We Are Here

by Michael Marshall

  “You’re in better shape than I would have expected.”

  “I made sure it happened in a public place.”

  Jeffers shook his head.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “How did he know who your partner was? Why did even care? Because you were here the other night. Which shows he already knows where you live, and that means—”

  “He didn’t know about her because of me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Until I confronted him over lunch, he didn’t know there was a connection between us.”

  I realized with a sinking heart that I’d helped Reinhart draw a line between two people he had reason to have a problem with, and that sometimes men who don’t hide are not merely excessively confident. They may also believe that they’re well connected enough not to need to care. Sometimes they’re right.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Kristina found a cryptic message a couple of days ago,” I said, sitting on one of the wooden chairs. “It was written in the dirt on our window.”

  “An unusual means of communication.”

  “Right. Especially as we live on the fifth floor. She worked out the message and went to Union Square Park. She met some people there, including the woman I later saw you talking to in Union Square. You know the one. We’ve been through this. Her name’s Lizzie.”

  The priest listened with an expression I couldn’t place at first.

  “A couple stole jewelry and presented it to her. Then everyone ran off—leaving her stuck in a doorway still holding the goods … at which point she noticed two men watching. One was Reinhart. Yesterday he accosted her in a backstreet and was not subtle about warning her to stay out of his business.”

  Jeffers’s face had become composed again. I knew now what I’d seen in his face, however. It was the look of a man who has been found out over something personal: a matter that has been on his mind a great deal but not allowed out on show; a load he has been carrying by himself, which at times has felt very heavy indeed.

  “Talk to me,” I said. “Explain what I’ve gotten myself into. I may even be able to help.”

  “No,” he said, sitting on the other chair. “You won’t. But I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  He told me he’d been the priest there for three years. When he’d arrived he’d found a community in decline. His predecessor had been in place a long time and was much loved and just about managed to hold the place steady, acting as a bridge between the era when people believed by default and a new one in which they did not. Partly, Jeffers said, this change lay at the hands of science. While he had no personal issue with the objective assessment of verifiable facts, the reductionist agenda could lead in only one direction when it came to the worship of things unseen. Even more important, he believed, was that people just didn’t have time for it. In the old days life was simple. You worked and slept and you attempted to reproduce. If you had time in between then what you craved was a sense of wonder, something to keep you reconciled to the drudgery of the day-to-day—and a sense of community, too. For hundreds of years the church was the go-to for both, but the Internet killed that. E-mail and Facebook took interaction and threw it somewhere nonconcrete: up in the cloud, yes, but not one where angels sat jamming on golden harps. You didn’t need to catch up outside the church gates on Sunday morning—you were constantly aware of your friends’ and neighbors’ every deed and thought and meal. If you wanted a glimpse of the lords of your manor, Twitter provided it in a parallel stream: endless updates on how vewwy, vewwy much your hallowed movie star loves the husband who in reality she’s enthusiastically cheating on with her personal trainer, amongst others. Instead of thinking about the nature of the universe, and your life, and wondering what kind of being or circumstance could have given rise to it, you thought “Cool! Ashton Kutcher has tweeted again, just for me!”

  After six months Jeffers had started to make do, settling for the status quo like the last Roman living in a far-flung European backwater after the empire had pulled the plug. It wasn’t a bad life and there were still a few old people who cared. As a way of serving the Lord and filling in the years until he could take a meeting with Him in person, it would do.

  “Then I met Lizzie,” the priest said, looking up at me. “And Maj, and some others, and things changed.”

  “Where did you first meet them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t remember?”

  “I can’t recall where I first became aware of them.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the distinction.”

  “They’re not easy to pin down.”

  “Who are they?”

  “People who’ve been forgotten by the rest of us and have no place in our society. That’s a hard life to live. Unlike most, they’re doing something about it.”

  “Stealing, you mean.”

  He shook his head. “Very few. For most there’s no point, or wasn’t until Reinhart came along. They’re organized, after a fashion. They have places they live and hide; there are roles and ways of being; there’s even a kind of hierarchical society. There was, anyway. Then a few of the older ones, the people who’d put a lot of this in place, left the picture at the same time.”

  “Died, you mean?”

  I could see him choosing his words. “It would be more accurate to say they stopped exerting an influence. Unfortunately Reinhart arrived during the same period, and he realized he could make criminal use of some of the skills the remaining had acquired.”

  “Like?”

  “Avoiding detection. Very successfully.”

  “And stealing things.”

  “Regretfully, yes.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Sometimes simply taking things out of stores—small, expensive goods that are handed on to Reinhart for sale. The thing is, there are very few of them who are skilled at that, and so he’s always coming up with new ideas. He has them spying at ATMs, observing PIN numbers. Once the victim is around the corner, Reinhart’s other accomplices intercept him or her and detain them until they’ve had a chance to use the number and the bank card to remove large sums of money.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, remembering the spate of similar crimes in our neighborhood over the last months. “And what do they get out of it?”

