XXXIV

TIFFANY’S IS THE FAMOUS Fifth Avenue jewelry store, and if I’d told a friend I was off to meet my girlfriend at Tiffany’s, he’d probably assume we’d be shopping for rings. But Tiffany’s is also the name of a coffee shop on Sheridan Square, open twenty-four hours a day, and Jan had picked it as a meeting place because it was midway between her neighborhood and mine.

I took my time walking to the subway, but even so I had to wait for her, and she showed up with a companion, a sharp-featured woman in her fifties with unconvincingly black hair. They came to my booth, each carrying a shopping bag, and Jan introduced the woman as Mary Elizabeth. We nodded at each other, and I motioned for them to sit down, and Jan looked at Mary Elizabeth, who shook her head.

“We won’t stay,” Jan said. She put her shopping bag on the table, and Mary Elizabeth placed hers alongside it. “I think this is everything,” Jan said.

I nodded, lost in thought, and then when nobody moved or said anything I remembered my assigned role in the proceedings. I reached into my pocket and took out a ring of keys. I put them on the table, and they just sat there for a beat, and then Jan reached for them, picked them up, weighed them in her hand, put them in her purse.

She turned to go, and Mary Elizabeth turned with her, and then Jan turned back to face me again. All in a rush she said, “I really hate this, and what I hate most of all is the timing. Right before your anniversary.”

“In a couple of days.”

“Tuesday, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“I was going to wait until afterward,” she said, “but I thought maybe that would be worse, and—”

“Let it go,” I said.

“I just—”

“Let it go.”

She looked on the point of tears. Mary Elizabeth said, “Jan,” and she turned and walked after her, to the door and out.

I stayed where I was. Two shopping bags shared the top of my table with the cup of coffee I’d ordered but so far hadn’t touched. One shopping bag was from a department store, the other from a company that sold art supplies. Each was a little more than half full, and Jan could have managed both of them herself. Mary Elizabeth, I decided, was there for moral support.

I went to St. Paul’s for the evening meeting. Afterward I followed the crowd to the Flame and sat there until everybody went home. I walked down Ninth to Fifty-seventh, then walked on past my hotel and all the way across town to Lexington Avenue. I turned on Lexington and walked down to Thirtieth Street and got there just in time to help set up chairs for the midnight meeting.

There were a few familiar faces in the room but nobody I really knew. They didn’t have a speaker, and the chairperson asked me if I had ninety days clean and sober. I said I’d spoken recently, and didn’t feel up to it. She found somebody else. They can always find somebody.

I sat there for an hour and drank a couple of cups of bad coffee and ate a few cookies. I didn’t pay much attention to the speaker and didn’t raise my hand during the discussion. At the end I thought about finding someone to go out for coffee with, and decided the hell with it. I walked up to Forty-second Street and caught a cab the rest of the way home.

My two shopping bags were as I’d left them, unpacked, standing side by side on the floor next to the bed. I went to bed, and they were still there the next morning. When I came back from breakfast, the maid had serviced my room, making my bed with clean sheets, emptying my wastebasket. And the shopping bags remained right where I’d left them.

I picked up the phone, called Jim. “I’ve got two shopping bags on my floor,” I said, “and I can’t seem to figure out what to do with them.”

“Empty shopping bags?”

“About half full.” He waited, and I said, “Clothes of mine. That I’d left at Jan’s place.”

“What I like about you,” he said, “is you always come right to the point.”

So I talked and he listened, and I waited for him to ask me why I’d waited the better part of a day before telling him what was going on, but he never said a word about my silence. He waited until I’d run out of words, and then he said, “You knew it was coming.”

“I suppose so.”

“That make it easier?”

“Not especially.”

“No, I didn’t think so. How do you feel?”

“Devastated.”

“And?”

“Relieved.”

“That sounds about right.”

I thought for a moment. Then I said, “I keep thinking that I made this happen.”

“By going to bed with Donna.”

“Right.”

“You realize, of course, that just because you keep thinking it doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Think about it, Matt.”

“She didn’t know about Donna.”

“No.”

