He was sitting in a booth in a gas station convenience store. In the booth ahead of him sat an old man drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.
He tapped one edge of the business card against the table until his middle and ring fingers reached the bottom edge. Then he flipped the card over and tapped it down again.
He stood up and walked outside. He crossed the lot to the pay phone and dialed the number on back of the card.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” he said. “I believe you came to see me in the hospital.”
They met at a diner on the Upper West Side. He sat at a booth with a view and while waiting watched a man on the corner, closer to the diner than the street, take a final puff from a cigarette and snuff it out under his shoe. It would have been unremarkable if not for the thin clear tube that ran from the man’s nose down to a portable oxygen tank. It caused him to look closer, and by the time the man entered he realized it was the same man he’d been waiting for, which should not have surprised him. He had been told to look out for the tank.
He stood up and waved. He didn’t think he’d be recognized otherwise.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” said Tim. They shook hands and the man sat down across from him.
“You’ve recovered.”
“More or less.”
“You were in a bad way there for a while. Taking care of yourself?”
“Trying to. Every day I feel about a year older.”
“Oh, I hear that. Try doing it all with emphysema,” he said, grabbing the clear tube that ran up to his nose. “That’s fun. Let me tell you. A-plus fun-o.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Fucking cigarettes,” he said, tapping the pack in his front pocket. “Fuck them to hell.”
They talked awhile longer. Then Tim said, “You said you had something to show me.”
From the inner pocket of his suit coat, Detective Roy removed the sketch from long ago that presented a likeness of the man who had accosted Tim on the bridge. It was quartered by heavy creases and he took care in unfolding it. Then he took out the photograph he had tried showing Tim in the hospital room. Tim patted his pockets in search of the eyeglasses he was still unaccustomed to having at his disposal. He removed the glasses from the case and gazed down at the sketch and the picture sitting side by side on the table. “What am I looking at?”
“This is your sketch. The sketch of the man you thought might have had something to do with the, uh—” He stopped and peered at Tim. “Sorry, do you remember… do you remember a man named R. H. Hobbs?”
Tim looked up from the table. He nodded.
“Sorry,” said the detective. “Stupid of me…”
“Why are you showing me this?”
The detective tapped the picture. “Is that the same man as in the sketch?”
Tim picked up the picture and studied it. “This is an old man,” he said.
“Taking that into account, do you see a resemblance?”
He stared hard at the photograph. It was taken at an office party. The man stood some distance from the camera in a huddle with six or seven others, among cubicle divisions and fluorescent lighting, holding a red plastic cup. The longer and more willfully Tim looked, the more distant his memory of what the man had once looked like grew. He looked frequently to the sketch for help. “Maybe,” he said. “The nose is the same, I think, with that knob in the middle. But it’s not a very good angle.”
The detective coughed violently. “Look harder,” he said, collecting himself. “Concentrate.”
“You don’t have any other pictures?”
“This one’s it.”
He looked back down at it. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
The detective resumed coughing. Soon his eyes were red and teary. His words issued out in the brief staccato pauses. “We want him for another murder… last year… victim like Evelyn Hobbs.”
“How?”
“Same pattern, same stab wounds… and there are others.”
“How many others?”
The woman in the booth behind them turned to see if the detective was going to be all right.
“Do you want some water?” asked Tim.
He dismissed him with an abrupt shake of his head. “And he harassed the lawyer.”
“Harassed?”
“Provoked… as he did you…”
“How?”
“On the street… knew the details. It’s how we got on to him.” Now the detective was having trouble breathing. When he wasn’t coughing, he was wheezing to take in air.
“Do you have him in custody? I could take a look at him, maybe then—”
“Can’t locate him… he might have fled…” The detective stopped talking and abandoned himself entirely to coughing. He was barely able to say he needed some air before standing and walking out of the diner, trailed by his oxygen tank.
Tim waited for the waitress to bring around the check. He paid up front and then joined the detective outside. He found him smoking a cigarette. His coughing was all cleared up. Tim handed back the photograph and the sketch.
“I can’t tell you one way or the other,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The detective looked down the avenue and exhaled before returning a baleful gaze. “Right now he’s just a person of interest in a single murder. But if we can tie him to Evelyn Hobbs, we can maybe tie him to the others. There are six, maybe as many as eight. And people, family members, who need to know what happened.”
“You were adamant,” he said. “Remember? Only one suspect.”
“I know.”
“He hanged himself in prison.”
“I know,” said the detective. “I know.”
The detective thought he knew something but he knew nothing. What did it matter, these other people? R.H. would never know the details. He would never know the name of the man who might be responsible. That was the travesty. This death-sealed ignorance, and the indifference to that ignorance by any power higher than man.
The detective snuffed his cigarette out under his shoe. “You’re the only one we’ve got,” he said. “The one guy in the world if we’re going to get anywhere on this.”
“Don’t pin that on me,” he said. “You’re the one who didn’t believe my client.”
