The Havana Room

Ten

A clattering wet darkness, cold and filled with exhaust- this is where I awoke, a bulkily shifting weight atop me, hurting my back and legs and my head, my face pressed in lip-snarled compression against a leaking plastic mass. When I moved against this restraint, pain sparked down my neck, dwindling away as I fell limp again. I pushed off harder and this time the volume atop me settled to either side and the air was better. I was in what sounded like a truck going forty or fifty miles an hour. The top of my head seemed to flatten, then crater downward, then pop out to its original shape. I vomited, but I could not smell or feel what came out of me, and I was already so slick with refuse that I did not feel my own spew, whether it landed on me or away. I cannonballed myself to my hands and knees, only now beginning to hear a muffled shrieking in another language, tinny and incomprehensible- Chinese, coming from what sounded like a radio a few feet in front of me. A blast of music followed, then near silence. I took this opportunity to yell as loudly as I could.

The vehicle slowed, with much excited hollering of men's voices. The truck seemed to be executing one barrel roll after another, or perhaps that was me, tumbling sideways. I vomited again, upward, and this time I tasted myself, felt the stomach acid wash in my eyes. The van or truck accelerated and rocketed over bumps and stones and craters and thousand-foot pits and whatever else might break its tires, and then stopped, the bulky mass rocking forward, then settling back onto itself as the vehicle came to a dead stop. I vomited a third time. A bag fell against me. The engine stayed on. I heard the voices, a door open, then the voices come alongside the walls of the vehicle. The lock on the door was being opened. I lifted my head. A rectangle of light opened at one end of the space and two Chinese men in overalls and long rubber gloves stood before me. I hollered bloody murder again and they climbed into the garbage and hauled me out feetfirst, roughly, yelling as if I had betrayed them, and I fought them out of instinct, but they got their clammy gloves around my legs and pulled me roughly through the leaking garbage bags, then along the slick floor of the van. I fell straight to the ground, banging my shoulder on the bumper, and before they slammed the doors shut, one of the men picked up a fallen bag of eggshells and shrimp carcasses, a pause just long enough for me to look up and into the van- it was a van- and notice, or think that I noticed, a man's brown dress shoe resting in the refuse, a shoe not my own, since I had both of mine still on. I fell backward, stunned and weak, my lungs filled with exhaust as the van sped crazily over a rubbled wasteland, through a broken fence, then into the street. The sky above me was a cloudless infinity of blue. A seagull winged lazily past. My eyes hurt, my head felt too big, my back numb, legs stiff and weak. I rolled to my stomach, got one knee up, stood, staggered, vomited again, this time a thin, burning gruel, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, pulled a piece of limp lettuce from my hair, and saw now that I stood in an abandoned lot strewn with bricks and bottles. I was suddenly cold and dry-mouthed. The garbage had kept me warm. I felt my pockets and was pleased to discover my wallet, with all my identification as well. Plus a set of keys I didn't recognize. I studied them. They were Jay's. I had to give them back. I counted my cash, found I hadn't been robbed. No, that would have been a relief, in a way. I was being dumped, taken out with the garbage.

Dumped, as if they thought I was dead.

Like the other guy in the van.

In a bodega three blocks away I bought coffee, juice, three scrambled eggs, home fries, and a New York Giants sweatshirt off a kid delivering newspapers. I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep the food down, but I ordered it anyway. The cook, a big, authoritative man, told me I was in Queens. He let me use the bathroom, where I took off my reeking button-down oxford. I could barely move my arms, I was so stiff. A cockroach lay inside the sleeve. I washed my chest and armpits and face with paper towels, threw away the shirt, then put on the sweatshirt.

"You got jacked, right?" said the cook when I came out, rubbing a hand over his pear-shaped belly. He kept a pen behind his ear.

"Something." My head was a mess. Fourteen-odd hours later.

He set the ketchup in front of me. "No, no, let me tell you something, I'm telling you, you got jacked. You don't remember nothing, right? That lot, it's like, what, three, maybe four times aJimmy, how many times we see guys get dumped where the old paint factory used to be?"

A voice from a back room. "Howafuck I know?"

"Don't give him no never-mine," the cook told me. "His wife got mental-pause and it got him, too. Guys get fucking jacked and they throw them in that lot because it's just off the expressway. One guy, it was a hooker and she had him pull over his car and when she got his dick out there was another guy waiting, then another time this guy was left there, couple of sickos, they taped a dead cat against his head, fuckin'-unbelievable-tha'shit, trying-a scare him, and this other time they threw fucking toxic waste out there, the government came with all the white moon suits, you know, we sold like two hundred cups of coffee."

"They didn't get all of it!" came the voice behind the door.

"What? What's that, Jimmy?"

"They didn't get all the fucking toxic waste."

"What d'you mean?"

"They left you, didn't they?"

I looked at my watch. "What day is this?"

"What day?"

"It's uh, it's Tues day, guy."

"No, I mean the date."

"The date? Let me- what's the date, Jimmy?"

"Howafuck I know?"

The cook slicked his hand across his head and checked a spattered calendar next to the cash register. "It's the first," he declared, "first of the month."

March 1. The day I was to start work. I was due at work in three hours, showered, shaved, in a new tie- walking human capital. It took me another moment to remember I didn't live anywhere anymore. I checked the cash in my wallet.

"You guys do me one more favor?" I said.

"What. Anything, name it."

"I want you guys to call me a car into Manhattan."

"Can't."

"Why?"

"I'm driving you myself."

"No, no, that's all right."

"Come on, it's twenty minutes." The cook reached for his coat. "Jimmy, take the front." He pointed at the front door. "We're slow today, anyway. It's a slow week. Actually, the year's been pretty slow, matter of fact."

We drove in silence in an old Chevy Caprice that looked repainted. Maybe an old taxi. I was immensely grateful. I asked the cook to drop me in midtown.

"So, did you know these people who jacked you?" The cook turned his eyes onto me, and beneath their penetration, I couldn't lie. "Or was it just a surprise, wrong place-wrong time?"

"Basically I knew them," I said.

The cook nodded, as if he expected to hear this. "Let me tell you something," he said. "I used to be a cop. I retired. I got tired and I retired. But I seen a lot of things."

I went rigid. "All right."

"You want to go on, right, you want to avoid more trouble?"

Had I shot a gun? Did I remember doing that? "Absolutely."

"Don't try to get revenge."

"It's not like that."

He wheeled the car through Spanish Harlem. "Just listen to me. Don't try to get revenge, don't try to explain it to a bunch of people, don't tell nobody, don't tell the police for freaking sake, don't do nothing. And don't go back to those people, don't associate, don't talk about it."

"Okay." I realized I hadn't told him my name.

"You got out with your skin, right?"

"Yeah."

"You're lucky."

"Just go back to my old life, let time pass."

He nodded as he pulled the car to a stop. "Yeah. Go back to your regular life and stay there. Die old."

How do you walk into your hotel at eight o'clock smelling of garbage, have no change of clothes, then two hours later arrive at a new job looking great in a new suit? Answer: It can't quite be done. I hurried stiffly into the hotel, showered, shaved, cleaned up, then padded downstairs in pants and a hotel bathrobe, bought a ridiculous red sweatsuit in a gift shop on Fifth Avenue, returned to the room, changed, then took a cab to Macy's, which opens at nine, bought a suit off the rack, shirt, tie, belt, socks, shoes, dressing in the little changing cubicle, then took the subway to work- and arrived seventeen minutes late.

But it didn't matter. Dan was on the phone with someone- his new mistress, I learned later. That morning, after he had introduced me to the other principals (younger men and women straining on their leashes, eager for glory and promotions and big bucks) and the new assistants (three battle-hardened fiftyish women, attuned to health care benefits and flexible hours to see their grandchildren in school productions), and after I had inspected my office (decent, but nothing like my former one, which had a helicopter view of Lexington Avenue), after I had asked my assistant to order me stationery and a corporate American Express card, after I had established my new law firm e-mail account and signed the employment tax form, after I had done all these functional things and more, I slipped away to a pay phone on the street a few blocks away and dialed Allison, first at home. No answer. Then I dialed the restaurant. A recording came on, in her voice. The restaurant would be "closed for annual cleaning" the next three days, but would reopen on the weekend. Please call after 3 p.m. Friday to confirm or make reservations. And so on. I called Jay Rainey's number. I still had his keys. Nothing. I called Martha Hallock, but she hadn't heard from Jay. Neither had I, I said.

I returned to my office, pushed the little bit of paper that was on my desk, made phone calls using a voice that sounded like mine, then returned to the hotel at the end of the day. From there I called Judith's attorney and left my new work number.

