Forrester shook his head, and once again tightened the grip on her wrist. ‘He came to get his legacy, the money that was rightfully his, and though you worked on him, though you started to turn him against me, the truth is that you meant nothing to him, will never mean anything to him.’
Annie was shaking her head, and even as her mind was reeling she was looking towards the door, back towards Forrester, trying to think if there was any way she might get herself free of Forrester’s grip and make it out and through the
kitchen. Was the door deadbolted out there? Was there any way in the world she could make it?
And then another thought, a thought she could barely contain. Is this it? Is this the point I will die? Is this man now going to kill me as he has killed before?
In her mind she was screaming, but not a single word left her lips.
‘David,’ Forrester echoed. ‘David who took you to Boston, David who left you in a hotel while he came back here to help me search your apartment for any indication of where your father’s money was, David who answered the telephone when you called me that night. The same David who investigated every inch of your life, your bank accounts, your connections, the people you know. The same David who finally convinced me that Harry Rose took all my money and left me without a dime. I told him who your father was, what he had done to me, what your father had done to him, an innocent boy, and who determined to break your heart into pieces just to redress the balance. You almost took him Annie O’Neill … for a little while you almost took him from me, but I made him see sense, I made him understand the kind of person you must be. Once again he understands that any child of Harry Rose’s is an enemy of ours, an enemy to be despised and hated. And though we have no money to show for this, we also know you have nothing too. You have less than nothing, because whatever you may have believed would happen with my son, you have lost that as well. Your father was so worthless he managed to destroy whatever happiness you might have found without even being here.’
Annie started up again, but once more her legs gave beneath her. Whatever intention she might have had to free herself, Forrester’s grip was like a vice. She could feel herself pulling away with all she possessed, and yet she could barely move a muscle.
She collapsed into the chair, couldn’t see for the tears that
filled her eyes, and as she wiped those tears away she looked at Forrester.
Forrester smiled, and as he did so he rose, and as he rose he released the grip from her arm. He gathered his topcoat, and while he was putting it on, stepping back, making his way from the table, Annie stared back at him with hollow eyes.
‘Whatever you may have believed David was, he was not. However you may have thought you reached him, I reached him deeper. You did reach him, I know you did, but in no time at all I turned him back towards the truth and made him see you for what you really are.’
Forrester took another half a dozen steps backward. He was ten, perhaps twelve feet from the door.
‘However you might have imagined your father, that he was good and kind and generous and compassionate, he was none of those things.’
Forrester moved again, and this time Annie did manage to get to her feet.
‘The life you might have had if your father had stayed with you would have been a life of running and hiding, of stealing and killing and breaking trust.’
Forrester reached the door. His fingers were on the handle, but as he started to turn it Annie was walking towards him, snatching a book from a stack as she passed.
‘Your father, Miss O’Neill, was a worthless excuse for a human being, and for his sins he will burn in hell.’
Annie screamed then, screamed and hurled the book at him. Forrester ducked, swung the door wide, and Annie ran after him, grabbed another book from near the counter and threw it towards the man as he hurried from the store. She could hear him laughing, a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard, a sound like rusted wire dragged through a grate, and as she felt the rush of cool wind reach her she knew that there was not enough left inside her to fight any longer.
By the time she reached the sidewalk Robert Franklin
Forrester was across the street. He reached the opposite sidewalk, and for a moment he stood immobile under a streetlight.
Annie took one step forward and stopped dead in her tracks. Forrester was joined by another man, and together they stood side by side, looking back at her.
Robert Forrester and his son looked back at her. They did not move for some time, and whatever Annie O’Neill might have felt in that moment it was swallowed soundlessly when David tilted his head to the left and turned to the side.
Just like in the window across the street a thousand years before.
Just like then.
He had been watching her all the time, watching her as she went about her daily life, watching her while she thought she was falling in love.
And then he moved. David stepped back and turned the corner.
Forrester hesitated for a moment more, and then he turned and vanished also.
And with him – like a shadow, like a ghost – went Johnnie Redbird.
An hour later, the lights in the store still burning, it was John Damianka who found Annie O’Neill slumped in the chair with her head in her hands. He’d been walking home after an evening out with Elizabeth Farbolin. He’d seen the lights on, and the sheer incongruousness had drawn him to the window. The outer door was closed and he beat on it with his fists until she raised her head and looked back at him.
Eventually she rose and walked towards the door, unlocked it and let him in. He called a cab with his cellphone, and almost carrying her as deadweight he got her into the cab and took her home.
Sullivan was there when they arrived, and took her in. He closed his arms around Annie O’Neill and brought her to his
apartment. He lay her down on his bed and he turned out the light. He sat with her until he was sure she slept.
There would be no talking that night. Not a word.
Seemed to Annie O’Neill that there was nothing left to say.
It took a week.
A week of tears and hysterics, of Jack Sullivan lying with her night after night until she slept. And often she would wake in the early hours of the morning, and she would start to cry again, and Jack would hold her, pull her tight against him, and say whatever he felt might help. It didn’t. There was no way it could.
She knew the truth.
And the truth hurt.
All these years her father had been out there, alive on Rikers Island, and Annie had never known. And her mother carried the knowledge, carried the secret close to her heart for all those years until she herself had died. And never said a word.
And they talked, Annie O’Neill and Jack Sullivan, talked perhaps more than they needed, and they read through the manuscript once more, and Annie faced the harshness of reality, and that reality came with teeth and claws and blood in its mouth.
