Deny, Defend, Depose? Deceive.

Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Midtown Manhattan hadn’t been the same since the pandemic, certainly not at 6:30 a.m. Where once the streets would have been an obstacle course of early-rising office drones, carts hawking halal BECs, and glittered partiers emerging from after-after-hours clubs you’re not allowed to know about, now the steel-and-concrete canyons remained empty, or empty-feeling. No one got in your way. You could hear yourself think, and in the cold dark of that December morning, it was about as quiet as midtown ever got. So when the three gunshots rang out, echoing off the naked skyscrapers, it felt like a tear in the fabric of space-time, an unwelcome intrusion from a messy, violent, half-remembered past. As the masked gunman hopped a Citibike and sped off toward Central Park, no one knew what to do. They’d all forgotten.

In the flurry of panic and excitement that followed the assassination of the health-insurance executive, no one noticed a figure watching from across the street, a roundish, grandmotherly type clad in a cream-colored Uniqlo puffer parka so clean it had to be brand-new. At her feet sat a nylon-and-cordura cat carrier, and a sharp-eyed observer, of which there were none around, might have spotted a feline stirring within. The grandmother was sipping from a cup of cart coffee—”regular,” she’d told the vendor who’d asked her if she wanted it regular—and leaning against a metal bollard. The bollard was cold against her thin leggings, but she’d been colder a million times, and in a way, she felt, it was helping keep her cool as the drama played out across the street. She’d worried that by not reacting, she might draw attention to herself, but she was not the only one. Some New Yorkers were still New Yorker enough to ignore a public murder.

The coffee wasn’t good. Too sweet, which wasn’t great for her blood sugar, and thin despite the full-fat milk. When she finally walked a few steps over to the trash can on the corner and tossed it away, she was hit with a tsunami of relief—not just from abandoning the cup but from having seen her plan through almost to the very end. The executive was dead, and dead by her hand. She returned to the bollard and picked up the cat carrier.

“Come on, Pepper,” she said, and the volume of her own voice surprised her. “Let’s finish this up.”

Two blocks north, and it was like nothing had happened. The police and ambulance sirens had faded, replaced by the hum of slow-moving traffic and the distant grumble of, possibly, the subway. The high-voltage airborne tingle of the crime scene had dissipated. The sun was coming up.

For the first time in three days, she began to notice the city: the towers that all seemed to nod toward different eras of architecture—heavy brickwork, fanciful limestone, the stark geometries of midcentury, the straining, grasping steel. She’d been to the city before, decades ago, and, intimidated by the heights, never really paid attention to the designs. Now they didn’t seem so domineering, and she gave them a critical eye. She was not impressed.

Then again, she was hard to impress now. She knew what went on in these buildings: Men got paid millions, tens of millions, and made blanket decisions that cost people’s lives. And their families’ lives, or fortunes. Maybe it wasn’t in these particular buildings—the health-care executive lived in the Midwest somewhere, she knew—but it was buildings like these. They were fortresses where the executives could make their own rules, unconcerned with people like her, her friends, her family. Those fortresses may have been impenetrable, but the streets were not. Now the other executives would be afr—

“Cuidado, lady!”

A burly man in a mustache and white jacket held up a hand to her, and she froze while his clean-shaven colleague, also in white, rolled a dolly laden with cardboard boxes from a truck and down an open hatch into the ground outside a deli. Smiling, he made a namaste sign at her and followed his coworker into the depths, and her heart began beating again. “Shhhh,” she whispered at Pepper, who needed no shushing. As she walked on, her eyes were drawn by the hatch, dark and unknowable, and she thought: the sinkhole.

“Can you imagine if I’d actually fallen in?” she said to Pepper with a little chuckle. “No sinkhole’s gonna take me!”

The sinkhole had been a stroke of luck in a day of mixed fortunes. That day had begun well: Her Internet alerts had told her the executive would soon be in New York for a conference, and with a few clicks she knew where it was, knew the schedule. This was her moment. She kept clicking, and she was in a part of the Internet she didn’t fully understand but had learned how to use. She sent a message to @ManWithaPlan, and told him it was time. He gave her a thumbs-up, and she sent him half the fee they’d agreed to, the remainder to be delivered on completion. So far, so good. But now she needed to get away—she had to see this through in person.

