Tabloid City

NIGHT

12:02 a.m. Sam Briscoe. City room of New York World, 100 West Street.

HERE COMES BRISCOE, seventy-one years old, five foot eleven, 182 pounds. He turns a corner into the city room of the last afternoon newspaper in New York. He is the editor in chief. His overcoat is arched across his left shoulder and he is carrying his jacket. The cuffs of his shirtsleeves are crisply folded twice, below the elbows. His necktie hangs loose, without a knot, making two vertical dark red slashes inside the vertical bands of his bright red suspenders. He moves swiftly, from long habit, as if eluding ambush by reporters and editors who might approach him for raises, days off, or loans. Or these days, for news about buyouts and layoffs. His crew cut is steel gray, his lean furrowed face tightly shaven. The dark pouches under both eyes show that he has worked for many years at night. In the vast, almost empty room, there are twenty-six desks, four reporters, and three copy editors, all occasionally glancing at four mounted television screens tuned to New York 1 and CNN, Fox and MSNBC. A fifth screen is dark. Briscoe doesn’t look at any of them. He goes directly to a man named Matt Logan, seated at the news desk in the center of the long wide room. Other desks butt against each other, forming a kind of stockade. All are empty.

— We got the wood yet? Briscoe says.

Logan smiles and runs a hand through his thick white hair and gazes past Briscoe at the desks. Briscoe thinks: We live in the capital of emptiness. Logan is fifty-one and in some way the thick white hair makes him seem younger. Crowning the shaven face, the ungullied skin.

— The kid’s still writing, Logan says, gesturing to his left. Maybe you could remind him this is a daily.

Briscoe grunts at one of the oldest lines in the newspaper business. Thinking: It’s still true. He sees the Fonseca kid squinting at his computer screen, seeing nothing else, only the people he has interviewed hours earlier, far from the city room. Briscoe leans over Logan’s shoulder, glances up at the big green four-sided copper clock hanging from the ceiling, a clock salvaged from Pulitzer’s World. Thinking: Still plenty of time.

— What else do we have? he says, dropping coat and jacket over a blank computer monitor. The early editions of the morning papers are scattered on the desk, the Times, the Post, the News. Logan clicks on a page that shows four possible versions of the wood. The page 1 headline. Briscoe thinks: I’m so old. He remembers seeing page 1 letters actually cut from wood in the old composing room of the Post, six blocks down West Street. The muffled sound of Linotype machines hammering away from the composing room. Most of the operators deaf-mutes, signaling to each other by hand. Paul Sann trimming stories on the stone counters beyond the Linotype machines, his editor’s hands using calipers to pluck lines of lead from the bottom of stories. Everybody smoking, crushing butts on the floor. Hot type. Shouts. Sandwiches from the Greek’s. All gone forever.

One possible front page says JOBS RISING? With a subhead: Mayor Says Future Bright. New unemployment numbers are due in the morning. The AP story will lead what they now call the Doom Page, always page 5, the hard stuff about the financial mess, with a sidebar trying to make the recession human. Names. Faces. Losers. Pain. If they have jobs, it’s a recession. If they don’t have jobs, it’s a depression. Foreign news is on page 8, usually from AP and Reuters, no overseas bureaus anymore, plus features bought from a new Web service that has correspondents all over the planet. OBAMA MOURNS AFGHAN DEATHS. Plus a thumbsucker out of the one-man Washington bureau. The problem is that most readers don’t give a rat’s ass. Not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan, only about whether they can still feed their kids next week, or the week after. Two more suicide bombings in Baghdad. Another bombing in Pakistan. A girls’ school. More stats counting the dead, without names or faces. It has been months since foreign news was used as wood.

— What else ya got? Briscoe says.

Logan picks up a ringing phone, whispers to the caller, but keeps clicking on the various page 1 displays. BLOOMIE’S LAMENT. All about more city job cuts, the need for a fair share of the stimulus package, the crackdown on parking permits for well-connected pols, the assholes in Albany grabbing what is not nailed down. And closing libraries while heading for the limousines. News should be new. This is all old. With this stuff, Briscoe thinks, we might even achieve negative sales. Logan gets off the phone.

— Where was I? he says. Oh, yeah. The Fonseca kid got the mother. Her son was admitted to Stuyvesant two years ago. Now he’s shot dead in the street.

Logan makes some moves on the keyboard, and then Briscoe sees six photographs of a distraught thin black woman pointing at a framed letter.

— That’s the mother, Logan says. The letter is from Stuyvesant. When he was accepted.

She is staring into the camera, her face a ruin, holding a framed photograph of a smiling boy in a blazer. The woman is about thirty-five, going on eighty.

— The quality sucks, Briscoe says.

— Yeah. We don’t have a photographer tonight so Fonseca shot it with a cell phone. Anyway, that’s the vic in the other picture. The dead kid. In his first year in Stuyvesant, after winning a medal for debating.

Logan points to a young man’s body on a sidewalk, facedown, chalk marks around him.

— Then he’s dead, late this afternoon. Shot five times.

— Why?

— The usual shit, Logan says. Drugs. Or someone got dissed. So say the cops. Who ever really knows? But there’s a Doom Page angle too. The mother lost her job six weeks ago. They’re gonna throw her out of the house, and the cops think maybe the kid started dealing drugs to save the house.

— Put that in the lede. If it’s true.

— I already told Fonseca.

Briscoe glances out the window, where he can see Stuyvesant High School in the distance, across the footbridge over the West Side Highway toward the river’s edge. The school where all the bright kids go, a lot of them now Asian. The lights are dim, the kids slumbering at home before Friday’s classes, the school corridors inhabited by lonesome watchmen. Briscoe sees the running lights on a solitary black tanker too, moving slowly north to Albany on the dark river. Delivering pork to the pols, maybe. Which way to the river Styx, Mac? Most of the river is dead now. That pilot who landed his plane in the river? Ten years ago, he’d have smashed into a freighter. Now it’s nothing but sailboats and ferries. Briscoe exhales slightly. Another dead kid. How many had there been since he started in 1960? Five thousand dead New York kids? Twenty thousand? More than have died in Iraq, for sure. Maybe even more than Nam.

— Anyway, it could be wood, Logan says. Depends on the story.

— It always does, Briscoe says, in a hopeless tone.

He turns and sees Helen Loomis three empty desks to the right of Fonseca. Briscoe has known her since each of them had brown hair. She was shy then too, and what some fools called homely, long-jawed, gray-eyed, bony. Down at the old Post. She sat each night with her back to the river, smoking and typing, taking notes from street reporters and interviewing cops on the phone, her dark pageboy bobbing in a private rhythm. She was flanked by good people, true professionals, but most of them knew that she was the best goddamned rewrite man any of them would ever know. Later, the language cops tried to change the title to “rewrite person.” It didn’t work. The rhythm was wrong. Too many syllables. Even Helen Loomis described herself, with an ironic smile, as a rewrite man. In her crisp, quick way, she could write anything in the newspaper. Finding the music in the pile of notes from beat reporters, the clips from the morning papers, files from the Associated Press, and yellowing clips from the library. She was the master of the second-day lede, so essential to an afternoon paper, and she often found it buried in the thirteenth graf of the Times story, or in the jump of the tale in the Herald-Tribune. Or, more often, in her own sense of the story itself. When her questions were not answered, and the reporter had gone home, she made some calls herself. To a cop. A relative. Someone in a corner bar she found in the phone company’s immense old street index. Her shyness never stopped her, even when she was calling someone at ten after three in the morning. She was always courteous, she always apologized for the hour, but she worked for an afternoon paper. That is, she worked according to a clock that began ticking at midnight and finished at eight. Now, fuck, everything has changed, even the hours.

Briscoe waves at Helen Loomis. She doesn’t see him. Doesn’t respond. She is wearing small reading glasses, her body tense behind the computer, peering at the screen, nibbling at the inside of her right cheek. Her helmet of white hair doesn’t move in the old bobbing style. Briscoe long ago realized that she hadn’t looked loose, or in rhythm, since cigarettes were banned from all the newsrooms in the city. But she comes in every night, always on time, always carrying a black coffee and a cheese Danish, always ready to work. And once an hour, she moves to get her coat and goes down to smoke in the howling river winds.

In addition to a few breaking stories, she writes the “Police Blotter” now, made up of two- or three-graf stories of crimes and misdemeanors that don’t deserve to be blown out. Cheap murders, usually at bad addresses. Assaults. Rapes. In the city room, they used to call the column “Vics and Dicks.” A young female reporter out of Columbia objected, and it was renamed “Bad Guys” for the reporters and “Police Blotter” for the readers. There was, alas, no music in these tales, no way for Helen Loomis to turn them into haiku or a blues riff. Most of the dickheads now were robbing techno-junk: cell phones, iPods, digital recorders. A digital camera was a big score.

Briscoe knows in his heart that it wasn’t the end of cigarettes that took the music out of her. Not really. With Helen, it was the final triumph of loneliness. Young Helen Loomis was only one of many great reporters he’d known who were drawn to the rowdy newspaper trade because of the aching solitude in their own lives. Their own pain was dwarfed by the more drastic pain of strangers. As bad as your own life might be, there were all kinds of people out there in the city who were in much worse shape. Their stories filled the newspapers. And for a few hours, the lives of reporters and rewrite men. Until the clock ticked past all deadlines. And the profane, laughing city room emptied. Helen Loomis was now a straggler at a late-night party that was already over. When the deadline was gone, she had nothing left but cigarettes and loneliness. The music of her prose was gone forever.

Or, hell, he thinks: Maybe it was just the cigarettes.

Now he glances around the room again.

— Let me know when the Fonseca kid finishes, he says to Logan.

And carrying coat and jacket he walks to his dark office at the far end of the city room. Thinking: The kid, that Bobby Fonseca, has loneliness in his eyes too. Except when he’s writing. Briscoe unlocks the door. Flicks on the lights. Hangs his garments on a gnarled coat tree he carried away when P. J. Clarke’s was remodeled. On his desk, there is a wire rack holding folders. One is marked “Newspapers.” Full of dismal news clippings or printouts about shrinking circulation and shrinking ad revenues and shrinking page sizes and rumors of extinction. Layoffs, buyouts, furloughs. The papers themselves were a subset of the main story of Doom, everything that had followed the obliteration of Lehman Brothers that day in September 2008. In the newspapers, everybody was hurting. The Times. The Tribune Company. McClatchy. The Boston Globe. Gannett. The San Francisco Chronicle. Briscoe didn’t know if anybody really cared, except the people who made the newspapers, the people he loved more than any others. In his mind’s eye he sees the three young techies working on the World website in their small uptown office. Culling stories from the newspaper, from the AP and Reuters. Lots of raving blog messages from readers. This just in. Breaking news. Nobody in the city room bothered to read the site. Not even Briscoe. But one man certainly did. The man they all called the F.P., the Fucking Publisher.

Another folder is marked “Love.” Filled with absurdity and betrayals and homicides. Wives killing husbands. Husbands killing wives. Mistresses killing men and men killing lovers. The endless ancient tale. Almost always at night. After two in the morning. When Cain whacked Abel, it was almost surely two-thirty in the morning. Just as surely, it had to involve a dame. If I live long enough, Briscoe thinks, I’ll write a book about it. At home, he has two entire file cabinets heavy with folders that are also marked “Love.” Enough for twenty books. If I live, he thinks, I might even write one of them.

Romantic love isn’t part of the deal much anymore. Now the clips are full of assholes coming home loaded, going for the gun, killing the wife, the three kids, themselves. Iraq War vets. Or gas station attendants. Or men who can’t pay the subprime mortgage. Guys whose wives weighed 108 when they got married and are now 308. Or God guys, listening to the Lord’s whispered commands in the men’s rooms of saloons or the front rooms of churches. They don’t often strike in New York. Usually it’s in what is laughingly called the heartland. Where there is always a handy gun. When these great Americans are finished with their bloody farewells, some cop stands before the house of the freshly dead and says: “They had issues.” Like what? Global warming? Nuclear proliferation? The stimulus package?

Fuck. Stop. His mind is always wandering now, he thinks, like water in a stream that pauses in tiny coves and eddies.

12:08 a.m. Josh Thompson. Madison Avenue and 92nd Street.

He needs thicker gloves. Goddamned New York City is cold, and now it’s raining. Spattering the poncho that covers him. The rims of the wheels are very cold, steel ice, his gloves already soaked, so that he can’t feel the tips of his fingers. He must feel or he can’t control the goddamned chair. Need a blanket too, Josh Thompson thinks. Need a lot of things.

He pauses at a corner, flexes and unflexes both hands. Warm me, blood. Make me feel. He remembers a fireplace in his father’s house in Norman, when the Oklahoma winds blew for days, his mother long gone, his father dressed in an old army coat, all of the old man thawing, except the heart. Dead now. The frozen heart gave out and he died cursing God and the Democrats.

Okay. He can feel now. Move on. Toward downtown, where the truck driver said he could find a cheap place to stay. Decent fella. Name of Vic. All gray hair and scraggy-ass beard, but big and strong. At the mall parking lot in Virginia, Vic pushed back the passenger seat and lifted me and the wheelchair at the same time, turned us a little to the side so I could see the country go by. I held on tight to the thing under the poncho. The MAC-10. Loaded. The short barrel wedged under my ass now.

Later, it gets dark and the truck driver stops talking about his daughter in college and starts talking about Nam. Some place called Bon Song. Or Bong Son. Where he got shot in the left arm and three of his buddies got killed. A pass home for Vic. Nothing for his buddies except graves. Wanted to know about Iraq. Josh Thompson didn’t say much. Fuck it, the truck driver said. You can still have a life. And Josh said, Yeah. And closed his eyes and faked sleep. Opened his eyes later, saw houses with lights still burning, more malls and truck stops and trucks, all going somewhere, closed them again, then woke up at the entrance to an amazing bridge. Into New York, and Vic dropped him off, said he couldn’t go into the city, had to take another bridge onto Long Island, already late.

— I’m really sorry, soldier, Vic said.

— No, man, you been more than kind.

Vic lifted him and the chair down from the cab, then pointed and said, Down there, soldier. They got cheap hotels. All the way down.

Josh Thompson moves now, past dark bags of trash, pushing the wheels harder, careful not to dislodge the gun shoved under his crotch. Nobody on the wet streets. Traffic grinding along to his left, heading in the opposite direction. Stores closed. No place to buy gloves. Or a blanket.

He thinks: How much bread I got left?

And answers himself: Enough.

Enough to get what I need.

12:12 a.m. Helen Loomis. City room of New York World.

She is finished now with another episode of the daily serial she still calls “Vics and Dicks.” The clock tells her that she must wait another eleven minutes for a cigarette. Then another two hours before heading home. Her eyes glance at the Post as she turns the pages but she reads almost nothing. She removes the reading glasses, folds them, gazes around the deserted city room. The year she turned sixty-five her normal vision actually got better. She needed glasses to read, but the glasses for seeing signs and streets and taxis were folded in the drawer at home. Now in the city room she sees only ghosts. Kempton, pulling on a pipe, referring to some sleazy Brooklyn pol while quoting Plotinus. Gene Grove and Al Aronowitz and Normand Poirier and Don Forst, all of them cracking wise, and Ben Greene pulling plugs on the switchboard. I have so little interest in heaven, she thinks. I’ve lived in it.

She often wonders if Sam sees the same ghosts. He was there too, twenty pounds lighter with brown hair and a Camel bobbing in his lips. He no longer smokes but seems more drained than ever. Sometimes he must look around the city room the way I do, she thinks, and remember other rooms in other buildings, the reporters cursing and laughing, making sexist remarks, and racist jokes, and wisecracks about everybody on the planet, including each other, and, of course, the opposition. Jokes about the Times. And the Daily News. And the Journal-American. I hear them still, she thinks. I see them before they needed glasses. There are the photographers, Louis Liotta, Arty Pomerantz, Barney Stein, Tony Calvacca. Each of them rowdy and sardonic and very goddamned good at what they did. They are rushing to show us copies of photographs that will never make the paper. Still wet from the developer. Look at this one! Bodies in Bath Beach with heads torn open by gangster bullets. A woman with wide dead eyes and a severed breast. A shot of blonde busty Jayne Mansfield’s black hairy crotch, pantyless and winking, as she sits smiling on a steamer trunk on the deck of an ocean liner.

Helen sees them. All gone now, their names mere whispers in the emptiness. Unknown to the young. Foot soldiers in the tabloid wars. Too many are dead now. But even the living are MIA. Living in gated communities in Florida or Arizona. Now the photographers use digital cameras and send their images from computers out of the trunks of cars or from press rooms at political rallies or the press pens above the fields at the ballparks. They never make it to the city room. There are credit lines in the paper now that she can’t match to a face. Now they cover baseball games in new stadiums, but I’m not going. She thinks of the game they cover as scumball. It’s not the game her father loved. Not the game she loved too. The game of Furillo and Robinson, Snider and Reese and Mantle. And Willie Mays. Jesus Christ. Willie Mays… Now it’s scumball, full of steroids and treachery, played by millionaires for millionaires. Played without joy. And we sit here in an emptied world of reporters who almost never come in, using gadgets for stories, sometimes sitting at home, watching events on television, and Googling to cover their asses.

When I was young, there was a comic strip about a guy named Barney Google. He had a horse named… what the hell was the name? Firehouse? Fast Track? Sam would know. He might be the only guy in Manhattan who would know. I’d better Google Barney Google. Now.

She needs to pull on her coat and go down to the street for a Marlboro Light. But first she reads again the newest edition of “Vics and Dicks.” The daily catalog of felonious New Yorkers. Two grafs each. Not a name or a sentence likely to attain immortality.

In Queens, some fat balding unemployed thirty-eight-year-old lout knocked down a seventy-nine-year-old woman at 17–39 Seagirt Boulevard. Grabbed her purse. Shoved her to the sidewalk. Ran. His face immortalized on an overhead video camera. A real tough guy. Meanwhile, out in Bushwick, two employed hookers got in a knife fight on Jefferson Street. One of them was working the wrong turf and a pimp told her to leave and she wouldn’t and the pimp’s hooker started shouting and the knives came out and they both ended up in the emergency ward at Queens General. Slash wounds on arms, hands, and faces. And, of course, under arrest. The pimp home sleeping, or smoking dope.

Up on Fifth Avenue, near 30th Street, a forty-seven-year-old master criminal named Rodriguez, recently laid off at Pathmark, tried to pry open a bodega door with a broom handle. A pedestrian said, “Hey, man,” and the guy walked away. Ten minutes later, he was back, with the broom. He didn’t notice the cop now stationed across the street. He started prying again, and, of course, was locked up. Another unemployed dumbbell tiptoed into a dark room, full of exhausted people, in Lenox Hill Hospital. He started lifting a pocketbook from a sedated patient. Another woman shouted. He knocked her down, breaking her elbow, and ran into the waiting embrace of a cop.

On and on. “Vics and Dicks.” Now it should be “Tales of the Recession.”

Christ, I need a cigarette.

Now.

Helen Loomis pulls on the down coat, fastens the hood, gives Matt Logan a wave, taps her wristwatch, and heads for the elevator.

12:15 a.m. Malik Shahid, aka Malik Watson. Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Outside Barnes & Noble.

Lean, his full black beard buried in the collar of a black cloth jacket, he is gazing at the books in the store window without seeing them. Trying to stay dry. He is looking for someone, anyone he can score off. Too early. Too much traffic on the streets. Too many whores and whoremasters. High heels in the rain. He even tried begging on Christopher Street. Holding an empty coffee cup from a diner named Manatus. Saying the word “change.” Humiliated. They went by, the whores and whoremasters. All my age. One old lady dropped a quarter in the cup.

A fucking quarter.

I need a hundred dollars, at least.

Gotta get it tonight. Gotta get it for Glorious Burress. My woman. Gotta get it for the child. To pay a doctor tomorrow. Me, with no I.D. Me, with no credit cards. Me, who doesn’t fucking exist in this world. Gotta get money, even if I gotta take it.

The rain comes. On some narrow street of shops and stoops in areaways, he sees a guy coming toward him. Skinny motherfucker. Sees him trip on a curb, then right himself.

Malik’s heart quickens. The guy comes closer. His jacket soaked. Malik thinks: Head lock, shove him into that doorway. Punch hard. Head. Or neck. Then balls. Reach into the pockets. Grab the bills. One more in the head. Then walk away easy. Into the subway. To Brooklyn. To the Lots. To Glorious.

But then: a police car appears. Slow. Cop sure to be looking. Malik walks as if without care or interest, hands in his pockets. The drunk goes the other way, humming some tune, fumbling for keys in his coat. The police car eases by.

Shit.

Malik thinks: I know you are testing me, O holy one.

But I need you. Not for me. For my woman. For the baby. For a clean warm room in a hospital. Oh please. Now.

And wanders on.

12:20 a.m. Sam Briscoe. New York World, his office.

Briscoe is shadowy in the muted light of the cowled green desk lamp. On the blotter, his secretary, Janet Barnett, has left her usual two pale blue folders. One is marked “Bitching.” Bulging with printouts of e-mail messages, handwritten letters from pissed-off readers. Why is A-Rod still a Yankee? Fire his ass. Why does my grandson, now nine, have to save AIG when he grows up? Why no editorial about Obama wasting our money on the faith-based initiative? Take the BMWs away from the preachers! The other is marked “Important.” He stares at that one, blowing out air like a relief pitcher with men on base.

He glances at the television set, on a shelf beside the bookcase. The remote lies before him on the desk, but he does not use it to turn on the set. He rises out of the expensive chair he bought with his own money to support his back. He stretches, sees the typewriter on the shelf to the right of the television set. The old Hermes 3000. The one he carried to Vietnam and Belfast and Beirut. The one he still keeps oiled. The one for which he buys new ribbons every four months from a hidden typewriter store on West 27th Street. A holy relic.

He lifts the “Important” folder.

On top, a single typed page tells him: Mr. Elwood says you should come to his office at 8:30 ayem Friday. He says it’s urgent.

He pictures young Richard Elwood. The F.P. He sees the narrow face that came from his father, the sharp chin, sees him in expensively sloppy clothes, the four-hundred-dollar black jeans, and carefully cut casual black hair. And sees his mother’s wide-set peering eyes. Briscoe starts talking to himself without speaking a word. I know what the kid is going to tell me. But why at eight-thirty in the morning? Do I work until seven-thirty and then take a cab to 50th Street? Or do I go home now? Christ, I’ve lived too long. I’m being summoned to the palace by a twenty-eight-year-old. The dauphin. A kid who spent two summers here as an intern, couldn’t get a fact straight. And earned his place at the top of the masthead because his mother died.

In the silence of his office, Briscoe glances at the framed photograph of Elizabeth Elwood, high on the top shelf, beside the framed account from the 1955 Times of the end of the Third Avenue El. There’s a photograph there of Briscoe with his daughter, Nicole, standing by the Eiffel Tower when the girl was sixteen. Nicole is now forty and lives three blocks from that tower with her hedge-fund-managing French husband. Briscoe sighs. He looks again at Elizabeth Elwood. How old was she in that photo? Sixty? Thin, with high cheekbones, elegantly defiant white hair, those wide-spaced intelligent eyes, an ironical flick in the smile. Taken around the time her husband died. Harry Elwood. A genius at investment banking, when no bankers aspired to run gambling joints.

In 1981, Elizabeth persuaded Harry to buy the title to the long-vanished New York World. It was Joseph Pulitzer’s great New York paper, a smart, hard-charging broadsheet that lived beyond his death in 1911 until the Great Depression killed it. Elizabeth Elwood wanted to revive the World as an upscale tabloid. To be published in the afternoon, out of competition with the Post and the News, who owned the morning. To be published right here, in the building where the World-Telegram once lived. She would run her World the way Dorothy Schiff ran the New York Post, and Katharine Graham the Washington Post. Her husband agreed, probably with a sigh heavier than the ones that Briscoe has been sighing tonight. Then she tracked Briscoe to Paris, where he was happily writing a column at the Paris Herald, and called him from New York.

— I’m starting a paper, she said.

— What?

