The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

  The school was composed of fifty-six children from six grades, being taught—if that was the verb—by three teachers. It seemed to Sully more like a lesson in crowd control. The children were aggressive, loud, anxious. They stood when they were supposed to sit, they ran when they were supposed to walk, they threw things. They were wildly energized by a foreign reporter dropping in, and this gave cause for more noise and frenzy. Children had never done much for him, and Sully had been of a mind to pop them upside the head and tell them to pipe down. His old man hadn’t been wrong about everything.

  The two other teachers were older, maybe early forties, and Nadia, a decade younger, was the quiet one who didn’t say much. She taught the youngest children. He had been struck, immediately, by her genuineness and warmth (well, her eyes, too, a deep, honeyed shade of brown) and, after a few minutes of conversation, the sly wit, the rough voice (she smoked).

  That first day, snow had just fallen. Where were the pictures . . . ? Here. Here she was, blue cable-knit sweater, jeans, boots. Black hair, loose, free. The kids surrounded her, excited by the camera, mugging. A kid named Sasha put his head on her shoulder as she sat at her desk. Here she was in teaching mode, writing on a whiteboard, one arm drawn across her chest to keep her coat close in the near freezing air.

  A month passed before he saw her again. He took her a copy of the story, a version that had been picked up and run on the front page of the International Herald Tribune. By then four kids in her class were dead and they had moved the classroom twice. He saw her in the Merkale Market, too, just long enough to say hello. Two weeks later, he saw her there again. She lingered, standing outside next to a table scattered with anemic vegetables, a pale winter sun barely over the mountains, her skin white as parchment, a cigarette in her left hand. His voice nervous, he couldn’t help it he said hi and hello and then just did it.

  —So maybe could I take you to dinner or something sometime? I could—

  —Nobody goes to dinner. Only foreign novinari and UNPROFOR.

  —Okay. I wasn’t trying to—

  —You can come over if you want pasta.

  —’m sorry?

  —Pasta. Do you eat it?

  —Yes, yes, but—

  —Is English one of your languages?

  —Yes.

  —So you know, come over, eat pasta.

  Teasing him in that Balkan accent, that world-weary Euro air, looking at him now, those eyes.

  —Yes. I can. I can come over. I got two bottles of red from duty-free.

  And so it had proceeded in the speeded-up hyperreality of war. Before the calendar turned to February, they were making love, on her bed, on the couch, on the carpet in front of the couch. He put her on her knees in front of the couch and neither of them lasted long like that. Pillow talk:

  —You like Yugoslav girls?

  —I don’t know that I’ve sampled the lot. But this one, touching the tip of her nose with his index finger, yeah, I like this one. But I thought you guys were Bosnian now.

  —I was Yugoslav when I was born. Tito said we were all Yugoslavs.

  —Tito’s dead. Yugoslavia’s dead.

  —It does not change what I am. You, you’re American. From the south part?

  —Louisiana.

  —What do they do in Louisiana? Loo-ee-see-anna.

  —Fight. Fuck. Play football. Fish.

  Giggling, brushing her hair back from her face, propping her head on her elbow, the muslin-thin moonlight streaming across the room behind her. There were the hills in the distance, a deeper dark than the sky above it. He could see them behind her. She was a shadow, a shape, and she possibly had the most beautiful voice he had ever heard.

  —Only things that start with the ‘F’?

  —Okay, okay. They cook. They speak English funny. They go to church, a lot of them, anyway, Catholics and Baptists, not Orthodox. They teach you to shoot before they teach you to drive. Manners. Most of them have manners, unless you’re being an asshole, and then they don’t. Then they really don’t.

  —And your parents?

  —They’re dead. Like Tito.

  —They were Louisiana?

  —Yeah.

  —So you would stop being Louisiana if they called it something else?

  By summer, they had progressed to the point where he’d stay with her when he was in the city. They talked of him hiring her as his interpreter and trying for a visa, issued by UN forces that were running the airport, to come with him past the siege lines. But they both knew that would not work, and the idea sank into the gloom of the apartment in the late evenings. There was nothing but candlelight and books and their conversation filling the long hours. She read Bulgakov, reread Gogol, she got him to read Ivo Andric. She read Günter Grass, she read the García Márquez and the Faulkner he’d bring. She read an Elmore Leonard book in a single evening, trying out the slang, working on her accent.

  She read like this, and made love to him, he believed, because she knew she would never get out of the city as long as the war lasted. She was a Serb living with Muslims and Croats, a living anachronism, a relic of the days of Tito. She knew and he knew she would be detained on the far side of any checkpoint. The Serbs, identifying her as a traitor for staying behind in Sarajevo, would tell her they could not guarantee her safety if she proceeded into Serb territory, which was the nice way of saying they would shoot her in the back of the head if she took another fucking step.

  So she stayed, parentless, without family, like him, and they talked of their lives before and maybe after. The war progressed into the next summer and the following winter.

  —It won’t end until we are all dead.

  —Yes, it will. It will end before then.

  —Your Americans, the NATO, is never coming to help us.

  —Eventually they will. I think they will.