And sometimes Annie would just ramble, monologuing her thoughts out into nowhere, and the fact that Sullivan was there to hear her made no difference. He could have been anyone at all, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. She had been caught up in something that was older than herself, and this man – this Redbird, Forrester, whoever the hell he was – had come for something that she didn’t have. He had even brought his son, a son who had used
her
name to take an apartment in
her
city … And then she talked of Boston, the way David had disappeared for those hours, and how – upon
her return – she had found little things had moved, changed, found themselves out of place, and realized that
they
had been here, invaded her home, invaded her heart and everything about her …
And then disappeared.
They had wanted to deliver the truth, and deliver it they had. And the truth was what it was, however she chose to look at it: her father had been a killer; her father would die a killer; he would die in a small stone room measuring no more than eight by eight, and he knew – had always known – that not only was his own daughter out there, but that one day she might find him.
And so it took a week.
Sullivan had made the call. He gave them Annie’s name, as much detail as he could, and he requested a visitation order. Rikers Island told him when they could come, that the order could be collected on the day of arrival, and Sullivan started preparing Annie O’Neill to meet her father.
Tuesday morning, 23 September.
It was a bitter day, and from the East River through Hell Gate the wind came like a tornado of razor blades and cut into Annie’s face as she stood on the deck of the ferry, her heart like a dead fist in her chest, her nerves ragged, her mouth dry.
She looked back several times, over Jack Sullivan’s shoulder as he held her close, back there at the mainland, the lights of Port Morris and Mott Haven. And to her right was Long Island and Astoria where her father had lived all those years before, from where he himself had set out towards the same destination to see Johnnie Redbird. The North and South Brothers were there, and Lawrence Point, the Conrail Freight Yard, the stench from Bowery Bay that seemed to penetrate her very being through the pores of her skin. It was all there, just as it had been written, just as she had read.
Her face was numb with the cold, but better that way – a reason to keep silent. It seemed the tears – whatever tears may
have been left – were now frozen in her eyes, and in blinking she could feel them, back there somewhere playing hard to get. Sullivan watched her, watched her intently, her every move, her every gesture, and when the ferry came in towards the docking station – already the sounds and smells of a strange world so far from their own around them – he held her arm tight as she made her way down the steps to the boardwalk that ran the length of the jetty.
They were not alone. There were other people who also knew people within this place. They were cold too, and perhaps a little overawed by what was ahead of them no matter how often they had made this narrow journey before.
And then there were men with uniforms and guns, high fences and razor wire, an endless procession of black walls every which way they looked, walls that seemed to march out into the sea, to reach the sky, their foundations buried in a hundred miles of earth so that no-one might think to leave. But everyone inside thought of little else. Surviving and leaving.
Sullivan was asked his name, gave it, and when Annie was asked, she stayed silent until Sullivan gave her name too.
‘And who are you visiting?’ the guard asked. He was a wide man, perhaps the widest man Sullivan had ever seen, and in his eyes was a hardness that came from the necessity to do his duty without emotion.
‘My father,’ Annie mumbled.
‘What?’ the guard asked.
‘Her father,’ Sullivan said. ‘Frank O’Neill.’
‘You visited before?’ the guard asked, and with each question he asserted more of his width, his authority, his dispassionate disregard.
Annie shook her head.
‘No,’ Sullivan said. ‘We haven’t visited before. There should be a visitation order here for us.’
‘Through there.’ He pointed to a heavy wire-mesh doorway. ‘People on the other side will take your names, go through
your things, the usual routine.’ The guard pasted a meaningless smile on his face, and as if attempting to bring some humanity into the proceedings, added, ‘Like when you go on the plane.’
Sullivan nodded, and they walked on.
The sounds and smells of the penitentiary were as bad as Sullivan had imagined, just as he’d read in Forrester’s manuscript: the odor of cheap disinfectant, the clinging stench of a mass of men crammed into tiny cells, living in each other’s pockets. He could smell the fear and frustration, the interminable boredom, the hatred and resentment, the guilt and the innocence. And he realized that he was feeling what Annie’s father must have felt, first when he came to visit Johnnie Redbird, and again when he came to stay – and knew he would stay for the rest of his life.
Annie was silent, wide-eyed and pale. She stood immobile as a female guard searched her, went through her purse, emptied out its contents and removed a nail file, a hairbrush and a powder compact with a mirror inside. These items were placed in a see-through baggie and labeled. Annie had to sign the label, print her name and the date, and was told in terse monosyllables that she would be able to collect these items upon her departure. Sullivan asked once again about the visitation order, but the guard just ushered them forward and Sullivan took Annie’s arm once more.
They were brought to yet another gate, a door beyond, and beyond that a corridor that ran as far as either of them could see towards a tunnel of darkness at the end.
The visitors’ group went forward, like a crocodile of scared children.
At some point Annie paused and, without thinking, turned back and took a few steps. Sullivan held her arm even tighter, believed she would be bruised come morning, but Annie seemed to feel nothing, simply stood there white-faced and red-eyed, with an expression so blank anything could have been drawn upon it.
‘I can’t,’ she murmured.
‘You can,’ Sullivan said. ‘You have to.’
And then he was leading her again, and she went without protest or question or choice, and after what seemed like an hour, a day perhaps, they reached another door at the end of the corridor.
Sullivan could smell the people around him; the smell of fear and awe.
The door was unlocked from within. That grating sound of keys and bars and heavy metal cast in such a way as to be challenged by nothing. To Annie, that sound cut through to the very heart of this moment. Within these walls was her past, her present, perhaps some of her future. You could never walk away from such a thing and stay the same.
The light was blinding – too bright, too harsh – and within the brightness a cold and invasive tint of blue like ultra-violet: a light that could see
through
things, see them for what they truly were.