A Debt of Death

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I didn’t think he was dead at first. My initial impression was that he was a drunk who’d had five or six too many and had stumbled to the curb and passed out. It was the positioning of his body. It didn’t look like dead people often do, with their limbs sticking out at angles that no living soul could tolerate. He looked peaceful, relaxed, like he was in the midst of a deep sleep.

It was only when I crouched down beside him, meaning to nudge him awake and off the wet pavement, that I noticed the blood. I had missed it at first, partly because of the dim lighting afforded by the streetlight five feet away, and partly because the blood had mixed in with the water in the puddle, which had diluted its natural redness to a barely discernible lilac.

I didn’t know it was Nathan Frankel until I turned him over and saw his face.

His eyes were open and, as bad luck would have it, they were staring right at me. I swore, and for some inexplicable reason I had chosen to do so in German. This made me swear again—this time in Hungarian.

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