We Are Here (21 page)

“I’d like a meeting tomorrow,” Jeffers said. “You, Lizzie, Bob, and as many of the others as you can gather.”

Maj shrugged. “Lizzie’s being kind of … I think she’s gotten spooked by these people following her. There’s something on her mind. I don’t know what it is.”

“I’d like it if you could try. Especially with her.”

When Maj had gone, the priest took a walk around the room, checking that everything else was in place. When he was satisfied, he went to the far end and closed the door there. He locked the church and went around to the house. He paused before going inside and looked up and down the street, half expecting to see someone in the shadows. There was nothing to see, but that didn’t mean there was no one there. Reinhart would be back, too. He was sure of that. Though until tonight he’d known the man only by reputation, a confrontation had been inevitable. Black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. They rub along together most of the time, but a battle always comes.

So be it.

Upstairs he stood becalmed in his sitting room. Usually he spent this period preparing for the next day. Planning a schedule of visits for those unable to visit the church in person, which boiled down to reassuring the very old that no, they didn’t look so bad and yes, God would be there waiting for them. There was nothing of the sort booked for the next day, however, which left working out what to say to the drop-in group at four and starting to gather his thoughts for the weekend’s sermon. He was ahead of himself on the first task, and drawing a blank on the second except for reiterating the bottom line:

God is basically on your side, so if life seems to suck it’s probably part of some big plan. In the meantime, pray. And keep coming to church, for Pete’s sake. I’m not doing this for the fun of it.

He sat in the chair by the window. It was the single decent piece of furniture in a room that was otherwise Spartan. It didn’t have to be that way. Nobody ever came up here. He could buy what he wanted, within reason and the constraints of his salary. He could pimp it out like a gangsta bordello, if he chose, or install a revolving bed with black satin sheets. He’d arrived owning little, however, and remained that way. Everything of substance in the room, excluding the piano, had belonged to Father Ronson. As a child of wealthy parents, Jeffers been brought up in the world of ownership and had found it wanting. Or … was choosing not to acquire merely an easy cop-out, a way of sidestepping the trials and risks of self-definition while appearing to live a virtuous life?

He didn’t know. He’d been back and forth on the subject, sitting in this very chair, staring out at the simple beauty of the trees and the streetlights, which he saw as the real decorations of the room.

The results of three years of patient effort stood in the balance. Maj was right. Reinhart could only have been led here by Golzen. Perhaps he should have tried harder to reach out to Golzen. Their messages weren’t so different. They preached parallel paradigms, up to a point: the only distinction being that Jeffers’s was right, and Golzen’s wrong. There were souls to be saved. Souls in danger, lives that had been lived in shadows and untruth but could now be steered toward the light. There was a limit to what Jeffers could do for the regular folks, those who attended because they were old and knew no different or middle-aged and felt they should, as if it was some kind of Book Club with Benefits.

He could make a difference with this other kind. Many were younger. Most lived outside the law, and almost all on the streets. He could bring them home. Through doing this he might also prove to the memory of Father Ronson that he was worthy of his post. Jeffers wasn’t sure this would make a difference. That wasn’t the point. In the realm of the spiritual, you do things because they’re the right thing to do. That is all.

What happened this evening was a sign it was time to step up the campaign. To gather the ones he had influence with and forestall any ideas they might have of allowing themselves to slip into Reinhart’s clutches—as so many had done—or following the road to the promised land, for which Golzen claimed to hold the key.

Tomorrow always holds the potential to be the very best of days.

Content to have reached this conclusion, the priest sat in the chair, his mind tending toward a comfortable blank. He started on hearing the sound of a distant thud.

He’d heard the sound more and more recently. He knew the city was loud enough at night that neighbors in the street would either not have heard the noise, or would dismiss it as one of those things, the sigh of a bending branch in the jungle night.

He knew also that when he went into the church tomorrow morning, however, the narrow door at the end of the hall would be hanging open.

Kris woke earlier than usual. When she trudged yawning into the sort-of-kitchen she found a note on the counter next to an empty coffee mug. It was from John. It said he was going for a walk. There were two arrows underneath, drawn in his confident and surprisingly artistic hand. One pointed to the cup. The other pointed in the direction of the coffee machine, which was loaded and ready to go. She picked up the note and frowned at it.

It was considerate, of course. But that wasn’t what struck her. He
always
went for a walk first thing. John went for a walk in the morning in the same way that the sun rose. John going for a walk was not news.

So why the note? The fight after the debacle at Catherine’s had blown over. It had been, as John had said, a dumb fight—though possibly not as dumb as he’d made out. It was dumb because fighting never achieved anything, true that, but when two people who love each other bang heads that hard then
something
needs talking about. Kristina was damned if she knew what that was, which was making her twitchy. She suspected John would have even less idea, not least because he wouldn’t have a clue that they were at …

The Six Month Suckfest.

It wasn’t always literally six months when she bailed—that would be stupid and weird and she could have put a note in her diary in advance saying, “Don’t screw things up this week”—but it had fallen close enough on enough occasions that it had become the Six Month Suckfest in her head. She and John had already been together longer than that, in point of fact. More to the point—his stubbornness about moving aside—she was happier than she’d been in her entire life.

And yet … still there was this itch in the back of her mind, an unsettled feeling in her stomach: and a small, shriveled hand starting to reach out for the Bail Switch. She’d never been able to work out whose hand this was. A remnant of her mother, trying to keep her single? Some personification of insecurities she simply didn’t feel (consciously, at least)? Pure perversity? She didn’t know. In the meantime, the hand kept moving insidiously out of the darkness, its twisted fingers groping toward some agenda Kris didn’t understand and wanted no part of.

She shoved it back into the shadows and reached for the switch on the coffee machine instead.

