Thirteen Ways of Looking

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

The first is hidden high in a mahogany bookcase. It shows the full expanse of room where he lies sleeping on a queensize bed among a heap of pillows.

The headboard is intricately carved. The bedframe, sleigh-shaped. The duvet, Amish-patterned. An urn sits on the left bedside table, a stack of books on the right. An antique lantern clock with exposed weights and pulleys is hung on the wall near a long silver mirror, freckled and browned with age. Beneath the mirror, tucked in a corner, almost hidden from view, is a small oxygen tank.

Half a dozen pillows are placed in the armchair, away from the bed. Several cushions rest on an oak chair with leather armrests.

The writing table sits near the doorway, with a number of papers neatly towered, a silver letter opener, a seal embosser, an open laptop. There is a pipe on the desk but no tobacco box, matches, or ashtray.

The artwork is contemporary: three urban landscapes, sharp lines and blocks, and a small abstract seascape on the wall by the bathroom door.

Amid it all, he lies lumpen in the bed, a blanket-shape, his head little more than a blur.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

I was born in the middle of my very first argument. He should rise, find a notebook, scribble the phrase down, but it’s frigid in the room and the heating hasn’t yet kicked on, so he’d rather not move. But at least the sheets are tight and warm. Perhaps Sally came in to re-tuck him, since he seems, now, to remember the journey, or the several journeys, or — more to the point — the endless voyages to the bathroom. I was born in the middle of my last epic voyage. Above him, the ceiling fan turns. The handymen have reversed its usual spin. But how is it that a reverse-spinning fan creates warmth? Something to do with the updraft of air and the way a current flows. If only we could catch the draft, reverse our spin. I was born in the middle of my first jury argument. Strange to rethink the memoirs at this age, but what else is there to do? It was a surprise that the original book didn’t sell well, back in the eighties, nicely published, nicely packaged, nicely edited. All the niceties. Even with a modesty pill he would have thought it would sell a few copies here and there, but it ended up, after three months, on the remainder tables. I was born in the middle of my first public failure. But when was it really, truly? I was born the first time I made love to Eileen. I was born when I touched the hand of my baby son Elliot. I was born when I sat in the cockpit of a Curtiss SOC-3. Oh, bullshit really. Bullshit with two capital L’s. Truthfully he was born in the middle of that first case when he stood in front of the Brooklyn court, a fresh-plucked assistant DA, and he shaped the words exactly the way he had dreamed, and they entered the air, and he could feel the way they fluttered, and what they did to the faces of all the all-male jury, and what they did, also, to the sympathetic judge who beamed with something akin to pride. A very solid argument, Mr. Mendelssohn. He knew right then he would never turn away. The law was what he was made for. How many eons ago now? He should write it down. But that’s the problem with age, isn’t it? You have the feeling, but not the dates. Find the dates, you lose the feeling.

A pencil and some paper, Sally, my dear, is that too much to ask? I was born in the middle of my very first memory loss. Why, oh, why is there is never any paper by the bedside? Maybe I should use a tape recorder? One of those little digital marvels. Perhaps there’s one on my BlackBerry — it has, after all, everything else. He has taken, recently, to tucking it into his pajama pocket where it remains during the night, the little red light pulsing. A wondrous machine, it brings news of all the latest triumphs and terrors while he dozes and snores. Coups and wars and revolutions and rebellions and other sundry sadnesses all plotting their escape from the comfort of his bed.

Interesting that. They design the pajamas so the pocket sits on the left-hand side, over the heart. Something medical perhaps? A little compartment for the doctor to search. Somewhere to hold the stents and tubes and pills in case of attack. The accoutrements of age. He should ask his old friend Dr. Marion. Why is the pocket over the heart, Jim? Maybe it’s just a tic of fashion. Who in the world invented pockets for pajamas anyway? And for what purpose? A place for a little extra bread or cracker or toast in case we get hungry during the night? A spot for the love letters from long ago? A slipcase for the alter ego, waiting, out there, in the wings?

Oh, the mind is wandering, plotting its escape: out the frosted window and away. And who was it, anyway, invented the cool side of the pillow?

He moves his toes a little in the sheets, rubs them together slowly, lets the warmth crawl up through him. He has never understood the heating systems in New York. All these underground steam pipes and oil trucks and board meetings about boilers, and Nobel-winning engineers, and smarty-pants architects, and global-heating specialists, a veritable brain trust, geniuses every one, and still all you get is a terrible clack clack clack in the morning. Dante in the basement, trying to prime the pipes. Good God, you’d think that in the twenty-first century they’d be able to solve the mystery of the fucking heating, excuse my French, my Polish, my Lithuanian, but no, they can’t, they won’t, never have, possibly never will. They don’t turn the boiler on until five in the morning unless it’s eastern Siberia outside. The building’s superintendent is a chess master, hails from Sarajevo, once played against Spassky, boasts about his brain capacity, says he’s a member of Mensa, but even he can’t get the goddamn heating going?

He grabs the BlackBerry, keys it alive. Twenty-two minutes still before the pipes kick on properly. He is tempted to break his ritual, do an early check of the news and his e-mail, but he slides the BlackBerry back into his pajama pocket. I was born in the middle of my first jury argument and I came out onto Court Street with a spring in my step. Not quite true. There was never much of a spring in my step, even in those days. Always lagging a pace behind. Not quite Joe DiMaggio or Jesse Owens or Wilt Chamberlain or anyone else for that matter. The spring was kept coiled, instead, in the language, the intonation, the shape of his words. He sometimes stayed up all night at the mahogany desk, crafting lines. He had wanted, when younger, to be a writer. The fountain of Helicon. I was born in the middle of my first contradiction. Great arguments had nothing to do with substance. It was all about style. The right word at the right time. All fools know that a touch of fancy language can make any stupidity shine. In court he would study the jury’s faces to see what fine words he might slip under their skin. The grace of an orator and the shape of a snake, said a colleague once, or was it the shape of an orator and the grace of a snake? A compliment anyway. Even a snake has its sibilant slither.

Eileen loved reading his judgments, especially in the later years, after he was promoted to the Kings County Supreme Court, when one newspaper or the other was always out to get him, The Village Voice, The New York Times, that chip-choppity New Amsterdam rag, what was it called? Not the Brooklyn Eagle, that’s dead long ago. They cartooned him once as a praying mantis. He hated the face they gave him, the pouchy cheeks, the spectacles perched on his nose, the little round sling of belly as he chomped away on another praying mantis. Fools. They got it wrong. Only the female eats the male, after a bout of love. Still and all, it was hardly complimentary.

And why was it that they always portrayed judges as portly mountains of flesh? He was always as skinny as they came. A beanpole. A scarecrow. More fat, said Eileen, on a butcher’s knife. But the cartoonists and even the courtroom artists insisted on giving him a bit of jowl, or a touch of paunch. It annoyed Eileen no end. She even started cutting back on the calories until he could hardly see himself sideways in the mirror. He used to think that the great grace of old age would be the giving up of vanity, but it is apparent even more these days: the sag of skin, the wrinkles, the eyes surprised by the sight of himself. He caught a glimpse in the mirror the other day, and how in tarnation did I acquire the face of my father’s father? The years don’t so much arrive, they gatecrash, they breeze through the door and leave their devastation, all the empty crockery, the broken veins, sunken eyepools, aching gums, but who is he to complain, he’s had plenty of years to get used to it, he was hardly a handsome Harry in the first place, and anyway he got the girl, he bowled her over, he won her heart, snagged her, yes, I was born in the middle of my first great love.

He lets his arm fall over to the other side of the bed. Saudade. A good word that. Portuguese. Get you close, Eileen. Come snuggle in here beside me. Never a truer word. The longing for what has become absent.

She always said that his early court performances in Brooklyn were full of patience, guile, and cunning. A literary reference somehow — she was a fan of Joyce. Silence and exile. At home every morning she ironed his shirts and starched his collars and, with each case he won, she bought him a volume of poetry and a brand-new tie from the shop on Montague Street. He could have strung them from here to the Asian sweatshop: the ties, that is, not the poems. Eileen must have kept the Gucci factory girls alive, the number of cravats he had hanging in his closet, perfectly arranged, neatly coded and layered. Her dark hair, her pert little nose, the single mole on the rim of her cheek. She was lovely once and always, like the girl from the song. Lovely once and always, moonlight in her hair. There are times he still spritzes a tiny bit of perfume in her pillow, just to inhale and pretend she’s still there. Sentimental, of course, but what’s life without sentiment? And let’s face it, when is the last time he had a bout of good old-fashioned lust?

Consult the BlackBerry, it will know. It does, after all, seem to know everything else: wayward sons, broken-hearted daughters, another spill in the Gulf.

He can hear Sally, already up and at it in the kitchen. The rattle of the spoons. The slide of the saucer. The touch of the teacup. The ping of the orange glass. The juicer being yanked from the cupboard. The soft sigh of the fridge’s rubber tubing. The creak of the bottom drawer. The carrots coming out, the strawberries, the pineapple, the oranges, and then a serious clank of ice. The juice. Sally says he should call it a smoothie, but he doesn’t like the word, simple as that, nothing smooth about it. He was on a shuffle in the park the other day — no other word, every day a shuffle now — and he saw a young woman at the park benches near the reservoir with the word Juicy scrawled in pink across her rear end, and he had to admit, even at his age, that it wasn’t far from the truth. With all apologies to Eileen, of course, and Sally too, and Rachel, and Riva, and Denise, and MaryBeth, and Ava, no doubt, and Oprah, and Brigitte, and even Simone de Beauvoir, why not, and all the other women of the world, sorry all, but it was indeed rather juicy, the way it bounced, with the little boundary of dark skin above, and the territory of shake below, and there was a time, long ago, when he could’ve squeezed a thing or two out of that, oh don’t talk to me of smoothies. He had a reputation, but it was nothing but harmless fun. He never strayed, though he had to admit he leaned a little. Sorry, Eileen, I leaned, I leaned, I leaned. It was his more conservative colleagues in the court who gave him the evil eye. A bunch of shriveled-up prunes, or prudes, or both — how in the world, beyond party politics, did they ever get elected? What did they think, that a man must hide his life in the judge’s shroud? That he has to pop the errant head back under the shell? That the only noise he’d make was the gavel? No, no, no, it was all about taking the rind of life. Extract the liquid. Forget the pulp. Juice it up. The Jew’s Juice. A smoothie.

Oh, the whirl of the mind. Sorry, Eileen. I was passionate once, and that’s the word. Flirtatious maybe even. Nothing more. Never one to harass. That was something he passed on to young Elliot instead. More’s the pity. Look at that poor boy now. But enough of all that. It’s no way to start the day, with his errant son, his wandering eyes, hands, ears, throat, wallet.

He can hear the faint ticking begin. Come, heat, hurry. Rise up the pipes.

Why is it that New York never produced some boy genius to solve the heating problem? You’d think that with all the children born in this thumping metropolis that at least one of them would get miffed about the clank of pipes and the hiss of steam? That they’d solve their everyday dilemma? But no, no, no. Off they go and make their millions on Wall Street and Broadway and in Palo Alto and Los Alamos and wherever else, and still they come home to an apartment designed for cavemen.

What is this godforsaken apartment worth anyway? Half a million twenty-seven years ago. Sold the brownstone on Willow Street and made the trek to the Upper East Side. All to make Eileen happy. She loved strolling by the Great Lawn, taking her ease around the reservoir, going on jaunts down to Greenberg’s bakery. She even put a mezuzah by the front door. To protect the investment as much as anything else. Two million dollars now, they say, two point two maybe, two point four, but they can’t get the heating on before five in the morning? We can put a black man in the White House but we still can’t get toasty? We can send a mission to Mars but we have to freeze a good man’s cojones off on East Eighty-sixth Street? We can fit our BlackBerrys into our heart-side pajama pockets, but we can’t guide the steam up through the walls without a racket?

Oh, but here it comes, here it comes. The first click of the day. As if there’s a man down there wrenching open the pipes. A second tick. A third. And then a whack. Crash bang wallop. Good man, Dante. A divine comedy indeed. Abandon all hope. Jazz in the heating pipes. If only. Wake me up, Thelonious Monk. Come dwell a while in my steampipes. Visit the basement while you’re at it.

— Sally!

He can hear the juicer crunching through the ice, the stammer of the blades, and the clack against the glass container.

— Sally!

The juicer gradually slows down, the sounds softening into silence.

— Sally, I’m up!

Which, quite plainly, he is not. Neither one way or the other. They have installed a hanging white bar at the side of the bed and a few other gadgets to help him levitate in the morning. Elliot even wanted to put a hoist in at one stage. Like he was some sort of giant shipping container. You need a hoist, Dad. A hoist, my ass, dear son. A hoist needs hoisters and not just for the oysters. Eileen, quite clearly, would not be impressed: she liked poetry of an altogether different order and she never quite cottoned to his cheap little rhymes. She was a fan of that Irishman, Heaney, and she had a penchant for another wild head of hair named Muldoon. She would go to their readings every chance she got. Chasing down the boisterous bards, it always made him smile. He himself saw both poets at a Waldorf dinner once: they should have written a rhyme about the rubbery chicken and the slippety-slop waiters. He crossed the room, stood in line, took out his good fountain pen, got the poets to sign a cloth napkin, and tucked it away — he was afraid that he’d get caught white-handed, a judge to be judged — and he brought it home to Eileen who clutched it to her nightgown and then kissed him a worthy goodnight: I’ll see you in my dreams.

But that’s. Some. Fucking. Noise. This. Morning. But here, at last, the hard hiss of steam. He can feel it already begin to flood the room. Good morning, Thelonious. Time to rise. And shine. Make God your glory glory. Katya used to sing that to him long ago. Along with her dreidel rhymes.

He grabs hold of the bar and swings his knees across, scoots himself up in the sheets and goddammit it all to hell. He can feel it now, under his pajama bottoms. She has put him in a pad. Yes, a pad. Plain and simple, by any other word, a diaper. Why the hell does she do it? A goddamn diaper. And when in the world did she slip it on? How did he possibly forget? He can remember the sound of the traffic on Court Street fifty million years ago, he can remember Heaney at the Waldorf, Muldoon too, he can remember being born as a young lawyer, for crying out loud, the tie shop on Montague, Katya and her nursery rhymes, he can remember boarding the SOC-3, but he can’t remember Sally slapping him in a diaper just this morning?

The dark dogs of the mind.

— Sally!

Long and tall she is indeed, but quick on her feet she is not. Not the girl to sally forth: sally eighth more like it, sally ninth.

— Coming, Mr. J.

Well, so too is Hanukkah. So, too, is the twenty-second century. So, too, is the end of the visible world. Hurry on and help me, woman. A goddamn diaper. Why the hell did you sling this forsaken piece of foolishness on me? What did I do to deserve it? What crime? What cruelty? A diaper! I might have needed one eighty-two years ago, that’s true, Sally, my dear, and forgive my Polish, my Lithuanian, my half-baked Yiddish but for fucksake, woman, I hardly need one now.

He is halfway out of the bed and virtually suspended in mid-air when he hears a little wheeze and the rumor of a sigh, and then footsteps in the hallway. A slow shuffle. Sally stops, perhaps to catch her breath, and it takes him a moment to figure out whether she is moving towards him or away. The clockwatch. The waterboil. The plodalong.

The cruelty of time. Never enough of it when you need it. And always too much when you don’t.

— Sallllly!

Another sigh, an audible Uh-huhn, four more steps, and then the turn of the gold-plated door handle.

— Here I be, Mr. J.

Here she is, here she be, and have they no grammatical rules in Tobago at all? They mangle the language. Mingle it. Mongrel it. No Chicago Manual. No Strunk or White. Sally will never make it onto the pages of The New Yorker, that’s for sure. Nor the Times, nor even the Daily News. She might scrape up a position for herself at the Post, but only just, by the hair on her chinny-chin-chin.

Yet there is something lovely about her cadence. She speaks with bright coins in her voice. A tambourine in her throat. She swallowed a bird, Sally James, the first of the morning. In she breezes, cool as a treetop, tall as a redwood, sturdy as an oak. Her shape above him in the bed. Her dangling earrings. Her hair sticking out at fantastic angles. Half her life spent on that hairstyle. Curlers and irons and combs and all sorts of accoutrements. In the early days he could hear her getting up at four in the morning, just to get ready, curling, blowdrying, stitching, braiding.

She has a peculiar smell to her, a good smell, like furniture polish, dear Sally from Tobago, or is it Trinidad? And how, anyway, do they differ? And who, quite honestly, gives a flying fig? Does it matter if she’s north, south, up or down, east or west, when the simple fact of the matter is that he is wearing a diaper and it must be removed, hastily, quietly, now.

How in the world did it happen, Sally? What hour did you sneak up on me?

Imagine that, my pajamas down around my ankles, the pocket still over my heart, the BlackBerry clock, tick-tock, and I wonder what she thought, or thinks, of my equipment? I am not a man of great fire-hose potential. She has seen it now, uncoiled, or coiled, how many times. Seahorsed. Hooded. We can only hope that the living don’t snicker.

— Sally?

— Yes, Mr. J.?

— Did I really need the winter gear?

It has become his little phrase: the winter gear. The idea of calling it a diaper galls him, and an incontinence pad is too much of a mouthful, or rather a handful, or a bucketful. And what is it the British call it? Such a fine gift for language, the British, having learned how to use it from the Irish, or so Eileen always said. But even the great linguistic masters fail here. A nappy, by all accounts. What specimen of genius came up with that for crying out loud? What learned Oxford mind? After a napkin no doubt. Fold it up. Tuck it in.

— Sally, I don’t like it.

— It’s so you don’t spoil your sleep, Mr. J.

— Well, it sure as hell spoils my waking.

She rears her head back and shows her mouth full of dark fillings, but this is no laughing matter, Sally, no laughing matter at all. Here’s me. And there I be. She is bending down towards me, her sharp perfume, her tickling hair, and she draws back the duvet, performs a quick whipaway of the sheets. Oh, is there anything worse on God’s dark earth? He shifts sideways on the bed and he can tell right away. Lock me up, Your Honor. Throw away the key. Oh, Lord, you pissed and shat yourself Mendelssohn. Who owns this body, this foul little wreckhouse, this meshuggeneh mansion? Who allows us this filthy comedy? Divine it is not. How in the world did I sleep through all that? The ancient pisher in me. A fountain of Helicon indeed.

She steadies him and reaches across for his Zimmerframe — who the hell was Zimmer anyway? He leans across and says that he’ll do it the rest himself, remove the winter gear, ski to the bottom of the slope.

And then he says: Please.

Oh, smash this body entirely, Sally, break it up into little bits and pieces, and then I can walk around with the still-working head and heart, leave the useless pieces behind me. Fare thee well bowels, colon, pajama pocket, errant prostate, all ye untenable pieces. Let the Mendelssohn mind meander. Let the heart stroll. Leave the alter kocker behind. I have always gone according to the laws of nature. It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf. I was born in the middle of my very first diaper change. Not even my first, truth be told.

He leans close to Sally again and he can feel her strong hefty arms and her hand at the soft of his back and who would have thought that the last lady in his life would have breasts as generous and as round as Sally’s? Soft and fragrant. Round and juicy. Full and floppy. Oh, you’re a good woman, Sally James, from Tobago, or Trinidad, or Jamaica Plains, or wherever the hell it is, and what is it I pay you again? I should make sure, double sure, triple sure, that there’s something in the will for her, she’s a good soul, she means well, though she has no grammar, but neither do I at times, I is, I am, I was, I will be, but, oh, she has me halfway in the air, it’s all a matter of science now, lift me, bring me to the mountaintop, resurrect me, roll away the stone, and he can feel his body creaking forward, Sallying forth, and he half collapses onto the Zimmerframe and he heaves a big sigh of relief, even though he can feel the contents of the winter gear shifting down below.

— Steady, Mr. J.

— Just get me to the church on time.

— Huhhn?

— The bathroom, Sally. The bathroom.

— Yes, sir.

Dilate your nostrils, Mendelssohn. Hurry on now. Mach shnell. Enough creakiness. Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, even the problem of being alive.

— You look pale, Mr. J.

— Never felt better.

— We forgot, she says.

She crosses the room and bends down to the walk-in closet. Stretching the white of her uniform into two neat halves. Oh, I’m a terrible man, but, Lord, there are indeed worse sights. Hear no evil, speak no evil, but at my age I should at least get a little peek?

— I forgot what, Sally?

