what?” Stone said.
“I mean, I get it, like life is an illusion and we don’t know if we’re here or we’re not here, like maybe we’re all somebody’s dream or the earth is just some cosmic giant’s ball of snot flying through space and we’re like ants or something just running around like it matters when it don’t. We all die in the end. That is the capital-T truth.”
By the light of the candle, Pinky’s sallow, pasty-white complexion was even more repulsive than it was under the bright light of day. Stone wanted to pity him but he knew the unexamined life was a contented life, and for a moment he wished he could switch places with Pinky to know what it felt like to be a happy idiot preoccupied with only the basest concerns. He stared at Pinky in disgust for a long moment, but he needed to talk, just to hear the words out loud, to make them real, to find a proper place to put his emotions.
“You know he died—just like that. The Judge. His heartbeat was replaced by a rattle in his throat. You know the death rattle is real? And then the rattle stopped. He looked the same at first, except the eyes maybe, but he wasn’t in there. And soon, I don’t know how long, he was just gone. No life at all. Where does it go?” Stone said. “Where does it go?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Pinky said. “You want answers, go see a priest or professor. I’m here to show you a good time.”
“I’m not much of a good-time guy right now,” Stone said, regretting his attempt to open up to Pinky.
“You’ll feel better. Just give it time,” Pinky said, craning his neck around and pointing toward a skinny girl with red, bee-stung lips. “Check out fuck-mouth over there. Why don’t you start with that?”
“I want another drink,” Stone said. He didn’t care what Pinky brought him; he just wanted to be alone again with his thoughts.
“Okay, but the next round is on you,” Pinky said, rising from the table. “I’m just bustin’ your balls. It’s on me, buddy.”
The dark, flickering room pulsed like a heartbeat, bodies pressed so closely together that Pinky was quickly lost to Stone’s view. Every mouth burned like an orange star as cigarettes were drawn and then exhaled. A song by Nico, which Stone had listened to on repeat one weekend with his girlfriend as a freshman at Wesleyan, played from the darkness. It was an acoustic song, sad and beautiful, the simple strumming of the guitar, her voice breaking and dropping, that accent, low and full of disappointment, then rising with hope through the strings. Not ten feet away, a tall skinny girl in a green wool hat and dark sunglasses mouthed the words. Points of ginger hair poked out of the bottom of her hat against her pale cheeks. She was almost flat-chested, wearing loose black peasant pants and a ripped gray cardigan. Stone thought she looked like a boyish elf when she sucked her cheeks in to draw on her cigarette. The girl danced almost without moving, a molasses-slow gyration. Her eyes were closed behind her dark glasses, but she was singing to him.
It would be obscene, vulgar, to pursue a woman now, considering all the things his father would never do again.
“Mind if I join you?”
Stone had not noticed the man approach, and without thinking he told him he was welcome to sit. The bar was packed, after all, and it would have been rude to refuse him a seat. The man wore a suit that looked out of place in the Catbird Seat. He was ten or fifteen years older than Stone and of a trim, sturdy build—he must have been an athlete once. He wore a neat goatee and had an olive complexion with a dark circular birthmark high on his right cheek. His battered nose appeared to have been broken numerous times. His eyes were small and brown and intense. Stone turned away. But the girl was gone now.
“Looks like you blew your chance there.” The man neither smiled nor frowned, his face inscrutable, blank. But there was something in the way he moved as he lit a cigarette off the candle, tilting his neck to one side as if he were working out a kink, which brought him into focus for Stone. The man had been at his father’s funeral, on the grassy knoll, telephoto lens pressed to his face. He had been too far away for Stone to make out his features, but the way he kept stretching his neck was his signature.
“What were you doing at my father’s funeral?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the man said. “I truly am.”
“You’re a journalist?” Stone asked. He didn’t look like the typical rumpled newspaperman. His suit was pressed and neat and his Windsor knot, even at this hour, was still tight and sharp, as if he had just slipped the narrow tie around his neck.
“Let me buy you a drink.”
“I have nothing to say,” Stone said. “And if you think a drink is all it takes to make me dish on my father, you are sadly mistaken.”
“Suit yourself,” the man said, sucking on his cigarette.
Stone scanned the bar for Pinky, wishing he would return with the drinks, but Pinky was nowhere to be seen. Stone thought about picking up and leaving rather than suffer the awkward silence of the stranger. But he was curious. Why had the photographer followed him here if he had just seen him at the cemetery? What could he possibly want?
The man was enjoying the uncomfortable silence as if he knew Stone would be the first to break. He blew some smoke into the air, winked at Stone, and took another long satisfied drag.
“All right,” Stone said at last. “Are you going to tell me who you are?”
Wordlessly, the man placed a small rectangular business card on the table between them. In the top right corner it read: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIONS. And then, centered in capital letters: LARRY ZOHAR—SPECIAL AGENT—JOINT TERRORISM TASK FORCE.
The vague uneasiness Stone had been feeling all night gathered in his chest and though he tried to harness his voice to respond, he could not. His premonition of doom had been correct. Stone felt a queasy swirling in his gut. Something big was about to happen, something he was not at all prepared to deal with.
“Now Matthew, let’s be clear,” Zohar said. “You are not in trouble. I just want to ask you a few questions.”
Stone managed to say, “And what if I don’t want to answer?”
Zohar laughed and said, “You have nothing in the world to worry about. I just want to ask you a few simple questions. This is not a big deal. Relax.”
“I have nothing to say about my father.”
“You seem quite certain I’m interested in your father and not you. You see, you’ve already told me something.”
Stone rose from the table, but Zohar grabbed him by the wrist and he sat again. “Maybe you’ll just listen then. Can’t hurt to listen, right?”
Zohar sipped something through a clear straw, placed the glass on the table, and looked Stone in the eyes. “You understand history, you’re well-read, educated, aware. You know the old cliché: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. There is something to that. You were born the day eleven Israeli athletes were murdered at the Olympic Village in Munich. That’s right, I know your birthday is in six days. Quite a violent welcome to the world. Of course you don’t remember, but you were told later, how your father spent the entire day watching Peter Jennings report on the massacre for ABC, and it wasn’t until the next day, when all the hostages were dead, that he came to see you resting in the maternity ward nursery.”
Stone
