Switch

by William Bayer

  The food came steaming and they attacked it greedily. He complimented her on her dexterity with chopsticks. She told him she'd had quite a bit of experience using them during her two years in Saigon. He asked her what it had been like out there, especially at the end during the final siege and the collapse, and as she talked about it, told him her war stories, it occurred to him that she was recounting her adventures the same way as a man. A very engaging trait, he thought, since she was most attractively feminine. He knew that young women were different now, that their lives could be as adventurous as a man's without their turning masculine. He'd seen it occasionally in young female detectives, but this was the first time he'd experienced it socially, a thought that made him feel old, as if the world had passed him by.

  She was sympathetic when he expressed this feeling, and also mildly amused. She said she figured him for early fifties, and when he confirmed that he was fifty-one she said she didn't think that was old at all.

  "Al was what? Sixty-six or something. He was old, and he'd retired. He lived in the past, in his old cases, but you're engaged with the world now. No, the world hasn't passed you by, Janek. I have the feeling you're right on top of things, and very much in your prime."

  He liked her for saying that, liked her more than he wanted to admit, and now he wanted to examine that liking, growing in him at such an exceptionally rapid rate, because he was feeling something he hadn't felt in years, and it frightened him a little because it had been so long.

  He had been conscious for some time that all his relationships were tainted by his work. The searching look he applied to people, his constant quest for motives, strengths and weaknesses, figuring how to play someone, seize psychological advantage, manipulate, interrogate, break a person down—all of that, which was the essence of being a good detective, seemed to work against any possibility of intimacy. He had wondered if normal relationships were possible when everything from buying a newspaper to making love to a woman seemed to be part of some vast investigation that circumscribed his life. It was as if he could never escape his work. Except now, sitting in this restaurant with Caroline, he was feeling something else.

  Attraction? She was very attractive, of course, but he felt something more. His liking of her fogged his instincts. She was no longer just a good-looking woman but someone he felt tender toward. And since he knew she could not possibly feel the same way toward him, he warned himself to be careful lest he get banged up.

  They lingered over tea, talking casually. It was hard for him to believe they had met only the morning before. The crumbs of their fortune cookies and the little paper strips lay before them on the table. Finally they got up, Janek paid, and then they walked the teeming streets, looking into grocery stores, sniffing sharp aromas, gazing up at laundry drying on fire escapes, hearing strange utterances chirped from windows by old Chinese women with straight-cut hair.

  When they finally crossed Canal Street they found themselves in another world; they had crossed the demarcation line to Little Italy. He led her past his car to a coffeehouse he liked, across the street from a Sicilian clam bar where Mafia gangsters hung out and, occasionally, were shot.

  They had drunk many cups of Chinese tea; now they sipped Italian coffee. But this was more than an ethnic change; there was a different atmosphere between them now. The walk had loosened him. He had intended to be a listener, but now he found himself talking rapidly, telling her about his adventures when he was a young police officer and Al DiMona was watching over him, of chases and gangland slayings and the code of silence on Mulberry Street which the police could never break. And as he poured himself out, he saw a look of entrancement on her face.

  "Take me there, Janek," she said.

  "Where?" What had he been talking about?

  "To the shop. I want to see your father's shop."

  He had been talking about his childhood on Lafayette Street, his father's shop and the apartment above where his family had lived.

  It was only a few blocks away. No reason not to take her there. He passed the place often, sometimes drove out of his way just to pass it after work, but he had never showed it to anyone, not even to Sarah, and he had been married to her for eighteen years.

  "All right. It isn't much, you know."

  She nodded, took his arm. They walked there, stood across the street, looked at the storefront where his father had worked visible to passersby, repairing broken accordions, the trade he'd brought with him from Prague. It was an olive-oil store now, and the apartment above, on the second floor, looked uninhabited. Perhaps it was now a storeroom. Janek pointed to the window on the left.