Here, now, is where I begin to equivocate, to confess I told no one anything, to squirm my way free. A lawyer can be disbarred in ten minutes for being party to illegal activities, so naturally I considered going to the police, telling all that I knew and letting them sort everything out. But I didn't, really, know what might come of it, except trouble for myself. Poppy had been killed by Lamont, whom I might have shot. Gabriel and Denny, I suspected, were dead, given how violently they'd reacted to Ha's lovely pieces of sushi. Of course, these men had families somewhere. People would want to know what happened to them. But nothing I could say was bringing them back. Moreover, the matter with Marceno and the land was still unresolved. Poppy was dead, and whatever had been scrawled on the HAVANA ROOM napkin was with Jay Rainey. Don't tell nobody, don't tell the police for freaking sake, don't do nothing. This, I reflected, was good advice. Illegal, immoral, unethical, unlawyerly, selfish, cowardly, flat-out wrong, and utterly reprehensible. But excellent advice nonetheless, and I quietly reported for work each morning, eager to lose myself in the business at hand, waiting each hour for the time that Timothy would arrive in the city. Timothy, my boy, my own lost child.

The following Saturday, I saw a small item in the metro section of the Times about one Harold Jones, a New York City rap club owner found next to a Dumpster behind a McDonald's in Camden, New Jersey. This was H.J. He'd last been seen alive in his limousine in the Overbrook section of Philadelphia late the previous Tuesday. Some boys had stolen the limo and joy-ridden it around for several days, H.J. apparently dead in the back, and they were wanted for questioning. I bought the Daily News and the Post to get the whole story. They played it smaller than I expected, probably because he had died out of town and there were no good photos and H.J. wasn't well known, anyway, except among certain black kids who went to his club. He wasn't a musician, didn't produce records. So went the cultural logic. Just a small-time businessman, in fact. Just another fat black guy with a gold watch pretending to be richer than he was. I ended up walking to the newspaper shop at Grand Central Station and buying the Philadelphia papers. The reporting was more detailed, and between all four papers, I could get a lot of the story. But I read that his driver didn't remember him taking any drugs. The paper said toxicology reports were inconclusive. Who knew what he had in his bloodstream at any given time? He'd gotten in his limo after a meeting in midtown, carrying a leather bag, hollered something, and been driven to Philly. Fell asleep in the car, said the driver. The driver got stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike, finally reached Philly, the black neighborhood of Overbrook. Big house, big party. The driver said he'd opened the limo door, swore he saw H.J. sitting in the limo. Soon people were in the back with him. Talking, partying. The limo driver admitted he ended up in a back room for the rest of the night. The limousine itself was found parked on the football field of a high school in Chester, Pennsylvania, a dying industrial town hanging off the underbelly of Philadelphia. How Harold Jones ended up in Camden, New Jersey, and his car twenty miles away in Chester, Pennsylvania, was unknown. The police found "drug paraphernalia" in the backseat of the car as well as "an undisclosed amount of cash." This would have been whatever was left of the extra purchase money I had negotiated for Jay, money originally earned, when you thought about it, by Chilean vineyard laborers thousands of miles to the south. I was surprised any remained at all. One could picture the scene, people finding H.J., a fat bag of cash, loud music outside a house, confusion, hours passing, rumors of a dead man, move the car, yo, not on my property, gimme them keys, move his dead ass someplace else. Which they did.

I studied the papers, feeling odd, sickened all over again. You could say H.J. had brought all this on himself, but then again, he hadn't, for his original motivations were honorable; his grieving aunt had asked him to secure a death settlement for their family. I didn't expect to feel bad about H.J., yet I did.

On the next Monday I reached Allison at work.

"Bill?" she answered warily. "Where are you?"

"You know we have to talk, Allison."

She insisted we not meet at the restaurant, so instead we found each other at the southeast corner of Central Park, across from the Plaza Hotel, and walked down the path to the pond ringed with green benches with IN MEMORY OF plaques on them. She looked good, Allison, fingernails manicured, one black pump in front of the other as she walked, put together, not a care in the world- just as I expected.

"You saw about H.J.?"

Colin Harrison

The Havana Room

She nodded.

"Probably the fish."

"I don't know," she said.

"What happened to Poppy? To his body?"

"I don't know."

"What happened to Denny and Gabriel?"

"Don't know."

"Did I shoot Lamont? I did, didn't I?"

"I couldn't tell. Honestly. I wasn't watching that. You might have just injured him."

"There was a second shot, I think. All that noise…"

"No one heard," she said. "Because of the vacuuming upstairs."

"Who took the second shot?"

"You didn't kill Lamont," she admitted. "He was just injured. He was waving his gun around."

"Someone else shot him? Who?"

She shrugged. I got a feeling.

" You shot him?"

She didn't answer.

"Jesus, Allison."

"It was horrible, that's all I'm going to say."

"Ha? What happened to him?"

"He's gone. Totally gone."

"Moved?"

"Disappeared. His little room at the top of the restaurant is cleaned out. He could be anywhere."

"If they come looking, then he draws the suspicion towards himself."

"Yes, I suppose so. He would think of that."

"What about all the videotapes of people going in and out of the steakhouse? You have all those cameras. Did Ha take the tapes with him?"

"No."

"So there's a record of everyone going into the place last Monday afternoon?"

Allison shook her head. She was composed. She had no worries. "The tapes get automatically erased with a magnet and reused every forty-eight hours. The machine does it by itself unless told not to."

"Days and days past. Erased three times over since then."

She nodded. "Has Jay called you?"

"No."

"I thought he might have."

"Did he leave after I passed out?"

"Yes," she said. "He left."

"I sort of remember him coughing."

"He was coughing."

"Did he say anything, about his daughter, before he left?"

"Not to me," she said, voice tight.

"He just left."

"Yes."

"He got up and walked out?"

"Yes."

"You saw this."

"Ha told me."

"What about H.J.?"

"He climbed the stairs and got out. The staff didn't see him go. Only a few people had showed up and they were in the kitchen. I think he had that limo waiting."

"What about Lamont? He was shot."

But she wasn't saying anything.

"What did you do, lock all the bodies in the Havana Room, open the restaurant like normal, then get rid of everybody after you closed?" I pictured the clientele arriving, the coat check girl collecting her tips, the waiters and cooks, the whole show, Allison coolly running the evening, while down in the Havana Room there were bodies on the floor, including mine.

"What do you mean?"

"How many bodies went out of there, Allison?" I remembered the man's shoes I'd glimpsed in the van.

She didn't answer.

"Did Ha think I was dead?"

"I don't know."

"He did, I bet. Did you think I was dead, Allison?"

She turned to me. "I did, yes. Well, I wasn't sure."

"You didn't bother to come over and feel for a pulse, to see if your old friend Bill Wyeth, who you'd dragged into this mess, was still barely breathing?"

"I was upset, Bill. Ha told me just to work upstairs. He stayed down in the Havana Room. I never went down there again that night, okay? He called some people, some Chinese men he knows, he said a van would come. I think they carried some of the bodies up the stairs, then down through the kitchen and up through the sidewalk doors. It would be easier that way. No one would see." She nodded. "Ha took care of everything. When I went downstairs to the Havana Room the next morning, it was clean, really clean."

"And Ha?"

"Like I said, then he was gone."

Allison was lying about something, but just what, I didn't know. I pretended a dull acceptance of all that she'd said, and casually got up to leave.

"Bill?"

"I'll come around the steakhouse, give me a little time."

Allison stared at me, then looked straight at the pond as if she didn't know I was still there, as if she had never known me.

If Jay had in fact walked out of the steakhouse, it would have been without his keys. Because I still had them. But certainly he had another set in his apartment. Had he moved his truck? Did it matter that my fingerprints were on the door handles and probably inside on the passenger side? Maybe not, but I didn't want to have to worry about it. And also, it was probably a good idea to see what was still in the truck. I caught the subway downtown to his building on Reade Street. It took me twenty minutes to find his truck three blocks away. A week had passed, and the windshield was plastered with three bright parking violation stickers threatening to tow the vehicle the next day. I found the right key on the ring, opened the passenger's door, keeping my gloves on, and removed the girls' basketball schedule I'd seen earlier. Had I not gone to that game, H.J. might never have found me. Nor would I have been hired by Dan Tuthill, for that matter. I tucked the schedule into my pocket. Anything else connected to Sally Cowles? I checked under and behind the seats, in the back, the glove compartment, behind the sun visors, everywhere. Nothing. I pulled out a handkerchief and rubbed hard over the passenger's dash, inside window, and handle. Then on the outside of the driver's door. Nobody saw, and nobody cared, anyway. I was just being paranoid, probably. I locked the door and slipped away, remembering to throw the handkerchief and the schedule in a trash basket a few blocks south.