Out she pops, all flesh and smiles, swinging a pair of slippers in the air.

— Oh, Sally, I don’t need any stupid slippers!

— Mr. J.?

— Did you hear me? No slippers, woman.

She bends and taps his leg and gets him to raise his foot anyway.

— It’s so you don’t slip, Mr. J.

— This is not a goddamn ice rink, Sally.

She darts the whites of her eyes at him and he lifts his right foot in a gentle apology. Oh, Sally, but did you really have to choose the fuzzy ones? Isn’t there a more subtle pair you could root out? Has my whole life come down to fuzzy slippers? Nor are they a perfect fit from Brooks Brothers. And did you really have to put a diaper on me in the middle of the night? And is my treacherous son in trouble yet again? Did something happen to my lovely grandkids? Is my daughter yet returned from her mission of peace?

He is glad, so very glad, that Eileen never had to see any of this. She checked out two years ago now, dearest Eileen. Imagine that, never smoked a cigarette in her life and ended up with the cancer all over her lungs. A quick, sharp exit. At least there was that. Exit ghost. Take Hamlet with you.

— All set, Mr. J.

Under starter’s orders. The Zimmer race. Might as well get the checkered flag. Assume a virtue, said the Bard, if you have it not. When in the world did she start calling me Mr. J. when my real name is Peter, Petras, Peadar? She glimpsed my initials once, I suppose. Which is not all she glimpsed, more’s the pity. Oh, Mendelssohn, you miserable fool. Solid as Peter’s rock you are not.

— Thank you, Sally.

— Hhhrrrmmmpppf, she replies.

Be a mensch, Lord, and put me out of my misery. What an exertion simply to get to the bathroom. He maneuvers the walking frame over the trim piece, manages to close the door. He stands, holding on: there are handles all over the bathroom. An emporium of handles — handles for the sink, handles for the shower, handles to haul himself up out of the bath, handles for the handles.

He nudges off the slippers, opens the drawstrings of his pajamas and lets them drop to his feet, steps slowly out of the puddled cloth. The string tangles around his big toe and he almost stumbles but he catches himself at the edge of the sink. A quick glance in the mirror. Hail, fellow, well met. That is not me. Nor even I. Good God, I look like a pair of old curtains with a great big valance under my neck. A rubbery thing, could stretch to eternity.

Onwards. Onwards now. Life is short, but it’s the morning that takes all your time.

Clean yourself, Mendelssohn, get yourself together. Dignity and grace. I was born in the middle of my first jury argument, though sometimes I feel I’ve been born at other times too. And who in the world would be interested in a second memoir anyway when truth be told the first was an all-out flop? Ridiculous, really.

He reaches down and pulls at the side of the diaper. Careful now. Contents in the underhead bin may have shifted during flight.

Oh God, oh Lord, there’s nothing worse than the sound of velcro.

There’s nothing worse on this fair earth.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

There are two cameras in the living room, both motion-activated. The first is hidden in the bookcase, the other well concealed on a shelf by the window. Both have fish-eye lenses, which gives the pictures a faintly maritime effect, everything stretched out on a moving wave.

When the curtains are opened, light flushes the room with a theatrical surprise. The focus is the large oak dining table, surrounded by six Chippendale chairs, hand-carved, fretworked. On the table sits a Chinese vase with flowers and a patterned dish that holds keys, letters, pens.

There is a large painting on the wall above the table, a portrait of Mendelssohn, wearing suit and tie, large-rimmed glasses, a serious gaze.

There are several other paintings in the room, eclectic in style and taste, the most prominent one a Maine seascape. A Persian rug takes up an expanse of the living-room floor. An all-glass coffee table sits by a long sofa. The books on the coffee table appear to be floating in mid-air: Roth, Márquez, Morrison.

The rest of the room has an ancient lived-in feel: a dark Steinway with an open lid, a set of fire irons by the blocked-up chimney, an antique wooden bar with several crystal glasses perched on top.

Later the homicide detectives will be surprised by the presence of the cameras: they will find out that it was Mendelssohn’s son, Elliot, who secretly installed the nannycams to keep an eye on Sally James, though there doesn’t seem much reason to suspect her at all, nor much reason to watch Mendelssohn at the table, sipping his coffee and reading his paper, looking down upon himself from his own portrait, the older self looking considerably more wan.

They scrub through the digital video and watch the footage from the day of his death. Every now and then Sally James walks in front of the mantelpiece camera. She vacuums. She arranges cushions. She sits for an hour and reads a magazine. Mendelssohn himself shoves his walking frame into view exactly three times: once, when he shuffles to the writing table, reads a book, scribbles a note, checks his BlackBerry; another, when he shuffles to the window to check, presumably, on the snowy weather outside; another, when he stands in the room, in the early morning, staring vacantly ahead.

When he turns to the camera he is caught in the faded glory of his maroon dressing gown. He has the lined cheeks, the hooded eyes, the frugal smile of age, but there is still something of the robust boy about him, the way the memory of his body still appears to move under the skin.

The detectives watch Sally emerge several times into the living room, slow and laborious. Each time it takes a moment for the aperture to adjust. A backlit blaze, then a slow darkening. She wears nurse whites and slippers. She is broad, sturdy, with an undulation to her shoulders. A large hip-sway. No malevolence to her, no impatience. Nothing untoward or suspicious. She comes in, puts down the early morning smoothie, sets the table for toast and coffee, hands him the newspaper, returns again with a jar of marmalade. The footage is chilling only because it is so ordinary.

Nor is there much in the way of interest, or evidence, later, when she helps Mendelssohn into his overcoat, wraps his scarf, dons his hat, takes his elbow, and walks him out of the living room.

They will watch Sally when she returns to the apartment to see if she betrays any further emotion, but she simply sits in the armchair, puts her feet on a footrest, reads her magazine. Later, when she receives the news in a phone call, she will throw her arms to the sky and rush through the living room, turning once to retrieve her coat and shoes. In the late afternoon, she will pace the floor, and when the news of his death is confirmed, she will fall grief-stricken to her knees.

There are so many ways to go, the detectives know, opposition and conflict, theories drifting over and beyond one another. Things changed by the act of observation. The old laws of physics. Speed and position. Time and distance.

They will comb through the images, looking for any random detail, the breeze of surprise, a clue. The more obscure the moment, the more valuable the knowledge. There is always a chance they will spot something they already overlooked.

They work in much the same way as poets: the search for a random word, at the right instance, making the poem itself so much more precise.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

Used to be there was quite an art to the newspaper fold. Back in the days when they summered out on the Island. A young whippersnapper. Sitting on the LIRR with the other suits and ties. It was a spectacular skill, to be able to fold the paper in long neat sections. The choreographed commute. An early morning ballet. They could sit in rows of three, knee to knee, turn the pages and still never touch elbows. Streamlining it. Some of the more meticulous could make perfect folds right along the storylines, four little corridors of broadsheet, like the fine edge of a bespoke suit. When the world was respectful and polite. Briefcases and umbrellas and door-holding. Occasionally there was a schmuck who couldn’t fold the paper at all and he would be there, arms flailing, paper rustling, no respect, an accordion of elbows, the same species who could never find his commuter pass, or who dropped his coffee, always fumbling around, making noise, causing a fuss. At least in those days there were no cell phones to deal with.

He took a train up to Stamford last week to Elliot’s house, his mansion rather, awful place, twelve bedrooms and swimming pool and media hall and five-car garage, but cheap and shoddy all the same, like the one next door, and next door to that, a row of Ikea houses, such wealthy mediocrity, his very own son, his big bald son, who could believe it? The baldness, the bigness, the stupidity, in a house designed to bore the living daylights out of visitors, no character at all, all blond wood and fluorescent lighting and clean white machinery, not to mention his brand-new wife, number three, a clean white machine herself, up from the cookie cutter and into Elliot’s life, she might as well have jumped out of the microwave, her skin orange, her teeth pearly white. A trophy wife, but why the word trophy? Something to shoot on safari?

Just as well Eileen never got to meet her. She wanted so much for her big, tall boy and what did she get except no grandchildren, a boatload of sorrow, and two divorces? Not to mention the fact that Jacintha came with three boys under her wing, ready-wrapped fatherhood, straight from the mail-order catalog, all legs and pimples and angst. His step-grandchildren, a blubbering stew of adolescence, he can hardly even remember their names, nor their faces, and who in the world would name their son Aldous these days anyway? A brave new world it is not.

Where was I anyway? The mind these days, it slides so quickly. Nosce te ipsum. Something to do with cell phones? Or was it the newspaper and the folds?

Used to be that he’d read the paper cover to cover, minus the sports, then fold out the crossword puzzle, finish it in twenty minutes flat. Not anymore. Still, it’s one of his favorite moments of the day, the mental brunch of The New York Times. Open to a story about the Central African Republic. An awful thing, those machetes. All the news that’s fit to splint. A report on North Korea. No money for the Super Collider. The imminent collapse of the Middle East peace process. Well, of course, there’s always that. Hard to think of it collapsing since he knows full well that it was hardly ever built up in the first place. Poor Katya, over there, week in and week out, in her diplomatic post, pleading and cajoling and mollifying her heart out, when the plain fact of the matter is the bastards just don’t want peace, any of them, one side or the other, Jew or Arab or Christian or Coptic or whatever else, they’d rather suicide-bomb one another asunder, it’s the ordinary man on the street who suffers, women, too, not to mention poor Katya herself, over there with his teenage grandkids, no step about them, beautiful kids, Laura, James, Steven, but a life under the microscope, armed guards all over the estate, and why did she have to choose Israel of all places, couldn’t she have gotten involved in Belfast or somewhere halfway sane?

Poor Eileen hated to see any news of Northern Ireland. Used to put her in an awful tailspin. Over there blowing the heads off one another for no sane reason either, lobbing molotov cocktails, marching in parades to celebrate the dead, flying their banners, King William up on horseback. All war, any war, the vast human stupidity, Israel, Ireland, Iran, Iraq, all the I’s come to think of it, although at least in Iceland they got it right. Odd that. You never hear a peek of war from Iceland at all, but then again who’d want to be firing bullets over a piece of frozen tundra?

Nothing but misery everywhere, truth be told. Why don’t we say that the whole world’s a madhouse and simply, then, leave it be? Isn’t that right, Sally? I’d bet there’s even some form of carry-on going down in wherever it is you’re from.

— Sally!

She is busy down in the bedroom, vacuuming and singing her sweet head off. An eternity ago, my mother used to sing to me too while cleaning the house. Far away, far away. In the kitchen. The stove was large and red and potbellied. A giant stovepipe, painted blue for some reason. Standing there with flour on her hands. Wiping them on the front of her apron. All the old Lithuanian tunes. Mountain flowers and frozen canals and riverbanks and ferryboats.

Vilnius, Vilno, Wilna, Wilno. The world has a complicated geography. In later years his mother filled him in on the particulars of his birthplace — the knifeblade used for making ice skates, the way the moonlight fell upon the rivers, the small red jacket he always wore, the gloves she stitched with elastic inside his sleeves, how they bounced when he ran along through Kalnų Park. Once a dog chased him, attracted by the bounce of his gloves. Dark dogs everywhere. He had nightmares after that. Then the daytime itself installed the dark. They got out of the city just in time. His mother had a feeling of what was in the air. How many wars had there been already? Poor Vilnius, Vilno, Wilna, Wilno, renamed at every turn. How many times had it been run and overrun? A great dignified city, all yellow brick, high cornicework, but pierced with bullet after bullet. His father, a well-known doctor, sold the house on Vokiečių Street, took the savings, bundled the family on a train bound for Paris. It was still a time when borders could be crossed with ease. They had plenty of money to get by. No hidden jewelry. No blessings from the rabbi. No furtive prayers. No curses either. No ghetto-quarter narrative. No babies thrown from the windows. His mother had dropped nearly all tradition behind her. It didn’t interest her to be Lithuanian, or Polish, or Russian or anything else for that matter, not even Jewish. His father, too, was a stern atheist. Not at all interested in the formalities, though he would sometimes read the Torah and even recite parts of the Kaddish, saying that lines of it were a recipe for great thinking. In this holy place, and every other, may there come abundant peace. Or something like that. Bow to the left, bow to the right. And it would be something indeed, wouldn’t it? Abundant peace? Two chances, as they say: slim and none.

The steam train rattled past the tall thin trees of Germany, Belgium, France. They lived in a hotel on the banks of the Seine. At night they gathered in the hotel kitchen, around the radio, the intimate fireside of the world, all that flaming hatred, ash, the sundering of Europe. The nights of long knives, the weeks, the months, the years.

But then it was Dublin, in the middle of the war. His father got a job in the Royal College of Surgeons. A city taking its ease under a bountiful sky. Applauding its own grayness. A hat of it, a homburg, a derby of drab. He loved it there. His happiest two summers. A house on Leeson Street not far from the canal. Ten years old, he wore shorts with garters and long elastic socks. Bobbed along the cobbled streets, came home to a warm fire in the early dark. A staircase. A long dining table. Two silver candlesticks in the middle. Oh, the mind itself is a deep, deep well. Lower me down and let me touch water. He even tried to acquire for himself a Dublin accent. Two chances there also: none and sweet fuck-all.

Out in the morning, he would run full tilt towards the canal. There were two gorgeous swans that twined their necks around one another. In the afternoons his mother took him for walks along the grassy banks where he was allowed to strip down to his undershorts and jump in, pale and skinny, with the other boys. For some reason he could never work out, he was called Quinn and then, after a while, Quinner. Maybe he looked like a boy of that same name, or perhaps there was a Dublin slang in it he didn’t recognize, but he loved it, especially given the fact that a Q did not exist in his language. Quinner! Hey, Quinner! He wrote his nickname out elaborately in lined copybooks. Even his teachers latched on to the name, and when he handed in assignments he wrote Peter J. Quinn Mendelssohn.

Oh, it takes a lot of volume to fill a life. So said Boris Pasternak. Or at least I think it’s Pasternak. Eileen would know. She used to read it aloud to me at night. The roof over our love has been torn off and is open now to the endless sky.

In Dublin one of his school reports had said that he had a youthful bent towards philosophical inquiry. A youthful bent! Philosophical inquiry! Eleven years old! Surely only the Jesuits were capable of a phrase like that. They saw great promise in him. Overlooked his background, slipped him books of Catholic substance. He walked home along the canals with Aquinas rattling around in his head. But on summer afternoons all he wanted to do was to jump off the dark canal locks, holding his knees to cannonball into the water. There was even a photograph taken of him on June 15, 1944, published in The Irish Press, caught in mid-air, his whole body bundled, his ribs tight, his arms ropy, the length of the canal dark behind him, the sky above him white, a look of fierce concentration on his face. The caption read, simply, Boy above Canal. His mother bought all the copies she could find in the small shop on Baggot Street Bridge. They have yellowed and even disintegrated now, but not the memory: it was her next door, quite literally, in the very next house — and she came across and slipped the newspaper clipping under the door. He watched her from the bay window. Eileen Daly. Even then she was a beauty. Alabaster skin and a row of dainty freckles paintbrushed across her nose. So beautiful in fact that he never talked to her at all in those years. Not once. Not even a glancing hello or goodbye or how are you Eileen Daly, isn’t it a fine Dublin day? But he watched her from afar and she took his breath away. A hollowing-out of his stomach.

The day he left Dublin, oh, the day. It was bright and dappled, a surprise of sunshine. The hackney pulled up outside, a large silver car, an air horn on the side with a loud commanding blast. The bags were packed. The suitcases were loaded. He hid himself in the cupboard underneath the stairs. America. He didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to leave Ireland at all. But his father had a job offer. A letter had arrived. Elaborate handwriting. An eight-cent stamp with a picture of a twin-motored transport plane. An invitation, or maybe an accusation. Another continent. He was dragged out from underneath the stairs, shoved down the steps and into the waiting car. He glanced backwards through the rear window and there she was, Eileen Daly, all eleven years of her — or was she ten? — waving to him from the window of her living room. The white curtains bracketing her face. Her head slightly tilted. A few wisps of dark hair around her shoulders. Her lips pursed open ever so minutely, as if about to speak. He knew even then that he would see her this way forever, his mind had processed a photograph and seared itself on his brain. He wanted to turn to wave to her again, but the hackney had already reached the corner and he waved instead at a dirty brick wall.

Ireland.

Gone.

A chuisle mo chroí.

Whatever that means. Love of my heart or something like that. Bubbala, they might say in Yiddish. She had told him once and often, but it was a queer language, Irish, or Gaelic, he could never get the hang of it, it rolled marbles in his throat, the dún an doras, the má sé do thoil é, but the door was indeed shut, the sky went down and fell into the Irish Sea.

On the boat from Dun Laoghaire he heaved his guts up over the side and looked back towards the land until it became just the white of a wave. A miserable sunshine poured down upon him. He thought at least it could have had the dignity to rain one last time. Then, from Liverpool, they took off for America. The posh rooms. Port out, starboard home. He moped along the deck, Eileen Daly, Eileen Daly, Eileen Daly. Her name lay gentle on his tongue. He wasn’t allowed into the ship’s saloon, or even the library, but there was a billiard room by the first-class cabins where he sat in the corner and began writing her letters, his every waking moment consumed in the glance she gave him from the window. He couldn’t understand how he had never said a word to her: what was it that had paralyzed him? They had lived next door to each other for the best part of two years and now here he was writing her page after page, telling her about the sunsets over the water, and the odd way the lifeboats creaked, and his glance back to Ireland, everything and anything, he wrote at a furious pace, head down, fountain pen gliding over the paper, he had never written so much in his life, eleven years old — or was he twelve? — didn’t matter, he had the ancient disease, stupid, ridiculous, endless, it was his very first taste of what he would know later, intimately, wonderfully, the best of the four-letter words.

Eileen, I leaned, I lean.

Life is not so easy as to cross a field. Pasternak again. For sure this time, and oh, the mind is indeed a deep stone well, but how often a surprising bucket dips down into it and hits cool water. Eileen read the Russian poet’s books aloud many nights, with her Irish lilt and a blanket pulled up around her neck, soft wool, Avoca, where the rivers met, or so she told him. She was a fount of Irish knowledge, and Russian knowledge, and even Jewish knowledge at times, a Helicon indeed, with some Greek thrown in and a smidge of Latin. Thankfully she never had to see me in the diaper, the nappy, the winter gear, down by those Salley gardens my love and I did meet.

He tilts his coffee cup and sighs. Empty now, just a small rivulet making its way along the inside of the porcelain. All life slowed down to this. The drip. The drop. The snow white feet.

Slowly falling, falling slowly. Out the window now. Big white flurries against the glass. That was a story she loved so much too, snow general all over Ireland, Michael Furey singing at the window, poor Gabriel left alone, the descent of his last end.

He tilts the coffee cup one last time and allows the last drop to fall on the newspaper where he watches it slowly blot and spread. A bi gezunt, his mother would have said. She was always one for the ancient phrase. You have your health, what more do you want?

— Sally?

He can hear her now in the kitchen, the rattle-out of the dishwasher, the clank along the rollers. Why in the world she needs to run the dishwasher he’ll never know, it’s not as if I spoiled a hundred plates with marmalade and toast.

And what is it that he wanted to say to Sally anyway, so deep in thought was he, back in Ireland, the good years, why interrupt them now, except perhaps the memory is so raw, and snow is general all over Eighty-sixth Street, the half-living, and I think she died for love, Eileen, I think she died for love.

— Mr. J.?

— It’s snowing out there.

— Yes, Mr. J.

Looking at him now, expecting something else. Hardly enough to interrupt her from the dishwasher just to tell her what she already knows, the snow coming down like an argument for snow.

— I was just thinking, he says.

She nods and her gold earrings go jangling. Looking at him now very curiously. What is it that goes on in her head? Does she think I’m senile? All age and folly? An old white man in his old white body? Does she think of slaveships coming across the waves? Does she think of her own darling grandson back there in the Caribbean? Isn’t that what she saves for? To send him to school? A good education for her grandson, or is it her nephew? Kindhearted Sally, all her life directed towards that boy. Don’t let him break your heart, Sally. And does she remember the good days I had with Eileen? Does she recall the fine household we had? Though truth be told, they sometimes went at it hammer and tongs, Sally and Eileen, many a good argument indeed, black and white, and Eileen had a sharp tongue on her, she could sometimes cut Sally down, the big tall tree tumbling, and oh, what is it I wanted to say, what did I need?

— I think I’d like to go to Chialli’s today, Sally.

His almost daily ritual.

