The Hit

CHAPTER 2

The hot sun made her feel sexy.

Thirty-three year-old, bikini-clad Katie Gant reclined in a lounge chair on a massive stone terrace, floppy sun hat shielding her eyes. The terrace looked over the backyard of her giant Tudor style home in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina. It was a bright afternoon, and from her lounge chair she could drink in the sloping and closely manicured back lawn, the sparkling blue water of the in-ground swimming pool, even the riot of plantings tucked against the back of the house that made up her own kitchen garden, which had seen quite a bountiful harvest this year, thank you. Although her eyes were open, she saw none of these things.

She had a lot on her mind.

For a little while, as the perspiration beaded and slowly rolled down her skin, she imagined a shirtless young man in jeans shorts and flip-flops down there cleaning the pool. Her husband was away on business, again, and frustrated housewife Katie was trying to get that sculpted Adonis of a pool boy to climb the steps to her. She couldn’t hold the image, though, and gradually it faded and was replaced.

She remembered a morning fishing trip with her dad when she was a little girl down in Beaufort, when at first light they flushed a heron out of the reeds by the shore. The great gangling bird flapped its huge wings and took off across the bay. It was so graceful, that bird, once it got going, gliding just a couple of feet above the water. A few minutes later, the sun came up over the saltwater flats, Dad was tying her bait, and all the world boiled down to just the two of them in a nine-foot aluminum jonboat. At that moment, she never wanted to leave. She wished that time would stop forever.

Yet she had run away from Beaufort soon after graduation. By eighteen, the town was too small to hold her. She was confident, she was blonde, she was beautiful – everybody told her so – and she loved to talk and meet people. The world seemed to hold such promise. There was so much to do and see, and she couldn’t wait to get started. Some kids were going to college, but she knew college would always be there when she was good and ready for it. First she wanted to taste adventure.

She moved to Washington, DC, with some vague sense that powerful people, movers and shakers, lived there. This was closer to the excitement, but somehow she always seemed to just miss out on it. Part of the problem was the jobs she could get. Secretarial jobs – she was always somebody’s secretary. One day, while working as an assistant at the law firm of Benton and Hoffman, she spent seven hours pushing the green START button on a Xerox copy machine. That morning, the machine developed a glitch. It would copy only one page at a time. She needed to make a dozen copies of a government contract that was nearly two hundred pages long. For some reason, unexplained, the job had to be done that day. And for some reason, also unexplained, they couldn’t send it out to Kinko’s or Copy Plus. So Katie did it.

‘Good job today, Katie,’ her boss said, and meant it.

When the day was over, she went home to the apartment she shared with two other girls and cried. At the age of twenty, her employer valued her because she could stand in one place all day long and push the same button more than two thousand times in a row.

Where was the promise? Where was the adventure?

The copy machine debacle helped her realize she wasn’t cut out for the business world. It wasn’t just that she felt humiliated. It wasn’t that she had been treated like a machine, or part of a machine. It ran deeper than that. She saw that if she were in her boss’s position, there was no way she could demand that someone push a button two thousand times. It was a soulless, spirit crushing thing. She wanted no part of it. She was too sensitive, she felt things too deeply.

As it turned out, she was actually an artist. When she was a child, she had loved to draw and to paint, and a life drawing class she took on eight Saturdays reminded her of this. She moved again, this time to Dewey Beach, Delaware, where there was open space, open air and open water.

It was a party town on the Atlantic Ocean, and she partied right along with it. On summer weekends, it seemed like half of the mid-Atlantic region descended on the beaches. She worked as a waitress, first at a bar and grill, then at a seafood place, then at a steak house. Sweating through the menial jobs didn’t bother her anymore. She was having fun.

All night keg parties at rented waterfront townhouses always seemed to end at dawn with eight or ten people nude in the surf. Katie was always one of them. Riding through town in late summer on the back of some guy’s motorcycle, high on pot, the sun sinking in hues of red and orange and gold. Steamy lovemaking sessions on the beach, in the outdoor shower, on the back porch, on sandy sheets, with all sorts of guys. A sun-bleached surfer one summer. An artist, like herself, who came to paint the fall foliage one November, and who stayed through until the following April. A married fireman from Philadelphia who shared a ramshackle house with five other firemen, and who came to town every two weeks. Her first and only black man, a retired football player named Ray.

Ray had spent three years on the Kansas City Chiefs without ever getting into a regular season game. The way he saw it, he made all that money and didn’t get hurt, and that made sense to Katie. She broke it off with him when he tried to get her into a menage a trois with a hard-bodied black woman he brought over from Baltimore.

‘Come on, baby,’ Ray said. ‘Look at that sexy thing over there. You know she looks good.’ The woman leaned against the living room wall in Katie’s small apartment. She had long braids and high cheekbones and tight buns. She looked damn good in a bikini. She had a body to envy, and her big brown eyes said she knew it. Her presence, and the question at hand, made it loud and clear that Ray was already sleeping with her.

‘Fuck you, Ray. No means no. It’s just not my thing.’

Ray held Katie’s face in both hands. He had soft hands for such a strong man. ‘Let her taste you then. I guarantee she drives you wild. She wants to do it. Ain’t that right, Bevie?’

‘Mmmm-hmmm. She look good to me.’ Bevie had a gap between her two front teeth. She said it meant she was sweet down below.

‘Tell you what, Ray. Both of you. Out of my house.’

But she felt sad and empty when he was gone. Even now, years later, he was still her image of the ideal physical man. She wasn’t tall, but she had a lot of body – she reminded herself of Marilyn Monroe. Ray was so big and strong he made her feel like a small and delicate flower. It was a beautiful feeling, while it lasted.

After Ray, she spent fall and winter collecting unemployment checks and walking the empty beach. When she looked in the mirror, she caught the first glimpses of something she had thought she would never see. Age. She was twenty-seven. Her skin had seen too much sun. Her body had seen too much alcohol and maybe too many lovers. She counted them and the number only came to twenty-one, less than the number of years she had been alive. She had come close with quite a few others, so close that she almost counted them, but didn’t. Twenty-one had received the gift, she decided. Still, it was more than she’d like. For the first time, she considered that she would like to be a virgin again.

The next one, she thought. I’ll take it slow and I’ll love him, and he’ll be the one I marry. It’ll all be innocent and like new.

Almost a year later, the next one was Tyler Gant. Handsome, fit and tough – in those days Tyler was every inch the newly retired cop. It had been good for a while with him, good enough to get married. He had taken care of her like no man before him – he was the first man who really had the means to do it. But things between them had turned dark and cold, and now their marriage, their love, was like a dead thing lying at the bottom of that pool on the rolling lawn below her.

The heat hit him like a blast from a furnace.

When the airplane door opened, Tyler Gant stepped from the sleek corporate jet into bright sunshine. He wore a suit of summer linen, and the air conditioning on the plane had let him forget how hot it would be here on the island. He climbed down the narrow steps of the plane to the airstrip’s tarmac, which shimmered in the heat. The black tar almost looked like it was bubbling. Gant was the only passenger disembarking from what had probably been designed as an eight- or ten-seater, but was laid out more like somebody’s living room. He’d sat in a barcalounger reading the New York Times for the whole two and a half hour flight. Bad news from everywhere – modern civilization was falling apart and there didn’t seem to be a damned thing anybody could do about it.

