why?”

  It sounded like she was running. “Just come, John. Now.”

  Chapter 21

  Kris hadn’t given me anywhere specific to head for and so I dropped south a couple blocks to hit Union Square at the most obvious entry point, the paved area at 14th.

  There was no sign of her when I ran across the street. I called her phone. She picked up right away but didn’t give me a chance to speak. “Where are you?”

  “The bottom,” I said, out of breath. “Where are you? You okay?”

  “Look around.”

  I turned in a slow, winded circle. “I don’t see the priest, if that’s what you mean. Or you.”

  “Okay. Wait there.”

  A minute later Kristina came walking quickly toward me along the central path. “You scared me,” I said.

  She smiled distractedly. “I’m fine. Just … come with me.”

  She led me up the path into the heart of the park. When we got to where the two main crossways intersected, she stopped. “Stand here,” she said. “And be still.”

  She glanced around and then back up at me. “Are you getting it?”

  A father and small child, toddling past, in no hurry and going nowhere in particular. In the distance, a small group of what looked like students in a loose huddle, talking and laughing. Over
on a bench, a couple of men in business suits. There was more than this, however. It reminded me of what I’d just experienced in the church. A sense of residue, of spaces not being voids. Two Japanese women ambled in our direction consulting a guidebook. A jogger appeared from nowhere and flashed past, leaving a waft of hot skin and self-satisfaction that seemed to linger longer than it should. I was aware of the sound of traffic and the rustle of distant chatter, but it sounded far away, as if there was something between me and it.

  “I’m getting something. I have no idea what.”

  “I lost the priest on the other side of Broadway,” Kristina said. “I came to check just in case, and …”

  I nodded, not wanting to dispel the atmosphere.

  “Try over here,” she said, gesturing up the path. “That’s where I felt it first.”

  I followed, knowing there was a conflict between what my senses were telling me, but not knowing which to trust.

  “Look,” Kristina hissed suddenly. She was pointing at one of the grassy areas, a forty-yard stretch near Park Avenue.

  The priest was close to one end. He was standing talking to a woman—a woman who looked a lot like the one we’d lost after following Catherine home from school.

  “That’s her,” Kristina whispered. “Christ—you were right. That’s the woman, isn’t it?”

  “Could be. Try to get closer.”

  She walked quickly up the path. I tried to keep myself out of the priest’s line of sight while drifting in the same direction.

  A moment later Kristina slipped her hand out of her coat pocket and made a fist with her thumb sticking up, down by her side, which I took to mean that it was indeed the same woman. What did that mean? And why was she here now, talking to a priest in a park?

  When Kristina got to the next junction she slowed, waiting for me to catch up. “It’s definitely her,” she said. I took a good look at the woman and saw she was tall, with dark hair. A pitch-black coat with a high collar, edged at the sleeves and hem with black lace. In good light it looked a little threadbare. Underneath it she was wearing a dress made of muted red velvet, trimmed with cream around the neckline.

  Two other people were standing just beyond. One was standing, at least—a nondescript man of about thirty, with brown hair. He was in conversation with another who was wearing jeans and a white shirt, and who was moving around in a kind of slow circle. Despite the fact that the second man was the taller and better-looking of the two, there was something more present about the first guy.

  I glanced toward the priest and realized the same was true there. He was a man in early middle age, blandly decent-looking. The woman talking to him was slim and very attractive. Yet your eye tended to settle on him and stay there. I tried to look at the girl, and it happened again—my gaze slipped back toward the priest.

  Then they were no longer talking, but walking rapidly in opposite directions.

  “Shit,” Kristina said. “Now what?”

  “Follow her.”

  She peeled off and strode up the central path. I was about to head after the priest but realized I knew where he’d be going, or at least where he could be found. So I stopped and looked back up through the park.

  I saw nothing but trees and grass.

  I was still there when my phone rang.

  “I lost her.”

  “Already?”

  “Right away. I’m sorry, John. Either I’m crap at this or that girl really knows how to lose people.”

  “You think she knew you were on her tail?”

  “I don’t see how. You still on the priest?”

  “No. I’m in the park.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We met where the two main paths crossed and sat on a bench. We waited half an hour but didn’t see anything, and soon I stopped expecting to. It just felt like a park once more, and a cold and increasingly dark one at that.

  “We’d better head back,” Kristina said. “I need to be at work in an hour. So do you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, though I’d already started to think that I’d be spending some of the favors I’d earned through handling Paulo’s pizza shifts, and taking the evening off, in order to try to talk to someone.

