Exact Revenge

17

MOVING DAY. I look up at the slate gray sky and blink. Snowflakes spiral down and melt on my cheeks. The sergeant of the Special Housing Unit at Great Meadow steps behind me and whacks his baton across the lower part of my spine. I go down in a heap of rattling chains. The others laugh, glad to finally be rid of me, but they shuffle their feet away from my mouth. I’ve heard the guards say more than once that a human bite is much more unsanitary than even a dog’s.

“So long, asshole,” the sergeant says.

Two guards lift me up by the arms and drag me across the icy pavement into the snowcapped blue van bearing a yellow state seal. My wrists are handcuffed. The lock on the cuffs is covered with a metal black box to prevent me from picking it open. The box has a padlock of its own with a chain that has been wrapped around my waist. My legs are manacled together just above the ankles.

The two guards sit behind me where I can’t see them. A transportation sergeant sits down in the front next to the driver. They can’t chain me to the floor. That would be illegal, and if they roll the van and I die in the burning vehicle, none of them will get their state pensions.

I have been promised a trip straight to the box at wherever it is I’m going, so I don’t plan to cause any trouble. They call me crazy, but I’m not so crazy. Isolation, or Special Housing, does more than keep me from fantasizing about the life I once had. I know from stories what it means to be in a maximum-security prison. In the regular prison population, a man doesn’t stay a man for very long. I’ve been in the system for just over eighteen years and that’s never happened to me.

The snow keeps coming and I doze off. Somewhere in a crazy dream about my dad and Black Turtle and Frank digging up boxes of gold coins in the quarry, I am awakened by the van coming to a stop. I hear the shriek of a huge metal door grinding open, but by the time I come to my senses, we are inside a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Out the other window, a forty-foot concrete wall glows under the halogen lamps mounted on the guard tower. The massive steel door slams shut behind us and the chain-link gates in front of the van creak open to let us out of the holding area.

They shove me outside, into the flood of lights and the cold. A raucous screeching fills the air. Thousands of desperate croaking voices in an ocean of agony. I look up and think for a moment that this is hell. The sky is alive, a pulsating flow of black vermin scurrying across an indigo plain. Crows. Thousands upon thousands of them.

Another cackle attracts my attention. It’s human. A guard in a wool cap with a face of blue razor stubble and an angry yellow smile pokes me in the stomach with his baton.

“Tough guy, huh?” he says.

I let my face go flat and I look into his eyes.

“Ooh, you’re real bad,” he says. “I’m scared.”

Then he cackles again and shoves me toward the entrance to a five-story stone building. Cellblocks with rectangular windows barred by rusty steel.

The stone above and around the entrance is distinct from the building that reaches into the distance on either side. Around the entrance, the rough-cut blocks are tall and narrow with popped-out horizontal stones and narrow portals. This bluntly decorative stonework rises above the roofline of the cellblocks. As I pass under the gothic peak of the door, I am struck by its similarity to the tower of a church.

The guard pushes me into an elevator. Now there are two of them, standing opposite me. Glowering. The bluebearded one slaps his baton against the palm of his hand. Long narrow fingers with pointy nails. The skin pale and the knuckles sprouting dark hair. I know his kind. The kid who got spit on in high school. Now he can push around murderers and thugs, the worst of the worst. Now he’s a badass. That’s what he pretends.

The elevator stops, and I am jabbed in the kidney on my way out. A sergeant looks up from his desk.

“Sit down,” he says, and I sit.

“Welcome to Auburn.”

I gag on my own saliva.

Auburn Prison. Seven miles from the Tudor cottage on Skaneateles Lake. There is a restaurant outside these walls where I used to eat. Balloons, it’s called. Good Italian food in the shadow of the west wall. A point of conversation for diners. Good for a laugh. There is a Dunkin’ Donuts in this town. Veal Francesco at Michael’s Restaurant. Dadabos Pizza. A movie theater. Curley’s, where the guards all drink after work. Places woven into the fabric on the fringes of my old storybook life.

That explains the crows. Hundreds of thousands descend on the tiny city of Auburn each winter. A plague of biblical proportions. Some say the crows are a curse on the forefathers’ greed for choosing to have the state’s first prison in 1812 instead of accepting the offer to become the state’s capital. Some say they are lured by the warmth of a microclimate created by the unique combination of concrete, lights, and the outlet of Owasco Lake.

I suck in air, the precursor to a sob, but I bottle it up. My head begins to throb.

The sergeant looks hard at me.

“Aww,” Bluebeard says, “she’s crying, Sarge. She’s not happy with her new home.”

“You can start over here, White,” the sergeant says, ignoring Bluebeard and the fact that my eyes are now on my shoes. “If you can live by the rules, you’ll be out of SHU in three months. If you fuck up, you’ll stay here. We’ll start you out on the regular food. If you fuck up, you’ll get the loaf. It’s the shittiest-tasting slice of crap ever made, but no one ever died from it. That and water. Fuck up again and, well, sometimes we have trouble with the fuse box for the lights in these cells. You choose…”

A chair scrapes the floor, and the sergeant’s footsteps move toward the door. It closes and I get a whack from Bluebeard across my shoulder blades.

“Up, asshole,” he says.

They put on latex gloves. They strip me down and search my rear. Bluebeard whispers to me, calling me his girl, his razor stubble chafing my ear. My eyes water and I close them tight. This part is worse when you fight it. I know.

They make me shower, then give me a new set of clothes. Forest green.

Bluebeard leads me into the top of D block and the other guard uses his keys to open a box on the wall. Home to five levers. Two of them are covered with a red sleeve that tells the guard they belong to the cells of prisoners without recreation. The other guard pulls down the lever on the end and I hear a cell door begin to hum. I am shoved into a tank, a self-contained unit of five steel cells. My cell door clanks open.

From the darkness beyond the crosshatched steel bars of the cell next to mine appears the pale shape of a face. An old man with tufts of white hair and a hooked nose that he pokes through the bars. Two glowing blue eyes magnified by owlish glasses. Small growths of crud are attached to their whites, encroaching on the irises. He says nothing, but his lower lip disappears behind a crooked row of teeth. It might be a smile. Maybe he’s a bug. A nut. Something about these eyes is very different.

Bluebeard shoves me into my cell. His kick barely grazes my backside, and I don’t bother to even look back at him. I stand over the bowl and relieve myself, then I crawl onto the bunk and curl into a ball, trying hard not to think about how close I am to home.

18

IT WAS A SUNNY SPRING DAY, so bright the towering buildings of Manhattan seemed almost clean. Sunday. The streets free from the weekday clutter. Lexis looked out of the long dark glass of the window and saw empty parking spaces along Park Avenue in front of their building. Home for the past ten years, ever since Frank somehow worked his way into a casino partnership in Atlantic City. Allen was hunched over his Game Boy, his dark hair hanging straight down in front of his face, his thumbs working the controls with fevered excitement. Frank was on his cell phone, going over his last-minute bets for the basketball games that afternoon.

Their limousine cruised down Fifth Avenue and eased to a stop in front of Rockefeller Plaza. The party planner was waiting in a tuxedo with narrow shoulders. Frank referred to him as “the fairy,” but insisted they use him because he had planned the same kind of confirmation party for the governor’s nephew. There were others waiting too. The caterer. The florist. The business manager for the band.

Lexis hustled Allen inside, still bent over his Game Boy, while Frank opened the trunk of their Mercedes limo and began dispersing banded stacks of money. Cash was king. That’s what Frank always said, and when Lexis stepped inside the Rainbow Room on the top floor she couldn’t help feeling that in a way it was. Gold and silver balloons, bundled into columns, rose to the ceiling. The center of every table bloomed with a four-foot-high flower arrangement of white flowers, lilies, roses, orchids, and gardenias. Over the head table loomed a gold football goalpost. At each place was an NFL football personalized for the guests and signed by Joe Namath, who would be joining them at the head table. Cash was king.

Allen looked up from his Game Boy.

“Wow.”

He ran to his own place at the head table and rolled the football between his hands.

“It says, ‘Congratulations to my good friend Allen Francis,’” he said, looking up at her with his hazel brown eyes and blinking.

“That’s exciting,” Lexis said.

“Why did Dad have to tell him Allen Francis?”

“Your father is very proud of you, Allen. This party cost him a lot of money, so please don’t act spoiled.”

“I’m not spoiled,” he said with a frown. “Here. Catch a pass, Mom.”

Allen threw a spiral across the room. Lexis made a breadbasket. The ball hit her in the chest and bounced out to the floor.

“Ha. Never throw a pass to a woman. How about this place?” Frank said in his loud low voice as he stepped into the room, arms spread wide, gut spilling out of his tuxedo jacket. “I had mine in the VFW hall. Throw me that other ball.”

Frank had grown steadily bigger over the past fourteen years so that he now weighed close to three hundred pounds. Lexis was pretty certain that the more of himself there was, the more he liked it. He still started every morning with a ten-minute gaze into the bathroom mirror, stretching back his lips to examine his teeth and toying with the thick curly locks that had recently gone gray at the temples. Allen took another ball from the table and threw a whistling spiral across the room to Frank. The ball smacked loudly into Frank’s hands but he held on.

“See that?”

Lexis dusted off the front of her dress and adjusted her two-karat diamond earrings. Frank tossed the ball back and took a long velvet box out of his coat pocket.

“I got this for you,” he said, handing it to her.

“Thank you,” she said. She had stopped telling him that she didn’t want any more jewelry years ago. It was a diamond necklace highlighted by a five-karat teardrop pendant.

“Thank you, Frank.”

“Hey,” he said, hugging her to him, then letting her go as she pushed away. “I’m not just a great father, you know.”

Lexis forced a smile.

The band began to play and the room soon filled up. Other big men in tuxedos with red ties and cummerbunds. Women with screechy voices, Brooklyn accents, high hair, and high heels. Frank’s business associates. Low-level politicians. Bookies. Judges. Some of Lexis’s friends from the board of the Guggenheim.

Lexis turned from her friend Marge to hear Frank greeting his old friend Bob Rangle. Rangle wore a perfectly tailored black suit with a gray silk tie. His long hands were clutched together and carefully manicured. He’d grown a neat thin mustache, maybe to make up for the gleaming baldness that shone through the long strands of hair swept over the top of his head. His frame was still straight, tall, and angular, and he seemed to have become infected with the same disease that caused his wife to walk with an arch in her back and her chin in the air.

“Sorry Dani couldn’t be here,” Rangle said, referring to his twelve-year-old daughter. “She had a sleepover. It’s hard enough to get Katie to a function on Sunday afternoon, but when I told her the governor was coming…”

Beside him stood Katie Vanderhorn, his tall wife. Old-money New York. Still pretty with her long auburn hair despite the heavy makeup, crow’s feet, and a nose that was so straight surgery wasn’t even a question.

“I just read his book,” she said, “otherwise, I promise you I wouldn’t be that interested.”

“Is that friend of yours from Merrill Lynch, Michael Blum, coming, do you know?” Frank asked.

“He said he’d try, Frank,” Rangle said, looking at his gold Piaget Emperador.

“You’d think having the governor here says something,” Frank said.

“In the world of finance, relationships are important,” Rangle said, squinting his close-set dark eyes at two loud men hugging and slapping each other’s back.

“There’s Joe Namath over there,” Frank said, pointing.

The Rangles’ faces went blank.

“You should try the cold lobster,” Lexis said, motioning toward the ice sculpture of a football player rising up in the middle of the hors d’oeuvre table.

“Thank you, dear,” Katie said, and off they went.

“God, he’s a flaming asshole,” Frank said. “But if I can get that financing…

“Where is he?” he continued, looking at his watch and then the door.

“Isn’t he always late?” Lexis asked.

“The troopers should be here by now, though,” Frank said, looking around. “Some of his people.”

Just then, a tall, professorial-looking man with gray hair and gold-rimmed glasses walked in wearing a blue suit and yellow tie. His name was Cornell Ricks, the deputy director of the Thruway Authority and Frank’s liaison to the governor’s office. Ricks saw Frank and approached him with open arms, giving Frank an awkward hug and a stiff pat on the back.

“Frank, congratulations,” he said. “Lexis, you too. I know you’re both very proud. I’m sorry the governor can’t make it. He sends his deepest regrets, but his wife isn’t feeling well at all.”

Ricks took Frank by the arm, lowered his voice, and said, “He’s very concerned, and he was glad that a family man like you would understand.”

Frank’s mouth was clamped tight and his face began to turn color. Finally, he took a deep breath and let it out through a small space between his lips.

Lexis stepped back and said, “I’ll go tell them we can sit down.”

She turned quickly away so she didn’t have to hear. The waiters had already filled the glasses at each table with red wine. Lexis stopped at a place by the wall and looked around before she picked up a glass and emptied it.

It warmed her empty stomach and she felt it quickly run up her center and calm her brain. She felt better already, and then she saw her boy across the room. The day she had him it looked like neither of them would make it, but now the photographer was lining him up next to Joe Namath, the two of them with their hands on the same football. Allen’s face was radiant. She sighed and emptied another wineglass. Her life wasn’t so bad.

Really, it wasn’t.

19

WHEN I WAKE, a thin light is seeping in from the dirty window across from my cell. A new start. As soon as I don’t cooperate, they’ll cover the front of my cell with a steel partition and I’ll live again in the darkness. I listen to the sound of my own breathing. In a way, the darkness is better. Then I can’t see how small my world really is. I will wait until tonight, though, before I do anything bad. Bluebeard is on the three to eleven shift and I will save my spit, a thick wad of flaxen goo, for his face especially.

Food comes. Soggy carrots with most of the color boiled out of them. A stiff slice of bread. A cup of powdered milk and an oblong hunk of gray meat-origin unknown. I eat, then push the tray out into the walkway. My calluses don’t fit the grooves above this door. I’ll need new ones, and chin-ups leave my hands dripping with blood. Katas are next. Now I’m breathing hard, sweat mingling with the blood. Tiny scarlet dots spatter the powder blue section of the bars. My own decor.

I do sit-ups and math, talking quietly out loud to hear the sound of a human voice. Numbers turn to history lessons. I recount as much as I can about Auburn. The Seward House, home to the U.S. secretary of state who purchased Alaska. States and capitals. I know a song and I sing it low. Time passes.

“Rec time,” says a guard I can’t see.

My cell door rattles and hums open.

“Step out.”

I do, along with the old man and a brown-skinned young man with a long black ponytail and a thin mustache. We are led up a set of stairs to the roof. A square of concrete caged in by a ten-foot-high honeycomb of rusted metal bars. Recreation. The guard stands outside and locks us in.

The old man gives me a curious look with those magnified orbs, then he begins to shuffle around the perimeter. He is a small man and stooped, and his gnarled hands, like the broad bald spot on his head, are covered with the spots of age. The young punk stuffs his hands into his pants pockets and begins to kick at the walls of the cage. I can only see up. The walls of the roof block any view of the surrounding city.

The bleached sky is dry and crisp. The sun only a glow behind the flat cover of clouds. The sounds of license plates being stamped and wood cabinets being milled float up from unseen shops below. The air is free from the typical stink of human smells, corroded metal, dust, and paint. I breathe deep, then start to walk too, keeping on opposite sides from the old man, following his tracks in the dusting of snow, giving wide berth to the punk.

I am looking up at the place where a mourning dove flapped across the sky when I hear a cry.

The punk has the old man down and he is swinging a blade. I don’t think. I react. My snap kick goes up between the punk’s legs. He shrieks and groans, staggers and turns. The blade slashes for my face. I leap back, seeing two razors melted into the end of a toothbrush. He slashes again. I measure the arc of the pendulum. The next time, I block his wrist, kick him again between the legs, and greet his dropping face with the full force of my elbow. His nose pops like a lightbulb. I pivot, break his arm, and crush the blade hand under my heel; I stomp and grind. Stomp and grind until his screams hurt my ears.

The guard is talking into his radio, but he remains outside the cage. His eyes are calm. The old man is rising, fumbling with the plastic frames of his glasses. I help him. He coughs, but there appears to be no blood. He shuffles for the door, leaning against me.

“Let us out, Clarence,” the old man says.

Clarence looks back at us. He has a shock of salt-and-pepper hair. A neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. His eyes are permanently sad and he appears to think for a moment, then nods without a word and rattles his keys. Another guard arrives. He watches the punk while Clarence leads us back to our tank. The doors hum shut and it is quiet. I hear Clarence answering questions amid the rattle of keys. There is some shouting in the stairwell. Then the voices all fade away.

“Thank you,” says the old man. His voice is small.

I drop down and begin a set of push-ups.

“I heard them say you’ve been in the box for almost twenty years,” the old man says. His voice is a little louder now.

“Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!” screams one of the prisoners who has been denied the enjoyment of recreation, but the old man keeps on as if it were the wind.

“You don’t have to do that to be safe,” the old man says. “What you just did for me? You’ve got protection now.”

I snort at this news. A fragile old man, on his back, about to be sliced open unless I’m there. That’s my protection.

“You don’t know anything,” he says.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say.

“Everything matters,” he says.

“Not if you’re me,” I say, speaking into the empty space as if I’m talking to God. “This is my life. This is my world. I don’t want to be out there with those animals.”

