Blood Acre

2 P.M.

Can it be-the sun and moon occupying the same piece of sky?

Above Coney Island the momentary overcast has pulled apart like cotton batting, but it has only confused matters. Dry snow whirlpools on the boardwalk into narrow cyclones, weaving between the rails. Below, strung along the frozen beach, a highwatermark of harbor refuse, clothes, bottles, the skeletons of household appliances thrown from the piers, unnameable mounds shrouded in frozen seaweed and foam snaking out of sight past Brighton Beach. Past the blackened ruins of the wood rollercoaster banking and rolling above an empty lot, the tarred lattice threatening collapse. Past the Wonderwheel and its love seats rocking out of sync, squealing in the wind. Past other rides, the giant octopus, the skeet shoots, the basketball throw, seven blocks of tarpaulined cotton-candy stands, the Sea Land clam bar, a large brick building bearing the legend ORIENTAL HOT BATHs barricaded by plywood sheets and wrapped in ribbons of graffiti. A pair of sneakers dangling from a telephone line kicking like amputated feet toward the backside dumpsters of Famous's where red paint spells FUCK WHITIE.

At the boardwalk rail, Nathan Stein sips at his cold coffee. He peers nervously across the peeled lip of plastic lid at the motionless harbor but doesn't see a thing. The oily slush is much higher now, these few hours later, hovering like ground fog rather than sitting on actual land. His cashmere coat billows around the middle; signs of heavier times. His eyes, luminous, green and clear, follow a white bloom of gulls attending a garbage barge right to left, out to sea. He contemplates a storm front moving in from open water, a solid line of the high purple thunderheads that usually mean summer, now covering the breadth of the horizon, billowing toward land.

His eyes are bad. That might explain things. They are worse now without his glasses. She'd knocked them away last night, he doesn't know where. He lifts his head up the beach, as though to see again the little scene, but finds only a galloping posse of stray dogs, adjusting their direction in small increments en masse across the ice, like a flock of birds.

But here, this cold offering no hope of thaw, these days in early December. A forty days and forty nights arrested in perpetual winter, as if someone had opened the door to the true outdoors. The papers say the face of weather everywhere seems to have been radically altered. In New York this past summer damp, sooty days were followed by sweeps of ovenheat. Since then there has been, amid other confusions, disarray amongst the trees. Two months ago, while the leaves of some had been singed at the edges, others were at the height of their promiscuity, continuing to flower and bud and discharge lurid fragrances that had a somnolent, hypnotizing effect. The old and new piers in Brooklyn and the Seaport and up and down the Hudson have been taking water.

Mercifully, the wind has dropped. At the bleating of his watch alarm Nathan's hand motions over his right coat pocket, then roots to the bottom there for the plastic vials. His fingers ache, the tips are raw. His wrist stings against the lining, the blood clotted by the cold. Other scratches have surfaced. Here and there the impressions of teeth.

But some kind of bird is rustling in the trash under the boardwalk, chirping away. Nervously rolling the vials in his fingers, Nathan looks not down but up, for the sun, and finds instead sun and moon like dim bulbs hanging vague and cold in opposite corners. The sky smolders with winter light, a football sky, once a blank scoreboard waiting to chronicle an afternoon of mud and scraped knees, of Nathan uncoiling like a human spring, running for the cheap seats beyond a fortress school and its squinty windows. Soon, though, the air will take him in. And he'll be gone, backing out of the gate, lifting slowly away from JFK, the craggy Manhattan skyline grabbing up at him and the surrounding stews of filth and monotony that are the outer boroughs twirling below him down and down and down, the cobalt swimming pools of Forest Hills and Great Neck scattering like gems. Then one last flush, and nothing but the drone of jet engines, that lush cottony sea of cloud and the hushed subservience of a stewardess. The plane south to Tegucigalpa, a jittery puddle-jumper over the straits to that island Roatan. The sliver of white beach, water the color of lapis stone, the thick trees murmur behind him-

But for now this strange bird and its ceaseless chirping. And the sun, like everything else, has snuck up on him. He raises his hand, inadvertently saluting the Statue of Liberty where she stands on the water from this distance like a curlicue of smoke. Wherever he looks these days he shields his eyes, as though from an eclipse. All week he's had this feeling of calamity. Somewhere Christmas is lurking, sometime soon. And Hanukkah. The commercials on the TV are growing urgent. It all seems to mean something, but he can't bring himself to care. Like the legions of shoppers he no longer lives in weeks or even days. He is down to hours. Sometimes it feels like minutes.

The bird, he finally realizes, is inside his blazer, his Twentyfirst-Century Message Center/Beeper. He clutches his side, as if shot, and peers in: Doctor E-urgent-call immediately. And he'd managed to forget. Though of course now Nathan replays that time he sat in the doctor's office with Maria holding his hand so tightly she was cutting off the blood. "I'm sorry, Nathan," the doctor was saying, looking out his picture window with its view of Park Avenue. "I can t tell you how sorry I am.”

Nathan had merely nodded, peeling Maria's fingers away, a small smile creeping across his face. It isn't me. It wasn't him. It was Maria, sobbing, hysterical, "I didn't know. How could I have known? It's not my fault my god please forgive me hailmaryfullofgrace."

Nathan had looked casually over the doctor's shoulder, at the assemblage of framed family faces that lined his sill. He looked past the windblown hair and the smiles and boat decks and through the window down Park Avenue, wanting to bring himself to some sort of conclusion, to achieve, even, some state of grace; knowing he should; that he would, he believed, his gaze plunging into a yellow river of taxicabs, if given time, he would actually feel something.

A violent burst of shivering rips through, and Nathan, reaching for the railing to steady himself, tips back his head and blinks. Though still he feels no cold. It stays vague and somewhere far 'de him, weather beyond the window, something he can go out in if he wants. Doctor E had forgotten to warn him about that, this numb impenetrability, so easily mistaken for perfection, for immortality. He tries and fails to laugh at himself, at the cruel swindle, opening his mouth to release the laughter but releasing instead dry breath, staccato pants. So tasting the sea air on his tongue he puts there a pill or two, he doesn't know which ones, he didn't see the colors, or the time-is it even time? And another for good luck. Why not still another? Why not, feeling little, stretch out in a rented room, turn on the oven, open his lips, pour in the whole vial, and truly feel-finally-nothing at all?

His eyes swim. Pinching them shut, his throat-as always these days-raw, the pills click inside his mouth like subway tokens.

Upwind, blue smoke and sparks flush through the boardwalk slats. Squinting unhappily without his glasses, Nathan spots movement below. Quickly he looks left and right up the beach and walks on, his shoes squeaking on the frost. But something alarming on the water has caught his eye. Unhappy, he tosses his coffee cup over the rail, clutching wood, and peers out.

Below him, a half-naked figure paces the shadows of a flaming oil drum, back and forth across the daylight. A nasal honk beneath the boardwalk, a whoop, a bellowed, "Hurry fools! Prepare thyselves!"

The pacing stops. Out in the light appears a head of thick red hair, a chin held aloft, then a pair of white tennis shorts fluttering at his hips, more loincloth than garment. The rest of him a flaccid patchwork of pinks and blues, his areolae puckered and browned like two gunshot wounds to the chest. He staggers on his heels – knees locked, bearing a blue-and-orange plastic horn with the logo of the New York Mets, a silhouette of the midtown skyline and the motto CATCH THE RISING STARS, the crackerjack prize from that fan remembrance day years ago when the Mets were contenders and the roster was filled with young talent. Ballasting himself in the wind, he aims the trumpet behind him. Out leaks a gurgling bleat.

"Clowns!" he cries "Fools, come on!"

One by one they emerge. From the open doorway of a tin cabana recessed beneath the boardwalk, short and fat, short and thin, old and withered, tall and stooped. At a windchill of minus ten Fahrenheit they are barefoot and equipped to swim. Racing suits, satin running shorts, a T-shirt and thong. Their bodies smoke. They wander the ice and cross ridges of frozen seafoam, obscured in shrouds of vapor.

Nathan would have laughed, but the sight haunts him instead. From behind, it seems an insurrection by inmates from a mental institution, their enactment of some joker's hypothesis about their primordial origins.

A fainter, garbled cry downwind.

The drunk has drifted, blowing his trumpet at the clouds gathering at the horizon, as though summoning the gods in New Jersey. He points threateningly. "Prepare ye, wimps!"

In the lee of a wave-break, a pair of hookers has stopped to watch. The bathers stamp the ice and pound their arms, but the hookers stand still, warding off the cold with routine refusal.

So it is a false alarm, Nathan sees. The water is clear. He palms down his thinning hair then leans his elbows on the rail like a man with nothing on his hands but time, hoping this, actually believing it to be, his very last time here-that plane south awaiting him on the tarmac, its engines whining-and looks more closely at the scene as though these few extra inches, if nothing else, will clarify it all.

Two men are probing through the cord grass of Jamaica Bay, high-stepping at a jog. Across the tops of the grass, the control tower at JFK; the tails of taxiing jets crossing like the fins of prowling sharks. Beyond, a mountainous landfill where clouds of birds are ripping off in the wind; beyond that, a tourist's diorama of Manhattan laid out end to end, red warning lights slowly blinking among the high-rises.

Two figures await them a hundred yards on. Unable to see down past his knees, Errol Santos stops to snap the collar of his coat around his chin, his eyes skittering about, taking the sparse clouds of gulls hovering overhead for signs of what lurks within.

A big man in his mid-thirties, just now giving up the battle against his tendency to turn to fat, Santos rustles through his coat pocket and produces a pack of cigarettes. He offers one to his own mouth and puts another to his companion's lips. Unshaven Barbados, the lines on his face saying drugs or the years of weather; he could be thirty-five, he could be fifty.

Santos draws deep and his chest tightens at once, his reedy exhale already a thin sigh, pulling air as if through a coffee stirrer. It's happening faster and faster; he pats his coat pockets, pats them again, then rummages through the old tissues and paper clips and pencil stubs for his inhaler, finally finding the little blue thing in his pants pocket. He pumps it into his mouth, pinching twice, his plumber's gas. The relief is instant, and even grants him a bonus shot of adrenaline to the heart, momentarily lightening his mood, clearing his eyes. By now he's forgotten which comes first, the cigarettes or the asthmatic strangle. He has inhalers planted everywhere, a little pump for every occasion, in the glove box of the car beside his lighter, on his bed stand, in his coat pocket with his cigarettes, one with the other, one always following the other.

"You should cut that." Barbados peers at him from under his cap.

Santos turns his head to offer his usual reply but Barbados has trudged on.

The body rests broken on a bed of grass, arms and legs akimbo. The cheek has been pulled back, the meat picked at. Prints of muddy claws cross the bridge of the nose.

One of the cops looks up. "You Brooklyn?"

"Why not," Barbados says.

"No blood," the other cop says.

Santos gestures downward. "You look underneath?"

The first cop shakes his head. "Hell of a place to leave a body."

"Who is this?" Barbados asks the partner.

The partner shrugs. "It's not his fault. He's new on the job."

Santos looks over one shoulder then the other. "Is this even Brooklyn? "

The four men, faces averted against the wind, scrutinize the empty marsh as though for a signpost. Snowy egrets return their stares.

"It doesn't matter," Barbados says. "This isn't a homicide."

"You still have to make the call," the partner says.

Barbados points his chin. "You make it."

"Suicide?" the neophyte asks.

A gull glides down and hangs overhead to investigate.

"In a manner of speaking," Santos says.

Above, an approaching growl, then the whine of jet engines reversing themselves. They all lift their heads. A massive plane passes at a thousand feet, skidding sideways in the crosswinds; the belly opens and the landing gear unfolds and locks into place. Santos waits, and nothing falls.

He used to consider the age of the deceased and compare it with his own. He'd think two more years and he's dead, three years left, eleven to go. This boy in the grass is no more than twenty, maybe twenty-five. Santos reads the obituaries of his cases. He still makes bargains about natural causes. Heart disease.

MS. Something exotic and cruel. Would he be happy enough to die at fifty, at fifty-three?

He says, "They hide in the landing gear and hang on for the ride. Every now and then they fall asleep, or they're not ready. And then the doors open."

The neophyte looks up, then down at the body, the surprise on his face telling a story of human flight, of falling like a stone through long seconds to the promised land.

Barbados sniffs. "Third bird this week."

The neophyte's partner is swinging his head, looking over both shoulders. "I don't know, this just feels like Brooklyn."

Barbados toes at the corpse's arm and lifts it off the ground and delicately places it over the head. Backstroking swimmer. "Now it's Queens."

In the car, Barbados takes them between empty lots and rollercoaster ruins. They pass a patchwork of trailers and tin sheds, plots of weedy flourishes clicking with ice, dead space compressed by the shapes of more dead space around. They pass a dark street of eyeless brick, a receding forest of I-beams bearing the elevated F train above, high square vaultings where the hollow snapping of pigeons' wings echo like gunfire. Shafts of murky half-light hang from the tracks in an infinity of gauzy curtains. The few cars and pedestrians pass through and pass through, vanishing and reemerging closer as through the slowmotion camera wink of old memory.

They drift to the curb. This street where no one lives crawls with life. In the alleys, a maze of coops, constructions of plastic sheeting and boxes slumped with snow. Tracks in the snow-dust begin nowhere, wander like goat paths and converge at a phone booth down the block where a man in thin leather jacket and baseball cap stamps his feet and leans out of the booth into a shaft of light. A small boy appears in a doorway and heaves a plastic bag of garbage out into the street and goes in again. Barbados falls asleep.

His jaw cradled in the crook of his arm, Santos eyes the fallen eaves across the street, the buckled doorways, thinking law school then the academy, then five years on the street, then five out of uniform, coming up on six now, and still he wanders like an alien through streets on which he was a child. He passes his hand over his face, closing his eyes, as though to erase what he has seen, his legs twitching, his lips moving against the tacky cold of the car seat, in his feet somewhere far below he can feel the subway, distant like surf, breaking upon him, and Santos wakes-has he fallen asleep?-his eyes searching the ceiling of the car. Following the train's guts sweep'ng by overhead. The shower of sparks like birthday flares burn piss-holes in the snow. Barbados, awake now, brings the lighter to his face. Up the street a man has stopped at the phone booth as before a confessional. Pusher and his buy shuffle hands in a kind of two-fisted shake. Santos watches Barbados watch the business, his deep black, even innocent, eyes like the eyes of a young girl; like himself, once a child of promise.

The radio under the dashboard emits a fart of murmured static. The buy at the booth straightens and cocks his head, as an animal will at a sign of danger. From above, a whistle, as for a dog. The silence around them all, suddenly, sinister. Dark faces fill the doorways. The buy skids away, running the way he came. A bottle whistles overhead and powders against a wall to the car's left. A child's shriek fills the canyon. "Fuck," Barbados mutters, and takes them quickly around a corner and down a street ending at the boardwalk and sky. Santos reaches for his inhaler.

The thousand marquee bulbs above Famous's blink off, on.

"Look," Santos says, rubbing a porthole in the glass.

Barbados leans over. Inside Famous's, at the window bar, stands a man, short, pear-shaped, his breaths hanging before him in yarnlike balls of vapor, pushed rapidly forward like a smoker's trick by the next, and the next. He dabs his glistening forehead and neck with a handkerchief. Looking down at his watch, his chins multiply. Krivit.

"You call him?" Barbados asks.

Santos shakes his head. "Wait here a minute."

Outside on his feet he inhales the briny cold, drops his cigarette in the snow, and walks a long diagonal to the door. The plexiglass flaps behind him. A family stands at the counter, joylessly chewing. In the rear a black man labors over a clatter of steaming fry-o-matics while a well-groomed Pakistan' gazes at a mute TV. An out-of-town game, 49ers and Seahawks, Santos thinks, the away team in their white uniforms veiled as ghosts, the home jerseys tackling bodiless helmets and a floating leather oval.

"My guess, you weren't expecting me today.”

Krivit sets down his cup of coffee with a click. "Am I expecting anyone?"

"You come all this way for the hot dogs."

"Everybody does." Smiling a gummy smile, Krivit dabs at his forehead with the back of his hand.

Outside, in the street, Barbados has pulled the car alongside a baby blue police cruiser.

"A little early for you, isn't it?" Santos says. "You're making office hours in the daylight now?"

"I like to keep my nights free for other business."

"I remember."

Barbados is leaning on the horn. The cruiser's passenger window drops. Bleary-eyed, a teenage cop pats his cheeks while his partner sleeps openmouthed behind the wheel. Barbados makes a gun with his hand, fires.

So, Santos says, "what do you have?"

"Nothing for you."

"Something for someone."

Krivit shifts his coffee cup forward then back. "Having a slow day, Detective?"

"Slow, fast, it's a day. You've never been at a loss."

"I'm generous. There's plenty to go around without repeating myself. Doubling back is bad for business. But maybe later. Yes, later, probably." Krivit lifts his hand, limp-wristed, and wriggles his fingers. "For now, hasta la vista, Tino." Santos blinks at this bottom-feeder, swallowing the metallic taste of contempt. Though who it's for he can't say. Fat rat, yes- but who's asking what from whom?

He shoves at the door with his shoulder, hands in his pockets.

A stop sign shivers in the wind. A ship brays offshore, a foghorn if there were fog, calling to-what?

He starts for the car but a figure, his chin in the collar of his cashmere coat, brushes past him toward the door. The face is instantly known to him.

"Cold enough for you?" Santos says.

"What-? No, not interested."

"Nathan, it's Errol. Errol Santos."

Nathan Stein looks back at him, his eyes blinking, focusing with recognition. "You haven't changed."

Stein looks to Santos made up for an older part, a better one, hair thinner and streaked with chalk, but his face taut and his body slim. "We've both changed. But you look good, Nathan. Isabel told me you looked good."

"She's your sister. She has to tell you that."

"Well, terrific for you anyway."

Nathan lifts a hand. "Not really." He points vaguely to his watch.

"Look, I don't want to keep you."

"Maybe a beer sometime," Nathan says, taking a step away.

"We'll catch some tunes downtown."

"Maybe Bradley's. Like the old days."

Nathan cocks his head. "Bradley's is gone, Errol."

"Since when?"

"They sold the piano. Since? It doesn't matter. Years- Well,Errol." Nathan looks about him, as though for a trap door in the air. "So how are you?"

"Like you see. How are you?"

"Fine. Real good. So-" Nathan is grinning. "So how is Claire? "

"Fine, Nathan. She's fine."

"Good. Good."

"I'm sure she'd send her regards. If she knew."

"I'm sure."

Santos pulls at his cigarettes and holds out the pack.

"No thanks," Nathan says.

"Go ahead.”

"I don't smoke."

“You used to."

"That was a long time ago."

Santos lights up and blows a thin breath toward the sky. "Not so long," he says. "It was good of you to give Isabel a job."

"Errol, it's been, what, four years, five?"

"Well, I never thanked you."

"Your mother had more to do with it than I did. It was an easy handoff, a pass of the baton, mother to daughter-"

"Still, I hope she's no trouble. And how's-" Santos peers into the air, searching. The smoke coils and fades in the low winter light.

"We live uptown," Nathan says. "Maria. Her and her boy, Benny. What, Errol, have you been keeping tabs?"

Santos shrugs a shoulder. "We go back in a hundred different directions. It's just information, Nathan. My mother works for your father practically before I was born. Now my sister works for you. I used to know everything about you all by myself. Now what I know they tell me, but just dribs and drabs. It's sad."

A funny smile crosses Nathan's face.

"But Benny, right," Santos says. "I remember now. Maria and Benny. Wow, she was something. And she was a keeper. And her kid, he was just a baby." Santos grins. "Daddy," he says. "I never would have guessed."

"Daddy," Nathan repeats dryly. "I don't think I'd go so far as to say that."

I have to say I can't see it."

I wouldn't." Nathan steps back, clutching at his belt. "Sorry," he says. "She beeps me ten times a day." He peers down at the readout. "It's the only number she has."

Santos sucks deeply on the cigarette, reflecting. "They need attention, Nathan."

"We all need attention, but she's got her daughters."

"Daughters? I thought it was a son."

Nathan looks up. "Son?"

"Yeah, Benny."

"Oh, Maria."

"Maria," Santos repeats. "Who are we talking about?" But he holds up his hand, his face darkening. "It's none of my business."

Santos searches the street. The junk shops on Surf Avenue are opening. He motions toward the door. "Let me buy you a cup of coffee.

"I'd like to Errol, but-" Nathan thumbs back through the doors, "I have a meeting."

Santos stares through the murky plexiglass at Krivit, who spots them and smiles the same gummy smile. Santos returns the gaze.

"He'll always play both ways," he warns Nathan. "You never know what he's saying in the other guy's huddle."

"He's just playing the game, Errol, keeping the clock moving, nudging things along when the rules get things stuck."

"That's what worries me. He's not interested in outcomes. Milton never trusted him."

"Milton? My father doesn't trust anybody-" Nathan begins, then stops. Some clock tolls the hour. An illuminated dial inset within the Wonderwheel, suspended above the barren carnival, hanging like another early moon, making the light shift. Santos blinks a stray snowflake out of his eye, thinking of Nathan's money, Nathan's clothes, Nathan's side businesses, his little ventures, his stable of Latina mistresses with whom he famously argued-Santos could have had all that. He was always smarter than Nathan, always a step ahead; already in law school Nathan was leaning on him, pawning favors for homework and crib notes.

Nathan shifts from foot to foot. "Anyway."

Barbados pulls up to the curb and knocks on the window, motioning to Santos, aiming his finger onward.

"Okay. I'll tell Claire I saw you."

"Do that."

"You ought to come down to Brooklyn some night."

"I'm in Brooklyn all the time." He looks about him. "Like now."

"You know what I mean, Nathan."

"Same apartment?"

Santos kicks at the old snow. "That's right. She'd be thrilled. You'd be surprised."

"I guess I would.”

The plexiglass doors of Famous's flap closed. Santos spins in the snow and, squinting upward, heads for the car. Up and down Surf Avenue Russians are smoothing blankets over the sidewalks, laying out pairs of old boots and rusty pliers, lampshades, authentic jackets from the Red Army. There is something threatening about the open day, the light a diversion, the sun not quite what it seems, not high enough, even for winter; a shadow washing over the city.

"Wasn't that Milton Stein's son?"

Santos nods.

That apple didn't fall far."

"It's a big tree."

"You were friends," Barbados says. "More. Compadres, no?"

Santos waves a hand, as if to say, Where would I begin?

As the Ferris wheel sinks from sight he slumps against the car door, his eyes locked on ten years ago. On a yellow room one summer night kneeling over his father. Reek of iodine and urine. Santos saw the skull through the old man's skin, the caved and wasted face. Everything phony slips off the dying and his father arched his neck to tell him the last thing. The dead will take the living with them if they can, and he wheezed his son's name to draw him closer in, but Santos pulled back against the wall and listened to his father suck at the cold air between words. His father said that in the courts and the billable hours is the carnival of the powerful and the insane while your people walk blind and helpless. His father said that the life Errol would one day feel he was missing was occurring in the streets. And since that day, on this planet, what has he done? By that autumn Santos stepped out of his suits and his law-firm offers and into dank bars full of sweaty cops. Knights of old, wielding their stubby little guns. Into the streets, his father had said. Into the streets. After his first collar, downtown to central booking and a meet with an A.D.A., he stepped into the sour spice of a hall strewn with men, men sleeping along the walls, propped up on elbows to stare stonily into the dingy middle distance. It looked at first like a railway station in the dead of night in a far part of the world, the bums, the unwashed drunks, the reek of refugee dishevelment and sleep and malnutrition. But here and there they wore parts of patrolmen's uniforms, the pants or the shirt, or the blue cap pulled low over the eyes, their street shoes. Pretenders, kids, those beat cops, twenty, twenty-two, buzz cuts and puffy cheeks and semiautomatics and off days in front of the tube. Stepping quickly over their legs, like a halfback running through the tire drill, Santos turned for the main waiting chamber where a fuzzy TV in the corner played soaps to blank-faced and slack-jawed cops. An emergency room at a public hospital but without the urgency.