  “Shelter. And attention.”

  “If they want attention, why do they spend their lives in hiding?”

  “It’s … difficult to explain. I’d become aware of some of these people in the neighborhood. I befriended a few. It’s not easy. When I realized how they were being used by Reinhart, I started a program. I tried to help them to see my church as a safe and supportive place. Tried to move them away from criminal acts, too. Partly on moral grounds. Mainly because sooner or later it’d mean exposure for them. Some have responded well.”

  “Which Reinhart doesn’t like. Hence him being here the other night, and also threatening Kristina.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why hasn’t he just whacked you?”

  The priest looked confused. “Whacked?”

  “Had you killed. These people tend to think in very straight lines.”

  “You think someone would kill a priest over something like this? Are you serious?”

  I looked into his sober, calm eyes, and tried to figure out how to break the news that people died every day for incomparably less. Then I realized from the corners of his mouth that he knew this fact very well.

  “You’re a smart man,” I said, standing. “And probably a good one. But I’d think seriously about letting these people look after themselves.”

  “That would not be the Lord’s way. Or mine.”

  “Maybe. But the Lord doesn’t live by himself in a house that would be easy to break into. These people exist outside society for a reason. They know the score. They don’t get anything out of our world, sure, but that means they also won’t feel they have to give in retu
rn.”

  He smiled, and I realized it was like talking to a great big bear, one who found the spectacle of the human in front of him mildly interesting, especially the noises he was making with his mouth, but who would not be altering his behavior on the basis of anything I said.

  “Seriously,” I tried. “If it comes down to it, these are not people you can trust to get your back.”

  “They are lost,” he said. “It’s my job to bring them home.”

  Chapter 40

  Kristina’s phone started being weird halfway through the afternoon. It rang, showing a number she didn’t recognize—but there was no one there. The first time she didn’t think anything of it. It was a Sprint phone and the service sucked. Attempts to discuss this with the company had achieved nothing but rage and the desire to hunt down and kill everyone who worked for them, which apparently you’re not allowed to do. Forty minutes later it happened again. She stuffed the phone back in her pocket afterward, prey to the churning in the guts that comes when our inexplicable new tech starts misbehaving. In days of yore you prayed to God to keep the magic working. Now we navigate ritualistic menus, sit in prayer on hold, and pay homage to customer service representatives of indifferent competence and temper. It’s a matter of debate which yields the more tangible results.

  Then it happened again.

  This time she didn’t even bother to look. John had texted ten minutes before, and she’d replied. The only other person she could think of was Catherine Warren, but her name would have shown on the screen.

  Then she pulled the phone back out, prey to a thought. She navigated to the incoming log and confirmed the failed calls had all come from the same number and that the last time had left a message. Maybe it was Catherine after all—calling from another number after a phone fault or loss, perhaps to say she wouldn’t be coming to the book club that evening. They hadn’t spoken since the fabulously awkward meeting at her house.

  Kristina thought she’d better check. Annoyingly, the message had also failed. A ten-second stretch of silence—or the strange, tidal version of it that dead telecommunication equipment sings—and it cut off.

  She walked on, more slowly now, keeping the phone in her hand. Five minutes later, it rang again. “Yes?” she said, getting it up to her ear fast. “Who is it?” Silence. “Don’t hang up,” she said, hurrying into a side street. “I can’t hear you.”

  The line went dead.

  Swearing, she flicked back to voice mail. As she waited for the previous message to read back, she wandered down the street, cupping the earpiece with her other hand to cut out extraneous noise—and trying not to remember that it was a street pretty much like this where she’d been cornered and threatened the day before.

  She listened to the tidal noise again, the silence that wasn’t silence. Except … maybe it wasn’t silence. Maybe she could hear … something. Something very faint.

  She listened to the sound one more time, hunched next to a stairwell, a finger in her other ear, closing her eyes to hand everything over to a single sense.

  It could just have been her mind trying to usher random sounds toward meaning, like those recordings people made in houses that were supposed to be haunted, in fact just meaningless white noise.

  She didn’t think so, however.

  brprr, sssnn

  That’s what it sounded like—someone whispering in your ear before you were awake. The first part sounded a little like “Bryant Park,” though. Perhaps only because it was in her mind as the first place she’d met Lizzie, but once she’d heard the sounds that way, she couldn’t unhear the words. The second part sounded like it meant something, too. In fact, she heard that part first. It sounded like someone saying “Seven.”

  Bryant Park, seven.

  She listened to the recording one more time and couldn’t make herself hear it differently. Why it should sound so very faint and strange, she had no idea. Maybe a problem with her phone, or voice mail, or the movement of the spheres. She wasn’t tangling with Sprint’s asshole version of customer service to find out.

  She could think of only one person who might be trying to leave a message—especially one that short, suggesting a meeting in a park. Lizzie had taken her number. If the whole thing wasn’t Kristina’s imagination, this had to be from her. And if it was an invitation to meet up, Kris wanted to take her up on it.