The following evening, I made a point of walking down to Reade Street. Rainey's truck was gone, no doubt now sitting impounded in a city lot. I'd bought a handsaw and a box of heavy-duty garbage bags. I opened the building, took the stairs quietly, then opened the empty office adjacent to Cowles's. In a few minutes, I'd picked up the trash. Then I turned my attention to the strange hooded tennis-judge chair, cutting it apart and bagging the pieces. After that I took a hammer to the lipstick cameras and their computer, then tore out the secret phone wiring as far as I could trace it. An hour later the refuse was bundled onto the street, and the office looked marred by some incomplete repair. I spent another half an hour looking for anything else in the office that might be a problem, then checked the basement, finding nothing there.

I called Jay a few more times after that, halfheartedly, each time from a different pay phone, never leaving a message. Then, finally, I could not help myself, could not resist the temptation, and took the subway to Brooklyn two nights later and walked to his apartment. It was dark and there was no light on at the top of the garage stairs leading to his door. The glass had not been replaced in his door but someone had hammered a piece of plywood over the hole, from the inside. I had the keys. I cupped my hand against the glass and could see only Rainey's neat camp bed, the blinking light of the oxygen compressor. Was there anyone inside, was he dead on the kitchen floor? I found the right key, then checked behind me. Someone was standing on his stoop across the street, trying to light a cigarette. He hadn't necessarily seen me, but if I turned on the lights in the apartment, he'd know someone was inside. I'd made a mistake coming at night. I eased down the stairs, eased away.

In this mood of worried self-protection it occurred to me that I should probably get rid of my rotten walk-up apartment on Thirty-sixth Street. I called the super and said I'd like to pay for any necessary repairs, then break the lease. He laughed and told me don't bother, we rented it three days after you left. Have a nice life, mister. So I found a small sublet near my old neighborhood on the Upper East Side, one with an extra bedroom this time, and I moved in.

All this transpired in the ten days after I started work, long zombified hours during which time I was simultaneously aghast and relieved that the world remained unknowing of what was probably four murders in the private room of a Manhattan steakhouse one night the previous month, plus a possibly related death the next day, somewhere on the road to Philadelphia. Where were the bodies of Poppy, Gabriel, Denny, Lamont? Where was Jay Rainey? Then, one morning, while I was shaving, looking in the mirror, my phone rang. I'd given my new, unlisted number to the people at the office but to no one else.

"William Wyeth?"

"Speaking."

It was a detective in Brooklyn, a man named McComber.

"You know a man called Jay Rainey?"

"Yes," I said, knowing I couldn't lie about this, what with witnesses, phone records, and my name on Rainey's documents. "I served as his lawyer for a recent real estate transaction."

"When was that?"

"About three weeks ago."

"When was the last time you saw Mr. Rainey?"

"It's been a little while, two weeks, I'd say."

"Mr. Rainey is deceased."

Was I surprised? I don't know. "What happened?"

His body had been found in the waters off Coney Island, McComber said, badly decomposed. Some kids on jet skis in wet suits found him floating, a swollen figure in sodden pants and shirt, and this being the world that it is, one of the kids had a waterproof cell phone and called the police. Jay's wallet was in the breast pocket of his coat, and my cell phone number was in it.

"But you called my new apartment line," I said.

"Yes."

"Oh."

"We like to know where people are," noted McComber. "Can you identify any immediate family members for us?" he went on.

"His father died a year or two ago, and he hasn't spoken to or seen his mother in more than a decade. I'm pretty sure there were no siblings."

"Was he married?"

"No."

"Children?"

"No," I said without hesitation.

"A girlfriend?"

"He didn't really discuss that part of his life with me."

"I see." The detective paused. "Well, we have a problem."

"Yes?"

"We need someone to identify and claim the body. We had to go ahead and do the autopsy, but we need to release the body."

"I don't know of any family members."

"Could you identify and claim?"

"Uh, I guess. I mean, I've never done it-"

"We need to release the body."

"Where do I go?"

He gave me the directions. I said I had some office business but could be there in three hours.

"Can I give you some advice?" asked the detective.

"Yes," I said, anxious that he meant some legal precaution.

"Don't eat lunch."

"Oh."

"I mean it."

"Okay. Thanks."

On the way to the medical examiner's office in Brooklyn I made a side stop at Jay's apartment, keeping my gloves on. This would be my last chance, I suspected, and I would take it. Inside I closed the door softly and turned on the light. Everything was as before. I had a plastic bag with me and removed sixteen unsent letters from Jay to Sally Cowles, including a few more I found in the oxygen chamber. But I knew there was more I should find. I took my time, I opened drawers, and the trunks under the bed. I found thirty-six different pieces of paper with references to his daughter. Plus some photos. Plus some more school schedules. Plus the handout from the recital. Plus his camera, which had exposed film in it that I removed. I also found a spare set of keys, both to Jay's truck and to the Reade Street property. The truck was gone now into bureaucratic infinity, eventually to be sold at auction. I slipped the Reade Street keys off their chain, checked around the apartment once more, set the door to lock, and pulled it shut behind me. Then I locked it from the outside as well. The whole operation took an extra twenty-five minutes. On the subway I stepped off at the Atlantic Avenue station, found a trash can that needed emptying, dropped everything but Jay's letters to Sally Cowles into it, then boarded the next train. I didn't want to have the letters on me in the presence of a police officer, so I stopped in a post office, bought an envelope, and mailed them to myself at home.

I met McComber in the hallway of the medical examiner's office. He was a small, tidy man. I shook his hand.

"You were his lawyer?"

"For one real estate transaction."

"How'd you meet?"

"We met and got to talking," I said, wanting to keep Allison out of it, if only for my sake. "I needed the work, so I said yes."

"Why'd he buy the building?"

I said it was a standard commercial investment but that the question was still a good one.

"Why is it a good question?" the detective responded.

"Because he was pretty sick."

"He was?"

"He had terrible breathing problems. Very bad."

McComber sucked at his cheeks, held my gaze. Of course, he had seen the autopsy report, which, I supposed, revealed the damaged lung tissue. "What do you mean?"

"He grew up on a potato farm on the North Fork of Long Island and was nearly killed in a herbicide accident."

"When was this?"

"I'm guessing fifteen years ago. It was degenerative. It caused a slow fibrosis in his lungs."

"How do you know all this?"

"He told me, but also I could see it. He had real difficulty sometimes."

"You guys got to know each other pretty well, I see."

"He told me a few things."

"But how well did you get to know each other, is what I'm really asking," pressed McComber.

"Not like that," I said.

"You're not married."

"Divorced."

"Children?"

"I have a son, yeah."

This relaxed him. "All right, so go on."

"He just had trouble breathing."

"You know where he lived?"

All the oxygen equipment, the black-market steroids and inhalers and bottles of pills were there, to be found by the police. "Here it is," I said, giving him the address. Seem to be helpful, I told myself, be the good citizen. "Can I also give you my work number in case anything turns up?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Anything else?" I asked.

"Did he go to a doctor?"

"I don't think so, never mentioned it."

"He was sick but didn't go to the doctor?"

I said nothing, appearing reticent.

"Come on," McComber prompted. "We got a dead guy here, we're trying to figure it out."

"Okay," I said. "I got the impression Jay sort of experimented with his medications. He said his condition was only getting worse. He used to measure his lung capacity a lot. He was very worried about it. He always had pills and medicines for his lungs with him. Basically I think he treated himself."

The detective nodded, and I sensed a tick of judgment and dismissal. Lonely guy, sick, played with his drugs, knew he was going to die.

Ten minutes later an assistant medical examiner pulled out the long refrigerated drawer three feet, and there was Jay Rainey, his head and wide chest, his skin a pearled gray, looking shrunken into the drawer, a long suture-tightened incision running from the bottom of his neck to his belly button. The medical examiner had cut him open, gutted him. It was goddamn sickening. I caught the bile in my throat, took a moment to swallow. As I slid closer I could see that his hair lay salt-thickened by the ocean, more salt dried in starry spots across his cheeks. His eyes were open but the eyes themselves were gone and I found myself remembering the heroic Roman sculptures in which the marble eyes are darkly hollowed, creating the strange sense of visionary blindness. Jay seemed similarly afflicted. You could look at him but he didn't see you. The attendant had stuffed some cotton wadding in his nostrils. Jay's mouth had fallen open, as if getting one last great breath, and I noticed that he was missing a number of back teeth, the effect, I supposed, of not having money for proper dentistry during all his lean years. His face was stubbled and he looked both younger and ancient.

