Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 (11 page)

Anna could understand that. There'd been nights patrolling the Anasazi ruins on Mesa Verde when the weight of a dead people pricked at her nerve ends and she wished she'd not listened to the Navajo trail crews' stories of corpses turning into wolves and loping after the living. If there was anything to the "science" of the paranormal, Ellis Island had the prerequisites for a hotbed of ghostly manifestations. Dreams had ended here, most happily but some at the end of a rope slung over the rafters. Families were separated, mothers from children and husbands from wives. Young women were turned away from the promised land because they traveled alone. With no one to meet them, they could not enter the country. The regulation was based on humane principles. An unprotected woman in New York was vulnerable to a number of evils. But who knew what terrors had induced her to cross oceans in the first place?

Still and all, despite late nights and scary stories, Anna had never actually seen apparitions. Getting the willies was one thing. Hallucinating was another.

Middle-aged mutant ninja rangers.
Dwight's description of the interloper on Island III crossed Anna's mind. Perhaps Billy was not delusional. She glanced at the clock. Time to catch her boat.

Riding down in the elevator, she reassessed Bonham. Park Police: trained, educated, professional. That didn't rule out superstition, but it did render it highly unlikely that a man trained to watch for intruders would, when faced with a classic black-clad skulker, chalk it up to an otherworldly visitation. Anna would pass the gossip on to Patsy. It was her park; she could decide if the boy needed therapy, drug intervention or a spanking.

Mandy not yet back from her interpretive duties at the Registry Hall on Ellis, Anna drew every drop of hot water from the aging water heater and soaked till her muscles grew loose and her skin turned rosy and began to shrivel. A bar of hand soap and vigorous scrubbing removed the bloodstains from her trousers. With a fresh dressing over her scratch and clean sweat clothes on, she felt renewed.

Five o'clock came and went without producing either Patsy or her roommate. Anna was grateful for the prolonged solitude. Six o'clock, then seven were marked off by the wall clock in the kitchen before she began to tire of her own company. Having yet again forgotten her duties to Bacchus, she helped herself to a Bud Light and munched on French bread and salmon pate left over from the day before. By eight o'clock she was feeling abandoned and telling herself she was not a guest but a friend in need and Patsy had every right to a night on the town without asking her along--or asking her permission. Besides, she would have turned down an invitation. She had had her fill of Manhattan for one day. Pacing the living room, she stared out at the coming evening, then the perverse dawn of electric lights on the horizon. For the first time since arriving on Liberty, she noticed Patsy didn't have a television. Positively un-American. On nights such as this, reruns would be just the thing: the mental equivalent of giving a feather to a baby with sticky fingers. Synapses could be kept busy plucking the treacle of sitcoms off of one another. A brief peek into Mandy's lair located a small TV squashed in amongst alternative press newspapers and a framed picture of brother or boyfriend with his army unit grinning out from a spiky forest of rifles. Kids and dogs crowded around, wanting to play war. Desperate as she was, Anna closed the door. The room was a wreck, clothes knee-deep on the floor and a refuse of papers, cosmetics and underwear skidding off every elevated surface.

Back in the living room, the telephone tempted her but there was no one to call. Not even Frederick. She hadn't bothered to ask for his friend Emmett's last name or phone number. Tomorrow she would rectify that. Fate had made them partners in Molly's recovery. Life would be easier if they became friends.

Should Frederick stick around--and apparently it would take an act of Congress to get him out of the ICU--he might take up where Molly had brutally left off two years before. With Anna's blessing, Molly might give in to his siege of affections. How weird would it be to have slept with your brother-in-law?

Jump off that bridge when you come to it,
Anna told herself. Molly was not yet out of intensive care. It was presumptuous to be marrying her off to an ex-boyfriend.

Nine o'clock brought no relief in the form of mental distraction. Anna decided to take her evening constitutional around Liberty Island, then try for an early bedtime.

