Fire in the Blood

by Perry O'Brien

  She set the letter down. Took off her glasses.

  “And this will also be a victory,” she repeated. “Isn’t that incredible? This man’s world is collapsing…” she trailed off again, put her fingers to her brow. “I’m sorry, Mr. Cooper.”

  “For what?”

  “You’re probably thinking you made a mistake.”

  “Ma’am?”

  Mrs. Bellante smiled, almost shyly. “Wanting to know us better.”

  “No. I’m enjoying this,” said Coop. “And, look,” he said, gathering himself up, “there is one thing I wanted to ask you about.”

  “Of course.” One eyebrow crooked up with new attention.

  “It’s silly, but…there’s this picture of us.” He’d worked out this speech ahead of time. “A picture of me and Kay, taken on her phone.”

  “Her phone?” Mrs. Bellante looked confused.

  “I don’t know if that got returned? It’s a sentimental thing.”

  “Um, yes, I think that the police—yes, we should have it.”

  She stood, eyeing him, and spoke quietly into an intercom on the wall. Coop thought he heard Sue’s voice but couldn’t make out the words. Mrs. Bellante retook her seat and watched Coop sidelong while they waited.

  A few minutes later Sue came into the den with a plastic bag, carrying it in both hands like a kid with a dead bird. Immediately Coop could see that the phone was badly damaged.

  “I’m not sure how you’ll get anything from it,” Sue said with a frown.

  “May I?” said Coop, and he tore open the bag. There was a crack through the casing and the screen flopped sideways, hanging half-amputated from its hinge. He held the power button, but the screen stayed flat and black.

  “It might still work with a charge,” Coop said, as he inspected the mangled device. “All depends on whether the storage chip is damaged. Would it be all right if I brought this back?”

  Mrs. Bellante and Sue were looking at each other. “Oh. Well, I’m not sure if that’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Bellante.

  “I’ll just need an hour,” said Coop.

  “Mrs. Bellante, didn’t the police say they might come back for these things?” said Sue, and Coop shot her a look of accusation.

  “Trust me,” he said. “The police aren’t doing anything.”

  Now Mrs. Bellante stood up. The warmth had drained from her and she was the matron of the house once more, icy and elegant. She reached out a hand.

  “I’m sorry about the photograph, but I think you should leave that here.”

  Coop looked away from Mrs. Bellante, out into the glass-enclosed forest.

  “Mr. Cooper?”

  He tucked the phone in his pocket and walked quickly away, past Sue, through the hall and the rows of paintings, across the oriental rugs, down the stairs where he retrieved his boots, not even bothering to relace them as he left the mansion at a half-jog, keeping his hand on the phone the entire way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  They walked out on the ice, Kosta in front, Buqa behind him, dragging the sack through the fresh snow that capped the lake. The city was all but absent from these massive woods, save for a faint electric glow in the sky. Zameer waited behind them, back on the shore. He had volunteered to be the lookout. Of course he did, Kosta thought. Not like Buqa, who followed. Who was loyal.

  Kosta loved this park, where the Bronx gave way to old trees and culverts, the rusted outline of the derelict railroad, open fields littered with abandoned cars. The snow was pristine except for the tracks of wild dogs. It reminded him of home, the thundering winters of his childhood. This place, it was almost a shame to contaminate it.

  Just another concession to his week of hells.

  He had gone to meet Presser, only to find the doctor sprawled on his back, his face a bloody mound of gauze. At first Kosta thought he’d been beaten to death, but then he spied the scorched glass pipe on the carpet, not far from a small pile of glassine bags. Doctor got his ass beat, Kosta reasoned, so he turned to the habit. But his nose was too busted to snort anything, so he tries smoking and ends up overdoing it. Kosta got down close and held his hand over the doctor’s open mouth. He wasn’t breathing.

  So Kosta called Buqa and Zameer. Together they rolled Presser into a sleeping bag and spent some time cleaning his office, all of them working in painter’s outfits and hairnets. During the cleaning, Kosta stopped to run a rubber-gloved finger over the warp mark in the filing cabinet. It looked as if someone had violently pried open the drawer.

