Book of Souls

Even though he was chronically sleep-deprived, Will’s head was awfully clear these days, thanks to his self-imposed separation from his pal, Johnnie Walker. He kept the ceremonial last half-gallon bottle of Black Label, three-quarters full, in the cabinet under the TV. He wasn’t going to be the kind of ex-drunk who had to purge the place of alcohol. He visited with the bottle sometimes, winked at it, sparred with it, had a little chat with it. He taunted it more than it taunted him. He didn’t do AA or “talk to someone.” He didn’t even stop drinking! He had a couple of beers or a generous glass of wine fairly regularly, and he even got buzzed on an empty stomach. He simply prohibited himself from touching the nectar-smoky, beautiful, amber-his love, his nemesis. He didn’t care what the textbooks said about addicts and abstinence. He was his own man, and he had promised himself and his new bride that he wouldn’t do the falling-down-drunk thing again.

He sat on the sofa with his large hands lying dumbly on his bare thighs. He was set to go, kitted out in jogging shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. The nanny was late again. He felt trapped, claustrophobic. He was spending way too much time in this little parquet-floored prison cell. Despite best intentions, something was going to have to give. He was trying to do the right thing and honor his commitments and all that, but every day he grew more restless. New York had always irritated him. Now it was overtly nauseating.

The buzzer saved him from darkness. A minute later, the nanny-troll, as he called her (not to her face), arrived, launching into an attack on public transport rather than an apology. Leonora Monica Nepomuceno, a four-foot-ten-inch Filipina, threw her carrier bag on the kitchenette counter, then went right for the crying baby, pressing his tense little body against her incongruously large breasts. The woman, who he guessed was in her fifties, was so physically unattractive that when Will and Nancy first learned her nickname, Moonflower, they laughed themselves to exhaustion. “Ay, ay,” she crooned to the boy, “your auntie Leonora is here. You can stop your crying now.”

“I’m going for a run,” Will announced through a scowl.

“Go for a long one, Mister Will,” Moonflower advised.

A daily run had become part of Will’s postretirement routine, a component of his new-man ethos. He was leaner and stronger than he had been in years, only ten pounds heavier than his football-playing weight at Harvard. He was on the brink of fifty, but he was looking younger thanks to his no-scotch diet. He was big and athletic, with a strong jaw, boyishly thick tawny hair, and crazy blue eyes, and clad in nylon jogging shorts, he turned women’s heads, even young ones’. Nancy still wasn’t used to that.

On the sidewalk, he realized the Indian summer was over, and it was going to be uncomfortably chilly. While he stretched his calves and Achilles tendons against a signpost, he thought about shooting back upstairs for a warm-up suit.

Then he saw the bus on the other side of East 23^rd Street. It started up and belched some diesel exhaust.

Will had spent the better part of twenty years following and observing. He knew how to make himself inconspicuous. The guy in the bus didn’t, or didn’t care. He had noticed the rig the previous evening, driving slowly past his building at maybe five miles per hour, jamming traffic, provoking a chorus of honks. It was hard to miss, a top-of-the-line Beaver, a big royal blue forty-three-footer with slides, splashed out in gray and crimson swooshes. He had thought to himself, who the hell takes a half-a-million-dollar motor home into lower Manhattan and drives around slow, looking for an address? If he found it, where was he going to park the thing? But it was the license plate that rang bells.

Nevada. Nevada!

Now it looked like the guy had indeed found adequate parking the night before, across the street just to the east of Will’s building, an impressive feat, to be sure. Will’s heart started to beat at jogging speed even though he was still stationary. He had stopped looking over his shoulder months ago.

Apparently, that was a mistake. Gimme a break, he thought. Nevada

plates.

Still, this didn’t have their signature. The watchers weren’t going to come at him in a half-baked-Winnebago battle-wagon. If they ever decided to pluck him off the streets, he’d never see it coming. They were pros, for Christ’s sake.

It was a two-way street, and the bus was pointed west. All Will had to do was run east toward the river, make a few quick turns, and the bus would never catch up. But then he wouldn’t know if he was the object of somebody’s exercise, and he didn’t like not knowing. So he ran west. Slowly. Making it easy for the guy.