By the afternoon, she’d settled on using the cat, Pepper. Cats escaped all the time, and who knew where they went? It had happened before, with a bunch of other cats, and each time she’d gone out looking for them. “You’ve got ten of them!” her husband, Ronnie, always complained. “Why not let this one go?” But she couldn’t let any of them go—they were her babies as much as her son was, as much as he had been. And god, it was refreshing to get out of that house, to go walk in the hills on a cold night with the frost-wrapped sticks crunching under her boots, to call out the names—Jenkins! Miss Lips! Ernie!—even if the cats never came running to her. They were cats, so what did she expect? Still, occasionally she found them, curled up in the crook of a tree’s roots, or playing with a half-dead mouse in the moonlight. They knew her, and would let her scoop them up and carry them home. Her belly had grown in recent years, so she could rest them on it and feel their purring through layers of fabric.

Faking Pepper’s disappearance would have been easy but for Ellie. At 5, Ellie was sweet and well-behaved, but needy. She didn’t like to be left alone, which you could understand: Ellie had lost both parents already, to diseases as predictable as the insurance company’s response to them. First her mother went, then her father, along with whatever money they’d left to their name. It happened so quickly, and so perfunctorily, that no one had the wherewithal to challenge any of it. With time, though, with weeks and months, the resistance and resentment grew, in both Ellie and her grandmother, and those emotions were emerging in ways no one expected. That night, the night Pepper “disappeared,” the iPad had not been enough for Ellie, nor cookies; an impromptu “dance party” did not tire her out. When her grandmother insisted she needed to go hunt for Pepper, Ellie insisted she go with. “I wanna find Pepper!” she whined. “I wanna find the kitty!” So Ellie went with.

Fine. Ellie’s grandmother drove to that out-of-the-way restaurant, parked, and left her there. It was a little cruel, she knew, but it wasn’t truly neglectful: The restaurant looked busy, and this was good country, with good people. Someone would notice a 5-year-old alone in a car, wrapped in a blanket, and do the right thing. She removed Pepper’s carrier, with Pepper in it, from the trunk, along with a duffel bag full of clothes and cash, waved bye-bye to Ellie, and headed into the woods.

And that’s where she found the sinkhole. She hadn’t meant to, didn’t even know it was there. Hell, it might not even have existed a week earlier—these things popped up, or down, all the time around here. But this one looked big, broad, like it was connected somehow to the mines whose passageways carved a hidden labyrinth through the landscape. It smelled of the underworld. It would, she could tell, be the perfect distraction. She set down Pepper’s carrier and pulled out of her weekend bag a pair of burgundy loafers she’d planned to wear in the city—she’d owned them for years, but put them on only rarely. One she tossed into the sinkhole. The other she’d find a use for later. Till then, she’d just keep wearing these old blue sneakers. She walked carefully around the hole, through the forest of bare trees, and over the ridge to the bus stop, where she had a ticket for New York City.

Compared with the winter-scrabble woods of western Pennsylvania, Central Park looked like an English garden, full of intention. The leaves had fallen just so, and horses were lined up with their carriages, steaming in the cold. An order, mysterious but tangible, underlay the scene. With the sun up, tourists were starting to wander in, unaware, it seemed, that a murderer had just minutes ago fled there, and that a Pennsylvania grandmother was on her way to meet him.

The paths here were a challenge to follow. She knew which was north, more or less, but the wide road twisted, and so did the sidewalks. Quickly, the tall buildings hid themselves behind the trees, and she had to rely on instinct. But her instincts had not always served her well. She had overreacted in the past, she knew, and she had underreacted. She could never calibrate. Ronnie sensed it, her moodiness, but said nothing—he had his own moods to contend with. Only in the last few months, when she began to formulate the plan, had she felt a confident kind of peace. The man had to die, she’d decided, and with that decision the rest of her world fell into place.

Soon she could see her destination: the obelisk that jutted from the landscape, an ancient survivor of an ancient world, transplanted to a home its carvers could never have imagined. How strange, she thought, that this most wonderful object was not the symbol of the city, the star of postcards and TikTok videos.

