THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE

 

She had missed it. Nobody blamed her, but she shouldn’t have missed it. She was supposedly one of the magic few, one of the ones who could hear the ping of true intention, like a distant hammer driving home a nail, no matter how florid the caller, no matter how unlikely the threat. But she had missed it. When the call came she’d thought: white kid, somewhere between an old twelve and a young fifteen, standard cybergeek sitting in a smelly boy-room that no force on earth could make him clean, surrounded by Big Gulp cups and remote controls; pale, ferretlike underling who lacked inflection of voice or body, who looked grubby even on the rare occasions when he was clean, who had one or two friends exactly like him and spoke to no one else, just his family because it was unavoidable and his tiny band of fellow Igors, with whom he shared a private language and a vocabulary of creepy passions and a proclivity for spending as much time as humanly possible in dim suburban bedrooms that glowed with furtive computer light and smelled of feet and sweaty wool and old cum.

This kid, in various incarnations, was a regular feature of life in the deterrence unit. They were a breed—sad little pockmarked desperadoes half-mad with hormones and loneliness, sitting out there with their dicks in one grimy hand and their cell phones in the other. Nothing about the call had been notably different, none of the danger signs was there. Or so she’d thought. She only half remembered it, at best. No specifics of target or weaponry, just that adolescent-voiced vow to take out an average citizen, because people were, well—what’s wrong with people, tell me—fucking up the world, destroying it—you thinking of anyone in particular, someone specific you want to take out?—doesn’t matter, does it, we’re all the same—not to us, we’re not—I meant it doesn’t matter to the world, it doesn’t matter in geological time—who are you mad at, I think you’re mad at someone, am I right?—no you don’t get it I’m not mad at anyone I’m just going to blow somebody up and I thought I should tell someone.

Click.

Cat had blue-tagged it, sent it down the funnel. Then, three days later, she’d heard that ping in the back of her mind when the report came in. Explosion on Broadway and Cortlandt, right by Ground Zero, at least one splattered, two likelies, maybe more. She had by then talked to dozens more potentials, among them a guy who said he was posing as a gay man and going to gay bars to slip poison into other men’s drinks, thus helping to eliminate a few of the people who were sucking the sap from the Tree of Life. She’d talked to an elderly male Hispanic who was going to machete the staff of the public library, main branch, unless they tracked down whoever had been writing insults about him in the pages of the books.

She’d started making lists again. She’d been trying to kick the habit. But after the man who was going to dice the librarians hung up, there it was, right in front of her, in Sharpie on a Post-it:

Harm is in the books

Kill the harmless

New broom?

It wasn’t crazy. These were her notes. A psychologist took notes. Still, hers could run a little loose. She’d crumpled the Post-it and thrown it away. Given the current climate, she didn’t like the idea of somebody finding those particular words in her handwriting. And okay, she didn’t like the fact that she hadn’t fully realized she was doing it.

Maybe Simon needed to take her away for a few days. Maybe a dose of beach and room service, a dose of pure, undivided Simon, would help her feel less edgy. She’d toss his BlackBerry into the surf, if it came to that. She’d drown it in her piña colada.

When the news arrived, Cat heard the ping but couldn’t quite remember the call. It came to her with the particulars, which rolled in an hour-plus after the incident. Two splatters, not just one, and barring further developments it seemed that the vaporized one had been rigged with explosives. The other had been identified as Dick Harte, real estate developer, part of the World Trade rebuild, whose third left-hand finger, wearing a wedding band, had been found on a WALK-DON’T WALK box.

Right. Going to blow somebody up, thought I should tell you. Jesus.

Cat retrieved her report, notified Pete Ashberry. If this kid was the one, she had missed it.

She declined Pete’s offer to go home early. She sat out the remainder of the day, waiting to hear whether they’d picked up any more fragments from the site. She talked to a man who was going to firebomb a Starbucks (no specifics of location) because they insisted on hiring nigger whores. (She dutifully declined to mention the shade of her own skin but did put a hex on the fucker, telepathically.) She talked to another man, Slavic accent, who was going to kill the deputy mayor (why the deputy mayor?) because, as far as she could tell before he hung up, it just seemed like an interesting thing to do.

She kept all her pens in her drawer, off the desktop. It was a little like quitting smoking.

Pete came to her cubicle at five minutes to five. He was as big as a file cabinet and about that exciting. But he was a decent man; he wore his troubles bravely. His wife was going blind. His daughter had married some ecocultist who’d dragged her to Costa Rica to live in a tree.

“Now what?” Cat said. She was in no mood. She should sweeten up—she had after all quite possibly missed it—but if she went all nice and apologetic now, if she started acting like someone who needed forgiveness, she might never get back to herself. Screw them if they wanted her meek.

Pete stood in the opening (you couldn’t call it a doorway; it was just the point at which Cat’s four-feet-by-five-feet bled into the greater fluorescence) with his mouth settled. Pete was the only brother in deterrence. His skin was varnished mahogany, his hair an incongruously beautiful silver-gray. When he was stern and focused, you could put a can under his upper lip and push his nose to start the opener function.

“They got a left forearm,” he said. “They got half a sneaker, with half a foot inside. It’s a kid.”

“Jesus.”

“You ready for this? Kid walked up to this guy, hugged him, and self-detonated.”

“Hugged him?”

“Witness says so. White kid, wearing a baseball jacket, very regular-looking. This is from both our reliables. It’s only the one who says he saw the clinch.”

“Fuck me.”

“Fuck everybody.”

“Who does Dick Harte turn out to be?” she asked.

“Speculator. Not Don Trump, but big. One of the people who make the high-rises rise.”

“Funny business?”

“Nothing yet. Lived in Great Neck with wife number two. Some kids, some pets. You know.”

“Think he knew the boy?”

“Hope so.”

Everyone would hope so. Everyone would be saying a silent prayer right now, to the effect that the kid had been Dick Harte’s illegitimate son, or that they’d been having sex in a park in Great Neck, or whatever. Just don’t let it be random.

“Shit.”

Pete said, “We don’t know it was your caller.”

“I have a feeling, though.”

“Yeah, well, I do, too. Want to hear the tape with me?”

“Nothing would please me more.”

She went with Pete down the corridor to the audio room. Pete stopped en route in the lunchroom for a cup of late-day, bottom-of-the-pot coffee sludge, with four Equals. Cat graciously declined. She and Pete went into the audio room, which was in her opinion the least unpleasant place on the premises. It was ten degrees cooler and not quite as relentlessly lit. They sat in the synthetic-plush gray chairs. Aaron had cued the tape for them. Pete punched the button.

Hello. This is Cat Martin. Like everybody, she hated hearing her own voice on tape. Inside her skull it didn’t sound so flat, so harsh. To herself she sounded muscular and musical, smoky, a little like a young Nina Simone.

Hello? There it was again, that throaty boy voice, utterly unexceptional. Nervous, a little squawky, probably thirteen. Are you a policewoman?

And your name is?

I called the police, and they patched me over to you.

What can I do for you?

Nothing. You can’t do anything for me.

His poor mother must have been hearing those words ever since puberty turned her sweet little boy sullen and strange and fetid. Had some mother out there started wondering yet?

Why are you calling, then?

I want to tell you something.

What do you want to tell me?

Silence. She could picture him all over again, desperate little wanker with a room full of slasher-movie posters, summoning his courage. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing at all.

I’m going to blow somebody up.

Who?

I can’t tell you.

Why do you think you can’t tell me?

People have got to be stopped.

Why do you think that?

We’ve got to start over.

You’re thinking of stopping someone in particular?

It doesn’t matter who.

It does matter. Why do you think it doesn’t?

I mean, it doesn’t matter to the company.

What company?

The one we all work for.

Who do you work for?

You work for it, too.

Is the company telling you to hurt somebody?

You think I’m crazy, don’t you?

I think you’re angry.

Please don’t talk to me the way you talk to crazy people. I mean, one person doesn’t matter. The numbers don’t crunch in single digits.

You want to hurt somebody who’s hurting you. Is that right?

I can’t talk to you.

Yes, you can. Tell me your name.

I’m in the family. We gave up our names.

Everybody has a name.

I just wanted someone to know. I thought it would be better.

Better for who?

I wasn’t supposed to call.

Shit. There it was.

You can work this out without hurting anybody. Tell me your name.

I’m nobody. I’m already dead.

Click.

She had in fact messed up, then. The moment a caller referred to anyone else, it was an automatic red tag. Any caller who claimed to be receiving instructions from a friend, from Jesus, from the dog next door or the radio transmissions that came through the fillings in his teeth, got promoted to the next level of seriousness. This one had been vague enough—he wasn’t supposed to call anyone—but still. She should have kept him talking, shouldn’t have pressed quite so hard for his name.

Had she been making a list? Probably. Had she paid more attention to her list than she had to the caller? Hoped not.

“‘I’m in the family,’ ” she said. “ ‘We gave up our names.’ What’s that about?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Is there a rock band with lyrics like that?”

“We’re checking.”

“Good.”

“The family. What family?”

“The Brady Bunch. The Mafia. IBM. You know.”

Right. She’d had one just the other day. Mild-voiced citizen who’d said he was going to start driving around the country and running down illegal immigrants, under orders from Katie Couric. They tended to like the idea of working for celebrities or international corporations.

“I do,” Cat said. “I do know.”

Pete said, “You shoulda red-tagged it.” He wasn’t nasty about it. Simple statement of fact. These things happened.

“You checked the trace?” she asked.

“Pay phone. Corner of Bowery and Second Street.”

“Ugh.”

“Bound to happen, sooner or later.” He slurped his coffee.

“I didn’t think it would happen to me.”

“Go home. Tell your boyfriend to make you a drink and take you someplace nice for dinner.”

“Think he was really as young as he sounded?”

“That I couldn’t tell you. Wait for forensics.”

“How would a kid get a bomb?”

“I’d say where they get all their deadly weapons. From his parents.”

“Pete.”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Right. Have a few drinks, get some sleep. Feel better.”

She went back to her cubicle, retrieved her bag. Ed Short, who had the next shift, wouldn’t arrive for another half hour, but the lines were covered; she could slip away a little bit early. She hated to admit it, but now, having heard the tape, she wanted to get out of there as fast as humanly possible.

She said a few quick good-nights to coworkers who were busy at their own phones and didn’t seem to notice that she was leaving before her shift was over. She clipped on down the hall. Although she didn’t like to dwell on it, the division’s offices might have been designed for maximum grimness. Could the cubicle dividers be the color of a three-day-old corpse? Sure. Could greenish light buzz down on everyone from milky plastic ceiling panels? Absolutely. Could the smell of burnt coffee be blown through the air-conditioning ducts? No problem.

She went down to the lobby and out through security. The evening sky over Broadway was mockingly beautiful, astral winds herding a flock of wispy pink clouds across a field of searing lavender. It was lucky, them having to locate the deterrence unit up here. Lucky that there hadn’t been room down on Center Street, where it was all cops and lawyers and secretaries; where the food came from pushcarts or Chinese takeout cartons and the stores sold cheap, gaudy party wear meant to appeal to buyers so unhappy they were ready to blow a tenth of their paychecks on a sequined synthetic sweater or a pair of fake alligator pumps just to have something to show for it all. The corner of Broadway and Prince was something else. Here, what they sold was meant for actual children, fancy sneakers and jeans with more pockets and zippers than anyone conceivably needed, and T-shirts emblazoned with anarchic messages or the faces of fallen heroes, Che and Jimi and the Grateful Dead.

She glanced downtown, in the direction of the incident. It would still be cordoned off; they’d still be combing the pavement. Even now, it was impossible not to be struck by the emptiness where the towers had stood. Woolly little clouds drifted along, and a pale sliver of moon had risen, visible now with the towers gone.

That same moon would be rising over countless little towns out there, all those tree-studded, lawn-bright expanses where the citizens tended to keep their murders confined to their hearts; where the cops dozed their way through teenage crimes and the occasional domestic disturbance; where they had no need of specialists to divine the actual intentions of professed bombers, poisoners, Uzi-owning defenders of racial purity, and machete-wielding grandfathers.

And where, of course, there was no place at all for someone like Cat. Where she’d expire discreetly of loneliness and strangeness, where she’d probably become an ever-more-frequent presence on one of the bar stools at the local steak house, trying to keep her voice down, arranging her swizzle sticks in neat rows in front of her, struggling not to make lists on the cocktail napkins.

She walked up to Bond Street, turned east. The people on the streets were going about their regular business, but there was a charge in the air. Everyone was spooked by the news. The guy in front of Cat with the attaché case strode along with his shoulders hunched, as if he expected a blow from above. The three Asian girls who paused at a shop window, looked at the shoes, looked at one another, and moved right along—were they thinking of being showered with broken glass? The danger that had infected the air for the last few years was stirred up now; people could smell it. Today they’d been reminded, we’d been reminded, of something much of the rest of the world had known for centuries—that you could easily, at any moment, make your fatal mistake. That we all humped along unharmed because no one had decided to kill us that day. That we could not know, as we hurried about our business, whether we were escaping the conflagration or rushing into it.

Cat went down Bond, past the stratospherically expensive Japanese restaurant, past the jinxed store where another optimist had put up signs announcing the imminent appearance of another boutique that would be gone in six months or so. She crossed Lafayette and went up to Fifth Street, her block, her home, what she had come to call her home, though when she’d moved there seven years ago it had been temporary, just a few dim, affordable rooms, postdivorce, until she started her real life in her real apartment. Funny how in only seven years it had metamorphosed from fallback to treasure, how people couldn’t believe she’d wangled her way into a rent-controlled, lightless third-floor walk-up on a block where crackheads didn’t piss in your vestibule every single night. It all kept shifting under your feet, didn’t it? Maybe future generations would prize those spangled Orlon sweaters from Nassau Street. Maybe things would fall so far that a pair of cardboard imitation-alligator shoes made in Taiwan would look like artifacts of a golden age.

She passed among the unnerved denizens of Fifth Street. The two Lithuanian women were out on the sidewalk in their folding aluminum lawn chairs, as always, but instead of watching the passersby with their usual regal weariness, they leaned into each other, talking animatedly in their language, shaking their heads. The punk couple with sunburst haircuts stomped along with particular fury—so, people, you’re fucking surprised that it’s all blowing up in your goddamned fucking faces? Only the old homeless man, at his post in front of the flower shop, looked unaffected, chanting his inaudible chants, the hired mourner of the neighborhood, its own singer for the dead.

Cat let herself into her apartment. For a moment she imagined it as the boys of the bomb squad would find it if she’d been blown up on the corner of Broadway and Cortlandt. Not so good. Admit it: it was the apartment of somebody who’d let things slide. There were clothes and shoes strewn around; there were dishes in the sink. The books that had long ago overflowed the bookcase (yes, boards and cinder blocks; she’d meant to replace it) were stacked everywhere. Were there spots of mold floating in the coffee cup she’d set on the book pile on one side of the sofa? Sure there were. If you ran a finger along a windowsill, would it come up coated with velvety, vaguely oily dust? You bet it would. It could have been the apartment of a slightly messier-than-usual graduate student. The oatmeal-colored sofa with the broken spring—Lucy had given it to her until she got something better. That had been seven years ago.

Fuck it. She was busy. She was beat. Cleanliness was a virtue but not a sexy one.

She checked her voice mail. Simon was the first message.

Hey, you know anything about the explosion? Call me.

She called Titan. Amelia, Simon’s secretary, put her straight through.

“Cat?”

“Hi.”

“What’s going on? What do you know about this thing?”

“I think I talked to him. The bomber.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Three days ago. We’re not sure yet, but I think I talked to him.”

“You talked to him. He called you.”

“It’s my job, baby. I’m the one they call.”

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Do you want some dinner?”

“I guess. I’m honestly not sure.”

“I’m going to buy you a drink and some dinner.”

“That’d be so nice.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Someplace unchallenging. You pick.”

“Right. How about Le Blanc?”

“Great. Perfect.”

“Half an hour?”

“Half an hour.”

He hung up. While they were talking, Cat had done it again. Picked up a pen and written in her spiral notebook:

Fortress of solitude?

Does dirt = filth?

Where’s the little house?

She tore out the page, crumpled it, and tossed it away. When had regular note-taking turned into…whatever this was? Free association. Had it started after 9/11? She hoped so. Cause and effect were always comforting.

 

She got to Le Blanc in exactly half an hour. She was the first to arrive, as she’d expected. Simon could never just put down the phone and walk away, not even in an emergency. He lived in an ongoing state of emergency. He traded futures. (Yes, he had explained it all to her, and, no, she still didn’t understand what exactly it was that he did.) Fortunes flicked across his computer screen, falling and rising and falling again. He was the man behind the curtain. If he failed to take care of business, Oz might dissolve in an emerald mist. He’d be there as soon as he could.

Cat herself could not overcome her habit of punctuality. She’d tried. It wasn’t in her to be late for anything, ever.

A place like Le Blanc was Simon’s idea of unchallenging because it wasn’t cool anymore. Three years ago it had been a Laundromat, just a dingy hole on Mott Street, and then somebody cleaned the hundred-year-old tile walls, put up yellowed mirrors, installed a zinc-topped bar, and poof, it was a perfect Parisian bistro. For a while it was an epicenter, then it faded. Regular people could get in now. At a front table sat a couple who were clearly not from the neighborhood. He was all gold jewelry; she’d draped her faux Versace over the back of her chair. Moscow-riche. A year ago, they’d have been stopped at the threshold. Cat’s idea of unchallenging was more like…well, okay, an entirely unchallenging restaurant was not coming immediately to mind.

She passed through a moment with the hostess, a new girl, mega-smiley in her confusion over what exactly to do with a black woman who’d arrived alone. Before the girl could speak, Cat said, “I’m meeting Simon Dryden. I believe we have a reservation.”

The girl consulted her list. “Why, yes,” she said. “Mr. Dryden isn’t here yet.”

“Let’s get me seated then, shall we?”

The queenly bearing and the schoolmarm diction, the smiling ultraformality. You did what you had to do.

“Absolutely,” the hostess chimed, and led Cat to the second booth.

As Cat settled in, she locked eyes with Fred. Fred was one of the legion of New York actors who impersonated waiters while they hoped things would break for them. He wasn’t young anymore, though. He was becoming what he’d once pretended to be: a wisecracking waiter, brusque and charmingly irreverent, knowledgeable about wines.

“Hello, Fred,” Cat said.

“Hey,” said Fred. Perfectly cordial, but glassy somehow. Caught up short. For Cat, sans Simon, he had no banter strategy.

“How are you?”

“Good. I’m good. Can I get you a drink?”

Funny how hard it could be, sitting alone in a restaurant. Funny to be someone who could calmly talk to psychopaths but had trouble being an unescorted woman who made a waiter uncomfortable.

She had Fred bring her a Ketel One on the rocks. She looked at the menu.

Cattle fed on bonemeal?

Slaughter of the innocents?

Poison in the walls?

Well, now. Apparently, at moments of stress, she didn’t need to write them down anymore.

She was on her second vodka when Simon arrived. It still shocked her sometimes, seeing him in public. He was so unassailably young and fit. He was a Jaguar, he was a goddamned parade float rolling along, demonstrating to ordinary citizens that a gaudier, grander world—a world of potently serene, self-contained beauty—appeared occasionally amid the squalor of ongoing business; that behind the blank, gray face of things there existed an inner realm of wealth and ease, of urbane celebration. She watched the hostess check him out. She watched him stride with the confidence of a brigadier general to her table, stunning in his midnight-blue suit. It might as well have been spangled with tiny stars and planets.

