Dark City Lights

by Lawrence Block

  I said, “They’re dead.”

  “You’re his legal guardian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Insurance card, please.”

  “I don’t have it with me. I’m sorry. We left the house in a hurry. I’ll go back and get it. How long before the doctor sees him?”

  “Within the next few minutes.”

  “I’ll leave now,” I said. “It won’t take me long. Here, Ben,” I said, pressing the money I had taken from the two corpses into his hand. “Keep this till I get back.”

  I saw that he knew I would not return. I saw the longing in his eyes, my eyes, the tears welling in them.

  “Just give us a moment, please,” I said to the nurse, taking Ben’s hand and raising him up from his chair. “He can finish the remaining questions you have without me.”

  “Sign here, first,” the nurse said, pushing a form across the table of her small station along with a pen. “We need you to authorize treatment. Also to acknowledge that you are responsible for any costs not covered by your insurance.”

  I signed the form and drew Ben off to the side.

  “They’ll treat you,” I said. “They have to. You won’t get in trouble. Not much, anyway. Just tell them someone robbed you in the subway. They cut you. I found you bleeding in the subway car and brought you here.”

  “Why won’t you come back?” he asked.

  “I can’t, Ben. I can’t.”

  “Then I want to go with you,” he said.

  I took his face in my hands. I kissed his forehead.

  “I can’t, can I?” he said.

  We looked into each other’s face

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  And I saw the need he had.

  “You can say it,” I told him. “It’s alright. Go ahead.”

  Tears spilled out of his eyes.

  “I love you,” he said, hugging me.

  “I love you,” I said. I held him close. Then I said, “Your father would have loved you, too.”

  The nurse called out. “We do have more questions, about medical history,” she said.

  “Yes. He’ll be right with you,” I said.

  Quietly, I said to Ben, “For the rest, afterward, just tell them the truth—who you are, why you ran away. Ask them to put you back into the care of the Foundling Hospital. The hospital will probably be willing to take you in temporarily, before you can be placed in a new home. Whatever the case, get up to the Forty-second Street library three days from now. Outside, at the base of the southernmost of the two lions, the downtown side. Be there at noon. Someone will meet you there, to help. If you can’t get there three days from now, then go on the fourth. If you can’t get away on the fourth, then go on the fifth. As soon you can get there, there will be someone looking for you.”

  “Please!” the nurse said. “He can’t be seen until the form is completed.”

  “Goodbye, Ben,” I said.

  “I love you,” he repeated, wiping away the tears from his cheeks.

  “I love you,” I said. “I always will.”

  And I left.

  I WAS AT HIS GRADUATION from St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights four years later, though I stood in a hall looking into the chapel through a partly closed door. The chapel was too small for him not to have seen me otherwise. I saw him look for me from the podium as he made ready to deliver the valedictory address. He smiled at his adoptive parents, who were in the chapel, at his classmates and at the other parents, but still his eyes moved about in search of me. He had kept the name Benjamin, I saw on the program. Benjamin Davidson, though as a middle name he had assumed the surname of the couple who had taken him in and treated him as their own.

  I had seen to his safety and future.

  I had done that through Dovid’s friend Michael Shannon, who had been with Dovid on the day he died. I had called Michael Shannon’s offices as soon as they were open the morning after I had left Benjamin at the Downtown Hospital and made—insisted on—an appointment the following morning.

  “It involves administering a sum of between two and three million dollars,” I told him over the telephone. “With a commensurate fee. And because you once had a friend named Dovid, to whom you were close.”

  Michael Shannon had done well. He was not one of the overwhelmingly powerful men in the city, but he was not unknown to those who were.

  He seemed bemused by me when we met. But only seemed so. It was a tactic to disarm me. His questions, when he asked them at intervals, as if something had only just then occurred then to him, were subtle and probing. I allowed him none of them.

  I had brought a leather satchel with me. In it were cash, gold coins, jewelry (much of it antique), and other small valuables: a fine miniature English enamel portrait someone had brought from England that fell into me in the early nineteenth century, a rare Qianlong jade someone else had brought home from China and that had found its way into my domain in the 1930s, and more.

  “It is all worth easily more than two million net,” I said to Michael Shannon. “Probably closer to three. And not difficult to sell.”

  “And you know that how?” he asked, smiling.

  “I simply do,” I said.

  “Do you have papers of provenance for the more costly items?”

  “No. But I have possession of them. And my right—your right—to that will not be challenged.”

  Things valuable as well as foul regularly find their way into my domain, lost, discarded, stolen, and then abandoned in fear, cast off by accident or in anger. In every city I have ever lived over the years, I have taken up some of this and set it aside. It was useful to have sometimes, as now.

  We agreed on his fee. I was generous in it.

  “You will administer the money for the boy’s security and well-being,” I said. “In seeing him placed in a good home, for his education, for any other needs and reasonable wants he has. Until he reaches the age of thirty, at which time you will disburse to him in full whatever amount remains.”

  “And you wish no papers on this, nothing binding me to fiduciary duty. No papers of any kind.”

  “No. None.”