— I want you to be the editor, and teach me the business.

He barely knew her. Glancing encounters, at parties, or public events.

— You’re out of your mind, you know, he said.

Two days later she was in Paris, on a day of spring rain, sitting across from him at a table inside the Deux Magots. Three hours later, at the end of lunch, he agreed to edit the new version of the old World.

Long ago. In a different century. A different world.

A world of paper itself, and ink, and trucks, and bundles dropped at newsstands.

A world that is now shrinking. Under assault from digitalized artillery. The future? Yeah. The goddamned future. Probably starting at breakfast with the F.P. Somewhere, his mother weeps.

Briscoe looks at the second message. A printed e-mail. From Cynthia Harding. Sam: I know you can’t be at table tonight, but call me tomorrow and I’ll give you a fill. Much love, C.

Cynthia. He hadn’t seen her in the past six days, but how long now had he been with her? Images jumble in his mind. Going with her to Brooke Astor’s place the first time and to Jamaica another time and how he fell in love with her, and she with him, or so she said. When he wanted to marry her, she said no, not now. When she wanted to marry Sam, he said no, not now. She joked once that they lived apart together. Sometimes other women for me. Other men for her. And then together. As she said, forever. After tonight’s party, she’ll sleep late. Tonight’s a small dinner to raise funds for the public library. Once again, she was saluting the memory of Brooke Astor, whose name, Cynthia always said, must survive her long, blurred good-bye and the ugly legal mess that followed. She never mentions hard times when asking for money from rich friends and acquaintances. Nor how it will be difficult to keep the library going at full strength. She doesn’t have to. For a second, Briscoe is in her bed in Paris, in the suite at the Plaza Athénée, hears her low voice. Remembers that she took the photograph of Nicole that stands now on the shelf in this room. He folds the printed e-mail and slides it into his back pocket. As a reminder. I’ll call her tomorrow, he thinks. After meeting with the F.P. He gazes out at the city room. Young Fonseca is standing beside Matt Logan. With any luck, the kid has the wood.

12:21 a.m. Cynthia Harding. Patchin Place, Greenwich Village.

She is wearing a long black simple Chanel gown, leaning back in a Billy Baldwin slipper chair in the small room beside the dining room. Thinking: Why don’t you all just leave? Please. I’ve been awake since six in the morning. Please, just go… The light is muted, seeping from the electrified flanges of old gas lamps. The sliding doors are closed. She can hear the clatter of dishes beyond the doors, as the remains of dinner are carted away, down the hidden back stairway that leads to the basement kitchen. Two large French windows open to the dark garden. The glass panes now streaky with rain. A gaunt bony man in his fifties is talking. Two older, heavier men are together on a small couch. They remind Cynthia of those two theater producers from Dublin, the ones they called Sodom and Begorrah. The room itself reminds her of Dublin. What did Sam once call it? A tabloid version of Merrion Square.

Sodom is smoking a cigar, flicking ashes into a ceramic dish. They are a couple, from an immense white-shoe law firm.

— Of course, I always liked Cummings’s poetry, after I learned to read it out loud, says the gaunt man. Cynthia thinks of him as a bone-colored Giacometti or an exclamation point under mild sedation. At once laconic and blasé. His name is Carson, retired after many years at an old-line publishing company, a big supporter of the library. He goes on about Cummings in a dry voice.

— But I much preferred his paintings, he says. If he’d painted more, he’d be known today as one of America’s greatest painters ever.

Sodom: I didn’t know he painted.

Begorrah: Nor did I.

— Oh, yes, says Carson. After the Great War, he went to Paris, painted up a storm.

— I’ll be damned, says Sodom.

— That’s a Cummings, Cynthia says, gesturing casually at a portrait between the windows.

The painting shows a brooding young man, in a mildly cubist style, the colors glowing. Sodom stands up, wheezing and squinting, laying the cigar in the ashtray. All eyes turn to the painting, and Cynthia remembers buying it through a dealer in the year she took her first apartment in this building. Nineteen eighty-one. Before she bought the entire building and made it her last home. What was his name, that dealer? She remembers his ferrety face, his oily manner, but no name. My mind rusts. How in the name of God did I get to be sixty?

— Just marvelous, Sodom says. In her head, Cynthia hears a song. “Too Marvelous for Words.” Sinatra singing it on a late-night jukebox. Or Sam, in the shower upstairs.

— Yes, Carson says. He has been in this room at several earlier dinners for the library. Before the collapse of everything. Has seen the painting before. Has looked it up.

— It was painted in nineteen twenty-eight, he says.

— Marvelous.

The word bounces musically in Cynthia’s mind.

— Did he paint it here in Patchin Place? Sodom says.

— Paris, I think, Carson says. Cynthia nods in a vacant affirmative way. Yes. Paris.

— What would he have become if he’d stayed there? Sodom says.

— A corpse, Begorrah says. Hitler would have had him gassed, for using Semitic punctuation!

The partners chuckle in a dark way.

Goddamn you, Sam. Why couldn’t you be here tonight? For an hour, anyway. On the way to the paper. And answers herself: Maybe he heard that the boss was coming, formerly known as Little Dickie Elwood. They couldn’t call him Little Richard. His mother was a wonderful person. So was his father, Harry. And young Dickie, Dickie at nine or ten, was a nice boy. Not now. Bosshood is a curse. And Sam’s boss was the youngest person at table tonight. Called to dinner at the invitation of someone at the library. A check sent this afternoon by messenger, so he could avoid touching it in front of strangers. A lesson from his parents. No show, please. Polite and modest in his matching paisley cummerbund and tie. Until asked about newspapers. Then he fell into bosschat, all about the digital age and why newspapers were doomed, not now but eventually, and a century of their content could be carried in a single laptop. Or better, on various electronic readers. Content provided by Google or somebody. He owns the New York World, for God’s sake. Which is made of words on paper. Better that Sam wasn’t here. He might have thrown him out the window.

Dickie departed early, pleading a morning meeting. So did that hedge-fund swindler, Myles Compton, or was it Compton Myles? How did he get on the list? Sitting in laconic reserve, with performed smiles, poking at the food. He delivered an early check too.

— Well, Carson says, rising from his seat like a long unfolding Swiss army knife. He must be six-four. I’d better go, he says. If my heart bursts here, the ambulance could never get through the gate.

Laughter.

— Thank you, Mr. Carson, Cynthia says, rising to shake his bony hand. Hoping the others would follow. The top of her head is level with his shoulder.

— Can I give you fellows a ride? Carson says.

— Well, yes, as a matter of fact, yes, says Sodom, eagerly tamping out his cigar. He and his mate stand up now, glancing around for the door. All the others rise too. Cynthia Harding is relieved. The smoke rising from the murdered cigar makes Cynthia think of other good-nights, other cigars. Her second husband smoked cigars at breakfast. That’s why he became the last husband. Sam was a cigarette guy then.

She leads the way down the stairs to the basement. From behind the door to the kitchen, Latin music plays softly from a radio. Dishes clatter. The coats of the guests are on a rack near the door that leads up a few steps to the street. Overcoats are donned, hats clamped on heads. Each wears gloves. Cynthia thinks they look like musicians from some aging society band of the early 1960s. A nostalgia act even then. The door opens and they all leave. The cold damp night air enters, rain seeping from the dark sky, promising worse, maybe even snow. They exchange hugs and good-nights. The door closes behind them.

Cynthia Harding places the flat of her back against the papered wall at the foot of the stairs. She exhales deeply. Breathes in. Exhales again. Thinking: I want to squat down here on the floor. I’m so tired I want to bawl. There were so many things to go over, from the napkins to the coffee. Mary Lou helped as always. As always, I chose the flowers myself. Like Mrs. Dalloway.

Then she gathers energy and goes into the kitchen. The chatter stops. The radio is switched off. The two younger waiters are doubling as dishwashers, a skill not taught at acting school. The air is liquid. Odors of the meal. One Mexican dishwasher is eating. At the far end, standing before the gleaming double-doored stainless steel Bosch refrigerator, is their boss. Thirty-one, maybe, handsome in a George Hamilton way, as if practicing for a career on the Food Channel. He devised five menus, and Cynthia chose one. The billi-bi soup, thick with mussels, with zwieback-like toast made from artichoke flour. Roast of veal, in fines herbes sauce. Braised Bibb lettuce. No salad, because of time. Spanish melon with lime and ginger.

Brooke Astor would have been proud of the meal. Even though the veal was a shade overcooked. Cynthia moves into the room, begins shaking hands.

— Thank you, everybody, Cynthia says, and smiles. You were all just wonderful.

— It was marvelous to be here, the boss says. She hears a fragment of the song. He smiles a practiced half-crooked smile, showing perfect white teeth. She imagines his body, gym cut, hairless. If he’s gay, he gives no obvious signals.

— Yes, thank you, Mrs. Harding, a slim young aproned woman says. Your guests were fabulous. It was like having ten different Charlie Rose shows at the same time. So cool.

Out of sight, the chef already has the envelopes with the fee and the tips. Mary Lou took care of that too.

— Thank you, he whispers. Thank you.

Then Mary Lou Watson appears at the door. A lean black woman in her fifties. Cynthia’s secretary. Her intelligent eyes look tired and unhappy. She knows that she must lock up when everything is finished and the catering crowd heads into the rainy darkness.

— Mary Lou will let you out when you’re done, Cynthia says to the chef, then smiles and takes Mary Lou by the elbow, through the door into the hallway.

— Can’t you stay over? Cynthia says. It’s so damned late and so damned cold and it’s starting to rain and you’ve got to go all the way to Brooklyn. The guest room—

— No, she says, smiling wanly. My husband’s expecting me. The car service’ll be fine. They come five minutes after I call.

— Well, good night, dear. And many, many thanks. Again. And for everything.

— G’night.

Cynthia trudges up the stairs. She doesn’t look into the sitting room or the dining room. She remembers her nervousness addressing the guests, evoking the spirit of Brooke Astor. How Brooke had done so much for the New York Public Library, in good times and bad. How she believed with all of her immense heart in books, available to all, and believed in preserving documents and manuscripts and supporting research. Cynthia Harding didn’t mention the awful final days, when Alzheimer’s had erased her mind, while ghouls were looting her grave before she was in it. Everybody knew. They all read the papers. She didn’t mention meeting Brooke at the home of Louis Auchincloss all those years ago, dear Louis, decent, brave, witty Louis. And how she and Brooke became friends. Lunching once a month, sometimes once a week, at the Four Seasons and the Knickerbocker Club and Mortimer’s. Brooke was always impeccably dressed in a tailored suit from Oscar de la Renta or Bill Blass, a lovely, rakish hat, and, of course, white gloves.

Cynthia did tell the guests that Brooke’s great lesson was a simple one: you could be rich, and a decent citizen too. Using a modest tone to avoid sounding as if she were claiming decency for herself. Brooke was gone, she told them, but lives on at the library and many other places too. Thousands and thousands of people who never knew her name were now enjoying the bounty of Brooke Astor. In this dreadful time, libraries were more important than ever. Then the man from the library talked quickly, with precision and wit, about how to make donations, and it was over. They had raised at least one hundred thousand dollars. About half the amount of a year ago. But even young Dickie came up with a decent check.

Now she turns on the staircase, passing the portrait of a young woman by Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and another by Robert Henri, of a Spanish dancer. At the landing is that landscape from Mexico, as solid as Cézanne, as moody as Corot. Painted by Lew Forrest. She wonders: Is Lew Forrest still alive? Over there at the Chelsea? She had read a brief obit a few years ago about the death of his wife, Gabrielle. Sent a card. Gabrielle was a smart, sharp woman. French. Even when Gabrielle was old and sick, alone each night in a hospice, Cynthia saw her as the lovely woman that Forrest painted when they both were young. The woman he loved for the rest of his life. Gabrielle looked down upon him from the wall of his studio at the Chelsea when Cynthia visited. She was not for sale. Must call tomorrow. If Lew Forrest is dead, I missed the news. The deskman at the Chelsea would know. There’s a portrait of Gabrielle in the lobby too. Right to the side of a Larry Rivers. Or there was. And a lovely portrait of a young Mexican woman too. I must call Lew Forrest.

On the top floor she enters the bedroom, with the dark studio beyond, her desk covered with papers, closes the door behind her, and slumps in exhaustion. A lamp glows beside the bed. The covers have been turned. She begins to undress. Laying each item on a winged chair. Books are stacked on the night table, beside the bed, a small blue jar beside them. She glances at her lean nude body in the full-length mirror. Her graying pubic hair brings a smile, but she thinks: Not bad for sixty. The same weight I carried when I was thirty. It all depends upon the lighting. But Nora Ephron is right. I have to do something about my neck…

She pulls a terrycloth robe around her, knots the belt, moves into the bathroom, and starts running a bath. She adjusts the faucets until the water is hot, but not scalding. The mirror over the sink clouds with steam. She thinks: Sam has been in this tub with me. So have a few other guys. But Sam most of all. The tub is long and narrow, long enough to stretch out, feet planted beside the taps, a hand shower there too, a Jacuzzi. All instruments of pleasure. How many times have I come in this tub? Alone, or with another? Stop. This is not a catalogue raisonné. She squeezes her breasts. Places the robe on a hook. Then slides into the water.

The heat of the water forces her into the present. She feels years peel away. Decades. She closes her eyes and soaps herself, using a thick white ridged bar that she found in Paris. Soaping armpits. Soaping toes. Feeling her bones melting away.

12:35 a.m. Lew Forrest. Room 802, Chelsea Hotel, West 23rd Street, Manhattan.

He awakes but his eyes remain closed. There is a trace of brightness in his vision so he knows he has been dreaming of Paris. Again. A walk along the river. In May. With Gabrielle, for sure, or hell, maybe alone. Birds in the budding trees. Boats. A small canvas on the easel. Yes, a clichéd dream of Paris. But he doesn’t open his eyes. A line from Gauguin comes forward: I shut my eyes in order to see.

Opening his eyes doesn’t matter anyway. Not anymore. The doctors have told him that he has 15 percent vision in his left eye, 5 percent in the other. Probably from the goddamned diabetes. All that wine. Too much whiskey. Sixty years’ worth. Häagen-Dazs too, after I stopped drinking. Packing on the pounds. He sees Gabrielle laughing, in her ironical French way. He thinks: Oh, Christ, I miss you, baby. I miss Paris too.

He listens now, hears a lone bus groaning across 23rd Street, some drunks arguing. And Camus breathing. The greatest of all dogs, for sure. Named by Gabrielle right here in this studio. She confessed two years later that she had slept with Albert Camus himself, before she knew who he was. Before she met me. And here is Camus in the studio, black, handsome, with a Lab’s deep intelligence and grace. Forrest thinks: I can see him, with my eyes shut tight. He is old now, like me. Thirteen. Ninety-one for a human. Forrest can smell Camus, because it’s true what they say: You lose your eyes and then you see with your nose and your ears. The dog smells old. When he needs to go down to the street he gives off a sweeter smell, like fermented farts. His good heart never changes.

Forrest opens his eyes, and Camus is ten feet away, just past the easel and the bright splashy painting it holds. Forrest can’t see him clearly but knows his hazel eyes are open, his tongue pink and loose between his teeth. Memory fills in blanks, in paintings, in life. The dog is waiting to take him on a walk. Forrest used to walk Camus. Now the dog walks him.

Soon, Camus.

Soon.

Forrest is stretched out on the ancient recliner. His hands feel the flaking imitation-leather arms of the chair. The same texture as my lower legs. A new painting is a few feet beyond his toes, all slashing reds and blacks and mauves, secure on the easel he bought after returning to New York from Paris in 1968, when he was a very different kind of painter. He doesn’t know what time it is now, since there are no clocks in the studio, and Forrest hasn’t worn a watch since 1961, when he read a remark by Picasso saying that civilization began to end with the invention of the wristwatch. He thinks: I couldn’t read a wristwatch now, anyway. Can’t see my prick, I can’t see a watch. There’s a telephone controlled by the switchboard in the lobby, but Forrest usually tells Jerry at the desk to block his calls. There is no television set here either. Forrest gave it to the young girl from ARTnews, down on the third floor. Lucy something. Jenkins? Hawkins? He could barely see the screen anymore, and listening to it was driving him mad. The verbal drivel. The slovenly language.

Sometimes that packaged noise made him want to rant on a street corner, like the old socialists on Pitkin Avenue, back in Brownsville. Rant in English. Rant in Yiddish. About the capitalist swine. The injured poor. The need for revolution. It was easier to give away the television set.

He ranted to that girl from ARTnews, who wrote an article last year about his twilight years. She laughed at the rant, his ravings about greed and gutless bloat, like Lew Forrest was the first guy ever to say such things. Then he politely asked her to keep that stuff out of the article, and she said, Sure, Mr. Forrest. Then she swerved and asked him what was the best decision he ever made. He said, Joining the army in 1943, on my eighteenth birthday. Taking the subway downtown from Music and Art and walking into the recruiting office on Whitehall Street.

— Why? Lucy said, in a surprised way.

–’Cause I lived through the war, and got the G.I. Bill, and the bill got me Paris. And my life.

He didn’t tell her about the Bulge and she didn’t ask. He figured kids her age didn’t know much about the old wars. And certainly never heard of the battles. Forrest didn’t mention that there wasn’t another person on the planet who knew about the German round that went through his right thigh and saved his life. When the medics took him away from the battle, he was happy. The Germans had given him a ticket out of the fucking war. Only Lew Forrest knew any of that.

The G.I. Bill was waiting, and the bill was everything. Not just for Lew Forrest. For millions of them. He wanted to tell her, that Lucy kid, that the bill let him say to himself that he was never going back to fucking Brownsville. The Brownsville in Brooklyn, not the one in Texas. Never going back to Saratoga and Livonia, where the wiseguys from Murder, Inc. stood outside Midnight Rose’s in their fedoras and pinkie rings, smirking at the working schmucks hurrying home from the few Depression jobs. Forrest made his vows in that hospital. He was never going back to the sour odors seeping from the cellar of their tenement. Or to his father’s silence, as he headed out each morning to cut fur, or at least try to. Or to his mother cursing Hitler, his kid brother Stanley studying and studying for the test for Brooklyn Tech. Forrest hated all that. Lew Forrest, the American son, was learning how to say to the world: Kiss my yiddishe ass. And fuck living like this. I’m going to fucking Paris.

He dreams of it still, that Paris. He still smells the oil and turpentine in the halls of the school. He still hears Ben Webster on the radio in the bistro on his corner. And Ellington. And Lady Day. He heard her sing “As Time Goes By” before he ever got to see Casablanca. He remembers the bony bodies of the women he slept with, because nobody that year was fat, and they were all desperate for a free meal in starving Paris. Or just the feel of a warm young man’s body. He made drawings of all of them. All pared down by hunger, like creatures out of Egon Schiele. But he never said any of this to the girl from ARTnews. He did tell her about his friend Buchwald.

— You mean Art Buchwald?

— Yeah, I met him at the V.A. where we were both picking up checks. He’d been a marine in the Pacific, then a student on the bill at USC. In Paris, he was broker than I was. I paid our checks in a few bistros.

— He just died, Lucy said. I mean, like a couple of years ago?

— Yes, Lew Forrest said. He was one funny son of a bitch, Mr. Buchwald. And he was from Queens, you know, from Hollis, I think, and so we got along right from the get-go. We spoke the same language. He loved asking me about the boys from Murder, Inc. and was astonished that I had seen Lepke and Gurrah, two of the worst of them. In the flesh! For Art, Brownsville was like a fabulous Jewish kingdom, the hoodlums all members of the Round Table. He had a sad side too, a mother in a nuthouse, a father who turned him and his sisters over to an orphanage. Good for your character, he said, and laughed. But there was hurt in his eyes that never really went away. No wonder.

— Then at some point he got a job at the Paris Herald, reviewing restaurants. He started taking me along. The only time I ever ate at the Tour d’Argent was with Art. And at Maxim’s too! He said, Welcome to journalism.

Lucy laughed with the shock of recognition, probably inspired by her own, fresher memories of free food at gallery openings and benefits for museums. And Forrest thought: Yes, Buchwald is dead, along with the whole lost patrol of laughing, drinking playboys of the western world who made Paris their own.

Now I’m on the way to join them, Forrest thought. I take all these goddamned pills from different-sized containers so I don’t mix them up. Metformin. Amaryl. Zocor. Benicar. For blood sugar and cholesterol and blood pressure and some other fucking thing. To ward off conditions we never heard of in Paris. And absolutely never heard of in the Bulge. What was it Buchwald told him that time when he was sick and Forrest called him in Washington? Remember one thing about being old, Buchwald said: Before you go to bed, never take a laxative and a sleeping pill at the same time.

They both laughed so hard Forrest thought they were at a table on the terrace of the Deux Magots. With the French all looking at them, because the French never laughed as hard as New Yorkers. Nobody did.

Forrest now thinks: Better get up. Swallow the fucking pills. Get taken for my walk by Camus.

He moves to the side of the recliner, twists, stands. So does the dog. Waiting with infinite patience. The routine as coded in Camus’s brain as it is in his master’s. For a long moment, Forrest stares at the painting on the easel. Remembering that first magical visit to the Louvre, and seeing Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and saying out loud: I want to do that. And how he made a life out of that ambition. Working on drawing and color and composition until his hand always did what he told it to do. A mountain or an eyelash. Loving Picasso and Matisse, but saluting older gods too, and pledging his fealty. The visiting New York dealers looked at his work and shrugged. They wanted something new. Bold, they said. Or angry. They wanted a cousin of Kline or Pollock, not Géricault. Lew Forrest wanted to make the imagined world visible. And went hungry too often, even after meeting Gabrielle.

Forrest glances down the length of the studio, past his bed, to the lighted area before the back windows. On the wall, there are two portraits he painted long ago. One was of Consuelo. The girl from Oaxaca. Again his mind fills in what he cannot see. Moody and dark, with golden skin in the morning light, voluptuous black eyes, high cheekbones, a perfectly curving nose. Consuelo, from that year in Mexico: what? Eleven years ago? Twelve? More? Ay, Consuelo.

The other portrait was of Gabrielle Marquand. Every time Forrest looks now at the blur of the portrait, he remembers the details of his first sight of her: sitting on a low stool outside Cabrini’s life class at the Académie, on a break, wrapped in a robe, with worn flannel slippers on her feet. She is smoking a Gauloise to ward off hunger. She sees nothing except what is behind her unfocused wide-set brown eyes. Her burnt-sienna hair is tied tightly in a bun. He is astonished at her beauty.

— Excuse me, he says, in Brownsville French.

She looks up, her eyes wary and instantly focused.

— Oui?

— I would like very much to draw you, mademoiselle. In private.

She shrugs, takes an amused, indifferent drag on the cigarette. He hopes the amusement is about his bad French.

— Five francs an hour.

That afternoon she came to his tiny room, still damp with the remainders of winter. And so it began. She would be his wife, until the day she died. The portrait of Consuelo did not go on the wall until Gabrielle was gone forever.

He shuffles now into the narrow bathroom, lifts a bottle of Evian from the small fridge, unscrews the cap, then shakes out his pills, places eight of them in his mouth, and washes them down. Camus comes up beside him, his nails clicking on the hardwood floor. The big Lab knows the meaning of all sounds in this closed world. The pills are a prelude. Forrest reaches for the blue leash on its hook behind the door.

— Let’s go, my man.

He pauses to pull on sneakers, laces them, sighs, thinking: All of this is to make death easier, isn’t it? The disappearance of all the people you love. The doctor visits. The pills. The scaly flesh. The faded eyesight. The vanished dick. For every man on earth, it must always start with the dick. Erasing one huge reason to live. He laughs, and says out loud: No wonder some people choose suicide.

And thinks: For me, it’s never been an option.

I want to see how the story turns out.

12:36 a.m. Glorious Burress. The Lots, Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

She shifts, turns in the twisted sheets of the queen-sized bed, always on her back, never finding a position that brings sleep. Her belly is bursting with the child. She wants to rise, to bang on the locked door that holds her as a prisoner. She wants to find Malik in the rainy night, Malik who put the baby in her. To find a hospital with dry sheets and nurses and doctors. Or even a police station. Anyplace where the walls don’t drip. Where water is hot. She wants to find her mother.

