South by South Bronx (20 page)

“Mink? Are you still there?”

Clatter clatter can cranking slam pounding that brush then tap tap tapping to drain it wetless.

“Mink! Caw, that sound … Christ, Mink. Are you painting?”

Rise and fall breath. Brush tap tap tap. She was NO blocks and cubes. That was funny. He laughed. Bruce laughed. They were both sharing it. Almost old times.

“I'll check out the CD-Rom,” Mink said.

Those old Vargas books, those pinup poses splashed on bellies of B-17s. Her face, that face, there was a picture in his mind and the more he thought about it, the crazier the vibe felt. When he was sure he knew what he was looking for, he hit the speed dial on his phone.

“Monk is home or Monk is not home,”
the answering machine said in Monk's voice to a background of cascading crunchy power chords from a band called Feeder.
“Monk might not be here or Monk is listening to your message right now so make it brief and interesting.”

(beep)

“Monk. It's me, Mink. Hey, listen, do you remember that picture book about Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler we were thumbing through last week? I forgot what it was that took us there but I really want to look at some of those pictures again.”

There was a click. Monk disengaged the machine with a peal of feedback.

“The book was
Eva and Adolf
by Glenn B. Infield,” Monk said. “What took us there was you seeing a documentary about Eva Braun's home movies on THE HISTORY CHANNEL. I got it right here.”

There was a feel of relief, a feel that things were now swinging into a regular rhythm. Uninterrupted unstoppable as always, whether painting whether not, whether writing whether not—there was Mink. There was Monk.

“You think you could bring it over, man? I mean, if you're not too busy …”

“Yeah, sure.” No hesitation no pause no sense of discomfort, just the usual fusion with something new. “I picked up my copy of EL DIARIO. There's something in here I gotta show you.”

“Come on down, bro.”

The sense that things don't change. That buildings that streets may come and go, change colors change shape, but that things still stay the same. To Alex the problem wasn't the South Bronx, or the people. It was inside him somewhere and it made it impossible for him to be happy there. He felt stuck there. The air was gone. The clouds hung like gray drapes. He was thinking that a life is made up of events that happen, forming a chain that creates a narrative. It adds up to something, it becomes the story of a life. A direction is visible. Alex would have given anything to feel he was on a path, that his life was a sum of events leading to now. He remembered one night, sitting in Mink's apartment with Monk, talking out this blackout problem. Vodka flowing freely, plus Mink made killer cocktails that started subtle and turned deadly.

“Sometimes I think Puerto Rican history is one big blackout,” Monk had said. “Some people have collective memory loss, a whole tribe. Other people train themselves, like the Americans are learning to do. It's picked up. A learned behavior. B.F. Skinner. Electromagnetic physics. The luminiferous ether.”

“I think the problem is the narrative,” Mink had said, getting a squint-eye from Monk. “The fucking narrative. The day-to-day. The sense of beginning and end that memory gives us. The trap of having to tell a story in its proper sequence. It's because of memory, Alex. You don't know how lucky you are to black shit out! I met her on a Sunday, I fucked her on Monday, on Tuesday she left me. But what if between every moment, there was a blank? A dark spot, a smudge on the tape? Something that obscured the narrator's voice?”

“A blackout,” Alex said.

“Exactly.” Mink snapped his fingers. Tore a scrap of newspaper from some nearby place. A chunk of charcoal. His hand worked fast. A slash, a few taps, some scribbles. “I would diagram it as

so that memories are a series of events that progress on a line, theoretically from A to B to C. The narrative moves the events along, gives them perspective and clarity. It's what we call the passage of time. But say we interrupt that narrative? If we cut into that line with a series of blackouts, events lose their connection. They become random, disconnected moments with no perspective, no predetermined flow.”

Alex was thinking a lot right now about these disconnected events in his life that meant nothing. He did not want to accept that this Ava Reynolds episode was just another meaningless nothing event that led nowhere. He just couldn't get it out of his mind.

