7
Mark Stern read the
New York Times religiously every day.
Without the success of his column in the Times and the books it had spawned, he wouldn’t be
writing his Journal column today,
complete with stipple portraits by artist Noli Novak. After all was
said and done, he enjoyed keeping his fingers on the pulse of New
York City, from Broadway to the bag ladies and schizophrenics who
slept behind dumpsters. Gotham provided the perfect microcosm for
Stern to practice his mojo, part journalistic, part
metaphysical.
He paged through the
Metro section first every day since the real stories were
there—stories that took place on crowded streets with millions of
pedestrians going everywhere and nowhere. On page three, he read
“Subway Traffic Halted—Woman Proclaims End of World.” That was
right up his alley. He had always thought that crazy people could
teach everyone else a thing or two. Wasn’t the normal response to
an absurd world to go a little wacko? Of course it was. And who
knew? Maybe this woman was on to something. Elijah and Jeremiah
must have seemed pretty far out in their day. Stern often wondered
how one could distinguish prophecy from lunacy.
The brief
half-column story explained that a Brooklyn woman started to
scream, alarming a carload of commuters at 8:07 a.m. the previous
morning. Two men finally managed to restrain her before the train
pulled into the next station where the Transit Authority Police
waited to remove the maniacal “prophet.” She wailed that Jesus was
coming back any day now. She’d seen the Great Beast from
Revelation, seen the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, seen the
great Harlot corrupting the powerful leaders of the world. With a
bloodstream full of righteous adrenaline, she had attacked a woman,
shaking her hard enough to cause a mild concussion when the woman’s
skull bounced off the thick glass window of the subway
car.
Stern turned next to
the obituary section, a morbid habit he’d developed since turning
forty. With a slight grin, he’d dismissed the black balloons he’d
received from friends along with birthday cards declaring that his
life was over, but the stark truth was that Mark Stern, kid in
residence at the Wall Street Journal,
did not like the idea of growing older. He had way too much to do
with his life—there were the tamarin and the spider monkey, the
rainforest trip he still hadn’t made, the dozens of bands he hadn’t
seen live yet, and maybe even the so-far-elusive woman to share his
soul with.
There. Page five,
column four. The brief obit caught his attention immediately. Marci
Newman, prominent lawyer and daughter of Lawrence and Jennifer
Newman, had collapsed in city court two days earlier and died at
Bellevue. He remembered Marci vividly as Gwen McBean’s roommate.
Something that reminded him of Gwen just moments after thinking
about “soulmates” had to have some cosmic significance. Gwen was
the flame Mark had never quite given up on, even after her marriage
to Jack Maulder. She must be hurting badly right now. He remembered
how close Gwen and Marci had remained even while they pursued
stellar careers.
Mark looked
wistfully out of his window. Gwen. He could still measure the time
between thinking about her in hours. And each time, he’d never been
anything less than mystified over how Gwen had so completely
subtracted herself from his life. Gwen had Jack, the FDA, and no
place in her life for a man she once must have loved.
Gwen was in town,
for she would have undoubtedly come up from D.C. to attend Marci’s
funeral. “I know you’re out there somewhere,” he mumbled, echoing a
line from an old Moody Blues song.
He moved his gaze to
the bookshelves opposite his desk and located an edition of
Wordsworth’s poetry. He got up, walked across his office, and
picked up the book, carefully opening the faded, embossed
cover.
Gwen knew that Mark
liked to read poetry from old editions since he believed slightly
yellowed pages had more character than pristine white stock
purchased at Barnes and Noble. He looked at the inscription and
smiled: “To Don Quixote. All my love—Gwen.” Yes, they did love each
other once. Even if only one of them remembered it
now.
At least she’d
understood who he was. “Don Quixote?” Yeah, that was as good a
description as any. Gwen was sympathetic to Mark’s mission on
behalf of the underdog as evidenced by her Herculean effort to make
a go of her father’s practice, but Mark’s personal style was simply
too anachronistic for the more practical and scientific Dr. McBean.
“Grow up and join the rest of us,” Gwen had told him. “You might
actually enjoy the experience.”
“Bingo, Gwen,” he
uttered, placing the volume back on the shelf.
For a brief moment,
he considered trying to find her and meet her for a drink. He could
locate anyone he wanted, even in a city the size of the Big Apple,
but tracing her through the Newmans would be inappropriate at such
a time. There were other ways to do it, but the timing was a
mistake. Gwen would be shattered by losing Marci. And then there
was her husband to consider. While Jack Maulder wasn’t the jealous
type, he was a former Secret Service agent and too tightly wound
for Stern’s liking. Federal cops always reminded him of Big
Brother.