  Now they hauled the sack farther along the lake, passing the ribs of a rotted skiff. Everywhere was death, mused Kosta, decaying corpses of stray dogs, raccoons, and birds, all buried just under the snow. But he and Buqa were very much alive, sweating and huffing out big breaths of steam, struggling under the weight of their load. It would have been easier with three people, Kosta thought.

  “Swing it around,” he said, as they came to the hole.

  Here was a gap in the ice, where tall weeds pushed up from the lake. He shoved the bag to the edge, knelt, and unzipped the length of the sleeping bag. The doctor lay inside: pale, cold and bloody-faced.

  “Give me the head,” said Kosta.

  From Presser’s office they had taken a heavy bust of an old man with a wavy beard and empty eyes. Now he placed the stone head at the doctor’s feet and rezipped the sleeping bag.

  “Help me,” Kosta said, and they slid the bag to the lip of ice, where it teetered for a second, then flopped into the water, vanishing in a flurry of bubbles. Just like that and you’re gone, thought Kosta, watching the rippled surface. It can happen that fast.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Kay’s phone reminded Coop of a heavy gray beetle, crushed on the polished landscape of his hotel desk. He examined the broken hinge, gently working the lid back and forth. Where would her fingers have fallen around the ovoid shell? There were scuff marks at the corners where the metallic plastic enamel had chipped off, and on the back, a faint spiral of abrasions. Kay was a compulsive spinner. On bad days he remembered her sitting in the kitchen, a butcher’s knife laid flat on the speckled counter. With one finger she’d sweep the blade into a slow spin, watch it go round and round like a sharp, fast clock. One day, in the weeks before he had deployed to Afghanistan, the knife point had ended its spin aimed at Coop. “If that were a bottle we’d have to kiss, right?” he had joked. By then it had become difficult to make her smile.

  Coop assembled his tools. A Gerber multitool, a miniature screwdriver set, and a soldering kit he had picked up from a Radio Shack. He popped off the battery case and started removing the miniature screws. His mind floated beyond the desk, spinning like the knife on the counter, settling on the dark, pockmarked skin of Sergeant Gayle’s arm. The wrist with its red lump, a little metal sandfly under his skin. Gayle was an ammunition technical officer who’d been brought to Kandahar to train Coop and his fellow sappers on the intricacies of IEDs. A few years ago Gayle had been wounded by an IRA car bomb in London. He was just outside the kill zone but got peppered with debris, leaving a constellation of scars across his face, chest, and arms. One morning Gayle had appeared at the engineer’s tent. “You mates ready for some true fucking grottiness?” he had asked them, holding up his forearm under the tent’s fluorescent light. Just below his hand there was a tiny laceration. “Appeared overnight,” he told them, and began to squeeze the wound like a pimple. Coop watched as a curled sliver of half-digested shrapnel was birthed from the fat of his arm. “Got about a hundred of those little cunts left, just waiting to come out. You should see the fun I have at airports,” Gayle said with a wink.

  Gayle had taught Coop and his colleagues that “mobiles” were the most popular choice for detonators; all the bomber needed was a second phone and a blasting cap wired to the vibration circuit. To properly dispose of such a device you needed to get at the ph
one’s guts.

  Coop pulled out the battery and the protective plate of Kay’s phone. He pried away a ribbon of wires and there he found an exposed wound of copper filament. He rubbed his temples. The circuitry had to be mended, and even then it was guesswork. The phone might simply be dead.

  The iron was ready. Coop touched the tip to the soldering wire, and wisps of smoke rose to the lamp. A metal globule came free, quivering at the tapered point of the wand, and gently Coop smeared a molten line along the cleave of circuitry. Slowly, carefully, he bound the damages of Kay’s phone.