— Yes, sir. In the snow?

— In the snow, yes, ma’am.

— You made you a reservation?

He scoots backwards in his chair. I do indeed have a reservation, Sally, though truth be told it’s more with your grammar, not the restaurant. Hardly worth it to correct her now, let bygods be bygones.

— What time is it, Sally?

— Ten fifteen, sir.

— Let’s make one for one.

— Sir?

— One o’clock, Sally. Call Chialli’s. And I’ll call Elliot. Maybe he can drag himself away for once.

She is lovely, once and always, Sally James, moonlight in her hair, wherever she walks cool breezes fan the glade, I strolled with her beneath the leafy shade, oh, I never kissed a black woman in my life, but it must be said that many of them have beautiful lips, and teeth to match, but not Sally, more’s the pity, or maybe just as well, no ancient temptations. Still and all, the old songs are always the best.

— Yes, sir, Mr. J.

— Thank you, Sally.

One never forgets the first kiss though, and while there were a few before Eileen — some that were paid for, if truth be told, in Dresden, the shiksas along the barrack walls who were known for their questionable virginity — it was really just all Eileen, and even if she wasn’t the first, she was, she always would be, now and tomorrow and the day after. How many letters did he send to her over the years? Hundreds, thousands even. Eileen Daily, she once called herself. Lovely once and always, with moonlight in her hair. He wrote to her from his high school in the Bronx. He wrote to her from the corridors of Fordham. He wrote to her when he joined the Air Force. And all that time he had never even said a single word to her, face-to-face. How odd it was to know someone so well and never have talked a single word in her presence. There was, of course, the telephone, and they had chatted down the wires, perplexed by one another’s accents, but never face-to-face, and it was not until 1952 when he was stationed in Dresden, an office job, checking flight patterns, an awful bore, day in, day out, reams of paperwork, clouds of pipesmoke, but he still wrote two letters a day, and she wrote back to him, grand professions of love and literature, and then he had a week of R & R, and he shined his shoes, pomaded his hair, stepped aboard a plane to Glasgow, where he hired a car, and met her in Edinburgh where she was studying literature, and neither of them could ever remember the very first words they spoke to each other, quite possibly they were speechless, but later that night he fell to his knees and asked her to marry him, you’re the love of my life, a chuisle mo chroí, you wrote it to me in several of your letters, I don’t know quite what it means, but marry me, please, Eileen, do. She blushed and said yes, and she lowered her eyelids, and his heart hammered in his shirt, and he said it would be a stylish marriage, though if we’re telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, it must be said that very little is ever truly idyllic, except in retrospect, and, to be honest now, he was just a tiny bit disappointed by Eileen Daly when he saw her first, she was not quite how he remembered her, at the window, in Leeson Street, looking out, raindrops across her eyes, no, she had grown a tad pudgier and her skin was of a pallor that tended away from the pink he remembered, and she was rather ordinary of eye-color, though he soon forgot that, and she became lovely again, if not even lovelier, but if another truth be told — a deeper truth — he was hardly a perfect specimen himself, rather he was a long thin drink of water with a big pair of spectacles on his nose, and anxious eyes, and his trousers at half-mast as if his own body was in mourning for what God gave him, and a skinny set of arms on him, not exactly a nautilus man, he couldn’t afford a carriage, a few stray hairs on his chin, already the fuzz on the dome thinning, a little peninsula on top of his head, and truly he had to admit that, later that night, when he tucked himself into bed next door, that he was getting the better end of the deal, marrying Eileen Mendelssohn, née Daly, and they fit rather well together, hand in hand along Anne Street, the whole world open to them, they would be married in six months and living in New York where she tested her new name on her tongue, and wandered along the Avenue of the Americas in full and righteous bloom, oh, she loved Leopold Bloom, too, that’s for sure, and where in the world did I come up with that phrase questionable virginity?

Which reminds me, I must call my errant son.

Where in the world, Sally, did I put my BlackBerry? Is it here, beneath the newspaper, everything that’s fit to print, anchored down by my empty coffee cup?

Oh, Eileen, I miss you. Daily, daily, daily.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendos,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

Poets, like detectives, know the truth is laborious: it doesn’t occur by accident, rather it is chiseled and worked into being, the product of time and distance and graft. The poet must be open to the possibility that she has to go a long way before a word rises, or a sentence holds, or a rhythm opens, and even then nothing is assured, not even the words that have staked their original claim or meaning. Sometimes it happens at the most unexpected moment, and the poet has to enter the mystery, rebuild the poem from there.

There are thirty-four days of footage from each of the eight cameras in Mendelssohn’s building: 59 East Eighty-sixth Street, between Madison and Park Avenues, just two hundred yards from the restaurant. The first camera captures the double glass doorways of the pre-war building, the high steps, the awning. The picture widens to the far sidewalk, the north side of Eighty-sixth Street. A limited angle, poor depth of field, north to south, recorded with a 50 mm lens. Another in the lobby itself. One in the laundry room downstairs. One on the staircase. One on the roof. One in the elevator. One by the boiler room. Another in the storage area downstairs.

On the afternoon of his death, Mendelssohn emerges from the elevator — an uneventful ride, he stands silently alongside Sally James — and they walk together into the lobby.

It is one of those ancient New York foyers, marble and flowers and chandeliers. Brass wall lights. A mahogany table. Black-and-white tiles. A long strip of carpet down the middle. Bad art on the walls, the sort created expressly not to offend.

Sally disappears around the corner a moment, and Mendelssohn takes a few steps alone. He wears a long overcoat. A Homburg hat. A drowsy determination on his face. The space awaiting his chronic fate. In zoom the eyes are hooded, the jaw is slack, he wears little half-moons of fatigue beneath his spectacles. A burst of wrinkles from the eyes. Another little burst of hair from the side of his hat. His head deeply veined at the side temples. The small sag of skin and the chickenwattle at his neck. The marks of decades. The detectives can imagine him at home, slackmouthed in sleep, his pajama collar askew, a light snore sailing from the back of his throat.

But later, when he moves along the corridor, they notice a drop of joy in his shuffle. Not a sideways lean or a bedraggled pull-along. A man still attached to the world. A curmudgeonly grace. The detectives examine the walk, as if the movement might carry a forensic clue to his being. They are well aware that a moment on its own, like a word, means little or nothing, but it is their accumulation that begins to make them matter. Life has been made strange by a series of actions and so there must be a corresponding series of triggers. The past is a key to the future: hidden causes must become plain, time should move to a singular point of revelation. The thrill is in finding the point where the mystery is dismantled. Then they can jigsaw the logic back together. If they can find one piece, they will glimpse another nearby, test it for fit.

The trick eventually comes in the agility to see the pieces all at once, and then build outward and backward — to commit the solution.

On the strength of the fluidity of motion alone, simply the way he walks, the detectives are sure that there has been no death threat to Mendelssohn, no advance suggestion of murder, even when he raps his walking stick on the ground and Sally James rounds the corner from the elevator, and seems to put a hand to his throat. His neck looks wattled and slack, as if it might be about to sound out the after-gulps of a sink. But then she gently wraps the scarf around him, and moves forward, supporting his elbow.

The nurse is, by all appearances, well looked after. She wears a large coat with fur on the collar. On her feet, tall boots.

They shuffle the length of the corridor and stand inside the double front doors. Sally pauses and turns while Mendelssohn has a word with the doorman, Tony DiSalvo, a man who looks lifted from a Mexican cantina, portly and balding, a hint of violence about him and yet a suggestion, also, of rumbling intelligence. Later, under questioning, it will be revealed that Tony is Puerto Rican, a former philosophy major from the University of Miami, but that the conversation was just yet another of those daily New York exchanges about the weather, how awful it is outside, how much snow there has been this winter, a familiar joke from Mendelssohn about being out to lunch, and how Tony wants Mendelssohn to be careful at the traffic lights, the taxis have been sliding all morning long.

Tony helps Mendelssohn down the steep steps and watches as the old man and the nurse step out of frame.

The detectives scrub through the footage from the previous days too, in case they can find something in the patterns of time that will propel them toward a critical epiphany, a mid-verse logic. A meter. An enjambment. Or a rhyme.

For the week of the murder they watch at a rate of thirty-two by: the world zooming past. A whole day slips along in less than an hour. There is a comic texture to the motion, especially when Mendelssohn, with his nurse, uses his cane and stutterstarts out of the frame. As the days wind down, they slow the picture and go forward at a rate of sixteen by, then eight by. Each minute takes seven and a half seconds. Four hours in half an hour. Their fingers glide over the keys. Looking. Digging. Scratching. Mining. A face seen one two three times. Someone loitering near the awning. A covert glance. A nervous tic. Or maybe something more brazen, more obvious, an assailant with a malevolent fuck-you stare. Every incident with its own peculiar rhythm: the ordinary comings, the goings, the delivery trucks, the doorman shuffle, the tenants, Mendelssohn and his nurse, the arrival of the snowstorm.

On the day of the murder they watch in real time, stopping, starting, chopping, rewinding. Over and over again. Think. Stop. Rethink. Watch Mendelssohn emerge. Gaze at the storm. Adjust his collar. Kick the first of the white snow off his shoe. Lean against his nurse. See Sally laugh. See Tony nod. See Mendelssohn smile. See nothing odd. See Mendelssohn go. See the old man disappear. See the snow coming down.

They wait, careful with the time stamp, to discover if anything happens in the intervening hour, but it is only the doorway, the awning, the pavement, the street, the increasing white of the storm, the return, back into frame, of Sally from the restaurant, with a nod to Tony and a blow of warm air into her hands, little else. For a while they wait for Mendelssohn to return from lunch, as if the video itself could trump reality.

They scrub the footage forward a few hours, just in case: a murderer is often known to return to the site of his work. They scan the faces of neighbors, paramedics, delivery boys, voyeurs, all hanging around the front entrance of the apartment building. The detectives dig through the ordinary, looking for any tiny finger-smear of evidence, any face that pops, a shadow that threatens. The evidence could be there in the oddest of moments, the briefest of glances, the slightest of shoulder rubs. They focus in on the son, Elliot Mendelssohn, the hedge fund man, political aspirant, well-known philanderer, parting the crowd. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with a large stomach, as if he has swallowed a bag of rocks. In and out of the building Elliot goes, several times, a cell phone clutched to his ear, a harried look on his face as if he might never have the chance to talk to anyone more interesting than himself.

Late in the evening Elliot emerges with a torn black ribbon placed over his heart, and the detectives, with their radar for the unusual, find it interesting that he could have so early a showcase of grief especially given the secular nature of the Mendelssohns: did he have the ribbon stored in his jacket beforehand? Did he tear one upstairs in his father’s apartment?

Later they observe the arrival of nephews and cousins and in-laws and old friends to the apartment: nothing creates a family quite like a murder.

The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away, like an ancient word stepping off a page.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

Trusty walking stick. Old reliable. He could, of course, use the Zimmerframe or even the motorized wheelchair upstairs, collecting dust in the rear bedroom, but why draw attention? He’d rather not end up like all those idiots zipping along Fifth Avenue, beep beep, out of the way, colonoscopy call, Fifth Avenue here I come, pave the way, Dr. Jim. He had to use a chair once, a few years ago, when he broke his hip after a tumble outside the Guggenheim. On a patch of ice. Before he knew it, he was sprawled on the pavement. The management was scared that he might sue, but that was not his style, he loved the law, respected it, obeyed it. It wasn’t for trifling idiocies like an old man’s fall. Two weeks in the hospital and then Elliot bought him a motorized chair. More buttons on it than an SOC-3. Magnetos engaged. Radar on. Spin that propeller. Contact! He crashed it into the hospital bed on his very first try. You needed a PhD in civil engineering just to sit in the thing for crying out loud.

Come on now, Sally.

Enough chitchat.

There she is, around the corner, at the daily conference of the housekeeping brigade. The Help, some people say. What a terrible thing to call them, but what other word is there? Not servants. Not domestics. Not aides, God forbid, they’re no disease. They congregate down by the mailboxes. One of them, he knows, is Russian. Another Welsh. Another Slovakian. Their own little United Nations in the lobby. He has often wondered what sort of chinwaggery goes on down there, who pays what, and who shouted at whom, and who got fired when, and why. The Yenta Brigade. All the gossip that’s fit to print. Every building in the city like a village in itself. The penthouse, the castle. The corridors, the streets. The stairwell, the alleyways. The elevator, the main thoroughfare. The storage space, the dump. The boiler room, the factory. The handyman, the cobbler. The doormen, the police. The super, the judge. And the judge himself, well, he’s the village putz, left waiting in the lobby, waiting, waiting.

He raps his walking stick on the marble floor. Once. Twice. They’re gossiping still around the corner. A high laugh and then a low whisper and then another cackle from Sally herself. What was it like in the Garden of Eden before there was a snake? No wonder Adam went for the apple. Or was it Eve who ate the apple? Strange how the simplest things slip from our minds. The original tale, and he can’t even recall who it was that transgressed. Or maybe nobody transgressed at all. Maybe they bit the apple together. Shared it. And why not? There was an old rhyme he knew as a ten-year-old: Wouldn’t it have been jolly if Eve’s leaf had been holly? What a marvelous thing, a woman’s body. Curved and designed for delight. Full and glorious and open for invitation, invocation, inhalation. Lord, he loved lying with Eileen on a Sunday morning, especially after high-jinks if they got the chance. They would watch the light crawl into the room, beckon it, good days, the horn of plenty, so to speak, once upon a time.

He hits his walking stick on the floor once more. Oh, come on now, Sally. Lord above. Onwards. Old men grow older quicker. Sally up, Sally forth, Sally sixth.

— Right there, Mr. J.

— I haven’t got all day, you know.

She pops her head around the corner.

— Right with you, Mr. J.

And then he hears a complicated sigh. And a giggle.

I hope to God that she isn’t telling them about my adventures in the diaper trade. You work your whole life to become a pillar of the community and then it all disappears in front of your eyes.

Perhaps he should just strike out into the snow on his own. Hand me my oxygen tank. Pull my hat down around my ears. Sir Edmund, hitting the slopes. Once he climbed the mountains in Italy with Eileen. Up in the beautiful Dolomites. They stayed in a chalet under the shadows of the mountains and in the mornings, after breakfast, they climbed up through the spectacular forests, hand in hand, and then used carabiners to clip themselves in to scale the via ferrate, high into the sky. The amazing thing about the Italians was that they had rifugios on the top of the mountains. You could eat a bowl of pasta and drink a glass of pinot grigio twelve thousand feet in the air. A civilized bunch. He often wishes that he had a little of the Italian blood in him, that big expansive generosity, that color, that style, but it’s all Lithuanian, which, of course, is its own little mishmash, Polish and Russian and German and Viking too.

Curious thing, the blood we inherit. Slapping around inside, making us who we are: the landscape itself gets a say in the outcome of the mind. Tobago with its beaches and sunlight and palm trees, no doubt, where life is designed to slow things down. Still, Sally somehow gets things done, it always amazes him at the end of the day the place is clean, the laundry is folded, the dishes are washed, the beds are tucked, and she disappears to her little room, where she keeps a picture of her nephew, or her grandson, on the table, and once or twice he has heard her weeping, but most of the time she goes happily off to sleep, or so it seems. Oh, nature’s soft nurse, how I have frighted thee.

Still and all, he wishes she would get a move on. He gazes the length of the lobby towards the snow falling white and fat-flaked outside. Strange how life becomes a telescope: the distance lengthening the older we get. He has lived in this building the best part of twenty years and the lobby has never been longer. He raises a salutary finger to Tony the doorman who is outside sprinkling rock salt on the ground. He has known Tony for two decades now. Seen him age and bloom and indeed balloon. Time. The great leveler. Since when did Tony suddenly hit the far side of middle age? It’s not as if this sort of thing happens overnight, or is it? Found him once reading a copy of Kant. Tried to make a joke. I tried Kant, but couldn’t. Fell flat. To Tony anyway. Which I might well do right now. Flat on my face in the lobby, waiting. Come on, Sally, for crying out loud.

There was a while in his own life, in his late thirties, when everything just fell away so suddenly: the hair, the ease, the grace. Walked around with a big lump of anxiety in his heart. A midlife crisis they called it. Didn’t begin to feel reinvigorated, really, until he reached the age of fifty. Elected, then, to Supreme Court, Kings County. Hardly a runaway election, but the party backed him, they even made him little buttons and leaflets to hand out at the polling stations around Brooklyn. Truth was they needed a liberal Jew and he just about fit the bill. They liked his Catholic wife as well, two birds with one poll. They lived in the Heights, so they had the cachet. Dugan Brothers Bakery Delivered to Your Door. He walked every day to the courts on Adams Street. The great thing about being a justice of the court was that you didn’t have to retire until seventy, seventy-six if you pushed it. It was written there under Judiciary Law, three two-year extensions. Sure, they put the thumbscrews on and the inevitable hints were dropped, especially because he moved to Manhattan — he was no longer their Brooklyn boy, how dare he move to the city? — but he hung in there until the end, especially after Eileen left, oh Lord, the day. He was in the bathroom on Eighty-sixth Street having a shave, half his face covered in foam, when he heard the thumping fall outside the door. She’d been sick for a long time but he had no idea that she was going to pass just like that — a quick fall as she stepped out of bed — and there she was, Eileen, lying on the carpet, gone, gone, a chuisle mo chroí. He leaned down and stroked her hair. That’s what he would remember, the feel of her hair. They say that it’s one of the last things to go. That it keeps on growing. Even days after. That’s why they have to shave the dead.

— Isn’t that right, Sally?

She has come, at last, around the corner, the little hem of her nurse whites showing beneath the dark of her coat.

— What’s that Mr. J.?

— I was just thinking—

— Yes? she says with a swell of boredom. She reaches up and adjusts his scarf tight around his neck.

— About Mrs. Mendelssohn.

— Yes, sir, Mr. J., sir. A fine woman, Miss Eileen.

— I do, I do.

— Excuse me, sir?

— Oh, don’t worry about me, Sally.

— On you go, Mr. J., I got you.

The dead are with us. They glide along behind us on our endless journeys, they accompany us in our smallest gestures, tuck themselves into our dark shadows, they even come along on our little lunchtime sojourns to Chialli’s. She used to comb her hair with a gold-handled brush. He loved watching her by the mirror, the stroke of the brush and the fan of her hair, pressing the long strands together with thumb and forefinger.

— Lovely once and always.

— Mr. J.?

— It’s an old tune.

— Yes, sir. Of course.

— Lovely once and always, moonlight in her hair.

— Yes, sir.

Sally is of course quite thoroughly confused, but how could she have any idea in heaven or hell what he’s talking about, unless the song got diverted and made it all the way to Tobago. And damn it all anyway. He can feel a little tremor in his pocket but he’s not about to stop out here, now, in the lobby, no matter who’s calling, God or Elliot or Job or anyone else for that matter. How odd to get that little vibration down below. A wocket in my pocket. He used to read Dr. Seuss to Katya long ago. They were good days, reading to the children when he had the time. Odd thing, time. So much of it now and we spend it all looking back. Lovely once and always with moonlight in her hair.

— Lord above, says Sally, looking out to the weather. You sure you want to venture out, Mr. J.?

He loves this, too, about Sally, the way every now and then she will burst forth with a word that he doesn’t expect. Venture indeed. Add venture, dear Sally. Upwards. Away.

He pauses on the lip of the first glass door, at the steps. A cold blast of air hits him as Tony hurries in to help.

— Young man.

— How are we today, Mr. Mendelssohn?

— Out to lunch.

His old joke. Guaranteed to bring a smile to Tony’s lips. It’s the repetition that makes it funnier: he says it almost every single day, rain, hail, shine. What would happen, one fine day, if he didn’t say it at all? The world would hardly stop spinning, but it might just hiccup a little on its axis. We Kan, we Kant.

— And who’s this lovely lady?

Tony the charmer. A beam from Sally. Yes, indeed, he loves that smile. It’s a good world, this, in its odd little moments.

— We just got married in the elevator, didn’t we, Sally?

— Yes, sir, we did.

— Hope you picked up all the confetti.

— Check the recycle bin.

— You’re very considerate, Mr. Mendelssohn.

It’s a high step down from the lobby into the street and getting higher every day. Feels like I’m lowering myself from a crane. Into the recyclables indeed. Maybe Katya and Elliot should hang handles along the length of Eighty-sixth Street: from the streetlamps, swinging along, like Johnny Weissmuller through the jungle, here we come.