“Though nothing can
bring back the splendor in the grass, we will grieve not,” Stern
said, philosophically quoting a snippet of Wordsworth.
Let it go. How many
times had he told himself that?
He needed to get
back to work. The reporter turned back to his computer screen and
to his examination of Gregory Randall’s dynasty. Why in the world,
he wondered, had Randall spent the last week globe-trotting? Wasn’t
he officially in mourning for his father?
Yeah, right. More
than likely, Randall had found himself a pretty, young woman—Asian,
no doubt—in some exotic location. Mark wondered if the younger
Randall gave the elder a moment’s thought, while some nubile lovely
performed acts on him no Western woman knew.
Gwen did not expect
to find what looked like a tornado debris field in Marci’s Fifth
Avenue apartment. Marci was a neat freak, maybe even a tad bit
obsessive-compulsive. Her precision of thought was matched by a
precision in most everything she did. She was an avid reader, but
leaving an open book on the sofa? No, that wasn’t Marci Newman. A
place for everything, and everything in its place; now that was
Marci.
The apartment Gwen
saw as she walked through the front door had not been cleaned for
weeks. Books, legal briefs, empty Diet Coke cans, and clothes were
everywhere. Black, rotten bananas sat on the kitchen counter next
to an open jar of lowfat peanut butter, which Marci probably used
as energy food when she didn’t have time to eat a proper meal—and
Gwen was starting to wonder exactly how many proper meals Marci had
eaten recently, if any.
An open pack of
Virginia Slims Light was lying on the glass end table by the couch
in the living room. Gwen considered Marci’s choice of brand to be
morbidly appropriate given her ninety-five-pound weight. At least
ten cigarette butts were visible in a mound of ashes.
Gwen scoped out the
rest of the apartment, but the same domestic litter was
everywhere—clothes, partially-eaten food, books, and ashtrays. She
next examined Marci’s desk. The little ivory seagull Marci got at
the shore and loved so much sat next to her PC, where Gwen imagined
she enjoyed seeing it so much of the time. When Gwen touched the
mouse, the screen came to light, the cursor still blinking. She sat
down in front of the screen, put her purse on the floor, and tapped
a few keys. Nothing. The entire system was password
protected.
“Piece of cake,”
Gwen said to the empty apartment. First, she tried Marci’s
birthday, her name, and her parents’ names, all without success.
Absentmindedly (but admitting to a little nudge from her ego), she
typed “Gwen”—and Marci’s personalized desktop floated onto the
screen. Gwen’s pleasure at guessing the password was muted by the
realization that she would probably never again be blessed with
such a close friend. A picture of the dunes at Montauk covered the
screen, a background to the many scattered icons. Gwen went
straight to the directory and looked at the list of documents.
There were hundreds, but she didn’t have time to inspect so many
files or even print them out for later inspection. Highlighting the
first line, she pressed the “arrow down” key and scrolled through
the document titles, looking for something that would raise the
proverbial red flag. Most of the files were related to her
cases—Aaron v. Thompson, Brown v. Altman, and so on—and Gwen didn’t
bother to open a single one.
Haydn104—now that
was a file she would open.
Marci had loved all
the symphonies of Josef Haydn and regarded them as musical “uppers”
in college, always playing them when she had to pull an all-nighter
to write a paper due the following day.
Gwen clicked on the
file, only to be rewarded with a password prompt. Of all the files
for Marci to lock, why this one? She tried a variety of passwords
but each attempt generated, “password incorrect, enter password.”
Displayed ad infinitum. She saved the file to CD. She would have
Jack, a specialist extraordinaire in the matter of computers and
the cyberworld, take a look at the file to see if he could find a
way inside.
Marci’s “Personal”
e-mail folder was filled with letters from Gwen and memos from
Susan Parks. Nothing unusual in the least.
Turning off the
laptop, Gwen put the CD in her purse and headed for the front door.
Her hand was already on the knob when she turned around and looked
at her friend’s apartment for the last time. She walked back and
picked up the ivory seagull. So many of Marci’s happy times had
been spent at the ocean side, watching the waves roll onto the
shore, sometimes for hours at a time.
Gwen decided this
would be her keepsake. She took the seagull and deposited it in her
purse along with the copied CD. She needed to rendezvous with Jack
at the hotel and then get to the airport. It was time to go
home.