Vigil (20 page)

At the corner, Carter waited for the WALK light to flash. Maybe he was being ridiculous, and Beth was right. Maybe Russo had just gotten lucky with someone at the party and he was out having a good time with her. Maybe he’d dragged her along on that Circle Line Cruise he’d said he wanted to take. If she’d gone along, then they
must
be in love.

Or else he’d be at the lab, wondering what had taken Carter so long to get back to work there.

As Carter approached the front of the bio building, he thought he detected a faintly ashy smell in the air. And as he went around the side to enter through the loading area, the smell only got stronger. The West Village always went a little crazy on Halloween night, and Carter figured somebody must have set a bonfire back there the night before. But as he came around the back of the building, the yellow brick, which was always pretty dirty, started to look a lot worse than usual—black and smudged, sooty. And the smell of smoke got overwhelming.

Then he saw the wet cement, the yellow police tape, the wooden barricades . . . the buckled loading doors. He stopped in his tracks.

What had happened here?

Russo
.

He ran toward the loading area and easily skirted two of the wooden barricades. No one was around but a couple of students on the other side of the street, casually taking in the damage. One of the two had taken his freshman seminar.

“You know what happened here?” Carter called out to them.

“I heard there was a fire—that’s all I know,” his former student said.

“Was anyone hurt?”

The other one said, “Yeah, I think so. But I don’t know who it was.”

Carter jumped up on the loading ramp that led to the side door. There was a police tape across it, and a posted warning from the Fire Department that said DANGER—NO ADMITTANCE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

Carter pulled the tape away from the door and fumbled for his key. He unlocked the door, but it was wedged into the frame. Putting his shoulder against it, he forced it back, the bottom screeching on the cement.

“Hey, Professor, I don’t think that’s safe,” his student called out.

But Carter had the door open just enough to slink through.

Apart from the light from the open door, the makeshift lab was dark. Still, there was enough light for Carter to see that the place was a total disaster area. The floor was damp and covered with gray rubble, charred wood, broken glass. The overhead lights, nothing but empty shades now, dangled listlessly from the ceiling. And in the center of the room where the fossil used to rest, the cement itself was gone, and in its place was a depression almost a foot deep and burnt to an even black. It looked like a bomb had gone off there.

Was that what had happened? Had something exploded here? The slab of rock—they’d suspected it had pockets of trapped gas inside it. But the rock was static—the laser hadn’t even been tried on it yet.

Or had it?

And where was Russo? Had he been in the lab when this accident, whatever it was, had occurred?

Carter was turning it all over in his mind, trying to make sense of it, when a slant of light hit the floor from the other side of the lab.

“Who’s in here?” a voice said. “This area is off limits!”

It was Hank, the custodian.

“It’s me, Hank—Carter Cox.”

Hank, wielding a big flashlight, came in from the storage rooms. “Oh, I knew I heard somebody in here.”

“Hank—what happened? Where’s Professor Russo?”

Hank shuffled in, picking his way through the wet rubble. “Who the hell knows what happened? All I can tell you is, it wasn’t the lights.”

“The what?”

“The fire marshal is claiming it was those lights I rigged up, with the separate fuse box, that set it off. But those lights were fine, I tested ’em myself.”

“Was Russo in here when it happened?” Carter reiterated.

Hank took a breath, as if this was the question he didn’t want to have to answer. “Him, and that other guy, the young professor.”

“What other young professor?”

“Mitchell something.”

“Bill Mitchell?” What the hell would he have been doing in here? He wasn’t even supposed to know this temporary lab existed.

“Yeah. He’s the one who got the worst of it.” Hank paused, bit his lip. “He got killed.”

Carter was stunned. Speechless.

“Last I heard, the other guy, your friend Russo, is still alive. But not by much. He’s over at St. Vincent’s.”

Hank had hardly finished before Carter had turned to go.

“I don’t know what went wrong in here,” Hank called after him, “but it wasn’t those lights!”

Outside, Carter ran down the loading ramp just as a sedan pulled up and a tall black prostitute in a short white rabbit’s fur jacket got out of the passenger seat. The sedan pulled away quickly. It wasn’t until Carter was moving past the hooker and she reached out to grab his sleeve that he realized it was a man in women’s clothing.

“You work in that building?” the transvestite said.

But Carter was already pulling away. “Let go—I’m in a hurry.”

“I
said,
you work in that place? Because if you do, I want to know what goes on in there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was here—last night—and I saw what came out.”

Against his own will, Carter had to stop. “What do you mean? What did you see come out of there?”

“That’s what I want to know. I saw a man, only it wasn’t a real man. And he was all made of light, glowing.”

Now Carter knew this guy was crazy.

“Good for you. I’ve got to go.”

But the man followed him and grabbed his sleeve again. He was strong enough to stop Carter in his tracks and spin him halfway around. “I gave that man—that
unreal
man—my coat. My best red coat. You want to know why?”

“Why?”

The transvestite looked him in the eye, hard. “Because that man didn’t have a thing on.”

Carter broke free and turned away. He did not have time for this gibberish.

“And you know the other reason I did it?” the transvestite called after him. “Because I think that man was an angel.”

Carter had to stand there, waiting for the light to change; when it did, he hurried across the street.

“I’ve got my eye on you!” the guy shouted. “Oh yeah! I know when something’s up!”

Carter was sure he did. But whatever this guy might or might not have seen, there was no time now to figure that out. All Carter could do was get to the hospital as fast as he could; even stopping to flag down a cab seemed an intolerable delay. He just wanted to keep moving, and did—dodging past the other pedestrians, racing across the streets as soon as the lights changed, making his way the remaining blocks to the hospital.

