ROMEY’S ACCUSATIONS ECHOED in my head as the unmentionable, if not universal, small, personal, unwanted, and feared words that could become truths: her truth that I was a coward hiding in India, a truth that pressed harder and harder against me in those first few weeks in December.
The morning after meeting Patel, the Ambassador car got stuck in a traffic jam behind a bus blowing out diesel fumes, while every car, taxi, and rickshaw from Delhi to the Pakistani border obeyed the blue bus’s “Please Horn” sign. I’d taken Holika’s advice and stopped giving out money. My daily ration of fruit and bread was already gone when a scrawny woman, with her naked baby tucked against her chest, pawed at the closed window. I wished I were invisible and I could reach out, swipe the baby from her arms, and drive away unseen. Instead, our eyes locked and I saw that she was high, and despite my guilt, I understood a few rupees would do her no good. I tucked my head into my chest and closed my eyes, still feeling her slack-jawed stare of practiced need. Chandon began arguing with her in Hindi. She shook the baby at him. Then the cell phone rang. My heart raced once again hoping to hear Sarah’s voice in this wanton game of tease, but a voice that wished it were a cudgel stick pounced out in a harsh and nasal accent.
“Neil Downs, Lee W. Corricelli here.”
Yeah, of Karpstein, Forman, and Corricelli. They, I had come to know from papers faxed to me by my lawyers, represented the family of Bobby Skirpan.
“How’d you get this number?”
“That is not of your concern.”
Not even Romey would be that nasty, so I figured there was another explanation.
He smugly informed me that he “had been alerted” that I’d made plans for Castor’s unveiling, which meant I was coming to New York. Stunned, I didn’t answer him with a “yes” or “no” because I needed to talk to Sarah before I made any official plans. I hadn’t mentioned any date to “my lawyers.” Only Matt, Holika, the cemetery coordinator, and the rabbi knew I was contemplating a Christmas Day unveiling.
I gripped the phone. “How do you justify your existence? Extorting money from dead people.”
“I don’t think it is in your interest to get personal, Mr. Downs.”
“Your clients’ kid killed my son, and I shouldn’t get personal? I did not kill anyone, unlike the child of your client.”
“That is a debatable point that we will determine in court. Have a good day or is it evening there? And I hope to be meeting you and your wife soon.”
I hung up and slumped down in the car, which hadn’t moved ten feet. I felt trapped worse than in a stalled subway car under the East River, rightfully anticipating a dreadful next few days and long nights of hellish phone calls to Judy Ludovicci-Lint and John Linscombe. This was the newest duo from the team of lawyers who’d been assigned to work my end of the case. I needed to talk to them, not only because of this call, but because I hadn’t set a date for the unveiling.
Ludovicci-Lint let me know that Karpstein, Forman probably paid off a worker in the cemetery to find out the schedule of the unveiling. They’d also hired a detective who found Sarah in Prescott. I surrendered to my anger and let loose with a few choice epithets at Ludovicci-Lint and Linscombe for not telling me this before. For trying to spare me the ugliness of litigation. How could I explain to them that I was afraid it was not the detective who chased Sarah from Prescott, but her desire to see Riegle? More afraid of what Karpstein, Forman might know.
According to Ludovicci-Lint they’d subpoenaed Sarah, which was way out of line. Normally the request was made through the lawyers. Ludovicci-Lint assured me she would quash it with no problems. It was harassment. This only displayed the dirty, no-holds-barred scare tactics they were ready to use and this aggressive ploy would backfire on Karpstein, Forman when she moved again for a dismissal. She would get an unlimited extension of Sarah’s deposition; they would invoke husband/wife privilege, which could exclude her altogether, but they still wanted Sarah to testify. “Sarah will be a perfectly wonderful witness for our side.” Ludovicci-Lint spoke in a low register, with accentless, quick bursts. “The aggrieved mother being harassed. Besides,” she asked, almost rhetorically, “they can’t learn much from Sarah about you, can they?”
“About me? Nothing that that will help them. Nothing.” I answered with a flawed truth. If Karpstein, Forman found out about Sarah’s whereabouts for those missing hours that would lead to a whole slew of “reasons” for my “choices” in the operating room.
