Red on Red (54 page)

When Nick withdrew from the room and told the detectives about her history of going missing, and the time with the three boys, they soured on her, lost interest. They’d just spent three weeks shadowing another self-declared victim of the serial rapist, a young teenager from a fundamentalist family who had finally admitted that what had really happened was that her first tongue-kiss with a classmate had been followed within hours by her first period. Knowing nothing about sex, she’d been afraid she was pregnant, and she’d decided she’d better have something to say. That was a tip that had wasted nearly a month of time.

The detectives told Nick that when they made an arrest, Grace would be welcome to view the lineup, but they would not, as of now, consider this part of the pattern. They already had twenty-four victims whom they believed, who had provided proven facts to work with and who depended on their efforts. As for Grace, they doubted even that any crime had occurred. When they left, one said, “She probably just wants to skip school. It happens. Sorry.”

Nick wanted to correct him on the last point at least, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t his case anymore. When they finished at the hospital, school was where Grace wanted to go. She calculated that if they rushed, she could make chemistry class; the teacher was doing an experiment today in which everyone would get to set something on fire. Nick walked her inside, and they went to Sister Agnes’s office. When they sat down together, Nick told the sister that there had been a man in Grace’s building who had frightened her, and she’d had to stay inside. After she’d first talked with the police, there’d been a concern that the man might be the serial rapist who had been on the news, and then other detectives had needed to speak to her. They should have let the school know sooner, Nick apologized, but the matter had been urgent. Sister Agnes nodded and studied Grace for any signs of contradiction to the account, changes
in her face and bearing. Finding none, she thanked Nick and sent him on his way. As he was leaving, he overheard the sister say, “You’re a good and brave girl, Grace. You make us very proud. Now back to class, and I will find out what lessons you missed, what you must make up.” Nick envied both women for their sense of purpose, their place in the world, and wondered if he’d ever find either again.

T
here was never any argument between Nick and Esposito, but there was a chill—little fissures in the bond, like ant-eaten rifts on the edge of a leaf. Despite everything, Nick’s refusal to assent to the scheme with Malcolm made him feel small. Since they’d begun working together, Esposito had yanked him along at any number of junctures. Always Nick had resisted, and always Esposito had been right—from the first dinner with Daysi, to staying with his family, meeting Lena, the children, and the rest. Nick would have known none of those experiences had he followed his instinct instead of his partner. Cowardice and conscience both held him back, as they had during his suicide idyll. As then, he tried the idea on in his mind, looked in the mirror to see how it fit him. He couldn’t see it; the mirror was dark. It was the complexity that troubled him most, the excess of ambitions and the softness of assumptions; the plan was like an arcane financial instrument, with Esposito giddily speculating on murder futures, buying up options on fratricides. Nick lacked the math for it more than he lacked faith, though he hadn’t an excess of the latter. He wouldn’t give Esposito his last penny for the magic beans. Nick felt smaller still when he realized that he hadn’t been asked for the penny; all he had to do was keep his mouth shut, his specialty. A small man but soundless, like a good child, not heard.

When there was a lull in work on Malcolm’s leads, Nick and Esposito tended not to linger in the office. The distance between them would be noticed, and both became increasingly on guard against any kind of scrutiny, however well-intentioned. They took to driving around, looking for something to happen, for an adventure, a distraction. They listened to the police radio more often, ready to jump in on heavy street
jobs. One evening, Esposito jerked the car to the side of the street. “Wouldja?” The old game they had, whether she was as pretty as the first glimpse, the first guess, believing before you saw.

“No,” Nick said, out of habit, but also out of confusion—he didn’t see a soul on the street. Esposito rolled down the window and took a mug shot from the glove box. Nick couldn’t see who he was looking at. No one was on the sidewalk, no figure emerged from the lane of barren-limbed ginkgos. The block was desolate, eerily so for the time and place. Esposito just stuck the picture back into the box, crumpling it, and lurched back into the street, speeding ahead. “Nah, forget it.” The episode was trivial, but the worry stuck with both of them. Esposito without an eye for this, shut out from his old luck, was not Esposito. Nick turned on the radio to a news station, so they could hear about traffic jams and gas prices, window-washers who had fallen from scaffolding.