  They were in a pizzeria on the eastern side of town on an August afternoon, a small stucco place in the middle of a block on a narrow street. The location was shielded from snipers and a shell would have to whizz-bang straight down to hit it from the Serb-held hills, an angle that was beyond the laws of physics. There was moderately cold beer. It cost seventeen dollars per bottle. She had eaten two slices and half of another and was still too thin, the stress, the diet pasta and almost no vegetables, her skin breaking out across her forehead.

  —We will be in Paris in a couple of years, he said, and then this will only be the way it used to be.

  —I don’t like Paris.

  —Okay. New York. We’ll go to New York.

  —I don’t like New York.

  —You’ve never been.

  —I wouldn’t like it.

  —Tell me then. Tell me where.

  She thought, looking at him.

  —Santorini.

  —Greece?

  —I like olives.

  —To live?

  —Why not?

  —It’s a tiny little island. What will we do there?

  —Olives. We will raise the olives. And goats. And kids.

  —Baby goats are kids. You call them kids.

  —We will make baby goats, she laughed, finally, her mood swinging back the other way, and she slapped the table, tipping her beer back, laughing harder. Sully and Nadia, they fuck and make the baby goats!

  Sully pulled her scarf, the only thing of hers he had left, over his lap. He did not smell it anymore because he knew the scent of her had long since faded.

  In the late winter of the third year of the war, when spring was still just an idea, he flew into the city on an aid flight. He was unable to get to her apartment because of the late hour, the curfew, and the falling snow. He spent the night in the hack hotel, the Holiday Inn, and went by the hospital the next morning to talk to a doctor he knew for a story he was working on about surgeons operating without elect
ricity or anesthesia or running water. He stopped in the morgue on his way out because the only way to count the dead in a city with no phones was to go there and count noses. There were several bodies on stretchers on the freezing concrete floor and there was Nadia, eyes closed and half her head gone, heaved in twain by shrapnel from a mortar. The rest of her body, when he had pulled back the sheet, was completely untouched.

  The photograph of her in the cable-knit sweater was in his hand now but he was hearing her voice, that husky Balkan accent that would say his last name in the dark, two syllables, Car-ter, Car-ter, like a chant, like a prayer, when they made love, as if it were carried by the breeze that would blow in from her balcony window.

  ten

  The sun was streaming across the room in ribbons of light, the sound of traffic coming up from the street below. There was no clear sense of the hour. Cotton balls seemed to fill his mouth, and there was a dim throbbing at his forehead. The phone was ringing.

  He blinked and sat up. He had his shirt on from the night before but had taken off his jeans and socks. The pictures were everywhere, on the bed beside him, on the floor, on the bookcase. His eyes wandered till he found the clock by the bedside lamp. Twenty after ten.

  “Fuck me,” he said.

  The caller ID on his cell read PRIVATE NUMBER. He coughed and clicked it on. “I didn’t think you did Sunday mornings,” he croaked.

  “I do brunch on Sundays in good weather,” Sly Hastings said, sounding like he’d been up since six, gotten in a nice run and a workout at the gym. “I’m sitting here reading my paper in a reputable establishment, a place people stand in line to get to, and this story you got here, you trying to run down my property values.”

  “I didn’t create the neighborhood, Sly, and I didn’t kill anybody in it.”

  There was a pause. “What, you got jokes now?”

  Sully, coughing some more, brushing the pictures back in the box, “No jokes, hombre. They wanted poetry of the neighborhood. You want better poetry, move to a better neighborhood. What’s the reputable establishment?”

  “Colorado Kitchen. Where they make real waffles and fried chicken. Which is what I got today, thanks to you. Put me in the mind for it, me and Lionel.”

  “So at least I did you a favor.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as a favor. A suggestion. But look here. That’s not what I called to tell you. I called to tell you to be ready for some news today. I think our friends in law enforcement will stumble across them three brothers they looking for.”

  Sully paused, then said, “You didn’t.”

  “You damn skippy I did. MPD and the DEA and FBI and all them other goons? Out there like ugly on ape. Two detectives and a fed came and knocked on my door last night, you know it? Acting all friendly, asking if maybe I knew something about something. You know what that tells me? It tells me I ain’t got no outstanding warrants, I ain’t got a goddamn parking ticket, ’cause they will bury you with that shit if they can. So, they asking a favor? Well. That’s a business proposition. So, as a responsible homeowner and taxpayer, I assisted local law enforcement. About where maybe they might could find them three.”

  “And what time is this to happen?”

  “You know, police can’t ever just go get motherfuckers. They got to call SWAT and fifteen other badasses.”

  “I thought it was bad form to cooperate with police.”

  “It is if you’re in the getting-caught-at-it business. If you’re in the keeping-your-ass-on-the-street-and-making-money business, which is my line of work, it is a sound decision from time to time. Particularly when you know they ain’t done it. They’ll be in D.C. jail for six months or something and they’ll be back home. Daddy Sly’ll be there for them when they walk out.”

  “How you know they won’t get drilled?”

