He lit a cigarette and sat on the windowsill and allowed the cooler night air to tingle upon his naked skin. He could feel sweat trickle between the hairs of his legs and down the back of his neck. He could feel it kiss the air and begin to dissolve in its desire to be taken up into the clouds, to be born again as rain or the condensation upon the windows of a lovers’ car.
What was all this? What was all this light and all this dark? What were these Will-O’–the-Wisps that ghosted through his life and then disappeared by dint of simply turning a bend or ending their burned-out days? Is that what he could smell, even now, in the middle of the night, in the burning oil of car exhausts and the thick perfume of sweat and Chanel? Was that the passing of these sprites? The remnants of their souls? Were those distant shimmering lights of town no more than stars? Memories of seconds passed?
Where did that leave him? Was he just a transient odour under someone’s nose, a brief light on their horizon? And what of Mrs Dybek? There one moment, gone the next. Her void was already filled. Her landlord would have found someone to rent the apartment. Her place in the queue at the supermarket was already occupied. Another had been born to breathe the air she left behind. She had left no scar upon this earth to signify the fight.
If there was no afterlife, if there was no God, if she didn’t see her husband again, what had been the point? To eat, shit, fuck and sleep? Was that it? If there was no Heaven or Hell - if, for certain, there was no Heaven and no Hell - then where were the rules? If the object was simply to live as long and as well as possible then, fuck it, tomorrow he would take his gun and start enjoying life. If the world suddenly found out that there was no such thing as sin, what hell would be let loose upon it? Was he really the keeper of the flame? Or was it God? He was pretty damned sure that it wasn’t human decency. You take away that thin veneer of bible-belt respectability and all you’re left with is an ape – and apes kill. The whole law stemmed from those Ten Commandments. They were either the word of God or the meanderings of a madman. If someone found out that they weren’t real, there really would be hell to pay.
Midnight thoughts. Midnight blues. He would wake up in the morning and, if he remembered this shit, he would feel shame for the childish helplessness that he had allowed to thrive as he sat naked at the window of his apartment in Queens.
He took a last drag of the cigarette and flicked it into the night. He followed it as it fell like a waning firework to the ground.
It landed at the feet of the man in the sharp, dark grey suit.
Tuesday
Chapter 5
The morning seemed very bright. Sun poured thickly through the office windows and stuck to clothes and walls like honey. The shadows seemed deeper, the whites whiter. The distant trees smudged their emerald green against the imperial blue to see who could grab a bigger part of the world.
Frank rubbed his eyes. It felt like he was rolling grit around beneath his eyelids. Sleep, that fickle friend, had deserted him altogether. He had ended up in the other room listening to Sinatra at his most downbeat, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely.
He came to work at six. The night shift damned near threw him out when they saw him, then got together a chorus of Night and Day. He told them where they could shove it. They sang some more until they got bored then faded back to their typewriters and chatter.
Steve came in at eight. ‘Wow! You look like someone swapped your face with your ass, Frank.’
‘Gee, thanks. Too hot to sleep.’
‘I slept like a baby. Kicked off the sheets, hung the old man out and just drifted away.’
‘Well, good for you,’ scowled Frank. ‘I’ve been thinking…’
‘That explains the tiredness…’
‘Would you shut up and listen? Jesus! It’s like working with a hyperactive kid sometimes.’
‘Young at heart, Frank. Young at heart.’ Steve laughed. ‘See what I did there?’
‘You’re a genius.’ Frank lit a cigarette. It was his fortieth since he had left for work yesterday morning. It tasted stale, mixed with the coffee. He’d showered and cleaned his teeth before leaving for work, but he felt infected. There was only one way to cleanse himself. ‘Let’s do some door to door today, up at the Dybek apartments. I can’t help getting the feeling that there was something I missed.’
‘I was going to say the same thing myself.’ Steve watched Frank as he ran the red heart of his cigarette around the ashtray. He rounded it off until it was smooth, then blew on it and stared at the glow. ‘What else, Frank?’ he asked.
‘I think,’ said Frank, ‘that I might be going crazy.’
They sat in the Plymouth and toured Brownsville. Steve drove while Frank scoured the neighbourhood.
‘Look at this shit,’ said Frank. ‘Buildings that look like they’ve had their faces sliced off by a nuclear bomb. Litter everywhere. These people are shitting on their own front door step. You remember those riots in Chicago a couple of years ago?’ Steve nodded. He was used to Frank going off on one now and then. ‘They broke into their own shops, their own bars. They broke what belonged to them. Why destroy the place that you live? I don’t get that. Do you get that, Steve?’
‘The difference between you and me, Frank, is that I don’t even try to understand it. You think too much. That’s why you’re going crazy. Speaking of which…’ He blew his horn as a middle-aged man weaved across the road in front of them. ‘Just how crazy are you?’
‘It was just a bad night,’ sighed Frank. ‘You think all sorts of crap when you can’t sleep.’
‘This is true,’ agreed Steve.
They rode on in silence for a couple of hundred yards. ‘You remember that guy yesterday morning? Robinson Taylor? When you were interviewing, I saw this guy across the street, sharp looking fella. He had one of those nailed down nineteen-fifties suits on, vest, hat, the works. I mean, he was money and style.’
