"Something happened to him while he was gone. He tried to tell me what it was but I freaked out. I didn't want to do it anymore." She made a face. "He wasn't ever rough with me before. I know he got sent away for a.s.saulting me or whatever but I never agreed with that. He used to be afraid to let me kiss him. That's part of why he pushed me that first time." She hesitated. "I guess you know why he took me to the tunnel. What he wanted to do with me, I mean."

Violet let herself down on the edge of the desk. "I think so. Will seems to have confused-"

"He wanted to f.u.c.k me."

She was looking back and forth between them now, eyes wide and unblinking, challenging either of them to contradict her. There was nothing blank about her expression any longer. She sat on the backs of her hands, letting her full weight rest on them, as though to keep from doing something she'd regret. She seemed to have no idea that she was crying.

"Do you know what he wanted me for?"

Violet nodded mutely. I'm afraid of this girl, she told herself, framing the thought very clearly. I'm afraid of her because she's been with Will. Because of what he's told her and because of what she's guessed. The sooner this is over with the better.

Lateef shook his head. "Miss h.e.l.ler and I understand, Emily. There's no shame in that." He cleared his throat like an embarra.s.sed father. "You know that there's no shame in that, don't you?"

Emily rolled her eyes at Violet, as if they both knew that Lateef was being childish. "If he'd still been the same I'd have done it," she said. "It's not my first time, you know. Not like Will." She shrugged her shoulders. "I might even have done it anyway."

Lateef said nothing to that. Violet saw her chance and took it.

"You're right about Will, Emily: he's always been afraid of things, and he's still afraid. You agree with that, don't you? So maybe he hasn't really changed so much." She was smiling and nodding at Emily but she was talking to Lateef. "Look at me for a second. Would you do that, Emily? Let's think this through together. I've always tried to shield you from Will's bad spells, always kept him at home, so you've probably never seen him at his worst. I'm sure you remember, on certain days, how I wouldn't let him come to the door-" But by then it was clear that she'd made a mistake.

"That's bulls.h.i.t, Yda. You're lying." Emily was on her feet now, no longer holding herself back, pointing at Violet like a detective on the last page of a thriller. "The reason you didn't let Will out had nothing to do with that. Who the f.u.c.k could you protect from anything?"

"Miss Wallace-" Lateef was half out of his chair, looking from one of them to the other, huffing and swaying like a man twice his age. "Miss Wallace, I'm going to have to ask you-"

"You're right, Emily," Violet said softly, reaching out to take her by the arm. "You're right about everything." But Emily had already started screaming.

"You're the reason Will's the way he is, Yda. What other way could he f.u.c.king be? You're his mother mother." She stood for a moment with her feet wide apart, bracing herself as if for punishment, taken aback by her own fearlessness. Then she said the thing that Violet had been dreading.

"What he did to me proves you're his mother, Yda. You know it does."

Violet said nothing, did nothing, made no reply or sound of any kind. Lateef was next to her but he did nothing either. He'll ask me now, she thought, and that was enough to keep her mute and still. She waited until she couldn't stand it, until she felt actual pain; then she turned around to face him. And still he didn't ask.

"Miss Wallace," Lateef said, as decorous as ever. "I'm going to have to ask you to sit down." Violet watched him as if through a telescope. She no longer felt the slightest trace of fear. He's not in on the joke, she thought. How could he be?

"She's lying," Emily said through her teeth. "She's lying, Detective Lateef. Just look at her."

Lateef kept his eyes fixed on Emily. "Miss Wallace," he repeated. This time he said it differently. Emily coughed into her fist and sat back down.

"You've been through a lot today, Miss Wallace, and you have my sympathies. But Will is Miss h.e.l.ler's son, as you've just said yourself, and I think it's safe to say she's suffering, too." He took in a conciliatory breath. "Would you agree with that?"

Emily said nothing.

"Why don't we all have a seat, Miss h.e.l.ler."

Violet did as she was told, feeling more detached than ever. She hadn't been aware that she was standing. She'd had the identical feeling at the end of Will's trial, and again when she'd visited him at Bellavista: the sense that disaster had missed her by inches. Somehow the feeling failed to comfort her.

"All right, Miss Wallace. Do you feel as though you could answer a few questions?" Lateef pulled open a drawer and rummaged through it, exactly as he'd have done in his own office. "The truth is that we really need your help."

"Don't talk down to me, then. And don't say 'we.'"

Lateef smiled at her patiently. "I'll try my best."

She narrowed her eyes at Violet. "I'm not going to talk with her around."

The smile faded. Violet thought he might glance at her but he did no such thing. He simply let them both watch the benevolence drain from his face.