As long as he was concentrating on that, he could keep from thinking about what might actually have happened to Russo. And what condition he might find him in at St. Vincent’s. Alive, or . . . and his mind could not even go there. Not yet. Not yet.

The light changed, and he charged across another avenue.

Even on a day as bleak as this, Ezra was amused by
the inscription. There, chiseled into the wall above the curving steps, across from the massive UN tower itself, were the words of Isaiah 2:4: “. . . and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” The irony was so thick, it didn’t bear commenting on. The United Nations, united, as far as he could see, in only one thing: the containment, denunciation, and eventual destruction of Israel. Other than that, the whole organization was just a sham—a bunch of puffed-up, powerless delegates living the high life in New York City while their people back home in Uganda, Rwanda, Cambodia, Serbia, Chechnya, India, Pakistan, wherever, starved and suffered and murdered each other by the millions.

The UN, in Ezra’s opinion, had only one thing to recommend it—and that was its public park running along the East River. It was nicely maintained, and Ezra had taken to walking there when he felt he had to get some air. There was a broad, elliptical path with benches and statues and a big green lawn in the middle on which no one was ever allowed to tread. No one bothered you, the security guards kept most of the riffraff out, and you didn’t have to keep an eye out for dog shit on the pavement. Some days, when he had a lot to think about and didn’t want to go home, Ezra made as many as ten or twelve loops of the park.

Today was just such a day.

His father and stepmother had returned, as Maury had warned him, that morning. But his father had been dropped off at his office, so it was only Kimberly who’d actually come home so far.

Under Gertrude’s watchful and encouraging eye, Ezra had gone to the trouble of greeting her at the door. He’d even offered to relieve her of a package she was carrying.

“Thank you, Ezra,” Kimberly had said, “that’s a very good idea. Especially since it’s for you, anyway.”

“It is?”

“Yes.”

His guard went up immediately. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

“You can open it now,” she said. The vacation in Palm Beach had given her a slight tan and lightened her hair. “It’s nothing much.”

Was he supposed to have a present for her, too? After all, he was the one who’d started the fight that had sent her flying. But it hadn’t even occurred to him to have a makeup gift on hand. He glanced over at Gertrude, whose frown told him to just be gracious and open the gift.

“Thank you,” he said, carefully removing the white ribbon and opening the small robin’s-egg-blue box. Inside, it was filled with a cloud of white tissue paper. Nestled in the paper he saw a gleaming silver clock with a white face and black numerals and a little envelope attached to the ring on its top. He lifted the clock out and put the empty box on a side table.

“It’s a Tiffany alarm clock,” Kimberly said. “Read the card.”

Ezra took the little buff-colored card out of the matching envelope and read it. “Wake up and smell the coffee. Love, Kimberly.”

He wasn’t sure what that meant; he thought maybe he’d once heard someone use that expression, but he wasn’t absolutely sure.

“Sam and I had a lot of time to talk while we were down at our place in Palm Beach,” Kimberly explained, perhaps noting his confusion, “and we both decided that for your own good, it was high time you got out of your old rooms, found a place of your own and started making a living for yourself.”

Ezra felt like he’d been pole-axed.

“There’s no rush. Take a week, take two if that’s what you need—I hear the apartment market is fairly tight right now—but we all think you’ll be much happier living on your own from now on.”

Ezra, not knowing how to respond, looked over at Gertrude, whose expression indicated sympathy, but not surprise; she’d probably been expecting this, Ezra thought. All his life, it occurred to him, people had been expecting things that somehow caught Ezra, and only Ezra, totally by surprise. What was wrong with his human radar, he wondered?

“But I don’t want to go,” he stammered. “I’m in the middle of my work. It can’t be disrupted.”

“Oh sure it can,” Kimberly said, blithely, moving down the hall toward the master suite. “In fact, you’ll probably work better in your own place. Especially after Monday of next week.”

“What about Monday of next week?”

“That’s when Laurent is swinging by, to take a look at your rooms. He’s the interior decorator.”

Kimberly was now halfway down the hall, her back to him.

“We’re going to redo that part of the apartment completely,” she said over her shoulder before disappearing into her own rooms.

Ezra heard her turn the lock.

He was still standing where he’d been when the lightning bolt had hit him, with the silver clock in his hands.

“I was afraid of that,” Gertrude said, stepping up and taking the clock. She looked it over. “You should always try to hold this by the ring on the top. That’s what it’s there for. Otherwise, you’ll leave fingerprints all over the silver.”

 
Ezra finished another loop of the park. It was a gray
day, and fairly chill, so most of the benches overlooking the river were unoccupied. On one, someone had just left a neatly folded copy of the
New York Times
.

Ezra swept his overcoat under him, sat down, and picked up the paper. The front page had all the usual mayhem—another bomb blast in Belfast, a riot in the West Bank, a political assassination in Eastern Europe. But on the lower right corner of the page was a more singular story that caught Ezra’s eye: CHURCH BELLS RING FOR HALLOWEEN? Reading quickly, he ascertained that church bells all over the boroughs of New York had rung shortly after ten o’clock on Saturday night. Before following the story over the jump to page two of the Metro section, he put the paper down and thought for a second. On Halloween night, he’d been working in his rooms, as usual, but he’d taken a break after ten—and yes, he remembered now that he’d heard the bell across the river, tolling and tolling and tolling. It had struck him as odd, but then he hadn’t thought anything more about it. He was skittish enough these days, without dwelling on external anomalies and occurrences.