DETECTIVE COMBS BOUNCED IN THE SEAT of the unmarked SUV, clutching the wheel with his knuckles nearly popping from the skin of his hand. His head swiveled shoulder to shoulder. Squinting into the headlights of the cars behind them, the evening march of commuters headed home. He laid on the accelerator, weaved through the tired crawl of cars.
Wren sat in the back seat, hands folded in her lap. “What’s going on?” It seemed like a reasonable question. Detective Combs hadn’t spoken a word to her since they’d left the station for the motor pool, a thousand suspicious stares accompanying them both. He’d only gripped her elbow, gently, leading her steps.
She asked him again, louder, “Where are we going?”
He either didn’t hear her or didn’t care. He turned a corner sharply and accelerated quickly, swerving through openings of clustered traffic, eyes oscillating between his rearview and the street itself. He fidgeted as the radio on the passenger side crackled. The words indiscernible to Wren’s untrained ear. But Detective Combs plucked it from the leather and brought it to his mouth. “En route.”
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, louder. “Do you really expect me to be able to tell you who made that video? Because I really don’t know.”
He peeled out from beneath a red light, running through the intersection. Wren reached out and grasped the door handle as oncoming traffic darted around them, stopping just inches away from her window. Headlights everywhere, tires squealing. The SUV turned a corner and screeched to a halt.
“Shit,” Jeremiah shouted. “Fucking hell fuck.”
Ahead of them, a street filled and overflowing with people. The street was marked off by police tape. Red and blue lights somewhere beyond the crowd. The crowd was so large that at first Wren couldn’t make sense of it. It was beyond comprehension, the mass and the swell. She heard, delayed, the distant drone of voices drowning beneath their own echoes. She thought of choirs singing in massive and empty cathedrals, the prophesied end of a world memorialized in church pew hymnals.
“What is this?” she whispered.
“A fucking protest,” Detective Combs said, more to himself than to her, as he threw the SUV into reverse and peeled out into the intersection. “We’ll have to find another way.”
She kept her face to the window, watching the event. She saw growing from the crowd a white banner spanning the breadth of the street. The banner displayed a spray-painted outline, the details minimal yet immediately recognizable. A likeness of the same face on every television—the Liber-teen caricature of Robespierre staring out over the masses, grinning, as though he had known in his lifetime that he would end up here on this banner, this millennium, and this street, wet paint dripping from his chin, smiling and presiding over a growing crowd, all of them chanting a thousand discordant cries. She watched the painted specter of Robespierre and couldn’t shake the feeling that his likeness was staring directly at her, thanking her, congratulating her, taunting her. She had given him new life in the twenty-first century, and she wished desperately that she could take it back. All of it.
Detective Combs maneuvered the SUV backward into the street, eyes wide in the rearview. “Oh shit.”
“What?”
“They’re following us,” Detective Combs said in a measured tone as he switched lanes, leaning into the window to peer through his side-view mirror. “Shit. I should have known.”
Wren turned in her seat. She saw headlights, outlines. Sports cars, taxi cabs, sedans with mufflers dragging on the concrete in a shower of sparks. Nothing out of the ordinary. Whatever that meant.
“The FBI is following us?”
He didn’t answer, speeding through another red light. A sedan crossed the intersection toward them, brakes squealing, and Wren heard the engine of the SUV strain as Detective Combs floored the pedal, streetlights and passersby melting outside the window.
“Where are we going?” Wren nearly shouted.
“Just, please,” Detective Combs barked, turning his head over his shoulder, narrowing his focus. “Just stop asking questions for a second.”
The SUV barreled forward, shifting and swerving and swallowing the blended world, sprawling corners as if it were not the vehicle turning, but the world that was shifting beneath them.
The next light ahead of them turned yellow, the intersection clustered with turning vehicles. The engine roared as they accelerated. The light went red a full twenty yards out. She tried to shout something, ask him to stop, but she knew that whatever might escape her throat wouldn’t be enough to slow the momentum of the moment. Instead, she fell back into the seat, clutching her seat belt. Detective Combs threw his weight on the gas pedal, his whole body thrust against the wheel as though willing it forward.
“Hold on,” he said.
Headlights at either side, wheels screaming, horns honking, Detective Combs shouting something primal, the SUV swerving in a lazy side-to-side. A sort of mechanical dance. The wheels lifting off the ground, a moment of weightlessness. The shuttling of a city passing too quickly to orient yourself in its massive spread. Tires screeching against the pavement, a dissonant song for the day blending in the rearview. Detective Combs hung a hard right, the tires slamming against the ground, and then they were speeding down a street Wren thought she might have recognized had it not flown past her window in a flurry of indistinct shapes of sidewalkers bleeding into each other. A static tableau of a city falling to pieces.
32 A FACE IN THE WINDOW
“SO HE LEFT THE WASTELAND?” Peter asked Miss May, an earnest slant to his broken posture. “Just like that? He never came back?”
The sun angled through the open window across May. It reflected from her ghost-white skin like a flashbulb.