— Careful now, says Tony. Can’t have the newlyweds crash.

There is still only a light dusting on the ground, but the storm is gathering force. Best get out and about now, quick and early. Who knows how long he might be housebound if it truly comes tumbling down?

He places the walking stick firmly on the ground, bends his weight into the leg. The creak of the knee. The rumble of the ankle. Here we go. Thank you, Sally. Doing just fine on my own.

Curious thing, the snow. They say the Eskimos have eighty words for it. An articulate lot. Slush and sleet and firn and grain. Hoar and rime. Crust crystal vapor blizzard graupel. Pendular permeable planar. Striated shear supercooled. Brittle glazed clustered coarse broken. An insult of snow, a slur of snow, a taunt of snow, a Walt Whitman snow, a bestiary snow, a calliope snow, it’s snowing in Morse code, three longs, a short, a long again, it’s snowing like the ancient art of the newspaper, it’s snowing like September dust coming down, it’s snowing like a Yankees Day parade, it’s snowing like an Eskimo song.

One step two steps three steps five. He stops for a moment at a muni-meter. God be with the days when you could park your carcass for a nickel, what do they cost now, two dollars for ten minutes, less, more? He watches a bus going past, chains on the tires. A woman on a bicycle. Good balance that. The shadow of death crossing to and fro. Careful, young lady. A minivan, beeping its way through the snow, perilously close to the cyclist.

The flashers flashing. The horn blaring. Good God, don’t hit her. Oh.

— That was close, Sally.

The hair on her chinny-chin-chin.

— Uh-huhn.

Sally too. There’s a market for that: a razor for elderly ladies. Eileen never had that problem. Smooth as silk.

He touches his hat and shuffles on. The trusty walking stick needed more than ever. A steel tip on the end. No sound from it today. Muffled.

— I’m building up an appetite, Sally.

— Yes, sir.

He pauses by the fire hydrant, to gather his breath. Can never see a fire hydrant without thinking of the September dust coming down ten years ago. All those young firemen going up the stairs. All intimately connected. A terrible day, he watched the collapse on television. For weeks afterwards every little thing was charged with meaning, even the dust on the windowsill, you were never quite sure what it might contain: a paper, a résumé, an eyelash.

— Sally, my dear, you are an angel.

— You’re out of breath, Mr. J.

— Just pretending, Sally.

He stands at the edge of the crosswalk. Why is it that the traffic lights are designed to humiliate us? Once he could get across from one side to the other without the little neon man flashing at all. These days he can only get halfway before the red man starts his antics. There is nothing he hates more than when the cars start to inch forward. Mendelssohn, your time is up. Goodbye, thank you, now sidle off to Florida. Or North Carolina. Down there the neon man lasts infinitely longer. It’s a known fact.

Here they go already, hooting and tooting. It never ceases to amaze him, how downright rude the city can be. Eight million lives colliding all at once. All those tiny little atoms in the process of bouncing off each other. Yes, yes, lady, you will have a chance to move your tush, but please just hush, and give me a chance to move my own.

One of the things he used to love about New York City was the sheer bravado of it all. It used you up, spat you out. But the more the years went on, the more he began to think that he’d like a little respect from it. He had, after all, put his time in. Sat on the bench. Went to party meetings. A Supreme Court justice. A fancy title, but in reality he got every case under the Brooklyn sun, a clearing house, really, for murders, mobsters, shysters, shucksters. The random stabbings. The premeditated takedowns. Probate matters. Injunctions. Rescissions. An endless ream of paperwork. He stayed within the system even at the worst of times. Never strayed. At half the salary he would have made if he had gone into corporate law. After all that he would have liked just a little ripple of thanks from the peanut gallery. A moment longer in the crosswalk, please. He put his career as a lawyer in the bin for a life of public service, and what did he get? Some fresh young tchotchke in a black SUV with New Jersey license plates looking as if she’d like nothing more than to flatten him in one fell swoop. Windshield wipers slapping back and forth. Her petulant glare. Her lip gloss shining. An ex-Juicy. Drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. Don’t think I don’t see you, young lady. Just because I’m going along here slow as molasses doesn’t mean that I’m not aware that you would very much like to put the pedal to the metal, scoop up poor Sally in the process, and drag us along Eighty-sixth Street, hanging to your bumper. A bit of respect, please. Objection sustained. There was a case he handled once of a kid from Bed-Stuy who was tied to the back of a garbage truck and dragged through the streets, he had been left lying on the ground for two hours afterwards, all the evidence was there but the jury wouldn’t convict. Rephrase. Move on. It was hard to leave a case like that behind. Haunted him for years. A young black boy, skidding along. Brutal days.

Who in the world designed those SUVs anyway? The ugliest damn things on the face of the earth. A big silver grille and a ram on the hood. As if they’re heading off to war. And why in the world are they needed anyway? It’s not as if she’s heading across the Rockies, flooding rivers and endless jungle.

— It’s always Jersey, Sally.

— Sir?

— It’s always a Jersey license plate.

— You take your sweet time, Mr. J. Don’t mind her. We can stay here until Sunday if we want.

— We might get snowed in.

How many mornings, noons, and nights have I walked up and down this street? How many footsteps along this same path? When I was young and nimble and slick I would dart across the road in the Dublin traffic, horse carriages, bicycles, milktrucks and all. Jaywalking. Jayshuffling it is, now. The jaybird. Mr. J., indeed. On the Upper East Side. A lot of volume in this life. Echoes too.

— Just fine.

Sally’s hand lies steady on his elbow now. Gripping rather hard into what is left of the muscle. The walking stick in his other hand, propping him up and propelling him along. And why is it that the mind can do anything it wants, yet the body won’t follow? What a wonderful thing it would be to live as a brain for a little while. To be perched in a jar and see it all from there. Without the rigors of the meshuggeneh mansion? A pure clean life. On a shelf. In a row of shelves. Not stuck out here, shambling in the snow, watching the red man flash and the New Jersey lady fume, and listening to her horn beep, and the whole of New York City build up behind her.

— All right, lady, all right.

— Shut up! says Sally with a glare.

The woman yanks the steering wheel hard and then pulls out around him. The tires spin in the light crust of snow. Time nor tide wait for no woman. Especially if she’s from Trenton. Or Wayne. Or worse yet, Newark. Good God, but she’s in a rush.

Maybe off for a dalliance somewhere who knows, maybe even a tryst with his very own Elliot. How come that boy never learned to keep his equipment in his trousers?

The red man is static now. Not even flashing. A Geronimo of the avenue. Wasn’t the neon sign a different color back once, long ago? Wasn’t there a large neon hand once? Or is there still? There most certainly was a Walk, Don’t Walk. It was so very New York, the insistence of it, the brash instruction. Walk or else. There was another sign also: Don’t Even Think of Parking Here. And once, long ago, he saw a sign in Hell’s Kitchen that said: Park Here, Motherfucker, and You Will. Which was funny, even if grammatically unsound. Park here and you will park here? Or park here and you will fuck your mother? Or both? Or neither? Or something in between?

Oh, no matter, Your Honor. Just get across the street. All Wimbledon rules have been suspended.

Another loud beeping. The traffic on the far side of Eighty-sixth has begun to move towards him. A Sikh in a taxi. Hold your turbines, sir. Good God, a pull of pain through his knees. A fierce tightness in the shoulders. His hips feel as if they’ve been lowered down into cement. We were young once, Sally. It’s like crossing the Styx.

One foot after the next. That’s all you should think about. One step at a time. Like an Alcoholics Anonymous for geriatrics. Another curb. Borrow the crane. Avoid the grates at all costs. Don’t get stuck in the Styx.

And hallelujah, thank the heavens, he gets to the edge of the curb and stabilizes himself against Sally. Both of them breathing a little heavily now.

— They’re even worse if they’re Chinese.

— Hhhhrrrummmpf, she says.

— It’s a well-known fact. The Chinese have the worst driving records. I don’t know why. They’re good people but they damn sure can’t drive.

— Is that so?

— If you ever meet a Chinese man from New Jersey, buckle up.

— You’re funny, Mr. J.

Which, quite plainly, he is not. She doesn’t even have the faintest of smiles. Out here, shivering. She’s not used to it at all. A couple of decades in New York and still she has the Caribbean sunshine in her bones. He should invite her to lunch. Always, every day, she accompanies him, and he brings her home some of Dandinho’s specially wrapped leftovers. She loves them. Twists them open. Puts the food on a plate. Microwaves it. Sits and watches soap operas on her little TV through the night. A tough life she has, Sally James. He would love, now, to see one of her enormous smiles. Something to crack open the day and whisk away the cold. But she’s intent on getting him down the road and squared away for his lunchtime ritual.

— On we go.

Moving like a tugboat. The flower shop, the chocolatier, the perfumery, the antique store, the wine shop, the handbag seller, the dry cleaners: everything the modern human needs.

Roll up, roll up. The shutters of life.

Hardly any pedestrians on the street today. A few delivery boys and a couple of hurrying mothers with their prams. One brave jogger wearing shorts, bouncing down the avenue like it’s August. Never understood that jogging phenomenon. Chest hair and headbands. Sometimes both at once. Snow in August. A good man wrote a book with that same title, what’s his name, he edited the newspaper once, was in love with Jackie O, so the rumor went anyway, or rather was she in love with him?

Sally on one side, the walking stick on the other. The hat on my head. The overcoat nice and toasty. The stomach rumbling and ready. What more could a man want? Eileen, Eileen, Eileen.

And I hate that, I truly do. Those hidden hats of dogshit left sprinkled on the sidewalk. Like little sombreros. Always in wintertime as well. A disgrace. All it takes is a doggie bag and a gentle scoop. Off with the sombrero and into the trash.

Land ahoy. The brown-and-orange awning. The large plate-glass windows. The beautifully scripted writing in the window. The small pleated curtains. The glow of round lamps. A home away from home. Pete Hamill, that’s the man.

— Careful now, Mr. J. Watch your step.

They pause a moment outside the handbag shop, and he leans towards her, sees a snowflake perch on her long eyelash.

— What time’ll I pick you up, Mr. J.?

— Elliot will walk back with me.

— You sure?

— Sure, I’m sure.

— Sure sure?

— I’m sure, Sally.

How many sures in a row? Love loves to love love. The little snowflake perched there on the ledge of her lash. Beauty comes and beauty goes.

— You know, I’ve never asked you, Sally.

— Sir?

— Which do you prefer? Salmon or steak?

She blinks and the snowflake is gone. Eyelashes. Towers. And why is it he always just brings her the leftovers anyway? Why is it that she gets the dregs of the day, the diapers too? He should buy her a whole plate and get it specially wrapped by Dandinho. Or even better, dress her up, take her out, celebrate her, she’s a good soul, Sally James, looking after her fine young nephew down there in Scarborough if I’m not mistaken, ah, the mind returns, yes, Tobago for sure, not Trinidad.

— Oh, don’t you worry about me, Mr. J., she says. I’m just fine.

— A little brownie perhaps?

— You’re sweet, Mr. J.

And she kisses him on the cold of his cheek.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

The household fly is a masterpiece of evolutionary design: it can see virtually 360 degrees and can piece together a complete image no matter how weak the light. Its compound eye is an intricate honeycomb. Its retina is a convex curve, dotted with hundreds of hexagonal photoreceptors. Each lens of the eye — with support cells, pigment cells, a cornea — harvests its own light and creates a deep visual map.

The fly can spot movement in shadows, and can pick out distant objects with far more clarity than anything the human can accomplish. The result is a mosaic of light, color, pattern, and speed. The images the fly sees are smashed together in its brain. The more lenses used, the higher the resolution.

On a microscopic slide, the insect’s eye looks like an exquisite artwork, the tiling on the wall of a mosque, or the curve of a planet we haven’t yet found.

With the eye of a simple housefly we could see, in a nanosecond, all the intricacies of Chialli’s Restaurant, the tables arranged in diamonds, the door opening on the walk-in fridge, the frantic slice of the knife upon the carrot, the creased folds of the napkins, the busboy adjusting the crank on the espresso machine, the manager turning to the wall for a sly crotch adjust, the slide of the bread basket on the food-station trays, the hostess touching a pencil against her tongue, the clearing of the dead man’s plates from the table, the leap of hot oil from a pan.

As it is, there are twelve cameras in Chialli’s altogether, neatly hidden in corners around the restaurant. A two-year-old system with a sixteen-camera capability, ports still open for four. Updated software with one terabyte of storage. Good compression, resolution and a full-motion frame rate with thirty images per second. The sort of system that is good enough that the video technicians can pump it to a remote location and examine it off-site.

It is a well-known restaurant, highly rated, very Upper East Side. A long mahogany bar. Dark wood paneling along the walls. A hardwood floor. A series of stained glass — shaded lights hanging from the ceiling over the tables. The restaurant is known for its Italian cuisine with a surprising South American flavor. The wine list is extensive. The service, impeccable. The speciality of the house is branzino, lightly grilled with mango and peppers. The most popular dessert is tiramisu, prepared with a hint of cachaça. The lunchtime crowd is generally quiet, well-heeled: the ladies who lunch.

The digital detectives exit the twelve-camera matrix and click on the images one by one: the kitchen, the manager’s office, the hostess station, the dining room, the staff cloakroom, the rear courtyard. They layer them, bookend them, break them apart, look for tiny inconsistencies. Check the time stamps for offset. Zoom in, zoom out, build a dossier for themselves, examining the time close to the murder, 2:19 p.m., searching for anything out of the ordinary.

There, the coat-check girl, Laura Pedersen, with her book of tickets. There, the oyster shucker, Carvahlo, sharpening his knife. Here, the chef, Chad MacKenzie, adjusting his hair under his tall white hat. There, the manager, Christopher Eagleton, flipping through pages on a clipboard. There, Pedro Jiménez at the dishwashing station. Here, the dropped fork on the kitchen floor. There, the swing of the restaurant doors. Here, the busboy, Dandinho, guiding Mendelssohn to the table. There, Mendelssohn, wiping the napkin against his lip. Here, Elliot calmly sipping his Cabernet. There, the last glass of Sancerre that Mendelssohn ever drank. Here, the waitress, Rosita Oosterhausen, tapping orders on a keyboard and later pinching her nipple through her blouse seconds before she delivers the check, a tried and trusted way to increase tips.

There is a sequence, too, of the outer foyer of Chialli’s, from Mendelssohn’s arrival to the tail end of his goodbye.

There are a number of people to mark — not least Elliot Mendelssohn. He arrives late, big and bundled, in an overcoat and scarf. They watch him and his father dine at a rate of eight-by — the dab of napkins, the quick lift of fork to mouth, the pour of wine, no obvious arguments. They slow the video sequence down for Elliot’s casual stroll toward the front doors, the donning of his wool hat, his walk out into the snowstorm, still nothing overtly suspicious about him, no signal, no nod, no wink. He leaves at 1:52, twenty-seven minutes before the murder. Still, so many killings are arranged by family members and the detectives cannot rule out an accomplice: there is something about Elliot that is distinctly unlikeable, not least his insistence on speaking on the phone during large portions of lunch.

Then there is Pedro Jiménez who is absent from his dishwashing station for a full four minutes before the murder and five minutes afterward. Pedro, fifty-seven, has no record, no violent past. At 2:12 they watch him and the busboy, Dandinho, in animated discussion by the giant metal sink under the Brooklyn Cyclones poster. It is interesting to watch Pedro remove his apron and throw it on the ground, and to see Dandinho hold him by the shoulders. There is a short pushing match between the two men. Later when they are questioned, it is revealed that Dandinho is Brazilian, and Pedro is Costa Rican, and they have a South American soccer betting pool where some mistakes have been made in the general accountancy. Pedro tells them that he was in the bathroom at the time of the murder. There are, of course, no bathroom cameras, but they do catch footage of him moving down the corridor in the direction of the toilets, a plausible-enough alibi.

Sally James, too, is tagged, though only half-heartedly. They scrub backward on the video timeline to the early angle outside Chialli’s. They watch the dead man, alive, with Sally at his side. A shuffle to his walk, a distrust of the small coating of snow on the ground. The halting steps of one who refuses to tumble. The bite of wind active in his face. His body a little elongated from the angle. They enter the frame, actor-like, hitting their marks. The detectives halt the image and magnify, hold them in digital suspension, then click a slow motion forward. The pair hover at the entrance. She kisses him on the cheek, then Mendelssohn lets go of his nurse’s arm, shuffles forward, slope-shouldered, and stops at the restaurant door. A single flake briefly obscures him when blown against the screen.

The detectives make a note to check if Mendelssohn’s will has been recently changed, a not uncommon occurrence amongst nurses or housekeepers and their charges, though Sally James hardly seems the type.

It is what the cops call a shrapnel case — the pieces exploding left right center up and down. Could be mistaken identity. Could be a hate crime. There is also of course the possibility of the random psychotic episode: a homeless man thrown slightly off-kilter, or a desperate robber at large. But there is no wallet taken, no cell phone swiped. The point for the detectives is to find the focus, the muscles that have propelled the punch. Then they might be able to move it backward, through the ligaments to the bone and bring it back eventually to the raw moment of release.

Several theories are always less convincing than a single one, so for their primary one they remain with Elliot — there is certainly something there, though they cannot locate it yet: certainly it wouldn’t be unusual for the son to murder the father, it happens far more often than anyone acknowledges.

After Elliot leaves, Mendelssohn waits and sips his wine. He rises a little unsteadily on his feet and goes to the bathroom, returns to linger at his dessert. He pays with credit card, signs his bill, makes his way through the rows of empty tables. Both the waitress and the coat-check girl help him with his coat. The detectives would like to tell them to stop, to do something entirely different, to have Mendelssohn sit down, please wait, don’t move, stop the world on its curve, decide against whatever it is he is doing, change the course of the world with lethargy.

One click, and then he is gone. What frustrates them most is the outdoor camera, by the front-door foyer. The angle is perfect, but all they can see is Mendelssohn as he steps out into the storm, tugging his collar sharply, tapping his walking stick on the ground, pausing a moment, not visibly upset, moving forward. Thirty-seven seconds later he falls back into the frame, his Homburg spinning from his head. He smashes back against the ground. They see the assailant step into the frame for a fraction of a second. A dark figure bending down as if to whisper something to Mendelssohn. Baseball hat, a puffy jacket. It’s always so much easier to solve a case in the summertime — no hats, no scarves, no covered faces. But it’s winter and he’s a man of indeterminate race, impossible to tell, even in zoom, shadowed and hurried. He appears to have a scarf around his mouth and he wears a hat with curved letters, possibly a B or an 8 and a C or an O. They enhance it further, crop it, copy it, send it to video forensics. At a quarter of a second of digital footage — thirty frames per second — they have 7.5 images of the hat. After four hours of examination, they come back to say that it’s B.C. braided on the brim. The detectives immediately go to Google to see if Elliot went to Boston College, but Elliot is a Harvard boy through and through. Still, the assailant is someone with enough gumption to wear a Boston hat in Yankeetown.

They split the screen and sift the images as thoroughly as possible, watching only the crucial moments in real time. The rest is speeded up so that there is a silent-movie quality to the footage, Mendelssohn eating quickly, donning his coat, moving herky-jerky toward the door on his walking stick, but then they slow him down as he steps outside, is gone from the image, and then reappears, frozen in midfall, frozen again a second later, his face a gasp of surprise: How dare you punch me, before his head cracks open in a pool of dark blood.

There is no camera on the employee entrance, located ten yards down Madison Avenue, a simple metal door that leads past the bathrooms back into the kitchen. The only other obvious angle to the assault is from the traffic-cam on the light pole at Eighty-sixth and Madison: a wide view remotely accessed from traffic control. The quality is low, but the scope is wide. On any other day it might complement the restaurant footage — the tideline of taxis, the baleful swarm of dented trucks — but today it is obscured by snow blowing directly onto the lens, beginning with droplets that melt on the screen at first but then accumulate one by one, coalescing, a gathering curtain of white. It starts with flakes that melt and burn against the heat of the lens, stay a moment, rivulet along the screen. Then they arrive in more rapid flurries. They build, layer, vault upward into the camera, like a crowd of rioters obscuring the crime. At the time of the murder the only thing that can be seen through the granules of snow are the headlights of the approaching cars, small and spectral as they make their way up the avenue. No figures. No faces. No men in baseball caps. No images of an assailant running down the street.

Moments after the assault, the granules pick up the vague swirl of blue-and-red siren lights until eventually the street is closed off and the footage becomes a static portrait of headlights. There is no soundtrack, but the detectives can almost hear the car horns blaring in frustration, until the word murder begins to filter among the stalled cars and they fall silent.