A couple of errands took her up into Midtown, a nice change. The big buildings and overshadowed streets there reminded her of the mountains and forests of Washington State. If you’d been raised accustomed to deep woods, a city was an easier transition than a town (and she should know, having bailed spectacularly from several of those in the past). In mountains and cities you are small in the face of geography and environment. Nobody knows your name, or cares, and that was generally fine with her.

Now it seemed as though some of these strangers were getting too close for comfort, however. More than twenty-four hours after the fact they still had no idea who’d been on their roof and left the message on the window. She wasn’t easily unnerved and John sure as hell wasn’t either. It was pretty strange, however, as the period yesterday afternoon in Union Square had also been. As John had pointed out, serious people who meant you real harm tended to get on and do it rather than leaving clues—but a warning was still a warning.

He’d said this with a distant look in his eye, as if considering ways of dealing with the situation that might not involve her—steps like taking the last night off from the restaurant and going to talk to the priest, a plan he hadn’t told her about ahead of time. Yes, he told her what had happened when he came into the bar later, but he should have told her he was going, like he should have told her about meeting Catherine that time. It probably wasn’t personal. Despite what society does in attempting to turn men into team players, they all think theirs is the only name above the title of the movie. She’d met John as a man who’d returned to his previous home in Black Ridge, Washington, to seek an explanation for the death of his older son, who’d perished there in what had appeared to be a freak accident. She’d watched John go at that situation like a bull at a gate, declining assistance until he’d already been shot by people he’d come to believe were implicated in his son’s death, and the situation looked to be getting even worse. In the end it had been resolved, albeit messily. So why did it bug her so much that he kept doing these things? Was it because it felt just a little like he was treating her like some young girl?

And had he left the note this morning because he sort of knew he was doing it, too?

The next thing she noticed, she was in Little Brazil, a short stretch of 46th near Times Square, narrow and shadowed and unexceptional, a cut-through between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Presumably there’d been reason for self-exiled denizens of a South American country to congregate in this corner of the grimy heart of Midtown, but all that remained of their passing—amid a smear of dusty buildings being knocked down or repurposed or ignored and a battered Irish bar—were a couple of small restaurants still flying the green and yellow flag and touting
feijoada
and
caipirinhas
—memories of a community now gone. Near the end of the block, she cut up an alley and onto 47th, the old diamond district, another historic enclave. The street still featured discount jewelry shops and stout men in homburgs but wasn’t the separate universe it would once have been. The future homogenizes.

Kristina found herself slowing in front of one of the store windows, in front of tightly filled ranks of metal and shiny stones, arranged to catch the eye of commercial buyers rather than passing individuals. She’d been gazing vaguely at a tray in the center for a few minutes before she realized something.

Was she really looking at
rings
? Was
that
what this was about? It couldn’t be. She’d never, in
any
relationship, started thinking along those lines. She sure as hell wasn’t going to start now. Even though there was a ring on the left that …

No
.

As she jerked her head away from the sun-bleached velvet cushions and their rows of expensive I-dos, she saw something reflected in the glass.

She hesitated, unsure what had caught her eye. Then she moved her gaze back down so she’d appear to be looking through the wares in the window again. She kept this up for fifteen slow seconds before allowing her eyes to drift up once more, pulling focus at the same time, so she was looking at the reflections in the glass rather than what lay beyond.

Yes. There, on the other side of the street, someone was standing in front of a boarded-up store.

Kristina held her position, moving now and then to make it look like she was still browsing—meanwhile drifting along the window and watching.

He or she kept in movement. Slow, but constant. Passersby kept coming between them, and it was hard to be sure, but it looked as though the figure was watching Kristina. The figure was tall and slim. The figure wore a dark coat. The figure looked a hell of a lot like …

“I give you good price.”

The voice made Kristina jump. A man had come out of the shop. He had the cheap charisma of the kind of person that will always be selling something, and offering discounts regardless of whether they’ve been sought.

“No,” Kristina said firmly, heart beating hard.

He reversed back into his store. Kristina took a chance and glanced directly across the street. There was nobody there now except for buyers and sellers of jewelry and a trio of tourists with bright anoraks and a big map.

Had there ever been? Or had she been confused by the shadows of passersby reflected in a dirty store window?

She started up the street and after twenty yards took a right into a narrow alley. It was filled with steam and the complex odors of old garbage. She slowed as she entered, to give anyone behind her a chance to see where she’d gone, and then headed along the alley, casting a quick look back after ten feet.

It was hard to be sure, but it
looked
like someone was now in position on the other side of the street she’d just left, opposite the alleyway, watching her.

It was morning and she was bang in the heart of Midtown. If this person was planning anything, they’d chosen the wrong time and place.

Unless, of course, they crossed the road and followed her up this alley, where there was no one to see anything at all.

She pulled out her phone as if to check incoming, to broadcast to anyone watching that she was plugged into the world and could summon assistance
right now
.

A glance to the left made her heart jump, a heavy double-thump.
Someone was at the other end, in silhouette against the light
.

It could be they were merely pausing on the street, but Kristina didn’t think so.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said in a quiet, low voice.

“Huh?” someone said, and she whirled to see a pudgy oriental man in the filthiest chef’s whites she’d ever seen, sitting smoking in an open back doorway.

She shook her head, making a mental note to check the name of the restaurant and make sure she never, ever ate there. She walked the rest of the alleyway, not too fast … but not slowly either.

Sixth Avenue was reassuringly crowded, people striding up and down and across and back as if fired from a battery of cannons positioned at right angles. She didn’t want to stand in a public place and call John, however. It wasn’t only that it would make her feel like a damsel in distress, which would suck. She knew that if she pulled John up here, he’d arrive with a strong following wind and scare off her shadow, taking them back to square one.