Robert trooped in late, more in the mood for a slow cigar and a long talk about the weekend's excesses, than work. Diana from the perfume counter came over and asked why he hadn't called her. Taína brought him a homemade
pudín
. He didn't really know her but she sat for twenty minutes, chattering away about how committed she was to the battle for
Vieques
before asking him what he was doing for dinner. There was that young girl checking out the flats who looked like Penelope Cruz and wouldn't leave. There were three women who made a habit of visiting him in the mornings, and this morning they all came at once. It had never happened before, and was vaguely stressful. Alex avoided it. Robert could be a real barnacle. He got rid of the guy by telling him Penelope Cruz was asking for him, then stepped outside for another cigarette break.

The clock moved slow. The streets teemed with life, a buzz of expectation. When his cell phone went off, he flipped it open, checked the screen, clicked the line.

“Monk,” he said, almost breathless.

There was a sound, a clatter bang.

“Alex. Go to the newsstand and pick up a copy of EL DIARIO.”

Alex didn't think to question. He crossed the street and cars honked. There, by the subway station entrance, was a newsstand. He plunked down some moolah and picked up the newspaper. Pinning his phone between cheek and shoulder, he walked like a hunchback.

“Got it,” he said.

“Turn to page five,” Monk said.

Alex flipped pages, almost dropping the phone. He tightened his grip, he arranged the page, he stared at the photograph in the story about a murder in the Bronx Saturday night.

“Shit,” Alex said, feeling a deep chill.

“Okay, you got to tell me. Is it her?”

The picture showed her with that guy from the ID. The two of them snuggled together, smiling. He had his arm around her.

“Alex! Is it her?”

“Yes, it's her.”

Just like that, the line went click.

22.

When I left Myers last night, it wasn't even raining. There was no air. The empty dark quiet was a shock. There was hardly a transition between night and day, almost blackout almost mirage almost a dream full of answers to be deciphered. I don't remember sleeping. It all flowed from wake to dream to wake, seamless like a montage. Milagros gave me a special bath of herbs that
Santeros
call a
despojo
. There was a lot for us to talk about. We were booked to fly to Mallorca in a week. Lieutenant Jack was not so happy I was heading off on vacation soon. Maybe he thought I would cancel the trip, like I would've in the old days when it was all pasion and fire. His round crinkled face was bursting with energy and it wasn't just the coffee or the cigarettes we smoked outside the window. It was his still-throbbing cop heart and the belief he had that he could solve the murders of David and Spook with that cop head of his, that cop heart. I couldn't tell him cop answers wouldn't work. I couldn't tell him about the answering machine tape, about a trail and where it led me. I knew if I told him, he would try to talk sense into me, talk me down from the ledge, talk me out of it. I just couldn't go there with him.

“Hey,” he said, “what the hell is the matter with you? I've been blathering over here for about an hour already. It's like you're in a fuckin coma …”

“It's just this Myers shit.”

“So what? What's that got to do with us?”

I sucked in that smoke. I closed my eyes. Cigarettes help the stall. A sick feeling came over me in waves.

“Jack, they're not going to let US find who did it,” I said, knowing at once how crazy that sounded.

Jack ditched his cigarette. “Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?”

There was an empty space. Between US, just words and time, which increased the distance minute by minute. I might as well have already been on that plane, crossing the Atlantic.

“I can't,” I said. I could hardly look at him.

“You know I'm going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

“I'm banking on it.”

He pulled three loose cigarettes from a pocket and handed them to me before he went back through the window and left me standing out there, fielding that call from Myers. The man always had timing.

“Yeah?”

“Sanchez. I've got her.”

“What?”

“I've got a bead on her. We picked up her cell phone. She's on a fucking train!”

My cigarette, that flaming nib. Burned my fingers. Ditched down the grille.

“Myers, are you sure?”

“I've been waiting for her to turn on her fucking phone. I just knew if I waited long enough, it would happen! It looks like you were right about her. She's on a fucking train, heading north!”

“Myers! Listen to me.” He was talking too fast, he was way worked up. “Why would she turn on her phone?”

“Just get your ass up to the helipad in Hunts Point! We've got our ripper trace and we're on our way over there with the bread truck! We'll meet you there.”