The detectives look for cameras in the nearby stores and banks, but there are none with a suitable angle onto the front of Chialli’s. Yet they know that there is a solution embedded in the footage somewhere, or perhaps there is another camera to be found in the shops along Madison Avenue, or some other digital eye that is witness to the day. It’s a simple logic — a crime has been committed and therefore an answer must be available, somewhere, somehow. Nothing is elementally unsolvable. It’s an obvious physical law. If it happened, it can be unraveled. The difficulty comes in the sheer amount of work that must be done to sift through the footage. Even if they find a glimpse of a man in a B.C. hat — in the subway at Lexington Avenue, or walking quickly uptown away from the scene — they will have nothing to tie him directly to the punch.

Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

In he walks, a ball of bristle and fear. The phone shoved against his ear. In trouble again, no doubt. He shakes off his overcoat at the coat check. Drips of snowmelt on the floor in a wide constellation. The coat-check girl gives him the once-over. He removes his scarf to reveal a neck that could fold over itself several times. There is something of the ancient walrus about Elliot, imposing and lumbering at the same time. He exposes the big bald head with a whip-off of the hat and gestures across the restaurant with a single finger raised: Wait for me, but don’t expect me to hurry. He turns away from the coat-check girl and cups his hand over the phone. A serious call indeed. An anger in the bend of his body. A touch of the Irish about him. Red and veiny. What happened to Eileen’s fine genes? Maybe they all went in Katya’s direction. Strange how it happens. We never really become fathers to the whole experience. We become, instead, the sons of our sons. What happens to them, then, happens to us. So be it. That’s my boy in the corner of the restaurant, shouting now into his cell phone, and here I sit, with a glass of water, watching, and the truth of the matter is that I couldn’t love him any more or dislike him any less — the curse of the father. Could somebody please quietly shut him up and guide him over here to my favorite table so that he can shake my hand, maybe even kiss my freckled forehead, say hello, and slide silently into his seat and be the charmer that he once was? Maybe the snow will interrupt the cell-phone signal and we can sit in peace, and when was the last time we actually spoke to each other, not just pleasantries? When oh when did I say a word to him that truly meant something?

He reaches for his glass of water — and thank the heavens, he can see Elliot getting off the telephone. Hurry on now, son, you’re making quite a fuss, another fifteen minutes of my life gone to waste.

Snow really hammering down outside now. A swell of intent, slantwise along the street. Mach shnell, son. Join me.

Across the room, Elliot raises his finger once again, this one in apology, or what seems like apology at least, and begins to dial once more.

Oh, to hell with manners, which waitress is mine? Can’t remember, though she’s been at the table at least twice already. Is it the tall blonde or the small blonde or the medium blonde or the medium-medium blonde with the ponytail? The new manager, it seems, has a stake in a hair-dye company.

He turns in his chair and flicks a look across the room and, sure enough, here she comes the medium-medium blonde with a smile on her face. They grow more beautiful by the year. Either genetics or it’s the optics of old age.

— Yes, Mr. Mendelssohn?

— I’d like a glass of Sancerre, my dear.

— Of course, sir.

— And a Cabernet too. For the full-bodied fellow over there.

— Excuse me?

— My son.

— Oh, of course, sir.

She smiles mischievously and swishes her way towards the bar. Oh, for crying out loud, Elliot, get off the phone and stop embarrassing me, please. The temptation of the Apple, the glory of Eve, the confusion of Adam, and what is it with me and the Garden of Eden today? Let me remain with my BlackBerry, dangling on the vine, and did they have any blackberries in Eden, I wonder, to complement the apple trees, and where is it, by the way, the phone? He pats his pockets but it is not there. Must have left it in my coat. Turned up to high volume if I recall correctly. Or was it only on vibrate? That would be embarrassing if the thing starts to ring from afar. No more than six customers in the restaurant today, but that would make the noise even more acute. Please don’t let it ring, please. Turn up the music, Dandinho, please. Funny that. It’s Mendelssohn. Symphony no. 4. Filtering over the speakers. A nice clean, cool sound, though he can still hear his roiled-up son barking into the telephone. Once upon a time he was a charmer with a garrulous gift, but somewhere along the way it dissolved. Take it outside into the snow, Elliot. If your mother were here, she’d march straight across and give you what-for. And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us? How awful the world would be if we were all carbon copies of one another. But Elliot most certainly is not his mother, and maybe I have to face it: he is more me, more’s the pity, for him, and for me, and perhaps for the rest of us too.

Here she comes, tray in hand. Sweating nicely: the glass, not the waitress. And a generous pour too: the drink and waitress both.

— You’re looking splendid today, young lady.

A speck of blue paint on the inside of her wrist. Probably an artist, they all have second jobs. Abstract, no doubt. A Brooklyn landscape, neat and precise but with a nice rounded swirl.

— Thank you, Mr. Mendelssohn. You’re quite dapper yourself.

Oh, how quickly the dark clouds disappear. From diaper to dapper. And she even knows my name. Genuine, it seems: she’s not just blowing smoke, like half the waitstaff seem to do every day, their mundanities, nice to see you, have a good day, are you still working on that, sir? I’m eating, young lady, not working. This medium-medium blonde has style and taste and charisma. Not just another throwaway. He must remember that come tip-time. He does indeed look — what’s the word? — oh, it’s fallen off the cliff face, gone, the old Yiddish phrase, there’s a few still in the vault, they bob up like Halloween apples, here and there, but what is it? Gone. Still and all, he looks dapper, yes. A Brooks Brothers shirt. A Gucci tie selected by Sally. A beautifully cut suit made for him by none other than Frankie Shattuck, the young boxer-tailor-soldier-sailor. The best damn suitmaker in New York. Good creases in the trousers. A beautifully finished collar. Silk lining. The clothes indeed make the man. When he was appointed to the Circuit Court, decades ago, he went straight down to the tailorshop to ask Frankie’s father to make him a proper judicial gown and that he did, the finest cloth, the most perfect stitches, the proper pockets, the right hang from his shoulders, the space inside to greet and gavel, farpitz—that’s the word, yes, farpitz. And he got one with an even finer cut of cloth when he got elected to the Supreme Court. Gone now, Frankie’s father. All of us fading like the morning dew. Our Yiddish too.

— Terrible weather, says the waitress.

— When I was a boy it snowed ten times worse.

Which is not true at all. He can only remember Vilnius in the summertime.

— I never saw a snowflake until I moved here, she says.

— Australia?

— No.

— New Zealand?

— No.

She’s toying with me now: South Africa?

— Zimbabwe, she says, with a flourish.

Oh, toy and tarry. What a city this is. Never ceases to amaze me. A blonde Rhodesian girl serving a Polish-born Lithuanian Jew in an Italian restaurant with, what, a couple of Mexican busboys hanging out near the edges, ready to pounce, and of course Dandinho, the Brazilian busboy extraordinaire moving gracefully from table to table, and my big bald American son yammering away on the telephone by the coat check.

— And your name is?

— Rosita.

— Why, thank you, Rosita.

An unusual name for a girl from Africa. She smiles as she backs away. He nods at Dandinho who moves swiftly across to fill up his water glass.

— Thirsty today, sir?

— It’s the heat outside, young man.

Dandinho pours with great panache, one hand kept behind his back, as if his whole body is paying respect to the water glass. Not afraid to get his hands wet. An all-rounder. A meeter, a greeter, a half maître d’. Known far and wide for the way he can wrap your leftovers. An aluminum artist. No mean skill that. Nothing to snigger at. A folder of the foil. He can create any shape the diner wants — swan or porpoise or cow or crane or giraffe. Within seconds the leftovers become a work of art. A doggie bag, indeed. The kids love it but so do the ladies who lunch and indeed so do the late-night businessmen going home with an exotic aluminum animal under the arm. There was even, a few years ago, a gallery downtown that put on an exhibition of Dandinho’s foil sculptures.

— How’re you feeling today, sir?

— A million bucks. All torn and wrinkly.

A tolerant smile from Dandinho: he’s heard the quip before.

— Anything else, Mr. Mendelssohn?

— Fine for now. Waiting in fact for my son.

— Ah, yes. Some bread?

— Thank you, Dandinho, but I’m watching my figure.

And here he comes at last, lumbering across, hardly a figure skater, bumping off the tables and chairs. Tucking away his phone as he goes. Still there is an energy about him, nothing small or meek, that’s for sure, three Mendelssohns in one movement, father, son, symphony.

— Dad, he says, with a kind swerve in his voice, and a grasp of his father’s shoulder.

A bit of weight on him, sure, but he still has a pair of fine, bright eyes, the same shape as his mother’s. Speak to me of her, son, in a pattering hail-shower of words.

— Elliot, meet Dandinho.

— A pleasure, sir.

— My pleasure, Davido.

Elliot grasps Dandinho’s hand and doles out a big handshake. He’d make a good politician, even if he keeps getting names wrong. A sharp dresser too. Gold tiepin. Straight collar. Fine-cut cloth.

— Elliot Mendelssohn, he says, Barner Funds.

As if Dandinho gives a flying fig about Barner Funds, but the Brazilian pauses a moment, then reaches behind Elliot’s chair and holds it politely, scoots it in, or hardly scoots it at all, given Elliot’s proportions. Elliot shifts on the chair like it’s a dangerous horse. The table shivers a little and the silverware clangs.

— Thank you, Davido.

An odd look on Dandinho’s face, something rattling through his mind, a bronco, a bull, a bear. Is it possible that Dandinho speculates? One never knows. The unlikeliest of people get themselves into the market these days and who knows what sort of life goes on behind another life? Maybe Dandinho has himself a fine big mansion out there in Brooklyn somewhere, gold-plated handles, swimming pool, a Jacintha wife, the whole nine yards, the NASDAQ pulsing in neon around his shaving mirror, stranger things have happened, even to an aging busboy.

— A very solid firm, sir.

— You invest there, Dandinho?

— Oh, no, sir, not me, Mr. Mendelssohn. I just know some people.

— Don’t we all? says Elliot.

Dandinho nods and backs away.

The menu-flip. The napkin unfold. The usual pleasantries. Great to see you, son. Terrible weather. Sorry I’m late. A drone of excuses, more sound than meaning — he got caught in work, was waylaid on Lexington, some business deal fouled up along the way, he’s just swamped these days, time, time, time.

A fine wine of a man to make excuses: he gets better with age.

— I took the liberty.

— Thanks, Dad.

— A Cabernet for you, sir.

Elliot pretends not to take an eyeful as Rosita leans across him and places the wine down. She stands with her hands on the low of her stomach as she enumerates the specials. Quite a pose. That little speck of blue on her wrist: such a perfect addition, like the wrongly tied knot on a Persian carpet.

— Thank you, Rosita.

Salmon with dill sauce for him. A porterhouse steak, medium rare, with mango sauce for Elliot. No appetizers. Straight to the heart of the matter. She scribbles it down on a small blue pad, bats her eyelids, moves away, yes, an artist, no doubt. Salmon indeed. Watch her sway upriver, a fine expanse of flank.

— L’chaim, says Elliot.

So often the boy for the opportune word, there has recently been talk of Elliot running for office, a disastrous move, no doubt, even for a macher like him — they would chew him up and spit him out and freeze-dry him in the process — but who’s to fault ambition? And here we go, clinking glasses and diving into the old murky water, father and son, and how is Jacintha, and what’s happening at home, any news from Katya, all smooth with Sally, do you ever use the motorized chair, are you eating well enough, have you seen Dr. Marion?

They are halfway through their wine when Elliot’s phone rings.

— Excuse me.

A woman’s voice from the sound of things. Elliot is quick and curt. Yes, no, I can’t talk right now, absolutely not, she doesn’t have a case, forget it, I said I can’t talk right now.

He shuts the phone and says: Jesus H.

And why in the world is the H always thrown in there? Our Father, who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name. Eileen once said: Why not A for Art? Our Father, who is Art in Heaven. Or sling them both together? Jesus H. A. Christ.

Elliot presses the phone down on the table, fingers some buttons, a piano player, even with his big meaty hands, a Richter of the keyboard.

— You’re a busy man, Elliot.

— Just work stuff, sorry. It never stops.

— Lady problems?

— Aren’t they all?

He deserves a good clip on the ear for that one. Good thing Eileen’s not around, she’d whip him silly, march him into the bathroom and soap his mouth out.

— My secretary.

— I see.

— Had to fire her.

— Sorry to hear that.

— She’s trying to sue me.

— That’s not good.

— Give them an inch, they take a mile. Bitcharita.

A sting of a word. A shot of Patrón. Salt on the wound. Bitcharita. An immigrant to the language. Beyond the blonde wives, Elliot always had a bit of an eye for the Latin girls.

— Sounds complicated.

Elliot flicks a look off into the distance. A little tremble of his eyelid and a twist of the mouth. Impossible to forget that he was once six years old, out on the beach in Long Island, blue shorts, a patch of dry sand on his shoulder, leaning against his mother’s shoulder, a sandwich in his hand, Eileen’s arm around his waist, the waves rolling up to shore, when he was the boy he seemed destined to be.

And there it is again, shimmying and shaking, vibrating on the table, what is this, Candid Camera?

— Sorry, Dad.

— Oh, that’s okay, go ahead, take it, really, it’s okay.

Though it’s not okay, it’s far from okay, it’s light years from okay — just do the right thing and turn the phone off, would you, please, son, keep Allen Funt locked in the kitchen, smile, you’re the star of the show, oh, the mind is a trampoline today, it was Allen Funt, wasn’t it? They were good years, uncomplicated, or so they seemed anyway, we gathered around the television together for the nightly shows, a long thin Elliot sprawled out on the carpet, Katya curled into her beanbag, he and Eileen in matching armchairs, the room was cozy, the fire was lit, there were belted ashtrays that hung around the arm of the chairs, and he smoked a pipe then, I haven’t touched a pipe in I don’t know how long, haven’t even smelled a cigarette for years.

A strong insistent whisper this time: I told you, I’m having lunch, don’t call me with this bullshit again.

Then a dip towards his wineglass: Sorry, Dad.

— Do you remember when they used to allow you to smoke in restaurants?

— Excuse me?

— I was just thinking about how everyone used to smoke. I still have the pipe, you know. In the bedroom.

— Nobody smokes pipes anymore, Dad.

— You can still smell the smoke in the bowl. If you put it to your nose. It lingers.

Elliot glances down at the phone again. And what is it that lingers anymore? Really what I want to talk to you about is those old days with your mother, when we were all together, and life rolled along, slow enough, day to day, and why is it that we complicate the past, is it simply just pipesmoke? But here we are, listening to you prattle about the bitcharita and yet another excuse for being late, and surely there’s something else, son? Should I have another try at my memoirs? Should I give Sally James a raise? Would you like another glass of Cabernet? How in the world are you going to fill that five-car garage? Could a man even poison himself with carbon monoxide in a place that big? No, no, tell me this and tell me no more: Do you miss your mother, son? Or tell me this: Do you recall the days we spent at the beach in Oyster Bay? Or tell me this: Do you ever return to the thought of her with the hint of a sigh?

And there it is again, the goddamn phone bronco-bucking on the table. From across the room come a few darting looks. He’s not mine, I promise you, he’s an alien — they make them big and blue-eyed and American now. A tut-tut from one of the Ladies Who Lunch, and a sympathetic tilt of the head from the waitress.

Rosita, Maid Marion, come rescue me, cart my son out into the snow, deposit him there, bring your bow and arrow, take careful aim, and shoot the fucking Apple off his head like Robin Hood, or indeed William Burroughs.

Elliot leans across and with the charm of which he is sometimes capable says: Do you mind, Father? I really have to take this one.

Do I what? Of course I mind. Here we are, breaking bread, and all you want to do is jabber on endlessly. There was once a time when you’d sit in the kitchen alcove, and we’d lean together over mathematics, quadrangles, quadratics, as close as any two could get, multiplied by one another. How long has it been since we actually looked at each other, tell me that, son. I’m a sentimental old fool, I’m dripping with nostalgia, but cynics bore me, and I might as well wear my heart on my sleeve, I’d like to talk to you without interruption, can you give me at least that?

— No problem, Elliot.

— Thanks, Dad.

He turns sideways in the chair, cups his hand over the phone, his big gold wedding ring shining. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. A silver bracelet on his wrist. To keep the vampires away. Didn’t work with Jacintha, that’s for sure. There is something afoot with Elliot, he can hear bits and pieces coming in his direction, a male voice this time, he jigsaws them both together, she was fired, fair and square, that’s extortion, there’s just no way, I’ll sue her, how dare she, who does she think she is, she’s a goddamn secretary, I don’t give a fuck what she calls it, look, Dave, I’m in a restaurant with my father, she just can’t, can you give me an hour, it was fair and square — goddammit, just take care of it, would you? — that’s what I pay you for, she wants a lawsuit she’ll get a lawsuit, executive assistant my ass, bring it on.

More to it always than meets the eye. How many women have slung accusations Elliot’s way? Hi, Barner Funds, Elliot Mendelssohn’s office, how can I help you? Save me a place in the unemployment line please, my boss just called me a bitcharita.

— Sorry, Dad, he says again, rolling his eyes at the phone and leaning across the table to take some bread from the basket.

No worries, son, I’ll just sit here awaiting my salmon with dill sauce and let the lazy day drift away.

— I’ll be right with you, I promise.

And there he goes with the finger again, and a shake of his jowls — he looks farm-caught himself, open-mouthed — and he is scooting back his chair, half the restaurant looking at him, hook, line, sinker.

Where in the world did I go wrong, did I ruin his childhood, did I neglect him, did I not read the right books to him, did I drop him on the crown of his early bald head? He came through the teenage years with flying colors, never caused too many problems. A good-looking kid, came home with his lacrosse trophies, debate certificates, chess medals. No late-night phone calls. No suspensions. No arrests. Amherst, then Harvard, got himself to Wall Street, hunkered down for a couple of years, played the money game, rolled the ball, made it round, but just look at him now, walking past the empty tables, towards the restrooms, watched by Dandinho all the way. An odd look on Dandinho’s face. Surely he’s seen many a customer chatting on the phone, cheating on the phone even? Maybe there’s a house rule against it, cheating and chatting?

I could do with another glass of Sancerre, where’s my medium-medium blonde, come to me, what is your name again, Rosita, Rosita, my stem, my petal, my thorn.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

If only real life could have the logic of the written word: characters with conscious actions, hidden causes becoming plain, all things moving toward a singular point, the universe revealing itself as inexorably stable, everything boiled down to a static image, controlled, ordered, logical. In a simple world it should have been a straightforward Jewish funeral, but Mendelssohn was an atheist, or so it was said anyway, agnostic at least, though he certainly had a touch of tradition to him, and he wasn’t averse to playing whatever card suited him. He had married a Catholic woman, and the children were raised between religions, and Mendelssohn himself had confessed to being Jewish when he wanted to be, and Lithuanian most of the time, but Polish if he needed to be, a touch of Russian if so charged, an American in most respects, an occasional European, even Irish every once in a while by virtue of his wife. A mongrel really, a true New Yorker, in a city where people never knew how to die. Cremation. Exhalation. Annihilation. A proper Jewish ceremony would have seen him buried as soon as possible, but then there was the issue of an autopsy and the delay of Mendelssohn’s daughter all the way from Tel Aviv, and the political aspirations of the son, and where his wife, Eileen, was buried, and whether his ashes should be scattered or not, and what he might have written in his will, and who might have had access to his very last wishes.

The service takes place on Amsterdam Avenue in the late morning, five days after the assault. The snow has turned to slush and there are deep puddles by the curbsides where the cars pull in. A sad splash of wheels in the potholes. It is a high, wide angle, but a good grade of footage: every funeral home in the city has its own series of hidden surveillance cameras. The detectives have, over the years, become watchers of funerals. It often surprises them that there are not more services on reality TV: there is something so compulsively informative about them. The way life gets played out in death. The manner in which the widow falls to her knees. Or not. The way in which the son shoulders the weight of the coffin. Or not. The way the father becomes the sole proprietor of the daughter’s death. Or not. The enigmatic notes arriving with the flowers. Or not. The subtle dig put in the eulogy by the rabbi, the priest, the imam, the vicar, the monk. Funerals as indicators of a life, how it was lived, the amount of tears shed, the keening and the rending of clothes, the sheer volume of mourners who choose to show up, the length of time people hang around afterward, the very nature of the way they hold their bodies. It has even struck them at times that they can tell some of the sexual predilections of the deceased just by looking at the clothes the mourners wear: the higher the hemline, the more ambitious the life. Hardly a mathematical formula, but then again so many things are unexplainable, and how is it that we know a life, except that we know our own, and it is brought into focus by the death of those around us.

