3

I didn’t go upstairs to try and sleep because I was afraid of waking Stefan, and he needed sleep more than I did.

But honestly, I also didn’t want to see him in his current state, awake or asleep. My strong, athletic partner was handsomer in middle age than he’d ever been before, and I wasn’t prepared to witness his collapse. Not when I was so shattered myself. It was too shocking, too mortifying. Call it selfish, but I needed to protect myself any way I could right then, and just being around him would have unraveled me.

That made me feel even worse, even more isolated. How had I become a person who could even think like this?

After reluctantly turning out most of the lights, I slipped off my shoes and sacked out on one of the twin overstuffed couches in our living room whose décor seemed utterly beside the point. We’d been so proud of this room that trumpeted comfort and conviviality, but it struck me now as an utterly false invitation. This was a Potemkin Village, masking what life was really like.

I had found some melatonin in the downstairs bathroom and taken a few, but they didn’t seem to be having any impact at all. I wasn’t a romantic, yet I thought of Byron’s sad lines that night: “in my heart / There is a vigil, and these eyes but close / To look within.” I kept seeing the APCs pull up, the black uniforms, the guns, and pictured myself being dragged from the house and hurled onto the grass. Oddly, I didn’t feel sore, not even in my shoulders. Maybe I was still in a state of shock and my body’s messages were scrambled.

Vanessa had said it could have been worse, and I agreed, but for completely different reasons. The black-clad thugs had come at night, and hopefully at least some of our neighbors had slept through the storm. By day, it would have been much worse, since there were a number of nosy retirees on our street and stay-at-home mothers with young children. But all that was cold comfort. Whatever the echoes in our neighborhood, the raid was seared into my memory—and God knows what Stefan would be experiencing when he woke up. That is, if he was sleeping at all. I did not want to check. One more sign of my cowardice.

The evening’s grotesque events continued to parade past me over and over as grimly as Richard III’s murder victims haunting him before his final battle. Even with Marco curled up next to me, nestled into my armpit as he often did at night upstairs in bed, I felt completely at sea. How was I supposed to live the rest of my life after this cataclysm, how was I even supposed to get through tomorrow? I hadn’t been the one taken off to jail, and yet I felt as trapped as if it had been me.

Police had polluted my home, treated me and Stefan like criminals or worse, insulted me, degraded us both. I could never recover the man I’d been minutes before it all happened: blithely unaware that disaster was about to tear apart my assumptions that life was solid and safe. I’d grown up in New York City but had never been mugged, never even seen a crime, and I confess that despite having encountered murder in Michiganapolis, the past six years of peace had been more than a balm, they were a narcotic. Thanks to Stefan’s amazing memoir and my getting tenure, we had more money than we could have hoped for. And that was even with Stefan tithing a portion of his royalties to the church he had joined.

But what did money matter?

Marco stirred against me, the underside of his muzzle very warm, and it was as if someone had nudged me and asked, “Are you kidding?” He was right. Money meant we could pay Vanessa whatever it would take to clear our names if we had to. The law had been turned against us tonight in one way—who knew what could happen next? Money meant we weren’t completely defenseless—or so I hoped.

Marco sighed in his sleep and rolled over on his back, looking adorable. Where had he hidden himself during the raid? I wish I could have had the sense (or courage?) to join him.

I must have slept, because Marco was nosing my cheek the way he does when I haven’t gotten up early enough for him. He’d been woken up by the rising sun and the birdsong outside.

I stumbled to the back door to let him out into the fenced yard and pee, standing further back than I usually did, as if to keep anyone from seeing me. There was still coffee left, and after putting out Marco’s kibble, I contentedly watched him munch away. He wasn’t a gobbler like some dogs, and seemed almost catlike in the way he took his meals. Despite everything that had happened, I felt myself grinning with enjoyment watching him. And then I remembered Vanessa telling me the local cops shot dogs during raids. Yesterday’s horrors rushed back in like some kind of alien horde in a sci-fi movie.

That was it. I couldn’t even try to rest a bit more.

I heard Stefan padding downstairs and heading into the kitchen. Marco trotted up to him, but when he was ignored, he settled down on his dog bed and lay there licking his chops, looking contented. If only I had his gift for letting go so easily!

