The blue steel of the raised weapon glimmered in the rain and neon. There was a moment when everything seemed as still and expectant as a frozen movie frame. Then the moment was shattered by a bright muzzle-flash from the mouth of the handgun and the loud, lethal pop of a bullet’s release.
Juliet hit the wet pavement, taking cover from stray shots as the impact of a bullet exploded against a wall close by. The reek of cordite was suddenly strong in the air, overlaying the hot smell of spilled coffee. Shouts broke out around her as the shooter turned and ran. The cops ran in pursuit towards the mouth of the alley, their rain capes flapping and unwieldy, grunting out breathless calls for back-up into their radios, the heavy chrome of police issue weapons brandished dully in their fists.
Juliet rose to her feet shakily, her coffee forgotten. She gazed around her in disbelief, only dimly aware of the blare of sirens growing louder from several different directions and lights flashing as the approaching patrol cars swatted a path through the gridlock. She’d only ever had to deal with the aftermath of violence before, and that was alarming enough. Gunshot victims could be hurt without knowing it. They sometimes bled to death unaware that they’d been hit. She checked to see that she had not been wounded by a stray shot or exploding brick fragment. She was fine, unscathed; the only damage she’d sustained was a bit of street debris from the sidewalk that she brushed from the front of her wet coat. Thanking God that it hadn’t been worse, she hurried to the hospital. She had no doubt that she’d soon discover whether anyone had been hurt.
It wasn’t long before Juliet learned that the cops had got their man. She recognised the patient wheeled into the emergency room later that night. The details on the clipboard she was handed told her that his name was Carlos Leon, aged eighteen, and he had gaping gunshot wounds to his neck and chest.
‘Punctured left ventricle and lacerated esophagus,’ she said, in expert assessment of the victim’s wounds. ‘Prep OR 3 stat.’ Her voice was commanding, authoritative. This was her domain. She was in the one place where she always knew exactly what to do.
Juliet performed the surgery immediately. She removed the bullets from her patient’s chest and neck, stemmed the bleeding and stabilised his breathing in a surgical marathon that only saw her drop her bloodied scrubs into a waste bin after dawn had come up. She sat down exhausted but satisfied. Carlos would recover from the damage done to him.
Juliet heard Dr Holstrom’s voice above her. ‘A zone three carotid GSW? I’m starting to suspect you’re a glory hound.’
She looked up. There was humour in her boss’s eyes as well as in his tone. She smiled. ‘Just happened to be there,’ she said.
‘Your colleagues will be jealous,’ Holstrom said. ‘Your shift ended three hours ago. Please: go home and get some rest.’
He made the proposition sound so simple. To her it was anything but. As far as she knew, her supervisor was unaware that her life had taken the traumatic turn it had. She had deliberately kept news of her domestic difficulties from him. She didn’t want him to start thinking she was more of a liability than an asset. It was not in her nature to look for excuses to fail. She always strove for excellence.
She took the elevator down to the ground floor of Williamsburg hospital feeling less certain with each foot she travelled away from the ER department, her work, her sanctuary. The automatic doors opened on to the fresh air and endless vista of a vast dawn. She felt very small in it, totally insignificant, a tiny detail suddenly forgotten by a careless world.
Where do I go from here? Juliet wondered. After the chaos and excitement of the hospital she felt utterly alone, and the thought of finding a place to live seemed far harder than saving the life of the gunshot victim. She walked through the raw morning until she saw a news vendor. Buying a copy of the New York Times she turned straight to the property section, searching through the rental listings with something like desperation in her eyes.
Juliet loved the city just as intensely as she sometimes hated it. New York inspired her every bit as much as it intimidated her. But there was nowhere else where her skills would be put to the same relentless day in and day out examination as they were here.
