The Devil_s Garden

FIVE

Abby Roman stared at the young man in disbelief.

He looked about nineteen or so, drove a tricked-out Escalade with tinted windows, spinner hubcaps, and a vanity plate that read YO DREAM. A real class act. He looked a little threatening, sitting high in the SUV, but that was just part of the white boy thug routine. Abby glanced at the girls. They were in the back seat of the Acura, still strapped in. They were both listening to audiobooks that Michael had downloaded onto their new iPods. Charlotte was lost in A Bear Called Paddington. Emily was giggling at something called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The windows were rolled up. They wouldn’t hear anything, if there was anything to hear.

Let it go or stand down, Abby?

She glanced at her watch. She had forty-eight hours off at the clinic, and at least sixty hours of things to do, but that had never stopped her from getting in the face of some asshole.

Not yet, anyway.

She may have grown up in Westchester County, she may have had a horse named Pablo – named after Neruda, of course, not Picasso – and studied ballet at the Broadway Dance Center, but she had spent nearly ten years in the city, all of them as an ER nurse, and there was a principle at work here

She pulled the handbrake, and got out of the car.

When the kid emerged from the Escalade he turned out to be about five-four – baggy jeans, T-shirt, backwards Mets cap. The bigger the SUV, Abby thought. He clicked the remote-control lock button on his key ring, locking the Cadillac with a toot of the horn. Just one more thing to endear him. He turned to do his pimp-roll into the market, staring at his cellphone, God’s gift in a pair of Nike Jordan Six Rings.

“Excuse me,” Abby said, at least twice as loud as necessary.

The kid glanced over, pulled the earbuds from his ears. He looked at her, then to his left and his right. She could only be talking to him. “Yeah?”

“Got a question for you.”

The kid looked her up and down now, perhaps realizing that, for a woman around thirty, she was in pretty good shape, and maybe, just maybe, he was going to hook up here. He half-smiled, raised his eyebrows in anticipation. “Sure.”

“Are you fucking crazy?”

Exit the smile. Exit most of the blood from his face. He backed up an inch. “Excuse me?”

“You did that for a parking space?”

For a moment the kid resembled not so much a deer in the headlights, but a deer that had just been run over. “Did what?”

“Endangered my life. The lives of my children.” A little dramatic, Abby realized, but so what.

The kid glanced at the Acura, at the girls. “What… what are you talking about?”

Abby took a deep breath, tried to calm herself. This kid was completely clueless, as expected. She put her hands on her hips. “All right,” she said. “One more question.”

Another step back. Silence.

“When was the last time you saw me?” Abby asked.

The kid did some kind of ape-math in his head. Apparently, he came up with nothing. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

Abby moved in, her finger out front. “Precisely my point. I was about to turn into that space and you jammed into it right in front of me. You didn’t even look. You didn’t even see me.” Abby clocked it up now, the angel of death on a tear. “You’re so caught up in your damn MP3, cellphone, text message, Jay Z gangsta-wannabe world, you can’t see anything past the end of your fucking 37th Avenue Serengeti knock-offs.”

The kid looked at the ground. So they were fake. He looked up. “What… what do you want me to do about it?”

“I want you to move your truck.”

The kid grimaced. Abby knew the word truck would get under his skin.

“It’s not a truck. It’s an Escalade.”

Wow, Abby thought. An Escalade driver with attitude. How rare. “Whatever. I want you to get inside, start it, and move it.”

The kid looked around. There were no parking spaces for about a hundred feet in any direction. “Where should I go?”

Abby glared her answer at him, as in, who gives a shit?

For a second, the kid looked like he was going to stand his ground. He glanced at the front window of the Acura. On the dashboard was a parking permit for the Queens County DA’s office, a large rectangle of laminated plastic that, despite the mayor’s efforts to curtail, generally allowed ticket-free parking on everything up to and including sidewalks.

The kid glanced at his laceless Nikes for a moment, weighing the options. He conceded. He pressed the button, unlocked the car, and with a movement somewhat slower than the glacier that had carved out the Niagara Escarpment, rolled back, and slipped inside. Driving down the aisle he executed his gangster lean, gave Abby one final glance in the rear-view mirror but did not – as Abby had expected – give her the finger. Obviously, he still had to go inside the store, and was not quite prepared for Round Two. Besides, who would get Mom’s nutmeg if he left?