Stefan was wearing the blue velvet vintage smoking jacket and silk pajamas I’d gotten him partly as a joke when his book hit the New York Times best-seller list. They matched his eyes, but today made him look like an exiled monarch who’d seen his palace go up in flames. He didn’t answer my “Good morning,” just moved around the kitchen listlessly, picking up a Vanity Fair, moving a fruit bowl, fiddling with things as if trying to remember what their purpose was or what one even did in this room. It was a crazy comparison, but I thought of Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, high on morphine, lost to the world and lost in herself. Stefan and I had seen it twice at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, with an amazing actress playing Mary. Each time, we had sat long after the theater emptied out, too stunned to move. Mary’s last line in that play was “And I was happy—for a time.” Was that our fate? Had we been happy for a time, and now the darkness would always surround us?

“Are you cold?” I asked him fatuously.

Stefan nodded, but he didn’t look at me.

“Why don’t you sit down, I’ll make breakfast.”

“Not hungry,” he murmured. Well, I wasn’t either. But I seemed doomed to say stupid things.

“Coffee?”

He shrugged an okay, and I brought him coffee, but he still wouldn’t sit down.

I waited for him to say something, but when he was silent for an unbearable ten minutes, I had to speak: “Will you tell me what happened last night?”

Now he sat at the glass-topped table, put his mug down carefully, and just began without even clearing his throat. “They called me faggot and I don’t know what else. After I was out on the lawn, with somebody’s boot on my ass, they dragged me into that truck or tank or whatever it was.”

“It’s an armored personnel carrier.”

“Whatever. It felt like a tank. One of them was in front of me and one of them was behind me. Inside, there were bench seats facing each other. It was like being in Iraq or something like that, and I was the roadside bomber they had caught and were going to execute. I kept waiting for them to pull over and dump me in a ditch.” He gulped and went on. “I was handcuffed to one of the benches and I heard the cops—they were cops, right?—I heard one of them talking to somebody, and when I looked up, I could see him entering information on—on some kind of dashboard computer. Maybe it was a tablet. I’m not sure.”

He breathed in deeply, face creased in pain.

“My picture was up there, my driver’s license maybe? It was really cold in there. We kept driving and then pulled up somewhere, a metal door opened, very loud, and when they took me out, it was some kind of garage, I think. The same guys took me into a tiny room and sat me down. It was sterile, the fluorescent lights were blinking a little and I could see that even with my eyes shut. They left me there for hours, I think.” He swallowed hard a few times. “I felt like I’d never get out.”

I was tempted to stop him, because the recital was filling me with despair and terror. I imagined myself there with him and it was horrible. Vanessa’s injunction came back: “Let him talk.”

Stefan went on without any prompting. “I didn’t know if you were okay or not. What if you were dead, or injured? And I thought Marco might have run away with the front door open.”

I winced—how come he had worried about our puppy and I hadn’t?

“I didn’t know what was going on, Nick, why I was there, and what they wanted, they never said. All I kept thinking was that I wished I had a gun.”

“What?”

For the first time that morning, his eyes met mine and he looked crazed, possessed, like a warrior leading troops into a hopeless battle.

“You wanted a gun?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. I would have shot every motherfucker in sight.”

Stefan’s an introvert, gets angry only rarely, and when he does, it can be explosive. But I’d never heard him like this. He was almost growling. In that moment, I realized not having bought a gun a few years ago might have been one of the wisest decisions of my life.

“Did they hurt you?” I managed to ask.

He grimaced. “You mean did they put electrodes on my balls or waterboard me? No. But I was strip-searched.”

“You were—?”

He nodded and looked away. “All I had on was pajama pants. But they took them off anyway and they made me bend over, and they lifted my—” He squeezed his eyes shut. “They lifted my balls and looked underneath. I won’t tell you what they said. I’ll never tell anyone what they said. But if I could kill them right now, I would, and I’d die happy. Every single one of them, a bullet to the brain.”

I wanted to say something to talk him down from the ledge he was on, but I knew Vanessa was right in urging me to just shut up and listen.

