Songs of Innocence

“I’m sure there will,” I said. “I haven’t heard.”

“We should hold one,” he said. “Here. For her classmates. Don’t you agree?”

If she’d been alive, being the center of attention would have been the last thing she’d have wanted. But she wasn’t and the rest of us were, and I could imagine it making at least some people feel better, including Stu, apparently. “I’ll talk to Lane about it,” I said.

Stu nodded gravely and levered himself out of the chair. Glancing past him, I saw someone approaching from the direction of the elevator. A student by the looks of her, though one I didn’t recognize. Asian, maybe five feet tall, with shoulder-length black hair, khaki cargo pants and a sleeveless t-shirt with FCUK style written across her chest. Stu’s path crossed hers, and she stopped him to ask a question. I saw his arm go up, one finger pointing at me.

She came the rest of the way and I waited for her to ask me for an application package or directions to a classroom. Then I noticed the padded glove on her right hand.

“You John Blake?” she said, surprising me with a British accent.

“I am,” I said, grabbing my jacket from the back of my chair. “Thanks for coming, Julie.”

“Di told me I shouldn’t,” Julie said, pulling a cigarette and a matchbook from her pocket. “Said just talk to you over the phone. I said, fuck it, it’s a public place, what’s the worst he can do to me here?” She slipped the cigarette between her lips, where it wagged as she spoke. She lit it one-handed with a maneuver she’d obviously practiced a lot, pulling one match down, bending it backward till its head touched the striking surface on the opposite side, and thumbing it to life. I raced to keep up with her as she clattered down the stairs.

She pocketed the matchbook again, shoved the door open, and suddenly we were out in the sunlight on the west side of campus. Plenty of people about, making her point for her. Even if my intentions were as bad as Di apparently still feared, what could I do about it here? It was why I’d suggested meeting here when Julie’s e-mail had come in just before midnight. And no doubt it was why she’d agreed.

“Besides,” she said, “you don’t look the type.” She waved the cigarette at me, tweaked my button-down shirt collar with the same hand, scattering flecks of ash on my shoulder. “Sorry, love. Don’t look so crestfallen. I’m sure you’re a real tiger where it counts.”

I’ve been hearing it all my life. When I turned eighteen, I looked fifteen; at twenty-five I was still getting carded. Now I was thirty-one and could order a drink without proving my age, but people still looked at me, with my slight frame and my glasses and my Central Casting, part-on-the-left, Iowa cornfield hair, and saw someone they didn’t have to cross to the other side of the street to avoid. It was a good thing, sometimes; it made it easier to get strangers to open up. But it was also a bad thing sometimes. All depends on what impression you’re trying to make.

“Listen,” I said, taking hold of Julie’s arm and steering her toward the steps at the foot of Low Library. We needed a place to talk where we wouldn’t be overheard by a dozen curious undergrads and the occasional professor wandering by. “I want you to tell me everything about what happened to you. There’s no way to know what’s relevant—I need to hear the whole story.”

She shook her arm loose of my grip. “People pay to touch me, love.” She sucked on the cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. “Anyway, they used to.”

I pointed her toward a patch of grass in the shadow of a red brick building, a little gabled house that didn’t match the elegant, monumental buildings that made up the rest of the campus. This house was the oldest building on campus, a remnant dating back almost two hundred years to when these were the grounds not of a university but of the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum. Now called Buell Hall, the building once was home, depending on who you asked, either to the asylum’s warden or to his wealthiest male patients. Maybe both. No one wanted to knock the thing down, but somehow, except for a few French classes that had nowhere else to meet, no one much went there either. We sat in the shadow of one of its eaves. The nearest person I could see was a brawny Hispanic man sitting well out of earshot, eating his lunch under a tree.

“So,” Julie said. “The story.” She raised her gloved hand. “Six weeks in a cast, three weeks of physical therapy, seven pins in there holding it together, and this is the best they could do.” With her left hand she pulled open two Velcro straps, one at the wrist and one across the palm. She tugged the glove off, roughly enough that I winced. The hand under it was a motley pink and white from all the scar tissue and the fingers were bent at wrong angles. Her fingernails, I noticed, though trimmed short, had a coat of polish on them, a dark plum color. “Lovely, no? You’d like to get a handjob with that beauty, wouldn’t you.”

She flexed the fingers. They moved, but not very far.

“That’s me making a fist,” she said. “I’ve got to do it fifty times a day. Hurts like a bitch. But I’m a good girl, I am, and I does what the doctor tells me.” Her accent had gone up an octave and taken on a cockney flavor. She stared at me. “Christ, what’s it take to get a laugh out of you?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t find it very funny.”

“Yeah, me neither. But you laugh or you cry, right? And I’ve done all the crying I’m going to.”

“So who did that to you?”

“Di told you what happened, right? Big guy, name’s Miklos, known to all and sundry in the business as E.T. You know, like the little monster in the movie, ‘cause he’s got these fingers—”

“Right,” I said, “I get it, E.T., with the fingers. But who put him up to it and why?”

She took a long pull on her cigarette. It was almost down to the butt. “What makes you think someone did?”

“That’s his job, isn’t it? Doing strongarm work for the Mob?”

She shrugged. “If you believe him.”

“You don’t?”

“Will it surprise you to learn, Mr. Blake, that the men who hire women like us to jerk them off sometimes lie about what they do for a living?”

“Di said Dorrie—Cassandra—asked him why he attacked you, and he said ‘She knows why.’ Meaning you.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I think you were unconscious.”

“And thank god for small favors,” Julie said. “She knows why. Well what if I told you I don’t.”

“I’d say you were lying to me.”

She raised her bad hand to me again and the fingers bent inward by a fraction. “That’s me giving you the finger.”

I didn’t smile.

“Ah—come on,” she said, “that was funny. Don’t tell me it wasn’t.”

“Why’d he do it, Julie? It’s important.”

“Why’d he do it. He did it to Teach Me A Lesson.” Her hands went up as if to frame her words but only on her left hand did the first two fingers curl downwards. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she said, “I can’t even make proper air quotes anymore.”

“What lesson?” I said.

“Thou shalt not steal, you might call it.”

“Why? What did you steal?”

Instead of answering, Julie stubbed out her cigarette and bent forward, the fabric of her t-shirt stretching from the weight of her breasts. “You think I’m pretty, don’t you?”

She was more than just pretty. She had some of the same quality Dorrie had had. But I didn’t know what she was getting at. “Yes,” I said, cautiously.

“Right. Men do. Always have. And I gave a great massage. You’ll have to take my word for that, I haven’t learned to do it lefty, but when I was working, I was the best. You came to see me once, you wanted more. Understand?”

“What did you steal, Julie?”

She laid an index finger against my lips, much as Samantha had. I wondered if Samantha had picked up the gesture from her.

“You want the whole story, love, you need to learn some patience.”

Patience. Dorrie was lying in a morgue; I didn’t feel very patient.