What Santos has done, he has done it there. He has done it in elevator shafts and dumpsters. He has done it in fields of rubble where sheets of newspaper roll in the wind.

All that school gone to waste. All that law and the money to come. His sister Isabel thought he'd gone mad. He hardly understood it then himself; today, he's forgotten his reasons for almost everything.

Warily, Santos eyes the horizon. There are clouds, he sees, over open water, black as thunder. Like a herd, or cavalry, body parts and animal shapes charge toward shore, fists, the fleeting contour of faces, vanishing as soon as they appear, dark horses rearing up.

Inside Famous's, Nathan's footsteps turn no heads. He slaps his arms and breathes in the tepid air, wanting to be glad to be here. After all those Sunday excursions from Queens and then Manhattan in the Silver Shadow with Milton, the pastrami, the foot-longs.

The friends he's brought, the women, Claire a dozen times, for this taste of old New York. Errol Santos-when weren't they here together, riding the train all the way out, kids leaving behind a wake of minor mayhem. Now Errol is thicker around the middle than Nathan remembers and shorter, with his hair slicked across the front of his scalp.

The fact is none of it is much to remember. Lately Nathan has been robbed of his ability to sentimentalize. Like a camera his shutter opens and closes, recording, not thinking, not feeling, while what sticks to mind is the opening scene of La Boheme when Marcello, staring out his attic window at an infinity of Paris rooftops, mourns the consuming appetite of love, while Rodolfo, hungry and cold, burns the manuscript of his five-act tragedy for fuel. Nostalgia, what is that? A settling of scores, small acts of vengeance and indiscretion between the now and then, the past and present.

"Buddy," Nathan says with false bravado.

"Mister Stein."

"It's cold."

"It's cold, yessir."

Behind the counter the old black man stands on wooden skids laid over pools of brine and sandy mud.

"Staying out of trouble?"

"Am, sir."

Nathan wags his finger. "You're bad for business."

Buddy smiles and his toothless face presses in like a rotten fruit.

"How many?"

Nathan looks over his shoulder at the stand-up bar lining the window. At one end, a pair of men eating: businessman, junkman. At the other stands Krivit.

"Three. With everything. And coffee."

"Four fifty."

Nathan peels off a twenty, holds up his hand. "Keep it," he says, and goes to the window bar with the tray. He passes a hot dog to his right.

"I don't like to be kept waiting, Stein." Krivit taps his watch. "One hour. How could you be late today?"

He grabs at the hot dog and the right side of his face balloons, his eye almost disappears. As Nathan lifts his coffee, his sleeve falls away. A patch of skin on the wrist has purpled.

"That's a nice little scratch there."

"Damn cat," Nathan says, spilling coffee, snatching at a used tissue on the counter. He dabs nervously at the brown puddle but feels Krivit's eyes on his wrist again and slides his hand deep in his coat pocket.

"You don't have a cat," Krivit says.

Nathan feels first surprise, then indignation, having believed for the moment his own lie.

"The cunt bit you too, you know," Krivit says. "You got to watch that these days."

Nathan grins, gathering his wits, and spreads out his hands dramatically. It is something he's good at, something he knows to do, screw up his mouth and arch his eyebrows in an attitude of profound disbelief: Can you believe it?-as he might do at Yankee Stadium when someone all of New York reveres and counts on does something incomprehensibly witless, drops a pop fly, boots a routine grounder; things thirty thousand rabid fans would not ever have done themselves-not for eight million a year. His profound disbelief in the face of dramatic but ultimately trivial things. Can you believe what the 'udge said? Can you believe she actually bit me?

"You shouldn't let them get away from you," Krivit warns.

Nathan knows there is a question he should ask but he sidesteps it, slides around, finds something else. "Just tell me what you have. "

"A little deep-sea fishing."

"The fishing," Nathan says, "is still better up north. Washington Heights-"

“Minnows, Stein. Greedy minnows. Bullshit. Boring."

"Boring," Nathan echoes.

"Today I'm offering ambition. Russian kikes."

Nathan sips at his coffee then sucks in, his tongue burnt. "I don't do ambition." He fingers his tongue. "Ambition is complicated."

A pleased smile plays on Krivit's lips. "I got you this because you fucked up, and you need to make new friends."

Nathan passes him a second hot dog. Krivit shrugs his left shoulder. Nathan glances over at the family standing by the counter. The father wears heavy black clothes, the mother a peasant dress and wool shawl. An older girl in her twenties, slim, tight 'eans and sweater. An anonymous boy levels at Nathan an expression darkened either by adolescence or plain wrath or some combination of both. They all have the parboiled features of Slavs, people with thick fingers and pillowy palms. No makeup, no flash. No one is talking, no one is having fun. It could be a regular family outing.

Krivit takes a swipe at his forehead, panting. "They look like peasants, but they're into smack, whores, rackets. Not big time. Not yet. But just wait. The Russians will own Brooklyn. They'll own everyone."

The parents and the girl nibble at their food, their eyes roaming over the plastic menu displays overhead. The boy glares on, unrelenting, as though waging some dumb high-school war.

"It's the kid?"

"His brother. Bail denied. That's all we're talking about. A simple writ."

"That's what I'm doing here?"

"It's due tomorrow."

Nathan looks at him. "Tomorrow."

"If we have to maybe we can have the case sent Rodriguez's way." Krivit wipes the corners of his mouth. "You can still arrange for that?"

Nathan considers his coffee, as though the cup itself holds the consequences of bribing a judge. "Tomorrow," he says again. He has taken liberties with judge Rodriguez only once, and even he would be hard-pressed to call it an actual buy: he'd given Rodriguez tickets to Madama Butterfly, his own coveted seat-eighth-eigth-row-center orchestra-in return for the small accommodation of rescheduling a hearing past the statute of limitations for a speedy trial, that magic date after which you fly as free as a bird But the business with Rodriguez was harmless, really, if not just. The defendant, a thief of petty sums in a neighborhood of crack dealers and junkies, an irritant to everyone, was set free on the condition of skipping town. Goodbye and good luck.

Nathan's hands settle before him in an attitude of prayer. Down the window bar it is just the junkman now, moved on to a paper cup of beer. "I had this friend who once mentioned that he knew somebody who once mentioned he might be able to do something."

"You still have these friends?"

"My friends can become their friends, but what are the terms?"

"Two-fifty."

Nathan darts another took back at the family.

"Don't look at them again. They don't eat on Mulberry Street and thumb their noses at the cops. They're in they're out, they'll slit your throat in broad daylight, bim-bam."

"Two hundred fifty thousand," Nathan murmurs.

"A rush job. They're anxious people, family people. Regular Waltons."

"What's mine?" Nathan asks.

“Fifty.”

“Fif-”

"Fuck you, Stein. You keep fucking up all over the place, you're stealing ball bonds, you have some real estate thing going on, this phone scam, your stock goes down not up, know what I mean?”

"How do you know-”

"Think of it as a temporary readjustment in your share price."

Nathan swallows. "Pricing yourself out of a future, Krivit."

Krivit's glasses have steamed over. "Look, you fuck. Don't you threaten me. I can get anybody. I'll get your bonehead partner. That schmuck. He'd sell his goddamn mother. He'd suck his own cock for twenty bucks. What's his name?"

Nathan shakes his head. "He's not a partner. He works with Milton.

"That's your problem."

"Schreck. Oliver."

"That's him. That fuck."

Nathan does not often look at Krivit. He doesn't, for instance, even know the color of his eyes. Now he sees that they are light blue, almost pretty. Nathan smiles to himself. A song comes to his head, the climactic aria from last night's Figaro, the sweet soprano in the lead opening her mouth to the cavernous Met and setting free the birds. And Isabel, sitting beside him in a lovely red dress, a flowery print, and black hair swept back in a bun. Her hand in his, her fingers long now and talented. Nathan begins to hum, falsetto.

"So why me?" he says between phrases. "Why not Milton?"

Krivit scowls. "He's got bigger fish to fry." He lifts his shapeless arm and waves it through the air to the muddy floor, the barren streets, the abandoned Wonderwheel. The sneakers kicking at the wind. Fuck Whitie.

"You're what I could get on short notice. You need- Will you just cut out that serenade?"

Nathan stops. His eyes follow a squad car rushing up Surf Avenue, its headlamps blinking and emergency lights spinning. It takes a corner fast and heads for the boardwalk. Twenty years ago, Coney Island children came to the windows of Milton's Silver Shadow and offered pocket change for a ride. Milton took the pennies and nickels and came out of Famous's with a box of hot dogs for all of them. He lifted them and put them behind the wheel, laughing; they stretched over the leather and touched the true wood paneling, black kids all of them, good kids, kids with half a chance until tomorrow. Then he drove away complaining to Nathan with sweeps of his fat hand, Nigger this, Nigger that. Spic whores.

Now in this neighborhood there are no phones. No one is calling. Across the street the carcasses of lesser cars sit charred and glazed with ice. Milton hasn't come down here in years. You sow too many seeds you end up with a jungle that swallows you whole.

A second squad car emerges under the subway trestles and follows the first. Sirens wail in the distance, bending on the wind. Krivit cranes his neck, trying to see the boardwalk.

Though standing still, at the sound of the sirens Nathan feels he is almost running, almost lurching. A trickle of sweat crosses the back of his neck. But there on the TV it's now the Eagles in white and the Packers in green. Though the game quickly dissolves into a local news update, a shot of a stormy Caribbean sea, the underside of a capsized boat. Bodies riding out the swells facedown, their hair and clothes puffing up and back, up and back. A wave breaks and they're gone.

Noting his calm, laying claim to it, Nathan takes out his best gold pen and unfolds a matchbook from Gambone's Ristorante. He clears his throat. Dully now, with studied disinterest: "What's the charge?"

But Krivit has seen something on the boardwalk and is on the balls of his feet.

Nathan prods his arm.

“Drive-by." Krivit brings his attention back. "When you come down to it Jews aren't any different from wops, just better at it. Who would have thought?"

"Why are they keeping him?"

"Fly risk."

"Would he fly?"

They both look outside. Across Surf Avenue, the El train screeches slowly through the Luna Park Houses at third-floor level, the third rail lighting up the towers with high strobe flares. By the time the tail-lights of the last car have pulled out of sight the platform's windblown vacancy feels permanent, as though the trains haven't come for years.

"Wouldn't you?" Krivit says.

Nathan puts down the pen. "Then he's gone."

"It's not your problem."

"What do they have?"

"A kid in the car who says our boy pulled the trigger."

"Did he?"

Krivit wipes his forehead. "Sure. Why not. What's it to you?"

Nathan coughs lightly into his fist, but he's stirred up the dirt in his chest. The cough screws deep, excruciating, and fighting it an immense weariness descends. If he didn't know better, he'd be thinking heart attack. Krivit has been going on about something or other, a litany of Nathan's indiscretions, his faults, like the plagues, blood, locusts, darkness, slaying of the first born…

But his heart, he's been told, is drum tight; a vault with plumbing, as the doctor said, obviously grateful to be able to pass that little tidbit along.

By the time Nathan is coughed out he feels kicked in the ribs. "And where's said witness?"

"Building snowmen upstate."

"And his last attorney?"

Krivit, saying nothing, probes a molar with his pinky. Answer enough. Nathan nods once, slowly. The father puts down a halffinished hot dog and leads the family toward them. Nathan yanks off a leather glove and turns, extending his hand. The father reaches into his coat and tosses a brown paper package the size of two hardcover books onto the window bar and brushes by; the family follows and pushes one by one through the swing doors and out.

Nathan watches them walk down the street. The boy-an argument, a planned escape-has bolted down an alley.

Krivit slides the package out from under Nathan's hand, opens the end and peers in. A pink tip of tongue breaks through the seam of his mouth. He reaches in and prowls around with his fingers.

"Hey, I got a good joke," he says. "You'll like this. There's this old wop and this old Jew sitting on this park bench. And this real babe walks by. I mean the real thing. Young, blonde, stacked."

Krivit pulls his hand out of the package, for a moment forgetting the bricks of cash inside, as though remembering something of superior interest and proven benefit.

“And the wop turns to the Jew and he points at her and he says, ‘I screwed that broad. I mean, I really screwed her.’ And the Jew nods and his eyes narrow and his mouth starts watering and he turns to the wop and says, 'Yeah, outta what?'”

Laughing, Krivit bobs his head like a bird. It is a lesson, practically a proverb. Nathan feels a brief, surprising surge of affection for this fat middleman. It is unearned, he knows, but there it is all the same, as fleeting as a light breeze that comes from nowhere and just as quickly leads nowhere, a mistake; and there it goes, going-after all these years Krivit is practically family-gone.

He watches Krivit feel around in the paper package and pull out a smaller one the dimensions of a single brick. Krivit leaves it on the metal bar between them. He shoves the larger package between the flaps of his coat, then raises a finger, as though testing the wind. "Don't let the cunts get in the way of business.” His high strained voice reminds Nathan of his rabbi from Ozone Park: Stay the course, stay focused, you're slipping, Nathan, slipping-

"Don't fuck this one up, Stein. They're not forgiving. And I know."

"What do you know?"

Outside, the Russians are abandoning their blankets and running for the beach. The Pakistani manager of Famous's pushes through the door to the street, his hands on his hips.

Again, Krivit cranes his neck. "I hear things," he says. "Weird things." He taps his ear. Not bothering to turn to Nathan he produces a fat manila envelope and leaves it on the counter. "Here's the history, docket number, the rest. Don't forget, Stein.Tomorrow."

Tomorrow, fifty thousand, tomorrow, fifty thousand. Nathan weighs the options. Options but no choices. And no questions. It's fifty G's and tomorrow's tomorrow's tomorrow-

He slides over the last hot dog to Krivit. "You should think about losing some weight," he says.

Krivit shoots him an angry glance. "Fuck you." "Look at me."

The corners of the fat man's lips lift in a gradual smirk: "Yeah, look at you."

The drunk, led back into the fold, has not stopped at the waterline. Instead, extending the plastic trumpet in a kind of fascist salute, he goosesteps calmly into the slush. The other swimmers hop on the beach, prancing back and forth at the water's edge. Some, closing their eyes, throw out their arms martyr-like to take the full force of the sub-zero wind. As though redemption lurks somewhere between agony and humiliation. One young girl, hugging herself, cries ohgodohgodohgodohgod. Then someone declares, "Time," and the members of this club, many looking as though they're hoping for second thoughts but are too dazed to find them, kick their way in. The water, a pebbly slush only a few degrees and a couple minutes from solid ice, barely budges at their waists. Undeterred, they lock hands in a circle, firing up and down in their places like pistons. The drunk has not stopped. His shoulders go under.

He cries, "Come on, losers!" His bluish hand breaks the surface and groggily waves them on.

"One! Two! Three!" they bellow, and go down, vanishing without a ripple. They emerge seconds later, blue-faced, eyes pinched, unable to scream, like tardy babies funneled through the womb and fired out, misshapen, slimed.

"Stupid fucks," says someone safely on the beach. A Korean in a cheap parka hammers his palms together. A photographer kneels and snaps away, catching the bathers in attitudes of stoicism and madness.

All that can be seen of the drunk: a patch of red hair, a flap of his shorts, his heels, a lip of orange plastic trumpet.

“Goddamn it, he's done it again," a bather complains. Two wade out to retrieve him while the others leap and pirouette and scream in the refrigerated air, searching up and down the beach and across toward Jersey as though for the purpose for what they've done. Others strike a pose for the photo-journalist.

Then a true scream, a woman's ringing shriek.

No one knows what is happening. Someone yells, "Shark?" People are running in place, knees high in the harbor. Someone points toward the floating drunk. A sluggish swell passes through him. He hangs in a dead man's float and looks to have been decapitated. No, not him, but past him a second pair of heels breaks the surface. Someone grabs the drunk and shoves him like a piece of driftwood toward the beach. Two hookers waiting there cross their arms with sudden interest as someone goes back waist-high, reaches in and tows back the corpse and leaves it face up, half in half out of the water. Hands clawed, mouth open, it lies between two flaps of ripped red cloth like a food offering; part torment, part repose.

The hookers approach the corpse like cops, without issues. One toes the ribs. "She's pretty."

"She was."

"Know her?"

They consider her.

"Black," the first says. "Or Chicano."

"How can you tell? She's all fucked up."

5 p.m.

A motionless string of red brake lights humps all the way to Queens over the Kosciuszko, traversing the dark below. The dashboard, blinking 5 P.m., sets an underglow off Claire Proffitt's chin as the bridge bounces disconcertingly beneath. Opposing headlights are massing for miles. An ambulance behind surges forward a few inches at a time. No one is moving, there is no place to go; the ambulance's siren falls silent, its emergency lights go dark. Ahead, a haze of yellow construction lights; Rikers Island, just a few miles away, will be an adventure.

At a full stop, Claire glances at the newspaper on the dashboard, folded back at a two-inch filler column on page seventeen:

REFUGEE BOAT SINKS; 40 DIE

A boat crammed with Dominicans trying to slip into the United States capsized and sank in icy, heavy seas, killing at least 40 people. Many more are missing and feared dead.

One survivor said 107 people were crammed aboard the Saint John, a refitted 30-foot fishing trawler, which sank five miles off Cape Engano, the easternmost point of the Dominican Republic…

Exhausted already, Claire leans over the wheel, myopic in the snow flurries, watching the blinking lights of planes gathering in their landing patterns. Planes dropping out of the darkness, gliding low overhead into LaGuardia. She is mere days from her week's vacation to-she's already forgotten the name; perhaps she never knew it, doesn't need to know it. She'd simply given her travel agent her orders: heat, loneliness, blind stupor. Picking her lane out of the sky, she again has her vision of her equatorial sea infinite and pure, the long waves marching on a white beach, crashing in clear sheets over the sand, the spent breakers racing back to do it again, while behind her, the exhilarating piles of mountain heaped on mountain-

Easing down the bridge, the four lanes of traffic pour grain by grain into a half-width of shoulder swept clear of rubble. Police cruisers and highway crews. A circle of flood-lit pavement: strewn shards of metal, a door, a wheel, bolts and screws. Cops with orange slickers and neon batons. She reaches for the tape player. Still that old tape of Nathan's,

Herbie Hancock's first album that he liked so much. The two of them together always had a soft spot for first albums, first books,first movies, the first blush, the courage and safety in anonymity, nothing but possibility and raw hope.

… Thousands of Dominicans try to enter the United States each year by crossing the turbulent 90-mile Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico in rickety wooden boats. The Border Patrol has captured over 8,182 this year alone.

Through and gone, the cars cavort like liberated animals over the four empty lanes. Streets and row-houses give way to long unlit slopes peaking and rolling toward other streets, more highway, then more water. An endless clutter of headstones back to back and wing to wing, obelisks, virgin marys boxed in by com peting apostles and multiple replications of the savior Jesus Christ himself. Airborne haloes tossing in the night like legions of Frisbees. More row-houses, more foundries, more cemeteries, Jewish this time, the stones lower, roomier, less of a crowd, ironically enough less of a push. In death, she thinks, they change their tune: composed, patient, they grant everyone around them a wide berth.

An off-ramp into a street of two-family duplexes with windows flickering blue with TV light. A neighborhood of cops and firemen; of plastic-sheathed sofas bearing cats; young sons spending their lives leaning over engines and hiring themselves out to the parents' friends.

Stopped at a zebra-striped gate, a guard box beyond which a narrow causeway humps over the water to Rikers Island, Claire is recognized. The guard, a woman, looks disappointed. "You," she says, and puts her finger to her watch. "What," she asks, "is your problem? "

Claire offers her the grin of the guilty but ever-loved child, then a look of commiseration, then disbelief. "I'm backed up. I'm bored. I have no life."

Anybody with style and grace this night will get what she wants. The guard lifts her eyes toward a passing plane and summons for Claire a look of motherly aggravation. "Don't be long. Don't be outside. Something's coming. I heard it on the radio."

In the waiting room of the Rose M. Singer ward for women, a guard in blue sits investigating her long clawed fingernails painted alternately pink and indigo. Her holster is empty. Outside this cubicle, two more women armed and large peer down from an elevated watch desk behind a slab of bulletproof plexiglass. No one has moved since Claire was last here. And no man in sight. When she first left law school she thought that a plus. Women in the cells, women holding the guns, sweeping the floors, calling the shots. All around Claire nothing but women. But today she smiles stiffly, taps her toes, very nervous: the place is vibrating, teetering on the edge. The women's ward at Rikers Island looks like anyplace else-dirty and bare and hard, a laboratory of unhappiness.

In the cubicle window, Claire focuses on her own reflection, touching her cheek, her face fine and ruddy, as though permanently lashed by wind and sun, suddenly afraid, as though the voyage already has been made -

A girl enters in prison grays, blurry-eyed and groggy; coppery skin and the flat, sloped face of the interior tribes, wrapped in a shy quiet that seems to have ancient origins. Her coal black eyes never rise above knee level. And she is pregnant, well into it, and seventeen, if that.

She lifts her cigarette, inhales deeply, closing her eyes in ecstasy.

Claire lowers herself into a chair across from her. "Regina Nunez," she reads off the docket folder. "You know any English?"

The girl shrugs.

"Well I don't know Spanish. Let's see. Possession. Resisting arrest. You have court tomorrow-but no one's been ing motions. Why hasn't anyone been filing motions?"

Regina says nothing.

"Haven't you had a lawyer?"

"He don't come."

Claire sniffs. "You drunk, too?"

The girl looks at her slippers and takes a breath. "I spilled something. "

"You smell like you've been dipped in whiskey." Claire's eyes linger on the girl's swollen belly. "Maybe you shouldn't drink."

"I didn't ask for you," the girl says, and her eyes, slippery, their hold on things tentative at best, lose their grip, tracking some faroff place, not home, Claire thinks, but some place she dreams of going. Hollywood. Disneyland. Niagara Falls. The girl's eyes pool. Teary nuggets fall to her lap. Behind all this, a child.

Claire leans forward but feels no desire or need to touch her, or offer comfort. "You've been here three months. Let's at least get you to make bail."

"I don't have money," the girl says.

"It's just five hundred dollars."

"Too much."

"It's not that much." Claire points at her folder. "There's an address here. There's family?" Claire instructs herself to breathe. "Okay. Who is it-was it? Your lawyer."

The girl holds out her palm, as though, there in her hand, the lawyer will appear.

"I need the name. I need to know where to start."

“Nathan Stein."

Claire looks up abruptly. "What did you say?"

"Nathan Stein?"

"That's what I thought you said. And how long have you known Mr. Stein?"

"Know him?"

"How many months, how many years?"

The girl shrugs. "I never-"

"Have you actually met him?" Claire demands. "Have you seen him? Has he ever been here?"

The girl gives a look of defeat. "Mr. Stein will come."

Before Claire's eyes opens an encyclopedia of heroes and villains and combats won and lost, and poisonings and bloodshed. White knights. Fair maidens. Ancient history disinterred from the mud.

"You want your child born and raised in a prison? Because that's what will happen if you wait.", She shuts the folder. "You are going to give birth in a hospital like a human being."

The girl is sobbing into her hands. "I'm taking your case. You're mine."

Nathan's watch, or is it his beeper, chirps like that captive bird somewhere beneath his coat. But the commotion on the boardwalk is spreading. People are lining the rail. A body in red has been dragged up the sand. "Oh, God," he says, and begins to run, wincing at the tug of his suit against a wound he doesn't remember, this one across his left rib cage. Everywhere dogs are barking. He feels the pull of the boardwalk and heads there, then finds his body veering off, taking him another way. He jogs back across Stillwell, under the El, and, looking over his shoulder, slows to a gimpy walk, clutching his chest. "Shit," he breathes. It's all gone, his stamina, his air.

The tide of cold shade has risen high on the brownstone and brick. On the rooftops a forest of naked antennas grabs at the porous light. In a plexiglass door between a doughnut shop and a shoe repair, a girl leans, examining her nails. When Nathan stops she lifts her face. She was one of the girls he'd seen earlier on the beach. Eyes set deep in blue caves. “Where's your friend?" he says.

The girl cocks a hip.,What's wrong with me?"

"There's nothing wrong with you."

“I'm better than her. White meat's better.” She laughs at her own joke. The glass door fogs.

