The waiter pulled the bottle of sauvignon blanc from the ice bucket and turned to the restaurant's corner table where a contingent from the Freilinghaus cocktail party had relocated for supper after things at the Central Park South apartment had wound down. He replenished the empty glass of Nan Freilinghaus who was having a conversation with Victor Sykes. Her husband was talking to Helen Carty.

"I was only half kidding," Paul Freilinghaus said, "about holding off on the hoopla till after we've had a chance to buy more of Mavro's paintings."

"And I thought you were a free-market guy," Helen said.

"There's free market and there's throwing it away." He looked past Helen and called to his wife. "Nan?"

She turned from her conversation with Sykes.

"Full charm on that man."

"Absolutely," said Nan.

Sykes smiled at the attention and tried a friendly look on Helen. She gave him an indifferent smile, turned back to her host who was addressing Sykes.

"The numbers we have in mind for Mavro," Freilinghaus said, "I'm sure will put you and your client at ease."

Philip Tierney, who was sitting on the other side of Sykes, leaned in and spoke quietly. "I'm starting to think this might actually work."

Freilinghaus turned to the waiter. "Let's have some champagne."

The waiter bowed and went to comply, squeezing past Sykes who had just gotten a cell phone chirp.

He pulled his phone from the jacket of his new second-hand suit and quietly answered the call. Listened and shook his head."Hold on."

He excused himself from the table and stepped into the vestibule. Turned his back to a group waiting for a table and spoke into the phone. "Sorry, I had to..."

The call was from Janna, who was in a speeding ambulance. "Sykes, something bad's happened..."

"What?" He pressed the phone tighter to his ear. "What do you mean?" Raised his voice. "Janna?"

Janna's eyes darted to two EMS medics bent over a figure stretched on a gurney. "It's Mavro. He racked himself. I don't know if he's alive."

Sykes was already on the move, running out of the restaurant, looking for a taxi. He saw one coming this way and flagged it, still on the phone. "I'm on my way. Tell me where."

After a six minute ride that normally would have taken twenty, Sykes leaning on the driver the whole way, the taxi pulled up at the Bellevue Hospital Emergency Entrance, lurching to a stop behind a flashing ambulance.

The EMS crew was sliding a gurney out of the back, Janna climbing out right behind it. She followed the rolling gurney with its blanket-covered passenger to the emergency room door.

Sykes jumped out of the taxi. "Janna!"

She stopped and ran back to him, pulling him toward the door.

"What happened?" he said.

"I'll tell you inside."

They rushed through the door and caught up to the gurney. The comatose figure on it had an oxygen mask strapped to his face.

A doctor in surgery scrubs broke into a trot beside them. "You with him?" he asked.

"Yes," Janna answered.

"Wait out here and someone will be with you."

She dropped back with Sykes and watched the others speed the gurney down the hall. The doctor pushed through a swinging door into the operating room, the EMS crew rolling Mavro in behind him.

Janna and Sykes went up to the door and peered through the small glass panel.

The doctor was in there thumbing back one of Mavro's eyelids. Two nurses in scrubs were already prepping him. One undid the gurney straps and pulled off the blood-soaked EMS blanket, tossed it in the corner.

Sykes asked Janna again what happened.

"Same old," she said. "Trying to prove whatever."

"Where? How?"

"He was doing some stupid stunt on the Williamsburg Bridge. Some jump thing on his board like we saw the other day."

"And he obviously didn't make it."

When Mavro had started falling from the peak of his jump, and was plummeting toward the river, he'd made a last-second grab for one of the bridge girders, couldn't hold on but had kept himself from the long drop.

"He fell and hit something," Janna said, "and wound up on the subway tracks."

He'd lain twisted on the track, disoriented, trying to lift his head to see where he was, saw a light coming toward him that kept growing brighter.

"He might've been okay then," Janna continued, "except there was a train coming and it couldn't stop."

"You saw it?"

"One of the guys called me and afterwards told me. I got there same time as the ambulance did."

Sykes looked back through the operating room window. "What was he proving?"

Janna looked in there too. "That he belonged."

Her eyes stayed on Mavro. Her answer made its point with Sykes.

~~~~~~

They'd both fallen asleep sitting on one of the waiting room couches, Janna with her head on Sykes's shoulder. She frowned when a man's hand gently shook her.

"Miss?"

She opened her eyes, looked up at the doctor in scrubs. A tired doctor.

"We've done what we could," he said. "We're moving him to I.C.U."

Sykes had his own eyes open, was about to ask what the prognosis was when a sound from the hallway made the three turn their heads.

Two orderlies were wheeling a gurney that had heavily-bandaged Mavro on it, steering the very comatose patient around a corner.

The doctor said, "He'll be out for quite a while. Why don't you get some of his things from home."

Janna got up from the couch. "I wanna see him."

"He's still touch-and-go. No one is allowed in I.C.U."

Sykes had gotten up too, said to Janna, "Let's get some breakfast and go get his things. We'll see him when we get back."

She started to protest, slumped her shoulders and nodded, went over to the door and stared in the direction the gurney had gone.

Sykes waited until he was sure she couldn't hear him and turned to the doctor. "Thank you for what you've done. What's the bottom line?"

"Bottom line is he's in trauma. We had to take off his arm."

Sykes blinked. "His arm? Which arm?

"His right. There wasn't enough to save." The doctor glanced toward Janna. "I don't know what your relationship is, but I sense she'd be better off hearing it from you."

Sykes processed this and finally nodded, thanking the doctor again. He went over and took Janna gently by the elbow, walked her toward the door where they'd come in however many hours ago.

~~~~~~

Mavro's work space was in its usual dishevelment, works-in-progress scattered across the paint-spattered floor, or propped against the cinder-block wall.

Jana was leaning against the workbench, arms folded, biting her lip. "So how's he gonna paint? Or do any of this?"

Sykes was rummaging through a battered bureau. He pulled out a T-shirt, folded it, dropped it into a shopping bag. "Right now it's just survive."

"He's big on that."

"He's putting it to the test." He went through some things in the top drawer, frowned and pulled out a snapshot. "What's this?"

Janna came over and he handed her the picture – a shot of a man and a boy of about ten smiling from the deck of a fishing boat.

"That's him and his father," Jana said. She handed back the snapshot, wiping her nose.

Sykes said, "I never heard anything about a father."

"They pulled his body out of Jamaica Bay couple years after that picture. Word was he was running junk in on his boat."

"The mother?"

"She just ran period."

"So basically no family."

Janna gave him a look. "We're the family."

i