Glorious Burress can’t look at this room, its pale bare walls, its flaking paint, the holes ripped away near the splintery floorboards to make gates for rats. With eyes shut, she thinks: Malik got the key. Malik, that locked me in. Malik and his Muslim shit. No surprise, she thinks. He wanted me to change my name, the name that my mother gave me. Wanted me to take some fucking Arab name. He even wanted me to wear a burqa. Imagine: in fucking Brooklyn! Malik wanted me to be a masked marvel, for fuck’s sake! I shoulda run. Shoulda slipped away. Gone to my cousin’s house in Paterson. Instead, I’m here. Hurting bad. On the top floor. No fire escape. Hurting. Oooooooooh…

She feels as if a cannonball is trying to burst out of her belly, ripping everything in its way. She grabs the filthy pillow, bare, no pillowcase, pulls it tight into her face, and screams again in pain. Ooooooooooaaaahhhhhhh! The pain ebbs. She throws the pillow into the darkness. Then reaches down with one hand. The floor is cold. She hears a scratching sound. She shouts: Stop! The rats stop.

The floor is cold as Malik’s black-ass Muslim heart, she thinks. Him and his Allah. Him and his holy Quran. If you exist, Allah, get me the fuck out of here. Unlock the door, Allah. Send me a fucking car service, Allah. Right downstairs, here in the Lots. Get me in the car, Allah, and take me to a fucking hospital.

And tell Malik to come back. He tells me he’s got some stuff to do, and will bring back milk and bread and maybe pizza. Come on, Allah. Find the fucker. Try the mosque. Maybe he’s there praying to you. Telling you how great you are. Maybe he’s with some Muslim wife, putting a baby in her too. Find him, Allah. Maybe he’s in that Gitmo. Down in fucking Cuba. Nice and warm.

Oh, she says out loud. Ooh, that hurt!

Her voice sounds thin and frantic in the darkness.

She feels the cannonball is trying to kill her now. Trying to rip her, to stretch her pussy as wide as her shoulders, to slam out free into the bed. In a river of blood.

Momma, she says out loud, where you at? I’m fifteen, Momma. I’m fifteen and you’re not here. I need you, Momma.

She stares at the place in the dark where the door is. She stares at the glassy window. She hears the scratching of the rats. She listens to the rain on the window glass. She puts one naked foot on the icy floor.

Oooooouh! OoooooUH!

12:40 a.m. Myles Compton. Madison Avenue and 59th Street, Manhattan.

He sits alone in the back of the limousine, gazing idly at the dark windows of the shops they pass. His face looks older than forty-one, his lean body wedged against the door. Under the dark Borsalino fedora, his face is rigid with tension. His overcoat collar is pulled high on his neck, a tweed scarf crossed upon his shoulders. The limo is warm. Compton is cold.

One final stop on the farewell tour, he thinks, and then I’m gone.

Everything is ready. He’s sure of that. Everything except the weather. This goddamned freezing rain. Weather report says no snow until tomorrow night. He has the EU passport and three untraceable credit cards in his new name. He has ten grand in euros and dollars. All the big money has been moved without a trace. The Learjet is waiting near Newburgh, the second in Toledo. Maybe the rain will delay them, but so far they’re flying. Myles Compton feels bad about his guys, his friends, his associates, but now at least they can blame everything on him. For sure, the Bulgarian will blame me. If any Bulgarian can ever admit to being a sucker. His lawyers might tell him to say nothing. No matter. By the time they all meet in the grand jury room at Foley Square at ten o’clock tomorrow — shit, ten o’clock today—I’ll be a citizen of the wind.

— It’s the next corner, he says to the Asian driver.

— Sure thing, sir.

— I’ll be about twenty minutes.

— Yes, sir. I’ll be waiting right here.

— Don’t smoke in the car, okay? I’m allergic.

— Yes, sir, the driver says.

He’s from an outfit called Eagle Limo, which caters to Japanese and Korean businessmen, and it’s the first time Compton has used the service. He has no account with them. He will pay cash. And when he called, for the first time he used his new name. Martin Canfield, he thinks. Martin Canfield. Say it again. Say it a lot. Martin Canfield. The Eagle car was waiting when he came out of the Oriental Garden downtown, after changing his tuxedo for a business suit in the men’s-room stall. That was itself a relief. The jacket and trousers were bad enough, but he hated the bow tie, suspenders, cummerbund, and patent leather shoes. Now they were in the old Gap shopping bag on the floor of the limo, along with the bunched tuxedo. He sat in this costume through the dinner and speeches at Cynthia Harding’s, the tux already stripped of its labels. Trying to look normal. Poking at the food, forcing himself to eat and look interested. Hearing nothing that was said about the library or the noble life of Brooke Astor. Thanking Cynthia as he left. Brushing her warm cheek. Thinking, for one stupid beat: I don’t know how old she is, but I’d like to boff her. While she reads a book.

The driver pulls over at the corner. Compton steps out and hurries through the light rain to the first apartment awning. The night doorman nods in recognition and waves him toward the elevators. He glances back and the doorman has picked up a phone. Even a mistress must be warned. He steps out of the elevator on 17 and Sandra Gordon is standing at the open door. She is wearing the white nightgown he bought her in London, the one that heightens the rich blackness of her skin. She smiles in a tentative way.

— Come in, she says, in a husky voice. He moves past her in silence, and she locks the door behind him.

He slips off the scarf, removes coat and jacket without separating them. He lays them on a chair like an actor playing casual. Sandra stares at him in a pensive way, her arms loosely folded, a thumb tucked under her chin.

— You look terrible, she says, and touches his face.

— I don’t feel great.

— What’s this all about?

He loves the British abruptness of her Jamaican accent, the rhythm softened by the tropics. And the aroma of her ebony body as he steps forward and hugs her. Her muscles are tense. She knows. He figures she must have known from the tone of his voice when he called from the Chinese restaurant.

— I have to leave right away, he says. For Miami, then maybe another stop.

— The Times website says the grand jury reports in the morning.

— My lawyer will handle that.

She stares at him.

— You’re going on the lam, aren’t you? she says, chuckling in a dry way. It better be to Saturn, Myles. ’Cause they’ll find you.

— The lawyers can get a delay. We’re preparing new evidence. That’s what they say.

He inhales, then breathes out slowly, thinking: The lies are coming very easily now, aren’t they? I never even told the lawyers. And Sandra doesn’t believe a word.

Sandra turns her back and pads on bare feet to the narrow oaken table that serves as a bar. Compton knows every inch of this small apartment, which is hers and hers alone. Sandra isn’t rich, but she isn’t poor either. She takes down a big salary, plus bonuses, at that advertising agency in the Lipstick Building on Third Avenue. She was a vice president there for four years before he ever met her. She owns this apartment too, and pays the mortgage and the maintenance herself. A year ago, when he offered to come up with the maintenance for her, and maybe pay off the mortgage, her eyes went cold, with a hint of insulted anger, and she said, in an icy way: “No, thanks.”

Her anger that night made him feel like an asshole, but filled him with respect for her. Now Compton sits down and she brings him a scotch and soda. He holds it, then ventures a sip. That’s all, he thinks. A sip. No more.

— How was the party? she says.

— Fine, fine, he says. You were right. Cynthia Harding is a fine woman.

— You didn’t mention me, I hope.

— My lips were sealed.

He glances at the bedroom where, so many times, she has taken him out of himself. The door is open. The bedding is rumpled. His right leg begins drumming hard, until he wills it into stillness. She surely must have been asleep when he called from that pay phone in the restaurant. He wants to take her to the bed, to make love one final time. And thinks, no: It’s time to go.

— I won’t see you again, will I? she says, still standing, looking down on him.

He slides the glass under the chair, then stands. And embraces her again.

— Of course you will.

And kisses her neck. His hands grip her small breasts. He presses against her. Feels himself getting hard.

— You’d better go, she whispers.

When he returns to the wet street, the driver is standing in a doorway facing the car, smoking in the cold. On the sidewalk, some loose pages of the Daily News are soggy with rain. Compton sees a woman across the avenue, wearing a thick down coat and a fur hat, walking a small dog to a fire hydrant. The dog lifts its leg. There are many parked cars, but no passengers are visible in their shadowy interiors. The driver stomps his cigarette twice and opens the door. Compton slides in. The engine starts, and they move up Madison Avenue, the windshield wipers moving slowly. He leans back, feeling empty. The tale is almost over, he thinks, the final act in the long sad story of big money. Or my own life in the Big Casino. Hedging all bets. Bundling shit and proclaiming it platinum. Bringing in all sorts of private players and handing them the dice. I never should have handed them to the Bulgarian. He placed his bets. And lost. Big.

The lawyer said, Never ever do business with a Bulgarian.

— Why not?

— Google “Bulgaria,” the lawyer said. More crimes per capita than any nation on the planet, Myles. They got guys there make the old Mob look like Quakers!

But he went to see the Bulgarian anyway, in a plush two-room suite at the Stanhope, across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum. Expected a thick-necked muscle guy, with shaved head, oozing menace. Instead found a sparrowy little man with rimless glasses, squinting at the paperwork like someone from the IRS. About sixty years old. Asking a few questions in accented English. And the return is what? The main bank is where? Myles heard a toilet flush beyond the door to the second room, but no goons appeared. The Bulgarian’s face was all lines. Finally, he looked up from the papers, removed the glasses. He smiled in a thin way, said “Deal.”

The Bulgarian’s eyes were a pale blue, like hotel mouthwash. The eyes were not smiling. Myles knows now that he should have fled. Instead, he shook the Bulgarian’s hand. “Deal.”

In the limousine now, Myles thinks: Fuck it.

I’m through with it all.

Except I’ve got enough dough to last me the rest of my life.

At 81st Street, across from the Frank E. Campbell funeral parlor, Compton sees a small shadowy man hurrying along in a space between parked cars, heading downtown, as if being pursued. He’s in a wheelchair. Covered with a poncho. In the streetlight, his face is chalk white. The light changes. The limousine moves north. The rain falls harder, mixed with grainy pebbles of ice. The driver shifts to the faster swish-swish, swish-swish of the windshield wipers.

1:05 a.m. Freddie Wheeler. North 8th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Wheeler hunches over the keyboard, a small gnarled man in a denim shirt and pale blue briefs, black socks, no shoes or slippers. His screen is framed with small Post-its that seem like leaves of a designer’s tree. The computer faces a wall covered with larger scraps of paper, a collage of more Post-its, invitations, index cards covered with scrawled notes, jammed into rain-damp plaster with pushpins or tacked up with Scotch tape. The only thing on the wall that’s not paper is the clock. Wheeler glances at it. Another hour. Hickory dickory cock…

Wheeler is alone in this one-bedroom in Williamsburg. He can afford larger but he loves the sense of a cell in a monastery. The radiator is knocking, dwarfed by gray metal file cabinets, disorderly shelves of books on movies and music and theater, hundreds of them, and CDs and DVDs and some old LPs: they are Wheeler’s true monastic walls. He has two land lines, and his cell phone lies open. So do two laptops. Waiting for bulletins. From the competition… Gawker. Jossip. Jim Romenesko… None of them have what I have… Wheeler’s thick glasses are clamped on the bridge of his nose. Time to work. He lays out Post-its and index cards beside one computer. He types in the name of the column and the website: CelineWire.com. And the date.

He is always tense when he begins the column. But he is relieved that he no longer has to write about Lindsay Lohan Paris Hilton Britney Spears. Well, maybe Lindsay if she kills herself, becoming another celebrity martyr. All three as dead as hip-hop… Politics the thing now, and Media, full of the new Names, waiting for verbs…

But tonight, folks…

Tonight Freddie Wheeler is ecstatically happy. Tonight the subject is Briscoe… The old hack… Shitcanned me, when?… Two years ago now?… I got more hits on the site yesterday than he sold papers… Told me that night he needed the space, and the money, for news, like I don’t write news… Said the old three-dot stuff is long over, deader than Walter Winchell… Take a look at me now, Briscoe… Take a look at the website tomorrow… Like most people will… And you’ll be the lead item… I promise… Take a fucking look.

Wheeler remains still before the keyboard. He flexes his fingers.

Thinking: I looked at him that morning and said, Okay, Briscoe, go fuck yourself… He laughed in that way he has… The laugh of a half a Hebe… That’s what he is, Jewish father, Irish mother… Clear out your desk, he told me… And go see Fay, for your check… I slammed his door so hard the glass fell out of the window that let Briscoe watch everybody in the city room… They all stopped moving… Briscoe’s zombies… Stopped typing, stopped talking on phones. Some stood up… Some old bitch screamed in anger and that Jew kid from sports, Spiegel or something, came over, and stood in front of me… You got a problem, man? he said… I said, Yeah, I got a problem: you and all the other losers in this shithouse… I started to go past Spiegel and heard Briscoe’s voice shouting Hey, Mark!.. But Spiegel grabbed my wrist and shouted past me into the city room: Call security!.. And now everybody was crowded around and a guy from downstairs… the big black dude from the front door in the lobby, he was there… and Briscoe came out, and said: Just put him in the street, Harry… Calming everybody down… Smiling… Shaking his head… Spiegel said, You better go while you can walk…

Wheeler laughed all the way to the elevators, thinking: It wasn’t Walter Winchell I learned from, you assholes.

My master was Céline.

Céline… King of all the three-dotters… There, his photo right in front of me now on the wall, here in Williamsburg, plus those lines from Rigadoon I typed years ago on that yellowing index card… “Gossip is right at home! Nothing fazes it! Peremptory! On the nakedest summits, Everest or Nevada…. Gossip is at home all over, wherever you go, it creeps in somehow”—Louis-Ferdinand Céline… He knew everybody was shit… presidents, generals, archbishops… Show me a hero and I’ll show you a shit… My slogan too… They’re all shit… And fifty years later, Americans finally know it… I confirm it for them every fucking day… Famous in September, forgotten by New Year’s… Joining the mountain of enrubbled American shit…

Yeah… Welcome to the shitocracy, America! Meet all the fashionistas… the priests and the pols… the boys in the band… Editors go, I’m shocked, I’m shocked… and leave their offices for the Days Inn to fuck little summer interns with big tits… Everybody at every magazine, every book publisher, all editors, all fact-checkers, all citizens of the Republic of Shit… My beat!

Comfort me, Louis-Ferdinand… I know, I know, you were a collaborator with the Nazis… I know you hated everybody who was not like you, starting with my fellow Jews… But you didn’t lie… Comfort me… I continue your work.

Wheeler starts typing. We’ve learned that the end is near for the Daily Loser, ancient Sam Briscoe, editor… Not days… Hours.

He smiles, glances at the clock, thinks: I had to blow a guy in the Elwood website room to get this… tonight I get laid as a plain old reward. Tonight, of all nights. Tonight, when Briscoe falls, and I win.

And resumes typing.

1:15 a.m. Sandra Gordon. 120 East 70th Street, Manhattan.

All lights are out. The bedroom door is closed, the heavy drapes drawn, sealing out the sounds of the city. Except for her breathing. The white gown is folded on a trunk at the foot of the bed. She thinks: I’ll drop it at Goodwill on the weekend. No, I have to get it cleaned first. She is curled on her side in pajamas under the heavy blanket, legs drawn up, hugging the thick pillow. She does not sleep.

Just like that, she thinks. He’s on the lam.

And laughs at herself.

Gone. And she knows he’s not coming back. Not in a few days. Not ever.

The worst of it is, she thinks, I always knew this could happen.

What do they say back home? He’s an ’at steppa. Myles tells her Miami, it must be Siberia. Always wrapped in secrets. Turning his back to her when he took a call on the cell. Texting close to his chest on his BlackBerry like she was interested in the messages he was sending, which she wasn’t. Now the fall is under way, for him, for thousands like him. Maybe more. It’s all they talk about at the agency. Or the client meetings. The Great Fall.

My man Myles is falling too.

Who knows where.

The funny thing was, she didn’t really know him. Didn’t know his mother’s name or if she was even alive. Or the name of his father. Or if he was ever married. Or had kids. Once, early on, she Googled him, and found the name of his firm but no bio, no list of degrees, no experience in other places. She knew his hair was his own but was never sure about his teeth. He said he was her age, which would have made him forty-one. But who knows? Not Sandra Gordon.

She did know some things, which is why she didn’t care about biography and other details. He was clean. Start with that. He took a shower when he got up and before he left his office and before he said good night to her. She knew his body was flat-bellied and hairless and free of marks. No scars. No tattoos. He ran his fingers over her butt one night and asked where the fine scars came from and she told some lie about a fall in a playground when she was a little girl, and then he caressed the scars, and kissed them and then oiled them.

Oh, my.

She knows he did everything she wanted him to do in bed and didn’t do what she did not want him to do. She knew he loved her neck, the lobes of her ears, the curve of her back, and the delicate biting she would do when he was in her mouth.

She knew he liked her black skin, blacker than a cave at midnight. He might even have loved it. He would stand behind her facing the bedroom mirror and place his hands on her belly or fondle her breasts and kiss her neck. Her blackness made his own skin whiter. And she could feel his rush of arousal, the exhaling, the quickening of breath. Even in the second year with him, one trip to bed was never enough.

He did ask for the résumé-style details of her life, Jamaica and then Columbia and then Harvard Business School. He always said he was impressed. But he never matched that information with information about himself. They had places, uptown and down, where they met for lunch or dinner, but they were never places where photographers might show up. Early on, she asked him if this was because she was black and he said no, no, it’s because I don’t want my face around anywhere. Celebrity is a killer. He talked about a shipping guy named Ludwig, one of the richest guys of his day, and how nobody had ever seen his face in the Wall Street Journal, or Forbes, or the Economist, or the Time business section, and that allowed him to live and work more freely. Ludwig could never live in the world now, he said, with all these scurrying rodents holding camcorders, trying to get on YouTube. Or be crowned as “iReporters” on CNN or Fox. Staying out of certain places is better for both of us, Myles said. That makes sense, Sandra said. She even wanted to believe it.

One night he did ask her how she started writing copy for an agency and she told him that she wanted first to write stories. About what? he said, his brow furrowing. About Jamaica, she said, and my coming to New York, and, well, all sorts of things. His face looked puzzled, as if she had told him that she wanted once to start a colony on Mars. And what happened? he said. I had to eat, she said. And he smiled in a relieved way.

Sandra Gordon never mentioned this again, never told him that she wanted to write about the things that truly mattered, to make sense of them, to make sense of herself. Above all, to freeze on paper the way chance is almost everything in life. Or at least in Sandra’s life. If my father had not abused me when I was eight, my madda would not have hit him in the head with a club and gathered me with her to set off to a kind of freedom. She might not have found work in the kitchen of those two gay guys in Montego Bay, in a house full of books that neither she nor Sandra could read. One of the guys, a very kind man, found the girl a tutor, and she started reading, and then there was a big party and they bought her a pink dress and new shoes and showed her how to carry a tray of appetizers and how to curtsy.

Sandra Gordon, aged nine, was a nervous wreck. But at the party, chance expanded its role. One of the guests was Cynthia Harding, who was there with the Briscoe guy, from the World. Her beloved Sam. In the library of the house in Montego Bay, Cynthia talked to Sandra about how books were the true food of the big wide world, and when she went home to New York, she sent Sandra copies of two Babar books and The Little Engine That Could. Stories too young for me, maybe, but I was only reading for about five months, and they were stories. Made of pictures and those little squiggles called words. Years later Cynthia explained that she was touched by my joy in reading. That I reminded her of why reading mattered. After those first books, she returned to Montego Bay once a year to visit, sometimes with Sam, sometimes without, and she kept bringing books. And sending them from New York. Right up the scale. From Little Women to Dumas. To Stevenson and My Friend Flicka. And when Sandra turned seventeen, Stendhal.

I have them still. All of them. And the letters that came with them. Full of counsel. Full of encouragement. Full of the future.

The year Madda died, Cynthia came to the funeral in Montego Bay and brought young Sandra home with her to New York. Arranging her first passport and a student visa. Placing her in a special cramming school in New York. A school so good, she was accepted at Columbia. And a month later Cynthia arranged to have all her books, all those letters, shipped from Jamaica to New York. They are here now, in the other room, the one Sandra Gordon calls the studio. Four shelves of treasure from Cynthia Harding. From Babar to Zola. The legacy of sheer chance. If Madda hadn’t hit my father, if she hadn’t found her way to Montego Bay, with me in hand, if Cynthia Harding had not come to that party, I’d have had a different life.

Cynthia became a permanent part of her private résumé. Her second mother. She encouraged Sandra’s writing, but also supported her decision to go for an MBA, her passport to the real world. To have a choice. Over those years, Cynthia spoke to her about boys, about sex, about putting first things first. Reminding her never to accept the feeling that she could not live without a certain man. “If you can’t live without him,” Cynthia said, “you can never live with him.” Telling her never, ever to surrender pride. Encouraging her to be free for all the days and nights of her life. To stay away from men who are too dumb, or too vain, or too hungry. To always be independent in matters of money. “Establish your career,” Cynthia said, “before you join yourself to any man.” These were all more sophisticated variations on what Madda had told Sandra in her own clipped, stoic Jamaican way. “Depend on no man.”

And Cynthia reminded her, more than once, “As long as you can read, you’ll never be lonely.”

They discussed movies too, and painting, and clothes, with Sandra explaining computers to Cynthia, and unraveling hip-hop for her. When Sandra began earning money, rising swiftly in one agency and then hired away by another, with more money each year and more power, she began taking Cynthia to dinner in various places, from Harlem to Brooklyn, places that her American mother had never heard of. She now bought books for Cynthia too and they talked for hours around those tables or walking on summer streets. Just the two of them. Sam was still in Cynthia’s life. Sam would always be there for Cynthia as Cynthia would be there for Sam. By her example, Cynthia taught Sandra there were many ways to love someone. That didn’t save Sandra from making her own mistakes.

Now, with another man gone, Sandra Gordon turns in her bed. She thinks about Myles. And she wants to weep. And tells herself: no. Not over him. Whoever he is. She turns, gripping the pillow. And at last the tears fall.

When they stop, and she wipes her eyes with a bedsheet, she thinks: Tomorrow, I’ll call Cynthia. As I always do.

And falls at last into sleep.

1:31 a.m. Sam Briscoe. City room of New York World.

He knows he looks tired, because he is tired, but at least now he has the Friday wood. A MOTHER WEEPS. Maudlin, yes, unless you look at the mother’s eyes, full of waste and loss and the dark invincible suck of the ghetto. Maudlin, yes, unless you look closely at the photograph of the smiling young boy and the letter from Stuyvesant on the wall behind him. Maudlin, absolutely yes, unless you look at the second front-page photograph. Of the young corpse in the street. Citizens forever of the tabloid night.

Or if you read the story by the Fonseca kid, spare and hard, with all mush words sliced away. The kid was deft too, with the way he folded in the unseen story: the foreclosure sign out front, another symbol of things ending. The piece was so good, Briscoe gave Fonseca an early slide. By now, he’s almost certainly in a saloon.

Now I can pack the briefcase, Briscoe thinks, and take my own early slide. Go home and try to sleep a few hours before heading uptown to meet the F.P.

First, a final look. On the computer he scrolls through the day’s package. The Doom Page. A hard-news follow about torture tapes. A grand jury reporting on some Wall Street swindle, with some Bulgarian as one of a dozen victims. On the world spread, an AP report from Pakistan about the muscular rise of new battalions from the lunatic armies of God. One of them blew up a school full of little girls, guilty of the sin of learning to read. And, of course, fear for the security of nuclear bombs. People are starving and these pricks spend money on bombs. His eyes glaze, then he forces himself to focus. A global-warming piece from Australia, where drought was destroying food supplies and there was great fear of wildfires. They can cut that for space… A two-graf bus-plunge story from Peru, no Americans on board… In sports, Knicks lose. Nets lose. The fans in the arenas sure to skip purgatory. More rumors of steroids in baseball.