He kissed her on the lips. Yes, people, I’m his date. I’m his girlfriend, okay?

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“You’re fine. Is it crazy at work?”

“You’re asking me?” Simon frowned compassionately. His brows bristled like a pair of chocolate-colored caterpillars. Cat had an urge to stroke them.

“Crazy is a relative concept,” she said.

“Mm,” he said. “So, you think you talked to this guy.”

Simon was going to be stern and unhysterical, even a little casual in this, his first secondhand crisis. He was going to be someone who could manage the news of a random bomber with the same grave suavity she knew he must bring to his business deals.

“Let’s get you a drink, and I’ll tell you about it,” Cat said.

He sat down across from her. Fred came right away.

“Hey, Fred,” Simon said. He’d been a regular since the restaurant’s glory days, was adored for continuing to come.

“Hey, homeboy,” Fred answered, fluent in manspeak.

“Heard the news?” Simon asked.

“Scary.”

“You know Cat, right?”

“Absolutely. Hey, Cat.”

“Cat’s with the police department. She’s working on this one.”

I live in a world of danger, Fred. I’m deeper inside of things than you can possibly know.

“You’re kidding,” Fred said. Cat watched him go through an intricate reassessment. All right, she had a real job and quite possibly an interesting one. But bottom line, didn’t this make her one of those grim black women, the sticklers for protocol who torture the populace from behind civic counters and post-office windows?

“Not at liberty to discuss it,” Cat said.

“Right, right.” Fred nodded sagely. He was up to the challenge of playing a waiter who could be trusted with a little inside information. He was more than up to it.

Cat said, “Simon, why don’t you order yourself a drink?”

Simon paused, then said, “Right. Just a glass of wine, I think. Like maybe a Shiraz?”

“The Chilean or the Sonoma?” Fred asked.

“You pick.”

“Chilean.”

“Good.”

Fred nodded again, in Cat’s direction. Undercover waiter. Good in a crisis. He went off to get the wine.

What was it with men? Why were they so eager to impersonate someone brave and competent and in the know?

“Simon, baby,” Cat said, “you can’t say things like that. Not to waiters.”

“Got you. Sorry.”

“You can’t be showing me off to people. Besides, I’m not Foxy Brown. I’m just a grunt, really.”

“It’s because I’m proud of you.”

“I know.”

“So. What happened?”

“A kid called in with a bomb threat. That’s all.”

“And you think it’s this kid who blew the guy up?”

“Possibly.”

“The kid must have known the guy, right?”

She hesitated. She had to give him something, didn’t she? He was her boyfriend. And—admit it—this was part of what she had to offer him.

“It would seem that way. My guess is, it’s a sex thing. Odds are we’ll get a missing report from somewhere in the vicinity of Dick Harte’s neighborhood, and we’ll find that he’d been blowing the perpetrator in the backseat of his BMW.”

Cat knew the word “perpetrator” would be exciting to Simon. She’d promised herself to stop acting extra coplike to turn him on. Screwed that one up.

“Right,” Simon said. His brows bristled. It would have been nice to peel them gently off his face, hold them in her palm, then put them carefully back again.

“What do you want to eat?” she asked.

“I don’t know. The tuna, I guess.”

Simon was Atkins. High protein, no carbs. And really, consider the results.

“I’m going to have the steak au poivre,” she said. “And mashed potatoes.”

Momma’s had a very hard day. All right?

 

They went back to her place that night, and never mind about the mess. She was rattled—she realized how much she wanted her own bed. Simon didn’t mind her crappy apartment every now and then. He claimed to like it, actually. Although she’d never come out and asked him, it was likely that until he met her he’d never been to East Fifth Street.

She woke up at 3:30. She didn’t have to look at the clock. She knew this abrupt and arid consciousness, this jump from deep dreams to a wakefulness that was not so much having slept enough as having suddenly lost the knack for sleep. On the nights it happened, it always happened between 3:30 and 4:00. She had a little something for it in the medicine cabinet, but she’d never even opened the bottle. She seemed to prefer insomnia to simulated sleep. Control thing. Fucked up, really, but what could she do?

Simon breathed steadily beside her. She let herself stare at him as he grimaced over a dream. He was a true classic. Big, broad anchorman face, vigorous thatch of sable-colored hair beginning to be threaded, here and there, with strands of sterling silver. He could have been fresh off the assembly line of whatever corporation produced the Great American Beauties. The corporation would be somewhere in the Midwest, wouldn’t it? And yes, he came from Iowa, didn’t he? Great-great-grandson of immigrants who’d escaped New York for the prairie, he’d returned in triumph a hundred or so years later, the exiled prince restored to his true home by way of the Ivy League. Rich and healthy, thirty-three years old. Practically adolescent, in man-years.

Maybe it was time to quit the unit, though if she did it now it would look like she was running away. In fact, she’d been thinking of quitting for some time. You got a little crazy, working the nuts. You listened to every lunatic with the same patience; you reminded yourself over and over that any one of these people might really and truly be about to torch a grade school or blow up a store or kill somebody just because he was well-known. Bartenders must start seeing a world full of drunks; lawyers must see it as largely made up of the vengefully injured. Forensic psychologists got infected by paranoia. You knew, better than the average citizen, that the world contains a subworld, where the residents do as most people do, pay rent and buy groceries, but have a little something extra going on. They receive personal messages from their television sets or are raped nightly by a sitcom star or have discovered that the cracks on the sidewalk between Broadway and Lafayette spell out the names of the aliens who are posing as world leaders.

The most surprising thing about these people, as it turned out, was their dullness. All their human juices flowed in one direction; they cared about nothing, really, beyond their fixations. Anyone’s sweet old aunt in Baltimore was more vital and various, even if her life was only watching television and clipping discount coupons out of magazines. You sat in your crummy police department office—which resembled nothing so much as a failing mail-order business—and listened to them. You logged them in on your five-year-old computer. You hoped none of them would follow through. You hoped, on your worst days (no one liked to talk about this), that one of them would.

She got out of bed, careful not to wake Simon, and went to the window. It wasn’t much of a view, just three floors down onto Fifth Street, but still. Here was a slice of the city; here was the old homeless man, still chanting in front of the florist’s (he was out later than usual tonight); here were the orange streetlights and the brown housefronts, the dark-clad pedestrians, the whole smoky, sepia-stained semireality of it, this city at night, the most convincing stage set ever devised, no ocean or mountains, hardly any trees (not, at least, in this neighborhood), just street after street, bright and noisy under a pink-gray sky pierced by antennas and water tanks, while down below, across the street from Cat’s building, a flame-blue sign buzzed CLEANER.

 

In the morning she made coffee, brought Simon a cup while he was still in the shower, got to spend a moment watching him through the clouded glass, the vague pink of his back and legs, the paler pink of his ass. Was a man ever sexier than when he was taking a shower? Still, this business of sneaking looks at Simon as he slept or showered wasn’t such a good sign, was it? Did he do the same with her? She couldn’t picture it. She set his coffee mug on the back of the toilet tank, wiped steam from the mirror over the sink, took a look. Not bad for thirty-eight. Firm chin, good skin.

Backless dresses, how much longer?

The melting ice cap of sleep

It’s a pig’s heart you hold in your hand

Simon emerged, brightened and water-beaded, kissed her, picked up his coffee. He said, “Work’s not going to be any fun today, is it?”

“Probably not.”

He grabbed a towel, dried off. The towels hadn’t been washed in, what, two weeks or more. Time flew.

“Call me. Let me know what’s going on.”

“I will.”

“I’ve got that damned client thing tonight. I can be done by around ten.”

“Great.”

She lingered another moment, sipping her own coffee, though it was time to let him have the tiny bathroom to himself. Simon was so heedlessly alive, so unquestioningly glad about it. He traded futures. He’d been president of his senior class. He filled the room with his heat and his soapy smell.

When her son died Cat had thought she was dead, too; she’d thought her systems would shut down all by themselves, but here she was, nine years later, not only still alive but looking pretty good, well educated (too bad the private practice hadn’t taken off), free of her poor tortured ex-husband (though he did creep into her fantasies), still capable of attracting someone like Simon.

She wished she hated herself more for wanting to live on.

She took a last deep draught of Simon’s shower smell, went into the bedroom to find something to wear.

Mornings were good. (Mornings are good, enjoy them.) She liked the fact that all over the city, people were having their coffee and showers, deciding on their clothes. This was as close as it got to collective innocence, this mass transition from sleep (however troubled) to wakefulness (however tormented). Just about everyone, or everyone who was at least minimally functional, had to get up and get dressed. Even the ones who were going to call her and tell her about their plans to shoot or stab or ignite somebody. Even the ones who were going to strap a bomb to their chests and blow up a businessman on the street. Here we are, all of us, going through this daily miniature rebirth, and doing it together.

She passed over the Maori-print dress she’d been thinking of in favor of the dark Earl jeans. The jeans and the black crewneck sweater, the low-heeled black boots. She would not try to intimidate or seduce. Not by way of costume, anyway.

She didn’t wait around for Simon. It was, if anything, a day to show up at work on the early side. She kissed him goodbye while he was still in his underwear and socks (was there anything as touchingly unsexy as a man in black socks and no pants?), gratefully accepted his assurance that he’d wind up the client thing by ten and they’d decide then about where to eat, which apartment to sleep in.

She descended the garbagey stairs, went out into the morning, a spanking-fresh June one, all spangly on the fire escapes. She paused for a moment on the stoop, taking it in. On a morning like this, you could believe the world was safe and promising. You could imagine that nothing harmful, nothing toxic, could flourish. Not when early light slanted down so purely from an ice-blue sky. Not when the window-box geraniums of the first-floor widow were incandescently red and a passing truck said PARTY PLANNERS in glittering gold letters.

Someone was watching her. Right now. She felt it. Any woman could; it was survival coding. She glanced around. In this neighborhood a woman out alone, even in daylight, was by general accord offering herself up for public entertainment. She had to admit it: lately her fury had gone a little soft at the edges. They wouldn’t keep annoying her forever. One day the moans and coyote whistles, the Hey, sexy mommas, would cease. Which would be a relief. She’d be just another middle-aged black lady, going unremarked about her unremarkable business. Still, all right, admit it: right now, this morning, here on her front stoop, having left her younger boyfriend upstairs, she felt herself being scrutinized, and she looked for the offending party with a certain angry eagerness, like a princess who’d found her prince but was still being pestered by the enchanted frog with the golden ball. Hey, frog, I’m off the market now, go croak under somebody else’s window. She wasn’t interested, but still, in some crevice of her mind, some dark and foolish fold, she dreaded the day the frog gave up and hopped off to moon over someone else.

No one was there. No, people were always there. No one was looking at her. There were the besuited eagers on their way to work, a couple of NYU students off to early classes, an old man lumbering along with bags of empty, chiming bottles dangling from both palsied hands.

Still, the feeling was palpable. Someone was staring at her, right now.

She hit the sidewalk, headed west. Get over yourself. You’re just feeling your own version of the same edginess that’s infecting everybody this morning as hatred once again demonstrates its capacity to find us wherever we are and suck us into the next dimension.

 

She got to her cubicle a full half hour before she needed to. Ed Short was still there, finishing up the graveyard shift.

“Morning, Ed,” she said.

“Good morning. You’re in early.”

“I am.”

Ed sipped at what was probably his fifteenth cup of coffee. His eyes were bright and watery. His sparrow-colored hair, already thinning, stood out from his head with a certain doomed desperation, the way a fire flares just before it goes out. Ed was, what, thirty-two, thirty-three? He was made for the job: young and more than a little bit mean, untroubled by imagination, incapable of boredom, eager to root out the bad guys and hurl them into the abyss. He’d have red-tagged the kid if he’d been on the phone that day. Ed red-tagged almost everything. People complained—red tags meant more work, of course, plus they cost money, and the whole err-on-the-side-of-caution policy had its implied limits. But Ed was just the sort of pain in the ass who got to be a department head. When the Eds of the world were right, when they appeared to have made a good call because they called almost everything, the fact that they’d spent years irritating everyone around them didn’t matter. They were heroes. They’d saved the day. It was impossible to imagine how many historical figures, how many great men (and women, there was the occasional woman), were people like Ed, people who never got distracted, whose faith never wavered, who would stay by their phones or in their laboratories or at their easels until finally, finally, something happened, while most of the rest of the population tended, over time, to think of other things, to wonder what it would be like to live in the country, to speculate over the possibility that doing a simple job and raising a couple of kids might actually be enough.

What lives in empty rooms?

How far does the light reach?

Are there teeth in the wood?

Cat asked, “What’s come in from the site?”

“Kid was rigged with a pipe bomb. No nails or anything, it wasn’t meant to scatter. Just to incinerate everything within five or six feet.”

“You can learn how to make something like that off the Internet.”

“Yep. Half of Dick Harte’s scalp turned up on a window ledge three stories up. Otherwise it’s just some bone fragments and one more tooth.”

“Why don’t you go home early?” she said. “I’m ready to take over.”

“Thanks. I’m fine. You just relax for a little while.”

Right. Today she was someone who should relax for a little while.

She went into the lounge, poured herself some coffee—it was drinkable until about 10:00 a.m.—and pulled the papers out of her bag.

Thirty-six-point type in the Times, above the fold, but only eight points larger than a headline about an experimental new weapon that could render a country uninhabitable without killing its citizens or destroying its structures. EXPLOSION IN LOWER MANHATTAN. Subhead: Two Killed, Five Injured in Possible Terrorist Attack. Bless all those guys at the Times, our good fathers, trying to tell us what we need to know (what they think we need to know) without unduly exploiting our collective desires to be titillated, to be reassured, to be scared shitless. Easy to picture the men (and women, there might be a woman or two) up there in Midtown, agonizing over how much panic they should or should not inspire, pending further details. The Post and the News, of course, were not similarly concerned. MAD BOMBER AT GROUND ZERO in the News, TERROR STRIKES AGAIN in the Post.

The gist of all three stories was essentially the same; only the tone varied. Unidentified bomber kills self and one Dick Harte, real estate magnate. Nothing yet about the bomber being a kid—the guys downtown had somehow managed to keep the witnesses sequestered for the moment. Obvious comparisons to what Hamas and the rest did in Israel. The Post reporter had fabricated something about the bomber shouting “Allah is great”—either found some lunatic who claimed to be a witness or made it up entirely—but otherwise nothing appalling, beyond, of course, the event itself. All three had patched together what they could about Dick Harte, though his wife and kids weren’t talking. There were pictures: a scrupulously regular-looking guy, fifty-three years old, with that strange babylike blankness certain men could take on when they went bald, when that big dome of forehead made their features look smaller and more innocent. CEO of the Calamus Development Corporation. Wife Lucretia (Lucretia?) was a decorator based in Great Neck, where they did in fact live. Daughter Cynthia was a senior in public school, son Carl a sophomore at some school Cat had never heard of. The Times and the Post had the same photo, the straightforward one from God knew where that would go with the obit; the News had dug up one of Harte standing with a few others who looked more or less like him, at the dedication of what Cat knew to be yet another office monolith on Third Avenue.

She went to her cubicle at nine, took her place in the chair still warm from Ed’s dedicated ass. She looked over Ed’s entries in the log. Three callers who claimed responsibility, all scrupulously red-tagged. Two were variations on the same idea: now you’ll all be sorry (no specifics about what we should all be sorry for), and I’m not finished yet; both were vague on the subject of how they’d survived the explosion and lived to make the call. The third said he was a member of something called the Brigade of Enlightenment and that the terror would continue until the U.S. stopped allowing women to murder their unborn children.

Pete stopped by just after nine, nursing his first cup of hot coffee-flavored, sugar-free liquid candy. “How you doing?” he asked.

“Okay.”

“Get some sleep?”

“A little.”

He stepped into the cubicle, made so bold as to put his hand on her shoulder. She and Pete had maintained an unspoken no-touching rule since that night three months ago when they were both working late, when they’d been exhausted and discouraged enough to duck into the women’s room together. Cat still couldn’t say why she’d done it, she wasn’t remotely interested, and yet mysteriously, unaccountably, she’d been headed to the ladies’ and had nodded to him, and before you knew it she was sitting on the sink with her legs wrapped around his unpretty middle-aged ass, he because she’d allowed it, because they’d seemed at that moment like the only two people in the world, because his wife was losing her sight and his only child had become an econut in Latin America, and she because…because Pete’s wife was losing her sight and his only child had become an econut in Latin America, because she’d let her own son die and she’d been taking calls for going on twelve hours, because Pete’s neck reminded her of her ex-husband’s neck, because this place was so ugly and silent and far from everything, because she seemed to have wanted, at that moment, to tear everything apart, to go down, to be as crazy and destructive and irresponsible as the people who called her. She and Pete had never spoken about it. They both knew it would not happen again.

“You sure you feel like working today?”

“Entirely sure. Find out anything new?”

“Forensics is saying the kid was thirteen, maybe fourteen, but small for his age. Seems to have been healthy, from what they’ve found so far.”

“I hate this.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I don’t just mean this. I mean all this.”

Pete nodded wearily, warily. Cat hesitated. There was an unwritten rule in the unit. No one speculated, ever. No one waxed philosophical. It didn’t work that way. No one went moony about the notable increase in callers who were under eighteen and clearly well educated or about the increase in carry-throughs, from one in a thousand to one in 650 over the last five years. No one spun out over the collapse of the family or of civilization at large; no one wondered about atmospheric gases or irradiated food or rays being projected at the earth by hostile aliens. That was the callers’ realm.

Cat said, “Sorry. I’m a little tired right now.”

“ ’Course you are.”

She sat up straighter in her chair. “What have they gotten from the wife and kids?” she asked. “Anything?”

“Wife’s hysterical. Daughter, too. Son came down from Vermont, real eager beaver, wants to be of service and get to the bottom of all this and etcetera but can’t tell us shit. Dad was a decent guy. Coached Little League, paid the bills on time. My opinion? I think the son’s having the time of his life.”

“What’s he doing in Vermont?”

“Special school for underachievers, kids who do more than the usual amount of drugs. Like that.”

“That’s interesting.”

“We’re checking into it.”

“They’ve got the tapes in Washington?” she said.

“They do.”

“And they’ll be in touch?”

“Nobody’s gonna nail you for missing a hint this small.”

I wasn’t supposed to call anyone. Jesus.

“Unless, of course, they decide they really and truly need someone to nail, and I seem like the best candidate.”

“Unlikely. Why worry about it now?”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll check in with you later.”

“You’re the best.”

She got to work. It was a busy morning, which surprised no one. It always took about twenty-four hours for the callers to man their stations. After a big story hit the news, only the most labile reached immediately for the phone. The majority, the petit bourgeois lunatics, had to mull it over, settle in their own minds just exactly how the event in question belonged to them, and decide that someone in a position of authority ought to know about it. Now they were in full stampede. She got five in her first twenty minutes, three of them so unfocused that even Ed wouldn’t have red-tagged them, just a trio of screamers who wanted somebody to know they hadn’t seen anything yet, the worst was still to come, Judgment Day was upon us. The fourth was an English guy who wanted to tell her he’d overheard a conversation in the lobby of his building and had come to understand that this incident was part of his neighbor’s master plan to bankrupt small businesses in the financial district, sorry, he couldn’t leave his neighbor’s name or his own name, for fear of reprisals, but given this information, he hoped the police would know how to proceed. The fifth needed to tell her that certain evidence had been planted at the site by white supremacists to implicate the Muslim faith. This one did leave his name: Jesus Mohamed, minister of the Church of Light and Love. He was willing to work with the police in any capacity they required.

