The Vanishing Glass and Handkerchief. Good sometimes, more often not, his father had nonetheless applauded each and every time, his thin, osseous hands meeting in an almost soundless smear.
Jack Paris sat in the blue chair for three months, standing guard over his father’s health, a bewildered, downhearted sentry. At the end of August the ambulance came in the night while Jack slept soundly. Three days later the call from the hospital came at six o’clock in the morning.
He’s dead, isn’t he? his mother had said in the kitchen that fog-laden late-summer morning, her pink waitress uniform suddenly a widow’s mantle. Jack waited for her gentle tread on the stairs, for the news.
All that spring and summer, from the balmy April day his father had come home, grim-faced, from Dr. Jacob’s office, to the rainy funeral at Knollwood cemetery on Labor Day, Jack Paris had rolled a silver dollar through his fingers-palming, transferring, producing, vanishing, concealing.
His father’s unhurried death may have taught him patience, but it was magic, he would reaffirm every good day he spent as a police officer, that taught him how to look at the other hand, how to see through the shadows.
It was magic that taught him illusion.
Paris rubs his eyes. He glances up at the Levertov front window, wondering how long he’d been gone, realizing that an entire performance of Guys and Dolls could have taken place in that window and he would have missed it.
You’re on the job, Fingers.
Paris straightens his legs, does a quick scan of the immediate area with his binoculars. Deserted, except for a lone hot dog vendor on the corner of Newark and Fulton. Paris gets out of his car, stretches his legs, does a few kneebends, allowing the frigid air to revive him, his stomach now rumbling at the sight of the vendor. He’d managed to miss dinner again. Before he can head over, his two-way blares: “Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m on my way,” Carla Davis says, sounding agitated. “Five blocks out.”
“You’re way early. What’s up?”
“Big fight with Charlie Davis is what’s up.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Gonna bust a cap up his skinny black ass is what’s gonna be up.”
Paris knows enough to leave it alone. Especially on an open channel. “Got it.”
“Where are you parked?”
Paris tells her.
“I’ll park closer to Trent, so we’re not in the same spot,” she says.
“Okay,” Paris says, eyeing the vendor and his cart, two blocks away, famished now that he’s seen it. “Listen, there’s a vendor on Newark and Fulton. Grab me something, okay?”
“No problem. What do you want?”
“I don’t know. Dog with the works, I guess. Coke.”
“You got it.”
“And listen, I know it’s Ivan’s case, but why don’t you pump this guy a little about the old man. Isaac Levertov peddled his cart around here. Maybe he saw something.”
“You got it.”
Carla pulls very close with her car. She hands Paris the hot dog-wrapped in Christmas themed wax paper-and the freezing can of Coke.
Paris asks: “Did he know the old man?”
“No,” Carla says. She holds her notebook up to the streetlight. “Mr. William Graham of Memphis Avenue in Old Brooklyn has been at this job exactly two weeks. Said he heard about the old man getting killed, but that’s about it.” She closes her notebook.
“What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” Carla says, yawning already. “Just bring coffee in the morning. And every damn McMuffin there is. Now get outta here. Go have a life.”
The snow falls; hushed, relentless, orderly. The sparse traffic crawls up the center of Lorain Avenue, wisely making two lanes out of four.
It just didn’t add up.
Willis Walker. Fayette Martin. Isaac Levertov.
What the hell ties these three people together?
Paris opens the Coke, sips, places the can between his legs. He grabs the hot dog, unwraps one end, lifts it to his lips, a third of his mind on Rebecca, a third of his mind on the road, the final third adrift on a stagnant sea of meaningless clues.
It is the smell that brings him back to shore.
The smell of death.
Paris slams on his brakes and begins to slide, sideways, up Lorain Avenue. Luckily there is no oncoming traffic. After a few uneasy moments he rights the car, brings it to a halt, straddling the center of the road. He opens the driver’s door and all but dives onto the icy street.
“God damn, man… shit!”
Jack Paris begins to pace around in the middle of Lorain Avenue, fighting the nausea, holding his shield up to the car behind him, directing it around his car. He stops, rests his hands on his knees for a moment. He spits on the ground-once, twice.
Fat snowflakes catch on Paris’s eyelashes. He brushes them aside, then dares to reach back into his car. He retrieves the blue light, puts it on the roof, and as he does he glances at the festive, brightly decorated wax paper, the beige-colored bun resting on the passenger seat.
“You are going down, motherfucker,” Paris says as he takes out his cell phone, dials the Second District precinct house, his fury now a living thing within him. He spits into the gutter again. “You don’t see a fucking courtroom. I swear to Christ.”
Paris listens to the phone ring, absolutely certain that the hot dog vendor is going to be nowhere in sight when the squad cars get to the corner of Newark Avenue and Fulton Road; absolutely livid that he had been taunted with that name, Will Graham, the tormented FBI agent in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon; absolutely revolted by the knowledge that he had just come to within an inch or two of biting into Willis Walker’s penis.
46
I can hear the police sirens in the distance and know that they are coming for me; a sober, urgent aria, rising and falling.
The old woman sits on the plastic-slipcovered dining room chair, her eyes a dead pool of defiance. I know that she has been through worse than whatever I can offer her now. Much worse. As a child she has survived the horrors of Buchenwald, has witnessed an encyclopedia of inhuman behavior.
Initially, she had refused to tell me where the keys to the garage could be found. I needed them to get at her husband’s hot dog cart. She had lost the tip of the little finger on her right hand to this stubbornness, yet still refused. When I brought the steam iron to within an inch of her face she pointed to a drawer in an old desk, her frail shoulders sagging under the weight of her shame.
She is very tough, clearly from another time, another era. Not soft and complacent like so many of my generation. She really has nothing to do with my plan, and my instincts are to just leave her apartment, take my chances. These are my instincts. And yet I know I cannot do this. I have no hatred for her, but I need until New Year’s Eve at the very least and she has seen my real face.
My father’s face.
I look out the window as two police cars converge on the corner of Trent Avenue and Fulton Road, their blue lights a sparkling, prismatic display on the ice-crystalled facade of St. Rocco’s church.
The old woman struggles against the ropes. It appears that life, complete with all its horrors and barbarism and cruelty, is still precious to her. She tries to plead with me, but the tape over her mouth catches her fear, mutes
