I open the door and walk to the kitchen, explain my situation to ’Tone. He mumbles something about how the neighborhood has gone south, hands me two worn cotton towels, one wet and one dry. Then he shoves a paper plate in my hand and drops two cannoli on it. I nod in appreciation and make my way back to the front. I tuck the towels under my arm as I open the door and half jog into the sun-filled parking lot.
Melody is missing.
Each step closer to the car brings a drop in my pace. Within seconds I am standing in the center of the parking lot, towels in hand, head and body twisting in every direction for any sign of her. I run to the corners of the building, look around both sides of the restaurant: nothing. Then up to the street, look east and west, find not a single person anywhere in my field of vision. I couldn’t have been in the restaurant for more than sixty seconds; it’s like she truly vanished, no trace of her having been here or having shared a meal and moments with me. My mind races at not only why she left, but how she departed so successfully. Dust from the parking lot does not hang in the air. No racing car engines can be heard, no squealing tires. No voices, no whispers or screams for help. There now exists a void, and I am standing in the center of the vacuum.
Melody is not just gone—she’s long gone.
FIVE
I jump in my car, toss the towels on the seat and spin out of the parking lot, drive down the road toward the city center. My eyes are peeled for any sign of Melody, but beyond the drivers of cars and commercial trucks, there are no signs of any living thing whatsoever. Even the two kids have disappeared far from view. After a mile, I hang a U-turn in the middle of the street and head in the opposite direction, speed toward the exit for the Jones Falls Expressway and stop just before the ramp and sit on the shoulder, defeated. Too much time has passed now. She could be anywhere, with anyone. It’s like looking for a needle across an unharvested field of hay.
I attempt to methodically run through all of the options; only three possibilities surface:
(1) She left on her own, officially having lost all faith and trust in me after my foolish reaction to the spitheads, from my lack of self-control that would eventually implode any master plan I professed to have. I’d never blame her for leaving.
(2) Somehow the feds knew where she was, managed to track us amidst all of my casual absconding, and spirited her away at the perfect moment. How I criticized Sean and his feeble protections of Melody in Cape Charles, how distracted he was, how his attention was distinctly elsewhere. Did I not just fail Melody the exact same way? Who’s to say he didn’t slip those kids twenty bucks to spit in my car and create a diversion.
(3) Someone from our crew preempted our successful arrival in New York. This someone figured I would do what I was truly attempting: Keep the girl alive. This someone decided enough was enough and Melody’s life needed to end, and now she’s riding in the trunk of a large black sedan. The question I can’t seem to answer is how anyone in my family might’ve had the slightest clue where we were; even I had no idea that we’d end up at this particular restaurant at this particular time.
Unless.
I hang another U-turn, narrowly beat a dump truck coming off the ramp from the expressway, and drive back to the restaurant. I barge into the kitchen, corner ’Tone, and ask in English he will fully understand if he has had any contact with my father or anyone else in our crew. He shakes his head like a dog trying to throw moisture off his fur. I scan the rest of the kitchen. “Anyone in here? Anyone call up to New York? Now is the time to speak up!” Everybody stops and stares, every motion frozen.
’Tone puts his hands up in a way that could be read as both not me and I have no idea what you’re talking about. I slowly walk backward toward the door. And when I return to my car, I grab my cell and call my brother.
“Pete,” he answers.
“Checking in. You at Sylvia?”
“There earlier, everything’s fine. Ryan’s got it under control.”
Sylvia’s head chef has opened for me before—during the majority of my other off-schedule journeys to locate Melody—and I am certain of Ryan’s reliability; this is hardly why I called.
“Everything else coming together?” I ask. People dropping like flies?
“Pop and Eddie got a close eye on everything, everyone.” Eddie Gravina, my father’s consigliere.
I shake my head even though Peter can’t see my reaction. “What’s Eddie got to do with anything? Where’s Pop?”
Peter ignores me. “You’re the only one who’s probably going to arrive late to the party.” You’re the question mark.
“You can’t have the party without all the party favors, right?” Pop’s not going to rest until every loose end is knotted. “And I’m bringing mine home shortly.”
Peter’s reaction is all I care about. Any delay, any slight cough of confusion—any sign that someone else is after Melody—and I’ll be screaming into the phone with such furor I’ll crack the plastic, returning to New York at a hundred miles per hour.
As much as I would dread this response from my brother, it would nonetheless bring me direction, a place to point my energy, a way to begin again and attempt to rescue her one last time. Unfortunately, he answers me with assurance, with a clear tone of relief.
“My brother,” he says with a laugh, “it may have aged like wine, but the flavor is that much greater, wouldn’t you say?” Then louder, “I will pass along the news. Can’t wait to open that bottle and take a drink.”
The most recent time I hated my brother Peter: two seconds ago, when he delivered this weird metaphor implying Melody was something he would consume, how he’d derive pleasure from putting her down, or knowing she was already with the fishes. I can’t shake the imagery, the sick look he’d get on his face from opening the trunk of the car and seeing another person lifeless and cold, the proportional punishment for disrupting his world, our world.
