• • •
NO COPS OUTSIDE ANYPLACE, no cabs, early-midwinter darkness. Cold, a wind picking up. The glow of inhabited city streets too far away. She has stepped out into a different night, a different town altogether, one of those first-person-shooter towns that you can drive around in seemingly forever, but never away from. The only humanity visible are virtual extras in the distance, none offering any of the help she needs. She gropes through her bag, finds her cellular phone, and of course can’t get a signal this far away from civilization, and even if she could, the batteries are almost dead.
Maybe the phone call was only a warning, maybe that’s all, maybe the boys are safe. Maybe this is a fool’s assumption she can’t make anymore. Vyrva was supposed to be picking up Otis at school, Ziggy should be down at krav maga with Nigel, but so what. Every place in her day she’s taken for granted is no longer safe, because the only question it’s come down to is, where will Ziggy and Otis be protected from harm? Who of all those on her network really is trustworthy anymore?
It might be useful, she reminds herself, not to panic here. She imagines herself solidifying into not exactly a pillar of salt, something between that and a commemorative statue, iron and gaunt, of all the women in New York who used to annoy her standing by the curbsides “hailing a taxi,” though no taxis might be visible for ten miles in any direction—nevertheless holding their hand out toward the empty street and the oncoming traffic that isn’t there, not beseechingly but in a strangely entitled way, a secret gesture that will trigger an all-cabbie alert, “Bitch standing at corner with hand up in air! Go! Go!”
Yet here, turning into some version of herself she doesn’t recognize, without deliberation she watches her own hand drift out into the wind off the river, and tries from the absence of hope, the failure of redemption, to summon a magical escape. Maybe what she saw in those women wasn’t entitlement, maybe all it is really is an act of faith. Which in New York even stepping out onto the street is, technically.
Back in Manhattan meatspace, what she ends up doing is somehow passing through the shadowy copless cross streets to Tenth Avenue and finding headed uptown a curb-to-curb abundance of lighted alphanumerics on cheerful yellow rooftops, traveling the darkening hour as if the pavement like a black river is itself flowing away forever uptown, and all the taxis and trucks and suburbanite cars only being carried along on top of it . . .
• • •
HORST ISN’T HOME YET. Otis and Fiona are in the boys’ room, having creative differences as usual. Ziggy is in front of the tube, as if nothing much has been happening in his day, watching Scooby Goes Latin! (1990). Maxine after a quick visit to the bathroom to reformat, knowing better than to start in with the Q&A, comes in and sits down next to him about the time it breaks for a commercial.
“Hi, Mom.” She wants to enfold him forever. Instead lets him recap the plot for her. Shaggy, somehow allowed to drive the van, has become confused and made some navigational errors, landing the adventurous quintet eventually in Medellin, Colombia, home at the time to a notorious cocaine cartel, where they stumble onto a scheme by a rogue DEA agent to gain control of the cartel by pretending to be the ghost—what else—of an assassinated drug kingpin. With the help of a pack of local street urchins, however, Scooby and his pals foil the plan.
The cartoon comes back on, the villain is brought to justice. “And I would’ve got away with it, too,” he complains, “if it hadn’t been for those Medellin kids!”
“So,” innocent as she can manage, “how was krav maga today?”
“You know, funny you should ask. I begin to see the point.”
Right after class Nigel was outside someplace looking for his sitter, and Emma Levin was going around setting the security perimeter, when Ziggy heard a beep from his backpack.
“Uh-oh. Nige.” Ziggy fished out his Cybiko, checked the screen, started punching buttons with a little stylus. “He’s in the Duane Reade around the corner. There’s a van out in front of this place with some creepy guys and the motor idling.”
“Hey, cool, a pocket keyboard, you can send, like, e-mails on this?”
“More like instant messaging. You don’t think this van is anything to worry about?”
Suddenly there was a huge flash of light and burst of noise. “Harah!” muttered Emma, “the tripwire.”
They ran out the back exit to find a large paramilitary-looking party in the areaway blinking, staggering, and cursing. Everything smelling like fireworks.
“Something we can do for you?” Emma stepping quickly to the right and motioning Ziggy to the left. The visitor turned toward where she’d spoken from and appeared to be reaching for something. Emma went blurring into action. The ape didn’t fly very far through the air but was disorganized enough by the time he hit that it took her only a few economical gestures, with Ziggy as backup, to dispose of him.
“Not only an amateur but stupid too. He doesn’t know who he’s fooling with?”
“You’re awesome, Ms. Levin.”
“’Course, but I meant you. You’re part of my unit, Zig, nobody messes with any of us, he didn’t even get that far with it?”
She searches the intruder and finds a Glock with an oversize magazine. Ziggy’s eyes grow distant, as if attending to something internal. “Hmm . . . maybe not a civilian, yet not much of a professional, what else does that leave, I wonder.”
“Private contractor?”
“What I was thinking.”
“So you’re a sleeper cell after all.”
Shrug. “I’m on call 24/7. When I’m needed, I’m there. Looks like I’m needed. Just let me set another flashbang here, then we’ll check down in the basement, find a dolly, roll this idiot out to someplace his friends in the van can collect him.”
They rolled the unconscious gunhand on up the block and dumped him by the curb next to a broken pressboard credenza, swollen and lopsided from rainwater. They discussed whether or not to dial 911, figured what could hurt. “And that was about it. Nigel typically was pissed that he didn’t get in on it.”
“And . . . this is all something you saw on Power Rangers or one of them,” Maxine hopefully.
“Bad karma to lie about stuff like that . . . Mom? You all right?”
“Oh Ziggurat . . . I’m just glad you’re safe. So proud of you, how you handled yourself . . . Ms. Levin must be, too. OK if I call her later?”
“Tellin ya, she’ll confirm.”
“Just to say thanks, Ziggy.”
Otis and Fiona come blasting out the bedroom door.
“Listenna me, Fi, lose the perpetuity language, you’ll regret it.”
“It’s only boilerplate, Satjeevan says I can walk anytime I want.”
“You believe that? He’s a recruiter.”
“Now you’re acting like a jealous boyfriend.”
“Real mature, Fiona.”
Horst comes blinking into the apartment, has a look at Maxine. “Need a minute with yer ma here, guys,” lifts her by one wrist, gently steers her to the bedroom.
“I’m all right,” Maxine avoiding eye contact.
“You’re shaking, you’re whiter than Greenwich, Connecticut on a Thursday. It’s nothing to worry about, darlin. I talked to Zig’s instructor, just the standard New York creep that krav maga’s designed to deal with.” She knows what this honest never-to-be-wised-up face can change into, knows she better let this ride unless she wants to collapse under whatever it is, call it guilt, settles for nodding, distant, miserable. Let Horst have the standard-creep story. There are a thousand things in this town to be afraid of, maybe even two thousand, and there’s too much else he won’t likely ever know. All the silences, all the years, fraud-examiner infidelities without the fucking, plus unexpectedly some real fucking and now the other party is dead. No question of improvising around what happened today, first thing Horst will go, this dead guy, you were seeing him? and she’ll flare up, you don’t know what you’re talking about, then he’ll blame her for putting the boys in danger, then she’ll go, so where were you when you should’ve been here for them, and so fuckin on and on, yes and it’ll be right back to the olden days. So best to just dummy up here, Maxine, once again, just, dummy, up.