  "I used to stand there Saturday mornings studying the street. My father was the best accordion repairman in the city then, and the old street accordionists would come to him from all the boroughs and New Jersey too. There was an old man with a decrepit instrument that was always falling apart, and every Saturday I'd watch him from that window as he limped across the street with his little monkey on his shoulder to have the old battered thing repaired. When I saw him I'd go downstairs and stand beside my father, waiting for the moment when the old man would set the monkey on the workbench and beckon me to shake its hand. I hated to do it. That paw was gnarled and scabrous. And, of course, I could have stayed upstairs, but something always drew me down. Perhaps I felt that old man's need. His one accomplishment, you see, was that he had trained the animal to do that simple trick. It made children happy, he thought. It made him happy if I shook the paw and smiled."

  She was photographing him. He hadn't noticed when he was talking, but when he finished and turned to her he saw she had her camera to her eye. It made him feel good, her shooting him. Her clicking shutter gave rhythm to his memories. He turned, started to say something, and then as his eyes met her lens she shot him again. And then she brought her camera down. She told him she'd shot out the roll.

  He wondered what she'd seen, what she'd caught. A middle-aged detective reminiscing, or something else? The love he was feeling toward her now—he wondered if she'd caught that too.

  "Will the pictures come out?" he asked. "Not much light here. It's pretty dim."

  "The lens is fast and the film's high-speed. They'll come out, Janek." There was a nice rhythm to her speaking, as nice as the rhythm of her camera's click-click-click.

  They paused at the corner of Baxter and Hester. She stood beside him while he unlocked his car. When he opened her door she just stood there under the streetlamp searching his eyes, and then he kissed her, and felt the warmth of her hand as she reached up and curled it around his neck.

  They drove back to Queens in silence. There was just the sound of the city outside, the summer sound of traffic and people, and it all seemed subdued somehow as if set in relief by the murmur of their breathing inside the car. There was a bond between them, he felt, and it heightened the feeling he had as they sat together and he drove, and the city was quiet, a gentler place because of the warmth he felt beside this quiet girl.

  Outside her building she turned to him.

  "Want to come up?"

  "Of course I do. You know I do." He paused. "I didn't know, Caroline, didn't know it was going to be like this."

  "I didn't know, either. How could we know? That's the mystery of it, isn't it? Sweet mystery."

  There was a spell between them and they were both careful not to break it. They moved quietly up the stairs. There was no talk, smiles, jokes, flirtatious looks as they paused and she opened her locks and led him in. The loft was softly lit. She had half a dozen Japanese-style paper lanterns, and they were set in various parts of the huge room. She had left them on when she'd gone out and now they cast a warm glow over everything, making the loft seem more tender than it had the evening before.

  She kicked off her sandals, opened a cupboard, pulled out a bottle of wine. He came behind her, stood just a few inches behind, and she turned to him and smiled. She handed him the bottle and a corkscrew, then brought down two glasses from a she
lf.

  "Music?"

  He nodded.

  She went to her stereo, chose a record from a rack beneath—Miles Davis playing with Coltrane, subtle and hypnotic, endless too.

  They sat side by side in her worn sling chairs, sipping and listening, not speaking at all. Then she stood and brought over a hassock and set it in front of him and sat so her back pressed against his knees.

  He reached down into her hair, ran his fingers through it. Then he massaged her neck, kneaded the upper part of her back, running his thumbs gently along her shoulder blades, and it seemed to him that she was purring almost as she moved her head slowly from side to side.

  It seemed to him that their lovemaking had been humane when, later, they held each other and stroked each other on her huge brass bed. He had felt consumed by tenderness, had reveled in the slow languorous rapturous way they'd moved at a half-time tempo, never lying still, but without banging or making any motion that was angry or angular, always smooth, always slow and easy. They had been people making love, not animals screwing, and he thought of that just before he fell asleep.

