City Of Lies (14 page)

‘You should’ve stayed,’ Marcus said. ‘You should’ve stayed and found out whatever you could about this John Bernstein.’

Neumann raised his hands, palms upwards. ‘Ben . . . after what happened with Lenny I figured—’

‘It’s okay,’ Marcus said. ‘It’s okay, Sol.’

Marcus sat almost motionless, his back to the window. Neumann could hear him breathing, and felt on edge.

Eventually Marcus broke the awkward silence: ‘Any news from Reiff or Dietz on this McCaffrey runaway?’

Neumann shook his head.

Marcus nodded slowly. ‘Okay . . . arrange a sit-down. I want everyone there. Reiff, Dietz, Victor Klein, Karl Merrett, everyone who’s going to be involved in this thing.’

‘We’re going ahead with the action?’ Neumann asked.

Marcus smiled. ‘Going to do more than one,’ he said. ‘We’re going to carry through with what was agreed with Lenny, but it’s going to be a little bigger than we thought, you know?’

‘Bigger?’ Neumann asked. ‘How d’you mean, bigger?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Marcus said. ‘Tomorrow morning. Everyone at the warehouse, and then we talk.’

Harper took a shower. Dried his hair, made some coffee with the complimentary provisions beside his bed. Stood at the tenth floor window smoking another of Cathy Hollander’s Winstons. Could see out across the Hudson, right over the West Side Highway and Battery Park City. Hell of a view, all the way to New Jersey.

Was this his city? Was this really where he would find himself? Had he merely divorced himself from all recognition because of the things that had happened here?

Like that Wednesday?

Harper shivered. There was no breeze. He was not cold. He drank his coffee, smoked his cigarette, willed himself not to remember.

The past came anyway, came like it had always intended to, right from the moment he’d boarded the plane in Florida with the knowledge he was coming here. Here to New York; returning to the past.

Before he had another chance to stop it, the past had found him, rolling up against him and pressing in from all sides. Something like a shadow perhaps; maybe more like a ghost.

Back a while; back some considerable time before. 1980, beginning of August. Twelve years old, standing beside the window looking out into the street.

Evelyn was worried, like a wound-up kind of worried, and her anxiety seemed to seep into everything like color through water.

‘Where is he, John? Where’d Garrett go to this time?’

Small John shook his head. ‘I don’t know Aunt Ev. Just said he needed some time to himself, and off he went.’

‘He took the car?’

‘No, he didn’t take the car . . . just walked right out the front door.’

Evelyn nodded. Couldn’t feel anything now, just nothing at all. Tears had come and gone; inner sense of guilt and pain and heartbreaking anger; all that shit backed up inside her like a reservoir waiting to burst the dam, and once upon a while ago she would have let it all run out of her, but now – now that she knew . . .

Garrett Sawyer was going to die sometime soon. Evelyn, strangely enough, kind of felt nothing much at all. He was going to drink a hole right through his guts, and his entire life would just pass right on out. Sometimes she wondered what made him the way he was, whether it was her, something she had done or said. Sometimes she remembered that wondering served no purpose and thus tried to think nothing at all.

Twelve-year-old John Harper, unwanted nephew, knew more than both Ev and Garrett put together. Garrett Sawyer was drinking himself into forgetfulness for the bad shit he’d done. What it was John Harper couldn’t tell, but he could see the shadows the man carried, and they were heavy shadows, dark and forbidding. Such things had a way of taking over some part
of your mind and catching you unawares. Just when you figured you’d got it licked there it went again. This one was the deep six, the Holy Roller, that
Come and meetcha Maker
kind of deal.

‘We’ll go out and look for him,’ Ev said, like such a thing made sense. Greenwich Village, late afternoon, middle of Manhattan.
We’ll go out and look for him
.

Harper agreed because there was no point in disagreeing. Disagreeing would make her mad and bitter and
I took you in, and this is the way you respect me you little
—

John Harper put on his coat and followed her out into the street.

