He’d sit at night with Red and try to let Bulley’s sermons wash over him, cleanse his sins and baptise him in one surging tide of words, but all he could hear was the hate and the sneering, the polemic rage of us and them. The revenge Bulley wanted upon mankind, on those who didn’t feel or see things the way he saw them. It seemed a high price to pay for that feeling of unanimity, to be disenfranchised universally in the hope of finding a feeling of harmony that was at odds with the world; it made no sense as far as he could see and for Alejandro it never would.
When Alejandro was younger, he and Guilhermo would borrow his older brother’s truck and drive out to the hills and climb into a low range of mountains, huddle in their sleeping bags to watch light splinter the sky and feel the darkness reach out above them and talk about the inevitable move they’d one day make to America, the cities they’d see, the girls they’d meet, the adventures they’d have. They saw themselves as returning heroes one day, a lifetime of stories written in the short years they’d spent across the border. As the sun came up, Guilhermo would climb to the highest point he could find and teeter on a cliff edge and call his friend up to join him, but Alejandro would always resist and hang back, too afraid to stand at the very place where the earth gave in to the sky.
‘The higher you go,’ said Guilhermo, leaning dangerously forward into space in a way that made Alejandro’s stomach flip over, ‘the more you can see. If you want to know the answers then you have to climb and we, Alejandro, we’ll climb.’
It was something his friend always said when they were alone out in the countryside and he thought about him now as he stood on the roof of his building. Dusk was a thick, horizontal stripe of orange, blue and black and New York winked into life below it. He leaned forward, ignoring the moving street below; he was above it all; he positioned his body the way his friend had, searching for the answers, climbing ever higher.
He thought back to the basement and to Red and to Bulley’s outrage, his anger caught in traces of spit at the corners of his mouth. He had heard the stories of Torquemada that Bulley never told, how he would take his victims up to a scaffold, their wrists tied with rope. He’d ask for their confession, ask that they recant, and when they would not, he’d push them over the edge almost wrenching their arms from their sockets, they’d dangle there, so very alone, their arms pulled uselessly above their heads, the pain making them cry out, their breath coming in short, hard spurts trying to find the words to sate the insane Grand Inquisitor who stood above them, so wrapped up in his God that he couldn’t see the cloak of other people’s skin that he wore, or the blood of the innocent covering his hands and face; he was blind to their pain and anguish while groping uselessly for the path to purity.
Alejandro resisted his grip and was suddenly free to find the answers his friend had promised him. In the distance he saw and heard The Beast – the train that had once promised to carry them into America and a new world of possibilities – come firing into life, wheels turning on an endless track, the sparks jumping; he felt the heat as it passed, the shouts of the people trying to board, attaching themselves to the streaking engine. He saw Guilhermo fall and as his friend fell then he was falling with him, the pair of them shuttered, stuttering shadows caught in the daylight between the carriages. The Beast left them lying there on the tracks, caught up in clouds of dust and the sound of their surprised laughter, together again for one last time.
Those were the things that Alejandro thought as he dropped down through the night air, the stars rising up around him; he looked up one last time like a diver trying to locate the bow of the boat in the choppy waters above him. Twelve storeys below, Henry Willow saw the body of Alejandro falling towards him as if it were rushing to get to the street. That was how Henry would always remember Alejandro, coming into sharp relief, like an image on videotape set on fast forward. Alejandro blotted out the sky above but made no sound. Willow drunkenly staggered backwards as Alejandro hit the sidewalk; he made a dull, wet sound on impact, completely broken. Something rose up and hit Willow in the face, but he was afraid to reach up and touch it and so he stood there with a whimper building in his throat and blood on his face in a smear that made it look like he was wearing a mask across his eyes. He screamed and sat down. A car skidded to a halt, doors slammed and someone came running and Willow could only point mutely at the man now shaped like a star that had somehow exploded out of the sky.
*
‘And I got on the phone pretty soon after that, you know?’ said Henry Willow.
‘I was pretty shaken up and I called Red and she calmed me right down, I took it as a sign that she and I might mean something, I’m a fucking idiot, sorry. But she was right with me on it, said that I’d been sent a clear signal, a sign from above. A sign from above, she wasn’t even fucking joking when she said that, can you believe that?’
Willow looked as rumpled as the clothes he was wearing, as if he were back there among the debris of Alejandro, his voice caught deep in his throat, wearing pieces of another man on his skin and suit.
‘Where was this exactly, where the guy fell?’ Green asked; he had no idea why, but he needed to know the name of the jumper, the hopeless case who had driven Willow back to Red and her church; he thought there might still be some answers lying there.
Willow scribbled the street address down.
‘Can I go now?’ Willow asked; he was like a shaken bottle of beer that had emptied out; all that fizz gone, thought Green.
‘Sure, one thing,’ said Green. ‘What happened to you two, Hank, why did you stop seeing her?’
‘That crazy church, she was obsessed with the place and those people. You never felt more outside.’ Willow’s colour was coming back to his cheeks, his ire roused, his emotions slopping around.
