Thirteen Ways of Looking

by Colum McCann

  The detectives make a note to check if Mendelssohn’s will has been recently changed, a not uncommon occurrence amongst nurses or housekeepers and their charges, though Sally James hardly seems the type.

  It is what the cops call a shrapnel case—the pieces exploding left right center up and down. Could be mistaken identity. Could be a hate crime. There is also of course the possibility of the random psychotic episode: a homeless man thrown slightly off-kilter, or a desperate robber at large. But there is no wallet taken, no cell phone swiped. The point for the detectives is to find the focus, the muscles that have propelled the punch. Then they might be able to move it backward, through the ligaments to the bone and bring it back eventually to the raw moment of release.

  Several theories are always less convincing than a single one, so for their primary one they remain with Elliot—there is certainly something there, though they cannot locate it yet: certainly it wouldn’t be unusual for the son to murder the father, it happens far more often than anyone acknowledges.

  After Elliot leaves, Mendelssohn waits and sips his wine. He rises a little unsteadily on his feet and goes to the bathroom, returns to linger at his dessert. He pays with credit card, signs his bill, makes his way through the rows of empty tables. Both the waitress and the coat-check girl help him with his coat. The detectives would like to tell them to stop, to do something entirely different, to have Mendelssohn sit down, please wait, don’t move, stop the world on its curve, decide against whatever it is he is doing, change the course of the world with lethargy.

  One click, and then he is gone. What frustrates them most is the outdoor camera, by the front-door foyer. The angle is perfect, but all they can see is Mendelssohn as he steps out into the storm, tugging his collar sharply, tapping his walking stick on the ground, pausing a moment, not visibly upset, moving forward. Thirty-seven seconds later he falls back into the frame, his Homburg spinning from his head. He smashes back against the ground. They see the assailant step into the frame for a fraction of a second. A dark figure bending down as if to whisper something to Mendelssohn. Baseball hat, a puffy jacket. It’s always so much easier to solve a case in the summertime—no hats, no scarves, no covered faces. But it’s winter and he’s a man of indeterminate race, impossible to tell, even in zoom, shadowed and hurried. He appears to have a scarf around his mouth and he wears a hat with curved letters, possibly a B or an 8 and a C or an O. They enhance it further, crop it, copy it, send it to video forensics. At a quarter of a second of digital footage—thirty frames per second—they have 7.5 images of the hat. After four hours of examination, they come back to say that it’s B.C. braided on the brim. The detectives immediately go to Google to see if Elliot went to Boston College, but Elliot is a Harvard boy through and through. Still, the assailant is someone with enough gumption to wear a Boston hat in Yankeetown.

  They split the screen and sift the images as thoroughly as possible, watching only the crucial moments in real time. The rest is speeded up so that there is a silent-movie quality to the footage, Mendelssohn eating quickly, donning his coat, moving herky-jerky toward the door on his walking stick, but then they slow him down as he steps outside, is gone from the image, and then reappears, frozen in midfall, frozen again a second later, his face a gasp of surprise: How dare you punch me, before his head cracks open in a pool of dark blood.

  There is no camera on the employee entrance, located ten yards down Madison Avenue, a simple metal door that leads past the bathrooms back into the kitchen. The only other obvious angle to the assault is from the traffic-cam on the light pole at Eighty-sixth and Madison: a wide view remotely accessed from traffic control. The quality is low, but the scope is wide. On any other day it might complement the restaurant footage—the tideline of taxis, the baleful swarm of dented trucks—but today it is obscured by snow blowing directly onto the lens, beginning with droplets that melt on the screen at first but then accumulate one by one, coalescing, a gathering curtain of white. It starts with flakes that melt and burn against the heat of the lens, stay a moment, rivulet along the screen. Then they arrive in more rapid flurries. They build, layer, vault upward into the camera, like a crowd of rioters obscuring the crime. At the time of the murder the only thing that can be seen through the granules of snow are the headlights of the approaching cars, small and spectral as they make their way up the avenue. No figures. No faces. No men in baseball caps. No images of an assailant running down the street.

  Moments after the assault, the granules pick up the vague swirl of blue-and-red siren lights until eventually the street is closed off and the footage becomes a static portrait of headlights. There is no soundtrack, but the detectives can almost hear the car horns blaring in frustration, until the word murder begins to filter among the stalled cars and they fall silent.