  “And I won’t see you again. Ever.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Nor any agent or representative of you.”

  “Nor any agent or representative.”

  He had been leaning back in his chair. Now he rocked forward, put his forearms on his desk, clasped his hands, and looked into my eyes. “Tell me, Ms. Purificare, then what would stop me from simply taking this money for myself?”

  “I would know,” I said. “And I would hurt you.”

  After some moments, looking at me, he said, “I believe you would.”

  “It is good to believe the truth.”

  “I wouldn’t, you know. I wouldn’t do such a thing.” He sat back.

  “I know. That is part of why I am here.”

  Michael Shannon had led the funeral service for Dovid, at the marina out on the small wharf where Michael’s sailboat had been tied that day. He had wept for his lost friend.

  I was there. In the water, watching, listening. I had come out of my home for it. I saw the man then for who he was. And I had read of him over the years, noting his name because he had been Dovid’s friend.

  Michael Shannon was studying me now that our business was done.

  He asked, “How did you know Dovid?”

  “I just did.”

  He nodded, not having really expected much more from me.

  “You’re what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight?” he asked.

  “Twenty-seven,” I said.

  “You would have been young when Dovid died, twelve or thirteen.”

  “I was younger then,” I said.

  I stood, ready to leave. I offered my hand.

  Michael Shannon got up from his chair. He paused, searching my face: my hair, my brow, my eyes, my skin, my mouth.

  “Do you have an older sister?” he asked.

  “No.”
>
  He came around his desk. He took my hand, shook it politely.

  “Dovid told me about a girl once,” he said. “He spent only a single night with her. She was gone in the morning when he woke. Dovid liked women, but he wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of guy. She really got to him. He spent months looking for her. In fact, he still was, right up to the day of the storm. I think she might have looked something like you.”

  I finished our handshake. “Thank you, Mr. Shannon. I appreciate your services.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He was reluctant to let me go.

  “And the boy, he’s never to know anything of you, anything at all. You’re sure of this.”

  “Only that there has been a benefactor, someone who cares about his well-being.”

  He nodded. “Well, then thank you, Ms.—may I call you Chloe, this once? It’s nice to meet someone who was Dovid’s friend.”

  “Yes, you may. And yes, it is nice for me, too, to meet someone who was Dovid’s friend.”

  “Well. Thank you, Chloe.”

  “Thank you, Michael.”

  I kissed him on the cheek.

  Then I left. I always do. I always must. It is the nature of things.

  I WAS THERE WHEN BEN graduated from Columbia, too, this time seated in the much larger audience, my hair darkened for the day and pulled back, face rouged, wearing a mannish suit. I wanted to be nearer him. And again he looked for me, eyes roaming the audience as he mounted the stairs in the moving line of graduates, stepped onto the platform and walked toward the dean to receive his diploma. They passed over me, went beyond and further back to the seats behind me—then stopped and snapped back to the row in which I sat. I coughed, covering my mouth with my hand, and lifted my program, bent my head to it. Ben was forced forward by the continuing call of graduates. He crossed the stage, still running his eyes over the row in which I sat, then descended and had to take his seat again with the other graduates.

  I left before the assembly was dismissed. He had not actually seen me, but I knew the part of me that was him had sensed me. I probably should not have gone, but was glad I had. I could only hope my presence had been better for him than not.

  I had seen Michael Shannon there, too, tanned, fit, temples graying, in an elegantly tailored suit. He sat with his wife, his equal physically and in dress, alongside Ben’s adoptive parents, and looked affectionately at Ben as he accepted his diploma and shook the dean’s hand. He did not see me. He had no reason to expect to, but would not have recognized me if he had.

  Ben had graduated summa cum laude, bearing out what he had accomplished at St. Ann’s and presaging well for his future.

  I was glad for him. What lingered for me, though, was the language of that honor, the dead language no one spoke anymore. It was still sometimes read in schools, used in medicine and law, and graven into cornerstones and monuments. But not spoken.

  I missed it. I do not miss things much, or places I have left. Things rise, things fall. As do days: here a little while, then not. As for places, I have always simply gone where it was best for me to go. Sometimes where I was most needed, others where I was most wanted, or appreciated, and still others just because I wished to.

  I began to think in those months after Ben’s graduation that a leaving might lie ahead.

  It did.

  But I saw Ben once more before then.

  I went to his wedding.

  He married a young woman who had studied with him at Columbia. They waited till she had finished law school, passed the bar, and had her first hire. Her name was Flora, which I liked, having had a friend in Rome from whom it had come down, a being like me and who, also like me, had wandered to many places over the years, as most of us did. Ben was with the mayor’s office by then. There was talk of a political future for him.

  I had read of them together and seen photographs of them: with the mayor, the borough president, the senior senator from the state, Flora to the side and just slightly behind Ben; with joined hands at a reception at the Metropolitan Museum; she speaking at a symposium, he in the front row of the audience. She was graceful and intelligent. Ben looked at her in a way that spoke to me of how I thought Dovid had come to feel about me as I lay on my side nestled back into him, he cupped to me, his arm around me, his breath soft and warm on the skin of my shoulder. And that I felt for him in those few short hours before I rose to leave.

