“You’ve got a long memory,” Coe tells him.
Henry shrugs. “It’s the kind of thing that sticks in your mind.”
Tell me about it, Coe thinks.
“So you can do this?” he says.
“No problem.”
“And we’re square?”
Henry smiles. “We’re square. I like this idea, Leon. Hell, I might even throw in a few thou’ myself to help sweeten the pot.”
“Where’d you get that kind of money?” China asks when they’re back out on the street again.
Coe just looks at her. “Where do you think?”
“Oh. Right.” But then she shakes her head. “You had all that money and you lived like a bum . . . .”
“Blood money.”
“But still . . .”
“Maybe now it can do some good. I should’ve thought of this sooner.”
“To make up for all the people you killed?” China asks.
Coe looks down the street to where a pair of crows are playing tag around a lamppost.
“You don’t make up for that kind of thing,” he says. “The foundation’s just to give a little hope to some kids who might not get to see it otherwise. So that they don’t grow up all screwed up like me.”
China’s quiet for a long moment.
“Or like me,” she says after a while.
Coe doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing he can say.
“So now what?” China asks after they’ve been walking for a few blocks.
Coe spies a phone booth across the street and leads her to it.
“Now we make a call,” he says. “You got a watch?”
She lifts her wrist to show him the slim, knock-off Rolex she’s wearing.
“Time me,” he says as he drops a quarter into the slot, punches in a number. “And tell me when three minutes are up. Exactly three minutes. Starting . . .” He waits until the connection’s made. “Now.”
While China dutifully times the call, Coe starts talking about Jimmy Chen, the hit on Bruno Ciccone, what Jimmy’s up to these days, where he can be found, how many men he’s got.
“Two-fifty-eight,” China says. “Two-fifty-nine.”
At the three-minute mark, Coe drops the phone receiver, lets it bang against the glass wall of the booth. He grabs China’s hand and runs with her, back across the street, down the block and onto the next, ducks into an alley.
“Okay,” he says. “Watch.”
He barely gets the words out before the first cruiser comes squealing around a corner, blocks the intersection the pair of them just crossed, cherry lights flashing. Moments later, another one pulls across the intersection at the other end of the block. They’re joined by two more cruisers, an unmarked car, and then a couple of dark sedans. The feds step out of those, four of them in their dark suits, looking up and down the street.
China turns to Coe. “Jesus. That was seriously fast.”
Coe’s smiling. “A guy who kills as many feds as Jimmy did is going to give them a hard-on that won’t go away. C’mon,” he adds as the police start to fan out, heading up and down the sidewalks, checking doorways, alleys. “We’re done here.”
China keeps her questions in check again. She lets Coe take the lead and he slips them out of the net the police are setting up like he doesn’t even have to think about it. Some skills you just don’t lose.
He takes her back to the junkyard. They ease in through the gates when the old man running the place isn’t looking and make their way back to the rear. The dogs the old man keeps won’t even come near them. But the crows follow, a thickening flock of them that settle on the junked cars and trash around them.
“That business with the phone call and the cops,” China wants to know. “What was all that about?”
“We just dealt with Jimmy.”
She shakes her head. “His lawyers’ll have him back on the streets before the end of the day.”
“Unless he resists,” Coe says. “What do you think, China? Think Jimmy’s the kind of guy who’ll go quietly and stand trial on murder one charges for killing a half-dozen cops?”
“No. I guess not. But if he gets away . . .”
“What do the crows tell you?” Coe asks.
She sits quietly for a moment, looking at them, head cocked, like she’s listening. Coe doesn’t hear anything except for their damned cawing. Finally she turns back to look at him.
“It’s over,” she says. “We’re done.”
Coe raps a knuckle against the fender he’s sitting on. It’s solid. So’s he.
“How come we’re still here?” he asks.
“I guess we’ll cross over tonight.”
Coe nods. There’s a kind of symmetry to that.
“I like you better without the war paint,” he says.
“Yeah? I think on you it was an improvement.”
She smiles, but then she gets a serious look.
“I’m glad we did it your way, Leon,” she says. “I feel better for it. Cleaner.”
Coe doesn’t say anything. His own soul’s stained with too much killing for him to ever feel clean again. He didn’t do this for himself, or because of the pacifism he’s embraced since Angelica Ciccone was killed. He did it for China. He did it so she wouldn’t have to carry what he does when the crows take them over to wherever it is they’re going next. Into some kind of afterworld, he guesses, if there really is such a place.
He’s been thinking. Maybe there is, considering the crows and how they brought the two of them back. And the thing is, if there is someplace else to go, he figures she deserves a shot at it with a clean slate.
Him, he’ll settle for simple oblivion.
* * *
It’s late at night now, close on to the anniversary hour of their dying. The crows are leading them back to where Jimmy Chen’s boys shot them down. When they reach the mouth of the alley, Coe hesitates. The skin at the nape of his neck goes tight and a prickle of something walks down his spine.
“It’s okay,” China tells him.