Four men in khakis and loose fitting, short-sleeved shirts waited for Gant at the bottom of the steps. They all wore wraparound sunglasses. They all had big shoulders and forearms. Their faces were nearly identical – stone-faced and expressionless. He guessed they all had guns in their waistbands. Hired help.

They didn’t ask him how his flight was. They didn’t offer him a glass of iced tea. They directed him to a corrugated tin shack near the side of the runway. They entered with him and one of them directed him to remove his clothes. The shack was nothing more than one room with a couple of chairs and a desk. It had a dirt floor.

Gant took everything off, right down to his BVDs. As he did so, he handed the articles of clothing to the men, each one pawing through his pockets, feeling the linings of his jacket and slacks, looking for hidden compartments in his shoes. They found nothing – no weapons, no wires, no nada. Gant stood barefoot in the middle of the room, his toes gripping loose dirt, the men hovering around him. They eyed his slim and muscular body, only a flicker here and there betraying the thought – this man is sixty years old? Barely concealed menace came off them in waves.

‘You guys want to do a cavity search?’ he said.

One of the men smiled. ‘We trust you, Gant. You’re one of the good guys.’ He gestured at Gant’s clothes hanging on the back of the chair and draped on the table. ‘Get dressed,’ he said, and the four gorillas stepped outside.

Gant put his suit back on, but there was no mirror to check his look. He made a Windsor knot without benefit of his reflection, the knowledge where it always had been – in his hands. He came out of the shack and a white Lincoln Town Car was now waiting for him. A black SUV was parked in front of it, and another black SUV brought up the rear. Energy crisis, what energy crisis? The commercial airline industry had disintegrated, and Fielding sent a plane to pick up one person. In the United States, fuel riots were a weekly event, but here Fielding sent a motorcade of gas-guzzlers out to the airport. Maybe it was all designed for show – here on fantasy island money and resources were not an issue. Maybe none of it was really true, a Potemkin stage play put on for Gant’s benefit. One of Gant’s guiding principles was not to trust first impressions – often enough, things were not what they seemed.

He climbed into the back seat of the Lincoln. A man sat in there, thin with round wire-frame glasses, nattily attired in a gray three-piece suit, sandy hair brushed back from his face. He extended a bony hand from a thin, fragile-looking arm. The arm could have been a loose thread at the end of his sleeve. Gant shook the hand, and the grip was firm enough. As Gant settled in, the little convoy rolled out. In fact it drove right down the middle of the runway toward a high chain link fence at the far end – the exit. The limo driver was a dark shadow on the far side of a smoked glass partition.

‘Mr Gant?’ the man said. ‘I’m Elliott Howe, Mr Fielding’s personal assistant. How was your flight?’

‘Smooth,’ Gant said. ‘No complaints.’

‘Would you care for a drink?’

‘Not at the moment. Thanks.’

‘Mr Fielding is eager to meet with you.’

‘That’s good news. I see he trusts I don’t have a bomb planted up my ass.’

Gant wasn’t one to suck up oxygen making small-talk, and he didn’t like having happy gas blown his way – especially not three minutes after a strip-search.

The car motored along a narrow, winding concrete highway lined with palm trees and dense undergrowth. Their little motorcade seemed to be the only cars on the road. Gant didn’t bother to look closely at the trees and other plants for what he knew he’d find. The island flora were sick – the rainy season was already lurching towards its end, and for the second year in a row it had barely rained at all. The climate patterns had changed here, abruptly and without calling the weatherman for permission.

Even in good times, many local people had been poor. A steady trickle of tourism had kept the island alive. Now the tourists were mostly gone. They had evaporated along with the gasoline and the good corporate jobs and the Wall Street funny money. With no rain, the meager crops the folks here had planted to save themselves were dried out and dead. There was trouble in paradise. Poverty was bad enough, and sustained drought made it worse, but events were quickly moving to the next level. The island government – dominated and manipulated for many years by the man Gant was about to see – had collapsed. People were going hungry. Roaming gangs of men, armed with machetes, had seized some of the land and homes of the wealthy.

Every few minutes, the Town Car rattled over some rough road, or slowed to a crawl to pick its way across a monster chuckhole. Road maintenance was no longer a priority, it seemed. On the right, a maxi van, that Third World taxi service deathtrap, zoomed by going the other direction. The driver laid on his horn as he passed. The maxi went by so fast that Gant didn’t notice much about it. He was left with the impression that maybe a dozen people were packed inside. All he knew for sure was that the van was still operational, the driver still had access to gasoline, and there was a slogan painted in bright colors on the front of the van: Angel Eyes.

On the left, across more undergrowth, Gant caught a glimpse of the turquoise ocean. On the right, through the bushes, and on the other side of a dilapidated green fence, Gant spied cinderblock homes and tin-roof clapboard shanties in a riot of fading colors. Many of the roofs were outfitted with cisterns to catch rainwater, Gant knew. The whole set up had been described to him months ago. But the cisterns were hardly much use these days.

High above the roofs and etched against the sky, he noticed the grand prize – a large water tower. It caught his eye for a few seconds before he looked away. He’d seen aerial and ground-level photos of it, of course, but had never seen it in person. The communities on this island were served by two old towers, this one the Town Car was passing and one other. The water was pump-driven up into the towers from the tiny local reservoir, the pumps powered by diesel gas. The water pressure in people’s homes was created by gravity as the water came down from the towers.

The towers themselves were very low security – you could simply cut open a chain link fence, and in each case, climb a staircase a few stories up to the tank. Each of the tanks had vents that could easily be forced open. It was mind boggling, such open access to a vital community resource like water. For a moment, Gant found himself lost in thought about it.

Suddenly, up ahead, two children darted out from the grasses on the right. They were black kids, boys, dressed only in shorts. They hurled something at the car, throwing their projectiles ahead of the car’s path, timing it perfectly, nailing the spot where the car would be in another second.

It was some kind of red fruit. Gant heard the first one hit somewhere at the front of the car – maybe the windshield. The second one crashed into the window next to Gant’s head. It made a loud THUMP, then hung there for a moment, stuck to the glass, weird, pulpy, almost obscene. The center of it looked like the mouth of some kind of suckerfish, with ruby-colored tendrils extending away like the arms of an octopus. Then the whole mess slithered to the bottom of the window and fell away. In its wake it left a path of slime, like a snail might leave behind.

‘The car is bulletproof, of course,’ Howe said. ‘Including the windows.’

‘They’re throwing away food,’ Gant said.

‘Yes, very foolish. Maybe it was rotten.’

Gant smiled. ‘Those little kids are probably pretty good at throwing a baseball. In another couple of years, maybe they’ll be just as good with a firebomb. Or a grenade.’ The thought pleased him somehow.

Howe smiled in return, but it looked more like a wince. ‘That’s one of Mr Fielding’s concerns. But hopefully, things will never get that far.’

The car slowed to a stop on a curve. Up ahead and to his right, Gant saw two of the men from the airstrip climb out of the lead SUV. They both had compact machine guns cradled in their arms. Suddenly there was the blat of automatic weaponry. Gant’s heart skipped a beat at the sound. He looked back to where the kids had been – they were both OK, running through the high grass toward the shanties. The gunmen had fired into the air.

‘Not very sporting,’ Gant said. ‘Firing on children, even over their heads, could be counter-productive.’

