"It's hard to imagine."
"It is. What a picture that would be! 'Twould be worse than the dying, to have to look at it."
There was something I'd forgotten. I was wondering what it was and thinking I ought to get on home when Mick said, "So he was no help at all to you."
"Who are we talking about?"
"The man you left for dead. Did you ever tell me his name? I can't recall."
"Chilton Purvis."
"Ah, you told me. I remember now. He had nothing to tell you?"
"They never told him a name, or gave him a number to call."
"Or if they did he wouldn't tell it."
"He'd have told me anything at that point," I said. "All he cared about was getting to the hospital. When I showed him the sketch, he ID'd the thing before I got it unfolded. He'd have sworn that was the guy who shot JFK if he thought that's what I wanted."
"You mentioned a sketch," he said. "Just before you told me that the boy was shot."
"Which was right around the time you stood up on the brake pedal and gave the guy behind us a heart attack."
"Aaah, he should learn how to fucking drive. But this sketch. You never said your man in Brooklyn saw it."
"I don't know that he really saw it. 'Yes, mon, that's him'- but he barely looked at it. I showed him another sketch by the same artist, someone he couldn't possibly have seen, and yes, mon, that was him, too. Which one, I asked him. Both of them, he said. And anyone else I wanted to throw in the hopper, just so I hauled his ass to the ER."
"He's looked at another picture now," he said. "His whole life laid out before him. He'll identify that straight enough. Do you have that sketch on you?"
"Oh, for Christ's sake."
"No harm if you don't. Next time'll do."
"I've got it," I said, "and I meant to show it to you hours ago. He's hired help, but my guess is he's a lot closer to the top man than Chilton Purvis or the Vietnamese. Maybe you'll know him."
I got out my wallet, found the sketch of the man who'd hit me, showed it to him. It was well drawn, he observed. You got a real sense of the man. But it was no one he recognized.
"Now the other one," he said.
"It's just a face," I said. "Somebody I thought I recognized, but couldn't place. I couldn't get the face out of my mind, so my artist friend drew it."
He took the sketch and the color drained from his face. He looked at me and his green eyes were fierce. "Is this a joke?" he demanded. "Is this a fucking joke?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You've seen this man, have you?"
"At Grogan's, the night we buried Kenny and McCartney. I just had a quick glimpse of him but he's got a memorable face."
"Indeed he does. I'll never forget it."
"You know him?"
He ignored the question. "And you recognized him."
"He looked familiar to me but I couldn't place him. TJ says he thinks he's seen him around the neighborhood."
"And is that where you've seen him? Around the neighborhood?"
"I don't know. I almost think..."
"Aye?"
"That it's a face from the past. That I saw it years and years ago, if I ever saw it at all."
"Years and years."
"But who is he? You know him, obviously, but I never saw you react like that. It's almost as if..."
"As if I'd seen a ghost." He stuck out his finger, touched the sketch. "And what do you think that is? What's that if it's not a ghost?"
"You've lost me."
"I've lost it all," he said, "for how am I to contend with a ghost? What chance have I against a man who's thirty years dead?"
"Thirty years?"
"Thirty years and more." He took the sheet of paper in both hands, brought it closer, held it at arm's length. "Just the head," he said. "All you'd put in a drawing, isn't it? And it's how I saw him last, and how I see him in my mind. Just the head."
He threw down the sketch, turned to me. "Don't you see it, man? It's Paddy Fucking Farrelly."
"How old was he, this man you saw?"
"I don't know. Somewhere in his thirties."
"That was Farrelly's age when he died. I killed him, you know."
"That's what I always understood."
"By God, I have to say he had it coming. He was a bad bastard, that one. I had my troubles with him in school days. A few years older than myself, and a bully he was, a terrible bully. That ended when I got my size and gave as good as I got. He didn't care for that, the dirty bastard.
