Page 70 of Graceless

“Okay,” she said. Quiet. “How dangerous is this one?”

“It isn’t,” I said. “He is the safest thing I know. In all the while I have known him, he has never once given me a reason to watch him.” I drank the terrible coffee, because it was hers, and it was mine, and I have a position on it now. “The work stays covered today. The alarm stays on. If anything is wrong — anything, a sound, a smell, Donnie being quiet — you call, and you stand at the interior wall, and I will be here before the phone cools.”

“You’ll be at the other end of wherever.”

“Yes,” I said. “It won’t matter.”

She looked at me for a moment with all of it in her face — the night, the size of it — and then she reached up and fixed my collar, which did not need fixing, and I carried that the whole sixty blocks.

“Bring him a pastry,” she said. “Whatever he is. Nobody’s above a pastry.”

I walked, and with every block I was breaking doctrine — ours, the only doctrine the fallen ever wrote for ourselves. One of us is a rumor. Two of us standing together is a signature, and things that read the air can read it from a very long way off. I could count on one hand the times I had broken it, and I would not need the whole hand.

I had not stood in a room with Sar since they raised the bridge over the Narrows. And still I knew where he was the way you know where a lighthouse is. All of us always know. It is the one thing the distance is for.

Before I left her block I walked it once, both corners, the alley, the laundromat step. The trace was there — last night’s pass, cold, correct, regular as a tide — and it had been saying the same thing for a week now: closer, and more often, and in no hurry at all. What it is waiting for, I have not solved. I stood over the cold print of it with her window at my back, and then I went to ask my question, because the room she had asked into last night was standing open, and I could not close it.

I took the long way, on foot, human speed, because you do not arrive at Sar’s at speed — you arrive announced, upwind, slow, as you would approach anything that has chosen its ground. Sheepshead Bay in late March is gulls and diesel and the smell of the night’s catch going into ice, and the charter boats sat along the Emmons Avenue piers in their slips with their radar masts down, and on the deck of the third boat from the end a man in yellow rubber overalls was coiling a hose with the precision of a surgeon closing.

He did not look up. He had known I was coming since I crossed the avenue. Possibly since I crossed the borough.

“Baraqiel,” said Sar, to the hose.

“Sariel.”

“All this while, and you catch me in the waders.” He straightened — and for one breath, before anything arrived in his face, the frame under the yellow rubber was only what it is: a thing built for older work, holding a hose. Every gull on the rail left at once.

Then his face did the thing I had walked sixty blocks bracing for, the thing none of the rest of us can do anymore: it opened. All the way. Joy, actual joy, unbanked, disgraceful, aimed at me like glare off the water. “Come aboard. Wipe your feet. There’s coffee, and it’s good, because unlike some of us I did not stop having standards in the Bronze Age.”

The boat was called the Carrie Ann and she was old and she was immaculate. That is Sar entire, if you want him in a sentence: everything he touches is old and immaculate. The deck was scrubbed to the grain. The rods stood in their holders like a rack of rifles in a chapel. Below, in the galley, the cups hung on their hooks in a row so exact it read as liturgy, and he moved through the small space as he has always moved — nothing wasted, nothing hurried, a discipline so complete it has stopped being visible and become the man.

“You work this boat,” I said.

“I'm the mate. Long enough that nobody asks questions anymore.” He poured. The coffee was, in fact, good. “Captain thinks I’m sixty and Portuguese. I gut fish, I tie rigs, I pull tourists’ hooks out of tourists’ thumbs. In the fall we get the blues running and the whole rail goes up at once, forty lines, everybody screaming.” He handed me the cup and his eyes were bright as struck metal. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I ran a garrison at Nineveh.”

“You always liked the water.”

“The water doesn’t remember anything.” He racked the last coil of hose true, edge to edge. “I find that restful.” He leaned against the little counter, folded his arms, and took my measure — and the joy banked itself — not away, just down, a lamp shaded by hand. “Now. You broke doctrine, you walked here upwind like a gentleman, and you’re carrying a bakery box. So either the world is ending, or it’s a woman.”

“Why is it one or the other?”

“Brother,” he said. “It’s always one or the other.”

“It may be both.”

“It usually is.” He nodded at the box. “What’s in the bakery box?”

“Sfogliatelle. She sent them. Her instruction was: nobody’s above a pastry.”

Sar looked at the box for a long moment, and then up, and did not say anything at first.

“She sent provisions,” he said, finally, “to your brother. Whom she has never seen. On the strength of your word that he exists.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me one thing about her. Not the file. One thing.”

I did not have to look for it.