Elliot is the first of the family to arrive. He steps out from his dark limousine and, interestingly enough, does not go to the other side of the car to help his wife emerge. Rather, he stands in the middle of the pavement and gazes up at the name of the funeral home as if he wants to read some deep significance into it. No outward sign of sorrow, though he still wears a torn black ribbon over his heart, a gesture at least to ancient tradition. His wife is a pile-up of peroxide. She stands alongside him, both together and apart. She has three children from previous marriages, and they step out from the car as if part of a moon landing, teenage boys, all gangle and long hair, looking as if they are already bored with their own patented slouch.

Elliot nods at them, checks his watch, consults his cell phone, a man distracted.

The daughter arrives ten minutes after Elliot. Katya Atkinson. Dark-eyed with grief and travel. She looks younger: early fifties maybe. She wears a dark skirt and a matching jacket. There is something fierce and intelligent about her. A streak of gray in her hair. She steps her agile way over the curbside puddle, toward her brother. Elliot leans down to give her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.

Together, brother and sister step toward the funeral home and are soon engulfed by others who have arrived almost simultaneously in a polite wave: judges, office workers, neighbors. The super and the doormen, including Tony DiSalvo. Sally James. At least one hundred people. Among them, too, the restaurant manager, Christopher Eagleton, and the busboy, Dandinho, who, upon his appearance, is marked as a person of significant suspicion: why in the world would the busboy arrive at the funeral?

The detectives return again to the restaurant footage, but Dandinho never leaves the building, not once, he simply has his animated conversation with Pedro Jiménez by the dishwashing station, and he is most certainly located on the footage by the bar when the punch is thrown outside the restaurant. Dandinho is, in fact, one of the first to go to Mendelssohn’s aid when he falls. He is calm and controlled when questioned, not a hint of guilt about him, keen to point out that Mendelssohn was one of his favorite customers, that he always took home his leftovers for his housekeeper, tipped well, was old-world, polite, a hint of a twinkle still in his eye. He did not witness the actual punch, although he heard the thump of the old man’s head on the pavement, he thought at first that maybe Mendelssohn had just slipped on the ice, but he knew immediately that he was dead, an awful thing, he felt very sorry for him, a terrible way to go, he went to the funeral to pay his respects, it was the Christian thing to do.

Although still a person of interest, the detectives rule Dandinho out. Same, too, with Eagleton.

They comb the funeral footage, looking for any other face or body language that might strike them as needing attention — they push in, push out, brush forward, rewind, bookmark what they find interesting, but there is nothing more compelling than the appearance of the middle-aged busboy.

And so, like the snow, or the latter point in a poem, the theories drift across the screen, opposition and conflict, so many possibilities available to the detectives, all of them intersecting in various ways, a Venn diagram of intent, the real world presenting itself with all its mystery — is it a murder of inheritance, a murder of jealousy, a murder of retribution, a murder of bitterness, or a murder simply tied to the random? They cannot discount the notion that it could be tied to an old case of Mendelssohn’s, a resurfacing on an anniversary, or a con just out of prison after serving a long sentence, or a specific grudge that has been left many years in abeyance, even though Mendelssohn has been retired from Kings County for six years and the detectives are unable to pinpoint any obvious cases likely to have left him with such a long-term enemy. A few gangland murders. The Screaming Phantoms, the Driggs Boys of Justice, the Tikwando Brothers, the Dirty Ones, the Vanguards, the Black Hands. Several minor Mafia figures and an early encounter with Roy DeMeo but no conviction. Some corruption cases. Break-ins. Carjackings. A high-profile city discrimination case in the late 1980s. Thousands of minor cases over the years. He was well liked in the corridors of Adams Street. He was known to spar verbally with the lawyers, but had a reputation as a relatively soft judge, a man of light sentence. No significant anniversaries. No candidates recently released from prison. Who would wait over a decade to extract revenge? Could it be that Sally James gave someone the nod along Madison Avenue and pointed him out? After all, Elliot Mendelssohn had installed cameras in the apartment to watch her, and he was aware that Sally had been given a generous stipend in the will to look after her nephew’s education. Or could it be that Elliot himself wanted to hurry up the inheritance? Perhaps he has some financial problems? When they question him about his restaurant phone calls he admits to having had a dalliance with his secretary, Maria Casillias, having recently fired her. Perhaps he was upset at something his father said to him? It is not beyond possibility that the anger built up inside him and he snapped. Or that he hired someone to snap on his behalf. Or perhaps there could be a tie-in with Katya, someone keen to wreck the final tatters of the Mideast peace process? But why would they do that in New York rather than Israel, and why would they go after her father rather than her? Could it be something that Mendelssohn said on his way out of the restaurant, just a glancing comment that elicited anger from a passerby? But there have been no other incidents along the street, on Park or Fifth or even down Lexington, and when they check the subway cameras they cannot locate anyone at all in a puffy jacket or a Boston College hat: it is as if the attacker has disappeared into thin air.

They play it again in their minds, in light of everything they already know. It is their hope that each moment, when ground down and sifted through, examined and prodded, read and reread, will yield a little more of the killer and the world he, or she, has created. They go forward metrically, and then break time again. They return, judge, reconfigure. They weigh it up and take stock, sift through, over and over. The breakthrough is there somewhere in the rhythmic disjunctions, in the small resuscitations of language, in the fractured framework.

The closest they have come to the killer is still in the footage just outside the restaurant where he steps into the frame for a quarter second in his jacket and hat, a man, most likely, bending over the body of Mendelssohn, maybe to check if he is alive, maybe to whisper some obscenity. The attacker pulls back and out of the frame and there is nothing more they can tell about him. He is, in essence, just a hat and a shadow. Moments later it is Dandinho bending over the old man, then the restaurant manager, Eagleton, followed by the waitress and the coat-check girl, and within minutes Mendelssohn is surrounded by dozens of passersby, the blood rivering from him, his hat fallen sideways, the bag of leftovers on the ground, a leak of dill sauce into the snow.

They rewind and freeze the attacker in his B.C. hat. Strange that, to come all the way from Boston. Or at least to showcase it in a rival city. And it is then that it hits them — one of those odd moments, when the truth comes in a sharp little slice, opening the echo chambers, releasing the synapses — that they may have been thinking in the wrong direction for quite a while now, and they have been flummoxed by their own preconceptions, like archaeologists, or critics, or literary scholars, and that it is so much more simple than they want it to be, and much of it lies in the attacker’s hat, the most available piece of evidence, but perhaps it is not a Boston College hat at all, but it could have any number of meanings, British Columbia, or a rock band, or the comic strip, an endless litany of B.C.’s, maybe even personal initials, but it could also possibly be the Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor-league team, yes, but a staple of the New York imagination, and this is the moment when the smallest of things becomes the linchpin, when the pit in the stomach grows, so that when the detectives google the Brooklyn Cyclones, they realize that the hats do have a similar texture to Boston College, the C braided into the B, they could easily be mistaken for one another, almost identical, especially in the off-color of the video images, the only difference being that the Boston College hat nearly always has an eagle braided into the brim, and how come they overlooked such a simple notion is beyond them, yes, of course, it must be the Cyclones, given that it’s closer to home, and perhaps then the killer is from Brooklyn, and wasn’t there somewhere along the course of the investigation that they saw a Brooklyn Cyclones reference, someone wearing a T-shirt, or something along those lines, a poster perhaps, yes, a poster, didn’t it creep along their sightlines, didn’t they make a vague note of it earlier when they were casting around? Or is it one of the recipients of Mendelssohn’s justice in Brooklyn long ago, a grudge revisited, did the Cyclones somehow creep into his litany of cases? Or is it just their imaginations and have the Cyclones never been mentioned at all?

In the hands of the detectives, the past never stops happening. They dive backward, with their spiral notepads, into the early verses of their work.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

One is too little, two is never enough. Another glass of Sancerre, please, my dear, then cut me off. Alexander the Great knew when and where to stop. It used to be, long ago long ago, that he could put away five, six glasses, but those days are gone, and his army has long since retreated.

In his early years there was the curious practice of the three-martini lunch. The Queen on Court Street. Luger’s on Broadway. Marco Polo’s in Carroll Gardens. But it was Gage and Tollner on Fulton Street that was the best of them all. Sunlight through the window. Motes of dust in the slanted shaftways. The gimlet hour. A spot of lime and soda, please. How in the world did the system operate when so much of the world was liquored up and tongue-loosened? You never quite knew what way the afternoon would swing. But he saw some great performances in his courtroom back in the day, lawyers who could spin out the most elegant of phrases when gin-lit. Standing up in the courtroom in slightly rumpled suits and ties, slurring, too, but still able to sling the sentences against sentence. Dan Barry, the best of them all. And Dwyer. And Cohen. And Dowd. All lawyer’s lawyers. They were sharpest in the morning. Their arguments could cut through steel. Come noon the world would grow fidgety. It was said that the worst time to finish a case was late in the afternoon when the judges were irritable and ready to go home. It was even worse earlier in the week, when they weren’t yet draped in the promise of a weekend’s respite. But for him, the energy would pick up with the assurance of escape from the gun barrels, the knifeblades, the razors, the meat cleavers, the endless parade of nightsticks and broken bottles. All that misery. It was as if, all of a sudden, the day had church bells in it, ringing again around four thirty as he sat in chambers, poring over evidence, or writing a judgment, or signing off on the endless paperwork which was, in itself, another form of mindless violence. Wake up, wake up, your day’s almost done. No more rapists. No more conmen. No more arsonists. No more shoplifters. No more stalkers. No more illiterate cops. It was like his own little get-out-of-jail-free card. The sun was going down, but the light was coming up. He never hung around for the evenings’ tomfoolery when the rest of them disappeared into the watering holes of Brooklyn, P. J. Hanley’s, the Inn, Buzzy’s place down by the waterfront. He caught a bit of shrapnel from within the party apparatus for moving to the Upper East Side, but he didn’t mind so much, it wasn’t incumbent on him to live in Brooklyn. He was off home to Eileen, driving across the bridge, no subway for him. The reverse commute. A lovely thing to see the sun fully disappear, a fine red aspirin swallowed by the city. He parked the car in the garage off Park Avenue. She would be waiting for him, in the kitchen, in her apron, dusting off her hands before she kissed him. He poured a stiff Scotch and headed straight for the deep leather armchair. How odd to live two such separate lives. He dozed off in the chair and woke to Eileen boiling up a cup of warm milk, his nightly mugshot.

Every now and then, Thanksgiving, Passover, Christmas, he’d stay out with the bigwigs in Brooklyn for a late night, or they’d drift their way to Manhattan, to the Lion’s Head, or McSorley’s, many of them Irish and paying the price for it. They thought of him as their Hibernian Jew: his accent still had a faint hint of the Dublin days and of course there was Eileen, reading aloud to him, putting what she called the rozziner in his language. The Irish war songs were merry, their love songs sad. They’d be there, in the courtrooms, the very next morning, after breakfast in Teresa’s on Montague, a little red around the eyelids, Janus-faced, but fully operational all the same. Keenan, Rhodes, Potter, McDonald, Jewell. Characters, all and sundry. Destined for heaven or hell, they didn’t really care that much. They were out and about, extracting life from life. What matter if half their clientele ended up on probation, or even worse, in jail? They had done their jobs. They had argued well. It was whiskey now, the water of life. Pour or be poured.

And how is it that the deep past is littered with the characters, while the present is so housebroken and flat? Wasn’t it Faulkner who said that the past is not dead, it’s not even past? Funny thing, the present tense. Technically it cannot exist at all. Once we’re aware of it, it’s gone, no longer present. We dwell, then, in the constant past, even when we’re dreaming of the future. Surely that’s a theme of some Shakespearean sonnet or other, though I can hardly remember them, waves coming towards the shore, our hastening minutes, our secret toil.

Oh, the head is spinning. Too much wine. The grapes of wrath. One is too little, and two is never enough. Words, it seems, that young Elliot has taken to heart, out there in the bathroom, or the restroom, or the john, or the jacks, or the vanetsimer, or the pishen hole, or whatever they call it nowadays. Gone ten, fifteen minutes. Take a good look in der shpigl, young man, and tell me what it is you see. He always was a boy vain for the mirror, especially in his college days, glancing at himself sideways every chance he got, that long blond hair on him.

How quickly the bright child becomes the ruined man. One is too little, two is often enough.

It was always Katya to whom he gravitated anyway. Quite the girl. A handful in her early years. An Upper East Side Marxist. At thirteen she sheared her hair. Then, a year later, got herself a nose ring. Wore a Che Guevara T-shirt on the few occasions that they went to temple together. She forged his signature on several checks that were made out to the Black Panthers. It started out in twenty-dollar installments, but ended up with one thousand. He learned about it through an article in the New York Post. He was not amused. He was the butt of jokes left, right, and center. They took, in the judicial corridors, to calling him Malcolm X. For her sixteenth birthday she sent her own check for five hundred dollars, but by then the novelty had worn off and she took, instead, to dropping the family’s china out the rear window of the apartment. Out with the footed cups and saucer plates! Out with the coupe soup bowls! Out with the tiered serving tray! Out with the immaculate gravy boat! ¡Viva la revolución! Who needs butter plates anyway? Let’s see how the sterling silver bounces! Hark, the serving platters sing! The courtyard was like an echo chamber. She loved how finely it splintered: apparently the sign of good china was how minutely it broke. They lived on the sixth floor, so there was time enough to hear the Waterford whistle. Several of the downstairs neighbors opened their windows and shouted at her to stop, but secretly they were surely interested in the sailing symphony. Stop, please stop, Katya, stop. Okay, if you must, just one more demitasse, please, my dear.

She went through a few thousand dollars’ worth of china over the course of two nights. The best punishment was no punishment at all. He went and kissed her sleeping forehead. A judge didn’t judge, not his own daughter anyway. She was into her military industrial complex by then. Ranted and raved and roared. Said he was having an obvious love affair with Nixon. Made Calvin Coolidge look like a liberal. Was interested to know if he’d like to buy body bags for all the students in her classroom. A government garment, she said. No pockets in a shroud. Went out in the streets with a loudspeaker, all five foot two of her, screaming through the canyonlands. Occidental death, she called it. But they all turn around in the end, anyway. Or some of them do anyway. She went out west to Berkeley where they put some manners on her, much to his surprise. Oriental Studies. Did her thesis on Ptolemy the Second. The Book of Optics. Vision occurs in the brain rather than the eyes. And isn’t that the truth? Went on to the State Department then. Agitating for peace while the rest of them made war. The argument for war has an easy gravity, she told him, but the one for peace does not. A smart cookie, Katya, even if she went out there to Israel, the one place on earth where it was guaranteed not to happen, at least not in this lifetime. You might as well try to turn the wine back into water.

— Would you like me to keep your son’s plate warm, Mr. Mendelssohn?

— That’s okay, Rosita.

— How’s your salmon?

— Oh, it’s good, very good.

Though he has hardly tasted a bite, if truth be told. Not a nourishing way to get through the day. Should have just had lunch on my own rather than invite Elliot along. So much better to sit in an accepted silence than have it enforced. That was something that Katya has learned no doubt: the power of silence. Broke her heart not to see peace. Came so close and then got whiskered away. What was his name? Arafat. To which Eileen once whispered: Ara-fat-lot-of-good-he-is-anyway. Always a woman for the fine Gaelic twist. Don’t put all your begs in one ask-it.

— Is it ever going to stop snowing?

— Doesn’t seem like it, Mr. Mendelssohn.

Oh, the way she rolls her m’s, I bet she’s great with p’s and q’s. Should tell her the story of how I became Quinner, though I can’t quite even remember it myself. Was it simply the sound of the word? Dublin was a good place. Always reminds me of hats.

We leap from cliff edge to cliff edge. Falling occasionally to the ground, sometimes with a good smack, but that’s part of the bargain with age. The memories are still agile enough. Thank God above I never went the Alzheimer’s route. Couldn’t stand the thought of a nursing home. A dark little room at the end of the corridor, somewhere in Queens or the Bronx or Tobago. The heating on too high. The flowers wilting in a grimy little vase. The nurses with a penchant for a backhand smack. Imagine all life coming down to that. Though they say certain ones among them could be lively enough. All those younger widows still willing and able to disappear beneath the covers. He heard once that the incidence of disease is highest of all in nursing homes. One last hurrah. Any port in a storm. The welts and boils hardly matter at that stage. Odd to think that there could ever be another love affair. Wonder if Sally ever thought of it, alone there in her little room, her small TV set, her playing cards on her little table? Solitaire. The only game in town. Would make for a great Hollywood epic that, the Supreme Court justice and his housekeeping nurse, double duty, finally shacking up after all those years. Conflict, drama, resolution. Roll up, roll under. Get your tickets today. He could sign another portion of the will over to her. Her nephew would get a fine schooling then. Perhaps that’s what I should do? Go right home and take out the pages from the files and put that boy further in the will, to hell or high water with Elliot and everyone else. Wouldn’t really cost that much. What is it Sally gets a week? Five hundred with room and board? That’s twenty-five grand a year, most of which she probably sends back. Could save that boy’s life with an extra ten thousand dollars. A drop in the bucket really. A fine lot better than slinging it Elliot’s way, although Katya might bear some of the brunt, and those beautiful kids I seldom see. Still and all, she has enough, his Katya, and how in the world did I get here anyway? Alzheimer’s. That’s the thing. Don’t have it now, probably never will. Would forget about it if I did. Isn’t that right, Eileen? What an awful thing it would be to forget your own wife, though. Though, there are times when he opens a door, or wakes in the morning, and he’s sure she’s still there. Good morning, mo chroí. What am I doing out here on my own? Jilted by my own son.

Rosita, my dear, I lied to you. The salmon is rubbery. The dill sauce is too milky. I feel like I’m back in the Waldorf Astoria. And really I just want to go home to Eileen. Wrap it up there in two white cloths, Dandinho, let me go.

— Sorry, Dad.

Surprise, surprise. Kill the fatted calf. Elliot parks his large carcass in the seat opposite, his face engine-red. Just short of steam coming out of his ears. Tie a blood-pressure cuff around his arm and the needle might break the glass. He’s a certain candidate for a heart attack if he keeps this up. And why in the world would he be fooling around with his assistant anyway? Would he not go the way of that other Elliot, the Spitzer boy, with one l, destined for h-e-l — but he was bright enough at least to cough up a few shekels for a bit of companionship?

Elliot pushes his plate forward on the table top.

— Listen, I’m going to have to take care of a few things….

— Okay.

— At the office.

— You haven’t even touched your food.

— Just get it wrapped, Dad. Take it home. Give it to — whatshername?

— Sally.

— That’s right.

Elliot flicks another look at his phone.

— Is everything okay, El?

He hasn’t called him by the diminutive in years. The elevated track. Is everything okay? If that’s not the stupidest question I ever asked, I don’t know what is. But it doesn’t seem to register with Elliot at all, neither the question nor the name. The boy seems distracted beyond language. He turns in the seat and clicks his fingers, then rubs them together like he’s divining money. Dandinho stands over in the corner, looking straight ahead. Most certainly something on that man’s mind. And what was it about Ptolemy? The truth of sight. He darkened his room and set up a camera obscura on the balcony. The first man to successfully project an entire image from outside onto a screen indoors. That’s what Katya said. A ray of light could not proceed from the eyes. Rather, light was the thing that proceeded towards the eye. The outside world giving to the world inside. He’s never seen Dandinho be anything but polite, but here he is now, fuming in the corner, a light from his eyes looking like it could scorch a path through the restaurant.

— Tell me this, Elliot.

Clicking his fingers again, over his shoulder, like some Arab prince. No friend of Aristotle’s. He feigned madness to keep himself out of prison.

— Did you have words with Dandinho?

— Davido?

— It’s Dandinho. He’s Brazilian. The busboy.

— Never saw him before in my life.

— He looks a bit upset.

— Wouldn’t you be? A busboy at his age?

On a roll now. The anger all sharp-angled. Slapping his credit card down on the table.

— Where’s our waitress?