As with Allison, when it started to go, there was a drift, and then it quickened. There was so much goodwill; the reserves were deep—so many debts back and forth that neither knew which account was red or black. For a while, there was a parody of elaborate deference, and whether the issue was whether to be tough on a shifty witness or where to eat, positions were quit at the first signs of conflict. Nick didn’t have the heart to finish arguments, even if they were only in his head. Neither of them made a joke at the other’s expense anymore; they didn’t know if they had the credit. No one in the squad saw its degree. Or rather, they saw a change, but did not assume that things were so bad. Nick and Esposito worked with each other, day and night, and when one of them vanished, the other did, too, to keep up appearances. Nick grieved to see it. Esposito was his last and best tie to life, the living, but Nick would let go before he went along. If you’re drowning, do you swim to a sinking ship?

Nick wondered what Esposito had done with the tapes. Magnets were supposed to work. He wanted to look it up on the Internet, but then he figured it was better not to have a record of the search. Substitution was easier, a distraction in the evidence room at the DA’s office and a switch. Easier still if the DA asked Esposito to pick up the tape for her to view. The system was weakly defended against sabotage, challenge from within. Malcolm hadn’t written anything down. The tape was all there was—a few feet of magnetic film, two spools, a plastic box. Micro-fine
layers, millions of dots. In one arrangement, it’s static, white noise. In another, it’s
The Godfather
, the face of Pacino after he kills Fredo, even the music: Da, da-da-da, dot da-da … “Say a Hail Mary before you throw the line in the water. That’s my secret. That’s how you catch a fish.” That was what Nick was thinking when they left a bodega robbery, grainy surveillance tape in hand. He wondered if they’d ever talk about it, when Esposito asked an unnerving question. “What’s your favorite movie?”

Esposito had seemed preoccupied since the start of the shift, alternately smug and then cagey, waiting for the moment. Nick assumed there had been a pickup, a hookup with a new girl, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear about it. Since he’d met Lena, he had understood that part of Esposito even less, since it was such a good marriage that was risked, upping the stakes even after he’d won the bet. But mostly it startled Nick to think that his partner had heard the
Godfather
music in his head, as if it were audible through his skull.

“What?”

“What’s your favorite movie?”

“Are you kidding me? What’s your favorite color? If you could be an animal, what kind would you be? Would you rather be able to fly, or be invisible? Espo, do you want to trade baseball cards after this? You wanna trade comics?”

Esposito laughed at Nick’s sputtering protest, and Nick started to laugh, too.

“C’mon. What’s your favorite movie?”

“You know. The same as yours, the same as everybody.”

“Yeah,
The Godfather
. I know. Which one?”

“One and Two. They’re the same story, the same thing. The third, it doesn’t count. I like the first one better. It’s more in New York. When they go away—Nevada, Havana—it gets harder. They deal with different people.”

“Exactly. But your favorite movie, it might change.”

Nick knew what was coming.

“There’s a tape in my locker. It’s labeled,
The Godfather, Part Six
. You might find another copy in your desk, same label, my handwriting, so it looks like a bootleg tape.”

“So if I see it, I know it’s not the real
Godfather, Part Six
?”

“That would be your first clue.”

While Nick was dismayed to be in possession of incriminating
evidence, he was relieved to find that Esposito was not clairvoyant, that his own mind was not so transparent. Not even a coincidence, really, given that thoughts about the tape led to thoughts about the movie, and Esposito had done the same, a few steps ahead, as was his habit. “Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever.” Stopping his partner now might have been beyond Nick’s ability. It was certainly against the tribal code, and this was not just his tribe—it was his brother, bloodier than most. The wrong that Esposito had done had been undertaken with such an honorable spirit, and such magnificent talent. It had been done to save a friend who could not rise to the occasion of his own saving.