"You broke the law today, Miss Wallace, and whether or not you regret it now doesn't especially matter. You seem like a decent girl to me, but sometimes I'm not the best judge of these things. Am I wrong this time?"

Emily shrugged and stared up at the ceiling.

"No, I don't think I'm wrong." He looked at Violet now-perhaps for Emily's benefit-then sighed and leaned soberly forward. "I'm told that your parents are on their way, Emily. I'd like to give them some good news when they arrive." There was a trace of appeal in his expression now, almost of vulnerability. Violet couldn't help but admire his technique.

"What do you say, Emily?" He glanced at his watch. "Can we work out a deal, the two of us?"

Emily slouched farther down in her seat. "What kind of a deal?"

"Did Will talk to you about what his plans might be?"

She frowned at him. "Plans?"

"Did he say anything about where he might go next?" Violet said before she could stop herself. "Did he say whether he was-"

"I'm not talking to you, liar." She kept her eyes on Lateef. "Tell her to go away."

Lateef took the watch from his wrist and laid it deliberately across the desktop. "You've got a quarter of an hour until your folks get here, Miss Wallace, and about seven seconds before I ask Sergeant Cruz to keep you overnight." He let his eyes linger on the watchface. "Should I call the sergeant over?"

"I don't give a s.h.i.t."

"Did Will ask you to go somewhere with him? Somewhere after the station?"

She shook her head stiffly.

"Why did he want to have s.e.x with you, Emily?"

"To save the world." She leered at Violet. "But you knew that already."

Lateef looked up from his watch. And still he doesn't ask, Violet thought. The fact that she'd won him over so completely almost sickened her. It's for Will, she reminded herself. It's for his sake, not mine. But still it was easier not to watch it happen.

Lateef rapped against the desk with his knuckles. "Look at me me, Emily, not at Miss h.e.l.ler. Where did Will want to go?"

She shrugged again. "Anywhere I wanted. He had money."

"What money?"

"Six hundred something dollars. He stole it out of a suitcase."

"Wasn't there some place you talked about? There must have been."

She gave the same laugh as before. "He only really ever talked about one place. But I shut him up about that."

"Why?"

She looked past them both as though the answer were obvious. "It was Union Square Station, that's why. He said it was the best place in the world."

She called out his name and he came through the window in the glory and fulfillment of his calling. Not Lowboy's or any other's but his own. A cardoor slammed shut and the curtains blew open and he came through the window as magnificent and silent as a G.o.d. His gold satin jacket hissed as he spread his arms and fell in elegant bright folds against his ribs. ninjaz 3:10 was written across the back of it like a psalm. He moved in arabesques and loops like a bird or a deer and hit Secretary across the face before his heels had landed on the floor. He took Lowboy by the hair and threw him up against the dresser. He was a vision to behold and Lowboy shivered just to see him. As yet he hadn't even made a fist.

He let his weight come down on Lowboy's back and asked a simple question. Lowboy turned his head to answer and saw nothing but a rippling in the air. The question was repeated like a punchline. Sometimes one voice asked sometimes another. His beautiful sad voice mellow and endlessly patient. Her thin panicked screeching. The question was simple but where could the answer be found. Lowboy made wellmeaning mindless noises. He wept and he babbled and he made every face that he knew. Where was the answer. A drawer of the dresser was closed and his hand was inside it. He rolled his eyes back in his head and felt a coolness.

"Look at me motherf.u.c.ker." His eyes inclined toward the mirror but he saw nothing worth seeing. "Look at me." The voice low and calm and the others behind it. A whirlpool of rabid hysterical hisses and his own voice lost among them like a pigeon locked inside a tabernacle. I'm writing my own psalm, Lowboy said to himself. The drawer was closed again where were his fingers. A face was in the mirror now he shrieked a question at it. A boneless ugly face and very white. Retching and weeping and asking somebody's forgiveness.

How can this face exist in this my world.

In the blink of an eye it was some later hour and he was being pulled along a hallway by his shins. His arms were crossed at his chest and his right hand was wrapped in a blue football jersey. He recognized the hallway: he was traveling backward in time. The lobby came next and the entryway and the pitted green steps. A palm cupped his head as he went down the steps and he looked up and saw Secretary's fat inconsolable face. It was night now or something like night and her hair glowed blue and silver in the backlight. He saw his breath and her breath high above it. The poodle lay flat on the fire escape with its bonnet caught between two of the bars.

They stretched him out against the curb and left him. The voices were even louder now if such a thing was possible. Bickering, wheedling, gibbering at each other and at him. Issuing instructions without number. He shut his eyes and turned his face into the wind. He felt no cold. What time is it, he wondered.

"What time is it?" he said into the air.

He knew better than to hope for a reply. He was leaking from his eyeholes and his ears. The voices were more urgent than he remembered them ever being and he frowned and held his breath and listened closely. Apparently there was something left to do.

