"You call his home?"
"Yes."
"The office?"
"Yes."
"His service?"
"Someone else returned the call."
"Someone else."
"Oliver Schreck."
"Schreck? I don't want a call from Schreck."
"He says he has an idea about Coney Island."
Santos raises a palm, warding it off. "He's zero. He's always been nothing but zero."
"But he called."
"What is he, Stein's boy now?"
"We're going to pass it on in the morning, Errol."
"Just tell me why he's returning Nathan's business."
Barbados sighs. "He didn't say."
"We'll talk to him tonight."
"They're going to put someone else on it tomorrow."
The specter of his sister behind the reception desk of the venerable law office of Stein & Stein, where his mother had sat for years before her. How close she'd come to working for him, too, had he accepted the place Milton offered. In their hands, she quickly took on that lawyerly quiet and seemed neither happy nor unhappy. To Santos she was vaguely cold, an old teammate traded on. Different manager now, different league. Now she is a rag of meat, a puddle in the sand.
There is a knock on the door. Someone says it is the funeral man and Santos begins to cry. He didn't know he was going to and he is ashamed. Barbados looks away. Muffled weeping from the living room. Santos lets his neck go and closes his eyes, but in the dark, guided only by vague notions of human frailty, he does not know what to look for, little even of why.
Nathan is off, trailing vapor, striding downtown, his watch aimed at the light. Snow slithers dry underfoot, dusting the cars, the balconies, casting them as marble statues. A bitter draft starts and stops, rattling the trash in the doorways. He stops midstep, making a sudden move for his belt, drawing his beeper. His cellphone appears in his other palm. He pulls its antenna and pokes. An operation that seems vaguely military, like pulling the pin on a grenade.
"No, Serena, you can't meet me here. Did I see what?… What boat? I told you, I've been out all day… From Puerto Rico?… A brother? I didn't know you had a brother… no, it couldn't have been. Listen to me. Puerto Ricans don't have to sneak across the water into the States. They're honorary citizens. They're not Haitians or Cubans in some broken-down wooden bathtub, or some Mexican roasting in the engine of a banana truck in Tijuana. They can come to America in a plane like human beings."
At the creaking of tires against the snow, Nathan catches a glimpse of a red sedan passing slowly along the curb. Some uneasy flame relights in his gut. Those faces in the window from this afternoon, and other afternoons. And these faces, hovering in the fogged window, snapping away as the car passes, "-Isabel," he thinks he hears Serena say, then flinches, clicks Serena off, and walks on.
Inside Jackies, an inch and a half of hundreds in his palm, wrapped like a spring roll in a few twentles-a chunk from his fifty-thousand-dollar day, and he hasn't done a thing. What a country. The bartender comes quickly. The shelves are thinly stocked, the bottles well spaced. Nathan steps up but says nothing. Instead, with his hands pressed against the bar's edge, he loses himself momentarily in the opposing mirrored walls. They yield reflection within reflection of a woman past her prime pitching forward over an imaginary pony. The debris of a great dream, the joffrey Ballet, Balanchine. Her false eyelashes are coming loose. To her right on the short stage, two other women spin on fireman's poles in a urine-colored haze to a medley of rock songs fifteen years old.
"Scotch rocks," Nathan finally manages to say, his elbows landing on the bar. The drink comes and he drains off half the glass, breathes, then drinks off the rest. He now feels himself in a position to contemplate, for a minute, the possibility that everything is normal. He pulls the legal envelope from his jacket pocket and leaves it on the bar before him, stares at it-and clutches, again, the beeper on his belt. Again it is Errol Santos NYPD with his attendant numbers, home, work, beeper, cell-phone, a play for urgency. Already, he can see the conversation. He can see Coney Island.
With a wave from the bartender the show behind Nathan has stopped, and as if by agreement most of the men avert their eyes. The dancers gather pocketbooks, stockings, hairbrushes, rotating to the right they carry their belongings in their arms like piles of laundry. At the farthest edge the last one steps into her slippers and down out of the lights to the floor, chaffing along the bar, tightening her silk robe around her waist. Off stage she is older, without resources.
Nathan catches the bartender's sleeve. "Mind if I make a call?" reaching for the bar phone while the music starts up again, he dials, lifts his watch, counts the seconds.
But the drinkers are spinning on their stools. Something odd is happening. The silence has brought a new girl out of the back through a curtain of beads. Halter top and pleated plaid skirt. Her adolescent knees. A field hockey captain, a Catholic-school girl, her face heavily painted, a touch of glitter, a screen of black hair across the brow. She steps onto stage left while the other two dancers turn their backs and put on for the men in the next sector the same clothes they had taken off for the men in the one before; as if they are not a mere five or six feet away but in another room. The new girl dances badly, stiff, out of sync with the music. Tall, gangly, her long arms outstretched, her lips pursed in a precocious smooch, she can't be more than seventeen. She's in over her head. It may well have been only hours since she was accosted by Jackie himself at the Port Authority gate, fresh off a bus from Gary or Omaha.
Nathan dials Santos's message service and leaves an address in the East Eighties with an hour that may or may not correspond to the time at hand or any time in the near future.
The girl is nude to the waist. While she moves her hips in her underpants, the other two dancers throw her dirty looks. But the girl's eyes are not unsure, unamused; they work the room with haphazard confidence. Nathan thinks it isn't impossible that her night on stage at jackie's-her debut-is no more than a lark, a perverse holiday from the tedium of the Dalton School or Spence or her freshman year at NYU, or even her outlay against a lost bet made at her best friend's birthday party.
Nathan sits with his elbows cocked behind him on the bar. He believes he understands. The girl is putting them on. He enjoys a good joke, even at his own expense. Bills fall over her feet like leaves.
A tightness, though, has begun in the back of his -neck and slips over his head like a hood. It is the sight in the open door: Oliver Schreck in green blazer and cowboy boots strides in reaching for his belt. He unclips and waves his beeper with one hand while shaking Nathan's with the other. His palm like raw meat coated in pretzel crumbs.
"It's fucking Johnny again, Nathan. It's the fifth time in the last two hours. I thought you were going out there today."
His accent is heavy on the outer boroughs. The Bronx, Brooklyn. Thick-wristed, balding, under his blazer he has the thick, sloped shoulders and long dangling arms of a fighter. He knows the streets. It is easy to see he never left them, P.S. 132, Queens College, New York Law nights while working in his dad's dell.
Nathan shakes his head. "Too busy. I've been crazy all day."
Schreck waves for the bartender, pointing into Nathan's glass for another round. "Because his family really wants to know what happened to the bond money."
"It's in transit."
But Schreck isn't listening. He snatches at a bowl of pretzels. "Well, thanks for inviting me down. Haven't been here in ages."
"I didn't invite you, Oliver. You asked where I was going to be, and here you are."
Schreck smiles, his mouth full of mash. "So Coney Island. How'd that go?"
Nathan turns aside. "Zip."
"Zip? I thought-"
"Small fry. Nothing. I let it go."
"And getting you out there Sunday morning. What's Krivit thinking?