“Outside the wall?”

“The wall?” I say. A short laugh escapes me. “No, I mean out there. With them. I’m not one of them.”

“That’s where freedom is,” he says.

“Freedom to be someone’s punk,” I say. “Whose punk are you, old-timer?”

The old man clears his throat. His voice takes on a different cast. It has an edge.

“I survived in here. There are three rules in here if you want to survive,” he says. “First rule: Never show fear. Second rule: Never be a rat.

“I came here in 1967,” he says. “I was thirty-four years old. The biggest buck in A block took my lunch from me on the first day. He said that night, I was going to give him more than that. At two-thirty, I walked out onto the weight court and smashed his skull in with a fifty-pound dumbbell.

“Exact revenge. That’s the third rule. The most important. If you don’t do it, you’ll be a professional victim. You exact it and it’s exact. Not just a reaction, but planned out. Precise. It needs to send a message.

“If someone takes your cigarettes, you smash their hand into jelly in a doorjamb. They push you, you break their knees. Touch your food, you gouge out their eyes. Someone tries to make you his punk? You kill him. Believe me, it’s self-defense. Whatever it is they did to you? You exact a revenge that’s ten times worse, a hundred times if you can. That, they respect.”

It’s silent between us for a while. I hear my stomach rumble.

“What did they do to you when you hit that guy?” I ask.

“I got out of the box in 1970, just before the riot. I didn’t have to hurt anyone else until 1979. Killed him with antifreeze.

“That punk today? Dumbass Colombians. I poisoned one of them two years ago. That’s why I’m here. The other ones sent that kid in here to get me before I get out of SHU. Scared. They’ll keep low now, and no one’s going to touch you either. That’s the game. You don’t have to be a mole. You can bunk with me.”

I laugh again.

“What are you?” he says. “Some homophobic?”

“I’m fine right here,” I say.

“What about books?”

“What about them?” I ask.

“You can’t read in the hole.”

“I got my own dreams,” I say.

“Books are more than just dreams,” he says. “Books are like a mirror… for your soul. You can see yourself. Keep yourself neat and clean. You need that for when you get out. To fit in.”

“There’s no sense in getting out,” I say.

“No sense?” he says, dropping his voice into an urgent whisper that only I can hear. “What are you, certifiable?”

“In, out,” I say. “Jail is jail. I like it okay in my own space. I don’t care what my soul looks like.”

“I’m not talking about jail, kid,” he says. “I’m talking about out. Outside the wall. Freedom.”

“Don’t even say that,” I say, my heart thumping before I know it. I am whispering too. “I can scream louder than that guy next to you.”

“Why not say it if it’s true?”

“It’s not true,” I say. “There’s no way out.”

“Kid,” he says, “you have no idea…”

I wrap my fingers around the bars. My lips are pressed to the steel and I taste its tang through the chips in the paint.

“You’ve been here for more than forty years,” I say in a hiss. “Don’t play with me, you crazy old coot.”

It’s quiet for a time. My ears start ringing and I wonder if I have imagined it all.

“I’m not playing,” the old man says in a whisper that only I can hear.

“Who are you?”

“Lester Cole,” he says, still low. “Thief and part-time murderer.”

“How?” I ask. “How can you do it?”

“They like me here,” he says. “They trust me. I fix everything. They get a jammed-up pipe and they need a man to go down into the catwalk and wade through the shit, Lester will do it. Anytime. Day or night. Just ask Lester.

“According to the warden, the job of the prisoners is to serve their time and maintain these buildings. I’m good at it. Plumbing. Electric. Air ducts. So I have… opportunities.”

“How?”

“Patience,” he says. “We have time.”

“Forty more years?”

“A lot sooner than that, kid,” he says. “Sooner than you think.”

20

CENTRE STREET. North of Wall Street. South of Chinatown. A powerful street, but relatively unknown outside the legal profession in New York City. Foley Square, and in the middle of it all, a neoclassical monster. Broad stone steps leading to massive fluted columns and justice. Beyond the façade, nearly two dozen men and women. Federal court judges for the Southern District of the Second Circuit. Appointed for life. The best and brightest, insulated from the political system to ensure their unbiased interpretations.

Villay didn’t have the nicest chambers, but he didn’t have the worst either. The crown molding needed refinishing, but the ceilings were twelve feet high and he had a high-backed leather chair. His clerk was Harvard. Third in his class. Thin, bookish, and blond like the judge himself had once been. Judge Villay ran the tip of a pocketknife under his thumbnail as he listened to the upcoming docket of cases. His broad forehead furrowed.

“What was that?” he said, putting his little feet down on the floor and looking up at his clerk over the silver reading glasses perched on his elfin nose.

“An appeal,” he said. “Raymond White v. the State of New York?”

“On what grounds?”

“Racial discrimination. Native American. Not a representative jury.”

“Ha!” Villay said, smiling and wagging his head. “I’ll be damned. Can’t take it. Total bullshit, though. Who’s the attorney? Not Dan Parsons still?”

The clerk looked down and nodded. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“It was my case,” Villay said, straightening his back and widening his eyes so that the clerk would stare into their torn pupils. “Murder one. Life without parole. Guy was about to get the Republican Party nomination for an empty congressional seat. Would have won. Big deal back then, part Native American and all that. But discrimination? Parsons was his partner. Must have run out of good ideas. What a fucking joke. Send it to Kim Mezzalingua. She’ll get a kick out of it and send Parsons packing as fast as you can say ‘summary judgment.’

“What else?” Villay said, returning to his nails.

The clerk cleared his throat and continued to read the upcoming docket until he reached the end.

“Make sure I’ve got time for that drug trafficking trial,” Villay said, opening the cabinet for his coat with one hand and pointing at his clerk with the other. “Schedule a good ten days. I don’t want it rushed. I’m sick of those bastards poisoning our kids.”

He picked up his briefcase just as his secretary stuck her head inside the door.

“It’s Ivan Lindgren,” she said in an urgent whisper.

“Shit,” Villay said. “Tell him I’m gone. Pain in the ass.”

He turned and scuttled out the door that led to the back corridor. The way was longer, but worth it if he didn’t have to see Lindgren. Outside, there was a light gray rain in the air, and Villay hurried to the curb with his briefcase over his head. He slid into the back of his Town Car, lifted the Post from the seat, and told his driver, Jack, to go.

Jack started, then lurched to a stop. Villay crackled the paper down.

“What the hell?”

Through the swish of the wipers he saw Lindgren, his thick brown mustache dripping, his lined forehead beaded with rain, standing tall directly in front of the car. Villay cursed under his breath.

“Go, Jack. He’ll move.”

The driver’s shoulders were hunched over and he clutched the wheel, trembling.

“I… can’t.”

Villay slapped down his paper, huffed, and rolled down the window several inches.

“Get out of the way, you lunatic!” he shouted.

“You talk to me, damn it!” Lindgren shouted back.

Villay looked up and down the sidewalk. Despite the rain, people were stopping to stare.

“What?” he said through his teeth.

Lindgren circled the car, keeping his hands on its shiny waxed surface until his face was in the open space of the window and his fingers were clutching its edge.

“Five years,” Lindgren said in a hiss. “They built that case for five years and you ruled that wiretap inadmissible?”

Villay stabbed his finger at Lindgren and said, “You be careful. You don’t talk to a judge that way. I don’t care who your father is. I’m a federal judge. You’re a government attorney. I’ll blackball you twenty ways to Sunday.”

“I’ll have you…”

“What?” Villay said, moving his face closer to Lindgren, smiling.

Lindgren’s face started to crumple at the edges.

“They killed three people,” he said, his voice broken and his fingertips white. “They admitted it.”

“Thugs. Killers themselves. In case you weren’t aware,” Villay said, “we have a constitution in this country. We have laws. I suggest you go read them.”

“You could have ruled either way,” Lindgren said, his hands dropping to his sides.

“I’m a judge,” Villay said. “I answer to a higher power than my willie. Maybe one day, if you grow up, you will too. Jack. Go.”

Jack screeched the tires as he pulled away from the curb, then he jammed on the brakes before cruising away.

“Jesus,” Villay said, shaking his head. “Go uptown, Jack. Gino’s. And try not to kill anyone.”

Gino’s was already busy, and Villay pushed through the tiny, crowded bar area to the red half-door at the coat check. He turned, and the maître d’ smiled and patted the judge on the shoulders before showing him the way to his table. There were no booths or private areas. Gino’s was wide open. Well lit, with people crammed into small tables sitting back to back. The red wallpaper was adorned with zebras on carousel poles.

Villay sat down across from a stocky gray-haired man with pale green eyes and a diamond pinky ring and said, “Could you find a place that’s a little more obvious next time? Jesus.”

“I’m a lawyer. You’re a judge,” the man said in a heavy New Jersey accent. He wore a dark brown suit and a yellow tie. “What’s the fucking difference? We got nothing to hide. Besides, this is one of the few places where you can sling around a briefcase full of cash without anyone taking notice. Place is a fucking gold mine, and cash only. You believe that?”

The waiter appeared in his gray waistcoat and black tie. He set down some breadsticks and gave them a bow.

“Pellegrino with lime,” Villay said.

“You ain’t going to eat?” the lawyer said, raising his thick gray eyebrows. “I’m getting a sautéed kidney.”

“Just Pellegrino,” Villay said to the waiter, before leaning over the table. “Stop playing games. Ivan Lindgren practically attacked me just now. Let’s get this over with.”

The bullnecked lawyer leaned back with a grin and took something from the outside pocket of his suit coat.

“Nervous. Nervous,” he said. “But not too nervous to take a little something for the missus.”

On the table he set a six-karat pink diamond engagement ring. Villay covered it quickly with his hand and looked around before slipping it into the pocket of his charcoal gray pants.

The lawyer chuckled. “No, not too nervous for that. A million dollars. That’s what it’s worth. A rare stone for a rare stone.”

Villay narrowed his eyes and said, “What about the cash?”

The lawyer knit his brow and said, “I’m a man of honor. If I say five hundred thousand in cash and the ring, I mean it. I’m just telling you you’re getting prime rib for the price of hamburger.”

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Maybe a little discount will be in order next time, eh?”

The waiter brought the lawyer a glass of red wine, then set Villay’s glass with ice and lime down and filled it from a green glass bottle.

When he’d gone, Villay took a sip, looked at his watch, and said, “Can I go?”

The lawyer swallowed a mouthful of wine, shrugged, and said, “Suit yourself.”

“I mean, is it there?” Villay asked, scowling.

The lawyer reached into his coat pocket again and handed him a blue plastic chip with a white number on it.

“There,” he said.

Villay took another sip and stood to go.

“You should eat,” the lawyer said. “Life is a lot better when you’ve got a full stomach and a nice glass of wine. Hey, aren’t you gonna even say thanks?”

“Aren’t you?” Villay said, turning.

“Yeah,” the lawyer said, leaning back in his chair. “You did good. Thanks.”

Villay gave him a two-finger salute. At the coat check, he took back his raincoat as well as the lawyer’s bulging brown leather briefcase without leaving a tip for the girl. He pushed out through the tight crowd and into the rain with the briefcase under his coat. The smoky clouds were teeming now, blurring the river of taillights and yellow cabs. He looked left and right, felt a small stab of panic at the sight of a police car with its lights flashing, but quickly chastised himself when he saw a cop writing out a ticket.

Still, he clutched the briefcase tight and kept his eyes riveted on the rearview mirror the entire way home to make sure Jack wasn’t looking at him. By the time the black car rolled through the gates, he’d chewed a crater on the inside of his lower lip that was big enough to bleed.

21

I THOUGHT THAT EVEN the remotest sparks of hope were buried and long cold in the ash heap under my ribs. But at the sound of Lester Cole’s words, a phoenix springs up.

I am afraid, but unable to stop it. I do not want to die all over again. I have been comfortably numb, slowly rotting away at my own pace. My life is empty, but the only sharp pain I feel is physical and it pales next to the anguish of being destroyed.

Lester tells me he doesn’t want to talk anymore now. He just wants me to know that things are different.

The loaf is the shittiest-tasting slice of crap ever made, but time goes by and I behave. Lester is a genius. He teaches me things I never knew. The way particles are assembled on a picture tube. Why airplanes fly and compressed Freon cools air. How J. J. Thomson used cathode rays to discover electrons. The weather on the day in AD 445 when Attila the Hun murdered his brother Bleda to secure the throne and how much the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosis II paid him to maintain peace. The affair between Gauguin and van Gogh that was the real cause of the great artist’s self-mutilation.

He pours it out and I suck it up. We whisper to keep the maniacs at bay. During rec, he diagrams things for me in the snow and then the dust. The battle plans of Alexander the Great. The layout for a particle accelerator. Michelangelo’s design for the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral.

Bluebeard is giddy with the power he appears to have over me. He gloats at my docile behavior, taking credit for kicking my ass into line. I am given an additional three months in the box for crushing the Colombian’s hand and breaking his nose, but my release now nearly coincides with Lester’s. We put in a request to be bunked together, and Lester works it out for us to get an end cell on the ground floor, A block First Company.

There are five blocks in Auburn, A through E. Each block has five floors of cells, forty-five in a row, two rows, front and back. It used to be one man to a cell, but to save money, the governor now allows double bunks on the end cell of each company by request.

Clarence takes me down the elevator from Special Housing and across the yard. I blink at the bright sunlight and shuffle my feet along the faded blacktop, enjoying the scuffing sound of long even strides. The yard is a rectangle of pavement surrounded by the cellblocks. Lester has familiarized me with everything during our hour-long rec sessions on the roof by drawing in the grit. The administration building rises above C block to the east. At the west end is the mess hall and auditorium. Corroding basketball hoops are staggered around the inside of the yard in no apparent order.

It’s after breakfast, so only a few inmates are scattered in small groups, sitting at metal picnic tables in the shadow of A and B blocks. The men are mostly black. They wear the faded forest green outfits and stare sullenly at me. My heart begins to pound. There are two guard posts on the roofs and what they call a sergeant’s box, a trailer without wheels in the yard, butted up to the wall of D block. All the guns are on the roof and in the towers and I can feel them.

I am light-headed with the sensation of freedom, but scared by the thought that I am sticking my neck out for some wild-ass notion of an old man who might be crazy, even if he is brilliant. I keep my eyes straight ahead as I am escorted up the steps and into A block. I think of the first rule and force a sneer onto my face. I think I hear a low whistle, but I pretend not to. I think of the third rule. Exact revenge. Does that whistle mean I have to punch that man’s teeth out?

Clarence passes me off to another guard and says he’ll see me around. The guard rattles his keys and opens the box of levers.

“Clear on one,” he says, and pulls down on one of the brass levers.

I hear the cell door begin to hum. The guard rattles his keys again and opens the barred door leading into First Company. I step inside. All along the wall, inmates push their faces against the bars to see who the fresh meat is. They look like zoo animals. Some hoot and catcall. Some laugh and holler. Lester is standing in the gloom of the double bunk, his thin white tufts of hair blazing. Those enormous eyes shine and his smile exposes how badly he needed dental work as a kid. I step inside and the door begins to hum shut. It clanks in place, and I feel relief as I take Lester’s gnarled hand.

“Welcome,” he says, pumping my handshake.

I see now that the walls and ceiling are plastered with museum posters. Reprints of famous works of art from Europe and the United States.

“What’s all this?” I ask.

Lester’s blue eyes glow and crinkle at their corners. I don’t even see the yellow scum of the cataracts any longer.

“A surprise, kid,” he says. “I never told you what kind of a thief I was.”

I know he killed a man during a job. That’s all he’s ever said about why he’s here.

“You stole this kind of stuff?” I ask.

“Picasso, Miró, Rubens, Dalí, Monet, Cassatt,” he says. He is beaming now and has straightened his crooked little form up to its full height. “Even a small van Gogh. Jewels too.”

I whistle to make him feel good and lean toward the wall to study the brilliant red flower on a Rembrandt, but I can’t say that it matters all that much to me.

“I guess a lot of people would kill for this stuff,” I say.

“What the hell makes you say that?” he says, and the tone of his voice makes me turn. I see that his face has clouded over.

“Well…”

“I killed a guard because he was going to kill me,” Lester says, holding up a single bent finger in the air. “It’s wrong to kill, except in self-defense. There is no other justification. None.”

“No, I guess not,” I say and his eyebrows ease up.

“I was there for Jan van Eyck’s panels of The Crucifixion and The Last Judgment,” he says. “I had it. I was in and on my way out. The guy wasn’t even on duty. Do you want to know what he died for?

“A pen,” he says. “His wife gave him a silver pen for their anniversary. He came back for it and saw me going up a rope. He shot three times and missed. I didn’t…”

“The well-placed little things are the ones that can move mountains,” I say. “I guess that goes the same for the misplaced little things too. You want me on the top bunk?”

Lester rubs the white stubble on his chin and looks up at me.

“Is that Aristotle?” he asks.

“My dad.”

“The top is fine,” he says.

I hop up and try it out. The ceiling is twenty inches from my face. I am looking at a print of The Slave Ship by Turner from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

“God, Lester. How about something a little more cheerful?” I say. “To look at, I mean.”

