76
THE SIGN-IN SHEET was a grid clipped to a binder on the counter of the nurse’s station, with slots for your name, the time in, and all those Establishment hoops a real punk would sooner die than jump through. But the nurse on duty was looking at him funny, so Charlie stooped to leave a squiggle where his name should have been, and again in the space where you were supposed to say who you were here to see. Once the nurse was out of sight, Charlie hung a left onto the hall where he thought Sam was. He yanked out charts holstered next to doorframes to check the names. The door by Cicciaro was open an inch or two. Like the others, it was wide enough to fit a stretcher through, he thought. Or a coffin, before telling his brain to shut its face, because how many months had his brain just cost him?
The bed by the door was empty, so she must have been in the one closer to the window. He stood for maybe a minute, fingering the privacy curtain that had been drawn between them. Finally, he swept it back, but what he saw made him wish he hadn’t. The fluorescent light bouncing off all the toothpasty green furnishings seemed to pool and deepen in the hollows of Sam’s skin. Her neck, sticking out of the hospital gown, was just skin stretched over tendons, like paper over the wooden sticks of a Japanese lantern. Her hair had grown back to what it had been at New Year’s, but there was this bald patch where they’d taken out the bullets. The saddest thing was the vase of cheap flowers, because they must have come from her dad. No, actually the saddest thing was the band-aid covering the place where the needle went into the back of her hand. The modesty of that. The hand, with all its nerve-endings, pierced. Oh, Sam. How could you have been naked in his bed?
Charlie thought he’d come here, finally, to ask. But the flesh-and-blood hurt of her made the answers meaningless. It no longer mattered.
He turned off the lights and climbed carefully onto the margin of bed her body left available. He’d ditched the smoke-smelling coveralls in a trashcan outside. With his tee-shirt rolled up to his chest, he could feel how warm she still was under her gown and press his belly against her hip and remember how she’d lain once with her head on his lap. It wasn’t dirty to do this, he felt, to show her how close he wanted to be. After a while, though, it got physically uncomfortable, so he retreated to the other bed, from which, if she’d been conscious, he could have held her hand. Her face, in profile against the bright window, was peaceful. But that was something you said about dead people, too.
A great weariness overtook him. He’d spent last night hunkered on some church steps with only a plywood awning to shield him from anyone on the street. Every time headlights rolled past, he’d found his grip tightening on the handle of the switchblade he’d remembered was in a pocket of his coveralls. And in between, he’d had the same argument with himself he was having now. On one hand, Nicky had been right; Charlie’s faith in the cause was imperfect, there were spots on his raiment, or why was he so freaked out? On the other, these things happened. Ready to leave the house, you discovered last winter’s snot on the sleeve of your sweater, and you couldn’t be sure you hadn’t worn it since then. Plus he recalled from the Bible that no prophet was perfect. Jeremiah was a notorious dawdler. Jonah basically turned tail and ran. And Post-Humanism turned out to be embarrassingly human. Look where he’d found himself: in a strange apartment, eyes burning, slopping water from the sink onto the bonfire Nicky’d made on the floor. Soiled, worldly, the whole stinking business. At least he’d managed to save the dog.
Trees sighed outside and hazy clouds scudded past and the shadow of a flower vase swung from west to east on the plastic tray table. No one came in to feed Sam lunch, because she couldn’t eat. Sometimes he imagined he was talking to her and she was talking back. Sometimes, without realizing it, he hummed. Sometimes he closed his eyes, but he didn’t pray. Maybe he even drifted off for a little while, because when a man’s voice spoke up in the hall, it took a second to really hear. Just look in on her for a minute, it said …
Oh, shit. How was he going to explain his being here? Charlie was an excellent sneak but a crappy liar. The voice, and another voice, that nurse or a lady doctor, were just outside the door. He had a few moments left to yank the privacy curtain closed around the bed he was on. Out of childish habit, he pulled the blanket over his head. Then came the footsteps. Then the complaint of metal on floor as a chair was dragged next to Sam’s bed. Then the chair, mere feet away, creaking under someone’s weight. Then nothing.
