Politika

TWENTY-ONE

Snow fell gently on the trees and monuments that surrounded him. Under any other circumstance, he’d have thought the scene was beautiful. Rosetta would have liked it, too, if she could have seen it from inside a room with a good heating system. She got cold too easily to appreciate winter landscapes under any other conditions. He’d had them put blankets with her, in her coffin. He hated the thought that she would never be warm again. But then, he hated everything about this.

Police Commissioner Bill Harrison stood on the edge of an open grave. He knew he wasn’t alone. This scene would be enacted hundreds of times as New York buried her dead. But that was no comfort. It just made it worse somehow.

How was he supposed to go on, without Rosetta? She was his heart, his center, his reason for existence. When the job got to be too much for him, when the things he saw every day overwhelmed him, he would go home to this woman and she would make it all right again. She couldn’t change what he saw. But every moment he was with her, he knew what he was fighting to protect. She represented all that was good in the world.

And now he was putting her in a hole in the ground. They’d be bringing the coffin here any minute.

The pain was devastating.

For the millionth time, he asked himself why he’d let her go with him to Times Square. He could have said no, claimed that there weren’t enough seats to spare for real working people after the politicians took their cut. He’d had that option, in his infinite wisdom but he had decided Rosie’s certain pleasure outweighed the risks.

It was something he found hard to forgive.

His daughter stood next to him. Her tears were acid in his wounds. She could have died, too, all because he hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t stopped it before it started. As it was, her nightmares were as haunted by that moment as his were. She’d been scarred, this child he cherished — on his watch, at his side, when he should have been able to prevent it.

Why hadn’t he?

It was no good blaming it on the mayor. The man was dead. He’d paid the ultimate price, if his relentless politicking had made the target too good to pass up.

It was no good blaming his men. The vender’s cart had looked fine to him in the split second he’d seen it. How could they have found anything? The earliest reports from the blast site indicated that this was a slick, professional job, invisible to even the most careful inspection.

The pallbearers, most of them police officers in full dress uniform, brought the coffin, slowly placed it onto the straps that would lower Rosie into the ground, gone from him until the next life claimed him, too.

His heart nearly burst from the pain of it.

He reached out and took his daughter’s hand, squeezed it.

The news cameras hummed and clicked.

Even their grief was a public matter.

The coffin was slowly lowered. When it reached its final resting place, the thud of the wood hitting the dirt was the loneliest, most final sound he had ever heard in his life.

Like the noise of the blast, it would haunt him, too.

The preacher intoned words of comfort. The sounds washed over him, useless now, but perhaps later, alone, as he sifted through his memories of this day, he would find a small measure of the peace they were intended to impart.

Now he dropped the bouquet of roses he’d brought with him onto the casket. Bright splashes of scarlet against the polished wood surface, they were slowly, slowly covered by the white flecks of snow, still falling gently. Like his heart, the blossoms were soon sheathed in ice.

Tasheya’s forget-me-nots joined his offering. As the service wound to a close, he watched them, too, fade under the onslaught from heaven.

He had lost his Rosie. The emptiness inside him was so vast he wasn’t sure how his body could contain it. But he had something to do that kept the grief that threatened to swamp him at bay.

He was the police commissioner of the city of New York. It was his job to find out who had done this. The day he brought those people to justice, his healing could begin.