The Broken Window

less severely damaged than Rhyme’s but the results were remarkable: return of bladder control, movement of limbs, even walking. The latter would not be the result in Rhyme’s case but discussions with a Japanese doctor who’d pioneered the procedure and with a colleague at an Ivy League university teaching hospital gave some hope of improvement. Possibly sensation and movement in his arms, hands and bladder.
    Sex too.
    Paralyzed men, even quads, are perfectly capable of having sex. If the stimulus is mental—seeing a man or woman who appeals to us—then, no, the message doesn’t make it past the site of the damaged spinal cord. But the body is a brilliant mechanism and there’s a magic loop of nerve that operates on its own, below the injury. A little local stimulus, and even the most severely disabled men can often make love.
    The bathroom light clicked out and he watched her silhouette join him and climb into what she’d announced long ago was the most comfortable bed in the world.
    “I—” he began, and his voice was immediately muffled by her mouth as she kissed him hard.
    “What did you say?” she whispered, moving her lips along his chin, then to his neck.
    He’d forgotten. “I forgot.”
    He gripped her ear with his lips and was then aware of the blankets being pulled down. This took some effort on her part; Thom made up the bed like a soldierafraid of his drill sergeant. But soon he could see that the blankets were bunched up at the foot. Sachs’s T-shirt had joined them.
    She kissed him again. He kissed her back hard.
    Which is when her phone rang.
    “Uh-uh,” she whispered. “I didn’t hear that.” After four rings, blessed voice mail took over. But a moment later it rang again.
    “Could be your mother,” Rhyme pointed out.
    Rose Sachs had been undergoing some treatments for a cardiac problem. The prognosis was good but she’d had some recent setbacks.
    Sachs grunted and flipped it open, bathing both of their bodies in a blue light. Looking at caller ID, she said, “Pam. I better take it.”
    “Of course.”
    “Hey, there. What’s up?”
    As the one-sided conversation continued, Rhyme deduced that something was wrong.
    “Okay . . . Sure . . . But I’m at Lincoln’s. You want to come over here?” She glanced at Rhyme, who was nodding agreement. “Okay, honey. We’ll be awake, sure.” She snapped the phone shut.
    “What is it?”
    “I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. She just said Dan and Enid had two emergency placements tonight. So all the older kids had to room together. She had to get out. And she doesn’t want to be at my place alone.”
    “It’s fine with me. You know that.”
    Sachs lay back down and her mouth explored energetically. She whispered, “I did the math. She’s got to pack a bag, get her car out of the garage . . . it’ll takeher a good forty-five minutes to be here. We’ve got a little time.”
    She leaned forward and kissed him again.
    Just as the doorbell rang jarringly and the intercom clattered, “Mr. Rhyme? Amelia? Hi, it’s Pam. Can you buzz me in?”
    Rhyme laughed. “Or she might’ve called from the front steps.”
    •   •   •
    They sat in one of the upstairs bedrooms, Pam and Sachs.
    The room was the girl’s for whenever she wished to stay. A stuffed animal or two sat neglected on the shelf (when your mother and stepfather are running from the FBI, toys don’t figure much in your childhood) but she had several hundred books and CDs. Thanks to Thom there always were plenty of clean sweats and T-shirts and socks. A Sirius satellite radio set and a disk player. Her running shoes too; Pam loved to speed along the 1.6-mile path surrounding the Central Park reservoir. She ran from love of running and she ran from hungry need.
    The girl now sat on the bed, carefully painting gold polish on her toenails, cotton balls separating the canvases. Her mother had forbidden this, as well as makeup (“out of respect for Christ,” however that was supposed to work), and once sprung from the far-right underground she took up small, comforting additions to her persona, like this, some ruddy hair tint and the three ear piercings. Sachs was relieved she didn’t go overboard; if anybody had a reason to slingshot herself into the weird, it was Pamela Willoughby.
    Sachs was lounging in a chair, feet up, her own toenails bare. A breeze carried into the small room the complicated mix of spring scents from Central Park: mulch, earth,