Empties

by George Zebrowski

  No, he told himself, the case was very real, not something sent at random to confound his reason.

  He looked around at his living room of ragged, second-hand furniture. He never sat in the two green easy chairs, so they came off best. It was the worn and torn sofa that looked as if it had been put out on the sidewalk before being rescued. The browned, parch-ment-like shades on the end table lamps seemed about to crumble into dust, but they had been decades old when he had bought them, and would last as long as he didn’t touch them. The coffee table was something a woman would hate and run screaming from when she saw it. There were too many unsightly repair nails in it, all of them the wrong size, but he never put his feet up on it, so it would not collapse. The bare wooden floor was a desert of dust balls, but with the windows always shut the dirt particles rarely moved, he told himself. The landlord had promised to paint, but his scheduling was always delayed. His wife had died a few years ago, and he seemed not to care about anything.

  Benek told himself that he had become a cop because he could do it, because he could peer into people’s minds just enough to see cases clearly. Maybe this kind of life was all the powers-that-be had planned for him, except that there were no such powers and he had made his own choice. Most cases were not anything deep. He saw cases well enough to do his cop job when called out. Great wisdom was not needed.

  Anyway, he had no time to clean regularly or decorate his apartment, and what good would it do him even if he did? When would he have time to invite anyone over? What would he say to a guest? Most of the other cops at the precinct lived in Queens, the Staten Island cop enclave, or on Long Island, and much of their free time was wasted in getting there and back. From upper Manhattan, Benek got to work in a few minutes.

  Still, there was a kind of order and neatness to his living room that went well with the old beige paint job, reminding him of the still-life orderliness of the attic bedroom at his childhood home, which had not been opened in thirty years until he had moved into the house with his parents and disturbed the locked room’s dusty peace. His mother had cleaned it up, and had made a retreat of it for herself, because her husband was lazy, or too drunk to climb the stairs after her. Silently, she had gone there on the day he had died in her arms, and Benek had found her asleep in the big wooden double bed with a peaceful expression on her face.

  She had opened her eyes and looked at him calmly. “It’s all right, Billy,” she had said out of her silence. “He didn’t want to live. He wasn’t himself anymore. It’s all right.”

  The phone rattled the wooden end table. Benek let it ring, wondering that the old dialer still worked. He had found it at the same warehouse sale in Brooklyn where he’d picked up the old furniture. The old bell ringer got on his nerves, but he could hear it even in the shower, unlike the new models, which chirped like birds and trained him to mistake various other sounds for the phone.

  He picked it up on the fourth ring. “Hello.”

  “Bill?”

  “Yes.”

  “Frank Gibney. I’ve been checking up some more on the autopsy. Want to come over and see for yourself?”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said, shaking off his mood as he hung up, pushed his doubts aside, then grabbed his coat and went out the door. As he turned the key in the deadbolt, and then in the police lock, his phone rang again. He hurried to the elevator, thinking it was probably Arthur DeSapio, his neighbor from the floor above, calling to demand again why the fuck can’t you get a modern phone with a soft ringer and what kind of cop are you anyway disturbing the peace?

  Still, Benek preferred loud ringing to soft aviary calls.

  “It was routine, as Johansen told me,” Gibney said as they went into one of the smaller autopsy rooms. “But your concern made me look again.”

  Benek squinted in the harsh fluorescent lighting as Gibney lifted the plastic sheet from the center table and revealed the body of the old black man. “See for yourself.”

  Benek looked away from the scooped-out skull, but the room’s sickly green walls only made him feel even more like hurling. “So what do you think?” he asked, holding back.

  “I’ll say officially that this head was not opened and closed prior to the autopsy, and the skull was full of fresh blood.” He squinted at Benek with small, blue eyes, then laughed nervously. “There’s nothing else to say, and no obvious conclusion to draw—except that what we see here could not have happened. The blood typing was our only hope of showing that this was a hoax, but it’s all the same blood. Does that make you happy?”

  “Why should it?” Benek asked.

  “You seemed to want it.”

  “I appreciate your extra efforts,” Benek said.

  “Want to see the videotape of the autopsy?”

  “No, I trust you.”

  “Oh, we found this in the man’s shoe, covering a hole.”

  Gibney handed him a dirty business card. Benek held it up to the light and read:

  TENTH STREET APARTMENTS

  DIERDRE MATERA, PROPRIETOR

  An address and a phone number were printed in smaller letters in one corner. Benek put the card in his pocket.

  Gibney stared at the body and shook his head. “There has to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for what’s on this table. Something stupidly simple.” He covered the corpse.

  “I’ll check this address. Do you want to know what I find out?”

  Gibney grimaced. “Sure. No one here is going to go after this. No one cares about dead nobodies until somebody complains. Especially stiffs who seem to have lost their minds somewhere along the way.”

  Benek felt that Gibney’s further interest in the case was partly a favor to him, as if he were trying to make a friend.

  “I’ll keep in touch,” Benek said.

  Gibney smiled and nodded, and Benek felt like a tolerated son.