  He awoke several times in the night, wondrous at finding himself here sleeping in her loft, with her smooth, young, bare body beside him, listening to her drowsy breathing, feeling the warmth of her back against his palms. It had never been like this for him, at least as far back as he could recall. It had been a long time since he had made gentle love, felt this way toward a woman, held a woman so young and strong and beautiful, held her through the night. And he was amazed that it had happened. It seemed like an impossible dream, something he had longed for, that marked a turning point. It was all so strange, the way they'd met and then fallen in love, without any sort of courtship except her photographing him and taking his arm out on the street. All his detectiveness had melted away, and now he was a man again, reborn, and this seemed a momentous thing, as if his life would be different now.

  Suddenly he was scared—he, Janek, who normally was not afraid of anything. Maybe she did this all the time, he thought. Maybe she'd put him on about Al. Maybe she liked old guys, dried-up old detectives. Maybe she had a thing for them, was into handcuffs, authority and thirty-eights. Or maybe, since she was the new kind of woman who lived like a man, could screw around like a man, maybe this was just another night in the sack which didn't mean anything to her. If that was true he knew he would feel awful, more alone than he had felt when he was alone before.

  He fell back to sleep. In the morning, when he awoke, he groped for her but she wasn't there. He almost panicked until he heard her moving at the galley and then he smelled the aroma of coffee, and heard her steps as she came back to the bed, sat beside him, set down a tray.

  "Hey, Janek." She was sipping from a mug. She said his name softly, sensuously, as if she loved the sound of it, not the harsh way people called it out at precinct stations or on the street. He pulled himself up so he could sit beside her, his legs still beneath her sheets. She stroked his cheeks, whiskery now, kissed him lightly, then motioned toward the tray. He reached for the second mug, raised it. They toasted each other with coffee. It was six-thirty in the morning, and he still couldn't believe all this had happened, was still happening even then.

  Interviews

  Ten A.M. at the Market Motel: Amanda Ireland's father came down to meet Janek and Stanger in the lobby. Mid-fifties, clear blue eyes, a weatherbeaten face. He had a shock of gray hair that fell across his forehead and the look of a man from whom something very valuable had been stolen away.

  Mrs. Ireland, he told them, was too upset to talk but would be available if Janek needed her. There were three chairs and a glass-topped coffee table in the corner of the lobby. They sat down. Ireland chain-smoked. His teeth were yellow and there were brown stains on the thumb and first finger of his hand.

  "My wife always worried about her living here. She'd read an item in the paper about a murder or a mugging or a rape, and she'd say to me, 'Let's call Mandy tonight. She's scared to admit she's scared. We have to let her know that anytime she feels like it she can give up the city and come home and live with us.' So we'd call her and she wouldn't know what we were talking about, wouldn't even know about the crime. She didn't pay attention to any of that. She loved the city and didn't feel threatened here. She loved her job at Weston too, and going to plays and chamber-music concerts, and the excitement—she kept mentioning that. She said she thrived on the energy of New York."

  "What did she mean by 'excitement'?" Janek asked.

  "All the people, I guess. The crowds. All the different things going on at once. The pace. The way people walk and talk. She certainly didn't mean bars and discos. She was home most nights unless she went out to a concert or to dinner at a friend's."

  "People we've talked to say she didn't date."

  "Yes, that's true, I guess. She lived a quiet life. She had some boyfriends when she was in college, and when she went to France to study she met a boy in Grenoble and they were engaged for a while, but then it got broken off. We never knew whose decision—his or hers. She didn't want to talk about it, but we had the feeling she'd been hurt. She didn't seem interested in getting married or having a family or anything like that. We have another daughter who lives in Hawaii, and Margaret has four kids. Mandy didn't want that kind of life. She liked being by herself."

  "Excuse me for saying this, Mr. Ireland, but it seems a little implausible that your daughter never went out with anyone at all."

  "I don't know whether it's implausible. I think that's the way it was. Maybe it was just a stage she was going through. She was an adult. She chose her own life. She didn't care what anybody thought."

