"Look, Chaplain-" Nathan says.
"Reverend is fine."
" This-" Nathan gestures to Maria's door. "This isn't my fault. I didn't do this."
Deftly, Cleary pats Nathan over the heart, summoning his mercy: "We have to take care of what we have left. I can't forgive you."
"Forgive me for what? She did this to me."
Cleary bows his head.
"So everything, then?" Nathan says. "I'm responsible for every thing?
"Only for what you do. We do what we can but then it's ours to keep. You can't keep cutting your losses, Nathan. Eventually, there is nothing left to cut."
Nathan looks to his wrist for the time but the watch face is a blur.
"Isn't the reason you came down here that you really wanted to see?" Cleary says. "You know, what it's like, what it'll be like for you in a few months or, God willing, a few years? Don't you think Maria had that in mind, too?"
Nathan is tapping his foot, looking up, away, anywhere.
The priest regards with doubt what's left of his cigarette then stubs it out against the handle of one of the square steel doors.
"Okay, let me ask you this," he says behind his lighter's flame. "Do you believe in God?"
Nathan wants to laugh but can't find the spark. "Should I?"
Cleary's eyes latch on to Nathan's, his curious gaze narrowing to a hostile glare, rounding out to something like horror.
"So what about you?" Nathan asks. "You believe in God?"
Staring at Cleary's pinched collar Nathan is not sure the question is off the mark. Something about the priest is smug to the point of defensiveness, insecurity, self-convincing. Still, Nathan knows he's committed the cardinal sin, drummed over and over by Sid Frankel into his head: don't ask a question in court you don't know the answer to. Don't hunt, don't fish, don't set your self up for an ambush.
But Cleary turns out to be less savvy than he first gives off. "I do right now," is the meager answer.
At first Nathan is startled by the ease with which Cleary offered that up, this nugget that seems to carry the weight if not of truth, then of honesty. Nathan is impressed. "But not always?"
Cleary toes the floor. "No, not always." His head comes up inhaling, the cords of his neck unwound, nostrils flared. Unconsciously, he has moved back a step. "Why do you ask?"
Nathan looks skittishly to Maria's door, as if she could answer for him. Though now he's not sure which address is hers; his eyes skip from one compartment to the other.
Boiler rumble surges beneath Nathan's feet, or the subway, or tectonic wind. The mounds of dead bumper-to-bumper along the walls seem to lurch, inching forward. He grits his teeth against the chill, blinks at the sting in his eyes.
"You're sweating, Nathan."
Nathan clears his throat. "What about Hell?"
Cleary doesn't hesitate: "Hell I believe in."
Up and outside in the day, a veil of thin rain, Nathan circles the block for his car, his overcoat billowing behind him. His slow aimless orbit. The car is nowhere. Tapping his coat pockets for his pills, he uncaps them, pouring nothing into his palm. He shakes the empty vials, tosses them into the street, under the cars, and follows after them, wading into the twitchy morning traffic. Endless strings of abuse are turned on him from all sides. He cups his hands over his ears and all disappears but the exploding sun. Church bells, samba music, the concussion of fireworks leaping off the Coney Island beach like mortars, their harlequin rainbow umbrellas reflected in a pair of raven-black eyes narrowing at him out of a gargoyle's head. Hideous pariah. Two men squatting against the hospital's retaining wall, blackened and shredded blankets and feet of gauze, peer over like birds of prey. In the silence someone touches Nathan's shoulder. When he turns no one is there.
Errol Santos leans back in his old chair. Barbados is walking quickly toward him. The two are surrounded by empty desks. In the corner a civilian secretary attends to her nails. Faces are everywhere, primitive sketches and Christmas photos and dated school portraits pinned and Scotch-taped to the walls and peering up from the desks atop piles of more faces. The back edge of Santos's desk is layered with stacks of manila folders, unsolved cases, cases nearing solution, and cases, like his sister's, that have just begun. The office has one window, but it looks out on the brick face of the building next door, offering little hint of actual outside, even less of sky.
"Are you going to tell me what Stein said to you last night?" Barbados asks.
Santos looks woodenly at the photo atop the pile on his desk, as though the figure in it will offer some reply: Isabel lying in the wan light of the crime scene photographer's flash, seaweed strewn through her hair like a crown of wildflowers, the shredded cloth of her thin dress clinging across her cold nipples and across her pouched belly and thighs. Her blue lips parted. Then there is nothing for him to look at except the place where the body had lain, a scooped and smooth bed of sand.
“Sign out, Errol. Go home. This is not helping."
"What do they have?"
"You know you're off this case. You should be working something else, probably shouldn't be here at all."
"Tell me what they have."
"It's all in the folder. But it's not much. They think they might have hair. They think they have a time, but that's it."
"Blood?"
Barbados shakes his head. "And the fingernails were clean, like you saw."
"What was the time?"
"Twelve to three the night before."
Santos nods. "She was still with Stein. They have a cause?"
"Errol."
"Just say it."
"Her neck was snapped."
Santos drags his hand over his face. What he can't stop considering is the possibility that it took her a while to die. He can't stop seeing it. He looks around the room.
"She knew something," he says. "She had to. Krivit knows more than he's saying."
"The rat smells bad," Barbados agrees.
"Cleaned up afterward to keep the innocent innocent," Santos mumbles to himself.
"Look at me, Errol. If you know something, now is the time to say it. I don't know what the man said to you, but go home, leave your gun in your desk. Don't go down with this guy."
The pinned and taped faces Santos passes watch through the windowframes their photographs make. As he goes by they turn and follow him with their eyes.
Rocking side to side in a subway car sprinkled sparsely with riders, he watches the subterranean world pass like a filmstrip through the windows. Graffittied darkness then flashes of light, the subway car, empty in Brooklyn, filling as the train heads uptown through lower Manhattan. Old people laboring past the poles with their plastic bags of toys; black families with sleepy children teetering in their eggcup plastic seats. A transit cop going past, pulling himself from pole to pole. A leak sprung in the tunnel showers the car, the beads of street water racing across the windowpanes as if from a sudden rain. Fulton Street, City Hall, like various small towns each stop a station in a life Santos can identify with a day, a night, a face. Three A.m. rides in subway cars like this, giddy-drunk with Nathan and Claire swinging on the poles, the three of them singing, the two of them pawing at each other. Errol the dateless third wheel, the loyal butler, Nathan's man Friday. He has known Nathan, looked on him with adoration, all his life. He has coveted his woman, then divorced his own to take her. Which makes him what?-an agent provocateur, a double agent, assassin. Where do his allegiances lie? He feels himself reaching back for ancient guidance. Looking for answers, he squints upward at the illuminated advertisements overhead. Remedies for hemorrhoids, foot fungus, ripped earlobes, unwanted pregnancy, male pattern baldness, bikini wax, allergies, fecal urgency, diminutive and surplus (mostly female) body parts, the ailments, the plagues, the toll-free numbers to make it all go away. What of emptiness, what of ruin?