“Martin.”

  “Kevin,” she said, “you’re going to be all right now. All you have to do is go to the light. Do you see the light? Your mother’s there, Kevin, and your father, and Martin—”

  “Mark!” David cried. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m so stupid, it wasn’t Martin, it was Mark, Mark, that was his name.”

  “That’s all right, David.”

  “I’m so damn stupid—”

  “Look into the light, Kevin,” she said. “Mark is there, and your parents, and everyone who ever loved you. Matthew, take his other hand. Kevin, you don’t have to stay here anymore, darling. You did everything you came here to do. You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to hold on. You can let go, Kevin. You can go to the light. Let go and reach out to the light—”

  I don’t know how long she talked to him. Fifteen, twenty minutes, I suppose. Several times he made the cawing sound, but for the most part he was silent. Nothing seemed to be happening, and then I realized that his terror was no longer a presence. She seemed to have talked it away. She went on talking to him, stroking his brow and holding his hand, and I held his other hand. I was no longer listening to what she was saying, just letting the words wash over me while my mind played with some tangled thought like a kitten with yarn.

  Then something happened. The energy in the room shifted and I looked up, knowing that he was gone.

  “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, Kevin. God bless you, God give you rest. Yes.”

  “Sometimes they’re stuck,” she said. “They want to go but they can’t. They’ve been hanging on so long, you see, that they don’t know how to stop.”

  “So you help them.”

  “If I can.”

  “What if you can’t? Suppose you talk and talk and they still hold on?”

  “Then they’re not ready. They’ll be ready another time. Sooner or later everybody lets go, everybody dies. With or without my help.”

  “And when they’re not ready—”

  “Sometimes I come back another time. And sometimes they’re ready then.”

  “What about the ones who beg for help? The ones like Arthur Fineberg, who plead for death but aren’t physically close enough to it to let go?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “The thing you want to say. The thing that’s stuck in your throat, the way his own unwanted life was stuck in Kevin’s throat. You’re holding on to it.”

  “Just let it go, eh?”

  “If you want.”

  We were walking somewhere in Chelsea, and we walked a full block now without either of us saying a word. Then she said, “I think there’s a world of difference between assisting someone verbally and doing anything physical to hasten death.”

  “So do I.”

  “And that’s where I draw the line. But sometimes, having drawn that line—”

  “You step over it.”

  “Yes. The first time I swear I acted without conscious intent. I used a pillow, I held it over his face and—” She breathed deeply. “I swore it would never happen again. But then there was someone else, and he just needed help, you know, and—”

  “And you helped him.”

  “Yes. Was I wrong?”

  “I don’t know what’s right or wrong.”

  “Suffering is wrong,” she said, “unless it’s part of His plan, and how can I presume to decide if it is or not? Maybe people can’t let go because there’s one more lesson they have to learn before they move on. Who the hell am I to decide it’s time for somebody’s life to end? How dare I interfere?”

  “And yet you do.”

  “Just once in a while, when I just don’t see a way around it. Then I do what I have to do. I’m sure I must have a choice in the matter, but I swear it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel as though I have any choice at all.” She stopped walking, turned to look at me. She said, “Now what happens?”

  “Well, she’s the Merciful Angel of Death,” I told Carl Orcott. “She visits the sick and dying, almost always at somebody’s invitation. A friend contacts her, or a relative.”

  “Do they pay her?”

  “Sometimes they try to. She won’t take any money. She even pays for the flowers herself.” She’d taken Dutch iris to Kevin’s apartment on Twenty-second Street. Blue, with yellow centers that matched her scarf.

  “She does it pro bono,” he said.

  “And she talks to them. You heard what Bobby said. I got to see her in action. She talked the poor son of a bitch straight out of this world and into the next one. I suppose you could argue that what she does comes perilously close to hypnosis, that she hypnotizes people and convinces them to kill themselves psychically, but I can’t imagine anybody trying to sell that to a jury.”

  “She just talks to them.”

  “Uh-huh. ‘Let go, go to the light.’”

  “‘And have a nice day.’”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “She’s not killing people?”

  “Nope. Just letting them die.”

  He picked up a pipe. “Well, hell,” he said, “that’s what we do. Maybe I ought to put her on staff.” He sniffed the pipe bowl. “You have my thanks, Matthew. Are you sure you don’t want some of our money to go with it? Just because Mercy works pro bono doesn’t mean you should have to.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You’re certain?”

  I said, “You asked me the first day if I knew what AIDS smelled like.”

  “And you said you’d smelled it before. Oh.”

  I nodded. “I’ve lost friends to it. I’ll lose more before it’s over. In the meantime I’m grateful when I get the chance to do you a favor. Because I’m glad this place is here, so people have a place to come to.”

  Even I was glad she was around, the woman in gray, the Merciful Angel of Death. To hold the door for them, and show them the light on the other side. And, if they really needed it, to give them the least little push through it.

  THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC

  We left halfway through the curtain calls, threading our way up the aisle and across the lobby. Inside it had been winter in Paris, with La Bohème’s lovers shivering and starving; outside it was New York, with spring turning into summer.

