Specimen Days (16 page)

Cat knew the word "perpetrator" would be exciting to Simon. She'd promised herself to stop acting extra coplike to turn him on. Screwed that one up.

"Right," Simon said. His brows bristled. It would have been nice to peel them gently off his face, hold them in her palm, then put them carefully back again.

"What do you want to eat?" she asked. "I don't know. The tuna, I guess."

Simon was Atkins. High protein, no carbs. And really, consider the results.

"I'm going to have the steak au poivre," she said. "And mashed potatoes."

Momma's had a very hard day. All right?

They went back to her place that night, and never mind about the mess. She was rattled she realized how much she wanted her own bed. Simon didn't mind her crappy apartment every now and then. He claimed to like it, actually. Although she'd never come out and asked him, it was likely that until he met her he'd never
been
to East Fifth Street.

She woke up at 3:30. She didn't have to look at the clock. She knew this abrupt and arid consciousness, this jump from deep dreams to a wakefulness that was not so much having slept enough as having suddenly lost the knack for sleep. On the nights it happened, it always happened between 3:30 and 4:00. She had a little something for it in the medicine cabinet, but she'd never even opened the bottle. She seemed to prefer insomnia to simulated sleep. Control thing. Fucked up, really, but what could she do?

Simon breathed steadily beside her. She let herself stare at him as he grimaced over a dream. He was a true classic. Big, broad anchor-man face, vigorous thatch of sable-colored hair beginning to be threaded, here and there, with strands of sterling silver. He could have been fresh off the assembly line of whatever corporation produced the Great American Beauties. The corporation would be somewhere in the Midwest, wouldn't it? And yes, he came from Iowa, didn't he? Great-great-grandson of immigrants who'd escaped New York for the prairie, he'd returned in triumph a hundred or so years later, the exiled prince restored to his true home by way of the Ivy League. Rich and healthy, thirty-three years old. Practically adolescent, in man-years.

Maybe it was time to quit the unit, though if she did it now it would look like she was running away. In fact, she'd been thinking of quitting for some time. You got a little crazy, working the nuts. You listened to every lunatic with the same patience; you reminded yourself over and over that any one of these people might really and truly be about to torch a grade school or blow up a store or kill somebody just because he was well-known. Bartenders must start seeing a world full of drunks; lawyers must see it as largely made up of the vengefully injured. Forensic psychologists got infected by paranoia. You knew, better than the average citizen, that the world contains a sub world, where the residents do as most people do, pay rent and buy groceries, but have a little something extra going on. They receive personal messages from their television sets or are raped nightly by a sitcom star or have discovered that the cracks on the sidewalk between Broadway and Lafayette spell out the names of the aliens who are posing as world leaders.

The most surprising thing about these people, as it turned out, was their dullness. All their human juices flowed in one direction; they cared about nothing, really, beyond their fixations. Anyone's sweet old aunt in Baltimore was more vital and various, even if her life was only watching television and clipping discount coupons out of magazines. You sat in your crummy police department office which resembled nothing so much as a failing mail-order business and listened to them. You logged them in on your five-year-old computer. You hoped none of them would follow through. You hoped, on your worst days (no one liked to talk about this), that one of them would.

She got out of bed, careful not to wake Simon, and went to the window. It wasn't much of a view, just three floors down onto Fifth Street, but still. Here was a slice of the city; here was the old homeless man, still chanting in front of the florist's (he was out later than usual tonight); here were the orange streetlights and the brown housefronts, the dark-clad pedestrians, the whole smoky, sepia-stained semireality of it, this city at night, the most convincing stage set ever devised, no ocean or mountains, hardly any trees (not, at least, in this neighborhood), just street after street, bright and noisy under a pink-gray sky pierced by antennas and water tanks, while down below, across the street from Cat's building, a flame-blue sign buzzed CLEANER.

In the morning she made coffee, brought Simon a cup while he was still in the shower, got to spend a moment watching him through the clouded glass, the vague pink of his back and legs, the paler pink of his ass. Was a man ever sexier than when he was taking a shower? Still, this business of sneaking looks at Simon as he slept or showered wasn't such a good sign, was it? Did he do the same with her? She couldn't picture it. She set his coffee mug on the back of the toilet tank, wiped steam from the mirror over the sink, took a look. Not bad for thirty-eight. Firm chin, good skin.

