The Exceptions

SIX


I sit in my car and face the sun, let the engine idle. Now that I have an enriched goal, I must find Melody and bring it to completion. If there’s been any plan to snag her without my knowledge, Peter would’ve been aware of it.

The next likeliest scenario is she fell—or leapt—into the arms of the feds, which also makes this the best-case scenario. The sooner she’s under their care, the better, for within a day’s time Randall will be put to good use again.

I start driving in concentric circles. I begin with tight ones, up and down every street near the restaurant, double back and begin again, eyes peeled for any sign of her having been anywhere: an abandoned sandal or clothing item, an intentionally left sign that she was taken rather than having left of her own accord.

As I negotiate the urban streets, I briefly replay the conversation with Peter, try to understand why Eddie is involved in taking all these people out. Eddie Gravina is a good guy, very trusted in our family. But he has two things working against him: He’s only been part of our crew for about eight years, and he’s never been on the action end of anything that I’m aware of. His purpose and value rests more in giving advice, acting as a sounding board for my father. So why would he be keeping, as Peter put it, a close eye on everything—on anything? It’s not sitting right with me. His name should have never come up. Last time I saw the guy he was sitting in the kitchen at Sylvia, reading the sports section and slurping a free bowl of Sylvia’s version of cioppino, a thin rivulet of broth dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.

As the sun shifts to an afternoon sky I make my way back to downtown Baltimore, hover around the federal building I’d hid behind not so long ago. Dr. Bajkowski is apparently working out of the office today, along with all of his or her associates, as not a single space is free. I circumnavigate the building a few times, not wanting to sit still in case my car was recognized or tagged back at the restaurant. The frigging thing sticks out like a bloody knuckle.

The more time that passes, the more nervous I get, the less in control I feel of the situation, despite the obvious truth: I have lost complete control. My nerves get the better of me and I call Gardner. He sighs, hangs up, calls me back from the server room; he’s performed this ritual enough times that I’ve come to recognize the sound of the fans whirring on all of the computers.

“You forget I have a job?” he says.

“You mean the one I just called you at?”

“I’ve got a meeting in seven minutes, and when that’s over I need to finalize a database design and submit the final draft of a disaster recovery plan.”

“I’m trying to recover from a disaster of my own.”

“Let me clarify: I do not have time.”

“You have time for your frigging addiction and to pimp out images of your wife, you have time for me. I cannot begin to explain how this is the wrong moment for you to test my patience.”

I hear him typing on a computer keyboard, taking out on the keys what he wishes he could take out on me. He clicks those keys for a solid two minutes, with gaps in his typing about every ten seconds, winds it all up with one loud slap of the keyboard.

“Gimme a minute,” he says, and the line goes dead.

And sure enough, it’s almost exactly sixty seconds when I get a call from Randall’s cell.

“Nine-one-nine Norton Drive, Columbia, Maryland. Goodbye.”

“Wait! That’s outdated information.”

“It’s what I have, okay? I don’t create, delete, or modify the data, I just tell it where to be stored and how to be accessed.”

This does not surprise me. Let’s be honest: Melody’s most recent address was the passenger seat of my Audi.

“It’s probably going to change very soon,” I say, “and I want to know when it does—the second it does.”

“How would I—”

“Monitor the status of her file every hour and let me know the instant it changes. If it doesn’t, you check in with me every four hours to let me know there’s no update.”

“For the love—I can’t keep doing this. They can’t track what I’m doing directly from the server, but if they wanted to they could find out how many times the record was accessed, which could raise a flag. I’m not taking this risk.”

“Listen, I’m completely finished explaining our relationship. You have a boss?”

“Of course.”

“I outrank him, you understand?”

He pulls the phone away from his mouth, yells a few commandment-breaking profanities, then returns with, “I should’ve never gotten into bed with you whores.”

Oh, if I could reach through the telephone line. “Yeah, but you did. And you know what? Consider me your own personal raging case of herpes, my friend. You’re gonna carry me around the rest of your life, everywhere you go. You can try and cover me up, but you and I both know you can never—never—get rid of me. I will always be right there, running through your blood, festering under your skin, waiting to pop—”

“I’m not doin’ it.”