  The cellphone battery was a lithium-ion firecracker, and if ruptured, it would melt Coop’s hand in a flash of superheated chemicals. Behind the faux sandstone wallpaper of his hotel room, flammable gases whispered through buried copper pipes. Every day people held bombs against their faces, commuted inside explosive shells, walked over rivers of possible fire. September 11th should have made it clear: the Explosion was everywhere, just waiting to be summoned.

  And if you knew, the Explosion spoke to you. Wasn’t that the real problem, Coop thought, that the Explosion was inside him? And that maybe it had been inside him before Afghanistan, perhaps even before the Army…

  Coop heard a voice.

  The phone was a string of pieces, connected by ribbons of wires and fresh metal globs. He had been holding down the buttons on the numeric pad, a small light above the keypad flickering to life, but the screen was still flat and dull, even after rubbing at it with the back of his screwdriver. He pressed the buttons, heard the voice again, crackling. A faint cough from the damaged speaker component.

  “Lisshhhenshen…”

  Coop got down close and shut his eyes. It sounded like a voice message. Coop pressed the End button, then Call, and again came the voice. Hurried, jumbled, an edge of panic to the incoherence.

  “Lissen, isshaun…”

  Coop listened again and again, until he was sure:

  “Listen, it’s Sean…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Somebody had left the light on in his cave. Most likely it was Kosta, Sean guessed, but the specifics were lost in a narcotic haze. Under the new polar glow he’d finally been able to examine his prison. It had a sharply angled ceiling, the space too small to be a bedroom but too big to be a closet, and one wall was half-finished with white subway tiles, a jigsaw of teeth, out of which sprouted a rusty plumbing fixture. Probably someone had considered making it into an extra bathroom. One of those lost spaces of geometry inside apartment buildings. You took an old family tenement and subdivided it and there was always some diagonal remainder.

  Sean was acclimating to the downers, his mind slowly achieving the coherence he needed to think clearly. To be scared. He’d stolen from the Albanians, and now they had him. What was their endgame? Sean told himself Kosta was just trying to fuck with his head. Maybe release him after a few days of terror, then make him work off the debt. In the year or so he’d been slinging for Kosta, the enforcement angle of the business had rarely came up. So he didn’t know the standard procedure, how they dealt with problems like himself. But he’d heard enough gossip to imagine this period of isolation being a prelude to some nasty example-setting.

  In the interim, all he had was regrets. He was only twenty, but already Sean worried he’d squandered his easy days. As a freshman at Pratt he had managed to score a great apartment filled with fellow art students, way down on Taaffe, deep in the kingdom of Hasids. It was one of those apartments people said you couldn’t find in New York anymore, a five-bedroom with high ceilings and a big central living space that had been sloppily painted in turquoise, an electric tidal wave crashing in spatters. Best of all was the deck, their neighbor’s rooftop, which previous tenants had layered with rolls of AstroTurf. Here Sean and his roommates would sit and smoke and drink and watch the costumed black throng of nineteenth-century Jewish toddlers playing in the park across the street. At night everyone would be working on their assignments, the apartment dizzy with spray adhesive and the grassy burn of yerba mate, mirrors dusted with pink and blue lines of Dexedrine. These had been good days, and Sean liked to imagine what alternate life might have developed if he’d stayed the course.

  At Pratt, Sean had rapidly come to understand that in the art world, being black put certain obligations on his past. Instructors always wanted to talk to him about where he’d grown up, what his childhood had been like, how he’d become interested in art. As if he must be some kind of refugee, someone who made it out. And upon revealing his roots in suburban New Jersey, how his parents were still together and his older sister worked in real estate, Sean always caught the scent of disappointment at the unspecialness of his achievement. Which was a problem because it didn’t take excess savvy to realize your relationships with instructors was pretty much the whole deal. Sean had gotten accepted to Pratt with a mixed portfolio of black-and-white photography and charcoal studies. After foundation courses he planned on going down one of the fine art tracks, which basically meant zero money, unless you had the endorsement of a big-shot instructor, someone who could land you assistant gigs and maybe even recommend your work to a gallery. Realizing that these possible mentors were more interested in his past than his future, Sean learned to change up the story. He started saying he was from Camden instead of Cherry Hill, and he learned to assume a wounded quietude, speaking only in suggestive generalities. “Yeah, you know, art, where I’m from? It wasn’t exactly encouraged.” The instructors would nod along. Of course, of course, no need to say more. Let’s talk about your work.