Simon emerged, brightened and water-beaded, kissed her, picked up his coffee. He said, "Work's not going to be any fun today, is it?"

"Probably not."

He grabbed a towel, dried off. The towels hadn't been washed in, what, two weeks or more. Time flew.

"Call me. Let me know what's going on." "I will."

"I've got that damned client thing tonight. I can be done by around ten."

"Great."

She lingered another moment, sipping her own coffee, though it was time to let him have the tiny bathroom to himself. Simon was so heedlessly alive, so unquestioningly glad about it. He traded futures. He'd been president of his senior class. He filled the room with his heat and his soapy smell.

When her son died Cat had thought she was dead, too; she'd thought her systems would shut down all by themselves, but here she was, nine years later, not only still alive but looking pretty good, well educated (too bad the private practice hadn't taken off), free of her poor tortured ex-husband (though he did creep into her fantasies), still capable of attracting someone like Simon.

She wished she hated herself more for wanting to live on.

She took a last deep draught of Simon's shower smell, went into the bedroom to find something to wear.

Mornings were good.
(Mornings are good, enjoy them.)
She liked the fact that all over the city, people were having their coffee and showers, deciding on their clothes. This was as close as it got to collective innocence, this mass transition from sleep (however troubled) to wakefulness (however tormented). Just about everyone, or everyone who was at least minimally functional, had to get up and get dressed. Even the ones who were going to call her and tell her about their plans to shoot or stab or ignite somebody. Even the ones who were going to strap a bomb to their chests and blow up a businessman on the street. Here we are, all of us, going through this daily miniature rebirth, and doing it together.

She passed over the Maori-print dress she'd been thinking of in favor of the dark Earl jeans. The jeans and the black crewneck sweater, the low-heeled black boots. She would not try to intimidate or seduce. Not by way of costume, anyway.

She didn't wait around for Simon. It was, if anything, a day to show up at work on the early side. She kissed him goodbye while he was still in his underwear and socks (was there anything as touchingly zm-sexy as a man in black socks and no pants?), gratefully accepted his assurance that he'd wind up the client thing by ten and they'd decide then about where to eat, which apartment to sleep in.

She descended the garbagey stairs, went out into the morning, a spanking-fresh June one, all spangly on the fire escapes. She paused for a moment on the stoop, taking it in. On a morning like this, you could believe the world was safe and promising. You could imagine that nothing harmful, nothing toxic, could flourish. Not when early light slanted down so purely from an ice-blue sky. Not when the window-box geraniums of the first-floor widow were incandescently red and a passing truck said PARTY PLANNERS in glittering gold letters.

Someone was watching her. Right now. She felt it. Any woman could; it was survival coding. She glanced around. In this neighborhood a woman out alone, even in daylight, was by general accord offering herself up for public entertainment. She had to admit it: lately her fury had gone a little soft at the edges. They wouldn't keep annoying her forever. One day the moans and coyote whistles, the
Hey, sexy mommas,
would cease. Which would be a relief. She'd be just another middle-aged black lady, going unremarked about her unremarkable business. Still, all right, admit it: right now, this morning, here on her front stoop, having left her younger boyfriend upstairs, she felt herself being scrutinized, and she looked for the offending party with a certain angry eagerness, like a princess who'd found her prince but was still being pestered by the enchanted frog with the golden ball.
Hey, frog, Pm off the market now, go croak under somebody else's window.
She wasn't interested, but still, in some crevice of her mind, some dark and foolish fold, she dreaded the day the frog gave up and hopped off to moon over someone else.

No one was there. No, people were always there. No one was looking at her. There were the besuited eagers on their way to work, a couple of NYU students off to early classes, an old man lumbering along with bags of empty, chiming bottles dangling from both palsied hands.

Still, the feeling was palpable. Someone was staring at her, right now.

She hit the sidewalk, headed west. Get over yourself. You're just feeling your own version of the same edginess that's infecting everybody this morning as hatred once again demonstrates its capacity to find us wherever we are and suck us into the next dimension.