I thought my STD metaphor was fairly vivid. I guess I should stick to what I know: sticks and stones; words suck. I wipe my face and speak the language of his native tongue: “When was the last time we gave you a boost?”

Gardner’s no longer quick to answer. “Two days ago.”

“Then let me put it this way: You don’t do this, we’re cutting you off.” I’m truly trying to avoid the threat of violence, but if turning off his supply of gambling cash doesn’t work, I’ll have only that card left to play.

He hesitates before carefully phrasing his response. “You’re squandering what I have to give, you know. You’ll be lucky to get another day out of this.”

I do know. But one day is all I need.

“Stay in touch,” I say as I flip my phone closed, toss it on the seat next to me.

My car rests at the edge of an alley two blocks from the courthouse. Through a narrow slit between the corners of two skyscrapers, I can see a margin of harbor, of shimmering water and motionless flags. In two-second intervals, people pass: the families, the mothers and fathers holding the hands of their children; the businessmen and women shortcutting across the harbor to get to the other side of the financial district or to grab a meal in Little Italy; the couples walking arm in arm along the wide brick pathway. Each of these are snapshots and nothing more—flashes, glimpses—people living simple existences, leading lives of normalcy, living without crime, living without constant fear, living without doubt as to where they are or who they are. It feels strange to witness them. I do not belong here and neither does Melody. We are actors cast as characters in the wrong play. These people live their lives day to day and misunderstand what occurs in the directions they never look, where all the terrible violence and fear proliferates. All around these innocent residents, people are having their names changed, their bodies relocated, living like ghosts among the true and real. They could never know we were even here.

Then, right in the small gap of my vision, in the slice between the buildings, a young couple stops. The boy turns around and says something to the girl and she laughs and slaps him on the chest. He reaches down to her waist and pulls her in and she throws her arms around his neck. They begin to kiss, and though I feel I should look away, I am unable. It strikes me: This is very well a direction I have never looked—down the path of the living.

Someday, I will bring Melody here and point out to the harbor and say, “Look. There is something I want you to see.” And I will explain how if she trusts me, she will be able to live this way, too. That if she allows me, I can change her from a ghost to flesh and bone.

Whatever captured my attention about the couple now makes me hurt. I feel like a little kid getting a stomachache from one too many candies.

A car pulls behind me and nearly taps my bumper. I pull my foot from the brake and roll out to the edge of the alley, turn northward on Charles Street. I start driving, heading nowhere.



My mind becomes preoccupied with the activities of our crew. Witnesses and other troublemakers are gone, bullets in their heads, weighted and resting on the floors of rivers, buried in beds of loose soil. No one knows they’re missing yet, won’t know until a family member or fed counts one less bird in the nest.

I carve a vertical line through the middle of the city, eventually end up so far north that I drive right along the edge of the campus of Johns Hopkins University. At the rate I’m rolling, I’ll be in Towson within minutes. Staying in motion somehow feels like progress, though I know the logical thing to do is stop and wait. I pull off of Charles Street, parallel park in front of an open meter, flip open my cell and make sure I have plenty of battery power and full signal strength. I drop my head back to the headrest and slowly relax the muscles in my neck, and when I twist to the right I look out the passenger door window and notice the campus bookstore for Hopkins, a Barnes and Noble that stretches across the bottom of a block-wide building. The smooth stone facility has blue awnings and ceiling-high windows, and café tables positioned in front of the windows with more students than chairs.

I play with my cell phone, flipping it open and slapping it shut in rhythm as I watch the students moving in and out of the bookstore; it occurs to me I’ve never seen a mentally unhealthy college student; the subtle smiles on their faces, the way they interact, their rush from building to building, all imply a sense of well-being that will be sucked from half of them within a year of graduation. For now, though, they study and try to learn more in disciplines that make them happy, of what they think will make them happy.

Once upon a time Randall Gardner walked some campus, studying computer science and cramming for exams, never could have imagined a future where he’d surrender every shred of common sense to satisfy a gambling addiction, where he’d have his head slammed into his own front door by the guy feeding his habit.