“She didn’t even pick it up subliminally, because we haven’t spent any time together since then. We’ve barely even talked on the phone.”

“Right.”

“I’m just looking for a way for it to be my fault.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I went to the midnight meeting last night.”

“Probably didn’t hurt you.”

“Probably not. I think I’ll spend most of the weekend in meetings.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“SoHo meets tonight. I think I’ll go somewhere else.”

“Good thinking.”

“Jim? I’m not going to drink.”

“Neither am I,” he said. “Isn’t that great?”

I went to meetings throughout the weekend, but I was in my room Saturday afternoon just long enough to get a phone call.

It was Joe Durkin. “I don’t even know if this is worth passing on,” he said, “but you were brooding about that mugging in Gramercy, and I thought you’d like to know it was just what it looked like. A mugger who didn’t know his own strength.”

“They got the guy?”

“In the act,” he said. “Well, not in the act of hitting your guy. Saperstein?”

“Sattenstein.”

“Close enough. He wasn’t the first person mugged in that part of town, just the first who died from it, so they used a decoy from Street Crimes, put him in plain clothes, poured some booze on him, and had him walk around looking like he was half in the bag.”

“I don’t know why I never got assignments like that.”

“It must have been a treat,” he said, “to see the look on the skell’s face when the perfect victim showed him a badge and a gun. What I hear, they’re about to clear ten or a dozen cases. Guy’s confessing to everything they’ve got.”

“Including Sattenstein?”

“ ‘Oh, the poor man who was killed? No, that one I didn’t do.’ But he’ll cop to it too, by the time he gets to court. His lawyer’ll see to that. Get everything listed in the plea agreement so there’s nothing left to come back at you later on.”

Sometimes things were just what they appeared to be. Gregory Stillman hanged himself, Mark Sattenstein got killed by a mugger.

I got out of there and headed off to another meeting.

Sunday afternoon I went to a meeting in a synagogue on Seventy-sixth Street a few doors west of Broadway. I’d never been there before, and when I walked in my first impulse was to turn around and walk out again, because Donna was there. I stayed, and we were cordial to each other, and she thanked me again for helping her out the previous Saturday, and I said I’d been happy to help, and it was as if we’d never been to bed together.

I met Jim for our usual if-it’s-Sunday-this-must-be-Shanghai dinner, and we didn’t talk about Jan or Donna or the state of my sobriety. Instead he did almost all of the talking, telling stories from his own drinking days, and back before his first drink, back in his childhood. I got caught up in what he had to say, and it wasn’t until later that I realized he’d purposely avoided discussing what was going on in my life these days. I couldn’t decide whether he was giving me a break or just trying to spare himself, but whatever it was, I was grateful.

We went to St. Clare’s, and then I walked him home and went home myself. Jacob was behind the desk, looking confused. I asked him what was the matter.

“Your brother called,” he said.

“My brother?”

“Or maybe it was your cousin.”

“My cousin,” I said. I was an only child. I had a couple of cousins, but we’d long since lost touch with one another. I couldn’t think of one who was likely to call.

“It was a man,” he said. “Have to be, if it was your brother, wouldn’t it?”

“What exactly did he say?”

“Says he calling Mr. Scudder. I ask would he like to leave his name. Scudder, he says. Yessir, I know it’s Mr. Scudder you calling, but what would your name be? So he say it again, Scudder, and I’m feeling like them two guys.”

“Which two guys?”

“You know. Them two guys.”

“Abbott and Costello.”

“Yeah, them two. So I say, lemme see now, you’re also Mr. Scudder. And he say, I am the Scudder.”

“ ‘I am the Scudder.’ ”

“Yeah, just like that. So I say, then you and Mr. Scudder be brothers. And he say how all men be brothers, and at this point it’s getting way too weird for me.”

“Gee, I can’t imagine why.”

“Say what?”

“Nothing. He leave a number?”

“Say you have it.”

“I have his number.”

“What he say.”

“All men are brothers, and he’s the Scudder, and I have his number.”

He nodded. “I tried to get it right,” he said, “but man like that don’t make it easy.”

“You did fine,” I told him.