Abby got in her car, pulled into the spot, the thought of NEW YORK AXIOM #208 giving her a warm feeling all over, that being:

Parking spaces fought over are much sweeter than parking spaces earned.

She unbuckled her seatbelt, checked her purse, making sure she had her wallet. Before she could open her door there was a query from the back seat. It was Emily.

“Mom?”

Abby turned around. Both girls had the earbuds out of their ears, and their iPods turned off. How did they learn these things so quickly?

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Who was that boy?”

Abby had to laugh. Boy.

God she loved her girls.

The city was every photograph he had ever seen, every film, every song, every postcard. Aleks had taken a cab from JFK Airport to a section of midtown Manhattan called Murray Hill.

If he had been a tourist, he could see himself taking in the wonders of New York for a week or more. He looked at the booklet. The UN Building, Grand Central Station, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the Flatiron Building, the Guggenheim Museum. There was much to see.

But he was not a tourist. He had business here. The most important business of his life.

The Senzai Hotel WAS located at East Thirty-Eighth Street and Park Avenue. The pictures on the website had not done the place justice. The floor was marble, the ceilings were high, the brass appointments were subdued. Before leaving Tallinn, Aleks had had his hair cut at the airport salon. He knew that all styles were served in a city like New York, and it would take something pretty outrageous to stand out, but he did not want to take any chances. At just over six-foot three, with shoulder-length sandy hair, dressed all in black, he might attract some attention. So now he looked like a tall European businessman in town for a meeting. In many ways, this was true.

He checked in. The girl behind the desk was Japanese, about twenty-five. She had small streaks of gold in her lustrous black hair.

She greeted him warmly, moved with grace and efficiency, an attention to detail Aleks had not only anticipated but expected. It was one of the many he things he admired about Japanese culture, another being how much was expressed in a non-verbal way. He sometimes lived in silence for weeks at a time, and he appreciated this.

After running his credit card, she asked after his immediate needs. In his best Japanese – which was quite meager, the product of a brief study he had made before visiting Tokyo on R amp; R in the federal army – he told her he was fine for the moment. She smiled again, pushed forward his electronic key. He took it with a slight bow, which was returned, and headed toward the elevators. Before he had taken two steps the concierge approached and told him that a FedEx package had arrived for him, and that it would soon be brought up to his room. He tipped the man, and took the elevator to the eighth floor, slid his electronic key into the lock, and entered his suite.

The room was small, but tastefully appointed. In the closet were slippers, a pair of terry cloth robes, an umbrella. He had selected the hotel for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it featured a rooftop garden.

After he unpacked, there was a knock at the door. A bellman handed him his package.

Aleks tipped the young man, locked and chained the door. He flipped on the television – it seemed to be some sort of show where people were locked in a house with each other, people who seemed to hate each other – and opened the box. Everything was intact. He removed the pair of passports, the cash, the Barhydt from its bubble-wrap cocoon.

After a shower, he dressed for the day, then took the elevator to the roof.

Although far from the tallest building in sight, the view was nonetheless exhilarating. He had been in a number of cities, but was never inclined to follow the tourist route, visiting the observation decks of the Eiffel Tower or the Triumph-Palace in Moscow or Frankfurt’s Commerzbank Tower. The view from above did not interest him. It was the view into a man’s eyes that told him everything he needed to know.

Stepping to the edge of the roof, a rush of warm air greeted him. Below the traffic on Park Avenue hummed. To the left was the massive Grand Central Station, a legendary place about which he had read and heard his whole life. So far, New York seemed rife with legend.

He glanced around the rooftop and, seeing he was alone, opened his flute case, lifted the instrument to his lips, and began to play “Mereschitsja” from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kashchey the Immortal, pianissimo at first, then building to a crescendo. The notes lifted into the morning air, and drifted over the rooftops. When finished, he returned the instrument to its leather case, glanced around the rooftop once more. He was still alone. He took out the Barhydt, touched the razor-sharp tip of the blade to his right forefinger. A glossy drop of blood appeared.

Aleks tilted his finger just as the breeze died down. The drop of blood fell toward the street, disappearing into the rushing city below, forever marking this place as one with him. It was his ritual, to stain the battlefield with his blood. He knew that, in this place, some were going to die. He owed them this, to mingle his blood with theirs.

“I will find you, my hearts,” he said, closing the knife. “I am here.”