“Of course,” he says. “How about an earlier period?”

“Like from the Renaissance or something?” I ask.

“Too far. I was thinking rococo,” Lester says, musing as he holds up the soft colorful print and examines it at arm’s length. A broad beam of sunlight filters down through the trees, illuminating an elegantly dressed young woman on a swing. “Fragonard’s The Swing.”

“It’s better,” I tell him. The colors are pleasing and everyone in the picture seems to be happy. Then I lower my voice. “But I shouldn’t bother you about it. We’re not going to be here very long anyway, eh?”

Lester drops his voice too and says, “We don’t need Einstein to tell us about the relativity of time.”

“Meaning,” I say, “a week? A month? A year?”

The bunk below me creaks and Lester’s face appears beside my ear. His bug eyes are wide. I smell those soft carrots from breakfast.

“Every tool in this prison sits on a shadow board,” he says. “Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“A board with the shape of that tool painted in black,” he says. “If a tool is missing, any tool at all, the entire prison is locked down. Everyone is searched. Everything is searched. Heads roll…

“I was in the shop in 1970 when the riot broke out,” he says. “I got a hacksaw blade, a chisel, and a claw hammer. More valuable than a Rembrandt. More valuable than the crown jewels. I will have one chance.

“I know you’re different, kid. You’re not one of these other animals. You saved my life for no reason, and I could use your strength. So, I’ll take you with me if I can, but I will not be rushed.”

Lester’s finger stabs up at the ceiling before he drops down out of sight. His bunk creaks, then he lies still. After a time, he begins to snore quietly.

I close my eyes. He’s brilliant, but he’s mad. A lonely old man who wants someone to care. I cannot stay here. They will get me before the day is out. I’ll have to punch the guard when they let us out for lunch. My eyes pinch tight and I try to slow my breathing.

22

LESTER MOANS and the bunk begins to creak. The girl in the picture above me is laughing. Her dress balloons out, showing her skirts. The bunk complains and Lester’s face is back by my ear.

“You need to sleep as much as you can during the day,” he says in a whisper. “We work at night.”

“What do we do?”

Lester looks around. He takes off his glasses. His naked eyes widen and blink. His fingers twist the plastic stem of the glasses. I roll on my side to get a better look.

“Drill bit,” he whispers. “With you, it’ll be twice as fast. I don’t know how long. Twelve months, maybe. Look, kid.”

Lester disappears and I slide off the bunk. He checks the bars, listening, then comes back and bends over the toilet. I lean close.

“Each cell is a steel box. Boilerplate steel,” he says, whispering. “But the prison was rebuilt in 1930 after the ’29 riot, so it’s old. Even the molecular order of steel is in the constant state of decomposition, returning to chaos.”

When he sees me looking at him funny, he says, “All matter seeks chaos. When it’s hot in the summer the sewage line from the toilet sweats like a bastard. In seventy-five years, even seamless half-inch-thick steel gets weak.”

He looks over his shoulder, then smudges his thumb against the metal wall close to the toilet. I detect a small hole, filled with a black substance.

“I fill the holes with shoe polish,” he says, “Every night. We work at night. After lights-out, they do a walkaround every hour to check. On the end cell, you hear the keys to the box before the guard opens the door to get in. You have plenty of time to get to your bunk.”

Lester looks wise again. My fingers shake as I reach out to touch the hole. I’m a basket case. Up. Down. Up. Down.

“What’s behind there?” I ask.

“Catwalk,” he says. “Access to all the pipes and wires and ductwork. Three times since ’77 I’ve broken drill bits off when I’m working in there and let them drop down. This one took a year to find. Down below is the basement, a holding tank of shit and piss and ten inches of scum. They left me in there to unclog a sewer pipe in ’99 and I hopped down into it and got this bit.

“Used to be you put everything up your ass, but they got smart back in ’98. Now they got the Boss Chair. It’s a metal detector you sit on, but my glasses work like a dream. It’s pretty goddamn nice, actually, not having to dig it out every night.”

I look at him to see if he’s playing with me, but his eyes are fixed on the wet steel. He stands up, fits the bit back into his thick plastic glasses, and puts them on. He adjusts the glasses on his hooked nose and, as if on cue, they announce it’s time for lunch.

Lester smiles at me and says, “Let’s eat.”

I don’t like the way we move like cattle out of the block and down through the yard toward the dining hall. I’m jumpy and there’s some twittering, but I don’t know where it’s coming from and no one touches me. I don’t look anyone in the eye. I don’t want to know them. I don’t even want to see them.

I take the boiled meat and the limp vegetables they serve me on a tray and follow Lester to a round seat that juts out from under the table on a metal arm. The tabletop is stainless steel like the tray. Two white men sit across from me. One is doughy with a bald head and a full brown beard.

“This is Carl,” Lester says, nodding toward the dough man. “Carl, Raymond. And that’s Justin.”

Justin is younger than I am-mid-thirties-with dirty blond hair, a ponytail, and a long muscular build. His arms are covered with tattoos. A green-and-orange snake’s head pokes out from beneath his collar with its tongue licking at his Adam’s apple. Part of a claw extends up toward his ear.

“Justin doesn’t talk,” Lester says. “But he’s okay.”

Carl belches and grins like an infant.

“They’re still finding bodies from Carl,” Lester says as if we were talking Easter eggs. “But he wouldn’t hurt a soul in here. He likes it here, don’t you, Carl?”

“Food’s not bad,” Carl says.

“He can’t hurt anyone,” Lester says. “And he doesn’t want to. Makes him feel safe to be locked up, I guess. He’s not the only one.”

After lunch, we go out on the south yard where the weights are. Half a football field of rusty machines and bars with the steel plates welded on so no one can use the bars as weapons. The weights are arranged in a patchwork of square spaces, and each area is painted a different drab color. Lester explains that the faded red weights belong to the Bloods. The yellow ones are for the Latin Kings, the blue for the Sunni Muslims.

“If you want to use them, kid,” he says, “the only ones who might let you are the Dirty White Boys.”

“Which ones are those?”

“The green ones,” he says, pointing. “I could probably get you in without too much trouble.”

I see a crowd of whites, mostly younger men with tattoos. Half of them have long hair. They go to work on the weights like miners. Somber and methodical. Justin is one of them.

“Think I’ll pass.”

Instead, we walk up and down the gritty pavement just outside the chain-link boundary of the weight yard. I look around me at the different men. No one looks back. I’m beginning to feel that Lester and I really are safe.

Lester says hello to a guard that I haven’t seen before. The guard smiles and says hi back. You can tell the man likes Lester.

“What about when you get to the catwalk?” I ask when we’re out of earshot. “I heard Clarence talking to another guard about a break in Elmira last month. They were saying that no one ever got out of here since it was rebuilt in ’30.”

“No one ever did,” he says, looking up at the clear blue sky, shading his eyes from the summer sun. “Once you get out of the steel cell, the block is just a solid box of concrete. If you could get out of that, you got the wall. It’s four feet thick and buried forty feet into the ground.”

“So, we’re screwed,” I say.

He stops and looks at me. His eyes glimmer and he smiles.

“It’s so simple, no one ever thought of it,” he says. “Or if they did, they didn’t have the patience to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Escape backwards,” he says, and begins to walk. “They get out of the cell, then they have to figure out how to break the block. Then the wall. The pumpkinheads in this place who do make it out of the cell just wander around down in the tunnels for a few days before they start screaming for someone to help them.

“I did it backwards,” he says. “It took almost forty years, yeah, but that’s what it takes, kid. When we break this cell, I’ve got the block and the wall already beat.”

“How?”

It’s time to go in and we do, following the crowd, milling into the back entrance of A block. I’m trying not to step on anyone’s toes when I realize that Lester’s white tufts are three deep in front of me. I am in a crowd of blacks and being squeezed. None of them look at me. One has thick glasses. I see a hairnet and bare shoulders like cannonballs. I see a cheek with two long scars and dreadlocks. I smell boiled beef and pungent body odor.

I try to push forward, but can’t and my heart races. Sweat beads on my brow and my palms are wet. Two big hands grab my ass. Moist lips brush my ear.

“Gonna make you my bitch,” he says. “Sweet little white thing.”

Fingers probe the seam in my pants. I roar and jump and flail.

“Hey, man.”

“The fuck?”

“Yo.”

Guards strain their necks and arch up on their toes. Batons are drawn. The press loosens. I push free and stumble in through the sliding steel door to First Company.

“Watch where the fuck you goin,’” a long-haired Dirty White Boy says, shoving me.

I swing a wild fist and scramble into the cell, backing into the corner. My fists are balled. My face is hot.

“What?” Lester asks, his smile fading.

“I’ll fucking kill them,” I say, pointing toward the cell door as it hums shut. “I don’t want this, goddamn it. This is why I can’t be here.”

“What did they do?” he asks.

I tell him and he shakes his head.

“You’ve been alone too long, kid,” he says. “They’re like dogs. You look them in the eye. You stare them down. You walk tall. They won’t do a damn thing. You should have heard that Colombian I did howling before he died while the poison ate out his guts and they couldn’t stop it. No one wants a taste of that.”

“That kid tried to get you in the box,” I say.

“A kid too stupid to know better,” he says. “You don’t see me worried.”

“I never let myself think like this,” I say, my voice breaking. “And, fuck, now I can’t stop. I keep thinking we can do it. That’s all I can think of.”

“We can, kid.”

“I can kill one of those motherfuckers,” I say. “Just like you. With a dumbbell.”

“Don’t,” he says. “You’ll be in the box for five years. Wait. Twelve months. Maybe fourteen. They won’t touch you. They’ll play with you if you let them. That’s the way.

“Listen, there was a women’s prison back in the 1800s. When they rebuilt this, they built right around the women’s block, and then built over it in 1934. There was a guard I knew in the seventies. I heard the rumors and I got him to get me the plans. They keep them. All of them. From the beginning. In the powerhouse. That brick smokestack you saw out in the south yard.”

Lester puts his hand on my arm.

“There was a cistern,” he says, dropping his voice to the faintest whisper, “below this block. There’s a tunnel down in this shit in the basement. The tunnel goes west toward the shop. Halfway there, there’s a manhole. Welded shut. It took me eight years to break the seal. I’ve spent ten more clearing out the overflow pipe inside the cistern. It goes through the wall. The end of it’s buried under the Owasco Outlet. It runs just the other side of the south wall. It’s full of water most of the year, but in late summer the water level drops and you can get in there. I’m almost through.

“I see what you think,” he says. “The way you roll your eyes sometimes when I talk. But it’s real, kid. It’s all real.”

23

THE SLIDE CHANGED, and Lexis stared hard at the low country cottage surrounded by a brooding sky. A small peat fire, a single splash of brilliant orange in a world of gloom, fought bravely, if hopelessly, against the bold brushstrokes of van Gogh’s tempest. The screen went black and the lights went on.

Everyone around the long table clapped and blinked in the direction of the curator, who took a slight bow and thanked them all for coming. He’d see them next month and he hoped they would enjoy the exhibit. Lexis left the room, passing by the others piling up outside the elevator. Important people pushing and jostling like everyone else. Lexis would rather walk.

On the outside, the Guggenheim is like an upside-down wedding cake. Inside, the exhibit space is the walls along a long slow spiraling walkway that climbs from the ground floor to the top. Lexis was halfway down the ramp on the Level 4 Rotunda when she heard her name and stopped.

Hurrying after her was Pablo Truscan, the long-legged art critic from the New York Times. Truscan looked more like an undertaker with his gray skin and sunken eyes. He had an old-fashioned, droopy mustache. When he caught her, he touched behind his ear before taking her hand.

“I heard about your paintings,” he said. “I’d love to see them.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m flattered but I’m afraid I don’t show them.”

Lexis turned to go, but Truscan hurried after her.

“I understand,” the critic said, touching his ear. “It’s just that I’ve heard about all the pain and emotion in them.”

Lexis continued down the museum’s broad spiraling walkway, her shoes slapping against the smooth floor. She could hear Truscan breathing hard. At the second level she stopped in front of a Chagall painting, Around Her.

Pointing at the face of Chagall’s dead wife, she said, “He lived for her. That’s pain people want to look at. Not mine.”

Lexis began to walk more quickly and Truscan dropped back. Outside, she squinted and made a visor of her hand against the summer sunshine. From the corner of her eye she saw a man in a blue blazer and gray slacks stand up from a bench and approach her. There was something familiar.

“Lexis?” he said, stepping in front of her.

She jumped.

“It’s me, Dan Parsons.”

Raymond’s mentor still had that round red face, but he wore glasses now instead of contacts, thick ones with brown plastic frames that magnified eyes whose sparkle had dimmed. His nose seemed bigger and the curly white hair had receded nearly to the top of his head. He offered her what was left of that once-broad smile and she smiled back.

“Dan, I’m sorry, I just-”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “You were thinking. Are you in a hurry? Could you walk a minute?”

“Sure.”

They crossed Fifth Avenue and walked into Central Park, where they took the path that circled the pond.

“Last time I saw you, I was still with my firm,” Dan said. Broad green trees towered above them and sunlight scattered the blacktop path.

“And you’re not practicing now?”

“Here and there. More money in the stock market,” he said, then gave an abrupt laugh. “Until it tanked, anyway. I was up there pretty good. Rode the bubble. Had my own plane. A Falcon. But you know, easy come-”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I hate to ask,” he said. “I know it’s been a long time and people generally don’t like to bring up the past, but I’m in a pretty tight spot. I remember what you tried to do for Raymond’s dad so I thought, maybe.”

“What do you mean tried to do?” she asked. She had given Paul Russo twenty thousand dollars in cash to help Raymond’s father when she heard from Dan that he was in serious financial trouble.

“Oh?” Dan said. He stuffed his hands in his pant pockets, looked at her, and then quickly away. “I thought you knew.”

“What?”

“He… well, you know how Raymond’s father was.”

“Was? He died?”

“That winter. After we spoke. They turned off his heat.”

“But Paul Russo was going to give him the money. Anonymously,” Lexis said, stopping and gripping Dan’s arm.

Dan shrugged. “He was proud, Lexis. Too proud, really.”

“Russo,” Lexis said, “that son of a bitch.”

She shook her head and scowled out at the rippled surface of the pond.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened,” Dan said, leading her along by the arm. “Listen, I’ve got a deal that’s pretty exciting. It’s just what I need, but the banks are all scared as hell right now and, well, I know your husband and Bob Rangle are pretty close and I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind, Lexis.

“If I could just get a meeting with him. Someone to jar his memory to the fact that I was a pretty decent contributor of his. That’s all I need. So that’s it. That’s where I am. Can I buy you a hot dog?”

They had come to the path’s end at an entrance on Fifth Avenue. Lexis shook her head no and said, “Thank you.”

“I’ll have one,” Dan said to the vendor, “and a Coke. You want a Coke?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Of course I’ll talk to Frank for you, Dan. Do you have a card or something I could give him to call you?”

“Right here,” he said, removing a card along with the ten-dollar bill he gave to the vendor. “Hey, I want you to know, I didn’t come here to track you down at your meeting. I had some business and I just figured-”

“No, that’s all right,” Lexis said. “I’ll try. It’s just that Frank is so busy.”

Dan bit into his hot dog, leaving a streak of mustard on his lip, and shrugged.

“Whatever you can do. I understand completely. The old days are… uncomfortable sometimes.”

“And gone,” she said, offering a weak smile and waving to a cab.

“That too,” Dan said, opening the door for her and licking at the mustard.

“But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about them,” she said, getting in. “I do. Every day.”

24

LESTER QUICKLY SHOWS ME how to spin the drill bit using a small block of wood for the handle. It takes us an entire night of drilling to punch one small hole in the steel. When I ask about the hacksaw blade, he explains that he wore it out completely working his way through the welded seal of the manhole. It doesn’t take long for me to realize that twelve months is a reasonable goal for an opening big enough to squeeze through.

We sleep in shifts and nap during the day. Every waking minute, I am either reading or Lester is teaching me things. Things he knows and things from books he gets at the library. I feel like a man who has a drink after being too distracted to know he was thirsty. Lester is right about the other inmates. They’re dogs and I treat them that way. I ignore their barking and, so far, none of them bite.

I use the time when Lester is working his maintenance job to keep doing my katas and my push-ups and sit-ups. Lester sees me one day and criticizes my training. He says karate without grappling is like a gun without bullets.

“Kid,” he says, “if you want to kick the ass of a bad man, you have to get in close.”

He is old and bent, but he teaches me anyway. At first, I feel silly with my hands wrapped around his thin bones, twisting against the grain of his knotted joints. But whenever I think I’ve really got him, he pokes a pressure point that I never knew about and sends me reeling in pain.

Lester also teaches me about poison.

“It has always been the erudite way to kill someone,” he says. “In case something goes wrong-not that it will-and you end up back in here, you’ll be glad to have it.”

The second man Lester killed in prison, he got with antifreeze. The Colombian he got with arsenic. For nearly two hundred years, the prison has stuffed rat poison down its holes. The sediment down in the basement is thick with it. Lester scraped the crust off his work clothes into a small plastic bottle, filled it with water, and spun it like a pinwheel on a string. A homemade centrifuge.

