Читать книгу Shadows Still Remain - Peter Jonge De - Страница 15

Three hours later, just before midnight, O’Hara and Krekorian watch through the falling snow as hundreds of NYU students and faculty crowd under the redbrick overhang in front of Bobst Library. While more students stream in from all directions, those in front, closest to the glass doors, grab a lit candle off a long table and file into the southest corner of Washington Square. The column moves silently past the leafless trees and white-limned statue of Garibaldi, and when a thousand candlelit faces surround the recessed circle at the center of the stone plaza, O’Hara and Krekorian leave their car to stand at the rear of the crowd.

Unlike the Lower East Side, Washington Square doesn’t seem foreign to O’Hara at all. As high school freshmen, O’Hara and her best friend Leslie Meehan would often skip school and catch a train into big bad Manhattan. A sizable chunk of those happy truant days was idled away in this very park, drinking Bud out of paper bags and making out with older boys with sideburns and brave smiles. The first time she let a boy slip a hand between her legs was in the grass at the edge of the square, although when she thought back on it, it was probably she who took his hand and guided it there. Sex is the one realm in which she felt at ease from the very beginning, maybe because with your clothes off, differences in class and income and education seemed less important and the playing field almost level. O’Hara isn’t so naive anymore. She realizes now that death is the only leveler, and although some of these kids will undoubtedly get laid post vigil, it’s the prospect of death, not sex, that’s brought them into the park tonight.

At the center of the circle are five stone mounds often commandeered by tattooed jugglers, fire eaters and street comedians. When the crowd settles, some twenty students separate themselves from the pack, divide into groups of three and four, and climb onto the elevated platforms. Then a female student, small and blond, wearing a camel hair coat, steps out from the crowd to face them. When she throws her arms into the air, twenty voices rise into the snow-filled night, and as O’Hara follows them upward, she looks north over the scaled-down Arc de Triomphe and elegant town houses just north of the park to the office towers of Midtown, where these same kids will soon be fighting hand to hand, cubicle to cubicle. In the middle of the dirge, which O’Hara is pretty sure is in Latin, her cell goes off.

“Darlene,” says George Loomis, another detective in the Seven, “some skell in East River Park just stumbled on a body by the tennis courts. Me and Navarro are on our way over, but thought you’d want to know. The description sounds a lot like your girl.”