Specimen Days

Simon was waiting for her upstairs. He held her. She was surprised to realize that she might start weeping, not so much from exhaustion or nerves but from the sheer joy of having someone to go to.

"Unbelievable," he whispered. "Unbelievable," she said.

She sat on his sofa, declined his offer of a drink. She loved his apartment, felt appropriately guilty for loving it, but loved it all the same. Four big rooms on the twenty-second floor, twelve-foot ceilings. The people walking the streets below, trying to find the least bruised bananas at the corner market, hoping not to get hit by cabs they had no idea what hovered over them, these oases of granite and ebony, these sanctuaries. The scorched plains rose to alpine peaks, where the wizards lived. Up here it was temple lights and a sequestered, snowy hush.

Simon was a collector. Nineteenth-century maps, Chinese pottery, vintage toys, and music boxes. Cat kept meaning to ask him. Why those particular objects, out of all the things in the world? She hadn't asked. She preferred the mystery. Simon bought and sold futures. He saw some particular significance in maps, pots, and playthings. She liked it that way. She spent enough time searching for explanations at work.

Simon sat beside her. "What happens now?" he said. She saw the spark in his eyes. He was turned on.

"They're checking out my building. I don't expect them to find anything."

"How can they not find anything?"

"There are thousands of fingerprints in a building like mine. And… Well. It's time you knew. We're not really all that good at this. We work very, very hard. But a lot of the time we just end up arresting the wrong person, and that person goes to jail, and everybody feels safer."

Simon paused, nodding. He seemed unsurprised, or had decided to act unsurprised. He said, "The pay-phone thing is funny, isn't it? Why not a cell?"

"Cell phones have owners. This is brilliant, in its way. Low-tech is the best way to go. You pump a few coins in, say your piece, and run. We can't watch every pay phone in the five boroughs. These little fuckers are smart."

"Do you think you'll catch him?" Simon asked. "We have to. We can't screw up something this big." "And your role is?"

"To go back to work in the morning and wait for another call."

"That's it?" "For now, yes."

He was disappointed, naturally. He wanted her careening around in an unmarked car. He wanted her cracking the case, saving the day. It was not sexy or interesting, her waiting by the phone. It was just say it too maternal.

She said, "I was reading Whitman. At the same time some maniac was writing a line from Whitman on the wall outside my door."

"I've never read Whitman," he said.

Of course you haven't. You're Cedar Rapids. You're Cornell and a Harvard MBA. Your people don't do poetry. They don't need to.

Stop.

She said, "Chapman was carrying a copy of Catcher in the Rye when he shot John Lennon."

"Why do you think the kid would choose Whitman?"

"I'm trying to figure that out."

"Why did Chapman choose Salinger?"

"Well, I'd say it was to feed his own narcissistic sense of himself as a sensitive loner. He identified with Holden Caulfield. Holden was right, and the rest of the world was wrong. Other people might think it was a bad idea to kill John Lennon, but Chapman thought he knew better."

"You think your kid feels the same way about Whitman?"

"I don't know. I'm talking to a Whitman person at NYU tomorrow."

"You tired?" "God, yes." "Let's go to bed."

* * *

Cat slipped under the covers while Simon was still in the bathroom, performing his rituals. Simon's bedroom was the sanctum sanctorum, the vault where the best stash was kept. Along the south wall, shelves offered row upon row of vases and plates and ginger jars, pale green and lunar gray. On the opposite wall a collection of old banks and music boxes looked back across at the pottery. Cast-iron Uncle Sams and horse-drawn fire trucks and dancing bears, carved boxes that still contained the favorite songs of people a hundred years dead. Little toys, behold the perfect serenity of a thousand-year-old jar. Pottery, never forget how much humans have always loved a sentimental song and the sound of a coin put by.

Cat let herself sink into the fat pillows, the zillion-thread-count sheets. Of course she liked it. Why wouldn't she? She'd gotten here by chance. If she and Simon hadn't happened to go to Citarella at the same time (they had the best crab cakes; she'd had a craving for crab cakes), if it hadn't been raining, if they hadn't hailed the same cab at the same moment…