The City (The City 1)

He walked behind the wheelchair, and I wondered what he was doing, and then he put the muzzle of the gun against the back of my head.

When I looked at Fiona Cassidy, what I saw so terrified me that I had to look away. In her leering, twisted countenance, I glimpsed so

mething other than the woman herself, something that had for a long time lived within her and that now rose like some beast out of deep dark water.

To taunt me further, Drackman took the gun away from my head, grabbed the wheelchair, and spun me, and I wished that I had the pistol that my father had put aside on the piano.

The gun roared, and I was kicked sideways in my chair, and a pain of great intensity rocked me. A blackness came upon me, and I fell away, as off a cliff, accelerating by the second, breathless and plummeting, until someone seemed to catch me, and a voice said, “Not yet, Ducks. It’s not your destiny to be tossed dead into a car trunk with that woman.” As I was lifted higher, higher, light formed around us. She materialized at my side. She wore an amazing white dress more layered than the kimono of the court lady in Mr. Yoshioka’s living room. And the dress flowed out in all directions, to every horizon, where there had been only darkness, and the dress was light. I met her eyes and felt a chill. She blew upon my face. Her breath smelled of roses, a sweet breath that had weight and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was in the wheelchair, without pain, and apparently Drackman had not yet fired the shot that killed me. Make of all that what you will, though I do have more to say about it later.

Reflexively, my right hand had gone to the Lucite heart. I don’t know why I fished it out of my pajama top, whether perhaps I thought there might be magic in it just when magic was most needed. But that would have been asking too much after my resurrection, too much.

Never in my life until then had I heard my grandfather raise his voice in rage, but when he charged into the room, swinging a baseball bat as if Babe Ruth had nothing on him, he bellowed like an angry bull, a raging bear. Drackman turned and fired and missed. Grandpa Teddy broke the creep’s right arm, and the pistol that had seemed to be my fate clattered across the floor, rattling to a stop against the left wheel of my chair. Howling in pain, Drackman slipped on the wet floor and fell, and in spite of his arm, he scrambled toward the weapon.

A paraplegic in a wheelchair can’t reach objects on the floor to pick them up, which is why a lot of us acquire assistance dogs, not only for companionship but also to retrieve objects we’ve dropped and to call elevators for us, open doors. The pistol was beyond my grasp, but I let go of the Lucite heart and with both hands spun my chair 180 degrees, getting the gun behind the right wheel and under the chair as Drackman reached for it, trying to move it with me and keep it away from him.

Grandpa swung at the good hand with which Drackman sought the pistol, missed when the killer snatched his hand back, and struck the floor a blow that must have resonated through the bat and for a moment numbed his hands, weakened his grip.

Switchblade sprung, Fiona rushed at Grandpa in his one weak moment. I grabbed the heart pendant again, jerked it hard enough to snap the fine silver chain around my neck, and threw it at her face. It was the only thing I had to throw, nothing more than a chunk of Lucite, weighing a few ounces, but it hit her in the eye, and as she reeled past my grandfather, missing him with the blade, she squealed perhaps more in surprise than pain.

Grandpa swung the bat again, fractured Drackman’s other arm, and turned to Fiona. I think it might have been a close thing as she slashed at Grandpa again, but her blade missed and his bat connected. Suddenly she had a handful of shattered and bleeding fingers, the pain apparently so bad that she staggered toward the front door, fell to her knees, and vomited.

For a moment, my grandfather’s face was such a mask of wrath that I thought he might continue to swing the bat until he broke down Fiona and Lucas so completely that they would never walk again or have the power in their hands to hold a gun. Instead, he put the bat in his armchair. He picked up the knife, folded the blade into the handle, and dropped it in a pants pocket. He took Tilton’s gun from the piano and tucked it in his waistband, scooped Drackman’s pistol off the floor and held it.

“You okay, son?” he asked.

I let out my breath in a whoosh, and I nodded.

“Mrs. Lorenzo,” he said, “our phone lines have been cut. Will you go next door and wake the Velakovskis and use their phone to call the police?”

Curled in the fetal position, Fiona sobbed and begged someone to help, her hand a basket of exposed and splintered bones that probably could never be put back together properly. Lucas Drackman was another portrait in misery, both arms useless.

Looking bewildered, shaking violently, Mrs. Lorenzo rose from the sofa and stood there as if uncertain what she’d been asked to do.

Grandpa said, “Are you able to do that for me, Donata? Go next door? I’d be most grateful if you could.”

“Absolutely,” she said, “I’ll do it right away.”

“Better put on your raincoat,” he said. “It’s nasty out there.”

She carefully stepped over the puddle of vomit, retrieved her raincoat from the closet by the front door, and went out into the storm.

Tilton got up from the piano bench. “Mr. Bledsoe, I’m no threat to you or to anyone. Let me go. You’ll never see me again, I swear. You know you never will. You know.”

After regarding Tilton in silence for a long moment, Grandpa said, “Sit down,” and Tilton sat.

105

When Mr. Smaller stepped close to the bed and shot Mr. Yoshioka, something about the reaction of the body wasn’t right. He threw back the light blanket—and found only more blankets shaped into a human form.

I never knew that in addition to tailoring and Asian art and haiku, Mr. Yoshioka was interested in martial arts. Neither did Mr. Smaller. Later, my friend explained it to me: “I introduced Mr. Smaller to my apartment. I introduced him to one wall and then to another. I showed him the door and then another door and then the floor. We took a tour, and though he knew the apartment from his years as the building superintendent, he seemed to be repeatedly surprised by what he encountered.”

106

Next door at our neighbor’s house, after Mrs. Lorenzo called the police, she was sufficiently self-possessed to ring Diamond Dust and have my mother brought to the telephone immediately at the end of the number that she was performing. By the time Mom could make her way home through the storm-washed city, police cars cluttered our street, their emergency beacons flashing red and blue, so that the falling raindrops almost looked like showers of sequins. Drackman had been loaded into an ambulance and taken away. Policemen had succeeded in subduing Fiona, who became dangerous again when she saw them arrive; though in great pain and bleeding from her shattered hand, she nonetheless shrieked and kicked and bit with all the ferocity of a wildcat. As my mother hurried up the walkway, the paramedics were conveying a bound and bitter Fiona to the second ambulance.

In the living room, two plainclothes detectives had sorted out things with Tilton, who remained as docile as Fiona Cassidy had been obstinate. They cuffed him, and a uniformed officer escorted him toward the front door. Just then my mother entered, a vision if ever there was one, her hair diamonded with rain, as lovely as a princess in a fairy tale, raincoat flaring like a royal’s cape. Tilton looked up, met her eyes, and seemed to be surprised, not only that they should encounter each other at this last possible moment, but as if he both knew her and did not know her, as if he might be seeing the real and complete Sylvia Bledsoe for the first time, because among the other emotions kaleidoscopic in his face, the most striking was a look of wonder. In her face, by contrast, there was neither anger nor pity, nor contempt; she would not give him the satisfaction of an emotional response, but regarded him as she might have any piece of furniture, and after a moment she stepped aside, out of the way, so that he might be moved elsewhere.

She came to me and dropped to her knees on the rain-slick floor and took my face in both of her hands and kissed my forehead. For the longest moment then, we stared into each other’s eyes, neither of us capable of speech even if there had been anything we needed to say. Grandpa stood over us, smiling and, I think, a little bit bewildered by what he’d been called upon to do and by what he’d done. Finally she said, “You know you’re up way past bedtime,” and I said, “Yes, ma’am, but it won’t happen again.” She said, “It better not,” and I knew then that we were at last safe.