Hard News Page 8

  Instead of: New York Child Welfare Administration.

  Rune and Courtney walked slowly toward the main office, through green corridors, over green linoleum. Through fluorescent light that started life white but turned green when it hit the skin. It reminded her of the shade of lawyer Megler's office. A guard pointed to a thin black woman in a red linen suit, sitting behind a desk covered with recycled files and empty cardboard coffee cups.

  "May I help you?" the woman asked.

  "You're Ms. Johnson?"

  The woman smiled and they shook hands. "Sit down. You're ...?"

  "Rune."

  "Right. You called last night." Paper appeared and civil servant Johnson uncapped a Bic pen. "What's your address?"

  "West Village."

  Johnson paused. "Could you be more specific than that?"

  "Not really. It's hard to explain."

  "Phone number?"

  Rune said, "No."

  "Beg pardon?"

  "I don't have a phone."

  "Oh." So far she hadn't written anything. "Is this Courtney?"

  "That's right."

  "We're going to the zoo," the little girl said.

  "What it is is this: I have a roommate, I mean had a roommate--her mother--and I don't know her last name and she left me with Courtney. She just took off--can you believe it? I mean, I woke up and she was gone."

  Johnson was frowning painfully, more mom than civil servant for the moment.

  "Anyway she went to Boston and what she did, she ..." Rune's voice fell. "... ditched you know who. And I'm like, what am I going to do? See, I wouldn't mind if I wasn't working, which is usually what I'm doing--not working, I mean--only now I--"

  Johnson had stopped writing. "Apparent abandonment. Happens more often than you'd think."

  Courtney said, "Rune, I'm hungry."

  Rune dug into her shoulder bag and pulled out a can of sardines. Johnson watched her. A can opener appeared and Rune began cranking. "I liked it better when they had that little key on them." Rune looked at a bewildered Ms. Johnson. "You know, the key. On the cans? Like in the cartoons you always see."

  "Cartoons?" Johnson asked. Then: "You think those are good for her?"

  "Water-packed. I wouldn't give her oil." She held up the can.

  Rune tucked a napkin into Courtney's collar, then handed her a plastic fork. "Anyway, her mother's gone and I don't know how to find her."

  "You don't have any idea? No last name?"

  "Nope. Just know she's in Boston."

  "Bawden."

  Johnson said, "Usually what happens in cases like these is the police get involved. They'll contact the Boston Police and do a standard missing person search. First name, C-L-A-I-R-E?"

  "Right. I just don't have any leads. Claire took everything with her. Except this too-disgusting old poster and some underwear. You could fingerprint it, maybe. But they probably wouldn't be her fingerprints on it."

  "Who's Courtney's father?"

  Rune frowned and shook her head.

  Johnson asked, "Unknown?"

  "Highly."

  "Describe her mother to me."

  "Claire's about my height. Her hair's dark now but we're talking it started life pretty light. Kind of dirty brownish." Rune thought for a minute. "She's got a narrow face. She isn't pretty. I'd say more cute--"

  "I'm really more interested in a general description that'll help the police locate her."

  "Okay, sure. Five-three, jet-black hair. About a hundred and ten. Wears black mostly."

  "Grandparents or other relations?"

  "I can't even find her mother--how'm I going to know the aunts and uncles?"

  Johnson said, "She's really adorable. Does she have any health problems? Is there any medicine she takes?"

  "No, she's pretty healthy. All she takes is vitamins in the shape of animals. She likes the bears best but I think that's only because they're cherry-flavored. You like bears, don't you, honey?"

  Courtney had finished the sardines. She nodded.

  "Okay, well, let me tell you a little about the procedure from here on out. This's the Child Welfare Administration, which is part of the city's Human Resources Administration. We've got a network of emergency foster homes where she'll be placed for a week or so until we can get her into a permanent foster home. Hopefully, by then we'll have found the mother."

  Rune's stomach thudded. "Foster home?"

  "That's right."

  "Uhm, you know what you hear on the news...."

  "About the foster homes?" Johnson asked. "It's the press that made up most of those stories." Her voice was crisp and Rune had a flash of a different Ms. Johnson. Beneath the ruby lipstick and pseudo Ann Taylor did not beat a timid heart. She probably had a tattoo of a gang's trademark on the slope of her left breast.