“How do you get it into their drink?” I ask.

“When I did the antifreeze, I was working the chow line,” he says, “but they won’t let me in there anymore. With the arsenic, I got a little eyedropper from the hospital, walked up to him, told him a funny joke, and squirted it right in his mouth.”

“What was the joke?” I ask.

“If you and your friends don’t leave me alone, I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Real funny.”

“To him it was.”

Every day, they give Lester a pill for his heart. He says there’s nothing wrong with him. It’s standard procedure in this country once you turn seventy to start taking heart medicine. When the hole in our cell is almost ready, he begins to break off small bits of his pills so he’ll have enough to get him through the first two weeks of our escape.

“After that,” he says, “I’ll be in New Zealand.”

We are lying in our bunks, waiting for the lockdown before we begin work. It is summertime and the air is hot and heavy, cooked over with the smell of human sweat, stale air, and fresh paint. My brow is beaded with sweat. I am wearing just my undershorts, and my arms are splayed out to my sides so my pits can dry.

Lester drones on about New Zealand. I am studying Fragonard’s eighteenth-century painting, a picture of happiness. The woman is happy, sailing up into the sunlight with her lover below. The lover is happy, he can see her wares beneath the ballooning petticoats. The husband is happy too, because he is ignorant of all this, an aging man with a fashionable and lovely young wife. I was ignorant too.

I am quiet after Lester finishes about New Zealand. He is waiting for me to reveal my own wistful plans. I know this because he’s mentioned it to me before, that if we get out we need to catch up on all the good things, put the past and all the bad things behind.

We hear the call of the guards up and down the block, and the lights go out. We are quiet for several minutes as the small bedtime noises of five hundred killers slowly wind down.

“We will escape,” Lester says, as if he were in the midst of a heated argument.

“I didn’t say we wouldn’t,” I say.

“Then why don’t you ever talk about your plans?” he asks.

“A wise man speaks because he has something to say,” I say, quoting Plato back at him, “a fool because he has to say something.”

“And if you were a fool? What would you say, kid?” he asks. “Are you afraid of what I’d think about your grand plan for revenge?”

“Who said that was my plan?”

“Aristotle said it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it,” he says. “You’re an open book, kid, and even though I am against what you’re planning, I love you enough to tell you that if you’re going to succeed, you need to become more of a cipher than you are.”

“Meaning?”

Lester sighs.

“I had a son,” he says. “His name was Seth. Died when he was eight. It was the year I killed the prison guard. I don’t know, I think if he hadn’t died, I never would have tried a museum.”

“I thought you had a small van Gogh?” I ask. My blood rises. Even after all this time, I am afraid of being duped. There is still a small voice inside my head telling me Lester is a fake, a brilliantly colorful fake. That we will get out of this cell and there will be no manhole. No cistern.

He is laughing quietly at me, as if he knows what I’m thinking. He says, “I did. But everything I stole until Seth died was from private collections. The market for stolen masterpieces is every bit as lively and lucrative as the ones auctioned at Sotheby’s. Everything I stole was already stolen. Until Seth died… I guess I stopped caring.

“But,” he says, “my point is this. We would play chess, my kid and I. He was good. Exceptional, really. Had my noggin. Even more. But he was a kid, and so he’d always be looking at the pieces he wanted to move. I’d watch his eyes and know what move he was thinking about before he even did it. Like you, kid. I see it in your eyes. The hatred. The determination. Everyone else is gonna see it too.”

“I don’t care if they see it,” I say. I can feel heat in my veins. My voice is louder than it should be.

“Like Carl. He doesn’t care,” Lester says, and the image of that doughy mass murderer fills my mind. The ear-to-ear grin when he scoops up a spoonful of corn. The consternation over a plate full of olive-colored peas. An open book.

“You think I want to be here?”

“You’re safe here, kid, behind these walls,” Lester says. “Just like Carl. For instance, what are you going to do about her?”

The breath goes out of me.

“I… you…” I say.

“I read all about it,” he says. “The whole joint talked about it back then. But you were convicted and then that winter the space shuttle went down and then there was Colonel Ghadafi and Libya and people forgot about Raymond White.

“I did too, but I was interested in the players. To see how the tragedy played out. I saw in the newspaper when the girl married a cop and I watched him become a big shot in the casino world and move to New York City. Every once in a while you’ll see him standing behind the governor in some group shot. The DA, Villay, he’s a federal judge. Maybe on his way to the Supreme Court.

“Then there was the guy who got the congressional seat after you were arrested. Rangle. He’s out of politics now, but he made the most of it. He married one of those fancy society women and moves money around on Wall Street. I always found it… interesting how well all three of them did…

“The girl too, I suppose.”

“And why do you suppose that?”

“I just don’t know much about her,” Lester says. “They don’t write about her. Just him. He’s a little shady. Got caught up in a racketeering probe of some real estate development company. She’s still there, though. I saw a picture of her next to him in the New York Post when he got cleared.”

I realize that my hands are clenched around the folds of the bedsheet and my teeth clamped tight. I am breathing through my nose, practically snorting.

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” I ask.

“Next Tuesday is a new moon,” he says. “We’ll be leaving. I didn’t want you to dwell on it, but I don’t want you to do something stupid either.”

“Like walk up to him on the street and blow his fucking head off?”

“I’ve taught you almost everything I know, kid,” he says. “I’d hate to see all that go to waste. You could have a nice life for yourself. Isn’t it enough to be free?”

“No,” I say, “it’s not. You’re the one with the rule about exacting revenge.”

“That’s for in here,” he says.

“Not to me,” I say.

I get down from the bunk and hold out my hand for the drill bit. Lester gives it to me and I softly pound it into its block handle. I press the bit into the corroding plate next to last night’s hole. The toilet bowl is damp and cool against my cheek. I push and grind. Push and grind, letting the sharp steel edge bite into the plate, shaving out thin curly strips a micrometer at a time.

Soon, I hear the rattle of keys. The first walk-by always includes a night count. They do two a night. I climb into my bunk and close my eyes. I hear the footsteps of the guard. My eyelids glow briefly red as he swipes the beam of his flashlight over my face. In minutes, I hear him walking back down the company. Keys rattle again and the door hums and the latch clanks into place. I slip down off the bunk. Lester is asleep and I go back to work.

I was in jail eighteen years before I came here. I spent six months in the box. It’s been just over a year since we started to drill. The final week passes like a blink. Lester encourages me not to eat much. The thinner I am, the easier it will be to fit through the hole. That’s not a problem. I’m not hungry anyway.

It’s time.

25

MY HEART POUNDS against my ribs. I glance over my shoulder and up at the window. I see nothing but the faint reflection of bars. The moon is dark. Lester and I always whisper, but tonight our hissing can barely be heard. Our bunks are stuffed with quietly crumpled newspaper. We have saved our own hair clippings and stuck them onto the papier-mâché masks that Lester has painted to look like us. In each of our pockets is a small Ziploc bag that contains some cash Lester has hoarded over the years as well as a detailed road map of central New York.

I hear the quiet snap of metal, Lester twisting our escape hatch free from the thin mooring that held it in place. The other edges we have filed smooth. We have bailed out the toilet, draining it into the sink. The pipe lies on the floor in the corner.

Lester squirms through the hole and waves to me. I am naked, glazed in Vaseline. I pass my clothes through, then slip my head into the hole along with my right arm. My left shoulder gets stuck and I feel the bite of the steel. A bead of sweat falls from my nose. I squirm and a small noise sneaks out of my throat. Lester hushes me quietly and whispers that it will be all right. Relax.

I feel his twisted hands on my head and back. He turns me gently, the way a doctor will deliver a child, easing me through the hole. My hips stick, but only for a moment. I am out. I stand with my bare feet on the narrow iron grid of the catwalk. The stink of sewage rises up on the back of the exhausted heat, but my spirit soars. I stand there, greased and naked in this new world. I want to raise my hands over my head and cry out, but instead, I quickly pull on my clothes.

Lester has a black piece of paper that he tapes over the hole. We are in complete darkness now, but only for a few seconds. In his hand, Lester has a small bulb, taped and wired to a D battery. In this pitch, it sheds just enough light for us to see the twisted labyrinth of pipes and wires and ducts protruding from the cells on either side. The tangle of mechanical veins rises five stories.

Lester starts to lower himself through the space between the narrow catwalk and the cells. I follow him, and he guides my ankles as he said he would so that I will find the footholds that will quietly bear my weight. Even though Lester warned me against it, I look down. It is a long way to the oily filth, and I wonder if I will be able to keep from retching once I lower my feet into its murk.

Soon I hear Lester swishing around. My footing is fine, but with five feet to go, I grab a hot water pipe that burns my hand. I stifle a cry, but drop down, splashing back into the sewage. I jump up with my hands plastered over my mouth, but the vomit finds the seams in my fingers and my quiet retching continues for another ten seconds before I am finally able to subdue it. Lester stares at me with those big eyes magnified under their lenses even more in the thin light. He blinks and I shake my head apologetically. He looks up toward the empty catwalk, shrugs, and begins to wade through the mess toward the other end of the cellblock.

The going is tricky with the sediment below the filth sucking on my shoes. Lester is taking long steps that bring his knees briefly clear of the oily stink. My stomach begins to turn again. Beads of sweat tickle my forehead. I think I cannot hold down another convulsion when I see a brick tunnel at the edge of Lester’s homemade light.

Lester stops and dips down into the scum. He comes up with his claw hammer and holds it out for me to see. He is grinning. We climb up into the tunnel and crawl along in the gritty crap that lines its belly. I search for a manhole, but see only the long smooth stretch of sediment. Lester stops suddenly and turns around.

“What are we doing?” I say.

“I must have gone past it,” he says.

My head spins with that same familiar fear. My heart thumps even harder. The tunnel walls seem suddenly tighter.

“What do you mean?” I say. “How?”

“It’s here,” he says. “I missed it.”

“I thought you dug it up.”

“It’s been two years, kid,” he says. “The water rises up down here in the winter and leaves fresh sediment. Right behind you, there. Dig.”

I spin and start to claw at the soft muck, scrabbling like a dog until my fingers rake the bricks below. The stink presses in on me.

“It’s brick,” I say, my voice rising in pitch.

“Keep going.”

Scraps of mud fly through the tunnel and spatter the crumbling walls.

My fingers are numb. They strike something harder than brick.

“I think I got it,” I say.

“Here, use this,” Lester says, handing over the hammer.

I claw at the edges of the old steel plate. My heart starts to slow and my breath is coming easier now. In minutes, I have exposed the entire manhole cover. Using the claw on the hammer, I lift it up and shove it aside. Cool air lies beneath us in a vast empty space that echoes with the sound of dripping water.

“There are ladder rungs,” Lester says, his voice laced with giddiness as he dips the light into the hole.

I see more black water down below. The stench is richer down there, but not as sharp. I see the corroded metal rungs protruding from the brick wall. As I descend into the cistern, the hairy rust flakes off in my hands, leaving them dusty brown.

The water is cold and comes up to my knees. Lester eases himself slowly down and we wade the length of the aging cavern. The walls are alive with spiders that creep and sway under the glow of our dim light. A rat squeaks and scrabbles along a ledge above us, kicking free a swirl of dust into the halo of light.

When we reach the end of the cistern, there is another set of rungs that lead up to the large dark hole of the overflow pipe. The cistern collected water to be used for the women’s bathrooms. When the tank filled up during the wet season, the overflow let the excess water run out into the Owasco Outlet. When the prison was rebuilt in 1930, Lester claims the new wall had to be built around this overflow pipe because the women’s prison wasn’t razed until 1934.

We climb up and in. The pipe is wooden. Narrow, but smooth with only a small deposit of grit on the bottom. Two feet in diameter. Just enough for me to get through without jamming my shoulders. We crawl for a good ways. The only stench now comes from my clothes. The air is stale, but cool. In the thin light from Lester’s bulb, I can see a few feet in front of my face, so I don’t bump into the pile of broken brick and dirt, but when I see it, my heart constricts.

“It’s blocked,” I say in a hiss.

“I told you it was,” Lester says. “We have to dig.”

“How far?”

“Not far,” he says.

I begin to pull at the pieces of brick, pushing them under my belly, then moving the mound back toward Lester with my knees and feet. After a time, the pipe behind us is nearly blocked. Lester moves backward, spreading the refuse beneath him, giving me more room to dig.

A battle rages between panic and hope in my mind. I try to reinforce my will with sweet images of freedom. A walk on the beach, cold sand in my toes. Moonlight dancing on water. The taste of a thick steak, red wine, and a Cuban cigar. But it’s hatred that wins the day and propels me on. The bullet I will put into Frank Steffano’s head. The sound of Rangle’s whimper. Villay’s squeal. Exact revenge.

I work on.

We must be twenty feet farther than the original blockage. Our muffled coughs are snuffed out by the pipe and the dirt. My arms and hands are numb from their work.

Lester clears his throat and says, “Kid. We have to go back.”

I hear, but it doesn’t register.

“Raymond,” he says, “we won’t make it. It’s light outside by now. We’ll have to come back.”

“We’re almost there,” I say, still clawing at the dirt and bricks. “We have to be.”

Lester grips my ankle. I feel the strength in his old hands, constricting my ligaments and the flow of blood. He shakes my leg and I stop digging.

“No, goddamn it,” he says, rupturing the quiet. “We need the night. I waited too long for this, kid. We have to go back.”

Lester lets go of my ankle. The light jiggles and begins to fade. I hear him squirming back down the pipe. I continue to dig, but soon it’s pitch black and I feel the earth squeezing in on me from all sides. A cry bursts from me and I scramble backward, slithering out.

Lester is waiting in the cistern. When I drop down into the cold water, he nods once and turns to go. When we reach the basement beneath the catwalk outside our cell, Lester shows me a spigot jutting out of a pipe that runs up the concrete wall. He turns it on and we rinse most of the stink and slime from our bodies and clothes.

Since most of the Vaseline was rubbed off, it will be harder for me to get back into the cell, so I go first. Lester is able to push me through without drawing more than a trickle of blood from my shoulder. Daylight seeps into the window outside our bars, but everything is still quiet. Lester fits the steel plate and the sewage pipe from the toilet back into the wall. He complains quietly of a pain in his arm. I help him fill the cracks with shoe polish.

We strip out of our clothes and change into our spare set. Lester rinses the dirty ones in what’s left of our hot water bucket from the day, then he stuffs them into the laundry bag and tosses them into the corner. I am climbing up into my bunk when I hear him grunt and collapse on the floor.

I take a panicked look around before I start to yell for help.

There is confusion and shouting.

Lester is taken to the prison hospital.

Later, a guard tells me that he’s had a heart attack. They don’t know how long he’ll be in the hospital. He might not make it at all. After two days of worrying, the company sergeant calls me to his desk. He says that tomorrow I will be moved into a new cell by myself. If Lester survives, we can apply for another double bunk when one opens up. If he dies, I will stay in my new single cell.

Night comes and I lie awake with these thoughts spinning through my head: If Lester dies, it could be ten or twenty years, if ever, before I have the chance to get a drill bit of my own. Even if he lives, when the new prisoners take this cell, they will be sure to find the hole. They will either use it, or report it. If they use it and find the open manhole, the route will be discovered and sealed off forever. If they report the hole in the cell, Lester and I will both spend the next three years back in the box.

Here’s what I keep coming back to:

If I wait, both of us are likely to be in Auburn for the rest of our lives.

If I go now, alone, I just might make it.

26

I OPEN MY EYES to The Swing. When Lester first showed it to me, it meant nothing. A pretty baroque painting with soft colors. A pink dress. A broad beam of sunlight through the blue-green trees. A dainty shoe sailing through the air. A young man in the bushes gazing up with admiration. An older refined gentleman entertaining the beautiful young woman. But as I began to study it, it wasn’t long before I knew it for what it was. A picture of betrayal.

I have used this painting over the past year to secretly fuel my hatred for the people who betrayed me. The light coming through the window is proof that at least I have not betrayed my friend, even if it costs me everything. I search within myself for even a flicker of contentment. I don’t know why, but there is nothing there. I am an empty grave.

The escape hole behind the toilet is so big it makes me ache.

I reach up and slip my finger between the edge of the paper and the metal ceiling, tearing the print free. The paper shears off at the corners where it has been taped. I spread my fingers and mash the print into a ball, then throw it onto the floor.

All the things in the cell besides my bunk and spare set of clothes belong to Lester. They said someone will take care of his things. I haven’t decided whether or not I will earn my way back into the box. I realize that I enjoy the small freedoms I’ve become accustomed to. The sun. The rain on my face. Long walks around the yard. The books. The question is this: How safe will I be without Lester?

I hop down and roll everything into my mattress. After breakfast, I sling the roll over my shoulder and a guard walks me across the yard to E block. I feel naked without Lester by my side.

When the first officer at the desk looks up, I recognize the shadowy face as Bluebeard’s. His hair is longer and slicked back with pomade, but his beady eyes still have their gleam.

“Well, well,” he says, “the big bucks were snortin’ and a-pawin’ in here this morning like they smelled a doe in heat, and I guess they did.”

