“You’re a newspaperman, right?” he asked.

“Surely you remember me, young man.” I stood, brushed myself off, and affected a transatlantic tone of befuddled impatience, casting myself as Cary Grant, him as Ralph Bellamy.

“What’s your name again, though?”

I searched and came out with: “Vance Christmas.” He was the only newspaperman I could think of in my condition, besides Jimmy Olsen. I supposed Christmas deserved any belated trouble Aeroman could bring him.

“Right, yeah, but from where?”

“Albany,” I said. “I’m with the, uh, Albany Herald-Ledger. You know, we’re doing a special feature on the state of the prisons.”

“But you came in with those other guys, right?” The fog of uncertainty between us was an irritation to this man, my diffident captor-he wanted me to supply a right answer as badly as I wanted to supply one, so he could resume his uncontroversial errand.

“Sure, Talbot invited me to tag along,” I said. I supposed those other guys were the ones just on the other side of the window. If I was made to join them perhaps I would be allowed to tag along and, eventually, shuffle out. “Because of the special feature thingee, the supplement.” This fiction was becoming distractingly real to me-I imagined a shattering exposé, Pulitzers for the underdog Herald-Ledger -so I neglected to wonder why reporters, real reporters, were here in the first place.

I’d made a mistake, though, in trying a second time to claim the unseen Talbot’s blessings. Gofer squinted harder, and arranged the cans of soda along the top of the machine to free his hands. He rubbed the crook of his arm to restore feeling to the chilled flesh, and cleared his throat, reassembling dignity and command.

“Can I see some I.D.?”

“Look, listen,” I said, lowering my voice. “I didn’t really come in with those other guys.”

“How’d you get here, then?”

“I spent the night. I came in as a visitor, yesterday-here, check my hand stamp, you’ll see.”

“Well, I don’t know about that…” He seemed about to panic and seek help. We were still unnoticed by the congregation in the search room. This was my margin, my breath, and it was rapidly vanishing.

“Listen, wait,” I said. “I really am a reporter for the Albany Tribune.” Had I bollixed my credential? No matter: “I persuaded a couple of guards to smuggle me in here-you know Stamos and Sweeney?”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t want to get them in trouble, that’s why I was stalling. They let me stow away, for my investigation.”

“Stamos did that?”

“Yup.”

“Christ, they’re idiots!”

“I know, I know.”

“Talbot’s going to murder them.”

“Maybe not, if you can get me out of here. Just slip me back through to the lot. I’ll never involve any of your names, I promise you that.”

“Jeez Louise!”

“Check my hand.”

Shaking his head, Gofer unclipped his scanner and shone it on my knuckles. The purple emblem seemed to hover, a tiny hologram.

I tried to hustle him past deliberation, by acting as if he’d already agreed. “Let’s make a move now, they’re not looking.”

“Jeez-”

“Only I really need to stop in the bathroom, I was stuck there all night.”

“Oh, brother.”

When I emerged from the men’s toilet Gofer regarded me pityingly, my threat all dissipated now. “Guess it was unlucky for you this whole thing went down today,” he said.

“Crazy unlucky,” I agreed.

“Teach you to try that again.”

“Indeed. Never.”

“It’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.”

At the A/B doors I whispered, “Probably you should just say I left something in my car.” Gofer made a face, then leaned through a sliding window.

“This guy’s got to go back to the lot,” he said, his tone morose, like a bullied boy. “I’m taking him out.”

“Okay,” came the bleary reply. The cage’s bolts slammed open and shut, each in turn, and we moved through.

“Hey, so what exactly did go down in there?” I asked Gofer at the entrance to the lot. The dawn’s early light, still combing through the treeline, shocked my crummy orbs. I caught a whiff of myself, an ordinary all-night stink. Three disgruntled crows jogged across the gravel as we approached, then flapped aloft to barely clear the razor curls atop the Cyclone fence, and winged for the highway and the strip mall beyond it. The birds made shabby harbingers of my freedom: the prospect of my rental car’s AC, some McDonald’s coffee.

“Holy Moses,” said Gofer, incredulous I’d been so near yet missed the breaking story. “Nothing apart from a fellow up in the SHU fooled an officer into opening his door, made a run for it. I guess he had some stolen keys, so we’ve got a whole headache about it now. Talbot’s having a cow.”

“Guy escaped?” I was blessed, I understood now, in being one headache too many this morning. Hence my easy ticket out. No one, least of all Gofer, wished to see Talbot further inflamed. I couldn’t have scripted Robert Woolfolk’s role better if I’d tried.

“Killed himself.”

“What?” I blurted.

Gofer shut his eyes and stuck out his tongue.

“They killed him, you mean.”

“Nope.” He staged-whispered for effect. “Suicide. Got loose, then did away with himself, poor crazy son of a gun.”

“Why would he kill himself if he got free?”

Gofer shrugged. “This fellow leaped off a gun tower, highest point on the yard. Gunnery officer said he was hooting like an eagle. He hit a sloped concrete embankment, landed sideways, I guess. It was pretty sickening. They were taking pictures out there but nobody’s going to use them. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen-his arms got tangled under his body, so he sort of crumpled up and broke in half as he slid down that bank. Didn’t even look human by the time he came to a stop.”

chapter 16

The Hoagy Carmichael Room, a mock Midwestern parlor with carpet and furniture and vitrines full of Carmichael ’s own scrapbook memorabilia, was open only by appointment, but I was able to make one on the spot. I didn’t sense the room’s keepers had too much demand. The formalities were only to be certain no intruder seated themselves at Hoagy’s upright piano and started playing, or swiped hand-scrawled notes from Bix Beiderbecke or Governor Ronald Reagan. The key-bearer was a middle-aged secretary down the corridor, in the Archives of Traditional Music, there in Morrison Hall. She hovered nervously beside me in the room, until I persuaded her I was a good bet. Then I was left alone, to balm my soul in contemplation of the original sheet music for “Ole Buttermilk Sky” and “My Resistance Is Low” and a ribbon-bound screenplay of To Have and Have Not autographed by Bogart, Faulkner, and Hawks. Afterward I went to the listening room and spent some time on headphones, exploring lost acetates, rare masters of Carmichael ’s music. The Collegians, Carmichael’s Indiana University fraternity band, had recorded a stomp called “March of the Hooligans”-careening hot jazz with a fiddle solo to peg it as Hoosier. I played that tinny, miraculous bit of schoolboy art five or six times, then returned to dwell some more in the Zen garden of the room.

I’d driven all day and far into Sunday night from the mall lot in Watertown, committing topological penance across western New York and into Pennsylvania, on a flat, three-lane interstate which judged or forgave nothing, only left me wholly to my own judgment. Now I understood: I’d wakened Aeroman to kill Robert Woolfolk. It was a collaboration that had taken Mingus and the ring and my half-conscious hatred years to devise, though the seed of inspiration had been unmistakable, in Aaron X. Doily’s plunge into the Pacific Street vest-pocket park, twenty-three years ago-what goes up comes down. Aeroman was nothing if not a black body on the ground. I hadn’t even played fair and told Robert of the ring’s switch to invisibility. I wondered if he’d discovered it. I wondered if the guards on the tower had only told themselves they’d seen the man who screamed like a raptor on his way down, if there’d been anything to see until he’d smashed to pieces on the embankment.