  "Did she ever speak about her friends?"

  He shook his head. "Not very often. Occasionally about colleagues at the school. She thought we'd be interested, I guess, since her mother and I are both schoolteachers, too. Actually I think she was very content living the way she did. We didn't pry, because there were areas she didn't seem to want to talk about."

  "Such as?"

  "Her love life. Her social life. Things like that."

  "But you just told us you didn't think she had any kind of love life."

  "That's what we thought, but how do we know for sure? We took what she said at face value. She never tried to deceive us, but if either my wife or I pressed too hard she'd just shake her head and laugh. 'Come on, Mom. Come off it, Daddy,' she'd say, and then we'd let it go because clearly she didn't want to talk about it. That was her privilege and we respected her feelings, of course."

  "What about this art teacher?"

  "Gary Pierson. She mentioned him. They went out a few times, and then became close friends. She told us he was gay."

  "Did you meet him?"

  "Yesterday. That was the only time. Up at Weston, in the headmistress's office. They told us he found her and he wanted to meet us if we came. He is a very nice young man. I felt he was pretty broken up. He took my wife in his arms and sobbed. I'm happy Mandy had a friend like that. He seemed like a person who really cared."

  "What about the other people at Weston?"

  "They were very nice to us, but frankly I thought they were more concerned about the reputation of the school, and finding a new French teacher in time for their opening next week. They're going to hold a memorial for Mandy and they asked us to stay for it, or else come down again. I doubt we will. My wife wants to go back to Buffalo this afternoon, so that's what we're going to do. Gary's going to clean out the apartment when you people say he can. The body will be shipped to us and we'll bury her at home."

  He paused, smiled, then his mouth turned bitter. "Mandy was an old-fashioned kind of girl and I guess what happened to her is what happens to an old-fashioned girl these days. The papers call her 'socialite' and 'debutante.' She wasn't either one. She happened to teach at a school where some socialites send their children and where some of the students become debutantes, so when she was killed all of a sudden it was 'East Side Society Girl Murdered in Her
Bed,' and then, when nothing happened, and there weren't any sensational revelations, the powers that be decided she was boring and dropped the story and that's the end of it as far as New York City is concerned. In a month the landlord will paint up the apartment, double the rent, and there won't even be a trace that she was here. The city will absorb her death as it absorbs so many things and we'll be left upstate with all our grief and pain."

  Janek met his eyes. Ireland was angry, and he was showing his anger the only way he could. He wasn't the kind of man who spoke bitterly very often, but now, Janek saw, he would begin to speak bitterly more and more. His friends would notice and say his daughter's death had marked him. They'd point to Ireland's bitterness and his wife's lament and whisper cautiously of tragedy.

  "We take this case very seriously, Mr. Ireland. We're not going to forget about it even if the papers do. There are five of us, detectives, and we're working on it very hard. We'll continue to work until we find who did it and bring him in with proof."

  "And then what? He plea bargains, goes to a mental hospital or makes a deal with the prosecutors and gets six to eight in Attica? We know what goes on and I tell you now it won't make one iota of difference to me. I have personally resolved never to inquire into your investigation. I don't want to know about it, because however it comes out it's not going to satisfy me at all. Now I don't want to be rude, but I don't think there's anything else I have to say. She came down here of her own free choice and lived her life and ended up getting killed. Some succeed down here and some fail and some find love and happiness and some get killed. Mandy was unlucky, her life is over and now we have to cope with that. I appreciate your efforts, certainly, but I can't relate to them. All I'm thinking about is how to keep my wife from going crazy and how to help her heal this awful wound."

  Stanger hadn't said a word during the interview. He remained quiet after they left the motel. Mr. Ireland was out of the case now, but it would be hard to forget what he'd said. However much talk there was of justice and one's duty to uphold the law, policemen were motivated by a need to make things even, redress the wrongs inflicted on a victim, and now Ireland had canceled out that need.