  4

  Sometimes it seemed to Benek that he had lost the city he had once found across the river. Someone had changed the reality in front of his eyes and replaced it with an elaborate, three-dimensional imitation. Details persisted, along with ragged edges where memories had been torn away. He might step into the dark one day and return as a stranger to the real city. There were days when it seemed to him that the old Penn Station had never been torn down. Old bookstores around Union Square reappeared when he wandered down that way, as memory tricked his tired mind. The true explanations were more than enough to disappoint any suggestible person who wanted to be spooked. The usual strangeness of the city’s ways made possible the people in it, he told himself. Was it the people who had made the city strange, or had the strangeness waited for them from before there was a city, to make the people strange?

  Tenth Street Apartments was an old, renovated four-storey brownstone in the middle of the block, with a tailor shop and dry cleaning store left and right of the steep front steps. The trim on both facades seemed new. There was an upscale grocery on the corner at First Avenue, but some of the buildings toward Second Avenue had yet to be saved.

  Grasping the black iron bannister, which he now saw was as sloppily painted as the riverside railing in front of the dead wino’s bench, Benek went up the stone steps to the white-curtained glass door and rang the bell marked “Office.”

  “Who is it?” a woman demanded over the intercom.

  “Police business,” he replied cheerfully, trying not to sound like an anxious intruder playing cop to get in.

  But the door buzzed open. He pushed through and went hesitantly down a narrow, well-lit corridor, noting the details. The floor was carpeted in gray. The blue ceiling was old tin sheet with a square-framed raised flower pattern, well restored, dating from the days of gaslight. There were two doors at the end of the hallway. The left one opened as he approached, and a dark-haired woman in a tweed business suit stepped out. “Your ID, please,” she said.

  He took it out and flipped it open. She leaned forward and examined it carefully. Benek noticed her light complexion and high chee
kbones.

  “What is it?” she asked, looking up at him with brown eyes, and he felt his sexual interest in her quicken.

  He looked away and took out a business card. “This was found on a dead derelict yesterday.”

  She took the card, then handed it back. “That is my card.”

  “Do you know how he might have gotten it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe from the man who sends me temps to polish the brass on our mailboxes, among other things.” She looked directly at him with a slight show of concern, but Benek knew she couldn’t care less about the dead man.

  “Can I show you a photograph? Perhaps you’ll remember him.”

  “Anything to help,” she said blithely.

  “It’s not a pretty picture.”

  He took out the autopsy head shot and handed it to her, watching her face closely for a reaction. She shrugged after a moment, with no sign of swallowing in the fine muscles of her throat. “I really don’t remember. They all look alike to me.” She handed the picture back to him.

  “Alike because he was black or a derelict?” Benek asked quickly, slipping the photo back into his pocket.

  “A derelict, of course,” she said, backing up and closing the door.

  He stood there, feeling foolish. It was an old ploy to provoke a possible witness into revealing something that she was either hiding, or perhaps was unaware that she knew. But that was not it. He had tried to rattle her because suddenly he wanted to see her composure fail.

  When he got back to the precinct, he found a memo on his desk, protesting the rudeness of the policeman who had come to her door, together with a tacked-on question from Mel Lasky, the morning desk sergeant, asking: “She didn’t say what you said to her, but she was angry. What did you say?”

  Benek crumpled up the note, knowing that Lasky had copied Captain Reddy. He should not have been so impulsive, but he did not regret annoying the porcelain-skinned landlady.

  Benek went on vacation in November, the first one he was entitled to since he had started with the precinct, but he hadn’t saved enough to go anywhere. He stayed home, grateful that at least he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.

  Increasingly, he felt demeaned by having to ask people obvious, provocative questions. It was like checking the coin returns in phones or vending machines, or worse, giving them a good whack, except that the machines paid off more often than people. Some cops could do without needling people, but usually there was nothing to lose and much more to gain, and it became a useful habit. Captain Reddy had not said anything to him about the complaint from Dierdre Matera, but he felt uneasy about the captain’s silence because Reddy had a fair-minded way of giving his men a free pass on unimportant complaints.

  On his second day off, Benek vacuumed his kitchen, living room, and bedroom floors. They didn’t look much different when he was through, but the air smelled better and the monotony of the job had relaxed him. Then he got a wet rag and wiped the dust from as many surfaces as seemed to need it, trying for the virtue that one was supposed to feel from cleaning, but he did not feel saved.

  He went grocery shopping every other afternoon, stocking up on frozen low calorie meals, several frozen cakes, some fresh vegetables, apples, and bunches of green, yet-to-ripen bananas.

  “Got a monkey at home?” the grocer asked him more than once.

  That evening he took out one of his old college books on Roman history and confirmed that the two men who had come into the precinct last month did in fact resemble the surviving images of Hadrian and Caligula. There had been no news on their stolen car. Benek put the book away and took down a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, preferring to read the work of a real Roman rather than a modern historian’s recreations. One day he would replace the copy of Livy that his college roommate Ray Ferguson had borrowed and never returned, despite repeated demands. Benek had called him up some years later and asked for the book. “You must be kidding,” Ray had said. “No, I’m a cop,” Benek had answered. A week later he had gotten a check in the mail, together with an apology for losing the book.

