Chronic City

CHAPTER Eighteen

Perkus was gone. By the time February rolled around, the blizzard’s traces down to those last blackened rinds in gutters, each marking a spot where some ambitious driver had made mountains uselessly digging out around their wheels, I’d long since quit my ritual visits to Eighty-fourth Street to search for him. The condemned buildings on his block had nothing more to show me. The neighbors of Brandy’s Piano Bar might be able to rest at last, the place shuttered, its noisy smokers flitted elsewhere, except Brandy’s had no neighbors anymore. The inhabitants of Perkus’s building, as well as two others on the block, had all been dislodged at once, to who knows where, the apartments of families and friends, I suppose, to await the city’s settlement for the tiger’s ravages, the machine’s or beast’s assertion of eminent domain over what had been their homes. The block wasn’t even fascinating or appalling by then, the darkness in those windows not ominous or intense. Around the corner, Jackson Hole still made a rather dramatic crater, but these were merely uninhabitable buildings, destined to come down and be replaced with something newer, and soon they’d be hard to remember. The city had moved on. Nothing there matched my own ominous intensity, certainly, as I pushed to the edges of the police barricades to cruise them for trace meanings, and soon enough my feeling faded. Perkus was gone, and I couldn’t mourn it the way I had before, at least not by creeping around his street.

Perkus was gone. By the last part of January, Oona and I had settled into yet another version of our stilted routine, and not mentioning Perkus or the circumstances of his going was a part of it. It was as if Oona and I had met through some other common friend, or picked each other up at a bar. If our career as secret lovers had always had weird denominators, Perkus now became part of that murky undertow, the stuff Oona and I left unspoken. She was deep in the finishing throes of Noteless’s book, on a crash publication schedule, in order to be in stores concurrently with a ceremony at the hole downtown, at the end of the spring. Without Perkus’s apartment as a rendezvous point, and forbidden from calling lest I interrupt, I mostly ended up waiting at home until she’d exhausted herself writing and felt she needed some reward. I knew just how she liked her martinis now, and had a perfect one waiting for her when she came sighing through the door bragging of how many pages she’d batted out. But she wasn’t looking for conversation, and I managed not to press her on sore points, mostly. My encounter with Noteless at the mayor’s party seemed distant history, part of the Perkus era, last year. I’d satisfied myself well enough that they weren’t lovers, but Oona had established something too. By squiring the artist through the party and leaving in his car she’d cemented me in my subsidiary place, forging our present odd equilibrium. I loved her in my bed, but I kept my mouth shut about it.

One day I whined that I couldn’t leave my apartment for fear of missing her. “You should carry a cell phone like everyone else,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t worry.”

“Perkus doesn’t carry a cell phone.”

“Like regular people. If he did carry one you’d be able to call him, wouldn’t you?”

“But you never call me.”

“I might if you had a number.”

“I don’t like the whole rigmarole, everyone going around… talking… everywhere.”

“You don’t have to talk anywhere you don’t want to.”

“I guess I’m old-fashioned.”

“Sort of like the word rigmarole.”

The next morning, before sharing breakfast at the Mews-a rarity, these days, that she’d linger for breakfast-we ducked in at a newsstand and Oona bought me a disposable mobile phone, with a hundred minutes built in before the thing expired. She entered its digits into her Treo, then handed the little plastic implement to me. It barely weighed anything. “There you go,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything else, just carry it around. If it rings, it’s me. The Oonaphone.”

Nice, but the Oonaphone never rang once. I waited at home with the martini makings-I had nowhere else I wanted to go.

Something else happened then. With Perkus gone, and Oona systematically depriving my heart’s hopes, I pined deeply for Janice, even if I couldn’t know who I was pining for. Maybe I pined for pining, for the notion of love itself. I read and reread the letters, the wealth of them from before her sickness, the few that had come since. Guiltily, I found I loved most not the Janice I was supposed to love, my onetime fiancée on earth, then heroically launched on her mission, nor even the brave professional of the first months after the Chinese mines had trapped her and the Russians in space. No, I loved the deranged astronaut of midwinter, resigned to the space station’s degeneration and perhaps to dying. The less of Janice I got, the more I cherished her. Any past was like the church tower, gray and mute, bedrocked in mystery. Her scant words now were like the birds, who when they circled into view took my breath away. The flock had never quit, returning to soar at kooky angles even in the tailing last flurries the morning after the blizzard and Arnheim’s party.

