We Are Here (29 page)

The hallway beyond was small and dark. After a moment I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. They stopped before I could see anyone.

“Come upstairs, won’t you? It’s the only part of the house that ever seems to get any light.”

The footsteps went back up again.

I trotted up past a first story with a landing and two closed doors, and onward to the top. Jeffers stood aside to let me into a room at the front of the house. It held a desk, two chairs that looked like they’d been borrowed from the church, and an upright piano. The only personal touch was an armchair, formerly luxurious but now threadbare, by the window. He saw me looking at it.

“My predecessor’s. He lived here for thirty years.”

“Feel some days like he still is?”

My comment was intended as throwaway empathy, but he looked at me sharply. “What happened with Reinhart?”

“He followed my partner yesterday and threatened her. I’m just back from talking to him.”

“You’re in better shape than I would have expected.”

“I made sure it happened in a public place.”

Jeffers shook his head.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How did he know who your partner was? Why did even care? Because you were here the other night. Which shows he already
knows
where you live, and that means—”

“He didn’t know about her because of me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Until I confronted him over lunch, he didn’t know there was a connection between us.”

I realized with a sinking heart that I’d helped Reinhart draw a line between two people he had reason to have a problem with, and that sometimes men who don’t hide are not merely excessively confident. They may also believe that they’re well connected enough not to need to care. Sometimes they’re right.

“I don’t understand.”

“Kristina found a cryptic message a couple of days ago,” I said, sitting on one of the wooden chairs. “It was written in the dirt on our window.”

“An unusual means of communication.”

“Right. Especially as we live on the fifth floor. She worked out the message and went to Union Square Park. She met some people there, including the woman I later saw you talking to in Union Square. You know the one. We’ve been through this. Her name’s Lizzie.”

The priest listened with an expression I couldn’t place at first.

“A couple stole jewelry and presented it to her. Then everyone ran off—leaving her stuck in a doorway still holding the goods … at which point she noticed two men watching. One was Reinhart. Yesterday he accosted her in a backstreet and was not subtle about warning her to stay out of his business.”

Jeffers’s face had become composed again. I knew now what I’d seen in his face, however. It was the look of a man who has been found out over something personal: a matter that has been on his mind a great deal but not allowed out on show; a load he has been carrying by himself, which at times has felt very heavy indeed.

“Talk to me,” I said. “Explain what I’ve gotten myself into. I may even be able to help.”

“No,” he said, sitting on the other chair. “You won’t. But I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

He told me he’d been the priest there for three years. When he’d arrived he’d found a community in decline. His predecessor had been in place a long time and was much loved and just about managed to hold the place steady, acting as a bridge between the era when people believed by default and a new one in which they did not. Partly, Jeffers said, this change lay at the hands of science. While he had no personal issue with the objective assessment of verifiable facts, the reductionist agenda could lead in only one direction when it came to the worship of things unseen. Even more important, he believed, was that people just didn’t have time for it. In the old days life was simple. You worked and slept and you attempted to reproduce. If you had time in between then what you craved was a sense of wonder, something to keep you reconciled to the drudgery of the day-to-day—and a sense of community, too. For hundreds of years the church was the go-to for both, but the Internet killed that. E-mail and Facebook took interaction and threw it somewhere nonconcrete: up in the cloud, yes, but not one where angels sat jamming on golden harps. You didn’t need to catch up outside the church gates on Sunday morning—you were constantly aware of your friends’ and neighbors’ every deed and thought and meal. If you wanted a glimpse of the lords of your manor, Twitter provided it in a parallel stream: endless updates on how vewwy, vewwy much your hallowed movie star loves the husband who in reality she’s enthusiastically cheating on with her personal trainer, amongst others. Instead of thinking about the nature of the universe, and your life, and wondering what kind of being or circumstance could have given rise to it, you thought “Cool! Ashton Kutcher has tweeted again, just for me!”

After six months Jeffers had started to make do, settling for the status quo like the last Roman living in a far-flung European backwater after the empire had pulled the plug. It wasn’t a bad life and there were still a few old people who cared. As a way of serving the Lord and filling in the years until he could take a meeting with Him in person, it would do.

“Then I met Lizzie,” the priest said, looking up at me. “And Maj, and some others, and things changed.”

“Where did you first meet them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t remember?”

“I can’t recall where I first became aware of them.”

“I’m not sure I understand the distinction.”

“They’re not easy to pin down.”

“Who are they?”

“People who’ve been forgotten by the rest of us and have no place in our society. That’s a hard life to live. Unlike most, they’re doing something about it.”

“Stealing, you mean.”

He shook his head. “Very few. For most there’s no point, or wasn’t until Reinhart came along. They’re organized, after a fashion. They have places they live and hide; there are roles and ways of being; there’s even a kind of hierarchical society. There
was
, anyway. Then a few of the older ones, the people who’d put a lot of this in place, left the picture at the same time.”

“Died, you mean?”

I could see him choosing his words. “It would be more accurate to say they stopped exerting an influence. Unfortunately Reinhart arrived during the same period, and he realized he could make criminal use of some of the skills the remaining had acquired.”

“Like?”

“Avoiding detection. Very successfully.”

“And stealing things.”

“Regretfully, yes.”

“How does it work?”

“Sometimes simply taking things out of stores—small, expensive goods that are handed on to Reinhart for sale. The thing is, there are very few of them who are skilled at that, and so he’s always coming up with new ideas. He has them spying at ATMs, observing PIN numbers. Once the victim is around the corner, Reinhart’s other accomplices intercept him or her and detain them until they’ve had a chance to use the number and the bank card to remove large sums of money.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, remembering the spate of similar crimes in our neighborhood over the last months. “And what do they get out of it?”