This couldn’t be Mr. Cicciaro; he knew that voice from the phone, and the muttering that came now sounded more educated. No, Charlie understood suddenly—for understanding was given in visions and in dreams—that the person he was trapped here with had to be the one who had shot her. Returned to the scene of the crime. Or the body that amounted to the same thing. Beyond the closed door, machines beeped, wheels rattled, clocks were punched. Should he bolt for the nurse’s station to raise the alarm? God, he was suffocating here. The light through the blanket’s thin places was malevolent, green. He tried not to think of the afflictions of all the bed’s previous occupants, snowing down on him in this underworld. He tried not to imagine this was how Sam had been feeling for the 192 days since this man had put her here, but he couldn’t help it: it was like being buried alive. He groped in his pocket for his inhaler, but found the switchblade instead. Some coins slipped out and clattered against the bed and then the floor, and for good measure rolled around and around before rattling to a halt. The silence that followed was the kind where you can actually feel the weight of the listening: his listening, your own, the wispiness of the fabric that separates you. And the last conscious thought of the Prophet Charlie Weisbarger, before the killer swept back the curtain, was to hell with the inhaler. It was going to have to be the blade.
77
REACHING CONEY ISLAND took several more centuries. The Triboro at rush hour was a catastrophe of millennial proportions, as was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, any time of day or night. (And didn’t time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?) Somewhere around the Verrazano Bridge, the Gremlin’s two-stroke engine began to whimper. From the passenger’s seat, Mercer watched the gas needle flirt with E. Then a string of kitelike pennants in primary colors was snapping outside a line of dead storefronts, beyond which stretched seagulls and the sea.
They pulled into a near-empty parking lot. He heard the engine die. Across the street was the place they’d come looking for, a derelict pile of cinderblock with an impenetrable steel door and heavy mesh over the windows. A big-bellied man in camouflage pants dozed on the steps. In the heat beside him lay the spine of a dog with fur hanging off it. The clinic’s sign was barely legible. Methadone, Mercer thought. A drug you take to stop using other drugs. William, who couldn’t be bothered to give up heroin for him, had done it for Bruno. But why all the way out here?
He got out to sit on the hood of the car. It was a million degrees, but fuck it. He felt like a discarded marionette, or a building collapsing in on itself, floor by floor. Jenny plopped down next to him, too light to register with the car’s suspension. “What now?”
“What do you mean, what now? The place is obviously closed.”
“We could check if there’s an open window.”
“I’m sure we could, but what would be the point? He’s not going to be in there. All we can do is wait for him to come get his dose.”
“Do you really think there’s time for that?”
Up until now, Mercer had been having trouble holding her gaze when he met it. “I read the article, too, Jenny. I saw the guy on the roof. But William’s not at his studio, he’s not in SoHo, he’s not here. Anyway, what are you going to do if we get to him first? Lock him up safe in a tower somewhere?”
She thumbed the edge of the folder in her lap. “I just feel like we have to warn him.”
“You’re virtual strangers, Jenny, you said it yourself. No one’s that altruistic.”
“I’m trying to take responsibility. It’s a choice I’ve made.”
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But this was ducking the question. “Sometimes you don’t get to make a choice,” he said.
“When have you ever not had a choice, Mercer? Okay, the man you love is an addict. Don’t you still have to choose?”
Well, so much for subtext, Mercer thought. He laid his arms across his knees and lowered his head to them. There was a pause here, a silence, in which he could feel Jenny wrestling with something. “Mercer, it’s not just that these people broke into my apartment. Do you understand how rare it is to get a real chance to save someone? You can’t just blow it off—trust me. This might be our chance to redeem ourselves, but you have to stop second-guessing. You have to let yourself think.”