Soon after that he got onto his feet. What time is it, he said again. Why is it so dark. He stuck his hand inside his shirt and started walking. The street was as dry and lifeless as the moon. Here and there a window flickered bluely. Had they waited until nighttime had they thought that he was dead. He walked with his head down and followed the scuts in the pavement. He pa.s.sed a window with a TV on behind it and the weatherman waved at him and wished him well. The clock on the livingroom wall said 4:15.

Four fifteen in the morning, Lowboy said to himself. Forty-five minutes to five.

A thought hit him then and the ma.s.sed voices scattered. It hit him like lightning. 4:15 in the morning. The appointed hour long since come and gone. It was black and cold and lifeless on the street but he saw no sign that there had been a fire.

"Nothing happened," said Lowboy. He said it out loud so that he could believe it. "No fire." He waited for the voices to deny it or to change his mind for him but they kept still. How can they deny it, he thought. They can't. His mouth went dry with victory. What can anyone say. Not a thing in the world. It's 4:17 in the morning.

He thought about all kinds of people as the shock of it pa.s.sed through him but the one he thought of most was Violet. A song came to him as he thought about her: "I'm a Little Blackbird" by Clarence Williams. Also "Goose Pimples" by Bix Beiderbecke. Also "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me."

I'm coming Violet, he said. I'm on my way. Do nothing until you hear from me. He saw her sitting tiredly on the black lacquered couch with the red wall behind it, then jumping up when he walked through the door, then swooning when he told her what he'd done. No one swooned anymore but she would if he asked her. People always did in the old songs. He thought of her on the couch again because it made him happy. I did it Violet, he was saying. I made the world stop ending. She called him her little professor and he was. A policeman was with her but it didn't matter. The policeman got up and reached for his gun but Violet pulled the rug from underneath him. He tried to get up but she hit him with a frying pan. He started singing "You'll Wish You'd Never Been Born" and Violet started singing "Black & Blue." The policeman switched over to "Leavenworth Strut" but Lowboy cut him off with "Sunny Disposish" and Violet was dancing on a stool.

In an alley by the station he saw Quick & Painless and told them the news. He held his broken right hand up as proof and they stood motionless and watched him without blinking. Only the white of the socks on their hands showed in the shadow of the houses and from time to time the glittering of their eyes. When he was a few steps from the alley he stopped and made his presidential face. I did it boys, he said to them. I did it. Nothing happened Nothing happened.

At the station he told everyone he saw. They gawked at him in simple disbelief. He walked up the row of turnstiles and picked up farecards from the ground and slid them through the slots and no one stopped him. The station was brighter and more beautiful than he remembered. Argon tubelights palpitated coldly. His skin felt hot against his clothes and when he brought a hand to his eyes his fingerbones clacked in their sockets. Nothing took him by surprise or made him worry. He was moving through a world transfigured and redeemed by sacrifice and it was only right that what he saw seemed foreign. He saw the world the way a headless saint would see it.

The fourteenth farecard was good and he went through the turnstile sideways, breathing very slowly, keeping his right hand pressed against his ribs. There was no pain. The 6 train arrived and he sat down inside it. The station fell away and there was no one on the train but a smell in the air like sheets of almonds baking. Night outside or could it be the tunnel. Stars pa.s.sed by like tracklights. The inside of the car was clean and gray and free of any shadows. His hands were on the crosspole and his feet were close together and his voice was like a locust in the air. William of Orange is my name, he shouted. Can I please have a smoke. Sometimes it happened that he spoke very clearly. The car was arranged not with L-shaped seatblocks but with ashcolored benches running the length of each wall. A dentist's office or a jailcell or a courtroom. The headmaster's office at the Bellavista Clinic. The smoking lounge with its patterned plastic stools.

Everything else that happened happened softly. In the gla.s.s he saw his sly white face reflected. His face made faces at him while he watched it. The stars and struts and guttered bedrock pa.s.sing. The steady sloughing of the rails and wheels. The train eased into the tunnel like a hand into a pocket and closed over Lowboy's body and held him still.

What time is it now? someone asked. It was 4:27. The train banked through a curve and straightened itself and gave a kind of cough and lost its power. The tubelights flared and flickered and expired. Lowboy opened his eyes as wide as he could and pressed his ghostly face against the gla.s.s. He saw colossal shapes and glyphs and signatures. Damp concrete slathered in ciphers. Turquoise and orange and silver and platinum blond. Bleeding heartwrenching letters. Tags the kids called them. Glorious and shrill and wet and horrifying. A righteous text set down for his eyes only.

