represented all that was senseless and beautiful about the world.
A place where someone could get shot for no reason; where a woman called Kim could wash blood into the gutter with no greater ceremony than if it were spilled diesel wine; where the reasons to live – love and money, perhaps the hope of something better – were indiscernible from the reasons to die. Blessed and brave, impassioned, afflicted, forever believing in fortune, a million lives crossing a million lives more, and all of them interwoven until the seams that lay between them could no longer be defined.
Sunday evening, mid-December; they rushed the old man to St Vincent’s and, despite knowing nothing of his life, not even his name, they all – the liquor store owner, his wife, the police officer, the medics in the Blue Cross ambulance . . . all of them hoped and prayed and willed that he would live.
Such was human nature; such was the way of the world.
An hour later, maybe less. Middle-aged man – greying hair, white shirt, woven silk tie, features made of character and muscular tension – stands in front of a desk. Replaces the phone in its cradle. Looks away towards the window of the room, a window that overlooks the street from where the sound of traffic, making its way from wherever to someplace else, is like staggered breathing.
Middle-aged man turns and looks across the desk at a younger woman – dark hair, beautiful yes, no doubt about it, but a ghost within her features that speaks of some internal disquiet.
‘They shot Edward,’ the man says. His voice is matter-of-fact and businesslike, almost as if such news has been expected.
Sharp intake of breath. ‘Who? Who shot him? Is he okay?’ The woman, name of Cathy Hollander, starts to rise from her chair.
The man raises his hand and she pauses. ‘We don’t know anything,’ he says. ‘Maybe something direct, maybe simple bad luck. Go get Charlie Beck and Joe Koenig. I have to make some calls. I have to get someone here—’
‘Someone?’ the woman asks.
‘I have to get his son from Miami—’
She frowns, shakes her head. ‘His son? What the fuck are you talking about? Edward has a son?’
The man, goes by the name of Walt Freiberg, nods his head slowly and closes his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he says, his voice almost a whisper, ‘he has a son.’
‘I didn’t know—’ Cathy starts.
Freiberg lifts the receiver and dials a number. ‘You didn’t know he had a son? I wouldn’t feel left out sweetheart . . . neither did the rest of the world.’
The phone connects at the other end of the line.
Walt Freiberg smiles. ‘Evelyn? It’s Walter . . . long time, no see. Calling because I need you to do something for me.’
TWO
So this – amongst so many other things – was the real deal, the hard-bitten truth: when he was drunk he believed in God.
But these days John Harper didn’t drink so often, and thus his moments of faith were few and far between. Harper was one of the very fortunate who’d experienced the moment of special revelation: sleep off the drunk and the debt was still owed; the girlfriend still pregnant; the wife knew you’d walked out on her for a twenty-two-year-old Thai girl with universal joints for hips. The fan was still spinning, the crap still airborne six ways to Christmas. Life turns a corner, and all of a sudden your soundtrack plays in a minor key.
And so John Harper stopped drinking, and therefore stopped believing in God.
But before that: raw-faced and noisy; thundering migraines surrendering to nothing but a combination of Jack Daniels and Darvon Complex; fits of anger, more often than not directed towards himself; a frustrated man; a man of words bound within the limits of a stunted imagination. Ate too little – corn-dogs and cinnamon cake and sometimes a cheeseburger from Wendy’s or Sambo’s; late-night shuffles through the kitchen searching out Ring-Dings and handfuls of dry Froot Loops, making inhuman sounds, hands shaking, wondering when the muse would come back.
Because John Harper wrote a book one time; called it Depth of Fingerprints; sold it for twelve thousand dollars up-front to a smalltime publishing house in Miami. Optioned for film; film was never made. Helluva story, even posted a squib in the Herald Tribune which told him he had a future if he kept his narrative dry and his prose succinct. That had been eight years before. Started a dozen things since; finished nothing.