‘And that guy, Bulley, did you ever listen to the stuff he was spewing out? It was just hate-mongering and Red would look at him like he mattered so much, she told me he spoke the truth. You ask me, his idea of truth would have been to take guns into the street and offing anyone who didn’t agree with his way of thinking. He gave me the creeps, they both did eventually, she told me once that she’d die for him.’
Maybe she did, thought Green, but he kept that thought to himself as he showed Henry Willow the way out.
April 1980
Detective Green looked at the letter he’d written himself on the day that he’d finally stopped drinking.
The centre will not hold, it concluded. Look for me at the end of the bar and I won’t be there.
He smiled inwardly, what a cliché, a broken-down, drunk cop with a string of failed relationships, an ex-wife (Nancy Young Green, who’d only agreed to share his name while keeping hers), a child in the ground, and now he had a new twist to add to the downward spiral of his life: he was falling for a dead girl, or the idea of her at least. One who had been brutally beaten to death with a blunt instrument that they couldn’t find. He couldn’t even offer her redemption or release by capturing the person who had done this; there was nothing he could give her.
Though it was hard to feel down on a morning like this; the sun reflected in a thin shaft off the kitchen worktop, the air was clear glass cut through with a smear of faint blue. The city was neither too claustrophobically hot nor bitingly cold, it was just right.
‘Like Goldilock’s porridge,’ he muttered, surprised by the lightness of his mood. Days when the city shone almost always cheered him, they reminded him of California and his father, poker thin, always in black, an inverted exclamation mark, a dark shadow the sun couldn’t obliterate. He wished he’d carried his father’s understanding: sometimes he could be like a blunt weapon in comparison. He remembered his father’s bravery after his marriage had crumbled and he saw his mother bloom. She would come to their house and drift in through the door, her lift idling momentarily outside and then pulling sharply away, the sudden snap of its engine foreshadowing the impact she was about to make on both of them. It was like a plane hitting the house, he though
t, the tornado from Oz spiralling their home skywards to its doom.
Louis stood outside his father’s study one afternoon, and heard his mother in there, her voice rising and falling, quivering with a quiet anger; he couldn’t begin to imagine where it came from. He caught glimpses through an inch or two of doorway, quick flashes of determination and hate.
‘You know that moment,’ she said, her face close enough to his father’s that she could have leant forward and bitten through his cheek, there were times Green thought she might, ‘when you realise that you can’t be with the person next to you for the next ten minutes, let alone the next ten years?’ She hovered there like a mosquito waiting to draw blood. ‘I can’t even remember how long ago that was now.’
Each time his mother came back it was if she were trying to tip all the furniture in their home over before she left again; she wanted carnage, she wanted to be free, but not forgotten once she’d gone, she wanted to leave a mark. Green didn’t understand it then and he found it hard to fathom now. Those moments would come back to him when he’d investigate break-ins where the perpetrators would take what they wanted and then streak the walls with piss and shit, kill the family pet, scrawl obscenities on the wall; he’d stand there among the wreckage, the muted sobs of the owners ankle deep in remnants and memories they couldn’t possibly piece together again. The thieves’ anger and anarchy (not to mention the noise they made) escalated the chances of them being caught, but he guessed they were beyond the nuances of carefully calculated crime; they wanted revenge on something they couldn’t quite place, they railed against their world by smashing someone else’s into tiny pieces. When he thought of his mother, he thought of them, defiant and unrepentant, standing among the detritus of lives they’d chosen to stand upon, screaming into the black.
*
Green was standing on the spot where Alejandro had fallen from the sky and landed a broken man; he looked up, but the cross of blue between the buildings above him was giving nothing away. He half-expected a black silhouette to fall suddenly towards him and dash out the light, but it was only a crow that flew across his eyeline to startle him. Green had found something in Rose’s unexplained death he hadn’t been expecting and now here he was on the ground trying to reach up and find the answers that lay somewhere between heaven and earth. He imagined night falling and Alejandro pitching out of the darkness; Henry Willow couldn’t remember if Alejandro had cried out as he flailed against gravity and thundered downwards, it could have been the shock that had silenced him, surmised Green: no one expects to be thrown off their own apartment building, cast out and caught in the moment, before taking the inevitable long journey down.
Green took the stairs quickly, pushed through the door and past the water tower and stood where Alejandro had stood and studied the low wall that was the beginning and end of the roof. It was high enough to stop someone that might have stumbled into it going up and over to their doom, but low enough that it wouldn’t be so hard to kick someone into oblivion if they’d been standing there wondering at their place in the world. The police report had surprised him; as far as they could tell, Alejandro had been kicked in the back – he’d never jumped from the building; someone had forced his hand. There was something that looked like a boot-shaped bruise imprinted on his back: whoever had elected to harry Alejandro on from this life to the next had been emphatic about it. He imagined they hoped his injuries would hide their handiwork, but Alejandro had flopped forward like a poor diver hitting the water hard, he’d never turned in the air; his features might have been mulch, his bones fragmenting inside him, but his back still yielded up the outline of a heel, the sole of someone’s shoe; it was as if they’d stamped or stood on the hapless Alejandro before throwing him away.
