Gideon began to write, trying to control the faint shake in his hand. It was not easy. Dajkovic would get the cabin and everything in it, with the exception of the Winslow Homer. He appointed Dajkovic his executor and charged him with returning the drawing (anonymously) to the Merton Art Museum. In life he had escaped all suspicion; he sure as hell didn’t want to be fingered after death.
It didn’t take long to complete the document. As he read it over, his mind drifted to his secret fishing hole on Chihuahueños Creek. It had taken him years of lashing the waters of the creeks that drained the northern Jemez Mountains to find that one place — the most beautiful on earth. After a moment’s consideration, he turned over the letter and drew a map for Dajkovic, showing him how to get there, along with suggestions for what sort of flies to use at what times of the year. That would be his biggest bequest.
He hoped to hell Dajkovic liked to fish.
When he was done, he called the waitress over.
“More coffee?” she asked.
“A favor.”
She immediately brightened.
“This letter,” said Gideon, “is my last will and testament. I need two witnesses.”
“Aw, hon, you can’t be over thirty, what you thinking about that for?” The waitress filled up his mug anyway. “I got thirty years on you and I still ain’t thinking about that.”
“I’ve got a terminal illness.” As soon as he said it, he wondered why in the world he was confiding in this stranger.
The waitress laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Nothing’s engraved in stone. Pray to the Lord and he’ll deliver you a miracle.” She turned. “Gloria? Get over here, this gentleman needs our help.”
The shop’s other waitress came over, a chubby girl of perhaps twenty, her face shining with happiness at being of service. Gideon felt moved by these two random strangers with big hearts.
“I’m going to sign this,” Gideon said, “and then I’d like the two of you to witness it and sign your names here, then print them below.”
He signed, they signed, and then, as Gideon rose, the old waitress gave him a spontaneous hug. “Pray to the Lord,” she said. “There’s nothing He can’t do.”
“Thank you so much. You’ve both been really kind.”
They moved away. Gideon wrote a cover note to Eli Glinn, asking him to make sure Dajkovic received the letter; he then sealed it and addressed it to Glinn at Effective Engineering Solutions on Little West 12th Street. He removed the brick of cash he had stolen from the drug dealer, slipped it under his overturned plate, and quickly left the coffee shop.
On his way to the subway he dropped the letter into a mailbox, feeling a huge wave of self-pity at his lonely, screwed-up existence, which was soon to end one way or another. Maybe the waitress was right: he should try prayer. Nothing else had worked in his sorry life.
60
Gideon took the subway to the end of the line and caught the bus for City Island. By noon he found himself standing outside Murphy’s Bait and Tackle on City Island Avenue, seabirds wheeling overhead. It was hard to believe this sleepy fishing village was part of New York City.
He pushed in to find himself in a narrow shop with glass cases on three sides and a gigantic man in a T-shirt at the far end.
“What can I do for you?” the man boomed out in a genial Bronx accent.
“Are you Murphy?”
“The one and only.”
“I want to rent a boat.”
The rental was quickly arranged, and the man escorted him through the shop to the docks behind. There a dozen open fiberglass skiffs were tied up, each with a six-horsepower outboard, anchor, and gas can.
“Got a storm coming in,” Murphy said as he readied the boat for departure. “Better be back by four.”
“No problem,” Gideon replied as he stowed the fishing rod and bait box he’d purchased as a cover.
A few minutes later he set off, soon passing under the City Island Bridge and entering the open water of Long Island Sound. Hart Island lay about half a mile to the northeast, a long, low mass, indistinct in the haze, dominated by a large smokestack that rose easily a hundred fifty feet into the air. The wind had picked up and the small boat ploughed through the chop, water slapping against the hull. Dark clouds scudded across the sky and gulls rode the air currents, crying loudly.
Gideon consulted the marine chart he had purchased earlier and identified the various landmarks by sight: the Execution Rocks, the Blauzes, Davids Island, High Island, Rat Island. He tried to get a feel for the waypoints of the journey: the next time he came this way it would be dark.
The boat, with its puny engine, moved through the water at a walking pace. Gradually, the island solidified out of the haze.
Almost a mile long, it was covered with a scattering of trees interspersed among clusters of ruined brick buildings. When he was about a hundred yards offshore, he turned the tiller and began making a circuit of the island, examining it with binoculars. The large smokestack rose from a ruined complex on the eastern shore that appeared to have once been a power plant. Reefs and outcroppings were everywhere. Giant, billboard-like signs placed every few hundred yards along the shore warned visitors away:
New York City Correction Department
RESTRICTED AREA
NO Trespassing NO Docking NO Anchoring
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED
As he reached the northern end of the island, he saw some activity and threw the engine into idle, scrutinizing the scene with his binoculars. Through a screen of oak trees, he could make out a group of convicts in orange jumpsuits laboring in the middle of a field. A backhoe idled nearby. They were unloading pine coffins from the rear of a truck and laying them out beside a freshly dug trench. A group of well-armed corrections officers stood around, watching the activity, gesturing and shouting directions.
Allowing the boat to drift, Gideon continued his observations, occasionally making notes.
Satisfied at last, he fired up the engine again and continued down the western shore of the island. About midway, a long sandy beach came into view, covered with various jetsam, including trash, driftwood, and old boat hulls. The beach ended at a concrete seawall, behind which rose the old power plant complex and the great smokestack. Painted on the brick façade of the main building was a message at least a hundred feet long and thirty feet high:
PRISON
KEEP OFF
He decided to land his boat beside the seawall, next to a salt marsh and beyond a treacherous-looking series of reefs.
Gideon brought the boat in, angling it through the reefs, moving slowly. A moment later he cut the engine, hopped out of the boat into the chop, and, wading, pulled it up on the beach.
He checked his watch: one o’clock.
61
Gideon walked up the beach, climbed over the low seawall, slipped into the cover of some trees, then paused to take stock. To his left lay an open field, beyond which stood the ruined power plant. On the right, set back from the shore, stood a neighborhood of modest bungalow houses, complete with streets, streetlights, driveways, and sidewalks. It looked like an ordinary, old-fashioned suburban neighborhood — except that everything lay in ruins, the houses crumbling, window frames broken and black, roofs caved, vines smothering the streetlights and choking the houses, the street itself a web of cracks through which sprouted weeds and stunted trees.