Nathan looks up and down the street, wanting in some place, though not necessarily this place; just some shelter, to solve some need as unutterable and instinctive as a baby's, like air but not as good.

A stairwell narrow and corkscrewed as a steeple's. Nathan's eyes climb the bowed steps, the shaved banister, the girl's thin legs into her skirt, following the gradual warmth of the building that ends at the second floor. The hallway, cold and gray with dirty light, disappears at both ends. There is a strip of yellow under one door and then other closed doors. Doorways clotted by shadow. The girl enters the lighted room without knocking, and Nathan follows.

A thickly walled space, a perfect cube, a high closed window ticking with blown sand and snow. A bulb hangs from the ceiling. Someone has made gestures of cleaning up, a sagging bed unconvincingly made. Beside it a pressboard nightstand painted brown in imitation of wood grain. A half-full glass of stale, bubbled water, illuminated under the dim lamp like a fetish. In the summer the street below is sandy, and salt-dust floats in the room and collects in the lee of upright things, but now the room is clammy and cold, the dust has fallen, and everything is coated in a thin, gritty paste.

"You want dope? Crack, smack, meth? We could do it now." She drops atop the ragged bedspread with her back against the wall. "Or whatever."

Nathan's eyes have settled on a calendar Scotch-taped over the bed, wrong month and old year. He sees there a shot of distant beach: Roatan, or some place just as good. Under an unseen brilliant moon a ribbon of radiant sand meets a white blameless sea. The breathy voice fades in, and Nathan works the private rhythm in his head, The Girl from Ipanema, a young woman rising from the water, passing up the beach-

The saxophone slides in, charming all the senoritas out of the water with thin sighs-

Wearily, the girl unbuttons her thin jacket and the blouse underneath and slips both together off her shoulders. She is narrow, more frail than her clothing has described. Her breasts are adolescent, her skin pale, blue, translucent; her ribs like notched acknowledgments of misdeeds, of bad memories unforgotten.

Nathan meets the girl in the middle of the floor. She is no more than sixteen or seventeen, he sees, her makeup a mask. Her tongue appears in the corner of her lip. Everything she is doing is young and tutored. And he, he knows, is here because he has been, because he can, because he will. Not because he wants to, but because he could. It feels, like everything lately, as needless as it does inevitable. And always what follows is a little dream, a shallow, furtive thing. Usually what comes to mind is someone from his long ago or his day-to-day, someone he's already left, someone safely behind him. Atop one woman he'd imagine another, and another, until, exponentially removed from his life, he'd be as good as dead, beyond harm, dreaming his little dream, until he twitch twitch twitches and opens his eyes, waking from the glorious twilight of his midday nap, and it all comes crashing down around him: the hard strip of lamplight, the touch of her clammy skin, her foreign smell, the crater in the middle of the cheap mattress beneath them like a foxhole-

A soft chirp at his belt. With immense relief, Nathan reaches inside, peering down at the darkened beeper display. Frowning, he reads the message again, losing himself for a moment, then looks up to find the girl naked and blue before him. She has left her socks on. He steps back, shrugging, Can you believe it, at a time like this? Smiling, he presses his business card into the girl's palm

NATHANIEL STEIN, ESQ. ATTORNEY AT LAW

and leaves her standing.

Then gone, safely behind his car's salted windows, switchbacking through traffic across the Belt Parkway to the strains of Leontyne Price's Aida. His eyes are everywhere but the road, settling for a moment on a sheaf of papers on the floor, a brief due in court last Thursday, finished Friday morning early, forgotten Friday morning late, disregarded until now. Cars honk from every direction. He straightens the wheel-he has been drifting between lanes-then reaches for the volume control and calibrates six speakers the size of quarters embedded in the doors and ceiling, a woofer in the glove box, tweeters hidden in the dash, the console as bright and elaborate as a pilot's cockpit-all of it compliments of Julio, who, thanks to Nathan and a brief miraculously unearthed in time, is back on the street in time served instead of inside for fifteen-to-life.

The phone in his breast pocket buzzes. He holds up his watch to the light in the rear-view mirror; not yet four.

"Hello? Hi… No, I wasn't-… a new client… no, not a lot of money, only a couple grand, that's it, look-… What music. That's just traffic. Some accident, ambulances everywhere… Around eight. I'll come by… what? I'm losing you. An underpass. A tunnel. Hold on, I'm losing you-"

Placing the phone face-down on his thigh, he lifts his thermal mug and sips at old, cold coffee. He sips again, holding the liquid in his mouth, and lifts the phone, uncapping the unceasing chatter. "Wait, what?… Serena, how could I? I haven't been near a television all day. What about what boat, can't we talk about it later I have to make a few calls, some bad boys at Rikers Island… Serena? I'm going to lose you. Yes, eight o'clock. Yes, I promise. Another tunnel… I'm losing you-"

Nathan taps the mute button, flicks the mouthpiece into place and slides the phone in his pocket. The barge-like car bears him along, shooting him through a bottleneck of orange work trucks and zebra-striped barriers into wide-open sky. Leaning forward on the wheel, his eyes lift, his own voice simpering a few famous bars.

Now his beeper vibrates, a cricket caught under a plate. He fumbles with dials and buttons small enough to be bumps or imperfections of design. He presses them individually and in various combinations, accomplishing nothing. The sound of a blaring horn makes him raise his head, and one hand on the wheel, eyes everywhere-road, lap, pocket, speedometer, road-his thighs close around his thermal mug as something jerks his head to the right. A red sedan has pulled alongside and is keeping his own pace exactly. The passenger leans forward, as though the driver has said something admirable about Nathan's car. As though Nathan's car were noteworthy, especially elegant, a vintage model, which it isn't: it is a badly beaten 4x4 with running boards and caged lights and a smoked plastic windbreak, everything a TV voice-over narrating the journey of a 4x4 across a butte somewhere-it looked like Hell-told him he had to have, and Nathan, sucker for a hitch to a dream, believed.

He squints over at the men. Both are wearing suits. Their car drops back, and looking at their silhouettes in the rear-view mirror, Nathan understands that the car has been tailing him all along; for the last few weeks, it seems. He had never had any doubt he was being followed, though until now they had acted with discretion. Today, a change has taken place; they want him to know.

“There," Nathan murmurs, pressing down. He shakes his head. A miracle. How is it done-it almost doesn't matter what the message says-how words transmit through air-who needs actual talk-we have answering machines for when we're not at home and Twenty-first Century Message Center/Beepers for when we are.

A little proud, a little smug, he doesn't understand: how had he ever gotten along without it? Pressing thumb and forefinger in rapid succession, he squints at the tiny screen:

Cabron. Fuck you and your tunnel. Turn on your phone.

Refugees have been straggling into the Spindrift all afternoon, emerging from the snow singly and steadily and already a little tight. Everyone a conspiracy of one, a statue of something. Opposite the bar three big windows bordered by tinsel and Christmas lights face the street and the Red Hook piers and the harbor beyond-alternating pictures of the dingy radiance inside the bar and the length of barren lamplit waterfront across the street, so that if you turn your head with either each coming or each going of the lights' blink you have opposing views of the world, in and out, you and them. You and some other you, Claire thinks, watching through her own reflection the snow devils rising off the street and jigging out of control, collapsing like drunks in the doorways.

Down the street the hulking converted warehouses of the Jehovah's Witnesses are recast as castles in the sky. The artificial turrets looming over the entrance ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge trumpet the veiled threat: now passing up God's Kingdom. The young men and women in their heels and trench coats are filing past the bar to mealtime or to their homes, a good day's work done. They've turned out their Watcbtower in the tens of thousands in fifty languages, convincing the world that the Big Bang is a hoax, that Christ's crucifixion wasn't enough to purge us of original sin, that we must go door to door for deliverance. Brooklyn, Claire knows, is home base, their safe haven, one of seven spots on earth prophesied by someone or other to survive the apocalypse. She thinks that sweet and hopeful. Fixing on her face an economical smile, she returns their cheerful nods.

Someone in the bar has actually brought a baby. The cries grate on her; she feels them like radio signals in her fillings, setting her on edge. And underneath the murmurings from the perky blonde anchoring the local TV news, the outside sweeps in through the windows. In comes the clanging of the distant buoys. In comes the constant hiss of traffic along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Claire returns to the bar. The baby is walling. The bartender, a small Greek with corkscrew hair, has turned his face up to the TV. There, footage of a sinking boat and the hunched backs of drowned bodies-the Dominicans, she assumes-dropping one by one beneath the waves as the unseen news helicopter hovers overhead, its rotors spreading the choppy water while one of the bodies-can it be?-actually seems to be waving.

"Martini," Claire says, eyeing the little Greek pouring her gin. She worries about him. Last week, the Arab who owned the bodega a few blocks away was shotgunned in cold blood, blasted into the racks of Snickers and M &M's. It's the Old West out there once again, these city store owners pioneers in their way, risking everything to nickel-and-dime their way to some low-fat version of prosperity. Bartenders are no different; any old nut can wind up at the end of their bar, running a tab, waiting for closing time to reach inside his jacket. Her own clients, for instance; thanks to her they are walking around free on ball, or just plain free. Claire resolves to call the Times when she returns from her holiday, have her paper chucked at her door from a passing car. She will phone an organic produce company and have delivered to her live and virginal things. She will shop for clothes exclusively by phone. She will buy a new phone by phone. She will call friends when she knows they will be out, preferring tape to an actual human being. More and more a life by proxy.

"This is no place for children," she proposes, to no one, as the baby walls on. Pouring and straining Claire's martini, the Greek brings the glass forward by the stem, as if offering his grandmother a rose.

Santos has appeared beside her. She is plucking macadamia nuts out of a bowl of bar mix, shoving aside the pretzels and the little orange fish. "Where have you been?" she asks, and busies herself by pulling his jacket down at the bottom; it seems, this minute, too short. She presses the back of her hand to his cheek. "Don't get too comfortable. If I have to keep looking at that baby we'll have to leave. I'm sorry-you were saying?"

"I wasn't. We had an extra call. Another illegal fell out of a plane. Or he jumped."

"They're 'ust dying to get into this country. I don't understand it." Outside, a sudden volley of thunder. "And this weather," she says.

His porcelain neck and hands, she sees, his black suit, damp, clinging, revealing every mystery, mysteries she once thought she had solved. But he has, lately, become strange again. He is growing puffy and obscure, an emblem of contrast and contradiction.

"Unfortunately," she says, "I can't get too drunk. At some point tonight I need to go to the office." She picks at his lapel. "You won't guess who I ran into today. Well, not into him, exactly. It was one of his little messes."

A blank expression crosses Santos's face. "I saw Nathan, Claire."

She cocks her head in confusion. "Extraordinary. That's just what I was going to say."

"After all these years, it's incredible, he actually looks better."

"It was typical of him, some pregnant kid in Rikers he just overlooked, just left her there. He never would have done that ten years ago, maybe five years ago. I never could understand his method. Not that he ever had one, just shooting from the hip, no strategy at all. One day, Robin Hood, the next day-whatever he is."

She sees he has, in fact, if not looking directly at her, been taking her in.

"You're not breathing, Errol," she says. "Breathe-"

Her hand, long and slender, rests between them. Santos sets his over hers. She makes a half-hearted attempt to pull away but he holds her down, looking directly into her face.

"It was strange seeing Nathan today," he says. "It's been years. Everything comes back in a flood."

She responds with an ironic smile, impenetrable, she knows.

He releases her, waving down the bartender. "I'll get us some coffee."

When it comes neither of them touches it. Claire stares ahead blankly, as if unconscious of her surroundings. Though she feels the air alive around her, feels every little thing, every grain of dirt under her shoe, every floating dust mote, the electric fields around the lamps, the breezes of microwave, the ultrasound, the invisible, sourceless currents. The Herbie Hancock still playing in her empty car down the street, the endless loop of tape going around and around and around. Nathan's tape.

The thunder comes steady now, close, then echoing far.

"It sounds like target practice," Santos says.

"No," Claire replies, "it's war."

This bar, for example, had finally felt purged, swept clean of the past. But now with Errol here alone, in the flesh, seeking, it seems, her help-

"Claire, you said we could talk about it. About a child," he begins.

She clears her throat. "So that's what's on your mind. Sort of strange timing. This wouldn't have to do with seeing Nathan, would it?"

"Time is what I'm talking about. I want to be a father, I want to send something out there, pieces of us-"

"Out there-?" Claire points. "Pieces?"

"We aren't getting any younger."

"Well," she says, "usually one gets married first."

Again she feels him taking her in, overturning every particle, every thought, in that thorough detective manner of his.

"Don't look at me so hard," she says.

"I've considered marriage, too," he replies.

Claire grips the lip of the bar tightly, light-headed. "Tell me," she says, "did Nathan remember about us?"

Santos finally sips at his coffee.

"Did he ask about me?"

He begins to answer but she turns from him. She has changed her mind; she doesn't, after all, want to hear the answer.

A silver Chevrolet pulls up outside the window, in the mirror. Claire hears honking. She points a finger. "Isn't that your little friend? "

Santos turns around. "Excuse me," he says, with his overbearing politeness, and heads for the door.

"Errol-" When he turns around, she says, "I don't want to see him again. Nathan," she says, to clarify. "I don't want it to startall over."

She watches him run into the street, ankle-deep in snow, leaning into the driver's window, his breath rising and twisting away in the wind. She remembers the first time she met him. Nathan had arranged it, of course, an evening with law school chums, to begin at Jackie's Topless. Ruth was there, and Oliver Schreck. The whole gang, of sorts. And next to the footlights sat Nathan and Errol, best of friends, so like adopted brothers, warriors in jeans and penny loafers without socks. Two chuckling cousins, she liked to imagine, who had pledged to run off to the strip club together at the height of the tedium of a family dinner but had never actually done so, until years had passed and their navels had grown to long gashes, and slapping high fives like middleschoolers at the varsity game they geared up the courage to flee after dessert. But they were in over their heads. It wasn't what they thought. The light was dingy and the men's room reeked and the unairbrushed girls were spotty with patches of cellulite and other minor glitches of construction. And later, they would slink into bed and with closed eyes and lax tongue wordlessly make love to their groggy women-Nathan to her, Errol to his young wife-kneading thigh and breast and puffing the right name, "Am I big enough, Am I big enough," but in their minds fucking against the men's room stall the sixteen-year-old stripper with pubescent tits and pristine mons who had leered at them repeatedly from the stage, shaking at them her cottoncandy promise until each dropped a twenty at her feet, after which she looked over not again, not ever, not even a mistaken glance-

"I have to go," Santos says. He has returned out of breath.

But Claire is unable to move. The roar of surf has returned to her ears. A little white road climbing and dropping, the tropical villages steadily passing. Their tin churches, signs in a language she never heard of-a kind of paradise.

She blinks it away. "But you just got here."

"I'm sorry."

"They can't do it. You're off duty."

He is fumbling with his coat, nervously squeezing his pockets."I don't know what's going on. I'll meet you later, back at your place. "

She stills his hand. "Errol, are you okay?"

He looks up. "They called me."

"Why would they do that?"

"They didn't say. That almost always means something, when you ask and they won't say."

Claire, worried, arranges on her face a smile of certainty. "You worry too much. It's nothing." She searches up and down the bar. All signs of the crying baby have gone. "Check for me here when you get back."

Santos slips out; the tail-lights of the car taking him away fade then turn a corner.

It's nothing," Claire says again, this time to no one, not even herself.

Back again at the middle window facing the harbor, she slides her free hand into the pocket of her jeans while in the competing reflections the wedding invitations she still remembers hover, blurred around the edges like a late-night commercial for romance, the same homemade paper with pressed flowers, the same florid print:

Nathan Stein and Claire Proffitt

request the pleasure of your company …

That was six years ago. Nine years ago, Nathan's big victory for his father was an actual innocent man, a petty thief who had been manhandled by police who quarried up and inside him in search of cocaine-packed condoms. They had found nothing. They had the wrong apartment, the wrong man. An anonymous Dominican, an easy patsy. But Nathan, through the nights writing his opening and closing, drawing up lists and lists of questions for cross, ques tions for redirect, stirred the indignation of the court and the newspapers, untiI, like his father, he was more conductor than lawyer, inspiring articles and talk shows, making a martyr of his client, stumbling upon this image of himself as a desired man-a man actually desired for the right reasons. In Washington Heights, he was a hero.

The attention eventually faded, Nathan had more work than he could handle, and he and Claire took the opportunity to run. He had had his heart set on Honduras, for reasons unclear to Claire at the time. That interminable ride to Tegucigalpa, a drive far outside that city to the home village of a client of Milton's, where in the mornings they were handed a glass container with the milk still warm. New York vanished. Milton's reach withdrew. Their walks were slow and endless and lovely. Outside the village, the grass chewed low made winding shapes between the goat tracks burned into hillsides. Straight young pine trees bisected the tops of the hills, a boundary separating some grass from other grass. By late afternoon a wind began, and the crisscrossing clouds piled up behind the hills. Days and days and days and all those young pines leaning into the wind, all that grass sighing at once.

Their last afternoon, atop a hill, the clouds descended nearly to them. It was a Sunday, and they could hear church instruments calling and answering each other from four or five different corners of the village at once. Goats tore at the ground, children's shrieks and a dog's barking flew upward, circled, evaporated. Brown squares of garden and disks of small homes and circles, circles of women's heads and circles of swollen bellies of children wandering in circles, collecting wood, scrubbing, picking, always with something in their hands, a hoe, arcing high overhead in a half-circle and cutting into the corn. Older children with more circular baskets. Half-sober half-dressed shoeless men weaving along the banks of the brooks toward their semicircle of thatch roof in compounds swept and groomed by other hands and goats. Everything had geometry, everything in its place, in its order.

The curtain of rain in the distance was already pounding some other place; it looked to be falling in surges, and Claire knew that the darker streaks must really have been something when they hit the mud.

A drum beat had started up somewhere behind them, steadily, vaguely threatening. The air was unfocused, tenuous with a fragile peace bargained for by grand compromises. In the distance the rain crashed against the trees.

Nathan pulled one of Claire's hands up to his mouth and bit on a knuckle, an opening, the sort of affection from him she'd dreamed of. She thought she'd lost it without having won it in the first place. Her forehead settled against his spine.

The first spit of spray passed over them. The thunder was underfoot.

"Claire," Nathan said, "we're going to get creamed." They were both twenty-six.

By the hand she led Nathan to the line of pine trees that divided the grass and sat them down adamantly, as if she had prepared something particular to say. Nathan sat behind with her between his knees and braced them together.

The grass on the hillside ripped, the trees knelt. Claire stiffened in Nathan's arms. Then it came in cold sheets, firmer than she expected, like soft wood. Nathan bent to her, but the press of his lips was lost in the weight of the rain. She reached up and pulled his head down to her, and against her ear his chest rose and fell, rose and fell, that side of his face, she felt, the only part of him that kept warm and dry.

When the rain stopped the air was peculiar, empty of sound. Slowly the grass rearranged itself.

She looked to him, his hair a wide dark curtain, face streaked and dripping. A thin veil seemed to drop between them, the feeling of a shared, rural peace, blurring for a moment her suspicions. Nathan hummed. She felt her heart melting.

They skirted down the hill. It was dark then, with dusk this time, the spaces between the trees and the tops of the village roofs more and more blue. Their little shabby house loomed before them.

Nathan tried to light a match for the cigarette he had somehow forgotten to put to his lips, but both were wet, and when he failed to light either he dropped them in the grass, and for a time they confronted each other like two enemy forts, mute, waiting-

The hospital's lobby staff gives Nathan the impression not of paid workers but retirees on social security. The old black guard sitting half-on, half-off a high stool beside the turnstile, his fixed-smile demeanor, his uniform the formal-informal combination of chauffeur's cap and old gray cardigan. Up the elevator, in Nathan's hand always the same scrap of paper with the hospital's address and a room number. On the sixth floor a pail of water and a mop bar entrance to the nurses' station. The long green hallway is silent, two opposing rows of green doors as quiet as linen closets.

Nathan stares wearily at the label outside 614. The name was there last night. It is there now. It might not be next time. That was what he thought yesterday. He thinks it again now: She's still there. Gone, a small harbored hope.

He knocks lightly. No answer. He pauses, then begins to push. But hearing footsteps down the hall he turns his head sharply, catching a glimpse of the heel of a shoe, a dark trouser cuff, pulling into a doorway.

Nathan watches, then walks through, "Jesus Christ," blinking, his nostrils flare against the reek: urine, ammonia, something else, something harder to take. A trash can blooms, soiled paper towels, latex gloves, a crusty syringe. A half-filled bedpan in the sink, the remains of her dirt, listing in a greenish muddy puddle. He is intimate with her shit by now.

But Nathan stands a moment in confusion. He looks at the bedpan, again at the bed. Emaciated, her hair thin and greasy, unwashed for weeks it seems, this woman is not who he expected, no Washington Heights beauty queen stopping traffic on the dance floor of Limelight, but a kind of dishwater blonde, moneyed Upper West Side material. Admiring the chiseled bone structure of the face-yes, Columbus Avenue, linen pants, Museum Cafe now betrayed and plunged into an old woman's crusty death. She stares ahead at the air but does not see it, as though she is asleep or fixed in a trance, perhaps already dead, though her eyes have not gone to stones.

He yanks aside the edge of the bisecting curtain and faces a bank of windows purpling with the twilight. In the office across the street many of the windows are actually alight, whole offices of little desks and drafting tables at which little people sit beneath banker's lamps, flanked by cartons of Chinese food. He steps to the foot of the other gurney where, superimposed on all the deadlines and ambition in the window, stands a transclucent replica of himself haloed by the bright gauze of the curtain behind him.

Once, Nathan was beautiful. He can still remember when he was approached at parties or on the street by someone claiming to work for a modeling agency. Have you ever thought about becoming a model, you'd be great, couple you with some yuppie mom on one of those sun-splashed solarium porches, full page in the New York Times Magazine, a killer wife on your arm, smoking Kools. Or no, a lanky blonde piggybacking, you're laughing so hard having that dreamily great time plastered across bus stop billboards, catching them all over Broadway with those baby blues of yours or are they green? Or Land's End, at the edge of a pier, that dimpled chin of yours, khakis yes, sandals, the water, you like the beach? You ever go to the beach?

The beach. Yes, he likes the beach.

Once he'd actually called the number on the card. He'd had a feeling about her. He'd mentioned he liked opera so she'd suggested Sfuzzi's, across from Lincoln Center. She was waiting at the end of the bar. Long dark hair and a tight black skirt an inch beyond mere allusion and into the region of out-and-out promise. She moved fluidly between subjects. His subjects, what he did, when he did it. Depositions. Trials. She was most curious-fascinated really-about those conjugal visits at Rikers Island she read about in The New Yorker. How does a murderer fuck, do you think? Is he sensitive and generous, does he wait for her, or possibly remorseful? Or does he do it like he wants to kill her? She led him back to her apartment through the snow. There had been no talk of cigarettes or Land's End. She didn't bring up her agency, the subject of his modeling never arose, and before she asked him up to her place it crossed his mind that the feeling he'd had about her was correct. It amused him. He said yes, coffee, fine, a drink, a drink better yet. Why not? he thought. It was a benign sort of trick, the sort he might have played himself.

Within fifteen minutes she'd flung down the Murphy bed with one hand while undressing with the other in a minimal and practiced show of effort. She was all fun, paper-thin, loud, an exhibitionist. He half thought she'd ask him to show her how they did it in jail. As if you'd know, she'd say. And he did. And he kept thinking she wouldn't like it. And thinking, too, about her neighbors on the other side of the wall. How many of her climaxes had they heard over the years, scorecards on the table, that one, that one, no way, faked that one for sure. He'd call again, he said, later, smiling at the door, buttoning his coat with one hand, waving with the other in his own show of minimal and practiced effort. She was expert at saying hello. Nathan the good-bye artist. Even before the doorman let him out he'd forgotten her.

"Nathan"-said with neither surprise nor pleasure.

Maria has been watching him. Maybe watching this, this very thing about the good looks with which he knows he has swindled even her. And maybe she is thinking the same thing he is: What a shame. What a waste.