The expected blessedness of the outdoors failed to soothe. Either the eternal hum of the city grew louder or Anna's filtering mechanism grew weaker. The harbor had lost its ability to buffer Liberty from the surrounding congestion. Indeed, the black water seemed but a different kind of pavement bringing the flotsam of noise and tension to the shore. Anna longed for the simple call of a night bird, the sweet cacophony of cicadas in the pines, for a night that was truly dark, pricked only by stars, and those confined to the purer shades of white. Urban nights were garish, without rest. Fervently, she hoped Molly would get well soon. Much longer in New York City and Anna knew she would be in need of a good psychiatrist.

Narrow wheels rattling on brick brought her out of her black study. Cleaning crew had finished the lady's ablutions and were putting away their equipment for the night. That meant the staff boat would be coming in an hour or so. Cleaning crew rode back to Manhattan on the last boat of the day. If Patsy and Mandy didn't arrive on it, Anna would have the house to herself till morning.

Men in groups made her leery and she faded into the shrubbery as they clattered near. Three of them were dark-skinned, two African-Americans and one Puerto Rican or Mexican. The fourth was almost painfully white, big and oafish with a neck nearly as thick as his head, which was either shaved or naturally bald from the edge of his green ball cap down. There was something tantalizingly familiar about him, but Anna knew she'd never seen him before. The type was familiar.

Alongside the smaller, wiry men, chitchatting in East Coast accents both Brooklyn and Bronx, he looked out of place. A big, dumb farm boy out to see the world. As they passed Anna's hiding place, he spoke. No accent, none. Like Anna, he wasn't from around here.

The four men wheeled their cart under a light and she noticed that the white boy had an unpleasantly large spider crawling beneath his collar. She was considering whether or not to warn him, when he turned his head and she realized it was something infinitely more poisonous than a spider. Two inches below his right ear a swastika the size of a nickel was tattooed.
That must endear him to his co-workers,
she thought.

Enjoying as she always did--as she had since she was a child--the simple act of hiding and watching, she let the men rattle and babble to a nearby building that was kind enough to swallow them from sight. Stepping from the concealing branches of the bushes, she continued her walk across the plaza and up the foreshortened mall. For three nights she had walked the island. Anna had seen Lady Liberty from inside and out, from sea, land and air, yet the statue never failed to make her feel, in some indefinable way, proud.

Tonight an invisible stage manager was calling the cues to Anna's personal show. As she walked up the center of the paved area, the two great bronze doors in Liberty's base swung open and a shaft of gold spotlighted her.                                                                   .

"I wish I could sing," Anna said.

"Give it a
go," Hatch invited. "Who knows? Maybe Broadway's been waiting for youse all these years."

Hatch was smiling, standing in his usual laid-back stance, but Anna could see the pull of nerves around his dark eyes, hear it in his lapse into the neighborhood "youse," a habit he'd kept out of his conversation the last time they met.

"Broadway'll have to go on waiting," she said. "My husband was an actor," she told him, in an unusual moment of confidence. "Zach was dying to get on Broadway."

"I didn't know you was married," Hatch said. He held open the inner security door to the statue and Anna joined him as if it had been prearranged. "He still dying to get on Broadway?"

Zach had died trying to get across Ninth Avenue, hit by a cab, but Anna didn't want to get that personal. "He went on to better things," she said.

Hearing what he must have thought was the flippancy of a slightly bitter divorcee, Hatch dropped the subject. "You come to help me with the sweep?"

Merely thinking of those 354 steps made Anna's thigh hurt, but there was such hope in his voice, and she had to admit, it wasn't like she had anything better to do. She gave in gracefully and followed him into the orgasmatron.

"How do you use this for medical emergencies?" she asked as they squeezed in, sardine fashion. "No room for a backboard, wheelchair, nothing."

"It's to get us to them. Then we carry them or whatever."

"How often does it happen?"

"Not often. Hasn't while I been here."