Perkus was gone. Midway through the month of January, before I’d completely quit pacing the periphery of that quarantined block of Eighty-fourth Street, I had an idea I was investigating his disappearance, though I could hardly report what outward form, if any, my investigation took. I made a pretty lame detective. One of my forays was to call Strabo Blandiana and get an appointment. I couldn’t imagine a way to interrogate Mayor Arnheim or Russ Grinspoon, but Strabo Blandiana was within reach. The Chinese medicinalist was implicated in the first moments of Perkus’s errancy, if that was what it was, the first encounter which eventually led up the mayor’s staircase. I wanted to see the evidence of the framed photograph in his treatment room and weigh for myself Strabo’s awareness of any plot. Likely I sensed that Strabo would treat any question kindly, and also as symptomatic. When I say I made a feeble detective, I mean that I was as willing to be cured of my case as to solve it.

Yet even anticipating Strabo’s soothing, nothing fully prepared me for how much of a rebuke his tranquil offices could be to my disquiet. I came in stamping off snowmelt, my rattling taxicab’s hornhonking pinball course through glistening, trafficky intersections fresh in my ears, and wrought up with recalled images of Strabo at Arnheim’s dinner, among (fellow?) conspirators. Through the door, at the sound of his chimes and sight of his receptionist’s smile, I was ashamed. To arrive here in a state was to fail Blandiana’s test as his longtime client, to suggest I’d gained no peace from all his needles over the years. So before Strabo even appeared I aligned myself, using breathing methods learned in these same rooms, and began dreaming of a time when I’d never known the name Perkus Tooth.

Inside, on his table, any shred of fear was converted. Though in his turtleneck and impeccable razor-cut Strabo could easily be cast as a Bond villain, it was impossible to find him sinister when he turned his Buddha searchlights on your distress. Who needed chaldrons? The light was in yourself. That was possibly the lesson of his tenderness. Though more gift than lesson, with all the reproach lesson implied. You were forgiven even for being inadequately tenacious in your peacefulness. We all slipped. And, as if to reinforce the self-chaldronizing principle, the framed print was gone from the wall at the foot of his bed. Wearing Strabo’s painless needles, mind settled into a fine drone, I gazed up at a dun-colored page of Sanskrit instead.

“You took it down,” I said when he came back for me.

His look in reply was sweetly puzzled.

“The… vase photograph you had there.”

“Oh, yes, that’s true. A few patients found it overstimulating.”

“You took it home instead?”

“I donated it to a charity auction.”

“Ah.” Material things were only ever passing through his relaxed fingers.

“Truthfully, I get too many gifts from patients.”

“What charity?”

“Médecins Sans Frontières.” Strabo never shed a dewdrop of impatience with irrelevant questions, yet also conveyed a sense that such exchanges stood in lieu of personal work that waited to be done. So I let him perform his usual mind-meld, his stunt of empathy. Without intruding or naming names, in elegant paraphrase, Strabo Blandiana informed me that I should quit wondering whether to love Oona Laszlo or Janice Trumbull, that the task instead was simply and unquestioningly to love. Of course. Then, as ever, he added that I obviously hardly needed to be told, that I contained this knowledge within myself and had evidently already been acting upon it, and that Strabo Blandiana as my friend was proud of me and confident in my talent for self-care. A cynic would have asked why he didn’t take his show to Las Vegas. Me, I strode back out into the cold chaos of Manhattan believing myself a sunbeam in which all who wished could bask.

