Surrender, New York

  But the easing of my fears about Marcianna did not similarly put my mind at rest about other issues, issues that kept me in the rocky den that was my companion’s home that night, smoking and wondering until close to dawn about dark questions meant for dark places: and Marcianna’s den—which I had modeled on photos of kopjes, those lonely formations of rock that rise suddenly and mysteriously from the African savannah to offer shelter to a wide variety of animal life—was an all-too-perfect place for such ruminations. Marcianna, of course, had done all she could to revive me, by urging me toward our usual forms of roughhousing; but when it became clear to her how very troubled and spent I was, she lay down with a groan and offered me her side as a pillow.

  I awoke to the thunderous sound of Marcianna purring deeply beneath my right ear, which was flat against her chest; and, looking up, I saw Ambyr, dressed in that same midnight blue Chinese robe, stroking the lightly spotted white fur of Marcianna’s chest and throat. It was an unexpected sight, to say the least: I had no idea, in my sleepy state, how Ambyr had even gotten into the enclosure, much less navigated the deliberately awkward passageway that led into the den. Yet it was also an amazing surprise, to see the two great beauties of my life together, Ambyr whispering to Marcianna as she moved her hands up and behind the rounded, furry ears, Marcianna pushing her head up and into those delicate hands to urge Ambyr to scratch even harder.

  “What…?” I mumbled, transfixed by the sheer wonder of the sight. “What’s happening?”

  Those opaque violet eyes turned on me, and Ambyr smiled, never having looked so beautiful. “Well,” she said softly. “Somebody’s finally awake. She puts up with a lot, Trajan—you were snoring.”

  “Was I?” Trying to sit up, I made it only to one elbow. “I was awake. Most of the night…”

  “So Mike tells me,” Ambyr said, giving Marcianna a last brush and then moving my way. “That was a horrible story—really horrible…” Her remorse seemed genuine enough. “And you really think the guy is still up in the hills?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said as she sat astride me, placing my arms around her after she’d undone her robe, revealing that she was naked beneath it. “They could catch him, if they wanted to,” I breathed. “But somebody clearly doesn’t…”

  “But he won’t get to Derek, right?” she said, even more earnestly. “Promise me that.”

  “I can’t promise anything, Ambyr,” I said. “But we’ll do what we can.” Then I remembered something far more elementary: “Say, how did you get in here, anyway?”

  “Shhh,” she noised, moving her lips to my ear as she started to undo my clothes. “Some detective you are—Mike let me in, he said you needed me. And you do…” As if on cue, Marcianna very carefully withdrew from beneath my head and then wandered out the entrance to the den, neither angry nor jealous, but simply curious to see what the day held. “I can’t believe that you spent the night here, and didn’t come to me,” Ambyr went on. “After a night like that…” By now our bare torsos were pressed tight to one another, and in another moment Ambyr had the last of both my clothes and her robe removed. “It isn’t healthy, Mister-Doctor-Man,” she went on. “That’s what we’re here for, after all, or have you forgotten—to comfort each other…”

  It seems self-serving to say that no man, given the circumstances that prevailed that morning, and coming off of so long a term of painful deprivation, could have resisted the remarkable girl who had swept into my life so forcefully; yet it’s true. Intellectual evaluations would only come later, however, when the passion between us had subsided and we lay on the den floor, protected atop my outstretched clothes. The easing of our mutual hunger then allowed such cogitations to slip back into my mind; and one in particular sparked the rest: Derek, it kept repeating; and when that was done, Context, you idiot! My eyes shot open, as in a rush I began to quickly put together some of the pieces that I had been helpless to make full sense of the night before.

  Maintaining control over that assembly, however, was vital: “I’m sorry you’re so worried about Derek,” I said carefully. “You must have known him since he was just a kid, hunh? Maybe always.”