"'Tis a vast city, New York, but the old Kitchen's not so big, and the pool we swam in wasn't large at all. We were forever in each other's way, forever coming head to head with each other, and everybody knew how it had to end. By God, I thought, if someone's after getting killed it needn't be myself, and I laid for the bastard, and I did for him.
"You've heard the stories, and there's a mix of the true and the false in them. This much is true: I took his great ugly head off his shoulders. Do that, I thought, and your troubles with a man are at an end, for the best doctors in the world won't sew him together again.
"I never thought to run a stake through his heart."
"Let's figure this out," I said.
"It's a mystery," he said. "If you'd been brought up in the Church you'd know that mysteries can't be figured out. They can only be contemplated."
We were in an all-night diner he knew in Queens, way the hell out in Howard Beach not far from JFK. He'd wanted to get away from McGinley amp; Caldecott, as if Paddy Farrelly's ghost had itself taken up residence there. I don't know how he managed to find the diner, or how he knew of it to begin with, but I figured we were safe there. The place was as remote as Montana.
For a man who'd just seen a ghost he had a good appetite. He put away a big plate of bacon and eggs and home fries. I had the same, and it was good. I could probably be a vegetarian like Elaine, but only if bacon was declared a vegetable.
"A mystery," I said. "Well, I didn't have the advantage of a Catholic education. I think of a mystery as something to be solved. Can we agree that it's not a ghost I saw?"
"Then it's a resurrection," he said, "and Paddy's an odd candidate for it."
"I think it would have to be his son."
"He never married."
"Did he like the ladies?"
"Too well," he said. "He'd have his way with them if they liked it or not."
"Rape, you mean?"
"Words change their meaning," he said. "Over time. When we were young it was scarcely rape if they knew each other. Unless it was a grown man with a child, or someone forcing himself upon a married woman. But if a girl was out with a man, well, what did she think she was getting into?"
"Now they call it date rape."
"They do," he said, "and quite right. Well, if a girl was with Paddy, she ought to know what she was in for. There was one was going to press charges, but Paddy talked to her brother and her brother talked her out of it. No doubt he threatened to kill the whole family, and no doubt the brother believed him."
"Nice fellow."
"If I go to hell," he said, "as I likely will, it won't be his blood on my hands that puts me there. But, you know, there were enough he didn't need to force. Some women are drawn to men like him, and the worse the man the greater the attraction."
"I know."
"Violence draws them. I had some drawn to me that way, but they were never the sort of woman I cared for." He thought about that for a moment. Then he said, "If he had a son, he'd have no love for me."
"When did Paddy die?"
"Ah, Jesus, it's hard to remember. I can't be sure of the year. 'Twas after Kennedy was shot, I remember that much. But not long after. The following year, I'd say."
"1964."
"'Twas in the summer."
"Thirty-three years ago."
"Ah, you've a great head for mathematics."
"That would fit, you know. The man I saw was somewhere in his thirties."
"There was never any talk of Paddy having a son."
"Maybe she kept it quiet, whoever she was."
"And told the boy."
"Told the boy who his father was. And maybe told him who killed him."
"So that he grew up hating me. Well, don't they grow up in Belfast hating the English? And don't the Proddy kids grow up hating the Holy Father? 'Fuck the Queen!' 'Nah, nah, fuck the Pope!' Fuck 'em both, I say, or let 'em fuck each other." He drew out his pocket flask and sweetened his coffee. "They grow into good haters if you teach them early enough. But where the hell has he been all these years? He's spit and image of his father. If I'd ever laid eyes on him I'd have known him in an instant."
"I saw how you reacted to the sketch."
"I knew him at a glance, and I'd have known him as quick in the flesh. Anyone who knew the father would recognize the son."
"Maybe he grew up outside of the city."
"And nursed his hatred all these years? Why would he leave it so long?"
"I don't know."
"I could imagine him coming for me in his young manhood," he said. "'When boyhood's fire was in my blood'- you know that song?"
"It sounds familiar."