Whether I searched for him or not, Perkus was gone, and I was tired of searching alone. I’d made one attempt to enlist Richard Abneg, two weeks earlier, on New Year’s Eve. This was just ten days since the mayor’s party, and all the traces felt fresh, the blizzard’s drifts still reshaping the streets, albeit crusted and steadily blackening. Richard and Georgina took pity on me and called me to spend the evening with them in Georgina’s penthouse, knowing (because I’d complained) that Oona had avoided me on Christmas, rightly suspecting she’d do it again. I was something especially pathetic in the way of third-wheel bachelor companions-there being not one but two women I was divided from, on that night when any couple is meant to be together. Richard and Georgina made the evening easy for me, ordering in excellent Chinese, tilapia medallions with spicy green chilies and Napa cabbage, eggplant with ground pork and green peas, then putting on some old black-and-white movies, consoling ones, Jimmy Stewart as a rube outwitting large numbers of sophisticates.

Between features Richard took me into their bedroom and cracked a window and we got high. Richard didn’t seem to want Georgina to know. He rolled a joint out of a box of Chronic and at first I didn’t think anything of it. We exhaled into the chill whistling breeze and it seemed to me the smoke was all blown back inside, that its perfume would draft to Georgina, several rooms away, but I didn’t point this out. I was just grateful to be where I was. From the high penthouse window distant party noises rose to find us, sweetly harmless at this distance, though I hoped we’d shut the window before the appointed hour, not hear the popping of corks, the commemorating hollers. I didn’t want to think of the year’s end passing with Perkus’s whereabouts unknown. The smell of the dope was commemoration enough, and I grew wistful. In return for Richard and Georgina’s kindness in not mentioning Oona or Janice, I could have left another name unmentioned, but the impulse was too fierce. Though I’d brought Perkus to the party, I wanted Richard to feel as responsible as I did.

“Where do you think he’s gone?” I said, handing over the joint, and waving off any return.

Richard shrugged. He reached through the window opening to stub the remaining quarter-joint against the outer sill before replying. “I wouldn’t drive myself crazy over it,” he said. “He’ll reappear right when you’ve given up.”

“I keep visiting Eighty-fourth, thinking I’ll see him haunting the block,” I said. “Other tenants are at the barricades sometimes, pleading for access to stuff they left inside. That apartment was Perkus’s snail shell. I can’t picture him surviving naked.”

“He’s resourceful, Chase. You’d be surprised.” The words might be hopeful, but Richard’s tone was curtly dismissive. It only made me want to push him.

“Have you talked to the mayor’s people? After all, he was last seen at Arnheim’s town house-”

“That’s where he was last seen by you,” said Richard irritably. “I’ll bet he was last seen elsewhere. He’s a grown-up. Anyway, Perkus’s name wasn’t on the guest list. What do you expect me to do, barrel into Arnheim’s office and say, ‘Did anyone cleaning up after your party find a one-eyed rock critic dressed in purple, because one’s gone missing’?”

“You’re being deliberately callous.”

Richard’s sneer said What else is there to do? I had no answer. “Let’s go in,” he said. “She’s probably wondering what we’re up to.”

“What if he got away with the mayor’s chaldron?” I whispered. It was a possibility too terrifying and thrilling to speak aloud.

“Listen, Chase. No fucking chaldron talk tonight, okay? It isn’t good for Georgina. That word’s verboten around here.”

It struck me as peculiar and maybe suspicious that Richard had declared martial law. We’d lost Perkus, and now the crippled Fellowship of the Chaldron might be suspending the civil rights of one of its remaining members. “Does Georgina know you’ve made that decision for her?” I said, managing to get honestly indignant on her account, though I knew I was up against the tyranny of coupledom-what Perkus would have called “pair-bonding.” I reminded myself I’d met Georgina several times before Richard laid eyes on her, and that we’d all lusted for chaldrons democratically together.

Richard had judo for my righteousness. “Have you had a look at her?” He cupped his hand, low at his own slight paunch, and raised his brows, waiting for me to understand. Then he couldn’t wait. “You haven’t noticed she’s not drinking, I guess-”

“What? Wait, really?”

