After that, things were better between them.
“My father told you all this?”
“No,” said Jimmy. “She told me, after he died. She said you were all that she had left of him, but that wasn’t why she loved you. She loved you because you were her child. She was the only mother you knew, and you were the only son she had. She said that she’d sometimes forgotten that, or didn’t want to believe it, but as time went by she realized the truth of it.”
He got up to go to the bathroom. I remained seated, thinking of my mother in her final days, lying transformed in her hospital bed, so altered by the disease that I hadn’t recognized her when I’d first entered her room, believing instead that the nurse had made some mistake when she directed me down the corridor. But then she made some small gesture in her sleep, a raising of her right hand, and even in her illness the grace of it was familiar to me, and in that moment I knew it was her. In the days that followed, as I waited for her to die, she had only a few hours of lucidity. Her voice was almost gone, and it seemed to pain her to speak, so i Rmed monstead I read to her from my college texts: poetry, short stories, snippets from the newspaper that I knew would interest her. Her father would come over from Scarborough, and we would talk to each other as she dozed between us.
Did she consider, as she felt the darkness clouding her consciousness like ink through water, telling me all that she had withheld from me? I am sure that she did, but I understand now why she did not. I think that she may also have warned my grandfather to say nothing, because she believed that if I knew the truth then I might begin digging.
And if I began digging, I would draw them to me.
Jimmy went to the bathroom. When he returned, I saw that he had splashed water on his face, but he had not dried it properly, and the drops looked like tears.
“On that last night…,” he began.
They were in Cal’s together, Jimmy and Will, celebrating Jimmy’s birthday. Some things had changed in the Ninth, but they were still the same in many ways. There were galleries where once there had been dive bars and deserted buildings, and shaky underground movies were being shown in empty storefronts that were now functioning as avant-garde theaters. A lot of the old places were still there, although their time too would soon come to an end, some of them with shadows cast over the memories of them. At Second and Fifth, the Binibon was still serving greasy chicken salad, but now people looked at the Binibon and recalled how, in 1981, one of its customers had been Jack Henry Abbott, an ex-con who had been championed by Norman Mailer, who had worked for his release. One night, Abbott got into an argument with a waiter, asked him to step outside, and then stabbed him to death. Jimmy and Will had been among those cleaning up the aftermath, the two men, like the precinct that they worked, both changed yet still the same, altered in aspect but still in uniform. They had never made sergeant, and they never would. That was the price they had paid for what had happened on the night Caroline Carr died.
They were still good cops, though, one of the small cadre of city, transit, and housing officers who did more than the minimum, fighting the general strain of apathy that had infected the force, in part a consequence of a widespread belief that the suits and brass at the Puzzle Palace, as One Police Plaza was known to the rank and file, were out to get them. It wasn’t entirely untrue either. Make too many drug busts and you attracted the attention of your superiors for all the wrong reasons. Make too many arrests and, because of the overtime payments required to process them and see them through court, you were accused of taking money from the pockets of other cops. Best to keep your head down until you could cash out at twenty. The result was that there were now fewer and fewer older cops to act as mentors to the new recruits. By virtue of their years on the force, Jimmy and Will practically qualified as village elders. They had become part of the plainclothes Anticrime Unit, a dangerous assignment that involved patrolling high-crime areas waiting for signs that something was about to go off, usually a gun. For the first time, both were talking seriously about cashing out.
Somehow, they had found a quiet corner away from the rest, cut off by a raucous throng of men and women in business suits celebrating an office promotion. After that night, Will Parker would be dead, and Jimmy Gallagher would never set foot in Cal ’s again. After RAnthro Will’s death, he found that he could not remember the good times that he had enjoyed there. They were gone, excised from his memory. Instead there was only Will with a cold one at his elbow, his hand raised to make a point to Jimmy that would remain forever unspoken, his expression changing as he looked over Jimmy’s shoulder and saw who had entered the bar. Jimmy had turned around to see what he was looking at, but by then Epstein was beside them, and Jimmy knew that something was very wrong.
“You have to go home,” said Epstein to Will. He was smiling, but his words gave the lie to his smile, and he did not look at Will as he spoke. To a casual observer, he would have appeared only to be examining the bottles behind the bar, choosing his poison before he joined the company. He wore a white raincoat buttoned to the neck, and on his head was a brown hat with a red feather in the band. He had aged greatly since Jimmy had last seen him at Caroline Carr’s funeral.
“What’s wrong?” asked Will. “What’s happened?”
“Not here,” said Epstein as he was jostled by Perrson, the big Swede who was the linchpin of the Cabaret Unit. It was a Thursday night, and Cal ’s was buzzing. Perrson, who stood taller than anyone else in the bar, was handing shots of booze over the heads of those behind him, sometimes baptizing them a little along the way.
“God bless you, my son,” he said as someone protested. He guffawed at his own joke, then recognized Jimmy.
“Hey, it’s the birthday boy!”
But Jimmy was already moving past him, following another man, and Perrson thought that it might have been Will Parker, but later, when questioned, he would claim to have been mistaken, or confused about the time. It might have been later when he saw Jimmy, and Will could not have been with him, because Will would have been on his way back to Pearl River.
It was cold outside. The three men kept their hands thrust deep into their pockets as they walked away from Cal’s, from the precinct house, from familiar faces and speculative glances. They did not stop until they came to the corner of St. Mark’s.
“You remember Franklin?” said Epstein. “He was the director of the Gerritsen Clinic. He retired two years ago.”
Will nodded. He recalled the worried-looking man in the small office, part of a conspiracy of silence that he still did not fully understand.
“He was killed at his home last night. Someone cut him badly to make him talk before he died.”