I say nothing more and Peter hangs up.
Fury builds inside me and for the first time I recognize it. I want so desperately to push it away, to be the man Melody suggested I could be—that she wants me to be—but I’ve been trained that the better use of a blazing temper is to harness the power behind it. I try to beat it back like a demon attempting possession, but the violence runs through my veins like an amphetamine. But this time—the first time—I pin it down, begin the process of suffocation: I have every intention of finding Melody, and when I find her I’m going to bring her right through the front door of my father’s house, and I’m going to present her, the innocent girl that she is, to my father and Peter and the rest of my family. My original plan now has fuel; Peter’s asinine metaphor has given me clarity and purpose. I will challenge them to look at Melody, to meet her and touch her, to take in her beauty and honesty and integrity and to try and find the slightest ability to take her life. Call me a hopeless romantic. Just call me hopeless. But I pray my family will see what I see, that they will lay down their frigging weapons this one time and say, Maybe you’re right. And if one of them—any of them—reach for a weapon or turn her way with evil intent, they will have to kill me first.
Take that, fury.
SIX
I sit in my car and face the sun, let the engine idle. Now that I have an enriched goal, I must find Melody and bring it to completion. If there’s been any plan to snag her without my knowledge, Peter would’ve been aware of it.
The next likeliest scenario is she fell—or leapt—into the arms of the feds, which also makes this the best-case scenario. The sooner she’s under their care, the better, for within a day’s time Randall will be put to good use again.
I start driving in concentric circles. I begin with tight ones, up and down every street near the restaurant, double back and begin again, eyes peeled for any sign of her having been anywhere: an abandoned sandal or clothing item, an intentionally left sign that she was taken rather than having left of her own accord.
As I negotiate the urban streets, I briefly replay the con
versation with Peter, try to understand why Eddie is involved in taking all these people out. Eddie Gravina is a good guy, very trusted in our family. But he has two things working against him: He’s only been part of our crew for about eight years, and he’s never been on the action end of anything that I’m aware of. His purpose and value rests more in giving advice, acting as a sounding board for my father. So why would he be keeping, as Peter put it, a close eye on everything—on anything? It’s not sitting right with me. His name should have never come up. Last time I saw the guy he was sitting in the kitchen at Sylvia, reading the sports section and slurping a free bowl of Sylvia’s version of cioppino, a thin rivulet of broth dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.
As the sun shifts to an afternoon sky I make my way back to downtown Baltimore, hover around the federal building I’d hid behind not so long ago. Dr. Bajkowski is apparently working out of the office today, along with all of his or her associates, as not a single space is free. I circumnavigate the building a few times, not wanting to sit still in case my car was recognized or tagged back at the restaurant. The frigging thing sticks out like a bloody knuckle.
The more time that passes, the more nervous I get, the less in control I feel of the situation, despite the obvious truth: I have lost complete control. My nerves get the better of me and I call Gardner. He sighs, hangs up, calls me back from the server room; he’s performed this ritual enough times that I’ve come to recognize the sound of the fans whirring on all of the computers.
“You forget I have a job?” he says.
“You mean the one I just called you at?”
“I’ve got a meeting in seven minutes, and when that’s over I need to finalize a database design and submit the final draft of a disaster recovery plan.”
“I’m trying to recover from a disaster of my own.”
“Let me clarify: I do not have time.”
“You have time for your frigging addiction and to pimp out images of your wife, you have time for me. I cannot begin to explain how this is the wrong moment for you to test my patience.”
I hear him typing on a computer keyboard, taking out on the keys what he wishes he could take out on me. He clicks those keys for a solid two minutes, with gaps in his typing about every ten seconds, winds it all up with one loud slap of the keyboard.
“Gimme a minute,” he says, and the line goes dead.
And sure enough, it’s almost exactly sixty seconds when I get a call from Randall’s cell.
“Nine-one-nine Norton Drive, Columbia, Maryland. Goodbye.”
“Wait! That’s outdated information.”
“It’s what I have, okay? I don’t create, delete, or modify the data, I just tell it where to be stored and how to be accessed.”
This does not surprise me. Let’s be honest: Melody’s most recent address was the passenger seat of my Audi.
“It’s probably going to change very soon,” I say, “and I want to know when it does—the second it does.”
“How would I—”
“Monitor the status of her file every hour and let me know the instant it changes. If it doesn’t, you check in with me every four hours to let me know there’s no update.”
“For the love—I can’t keep doing this. They can’t track what I’m doing directly from the server, but if they wanted to they could find out how many times the record was accessed, which could raise a flag. I’m not taking this risk.”
“Listen, I’m completely finished explaining our relationship. You have a boss?”
“Of course.”
“I outrank him, you understand?”
He pulls the phone away from his mouth, yells a few commandment-breaking profanities, then returns with, “I should’ve never gotten into bed with you whores.”