I can’t help but think the same thing about the cops, the folks at Justice, the Seans of the world—who once sought to serve and protect but later learned that all the stuff in the textbooks was theory, and half of it was crap in the first place, that the two most effective ways to overcome the bad guys are the same mechanisms that’ve worked so well for the villains: physical force and extortion. I wonder if the cop who worked me over when I was only ten years old, the one who served as the impetus behind the wrecked lives of the McCartney family, ever cracks open one of his dusty texts on the concepts of law enforcement.

For now they hope. For now they study. Accounting, art, architecture. Computer science and political science and environmental science. Law and medicine.

And math.

I stare at the billboard on the edge of Charles Street, the one advertising the variety of programs available at Johns Hopkins, and dial the number listed at the bottom, my ear pressed tightly against the phone for any sign of an incoming call. Three transfers later I’m connected with the math department. I ask one question (barely understand the answer) and hang up.



I drop a handful of coins in the meter and make my way past the café tables and the bicycle racks, keep my cell in my hand as I enter the bookstore. I walk around the display tables holding the phone in front of me, verifying signal strength with every step. It looks like I’m checking for an explosive device hidden in the stacks.

I follow the signs for the textbook section, walk aisles filled with knowledge I could never acquire, pass books on theory that would never lead me to discovery. I have fallen so far out of my depth, I’m outside looking in.

I slip behind a young girl carrying a pile of books nearly half her size and ask, “Does anyone here know much about math texts?”

She slows and turns to me a little, but her face is covered by the books. From behind them she says, “Let me get Diane, she’s a graduate engineering student. Wait here.”

She walks away, wobbling side to side. As she makes a ninety-degree turn between rows of racks, the top three nearly slide off. I turn and look at the textbooks at my side, organized by subject for their respective courses.

Physiological Fluid Mechanics

Bioelectromagnetic Phenomena

Theoretical Neuroscience

I do not belong here. People tell their kids they can be anything they want to be in life; the optimism is warm but the truth is cold. I couldn’t become a mathematician any more than I could become a Chinaman. I may long to be something else, something other than a mobster, but I have no illusions that I should be something more. Melody, though… it would be hard for her to be much less. She belongs here, would’ve been here had I not forced her into a biannual escape. And that’s why I’m in this store, in this section. I want to understand her, to know who she was born to be. Through her music I heard her speak; through her study I hope to interpret.

Diane walks my way, has a clipboard in her hand and wears a headset with the microphone aimed at her lips. She’s a pretty but oddly petite, small-featured gal, like a nine-year-old who one morning woke up twenty-seven.

She stares at me from a foot below and shines a smile so full of perfect teeth the orthodontist should have signed his work.

“I’m looking for a math text,” I say.

She moves the microphone down an inch. “Do you have the course name or number?”

“No. I spoke with dean of the department of applied something-or-other. Told him I was looking for a textbook for someone who had a full understanding of differential equations. He suggested a list of books—stochastical something and combinatorial yada yada. The only thing that stuck was something, like, string theory.”

“Which professor’s teaching the course?”

“No, it’s not for a class. It’s a gift. For a friend.”

She studies me. “Odd,” she says, “but okay. This way.” She tries to yank her headset off but the wire gets tangled in her hair. She grunts as we walk to the math textbooks.

“We have a few on string theory, but take it from someone who completed the course here a year ago that this one’s undeniably the best.” She hands me an eighty-dollar, seven-hundred-page, four-pound monster: A First Course in String Theory by Barton Zwiebach. “This wasn’t the book required for the course at the time, but I can tell you I’d have never passed if I hadn’t bought it. If your friend is trying to understand string theory all on his or her own, this is the one.”

I fold my phone and slip it in my pocket, open the cover and hear the binding crackle. As I carefully turn the smooth pages I glance at the writing. The thing might as well have been written in Cyrillic.

“You have friends who like to explore the world of mathematical physics in their spare time?”

Tommy Fingers once explained how to get all the air out of a guy’s lungs—displacing the air with fluid—so he’ll sink to the bottom of whatever body of water he’s being dumped in. I’m guessing this is not what Diane means. Theory is not important in the Bovaro household; success resides in the application.

“I’m trying to make new friends, you might say.”

Diane shrugs and smiles. “Enjoy.”

I tuck the text under my arm and check my cell as I make my way to the counter.



With no hope of finding Melody on my own—I’m relying completely on Gardner; what a frightening thought that is—I come to the realization that the best position to place myself is on the edge of an interstate. Being in the center of a large city is like being in a cage.