  The detectives look for cameras in the nearby stores and banks, but there are none with a suitable angle onto the front of Chialli’s. Yet they know that there is a solution embedded in the footage somewhere, or perhaps there is another camera to be found in the shops along Madison Avenue, or some other digital eye that is witness to the day. It’s a simple logic—a crime has been committed and therefore an answer must be available, somewhere, somehow. Nothing is elementally unsolvable. It’s an obvious physical law. If it happened, it can be unraveled. The difficulty comes in the sheer amount of work that must be done to sift through the footage. Even if they find a glimpse of a man in a B.C. hat—in the subway at Lexington Avenue, or walking quickly uptown away from the scene—they will have nothing to tie him directly to the punch.

  Just as a poem turns its reader into accomplice, so, too, the detectives become accomplice to the murder. But unlike our poetry, we like our murders to be fully solved: if, of course, it is a murder, or poetry, at all.

  VIII

  I know noble accents

  And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

  But I know, too,

  That the blackbird is involved

  In what I know.

  In he walks, a ball of bristle and fear. The phone shoved against his ear. In trouble again, no doubt. He shakes off his overcoat at the coat check. Drips of snowmelt on the floor in a wide constellation. The coat-check girl gives him the once-over. He removes his scarf to reveal a neck that could fold over itself several times. There is something of the ancient walrus about Elliot, imposing and lumbering at the same time. He exposes the big bald head with a whip-off of the hat and gestures across the restaurant with a single finger raised: Wait for me, but don’t expect me to hurry. He turns away from the coat-check girl and cups his hand over the phone. A serious call indeed. An anger in the bend of his body. A touch of the Irish about him. Red and veiny. What happened to Eileen’s fine genes? Maybe they all went in Katya’s direction. Strange how it happens. We never really become fathers to the whole experience. We become, instead, the sons of our sons. What happens to them, then, happens to us. So be it. That’s my boy in the corner of the restaurant, shouting now into his cell phone, and here I sit, with a glass of water, watching, and the truth of the matter is that I couldn’t love him any more or dislike him any less—the curse of the father. Could somebody please quietly shut him up and guide him over here to my favorite table so that he can shake my hand, maybe even kiss my freckled forehead, say hello, and slide silently into his seat and be the charmer that he once was? Maybe the snow will interrupt the cell-phone signal and we can sit in peace, and when was the last time we actually spoke to each other, not just pleasantries? When oh when did I say a word to him that truly meant something?

  He reaches for his glass of water—and thank the heavens, he can see Elliot getting off the telephone. Hurry on now, son, you’re making quite a fuss, another fifteen minutes of my life gone to waste.

  Snow really hammering down outside now. A swell of intent, slantwise along the street. Mach shnell, son. Join me.

  Across the room, Elliot raises his finger once again, this one in apology, or what seems like apology at least, and begins t
o dial once more.

  Oh, to hell with manners, which waitress is mine? Can’t remember, though she’s been at the table at least twice already. Is it the tall blonde or the small blonde or the medium blonde or the medium-medium blonde with the ponytail? The new manager, it seems, has a stake in a hair-dye company.

  He turns in his chair and flicks a look across the room and, sure enough, here she comes the medium-medium blonde with a smile on her face. They grow more beautiful by the year. Either genetics or it’s the optics of old age.

  —Yes, Mr. Mendelssohn?

  —I’d like a glass of Sancerre, my dear.

  —Of course, sir.

  —And a Cabernet too. For the full-bodied fellow over there.

  —Excuse me?

  —My son.

  —Oh, of course, sir.

  She smiles mischievously and swishes her way towards the bar. Oh, for crying out loud, Elliot, get off the phone and stop embarrassing me, please. The temptation of the Apple, the glory of Eve, the confusion of Adam, and what is it with me and the Garden of Eden today? Let me remain with my BlackBerry, dangling on the vine, and did they have any blackberries in Eden, I wonder, to complement the apple trees, and where is it, by the way, the phone? He pats his pockets but it is not there. Must have left it in my coat. Turned up to high volume if I recall correctly. Or was it only on vibrate? That would be embarrassing if the thing starts to ring from afar. No more than six customers in the restaurant today, but that would make the noise even more acute. Please don’t let it ring, please. Turn up the music, Dandinho, please. Funny that. It’s Mendelssohn. Symphony no. 4. Filtering over the speakers. A nice clean, cool sound, though he can still hear his roiled-up son barking into the telephone. Once upon a time he was a charmer with a garrulous gift, but somewhere along the way it dissolved. Take it outside into the snow, Elliot. If your mother were here, she’d march straight across and give you what-for. And what is it we give our children anyway, except the ability to not become us? How awful the world would be if we were all carbon copies of one another. But Elliot most certainly is not his mother, and maybe I have to face it: he is more me, more’s the pity, for him, and for me, and perhaps for the rest of us too.

