by Paul Hond
They gathered their coats and said good-bye to David Shaw, who was too drunk and joyous to understand that they were leaving. “Isn’t it wonderful!” was all he said, looking not at their eyes but a little above them.
Emi did not, Mickey noted, say good-bye to Sato, who must have still been in the bathroom; Mickey joked to himself that it was all part of the deception.
The streets were deserted, silent, the air seasonably cool.
“So where are you parked?” Mickey said.
“A couple of blocks over,” said Emi. She took his arm.
Mickey thought to ask her some questions about Sato, but wasn’t sure how to do it without sounding like a jerk. Instead he remarked on the food, and some of the familiar faces he’d seen. Sue Wang was looking well, he said, as was Keskov, but Gonzalez had put on weight.
“There it is,” she said, pointing to the darkness of the next block.
“You couldn’t get a space closer to Shaw’s?”
“I don’t mind walking.”
“That’s not what I meant.” They were on the edge of another area altogether.
Emi pulled out her keys. “Where did you park?”
“I’m on Calvert Street,” said Mickey. He noticed two figures near the next corner, coming toward them in the darkness. They wore identical rubber masks, representative, Mickey supposed, of some horror film maniac, and walked with their hands in their pockets. Mickey said, “Give me your keys.” He took them from her.
The car was exactly between them and the two youths—and Mickey could tell they were young, it was their bodies, their way of moving. Teenagers. They crossed the street abruptly, as though on a signal.
“Why do you want my keys?” Emi said. But there was a slight trill in her voice; she knew what he was thinking: that he could get them out of there faster.
“Let’s go,” Mickey said. He placed his hand on Emi’s back and hurried them along; they were almost at a trot. He felt ridiculous.
“Mickey,” Emi said, “I’m not wearing the right shoes.”
They arrived at the car. There was no one around. Mickey jabbed the key into the lock of the door. Wrong key. He tried another. It slid in like a knife.
“Yo, mistuh,” came a voice. It was behind them, not ten feet away.
Mickey opened the door.
“Hey, yo.”
“Get in,” Mickey whispered.
“Yo, wait up.”
Mickey stopped, turned. Emi slipped into the passenger’s seat.
“Mickey,” she hissed. “Get in here. Give me the keys.”
Mickey found himself face to face with the two youths. Gloves, dark clothing, sneakers, the grisly masks; all Mickey could see of their humanity was a faint glimpse of their eyes, the whites of them. They might not have been human at all.
“Don’t move,” one of them said. From his pocket he pulled out a small gun. “Yo, lady. Get out the car.”
Mickey looked around frantically. There was no one: even the windows of the surrounding row houses were dark.
“Listen,” said Mickey, now looking both of the youths dead on, as best as he could. “Take it easy. We’ll give you what you want.”
“Tell the lady to get out the car.”
“Emi?” Mickey said, not turning his back. “Get out of the car.”Then, to the youths, “Is that it? You want the car? Emi—did you hear me?”
He felt her behind him. She touched his back.
“Keys and money,” said the one with the gun. He came closer.
“Yo, let’s cut out,” said the second youth.
Headlights from a car appeared from two blocks away.
“Grab the bag then!” said the first. “Gimme that shit!” He grabbed Emi’s leather bag from her hands—swiped it, fast as a cat—and rifled through it right there on the sidewalk. “Where the keys at?”
“Yo, somebody comin’!” said the second youth. He took off running in the direction from which they’d come.
Mickey looked. The headlights had disappeared, but another pair, more distant, had taken their place. He then felt something hit him in the side of the head: it was the bag: it fell to the ground, spilling coins, vitamins. The youth with the gun stumbled back. “You ain’t got shit!” He raised his hand, and there was a loud pop, then another.
Mickey froze. What had happened? The youth ran off. Mickey turned. Emi was on the ground.
“Jesus God,” Mickey said. He threw himself on his knees beside her.
She’d been hit. Hideous purple flowers grew from her eyes. Her head lay in a pool of black.