"That him?"

I nodded. "Yes."

"You're sure."

"Positive."

"You'll sign the form?"

"Yes."

"No doubt?"

"None."

"You happen to know if he had a dentist?"

"I think he did, yes. But I'm positive this is Jay."

"Occasionally people make mistakes."

Yes, of course that was true. "Pull him all the way out," I said.

"Why?"

"Look at his calves."

"Why? He have a tattoo?"

"No."

"What?"

"Immensely muscled. Enormous calves."

The attendant pulled the drawer all the way out. It rolled smoothly, though I could see that the weight of Jay Rainey made the long drawer tilt ever so slightly. He was naked. Laid out, he looked larger, his true size. His chest hair was thick and tapered into an arrow toward his groin. His penis fell to one side. Jay Rainey's thick calves bulged inward toward each other from the pressure of the drawer bottom. The attendant nodded. Then he pulled out a tape measure. "Hmm."

"Yes, right?"

"Twenty-one inches. You usually maybe see that on someone who is grotesquely obese, but not someone with low body fat."

"Can I have a minute more?" I asked. "He was a friend of mine."

"That's fine. Just a minute."

Then I moved up to Jay Rainey's head and touched his ear, the left one, the one that matched Sally Cowles's. The distinct horn of cartilage was there, as before, except cold this time. Somehow it made me think of my son, how much I missed him, how I was still bound to him.

I let the palm of my hand rest on Jay's forehead for a moment, but of course that was for me, not for him.

"Okay," came the attendant's voice.

I stepped away from the drawer. The attendant handed me a clipboard. It was a declaration of identification. Under penalty of perjury, I swore that the human remains shown to me by the… yes. I signed.

"That's it," the attendant said. "You're free to go, thanks."

"No, he's not," came the detective's voice.

"No?"

"Don't you want somebody to claim the remains?" the detective asked the attendant.

"Sooner the better."

"You," McComber said. "You're going to claim the remains here. I got no family. But I got a lawyer."

"Wait, wait-"

"Nothing to it." McComber handed me a business card of a funeral home. "These guys are three blocks away, they'll take the body and keep it or embalm it or whatever. We need to clear the space. This is Brooklyn. People keep dying around here."

"All right," I said. "Fine."

"You'll call today?"

"Sure."

"Good. Then I can release the effects now."

He nodded at the attendant, who went to a separate drawer. He pulled out a cardboard box. "Here."

I looked inside. Clothes.

"Plus this," said the detective, and handed me a clear Ziploc bag. "Wallet and watch, book of soggy matches."

I looked at the clear bag. The matchbook was from the steakhouse, the watch ruined by seawater. Then the clothes. "These things kind of smell," I said.

"Yes, they do. That's why we like to get rid of them."

I remembered the last piece of sushi on the plate in front of Jay Rainey. "By the way, what did he actually die of?"

The detective handed me his clipboard, flipped over two pages, and stuck a finger at a long paragraph:

Decedent's lungs and stomach were filled with seawater but autopsy and further sectioning revealed severe and progressed disease of the lungs and airways. Diffuse, symmetrical alveolar disease noted. Indications of pulmonary collapse and consolidation. Probable bronchiectasis, although these tissue slides were not prepared. Obliterative or constrictive bronchiolitis noted, with characteristic plugs of organizing fibrous tissue accompanying similar changes in the alveoli. No indication of bronchial carcinoma. Reduced lung distensibility noted by digital examination. Airway was scarred, indicating multiple instances of mechanical ventilation. Indications of chronic arterial hypoxemia. Secondary breathing muscles in chest showed unusual compensatory development. Pedal discoloration was also noted, as is typical. Cause of death: asphyxiation secondary to chronic, degenerative airway disorder with diffuse pulmonary alveolitis or fibrosis of unknown etiology.

I handed back the clipboard.

"That means he couldn't breathe," said the detective.

I nodded.

"You'll call the funeral home?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Free to go then."

Free to go, perhaps, but not free. Not at all. I carried the box to the pocket park a block away and found a bench. I put the bag with the wallet and watch and matchbook in my coat, then examined the clothes in the sunlight. They looked familiar, and included the same tie Jay had been wearing the night I'd last seen him in the Havana Room. They had been thrown in a dryer and were stiff yet unwashed. Three homeless men watched me from across the park. First the shoes, size 12, larger than mine. These I set on the bench. Then the socks. I shot my hand into each one. Empty. I rolled them up as my mother had taught me when I was a boy and put them into one of the shoes. Next came the pants. They'd been scissored off of him and were useless. I slipped my fingers into every pocket. Nothing. These I set on the other side of me. Then the underwear. These had also been cut off. I noted the waist size, 38. Un-stained, almost new. Then the shirt, also cut off. I checked the size. A 48 long, Brooks Brothers. Nothing in the breast pocket. I stood up and dropped the slit underwear, pants, and shirt into the municipal garbage can and returned to my bench.

The tie I kept. It was silk and quite nice and could be cleaned. I tucked it into my coat. Next came the jacket. It was discolored by salt and other liquids but intact. I slipped two fingers into the front breast pocket. The HAVANA ROOM napkin that Allison had handed him was still there, still folded into a tight square. I slipped it into my pocket. Next I checked the inside breast pocket and the side pockets. Nothing. I folded the jacket and set it by the shoes. Last was the heavy overcoat, a beauty. The label read Brentridge of London. I checked the side pockets. Nothing. I checked the inside breast pocket. Nothing.

"Hey," I called to the homeless guys. Then I pointed at the pile of clothes. "You want these?"

One of the men stood up, shambled over, poked disinterestedly at the pile, then picked up the whole bundle and shuffled away.

Now I drew the HAVANA ROOM napkin from my pocket, daring myself to unfold it. The marks on it, made in red lipstick, had nearly been bleached by the cold Atlantic. Nonetheless, unlike before, I could examine what had been drawn there. It was a small map, with the three X's and the box marked KROWLA.

Yes, a simple map. Of a small section of Jay Rainey's family farm, now owned by Marceno and his Chilean wine company. The scale was a little off, but the three X's probably corresponded to the three ancient trees next to the driveway with the rectangle indicating that something might be found directly off from the third tree: KROWLA, in Allison's block letters.

I called Marceno that afternoon.

"This is William Wy-eth?"

"It's me. I have something for you," I said. "What you wanted."

"You are perhaps hoping to resolve the lawsuit, Mr. Wy-eth?"

"Why didn't you come to the restaurant that day?" I asked. "After I called you?"

"Simple."

"Simple?"

"I called Martha Hallock to see if you were telling the truth, that Poppy was her nephew."

"And?"

"She said he'd told her he was driving to Florida."

"But what about the nephew part?"

"She said in these old farm communities everybody's related to everybody else somehow. She also said he was an unreliable character, drank too much."

"Ah." This sounded like a fat lie. But I didn't have enough leverage on him to force out the truth, whatever it was.

"What is it you want?" Marceno said, his voice measured but not without threat in it.

"I have the information you wanted."

"I see. Why don't you send it to me?"

"No, I want to give it to you in person. I want you to have it. You caused enough grief and suffering that I really think you should have it."

"I will meet you tomorrow."

"You will meet me on Saturday morning and you and I will drive out to the old farm and then and only then will I give you the information," I told him. "Got that?"

He did. His chauffeured car glided up in front of my building at eight the next Saturday morning. The sun was out, spring not far away. The ride was smooth, if not particularly fast. The expressway is a nightmare, day and night. Weekends everybody is shopping. From time to time Marceno had a brief conversation on his phone in Spanish.

As we neared the old farm, Marceno said, "I am sorry for all of this trouble, Mr. Wy-eth."

I nodded.

"But you see, I had to press the issue, as you say."

"I understand that you panicked, yes."

"That depends on what we find." He consulted the palms of his hands. "Maybe my fears were well founded."

We reached the farm. The old barns had been demolished, and all that remained was a smoking pile of lumber.

"That will be where the winery goes," said Marceno, pointing across the field. "You are just in time. We decided to begin, we had to take a chance."

Across the fields, a dozen workers had just started to erect the parallel rows of grape trellises. The car traveled over a new gravel road. I noticed what looked to be a profusion of daffodils pushing through the earth at the edge of the field. When we reached the place where the barn had stood, we counted the three trees specified on the napkin. Rather, we counted two stumps and one old box elder tree that had been trimmed to a limbless trunk reaching into the sky like an immense bony finger, swollen at the joints. It was due to come down that day. Marceno told his driver to stop and we got out. The field was soft- spongy and wet, sucking at our shoes.