Briscoe sighs and glances at his desk. He sees the invitation from Cynthia Harding. Ah, shit. And goes to e-mail. He clicks on the address book, punches in her name, starts to write.

Dearest C:

Sorry this is late. I’ve been too goddamned busy with my wife, Miss World. I hope it went well and that you raised a few kilos of dough for the library. These days, they need every dime. I’ll call you tomorrow (Friday) and we can try to catch up. Dim sum? I miss you.

Much love, para siempre, Sam

He reads it over, exhales, then hits “Send,” and shuts down the computer. He puts the folder marked “Newspapers” in his briefcase, along with others, maybe to prep for the morning meeting, dons jacket, coat, and a fedora lying on the floor behind his desk. He turns out the light. He locks his door and walks into the nearly deserted city room, saying his good-nights, and promising Matt Logan to call if there is any news in the morning.

— May the wind be always at your back, Logan says, and smiles. The old Irish farewell. The one Briscoe’s mother always used when he went off to school. Or to the navy. The wind at his front includes the morning meeting.

He notices that Helen Loomis is already gone.

Then he walks down the long hall to the elevators. He passes the row of typewriters he had installed on low glass-cased tables during the first year of this brave new World. They had belonged to people he had worked with or admired: Murray Kempton and Jimmy Breslin, Peter Kihss and Abe Rosenthal, Paul Sann and Buddy Weiss, Gay Talese and Meyer Berger, Eddie Ellis, Joe Kahn, and Carl Pelleck, Jesse Abramson and Frank Graham and Jimmy Cannon. Bill Heinz was there too. Remingtons, Smith Coronas, and hell, someone had even produced an old Royal that once belonged to Damon Runyon, and that led to a portable used by Hearst’s favorite assassin, Westbrook Pegler, who once worked in this building. And on the walls, there were great World front pages, and a section of cartoons by Willard Mullin and Bill Gallo, Leo O’Mealia and Johnny Pierotti and, of course, Rollin Kirby from the original World. All originals, right off Briscoe’s wall at home. The kid reporters don’t know much about any of them. If Briscoe sees a kid in the hall staring at a certain typewriter, he always tells the kid to check the clips. Or Google the guy. He hopes the ghosts will rise from the typewriters and touch the kids as they rush off to a good murder or a terrible fire or some gigantic calamity.

And thinks: If the news ahead of me this morning is bad, where will they all go? The typewriters, the cartoons, the framed front pages, the kids. And, shit: Where will I go?

Out on West Street, the wind is blowing hard and cold from the harbor as Briscoe looks for a cab heading uptown. No limos for the New York World. Almost no cabs either. Sparse traffic moves out of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel off to the left. No taxis. He begins walking to stay warm. The wind is at his back. He can see the glow of Battery Park City. The sprawl of apartment buildings did not exist down here when he started at the old Post. There were banana boats at the piers and in August the cargo included immense mosquitoes — migrants from Honduras, all without visas — and the sound in the sweltering city room was punctuated by people slapping them dead while typing their stories. No air-conditioning. The windows open. Much laughter. Always laughter.

Then he sees a taxi with its roof light on, steps into the street and hails it. As he slides in, he gives the address, explaining it’s in SoHo. The driver says nothing, and starts moving. Briscoe feels a dull ache in his lower back. Not pain. An ache. He looks at the driver’s name in the plastic slot.

— You from Pakistan, driver? he says.

— Brooklyn, he says curtly.

— Originally Pakistan?

— Eh.

That could lead to more talk, maybe, but Briscoe thinks, Ah, hell, just get me home. The driver makes an abrupt turn off the highway, as if closing the conversation. Briscoe accepts his dismissal, leans back, aching now for the cabbies of his youth, and their soliloquies on life and death, men and women and baseball. Gone forever. Maybe that’s causing the ache in his back too. The ache of losing too many things. And people. Then thinks: Stop. That’s like nostalgia for the clap. He watches a knot of drunken kids lurching from a club with an unreadable sign. Up the block, three very young women are also tottering toward Sixth Avenue on high spiked shoes. To be up this late on a Thursday night, none of them must have day jobs. Or they’re college kids spending their fathers’ dwindling money. Which is the same thing. Do they know how to sign up for unemployment? How many of them? Gotta tell a reporter…

At the corner of West Broadway and Spring, he overtips the surly driver, because he always overtips cabbies, steps out, and walks east toward Greene Street. Two blocks. A counterfeit of exercise. Cold air for the aging brain. He sees more stragglers from the saloons. In twos or threes. He glances up Wooster Street and is sure he sees a man in a poncho glistening with rain. Maybe even a combat poncho. Seated in a wheelchair. A glance. A freeze frame. Then the man is gone. What the fuck? And thinks: Another member of the VFW. The Veterans of Foreign Woes. Or Foreign Whores. Roaming around SoHo like it was the Ia Drang Valley. Or maybe just coming from a costume party. If he has a gun, someone might be in trouble.

Briscoe crosses Wooster and remembers walking here one spring night long ago with Cynthia Harding, the two of them joined by anticipation. She would stay the night. Or maybe a week. Everything seemed possible. Until later, when she turned to him.

— What do you want, Sam? What do you want out of this life?

— Nothing, he said.

She took this remark as a dismissal and a month later she married her second husband and moved to Switzerland for two years. Married the old guy with all the money. Cynthia thought Briscoe meant he didn’t want her either. And maybe she was right. He felt then, and feels now, that he has no talent for marriage. For the compromises and little lies that made shared lives work. He had tried it once, and that was enough. He had no talent for the mutual invasions of privacy. Laughter was never enough. At least not then. And maybe not now. After that night when they crossed Wooster Street, he didn’t see Cynthia until after her second husband’s funeral.

By then he knew that Cynthia was the one woman he could not live without. Life, he had learned, was a series of mistakes, delusions, and stupid losses. Not just for him. For most people. It’s fourth and two and you don’t score. Down by three runs, you pop up with two out in the ninth and the bases loaded. He said out loud: Stop with the fucking sports metaphors. And thought: If the Fonseca kid ever said such things, I’d cut them off his tongue. But one thing is sure: All true wounds are self-inflicted. Aside from his daughter, Nicole, Cynthia was now the only woman in his life. Yes, their lives were separate and private. But who said the sentence that has been moving in his head? You are who you are when you’re alone. Even when he was alone, he was with Cynthia.

He stops at his building, glances warily around the wet cobblestoned street, then opens the outside door into the bright small lobby. He checks the mailbox. Grabs some envelopes, most of them junk mail, 50 % OFF! TWO SUITS FOR PRICE OF ONE. The same as the signs now in all SoHo windows. Except for the signs saying TO LET. A few bills. He turns the key in the elevator slot for his floor, pushes the button, starts rising. Uses another key for his own door. On the third floor. Only one above him.

On the wall of the vestibule is a framed poster from the Picasso retrospective at MoMA more than twenty years ago. He saw it twice with Cynthia Harding. He unlocks the door to his loft, flicks on the light switch, locks the door behind him. And sees the framed photograph of Willie Mays playing stickball on St. Nicholas Place in 1951. The picture always makes him smile. Welcome home, it says. Say hey. Joy lives.

On the street end of the loft, a desk lamp glows upon his large computer table, which is littered with folders and paper. To the side, a stack of old newspapers rises two feet off the polished plank floor. A computer rests on its own small table, and beyond it is an HP color printer. Small green lights blink in welcome. Not tonight, boys. Gotta get some sleep.

He removes hat, coat, jacket, tie as he walks deeper into the loft, dropping each upon the couches and chairs of the living area, and goes into the bathroom. He thinks: Been here so many years now. Since they were just starting to use the word “SoHo.” Wasn’t even legal to live here. His loft had been an old metalworking shop and the bare polished wood floors were gouged where machinery had been torn out, probably for shipment to South America. They all laugh at him now, his few living friends from those years. Briscoe had combined the luck of the Irish and the chutzpah of the Jews. They know he bought the loft in 1974 for fifteen thousand dollars borrowed from a bank, where he knew the vice president from the Lion’s Head, then wrote a fast thriller under another name to pay off the mortgage and do the work the place needed, and now it’s worth almost four million. Or was. Before the Fall. He thinks: I gotta fucking laugh. Four million, and I never even considered selling. Even after Joyce died. My only wife. Even after I went to Europe. He rented the place to a director friend from the Public Theater who was getting divorced. A friend who wouldn’t steal the books. He’s dead too.

In the bathroom, Briscoe turns on the taps of the tub, testing the heat of the water with his left hand. He dons a robe from the 1957 Golden Gloves tournament, where his friend José won the middleweight championship. He pulls on slippers and goes out to the wider loft, looking for something to read in the tub, walking past the tall bookshelves that fill one long wall from floor to ceiling. They are organized like tenements. The French tenement. The Mexican tenement. The Irish tenement. The Jewish tenement. The three tenements of New York histories and old guidebooks, novels and diaries that tried to define the city, and always failed. Each of the tenements were about places he had lived, and people he knew, and they defined him too. His mother was Irish, his father Jewish, both immigrants who met here in New York, and their own past seeped densely from the leathery New York tenement, whispering to him as he walked by. And the Jewish tenement. And the Irish tenement. Not tonight, Momma. Not tonight, Dad.

He stops in front of the Italian tenement. Should he listen to Calvino in the tub? Or Barzini? Should he take some sentences of Eco to bed with him, or Manzoni, or Moravia, or Pavese? Ah: Machiavelli. The argument for a republic. Perchè no? But then he would be up for hours of dispute and agreement with a man who has been dead for five centuries, and was smarter in death than Briscoe has ever been in life. He lifts down Pavese’s diaries, opens at random. Many pages brightened with a yellow marker. Thinks: No.

Nobody.

Alone.

And goes back empty-handed to the tub, slips off his robe, shuts off the faucets, slides in, and closes his eyes. He always loves this moment, the loft full of a teeming silence, a dense watery solitude. He stretches out. Cynthia. The tub at Patchin Place. The one in Montego Bay that time. The Plaza Athénée in Paris. He erases the images, and begins to think of Rome. The yellow light, the ocher walls, the gurgling of fountains. Talking with Fellini one night about Batman.

In a city so old that the buildings themselves dwarf the fear of death. What’s a single human life, Rome says, compared to millennia? To be there again, reading Catullus, in some year before Vietnam. And did he really see a man in a combat poncho on Wooster Street tonight? And was it Cynthia who said that she was delighted to know that a street in New York was named after Bertie Wooster?

A MOTHER WEEPS?

Ah, shit.

Briscoe wants to be in the golden city, studying Latin to ward off Alzheimer’s, waiting for Virgil to take him home…

Now he realizes that the ache is gone from his lower back, sucked away by hot water and visions of Rome. He opens his eyes.

1:45 a.m. Ali Watson. Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Two blocks from home, driving slowly in the Mazda, wary of the rain, he tries the cell phone again. Calling the house. Hears it ringing. He says out loud: Come on, Mary Lou. Pick it up, woman. Come on, baby. Three rings. Four. On the fifth, he hears her recorded voice. For the third time in the last hour. You have reached the Watsons. We are not available. Please leave a—. With his thumb, Ali Watson cuts off the call. He turns into a street with brownstones on both sides, where there is never a parking spot. Some of the cars never leave the block. The owners move them in the morning to the other side of the street, to avoid the ticket, but they are always here. Alternate-side-of-the-street squatting. He clicks the work number at Cynthia Harding’s house. Thinking: Maybe they all stayed late. Drinking, eating, talking. Mary Lou forced to wait until the final bell. No. The Harding lady wouldn’t do that. Mary Lou’s been working there twenty-one years. Definitely not. Mary Lou never did learn to drive, but on party nights at Patchin Place, she always calls the car service for the ride home to Brooklyn, and the Harding lady always pays.

No answer. He tries the other number. After four rings, the answering machine starts. Again, Mary Lou’s voice. You have reached the office of Cynthia Harding. Please leave…

He looks at his watch. One forty-eight.

Shit.

Something’s fucking wrong.

He eases the Mazda up the rainy street and pulls into the space beside the fire hydrant outside his house. He stops, turns off the lights. The wet street is empty. Not even a man walking a dog. The jobs are going and maybe the dumb kids will rise again. The stats say no. Crime keeps going down. But lesson number one from the sixties is still true: Never create guys with nothing to lose. Not here. Not Pakistan. Not Iraq. Not Afghanistan. But definitely not Brooklyn. Ali Watson leans across the front seat and gazes up at his house. No lights burning. Not from any of the three floors where he has lived with Mary Lou since he made sergeant. This was where they would live until they died. Ali and Mary Lou and Malik until he finished college and went on to his own life.

Then Malik comes to him like a jagged scribble in his mind, and Ali Watson’s heart quickens.

Malik, Malik, my only son. Twenty-three years old, but not yet a man.

Gone now for months, he thinks, God knows where. Maybe Pakistan, for all the fuck I know. Or Yemen. To become one of those goddamned foreign fighters we always hear about when generals hold press conferences. Or an amateur jihadist, who’ll come home on a U.S. passport. The kind of knucklehead we talk about at the weekly meetings of the task force. He knows just one thing about Malik. He’s gone. The task force has him on the list, and know to call if they pick up a scent. Ali Watson had told them all about his son. Ali became a Muslim because of Malcolm, and Malik became a Muslim because of Ali, his father. Mary Lou never became a Muslim, shouting at Ali once, They were the goddamned slavers who sold us to the English! And she was right. She always is. After the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center, Ali gave it up. Good-bye, Islam. Fuck you, and Paradise too.

Malik was seven in ’93. Bright, smiling, an obsessive fan of the Mets and the Knicks. When he was twelve, he discovered the shelf near the top of the bookcase on the second floor. The shelf with all of Ali’s old books about Malcolm and Islam. Books no longer read. Books he should have thrown out. A year later the boy told his mother and father that he was now a Muslim. Mary Lou said, Don’t be ridiculous. But he went his own way, with a few friends that he had converted. Or who had converted him. He went to a mosque not far from here, just as he went to Brooklyn Tech, six blocks in the other direction. Ali tried to talk to him about it, to put doubt in him, or common sense, but he looked at his father with that knowing smile people have when they believe they know the truth, and you don’t. Not a smile. A sneer. And he started looking at his mother with dead, bitter eyes.

Malik prayed five times a day, shoes off, facing Mecca. Even when he was out among the crowds on DeKalb Avenue. He didn’t smoke or drink, of course, and that was a good thing. But he became more evasive by the day, barely talking to Mary Lou, looking at Ali as if he were a traitor. Ali tried to talk about the Knicks and the Mets, but Malik made a snorting sound with his lips, and retreated into silence. He was living with a secret script. Ali slipped into the boy’s mosque a few times, well to the rear, but never heard any talk of jihad or violence, only the usual stuff about submission and Allah. But as Malik grew up, taller and more muscular than his father, he became more rigid, more fanatical, right up to September 11. After that, he was even worse. He tried to grow out his beard, but the hair was thin and scraggly, a teenaged sketch. He wore a kufi on his head. He had been accepted by CUNY, but when he turned eighteen, he left home. Taking a place with his friend Jamal. A month later, Ali checked with CUNY and discovered that Malik had stopped going to classes. Ali used all of his skills and his craft, his police and FBI friends, his gangster contacts, to track Malik, but all he could find were rumors and maybes. He gave many details to the task force, just in case. There were a few reports. Malik, Jamal, and a few other Brooklyn friends had been seen in Jersey City, or in Miami, or preaching in Compton, out in L.A. If Malik had a cell phone, it was certainly under another name. And serious jihadists didn’t have Facebook pages. Malik called home once and Mary Lou answered. She insisted he come home, he shouted at her in Arabic (or what she thought was Arabic) and hung up. He never called again.

Ali told much of this to Ray Kelly when, as police commissioner, Kelly asked him to join the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Ali begged off. “Imagine if you had a son that might be in the Irish Republican Army,” he said. “Not is. But might be.” Kelly smiled and nodded, the way any good police commissioner would, especially a mick. Then he said he needed Ali because he understood the Muslim mind, and the way it worked in New York among American Muslims.

— Besides, he said. You can keep an eye out for Malik.

So many years now since September 11, and Ali still did his best for Kelly, every day of the week or, more often, every night. Some asshole shakes Ajax on the steps of a post office in the Bronx, and off goes Ali Watson and his young partner, Malachy Devlin. Three assholes in Crown Heights are bullshitting in a bar about blowing up the Williamsburg Bridge, the tip comes in, off go Ali and Malachy, saying that if these guys succeeded they would win an architecture improvement award.

Malachy Devlin is a good cop, a good partner, a Fed, smart, cool. The other guys say they are a typical Morgan Freeman — Colin Farrell movie. Sometimes Ali feels that way too. But the partners are not close friends. The younger guy has a wife and a little kid. He likes regular hours, and then goes home. But they work hard on the trail of knuckleheads who might be terrorists. If the evidence is more than just bullshitting, they lock them up, search the dumps where they live, track down their former wives and abandoned sons wherever they might be, set one free and follow him around, and if they realize it’s just another case of three assholes bullshitting in a bar, which ain’t a felony, they let them go. They process tips, calls, anonymous notes, rumors, and the Feds’ reporting once a month about “chatter.” In all of this, there is little to be found about Malik.

And here is Ali Watson, on his own block, caressing the gun in his holster before getting out of the car. Afraid Malik has come to visit. Afraid he called Mary Lou, out of the blue. Afraid she let him in. Afraid she said something that he thought dissed Allah. The world is full of nutso shit. Maybe it’s a lot simpler. Just some junkie on the prowl. Maybe.

Ali unlocks the gate under the stoop, pauses, hears nothing, then opens the two doors leading to the garden floor and the kitchen. He does not turn on a light, but he knows every inch of this house, and in each room there are small plug-ins that throw pinpoints of light across the floors. He moves to the rear windows, holds one curtain aside, gazes into the garden. Empty.

Don’t be here, Malik. Please. Be in fucking Pakistan. Be in Afghanistan. Be in Jersey fucking City.

Silently, he moves through the house, up two flights of stairs, inhaling the familiar odors of home, of food and old books and couches, of the place where he lives with his woman, the home place. His gun is now in his right hand. He passes the room that once was Malik’s, but the door is open and the shades half drawn. Nobody there. He lifts a leg over the one step that creaks and then is on the second landing. Waits.

Nothing.

In the top-floor bedroom he takes the flashlight from beside the bed, turns it on. The bed is crisply made. All clothes are hung in the closets. Books and a clock beside the bed on Mary Lou’s side. The bathroom is as it always is: gleaming and clean. No scrawled message on the mirror or walls. Watson exhales. Warmer here. Heat rising. But no human presence. His mouth is dry now. Holding the flashlight, he turns and hurries downstairs. There are no signs of alarm anywhere. No Arabic graffiti. No blood.

In the kitchen he takes a Diet Coke from the refrigerator, leaves the door open, stands in the cold shaft of light and swallows a long draft. He screws the cap back on the bottle, places it on the door shelf, closes the door, and stands there in the dark.

Malik, Malik.

And oh, my Mary Lou.

He exhales hard, then switches on the ceiling light.

1:55 a.m. Bobby Fonseca. Nighttown restaurant, Stone Street, Manhattan.

When he walks in, the place is almost empty. A pair of bulky guys are at the bar. Maybe off-duty firemen. Laughing with a blonde barmaid. Three Japanese guys are at one table in the front room, looking gloomy in suits and loosened ties. What time zones do their bosses live in? They look like gamblers waiting for results. From the Nikkei, for sure. One has a laptop on his knee, flicking, mumbling to the others. All news all the time. Irish music plays from the sound system, the volume down low. The Chieftains. There is still light in the kitchen. No sign of Leopold Bloom. Or Stephen Daedalus. The large framed photograph of Mr. Joyce looks pensive in the gloom of the empty second room.

But there’s Victoria, her arms folded, shoulder leaning against an arch. Lost in thought. Jesus Christ, Fonseca thinks, she is so fucking beautiful.

He peels off his dripping raincoat, drapes it on the back of one chair, lays his wool hat on another, sits at a table. His scraping of a chair against the floor wakes Victoria. She comes to him, smiling broadly.

— Hey! she says.

Her eyes are bright. Her breasts masked with the top of a dark green apron bearing the name of the restaurant.

— Hey, Victoria.

— You eating? Ya got five minutes to order.

— First things first, I guess. Three scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, rye toast, and a beer.

She touches his shoulder, hurries to the kitchen.

Victoria Collins, he thinks. Why would anyone in Bayside call an Irish kid Victoria? The mother must have picked the name. Or maybe Victoria did. Was she really baptized Bridget? They graduated from J-school at the same time. Last year. Except she was at Columbia and Fonseca at NYU. He got a shot at the World. She was still looking. Her father some kind of union boss. Operating Engineers? Won’t let her be an unpaid intern. Isn’t in favor of free blogging. So she’s a waitress. Waiting. Maybe envious of me.

She returns.

— So whattaya working on for tomorrow? she says.

— A murder. Sad. A bright kid shot dead. A kid from Stuyvesant.

— Chinese?

— No, black. When I left the paper, it was the wood. Who knows by tomorrow? The night is young.

— It is, she says, then hurries to the kitchen.

He thinks: Forget the eggs. Let me lick your thighs.

Victoria Collins returns with eggs, toast, beer on a tray. She lays each item gently in front of Fonseca.

— Heard anything? he says.

— A friend called, says there might be an opening at the Daily News. I sent a follow-up to my résumé. They must have three of them on file.

Fonseca lifts some egg on his fork.

— Maybe call the editor, Victoria. You know, follow-up with a voice attached. Try to see him.

A pause. She stands there.

— Want to celebrate the wood? she says. Without a smile.

Fonseca stops eating.

— Sure.

— Eat fast, she says. We’re almost closing.

She walks back toward the kitchen and turns into a back room. Fonseca crunches a piece of toast. He has been here five times in the past month, and she always laughed when he came on to her. Now… now? Tonight?

The firemen start arguing with a third man. A short red-haired guy. A regular. Fonseca can hear the names Lee and Gallinari and knows they are arguing about the Knicks. God. Don’t they know that life is short? He eats quickly. Too quickly. Belches. And sees Victoria Collins come out of the back room. The apron is gone but she is carrying a thick coat under one arm. She hands him a bill. He hands her his Visa card.

— Right back, she says.

The three Japanese guys are standing now. Fonseca hears a sentence from the bar: You kiddin’ me, Charlie? Nate is great! He sips his beer. And then she is back with the green plastic wallet that holds the check and a pen.

He opens it, starts calculating.

— No tip, she says.

— But I—

— My turn.

A minute later, they are out on cobblestones in the rain. Her down jacket has a hood. His wool hat is pulled tight on his skull. They walk toward light but there are no cabs.

— Where do you live, anyway? Fonseca says.

— East Village. Avenue B and Twelfth Street. And hey, Fonseca, what do I call ya?

— Fonseca’s fine.

— I like Fonseca. Three Latin syllables! But, hey, Fonseca: whatever ya do, don’t call me Vicky.

Victoria Collins laughs.

— Okay, Collins. Whatever you say.

A taxi turns the corner. They start waving and shouting. The taxi stops and they get in. The backseat is wet, but so are they.

As they are crossing Houston Street, Fonseca feels the cell phone thumping in his trouser pocket.

2:07 a.m. Helen Loomis. Second Avenue at 9th Street, Manhattan.

She’s been home for thirty minutes now, but after a shower, and four cigarettes, she can’t sleep. The apartment is dark, as always, and she knows it is spotless. Two doors are closed between the bedroom and the windows that open onto Second Avenue but she can still hear the usual sounds of emergency from the street, as she does every night. First, there was the ambulance siren, then heavier screams from a fire engine. They fade away, heading downtown. Then a shout, followed by an answer, then another shout, like a dialogue between angry seals. A new version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp.

Helen Loomis turns on her side, squashing a pillow over her head, then hears a second fire truck, wilder, more guttural, the ladder. She gets up, pulls on a robe, opens the door to the kitchen, then to the long room with its dining table and bookshelves, and on into the living room. She opens the drapes a few inches, peers out into the rain-lashed avenue.

