Andrew was already dead for half an hour when Michael found the medical chopper.
He would not let them take the body out of his arms.
He kept holding the handless body close, rocking it.
“Come on, man,” the black medic said.
“Get a grip.”
Michael turned to him and snarled at him.
Like a dog.
Lips skinned back over his teeth.
Growling deep in his throat.
The medic backed off.
A colonel came over to him later.
“Let’s go, soldier,” he said, “we’ve got work to do.”
“Fuck you, sir,” Michael said.
And growled at him, too.
Click.
A sound to his right. He whirled, terrified. The door to apartment 2B was opening. A girl the color of cinnamon toast was standing in the doorway. She was wearing only a half-slip. Nothing else. Naked from the waist up. She stared blankly into the hall.
“You lookin’ for Mama?” she asked.
“Yes,” Connie said.
“Try the club,” the girl said.
Michael felt a tremendous rush of relief.
Mama was at the club.
She was not behind this closed door. She would not have to be faced just yet.
He put the pistol back into his pocket.
“What club?” he asked.
He did not want to know.
He hoped the girl would not tell him.
Stoned out of her mind, she would not be able to remember the name of the club. No older than sixteen, stoned beyond remembrance. He had seen that same glazed look in Vietnam.
Young Americans going into battle stoned. To face the faceless enemy and the nameless horror in the jungle. For Michael, here and now, inexplicably here in this hallway in downtown Manhattan, the horror was an unseen, unknown woman named Mama, and he did not wish to face that horror again. Because this time it would destroy him. This time, the horror would explode in his hands, and he would run weeping all the way to Boston, his stumps spurting blood, only to learn that his Mama had given away even his best blue jacket. No cause, he thought. No cause on earth.
“Oz,” the girl said.
“All the way downtown,” Connie said. “Over near the river.”
No cause, Michael kept thinking.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m fine.”
Oz was a disco on a peninsula that hugged the exit to the Battery Tunnel. Located on Greenwich Street, as opposed to Greenwich Avenue farther uptown, it seemed undecided as to whether it wished to be closer to Edgar or to Morris, which were streets and not people. In any event, the club was so far downtown that in the blink of an eye the West Side could suddenly and surprisingly become the East Side. Or rather, and more accurately, the West Side could become the South Side, for it was here at the lowest tip of the island that West Street looped around Battery Park to become South Street.
“It’s all very confusing,” Connie explained, “but not as confusing as the borough of Brooklyn.”
They had parked the open convertible in an all-night garage on Broadway, and had walked two blocks south and one block west to the disco, passing several young girls shivering in the cold in short fake-fur jackets, high-heeled shoes, and lacy lingerie. Michael wondered if any of these girls had earlier been at the Christmas party where he’d met Frankie Zeppelin. He did not think he recognized Detective O’Brien among them.
At three o’clock in the morning on Boxing Day, there were at least a hundred people standing on the yellow brick sidewalk outside Oz. Not a single one of them appeared to be over the age of twenty, and most of them were dressed like characters from The Wizard of Oz. Standing on line in the shivering cold were a dozen or more Tin Men, half again that number of Scarecrows, six Cowardly Lions, eight Wicked Witches of the East, a handful of Glindas, three or four Wizards, a great many people wearing monkey masks on their faces and wings on their backs, some shorter folk chattering in high voices and pretending to be Munchkins, and a multitude of Dorothys wearing short skirts, red shoes, and braids.
Michael felt a bit out of place in his jeans and bomber jacket.
The sidewalk outside the disco was not merely painted a yellow brick, it actually was yellow brick. The building itself had once been a parking garage, shaped like a flatiron to conform to the peninsula-like dimensions of the plot. Its old brick facade was now covered with thick plastic panels cut and fitted and lighted from within to resemble the many facets of a sparkling green emerald rising from the sidewalk. The name of the club was spelled out in brighter green neon wrapped around the front and sides of the building, just below the roof. There were no visible entrance doors. There was only the yellow brick leading to this huge green, multifaceted crystal growing out of the sidewalk.