His long hairy fingers slide over the change sheet, a yellow pointed nail comes to a stop halfway down the page. He turns his head and raises his voice to a group of officers standing in the doorway.

“Seventeen ready to go?” he says. “New girl’s here.”

He leers at me and says, “I know you’ll be wanting to bunk up once you decide who your new daddy’s gonna be, but for now, I hope you’ll like your new home.”

A guard marches over and says, “Uh, Marty. Seventeen still ain’t ready. Garden Hose says he ain’t goin’.”

“Well, you tell Garden Hose I’m gonna come in there and tickle his ass with my stick,” Bluebeard says, putting his hand on his baton as if to prove he means it.

“Told him that already.”

“Well, gas the motherfucker out of there,” Bluebeard says.

“You’ll have to call the lieutenant.”

“And I’ll do that,” Bluebeard says. With his chin in the air, he picks up the phone and punches in a number.

He glares at the guard who brought me and says, “Take her back to A block while I fumigate that bug.”

To me, Bluebeard says, “Don’t you worry, little lady. We’ll have your room for you real soon. Why don’t you go out and have a drink by the pool?”

I walk back across the yard to my cell and unroll my bunk. I lay down and stare at the ceiling, empty except for the four corners of the print. I have decided that my next interview with Bluebeard will send a message to the entire prison. It will be nothing for me to launch myself across his desk. I will roll his head between my hands like a melon, snapping his neck and tearing the spinal cord between the third and fourth vertebrae. If I’m going to go to the box, I might as well go in style. When I do get out-if I get out-I feel pretty confident that after something like that, no one will bother me.

I am reviewing the technique in my mind when I hear Lester’s gravelly voice at the end of the hall. I jump down and grab the bars. He shuffles slowly toward our cell, prattling to the guard.

“Clear one,” the guard says in a loud voice.

I step back.

“Open one.”

The bars vibrate and the door slides open. Lester stands there. His enormous eyes are shiny and brimming with tears.

“Later, Jim,” he says to the guard in a choked voice.

He steps inside and the bars hum shut. He opens his arms and steps toward me, hugging me. The tufts of his hair tickle under my chin.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” he says, his voice muffled by my shirt. Then he pushes me away. “You should be gone.”

“I… couldn’t.”

Lester shakes his head and sits down on the edge of his bunk, laughing softly, but crying at the same time.

“You’re a prince, kid,” he says, looking up. “Like my own.”

“They tried to move me,” I say. My own eyes are watering. “I was gone. E block, but the cell wasn’t ready. They said you were going to die.”

“They wish,” he says. “The state would love to have my bunk, but I’m tougher than that.”

“Are you all right?”

Lester swats his hand in the air and says, “A minor episode. I’ll outlive the doctor. Happens all the time. Sit.”

I sit down next to him, and Lester claps my right hand between both of his.

“Tonight,” he says, in a whisper, “we go. We’ll make it this time.”

“My God, Lester,” I say. “I mean, I was gone. Do you get it? They moved me out. Then some bug named Garden Hose decides he won’t leave the cell…”

“I don’t know about God, kid,” Lester says, “but destiny… That’s another story. And what you’ve done… The loyalty?

“We still need to split up when we get out,” Lester says, “but not for long.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about unimaginable wealth,” Lester says, shaking my hand in his, his eyes glittering at me. “I’m talking about sharing it with you, kid. I… I didn’t know before. Even after all we’ve been through. Money does things to people, and we’ll be on the outside. Things will be different.”

Lester’s eyes turn glassy and he looks across the cell as if he were peering out over the ocean. He tells me about an old Adirondack lodge built by Thomas Durant on Lake Kora, a place that burned to the ground at the turn of the nineteenth century. Lester bought the only standing building, a guest cottage, in 1964.

“You can only get there by water and it has a cobblestone foundation like a fortress,” he says. “Dry as dust. Perfect temperature. Fifty degrees in the middle of summer or the dead of winter.

“I turned it into a huge vault,” Lester says. “Brought a locksmith up from Baltimore and two boilermakers from Peoria. The floor is these two-inch-thick oak planks, and with the hardware, you’d have to use dynamite to get it open.”

“What’s in it?” I ask.

Lester lowers his voice and leans toward me. His big eyes blink and he peers hard through the gloom.

“Almost everything I ever stole,” he says. “I was going to live modestly and work for twenty years. Then I was going to sell it all and retire to New Zealand. I still will, but I don’t need all that. Put together, by now it’s got to be worth close to a billion.”

“A billion?” I say. “As in nine zeros?”

“There was a trainload of stuff from the Louvre that Hitler was having shipped from Paris to Berlin. It never made it,” Lester says. “I spent over ten years stealing it and now I’m giving half of it to you…”

“What can you do with it?” I ask.

“Sell it,” Lester says with a shrug.

“To who?”

“Sotheby’s,” he says. “Christie’s. I’ll call the director of fine arts. Happens all the time. He’ll be outraged, but in about a week I’ll get a call back from someone who’ll just happen to be looking for what I’ve got.”

Lester tells me the exact location of the cottage and how to get into the vault. There are two bank vault tumblers. The combination is derived by assigning a numeric value to each of the letters in his son’s name-Seth Cole-and subtracting them from fifty for the first descending to forty-three for the last.

“Not that anything’s happening to me, kid,” he says, showing me those crooked teeth, “but, who knows? Maybe only one of us gets away, and if it’s you, I don’t want you going hungry.”

My face is warm and I put my other hand on top of his and begin to stammer, not knowing what to say.

“If you want to do something,” he says, nodding his head as if he can read my thoughts, “promise me this: that you’ll use this treasure for yourself. Go. Start a new life. Leave the past alone, kid. Let it die.”

I go rigid.

Lester cocks his head just a tick to one side, as if he’s heard a small noise. He looks at me for quite a while before he sighs and says, “No, I guess not.

“It’s all right,” he says, patting my hands. “I love you like my Seth. It’s unconditional, and so is this gift. You do with it what you want. That’s not for me to decide.”

I tell him what I think, but it comes out in a mutter.

“What?” he says.

“You said destiny,” I say. “It’s my destiny, Lester. It just is.”

When night comes, we climb back down into the tunnel. After only a few minutes, the dirt becomes damp. A slow trickle begins to run back down the pipe. My throat grows tight as I imagine the water bursting in and washing us backward into the cistern. It grows to a steady flow, but rises no more than five inches.

It takes me less than an hour to dig through the last layer of soggy silt. I can hear the river’s song and feel the cool air rushing in. In anticipation, Lester puts out his waning bulb, but a large stone is wedged into the opening. Try as I might, I cannot push it aside with my hands and the claw hammer does me no good.

Lester and I crawl back down the length of the overflow pipe, then worm our way back, feet first. I roll splashing onto my stomach and wedge my frame against the walls of the wooden pipe. Then, with all my might, I press my legs against the stone. It moves half an inch at a time, but it moves.

The stone scratches against its sandy bed. I hear Lester’s low chuckle bubbling toward me from deeper in the pipe. My heart swells and my legs burn, and in less than two minutes I’ve shoved that rock aside enough for us to squirm out.

I don’t stop to enjoy it. I don’t see the stars or the towers or the vertical plane of the wall aglow and stretching up into the night. Instead, I keep my eyes fixed on the darkness around me and I slide over the rocks and into the swift water of a deep pool.

I am free.

27

I SWIM ACROSS THE CURRENT, not down. This is the plan. They will look for us downstream. They will close off all the roads around the city and squeeze it until they find us. No one has escaped Auburn since the new wall was constructed back in the thirties. Hell will be raised.

It requires great effort to swim through the current. When I feel the rocky riverbed beneath my feet I turn to look at Lester. Water slips past me, but not without a strong steady shove. I see now that Lester is flailing. The sound of splashing rises above the steady hiss of water over stone, and my eyes go up to the tower. It stares down like a dull monolithic eye in its bed of stars. The shadow of the guard is nowhere to be seen. The other towers too-there are three in all-are blind.

Lester is almost to me. I stretch out my arms, digging in at the same time with my heels to keep from being swept back into the pool. Lester is four feet from me when he cries out and goes under.

I dive and bump heads with him. We swirl in the water. I have his waist and I scissor-kick my legs until they’re numb. My feet hit the riverbed and the darkness is destroyed by white light. The scream of sirens breaks the night. Bullets zip past, humming like angry bees. The water is shin-deep now and Lester is on my back. I run for the railroad bridge.

The thud of a bullet striking him knocks me facedown into the water, but I scramble up without letting go. I slosh upstream, desperate for the cover of a bridge. Two feet from its protective shadow, another bullet strikes Lester, knocking us both forward and down. This time, my elbow strikes a rock and Lester rolls off my back.

His eyes stare up at the underbelly of the bridge. His mouth hangs open, spilling blood. There is yelling above and the strident ringing of alarms.

“Lester!” I shout, lifting him.

I see now, even in the shadows, that the last bullet struck the back of his head. Blood and matter spill from his skull. I retch and drop his body. Frantically, I search around me. On the upstream side of the rail bridge, someone has dumped a bag of garbage and it lies wedged between two great stones. I strip the shirt from my back without unbuttoning it and jam the black bag of garbage inside.

I tie the sleeve of my shirt to Lester’s wrist, then I wade toward the deep flow. When I’m close to the middle, I shove Lester’s body and the floating bag into the stiffest part of the current. They swirl and shoot downstream. They are pushed out of the shadows and into the beam of the spotlights. The lights stay with Lester and my shirt. There is more shouting. Bullets rain down, breaking the water’s surface, striking Lester’s dead body and the garbage as they rise and fall in the current, spinning madly down along the wall. I return to the bank and move with stealth up under the road bridge.

Shots and yells echo up the riverbed. I leave the cover of the bridge and find myself in a thick tangle of vegetation. Above me is Curley’s Restaurant, and I can hear the people spilling out onto the bridge to see what has happened. I keep sloshing upstream. Vertical concrete embankments replace the undergrowth where the river bends through the middle of downtown. I stay close to the shadow of the wall where the water is below my knees.

Up to the left is a stately old brick building with a white cupola. Black-and-white police cars are lined up along the rail that overlooks the river. The police station. The dark shapes of men are jogging out. Red and blue lights spin and tires squeal as they back out and head for the prison. I am almost to the next bridge when I see one figure approach the rail with a flashlight.

A wide drainpipe opens in the wall and I throw myself inside. A moment later, a beam of light sweeps past the mouth of the pipe. I can feel the hammer of my heart between my ears. I wait another minute, then creep toward the edge. The figure is gone and so is the light. I slip out and wade as quietly as I can upstream. When I reach the darkness of the next bridge, I start to run.

I pass under two more bridges and under the shadow of a stainless steel diner with a red neon sign, then the shambles of some tenement apartments before the concrete wall ends and the shadowy overgrowth of bushes and trees crowds the riverbed. The river widens and the going is easy for a time. Stars wink from above and they give the rippled water a pale glow. As I step carefully between the rocks, my ears are filled with a hissing that soon grows into a roar.

I round a bend and see the misty white sheet of water spilling over a dam. There are darkened brick buildings above harnessing the water flow and turning it into electricity. I leave the water for a rocky service road that climbs the right side of the bank up to the top of the dam. Two streetlights give off a blue glow. The pool above the dam is still and black and I stare around, breathing hard. There are a handful of houses with amber light spilling from random crooked windows. A string of laundry hangs in the backyard of the one closest to me and a small dock juts out into the still pool. Moored to it is a small aluminum skiff with an outboard motor.

Destiny.

I case the house as I wade through the bushes and creep across the grass. I can just make out the sound of a radio above the roar of the dam, but see no signs of life. I strip a man’s white dress shirt and a worn-out pair of khaki shorts from the line, tuck them under my arm, and hurry toward the boat. After unmooring the skiff, I use the oars and row quietly up past the houses. When I am completely surrounded again by trees, I pull the starter cord and race off.

The skiff finally runs aground and I hop out. I can see the next dam, not nearly as dramatic as the first, but when I get to the other side, I see what I’ve been looking for. The inlet. A marina. Dozens of boats, covered and waiting for their owners to take them out on the lake for a day of fun. Across the inlet from the marina, cottages stand clustered together under the trees. I hear the sounds of laughter and smell the campfires of people on vacation. I strip out of my prison pants and T-shirt in the shadows, then change into my new clothes and roll up the sleeves of the shirt before walking through the yard of the marina like I belong there.

I find a boat similar to the one I used to own, an open-bow Four Winns, and uncover it in plain sight of the people on the other side of the narrow inlet. Hotwiring this boat is easier than with my dad’s heavy equipment when I was a kid. Two wires clearly exposed beneath the dash. I flip on the running lights, back the boat out of its slip, and wave to the revelers as I ease up the inlet toward the open lake.

The water’s surface is smooth, and I am zipping along like a ghost, skimming the surface, flying through the night. The hillsides are dark except for a sprinkling of lights from the homes on the water. I pull up for a few minutes in the middle to strip and wash the scum from my body. The wind soon whips me dry and I stop again to put the clothes back on. Owasco is fourteen miles long, so in less than half an hour I am idling in toward a lively restaurant and bar tucked into the lake’s last cove.

This is no coincidence. Lester learned from an electrician about the place called Cascade Grill on the end of the lake. Our plan all along was for me to get us transportation this way. To be obvious and invisible. I was going to drop Lester at a bus station in Binghamton. Lester, my friend.

There is a long dock sticking out into the water. More than a dozen other boats are moored along its edge, bumping gently up against the car tires looped down over its metal support poles. The stillness of the air gives way to the steady hum of people talking and laughing and the vibrations and thumping of a band called the Works. I know because a huge banner stretches across the back of the one-story pale blue building: CASCADE GRILL WELCOMES THE WORKS.

The narrow dock leads right up a ramp and onto Cascade’s deck. Bugs swirl in the halos of the small lanterns nailed to a tall fence that blocks out the neighboring cottages. The orange wood of the deck is new and topped with dark green plastic tables and chairs with matching square canvas umbrellas. It’s wall-to-wall people. I ease through the crowd with my head bobbing gently to the beat like everyone else, and slip inside and up to the bar.

From my pocket, I remove Lester’s baggie of money and the map and I strip off a twenty from 1973. The bartender is a big teddy bear of a man with a walrus mustache and baggy pale green eyes. Even in the smoke of the bar, I can smell stale cigars on his clothes from behind the taps.

“Got any wheat beer?” I ask.

He scowls and shakes his head as if he doesn’t even know what I’m talking about.

“Löwenbräu?” I say.

He gives me a funny smile and says, “And you want to borrow my Foreigner eight-track too, right? Come on, buddy, I’ve got customers.”

I see a Bud tap handle and ask for a bottle of that. He reaches down into the cooler, keys off the top, and sets it down in front of me. I point to the twenty and leave the change on the bar like everyone else. With the bottle tipped up to my mouth, I look around. On my left are two muscle-heads in tank tops with crew cuts and big tattoos. To my right is a couple in their fifties wearing leather chaps and vests. The man has long gray hair pulled into a ponytail and his chick’s poorly bleached cut is windblown.

In front of them is a pile of small bills and change, two bottles of a brew I’ve never heard of, and a heavy chain with a set of keys. It takes me only a minute to see that they’re fall-down drunk.

I cock myself their way on the stool and buy them a drink. He’s a math teacher in Union Springs. She’s a psychologist from Seneca Falls. Every nice weekend in the summer, they get on their bikes and ride across the state. He rides a 1953 Indian Chief.

“Rebuilt it myself,” he says, throwing back his shoulders. He butts out his Marlboro and his eyes take on a sheen. “One of the ones they made in their last order for the New York City police.”

I tell them I’m a lawyer from Syracuse with a summer cottage halfway up the lake. We communicate all this by leaning close and yelling above the sound of the band and the noise of the bar. Through the window, I can see the throng swaying with their hands in the air. People start taking off their shirts.

The math teacher finishes off his Saranac Ale and staggers to his feet.

“Be right back,” he says, clasping my shoulder and using it to keep from falling on his face.

He disappears around the corner where the bathrooms are before the girlfriend stretches a smile across her face, blushes, and says, “Me too.”

She slips off her stool. I put two more twenties on the bar, ask the bartender for another round and whatever the big guys next to me are drinking too. This keeps him busy while I slip the keychain over the lip of the bar and into the pocket of my baggy shorts.

I wait for them to come back and start working on their fresh drinks before I excuse myself for the bathroom. I push through the bar and around the corner. Left is the bathrooms, right is the front door. I go right. Across a small lane is a two-tiered stone parking lot. The Indian Chief is up in the second lot alongside an orange Honda 650. They’re parked between a white van and an old Ford Escort.

I look around quick, then mount up. I had a dirt bike growing up, so I know how to drive, but I’ve never been on something as big and heavy as this. I take it easy down Route 38 into Moravia, scanning ahead of me for the flashing lights of a roadblock.

It’s too soon for that, though, and instead of making a right in the center of town to keep going south on 38, I pull over under a streetlamp to check my map. Straight through the intersection takes me out of town on 38A. Less than a mile after that, I turn off onto a farm road and weave my way across the bottom of Skaneateles, past Glen Haven, through Otisco, across Interstate 81, and on up the other side of Syracuse on Route 46.