I drive westward to the perfect location, the point where I-70 intersects with the Baltimore Beltway; I can equally go north, south, or west, and all while safely sitting still. Waiting. I park at the border of the park-and-ride, aim my car down the empty interstate like a rock pulled back in a slingshot.

Melody is likely in motion toward a destination with the sole characteristic of being somewhere far away; this is one large friggin’ country. She has got to be tired of running. At least as much as I’m tired of following.

I plug my cell phone into the car charger and wait. I open the text on string theory and understand pretty much everything on the copyright page. Beyond that, not a clue. The book gives me more insight into Melody than I’d originally imagined, though; intelligence is a sensual thing. The fact that she understands all this stuff, that she could understand what Motivating the AdS/CFT correspondence means, that these formulas and Greek letters and strange shapes can be brought together to make sense and be applied to life sends a wave of warmth through me. It’s like she knows how to speak another language, except this language can only be understood by very few. Capacity for knowledge is as innate and uncontrollable as eye color, and Melody’s radiates.

I sit and hope for the call—ninety minutes pass—and as my ability to control the situation drops to zero, my anxiety climbs. Here I am at that rock-bottom moment that has me finally turning to God. I’ve come to the realization that I’m never going to do this on my own, that I have no means left to rescue Melody, that someone needs to help. And so I bow my head and pray to God, the One whose wrath seemed so sweet and glorious all those Sundays in Mass. I now pathetically ask Him to throw down a soft blanket of grace upon me, one of the least deserving souls on this earth. Though I can recall so many biblical instances of destruction put down upon the unrepentant, I try to recall the lessons of mercy and come up dry. I just keep seeing Job, poor slob. I rest my head on my steering wheel, whisper out my needs and a final amen.

Within ninety seconds my cell rings.

I grab for it so quickly I send it across the passenger seat.

“Go,” I say.

“Your update,” Gardner says, “is no update.”

I pound my stick with my fist. “Nothing, no activity at all?”

“No update means no update.”

I flip my phone shut and stare down the empty highway.

How I would love to testify that God gave me exactly what I asked the moment I requested it. But I have to remember He really did answer my prayer; He just said No.



Had I known I would spend so much time sleeping in my car, I would have bought a Lincoln Navigator, an expansive touring machine with bucket seats the size of La-Z-Boys. I can attest to the firm ride my car boasts. I wake up to the sun shining in my rearview, reflecting back against my face. The clock reads just after eight o’clock, which means Gardner is overdue for an update. The gap between his phone calls increased by roughly forty-five minutes each time, until he’d extended an every-four-hour update to every six hours.

I get out of the car and stretch, run my fingers through my hair, and have a Marlboro for breakfast. Cars drift into the park-and-ride with regularity and people pull in the spaces around me, men and women in suits and dresses. In the distance I see the massive building for the Social Security Administration. Of the thousands who work in that facility, I imagine there’s at least one clerk or accountant or customer service representative who was deposited there by the feds, at least one person who goes by a name not on his or her original birth certificate. I am starting to see the ghosts everywhere.

I hop back in my car, drive out to find somewhere to grab a quick bite while I wait for Gardner to call. The air is weighed heavy with a humidity found only in urban centers; I put the top down and my sunglasses on. And just as I exit northward onto the beltway, my phone rings.

“Go.”

I hear my own voice echo quietly on the phone, then: “Guess who?”

I pull my foot off the accelerator. “I don’t know.” I check my phone to read the incoming number. “Someone calling from the Mountaineer Coffee Mill?” I’ve slowed down to forty-five miles per hour. Cars zoom by so fast my car shimmies with each passing vehicle.

“Right,” the female voice says. “Now, who do you know who could be so unfortunate to be calling from a coffeehouse in Morgantown, West Virginia?”

I’ve spoken with Melody so little, yet I recognize the sarcastic downturn in her voice, as true and unique as a fingerprint. “Well, that certainly narrows it down.” My nerves are sparking. I do not want this call to get dropped. “How are you, Melody?”

She sighs as though she’s trying to hide it from me. “I’m cold, dirty. Exhausted and broke. I’m at the end, Jonathan.” Another sigh, louder. Then she whispers, “I didn’t leave you. I want you to know I didn’t leave you.”