Howe was unapologetic. ‘We live in a profoundly active balance of terror with the neighbors, I’m afraid. We don’t shoot children, but we do try to demonstrate who is in charge on this island. Increasingly, it’s a lesson that seems lost on their parents.’

Gant just looked at Howe. He took a good long look. Howe was a man who had probably never fired a weapon in anger during his entire life. But Howe held Gant’s stare, his eyes never wavering. It was easy to be a tough guy in the back of a limousine.

‘I guess that’s why we hire a person like Mr Tyler Gant,’ Howe said. ‘To remind everyone just who’s in charge around here.’

Gant glanced at the red smudge on the window. ‘Actually, you hire me when no one is in charge, and you want me to fix that.’

The car and its SUV escorts started again. They exited the main road and followed a narrow, well-paved lane uphill through thick green foliage. The ascent was steep for a moment, and then very steep. Gant sat back in his seat, almost like an astronaut waiting for takeoff. He felt the heavy Town Car working to manage the hill.

The entrance to Fielding’s estate was at the top of the hill. Gant took in the security – the place seemed well-guarded. The procession waited while the main gate slid open, then each car passed through in line. Unlike out at the airstrip, here the security team made no pretense. Two men stood near the booth with Uzis carried lightly in their hands. The perimeter fence was wrought iron and very tall – the gaps were too narrow for even the skinniest kid to slip through.

Gant glanced upward and spotted bands of circular razor wire at the top. Beat that fence – a determined mob could probably take it down – and you faced about thirty yards to an identical wrought iron fence, with identical razor wire on top. The thirty yard gap between fences was a dog run. Gant spotted half a dozen Rottweilers roaming free in there. Beat the dogs, beat the second fence, and you probably confronted ten or more slack-faced, dead-eyed professional killers with automatic weapons. It would take something just short of a revolution to breach these grounds – hundreds of people, too hungry to fear death. Either that, or a sudden outbreak of empathy and reluctance to fire among the security team.

The house itself was a palace. When the Lincoln pulled to the top of the circular driveway, Gant did a quick calculation. Old quarried stone plantation house, around two hundred years old, fully restored, probably thirty rooms. Gant’s own large home – a mansion by many people’s standards – would fit tucked neatly into a far wing of this house.

He exited the car and immediately felt the breeze – the air wasn’t nearly as heavy up here. Ahead of him, Howe jogged briskly up the stone front steps. Gant carried his own bag and followed him. They turned around. The front of the house faced inland – a sweeping panorama downhill across the brown and green island, the township far below, and in the distance, a white sand beach. Here and there, wisps of cloud clung to the treetops – maybe a few drops of rain in those clouds, but not much. On a few of the hillsides, Gant spotted homes similar, but perhaps not as grand, as this one.

‘Quite a view,’ Gant said.

Howe shrugged. ‘That’s nothing. Wait until you see the view from the veranda, and from your bedroom.’

They crossed into the foyer. A simple white cross, seven feet high, dominated the space in front of the wide spiral stairway. Gant thought of the garish depictions of Christ on the cross from his Catholic upbringing – super-realistic, emaciated, bleeding from the spikes piercing His hands and His feet and from the thorns pricking His head, wild eyes rolling Heavenward in anguish. It was the stuff of nightmares, and had made an impression on Gant. But none of that for Fielding. Fielding’s own brand of fanatical Christianity was crisp and clean – it had abstracted ol’ Christ right out of the picture.

Howe led Gant to the second floor and down a wide, cool hallway. Their feet echoed on polished stone. They passed through a doorway and here was what must have been Fielding’s office – fifty yards away, on the far end of what might have once been a ballroom. Gant could almost hear the strains of music and laughter from those long ago times – the good old days. As they walked across the open space, Gant could see the desk, positioned to the right of the open balcony. To the left of the balcony was a sofa, two chairs and a settee. Two men sat there, each sipping from a teacup. Gant recognized one of them, a man with white hair, as Roscoe Fielding, the owner of this house, and the master of all he surveyed. Gant didn’t know the other man. They rose as Gant and his minder approached.

‘Mr Gant,’ Fielding said. ‘Good of you to join us. Do you know Representative Harting?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t.’ Gant extended his hand to the Congressman, who took it in his soft paw. Harting was a beefy man of indeterminate age with a swoop of sandy brown hair. He wore a light brown sports jacket over a dress shirt open at the collar, and khaki shorts – the prep school look. It was enough to make Gant dislike him instantly. Even worse, Harting’s chubby cheeks and the spot of red on each one made him look like a spoiled twelve year-old who spent much of his time indoors playing video games.

‘Jim Harting, Tyler Gant,’ Fielding said. He put a proprietary arm around Harting’s big shoulders. ‘Jim is one of the good ones. He’s one of ours.’

‘Fighting the good fight,’ Gant said. ‘Don’t let me interrupt you.’

‘Roscoe and I were just finishing,’ Harting said, with a hint of a Southern twang. ‘He told me y’all had some important business to talk about, and I’m here for a couple more days, so… ’

‘He has plenty of time to grab my ear, should he need to,’ Fielding said.

Howe smoothly escorted the Honorable James Harting out. Gant took a seat across from Fielding. Fielding was thin to the point of pain. His bony wrists extended a few inches past the end of his white cotton sleeves. His eyes seemed sunken back into his face. The face itself looked like it was written on wrinkled parchment.

‘The tea is still hot,’ Fielding said, gesturing to the pot on the table. ‘Hot tea on a hot day, it makes you perspire. Cools you off some.’

‘No thanks.’

Fielding poured himself some, his hands shaking just a bit. ‘We see you already moved the money from the account we set up for you.’

Gant smiled. ‘One bank account is as good as another.’

‘Do you trust us?’

Gant shrugged, didn’t say anything.

Fielding waved the issue away. ‘It’s your money. Do whatever you want with it. Anyway, that’s not why I asked you here. I thought it was time for us to meet. You’ll find that I’m a man who isn’t much for chit-chat. I like to get down to business right away. And I like to speak plainly.’

Gant thought of the politician who had just left. He looked like a chit-chatter and double-talker, if ever there was one. ‘I’m all for speaking plainly,’ Gant said.

Fielding nodded. ‘Good. Then here it is. We’ve paid you a lot of money, and as I say, that’s OK with me. But I’m concerned. I find you much less forthcoming with information than I’d like. We’ve had no status reports from you. You’re hesitant to talk on the telephone or to submit anything in writing, and I understand that reluctance. But you also refuse to send any of your people here to make a report, and that I don’t understand. Our mutual friends told us to expect these things from you, so I’ve been patient, but my patience is wearing thin. I’m beginning to suspect I’ve been taken for a ride. I can’t tell you how much that upsets and disappoints me.’

Gant felt nothing as a result of Fielding’s little speech. He’d been through this type of thing before. Clients, at some point in any operation, especially one as uncertain as this, always needed to be reassured. They needed a hug, and they needed a grown-up to tell them everything was going to be all right. In fact, Fielding had lasted longer than some others before reaching that place.

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ Gant said. ‘I’d hardly come waltzing through all of your gunmen if I were, as you say, taking you for a ride.’

‘Agreed. I feel a little better already, just having you as my guest.’

‘So then, what would you like to know?’

‘Well, by now I was expecting to see… something. Some action. Since you’re here, would you like to update me on the project’s status?’

