And that was that.
He’d changed it when he recounted it to his sponsor. Shifted the scene from the Village to the Upper West Side, recast the personnel, changing a money guy and his playmate to a drug dealer and his Spanish girlfriend. The most vivid image of all, S. pressing the gun into his hands and making him shoot the girl, somehow never made the final cut.
Some of it had likely been designed to render the event less identifiable, and it had certainly worked; I’d been unable to find a case that fit the account I got from Greg. Beyond that, I had to believe he’d tailored the story to lessen its impact on his sponsor. Jack had wanted to be honest, but he hadn’t been capable of one hundred percent honesty right off the bat. He had to work his way up to it.
It was getting dark out when I left the library. I’d lost all track of the time, and when I checked my watch I saw that it was past five. It wasn’t fully dark, but the sun was down, and a gray day was drawing to a close. Every day the sun disappeared a little earlier than the day before. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that, it happened every year, but there were times when I felt there was a sadness attached to it, that the poor old year was dying a day at a time.
One more day and I’d be a year sober.
I hadn’t even thought of it, not on this particular day, not until this moment, standing on the library steps between the two stone lions, weighed down by the encroaching darkness and by the greater and deeper darkness of what I’d been reading. Gordon Decker Raines, Marcia Anne Cantwell, John Joseph Ellery—all dead. And one man, S. or Steve or Even Steven, who’d put bullets in all three of them. And I was alive and sober, and in another day I’d have a year.
I knew I ought to go to a meeting. I’d been too busy to go at noon, but it’s a rare time of day when Manhattan doesn’t have a meeting on offer somewhere, and there were several in and around midtown in the hours between five and seven, designed to catch the office worker on his way home. I’d been to one called Happy Hour a couple of times, and there was Commuters Special, near Penn Station, and another around the corner from Grand Central. I was at Forty-second and Fifth, just a few blocks west of Grand Central, and there might be another even closer, but I didn’t have my meeting book with me. It’s always in my back pocket, but I’d evidently not transferred it to the pair of pants I had put on this morning, and I didn’t know where the meetings were or exactly what time they started.
I decided I could go home and shower and shave and maybe even go so far as to eat something. And I could put away the manila envelope, which now held some notes I’d made at the library, along with the clipping and Jack’s account of the twelve-year-old killing on Jane Street. And I’d be able to show up at my regular meeting at St. Paul’s, and I could raise my hand and announce that tomorrow would be my anniversary.
Or I could wait until tomorrow, and announce it then.
Either way, people would applaud. They’d clap for me, as if I’d done something remarkable. And maybe I had.
But not yet I hadn’t. The announcement could wait, I decided, until the year was complete.
I was tired, and was all set to hail a cab until I remembered that it was the heart of the rush hour, and the traffic would be impossible. I didn’t want to sit in an unmoving taxi while the lights changed and changed again, but neither was I ready to face the sardine-can crush of the rush-hour subway.
It had rained a little earlier. It felt as though it might rain some more. But maybe it would hold off, at least for as long as it took me to walk home.
I was four or five blocks from my hotel when the rain started. I was just passing a chain drugstore when I felt the first drops, and I thought about stopping for an umbrella, and decided it wasn’t coming down hard enough to justify spending the three or four dollars. I already had four or five of them in my room, and if I bought another I’d have five or six, and I never remembered to take one unless it was already pouring when I left my room.
I walked another block or two and the rain slackened, and I was congratulating myself on my good judgment when the skies opened up. I ducked into a shoe repair shop, and the only umbrellas he had cost ten bucks. I bought one, and by the time I got outside and opened it, the rain had stopped altogether, and not another drop fell all the rest of the way home.
There are days when that sort of thing gets a laugh out of me, or at least a chuckle, but this wasn’t one of those days. I wanted to smash something, perhaps the umbrella, perhaps the man who sold it to me. But I didn’t. I was, after all, a model of sobriety, one day away from my anniversary, and I reminded myself of this as I carried my umbrella into the hotel.
No messages. I went upstairs, walked down the hall to my room. I had my key out, and it seems to me that I felt something, had some sense of foreboding. And maybe I did, maybe I picked up a vibration, maybe without identifying it I caught some scent coming under the door or through the keyhole.
And maybe not. The memory tends to fill in the blanks, furnishing what seems fitting whether or not it ever happened. Maybe I sensed something and maybe I didn’t, but either way I stuck my key in the lock and opened my door.
XXXVIII
AT FIRST I didn’t recognize the smell. It was strong, it hit me in the face the minute I had the door open, and I’m sure it was as unmistakable in its own way as the stench that had permeated Greg Stillman’s apartment. I thought, That’s an awful smell, that’s unhealthy to breathe, I’d better open a window and clear the place. So I recognized the nature of it, but I couldn’t say what it was.
And then in an instant I could. It was booze, it was ethyl alcohol, it was more specifically bourbon.
The whole room reeked of it. Was it really there? Was my mind doing this, conjuring up a smell in response to the stress of my work and the anxiety that precedes an AA anniversary? It was as if the cleaning woman had broken a bottle in my room, but I didn’t keep whiskey in my room, so there was no bottle for her or anyone else to break. And it was Monday, and Saturday was the day she cleaned my room, and she’d have no reason to be there, and neither would anyone else, and I’d left the room locked, and it had been locked just now because I’d needed to turn my key to let myself in, and God, God in Heaven, what was going on?