She red-tagged the Englishman and Jesus Mohamed, thus setting into motion the inquiries into their lives and natures that would cost taxpayers roughly fifteen grand, She wondered if these people knew, if they had any idea, how much money and muscle they could summon just by making these calls. Better, of course, if they didn’t.

Between calls she filed what needed to be filed, wrote her follow-ups, checked the mail, which was for the most part unremarkable: a half-dozen threats and one hex, written variously by hand, on a computer, and on what appeared to be a manual typewriter. The letters about the explosion wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. The day began to establish its momentum; it started feeling ordinary. This would pass, wouldn’t it? The kid would turn out to have been Dick Harte’s sex toy, or he would turn out to have been regular crazy (the new regular crazy), a friendless and universally bullied weirdo who’d been obsessed with computer games since before he knew how to walk. It was—what else could it be?—another disaster in a disaster-prone world, tragic but unavoidable. Life would go on.

 

The call came a little before ten-thirty. It was patched directly to her—caller had asked for Cat Martin. She figured it was one of her regulars. She had a handful who called at least once a week, and twice that many who called sporadically, when they went off their medication or the moon was full or the papers (they were readers, these people) had featured something doomish that could conceivably have been somebody’s fault. Antoine always called about anything that inconvenienced commuters (automotive industry’s conspiracy to eliminate mass transit); Billy could be counted on whenever anything appeared about hostile conditions on other planets (ongoing attempt to disguise the fact that the aliens have been here for decades and are being tortured in government internment camps). Antoine and Billy and the others had been checked out long ago. Antoine lived on monthly disability in a rathole in Hell’s Kitchen; Billy was a sanitation worker on Staten Island. The regulars tended to love patterns. They scanned the news every day for further evidence. She couldn’t blame them, not really. Who didn’t want more patterns?

She picked up. “This is Cat Martin.”

“Hello?”

Adolescent white boy. Her synapses snapped.

“Hello. What can I do for you?”

“Did you talk to my brother?”

Cat pushed the green button. The readout was a 212 area code.

“Who’s your brother?”

“He told me he called you.”

No, not adolescent. This kid sounded young, nine or ten. His voice was serene, even a bit aphasic. Drugs, probably. A few of his mother’s OxyContins.

“What’s your name?”

“Did you talk to him? I’m sorry, but I need to know.”

“When would he have called?”

“Last week. Tuesday.”

Shit. This was something.

“I’d have to check the records. Can you tell me his name?”

“We’re in the family. We don’t have names.”

Keep him talking. Give the guys as much time as you can.

“What family are you in?” she said.

“He told me he talked to you. I just want to make sure.”

“Are you in trouble? Can you let me help you?”

“I was wondering. Can you tell me what he told you?”

“If somebody’s hurting you, I can make them stop.”

No, no statements. Phrase everything as a question. Keep him answering.

“I didn’t know.”

“What didn’t you know?”

“I thought he was just going to put the bomb somewhere and run.”

“Can you tell me about the bomb?”

“Did you tell him not to do it?”

“Who’s your brother? What do you think he did?”

“I shouldn’t have called. I’m just scared. Sorry.”

“Won’t you tell me what you’re afraid of? Won’t you let me help you?”

“That’s nice of you. But you can’t.”

“Yes. I can.”

“Are you happy?”

What the fuck? No one had ever asked her that particular question.

Cat said, “I think you’re unhappy. Is somebody making you do something you don’t want to do?”

“You’d do the same thing. Wouldn’t you?”

“What is it you think you and I would do?”

“We’re all the same person. We all want the same things.”

“Can you let me come meet you? Don’t you think we should talk in person?”

“Nobody really dies. We go on in the grass. We go on in the trees.”

He was spinning out. Cat kept her voice calm.

“Why do you think that?”

“Every atom of mine belongs to you, too.”

Click.

She paused a moment, to be absolutely sure he was gone. By the time she’d risen from her chair, Pete was in her cubicle.

“Fucking A,” he said.

“What the hell? Brothers?”

“He was on a pay phone. Way the hell up in Washington Heights.”

“Are they there yet?”

“On their way.”

“Mm.”

“There’s that line again. ‘We’re in the family.’ ”

“Is it from some rock band?”

“Not that we can find. We’re still on it.”

“They’re checking movies, TV shows?”

“They are, Cat. They’re good at this.”

“Right.”

“What was that he said at the end?”

“I’m not quite sure. I think it was from Whitman.”

“Say what?”

“I think it was a line from Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass.”

“Poetry?”

“That would be poetry, yes.”

“Fuck me. I’ll check in with you later,” he said.

“Right.”

Pete barreled off. Cat had to stay put in case of a callback. No other calls for her unless she was specifically asked for.

Thirty minutes passed. This was part of what she hadn’t expected—the downtime, the hanging around. When she went into police work she’d seen herself careening around in unmarked cars or touching down in helicopters. She hadn’t anticipated so much waiting by the phone. She hadn’t pictured a life that would so closely resemble working for a corporation, dutifully performing her little piece of it all.

Every atom of mine belongs to you, too. That wasn’t quite right, but it was close enough. A kid who quoted Whitman? Cat was probably the only department member who’d recognize it; she was without question the only one on the premises who’d read Winnicott and Klein, Whitman and Dostoyevsky. For all the difference it made.

Did you talk to my brother? Jesus fucking Christ. One kid self-detonates and his little brother calls to check up on him. A picture was emerging—there was that, at least. A missing kid with a younger brother—assuming it was true, and who knew?—would be much easier to track down. Were they the sons of cultists? That was more of a rural thing, messianics who raised children deep in the woods, taught them to hate the sinful world, and congratulated themselves for doing God’s work. It was more Idaho or Montana, these righteously murderous families who’d gone off the grid. But the five boroughs had their share, too. Hadn’t they just arrested a guy who’d been keeping an adult tiger and a full-grown alligator in his one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn? They were everywhere.

She could have kissed Pete when he finally returned.

“What’s up?” she said.

“Phone’s on the corner of St. Nicholas and 176th. Out of the way. No kid on the scene, no witnesses yet.”

“Shit.”

“You’re okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll check back again soon.”

“Thanks.”

She was sequestered now. She was bound to her cubicle, on the off chance of a callback. Momma is waiting. Call her. She’ll never leave you alone.

 

The morning passed. Cat did some filing, caught up on her e-mails. She had one caller, at eleven forty-five, asking for Cat Martin, and her short hairs stood up, but it was just Greta, her only female regular, calling to tell her that the explosion had been caused by the unquiet spirit of a slave girl who’d been murdered on the site in 1803 and that the only way to appease her was to go there immediately and perform the rite of extreme unction. Greta lived on Orchard Street, had been a seamstress for more than fifty years, had eight grandchildren, was probably a nice person.

We all want the same things. She kept hearing the kid’s high-pitched, tentative voice, his strange courtliness. There was—how to put it—an innocence about him. Subject matter aside, he had sounded for all the world like a decent, ordinary kid. That was probably drugs, though. Or dissociation.

Pete stopped by periodically, bless him, to tell her they hadn’t found anything, and at twelve-thirty to bring her a pizza from Two Boots.

“Seems like a good day to say ‘screw the diet,’ ” he said.

Pepperoni and mushrooms. He knew what she liked. She offered him a slice, which he accepted.

“How serious you think this is?” he said.

“Not sure. What’s your gut telling you?”

“That it’s small but looks big.”

Cat folded the tip of her pizza slice, took a big voluptuous bite. Was there anything, really, as delicious, as entirely satisfying, as a slice of pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza?

She said, “You think it’s only these two kids.”

“Yeah. Think Menendez brothers.”

“A truly whacked-out fourteen-year-old, no longer with us, and his impressionable younger brother.”

“Our first copycat.”

She nodded. Since 9/11, they’d all been puzzling over the dearth of follow-ups. Not Al Qaeda—that was the concern of other departments. Cat and Pete and the rest of deterrence had been wondering why more ordinary American citizens hadn’t used it as inspiration. It had been the terrorists’ gift to the violently deranged. You could blow up a garbage can now—you could yell “Fire!” in a goddamned theater—and cost the city of New York another billion or so in lost tourist revenue.

She said, “Receiving their instructions from?”

“A higher power. You know.”

She knew. Nine times out of ten, the ones who followed through were obeying someone or something. They were servants to a cause.

“First one said people have got to be stopped,” she said.

“My guess? Dick Harte was having sex with both of them.”

“There are no reports of missing kids from anywhere near Great Neck.”

“He’s got wheels. There are kids everywhere.”

Cat said, “I don’t quite figure Dick Harte as somebody who drives around looking for little boys to have sex with.”

“Happens all the time.”

“I know. I’m talking about a feeling, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Pete said. “Dick Harte is a God-fearing family man who’s never touched anybody but his two wives. Why does the kid pick him?”

“I’m just throwing this out. I predict that sooner or later we’ll track a missing and find a father who’s been torturing his boys all their lives. Older one gets to an age and decides it’s got to stop, somebody’s got to pay. But he can’t bring himself to kill his father. He picks some guy who looks like his father. Same age and weight.”

“Possible.”

“If the kids weren’t local, if they weren’t the sons of people the Hartes knew, it suggests they were the kind of boys who could be picked up by a stranger in a car.”

“Which happens all the time,” Pete said.

“Absolutely. But something in these kids’ voices, especially the second one…I don’t picture them hanging around a park, waiting for some guy to pull up in an expensive car and suck their dicks for ten dollars. It doesn’t click for me.”

“Hey, you’re the one with the pee-aitch-dee.”

“For all the good it’s done me.”

“So you think the guy they really want to kill is their father.”

“Don’t hold me to it.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“I predict we’ll find a citizen who’s so stressed about his oldest boy running away he’s been torturing the younger one double. The kid’ll turn out to have been privy to the plan, he’ll be taken from his fucked-up home to a differently fucked-up home, where he’ll live and get treatment until he’s old enough to go out and get a job and have a family and start torturing his own sons.”

“You take a dim view,” he said.

“And you don’t?”

“Why would a kid like that quote poetry?”

“Good question. Are they checking Whitman for that ‘in the family’ shit?”

“All done. It’s not from Whitman.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah.”

She spent the day waiting for a call that never came. It was funny—she usually felt grotesquely popular here on the job. She was sought-after. Today she just sat by the phone, begging it to ring, like a high school girl in love.

She tracked down a Whitman scholar at NYU, one Rita Dunn, and made an appointment for tomorrow morning. Otherwise, she killed time. Filed a few more things. Got to some old reports that had been languishing in a bottom drawer.

She stayed an extra hour, then packed it in. She had her cell, of course—if the kid called back, they could patch him straight through to her wherever she was. She walked home through the dusk of another perfect June day among citizens who refused to shed their habits of looking suspicious to her. The guy nervously unloading boxes from a bakery truck, the jogger in Princeton sweats, even the blind man tapping along with his cane—they all seemed like potentials. They were, in fact, all potentials. Everyone was. The trick was to keep living with the conviction that almost everyone was actually harmless. It was the job’s central irony. If you weren’t careful, you could get as paranoid as the people you dealt with.

We’re all the same person. We all want the same things.

Her apartment felt particularly small. It had a way of expanding or contracting, depending on how the day went. Today it struck her as ludicrous, these little rooms in which she, an expensively educated thirty-eight-year-old woman, found herself living. Remember: it’s a prize. In today’s market, a dinky one-bedroom on Fifth Street cost a grand and a half, minimum. Be grateful for your rent-controlled life. Embrace the fact that you live above the poverty line.

She went to pour herself a vodka, decided against it. Better stay stone-cold sober, in case the kid should call. She made herself a cup of tea instead, took her Whitman down from the shelf, and curled up on the love seat with it.

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Whitman, Walt. She hadn’t thought about him, really, since college. Yes, she was an avid reader, but she wasn’t the kind of person who sat home at night and read poetry for pleasure. She knew the basics: America’s great visionary poet, alive sometime in the 1800s, produced in his long life this one enormous book, which he kept revising and expanding the way another man might endlessly remodel and add onto his house. Big, white Santa Claus beard, floppy hat. Liked boys.

He liked boys, didn’t he? Was that true? She paged through the book.

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,

Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly,

Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

Right. What else?

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,

Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,

It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

Would the kid have read that? Maybe, maybe not. He’d quoted from the opening stanza, nothing more. A smart kid picked up all kinds of things.

Still, there was something sexual about this. A boy embraces an older man and blows them both up.

We’re all the same person. We all want the same things.

She kept hearing his voice in her head. Giving a kidlike perfor-mance, she thought. A child who was doing his best to act like a child.

Yet she didn’t feel the murder in him. The kid was, of course, crazy by definition. But still, she prided herself on a certain ability to suss out the truly dangerous. She couldn’t name the specifics, though there were plenty of well-documented signs. This was something else. A flavor, a whiff. A buzz—that was the best term she had for it. As if she could hear the tiny sound being made by a bad connection, the particular bit of faulty wiring that made murder more than just a fantasy.

It was complicated by the fact that every now and then, some of them were right. The tobacco companies had discovered a secret ingredient to make cigarettes more addictive. The North Koreans had been kidnapping Japanese tourists to educate their spies about the particulars of Japanese customs. Those noises coming from the apartment next door were in fact being made by a full-grown tiger.

She heard a noise in the hallway, right outside her door. A scraping. Something. Like a heel dragging across the tile. It was probably Arthur next door, pausing for an emphysemic breath before stumbling on, but she knew the sounds Arthur made; she knew all the ordinary sounds the tenants produced in the hallways. This one wasn’t familiar.

She raised her head from the book. She listened.

There it was again. A furtive, scrabbling sound. If this were the country, it might have been an opossum, scratching at the shingles.

The country—teeth out there in the dark?

She got up, went and stood by the door. Nothing now. Still, she was shaky. A little shaky. Given the times. She didn’t have a gun, being deterrence. Had never wanted one. Now she wondered.

She said “Hello?” and was embarrassed by the girlish fear in her voice. Fuck that. Fuck them if they wanted her meek. She opened the door.

No one. Just the ordinary drear of the corridor, its brackish aquarium light, its tiles the color of decayed teeth. She stepped out and took a proper look. Empty. The sound had probably been coming from the street or through the wall from the other next-door apartment (where the druggy, dreamy young couple in residence were always engaged in some mysterious project that involved endless little tappings and draggings). There was no one and nothing.

It took her another moment to see what was on the wall opposite her door. In white chalk, in perfect if slightly labored grade-school cursive, someone had written, TO DIE IS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT ANY ONE SUPPOSES, AND LUCKIER.

 

Neither Pete nor the FBI boys could offer much. They questioned the neighbors, of course, and of course nobody knew anything, had seen anyone untoward, or etcetera. As every tenant knew, it was semichallenging but not impossible to get into the labyrinth of alleys and dumping grounds behind the building and slip in through the broken back door. The building’s denizens had recently observed the fifth anniversary of their ongoing attempts to get the landlord to fix it.

Pete stood in Cat’s living room, sweating majestically, sipping the espresso she’d made for him.

“How’s the coffee?” she asked.

“Strong.”

“Only way I know how to make it.”

“I’m frankly at a loss about how this asshole figured out where you live.”

“There are about a dozen ways.”

“Right.”

This was one of the surprises—there were no elaborate systems for keeping cops anonymous. That was movie stuff. Matter of fact, the systems that did exist, for the higher-level grunts, didn’t work all that well. Just about anybody with true determination and a computer could track down a cop or an FBI agent or an auditor with the IRS, knock on the door one night, and deliver a lethal message. Only the biggest bosses had protection.

Pete said, “You want one of the guys to stay with you tonight? Or would you rather go to a hotel?”

“I can spend the night at Simon’s.”

“If they’ve got your address here, they may know about him, too.”

“Simon’s building is probably safer than FBI headquarters. Some exiled king lives in one of the penthouses, plus a few very kidnappable CEOs.”

“Have you called him?”

“I was just about to. He should be done with his client by now.”

“Call him. I want to get you settled somewhere.”

She dialed Simon on her cell. She told him the story.

“My God,” he said.

“I am, in fact, a little rattled,” she told him.

“Come right over.”

“I will.”

Pete took her. They left the FBI boys lifting the ten thousand fingerprints from every inch of the premises. Who knew? Maybe they’d come up with something.

Pete walked her into the lobby of Simon’s building on Franklin. He whistled softly over the maple paneling, the silent explosion of pink lilies on the concierge’s desk.

“Fat,” he said under his breath.

She announced herself to Joseph, the supremely capable Korean doorman.

“ ’Night,” she said to Pete.

“Must be nice,” he said.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” she answered curtly. She was in no mood right now.

“Right. See you in the morning.”

Simon was waiting for her upstairs. He held her. She was surprised to realize that she might start weeping, not so much from exhaustion or nerves but from the sheer joy of having someone to go to.

“Unbelievable,” he whispered.

“Unbelievable,” she said.

She sat on his sofa, declined his offer of a drink. She loved his apartment, felt appropriately guilty for loving it, but loved it all the same. Four big rooms on the twenty-second floor, twelve-foot ceilings. The people walking the streets below, trying to find the least bruised bananas at the corner market, hoping not to get hit by cabs—they had no idea what hovered over them, these oases of granite and ebony, these sanctuaries. The scorched plains rose to alpine peaks, where the wizards lived. Up here it was temple lights and a sequestered, snowy hush.

Simon was a collector. Nineteenth-century maps, Chinese pottery, vintage toys, and music boxes. Cat kept meaning to ask him: Why those particular objects, out of all the things in the world? She hadn’t asked. She preferred the mystery. Simon bought and sold futures. He saw some particular significance in maps, pots, and playthings. She liked it that way. She spent enough time searching for explanations at work.

Simon sat beside her. “What happens now?” he said.

She saw the spark in his eyes. He was turned on.

“They’re checking out my building. I don’t expect them to find anything.”

“How can they not find anything?”

“There are thousands of fingerprints in a building like mine. And…Well. It’s time you knew. We’re not really all that good at this. We work very, very hard. But a lot of the time we just end up arresting the wrong person, and that person goes to jail, and everybody feels safer.”

Simon paused, nodding. He seemed unsurprised, or had decided to act unsurprised. He said, “The pay-phone thing is funny, isn’t it? Why not a cell?”

“Cell phones have owners. This is brilliant, in its way. Low-tech is the best way to go. You pump a few coins in, say your piece, and run. We can’t watch every pay phone in the five boroughs. These little fuckers are smart.”

“Do you think you’ll catch him?” Simon asked.

“We have to. We can’t screw up something this big.”

“And your role is?”

“To go back to work in the morning and wait for another call.”

“That’s it?”

“For now, yes.”

He was disappointed, naturally. He wanted her careening around in an unmarked car. He wanted her cracking the case, saving the day. It was not sexy or interesting, her waiting by the phone. It was—just say it—too maternal.

She said, “I was reading Whitman. At the same time some maniac was writing a line from Whitman on the wall outside my door.”

“I’ve never read Whitman,” he said.

Of course you haven’t. You’re Cedar Rapids. You’re Cornell and a Harvard MBA. Your people don’t do poetry. They don’t need to.

Stop.

She said, “Chapman was carrying a copy of Catcher in the Rye when he shot John Lennon.”

“Why do you think the kid would choose Whitman?”

“I’m trying to figure that out.”

“Why did Chapman choose Salinger?”

“Well, I’d say it was to feed his own narcissistic sense of himself as a sensitive loner. He identified with Holden Caulfield. Holden was right, and the rest of the world was wrong. Other people might think it was a bad idea to kill John Lennon, but Chapman thought he knew better.”