I tried to tell him I thought it was a trick, that she was too smart to turn on her phone when she's making a run for it, but I was speaking to myself. Myers was too keyed up to listen. He was talking some gibberish about how the two of them went way back, about how he just knew that eventually those feelings she had denied would get the best of her. So of course, he was saying, of course she turned it on, on purpose. She knew he had been waiting. It was a language. There was no point in telling him I thought she had done it for a different reason, but what the hell? We all had a part to play, and I was playing mine. I had hoped to lead him away from her. I felt, once again, like I was the one being led.

I was in my car, driving. I had the sirens going. I had the pedal down all the way. This glinty silvery sun, off windshields off car chrome, off the flowy East River. The helipad was right by the water, far past Hunts Point. Myers was already there with his two boys, both carrying equipment. The four of us crowded into a police chopper. I had ridden in choppers before but this time the lift-off made my stomach revolt. There was a dizzy spin of sky and turf, the uncertain sway and lean forward as the pilot eased the stick down and we began moving over buildings all blur. Myers was yelling at one of his people who had a small box with a GPS screen and some blinking lights. I didn't want to be looking at that blinking light, that fine track that a train takes on its journey—unchanging and sure—there would be no sudden dips and shifts, no swerve to the left like some runaway car in a pursuit video. The train was a steady long snake. I was thinking how beautiful the South Bronx looked from so far up. The chunky thick tenements had a French toast color, the streets between all grays and blacks like the piping on a fine suit. It sure looked greener from up there, especially along the edges. Highways crisscrossed like arteries pumping fat corpuscles. There, on the tiny GPS screen, overlaid with a dispatcher's map, was Ava Reynolds, her red blip sitting on that long silver snake that moved under trees, under highways, and sometimes under streets. The Tremont Avenue stop was clearly visible from above. We circled, Myers expecting to catch sight of her stepping off, but her blip did not move, and was not moving. The train, so smoothly long, stopped at Fordham. At the Botanical Garden, it was lost under beautiful green shrubbery. Her blip did not step off.

“You were right,” Myers said to me, looking almost grateful. “She's going home all right.”

“She supposed to take you with her?”

“You get to know things about people after a while. I can't explain it to you. I can't talk logic. I can only say that I felt she would do this. It's the same way I feel that once I see her, find her, I will also find the money.”

“I don't know, man.” I was shaking my head. “This doesn't look right.” At the same time I was wondering, well, what if it
is
right? Spook dead, David dead, the two of them reunited at some train station, and me standing there looking like the real sucker. I can't prosecute anybody, I can't arrest anybody. I can only stand there watching the two of them walk off into the sunset. And all I'd get for it would be the privilege of returning to my life, to the same tired turf.

The pilot's name was Jensen. He had a slow Brooklyn drawl and a good knowledge of the Bronx. With our train leaving the Williamsbridge station and Myers talking about landing, Jensen calmly informed us the closest helipad was Pelham. This put us at least three stations ahead.

I remember my legs feeling all springy rubber when I got off the chopper, that it seemed somehow I was still in motion. The lieutenant who met us there was named Mitchell. By the time we piled into a pair of squad cars with him and three other officers, the red blip was only a station away. I was amazed at how good Myers was at mobilizing the forces around him, and like a precision clockwork machine we were at the station just minutes before the train rolled in, already accompanied by a station manager and train dispatcher.

When the train rolled in, the Metro-North police had already sealed off all the exits. Once the train stopped, it wasn't going anywhere. The conductor kept the doors shut for us, until Myers and his boys effectively narrowed down that red blip to a specific train car. By that time, I wanted a cigarette so bad I almost ate one.

“It's this one!” Myers yelled, peering in through the windows. Not easy to see with all that reflection. Did I mention that he had been calling her cell phone? Over and over he had phoned, but she had not picked up. She had not said a word, had not bothered to acknowledge him. I had quit trying to tell him—I had quit. I hung back when the conductor finally opened the doors of the car, only that one. Myers stormed in with his boys, plus about six cops. I stayed by the doors, watching them all fan out across the narrow aisle, this way, that. There were only six passengers in a car that seats 112. Myers rang the number again. The guy holding the small GPS unit said, “It should be that seat there

because the blip is still there.” The seat was empty, except for that cell phone jammed deep into the tight space between cushion and armrest

the ringer disabled, though the phone vibrated with his call.