We walked to the tree. Marceno studied the napkin, then paced ten steps east toward the Atlantic Ocean and stuck a shovel in the earth. This, I realized, was a straight shot to the place where the bulldozer and Herschel atop it had gone over the sea cliff. Holding the napkin in his hand a different way, Marceno paced out from the tree again, arriving at more or less the same spot. "There." He dug with a shovel and a foot down revealed a thatch of browned grass. "This whole section was regraded," Marceno said. "A huge amount of topsoil was brought in." He pointed at the rotting grass. "That was the original elevation a few weeks ago." But he uttered this softly, as if not yet committed to the act that awaited him.

His men brought over their tools and sat on their haunches. The bulldozer swung around and dipped its cup into the earth, pawing away a few feet. The bulldozer- not the old rust-pocked one Herschel had died on, but another, shining red and twice as large- dug a long channel in the earth. The backhoe bucket dragged shallow scoops of topsoil, its operator skilled and meticulous. The patch of earth was about twenty feet by twenty feet. The work went quickly once he got through the topsoil into the sand beneath it.

"Like digging at the beach," Marceno noted.

Five minutes later the operator caught the teeth of the scoop on something, noticed, then cut the engine. "There," he hollered, pointing at the hole in the earth. "Look!"

At that moment I saw a car speeding along the new road, kicking up dust. It turned off the road, bumped over the field. Martha Hallock emerged from the door and stood uneasily ten feet away.

"Stop!" she screamed. "Stop!"

But Marceno didn't. And within a minute his men had scraped their shovels across a rusted flat piece of metal, which upon further digging curved downward at the edges. It was rusted through and the original paint had flaked away entirely. Then the men jumped down and dug until the curved ends of the metal became a chromed edge that then fell away to glass; we were looking at a buried vehicle of some sort.

"No, no!" cried Martha Hallock. "This, this-"

But the men kept digging, and whatever might be inside what now looked to be an old subcompact was obscured by the dirt on the windshield and a hanging forest of mushrooms inside. Marceno ran his thumb over the grille markings. Toyota Corolla. Or, spelled KROWLA, if you were semi-illiterate, drunk, and maybe suffering from a mild concussion. The men concentrated on digging away the dirt in front of the car to get access to the front axle, and after they did this, the bulldozer was able to haul the car up and out of the earth, the rotten and collapsed tires not spinning but dragging flabbily up the incline of dirt until the car lay perched over the lip of the hole. Then, with one more tug of the dozer, the car lurched forward ten more feet, prehistoric in its rusted ruin, yet all the same utterly recognizable as from our era, our modern time, the blurry then-and-now, a car that was once new and driven off a dealer's lot, used and lived in for the carrying of people and children and groceries and whatever else we use cars for, and the fact that the inside of it was dark, the windows smeared as I have said with earth on the outside and spores and molds on the inside made all of us stand back in sickened wonder.

"Open the door," Marceno ordered one of his men.

"No!" cried Martha Hallock. "No!"

"Open it this second!"

But the man, slope-shouldered and miserable as a dog that dares to disobey its master, just shook his head in meek defiance, whispering something fearful and worried. Marceno turned to another man, who agreed to touch the door with his shovel- experimentally, jabbing it like it might writhe in response, but this was all he could do.

"Don't," said Martha Hallock. "You mustn't. Enough is enough. I demand you stop."

I looked at Marceno and spoke in a low voice. "If you are decent, you will escort her away from this, no matter what is or isn't inside there. It's terrifying her."

"Yes," Marceno nodded. "Of course." And he signaled to his men to help Martha Hallock back into her car, where she sank into the cushioned seat and wept.

Then I turned to Marceno. "I'll do it," I said.

"You?"

"Yes," I told him. And I did.

I put my hand on the driver's-side door and pulled the handle. Nothing happened. I yanked, quite hard, and the door fell away, right off the car, hinges rusted to nothingness. I jumped backward. Inside the driver's side we saw an enormous mass of mushrooms crowding against each other, falling with thick abundance over the seat and floor and everywhere, covering like a thick blanket whatever might be below them, and I felt just strong enough to step forward and brush my hands against them, and what I saw made all of us understand that we were gazing not just into a buried car but a dripping, imperfectly sealed crypt- what I saw was a woman's watch and a curled brown athletic shoe and a rotten swath of a flowered material such as might be used to make a summer dress. What I saw was what remained of Jay Rainey's mother.

Yes, as the official tests would later prove- some remaining teeth, a bit of hair, the serial number in the car's engine blockthis was what was left of Jay's mother, aged thirty-nine years old when she died, a woman who had not abandoned her only child, her strapping, beautiful son, but- judging from the position of the car in the field- had gone looking for him, perhaps catching a taint of herbicide floating on the night air, which meant that she found her death.

Marceno's men lay a section of plastic sheeting on the ground and on it they put what they found: one earring, a wedding ring, the running shoes, a necklace of semiprecious stone, and a small clay dog. Marceno examined it and handed it to me. It was heavy in the hand, and I wiped the dirt from it. The creature had a certain crude sweetness and had been glazed. I turned it over, my thumb finding the lettering on the belly: JAY R. 4TH GRADE.

We pried open the trunk of the car, and in it were the following items: a plastic gasoline can, a beach chair, an aluminum baseball bat, and rubber flip-flops. No suitcases, no items suggesting a flight from a bad marriage. I turned to Marceno. He and his men stood silently, understanding what the artifacts meant, tribally respectful of them and the earthen rituals of death.

Martha Hallock sat in her car, weeping fitfully. "My girl," she sobbed. "My sweet girl." How had I not figured out that she was Jay's grandmother?

Marceno and I walked away from the car toward the ocean.

"She sold me the land, you know," he said. "He owned it but she sold it to me."

"I think she knew somebody was buried here, feared it might be true."

"Who?"

"Her daughter, Jay Rainey's mother. Her nephew, Poppy, knew for sure, must have been the one to bury her. There was an accident with herbicide. The mother disappeared that same night, everyone thought she'd left the husband. But Martha knew, somewhere inside her."

Marceno ran his fingers through his hair, demoralized by the waste and stupidity of everything. "Poppy was just putting a little more earth on top of the car, that's all?"

"It looks that way."

"And this man Herschel happened along," confirmed Marceno. "Said what are you doing? And they got in a fight. That could cause a heart attack right there."

"Or Poppy told him what he was doing. Or Herschel figured it out. Or Herschel knew what had happened and was afraid it'd be discovered."

Marceno studied the rusted hulk of the Toyota.

"Poppy was desperate," I went on. "Once the vineyard was planted it would be a very long time, if ever, before the car would be discovered."

"He would be dead."

"More importantly, Jay Rainey would be dead."

"I don't understand."

"Poppy was probably the one who left the herbicide sprayer on. He killed Jay's mother. Found her, panicked, buried the car."

"Even if the ground was soft, that would still take hours."

"He had a bulldozer. He could've found her a few hours before dawn."

Marceno knelt down to touch the earth. "So he was trying to spare Jay Rainey from finding out?"

"I think he probably didn't want to face manslaughter charges. You could begin there."

"But did Rainey know?"

"I don't think so. At least not until recently," I said. "He found out in the Havana Room."

Marceno dusted off his suit and faced me, ever the tidy international businessman. "So, are we done then?"

"Not quite."

"Hmm?"

"I want to know why you didn't come to the steakhouse when I called and told you Poppy had arrived there."

He inspected his fingernails. "I didn't feel it was necessary, Mr. Wy-eth."

"But I had the information you wanted."

No answer. Marceno's silence felt cold. He adjusted his watchstalling, I figured, preparing an explanation. "This man H.J. came to my office," he finally said. "Full of threats." He looked at me and shrugged, as if the rest of it was obvious.

"What happened?"

"We made an agreement. We were both looking for the same people. It wasn't supposed to-" He appeared to sense that I could still cause him enormous trouble. "I owe you an apology."

"It was just business for you," I muttered.

But this was not the way Marceno chose to understand himself, and his eyes found their way back to the rusted hulk sitting atop the earth, the blanket of mushrooms inside. "Men died for nothing. For money, for wine."

Not Jay, I thought.

I will tell now four more things. I will tell why I slept very poorly the next few days; I will tell what I did with Jay's estate, including his letters to his daughter, Sally Cowles; I will tell what I said to her about her true father; and I will tell what passed between me and Allison Sparks in our last conversation, during which we discussed the terrible events in the Havana Room.