“That’s right,” she said.
“So when did you see him again?”
* * *
It was the first day of spring, 1980. A decade that the whole country, including May herself, had seemingly willed into existence. There was a collective, nationwide understanding of starting something new. Forgiving and forgetting. Sleeping dogs of past decades left snoring.
Spring in Chicago. Cold but glowing. Each breath hits your lungs like the first and last you’d ever breathe.
May paused at an empty intersection and waited absently for the light to change. No cars in sight, but still she waited, hips slanted and head swiveling. She’d just used a pay phone across the street to call Richie and tell him she didn’t need a ride from the client’s home. It was a nice night, she said. The fresh air did her good.
While she waited for the light, she caught sight of a window display to her side. A woman’s boutique, closed. She discerned behind the unlit window the slim shapes of mannequins, ghostly white, haunting her own reflection, cigarette in hand. The mannequins behind the glass wore diamond necklaces and stringy negligees, and she thought they looked like something from a horror film. A faceless army of blanched tarts.
As her eyes wandered over the statuettes—the calculated curvatures of elbows and hips—she saw what she first thought was a male mannequin behind the others. The exact shape and size somehow distorted no matter how much she focused. But still she was drawn to its curious shape, or what she could see of it. A sort of imposing stature, leaning into her stare. She tilted her head and, to her surprise, it walked away. She felt her heart kick in her chest. It was not a mannequin, but a reflection in the window of someone behind her, maybe across the street. She turned around so quickly that her stiletto heel snapped and drew a surprised gasp from a rabbi passing behind her.
“What is wrong?” the rabbi asked, steadying her as she stumbled for balance.
“I saw someone,” she said, but she saw no one across the street that resembled what she had seen in the glass.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
But she did know. She’d known immediately. Before she even knew she knew.
The first story she had read in the Inquisitor about the mysterious vigilante wandering C
hicago at night and wrangling criminals, she knew exactly who this man was. But her first thought upon reading this story was that the name the journalist Marcus Waters had given him was a silly name for who he was, or at least for how she remembered him. It was the name of a small and exotic bird. The person she remembered was not exotic or delicate or small. He was plain as day, hardened, and larger than a fifteen-year-old ought to be. Because she still thought of him as a boy. A fifteen-year-old, denim-jeaned boy smiling in his walk. Even though she was now a woman and he was now a man. But these were just words like everything else.
The L thundered down the street, a screaming rush of air in its wake. She watched its cabin lights fade and disappear.
May walked hurriedly to her apartment in Englewood, her heels dangling from her fingers like Christmas ornaments, her feet freezing on the cold concrete. She scanned her surroundings—alleys, fire escapes, the rooftops on either side of the street. For a shadow, a silhouette, a shape pressed into this dark night.
She drew a bath and stuck her feet in a layer of steaming, rusty pipe water. Her toes reddened as feeling slowly returned to them. She dried off and lay on her mattress, which was on the studio apartment floor—she couldn’t afford a frame. Her hands held each other over her stomach, rose with each breath. She turned on her radio and lay awake all that night, staring expectantly at the only window in the studio apartment. When morning came, she crawled over and looked out the window into the alley where a dump truck was pulling out into the street and a homeless man, shivering, smoked a cigarette and exhaled into a beer bottle to watch the spectral smoke spin inside the glass.
He hadn’t come to her that night, but she knew he would. She felt it, a weighted anticipation of the inevitable. She considered calling out to him, to become one of the many voices he once claimed he could hear. Her voice would rise above the others, she knew. But she also knew he would come to her when he was ready.
So she waited for him the next night and when he didn’t come that night, she waited the next. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Throughout each waiting day, she sometimes caught peripheral shimmers of a body in motion on the surfaces that shined, the surfaces that reflected back to her all the things she couldn’t see directly. She knew whose reflection she saw, though. She knew every time. A memory like a vagrant wind.
Sometimes she felt, even though she could not spot him, that he was a shadow to her steps, but always at a safe distance away. A respectful, calculated space between them, one that superseded those of the city’s creeps and catcallers and seemed to her more like a distant companion—two people walking through Chicago, their steps in sync, aware of each other the way you are aware of yourself in a dream.
When she met with her clients, she could sense his proximity, and sometimes she left the windows open to the street in case he watched as she slipped from her bra and lay on the bed. She felt his hidden, rooftop eyes roving her bare skin. Some lovers know each other by their touch, their voice, their face, their scent; May knew hers by his gaze, the sensation of her skin bristling beneath a steady, obtrusive, welcome stare. She wanted to bathe in his watching.
One of her clients, as he kissed her neck, asked her what she was looking at out the window, and she told him to shut the fuck up.
How good it felt to be watched, to be known, to be seen entirely and completely, and from a distance safe enough to ignore.
So when he finally revealed himself to her one evening as she was walking home, just a block away from her apartment, she took it as an affront. She had been more than comfortable with their relationship of distances and space. But here he was, a tangible presence once again. Finite and comprehensible. All of these short years later.
