And then after two weeks of silence Gabriel received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a copy of the New York Post. The headline on the front page read, Deadly Sex Games of the Rich and Famous. There were three long articles on a murder, in a pay-by-the-hour Bronx motel next to the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx, of the leading corporate partner in the whitest of white-shoe New York law firms. According to the Post, Jerome Fletcher had been a frequent guest at the motel under the name Robert Smith. He was found strangled with a belt and stabbed fifteen times, mainly in the face. A seventeen-year-old black boy, who had arrived at the motel just minutes after Robert Smith checked in, was under arrest for the murder. He had several prior arrests for prostitution.
Jerome’s death was searing to Gabriel. He had lost, violently, a man he loved. He was also angry. Jerome’s cruel and abrupt suspension of the letters, e-mails, the texts, and the cell calls had wounded Gabriel profoundly in the two weeks before the killing. Gabriel had never been in love before Jerome and so had never been spurned or hurt in that way. He had no equipment in his life for dealing with a lover’s rejection, the abrupt and painful fact of separation; he had written a series of e-mails and texts, even a letter, to Jerome that expressed his longing, asked questions, and begged forgiveness for whatever he’d done that led Jerome to drop him. Gabriel devoutly believed that if anyone would be able to explain to him the vagaries and mysteries of love, and how to deal with the loss of love, it would have been Jerome. After all, Jerome had taught him how to run, how to think, how to relate to and assess other people, and how to spend quiet time listening to music and reading. Now Gabriel had no mentor. And no lover.
And in the weeks before the murder, Gabriel, for the first time, had experienced the torments and pettiness of jealousy. He had no doubt that Jerome had replaced him with another lover or lovers. He found himself imagining what Jerome was doing and how: Where did Jerome and the new boy or man spend time together? Who had been the seducer? How often were they making love?
It was three days after Gabriel read the articles in the Post and elsewhere, including the Internet and even the West Coast newspapers, that Detective Talbot called him.
“Is this Gabe Hauser?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a detective with the NYPD.”
Gabriel felt a rush of anxiety. He was eighteen. He had never once talked to a cop. “Yes,” he said.
“Need to talk to you about a buddy of yours, Jerome Fletcher.” In Talbot’s grating Brooklyn accent Gabriel for the first time heard the scorn reserved for gay men. The sarcastic words, the malicious tone, and the edge of mockery. A buddy of yours.
Gabriel asked, “Who?”
“Guy named Jerome Fletcher.”
Gabriel tried to sound respectful, even childlike. “He was a friend of mine.”
“Listen, Gabe, we know he was more than a friend. We got his e-mails, texts, voice mails to you, the works. Yours, too.”
Gabriel said nothing, thinking, Why would Carol Fletcher give that stuff to the police?
Detective Talbot said, “We want to help you, and you can help us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Can you come back to New York? We’ll pay for it.”
“I’ve got finals soon.”
“Your friend was dangerous, Gabe. You’re not the only boy he did what he did to you. Your friend knew other men who liked to do what he did. We want to find them, too. Mr. Fletcher was part of a little club of guys who liked boys.”
“What did Mr. Fletcher do?”
“Come on, Gabe. He raped you. He did it to others, including the boy in the motel.”
Raped. That word haunted him for years afterwards. When he was in medical school his course in psychiatry described any sex between an adult male and a boy under eighteen as rape and instructed on the troubled, terrible lives that the victims later suffered. Posttraumatic stress disorder, acute anxiety, manic depression, suicidal tendencies.
In truth, Gabriel had experienced none of that. Over time he did wonder what borders Jerome Fletcher crossed to bring himself to stand naked that day after their first run together and to initiate that first embrace, when Gabriel, his young torso almost hairless, was still gleaming and wet from his shower. As an adult, Gabriel never sought out boys, and there had to be some deep-seated reason for that restraint, some taboo that Jerome Fletcher had set aside and that ultimately killed him in a rancid motel room in the Bronx. Even as an adult, Gabriel wouldn’t apply the word rape to the two years he and Jerome had passionately pursued their afternoons together, often at the Regency on Park Avenue and sometimes in the West End Avenue apartment.
“I wasn’t raped, Mr. Talbot.”
He knew he was a continent away from New York and couldn’t be forced to return and at that stage in his life didn’t want to go back. New York was where his father had in effect barricaded himself in the grungy apartment on upper Broadway. And it was where the places were to which Jerome Fletcher had introduced him, such as the grand Metropolitan Museum, the cobblestone streets of Soho, the cozy warmth of the West Village and the vital, alert men striding on Christopher Street, many of them holding hands. And New York was where Jerome had met his squalid death.
“Sure you were, Gabe.”
Before Talbot could go on, Gabriel Hauser hung up. It was an act of courage, defying authority for the first time. Defiance of authority: he liked the feeling. He never heard from Talbot again.
Now, as they listened to the broadcast on CNN describing him as the Angel of Life, Cam asked, “What do you plan to do?”
“Sell my memoirs.”
Cam chuckled. “I’ll write them for you.”
“I’m headed back to the hospital. I came home to catch my breath, remember? I have work to do.”
Just as he was rising from the sofa, he was riveted by the scene on the television. The police commissioner, a woman whom he and his friends described as the cop who looked like Cher, announced that the police were searching for a man named Silas Nasar, a United States citizen “of Afghan descent.”
There on the screen was a picture of the man Gabriel knew both as Patient X52 and Silas Nasar: a face with a distinct, seahorse-shaped birthmark. It was a face, too, he had seen before: a grainy image sent from Kabul to his cell phone not long ago and then on the shattered steps of the Met and again in the emergency room at Mount Sinai.
Gabriel’s cell phone had slipped between the pillows on the sofa where he had been sleeping. As soon as he found it he scrolled to the contacts window and pressed the screen for Vincent Brown, who was still in the hospital. Brown answered on the first ring.
“Gabriel, how are you?” Brown’s cell had identified the incoming caller.
“Rested. And you? Why are you still there?”
“Hey, man, why leave? Where else can I have as much fun as this?”
“I’ll be back soon.”
Brown could be sardonic, like one of the doctors on M*A*S*H*. He said, “Why don’t you stay there and rest? I don’t think any more patients have come through the door since you left. It’s funny, but when there’s something like this all the usual street stuff we get just stops. No beatings, no stabbings, no overdoses. Strange way to get peace on the streets. If we had a big bomb going off every day, there’d be no more muggings.”
Gabriel asked, “Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“There’s a patient we only know as Patient X52. He’s the first guy I treated and then I saw him again in the ER.”
Brown had an immediate answer. “You signed him out just before you left.”