Knowing only two things, that Jay lay in the field near death, and that his mother stopped her car before him, one can surmise the horror she felt as she saw her son fallen to the earth. She would naturally have wanted to open the door and rush to him. But did she pause? In an instinct of self-preservation, perhaps smelling or tasting the herbicide that had already come in through the window or air vents? Did she sense that she needed to back up in the soft earth and flee? And was Jay in any way aware of the headlights upon him, did he know it was his mother? Perhaps she called to him. Perhaps he knew that she was affected by the herbicide. In any case she must have looked upon him, seen him dying, and then known she was dying herself. These are the lost seconds of Jay Rainey's lost life. Seconds that yet tick forward unknown. And, I wondered, did Jay have any remembrance of the lights of his mother's car or her voice or perhaps even the sight of her slumped form against the dashboard, or even out the door, dying in the field? Had there been one molecule of this memory? Did he think that she had gone looking for him, that he had unknowingly drawn her to her death? That, too, was undiscoverable. One might infer from his pursuit of his lost daughter that the answer was yes- that there was within him a hidden call of the flesh, to find the flesh that was of him and of those from whom he'd come. These are the deep pressures of being human, and those of us who are parents feel the forwardness of our flesh even as we know our own is failing. The rhythmic scything away of the previous generation forces our attention to our children, for if we do not have our children, then, knowing ourselves to be doomed, we do not have anything. People who don't have children often take violent exception to the idea that their lives are in any way existentially different from the lives of those who do have children, and to this I only laugh darkly to myself and think, Well yes, you may think that, but you are already dead, my friend. I am also already dead, yet live on in my son, who will have his son or daughter when I am dispersed with the fluorocarbons, part of the mist of ozone cooking the earth. Yes, I will yet live. And I think this is in all of us. And in Jay Rainey, too. The will to live. To pursue life is always to flee death, including murders in which one is somehow complicit, and this pursuit of life is not only essential to the survival of the species but also a courageous pull from the terror of biological anonymity. We want to be known. We want someone to know us. And there is something more, which obtained in the case of Jay Rainey. If you are a man, you cannot live without women, whence men come. I don't mean that men cannot live without women sexually, which of course they can, but rather without the fact of them, in the man's past, as mother and sister, as mitigating influence against all that is the most awful in man's murderous endocrinological nature. Women, it should be admitted, often make men better than they otherwise would be, save them from themselves. Jay could find lovers, of course, but except for Martha Hallock, his grandmother, he had no female who knew him, no woman who had insight into his essence, no female blood. Is it unreasonable to think he hoped, if only instinctively, that his daughter might someday look upon him and know him as no other female might, with the knowledge of shared flesh? As daughter to him, her father? On this, the answer is not lost. The answer is yes.

And then there is the matter of Jay's letters to Sally and what she might know.

This was the hardest thing of all. I studied the question. I really did. She did not understand why she had been kidnapped. She had not been harmed, at least not physically. Not a hair. She had spent less than one hour of her life in the company of some strange men. If she was traumatized, perhaps her stepfather and stepmother had seen to it that she had a trip to Disney World or a ski trip, some distraction that melted and obscured that one strange hour. An hour in a girl's life, what might it mean?

It was a grave responsibility. I could give her those letters, either directly or through Cowles, whose whereabouts I knew. But in the end, I did not. She had not asked to be born to doomed parents, she had not asked to think that she might have been abandoned. It was enough already, I supposed, that she'd experienced her mother's death. We have a responsibility to be merciful, I think, to save not just a life but the best version of a life, if possible. I do not think that I can ever forgive myself for the death of young Wilson Doan, and all that resulted, but I believe that I decided rightly when I took Jay's letters and watched their torn little pieces float down the Hudson River, releasing his daughter from the life she did not need to have. If this damns me, then it will not be for the first time, but I trust it does not. I will never be at peace with myself- how could I? — but the sight of those letters floating along the water gave me some hope, some fleeting belief, that the past may leave our bodies as surely as we will leave the earth.

I thought that question was resolved. But then David Cowles called me, at my office.

"I have a few questions for you," he said. "It took me a long time to contact you. I had to go through the old Voodoo owners, then some man named Marceno, through his office."

"What can I do for you?"

"I can't seem to find Mr. Rainey, and-"

"He's dead," I said.

"Dead?"

"But let me try to answer your questions anyway."

An hour later, I climbed the stairs to Cowles's offices, wondering what he knew, what he wanted to know, what answers I'd provide him. He was waiting for me at the door, which he unlocked silently and locked again behind me. I followed him to his office. Sally was there.

"This is the man?" Cowles asked. "This man was there, too?"

She turned. For a moment she looked older, the woman she would become. "Yes." She nodded at Cowles. "He's the one who saved me."

He motioned for me to sit, which I did, with some apprehension.

"Naturally I want an explanation," said Cowles. "I want to know why my daughter was snatched on her way home from school and driven fifty blocks south." He drew a breath. "She's been terrorized. It took her three weeks to tell us. My wife and I were shocked. We are this close to calling the police. We see no reason not to bring the full fucking might of the law down on you, Wyeth!"

"Daddy, I wasn't gone that long. They brought me to you."

"You were taken!"

"It wasn't his fault, Daddy."

"I don't know that I believe that."

"Jay Rainey was not well," I began. "He had people after him."

"What does my daughter have to do with that?"

"He was-" I wanted to be careful. "He was unstable."

"What the hell did he think he could accomplish by kidnapping my daughter?" Cowles bellowed.

Oh pal, I thought, you should stop now.

"It's very hard for me to say what he was thinking."

"Sally," said Cowles. "I want you to leave my office so Mr. Wyeth and I can talk privately. But if you want to ask anything of Mr. Wyeth first, or tell him anything, then now is the time."

"Okay." She stood up. "I guess I want to know if it was dangerous to me. Being in the car, I mean. Was I in any real danger?"

"Yes." I nodded. "But how much I don't know."

"Why were you there?"

"I didn't want to be there."

"But why were you?"

"I was trying to get Jay Rainey out of the mess he was in."

"Did you?"

I waited for words to come to me.

"What happened, I mean?"

"He died, Sally." Your father died, I thought. You'll never know him now.

"That man? How?"

"Mr. Rainey had a breathing problem. He was ill."

"He was killed?"

"No. As I said, he had serious health problems."

"Was he a nice man?"

"He was a man who had been hurt," I answered. "He meant well."

"Did he want to hurt me?"

I looked at Cowles before I answered. "No. In no way did he wish to hurt you, Sally."

She heard this and something seemed to relax in her. "So it was more sort of a big mistake, kind of?"

I nodded. "A huge mistake, yes."

Sally shrugged. "Okay." She looked at Cowles. "Dad, I'm going to go check my e-mail, okay?"

"Sure, sure."

"Will you be long?" she asked.

"No, but why?"

"I was hoping we could go past the sports store on the way home."

"You got it," he said.

She left and Cowles closed the door and faced me, unable to contain his anger. "Which part of your sick story is bullshit?"

"What do you really want, Mr. Cowles?"

"I want to know why Rainey was obsessed with Sally."

"I'm not going to tell you."

"What?" He held his fists tight and I thought of Wilson Doan Sr., and how I'd been destroyed once already. "I can go to the fucking police, Wyeth. They'll-"

"I know. And then, unfortunately, I'd have to tell them."

"Unfortunately for you, you mean?"

I had an obligation here, an obligation to Wilson Doan and his wife, from whom I had taken a child, and I had an obligation to my son, whom I'd allowed to be taken from me, and I had an obligation to Jay Rainey, who, let it be remembered, never revealed himself to his daughter as her father, despite how painful it was for him not to do so. I also had an obligation to Cowles himself, and most importantly I had an obligation to Sally. I had an obligation to her because she was a child, still, and I was an adult, simple as that. My obligation to all of them and my obligation to myself was that I would never again be the agent that separated a child from a parent. Never, never again.

"Unfortunately for whom?" Cowles repeated angrily. "Who would be hurt if the truth got told?"

I looked at him and into him and stared down his fearful righteousness. He blinked several times, then looked away. "Those who love you very much," I finally said. "Those who need a loving father."

Cowles stopped at that. I don't think he quite understood. But he understood that he didn't understand. He knew he didn't need to know something. He slumped a bit, and sighed. "You're asking me to trust you," he said.

"I'm asking you to trust yourself. Trust in what you know."

He pondered this. Finally he nodded to himself.

"All right. My daughter seems okay. It helped her to ask those questions."

"It was wise of you to suggest that," I said.

He made a noncommittal humming noise. "I'm breaking my lease," he announced. "We're moving back to London."