Sometime after I was born, in a brief fit of nostalgia, my mother bundled me up and took me to the reservation to show me off to her older half sister. A week later, my mother received a proud phone call from her sister. Of her own volition, the sister had registered me as a member of the tribe. Because my mother was a Mohawk, I was a Mohawk too. Nothing to be overly proud of in the Onondaga Nation, but still, one of the people.

With that lineage came certain rights. For the same reason my father and Black Turtle had been able to line up some help for me to leave the country at the end of my trial, I zigzag my way up along the Adirondack State Park. Sticking to back roads, I go through towns like Ava, Lowville, and Colton all the way to the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation.

I ease the big Chief down Route 37 onto the reservation and into the town of Hogansburg. Right there off the highway is a long single-story building, newly built. Longhouse of the twenty-first century. The Akwesasne Casino. The sky is beginning to lighten in the east as I pull into the lot. I am teetering on exhaustion until I see a bundle of newspapers that have been tossed onto the curb. I yank one out from beneath the plastic band and search for news of my escape. There is nothing. Yet. I know by the evening edition, my face will make page three at the least.

Inside, I am greeted by a weary-eyed Mohawk whose nameplate reads: UNCLE BUCK. Behind him a single blackjack table is illuminated in the gloomy cavern. A sluggish set of players take their cards from a big red-lipped blonde who just might be a transvestite.

I step into a small grill for a coffee and some eggs. Real eggs. I devour them and order four more, over easy, sopping up the yolk with buttered whole-wheat toast. I wash it down with the sweetest orange juice I’ve ever tasted. The coffee too is rich and it energizes me from the inside out. I pay with a hundred-dollar bill from 1977. That kind of bill might raise eyebrows, but this is a casino and I leave a tip that’s good, but not crazy enough to draw attention.

I return to the entrance, where Uncle Buck is affable enough and apologetic that the casino has no hotel. He tries to direct me across the border to the Canadian side of the reservation and a Best Western, but I know there will be customs agents at the bridge and, rather than risk it, tell him I want something local.

He shrugs. The only place in town is the Rest Inn Motel.

“People complain sometimes that you can smell the cow pasture,” he says, “but there’s a good gal that runs it.”

“I grew up near cows,” I say with a smile. “Will she mind me showing up at this hour? I’ve been riding all night.”

“No,” he says, his teeth gleaming beneath his regal nose. “She’s used to all kinds of things with the casino here now.”

My pride in the nation to which I am officially a member continues to deflate as I pass by sagging and decrepit one- and two-story homes with yard dogs snapping after me without restraint. The road needs repair and the scent of filth wafts up out of the ditch, reminding me of the prison’s belly.

The motel owner is a stout middle-aged Mohawk woman. I slip her my last hundred and tell her I’d like to pay for two nights. Her small dark eyes look deep into mine before she smiles and gives me a key. I draw the shades and use the bathroom before I lie down on top of the bed and fall into the pit of sleep.

I don’t know what time it is when I wake up, but I know what woke me.

The cold barrel of a revolver is tickling my nose.

28

THERE ARE THREE OF THEM. All Indians. All younger than me. Late twenties, early thirties. Long dark hair, flat angry mouths, and scowling brown eyes.

The smallest one has the gun. The two by the door are goons.

“You came to the wrong place to pass your shit, white man,” the little one says with a low growl, flipping a hundred-dollar bill at me with his free hand. “We’re gonna send you on your way, but we got a little present for you first. Get up.”

I get up off the bed with my hands in the air. The gun is still pressed into my nose. I glance down at the bill on the bed and see that it’s my own 1977 Ben Franklin. I need to use the bathroom and I tell them.

“You can piss your pants you got to go that bad,” the little one says.

The two goons snicker and they shove me out into the bright daylight. Puffy white clouds on a field of blue. The stout motel owner is scowling at me from the shadow of the porch in front of the office. Her hands are on her hips. My stolen motorcycle has already been loaded into the back of a big dark green Chevy with an extended cab.

They drive me down Route 37. Another pickup with a bed full of Indian men follows us. We pull over in a field behind a big billboard that welcomes the rest of the world to the St. Regis Indian Reservation. The biggest goon shoves me out of the truck. The other one dumps the bike out of the back and it crashes to the ground. The other truck pulls up. Everyone piles out and they make a loose circle around me. The little one they all call Bonaparte stuffs the pistol into the waist of his jeans, walks over to the bike, and pisses on it.

“I wasn’t trying to pass anything off on you,” I say for the tenth time, “and I’m not a white man. My mother was a Mohawk.”

“We’re Akwesasne,” the little one, Bonaparte, says, zipping up his fly.

“Her family was from the reservation outside Toronto,” I say, remembering now that the northern Mohawks call themselves by their own name.

Bonaparte narrows his eyes and says, “You got a white nose.”

“My father,” I say. “My mother grew up in the Onondaga Nation.”

“So after George here beats your ass black and blue,” he says, “you can go back down there and rediscover your roots, but no one comes up here and passes bad money to us. Not no white man. Not no half-breed. Not no skin.

“Go ahead, George.”

The biggest Indian steps for me and swings a big fist from out far. I duck and rabbit-punch him just below the rib cage. The air huffs out of George and he staggers, then kicks at me hard with a gilt-toed cowboy boot. He’s quick for a big man, and the metal toe nicks my knee and I tumble. George is on top of me with his fists pummeling. I slip out, twist his arm up and back, and jam his face into the gravel. He roars.

I whip my legs around his abdomen and clamp my arms around his neck. I twist and squeeze at the same time, and after less than ten seconds of struggling, George collapses on his face.

I’m on my feet. Ready.

Bonaparte waves his gun in my direction and says, “Take your goddamn bike and get the fuck off this reservation.”

It’s a ten-mile walk to Massena, but I’m not sitting in this guy’s piss.

“You can keep the bike,” I say, turning to go. “It’s stolen.”

“Hey,” Bonaparte says. “You really a skin?”

“Call down to the Nation,” I say, stopping to look him in the eyes. “My mother was Martha St. Claire. They named me Running Deer.”

One side of Bonaparte’s mouth creeps up as if he’s either skeptical or amused.

“You want a job, Quick Buck?”

“Doing what?”

“What you just did,” he says, angling his face down at George, who is now sitting up and rubbing the back of his neck.

“I need a place to stay,” I say, “and I need to stay away from the white law.”

“The only law here is me,” Bonaparte says. “We’re a sovereign nation.”

He sticks the pistol back in his jeans, turns, and climbs back into the extended cab. I get in on the other side. George gets into the front seat with the other long-haired goon, whose name is Bert. Bert’s big belly is shaking and he’s having a hard time not smiling, even under George’s evil glare.

A grainy picture of Lester and one of me from twenty years ago runs the next day on page five of the Watertown Daily Times. It talks about the attempted escape, how Lester Cole was shot dead, and that they are looking for my body somewhere downstream. Mostly, it’s treated as downstate news, separate and apart from the North Country. Anyway, Bonaparte and his men don’t seem to read much and my hair is much longer now than in the picture. Even so, I take to wearing a Buffalo Bills cap with the brim pulled low.

The Akwesasne let me share a trailer with Bert, the big man with fat round cheeks and eyes squinted in a permanent smile. He has an old streamliner, a silver-skinned melon buried in a nest of high grass and weeds. It’s small but clean, with two tiny bedrooms and its own shower and toilet that drains into a septic tank that has to be pumped once a month. Bert leaves me alone for the most part, except when he’s trying to get me to participate in one of his two favorite pastimes: drinking Molson Golden and thumb wrestling.

One day I am reading a New York Times account about Judge Villay’s ruling for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on same-sex marriages when Bert walks in with a bottle of Molson Golden. He offers me one and I look up from my paper to say that I would. When Bert sees the paper, his face clouds over and he takes a step toward me.

“You know that man?”

There is a picture of the curly-headed little judge, Dean Villay, in the top corner of the page.

“Long time ago,” I say.

“Friend?”

“Enemy.”

“Good,” Bert says, his face softening a bit, but his voice still bitter. He goes to the refrigerator and returns with a bottle of beer for me.

“If I ever get the chance,” he says, flopping down in a worn-down La-Z-Boy recliner, “I’m gonna kill that man, judge or no judge.”

Bert tells me the story about his younger brother who lived and worked in Watertown and a trip the two of them took one weekend to visit some friends at the Onondaga Nation so they could watch the ABA bowling championships in Syracuse. They were at a South Side bar after the finals when his brother got into a scuffle with some locals. After the fight, the two of them decided to head north instead of spending the night with their friends on the reservation. They were back at his brother’s apartment in Watertown when his brother realized that somehow during the fight he had lost his knife, a nickel-plated switchblade.

The next day, the police showed up at the door to arrest his brother for the murder of the man he got into the fight with. Villay was prosecuting his brother on the theory that after the fight, he ambushed the dead man while he walked home, stabbing him fifteen times with the nickel-plated switchblade that was left at the scene.

Bert was his brother’s only alibi and chance to prove his innocence. At the trial, Villay had torn Bert to pieces, but the jury never did get to issue a verdict. The night after Bert’s testimony, his brother hanged himself in the Public Safety Building.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get that chance,” Bert says, getting up for two more bottles of beer, “but if I do…”

Bonaparte isn’t the chief, but he runs things: the casino, the big-stakes bingo parlors, and a smuggling operation that brings mostly cigarettes across the river from Canada, where the taxes are low enough to make the whole venture extremely profitable. Bonaparte also runs some marijuana to supply the Adirondacks, but it’s not a big market and I think he and his men smoke most of the profits.

I get paid every Friday in cash. We drive up to Bonaparte’s big white contemporary home overlooking the river, and he laughs as he pays me with hundred-dollar bills that he says might be real, but might not, since I don’t know the difference. Most of the men eat, drink, smoke, and gamble away their pay, but they don’t seem to resent me for saving my money and spending most of my free time reading under the bare bulb that hangs down over Bert’s couch. My name has evolved from Running Deer to Bonaparte’s Quick Buck to the men’s version of Quick Book.

There is an Akwesasne named Andre who is one of Bonaparte’s lieutenants, and after a while Bert and I are the ones who get sent with him to collect drug money. I’m not crazy about these runs since they take us off the reservation, but this isn’t a democracy and I don’t get a vote.

Andre is a young man, only twenty-five. He is smooth-skinned and handsome, with big round eyes, a straight narrow nose, and shiny black hair cut blunt just above his collar. He’s a half-breed like me, and with dark hair on his arms and legs, he looks more like a Caucasian than an Indian, but no one ever talks about it. Andre plays the guitar and his passion is his band, but it’s his viciousness that pays the bills. He’s the one Bonaparte sends out to collect from the white man.

The rumor is that Andre beat up his own father with a tire iron. It is fact that he’s done it to plenty of other white men, and it doesn’t take me long to realize that Andre likes his job, that he goes into a place eager for trouble.

One night, we catch up with a pot dealer in his cabin outside of Lake Placid. The guy has this high school cheerleader on his couch stripped down and ready to go when we bust in. He coughs up the cash he owes real fast, but Andre bops him on the head with the butt of his gun anyway and grabs the girl by the wrist and starts dragging her screaming into the bedroom.

I put my hand on Andre’s shoulder.

“Come on,” I say, and before I can blink, his Colt.45 is cocked and in my face.

“You don’t touch me, you fucking bookworm,” he says. “Not ever.”

“Then come on,” I say, not letting go.

The girl wrestles free and scampers into the bedroom, where she slams the door shut. Andre gives me a twisted smile.

“You just get your ass outside and wait for me to finish up in here,” he says, “or Bert’s gonna be cleaning your brains up off that wall with a paper towel.”

My eyes don’t waver and I say, “Go ahead. You’ll be saving me and a lot of other people a whole hell of a lot of trouble. We got what we came for.”

“Bang!” Andre yells, jerking the gun.

I just stare, and he begins to laugh and pats me on the back. To Bert he says, “You got a real loon here, you know that? I hope you lock loon-man in his room at night.”

We leave together with the money and Andre’s arm around my shoulder. After that, Bonaparte starts sending Bert and me out alone. Andre seems to behave himself whenever we’re together, but I still don’t trust him and I can’t help the feeling that one day, when my guard is down, he’s going to do me some harm.

29

THE SUN HAD ALREADY GONE DOWN. Outside, the muffled sound of taxi horns and truck brakes moved along Park Avenue. Lexis stood in the darkness. Only the vaguest shapes of the painting in front of her could be discerned now. When she first went into her trance there was enough light to see. She heard her name being shouted from somewhere deep inside their apartment. She set her brush down on the palette and placed both on the small table where she kept her paints.

She finished off the half-empty glass of chardonnay before shedding her smock and brushing off the front of her sweater. In the front hall, Frank was waiting, holding open her three-quarter-length mink coat.

“Frank,” she said. “It’s a football game.”

“Will you hurry up?” he said, shaking the coat.

He smelled strongly of Cool Water cologne, and the milky soft black leather of his coat matched the color of his belt and shoes. His silk shirt and wool slacks were also black. On his wrist was a big gold Rolex studded with diamonds. On his pinky was a three-karat gold diamond ring.

“Where’s your wedding band?” Frank said with a scowl, lifting her hand as she pushed it through the fur sleeve.

“Here,” she said, spreading her fingers so he could see the thin platinum band.

“Go get your good one,” he said, pointing his finger. The heavy slabs of his cheeks were turning red. She could see the top of his head as he looked down at her feet, and a small bald spot beneath that curly black-and-white hair.

“Frank,” she said. “It’s a football game.”

“It’s our championship game and people will be there, goddamn it,” he said, still looking down, his lips pressed tight after the words were out. “I don’t buy you that stuff to sit in a drawer.”

Lexis turned and hurried down the long hallway. She walked through the broad double doors and into her closet. At the far end was her jewelry drawer. She found the ring quickly, and without bothering to lock the drawer, she hurried out of the bedroom and back down the hall, stopping in the kitchen for a quick glass of wine.

“Got it,” she said, splaying her fingers for Frank as she walked into the rotunda entryway of their apartment.

Frank only huffed and opened the door for her. The white-gloved elevator man was waiting. Outside, their long black limo was idling at the curb. Frank wedged his massive frame into the backseat and the doorman handed Lexis in after him. The glass partition was up. That’s the way Frank liked it, and he picked up the phone to tell Duvall to hurry up because Lexis had made them late.

“Again,” he said, frowning at her.

“Pour me one of those, would you, Frank?” she said. “You’d think you were playing tonight.”

Frank poured two fingers of bourbon from the crystal decanter and handed her the Baccarat glass.

“It is like I am playing,” he said, pouring himself a glass. “If he didn’t remind me so goddamn much of myself, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way. But shit, every scout from Syracuse to Alabama is going to be there.”

“He seemed calm enough,” Lexis said, feeling the warmth of the liquor spread through her. The car turned onto the West Side Highway. Ships moving up the river appeared in the dark. Lights from New Jersey twinkled on the other side. Ahead, the George Washington Bridge spanned the night, illuminated by hundreds of blue-white lights and pulsing with the flow of red taillights.

“He hides it,” he said. “Like I do. He’s nervous, though. I can see it. It’s a guy thing.”

Frank picked up the phone. “Pass that guy, goddamn it, Duvall. I told you to hurry.”

The limo surged ahead, swerving in and out of the traffic. Someone blared his horn. Lexis held out her empty glass. Frank pulled down the corners of his mouth.

“Afraid I’ll embarrass you?” Lexis said, shaking the glass.

Frank puckered his lips and poured another. “Embarrass” was a hot button. A word she would fire at him from time to time that reminded them both of the day she caught him cheating dead to rights. The day he promised to kill her if she ever tried to leave him and take his son.

Frank loved to pretend to the world that all was well in the Steffano household. He hated to be reminded that it was all a façade. She couldn’t always push that button, but on a night like tonight, this close to game time and all the people, she knew she had the upper hand.

She smiled to herself and backed into the corner of the car, sipping from her drink with both hands. Frank took out his cell phone and called one of his friends, confirming a business meeting for later.

Theirs wasn’t the only limo pulling up to the big game at Riverdale Country, but it was the only one Lexis saw with chrome tire rims that matched the grille. The air was crisp and a breeze wafted up from the Hudson River and across Bertino Field. The bleachers were already filled and buzzing under the lights. They walked across the grass and along the track. The team was warming up. Frank walked through a small opening in the fence and right up to the edge of the playing field where the referees were conferring.

“Allen Francis,” he yelled, cupping his hands. “Go kick their goddamn ass, son!”

Allen looked at his father, then dipped his face mask down to his knee, intent on his stretching. Frank strode back toward the track pumping his clenched fist, his face a beaming smile.

A man in a brown suede coat with his arm around his wife walked past looking. Under his breath, he said, “What an asshole.”

“That Allen’s such a good kid,” the wife said, shaking her head.

“Nothing like the old man,” said the husband.

Lexis jammed her hands into her coat pockets and turned her head.

Frank returned with a flushed face and said, “He’s ready now.”