‘Why? Don’t you trust me?’ Gant said.

Fielding smiled the tiniest bit. He moved a few papers aside on the table, and came up with a manila folder. He opened it and looked at the one sheet of white unlined paper inside. ‘Tyler Gant. US Army 25th Infantry Division, Vietnam. Two tours of duty, 1969 – 1971. Philadelphia Police Department, 1972 – 2003. You’ve spent most of your life in service to your country and your community. That’s to be commended. You should be proud.’

‘I don’t make a fetish out of it,’ Gant said.

Fielding laughed. ‘They said you were a wiseass. I like that in a man, but only so far.’ His face became serious. ‘You know, I’m only five years older than you.’

‘I know.’

‘Well, how do you do it? How do you stay so young?’

‘Believe me, I’m nothing like I used to be,’ Gant said. “I feel the time passing.’

‘But still,’ Fielding said. ‘It’s remarkable.’

Gant shrugged. ‘I only drink the best whiskey. That helps. And I’ve been blessed with good genes.’ He didn’t mention the two days a week with a personal trainer, the five mile runs, and the yoga nearly every morning. He didn’t mention the fruit and vegetable juicing, and the four days of fasting each month. They probably had all that in a file, in any case. ‘My father turned eighty-nine this year. He just came back from his fall hunting trip. Took down a ten-point buck. Clean shot to the head.’

‘Amazing,’ Fielding said. ‘How’s he getting along in these dark times? Does he find it hard?’

‘He’s a tough old bird. Says he’s seen it worse. He was alive during the Great Depression. That was, of course, worse than now.’

‘I’ll grant that’s probably true,’ Fielding said. He paused, seemingly lost in thought for a moment. ‘Mr Gant, I’m concerned. That’s all I’m saying. You come highly recommended. I’m told you’re among the best at what you do, but I feel like you’ve left me in the dark here.’

‘Do you really want to be in the light? In matter such as these, highly sensitive matters, I operate under the assumption that the less the client knows, the better for the client. I think you should take a moment before you answer. Do you really want to know what’s happening?’

Fielding didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. I want to know.’

Gant took a deep breath, then nodded. ‘We are very close. There’s a boat anchored off the East Coast of the United States, exactly where doesn’t matter at this moment. A small laboratory has been built aboard the boat. Not state of the art, but quite good under the circumstances. It has everything necessary. A person I trust, and who has experience in these matters, built the lab based on very specific guidelines. Some people I do business with have acquired a quantity of a certain substance, an organism, and they will deliver it to the boat when I give them the go ahead. A scientist is en route to the boat. He was unavoidably detained very recently, so the work is a little behind schedule, but I can tell you that soon he will be in place. Once he is, the work will proceed very quickly. After that, your men can meet us at the boat, and we’ll make the transfer.’

Fielding nodded. ‘You’ll accompany my men back here on the plane, of course. To make sure the operation ends smoothly?’

‘Of course. I’ll probably bring at least one of my men with me as well.’

‘The scientist,’ Fielding said. ‘He’s a good man?’

Gant chose not to answer the question. ‘I’ve worked with him before, and our previous work has been a success. What we accomplished in the past is likely what brought my name to your attention.’

He paused, then looked deeply into Fielding’s eyes. ‘The question now becomes, are you sure you want to go through with this?’

Gant saw the look come into Fielding’s eyes. He had seen it many times before, in many other sets of eyes. It was a hunger, like a vampire thirsty for blood.

‘Mr Gant, this house has been my primary residence for the past thirty years. I’m an American, but this island is my home. I buried my wife here. I raised two children here. I’ve run my businesses from here. Many good friends of mine have been driven away, forced off the island, by the tyranny of the mob. Innocent people have had their homes taken, have been murdered, and far worse.’ Fielding’s thin, weak hand clenched into a fist. ‘ Worse than murdered, do I need to explain the meaning of that to you? And some of the men doing these things were policemen not even a year ago. But this isn’t Rhodesia, or Zimbabwe, or whatever you want to call it. A few of us are still here, and we’re not going anywhere. We will not be terrorized and we will not be driven out. I am totally committed to the course of action I’ve asked you to take.’

‘And the media reaction?’ Gant said. ‘What will you do when CNN and the BBC are broadcasting footage of corpses being buried by bulldozers? What will you do when the Marines come ashore, with investigators from the Centers for Disease Control? What will you do afterward? How will you stay here? This is going to be a land of the dead.’

Fielding waved his hand, as he would wave away a mosquito. ‘Please don’t underestimate my ability to influence media coverage, or to influence the US government response. Let’s just say that members of Congress are among the least powerful of my friends. Anyway, this is a tiny island, barely worth mentioning. I’m sure you read the newspapers – people are dying everywhere. If a few thousand people here suddenly succumb to an infectious disease…’

He shrugged and paused for several seconds. Then he nodded. ‘And what am I going to do in this land of the dead, as you describe it? For one thing, I’m going to stay and see my enemies defeated. Then, after an appropriate length of time has passed, I’ll repopulate the island with immigrant workers who can better appreciate the blessings available here. To put it another way, I am completely prepared for the consequences of the operation.’

When he finished, a silence drew out between them.

‘Have I answered your concerns, Mr Gant?’

‘I guess you have. And I assume that means your operatives are ready?’

‘They’ve practiced nighttime attacks on the water towers half a dozen times now, without being detected.’

‘And you’ve taken the precautions I suggested? You have bottled water and food stockpiled? Your people are ready to defend this perimeter?’

‘I do, and they are.’

‘I want to tell you something. It’s a hell of a thing, what’s going to happen. I hope you’ll feel as gung ho about it afterward as you do now. Personally, I think you probably won’t.’

‘I’m surprised to hear you say that, Mr Gant. You sound like a man suffering from regrets. Will you lose sleep over this project? Have you lost sleep over similar projects in the past? If so, then I’m afraid I have the wrong intelligence sheet here.’

Gant stared into Fielding’s deep black eyes. ‘I’ve been around death a long time, Mr Fielding. It doesn’t bother me. In fact, it’s been my constant companion. If I’m away from it for any length of time, I start to feel lonely.’

Fielding smiled. ‘That’s good. That’s very, very good to hear.’

Gordo hummed a happy tune.

An hour had passed since they missed Foerster, and he and Jonah were in Kelly’s Bar, a dark and moody watering hole with two shamrocks in bright green neon adorning the front windows. The place sat along a grim and desolate strip of road, across from a cemetery. The nearest open shop was halfway up the street, a place that installed alarm systems. Also, there was a scrap metal dealer next door, a sign announcing ‘We Buy and Sell’ hovering above a barbed wire fence, but Gordo had never seen anybody go in or out of there. Kelly’s itself was long and narrow inside, like a tunnel, and always smelled of beer and piss. On the plus side, they had their own diesel-powered generator under an awning behind the building, and they weren’t reluctant to use it. As a result, the jukebox in the far corner and the color TV bolted to the wall over the bar always worked.

Gordo had the beers in hand, pints in frosted glasses. Despite the day’s fiasco, he felt pretty good. It was a temporary setback. Before leaving the scene today, Gordo had gone upstairs and snatched some unopened mail he found laying around the apartment. There was good stuff in that pile of envelopes, he knew there was.