Across the street, under an awning, she sees Federico the mambo dancer. It’s his time, and he is dancing. She knows he is seventy-two, knows that his wife is dead, his two daughters living in Miami, one grandson serving in Afghanistan. He should be too old for this. But Federico surges with life. He wears a woven straw hat, a Mets jacket, polished boots with lifts. Wires feed into his ears from a machine strapped to his chest. The wires give him Tito Puente. They give him Machito. They give him El Gran Combo and Cortijo and Rubén Blades and Eddie Palmieri. They give him the Palladium on Broadway in 1958. She knows, because Federico has told her so, on many warm nights when she meets him while hurrying home from the World. He dances alone on the avenue with the precision and lightness of a twenty-year-old. He never looks for applause. He doesn’t ask for loose change. He doesn’t flirt. He dances for himself. He dances to avoid going home to the apartment where the only resident is himself. He dances to ward off loneliness.

Helen closes the drapes, whispering a “Buenas noches, Federico.” She moves back through the dark apartment. She thinks about a cigarette, decides no, and returns to bed. A few minutes later, she is asleep.

A few minutes after that, the telephone rings.

2:17 a.m. Josh Thompson. Union Square, Manhattan.

He is staring at George Washington’s iron ass in this deserted park and the rain starts hammering the poncho. The last leaves are falling. A stray dog hurries from tree to tree, with nobody ready to pick up his crap. He’s my brother, that dog, Josh Thompson thinks. All alone in a cold rain. At least Josh is wearing two sweaters. And the poncho is pulled taut over his stumps, with the gun steadied by his hands. The dog has nothing. And it’s colder now. He tells himself to suck in the wet air, suck the rain. Thinking: I did too much time sucking sand.

He closes his eyes and he’s in a Humvee and the sky is white and the sand is white, blinding him, and they’re all talking nonsense, making jokes, trying to see in the white, trying to see wires coming out of the sand beside the road, and his lips are dry and burnt and the snot is like tiny rocks in his nose and his throat is dry, and someone passes a water bottle and Josh takes a swig, and on they go, into the dry killing whiteness. The dryness soaking up all wetness. And sometimes he even gets a hard-on.

Thinking: I gotta have payback.

Thinking now: Allah took my legs. Took my balls. And not just Allah and the people who love his sorry ass. All kinds of Americans too. Never could get payback. Not from the Iraqis. Not from nobody else.

In Walter Reed that time? The shrink said to him, Make a list. A payback list. Get it out of your head, the shrink said. So he put down the names. Put down the Americans too. Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Franks. The lieutenant too. Armstrong. He thinks: That was stupid, putting him on the list. He was dead. Killed the same time I got it. Stupid bastard, riding us straight into a white sandy road with wrecked cars all over, and wrecked houses too, like he was Bruce Willis in a fucking movie. He was in Iraq three weeks and thought he was a little Patton. He charged us right into it. The IED blew his fucking head off. So there’s no payback for him. I’ll never see his squinty-ass little eyes again. His mouth with no lips. Just a line is all. Telling us, Go, go, get in there, and then kuh-fuckin-boom! Killed Whitey too. And Langella. And Alfredo Salinas. And Freddie Goldsmith. Me, I’m the only one that lived. To come to this bench in the fucking New York rain, just behind George Washington. To say, out loud, to an audience of raindrops: The towelheads took my balls.

They took his wife too. Took Wendy and the little girl, Flora. He hardly knew that little girl. She was what? A year old when he went to Iraq? So he could get a reward at the other end, get the G.I. Bill, get educated past what he was and where he came from. To make a good life for Wendy and Flora and whatever other kids they’d have. He sees Wendy holding Flora at the airfield in Texas while the band played and everybody saluted, and Flora was bawling, the tears just pouring down her face, her mouth like Jell-O, pointing a chubby little finger at him, and then Josh Thompson followed the others right on the plane. He waved from the door. Wendy waved back. The girl bawled. Then Pfc. Josh Thompson was off to the war. Wendy wrote him letters. Every day, then three days a week, then every Sunday. She sent him pictures of Flora too, in a bright little new dress, standing up and holding the couch, bigger each time, the brown eyes always sad. Josh cried each night after seeing new pictures. Cried quiet, not making a sound. Cried into the pillow.

Most soldiers knew the computer, but not Josh. His shit-ass school had nothing. But one of the guys, Norris, helped him get online and Wendy sent him some video through that, he didn’t know how, and Josh saw that Wendy was getting fat, in a big oversized yellow dress, pure Target, or Walmart, a dress like a yellow tent, and her face was all round, and her tits bigger, and Josh Thompson wondered: Who took the video? Norris showed him how to write an e-mail and he asked his wife. Wendy said it was a woman friend from church.

But trying to sleep, he wondered: Was it some guy took the video? Some guy from the base who makes the video, waits till little Flora is asleep, and then Josh sees Wendy in the living room, and she’s doing what she did with him one time, but with the guy sitting on the couch, Wendy kneeling on the floor, on the rug.

That night, Josh masturbated in the dark tent, seeing himself on top of Wendy, jamming it home after she blew that guy. Josh playing with his pud, which is what almost everybody did at night because none of them could go anywhere in Iraq to get laid. If you slipped off the base, looking for Iraqi pussy, they buried your body without a head. So every night in Iraq, thousands of guys just beat their meat. The last resort of the lonely. Coming in a Kleenex. Or a washcloth. Or a sock. Some guys scored with the women soldiers, even married them so they could get laid before dying. The way Josh almost died. He closes his eyes. Pay you back. Sees the blinding light, the explosion, shrieking voices of people he can’t see. Others quiet. This one’s alive! Morphine! Stretcher! A chopper then, followed by a blur, and he woke up in Germany. How many days later? Sixteen, they told him. And Wendy was there, out in the hall, that’s what the medic told him. The room bright, with blue trim on the windows. You want to see her now, your wife? Talking very carefully. Yeah, Josh Thompson said. Yeah. The medics unfolded a portable screen to give them privacy and Josh saw that there were eight or nine other guys in the long room, all on beds. Each one totally fucking alone.

Wendy came in, wearing the yellow dress from the video and her hair all curly and too much lipstick, all curves and flesh. She was breathing hard, her eyes full of tears, and she leaned over and kissed Josh on the mouth. He couldn’t smell her. He couldn’t smell anything, and still can’t. There was a buzz in his head too, like a dentist drill.

— Hello, baby, she whispered.

— Hello, Wendy, baby.

— I’m so sorry, Josh.

— Me too.

She started telling him that the church raised money to send her there to Germany, that everything was okay with Flora, she was staying at Wendy’s mother’s house in Norman, that she was praying for him too. Everybody was praying for him. The whole state of Oklahoma was praying for him. She had cookies from the church for him and the other guys. She had flowers. And a book about the Hornets, who played two seasons in Oklahoma City after Katrina. And, oh, it was in the papers, she said, what happened to you.

— Can I go home now? he said.

— Not yet, the doctor says.

Josh pushed a hand under the sheet and blanket. There was a thick pad of gauze where his penis used to be. To the side, left and right, more bulging bandages. He wiggled his toes, or thought he did. But there were no toes, because there were no feet and no legs. Jesus Christ.

— Let me see it, Wendy said.

— No.

— I need to see it, she said, her voice colder. I’m your wife.

— Wait till it heals.

She came around to the side and lifted the sheet and blanket. Her eyes grew wide with horror, her eyebrows arched, she made a choked sound in her throat. Then she squeezed his hand, covered him again, seemed to melt a bit, and walked heavily to the door. He never saw her again. She went home to Norman and closed the house and picked up Flora and went away. She divorced him by mail a year later when he was in Walter Reed. On that day in Germany, the cookies were great but he couldn’t smell the flowers.

And now he’s freezing in this park in New York fucking City. The rain harder. The MAC-10 icy to the touch of his bare hand. The second clip is cold and hard against his gut. Thinking: Payback.

And wondering where that little girl is now, his daughter, little Flora, and whether her eyes are still sad.

George Washington is all green and shiny with rain. Beyond him, a red light blinks on but there is no traffic for it to stop.

He unlocks the wheels and rolls to the edge of the park. Something called Filene’s Basement is one way, a Staples store the other. The rain lashes his face.

A black guy in a hoodie comes hurrying across the drowning street. He is hatless, without an umbrella. The hood keeps falling back in the wind and he keeps brushing it forward. He’s about the same age as Josh Thompson. He sees the wheelchair and his eyes go wide.

— Hey, man, Josh says.

— I’m busy, muthafucka.

— I’m just wonderin’, is there a place I can stay around here?

The black man points down a wide two-way street.

— Try down there. Might be a hotel. A church. At the end, they’s an overpass called the High Line. The fuck knows?

Then he looks behind him, and hurries away, heading uptown. And disappears down some stairs.

Josh rolls into what a sign calls 14th Street. He lowers his head and moves into the wind and rain. It ain’t sand, he says out loud. It ain’t sand. It’s wet. It’s rain. What I wanted so bad back there in Iraq. He crosses other avenues and passes many shuttered stores. No sign of a hotel. But across the street, there’s a church. Our Lady of… something. Goo-add-a-luppy? All the lights are out. The Mexicans back home got a church with the same name. Or like Salinas in Iraq, with a Virgin Mary medal around his neck. It didn’t save him.

Then in the distance, on the right-hand side of the street, he sees minarets. He stops, his heart pounding. One big minaret, and a dome, and others around it, high thin towers where they can chant their fucking prayers. Just like in Sadr City. His hips are hurting now but he moves faster.

A neon sign says: ALADDIN.

Then: LAMP.

Aladdin’s Lamp.

He hears another word.

Payback.

2:19 a.m. Beverly Starr. Eighth Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn.

She eases back from the drawing table, then pushes hard against the black Girsberger chair, the one she thinks of as her second spine. She exhales, takes another breath, holds it, lets the air out more slowly. Then stands. She stares down at the large painting on the table. On thick illustration board. Made of grays and blacks. Bold slashing blacks. A young black woman, infant in arms, small boy holding her skirt. An old junkie with a shirt hanging loose on his bones. A middle-class white man with a lumpy suit, his face sagging in defeat. An old soldier with a steel helmet and combat fatigues. The eyes of each of them full of fear, abandonment, injury, shame.

Beverly Starr steps to the side, a brush in hand, thick with a load of gray casein. She first goes left, then to the right. The eyes follow her. As she wanted them to. Eyes she hoped were full of questions. How did this happen? How did I end up like this? How did I get to be a wanderer in empty streets? Can’t you see we need help? A roof over our heads, a warm bed, a stove, food? Beverly has lived with them for weeks, has sketched them from window seats in coffee shops, has seen them waiting for food-stamp cards outside welfare offices, has frozen them in memory with her own blinking eyes, using the blinks as if they were shutters in a camera. A trick learned long ago from a sidewalk artist in the Village.

Here they are.

The homeless.

On a street as empty and menacing as any in Batman’s Gotham.

She moves in on the painting, and with her brush she blurs the details of the soldier’s hands. Too literal. Too comic-book-y. Does the same for the middle-class man, then lifts a smaller brush and makes a subtle crack in one lens of his glasses. Thinking: Don’t fuck it up now. Don’t overfinish it. She pauses again, and abruptly thinks: It’s done.

She slips the two brushes into a large jar of water, shaking the paint loose. Then she lifts a black lithographic pencil from her tabouret and signs her name in the lower right corner. Boldly. Proudly. The first time in too long a time that she has done such work. Doing it for a benefit instead of an editor. To help raise money for the homeless. Tonight.

Another goddamned deadline kept. With hours to spare. Thank God for water-based casein. Quick-drying acrylics. Someone is coming at nine, to carry the painting away for a quick scanning and a framing job, and delivery to the committee in charge of the benefit. The painting will be auctioned off. The scanners will turn it into a poster and all benefactors will receive personally framed copies a few weeks later. She thinks: This is the moment in the old days when I would have had a cigarette.

She stretches, moves her shoulders like rippling gears. Then glances at the Mac. Her true workshop. The homeless painting is the first work she’s done away from the Mac in two years. But she can’t sleep now. She has more work to do. She rolls the chair and sits down facing the screen. There’s a page on the screen, half the panels in black and white, half in color, alternating real world, virtual world. Page 5 of Like Mama. For Vanity Fair. Splash page, and four strip pages. All about a mild-mannered English teacher named Lois Trueheart, early forties, a spinster, like her creator. She’s been driven half mad by the way all the girl students use “like” in almost every uttered sentence. Sometimes twice. Or three times! And how they add question marks after statements of fact. As if all fact were conditional.

On Beverly’s splash page there’s an aerial shot of New York City, showing the skyscrapers, Central Park, the East River, parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Voice balloons are rising over the city, some large, others tiny, hundreds of them, many millions of others just suggested, all saying likelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelikelike… In class, in the corridors, in stores and churches and bars, on the streets, in the subway, maybe even in their sleep… He calls, and I’m, like, scared?… I finish and I’m, like, happy?… He’s handsome, but he’s, like, thirty?… I look at it, and it’s, like, awesome? One four-letter word blurring the city’s soundtrack, part of the pasty verbal mush, and on the splash page it’s crowding the sky among the many towers.

Is that girl scared, or is she like scared?

Is this one happy, or is she like happy? The guy is thirty, or like thirty, and his schlong is, like, awesome?

Where the twin towers once stood, an immense new steel and granite edifice, ominous, primordial, carries the name of the story: The Charge of the Like Brigade.

In a small panel at the bottom, Lois Trueheart holds her head in her hands, wracked with despair, alone at her desk in an empty classroom. On a blackboard behind her are the words “Precise, Clear, Exact.” Those words that mean, like, nothing to millions of young women. She clicks to the following page. A gigantic gray finger enters through the window, a finger with the crosshatched texture of stone, and touches her clenched hands. Then Lois is swept up and out the window, into the sky, whizzed to the far reaches of the galaxy, all the way to the Fortress of Exactitude, where she is placed before the ancient deity Gramaticus. He gives her the sacred task. To cleanse the English-speaking world of “like.” By any means necessary. She will become… Like Mama.

Beverly Starr laughs. A gust of rain sprays the room’s two windows. Hard and tiny pieces of the sky, drowning and silencing the earth, one pellet for each “like.” Millions. Billions. Cluster bombs from God or Gramaticus.

She lays down the stylus she uses for details, moves the chair back with her flat butt, hits “Save,” and rises. She is barefoot, in jeans and black T-shirt, inhaling the damp warm stale air of the room. She caresses the frame of the tablet/monitor, turns, runs the tips of her fingers over the top of the scanner. She glances at the painting of the homeless. They are, like, hurting. She places it on an easel, revealing a sheet of two-ply Bristol taped to the immaculate white surface of the table. Panels are drawn in blue pencil, lines laid for lettering. In the drawer to the right are the old tools of her trade: two Winsor & Newton sable brushes, two steel-nib pens, a crow quill, various pencils and erasers, markers and technical pens, an X-Acto knife, a single-edge razor blade, an old bottle of Higgins ink, with a jar of white beside it for corrections. The Luxo swing-arm lamp is off now, but it contains a fluorescent bulb and an incandescent one, balancing each other so that color stays true. There’s a T square too and a steel ruler, eighteen inches long, and a clear plastic triangle. She thinks: The tools Caniff used, and Will Eisner, and Noel Sickles. Tools I don’t use anymore.

She crooks her right arm as far as possible across the top of her head, grips the elbow in her left hand, and bends to the side. Twenty times. Facing a ten-foot-high mirror, she reverses hand and elbow and bends the other way. Her body is still lean and hard, buttless and almost titless, but she wears the same size 8 she wore at nineteen.

In Like Mama, Beverly uses herself as the model for Lois, an exclamation point in a Catwoman suit, improved by art into a 34C cup. The character has a secret lab in Red Hook, where she invents her own tools for the crusade: a stylus-sized secret weapon, with a button she can press when it’s slyly aimed at one of the Like Brigade. The girl says “like” and her thorax freezes, her eyes widen, she can’t finish a sentence? Like Mama presses the button again, and the young woman can speak, which she does nervously, until she says “like” again, and click! Frozen silence! Panic? She resembles a dog who has encountered an electric fence. Maybe the girl even gets what happened, connects “like” to paralysis. But Like Mama doesn’t stick around for Pavlovian results, as puny as this one might be. She is returning to the beginning of this, far from Brooklyn, in distant California. Google has taught her that Valley Girls were the Muslim Brotherhood of this linguistic perversion. Now they are Beverly’s age (or the same age as Lois Trueheart) and still talking that way, making it seem normal in certain households and classrooms, and Beverly realizes that she will need to invent a Weapon of Mass Obstruction. And then…

Now, listening to the rain, Beverly Starr looks down at a narrow blue padded mat spread across the floor. She kneels on the mat, stretches forward, facing the floor, her hands flat beside each shoulder. Then she rises, arching backward, pushing against the floor, forcing her back to crack. She is facing the Mac, a kind of supplicant, and when she comes up she can see the packed shelves of the Collection. And remembers trying to sell Bushwhacker to that guy from the World. The editor. Briscoe. The one-shot strip was about a woman who had the mysterious power to remove clothes from anyone. She chooses to strip clothes off George W. Bush. There he is with a bullhorn at the ruins of the World Trade Center, and the rescue workers are all laughing or smiling, and Bush is naked. His limp pecker hanging there. Yelling “Bring ’em on!” The crack of his ass is withered. He stands with Condoleezza Rice on the White House steps and she’s got a big grin, and Bush is balls-ass naked. He visits troops for Thanksgiving dinner in Iraq, and they are all laughing, and Bush is holding a tray with turkey and stuffing, his schlong resembling a week-old piece of broccoli.

Remembering: When she went to Briscoe’s office at the World and showed him the printouts, he laughed out loud and then said he couldn’t use them without folding the paper an hour after they came off the press. But he was having a dinner party that night at his place in SoHo and she was welcome to come if she had time. Why not? She was single. Free. No deadline. There were eight guests at the table in Briscoe’s loft: a political operator and his wife, a professor of French history from NYU and his wife, an unhappy woman novelist and her unhappy female companion, the painter Lew Forrest, and Beverly. The chef was from the French Culinary Institute, a man handsome in a vaguely sinister way. Forrest and Briscoe and the professor exchanged jokes in French. Beverly imagined her own mother at this table. Hawk-faced, her mouth a slash. Sneering, bitter. Muttering: Speak English, you schmucks. Full of the endless anger of the South Bronx, anger at the Depression, anger at the rich, the deck stacked against them all. Heard her: You wanna be what? An artist? Yeah? Go downstairs, sit on the railing, you meet plenty of artists, baby. Bullshit artists! Until one son went off to the army and died in Korea and the other son found heroin and died in Attica. And I invented Beverly Starr. Good-bye, Ruthie Rosenberg. Hello, Beverly.

In a corner, Briscoe introduced Beverly Starr to Forrest. The older man’s eyes were glassy, but he seemed alert and amused.

— Are you related to Brenda, the great reporter? Forrest said.

— In a way, yes.

— I always liked her stuff.

— So did I, Beverly said. And yours too. I have a print of Chelsea Hotel, Evening in my studio.

— No kidding?

He smiled in a pleased way and then turned to the political couple. Parties are always like that. You start a conversation, but almost never finish it. Beverly did like the people, or as much as she could learn about them, which wasn’t much. They all had good faces, character digging into their flesh, and she slipped away to the john twice to jot sketches on index cards when the light was too dim for her use of the blink. She was still smoking then and slipped onto Briscoe’s terrace for a fast Marlboro Light, looking out at the city and the dark river and the moving line of cars on the Jersey shore. That night she felt that New York and its buildings and its people and its nervous style would last forever. Before they sat down to dinner, Briscoe showed her around, and Beverly saw the way he had organized his library, New York, Italy, Mexico, and so on, and the next day she started doing the same here in her house on 8th Street in Brooklyn. The house that was not yet paid off. The house purchased with her work.

So tonight, three years later, the house paid off, cracking her back, doing sets, she can see each section rising from floor to ceiling, covering the entire wall. The Collection. Her collection. The first section on the left, near the draped window, has the early classics in hardcover reprints, old comic books, or in retrieved pages from ancient newspapers, all covered in protective plastic. Winsor McCay and Little Nemo in Slumberland or Dream of the Rarebit Fiend; Herriman and Krazy Kat; Milt Gross and Count Screwloose of Tooloose along with Nize Baby; Max and Moritz from Germany; Mutt and Jeff; Happy Hooligan; Bringing Up Father, with the amazing George McManus holding the pen. Briscoe even had a McManus original on his wall. They invented comics, those guys, and, in a way, the movies, since comic strips are really frozen movies. At the party at Briscoe’s she asked Lew Forrest if he ever knew the painter Lyonel Feininger, who once drew a knockoff version of The Katzenjammer Kids.

— I did, he said. He was a wonderful painter. But as a comics artist, I liked Harold Gray better. Daddy Warbucks! Punjab and the Asp! What blacks! What a sense of… night. All the communists I knew just loved Orphan Annie. How could the Daily Worker have invented a better epitome of savage capitalism than Daddy Warbucks?

Momma would have agreed. To her, every rich guy was Daddy Warbucks. She hated the communists too, because she hated anyone who believed in the future. And every one of her own kids was an orphan, even when they lived at home. Kids not like Annie, with a rich protector to watch her back. But kids like me, who found work at sixteen, clerking in a Walgreen’s, then took a furnished room for twenty-five bucks a week, and started drawing comics. Nobody watched my back, not even the young dummies I fell in love with.

The second book tower holds Sickles, when he was doing Scorchy Smith, and all of Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, almost all of The Spirit. She thinks of them as the books of the Gold Testament. Even Briscoe, who loved newspaper strips and hated comic books, knew how good The Spirit was. Then the superheroes, Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch, Batman, Sheena, the Young Allies, and, above all, Captain America. No Superman, who was a fucking bore, living in Metropolis, where there were no shadows. At least Batman lived in Gotham, which was all shadows, put there by Jerry Robinson even if signed by Bob Kane. Metropolis was Minneapolis. Gotham was New York. But this tower of shelves is really Muscle Beach, and the star is Jack Kirby. He came crashing off the page, the toughest Jew on the Lower East Side, making his heroes do things nobody had ever done before. Baroque, full of violent power. Punching, heaving, in mortal combat with the Red Skull, that filthy Nazi saboteur. The first American heroes on steroids. All before Beverly Starr was born.

Forget all this childish crap, Momma said that time. Learn to type. To take shorthand. Then get a job in an office!

Until the day Ruthie Rosenberg came home from high school, and her comic book collection was gone, bundled up, hauled away by Momma. The girl went bawling to the street, searching in garbage cans, and the lots, and never did find her treasures. And knew she had to get out of there, go off on her own, because if she didn’t she was sure to kill Momma, and make page 1 of the Daily News.

She built up her collection in the furnished room, started her life in the comics business, and now thinks: Who was that guy took me home that time? Some kind of banker. He looked around the studio, and said, You read comics? She said, I write comics. I draw comics. Lawyers read law books, right? He never came back. Ah, well… Gotta get a Depression story going. Put Momma in it too. Find some way to forgive her…

Beverly is in the second set of the back crunchers when she hears through the rain the sound of the F train moving on the trestle over the Gowanus. Kudda-kuh-kudda-kuh-kudda-kuh, pock, kudda-kuh kudda-kuh. Pock. The wheels sounding hollow, warm, not steel on steel. Lionel trains. The pock like a drummer’s rim shot. An accent. High above the steel girders of the Kentile sign and the one from Eagle Outfitters. Brooklyn’s Eiffel Towers. Thinking: Roy Crane wrote the best sound. Caniff never tried. And Eisner was best on cities, on shadows, on nights slick with rain. Nights like this. Nights when Denny Colt rose from the mausoleum in Wildwood Cemetery. Which she knows must be the Green-Wood, the most beautiful of all cemeteries. Right here in Brooklyn. Hell, with a little effort, she can walk there from this house. My house.