‘So what happened?’
‘He was staring at the scene, so I hopped across the road to see him, but by the time I got there, what with the traffic and everything, he’d gone. I even checked the alley and peered over a couple of walls.’
Steve stopped at a set of lights. People, mostly black, sauntered across the road. They didn’t smile. They didn’t acknowledge each other. They just floated across in their own air-tight bubbles.
‘Probably just a curious bystander, Frank,’ reasoned Steve. ‘You saw the crowd that built up yesterday.’
‘That’s what I thought. Then, after you went to get Milt to look at the plate and stuff, there he was.’
Steve pulled away from the lights and turned left. ‘Where?’
‘On the fire escape, just staring in from underneath this fedora. Arms crossed, leaning against the railing.’
‘Jesus! What’d you do?’
‘I damned near shit myself, that’s what I did. He made me jump so much I fell over the chair. By the time I’d got up, he was gone. I went out the window after him, down the fire escape, but he’d disappeared.’
‘Hiding in the alley.’
‘I stayed and watched. There wasn’t even a rat in that alley.’
‘It was a hot day. Maybe it was one of those…what do you call them? Mirages.’
Frank stared at Steve like he’d gone out to lunch. ‘It’s not the Nevada Desert, Steve. You don’t get mirages on fire escapes in Brooklyn.’
‘You don’t know that. You get dehydrated in weather like this you never know what you might see.’
‘You crazy bastard! It wasn’t a goddam mirage, okay? Could you just take my word for that? Please?’
‘So are you saying it was the perp? Is that what you’re saying? That this guy killed a junkie and old lady Dybek and hung around to watch you work?’
‘Is that so far-fetched?’
‘Frankly, Frank, I think it may be.’
‘So, explain this, Mr Clever. Explain this. How come he was outside my apartment last night?’
Steve pulled the car over and s
witched off the engine. A truck blared its horn as it nearly took off the rear of the Plymouth and accelerated away towards the next set of lights.
‘How do you know?’ asked Steve.
Frank took off his hat to let some air under it, then put it back on. ‘I saw him. I was sitting on the bedroom windowsill smoking. I threw the tab away and it landed right at his feet.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I got my cape out of the cupboard and flew after him. Only I didn’t get so far because he had a lump of kryptonite in his hand…’
‘Will you be serious for a moment?’
‘What could I do? If I’d gone down, by the time I got there he would’ve been long gone. So I went back to bed and listened to every creak and groan that place makes in the middle of the night until sun up. When I looked out of the window again, he was gone.’
‘You tell Mary about this?’
‘Are you kidding? She’d hunt the poor bastard down and kill him.’ He lit a cigarette. He took a long drag and let the smoke drain slowly from his nostrils. ‘No, I didn’t tell her. I figured it best not to until I spoke to you, heard what you thought.’
‘That was probably sensible. You don’t want to go scaring her for no good reason. On the other hand, you putz, I think you should've told me all this before we left the building. What's the matter with you?'
Frank opened the door to get some air into the car. 'And what? Sit there sucking our gums like some toothless old bastards while the world revolves around us?'
'We could've got a car to do a circuit of your place once in a while. '
'What for? Mary's at work and I'm surrounded by cops.'
'And when she comes home?'
'She’ll be fine.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Are you trying to scare me?'
'A little, yeah. We could have got a description out...'
'It's just some kook...'
Steve clawed the air with frustration. 'Some kook you've see three times in two days. On two of those occasions, they were crime scenes of which he may have created.' He threw his hands up in exasperation. 'Jeez! The more I say this, the worse it gets. How do you know that you and Mary weren't meant to be the next crime scene? He’s obviously got some sort of fixation on you.’
‘It’s not obvious.’
‘Sure it is and if the situations were reversed, you’d say exactly the same thing as me. And you know what? I would probably try to brush it off like you are. You wouldn’t accept that and neither am I.’
‘Fine,’ said Frank. ‘Okay. When we get back to the precinct, I’ll have a word with Emmet, see what he thinks.’
‘And I’ll go with you to make sure you do.’ Steve started the engine and pulled away.
‘Gee, thanks Mom.’
‘And you know what you can do with your sarcasm?’
Frank put his feet up on the dashboard. ‘Just drive to the Dybek place.’ He tossed his cigarette butt out of the window and watched in the side mirror as it sparked along the road. ‘I’m sorry, Steve. You’re right. I should’ve told you.’
‘Damn right, Frank. You know…’
‘Christ almighty!’ Frank grabbed Steve’s arm. The vehicle lurched to the right, bumped over the kerb and dithered across the road. ‘Stop!’
‘What?’
Frank pointed ahead, his arm rigid, his finger pressed against the windscreen, like a bloodhound that had found the scent. ‘That’s him. I saw him.’
Steve pulled over. Before he’d stopped, Frank had the door open and was running ahead. Steve parked up and followed him. He hadn’t spotted the guy, but for half a second he had seen Frank’s face. His blue eagle eyes, lost in an expression that fell between horror and hatred, had without doubt latched onto something.