8
Mickey gripped his drink in both hands and gazed into it. Joe Blank and Buddy Grossman and Morris were watching him. If not for the pale dawn light in the windows, this might have been their old Wednesday night card game: the men seated around the kitchen table, waiting for Mickey to fold.
He had called Morris just before he left the police station.
“What?” Morris had said. “Shot?” He’d been asleep—it was three in the morning by then—and Mickey could picture him putting his glasses on to hear better. “Shot? With a gun?”
Morris must have called Joe and Joe must have called Buddy Grossman, because in less than an hour all three were at the back door of Mickey’s house, knocking softly on the glass. Mickey wondered how they knew he’d be in the kitchen. Maybe they’d knocked first at the front door and he hadn’t heard them. In any case they’d been careful not to make enough noise to wake Benjie, for which Mickey was grateful; he had no idea how to break the news.
He opened the door, too dazed to acknowledge the pats on the back, the hands gripping his shoulders. How could he speak? He was living in a nightmare, one which continuously repeated itself in front of his eyes: Emi on the ground. His own ungodly screams. Her head in his arms (eyes drowned, nose blown away like the smashed graywacke noses of some Egyptian sculpture in a museum they had once visited), her blood on his shirt (gone; as soon as he’d arrived home from the police station, he’d run out to the alley and in half-madness removed the shirt—the dried blood was like an infection, a mark on his own skin, deadly, a curse—and set it ablaze). Then came the first sirens, with him holding her and filling with a blood-soaked lunatic hope (“They’re here, baby, they’re here, don’t worry, they’re here”) as the street erupted in noise and light, and a half dozen police appeared and pulled him away (“What is your relation to the victim? What happened? What did you see? Can you describe the assailant or assailants?”) while paramedics gathered round, kneeling before Emi with their instruments, an efficient, well-trained team of mechanics on hand to repair her, to recover her life from under the blood, the matted, lacquered hair.
Joe had brought a bottle of vodka. “Sit down, Mick. That a boy.”
“Tell us what happened,” said Morris. “Mickey.”
How could he speak? He’d spoken plenty. Even after he’d been taken away from the scene, after he’d watched, dazed, as the paramedics placed his wife on a gurney and pulled the sheet up over the blasted face (he’d actually thought, for a long second, that in doing this they were merely protecting her wounds), even then, having refused medical treatment (for trauma, for the fake gash on his head that Shaw had put there), he’d composed himself well enough to ride in a patrol car to police headquarters and take a seat under the hot lights of Detective Flemke’s cramped, paper-filled office—so much like his own office at the bakery that at once he felt a kind of desperate kinship with the man—and pledge his cooperation and give as good a description of the dirty sons of bitches as he possibly could. And Christ, the precinct was crawling with them—young blacks, handcuffed, looking around, a little nervous, maybe, but not seeming to fully appreciate the seriousness of their condition. They should be crying out for their mothers, Mickey thought.
As he described the triggerman—a welterweight, slightly pigeon-toed, long arms, no hips, definitely black from the voice, no, from the act itself, who was anybody kidding, look at the area they were in, loo
k, as Joe might say, at the statistics, the six o’clock news, you didn’t have to be an Einstein to figure it all out—as he identified, from pages of photos in a thick three-ringed binder, the exact mask and the approximate style of tennis shoes—and he was amazed at what he did remember—he felt himself coiling with a fresh desire to kill, to rip the mask off the little beast and pound that worthless face to blood and gristle with his bare goddamned hands. But he knew an arrest was unlikely; those kids had disappeared, they lived undocumented lives, the city was filled with thousands of them. Sure, there’d probably be a reward—Mickey himself would offer one, and no doubt the pot would be sweetened by others—and sure, there’d be a lot of press (a couple of news crews had arrived at the scene just as Mickey was leaving), but how could any of it—the money, the community outrage, the broadcast descriptions, the time and resources, God willing, of the entire police force—how could any of it hope to penetrate the faceless ant farm of shvartzes that was Baltimore City?