“You think your kid feels the same way about Whitman?”

“I don’t know. I’m talking to a Whitman person at NYU tomorrow.”

“You tired?”

“God, yes.”

“Let’s go to bed.”

 

Cat slipped under the covers while Simon was still in the bathroom, performing his rituals. Simon’s bedroom was the sanctum sanctorum, the vault where the best stash was kept. Along the south wall, shelves offered row upon row of vases and plates and ginger jars, pale green and lunar gray. On the opposite wall a collection of old banks and music boxes looked back across at the pottery. Cast-iron Uncle Sams and horse-drawn fire trucks and dancing bears, carved boxes that still contained the favorite songs of people a hundred years dead. Little toys, behold the perfect serenity of a thousand-year-old jar. Pottery, never forget how much humans have always loved a sentimental song and the sound of a coin put by.

Cat let herself sink into the fat pillows, the zillion-thread-count sheets. Of course she liked it. Why wouldn’t she? She’d gotten here by chance. If she and Simon hadn’t happened to go to Citarella at the same time (they had the best crab cakes; she’d had a craving for crab cakes), if it hadn’t been raining, if they hadn’t hailed the same cab at the same moment…

Just like that. Just that quick and easy. A little banter in the cab’s backseat. (You sell the future? That is heavy shit. You talk to murderers? No, that is heavy shit.) A cup of coffee and that thing he did with his thumbs, hooking them around the cup rim, tapping out a little tattoo. He had pretty thumbs (she was a sucker for men’s hands) and a way of tucking in his lower lip—that was what made it happen, initially. Soon after, he proved to be one of those men who cared if a girl had a good time, and she appreciated that. Okay, he was more focused than passionate, his lovemaking had some hint of the deal about it (got to close this one, got to keep the customer satisfied), but still, he was sweet in bed, and she’d thought she could loosen him up, with time. There was his beetle-browed determination to see her come; there was the impossible beauty and sureness of his fat, white propitious life. His collections and his deep leather sofas, his gigantic chrome showerhead. Which had mattered more at first, the thumbs and lips and conscientious sex or the gear?

The man. She wasn’t like that. She’d never gone for rich guys, even young, when she was proper bait.

But still, here she was, safe, in this bedroom, high above the streets. It was—admit it—a little fucked up. Probably. It was a little bit cold. Wasn’t it? She gave him street cred; she tickled his edgy bone. She made him more complicated. He gave her, well…this.

And love. She did in fact love him, and he seemed to love her, too. She’d gone years without anything she could call love. She hadn’t expected Simon or anyone like him, but here he was. Here were his thumbs and lips and eyebrows; here were his gravitas and prosperity; here was his secret self, that tiny, harmed, indignant quality she sensed in him, thought she detected on his face as he slept.

Simon came out of the bathroom naked, got into bed beside her. He said, “Do you think the kid will call again?”

“It’s hard to say.”

“You must have some idea, don’t you?”

She said, “Once a perpetrator has initiated contact like this, odds are he’ll want to reestablish.”

Screw it, talk dirty to him. You’re too tired to resist.

“That figures,” he said.

“What you try to do,” she told him, “is supplant the existing object. If you’re lucky, if you’re very lucky, you can become the person he loves and wants to destroy. He starts redirecting all that feeling to you.”

Shameless. Not even true. Just sex talk.

“Like you would in therapy,” Simon said.

“Yes and no. You need to be compassionate but authoritative with someone like this. Somebody like this usually wants a boss. A voice in his head is telling him to do things he suspects he shouldn’t do. He wants a new voice. That’s probably why he called in the first place.”

Was that enough? Now could they just have sex, or not have sex, and go to sleep?

He said, “So, you try to become the voice in his head?”

He ran a pink fingertip precisely along her forearm, as if he were reading Braille. They could make one beautiful baby together, no denying it. Caramel-colored skin, head of billowy curls. Cat was probably still young enough. Maybe she was.

“Yeah,” she said. “As opposed to the aliens, or the CIA, or whoever.”

“You try to be the new, better delusion.”

“Right. And if that doesn’t work, you track the fucker down and blow him away.”

That did it. Simon kissed her and worked his hand up to her breast.

 

She woke at a quarter to four. She gave it five minutes, on the off chance, then slipped out of bed. She went into the living room, took Leaves of Grass from her bag, and started reading.

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,

And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,

And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral, drest in his shroud,

And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth,

And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times,

And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,

And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,

And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

She put the book down and went to the window, looked out at the slumbering city. From here it was all lovely and remote, twenty-two stories below. It was lights and silence and the few stars bright enough to penetrate the city haze. There were the windows of Tribeca and then the empty sky.

Where was the kid right now? Was he sleeping? She had a feeling he was not. She imagined him out there, as wide-awake as she was; he might be looking through a window of his own.

Luke would be twelve now. Since he died she’d been sure he was somewhere; she’d known it as deeply as she’d known his presence inside her, shortly after conception. She’d never been religious. She hadn’t allowed grief to send her crawling to the church. That might have helped, but she hadn’t had it in her; it had seemed if anything like a final insult, to concoct sudden hysterical convictions about what she’d spent her childhood escaping. All right, take my baby, but don’t expect me to don the veil and kneel before the statue. Don’t expect me to clap my hands or raise my voice in song. If she’d done that, she’d have lost herself completely.

And yet, Luke wasn’t gone. She had no idea where he might be. He wasn’t in heaven, and he wasn’t a ghost, but he was somewhere. He had not evaporated. She knew it with gut-level certainty. It was her only belief. That, and the workings of justice in a dangerous world.

Danger—our true parent?

Where do the dead live?

These curtains—can Simon really be straight?

She slipped into bed just before sunrise. She wasn’t sleepy, not even a little bit, but if she simulated sleepiness, if she acted like someone about to fall asleep, she could sometimes fool herself. Simon breathed steadily beside her, murmured over a dream. He never had trouble sleeping. She tried not to hate him for that.

She was still wide-awake when her cell went off. It was ten minutes after six.

“This is Cat Martin.”

“Cat, I’ve got your caller. I’m patching him through.”

It was Erna, from downtown. Cat’s heart quickened. Simon opened his eyes, blinked uncertainly. She put her finger to her lips.

She said, “Go ahead, Erna.”

There was the brief electronic hiccup of the transfer. Then there was his voice.

“Hello?”

He sounded even younger than she’d remembered.

“Hello. Who’s this?”

“Um. I called before.”

“Yes.”

Keep it calm. Keep it matter-of-fact.

“I could get in trouble,” he said.

“You’re not in any trouble at all, not if you let me help you. Did you write something on a wall last night?”

“What?”

“Did you write something for me last night? On a wall?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“What were you trying to tell me?”

“Well. What it said.”

Simon was sitting up now, watching her, wide-eyed.

“Do you think it’s lucky to die?” she asked. “Do you think dying is a good thing?”

“I don’t think I want to yet,” the boy said.

“Who is it who wants you to die?”

“That’s how it works. I didn’t know. It’s murder, if you don’t go, too.”

“Is somebody telling you to hurt yourself?”

“I beat and pound for the dead.”

“That’s Whitman, isn’t it?” she said.

“Who?”

“Walt Whitman. Did you learn those words from Walt Whitman?”

“No. Walt doesn’t talk like that.”

“Where did you learn them, then?”

“They’re from home.”

“Listen to me. Listen very carefully. Someone is telling you to do things that are bad for you, that are bad for other people. It’s not your fault. Someone is hurting you. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come there and help you.”

“I can’t.”

“You don’t need to be afraid. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of, but you have to let me help you. Tell me where you’re calling from. You can tell me that. It’s all right.”

“The next one is today.”

“Tell me what he’s making you do. You don’t have to do it.”

“I have to go.”

“Don’t go. You’re in trouble, and it’s not your fault. I can help you.”

“Do you think a great city endures?”

“What do you think?”

“Goodbye.”

He hung up.

Simon said, “That was him.” He all but quivered with fervent competence.

“It was him.”

“What did he say?

“Just sit tight a minute, okay?”

Her cell went off, as she’d known it would. It was Pete.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

“Where was he?”

“Pay phone in Bed-Stuy.”

“They’re doing another one today.”

“So he says. What do you think?”

“Off the top of my head, I’d say I’m not sure.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“I’d say he’s serious.”

“I’d say so, too. What was all that shit about Walt?”

“Frankly, you’ve got me there. The little fucker seems to have memorized the whole book.”

“He says the words are from home. What’s that about?”

“They’re loose, Pete. As you know.”

“How soon can you be in the office?”

“Twenty minutes. Give or take.”

“See you there.”

She clicked off. Simon stared at her, all executive readiness.

“Got to get to work,” she said.

“Right,” he said.

He was so fucking gorgeous like this, he who was a potent figure in his own circles but a spectator in this one, a wife if you will, lying here looking at her with those impossible agate eyes of his, hair electrically disordered, face bristling with stubble. It seemed for a moment that she could stop, she could just stop; she could blow off her job and move with Simon into his realm, his high-octane but undangerous life, the hush and sureness of him, buying and selling the future, seeking out maps and jars and bringing them home. She was on her way to a grim office where the equipment was outdated and the air-conditioning prone to failure, where most of her coworkers were right-wing zealots or B students or just too peculiar for the corporate jobs that claimed the best and the brightest; where the villains were as pathetic and off-kilter as the heroes; where the whole struggle between order and chaos had no beauty in it, no philosophy or poetry; where death itself felt cheap and cheesy. She wanted—how could she possibly tell him?—to take shelter in Simon, to live peacefully alongside him in his spiky and careless beauty, his electrified contentment. She wanted to abandon herself, to abide. But of course he wouldn’t want her that way.

She got out of bed. “Call you later,” she said.

“Right,” he answered.

They both paused. Now would be the time for one of them to say “I love you.” If they were at that point.

“Bye,” she said.

“Bye,” he answered.

 

It was Halloween at the office. She’d never felt the air so agitated. This was what never actually happened: a psychopath announcing his intentions, with every indication of follow-through. This was movie stuff.

Ed was just shy of coming in his pants. His hair, what was left of it, seemed to be standing on end. “Hot damn,” he said.

“They find anything in Bed-Stuy?” she asked.

“Nope. I wish I could talk to him.”

“And what would you say?”

“I think he needs a father figure.”

“Do you?”

“Don’t be offended. You’re doing a fine job with him.”

“In my way.”

“No offense. I just think maybe a guy could get more out of him. It’s the luck of the draw, him calling here and attaching to you.”

“You don’t think a woman is as effective with him?”

“Hey. Don’t get all Angela Davis on me.”

Ed was one of the new breed, the guys who seemed to think that if they were right up front about their sexism and racism, if they walked in and sat down and just said it, they were at least semi-absolved. That if racism was inevitable, it was better, it was more manly and honorable, to be candid. She, frankly, preferred secrecy.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said.

“A bad dad is telling him to do bad things. A good dad might have a better chance of telling him to do good things. A mother figure doesn’t have the same authority. She’s a refuge. She can’t contradict the bad dad. She can only console.”

“I can’t tell you how much I hope you’re wrong about that.”

“I hope so, too. We’re going to get this little fucker.”

Ed had the killer buzz in his voice. He had the pure, shining conviction of the almost smart. When Ed went on like this, Cat heard the ping inside her head. Here was a true murderer.

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to get him.”

Pete came into the cubicle, with black coffee for her.

“You’re sweet,” she said.

“We’re nowhere,” he told her.

“We’re never nowhere.”

“They’ve run dental records on more than two thousand missing kids. They got no matches to the teeth we found.”

“Disappointing.”

“It’s like that first kid appeared out of thin air.”

“Or nobody knows or cares that the first kid is missing.”

“I know, I know. It’s funny, though.”

“I agree. It’s funny.”

Ed broke in. “Or somebody never cared enough to send their kid to a dentist.”

“Always a possibility,” Cat said. “Have you noticed how he starts to disintegrate as he gets agitated?”

“Go on,” Pete said.

“His coherence fades. He starts throwing out lines from Whitman. Or, as he would say, from home.”

“He gets more and more random,” Ed offered.

“Maybe,” Cat said. “Or maybe, in his mind, he gets less and less random. I have a feeling that the poem is his language. It’s what’s in his head. Maybe it’s more of a stretch for him to say something like ‘I’m afraid to die’ than it is to say ‘Do you think a great city endures?’ ”

“That sounds like a bit of a stretch, to me,” Ed said.

Cat wanted to say, I have a feeling, but she couldn’t say that kind of thing in front of Ed. He’d use it against her. She was the girl with the degree from Columbia, who’d read more books than all of the men put together, who’d gone into forensics because she hadn’t managed to establish a private practice. She was overaggressive and underqualified. She was someone who relied on feelings.

She said, “It’s just an idea, Ed. This seems like an excellent time for us to give free rein to our ideas, wouldn’t you say?”

Queenly bearing, schoolmarm diction. She really had to quit that. Problem was, it worked. Most of the time.

“Sure, sure,” Ed said. “Absolutely.”

“There’s something strange about the kid’s associations,” she said. Back to regular voice. “It’s like he’s programmed. A concept trips a wire, and he’s got the line, but he hasn’t got the circuitry to make sense of it. He’s like a vessel for someone else’s wishes. The poetry signifies something for him, but he’s not able to say what it is.”

“I thought we’d have a trace by now,” Pete said. “These are kids.”

“Someone is putting them up to it,” Cat said.

“I don’t know,” Ed said. “No one’s taken any credit yet.”

Cat said, “Unless whoever it is wants these kids to call in. Unless that’s his way of taking credit.”

Pete said, “I started that Whitman book last night. Can’t make head or tails of it, frankly.”

“I’m seeing a woman at NYU later today.”

“Good.”

“What more do we know about Dick Harte?” Cat asked.

“A lot,” Pete answered. “But nothing’s jumping out. No history with boys. Or girls, even. Nothing we can find. It’s all pretty standard. Went to law school—”

“Where?”

“Cardozo. Not Harvard. Practiced for a few years, then went into real estate. Married a decent girl, got rich, dumped the decent girl and married a new decent girl but prettier. Had two pretty children with wife number two. Big house in Great Neck, country place in Westhampton. All in all, a very regular guy.”

“Apart from all that money,” Cat said.

“Right. But it’s real estate. He didn’t have sweatshops. His employees didn’t love him, but they didn’t hate him, either. They got their salaries. They got their benefits. They got Christmas bonuses every year, plus a party at the Rihga Royal.”

“In my experience,” Cat said, “very few rich people have no enemies.”

“His enemies were all on his level. Basic business rivalries, guys he outbid, guys he undersold. But these people didn’t hate him. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a club. Dick Harte was one of the less sleazy members.”

“What about the son who had to be sent away to school in Vermont?”

“Just a troubled kid. Got into drugs, grades started slipping. Mom and Dad shipped him off to the country. I’m sure they weren’t happy about it, but it doesn’t seem like any big deal.”

“What was Dick Harte up to at Ground Zero?” Cat asked.

“He was one of a group of honchos pushing for more retail and office space in the rebuild. As opposed to those who favor a memorial and a park.”

“That might be a big deal to any number of people,” Cat said.

“But to a ten-year-old?”

“This is a ten-year-old who’s memorized Leaves of Grass.”

“A freak,” Ed added.

“Or maybe a savant,” Cat said.

“The one doesn’t necessarily rule out the other,” Pete said.

“No,” Cat answered. “It doesn’t.”

 

She spent the morning waiting in her cubicle, hoping for another call. Who were the great waiters in literature?

Penelope—waiting for Odysseus, undoing her weaving every night

Rapunzel, in her tower

Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and all the other comatose princesses

She couldn’t think of any stories about men whose job it was to wait. But as Ed had put it, Hey, don’t get all Angela Davis on me. She’d do her best.

She listened to the tape, several times. She looked through Leaves of Grass.

They prepare for death, yet are they not the finish, but rather the outset,

They bring none to his or her terminus or to be content and full,

Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars, to learn one of the meanings,

To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.

Little boy. Who do you want to take into space to behold the birth of stars?

 

At ten-thirty, she tossed her cell into her bag and went over to Rita Dunn’s office at NYU. Dunn was in a building on Waverly. One of these buildings, Cat had never been quite sure which, had been that sweatshop, where the fire was. She knew the story only vaguely—the exits had been blocked to keep the workers from sneaking out early. Something like that. There’d been a fire, and all those women were trapped inside. Some of them had jumped. From one of these buildings—was it the one she was entering?—women with their dresses on fire had fallen, had hit this pavement right here or the pavement just down the street. Now it was all NYU. Now it was students and shoppers, a coffeehouse and a bookstore that sold NYU sweatshirts.

Cat went up to the ninth floor and announced herself to the department secretary, who nodded her down the hall.

Rita Dunn turned out to be red-haired, mid-forties, wearing a green silk jacket and heavy makeup. Dark eyeliner, blush expertly applied. Around her neck, a strand of amber beads just slightly smaller than billiard balls. She looked more like a retired figure skater than she did like a professor of literature.

“Hello,” Cat said. She gave Rita Dunn a moment to adjust. No one ever said, You didn’t sound black over the phone. Everybody thought it.

“Hello,” Rita responded, and pumped Cat’s hand enthusiastically. People loved talking to cops when they weren’t in trouble.

“Thanks for taking the time to see me.”

“Glad to. Sit.”

She gestured Cat into a squeaky leatherette chair across from her desk, seated herself behind the desk. Her office was a chaos of books and papers (disorderly sister). On the wall behind her, a poster of Whitman—great lightbulb of old-man nose, small dark eyes looking out from the cottony crackle of beard and hair. In the window of Rita Dunn’s office, a spider plant dangled its fronds before the vista of Washington Square Park. Had seamstresses once huddled at that window, trapped by flames? Had they stood on that sill and jumped?

“So,” Rita Dunn said. “You want to know a thing or two about Mr. Whitman.”

“I do.”

“May I ask what exactly you’re looking for?”

“Relating to a case I’m investigating.”

“Does it have to do with the explosion?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t discuss the details.”

“I understand. A case involving Walt Whitman. Is he in trouble?”

“I know it’s unusual.”

Rita Dunn steepled her fingers, touched them to her mahogany-red lips. Cat felt, abruptly, the force of her attention. It was palpable, a clicking-on, a jewel-like zap that rose in her perfectly outlined eyes. Right, Cat thought. You dress like this to fool the men, don’t you? You’re a stealth fighter.

“I like the unusual,” Rita said. “I like it very much. Can you give me a hint about where to begin?”

“Let’s say this. Could you give me some idea about Whitman’s message to his readers?”

“His message was complicated.”

“Got that. Just tell me whatever comes to mind.”

“Hm. Do you know anything about him at all?”

“A little. I read him in college. I’ve been reading him again.”

“Well. Okay. Whitman as you probably know was the first great American visionary poet. He didn’t just celebrate himself. He celebrated everybody and everything.”

“Right.”

“He spent his life, and it was a long life, extending and revising Leaves of Grass. He published it himself. The first edition appeared in 1855. There were nine editions in all. The last, which he called his deathbed edition, appeared in 1891. You could say that he was writing the poem that was the United States.”

“Which he loved.”

“Which he did love.”

“Would you call him patriotic, then?”

“It’s not quite the right term for Whitman, I don’t think. Homer loved Greece, but does the word ‘patriotic’ feel right for him? I think not. A great poet is never anything quite so provincial.”

She picked up a pearl-handled letter opener, ran a fingertip along the blade. Aristocrats with tentative claims to thrones might have been just this impeccably overdressed, Cat thought. They might have possessed this underlayer of fierce, cordial vigilance.

