“Besides Americans, do you know who’re the most dangerous people on earth?”

He removed a shark fin of green glass with his fingers. The woman didn’t even flinch, her gaze roaming the walls.

“The most dangerous people on earth are the educated middle-class men of the Third World. Do you know why?” He scowled in concentration, plucking a piece of rusted tin. The triage nurse, still behind him, rolled her eyes.

“They labor under the illusion that their education will allow them to rise to the upper class of their homeland, OK? But the class system is too rigid. Are you following me?”

The woman hid her eyes behind her free forearm.

“So they come to America thinking anybody can rise to the top in America, but here they run into the skin game like running into a wall, so at best they get to be professionals, own a few tenements on the side. So what do they do, eh? You know what they do?” He teased out the tiny coil of metal, the woman’s knees running like jackhammers. “They go back to the country they came from and they start a peasant revolution to overthrow the upper classes in the name of the people. And in this way, they finally get to the top of the chain, the new elite. What do you think about that, huh?”

“It’s not my fault,” the woman said distractedly.

“What isn’t?” he asked, his tone registering true confusion. She wouldn’t say.

“OK.” He shrugged, reaching for a soap solution. “So. That’s my story Tell me yours. What happened to you tonight?”

The woman opened her mouth, but her throat caught and her juddering spine jerked her into a hunch.

The doctor’s eyes strayed to a matted tangle of hair slightly to the side of her head. Still holding one of her injured hands, he reached out and fingered the crusted ridge of a scalp laceration.

“Is this from tonight too?”

“No,” she muttered.

He glared at her for a long minute, as if challenging her reticence with his own. Finally, letting loose with an ostentatious sigh, he carefully laid her hand on the edge of the sink, said “Don’t move,” and walked out of the room.

A dazed, disheveled black woman drifted in from the hall, one eye closed as if by a punch, her blouse buttoned all wrong. She had a dollar bill in one hand and a business card in the other.

“You got change of a dollar?” she asked no one in particular. “They said I’m supposed to call this detective.” Before anyone could answer, she drifted back out into the corridor.

“What’s your name, hon?” the triage nurse asked easily.

Behind the nurse’s back, the Russian doctor interviewed a man on a gurney. “High blood pressure. Anything else?”

“Yeah, well, I hear voices…”

“What’s your name?” the nurse repeated.

“Brenda Martin,” the woman answered distantly, watching another East Indian-looking doctor, a woman, extract a roach from a child’s ear with a pair of long dogleg scissors.

“Brenda? Do you know your Social Security number?”

Before she could answer, Chatterjee reappeared, a uniformed cop in his wake.

“C’mon, Doc, I’m backed up the yin-yang here.”

“Then radio for another unit.”

Chatterjee gave the woman a sour look from across the room. “You talk to him,” he said, chucking a thumb at the cop over his shoulder.

Brenda Martin shot to her feet and stood there as if about to make an announcement. Her sudden uprightness made the two men hesitate. She opened her mouth, and both of them, seemingly reading her eyes and coming to the same conclusion, made a tandem lunge. It was a heartbeat too late. Sliding through their grasping hands, Brenda Martin hit the floor hard.

Part One

        One Monkey
Don’t Stop
        No Show

1

“You know, life, life and death, you hear the kids; life and death are so, flippant to them. Death is no big thing. Death is, life.”

Pacing back and forth across the stage decked with two pictures of Mother Barrett and her twin brother, Theo—enlarged photos framed in black construction paper with white doily trim—the Muslim cleric, a local black man in kufi and dashiki, was winding up his appeal, the people giving him a kind of slouched-down, half-guilty look of attentiveness. There were about a hundred tenants seated on folding chairs in the hangar-shaped community hall, but not many of them were under fifty or more than children. Six uniformed housing cops, flat-faced, arms folded across their chests, stood at the rear because of rumors about some kind of trouble.

Detective Lorenzo Council, sporting black rumpled jeans and a positive-message T-shirt, sat on a window ledge to the side of the stage, waiting for his turn to speak. Everywhere Lorenzo looked there was something to piss him off. Out the window was that field of crated refrigerators Housing had neglected to secure with some kind of lock or seal.