  We held hands and walked across the great courtyard, past the fountain shimmering under the lights, past Avery Fisher Hall. Our apartment is in the Parc Vendôme, at 57th and Ninth, and we headed in that direction and walked a block or so in silence.

  Then Elaine said, “I don’t want to go home.”

  “All right.”

  “I want to hear music. Can we do that?”

  “We just did that.”

  “Different music. Not another opera.”

  “Good,” I said, “because one a night is my limit.”

  “You old bear. One a night is one over your limit.”

  I shrugged. “I’m learning to like it.”

  “Well, one a night’s my limit. You know something? I’m in a mood.”

  “Somehow I sensed as much.”

  “She always dies,” she said.

  “Mimi.”

  “Uh-huh. How many times do you suppose I’ve seen La Bohème? Six, seven times?”

  “If you say so.”

  “At least. You know what? I could see it a hundred times and it’s not going to change. She’ll die every fucking time.”

  “Odds are.”

  “So I want to hear something different,” she said, “before we call it a night.”

  “Something happy,” I suggested.

  “No, sad is fine. I don’t mind sad. As a matter of fact I prefer it.”

  “But you want them all alive at the end.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Sad as can be, so long as nobody dies.” We caught a cab to a new place I’d heard about on the ground floor of a high-rise on Amsterdam in the 90s. The crowd was salt and pepper, white college kids and black strivers, blonde fashion models and black players. The group was mixed, too; the tenor man and the bass player were white, the pianist and the drummer black. The maitre d’ thought he recognized me and put us at a table near the bandstand. They were a few bars into “Satin Doll” when we sat down and they followed it with a tune I recognized but couldn’t name. I think it was a Thelonious Monk composition, but that’s just a guess. I can hardly ever name the tune unless there’s a lyric to it that sticks in my mind.

  Aside from ordering drinks, we didn’t say a word until the set ended. We sipped our cranberry juice and soda and listened to the music. She watched the musicians and I watched her watch them. When they took a break she reached for my hand. “Thanks,” she said.

  “You okay?”

  “I was always okay. I do feel better now, though. You know what I was thinking?”

  “The night we met.”

  Her eyes widened. “How’d you know that?”

  “Well, it was in a room that looked and felt a lot like this one. You were at Danny Boy’s table, and this is his kind of place.”

  “God, I was young. We were both so goddamned young.”

  “Youth is one of those things time cures.”

  “You were a cop and I was a hooker. But you’d been on the force longer than I’d been on the game.”

  “I already had a gold shield.”

  “And I was new enough to think the life was glamorous. Well, it was glamorous. Look at the places I went and the people I got to meet.”

  “Married cops.”

  “That’s right, you were married then.”

  “I’m married now.”

  “To me. Jesus, the way things turn out, huh?”

  “A club like this,” I said, “and the same kind of music playing.”

  “Sad enough to break your heart, but nobody dies.”

  “You were the most beautiful woman in the room that night,” I said. “And you still are.”

  “Ah, Pinocchio,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “Lie to me.”

  We closed the place. Outside on the street she said, “God, I’m impossible. I don’t want the night to end.”

  “It doesn’t have to.”

  “In the old days,” she said, “you knew all the after-hours joints. Remember when Condon’s would stay open late for musicians, and they’d jam until dawn?”

  “I remember Eddie Condon’s hangover cure,” I said. “‘Take the juice of two quarts of whiskey …’ I forget what came after that.”

  “Oblivion?”

  “You’d think so. Say, I know where we can go.”

  I flagged a cab and we rode down to Sheridan Square, where there’s a basement joint with the same name as a long-gone Harlem jazz club. They start around midnight and stay open past dawn, and it’s legal because they don’t serve alcohol. I used to go to late joints for the booze, and I learned to like the music because I heard so much of it there, and because you could just about taste the alcohol in every flatted fifth. Nowadays I go for the music, and what I hear in the blue notes is not so much the booze as all the feelings the drink used to mask.

  That night there were a lot of different musicians sitting in with what I guess was the house rhythm section. There was a tenor player who sounded a little like Johnny Griffin and a piano player who reminded me of Lennie Tristano. And as always there was a lot of music I barely heard, background music for my own unfocused thoughts.

  The sky was light by the time we dragged ourselves out of there. “Look at that,” Elaine said. “It’s bright as day.”

  “And well it might be. It’s morning.”

  “What a New York night, huh? You know, I loved our trip to Europe, and other places we’ve gone together, but when you come right down to it—”

  “You’re a New York kind of gal.”

  “You bet your ass. And what we heard tonight was New York music. I know all about the music coming up the river from New Orleans, all that crap, and I don’t care. That was New York music.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And nobody died,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Nobody died.”

  LOOKING FOR DAVID

  Elaine said, “You never stop working, do you?”

