11

There was discussion before it was decided what Fred would do. Molly had changed clothes, the yellow robe supplanted now by pink shorts and one of Fred’s white shirts, and they sat at the table in her kitchen.

“It’s not the desert. Someone must have seen you come out of the building with that painting,” Molly said.

“It was wrapped. It was the day before Smykal was found,” Fred said.

“You’re damn right. Which you know because you were there just before he got killed, and then right after. Jesus, Fred, you were practically living at that place.”

“Smykal was expecting someone,” Fred said. “He buzzed the door lock open without using the intercom. He said, when he saw me, ‘You’re not him.’”

“Who was ‘him’?” Molly asked.

“I may have to find out,” Fred said.

If they had been married, Molly would have something to say about the situation he was in. And Fred would have to say something like, “Trust me.” This present arrangement was more awkward since it didn’t provide Molly any legal right to worry.

“Just don’t be an asshole,” Molly said, taking his arm and giving it a rough shake.

Fred didn’t say, “Trust me.”

“And don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean,” Molly said. “Someone’s been killed. So you’re going to poke a stick into a dark place where you can disturb somebody who will kill. You, for example.”

They both knew that Molly was thinking about Fred’s scars, which looked too amateur to be from surgery: the slash marks on his chest and upper arm and the one along his jawbone on the right side; the puckered, light circle on the inside front of his left shoulder, matched by the larger one from the exit wound on the back.

Fred wouldn’t talk about them. When she’d asked him, early on, what they were from, he would only say, “I was acquiring life skills.” Then he would talk about artists, people like Caravaggio, who had died violently.

Now he said, “Art itself is violent, like hanging steel girders three hundred feet up, or making anything, really; like breaking eggs. Art requires philosophical defiance as well as the contest with material. The artist’s eye is grasping, transforming, destroying. Clay finds art peaceful and can’t feel the painter’s hot breath as he gets down to the short strokes. There is nothing peaceful in a work of art, any more than the force of peace prevents the moon from crashing into the earth.”

Fred talked about this with Molly. He would talk pictures, she would recall his scars, and they mixed in her mind, the pictures and the scars.

Fred added, “Besides, I’m interested.”

He began prowling the backyard. He realized that the yard wouldn’t long survive that, so he put on shorts and a T-shirt and went for a run by the pond to clear his mind or give it distraction. It was midmorning, already getting warm. Dogs were out, and birds. The sky was blue and clear.

Fred hadn’t known that Molly was running, too. They bumped into each other three blocks from the house, both of them sweating, coming from their opposite directions.

They got back to the house and sat on the front steps, cooling off.

“It’s true,” Molly said. “We are interested.”

Fred stretched and turned to go into the house. He showered in the creaky little bathroom all of them shared on the second floor. He dressed for a warm day, putting on a blue polo shirt without the alligator, khakis, and once-white sneakers.

Sam’s door was closed. Terry was waking as he passed her open door. He stepped in for a visit. She kept her room in a sweet rumpus. She collected rocks, which tended to get mixed in with homework she forgot to deliver; she slept only in the upper third of her bed so there would be room for the rocks at the foot.

“Sit down,” she said, offering him the rock pile.

“Thank you.” Fred sat. “Your bed reminds me of the Yukon.”

“Thank you,” Terry said. “Fred, can you teach me to throw a curveball?”

“I’ll show you how it’s done,” Fred said, “but your coach may want you to wait till your hand is bigger.”

Terry followed him downstairs, still in her ragged blue pajamas, and made a lunge for the most disposable parts of the paper in time to provoke a confrontation with Sam, who came in right behind them, still dressed in yesterday’s T-shirt and jeans.

Fred did what he could to postpone bloodshed, found Molly still sitting on the front step, gave her a squeeze, told her, “Don’t worry, I won’t be recognized. Yesterday I was wearing a coat and tie,” and took the car into Cambridge to poke around.

*   *   *

Cambridge on a late Sunday morning in spring, warm, not raining, around Harvard Square, was filled with people who were somewhere else. Many were in Paris. They sat at tables next to the traffic and consumed coffee and croissants served to them by kids required by the management to wear berets. But the kids smiled at you, so you didn’t get that Paris feeling.

Some people were in New York. In jogging outfits, jangling with jewelry, accompanied by designer dogs, they ran or biked or roller-skated through the streets and on the sidewalks.

Some folks were attending church in Armenia. Some were at a Baptist wedding in Atlanta.

Some were in Southeast Asia still. Even home, they hadn’t been able to get home. They lived on vents by the river and panhandled, trying to score the comparative sanity of being drunk to take the place of the demon-haunted nightmares they otherwise frequented.

The parks were full of people. The bookstores, at least half of them, were open, but the places to buy earrings were still closed.

Harvard’s buildings loomed, dorms and offices strangling the village that had been here once, where cows had walked down to drink out of the river. Long afterwards, in the same village—now a city—a generation of young people had heard the martyred ghost of JFK urging them to ask what they could do for their country, and some, like Fred, had tossed everything and talked to the smiling suits and opted for a life of patriotic travel and intrigue.

Fred parked near Turbridge Street. The sun was bright enough for him to keep his sunglasses on. Half the people were wearing shades anyway. When he was here before he’d been wearing his working clothes: the white shirt, jacket, and tie. He could sit at a table on the sidewalk on Mass. Avenue, drink coffee, and stare up Turbridge Street, seeing what was going on and expecting not to be recognized. A cop car idled across the street from the café. The cops were drinking coffee, not going anywhere, now and then glancing up Turbridge Street.

Fred bought a Sunday paper and watched. A man he knew only as Teddy, a damaged veteran now living in the Charlestown house, sidled by and looked a question at Fred, asking, Can I know you? Can you know me? He was six-two, rail-thin, and dressed in odd scraps of uniform and mismatched sneakers, his lean face twisted and grizzled with a week’s beard.

“Sit down,” Fred said, and he went inside and bought Teddy a cup of coffee.

Teddy had come to the place in Charlestown after Fred left it. Teddy was the only name he would give. He sometimes was absent for long periods. He’d got the address from some buddies—nobody knew who—and he wouldn’t talk, except about baseball.

Fred believed that Teddy was from Atlanta, though his skin was so black you would have thought him straight Senegalese or Nigerian.

“How you doin’?” Teddy said. “We don’t see you.”

“Well, no,” Fred said. “How you been?”

Teddy closed his mouth tight and shook his head. He was not saying. He looked carefully at the surface of his coffee and left it on the table, untasted.

“You be back, you know,” Teddy said. “You hear me, Fred?”

“I reckon,” Fred said.

“We all come back, don’t we?” Teddy said.

“Drink your coffee while it’s hot, Teddy,” Fred said.

“Later,” Teddy said.

Teddy looked more frantic, less focused, than when Fred had last seen him. He stood up. He smelled a great deal when he moved, as anyone would.

“You staying over at the place?” Fred asked, meaning the place in Charlestown. “You doing okay? Need anything?”

Teddy shook his head, not saying. He was looking in the pocket of his desert camouflage pants for money. He couldn’t take anything without paying for it. He found a scrap of foil; it looked like something torn off a chewing-gum wrapper. He laid it beside the coffee he hadn’t tasted.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Fred said as Teddy walked off.

He had some of Teddy’s coffee.

He looked up Turbridge Street and speculated. People had been in the apartment. He’d heard a woman’s voice. The man with the bike, coming out, letting Fred in—what floor had he been coming from? At 3:30 A.M.? Smykal had been expecting another person. A him. Whoever had been with him ought to have a useful insight into what had happened.