The Lark, Crivano says. Your family called me the Lark.
With a broad melancholic smile, Perina slides supine on the mattress. Her eyelids droop, as if in a rush to meet the blanket that she draws to her chin. In the morning, she says, our faculties will be restored. Then we shall speak pleasantly and at our leisure of the happy past, and what warm recollections we share will bring us both solace. Now, we want for sleep. Will I be judged greedy, dottore, if I beg you to lull me in the old manner of your boyhood? This small favor, I promise, will discharge any debt you may imagine you accrued last night, and will tilt the balance toward me.
Her blanket-hooded face smiles up at him. Her eyes are squeezed shut against encroaching disappointments. He watches her closely. Much has been lost; much more will be: among those casualties, an ancient name is hardly foremost. But the courage of his forefathers—the fatal courage that Fortune spared him—still persists on the undeserving earth. This brave girl has made him proud.
His throat tightens. He clears it, then leans forward to blow out the candle on the bedpost. The second bell moves across the city, measuring the sun’s retreat; the gaps between the shutters have gone black. Crivano draws a steady breath and tries, as sweetly as he is able, to sing.
The Shroudy Stranger’s reft of realms.
Abhorred he sits upon the city dump.
His broken heart’s a bag of shit.
The vast rainfall, an empty mirror.
—ALLEN GINSBERG, “The Shrouded Stranger”
60
Curtis wakes to white light, black dark, a cop’s voice. It’s Coach Banner’s voice from high school, Colonel Gandy’s from Kosovo; he can’t understand anything it says, but he knows exactly what it’s saying. You did okay, Stone, but you screwed up, too. Curtis doesn’t need to be told. His eyes roll back; he’s out again.
Time passes: a slideshow flashed on a flapping white sheet. Doctors and nurses in masks and gowns. The bright OR; the dim recovery room. Interchangeable LVMPD badges. At first there’s no sequence—everything happening all at once—but then events line up, and Curtis starts to make memories again. Albedo rode in the ambulance with him, he’s pretty sure of that, but never made it to the ICU.
Curtis wakes again, realizing that he’s already awake. Taking inventory. Adding up limbs, losing count. He feels like something’s missing, or something extra’s been added. He must’ve twisted left when he the headlights came at him: his right wrist is in a cast. A figure-eight sling pins his shoulders back; that means collarbone. Foam boots on both feet, pendent weights hung from the bed’s edge: traction to keep his legs straight. That means both hips broken.
Curtis takes a breath, lets it out. His throat hurts; his arm itches where the IV needle’s taped. He’s going to bounce back from this. Probably not all the way back, and that’s fine. Nobody ever bounces all the way back. Not from anything. That’s the way it goes, bouncing.
He’s on a bunch of pretty heavy drugs. Even as he thinks this, he can feel them fade: a cold dead tide going out. That’s probably why his eyes are open. Somebody must want to talk to him.
Mister Stone?
A tall thin Hispanic guy, in a steel-tube chair beside Curtis’s motorized rack. Curtis’s age, or a little younger. Patient. Not fed up, or put-upon. Not like most cops Curtis has known. Federal, probably. Somebody in Jersey got his message.
Curtis? the guy says, like he’s trying different frequencies. Mister Stone? Master Sergeant Stone?
Yeah, Curtis says. I’m here.
His own voice sounds harsh and loud, although he knows it can’t really be loud. His throat feels like it’s tearing. He clears it, coughs. His right side aches.
The Hispanic guy gives Curtis his name—Agent Something—then starts with the customary spiel. LVMPD wants to bring serious charges against you, Mister Stone, he says. I asked them for some time with you first. There’s a bigger picture here that I don’t think anybody has seen yet.
Yeah, Curtis says. You got that right.
You want to tell me about it?
Curtis licks his lips. Flecks of dry skin scrape his tongue. There’s a lot of pain inside him someplace; he glimpses it now and again, like a lantern moving through the windows of an old house. The traction on his legs means the docs haven’t cut there yet. Maybe he hasn’t been out so long. I want to talk to my wife, Curtis says.
The agent smiles. Danielle’s on her way, he says. She’s in the air now. Metro’s sending a car for her. Of course, we don’t know yet when they’ll clear you to see her.
I’m under arrest?