The Stop amp; Shop on Tall Pines Boulevard was crowded with locals stocking up for the long weekend. As always, the girls insisted on pushing the cart. They lined up, each grabbing a portion of the handle and, as Abby watched them roll down the produce aisle, she realized that it wasn’t so long ago that they couldn’t even move the cart a foot without help. Now they did it with ease.

Abby clicked off the items on her list, with Charlotte and Emily on point, gathering things from the lower shelves.

As they waited at the deli counter, Abby noticed that both girls were humming a song, a song that sounded vaguely familiar. Was it a classical theme? Was it on the audiobooks they were listening to? She couldn’t put her finger on the tune, but it sounded so melancholy, so wistful, that she suddenly felt a chilly shiver of disquiet. It seemed a portent to something, although she had no idea what.

Abby shifted her attention to the Muzak. It wasn’t anything classical. It was an instrumental version of an old Billy Joel song.

“What are you guys singing?” Abby asked.

The girls stared up at her, and for a moment they looked as if they were disengaged from the present, as if they were not in a store at all, but rather rapt by another moment. They both shrugged.

“Did you guys hear it on the radio or on your iPods?”

They both shook their heads. A moment later they seemed to snap out of whatever mini-trance they were in.

“Can we get macaroni and cheese?” Charlotte asked, suddenly brightening. She wasn’t talking about the Kraft variety. She was talking about the prepared kind. This store had an amazing prepared food section, and offered a three-cheddar ziti. Lately, it seemed, Abby was taking full advantage of the prepared food counters. She wanted to cook for her family every night – she really did – but it was so much easier to buy it already made.

“Sure,” Abby said. “Em? Mac and cheese okay?”

Emily just shrugged. The girls were so different in many ways. Charlotte was the schemer. Emily floated.

They got their cereal (Captain Crunch for Charlotte, Cheerios for Emily); their peanut butter (smooth and crunchy respectively), their bread (they both agreed on multigrain for some reason; Michael thought it tasted like tree bark).

While they waited in line, Abby cruised the tabloids.

“Can we get Peppermint Patties?” Emily asked.

Abby wanted to say no. But how could she resist all four of the prettiest blue eyes in the world? Sometimes the magic was too strong to resist.

“Okay,” Abby said. “But just one each. And you can’t eat them until after dinner tonight. Okay?”

“Okay,” in tandem. They took off for the candy aisle. A minute later they returned. Emily carried the goods. She put them in the cart. There were three Peppermint Patties.

Again with the three, Abby thought.

“Sweetie, I said one each,” Abby said. She picked up one of the candy bars. “Did you bring this one for me?”

No answer.

“Okay, let’s get one more,” Abby said. “One for Daddy. Then we’ll have enough for all of us.”

It seemed like this was getting to be a standard routine and speech. It wasn’t like the girls were leaving out Michael in the equation. Abby had watched them interact with other kids many times. They were always generous with whatever they had to share. This was an early lesson from both her and Michael.

On the other hand, the girls were only four. She couldn’t expect them to be math wizards yet.

The Eden Falls Free Library was a small, ivy-laced brick building near the river, a Mid-Hudson design that also was home to the Crane County Community Theater.

Despite the fact that the girls were getting somewhat proficient at the computer, Abby was scared to death of leaving them alone online. So, at least once a week, time permitting, she took them to an honest-to-God, brick-and-mortar library. She had spent a great deal of time at the Hyde Park Library as a girl, and she would not deny the experience to the girls. There was something about the feel and smell and heft of books that no computer monitor could supply. Neither Charlotte nor Emily ever wanted to go. An hour later, neither wanted to leave.

As the girls settled into the children’s section, Abby heard an EMS siren approaching the library. As a trained RN, it caught her attention. It had always been so. From the time she was a child, she had been expected to go to medical school, to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a surgeon. Dr Charles Reed knew his son Wallace did not have the discipline or temperament for heart surgery, or even the rigors of residency, but felt his only daughter did.

Abby had gotten as far as her freshman year in pre-med at Columbia when, one night, on an icy sidewalk in the East Village, she slipped and broke her wrist. While being treated in the emergency room at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, she watched the ER nurses in action, and knew that this was what she wanted to do, to work the front lines of medical care. Part of her had to admit that she knew it would get under her father’s skin, but when she switched over to the Columbia School of Nursing, she knew she had made the right decision. It took Charles Reed most of the ensuing thirteen or so years to get over it, if he ever did.