  “No,” she murmured simply, letting her lips linger on my neck. “They only moved next door a few years before I got sick, so he was—God, I forget—six or seven, maybe? And it’s funny: no matter how much I know, in my head, how he changed when he got older, I still mostly see him the way I did then: following me around like a lost little puppy, wherever I went.” Of course, I mused silently. “Always helping with things, always trying to be cheerful. In a way, he was my friend before he was Lucas’, because it took Lucas a while to adjust, and to learn not to make fun of him. After that, they got to be like brothers, but…Well, shit, you know. I just can’t stand the idea of him being in danger, because of that—because of how I still see him…” Because of context, I reflected; because of your perspective. Then another rush of ideas shot through my cranium, sparks that were fanned into flame when Ambyr went on: “Oh, by the way—speaking of Mike, you’ll never guess where he is, right now.”

  “He’d better be in that plane working,” I breathed heavily, trying to laugh a little.

  “While you lie up here taking advantage of the poor blind girl?” Ambyr replied, able herself to laugh quietly. “He is not. He’s in Albany, helping Dr. Chang move back into her apartment from the hospital. Seems like, without telling any of us, he’s been slipping off for early morning visits to Albany Medical to see her—and it also seems like maybe she’s starting to take him seriously. Now…” Ambyr moved her head up to kiss me and speak into my lips. “I wonder where he ever got that idea?”

  “He watches too much TV,” I told her; and was not entirely shocked to receive a sharp slam into my chest for my trouble.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” she said, smiling. “You know perfectly well that he got it from you.”

  “That’s right,” I said with a nod. “From me and Marcianna…”

  And that time I really paid: after jabbing me in the ribs, she sat up on her knees and began to squeeze my hips with her thighs, tight enough to cause a sharp pain on my left side. “I warned you,” she said, smiling a little sadistically. “Remember which one of us has got two good legs, and—” But I had already grunted in pain, loud enough to bring Marcianna back into the den in a confused state. “Oh, I get it,” Ambyr went on, hearing those big padding paws and the accompanying panting. “Call your secret weapon in, hunh? Your protector? Pretty lame, buster.”

  “Yeah, well, so am I,” I said, at which Ambyr suddenly threw herself on me and apologized genuinely, though she couldn’t help but keep laughing as she did. And then the chain of all my electric shocks suddenly became completed: Ambyr’s mention of Mike’s activities had put the last piece of the solution to my dilemma in place. “Wait!” I said suddenly, causing even Marcianna to turn. “Ambyr, you just said that Mike’s gone to help Gracie—did he say anything else about it?”

  Ambyr raised herself again, sensing that I was serious, and shrugged. “Just that he might pick her brain a little about the case.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said, full of new determination and trying to sit up; but Ambyr was having none of it, and kept her legs locked on me. “Come on, Ambyr, I beg of you—I think I may have just had an epiphany about the case.”

  “Tell me you love me, and then tell me what it is,” she insisted, although she had already sensed enough earnestness in my voice to cause her to begin to gather her robe.

  Her requests, seemingly innocent, were wrenchingly hard for me: the first brought me directly back to my crisis of the night before, almost dispelling the out-of-time experience we had just shared in the den; while compliance with the second was, at least for the moment, dangerous. However, as I always had with Ambyr, I pushed danger aside, and did as she asked on both counts. In response, she faced me with an expression that was somewhat difficult to decipher: she seemed happy to let the first statement stand, but the second she could
not but question.

  “I thought you said that was a terrible idea,” she observed, tightening her robe as she stood up. “Back when Mike first suggested it.”

  “And it was,” I said. “Back when Mike first suggested it. Now? It may be just the thing.”

  “Trajan,” Ambyr said, with apparently real concern. “Are you sure it will be safe?”

  “Frankly,” I answered, securing my prosthesis, dusting off my outer garments, and then getting into them, “I’m not sure anything to do with this case is safe, anymore.” I grabbed her by the hand and pulled her toward the den entrance, as Marcianna gleefully ran beside us, anticipating some sport in the grass of the enclosure. Once out in the glaring sun of morning, however, I only shouted down to the hangar, knowing that at least one person would be there: “Yo! Lucas!”

  The kid soon shot out, obviously having leapt from the hatch of the JU-52 to the ground and still not having gained his balance, focused as he was on a half-eaten banana. “Yo!” he called back.