What Mercer thought was that in the distorting chrome of the bumper, with his stupid beard, he looked like someone who’d been turned inside out—superficially soft, but with a hard shell where his tissues should be, holding the emptiness in. He could hear the pop of balls jumping off bats in cages and a bored voice through a megaphone, They’re here, they’re weird, real live girls, and a spectral organ recalling something from his youth, though he couldn’t remember what. “You aren’t a bad person,” Jenny added gently, as if she could hear him.
“You know, people keep telling me that.” When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close. He wouldn’t be surprised if up there behind the yellow haze there were two or three moons, and mutually exclusive evening stars. But even in this strange new cosmos, was there not still something of the old one left? “I suppose there is one other thing we could try,” he said at last. “I’m just guessing you’re not going to like it.”
78
PULASKI HAD SUSTAINED NO SERIOUS INJURIES in last week’s fall. Or tumble, as he’d put it in the car on the long homeward loop from a downtown ER. Just a deep-tissue bruise in his thigh and, he joked, some surface abrasions to his pride. Sherri was unamused. Back in Port Richmond, with the engine ticking down, she’d twisted her hands on the customized steering wheel and stared through the windshield at the garage’s pegboard wall. Did he know what it felt like, to get that call? Did he have any idea what had gone through her mind, in the gap before the nurses put him on the line? She didn’t have to tell him, of course. Nor did she have to remind him that, with his condition, he could have filed for disability years ago. That his overlords at 1PP had set him up to fail; that he had no probable cause to search the house on East Third, or even to assume the Feds weren’t backward on this. There was no way they knew his city better than he did, and the carrot-topped kid he’d chased up Second Ave. could easily have been the lone member, or a product of Pulaski’s own need to believe.… When a minute had passed without Sherri saying anything, he realized it was his turn to speak. He suggested they call and see if the New Paltz place was still on the market. Then she was crying. “For Pete’s sake, Larry. I don’t want you to do this because I want you to. I want you to want to do it.”
He peeled her hands off the wheel, cradled them between his awful claws. “I do want to do it,” he said.
Now that he’d submitted the paperwork, he even found that it was true. Pulaski hadn’t realized how twenty-five years of work could tax a body, or how restorative it could be to start boxing up an office. At the bottom went anything from the mounds of files he’d be taking with him. Next came the velveteen cases to which his special pens returned, disassembled, and his hardwood pipe. Then the pictures. Other people kept photos of their kids; Pulaski had Sherri and Pope Paul VI and his late mother. The last dozen boxes were for books. He’d amassed a substantial library over the years, through a mail-order service he kept forgetting to cancel. The Time-Life History series. It had been the uniform and color-coded spines that had first caught his eye when he’d seen the special trial offer in the back of the TV Guide. He’d been meaning to repopulate the built-in bookcases he’d inherited from the previous Deputy Inspector. You needed books, if only to remind the subordinates who would be the only people to see the inside of your office that you knew more than they did. Over the years, though, he’d discovered that he liked to read them, too. To be a cop at this late date in history was to be, by definition, a nostalgist; beyond the big window at his back, the streets were humming, anarchic, yet still every morning he’d taken up badge and revolver, pledged to defend laws laid down mostly before he was born. And even as he should have been bundling them into boxes, he found himself wanting to linger over the books one last time, as if saying goodbye to the friends of his youth. The Mughal Empire. Pagans of the British Isles. Probably he was just tired.
But now the hum from the open window started to seem more like chanting. He used the edge of his desk to swivel himself in his chair. The view was unchanged—water towers and the strutwork of the bridge—but when he craned to the right, a column of tiny people was flowing into the pedestrian plaza below. Heads seemed to lift toward Pulaski’s window. Distance blurred their chants, so he couldn’t quite hear their demands. For weeks now, he knew, “Dr.” Zig Zigler had been hectoring his listeners to reclaim their city, but to no effect—until today. And reclaim it from what, from chaos? Pulaski wanted to laugh. The protest itself was chaos, and anyway, it couldn’t reach him now. Or was all this just, as he’d once imagined, the mask worn by some deeper order? Because just at the moment when Larry Pulaski was about to shut the window and finish packing, the phone began to ring.