She was coming back from a visit to a client named Don, an ex-marine who insisted they listen to jazz records before and during sex on his wife’s empty side of the bed. He asked her to cling to him once it was over, which she did. He asked her to hold him even more tightly, which she did. He asked her to tell him she loved him, which she didn’t.
And now her teenage lover stood before her for the first time in a long time, an immobile presence fixed to the sidewalk. He wasn’t how she remembered him. But of course he wasn’t, because she remembered a fifteen-year-old boy. Standing before her now was a man. A towering man. He was wearing a bomber jacket, black, and he kept his hands inside the pockets. But beneath it all, there was the same warm and beating body that had wrapped itself around her in the Wasteland, shielding her from whatever world existed beyond. She tried to get a look at his face, a face she had once known, but she couldn’t. Shadows from unknown sources hid whatever expression existed beneath.
It was evening, a few passersby on the other side of the street. Two men were greeting each other loudly, guessing how long it had been since they’d last seen each other.
She wanted to ask him, Why? Which, even if she had asked it, would have only been a one-word question to capture the many that tangled all at once. Why did you leave the Wasteland? Where did you go? Why are you here now? Why these years later? How did you find me? Were you even looking for me at all? Did you ever think about me?
But instead, she stood there, silent, waiting for him to speak first.
“You remember me?” he asked.
“Don’t ask stupid questions.”
“Well, aren’t you going to say something?”
A full moon growing from the clouds. A spotlight without direction. You could feel it if you stood still, closed your eyes.
“And just what the hell am I supposed to say to you?”
* * *
“Just like that?” Peter interrupted. “He found you?”
She shrugged like, Why does it matter?
“So he shows up out of nowhere, and then what?”
Miss May cleared her throat as if to continue, but instead she crossed her arms and her legs, settling into the silence between them. The street outside clamored with faraway voices, the sky was growing dark. Marcus’s hand was cramped from jotting down monosyllabic annotations in his notepad. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing, this bared and intimate account of a man he had spent the most important years of his professional career trying to understand. It was delirium, and he tried to capture it all in scratchy ink.
He heard the echo of some sea shanty played on an organ. He made a face that invited an explanation.
“Guess there’s a game.” She pointed her cigarette out the window in the direction of Wrigley Field, its stadium lights burning like an atom bomb in midburst.
“You two were together then, after he returned to you?” Marcus leaned forward. “Like, in a relationship?”
“I don’t know what you’d call it.”
Marcus nodded and massaged his hand. He looked back to his notes. “Well, how long were the two of you together?”
“I don’t know if I’d even call it ‘together.’”
“How long were the two of you involved then?”
“Until he died. So about four years, I guess.”
* * *
He came in through the window noiselessly at hours lost to night and day, slinking over the windowsill to curl against her on the mattress. The way he used to in the Wasteland. Bodies so close that the plural didn’t matter. Warm and cold and beating bodies.
Sometimes he was breathing heavy, jagged. Sometimes she heard him cough, a rumble in his throat.
In the mornings, after the sun rose, sometimes she saw blood—rusty and cracked—on his knuckles or his face, and once she saw the blood dried down the corners of his mouth. She didn’t know he was capable of bleeding. But she also didn’t know if it was his blood or someone else’s. She never asked about it. There was nothing to ask. They kept their secrets like they always had.
She only asked him about what he did on those nights once. He came through the window and lay down beside her, slick with sweat. He kissed her forehead, but she wasn’t asleep. She asked him the only question she had, “Why do you do it?”
>
He sighed. “Go to sleep.”
She laid her arm across him, her hand atop his chest.
“Just tell me why you do it,” she said. “You could do anything. You are”—she paused, feeling his heartbeat pulse beneath her palm—“whatever you are. You could do anything. You don’t need to do this.”
“I have reasons.”
“What are they?”
“Please.”
“You could do something for money. You could get good work.”
“I don’t need money. I don’t want money. I don’t do it for money.”
“Then tell me why you do this.” She paused, feeling the silence deepen between them. “Or at least tell me what made you this way. Because I don’t believe you are what you think you are.”
“What do I think I am?”
“You think you’re more than us. Or you think you’re not like us at all. I don’t know. But either way, you’re wrong. You’re so wrong.”
“Go to sleep.”
“You’re this man lying right here. And I don’t want—I don’t know. They’ll kill you. One day they will kill you.”
“No they won’t. They can’t.”
She felt his heartbeat quicken. She pressed her fingers into his chest, trying to calm the rhythm. “They’ll find a way.”
“Go to sleep.”
“You think that they can’t kill you, but it isn’t true. You’re strong, but you’re not invincible. No one is. I know what you think you are, but you aren’t that.”
“It’s late.”
He wrapped his arms around her.
“We could leave here. We could go anywhere. We could have a life away from all this. In a second. We could be gone. We could leave this city. You’ve done enough. You don’t owe them anything. We could have a life together without all of this.”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“We could move to that lake you talk about. The one you went to when you were young. We could go there. We could live there. The two of us. We could have a life that isn’t this.”
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 29
