V

EPILOGUE

The days fall like leaves. All is quiet now.

The marsh grass is blackened, and when the wind blows from the southeast it carries with it the smell of smoke. Someone found the charred body of a mute swan floating in the water, and the burned remains of shrews and hares have been discovered in the charred undergrowth. The dog no longer likes to venture where the fire burned, and so the twin boundaries of his world are represented by events from the recent past: flames rising where no flames should have been, and a deformed man drowning slowly in a pool of bloodied water as a pregnant woman watches him die.

I traced the young prostitute named Ellen to Tenth Avenue, just a couple of blocks from Times Square. After the death of G-Mack, I heard that she’d been taken under the wing of a new pimp, a middle-aged serial abuser of women and children who called himself Poppa Bobby, and liked his girls to call him Poppa or Daddy. It was after midnight, and I watched single men hover around the street girls like hawks circling wounded prey. Natives drifted past the hookers, by now immune to such sights, while late-night tourists darted uneasy looks at them, the glances of the men perhaps lingering for a moment too long before returning to the street ahead or the faces of their partners, a little moisture falling softly and secretly upon the seeds of their discontent.

Ellen was different now. Before, she had maintained a veneer of toughness and carried herself with a confidence that, if she did not actually feel it in reality, was still a sufficiently strong counterfeit of the original to enable her to live the life that had been forced upon her. But now as I watched her stand on the corner, a cigarette in her right hand, she looked lost and fragile. Something had broken within her, and she appeared even younger than she was. I imagined that would have suited Poppa Bobby just fine, as he could then sell her to men with such tastes as a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old, and they would inflict themselves upon her with greater ferocity as a result.

I could see Poppa Bobby about halfway down the block, leaning against the window of a convenience store, pretending to read a newspaper. Like most of the pimps, he kept his distance from the women under him. When a john approached one of his “team,” as he called them, the girl would usually commence walking toward Bobby, in part so as not to attract the attention of any curious cops who might be watching by carrying on a conversation with a stranger at a street corner, but also to allow the pimp to fall in behind, maybe eavesdrop on the negotiations to make sure the girl wasn’t trying to rip him off. Whenever possible, Bobby preferred to have nothing to do with the clients themselves. It made them uneasy, he knew, to deal with a man, shattering whatever illusions they might have had about the transaction in which they were engaged. In addition, if the john turned out to be an undercover cop, then there was nothing to connect Bobby to the girl.

I watched a man casing Ellen from the subway entrance. He was small and pale, with a Dodgers cap pressed down low on his head. The cap failed to hide his eyes, instead causing the hunger in them to shine more brightly in the shadow of its peak. His right hand worried relentlessly at a small silver cross that dangled from a leather strap on his left wrist: a misguided offering from a priest or a therapist, perhaps, so that when he felt the urge upon him he could touch it and derive from it the strength to resist his appetites, except the touching of the cross had instead become an element of his preparations, the icon an extension of his sexuality, each stroke ratcheting his excitement up a notch so that sex and worship became inextricably bound together in a single act of transgression.

Eventually he decided to make a move on her, but I slipped past him and got to her first. He seemed about to say something, but I raised a finger to him in warning and, reluctantly, he backed away, melting into the crowds until he could find another outlet for his cravings.

Unseen by him, a dark figure detached itself from a wall and followed him.

It took Ellen a moment to recognize me. When she did, she tried to move around me, hoping to attract Poppa Bobby’s attention. Unfortunately, Poppa Bobby was otherwise engaged. He was sandwiched between two large Italian-Americans, one of whom had a gun pressed into Poppa Bobby’s side. Tony Fulci was laughing. His arm was draped around Bobby’s shoulder, and he had clearly just told Bobby to laugh along with him, because Bobby’s mouth split reluctantly like a dropped orange. Tony’s brother Paulie was behind the two men, with his right hand in the pocket of his leather jacket and his left clenched by his side, forming a fist like the business end of a sledgehammer. They led Bobby to a dirty white van, its motor running. Jackie Garner was sitting in the driver’s seat. He nodded to me, barely perceptibly, before Bobby was hustled into the back, and the van pulled away.

“Where are they taking him?” said Ellen.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Will he be back?”

“No.”

She looked distraught.

“What am I gonna do without him? I got no money, no place to go.”

Her teeth worried at her lower lip. I thought she was about to cry.

“Your name is Jennifer Fleming,” I said. “You come from Spokane, and you’re seventeen years old. Your mother reported you missing six months ago. Her boyfriend has since been charged with assault, possession of a controlled substance with intent to supply, and sexual abuse of a minor based upon photographs found in the apartment he shared with your mom. The photographs were dated. You were fifteen when they were taken. Your mom claims that she didn’t know it was going on. Is that true?’

Jennifer was crying. She nodded.

“You don’t have to go home yet, if you don’t want to. I know a woman who runs a shelter upstate. It’s pretty, and you’ll have some time to think. You’ll have your own room, and there are green fields and woods to walk in. If you like, your mom can come visit you, and you can talk about stuff, but you don’t have to see her until you’re ready.”

I didn’t know what to expect from her. She could have walked away and found shelter with some of the older women. After all, she had no reason to trust me. Men like G-Mack and Poppa Bobby had probably offered her protection too, and extracted a heavy price in return.

But she didn’t walk away. She dried her tears with the back of her hand, and suddenly she was just a lost girl. The woman she had been forced to become disappeared entirely, and the child that she still was took her place.

“Can we go now?” she said

“Yes, we can go now.”

Her eyes moved sideways, looking past me. I turned to see two men approaching. One was skinny and black, with gold chains at his wrist and neck. The other was a fat white man wearing a red padded jacket and worn sneakers.

“Fuck you doing?” said the white guy. “Where’s Bobby at?”

“Look over your shoulder,” I said.

“What?”

“You heard me: look over your shoulder.”

He did. It was a quick movement, like a dog snapping at a fly. Over by the subway, barely ten feet from us, Angel stood watching us. Louis was just rejoining him. He dropped something into a trash can as he walked. It looked like a Dodgers cap.

Angel waved. Tubby tapped his buddy on the shoulder, and the small black man turned to see what the problem was.