S Rozan - Absent Friends

Her eyes blazed at his. He hadn't had to ask the question, not really. He knew. All these years, he'd known. Though even tonight, until right now, he'd hoped he was wrong, hoped someone-Marian, even Marian-could prove to him what a mistake he'd been making. Because she'd been Jimmy McCaffery's lover back then. Because she'd know, if anyone knew.

She didn't answer him.

And that was answer enough.

As if he'd said that out loud and it made her furious, Marian slapped both palms on the table and stood. She dealt a twenty-dollar bill to the tabletop in the contemptuous stroke of a gypsy turning over a card of ruin. Phil understood the insult for what it was: Money's been so important to you all these years, you bastard, well, here's more of it. She stalked out, and he watched her go. After the door drifted shut behind her, he motioned the waitress over, handed her his credit card. He covered the whole bill including the tip and left the twenty lying among the coasters and napkins, across the water-ring chain. In spite of himself he grinned as he left the bar, astonished, as he'd been so many times before, by the human capacity for costly, meaningless gestures.

Now, in his office two days later, staring into the sky, Phil heard the echo of Marian's voice, telling him what she had called to say: that Jimmy McCaffery had left papers behind. Harry Randall, according to the second Tribune reporter, had probably seen them.

And Phil wondered what was in those papers. And where they were. And what the hell McCaffery had been thinking, writing any of this down.

And, he asked himself, how do you measure the meaning of a gesture-or its cost-when someone else pays?

October 31, 2001

Laura's head was pounding. Squinty-eyed even behind her sunglasses, she turned south from Marian Gallagher's office and stopped at the first open coffee shop she saw. Before she found it, she passed another, a place called Wally's, where a dark and ghostly interior showed through a grimy plate-glass window. Everything inside was smothered in sticky, poisonous ash. Gray coffee cups and ketchup bottles stood on a gray counter in a trickle of sunlight that was cheerfully yellow out where Laura was but gray inside. Laura tried to imagine this place, filled with the smell of toast and the splatter of frying bacon and the shouts of orders being barked back and forth, as it would have been before, as maybe in another universe it still was.

The second coffee shop, the one she came upon two blocks later, had been scrubbed, polished, restocked, and renewed. The owner, awash in smiles, greeted her like a long-lost friend, though she'd never been there before.

She ordered coffee; as an afterthought, she asked for a cherry Danish. Marian Gallagher's cookies had been some delicate gourmet brand, and Laura felt she deserved a reward for resisting them. Not to mention the coffee she had not had, which might have cured her headache. Although probably not. It was an article of faith with Laura that lack of caffeine in the bloodstream was the most common cause of headaches, and a dose of caffeine would melt them away, repeat as needed. This headache, though, had additional causes, and from experience Laura knew that caffeine, while it would be useful, would, like sunlight on an ice floe, not quite be enough.

Laura pushed her mind away from the additional causes. She was working. She swirled milk and sugar into her coffee, used both hands to lift it, and drank down half with her eyes closed, instructing the caffeine to plow straight to the headache. Sometimes that worked.

After she'd sliced a wedge off her Danish-she'd never learned to feel comfortable picking up an entire pastry and taking a bite out of it, like other New Yorkers, like Harry-she licked her fingers and reached into her bag for the tape recorder. Pressing rewind and then play, she lifted the machine to her ear, nodding to herself when she heard, as she expected to, Marian Gallagher's voice: “What do you mean? What papers?” She lifted the tape out, labeled it, and popped in another. Of course the recorder worked. It always worked. She'd done her research, consulted Consumer Reports, and chosen this brand for reliability. She rooted around in the bag for the other recorder, listened to it for a moment, too. The sound from this one was much murkier, having been recorded through canvas, but the whole interview was there.

As Harry had taught her, as Harry had been, Laura was a great believer in backup.

“Like a chameleon,” Harry had saluted Laura, his voice soft with admiration, when he'd worked with her enough times to have watched her, when he understood. “Like a puzzle piece changing its shape to fit in.”

Laura remembered that conversation; she remembered she had smiled. “Okay,” she'd said. “But you want to know how I think of it?”

“Most certainly I do.”

“Like a virus.”

“Explain?”

“Isn't that how a virus works? It imitates something the cell was expecting and prepared for. The cell doesn't call in any defenses because it doesn't think it needs any. The next thing it knows, the virus is inside and the cell is giving up all its secrets.”

“My sweet amoeba, that's disgusting.”

He was right; but the fact that it was disgusting didn't stop Harry, after that, from calling her his precious little virus at the most surprising moments.

Laura, heading for the Staten Island ferry, climbed a plywood slope covering the temporary cable Verizon had laid along the curbs downtown. This close to the site, a smoky scent drifted on the air. Fires were still burning under tons of dust and steel. Like everyone downtown, Laura had been smelling this odor for weeks; but still she was unsure whether it was a bitter smell, or sweet. The acridness was the scent of smoldering plastic, and steel, and jet fuel. The sweetness, she had been told, was flesh.

The smell brought with it a familiar discomfort. She'd felt it from the first, inhaling this air, and recognized it. It was the same queasy sense that washed over her whenever Reporter-Laura crossed the line, from running after a story to trampling on private grief, from digging for facts to probing an open wound. Some things were too intimate, not made for strangers to intrude on.

Laura focused on the work ahead. She walked the blocks trying to ignore the smell, ignoring the traffic lights, as everyone now did. When cars were finally allowed downtown once more, she knew, pedestrians would start minding the lights, and ten minutes after that they'd be jaywalking again. People, especially New Yorkers, Harry had observed a few weeks ago to the newsroom in general, were infinitely adaptable.

Laura swept Harry's voice from her mind. She was working; she marched on. As she neared a building on Broadway, though, she found herself stopping. Small heaps of dust lay on the building's windowsills and protruding brick, but the bronze address numbers were newly burnished and they shone. The address clicked for Laura. The lawyer, Phil Constantine. The only one who'd refused to see her. He had his office here.

Laura checked her watch. She had time. Considering, she walked away from the glass doors. It was foolish to linger outside a downtown office building: security guards, like everyone else, were on edge these days. Circling the block, Laura called up everything she knew about Phil Constantine.

By the time she turned the corner again and approached the building's entrance, her stride had been transformed, her shoulders set. Her voice, when she spoke to Constantine, would be different from the voice that had come from her in Marian Gallagher's conference room, with its gently obvious view. The distracted, bumbling girl reporter was unlikely to elicit anything but impatience from Constantine. A man like him would need an equal, a worthy opponent. All right then, Laura thought, swinging her shoulder bag down, unzipping it for the guard in the lobby, taking out whatever he asked to see, then stuffing it all back in. All right. If that's what was most likely to work on him, that's what Phil Constantine would get.