She waves her scabby lips, shriveled fruit. Her cheeks, Nathan sees, are no longer sunken. There is nothing left to sink, or give. She is picked clean: her eye sockets, protruding through the skin as though they lie atop it, make with the bridge of her nose the figure of a cross. Beneath the covers the body is dissolved, without contours, hardly a ripple across the surface of the blanket. They've cut her hair since yesterday. It is shorn unevenly, mere tufts in places, the scalp bared in others, like a sheep's. It gives Nathan the impression that she has been hurried along an assembly line into some sort of institution, prison, concentration camp during an epidemic of lice; that there are many more just like her on the other side of the walls, others up and down the long corridors, in the wards above and below, shorn and freshly disinfected; and that these people are not ill but mad, the criminally insane. Maria's hair gives Nathan the impression that she has gone bad.

"Nathan." She speaks a full octave below her former voice, as though someone else is speaking for her, a heavy smoker, a whiskey-voiced transvestite, someone who is really expecting him. Maybe-it does actually cross his mind-someone he deserves.

A skeletal arm drops out of her blanket and motions toward the chair at the foot of her bed.

Who have you told that I'm here?" Nathan hangs his head.

“You are no good, Nathan. Though your friends love you. Ruth was here today. Somehow she knew."

Nathan, alarmed, checks his watch. "Today?"

Maria's cracked lips part, in a smile, Nathan supposes, but the effect is monstrous, a demonic sneer. "And I love you. But you are no good now. I'll tell you what has happened. You've become just like your father. When you were fat I couldn't tell you apart. I used to think that you'd crawled inside his body. You laugh. Look at you, laughing. You made fun of him your whole life, the things you said about him, but now look. You waited your whole life to be something else but you never were anything but him. Did you tell anyone, Nathan? Does anyone know I'm here?"

Nathan shuts his eyes. He has been going around without her for more than a year, bringing along with his bottles of wine his new excuses: Maria has to stay late at work; Benny is sick; Maria's mother is not well. When is it that he thinks up these lies? Even he doesn't know. Does he conceive of them over time, making certain they are enough unlike the ones preceding; or do they come to him while he stands at the front door, ringing the bell, spontaneously, randomly coming to him, and he is merely lucky the lie is different enough, for it is, all the lies are different enough. Or is he so practiced at producing excuses that they merely fly out of his mouth via a direct conduit between his lips and the lying part of his brain?

Maria doesn't come, can't, won't, won't ever again. And by the way, didn't I tell you? She is dying.

The world is not that gullible. It is merely too afraid to insist.

"I am dying."

"Yes," he says.

“Yes.”

Yes. Nathan traces the sweaty creep diagonally across the base of his neck. As though he has said not yes but guilty, as though he is giving it again, in case she didn't believe it the first time, her verdict: guilty.

Maria lets her head drop toward the window and the office building across the way. "They're always watching," she says dreamily. "You don't know. They send signals."

Nathan sighs, then leans forward, solicitous. "What do the signals say?"

"That they're going to kill me."

"They look too busy."

"There is an aerobics class on one of those floors."

"Tuesday and Thursday nights."

"And don't you love that," Maria scolds.

"I was only kid-"

"Young girls shaking their tits at me in the window. They want me to die."

I'm sorry.

We'll be happy.

Nathan says neither of these things.

A light comes to her face, a union between stillness and sweatsheen and the dingy blue light. Her lips harden and curl. Eyelids flutter, pupils capsize, as blank now as a marble statue's. Beneath the blanket she brings her feet together and lifts the jagged knobs of her knees. Her arms lift, her head turns, and her eyes, rolling and rolling, now return, staring with electric certainty at the drab gray wall. Stilling, breathing quietly, she doesn't move until her position hardens over the long seconds into a Christ-like pose. Nathan half stands, seeing not Maria but something using her, inhabiting her body, again that thing that awaits him, too. Dementia. Sign of last days.

Up Nathan goes, looking away, taking a wide berth around Maria's outstretched arm, reaching for the phone. He dials, lifts his wristwatch and counts to fifteen. This is a nifty thing he's learned. His own 900-number charging $99.99 a call for nothing. He wanders the city, using phones at offices, at friends', calling himself, holding on for the required fifteen seconds, and hanging up. Most offices will miss the calls, not enough digits to stop the eye. A hundred bucks a pop, he can make what, twenty grand, forty, before someone catches on, before he's long, long gone. It is horrible, he knows. Horrible, especially, here.

Nathan puts down the phone and goes to stand by the window. Outside, the streets have darkened, the sky has paled, weighing down with the dull fog of a hundred million pricks of light. Television, reading lamp, billboard, tall-light, streetlight. Wires pass across the window, offensive, closing him in. The snow swirling around out there doesn't yet amount to anything, merely a manifestation of the cold.

Wringing his hands, looking back, briefly, at Maria's demonic grin, he turns toward the snow and remembers. A second date. She came armed with a chaperone. "This is Benny," she'd said. "Today he is four. And I am twenty." It was a prepared speech. And she paused to permit time for the math, as a stage actress will leave a space for laughter. Ultimately, it was this indifference toward all that, her nonchalance about her unwed motherhood, that won him over. She was different, and insistent on him seeing her as different. It wasn't beyond her to know full well that she, her tribe, was merely his taste, that she was merely the momentary head of Nathan's barrio queue. Standing firm, with her hand like a hat on her boy Benny's head, her eyes flashed defiantly. She'd given birth at sixteen. There it was. It was all clear now: she intended to resist. Interesting, she shall resist. Nathan asked her what she did. She merely laughed, she waved her hand. It does not matter, she said. What I do, it has nothing to do with me.

The sheets shift. Maria's arms lower, her legs slide beneath the covers. Her eyes slide and focus on the first thing that comes into her view: Nathan's empty chair. Craning her neck: "He has gone already? "

"Here.”

Her eyes, locating him at the window, stalk him as he returns to his chair.

"Come sit by me," she says.

"Me?”

She cannot have meant him. Nathan's chair is Nathan's chair, distant, the doghouse. But Nathan sits beside her, and she takes his hand. Between her bones he feels swollen.

"I have been in this bed for a week," she says. "The people in this bed always die. I don't know how many corpses I am lying on top of." She wipes her face with the back of her hand. "I want you to know that I come from a wealthy family. My father bought for nothing that property on Roatan before I was born, before the resorts, before the airstrip. Trees and beach and water-who knew the world would want it?”

Maria pauses, out of breath, and Nathan, hearing a whisper in his ears, scans the room, suspiciously eyeing the bedstand, the gurney, the intercom wired to the nurses' station outside. You are a liar, says the bouquet of near-dead flowers tossing in front of the heat vent. You are a traitor, hum the fluorescent bars.

"We would be rich, if we sold it," Maria is saying. "We would be happy, if we built on it. I once thought we would together, Nathan, build a house, both of us, on the water. Be happy. I gave it to you in case something happened to me so that you could still be happy. I wrote it down. We did that together. Your father was a witness.

You are a coward, Nathan hears. But he throws a sweeping glance around the room. The flowers, it turns out, are saying nothing at all.

"But I can't depend on you, Nathan. I have taken back my piece of Roatan. All of it. There is nothing you can do. The will is done. It's with my things. You get nothing. I want you to know I have seen to it. You will get nothing."

Nathan swallows, takes back his hand, his plane ticket, his vision of white sand, and clutching it all moves back to the chair at Maria's feet. She opens a Bible to a particular spot, most of the lines scored under, the margins darkened with notes. "For the wrath of God, Nathan, is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth-" She clears her throat. "The invisible things of the world are clearly seen"-looking up to train her gaze on Nathan, now closely examining his fingernails-"and who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature more than the creator who is blessed forever amen. For this cause God gave them up until vile affections, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, Nathan! spiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things." Whispering now: "Disobedient, Nathan." She levels at him a disdainful stare, and continues by heart: "Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them, Nathan, fornication, Nathan! Do not.

Do not-"

Nathan is sweating viciously. His eyes have shut.

Maria closes the Bible, her withered pinky finger marking the place. "Genesis. Your book, Nathan. The race of men whom I have created, I will wipe them off the face of the earth-man and beast and reptile and birds. I am sorry I ever made them." She nods. "Amen."

Maria leaves the Bible on her chest like an offering. "We are all God's children," she says.

"We could well be," Nathan replies hoarsely.

"Father Cleary helped me to see."

"He's not even Catholic."

"What does it matter what he is," Maria snaps. She calms, smiles. "I did want you to see, too. But you are too late. Praise God, I want Father Cleary to bury me. I want him to put me in the ground. And I want people to know who I was and what I did. I want Benny to know who I was. There is so much to be learned from my life." She covers her eyes. "But I won't be able to tell anyone what it is."

Maria trembles with comprehension. Glimpses of inconceivable dark, outer space, the misunderstood distances beyond the sun-a better and better view. Then a bitter expression crosses her eyes. She has seen something at the end of the bed. Her lips purse: it is Nathan. She opens her mouth to say something, deliver a final blow, then stops herself-

They both have heard it, and they stiffen at the same time, as dogs will at the first detection of danger: mad singing, hooting, sputtering laughter. The silhouette in the gauzy curtain rises out of the shadowbed and stands atop it and begins to sway, tubes and tape waving about the face, emitting a tra-la-la medley of childhood ditties.

Nathan focuses on a point in space over Maria, his face drained of all embarrassment and contempt. Maria, though, sits upright in bed, facing the curtain, enraptured. She watches the silhouetted contortions with courteous, even studious, attention.

Two residents and two male nurses, big men with broad backs and thick arms, come, and wielding a long syringe subdue Maria's neighbor, holding her until she goes limp and falls silent. They tie her down and reattach her tubes and tape them, then leave. Their footsteps fade down the corridor.

A last-minute bleat-Nathan grabs for his beeper but finds it with nothing to add. Then silence. The silence that comes after a loud noise; a strange, bad quiet that has the feel of permanence, as though the woman has not been put down but murdered.

The shadowbed is flat and still. Maria looks with weary suspicion toward the stillness, searching the translucent curtain for signs of life. Nathan watches the curtain himself, but as a child will keep an eye on the kitchen door while raiding a jar of honey, he stands, lifts the phone again, dials. He listens for a ring, then his own voice, "You have fifteen seconds to terminate this call-" Wincing, he brings the receiver to his hip, where his voice murmurs softly against the wool tweed. He is hating this. He counts out the fifteen seconds, lightly replaces the receiver, "Hey," he says to her gently. He bends near, remembering her in the morning before she washed. She was savage, full of rage, rampant with grace. Now she won't answer him. For a moment he believes she isn't alive. She lies weightless and silent and her body hidden. "Hey," he says again. She blinks. He tucks the top hem of the blanket under her shoulder, though he doesn't know why, except that it feels right. He touches her cheek with his fingertips. "I have to go," he says.

Still, the body under the covers and the tufts of hair on her head don't move. Though her eyes see. They have lost the glaze, and they are huge, outsized in her new head. She takes everything in through there, sight, sound, touch. Nathan knows he should stay but he can't repel the urge to leave, as though something is pulling him, something from out of the ground.

"Maria. I have to, I must, go."

Paper cups full of steam in both hands, Santos steps off the boardwalk onto the beach. A crowd has gathered at the waterline around a pen of yellow caution tape. The uniform cops there wander the perimeter, their flashlights dragging circles of light in the sand. Streaks of snow, as if the air is filled with hay. Beyond, the harbor's backwash bares pink lips of foam. Noise of boiling water, the frenzied clang of buoys. Thunder has begun to blast away far offshore.

Barbados, who had raced ahead, emerges out of the crowd and strides forward. But he is not picking his nails, blowing his nose, looking up, away, into the sky for his multitude of distractions.

"Why us-?" Santos begins.

"We have a situation here," Barbados says. The look on his face is new. There is none of the usual calm or active disinterest when they find their corpses. In the beginning there was horror and morbid fascination and numb voyeurism. Once there was pity. Now, at the scene, they give their cadaver as much attention as a shoe that needs tying. But Barbados is agitated. The two of them stand shapeless in their overcoats, their backs to the wind.

Santos tests his cup rim against his lower lip and blows. "Whose?" he asks.

Barbados aims his finger, Yours.

Santos hands him his cup and squints again at the mound lying motionless in the sand and begins to walk. There is little but the minor squalls of snow in the air, no shout, no murmur. He ducks under the caution tape. The other cops stop what they are saying. Santos looks and they look away. So Barbados has told them. Santos doesn't know what was said or why, and he'd just as soon walk away from here as find out who else in his precinct got found on this day besides the South American who fell from his ride to paradise, the runaway wife killed in a squatter's shack, the Russian paperhanger whose throat was cut from ear to ear then kicked ten flights into space. Tagged and printed and photographed and zipped into plastic sleeves in stairwells and bars and salt marshes and parked cars and subway tunnels, finally in that state they will not need to explain. No longer capable of transgression, free from the forest of perils.

The darkened afternoon is ripped away. Noonlight, handheld, explodes from the boardwalk. A reporter stands clutching her mike with one hand and the collar of her trench coat with the other. Other news vans have pulled up, their antennas telescoping skyward. Here, the silent crowd is scared and excited, craning their necks. There, kids mug for the cameras. In the klieg lights Santos watches his shadow lie down at his feet, stretching toward the waterline. He reaches for the plastic sheeting over the face. All eyes on him, he feels like a character in a play with cast and props but no script. He is a sucker, a dupe. This no job. How does it turn out this time? He is here, he now understands, to see someone he knows.

7 P.M.

Night, and the lights of New York expose a curdled, festering sky. Snow sifts over the city, filling dents in car tops and windowsill flowerpots, purifying the trash in the street. White lattice collects on the sewers. Snow touches the manhole covers, sits softly and is gone, leaving black circles in the street, screw holes where the city is held together. Somewhere a sanitation truck fitted with a plow recedes block to block, scraping the slush down to rails and old cobbles entombed by skins of asphalt. Though only dinnertime the streets are filled with a midnight vacancy, as though the city lies under curfew.

Claire brushes the grease and crumbs from her palms and holds out her hand. Ruth takes it uncertainly, shifting her briefcase to her other hand, then spreads her coat over her stool.

"Ah, the old drink," Ruth says happily, eyeing Claire's glass. "Martini for me, too,” she calls down the bar. "Another?" she asks Claire.

How is the glass empty already? Should she? She hates to drink on Sundays-she's always thought it a bad sign. But as long as Errol is gone she's made up her mind to do what is necessary. Claire lifts her empty glass and gives the Greek a little wave with it.

"Ruth, thank you for coming-" she begins, then stops herself, feeling pathetic that she beeped her, obviously to deliver some well-planned speech. But her strategy and poise have evaporated in the bar light. "Can you tell me what he has done with his-?"

"Life?" Ruth fills in with a snort, picking at her frilly-frumpy white shirt, then shrugs and delivers one of Nathan's own expressions of helpless wonder, like a kid sister who will despise what she's learned but use it anyway. Her mimicry is so obvious, Claire turns away, embarrassed for her. So this is what Nathan's been doing. Though he and Ruth couldn't be sleeping together. First of all, she's stuck around, or he's let her. And then there's the matter of his little habit, his geographical devotions. Ruth, obviously, is disqualified. It is her compact heaviness, her hushed, mannered way-a little shrug, her sudden silences-of punishing with her disapproval.

"I hear you're well," Ruth says. "I always liked Legal Aid myself-"

But Claire politely waves the subject away. She knows well the patronizing compliments that come next. Though by now her work is like any other, unheroic and time-consuming. It all seems a conspiracy to reward her for her inertia. "I took a case from him today.

"Did you," Ruth says, as if she'd already known. And she has, Claire is sure. Ruth and her spy's clubby demeanor, her transparent smile. Homely, so plain, so oppressively plain as to make her invisible. She was built for surveillance.

"Gross negligence." Claire is fuming. "He just abandoned another client. How does he keep it up? How do you keep it up, working for him?"

"Not for him," Ruth insists. "Just when he needs some help and I have the time. And Nathan has always treated me well."

"He always did."

"He pays me too much."

"I'm sure." Claire smiles with recognition. Those tips he always left. Waiters and cabbies and the Chinese delivery boys in the dead of night, making a bargain of their affection. As at a store's liquidation, buying up whatever was on sale just because he could, treating his merchandise better than he treated his actual human beings.

Claire lifts her fingers, offering the thick air a cigarette. Still, though, Nathan did always foot the whole rent, pay for the movie, and the midnight waiters at Gambone's, the zuppa di giorno, the baskets and baskets of bread, the espressos, gaining weight before her very eyes. Even then he sat there, overweight, a mobster-in-training, with the vest and the pocket watch and his stomach swelling through the suspenders. Fat wads of cash, though it was mostly twenties wrapped in a hundred or two, all of it for show, while his lawyering was bringing in nickels and dimes. Always just a baby step ahead of the collection agencies. The details of life, the bills and RSVPs and grocery lists, bored him. It was the grandiose that lured him. He was operatic. He performed when the lights were on. He lived on praise. He lived-brilliantly, she always thought-on credit, on air.

"So why don't you just call him?" Ruth asks.

"Who says I didn't? You can't reach him. And when you do, he won't call back. He never called back."

Ruth tips her head. "That's true."

Claire permits herself a laugh, letting down her guard for Ruth though she never felt it go up. She pats her old law school-mate's pudgy fingers. "Why should that have changed?"

A pained look crosses Ruth's face. "He needs to see people now."

"He needs," Claire repeats, trying it out on her tongue. It tastes like a joke. Nathan needs. "What for?"

But Ruth is into the bar mix, rummaging around for something, a missing ingredient. "His friends-"

"I'm not-don't call me that. His friend. Does he even mention me?"

The hitch in Ruth's voice says no, though Ruth says, "Here and there."

Here and there. Claire watches the speech she prepared shredding, spinning like confetti in her drink. So unthreatening, so respectable, Ruth is the perfect front, the perfect accomplice. A woman who asks nothing. She's always had that mind like a steel trap. No wonder Nathan likes her around.

"We've all been friends a long time," Ruth says. Claire raises an eyebrow. "Have we?"

"I can't speak for him."

"You mean you won't. You know what he does. You can probably put him away all by yourself." An irresistible thought comes to her: "Maybe that's just what you're doing."

Ruth sighs, weary. "I don't know what you're talking about.

Do you?"

"I don't need to. There was always something. I knew when Milton took him in that it was the end. He was all right on his own. He would have made a hell of a lawyer."

He is."

Claire looks up sharply.

"In his way," Ruth suggests. "But it's true, too, that you don't see everything he does. He has his pro bono cases, like everyone else. You know that in his heart he is a saint."

"We're all saints in our own hearts," Claire replies.

She lifts her head, suddenly, at a sound. Across the river, above the South Street Seaport and the cluster of tall ships the city keeps chained to the docks, balloons of lavender smoke drift like thoughts toward open water. Fireworks, celebrating-she can't imagine what. The overcast a flashing riot, the skyscrapers half disappeared up in the clouds like splintered amputations. The city seems under attack. Downriver, the triple-decker ferry drifts away from its mooring, hunched low and dark like a refugee ship escaping to the safer ground of Staten Island.

They watch a minute in silence.

"Tell me, does he even know he had a son?" Claire asks, realizing, perhaps, the true reason she called Ruth.

Ruth turns her head. "Benny?"

"Benny?"

"But Benny's not his. He couldn't be-"

Across the water, overhead, sail the little gray parachutes of clouds from the fireworks.

"-Nathan's son."

“Of course not." Claire looks at Ruth, unconsciously watching her, the frilly bow at the neck, the brown bob circling her ears, the piercing black eyes. To read her face you'd need a map. "God, you can be beautiful. What a fool Nathan is."

Ruth isn't even blushing. "You have a child? You and-"

"But of course you knew."

Ruth says nothing.

"You knew I was pregnant, Ruth. I know you. You understand everything, you have all the information. You hoard information. And you don't give out a thing. That leaves you in charge. You pull the strings. I like that. I respect that in a woman."

Ruth gives no reaction, betraying nothing.

"So you knew," Claire continues on. "Though not many did. I’m not sure anyone did. I didn't even tell my parents."

“Baptists, I remember."

“They don't want to know. And I hid it well, then took that leave. Though anyone who cared to know could have seen-"

She looks at Ruth, amazed. "Isn't it extraordinary, how much is right in front of us, how truth is right there, and we don't see it, won't see it, despite ourselves, just because we don't want to? We look right tbrougb it. How powerful we are, Ruth. How utterly, utterly magical."

Ruth is saying nothing. Her eyes are casting about for something to grab on to, something safe, something cleaner. Which surprises Claire. This is just the kind of scene Ruth specializes in: barriers breaking, soft spots exposed, vulnerabilities, and Ruth coming in to sweep up, collect information, and clean, clean, clean.

Claire, watching herself in the mirror, is reduced before her own eyes to the status of her own-and only-witness. Her testimony, flawed, raw, sentimental, will have to be revised to do anybody-even herself-any good.

How lonely we are, she thinks.

"You know, I actually once had an idea," she says. "I don't know why. I've always dreamed of having a farm somewhere with

Nathan. A real one, with that blue silo they have now with the American flag painted on the side. A red barn, of course, an old pickup truck."

"Nathan hates the country," Ruth says with a wife's nonchalant bitterness.

"He does have that East Hampton house," Claire points out. "That mansion, that hideous gargantuan thing. That Sheetrock palace, as sturdy as a house of cards."

"It's beautiful in its way."

"Big enough for a family of ten plus servants, if that's beauty."

"He has all those gardens but never weeds it. All that lawn and doesn't mow it. He even has a pool."

Claire's eyes are blurred with tears. She is laughing, she thinks. "But he can't swim."

"Hates the water."

"Does he even own it outright yet? He probably doesn't even know. There are so many things he used to own, or owns, or thinks he owns. Though all he really has are those stashes in his closets and drawers, the rolls of cash and all those Rolexes, in his suit jackets for god's sake." Her martinis are finally beginning to take pleasurable effect. Claire gives a snort. "Sorry, it's just the idea of Nathan knee-deep in the rhubarb, in overalls and boots and a John Deere hat, a shovel in those soft little hands of his, digging into the manure. All his Armani suits sealed in plastic in the closet. It's almost too much to imagine."

Ruth is laughing, too, but embarrassed, her little dark pouched eyes glinting, beaded and distant.

"What is it?" Claire asks her. "What's wrong?"

"I think of him differently. Maybe as he should be."

"Ah." Claire spins back to the bar and eagerly swallows what is left of her martini. "And what way is that?" But there will be no reply. "You love him," she says flatly. "That's why you put up with everything you do. Though I don't see how you can. After a while, I couldn't. He would have liked the farm, though," she says, drying her eyes. "Just to own it, like his record collection. Own it just because he could. And he'd have hired some Guatemalan to run it for him, the wife of some client doing fifteento-life. And her daughters, of course. Can't forget daughters. Especially Guatemalan daughters."

Ruth clears her throat. "Nathan never told me you had a child. "

"Nathan doesn't know. But you did, didn't you?"

Ruth presses on, as a good lawyer would: "Does Errol?"

But Claire's attention has been tugged back to the TV. "My god, isn't that-?" A stunning face in high-school portrait, a strange hybrid of Hispanic and some blood that gives the girl green, bottomless eyes, virtuous, maddeningly off-line to the right; that gummy blue background behind every adolescent's head; her white shirt buttoned chastely to the neck, a tiny silver crucifix looped through the collar. Prim as a nun the day she marries Christ. The face vanishes, spliced into a long shot of Coney Island and its ferris wheel and its long and vacant-boardwalk. Finally a pan across the icy beach, focusing on a shrouded corpse. "Isabel Santos of 147th Street, Manhattan," the anchor says with the swagger of one calling a horse race, "a gruesome discovery made earlier today by chilly members of the Polar Bear Club."

“Oh-" Ruth has clamped her hand to her mouth.

'Errol's Isabel? My god-" Claire pictures Errol's sister, Milton's secretary, mastering the phones, making the coffee, collating the depositions, then sashaying into Milton's office for dictation, the door locking behind her, to actually do god knows what. Ruth is on her feet. "The phone?" she asks the bartender.