Oh, if I could reach through the telephone line. “Yeah, but you did. And you know what? Consider me your own personal raging case of herpes, my friend. You’re gonna carry me around the rest of your life, everywhere you go. You can try and cover me up, but you and I both know you can never—never—get rid of me. I will always be right there, running through your blood, festering under your skin, waiting to pop—”
“I’m not doin’ it.”
I thought my STD metaphor was fairly vivid. I guess I should stick to what I know: sticks and stones; words suck. I wipe my face and speak the language of his native tongue: “When was the last time we gave you a boost?”
Gardner’s no longer quick to answer. “Two days ago.”
“Then let me put it this way: You don’t do this, we’re cutting you off.” I’m truly trying to avoid the threat of violence, but if turning off his supply of gambling cash doesn’t work, I’ll have only that card left to play.
He hesitates before carefully phrasing his response. “You’re squandering what I have to give, you know. You’ll be lucky to get another day out of this.”
I do know. But one day is all I need.
“Stay in touch,” I say as I flip my phone closed, toss it on the seat next to me.
My car rests at the edge of an alley two blocks from the courthouse. Through a narrow slit between the corners of two skyscrapers, I can see a margin of harbor, of shimmering water and motionless flags. In two-second intervals, people pass: the families, the mothers and fathers holding the hands of their children; the businessmen and women shortcutting across the harbor to get to the other side of the financial district or to grab a meal in Little Italy; the couples walking arm in arm along the wide brick pathway. Each of these are snapshots and nothing more—flashes, glimpses—people living simple existences, leading lives of normalcy, living without crime, living without constant fear, living without doubt as to where they are or who they are. It feels strange to witness them. I do not belong here and neither does Melody. We are actors cast as characters in the wrong play. These people live their lives day to day and misunderstand what occurs in the directions they never look, where all the terrible violence and fear proliferates. All around these innocent residents, people are having their names changed, their bodies relocated, living like ghosts among the true and real. They could never know we were even here.
Then, right in the small gap of my vision, in the slice between the buildings, a young couple stops. The boy turns around and says something to the girl and she laughs and slaps him on the chest. He reaches down to her waist and pulls her in and she throws her arms around his neck. They begin to kiss, and though I feel I should look away, I am unable. It strikes me: This is very well a direction I have never looked—down the path of the living.
Someday, I will bring Melody here and point out to the harbor and say, “Look. There is something I want you to see.” And I will explain how if she trusts me, she will be able to live this way, too. That if she allows me, I can change her from a ghost to flesh and bone.
Whatever captured my attention about the couple now makes me hurt. I feel like a little kid getting a stomachache from one too many candies.
A car pulls behind me and nearly taps my bumper. I pull my foot from the brake and roll out to the edge of the alley, turn northward on Charles Street. I start driving, heading nowhere.
My mind becomes preoccupied with the activities of our crew. Witnesses and other troublemakers are gone, bullets in their heads, weighted and resting on the floors of rivers, buried in beds of loose soil. No one knows they’re missing yet, won’t know until a family member or fed counts one less bird in the nest.
I carve a vertical line through the middle of the city, eventually end up so far north that I drive right along the edge of the campus of Johns Hopkins University. At the rate I’m rolling, I’ll be in Towson within minutes. Staying in motion somehow feels like progress, though I know the logical thing to do is stop and wait. I pull off of Charles Street, parallel park in front of an open meter, flip open my cell and make sure I have plenty of battery power and full signal strength. I drop my head back to the headrest and slowly relax the muscles in my neck, and when I twist to the right I look out the pa
ssenger door window and notice the campus bookstore for Hopkins, a Barnes and Noble that stretches across the bottom of a block-wide building. The smooth stone facility has blue awnings and ceiling-high windows, and café tables positioned in front of the windows with more students than chairs.
I play with my cell phone, flipping it open and slapping it shut in rhythm as I watch the students moving in and out of the bookstore; it occurs to me I’ve never seen a mentally unhealthy college student; the subtle smiles on their faces, the way they interact, their rush from building to building, all imply a sense of well-being that will be sucked from half of them within a year of graduation. For now, though, they study and try to learn more in disciplines that make them happy, of what they think will make them happy.
Once upon a time Randall Gardner walked some campus, studying computer science and cramming for exams, never could have imagined a future where he’d surrender every shred of common sense to satisfy a gambling addiction, where he’d have his head slammed into his own front door by the guy feeding his habit.
I can’t help but think the same thing about the cops, the folks at Justice, the Seans of the world—who once sought to serve and protect but later learned that all the stuff in the textbooks was theory, and half of it was crap in the first place, that the two most effective ways to overcome the bad guys are the same mechanisms that’ve worked so well for the villains: physical force and extortion. I wonder if the cop who worked me over when I was only ten years old, the one who served as the impetus behind the wrecked lives of the McCartney family, ever cracks open one of his dusty texts on the concepts of law enforcement.
For now they hope. For now they study. Accounting, art, architecture. Computer science and political science and environmental science. Law and medicine.
The Exceptions Page 20