He led Lexis up to the top row and told some older people to squeeze down for the quarterback’s parents.

“Frank,” Lexis said.

Too loud, he said, “What? These snooty old farts wouldn’t even be in the championship if it weren’t for my boy. They can slide their skinny asses right down.”

Lexis clamped her lips tight and angled her face away. Frank began to scour the crowd for college scouts with his binoculars. Lexis was thinking that at the quarter break she could get a quick one back at the car.

“There,” Frank said, still loud, grabbing her arm and pointing. “That’s the guy from Syracuse. There’s the one from Penn State over there.”

Lexis glanced and nodded, then quickly focused on Allen as the team broke into small groups after their stretching. Allen began throwing passes down the field to his receivers, licking his fingers between throws.

“Look at that arm,” Frank said.

“You didn’t play quarterback, did you, Frank?” Lexis asked, feeling light-headed.

Frank glanced at her quickly, then put his binoculars back up to his face.

“I had a hell of an arm,” he said. “Just like him. But, you know, with my size they put me on the line. That’s the only thing he got from you. Those eyes and that frame.”

Lexis just nodded.

30

THE THIRD COLLECTION RUN for Bert and me on our own takes us to an old refurbished hotel on Raquette Lake by the name of Bright Side. I study a map before we leave and see that Lake Kora is close by and right on the way. I’m driving Bert’s old Ford Bronco, and he’s asleep with his face against the window when I pull off Route 28 and down Uncas Road. When I stop the truck, Bert scratches his head and rubs his eyes. It’s late afternoon and the sun is shining through a warm breeze, but I slip a flashlight from under the seat into the side pocket of my cargo pants.

“A little lost,” I say.

“That’s okay,” he says. “I gotta piss anyway.”

Bert climbs out and makes for the bushes. I walk down a dirt path that leads to the water, the smell of pine needles in my nose. Across the lake, under the shadows of some tall hemlock trees, I think I see the rooflines of the cottage that Lester told me about. Up the shore a ways is a weathered dock and a small skiff. I pick my way along the rocks on the water’s edge and check out the new camp that was apparently built over the spot where Durant’s lodge used to be. It’s a Tuesday and late in the season, so I’m not surprised there are no signs of any people.

I’m halfway across the small lake, rowing, when Bert appears on the shore.

“What the fuck you doing?” he asks with his hands cupped around his mouth.

“I think I know where we are,” I say. “I had a friend used to own that place over there. I’m just checking it out.”

Bert shrugs and rips a thin branch from a tree. He strips off the leaves and starts to whip the seed heads off the grass growing out of the bank. I know if I offer to thumb wrestle him when I make the turn back onto the main road, he won’t even remember this place.

The cottage is sagging and it smells damp in there under the shade of the trees. The front porch is coated with moss and even a few saplings struggle up out of the wood. The key is buried in a plastic bag at the base of a post. I dig it up with a flat rock and unlock the heavy front door. In the back of the kitchen is the pantry. I have a hard time swinging back the shelves. They seem to be fixed and, just as I was in the prison, I am gripped by the fear that I am the victim of a ruse. A film of sweat breaks out on my arms as I strain against the wood frame. Finally, their rusty hinges creak and give way and there behind the wall is the full-size door of a safe.

I spin the knob, marveling at how slick it moves after all these years. It clicks, and I spin the second one until it clicks too. I press my weight against the lever and the door swings open. I flick on the flashlight and walk down into the cool dry space that is lined with narrow wooden boxes stacked upright like books on a shelf. My heart starts to thump when I see the metal strongboxes on a shelf in the corner. When I open them, I suck in my breath.

Refracted light sparkles back at me in a million different hues. There are rubies and emeralds fat as walnuts, but mostly it’s diamonds set in rings, strung from necklaces, or mounted on precious crowns. I slip four of the biggest stones into my pockets.

“Holy shit,” I say and sit down on the edge of a shelf that is labeled Picasso.

I shine the light all around me. Crate after crate, lining the shelves, stacked three tiers high to the massive beams of the ceiling. If anything, Lester grossly underestimated the worth of his fortune.

I sit for several minutes until the light-headed feeling passes, then I go back across the lake to Bert.

“Find it?” he asks.

“What?”

He shrugs, tosses away his switch, and says, “Whatever you were looking for.”

“Yeah,” I say, adjusting the brim of my cap down over my face. “I found it.”

“My grandmother used to say when you found what you’re looking for, it’s time to start looking for something new,” Bert says.

The sun is going down when I pull over the old Ford Bronco at a place called Byrd’s Marina. An old guy rents us a party boat for the rest of the day and gives us a map of the lake. I catch him staring at our hair. Bert’s is tied in a long ponytail and mine sweeps down to my shoulders. I’m still not used to the way white men look at Indians and I feel that my lips are tight. He puts an X on the spot where Bright Side is and tells us to watch the buoys.

“There’s rocks all over this lake,” he says, forcing a smile. “Have fun.”

I keep my head down, but take the wheel. Bert clutches a life jacket to his chest, the same way he does every time we cross into Canada by boat. A slight breeze coming from the direction of the sunset ripples the water. Lights begin to go on in random cabins around the lakeshore, but most of the places stay dark.

Bright Side is a dinosaur. Big and old and missing a few pieces. The boathouse has been patched together with bald pressure-treated planks. The dock stretches out from a crumbling concrete pier that is cloaked in green moss. The hotel itself is freshly painted, but looks as if it has shifted from the effects of an earthquake. It’s easy to see why whoever runs it supplements their income by selling small bags of weed.

We are docked and halfway up the lawn when someone skips down the front porch steps and jogs up to us. His hands are raised in the air in the act of surrender. I peer through the gloom from beneath the brim of my hat and my heart jerks to a stop.

Grinning stupidly at us is a stooped and wrinkled version of Paul Russo. The bags under his red-rimmed eyes are darker now and his shoulders sag and curl forward at the same time. In an attempt to diminish his baldness, he has grown a long flap of dyed-black hair that he sweeps over the top of his head from one protruding ear to the other. His clothes look like they come from an L.L. Bean catalog.

“Hey, guys,” he says with false cheerfulness. The wheezy sound of his voice losing its way in that big nose removes any doubt that this is the man from my past life. “I’ve got some guests in the lobby. Okay if we talk right here?”

I can see Bert staring at me from the corner of my eye, but I keep my face angled down under the brim of the hat and my mouth shut. Bert starts to shift his feet.

Russo laughs nervously through his nose and says, “I know you guys are here for the money and I’ve got most of it. Here. It’s right here…”

He pulls a fat wad out of his pants pocket and begins peeling off bills, counting by twenty. When he’s finished, he holds the stack out to me.

My bones ache. That’s how bad I want to show him my face. To see his eyes go blank. To smell him wet his pants when he stares back at this ghost. To savor his muffled shrieks as we take him away, out to the middle of the lake where I can choke him to death with my bare hands before we tie the anchor to his neck and sink him forever. I know we could do it. It would be easy.

This is my first test.

31

WHEN I WAS BORN from the pipe in that prison wall, my second life began. It is a simple life with a single purpose. The lessons of my past life have stayed with me, but gone is the scattered focus. I am here to bloody my sword with the mess of everyone who destroyed Raymond White. I am no longer him and I am no longer Running Deer, or Quick Buck, or Quick Book. The joke is over.

I will take the name of the son of the man who gave me this second life. I will not be overeager or impulsive. I will have ice in my veins because I have already been dead. I will now become Seth Cole.

This is what I tell myself.

I take the money pinched between Russo’s fingers and turn to go. I promise myself the time will soon come.

“Tell Bonaparte the rest is coming,” he says after us, then we hear that nervous nasal laugh.

“We’re not gonna bust him up some?” Bert says to me in a low tone.

We are standing on the dock and I have the mooring line of the party boat in my hands. Its aluminum pontoons ring hollow as they bump against the wood. A yellow bulb in a broken fixture on the wall of the boathouse glows dully and insects swirl through its beams.

I tilt my hat back and look up at Bert so he can see my eyes.

“Do you want a job?” I ask.

Bert giggles and looks around.

“What do you mean?” he says. “I got a job.”

“You want another? You want to work for me?”

“You’re not gonna take that money?” he says, his eyebrows furrowing.

“I’ll pay it back,” I say. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll pay it back double by the end of the week. You want a job?”

“Workin’ for you?” he says. “Just you?”

“Just me.”

“Yeah,” Bert says, smiling big, the slits of his eyes nearly invisible above those big round cheeks. “I want that job.”

I reach out and squeeze his thick arm and we step onto the boat.

I drive all night to just outside New York City, where we flop down in a motel under the shadow of Bear Mountain. We sleep until midmorning, then go into Manhattan. Bert waits in the truck while I go into Zegna on Fifth Avenue and buy a dark blue suit, shoes, a shirt, and a tie with Russo’s money. I step out onto the sidewalk and see that Bert doesn’t recognize me without the Bills hat and frumpy clothes that I carry in a Zegna shopping bag.

I go around the corner to a hairstylist and pay for a hundred-dollar trim, pick up a fake Cartier watch on the street, then have Bert drive me to a 49th Street diamond shop. I deal my stones in the backroom with a Hasidic grandfather who gives me a briefcase half full of crisp hundreds banded together in narrow paper sleeves that read: $10,000.

The old man stares up only briefly from beneath his black felt hat and thick round glasses before he tells me where I can get some fake identification made up. The next stop is Western Union so I can wire Bonaparte notice of our respectful termination along with Russo’s money in full plus another equal amount as interest for the day’s use.

We eat bulging pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s Deli before circling the Bronco back to the garment district, where hopefully they’re finished making up my identification. For ten thousand dollars cash, I get a valid Mississippi driver’s license, a library card from the Oxford Public Library, and a Social Security card all bearing the name of Lester’s dead and long-forgotten son. I give the guy one of the packets of hundreds from the diamond merchant, then Bert and I leave the city.

We hire some strong young kids from a guy Bert knows at the Turning Stone Casino, the Oneida Indian Reservation casino just west of Utica. I rent a U-Haul with a twenty-four-foot van and buy three sets of handheld radios along with a six-horse Johnson outboard motor. It’s ten o’clock, pitch black, with the wind promising rain when we post two of the kids along Uncas Road with radios to keep a lookout.

It takes four hours to empty the cottage vault into the truck. During the last half-hour, it begins to rain. I give the kids each ten one-hundred-dollar bills and they grin all the way back to Turning Stone. After we drop them off, Bert and I get a start on our drive back to New York City, stopping when we get to a motel outside Hamilton and hurrying inside to get out of the spattering rain.

The next day, the sky is clear. We find a stout-looking storage facility in one of the sprawling new suburbs of Bergen County across the line into New Jersey. It takes me three days to sell a Cézanne for three hundred and fifty thousand. I know I’m being taken, but it’s just one painting, and I want to get out to Los Angeles to begin my transformation.

I use the two months it takes my face to recover from surgery to enhance the knowledge Lester has already given me about moving rare and missing works of art and jewels. I meet buyers from Japan, Germany, France, England, and Indonesia. I get some credit cards going and some brokerage accounts too.

I send Bert back to New Jersey to rent a modest house close to where my paintings are stored. I have a stop to make that I want to do alone. I get off the plane at Syracuse with my head held high, confident I won’t be recognized. My eyes will always be the same liquid brown as Raymond White’s, but the skin around them has been tightened. My chin is broader than his was and my nose is smaller and straighter.

To return before my surgery would have been stupid. The same thing goes for trying to contact my father. I’m sure Raymond White is still a wanted man and not enough time has gone by for the authorities not to be keeping an eye on the only person in the world who he was connected to.

As I approach the airport security doors, I look up and see the camera. I swallow my spit and quickly take my wallet from my suit coat pocket and look down at it, pretending fascination with its contents as I pass by the screening station and through the doors. I slide the wallet back inside my coat and look around at the crowd of people waiting for family and friends who have arrived on the same flight I was on. It’s a lonely feeling to see their eager faces and have their eyes slip right on past me.

I am downstairs and standing in line at the Hertz counter when I see two uniformed police walking toward me. Their faces are set in concrete and they are scanning the terminal. When the one with the brown crew cut meets my eyes, he taps his partner and they head my way. My heart jumps and my muscles go tense. I look around. There are enough people milling about that I think I could get out of the building, but where I’d go from there, I have no idea. I would have to jack someone’s car. It would end in a mad chase, probably with a bullet in my spinning head. Before I can act, they are here.

“Excuse me,” the crew cut says, “are you Seth Cole?”

“Yes.”

The cop smiles in a knowing way and says, “Thought so. You dropped your wallet upstairs.”

He is holding the wallet out to me. I reach out and take it. They stare at me with their smiles fading. When I finally sense the tension, I thank them, and thank them again. Their smiles return. They nod and they walk away.

I rent a Cadillac and drive out to my father’s. In the weeds that have grown up around the mailbox is a crooked Realtor’s sign. I grip the wheel and speed up the hill with rocks clattering off the undercarriage as I search the trees for the lines of the house. There are no vehicles in the driveway, and a blanket of leaves from last autumn has been piled up into the corners of the porch. A torn window screen wafts gently in the breeze.

It’s a warm day for October. Indian summer. My armpits sweat, and I sniff at the unfamiliar scent of mothballs in the stuffy air. I peer through the window and the spiderwebs. None of the furniture is familiar. Broken children’s toys are scattered about the dirty floor. My spirits are lifted though when the roar of a blast soars over the treetops from the direction of the quarry. I jump down off the steps and speed around the hill, the Cadillac trailing dust in the heat.

The old office trailer is sunken and buried in a sea of saplings and high grass, but down in the quarry I see men in lime green hard hats moving about. The old payloader lies with its back broken in a rusted heap beside the road, but I see fresh yellow equipment crawling like monstrous beetles up ahead. It’s obvious there is money being made here, and it’s not at all unlikely that my dad finally moved out of the woods.

I don’t see him, or Black Turtle, but there is a man with plans spread out over the hood of a Chevy pickup who is obviously in charge. Yellow foam plugs peek out of his ears. His hair and mustache are powdered with stone dust the way my father’s always were. He stares up at me from behind his safety goggles and frowns.

“This is a hard hat area,” he says. “Who are you?”

“I’m…” I say, frozen and sick at how close I came to calling myself Raymond White, “looking for Kevin White.”

“Who?” the foreman says, his powdered eyebrows knitted.

A gray bearded man in overalls and leathery skin comes around to my side of the pickup and says to the foreman, “The guy used to own this place. Remember? Guy who froze to death?”

“You got me,” the foreman says, tilting back his lime green hardhat and dabbing at his brow with the back of his hand.

My head feels hollow and I hear a sound like waterfalls. I’ve lost my sense of standing upright.

“Hey, fella. You okay?”

“You sure?” I ask. “Did you know him?”

“Not really,” the older man says. “Just remember it in the papers back in, I don’t know, 1990 or something, about him having his power cut off middle of January. Didn’t pay his bills, they said. Power company took hell for it anyway…

“I remember because guys used to kid each other when we first started working this place,” he says, nodding his head toward the rusty hulk on the road above us. “There was an old Indian who used to come around-”

“Black Turtle?”

“Yeah, I think that was it. He died too, not long after. Anyway, he said you could see that Kevin White guy’s ghost on that old payloader sometimes after dark. Well, that got them all going. You know how rock guys are.”

“Rocks in their heads, half of ’em,” the foreman says.

“They say it’s not a bad way to go,” the older man says. “Say you start feeling real warm and then you just kind of go to sleep.”

I hear him, but my eyes are on the payloader, broken and flaky. The air above the seat glimmers and I squint my eyes, looking for his shape. But it’s only the heat from the brown metal and the weeds, making tracks for the cooler regions of the blue sky. I wish my hatred had a vent like that.

My father is gone. Even his ghost.

32

THE SNOW IN UPSTATE NEW YORK is piled high by the time I return. It’s taken me that long to turn Lester’s stash into a massive portfolio of cash and stocks and bonds. Bert is driving me in a black Lincoln Navigator and he has to use four-wheel drive from the minute we leave the Thruway. The slush from the morning’s snow is four inches deep. At my feet is a suitcase with a million dollars in cash as well as a street-bought Smith amp; Wesson.357 with a silencer attached.

Bert’s hair is cut short now and he wears an expensive tan shearling coat that makes him look even bigger than he already is. I wear a black leather trench coat, even though it’s not as warm. It matches my driving gloves and looks good with the full black beard and mustache I’ve grown. My hair is still long, but slicked back tight to my head. Paul Russo will be the first person I’ll meet up close, in the light, who really knew Raymond White.

Byrd’s, the same place that rented us the party boat last summer, rents snowmobiles in the winter. Bert has called ahead, and two red-and-black machines that look like they came out of Star Wars are waiting for us in the middle of the plowed lot. The sky is bitter and bleached and the sun shows through in only a pale yellow wash. The same old guy comes outside with his smoky breath trailing him. He gives us helmets to use, and I see him staring at the Ferragamo shoes on my feet.

“You going like that?” he says, nodding toward the shoes and the pant legs of my suit.