They drove around aimlessly for a while. Nick looked at the buildings, the five- and six-story brick apartment houses, sturdy and modest, none without some unpretentious classical ornament or variegation in the brickwork, zigzags of color and pattern. They were constructed with the subways, with them and because of them, in the teens and twenties, to relieve the sweaty densities of the downtown tenements, to make the city bigger and better, ideas that went hand in hand. There’d been a flow to it: Sandhogs had dug the tunnels for the A train, and Duke Ellington had finished the ride. New Yorkers of the midcentury, the American century, had grown up in more rooms than their parents had, with more possibilities. The can-do spirit.
Let’s put on a musical, invent a vaccine
. Nick tried to recall what the mood had been when he had grown up here, if it had been invested with such confidence. He couldn’t separate his own memories from the TV clip shorthand, the brassy newsreel voice-over announcing serial triumphs over breadlines, brownshirts, the moon. It didn’t seem like that now. It didn’t feel like greater heights awaited. If disaster could be averted, decay slowed, most would think it enough. They passed the Audubon Ballroom, another of the old vaudeville palaces, where Malcolm X had been killed before a speech. The assassins had been from the Nation of Islam, which he had left for Islam. The building had been an active synagogue at the time. What to make of that one? If those walls could talk, they wouldn’t. Nick was reminded of nearer history, other chickens that might come home to roost.

“Any word on the guy?”

They barely mentioned the scheme with the Coles, but when they couldn’t avoid it, they slipped into mobster obliquities, careful of microphones. It sounded affected, but it wasn’t unwise. Nick considered
whether it might have been better to be on speaking terms with IAB, now that real laws had actually been broken. But he could no more help Esposito with them than he could help Otegui with the Feds: the nature of his expertise made him suspect, his timing worse, like an enemy general offering to switch sides hours before the white flag is raised.

“The other one says he’s down south.”

“That’s a little easy.”

“Nothing wrong with easy, my friend. Everything doesn’t have to be inventing the wheel.”

Nick couldn’t believe Michael would simply do as he was told, pack up and settle down amid the peach trees. Things worked out for Esposito, Nick knew, but this would have been ridiculously accommodating. If anything, Nick would have bet on another exceptional clearance, that the Dominicans would get Michael first. Miguelito’s funeral would not be forgiven; Kiko’s people would not let that pass unanswered. Nick knew he could trust their hate, but not their efficiency, and he did not know if he could wait. Still, there was something sly in Esposito’s voice, something superior that incited Nick’s curiosity even as his misgivings remained. It would have been hard enough to talk if they could have spoken openly, frankly, without the absurd codes.

“How long?”

“Can’t say. I’m in touch, on top of it.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Maybe it’ll agree with him—the weather, the pace.”

“People don’t change.”

“No? I’ve seen it happen.”

Nick couldn’t tell if there was affection or annoyance in the mild barb, if Esposito wanted to tease him into talking more, or if he wanted him to shut up. And if Nick couldn’t read his partner, how could he hope to understand Michael? Nick couldn’t picture Michael’s mind any more than he could the rapist’s, the furnace of alien hungers and hates. The mother’s death had to have been the catalyst, but Nick had lost his mother as well, and it had not driven him to such galloping fantasy and fanaticism. And he had been younger when it had happened, when it should have been more formative. It had made him a little more solitary, a little more saturnine, sometimes a lot. Anything else? Not really, no. Grace, too, it must have changed her, even though Nick hadn’t known her before. She found solace in homework and orgies, the scholarship
slut. For what it was worth, she had the best take on death and disaster of the three of them, refusing revenge and despair. Nick pictured himself in a silken bed with Daysi and Allison, reading poetry, all of them feeding one another grapes. Esposito mistook his peaceful expression for a degree of reconciliation.