Cat said, “But might someone, reading him today, interpret him as patriotic? Could Leaves of Grass be read as some sort of extended national anthem?”

“Well, you wouldn’t believe some of the interpretations I’ve heard. But really, Whitman was an ecstatic. He was a dervish of sorts. Patriotism, don’t you think, implies a certain fixed notion of right versus wrong. Whitman simply loved what was.”

“Indiscriminately.”

“Yes and no. He believed in destiny. He imagined that the redwood tree was glad for the ax because it was the tree’s destiny to be cut down.”

“So he had no particular sense of good and evil.”

“He understood life to be transitory. He was not particularly concerned about mortality.”

“Right,” Cat said.

“Is that helpful?”

“Mm-hm. Does the phrase ‘In the family’ mean anything to you?”

“Do you mean, do I recognize it from Whitman?”

“It’s not from Whitman.”

“I thought not. Though I can’t claim to know every single line.”

“Does it suggest anything to you?”

“Not really. Could you put it in some sort of context?”

“Say, as a declaration. If somebody said to you, ‘I’m in the family.’ In light of Whitman.”

“Well. Whitman empathized with everyone. In Whitman there are no insignificant lives. There are mill owners and mill workers, there are great ladies and prostitutes, and he refuses to favor any of them. He finds them all worthy and fascinating. He finds them all miraculous.”

“The way, say, a parent refuses to favor one child over the others?”

“I suppose you could say that, yes.”

“What about the idea of working for a company?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“If somebody said, ‘We all work for the company.’ In light of Whitman.”

“Hmm. I could go out on a limb a little, I suppose.”

“Please do.”

“Well. When Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the industrial revolution was well under way. People who had lived on farms for generations were all moving to the cities in hopes of getting rich.”

“And…”

“A handful did in fact get rich. Almost everybody else worked twelve-hour shifts in factories, six days a week. It was the end of the agrarian world and the beginning of the mechanized one. Do you know that universal time didn’t exist until around the late 1800s? It was two o’clock in one village, three o’clock in another. It wasn’t until the transcontinental railroads that we all had to agree on when it was two and when it was three, so people could make their trains. It took a full generation just to convince people that they had to show up at work every single day at the same hour.”

“Everybody worked for the company, in a manner of speaking.”

“You could say that. But, really, it’s impossible to pin a poet like Whitman down this way. Was he writing about industrialization? Yes, he was. Was he writing about family? Certainly. And he was also writing about logging and sex and the westward expansion. You can go at him from just about any angle and find something that seems to support some thesis or other.”

“I see.”

“ ‘Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.’ I’m afraid that if you insist on too much focus here or there, you miss the larger point.”

Cat said, “ ‘To die is different from what any one supposes, and luckier.’ ”

“You know your Whitman, then.”

“Just a line or two. I shouldn’t take up any more of your time.”

“I don’t think I’ve been very helpful.”

She rose graciously, a compassionate duchess who’d reached the limits of her ability to intercede in the coarser mysteries of the world, its infestations and calamitous weather. There were afflictions that were probably best addressed by local methods—by chants and ritual burnings, the drawing of pentagrams.

“May I ask you one more question?” Cat said. “It’s not related to Whitman.”

“By all means.”

“Is this where that fire was, the one that killed all those women? Was it this building?”

“No, actually, that building is around the corner. It’s part of the biochemistry department now.”

Cat rose and went to the window. It was all calmness below. It was students hurrying to class and, at the end of the block, the leaf-shimmer of Washington Square Park.

 

She called Pete on her cell when she got to the street.

“Ashberry.”

“I just talked to the Whitman person.”

“She tell you anything?”

“It seems you could interpret him as some sort of voice for the status quo. As in, if you worked at some awful job in a factory, twelve hours a day, six days a week, here was Whitman to tell you that your life was great, your life was poetry, you were a king in your own world.”

“You think the kid thinks that?”

“I think somebody thinks that. I think somebody is speaking through the kid.”

“You on your way back in?”

“I am.”

“See you.”

Pete was waiting in her cubicle when she arrived. He didn’t ask about Whitman. He said, “Dick Harte’s wife just gave us a little something.”

“What?”

“He woke up in the middle of the night, the night before he was killed. Said he heard a noise.”

“A noise?”

“One of those middle-of-the-night things.”

“He was scared?”

“She didn’t say scared. She said he said he heard a noise. She said he said he was going to go see what it was.”

“She was scared.”

“Yeah. But she takes a little something to help her sleep. She doesn’t rouse easily, it seems.”

“And?”

“And he got up, left the bedroom. Was gone maybe ten minutes. Came back, said it was nothing, the two of them went back to sleep.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Pete said.

“You think it means anything?”

“Probably not. What do you think?”

“Hard to say. Probably not.”

“At least she’s talking now.”

“The daughter?”

“Still in the ozone. Seriously unhinged.”

“What’s up with the son?”

“Mondo cooperative. Scary cooperative. Boy detective seems to like his sudden fame.”

“As people do.”

“He’s a piece of work, as it turns out. Serious drug history, lately turned to Jesus. That school in Vermont’s a jail, basically, for rich kids.”

“Interesting.”

“Semi-interesting. You don’t think the son’s involved, do you?”

“No. I don’t.”

“We’re not going to get anything from the family, I don’t think. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything to get.”

“Probably right,” she said.

And yet, an image crept into her mind. She pictured Dick Harte roused from sleep, walking through a big, dark house in his pajamas (he’d have worn pajamas, wouldn’t he; a balding fifty-three-year-old with no record of drug use or illicit sex, a man who paid his bills on time, whose pretty wife number two sent herself to Pluto every night with the help of a few key pharmaceuticals), tracking down a suspicious nocturnal sound. What would it have been like, being Dick Harte? Was he satisfied; was he prospering in his heart? Had he had a premonition that night, out there in the stately abundance of Great Neck? Cat imagined him going down the staircase, walking barefoot over parquet and Oriental rugs, finding nothing amiss, but wondering. She pictured him going to a window—make it a living-room window, Thermopane, with heavy brocade window treatments (the wife was a decorator, right?); say it looked out onto an expanse of black lawn, with hedges and rosebushes and the dark glitter of a pool. She saw Dick standing at the window, looking out. She saw him understanding—he would sense more than see it—that a child stood on his lawn, a boy, skinny and erect and alert, crazy and worshipful: a sentinel, watching Dick Harte’s slumbering house the way a guerrilla fighter might take a last look at a village, its lamps extinguished and its people dreaming, before he set it on fire. The child would have vanished immediately, nothing more than a child-shaped shadow that resolved itself into a patch of darkness where a rosebush bore no blooms. Dick would have shrugged it off, gone back to bed, assured his zonked-out wife that there was nothing to fear.

Pete said, “Just wanted to let you know. See you later.”

“I’ll be right here. At my loom.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. See you later.”

She sat at her desk, resumed her waiting. Was it possible that the kid had gone out to Dick Harte’s house, to see his deathmate at home? Unlikely. She was projecting. Say it: you want Luke to be out there in the dark, watching you. You want that, and you fear it. She couldn’t help imagining herself looking down at Fifth Street from her own window, late at night, and seeing him on the pavement, three years old, staring up at her window. There he’d be, dark-eyed, curious, prone to fits of inexplicable laughter, a little bit pigeon-toed, devoted to trucks and to anything red.

Would he be loving? Or would he be furious? Would he have forgiven her?

A nick in your heart. The settlement from the doctor sent me to Columbia. Which got me here.

What had she done to merit forgiveness? Nothing came immediately to mind.

 

It happened at ten minutes to five.

Cat heard it first from Aaron, the audio guy. He raced by her cubicle, stuck his small, otterish head in.

“There’s been another one,” he said.

“What?”

“It just came in. Central Park.”

“What do you know?”

“Looks like the same thing. Bomb. Right by Bethesda Fountain.”

He ran on. Cat bolted up out of her chair, ran into Pete on her way into the hall.

“Fuck,” Pete said.

“What do we know?”

“Central fucking Park. Bethesda fucking Fountain.”

“A kid?”

“Don’t know yet. I’m on my way up there.”

“I’m coming, too.”

“You can’t. You’re here.”

Right. She was on phone duty. There was no telling who might call, and her call would pick up background noise if she went to the site. She knew better than to argue.

“Keep me posted,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She returned to her cubicle.

He’d done it, then. The little fucker had walked up to someone in the park and taken them both to behold the birth of stars.

She remained. There was nothing else for her to do. The office rocked and roiled around her; she was its still center. News filtered in. Victim was one Henry Coles, African-American, age twenty-two, married but separated. One son, five years old, who lived with the mother. Worked at Burger King. Perpetrator, according to witnesses, was a kid, eleven or twelve, wearing a Mets jersey and some sort of cap. Henry Coles had been out for a stroll, just sucking up a little light and air before his shift started. Kid came up behind him, hugged him, and detonated.

Fuck.

Cat heard snatches of the phone conversations going on in other cubicles. There was no lag factor today—the citizens of the Bizarro Dimension were seriously unnerved. Why do you think the government would want to do this? Do you, personally, know members of Al Qaeda? When did your television first start warning you about the Aryan Nation?

Cat’s phone did not ring. She waited. There was nothing else for her to do.

She thought about Henry Coles, brother from another planet. Or rather, from another country here on her own planet. She did not of course know Henry Coles, and if Ed Short or anyone like him had dared to generalize about the poor annihilated motherfucker, she’d have nailed him good. She was in no mood. But okay, privately, here in the unquiet of her semi-office, she could let her mind rove a little. Twenty-two years old with a child he wasn’t supporting (not by flipping burgers), probably working a scam or two, trying to get by, trying to be dignified if not powerful, struggling every moment to feel like somebody, to hang in, to not collapse, to not be in the wrong place at the wrong time, to not make the mistake that would send his ass to jail for the rest of his life. She knew Henry Coles. She’d been married to him.

And not. Daryl had done better than Burger King; he was pretty and smart; he’d earned passable money working for UPS (he could deliver, that boy could) and was taking prelaw courses at Hunter. Still, he couldn’t quite pass, could he? He didn’t have the diction; he didn’t have the stance. Cat’s mother had never tired of insisting that Daryl was beneath her. Cat had had church dresses and piano lessons. She’d been read to every night.

Daryl. I still think about your neck and your hands. I hope LA is working out for you. I hope you’re thinking about law school again.

She pictured him walking through Central Park, as he might very well have done. Striding along, hopeful and scared and angry, aware of the unease he inspired in the white girls pushing strollers, mortified by it, glad about it. Step back, bitches. Dick Harte might have made the high-rises rise, but he couldn’t scare the mothers in Central Park just by walking past. Cat saw Henry Coles crossing before the fountain just as Daryl might have done, looking up at the angel with her furrowed profile and big peasant-girl feet; she who was always there, day and night, spreading her heavy wings for everyone but offering heaven only to her favorites. Step back, bitch. I’ll make my own heaven. You won’t be there.

And then, from behind, a pair of small arms wrapped around him. Then blinding light and the intimation of an impossible noise.

She struggled to imagine the kid. There wasn’t much to work with. Mets jersey, some sort of cap. She pictured him small, even for his age; pale and grave; a ghostly creature with unnaturally bright eyes and quick little fingers, like an opossum’s. A Gollum, a changeling. He’d have been a listless baby, and as he got older he’d have been passive and fearful, strangely empty, infinitely suggestible; an “as if” personality, one of those mysterious beings who lack some core of self everyone else takes for granted. He’d have been, all his short life, a convincing member of the dead, waiting for his time to come.

She stuck around until after seven, when Pete returned.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He slumped against the wall of her cubicle. She’d never seen him so exhausted. His eyes were rheumy, his face mottled.

“What do we know?” she asked.

“Black kid, cap pulled down low over his face, and then, poof. Nothing more for the witnesses to see.”

“He was black?”

“So say the witnesses.”

He must have assumed she was white when he called in. As he naturally would. Black kids always assumed the person in power was white.

But the kid had sounded white to her as well. Funny. Two black people, cop and killer, each assuming the other must be white. Funny.

We’re in the family. We don’t have names anymore.

She said to Pete, “Looks like they weren’t related, then.”

“Unlikely. We’ll know as soon as the DNAs are in.”

“A white kid took out a white guy, and a black kid took out a black guy.”

“Yep.”

“A black guy who worked at Burger King.”

“He didn’t even have an address. He slept here and there. Been bunking most recently with his mother, up on 123rd.”

“Very not Dick Harte.”

“Couldn’t be much less like Dick Harte.”

“It’s as if they’re saying nobody’s safe. You’re not safe if you’re a real estate tycoon, and you’re not safe if you work for minimum wage.”

“That would seem to be true.”

“I keep thinking about that ‘in the family’ shit.”

“We’ll find something on that. It’s probably some obscure Japanese video game. Or from some storefront church.”

“You think this is the end of it?” she said.

“Hope so.”

“Two crazy little boys who said they were brothers.”

“You want dinner?”

“Yes.”

She pulled the stack of take-out menus from her top drawer. They decided on Thai.

Pete said, “There can’t be no pattern.”

“We’ll find one.”

“You sure about that?”

She hesitated. What the hell, just let yourself talk. You’re a couple of exhausted government workers waiting for their pad thai to come; you can break the code.

“I wonder,” she said. “It’s getting harder to see the patterns, don’t you think?”

“We’re all freaked out these days.”

“I hope that’s it. I hope it’s about us not being able to see what’s there.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I hope there’s something there to see. I hope it’s not just…randomness. Chaos.”

“It’s not.”

She looked at him, steadily and hard. For a moment she thought, What I’m going to do is have another child and raise him far away from all this, in a house in the mountains, by an unpolluted stream where unmutated fish still swim, where we’ll have books and no television, and I’ll do the best I can with the boredom and racism, I’ll manage, I won’t be sitting on some bar stool every night, I’ll stay home and read to the kid, and during the days I’ll work in the local clinic or be a high school counselor or learn to knit sweaters and sell them in fucking crafts fairs. She thought, If you had any sense, Pete Ashberry, you’d want that, too. You’d admit that we’re emigrants, that our native land is too barren for us, too hard; that what we should really and truly do is buy a good reliable used car and drive out into the continent and see what we can find for ourselves.

“I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

“You did a good job. You did the best anybody could have done. You couldn’t have saved this kid.”

And sounded white over the phone

And let him die

And am a cracked vessel, and am an empty cup

“We’ll never know that, will we?” she said.

“Give yourself a break.”

“Trying.”

“Would it piss you off if I gave you a little advice?”

“That would depend on the advice.”

“Don’t mix any of this up with what happened to your own kid.”

She nodded, tapped her chin with her forefinger. Probably stupid to have told Pete about Luke. You lost track, working with someone every day. You told them things. You had sex with them in the ladies’ room.

She said, “You don’t have some kind of theory going on about me, do you, Pete?”

“No way.”

A silence caught and held. Had she embarrassed him? Had she shamed him? Okay, then, give him something. He’s a good man; he cares about you.

She said, “I didn’t take him to another doctor.”

“You had no reason to.”

“We didn’t have any money. We had shit for insurance.”

“And a doctor told you it was gas. Kids have strange little aches and pains all the time. Gas was a reasonable diagnosis.”

“The wrong one.”

“You didn’t know that.”

I suspected it. I had a feeling. I decided to believe the doctor. I told myself, kids have strange little aches and pains all the time.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”

“So give yourself a break. Can you do that?”

A nick in his heart. He crawled into bed with Daryl and me, said he was thirstier than he’d ever been, and died. Right there.

“Sure,” she said. “I can do that.”

 

The food came. They ate, talked about other things, threw the empty containers out. Pete went back to his office. Cat hung around a little longer, for no good reason. It was all cleanup now, it was investigation; the deranged boys were dead, and the work of finding out who they’d been would fall to others. She dialed Simon’s number. He’d called three times since the event, left messages. He’d believe her when she’d tell him she’d been too busy to call him back, though of course it would be a lie. She was the least busy person on the premises. She’d put off talking to Simon (admit it) because she hadn’t felt up to it, hadn’t felt like being tough and passionate and wised-up.

Amelia put her straight through.

“Cat. God, I’ve been worried.”

“Sorry I couldn’t call earlier. It’s crazy here.”

“Can you get out of there now?”

“Yes. Meet me at your place, okay? Just give me a drink and put me to bed.”

“You got it. I can get out of here in about forty-five minutes.”

Forty-five minutes was good time for Simon. Who knew what fluctuations in the futures needed his immediate attention?

“I’ll come by around nine, then.”

“Good. You okay?”

“Relatively.”

“Good. See you at nine.”

She said good-night to Pete and went out into the streets. She’d wander a while among the terrorized citizenry, until Simon could extricate himself from the particulars of whatever deal he was dealing.

She started down Broadway. If you didn’t know what had happened, you could easily believe it was just another night in the city. The sidewalks were a little less crowded, people were moving with more than the usual degrees of slink or alacrity, but if you were fresh from Mongolia or Uganda you wouldn’t have any but the usual touristic impressions. The city was only being rocked in its less visible parts, along its filaments, in its dreams of itself. People were scared, and yes, it was impossible to know yet just how much money was bleeding out, how many reservations were being canceled, how many corporations were considering relocating, but Broadway was still full of cabs and trucks, stores were still open, unfortunates still worked the passersby for change. The machinery of the city, the immense discordant poetry of the city (thank you, Mr. Whitman), racketed on. You had to bring a building down to make things look different. Tonight there were no candlelight vigils, no mounds of flowers, no women wailing. It all went on.

Four people had gone into space to behold the birth of stars. It all went on. What else should it do?

She browsed the store windows along lower Broadway. She was hungry for normalcy the way she might be hungry for a pastrami on rye. She didn’t want to be herself. Not right now. She wanted, right now, to be a shopper, a regular person, unhaunted, unjaded, free from all but the usual quotients of bitterness and guilt, somebody with a little time to kill on her way to her boyfriend’s place.

The shop windows down here were full of jeans or running shoes or discount cosmetics or every now and then Chinese herbs. The fancier establishments were on the side streets. Broadway was for the young, the semipoor, the easily delighted. She was not young and was not easily delighted. She could have wandered east or west, into different neighborhoods, but then she’d have been window-shopping, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Too trivial. She could at best wander slowly along her inevitable route, scanning the windows she’d be passing anyway, being incidentally trivial, waiting for it to be nine o’clock.

It was just after she’d crossed Canal Street that the feeling arrived again. Someone was watching her. She walked on. She didn’t turn around. Not right away. She waited until she’d reached a shop window (a junk shop, it seemed, didn’t matter what it was). She pretended to be checking out the merchandise, then did a quick glance up the street. Nothing and no one. Okay, a white couple huddled pigeonlike into each other as they negotiated the scraps of windblown trash, and an old woman sitting on a loading dock, dangling her tattered legs over the edge, swinging them like an ancient, exhausted child.

Still, Cat had the feeling. The queasy tingle along the back of her neck.

She refocused, actually looked at the contents of the store window. Gaya’s Emporium. It was a little strange for Broadway—more an East Village sort of establishment. Its window was heaped with scavengings: a ratty coat with a fake-fur collar, two pairs of ancient roller skates, a mirrored disco ball, tangles of costume jewelry, a lantern-jawed male mannequin’s head, blandly cheerful under a rainbow Afro wig. Total randomness—things that were gathered together because the shop owner had found them somewhere and thought that somebody might conceivably want to buy them. The world overflowed with product, old and new; it was impossible to contain it all. At the lower levels, sheer quantity trumped categorization.

