We Are Here (17 page)

She glanced around and then back up at me. “Are you getting it?”

A father and small child, toddling past, in no hurry and going nowhere in particular. In the distance, a small group of what looked like students in a loose huddle, talking and laughing. Over on a bench, a couple of men in business suits. There was more than this, however. It reminded me of what I’d just experienced in the church. A sense of residue, of spaces not being voids. Two Japanese women ambled in our direction consulting a guidebook. A jogger appeared from nowhere and flashed past, leaving a waft of hot skin and self-satisfaction that seemed to linger longer than it should. I was aware of the sound of traffic and the rustle of distant chatter, but it sounded far away, as if there was something between me and it.

“I’m getting
something
. I have no idea what.”

“I lost the priest on the other side of Broadway,” Kristina said. “I came to check just in case, and …”

I nodded, not wanting to dispel the atmosphere.

“Try over here,” she said, gesturing up the path. “That’s where I felt it first.”

I followed, knowing there was a conflict between what my senses were telling me, but not knowing which to trust.

“Look,” Kristina hissed suddenly. She was pointing at one of the grassy areas, a forty-yard stretch near Park Avenue.

The priest was close to one end. He was standing talking to a woman—a woman who looked a
lot
like the one we’d lost after following Catherine home from school.

“That’s
her
,” Kristina whispered. “Christ—you were right. That’s the woman, isn’t it?”

“Could be. Try to get closer.”

She walked quickly up the path. I tried to keep myself out of the priest’s line of sight while drifting in the same direction.

A moment later Kristina slipped her hand out of her coat pocket and made a fist with her thumb sticking up, down by her side, which I took to mean that it was indeed the same woman. What did that mean? And why was she here now, talking to a priest in a park?

When Kristina got to the next junction she slowed, waiting for me to catch up. “It’s definitely her,” she said. I took a good look at the woman and saw she was tall, with dark hair. A pitch-black coat with a high collar, edged at the sleeves and hem with black lace. In good light it looked a little threadbare. Underneath it she was wearing a dress made of muted red velvet, trimmed with cream around the neckline.

Two other people were standing just beyond. One was standing, at least—a nondescript man of about thirty, with brown hair. He was in conversation with another who was wearing jeans and a white shirt, and who was moving around in a kind of slow circle. Despite the fact that the second man was the taller and better-looking of the two, there was something more
present
about the first guy.

I glanced toward the priest and realized the same was true there. He was a man in early middle age, blandly decent-looking. The woman talking to him was slim and very attractive. Yet your eye tended to settle on
him
and stay there. I tried to look at the girl, and it happened again—my gaze slipped back toward the priest.

Then they were no longer talking, but walking rapidly in opposite directions.

“Shit,” Kristina said. “Now what?”

“Follow her.”

She peeled off and strode up the central path. I was about to head after the priest but realized I knew where he’d be going, or at least where he could be found. So I stopped and looked back up through the park.

I saw nothing but trees and grass.

I was still there when my phone rang.

“I lost her.”

“Already?”

“Right away. I’m sorry, John. Either I’m crap at this or that girl really knows how to lose people.”

“You think she knew you were on her tail?”

“I don’t see how. You still on the priest?”

“No. I’m in the park.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

We met where the two main paths crossed and sat on a bench. We waited half an hour but didn’t see anything, and soon I stopped expecting to. It just felt like a park once more, and a cold and increasingly dark one at that.

“We’d better head back,” Kristina said. “I need to be at work in an hour. So do you.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I’d already started to think that I’d be spending some of the favors I’d earned through handling Paulo’s pizza shifts, and taking the evening off, in order to try to talk to someone.

Just before we crossed 14th to head down toward the East Village and the evening’s work, we turned together and looked back at Union Square.

We still saw nothing.

When David tried to think back over what happened in Union Square he got only fragments. He remembered turning to see Maj. He remembered a beautiful girl in a black coat standing to one side and taking a friendly interest before returning to an intense conversation with another man, who was wearing a brown suit.

