The day was cold but not bitter. I wore my zip-up quilted jacket, which was somewhat too big for me, because even though I was skinny and a bit short for my age, I grew too fast to get much use out of clothes if everything was bought to fit perfectly. Coats were more expensive than jeans and shirts, so I always had to wear them somewhat large to start and then gradually grow into them. I wore my new toboggan hat, too, which was striped red and white and topped with a red pom-pom that—in retrospect I am amazed to reveal—I thought was the essence of cool.
Although it was smack between breakfast and lunch rushes when I got to The Royal, the place was busy, as always. A few tables were available, so that the only people standing were those at the takeout window near the front.
I got in line to place my order, not at all impatient because I delighted in the atmosphere of the diner. Such a mélange of aromas. Hamburger patties on the griddle, bubbling with melted cheese. Bacon. Butter-scrambled eggs with ham. Mere bread becoming toast. All of those smells and more were threaded through with cigarette smoke; if you did not live through those times, you will need some imagination to understand how reliably people tolerated one another’s habits and foibles in those days.
Clink of flatware, clatter of dishes, waitresses calling out orders in diner lingo, a ceaselessly rising and falling and rising tide of conversation among the customers: It was music of a kind, at the same time soothing and invigorating, such a human place and time, when no one texted at the table or had an Internet to surf while they ate or carried a cell phone the ring of which could never be ignored.
Waiting in line, I enjoyed looking around, seeing the different kinds of people, wondering who they were, what lives they returned to when th
ey left The Royal—and it was then that I saw Tilton, my father. Against the farther wall, a row of booths extended the length of the diner. He sat in one toward the back, in animated conversation with someone across the table from him, gesturing with a fork.
I almost didn’t recognize him because he’d grown a beard. He wore a black turtleneck and some kind of silver medallion on a silver chain.
Because the booths had high backs, I couldn’t see the companion with whom Tilton so vigorously conversed. I wondered if it might be Miss Delvane, the writer and would-be rodeo novelist. I was curious, of course, but I was more spooked than anything.
If Tilton glanced in my direction and spotted me, nothing good could follow. Not yet having placed my takeout order, I turned at once away from him and hurried to the door, praying that nothing I wore would identify me to him. The quilted jacket was identical to a million others. Although my striped toboggan cap was a beacon on my head, my mother had given it to me for Christmas, less than a week earlier, and my father had never seen it.
Outside, leaving the congenial world of The Royal, slapped in the face by a gust of cold wind, I initially intended to run, to get out of the immediate neighborhood and beyond Tilton’s reach. But I’d gone not ten feet when intuition took hold of me as surely as a hand gripping my arm, brought me to a stop, and told me that I needed to know with whom my father was having a late breakfast or early lunch, that the identity of his companion must be of crucial importance.
After all these years, I occasionally wonder how my life would have been different if in that fateful moment I had followed my first impulse and had run. But I suppose that what we call intuition is just one of the many ways that the still small voice in our souls speaks to us, if we will listen, and that inner companion wants only what is best for us. If I had run, no doubt what might have happened to me would have been far worse than what did happen, my losses even greater than they have been, my story darker than the one I’ve lived. And yet I wonder.
38
Directly across Forestall Street from The Royal stood a shoe-repair shop on the ground level of a century-old four-story brick building, the upper floors of which might have offered either offices for businesses with uncertain prospects or apartments even cheaper than our own. Beside that structure lay an empty plot of ground, where another building had been torn down in the name of progress; but progress evidently had gone elsewhere. A decrepit chain-link fence surrounded the lot; years earlier the gate had been broken down and never replaced. In warmer weather, neighborhood kids gathered there to play kickball and other games.
When I came out of the diner, traffic was light, and I crossed the street in mid-block. The bright sun painted the pavement with the black shadows of bare-limbed trees, and in the fitful winter wind, those silhouettes twitched underfoot like the many tangled legs of agitated spiders.
I went through the gap in the fence where the gate had once been and stood behind the chain-link, watching the diner. Around me, the ground was mostly barren, hard-packed dirt with here and there a few bristles of withered weeds, empty soda-pop cans, and scraps of paper litter.
Overhead, the winter-stripped limbs of the trees scratched at one another and rattled when a gust of the inconstant wind passed through them. The last birds hardy enough to perch in those leafless bowers cast themselves, with much flapping of wings and shrieking, into a rush of wind and let it carry them to roosts in the more sheltered eaves of nearby buildings.
When my father came out of the diner, he was not in the company of Miss Delvane. Instead, the man with him was a few inches past six feet, with long dirty-blond hair that the wind tossed. They huddled for a moment, sharing a last word, and then my father walked west toward the avenue. His tall companion stood at the curb until a cluster of cars passed, and then he crossed the street as if he had business at the shoe-repair shop.
Having crossed, however, he turned east toward me, and I found a soda can to kick along the fence, hoping to pass for a bored kid with nothing more interesting to do than to haunt a vacant lot and hope others like me might come along for a game of kickball. I noisily booted the can eastward, then turned and kicked it toward the west, looking up at him as he approached along the farther side of the chain-link.
Although his short hair was now long, although he had a poorly groomed mustache when once he had been clean-shaven, although he was perhaps twenty-five instead of seventeen, as he had been when I had seen him in a dream, I recognized him at once. Lucas Drackman. Murderer of his parents. Bomber of military-recruitment offices. He so little resembled the police artist’s portrait that he was in no danger whatsoever of being identified by it.
In memory, I heard the voice of Miss Pearl, who had seemed to be in my bedroom, sitting on the edge of my bed, on the night that I dreamed of this killer: Go to sleep, Ducks. Go to sleep now. I have a name for you, a name and a face and a dream. The name is Lucas Drackman and the face is his.
His dragon-smoke breath pluming from his open mouth, he met my eyes through the fence, and for a moment I couldn’t look away from him, for I felt that I was staring into the eyes not of a man but of a demon. Perhaps in that moment, he sensed that my interest was not that of someone to whom he was a stranger, because when I moved again and sent the can tumbling, he came to a halt. I kept going, kicking that tortured scrap of aluminum to the west end of the property, turned, and started back, pretending that I didn’t realize he was waiting for me.
As I approached him, he said, “Hey, kid.”
Trying to look pissed-off at the world rather than frightened, I dared to look at him.
He studied me for a moment and then said, “What’s with you?”
I did what I thought a juvenile delinquent in the making might have done. I flipped him my middle finger and turned away and booted the can hard toward the center of the vacant lot. I gave that can hell for a while, kicking it this way and that half a dozen times, and when at last I looked toward the fence, Lucas Drackman had gone.
39
At home, after putting the cheese bread in the oven, which served as our breadbox, the chili and cupcakes in the refrigerator, I took Mr. Yoshioka’s business card from my wallet and went to the telephone.
The card provided no company name, but a woman answered the phone with, “Metropolitan Suits. May I help you?”
Although she must have thought it peculiar that a young boy would be ringing them up, she didn’t hesitate to give me their address when I asked for it.
I felt the need to consult with Mr. Yoshioka at once, but what I had to tell him could be conveyed convincingly only face-to-face. The address I’d been given was in the city’s Garment District, two short blocks and four long blocks from our apartment, farther than I had permission to roam alone. I regret to say that I hesitated not at all to be disobedient, but instead set out at once.