She lingered a moment before the sorrowful bounty. It would look like treasure to most people in the world, wouldn’t it? You had to be among the privileged few to know that this stuff was junk even when it was new, this faux rich-lady coat and this chipped porcelain shepherdess and this bundle of plastic swizzle sticks topped with plastic mermaids.

Among the coils of jewelry was a bowl, half hidden. It had been carelessly filled with gold-toned brooches, a strand of fake pearls, but the rim showed, pale and bright as the moon, decorated along its upper edge with symbols of some sort, which might have been flowers or sea anemones or stars. Junk, it was probably junk—what else could it be, considering where it had ended up?—and yet, it didn’t look like junk, even in the fluorescence of the shop window. It seemed to emit a faint but perceptible glow, like a wristwatch in the dark, though it was pure, pure white. It looked, from what she could see of it, like a displaced treasure, something genuinely rare, mistaken for dross. These things turned up every now and then, didn’t they? The da Vinci drawing slipped in among the botanical prints, the Melville letters stacked with old bills and yellowed shopping lists. Could it possibly be Chinese? Could it be something Simon might want for his collection?

She went into the shop. It smelled of mold and sweaty wool, with an undercurrent of sandalwood incense. It was more like someone’s messy closet than a store. There were piles of shoes, a sagging clothes rack jammed full of old jackets and sweaters, a round cardboard bin that proclaimed, in scrawled Magic Markered letters, that its contents could be had for fifty cents apiece.

A woman sat at the rear, behind a glass counter. She was as wan and worn-looking as her merchandise. Her gray hair hung to her shoulders, and her face was vague, as if someone had drawn the features of a woman onto the front of her head and then tried to erase them. Still, she was queenly, in her ruined way. She sat erect, with a vase full of peacock feathers on her right and an oval mirror on her left, like a minor queen of the underworld, ruler of the lost and inconsequential.

Cat summoned a regal bearing of her own. I have no intention of slipping any of your sorry shit into my handbag.

“Hello,” the woman said, without a hint of malice or suspicion. She might have been sitting here among these things for years, waiting to see if tonight someone would finally come in.

“Hello,” Cat said. Regular voice. “I wonder if I could see that bowl in the window.”

“Bowl.”

“Yes. It’s right there. It has jewelry in it. Is it for sale?”

“Oh, the bowl. Just a minute, please.”

The woman stood. She was violently thin. She wore a lank dress covered in roses and some sort of purple shawl over her shoulders. She went to the window, leaned over, and dumped the jewelry out of the bowl. She brought it to Cat.

“Here it is,” she said.

The bowl was, in fact, something. Anyone could see it. It was about the size of a sparrow’s nest, luminous; it seemed to amplify the room’s stagnant illumination. Cat took it from the woman. It was lighter than she’d expected it to be, almost weightless. Even up close, she couldn’t tell what the symbols painted along its outer rim were meant to be. They didn’t look Chinese. Each was different from the others, but all were variations on the same design: a circle that emanated slender spokes, some straight and some wavy, some long and some short.

“It’s beautiful,” Cat said.

“I don’t know where it came from.”

“Is it for sale?”

“It’s ten dollars.”

Cat paused, briefly and absurdly doubtful—if it was really as lovely as it seemed, would it cost so little?

“I’ll take it,” she said.

She gave the woman ten dollars and waited while she wrapped the bowl in a sheet of newspaper. Cat thought she would give the bowl to Simon. She’d never bought him anything like this; she’d only bought him books, and once a tie he’d admired when they were in Barneys together. She’d never before given him anything that involved her own sense of beauty, anything meant to join the carefully selected prizes he kept up there in his aerie. She hadn’t dared to.

The woman slipped the wrapped bowl into an old plastic Duane Reade bag. She gave it to Cat.

“Enjoy it,” the woman said.

“Thank you,” Cat answered. “I will.”

As she left the shop, she heard a clatter. Horse’s hooves, galloping. She froze. Here it came, toward her. A bay horse, riderless, running up Broadway. For a moment, the world tipped on its axis. Something dreadful and impossible was happening. And then the world righted itself again. It was a runaway horse. It was only that. A car pulled over to avoid it, another laid on its horn. The horse was running up the middle of the street, its hooves sparking on the pavement. After a moment a patrol car appeared in pursuit, lights flashing and siren blaring. There was a stable down there, wasn’t there? Where the police horses were kept. Cat stood sheltered in the doorway of the shop. The horse ran by. It was beautiful, no denying it. Black mane fluttering, brown flanks glossy and strong. An ancient and marvelous manifestation, slipped through a dimensional warp. It did not appear to be frightened. It was only running. The squad car came after, flashing its lights. The horse galloped on, pursued by the car.

The woman from the store came out and stood beside Cat. “Terrible,” she said.

“My God.”

“It’s the second time this month.”

“Really?”

“Something’s spooking them,” the woman said. “This didn’t used to happen.”

“What do you think it is?”

“Something in the air. Animals know.”

Cat stood with the woman, watching the horse disappear up Broadway amid screeching brakes and car horns, carrying with it the steady hollow sound of its hooves and the wail of the siren. What would happen when it got to Canal Street?

“You didn’t drop the bowl, did you?” the woman asked.

“What? Oh, no.”

She was, in fact, holding the bowl close to her breasts, as if to protect it, or as if she’d believed in some reflexive way that it could shield her.

“Good.”

The shop woman nodded. It seemed for a moment that the incident had been meant to deprive Cat of a ten-dollar bowl and that the woman was glad to know things hadn’t turned out badly after all.

The two women watched the horse as it receded. There was no sound of collision. The horse stopped at Canal Street, reared halfway on its hind legs. The cops jumped out of their car. There was a noisy confusion of people and lights, corner of Broadway and Canal, and above it all the horse’s head, tossing. There was a flash of the horse’s eyes and teeth, a string of its dangling saliva, bright in the streetlight.

“Wow,” Cat said.

“Something’s spooking them,” the woman said.

“I guess so,” Cat answered.

 

At nine (was it a bad idea, was it desperate-seeming, to be always so exactly on time?) she presented herself to Joseph the doorman and went up. Simon met her at the door. He held her, kissed her hair.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

“Nasty business,” she said.

He settled her onto one of the couches, fixed her a drink. She told him the story. He listened with scowling avidity.

“My God,” he said, when she had finished.

“So it looks like that’s it,” she said.

“That can’t be it.”

“No, I mean, that’s it for me. The boys are dead. I’ll be going back to talking to the regular nuts.”

“So now it’s all just what? Postmortem?”

“Mm-hm. It shouldn’t take too long. Two fucked-up kids who made some kind of pact, inspired by terrorists. Went on the Internet, learned how to make pipe bombs. We can’t figure why no parents have called.”

“What’s your guess?”

“Denial. Pure and simple. If you call the police and get the confirmation, then it’s really and truly happened. If you don’t call the police, you can still tell yourself that your kid has just run away.”

“You think these boys were abused?”

“Probably. Or maybe not. Some of the time, these people turn out to have had relatively ordinary childhoods.”

“You hungry?”

“No. I ate.”

“You want another drink?”

“Please.”

He took the glass from her hand. Her throat constricted, and then she was crying. One moment she wasn’t, and the next moment she was. It came out of her in great, heaving sobs. He took her in his arms.

“It’s okay,” he said softly. “It’s okay.”

She couldn’t stop. She didn’t want to stop. She let herself go on. She choked on her own sobs, struggled to catch her breath. It was as if a stone were lodged in her gullet and she were trying to weep it out.

“It’s okay,” he said again. “It’s okay.”

Finally the crying subsided. She lingered in his arms.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s just. I fucked up.”

“I don’t think you did.”

“Those little boys called me, and I didn’t help them.”

“It’s okay.”

She paused over whether or not to go into the part about sounding white to a black kid. Decided against it. She knew his reassurances wouldn’t mean anything to her. She thought she should talk to him about it anyway—for, you know, the sake of their closeness—but she was beat, she was worried about other things, she didn’t have it in her at the moment, it was just too hard right now.

What she said was, “I’m not sure if I can do this anymore.”

“You should get some sleep.”

“I know. But I don’t think it’ll be any better in the morning.”

“Let’s wait and see.”

“I think I may need to find some other kind of work.”

“Wait and see, okay?”

“Right. Oh, I brought you something.”

“You did?”

“Just a second.”

She got to her feet, a bit unsteadily. She was slightly tipsy already. She took the bowl from her bag, gave it to him.

“Didn’t have time to wrap it,” she said.

He removed the bowl from its plastic drugstore sack, pulled away the newspaper. And there it was, in his hands. Yes, it was in fact a marvelous thing. It was all the more apparent here, in this room, where only the rare and marvelous were permitted.

“Wow,” Simon said.

“It just came from a junk shop. But it’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it Chinese?”

“No. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.”

He set the bowl on the coffee table. It glowed like an opal, seemed to be studded with tiny sparks.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You like it?”

“Yes. I do.”

“I just…I saw it in this strange little store, and I thought you’d like it.”

“I do. Very much.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

He stood up. “And now,” he said, “it’s time for you to go to bed.”

“Yeah. It is.”

She knew when he put his hand on her shoulder. His touch was tender and kind, but something had changed. She slipped her arm around his waist. Something had changed.

“Come on,” he said.

They went into his bedroom. She started undressing.

“Are you coming to bed, too?” she asked.

“Not yet. It’s early. I’ve got a pile of shit to do.”

She got her clothes off, got into bed. Simon sat on the edge of the mattress, adjusted the covers over her. He could not have been gentler. Still, something was wrong.

She said, “Don’t stay up too late, okay?”

“I won’t.”

She took his hand, stroked his fingertips. “Simon,” she said.

“Uh-huh?”

Say it. Sooner or later, one of you has to.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Easy. Natural. No strangeness. And yet.

He kissed her. He turned off the light and left the room.

It came to her after he’d closed the door. She’d wept in his arms. She’d brought him a present, nervously anticipating his response. For the first time, she had failed to be strong and cynical, wised-up, policelike. For the first time, she’d been like the other women (there had, of course, been a number of other women): fragile, in need, eager to please him, grateful for his attention.

She tried to push the thought away. It was one night, for God’s sake. It was a goddamned crisis. Who wouldn’t fall apart? She’d be herself again in the morning. (Wouldn’t she?) This was what happened when two people got to know each other. Nobody stayed in character all the time. This was intimacy. You saw each other through the dark spells. You didn’t need—you didn’t want—to be spared the fears and doubts, the crying fits, the self-recriminations.

And yet, she had a feeling. She was damaged now, in his eyes. She was no longer rare and marvelous. She wasn’t a stern black goddess of law enforcement. She was someone who collapsed, who needed help, who awaited his judgment.

She could see how it would play out. She thought she could see it. Simon wasn’t a bad man; he was not out there in the other room wondering how he’d get rid of her. What he had, she suspected, was an empty spot where his admiration and his lust had been. He would think nothing of it. He’d make coffee for her in the morning. He’d be more than kind. He wouldn’t desert her when she needed him. But an unraveling had begun. She could feel it, she could see it, still months away, but coming: the end of his interest in her. The beginning of her life in his mind as someone he had dated once. It wasn’t surprising. It wasn’t exactly surprising. Simon was a collector. She understood now that he was collecting the incidents of his own past, and that one day he would arrive at his present, married to a smart, pretty white woman his own age or a few years younger, raising children, referring every now and then to his youth, when he had bought art and antiques instead of paying tuition, when he had gone to the restaurants and clubs known only to the few, when he had dated a dancer from the Mark Morris company and then an installation artist who’d been in the Biennial and then, briefly, an older black woman, a forensic psychologist who’d been involved in those terrorist attacks, who had spoken to the actual terrorists.

He was programmed for this. Smart boy from Iowa, perfectly formed, ambitious—he’d naturally want, he’d need, a wild phase before he took up the life that had been waiting for him from the moment of conception. It had been all but predetermined. If he and Cat hadn’t met when they did, he’d have met another colorful character soon enough. And all the while his true and rightful wife was out there, waiting for him.

She, Cat, was a collector’s item, wasn’t she? She was an exotic specimen—men had always thought so. No-nonsense, ultracompetent black girl who’s read more books than you have; who doesn’t give a shit about domestic particulars and can beat your ass at any game you choose. They liked the tough girl, but they weren’t quite so crazy about the nervous one. They hadn’t signed on for that. She and Daryl might have survived Luke’s death together, but they hadn’t survived her remorse. Daryl could have comforted her for a month or two. He couldn’t manage a year of it, not when she had nothing left for him. Not when she kept telling him, over and over again, that she had killed their child and that he was an idiot for thinking he loved her. Say something like that often enough, anybody will finally start believing you.

Who could blame these guys, really, for bailing when the messy shit came out? She didn’t like it either.

 

Her cell rang. She bolted awake, accustomed to listening for it. Where was it, though? Where was she? Simon’s. Simon’s bed. He wasn’t there. Clock said twelve forty-three. She got up. She was naked. She went into the living room, where Simon sat at his thousand-year-old Greco-Italian table, working at his laptop.

“My cell,” Cat said groggily.

“I wasn’t sure if I should wake you up,” he answered.

She got the phone out of her bag, checked the readout. Pete.

“What’s up?” she said.

“Guess who just walked into the Seventh Precinct station? Walt Whitman.”

“What?”

“You ready? Some old woman who says she’s Walt fucking Whitman. Walked into the Seventh, said she wanted to turn herself in. I’m there now.”

“You’re joking.”

“Never more serious. Says she’s the mother of the perpetrators and her name is Walt Whitman.”

“What the hell.”

“She knows about the Whitman business. That’s all I can tell you.”

“I’m on my way.”

“You know where it is, right?”

“I do.”

She clicked off. Simon was out of his chair, all thrilled capability. “What’s going on?”

“Walt Whitman has turned himself in. Walt Whitman, however, turns out to be a woman.”

“What?”

“I’ll call you later.”

She went back into the bedroom and got dressed. Simon was right behind her.

“Cat. What’s going on?” he asked.

“Hell if I know.”

She couldn’t help thinking about how he must want to fuck her now.

She got into her clothes. Simon walked her to the door. She kissed him there. She took his face in both her hands, kissed him softly and lightly.

“Call me as soon as you can,” he said.

She lingered a moment. There on the coffee table was the bowl, perfect in its modest way, bright as ice under the track lighting. It wasn’t rare or fabulous, it wouldn’t have a place among the ancient treasures on the shelves, but she’d given it to him, and she knew he’d keep it. He could put his keys and loose change in it when he got home at night.

“Goodbye, sweetheart,” she said. Queenly bearing. Schoolmarm diction.

 

The woman sat in interrogation room three at the Seventh. Pete was with her, as were portly Bob (eyes like a pug’s, smell of burnt toast) and scary Dave (Duran Duran haircut, tattoo tendrils creeping up his neck from God knew what he had crawling over the rest of him), FBI. Cat was escorted in by a sweet-faced Hispanic detective.

The woman was sixty or so, sitting straight as a hat rack in the grungy precinct chair. Her white hair—arctic white, incandescent white—was pulled into a fist at the back of her long, pale neck. She wore a shapeless coffee-colored dress and a man’s tweed jacket with the sleeves turned up at the wrists, revealing modest bands of gray striped lining. Her long-fingered hands were splayed primly on the tabletop, as if she were waiting for a manicure.

For a moment Cat thought, It’s the woman I bought the bowl from. It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Still, this woman could have been her older sister.

“Hey, Cat,” Pete said.

Portly and Scary both nodded.

Cat said to the woman in the chair, “They tell me you’re Walt Whitman.”

“The boys call me that,” the woman said. Her voice was strong and clear, surprisingly deep; her diction was precise.

“It’s an unusual name for a woman,” Cat said.

“I’m an unusual woman.”

“I can see that.”

“I’ve come to tell you that it’s starting,” the woman said.

“What is it that’s starting?”

“The end of days.”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

“The innocents are rising up. Those who seemed most harmless are where the danger lies.”

“What are you saying, exactly?”

“Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.”

“Listen, lady—” said Portly.

Cat cut in quickly. “You know your Whitman.”

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” the woman asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“You will.”

“Are you the reincarnation of Walt Whitman?” Cat asked.

The woman gazed at her with wistful affection. Her eyes were milky blue, oddly blue, albinoish and unfocused. If Cat didn’t know better, she’d have thought the woman was blind.

The woman said, “It’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“To start over.”

“Start what over?”

“The world. The injured world.”

“And how do you think the world is starting over?”

The woman shook her head regretfully. “Those boys were dead anyway,” she said.

“What boys?”

The woman didn’t look particularly unstable. Her pallid eyes held steady. Her pale pink lips were firm. She said, “No one wanted them. One was left in an alley in Buffalo. He weighed just under three pounds. Another one was purchased from a prostitute in Newark for two hundred dollars. The middle boy had been a sex slave to a particularly unpleasant person in Asbury Park.”

“Tell me what you think you and the boys are doing.”

“We’re reversing the flow,” she said.

Scary said, “Who are you working with?”

The woman looked at Cat with kindly, knowing weariness. She said, “It’s time to make the announcement. We can’t wait for the last one. He’s taking longer than he was supposed to.”

“Who’s the last one?”

“I can’t find him. I wonder if he’s gone home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Would you go and look for him? He likes you. He trusts you, I think.”

“Look for him where?”

The woman said, “327 Rivington. Apartment nineteen. If he’s there, take care of him.”

She smiled. She had tiny, perfectly square teeth, symmetrical as jewelry.

Pete said, “You’re telling us this boy is at 327 Rivington?”

“I’m saying he might be,” the woman answered. “It’s hard to keep track of your children, isn’t it? No matter how hard you try.”

“Is he armed?” Pete asked.

“Well, yes, of course he is,” the woman answered.

Pete said to Scary, “Let’s go.”

Cat knew who else would be going with them. If there was in fact a little boy sitting in an apartment with a bomb, he’d be vaporized by the squad. No one was wedded, at this point, to the notion of a live capture.

“Good luck,” Cat said.

The woman said to Cat, “Aren’t you going?”

“No. I’m going to stay here and talk to you.”

“You should go. If he’s there, you’re the one he’ll want to see.”

“Not gonna happen, lady,” Scary said.

“You care to tell us what you think we’re going to find there?” Pete asked.

“You won’t be in any danger. I can tell you that.”

“Thanks. That’s good to know.”

“If you find him, will you bring him here?”

“Right,” Pete said. To Cat he added, “I’ll be in touch.”

“So long.”

Pete and Scary took off. Portly stood ominously by the door as Cat settled herself in a chair across from the woman, whose hands were still placed carefully on the tabletop, fingers spread. Her nails, on closer inspection, were not clean.

Cat said, “You know, don’t you, that if your boy is there, they’ll be very hard on him.”

“There’s nothing they can do,” she answered.

“There’s a lot they can do.”

“I’d hate for them to hurt him. Of course I would. No one wants a child to be hurt.”

“But you’re hurting your children. You know you are.”

“It’s better, don’t you think, to have it over quickly. One flash, a moment of hurt, and then you’re elsewhere. Then you’re on your way.”

Cat held herself steady through a spasm of white-hot rage. She said, “Tell me a little more about what it is you’ve come to announce.”

The woman leaned forward. Her eyes took on a remote, cloudy light. She said, “No one is safe in a city anymore. Not if you’re rich. Not if you’re poor. It’s time to move back to the country. It’s time to live on the land again. It’s time to stop polluting the rivers and cutting down the forests. It’s time for us to live in villages again.”

“Why are you doing this?” Cat asked.

The woman sighed and tucked an errant strand of ghost-white hair behind her ear. She could have been an elderly professor, fatigued by her students’ youth and opacity but still hopeful, still willing to explain.