She climbed onto the obelisk’s small plaza and strolled up to it. The symbols etched on its face were echoed by a wavy pattern of clouds in the sky behind—inscrutable communications from a place beyond. She breathed deeply and felt connected: a historic actor in a historic spot, encircled by nature both wild and tamed. She’d acted in a way no one else could have imagined, and that meant something.

From the east appeared a young man, and although he’d ditched the black clothes and fancy backpack for jeans and gray hooded sweatshirt, she could tell it was @ManWithaPlan. The posture, the gait, the self-assuredness. She figured she had the same thing going for her, a murderer, too. The confidence was almost post-coital.

As he got closer, she put down Pepper and her duffel bag. First she unzipped Pepper’s carrier a little, just enough to reach in and nuzzle her under behind the ears. Then she unzipped the latter, and removed from it a nylon cosmetics kit that she’d filled with hundred-dollar bills. She held it tight.

“Not here,” he said when he was just a few feet away from her. His voice was very soft, gentle even. “Too many people,” he added, still moving, and he was right: There were joggers passing by, and cyclists, and people heading to or coming from the museum. Too many people. “I go this way, you go that”—he pointed with his chin—”and we meet in the woods in the middle.”

She nodded, but he’d already passed her by. She waited a minute more, to see which way he was going, then followed, crossing the jogging path and turning left where he’d turned right. The journey was not long, but she was getting tired. Pepper was heavy, and mewing, and she’d already been up for hours in the cold. But this would be over soon. Over to her right, she could see @ManWithaPlan head off his own path and into the thicket of trees between them. She did likewise, and in less than a minute they were together, in a spot where no one could see them.

“Thank you,” she said, not really knowing what else to say.

@ManWithaPlan shrugged, his hands in his hoodie’s pockets. “It’s what I do,” he said, and his voice was even fainter than before. Was this shame or humility?

“You did a good thing,” she said, and wondered if her crackly Grandma voice was reassuring under these circumstances. “This will mean something, I know.”

The young man looked at his Nikes. He might have shrugged, or he might have just shifted his weight.

“I have the remainder,” she said, and held out the cosmetics bag. Instantly, he snatched it, pulled it close to his chest, and opened its cheap zipper to count the bills before shoving it into the sweatshirt pocket.

She stared at him, and he back at her, and then, very slowly, he took a step toward her, made a fist with his right hand, and slammed it into her face, on the cheekbone right below her eye. For the briefest instant, she could feel the skin of his knuckles, surprisingly smooth and undamaged by the late-fall air, and then she was tripping backward over her bags and tumbling into the leaves and the loose, dry earth. She didn’t lose consciousness, but she lay there a while, longer than she needed to, looking up at the tree branches and the mottled sky beyond them. Actually, she may have passed out—she couldn’t quite tell.

But when she did pull herself together and sit up, everything felt different. Her new jacket was dirty, her leggings too. Her cheek throbbed and she’d bonked her elbow in the fall. Her left sneaker was untied. And Pepper’s carrier was open—and empty. She looked around, knowing she’d see nothing, and once she’d clambered to her feet, knotted her laces, and slung the duffel bag over her shoulder, she whispered Pepper’s name a few times, unable to make herself heard. She considered searching for the cat, considered the strange vastness of the park, and decided to let Pepper go. The missing cat would corroborate her story, and besides, she had nine more back home.

Now all she had to do was get home. There were buses leaving from 42nd Street, she knew, and by the end of the day she could be back in Pennsylvania, somewhere in the woods near her home. She had alibis: She was down a cat, bruised and scraped up, her only witness was in kindergarten, and she knew where to find a good, big sinkhole. Thinking of it now, she could smell it—its decay, its alien gases—and imagine the half-light of its depths. Maybe she’d even climb down into it and wait there for rescue, for Ronnie, for Ellie. She would wait as long as it took. After all, she still had the other shoe. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Preserved Lemon Paste

Preserved lemons are, along with harissa, the greatest ingredient of North Africa: sour, salty, funky, spicy. The only problem with them (and it’s not much of a problem) is that you really only use the rind, and toss the pulp. Which is why I love New York Shuk’s preserved lemon paste—it takes only the part you want and transforms it into an easy-to-add-anytime flavor enhancer. I put it in Moroccan-style tagines, of course, but also hummus, salad dressings, and anywhere I crave that bright, fermented citrus hit.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt