bent over, he looked at me as the semiparalysis began to ease.
'What the fuck you want, man?' he said.
'Mostly I want to know that April Kyle is all right, and is going to stay all right.'
Robert had straightened up. His shoulders were still a little forward and he was massaging his stomach with his right hand. But he could breathe.
'She's a fucking chippy, man. How all right do chippies get? How long they stay all right, you know?'
Two black kids on skateboards zipped between us and on down the walk.
'I didn't turn her out, man. She was a chippy 'fore I knew her.'
I nodded. 'Everything's relative,' I said. 'I don't want her worse off than she was.'
'Hey, she's better off. She's making better bread than she ever made with Utley.'
'And keeping it?' I said.
'Sure, man, whatta you think, I'm no pimp.'
'Yeah, sure,' I said, 'you're a music student. You probably carry that razor to trim clarinet reeds.'
'No shit, man. I'm taking courses at Juilliard.'
'Robert,' I said, 'what's the point? If I can talk her out of you, I will. If you can stop me, you will.'
'You can't talk her out of me, man.'
'Probably not,' I said. 'But I'll try. And if you try to cut me again, I'll break both your arms.'
'Maybe next time I won't be alone, man.'
I turned back toward Fifth Avenue. 'I think we can count on that, Rob,' I said.
4
I strolled across the park toward Lincoln Center. To my left the row of high-rise hotels on 59th Street gleamed in benign elegance over the burgeoning green swales of Olmsted's grand design. Roller skaters and Walkmen and joggers and Frisbees and dogs and kerchiefs. Lunch in brown bags and park rangers on horseback and outcroppings of dark rock on which people sat and got the early yellow splash of spring sun in their faces. Birds sang. Maybe ten years ago a group of young men raped a young woman in the park and left her naked, gagged, and bound hand and foot. Another group of young men came along and found her and raped her too.
Ah wilderness.
Lincoln Center looked like an expensive complex of Turkish bathhouses, a compendium of neo-Arabic-Spanish and silly. It did for the West Side what the Trump Tower did for the East, offering the chance for a giggle on even the drabbest day.
A large-eyed woman wearing a full skirt and silver New Balance running shoes opened a file folder and told me that in fact Robert Rambeaux was registered at Juilliard. He was taking a course in composition with a practicum in woodwinds.
'What's his address?' I said. 'He still living on First Street?'
'I'm sorry, sir, it's against our policy to give out that sort of information.'
'Quite right,' I said. 'People drive you crazy if they know where you live. A person has a right to privacy.'
She smiled at me and nodded. Her hair was pulled back behind her ears and fell to her shoulders. She didn't look very old, but there were gray streaks in her hair. Premature. Probably from worrying about the rights of privacy.
She had a cup of coffee in a white mug with Beethoven's picture on it. As I stood I brushed it with my elbow and spilled it across her desk and onto her lap.
She jumped up, trying to keep the coffee from soaking through, brushing her skirt with both hands.
'Oh, my God,' I said. 'I am sorry.'
While I said that I shuffled the stuff on top of her desk frantically out of the way, and in doing so I copped the top sheet out of Rambeaux's folder and folded it inside my jacket.
'It's all right,' she said, her graying head still bent over, smoothing at her skirt. 'Really, it's all right. The skirt is washable.'
I closed Rambeaux's folder and put it and two other folders and a long pad of yellow paper in a pile on the corner of the desk. She left her skirt and turned her attention to the calculator on her desk, wiping it off with Kleenex she took from a drawer.
'Really,' she said, 'it's my fault. I shouldn't have left the coffee there. It'll be fine. I'll just get a wet paper towel from the ladies' room and wipe off the desk.'
'Well,' I said, 'thanks for being so decent about it.'
'No, really,' she said.
I smiled my earnest smile at her and thanked her again and she put her file folders away in the file and locked it and went to the ladies' room to get a paper towel. I left.
Walking through Columbus Circle, I read Rambeaux's transcript. He'd done well in his courses. And he lived on East 77th Street. I put the transcript in a trash bin attached to a lamppost. Incriminating evidence. Probably could have looked Rambeaux up in the phone book. How many Robert Rambeauxs could there be? But it's good to keep in practice. And the risk factor at Juilliard was low.
