When she had met Mallory for the first time, Henrietta understood him better. Charles loved Mallory, and Mallory loved no one. Henrietta held out no hope for any of them.
Oh, Christ! It’s in bed with me! Andrew Bliss sat bolt upright, eyes wide and frightened. As he fought with his quilts, his panicked heart pounded on the inside wall of his chest. The brown rat slithered out from under the bedding and scurried across the roof.
Andrew fell back on his pillow, exhausted and sweating, until his breathing was normal again. His hand fluttered over his head to chase the bugs out of his hair.
Perhaps the rat had taken him for dead, and thus, fair leavings. Well, was he not? He hadn’t bathed or brushed his teeth in nearly a week. Would road kill smell as sweet?
Oh, sweeter, surely.
And while he was in the revulsion mode, he had one particularly vile act to perform, and he might as well get it over with. He walked to the most distant corner of the roof, squatted down and dumped his bowels with the shame of a fanatically housebroken dog, unable to hold back anymore. This shame was the cost of the loaves of bread which dropped from the sky.
And now, of all the hours of the day, now the damn traffic-watch helicopter flew overhead. As it hovered above the roof, the wind of the whirling blades sent every loose thing flying, and stirred up funnel clouds of dust. The distressed canopy of Armani raincoats swung back and forth on its armature of ropes and wildly waved its sleeves.
Andrew pulled his robe closed and stood up as the woman in the helicopter addressed him from a bullhorn.
“How are you this morning, Mr. Bliss?”
Andrew was moving slowly as he crossed the roof against the stiff wind of the helicopter blades. He picked up his own bullhorn and turned it skyward. The woman had put away her loudspeaker to shoot him with a video camera, to take his portrait with matted hair and a scraggle of beard. He made the appropriate obscene hand gesture, and then released a golden arch of piss.
She lowered the camera.
“That blue jumpsuit is more pathetic than the last one, my love!” yelled Andrew, sinking down to a tired cross-legged sit. “Were you raised in a discount store? Do you want God to strike your helicopter down? Get a long-line girdle from Intimate Apparel on the fourth floor! And now, would you like to discuss that brassy, bimbo-blond hair while there’s still time to repent?”
Apparently not, for the helicopter was veering off. The bullhorn fell from his hand and rolled off to one side as his head sank to his chest. His chin lifted slightly as he tracked a quirky movement across the roof out of the corner of one eye.
The rat was back.
The animal was getting bolder, coming out in the broad daylight. It trotted up to his splayed hand and sniffed it, checking the fingertips for signs of life. Andrew snatched his hand back to his chest, but the rat didn’t run away. It only sat there, watching him. The creature seemed to grow in size as it walked around his knees and stood in front of him, slowly lowering itself on its haunches.
Perhaps this was the devil come to sit with him awhile. If the being who left his bread and flew from the roof was his Sunday school angel, replete with moon-gold hair, then there must be a devil, too. And didn’t the devil also have a long switching tail?
Oh, where was his guardian angel now? He looked up to the heavens, and the sun seared his eyes, but he felt no pain anymore.
Where was the angel?
Mallory stood just outside the ring of television cameras, boom mikes and round, bright lights on stalks of steel. A technician was attached to each piece of equipment. Other workers milled around inside this loop of machinery, while the pedestrian watchers stood behind the ropes which cordoned off the East Village gallery. Oren Watt’s head made furtive, jerky turns as he looked Mallory’s way from time to time, perhaps not believing she was still there, still doing this to him.
The man acting the role of Oren Watt wore clothes soaked in Technicolor blood. On cue from the director, the actor burst out the door of the old East Village gallery and ran down the street.
“You’re a lousy technical advisor, Oren.” Her voice was just behind him. Only a second ago, she had been at the edge of the crowd. “Everybody knows a junkie can’t run that fast. And you only had blood on your shoes when you left the gallery-that’s another mistake. How did you get rid of the rest of the blood, Oren?”
Watt was rigid now, never acknowledging her, but reflecting every verbal blow in some stiff movement of the head or shoulder. She looked down to his hands in spasms of clenching and unclenching.
She turned away from him to scan the crowd of pedestrians behind the ropes, wondering who else might have been attracted to the reenactment of New York’s most famous crime. Her eyes fixed on an old woman in layers of shabby clothes. The woman cradled a tea tin in her arms, rocking it like a baby. Now the gray head bowed down to speak to the tin as she tied it to the top of her wire cart with a bungee cord.
Very crazy, very old.
Or maybe this woman was not so ancient as she seemed. Life on the streets of New York was a rapid aging process. The average homeless person could expect to die in twelve years.
Mallory stripped the woman with her eyes, taking years off the bent body, looking beyond the matted strands of gray hair to see what lay beneath the deep-etched lines of the face. The gray head turned toward her, and Mallory was staring into familiar eyes, large and expressive.
Sabra?
The woman dragged her cart backward into the crowd. A path was made for her by those who dreaded head lice and the stench of the homeless. Mallory moved forward, crossing the space between the television crew and their audience. Her long legs easily swung over the restraining rope, and she was pushing her way through the crush of people.
A man grabbed her by the arm. “Who do you think you’re shoving, sister?”
She stopped to open her blazer and retrieve her shield and ID. The man let go of her arm. It was the exposed gun that spoke to him, not the badge. It was a very large gun.
Mallory pressed on and broke through to the other side of the crowd. Sabra was turning a corner at the end of the block and disappearing down a side street. Mallory followed from a distance as they moved south across Houston.
On Essex Street, Sabra settled her cart by the wall of a boarded-up building. Mallory watched as the woman pulled wood slats from a basement-level window. With no hesitation, Sabra lowered her cart through an exposed black hole and followed after it with the ease and confidence of long practice.
So this was home. Well, good.
It was best to meet on Sabra’s own turf. From what she’d been told of this woman, intimidation would not work. They had to talk on Sabra’s terms, or she would get nothing.
Sabra’s hands reappeared at the hole between the boards. She reached out to retrieve the slats she had removed, and now she was pulling them into place, fitting them back into the nail holes.
Mallory gave her a four-minute lead. Then she knelt on the ground and gently, soundlessly pried one board away from the basement window. She looked in on a shallow, dark space, accented by one blurred rectangle of bad light streaming in from the street. She pulled away the rest of the boards and eased herself through the opening.
Her running shoes touched down on a surface too high to be the basement floor. Her eye adapted, but there was little to see. She was standing on a large wooden shipping crate. Directly before her was a plywood wall. On her right was a crude staircase made of smaller crates in staggered sizes. It led down to the basement level and turned a corner into perfect blackness.
Mallory reached outside the window and pulled the boards back in place, fitting the wood to the window frame in the manner of politely closing a door behind her. When the last pinhole of light was gone, the space had become so dark, her eyes had lost their purpose- she was blind,