A miracle in itself. With the high-density traffic and no way to clear a path from level S-l to the crown, it was a wonder there had not been at least a handful of heart attacks and strokes. "What a mess," Anna said, picturing the situation.

"You got it," Hatch replied. "If some old guy croaks up high, you got all of PS 191's third-grade class steppin' over the corpse to get down the stairs. We been lucky."

Anna followed him up the spiral staircase, through the light-drenched frontal lobe of the lady and back down to the orgasmatron. The climb had tweaked at her gash and she could tell it was bleeding again, but it was well dressed and the seepage wouldn't amount to much.

Keeping to a pattern too predictable to be desirable in a law enforcement officer, Hatch stopped at the top of the pedestal and went out to the same place he had the first time Anna had accompanied him. "Time to do drugs," he said.

There was a faint breeze. Anna welcomed its tickle in her hair. Hatch, ahead of her on the high balcony, turned when he reached the parapet. Indicating the crenel facing Manhattan, he said: "You want to sit? You being company, I don't want to hog the best spot."

Self-preservation, dragged from dormancy by the gang of cleaning men, reasserted itself. Backlit, faceless, Hatch no longer seemed utterly harmless. Alone, sixty feet above an unforgiving surface, it was not unthinkable that he had pushed a girl to her death.

"No thanks. Afraid of heights," Anna lied, and planted her back firmly against the wall beneath Liberty's big toe.

Hatch was quiet for a moment and still. For the latter Anna was grateful. With his face in darkness and his uncharacteristic failure to speak, if he'd started toward her she might have embarrassed them both by making a run for it. Was this how the little girl felt? Confronted by a nameless threat? Or
was
he nameless? The child was not identified. Nothing existed to prove she hadn't known Hatch, or he her.

"You're afraid of heights?" Hatch said after too long a silence. "You was okay in the elevator and it's all glass. That gets to most--what do you call 'em? Acrophobes? Agoraphobes?"

"Acrophobes."

"I get it," he said, and there was a change in his voice that made her uncomfortable, an undercurrent of anger. "It's okay." He turned away, swinging himself up onto the chest-high parapet.

Anna sucked in her breath, took two steps toward him, thinking for an instant he meant to jump.

He settled himself, legs dangling, and fished the foil packet with its Gauloises from his shirt pocket. "You're thinking of that little girl. I've about thought of nothing else." He seemed himself again. His anger was at the child's death; nothing to do with Anna. Prickling subsided from the back of her neck and she walked over to lean on the wall, close enough to be companionable but not so close she could be grabbed had she mis-guessed his intentions.

Hatch smoothed out his cigarette and lit it, cupping the match against an imaginary windstorm. "She didn't go off here. It was over on that side." He waved smoke in the general direction of Wyoming. "I been over there maybe a hundred times tonight. The cleaning crew probably thinks I'm dingy. I been trying to figure it. Why she ran. And jumped. Jeez, she was just a kid. I thought she was a boy, maybe ten years old." He looked at Anna. She managed not to flinch at the sudden movement. "They don't know who she was, you know that? This beautiful little girl and nobody claims her. I don't get it."

Anna had no response and no way to help with whatever demons he was exorcising but to let him talk.

He took a drag, tapped the ash and leaned out, watching it fall through the beams of light trained on the lady from the ground. "Long way," he said.

"Long way," Anna agreed.

He smoked and she shifted her weight, trying to ease the ache in her thigh.

"This punky pimple-faced kid said I pushed her. You hear that?" he asked, his eyes still on the ground.

Several lies occurred to her, but she could think of no reason to employ them. "I heard," she said, and told him she'd been the first to get to the body--first in a semiofficial capacity. A hundred others had milled around before she arrived.

"Did you see her go over--jump? Her or me?" Hatch asked. Hope, or alarm, tightened his throat and Anna felt the little hairs on her nape stir again.

"I didn't," she said truthfully, and waited for him to believe her. "I came when I heard the crowd beginning to stampede."