  The woman continued. "We spend weeks investigating foster parents. If you think about it, who scrutinizes natural parents?"

  Good point, Rune thought. "Can I visit her?"

  The answer was no--Rune could see that--but Johnson said, "Probably."

  "What happens now?"

  "We have a diagnostic caseworker on call. She'll take Courtney to the emergency home tonight."

  "I don't have to do anything else?"

  "That will be the end of your involvement."

  Rune hated civil-servant language. It was as if they took the words and quick-froze them.

  She turned to Courtney and said, "Will you miss me?"

  The girl said, "No."

  No?

  Johnson said to her, "Honey, would you like to go stay with a nice mommy and daddy? They have some children just like you and they'd love for you to visit."

  "Yeah."

  Rune said to her, "You'll be happy there."

  Why isn't she sobbing?

  Johnson said, "I'll take her now. You have her things?"

  Rune handed over the bag containing the ratty stuffed animals and her new clothes. Johnson looked at Rune's face and said, "I know how you feel but, believe me, you did the right thing. There wasn't any choice."

  Rune squatted down and hugged the girl. "I'll come visit you."

  It was then that Courtney sized up what was happening. "Rune?" she asked uncertainly.

  Johnson took her by the hand and led her down the corridor.

  Courtney started to cry.

  Rune started to cry.

  Johnson remained dry-eyed. "Come on, honey."

  Courtney looked back once and called, "Zoo!"

  "We'll go to the zoo, I promise."

  Rune left the ugly slab of a building, feeling an intense freedom.

  And feeling too the weight of a guilt that matched her own 102 pounds ounce for ounce. But that was okay. She had a story to do.

  SPRING IN PRISON IS LIKE SPRING IN THE CITY. WEAK, ALmost unnoticeable. You only sense it because of the air. You smell it, you taste it, you feel an extra portion of warmth. It flirts with you once or twice, then that's it. Back to work, or back to the prison yard. Crocuses can't break through concrete.

  Randy Boggs was waiting for Severn Washington in the prison gym when the smell of spring hit him. And, damn, it made him feel bad. He'd never been to college. School for him meant high school and this battered prison gym reminded him a lot of the one at Washington Irving High where, twenty years earlier, he'd have been working out on the parallel bars or struggling to do an iron cross on the rings, and, bang, there would be that smell in the air that meant they'd soon be out of school and he'd have summer ahead of him--along with a couple of weeks' pure freedom before the job at the Kresge warehouse.

  Damn, what a smell spring has....

  He thought about a dozen memories released by that smell. Girls' small boobs and hot grass and the chain-saw rumble of a 350 Chevy engine. And beer. Man, he loved beer. Now as much as then, though he knew there was no taste like the taste of beer when you were a teenager.

  Randy Boggs squinted across the gym and could see the loping figure of Severn Washington, two
hundred thirty pounds' worth, a broad face in between a scalp of tight cornrows and a neck thick as Boggs's thigh.

  Washington had laughed and told Boggs not long after they met that he'd never had a white friend in all of his forty-three years. He'd missed Nam because of his eyesight and always stayed pretty close to home, which in his family's case had been a Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street, where there were not many whites at all, let alone any that he'd befriend.

  That's why Washington had been uncomfortable when, one day in the yard, Boggs began talking to him, just bullshitting in that soft, shy voice he had. At first, Washington later told him, he had thought Boggs wanted to be his maytag, his loverboy, then Washington decided Boggs was just another white-ass crazy, maybe methed or angel-dusted out. But when Boggs kept it up, talking away, funny, making more sense than most people Inside, Washington and Boggs became friends.

  Boggs told him that he'd been through Raleigh and Durham a bunch of times and learned that Washington's family had come from North Carolina, though he'd never been there. Washington wanted to hear all about the state and Boggs was glad to tell him. From there, they talked about Sylvia's, Harlem, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington (no relation), Class D felonies, beer, traveling around, hitchhiking....

  But there was another foundation for the friendship between the two.

  One day Washington had sought Boggs out in the yard and said, "Know why you come up and talked to me?"

  "Nope, Severn, I sure don't. Why was that?"