An hour later, maybe a little more, Evelyn Sawyer stood on the corner of West Houston and Seventh. ‘I’ll stand here,’ she said. ‘I’ll stand here and see if he comes by.’ She smiled weakly, nodded her head up and down in a vague attempt to make herself believe that what she was saying possessed some slight degree of rationality. ‘You run back to the house and see if he hasn’t come home, okay?’

Harper stood there for a moment, didn’t move a muscle.

‘Go!’ she said, and shooed him away like a hungry rag-taggle dog.

John Harper turned and started walking.

Garrett Sawyer scared him. One time he’d heard him shouting at the top of his gravelly voice from the bedroom. One time he smashed something and things went silent for a godawful long time.

Wedding photos. That was what he’d hurled against the wall.

He was screaming at God. Believed in God when he was drunk: something John Harper would ultimately inherit from the ancestral line.

August second 1980. A little after eight in the evening. John Harper walking down the street where he’d lived for the better part of his memory.

Everything had a cold blue light that time in the evening, and it didn’t come from the fluorescent street-lamps, nor from the moon. Came from the collective lights of the world reflecting back from the heavens; something such as that. God was up there, and God was smiling, because he knew the joke and the punch-line and he wasn’t saying.
Here ’til Friday folks . . . don’t forget to tip your waitress. Hardest working girls in the U.S. of A!

Sounds were dead, like darkness could swallow most of what those sounds had to say, and what they had to say wasn’t a great deal of very much at all at that time in the evening.

Stood on the steps in front of the house for a while. John Harper wondered how long this would all go on; how much longer he could take his uncle being some crazy guy he didn’t even recognize. Not for long he reckoned, and then guilt kicked in like adrenaline and he remembered that you weren’t s’posed to think such things about your own flesh and blood.

Went up the steps and pushed open the front door. House was silent like a church. Kicked off his shoes and padded through to the kitchen in his socks. Stood there breathless and kind of frightened for a while, and then turned and made his way back to the bottom of the stairwell.

Thought:
Scared. I’m scared. Can feel my heart beating, rushing inside my chest like . . . like something in a real damned hurry
. . .

And then:
This is no life for a twelve-year-old kid
.

Smiled to himself because he knew he wasn’t serious.

Moved slowly then, like the body wanted to stay right where it was; went one step at a time, slow-motion, hand on the banister, sweat on his palms.

Sensed his uncle was in the house;
knew
he was, though had he been asked why he knew he couldn’t have said.

At the top he turned left towards his own room, and then – almost as an afterthought – he turned back towards Garrett’s room, figured he should at least take the bottle off the bed, cover him with a blanket and put out the light. Nothing more than the decent thing to do before he went back to get Evelyn and told her that her husband was home. At least he was home, right?

Garrett Sawyer was losing his mind down the neck of a bottle, but he was still one half of the only family Harper had. Whatever went down, he was still family.

For a moment John Harper pressed his ear against his uncle’s door. Not a sound. Old guy must have drunk himself into a stupor, insufficient energy to even raise a snore. Garrett had always been a hard man, a man of little communication and rigid views. Garrett Sawyer had never gotten in touch with his feminine side, and would’ve landed you a five-fingered thunderbolt if you’d suggested such a thing.

John Harper reached for the door-handle. He held his breath and eased it anti-clockwise. He smelled the liquor even as the door inched open. Ripe, like sour watermelon, heady and intoxicating.

Hell
, he thought.
Old man’s going to punch a hole right through his middle
.

Wondered if he should take his heart in his hands and talk to him, try to help him, and then thought:
I’m a twelve-year-old kid. What do I know?

Pushed the door wide, because John Harper knew that if the room smelled that bad then Garrett must have drunk two quarts of rye all by himself and would be unconscious.

Garrett Sawyer was more than that.

Garrett Sawyer was sat in the chair by the right-hand wall. Head was lolled right back and most of his brains were up the wall.

John Harper’s first thought was:
How in hell did he get a gun?

Second thought was:
Oh my fucking Christ almighty
.

Garrett Lewis Sawyer had blown the back of his own head off.

Image was like a hotwire into the small Harper’s brain. Vivid, surreal, beyond description.