Claire can only stare. "Call Nathan? But they have already-he must already know. After all, they called Errol."

Against the wall near the johns, Ruth dials one number and says nothing. She dials another and turns her back, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand. She hurries back, her coat already on. "I couldn't get him."

"Then who was that on the phone?" Claire asks, then waves off the answer, for a moment having forgotten whom she is dealing with. "I'm sorry."

"I have to go."

"Of course. Some other time."

Claire looks up at the bang of a door and an icy gust and Ruth's hunched bulk shrinking in the frame of the window, trudging away through the snow.

Santos is on the sidewalk before Barbados has stopped the car. The tenements run like hedges, none the same yet all alike. Gaps among the buildings like punched teeth. Arms full of flowers and eyes crippled by memories, Santos lets himself in the front door and leaves it open for Barbados. The derelict building. Upstairs, in the apartment in which he was a boy, plain rooms, pressed-tin ceilings, rough-hewn floors. A gust of wind moans through the windows, prowling room to room through the puckered-glass transoms, making them chatter. Somewhere a clock ticks. His chest is tight, his throat rattling. He goes to his pocket for his inhaler. The clock tocks. Something more than time passes here. The little spray of medicine tricks him: his eyes clear, his lungs rise, his veins run.

"She was clean," he says, turning at the door. "I still don't get that.

Barbados touches the center of Santos's back. "The examiner will know everything in a few hours."

"They did the core temp? Sometimes they pass on the core temp.

"They never pass on it. They didn't pass on it now."

"They pass on it. Believe me. When they don't give a shit."

"About her, they give a shit," Barbados says.

"You saw her nails. They were clean. Do you get that? You telling me she didn't fight? That girl didn't fight? She fights everything. She fights all the time. There were marks. She was fucked up. You saw the marks-"

"Errol."

They watch him from the couch, gathered there below the X-ray light of the fluorescent ring, as for a family photograph. The sister he has left, his mother’s hand on her shoulder. Others, old friends and neighbors, line the walls. Here and there, displayed proudly on old, unworthy furniture, gleam the expensive gifts Milton Stein has given Mrs. Santos, his long-time secretary: vases and wood boxes, a brass lamp; in the corner, a stereo system with all of the doo-dads. A neighbor raises a hand, a solemn gesture.

Santos kneels before his mother, rests the bouquet in her lap and takes her limp and clammy hand. "Momma," he begins.

She blinks some signal. Beside her, on the end table, a lush display of flowers. Wildflowers, carnations, poinsettia, their cards. Blood-red roses, Milton Stein and Natban Stein. Santos fingers the card and snaps it from its string and hands it up to Barbados.

"They're fast," Santos says.

"It is their business to know."

Santos's mother slides a finger along his hairline, contemplating.

"What was she doing out there?"

Since he saw Isabel lying on the beach he has tried to see her face in his mind but he cannot. He remembers her hand, like a tiny creature in his. He remembers tugging her through a schoolyard fence in the muffled quiet of a winter's day, deploying her to the outfield on a pond of asphalt as blank and featureless as airport tarmac. A playground strewn with old snow, glittering puddles of broken glass. Her even breaths hanging before her in transfiguring balloons. He remembers that while the boys moved listlessly in grimy parkas Isabel in her white snowsuit scurried here and there, flailing, giggling, blocking the ball with her shins. Errol hit the ball high into the gloom, Isabel staggered beneath, face to sky, hands outstretched, waiting to cradle anything that might need catching.

"Momma, who did she go out with last night?"

His mother is weeping. "She didn't say."

He looks to his other sister.

"Has she been going out with somebody?"

Nothing. A dull shake of the head.

Santos presses his eye with the back of a hand. "I have to call Claire," he says.

At the kitchen table he rolls a bottle of beer in his hands. Bar bados puts down the phone. "Nathan Stein didn't call in, but someone else did."

"You call his home?"

"Yes."

"The office?"

"Yes."

"His service?"

"Someone else returned the call."

"Someone else."

"Oliver Schreck."

"Schreck? I don't want a call from Schreck."

"He says he has an idea about Coney Island."

Santos raises a palm, warding it off. "He's zero. He's always been nothing but zero."

"But he called."

"What is he, Stein's boy now?"

"We're going to pass it on in the morning, Errol."

"Just tell me why he's returning Nathan's business."

Barbados sighs. "He didn't say."

"We'll talk to him tonight."

"They're going to put someone else on it tomorrow."

The specter of his sister behind the reception desk of the venerable law office of Stein & Stein, where his mother had sat for years before her. How close she'd come to working for him, too, had he accepted the place Milton offered. In their hands, she quickly took on that lawyerly quiet and seemed neither happy nor unhappy. To Santos she was vaguely cold, an old teammate traded on. Different manager now, different league. Now she is a rag of meat, a puddle in the sand.

There is a knock on the door. Someone says it is the funeral man and Santos begins to cry. He didn't know he was going to and he is ashamed. Barbados looks away. Muffled weeping from the living room. Santos lets his neck go and closes his eyes, but in the dark, guided only by vague notions of human frailty, he does not know what to look for, little even of why.

Nathan is off, trailing vapor, striding downtown, his watch aimed at the light. Snow slithers dry underfoot, dusting the cars, the balconies, casting them as marble statues. A bitter draft starts and stops, rattling the trash in the doorways. He stops midstep, making a sudden move for his belt, drawing his beeper. His cellphone appears in his other palm. He pulls its antenna and pokes. An operation that seems vaguely military, like pulling the pin on a grenade.

"No, Serena, you can't meet me here. Did I see what?… What boat? I told you, I've been out all day… From Puerto Rico?… A brother? I didn't know you had a brother… no, it couldn't have been. Listen to me. Puerto Ricans don't have to sneak across the water into the States. They're honorary citizens. They're not Haitians or Cubans in some broken-down wooden bathtub, or some Mexican roasting in the engine of a banana truck in Tijuana. They can come to America in a plane like human beings."

At the creaking of tires against the snow, Nathan catches a glimpse of a red sedan passing slowly along the curb. Some uneasy flame relights in his gut. Those faces in the window from this afternoon, and other afternoons. And these faces, hovering in the fogged window, snapping away as the car passes, "-Isabel," he thinks he hears Serena say, then flinches, clicks Serena off, and walks on.

Inside Jackies, an inch and a half of hundreds in his palm, wrapped like a spring roll in a few twentles-a chunk from his fifty-thousand-dollar day, and he hasn't done a thing. What a country. The bartender comes quickly. The shelves are thinly stocked, the bottles well spaced. Nathan steps up but says nothing. Instead, with his hands pressed against the bar's edge, he loses himself momentarily in the opposing mirrored walls. They yield reflection within reflection of a woman past her prime pitching forward over an imaginary pony. The debris of a great dream, the joffrey Ballet, Balanchine. Her false eyelashes are coming loose. To her right on the short stage, two other women spin on fireman's poles in a urine-colored haze to a medley of rock songs fifteen years old.

"Scotch rocks," Nathan finally manages to say, his elbows landing on the bar. The drink comes and he drains off half the glass, breathes, then drinks off the rest. He now feels himself in a position to contemplate, for a minute, the possibility that everything is normal. He pulls the legal envelope from his jacket pocket and leaves it on the bar before him, stares at it-and clutches, again, the beeper on his belt. Again it is Errol Santos NYPD with his attendant numbers, home, work, beeper, cell-phone, a play for urgency. Already, he can see the conversation. He can see Coney Island.

With a wave from the bartender the show behind Nathan has stopped, and as if by agreement most of the men avert their eyes. The dancers gather pocketbooks, stockings, hairbrushes, rotating to the right they carry their belongings in their arms like piles of laundry. At the farthest edge the last one steps into her slippers and down out of the lights to the floor, chaffing along the bar, tightening her silk robe around her waist. Off stage she is older, without resources.

Nathan catches the bartender's sleeve. "Mind if I make a call?" reaching for the bar phone while the music starts up again, he dials, lifts his watch, counts the seconds.

But the drinkers are spinning on their stools. Something odd is happening. The silence has brought a new girl out of the back through a curtain of beads. Halter top and pleated plaid skirt. Her adolescent knees. A field hockey captain, a Catholic-school girl, her face heavily painted, a touch of glitter, a screen of black hair across the brow. She steps onto stage left while the other two dancers turn their backs and put on for the men in the next sector the same clothes they had taken off for the men in the one before; as if they are not a mere five or six feet away but in another room. The new girl dances badly, stiff, out of sync with the music. Tall, gangly, her long arms outstretched, her lips pursed in a precocious smooch, she can't be more than seventeen. She's in over her head. It may well have been only hours since she was accosted by Jackie himself at the Port Authority gate, fresh off a bus from Gary or Omaha.

Nathan dials Santos's message service and leaves an address in the East Eighties with an hour that may or may not correspond to the time at hand or any time in the near future.

The girl is nude to the waist. While she moves her hips in her underpants, the other two dancers throw her dirty looks. But the girl's eyes are not unsure, unamused; they work the room with haphazard confidence. Nathan thinks it isn't impossible that her night on stage at jackie's-her debut-is no more than a lark, a perverse holiday from the tedium of the Dalton School or Spence or her freshman year at NYU, or even her outlay against a lost bet made at her best friend's birthday party.

Nathan sits with his elbows cocked behind him on the bar. He believes he understands. The girl is putting them on. He enjoys a good joke, even at his own expense. Bills fall over her feet like leaves.

A tightness, though, has begun in the back of his -neck and slips over his head like a hood. It is the sight in the open door: Oliver Schreck in green blazer and cowboy boots strides in reaching for his belt. He unclips and waves his beeper with one hand while shaking Nathan's with the other. His palm like raw meat coated in pretzel crumbs.

"It's fucking Johnny again, Nathan. It's the fifth time in the last two hours. I thought you were going out there today."

His accent is heavy on the outer boroughs. The Bronx, Brooklyn. Thick-wristed, balding, under his blazer he has the thick, sloped shoulders and long dangling arms of a fighter. He knows the streets. It is easy to see he never left them, P.S. 132, Queens College, New York Law nights while working in his dad's dell.

Nathan shakes his head. "Too busy. I've been crazy all day."

Schreck waves for the bartender, pointing into Nathan's glass for another round. "Because his family really wants to know what happened to the bond money."

"It's in transit."

But Schreck isn't listening. He snatches at a bowl of pretzels. "Well, thanks for inviting me down. Haven't been here in ages."

"I didn't invite you, Oliver. You asked where I was going to be, and here you are."

Schreck smiles, his mouth full of mash. "So Coney Island. How'd that go?"

Nathan turns aside. "Zip."

"Zip? I thought-"

"Small fry. Nothing. I let it go."

"And getting you out there Sunday morning. What's Krivit thinking?

Nathan looks at him. "You tell me."

"That fat fuck," Schreck says, spraying pretzel. "Fuck him. We don't need him. It's you and me, Nathan. And Milton. We all have better things to be doing now."

Nathan halfheartedly raises his glass. "Okay, Oliver."

"So who are you meeting?" Schreck asks.

"Some bad guy is threatening to pay my retainer."

Schreck turns, elbows cocked on the bar, and surveys the room.

"Which one is it?"

"He's still in the Tombs. He's sending someone."

"Last week Johnny tried to get me out to Rikers by promising me a pair of tickets to a samba fest. That or ten pounds of veal from his brother the butcher." He drinks his drink. "But hey, who cares. Screw Johnny and his family. With Milton doing that rape case now-"

Nathan raises his head. "Rape?"

"What do you mean? That Riverside Drive thing."

"What's Milton got to do with-"

"You know, that advertising exec getting snatched jogging along the river, pulled into the trees. They banged the shit out of-"

"I know the-"

"What do they call it? Whupping? Whipping?"

"Wilding."

"Good term. Fits them. Fucking animals." Schreck's masticating jaws pause at their work, and his eyes, studying Nathan's face, betray the rules of a new game. "And where's Isabel by the way? Shitty time to disappear. She's not answering her beeper. "

A silence between them. Nathan believes Schreck is examining him out of the corner of his eye. He is sure of it. Or is he? Selfconsciously he covers his wrist with his hand. Schreck is waiting. Schreck, he is certain, is calculating.

"Isabel-" Schreck begins.

"But what does Milton-"

"What are you talking about? Don't you talk to your own father? It was two days ago. It's been all over the news for over forty-eight hours. Milton Stein of Stein and Stein and-"

"Forty-eight hours? Where have I been?" "A good question."

"And what do you mean Stein and Stein and-?"

Schreck throws back his head and dro s in a handful of pretzels. "Look, you need to expand your horizons. I'm telling you that store-front office in Washington Heights is a great idea.

You need fresh blood."

Nathan, smiling strangely, looks past Oliver into the middle distance.

"You should really listen to me, Nathan."

"I'm listening. Who asked him?"

"Who asked who?"

"My father, Oliver. Riverside Drive. I thought those kids all signed lawyers already."

"Did. They did all sign lawyers. But which lawyers, Nathan. The question is did they sign the right lavryer."

"Which one, Oliver, which one is it?"

Schreck beams with mischief. He throws in another fistful of pretzels and chews slowly, savoring the moment. He swallows, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and lifts his glass. "Williams," he says, throwing back the shot.

"Williams. Jesus. "

Schreck lifts his hand for a high five, but Nathan's arm is stayed by his drink.

"Fucking A," Schreck says, his hand chopping the air. "I mean wouldn't you know it? The fucking ring-leader. Christ, Nathan, today the answering service had to give a whole operator to our line alone. The Today show. Charlie Rose. Ted Koppel himself called to get him for Nigbtline. They all think Milton's some vault of knowledge about the seething rage in Harlem, the war between the races, the continuous pulse of violence and greed undercutting urban America. What did Koppel say? Martin Luther King's true legacy? So this poor advertising chick goes logging one night to blow off steam, she blew a multi-million-dollar account, whatever, she gets on the walkway in the eighties, not so smart maybe, but hey, it's America, why shouldn't she? And they sweep down on her at 102nd like a pack of wolves and drag her kicking and screaming. Christ, Nathan, one of them jammed a fucking Coke bottle-"

"Oliver." Heads are turning down the bar. Though it is, Nathan realizes, a pot of gold. All this will be, he himself will be, very public.

Schreck lowers his chin but not his voice. "I mean, just think about it for a minute, Nathan. Some fat Jewish lawyer driving around in his Rolls rising to the defense of some poor, abused, fatherless, fifteen-year-old walking time bomb, a vacuum of power venting his rage on some young white advertising-exec prodigy, the symbol of the white marketing establishment. Can't you see it, Nathan? Oprah. Donahue. The Daily News wants your father to write a running column during the whole thing. But of course he can't. It's client-attorney privilege. It's conflict of interest."

Nathan is looking at him. "You have it all figured out."

"Me?" Schreck says, his hands spread on his chest in fake humility. "What's to figure? The animals went down like a line of dominoes. They tripped all over themselves to confess. One of them was still wearing the girl's Harvard sweatshirt, her panties practically hanging out of his belt. I mean, come on. Even Milton agrees. "

"You talked to Milton?"

"Of course I talked to Milton. Didn't you talk to Milton? Don't you talk to your own father?"

Nathan, lifting his drink, hides behind his glass.

"I've never seen him so excited. Who gives a shit what they do to Williams. It's what Milton's going to say. It's what he's going to look like. It's the exposure, Nathan. It's all about exposure."

The barrage of thoughts incites red patches high on Nathan's cheeks. He sets down his glass and touches, again, the wound on his wrist, as if to connect the worry itself, news of Isabel hitting the streets, the papers, with his base instinct: he is, after all, still Milton's son, territorial and protective. The timing is bad. He knows this rape case will turn out to have been everything. The old life will have ended here, and the new life will have begun. Isabel will be a bad coincidence.

Schreck has rested a hand on Nathan's shoulder. "About that storefront. I was talking to someone today-"

"Give it a rest."

"No pressure or nothing, Nathan, but it's a guaranteed gold mine. Got people working on things already. Especially after they see your dad on the tube, they'll flood that office thinking Stein and Stein and Schreck are direct emissaries from the Vatican wangling truth and justice and green cards for all. I need you. I need your Spanish."

“You need."

"I'll give you a cut. A percentage off the top. Right off the top. In or out?"

"A percentage. Stein and Stein and Schreck, and you're going to give me a-"

At the faint, almost reluctant bleat from his beeper, Nathan peers into his jacket:

I knew you'd be late. You promised. You

– falls off the edge of the screen Just as the beeper vibrates again for the second installment, but Nathan, not bothering, rebuttons his jacket.

Schreck jabs the air. "Was that Johnny?

"What? Yeah," Nathan says, holding his beeper still.

Nathan shrugs.

"You've spent the money." Schreck looks at him. "Am I right? Tell me, am I right or what-?"

"Their boy has ten kilos of coke under their floor, Oliver. What are they going to do, sue us? Sue the big-shot law firm of Stein and Stein and Schreck? Sue the Pope's epistolary saviors?"

"I don't think-"

"Oliver, when they get to the part where they say they want a lawyer, just give them your card."

Pretzel dust rimming his lips, Schreck laughs and lifts his hand in a gesture of concession to Nathan's parting volley, allowing the matter to be put to bed where it belongs, save a last shot of his own, "I don't think they'd bother, Nathan. Because I'll tell you, between you and me," he says, and pokes Nathan in the ribs, "I think they'd rather just kill you."

Turning and pointing, as though at a passing plane, or a shooting star, Schreck waves down the bartender.

Nathan watches him, sober, suddenly. Suddenly, not even tired. “Oliver, what did you come down here for? Why did you want to see me? What couldn't wait?"

A plastic smile, poured and now cooling, sets on Schreck's face. Eyes open-not missing a thing-teeth bared, he slaps Nathan on the shoulder. "Nothing, buddy boy. No reason at all. just happy to see you."

Again the dancers cease mid-writhe and kneel for their heap of belongings and rotate, the one farthest over stepping into her slippers and down and zipping across the floor along the bar. A new girl surfaces out of the beaded curtain. The off-duty dancer stops in front of Nathan. Her eyes are red-rimmed. She lifts a knuckle to her nose and sniffs, and staring walleyed at Schreck, withdraws from her purse a packet wrapped in butcher's paper the size of a pound of swiss cheese and slides it into the pocket of Nathan's jacket. She doesn't look, Nathan says nothing, and she turns abruptly for the back as though she's forgotten something there, as though the phone in back has rung.

Schreck slaps the bar. "Stay there, be right back," he says, patting his pocket for keys. "I have something to show you."

He runs out, but his presence lingers, like an offensive smell.

Nathan probes the package in his pocket. He pats his jacket for the shape of the envelope. In the mirror he sees Isabel on the boardwalk turning a sloppy pirouette, much too drunk. Her mouth open, so beautifully, in laughter, or a scream-

Schreck returns, steering before him a young girl wearing dayglo lipstick and a little black dress. "This is what I mean," he says, winking, his voice sliding to a whisper. "Consuela wants a green card. What was I telling you?"

The girl eyes Nathan's scotch. Nathan hands it over and she drinks it down thirstily. "Where the hell were you keeping her, leashed up outside?"

Schreck smiles. "Mr. Philanthropist all of a sudden. She was in the car. Don't worry so much. What am I, an animal? The engine was running. But, look, Nathan, can't you see it now? A line of Dominican peasants around the block with hundred-dollar bills in their hands?"

Nathan looks at the girl with alarm.

"No English," Schreck says. "No habla inglgs, hey?" He grins an even row of white caps at the girl, and the girl grins broadly back, her teeth ragged and gray. "We hire some law students for eight bucks an hour for the shit work," he says out of the corner of his mouth, "get some of Isabel's cousins to watch the door." He leans forward, squinting with sincerity. "Ten percent of the gross, Nathan"-chopping the air-"clean cut off the top. Overhead's my problem. Fair or what? In or out?"

Behind them the music starts again. Consuela, fingers meshed around the empty glass, steps softly to the beat.

"You feeding her, Oliver?"

"Okay. Fifteen. I'll make it fifteen. Fifteen percent, Nathan. Trouble-free dollars. You and your father's name. My work. I couldn't be more fair."

"Just get her a drink." Nathan slips away.

In the men's room, clutching his side, he reaches out and lands on the condom dispenser. He locks the stall door behind him. He has a fever, he feels it on his face like the sun. His own wavy reflection stares back from the toilet water. Crushing his thumbs in the palms of his hands, he looks about the graffitied stall. Limericks, phone numbers. Ten-inch cocks.

The pain is numbing. Laughter, anonymous, fills his head then is sucked out. He leans his ear against the wall to hear within. A vent overhead hums with cold air. His knees draw up sharply and he goes down, the porcelain sweating cold in his hands. Kicks, kicks him again. He holds himself tightly around the waist while the muscles beneath collide and wrench loose the debris down below, his mouth falling open as though he's been punched in the groin, the air rushing both ends, all of him working to expunge what? Again the dry retches burn the roof of his mouth. Then his reflection shatters, the water darkens, the drool reaches the floor. He pats his pockets and brings out the vials. Two labels made out to him, two to Maria. Shaking, he struggles with the childproof caps, finally bringing the vials up over his shoulder and down one at a time against the toilet bowl rim. Pink blue yellow ricocheting like hailstones over the floor, into the water, twirling like confetti in the loose mud. "Fuck it, fuck it." He sweeps together what he can off the sandy floor. Off the urine-stained rim into his trembling palm, picking out one of each. His eyes blurry with tears and pain he spits at the little mound of pills in his hand, spits again and overturns them into the toilet with the rest. "Fuck-you," he says.

Panting against the steel partition, his hair matted to his forehead, the trembling of his lips stills as he digs into his pocket, fingering the paper. The package gives with a squeeze. Cornerless.

No money. Fuck. Fucking cold cuts I'll kill him, I'll have him killed. Johnny owes me, I'll just have him bumped off, kill two birds with one stone, clean off both accounts.

Working the corner he inserts his pinky and brings it up frosted, like a vanilla-topped creamsicle.

What am I? What-? He thinks for a split moment, like a flash of a bad dream, an old recollection, of all the people he owes. He thinks, briefly, of the Citibank mail sorter in her bunker in Sioux Falls distributing Visa stubs and checks and hate notes into plastic pneumatic tubes, opening a package containing a half-kilo of cocaine, unfolding the note: To Whom It May Concern: Please accept enclosed in lieu of my debit of eight thousand fifty-four dollars and seventy-eight cents. Keep the change.

The outside door opens. The tinny music washes in, then chokes off. Footsteps stop outside his stall. An eye peers through the crack of the door. "You all right in there?"

The footsteps retreat. The door bangs softly.

His cell-phone rings beneath his clothes and a choked bleat of sound escapes his throat. The phone rings, then rings again, then stops. It begins once more but is cut before the first ring is done. Then his belt chirps. He peels aside his jacket, hands trembling, thumbing the illumination button. His chest lights up like a flare:

Cabron. Bastardo. It is 9 o'clock. I rain dead roses on your bed.

9 P.M.

Santos rehangs the pay phone and cinches his coat tight at the waist. His heels pace off the minutes, echoing past the house of detention, a highrise of crosshatched windows ringed by a skirt of razor wire. Past a row of alternating pawn shops, bail shops. Past black and padlocked storefronts. Across the river the Manhattan Municipal Building with its spires and grand arches and engraved cornice naming the old quadrants of the old city when all was wilderness. Years ago, Santos arrived there dressed in white and pinned a two-dollar flower to his young wife-to-be and an old black man with a beaten box camera took their wedding portrait against the scuffed marble.

The sky to the west shivers with lightning. Streaks of frozen rain race the snow. He turns in at a doorway and finds Barbados at a table by a window. "He's coming down," Santos says.

"That's awfully sweet of him."

"He said he's eager to help," Santos says.

"How likely is that?"

Santos edges past a dark pinball machine toward the sound of dull chopping and the beating of eggs. At the counter he grips the menu in both hands and studies it. The waitress appears tapping her pencil against her pad. "After all these years you still need to look at that?"

"No. I'm sorry. Coffee, please. A grilled cheese." He looks back at the booth but Barbados is staring out the window. "That's all."