The air above them’s thick with crows, wheeling and cawing. Coe still can’t make any kind of sense out of them.
China takes his hand.
“If you can’t trust them,” she says, “then trust me.”
Coe nods. He doesn’t know where they’re going, but he knows for sure that there’s nothing left for him here. So he lets her lead him out of the world, the crows flying on ahead of them, into a tunnel of light.
In the Quiet After Midnight
It’s a winter’s night, the stars are bright
And the world keeps spinning around . . . .
—Kiya Heartwood, from “Robert’s Waltz”
1
I’m fifteen when I realize that I don’t remember my mother anymore. I mean, I still recognize her in pictures and everything, but I can’t call her face up just before I fall asleep the way I once did. I used to tell her about my day, the little things that happened to me, all the things I was thinking about, and it made the loneliness seem less profound—having her listening, I mean. Now I can’t remember her. It’s like she isn’t inside me anymore and I don’t even know when she went away.
I still remember I had a mother. I’m not stupid. But the immediacy of the connection is gone. Now it’s like something I read in a history book in school, not something that was ever part of my life and it scares me because it was never supposed to go away. She was always supposed to be with me.
It’s a seriously hot day in the middle of June and I’m walking home from school when it hits me, when it stops me dead in my tracks right there in the middle of the sidewalk, near the corner of Williamson and Kelly. I can’t tell you what makes it come to me the way it does, so true and hard, bang, right out of nowhere. But all of a sudden it’s like I can’t breathe, like the hot air’s pressing way too close around me.
I look around—I don’t know what I’m looking for, I just know I have to get off the street, away from all the people and their ordi
nary lives—and that’s when I see this little Catholic church tucked away on a side street. Kelly Street was a main thoroughfare years ago, back when the church was really impressive, too, I guess. Now they’re both looking long neglected.
I don’t know why I go in. I’m not even Catholic. But it’s cool inside, dark after the sunlight I just left behind, and quiet. I sit down in a pew near the back and look up toward the front. I’ve heard of the Stations of the Cross, but I don’t know what they are, if they’re even something you can see. But I see Jesus hanging there, front and center, a statue of his mother off to one side, pictures of the saints. I wonder which one is the patron of memory.
I bring my gaze back to the front of the church. This time I look at the candles. There must thirty, forty of them, encased in short red glasses. Only five or six are lit. They’re prayers, I’m guessing, or votive offerings. Whoever lit them doesn’t seem to be around.
I slouch in the pew and stare up at the vaulted ceiling. It’s easier to breathe in here, the world doesn’t seem to press down on me the way it did outside, but the sick, lost feeling doesn’t go away.
I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting there when there’s a rustle of cloth behind me. I turn to see a hooded man kneeling, two pews back, head bent in prayer. He’s all in black, cloak and hood, shadows swallowing his features. A priest, I think, except they don’t dress like that, do they? At least none of the ones I’ve ever seen—on the street or in the movies.
Maybe he’s not even a man, I find myself thinking. Maybe he’s a she, a nun, except they don’t dress like that either. I guess I’m thinking about him so hard that my thoughts pull his head up. I still can’t see anything but the hint of features in the spill of shadows under the hood, but the voice is definitely male.
“A curious sanctuary, is it not?” he says, sitting back on the pew behind him.
I have no idea what he means, but I nod my head.
“Here we sit, neither of us parishioners, yet we have the place to ourselves.”
“The priest must be around here someplace,” I say, hoping it’s true.
It’s suddenly occurred to me that this guy could easily be some kind of pervert, following young girls into an out-of-the-way place like this and hitting on them. I’m very aware of how quiet it is in here, how secluded.
He shakes his head. “They are all long gone,” he says. “Priest and parishioners all.”
Now I’m really getting the creeps. I don’t want to turn my back on him so I gesture with my chin toward the front of the church. I clear my throat.
“Somebody lit those candles,” I say.
“At one time,” he agrees. “But now we see only the memory of their light, the way starlight is but a memory of what burns in the heavens, crossing an unthinkable distance from where they flared to where we stand when we regard them.”
“My, um, dad’s expecting me,” I tell him. “He knows where I am.”
As if, but it seems like a good thing to say. I might be alone in here, but I don’t want him thinking I’m an easy mark. I sit up a little straighter and try to look bigger than I am. Tougher. If worse comes to worst, I’ll go down kicking and screaming. I may be small, but I can be fierce, only ferocity doesn’t seem to be the issue since all he’s doing is sitting there looking at me from under the shadows of his hood. A footnoted script would be good, though, since nothing he’s saying really makes much sense.
“What is it you have lost?” he asks.
The confused look I give him isn’t put on like my bravado. “What do you mean, lost?”
“We’ve all lost something precious,” he says. “Why else would we find ourselves in this place?”
Maybe I’m not a Catholic, but I know this conversation has nothing to do with their doctrines. I should get up and see if I can make it back out the door. Instead I ask, “What have you lost?”
“My life.”