  "Allah."

  "What's that again?" Boggs asked.

  The huge man explained that Allah had come to Washington in a dream and told him it was his job to befriend Boggs and eventually convert him.

  He told all this to Boggs, who felt himself blushing and said, "Damn, if that's not the craziest thing I ever heard."

  "No, man, that's the way it is. Your ass's safe. Me and Allah gonna watch out for you." Which Boggs thought was even crazier, the Allah part at least, but perfectly fine with him.

  From the start, though, Washington's job wasn't easy. Boggs was animal feed in Harrison prison. Scrawny, shy, quiet, a loner. He didn't deal, he didn't fuck, he didn't side. Instantly unpopular. The sort that ends up "accidentally" dead--like not paying attention and driving a 3/4-inch drill press bit through his neck then bleeding to death before somebody notices the blood.

  Or the sort that does it himself. They may take your belt away from you but if you want to get dead in prison you can get yourself dead, no problem.

  But Severn Washington did his job. And when it became clear that Boggs was under the wing of one of the most devout Muslims in all of Harrison (who also happened to be one of the largest) when that news made the rounds of the cell blocks, Randy Boggs was left pretty much alone.

  "Pretty much," however, didn't mean "completely."

  Washington, disposing of the fast Muslin greeting, "Marhaba, sardeek," now frowned as he whispered, "Yo, man, you got trouble."

  "What?" Boggs asked, feeling his heart sink.

  "Word up they gonna move on you again. Serious, this time. I axed a moneygrip o' mine from the home block and he say he heard it for fucking certain."

  Randy Boggs frowned. "Why, man? That's what I don't get. You hear anything?"

  Washington shrugged. "Make no sense to me."

  "Okay." Boggs's face twisted a little. "Shit."

  "I'm putting out some inquiries," Washington said. "We'll find ourselves out what the fuck's going on."

  Boggs considered this. He didn't go out of his way to look for trouble. He didn't give steely killer eyes to blacks, he didn't eye anybody's dick in the shower, he didn't get cartons of Marlboros from the guards, didn't look sideways at the Aryan Brotherhood. There was no reason he could think of that somebody'd want to move on him.

  "I don't know what I did. I don't think--"

  "Hey, be cool, man." Washington grinned. "You walk in what? Twenty-four months. Shouldn't be too hard to keep yo ass intact that long."

  "This place, man, I hate it so much...."

  Severn Washington laughed the way he always did when somebody expressed the obvious. "Got the antidote. Less play us some ball."

  And Randy Boggs said, "Sure." Thinking, as he saw his reflection in a chicken-wire-laced window, that what he was looking at with the red-socketed eyes wasn't his living body at all, but something else--something horrible, lying cold and dead, as his blood fled from the flesh.

  Thinking that, despite this huge man's reassurance, the only hope he now had was that slip of girl with the ponytail and the big camera.

  chapter 11

  THIS CITY WAS A PLAYGROUND YOU NEVER GOT TIRED OF.

  Once you took the element of fear out of it (and there wasn't anything Jack Nestor feared) New York was the biggest playground in the world.

  He felt the excitement the instant he stepped out of the Port Authority bus terminal. The feeling of electricity. And for a moment he thought: What was he doing wasting his time in piss-ant Florida?

  He smelled: fishy river, charcoal smoke from pretzel vendors, shit, exhaust. Then he got a whiff of some gross incense three black guys dressed up like Arabs were selling from a folding table. He'd never seen this before. He walked up to them. There were pictures of men from ancient times, it looked like, dressed the same. The twelve true tribes of Israel. Only they were all black. Black rabbis ...

  What a crazy town this was!

  Nestor walked along Forty-second Street, stopped in a couple peep shows. He left and wandered some more, looking at the old movie theaters, the live play theaters, the angry drivers, the suicidal pedestrians. Horns blared like mad, as if everybody driving a car had a wife in labor in the backseat. Already the energy was exhausting him but he knew he'd be up to speed in a day or two.

