The wound that Ratface and his kitchen knife had given my side required seven stitches. Fortunately, nothing vital had been pierced. Another set of stitches had been required to close up the nasty gash on the back of my head, where I’d hit the ice. This was where the doctors were placing concern. My head. They were worried about brain swelling, a concern that had prompted Margo to blurt, “God, that’s all we need.”
Perversely, the several minutes I had spent partially under the ice were to thank for my head injury not being quite as threatening as it otherwise might have been. The East River had performed first aid on me, the bracing water freezing the swelling in its tracks. However, it had also taken the opportunity to fill my lungs with a gallon or so of its chilly swill. But that was the least of my problems. Mainly, it was the concussion that preoccupied the doctors. I was given a list of symptoms I needed to be on the lookout for. Trouble remembering things, disorientation, difficulty making decisions, headaches, irritability.
My doctor insisted that I remain in the hospital through the day and overnight for observation. I wanted to wrestle him on the matter, but he refused. My memory seemed to have holes in it. My mother and my half sister, Elizabeth, came by to see me, but I have no recollection of what we spoke about. Joe Gallo’s face appeared at my bedside, but when it vanished, so, too, did my memory of our conversation. I got calls from Peter Elliott and Michelle Poole and Megan Lamb, but General Margo refused to let me take them. Kelly Cole put in a call as well. Margo jotted her number on the back of one of my business cards and stuck it in my wallet for me.
“I don’t think you’re up for that kind of syntax right now.”
I felt remarkably better the next morning and was dressed and ready to go by the time the doctor came to check on me. He aimed a penlight in my eyes and had me follow his finger as he waved it like a symphony conductor; then he told me I was to rest, not drive a car, keep off alcohol for at least a week and also to refrain from sex. Margo was seated on the large windowsill, posing with her hands on her knees. “Thanks, Doc. You’re a pal.”
I lost the argument with Margo about staying at my place while I convalesced. Truth was, I put no real heart into my end of the argument. Neither Margo nor I had touched on the subject of our recent sword crossings. My injuries had forced a truce, and I was just as happy to keep the issue unspoken. Margo took me from the hospital to a tiny country-food-themed restaurant near Gramercy Park, where I ate a double helping of eggs and sausage and home fries. After breakfast, we went to Margo’s, where I picked up the phone, set it back down, then crawled onto the couch and slept until eight that night. Margo shoveled some pesto pasta into me. I showered, got into bed, made a lame pass at Margo when she joined me, then went out with the light.
I can’t say I felt like a million bucks in the morning. More like enough for a down payment on a small dump somewhere unpopular. But that would do. Margo dutifully retrieved a three-day-old copy of the Post that she’d been holding on to for me. “If your head was a hundred percent, you’d have asked for this already.”
She flipped the paper open to page five. There was a short article about my unscheduled trip into the East River. Accompanying the article was a police sketch of my alleged attacker. If he looked like anyone, he looked like Thurman Munson, the beloved Yankees catcher who was killed midseason in a plane crash a quarter century ago.
“This looks like Thurman Munson,” I said to Margo. “The guy who attacked me didn’t look like this. You look more like him than this does.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. You’re doing a fine job of patching things up.”
Margo had a meeting at ten o’clock. She made herself pretty, then climbed into a thick winter coat and a mighty fur hat. I told her, “You look good enough to tackle.”
“You’ll be careful,” she said, not even pretending to make a question of it. “I don’t do hospital visits twice in one week.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Lies,” she said, grabbing her keys. “All lies.”
After Margo left, I called my answering service. Among a dozen dumpable calls were ones from Kelly Cole (“I know a suffocated story when I hear one. I want to know what was going on. Call me.”) and Alan Ross. I dug Kelly’s number out of my wallet and tried it, but I hung up when I was delivered into Ms. Cole’s voice mail. I had better luck with Alan Ross.
“I read about your adventure in the paper,” the executive said after his secretary put me through. “How are you holding up?”
I gave him a brief status report. “The doctors are giving me another forty years minimum, so long as I play my cards right.”
Ross said that he would like to meet with me. “I have a business proposition to discuss.”
“When would you like to meet?”
“Today, if that’s possible. How does noon sound?”
Noon sounded fine. He gave me the midtown address of his office, and we hung up. I showered, careful to keep my various sets of stitches dry. Not exactly your fun-loving singing-in-the-rain kind of shower. On the checklist I’d gotten of possible concussion symptoms, I was feeling low-grade most of them. Especially the headache. Despite the siren song of the couch, I pulled on a thick Irish sweater, double-wrapped a scarf under my chin, shrugged into my bomber jacket and gingerly tugged a watch cap over my battered skull. A bastard wind hit me full force in the face as I exited Margo’s building. Across the street, Robin Burrell’s Christmas tree was gone from the bay window. The final witness shunted off.
MEGAN LAMB CAME OUT to the front desk to meet me. She looked as if she’d gone a few rounds in the ring with a determined kangaroo. If there weren’t exactly bags under her eyes, it was close. She saw me noticing. “Crappy night.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I don’t sleep much. But hey, you’re not looking so bad, considering. Word was you were half dead.”
“Half alive. It’s all a matter of viewpoint.”
“I understand you took a knife.”
I gave my kidney a light pat. “Came in through the side door. I was stupid, he was lucky. Won’t happen again. Trust me.”
I followed her down a corridor to a roomful of desks. Megan’s was in a corner. She dropped into the chair behind her desk and motioned for me to sit. Her phone rang and she took the call. The desk was a mess of papers and folders. The way they were spread clear across the large desk, it looked as if Megan had slept here overnight. There was a framed photograph of an attractive brunette posing next to a table piled high with summer produce. I angled it for a better look. I recognized the spot. The farmer’s market at Union Square. I also recognized the woman.
Megan ended her call. She followed my gaze. “That’s Helen.”
“I know.”
She picked up the photo and looked at it. “Her acupuncturist used to prescribe a visit to the farmer’s market every weekend. He had a whole energy theory going. The harvest. Locally grown foods. He said that just walking through the market was therapeutic. I could never quite catch it all. Kidney energy. I kept hearing about Helen’s kidney energy, whatever the hell that was.” She set the picture back down. “She swore by him. If he’d wanted to put his damn needles in her eyes, she’d have let him. He had her on this thing for a while where she stuck these fuses to the bottom of her feet and then I lit them for her. Some kind of heat acupuncture. Don’t tell me it sounds crazy, I already know. But guess what? Helen was the healthiest person you’d ever want to know, so what can I say? Every Saturday, religiously, off to Union Square to talk with her tomatoes.”
She picked up a pen and tapped it thoughtfully against the picture frame, then tossed the pen on the desk. “You make sense of it. Helen taught sixth-graders how to read and write while I run around for a living with a gun on my hip. But which one of us is still here to tell the story? When I think of how that woman used to worry herself sick over me. That’s a real laugh, isn’t it?”