“Shelter. And attention.”

“If they want attention, why do they spend their lives in hiding?”

“It’s … difficult to explain. I’d become aware of some of these people in the neighborhood. I befriended a few. It’s not easy. When I realized how they were being used by Reinhart, I started a program. I tried to help them to see my church as a safe and supportive place. Tried to move them away from criminal acts, too. Partly on moral grounds. Mainly because sooner or later it’d mean exposure for them. Some have responded well.”

“Which Reinhart doesn’t like. Hence him being here the other night, and also threatening Kristina.”

“Yes.”

“So why hasn’t he just whacked you?”

The priest looked confused. “Whacked?”

“Had you killed. These people tend to think in very straight lines.”

“You think someone would kill a priest over something like this? Are you serious?”

I looked into his sober, calm eyes, and tried to figure out how to break the news that people died every day for incomparably less. Then I realized from the corners of his mouth that he knew this fact very well.

“You’re a smart man,” I said, standing. “And probably a good one. But I’d think seriously about letting these people look after themselves.”

“That would not be the Lord’s way. Or mine.”

“Maybe. But the Lord doesn’t live by himself in a house that would be easy to break into. These people exist outside society for a reason. They know the score. They don’t get anything out of our world, sure, but that means they also won’t feel they have to give in return.”

He smiled, and I realized it was like talking to a great big bear, one who found the spectacle of the human in front of him mildly interesting, especially the noises he was making with his mouth, but who would not be altering his behavior on the basis of anything I said.

“Seriously,” I tried. “If it comes down to it, these are not people you can trust to get your back.”

“They are lost,” he said. “It’s my job to bring them home.”

Kristina’s phone started being weird halfway through the afternoon. It rang, showing a number she didn’t recognize—but there was no one there. The first time she didn’t think anything of it. It was a Sprint phone and the service sucked. Attempts to discuss this with the company had achieved nothing but rage and the desire to hunt down and kill everyone who worked for them, which apparently you’re not allowed to do. Forty minutes later it happened again. She stuffed the phone back in her pocket afterward, prey to the churning in the guts that comes when our inexplicable new tech starts misbehaving. In days of yore you prayed to God to keep the magic working. Now we navigate ritualistic menus, sit in prayer on hold, and pay homage to customer service representatives of indifferent competence and temper. It’s a matter of debate which yields the more tangible results.

Then it happened
again
.

This time she didn’t even bother to look. John had texted ten minutes before, and she’d replied. The only other person she could think of was Catherine Warren, but her name would have shown on the screen.

Then she pulled the phone back out, prey to a thought. She navigated to the incoming log and confirmed the failed calls had all come from the same number and that the last time had left a message. Maybe it was Catherine after all—calling from another number after a phone fault or loss, perhaps to say she wouldn’t be coming to the book club that evening. They hadn’t spoken since the fabulously awkward meeting at her house.

Kristina thought she’d better check. Annoyingly, the message had also failed. A ten-second stretch of silence—or the strange, tidal version of it that dead telecommunication equipment sings—and it cut off.

She walked on, more slowly now, keeping the phone in her hand. Five minutes later, it rang again. “Yes?” she said, getting it up to her ear fast. “Who is it?” Silence. “Don’t hang up,” she said, hurrying into a side street. “I can’t hear you.”

The line went dead.

Swearing, she flicked back to voice mail. As she waited for the previous message to read back, she wandered down the street, cupping the earpiece with her other hand to cut out extraneous noise—and trying not to remember that it was a street pretty much like this where she’d been cornered and threatened the day before.

She listened to the tidal noise again, the silence that wasn’t silence. Except … maybe it wasn’t silence. Maybe she could hear … something. Something very faint.

She listened to the sound one more time, hunched next to a stairwell, a finger in her other ear, closing her eyes to hand everything over to a single sense.

It
could
just have been her mind trying to usher random sounds toward meaning, like those recordings people made in houses that were supposed to be haunted, in fact just meaningless white noise.

She didn’t think so, however.

brprr, sssnn

That’s what it sounded like—someone whispering in your ear before you were awake. The first part sounded a
little
like “Bryant Park,” though. Perhaps only because it was in her mind as the first place she’d met Lizzie, but once she’d heard the sounds that way, she couldn’t unhear the words. The second part sounded like it meant something, too. In fact, she heard that part first. It sounded like someone saying “Seven.”

Bryant Park, seven.

She listened to the recording one more time and couldn’t make herself hear it differently. Why it should sound so very faint and strange, she had no idea. Maybe a problem with her phone, or voice mail, or the movement of the spheres. She wasn’t tangling with Sprint’s asshole version of customer service to find out.

She could think of only one person who might be trying to leave a message—especially one that short, suggesting a meeting in a park. Lizzie had taken her number. If the whole thing wasn’t Kristina’s imagination, this had to be from her. And if it was an invitation to meet up, Kris wanted to take her up on it.

But what about Reinhart? She’d been
really
scared last night, and scaring Kris wasn’t a job for the faint of heart. She’d gone running to John and he’d hugged her and made sure she was all right—and not done what she knew he wanted to, which was run off and try to find the guy. He hadn’t said anything about him since, either, which must have taken herculean reserves of self-denial. And if what he’d since told her about his conversation with the priest that afternoon was true, and some of Lizzie’s broader circle of friends were working for Reinhart, he wouldn’t want that deal messed up by people like Kristina.

He’d warned her, and made the message good and clear.

A stray thought dropped into her head. It struck her that John had been vague about how he’d spent his morning. Just walking, he’d said, winding up in Chelsea with Jeffers more or less by chance. It occurred to her to wonder whether he’d been making inquiries about Reinhart instead, and if so, what he’d found. Not much, presumably, or he would have said.