79
SHE WAS OLDER BY THREE YEARS, but around the time when William’s patchy memories had fused into the single, continuous individual now before him—which is to say, in the afterburn of their mother’s death—he’d decided that Regan was in need of his protection. In the Park, where Doonie took them afternoons, he’d fought the other boys off no matter the game: Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Peter Pan. A shrink might have had interesting things to say about this. There was, e.g., the possibility that the woman up there at the front of the fortieth-floor press room, lit up for the cameras, had in fact been his protector. But William believed that psychoanalysis was at best a collection of insights you could figure out on your own, and at worst hippie-dippie bullshit. It had been one of the reasons he’d felt so threatened by Mercer’s attempt to get him help there at the end, he was remembering, when a flashbulb in the vicinity of his elbow saved him from having to remember any more. They’d reached the Q&A portion of the press conference, and though Regan’s prepared statement had been perfectly straightforward, etiquette demanded that the reporters pretend they’d just been made privy to some shocking new development. A blond Ken doll with shoulder-length hair (had Daddy’s standards slipped?) pointed into the crowd and then the clamor died and one of the reporters repeated his question. Cameras turned. Turned back. William knew of pawnshops where a news camera could have fetched several hundred bucks. But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind’s insistence that this was the same Regan he’d known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who’d perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.
His arm had started to tingle from being held aloft so long, or maybe it was just the last spasm of withdrawal, when the guy finally called on him. “Yeah. Freddy Engels. Daily Worker,” William said. He made no effort to consult an imaginary steno pad. Just crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “My readers want to know, how much money has the parent company already wasted on the defense, and will it lead to sail-trimming at the various subsidiaries?”
Regan squinted against the light. He was sure she recognized his voice, despite the fact that it was scratchy from vomiting. Siblings knew these things. There had been months in the past when he’d felt her fretting about him from afar. Years when he’d known she was dying inside. She covered the mic with her hand and whispered something to the man, like a mobster at a RICO hearing. The man leaned forward. “I think that will be all for the question and answer period.” There was another perfunctory c
lamor, and the bursting of flashbulbs, and under cover of brightness, William ducked out into the hallway to wait.
The Hamilton-Sweeney Building, despite its height, dated to the dark ages before air-conditioning, and updates to this part of the floor looked unfinished. His great-grandfather had evidently subscribed to the idea that marble had cooling properties, but on days like this one, the dog-slaying, hydrant-bursting, power-sucking July days, marble seemed instead to trap the heat, and all the fans could do was blow it around. On a window-washer’s platform outside an open window, a pair of birds did their best to avoid unnecessary motion, but when William went over to see what kind they were, they took wing, as if they knew better than he did what was in his heart. Swooping out over the parks and streets, Madison, Park, Lex, they achieved an improbable beauty. But around them rose high-rises that hadn’t been here when he was a kid, thousands more people crammed into boxes, and off beyond that two towers wavering in the haze. It seemed impossible that mortals had built all this. Men would be the size of fruit flies up there, battering themselves against the locked heavens. More likely, thought William, the towers had been quarried whole out of granite, and somewhere in Vermont twin holes plunged a thousand feet into the bedrock.
Then his sister said behind him, “You’ve got some nerve. And you can’t smoke in here.” She tried to snatch the cigarette from him but he fended her off. Reporters spilled from the press room, breached the quiet. She waited for them to pass. “Honestly, William, it’s like you just learned to walk around on your hind legs,” she continued, when they were gone. “And you look like death warmed over. But you know what?” She put up her hands. “I’m not getting sucked into this again, after your whole tantrum of renunciation. I’m a busy person.”
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