“Use your eyes.”

“When-?”

“We’re pretty sure the very first night. She’s three months along, but she’s built so flat there you can already see a bulge, like a sweet potato.” I heard a crazy wondering pride in Richard Abneg, a dreaminess that had colonized his patented tone of worldly grousing. In conquering the exotic ostrich-woman, seizing her from the bracket of privilege, that now-epochal night at Maud and Thatcher Woodrow’s, something else had conquered Abneg in turn, an unaccountable human possibility.

So I went in half tripping and gathered Georgina in an embrace, making a joke about my dimness and self-absorption in not noticing sooner, and insisting that no matter what the date happened to be, we really ought to open some champagne. Richard uncorked another Châteauneuf-du-Pape instead, but he did pour an aggressively protective thimbleful for Georgina, who didn’t blink at being stinted. Her mood was implacably mellow, as though bodily exalted by pregnancy, shifted to some elevated plane, past the flushed-and-vomity phase. (And indeed, I could make out the sweet potato she was sporting.) By contrast I felt Richard smoldering as he shifted around the room, ruminating through his beard while replacing one DVD with another and crushing white cartons slimed with sauce into a trash bag, his impregnator’s pride mingled with something more ambivalent and turgid. Our talk of Perkus felt incomplete, usurped by the news of the Hawkman’s pregnancy. Whatever was disgruntling Richard, I knew what I felt it should be. I wanted Georgina to hear about Perkus, too, before they sealed themselves in parental solipsism and forgot the floe-stranded polar bears of the world. My passive-aggression took form as the last thing I’d expected to hear myself delivering this night, a toast.

“Here we sit… in this city of apartments… in one of the most superb examples anywhere… such a perch you enjoy, Georgina! We’re lucky souls, aren’t we? And you’re bringing along a little Hawkboy, who’ll someday need an apartment of his own…” In my muddle I couldn’t remember whether Richard ever called Georgina “Hawkman” to her face. And I’d awarded them a boy child, with random confidence. “I’ll go home to mine tonight and give thanks, though by comparison it’s a tawdry shoe box… yet what a thing it is to have a place, any place at all, in the great conglomeration of apartments making up this mad island… so let’s drink, too, to our friend Perkus who’s been cast out in the cold, who’s lost his purchase on Manhattan…” I aimed at Richard’s weakness, real estate. By harping on apartments I’d remind him he’d lost one, too. I couldn’t have known, though, how exactly I probed a sore point.

“What are you driving at, Insteadman?”

“Nothing, just thinking of Perkus, on this night of blessings.”

Georgina asked. “I fail to understand. What has happened to Perkus?”

“Richard didn’t tell you? After the blizzard, the city condemned the tract of apartments around the Jackson Hole disaster. We don’t know where Perkus ended up.” I was restricted from saying the rest: that his actual departing gesture was to throw himself at Arnheim’s chaldron, on all our behalves.

“That’s terrible. Richard, did you know about this?”

Abneg bore a hole in me, his gaze like a cigarette ember knocked off onto a sleeve. “Perkus was just playing out the string in that place to begin with,” he said, his tone hard-boiled. “He was on borrowed time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Look, nobody’s entitled to live in a rent-controlled apartment forever. I protected him as long as I could. He was past his time, that’s all.”

Past his time? The era of Mailer and Brando? I tried to grasp Richard’s implications. “Protected him exactly how?”

“Protected literally. You don’t think he’d have been able to afford that apartment if he’d lost his sixty-year-old rent control, do you? Did you imagine Perkus was actually the legitimate holder? Wanna know why his name wasn’t on the buzzer? Because he and I pried off the old linoleum nameplate reading E. Abneg.”

“Who’s E. Abneg?”