  “This ain’t the parade of the innocents, you hear me, so I wouldn’t worry about these three brothers even if they do wind up catching a twenty-five-year bid. But they ain’t no way they did this, and not even the U.S. Attorney’s Office is going to think that.”

  “You tell your new friends in MPD that?”

  “Oh, hell no. They out there saving white folk from crazy-ass niggers, far as they know.”

  Sully hung up a minute later and went downstairs to put on the coffee. When it finished, he called the desk and told them to look out for an arrest of the three suspects. Patrick Ogle, running the paper for the day, startled, asked him his source, and Sully said it was reliable and not to worry about it. Sweet as spun honey, he said he’d love to help more, but that Melissa had asked him to cover the Reese family announcement and that he had to run. Also, since he’d be on the bike? He couldn’t take any calls. Sorry. Clicked off to end it before Patrick could say anything else.

  He drummed his fingers on the kitchen counter and put three spoons of sugar in the coffee and sipped and looked at his tree. Picking up the cell, he punched in the numbers of MPD lieutenant John Parker, deciding to see what he could get out of him.

  John was a decent sort but last year had been put in charge of the city’s demoralized homicide squad, a group beaten down by years of crack wars, union infighting, and then, the coup de grâce, the chief’s sudden orders to decentralize. The chief had the brilliant idea that he would spread his best detectives out to the city’s seven wards. Supposedly this was getting guys out on the street, closer to the action, closer to the Fat Chuckys of the world, who would turn on bigger players like the Sly Hastingses, which would help them solve more of the sixty-five percent of the cases that were now going unsolved. It was a pathetic closure rate, Sully would grant the chief that—two out of three killers in the city were literally getting away with murder—but blowing up the department, separating your best thinkers and most experienced ballbusters was just depriving yourself of decades of institutional knowledge. And then there was the practicality of it all: John had guys twenty years on the force and suddenly their commute got bumped from twenty minutes to get to headquarters to an hour, each way, to get out to 7-D. It was a morale killer, and John was still swimming upstream in a river of shit.

  This morning, his cell rang five times and went to voice mail. Sully cleared his throat, still waking up.

  “Hey, John, how you living? I just need to know what time and where the raid is going down on the suspects in the Sarah Reese homicide.” “I just drove by and saw your car out back of 4-D so don’t even fuck with me that you ain’t working this. I’ll call you back every three minutes. You know I love you.”

  He hung up and went into the backyard.

  The tree, he decided, would look better with flowers around the base. He walked out front to get the paper. Flapping it open, he saw that his story was the centerpiece. The phone rang.

  “You’re not half as smart as you think you are,” John said.

  “I’d believe that if you hadn’t called me back so fast.”

  “You get this from our shop or the feds?”

  “I’m a popular young man, John. People like talking to me. It’s flattering. And this is—have I mentioned?—never seeing the light of day. I have not spoken to you.”

  “We’re going to talk about this later.”

  “Un-hunh.”

  “The 1500 of First Street, Southwest. First and P. Three-story apartment complex. Don’t even try to get on First. Stay on P.”

  “When?”

  “I’d say just before dark. And keep your head on a swivel.”

  A couple of Tylenols later, Sully was dressed and taking the bike out on Constitution Avenue, past the museums and the Mall, opening up the throttle as he crossed the bridge, looking over the dark brown waters of the Potomac until he was in Virginia, peeling right on the George Washington Parkway. The rain had blown through and now the air felt so clean it seemed somebody ought to be charging for it. Far below, the yachts rested out on the Potomac, bright white d
ots in the sun. The doctor, the guy at Landstuhl, the one who had told him to focus his mind on something good and hold it there? He had said it was a bit of mental discipline to pull himself out of everything that had happened in the war, the things that he had lost.

  • • •

  By the time David Reese emerged from the front door of his house at one thirty-five, the press herd on the street out front was fifty or sixty strong, nervous, mooing in their discontent. Reese was in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, walking briskly down the sidewalk, turning and walking up the driveway toward the street. The house was an impressive but not overbearing two-story colonial on a street filled with them, the kind of well-to-do-but-not-ostentatious place federal judges seemed genetically programmed to seek out. Manicured hedges, mulch in the flower beds, half a dozen oaks in the front yard, a canopy of green. In the back, Sully guessed, was the pool and the deck, maybe with one of those little rock waterfalls. It took him a few minutes to spot the security cameras, discreetly mounted on the balcony over the front door and next to the light over the driveway. Just once, he thought, watching Reese move up the sidewalk, he’d like to meet a federal judge who lived in a row house, drove a Civic, and vacationed at Ocean City because that’s all he could afford.

  Now, with Reese in plain view, the press crew bolted into action, cameramen trying to pull him into focus while he was walking—a few extra seconds of video would go a long way for background fill—with Secret Service officers or U.S. Marshals flanking him as he approached the bank of microphones. He stopped there and they kept walking toward the mob of reporters.

  The taller one with dark hair said, almost in a whisper: “No questions. No questions at all. There will be no questions. Judge Reese will make a statement and that will be the end.” Then he and his partner moved back, flanking Reese.