The Patriots' Club

24

Bolden threw open the door to Jenny’s classroom without knocking. He stepped inside and met a sea of gaping faces.

“Yes? May I help you?” asked the teacher, a slight Chinese woman.

“Jenny.” Bolden looked around the room. “This is Jenny Dance’s class. Where is she?”

“You are?”

“He’s Thomas,” volunteered one of the students. “He’s her squeeze.”

“Her main man,” came another voice, to a crescendo of chuckles and wisecracks.

“Yo, Tommy, you lookin’ all a mess,” shouted someone else.

Bolden didn’t acknowledge any of them. “I’m Tom Bolden,” he said, stepping inside the classroom. “I need to speak with her. It’s important.”

The teacher took in Bolden’s clothes and motioned for him to join her in the corridor. She shut the door behind them. “Jenny’s not here,” she said, visibly agitated.

“Didn’t she come to work?”

“Yes, she did. But she left the class twenty minutes ago and she hasn’t come back since.”

“She didn’t tell you she was leaving?”

“She didn’t tell anyone. The students said a man came to the door asking for her. She told them to wait quietly while she spoke with him. No one said anything when she didn’t come back in. These kids”-the slight woman shrugged-“well, they’re not exactly scholars. Finally, one of them came and got me.”

“Did they see who it was?”

“Just that he was white. A few thought he was a policeman. Is there anything we should know about? Is something wrong?”

Bolden began to walk back down the hall.

“Is there anything wrong?” the teacher called again.

“Mr. Guilfoyle, I have something that might interest you,” said a nasal, South Asian voice.

Guilfoyle rose from his chair and walked down the stairs to the work area. It was Singh, a young Indian they’d picked up from Bell Labs. “Yes, Mr. Singh?”

“I was doing a cross-check on Bolden’s insurance records to see if he might have visited a pharmacy in the area regularly. I drew a blank, then I checked this Dance woman’s records.” Singh leaned closer to his monitor, his eyes narrowed. “Her medical insurance records indicate that she’s recently had a prescription filled at a pharmacy on Union Square once a month. On Wednesdays, around twelve o’clock. Like today.”

“What’s the prescription for?” asked Guilfoyle.

“Antivert.”

“Never heard of it. Any idea what it’s for?”

“Why yes,” said Singh, swiveling his chair so he faced Guilfoyle. “The active drug is meclizine. It combats nausea. As a matter of fact, my wife used it, too. It’s for morning sickness.”

“Thank you, Mr. Singh.” Guilfoyle crossed the room and put a hand on Hoover’s shoulder. “Bring up the pharmacy, would you?”

A light appeared on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Union Square West.

“Get me the phone number of all restaurants within a four-block radius of that pharmacy. Then, I want you to cross-check them against Bolden’s phone records. Cell, private, and business.”

Hoover pursed his lips and looked over his shoulder at Guilfoyle. “This will take a few minutes.”

“I can wait.”

At Canal Street, Bolden purchased a pint bottle of orange juice from a corner vendor and guzzled it in ten seconds. Tossing the container into a garbage can, he caught sight of something dark and mottled on his sleeve. He looked closer, touching it with his fingers. It was blood. Sol Weiss’s blood. He dropped his hand as if he’d been shocked. He looked down the street as memories of another day flooded his mind. There was blood on his sleeve that day, too.

“Come to Jesus. Come to Jesus.”

Chanting.

Bolden heard it building in his ears, the rhythmic chant of the twenty boys who had encircled him in the basement of Caxton Hall at the Illinois State Home for Boys. The room was large and low-ceilinged, dimly lit, smelling of piss and sweat. It was the room they called the Dungeon, and at some point, the name had simply been shifted to the school.

“Come to Jesus.”

“Are you with me, Bolden?” demanded Coyle, a determined, muscular kid of eighteen who’d lived at the Dungeon for six years. They called him the Reverend.

It was midnight. They had come for him in the dormitory, wrapping a pillowcase around his head, binding his hands and dragging him downstairs to the basement.

“No,” said Bolden. “I’m not.”

Coyle smiled sourly. “Have it your way.”

He came at Bolden, knife held down low, blade turned up, circling him slowly. The vain, sure smile had faded from his sallow face. His eyes were steady. Black marbles, dead as a shark’s.

Bolden threw his hands in front of him and bent low. He’d seen it coming. He’d been at the school a month, and a month was long enough to learn the rules. The rules said that either you went to Coyle and asked to be part of his crew, one of his “choirboys,” or he came to you. Coyle was a bully and nothing more, a big, strong kid, older than his years, who preyed on anyone who was smaller, fatter, weaker, or slower than he was. Bolden didn’t like him. He wasn’t going to be anyone’s choirboy. And he knew that Coyle was scared of him. Coyle never waited a month.

The knife flashed and Bolden jerked backward. He felt cold and emotionless. He’d known how to fight his entire life without ever being taught. He knew that he had to keep moving to draw Coyle in. You never stayed still. Never. He glanced behind him. The circle had tightened. It didn’t matter that he was surrounded. Get out of here and he still had nowhere to run.

