front of me. They were like objects, pieces of stone, not part of my body. “Why are you helping me?”
He came around, pulled me to my feet, draped one of my arms across his shoulders. “You’re just a foolish boy,” he said. “You don’t deserve to die for it.”
We started slowly to climb the stairs. In the unsteady beam of the flashlight, I saw that the door at the top was closed. I could barely walk and Andras had to support my weight all the way up. We made slow progress.
At the top, he leaned me against the wall. Very slowly, sensation was leaking back into my fingers. I could tell it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Andras reached for the doorknob, but he never had a chance to turn it. The door swung open and light from outside splashed in. Miklos was there, a pistol in his hand.
He looked from one of us to the other. He sneered at Andras. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t you dare point that at me,” Andras said, but his voice trembled. “My brother—”
“Your brother. Don’t talk to me about your brother, you...you
“You,” he said to me. “Take this. Ardo wants you to have it.” I could lift my arm but couldn’t open my fingers.
Miklos pressed the object against my chest, smeared it across my shirt. It left a dark streak. Then he slapped it into my palm, squeezed my fingers closed around it. It was the wallet. The streak was blood.
“He says go home. He makes you a present of this one.” He swung the gun around to me, used its barrel to tip my chin up. “If it was me, I’d shoot you.” For a second he seemed to be considering it. “But Ardo says not this time. If I ever see you again, he says do what I want.” He leaned in close. “I think I will see you again,” he said. “Mr. Lucky.”
“Get away from him,” Andras said.
In an instant the gun was pressed against Andras’ forehead.
“Point it at your own head,” Andras said in a quiet voice. “You know you might as well.”
Andras’ face went pale.
“I should have let him
I pushed myself away from the wall. Andras must have seen something in my face because he said, “No. Go. He won’t do nothing to me. Ardo would skin him alive. He knows it and it makes him feel small.”
“One day, old man,” Miklos said, “I won’t care.”
“Go,” Andras said again.
My legs were still stiff and painful, but with an effort I was able to control them. I looked back at the two men, who hadn’t budged. I walked out.
I found myself in the nave of a church. I limped slowly down the long aisle between two banks of pews, listening with half an ear for footsteps behind me. Or a gunshot.
I stepped out onto 81st Street. Andras’ bar was to my left, the church behind me. It looked to be early afternoon. The sunlight was jarring.
I made my way to the curb and from there to the corner of Second Avenue, leaning on a tree and a mailbox along the way. My hands were burning, but my legs had progressed to the point where they were just painfully sore. I flagged a cab going downtown and fell into its back seat gratefully. I told the driver to turn around and head up to 116th Street—all the way up and all the way west. It would use up one of my remaining twenties, but I was in no condition to take the subway. I thought about calling Kurland to find out if anything had happened at the hospital—the battery on my cell phone probably had a little charge left. But my hands were still useless weights at the ends of my arms; it was all I could do to paw the money out of my pocket. I asked the driver to open the windows and I sank back against the door, my legs stretched out along the seat. A half hour later, the white stone and red brick and green metal roofs of Columbia’s campus came into view like some giant architectural version of the Hungarian flag. Or the Italian flag. I’d had enough of Hungarians for one day.
By the time I got to Lewisohn Hall, I was walking steadily enough not to attract notice. I massaged each of my palms with the thumb of my other hand. Feeling was returning, though fatigue was creeping back with it. I stopped in the bathroom to wash my glasses and my face, straighten my hair. The brown smear on my shirt wasn’t going to come out. It was pretty obvious to me that it was blood, but maybe it wouldn’t be obvious to other people. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it.
I looked at Ramos’ wallet. Aside from the blood on it, mostly dried by now, it looked the same as when Julie and I had taken it out of his pocket in the tunnels. A driver’s license, a few dollar bills, a plastic card showing a 2002 calendar on one side and a zip code map of the city on the other. Nothing missing, nothing added. I pocketed it and tried not to think too much about where the blood had come from. Ardo had decided, apparently, that one of us deserved punishment and the other did not. I’d walked into the lion’s cage, but I hadn’t pretended to be the lion myself. Of course, Jorge Ramos hadn’t either— he’d never said Ardo sent him, I’d just reached that conclusion on my own. But I’d let Ardo believe he’d said it, and now Ramos lay somewhere, bloodied or dead. I didn’t feel terrible about it—the man had tried to kill me, after all. But I won’t say I felt good about it either.
At my desk, I saw a small pile of pink ‘While You Were Out’ message slips. None of them looked pressing. The one voicemail message blinking on my phone was Lane saying that he’d reached Mrs. Burke and she’d be coming to the memorial at six. I looked at the clock. It was 2:30.
Sitting on the desk where I’d left them were the two manuscripts Stu Kennedy had given me, the final pieces of the assignment Dorrie had been working on for him, or the last ones she’d completed anyway. I read the top page of one, turned it, bent the paper back against the staple. It was a scene with a young couple, two daughters, crushing medical bills, grim silences across the dinner table. The mother came off as a bit of a harridan, the father as long-suffering and put upon. Of course, Dorrie had grown up with her mother—her father had been conveniently absent, so it was easy for her to imagine him as the more sympathetic of the two. As for the sister, she had a whiff of Victorian melodrama to her, lying in her hospital bed, expiring from some ill-specified malignancy.
I remembered Dorrie complaining about the assignment over dinner in back in March, her fingers tangled in her hair with exasperation. She’d wanted to find out some basic information: how old had Catherine been when she’d gotten sick, had she been at the hospital or at home when she died. It was her own sister, for god’s sake; she had a right to ask. But instead of answering, her mother had used their time together to vent decades of free- floating anger, disappointment, and frustration, and as for her father, well, I took it upon myself to track him down—a nice chance to exercise the old muscles again and maybe show off a little for Dorrie—but after twenty years of neglect the man had taken the easy road out again. Dorrie had shown me the letter she’d mailed him after I’d handed her his address and hounded her to use it; the envelope had come back returned, refused written across the front in red ink.
“It’s not like I want anything from him,” she’d said. “One lousy hour, in a public place. Lunch. I’ll buy. Jesus.”
“Maybe he’s embarrassed.”
“Of what?”
“He works in a shoe store.”
“What’s wrong with working in a shoe store?”
There was nothing wrong with working in a shoe store, not even if you’d once been a high school English teacher; but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel ashamed of it. Anyway, he’d refused her letter and refused to talk to her and now he’d never have the chance. Maybe if I called him today, I thought, he’d have an hour for Dorrie at last. I was sorely tempted. But then I thought about the mother and the stories Dorrie had told me about growing up in a house where all the family photos had neatly scissored holes where her father’s face used to be, and I decided that a matter-antimatter collision between those two was one headache I didn’t need.
I opened my desk drawer to put the two manuscripts away. In there I saw the handwritten notes I’d made
