The Broken Window

man.”
    “I—”
    “Fuckin’. Wit. You.”
    “Oh.” Arthur laughed and wondered if his heart would explode right at this moment or would wait till later. He hadn’t gotten all of his father’s genes, but had the faulty cardiac messages been included in the package?
    Mick said something to himself and took an intense interest in his right elbow, scratching it raw.
    Both Johnson and Arthur watched him.
    Tweaker . . .
    Johnson then said, “Yo, yo, Jersey Man, lemme ask you somethin’.”
    “Sure.”
    “My momma, she religious, you know what I’m saying? And she tellin’ me one time the Bible was right. I mean, all of it was exactly the way that shit was wrote. Okay but listen up: I’m thinking, where’s the dinosaurs in the Bible? God created man and woman and earth and rivers and donkeys and snakes an’ shit. Why don’t it say God created dinosaurs? I mean, I seen their skeletons, you know. So they was real. So whatsa fuckin’ truth, man?”
    Arthur Rhyme looked at Mick. Then at the nail pounded in the wall. His palms were sweating and he was thinking that, of all the things that could happen to him in jail, he was going to get killed because he took a scientist’s moral stand against intelligent design.
    Oh, what the fuck?
    He said, “It would be against all the known laws of science—laws that have been acknowledged by every advanced civilization on earth—for the earth to be onlysix thousand years old. It would be like you sprouting wings and flying out that window there.”
    The man frowned.
    I’m dead.
    Johnson fixed him with an intense gaze. Then he nodded. “I fuckin’ knew it. Didn’t make no sense at all, six thousand years. Fuck.”
    “I can give you the name of a book to read about it. There’s this author Richard Dawkins and he—”
    “Don’ wanna read no fuckin’ book. Take yo’ word fo’ it, Mr. Jersey Man.”
    Arthur really felt like tapping fists now. But he refrained. He asked, “What’s your mother going to say when you tell her?”
    The round black face screwed up in astonishment. “I ain’ gonna tell her. That’d be fucked up. You never win no arguments ’gainst yo’ mother.”
    Or your father, Arthur said to himself.
    Johnson then grew serious. He said, “Yo. Word up you din’t do what they busted you fo’.”
    “Of course not.”
    “But you got yo’ ass collared anyway?”
    “Yep.”
    “The fuck that happen?”
    “I wish I knew. I’ve been thinking about it since I got arrested. It’s all I think about. How he could’ve done it.”
    “Who’s ‘he’?”
    “The real killer.”
    “Yo, like in The Fugitive . Or O.J.”
    “The police found all kinds of evidence linking me to the crime. Somehow the real killer knew everythingabout me. My car, where I lived, my schedule. He even knew things I bought—and he planted them as evidence. I’m sure that’s what happened.”
    Antwon Johnson considered this and then laughed. “Man. That yo’ fucking problem.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You went out an’ you bought ever’thing. Shoulda just boosted it, man. Then nobody know shit what you about.”

Chapter Twenty-three
    Another lobby.
    But a lot different from SSD’s.
    Amelia Sachs had never seen anything quite so messy. Maybe when she was a beat officer, responding to domestics among druggies in Hell’s Kitchen. But even then a lot of those people had had dignity; they made the effort. This place made her cringe. The not-for-profit organization Privacy Now, located in an old piano factory in the city’s Chelsea district, won the prize for slovenly.
    Stacks of computer printouts, books—many of them law books and yellowing government regulations—newspapers and magazines. Then cardboard boxes, which contained more of the same. Phonebooks too. Federal Registers.
    And dust. A ton of dust.
    A receptionist in blue jeans and a shabby sweater pounded furiously on an old computer keyboard and spoke, sotto voce, into a hands-free telephone. Harried people in jeans and T-shirts, or corduroys and wrinkled work shirts, walked into the office from up the hall, swapped files or picked up phone-message slips and disappeared.
    Cheap printed signs and posters filled the walls.
    BOOKSTORES: BURN YOUR CUSTOMERS’ RECEIPTS, BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT BURNS THEIR BOOKS!!!
    On one wrinkled rectangle of art board was the famous line from George Orwell’s novel, 1984, about a totalitarian society:
    Big Brother Is Watching You.
    And sitting prominently on the