She knows the Green-Wood is beautiful, because she’s walked among its tombstones on summer afternoons. Leonard Bernstein is there, and Fred Ebb, and George Bellows, and William Merritt Chase, and George Catlin, and Lola Montez, and Joey Gallo, and, what’s his name? Boss Tweed… and yeah: Denny Colt. Gotta do a comic about the place someday. A girl dies too young. She wakes up in the Green-Wood. Calls it “The New Neighborhood.” She meets all of them, even Denny Colt… In real life, Beverly never did find Denny Colt, although she tried, and slept with three guys who looked like him, even asking each of them to wear the fedora and little mask that changed Denny Colt into the Spirit. She even made love to one of them under the stars in the Green-Wood, for Chrissakes. Life never does imitate art.

Gotta go to work, she thinks. Gotta finish the story. Can’t sleep now. Gotta be awake until nine, when the guy comes for the pickup. Sleep now, I’ll be like granite when he shows up. Gotta work until eight. Breakfast. Watch some Morning Joe. Make the handover. Then sleep until four.

The thing tonight is cocktails, with snacks.

Like eating Crayolas.

One thing I learned in this life: If you’re going to a benefit, better eat before you go. Like going to Momma’s house for dinner. Before she did the world a favor, and died.

2:20 a.m. Ali Watson. Manhattan Bridge.

He pulls onto the bridge with the lights of the skyline visible on the far side. Left hand on the wheel, his right hand is flicking the handheld radio, trying to get the special operations division channel, then the Sixth Precinct, in Greenwich Village. A garble of voices, male, female, abrupt bulletins about small emergencies. Can’t find it. Must be ’cause I’m between Brooklyn and Manhattan… Left message. Cell was on Cynthia Harding’s answering machine too… Nothing.

The bridge is almost empty in the driving rain. An N train goes by, heading back into Brooklyn, next stop Atlantic-Pacific. Where all the Mexicans change to the R, to get off in Sunset Park. He remembers when they just called it the Sea Beach Express. Three beautiful words, full of summer. Sea Beach Express. Almost empty at this hour. Cleaning ladies and dozing drunks. Down below, the East River’s empty too. A lot fewer yachts since the collapse on Wall Street, and none at all past the midnight hour. In the late morning, there’s an occasional Circle Line boat jammed with tourists. He took the tour once with Mary Lou. Just for the hell of it. Two New Yorkers playing at being tourists. They sailed around the island. Under the bridges. God, she was beautiful then. With a smile that could crack open a safe. In her second year at Hunter, talking about being a lawyer, maybe running for office. Sure didn’t want to get married. Not to me, anyway. Not to a cop that was a Muslim. Fuck no. And then she got pregnant…

The cell rings.

— Watson.

— Reilly, from the Sixth. You called about Patchin Place? There’s a fire there. One alarm.

— A fire? Jesus Christ… I’m on the Manhattan Bridge. Be there in ten, twelve minutes.

He clicks off. Tries the operations channel again. A fire. On Patchin Place. Oh, my Mary Lou, he thinks. Please be gone. Oh, please be safe. Please be waiting for me outside, so I can drive you back home, so we can climb into bed, so we can be warm on this cold night. Please, Mary Lou. Please.

Then in the rearview Ali sees lights coming closer, real fast. Hey, pal: I’m in the left lane. You got lots of room. No: he’s playing games. Tailgating. On the Manhattan Bridge! In the fucking rain!

Now his brights are on, blinding Ali, flooding his car with light.

Ali slows down.

Pass me, muthafucka.

And then a yard behind him the tailgater rips to the right on the slick bridge, and Ali glances at him. A BMW. A black-haired white kid. Maybe twenty. Maybe younger. Someone beyond him in the passenger seat. A girl, for sure. The kid’s laughing, eyes cocaine-wide, and then he races past. Foot harder on the pedal, and there’s a taxi up ahead. The kid wants to pass the cab, racing for Manhattan, for Canal Street. Speeding to SoHo or Tribeca. Or the Meatpacking District. But he clips the cab, spinning it off to the right, and then the BMW swerves, and hits a steel restraining wall, and flips and turns, once, twice, then comes to a tumbling thumping halt on its roof. Filling two lanes. Ali stops three feet from the wrecked car.

Fuck.

He puts the Mazda in park, red lights blinking, turns off the ignition, grabs a heavy-beam flashlight, gets out. Waving the flashlight at oncoming traffic. The taxi is backing up, righting itself, leaving a path.

Ali glances into the crumpled BMW, still waving the flashlight. He sees the driver and a young girl splayed on the inside of the roof, which is now the bottom. Blood moves in a lumpy way from the driver’s mouth. The girl’s neck looks broken, her shirt near her waist. She’s not wearing panties. Neither of them wearing seat belts. The motor is running, as steady as the rain. They look very dead. He touches the driver’s wrist. Warm. Then stops himself. No, wait for whoever gets the squeal. For a moment, he wonders how many dead people he has touched in his life.

Then he taps 911 on the cell.

Wait for me, Mary Lou. Wait, my darling. I’ll be a bit late. Wait.

He reports the accident, clicks off. Then glances at the ruined car. And imagines the parents getting the news from a tired cop. Two hours from now, the phone call at the wrong hour, the hearts thumping in alarm, hands lifting receivers. Seeing the boy at four, the girl at three, running barefoot in a backyard on a summer afternoon, splashing in surf. Seeing New York from the Circle Line. Full of amazement. Staring at the phone. Then sobbing, collapsing, falling, screaming.

At least it’s not Malik.

The rain falls hard.

2:22 a.m. Consuelo Mendoza. The N train to Brooklyn.

She is wearing a thick brown polyester jacket, cloth gloves, a watch cap. She speaks good English, but usually thinks in Spanish, and knows that at this hour of the night, on this night of all nights, she must be extra careful. Por seguro. She carries no purse, nothing to tempt some pendejo. In her hidden belt, she has 207 dollars in cash. In her jacket pocket, some change and a Metro-Card. The last payday. The last night of a job she has held for seven years. The thick down jacket hides an immense gouge in her stomach, an emptiness put there by her boss. There were many consoling words from the woman who was her boss. But the hole is still there. Getting larger.

The windows of the train are streaked with rain, racing left to right instead of top to bottom, as they cross the Manhattan Bridge, high over the river. The train turns and an empty plastic Diet Pepsi bottle rolls from one side of the car to the other. Just another passenger, lost and empty. Two men move to a window, looking down at something. Bright whirling lights. An accident. The train keeps moving. The men can see nothing now and one returns to a seat. A sleeping Chinese man lurches and almost falls from his seat. His eyes widen, and then he gazes around the car, relaxes, and returns to sleep. An unshaven white man in a Giants jacket stares at something in the back of his eyes. There are three other women on the train as it comes down off the bridge into the tunnel. The rain now makes paths from top to bottom. Usually, her friend Norma is with her, and they can talk and make jokes in Spanish. But Norma was laid off two weeks ago and still doesn’t have a new job. She helps out at a taco van in Red Hook on weekends, but that’s not a real job. The last year, lots of people lost jobs. Maybe tonight was just her turn. Just like that. Paid in cash by Sara, the Colombiana, as always, so they’d have no records at the cleaning company. I’m carrying the money alone. And alone, Consuelo tries to look small, insignificant, worthless, homely, avoiding all eye contact, especially with the men.

The train pulls into Atlantic Avenue — Pacific Street, and several people get up. Down the car, near the middle door, she sees a sign:

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING,

SAY SOMETHING

Consuelo Mendoza never sees anything that they’re talking about. No crazy Arabs. No guys with guns or bombs. She sees a lot of other things. But no musulmanes locos. The train waits, with doors open. Down the aisle are two other women, one of them Mexican. Or maybe Guatemalan. She has an Indian face, like Consuelo’s. Sad too. The R pulls in, the doors open, and more people hurry into the N. On the platform, dozens of others start pushing into the R, which is always late. On one of the benches, Consuelo glimpses a white vagabundo in clothes made shiny by filth. No socks. Stretched out, one sneakered foot on the cement floor, one arm hanging. There are many of them now. Homeless. Jobless. Borrachos, adictos, most of them, but not all.

In her work building back in SoHo, she and Norma weren’t the only persons fired. So were the men who worked there days, and sometimes nights. All the women too. Many worked late, sweating, ruled by the computer, sometimes joking. But when she arrived at seven sharp on this night, they all were gone. She cleaned anyway, sensing it was over, but not knowing for sure, didn’t call home to Raymundo, didn’t want him to worry, to lose sleep, to fret. He is such a sweet man. All evening, she didn’t do anything except her job. While the emptiness began to widen in her belly. She ate nothing, took nothing but water. Her head was buzzing with unspoken words. We all knew what was coming. We knew for weeks that if the men left, if the office closed, if the computers were all blank, there’d be no garbage to empty, no cardboard coffee cups, no half-eaten sandwiches, no banana peels, no apple cores, no empty soda bottles, no pizza crusts. No floors to sweep and mop. No work. What will we do?

Raymundo is home, right this minute, sleeping in their bedroom, the three children in theirs. She and Raymundo will sleep together for three hours tonight and then he will rise up in the morning dark, mi Dios, whispering, walking in socks to make no noise, and wash and get dressed and take the train to his job in the coffee shop. Does she tell him when he wakes up that she has lost her job? No. Then all day at the coffee shop he will be sick in his heart, in his hands, in his belly, like me. The coffee shop won’t be the same. Usually, he would be there all day, starting at six, finishing at five, hurrying home, where they would kiss and she would show him the food in the pot, and then hurry off to her job. In the coffee shop, he cooks sandwiches, ham and bacon and cheese and eggs. All the stuff the gringos love. Sometimes a club sandwich with turkey and lettuce and tomato and bacon. He slices and toasts bagels. He fills many cardboard cups of coffee.

Carajo, how can I tell poor Raymundo? How do I say I lost my job? Wake him up? Take him out to the hall when he wakes up in the dark? So the kids don’t hear?

No, he’ll be sick.

I’m sick.

Right now.

My stomach is turning over.

My heart beating.

The N train pulls out. One more stop, and then a final stop on the local. The familiar stations of the R pass in a blur of black poles and flashing lights. Union Street. Fourth Avenue, Prospect Avenue, 25th Street. She sees the signs before she sees the stations, some trick in her head. The stations changing the way their luck is changing. But she knows from Mexico that you can’t trust in luck. You will not kneel before Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and the next day win the lotería nacional. You will not be told you have cancer and then pray and pray and pray and find that you are clean again. You make your luck. You work for your luck. You work and work and work and work.

Then at 36th Street, she rises to change to the R. The Chinese man gets up and yawns. The woman who looks Mexican grabs a pole and angles to the door. The angry-looking gringo stays there, his fingers laced, his knuckles white, staring at nothing. Consuelo thinks: Who can I go to? Who will help me find a job? Who can save us? The Diet Pepsi bottle rolls across the floor. Consuelo follows it with her eyes. Looks up. Sees a sign:

SI VES ALGO,

DI ALGO!

If you see something, say something. The bilingual train stops. The doors open. Here is the R. She boards it, notices the usual people. Latinas and Chinese, a few gringos. Like most of them, she remains standing, until the train reaches 45th Street. She leaves the train and moves quickly along the platform to the revolving door that leads to the stairs and the street. The dented metal bars on the door need painting. She moves quickly with the other women, Chinese women, Mexican women, some Dominicans too, por seguro, some from Ecuador. Up the stairs. Into the rain.

She sees the familiar signs. El Reencuentro restaurant. Mega Car Service. The Sprint Payment Service. The Tlaxcala Estila barbershop. They all start up the hill, the Chinese heading for distant Eighth Avenue, Consuelo and most of the other Latinas one long hilly block to La Quinta. This street is safe, with people here most of the time, even in the rain. You can see a police car every twenty minutes, maybe, just cruising along. Some other streets are not so safe. She reaches Fifth Avenue, and knows where everything is, even when the stores are closed and the metal shutters rolled down tight. Zapatería México. Tacos Matamoros. Cancún Fashion. The travel agency with a sign that says ENVíA DINERO A MEXICO AQUí. They haven’t sent money back home since little Timoteo was born. Now four years old. And the middle one, Marcela, is ten. The boy loves her. Always giggling when she tickles him. Following her everywhere in the house. What will happen to them?

She turns right, heading south, hugging the wall to avoid the rain. Her bare hand clutches the key chain in her pocket. She sees the sign on the corner of her street: School Daze. Where everybody buys clothes for kids, the boys downstairs, the girls right inside the door. Beside it and on top of it, the apartment house called Roma rises five stories, the shades drawn in every apartment, no lights burning.

Abruptly, from a shadowy doorway, a black man appears, his back against the door. She gasps, says Oh. He wears a thick black beard. His eyes are as surprised as hers must be. His skin is wet.

— Don’t worry, he says. Just keep going.

She moves out toward the avenue and hurries along, not too fast, so she won’t show fear. But she’s afraid. Where is the police car? Where is anybody? At the corner, in front of the Toda Moda shoe shop, she sees the lights of the Korean store a block away, burning as always through the night, and thinks she can run to its safety. They know her there. In the daytime, after school, her oldest son, Eduardo, works there, delivering orders, sweeping. The customers call him Eddie. The first American child. Fourteen now. Almost as tall as his father. And we were here only a year when he was born. Eddie is one reason Consuelo likes the Korean store. When she doesn’t have time to go to the cheaper store on 42nd Street down by Second Avenue, she buys serrano chilies there and nopales and tortillas.

She turns and looks back.

The black man is gone.

She moves quickly into her street, stops before the shuttered unisex barber, looks for slow-moving car headlights, sees none, looks for the bearded black man, sees no one, and dashes across the wet street to her house. She jams the key into the downstairs gate. Turns it. Goes in, flicks the small lever that locks the door, and slams shut the iron bolt that Raymundo always leaves open for her. Goes through the second door, locks that behind her, stands there for a long moment, breathing hard. Home. Safe.

She hangs her hat on a wallpeg, shakes her hair, unbuttons her jacket and pulls off her scarf and hangs them on a separate peg. Raymundo’s padded tan jacket is on the third peg. She slides off her wet shoes, and places them on the floor beneath the pegs. She walks in socks past the stairs into the kitchen. A coffee cup and saucer are in the sink, on top of dinner plates. That is part of their deal. She will do the dishes. Over the years, Raymundo had washed so many dishes, before becoming a cook, that he told her once his only wish was that he never wash another dish. She smiled and hugged him, and said, Okay. He said, No, no, it’s only a joke, un chiste, mi vida, but she said, No, I do the dishes from now on.

She turns on the hot water, letting it run, squirting some liquid cleanser over the dishes. Four dishes, one each for Raymundo and Eddie, Marcela, and Timmie. The water warms her cold hands. She glances at the refrigerator, where photos of the kids are attached to the door with magnets. On the table is a copy of Diario de México, the new paper with all the terrible news from the old country.

EJECUTAN

A TRECE

Thirteen more killed in the drug war. Usually along la frontera. This time in Mazatlán, to the south. It’s as if Raymundo is sending a message: We can’t ever go back to that country. Our lost country.

She thinks: Oh, how will I tell him?

She thinks: And what will we do?

She tries to remember Mexico. To forget their two floors in this house, the kitchen and the room with the TV and the garden on the first floor, the bedrooms up one flight. To forget Sunset Park. Writing the rent checks. Addition and subtraction. Clothes for the boys. New shoes for Marcela. Instead, she pictures birds in the morning in the house in Cuernavaca. She is seventeen again, working up north in Cuernavaca, and sending money home every two weeks to Mama in Oaxaca. She sees the stone house in Cuernavaca, with light streaming into the rooms while she mops, and the pool blue and glassy and the birds singing. Señor Lewis said one time that birds were the first musicians. He was right. And on the second floor, Señor Lewis is in his studio, sipping coffee, painting in shorts and T-shirt. She sees the narrow bed against the studio wall. The bed where—

Señor Lewis.

Perhaps he can help.

She has his address in New York, from fifteen years ago. She has never gone to see him. Not once. Not after—

Señor Lewis.

His kindness. His heart.

She thinks: I don’t even know if he’s alive.

I must try to find out.

2:28 a.m. Malik Shahid, aka Malik Watson. Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

Rain and rain and rain. Malik moves with caution, his kufi behind him in a sewer, his shoes soaked. Here nothing grows. Paradise is a garden, says al-Quran, but this is not Paradise. Here is only concrete and slate and asphalt, skeletons of trees, dead cars whose floppy airless tires caress stone curbs. He thinks: I am alone in rain and night. I hear the tearing sound of cars above me on the expressway but can’t see their lights. A few taxis, roof lights saying “Off Duty,” move south to their garages.

Under his watery canvas jacket, Malik hugs the plastic bag from the Korean store, lowers his head, moves through black shadows. He needs to vanish. After tonight, after the holy mission of redemption, he must disappear. To make the final cleansing on Friday night. Holy night. With Glorious, or without her. With the child, when all is over. Yes. Above all, with the child. A boy, they told Glorious at the clinic. A son of Islam. Inshallah. Me and the boy. To the sacred places. Now he sees sleeping bodies under spread blankets, scrunched up against ugly girders that support the expressway. Shoe-covered feet jut from packing crates. Some mixture of rain and piss finds channels between fractured cobblestones. He sees garbage in black plastic bags, and a banana peel turned brown. A patrol car hurries by, dome light turning, and Malik flattens himself on the dark side of a girder. When the police car is gone, he gazes at the vacant side of the avenue, the one that carries traffic to Manhattan.

And runs.

In the rubbled street leading up the hill, there are three parked cars, each one alone, separate, two on one side, a solitary on Malik’s side. Just a few, as always. In summer, hornboys from New Jersey come here for twenty-dollar blow jobs from the filthy infidel women. Jizm in the throat, junk in the veins. On this night, the parked cars seem empty but Malik cannot be certain. He slides into the front yard of a condemned corner house, windows boarded up, and hunches behind the remains of a battered stoop. He peers at the dark parked cars, looking for steam on the windows, or a match lighting a cigarette. Nothing. The Lots are part of a vast project organized by some developer: housing for yuppies, or for NYU students to share, or for Jersey types who wanted a place to get laid before driving home; an office building too, and an Italian hotel where tourists could pay in euros. The sell: Wall Street just fifteen minutes away through the Battery Tunnel. It was all set to go, until Allah punished America, punished the crusaders, punished the Jews, punished the filthy infidel women with their polluted cunts and sucked-out tits. Allah gazed down upon them and broke their fucking economy, exposed their filth and usury and greed. The project stopped dead.

Now all is gone except a few lonesome old-time tenements, somehow missed by the bulldozers, including the tenement used by Malik and Glorious. The whole area weeps now. It looks like a wet Baghdad. The one he sees in newspapers. On TV. That ruined city. Baghdad without the Muslim dead.

He says out loud: Be there soon, Glorious. We got things to do. Hey: the rain is lighter now. All of a sudden. A message, for shit sure. Gotta go home. Gotta get dry. Gotta bundle these clothes. Gotta chop this beard. Gotta sleep. Can’t sleep, then hold the tits of Glorious, bursting with God’s milk. Oh. And enter her. As you have willed it, my beloved Allah. No papers from any authority. Just your will. You created women for us, didn’t you? Glorious doesn’t believe it, doesn’t believe anything, not Yahweh, not Jesus, not Buddha, not Allah. She’s not into it, she says. Won’t even wear a hijab out in the street, to cover her hair, to hide it from the lusting eyes of strangers. Why not? He didn’t ask her to wear a chador, covering her face, even her eyes. Just the hair. She says no. He keeps telling her that belief will come, that she will accept, will submit. Thinking: She’s a puppy, that’s all. One morning she’ll wake up and understand everything and accept Allah. But now she says something like What’s all this shit about submitting? Submitting to what? To who? And Malik always says: Submitting to Allah’s order, Allah’s rules. Told in al-Quran and the Hadith. And she says, You mean, submitting to you, right? And laughs.

That’s the way she is. An example of jahiliyah. Ignorance of God. She knows as much as any puppy. She should be nasty but she isn’t. She’s got a good heart, Glorious, but she’s her mother’s daughter. The mother that named her. A filthy woman for sure, who lived with a Muslim, some asshole who pledged allegiance to Elijah Muhammad and his Lost-Found bullshit Nation street hustle. She left him because she loved junk more than the creed passed to us by the Prophet. Malik remembered talking about such traitors as heroinfidels. The mother went on the stroll, Glorious told Malik. Probably fucked a thousand guys, at least. Poor Glorious doesn’t even know who her father is. Some dude threw a load into her mother’s belly and moved on. Maybe even a white dude, ’cause Glorious is tan, not black.

Later, after Glorious was born, some other dude threw the mother the virus. The usual shit started after that: moving around, shelters, different dudes moving in with the mother and trying to fuck Glorious, foster care, one school after another, until finally Allah put the mother out of her misery. Just last year. Around the time Malik met Glorious in Newark. Even now, Glorious wakes up calling for her mother. Imagine. Not Allah. Her filthy mother. Malik thinks: I never cry for mine.

Then Malik starts to run through the Lots, staying low in the black emptiness, avoiding the open spaces, the deep gouges in the dirt, the sudden drops into basements where the houses are gone, one mound of rubble following another, one three-story house with only one roofless story left, an abandoned car without wheels or windows, a fuel drum on its side with charred wood from a dead fire spilling out. Up ahead: the tenement. No lights burning, even on the fourth floor, where Glorious is waiting. Nobody else lives in the tenement. The buried power line comes from the far side of the site, where an abandoned construction trailer awaits workers who went away when the money ran out and may never come back. Malik laid the power line himself. Stole it off a pole. Learned how to do all that when he worked a summer job upstate, near Canada. Malik and Jamal. He was into computers, Malik was a student, just starting at CUNY. But he was Jamal’s student too. A student of Islam. The true Islam. More and more they moved from the banalities of the mosque to the thinking of Sayyid Qutb. To Hassan al-Banna. To the true children of the Prophet. To the brotherhood. To jihad.

Now he reaches the back side of the tenement. He faces the side wall, pale, jagged, broken into rectangles of old paint, the colors of rooms that are now gone, slowly washing away in the wind and weather. In the daytime, the walls are weird and beautiful: baby blue, bright red, one wall all black. The people who painted them are all gone now. Now Malik reminds himself: Be careful. He goes to the back door, facing the rubble where the yard used to be. He grips the big key for that door, a small one for the apartment on the top floor. He is jittery. You can never know if some crackheads made it into the building.

Malik inserts the large key, pauses, leans gently on the door, listening, while wondering where Jamal is now. He is sure his old friend, his instructor, is still in the house he bought in the lower part of Park Slope. Bought with money he started making as a designer, after the friendship broke, after Jamal made the haj, with some help from his father, the X-ray guy. And came home a different man. Calling himself a lover of Islam, a hater of jihad. It must have been Jamal’s wife that changed him. Another American bitch. And her having a kid. Or maybe it’s a cover story, a way to exist here as if he were another dumb American nigger, working away, but keeping jihad in the most secret place in his mind. Malik wants to believe that. But he simply doesn’t know. He will have to find out. When this night of red rain ends.

Now Malik inhales, turns the key, leans close, listens. Then exhales. No sound. He looks behind him across the Lots through the rain. Nobody. He slips inside.

He hears faint groans and creaks from the black empty building above him. He has learned that such sounds are normal on nights of hard rain or stiff wind. Still, this night is different. He waits with the door shut behind him, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. In a corner, a pile of discarded shovels resembles a small monument of iron tombstones. He closes his eyes and remembers the chant recited each night by him and Jamal and Atub. They took turns with the first name, then all three repeated it, heads bowed in submission, barefoot, kneeling on the floor of whatever place they were in.

Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Majed Moqed.

Majed Moqed.

Nawaf al-Hazmi.

Nawaf al-Hazmi.

Salem al-Hazmi.

Salem al-Hazmi.

Hani Hanjour.

Hani Hanjour.

Satam al-Suqami.

Satam al-Suqami.

Waleed al-Shehri.

Waleed al-Shehri.

Wail al-Shehri.

Wail al-Shehri.

Abdulaziz al-Omari.

