I stood for a long time staring out my office window. Below me were rooftops. Manhattan rooftops. Ancient wooden cisterns. The occasional evergreen tree, struggling to provide a contrast to the impossibly thick accretion of concrete, steel and artificial space. I saw it all around. I saw it from space. How thin it was from there. How God with a shovel, a spade, a can opener, could peel it off and toss it in the sea, if he so wished.
How fragile it all was.
I saw a woman on a rooftop. She wore a long brown overcoat. She stood at the edge of the roof. She had something in her hand. I couldn’t make out what it was. She didn’t move. She was thinking, too. She’d been hurt, like me. Hoping to take some solace from the view. Letting her imagination create a world from a detail on the horizon. Yes. That could be me. Living there. In that building, way up north. The thirty-third floor of that building there. There’d be children in that home. Happy, playing children. And paintings on the wall. And phone calls from friends. A life. A place.
A home that gave her more than pain and dread and solitude.
My father spoke to me.
A man did not give up.
I shook myself. I resolved to do my job. I had a client. My client needed me. He sure as hell needed somebody. Soldier on, I said. Be right. Be good. The rest will take care of itself.
I wasn’t sure I really bought into it. But I couldn’t resist it, either. I didn’t have much choice. I wasn’t suicidal.
I loved my misery too much to give it up.
I sat and thought.
Strange, I mused, that FitzGibbon would insist that I stay on. If he was involved in something, it could only mean he figured I was incompetent enough to cause no harm. Not beyond the realm of possibility. Though I preferred other theories. That he wasn’t. That he could see that he needed a man of my sterling abilities to get his only natural son out of this mess.
The problem being, of course, that everything pointed to the opposite conclusion.
I gathered up my four-by-six index cards, with the scribbles and lines. I untacked them from the walls. I put them in my jacket pocket. I took the elevator down. I went out the revolving door. I walked down the avenue. I stopped at Michel’s. Last time I’d be there for a while. I sat at the bar. I had a steak. Onions fried in butter. Fuck cholesterol. A glass of Australian Shiraz. Another. Three. I placed the cards on the bar, in groups of five. I looked at them. I read the words. I followed the lines. I wrote in the margins. I drew more lines. I’d stolen some colored pens from the office supply closet. A man of action thinks ahead.
When I got bored with the colored pens, I made a list:
Larry Silver is dead. •
His body was found in an alley three blocks from Jules’s loft; blunt trauma to the head; his body had been covered with a cardboard box. •
The perp was probably right-handed, and Larry was probably sitting down when he got whacked. •
Jules is right-handed. •
He smokes my brand. •
Larry Silver was a lowlife and a snake, a penny-ante drug dealer, a small-time scam artist with pretensions to more. •
In other words, he probably deserved what he got. •
Jules is a bit of a nutcase; he disfigures himself; has some kind of samurai fetish; might be suicidal. •
He has a girlfriend, Lisa; she is a nutcase too. •
But rather sexy, in a tiny green-eyed junkie kind of way. •
She has a dragon tattoo. •
Jules has a lion tattoo. •
Absolutely nobody is telling me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. •
But then, isn’t that always the case.
I thought. I pondered. I came to a conclusion.
I didn’t know a fucking thing.