She had not been tempted for a single moment by the jangle of the keys carried in Philip Beal’s pocket. Her old home was a place synonymous now with heartache and indignity. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to even look at the house again without the smell of that woman’s perfume and the vision of a naked Jack, still sweaty from his exertions, coming back to haunt her. Just the thought of it now made her feel sick in a way that the blood gushing from Carlos’s wounds could never do. No, no matter what it took she would find an apartment and start a new life. Prove to herself and Jack that she was not a woman that could be destroyed so easily.
Hours later, in the hallway of a seedy run-down building, however, she was not so sure. The search for an affordable place was relentlessly grim and totally exhausting. A nice little place in the suburbs was starting to take on an alarming attraction. Sighing, she squinted up at the narrow tenement stairs. Only five flights, she thought wearily, as she trudged upwards.
‘You must be Juliet.’
She looked up. Her to-go coffee was tepid and undrinkable in one fist. In her other hand her copy of the New York Times was smeared and tattered. On the stairs above her was the bright-eyed and deflatingly over-eager sales agent she had spoken to on her cell earlier. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Juliet was still out of breath from the climb when she entered the apartment. The room was about the size of an elevator compartment, but nevertheless the realtor looked very pleased with herself. However, so cramped was the space they shared the two of them felt somewhat like a crowd to Juliet.
‘Which way is the bedroom?’
In a triumphant tone, the agent said, ‘This is your bedroom.’ She reached across and pulled down a Murphy bed from its recess in the wall. Then, from the facing wall, she pulled down a table. ‘And your dining room, your kitchen and study,’ she said. ‘It’s real New York living. And as a bonus, the view is amazing.’
Juliet waited for another of the conjuring tricks that had made furniture materialise from nothing. She was feeling somewhat confused because the room, to her, appeared windowless. Perhaps the realtor would produce a sledgehammer and improvise one? But she did not. Instead, she pushed a chair towards Juliet and gestured above them, about eight feet high, where what looked to Juliet like a gun slit, allowed in a measly wedge of light.
‘Go ahead,’ the agent said.
Juliet climbed on to the chair. She stood on tiptoe and stretched her neck and was just able to glimpse the vista beyond the narrow rectangle of glass. The agent had not lied, she saw. The view was indeed amazing. ‘It is a good view …’
‘Interested?’
Juliet stared incredulously around her. Was the woman serious? She jumped down from the chair. She felt as if she was in one of those TV shows where people are secretly filmed becoming more and more indignant in a farcical situation as they’re goaded by someone straight-faced and relentless.
The Murphy bed snapped shut with a suddenness that startled both of them.
‘No,’ Juliet said, as calmly as she could. ‘I really don’t think that I am. Interested, I mean.’
‘Would you mind telling me why?’
Juliet thought about the question. ‘I just have the fear somewhere as airy and spacious as this might trigger my agoraphobia,’ she said.
‘There is no need for sarcasm.’ The realtor’s fake smile and manufactured goodwill vanished
‘I think there is,’ Juliet said. ‘I think there is a compelling need. You have completely wasted my time.’
Juliet stomped out of the building. Jesus, do people actually live in these places? She thought back to the stream of apartments she’d seen. There’d been a basement apartment so damp she could visualise the mildew creeping across the fabric of her clothes as they hung in the bedroom closet. Then there was a place so thoroughly infes
ted by roaches that the stuff used to kill them had left a sticky residue on every surface and a smell like rotting mackerel was miasmic in every room. In one property, she’d had to use the lavatory and when she’d pressed the flush button, pipes sang in the ceiling above her head like some demented, metallic choir. It took fifteen minutes for the noise to stop but in truth, she had made her mind up after ten.
A large loft space shown her by her fifth or sixth agent of the day (Juliet was starting to lose count) appeared promising at first glance. It was spacious and airy and light-filled. It was in a part of Brooklyn with coffee shops, a bakery and an authentic and traditional corner delicatessen. In the middle of the main room, a man was teaching a little boy how to play guitar. Juliet thought it strange to be showing the property before the existing tenants had even packed up their things.
The agent showing the property said, ‘Rashid only holds his classes during the day, from around nine until six. And every other Saturday. The rest of the time is yours.’