“Come to Jesus.” The voices continued chanting. Coyle’s paean to his righteous Catholic upbringing.

Suddenly, Coyle lunged forward, knife outstretched. Bolden jumped to the side and toward Coyle, turning at the waist, closing the gap between them, the blade slicing his T-shirt. The move caught Coyle off guard. For a moment, he was exposed, arm extended, foot forward, off balance. Bolden lifted his arm and drove his elbow into the larger boy’s neck. At the same time, Coyle twisted his head to look back at him. The blow landed with a sickening crunch. The elbow seemed to bury itself in the outstretched neck. To go down and down forever. Coyle collapsed like a rag doll and lay motionless on the floor. He didn’t get up. He didn’t cry out. He just lay still.

No one else in the room moved either. The chanting stopped. The circle of boys stood frozen.

Bolden kneeled down next to him. “Terry?”

Coyle blinked, his mouth working, but no words came.

“Get a doctor,” said Bolden. “Call Mr. O’Hara.”

Still no one moved.

Coyle’s depthless black eyes were filling with tears, imploring him to do something.

“You’ll be okay,” Bolden said, knowing it was a lie, sensing that something terrible had happened. “Just got the wind knocked out of you, that’s all.”

Coyle’s mouth moved. “Can’t breathe,” he managed in a pained whisper.

Bolden stood and forced his way out of the circle. He ran to the headmaster’s cottage and summoned Mr. O’Hara. When they returned, the other boys were gone. Coyle lay in the center of the floor. He was dead. The blow to the neck had fractured his second vertebrae. He had suffocated to death.

“You killed him,” said O’Hara.

“No, he had a…” Bolden looked at Coyle, and then at the rip in his shirt where Coyle had cut him. He ran his hand over his belly and his fingers came away red with blood. His eyes searched the floor for the knife, but the others had taken it. “A knife…” he tried to explain, but like Coyle, he could no longer talk.

Bolden blinked and the memory faded. A knife. A gun. A man dead. Coyle. And now Sol Weiss.

Using his BlackBerry, he pulled up Diana Chambers’s company e-mail. He wrote, “Diana, please contact me as soon as possible. Who did this to you? Why? Tom.” It was a futile gesture, but one he had to make.

Bolden replaced the BlackBerry on his belt, and set off down the street. A stiff wind blew intermittently, the gusts driving the drizzle in horizontal sheets that stung his cheeks. He needed a hot bath, and fresh clothes. He weighed going home or to Jenny’s apartment, but decided both were too risky. Any number of interested parties might be waiting for him: the police and Guilfoyle, to name two. He was no longer confident that one was independent of the other.

He lowered his head and turned up the collar of his jacket. If the temperature dropped another degree or two, the sleet would turn to snow. He hurried down the street, avoiding puddles and patches of ice. He tried not to think about Jenny.

First, there was the picture of Diana Chambers. If the photo was genuine-and he believed it was-someone had to have punched her in the face. It was no fairy kiss, either. It was a rock-solid blow. Something “Iron Mike” Tyson might have thrown in his prime.

What did they offer you, Diana?

He’d always picture her as the chirpy Yalie who sang “Boola Boola” to the corporate finance department after he’d suggested everyone do a few tequila slammers to liven up a company-sponsored Circle Line cruise around Manhattan. How had they convinced her to go to the police and incriminate him? Did persuasion have anything to do with it? Or was it coercion, plain and simple? He couldn’t imagine that Diana was thrilled with her new makeup. An orbital fracture, according to Mickey Schiff.

Bolden blew a long breath through his teeth. Someone at the firm was working with Guilfoyle. There was no other way to explain how they had gotten to Diana Chambers so quickly, or how they could have manufactured the flirtatious e-mails and planted them on the company’s mainframe on such short notice. There was too much evidence in too little time. The more he thought about it, the more reckless their actions became.

Bolden tilted his head and looked into the sky. A fat snowflake landed on his nose and he wiped it away. The great reckoning, he was thinking. The scales of fortune tilting against him after a run of good luck. He wasn’t surprised.

As a kid, he’d hardly been an angel, granted. But when he’d been given a chance, he’d grabbed it with both hands. He studied and scrimped and saved. He worked tirelessly. And when success finally arrived, he gave back. First out of duty, then from enjoyment. He’d done nothing to deserve this. He hadn’t stolen a twenty out of his foster father’s money clip, or beaten up the latest bully at his latest school. He hadn’t lied about where he’d been the night before, or how it was that a picture of someone else’s parents had gotten into his wallet.

He had done other things, though. Things that could not be easily forgotten. Things that he could not forget, no matter how he tried.

Hurrying his pace, he wondered if retribution had finally found him. If this was just one more disaster in a recurring line, or if it was the final act of abandonment that had begun when he was six, and had held him hostage ever since. Bolden laughed at himself. Bitterly and with disdain. Somewhere in his past, someone had loaded his mind full of Eastern ideas of karma. Of good energy and bad energy. Of chi and the balancing of the scales. It was all nonsense. The past. The future. There was only now.

Bolden never looked back.