Green spoke to the officers who had looked into his death, the case was still open, but tracing the source of an illegal immigrant who no one would admit to sheltering let alone employing meant that they were only chasing another ghost in a city that was filled with them. Green read the notes and began to treat it like he would any other case: he went back to talk to those who knew the victim and check for himself; Bulley thought he’d simply lost one more soul to the darkness that haunted every shadowy corner of his world. His old boss at the grocery store – who wouldn’t admit to knowing Alejandro until Green could convince him that he wasn’t there to bust him for hiring illegals – had surmised that he’d just stopped showing up, that a better offer had come up or he’d just been sent back home like so many before him. The people at his apartment were part of the shifting, floating workforce that underpinned the city, working illegal and long hours – the last people they wanted to talk to were the cops. He saw only mistrust and fear in their faces: it could have been any of them up on that roof and then dashed on the sidewalk below; they knew as much about Alejandro as he knew about them, and it was hard to look or care for someone who wasn’t there. You couldn’t blame these people for never trying to moor themselves to something solid when the version of the city they lived in was always at sea and they were constantly adrift; it was enough to keep their heads above water let alone look out for others and stop them from going under too.
‘I thought Red knew Alejandro, that they were friends, that she was the one who brought him here?’ Green asked Bulley, but Bulley, his eyes like a surprised owl through his glasses, gave a deft shake of his head.
‘She welcomed everyone in,’ said Bulley. ‘She stood at our doorway, she favoured no one person over the other, she watched over everyone, she saw to their comings and goings.’
‘They had coffee a few times,’ said Green, but he could feel himself grappling with the unknown, he couldn’t hold on to anything, no foothold so he might begin to climb. If there was a trail of hopelessness and despair leading from this basement to that roof he couldn’t yet see it, it had been lost in the commotion of the streets leading away from here.
*
‘No man can achieve such glories or power without either breaking the law or his own moral code.’ Robert Walker’s father had said those words on the boy’s twelfth birthday. Whether he was talking to himself or his son remained a mystery, one thing Robert Walker wished he’d asked his father when he still had the chance. He had stood in his father’s office overlooking Manhattan while his father pored over sheaves of paper on his desk, a great oblong of carved wood almost as deep as it was wide, obscured by notebooks and reports, pieces of neatly typed A4 marred by his father’s squirrely signature, a scribbled line of black ink that ran from a fat flourish to an inconspicuous scrawl to nothing. Like a python digesting a boar, Walker would think later, or the trajectory of my father’s miserable life.
‘“Power tends to corrupt”, he liked that one too,’ said Walker to himself, lighting a cigarette, now seated in his own office years later, another rectangle of glass and light sealed into place high above Manhattan. ‘“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”’ He mused, ‘So then, does that mean that great men are almost always bad men? Does that mean, given the company he kept and the precedent that history or Shakespeare set, that my father wasn’t such a bad guy after all?’ Walker sighed. The notion of power corrupting his ideology the way cancer went after certain cells troubled his father, especially later in life as he weakened and fell ill. Walker Senior had begun to imagine that his inevitable demise was a manifestation of his own deeds; karma had never bothered him until he was unwell and then he began to carefully measure the metaphorical scales set before him. ‘Karma, he believes in fucking karma now?’ Robert Walker had asked sneeringly of a doctor who had conveyed his father’s words to him. Walker thought back to the old man there among the tubes, the dull beep signalling life intermittently: the too-bright lights. Karma and fairness didn’t bother Robert Walker one bit, not anymore.
It was late, most of the city’s workers had gone home for the night and, from the distance, Walker’s office looked like it was suspended hundreds of feet in the air, hovering as a point of light that might rise sudd
enly, tilt and sweep towards the horizon, Walker caught as a thin blade of black against the ever-receding oblong of neon. It hadn’t always been this way, thought Walker, a momentary face at the window, a satellite above the city, his father had only started to wonder at what he might leave behind, at the shape of his legacy, once he’d survived his first serious illness and seen friends and associates wither and die. Walker had watched the old man weighing up the odds, checking to see what bargaining power he might have with his God when they did finally meet. ‘There aren’t enough chips in the world, or enough rolls of the dice to win this one, dear Father,’ he said half-mockingly as the old man sat there scowling at reports and spreadsheets, tallying up and counting the cost of his actions, the things he’d wrought.
Robert Walker’s father was a collector. Men had collected things for centuries; this was nothing new – cars, wives, companies, houses; the small stuff, as his father put it. For him, it was the collection of ideas, thoughts, words and phrases, the essence of things, which was how he often referred to it when he was asked what it was that he did exactly. In truth, his father filled the air with notions; he populated conversations and speeches with everyday parlance, jargon; words. It was as if he pinned letters on currents of air, black typeface against blue sky, so that the entire world might read them, say them aloud and bring them to life. It was something his father had done before him, his father before him too, and his before that. The grand patriarch of the family had been a speechwriter, a pamphleteer who had risen through the ranks of industries and then, almost inevitably, into the government of the day. He’d created and nurtured phrases that haunted boardrooms and meetings, literally echoed through the ages and down to the modern day.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 6