The Broken Ones (13 page)

Oscar lifted the cardboard flap and peered inside.

Newspaper clippings. Not dozens but hundreds. Some were recent, their paper almost white; others were yellow with age. Some were large clippings with halftone photos; others were merely a byline and a paragraph of copy. Oscar lifted the top handful and leafed through them. Murder convictions, murder trials, murderers apprehended, murder victims found. Where the articles had photographs, the halftone images were of men in the backseats of police cars or paddy wagons, trying to cover their heads behind upraised arms and under jumpers. Often, the offenders sat between the same two officers: Sandro Mariani and his partner, Vic Pascoe. “Cassidy’s Killer Arrested” declared one headline; “Murder Suspect Remanded” read another. A small photo surprised him, and it took a moment for Oscar to recognize himself at a press conference standing behind a former commissioner, neatly shaved and looking startlingly young in dress uniform. The last clipping he held was the one that had been on top of the rest. The paper was the color of old ivory. There was no copy text, just a headline and a photograph. It showed a long-haired man in his thirties wearing a wide-collared shirt; his face was to the sky. He was laughing as a young and vital Sandro Mariani led him away in cuffs.

“You died down there?” Sandro called. Al Martino had fallen silent. “I should throw this pasta away?”

“Coming,” Oscar replied.

He replaced the clipping, then put the last boxes on the bench.

And if the waters rose that high? Well, maybe the past could wash away.

He carried the gas bottle up the stairs, walking silently on bare feet. He stopped inside the doorway to the kitchen. Sandro wasn’t looking at him or at the tray of bone-shaped biscuits. The old man was staring down at an empty space on the bench, smiling the beatific smile that adults reserve for their infant children.

Chapter
7

T
he night was cold, and lightning winked in the distant clouds to the east. From the street he could hear laughter; the balcony of the Gests’ apartment glowed with the festival warmth of paper lanterns. Jon and Leonie lived in a building with river views and, enviably, a propane generator. Oscar took off his hat and pressed the buzzer. Leonie was a pianist and had been in the chamber orchestra until it folded; now she tutored from home. Oscar got the sense that she and Jon couldn’t have children but he had never quite worked out how to ask. A moment later, the door opened on Leonie’s smiling, pixie face. When she recognized Oscar, her smile stuttered.

“Oh dear,” she said.

“Nice to see you, too.”

Over her shoulder, across the crowded lounge room, Oscar saw a familiar profile. Sabine looked lovely. Asleep on her shoulder was a baby, its face a pleasantly squashed circle. Beside her was her new husband. Oscar understood.

“Jon forgot to uninvite me,” he said.

Leonie sighed and opened her hands. “I’m married to an idiot. Anyway, come in.”

“I’ll go.”

“Stay.” She took his wrist and kissed him lightly. “I insist. For me. Make it my birthday present.”

Oscar hesitated, then rolled his shoulders and let her guide him into the burbling room. He handed her the biscotti wrapped in cellophane. “You get these, too.”

“You baked?” She looked from the sugar-dusted cookies up to Oscar. “Such a waste.” He wasn’t sure if Leonie meant the biscuits or
him. She took his face in both her hands and turned his head toward a glittering trove of bottles. “Do me a favor? There’s the bar. Drink a lot and
talk
to your ex—it’ll make life easier for all of us. Now, I have some matrimonial ass-kicking to do.”

She smiled prettily and slipped away between the partygoers like a forest sprite among trees.

Oscar moved carefully, keeping as much of the small crowd as possible between himself and Sabine. Snatches of conversation were idle clouds passing: “I mean, how are you supposed to straighten your hair without it?” “So I asked Gai’s husband—” “The scientist?” “Her first husband was a scientist.…” “Another baby! How can they afford it?” “The house next door is vacant, so they bought a goat—” “… a gun and made him empty his pockets.” “What did the police say?” “Christ, it probably
was
the police.”

