Origin

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  She looks around speculatively. “Oh, I do, I love places like this—it’s such a nice break from the rest of . . . everything. Where all these sorts of freethinkers and subversives gather,” she says, with enough emphasis that I think she might be a bit facetious. “Like that great, tall man who’s always in the bakery.”

  “You mean Mr. Memdouah? I hope he didn’t frighten you the other day.”

  “Not too much,” she says and adds wryly, “Nurses don’t scare easily. I appreciate him—he shakes things up, challenges things.”

  “Like being a reporter,” Joan interjects, grinning.

  Opal turns to Joan, her gaze measured and cool, and, to my great pleasure, Joan appears to shrink in her chair. “Is that what you think?”

  Joan can’t seem to meet her eye. “Well. Yeah. I just mean I appreciate those—I don’t know—godless types.”

  “I believe in God, myself,” Opal says stiffly, and Joan retreats even further. Opal turns back to me. “And then there’s the sorts who claim to be radical and lawless, who are, in fact, the most obedient and sheltered of all.”

  She smiles and waves again then—ignoring Joan—and carefully negotiates between the tight tables. I admire her self-possession and poise. She’s tall with a touch of the osteoporotic about her posture, a little doddering in her movements, but I notice that she manages not to disturb a single saltshaker or sugar canister in the crowded space.

  I turn back to Joan. “She’s a nurse—at Upstate Medical.”

  “Mm. And a really delightful individual.” She brushes her fingers at the woman’s departing form. “Whatever. But, about that Columbus Bakery—”

  Surprise jerks through me. “You know the bakery?”

  “Sure—it’s nice local color. Detail. I’ve got to evoke a setting. How often does a place like Syracuse get a serial killer?”

  I don’t respond. I feel myself going very still.

  “Anyway, the story’s larger than the crime. It’s also about the disintegration of a way of life, the breakdown of the industrial East, the loss of a simpler way of blah-blah-blah. All the nice things that a place like the Columbus Bakery stands for. I spotted you going in there the other day, and—” She snaps her fingers. “It was just right.”

  Perhaps it’s because I’m feeling emboldened by Opal, but my entire back is rigid. “My God, this isn’t some sort of . . . joke for your benefit. Children’s lives are at stake. This is deadly serious.”

  She smiles faintly. Sliding back in her chair, she has the abstracted look of a smoker on the exhale. “Aha.”

  I turn my head to study her; I feel I am at that moment finally seeing her face.

  The door at the front of the café flashes light onto the counter, flares on the chalked drink specials. A gust of frigid air at my shoulders. Joan’s expression freezes.

  I smell the particles of ice and nylon, wet leather. Charlie stops at our table. “Lena? What the hell?” he says. “Do you know they’re going crazy back at the Lab? Everyone is wondering where you are.” He’s holding his fur-lined hat in one hand, his black parka with the police insignia is shiny and ridged with frozen seams. There are drips of frost in his brows and lashes and a crimson bloom across his face.

  “Charlie—how long were you outside?” I push back my chair.

  “C’mon, let’s get out of here.” He tosses a ten-dollar bill on the table, doesn’t look at Joan. “I’ll run you back to work.”

  “By the way,” Joan pipes up, “that was really something—seeing you in action back there.”

  We both turn to look at her and she says to Charlie, “I saw her grab a kid who was about to get mowed down out there on the street—just a little while ago. It was great—she knew exactly what he was about to do and she saved him. There weren’t any cops around, of course,” she adds.

  “No, no, it wasn’t like that. It was nothing, absolutely.” I shake my head.

  “Don’t do that, Lena,” she says. “Don’t deny your own talents.”

  Charlie hunches toward her. “Hey, lady. Do not tell Lena what to do. Under any circumstances. Lena is my wife.”

  Her face seems to stretch then with held-in hysterics and she says to me in a strangled voice, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  I stand quickly. Joan doesn’t move her face, but her laughing eyes remain on mine and a vapor of guilt evanesces through me.