Ludovicci-Lint also delivered an encore of delightful news. The families of the other murdered children and teachers initiated two more civil lawsuits, one against the families of Kickham, Skirpan, Graper, and Tabaldi, and the other against the city and school board for lack of security. This was no damn surprise. Within days of the slaughter the parents of the wounded and dead found letters of solicitation from a score of lawyers in their mailboxes, under their doors, and on their phone machines. I wanted no part of either suit.
The prospect of my sneaking in and out of New York now near zero, I resigned myself to being deposed, not to being exposed.
In the midst of this swirl of conversations and faxes, Charlie called. “Downs, we need to play tennis.”
It had been almost a year since I last played, when Castor had begun, unquestionably to please me, to take tennis at Stuyvesant, and we had started hitting the ball on weekends at the court inside the seminary on 10th Avenue, which was associated with St. Vincent’s. The summer before we went to an early-round afternoon session of the U.S. Open, which, I think, he enjoyed almost as much as I did. Probably because I did.
As my mind wandered and Charlie talked, a staff person brought in a folder that contained three newswire printouts and handed it to me. “Downs, you have the folder?”
“Yeah, just got it.”
“Take a look. We’ll talk tomorrow morning at seven at the courts.”
I read the printouts. Luisa Torres, mother of fifteen-year-old Elissa Torres, who was killed instantly and never made it to an ER during the massacre, committed suicide three days after being interviewed for a coming Newsweek magazine article: “Stuyvesant: Six Months Later.”
I’d met Elissa. She belonged to a group of older girls who doted on Castor. I knew her mother as well. Luisa was a single mom who’d worked for years in the Woolworth’s on 14th Street. When it closed, she found other low-paying sales jobs. She lived on Avenue B in the gentrifying streets of what she still fondly called Loisada.
Luisa brought Elissa to the ER after Castor told me that Elissa suffered from asthma and wasn’t getting the proper care. Like so many people without health insurance, and many of our patients, they used the ER as their primary line of defense against illness. During those visits I learned that Luisa existed for the sake of her daughter’s future, which seemed so bright the second she buoyantly stepped through the doors of Stuyvesant High School.
After Luisa spent a lonely Thanksgiving Day, on Friday, after leaving never-answered messages with Newsweek staff reporter Julie Earl, and the grievance counselor hired by Stuyvesant, she trudged to the church on Avenue D where she lit a candle for Elissa, after which she went home and poured herself a glass of Jim Beam. Then she took her unregistered .38-caliber revolver, and shot herself once in the heart.
Reading about Luisa scared me. I wanted to call someone, send flowers, do fucking something. I wanted to speak to Sarah.
I wished I knew if Luisa had other family. I didn’t want to go online and read about more than I needed to know. Too much evil would surely invade my screen. Luisa’s reason for doing the interview baffled me until I thought about her aloneness, her need to speak of Elissa. How speaking aloud brought Elissa to life for those minutes when Ms. Earl treated her as if she were her best friend, as if she cared, as if Elissa were still alive, as if the tragedy could be undone. And then, after Earl faded into her upscale world, Elissa’s sweet voice and silly, embarrassed laugh repeated in Luisa’s head until it faded to this: Elissa, my Elissa is never coming back. All Luisa’s hopes and dreams for her daughter collapsed into a vacant solitude shifting between excruciating pain and feeling almost dead, so she finished the job. And that, I understood.
No matter that Sarah and I always refused to talk to the press; that wouldn’t stop them from hunting us down. I thought a follow-up call or a visit to the temple to talk to famille Donneaux might be in order. I thought I’d talk over my options with Charlie.
We met at the club where I felt out of place among its manicured gardens with women kneeling on hands and knees snipping and shaping the flowers with scissors, perfectly swept clay courts, and Victorian Age rules that all players wear whites, which I bought the previous evening.
Charlie pretended that these games meant nothing to him, but he hated losing. I cared less now than ever before. I’d insinuated that a doubles game suited me because I was slowed down from my dysentery and being in lousy shape. “Cut it, I don’t want to hear any excuses out of you when I whip your ass,” Charlie ordered in his mano-a-mano voice.
