Chapter 14

I woke up around two after five hours of a restless, dream-ridden sleep, most of it suspended just a degree or two below the horizon of consciousness. All that coffee may have had something to do with it, much of it on a stomach unsupplied with food since the spinach pie at Tiffany's.

I rang downstairs and told the desk clerk he could put through my calls again. The phone rang while I was in the shower. I called down again to see who it was, and the clerk said there was no message. "You had a few calls during the morning," he said, "but no messages."

I shaved and dressed and went out for breakfast. The snow had stopped falling but it was still fresh and white where human and vehicular traffic hadn't yet turned it to slush. I bought a paper and carried it back to the room. I read the paper and looked out the window at the snow on rooftops and window ledges. We'd had about three inches of it, enough to muffle some of the noise of the city. It was something pretty to look at while I waited for the phone to ring.

The first to get through was Elaine, and I asked her if she'd tried earlier. She hadn't. I asked her how she was feeling.

"Not great," she said. "I'm a little feverish and I've got diarrhea, which is just the body trying to get rid of everything it doesn't need. That seems to include everything but bones and blood vessels."

"Do you think you ought to see a doctor?"

"What for? He'll tell me I've got this crud that's going around, and I already know that. 'Keep warm, drink lots of fluids.' Right. The thing is, see, I'm reading this book by Borges, he's this Argentinian writer who's blind. He's also dead, but-"

"But he wasn't when he wrote it."

"Right. And his work is kind of surreal and spacy, and I don't know where the writing leaves off and the fever starts, if you know what I mean. Part of the time it seems to me that this is not the best condition to be in while I read this stuff, and other times I think it's the only way to do it."

I filled her in on some of what happened since our last conversation. I told her about the run-in with Thurman at Paris Green, and that I'd spent a long night with Mick Ballou.

"Oh, well," she said. "Boys will be boys."

I went back to the paper. There were two stories that particularly struck me. One reported that a jury had acquitted an alleged mob boss charged with ordering an assault on a union official. The acquittal had been expected, especially in view of the fact that the victim, shot several times in both legs, had seen fit to testify for the defense, and there was a photo of the dapper defendant surrounded by well-wishers and fans on his way out of the courthouse. This was the third time he'd been brought to trial in the past four years, and the third time he'd skated. He was, the reporter said, something of a folk hero.

The other story concerned a workingman who'd been leaving the subway station with his four-year-old daughter when a homeless person, apparently deranged, attacked the pair and spat at them. In the course of defending himself the father pounded the lunatic's head against the ground, and when it was over the homeless man was dead. A spokesman for the DA's office had announced the decision to prosecute the father for manslaughter. They ran a photo of him, looking confused and besieged. He wasn't dapper, and seemed an unlikely folk hero.

I put the paper down and the phone rang again. I picked it up and a voice said, "Is this where it's at?"

It took me a moment. Then I said, "TJ?"

"Where it's at, Matt. Everybody want to know who's this dude, hangin' loose on the Deuce, passin' out cards an' askin' everybody where's TJ. I was at the movies, man, watchin' this kung fu shit. You know how to do that shit?"

"No."

"That is some wild shit, man. Like to learn me some of that sometime."

I gave him my address and asked him if he could come up. "I don't know," he said. "What kind of hotel? One of them big fancy ones?"

"Not fancy at all. They won't give you a hard time downstairs. If they do, just tell them to call me on the house phone."

"I guess that be all right."

I hung up, and it rang again almost immediately. It was Maggie Hillstrom, the woman from Testament House. She had shown my sketches to kids and staff members at both Old Testament House and New Testament House. No one could identify the younger boy or the man, although some of the kids had said that either or both of them looked familiar.

"But I don't know how much stock to place in that," she said. "More to the point, we were able to identify the older boy. He never actually lived here but he did stay overnight on several occasions."

"Did you manage to come up with a name for him?"

"Happy," she said. "That's what he called himself. It seems ironic, doesn't it, and in a shabby way. I don't know if that was a long-standing nickname or if he acquired it here on the street. The consensus is that he was from the South or Southwest. A staff member seems to recall that he said he was from Texas, but a boy who knew him is just as certain he came from North Carolina. Of course he may have said different things to different people."

He was a hustler, she said. He went with men for money and took drugs when he could afford them. No one could recall having seen him within the past year.

"They are forever disappearing," she said. "It's normal not to see them for a few days, and then suddenly you'll realize you haven't seen someone for a week or two weeks or a month. And sometimes they come back and sometimes they don't, and you never know if the next place they went to was better or worse for them." She sighed. "One boy told me he thought Happy had most likely gone home. And, in a manner of speaking, perhaps he has."

THE next call was from the desk, announcing TJ's arrival. I told them to send him on up and met him at the elevator. I took him to my room and he moved around it like a dancer, checking it out. "Hey, this is cool," he said. "See the Trade Center from here, can't you? An' you got your own bathroom. Must be nice."

As far as I could tell he was wearing the same outfit I'd seen him in before. The denim jacket that had looked too warm for the summer now appeared unequal to the winter's cold. His high-top sneakers looked new, and he had added a royal-blue watch cap.

I handed him the sketches. He glanced at the top one and looked up at me, his eyes wary. He said, "You want to draw my picture? Why you laughin'?"

"I'm sure you'd make a fine model," I said, "but I'm no artist."

"You didn't draw these here?" He looked at each in turn, examined the signature. "Raymond something. What do you say, Ray? What's happenin'?"

"Do you recognize any of them?"

He said he didn't, and I ran it down for him. "The older boy's name is Happy," I said. "I think he's dead."

"You think they both be dead. Don't you?"

"I'm afraid so."

"What you want to know about them?"

"Their names. Where they're from."

"You already know his name, you said. Happy, you said."

"I figure his name is Happy like your name is TJ."

He gave me a look. "You say TJ," he said, "everybody gone know who you be referrin' to." He looked at the sketch again. "You sayin' Happy's his street name."

"That's right."

"If that's his name on the street, that the only name the street gone know. Who give you that name, Testament House?"

I nodded. "They said he didn't live there but he stayed there a couple of nights."

"Yeah, well, they be good people, but not everybody can handle the rules an' shit, you know what I'm sayin'?"

"Did you ever stay there, TJ?"

"Shit, why'd I do that? I don't need no place like that. I got a place where I live, man."

"Where?"

"Never mind where. Long as I can find it, that's all that matters." He shuffled through the sketches. Casually he said, "I seen this man."