“Look around,” she said. “Do you see happiness? Do you see joy? Americans have never been this prosperous, people have never been this safe. They’ve never lived so long, in such good health, ever, in the whole of history. To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself. We can fly. Our teeth don’t rot. Our children aren’t a little feverish one moment and dead the next. There’s no dung in the milk. There’s milk, as much as we want. The church can’t roast us alive over minor differences of opinion. The elders can’t stone us to death because we might have committed adultery. Our crops never fail. We can eat raw fish in the middle of the desert, if we want to. And look at us. We’re so obese we need bigger cemetery plots. Our ten-year-olds are doing heroin, or they’re murdering eight-year-olds, or both. We’re getting divorced faster than we’re getting married. Everything we eat has to be sealed because if it wasn’t, somebody would put poison in it, and if they couldn’t get poison, they’d put pins in it. A tenth of us are in jail, and we can’t build the new ones fast enough. We’re bombing other countries simply because they make us nervous, and most of us not only couldn’t find those countries on a map, we couldn’t tell you which continent they’re on. Traces of the fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turn up in women’s breast milk. So tell me. Would you say this is working out? Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?”

Portly said, “Yeah, but you still can’t beat a Big Mac.” He cleaned a fingernail with an opposing thumbnail.

“And you think you can do something about it?” Cat asked.

“One does what one can. I’m part of the plan to tell people that it’s all over. No more sucking the life out of the rest of the world so that a small percentage of the population can live comfortably. It’s a big project, I grant you. But history is always changed by a small band of very determined people.”

This got Portly interested again. He said, “Who are you working with?”

“We don’t see one another as much as we’d like to,” the woman said.

“Give me a name.”

“We don’t have names.”

“You call yourself Walt,” Portly said.

“The boys call me that. I don’t know how it started, really, but it seemed to comfort them, so I allowed it. You know how children are.”

“What’s your real name?” Portly asked.

“I don’t have one. Really, I don’t. They gave me one, many years ago, but I hardly remember it anymore. It isn’t mine. It never was.”

“You’re in the family,” Cat said.

“Why, yes, dear. I am. We all are, don’t you see?”

“What do you mean by that?” Cat asked. “Whose family?”

“Oh, you know.”

“I don’t know. I’d like you to tell me.”

“You’ll forget your false name, in time.”

“Do you work for the company?” Cat asked.

“We all work for the company. It’s going out of business, though.”

“Tell me about the company.”

“I’m afraid I’m all talked out now. I really don’t have anything more to say.”

Something happened to her eyes. They went glassy, like the eyes taxidermists put in the sockets of dead animals.

“Walt?” Cat said.

Nothing. The woman sat with her hands splayed out on the tabletop, looking blindly at the air directly in front of her prim pink face.

 

Pete called fewer than twenty minutes later, on Cat’s cell.

“Did you find him?” she asked.

“No. There’s nobody. I think you should come over here. Have a patrolman bring you.”

“I’m on my way.”

The building on Rivington was one of the last of the old wrecks, sandwiched between a skateboard store and a wine bar. It was scabby brown plaster, chalky, like very old candy. Across the street a converted warehouse, its bricks brightly sandblasted, flew a green banner that announced the imminent availability of The Ironworks Condominium Luxury Lofts.

The galvanized steel door, which said DETHRULZ and PREY FOR PILLS in bright, dripping letters, was open. Cat went in. The door led onto a scarred yellow hallway illuminated by a buzzing fluorescent circle. Desolation Row. And yet, someone had put a vase full of artificial flowers on a rickety gilded table just inside the vestibule. Gray daisies and spiky wax roses and, hovering over the flowers, impaled on the end of a long plastic stick, a desicated angel made of plastic and yarn.

Cat went up the stairs, found the door to apartment nineteen. It was open.

Inside, Pete and Scary and the guys from the bomb squad stood in the middle of a small, dim room. Cat paused, getting her bearings. The room was neat. No clutter. It smelled of varnish and, faintly, of gas. There was an old beige sofa, a little like the one in her own apartment. There were a couple of mismatched chairs, a table, all chipped and scarred but presentable, surely found on the streets. And every surface except for the furniture was covered with pages, carefully aligned, yellowish under coats of shellac.

The walls, ceiling, and floor were covered with the pages of Leaves of Grass.

“Motherfuck,” Cat said.

“Motherfuck,” Pete agreed.

“What do you make of this?” Scary said.

Cat walked slowly around the room. It was all Whitman.

“It’s home,” she said. “It’s where the boys grew up.”

At the room’s far end, an arched opening led into a short hallway. It, too, was covered in pages. She gave herself a tour.

Kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, lit by bare bulbs screwed into ceiling sockets. The bulbs were low-watt, probably fifteens—they emitted a dim and watery illumination. The wan light and the varnish that covered the pages on the walls made it all sepia, insubstantial, as if she were walking through old photographs of rooms. The place was snug, in its insane and barren way. The kitchen was more presentable than hers. Pans, battered but clean, hung from hooks over the stove. On the countertop, a Folgers coffee can held silverware. In the first bedroom were three cots side by side, each scrupulously made up, their dust-colored blankets tucked in, an ivory-colored pillow centered at each one’s head. Blue plastic milk crates contained modest stacks of clothes. In the second bedroom was another cot, just like the others. The second bedroom also contained an old sewing machine, the treadle kind, glossy black, insectlike, on an oak stand.

It might have been the low-budget version of an army barracks or an orphanage. Except of course for the fact that everything—the kitchen cabinets, the windows—was plastered over with pages.

“She’s kept them here,” Cat said to Pete.

“Who?”

“The boys. She got them as infants and raised them here.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“She brought up a family of little killers. She got custody of kids nobody wanted and brought them here. She’s been planning this for years.”

“You sure about that?”

“I’m not sure about anything.”

“You got any ideas as to why?”

“What do you think endures? Do you think a great city endures?”

“Say what?”

“According to her, it’s the end of days. The innocents are rising up.”

“Crazy.”

“Mm-hm. Entirely crazy.”

“Her prints aren’t matching up with anything in the files yet.”

“They won’t. She’s nobody. She’s from nowhere.”

“You’re starting to sound a little like her.”

She said, “Doing my job. Projecting myself into the mind of the suspect.”

“Not a fun place to be.”

Never has been, baby.

She said, “Honestly, Pete, we’ve been expecting this. You know we have.”

“I haven’t.”

“Not this. You know what I mean. People see how easy it is to scare the world right to its core. Not so hard to fuck up the system, as it turns out. You can do a lot with a few deranged children and some hardware-store explosives.”

“Give me a break, okay? Sure everybody’s freaked out, but the world’s going on. One insane old witch and a couple of retarded kids are not bringing it all down.”

“I know. I know that.”

“So what are you saying?”

“You mind if I just go a little loose?”

“Nope. Go.”

“You’re probably right. An old witch and a couple of damaged children. But she told me she thinks history is changed by a small band of people.”

“That would be, say, a few thousand Bolsheviks. That would be entirely fucking different.”

“Of course it is. It’s entirely different.”

“Don’t use that voice with me.”

Pete would know about the voice. His mother had probably used it.

“Sorry. I’m just saying it seems possible, it doesn’t seem impossible, that this ragged band of crazy fucks we’ve stumbled onto is part of something bigger. Something with considerably more potential.”

“More of them?”

“She mentioned an extended family.”

“Christ.”

“She’s probably just crazy, Pete. She’s probably doing this all by her crazy old white-lady self.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I don’t know what to think. Truly, I don’t.”

Pete shoved his hands deep into his pockets. His face was ashy, his forehead studded with sequins of sweat. She could see him, briefly, as a child. He’d have been balky and stubborn, furious at the slow-moving, ungenerous world. He would never have told anyone, certainly not his poor overworked mother, of his convictions about what whispered in the back of his closet, what waited hungrily under his bed.

Children know where the teeth are hiding

They only tell us what they think we can bear

Pete said, “You should go back and interrogate her.”

“I don’t interrogate.”

“Whatever. Go have a chat with the murderous old bitch.”

“Glad to. You’ve got more people coming, right?”

“About half the force.”

“Pete?”

“Yeah?”

“I was about to say, Don’t worry. Now why would I say a thing like that?”

“Take a cab back to the precinct, okay? I need all the boys here.”

“I love a cab.”

“Get the receipt.”

“You know I will.”

 

It took her a while to get a cab in a neighborhood this close to the projects. When a courageous soul finally stopped for her (Manil Gupta, according to his ID; thank you, Manil), she let herself sink into the piney semidark of the backseat, watched the city slip by.

She asked Manil to take her to her apartment instead of the precinct so she could pick up her copy of Leaves of Grass. She might want to refer to it as she talked to the woman, and it seemed unlikely there’d be a copy lying around the Seventh.

Manil nodded and took off. Even if he was only taking her to East Fifth, she found it nice to be driven like this, to hand over control to somebody else. The late-night New York you saw from a moving car was relatively quiet and empty, more like anyplace else in nocturnal America. Only at these subdued moments could you truly comprehend that this glittering, blighted city was part of a slumbering continent; a vastness where headlights answered the constellations; a fertile black roll of field and woods dotted by the arctic brightness of gas stations and all-night diners, town after shuttered town strung with streetlights, sparsely attended by the members of the night shifts, the wanderers who scavenged in the dark, the insomniacs with their reading lights, the mothers trying to console colicky babies, the waitresses and gas-pump guys, the bakers and the lunatics. And scattered all over, abundant as stars, disc jockeys sending music out to whoever might be listening.

She got out of the cab at the corner of Fifth Street, paid Manil and gave him an extravagant tip. At first, as she approached her building, she merely understood that a small person was huddled in the doorway. Finding someone camped there was not unusual. She’d gotten used to stepping over drunks and vagrants on her way in. This one was smaller than most, though. He sat with his back against the vestibule door, knees pulled up to his chest. He was wrapped in a khaki jacket, army surplus. He was white. When she reached the bottom stair, she knew.

“Hi,” he said. Here was his voice.

Although it was hard to tell from his bunched-up position, she guessed he was just over three feet tall. A midget child. Or was it a dwarf? He looked out at her from the upturned collar of his oversized jacket. He had a pale, round face. Big, dark eyes and a tiny mouth, puckered, as if he were whistling. He might have been a baby owl, roosting on a branch.

“Hello,” she said. Calm. Stay very, very calm.

They were silent for a moment. What should she do? She could have the boys here in less than ten minutes, and she had his only exit blocked. Even if he managed to get around her, she could probably catch him.

Not yet, though. Not right this second. She mounted one stair tread. He didn’t seem to mind her coming that much closer. This might be the only chance to get him talking. After this, it would be the interrogators.

She said, “Are you all right?”

He nodded.

Cat fingered the cell phone in her coat pocket. “Have you decided to let me help you?” she asked.

He nodded again. “And you’ve decided to let me help you, too, right?”

“How do you want to help me?”

“Every atom of mine belongs to you, too.”

“I know,” she said.

“I brought something.”

“What did you bring?”

He opened the jacket. Strapped to his tiny chest was a length of steel pipe. It seemed to be attached with duct tape. In his right hand he held a lighter, one of the cheap plastic ones you can get anywhere. It was red. He flicked it, produced a flame.

She drew a breath. Focus. Stay calm and focused.

“You don’t want to do this,” she said. “I know you don’t.”

“We have to do things that are hard sometimes.”

“Listen to me. Walt is telling you to do something bad. I know it seems like it’s right, but it isn’t. I think you know that, don’t you?”

He faltered. He looked at her pleadingly. He let the flame go out.

“You have to do it so it isn’t murder,” he said. “You have to do it with love.”

“You have a lot of love in you, I think. Am I right?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“And you’re alone now. Is that right?”

He nodded. “We moved out,” he said. “We’re not home anymore.”

“It’s just you now.”

“Well. Me and Walt.”

“Walt left you on your own?”

“It’s my time.”

“Are you afraid of Walt?”

“No.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I think maybe you’re afraid of getting hurt. I think you’re afraid of hurting other people, too. Is that right?”

“It isn’t murder if you do it with love.”

“Are you afraid you don’t feel enough love?”

“I guess.”

“I think you have a lot of love in you. I think you’re loving, and I think you’re brave. It’s brave of you to want to talk to me.”

“That’s nice. But it’s not true. You don’t know.”

“What don’t I know?”

He paused. His little puckered mouth curled in on itself.

She said, “Listen to me. You’re confused. You know what Walt is telling you to do is wrong. I want you to take that thing off your chest and give it to me. Then everything will be all right. I promise.”

He stood. He was barely three feet tall. It was impossible to tell, in the big jacket, how deformed he might or might not be. The eyes were slightly too big, the mouth too small. His round head was big for his frail body. It stood on the shoulders of the coat like a pumpkin. Like a picture of the moon in a children’s book.

“I can’t tell what to do,” he said.

“Yes, you can. Take that thing off and give it to me. I’ll make sure you’re all right. Everything will be all right.”

“I didn’t want to move. We always lived there.”

“It’s hard, moving. I can understand why you’re upset.”

He nodded gravely. Cat was seized by a spasm of dreadful compassion. Here was a monster; here was a frightened child. Here was a tortured little boy who could at any moment blow them both away. Her ears buzzed. She was surprised to know that she was not afraid, not exactly afraid.

“I am upset,” he said.

She hesitated. What was going to work? Too much kindness, and he could decide he loved her enough to kill her. Too little kindness, and he might do it out of rage.

She moved a step closer. Why not? It wouldn’t make any difference, if he detonated. And if she got closer to him she might be able to knock him down, pin his arms, get the bomb. He’d have to strike a flame and light the fuse. She’d probably have time to stop him. But she couldn’t be sure.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His nose had started to run.

“Don’t be sorry. You’ve got nothing to feel sorry about.”

Whoever put him up to this had abandoned him. No child responds well to abandonment, not even a deranged one. She decided. Her best chance was to take him in, try to gain his trust. Wait until he let his guard down, and make her move.

She said, “Are you hungry?”

“A little.”

“Why don’t you come upstairs with me? I could make you something to eat.”

“Really?” he said.

“Yes. Come on, it’s fine.”

She went up the last two stairs and stood beside him. She took the keys out of her bag. Her hand was shaking (funny, she didn’t think she was afraid), but she managed to unlock the door.

“Come in,” she said.

She held the door open for him. He waited. He wanted her to enter first, didn’t he? He must know that if she got behind him, she could grab his arms.

She went in ahead. He followed.

“It’s upstairs,” she said.

She mounted the stairs, with the kid right behind her, and opened the door to her apartment. He refused to go in ahead of her. He remained two paces behind.

“This is nice,” he said.

It wasn’t nice. It was a dump. It was dirty. There were shoes and clothes strewn around.

A broom to sweep it all away

No more parties to plan

We’re in the family

“Thank you,” she said. “Why don’t you take your coat off?”

“That’s okay.”

She went into the kitchen. He followed close behind. She opened the minifridge. Not much there. There were a couple of eggs, though, that were probably still all right. No bread. She thought she might have some crackers somewhere.

“How about scrambled eggs?” she said.

“Okay.”

She washed out the skillet, which had been soaking in the sink for a few days, and passed through a moment of surreal embarrassment about her housekeeping. The boy stood a few feet away, watching her. In the light, she could better appreciate how compromised he was. His shoulders, frail as the bones of a bird, canted to the right. His ears were mere nubs, bright pink, like wads of chewing gum stuck on either side of his big round skull.

“Where are your children?” he asked.

“I don’t have any.”

“You don’t have any at all?”

“No.”

He was getting agitated. He was looking around the apartment and fingering the lighter. Apparently he thought every woman had to have children.

“Okay, yes,” she said. “I have a little boy named Luke. But he’s not here now. He’s far away.”

“Is he coming back soon?”

“No. He’s not coming back soon.”

“Luke is a nice name.”

“How old are you?” she asked as she cracked an egg into a bowl.

“I’m the youngest.”

“And what’s your name?”

“I don’t have one.”

“What do people call you, then?”

“I know when they’re talking to me.”

“Your brothers didn’t have names, either?”

He shook his head.

Cat broke the second egg. She looked for a moment at the two yolks, their deep yellow, floating in the pallid viscosity. It was so normal: two eggs in a bowl. She beat them with a fork.

“Did you love your brothers?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You must miss them.”

“I do.”

She poured the eggs into the pan. Ordinary, ordinary. Making scrambled eggs for a child. Should she throw the hot pan at him? No, his hand was still inside his jacket, holding the lighter. It was too risky. She scraped the eggs with a spatula, put them on a plate with a couple of Triscuits.

“Come on,” she said. He followed her to the table in the living room. She put the plate down for him, went back for silverware and a glass of cranberry juice. It was that or tap water.

If he detonated in here, the whole apartment would go.

She took him a fork, a napkin, and the juice. She sat in the other chair, across from him.

“Don’t you want any?” he asked.

“I’m not hungry right now. You go ahead.”

He ate innocently, hungrily. She watched him.

“Have you always lived with Walt?” she asked.

“Yes.” He took a sip of the cranberry juice and grimaced.

“Don’t you like the juice?” she asked.

“No, it’s okay. I’ve just never had it.” He took another sip.

He was trying to please her. He was being polite.

“Does Walt hurt you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then why do you think she wants you to die? That doesn’t sound like love to me.”

“We don’t die. We go into the grass. We go into the trees.”

“Is that what Walt tells you?”

“It’s in our home.”

“What’s in your home?”

“Everything is.”

“Do you go to school?”

“No.”

“How often have you left?”

“At first, I never did. Then it was time, and we went outside.”

“What was that like?”

“It was hard. I mean, I was surprised.”

“By how big the world is?”

“I guess.”

“Did you like it?”

“Not at first. It was so noisy.”

“Do you like it now?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you’re not sure if you’re ready to go into the trees and the grass?”

“I’m not brave,” he said. “I’m not loving. My brothers were.”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The world is more beautiful and wonderful than you can imagine. It’s not just the city.”

“I know that. It’s on the wall.”

“But it’s different when you see it. There are mountains. There are woods, and they’re full of animals. There are oceans. There are beaches covered with shells.”

“What are shells?”

“They’re…They’re the most beautiful little round boxes. The ocean makes them. And when you put them close to your ear, you can hear the sound of the ocean inside them.”

“The ocean makes boxes and puts itself inside?”

“It puts its sound inside. Wouldn’t you like to go to a beach and see the shells?”

“I guess.”

“I could take you there. Would you like me to do that?”

“I guess.”

“You can have a long, wonderful life. You can see the ocean. You can sail on a ship.”

Why did she feel even slightly guilty, telling him that?

He said, “I like dogs.”

“Of course you do. Dogs are nice.”

“But they can bite you, right?”

“No, a dog wouldn’t bite you. A dog would love you. He’d sleep with you at night.”

“I think I’d be afraid.”

“You wouldn’t have to be afraid. I’d be with you.”

“You would?”

“Yes. I would. Now. Why don’t you take that thing off your chest?”

“I shouldn’t do that.”

“Yes. You should. It’s the right thing to do.”

“You really think so?”

“Yes. I do.”

“And you’ll stay with me?”

“I promise.”

His little mouth puckered up. “Don’t you want to go into the grass and the trees?” he said.

“Not yet. And I don’t want you to, either.”

“We could do it later, right?”

She said, “I’m going to take the lighter and get that thing off you now. Okay?”

“Oh, I don’t think you should do that,” he said.

“I don’t think the shells will make their sound for you if you have it on. They’re very sensitive.”

“Oh. Well. Okay.”