“It’s
not
Reinhart,” she said to him. “It’s somebody else.”

“Just consider staying at the church,” Brown Suit was saying. “For a couple of days, that’s all.”

She smiled, but it was obvious that meant “no.”

There were others, too, including a listless man called Billy, all taking part in some kind of informal gathering or catch-up. Maj appeared torn between wanting to talk to David and having business with the girl and the man in the brown suit—and David overheard enough to gather that it was this that had sent Maj hurrying to the phone in Kendricks and brought him back to the city after that. They were talking fast and urgently. Billy stood off to one side throughout this. He looked ill.

In the back of David’s mind a voice kept telling him he ought to be getting to the train station. That voice, the voice that always told him
not
to do things, to be careful, to stay safe, was taking up perhaps ten percent of his mental bandwidth. Thirty percent was insidiously suggesting the opposite.

All the rest was a cloud.

Sometimes he thought he could hear a hubbub of conversation, but it sounded like a combination of traffic around the square and the distant roar of a jet passing high overhead, and so it was possible that’s all it was. If you blinked, everything came into focus. A New York park on a cold afternoon. If you let your attention wander … it became something else. David hadn’t spent much time stoned—experiencing his parents out on the deck staring owlishly at him before breaking into high-pitched laughter had been enough to put him off the idea—but it’s hard to grow up in semi-rural America and avoid drugs altogether. From his single experience with MDMA he remembered this sensation of being untethered, watching reality peeling off to stand to the side and of being unsure of whether it was you who’d taken this step, or the world—and what it would take to marry you again.

He observed groups of the circulating people, in conversation—some serious, some joking. Individuals and twos and threes walking up and down the thoroughfares. A very large dog came and stood and looked up at him as if waiting for him to say something. The dog appeared to be on his own, without an owner, and after a few moments trotted off. All of this was silent, as if seen through thick and grubby glass—but once in a while there’d be a bubble of noise, like opening the door to a room that held a party to which you hadn’t been invited. Similarly, David stood there as if invisible most of the time, but once in a while someone would turn their head to look at him curiously, before turning away again.

Then he was down at the bottom end of the square once more, his head clear, as if jolted out of a daydream. Two women were walking toward him from the pedestrian crossing. He felt a panicky urge to step out of their way. They seemed too big. Not tall, or fat, just too
present
. One glared at him as they passed, as if to forestall him bothering them. He heard the other sniff, and saw rings of red around her nostrils.

Two normal women, one with a cold, but he felt disconcerted and frightened. Was
that
all this was? Some kind of panic attack? Was he seeing normal people, but just responding to them in the wrong way?

He realized belatedly that someone else was looking at him. About forty feet away, on the other side of Broadway, a man wearing a fedora and a dark suit with wide lapels. He was standing with his hands in his pants pockets, staring at David.

His face was hard and unfriendly.

“Let’s go,” said a voice from behind.

It was Maj, alone now. The other man and the girl had disappeared. David glanced back toward where he’d seen the man in the hat, but he was no longer there either, and all the other people in the park had gone.

“
What just happened
? Who were all those people?”

“Come with me.”

“Why … would I do that?”

“You came to the city for answers, yes? You’re not going to get any standing by yourself in a park.”

Maj started walking. David followed. The other man crossed 14th, striding along busy patches of sidewalk, avoiding oncoming pedestrians without ever dropping pace. After ten minutes he finally slowed, somewhere south of the Village, but kept switching in and out of backstreets before popping out opposite a high wall made of stained red brick. To the left was a metal fence, and beyond it David saw a church. It took a moment for his memory to serve up the name—old St. Patrick’s Church.

Maj stopped outside. “I want to introduce you to some friends,” he said. “But something happened while I was out of town. We’ve got outsiders taking too much interest. I need to try to talk to someone, get his advice. You can’t come with me. He won’t talk if you’re there. He probably won’t anyhow.”

