City Of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

knew that things wouldn’t be the same when hereturned. Things were never the same when you left and then returned. Something always changed, often internal, often profound. Such was living.
    Banking high and steep, evening casting sequins across Florida as the setting sun reflected off a hundred thousand mangrove swamps and tributaries. Window seat, no-one beside him, Harlan Coben book in his lap which he couldn’t find the concentration to read. Stewardess asked if he wanted something to drink and he declined, changed his mind, asked for a Jack Daniels with a single ice cube. Ice melted before he drank, and it didn’t taste so good.
    New York beckoned like a half-forgotten dream, a dream he’d had before and recalled with a feeling of tight anxiety. Altogether unsettled, angular distractions that sat between duty and resistance, emotions bound one to the other – anger, resentment, sympathy for Evelyn and her all-too-evident loneliness. Harper smiled to himself, a smile that did not reflect in his eyes, leaned his head back and exhaled deeply.
    He drifted away and did not wake until the stewardess leaned across him, smiled like an angel, asked him to buckle up for landing. She smelled of something one could breathe in forever and never be satiated.
    Newark Airport, New Jersey. Took a cab through the Holland Tunnel. Evening; the swollen hum of the city pressing against the windows as he went. Everything he remembered, nothing had changed, and all of this crowding up against his eyes like it had a wish to burn itself indelibly into his mind.
Home is where the heart is
, he thought, but the heart that lived in New York was a dark and shadowed version of his own. He realized that only in his mind was this the same city. Notwithstanding his Christmas visit four years before, he had been gone since 1987. This was New York post-Bush Snr, post-Clinton, post the fiasco that saw Al Gore take the popular vote by 540,000 but lose at the Electoral in 2000. This was New York after the first attack against the homeland by foreign aggressors since the War of 1812, the ghost of 9/11 inclusive and encompassing despite the passing of three years. Harper could still recall a news headline that had stopped him in his tracks – ‘Vacant Rooms, Empty Tables and Scared Tourists’.
I’ve come back
, he thought,
but what have I come back to?
    Detoured on Sixth, headed for West Third on foot. Diverted by the Blue Note Jazz Club where he paused and drank a soda. Evelyn would have smelled alcohol and bitched at him, called him a deadbeat, a bum. Garrett had been a drinker and had fallen by the wayside. By the time Harper left it was gone eight. Yellow medallion cabs, New York buses, cars crowding fender to fender, smell of diesel and cigarette smoke, the sweat and frustration of several million lives, each of them intersecting, each of them lost and yet still looking for something in their own quiet and special way. Back out into Greenwich Village, bohemians and skateboarders, freethinkers and hopheads; sharp darts from the past, like edges of things he didn’t want to recall, but he did recall them, and somehow they hurt. This was all a hundred thousand years before, and yet – with each step towards Evelyn’s three-storey walk-up on Carmine between the Cherry Lane Theater and Sheridan Square – John Harper felt the past rolling up towards him, inexorable and relentless. The past did not tire, the past did not disappear, it merely waited for you to come home.
Home?
Harper stopped right there on the sidewalk. Was that what he believed, even after all these years – that he was really coming home?
    He remembered this same walk as a child; a particular day, an unforgettable Wednesday.
    He shrugged off such thoughts; they scurried away like trick-or-treat children, catcalls and snickering and curse words.
    Harper started walking again, crossed West Fourth towards Bleecker and angled left. Thought back to the moment on the
Mary McGregor
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