And just that easily, he handed her the lighter. Here it was, a piece of red plastic you could buy anywhere for ninety-nine cents. She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.

She helped him out of his jacket. His chest was bare underneath. He was so thin, his sternum so sunken—the bomb must have been heavy for him.

She got a pair of scissors and cut through the tape that held the bomb to his chest. It stuck to his skin as she pulled it away. He winced. She was surprised to find that she hated to hurt him.

When she had the bomb, she put it on the kitchen counter. It was only a footlong piece of pipe, with a cap on either end and a fuse sticking out of a hole drilled in one of the caps. Easy to buy, easy to assemble. It sat on her countertop, next to the coffeemaker and the toaster oven.

He was harmless now. He was just a little boy.

“So now we’ll go?” he said eagerly.

She paused. She knew what she had to do. She had to take him to see the shells at headquarters. He couldn’t hurt her, or anyone, now.

And yet. He was so trusting. He was so happy about being taken to a beach. He had no idea what was about to happen to him. She should at least let him get a little sleep first.

“Not right now,” she said.

“No?”

“We should wait until morning. You can’t really see them at night.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You must be tired. Aren’t you?”

“No. Well, maybe a little.”

“Come on. You take a nap, and then when the sun’s up, we’ll go.”

“Okay.”

She took him into her bedroom, had him take off his jeans. There he was in a pair of tiny underpants. He was so frail. His right shoulder was three inches lower than his left. She tucked him into her bed.

“This bed is nice,” he said.

She sat on the edge of the mattress, touched his wispy hair. “Sleep, now,” she said.

“If I had a dog, would he really sleep with me at night?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Would a dog like to go to the beach?”

“Oh, yes. Dogs love the beach.”

“Did you ever have a dog?”

“A long, long time ago. When I was a little girl.”

“What was his name?”

“Smokey. His name was Smokey.”

“Smokey’s a good name.”

“Did you mean it when you told me you don’t have a name?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is there some kind of name you call yourself?”

“Not really.”

“We should give you a name.”

“I like Smokey.”

“Smokey is a dog’s name.”

“Oh.”

“Go to sleep now.”

“Okay.”

He closed his eyes. After a few minutes, his breathing evened out.

She sat watching him, this changeling, this goblin child. What would they do with him? He hadn’t hurt anyone, that would weigh in his favor, but others would know, as surely as she did herself, that he’d been fully capable of it. Still, he was a child, and a very suggestible one—he could be reeducated. And once his picture hit the papers, good Samaritans would be lining up to adopt him after the government had done its work.

But would they release him, ever? People were spooked; people were seriously spooked. They’d want to study him, of course, but would they want to rehabilitate him? Not likely. What kind of message would it send, if you could be part of a group that blew up random citizens on the street, undergo intensive therapy, and be released back into society? No, it was zero tolerance for terrorists. Even child terrorists.

Here he was, sleeping in her bed. Here was the devil—a malformed child who’d been meant to die in an alley in Buffalo, born prematurely to some woman who’d done God knew how many drugs. Here he was, dreaming about being taken to a beach to hold a shell up to his compromised ear. Willing to be called a dog’s name.

 

She put the bomb into her bag, along with her copy of Leaves of Grass. Crazy to take it with her, but she couldn’t leave it in the apartment with the kid, could she? She got her pills from the medicine cabinet, took one into the bedroom with a glass of water, and woke the kid up.

He blinked in confusion. He didn’t seem frightened, though, not like a normal kid would in a strange new place. For a while now, everything had been strange to him. It had become the way of the world.

She said, “Sorry to wake you up. I want you to take this pill.”

“Okay,” he said. Just like that. No questions. Endearing and creepy at the same time.

He opened his mouth. She put the sleeping pill on his tongue, gave him the water. He dutifully swallowed.

“Back to sleep now,” she said. She sat with him until he fell asleep again, which took only a few minutes.

Then she slipped quietly out of the apartment and locked him in. As she turned the key she paused for a moment over the possibility of a fire, saw herself as one of those women on the news, the ones who had just run out for a moment for cigarettes or milk, had left the kids alone because there was no one else, no one to watch them, it was always her, only her, and she needed cigarettes, she needed milk, she needed to be someone who could run a simple errand, and then a few minutes later there she was, held back by a fireman or a neighbor, wailing as the flames did their work.

Fuck it. He’d be okay. Please be okay, little killer.

She walked to the precinct. It was fifteen blocks or so, but she wanted the time, she wanted the solitude. She wanted to be somebody walking alone. It seemed briefly to her, as she walked the depopulated streets, that she could slip out of her life altogether, could be just anyone anywhere, herself but unhaunted and unharmed, untutored in the hidden dangers, a woman with a job and a child and the regular array of difficulties, the questions of rent and groceries. It seemed, as she walked, an unimaginable happiness.

Pete was waiting for her in front of the precinct office. He was smoking a cigarette. He’d quit smoking years ago. He stabbed the smoldering butt into his mouth, strode up the block to meet her.

He said, “There’s been another one.” His voice was soft and low.

For a moment she thought the boy had detonated in her apartment. No, she had the bomb in her bag.

She had a bomb in her bag. Right next to her copy of Whitman.

“Where?” she asked.

“Chicago.”

“Chicago?”

“It came over the wire twenty minutes ago.”

“What do they know?”

“Looks like the same thing.”

“In Chicago.”

“Shit’s still coming in. No IDs yet, but it matches. Single victim, as far as they can tell. Out on Lake Shore Drive.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the old woman told you? Anything?”

“You want to know? You want to know the one and only thing she said since you left?”

“Shoot.”

“She said she’s waiting to speak to you. Otherwise, nothing.”

“I guess I’d better go in there and talk to her, then.”

“Yeah. I guess you’d better.”

She went with Pete into the precinct station, into the interrogation room. The woman was exactly as Cat had left her. Same ramrod posture, same taxidermist eyes. She was surrounded, however, by a half-dozen burly suitors from the FBI.

Pete ushered her in. The FBI guys parted reluctantly. Cat sat across from the woman, who blinked, shook her head slightly, and offered Cat a wry, coquettish smile.

Cat said, “I’ve been to your apartment.”

“But he wasn’t there, was he?”

“No,” Cat said. “He wasn’t.”

“He’ll be along. I wouldn’t worry.”

“I saw what’s on the walls.”

“I thought they should grow up with poetry. It’s been good for them, I think.”

“Why did you choose Whitman?”

“He’s the last of the great ones. Everyone since seems so slight.”

“That can’t be the only reason.”

“Everybody wants a reason, don’t they? Let’s say this, then. Whitman was the last great man who really and truly loved the world. The machinery was just starting up when he lived. If we can return to a time like Whitman’s, maybe we can love the world again.”

“That’s the message you wanted the boys to get?”

“Oh, I don’t think you get a message from poetry, really. You get a sense of beauty. I wanted my boys to understand about beauty. My family is bringing beauty back.”

“You said you were part of a big family.”

“People are so scattered nowadays. We used to live in villages.”

“Where’s the rest of your family?”

“I’m afraid we’ve lost touch.”

“I think you can tell me where some of them are.”

“No, really, I can’t. I’ve just been raising my babies here in New York. No one ever calls. No one writes.”

“You told me, ‘It’s time.’ Someone must have told you that.”

“Oh, that was decided a long, long time ago. June 21 of this year. It’s the first day of summer. It’s when the days start getting shorter. Doesn’t it always seem too soon, this early dark?”

A large FBI hand landed on Cat’s shoulder. She looked up. Older guy, uncanny resemblance to Bashful in Snow White. She’d never met this one.

He said, “We’re going to take over now.”

“It’s been nice talking to you, dear,” the woman said.

“Give me a little more time,” Cat said.

“We’re going to take over now,” the man repeated.

She understood. The interrogators were about to step in. Ordinary persuasion had reached its limit.

Cat said to the woman, “It would be better for you to tell me anything you know. Right now. These other people are not going to be gentle with you.”

“I don’t expect anyone to be gentle with me. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, then.”

The woman said, “Take care of him.”

“Take care of who?”

The woman laughed, sharply and suddenly. Her laughter was high, crystalline, songlike; although it seemed genuine, she enunciated clearly: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Then, just as suddenly, she stopped.

 

Pete walked Cat out to the sidewalk. A breeze, smoke-tinged, was blowing down Pitt Street from the north. Truck horns bellowed from the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Sweet mother of God,” Pete said.

“I don’t think they’re going to get anything more from her.”

“You might be surprised. They’ve brought in the guys who don’t take no.”

“I mean, I don’t think she knows anything.”

“She knows things.”

“Okay. Probably she knows about a plan that was set in motion years ago. Probably she knows a few names that aren’t real names, attached to people who won’t ever be found.”

“These guys can do a lot with a little information.”

“I know that.”

“You should go home and get some rest.”

“What about you?”

“Soon. I’m out of the picture now, too.”

“But—”

“It spooks me, is all. I’m going to hang around here a little longer. I’m just not quite ready to go home and get into bed.”

“I understand. I can stick around with you.”

“Naw. Get some sleep. You’re on duty in, like, three hours.”

“Right.”

“Chicago. Fucking Chicago.”

“She said she has a big family.”

He closed his eyes, rocked slightly, as if he might lose his balance. He said, “I don’t want to think about it.”

“Who does?”

“Right,” he said. “Who does?”

They stood there together in the 3:00 a.m. quiet. Something was happening. Maybe it was no big deal; maybe it was small and only looked big, as Pete had said just a few days ago. It might even be a copycat, some Chicago-based citizen of the Bizarro Dimension who’d looked at the headlines and thought, Hmm, hug somebody and blow him up, interesting idea, why didn’t I think of that? Or maybe, at worst, it was a handful of lunatics, scattered around—dangerous, yes, but not majorly dangerous, not history-changing dangerous. How many Bolsheviks had brought down the czar? She should know that.

Still. She had a feeling, and she was someone who relied on feelings.

“Pete?”

“Yeah?”

She wanted to tell him that there might be somewhere. There might be grass and mountains, a little house. It wasn’t heroic—it was in fact more than a little bit cowardly—to want to slip away, to think of saving yourself and maybe another person or two, to try to live out your life in some hamlet while other people worked the front lines.

And besides, Pete couldn’t go. He had obligations. Even without obligations, he wasn’t the house-in-the-country type. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself.

Shade and water

The murmur of the world

Your cup and garden

“Don’t start smoking again,” she said.

“It’s just for now.”

“Right. See you.”

“See you.”

She left him there, standing in the quickening air, under the rumble of the Williamsburg Bridge.

 

The boy woke up a little after seven. Cat was sitting on the edge of the mattress.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“Are we going now?”

“Yes. Let’s get your clothes back on.”

He jumped out of bed, got into his jeans and jacket. Cat took up a pad of yellow legal paper and a pen.

“I’m ready,” the boy said.

“Just a minute,” she answered.

She wrote:

Pete—

I have to go away. I’m not in my right mind. I wonder if I’ve been crazy for years without realizing it. I seem to have caught something from all the nuts I’ve talked to. I seem to not want this life or anything else that’s readily available. I can’t work for the company anymore. I need to find something else to do.

What I want to say. Try to keep yourself safe. I want to thank you for all the love you’ve given me. If that isn’t unbearably corny.

Cat

She put the note on the kitchen counter. She still had the bomb in her bag. Not a good idea to leave it. She’d figure out a way to get rid of it so nobody would pick it up.

“Okay,” she said to the boy. “I’m ready now, too.”

There was nothing to give him for breakfast. She’d get him something en route to the train station.

The train was the best way. She didn’t have a car, and if she rented one it’d be traceable. Plane tickets would leave a record, too. You could pay cash for train tickets, and no one needed to know your name or anything about you at all.

She took him downstairs, paused with him on the stoop, looking up and down the block. It was the regular early-morning scenario. The achievers on their way to work, the shoe-repair guy rolling up his grate. The old man raved in front of the flower shop across the street. It was another day on East Fifth.

She hesitated. This was her last chance to do the right and rational thing. She could take the kid in. She’d lose her job, of course—not policy to drug a dangerous suspect and keep him in your apartment overnight. But she could get another job. She could get another boyfriend. She could hand over the kid and go on as a respectable citizen. What she was doing—what she had not yet done but was about to do—would be irreversible.

The little boy took her hand. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

With a sense of vertiginous recklessness, a queasy and light-headed plunging, she led the child down into the street.

She stopped at an ATM and withdrew five hundred from her checking, five hundred from her savings. That was the maximum. Money would be a problem, of course. If she used her credit cards or withdrew more money from another ATM tomorrow, they’d be able to trace her. She’d figure something out. She’d have to.

She took the kid to a Korean market, bought two big bags full of food, and paid with her Visa card—it wouldn’t make any difference, charging this last purchase in New York. The food would last them for a couple of days. She got the kid an egg on a bagel and got one for herself. He ate his bagel cautiously, in tiny bites, in the cab on the way to Penn Station.

“How long does it take to get to the beach?” he asked.

Right. The beach. They should head south, shouldn’t they? Better to be scraping by in a warm climate.

She said, “It’ll take a while. The beach is pretty far away.”

He nodded, chewing. “This is good,” he said.

They got to Penn Station. She bought them two tickets on a train leaving for Washington, D.C., in twenty-five minutes. They’d change trains in Washington. They’d change trains a couple of times.

Penn Station was mostly businesspeople, this early. It was the minor movers and shakers (the big ones flew) off to Boston or Washington, doing deals, standing now in the bright nowhere of the station, sipping Starbucks, talking on cell phones, guarding their briefcases against thieves, heads full of flowcharts and cost analyses; men in decent if unspectacular suits, women with impeccable hair and heavy makeup, working their pieces of it, lining up lunches, phoning in last-minute questions to bosses or instructions to spouses, maintaining their accounts, soliciting new business, keeping it going, moving it along.

And here she was, holding the hand of an impaired child, with two sacks of groceries, a pipe bomb, and a copy of Leaves of Grass. The others made a little extra room for her, unconsciously, the way New Yorkers do when they sense the presence of someone strange. Black woman with a compromised white child. Crazy. Or so luckless, so dispossessed, as to be crazy by default. Here, then, was the beginning of her strange new life.

Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Their train was announced, and they got on. She found two seats, gave the kid the window. As the train pulled out, he pressed his moon face to the glass.

“Here we go,” he said.

“Yes. Here we go.”

She was terrified and elated. She couldn’t be too optimistic about their prospects—it was hard to vanish, and she was already down to eight hundred and seventy-some dollars, after paying for the cab and the train tickets. Most likely she was only delaying the inevitable, and it would not go well for her if they were caught. She’d do time. Pete would intervene on her behalf. That would help. A lawyer would argue that she’d lost her own child and had collapsed under the stress of her job. Maybe they’d go easy on her. Maybe not.

And maybe, just maybe, she and the kid would get away. It happened. People disappeared. Maybe, just maybe, she’d be able to get a job waitressing or tending bar in Sarasota or Galveston or Santa Rosa. She’d keep them out of the cities. Maybe she’d be able to rent them a little apartment close to a beach, get a simple job, give the kid books to read, get him a dog. They’d probably have to keep moving. People would get curious. People would want to know why the kid wasn’t in school, and telling them that he wasn’t right, that she educated him at home, would hold up for only so long. But if they kept moving, if they lived in enough places, then maybe they could manage to eradicate their pasts, become just another woman with a child, trying to survive in the big, difficult world. There were so many people out there living anonymously. It was possible, it was not impossible, that they could join them.

The train pulled out of the long darkness of the tunnel into the marshland of New Jersey. The boy gasped at the sight, though it was only cattails and scummy little pools of dark green water.

“You like it?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“You know what we need to do? We need to give you a name.”

“I like Smokey. I do.”

“Smokey’s not a good name for a boy.”

“Luke?”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“I know your other boy has that name. But I could have it, too, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. I think you should have a name all your own.”

“I like Luke.”

He returned to the window, enraptured. Although the field of cattails was interrupted periodically by asphalt tundras full of empty delivery trucks, and was studded with utility poles and smokestacks, Cat had to admit that there was something…wild about it, if not exactly beautiful. Even here, this close to the city, were brief passages of land that had probably looked just this way before the first tree was felled to build the first farmhouse. It was a brilliant morning, building toward a hot, cloudless afternoon. Early sun gilded the marsh, glittered on the brackish water.

They were going, then. They were on their way someplace; there was no telling what would happen to them. It was morning everywhere. It was morning in Dayton and Denver and Seattle. It was morning on the beaches and in the forests, where the nocturnal hunters had returned to their dens and the timorous daylight animals, the ones meant to be eaten, were out browsing for food. It was morning on the tin roofs of factories and on the mountain peaks, morning in the fields and parking lots, morning in the rented rooms where women with no money did what they could to keep their children alive and healthy—where they hoped, given what they had to work with, to make them happy, at least some of the time.

A seagull, almost painfully white, dipped down and for a moment kept abreast of the train. Cat could see the black bead of its eye, the spot of brilliant orange on the underside of its beak.

She took a quick look inside her bag. Yes, the bomb was still there. Her cell was blinking. Someone had left a message. She clicked the phone off.

The boy turned back from the window. His face was bright with excitement.

He said, “You know what?”

“What?”

“The smallest sprout shows that there’s really no death.”

“Right.”

He turned back to the window, watched rapturously as the train rumbled into New Jersey. He was harmless now. He’d been disarmed. He was just a little boy, happy for the first time in his life. She could get to him, couldn’t she? She could bring him around. It was what she’d been trained to do.

She touched his frail shoulder. He reached up and patted her hand, without taking his eyes from all that was passing by. It was a small gesture, small enough, but it was uncharacteristic. It was the first overture she’d seen him make that was not tentative, that implied the absentminded confidence of a child who’s been loved. He was beginning to respond, to trust her. He was an impossible being, irreparably damaged, and he was a little boy who wanted to see the shells, who wanted to have a dog. He was letting her save him.

He turned to her and smiled. She hadn’t seen him smile before. His smile was crooked, like a jack-o’-lantern’s.

He said, “Now you’re in the family, too.”

His smile was insane. It was gleeful and unabashed and full of a malice so crazy it would feel like joy to him.

The ping went off in Cat’s mind. Here was a killer. Here was the face of true intent.

And now, suddenly, she understood. She had fallen for it.

We need to make it known that nobody is safe. Not a rich man. Not a poor man.

This, then, was the message: no one is safe, not even mothers. Not even the people who are willing to sacrifice everything in the name of love. She and the boy were hurtling toward the day when, with milk on the table and a dog browsing for scraps, her adopted son, her second Luke, the boy she had rescued, would decide that he finally loved her enough to murder her.

She could, of course, give him up. She could call Pete; she could hustle the kid off when the train stopped in Newark. Sure, she’d be in trouble, but she’d survive in ways he wouldn’t. He’d be sucked away into institutions; he’d never be heard from again.

He could always choose to kill her. She could always decide to do away with him.

But for now, she thought, they could go on together. They could put it off from hour to hour and maybe from month to month or year to year. She might still want to be his mother even if it proved fatal. And he might not, after all, be waiting to do it with a bread knife or a pillow as she slept; he might be willing to do it gradually, as children had been doing since time began. In a sense, he had killed her already, hadn’t he? He had ended her life and taken her into this new one, this crazy rebirth, hurtling forward on a train into the vast confusion of the world, its simultaneous and never-ending collapse and regeneration, its rock-hard little promises, its owners and workers, its sanctuaries that never endured, that were never meant to endure.

To die is different from what any one supposes, and luckier.

The child kept smiling his murderous smile.

Cat smiled back.