City Of Lies (7 page)

‘Don’t say anything,’ Freiberg said, and Harper didn’t know who he was talking to. Wouldn’t have mattered much anyhow: Harper had nothing to say.

‘Go do your job,’ Walt said. ‘Jesus man, can’t you have just a little compassion. Go find out who did this thing, huh? Isn’t that what you’re paid for?’

The man in the suit looked over his shoulder at Freiberg. He didn’t respond. He turned and walked past Harper without a word.

Freiberg walked after him, just two or three steps, but Harper sensed the territorial thing. Freiberg was seeing the man away, making sure he didn’t get halfway down the corridor and turn back.

‘Come on,’ he told Harper, and then he was guiding him once
more, walking him through the doorway at the end of the window.

The doctor still looked unnerved and ill-at-ease. ‘I’m sorry sir—’ he began. ‘I didn’t—’

Walt Freiberg raised his hand. ‘It’s okay doctor. No harm done. You were doing your job . . . which is more than can be said for that asshole.’

The doctor seemed simultaneously concerned and relieved. ‘I’m actually unable to let you into the room,’ he said. ‘There’s a window to the side. You can see him from there, but in his present condition I am maintaining a strict policy of no visitors. His vital signs are too weak for any non-medical contact at all.’

Freiberg nodded. ‘It’s okay doctor, I understand. It will be fine if you just let us through to see him, right John?’

He smiled as he looked at Harper. Harper smiled back without awareness of what he was doing, what he was smiling at.

The doctor seemed satisfied. He stepped past them and opened another door.

Freiberg led Harper through and down a narrow corridor to the end. To the left was another window, smaller than the first, and as Harper drew to a stop, as he stood beside Uncle Walt and looked through the glass, as he saw the old man lying right there before him, tubes in his nose, his mouth, wires and lines and machinery humming and buzzing and making green jagged lines across black screens, he realized that the man before him was a father he had never known, had never really been aware that he didn’t know . . . Everything that had happened in the last thirty-six years came back to him, everything he had experienced alone and yet now felt he’d been meant to experience with this dying stranger. As all of these things crowded up against him, pushing the walls of the corridor into him claustrophobically, he believed he was actually feeling nothing at all.

The machines hummed and buzzed and clicked. They drew their jagged green lines across black glass screens.

Harper felt the tension in his own chest rising and falling.

It was the only thing that told him he was still breathing.

*

Standing half a block down the street, looking back towards St Vincent’s, Frank Duchaunak buried his hands in his pockets and exhaled. Condensation issued from his mouth.

A few feet to his left Don Faulkner sat in the car, engine idling, window down.

‘Get in the freakin’ car, Frank . . . it’s goddamned cold.’

Duchaunak turned and looked at him. ‘Freiberg was in there.’

‘Walt Freiberg?’

Duchaunak nodded. ‘The very same . . . and someone was with him, someone who looked like Lenny.’

‘You think he’ll die?’

‘Fuck knows, Don,’ Duchaunak said.

‘Frank?’

Duchaunak looked at his partner.

‘Get in the car, will you?’

‘I don’t want him to die like this,’ Duchaunak said. ‘Not after all this time . . . after everything we’ve gone through to get here. It can’t end like this . . . it wouldn’t be right.’

Faulkner didn’t reply. He wound the window up, sat watching as Duchaunak stood there for a further two or three minutes. Faulkner couldn’t see clearly, his own breath was misting the glass, but it seemed like Frank Duchaunak was talking to himself.

‘Jesus,’ he whispered eventually to no-one but himself. ‘Jesus Christ almighty. What the fuck do we do now?’

Evelyn Sawyer stands at the top of the stairs. Her house is silent.

‘You heard him?’ she asks, as if to no-one, and does not wait for a reply.

‘He was here. You heard him, right? You should have seen him . . . looked so much like Edward you’d have figured him for a ghost. I wanted you to hear him . . . hear his voice, you know? Wanted you to know who he was so you’d understand why we made this agreement. If anything happens to him . . .’

Her voice fades. She lowers her head and closes her eyes. ‘Well, if anything happens to him . . .’

She never finishes what she planned to say. She turns and makes her way back down the upper hallway to the head of the stairwell.

The house on Carmine is silent once more.