"All right."

"Are you the executor of Rainey's estate?"

"I might be," I realized, "by default."

"You wouldn't be trying to enforce the lease."

"Of course not."

"You'll give me an address and number in case there are any further questions?"

"Yes."

"Let me just ask-"

"Sure."

"How long did you work for Mr. Rainey?"

"Just a few weeks."

"So you barely knew him."

"Barely."

"Did he have a wife?"

"No."

"No family?"

"No," I said. "He had absolutely no one."

He pondered this, his basic decency getting the better of him. "Bit of a sad story, then."

"Yes."

He stood and shook my hand. "I hope you understand I was scareda father gets, you know- protective when-"

"You don't have to apologize for that."

I followed him out. Sally was sitting at one of the office's computers, typing away. She noticed me leaving and stood. She had Jay's wide shoulders, the dark eyes, his long legs. But Cowles didn't see it. "Bye," she called politely.

"Bye."

The office door closed behind me and I never saw David or Sally Cowles again. But I lingered behind the door and listened.

"Daddy!"

"What?"

"It's boring here!"

"You want to go home?" Cowles asked her.

"You said we could go get the new hockey stick!"

"We will. Let me just pull together my papers, sweetie, won't be a minute."

"Oh, Daddy!" Sally Cowles cried in exasperation. "I'm so bored!"

That was all I needed to hear, forever, so I slipped away down the steps and outside. The weather was getting warmer and I walked the streets for an hour feeling the strange emptiness of it all. Jay, I said to myself, I did it to protect her. She didn't need to know who her father was, because if she found out, it would crack her relationship with the man she thought was her father and because her own father was lost to her now. It was a truth within a lie or a lie within a truth- which, I wasn't sure. But I suspected I might have done the right thing. It didn't weigh on me. I'd lied on behalf of a greater good, and though it was not anywhere close to bringing poor Wilson Doan back to life, it was a small offering of penance, one that might perhaps count.

In time I found myself walking by the steakhouse on Thirty-third Street, but not turning in. The second ceramic pot had been replaced, complete with evergreen. It needed to weather and didn't quite match. One night, finally, as the nights began to warm, I stepped inside the heavy door, past the gold lettering, and all was the same, the mahogany woodwork and oil paintings. As ever, as if nothing had happened. It was perhaps an hour before the dinner rush. I saw a busboy vacuuming at the far end of the dining room, the maitre d' checking the reservation book. The door to the Havana Room hung open, I noticed, and before anyone could object, I darted through it and down the nineteen marble steps, expecting to see the painting of the black-eyed nude above the bar, the books on the shelves, the ancient barman wiping a glass, the dusty sconces above the wainscoting.

But the room had been painted an improbable yellow, cheery and harmless as a child's bedroom, with all of the paintings and old books removed. The tile floor had been carpeted over beautifully and the booths and men's room removed- torn out. Two long banquet tables had been set up, with folds of linen tablecloth, and each bore a printed placard that read: Women in Dialogue/Monthly Guest Speaker Dinner. On cue I heard voices coming in through the door and found myself confronted by fifteen or sixteen professional women eagerly taking their seats.

"I'd like three bottles of sparkling water at each table, please," one woman said to me. "Thank you."

I didn't bother to explain her mistake and instead slipped out the doorway and up the stairs into the main dining room. I walked straight through the kitchen looking for Allison. I saw cooks and busboys and waitresses, many of them familiar, but no Allison.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"I'm looking for Allison Sparks."

"She's here, somewhere."

"In her office?"

"I think she's in one of the lockers downstairs."

"Will you take me to her?"

"Is it-?"

"It's quite serious, yes."

I followed the waitress down the stairs and along a corridor hung with pipes until I saw the open door to the meat room.

"Allison?" called the waitress.

"Yes."

The waitress nodded at me and scurried away.

"Yes?" came Allison's voice, exasperated.

I stepped inside the room. As before, it was hung with perhaps fifty beef carcasses, each stamped and dated for aging. Allison stood examining her clipboard, back to me. She turned, and drew her breath. "Bill."

I nodded. "I almost called you."

"You should have."

"You painted the Havana Room," I said.

"I wouldn't use that exact word."

"No?"

"I destroyed the Havana Room, Bill."

"Scrubbed it away."

"I hate how it looks. Hate it."

There was an uncomfortable tension between us.

"Are you going to tell me?" I said.

"What?"

"What happened."

She shook her head. "I don't know. I told you before. Ha had some men come."

"Men in a van, I know that. I mean what happened to Jay."

Allison stared at me, something passing through her eyes.

"I mean, how did he die? You told me he walked out of there but I know he didn't. He didn't go to his truck, he didn't go to his apartment, he died in the very same clothes he was wearing that night."

"I really don't know what happened, Bill."

"Did he eat any fish?"

"I don't know."

"Did you see Jay eat any fish?"

"No."

"You saw him collapse?"

"No."

"Did you see him after he collapsed?"

"Yes."

"Did you see him after he died?"

She wouldn't answer.

"You did."

"Yes."

"Then you saw Ha's men take him away?"

Nothing.

"And me, too?"

Nothing.

"I was left for fucking dead, Allison!"

She'd been willing to let go of the chance that I might be saved, and I might have hated her for that, but here I was, after all. I'd been at fault like the others, in my own way, and the rope of mutual betrayal had been braided from the desires of all of us.

"Tell me how Jay really died, Allison."

"I don't know."

"Allison, remember. Ha made eight portions of fish. Denny and Gabriel had two each. H.J. had two. I had one. One was left. It was in front of Jay when I passed out. Did he eat it or not?"

"No."

"And he was fine?"

"Unsteady, but fine, I guess."

"What do you mean, unsteady?"

"He was bent over, like he got sometimes. Tired-looking."

I waited.

"I went upstairs to open the restaurant for the night. The cooks were there, the waitstaff, everybody. Ha came with me."

"Did Ha think he'd killed me?"

"Yes. By accident. He said he gave you too much of it. He said your brain was destroyed and that you would die in the van."

"Seems to me he got it just right," I said. "Where's Ha now?"

"I told you before, I don't know."

"Left?"

"Right away. That same night."

"Did you think about looking for him?"

Allison shook her head- sadly, I thought.

"Why not?"

"I have no idea where he could be, that's why."

"What's his complete name?" I said. "You could do a search for him by-"

"Don't know."

"You don't know? Is Ha his first name or his last?"

"Don't know."

"But you hired him."

"I paid him under the table. We never did any paperwork."

"Is Ha his real name?"

She smiled. "I don't know."

"No more funny Chinese fish."

"Nope."

"All right." I wanted to resume the sequence. "Where was Jay when you and Ha went upstairs to open the restaurant?"

"He had a cigar in his hand."

"You saw him light it?"

"No."

"That's the last time you saw him, saw him alive?"

Allison's eyes filled and she blinked.

"Come on!"

She nodded. "Yes. When we came back maybe, I don't know, maybe ten minutes later, he was dead. On the floor, dead. It was awful."

"Had he eaten the last piece of fish?"

"No. I didn't understand how-"

"Was a cigar there? Was it lit? Did it burn out?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I got kind of hysterical, actually."

She wasn't telling me something.

"I saw the girl the other day," Allison mused, eyes downcast. "I'd seen her in the neighborhood. She looks just like him."

I still wondered why I didn't believe Allison's story about Jay and the cigar. Or how I could believe it.

"You knew?" she asked. "That night we-?"

"I was figuring it out, yes."

"She lived right across from me." Allison was telling it to herself now. "He was trying to find her-"

"Wait," I said. "What happened to the last portion of fish?"

Allison slumped forward and fell against me. Despite myself I held her. "I kept looking at it," she said. "Then I ate it."

She wept against my chest. Yes, Allison Sparks, hard and tough and rotten, sobbed against my chest. "Jay was dead, I thought you were dead, you had foam in your mouth, and there was that Lamont guy, he was dead, too, and I panicked, Bill. I was so upset about the girl and I understood why Jay did it, why he- I wasn't angry with him anymore, it was just so sad, so terribly sad, and I wanted to just die, to die there with him."

"So you-?"

"I took the fish and ate it and Ha yelled at me and he dragged me down and stuck his fingers down my throat and I fought him and hit him and he wouldn't let me do it, Bill, he took the spoon and shoved it down my throat and made me vomit."

She collapsed against me again. I had eaten the fish of my own accord, but I had trusted that it was a benign portion. And it had not been, not quite- or just barely? But Jay's portion had been poisonous. Had Ha meant to kill him? Why? Because of his betrayal of Allison? For bringing trouble to the steakhouse? Or maybe a portion of the fish just right for a big man of Jay's size would have been lethal for Allison, and she'd realized this. I'd never know.

