‘Ricki’s phone in Amsterdam. And an unknown.’
‘You can’t trace it?’
‘No. The last number is Israeli. I haven’t been able to access a call log for it.’
Israel. Zviman was from Israel. But why would Jack Ming be calling the people who got his mother killed?
Because he wanted to find them and kill them himself.
‘Do you want to call Ming?’ she asked me.
‘And what? Apologize?’ I stared at the Israeli phone number.
Well, I could think of one good reason. But it was suicide for him, alone, to try and take them on.
‘It fascinates me that he’s calling Central Park. Why do you call an info line?’
‘Maybe to get their hours, or to find out if there are events going in a certain section of the park.’
‘You think he’s meeting someone there.’
‘Yes. It’s open, it’s crowded, he might feel comfortable meeting there.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know. But I do know what he’s actually going to do tomorrow. He doesn’t know it yet. But I do.’
I took a screen capture from the security monitor tape of the man in the corner. August didn’t have a phone of his own; in Special Projects you are only allowed to have a phone that can be monitored by the group and he’d said he’d surrendered his to Braun. Unfair maybe but you give up a certain expectation of privacy when you do this work. If he had his own phone then I could send this to him. Tomorrow he’d get one. I’d send it then.
I stood and I winced. My body hurt. And I didn’t want Leonie thinking much more about this phone number.
‘Your arm is hurting. Let me get you a pain pill.’
‘I can’t be fuzzy. I have to be ready.’
‘It won’t make you fuzzy for tonight. Here.’
I grudgingly took the pill, swallowed it with cold water.
‘You rest.’
I stripped out of my clothes, put on pajama pants I dug from a bureau, lay on the bed. I closed my eyes. I thought she would show more reaction when I knew her real name. But what, really, did it matter, when our children were in danger? I looked through the bedroom door and she sat at the computer desk. Looking at her picture of Taylor. The worn-with-love picture.
I closed my eyes again. Darkness fell on me.
Leonie awoke me when she slid into bed next to me. I raised my head up with a start.
‘Is this okay?’ she asked. ‘I can sleep on the couch.’
‘No, it’s fine.’
I lay back down.
‘Sam?’
‘What?’ I opened my eyes. I must have bruises going to the bone. I thought granules of sand had been driven past my clothes into my skin.
Leonie’s face was close to mine. I blinked, hazy with sleep. The pain wasn’t so bad; the pill must have taken off the edge.
‘I feel sorry for you,’ she said softly.
I don’t do pity. I hate it. I got it from every kid who felt bad for me, always being the new kid in school, the new American who couldn’t decipher the slurs or the name-calling in the native tongue. ‘Well, don’t.’
‘You haven’t even gotten to hold your child.’
I stared past her into the darkness. My skin itched under the cast, probably along the stretch of arm where Daniel should rest when I did get to hold him.
‘Time will come,’ I said.
‘Yes. I want that for you, more than anything. It is the best feeling ever. Nothing matches it for love, for terror, for hope.’
‘That sounds like a slogan for parenting.’
‘And you and I can be the poster children for single parents.’
In the dim light from the street’s glow I smiled. ‘I shouldn’t be on anyone’s poster.’
She lay close, but not pressing against me. For a minute the only sound was our breath in the room, the soft grind of the air conditioner, the distant murmur of the city.
I turned my head to say something – I don’t remember what – and she kissed me, softly, then more insistently, her mouth hungry, nipping at my lips. The kiss grew, deepened, her tongue tracing a delicious path.
The first time was from fear and stress. What was this? I was half dead but I felt my blood stir.
I tasted salt: the sting of her tears.
‘I didn’t mean to make you cry,’ I said. I could smell toothpaste on her breath; she’d brushed her teeth before she came to me.
‘You didn’t.’
‘Why are you alone, with a child?’
‘I wanted to be alone.’
‘I never believe that. No one wants to be alone like that.’
Her hands had moved to my chest; her fingernails moved along my skin and my breath nearly left me.
‘You don’t have to use your arm, you know. I’ll do the work.’ She kissed me again. ‘How sore are you?’
The correct answer was very, but I said, ‘Not a bit.’
Probably people whose kids are in mortal danger shouldn’t be having sex together. We’re wrecks. It’s not like this moment could bring intimacy or grace.
But there was none of that. Only an exhausting, fierce rawness of energy and anger and fury. At one point, her atop me and deep in her pleasure, she hammered at my shoulders, forgetting in the dark that I was a bruised beast. It was pain and glory all at once. That or she decided to fake an orgasm and beat the snot out of me at the same time.
She collapsed on me when we were both spent and her body was warm and wonderful and rich, lying against mine. Silence, only broken by breathing. I nuzzled her hair.
‘That was good,’ she breathed.
‘Yes. Very for me,’ I said.
‘And very for me.’ She cupped my face in her hands. ‘We have to get them back, Sam. We can’t fail.’
‘I know. I know. We will.’
‘Tell me what you’re planning.’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if I do, you’ll say no.’
‘Don’t… don’t you trust me?’ Her breath seeped against my throat, her nails traveled my chest.
‘Yes.’
‘So tell me.’
‘Tomorrow Jack Ming goes down and our kids are going to be okay. All right?’
She lay next to me, not cuddling, but lying there. Present, our breath close together. I suspected she wanted to beat me to a pulp in her trembling anger, but she needed me functioning. So she let me keep my secrets.
While she kept all her own.
I got up while she slept, put on my clothes despite my exhaustion, and slipped out into the night.
76
The Last Minute Bar, Manhattan, upstairs
Sam’s phone, buzzing, woke Leonie. She groped across the empty bed for him; he was gone.
She sat up and grabbed for the phone.
‘Yes?’
‘Leonie. Let me speak to Sam.’ She didn’t know this voice. It was the phone Anna Tremaine gave them as the lifeline to Nine Suns, to get their instructions, but it was not Anna on the phone. A man’s voice, crisp and precise and cold.
‘He’s… he’s not here.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. I was asleep. Who is this?’
‘This is the man who can have your kid killed with one phone call.’
‘Please. Please don’t.’
‘I presume you are capable of taking a message?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell Sam I will call back in one hour. I am not happy that he is not near this phone. What if I was calling him to tell him that I knew where Jack Ming was?’
‘Then I’d go kill Ming,’ she said. ‘We already know where he’s going to be tomorrow. Central Park.’
‘Central Park doesn’t quite narrow it down, does it?’
‘We’re finding out where, I promise… ’
‘Yes, I believe you would. You’re an excellent mother. You just saved your child from unnecessary suffering.’
A flash of horror danced through her.
‘I’ll call back in an hour, and Sam better have a good reason for his absence.’ The phone went off with a click.
77
Ming apartment, East 59th Street
The flame burst up from the pile of garbage bags across the street, drawing the night doorman out onto the sidewalk and hurrying over to the sudden, sputtering fire. He did not see me slip inside the lobby while his back was turned, while he had a cell phone pressed to his ear to summon the fire department. I spent six months of naughty teen years in Jakarta; kids there used to burn trash for fun, and they were most clever about how to torch with efficiency.