Night of the Juggler

Chapter 27

Joyce Colby stood with Detective Miles Tebbet and Patrolman Max Prima at the Artists’ Gate where Sixth Avenue crosses Fifty-ninth Street and begins its curving northward passage through Central Park.

The night was cold. Many details of detectives and patrolmen had been returned to their precincts and to their normal duties. Traffic was almost normal, the crowds of the morbidly curious drifting off on news that the little girl was back safe with her family.

When Joyce Colby received the phone call telling her that Rusty Boyle had been wounded, she had put on slacks and a sweater, stepped into loafers, and wrapped a polo coat around her slim body before running from her apartment to find a cab.

The wind that whipped across the pond north of Fifty-ninth Street swept through her long red hair and cut like icy whips at her bare ankles.

Miles Tebbet pointed toward the curving extension of Sixth Avenue where he had spotted the revolving red dome light of an ambulance.

“Here’s the big guy now,” he said.

It had been a chaotic night, Tebbet thought, but mercifully it was over, and Fifty-ninth Street was practically deserted except for a few policemen and Joyce Colby and the stocky old woman who looked as wide as she was tall with her layers of sweaters under a cloth coat.

She had been here most of the night and now stood as patiently as a cow in a field watching the approaching ambulance.

Max Prima walked into the pathway north of Fifty-ninth Street and flagged the ambulance down with his red torchlight.

Miles Tebbet took Joyce’s arm, and they walked to the rear of the ambulance, where he pulled open both doors.

The two ambulance attendants flanking Rusty Boyle’s stretcher stared at Joyce and Detective Tebbet with the cynical eyes of men who earn their money going to fires and treating bullet and knife wounds.

“What’s all this shit?” one of them said to Tebbet.

“One more passenger,” Tebbet said, and held Joyce’s arm as she climbed into the ambulance.

“That’s against regulations,” the attendant said, but Joyce had already brushed past him to Rusty Boyle.

She was in his arms, and he was grateful for the clean fragrance of her hair, grateful even for her tears on his cheeks.

Drowsy from the injection the medics had given him, he still had one clear thought: When he was discharged from the hospital, he would go to Epiphany Church at Twenty-second Street and Second Avenue, where he had gone as a youngster. He would go there to say thanks.

Tebbet slammed the rear doors shut, and the ambulance turned west into Fifty-ninth Street, its dome lights flashing and its siren rising with the winds.

Out of curiosity and simple compassion, Detective Tebbet walked over to the fat, swaddled woman who stared with empty eyes after the ambulance. She stood as if rooted to the ground, and there was something abandoned and lonely in her tired old face.

“Can I be of any help, ma’am?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, and turned her vacant eyes toward the trees and traffic in the park.

“Did you know any of the people who were in trouble here tonight?”

She was too frightened and too shrewd to fall into traps. “No, I know nobody,” Mrs. Schultz said, and went away from him with her shuffling walk in the direction of Columbus Circle.

She was praying again for the poor strange man she had been told to take care of, but she was praying in her own old language now, not hard like the English they had made her learn, not hard like this country could be to some of its people.

“Gegrusset eist du Maria,” she said, whispering the words into the night, “full der Gnade der ist mit dir du bist Gebenedeit under denweibern und gehendeit ist die frucht deines libes, Gesus.

“Heilige Maria Mutter Gottes bitt fur uns sinners jetzt und in diestundes unser todes. Amen.”

Luther Boyd carried his daughter through clearings that would eventually bring them to pathways flanking the East Drive. Her arms were tight about his neck, and her face was buried against the warmth of his chest and shoulders. He held her in the crook of his left arm, while his right hand gently massaged her back and shoulders.

Words would be of no comfort as yet, Boyd knew from long experience at field hospitals. Soldiers needed letters from home and security foods and the mothering of nurses, but Boyd had never known a wounded soldier to take initial solace from discussing the impact of the bullet, the splintering of bones and the pain and nausea that followed.

Talk might help later, perhaps with doctors. And the two of them might take a long skiing vacation at Tahoe-Donner. Two of them, not three, he thought with bitter resignation.

“Daddy?”

“What, baby?”

She was silent and still in his arms. Then she said so softly that he could barely hear the words, “I told him you’d help.”

“Told who, Katie?”

She was silent, pressing her cheek hard against his shoulder.

“You told the man, is that it?”

She nodded slowly.

“I know he killed Harry Lauder,” she said. “But I meant it when I said you’d help him. You could, Daddy. . ”

Her strength and compassion almost brought tears to his eyes. And he realized with pride, but with a sense of loss, that the humanity of this child had been bred into her by her mother, not only by Colonel Luther Boyd.

“He scared me, and he tied me up, but he didn’t do anything else to me,” she said. “He wanted to talk to me. I could tell.”

This might explain the Juggler’s splintered, rambling talk of dates and chocolate and boat rides. Perhaps Kate had seen something in that dreadfully flawed unit of humanity that he, Luther Boyd, could never have seen. In her own terror, she might have had the detachment to feel some sort of compassion for him. Was it that mercy which had allowed her to survive her agonizing ordeal? Kate, with childish wisdom, had been generous to him, had promised him his help. And that might have deflected his monstrous needs, providing the lead time for Luther Boyd to save her life.

“We can talk about it later,” he said, and to his relief saw that she had been distracted by the sight of the red dome lights of police squad cars coming toward them through the trees.

“Is Mommy here?” she asked him.

“Yes, baby.”

When Kate saw her mother step from one of the cars, she slipped from her father’s arms and ran across the meadow, her footsteps stumbling and uncertain, crying for the first time since her father had found her.

Barbara hugged her daughter as tightly as was physically possible and whispered her name over and over again as if this were some guarantee that this warm, living presence in her arms was not a cruel, figmented twist of her imagination.

Other figures stepped from the police squad cars: Detectives Jim Taylor and Ray Karp, Crescent Holloway and Rudi Zahn.

Crescent Holloway slipped her arm through Rudi Zahn’s and hugged it tightly and looked at him with shining eyes. His jaw was swollen and discolored, and there were bandages on his forehead and his cheeks.

“I’m a disaster area,” he said.

“No, you look positively gorgeous,” she said.

Kate Boyd turned from her mother and looked up at Rudi Zahn.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“Well, I tried,” he said, and while Crescent Holloway hugged his arm even more tightly, he touched Kate Boyd’s cheek with the back of his hand. “It turned out all right,” he said. “We can be grateful for that.”

It was all right, Zahn thought, true and right, and he could say AufWiedersehen now with poignancy but without regret to the name that had haunted him so long and so endlessly, forever, the face that had blazed in his mind through all those weary years: the name and face of Ilana.

And watching the faint smile on his lips and seeing that Kate was holding his hand against her face, Crescent Holloway realized that in some fashion Rudi Zahn was free.

Barbara Boyd stared at her husband. There was a longing question in her eyes, and she desperately needed an answer to it.