“Funny you should ask. Ephraim Abneg-my father. That pad was my college graduation gift, at the rent, in 1988, of seven hundred and forty-six dollars. I think it’s gone up a hundred bucks since then. I set up Perkus in the sublet when I bought my place. A new management company bought the building five years ago and harassed all the rentstabilized tenants out with the old trick of not cashing their checks and then suing for nonpayment, so I’ve had to personally wade in and fend off all sorts of shit just to keep him installed there, including a definite abuse or two of the power invested in me by blah-blah-blah. The point is, it wasn’t going to last forever, Chase.”

It was as if I’d just wandered into the big city from the boondocks, and was forever to be the callow newcomer. Everyone else’s friendships had provenances I couldn’t begin to trace, let alone compete with. Also, I might be stoned, and reading too elaborately into Richard’s outburst, but it puzzled me how eager he was to view the tiger as an envoy of real estate destiny, an impartial (if regrettable) agent calling in the city’s old debts. At this instant, though, I only wished to rebottle the pressures I’d uncorked in Richard, which looked to wreck the evening. I felt I’d rewarded Georgina’s hospitality poorly. She now reached out to stroke Richard’s arm, to draw him back to her special corporeal calm, that oasis in her which they’d created together. But Richard wasn’t pregnant, she was-just as this wasn’t his glorious penthouse, but hers. If apartments were fate, what about Abneg’s?

“I didn’t know you’d put yourself out like that,” I said placatingly. “Still, just because Perkus was on borrowed time in that place doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about his going up in smoke entirely.”

“You’re the one who raised a toast to apartments,” Richard snarled.

“This is irrelevant,” said Georgina, her tone of correction gentle but absolute. “You must try to do something from within your offices, Richard.”

“What makes you think I haven’t done something from within my offices?” asked Richard darkly, though his words were plainly chosen to skirt a lie. “Though some would defend the right of an adult to fall off the radar in this town without necessarily conferring with the fucking authorities.”

“You must find your friend,” said Georgina. The clarity of her statement suggested a simple parallel with Richard’s fussing to keep her from red wine, pot smoke, and chaldrons, a posture that plainly hadn’t escaped her. If Richard Abneg was a protector now, he should protect.

With that we turned to Jimmy Stewart, who always knew when he was a protector. Stewart set about rescuing a gun-ridden town without carrying a gun, but before Marlene Dietrich could be won over, the Hawkman was fast asleep, her stockinged feet drawn up and tucked to one side. The love seat on which she’d been sitting formed a plush catcher’s mitt where she sagged, so Richard and I finished the movie before he gently guided her away to bed. Somewhere in there midnight had tolled, but sealed in our turret we’d been blessedly unaware.

When Richard returned to where I waited, where the tube’s blue glow provided the only illumination over Georgina’s spoils, her Arp and her Halimi and her several Starcks, I couldn’t read his expression but figured in any event it was time for me to go. But Richard said, “Do you want one more smoke?” It was then I had my big idea.

“That’s Watt’s stuff we were smoking before, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re on his safe list?”

“Sure, and I can guess what you’re thinking, but I haven’t called him in months, that’s an old stash.”

“Okay, so call him now.”

“Tonight? Are you kidding?”

“He’s a drug dealer, he’s working, I’m sure.”

Richard used his cell, entering his digits into Watt’s beeper. The dealer confirmed immediately, so Richard dialed down to Georgina’s doorman, to prepare him to expect the late visitor. I sat with Richard and waited in sullen silence, our last grab at camaraderie apparently spoiled by my detective work. Fortunately, our wait wasn’t long. Watt was such a pro.

“You remember Chase Insteadman,” said Richard grousingly, once Watt was settled in and his case of wares clamshelled on the coffee table between us.

“Sure, Perkus’s friend. I used to love your show, man.”

“Thanks. Listen, speaking of Perkus, when’s the last time you heard from him?”

Friend or fan or whatnot, Watt had an ingrained dislike of questioning, and retreated to generalities. “I do a lot of business,” he said. “I don’t keep a log or anything, fellas, and if I did-”

“Right, you wouldn’t share it with anyone,” said Richard, glaring at me. “We’re all grateful for that.”

