Darker Than Night

22

The woman in the mirror hadn’t been rich before, or what she’d describe as poor, and hadn’t been married before. This was quite a change. The woman was smiling.

The mirror, bolted to the wall near the door to the hall, was a leftover from the previous tenant. Reflected in it was Mary Navarre, a woman in her twenties, with her mother’s ginger hair and her father’s Spanish eyes, and what he used to call her noble nose. She was of average height and slender, dressed in a light tan Gucci knockoff she’d bought before the inheritance.

Mary turned away from the mirror and looked around the spacious apartment on West End Avenue. She began mentally placing her furniture, which was still in a rental storage building in New Jersey. She was grateful again for the inheritance, but she would have preferred to wait a few years.

She missed her mother, who’d drowned while swimming off the coast of Florida five years ago. And she missed her father, who’d died of emphysema six months ago, soon after her marriage to Donald Baines. She and Donald hadn’t thought they could make it on one salary, even though he’d received a raise along with his transfer to the New York office, so Mary assumed she’d have to find some kind of work in or around Manhattan.

However, they’d been shocked when they learned after her father’s death that Mary, his only living child, would receive almost a $1 million inheritance.

Mary’s father, Hector, had arrived in the United States in 1980, one of the Marielitos that Castro had allowed to leave in order to empty Cuba’s prisons and mental institutions. Hector Navarre had been imprisoned for killing a man in a machete duel over a woman. The man happened to be a deputy commissioner of the state. It had happened when Hector was still a teenager, but he’d been in prison for almost twenty years.

When he suddenly found himself free in Southeast Florida, he’d made the most of his situation. He saved his money and within a year had opened a dry-cleaning establishment with a partner who’d supplied most of the cash. Hector’s end of the deal was sweat equity. Within another three years, they’d opened three more dry cleaners in Miami. Hector secured financing, bought out his partner, and further expanded the business, establishing cleaners in Fort Lauderdale and on the other side of the state in Tampa. When he died, he still had much of the money obtained from selling to a franchise operator five years ago, almost immediately after his wife’s death.

It truly is a great country, Mary thought, and not for the first time. She didn’t plan to waste this opportunity provided by her father’s money. The wealth carried with it an obligation. She would delay having a child and attend New York University in the spring. Eventually she’d obtain a degree, the first in her family. Perhaps she’d go into the dry-cleaning business. Donald had no problem with any of her plans. He wanted her to succeed.

He wasn’t flawless as a husband, but he did wish her the best.

Luck in love and money, having the right parents, the right husband, being in the right place at the right time. It was what life was about, and whatever happened, you had to make the most of it, because it could also swing the other way.

The intercom rasped, startling her. Mary crossed the room to it and pressed the button.

The decorator was downstairs, precisely on time for their appointment. She buzzed him up.

They would go over preliminaries and make plans for the apartment. Mary would listen carefully to his advice, then deliberate and tell him what she preferred.

For the first time in her life, she knew exactly what she wanted.

The Night Prowler strolled along Broadway at ten that evening and ignored everyone going in the opposite direction. He didn’t like making eye contact with passersby; he wanted no connection, no relationship to take even tenuous hold. He managed his life and his time and chose his relationships carefully. All kinds of relationships. He kept his colors bright.

He paused and looked across the street to where a glowing red sign sent its brightness shimmering over diners at an outside café, lending a glow to the hair of the women and a satanic hue to their features. The women, caught laughing with heads thrown back, daintily dipping spoons into soup, leaning back in their chairs and smiling, raising skewered meat or salad to red lips, talking intently over coffee or dessert. Even at this distance their jewelry glinted like bright taunts attached to the softness of their flesh. The men seated across from the women leaned toward them, close to them, drawn by the timeless thing that had drawn reptilian ancestry and still lived.

Fools with their fools!

A waiter emerged from the restaurant, and diners at one of the tables stood up to leave. An oblivious bicyclist pedaled by like a haughty trespasser. The tableau was ruined and became part of past and memory.

Almost nothing in the world was perfect. For God’s sake, he, among all, understood that. But once concessions were made, choices settled, plans laid and carried out—there could be perfect moments. Imbalances in the cosmos could be shifted, measurements recalibrated, objects and colors brought into sharp focus. Colors could be felt and heard like music. Like music!

So much better than the gray buzzing, a maelstrom of all colors, a breakdown of order and control.

The universe would come to bear and press down and in, until finally pressure triggered action. Beneath the smooth flesh, bones, bleached white and beautiful, an absence of color.

Then the kaleidoscope would lurch and there would be new patterns and colors and hopes and order and design. There would be internal silence, almost. There would be a new mystery even if the same old need survived.

The need was immortal because love and hate and betrayal never changed. Not of their own accord.

They had to be changed.

In the brightness of an intersection, the Night Prowler glanced down at the name he’d scrawled five times in red ball-point ink on the inside of his wrist, where his blood pulsed and coursed visibly in a blue map of destiny.

Mary Navarre.

“You okay today?” Fedderman asked the next morning when he approached Quinn and Pearl, who were seated on the park bench off Eighty-sixth Street. He was wearing his usual baggy brown suit and had a folded Newsday tucked beneath his right arm.

“Still a little shaky,” Quinn said. “You and Drucker learn anything yesterday?”

“Not really. The usual see no, hear no, tell no. A next-door building in New York can be like another world.” He looked more closely at Quinn. “You sleep in your clothes?”

“Sort of. Those nighttime cold medicines knock you out.”

Fedderman looked at Pearl, who’d said nothing since his arrival. Not like Pearl. He sighed, and Quinn watched his eyes and saw his old partner catalog information in his mind.

Quinn knew it wouldn’t do any good to tell Fedderman he’d spent the night on Pearl’s sofa and nothing happened between them. Feds would believe what he chose, but he’d keep his mouth shut about it.

Fedderman held out the folded newspaper. “You might wanna look at this.”

“We take another flogging in the press?”

“You in particular. There’s an interview in there with Anna Caruso.”

Quinn unfolded the paper and saw the photograph of a beautiful young woman with dark hair and somber brown eyes. Not a child. No one he remembered.

But there was her name beneath the photo, and there was the old accusation in her eyes.

In the interview she recounted her rape by Quinn, then talked about her life now, how she’d put the horrible experience behind her. Or thought she had. Here it was again because Quinn was getting another chance. One he didn’t deserve. No one had served a day in prison for what had happened to her, and that injustice still haunted her. She didn’t like it, but she could live with it, she told the interviewer. Her father died recently, and she was concentrating on coping with that and going ahead with her music. With her life.

She played the viola and that was therapeutic. She wouldn’t be afraid, or think about Quinn. She would be fine, she said. People shouldn’t worry about her. People had better things to do. She had better things to do.

Hate burned between the lines.