When Gordo arrived at the table, Jonah was slouched on his stool, ignoring Foerster’s mail. Instead, he held a wet cloth napkin packed with ice against his forehead. He said he had gotten hit with a bottle, and he had an evil lump to prove it. The lump had cracked open and was oozing a sort of liquidy pus. Maybe there was some glass in there, Gordo didn’t know and didn’t care. He had bigger things to think about. For one, Jonah had shown him something today. That leap across the fire escapes, that took the door prize for guts. That was probably why Gordo felt so good, just knowing he had a partner with the stones to do that.

For a moment he saw the Jonah others saw. Light-skinned black man, son of a black mother and a white father. He had softer features than a lot of black guys – a leaner nose, thinner lips. Jonah was a solid, handsome dude, like an actor or maybe a pro baseball player out and about in street clothes.

It was rare for Gordo to look at him this way. Most of the time, Gordo still thought of his partner as he was when they first met and became friends in junior high school – a skinny kid with a crazy head of curly hair and basketball shorts hanging down past his knees. They had known each other a long time now – just about twenty years.

Gordo placed the beers on the table and slid onto his stool.

‘You want some acetaminophen?’ he said. ‘I got some out in the car. Generic store brand, but it works real good.’

Jonah shook his head. ‘The stuff is poison, man. It kills the liver.’

Gordo saw right away that Jonah was in a mood. Well, then it was up to Gordo to lighten the place up a little. ‘Listen, it was poor planning,’ he told Jonah. ‘The fucking guy out-thunk me, that’s all.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Jonah said.

‘We learned something today, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Planning is the key, all right? We just gotta look at all the angles. Cover all possible exits, no matter how crazy they seem.’

Jonah grimaced in response and stared down at the table. ‘That’s a long way to go to learn something.’

Gordo sipped his beer.

He was thirty-two years old, stood a shade under six feet tall, and weighed almost two hundred and fifty pounds. He thought he carried it pretty well, more like a strong, heavy thickness than fat. His massive belly was as hard as an iron skillet. His legs were like the trunks of California redwoods. His arms were like the big bass pipes on a giant church organ. And the nickname? He loved it. El Gordo. It reminded him of a superhero, or maybe a monster from the old Jap Godzilla movies. He had loved the girl down in Santo Domingo who thought it up, too. She was dark black with dyed-blonde hair and a killer body. Chocolata, she called herself, though God knew her real name was probably something a little more conventional like Rosa, or Maria. In any case, Gordo did her good, in ten different ways and in the morning he gave her an extra tip for the nickname idea.

He had been around.

He sold cocaine for a while when he was coming up. He had a little route that took him all over the metro area three days a week. It turned him off pretty quick. He grew tired of listening to screaming babies in the back bedrooms of tiny houses while Mom and Dad had a taste in the kitchen before buying. How often had he seen that? Once or twice, but it seemed like every week. He also didn’t like that paranoid, up-all-night feeling after too many lines, hours of time to think about the cops knocking down the door and coming through the walls one day soon. He got out before that could happen.

Later, he spent some time repossessing cars. It was back when the collapse started happening, the first phase. People had bought all kinds of junk on credit, and now they were out of money. Gas prices going through the roof, house values tanking, people losing jobs left and right – suddenly, paying the note on that Hummer or that Land Rover didn’t seem so smart anymore. Those were good times and Gordo made good money. It seemed like he could always make money, up or down, it didn’t matter.

But the banks themselves started going belly up. There was a glut of consumer shit out there – cars, boats, jet skis – and nobody was paying on any of it, but the companies didn’t want it back anymore, either. It cost more to collect the stuff than the money they could get reselling it or unloading it at auction. Then the gasoline dried up, and no middle-class worker bee would take a powerboat or a jet ski if you tried to give them one. You might as well try to give them bubonic plague. It was a good lesson to learn – toys that had once cost ten thousand, twenty thousand, even thirty thousand dollars or more could become worth zero, or less than zero, practically overnight.

When that happened, Gordo drifted for a while. The occasional repo popped up from time to time, but it wasn’t enough. During a brief period, maybe six months, he lost his confidence a little bit. He began to think that maybe he was going to go down with ship, that he wasn’t going to be able to turn this thing around.

Then he stumbled on an idea while watching television one night. They did a short piece on some fluff news show about guys who went around serving lawsuit papers and summonses to people who didn’t want to be served said papers. The show said the guys worked for themselves, on their own, taking jobs from the courts and from law firms that operated around the court buildings. It could be a rough and tumble type job, according to the announcer, good for snoops who weren’t afraid when people got out of line. The news piece was over in about five minutes. Afterward, Gordo sat on his couch and drank a beer, staring at whatever came on the television next. But what he was looking at was an image in his mind’s eye, an image of the Bronx County Courthouse.

For as long as he could remember, Gordo had known about the Courthouse. It was that huge off-white ten-story Art Deco monster looming in the distance beyond the white bunting and the bleachers at the old Yankee Stadium. It sat high above the elevated subway line and all the shops and fast food restaurants wedged together along the wide boulevard of 161st Street. It ate up a whole city block. It always caught his eye, and he would gaze at it between innings, but he never imagined himself going up the hill and walking inside. Then one day he found himself there, as if he had floated there in a dream. He passed through the security checkpoint without incident. He asked some faceless person for directions, waded through the crowds, and stood in line at a window. He took a course, complete with a workbook and pencils and a buttoned-down instructor who told the twenty people gathered in the dusty classroom how it was all going to go down. Two weeks later Gordo was serving paper.

He liked it and was good at it. He could find people, even the people who didn’t want to be found – especially those people. And once he found them, there was no mystery to serving them. His first test came early on.

One day, he had to serve a mechanic who was delinquent in his child support payments. It was a typical set-up. As the economy went from bad to worse, a lot of women were chasing down a lot of deadbeat dads who claimed they had no money. And an auto mechanic would be a good candidate for deadbeat dadhood – cars were dropping off the road like houseflies had once dropped in the first chill of October.

It was 6:30 in the evening, and Gordo tracked his prey to a nudie bar a block away from the auto body shop. The bar had a steeple in front as though it were once a church. The guy Gordo wanted was in there drinking dinner with two of his buddies, watching some blonde-haired Bavarian sow in a lime green thong gyrate to loud disco music back behind the bar. She liked the night life, she liked to boogie. Her huge pink nipples hung down almost to her waist. The thong carved into her love handles. The bartender, a creaky old Slav, looked so bored he was about to expire from the tedium.

Gordo had a copy of the mechanic’s photo from a driver’s license, so he knew what the guy looked like. He walked up to the three of them at their table and sat down. The guy he needed to serve was the one in the middle, still wearing his grimy and oil-caked work coveralls. He had slicked-back hair, a pock-marked face, and oversized hands. His two friends were a small round Mexican in a baseball cap and a skinny, dark West Indian. Gordo envied them their openness – here in the Bronx, the various cultures mostly steered clear of one another.

The three men eyed Gordo.

‘Eddie?’ Gordo said. ‘Eddie Valence?’ Gordo thought that somewhere in the past the family had Americanized its name from Valenzuela.

‘Who wants to know?’

Gordo gave them all an apologetic grin. ‘Hey, I hate to bother you man, but I got a problem with my car outside. I think it’s the carburetor. A guy told me to look in here for you, said you might be willing to make some extra money. It’ll probably take somebody like you five minutes to fix it. Me, I don’t know anything about cars.’

