The snow came off Lake Erie the way it always did in Buffalo, sideways and personal, as if it had a grudge against the particular person standing in it.
By three o'clock on Christmas Eve, 1981, it had erased the far bank of the Niagara River, then the Peace Bridge, then the grain elevators down along the Buffalo River, and now it was working on Niagara Street itself, one streetlight at a time. From the dispatch window of Niagara Checker Cab, Harper Mazur could see the red neon of the Riverside Tavern across the street go soft and pink and finally disappear, as if someone had breathed on a photograph.
"Car nine," she said into the microphone. "Car nine, where are you, Sobczak."
The radio hissed. Then a voice full of gravel and cigarette came back. "Car nine is at Delaware and Gates, Harper, and car nine is sitting behind a city plow that has not moved since the Carter administration."
"Is there a driver in the plow?"
"I can see a hat. I can't swear there's a man under it."
"Honk at the hat," she said. "I've got a lady at the Sattler's bus stop on Broadway with four shopping bags and a fruitcake, and she's been waiting since two."
"Nobody waits for a fruitcake, Harper. Fruitcake waits for you."
"Just get there."
She let go of the button and leaned back in the chair. It was an old oak office chair with one wheel that wouldn't turn, so that whenever she rolled away from the console she went in a slow curve to the left, like a car with a bad alignment. Over the past four years she had worn a pale crescent into the linoleum with it. The dispatch room was a converted front office in a cinder-block garage, eight feet by twelve, with a radiator that knocked like a man who wanted to come in, a Mr. Coffee that had been brown on the inside since Nixon, and a big pegboard on the wall where the cab numbers hung on brass hooks: green tags for cars on the road, red for cars in the garage, white for cars that were somewhere but nobody quite knew where. Taped above the pegboard was a calendar from Pietrangeli's cousin's funeral home, open to December, showing a painting of a horse-drawn sleigh in front of a church. Somebody had drawn a mustache on the horse.