The drunks did not know their rights, and did not particularly care about them. They had all begun celebrating a bit early and had in their exuberance done one thing or another considered illegal in this fair city—things like throwing a bus driver out onto the sidewalk when he refused to make change for a ten-dollar bill, or smashing the window of a taxicab when the driver said he couldn’t possibly make a call to Calm’s Point on the busiest day of the year, or kicking a Salvation Army lady who refused to allow her trombone to be played by a stranger, or pouring a quart of scotch into a mailbox, or urinating on the front steps of the city’s biggest cathedral. Things like that. Minor things like that.
One of the drunks had killed someone.
He was unquestionably the star of the 87th’s little Christmas celebration, a small man with vivid blue eyes and the hands of a violinist, beetling black brows, a mane of black hair, stinking of alcohol and vomit, demanding over and again to know just what the hell he was doing in a police station, even though there was blood all over his white shirt front and speckled on his pale face and staining his long thin, delicate fingers.
The person he had killed was his sixteen-year-old daughter.
He seemed to have no knowledge that she was dead. He seemed not to remember at all that he had come into his apartment at three o’clock that afternoon, little more than an hour ago, having begun his Christmas celebrating at the office shortly after lunch, and had found his daughter making love with a boy on the living-room sofa, the television casting unseen pictures into the darkened room, television voices whispering, whispering, and his daughter locked in embrace with a strange boy, skirts up over belly and thighs, buttocks pumping, ecstatic moans mingling with the whisper of television shadows, not hearing her father when he came into the room, not hearing him when he went into the kitchen and searched in the table drawer for a weapon formidable enough, punishing enough, found only a paring knife and discarded that as unequal to the task, discovered a hammer in the shoebox under the sink, hefted it on the palm of his hand, and, thin-lipped, went into the living room where his daughter still moaned beneath the weight of her young lover, and seized the boy by the shoulder and pulled him off her, and then struck her repeatedly with the hammer until the girl’s face and head were gristle and pulp and the boy screamed until he fainted from exhaustion and shock and the woman next door ran in and found her neighbor still wielding the hammer in terrible dark vengeance for the unpardonable sin his daughter had committed on the day before Christmas. “George,” she had whispered, and he had turned to her with blank eyes, and she had said, “Oh, George, what have you done?” and he had dropped the hammer, and could not remember from that moment on what he had done.
It was a nice little Christmas party the boys of the 87th had.
He had forgotten, almost, what she looked like.
She came through the hospital’s chrome and glass revolving doors, and he saw at first only a tall blond girl, full-breasted and wide-hipped, honey blond hair clipped close to her head, cornflower-blue eyes, shoving through the doors and out onto the low, flat stoop, and he reacted to her the way he might react to any beautiful stranger stepping into the crisp December twilight, and then he realized it was Cindy, and his heart lurched.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
She took his arm. They walked in silence for several moments.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you. So do you.”
He was, in fact, quite aware of the way they looked together, and fell immediately into the Young Lovers syndrome, positive that everyone they passed on the windswept street knew instantly that they were mad about each other. Each stranger (or so he thought) cased them quickly, remarking silently on their oneness, envying their youth and strength and glowing health, longing to be these two on Christmas Eve, Cindy and Bert, American Lovers, who had met cute, and loved long, and fought hard, and parted sadly, and were now together again in the great tradition of the season, radiating love like flashing Christmas bulbs on a sixty-foot-high tree.
They found a cocktail lounge near the hospital, one they had never been to before, either together or separately, Kling sensing that a “first” was necessary to their rediscovery of each other. They sat at a small round table in a corner of the room. The crowd noises were comforting. He suspected an English pub might be like this on Christmas Eve, the voice cadences lulling and soft, the room itself warm and protective, a good place for nurturing a love that had almost died and was now about to redeclare itself.
“Where’s my present?” he said, and grinned in mock, evil greediness.
She reached behind her to where she had hung her coat on a wall peg, and dug into the pocket, and placed a small package in the exact center of the table. The package was wrapped in bright blue paper and tied with a green ribbon and bow. He felt a little embarrassed; he always did when receiving a gift. He went into the pocket of his own coat, and placed his gift on the table beside hers, a slightly larger package wrapped in jingle-bells paper, red and gold, no bow.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he said.
“Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
They hesitated. They looked at each other. They both smiled.
“You first,” he said.
“All right.”
She slipped her fingernail under the Scotch Tape and broke open the wrapping without tearing the paper, and then eased the box out, and moved the wrapping aside, intact, and centered the box before her, and opened its lid. He had bought her a plump gold heart, seemingly bursting with an inner life of its own, the antiqued gold chain a tether that kept it from ballooning ecstatically into space. She looked at the heart, and then glanced quickly into his expectant face and nodded briefly and said, “Thank you, it’s beautiful.”
“It’s not Valentine’s Day . . .”
“Yes.” She was still nodding. She was looking down at the heart again, and nodding.
“But I thought . . .” He shrugged.
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” she said again. “Thank you, Bert.”
“Well,” he said, and shrugged again, feeling vaguely uncomfortable and suspecting it was because he hated the ritual of opening presents. He ripped off the bow on her gift, tore open the paper, and lifted the lid off the tiny box. She had bought him a gold tie-tack in the form of miniature handcuffs, and he read meaning into the gift immediately, significance beyond the fact that he was a cop whose tools of the trade included real handcuffs hanging from his belt. His gift had told her something about the way he felt, and he was certain that her gift was telling him the very same thing—they were together again, she was binding herself to him again.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Do you like it, Bert?”
“I love it.”
“I thought . . .”
“Yes, I love it.”
“Good.”
They had not yet ordered drinks. Kling signaled for the waiter, and they sat in curious silence until he came to the table. The waiter left, and the silence lengthened, and it was then that Kling began to suspect something was wrong, something was terribly wrong. She had closed the lid on his gift, and was staring at the closed box.