  I looked at her. We were in Florence, sitting at a little tile-topped table in the Piazza di San Marco, sipping cappuccino every bit as good as the stuff they served at the Peacock on Greenwich Avenue. It was a bright day but the air was cool and crisp, the city bathed in October light. Elaine was wearing khakis and a tailored safari jacket, and looked like a glamorous foreign correspondent, or perhaps a spy. I was wearing khakis, too, and a polo shirt, and the blue blazer she called my Old Reliable.

  We’d had five days in Venice. This was the second of five days in Florence, and then we’d have six days in Rome before Alitalia took us back home again.

  I said, “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “I caught you. You were scanning the area the way you always do.”

  “I was a cop for a lot of years.”

  “I know, and I guess it’s a habit a person doesn’t outgrow. And not a bad one, either. I have some New York street smarts myself, but I can’t send my eyes around a room and pick up what you can. And you don’t even think about it. You do it automatically.”

  “I guess. But I wouldn’t call it working.”

  “When we’re supposed to be basking in the beauties of Florence,” she said, “and exclaiming over the classic beauty of the sculpture in the piazza, and instead you’re staring at an old queen in a white linen jacket five tables over, trying to guess if he’s got a yellow sheet and just what’s written on it—wouldn’t you call that working?”

  “There’s no guesswork required,” I said. “I know what it says on his yellow sheet.”

  “You do?”

  “His name is Horton Pollard,” I said. “If it’s the same man, and if I’ve been sending a lot of looks his way it’s to make sure he’s the man I think he is. It’s well over twenty years since I’ve seen him. Probably more like twenty-five.” I glanced over and watched the white-haired gentleman saying something to the waiter. He raised an eyebrow in a manner that was at once arrogant and apologetic. It was as good as a fingerprint. “It’s him,” I said. “Horton Pollard. I’m positive.”

  “Why don’t you go over and say hello?”

  “He might not want that.”

  “Twenty-five years ago you were still on the job. What did you do, arrest him?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Honestly? What did he do? Art fraud? That’s what comes to mind, sitting at an outdoor table in Florence, but he was probably just a stock swindler.”

  “Something white-collar, in other words.”

  “Something flowing-collar, from the looks of him. I give up. What did he do?”

  I’d been looking his way, and our glances caught. I saw recognition come into his eyes, and his eyebrows went up again in that manner that was unmistakably his. He pushed his chair back, got to his feet.

  “Here he comes,” I said. “You can ask him yourself.”

  “Mr. Scudder,” he said. “I want to say Martin, but I know that’s not right. Help me out.”

  “Matthew, Mr. Pollard. And this is my wife, Elaine.”

  “How fortunate for you,” he told me, and took the hand she extended. “I looked over here and thought, What a beautiful woman! Then I looked again and thought, I know that fellow. But then it took me a minute to place you. The name came first, or the surname, at any rate. His name’s Scudder, but how do I know him? And then of course the rest of it came to me, all but your first name. I knew it wasn’t Martin, but I couldn’t sweep that name out of my mind and let Matthew come in.” He sighed. “It’s a curious muscle, the memory. Or aren’t you old enough yet to have found it so?”

  “My memory’s still pretty good.”

  “Oh, mine’s good,” he said. “It’s just capricious. Willful, I sometimes think.”

  At my invitation, he pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat down. “But only for a moment,” he said, and asked what brought us to Italy, and how long we’d be in Florence. He lived here, he told us. He’d lived here for quite a few years now. He knew our hotel, on the east bank of the Arno, and pronounced it charming and a good value. He mentioned a café just down the street from the hotel that we really ought to try.

  “Although you certainly don’t need to follow my recommendations,” he said, “or Michelin’s, either. You can’t get a bad meal in Florence. Well, that’s not entirely true. If you insist on going to high-priced restaurants, you’ll encounter the occasional disappointment. But if you simply blunder into whatever humble trattoria is closest, you’ll dine well every time.”

  “I think we’ve been dining a little too well,” Elaine said.

  “It’s a danger,” he acknowledged, “although the Florentines manage to stay quite slim themselves. I started to bulk up a bit when I first came here. How could one help it? Everything tasted so good. But I took off the pounds I gained and I’ve kept them off. Though I sometimes wonder why I bother. For God’s sake, I’m seventy-six years old.”

  “You don’t look it,” she told him.

  “I wouldn’t care to look it. But why is that, do you suppose? No one else on God’s earth gives a damn what I look like. Why should it matter to me?”

  She said it was self-respect, and he mused on the difficulty of telling where self-respect left off and vanity began. Then he said he was staying too long at the fair, wasn’t he, and got to his feet. “But you must visit me,” he said. “My villa is not terribly grand, but it’s quite nice and I’m proud enough of it to want to show it off. Please tell me you’ll come for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Well …”

  “It’s settled, then,” he said, and gave me his card. “Any cab driver will know how to find it. Set the price in advance, though. Some of them will cheat you, although most are surprisingly honest. Shall we say one o’clock?” He leaned forward, placed his palms on the table. “I’ve thought of you often over the years, Matthew. Especially here, sipping caffé nero a few yards from Michelangelo’s David. It’s not the original, you know. That’s in a museum, though even the museums are less than safe these days. You know the Uffizzi was bombed a few years ago?”