He sat on the bench and watched the great words pa.s.sing. They oozed and writhed and chirruped and collapsed. No use trying to decode them. They dripped against the window like tattoos. He made a frightened sound and shut his eyes and the tags made words and signs behind his eyelids. They issued decrees. The almond smell was sharper and he knew that if his eyes came open the unthinkable thing he'd thought of would have happened. It was happening now. He pressed his hands against his face and tried to listen. Something in the car was moving. The tags were coming clear to him or was the cipher broken. Yes he had broken it. They weren't words at all but pictures. Each letter its own heaving organism. They shuddered together like bees in a hive, dancing out messages and swallowing one another and making a history and f.u.c.king. When he opened his eyes he understood them perfectly.

Violet and Lateef sat on the 4 train in the early morning, an empty seat between them for propriety, studying the backlit ads across the aisle. NEW CAREERS IN COMPUTING AND CAPTAIN MORGAN SPICED RUM AND THE INSt.i.tUTE FOR PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY AND JONATHAN ZIZMOR'S FACIAL FRUIT PEELS NEW CAREERS IN COMPUTING AND CAPTAIN MORGAN SPICED RUM AND THE INSt.i.tUTE FOR PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY AND JONATHAN ZIZMOR'S FACIAL FRUIT PEELS. From a police recruitment poster a grayscaled woman of no particular age or ethnicity beamed at them like a televangelist: imagine a mother thanking you for finding her missing son. Lateef glanced furtively at Violet. They'd spent the last three hours doing next to nothing and the wait seemed to have affected her. She was sitting up straight with her hands in her lap, moving her lips very subtly, like someone just learning to read. She seemed more foreign to him at that moment than at any time since he'd first seen her. She hadn't said a word to him since they'd left the Second Precinct.

"Two more stops," Lateef heard himself saying, as he might have to a tourist or a child. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

"We might not find Will there, you know. He might be gone already."

She said nothing.

"He might not be coming to Union Square at all."

"I know, Detective." She shook her head. "We shouldn't count our blessings."

He smiled and nodded. "That's right. Or our chickens, either."

She didn't answer.

"If you see your son, Miss h.e.l.ler-this is important-point him out to me right away." He cleared his throat. "Don't pursue him yourself. Can we agree on that?"

She said something too quietly to hear.

"What was that?"

"I hate trains." She took a breath and held it. "I hate them."

"Just two more stops," he repeated lamely, glancing at his watch. "We're in good shape, Miss h.e.l.ler. It's been less than fifteen minutes since the sighting."

"What sighting?"

He watched her without answering, waiting for her to acknowledge him, but no acknowledgment came. It was impossible that she'd forgotten the last quarter hour-the call, the positive ID, the frantic rush to the 4-but no other explanation came to him. Her expression was the same as when she'd first come to his office: the same spiritless dullness, the same defeat. What's changed in her, he wondered. What pills did she take. What is it that I'm not seeing clearly.

Stop asking questions, he told himself tiredly. Stop playing detective. You've been asking questions all day and they've been the wrong ones and you've been too stupid to answer even those. Too stupid or too self-satisfied or too smitten. You're going to sit here quietly now and get off at Union Square and wait for the boy to come out of the 6. If he doesn't come out you'll have to start over from nothing, which wouldn't be a bad idea at all. Pretend you've never seen her and begin at the beginning. Good morning, Miss h.e.l.ler. I'm Detective Lateef. Imagine yourself thanking me for finding your missing son.

After a time she seemed to recollect him. Her eyes came slowly into focus and she leaned away from him and licked her lips. "Detective," she said, still not turning her head. "I want you to do something for me."

"That doesn't surprise me, Miss h.e.l.ler." He managed a smile. "You usually do."

"You'd know my son, wouldn't you? You'd know him if you saw him." She took in another slow breath. "You'd recognize him, I mean."

"If I didn't, I'd just-"

"I want to know what you'll do when you find him. Will you tell me that?"

He waited to answer until she'd looked at him. "I hope you're not planning on leaving me, Miss h.e.l.ler."

She blushed as though he'd asked her something shameful. "I'll be there," she murmured.

"Then why ask me that question?"

It took her a long time to answer and when she did the words came out awkwardly, tentatively, as though she'd already forgotten what he'd asked. "Just tell me what will happen when you find him."

He was about to repeat his question when he saw that she was looking at the poster. He pressed the heels of both his palms against his eyes. "I'm going to approach him very slowly, with my hands away from my body, so that he can see he's not in any danger. I'm going to talk to him. I'm going to make sure that no one else comes within fifteen feet. I'm going to keep all weapons holstered. And I'm also going to keep you close at hand." He leaned toward her then like the host of a talk show, arranging his hands in his lap. "I'll have to judge his state of mind, to start with, and you know your son best. That's why I need you to stay right with me, Miss h.e.l.ler."