Abdulaziz al-Omari.

Marwan al-Shehhi.

Marwan al-Shehhi.

Fayez Banihammad.

Fayez Banihammad.

Ahmed al-Ghamdi.

Ahmed al-Ghamdi.

Hamza al-Ghamdi.

Hamza al-Ghamdi.

Mohand al-Shehri.

Mohand al-Shehri.

Mohamed Atta.

Mohamed Atta…

A prayer.

Our prayer.

A prayer for our martyrs.

All waiting for us in Paradise.

Allahu akbar!

Now Malik can see, if only the large shapes of ceilings and walls, as he peers up the stairs to the first landing. He starts up. Somewhere up there, a door creaks open on rusting hinges. There is nobody visible, no sounds of breathing, no crackheads grunting, no pigs with badges from Homeland Security or the FBfuckingI. No New York cops. Like my father. Just the wind and the rain. On the landings, puddles are spreading from apartments without windows. The writhing unreadable graffiti on the walls hasn’t changed. On the second flight of stairs, the entire banister is gone, used for firewood in the iron barrels of the empty lots, and Malik hugs the walls. A damp rotting smell is everywhere in the vertical cave of the stairwell. Water leaks from another doorway without a door. He listens as if he were a cat. He hears the distant hum of the expressway. The beep of a horn. Silence, except for the rain. Thinking: I’m coming, baby. I got money, gorgeous. Like I promised. Tomorrow you see a doctor. Tomorrow you go to a warm place.

On the top landing he goes to what was the front door and inserts the key in the lock he installed himself, bought from a locksmith up on Fifth Avenue. The same key can open the bedroom door, with its separate cylinder. Nine hours earlier, Malik locked Glorious in the bedroom, with its tiny closet of a room holding a toilet and nothing else. Afraid that she would go wandering and trip or fall and hurt herself. He lets himself in through the front door, and quickly locks the door again, using his free hand to smother the sound of clacking steel.

Sleep, my Glorious.

Be there soon.

Sleep.

Some clothes hang from a steel rack outside the hall bathroom, a flannel shirt, fresh jeans, socks looped over the bar. Sleep, Glorious, Malik thinks. We have things to do tomorrow. To get you to a hospital at last. To a doctor. He slips into the narrow bathroom, and begins to undress in the dark. He urinates, hoping the sound of water puncturing water does not escape the room. He is very cold. From a plastic milk crate on the tiled floor, he removes a flashlight and a pair of scissors. He tests the flashlight, then shuts it off. On the chipped sink, he lays out some things from the Korean store: a razor, a small can of shaving cream. He hopes he can remember how to do this, after so many years. And there’s no hot water. The rusted boiler in the ruined basement holds no water. Somehow the pressure still moves cold water to the top floor. Malik holds the bag from the store under his chin and begins to chop away his thick beard. The hair is wet and wiry and tough. His body shakes from the cold. After a while, he runs a hand over his chin, feels a kind of bumpy fuzz, then switches on the flashlight. He doesn’t know the face in the cracked mirror. He covers his jaws and chin with cream and begins to shave. He nicks himself in three places, wipes the blood with the back of a hand. My father’s blood. Her blood. Soon it will be the boy’s blood. The blood of Glorious too. Our blood. Allah’s blood. Then he feels the smooth cheeks, makes a square cut for sideburns, and shuts off the light.

He shudders again from the cold, lays down the razor and the bag of hair, and steps into the shower. He doesn’t want to do this. He’d rather fight someone in the lot with bare hands. Not this. But he must. He must wash away the filth of infidels. This water will not hurt him. Inshallah. He reaches around for the shrinking bar of Dove, lying on its metal tray fastened to the water pipe. He turns the tap. His body feels a small death. He tells himself: Paradise is a garden with a stream running through it. Hell is another place, which Allah suggests to us through our living. And must be full of ice. Malik starts to pray as the water courses slowly down his body.

Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Majed Moqed.

Nawaf al-Hazmi…

He lectures himself: When we conquered Spain, we taught the infidels how to wash. And there was no steam heat in Andalusia or boilers in the basement. I would remind Mama when I was twelve or thirteen or fourteen that Islam civilized the world. Taught the filthy Christians to wash, Mama, taught them to read, taught them numbers, Mama, and architecture and music. Taught them for eight hundred years. And Mama would laugh, and say, If the Muslims were so damned civilized, why did they circumcise little girls? And why did they round up your ancestors in Africa and sell them to white folks? How is that civilized? And young Malik would say, Allah knows. Allah was testing all of us. And she would laugh. And say: Allah should get a life.

Bitch.

Now he soaps his hands over and over again, digging his nails into the Dove, soaps his hair, soaps his armpits, his ass, and his balls, grunting silently, using motion to warm him. The trickling water falls upon his shoulders and he splashes it roughly, feeling cleansed, purged, ready again for the mission, ready again to go forth as a member of the brotherhood. Ready for one final purge. Ready to die.

He turns off the shower, steps onto the cold tiled floor, and grabs a towel, the only towel, one that smells of Glorious. He feels his cock getting thicker, harder, and now wants the warmth of Glorious, Allah’s gift; wants to lie behind her, to kiss her neck, to hold her swollen tits, to feel her ass grinding against his groin, to plunge his cock into her wet cave. He takes the key from his trousers, pulls on dry socks for warmth, wraps the damp towel around his shoulders, lifts the flashlight, and pads down the hall to the bedroom. Thinking: She’ll be shocked. She has never seen me without my beard. I must be silent. I must be gentle. Above all, I must not scare her. She’s my woman. She’s carrying my son.

He unlocks the door and steps into the darkness. The room is full of a black wind. The cold is bitter. The cold is unforgiving. He switches on the flashlight. There is nobody in the bed. The covers are wild and rumpled and stained with something dark that he knows must be blood. A pillow lies on the floor. He moves the light and sees that the window is open.

No.

— Baby? You here someplace?

No answer.

He walks to the open window, the towel falling. No. He stops a foot from the window. His feet are suddenly sticky. No, please. No… The rain has ended but the wind blows harder. But now he does not shudder. He feels that his body is made of ice. No.

He steps forward, his feet making a squishy sound, and lays a free hand on the icy windowsill. His breath expels a small cloud of steam. Finally he leans forward and looks down. Four stories.

He sees the naked body of Glorious on a carpet of rubble. Her luminous brown skin glistens from the rain. She does not move. In the crook of her left arm is a tiny child. Like a doll. The child does not move either.

Malik jerks backward, then falls hard to his knees. He faces the empty sky, and begins to howl.

2:29 a.m. Sandra Gordon. Her apartment.

She’s awake again, out on the balcony, high above the glistening street. The plants are all dead, or dozing through winter. She’s wearing the heavy down coat that Myles Compton bought her that cold spring day a few years back, explaining that it was to keep her Jamaican blood at room temperature. She laughed then. Jamaican blood. Why not New York blood? she said. I’ve been here longer than I ever lived in Jamaica. Longer than you, Myles, ever lived here either.

Now he’s gone, lugging his credit default swaps and his derivatives or whatever the hell he was into. Gone. A fugitive now like ten thousand other rich grifters. He won’t call me, she thinks. He won’t e-mail. He won’t do anything that will help them track him down. For sure, she thinks, the people on his trail will be listening to me too. Gotta change this number. The e-mail address too. They’ll catch him anyway. The Feds. Interpol. The Bulgarians. Whoever. Ah, Myles.

Where are you, Myles? She turns and slips back into the dark living room, sliding the balcony door shut. She unzips the coat and drops it on the carpet.

Thinking: I can’t ever do this again.

2:31 a.m. Ali Watson. Patchin Place, Greenwich Village.

He turns left off Sixth Avenue onto Greenwich and sees an open spot along the curb on the right. When he was young and tending bar in a joint called Asher’s, the summer after he took the cops’ test, he often walked past this spot when the little park was one of the saddest buildings in the city: the Women’s House of Detention. Day and night, women in the House of D. would yell down from their cells to young men or older women who were holding babies for them to see. Most of the women in the cells were caught hooking or dealing drugs. Their mothers were scolding them from Sixth Avenue. Many men on the sidewalks were really only older kids. You take care a’ him, Buddy. Feed him good, Momma. No crap now, JoJo…

The building is now gone: replaced by a park, and on an angle through the wet leafless trees Ali Watson can see two fire engines, three police cars, a gathering of people in black silhouette. He can see the helmets of firemen bobbing in and out of the handheld lights. He pulls down the sun-blind mirror, with its NYPD placard facing the street side, clamps his badge on the top of his coat collar, gets out, pats his cell phone, locks the doors. Thinking: Jesus fucking Christ.

The rain has stopped now but the street is wet and glassy, reflecting a garish mixture of red lights and brights. And there in front of him is Patchin Place, a gated dead-end street between Greenwich and 10th Street, where he has so often dropped Mary Lou or picked her up to go home. The iron gates are open, hoses on the ground. Other residents of the small dead-end street are outside the gates, flanking the entrance, coats pulled tightly over nightgowns and pajamas, drinking coffee, smoking. All alone, a fat bare-legged white guy with a coat on top of a bathrobe seems to be eating a bowl of cereal. Watching. In a separate cluster, men and women aim cameras or cell phones, scribble notes: the reporters. Ali’s breath is coming in tiny gasps. The front door of the house is open. Hoses snake from fire hydrants up the few steps into the Harding house. Three windows are open on the top floor. Lamps move in jerky patterns inside all floors. The air is gritty with smoke and ash.

Oh, Mary Lou. Let them tell me you’re at St. Vincent’s. Let me know that you’re okay.

He walks to the front gate. He sees that each corner of the short street is blocked by a squad car with its red dome light turning. A lieutenant from the Sixth Precinct, a guy named Brennan, spots him. And comes up to him, taking his arm.

— Hey, Ali, he says softly.

— How bad is it, Joe?

— Pretty bad.

Mary Lou. Mary Lou. Let me drive you home now.

— Exactly how bad?

— Two dead. Then the fire after.

— Is—

— Yeah.

Brennan hugs Ali, tries to move him away from the house. Ali sags, then stiffens. The reporters, some street cops, an old lady in a man’s overcoat: all are now watching. Tiny orange digital lights flicker like eyes. Ali gives Brennan a soft push and starts for the steps.

Just as a man in a civilian overcoat, a fedora, collar up, steps out of the building onto the top of the small stoop. Ray Kelly. The commissioner. He sees Ali, removes gloved hands from his pockets. There are two other cops behind him, blocking the narrow doorway. The odor of burned wood and fabric is stronger here. But clearly the fire is out. Kelly comes down the steps and goes directly to Ali Watson.

— Don’t go in there, Ali, Kelly says softly.

— For Chrissakes, Ray. It’s my wife!

— I know. That’s why you’re not going in.

— I gotta—

— It’s an order, Ali. Come on. We’ll take a walk.

2:32 a.m. Sam Briscoe. His loft on Greene Street, SoHo.

The phone rings in the darkness. From his bed, Briscoe glances at the night table. The bright green phone with caller I.D. From the paper.

— Sam here.

— Mr. Briscoe, it’s the desk and—

— Put him on.

Briscoe sits up, swings around with his feet on the floor. Then he hears Matt Logan’s voice.

— Sorry to bother you, Sam. But we got a big one.

— Tell me.

— A double homicide in the Village. One of them we think you know. Named Cynthia Harding and—

— What?

— And her secretary, a black woman named Watson. Mary Lou Watson. Her husband’s a cop. Fonseca’s at the scene. No details yet. How they died. Suspects. Nada, Sam.

— Call Helen.

— She got here ten minutes ago.

Briscoe switches on the lamp.

— The paper’s locked up, Logan says. Maybe we can do a wrap, front and back.

— Yeah. Call Billygoat at the plant. See if we can do the wrap. Have Helen write the lede. Fonseca can write the scene. The clips should have a lot of stuff on Cynthia Harding, charities, the public library. Two husbands.

— Right.

— One more thing, Matt. Tonight she had a small fund-raiser at Patchin Place. For the library. I know because I was invited, but couldn’t go. See if Fonseca can get a guest list, then you know what to do.

— Right.

— I’ll get dressed and head to Patchin Place for a bit. Maybe call in a few things. Then I’ll come to the paper. And Matt? One more thing.

— Yeah?

— Tell Helen she can smoke.

Briscoe hangs up. Mumbling in the emptiness of the loft. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Cynthia? Dead? Christ Allfuckingmighty. No. It’s bullshit. No. Wrong address. But Matt has Mary Lou’s name too. Oh, Cynthia… If I’d gone to the party, maybe I’d have picked up something, something wrong in the rooms, something about the guests or the mood. But hell: Cynthia’s a grown-up. She knows what to look for too. So does Mary Lou. She sees like a cop. Like her husband, Ali.

Briscoe moves quickly to the bathroom, splashing water to wake himself up. Dries himself while looking out the back window. The rain is over. Cynthia? Cynthia dead? His heart is beating furiously. His stomach contracts, expands. Cynthia. My Cynthia. He sees fragments of her face. Many angles, always shifting, depending on age, emotions, the light. He sees the intelligence in Mary Lou’s eyes. And her permanent skepticism. But Cynthia… Oh Jesus fucking Christ.

He pulls on socks, the gray trousers, thinking coldly now, becoming the newspaperman again, the craft that always protects him. Murder at a good address always leads the paper. Then remembers his breakfast meeting with the F.P. Eight-thirty in the morning. Very important. I’ll bet. Yeah. Briscoe knots his tie. He is filled with a sudden rush of things ending. Cynthia Harding is dead. Along with Mary Lou Watson.

Oh.

Going cold again. Displacing the human. Displacing the enduring privacy of his life, and hers.

Cynthia Harding has been murdered.

He shoves some files in his leather bag, grabs a fedora and trench coat, and goes down to the street. He finds a cab on Sixth Avenue. He and the driver travel uptown in silence. The man doesn’t play the radio as he moves north through the emptiness. Briscoe loops the chain of his press card around the collar of the coat. He gets off at Barnes & Noble on the corner of 8th Street, overtips, hurries toward the aura of bright white police lights and red domes. He sees the group of curious citizens, the cops, the firemen, the huddle of reporters. A few nod. He nods back. Fonseca is there too, and Briscoe motions him aside.

— How bad is it?

— Pretty bad, Fonseca says, looking at a notebook. Both women stabbed to death, Mr. Briscoe. Kitchen knife, maybe. There’s one missing from one of those racks. The cops are searching sewers. It looks like the Watson woman got it first, in the hall outside the bedroom door. Then the Harding woman opened the door, they figure. And she got it. She was naked under a bathrobe. The Watson woman was fully clothed. There’s blood all over.

— God…

Briscoe inhales the wet ashy air, lets it out slowly.

— Watson’s husband is a cop, Fonseca says. Ali Watson. Ray Kelly was here and took him away somewhere, I guess to comfort him. Wouldn’t let him in the house, for obvious reasons. I got a picture of Kelly and Watson on my cell phone, sent it already.

— Ali Watson’s a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Briscoe says. Tell Helen, but tell her I said she shouldn’t put that in the paper. I’ll tell Matt to keep Ali’s face out of the paper too. Who knows what he’s working on. Do they have any suspects?

He hears his own voice. Cold and flat, with a slight tremble.

— I don’t know, Fonseca says. They’re not saying much at all. The women were killed, then whoever did it used some kind of an accelerant to cover himself. Maybe from some kind of old-fashioned oil lamp. If it’s a him. The firemen kept the damage to one room, top floor. Mostly scorching.

The bedroom, Briscoe thinks. Up past the paintings by Kuniyoshi and Lew Forrest.

— Who’s running this? he says.

— A lieutenant named Brennan.

— He’s a good cop. Tell him you know there was a party here last night, a fund-raiser for the library. Ask him if he has a guest list. If he lets you, then write down the names and we’ll call each one of them. Don’t do any of this in front of the other reporters.

— Right.

— Also ask if he’s got the name of the caterer. And the waiters. Cynthia Harding always used a caterer for these things. They’d be the last to leave. Or one of them maybe stayed. If Brennan won’t tell you shit, then do a sidebar right here, while you’re waiting. Neighbors, everything. On the scene itself.

— Someone said that E. E. Cummings lived here. And John Reed.

— And a bunch of other people, including Anaïs Nin. I’ll edit your piece and fill in any blanks.

— Great.

— See ya, Briscoe says, and slips away, walks to Greenwich and hails a cab.

2:33 a.m. Bobby Fonseca. Patchin Place.

He watches Briscoe go, then searches the corner crowd for Victoria Collins. No sign of her. His heart sank when the cell phone found him in the taxi. Matt Logan. Double murder in the Village. Go. He thought Victoria would be furious. Instead, she was excited.

— I want to go with you, she said.

— You got a press card? Fonseca said.

— An old one, a student I.D. from Columbia. Laminated. And—

— You probably can’t get very close, he said. The cops—

— Come on, Fonseca. Let me try. I can work the neighborhood. Talk to people who might have known the victims. Whatever. I’m a good reporter. And I got this little recorder too. I can feed you my notes. Please.

The “please” got him. He leaned forward and told the taxi driver to take them to Sixth Avenue and 8th Street instead, and she squeezed his hand. At the scene, he got past the police line and she didn’t, but he saw her talking to people beyond the line, knowing she held the tiny recorder in her hand shielded by a small notebook. Hands bare. Scribbling notes. As he was soon doing. Fonseca thought: She is a reporter, for Chrissakes. Why didn’t someone hire her? Why’d they hire me?

The details came fast. From a uniformed cop. From a lieutenant. The air grainy from the fire, which was out. He called in notes as he got them, unloading to Helen Loomis. He went over to the edge of the gathering crowd, found Victoria Collins, took her notes, thanked her, pecked her cheek like a colleague. A Times guy showed up. Somebody from AP. Then Fonseca was back at the gates. Not feeling the cold. Full of the rush. A big one.

Then he saw Mr. Briscoe. Wondered why he was here. The boss. Fonseca saw pain in his face. Gave him a fill. Heard his directions. Saw him walk off. Thinking: Who the fuck am I to feel sorry for Briscoe? But I do. And I don’t know why.

Victoria. Hey, there she is.

2:36 a.m. Sam Briscoe. A taxi.

His head throbs. Two dead. Stabbed and sliced. Fresh blood on the floor. Eyes wide in shock, for sure. Oh: my Cynthia.

And turns the switch in his head. Thinking. What’s the wood? Think about wood. VILLAGE HORROR. No. Maybe. VILLAGE SLAUGHTER. Too many letters in “slaughter.” Think about wood. Page 1, page 1… BLOODBATH, with a subhead, Socialite, Cop’s Wife Killed in Village. And the press run. Gotta tell Billygoat at the plant. A hundred thou more. Maybe two, if we replate completely for another edition. A head shot of Cynthia Harding. And Mary Lou Watson. Side by side. Back page, the kid’s photo of Ray Kelly and Ali Watson. Maybe the kid shot them from the rear. Ray with his arm across Ali’s back. The wet street. Cynthia smiling.

Then thinks: Stop, you asshole.

Stop.

You loved this woman for three decades…

The cab pulls up at the newspaper. West Street now busy with groaning early-morning trucks. He pays, rushes through the one unlocked door, is waved to the elevator by the black security guard. Into the city room. Almost running. Right to Logan.

— How much time we got?

Logan glances at the old clock.

— Maybe forty-five minutes.

Briscoe pulls off his hat, coat, and jacket, throws them on a desk. He waves at Helen Loomis. She is smoking. Flourishing the cigarette, nodding thanks.

— The kid got the guest list, Logan says.

— Great.

— Guess who’s on it?

— Tell me.

— Our brave publisher.

Briscoe makes a percussive sound with his mouth. Pah!

— You’re kidding me.

— I’m afraid not.

— Give me some time. I’ll call him and get details. What’s the wood?

— Maybe THE LAST DINNER PARTY. No gore, except in the subhead.

— You’re a fucking genius, Matt.

Briscoe walks away and stops at the desk of Helen Loomis. She looks up, a smile on her face. She’s using a coffee container for an ashtray.

— Matt tell you about the party list? he says.

— Yeah, I’m calling them now.

— I’ll call the publisher, Briscoe says.

— That’s what I figured.

— I’ll read the obit at my desk.

— Sure. By the way, Sam. You’re in it. Among the various boyfriends.

— Not in this edition, Helen.

— Sam, it’ll be in the News, the Post, and the Times. You can’t leave it out.

Briscoe sighs.

— But I buried it with the names of other boyfriends, Helen says. The ones that made the gossip columns. And by the way, the Fonseca kid just dictated a scene sidebar. Very good — tight, great details. It ends with the cops carrying off two computers. I figure one for each vic.

He thinks: One of them contains the last e-mail I ever sent her.

— Thanks, Helen. For everything, but especially for showing up.

He hurries to his office, dumps his clothes in a chair, turns on the lights, opens the computer. Still standing, he checks the Times website. Nothing yet. Same with the Post. He doesn’t bother with the News website because he can never figure it out. Then he sits down, looks for the phone number. Richard Elwood. He dials. Busy signal. Christ, the news is spreading.

He looks at the paper. The wrap will take a while. Fonseca’s story about the murdered kid from Stuyvesant. The Doom Page. All old news now. He dials Elwood again. This time the young man answers.

— Yes? he says, his voice distracted.

— Briscoe here. I’m at the paper, Richard. You might have heard about what happened on Patchin Place.

— Yes, he says, his voice lowering. I was just on with some cop. It’s a horror, Sam. She seemed like a nice woman.

Briscoe thinks: You mean Cynthia, of course, not Mary Lou.

— Do you want to give some sense of the dinner party to a reporter? Just atmosphere. What they talked about. No direct quotes, or I.D.

— I don’t know. Let me think about it.

— We’re on deadline, Richard.

— Deadline? I thought the deadline had passed.

— We’re doing a wraparound. Four pages.

— A wraparound? How much will that cost?

— You can sell a hundred thousand more. We have stuff nobody else has. They’ll blow it out on the morning news shows. If we can get it to them around nine.

— A hundred thousand more copies? That’s a lot of paper.

— It’s a lot of news.

Elwood exhales, pauses.

— All right, give me a few minutes to gather my thoughts. And Sam? We’re still on for eight-thirty. It’s very important.

Elwood hangs up. Briscoe writes his name and number on an index card, walks out to the city room, and hands it to Helen Loomis. She is lighting a fresh Marlboro Light.

— Call him in about five minutes, Briscoe says. As much detail as possible. Who was there, what was said, what was served for dinner, what they talked about. Everything.

She nods, focused by nicotine and urgency. Briscoe walks over to Logan.

— Tell Billygoat to print a hundred thousand more, with the wrap, he says. And be ready for a replate, if they make an arrest.

— Yes, Logan says, smiling and making a fist.

Neither mentions the tabloid joy of murder at a good address. But Briscoe feels the rush, the adrenaline pumping. And then walks to his office consumed by shame.

2:37 a.m. Malik Shahid. The Lots, Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

There was no time to wash the body. No washing table there in the mud. No time to braid her hair either. No need to squash out the shit or piss or other filth; there was nothing inside her at the end, not even the baby. Malik knows he should have washed her three times, or five, or seven, always an odd number. But he is sure that the rain has washed her pure. He is sure of that. She was pure enough for Allah. Cleansed by rain sent by Allah.

Standing above the grave, he spoke scraps from the takbars too. O Allah: let the one thou causeth to die from among us die as a believer…

Malik wants to believe that Glorious died as a believer. When he covered her with the wet dirt, he whispered, Minha khalaqnakum. And added, And into it we deposit you… He wants Allah, in all of his mercy, to forgive Glorious Burress. For her puppy’s doubt, for her scorn. She was a child herself.

But nothing has been easy, on this night of death. He dug the trench with a shovel from the hallway, grunting, moaning. Losing feeling in his hands. He brought down the bloody sheets and wrapped her in them, making a shroud. The boy’s flesh was already cold, still tied to her by the cord. He placed the boy facedown on her rain-washed body, both of them like ice, moved her arms so that she was holding the baby, hugging the boy into eternity. Then he moved the sheet over her head, covering her face, and tied the ends beneath her neck. Praying all the while. Ending with Allah is most great, four times.