Abruptly and deafeningly, the acoustic strumming of the guitar became electric, the blare of sound from the amplifier practically blew the two women out of the room. They retreated into the relative quiet of the hallway.
‘I don’t get it,’ Juliet said.
‘It’s a shared space,’ the realtor said, as though explaining things to a dull-minded child. ‘I’ve found it works quite well for working professionals with long hours. And you did say you were a doctor.’
Juliet was too nonplussed to respond.
The agent said, ‘It’s only six thousand a month.’
Juliet kept her eyes fixed through the open doorway on the talentless pupil making ugly noises with an off-key guitar. Maybe he was tone deaf. Maybe Rashid was tone deaf and had taught him to play that way and it wasn’t his fault. She concentrated on the tableau of boy and tutor at the airy centre of the loft and tried with all her will not to lose hope completely.
Four
HOME AS A concept mattered more to Juliet perhaps than it did to most people. The child of hippies, she had grown up in a shifting, nomadic commune of trailers and camper vans and had been taught to believe that property was something from which enlightened people learned to liberate themselves.
She had never learned. To her, the rootless, shiftless nature of her early life was not free and easy but shameful and enervating. To fixed communities, the people of the commune to which her parents belonged were little better than itinerants; the hippie equivalent of the freight-hopping hoboes of the Dust Bowl Depression era. Radical ideology cut little ice with people who thought you might trash what you didn’t steal and despoil the land before you skulked away to inflict your presence on another pretty township.
She had been solitary by circumstance and inclination in the way that ambitious and single-minded people often are, but her brains and determination had set her free. She had got through med school and begun to practise at the sharp end of urban medicine in the most demanding and volatile metropolis in the world.
Jack had completed the dream. A career, a steady home, someone to love her exclusively. They’d even bought a dog, Amelie. Everything she’d ever wanted had been right there in the palm of her hand. But obviously it wasn’t enough for Jack. The dressing might have been perfect, but it was all a sham; he’d wanted more. It was a depressing conclusion, but she could think of no other explanation for what Jack had done.
She shook her head. She couldn’t keep descending into gloom like this. Life went on. You just had to adjust to the changes and come out fighting. That’s all there was to it. There was time to go to one more address before returning, sleepless, to the hospital and her next shift at work, but before she did, she needed some food to see her through the next few hours.
She found a café so deeply recessed in its gloomy interior it was almost cave-like where she ate a salt beef sandwich and gulped a mug of coffee. From where she sat, through the rectangle of the café frontage, the street was framed like a cinema screen and the traffic hurtling across it was vivid and picturesque, glossy and bright in the falling rain, a colourful world divorced from her problems.
Reluctantly, she heaved herself up from her table. She was exhausted and much of her recent resolution seemed to have drained away, like fuel from a holed tank. She had to carry on, but she knew she was running on empty. She needed a pep talk before she got too mired in self-pity. Picking up her phone she called Sydney.
‘Hey, Jules, how’s it going? You found the perfect apartment yet?’
‘Oh yeah, Syd. You know how I’ve always wanted one of those beds that pulls down from the walls? I’ve found just the place. With a spectacular view. It’s just so cute.’
‘Uh huh. Sounds great, hon. Is that sarcasm I hear? So was there anything else?’
‘You would not believe what I’ve seen today. I mean, do people really live in places like this?’
Juliet told her about the apartments she’d seen so far. Sydney found it hilarious.
‘That’s just priceless. Seriously. OK, forget about them now, Jules. This next one is the one for you. I can just feel it. Not much longer and you’ll be standing in the apartment of your dreams. And if not, well, you know you can stay with us for as long as you want.’
Juliet hung up feeling much better. She just had to stay positive. With Sydney’s words ringing in her ears she approached the next building in a better frame of mind. The building was old, she observed as she approached it; built, she thought, at the turn of the previous century, its façade stolidly indifferent to the battering to which time and the elements had treated it. It was a tall building for the time of its construction and its ground-floor windows were sullenly blanked by sets of dusty brown blinds. Rain stains smeared the glass. The shadows were deepening in a dark creep through the streets.
