Die For You

the Little Quarter Bridge Tower. A young man passes me, gives me a strange look but keeps walking, more quickly. He doesn’t look back or offer help. Smart guy.

I grip a black metal rail and follow down a steep set of narrow steps. Before me a sloping cobblestone lane-a marionette shop, its windows shuttered, a small hotel, a new condo building rise up to my left. Ahead I see the canal they call Certovka-the Devil’s Stream.

There is more blood now-his and mine. I keep following until I come to the landing above the bank. It’s so quiet. A family of swans drift peacefully, gray water below them, snow falling, disappearing into their white feathers. Down further I see a large wooden mill wheel, slowly turning water, impervious to drama.

Then I see him. He stands on a small boat, docked below me. He is untying the lines. I can see that he is hurt, afraid. I am about to call for him, when the world explodes with sound. There are rough hands on me, pulling me away from the edge, but I hold on to the railing. I am surrounded by police officers, all of them yelling, guns drawn. I am yelling, too, calling his name, over and over. I don’t want him to die, not yet. There is too much I don’t understand.

He stands for a moment, dropping the lines, and I think he might surrender. The boat starts to drift and there is still so much yelling, still hands tugging. He and I lock eyes. But there’s nothing there. He is blank. Then he’s raising his gun.

I find myself screaming his name again, but his body is jerking, dancing with the impact of bullets. He falls to his knees and the boat rocks but doesn’t tip. I hear his gun hit the water with a heavy splash. He sinks down on his side, and I watch life leave him. That terrible stillness settles as the boat slowly drifts away in the current. I let myself be pulled back, lose my battle to stand in spite of the hands on me. And then I am on the cold, hard ground, clinging to consciousness. But the world is turning fuzzy, all the color draining. A woman is talking to me, yelling at me. But I don’t understand her, wouldn’t have the energy to answer her if I did.

I see him then. Jack. He is gold in my black-and-white-and-red world. But there’s so much cold distance between us, I am afraid I’ll never reach him now. He’s running, then being held back from me. I see uniformed men push past him with a stretcher. I want to tell Jack that he was right. No second, third, and final draft. Just the words as you first wrote them, the plot as you first conceived it. You can’t go back and make it better, change the ending so that it is happier, more satisfying. You have to live with it or die trying.

28

There’s a universe in a moment, in a single frame. Not in every frame. Just the perfect one, where light and shadow mingle, when an expression tells a story-beginning, middle, and end-when a reflection offers meaning. The “now” frozen, everything that came before and after rendered meaningless.

Linda Book stood in the far corner of the gallery and watched them looking at her photographs-pointing, smiling, frowning, nodding “ahh.” Her show, called Assignations, was drawing a lot of attention, more attention than her last few. She liked to think that her art had reached a new level, but probably not. Mimicking candid shots that might have been taken by a private eye, she’d captured lovers around the city- exchanging glances, embraces, passionate kisses. Some were candid. Some staged. She wouldn’t say which was which. Some critics called it shameless, in view of her family’s recent scandals. Others called it magnificent, sensational. Art Forum wrote, “Linda Book’s most captivating show in years-maybe ever.”

It was a week after the opening and the gallery was still packed-on a Tuesday, no less. No one recognized the photographer. Her publicity photo was far too old, airbrushed even then. She looked like a windblown goddess in her photo, untouched by grief or childbirth or disappointment, or infidelity of any kind. Only her husband, who drifted, eavesdropping on conversations, offered her a secret, knowing smile. He was the only one who knew her, here or anywhere.

To see them, the way they made love in the mornings after the kids went to school, the way they held hands again in the cab on the way here, the way he smiled at her now, one might believe that she was still that young girl untouched by life’s trials, after all.

Through the large picture window, she saw Isabel and Jack walking up the sidewalk slowly. Her sister looked so small, still leaning on Jack a bit as she walked. Her injuries-internal and external-would take much more time to heal. But heal they would. She’d see to it.

She moved away from the wall and met her husband in the center of the room. They left together to walk with Jack and Isabel back to the loft-it was still theirs for now-for dinner, and to watch something on television that none of them was quite sure they wanted to watch.

The kids were staying with Margie and Fred, so that Linda and Eric could have some couple time, something they had been sorely lacking. Now that there was a wireless hub, sixty-four-inch flat screen and a Wii in the Riverdale home, Emily and Trevor no longer considered a visit with their grandparents a hardship. There was a minimum of grousing. Therefore, Linda had only a minimum of guilt. Even when Emily called to complain that Margie was making fish and wouldn’t let them order pizza instead, Linda only smiled and told her daughter that fish was good for her and she’d have to bare up.

“You don’t want to see the show again?” Linda teased her sister, embracing her gingerly, afraid to cause her pain. Izzy gave a weak laugh; she’d been to the show several times, had seen it even before it opened. She waited for a smart comment in return, but her sister didn’t say anything. In Linda’s arms, Isabel felt fragile. Linda was still waiting for the haunted look to disappear from her face. She felt as if she hadn’t seen her sister even really smile in months. Not that she could be blamed.

* * *

BACK AT THE loft, Erik ordered Chinese and then turned on the television. Izzy hadn’t said much on the walk home and Linda was starting to worry that they were making a mistake.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Linda asked.

“I happen to think it’s a terrible idea,” said Jack. “It’s not as if we’re going to learn anything we don’t already know. This is the psychological equivalent to scab picking.”

Erik nodded his agreement. “He’s right.”

“I want to see it,” Izzy said, lowering herself on the couch. “I need to.”

No one else offered any arguments. Anyway, it was too late. The newsmagazine show had already begun.

A bestselling writer and her software designer husband are living the ultimate urban dream. With a beautiful home in Manhattan, skyrocketing careers, and an extravagant lifestyle, they seemed to want for little. Except that when it came to Isabel Connelly and the man everyone knew as Marcus Raine, nothing was as it seemed.

“We were called to the scene of a triple homicide in the West Village at the offices of Razor Technologies,” said a well-coiffed Detective Grady Crowe. He was sharply dressed and looking very much the role of the celebrity cop. “We found the bodies of Rick Marino, Eileen Charlton, and Ronald Falco, the office trashed, every file and computer removed, and Isabel Connelly unconscious in her husband’s office. We knew we were looking at something big. We didn’t realize at the time that it was international in its scope and that it reached back to the unsolved case of a missing man from years earlier.”

The hour wound on, detailing the disappearance and assumed murder of Marcus Raine after the betrayal of his girlfriend, Camilla Novak, how Kristof Ragan was able to steal the other man’s money and identity, then use Izzy’s Social Security number to establish an EIN for his new business. Some time was devoted to Kristof Ragan’s childhood in an orphanage, how he nearly made good by winning a scholarship to an American university.

He was smart, charming, hardworking, could have made a legitimate success out of himself. What made him choose murder, identity theft, fraud? lamented the reporter in a voice-over, where they showed b-roll of the modern-day orphanage, where children sat at computers, played soccer, read books at round tables. They called in an expert psychologist to offer an explanation.

“It wouldn’t be hard to understand the despair a child like Kristof Ragan felt, abandoned to an orphanage, possibly mistreated under communist rule,” said the very proper-looking gentleman with round glasses and a red