She got to her cubicle a full half hour before she needed to. Ed Short was still there, finishing up the graveyard shift.

"Morning, Ed," she said.

"Good morning. You're in early." "I am."

Ed sipped at what was probably his fifteenth cup of coffee. His eyes were bright and watery. His sparrow-colored hair, already thinning, stood out from his head with a certain doomed desperation, the way a fire flares just before it goes out. Ed was, what, thirty-two, thirty-three? He was made for the job: young and more than a little bit mean, untroubled by imagination, incapable of boredom, eager to root out the bad guys and hurl them into the abyss. He'd have red-tagged the kid if he'd been on the phone that day. Ed red-tagged almost everything. People complained red tags meant more work, of course, plus they cost money, and the whole err-on-the-side-of-caution policy had its implied limits. But Ed was just the sort of pain in the ass who got to be a department head. When the Eds of the world were right, when they appeared to have made a good call because they called almost everything, the fact that they'd spent years irritating everyone around them didn't matter. They were heroes. They'd saved the day. It was impossible to imagine how many historical figures, how many great men (and women, there was the occasional woman), were people like Ed, people who never got distracted, whose faith never wavered, who would stay by their phones or in their laboratories or at their easels until finally, finally, something happened, while most of the rest of the population tended, over time, to think of other things, to wonder what it would be like to live in the country, to speculate over the possibility that doing a simple job and raising a couple of kids might actually be enough.

Cat asked, "What's come in from the site?"

"Kid was rigged with a pipe bomb. No nails or anything, it wasn't meant to scatter. Just to incinerate everything within five or six feet."

"You can learn how to make something like that off the Internet."

"Yep. Half of Dick Harte's scalp turned up on a window ledge three stories up. Otherwise it's just some bone fragments and one more tooth."

"Why don't you go home early?" she said. "I'm ready to take over."

"Thanks. I'm fine. You just relax for a little while."

Right. Today she was someone who should relax for a little while.

She went into the lounge, poured herself some coffee it was drinkable until about 10:00 a.m. and pulled the papers out of her bag.

Thirty-six-point type in the
Times,
above the fold, but only eight points larger than a headline about an experimental new weapon that could render a country uninhabitable without killing its citizens or destroying its structures. EXPLOSION IN LOWER MANHATTAN. Subhead: Two Killed, Five Injured in Possible Terrorist Attack. Bless all those guys at the
Times,
our good fathers, trying to tell us what we need to know (what they think we need to know) without unduly exploiting our collective desires to be titillated, to be reassured, to be scared shitless. Easy to picture the men (and women, there might be a woman or two) up there in Midtown, agonizing over how much panic they should or should not inspire, pending further details. The
Post
and the
News,
of course, were not similarly concerned. MAD BOMBER AT GROUND ZERO in the
News,
TERROR STRIKES AGAIN in the
Post.

The gist of all three stories was essentially the same; only the tone varied. Unidentified bomber kills self and one Dick Harte, real-estate magnate. Nothing yet about the bomber being a kid the guys downtown had somehow managed to keep the witnesses sequestered for the moment. Obvious comparisons to what Hamas and the rest did in Israel. The
Post
reporter had fabricated something about the bomber shouting "Allah is great" either found some lunatic who claimed to be a witness or made it up entirely but otherwise nothing appalling, beyond, of course, the event itself. All three had patched together what they could about Dick Harte, though his wife and kids weren't talking. There were pictures: a scrupulously regular-looking guy, fifty-three years old, with that strange babylike blankness certain men could take on when they went bald, when that big dome of forehead made their features look smaller and more innocent. CEO of the Calamus Development Corporation. Wife Lucretia
(Lucretia?)
was a decorator based in Great Neck, where they did in fact live. Daughter Cynthia was a senior in public school, son Carl a sophomore at some school Cat had never heard of. The
Times
and the
Post
had the same photo, the straightforward one from God knew where that would go with the obit; the
News
had dug up one of Harte standing with a few others who looked more or less like him, at the dedication of what Cat knew to be yet another office monolith on Third Avenue.