“And I feel awful about that.”
“Awful enough to kill yourself?”
The detective was taken aback. “To kill myself?” He had fired up a new cigarette and now blew out a dismissive stream. “No,” he said. “Not to kill myself.”
“Then you should feel indifferent,” said Tim.
His departures from the room were peremptory. A sudden movement, a glimpse of him passing through the doorway, and he was gone. “Going now,” he might say. He might be in the middle of recounting for her things he’d seen. “Back soon.”
If they were lucky, he had time to turn his head so that she saw he was addressing her and not some ghost standing before him.
Some days he left, and as he walked, he brooded that his final words to her one day might be, “Going now.”
He did not want his final good-bye to be a hasty good-bye.
He returned one morning smelling of fresh snow and brick mortar, car exhaust and woodsmoke. Was that all in her head? She wanted him to resume telling her what he’d seen. He brought the world inside for her. He stood over the bed.
“I want to say good-bye” he said.
“But you just got here.”
“I mean as if it were for the last time.”
“Why do you want to do that?”
He explained. They had the opportunity, before it was too late, to preempt the regret that nothing or too little had been said between them. She agreed that that might be important. He assumed a serious expression. He did not have anything prepared. He took her hand, kissed it, and said good-bye. She thought there would be more to it, but nothing more came. She started to laugh.
“Is tha
t it?”
“I guess so.”
“Well,” she said. “Good-bye, then!”
They spent the next several hours in each other’s company, long after they’d said good-bye. Then, against everyone’s sunniest assessments, in defiance of the grimmest percentages, and to her own astonishment, she began to recover.
It was wonderfully swift. He watched as her weight started to hold. Every time he returned to her room, she seemed to have gained back some measure of strength. She was up. She was getting off the bed to go to the bathroom. She was walking the hallways on her own. The final phase of the clinical trial came to an end and she was released.
She went home to that apartment where they had lived happily during the time between his second recurrence and his third, final, permanent one. She hadn’t sold it, as he had assumed, but had kept it, hoping someday that he would return to her and that they would resume their life together there. It was the same old place with the same furnishings, the lived-in chairs and pretty Persian rugs, the books lined up on the built-in shelves, the fireplace. He stood in the doorway a nostalgic stranger.
He had been living in parks and rented rooms, his home base the cancer center on the Upper East Side. Now it shifted to the parlor-floor apartment in the West Village. He left and returned frequently, but discovered this difference. Upon his arrival, he no longer found her hanging over an uncharted abyss, but rinsing a glass or making herself a grilled-cheese sandwich, or doing something downright vigorous, like scrubbing the bathtub. It occurred naturally then, as the days passed and he came to the ends of walks and faced the myriad challenges of reversing course—the tedious backtracking, the physical exhaustion—that the urgency to return, the motivation to get back to her, began to wane.
A livery wrangler orchestrated the waiting lawyers through the drizzle into towncars on Eighth Avenue, holding an umbrella over their heads, opening and closing the back doors. The sky was wrecked and darkening.
He stood outside the old bastion under the arcade, staring at the revolving doors. Once upon a time, he could have taught a master class in entering with authority. Now he was building up to something, summoning courage. There was some dismay. There was also indifference. He struggled to recall all the significance, investment, meaning, now petrified.
He entered, walked across the lobby, and stepped on the escalator. Midway up he glided toward a man he recognized. It was Peter, his old associate. He stared at Peter, unafraid to size up or be sized up. Peter’s hair had thinned and he had grown enormously fat. He was cultivating a massive heart attack under an expensive wool coat. The flamboyant signature of a red bow tie sat framed between the coat’s lapels. Just as they passed, Peter finally graced him with a glance. He might have quickly turned away again if Tim hadn’t been staring as hard as he was. He flipped Peter the bird. Peter continued to descend, now following the hostile stranger with offended eyes.
Frank Novovian had also gone fat. His head no longer shaved to the skin, his dirty gray hair was clumped and patchy, like the quills of a feather permanently skewed by a rough hand. His retiring slouch behind the security post said there was no going back. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“My name is Tim Farnsworth,” he said. “I wonder if you remember me.”
Frank held him suspended in a surprised and penetrating gaze. He lifted an inch off the chair, righting his jellied form, which immediately settled back into place. All at once his expression broke into clarity.
“I sure do,” he said. “Like it was yesterday.”
He waited around for Frank’s shift to end and then they walked to a bar on Ninth Avenue. Frank continued to express surprise at his reappearance after so many years. He might have thought Tim was dead. Most likely he hadn’t thought of him at all. Tim didn’t ask.