Frank ran full pelt with no regard for others on the sidewalk. Some he pushed past, others he ran around, one or two cursed his back as he forced them to drop whatever was in their arms.
Steve tried not to lose him as Frank disappeared into an alley. He should’ve waited he thought. He should’ve waited. I’m seconds behind. He feared that any second he would hear a shot or see Frank stagger back out of the alley with his hands across his belly.
He turned the corner and to his relief saw Frank leaning, out of breath, his shoulders down, his gun held limply in his hand, against the entrance to a deserted building.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ wheezed Frank.
Steve looked up at the tall, brown, ugly building. The windows had been knocked out. Glass protruded like broken teeth or lay at their feet. The alley stank of piss.
‘He go in there?’ asked Steve.
Frank nodded and straightened up. ‘I heard the door.’
The door, an old wooden, weather-beaten, blistered green lump of rot, was ajar.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Steve.
Frank craned his neck towards the gap. ‘I heard footsteps. Just before you turned the corner.’
‘We going in?’
Frank smiled acerbically. ‘No. We’ll wait here until he comes out. I’m sure he just popped in to buy some cigarettes.’
‘You know what, Frank? You came to work a bitter man today. You first or me?’
‘Me.’ Frank put the end of his foot into the gap at the bottom of the door. ‘On three. One. Two. Three.’
Frank went through the door, his .38 held high. Steve went in almost immediately behind him to his left. Their steps echoed around the high-ceilinged wreck as they crept their way around the edge of the vast chamber. Birds flew across the room, disturbed by the new noise. Their wings clapped and reverberated like some distant audience.
Steve continued left. The walls were strewn with graffiti. The floors showed signs of habitation; discarded needles, food wrappers, smashed liquor bottles. There was machinery, rusted and brown, strewn about as if it had died where it had fallen. Chains hung motionless from the ceiling like Spanish moss. The place stank of rot and urine and damp. Guano carpeted the concrete floor and kicked up dust when Frank’s feet disturbed it. It was like the bayou, the way the heat was trapped by the unbroken glass, by the moisture that, even in summer, lay upon the ground in the dips in the concrete and seemed to create a humid micro-climate within this turn of the century ruin. They had stepped into another world.
Frank could feel the sweat burst upon his forehead and begin to roll like ants down his face. He wiped his eyes. They stung with the salt.
He and Steve worked their way around the room. It was impossible to put their feet down without something cracking under them. Even the guano had had been through the freeze drier; wet one day, dry the next, until it lay like a soft laval skin that subsided with even the slightest weight.
Each time they came across a piece of machinery, they did the same dance; the halt, the step, the step, the halt, the dash. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. Each time their weapons pointed at nothing but wet air. Finally they met in the middle of the room, next to a sharp-edged, rust-holed lump of metal that had once upon a time have churned out something ten to the dozen. Now it had no teeth, no memory.
At the front of the machine was a hatch. It was closed, the handle rusty, the door thin at the edges where the rust had slowly nibbled away like termites at wood.
Frank heard something inside move. He looked at Steve and pointed at his ear. Did you hear that?
Steve shook his head, his faced creased in question, his skin shiny with sweat.
Frank indicated that he was going to open the door. Steve moved around and stood directly before it. If there was anything in there, it wouldn’t get far.
Frank grabbed the handle.
Three. Two. One.
He yanked the door open.
Steve’s arm jarred against the air, straight and stiff at the elbow, his eyes wide, his body rigid.
An arm, long past rotten, fell through the door and slapped limply against the outside of the machine.
Whoever’s arm it was, they were very dead.<
br />
Captain Diehl curled his lip and gazed at the bloated corpse.
It had torn and ruptured as it had been dragged out of the furnace, which was what they had eventually figured the decomposed lump of metal to be. Viscera had slid freely to the floor. The stench was overwhelming. There was a sweet smell to the rotten flesh. It was deceptive. It made people think that it was not so bad, that they could cope with that, that all they had to deal with then was the unreality of the half-closed eyes and still chest, but beneath that lay the truth of being human; the faeces, the mouldy meat, the bacterial expulsions that spored upon the air. The bystander became afraid to breathe for fear that, by an intake of breath, death would take root within them, that it would grow in the amniotic sac of their warm, healthy bodies and erupt violently and unexpectedly in the pleasant ignorance of an ordinary day.
Steve had thrown up. He wasn’t shy in admitting it. He stood outside smoking while Emmet and Frank watched the clear up.
‘Why are you here, Emmet?’ asked Frank. It was said without attitude.
‘I heard it was messy. I wanted to see how messy.’ The Captain inhaled deeply from his cigarette as if it was some sort of prophylactic against death, maybe even a cure. He held his breath as long as he could, then let the smoke go slowly. ‘Who knows what?’
‘Nobody knows anything,’ said Frank. ‘Look at this place. It’s a fucking transit camp. Homeless, users, kids painting the walls with shit. They ought to pull the place down. Be done with it.’
Emmet raised his eyes to the grim walls and fractured windows. It was an epitaph to Hope. ‘Nothing in his clothes?’
The Ashes of an Oak Page 4