  “I’ve got to get on to work now,” I say. She just waves, fingers up and down like a hinge. Charlie grips my arm and steers me away from the table, saying, “I don’t get this—it isn’t you. You are never late, Lena. Never, ever late!”

  The cruiser is out front, next to a fire hydrant, engine running. I track in inches of caked-on snow and road salt. Charlie waits until I’m in, then thunks the heavy door closed after me. He gets in and pulls away before his door has swung all the way closed. At the first light, directional blinking, he bangs his palm against the steering wheel and says, “What on earth were you doing in there? And would you please let me know if you’re planning any more running wild or rescuing children or whatever? At the Lab, they’re all sure you got lost or kidnapped or something. You know this town is full of creeps. I don’t know what you thought you were doing there, sitting around in the middle of the day. I’d have never found you except the girl at your bakery saw you go by.”

  Light gleams in the windshield. “Charlie,” I say, “were you worried about me?”

  A thin stem of muscle pulses in his jaw “What the hell?” he says irritably, his voice constricted. He slides on the Ray-Bans from his wheel well. “What do you think? Of course I was worried—I am worried. You’re not supposed to be talking to the press. That’s what they pay that numbskull in the publicity office to do. You don’t know how to deal with reporters. People like her will eat you alive.”

  I make a dismissive sound and the Ford bobs in the road. Charlie is looking at me. “Are you kidding? After all the publicity with that psychic kid thing?”

  “That was almost seven years ago.”

  “So what? They’ll drag all that out. Anything to give the department a black eye.”

  “There might be an even bigger publicity problem than just me,” I say moodily.

  He shoots me a look. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Do you know the rumors—about the cribs coming into Evidence?”

  He tilts his head back, lets go a frayed sigh. “Of course I know the rumors. Yes, I know the rumors. The baby killer. It’s a load of hogwash and I don’t want to hear about it. But especially I don’t want to hear about you and reporters and God knows who else.” He flips on his directional. “Haven’t gotten a raise in three years running. City budget gets cut every time you turn around. No, I would say we do not need to be playing footsie with a bunch of reporters right now.”

  I face the window, watch my breath fog it up. “I haven’t gotten any raises either.”

  Charlie makes a furious right onto State and pulls in front of the Lab, tires grumbling in the snow. He shifts into park and then turns and looks at me. But his face has lost the ruddy light. “Would you mind telling me who you are?” he says. “I’m serious. Because the woman I know doesn’t do things like that—skipping out of work and gabbing with reporters. And not with this kind of attitude you got.”

  “Charlie, for heaven’s sakes, what is this? I haven’t done anything wrong. I got cornered by some reporter. I don’t think she even asked a single question about the case.” I lean against the door and turn my head to look up through the glass. The snow comes down in a few fat, interlocking flakes.

  “Just tell me one thing,” he says. “Is this somehow related to Duseky? Did he put you up to this—tell you to go talk to that woman?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Who knows? That prick is looking out for Number One. Maybe h
e figures he can use you to get a little media attention, go fluff himself up on the evening news.”

  “What are you talking about?” I scoop up my files and stack them on my lap. “Charlie, don’t be insane. Unlock the door, I gotta go to work.”

  The locks open with a mechanical clunk. He puts up his hands as if to show me he’s not armed. “Hey, I’m just saying. I know human nature.”

  “You are insane. Keller Duseky doesn’t have anything to do with anything. And I guess I don’t think it’s any of your business anyway.” I get out of the car and give the door a good shove closed.

  “Jesus, Lenny,” Charlie says, buzzing down the passenger-side window.

  “Just go.”

  “I’m going!” Charlie yells at me, now sitting back, rigid behind his steering wheel. He doesn’t look at me. The passenger-side window hums back up into place and the front wheels turn away from the curb. The black-and-white slips on the ice and rocks against the curb, then finally carves a swath out of the snow and rolls down State.

  I put my hands in my pockets and I can feel the cold belling into my coat sleeves as I watch him pull away. Wish I’d worn my parka.

  CHAPTER 14

  WHEN I GET TO THE OFFICE, ALYCE IS LINGERING AT MY DESK, BUT then she simply waves and walks away when she sees me. There’s a stack of CS photographs and print cards piled on the desk, all from the Cogan house, plus a terse note: Lena, please look at these right away. Thank you, Frank.