“They strip-searched me,” he said again, coldly, as if observing the scene from a tremendous distance. And then he shrugged, helplessly. I felt his silence now was an invitation.

Picturing what had happened to Stefan, I felt bombarded by every scene of police brutality I’d ever watched on TV or in the movies. “How many of them?” I asked.

He squinted. “At least two. They kept poking me with a gun or a baton or something and—” He shook his head. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. In Michiganapolis.”

Stefan’s parents were Holocaust survivors who’d hidden their Jewishness and pretended to be Catholic when he was growing up, then revealed that he was actually Jewish when he was a teenager. I wasn’t really sure how much they’d told him about their war years when the secret was finally out, but I was certain the unspoken trauma they’d passed on to him in all the years before that had just been re-triggered by the SWAT team. I despise the American habit of comparing everyone you don’t like to Nazis, but it was impossible to escape thinking like that this morning.

The doorbell rang and Stefan jerked back in his chair as if he’d been punched in the chest. I froze, but Marco woke up and trotted off to see who was there and I had to follow. “It can’t be them, it can’t be them,” I kept repeating softly as I made my way into the foyer, ready to grab Marco if there was trouble.

I didn’t have to.

Vanessa bounded in, looking even more glamorous than yesterday, this time in an orange and black checkered pants suit and ropes of amber beads around her neck. “I brought you donuts,” she said. “Tim Horton’s. Even if you’re not hungry, these are no ordinary donuts.”

I followed her into the kitchen where she greeted Stefan as casually as if she’d been invited. She set her iPhone down on the island and quickly found a plate for the donuts, set them out on the table. Stefan actually took one. I guess nobody ever said no to Vanessa. Marco certainly liked her. Or the donuts. He sat there glancing from one to the other.

“You look amazing,” I heard myself saying. It was inappropriate, but I was punch drunk, I suppose. “Do you ever sleep?”

“Me? Never. Kidding! Of course I sleep. When I need to. I also swim, stay hydrated, and my sister is a model, so I know makeup secrets of the gods.”

She whirled around to Stefan. “You guys have to stick together now. What happened last night can drive any couple apart.” She cocked her head. “Tragedy does that to people. I’ve seen it too often, especially when the cops are involved.”

“I want to sue those bastards,” I said.

She smiled. “For what? Protecting the Homeland? Are you unpatriotic or something?”

“What are you talking about?”

“My guess is that they would end up claiming the whole thing was connected to national security. That’s the best way out of a tight corner—it trumps everything and they can say or do whatever they want to. Don’t you know what kind of country we live in now? Stefan could have wound up in some secret base abroad if somebody had pushed the right buttons.”

“You mean there’s nothing we can do about it?”

“Nope. He wasn’t hurt, and the damage to your property is minimal, I assume?”

“There wasn’t any.”

“That’s it, then. I’ve seen houses that were torn apart, every damned dish and vase and glass and picture frame and ashtray broken, paper files shredded, beds and chairs and couches ripped open. I told you before, you’re lucky.” Then she added, “And Stefan was released quickly. If the DEA had been involved, they could have held him for days without food or water. Not on purpose. By accident. They sometimes forget they have suspects.”

I didn’t even want to imagine that. “But isn’t there some way to find out how this mess started?”

“I told you, I have contacts on the force. I’m asking some questions, maybe I’ll come up with something, but don’t hold your breath, guys.”

Stefan was silent through all of our conversation. He’d broken a donut into pieces on the table and was eating them one at a time, carefully.

“You’re a sleuth, aren’t you?” Vanessa asked, folding her arms and looking a little stern.

“No, I’m a professor. I’m a bibliographer.”

“Bullshit. I know who you are. I know you’ve solved some murders in the past. Get out your gear and start sleuthing.”

“And when we find who did it?” Stefan said. “I will kill him.”

Vanessa turned, planted both hands on the table and leaned into his face. “No way, José.” Casual phrase, tough attitude: She could have been Maggie Thatcher declaring war on Argentina. “You will want to kill whoever set you up. I don’t blame you. I’d feel the same way. But you are not going to do it. I’ve defended guilty clients and defended innocent ones and I much prefer the ones who don’t keep me up at night, worrying about what kind of person I am.”