Harsh wind. Walking down the back steps of the hospital, leaning against Walt Freiberg. Wind almost blew him over. Uncertain steps. Tears in his eyes. Difficult to see. Nearly lost his footing on the last riser, but Walt was there, Walt was there to hold him up. Said nothing, just felt Walt’s hand hold him tighter, and regained his balance.

Passenger door of the car opened as Harper and Freiberg approached it. Someone came out and started towards them. A woman. Long hair, dark, blowing wild in the wind. Hard to see her face clearly through his tears. And then she was there beside Harper, there on the other side, and she and Freiberg led him like a lost soul to the back of the vehicle. The girl opened the rear door. Harper climbed in. Didn’t say a word; couldn’t find any. Had been looking for half an hour but there were none inside.

Girl came in beside him and he shuffled along the seat. Walt climbed in on the driver’s side up front, and then all the doors were closed and the wind had stopped blowing and for a brief moment there was silence.

‘This,’ Walt Freiberg said, glancing over his shoulder and smiling at the girl, ‘is Cathy Hollander. Cathy is a good friend of your father’s. She came over with me.’

Harper turned as Cathy brushed the windswept hair from her face. His heart missed a beat. Whatever he might have said died a quiet death somewhere between his mind and his mouth. He felt his eyes widen. His mouth was dry.

Cathy frowned, tilted her head, kind of half-smiled.

Harper continued to stare. A knot of emotions, tied so tight it could never be unravelled. Would take a sharp blade to sever it cleanly and release him. Harper blinked twice, blinked in slowmotion like a lizard. Almost heard the sound of his eyelids closing, opening once again. Cathy Hollander.
Cathy Hollander
.

Harper felt as if he’d taken a swift roundhouse to the solar plexus. Nothing much left of him but wishful thinking and absent words.

‘It’s unnerving,’ she said. She looked at Freiberg. ‘Jesus. . . this is a little freaky, Walt.’

Harper shook his head. He had difficulty taking his eyes off her. He frowned. It was pretty much the only change of expression he could manage.

‘You look so much like him,’ Cathy said. ‘You look so much like him it’s actually quite unsettling.’

Harper looked at Walt, did so simply to change the direction of his gaze. Walt smiled. ‘We’re going to go eat . . . it’s good to eat at a time like this. We’re also going to call Evelyn and tell her you’re okay, that you’re with us and we’re going to take care of you tonight.’

Cathy shifted in the seat and looked more closely at Harper.

Harper looked back. He still felt unable to speak.

‘So – no more staring at each other,’ Walt said. ‘Eyes front and center. We’re driving now, all eyes on the road, okay?’

‘You sound like a schoolteacher,’ Cathy said.

‘Good enough,’ Walt said. He started to laugh. ‘We should sing a song, a school song, right? The kind of song kids sing when they go on a trip.’

‘Forget it, Walt,’ Cathy replied. ‘You sing if you want to, but you’re on your own.’

‘Radio then,’ Walt said, and leaned forward to switch it on. ‘Tell Her Tonight’ by Franz Ferdinand rushed from the speakers behind Harper. He looked to his left and out of the window. His heart thundered. The engine gunned into life and drowned everything but the tension in his chest. He wanted to look at Cathy Hollander again; wanted to look at her and nothing else.

Walt turned out of the lot and headed onto West Eleventh. Harper looked at the lights of New York, the shops, the pedestrians. He saw someone stringing a line of Christmas bulbs across the front of a delicatessen. He saw himself as a child, walking streets just like this one. He remembered everything that had happened with Garrett Sawyer. He remembered the rank smell of drying blood – coppery, earthy, immediately identifiable. He remembered the way Evelyn fell apart, the way the seams that kept her together just unravelled. He remembered
all these things with a child’s perspective. Remembered them like they were yesterday. Realized he was concentrating on anything he could, anything to take his mind off the mess of feelings that had swamped him.

‘You alright?’ Cathy asked.

Harper turned and looked at her. Her hair was past her shoulders, her features clear and perfectly proportioned, her eyes a kind of hazel color, bright and inquisitive. She had long fingers, Harper noticed, as she once again reached up to fingertip a stray lock of hair away from her cheek and tuck it neatly behind her ear. A pianist’s fingers. He thought to ask her if she played but let it go. He thought to ask her if there was someone she loved, someone who loved her in return. His heart was now twice its natural size, and the blood it pumped was molasses.