  These are prints from the nursery—most of them already identified—a series of nannies and housekeepers who’d worked in the nursery. Seven consecutive nannies, for a six-month-old baby. There’s a note in one report that when Erin Cogan was initially questioned about the number of nannies they’d hired—and fired—she’d said, “Oh, I don’t remember exactly how many—three or four?”

  The police interviewer’s report describes Erin as imperious, aloof, angry rather than grieving, a smoker, expensively dressed and groomed, uncooperative, defensive—not much like the woman I’d met. Her husband, Clay Cogan, is also described as cool, preoccupied, busy, taking business calls on his cell phone during questioning, protective of his wife. They held hands during joint questioning. He cleared his throat frequently.

  I stare at some prints the investigators brought out on the nursery light switch with cyanoacrylate—the vapors from superglue. I compare them to a fan of prints taken from Clay Cogan’s right hand: his index finger shows a central pocket whorl containing many bifurcations above the core, with several intervening incipient ridges. For some reason, as I gaze at the curving lines, I think of a tarot card reading at the New York State Fair, ten years ago. I remember Charlie’s damp hand in mine, and the scorched smell of cotton candy. Behind a red curtain, a young woman with braided hair hunched over a deck of cards. I remember the images as she turned them: a whistling man about to stroll off a cliff; a man facedown, swords through his back; a man and woman, naked, in chains. She looked at Charlie and me several times, then finally said to me, “Patience.”

  I train my attention on the prints; erratic, quantum, repeating and nonrepeating, they soothe me.

  AFTER HOURS OF studying the file, Alyce asks me if I’ve taken a break in a way that lets me know that she wants me to stop looking at the report, that she disapproves of all the energy I’m bringing to it. I sigh and put down my pencil.

  At first I’m annoyed by my sense of work interrupted, but once I’m outside, the sharp air is invigorating and head-clearing, and I end up walking all the way back down the hill, under the on-ramps and overpasses, till I’m at the Columbus Bakery. I’m in line when Mr. Memdouah walks in reading our neighbor, Derry Kingston’s, copy of Cosmopolitan. Our mailboxes in the St. James are all located in a vestibule to the right of the front entry, a bank of bronze boxes opened with tiny skeleton keys; but our mailboxes no longer lock. So Mr. Memdouah will check our boxes and pry out the magazines. I know this because I’ve spotted him walking along the hallway, his face curved intently toward the latest copy of Popular Mechanics or Golf Digest.

  He stands beside me now in line. His hair is brittle with grease, the strands caked up in an eave across his forehead. The area around his nose and fingers is always inflamed with psoriasis. His eyes are algae-green. He quivers beside me in line, the magazine open in his hands. “Lena,” he says. He looks around quickly, fixing on the one little round table and chair, though they’re empty. “Is that one here again? This neighborhood is going down. Assassins and muggers.” He smells so strongly of rancid tobacco it burns my sinuses. “See, this is Cosmopolitan magazine,” he says. “It isn’t yours. I didn’t take it out of your mailbox.”

  He steals other mail as well—mostly junk mail, studies it all closely, and stacks it in an orderly pile beside his front door mat so that the other residents can reclaim it. The thievery makes Mrs. Sanderson from 412 frantic: once, she stopped Charlie outside my apartment and demanded that he arrest Mr. Memdouah.

  Mr. Memdouah’s fingers quiver along the edges of the magazine, leaving fine prints on the pages. Peering around his shoulder, I think I spot a quiz: Are you a “Bird,” an “Ape,” or a “Lizard”? He bunches up his shoulder and turns.

  When it’s my turn at the counter, he pushes in front of me. “A long-round loaf!” he barks at the bread lady. It’s a different girl than the one who works weekends. He puts the magazine facedown on the counter. “Can I look at that for a second?” I ask.

