In every newspaper, starting on page eight of the tabloids, he sees Warren’s face. He was one of the best-known people at breakfast in Windows on the World on Tuesday morning. A businessmen’s alliance breakfast, a clean-up-the-city breakfast. The stories don’t say he’s dead. He is just among the missing. But even his own newspaper writes about him in the past tense. The New York Times uses a handsome portrait by Richard Avedon, from a profile in The New Yorker. There are pictures taken at openings, including one from the show at the Metropolitan. Most of them include Elizabeth. The Daily News runs two photographs of her taken on Tuesday afternoon, one leaving the apartment house on Fifth Avenue, the other, her back to the camera, peering south from the Chambers Street Bridge at the burning ruins. The second was at dusk on Tuesday. The Post was also on the bridge, and their photo shows her with a scarf covering the lower part of her face, as if wearing a burka. The scarf turned into a filter against the ash and the odor. As always, she looks beautiful. And in the Post photograph, stricken. And to Cormac, detached. She has nothing to say to reporters except, “I’m so sorry for everybody.”
After his long day’s journey, and an evening patrol, Cormac comes home in the dark. There are still no lights. Duane Street is black and empty, although Church Street is now full of hard, bright imported lights and out-of-state police cars and a holding pen for the media and a long line of heavy vehicles pointed south. He thinks: They are already organized, they know what they are doing, they are doing it better than any other city could have done it. He enters Duane Street from the Broadway side and finds himself whistling the Coleman Hawkins version of “Body and Soul.” The last whistler on Duane Street. The only man in all of the wounded city who is whistling. “I long for you, for you, dear, only…” He gets off the bicycle and fumbles for keys, his eyes sore from the poisoned air. He wants to be rid of the weight of the sword. He wants bed. Some drops of soft rain begin to fall. He thinks: Rain will help. Rain will clean the air. Rain will cool the molten steel. Rain will chill the burning bodies.
Then he sees Kongo.
He’s squatting low in the doorway, a cape turning him into a dense black triangle. He stands up slowly.
“Do you still want to go?” he says.
Cormac knows what he means. He pauses, weary, exhausted, without much residue of hope.
“Yes.”
“You don’t sound as certain as you did.”
“How can I go without finding the woman? I need to find her. I can’t go without that.”
He looks toward Church Street, hearing the unseen muffled voices, the grinding of gears. Kongo sighs. A siren wails.
“You couldn’t kill this fellow Warren.”
“True.”
“That was the sign of a merciful man,” he says, and smiles. “And after all, his death was your duty, not ours.”
“They were always together in my mind, like the East River and the Hudson, coming out in the harbor,” Cormac says. “But you’re right, of course. You’re right. And now it doesn’t matter. The man, Warren, was in one of the towers, above the fires. It’s in all the newspapers. He’s surely dead.”
Kongo looks at him.
“You can leave this world tonight.”
“Not without seeing Delfina.”
“I know where she is,” he says.
123.
They use both bicycles and pedal north. They pull over at the corner of Fifty-eighth Street, a half block from Roosevelt Hospital, and chain the bicycles to a lamppost. Cormac knows the hospital. When the third Madison Square Garden was still on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, battered prizefighters were taken here to be stitched up or to die. Now, Kongo says, Delfina Cintron is in a bed on the sixth floor.
“I can heal her,” Kongo says. “The way I once healed you.” He shows Cormac how he entered in his own search of the city. The route goes from a loading dock in the rear to a freight elevator. Most ambulances are downtown, along with many of the nurses and doctors, and there is an atmosphere of abandonment around the back entrance.
“I’ll wait for you there,” he says, pointing a few blocks toward Central Park. “Just inside the entrance, in the darkest trees.”
He gives Cormac the cape and takes the backpack that holds the sword, the towels, the earrings. Its weight makes Kongo smile. Then he walks away in a loping, long-legged stride, and Cormac slips into the hospital. He finds an elevator, pushes six.
With the cape on his shoulders, he walks past an empty nurse’s station and into a large room with six beds, each filled with a sleeping woman. Delfina is in the bed nearest the window. Her face is swollen and she’s deeply sedated. But there are no tubes in her nose, no IV dripping into her veins. Her right hand is raw, her nails cracked, and her breath is shallow. She looks like an injured child. Boy, nothing can be harder than the road that you took to get here.
“Hey, who are you? The Phantom of the Opera? What are you doing here?”
A heavy black nurse with a tough face stands in the doorway, hands on her hips.
“This is my wife,” Cormac says. “I’ve been looking for her for two days.”
“You can’t—”
“She was in the North Tower.”
The nurse picks up a clipboard from the foot of the bed. She still looks professionally angry.
“She’s pregnant too,” Cormac says. “Or she was.”
The nurse squints at the case file.
“She still is,” she says. “Some kind of miracle.”
“I want to take her home.”
She looks at him more carefully now. “Sorry for your trouble,” she said. “But I’m sure that ain’t possible. It sure ain’t advisable. Let me go find a supervisor. You can wait right here.”
When she leaves, Cormac wraps Delfina in the cape, lifts her heavy body, feeling its warmth, and carries her down the deserted hallways to the stairwell. Easy, boy, don’t make a move, just take a ride now. All the way down to the loading area, Delfina makes small whimpering sounds, tiny protests, but says no words, not even when Cormac moves with her into the rain.
Columbus Circle is slick with rain and Cormac can see lights downtown in Times Square and nothing at all in the far distance. Traffic is light. A dozen yellow cabs. A few buses. No police cars at all. When the street is empty, he hurries into the park, straining against the weight of Delfina. As promised, Kongo is waiting in a grove of dripping maples.
With Thunder.
He is here again, as he was on the night when Cormac and Kongo rode him north, blood merging, language merging, gods merging. Thunder: back from the place where he has been waiting.
The great horse paws the earth, stretches in pleasure and renewal, shudders, but makes no other sound. The sword is slung from the saddle horn, the black bag beneath it. Kongo hands Cormac the reins and holds Delfina in his own arms, her face masked by the cape against the rain. Cormac strokes the great horse and whispers in Irish. We go now to see Da. Then he swings into the saddle. Kongo passes Delfina to him. Her eyes are closed, her face bleary. She faces Cormac, her body against his, her legs spread in the saddle, burrowed against him. He pulls the cape tight around her body, steadying her with his elbows, gripping the reins.