  But what about Reinhart? She’d been really scared last night, and scaring Kris wasn’t a job for the faint of heart. She’d gone running to John and he’d hugged her and made sure she was all right—and not done what she knew he wanted to, which was run off and try to find the guy. He hadn’t said anything about him since, either, which must have taken herculean reserves of self-denial. And if what he’d since told her about his conversation with the priest that afternoon was true, and some of Lizzie’s broader circle of friends were working for Reinhart, he wouldn’t want that deal messed up by people like Kristina.

  He’d warned her, and made the message good and clear.

  A stray thought dropped into her head. It struck her that John had been vague about how he’d spent his morning. Just walking, he’d said, winding up in Chelsea with Jeffers more or less by chance. It occurred to her to wonder whether he’d been making inquiries about Reinhart instead, and if so, what he’d found. Not much, presumably, or he would have said.

  Presumably.

  It was six o’clock. She was a twenty-minute walk from the park. Said park was a ten- or fifteen-minute cab ride back down to Nolita. The reading group didn’t start until seven thirty and it wasn’t like you got shot for being five minutes late. Eyebrows might be raised—and God knows the raising of educated eyebrows could make you feel small as hell—but no one would actually stand up and point at her.

  The park was nowhere near the part of town where Reinhart had caught her. There was no reason to expect him to be in this neighborhood. She wasn’t expected at the restaurant for a few hours, but John would be working—which gave her a rare window of free will.

  If it came right down to it, she didn’t need a reason.

  She wanted to go.

  The park was almost empty. A couple of tourists sat huddled over one of the little tables at the top of the steps at the library end, looking cold and daunted. A few office workers cut down the side paths, heads down, focused on getting to the subway or a working dinner or somewhere to grab a couple of private drinks before getting into the next phase of their existence. If there was anything that working a bar taught you it was that there was a whole lot of parallel living going on—people who presented one way for ninety-five percent of the time but lived somewhere more private in the remaining sliver. Kristina had occasionally wondered what proportion of the city’s inhabitants spent the hours between five thirty and eight either drinking or covertly holding the hand of a coworker, but had decided it wasn’t a question that led anywhere happy.

  She walked to the middle of the grass and looked around. She watched the couple at the top of the steps get up and head wearily to their hotel to shower and regroup for an evening’s fun in a foreign city and to try to ignore the fact that if they were honest, simply fabulous though it all was, just for tonight they’d prefer to be back at home watching TV and wearing sweatpants.

  She checked her watch. Did she wait a little longer, or get a cab? That’s what made sense, of course. Heading down to Swift’s, meeting with Catherine and patching things up, an hour’s chat about the gentle—and slim—novel they’d enjoyed (or, in Kristina’s case, tolerated with growing irritation). Then get to the bar and her job and lover and life. Run along that track. Her track.

  She didn’t want to. Not tonight. She wanted something else. She wanted something new.

  When she looked up she saw there were now people at all four points of the park. Dark figures, their faces unclear, alone or in pairs.

  “Hey,” she said. Either it wasn’t loud enough, or they chose not to respond. She said it again.

  “Hello.”
>
  The response came from much closer than she was expecting, and from behind. Kris turned and found Lizzie there. Her heart hit a heavy beat. “Hey.”

  “You got the message.”

  “Just about. Why didn’t you talk to me?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why? And why did it sound so weak?”

  “It’s too boring to explain,” Lizzie said. “I’m glad you came.”

  Kristina found herself tongue-tied, and nodded.

  The figures from the corner of the park had moved while she wasn’t looking, and congregated at the Sixth Avenue end. Kristina recognized several from the previous meeting, including the plump girl. They were all watching her, as if waiting for something.

  Lizzie took Kristina’s hand. “Let’s have some fun.”

  Chapter 41

  Kristina followed the Angels out of the park and into the streets as lights started to come on, and the mood of the streets shifted from afternoon to evening in a city that prides itself on never sleeping. She crossed the avenue, into a knot of streets lined with restaurants and bars on the other side, feeling—knowing—this was a gang that didn’t let outsiders in very often, if at all. Sometimes they walked together, chattering to Kristina, asking her questions about her life. Then they’d be spread out across the street and both sidewalks, as if they had no connection to one another.

  She let herself be led, following in their slipstream—sensing that it was kind of a buzz for them, leading someone like her. Sometimes they’d cut through side streets; at others they’d walk down the middle of the road, weaving between the cars with enough grace and timing that they never got honked (though Kris did, more than once), as if they were cold, hard streams of mountain water cutting through forest soil. She found herself being led into a bar. It was noisy and crowded and dark and it seemed to Kristina that her new friends relaxed when they were inside. Lizzie certainly did. When on the street she always seemed watchful. Here in the hectic gloom there was greater freedom in her movement.