He paused, Valence looking at him, the other men staring past him now, eyes glued to the girl on stage. At the end of a long day, and after a few drinks, even a specimen like that could get a man going. Gordo knew how they felt. He was the same way.

Valence nodded. ‘It’s me. I’ll look at it in a minute.’

‘Tell you what,’ Gordo said, taking the papers from the pocket inside his jacket and placing them on the table. ‘Before you look at the car, why don’t you go in and talk to the judge about all those child support payments you missed?’

All three men were gaping at him again.

‘What I’m saying is you’ve been served.’

Valence took it hard. Without a word, he stood and grabbed Gordo by the shirt. The West Indian also stood. A moment later, both men were splayed out under the table, with the Mexican standing ten feet away, wanting no part of the action. It happened so fast that Gordo had no memory of putting them down there, just a blur of throwing fists and knocking beers over. His hands were slimy from Valence’s hair gel.

Gordo looked at the Mexican, but the Mexican shook his head. Gordo looked at the girl, who had paused in her dance routine. She made no sign, just stared at him. The ancient Slavic bartender held a sawed-off pool cue, but made no move forward with it. Just before he left, Gordo folded the papers and placed them in the breast pocket of Valence’s coveralls.

That sort of thing got around, and Gordo started to gain a reputation. Somebody who’s gone to ground, with no forwarding address? Give it to Gordon Lamb. A hard-ass who popped the last process guy in the mouth? Lamb will take it.

Then, eighteen months ago, while hanging around the halls of justice one morning, he got to talking to a bail bondsman, a short guy named Leo who always wore a bowtie and pants held up by suspenders. Leo’s thing was that the suspenders and bowtie always had themes – whales against a deep blue sea one day, the red hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union the next day, green hundred dollar bills the next. Leo’s bald head glistened in the overhead fluorescents – if Gordo didn’t know better, he’d guess that the little man polished it like a bowling ball. Leo was also hanging around that morning.

‘If you’re so good at finding people,’ Leo said idly, ‘then why don’t you do the bounty hunter thing? Catch a couple of these assholes that’ve skipped out on me? I got criminals disappearing left and right. How am I supposed to make a living when nobody shows up for trial anymore? You want money, that’s where you can make some real money. Bring these fucking jerks back.’

‘Tell me more,’ Gordo said.

Inside Kelly’s Bar, ten minutes had gone by since Gordo brought over the beers, and Jonah’s headache had not improved at all. The sound system pounded out some bad rock tune. It was just after six o’clock, and almost nobody was in there. Three long hairs, skinny guys in black T-shirts and dirty jeans, crouched over in the corner getting loaded and shoveling dollars into the juke.

Jonah’s head thumped along to the music. A few moments ago, he had gone in the bathroom and seen the angry red lump growing on his forehead. It stung where the skin was broken and it throbbed with every beat of his pulse. He didn’t want to touch it.

Now he sat at their table and sulked while Gordo pored through a pile of mail he found in Foerster’s apartment.

‘That fucking guy,’ Jonah said. ‘All these skips are crazy, man.’

Gordo seemed fixated on the letter he was reading. There were so many envelopes, it seemed that Foerster hadn’t opened any of his mail in a month. ‘You know,’ Gordo said, ‘this guy tells his landlord his name is Mark Foster, then goes ahead and tells half the world his real name. All his bills at that address came to Davis Foerster, not that he paid any of them. Isn’t that dumb?’

Jonah said nothing.

Gordo peeled his eyes from the paper and peered at Jonah for a moment. ‘Sure you didn’t get any glass on your brain?’

‘Fuck you,’ Jonah said.

Gordo frowned. ‘Relax. We missed one. Granted, it was the big fish, but that’s the first one we missed in a month. And maybe we’ll pick up his scent again. What more do you want?’

Jonah shook his head. ‘I want some more money. How about that?’

Gordo smiled. ‘The money’s coming, brother. You just gotta stick with it a little while longer. We catch this guy and then we’re talking about real money, right?’ He picked up his beer glass and took a long sip. ‘Listen, you need to think like me. I’m in the same boat as you. I’m just about flat busted. But I don’t worry about it. As long as I’m still breathing, I’m cool, because I know something big is just around the next corner. Every dollar I get, I put it back into this business. I’m building for the future. See?’

‘I got you,’ Jonah said. ‘Look at the money like it’s no big deal.’

‘That’s right. If everybody’s going broke, then the fact that you’re going broke is no problem.’

There was some truth to that. Jonah wasn’t the only one going under. The modern world – the world Jonah had grown up in – hadn’t exactly rolled over and died. But it was going away and faster than anyone could have imagined. It was already a disintegrating remnant, a pale shadow of its former self. Economies had ground to a halt. Millions were out of work. Governments fell apart overnight. In the Third World, there was mass starvation and disease. Earlier this year, for the first time, there were food shortages in the United States. Food shortages in the land of fat people? It was hard to accept.

Jonah remembered, as a child, being comforted by the fact that the grown-ups were in charge. Now, as a grown-up, he realized no one was in charge. In this new world, you had to make your own way and figure it out for yourself. Nobody was going to do the figuring for you.

Gordo was wrong. It was a problem. It was a big fucking problem. The year was three quarters over and Jonah had pulled down less than half his old salary. It wouldn’t have turned out so bad, except he had lived a high-flying lifestyle in years past, and he still had the bills to prove it. Gordo might be busted or he might not, but one look at the man would tell you that he’d never spent money the way Jonah had.

Less than three years ago, Jonah had been driving a sleek white Jaguar XJ8 with a luxurious interior. He thought of that car as a high-water mark of sorts. At some point he had stopped making payments on it and one morning it just wasn’t there anymore. Goodbye to the leather bucket seats and goodbye to the lamb’s wool foot rugs. Goodbye to the walnut trim with the Peruvian boxwood inlays, and goodbye to the charging silver jungle cat on the hood. Jonah had heard that all the jaguars in the wild were dead – the only place they still existed was in the zoo and as hood ornaments on expensive cars. When he heard that, it made him kind of sad to keep driving it. So when the repo men took his fancy ride, Jonah didn’t even bother to call anybody. It didn’t matter anyway. He knew what they would say.

The weird thing about it was that every now and then, Jonah would get the suspicion that Gordo himself had taken it. And why not? Gordo was a repo man – even now, he wasn’t above a repo job if one came in. Gordo knew where the car was, and he knew how far behind Jonah was on the payments. He knew Jonah’s personal habits and schedule. It wouldn’t take much for Gordo to put out a feeler and see if the car was slated for repossession – probably no more than a few phone calls.

Jonah brought up the issue over drinks one night.

‘What?’ Gordo said. ‘Are you crazy? Why would I repo your car?’

Jonah shrugged. ‘Money. Why else?’

‘Man, you are crazy. You’ve obviously lost your marbles. Listen, I’m not even going to dignify this by talking about it.’

Now Jonah owned a brown 1992 Toyota Corolla, which he rarely even drove. Jonah was just not the type of man who spent his days scrounging for gasoline. In any case, the car was a joke. The rear bumper was missing, although the black rubber covering of the bumper was still there. To the naked eye it seemed as if there was still a bumper, but there was no substance to it. If he ever got rear-ended, the other driver would be sitting in the front seat with him.