  “Get hold of Mike, I don’t have my phone!” I told him. “He’ll be at Gracie’s, so call his cell, and tell him to get his ass back here now, that it’s four-alarm important!”

  “Right!” Lucas said, disappearing again to head for the phone in the plane.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Ambyr said, smiling as she clung to me on our way down to the gate. “He’ll kill you for cutting his romantic day short.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said. “He’ll want to, but his ego will take over pretty quick…”

  Once at the gate, Marcianna was disappointed to see us exit without her, but I explained that we’d be back for our usual walk (a word she knew well) that afternoon, and then took her breakfast from the cooler and tossed it over to her. She had been too worried to eat the night before, but now, with the worry seemingly gone, she snatched up the bit of beef studded with supplements and trotted back toward the high grass to consume it.

  Over the course of that day, I had to do something that I had known from the beginning was inevitable (although I had never suspected, even in my worst-case scenarios, that it would become necessary in the way and for the reasons that it did): I had to separate Ambyr and Lucas from the main thrust of the investigation. Nor could I tell them why, or even attempt to lie: the first would have been calamitous, and the second Ambyr would almost certainly have detected, precipitating an even greater disaster. So I simply let them know that the discussions I needed to have, first with Mike and then with others yet to be selected, were ones to which they could not be privy, because of academic ethics. Lucas howled in protest, claiming, quite fairly, that he had not come this far only to be shut out at a key moment. I continued to tell him, however, that Mike and I had to observe some professional principles, not just as investigators, but as teachers.

  “But I still don’t get it,” Lucas said, making his last stand as he stood with Ambyr on the porch that evening after dinner, while I got ready to head up the hill to the hangar. There, Mike was already waiting, having just returned from Albany and dinner with Gracie but not yet knowing why. “I mean, okay,” the kid went on, “they’re your students, but I, at least—and don’t you whack me, sis, you know I’m right—I’ve been around this case a lot longer than they have, and I’ve sat through the courses for like, weeks! So I can’t listen, just because one of them might say something they’ll be sorry for?”

  “You’re not always speedy, kid, but you do get there, eventually,” I answered. “Yeah, that’s about it. Our jobs at the university are still our main concern—we can’t play around with that. And the students won’t be given enough information to screw with: they’ll give us perspective on a hypothetical case. We need it, and there’s nobody else we can get it from.”

  “But…” Lucas simply wouldn’t surrender. “If it’s just hypothetical—”

  “Give it up, baby brother,” Ambyr said, before the kid could argue further. “If it’s going to help the case, and help Derek…” She flicked her cane toward my backside. “Go ahead, baby. I’ll keep this one’s big nose out of it—just do what you have to do.”

  Making my way up into the JU-52, I found a none-too-happy Mike, who began quizzing me on what idea could be so important that it required not only his cutting his romantic evening short, but the Kurtzes’ being excluded from it, as well. I fell into the pilot’s seat and, at long last, outlined for the first time my complete plan to follow his suggestion, made in jest early on in the case, that we use selected members of our classes as sounding boards to gain additional insights. I saw his face fill first with the involuntary pride I’d expected, then watched it change to a much deeper confusion.

  “Hang on a second, L.T.,” he said, starting to rub at his hair. “When I brought that idea up, as I recall, we were at a little bit of a dead end. But we’re not, now. We know what our next moves are, and they all lead in the direction you wanted: straight south, to the big money in the big city.”

  “They may, Mike,” I replied evenly. “But they may lead in other, less welcome directions, as well. Besides, even if the idea of heading south is confirmed, our record in that kind of showdown isn’t exactly great: 0-and-1, unless I’m missing something. You don’t think maybe we could afford to bounce our next moves, along with our overall speculations, off of some pretty exceptional minds, and gain some valuable perspectives on the case?”

  Mike had to think about that one. “So,” he eventually said, after lighting a pair of cigarettes, handing me one, and tossing a fairly thick file in my lap with affected nonchalance, “when you say ‘exceptional minds,’ I assume you’re not talking about our students generally?”

