an act of will. But if he abandoned it, Henderson would win, and Lockridge would win, and they could win only at the cost of Marisol.
Stark shook his head at the morbidity of his thoughts and glanced about the shop, hoping some small, precious thing would catch his eye.
Over the years, he’d spent almost everything he made because he saw no reason to hold on to anything. He had no wife, no children, no one whose later survival meant anything at all to him. And as for saving for that rainy day when he would be old and sick, he knew that he would never reach such a point. If he got sick beyond recovery, he would simply kill himself. When he got old, when the last small joys were gone, he would tuck the barrel of his nine-millimeter automatic against the roof of his mouth and pull the trigger. There would be no rainy days.
And so Stark spent whatever he had on clothes and restaurants and obsessive grooming. But more than anything, he spent money on delicately wrought objects, usually of glass or porcelain. They were tremendously expensive, these little statues or figurines, but in the past they’d kept him afloat. In them he’d been able to find something good in life, something done for the love of it, something to which an otherwise ordinary human being had applied the full measure of his skill.
In the past these things had soothed him like a soft, warm light.
But no longer.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Stark faced the dealer, noted the small rosebud in his lapel, thought it foppish.
“It’s sixteenth century,” the dealer added with a nod toward the fluted glass at which, Stark realized, he must have been gazing.
“Not my thing,” Stark said coolly.
The dealer looked as if he’d been gently pushed away, perhaps with the nose of a silver derringer. “Well, if I may be of help . . .”
“I’ll let you know,” Stark said.
“Of course,” the dealer said, then vanished.
Alone again, Stark strolled back down the aisle toward the shop’s front door. Scores of beautiful objects lined his path, but nothing called to him, and because of that he knew that he’d slipped out of the old reality, the one that had held him for so many years. Even though Mortimer would arrive that night with the latest payment, he would never spend another dime on what he now suddenly dismissed as collectibles.
He walked out of the shop and headed south down Madison Avenue. He knew that dressed as he was, in a fashionably cut black suit, he looked like a successful Manhattan business executive. It was a look he’d cultivated over the years and which he scrupulously maintained. It went with the false and decidedly metaphorical name he’d chosen for himself, and for the secret life he lived, and it was incontestably appropriate for the elegant bars where, if he sat long enough, a woman would finally approach him.
Marisol.
For years he’d tried to tell himself that she was just a woman, that if she’d lived and they’d remained together, they would have grown apart, their passion faded. But she had died horribly and thus became Helen still on the walls of Troy, and he had never been able to bring her down from that mythic height. He’d tried to find another woman, fall in love again, but the ghost of Marisol lingered in the air around him. She slithered between himself and any woman he caressed. Her breath stained every kiss.
And so for the last few years he’d pursued only sex, sex without affection, and except for Kiko, always with strangers. He could sense that this was just another detour from the road he truly sought and which he now imagined leading off into the shadowy and impossible distance, Marisol at the end of it, perfect and unchanged, her arms opening to receive him. He could almost hear her sensuous whisper,
MORTIMER
Sitting in Dr. Langton’s office, he felt small and uneducated, both of which he knew he was, a dull, pudgy little man with a mind that had precious little in it, at least precious little of the stuff educated people had in their minds—dates and names and bits of poetry. If he had it all to do over, he thought, he’d have gone to college, even if nothing more than Bunker Hill Community College, gotten a little polish, a little class, so that he could look a doctor in the eye and not feel the way he did now, two pegs up from a bug.
“Good afternoon,” Dr. Langton said as he came into the office.
Mortimer nodded.
Dr. Langton sat down behind his desk, a wall of diplomas arrayed behind him. He placed the folder he’d brought with him on his desk and opened it. For a moment he flipped through the pages, then he lifted his eyes and Mortimer saw just how bad it was. His stomach emptied in the way it had during the war when someone yelled “Incoming!”
“I have the test results,” Dr. Langton said. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid.”
“How long?” Mortimer didn’t want to be curt, but he didn’t want to string it out either, because he knew that if he didn’t get it quick and straight, he’d end up feeling even worse than he already did.
“That’s always a guess,” Dr. Langton answered. “But I’d say we’re probably looking at around three months.”
To his surprise, Mortimer felt a screwy sense that it couldn’t be true, that a man couldn’t sit in an office, feeling more or less okay, and hear a death sentence like that, three lousy months. My God, he was only fifty-six. “You’re sure?” he asked.
“I wish I had a treatment for you. But in this case . . .”
“Okay,” Mortimer said. The incoming round exploded somewhere deep inside him and he suddenly felt already dead. Then his mind shifted to the living, to Dottie, the wife he’d leave behind . . . with nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Dr. Langton said.
“Me too,” Mortimer said, though it was not for himself he felt sorry now, but for how little he’d accumulated. Nothing in the bank. Nothing in the market. Not even a little row house in Brooklyn or Queens. All of that had galloped away from him one horse at a time, galloped away on the back of some nag that finished fifth on the track at Belmont. Leaving him with nothing. No. Worse than nothing. In hock fifteen grand to a guy Caruso claimed was capable of anything. Breaking thumbs. Cutting out your tongue. And if Mortimer were, so to speak, beyond reach? What would Labriola do then? Was it really unthinkable that a guy like that, a crazy, brutal thug, might go after Dottie just to get even?
“Is there anything else?”
Mortimer looked at Dr. Langton. “What?”
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the doctor asked.
“No,” Mortimer answered. Not you. Not anybody.
Once outside the office, Mortimer glanced down Eighty-fifth Street, trying to decide what would do him the most good now, the bustle of Broadway or some secluded corner of Central Park.
He decided on the park, and after a few minutes found himself seated on a large gray stone, watching dully as the park’s other visitors made their way down its many winding paths. Not far away a fat black woman bumpily pushed a wheelchair across the lawn. An old man sat in the chair, his legs wrapped in a burgundy blanket. The old man’s eyes were blue, but milky, and little wisps of white hair trembled each time the wheelchair rocked. He was deathly thin, his long, bony fingers little more than skeletal.
But it was not the speed of his approaching death that rocked Mortimer now. It was how little time he had to make things right with Dottie. Poor Dottie Smith, the girl who’d been desperate enough or hopeless enough or just plain dumb enough to marry him. He had no illusion that she would miss him. He had not been an attentive husband. In fact, he’d hardly been around at all. Was that not reason enough to leave her something to make up for the thirty wintry years she’d spent with him, a guy who had never taken her out dancing, or even given her a little kiss when he left in the morning or came back at night. What could her life have been, he wondered, without that kiss? And now, after so many dull, dead years, the only kiss he had to leave her was his kiss of death.
No, he decided. No, he couldn’t do that. He had to find a way to leave something for Dottie. That, he concluded, was his mission now.