And he’d even asked the same of Flemke—“What are the chances of finding them?”—as if by losing himself in this question, one that inquired into all the various sciences by which criminals are captured, he could ignore the real horror, which was that Emi was dead, her body on a slab at the morgue, cut off from life, the face destroyed, the hands as useless as his own, the ringless fingers curled in the attitudes of ten individual deaths.
This image now fired through his brain as he pushed his drink aside and rested his head on the kitchen table. “I should have saved her,” he groaned. “I should have done something.” He felt more hands on his shoulders, assuring him that there was nothing he could have done, that it wasn’t his fault. Finally he subsided.
He listened as the men tried to piece together, from his intermittent grunts and utterances, the story of what had happened. The voices became whispers. What had they been doing in such a neighborhood in the first place? Had they tried to plead with the killer? Was anything taken that might turn up later? And what about Ben? Who would tell him?
“Terrible,” said Buddy Grossman. He must have assumed Mickey was out cold. “Can you imagine seeing that. Being right there, and so helpless. Terrible.”
“Brazen,” said Morris. “They get more brazen by the day.”
Mickey could hear the click of a cigarette lighter. His nose twitched at the first threads of Joe’s smoke.
“Forget about that,” Joe said. “Us sitting around bitching about the state of the world isn’t gonna change a damn thing. The question is, what happens now?”
“What happens with what?” said Buddy.
“The arrangements. Mickey can’t handle this himself.”
“What arrangements?” said Morris.
“A funeral, for one.”
“How can you think of a funeral?” said Buddy. “This is a tragedy. Meanwhile, the shvartze that did this is running loose.”
“Forget the shvartze,” Joe said. “We’ve got to think of Mickey. The police’ll do their job.”
Morris took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. “There won’t be a funeral. She wants to be cremated and dumped into the water. She told me once, years ago.”
“You can’t have a cremation,” said Buddy, who had a little religion in him. “It isn’t right.”
Mickey then heard, from above, the sound of Ben’s feet swinging out of bed and landing on the floor. He alone recognized that sound. He lifted his head.
“Mick,” Joe said. “Have another.” He poured more vodka into Mickey’s glass.
“Benjie’s awake,” Mickey said.
The men looked thoughtfully at the ceiling.
Mickey placed his hands on the table and pushed himself up. Better get him before he comes down, he thought.
“You okay?” said Joe.
Mickey nodded. He was far from okay, of course, but he had to do what a father must. “I’ve got to tell him,” he said. He awaited their protests (“Sit down, Mick, sleep it off, you’re in no condition”), but when none came he took a breath and made his way out of the kitchen, unbearably alone, half-staggering through the rooms until he fell toward the banister, by which he pulled himself up the stairs.
He reached the top. Ben’s door was closed.
Mickey stepped back and looked at his own bedroom door. It was open just a crack. He looked down: this was the very spot where Nanna’s ring had dropped from his hands years before, and for a moment all the time in between—half his life—seemed to vanish, leaving him with the same feeling of tongue-tied helplessness, the same agony of indecision, of not knowing what to do next.
He pushed his door. The light in the room was strong enough for him to perceive in detail the topography of the unmade bedsheets. Those dark ridges and gullies and hills ought to be preserved, he felt, memorialized as the final sculpture left by their bodies, the last in a long history of silent collaborative efforts.
He looked over at his parents’ wedding portrait. Both had died younger than Emi. He tried to remember how his father had broken the news to him about his mother, but it was a blur; he just remembered being picked up early from school, and nobody talking much. He was sixteen at the time, and not given to tears. A tough guy. Didn’t let anyone near him, especially his father. Too much emotional weight there—the heave of the chest, the gush of his heart; nor was there any escape at the funeral: no throng to absorb one’s grief, to buffer and cushion the nearness of the principal mourners. Mickey had stood next to his father at the grave, listening to the sobs, the dumb little spurts. He hated his father for that—for crying, for being able to cry.