They sat at the bar and talked about the people they once had in common. Frank asked him if he’d heard about Mike Kronish. It was policy at Troyer, Barr to make partners “of counsel” when they turned sixty-five—an emeritus-type designation that furnished them with an office and an income for perpetuity, but stripped them of responsibility and power. When they tried to make Kronish of counsel he declared a fight. He made it clear that he had no desire to be the defanged old man coolly sought out on occasion for some niblet of sage advice. He campaigned hard to have the bylaws changed. When the vote was rejected at the partner caucus, he threatened to sue for age discrimination, but he knew as well as anyone that the bylaws were the bylaws. Troyer, Barr was bigger than any one man. He resigned and started his own firm downtown. He was, Tim guessed, siphoning off clients and billing like a bull fresh out of law school.
Frank told Tim the details of Sam Wodica’s death. Unlike Kronish, Troyer, Barr’s former managing partner had been happy to retire. He moved to Malibu and devoted himself to surfing and flying. His antique biplane drifted off course and ran into trouble during a sudden ice storm over the desert. He radioed for help and then went silent. The wreckage was spotted a few weeks later between broken canyons, and his remains were confirmed by dental records.
“An ice storm over the desert?”
“That’s what I heard, Mr. Farnsworth.”
Mr. Farnsworth. He had not heard those words spoken in years. It was someone’s name, his name, but it was no one he knew. It had belonged, if it belonged to anyone, to a fiction, the name of someone who might never have walked the earth.
“There’s something I’ve always meant to ask you, Frank,” he said. “Do you have kids?”
Frank was tipping back his beer. He nodded with his brows. “Two boys,” he replied, resettling his bottle on the coaster.
“Do you have pictures?”
“Pictures?”
“With you. In your wallet.”
“They’re grown men now. Twenty-eight and thirty.”
“No families of their own?”
“One’s married. The other… I can’t say one way or the other about that one. To be honest, he’s always sort of confused me. Maybe he’s gay. I don’t know.”
He turned away and drank his beer. Tim did the same, and for a moment they looked like perfect strangers forced together by the confines of the bar. After a moment Tim removed his leather wallet, water-stained and contoured by age. He opened it to a portrait of Jack at just a few months, sitting on Becka’s lap. Next to them sat Becka’s boyfriend what’s-his-name, the producer. Jane stood behind them.
“That’s my family there,” he said.
Frank took the wallet offered him and admired the picture. Then he handed it back with a kind word. “Looks like a happy bunch,” he said. When they were through with their second beer they left the bar.
He walked with Frank to the subway terminal. They walked leisurely, avoiding the puddles. He spoke freely to Frank. He told him about his wife’s sickness and recovery, his daughter’s music career, and his walking. He admitted that a breakdown some years back now required him to take a cocktail of antipsychotic medication. He wasn’t confiding, for there was nothing to keep secret anymore, and no one to keep a secret from. Surprised by the candor, or simply attentive, Frank said very little.
When they reached the entrance he held out his hand, something he never liked to do because of his missing fingers. “Mr. Novovian,” he said.
Frank showed no reservations in taking his hand. The two men said good-bye, promising that if the chance arose in the future, they’d do this over again. Then Tim watched him as he disappeared into the terminal, heading toward the train that for all these years, night after night, had taken him from the city into New Jersey, toward home.
Months before his reappearance, Becka had mentioned that he was trying to return. She wanted to give her mother reason to live. But Jane didn’t want him to come and she didn’t want to live. She had made peace with dying. She had watched him struggle for too long to pretend that struggling was profitable. If it was her turn to go, she would go. She would go peacefully.
Then he returned and she wanted to live.
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If he could suffer like that, if he could endure such an ordeal. If he could be so valiant.
The equipoise she had struck was ruptured the minute he walked into the room. Going peacefully, that was history. She began to rage as he had raged.
Did he think it was the clinical trial? The clinical trial wasn’t what saved her.
He didn’t believe that. With him it was just working or failing to work. Cells lived or they died. The heart beat or stopped beating. Then the entire thing returned to ashes and dust. He’d come a long way from the man who once believed that God was in the trenches surrounding every atom, fighting the devil for the soul.
“There’s no soul,” he said. “No God and no soul.”
“What about your mind, all the miracles of your mind?”
“It’s captive.”
“Captive to what?”
“The body. The body’s decay.”
“You don’t believe that,” she said. “I don’t believe you believe that.”
He did. The medicine had set him right at last.
She stood up and went over to the window. She looked out for a while before turning and sitting on the ledge. “When you recover from an illness,” she said, “as I have, no matter what you thought you believed, you start to think maybe there’s something.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “I’ve never recovered.”
“Don’t be self-pitying.”
“I’m not self-pitying,” he said. “Just stating the facts.”
He had walked and walked to get back to her, and now that she was home, there was nothing more to do. Returning to her, returning to her, returning to her again and again, was not a possible life. It was twice the challenge as the going because he was working on low energy and no sleep. He could do it when it was a matter of life and death. But now, now he needed to let himself rest when it came time to rest, and to move on when it came time to move on, and to do so in the direction of the moving on.
“What about the vacation?” she said. “We planned a safari.”
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