Nathan looks at her. He pictures the house, at the end of a cul-de-sac, hidden behind a stand of thick trees and brush. "How did they know the house?"
Amparo laughs pleasantly. "How many times do I have to tell you that I know everything? I know you don't believe me, but I do. All of us, we all know where you live."
Then as if to prove it Nathan's telephone chirps in his jacket pocket and Amparo points and rolls her eyes like a wife who's seen too much, who knows it is too late so who chooses not to see. "Aren't you going to answer your telephone call from your little friend?”
“Friend?”
Amparo taps her temple.
The chirping ceases, the beeper vibrates. The weight of the girl's gaze blankets him, with comfort, or suffocation, with some malignant combination of the two. He unclips his beeper and holding it up to the light fingers the controls and once more brings out of its memory Serena's latest bulletin.
"I know you went home to see her," Amparo says. Nathan looks up. "See who?"
"Not the one who calls you."
"Then who?"
"The burro perra. Mujerzuela. The cunt." She smiles. "You went to that apartment where you leave her and that poor boy. This child that you have. That you keep in that small, dark place all the time alone. How kind of you, Mr. Stein. To me you should be so kind." Amparo's eyes flare with self-congratulation. "So," she says, "how is she?"
Nathan smiles woodenly. His hand comes to rest upturned on the table, releasing what is alrea y gone.
"She is fine."
Amparo shakes her head, smiling meanly. She puffs her lips with spite: "She is dead." She plucks at the cuff of Nathan's sleeve. It is the arm without the cuts but Nathan gets her point. "And this," she says, "was not even your big mistake."
The door swings open and the guard points at Amparo. "Phone call.”
"Maybe it is Roberto," she says, and stands. But before she goes out she whispers something to the girl that Nathan cannot make out, then locks eyes with her and nods, something decided or sealed. By the time Amparo is gone the girl's eyes have located the bulge in Nathan's jacket pocket. Tears dried, instantly expert, she sweeps her head back and forth, toward the closed door, over the empty supervisor's seat, the abandoned control booth in the hallway.
"Manana te saco de la carcel," Nathan says.
But news of her imminent release does not change her expression for the better. He says, "The five hundred dollars." He has decided to give it to her himself. But she is still looking at him coldly. She is concerned with matters more pressing, more immediate. He withdraws the packet wrapped in butcher's paper and drops it on the table and stands up and away. In one motion, a plastic card appears in the girl's hand, a straw. The lines are drawn, then done, and she sits back. The paper bag lies unpeeled on the table. The girl's eyes, glazed, lock on a point halfway between Nathan's neck and his belt. Her nose runs and she prods it with her knuckle. Nathan leans forward and slips the straw into a nostril. His eyes slowly close. A thin line of blood draws its way from inside his nose to his lip and pools there on the ridge. He reaches for it with his tongue and tries to forget about his body, thinking instead about the atmosphere, the various hums; the low one, like distant traffic, of the prison's air circulation; the high whine of the fluorescent lights. He sits waiting for the plane to land. For Claire to come to him with a key in her hand, maneuvering like a ghost of mercy down the roadless beach-
But a finger, not his, draws along the rim of his lips, spreading the blood, and with one eye open Nathan sees the girl hold up her pinky, red-stained. And what does he do as she kneels before him, as she tugs at the belt and withdraws the spindle and unloops the polished leather, running it out through her fingers as if measuring it for some later purpose? As he is taken out into the air he considers Amparo's letter, a threat being made good, a promise actually kept. He lets this happen. He is always letting it happen. As he is letting it all happen now. Briefly he opens his eyes, like a man asleep who wakes from a dream of misery to an even greater affliction.
The girl stands. She wipes her mouth, where there is a small smile. "Bueno," she says.
Amparo, who has been waiting and watching on the other side of the glass, gives him a little nod.
Across the prison causeway, he sees the red car parked beside the gate. There is a second car parked behind it. Two of the secret agents, or whoever they are-there are three now-are patrolling the shoulder. One is shorter than the other, and thicker, older; they are like father and son. The third is chatting with the guard. They all stop when they see Nathan's beaten 4x4, and when he passes they get in their cars and follow one behind the other.
He retrieves his cell phone and he calls her now. "No, Serena, I'm not being paranoid. No, I don't think everyone is out to get me."
She is cynical. She tells him that the men following him are just out for a drive. She says she is certain of it. She then hangs up. How, Nathan wonders, can she be so certain?
The car rocks side to side, the broadside wind ripping like cloth. Street salt and debris ping the glass. In the well in back Baron snorts and waves through his dreams. In the rear-view mirror, a pair of headlights maintains his pace exactly. He slows, and they gain a little, then drop back. He looks ahead, up, at the same old factory along the expressway stamped BARCLAY BARCLITE FURNITURE CO. in erratic red neon, dark, out of business for years now, the sign left on by some mistake. It is crowned now with a sedan import, its caption WHY STRIVE FOR PERFECTION WHEN YOU CAN DRIVE IT? as long as a city block, subtitled by a digital readout, 21'F… 12:54 A.M… -6'C… 12:55 A.m. The whole thing seems to him a cryptic message that our possessions are really negations of our actual selves that remain more primitive than we think. The numerical readout merely the meter of our lack of control, a high-concept call for religion.
"I don't believe it." He pulls abruptly onto the breakdown lane and peers up through the windshield. Ropes and scaffolding breach the Barclay Barclite walls, partially hiding a half-finished billboard draping across the entire width and height of three floors. The message beneath a remnant of a campaign by the NYPD, splashed across the back of buses all over town:
1-800-COP-SHOT
$10,000 REWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO
now overridden by
BUS ACCIDENT? SLIP AND FALL?
HOSPITAL MALPRACTICE? POLICE ABUSE?
SEXUAL HARASSMENT?
WHY HURT?
YOU ARE ENTITLED TO COMPENSATION
YOU ARE ENTITLED TO MONEY
EARLY RETIREMENT PLANS AVAILABLE
CALL NOW
PAY NOTHING UNLESS SUCCESSFUL
SCHRECK & STEIN ASSOCIATES
1-800-PAY-BACK
Primitive pictographs-stick figure falling, stick figure in head wrap and sling, stick figure fending off stick-figure assailant-bullet the possibilities.
Nathan crosses the Harlem River, he crosses town. A horsedrawn carriage emerges from the park, pausing at a traffic light and moving on past cars pebbled with snow and mud and road grease, its robed and bowler-hatted driver and an old, distinguished couple blanketed to the knees, their heads and shoulders finely powdered, and the stiffly prancing horse smoking from the flanks. So much of another time that Nathan grips harder on the steering wheel and casually clears his throat to convince himself that here he sits and here he breathes. A taxicab sits at an oblique angle to the curb, its nose buried in a snowbank. A white rag hangs from its cracked windows, no signal for help from the cold but a sign of surrender in hope of a general amnesty.
Book open on her chest, unread, water untouched, Claire looks through the window to the simple pity she'd once felt for Nathan's mother. Not daughterly empathy and not sorrow, but pity laced with contempt. To Milton flaunting his women, and she and Nathan actually having drinks with some, dinners with others. All that time wondering at Nathan's mother's blindness. How could she not know? Though of course she did. And of course that blindness returned to Claire as a kind of thin strength, the sort that comes with mere survival.