“He’s missing,” I said. “But we know he calls you a lot, and we were just wondering if you’d heard from him in the past ten days or so. Or if you’d gone to visit him anywhere apart from Eighty-fourth Street.”

This brought a scoffing laugh. “Brother never budges from his crib.” The burst of rococo dialect seemed a response to being asked to discuss Perkus in his absence, as though Watt had until now expected Perkus to emerge from the shadows of Georgina’s apartment, hence had still been on best behavior. I found it touching that the dealer had a special edition of himself tailored to please Perkus Tooth. It was more proof Perkus existed, at least.

“He’s budged now,” said Richard. “The city condemned his building.”

“Oh, shit,” said Watt. “Tiger?”

We both nodded. My eyes fell to the rows of Lucite boxes, with their gloriously ugly multicolored font: URBAN JUNGLE, TIGER’S CLAW, GIANT PAW PRINT. SABER-TOOTH, these nestled in alongside CHRONIC and the other usual names. Watt noticed me looking. “Kind of a craze lately,” he said, with the air of one making a helpless excuse. “Can’t sell enough, which just goes to show, you know, what I’ve always heard. People do love them some fear.”

“You’ve always heard that, huh?” said Richard. I felt the sarcasm was aimed in my direction. Certainly Watt took no notice.

“Listen, Foster,” I said, waving off the matter of his tiger-centric line of goods. “What about Ice?”

“Got plenty of that.” He shifted aside the top layer, the new names, to show me, even as he shifted his own register back to that of salesman. “Never travel without the old standbys.”

“I meant what’s different about it? Because you must be aware it has some special properties.”

“They’ve all got special properties,” he said, again resorting to platitudes. “Just depends what you’re in the mood for.”

This concerned Richard, too. He’d journeyed with me to the crossroads of Ice and eBay. He made a sour face, then summoned his full authority. “Here’s the thing, Foster. You’re not in any kind of trouble with us, we’ve just got a simple question. The names change, right? You don’t really have access to a hundred different grades of pot, you couldn’t possibly. That’s fine, you need to keep things interesting for your clientele. We just want to know if there’s something about Ice in particular that’s different, or if any of your other clients are reporting any special effects from it. This might or might not have something to do with Perkus’s disappearance, we don’t know, but we’d appreciate an honest answer.”

“It’s real popular,” Watt stalled. Under pressure he shrank to a Nielsen-rating view of his trade. Ice was a smash pop hit, like Coca-Cola or Adidas, like Martyr & Pesty. Maybe Watt could retire on the residuals from it. What else was there to consider?

“Do you switch the labels?” I said, barely containing my impatience.

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously.”

“Sure, I switch them around. There’s usually about three or four different grades. Chronic and Ice, that’s the same dope. Same as AK-47 too, usually. Ice used to be called Bubonic for a while, then someone told me what that means. Anyway, I’m not even always with the same supplier.” He squinted at the red digital glow of his beeper. “No offense, but you picked out what you want?”

“It doesn’t… mean… anything-?”

Nothing left to be defensive about, Watt could afford to show his own impatience. “Some smoke sweet, some a little skunkier. They all get you high, or you get your money back.”

I’d felt a creeping sympathy for Watt, summoned up into the lap of luxury to find himself good-and-bad-copped by surly customers, but now his rap was only infuriating. “How much Ice have you got?” I asked, in blatant defiance of his confession that the brand meant nothing. I couldn’t refuse that knowledge, but I could try to keep it from Perkus, if I ever had that chance.

Watt found four of the Lucite boxes labeled ICE. I had Richard empty his wallet to help me afford them, then we discharged Watt back into the first morning of the new year. Richard and I smoked some-there wasn’t anything else to do-and in the fading hour as we sat together I felt that though we didn’t speak of it directly, he’d both forgiven me the clumsy zeal of my investigation and made it clear the lengths he could (and, mostly, couldn’t) go in assisting me. He cared about Perkus, had for years before I was on the job. Georgina was pregnant. The two facts seemed balanced one against the other. If there was yet something else lingering unsaid, I chalked it up to the feeling Richard Abneg was always wanting to impart, that he had responsibilities I couldn’t imagine.