  He stopped and bought a hot dog and ate it in three bites. At the next street corner he bought another one. This time he asked for onions too. On the third corner he bought two more hot dogs, without onions, and stood eating them and drinking a Sprite, which wasn't a Sprite at all, which he'd asked for, but some brand of lemon-lime soda he'd never heard of. It tasted like medicine. As the vendor split a sausage to fill with sauerkraut, Nestor asked him where there was a hotel in the area.

  The man shrugged. "Donoe."

  "Huh?"

  "Donoe."

  "That's a hotel?"

  "I donoe."

  "Why don't you try learning fucking English?" Nestor walked off. Two blocks later he saw a sign, King's Court Hotel. Which was the same name as a motel he'd been to in Miami Beach once and which wasn't a bad place. He remembered it being clean and cheap. It must have been a chain. Nestor walked up to the door, which opened suddenly. He hadn't noticed a tall young man, dressed in black, standing inside. The man said, "Hello, sir, take your bag?"

  The Miami branch didn't, Nestor recalled, have a doorman.

  "Just wanted to ask the desk guy a question."

  She wasn't a guy but a young blonde woman with a French accent and teeth that were absolutely perfect. She smiled at him. "Yessir?"

  "Uh ..." He looked around him. Bizarre. It looked like a warehouse with a low ceiling. Stone and metal furniture everywhere. And a lot of the furniture was wrapped up in white cloth.

  "Uh, I was wondering, you have a room?"

  "Certainly, sir. How long will you be staying?"

  "Uh, how much would that be? For a single?"

  A computer was consulted. "Four hundred forty."

  For a week"? Are these people fucking insane?

  The question now was how to get out of here without the blonde with the ruler-straight teeth thinking he was a complete asshole.

  "I mean by the night."

  A moment's pause. "Actually, that is the daily rate, sir."

  "Sure. I was joking." Nestor grinned, saw no way to salvage the situation and simply walked out.

  Only one block away he found the Royalton Arms, which he knew was okay because there were a couple o
f dirty-looking tourists standing out in front, looking at a Michelin guide to New York City. The desk clerk here didn't even have straight teeth, let alone white ones, and he was behind a Plexiglas bulletproof divider. Nestor checked into a $39.95 room and took the elevator up to the seventh floor. The room was okay. He felt good as soon as he walked inside. It didn't overlook any oceans or expressways or anything else except an air shaft but that didn't bother Nestor. He lowered the window blinds then lay down on the bed and listened to the argument his stomach was having with the hot dogs.

  He clicked on the TV and watched some Miami Vice rerun for a while, flipped through the channels once then shut off the set. It was irritating not to have a remote control. He stripped down to his boxer shorts and sleeveless T-shirt, brushed his teeth powerfully and got into bed.

  He closed his eyes.

  Snap. The pictures began.

  Nestor often had trouble sleeping. He'd thought, a long time ago, it was something physical. Well, hoped more than thought. But he knew now that wasn't the case at all.

  The reason for his insomnia was the pictures.

  The minute his head hit the pillow (unless there was someone next to him, distracting him or at least promising distraction), the minute he was prepared to sleep, the pictures began. He supposed he could call them memories because they really were nothing more than scenes from his past. But memories were different. Memories were like the impressions he had of his family or his childhood. His first car. His first fuck. Maybe they were accurate. Probably not.

  But the pictures ... Man. Every detail perfect.

  A Philippine revolutionary he picked off at three hundred yards using an M16 with metal sights, the man just dropping like a sack ...

  A black South African who thought he was safely across the border in Botswana ...

  A coat hanger binding the hands of a Salvadorian, Nestor thinking, Why bother to tie him up? He'll have a bullet in his head in sixty seconds anyway....

  Hundreds of others.

  They were in black and white, they were in color, they were mute, they were in Dolby stereo sound.

  The pictures ...

  They didn't haunt him, of course. He didn't have any emotional response. He wasn't tormented by guilt, he wasn't moved to lust. They just wouldn't go away. The pictures came into his head and they wouldn't let him sleep.

  Tonight Nestor--energized by the city and troubled by its fast food--lay in a too-soft bed and fielded the pictures. Pushed one away. Then he did the same with the one that took its place. Then the next. For an hour, then two. He wanted Celine next to him. He thought about her but the pictures pushed her away. He thought about what he was in town to do. That kept the pictures away for a while. But they came back.