The cable TV was gone, and had been for months – no more watching the big booties shake it on BET, no more watching the white girls spank each other on the Playboy channel. He was months behind on the telephone bill, and every now and then the phone company sent him a threatening letter. When the letter came, and he knew the letter by the red envelope it came in, he would open it and send them a check for half of what he owed. Otherwise he didn’t open their letters. Losing the phone wasn’t on his mind. What needed to go was the apartment itself – it was the crib of a man who could blow money on Hudson River views. He was no longer that man, but he had renewed when the lease expired, more out of a misplaced sense of optimism than anything else.

He’d had a bad couple of years. Every time he thought he’d hit bottom, that things couldn’t get much worse, life dropped him another notch. A few weeks ago, he would have thought this had to be it – flat broke, deep in debt, working with Gordo, wrestling crazies back into police custody for chump change – that had to be the bottom. But today was a new bottom. He had risked his life for nothing, no reason at all. Tomorrow he’d probably get killed for the same reason.

If he really wanted, he could remember the exact moment when things in his life first started going dark. It was the day Melinda met Elaine.

Melinda kept her pubic hair shaved clean.

Whenever Jonah thought of her, that bald mons was the first thing that leaped to mind. She was a nice little white girl and Jonah often worried that he didn’t deserve her. She worked that body until it was lean and tight and hard. She cut her brown hair in a short bob. She wore Donna Karan for nights out, with white gold from Fortunoff. For casual times, she picked the smallest clothes she could find at Eileen Fisher. Beneath everything, she wore only Victoria’s Secret. When she slept she wore nothing.

She and Jonah looked good together, whether sitting at a table in Carmine’s after taking in a Wednesday evening Broadway show, or cruising home in the Jag with the sunroof open, or wrestling nude on silk sheets later that night. She was fair and small and smelled like money, and he was brown, but not too brown. No, too brown wouldn’t look right, but the kind of brown that came from his mother’s honest blackness and his old man’s rumpled, cigar-chomping whiteness, that was a good soft brown. Jonah thought Melinda liked them together, the look of it. She liked his money, although she had her own, more than he would ever have. She liked that he was strong. Above all, she liked his skin against hers. Yes. She had a taste for brown. It made for three years of damn fine rutting.

But Jonah had a problem. He was not a one-woman man.

It was the Sunday morning just after Thanksgiving. It was rainy and overcast, and they had wasted the weekend and each other in bed. By Jonah’s count, they had fornicated nineteen times since a good-morning romp on the kitchen table the day before.

He lay sprawled on his back in the bed, head resting on the pillows, watching himself in the mirror embedded in the ceiling, and listening to the sound of Melinda taking a shower in his bathroom. After a moment, the water stopped and he waited for her to come out. He felt sexy and pretty damn good about himself. The soreness, the physical emptiness was like a tingling throughout his body. Just seeing his body made him feel pretty good, too. It always did. Other men bought magazines and lotions and uppers and downers because they wanted a body like his. He worked out like they did, but not as hard and not as long. The body was just there for him, better than most of them would ever have. Washboard abdominals without the infomercial gimmicks. Wide round shoulders and a broad chest. And down below the waist… If he was half-black, it was the half that mattered. Little Melinda was fascinated by his size, obsessed with it, maybe addicted to it.

He ran a hand along his chest, played with his nipple ring, and rested his hand on his stomach. He didn’t know why he got that ring. He just did it on impulse one day, walking past all the freak shops on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. It was a small gold hoop like a pirate would wear in his ear.

Melinda came out of the bathroom holding something.

He knew she saw all of him from where she stood. She was already dressed. Dark tights clung to her legs. She wore a blue boiled wool jacket, what he thought of as her fuzzy coat, against the chill of late fall she would face outside.

He figured if he played the next few minutes right, he could get something moving inside her body. If she watched him a few seconds too long, she would take all those clothes off again and they’d go for it one more time before she left for the day. Make it an even twenty.

‘What are these?’ she said.

He caught a note of alarm in her voice. It made him look at what she was holding. The first thing he noticed was a pair of black panties, too large for Melinda. His heart did a lazy belly flop as he responded.

‘Looks like underwear.’

‘I found them in the bathroom drawer,’ she said. Now her voice began to shake and her chin began to tremble. She held the label in the waistband face out so he could get a good long look. ‘They’re La Perla.’

‘OK.’ His mind went dumb, searching for anything, any thought.

She shook her head so hard that her hair bounced back and forth. It returned to almost the same position from which it started. ‘Wrong. Not OK. They weren’t there the last time I went in that drawer. Neither were these.’

She offered her other hand for his inspection. That hand held big trouble. Jonah recognized the items, a tube of KY Jelly and a clear plastic applicator which resembled a toy syringe. They came as a kit and were designed for women who had a hard time maintaining lubrication during sex play, a problem Melinda just didn’t have.

‘Where did these things come from, Jonah?’

There was nowhere to hide. He saw this and he didn’t run from it.

In his mind’s eye, as though it were showing on a giant high-definition liquid-crystal television, Jonah watched his relationship with Melinda collapse and crash apart. It was an awesome thing to behold, like a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island calving away from Antarctica and falling into the ocean.

‘They belong to a woman named Elaine,’ he said. ‘She’s my boss at work.’

Melinda nodded.

She left without another word, but that wasn’t the last he saw of her.

‘I make myself sick,’ she said two weeks later.

She pulled on a thick wool sweater as she readied herself to leave. She checked her look in the full-length mirror. She was satisfied with what she saw. She turned to Jonah. As usual, he lay on the bed watching her dress.

Tonight had been a grudge match.

‘You know that? I make myself sick by coming here again. Already I feel horrible about what I just did. I don’t know what I ever saw in you. I don’t know what you even see in you. On the surface, you seem so arrogant, so self-centered. But what you really are is weak and pathetic.’

‘I’m weak,’ he said. ‘In what way?’

She laughed at him then. ‘In what way aren’t you weak? You’re like a weak little white boy, an accountant maybe, in a nice body. Oh yeah, you have a nice body, not the best, believe me, but nice. But inside, you’re weak and ugly, and when I think of you touching me tonight, it makes me sick.’

‘Come on, Melinda,’ he said. ‘Be honest. It was good, wasn’t it?’

She was dressed, had tousled her hair some, and was ready to go. ‘I need a man, Jonah. I need a real man, not some Oreo cookie, not some pretty boy who never passed a mirror he didn’t like, not some coward.’

She stood by the door, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she went on without waiting. ‘You’re hiding, Jonah. Big ladies man. Flashes his money around. Smiles his pretty smile. Talks all that sincere bullshit. Gets whatever piece of ass he wants. Right?’

‘Hey. You said it, not me.’

‘But without all that, you’re nothing. I can’t believe I didn’t see through you sooner. You always need a new one, right? A new little piece? Because without it, you’re nothing and you know it. You’re not a man, and you think maybe if you can fuck every woman in sight, that’ll make you seem like a man. You’re so weak. You keep acting this way, you’ll be their slave forever.’

He laughed. ‘Whose slave?’

‘The people who own you.’

‘Nobody owns me.’

She pointed at him. ‘Wrong! They all own you. The job owns you. Your little boss lady owns you. She’s using you, Jonah. You might think you get something out of it, but you don’t. She uses you. And you let her do it. You’re like the house slave. They dress you up nice, and they teach you to talk nice, but you’re still a slave.’