Oscar poured a short whiskey. Laughter like thunder shook the room. He looked up and saw Jon with a sergeant from Counterterrorism, sharing what seemed to be a bawdy joke. Jon shook his head and looked across the room and caught Oscar’s eye. His eyes widened a little, and said, “Oh, fuck …”

Oscar raised his plastic glass.

Jon’s shoulders sagged. He mouthed an apology and mimed putting a pistol in his mouth. Oscar smiled and waved it away. He pushed politely through the crowd, uncomfortable in the crush.

As he glanced at faces, Oscar noticed the tiny flicks of people’s eyes. A man in deep conversation might suddenly glance at an empty patch of wall, or a woman laughing at her friend’s story might catch sight of something not far away and the merriment in her eyes would die a little. How many people were in the apartment? Fifty? Sixty? Then there were sixty ghosts in here, too, standing as he was, watching, each unseen by anybody but one. The thought made him look across the room. At the far end of the crowded hallway stood the pale, dead boy. He gave Oscar a timid nod. Oscar ignored him.

He pushed past the kitchen, casting a glance inside at the caterers; one opened a new stainless-steel refrigerator to retrieve a platter. Oscar felt another bubble of jealousy rise in him. His home had neither regular power nor a fridge, let alone a new double-doored monster.

He found a corner with a window where he could pretend to inspect the view of the dark apartment buildings opposite. Outside, night and
rain had turned the city into a huge and gloomy spread of black monoliths and occasional winks of dull light. It reminded him of a cemetery he’d visited in a small town near Innsbruck on a holiday with Sabine a thousand years ago. It had been nearly Christmas, and beside dozens of the dark headstones in the small churchyard were little candles in small red lanterns. He and Sabine had held hands, walking the narrow path between the headstones, reading the names as snow drifted in silence. Those flickering, tiny lights had been placed with tenderness and care; the lights winking in the dark outside this window were loveless. The path here was a river, black and snaking. The river, Oscar thought. Why not dump the girl in the river? Six feet of chain would hold her down for weeks. Someone was so concerned that her body would be identified that the best option was to destroy it in an industrial auger. Only it wasn’t destroyed.

A hand touched his shoulder, and he flinched.

“I saw your biscuits in the present pile.”

Sabine wore a frown that might have been angry, or confused, or concerned. Oscar thought that not knowing which after all these years must be some kind of sign. He willed his jittering heart to settle.

“Leonie won’t eat them—she survives on air,” he said. “But Jon likes them. Where’s Lambert?”

Lambert Powter had become a councilman at twenty-eight, a deputy mayor at thirty, and Sabine’s new husband at thirty-three. Oscar wondered what other conquests awaited him.

Sabine pointed with her narrow chin. “There, holding Alice.”

“Alice.” Oscar nodded. “Nice.”
Nice?
he thought sourly. He tried to think of a more enthusiastic adjective. “Really nice,” he added.

Sabine inclined her head. “We’ll have to get her home soon.”

“I thought babies could sleep through anything.”

“We’re the ones who need the sleep.” Sabine watched him carefully. “So, you know, things like late-night phone calls aren’t really appreciated.”

Oscar felt his face grow warm, but he said nothing.

Sabine reached out, and he found himself recoiling from her hand—another sign he wished he’d learned to read a long time ago. She ran critical fingers over his bike jacket’s front pockets. “Oh, Oscar, this old thing.”

“I like it.”

She nodded as if she knew that fact very well. “They do still make jackets. The world hasn’t ended.”

“I have budget priorities.”

Sabine’s eyes hardened.

“Are you still giving away half your wages?”

Oscar felt a familiar blister of heat rise inside him, returning as readily as the lyrics of a Christmas carol. It was as if cogs of time had slipped and they were having the same argument they’d had week after week three years ago. “Sabby, please,” he said. “Give it a rest.”

“You are, aren’t you?”

“I can make my own decisions.”

“Shitty ones,” Sabine said. “I care about you, Oscar. You have to stop it.”

