Prologue
To Mai, the East River was as mysterious as the moonlit river near her childhood village in Vietnam, but it was colder—and more dangerous. In New York, she didn’t need to fear snipers or a sudden assault from American helicopters, like hawks circling above, waiting to swoop, the smell of napalm burning. She needed to fear the river itself, as if it were alive, living, in the way Buddhists taught that all things were living and connected.
Mai knew no single current controlled the river, no orderly flow ordained by the moon and the tides. Instead, currents fought against each other, colliding and viciously warring with each other, waiting to pull anything into the river’s depths. Beneath the surface were cars and old appliances, trash, worn tires, the silt making visibility impossible. NYPD scuba divers who came to search for jumpers couldn’t see their own hands inches from their faces. Mingled in the waters, too, down in the silt, were bodies. Murder victims and jumpers in the East River were as much a part of New York lore as alligators in the sewer system. Mai knew bodies lurked.
No one survived the East River. No one. The currents would drag a body down deep, as if claiming it for some unseen angry god. She feared the bodies. The dead luring her, their skeletal fingers beckoning, whispers in the night, join us.
Mai tried not to think of her children. She longed for a last hug, to hold them tightly on her lap and breathe in their innocence. She felt her resolve weakening. Then she pictured Jimmy. He was her brave soldier, her hero, and from the first day she saw him appear through the tall reeds into her village, she loved him. Thoughts of Jimmy, of his fearlessness, like a tiger in the grass, stalking, patient, courageous, filled her.
The air whipped at her silk dress, the one he loved best, and her hair, long and black, flew about her face. She almost lost her balance. Then, with a mournful glance skyward, she whispered.
Forgive me.
And Mai Malone, her thin body lithe and graceful, arms stretched wide, stepped off the pier and into the ebony waters swirling below her.
Chapter One
Clinton.
Not for the first time, Maggie Malone shook her head in wonder at how trendy Hell’s Kitchen had become. They’d even rechristened the area Clinton, after DeWitt Clinton, a New York governor from over a hundred years ago. Everyone knew Clinton Court and the old DeWitt Clinton school, but face it, Maggie thought, the name Clinton allowed real-estate developers to make this part of the city sound more attractive. Who wants to pay a million dollars for a co-op in Hell? The yuppies had invaded like bacteria spreading through an infected sore. They made Clinton fashionable. But for her, it would always be Hell’s Kitchen.
Emphasis on Hell.
Down at the end of the bar, a guy with an expensive haircut waved an American Express platinum card and snapped his fingers. Maggie took her time strolling over to him and the three girls—two brunettes and a blonde, all in low-slung jeans and expensive tops—hanging all over him.
“I’d like a bottle of your best champagne,” he said loud enough for pretty much anyone in the bar to hear, though the crowd was thinning out.
“First, we don’t carry champagne, and second, we don’t take AmEx.”
“Fine, I’ll put it on a different card.”
“We don’t take cards, period.”
“What?” He looked at her incredulously, then he shook his head. “Fine. Give us four sour appletinis.”
Maggie gave a slight nod and moved down the bar a couple of feet to mix the neon-green concoction. When she’d been a little girl, the Twilight had been a hellhole. You didn’t even walk in if you weren’t neighborhood. Not if you knew what was good for you. She’d started out running the register, standing on a wooden crate. Her brother Danny had cleaned tables. They’d both graduated to bartender before their eighteenth birthdays. But back then the drinks had been beer, bourbon, scotch, vodka, boilermakers. Not appletinis and cosmos.
The yuppies had started coming in a few years before. Danny was rude to them. Maggie was ruder. She felt desperate to hold onto the Twilight the way it was. The way it had always been. Her familiar alcoholics. The ones she drank with, the ones she threw out at 3:00 a. m. The ones who knew her father.
She served the appletinis and then went down to the far end of the bar to refill the beer in front of Charlie—no last name that she knew of—an old-timer.
“What’s eatin’ you, Maggie? You look like you lost your best goddamn friend.”
She shrugged. “I just hate seeing the place like this.”
“What? Crowded? Making money hand over fist?”
“You know what I mean,” she snapped at him. His nose was like a road map of crisscrossed blood vessels, and he had a way of curling over his beer, lest someone should steal it.
“So sell.”
“I keep thinking about it. Got another offer this week. Haven’t talked to Danny yet.”
“What’s the old man think?”
She shrugged. “We haven’t heard from him in months.”
“Wanna know what I think?”
“Sure.”
“Sell the fuckin’ place. I don’t know what the hell you’re holding onto it for. Take the money, go retire to friggin’ Florida or something. Get out of the winter. Al Roker said it was minus ten with the windchill this morning. That’s colder than a witch’s tit.”
“Point taken, Charlie.” Maggie noticed how the spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth, and his teeth were stained with tobacco, like the ceiling of the Twilight itself. He was one of the last of the old-timers. They were dying off.
God, despite its patina of hopelessness, she loved the place. In the midst of Hell’s Kitchen, it was her oasis. Her temple and shrine to all that she loved.
They raced into the Twilight.
“Hi Daddy!” Maggie squealed, both her front teeth missing. He picked her up and kissed her nose, depositing her on a bar stool and filling a highball glass with Coke.
“Don’t tell your mother I’m giving you Coke. If she asks, tell her I gave you milk.”
Danny climbed up on the stool next to Maggie. Their father tousled Danny’s hair and poured him a soda, too. Then their father leaned two elbows on the bar and asked them about their day.
A few stools away from Maggie, she noticed a man with prison tattoos on his forearms. She waved at him, and he winked at her.
Danny told their dad about his class’s field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Maggie couldn’t wait to be in third grade and take that trip, too.
“Dad…the elephant had tusks that went up to the ceiling!”
“Did it try to eat you?”