She had something more to say, he was sure, and he couldn’t think of anything. She had him, calling him a slave. It caught him off guard. It hurt, that word.

‘Fuck you,’ he said.

She laughed, not a sound of mirth but a burst of stale air from a deflated tire. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s the best you can do.’

With that, she went out.

He lay still for several minutes after she was gone, his mind dark and quiet. Then he got up, put his robe on, and went about making something to eat in the kitchen. He picked up the remote control off the counter, leaned back into the living room and started a compact disc going in the stereo.

He figured he would just put Melinda out of his mind, like he had all the others. But in the days that followed, Melinda stuck with him, more than he would care to admit. She was always simmering on a back burner of his mind, and too late he realized he had ruined a good thing. What’s more, the things she said stayed with him. He began to see how some of it made a certain amount of sense.

Jonah knew what people thought of him. He wore a pinstripe three-piece suit, Armani; a gold Seiko chronograph, stylish because it was shockproof – he also could wear it mountain biking if he wanted; silk tie, also Armani; alligator shoes; a smooth hundred dollar fade that enhanced what one art director had called his ‘delicately-shaped’ skull. He was a young executive now, working big advertising accounts. Two belated years of night school at the Westchester Business Institute got him in as a glorified secretary, but he moved up fast. He didn’t handle the accounts, no, he was too brown for that, but he was in the meetings, eating the lunches, bouncing the ideas back and forth, selling the people yet another light bulb that lasted even longer. The honchos liked having him there, and not because he ever hit the home run. They liked him there because they needed a lapdog. They paid him well. In exchange, he smiled and looked good and smelled good and didn’t cause trouble. He did what they wanted.

Sometimes what they wanted was sex.

Elaine was not the first well-kept middle-aged lady executive to bed Jonah, but she was the most giving. Even before Melinda found him out, Elaine’s generosity had begun to make the whole thing look like a job, one that paid in sushi and nights out and new clothes.

Now, with Melinda gone, Jonah was free to spend more time with Elaine. Elaine must have sensed the change, because right away she took him for a weekend on the East End of Long Island. They stayed in a rental cottage hidden back in the scrub pine and sea grass along Old Montauk Highway, with Dom Perignon on ice, a Duraflame burning in the fireplace, and the surf crashing outside and just down the hill from the sliding glass doors.

When any bill came, he reached for his wallet.

‘Oh please,’ Elaine would say. ‘Put it away. I enjoy paying for you.’

Later, after a nightcap, his bill would come. And he always paid in full. Elaine was divorced, and she made love in absolute darkness.

‘Jonah,’ she said as she drifted off to sleep on his chest. ‘Don’t let me fall in love with you.’ As if such a thing could happen. For him, maybe it could. He often fell in love. Women were exotic and wonderful creatures to him, no matter what Melinda said. He felt it for them down deep. It might last for just a little while, but it was there, like the best music. When the music was right, when it was some smoky Miles, or some funky driving hip hop, he caught the line and felt it all over his body.

Love was like that.

But for Elaine, love was improbable at best. She had scraped and crawled and scratched people’s eyes out to get her position, and it had cost her half a lifetime to get there. The wars had taken their toll. Even in her most human moments, even in passion, she was like a granite cliff face warmed by the sun. The heat was there, but then so was the stone.

Jonah grew weaker and less alive the more time he spent with her.

Show up, smile at the dumb jokes, fuck the expensive lady. He knew why he was moving up. He was the thinker who never had a decent idea. But behind the scenes, people pulled strings – Elaine was the chief string-puller right now.

Bending had become routine for him. He came in one morning and some comic genius had cut a picture of Step’n Fetchit out of a book and taped it to his computer. All he did, he pulled the picture down and threw it in the trash.

They were laughing at him.

Meanwhile, shopping had become his consolation. He bought so much expensive shit his apartment looked like the inside of Home amp; Garden magazine. In fact, he subscribed to Home amp; Garden and got his ideas from there.

He lived through his things: the car; some pricey Crate amp; Barrel knick-knacks gathering dust on his shelves; a couple of one-of-a-kind ironwood Nubian sculptures, one of a man and woman making love, the other of an old man’s balding head, both of which were good at gathering dust; the cleaning lady from Romania who came in once a week to wipe the dust off everything; his hanging ferns and aloe plants, which the Romanian gave him a hard time for neglecting; a Trek mountain bike (which he sometimes rode on the streets near his apartment); his two year old Rossignol skis (he had gone skiing once since buying them); his bedroom set, his living room set, his home entertainment center; that river view, don’t forget that, put that first on the list; his Ray Bans; his jacket from the Leather Factory…

He couldn’t afford any of it. The pay was good, but not that good. He carried nearly forty grand in balances on four credit cards. Some days it made him want to cry. But the fun didn’t stop there. As the economy went down the tubes, the firm started letting people go. The citizenry stopped buying things, the companies that sold things started going under, and there came a steep decline in the need to advertise things – especially in the need to have a whole creative group sitting around, throwing out ideas about how to advertise things. Jonah sensed that Elaine protected him as long as she could, but there came a day when even she couldn’t do anything for him.

He remembered the day they pinked him, going on two years ago. He was in her office that day. He could tell from her tone that he was dismissed in every way. ‘Baby doll,’ she said. ‘You’re going to do great things one day. I know that about you. This downturn isn’t going to last forever, and when it ends, even before then, I’m sure you’ll be doing better than ever before.’

Half an hour later he was out on the bright and cold evening streets of the city, the people a faceless swirl around him. Christmas coming – the shop windows were all dressed up for the holidays. Tourists ran around, all bundled up and carrying packages. Downtown, the spire on the Empire State Building shone green and red.

He went down into the subway and made the long ride up through the Bronx. He stood at the head of the first car, looking out the front window at the tracks ahead. It was a place he had stood many times as a child. The mystery of it, the vastness of the dark underground empire, never lost its hold on him. He stared and stared as the train roared through tunnels, lights zooming by on each side. The train changed tracks, never hesitating, as workmen with lanterns stood to the side in the gloom. The train passed through stations that were out of service, darkened corners, graffiti-stained walls, empty platforms long disused. Sometimes there’d be no lights at all out there, and he’d catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the black window. He stared back into his own eyes.

Who was he? Where had he gone?

Now, Jonah poked his head up and was almost surprised to find himself still in Kelly’s Bar. He glanced around. The long hairs had gone. The juke box was silent, and the only sounds came from the television and a few people sitting along the bar and talking in low voices. Jonah’s head had settled down to an almost pleasant thumping.

Three pints of beer hadn’t hurt him any.

Thump.

Thump.

The pain beat slow and gentle, like the bass signature on a sad love song. He was already thinking better about the day’s fiasco. At least one good thing had come out of it. He had sure flown across that alley. There were many days when he felt he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, but man, what a feeling today. He envied the birds. He was beginning to think he should take up hang-gliding.

Gordo nudged him. The big man sat with three piles of Foerster’s open mail before him, one pile for possible leads, one for garbage, and one for mail he hadn’t opened yet. That third pile had dwindled away to almost nothing.

‘I found him,’ Gordo said, waving the piece of paper in his hand. ‘He’s out on Staten Island. He’s at his mother’s house.’