Okay. Way too creepy. But I can’t seem to get up. It’s like it’s really late at night and I know I have to get up for school the next day, but I still have to finish the book first. I can’t go to sleep, not knowing how it ends.
“You don’t look dead,” I say.
“I don’t believe in death,” he tells me.
There’s a glint of white in the shadows under his hood. Teeth, I realize. He just smiled. I don’t feel at all comforted.
I clear my throat again. “But . . .”
I can’t see his eyes, but I can feel the weight of his gaze.
“I have lost my life,” he says, “but I cannot die.”
He shrugs and I realize there’s something wrong under that hood of his, the way the folds of the cloth fall. He’s bumpy, but in the wrong places.
“And you?” he asks.
“My mother,” I find myself saying. I remember what he said about the candles and starlight. “The memory of my mother.”
I don’t even know why I’m telling him this. It’s not the kind of thing I’d tell my dad, or my best friend Ellie, but here I am, sharing this horrible lost feeling with a perfect stranger who doesn’t exactly make me feel like he’s got my best interests at heart.
“Some would embrace the loss of memory,” he says, “rather than lament its absence.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
“Remembering can keep the pain too fresh,” he explains. “It is so much easier to forget—or at least it is more comfortable. But you and I, we are not seeking comfort, are we? We know that to forget is to give in to the darkness, so we walk in the light, that we hold fast to our joys and our pains.”
At first I thought he had a real formal way of speaking, but now I’m starting to get the idea that maybe English isn’t his first language, that he’s translating in his head as he talks and that’s what makes everything sound so stiff and proper.
“There was a glade in my homeland,” he says. He settles further back against his pew and I catch a glimpse of a russet beard, a pointed chin, high cheekbones before the hood shadows them again. “It had about it a similar air as does this church. It was a place for remembering, a sanctuary hidden in a grove where the lost could gather the fraying tatters of their memories and weave them strong once more.”
“The lost . . .”
Again that flash of a smile. There’s no humor in it.
“Such as we.”
“I just came in here to get out of the heat,” I tell him.
“Mmm.”
“I was feeling a little dizzy.”
“And why here, do you suppose?” he asks. “I will tell you,” he goes on before I can answer. “Because like us, this place also seeks to hold on to what it has lost. We help each other. You. I. The church.”
“I’m not . . .”
Remembering anything, I’m about to say, but my voice trails off because suddenly it’s not true. I am remembering. If I close my eyes, I know I can call my mother’s face up again—not stiff, like in a photo, but the way it was when she was still alive, mobile and fluid. And not only her face. I can smell the faint rose blush of her perfume. I can almost feel her hand on my head, tousling the curls that are pulled back in a French braid right now.
I look at him. “How . . . ?”
He smiles again and stands. He’s not as tall as I was expecting from his broad shoulders.
“You see?” he says. “And I, too, am remembering. Reeds by a river and a woman hidden in them. I should never have cut a pipe from those reeds. Her voice was far sweeter.”
He’s lost me again.
“I can pretend it was preordained,” he says. “That the story needed to play out the way it did. But you and I, we know better, don’t we? The story can’t be told until the deed is done. Only the Fates can look into the future and I have known them to be wrong.”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” I say.
He nods. “Of course. Why should you? They are my memories and it is an old story, forgotten now. But remember this: There is always a
choice. Perhaps destiny will quicken the plot, but what we do with the threads we are given is our choice.”
I’ve taken this in school.
“You mean free will.”
He has to think about that.
“Perhaps I do,” he says finally. “But it comes without instruction and the price of it can be dear.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “I can only speak of what is pertinent to my own experience, but if there were any advice I would wish I had been given, it would be to believe in death.”
“How can you not believe in it?” I say. “It’s all around us.”
There’s a tightness in my chest again, but this time it’s because I can remember. It’s because my memories are immediate and clear, the good and the bad, the joy of my mother’s love and the way she was taken away from me.
“It was not always so,” he says.
“Then it was a better time.”
“You think so?” he asks. “Consider the alternative. Imagine being alive when all consider you dead. You walk through the changing world as a ghost. You can touch no one. No one can see you.”
I could really use those footnotes now.
“But—”
“Be careful with your choices,” he says and turns away.
I hear the rustling of cloth as he moves, the faint click of his heels on the stone floor, except they don’t sound like leather-soled shoes. There’s a hollow ring to them, like a horse’s hoof on pavement. He turns to face me again when he reaches the door, pushes back his hood. He has strong, handsome features, with a foreign cast. Dark, olive skin, but his hair is as red as his beard, and standing up among the curls are two small horns, curled like a goat’s.
“You . . . you’re the devil,” I say.
I can’t believe he’s here in a church. I want to look up above the altar, to see if the statue of Jesus is turning away in horror at this unholy invasion, but I can’t move, can’t pull my gaze from the horned man. I feel sick to my stomach.
“Where one might see a devil,” he says, “another might see a friend.”
I’m shaking my head. I may not be much of a churchgoer, but even I’ve heard about what happens to people who make deals with the devil.