The waitress tears off the ticket and turns to go, then stops. "You okay?"

He sightlessly watches her through her thin blue uniform: as she heads back to the grill; as she stands on one hip in a cloud of steam; as she comes back with the coffee. She sets down the cup with a click and the liquid tilts and slips over the rim and fills the saucer. She covers her mouth and contemplates the mess. Not a pretty face, but eyes that see and lips that form words and kiss a baby's moist head.

"Thank you," Santos says.

In a minute she comes back with the sandwich. Saturated with sweet butter, the filling orange and gummy, crammed with hope. Santos holds a wedge of it to his nose, closes his eyes and chews slowly, but it goes down like a wad of cotton and fills him with nothing he wants or can even imagine and his body registers nothing of it at all.

From the booth, Barbados looks over blearily. He puts one finger in his ear and jiggles it.

The door opens and lets in a cold gust.

"Sit down," Santos says.

Outside, a car sits at the curb. Pellets of exhaust ride up the back.

"Your car is running," Barbados says.

"I have someone waiting."

"You don't plan on staying long," Santos says.

"This won't take any time at all."

Oliver Schreck slides into the booth and Santos slides in after him.

"Isabel was a beautiful girl. I couldn't be more sorry, Errol."

"You said you're eager to help. How is that, Oliver?"

"Let me come straight to the point."

Barbados nods. "That's a good idea."

Santos stabs a cigarette into his mouth, frowning at the brief orange flame.

"I thought you can't smoke in these places anymore," Schreck says.

“You can't." Barbados leans forward.

‘Isabel was with Nathan last night," Schreck says.

"So what," Barbados says. "They were working, on a brief or something. "

"They were out."

"So they were working late and then he took her home."

"Did your mother say she came home last night?" Schreck asks

Santos.

"Careful," Barbados says.

Santos drapes his arm around the back of the bench. "What are you saying, Oliver?"

"All I'm saying is that they were out."

"That's all you're saying," Barbados says.

"They've been out. A lot."

Santos, bent over the table, rolls the salt shaker in his palms. "That would be quite a mouthful."

"Look at Nathan's hands," Schreck says. "Look at his arms."

Santos has made a fist around the salt shaker. "Nathan has known Isabel for years."

Schreck leans back to look at him. "Isabel was a very beautiful girl. A girl with promise. Maybe she would have been a lawyer herself one day. Nathan was at Coney Island. You saw him there. "

Santos looks across the table at Barbados, who holds out his hands toward Oliver Schreck. "And how do you know something like that?"

"You saw him, Errol. Did you see his hands?"

"How do you know all this?" Barbados asks.

"Did you see the marks on his arms?"

"It doesn't mean anything," Barbados says.

"But it is interesting."

Santos's eyes are locked unseeing on some spot on the wall.

"Errol?"

Santos tilts his head. "It is interesting."

The waitress brings over the coffeepot and a cup and saucer for Schreck. "You want some more coffee?"

Santos's hand is up, warding her off. "We're good."

"I wouldn't mind," Schreck says, and reaches for the cup.

But Santos intercepts Schreck's wrist and brings it down to the table and pins it there. A glass falls to the floor and is smashed. "We're good," Santos says.

The waitress returns to the counter and withdraws behind the coffee urn.

"Why are you trying to give me Nathan?" Santos says.

Schreck lifts his free hand, as if in surrender. "We've known each other a long time."

"You've known Nathan a long time, too."

"We're just talking here," Schreck says.

"I'm glad you brought that up. Why are we doing that?"

"I'm a lawyer," Schreck says.

"Is that what you are?”

"I'm obligated to give you evidence in my possession.”

"You're not, actually," Santos says, "as a point of law.”

"But you're telling us the truth," Barbados says. He looks at Santos. "He's a lawyer. It's the truth. He says it is."

"Absolutely," Schreck says. "I'm done here."

Barbados says, "Because you do have the right to remain silent."

"What are you, reading me my rights?"

"Don't look so worried," Barbados says. He is grinning openly. "Did you understand that part?”

"Am I under arrest?"

"Are you with me, Oliver?"

"No, I'm not."

"You have the right to consult an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning now or in the future. Do you understand that?"

"You guys are fucking with me.” Schreck smiles at one face then the other. "I haven't done anything wrong."

"Don't count on it," Santos says.

"If you cannot afford an attorney," Barbados says. "One will be provided for you without cost.”

Schreck is sputtering. "I am an attorney."

“Is that so?" Barbados says.

Schreck begins to smirk. "Though I do have a lawyer."

"Who might that be?"

"But it's Nathan."

Silence erupts among the three of them, as if they've all Just realized their part in the farce, that they could have gone right to this part, skipped the rest.

Schreck laughs with relief. "You guys are fucking with me."

Santos's eyes are dull with grief. "We could never use this conversation," he says.

Schreck lifts a shoulder. "I see a man in need."

"That's not why you're here," Barbados says.

Santos is shaking his head. "I know Nathan Stein."

"No, Detective Santos, I don't think you do."

But Santos does know Stein. He sees with perfect clarity a picture of Nathan with his arms around him and his new wife, the three leering drunkenly, smiles pasted and eyes gooey. He catches Nathan watching from the East Hampton living room across the patio, observing through two glass doors as they fucked in the yellow bug light of their room. Behind them, writhing on the wall, their silhouettes a pair of underwater swimmers dolphin-kicking in embrace. The shadows of moths flying overhead like a mute flock of birds.

They slept in that house where he lived, the weekend house listing on a hill pale and blind. Nathan had brought Santos shopping for the bed. The matching sheets, the night tables. Pick a pattern for the carpets, he'd said. Ralph Lauren. Givenchy. Nathan and his rubber-banded rolls of C-notes. Nathan was responsible for his own supply of companionship, and he summoned them one by one to his second-floor room. Agency maid. Waitress. A toll collector. Dime-store clerk. And all of them something good to look at, disarming, razor-tongued, schooled in unarticulated sorts of street intelligence. Nathan made his opening moves as in chess, well rehearsed, without hesitation, feigning interest in their mundane and clocked days. And then he offered an invitation to a swim and then dinner and then a drink on the pool deck. And then. Then night became a holiday, a celebration in honor of Nathan's catch. The speakers filled the surrounding woods with music. The four of them laughed and drank in the gurgle of the pool and the hum of its filter and the slish of Santos's new wife as she passed beneath his feet and emerged in the shallow end scaly and slick as a reptile, and Santos looked up, to the window where Nathan Stein passed with his night's reward.

And all this time there had been Claire. The lonely Claire left at home, the serious Claire left studying, loyal Claire in Louisiana to visit family and friends. Or sad Claire, merely left. Santos would have been happier with her, with any of the Claires, happy enough, as Nathan was so obviously willing to let her go.

In the morning Santos woke to find Nathan gone, or going, or just returned.

Stein and antistein.

Not actually Stein but a cardboard construction. A life-size figure of a celebrity, the kind you stand with to have your picture taken; a celebrated figure who once, many years before, when you were a child, might have been your best friend. The kind with a father for whom your mother works, cleans, takes dictation, performs duties and functions shrouded in obscure and pleasurable forms of compensation. Vases and wood boxes. Stereos.

Santos had known him most of his life, and yet in law school Stein became a kind of celebrity to him, and to Santos's sisters and parents. Hours behind schedule, he would drive up to Washington Heights in the famous father's sleek and expensive cars, a different one every month, a Mercedes, a Lincoln, a Cadillac, another Mercedes, but not the Rolls, never the Rolls. He would come straight from court where, dressed like a dandy, he'd assisted the maestro, ready on his tongue-he could hardly get through the door before it fell out of him-an impossible story about Milton's latest client, the drug dealer or thief or rapist whose guilt was beyond question but whose rights were invariably violated by the police. The Santos family rolled their eyes. Even the mother, Milton's secretary of twenty-five years, as though she hadn't been there, hadn't helped prepare the motions, taken them down, collated them, glanced them over, passed them to Nathan herself in the well of the courtroom; as though she hadn't witnessed Milton Stein's angle, Nathan's angle too now, Stein & Stein's best and most successful defense: the irrelevance of guilt in a court of law.

Nathan's lateness was less forgiven than sanctioned, as though they wouldn't have him any other way. And what was to be celebrated, a birthday, a holiday, was instantly forgotten, and the party they had been waiting for to begin, with Nathan's arrival, began. And the time would grow late, it would reach two, sometimes three, with Nathan sitting on the opposite end of the couch from Santos's father, both of them with their eyes closed, listening to selections from their favorite operas, highlights they would have chosen together from Mr. Santos's vast collection. Half drunk with wine and half with the opera, upright on the couch together, they lifted their hands in concert, conducting the same passage in the score.

Nathan seduced them all. The family's love for him, its dismissal of all the questionable things it collectively suspected-the things Mrs. Santos could confirm-was almost sexual in its blindness, in its ability to look past all they did not want to see-the already sordid, the bordering-on-criminal-to see straight through to what they'd known as chaste and pure, all that he was born with. His soul. They all looked on him, went to him, with the adoration for a lover returned to them after a long absence. Nathan Stein the celebrity. As though in his presence you felt-as Errol did, always, even at the end of that time-that there were things, so many things, you had yet to do or be.

Still, after Nathan left, Santos's own father would stand, unsteady with exhaustion, and point through the closed door, down the creaky stairs, into the night, between the tail-lights fading down the street. "Beware that," he said, about the boy he'd watched for years. "He sees everything and nothing."

Soon opera became Santos's own need. Not the music, but something else. He listened on his shitty little stereo with the librettos before him, as Nathan instructed. Santos wanted to learn it, to duplicate the cultured and intelligent sides of Stein. The studied knowledge of Stein. Stein. Something redeeming, something tragic. Something Downtown, something Village, something Upper East Side. To do justice to a tenement life. The deficiency being himself. He was envy. He lacked the words to describe the fundamental. He needed Nathan Stein's good looks, even their deadliness, to gain vicarious thrill. Toward Stein, toward his looks, toward the agency maids and waitresses and barrio queens he was blind devotion. Even after he married, toward Nathan's lovely fiancee, toward Claire, he was desperation. The larger reward being forgiveness. The two young men pass silently the spotlit marble of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera House and its pink and blue illuminated fountain, the rainbow arcs of water; through the pre-opera dinner crowds chaffing in their sweat-soaked evening wear, discouraged by the blundered nighttime promise of cooler temperatures; the happy-hour crush unknotting their ties and letting down their hair. Santos follows a half pace behind Nathan through these crowds and up Columbus Avenue while into Nathan's left ear he calls out his list of inconsequential questions. Blindly he chases Nathan toward a banner and through a door and into an air-conditioned vestibule, beyond which clumps of besuited and coiffed young men and women lean on white linen and a high mahogany bar. The customers are perfect, outrageously alive, monstrously vital. The vastness of their futures. And Santos, like a dog hanging off a backyard gate, panting toward the tall grass across the road. The night is young, is always young, its possibilities limitless. And they, he and Nathan, a couple of greyhounds in pursuit of the unseen and unnamed that lay ahead in the night. A man and his spic apprentice-

Santos has gone to the bathroom. The knocking almost brings the door down. "Errol, you all right in there?"

Santos bends over the little sink and kneads his puffy hands. In the dim glass his face cracks into the geometric shapes of fatigue.

Barbados is standing in the open door, Schreck a few paces behind him, looking contrite. Santos wipes his mouth. Barbados says, his voice flat, "I think there's someone else we have to talk to."

The doorman is asleep in his greatcoat and epaulets like a Red Army soldier.

"Ivan," Nathan calls.

The doorman rushes the door and Nathan enters the plush, cavernous atrium. "Ivan. Good to see you again." Nathan tugs on the man's epaulets.

Ivan stands back, heavy-lidded, swollen-faced. He smiles a gold-capped smile and presents Nathan with a double thumbs-up. "Senor Nathan, you have grown very thin. Very strong. Like a hard bull." He jabs the air with his fists. "Like when you were a young man. You exchange last year's costume for a better model. It's the senoritas, no? Keeping my boy in fighting condition?"

Nathan shakes his head, smiling. Compadre. "Only bad luck with the sefioritas, Ivan."

Ivan scoffs and waves him away. "You? Please, Nathan. Look who you are talking to please."

The two men set their feet and exchange mock blows, ducking and fending off flurries. Like old friends who have made good their bond in rougher places and harder times. Nathan lets out a little laugh, as genuine a discourse as anything he's let pass all night.

Then Ivan connects, a little slap to the side of his head. A small twinge and the lobby tips back. Nathan staggers. Ivan's hands are on his shoulders but still Nathan spins.

"Are you drunk?"

"I'm fine," Nathan says, brushing off his coat.

"Your eyes are yellow."

An edge of cold slips through the cracks of the door into the lobby. Outside, the padded silence of a car passing through the quilted streets.

How's my father?"

Ivan wags his finger. "We men have to take care of our fathers. In the end there is no one to understand but other men."

Nathan eyes the doorman warily.

"Senor?" Ivan asks.

"No, nothing. Forget it."

"Your father is very fine. Now he is a famous man. Tonight the sexy TV ladies were waiting for him." Ivan extends his arm and sweeps it through the lobby, indicating where they stood waiting. "You are working on the big case with him?"

"Of course," Nathan says.

Ivan smiles broadly. "Then you will be famous."

"Of course."

"Like that other case."

"That was a long time ago."

"The big victory."

"Ten years ago, at least."

"And your face, it was everywhere." He takes Nathan's shoulder in his strong hand. "I used to lift you to my shoulder and take you upstairs like a package of groceries."

Ivan shakes his shoulder once, but still Nathan will not raise his eyes. Ivan opens his fingers and Nathan walks out from under them toward the elevator.

"You need sleep," the doorman calls.

He tries four or five keys from his ring before he finds one that fits his parents' door. But the door is unlocked to begin with, and when he turns the knob he stumbles in, and, stepping through a patch of streetlight to a foyer of herringbone wood, instantly regrets having come. A living room of fluted columns, teakwood newel and finial beginning a balustrade that swirls like the hem of a woman's skirt to a second level. Furniture scattered amidst a garden of low potted trees. Cherubs watch from the high corners. Nathan stands as in a small cluttered room, as though he can turn this way and that and touch the things and the people he knows, dead and alive and in various stages in between, ghosts of themselves, led by himself, the chief ghost, at eight, ten, fifteen, a package of promise and possibility.

In a picture window branches encased in ice beckon him, like the gnarled fingers of old women. He steps into the frame and looks down to the avenue on which he was a boy, on which he did boyish things. The buildings across the park are lost in a crosshatched blur. Up and down this street, strings of Christmas lights flail like spastic jump ropes.

Through a cut in the skyline he can see a fragment of the East River. A light passes there, police boat, garbage barge, the luminescent ice floes running to the harbor, the water ferrying them a black and silent broth, strangely, he knows, now almost level with the road. Everything is flooded. Things north have melted. But that river has always given him a childish obsession, a thrilling fright, even more than the Hudson, which is four times as wide. The Hudson-five avenues behind him-is all relaxed grandeur with its Rip van Winkle history and its source supposedly that little mossy Lake Tear of the Clouds up in the Adirondacks. A tour of America, all of it-its sail boats and water-skiers and skim ice-sliding between Westchester's old-money mansions and New jersey's Palisades. The East River on the other hand is a moat, a razor-wire fence, all rawness and urban fuckup. Running heat, eddies of unnamed spew splitting off into competing currents, rivers within rivers, one with waves and whirlpools while the next is all smooth secrets, all of it accelerating through the Bronx, then Harlem, racing down here between mid-Manhattan and the fallow cranes and dumps of Long Island City and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the barred dry docks gaping eye-sockets staring unblinking at the sky. Nathan has seen them all up close. More than one client of his has turned up broken like a rag doll at the weedy bottom. The East River is his river; that river he will take, even if it kills him. The soul thrives on its sufferings. Keep the Hudson, its sailboats, its boatdocks.

A long, tympanic roll of thunder. The window pane trembles. In the sky, the clouds are climbing, feeding on themselves. A wind has kicked up, sending waves through the trees of Central Park below, the stripped heads boiling. Something in the jagged strength of the skyline, in the designed wildness of the park, seems to be shouting at him, a voice whose cry is familiar, some youthful passion, some point of pride, the desire to do, he thinks, what is right. The tasks materialize before him one after the other, Isabel, the Russian weasel, Rikers Island, his pills, his diagnosis, his sentence, Isabel-

He quickly turns from all of it, and, sitting back on the windowsill with his legs stretched before him, looks at the room and its gaudy furniture, at the darkened doorways leading right and left into still more familiar regions, and with fascination remembers that occasionally he once knew great happiness here. Happiness: yet it was, he knows, a life lying in wait for annual rituals to give meaning to the dead space between. So it was a sort of life, the roads out of it to this place here where he stands already overgrown. Childhood and what? What is that? And what, he wonders, looking around the shadows of the room, at the streetlight playing through the branches on the wall-of course knowing the answer all along-was that?

That one late autumn morning, the last day of his childhood, a clean line between before and after. He was eighteen, home for Thanksgiving from his first semester of college in already frozen Syracuse. His father had once again invited to the apartment the citizens of his own strange country, his specially cultivated blend of Treasury agents, cocaine merchants, soap opera stars, convicted rapists, gold shield detectives, a virtuoso soprano from the Met, a Colombian money launderer, a famous composer; and sprinkled throughout, a small legion of anonymous women in tight wool sheaths who might have been models, who might have been prostitutes, who were probably a little of both, coming and going without introduction. The presentations of names and occupations were carried out in code. "Pedro is in sales," "William is in protection," "Barbra sings," "Leonard writes"-not to conceal or to be cute, but as though to leave what you did at the door with your hat and coat in order for things to settle to a better level, to the spirit of the day. These meetings were an annual suspension of hostilities, during which Milton's guests stood crowded at the bar and picture windows in virtual cease-fire. Sharing paper plates sagging with bagels and nova and whitefish salad, talking about the Giants, kids, the weather, anything. Below, between them and the park, passed the Macy’s parade. The solemn marching bands, the human snowflakes, the sanitation department brigades, the goliath balloons, happy heroes and quacky demons inflated to the size of buildings. Milton's guests gazed downward, giddily talkative, as though relieved by their proximity not to the parade but to each other. Broadway's Little Orphan Annie and smalltime Harlem dealer, District Attorney and money launderer for a Chinese crime family. As if this, this day and this food and this glass-enclosed apartment, were real life and their occupations were the contrivance, things to engage them untiI they slept again, those long days and nights until this meeting same time next year. Liquor flowed and the hills of food slowly leveled off, then flattened. The air was alive with sexual tension, the sense of abandon that comes with twiddling the forbidden fruit, punctuated by the rhythms of the passing drum corps below. It was the middle of the day, late morning even, crisp and blustery, but inside this sprawl it was midnight in a moonlit garden in springtime. People overate and drank too much.

Nathan was standing at the window of his parents' bedroom, which had a view downtown, fielding questions about college. Directly behind him, alone in the corner, stood the city's latest hero, champion of law and order, a thin, stooped, bookish man with an unruly beard, a narrow, meatless head, sunken temples, narrow beakish nose. He had the vacant, preoccupied look of a discouraged Jesus. He spoke to no one; he looked on the verge of speaking to himself. The month before, he had killed an aggressive subway beggar with a penknife. The tabloids had dubbed him the Philosopher King of New York, model of decisiveness and integrity and moral action. And Milton Stein had stepped forward as Christ's champion and spokesman, his John the Baptist, a model of generosity himself, having offered his legal and publicrelations services free of charge. Standing at the window in his ragged clothes, the parade passing below him, the man spoke to no one. The heaping plate of food had been foisted upon him, and he did not touch it. He looked about the room disapprovingly, more angry, still more discouraged. The experiment-his, presumably-had gone awry. He was a lunatic and everyone knew it, but he had taken on the role of an expensive and exotic pet.

And Nathan was beautiful. His adolescent features had come into focus. He had grown tall and trim, and the frame made by his cleft chin and high forehead converged nicely at the tip of his Grecian nose. He had watery, feminine eyes deep with character that outran his own. His stature as the best-looking man in whatever room was an obligation. And here he stood, before a woman as old as his mother, who, holding him by the elbow, cheerfully drank everyone at the party under the table. Nathan could have 'd nothing, it would not have mattered. The woman referred to her Kandinskys, her Picassos, to her schedule-her husband's evenings away at poker, her maid's days off-and the silence and loneliness of a Park Avenue triplex. And all those ridiculous paintings staring down at you, accusing you, so why not-the old lyric-give them something to accuse you of Nathan's father was simply divine. Now she had to know, like father like son?

Nathan excused himself, waving his empty plate, he would be back. They exchanged winks, she tweaked his arm. He gave a winning smile and was gone, twisting through the crowd, carefully eyeing everyone he passed, considering the consequences of a bump-the bodyguards, the violinists, the whores-he achieved the living room, where the wall of law journals and case books rose above the heads of the criminals and custodians like a monument to the system of criminal justice, inscribed with the names and numbers of laws deceased and irrelevant.

Suddenly the sun dimmed. It felt like an eclipse. People were turning toward the windows. The first of the gargantuan balloons was passing. Goofy or Daffy or Superman-not the whole figure, just passing elbows, cheeks, feet. The gusts took them against the wires, against the buildings themselves, against the most wealthy of the spectators encased safely above the masses, Milton's guests, who, laughing nervously, held firm to their plates of whitefish salad as the passing monsters ferreted them out, the giant eyes filling the apartment windows like some parody of King Kong. The room giggled and screeched in a brave show of silliness, then quieted with an unsettled strain. The cease-fire was called off, as though, despite the concealed arsenal of small weaponry-ankle holsters, switchblades-nowhere was safe. Hostility settled in. The room began to empty of guests making parting comments about the traffic, missing the rush.

Nathan felt someone beside him. It was the Philosopher King, twitchy, eyes deeply abstracted. There was commotion down on the street, a faint roar from the crowd. A pillow-waisted Santa was rolling down Central Park West on the flatbed of a truck, his recorded ho-ho-hoing blaring tinny and staticky through loudspeakers. Waving at the crowds. The crowds waving back. Lifting his fat, rouged face up toward the buildings. Toward the windows where the children were raised in fathers' arms aloft. As though at some signal previously agreed upon the fathers would send the infants tumbling out the windows up and down Central Park West, some mass move toward infanticide, fathers offering up their young sons and daughters in sacrifice to the Santa god. Upstairs, meanwhile, Milton Stein's guests streamed out, pouring out onto the street. The Philosopher King hurried across the living room and disappeared through a narrow door, the back stairs down.

A lone figure pushed through the congested hallway into the apartment. A tall woman, young, Nathan's age or younger, he couldn't tell. He stopped and stared at her. A client? But what could she have done? There was something vaguely familiar about her; he'd seen her before, he knew her, and he was equally sure they'd never met. Not pretty enough to be a model, not that pretty, not one of the set of anonymous women. She was the color of coffee, with Caucasian features, faintly like an Arab, or a Somali.

He stepped forward, but the girl moved away, heading confidently toward the kitchen, as though the layout of the apartment was not merely familiar but home turf. As though she lived here. Nathan followed her into the kitchen, where his father's secretary, Ellie, was helping herself to another bagel with lox. The girl came up behind Ellie and kissed her on the cheek. Ellie turned, and the two women looked at Nathan, who stood dumbstruck in the doorway. Their bodies were the same height and build, the benign expressions the same, the intelligence and competence of their eyes. But the girl's eyes: though the expression was the same, the shape was not. They were green and almond shaped; they looked roughly like his. Her lips, no-foreign, neither here nor there. But her nose, narrow, almost hooked, flaring out at the end in a knobby bud. Nathan gazed at the nose, and if he squinted, blurring her color and her hair, the nose was the one he looked at in mirrors and window panes across the city. The nose was his, a Stein nose, distinctive in its attempt at a puggish waspiness, its failure coming at the hooked bridge. Before his own mother pushed by him, before she greeted Ellie and this girl with the comfort and familiarity usually saved for family, before she'd introduced the girl-it struck Nathan standing there, as his mother was pushing past, that what he was seeing would have been a mirage had this been a desert. Before him stood a perfect fusion between Ellie, Milton's secretary, and-how else to explain it?-his father. Here, in no need of introduction, stood Nathan's own half sister, his black twin.