Thirty-five miles per hour and falling. “I know,” I say, but a more honest voice would have confessed, I hoped.

“I was taken. Stolen. Lifted right off the ground and tossed in the backseat, then raced away. Next thing I know, I’m”—long delay as if she’s examining her surroundings—“here.”

A guy in a commercial plumbing truck pulls up next to me, blows his horn, and yells out the passenger window, “Hey, Granny! The other pedal! Press the other pedal!”

I turn and answer, “Hey, up yours, you fug-g-gantastic driver.”

“Always the gentleman,” she says.

I try to get my car moving, except I’m moving so slowly that sixth gear has been rendered useless; I keep the phone to my ear, press my knee against the steering wheel, and shift down to third, punch the accelerator, and three seconds later I pass the truck like it’s a tree in the median.

Then it occurs to me how odd it is that her opinion of me—whether in jest or not—would be that I’m some form of a gentleman, that some sheath of honorableness covers the real me. How could a man with so much blood on his hands ever be categorized this way? Her perception of me is only what I’ve displayed. Why did I not curb my tongue in front of the women I’d dated? Why could I never put aside a cigarette for the girls who detested the habit? My goal is to improve—to fix—her life, but the unpredicted by-product is that she makes me want to be a better man.

Melody makes me want to be that something else.

I speak what I’m thinking, speak without thinking: “You have an unexpected positive effect on my life, Melody.”

I regret the words as soon as they pass my lips. The sentiment had to be from the adrenaline-fueled rush of finding her, of knowing she is okay, of knowing she wants me to rescue her and free her once and for all. That the emotion running through me is composed of something more than excitement, that some percentage of this experience is dedicated to sentiment, alarms me. Except…

“And for some reason you have the only positive effect on mine,” she says, “which is why I want you to know that I didn’t leave you. I was taken away.”

With her words, my guard drops, falls to the ground and shatters to pieces. I’m afraid to look in the rearview for fear of seeing a dopey smile in its reflection.

“It seems no one wants me to have you,” I say. “Not the good guys or the bad guys. It’s just one big”—apparently I had a backup guard, because it rises in front of me—“hey, how’d you get my number?”

My instant fear: I’m being set up, that the feds wore Melody down or somehow extorted her, and they’re collectively preparing some trap.

Except Melody quickly answers, “Your dad gave it to me.”

“No, really.”

“Does 718-555-4369 sound familiar?”

“That’s… impossible.”

“You mean that was dear old dad? The Disemboweler of Brooklyn?”

“The better question is where did you get that number? That’s the private line for his office in Brooklyn. Not many people have it.”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Wait, no. My father would’ve never handed out my cell phone number.”

“I’ll tell you lay-ter. Where are you? I’m a damsel in distress here.”

“Distress?”

“West Virginia, Jonathan, West Virginia.”

“I’m still in Baltimore.”

I hear her slowly inhale over the line, then she asks in the sweetest voice, with a subtle surrender that no man could ever deny: “Will you come find me?”

A wave crashes over me; I swim to the surface, to the light, to the air, struggle to remain afloat. I try to formulate the proper response, but no matter what actually comes out of my mouth, the answer could only be of course I will.

I bring moisture to my lips, eventually say, “Are you sure, Melody?”

She does not hesitate. “I’m sure.”

I whisk across two lanes of traffic, go up the exit ramp for Liberty Road, zoom around two loops of the cloverleaf, and head south. “I’m getting on I-70 right now. What’s the address?”

“Two-fifty-four Walnut Street, outside the university.”

“Two-fifty-four Walnut. Got it.” I punch the accelerator and merge back onto the westward interstate. “Don’t move.”

Our call ends and I pull in front of a crowd of cars. It takes only a few minutes before I have passed the exits for the roads leading to Ellicott City and Columbia; nearly all of the traffic goes with them. Heading directly away from the city, I have quickly broken free into the sprawling Maryland countryside.

And as I traverse the hills and valleys of western Maryland, I recall my prayer at the park-and-ride. Like before, I’d love to testify God gave me exactly what I asked the moment I requested it. And though sometimes His answer to prayer is No, turns out this time His answer was Not yet.