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hanging there, meat for the vultures, blood dripping from the milky white hooks of their beaks.

 
    NEW YORK, 2008
    The griddled zucchini lie in a bowl banded with faint stripes of char, flecked with pepper and basil, soaking up olive oil and sherry vinegar, while the steak cooks slowly in water and the potatoes, parboiled and dusted with rice flour, dry off in the fridge.
    Rice flour, don’t ever tell anyone your secret, Patch.
    All the better to crisp them with.
    He sits at the kitchen table reading the comments on his blog as he waits. He will begin preparing the salad as soon as Hannah calls to say she is heading home, his signal to start peeling asparagus into a pile of pale ribbons, trimming the sugar snaps, acidulating apples.
    Jorg é , the doorman, has been enlisted to help with Patrick’s plan to make everything perfect tonight. When he sees Hannah coming through the door, he will buzz their apartment, three quick blasts their agreed-upon signal, and then Jorg é will delay Hannah, complimenting her hair, tutting over the weather, the snow, her poor shoes.
    Please, how long do I keep her, gentleman? A minute would be great, Jorg é . No problem, gentleman. Thank you, Jorg é .
    And action. Deep greens and pale greens will be tossed in the lemony dressing. He will make a wreath of tangled pea shoots on the plate and scatter everything else from above, seemingly atrandom. The composition of a salad always makes Patrick feel like Jackson Pollock dripping paint.
    No delusions of grandeur in that whatsoever, Paddyboy.
    Once the salads are plated he will begin crisping the potatoes in duck fat and heating his large slab of cast iron on which the steak will be seared to a crust. A half hour of preheating and the metal will take on the appearance of charcoal, hints of white ash in the shimmering iron.
    By the time he carries the salads to the table, Jorg é will have released Hannah, a thirty-second elevator ride to their penthouse floor.
    Patrick will slip off his apron and fetch champagne. When she walks through the door he will be standing by the table in his wedding suit, the same tie as four years ago, the same silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and a white napkin wrapped around a bottle of Pol Roger.
    Soft pop. Happy anniversary, Hannah.
    Hannah will clap and kiss him.
    Everything must be made to happen just so, with perfect timing. Everything for her.
    And then Patrick wonders if the salad needs some crunch. What about pistachios? he thinks. There is a bag in his pantry, vivid green nuts speckled with patches of dusty violet skin.
    *   *   *
    HANNAH TRIES TO INITIATE HOME-HANNAH mode, anniversary-Hannah, leave-the-streets-for-the-day-Hannah as she rises from her desk in The Shack.
    NYPD in the elevators, NYPD in the corridors, NYPD in uniform, NYPD in suits, the ugliest fourteen-floor stack of stone you ever saw, all clay-colored bricks, little blocks piled high to form a squat square building, all shithouse glam and checkerboard curves, address 1PP, looks exactly like a cubist giant has lain a terra-cotta turd (Detective McCluskey liked that one, she’d heard him steal it more than once, only he dropped the cubist giant and terra-cotta motifs), the most important building in the city, atleast if you value not being slain in your bed on a nightly basis, 1PP, One Police Plaza, the headquarters of the NYPD—Major Crime Squad, Real Time Crime Center, Police Commissioner—the place that Hannah calls (among other scatological names) her office, or when she’s talking to anyone in the know, The Shack, because they all call it The Shack, the crime reporters who work there, 1PP’s second floor set aside for the journalists of eight news organizations, rivals fraternizing, hanging out in the same small space, the thin schmear of mustard in the fat pastrami sandwich of the NYPD HQ.
    NYPD in the elevators, NYPD in the corridors, NYPD in uniform, NYPD in suits, the