Nathan nodded hello. Ellie turned away. The girl did too. Nathan was left with his mother, her face set with determination, as if she knew she was staring straight at her betrayal and knew that the consequences of not enduring it were worse than having to live with it. She had coped and accepted and put it in its place, permitted the betrayal, nurtured it.

"That's Isabel," his mother said.

"Of course," Nathan said.

"Ellie's daughter," his mother said.

"I understand."

Nathan stands now in the light of the open refrigerator. He takes a long hard look inside at each shelf, contemplating the eggs in their little cups, the month-old apples collapsing in the crisper. A half-eaten TV dinner. The same food, the same locations. The whole thing kept carefully and lovingly empty, as though his parents had neither eaten nor shopped nor cleared these shelves since he last left this apartment some number of years ago he would not remember. Since that Thanksgiving morning, when his mother so offhandedly introduced to him his long-lost sister; that face that seems now to have launched his thousand ships.

He pours himself a glass of milk, drinks off half then refills it and drinks another half, then leaves the last half on the shelf next to the container. He goes looking for replies to questions still unknown to him. Through the high rooms with their marbleized plaster and faux wainscoting, past a dry fountain where an old bronzed angel aiming bow and arrow stands lit in ambient streetglow. He finds one answer. He stops in a small study and sits at a desk before a typewriter. His hands awash in the green nimbus of a banker's lamp. On the stationery of Stein & Stein he calmly types, Maria Rosa, Last Will and Testament, and recommits to paper as best he can in numbered paragraphs and noted subsections all Maria asked him two years ago, as her attorney, to put down and notarize, including the sole rights of one Nathan Stein to titled property on the priceless paradise, a stretch of as-yet-undeveloped coastline on the Honduran island of Roatin.

Along a narrow hall the door to his old room is locked. At the hall's end another door stands open. In the silence, he can hear his parents snoring together in a duet of practiced confusion. Then only one, his father, goes his own way while his mother gurgles and whimpers through lonely dreams. The sheets shift and Nathan feels someone standing in a doorway behind him. Footsteps? Somewhere a door closes. Nathan turns. The doorway is empty. Clutching the deed to his freedom, he steps in, filling the doorway, and through to the next, and the next, stopping and filling doorways until he stands in his parents', open as it had been. A room sour with sweat and old breath. They lie there like corpses, his mother spreadeagled on the king-size mattress, hands up overhead as though shot in the snow. Milton rising beside her like a sudden hillside, his belly pale and monstrous. Beside a glass of water his toupee askew on an eyeless wig stand.

Nathan leans and touches his elbow to wake him. "Milton," he whispers. "Daddy-"

He steps away, as though he's caught a whiff of something bad. In the bed there is, as there has been, nothing. The room is deserted, the blankets undisturbed. Only a copy of today's Post, open to a double-page spread where Milton Stein is pictured striding out of court with Schreck at one arm and Ruth at the other. Stein to fight for Williams, the caption reads.

"Hello," Nathan says. A voice that calls from room to room and back again.

In the lobby, Ivan is asleep upright on his bar stool, arms folded, chin in his coat.

Nathan tugs at the doorman's elbow. "Where are they?"

Ivan opens his eyes with a snort. "They are away for the rest of the weekend. But of course you knew?" He looks at Nathan. "Do you need a doctor?"

Nathan thumbs down the door latch and sets himself free.

11 P.M.

Barbados drapes over the steering wheel, peering up.

"This is where he does his fun?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"You ever go in?"

"Just the one time."

Gleaming sports cars and long sedans circle a hunched building with blackened windows and no markings but a line of purple neon above the door. Behind and on either side, chop shops, blocks of buses packed in herringbone patterns, school yellow, Greyhounds; hangars marked with the cyclops seal of the Department of Sanitation. This could be an old diner, or a bus depot, refitted and camouflaged as a garrison to hide atop the pavement on the outer edge of all this industry.

"I always wondered about this place."

"You don't want to know," Santos says.

The door opens on another door within and a tall woman descends the steps flinging a stole around her neck. Despite her great height she has a floral delicacy, the purple light a halo for her teased hair. As she walks toward them Barbados's hands stay gripped to the wheel. His eyes follow her but not his head.

"She's a man."

Santos nods.

Barbados can't help it. He turns in his seat and watches her climb into the back of a limousine. "Chinese, or something."

They're Filipino. That's part of the thing."

"I don't get that."

"Don't think too hard about it."

They sit a while in silence. Santos watches the door, blinking steadily.

"What if he's already inside."

Santos looks at his watch. "We'll wait until twelve."

A stream of false women comes and goes. The novelty of the parade wears thin, and they are quickly bored. A car pulls up across the street, out of which Krivit steps and looks about, hesitant. He walks quickly toward their car and Santos opens his door and Krivit stops, expressionless. Without a word he opens the back door and slips in. His hair redeployed across his head in countable strands. Eyes watery and half closed. He wipes his forehead with his handkerchief.

"I didn't think this was your style," he says.

"I like talking to you," Santos says.

"Not that much."

"Enough."

"You have fun in there?" Barbados asks.

Krivit holds his stare until Barbados looks away. "Fuck you," he says.

Barbados holds up a palm. "No offense. It's just that I never thought-"

No one says anything.

"It doesn't matter," Santos says.

Krivit nods out the window, into the night. "Look at these fine cars. They say it's going to snow like hell tonight, but the lot's full. Think about that. You'd be surprised."

"I guess I would," Barbados says.

"Enough," Santos says. "I want to hear about Coney Island."

Krivit nods. "My deepest sympathies," he says flatly.

He doesn't mean it, Santos knows. He doesn't mean it and it doesn't matter. "You met Stein today."

"Which one?" Krivit asks lazily.

Santos stills.

"I saw you with Nathan Stein."

“You want to talk about Stein or to Stein? Because you can join me inside."

Santos looks up at the blank door of the club. Noiseless, hermetically sealed.

"In there?" Barbados asks.

Santos blinks. Nothing this night will surprise him. "Nathan or Milton? "

"Either. Both. Like father like son?"

"I didn't think the South Pacific was their flavor," Barbados says.

Krivit shrugs. "The Steins have generous and shall we say heroic appetites."

Barbados waves. "Give me a break."

"I'm a merchant. I buy what I think I can sell. I sell what I have. I always sell what I have, and what I have is always real."

Santos passes his hand over his face. "I'm listening."

"What do you think I can tell you?" Krivit asks. "All I have is a little news. It may be neither here nor there."

Santos feels Krivit looking at him but he doesn't move.

"Okay.”

"Someone is a very large player right now. Let's call it a high-profile-yet delicate-place to be. A place where unwanted news would do damage."

"What kind of news?"

"I'm not doing your job.

Santos lifts his eyes to the pilled ceiling of the car. "This is not a game.”

"Here's the broadcast: open your eyes, Errol. You don't have to look far. Nothing is a coincidence, nothing is chance. What Milton is doing, what Nathan has done. These are not unrelated things."

"You're talking about Isabel. What is it with you, what are you saying? First Schreck, now you-"

"Schreck? That fuck-"

“He tried to sell me Nathan."

“He'd sell his mother. Listen to me, Errol-" Krivit slides forward. "What he did, what Nathan did-”

"What did he do?"

"And who is who. We don't always know who we are."

"Give me something, give it to me, something real." "What I have is always real. I sell real."

"Fuck it, Krivit, I'm buying real." "It's not nice."

"Fuck you."

Krivit sits back, hands folded in his lap. "Secrets own those who never wanted to know-"

Now Claire is alone, has been for some time. Her elbows on the bar, her eyes up toward the murmuring TV but not seeing it. The Frangelico and Ouzo behind the bar green from the TV light and the vodkas blue and the whiskeys the color of thin mud.

Her fingers around an empty martini glass glumly, she steps back with the gin inside her at chest level and stands at the middle window. She can see only the streetlight and Where it ends and where nothing begins, and she traces the progress of the liquor downward and outward. A high, optimistic C from a song on the radio lifts behind her and holds for the big finish, then turns tinny and hollow, then only the snap and rain-like rattle of the pool rack breaking, and the liquor bottles and shot glasses flashing like jewels.

She makes a drippy circle in the glass with the heel of her palm and can see now no tracks on the sidewalks. The Witnesses are safe at home with their Bibles, safe here in Brooklyn, witnessing away. Up and down the street she is sure she is the only waking consciousness, despite the little Greek plunging glass after glass into the glass washer and the boys playing pool.

Why hasn't Errol come for her? After all, didn't she know Isabel, too? Doesn't Errol need her now, now that they-the both of them-have to publicly mourn? And she, of course, deserves-she wants-the chance to need him.

Looking out across the street, into the harbor, looking but not finding all the things she and Errol have not yet done, she recalls that as a girl, as Nathan's girl, often up at that earliest hour in an apartment not a mile from where she now stands, she'd been unable to bear the thought of her consciousness being so alone, positive she was the only person in the world alone at night. She'd stay up with her consciousness to give it a companion, until Nathan came home. From night court. Or so she'd thought; such was her logic then. The streetlight falling from the window on the bottom of the stairs, the heat in winter or the fans in summer rattling on, the settling foundation sending creaks through the walls, she'd squat as if by her parents' door as the noises and various lights moved over her. Eventually, whispering to herself, she'd fall asleep, more often than not atop her and Nathan's disheveled bed-on top because to go under signified to her her submission, to the house, to him-always with the light on, not for him to see but for her to see him when he returned home, and so she would have herself for company if she should wake.

Claire senses someone behind her. "Nathan," she says, hopefully, she realizes; she heard the little jump in her voice. She turns, not toward that one but toward the specter of the infant, who, when born, moved the doctor to silence. A nurse had gasped.

The bar stools have emptied. Though a bar never seems to sleep, Claire believes, it should never be so deserted, or so quiet, or the bottles so straight, so ready. A bar empty and quiet seems to her too much the terminal abode.

As if to prove her point, on the other side of the frosted glass a bulky shadow-figure is raising and lowering its arms in the streetlight, and Claire rubs a new circle in the window to find a man and a woman on the sidewalk, kept upright only by their attachment at their hips. The man, stone sober, has descended, Claire sees, into a black mood. The woman, caving a little, bumps her head on the glass at Claire's fingers, as though seeking her blessing or absolution. The man props her and looks up, pleading with Claire for a loyalty that once had to do with the great history of drinking and drunks. But Claire pulls back and is already looking beyond, angrily peering into a circle of spotlit snow beneath a distant streetlamp, as if at particular moments of Nathan's secret life strolling down the street before her.

What it had become with Nathan was primarily an arrangement of recognitions, a series of checkpoints at which Claire had reassured herself that she could, like him, act without loyalty to a thing. Nathan, she'd assumed, would be vastly different. The others she'd known before they introduced themselves. They were always big and thickly muscled and confessional, and she knew them in her father and her three brothers and every one of the men at her small southern college. She knew what car they drove and at what escalatored and potted-planted mall they bought their records, how they would kiss and how they would make love to her and what they would say about it and her and themselves afterward. Initially, about Nathan, she'd thought she'd known nothing. Not his order of things, not the ritual before or after, his foreign but still obviously male conceit. She did not know what to do when he first met her in her small law school dorm room and undressed before her, this Jew, the head of his cock unsheathed. Though he was not, her southern-belle mother had agreed, a jewy Jew, hook nose and all; he almost could have passed for one of their own. Nor did Claire know what to do when she was liking it and the sex was not, after all, very much like what she had had before. Nathan was forceful and investigative. The others had always been effusive, tender before, absent afterward, but ultimately unintelligent.

Still, every morning after a night with him, she woke breathing heavily, with Nathan breathing heavily beside her. She closed her eyes again and found herself trying too hard to sleep; not because she did not want to be tired the next day but because in the morning she felt fear, fear of being awake at dawn, the dust taking flight, the vodka still sharp in her head, the light slowly revealing Nathan encircled in her arms.

Then Claire made her discovery.

Outside of her, it seemed, Nathan had a favorite brand. Marlboros or Camels. Coke or Pepsi. Caucasian, black. Nathan's was Latina. It was like an aspiration. It had become a joke among Nathan's law school friends, to whom he had always brought his women for their stamp of approval, their clubby endorsement, that until Claire every one of his dates had fit a precise mold. Each of them had been extraordinarily, unusually beautiful, each finely done up, and each a young mother, a mother before twenty, before they left Honduras, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Colombia. Not merely Latina but a specific Latina subspecies: tall, athletically lean; light skinned, a shade darker than a Spaniard, say, or an Egyptian; and tightly sealed in a thin cotton shift or leather dress that left nothing to the imagination. As though Nathan had laid the outfits out on the bed. As though he had a closet full of little black dresses. And his family, Nathan's family, even his friends, Claire's friends, they'd all been complicit. All of them-even I, Claire thinks, we accepted our role, took it on, as it were-over time we became Nathan's accomplices.

Claire shifts uneasily on her stool. We were his bait. His foreplay.

Of course, Maria was disarming. Claire, actually bringing herself to follow him, saw her once from a distance. She possessed a quick tongue, Claire could tell. And she wore-well, practically nothing. A little black leather something, an afterthought. You looked everywhere. It would have been impolite not to.

After that, Nathan himself became a pattern. Claire discovered that she did after all know his lines ahead of time and found herself moving her mouth with them in the dark: also that she knew by heart his strategy in lovemaking and had found herself lying in wait in certain positions of her own. She became aware of him acting with the usual bravado of a man with all the cards. It crossed her mind that perhaps all that time she had been employed as a pontoon bridge, and that Nathan and his immigrant mistresses had been communicating across her span, exchanging goods, finding little understandings with which to build treaties of further, deeper understandings. This is how cultures self-destruct, she thought to herself, fuck by fuck.

On the other hand, she was free. Gone was any fear she might have secretly harbored that Nathan would show himself to be remarkable. Sometimes, with him, she had forgotten many times through the night that she was even with a man, and after a while had been only thinly conscious of being shaken by some hands, not knowing whose they were until the light came on and she recognized the fingers clawing her belly. She might leave those hands tonight, or next year, it would not matter. She knew she could, and would, go anywhere. The world was now clear, a transparent plain on which she would ride free from turbulence, from geographical seams. What had bound her was her illusion of another, more perfect, world. But now Claire was free from all that. Nathan had seen to it. She was freer than anything. She felt as capable of cutting through lies as walking through air.

Her last night with him, five years ago, Claire waited atop their bedspread with her back against the wall, feet extended. Her red hair was pulled back tight, her throat forward, damp, the creases faintly lined with grease. Their wedding, a myth until the invitations arrived that day in a box from the printer, was taking shape somewhere without them. Claire-her small, elegant features now undone-wore the look of the deeply pious who had jumped ship.

Nathan took off his jacket and sat at the edge of the bed, knees apart, tie loosened. Claire stood. Mosquitoes, having fought their way here through the smog, had been waiting and drew to her face. She ducked slightly, raising her arms, and pulled off her dress, letting it drop at her feet. She rose now out of the faded material, her arms and neck and face bronzed, the rest illuminated pale blue sunlessness. She reached and switched off the bedside lamp. The mattress sank beneath her. Nathan collided with her knees. She lifted her legs. He fell to her side and began to caress her face. "No," she said, and pried at him and slid under. Nathan began to kiss his way downward. "No!" she cried, and pulled him on top of her. She felt his lips against hers. She very nearly softened and opened, but then his sourness-his, the others', Maria's- appalled her and she turned and stiffened. Nathan, having given over to her demand, began the stale, anonymous thrusting. He hardly breathed. They themselves made no sound. The bed jousted beneath them. Their hands did not touch.

In the morning she woke not only fearful but also perspiring. She closed her eyes again and found herself trying hard not to think, and she sat up. Nathan slept beside her, one hand between his chubby thighs. He too was sweating, the dampness had already reached her through the sheets. Carefully, insistently, brown dawn came. The street, the cars outside, the floor and tables and chairs, her hands, everything a shade of brown. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway began its morning whine. The monstrous boats rusting in the harbor.

Claire cradled her belly. She began to murmur to it. She was pregnant with Nathan's child. About to marry a man already emotionally gone. She'd bring it to term, though. She'd have that. From Nathan now she wanted nothing else. And he was gone, with no more than his usual lukewarm whimper of protest.

He has come by the apartment for the dog. A tree-lined street, the leafless gloom. Pale window light falls across the walks like trap doors in the snow, ways out to sunnier, warmer times. Hugging himself he hesitates at the stoop, looking up to the address in confusion. He has been giving out a street address on scraps of paper, corners of envelopes, the backs of business cards for years, We should get together, hear some jazz, grab a bite to eat, drink a drink, the address in the East Eighties. This is West Ninth. He brings out a ring as big around as a janitor's, sprouting dozens of keys. They all look alike, apartment keys, office keys, security door, doorknob, dead bolt, various other drawers, cabinets and bus terminal lockers what holes they fit he can't remember. But he can t de-ring yet. Something might catch up to him, something, anyway, that might need opening. Trying one key then the other he works expertly, glancing up and down the street, as though he is breaking in, until the lobby door gives and he hesitates in surprise and lifts his head to the sound of forgotten doors opening on the hallways of old addresses and slamming closed one by one. A stack of mail bearing his name has toppled across the lobby table. He eyes it cautiously and picks at it here and there, all of it official,

credit bureaus, law firms, department of parking violations, the office of the United States Marshal. Two pieces of overnighted mail signed for by a neighbor he has never met. The postmarks go back weeks, but that doesn't tell him when he was last here. He could have left the mail three weeks ago, two weeks ago, last week, yesterday. As he leaves it now.

Inside his first-floor door, a tropical warmth. The radiators knock and hiss. His entrance has set off a commotion at the far end of the apartment. An English pointer takes a wide corner at full gallop and is upon him, all tongue and breath and claw and raw, impolite power. Nathan kneels and presents his face. The dog braces itself on Nathan's shoulders and Nathan struggles up and past, bowing and twisting away from the blows to the crotch and defending his jacket, dancing his way down the hall. "Baron, stop."

The lights are on, every one, bedside, chandelier, the microwave is ajar a mug of coffee spotlit on the carousel. The sink blooms with waste, flower-stenciled dishes spilling onto both wings of the counter. In the bedroom there is no bureau. A single sock petrified by the heat seesaws on the radiator.

"Get, Baron-away."

His footsteps echo in the back room where a black leather easy chair is an island on an otherwise bare wooden floor. French doors letting out onto a small patio are flanked by a pair of mansized speakers. In the corner blinks the readout of multitiered controls, a solar system of green and red stars clustered in this one remote corner of Nathan's universe.

He sits, sighs, aims the remote control once, fires, fires again. A muted horn leaks out of the speakers. The soft lick of a drum. Civilization strides in. The apartment phone rings but Nathan doesn't budge, as though it has been ringing all day-and it has, he knows; the solid red light on the answering machine tells him that the tape is full. The dog sulks by and sits shivering by the doors. How long has he been waiting? Nathan can smell it now, the reek of nervous waterings and clandestine shits. The dog turns his head, pleading out of the corners of his sad cue-ball eyes. Nathan is seated, and tired, but sighing he gets up with a wince and throws open the doors and stands there clutching the doorjamb. The dog circles his own old piles deodorized by frost, sniffing his way one to the other, connecting the dots, holding back his new batch for signs of an imaginary intruder. Looking out into the garden, Nathan remembers having taken this apartment for the exuberance of its growth, the little ordered rows of pachysandra and hyacinth, its brave stand against the perpetual shade between the buildings.

The dog has sulked off against the back wall of the brownstone behind. He squats silent and without reflection in the dark, as though understanding how alone he really is.

Nathan, meanwhile, has been observed. His neighbor, Mr. Somethingorother, shoveling snow at their common fence, peers at him with open disapproval. He is being silently condemned, Nathan sees, and feels hemmed in. Gone-long ago now-is his little vision of floral order. What else his neighbor must have seen-

Barton. The neighbor's name is Barton.

In the back room the now-familiar chirp of his cellular. Nathan recognizes the voice of someone he knows, faint among the other voices. He knows none, he knows them all, he can't decide. It doesn't seem to matter. He raises his own voice. "Isabel-found?"

He must pack. A phone slams, but which? The dog pushes his way through Nathan's legs and Nathan closes the door and sits quickly in the chilled leather. He closes the phone, then his eyes, as another CD, another selection, wheels around. Here comes Chet Baker, singer and trumpeter, discovered not long ago in a puddle of his own bones and gristle at the base of his Amsterdam hotel, a dozen floors beneath his well-appointed room. Nathan feels a certain kinship with him, always has. The voice of an angel, the face of eternal boyhood, quiet and patient to the point of transparency. A living ghost. Those old standards about lost love slipping easily out of that throat. As if he really knew. Nathan had actually believed Baker a young woman the first time he heard him, he had that kind of sensitivity. Maybe that was the problem, Nathan wonders, for it was all a lie. Baker was all surface, his bewildered innocence, his wide-eyed sincerity. His arms pinched to hamburger by needles, his veins coursing with crank. Everything he did-even the music-to get laid and high, and his silky boyhood face cracked like a window into a web of fissures with his little pug nose in the middle like the thrown stone that brought it all down. Inside, he was rotting, contaminated by self-absorption and sloth. Like us all, Nathan thinks, the pressure from within building and building, what we really are pushing its way to daylight and leaking over our pretty faces.

Nathan sags deeper into his chair. The millimeters pass like miles. Lovely Isabel floats by in her long red dress. Hey, sister. He found her competence in denying the obvious sympathetic, extraordinary even, worthy of applause. After all these years he'd taken it upon himself to tell her. So last night, on a whim, he asked her to take his extra seat at the opera, then dinner at Gambone's, then after the wine he took her to the New Haven to hear Eddie Young. Aged in the years since Nathan last saw him, Eddie Young stood in the colored haze flagging his fingers at the keys of his alto sax, working the changes through a competent Charlie Parker. The tight acorns of muscle throbbing in his cheeks and his throat leaping and the octave hammer sputtering like the top of a kettle come to boil, a hint of white froth at the corners of his mouth. In his presence Isabel, like everything else, receded behind an even greater tragedy, a more urgent memory.

Once, years before, when Nathan was in law school, Eddie Young, playing after-hours at a lesser club, invited any in the audience to join him at the mike. Claire was sitting beside him. They were drinking heavily. And it was Claire who whispered in Nathan's ear that night to go on, here it is, what are you waiting for, and nudged him up. Nathan cinched his strap. The band patiently idled. The pianist flitted over the chords in a playful meander. Smoke swirled through the cones of those blinding lights, the dark beyond them in which his constituency stiffened halfway between approval and embarrassment. The gentle rebound of the keys beneath his fingertips, the heat and crescendo of the band. The bell of his saxophone swung out into the dark. Then the unlanguage and uncharted buzzing of the reed on his tongue. Eddie Young cocked his eye, as though he'd heard something small he liked. He stepped to the side and briefly roused the unseen home team with head-fakes, clapping the new phenom on. Then he clapped him quickly off, and there came Nathan's slow promenade around stands of bottles and glasses back to his seat where the vodka had gone tepid, where he heard himself murmur in Claire's ear that he really did love her, he really would marry her. Marry me, be my wife. "Someone to Watch Over Me," Chet Baker croons now, today, a man famous for watching over no one.

Nathan's eyes sting. Sweat runs off his brow. At some point he has risen and-knees cold and weak-sat back down. Through the glass of the french doors, through his own reflection, he sees his neighbor, armed with his shovel, glaring away. Woozily, Nathan gets back on his feet. He digs his hands in his soaked pockets in a heroic attempt to appear nonchalant. But it is all in vain. He lurches forward, shattering the image he hoped to convey, a kind of lawyerly majesty, peering out his windows, taking in the view, plotting his next point of order. Objection, objection! Barton scowls, and Nathan's eyes rendezvous with his neighbor's at Baron's latest deposit, a steamy green log set artfully atop a small mound freshly snowed, like a cairn showing the way. Across the little yard Nathan offers up an expression of profound surprise. Again, he drifts-

"Who's the kid?" Isabel had asked last night.