Then he climbed the stairs one final time, gathered what he needed into a backpack, scattered what was there as if it had been a crack house. He thought about spreading alcohol and setting it all on fire. And decided, No, that would attract police and firemen. Then he came down through the dark hallways, paused for a final prayer. Now he sets off into the night without end. Night of godly avenging horror. Night of red rain.

2:42 a.m. Myles Compton. New York State Thruway.

There is almost no traffic on the thruway. The driver is following orders: driving just above the speed limit, because his passenger doesn’t want a delay caused by a state trooper. No ticket either. No record. Myles doesn’t explain any of this to the driver and the two men don’t chat. The digital clock on the dashboard changes by the second. Myles keeps repeating his new name, silently, like beads in a rosary. Martin Canfield, Martin Canfield, Martin Canfield… And in a silent echo of long ago, adds an ironical coda: Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of thy death…

For a while in the past two months, he even thought of going back to his real name, his birth name, his baptismal name. Michael Cooney. The one he changed when he arrived on Wall Street. The name that was too Irish. Who the hell would invest money with a mick? At least in those years before the Celtic Tiger roared in Ireland. Now that’s gone too. And if he became Mike Cooney again, then some smart little prick from the FBI could trace it, and trace me. Martin Canfield, Martin Canfield…

— How much longer, driver? he says.

The driver pauses, taps a finger on the GPS, says: Maybe ten minutes, sir.

— Okay, Myles says. They’ll wait. Just don’t speed.

— Yes, sir.

Myles slouches lower as the interior of the limo suddenly brightens. He feels a moment of fear. The Bulgarian’s eyes. But a pickup truck passes on the left. No passenger. The driver in his thick plaid shirt doesn’t look. Within seconds, the truck becomes two red eyes far ahead of them.

Martin Canfield.

He looks at tree branches whizzing above him, a stretch of emptiness, more trees, conical, dark and full, pine without Christmas ornaments. He thinks: My guys will be pissed at me today. All charged as co-conspirators. They’ll probably think I was turned. All except the fucking Bulgarian. Sorry, guys. Blame me, okay? Just don’t come looking for me. Don’t find me.

He knows that Sandra won’t even try. Too proud. She would no more pursue a man than she’d stick up a blind news dealer. Maybe that’s why… Does he love her? Maybe. Probably. Whatever the hell love means. For sure, she didn’t want a dime from him. Never asked for stock tips. Never asked about his business. A lot of women he knew were creatures of appetite and opportunity. Sandra, no. Maybe later, a year from now, the man formerly known as Myles Compton can call from somewhere. He could ask her to meet him in another place, and they could drive to Martin Canfield’s house, and… Nah. She’d hang up.

Christ, he thinks, it’s harder to run from a woman than to run from an indictment.

The driver passes an exit sign and begins to slow. He pulls right, onto a ramp. Myles glances behind him through the tinted rear window. No other cars have turned off the thruway. He leans back, closes his eyes. In his mind, he sees the Learjet waiting on the landing strip. The pilot is standing by the door, glancing at his watch. The limo pulls over, and Myles gets out. No bags. A briefcase is all. Business trip to Toledo. The pilot says: Mr. Canfield? Then he sees himself tightening the seat belt and hears the engine revving up.

The limo driver makes several turns, and then is on a dark country road. Two lanes. Myles watches now. They pass houses whose windows are all dark. They pass some shuttered country stores. Another turn.

Then the driver leaves the two-lane road, into a lane with a painted sign for a place that ends in “Farms.” He drives slowly now, then passes a dark house, moves into a parking area just beyond, and stops. The area is fenced by trees.

— One moment, sir, the driver says.

He steps out, leaves the door open, walks back toward the house.

Myles thinks, sucking saliva: This is not an airfield.

He pushes a button to lock the door beside him, his heart pounding now. He reaches across the front seat for the open front door.

Then a hand is in the car, and it’s holding a pistol.

— Out of car, a voice says.

— Who are you? Myles says.

— Out.

The pistol is aimed at his head. Myles lifts the door button, pushes down on the handle, steps out into the rain.

There’s a second man on the far side of the car. He walks around to face Myles.

— We take walk, he says.

And gestures to the woods.

3:10 a.m. Ali Watson. Fort Greene.

He can smell her everywhere in the house. Aromas more powerful than when he left, an hour or so ago. In the kitchen. On the stairs. In the sweetness of hand soap in the parlor-floor bathroom. There are traces of her cooking in the air, her breath, her skin. The perfumes of Mary Lou Watson. His body is clenched as tight as a fist. He knows he will have to leave.

His gun lies on the kitchen table, jammed into the holster that fits under his arm. He stares at the pistol. He knows he must carry it back into the night. And use it to find the person who stabbed his wife to death.

And remembers many of the people he has met after slaughter in this city, wives, lovers, husbands, boyfriends, children: the whole broken lot. All wrecked by the death of love. Life blown out of the ones they loved, or sliced out of them, or battered, or gouged. In their presence, working his imperfect craft, Ali was always low-key, knowing that force or threats or accusations never worked when the goal was to find out what happened. He wonders now how long it took the survivors to find sleep. He imagines them reaching for pills or whiskey, reefer or smack, anything that would obliterate memory or consciousness. In memory, every one of them talks about revenge. Some loudly. Some bitterly. Most often in whispers. The baffled children simply weep. But every one of them must have known that there were some problems you could not shoot.

He opens the refrigerator, looking for the bottle of Diet Coke that would scour the ash in his mouth. And sees Mary Lou there, too, in the neat Ziploc bags of cold cuts, the jars of sugarless jam on the door, the plastic cup of fake butter: the armory of her campaign against his cholesterol problem and her diabetes. He takes a bottle of water and closes the door. He cannot yet climb to the bedroom. He cannot stare at her shoes and clothing in the closet, or her dresser with its vials and combs and brushes and powders, or the sink with her mouthwash and toothbrush and tube of Crest.

He should not have come here alone. Ray Kelly offered to drive him home in his own car. “We can talk on the way,” said Ray, who had talked to many survivors too, starting in Vietnam. But Ali Watson insisted that the commissioner had too much to do. Implying that this horror would be in all the papers. Kelly would have to speak in front of cameras and lights, maybe at the side of the mayor. So Kelly hugged him and whispered that he was very, very sorry. Malachy Devlin, his young partner from the task force, arrived in a raw angry mood, and used Ali’s car to drive him back to Brooklyn. He wasn’t angry at Ali. He was angry at whoever had caused Ali such pain. Everything was arranged, the kid said. A local squad car would return Malachy to Manhattan. All the way to Brooklyn, they talked very little. Ali Watson didn’t want to sound like another mourning example of collateral damage. The kid offered to stay the night. No, Ali Watson said, I’ll be all right.

Both of them knowing that he was lying.

Thinking now: I’ll have to leave. But for where?

For a moment now in the kitchen, he imagines Mary Lou at the morgue. On her slab. Permanently silenced.

He forces himself to see her when she was twenty-three. Her skin glowing gold in the dim light of that little one-bedroom place in Bed-Stuy, framed by white cotton sheets. He forces himself to feel her warmth again as he held her tightly, full of need, and she again helped melt the ice jam in his heart, the one he had formed to protect himself from the horrors of the world that he was paid to police. She helped him on many nights to build a fence around all of that, to keep it in a separate place, far from home, far from here, far from all these rooms that bear even now the aromas of Mary Lou Watson. Now he has to build his own fences.

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn.

Oh, Mary Lou.

My baby.

My love.

He leans forward now on the table, his forehead pressed upon his folded arms, and his body unclenches, and he begins to weep.

When he is finished, when there are no more tears left in him, Ali Watson sits up. He reaches forward and taps the cold steel of the revolver.

3:45 a.m. Lew Forrest. Chelsea Hotel lobby.

He knows it’s late because the lobby is empty. He can see it with his ears. Even Harry, the night man behind the desk, is dozing. He can hear the man’s faint snoring, a papery flutter. Or the sound of someone blowing into an old Chiclets box. At this hour, it’s just Forrest and Camus. At this hour, whatever time it is, the dog is usually a no-no. He’s the gentlest and most noble of creatures, but there’s always a chance that some knucklehead will barge through the door and Camus will read him wrong and go for his balls. But on nights when Lew Forrest can’t sleep, the owners let them both sit here. A comforting solitude, in the best of company. No odors of paint or turpentine. No demands to keep working.

After Camus walked him to 24th Street and back, Forrest did sleep for a while. Then he was suddenly awake, his heart racing, and he knew he’d been dreaming about the war. There were no images alive in his head, no scenes, no faces, but he knew what they must have been, for they had been coming to him across more than sixty years. He was lost in the fog of the Hürtgen Forest. The artillery was roaring. And he was running, running, running. With no way out.

Now he is in the lobby of the Chelsea. No running. No panting. No artillery. From the street, he can hear a few cars, and one bus, all moving east and west on wet asphalt. He can hear Harry’s snoring. There is no sound of fresh rain, but he can smell the wetness sliding under the front door. In the old days, the empty lobby was alive with tobacco smells, from cigarettes, cigars, pipes. All banished now by the triumphant armies of reform. There is a trace of disinfectant in the air, so he knows the lobby has been mopped.

Then he hears the elevator kicking in, humming as it rises in its shaft. A pause, as someone boards. Maybe it’s that Irish guy who has a hit novel out that I can’t even read now. Seems like a nice fella. Another guy who wakes up in the night and needs the air to unlock a paragraph. There’s been a lot of those guys here over the years. Now the elevator is coming down. He hopes the passenger is not leading a strange dog. Camus knows all the regulars. But he brooks no arrogant hounds. Particularly phony tough guys. Those runty little dogs with teeth like critics. Camus, after all, was once a member of the Resistance. Or his namesake was.

Lew Forrest hears the elevator stop, with a jerk and a thump. The doors open. Harry whispers his good morning. Then he hears the klok-klok klok-klok of knobby heels. He knows who it is.

— Oh, Mr. Forrest.

Lucy from ARTnews. Down from the third floor.

— Good morning, dear, Forrest says.

She comes around and sits next to him. Camus exhales, returning to his position with paws stretched out, head between them on the tiled floor.

— I couldn’t sleep, she says.

— Good. That’s the best time to work. Wear yourself out and sleep till noon.

— It’s not that easy.

— The key is, Forrest says, leave the television set off. It scrambles the brain, whether you’re painting or writing.

— Funny, that’s exactly what happened.

— See what I mean?

— There was an awful story on New York One. I had it on to check the weather, to see if the rain would end. And there was this story. Very upsetting. Two women were murdered in the Village. One of them was a cop’s wife. The other was a woman named Cynthia Harding.

— Cynthia Harding? Forrest whispers, shock in his voice.

— Did you know her, Mr. Forrest? New York One said she was a patron of…

He inhales, then exhales.

— I knew her, yes.

— The TV said she raised money for the arts and—

— She did a lot more than that.

— Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Forrest.

— She owned some of my paintings and hung them down at her home in Patchin Place. She bought them in, oh, nineteen eighty-five? Before anybody was buying them. Before the dough started rolling in from buyers, before I was suddenly hip after fifty years of painting… But I first knew her back in the sixties, after I came home from Paris… Or was it Mexico? Anyway, I knew her. She was the same age you are now, maybe. Beautiful, and very smart… Oh, God. Oh, goddamn it all to hell.

She touches his face with both hands.

— I didn’t mean to hurt you, she says. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

— Yes, the hurt… But it’s not about me, Lucy dear. Not even close. It’s about her. Lovely Cynthia…

He stands up. So does the dog, who stretches, then shakes.

— Can we go for a little walk? Forrest says. The rain’s over, isn’t it?

— Yes, Lucy says. But it’s pretty wet out there.

— Eh, let’s try.

Lucy opens the door, and Camus moves through it, pulling Lew Forrest after him.

Harry is with them. Awake now. Protective.

— Don’t go too far, Harry says.

— We’ll be all right, Harry, Forrest says.

Then he, the dog, and Lucy are outside under the awning. Each inhales the freshness of the rain.

— Just beautiful, he says.

— Yes, it is.

They walk in silence toward Eighth Avenue, following the lead of the dog.

— Can I ask your permission for something? Forrest says.

— Of course.

— Can I touch your face?

She giggles.

— Of course, she says.

He uses his right hand, and runs his fingertips lightly, gently over her brow, her cheekbones, her chin, her nose, and her lips.

— You’re beautiful, he says. I thought so.

— Come on, Mr. Forrest.

— You are, he says. I wish I could draw you.

They are still walking toward Eighth Avenue, and stop under the marquee of the movie house.

— But you live alone, he says. How come?

— Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m not as beautiful as you think. Guys are… you know.

— Yeah, I know. Are you lonely?

— Sometimes, she says.

Forrest thinks: That means all the time.

— Don’t let it get to you, he says. It’s part of the deal, especially in this goddamned city.

He turns to go back to the Chelsea. She holds the crook of his arm. Then he stops again.

— How bad was it? he says. The killings, I mean.

— Pretty bad, she says. If New York One has it right.

— Both of them shot?

— No. Stabbed.

— Oh, God.

He pauses, feels tears welling in his ruined eyes. He flashes on Cynthia Harding’s smooth skin, her delicate neck.

— I’m so sorry, Mr. Forrest, Lucy says, squeezing his arm. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.

— No, no. Don’t apologize. Please.

— But I—

— It’s not you, Lucy. It’s her. And the son of a bitch who did it to her.

Camus senses that something is wrong. He nuzzles Forrest’s leg, pulls gently on the leash. And leads him home.

3:50 a.m. Freddie Wheeler. His apartment, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

He sits barefoot in a bathrobe, leaning back in the chair, staring at the blank screen. He has checked the news bulletins online, and they are alive with the killing of Cynthia Harding and Mary Lou Watson. He wants to write, and can’t. He knows nothing about Mary Lou Watson. She doesn’t even have a Facebook page, f’ fuck’s sake. But neither does Cynthia Harding. He has never spoken with her, but he does know her. Rich bitch with a press agent. Her name in the papers, the columns, fund-raising for the library, a Brooke Astor knockoff. Never gives interviews. Didn’t even know that books are over, that words on paper are over, that nobody goes to the fucking library in the age of Google. Still, why kill her? Why slice her up? Nobody deserves that…

— Stop, he says out loud.

Céline would laugh at you, you mushy airheaded sentimentalist! What makes you think Cynthia Harding was not just another New York hustler, chiseling her piece from the charities, lying on her taxes, and always nasty with the help? What makes you think she didn’t deserve it? For Chrissakes, she was the girlfriend of that son of a bitch Briscoe. That should have been enough motive, right?

And laughs, thinking: Oh, my Céline: I’ve been doing this too long.

He stands up and stretches. He places a hand on the window frame and stares across the street at the converted four-story tenements, with their black metal chimneys rising from the rooftops like hooded night watchmen. Water drips from cornices. Fire escapes cover the facades… a kind of iron calligraphy… cluttered with dead flowerpots… and one soaked denim shirt that has been there for months. A few lights burn in yellow rectangles behind drawn shades… still awake, or living in fear. He senses the city beyond the corniced rooftops… the sleepless… block after block of loveless imperfect fortresses that have lasted now for a century. So many people are awake… like the rats within the walls. The lucky ones are fucking… risking everything… even their lives. The rest are plotting… scheming… seething.

The way I do.

The way Céline did.

Even Céline needed sleep, he thinks. I must sleep now… be ready to celebrate. In a few hours… must raise a fist in the air… and curse Briscoe… and proclaim the end of the World.

3:50 a.m. Malik Shahid. Sixth Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn.

He is stretched across the backseat of the car, thinking that all we have is the past. The long-ago past. Medina in the seventh century. The immediate past. Two days ago. An hour ago. The blue Toyota is about eight years old, with a rusting scar on the hood. Definitely not a car worth stealing, either for resale or joyriding. It smells too of cigarette smoke and stale Chinese food. The filthy perfume of corruption. All the way from Sunset Park, Malik had been careful, never speeding, never trying to beat a red light. On Fourth Avenue, he drove all the way in the center lane. Looking casual. Middle-class. Yeah. Some graduate student from CUNY. Yeah. That’s me. Even when a police car eased past him and made a right on 9th Street. He didn’t play the radio, didn’t want to hear news bulletins on 1010 WINS. No weather report. The rain stopped. The sky gray.

He drove past Jamal’s street, went three more blocks, and turned on 3rd Street toward the Gowanus Canal. Pulled over beside a shuttered clothing factory, just past a loading bay. Turned off lights and engine. He pocketed the key, left by some drunken asshole. He wasn’t worried about the license plate. Nobody would report this heap of shit stolen. Waited, battling sleep, exhaustion eating his flesh. Alert for cruising patrol cars. Or anyone else who might spot him. Then he climbed into the backseat. The floor littered with beer cans mixed with a child’s plastic earthmover toy and a scuffed pair of women’s shoes. He opened a window on the right side, about a quarter inch, to allow air to enter. And stretched out to rest. He did not truly sleep.

Sleep would have to wait until he entered Jamal’s house on 6th Street, three blocks to the south. Jamal, his closest friend in the years after his conversion, Jamal, who traveled with him to Philadelphia, to Buffalo, to Canada, to all the stops in what they both called the Network. He was my brother then, the older brother I never had. His father was a doctor in Philadelphia, maybe still alive, practicing. Making money off sick black folks. Whites too. After September 11, Jamal was convinced that jihad was the only way. He and Malik started collecting the things they needed. A few guns. Powder. Accelerants. Bomb stuff. Getting ready for a rising.

Even after Jamal married an unbeliever, even after his father helped him buy the Brooklyn house, he still believed that day was coming, the moment when Allah’s punishing wind would blow again through America. Malik believed too.

Then Jamal went on the haj. And when Jamal came back, he called Malik and said: Malcolm was right, brother. Malik was sure he knew what Jamal meant. Malcolm came back from making his own first haj believing that Elijah Muhammad and his Black Muslim cult was a bunch of shit. Pure Islam, Jamal said, was all that mattered. Malik agreed. But Jamal said that pure Islam didn’t necessarily include jihad. Their friendship started drying up. Jamal’s marriage helped it happen. They stayed in touch for a while. But it wasn’t the same.

After services at the mosque in Cobble Hill, even the imam, that timid man, asked them to stay away, insisting that suicide was against the Quran, that if you kill yourself in some action it is haraam and you cannot enter Paradise. Later that afternoon, walking in Brooklyn, Malik ranted to Jamal, shouting that the imam was a mushrig, a Muslim who betrays other Muslims. He should be killed. Jamal disagreed, softly, politely, a consoling arm upon Malik’s shoulders, but Malik raised his voice even higher and they went their separate ways. Malik traveled different roads. Longing for Iraq. Longing for Pakistan. Longing for Tora Bora. For training. For sacrifice. And never going. Finding Glorious Burress instead.

Now Jamal is a designer, a graphic artist, who uses his talent to sell the worthless shit that corrupts the world, even the Muslim world. His infidel whore wife won’t allow Malik into their house. They have a child, now about four years old, and the wife is too busy for visitors. Or so Jamal said once when Malik called from Denver. “You’re my brother, Jamal,” Malik said. “I miss you, man.” Jamal chuckled and said, “Yes, but I’m my little girl’s father and my wife’s husband.”

Malik couldn’t tell anyone all that he felt about the old friendship. The endless nights of talk. The dissecting of the Quran. The discovery of the work of Sayyid Qutb. The sense of mission, and purpose, and fierce shared anger at all the corruption in America. He never had another talk as intense as the talks with Jamal. Not with anyone. Certainly not with Glorious Burress, that beautiful heathen puppy. Jamal was the one, the channel into truth. He did try to keep Jamal alive in his life. When he called Jamal, the infidel whore wife almost always answered and Malik always hung up. One Friday evening in the previous July, Malik even went to Jamal’s street, taking the R train, walking to their block. Looking casual as he passed their house. Hoping he would bump into Jamal as he took a morning walk. Watched for a long time from the doors of the abandoned garage up the street. Rehearsing words. After twenty minutes, he saw them placing bundles and suitcases and a folded stroller into the trunk of a BMW. The wife held the little girl by the hand, the two of them whorish in bare legs and flip-flops. Heard the wife calling to Jamal: “Jerry! Jer-ry! We’re late!” Jamal now called Jerry. Malik turned and walked around the corner, out of sight into Third Avenue, thinking: Maybe they are picking up the imam to drive to the Hamptons.

Fatigue gnaws at him now. Eating the sore muscles in his arms and legs and hands. Reducing him to this boneless body flattened against the backseat. He thinks: I have nobody at all left to talk to. Nobody in the whole wide godless world. Unless Jamal talks. One last time. I will lie here, empty, until the sun comes over the ridge behind me and warms the morning and dries the rain. Then I will rise too, he thinks. To walk the short blocks to 6th Street. To look, to see, to go to Jamal and retrieve what I know is in his house. The stuff of cleansing.

He begins to pray.

Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Khalid al-Mihdhar.

Majed Moqed…

And sleeps.

5:25 a.m. Bobby Fonseca. Avenue B and 12th Street, Manhattan.

They lie together in the dark, spent, breathing deeply, Victoria’s breasts against Fonseca’s back, a down blanket pulled tightly to their necks. Gray street light seeps from the bottom of the window shades. The sound of rain has stopped. Both are awake.

— Thank you, she whispers.

— I promise I’ll get better.

— Not that, dummy. Thanks for taking me with you. For making me feel like a reporter, instead of a goddamned waitress. For three hours, at least.

He turns to face her, breaking into a smile. His black hair is spiky.

— I’m glad I did, he says. You kicked ass. Made me look good. I told them to give you a credit line.

— Now you tell me?

She sits up.

— I gotta tell my father!

— Not now, he says, leaning on his bent elbow, head in hand, as if addressing her right breast. We don’t know if they’ll give you the credit. I can’t order it, y’know.

— He’ll increase today’s circulation by at least ten papers, Fonseca.

Then she laughs and slides back beneath the covers. And is silent.

— I’ll be right back, Fonseca says. Where’s the, uh—?

She switches on a muted bedside lamp. In the yellow darkness, framed photographs cover a wall, with some front pages too. Times. Daily News. Post. HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR. A stove. A sink. One wall of books, CDs, DVDs. She points.

— Right there. The blue door.

Fonseca walks naked to the blue door, shivering in the cold. The wood floor is cold too when he steps past the rug. A small narrow john. Just a toilet, a roll of paper attached to the wall, the seat down. Like an airline toilet, without the sink. He lifts the seat. Staring at a framed browning photograph of a blonde woman. Eyes that miss nothing. From the thirties, maybe? Her grandmother, maybe? Finishes. The woman in the photograph seems to demand he wash his macho hands. No sink.

He steps out, closes the door behind him.

— The sink is beside the stove, she says, her head showing above the blankets. Shoulda warned you.

He washes his hands, uses a towel on a rod above the sink.

Then hurries back to the warmth, the aroma of Victoria Collins. Reaches past her back and holds one of her hands. Silence for a beat. Then:

— A question, he says.

— Yeah?

— The woman in the bathroom: who is she?

— My hero. Martha Gellhorn. She’s in the bathroom so I’ll see her every morning. And night.

A vague memory stirs in him. Professor Norman’s class at NYU…

— She was married to Hemingway, right? Fonseca says.

— Wrong. He was married to Martha Gellhorn. As a journalist, Hemingway wouldn’t make a pimple on her ass.

And laughs. So does Fonseca. She squeezes his hand. His flesh is warm now. They are quiet. Finally, she clears her throat.

— Did you read CelineWire tonight?

— Life is too short for that asshole. He’s a nasty little prick that Briscoe fired a couple of years ago. Why should I read his crap?

— He says the World is folding this weekend.

— He’s always saying that. He wants it to be true, even if it isn’t.

— Just thought you should know, she whispers.

They are silent again.

— Would Martha Gellhorn read CelineWire? he whispers.

She giggles.

— If it was about Hemingway, she would.

And pushes her butt against him.