As the EMS ambulance passed the library, Abby flashed on the night, five years earlier, when she met Michael.

She had been on for almost twelve hours that day. The ER wasn’t busier than usual – that night there had been only one gunshot victim, along with a handful of domestics, including one that had ended in the husband, a fifty-nine-year old man who apparently had received a Westinghouse steam iron to the side of his head for saying to his wife, as a prelude to sex: “Yo, fatso, get with it.”

At midnight an EMS arrived at the door. As they wheeled in the unconscious patient, the paramedic looked into Abby’s eyes, his post 9/11 thousand-yard stare in place.

“Bomb,” the paramedic said softly.

All kinds of things raced through Abby’s mind. All of it terrifying. Her first thought was that the city had been attacked again, and this was just the first of the victims. She wondered how bad it was going to get. As the other two nurses on duty prepped a room, Abby stepped into the waiting room. She flipped the television channel to CNN. Two guys yelling at each other about the mortgage crisis. No attack.

When she stepped into the triage room, she saw him.

Michael Roman, the man who would become her husband, the love of her life, supine on the gurney, his face powdered with black ash, his eyes closed. She checked his vitals. Steady pulse, strong BP reading. She studied his face, his strong jaw, his fair complexion and sandy hair, now coated with black ash.

Moments later he opened his eyes, and her life changed forever.

In the end he had a slight concussion, a small laceration on the back of his right hand. Days later, when Abby saw the photographs of the car bombing, and what it had done to the nearby building, she, like everyone else, was amazed that he wasn’t killed on the spot.

The siren faded into the distance. Abby glanced at her watch, then over at the children.

The girls were gone.

Abby sprang to her feet. She walked over to the children’s section, looking behind all the low stacks, the festive displays for books on Easter and Passover. She stepped into the ladies restroom. No Charlotte, no Emily. She went down to the lower level, the section that had the DVDs and CDs. Sometimes she and the girls picked out movies here in the Family section. There she found four children, none of them her own. Quickening her pace, she returned to the ground floor, and was just about to speak to one of the library assistants when she looked down one of the long stacks in the adult section and saw them.

Her heart found its way back into her chest. The girls were sitting side by side, at the end of the stack of books. They had a large, coffee-table sized volume across their laps. Abby walked down the aisle.

“Hey, ladies.”

They looked up at her.

“You guys shouldn’t run off like that. Mommy got a little worried.”

“We’re sorry,” Charlotte said.

“What are you reading?” Abby got down on the floor with the girls. She sat between them, took the book from Emily. She glanced at the cover.

Russian Folk Tales and Legends.

“Where did you find this?” Abby asked.

Emily pointed to the bottom shelf of a nearby stack.

Abby returned to the page at which the girls had been looking. On the left was a large color plate, an intricate woodcut of a fairy tale figure, a tall, skeletal man with a pointed chin, rabid eyes, and gnarled fingers. He wore a black velvet robe and tarnished crown. To the right was an index to stories about Koschei the Deathless. Abby skimmed the next few pages, a little unnerved.

There were a number of variations on the legend, it seemed. One version included a prince and a gray wolf; another was about a firebird. One thing they agreed upon, though, was that Koschei was an evil man who terrorized the countryside, primarily young women, and could not be killed by conventional means. This was because his soul was separate from his body. As long as his soul was safe, he could not die. Except for one way, according to one of the variations. If he was stabbed in the head with a needle, it would be curtains for the big ugly guy. But only if the needle was broken.

Nice kid’s story, Abby thought. Right up there with Charlotte’s Web.

The good news was that her daughters couldn’t yet read.

Back in the car, heading home, Abby realized she couldn’t get the melody the girls had been humming at the grocery store out of her head. She knew it – recalled the piece of music the way you sometimes remember a face, like a person who was present during something important in your life: wedding, funeral, graduation. It was so melancholy, Abby doubted it was a wedding. The song was too gloomy.

She realized the only way to get a song out of her head was to replace it with something else. She flipped on the radio, dialed to a Nineties oldie station. Good enough.

Twenty minutes later they pulled into the drive. The sun was out, and the girls were giggling over something secret, as they often did. As Abby unloaded the groceries she’d found that the mysterious tune had left her, but for some reason the sense of unease had not.

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