The door opened and he saw Mortimer’s face hanging like a funeral wreath in the air.
“Hey, Abe,” he said.
“Mort,” Abe answered dully, his mind still on Samantha, how at sea he was.
Mortimer took off his hat and flopped it down on one of the stools while he slid up on the one beside it.
Abe poured him a drink.
“Thanks,” Mortimer said. He knocked back the scotch, wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. “So, what’s new?”
“Not much,” Abe said. He’d meant to say nothing more, but suddenly he thought of Samantha again, and despite the fact that Mortimer was hardly the guy he’d normally have talked to about anything important, he said, “I met this woman.”
Mortimer seemed delighted not by what Abe had said, the fact that he’d met a woman, but simply that Abe had mentioned it to him. “No kidding,” he said. He idly circled the rim of his glass with a single finger. “Good for you.” His finger abruptly stopped its circuit and he looked at Abe like a guy who wanted to give good advice. “ ’Cause we ain’t got long, you know?”
Abe wiped the bar with a white cloth. “No, we don’t.”
Mortimer glanced away, his eyes now fixed on the front window, the gray, cascading rain. “So don’t let this one get away,” he said.
“I may have to,” Abe said.
“Why’s that?”
Abe realized that he didn’t know Mortimer Dodge nearly well enough to be talking to him this way. He laughed. “Ah, nothing. She doesn’t talk about it, but, I don’t know, it’s got me thinking maybe I should start packing a gun.”
“A gun?” Mortimer asked. “What for?”
Abe waved his hand, now sorry that he’d brought it up, since the whole thing had finally sunk into nothing more substantial than a cowboy movie fantasy. “In case some guy’s bothering her, which maybe there is and maybe there isn’t.”
“More like a chance of it,” Mortimer said thoughtfully. “Like it could be a guy.”
“Yeah.”
Mortimer nodded. “So, you got a gun, Abe?”
Abe laughed. “Of course not,” he said. He poured Mortimer another drink. “So, what’s new with you, Morty?”
“Same,” he said without emphasis.
“Nothing new on your… condition?”
“I’m a dead man,” Mortimer said. “So what?”
“So what?” Abe asked.
Mortimer looked at him without expression. “It ain’t like I got much to lose.”
“It’s harder, I guess,” Abe said, thinking of Samantha again. “It’s harder when you do.”
EDDIE
He blew into his cupped hands, then rubbed them together rapidly. It was nearly two thirty-four in the morning, and he’d decided that if the man in the black suit did not come out again before three A.M., he’d leave. On the other hand, if he reemerged from the building, Eddie would fall in behind him, follow him wherever he went, wait until he came out again, resume the tail.
It was boring labor, especially in the spitting rain that had now begun to fall. It was cold and dark and boring, but that was the price of real friendship, Eddie decided. Helping Tony was something he had to do because he could not imagine doing otherwise. He remembered the day the Towers fell, how his cousin Tommy had survived the collapse, called his wife, Celia, and told her he was okay. She’d begged him to come home, crying all the time they were on the phone together. But Tommy had said no, that there were other firemen buried in the rubble, that he had to stay. Celia had kept crying, and Tommy had finally just hung up on her. It was a little like that, Eddie concluded, this thing he had to do for Tony. Not as terrible as the thing Tommy had gone through, but one of those moments when there really wasn’t a right thing to do, so you just did the thing that seemed less wrong.
A blast of wind struck him, shaking raindrops from the tree above him in a splattering shower. He brushed the shoulders of his old blue jacket, then pulled off his cap and slapped it against the side of his leg. When he returned it to his head, the man in the black suit was already coming down the stairs.
He eased himself behind the tree but saw that it was too late. The man had already caught him in his eye. But so what, Eddie thought. He was just some guy on the street, no one likely to be noticed. And yet the man seemed to notice him, and as Eddie watched, he glanced left and right down the street as if checking to see if anyone else was around, then stepped off the curb and made his way across the street, walking slowly, deliberately, until he made it to the other side, where he stopped, his body in profile under the streetlamp.
He was only a few feet away now, and Eddie could make out the gaunt face, the shimmering white hair. He looked like a guy in the movies, an aging film star, the Cary Grant type, but with a silent, sinister edge. For a moment he stood very still, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of the black overcoat, his collar turned up against the wind and the rain. He seemed to be looking at the brick wall that faced him, staring at it intently, as if reading instructions that only he could see. Then he turned, his face now in full view, so that Eddie could see the curious sadness that wreathed it and gave it the lost, hopeless look of a man who didn’t like the things he had to do.
“It’s over,” the man said.
The words had come so suddenly and with such finality, Eddie wondered if they’d actually been meant for him at all.
“What?” he asked.
The man took two broad steps with a quickness and agility that made it seem as if he’d been blown across the pavement by a sudden gust of wind. “It’s over.”
Eddie stared into the unblinking eyes. “What is?” he asked.
“All your plans,” the man said.
“I don’t know what you-”
He felt the man’s hand at the collar of his jacket, then the sharp bit of a blade at his throat.
“Don’t say a word,” the man said.
Eddie wanted to speak but could think of nothing to say, and so simply obeyed helplessly.
“Now,” the man said. “Come with me.”
FOUR
STARK
To his surprise, he’d stayed the night, something he’d never done before, and which told him that new arrangements were being made, preparations for the moment, that something deep inside him had pronounced the last rites.
“You want to have breakfast?” she asked tentatively.
He shook his head. “I have an appointment.”
It was the only answer he’d ever given, but on this morning, with her eyes upon him so oddly, as if studying some previously unnoticed feature of his face, he felt a curious impulse to say more. “I don’t mean to be so aloof,” he said.
She laughed. “Aloof doesn’t begin to describe you, Stark.”
Her name was Kiko, and she was the only lover who’d lasted. And yet, even with Kiko, he’d maintained his usual distance. She called him when she had a free afternoon, which happened about once a month. They met at her apartment on the Upper East Side, a place that was always immaculately clean and smelled faintly of lavender. The bedroom was small but beautifully appointed, with Kiko’s own small paintings on the pale blue walls, flower gardens that had a vaguely sensuous feel to them, though in a chilly, refrigerated sort of way. Amid these motionless blooms they “did” each other, as Kiko liked to call it, then went their separate ways.
“My father’s pretty sick,” she said.
Stark had never met Kiko’s father, nor anyone else in her family, nor any of her friends. And so it surprised him when he said, “I hope he’ll be okay,” with an unmistakable sympathy.