I left Allison there, collapsed against the wall in the meat locker, and found my way back upstairs, through the kitchen and out of the restaurant. I could not resist one more peek into the Havana Room, which, I now saw, had been renamed the Flower Lounge, and when I came to the door, I conjured the room for myself- the mahogany wainscoting, the black-and-white tiles, the volumes on the shelves- and there I stopped. I could hear the clever voices of the Women in Dialogue group and I realized it'd be best for me never to go down the stairs again.

I turned toward the exit, and it was at that moment that the elderly literary gentleman I'd seen twice before arrived, dressed in an excellent suit. Sober, he was quite the distinguished lion.

"I'm giving a talk," he announced, assuming I'd recognized him. "I'm expected."

I noted the haughty gray eyebrows, the lifelike teeth. "You're the guest speaker?" I asked.

He was in a hurry. "Yes."

I pointed at the Havana Room door. "You've been down there before."

"Yes," he answered, "and I see they finally abandoned their silly little charade."

I couldn't smile. My mood was not good. I pushed out through the heavy front door. If you live long enough in New York City, there are places you avoid, and now the entrance of that steakhouse is one of mine.

A week or two passed, and I was happy to be buried under paperwork at my new job. More than happy- relieved. Tuthill remained a stupendous rainmaker and the young men he'd hired thrived in the new business. He and I laughed a bit privately, older men knowing how younger men were going to make us rich. And we would be rich, or rather he already was and I would become so, because he told me that first I would be his partner and we'd build from there. It was a new cycle, a new season, a new chance- something that the city gives you from time to time. It was even better than that. Judith called to say she'd be coming to town with our son in the next month.

Meanwhile, Jay Rainey's estate would go into escrow. He had no registered will, so the court asked me, as his last lawyer of record, if I would dispose of the estate. This would be a lengthy process, and when I called Martha Hallock to ask her who his nearest living relative was, she said, "I am."

"What do you want me to do with the money?"

"I want you to sell that building."

"And the proceeds? How can I send them to you?"

She coughed. "I don't need the money. Give it to the land trust out here. They buy open spaces and preserve them. Several million bucks will go a long way."

I thought of Jay's boyhood out there, in those open spaces, and this seemed a kind of fitting memorial to him.

"Also give some to the family," Martha Hallock told me. "Give half."

"The family?"

"Herschel's widow," she said. "Take out your fee and give them half of the rest."

I called Mrs. Jones and explained that a very substantial sum was coming to her. She was gracious. "Our family lost one of our boys a little while back," she said.

"I'm very sorry," I replied. And I was. I could have told her that the reason H.J. was dead was that she had enlisted him in her effort to get compensation for Herschel's death, that her judgment had been wrong, but then again, her cause had been just, as had H.J.'s, and neither of them had imagined that his fate would come down to a piece of fish served in a steakhouse by an illegal Chinese immigrant. No one could have imagined that, and so I repeated my condolences and gently hung up.

I waited for the police to call. Try as I might, of course, I could not escape the fact that I knew how certain crimes and murders had been committed. I told myself that clearing up these cases wouldn't bring back any of the dead, would only endanger me and others. Yes, I absolutely was thinking of myself. I can't deny it. But I knew too that if I went to the police, one question would elicit ten others and within a few days Sally Cowles would be drawn into the investigation, and if that happened, she would know that the man who had touched her ear in the limousine had been her father and now was dead. And David Cowles, the man who had clothed and fed and cared for her as his own, would be revealed to himself, to the world, and to Sally as not her father. A child would lose her father, and a father would lose his child.

No, the police did not call, but I was not yet free. I felt infected by a splinter of dread, a nagging sense that one thing remained unresolved. And then, finally, I got it, I remembered.

In the plastic bag of Jay Rainey's effects, which I now kept in my office safe, there was the HAVANA ROOM matchbook. To the best of my knowledge, Jay had been in the room only twice, once when he did the real estate deal and the last time. I did not remember seeing him pick up a matchbook during the first visit, and except when I briefly left the room to read the contract, I was there every minute that he was.

Remembering all this, I opened my safe, the combination of which was Timothy's birth date, and retrieved the matchbook. It hadn't occurred to me before to open it, but now I did — and what was there was not proof, not exactly, but it will have to do. One match had been torn out of the book. Jay had lit a match and dropped the matchbook into his pocket. You could surmise that he looked around the Havana Room and saw three dead men and his own seemingly loyal lawyer unconscious (foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling) and wondered what lay in store for him. After all, he had just said goodbye to his daughter, presumably forever, and he had not told her who he was. This was an enormous blow, but it was followed by the crude map Poppy had drawn, which showed where his mother had been interred all those years ago- which told him that she had, in all likelihood, died the very death he had narrowly missed himself.

I assert that this is quite enough to kill a man, yank all hope from his heart, especially one who knows himself to be already doomed. Jay's long chase was over; there was only now the waiting for death, the slow sink toward asphyxiation. So he made a symbolic gesture, a grand one, even- except that no one saw it.

In the Havana Room, one could choose a Cuban cigar, and if the tobacco was excellent, the smoke thick and sweet and beguiling as it drifted past the mahogany wainscoting and oil paintings up to the pressed-tin ceiling, then it was also true that this particular act could kill a man such as Jay Rainey, especially if one brought the smoke in deep and held it, bit shut the mouth and squeezed tight the nose until the long-tormented and fragile bronchial tissue spasmed and swelled, so much that within thirty seconds or so it did not matter if Jay fell over, gasping freely, eyes bulging, throat ribboned in strain, face a red rictus of depletion. No, it did not matter by then. He dropped heavily to the floor; the cigar fell away to be unknowingly swept up later by Ha; he rolled, he gasped, and suffered there on the black-and-white tiles of the Havana Room. A human being with a very low FEV can drop into acute respiratory distress quite rapidly. Unconsciousness occurs as the oxygen content of the blood plummets, the heart pumps rapidly, trying to save itself, thereby consuming what oxygen is left, and all the bodily functions collapse. The linings of the lungs fall into what is termed "enzymatic cascade." Within five or six minutes the brain is saturated with waste chemicals and profoundly damaged; death ensues soon thereafter.

Yes, knowing what I know about my former client Jay Rainey, and considering that matchbook with one torn match stub, which I still possess, it is my opinion here and now and forever that he quickly took his own life before it was taken from him slowly, and I would be very hard pressed not to see his gesture as paradoxically self-affirmative, a certain gift to himself even, but no small tragedy for those few of us who knew the man, however briefly.

Judith had said she'd be staying in a midtown hotel, and would call when she and Timothy arrived. I tried not to expect anything but the worst. "It'd be nice to feel the city around me," she added, and I thought I heard a wistfulness in her voice. "Timothy wants to see you, so much."

When she got in, I waited for her call. I knew she'd be nervous, as would I. Finally, the phone rang in the evening.

"I want to see you," I told her.

Judith didn't respond to this directly. "So much has happened," she finally said.

I had to agree with that.

"So you're working these days?"

"I recently took a job with a new firm," I told her, making it appear more substantial than it was, and Judith made a sound of surprised appreciation.

"But it's not a situation where you end up with $852 million," I added.

"Yeah, well," she sighed. But she didn't elaborate.

I tried to think of something to say.

"You know, Bill," she began again, "basically I freaked out."

"Right."

"Are you seeing anyone?" she ventured.

I waited to answer this. "Yes," I finally said.

"Oh," she responded, a little flustered. "Do you mind- I mean, it's not my business, Bill- but do you mind telling me who you're seeing?"

"I don't mind."

"Well… who?"

"You," I said. "I'm seeing you. Tomorrow, at 3 p.m., in the tearoom of the Plaza Hotel."

Judith was pleased to hear this, I could tell. I still knew her, still heard everything in each breath. "Good… that's good," she answered, and I thought to myself that it might be very nice to see her, to look her in the eyes, to find her in the bustle and hurry of the city, to pick her out of the crowd and to stop in front of herand embrace.

And I was right. There they were the next day, coming toward me. Judith walked resolutely, I could tell, and Timothy had a baseball glove on his hand, the one I'd sent him, and was tossing and catching a ball. I stood to greet them. Judith's body felt familiar. So did Timothy's, though he was much taller. I crushed him to my chest, as Judith watched. It'd be a matter of forgiveness, on all sides. Maybe it wasn't likely. Maybe it was beyond us. But maybe it also wasn't unthinkable. Things stranger than that have happened, after all, things much stranger than that.