  He picks it up and presses it to his narrow chest. “I didn’t take it, and you’d better not read it. There are things in here that it’s best you didn’t know about. It’s part of the patriarchal conspiracy and the tyranny of the beauty industry, confining women to domestic servitude.” He tears the cover off and crumples it, then looks confused. “No more confining than religious servitude. Though I don’t seem to be able to convince her of that,” he says intensely. “Handmaidens of God the priest father.”

  The bread lady places my round-flat loaf in its paper sleeve before me and smiles as if Memdouah isn’t even there. He stiffens with indignation, then scurries out, the bell above the door clanging. He never has money anyway.

  “And a long-round for my friend, please,” I say. “I’ll bring it to him.”

  She puts the heavy-crusted loaf beside mine, the bread wrappers imprinted with red ink drawings of two identical squat bread bakers. I hand over the coins, which she plunks into the register compartments. A radio is on in the back, a low, serious muttering. “By the way,” she says, “someone came in here the other day, looking for you.”

  “Oh?”

  The girl contemplates the tops of the windows. “She kept looking all around at the store. Not really saying anything, just standing there near the door. I would’ve thought maybe she was some sort of homeless person—you know how sometimes it doesn’t even matter how people are dressed? Anyways. She just—I don’t know, it’s so funny—she just really looked like she was in the wrong place.” She smiles in a private way. “You used to be able to see it more often—like there was a sort of a—a Syracuse-person, you know? But she started asking about you: How often do you come in? Where do you live? What do you order?”

  “What do I order?” I study a razor-fine stencil of flour etched along the countertop. I find this unnerving. “Did she have short red hair, a nice coat?”

  She shakes her head. “I wish I’d paid better attention. She was just sort of crazy-looking.”

  “That sounds right,” I say with a laugh. “What did you tell her?”

  She touches a lock of hair that’s come loose from her barrette. “Pretty much nothing.” She shrugs with one shoulder. “Not very much. I just kept saying that I didn’t know whatever it was she was asking. I said I forgot.”

  “You said that?”

  “Well, you’re my customer, not her.” She smiles in a confined, Mona Lisa way.

  The
bell erupts over the door and a few people enter, stamping and shaking off snow, their cheeks bright with cold. I tell her thanks, moving sideways a few paces, then turn and shove out the steamed-up door.

  CHAPTER 15

  BACK AT THE OFFICE, I BARELY HAVE A CHANCE TO SETTLE AGAIN into the file when a hand touches my shoulder blade: I jump. “Frank would like a word.” I turn and watch Peggy—a swoop of short gray hair and rolling backside in black wool pants—as she hurries out. She hates the Trace section of the Lab and says it’s “poisoned.” And even though she exhibits what is sometimes called “motherly” behavior, she seems to not actually care for any of the women who work here. Unhappy news makes her come alive. “Did you hear about Sonja in Ballistics? She’s pretty sure she’s pregnant, she isn’t sure who the father is,” she’ll whisper in the corridor. Frank calls her his “watchdog.”

  As I come up the hall, I notice that she’s hung some tinsel and a paper happy new year banner on her ferns. She’s already sitting at her desk, the receiver pressed to her ear, saying, “So, Jamie? You will not believe how . . .” Her voice drops to a hush as I approach and she eyes me over her computer terminal. A solitaire game on the screen.

  Peggy watches me now, her lips moving soundlessly next to the receiver.

  I open the door to Frank’s office. The window faces a corridor with a window in its opposite wall, so the sun shifts through two windows on its way into Frank’s office which somehow deadens it, like the light inside a dream. He’s studying a folder, so I spot a glimpse of scalp though thinning hair. Evidently he’s ignoring me.

  I say, “Hi, Frank, I’m here.”

  He doesn’t look up. “Ah, Lena,” he says, his voice flat. “I hear you walked off the Cogan scene yesterday.” He finally lifts his head, index finger pressing his glasses against the bridge of his nose. “Now why do you suppose you did that?”

  I touch the top of his desk, the beveled edge of his blotter. “It smelled wrong.” I watch him. He doesn’t say anything. “I had to get out of there. I could feel it . . . in the air.” I lower my eyes, my stomach tightening with embarrassment.