Af t e r s o m e time Gavin came upon a wider road— a semitrailer roared past in the darkness— and ahead were the bright signs of chain restaurants, a shopping mall that he recognized. The mall had faux-Greek pillars around the entrance, a banner reading summer midnite madness!!!
sagging over the glass doors.
Gavin walked blinking into the mall's winter chill and found a bench under a plastic-and-fabric palm tree. It was a mall filled with elevators and mezzanines. He found himself gazing blankly up at the levels of other people, these stragglers under the spell of a late-night summer sale, sales clerks smiling fixedly from store entrances. What was the Star story? It had been published years ago but there was something in it that he thought might somehow pull everything together, if only he could remember the details. There had been a lost boy in the Bronx, a transaction. He hadn't worked on the story but he remembered his editor and another reporter talking about it, and what was startling was that after all these months, here under the halogen lights of this distant southern land, in this unrecognizable life, he still had his editor's cell-phone number programmed into his phone. He scrolled through the names, all these ghosts from his vanished life, let her name slide past on the screen three times before he summoned the courage to press the button that sent the call through the satellites to New York.
"I almost didn't pick up," Julie said. He imagined her in the night quiet of the Star newsroom, her stocking feet on her desk and her hand on her forehead, the far-off look she always had when she talked on the telephone.
"Hello, Julie," he said. He hadn't seen her since an afternoon months earlier, a different lifetime actually, when he'd risen from a conference-room table with her and the editor-in-chief and the directors of the personnel and legal departments staring at him and walked out of the Star building for the last time.
"You know where I work now?" Her tone was studiedly casual. "A website, Gavin. There isn't even paper involved anymore."
"You lost your job?"
"Most of us did."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I can't tell you how sorry I am." He could think of nothing else to say. He closed his eyes against the mall's cool light and pressed the palm of his hand against the plastic bench.
"I'm not even going to ask why you lied in your stories, Gavin. Nothing you could possibly say would make it better."
"I wasn't myself," he said. "I came a little undone."
"Just like that," Julie said, but she sounded deflated, the fight fading from her voice. It was, after all, one thirty in the morning. She sighed audibly and he reformatted his image of her into another, imagined office. What kind of space would a website occupy? He pictured a loft, an open workspace, her feet up on a different desk, the ceiling so high that shadows gathered up above her.
"Julie, I have to ask you something. It's about a story."
"You know, I've often wished over the past few months that you'd
come to me to ask about stories," she said. "But it seems a little late now, doesn't it?"
"You have no reason to believe me," he said, "but it's important. I wouldn't have called if it wasn't."
She was silent, but she didn't hang up.
"Do you remember two years ago, maybe two and a half, the paper covered a story about an abandoned boy in the Bronx? You worked on the story. I think there'd been a shootout or something, and the kid had somehow been part of it. There was some kind of drug connection."
"Theo," she said, after a moment. "Theo Cordell. He was seven."
"Will you tell me about it? I was thinking about it just now."
"You called me at, what, one thirty-five in the morning," Julie said, "to ask about a story I worked on two years ago?"
"I knew you'd be up."
"You knew I'd be up. Fine," she said, "why not? Let's tell each other stories. A seven-year-old boy was found wandering in the Bronx after a shootout. Turned out the boy's father was one of the men who'd been shot. He'd taken the kid along to some meeting, I can't remember all the details but it was a drop-off of some kind, at the other party's request."
"But why would the other person request that? Wouldn't a kid just get in the way?"
"The deal was, if either the product or the count was off, I can't remember which it was, the other party would take the kid."
"Was it off? The product, or the count?"
"One or the other," Julie said. "I can't remember now. The kid escaped in the confusion."
"So the kid came along to the transaction," Gavin said, "as, what, a kind of insurance policy?"
"Exactly," Julie said. "That's exactly it." She was animated now, the exhaustion fallen from her voice. She had a passion for people, for drama, for news. It seemed to him that she'd perhaps forgotten whom she was speaking to, or perhaps they'd managed to slip back through some invisible doorway into a time when he hadn't yet given her cause to despise him. "The detective told me it's not that uncommon. The theory is that people who'll risk their own lives won't risk their kids."
"Except Theo's father did."
"Well," she said, "you can't choose your parents."
"What happened to him?"
"To Theo? He went into foster care. I don't know what happened to him after that."
" Thank you for talking to me," he said. He wanted the call to end before she remembered who he was and became angry again, and also he was feeling ill.
" Good-night, Gavin."
He disconnected. His head was pounding and his arm was throbbing, an ache that he was afraid might stay with him forever. It was nearly two in the morning. He'd left Sasha and the girl at the diner two hours ago and whatever had happened there was almost certainly over by now. It was too late to do anything but he thought he finally understood.
How does this play out? A man from Utah arrives in a parking lot. Through the window he sees a girl in a white-and-pink dress. She's thirteen but she's small for her age, she could be ten, she could be Chloe, especially in that getup with her hair falling over her face, especially from a slight distance. Someone speaks to him and the arrangements are made. He sees through the diner window that the girl is being led toward the back door, his insurance. Someone's giving him money tonight. He's confident that the amount will be correct because the girl will be standing there when he counts it. And then?
The pain from his arm was overwhelming. Gavin left the mall and in the parking lot he realized that he was closer to Jack's house than he was to his apartment, so he set off walking in the direction of Mortimer Street.
Twenty-Three
Jack had been playing the saxophone on and off for a long time before he became aware of movement at the edge of the yard. Gavin was coming through the bushes at the side of the house.