But back at the Plaza Little Mister Kissy Lips couldn’t sleep. No sooner was he through the locks than his guts knotted up into a Chinese puzzle. Only after he’d unlocked his window and crawled out onto the ledge did he get rid of the bad feelings. The city was real. His room was not. The stone ledge was real and his bare buttocks absorbed reality from it. He watched slow movements in enormous distances and pulled his thoughts together.
He knew without having to talk to the rest that the murder would never take place. The idea had never meant for them what it had meant for him. One pill and they were actors again, content to be images in a mirror.
Slowly, as he watched, the city turned itself off. Slowly the dawn divided the sky into an east and a west. Had a pedestrian been going past on 58th Street and had that pedestrian looked up, he would have seen the bare soles of a boy’s feet swinging back and forth, angelically.
He would have to kill Alyona Ivanovna himself. Nothing else was possible.
Back in his bedroom, long ago, the phone was ringing its fuzzy night-time ring. That would be Tancred (or Amparo?) trying to talk him out of it. He foresaw their arguments. Celeste and Jack couldn’t be trusted now. Or, more subtly: they’d all made themselves too visible with their Orfeo. If there were even a small investigation, the benches would remember them, remember how well they had danced, and the police would know where to look.
But the real reason, which at least Amparo would have been ashamed to mention now that the pill was wearing off, was that they’d begun to feel sorry for their victim. They’d got to know him too well over the last month and their resolve had been eroded by compassion.
A light came on in Papa’s window. Time to begin. He stood up, golden in the sunbeams of another perfect day, and walked back along the foot-wide ledge to his own window. His legs tingled from having sat so long.
He waited till Papa was in the shower, then tippytoed to the old secretaire in his bedroom (W. & J. Sloan, 1952). Papa’s keychain was coiled atop the walnut veneer. Inside the secretaire’s drawer was an antique Mexican cigar box, and in the cigar box a velvet bag, and in the velvet bag Papa’s replica of a French dueling pistol, circa 1790. These precautions were less for his son’s sake than on account of Jimmy Ness, who every so often felt obliged to show he was serious with his suicide threats.
He’d studied the booklet carefully when Papa had bought the pistol and was able to execute the loading procedure quickly and without error, tamping the premeasured twist of powder down into the barrel and then the lead ball on top of it.
He cocked the hammer back a single click.
He locked the drawer. He replaced the keys, just so. He buried, for now, the pistol in the stuffs and cushions of the Turkish corner, tilted upright to keep the ball from rolling out. Then with what remained of yesterday’s ebullience he bounced into the bathroom and kissed Papa’s cheek, damp with the morning’s allotted two gallons and redolent of 4711.
They had a cheery breakfast together in the coffee room, which was identical to the breakfast they would have made for themselves except for the ritual of being waited on by a waitress. Little Mister Kissy Lips gave an enthusiastic account of the Alexandrians’ performance of Orfeo, and Papa made his best effort of seeming not to condescend. When he’d been driven to the limit of this pretense, Little Mister Kissy Lips touched him for a second pill, and since it was better for a boy to get these things from his father than from a stranger on the street, he got it.
He reached the South Ferry stop at noon, bursting with a sense of his own imminent liberation. The weather was M-Day all over again, as though at midnight out on the ledge he’d forced time to go backwards to the point when things had started going wrong. He’d dressed in his most anonymous shorts and the pistol hung from his belt in a dun dittybag.
Alyona Ivanovna was sitting on one of the benches near the aviary, listening to Miss Kraus. Her ring hand gripped the poster firmly, while the right chopped at the air, eloquently awkward, like a mute’s first words following a miraculous cure.
Little Mister Kissy Lips went down the path and squatted in the shadow of his memorial. It had lost its magic yesterday, when the statues had begun to look so silly to everyone. They still looked silly. Verrazzano was dressed like a Victorian industrialist taking a holiday in the Alps. The angel was wearing an angel’s usual bronze nightgown.
His good feelings were leaving his head by little and little, like aeolian sandstone attrited by the centuries of wind. He thought of calling up Amparo, but any comfort she might bring to him would be a mirage so long as his purpose in coming here remained unfulfilled.
He looked at his wrist, then remembered he’d left his watch home. The gigantic advertising clock on the facade of the First National Citibank said it was fifteen after two. That wasn’t possible.
Miss Kraus was still yammering away.
There was time to watch a cloud move across the sky from Jersey, over the Hudson, and past the sun. Unseen winds nibbled at its wispy edges. The cloud became his life, which would disappear without ever having turned into rain.
Later, and the old man was walking up the sea promenade toward the Castle. He stalked him, for miles. And then they were alone, together, at the far end of the park.
“Hello,” he said, with the smile reserved for grown-ups of doubtful importance.
He looked directly at the dim-bag, but Little Mister Kissy Lips didn’t lose his composure. He would be wondering whether to ask for money, which would be kept, if he’d had any, in the bag. The pistol made a noticeable bulge but not the kind of bulge one would ordinarily associate with a pistol.
“Sorry,” he said coolly. “I’m broke.”
“Did I ask?”
“You were going to.”
The old man made as if to return in the other direction, so he had to speak quickly, something that would hold him here.
“I saw you speaking with Miss Kraus.”
He was held.
“Congratulations—you broke through the ice!”
The old man half-smiled half-frowned. “You know her?”
“Mm. You could say that we’re aware of her.” The “we” had been a deliberate risk, an hors d’oeuvre. Touching a ringer to each side of the strings by which the heavy bag hung from his belt, he urged on it a lazy pendular motion. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
There was nothing indulgent now in the man’s face. “I probably do.”
His smile had lost the hard edge of calculation. It was the same smile he’d have smiled for Papa, for Amparo, for Miss Couplard, for anyone he liked.
“Where do you come from? I mean, what country?”
“That’s none of your business, is it?”
“Well. I just wanted … to know.”
The old man (he had ceased somehow, to be Alyona Ivanovna) turned away and walked directly toward the squat stone cylinder of the old fortress. He remembered how the plaque at the entrance—the same that had cited the 7.7 million—had said that Jenny Lind had sung there and it had been a great success.