Before we started, he stretched and flexed. Despite his growing midsection girth, Charlie kept in damn good shape. I stood rather inertly, feeling brittle. He put his right leg up on the bench and leaned forward to stretch his calf and turned his head to me. “You read the papers I sent over?”
“Yes.”
“I fixed it so Newsweek and Time will not approach you.” Charlie was way ahead of me.
“How’d you manage that?”
He finished flexing and opened a new can of balls. He bounced them off his racket. “Newsweek will be getting an interview with Hal Burden about Environ’s nuclear projects and their benefits to India. And you’ll soon be reading an exclusive interview by Madame Donneaux with Indian Prime Minister G. B. Sowat in Time.” That was a major coup. Sowat was a notoriously tough-to-get interview.
“Charlie, why do I deserve such preferred treatment?”
“Cause you’re so cute.” He tossed one tennis ball at me, which I caught. He held the other two in his hand and tapped my butt with his racket.
“Come on, Charlie.”
“Dammit, Downs, you saved my only son’s life.”
He eyeballed me up and down with that peculiar American pathetic frown of pity and pathos that made my stomach implode. I gnashed my teeth behind my widening, closed-mouth grimness, because I had no damn answer—and I felt pathetic.
“Let’s play, Downs.”
No more needed to be said. Charlie played fast. No rest between points. No small talk as we switched sides of the court after the odd games. Charlie played tennis as if it were football: the harder you hit, the better. But like so many macho players, he hit the ball into the net or out as often as he hit a winner. His off-the-court strategic caginess gave way to the impatient foolishness of the Buffalo street kid. He caustically made fun of my style as “girl’s tennis,” because I used my speed to keep the ball in play instead of slamming away, until he eventually screwed up. He beat me in the first set. Then I found my stroke, got in a mental safety zone, started to hit to the corners with my shots, keeping him on the run, then bringing him into the net, where I could easily lob or pass him—which pissed him off even more. I won the second set.
In the third set I rushed out to a 3-1 lead, and he blistered with anger. Not that I felt sorry for him, that was impossible, because he wanted to win so badly, and he had been so good to me and I needed his goodness. I began to purposefully hit out on my forehand, hit my dink shots into the net. He never doubted his victory. He even let slip a mild boast, “I thought you might get me ’cause of these old legs.”
I smiled benignly like a good loser and he patted me on the shoulder with an aging, avuncular pride as we headed to the showers and then ate breakfast in the club with other embassy and official types. During breakfast, I realized that for much of the hour and a half I actually had fun with my endorphins exploding. We planned to play again soon.
Outside, while waiting for our separate cars, I decided to mention the two other favors I wanted from Charlie and that I’d been too intimidated to broach before. The first was less threatening. In the midst of the hubbub of the last few days, Levi had called when I wasn’t there and asked Donna if he could come in for a consultation about his knees. Initially, having never heard of him, she said no. Since the to-do with the Indian couple and Schlipssi, Donna was under “no bend” orders to get his permission for any nonemergency, nonauthorized list cases. Levi was on no list. Schlipssi certified his denial. I felt too embarrassed, because I hadn’t yet taken up his offer to meet for lunch, to call Levi back until I had good news.
“Consider him your new patient.”
“I’d also like to do some research on someone—and I need your guidance.”
“I’m listening.” His car pulled up. He opened the back door.
“Siddhartha Singh.”
He raised his eyebrows, his control and tact steadfastly back in place, he chose his words carefully, “I’ll take care of it, but don’t push your friendship too far.” I wondered if he meant my friendship with him, or if he suspected that Holika and I were trysting the night away and not simply visiting Hindu temples.
Then, it seemed, he abruptly changed subjects with a question that superficially expressed compassionate curiosity, but in Charlie-speak was no question at all. “Hey, how did you enjoy your foray into the world of New Delhi Public Hospital?”
“H … how …,” I stuttered and stopped because I hadn’t told him about my meeting. That reinforced my fear that Charlie kept tabs on everyone and every action, even of a nonpolitical entity like me that transpired in his circle and outside, too. I felt like a dope for not realizing that Charlie, or one of his assistants probably, had spoken to Patel on my behalf. “Not much. And even less as I think about it now.”
“Yeah, it’s a sinkhole over there, and I’ve warned you, you need to be careful where you step in Delhi.”