She looked at her watch. The real estate agent was late. Terrific, she thought. It seemed she no longer qualified for even the most basic courtesies. Still, it was a sellers’ market, demand in New York was monstrously in excess of supply; she expected that a proud tenant would soon be unpacking treasured belongings in the elevator size space with the gun-slit view. Realtors did not need to be courteous when their clients were almost always people sharing Juliet’s desperate need for a place to call their own.
The front door of the building was open a chink and when Juliet tested it, it widened a fraction further, expanding the line of gloom between the edge of the door and the jamb. She took a step forward and pushed the door properly. It opened with a heavy whoosh on to a dark vestibule. She stepped in tentatively and the click of her leather heels told her it was floored in marble. Classy, was her immediate thought, an impression solidified by the weight of the door as she closed it behind her and the cool smells of stone and oiled wood and the sheer stillness of the quiet building interior.
The apartment she was there to see was on the first floor. There was an elevator, but she climbed the stairs. As her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, she saw that the bronze stair rail was thin, almost spidery, and cold beneath her touch. She expected the stairs to creak with age but under their covering of patterned carpeting, she realised that they too were hewn from stone.
The door to the apartment she was there to view was not locked. It moaned slightly on hinges grown stiff with lack of use when she opened it. The interior was shuttered, dark. She walked across the bare boards of the floor and opened the blinds over the windows. Bars of wan autumnal light smeared the floorboards, illuminating a single naked bulb hanging from a high ceiling and the faded hues of ancient, cheerless wallpaper. From somewhere, there was the persistent dripping of a faucet, the cold splash of a single drop of water hitting the stone of a sink, as if to emphasise the silence and stillness of the place.
It was a dismal prospect, but the worst aspect of the apartment was the smell, subtle but persistent, something between boiled cabbage and flowers rotting in a vase. For a moment Juliet couldn’t move. Her instincts were telling her to run, gooseflesh
tingled along her arms and up the back of her neck. Her breath caught. There was something malevolent in the room. Then, slowly, rationality returned and she shook her head impatiently. She was being stupid. She was a doctor for God’s sake, not prone to being affected by feelings and atmosphere. Her mind didn’t work that way. She was logical and reasoned and acted only when she had proof, and there was no tangible threat in the room. But despite these thoughts, she could not stop shivering and the creeping feeling of terror and helplessness would not go away.
The door behind her swung open suddenly and Juliet squealed and jumped. She’d never made such a ridiculous sound in her life. Her face reddened in embarrassment. The doorway framed a man, middle-aged, florid-faced, a yellow rose vivid on the lapel of his broadly chalk-striped three-piece suit.
‘Miss Devereau,’ he said, ‘My apologies for being late. The day has stacked badly for me.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens. I’m sorry. I am Mr de Silva.’
His voice was so thickly Brooklynite, it was like listening to someone from another time. Like the building itself, she thought, except not like the building at all, because she could see that he was nice. He was a dapper, courteous man who clearly earned his living respectably.
He raised his eyebrows and made a show of glancing around the room they were in. ‘All it needs,’ he said, ‘is a little love.’
Juliet smiled at him. She felt better now someone was with her, but she still wanted to get out of the building as fast as she could. But he was entitled to know why. ‘What it needs,’ she said, ‘is absolution. I can’t provide that.’
He opened his arms. ‘You couldn’t like it here?’
‘Not in a million years.’
‘Are you a psychic, Miss Devereau?’
‘No, I’m not. But something bad happened here.’
He shrugged. ‘If it did, it was an awfully long time ago.’
‘It left a residue,’ Juliet said. She could hardly believe she would even think something like this, let alone say the words out loud. ‘I can smell it. I can feel it. What was it?’
The Resident Page 3