“This is not a bus stop,” the doorman said. “Are you waiting for someone who lives in this building?”

“No,” Corman said. His eyes drifted back toward the chapel. The long black limo had already pulled away from the curb.

“Then I’d like for you to move on,” the doorman said firmly.

Corman glanced at him. “Move on?”

A thin smile slithered onto the doorman’s face. “It makes people nervous.”

Corman looked back toward the chapel, its door now tightly closed.

“I said, it makes people nervous,” the doorman repeated emphatically.

Corman looked at him. “What does?”

“People just sort of hanging around the building. People they don’t know.”

“I’m a photographer,” Corman told him.

The doorman chuckled. “Is that supposed to impress me?” He placed his hand on Corman’s shoulder and squeezed very slightly. “No trouble, please. Just move on.”

Corman felt like resisting. He didn’t move. “What’s wrong with me standing here?”

The doorman looked surprised by the question. He gave him a very small shove. “I mean it.” He was an overweight, middle-aged man with wispy strands of gray peeking out from under his cap, but he looked hardened rather than weakened by his age, the sort of man who’d been pummeled, come back for more, then taken it again on the chin, the jaw, the eyes, until all the features had finally merged into a kind of doughy mass, slack and puffy, but still strong despite all that. Corman had met such people before, the type who knew exactly where the line was in them because they’d faced so many others who’d crossed it without a thought.

“I mean it,” the man repeated.

“I was just watching the chapel across the street,” Corman said innocently.

The doorman didn’t feel like discussing it. “Look, pal, when you pay rent in this place, you can stand here till hell freezes over, but until then …” He gave Corman another small shove.

Corman thought of Lucy, Lexie, and his picture in the paper, sprawled across the sidewalk, the doorman grinning above him. He could read the caption: News stringer roughed up by doorman. He stepped away from him and put up his hands. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m going.”

The doorman eased off slightly. “Good.”

Corman nodded, strode out from under the awning and headed across the street to the chapel. He could feel the doorman staring at him all the way, watching for a quick move, the pistol that might come from nowhere and turn his big hard fists into paper cups.

Once across the street, Corman took a few close-ups of the chapel’s stone facade. He focused on the small details, the carvings on the wooden doors and the swirling pastels of the stained glass windows. Then he took a few more shots of the entire exterior.

Inside, the chapel was modest, and as he stepped into its small dark foyer, he was struck by how slightly seedy it looked. There was a small square foyer, decked with slightly faded flowers, a brown wooden table with a few assorted vases and a signboard which listed the various rooms, along with the people who were in them. The memorial service for Sarah Rosen was scheduled for Room Four.

Corman glanced around, found the stairs and headed up them. There was a wooden lectern just outside the room. Someone had placed a leatherbound register on it. Corman searched his pockets for the little notebook which seemed to be a part of him now, the one in which he could write down the facts, then hand them over to Julian or Willie Scarelli. He quickly opened the register. The page was blank. He sank his notebook back into his jacket pocket and stepped quietly into the room.

Sarah Rosen’s plain mahogany coffin rested in front of a short wooden altar. It was closed, and someone had laid two sprays of red roses on top of it. The man in the black raincoat sat alone in the front pew, his head erect, facing the coffin.

Corman took a seat in the back and waited for the ceremony to begin. Several minutes passed, then suddenly, as if on a signal, the man in the raincoat rose silently and began to make his way down the aisle.

Corman stood up and watched him approach. He could tell that Dr. Rosen’s eyes had fastened on him, but it was too late to retreat, and so he simply stood in place as the old man made his way up the aisle.

Dr. Rosen’s head was lifted high, chin up, his face strangely shadowed, as if stage makeup had been applied to darken the deep furrows of his brow. He stared intently at Corman as he approached, then stopped dead in front of him.

“Who are you?” Rosen asked.

His face was so near to Corman’s that he could gather its details immediately, the white, carefully trimmed Vandyke, the goldrimmed glasses that looked as if they’d been imported from another age, the dark, hooded eyes. In a modern version, it was the face of Lear, Creon, King David’s face when he first glimpsed Absalom hanging by his hair.

“Who are you?” Rosen repeated, when Corman failed to answer him.

Corman lifted his shoulders nervously. “Nobody,” he said.

“Nobody?” the old man said. One of the hoods lifted. “You don’t have a name? I made it clear that this was strictly a closed memorial.”

Corman glanced away, then said, “My name is Corman.”

“Did you know my daughter?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I’m a photographer.”

“A photographer? Why are you here? What was Sarah to you?”

Corman realized he couldn’t exactly answer that question, but struggled to do it anyway. “It’s just that … that I was there the night she …” He stopped.

Rosen’s body stiffened. “You took pictures of her?”

“Yes.”

“On the street?”

“It’s my job,” Corman said weakly.

Rosen looked at him hatefully for a moment, then suddenly his hand shot up and slapped Corman’s face.

Corman remained before him, frozen, his face still hot and trembling from the blow.

Rosen lifted his hand again, then held it trembling in the air, its gray shadow resting like a veil over Corman’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Corman sputtered. “I didn’t mean to …”

Rosen’s eyes narrowed spitefully for an instant, then darted away. For a moment he stood entirely still. Then he bolted forward abruptly and fled the room.

Corman sank down in the wooden pew, felt himself give over to the inevitable, rose again, walked into the street and headed east, toward what he thought now the only opportunity he still had.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

THE CONCIERGE was smartly dressed, and he did everything but click his heels as Corman walked through the large glass doors.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“I’m here to see Harry Groton,” Corman told him.

“And your name?”

“Corman.”

The concierge began to finger the buttons of the console behind his desk. “That’s 20–B, isn’t it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Corman said, glancing back outside. The bare limbs of the trees weaved slowly as the rain and wind lashed them. They looked forlorn, forsaken, forest exiles walled in by the cityscape, their slender uplifted branches entangled in a net of rain.

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