At the end of the New Haven's bar slouched a tow-headed youth of sixteen or seventeen. His body was a pubescent collection of lines and angles, his white hair as fine and feathery as a child's. Nathan noted the saxophone case between his knees.

Nearing the end of "Cherokee," Eddie Young pulled up short. He twisted off Parker's finish with a riff of his own, then ceased mid-run, his saxophone in a pose, his quivering lips receding off the mouthpiece, teeth bared like a whinnying horse. Then Young nodded at the blond kid, who, without ceremony, took his case across his knees and assembled the saxophone with the trained, passionless calm of a sniper snapping together his weapon. He gave it a neck and a mouthpiece and hung it with its strap and, sucking on a reed, took three strides toward the band. Tedium and indifference had long ago veiled Isabel's cherub face. Really, was all she'd replied, unenthralled, when Nathan told her he used to play the saxophone. After that he ignored her. She, like the others, couldn't understand. Claire was the only one who cared about all that, who understood the perils of an abandoned dream. Why had he given up? Why is the sky blue? Why was it so hard to attempt, so simple to stumble, so terrifying to risk all that polluting ambition? Claire was the only one who urged him to play in the privacy of their apartment. To play, to do, to be anything, to keep playing and playing and playing-

Nathan watches, watched, as Eddie Young brought the microphone up to the boy's saxophone, then bent to talk into it. "Here's a young man I'd like you all to know, ladies and gentlemen. This morning he won a contest at the Conservatory. I had the honor of being the judge of this contest and also the grand prize. The award was to come down here tonight and share this late gig before youall." He paused, then, extending an arm toward the boy: "Mr. Ernest Filch. Ladies and gentlemen. Ernie Filch."

Sparse applause. The band picked at their shirts. Eddie Young led the way into an old standard. When the bridge came to an end the drummer and keyboardist backed down, settling their pitch. The youth's hands snapped to life like a ma'orette's. In one fluid motion the mouthpiece neared, the teeth struck. No one was prepared. The entire club was overcome, as though everyone a eaten the same thing at once. The boy was terrifying, working the changes fluidly, as though he'd begun practicing his finger movements on the spindles of his crib. Nathan pictured his own saxophone in dissembled pieces, the neck wrapped in the chamois cloth, the strap rolled away, the reeds tucked in their paper sleeves, all of it entombed beneath clothes and tennis racquets in a back closet at Claire's. He reminded himself that he still burned with the flames that everyone-the great New York lawyers, his instructors at the Manhattan School of Music, the audition jury at Juilliard-once spoke of as a kind of genius. When Claire used to whisper: How fine you were, how wonderfully you played. Together-what a team!-they were wonderful.

They were wonderful. How fine.

And where did it go? Where did the music go? Where did Claire go? Then it was years later and Nathan hadn't picked up the saxophone, and when he did one day on a whim the instrument was a small strange animal stiff and lifeless in his hands, and he put it down, his affections for it like old teenage love, leftovers from the first great meal of his life left too long.

Nathan has changed out of his suit. He stands before the french doors as before, though now in a blue blazer and light gray turtleneck, garnished with a nautical motif. A burgundy leather portmanteau hangs from one hand, his attache case from the other. After the New Haven he had fully intended to bring Isabel back here for a nightcap and then out to East Hampton. Schreck could have handled the arraignments, Ruth the pleas. Somewhere he changed his mind. Somewhere he wanted to show her where Milton used to take him. Coney Island, capital of night. Somewhere it went wrong. She sobbed loudly. A car door slammed, but whose? Her flight along the boardwalk, her heels catching between the slats-

Outside now Barton has gone. Snow crosses the blue security light in the garden, a single beam of frost drawn through the night, daring Nathan to cross or stay. He is conscious, here and there, of new aches.

"Baron, come."

But outside on the stoop, Nathan and dog both are stopped by the sight of Oliver Schreck standing across the street. Snow has collected on his shoulders, salted the toboggan hat on his head, dusted away his tracks as if he has been there always, like a stanchion pile-driven into the sidewalk. Though Nathan believes he's caught Schreck clapping shut a cellular phone.

He leads Baron toward his car. Schreck, his feet ripping free of the snow, heads him off: "Nathan."

Baron begins to growl.

"Oliver, what are you doing here?"

"Good dog, good."

"How did you know about the apartment?"

"What are you talking about? Nathan, what the hell happened?"

Nathan's arm, as if of its own accord, waves behind him. The apartment, it seems to say, will explain it all. "This address-"

Schreck eyes Baron warily. "I've been here before what do you mean? I was-you invited me, Nathan. You let me, you know, use it. Once or twice. You don't remember?"

With a glance toward Schreck, Nathan feels a peculiar embarrassment, that sense, almost, of indecency that he has been Schreck's partner, his confederate in forgotten adventures. In the snow, wrapped and hatted like a child, the prick looks so vulnerable and friendly. "Oliver, I'm in a hurry."

"Where to?"

"Rikers Island. We talked about this."

"Don't go.”

"Not to see Johnny. It's Amparo-"

"Don't. Nathan, it's Isabel, didn't you hear?"

"Hear?"

"They found her, buddy boy," he says mournfully. "She's dead."

Nathan can't read him. Did Schreck think he was breaking the news, or just confirming the obvious? His own face a mask, Nathan considers him as something he might buy, a display of clothing in a window. But he can't afford it. "I don't know what you're talking about," he says, letting Baron in the car.

Schreck cocks his head. "Why are you lying?"

A cab pulls up and Ruth emerges and settles in the snow beside Schreck, her bulk swaddled in red wool. They stand together, a mismatched pair sending off their child to college, or the prom. They exchange a glance that registers strangely with Nathan: is it worry or pride? Ruth and Schreck have exchanged only venom and vitriol, nothing remotely civil since law school. Not until now. Or so he thought.

"And then there's this matter of Krivit," Schreck says. His voice has lowered an octave, matured. As though one of the Oliver Schrecks is an act. This Schreck, that Schreck. "Are you working on the brief?" he says flatly.

How does he know? Why does he know? Why does he care? Who is Oliver Schreck? These thoughts pass through Nathan's mind like little grace notes. "I told you, I didn't take the job," he says.

"Milton's worried," Schreck says.

"Milton's worried. This is nothing. Next to Riverside Drive this isn't peanuts."

"He wants you to take care of Krivit. Krivit's doing a lot for you. Milton just wants you to finish it off, you know, follow through with things. He wanted me to pass that along."

"Krivit's doing a lot for me?" Nathan glances at Ruth, but she is looking down at her feet, embarrassed, ashamed, or both. Nathan settles on a different thought altogether: Escape. It's late," he says, and shuts the door.

Car and dog are one. The silvery hair is everywhere, woven into the seats and carpet. The paneling oozes dogsmell and rainy runs throu h the East Hampton woods. Beach sand sprinkled under the dash. The damp and sinewy pointer, his legs planted firmly in the back well of the vehicle, drapes himself over the front seat and rests his paws on Nathan's shoulders. His tongue now and again sneaks a swipe around Nathan's cheek into his eye; his hot breath in Nathan's ear; panting jowls resting on the top of Nathan's head. Like a person he demands attention, and when refused, takes it anyway.

It is eleven o'clock. And Nathan doesn't understand, anything, it seems. Quickly, like an addict hurrying the hit, he feeds a CD to the dashboard, then floats away on the streetlight's amber glow, the night before him stretching out like a rolling sea on which one sets sail primarily to be disoriented and lost.

But beeper then phone go off one after the other.

"Dominicans, Serena. It was Dominicans, not Puerto Ricans."

Still, he is relaxed. It is the music, the swell of spontaneous inspirations, emotional tremors. He leaves the silent phone on the dash and digs through a pile of bagel wraps and coffee cups, res cuing a remote control for a stereo six inches away. He points, fires, cocks his head, listening, and his hand lifts off the wheel, as if of its own accord, to conduct the grim opening strains of Don Carlo.

"No look, Serena, it's not that I'm just in a car. I'm sitting in traffic look… Who? I told you I'm with Oliver… No. Really. My partner. Yes I have a partner. Oliver."

Nathan blithely holds the phone toward the dog. "She doesn't believe me," he says. "Say something."

The dog pricks his ears, cocks his head. Nathan's eyes fall on the empty passenger seat, and for a moment he wonders why someone-he wonders who-isn't actually there.

In the rear-view mirror, the red sedan has pulled out thirty yards behind him. Its headlamps swing wide, then lock on the mirror. Nathan stops along the curb. The sedan stops half a block back, idling in the middle of the street. The two figures smoke steadily in the darkened car, the fringes of their hair and collars glowing behind the glass.

Nathan brings the phone to his ear, in case they might want to talk, but he hears only crackling silence and slips the phone into his pocket. His car creeps from the curb. "Isabel," he whispers. Baron barks at enemy apparitions, ghosts of dogs and figments of dog imagination, at nothing, anyway, that Nathan can or will ever imagine. In this city a thousand million lights come on, a thousand million lights go off. Passengers on the woollen sidewalks tip into the snow, clutching at hats and scarves. But Nathan feels in the air a sense of black conspiracy, as in a cove full of boats slowly turning together before a storm. Turning, as the winds shift, toward him. He accelerates past an office tower, the illuminated news aloft passing around the corner of the building, news of mass slaughter in Burundi, an orphanage bombed in Sarajevo, fortytwo Dominican illegals drowned in a boat disaster, the Knicks' afternoon loss to the Celtics in Boston, of, suddenly, nothing, snapping off into muteness, as if something-the world, his own capacity for information-has come to an abrupt end, and there is news of nothing at all.

Santos leans solitary and lamplit against his car, sucking his coated teeth. In the shelter of this block the snowflakes swirl softly. Across the street the address Nathan left for him on his message service stands dark save a single window, on the ground floor, dimly lit behind a thick curtain. A figure passes before it, passes again. Someone small, someone's child. Three stoops down an old man spends this cold night in a doorway in bewildered repose.

Santos is considering giving up as Nathan's car stops and Nathan himself climbs out. "Cold enough for you?" Santos says.

"What-?"

"It's Errol, Nathan."

Nathan takes a step toward him, looking about, hesitant.

"You told me to be here," Santos says.

"Of course."

"I didn't realize you had an uptown place, too."

"I lost track of the time."

"This is a terrible day to do that."

"I know, I'm sorry-about Isabel. It's-" His hands move slightly with the wooden smile he manages. "It's unspeakable. I don't know what to say. I don't see you once in five years, now twice in one day. But over this-"

Santos shifts a little on his feet and watches him. "You know why I called. It wasn't for you to express your grief."

Nathan just looks.

"You sent the flowers," Santos says carefully.

“l did?”

"It was your father."

Nathan shrugs. "He doesn't do anything. Maybe his secretary-"

Santos pinches his eyes. "Jesus Christ, Nathan, just do me the fucking courtesy."

Nathan looks away and Santos lights a cigarette, points to Nathan's wrist. "Tell me about the scratches."

"Is this an investigation, Errol? Are you interrogating me?"

"It is what it is. Answer the question."

“Is it your investigation?"

"Answer me."

"Because if it's not, you won't be able to use a thing."

Santos watches the cigarette smoke spiral and unwind in the snow. The rope pulls through his chest, the knot in his lungs tightening. He reaches for the bulge in his coat pocket but looking at Nathan leaves the inhaler alone. "Just tell me about the scratches."

“It was a cat."

Santos looks back at the car. All the windows have fogged. The ghost-shape of the dog hovers in the rear, nosing the glass, his huge pink tongue pulsing. "You hate cats."

Santos doesn't mean to, but he feels it coming-reaching up, he touches his eyes with the balls of his fingers. Then he grabs Nathan. "What the fuck did you do? She was my sister."

"You don't know what you're saying," Nathan says.

Santos presses a finger into his own chest. "Who are you talking to here? She was like the others, and the others, and the others. It's not like I've forgotten anything. You think I'd forget all that sick shit? I know, Nathan. I know you were with her last night. "

"I was, but we saw Figaro at the Met. We had dinner at Gambone's. We went up to the New Haven."

"Jesus, all your haunts. You were working her over, giving her the business.

"I know what this looks like, but I have nothing to hide."

"Don't" – Santos lets the shout out into the night, but it dies in the snow, falls at their feet -"Lie to me." He pulls Nathan down a step. Their breath mingles and coils and Santos can smell it in him, sweet death at the edges. No one's but his. "You don't exactly look like an innocent man."

"We both know it's not how someone looks, Errol."

Santos says, his voice giving way, "This is no time to be playing lawyer. I'm talking about my sister. You never had a secretary you didn't fuck."

A strange smile crosses Nathan's lips. "And she's been my secretary for four years. What finally brings you out tonight?"

Santos breathes. "What-?" His arms drop like a stricken puppet's. "She's dead, Nathan."

"I've known for hours."

The tightness has spread from Santos's chest to his arms now, his hands. "Maybe you've known longer than that."

"You're no saint, Errol," Nathan says. "None of us are. But you've done well. I'm sure Claire would say so."

"Nathan, my god-"

"Of course I see the romantic predicament you two are in. I'm not angry about you and Claire. In a way I was glad it was you."

Santos runs his hands over his face. "How do you do it? How do you make everyone want to kill you, and then want to save you?"

"We're tied together, Errol. We grew up together. You don't kill your friends."

Santos drops a step back. "There's a point when you do. There's a point when you have to, when they're the only ones worth killing.

"And worth dying for," Nathan adds.

Usually, Nathan is slippery, his eyes skipping along the surface of things, skidding, his hands fidgety. But now he seems to still, his eyes focusing, leveling at Santos a steady stare. "There's something you don't know."

His breath thin and thinner. Santos looks at Nathan warily. "Tell me one thing I don't know."

"You don't want it."

"I want it."

"You'll have to talk to Ellie."

"My mother would be happier dead right now. She's in no condition. What does my mother have to do with this?"

"You won't ask her?"

No.

Leaning, Nathan whispers something in Santos's ear. Santos coughs into his fist, his chest hard as wood. His heart thuds, getting hot.

As Nathan speaks, Santos raises and lowers his arm two or three times, trying to compose the news out of the air. Then a headache, sudden, blinding. Squeezing the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, he feels the weight of the whole of the city behind him, the permanent daylight, the trace lamplight, the lightning beyond the clouds. At night in this city, around every corner everyone a potential murderer, everyone a potential murder. Santos sees how he used to wake as a boy in the night in terror of the uninvited ghouls that crouched in the dark corners of his room. The imagined gargoyles and demons that dropped from incandescent webs. He sees his parents and their one boy and two girls and the stretches of angry silence that sent them to opposite ends of a small apartment. He sees the last time he and his sister touched: adults outgrown in their childhood home she ripped the phone out of his hands for no reason at all and he pinned her shoulders to the wall. A spat that lovers might have. Fighting the hideous urge to kiss her. Calmly, she threatened to scream, Rape. And then she did scream it. She took a breath, looked at him, her eyes full of mischief, then screamed it again. His glare dimmed and his hatred softened and he considered the line between lust and indifference and the fact of their blood relation, and he released her. She screamed a third time, at first he thought for the hell of it. Though she seemed to mean it. She was shrieking, tearing at her hair, as if she saw someone else in him, someone worth running from. And maybe he was, someone to run from. He sees her coming at him with a pair of scissors and he sees himself fighting her off, flinging her across the bed and turning and running away, and boarding the downtown bus he leaned his head against the plexiglass and closed his eyes. Remorse in his throat like a hot cinder. He hadn't seen her since, until today.

Somehow did he know?

Because of Isabel's green eyes? Because he couldn't bear to see her again, because he wrote them both off-her and Nathan together, Nathan because of what he'd become, Isabel because of what she'd always been? He'd understood that of course he'd be able to have, possess, love, neither of them. They shone in a secret constellation in which he was some imploded, snuffed star, at the center of which, drawing everyone in, unseen, menacing as a black hole, hovered Milton Stein.

The day he said goodbye to them all he rode the bus and walked the Brooklyn Bridge to Claire's apartment and for the first time, with hardly a word between them, they made love; as though she understood as well as he, as though she had been waiting for him, or half expecting him. It was blind sex fueled by a lusty terror of the truth. They were both Nathan's dupes, patsies, and foolishly Santos believed he was making Claire an offer of reconciliation, to generously fill the void left by Nathan with something better, at least something honorable. He would love her as she deserved to be loved. But he was only filling himself. The spic apprentice. And he knows now that he was thinking he wouldn't miss a sister he had coveted for unnatural reasons but may never have actually had. And he was thinking that those things we go out of our way not to ask we know to be true.

All that we have done, Santos sees now, all that we do, is no longer a question of rehabilitation. It is, like everything, merely a question of outlasting the consequences.

Winded, buried in worlds of his own making, he squats in the snow like an ape, his back to Nathan, crying openly. "God help you," he says.

He hears the heavy door behind him swing open then closed. A lock turns. Nathan's footsteps fade down a hallway. Santos grips the iron banister and hoists himself up and turns and steps down to the sidewalk, and with a drunk's meticulousness crosses the street through a circle of spotlit snow and fades into the dark other side.

Inside, the lamps are off. The dark smells like a sleeping child, warm pungent. Outside, Santos's car pulls away and fades down the street.

A low light comes on against a far wall. Nathan quickly steps through a doorway. Another, distant lamp comes on: an unmade bed, a nightstand littered with prescription vials; an IV propped in a corner; a black brassiere draped over the back of a chair.

Heading for the bathroom, Nathan stops at the bed. The pillows are dented, the sheets wrinkled, the blankets thrown back. Evidence that he has lain here. Of Maria as she was five years earlier, dancing with her girlfriend in the middle of Limelight's dance floor. The gray cashmere wrap keeping her to small twitchy movements, ginger motions of hips and shoulders, not restraint as much as a suggestion of wider possibilities. Her head tossed back, her hands running up and down her own thighs, she seduced the room with her self-sufficiency.

Nathan had been standing in his suit with his elbows propped up against the bar, his briefcase wedged between his feet. It was a Wednesday night. He was not the only man alone, or wearing a suit, or the only one with his eyes trained on her, but at two o'clock he was the only one to walk over. She looked at his briefcase, then up at him, as if he were breaking some rule. And he was, he was sure. He wasn't dancing. She looked at him again. He asked for her phone number. She didn't hesitate, but she didn't seem to give it much thought. He called one week later. She said no, he'd waited too long. The next night he arrived at her apartment with flowers, and the night following he picked up her things and her boy and by morning she had her name on his mail slot and her mail forwarded to East Eighty-ninth Street and Benny was pulled out of that school and put into this one. The delivery trucks came and went. A new bed. A new 'TV. A desk and chair for Benny. An Electrolux. A thoroughbred English pointer Maria named Baron. In the morning Nathan opened his eyes to the smell of coffee and Maria standing before the mirror making, again, small movements of hips and shoulders in her new tweed suit, with flowers in her hair.

Nathan opens a dresser drawer and feels along the bottom beneath the underwear. He opens another drawer, then another. He sweeps his hand under the mattress, squeezes the pillows. He flips clothes, tosses shoes. Stacks of paper topple. A bottle of perfume upends and fills the room with sickly sweetness. Under something, behind something else, Maria's jewelry box: inside, a legal-sized envelope. Nathan slips out the contents. Maria Rosa. Last Will and Testament. Revised a month ago, prepared by, dated by, signed and notarized by one Oliver Schreck. Nathan's quivering finger rests on Roatan. On Benny.

A medicine cabinet opening, he prowls through the contents. Full prescription vials fall clattering like maracas to the sink. He counts pills and puts them between his teeth and bites. He picks another vial and overturns it and cups the entire contents in his palm and stares into the mirror, looking at nothing, not even himself.

His eyes open level with the sink. At some point he has fallen and is left now in a low squat. The taste of saltwater on his lips, his eyes burn. He squeezes a vial in his palm but it slips out and rolls to the wall. Miraculously he stands, fills the sink and slips in his rashy wrists. His eyes slide to the side, listening, his face a convergence of rivers of thought, lips twisted, one eye half closed, interrupted-

Maria here in this bed. No needles. No tubes. just a Washington Heights beauty queen and happiness once, for once real happiness, for one good year, then a second, distinctly less good, then their common verdict and three more years as cell mates imprisoned by their living death. All the while, after leaving Claire, there was his other life as a bachelor in his own downtown garden apartment. Two beds to change, two faces to wash, two sets of delinquent bills and their attendant threats. Two skies to simultaneously breathe.

He pulls the rubber stopper to let it all drain. The water slides slowly and evenly down the wall of the sink, the drain gasps, and the rest of it is sucked away.

She did this. She killed me.

"Daddy?"

A small sleepy voice. Nathan catches his own eyes in the mirror and remembers his first night alone with Benny. Maria had gone out, some place with friends. To leave the men to themselves, she'd said. But the boy fell asleep quickly. His breath pulled in and out between his bunched lips, his fine hair fanned over the pillow, the perfect skin of his pouched cheeks, flushed with heat but drained of vitality. Looking down at the boy, a dead place had opened in Nathan and he felt the terror of a child's sleep so heavy one fraction of an ounce more and slumber might slip through the skin of life and plummet through to infinity and death. He reached to the boy and lifted his arm, pudgy and kinked, to confirm for himself the boy's warmth and the hesitant breath, the steady, steady pulse. Still there. He slid a CD into the stereo, Bill Evans on piano, a blessed jangling, chattering glass, that must sound very like a dreamworld, even to a boy. He thought it might inspire something in the boy's imagination, but what would it be? What did it inspire in his own? He rattled around the apartment. He turned on all the lights, he turned on the television. He drank scotch and leafed through Vanity Fair. He moved things from here to there, touching everything he passed as if he could add the furniture and underwear and books and the smashed plastic toys and even the dog to his life's inventory and stuff that emptiness, fill it, fill it up. The music wasn't doing it. Sitting on the edge of his bed he hugged his knees and braced himself to slide across the chasm between the darkness and the time when in the blue flash of morning sun the boy appeared, resurrected, atop the big bed, apprehensively petting his mother's perfect face, just as Nathan had touched the boy's, to confirm sweet life; as Maria, the night before that night, had touched Nathan's, while Nathan faked sleep. Sweet life.

He had awoken to a scatter of black vinyl crumbs in their bed, across the floor, in his hair. The remains of his vast collection of irreplaceable LPs, his purest-maybe only – joy. These discs that ask nothing but only give and give, hurled, obviously, one after the other against the wall, entire epochs of music history, their composers, their virtuosos, annihilated, until the room looked as if it had rained coal. The cardboard jackets and their liner notes and librettos torn to bits. Maria swore it hadn't been her. Why would she have done it? Though, on the other hand, now that the records were gone, she was sorry she hadn't thought of it herself. But if it wasn't her, then who-? After all, the shards were strewn in his hair, not hers. It was his liter of Dewar's lying empty amidst the rubble, not hers-

Maria's last will and testament dangles over the sink. Nathan lights a match.

"Daddy?"

The small voice creeps up on him. He locates in the mirror the boy standing in the reflection of the living room. It takes a moment for Nathan to adjust to his realization that he knows this boy. How easy it is to forget. This child has to be somewhere. Where else would he have been but in his mother's apartment?

The paper flames brightly then quickly shrinks and blackens, run through by worms of red ash.

"What are you doing?"

"Benny, go back to bed."

"Did you see Mommy?

"I saw her. Your grandma come by after school?"

The boy nods.

"She gave you your supper?"

The boy keeps nodding. "When is Mommy coming home?"

Nathan, fugitive from a half-dozen lives, shuts his eyes, summons the lie. But what to base honesty on? These little alternative versions are superior, happier, cleaner, evidence of a better, more Just, world. The kid will sleep, he'll get through another night, another day, week. Maria can hold on another week. "Soon," Nathan says. "Soon."

Retreating, Benny turns in time to see the crack of light melt away as the door closes, leaning against the wall in wait, on the boy's face the same resigned expression-hopeless expectancy-of the expectant dog.

Eventually the boy goes back to bed, and Nathan trades the apartment for the cold. He goes down the stairs to the car, to the empty streets, and to Baron, who does not get left behind.