“Why?”

“I won’t be long. Half an hour. I’ll meet you at Bid’s. You remember that, at least?”

David didn’t, or at least hadn’t thought of the place in years, but then there it was—back in his head. A basement bar not far from where they now stood.

“Get a table in back if you can. In the meantime, there’s something you should do.”

“What?”

“Call your wife,” Maj said, and walked away.

It took David ten minutes to get an approach straight in his head. Then he stood on a corner and called her.

“Plus amazingly I ran into someone,” he said, low-key, after he’d told her everything he’d done—up to but
not
including whatever he’d just experienced in Union Square. “From when I lived here.”

“Would this be a man someone … or a lady someone?”

“Man, of course,” David said quickly.

“I’m joking,” Dawn said, though she sounded a little relieved. “So who is he? I don’t remember you mentioning anybody in particular from back then.”

“His name … he’s called Maj.”

“Weird name.”

“He’s … kind of a weird guy.”

“Do you want to stay there tonight and hang out?”

“Would that be okay?”

“Of course, silly. If you’re going to set a book there, this has to be a good thing, right? He should be able to help. With current stuff, atmosphere, what it’s like living there now. It’s been a while since you were in the city properly, after all.”

“Exactly,” David said.

“Where would you stay?”

“I don’t know. Maybe with him. Crash on a couch or something.” There was silence down the line. “What?”

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she said, in a bubbling rush. “I wanted you to find it when you got home. But there’s a letter for you from Ralph’s office. Plus … I checked our account. Your advance came through.”

David felt exhausted. “Oh, thank God.”

“So if you wanted to stay in a hotel or something, it’s okay. Nowhere too fancy, though—save that for when we’re there together.”

“I will,” he said, laughing, feeling relief wash over him—mingling with guilt he felt for not being honest with her. “What will you do?”

“I’ll muddle through somehow. I’m …” She hesitated. “Maybe it’s wrong. But I thought I might start sorting through the spare room.”

For a moment David didn’t get what she meant—he couldn’t imagine what would impel her to tackle the room on the second floor where all the homeless junk in their lives got thrown—but then he did.

“Go for it,” he said, momentarily nowhere else in the world except on this phone call, with this woman.

“You don’t think it’s too early?”

“I think it’s a great idea.”

“And it won’t … you know.”

He knew what she meant. That starting to prepare the room for a nursery would anger the gods, causing them to reach down to stir darkness back into their lives.

“No,” he said firmly. “We walked a long way down Superstition Road the other times and it didn’t help at all. Good things need welcoming too, and that’s what we’re going to do this time.”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too.”

“So go hang out. But get home early tomorrow. Remember what we’re doing.”

“What?”

“The scan,” she said. “I told you.”

“I knew that.”

“Hmm.”

“Be careful, okay? Don’t move anything big. Wait until I get back.”

“I’ll be fine. I’m only a bit pregnant.”

“That’s like being a bit unique.”

“Pedant. Buzz off and have fun. But not too much.”

David lowered the phone from his ear, feeling a pang of regret for not being home, for not being able to hug his wife at the moment they’d discovered he’d been paid. He resolved that nothing like this should ever happen again, making it all the more important that he got to the bottom of what was happening right now, and end it.

It took him another five minutes to get to Bid’s, down a side street not far from Bleecker. His feet remembered the way even if he didn’t. He hesitated on the sidewalk. The door at the bottom of the steps was open and you could smell decades of stale beer from where he stood. He hadn’t yet discounted the idea that this was a complicated con and/or set-up—and if so, that getting further into it was a very dumb idea. Right now, a voice was telling him, he could just split. There was no one here to stop him. He could get the hell out and just go home.

That was his rational mind, however.

Another part knew, though it didn’t understand, that something else was going on, that even if he didn’t remember Maj, he somehow knew him—and that things do not go away simply because you turn your back or run away, and that at least this was a public place.