Strawman Made Steel (24 page)

Nate returned with a lamp and the beat-up
leather suitcase that served as his war chest. He rummaged through its contents
with familiarity and was soon threading stitches through my flesh.

I endured the prick-and-draw pain of the
needle and thread with that sense of sweet loss one finds at the end of a good
book.

Nate was silent until he began twitching
the last stitch. “So who is it this time? Who’s the damsel in distress?”

“They’re all in distress,” I said. “I’ve
moved on to damsels in boredom.”

Nate cut the thread, checked his work, and
masked it with gauze and plaster.

I must’ve pulled my shirt too high, because
he planted the end of one of his big, callused fingers right in a divot the
bluestone had gouged from my back. It made me hiss with pain.

“You want me to treat these?”

I shook my head and tugged my shirt down.

He said, “One day you’re not going to make
it back here.”

“I certainly hope so,” I said.
“Antibiotics?”

He searched in the suitcase.

“Meropenem, Tramethycin? Intravenous.”

“Tramethycin,” I said. “Mero clogs my
works.”

He began to draw it up. “You want to tell
me the score?”

“One dog bite, two concussions, one bullet
hole, and a rash of cuts and contusions.”

He raised a needle, tapped it once.

“A shrink would have a field day with you.
Self-destructive tendencies―”

“That’s just the warm up,” I said. “Wait’ll
I get my trackpants off.”

“―over-protective, stubborn,” he finished,
lifted my shirt and stuck me with the needle as if skewering a chicken.

“You’d make a good vet,” I said.

I tucked my shirt back into my trousers
while Nate packed up his case. He snapped its clasps shut then straightened to
look at me.

He said, “Now you want to tell me the real
score?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, and I
followed him down the aisle. I passed the bulk of the raised pulpit, and saw by
the angling light of the lamp in Nate’s hand, the dust gathered in its
crevices. Nate preached from the floor.

Through a door in the back wall of the
sanctuary and along a short corridor was the room where Nate lived. In barely a
hundred square feet was crammed a thin bed, a gas cooker, a card table, two
chairs, and a bookshelf. The bookshelf occupied the entire length of one wall
and was stuffed to overflowing with books and periodicals.

Nate hung the lamp on a hook above the
table, and tucked the suitcase under his bed. From the space beneath his cooker
he retrieved a bottle of Cinzano and two glasses. He poured us each a shot.

We sat and drank in silence.

The alcohol hit my gut and began warming me
from the inside out. It took the edge from my complaining flesh. My eyelids
felt heavy. I knew if I closed them I’d sleep.

“Janus McIlwraith, no middle name,” said
Nate in his voice like gravel, as if he were reading the title of a tome he’d
plucked from his shelves.

I raised my heavy eyes to look at the
familiar features of his face. It was a storied face. Even its composition
hinted at stories. Its coffee-colored skin spoke of sunblasted land, but
further deduction was defied by the mongrel mismatch of the rest. Asia, Europe,
America. Some new facet of the world seemed to shine with every motion of his
head.

I called him the United Nations. Nate for
short. His real name he’d never told me. I got the feeling whatever it was held
too much memory. He’d buried it, mourned for it, and moved on.

I drained my glass, knit my fingers, and
with them cradled the back of my head.

“So I’m working this case, the Speigh
family...” I began, and proceeded to lay it all out for him, everything since
Evelyne Speigh had first turned to greet me in my office those three days ago.

He listened quietly until I got to where I’d
landed on his doorstep not half an hour earlier. The first thing he said was,
“You need another drink.”

He poured me one, and while I was draining
it, said: “So you like this Nicole?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling the liquid
reinforcements make their mark. “I like a lot of things. I like an ocean
breeze. I like pretzels.”

“Why don’t you ask the lady out then?”

I ran my tongue over the inside of my cheek
where it had been cut by my teeth in the fall. It stung from the drink.

“How long since you had a convert?” I said.

“I just plant the seed brother,” he said.
“God makes it grow.” He laid a thick finger against his face and gazed at me
with twinkling eyes. “So why not take her to dinner?”

“Is that the best you’ve got?” I said. “I
give you the inside story on the biggest murders this decade, and you ask me
why I’m not dating the stiffs’ sister?”

He sat like a statue. Waited me out.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I said. My voice had
risen without my meaning it.

He said, “You’re the one that dragged me
into this fight―but, okay, you want a reason?” He prodded a callused finger at
my left hand. “That ring on your finger.”

I raised my hand to look at it shining in
the lamplight with dull luster. Eighteen carat gold. Nine pennyweights. Almost
half a troy ounce. I twisted it, feeling it tug on my skin, slip friction, and
slide around my finger.

“The ring around your heart,” he added.
“You want an answer, cut and dried,” he continued. “But this kind doesn’t come
in a package.

“Why do you come here?” he said.

At first I mistook his meaning. “Cheap
drink and cheap advice.”

Then I understood. He didn’t mean the
church. He meant Newer York. He meant the flipside of the mirror.

Nate alone new my secret, one man in a city
of thirty million. I’d tried it with none, but that was a path to madness.

“Because,” I said, and found my cheeks were
wet, “if I don’t, she doesn’t visit my dreams.”

Most nights I dreamed of my wife. Vivid
dreams. But the one time I’d sworn off mirror travel, six years ago, following
a brutal case that ended with a dead client, my wife had faded from my dreams.
It was as if she existed in the air of Newer York, and if I didn’t continue to
breathe her in, my flesh forgot her.

But I didn’t need dreams to tell me my wife
and the mirror-travel were linked. It was the morning she disappeared that I
first leaned on a mirror and stumbled through burning chaos into Newer York.
And I’d be damned if I’d let go that last link to her.