  I sensed that now in Benjamin, deep below the streets of the city, the love he had for her and the love he knew back from her.

  I was made peaceful by it, calm, content—and knew I could leave.

  They were married in St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue, an important church in the city, a lovely edifice,

  Byzantine in design, beautifully domed. The mayor was there, and other people of note.

  As was I.

  I sat on the groom’s side midway back from the altar, two people in from the aisle. It was pretty ceremony. I have always liked ceremonies, of any kind. Dovid would have liked it, too, I think, though it was not of his faith. As it was not of mine.

  Ben and Flora were joyful it as they came walking back down the aisle at its completion, the organ playing, swinging their clasped hands, smiling and nodding to people, stopping spontaneously once to embrace and kiss one another, followed by the bridesmaids and groomsmen, happy and smiling, too, and waving to people they knew.

  And Benjamin saw me.

  Me.

  His face froze—for an instant, less even. Then it softened, became softer than I have ever seen a face become before. He smiled ever so gently, and looked lovingly into my eyes, which were the mirror of his own. It was as if, for a moment, we were suspended outside of time, outside of anything else at all, that there was only he and I. My own face softened, and I opened my heart, fully, and I looked lovingly into his eyes. And then he was gone, passed on with his bride, into his life.

  I left New York that night.

  I went home. I could now, it was right now. And when I arrived there, after all those years, all those other cities, I was indeed home, and it was good and I was made glad.

  IN THE SPRING, I SPENT an afternoon with Flora—my Flora, the first Flora—who had also come home. We spent it in a meadow outside the city on a late spring day. We walked, laughed, rested, and caught one another up on two other dear friends, Pomona, whom Flora had last seen in an orange grove outside Valencia, in Spain, and Ceres, with whom I had visited at the edge of a broad field of wheat near Topeka, in Kansas, back in the United States. We picked wildflowers and wove them into wreaths which we wore in our hair, and listened to the laughter of nymphs in the woods nearby and the rutting cries of a pair of satyrs who pursued them. There was no one else about—which is why they were.

  It could have been a day from long, long ago.

  We gossiped, Flora and I, about the doings of the greater ones of which we had heard since last we met, though there is much less of that now since your kind have turned away from them as well as from we lesser ones. We stayed the afternoon and most of the night, too, lying on our backs in the meadow, the wreaths of flowers still in our hair, feeling the lovely, temperate, timeless breeze blow softly across us and listening to the sounds of the satyrs exhausting themselves with the handful of nymphs who had allowed themselves to be caught, and looking up in dreamy pleasure at the night sky, which, we being far enough from the city and any town or village of significant size, was filled with glittering stars, many of which were arranged in the shapes and forms of, and named for, some of the more notable among us.

  I have never, as I said, really missed any place I have left, or time, or thing that is gone, but it was good to be there that night with Flora, lying on our backs, holding her hand, the breeze gentle, with the fragrance of our wreaths, listening to the rioting of the nymphs and satyrs, the stars abiding and abundant above us, like crystals or diamonds, and wondrous to see.

  I SAW BEN ONCE MORE.

  He came to me. Ostensibly
, to my city. He arrived with others who did what he did in other cities to meet and speak of their work with one another, of what was effective and what was not, to talk of remedies and the future, what might be and how it might. Ostensibly. I knew he was here the moment he set foot on the soil (rather, the paved-over soil) of my city. I felt him, and knew why he had come. I had known of the impending conference, of course; in a way, it was in my honor—focused on my being and purpose, to the extent its organizers and participants understood me. They didn’t, not actually anyway. They saw me as a metaphor, knew me only in my secular guise. Still, they had chosen my city, the place of my coming into being, in honor of that.

  Benjamin was now Director of New York City’s Bureau of Water and Sewer Operations, the most extensive of its kind in the world. That it was such was partly why I had the stayed the time I had in New York, which was longer than I usually did in a city (though London and Paris both held me for goodly lengths, too).

  The significant work of the conference was finished by the end of the third day, and the event was formally ended at a breakfast convocation the next morning. Some of the conferees left immediately after to return home. Others remained for what many considered the highlight of their trip, an afternoon tour of me that had been arranged for them. They were taken by bus to an entry point of the Cloaca Maxima—the Great Drain—the central, most ancient, and most important part of my domain, and led down into me by an historian from Sapienza University, the largest in Europe and the oldest in the city (though not nearly as old as I).

  I watched them from within the stones and concrete, the terra cotta and brick. They marveled at me, not in flattery but rather in genuine admiration and appreciation, and such as I had not been given in a very long time. They were, after all, men and women who cared for me, who maintained and wished my well-being, my flourishing, through all my domains in all of their cities.

  I was pleased, touched even, and renewed in my desire to serve.

  Still, it was Benjamin on whom I dwelt. While the rest esteemed me, they did not see me. He did. He looked deeply at the parts and pieces of me during the tour, and into them, and saw me. I watched his body loosen at the moment he actually perceived me, saw the softening in his face again, the comfort and love within him.