  “Of course not,” I answered, picking up the dossier that Mike had apparently been waiting for this or some similar occasion to reveal: UNNAMED CASE TO DATE, read the cover. “What the hell?”

  “Well,” Mike said, his pride returning again. “I figured you’d come around to this idea, sooner or later. I’m not a hundred percent sure about why now, but I’ve kept this going. It’s the full notes on the whole thing—if it were being told as a hypothetical story. If you really want to pick some of their brains, then this’ll bring them up to speed. And before you ask…” He opened the file and took out a USB flash drive that lay atop its contents. “The digital version. Up to date, and ready to transmit.”

  “Now for the tougher question,” I said, seriously enough that Mike’s smile faded. “If you’ve got this hypothetical version, I’m assuming you have a parallel real version, somewhere?”

  Mike’s concern became mixed with confusion. “Of course—but you don’t want—”

  “Just get it, Mike, and let’s begin.” He went to his main desk and fetched the second file as I stood up, pulling on my cane and the wheel of the plane hard: there was no turning back now.

  “I’m not so sure I’m with you on this step, L.T.,” Mike said as I joined him in the cabin. “I mean, this was always supposed to be a hypothetical exercise, right?”

  “This case was always supposed to have been a lot of things, Mike,” I said. “And absorbing what I think we’re going to have to absorb as a result of this exercise is going to be very tough—for both of us.” He wanted to ask more questions, but I held up my hand. “It’ll be a lot easier if we just let it unfold once and for real, trust me. So let’s start going over the names, and come up with some kind of a competent and discreet bunch…”

  For the rest of the night, or at least until the early morning, the still-befuddled Mike and I went over the various lists of all those SUNY students who had been recently enrolled in our respective classes. Mike retrieved copies of their photos, given to us at the beginning of every semester by the school, and arranged them on a desk that was vacant (or rather that, with a crashing sweep of Mike’s arm, was made vacant); and from there, the weeding process began. At each step of the way, we considered experience, variety of interests, sense of humor, and above all, reliability, while studying the faces before us; and a
s we did, photos went sailing away onto the floor at an alarming rate. As a final consideration, we had to ask ourselves whom we simply could not carry the project off without. In this category, there were at first only four names (not a bad thing, for security’s sake), all of them women, in keeping with the ratio of who was going into criminal science, at the time: there was Colleen Burke, the shy but sharp Bostonian, who had worked at that city’s crime lab; Vicky Ferrier, the deceptively beautiful blonde from California; Linda Walker, the quiet, no-nonsense black woman from the Bronx, whose insights would, we hoped, override her close geographical proximity to the case; and Mei-lien Hsüeh, Mike’s favorite, the soft-spoken exchange student from the forensic sciences school at the Kunming Medical University in Yunnan, China.

  “So—these four,” Mike said at length. “You good?”

  “I don’t know…I just wish we had one guy. You know my feeling: too much homogeneity, of whatever kind, isn’t ideal. And I wouldn’t mind just a little more testosterone in the mix, though the Thought Police could probably get me fired just for saying that.”

  “Well—hang on,” Mike answered, sifting through the photos on the floor. “Did we discuss—you know, the Latino kid, he was a standout in a couple of my courses, why didn’t we…?” At length, Mike held up a photo, which I recognized instantly:

  “Frankie Arquilla!” I said, nodding. “We eliminated him on a technicality—he hasn’t finished my advanced profiling course yet. But otherwise, yeah, just what I mean: brilliant, sensitive under the facade, and very funny—”

  “Well, L.T., for fuck’s sake…” Mike shook his head and put Frankie’s picture on the desk. “There’s what, one or two classes and a test left on that course? Not to mention that he’s in Arizona, around where at least some of these throwaway kids’ parents supposedly disappeared to? Might come in handy. So do you think that maybe we could let him slide, on the damned technicality?”

  Realizing that I’d been a bit of an idiot, I nodded. “Yeah. I think so…Okay, that’s our five.”