I don’t know what he’s looking at. He’s got a Valvoline cap on his head and his nose and ears are red like beets from the cold. I ease the helmet down over my slick hair and get onto the snowmobile. Bert loads up two overnight bags and my briefcase on the back of his snowmobile, then shells out the cash for the machines. I rev my engine until he’s mounted up, then we shoot across the street and out onto the frozen lake.

In the open stretches, I grip the accelerator tight. The machine shakes and swerves, floating, almost out of control. Snow crystals whip up under the edge of my helmet. I look down at the speedometer. The needle pushes past eighty and the sensation of speed gets my heart going.

There are other snow machines lined up on the bank outside the old hotel. Heavy gray smoke pours out from three different chimneys. Inside, it’s warm and I can smell cinnamon and burning wood. Russo greets us with a clap of his hands. He wears a green sweater with a line of white reindeers knit across the front. His pale neck sticks out of the collar like a broomstick. The veins in his big nose and even his protruding ears are angry from alcohol and his breath smells like cheap scotch.

“Gentlemen,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “we’ve been expecting you. Good ride over?”

When he sees my Ferragamo shoes crusted with snow, he raises his eyebrows, chuckles, and says, “There’s a fire around the corner. If you want to give me your credit card, I’ll get you checked in.”

Bert takes four one-hundred-dollar-bills out of his wallet and extends them toward Russo. Russo looks up at him and his eyes strain for a moment as if he might have seen Bert before.

“We’ll pay cash,” I say.

“That’s not a problem,” Russo says, returning his eyes to me. He blinks under my gaze. “How should I fill out your registration?”

I flip out a business card between my first two fingers and extend it toward him. He takes the card and examines it.

“Ah, Mr. Bell, an attorney,” he says with a nod before angling his head toward Bert. “And your friend?”

“Put them both under my name,” I say. “I want to talk to you after dinner. About some business.”

Russo’s eyebrows pop up and he touches his fingertips to the knit reindeers.

“In private,” I say. I hand my coat and gloves to Bert, then I turn and walk into the great room whose wainscot walls are shimmering in the firelight.

There is a golden oak bar in the corner opposite the fireplace and a pale scrawny woman stares out at me from behind it with big dark eyes. Her hair is the most animated thing about her, long and frizzy. Dark, but shot through with strands of gray. The other guests, snowmobilers in jeans and sweaters, gaze up at my suit, but return their attention to their drinks as soon as they meet my eyes. I have a drink at the bar, answering the hostess-who is also Russo’s wife-in short sentences until she excuses herself to see to the dinner.

Bert and I eat our overcooked pot roast in silence. The dining room overlooks the frozen lake. In the winter moonlight, we can see it and the naked mountains beyond through the frosted panes of glass. The other guests begin their dinner in a drunken uproar, but by the time Mrs. Russo brings around wedges of store-bought pecan pie, our own solemnity seems to have spread. The loudest sound is the silverware striking the old ceramic plates.

Russo comes out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on an apron and casting a worried glance our way before disappearing in the direction of the great room. Bert presses his lips tight and wags his head and we get up and follow our host. Halfway down the hall, there is an open door and we step into a snug office where a fire crackles and Russo sits at a round oak table smoking a Marlboro Light.

“If you don’t mind,” Bert rumbles, “Mr. Bell doesn’t like smoke.”

I stare at Russo until he stabs out the cigarette in a ceramic ashtray, blows the smoke out of the corner of his mouth, and says, “No problem.”

I set my briefcase down on the table and sit opposite Russo. Bert quietly closes the door and remains standing there.

“Does… he want to sit down?” Russo asks.

“We’re fine,” I say, flipping the latches and opening the case so that the cover prevents Russo from seeing the money and the gun. “Mr. Russo, I am here for a client who might want to give you some money.”

“Money? For what?” he says, his eyes darting to Bert and back.

“For some information,” I say. “About a man named Raymond White.”

The blood drains from Russo’s face. In a whisper, he says, “Raymond was a friend.”

“That’s what I understand,” I say. “My client wants to know more about what happened to Mr. White. They were in prison together and Mr. White saved my client’s life. Unfortunately, Mr. White was killed during an attempted escape.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yes,” I say.

“I didn’t hear that,” he says, with his brow furrowed. “I heard they thought he was, but I never heard that he was.”

“And my client would like to do something for the people closest to Mr. White,” I say. “Mr. White mentioned you several times… as a friend.”

“Oh, I was,” he says. “Raymond…”

He shakes his head. “What they did to him… goddamn.”

“But you knew he was framed,” I say. “You knew what Frank Steffano and Bob Rangle did.”

“He told you?”

“He told my client.”

Russo puts his round flat face into his hand.

“I should have said something,” he says. “I know. I was drunk back then. Pretty much all the time. I didn’t really think they meant it, and when I…”

Russo looks up at me with red eyes and says, “I’m telling you the truth. I was scared. I still am. Of them.”

“What about his father?” I ask. “Weren’t you supposed to help him? I read that he died. They turned off his power. My client was told that you were supposed to help Raymond’s father.”

“Oh, I did,” he says. “Are you kidding? At least I tried. That old… he wasn’t easy. He didn’t want my help or anyone’s.”

“How do you know that?”

“There was a girl,” he says. “Lexis. I don’t know how much you know.”

“Go on.”

“She was Raymond’s girl. Then, after everything, she married Frank.”

“The man who-”

“Yeah, well, she had a baby boy,” he says. “I just know she came to me with money. A lot. She asked me to give it to the father, but that old crab-ass…

“He wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t take anything from anyone. Raymond, he was a stubborn son of a bitch and it wasn’t hard to see where it came from.”

“Why are you still afraid?” I ask.

“Do you know who those guys are?” he says, tilting his head just a touch.

“A cop who did well in business,” I say. “A politician who cashed in on Wall Street.”

“Ha, well in business?” he says. “That Frank, he cut people’s nuts off who got in his way. Got involved with the big boys down in Atlantic City. Owns some casinos and hotels and shit.

“Well? He’s gotta be worth a hundred million and Rangle’s probably worth even more. Some fund manager or something and he didn’t take any prisoners either, I can promise you that. Two very big men. Dangerous to your health, even a fancy lawyer like you.”

“And things haven’t gone that good for you,” I say, looking around.

“Yeah, well, it’s not so bad. Little cold in the winter.”

I look into the blaze of the fire and nod slowly.

“Aw, who the fuck am I kidding?” he says. “It sucks. If I don’t have like a convention of snowmobilers every day for the next two months, the fucking bank will probably take this shithole. Maybe do me a favor. I’m thinking about starting a rumor of a ghost. Sometimes that draws people in.”

“You deal drugs too,” I say, locking my eyes onto his.

“Hey, who the fuck are you, coming in here?” he says sitting straight and scowling down his nose, but his eyes flicker nervously up at Bert.

“There was another man,” I say, ignoring the flare in his nostrils. “His name was Dan Parsons.”

“Yeah, makes me look like King fucking Solomon,” he says, fidgeting with his pack of Marlboros.

“Meaning?”

“Got kicked out of his own fucking law firm,” Russo says. “Big fucking deal. Parsons amp; Trout. Dan Parsons this. Dan Parsons that. Oh, they paid him, but they wanted him out. His own firm. Didn’t do a damn thing but file appeals for Raymond White. Went a little batshit, I guess. Then he took every fuckin’ penny he had and got into that dotcom bullshit. Made a fuckin’ fortune, then lost a fuckin’ fortune. Uncle Sam-as in IRS-didn’t get their cut on the upside and last I heard the barbarians were at the gate.”

My eyes are drawn back to the fire. One log sticks up at an angle. On its tip is a fiery brand pulsing orange. I watch until the wood pops and the ember falls and disappears into the ashes beneath the grate.

“How much would it take to get this place into good shape?” I ask. “So you could stop selling pot to kids?”

“Kids? You should see the shit these little bastards do.”

I stare at him without comment.

“Well,” he says, crossing his arms and frowning all the way into the area where his chin mixes with his neck, “I don’t know. If I had, like… two hundred thousand. That would put me in pretty good shape. That’d pay down my loan to where I could get down to Daytona for a week in February or something. Shit, the fucking winter here never ends.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars?” I say.

“Well, you asked.”

I reach into the briefcase and push the gun aside. I take twenty stacks of hundreds out and set them on the table.

“A gift,” I say, “from Seth Cole. In memory of Raymond White… To turn your life around.”

“Hey,” he says, reaching for the money. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t kid. It’s yours.”

“Do I have to claim it?”

A smile creeps onto my lips and I say, “You can do whatever you want with it. It’s yours. No one has to know where it came from.”

“Hey,” he says, peering around the cover of the case as I close it. “How much is in there?”

“There was a million,” I say, rising from my seat and snapping shut the latches on the case.

“What if I said I needed a million?”

“Then I would have given it to you,” I say. “But I was authorized to give you only what you needed to get your business on track so you could live an honest, decent life. Now hopefully you’ll do that.”

“I could use it all,” he says, his voice rising with the rest of him. “Really. I just didn’t want to be greedy, but I need it.”

“If you didn’t,” I say, “then don’t.”

“What?”

“Be greedy,” I say, and leave.

33

WHEN I AWAKE, it’s still dark. I shower and change. I open the door and Bert-playing guard dog-falls backward into the room. He wakes up in a sputter, grabbing for the handle of the Glock in the waist of his pants.

“It’s me,” I say. “Let’s go.”

The boards creak beneath our feet, otherwise there’s no sound. The wind is gone. Outside, it’s frigid. There is a low ceiling of gray clouds that are lit by the glow in the east. We cross the frozen lake and leave our machines in Byrd’s empty lot, and I tell Bert to drive us to Syracuse. After almost three hours, we stop at Cosmo’s diner near the university for breakfast and I order a broccoli and cheese omelet. It is a taste from another life.

Bert asks if he can get a burger this early and the waitress with an earring in her nose shrugs and says sure. I lean out of our booth and ask the woman at the cash register for a phone book. She smiles and takes it out from under the counter.

Bert hops up to get the book, but when he sits down, he puts it in his lap instead of giving it to me and says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You got all that money now,” he says, “but you don’t do nothing that’s fun.”

“What’s the question?”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Maybe when I finish doing what I have to do,” I say, “I’ll go to Disney World.”

“My grandmother used to say that even a big chief needs to laugh,” he says, “or else it makes his spirit small.”

He’s wearing a crooked smile and extends his beefy fist across the tabletop and says, “Want to wrestle?”

I take his hand and bait him with a chance for a quick win, but I slip out at the last possible second, pin his thumb down, and quickly count to three.

“Best out of three,” he says. “You never win a war with just one battle, and I got the phone book.”

He beats me two in a row, mashing my thumb and rumbling with laughter, then slaps the phone book down on the table.

“Thanks,” I say, rubbing the joint between my first and second digits and opening the book. “My spirit’s now soaring.”

Dan Parsons is listed at a new address in Skaneateles. Elizabeth Street. Nice neighborhood, but nothing like his white Georgian mansion on the lake. There is also an office listed on Fennell Street. After breakfast, we drive out to Skaneateles, where the trees in the village are frosted and the homes and buildings wear fresh caps of snow.

Dan’s office is in the back of the old Trabold’s Garage. Someone has renovated the old stone blacksmith shop and put a restaurant on the ground floor. We park in the municipal lot behind all the stores and buildings. There is a bent old man in a hooded parka and heavy snow boots shoveling the stairs that lead up to the offices.

When we reach the bottom, I notice a tear in the corduroy pants stuck into the top of the man’s boots and say, “Excuse me, we’re looking for Dan Parsons’s office.”

The man stops his shoveling and turns. It’s Dan. His face is pink, either from the cold or embarrassment. Most of his curly white hair is gone. His nose is even more pronounced. His jowls hang limp from his jawbone and the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes sag with disappointment. His smile is gone.

“I’m him,” he says, glancing at Bert and then turning his attention back to the shovel. “If you wait a minute, I’ll finish this. What do you got? A house closing?”

I study the profile of his face for the joke. This is a man who brokered billion-dollar deals. A good house closing can net you five hundred.

“No,” I say. “I need to talk with you about the IRS.”

His head snaps up and his eyes seem to droop even more. He presses his lips tight.

“You don’t look like Feds,” he says.

“We’re not,” I say. “I’m here to help.”

“Well, I don’t have any money to pay you,” he says, “so unless you’re with Legal Aid, you might as well not waste your time. When’s the last time you saw a lawyer who had to shovel the steps to help pay his rent?”

“Can we go inside?” I ask.

Dan shakes his head and slowly mounts the stairs. He grips the railing tight through his ski gloves to steady himself. He kicks some of the snow off the landing and we go inside and down a narrow hall. His office isn’t much more than a closet with a desk and a phone. There are two chairs opposite the desk that are wedged between it and the wall. On the wall are pictures of Dan and his wife-fading, but still pretty and trim-and their son, who is now a good-looking young man.

After Dan hangs his parka on the back of the door, I see that his husky shoulders have gone round and his potbelly has become a barrel of flab. He wears an old herringbone blazer that’s too tight around his middle, and beneath the wrapping of his plaid scarf is a yellow paisley tie.

He sits down with a sigh and motions to the chairs. Bert and I sit.

“What do you want?” Dan asks.

“I said I’m here to help.”

“How’s that?”

“How much do you owe the government?” I ask.

Dan’s knuckles are swollen and bent. He rests his forearms on the edge of his desk and raps the knuckles gently on the edges of his blotter. Outside I hear the muted banging of a garbage truck emptying a Dumpster.

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, taking a card from my pocket and pushing it across the desk. “My name is Arthur Bell. I’m an attorney and I have a client who wants to help you.”

“Bob Rangle?” he says.

I have to swallow before I say, “Rangle?”

Dan shrugs and says, “No, I didn’t figure. He was the congressman. I put that son of a bitch in office and I went down to New York a few weeks ago to ask for a loan. He runs a fund now.”

“No,” I say, “I have nothing to do with him. My client is Seth Cole. He was friends with Raymond White.”

“What?” he says. His eyes narrow.

“My client was in prison for a time,” I say. “Raymond White saved his life. When he heard that Raymond died, my client wanted to do something for the people who were good to him.”

“Raymond died?”

I nod.

Dan’s eyes lose their focus and he looks down at his hands. They are clenched tight like his teeth.

“No one told me,” he says, as if speaking to himself.

“No,” I say, “they probably wouldn’t. You weren’t actually related to him.”

His eyes snap up at me. He scowls and says, “He was-”

Then he drops his eyes again and says, “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“My client wants to pay off your debt,” I say. “He thinks Raymond would have wanted that.”

“I’ve got this dream, you know,” Dan says as he massages the fingers of one hand with the other. “I got this dream of starting it over. Parsons amp; Parsons. My son’s gonna be a lawyer, you know?

“Mister,” Dan says, looking up again. “I appreciate your coming here. But I owe them thirteen million dollars… I’ve got an insurance policy for ten, and to be honest I’ve been thinking about taking a fast drive, maybe hitting a bridge. Problem is, my wife would still owe the bastards three more and you better believe these people don’t negotiate.”

“Mr. Parsons,” I say. “Seth Cole has authorized me to pay the IRS in full.”

“Hey. Get the hell out of here,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. He rises up out of his chair and draws himself up nearly straight. “Who sent you?”

“Believe me,” I say. “Thirteen million dollars to Seth Cole isn’t what it is to most people. Who’s your bank?”

He stares at me for a long time. I hold his gaze, fearful that he will see me.

Finally, he wags his head and says, “Next door.”

“Let’s go,” I say. “You’ll see.”

Together we go down the back stairs and into the single-story bank next door. I ask for a wire number and I call Bob Mancini, my contact at Goldman Sachs. The girls at the bank are twittering behind the counter and the manager comes out from his office as well.

“What is it?” Dan asks.

The manager is shaking his head. He looks up with a wide grin.

“Mr. Parsons,” he says. “Goldman Sachs just put thirteen million dollars in your account.”

“Can they take it back?” he asks, shooting a glance at me.

“No sir,” the manager says. “It’s there. No one can take it but you.”

Dan Parsons utters a cry. He grabs my hand and gives it a quick strong shake, then he races out of the building. Bert and I walk outside. I stand on the sidewalk and watch Dan make his way up the street in a ragged jog while Bert gets the truck. When Bert picks me up, I have him drive to Elizabeth Street.

There is a big bay window in the front of the small saltbox house where Dan lives. We stop out front and I roll down my window. Through the bay window, I can see him hugging his wife and swinging her around. I can see the sparkle of tears running down his face. His mouth is open in wild laughter that I don’t have to hear.

I roll up the window and stare straight ahead at the snow-covered street that is lined with four-foot banks.

“Back to New York, Bert,” I say.

“What about Mickey Mouse and Space Mountain and all that?”

“No,” I say. “You liked when I played God, right? Reward a loyal friend? A kind old man? Make his dreams come true? That’s like Disney World. You take the ride, get a little scared, then you get off and have some cotton candy or a turkey drumstick. Take your picture with Snow White. But God’s got a night job too. God is a judge. Yeah, he rewards the good guy, right? Supposedly… But what about the bad?

“God makes a call. Good, you get Disney World. Bad?”

I look Bert in the eye and say, “You go to hell.”