The trick for her was to figure out how to disconnect his fate from her own self-regard, and it was there, just lately, that she felt she'd been making inroads.
She had no idea if this was actually true, of course, but it made her feel better about herself, and for the moment that was enough.
Slightly warily, Ogden stepped farther into the room and placed a photograph on the table. Gunther was watching from the doorway.
"That the guy you were looking for?" Ogden asked gently.
Willy gazed down onto the obviously lifeless face of Nate Lee. "What happened to him?"
"He was found under the 145th Street Bridge, dressed like a bum. The assumption was he'd fallen and hit his head. He had no ID, nobody in the area knew who he was, so they declared him an accidental and took him to the potter's field on Hart Island yesterday. We're lucky they started photographing these folks a while back and cataloguing where they're buried. We can have him exhumed first thing tomorrow morning."
Willy pursed his lips, drawing connections in his head. "Anything on the other one-Ron Cashman?"
"No, sorry. We only came up with this 'cause of a habit of mine. Anytime somebody living hand-to-mouth goes missing, even if he fancies himself an independent businessman, as I'm sure Mr. Lee did, I check the Hart Island index. I figured this was him. They've only had four this past week, and he was the only one fitting the description."
Willy nodded. "Well, I appreciate it."
Ogden checked his watch. "It's getting late. I got a couple of people keeping the search engines running on some of our inquiries. I suggest we get a good night's sleep and meet at Bellevue after they bring the body back from Hart Island."
"I'd like to be with him," Willy said softly.
Ogden gave him a surprised look, but instantly grasped his meaning. "At the exhumation?"
Willy simply nodded, not making eye contact.
Ogden immediately defused any possible debate. "Sure. We'll all go-make it a field trip. It's a beautiful spot. How 'bout the dock on City Island at eight A.M.? You need directions?"
"I know where it is," Willy said, turning to Gunther and Sammie. "Where're you two staying? I'll pick you up."
Joe gave him the name and address of an inexpensive hotel, followed by, "You want to have dinner together?"
But predictably he shook his head. "No. I better pay somebody a visit I haven't seen in a while." He smiled sadly at Sammie and added, "Maybe make amends. I'll see you seven-forty-five." It wasn't all that late when Willy reached Washington Heights by subway and began walking toward the street where he'd spent his entire youth. If she was keeping to her old habits, which he had no reason to doubt, his mother would be lost in whatever television was beaming out after suppertime, and would probably stay there until eleven. She'd always been a night owl.
He wasn't making this journey with any great conviction, or holding out much hope. In fact, he wasn't sure he fully understood his own motives, aside from the fact that Sammie had indirectly made him feel he should make some sort of gesture-that and Nate's death being confirmed right afterward. Sammie's comment about his abandoning people who didn't do him the service of either abandoning him or dying first had struck a chord. Despite all that had befallen him, Willy had never seen himself as one of life's victims. However insensitive, clumsy, and even brutal his ways of fighting back, he had never considered quitting. So, while the cynical pessimist in him was gearing up for a disappointment, he was nevertheless going to show Sammie that he was at least sometimes capable of making the first move.
As he approached its perimeter, the old neighborhood seemed to echo similar contradictions to the ones he was struggling with. The buildings and streets were familiar, the roll of the terrain underfoot like an old and comforting home movie, but the foreground of language, people, and general spirit was utterly foreign, as if the old hometown had been completely taken over by a busload of tourists.
Gone were the sausage shops and beer parlors and the guttural shouts of angry hausfraus yelling at children running in the streets. Gone, too, were the synagogues and kosher delis and serious men all dressed in black that had been as much part of the landscape as trees were to Vermont. The Irish Catholics, whose presence here had wobbled between the entertaining and the threatening, depending on who you were and what the alcohol intake had been that evening, were also just figments of memory. Now, nearly everywhere he looked, Willy saw a world almost completely become Hispanic.
As a result, he noticed with some amusement, the old stomping grounds had been blessed with a lot more life and color. He knew the area had suffered hard times, including violence, drugs, and civil unrest, but there was also an exuberance now that he didn't recall from before. The music spilling into the streets, the effervescence of the neon store lights, even the swagger of the people loitering on the sidewalks, laughing, catcalling, and having a good time after work, were all things he wished had been there when he'd been young. Admittedly tainted by retrospection, his memories were of a dour place of Germanic discipline and disappointment, and of traditions he'd longed to escape.
He continued walking up St. Nicholas Avenue, to where Washington Heights becomes Fort George. Here were the remnants of his youthful experience, surviving like an outpost on foreign soil, and sure enough, the old familiar restlessness began welling up inside him like an instinct.
He turned the corner onto 187th Street, now just a few blocks away from his mother's apartment, the smell of some familiar German meal drifting by on the cool night air, when he heard a tired, slightly querulous voice say behind him, "Hey, mister, gimme a buck?"
The question wasn't directed at Willy. He was already too far past the spot for that to be the case. It was also nothing he hadn't heard before, especially given the streets he'd been walking recently. But there was something about the plea that made him turn around. Later, he thought it might have been the utter silence following the request, instead of the usual muttered evasion. But whatever the cause, when he looked back, he saw not the bum propped up against the wall, but the man who'd stirred him to speak.
And as soon as he saw him, a tall, angular man with a large, flesh-colored bandage incongruously plastered across the bridge of his nose, Willy knew he was looking at someone wishing him harm.
He didn't hesitate, as an innocent might have. Nor did he wait for this perceived threat to announce itself, as cops are trained to do. He simply reached under his coat and pulled out his gun.
The other man reacted with equal instinctiveness. Producing his own weapon, he ducked and sidestepped, dropping behind the bum, using him as a barrier behind which to draw a bead. Willy fired once at a spot just beside them to make his pursuer tuck in, and then made for the nearest alley at a dead run, his eyes still smarting from the brightness of the muzzle flash.
The ploy worked. The one return round sang harmlessly by like a wasp on adrenaline.
Willy ran down the alley to where an oversized metal Dumpster lay as large as a sleeping buffalo. He swung around behind it, using its bulk as a shield and its side to steady his arm, but even as he waited for his follower's shadow to fill the opening of the alleyway, he knew it was over as quickly as it had begun.
As if in confirmation, the bum's thin voice drifted down to meet him. "Help, police. Somebody call the cops. There's shootin' goin' on."