“You know, I don’t think I do.”

“Yes, you
really
do. You’re killing yourself over something that wasn’t your fault.”

“Really? Because it was my car that hit her. My hands on the wheel.”

“You thought you were saving a life.”

“And wasn’t that rich? Because instead I ruined one.”

Sabine’s lips had pursed down to a tight horizon. “Were you charged? No. Were you exonerated? Yes. Do they have homes for people like her? Yes. Do they have hospitals?”

“Have you been to a public hospital lately? Or one of those homes? It’s the fucking Dark Ages out there, Sab. But you live on the Heights, so you wouldn’t—”

“It. Wasn’t. Your. Fault.” Her teeth were gritted.

“Then whose fault was it?!”

“It was an accident!”

“I put her in a
fucking wheelchair
!”

Oscar was suddenly struck by how quiet the room had become. The music had stopped, and people were staring. Other guests had edged a little away from the pretty, frowning woman and the untidy man in the patched motorcycle jacket; he and Sabine had become a little Krakatoa surrounded by a sea of nervous silence. Leonie was doing the rounds with a plate of canapés—she gave Oscar a worried smile.

Well, you asked me to talk to her, he thought.

Suddenly, the Violent Femmes began singing an old Marc Bolan
song. Jon turned up the volume, and a few moments later conversations started again.

“Everything okay?”

Lambert Powter was dressed with the casual ease of a yachtsman sailing off the Hamptons, and he cradled his sleeping baby like a man born to love children. He was as tall as Oscar but had looks that would hold all his life. Where Oscar’s face already felt stubbled an hour after shaving, Powter’s square face was shaved so smoothly that light skated on it. Aside from the infant on his shoulder, he looked as if he had just stepped from a Ralph Lauren advertisement.

“Hi, Lambert,” Oscar said brightly. “How’s City Hall? Getting that pesky staff parking sorted out?”

Powter ignored him and looked down at Sabine. She gave him a twist of the head that was inscrutable to Oscar but had crystal-clear meaning for his successor. Satisfied, Powter looked up at Oscar. “Nice seeing you.”

Powter carried the baby into a crowd, where two young women began to coo over her.

Oscar suddenly felt very tired. “I have to go,” he said.

“Oscar.” Sabine touched his arm and stared at him with an expression he could not identify. “You have to change. People who won’t … don’t make it anymore.”

Chain lightning flashed in the west, strobing the outline of the building across the street. Its rooftop was almost level with the Gests’ apartment. On the roof edge, directly opposite Oscar, was a child-size silhouette. The instant the thought registered in his mind, the child jumped.

“Oh, fuck,” Oscar shouted. The small form became shadow as it dived in a speedy arc down toward the street.

“What?”

“A kid just jumped off that building.”

“What!”

Oscar pushed through the crowd, riding a wave of rising voices. He flung the door open, ran down the corridor, and took the stairs three at a time. At the bottom, water had pooled and the air had the alkaline odor of wet concrete. He slammed down on the handle and burst out into the rain.

He ran out to the street, expecting to hear the screams of onlookers
and the squeals of brakes as cars stopped to see what had struck the footpath … but the road was quiet. A taxi rattled by, tires hissing on the wet. The footpath across the road was in shadow.

Oscar sprinted behind the cab and across the road, eyes probing the dark asphalt of the footpath for a tiny, shattered body. Chain lightning again jolted the clouds into a moment of silver light, and details jumped forward. A trash can was stuffed to overflowing, weeds flourished in the untended garden flanking the unlit path, but no body. Darkness again. Thunder rumbled.

“Oscar?”

He turned. Jon and several guests had followed him out onto the street.

“What happened?” Jon called. “Os!”

You dreamed it
, Oscar told himself.
You imagined it
.

But his racing heart said that wasn’t true. He’d seen something the height of an eight-year-old child plunge from the roof. Impossible. City birds didn’t come that big.

“I don’t know,” Oscar said. “I saw something fall from the roof up there.”