Night of the Juggler

Chapter 28

The Boyd family was driven home in a police squad car by Detective Carmine Garbalotto, who let them out at the entrance to their apartment building.

Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli parked his unmarked sedan on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue and turned off his motor. He intended to wait until the little girl and her parents were safe in their own home before returning to his precinct to begin the massive paperwork that would be generated by this night’s events.

Detective Garbalotto waved a good-bye to the Boyds and drove south down Fifth Avenue.

The revolving doors of the building spun and glittered in the darkness, and John Brennan came through them, and Kate was swept with a blend of confusing emotions when she saw the small kitten cradled in his hands. She took it from him and felt it warm and purring against her body. Poor Harry Lauder, she thought, stroking the silky white star on the kitten’s forehead. If he hadn’t been so jaunty and brave, he’d still be alive. But her little Scottie had to be what he was.

Luther Boyd looked at Barbara. The night’s ordeal had marked her face; shadows like bruises lay beneath her eyes, and her lips, even without makeup, were livid against the masklike pallor of her features.

“When we get Katie to sleep, we can talk about what you want to do, Barbara.”

“I’m home, Luther,” she said. Her body trembled as if an electric current had passed through it. There was a sudden, bright shine of tears in her eyes as she asked the question she so desperately needed an answer to. “Is that all right?”

“All right? It’s perfect,” Boyd said, and put an arm tightly around her shoulders.

They went into the lobby with Kate holding the kitten in her arms and Mr. Brennan leading them to the elevators. Boyd said, “You take Kate up. I won’t be a minute.”

He walked back the length of the lobby and pushed through the revolving doors and looked across the street at Gypsy Tounelli.

For what seemed an attenuated interval the two men stared at each other, and then Luther Boyd sighed and said, “Can we agree we both did what we had to do tonight? That we really had no choice in the matter?”

“Let’s just agree it’s over,” Tonnelli said wearily. “No loose ends. They even got a couple of tranquillizer bullets into the lion. Damn cat was sound asleep in a toolshed at Seventy-third Street.”

Boyd smiled faintly. “Lieutenant, I’ve got a bottle of twenty-eight-year-old bourbon upstairs,” he said. “How about a drink?”

But the mood was wrong for it, and he wasn’t surprised when the lieutenant shook his head with slow finality.

“Thanks, but I’ve got a ton of paperwork to do, Colonel,” Tonnelli said, raising his voice above the sounds of intermittent traffic.

“Paperwork is for clerks, Lieutenant,” Boyd said. “We’re field-grade soldiers. And we’ve got something to celebrate.”

Tonnelli turned his face in profile to Boyd and drew a thumbnail slowly down his disfiguring scar, and Luther Boyd, who understood men, guessed at the significance of that gesture and the direction of Lieutenant Tonnelli’s thoughts.

Yes, Boyd had something to celebrate. But what of the others?

The white princess was back in her electronically guarded castle, the Gypsy was thinking. That’s what they would drink to, that’s what they would celebrate.

But who would raise a glass to Manolo and the dead men at the boathouse and the Arsenal? And what did Samantha and Babe Fritzel and Rusty Boyle, with fire in his leg and ribs, what did they have to celebrate?

Could you say that John Ransom had got a break, rotting with cancer and a pair of slugs in his face? That’s what he’d bought tonight. And even the human animal killed, he had to matter. The whole city mattered. Or should anyway.

He snapped on his sedan’s red dome light and turned and looked at Luther Boyd. The men stared at each other for a long, thoughtful moment.

“Some other time,” Tonnelli said.

“I understand, Lieutenant,” Luther Boyd said, and gave him a soft salute.

Maybe he does at that, Tonnelli thought, maybe he does, as he shifted into drive, his car rolling smoothly away from the curb.

Luther Boyd stood on the sidewalk and watched the red dome light of Tonnelli’s car as it flowed away from him into the darkness, turning out of sight at last into Fifty-ninth Street, where the mighty equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman stood in its full arrogant glory on the Grand Army Plaza.

The irony suggested by that statue was a familiar one to Luther Boyd and perhaps to all professional soldiers. The general, an awesome, idealized figure astride a magnificent horse, was being escorted into heaven by a winged angel holding aloft the palm of peace. But while the general’s tasseled sword was sheathed, his boots were spurred to charge, and he was headed south, forever south toward Georgia.

Standing alone on the sidewalk, Luther Boyd experienced the emptiness that always beset him after battle. Even in victory there was a sense of loss, the dissolution of that inevitable but spurious fraternity generated among combat troops.

He realized then how very much he had wanted to have that drink with Lieutenant Tonnelli.