Image that came back to him as he stood looking out from the tenth floor of the American Regent. Twenty-four years older, perhaps twenty-four years wiser, no less troubled by the memory of that evening and how things had been from that point on.

Evelyn came down like a house of cards. An emotional whirlwind tore up her foundations and scattered what was left of her to the four corners. Blamed herself, blamed the Harper boy, blamed everyone but Garrett who had drunk himself insensate and gotten the idea salvation lay somewhere through a hole in his cranium. Took the better part of six months to gather the loose ends and unravelled threads of her senses together, and then – finally – she took John Harper aside and admitted that Garrett had been the one to kill himself. She had somehow managed to forgive herself for whatever part she’d played in his demise, and thus – in forgiving herself – had also tried to forgive the world.

John Harper did not scar. John Harper believed himself built of taut steel and whipcord, perhaps a heart made of kevlar. John Harper became a teenager regardless of everything else, and
angled through those teens with an element of precarious grace. He walked a tightrope that ran a straight line between familial allegiance and a thin hope for the future, and when he turned nineteen he left New York behind. That had been both the beginning and end of his growing up. He aged quickly, perhaps too quickly, and it was out of these things that
Depth of Fingerprints
was written. Perhaps an element of autobiography, perhaps not. These days it didn’t matter. Believed nevertheless that one day, one day sometime whenever, he would find the muse, the words she carried, and he’d write another book.

Wondered in that moment if such a belief was nothing more than fantasy. Now there were so many other things. Now there was a father. A dying father.

Harper reached forward and pressed his hand against the glass. Eight millimeters of transparency between himself and a hundred-foot drop. Between his fingers there was New York – home from home, home of his heart: a place he wanted to leave, wanted desperately to leave, and yet somehow believed he could not.

He closed his eyes. He exhaled. Seemed like the end of an era.

Cellphone rings, an awkward and fractured sound in the cool silence of early morning.

Cathy Hollander leans over and fumbles for it. She retrieves it before it slides off her bedside table, answers it.

‘Hey,’ she says, recognizing the number. ‘How goes it?’

She pauses.

‘How the fuck would I know?’ she replies. Frowns. Eases herself up into a sitting position, tugs down her tee-shirt.

‘Hey, that was not the deal . . . that was not the fucking deal here. You set rules so you keep them—’

Interrupted, looks angry, looks like she’s going to let fly with something she might regret tomorrow.

‘Well, on your head be it. You want to risk screwing everything up then on your head be it. You tell them what I said. Harper is here. You have to get the word out, you understand? You fuck this up and he’s a dead man, and you can tell whoever the fuck wants to listen that I—’

Turns the phone to look at it. Back to her ear. ‘Got another call coming.’

She jabs the button, smiles. ‘Walt,’ she says. Her voice is calm and gathered. ‘Sure. What time?’

She nods, raises her left hand and tucks her hair over her ear. ‘Sure thing . . . meet you there about ten.’

She ends the call, returns the phone to the table, collapses back on the bed.

‘Fuck,’ she says to no-one but herself. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘Visitor?’ Harper asked. ‘Who is it?’

He nodded. He should have known. ‘Tell her to come on up.’

He put the phone down and walked through to the bathroom. He stood looking at his own reflection. He looked like a hundred
and fifty pounds of crap tied tight in the middle. Hadn’t slept well. Carried the look effortlessly, like a condemned man the night before the cookhouse. Had woken sometime in the small hours and smoked some more. Had finished the pack, vowed never to smoke again, wished he could go out and buy another carton.

Minutes, and Cathy Hollander was knocking at the door.

She looked great. Better than ever. Looked like she’d slept enough for both of them. Asked her to come in and sit down.

‘A little adventure,’ she said.

‘Walt?’ he asked unnecessarily.

She smiled, sat on the edge of the bed. Crossed her legs and leaned to the side, one hand on the mattress, the other on her knee. Looked like she was practising an invitation.

She laughed. It was a good sound, an alive sort of sound. Harper felt she was the embodiment of temptation; in that moment she looked better than any woman he’d ever seen.

‘So what is the deal with you?’ he asked. ‘How do you fit into all of this?’

‘All of what?’