Was Ptolemy happy to know what he knew? Is Katya happy to keep on struggling? Is Sally happy to wake up in the morning? Not much happiness here in Elliot, that’s for sure. He has the wife, the car, the garage, the job, the kids, but there’s no joy there at all. Used to have it, long ago. A dark magician. Lost it up his sleeve.

— It’s on me, Elliot.

His son still clicking his fingers in Dandinho’s direction.

— Good place, this, to open a restaurant.

— My treat, I insist.

— Where the hell is she?

— Rosita.

— What?

— Rosita’s her name.

— I don’t need her name, Dad, I just need the bill. Sorry. I know, I know. I just, I have some stuff I really have to take care of. An hour ago. I called you. I should have—

Ah, the tremble in my pocket on the street. So the ringer is off after all.

— I told you, son, it’s my pleasure.

He watches as Dandinho passes along the back of the restaurant, carrying the water jug.

— Jesus, says Elliot.

Without the H. Or the A. No joy at all.

None and sweet fuck-all.

— Next week, Dad, I promise.

Finally she comes around the corner, her long blond locks bouncing. Thirty-two perfect shining white teeth. A pair of sharp blue eyes. A girl destined for the big screen, surely, but didn’t she tell him earlier that she was an artist? Or did he just surmise that? There was a touch of blue on the inside of her wrist, wasn’t there?

— Rosita, my dear, this is my bill.

— No way, Dad.

— Look, you haven’t even had a bite. Rosita and I have an understanding, isn’t that right, Rosita?

Smiling her great big Rhodesian Zimbabwean smile.

— Doesn’t the home player get the advantage?

— Sir?

— I mean, I’m the local here, am I not?

A small amount of confusion hovering at the edges of her mouth.

— Besides, he says, I haven’t even ordered dessert.

Shifting her weight from foot to foot, she smiles down at Elliot, a thin regal smile.

— I guess your dad wins, she says.

— I guess he does, says Elliot.

And, just like that, he has tucked the credit card away in his shiny brown wallet, as if he had never intended to pay at all. He taps the wallet like the head of a friendly dog. You’re not really serious, are you, son? Just like that? Not an ounce of irony? One two three and then away? Like shit off a shovel? Aren’t we supposed to at least play a little bit of bob-and-weave? Isn’t that what the etiquette demands? You jab, I jab, you duck, I don’t. Who raised you anyway? What barn door opened up and tossed you out? Never touched the boy once in my life, but, ay, he deserves a good rap across the wrist now. Bring Katya along and have her produce peace at this table. The last time I fought with anyone was along the Royal Canal when I fell, ten pins down, after a single slap from some carrot-headed Gypsy boy. It rocked a tooth loose in the back of my jaw. The tongue went to it over and over again. A probe of pain. Like fatherhood. Trying to ease those little aches that spring up each and every day. The promise of consolation outlasting the punishment of living.

— So you’re off then?

— You know.

No, I don’t know, not really.

— Shit happens, Dad.

Indeed, it does. Just ask Sally James.

Oh, the morning seems so distant to me now. Gay gazinta hate. That fine doublespeak. Eileen adopted that phrase when she heard it, she loved to say it over and over, at the door, or at the end of a night, there was something pure Dublin about it for her. Go in good health and Get lost all at once.

— Sorry to hear about your trouble.

— Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll crush her.

Crush her? Really? There’s no doubt that Elliot has, and could, crush many a thing, though perhaps he shouldn’t wear it as a badge of honor. The big rich white man crushing the small brown girl? Hardly a moment of enlightenment. No rewriting of history. How many times has that happened, from Christopher Columbus all the way here, now, to Elliot Mendelssohn?

— Just look after yourself, son.

Which is not what he meant to say at all. Rather he should have said: Don’t be despicable, Elliot. Stop twisting women’s arms. Display some heart. Stop whining. Show some character. Grow up. Talk to me about our gone days. Give me something to kvell over.

Elliot leans down to sip the last of his wine, a trickle in the end of the glass.

And what is this but a hand coming across the table to shake his, as if they have just done a business deal, no stand-and-hug, no clap on the back, no manly peck on the cheek. Not quite sure, Elliot, if I’ve ever disliked you more than at this particular moment. Is that it? Is that all we get? No sweet words, no revelations, no human resolutions, just a new word added to the lexicon, and not even a good one.

Elliot swipes a napkin across his wine-colored mouth and throws the crumpled result down upon the table, a mountain of cloth.

— I’ll call you.

— You do that.

— We’ll get a proper lunch.

Gay gazinta hate indeed. Elliot, son, you could clear a room quicker than the Black Death.

There he goes, lumbering across the restaurant towards the coat check. Keying something again into his cursed phone. Stared at by Dandinho. He might burn a hole in his back. Go ahead, Dandinho, wrap him in aluminum and sling him out into the street.

— Rosita.

She turns immediately from the bar where she is leaning seductively against the counter.

— Yes, Mr. Mendelssohn?

— I think I’m finished here. Can you have Dandinho wrap them up? And I’d like to order a dessert.

— Yes, sir. What’ll you have?

He should ask her now about her paintings. What is your life really like, out there in Brooklyn, or the Bronx, and that blue on your wrist, is that from a painted sky, because all I can remember of a very blue sky was a day in September when it all came crashing down.

— The tiramisu, I suppose.

— Great choice, Mr. Mendelssohn.

Thank you, my dear. Lovely once and always, moonlight in your hair. Time was, once, when the world was full of the likes of you.

And there the silhouette of Elliot goes, along past the window, the dark shaping itself into the white of the storm.

Jilted, then. By my own son.

And look at that. Two little puddles of rainwater on the floor beneath the table. All that’s left of Elliot.

Which makes him think: time to tap a kidney.

He scoots the chair away from the table. And how is a man supposed to negotiate these other tables all sandwiched together? A slalom course. Hit the gates, zoom down the snowy mountain, watch out for patches of ice.

— How is everything, Mr. Mendelssohn?

Eagleton, the new manager. A long skinny drink. Awful complexion. Skin all rutted and scarred. It would hardly help to tell him the truth.

— Just fine, thank you. The salmon was delicious.

— Good.

— And the waitress.

A strange look on Eagleton’s face. Oh, no, no, no. Not that she was delicious. No, no. Or not that she wasn’t. Just a good waitress. Is what I meant. Not delicious.

— She’s very charming.

— I’m very glad to hear that, Mr. Mendelssohn. Can I help you there?

— I’m fine, thanks. A quick visit.

He nods in the direction of the bathroom. Just standing up, he can feel the necessity. God, oh, God, there are times indeed when the winter gear would help on the slippery slope.

Through the tables he goes, tapping his cane on the ground. He flicks a quick look towards the kitchen through the circular porthole on the swinging kitchen door. Like ships, these restaurants. He can just about make out Dandinho, ahoy there, in full and animate conversation with a small little aproned man. Not fisticuffs but certainly a little wave bouncing between them.

A flash of eyes from the aproned man. Over Dandinho’s shoulder. Hardly a hello either, what is the world coming to? Just jocular no doubt. Wonder if that’s the man who prepared my salmon? Though he doesn’t look like a chef. More like a porter.

Onwards, anyway. The smell of Clorox. Bathe me in it. Cleanse me.

No emporium of handles in this bathroom but at least it’s clean and tidy. Only a quick whizz anyway. Root around, find the equipment, extinguish, wash your hands, be on your way, two minutes flat, make the fire-hose company proud.

In the corridor, he glances towards the kitchen once more. No sign of Dandinho or the aproned man. Around the corner, through the tables. Candles in daytime. Snow still out the window.

Tiramisu on the table, yes. The world restored. Thank you, Rosita. What we all need, from time to time, is a little pick-me-up.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

In nearly all interrogation rooms, the camera is set up high in a corner: the cobweb cam. It is preferable to have a glimpse of the doorway — the truth is so often worn in the shape of arrival. The innocent walk in and sit straight down, perplexed, their hands joined together as if eager to be in prayer, but the guilty often pause for a second to look at the room and gauge it, searching for a hiding place, ready to defy their own knowledge of what has happened.

The furnishings of the room are designed so that there is nowhere to turn: the bareness itself is an accusation. Two or three chairs, near always wooden. A simple desk, generally one with a shallow drawer: no sense of heft or hidden things. In the drawer, a few sheets of paper and a simple pen. A two-way mirror on the far wall, plain, unadorned. Nothing to be used as a weapon: no folding chairs or glass or sharp pencils. No cups or coffee machines. No distracting posters on the walls. A carpet is unlikely, but if it exists, it’s monotone. The baseboards painted the same color as the walls. The light is often fluorescent and hard, though there is sometimes a table lamp that the detectives turn on when the truth starts to emerge: it softens the light, takes away the edges, redeems the room.

The camera is positioned high enough that it is not the first thing seen, but those who pause in the doorway — so often the guilty — glance upward at it. There is much to be interpreted from the eye-flick: fear, defiance, insolence, disdain. Often they try to sit with their backs to the lens but the detectives are quick to redirect them to the other side of the table. The detectives count the amount of times their interviewees look up at the camera: the more they do so, the more likely they are to lie.

Others — so often the innocent — go immediately to sit down, as if they want to protect their truth, keep it tight, hold it in its own little universe for a while, put their arms around it. Theirs is a searing gaze into the lens: a mixture of plea and terror.

There are times the detectives leave the interviewees alone in the room. They watch, then, through the two-way mirror. It is nearly always the guilty who wave up at the camera: a fuck-you defiance. Some go to the corner underneath the camera to try to hide from it. In some stations there is a second camera set up in the opposite corner, though sometimes it is just a dummy, a second eye.

The room is nearly always sealed off from sound, though the camera itself is wired to pick up all noise. For backup the detectives also use a recorder.

When Pedro Jiménez is hauled in for questioning he displays a curious cocktail of innocence and guilt. He arrives in a suit jacket and blue shirt and white chef pants, a sad garage sale of a man, fifty-seven years old, a little isthmus of hair in the center of his forehead. He is thin, but gone a little to jowl, an autumn of skin upon him. He stands in the doorway and glances around but doesn’t look up to the camera, rather turns toward the Latina detective as if beseeching her to make sense of the room. Her hair is dark, her eyes are dark, her clothes dark too. She wears a simple gold chain around her neck. She touches Pedro’s elbow and guides him toward the seat at the bare wooden desk. She is followed moments later by another detective, a pale white loaf of a man who takes his chair to the end of the table. He places the chair backward, puts his chin on the rest, leans close.

Hemmed in, Pedro glances up at the camera as if he might be able to see his own reflection in the glass, then looks back down at his hands upon the tabletop. Surprisingly he pulls from his pocket a pair of reading glasses, though there is nothing in front of him to read.

When he perches the glasses on his nose he seems like a different man, not a scruffy dishwasher anymore but something of the disheveled librarian about him.

The female detective speaks to him at first in a Spanish that seems as if it has been scuffed and rolled on the streets of the city. The date, the time, the exact location of the interview. Is he aware, she asks, that their conversation is being recorded? He has not been arrested, but the word yet seems silently attached to the end of her sentence. She knows that he is a family man. She’d like to help him out. She’s not interested in his immigration status. She is friends with a lot of people in the Costa Rican community, she is from the islands herself, born in the D.R., moved here when she was two years old. She is easy, chummy, open, her body turned sideways in the chair. She knows that he has a past but everybody has a past, isn’t that right, Pedro? Pedro nods, a slight shine behind his spectacles. The detectives stop to whisper in English and then Pedro tells her that he understands perfectly, he’d be happy to do the interrogation in either language. She says that, yes, Rick, her partner, is a bit rusty. We appreciate it, Pedro, she says, we really do. Still, she maintains a lilt to her questions, as if her English has just swum through the Caribbean. She is interested in clean slates, she says. She avoids the word murder. It is an assault, a serious assault, a tragedy really. Is he aware of what happened? Yes. Has he heard anything come along the grapevine? No. Some people just lose it, you know? I suppose so. Did you ever lose it yourself, Pedro? No, I’m a quiet man, I live a quiet life. You live in Brooklyn, yes? Yes. Where? You know, Coney Island. What’s it like living out there, Pedro? Gets windy sometimes. That’s funny, gets windy, you hear that, Rick, it gets windy in Coney Island, Pedro’s a comedian. I’m not trying to be funny, Mami. Just kidding, Pedro — so, how long you been working in the city? Twenty years. How long in Chialli’s? Four. Four? Yes. Hard to look after a family on a dishwasher’s salary? My wife, she’s dead. You get by? I get by. You got a daughter? Yeah, Maria. Maria’s married? She just got divorced, she’s looking for a job. She got laid off? Yeah, she got laid off a couple of months ago. She got kids? Two. That’s a tough life, Pedro, divorced, two kids, just got laid off, want some water, Pedro? No. You look like you might need a drink of water.

He adjusts the glasses on his nose. She leans forward, the male detective leans back. It is as if there is some sort of swinging pulse in the room, the bodies, like rhyme, dependent on one another.

So, I’d like to talk about the restaurant, Pedro. Whatever you want, Mami, I’ve got nothing to hide. You can’t remember anything unusual happening that day, like anything to do between you and Dandinho, because we heard a thing or two, let’s be honest, let’s be fair here, Pedro, we heard you had a little bit of puñetazos? He glances upward at the camera but holds a pursed tightness to his lips, shakes his head, no, that argument with Dandinho, that was nothing, Mami, nothing, they have a fútbol pool among the employees, you know, a little betting gig, and there was a — what do you call it? — a question over a Corinthians game in Brazil, a dispute, just a bit of fun, nothing to it. Was there anything else Dandinho said to you? No. You sure? I’m sure. And where did you go then, Pedro? The bathroom. But isn’t that the busiest time of day, the lunch shift, Pedro, what are you doing going to the bathroom then? I was taking a shit. You were taking a shit? Yes. That’s all right, Pedro, everyone takes a shit, but are you sure that shit of yours didn’t get any snowflakes on it? Snowflakes? Did you go out the employee exit by any chance, maybe to get a breather, Pedro, maybe to have a smoke? I don’t smoke. But did you go out, maybe pick up your jacket, maybe pick up your hat, and take a little breather outside, through the employee entrance, out the steel door to Madison Ave? I didn’t go anywhere. Just went back to washing dishes? Yeah. Pearl diving they call it, isn’t that right, Pedro? I suppose. Why do they call it pearl diving? Listen, I’ve got a job, I’ve got two grandkids, I don’t know.

There is, in the questioning, a moving cadence, sometimes delivered to the point of the desired information, at other times looping in discursive swirls, designed precisely to disguise.

That’s something we wanted to talk to you about, Pedro. What? About Maria. Maria? You know, her getting divorced, losing her job, coming back in to live with you in Coney Island. She wanted to save money. Did it put some pressure on you maybe? No. Because Maria, she had a good job — where was it she worked again? — what was it she said to us, Rick? You talked to Maria? Of course, we talked to Maria. Maria’s got nothing to do with any of this. Any of what? What are you doing talking to Maria? Any of what, Pedro? Nothing. Nothing? She’s a good girl, is all I said. Of course, she’s a good girl. Then leave her out of it. To be honest, Pedro, well, she had a lot of things to say. Maria wouldn’t say nothing bad about me. Of course, she didn’t say anything bad about you, she’s crazy about you, la niña de sus ojos. So what’s the problem? No problem, Papi. Then what am I doing here? You know the Barner Funds? The what? Maria was working for the Barner Funds. Yeah, what about it? What do you think of the Barner Funds? She had a good job, she liked it there, that’s all. That’s all? That’s it. It didn’t piss you off, Pedro? No, why should it? Even when she got fired? That’s a couple of months ago, I told you. What do you think about the bosses there, Pedro? Nothing, none of my business, never thought about them. Because Maria told us that she was bringing a lawsuit against the Barner Funds for wrongful dismissal, did you know that? Sure. And what did you think? Bueno, no big deal. And you know that guy Elliot Mendelssohn? Huh? He’s the son of the guy that got punched outside your restaurant? Yeah. You’ve got to forgive me here, Pedro, but this guy Elliot, he might’ve, I don’t know, he might’ve stepped in between Maria and your son-in-law a few months ago. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You know what I mean, before she got fired? What? That’s just what we heard, that he might’ve just had a bit of a wandering hand with Maria, that they — sorry to say this, Pedro, you’re a father, and fathers don’t like to hear this shit, mothers don’t either, trust me, but fathers for sure don’t, right? What the fuck. What I’m saying, Pedro, is they made further acquaintance a couple of times in a hotel in Stamford, where this guy Elliot lives, up there in Connecticut, with his wife and kids, he’s got a fondness for hotels, Pedro, do you know what I mean, are you hearing me, Pedro, is anybody home, knock-knock, who’s there, are you hearing me, Pedro, is anyone there? I don’t know what you mean. You don’t? No, I don’t. Maybe you felt something bad about the Barner Funds, like maybe this guy Elliot was exploiting her, maybe he was dabbling a little too much? Maria never did that, Maria’s a good girl, Maria was married. Don’t get me wrong, Pedro — this guy Elliot he’s a prime-rib asshole, we know that. I don’t know him, never met him. Maybe he was suggesting to Maria that he was going to make her rich, but then he turns around and fires her? I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe he was whispering sweet nothings. I never heard of him before. Maybe the jury’ll buy that story, Pedro? What story? You being a father and all, you punched his father? I didn’t punch no one. Are you sure about that, Pedro? I swear to God, Mami. You can call me Carla. I didn’t punch no one. Maybe you didn’t mean to hit him so hard, just an accident, like? I told you, I didn’t touch him. Maybe pushed him over? No. You want that glass of water now? Are you telling me that I need a lawyer? Look, we’re not trying to nail you here, Pedro. I have the right to a lawyer, I know that. You certainly do, but what we’re trying to do is help you here, that man who died, he was a judge once, Pedro, Brooklyn Supreme Court, and the way things are looking, you’re going to need us on your side. I didn’t punch no one. ’Cause, me and Rick here, we’re on your side.

It is then they must pause and change the tempo — not a good idea to walk out of the room and leave Pedro alone, in case he decides to clam up further, or engage a lawyer, but it is time to shift the territory a little, so Carla rises from her chair, leaving Pedro alone with Rick, the big damp white loaf, making the room so very male and somehow even more cramped. And it is here that Rick employs the direct gaze, the lean forward, the half-menace, and asks Pedro if he can explain again where he was at the time of the assault, and why did he move from his dishwashing station, and what was the earlier argument he had with Dandinho, and when he went to the bathroom is it possible that he took the employee exit to the street — can you answer me that, Pedro? — and is it possible perhaps he even ducked back in the same door just seconds later, is any of that viable at all, because it’s understandable, man, it’s his son, it’s your daughter, you know what I mean? We’re here to help, frankly I’d like to put that Elliot asshole behind bars, he’s the one who should take the rap, know what I’m saying?

When Carla returns she has one glass of water and three orange sodas in glass bottles, and she slides the Jarritos across the table, and it is as if they are in a distant cantina together, somewhere safe and warm, somewhere they can trust one another, but Pedro leaves the soda sitting in front of him. Carla leans forward and asks again about Maria, what she was like growing up, if she had any problems, if she ever mentioned any difficulties at work, if she got upset, if she said anything about going to Connecticut. Pedro takes the water, but leaves the soda untouched.

The time slips away from them, the clockhands on the wall turn, the fluorescent light in the office remains constant. The detectives ready themselves for their last-line flurry.