  But Sean knew that prodding folks’ assumptions would only take him so far. To make it as a black artist in New York, he’d eventually need that precious credibility of the underworld. And thus in retrospect it was easy to see why he had been drawn to Jasper and Gem, a notorious ex-Pratt couple who had abandoned their studies but still hung in the proximity of Bed-Stuy. They called themselves artists but it was hard to know what exactly they were up to, creatively speaking, since their primary vocation was selling heroin. Together the two of them had cornered the market on Pratt students and teachers who lived scattered around the campus in Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill. Jasper got his product from the Bronx, where he knew people who could hook him up with a little weight, usually five-gram bundles of dubious purity. Jasper and Gem would dilute the product further, cutting in a mixture of ground-up caffeine pills and powdered milk, then repack it into custom-stamped bags they sold for fifteen a pop.

  Sean got in on the operation through the manual labor of cutting, weighing, and repacking. Eventually he worked with Gem to design the stamps for the baggies. The medium made it hard to do anything complex, the ink didn’t hold well, but Sean had figured a way to do these geometric sigils, and pretty soon “Hex” became a trusted brand.

  And of course, Sean had started using himself. Why not? As Jasper liked to say, try naming a great artist who wasn’t a junkie. If you can think of one, it probably means they were true users, the habit so bad they had to conceal it. Sean never shot up—thank you Trainspotting, thank you Requiem for a Dream—but he was sniffing the stuff for a few months, and then, after a particularly fearsome respiratory infection, moved on to plugging, where you put the heroin in a dissolving suppository and cram it up your ass. Probably the least sexy and most effective way to get loaded, short of shooting.

  What followed was a predictable decline of his life situation. School became impossible, and Sean joined his roommates in an extended leave of absence.

  Looking back, as he waited in captivity, Sean could see this period as the point of rotation, the moment an outsider would have pegged as his opportunity to turn things around. To intervene in his own destiny, to resist the trajectory of his downfall. But they would have been wrong. If he’d read the signs of disaster, maybe he never would have moved to the Bronx. And then he never would have met Kay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Coo
p staggered down the stairs to the hotel lobby, his eyes half-closed against the morning light. He’d been awake all night with Kay’s phone and files, but the electric coffeepot in his room had stopped working, so he’d come down to get a refill from the vending machine.

  “Specialist Cooper.”

  Coop snapped his head toward the voice. Detective Melody sat in the waiting area of the lobby reading a newspaper. He wore a bunched-up overcoat with a plaid scarf looped around his big neck. He was still wearing his Mets cap. Other than the two of them, the lobby was empty.

  Coop had frozen on the stairs, and his fist going tight around the quarters in his palm. In the swirl of his head he heard Jackie’s advice: Your best bet is to turn yourself in.

  “Let me guess,” said Melody. “Right now you’re thinking, how’n the hell did this guy know where I was staying?”

  Coop fought the urge to run back up the stairs and lock himself in his room. He cleared his throat.

  “You surprised me,” said Coop. He forced himself down the last few steps and went over to the vending machine. Get your coffee, he thought. Try to be casual.

  “So what can I do for you, Detective?”

  “Are you buying coffee from a machine?” said Melody. “Nah, c’mon. What say we get a cup of the real stuff? I got my car, it’s right outside.”

  Coop patted his pockets, as though he was worried he might be forgetting something. Melody squinted at him expectantly.

  “Unless you have somewhere else to be?”

  They drove west to the bridge over Ward’s Island. Melody gunned it the whole way, his fat body squeezed into the driver’s seat of his old Nissan Altima, doing twenty over the limit to cross the solid HOV line.