  Just before we crossed 14th to head down toward the East Village and the evening’s work, we turned together and looked back at Union Square.

  We still saw nothing.

  Chapter 22

  When David tried to think back over what happened in Union Square he got only fragments. He remembered turning to see Maj. He remembered a beautiful girl in a black coat standing to one side and taking a friendly interest before returning to an intense conversation with another man, who was wearing a brown suit.

  “It’s not Reinhart,” she said to him. “It’s somebody else.”

  “Just consider staying at the church,” Brown Suit was saying. “For a couple of days, that’s all.”

  She smiled, but it was obvious that meant “no.”

  There were others, too, including a listless man called Billy, all taking part in some kind of informal gathering or catch-up. Maj appeared torn between wanting to talk to David and having business with the girl and the man in the brown suit—and David overheard enough to gather that it was this that had sent Maj hurrying to the phone in Kendricks and brought him back to the city after that. They were talking fast and urgently. Billy stood off to one side throughout this. He looked ill.

  In the back of David’s mind a voice kept telling him he ought to be getting to the train station. That voice, the voice that always told him not to do things, to be careful, to stay safe, was taking up perhaps ten percent of his mental bandwidth. Thirty percent was insidiously suggesting the opposite.

  All the rest was a cloud.

  Sometimes he thought he could hear a hubbub of conversation, but it sounded like a combination of traffic around the square and the distant roar of a jet passing high overhead, and so it was possible that’s all it was. If you blinked, everything came into focus. A New York park on a cold afternoon. If you let your attention wander … it became something else. David hadn’t spent much time stoned—experiencing his parents out on the deck staring owlishly at him before breaking into high-pitched laughter had been enough to put him off the idea—but it’s hard to grow up in semi-rural America and avoid drugs altogether. From his single experience with MDMA he remembered this sensation of being untethered, watching reality peeling off to stand to the side and of being unsure of whether it was you who’d taken this step, or the world—and what it would take to marry you again.

  He observed groups of the circulating people, in conversation—some serious, some joking. Individuals and twos and threes walking up and down the thoroughfares. A very large dog came and stood and looked up at him as if waiting for him to say something. The dog appeared to be on his own, without an owner, and after a few moments trotted off. All of this was silent, as if seen through thick and grubby glass—but once in a while there’d be a bubble of noise, like opening the door to a room that held a party to which you hadn’t been invited. Similarly, David stood there as if invisible most of the time, but once in a while someone would turn their head to look at him curiously, before turning away again.

  Then he was down at the bottom end of the square once more, his head clear, as if jolted out of a daydream. Two women were walking toward him from the pedestrian crossing. He felt a panicky urge to step out of their way. They seemed too big. Not tall, or fat, just too present. One glared at him as they passed, as if to forestall him bothering them. He heard the other sniff, and saw rings of red around her nostrils.

  Two normal women, one with a cold, but he felt disconcerted and frightened. Was that all this was? Some kind of panic attack? Was he seeing normal people, but just responding to them in the wrong way?

  He realized belatedly that someone else was looking at him. About forty feet away, on the other side of Broadway, a man wearing a fedora and a dark suit with wide lapels. H
e was standing with his hands in his pants pockets, staring at David.

  His face was hard and unfriendly.

  “Let’s go,” said a voice from behind.

  It was Maj, alone now. The other man and the girl had disappeared. David glanced back toward where he’d seen the man in the hat, but he was no longer there either, and all the other people in the park had gone.

  “What just happened? Who were all those people?”

  “Come with me.”

  “Why … would I do that?”

  “You came to the city for answers, yes? You’re not going to get any standing by yourself in a park.”

  Maj started walking. David followed. The other man crossed 14th, striding along busy patches of sidewalk, avoiding oncoming pedestrians without ever dropping pace. After ten minutes he finally slowed, somewhere south of the Village, but kept switching in and out of backstreets before popping out opposite a high wall made of stained red brick. To the left was a metal fence, and beyond it David saw a church. It took a moment for his memory to serve up the name—old St. Patrick’s Church.

  Maj stopped outside. “I want to introduce you to some friends,” he said. “But something happened while I was out of town. We’ve got outsiders taking too much interest. I need to try to talk to someone, get his advice. You can’t come with me. He won’t talk if you’re there. He probably won’t anyhow.”

  “Why?”

  “I won’t be long. Half an hour. I’ll meet you at Bid’s. You remember that, at least?”

  David didn’t, or at least hadn’t thought of the place in years, but then there it was—back in his head. A basement bar not far from where they now stood.