So Perkus was gone. It was all I thought about that January, except when I thought about something else, or nothing at all, watching my birds circle, munching eggs alone at Gracie Mews, trudging through refrozen slush to catch afternoon matinees on Eighty-sixth Street, all the prestige pictures that clung to one screen on the East Side and one on the West, waiting for Oscars to give them immortality or at least get them into the black. Days spent waiting for Oona or for not-Oona, it was always a toss-up. It occurred to me that I worried about Perkus because the case of his vanishing was simple, as opposed to the two women I should be troubled over, one present in absence, the other the reverse, or something like that.

Perkus was gone, Perkus was lost, and I spent weeks wandering in circles, but before that, for one instant, I’d actually been thrilled inside my fear, even proud. It was the first afternoon following the party, when, thinking I’d visit and at the very least hear some wild tale of his ejection from the mayor’s residence, I found myself approaching the barricade at Eighty-fourth Street to find policemen everywhere, their lights blipping and radios crackling with the fizz of a fresh emergency. My initial thought was that it had something to do with the blizzard, and in a way it did. The streets everywhere were stopped in white, every hard edge rounded or heaped into softness, lanes empty apart from sanitation plows scudding their blades, groping for the buried asphalt. The sky, its white and gray pressed claustrophobically near the day before, now gaped infinite blue, as though awestruck at what it had belched out onto the city.

When I got to the limit and saw the senior detectives, weathering the cold in their knit caps, filtering in and out of Perkus’s very entranceway, there came one thrilling moment when I was sure he’d done it. The cocky fool stole the mayor’s chaldron! And oh, what confirmation of the treasure’s value, that fuzz swarmed in all directions, even helicoptering overhead, and had had to set up a cordon! The story I told myself in those brief seconds of misunderstanding veered from disbelief to giddy terror: Had he outsmarted them, or was he caught? Would I be implicated? You can think a lot in a microsecond, a fact I never seem to notice except when I’m all wrong.

“Who are they looking for?” I asked, cagily, I thought, of the nearest cop at the barricade where I stood, in a tramped-down section of snow. Very little of Perkus’s block had been shoveled, but there were several places where it appeared a flare had burned down through the drifts during the night. God, they’d really been on him almost instantly, I thought. I hoped he’d never returned here with the chaldron at all, but was sealed with the treasure in fugitive ecstasy, in some unguessable neutral site.

“Step back from the line, sir, thank you.”

“Did they already apprehend him?” The cop I addressed had a face like a bowl of pudding someone had thrown his features at, and they’d barely stuck. The features claimed experience, attitude, cynicism, but the medium in which they’d embedded was impossibly raw and blank.

“Uh, I’m not at liberty to discuss cases with you, sir. Are you a resident of one of the buildings here? If not, I’ll have to ask you to go on about your business.”

“I’m a regular visitor to one of the buildings, that one. I’d like to go say hello to my friend, if you don’t mind.”

“Your friend’s not in that building, sir. This whole area is unsafe to occupy. Our orders are to clear this area.”

Perkus’s dwelling, holy diorama of possibility and encounter, had been bureaucratically shrunken to a mere area. The police presence had nothing to do with Perkus or where we’d been the night before, that was just my lowly brain connecting the nearest available dots. When I sorted out my confusion, I learned it was the weight of the snowfall and the erosion of street salt on the century-old foundations accessible within the Jackson Hole crater that brought about the wider damage which made Perkus’s building, and the others, unsafe. The word infrastructure came to mind. This city was always on the brink, hardly needing an excavating tiger’s help to fail.

So Perkus was gone. The Ice I’d bought with Richard’s money, on New Year’s Eve, I sunk deep into my freezer, where I thought it belonged, though that January I could have kept it as consistently frozen on my windowsill. But if that cache of Lucite boxes could be a kind of homing device, it was Perkus I meant to call home, not pigeons.