Nate was silent, but I heard his thoughts
all the same, and answered him. “No, it would not be for the best.”

I plucked the ring from my finger, and
angled it so the light caught its inside edge. Engraved within was her name:
Grace.

I returned Nate’s gaze. “Forget the ring.
It’s the promise: till death do us part. We’re parted, sure. But death...?” I
slipped the ring back onto my finger. “What am I without my word? I
am
my word.”

At last he lowered his eyes and chuckled.
“Not a word, Janus. An argument.”

Again I’d used the man as a punching bag,
and he’d soaked it up with barely a murmur. So I handed him a free kick: “An
argument? That the best you’ve got?”

“Janus McIlwraith, in the vast and
intricate cloth of Time, you”―he smiled as his eyes found me―“are a dropped
stitch.”

I laughed. Everything was starting to seem
funny.

“So God’s clumsy?” I said.

“Can’t a man drop a stitch on purpose?”

“If you ask me that’s a messy way to get
things done,” I said, and tried to lick the bottom of my glass.

His features drew into that mixture of
sobriety and joy I’m yet to see on another face.

“Very messy,” he said. “Spilled his own
blood on that cloth.”

I didn’t want to go there. Not now.

I said, “Do you want to hear what happened?
The night she left?”

That was my question. The first of the
ritual I shared with Nate. The first of the liturgy. I wanted it that night
like a glimpse of beacon-light over a storm-tossed sea.

“Tell me,” he said. The response.

“It was the Sixth of January,” I said.
“Snow blanketed the sidewalk and clung to the window. We didn’t make love. She
was still angry―no. Not angry. Sad. She thought I... But she lay naked in my
arms. Curled just so. I woke while it was still dark, 5:23. The clock readout
is seared in my memory. I woke in pain, as if someone were screwing his boot
heel into the bowl of my skull. Only, there was no one there. Not a soul. I was
alone.”

“Maybe she woke,” Nate said, “and slipped
away?” Second response.

“No. The bedroom door was still locked from
the inside. She never liked that. But she understood. My past made enemies.”

“So, she vanished into thin air?” Third
response.

“Thin air,” I said.

“Does that sound rational?” Fourth
response.

“As rational as walking through mirrors.”

“And you think she still lives?” Fifth.

“I don’t know. But I mean to find out.”

Nate paused, searching my face. Then, with
his gravel tones: “You will.” A benediction.

Later I slunk as near as I dared to my
office building, and went, instead, down the nearest subway station with a
restroom. It was empty, so I plunged straight through the only intact mirror in
the joint.

I rode a different groove home. Greater
friction. Slide like fire. But my body was done with registering more that
night. The new pain joined the old and lost its voice.

As I moved away from the exit mirror, down
the hall, my eye caught on her things. It always did after I talked with Nate.

Her handbag propped against the wall in the
apartment’s vestibule. The shoes, burgundy leather, bought the day before she disappeared
and pristine but for a warehouse film of dust. Hanging above them the
threadbare woolen overcoat that had once been her mother’s, and matched neither
the bag nor the shoes.

But these were not the most potent
mementos. All of them had been prepped for the day she’d envisaged. They were
clinical. It was the items that were precipitated throughout the apartment that
gouged me. The chance-fallen tank-top, lying twisted in a rope on the dresser
by the ensuite. Her camera wedged into the bookcase, lens cap dangling free on
its tether.

One day I’d clear them all away, clean the
apartment top to bottom. The day I gave off visiting the other side of the
mirror.

When I sat at the Royal 10 and sought an
explanation for the day’s events, I was conscious instead of the cool kiss of
the typewriter’s keys beneath each fingertip. They were her keys. Her fingers.

I sat and simply stared into the middle
distance.

For the first time since I’d taken the
Speigh case, I had nothing. Nothing wanted out of my aching skull and onto
paper so bad it could shift my fingers.

I sat silent for the time it took a cab to
crawl a peak-hour city block.

Then I pushed my chair back.

In the hallway I passed the coat and the
shoes and the bag. I took my apartment keys from the hook behind the door and
let myself out.

For hours I walked the streets and visited
the bars of electrified New York. Times Square was ablaze, and the air was full
of the sound of ringtones and intercontinental chatter. I shared a drink with a
man whose name I couldn’t remember. For hours I haunted my own life.

— 16 —

Next day I broke the pattern.

I woke with a todo list emblazoned on my
mind, and the first item had me ride the mirror on return trips to three
separate locations in under ten minutes. I was a blip on the radar at Grand
Central Station, Columbus Circle, and a message post on Times Square. I didn’t
want to take chances with the cops. For all I knew I was now shoot on sight.
Each trip required a return to my apartment, and each time I stepped back into
its hall and paused to draw breath, my head ached that bit more. By the end of
it my body felt sapped, and my head was humming like I’d spent the morning
perched on a hundred-watt Marshall Stack.

But I was happy with my work. I had three
gangs of street kids hungry for the same commission. Each coterie worked
separate. From past experience, I knew competition squared their output.

While I waited for news, I ticked off a
couple other items on my list.

Number One was Carl Inker, the oracle of
Meatside. I gave his office building the twice-over, but seeing no signs of
trouble, I climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. I rapped on the glass of
Prometheus Investment Brokerage, same as I had three days before, and let
myself in. The same smell of carbon assaulted me but the office’s expensive
fiber link was splashing light onto the wall at an empty transcoder’s station.
The lady with the gnarled hands whose job it had been to decode the ticker into
holy financial writ was absent. Maybe she had a good union.