  Unlike Marcus Aurelius, with his equanimity and quietism, Livy loved gossip, and delighted in putting words into the mouths of his characters, making them confess to all sorts of crimes against Rome.

  Benek slept late into the next morning after the all-night reading binge, but woke up feeling somewhat refreshed and virtuous, having done something for himself rather than for the violent, dark age in which he lived. He stayed in bed for a while, imagining himself a professor of ancient history, reading, researching, and talking to students about the past, recording black marks against the villains of the day for futurity to discover. He had gone to Rutgers on his father’s life insurance money, but when his mother died of leukemia just after graduation, he had not been able to continue. She had hidden her illness from him while giving him all the money. After her death, there had not been enough money left to go on to graduate school even if his grades had been good enough. The family house had burned down on the day of his mother’s funeral, and he had learned that the insurance premium had not been paid for over a year.

  Maybe he hadn’t lost that much. He had always struggled with Latin, and would have had trouble getting admitted to any rigorous graduate program in history. So he had gone to the police academy because his grandfather had been a cop and because the course started a week after his mother’s funeral. Even now, it seemed impossible and dreamlike what had happened to him, but he had worked hard at not feeling sorry for himself.

  As he got out of bed he imagined that he might suddenly wake up and learn that he was entirely someone else.

  In the afternoon he took the subway downtown to the St. Mark’s Place movie house and saw a revival of The Grand Illusion, which now struck him as naive and sentimental, even though he knew that it probably wasn’t, that it was his problem, akin to the straw that broke the camel’s back; it didn’t take much with him to overreact to emotions on the big screen and get it wrong. When he came out, he noticed that he was only a block away from Tenth Street Apartments. The image of Dierdre Matera quickened his pulse as he debated whether he should go over and apologize to her for his rudeness, even if he didn’t mean it.

  But as he passed her house, he decided against it and continued down toward the corner grocery, where he bought some black bread and imported caviar, telling himself that he was on vacation and how many luxuries did he ever allow himself anyway. On the way back to Second Avenue he passed Tenth Street Apartments again, and once more decided against an apology. After all, the woman had to be thin-skinned indeed to be upset by so little from a cop.

  Yet she was very different from the women that Didsbury had tried to fix him up with occasionally—usually shy, single women, or recently divorced, vulnerable wrecks. The first kind invariably wanted him to move to Great Neck or Farmingdale and become a father. One or two of the second kind would put on a great show of passion that might even have been real, and try to convince him to have a child with them, whether there was to be a marriage or not. The idea of a woman bringing up his son or daughter alone and against his wishes had unnerved him. A child born without his knowledge was an even greater horror.

  Still, there was something about Dierdre Matera that sang to him and made him feel uncertain; maybe her controlled exterior hid a deeply erotic nature and a warm, loving personality. For a moment he fantasized about her, flattering himself with his ability to unmask her concealed goodness. Naked, her image was that of a demure woman who invited him into her arms. Powerful and unafraid, he surrendered himself to the lock of her legs around his waist and fondled the smoky black hair that fell to her milky shoulders.

  Four days into his vacation, soothed by his domestic routines and beginning to feel in control of himself again, someone knocked on his door. He opened it and found a young woman with short, red hair, dressed in a green sweater, jeans, and sneakers, just about to knock again.

  “Hi,” she said, “I’m your neigh
bor down the hall.” She looked up at him with green eyes and smiled. “My name’s Carla Selkirk. Would you like to come over for a drink?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said without thinking. No smoky hair or milky white shoulders.

  She seemed startled, then annoyed, as if she had read his mind. “There’s something very sad about you, you know. Whenever I’ve seen you coming and going, I mean. Are you shy or just otherwise inclined?”

  “I’m a cop,” he said, wondering at her confidence in asking.

  She smiled. “Well, then you’re one of the good guys,” she said, and for a moment he thought she might be a prostitute looking for an easy gig. Or maybe a woman slowly drifting that way, hiding behind an easy exterior, desperate to earn as her funds ran out.

  “How long have you been in New York?” he asked.

  “A couple of months. I was lucky to find an apartment.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” she said after an awkward moment, and hurried away.

  “Oh, Carla,” he called after her as she reached her door.

  She turned her head appealingly and smiled.

  “I’m Bill Benek. Would you like to come in for a drink?” he asked suddenly, and was startled by his impulse. That Gibney would approve seemed enough of a reason.

  “Sure,” she said, smiling, and came back down the hall.

  As she stepped inside and he closed the door, he said, “I’m afraid I can only offer you tea or coffee,” and showed her to the sofa.

  “Coffee’s fine,” she said, sitting down and looking around. “You like Spartan decor,” she added, then looked worried that he might take offense.

  “I don’t do much with it,” he said, wondering if she knew what Spartan meant or had simply used it instead of austere. “I don’t clean too often.”