Nor had Mickey cried at his father’s funeral two years later. He had a fight scheduled the next day, and considered suppressed grief a weapon. Besides, there’d been a dozen of his father’s customers in attendance, and they’d looked like orphaned children—lost, hungry, their bread taken away. How could he cry? They were supposed to be his inheritance, his new constituency: he shook their hands like a politician, leader, provider, father. But he had believed, even as he comforted them, that they would have to fend for themselves.
Alone in the bakery after the funeral, though, he had indeed cried. Cried at the sight of his father’s apron folded on a shelf.
Mickey turned away from the portrait, from the bed, from the whole room. A great sense of resolve and determination swelled in his chest.
He swung around to face Ben’s door.
Don’t think too much, he told himself. Just sit him down and put your arm around him and hold him. Tell it softly. Let him feel your strength.
He knocked. “Benjie?”
A grunt.
“Can I come in?”
A sigh. “I suppose.”
Mickey turned the knob, leaned into the door. The morning was brighter in here.
Ben, wearing only undershorts, was seated on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, a white bath towel over his shoulders. He smirked at Mickey’s slovenly appearance—the T-shirt and trousers, the squinting, bloodshot eyes. “Must have been some party. You just get in?”
Mickey scratched his head. “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Benjie.” His voice was measured, hoarse.
“You do?”
“Yes.” Mickey saw terror in the kid’s eyes. He wished he could spare him, but he couldn’t. “Your mother,” he said. Suddenly he was aware of the power, the grisly power of his words: they were more destructive than his fists had ever been. “Last night. Your mother—she’s gone, Benjie. She’s dead.”
“What?” Ben stood up. The towel dropped to the floor.
Mickey couldn’t move. “Last night,” he said, thinking that with his words he had killed her, whereas a moment before she had still been alive in Benjie’s mind. He went on. “We were walking to the car downtown, and two kids came up to us. Wanted to rob us, take the car. Then something happened. They panicked, I don’t know what. One of them pulled out a gun and began firing. Your mother was hit.” The story seemed incredible to him; the power of it steeled him, he fel
t like a prophet. “She died instantly,” he said. “I held her. She was peaceful. Someone called the police.” He then thought he might cry—it was like a renegade urge, the potent climax that suddenly betrays one and shoots through one’s concentration—but he managed to hold back, waiting instead for Benjie to start, so that he himself could release and rush over and hold the kid close.
But Ben only stood there. He said, “You’re telling me that Mom was shot to death.”
Mickey was stunned by the sound of that. “Yes,” he said.
“By who?”
“They don’t know yet.”
“But you saw them.”
“Yes, I—”
“They came up to you. What did they look like?”
“Their faces were covered, I couldn’t—”
“What did they sound like?”
“They sounded,” Mickey said, “like black boys.”
“Why? What did they say?”
“Benjie.” Mickey supposed the kid was just talking out of shock, that he needed to know details the way Mickey had needed to tell them in Flemke’s office. Anything to cover the fact of the body. “They wore masks and sneakers,” Mickey said. “I heard them speak. There were two of them.”
“What happened? Did you try to stop them?”
Mickey opened his mouth. Somewhere in his mind, from the moment Emi was taken away in the ambulance, he knew he would have to face that question of why. Why he’d done nothing, why he’d just let it all happen—thinking that by demanding it of himself, aloud, he would be assured—by Flemke, by the men down in the kitchen—that he was blameless, that there was nothing he could possibly have done without having made the situation worse. And blameless and faultless he’d been found. But under the scrutiny of his son (Emi’s son, really, and never had he seemed more his mother’s son than now), under such a cold and unforgiving glare, Mickey felt culpable, harshly implicated. He knew this was false, an outrageous charge; and yet he knew also that the worst was yet to come, that people—Ben included, Ben most of all—would begin to question why, why her and not him. And why indeed! Already Mickey could hear the voices, saying that here was a woman who had so much to offer, whose contributions would be missed, whose music had touched so many; why, then, had he been the one to survive?