I’m sorry you’re never going to see your husband or children or grandkids again.
Something grated within him at those facile, worthless apologies.
I’m sorry I lent a friend the fifty bucks you were planning on buying the kids’shoes with, honey. They’ll be okay for another two weeks.
As a child he’d learned to hate the words.
Sweat ran down his face. Far to their left, thin smoke rising above the trees showed the location of another downed plane. Shango wondered if he could determine whether it was a United flight by simply standing on top of an SUV and studying it through binoculars, and if his companion would feel obliged to ride over to the wreck to say I’m sorry to them, too.
Czernas persisted angrily, “We may not be able to do anything, but we don’t have to treat people like they don’t exist.”
“She exists, all right.” Shango braked beside a big silver-gray Washington Flyer in the number one lane. “She exists enough to have taken a liter of my water, which is what I’m going to have to give you to split the difference of what you’ll be short.” He slipped his hammer from the straps of the backpack, walked warily among the cars, as careful as if he were in one of the old New Orleans cemeteries, where the tombs cut your field of vision to about two feet. The rear wall of the cemetery backed onto the projects: the Park Service found dead tourists there all the time. The only difference was that the tombs weren’t made of metal and didn’t throw waves of heat.
“Well, you can keep your fuckin’ water!” Czernas yelled from the shoulder.
Shango paused beside the searing, silvery wall of the Flyer’s side. “I can’t even do that,” he said patiently. “Because if you collapse from dehydration, we stop, and since we can’t stop, I have to split my water with you.”
“I’ll manage.”
The fuck you will, thought Shango, but he let the quarrel drop. Yet it disturbed him, because he knew Czernas was right, or at least right in any context but this one. When you’re pinned down by enemy fire, you don’t sit there putting Band-aids on the bullet holes, you take out the goddam machine-gun nest and then care for the survivors.
The hot steel of the bus seared his bare knees and elbows where they brushed it. Even standing up on top, he couldn’t see past the trees in the direction of the rising smoke.
Fuck. Another side trip, and it was nearly noon. If Bilmer started walking to Washington-given that her plane had landed at least three minutes early-she wouldn’t follow the main road. They’d never find her.
He could see two more smoke columns, too, which might or might not also be planes.
Probably were. The countryside around Dulles would be littered with them. He put from his mind what that meant, in terms of death and lives shattered, of men and women like those the woman in green was trying to care for, with her two pitiful little liters of water, of people sitting in dark houses somewhere wondering if their mothers’ or husbands’ or grandkids’ plane had touched down before the lights went out.
“You think he can do it?” Czernas asked, when Shango returned to the shoulder and mounted his bike again. “Turn this around?”
“Do you?” Shango took a drink, held out one of his bottles to Czernas, who shook his head. Shango unceremoniously draped the strap around the aide’s neck. Czernas made a move to pull away, and their eyes met. Then the young man’s lips tightened, and he looked aside and adjusted the strap to sit better on his shoulder, and swung onto his bike.
“I don’t know,” he said after a time. “Even if whatever Bilmer found is complete. . The sooner we get it to him, the better. The quicker he can act. He has enemies, even in his own party; he always has.”
For some reason Shango heard Cox’s voice in his mind again, Things fuck up, and they start wreckin’ their own neighborhoods.
But he couldn’t even begin to explain to Czernas why he laughed.
NEW YORK
He hadn’t ever liked her, Sam reflected. But then, he hadn’t actually known her.
And now, surprisingly, she was his second guest.
The little neighbor girl, the dancer, sat mute in the corner, scanning the room with queer blue eyes. She was pallid as uncooked dough and sickly blue veins spiderwebbed out over her skin. He might have feared catching some awful illness from her, if he hadn’t seen Ely first. She was “becoming”. . something. If she didn’t fade away to nothing first, crumble to white ash like his precious notepads, now cold dust in the fireplace.
Stern crouched on his haunches watching Tina, who stared back at him silently, doll-like amid the curled and coifed bisque figures.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” he murmured contentedly. “Nothing at all.”
It was only because Sam was watching her closely, looking for it, that he saw the lightning flash of fear across her face before she submerged it, masked it with indifference. She’s trying to be brave.
Sam clucked his tongue. “We don’t need her.” And he didn’t know, really, if he was saying this in an attempt to protect her or because he resented her presence; in some perverse way, he felt possessive of Ely’s attention. The taunts, the malice, the contempt-at least they made him visible.
“Speak for yourself,” Stern said acidly, and Sam felt the sharp prick of his scorn. Stern drew closer to his unwilling guest. “I thought I was a solo dance. Turns out I’m a pas de deux.”
Tina raised her head defiantly. “I’m not like you. I won’t be like you.”
“Look in a mirror, child. Oh, I admit, you don’t have all the luxury extras yet, but give it time.” Stern eyed himself in the aged wall mirror, its silvering half fallen away. “Symmetry, matched and balanced, the two of us. . How little faith I showed, to think all this would unfold and I’d be left alone.”
“You weren’t alone, Ely,” Sam demurred.
Stern’s eyes slid over to him, narrowed to slits. “Sorry, you’re not my type.” He cast a critical gaze about the room. “And, frankly, I’m used to better.”
“You have to change with the times.” Sam heard the edge of anger in his voice. He had barely slept since Ely had arrived, and he was finding it increasingly hard to hide his feelings.
“That’s just what I’ve been thinking.” Stern rose and strode to the window, swept aside a curtain. Twilight was falling-“magic hour,” Sam had heard it called-and its melancholy light washed over Stern’s face, emphasizing its monumental, grotesque beauty.
“Know why most people hire a lawyer? They don’t want justice. They want more.” His saurian head swiveled to regard Sam, and his twisted smile revealed ivory scalpel teeth. “I ran a business. I can run a mob.”
Sam felt his stomach clench, a wave of nausea surge into his throat and mouth. “But if they see you. .”
“Ever catch Cyrano de Bergerac? After she fell in love with his ideas, she didn’t care what his nose looked like.” Stern let the curtain drop, his eyes burning into Sam. “He just needed a front man.”
Sam remembered the grade school play Mother had made him appear in, as J. Pierpont Morgan, of all things. He had opened his mouth to utter the first line and had vomited in front of them all.
And now, to venture out onto those riot-torn, killing streets-a front man-so naked, so vulnerable. .
He said, pleading, “Ely, we’re safe here.”
“Mr. Mole wants to stay in his mole hole.” Stern’s lips curled contemptuously. “Well, I need room to spread my wings.”
Astonished, Sam heard himself say, “No.”
“No?” Stern’s response was immediate and terrible, his anger igniting like a firestorm. Before Sam could shriek or move at all, Stern was upon him, grasping either side of his head in immense, taloned hands.