He shrugged his shoulders. He felt like such a fool.

She reached out with her long fingers and took his right hand. She closed her other hand over it. He felt the warmth of her skin. Felt the unmistakable security and assurance of female contact. A rush of electricity invaded his entire body. He wanted to slip sideways, wanted to just slip sideways and lean his head against her shoulder. He wanted to close his eyes and sleep with his head on her shoulder, feel her hair on his face, smell her perfume, smell the leather upholstery – anything but the smell of drying blood which he now seemed unable to forget.

He didn’t say a word. His heart continued to beat in two-four time. His mind continued to wander.

They drove in silence for a long time. They must have been heading south because at one point they passed the Fire Museum. Harper hadn’t been there for the better part of thirty years, but still recalled it vividly. Perhaps he drifted away at some point, because it seemed that, as they drew to a halt, he opened his eyes. He couldn’t remember closing them.

‘You hang in there, John,’ Cathy said, and squeezed his hand with her pianist’s fingers, and John Harper sort of half smiled and closed his eyes in slow-motion like a sunbathing lizard on a New Mexico rock, and then the back door of the car was open and Cathy was leading him out and across the sidewalk, and Uncle Walt Freiberg was standing there smiling, but there was something in his eyes that said everything that needed to be said about the real reason for their long-overdue reunion.

The old guy – the one that was both a friend and a thirty-year-absent father, well he was laid up in St Vincent’s connected to everything they possessed and then some, and he was going to die.

‘Who was the man?’ Harper asked eventually, and the words slurred from his lips like the memory of an unpleasant taste.

‘Man?’ Freiberg asked. He frowned and shook his head. ‘What man Sonny?’

Don’t call me Sonny
, Harper thought.
I’m thirty-six years old. I was Sonny when I was a little kid
. Thought it, but didn’t say it. What he did say was, ‘The one in the hospital. The one that was there when we went up in the elevator.’

Freiberg snorted contemptuously. ‘Asshole cop!’ he snapped, and then he laughed again. ‘It was nothing John, absolutely nothing . . . now let’s get inside here, it’s cold.’

Harper followed Cathy. She walked beside Freiberg and they entered a narrow-fronted Cantonese restaurant. Harper glanced over Cathy’s shoulder. They were down near the east corner of Tribeca, on Sixth. Inside it was warm, welcoming almost, and Harper realized how hungry he was.

‘We sit, we talk, we eat,’ Freiberg said. He started to remove his overcoat. The maitre d’ approached them, smiling, hand out to greet Freiberg like a long-lost.

‘Mr Fleeberg,’ he cooed, and Uncle Walt was talking, laughing, walking with the guy to a small table at the back of the room, and before Harper knew it he was up tight and close beside Cathy, the pressure of her leg against his, the smell of her perfume, the awareness that there now seemed to be an altogether different reason for being in New York. She turned and put a glass of sake in his hand. Uncle Walt was laughing louder and telling some anecdote he’d heard about Elvis in Las Vegas and an impersonation contest.

Surreal, disconnected from anything even remotely close to reality, John Harper sat and listened, and every once in a while he talked, but in all honesty he felt he didn’t really have a great deal of anything to say. Felt like the world had closed in on him, a world he never chose to belong to, a world that just came rushing right at him without respite.

He thought of Miami, catastrophe by the sea; of the islands, of the shoals of blackfin tuna, of the waves of frigate birds, and the
smell – the once-in-a-lifetime smell of salt, seaweed, fish and mangrove swamps. He thought of pirates and Ponce de Leon, the Dry Tortugas, the footprints of turtles, the reefs, the clear water, the citrus, the coconut . . .

Such things as these, a hundred million miles from the dark streets of New York just before Christmas.

Later, how much later he didn’t know, Walt came from somewhere and sat down facing him.

‘I called Evelyn,’ he said, and he smiled. He smiled like when Harper was a kid and he came visiting with gifts. ‘I called her and said we’d be taking care of you tonight. You have money John?’

Harper merely looked back at Walt Freiberg with a blank expression.

Freiberg nodded, buried his hand inside his jacket, and was then pushing a wad of notes into Harper’s shirt pocket.

‘We’ll have you stay in a hotel near here,’ he said. ‘Should get some rest, eh? Long day for you, Sonny . . . long old day for you. . .’