"That's when you'd think he'd have done it, when boyhood's fire was in his blood. But he's well past thirty, he'd have to be, and boyhood's fire is nothing but dying embers. Where the hell's he been?"
"I've some ideas."
"Have you really?"
"A few," I said. "I'll see where I can get with it tomorrow." I looked at my watch. "Well, later today."
"Detective work, is it?"
"Of a sort," I said. "It's a lot like searching a coal mine for a black cat that isn't there. But I can't think what else to do."
I was home and in bed before sunrise, up and showered and shaved before noon. TJ had had a good night, and was sitting up in front of the television set, wearing navy blue chinos and a light blue denim shirt. He'd told Elaine he had clean clothes in his room, but she'd insisted on buying him an outfit at the Gap. "Said she didn't want to invade my privacy," he said, rolling his eyes.
I brought him up to speed and let him have another look at the man I'd come to think of as Paddy Jr., whatever his name might turn out to be. I was hoping there was a computerized shortcut to the task at hand.
"The Kongs could probably do it," he said, "if we knew where they at, an' if they still into that hackin' shit. An' if the records you talkin' about's computerized."
"They're city records," I said, "and they're over thirty years old."
"Be the thing for them to do. Have some people sit down an' input all their files. Be a real space saver, 'cause you can fit a whole filing cabinet on a floppy."
"It sounds like too much to hope for," I said. "But if Vital Statistics has all their old files on computer, I wouldn't even have to hack into their system. There's an easier way."
"Bribery?"
"If you want to be a tightass about it," I said. "I prefer to think of it as going out of your way to be nice to people, and having them be nice in return."
The clerk I found was a motherly woman named Elinor Horvath. She was nice to begin with and got even nicer when I palmed her a couple of bills. If only the records in question had been in computerized files, she could have found them for me in nothing flat. As TJ had explained it to me, all she would have to do was sort each pertinent database by Name of Father. Then you could just shuffle through the F's and see exactly who had been sired by someone named Farrelly.
"All our new records are computerized," she told me, "and we're working our way backward, but it's going very slowly. In fact it's not really going at all, not after the last round of budget cuts. I'm afraid we're not a high-priority division, and the old records aren't high priority for us."
That meant it had to be done the old-fashioned way, and it was going to require more time than Mrs. Horvath could possibly devote to it, no matter how nice a guy I was. The money I gave her got me ensconced in a back room where she brought me file drawers full of birth certificates filed in the City of New York starting January 1, 1957. I couldn't believe he was over forty, not from the glimpse I'd had of him, nor could I imagine he'd been more than seven years old when Paddy got the chop. According to what I knew about the father, by then the son would have had enough neglect or abuse or both to have been spared a passion for revenge.
That gave me my starting date, and I'd decided I'd go all the way to June 30, 1965. The killing of Paddy Farrelly, which Mick recalled as having taken place during the summer, might have occurred as late as the end of September, and the darling boy himself might have been conceived that very day, for all I knew. It all seemed unlikely, but you could say that about the whole enterprise.
It was slow work, and if you sped up out of boredom you ran the risk of missing what you were looking for. The records were in chronological order, and that was the sole organizational scheme. I had to scan each one, looking first at the child's name on the top line, then at the father's name about halfway down. I was looking for Farrelly in either place.
I was fortunate, I suppose, in that it wasn't a common name. Had the putative father been, say, Robert Smith or William Wilson, I'd have had a harder time of it. On the other hand, every time I hit some inapplicable Smith or Wilson I'd have at least had the illusion that I was coming close. I didn't hit any Farrellys, neither father nor child, and that made me question what I was doing.
It was mindless work. A retarded person could have performed it as well as I, and possibly better. My mind tended to wander, it almost had to, and that can lead to a sort of mental snow-blindedness, where you cease to see what you're looking at.
One thing that struck me, wading through this sea of names, was the substantial proportion of children who had different last names from their fathers, or no father listed at all. I wondered what it meant when the mother left the line blank. Was she reluctant to put the man's name down? Or didn't she know which name to choose?