So, Pedro, did she tell you? Tell me what? About her thing with Elliot Mendelssohn? Her what? Her liaison, you know, her monkey business. Don’t know what you’re talking about. How do I say it delicately for you, Pedro? Say what? She was fucking this guy, Pedro, now calm down, Papi, calm down, cálmese. I’m calm, don’t talk about my girl that way. Okay, okay, what do you know about their re-la-tion-ship? I don’t know nothing about that. Because the way I see it, she was living a good life, wasn’t she, Pedro, at one stage, she was happy, right? I got nothing to say. She was a good girl, doing a good job, went to secretarial school, got a good husband, he was a nice guy, second generation, she’s making you proud, you like your son-in-law, you like your grandkids, life is good, she’s happy, she’s got herself a little place in Rockaway, picket fence, you know what I mean, the American dream, are you there, Pedro, we gotta play knock-knock again? I’m listening. Working for an investment firm, wearing nice clothes, making some good money, assistant to the CEO, and here she is, now, she’s working in Midtown, an office on Lexington Avenue, big glass tower, and then one day, poof, it’s all gone, in a flash of smoke, her boss turns out to be the asshole he always threatened to be, and he flat-out fires her. I don’t know nothing about that. And then you hear that he’s in the restaurant? I didn’t hear nothing. Maybe Dandinho tells you? Dandinho didn’t tell me nothing. You’re just talking fútbol? That’s it. Dandinho, he’s your best friend, right? What’s Dandinho got to do with this? And you’ve confided in him maybe, about how your little girl lost this job at the Barner Funds, and he puts two-and-two together, says the old man is out there right now — Pedro, is that what happened? — because it’s perfectly forgivable, man, I can see it plain as day, by the time Dandinho tells you that Elliot Mendelssohn is in the restaurant, he’s gone, and you, you been washing his dishes. We were arguing about fútbol. But it’s not just fútbol, is it, Pedro? Huh? Are you a baseball fan, Pedro? Sí, claro. What’s your team? Don’t really have one. So, how much do you get paid again, Pedro? Eight bucks an hour, ten-fifty for overtime. Not a great job, dishwashing, is it? It’s okay, I do some other things too. Like what, Pedro? Some vending, you know. Is that right? Yeah. You push the peanuts then, do you, Pedro? I don’t know what you mean. Where do you do your vending? At the Cyclones. You mean the Brooklyn Cyclones? Yeah, the Brooklyn Cyclones, what’s the problem? And by any chance do they give you a uniform to wear, Pedro, a hat maybe? Sure, I wear a hat sometimes, everyone wears a hat, in the kitchen anyway, you got to wear a hat. But you wear a Brooklyn Cyclones hat? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mami.

Slowly they draw back their words, form them into a fist, hold them in mid-air a moment, then propel them forward.

Because we got a guy on camera wearing a Brooklyn Cyclones hat and he looks like a dead ringer for you.

Where?

Outside Chialli’s, leaning over the dead man.

I don’t know nothing about it.

On camera, Pedro. A dead ringer.

For me?

You and him, Pedro, dos gotas de agua.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

More to the point, the endless journey home. Let freedom ring, Sally, from the hilltops. Throw another log on the fire. Warm the pan, boil the milk, melt the chocolate, position the chair, unfold the blanket, hear the lumber hiss. Perhaps I should call her and let her know I’m on my way. Then again, she’ll probably rush out into the storm. What in the world are you doing, Mr. J.? I’m coming home, Sally. Jilted by my very own son. He left me high and dry. Not even dry, come to think of it. I could have done with some winter gear. He even let me pay the check. Still, we’ve a little salmon and a lot of steak to see us through the storm. Unwrapped for some reason. Dandinho didn’t do his job.

Awkward this, having to hold the plastic bag and the walking stick at the same time. But here we go, onwards, upwards, away.

Well, almost.

He stands in the outer foyer and hears the restaurant door close behind him. Goodbye now, Mr. Mendelssohn. Her sweet Rhodesian Zimbabwean voice and the last strain of music from inside. Should hurry back in and order myself a hot brandy. A spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

Good God, but it is curtaining down. Never seen anything quite like it. Slantways, broadside, edgeways. A theater, a blockbuster, an opera of snow. All the taxi drivers onstage, sliding left, right, sideways into the pit. An applause of windshield wipers. Trucks and vans, headlights blazing, and some poor idiot on a motorcycle. An actual biting snow. Like those little circular weapons, a million flying chakri aimed my way.

Hardly a soul on the street. A tad early for the mommies and the nannies on their way down to PS 6. No flowerboys. No deliverymen. No one shoveling. No rock-salt rollers.

Should hail a taxi, really, but he would have to take me past the synagogue, up to Eighty-eighth, down the block, back down Park Avenue, along Eighty-sixth again, and who knows what sort of trafficjam there might be in that direction. Car horns blaring everywhere. A terrible sound, really. Isn’t the snow supposed to deaden the sound? How is it that my hearing gets worse but the awful sounds get louder day after day? A cacophony. That’s the word. The pianist playing the contrabass. The saxman on the violin. The flautist on the horn, so to speak.

Isn’t there supposed to be a fine for overuse? Listen up, Elliot. They have it for car horns, they’ll get you yet.

What is it that happened to him? Why couldn’t he be the boy he promised he would be? He did well in his final exams, threw his graduation hat in the air, took his mother by the arm, walked her proudly around Cambridge. She was happy then, she laughed, we did, together. Moved back to the city. Lived in the Village. Found himself a little French girl. What was her name? So long ago now. Chantal. And she could. Sing, that is. Eileen was a big fan. A voice like a wren. At the holiday parties she was always there. And then she wasn’t. A ladle dipping down into the well of the mind. The strangest things appear and disappear. Who was it who gazed into the bottom of the well? Who was looking for their reflection in the dark?

Dark it is too. For this time of day. But onwards, let’s go.

A chill at the neck. Didn’t even button up my coat properly. Spent so long inside sliding my arms into the sleeves, they must have felt they were getting me in a straitjacket. Still, they were happy, all of them. Left a ten-dollar bill for a sulky Dandinho, and gave Rosita thirty percent, why not, she deserves a thing or two beyond the blue mark on her wrist.

A beauty.

Reminded me somewhat.

As all beauty does.

He balances precariously against the wall of the foyer, shifts the collar and lifts the scarf out and over his mouth. An impromptu balaclava.

Here, Eileen, come take my hand and step me out onto Madison. Many days we walked here together, though I remember you in sunshine, you wore a pale sundress and a simple pearl necklace, though the truth is we probably remember things as more beautiful than they actually were. The years put a few pounds on her in the end, and she walked with a bit of a lopsided limp. The folds and the creases and the humps at the hip. Cruel, the way God plays it. The more we know of time, the less we have of it. The less we have, the more we want. The scales of justice. If there is such a word. I was born in the middle of something or other.

On now. Soldier forth.

Sally too.

Out into the hard bite of snow, one step, two. An immediate chill against the high of his cheeks. He closes his eyes and tries to shake the burn away. The shock of it. The wind and the storm wrapping itself around him. He stops to adjust the precarious leftovers. How quickly we step from one state to the other. Can’t be much beyond two o’clock and it’s already pitch-black. The dark rises from the ground and wings itself up.

— Elliot Mendelssohn.

Yes. No. Of course not. Question or statement? Who’s to hear a thing when the goddamn car horns are going and the wind is howling and your scarf is up around your ears and the city is in uproar and there’s still a symphony in your head from the restaurant, it’s simply impossible to hear anything at all, but was that my name? Am I my son? Surely not. Not in this lifetime at least. The voice seems to come from behind and he turns to look over his shoulder, his tongue flickering against the wool scarf. Am I the son of my son? A better question. Though not one I’d like to answer right now.

Get me out of this storm, please. Good God, it’s cold, and the snow stings and I can hardly see a thing, but there’s no voice from behind at all, just the orange light of Chialli’s catching the snowflakes and the footprints of others who have gone on before me.

Should have called Sally.

He turns slowly and the tip of the walking stick crunches in the soft snow. He slides his right foot around and follows, inch by inch, with the left, careful now, no handles along Madison, more’s the pity, two glasses of Sancerre rolling through me, and who is this spectacle striding up to me now, deep brown eyes behind spectacles and a little spray of grayish hair from the baseball cap, who, leaning forward, a shade this side of homeless, maybe looking for a few shekels, though something vaguely familiar about him, who, and why in the world do his eyes have that shine, where is that coming from, how many faces have I seen like his, they were out there in Brooklyn for so many years, the hustlers the haters the barkers the bakers the shoeshine boys the two-bit conmen from every corner of the globe, but he knows my name, or my son’s name at least, and maybe something has happened to Elliot, he might have slipped in the snow, hurt his back, or landed soft on his wallet, who knows, he didn’t, after all, pay for lunch.

A twitch in the man’s face like he’s been carrying something and just let it drop, and then picked it up again and there again, someone’s lived in that face a long hard time, I can recognize, that, and what is it I can do for you, young man, though he is not young at all, maybe forty, fifty, who can tell anymore?

No more than three steps away and something indeed has got the man’s goose or his gander or his goat or whatever they call it. Hat pulled down just a little bit farther and I can’t even see the shape of his eyes anymore. Mouth in a snarl, but something gentle, too, about that face, a chub to it — is that Tony? — it looks like Tony, off the door, what in the world did I do wrong with Tony, my stupidities, my Kan, my Kant — what is wrong with you, Tony? — did something happen to Sally perchance, has she sent you out in the snow to rescue me, Saint Bernard, where’s your brandy, I thought about that just a moment ago, and why in the world are you striding up to me so fast, Tony, without your doorman clothes, without your gloves even, and your knuckles shiny brown, I have never seen you in your street clothes, did I not tip you enough at holiday time, did I say something errant a little while ago, one of my silly phrases, there are many, my head is an avalanche, and still he keeps coming, his shoulders rolling around in his dark jacket, he’s small and he’s boxy, an odd look for Tony—

Once, long ago, I skated on a frozen lake with knifeblades attached to the bottom of my shoes—

A single step away, but maybe that’s not Tony at all, is it, not enough of the chub, and a bit on the short side, muttering something in Spanish now about my father, or his father, or someone’s father, what in the world has gotten into the man, someone help me, now, what’s he saying, the snow blowing hard around us, a cyclorama, and it’s impossible to hear what the man is shouting, spittle coming from his mouth, his own little snowstorm, rapidfire, how many words do they have for it, leaning forward, oh the hat on my head shifting, but what is that you’re saying, man, I can’t hear a word in the thunderous roar, calm yourself down, hold on one second, you don’t look a bit like Tony at all, who are you, where are you from, where have I seen you before, and oh the leftovers are shifting that’s my son’s name you’re shouting my treacherous son you are unaproned and oh all over the street that white coming down not even the snow can stand up straight and oh—

The canal was easily the best place to cannonball.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

If it had been another day — without the snow, the wind, the early dark — they would have seen him fall like a character out of an old epic, all hat and history.

It would have been captured from the traffic-cam atop the ornate limbs of the lightpole on Eighty-sixth Street. Even in a low-definition download, he would have emerged from the restaurant, his scarf looped around his neck, and the hat perched rakishly. He would have stopped to adjust his overcoat and then he would have stepped forward on his walking stick. In the picture he would have accepted the punch and he would have stood stockstill a moment, as if registering its seismic quality. The blow would have landed in the middle of his chest. The knees of his trousers would have started to accordion, his legs would have pleated and the lower scaffold of his body would have begun to totter as if on delay. It would have taken a second or two for the puppetry to achieve full motion: the swoon, the dip, the crumble. His body would resign and he would keel over, all eighty-two years of him, disintegrating downward. They would see the ancient Homburg staying on his head for most of the fall, defying physics, the bag of leftovers from his lunch leaving his grip almost immediately, opening with a thump against the ground, the same time as his head cracks off the pavement. It would capture, too, the shape of the assailant standing on the street having just delivered the punch, momentarily frozen in place, unsure of what has happened in front of his eyes, looking down at his fist, then stuffing his hand into the pocket of his puffy jacket, walking quickly ten steps north, confused, then furtive, pulling the brim of his hat down farther, stepping into a shadowed entrance, opening the heavy metal door. A slice of anonymity dissolving into a further anonymity. The street would be quiet for just a moment, and then the busboy and the manager and the waitress would appear over the prone body on the street, and baby carriages would move along the avenue — more of them of course, if there had been no snow, no wind, no dark — and there could, then, have been eyewitnesses from the neighboring shops or from passersby to attest to the man stepping in and out of the entrance.

As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.

It could have been, too, that had the camera angles in the restaurant been tilted in another direction, they might have seen Pedro Jiménez come in through the door, with sprinkles of snow on his shoulders, his hat whisked off and folded into his pocket, the jacket hung on a metal hook near the door. In that instance they might have seen Pedro return to the jacket just seconds later and tuck it under several dry coats in order to hide the wetness of his own. He could also have been seen shoving the baseball cap farther into the pocket. It might have been possible to catch him, just before he turned the corner toward the bathroom, stopping and putting the heels of his hands to his anguished face and pulling his skin tight, shaking his head quickly from side to side, as if to disperse the past few minutes from his life before he went back to his dishwashing station. Another angle might have shown the terror on his face, later in the afternoon, as specifics emerged from the chef, the manager, the waitresses, and the cops together huddled in the kitchen while he washed the pan that had grilled Mendelssohn’s salmon. It might have shown the glances that went between him and Dandinho when the cops pulled Pedro aside for questioning, or the look on Dandinho’s face by the front door, or the backglances both men gave when they left the restaurant late in the evening, checking out the angles of the camera by the front foyer at a time when the cops had already downloaded the footage for examination.

None of this was yet apparent: the homicide, like the poem, had to open itself to whatever might still be discovered.

The cops could have downloaded the footage from the subway station that night where the two men stood, sullen, waiting for the 4 train to take them home to Brooklyn. But who could have intuited what their silence meant? Who could have foretold what Dandinho might say to Pedro? Who could have guessed that they might have struck a pact together? Who could have interpreted Pedro’s face as he got off the F train in Coney Island almost two hours later and pushed his way through the silver turnstile? Who could have understood his terror as he passed by the bodega on Tenth Street? Who could have known what thoughts rifled through him as he paused on the corner of Coney Island Avenue, then turned south toward the water? Even if we had access to the cameras that are peppered along the boardwalk, who could properly say that the man stuffing the puffy jacket and baseball cap in the garbage can was truly guilty? What can be seen from the manner in which he looks at the discarded clothes that nobody will ever find? What can be learned from the manner he walks away? What can be intuited from the way he gazes out to sea? What country lies out there? What past? Who is to know how much failure is still trembling through his fist?

Or maybe this is not the case at all. Maybe he is triumphant. Maybe he is raw with joy. Maybe he feels strong and justified. Perhaps he did this to avenge his daughter and her children, their poverty, their sadness, their loss of their father, the sins of their mother. Perhaps there is something entirely congratulatory in the way he walks back down the boardwalk, past the carnival grounds, under the twinkling lights. Perhaps he feels that he should do the same with the son of the man he killed. Perhaps he is thinking, Fuck you, Elliot Mendelssohn, you’re next.

It is happening, as the poet says, and it is going to happen.

Pedro will be arrested six days later. He will be charged. He will plead not guilty. His daughter will make bail for him. The State will offer. Pedro will not take it. The State says it will go all-out: second-degree murder. Pedro’s lawyer will say he should take a lesser charge, manslaughter perhaps, but Pedro will say no, he is too old for jail, he would rather fight it. He will go to trial almost a full year later. It will be up to a jury to decide. In a high-ceilinged room on Centre Street in lower Manhattan they will weigh it all up. Sift through the evidence. Disregard. Reinstate. A form of excavation and rebuilding. They will look for the one moment of revelation that might eventually turn to truth.

There will be doctors and paramedics and cardiologists and blunt-trauma experts, one who will say that Mendelssohn was killed by the punch, another who will say that he died when his head hit the ground. There will be two forensic video analysts who will ask for the courtroom curtains to be drawn. They will carefully analyze the footage for the jury using six flat screens: one for the judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense, three for the jury. They will discuss compression, resolution, blurring, time stamps, frame rates, comparative analysis. They will show the angle of the fall. They will point out the brief appearance of the assailant. They will crop in and zoom out. They will focus on the cap and the jacket. They will argue about unique characteristics, the known and the unknown. They will not be able to show a recognizable face. They will, however, show the footage of the kitchen argument of Dandinho and Pedro. They will count through the minutes and seconds of Pedro’s bathroom visit. They will show Pedro returning to the giant sinks beneath the Brooklyn Cyclones poster. They will freeze him there a moment, plunging his hands into warm water.

Are those hands cold? Are those hands tormented? Are those hands simply doing their chores?

The prosecution will call on Elliot Mendelssohn to testify. He will tighten his jacket and stride to the front of the courtroom, then slide into the witness box. He will try earnestness, rage, prolonged silence, even tears, but the judge will cut him short. His voice will crack on cross-examination. He will say he never met the accused in his life. He will showcase his habit of raising his forefinger when answering a question. A little tremble will animate his neck. He will say that the death of his father has left him bereft. He will look at his hands as if to check that what he just said was correct. He will say that he will never recover from the shock. He will plead and cajole. He will glance once at Pedro, then quickly away. He will step down from the dock with two ovals of sweat appearing even through the cloth of his jacket. At the rear of the Centre Street courtroom he will look at his cell phone as if the answers to all the questions can be found there.

The days will go on.

They will call on the restaurant manager, Christopher Eagleton, and the waitress, Rosita Oosterhausen. Rosita’s testimony will be curt and polite. She will say that she helped Mendelssohn into his coat at the door. She will say that he was a sweet old man, and she has no idea who would choose to hurt him, or why. She will say that the trauma made her give up her job. She will say that she never saw such a pointless death. She will step down from the witness stand, furtive, coiled, as if embarrassed by her testimony. She will flick a quick look at Pedro, though he will not return her glance. Christopher Eagleton will appear nervous, as if anything he might say will affect the business of his restaurant. He will loosen his tie and say that he is very sorry for the loss of his favorite customer and he really has no clue why the attack might have occurred. He was present in the restaurant, yes, and he heard a commotion outside. He ran out to help, but did not see the assailant, or even the shape of the assailant, and really there was little more that he could say. He bent down to Mendelssohn, who appeared already dead. It all seemed entirely senseless to him. Certainly he never heard Pedro say an errant word about anyone, least of all Mendelssohn. He will leave the witness stand, head bowed, fists thrust into his jacket pockets.

The court will be told that the whereabouts of Dandinho are unknown, he is thought to be in Rio de Janeiro with a wife and three children, although it is also possible that he was spotted working in a restaurant in Toronto, and he may also have been seen in a barbecue restaurant in South Carolina. They will hear that all attempts to contact him after the initial interrogations were impossible. The defense will claim that without Dandinho there is no case. The prosecution will say that the evidence is clear-cut, and Dandinho clearly aided in the crime, underlined by his subsequent disappearance. The court will call on Sally James who will have just returned from Tobago for a week with her nephew to settle her financial affairs. She will be polite and confused and she will carry a little handkerchief to dab her eyes. They will call on Maria Casillias who will testify to the fact that, yes, she is currently in the process of bringing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Barner Funds, though settlement is imminent. She will say that, yes, she told her father about losing her job. She will admit that, yes, she mentioned Elliot’s name. But she will say that, no, she never told him of the affair. And she will say that he never displayed any anger, she has never seen him raise a fist to anyone, least of all an old man, there is simply no way her father could have done such a thing. She will say that it’s much more likely that Elliot came out of the snow and punched his own father, he is that sort of man. The court will hear an objection. She will say that, even if it wasn’t Elliot, the old man probably slipped, that is the logical thing, it was snowing, can’t you see that he slipped, didn’t they say he had two glasses of wine? The judge will instruct her, quietly, to limit her emotions. She will step down from the stand, glancing at her father, and then turn away when her ex-husband emerges from the gallery to hold her hand.

The court will call on Pedro who, on his attorney’s advice, will not testify. He will sit in the courtroom, stone-faced, gentle, unmoving, a hard man to read. The jurors will wait and they will listen. They will weigh up notions of truth and lies — the truth with its border emptiness, and lies with their standard narrative conventions. They will trawl through the vast compendium of facts and figures and conjecture. It will be, to them, like trying to mine for light in the darkness, working in shafts, pockets, seams, chutes. The judge will instruct the jury members of their responsibilities and they will retire to deliberate. They will watch — once again — the footage of Mendelssohn’s fall outside the restaurant. They will watch, too, the footage of Pedro and Dandinho in the kitchen. They will ask to see it again and again: each time it appears to them differently. They will freeze Mendelssohn in midfall and that image itself will become the screensaver upon their imaginations: they will wake with it for many days, weeks, even months afterward.

Twelve days of testimony, then the verdict. It is captured on video of course. A high angle designed not to include the faces of the jurors. The wood-paneled room is airy and spacious. The judge is seated high at the front. The Star-Spangled Banner on one side of him. The New York State flag on the other. The court reporter to the judge’s right. The lawyers set up on opposite sides of each other. A sense that the room has been here forever, set down in aspic, a place that will never change.

There is a courtroom window right behind Pedro Jiménez. When he stands, he blocks out some of the light. The lens takes a moment to adjust. It flares and comes back into focus. His head is bowed. His hands are clasped at his waist. His suit is a hopeful blue. He waits as the jury forewoman steps forth. He closes his eyes while pronouncement is read out.

The sky outside is an immense sheet of gray. There is no movement in the clouds at all.

More cameras in the city than birds in the sky.