Frank watched the red second hand. All that could be said had been said. He and Esther Janowitz had been by turn withdrawn and almost maniacally chattering, only to drift off again into isolation. The clock notched another second, then another and another. And the near-silent ticking engulfed the tiny room.
He had told her all he remembered. How he and her husband had sat over coffee, how his remote had triggered the explosion. She had listened expressionlessly, and there was no way he could tell whether she blamed him for what had happened. If she was angry, the anger might come up later, but then it might never come up. She didn’t impress him as a whiner or sniveler, and if she did bring it up, she’d come at him in-your-face hard. He didn’t want it now, but he’d rather have it now than never.
He stepped outside to use his phone. He left a short message with Kate’s answering service, then called Jose. Calkins was setting up for a twenty-four-hour operation. Robin Bouchard had offered the Bureau explosives team, and Jose had gone into Frank’s to feed Monty.
Frank thought about calling Emerson, but gave it up when he realized he had nothing to say. He didn’t want to get involved in a hand-holding exercise.
Back in the waiting room, Esther Janowitz put down the copy of Conde Nast Traveler-“The Best Tapas Bars in Seville”-and gave Frank, a long, appraising look.
“Mind if I ask you something?”
“No. I don’t,” Frank said, wishing inside that she’d stayed with the magazine. What were the best tapas bars in Seville?
“Why did you choose Leon?”
It didn’t come across as a baited question. Esther Janowitz seemed genuinely curious. All the same, Frank found himself vaguely troubled that she’d asked and that he’d have to answer.
“I don’t know that I’m making the best of sense right now,” he began slowly, talking to her and to himself as well. “Simple answer… I asked for Leon because Jose and I needed help. We’d worked with him on the Keegan case, and we thought he was a good cop.”
He paused to gather his thoughts. “There’s a not-so-simple answer too. I’m proud of being a cop. There’ve been lots of days I wish I wasn’t, but on the whole, I like what I do, and I think it’s important.”
He searched for a word, a word that meant something. “It’s a worthy job. A job worth doing. Something worth devoting a life to. And it’s worth all the crap that goes along with it. And I guess when I see a young cop like Leon, it makes me feel good because I know when I hang up the badge, somebody is going to be out there wearing that badge who feels the same way I do about being a cop.”
“A legacy?”
“Call it that. Why’d you want to know… why I chose him?”
A small, nostalgic smile played around Esther Janowitz’s mouth. “I know why I chose him. And those reasons are good enough for me. I love him very much for those reasons. But it helps to know him better if I know how others see him.”
“I didn’t want him to leave the force.”
“I know. He told me. He said it made him feel warm inside.”
“Now I’m not so sure. Maybe New York…”
From the corner of his eye, he caught a flurry of motion in the narrow window set into the door to the ICU. A tall African-American man in green surgical scrubs came through a set of double doors, crossed the hallway, and entered the waiting room. He came over to Esther Janowitz.
“Mrs. Janowitz, I’m Dr. Michaels. They’re bringing your husband out of surgery now. I expect a full recovery. We had some internal injuries to take care of… There were facial lacerations, and…”
Michaels paused. Frank sensed a man about to step out on unknown ice. The doctor shot a glance at Frank. “… we… I… I had to amputate his arm.”
Esther Janowitz gave no sign she’d heard. Her eyes widened as two orderlies brought a gurney through the double doors into the ICU. Without a word, Esther Janowitz brushed by Michaels and was at her husband’s side.
That night, Frank couldn’t sleep. Outside in the rain, R.C.’s techs were still scavenging the block for evidence, working below canopies flung up over high-intensity floodlights. In his bedroom, each time Frank closed his eyes he felt the presence of meaningless death, the slow, circling beat of dark wings. He lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the rain, measuring its rhythms on the roof.
He couldn’t imagine ever having slept before or ever sleeping again. Soon he gave up. He got out of bed, slipped a pair of denim shorts on, and padded downstairs to the kitchen. Standing in the light of the open refrigerator, he drank deeply from a carton of milk. He wandered into the den, where he switched on a floor lamp and aimlessly began opening cabinets. One after another, he surveyed their contents, then closed them. Finally, in one, a thick album caught his attention.
He took it into the kitchen, retrieved the carton of milk, and sat at the table. He opened the album and it was Vietnam again.
A series of photographs: the building of the firebase near Ben Cat. GIs filling sandbags, digging bunkers, stringing razor-bladed coils of concertina wire.
In one photograph, he and Masek stood grinning into the camera, interrupted from their task of setting out Claymore mines. Masek held a curved book-size mine in his hand. They were both bare-chested and rail-thin, and their fatigue trousers were stained dark with sweat. A gold tooth glinted in Masek’s mouth, and Frank wore a low- slung pistol belt. They looked rakish and impossibly young.
The pictures tugged at him-he was looking into a time when the firebase at Ben Cat still existed, before Masek became a name on the black marble wall, and when all that had happened to Frank had yet to happen to the Frank in the pictures. It was a time before the images became distorted by shattered truth and failed ambition.
Looking at himself, Frank wanted to whisper a warning to the young man he once was.
THIRTY-FIVE
The headache was a roaring, clawing dragon behind his eyes. Eyes shut, Frank crab-walked his hand across the nightstand until he found the plastic container. Cursing the nanny state, he managed to work open the childproof cap and roll out two capsules. He got them down dry, then lay back in half-sleep and listened to Monty snore on the other pillow. He heard the grandfather clock downstairs strike two. Only seconds later, he heard it strike seven.
The dragon had left, but the stitches over his right eye felt like dozens of needles thrust under his skin. When he sat up, a painful protest swept over him from the bruises covering his chest and arms.
Every joint creaking, he made it into the shower, then, after gingerly drying himself, in front of the mirror to shave. The stitches pulled his right eye open, while a world-class shiner surrounded his left eye and blood from a ruptured vein had turned the white of the eye a deep red.
“No Hollywood contract today,” he muttered to himself.
Thirty minutes later, he hailed a cab at the corner of Thirtieth and M, and fifteen minutes after that, John Richardson, the department’s dispatcher, was looking up at him.
“Jesus, Frank, you look worse than your car.”
“Car didn’t wake up with a head-popper this morning. You got something drivable?”
“You don’t want to wait until we fix yours?”
“You and I aren’t gonna live long enough, John.”
Richardson checked his computer, running a finger down the screen. “We got a couple of confiscated vehicles. How about a Hummer? Leather, Bose sound, only eight thousand miles, no bullet holes?”
“Maybe when I move to Montana.”
“You moving to Montana?”
“No. You got a spare Crown Vic?”
Richardson swiveled around, ran his fingers across a pegboard on the wall, plucked a set of keys, then turned back to Frank.
