"Joan, you don't look so good."
"Joan" and "don't" came out sounding like "Jon" and "don" in Neeva's island lilt.
"Oh, I'm just a little run-down." She popped some Motrin and two Flexerils and sat down at the kitchen island, opening House Beautiful.
"You should eat," said Neeva.
"Hurts to swallow," said Joan.
"Soup, then," decreed Neeva, and set about getting it for her.
Neeva was a mother figure for all of them, not just the children. And why shouldn't Joan have some mothering too? God knows, her real mother-twice divorced, living in an apartment in Hialeah, Florida-wasn't up to the task. And the best part? When Neeva's doting ways became too annoying, Joan could simply send her away on an errand with the kiddies. Best. Arrangement. Ever.
"I hear about that air-o-plane." Neeva looked back at Joan from the can opener. "No good. An evil thing."
Joan smiled at Neeva and her adorable little tropical superstitions-the smile cut abruptly short by a sharp pain in her jaw.
While the soup bowl rotated in the whirring microwave, Neeva came back to look at Joan, laying her roughened brown hand against Joan's forehead, exploring the glandular region of Joan's neck with gray-nailed fingers. Joan pulled back in pain.
"Swollen bad," Neeva said.
Joan closed the magazine. "Maybe I should go back to bed."
Neeva stood back, looking at her strangely. "You should go back to hospital."
Joan would have laughed if she knew it wouldn't hurt. Back to Queens? "Trust me, Neeva. I am much better off here in your hands. Besides-take it from one who knows. That whole hospital thing was an insurance ploy on the airline's behalf. All for their benefit-not mine."
As she rubbed her sore, swollen neck, Joan envisioned the impending lawsuit, and once again her spirits soared. She glanced around the kitchen. Funny how a house she had spent so much time and money redecorating and re-renovating could appear so suddenly...shabby.
Camins, Peters, Lilly...and Luss.
The children entered the kitchen then, Keene and Audrey, whining about some toy-related incident. Their voices worked their way inside Joan's head such that she was seized by a commanding urge to backhand them each hard enough to send them flying halfway across the kitchen. But she managed to do what she always did, channeling her aggression toward her children into false enthusiasm, thrown up like a wall around her angry self. She closed the magazine and raised her voice in order to silence theirs.
"How would you each like a pony, and your very own pond?"
She believed it was her generous bribe that had silenced the children, but it was in fact her smile, gargoylelike and glaring, baring an expression of utter hatred, that frightened them into stillness.
For Joan, the momentary silence was bliss.
The 911 call came in for a naked man at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel exits. The dispatch went out as a 10-50, a low-priority disorderly person call. A unit from the 1-7 arrived within eight minutes, and found a bad jam-up, worse than usual for a Sunday night. A few drivers honked and pointed them uptown. The suspect, they yelled, a fat guy wearing nothing but a red tag on his toe, had already moved on.
"I got kids here!" howled one guy in a dinged-up Dodge Caravan.
Officer Karn, the driver, said to his partner, Officer Lupo, "I'm gonna say Park Avenue type. Sex club regular. Took too much X before his weekend kink session."
Officer Lupo unbuckled and opened his door. "I'm on traffic duty. Loverboy's all yours."
"Thanks a lot," said Officer Karn to the slamming of the door. He lit up his rack and waited patiently-he wasn't paid extra to rush-for the traffic snarl to part for him.
He cruised up past Thirty-eighth, eyeballing cross streets. A fat naked guy on the loose shouldn't be too hard to find. People on the sidewalks seemed okay, not freaked. One helpful citizen smoking outside a bar saw the slow-rolling cruiser and stepped forward, pointing him up the street.
A second and third call came in, both for a naked man marauding outside the United Nations headquarters. Officer Karn hit the gas, looking to end this. He cruised past the lit-up flags of all the member nations flying out front, to the visitors' entrance at the north end. Blue NYPD sawhorses everywhere, as well as car-bomb deterring cement planters.
Karn rolled up on a detail of bored cops near the sawhorses. "I'm looking for a fat naked man."
One cop shrugged. "I could give you a few phone numbers."
Gabriel Bolivar returned by limousine to his new home in Manhattan, two town houses undergoing extensive renovations on Vestry Street, in Tribeca. When finished, the home would encompass thirty-one rooms and fourteen thousand total square feet, including a mosaic-lined swimming pool, servants' quarters for a staff of sixteen, a basement recording studio, and a twenty-six-seat movie theater.
Only the penthouse was finished and furnished, rushed into completion while Bolivar was away on his European tour. The rest of the rooms in the lower floors were roughed out, some of them plastered, others still dressed in plastic wrap and insulation. Sawdust had worked its way onto every surface and into every crevice. Bolivar's business manager had briefed him on the developments, but Bolivar wasn't much interested in the journey, only the destination of his soon-to-be lavish and decadent palace.
The "Jesus Wept" tour had ended on a down note. The promoters had had to work hard to fill the arenas so that Bolivar could truthfully claim to have played to sold-out audiences everywhere-but he had. Then the tour charter crapped out in Germany, and rather than wait behind with the others, Bolivar had consented to hop a commercial flight home. He was still feeling the aftereffects of that big mistake. In fact, it was getting worse.
He moved inside the front entrance with his security detail and three young ladies from the club. A few of his larger treasures had been moved in, including twin black marble panthers poised on either side of the twenty-foot-high foyer. Two blue industrial-waste drums said to have belonged to Jeffrey Dahmer and several rows of framed paintings: Mark Ryden, Robert Williams, Chet Zar-big, expensive stuff. The loose light switch on the wall activated a string of construction lights winding up the marble staircase, beyond a great, winged, weeping angel of uncertain provenance, having been "rescued" from a Romanian church during the Ceausescu regime.
"He's beautiful," said one of the girls, looking up into the angel's shadowed, time-worn features.
Bolivar stumbled near the great angel, seized by a pain in his gut that was more than a cramp, that was like a punch from an adjoining organ. He gripped the angel's wing to steady himself, and the girls converged on him.