  Here she comes, tray in hand. Sweating nicely: the glass, not the waitress. And a generous pour too: the drink and waitress both.

  —You’re looking splendid today, young lady.

  A speck of blue paint on the inside of her wrist. Probably an artist, they all have second jobs. Abstract, no doubt. A Brooklyn landscape, neat and precise but with a nice rounded swirl.

  —Thank you, Mr. Mendelssohn. You’re quite dapper yourself.

  Oh, how quickly the dark clouds disappear. From diaper to dapper. And she even knows my name. Genuine, it seems: she’s not just blowing smoke, like half the waitstaff seem to do every day, their mundanities, nice to see you, have a good day, are you still working on that, sir? I’m eating, young lady, not working. This medium-medium blonde has style and taste and charisma. Not just another throwaway. He must remember that come tip-time. He does indeed look—what’s the word?—oh, it’s fallen off the cliff face, gone, the old Yiddish phrase, there’s a few still in the vault, they bob up like Halloween apples, here and there, but what is it? Gone. Still and all, he looks dapper, yes. A Brooks Brothers shirt. A Gucci tie selected by Sally. A beautifully cut suit made for him by none other than Frankie Shattuck, the young boxer-tailor-soldier-sailor. The best damn suitmaker in New York. Good creases in the trousers. A beautifully finished collar. Silk lining. The clothes indeed make the man. When he was appointed to the Circuit Court, decades ago, he went straight down to the tailorshop to ask Frankie’s father to make him a proper judicial gown and that he did, the finest cloth, the most perfect stitches, the proper pockets, the right hang from his shoulders, the space inside to greet and gavel, farpitz—that’s the word, yes, farpitz. And he got one with an even finer cut of cloth when he got elected to the Supreme Court. Gone now, Frankie’s father. All of us fading like the morning dew. Our Yiddish too.

  —Terrible weather, says the waitress.

  —When I was a boy it snowed ten times worse.

  Which is not true at all. He can only remember Vilnius in the summertime.

  —I never saw a snowflake until I moved here, she says.

  —Australia?

  —No.

  —New Zealand?

  —No.

  She’s toying with me now: South Africa?

  —Zimbabwe, she says, with a flourish.

  Oh, toy and tarry. What a city this is. Never ceases to amaze me. A blonde Rhodesian girl serving a Polish-born Lithuanian Jew in an Italian restaurant with, what, a couple of Mexican busboys hanging out near the edges, ready to pounce, and of course Dandinho, the Brazilian busboy extraordinaire moving gracefully from table to table, and my big bald American son yammering away on the telephone by the coat check.

  —And your name is?

  —Rosita.

  —Why, thank you, Rosita.

  An unusual name for a girl from Africa. She smiles as she backs away. He nods at Dandinho who moves swiftly across to fill up his water glass.

  —Thirsty today, sir?

  —It’s the heat outside, young man.

  Dandinho pours with great panache, one hand kept behind his back, as if his whole body is paying respect to the water glass. Not afraid to get his hands wet. An all-rounder. A meeter, a greeter, a half maître d’. Known far and wide for the way he can wrap your leftovers. An aluminum artist. No mean skill that. Nothing to snigger at. A folder of the foil. He can create any shape the diner wants—swan or porpoise or cow or crane or giraffe. Within seconds the leftovers become a work of art. A doggie bag, indeed. The kids love it but so do the ladies who lunch and indeed so do the late-night businessmen going home with an exotic aluminum animal under the arm. There was even, a few years ago, a gallery downtown that put on an exhibition of Dandinho’s foil sculptures.

  —How’re you feeling today, sir?

  —A million bucks. All torn and wrinkly.

  A tolerant smile from Dandinho: he’s heard the quip before.

  —Anything else, Mr. Mendelssohn?

  —Fine for now. Waiting in fact for my son.

  —Ah, yes. Some bread?

  —Thank you, Dandinho, but I’m watching my figure.

  And here he comes at last, lumbering across, hardly a figure skater, bumping off the tables and chairs. Tucking away his phone as he goes. Still there is an energy about him, nothing small or meek, that’s for sure, three Mendelssohns in one movement, father, son, symphony.

  —Dad, he says, with a kind swerve in his voice, and a grasp of his father’s shoulder.

  A bit of weight on him, sure, but he still has a pair of fine, bright eyes, the same shape as his mother’s. Speak to me of her, son, in a pattering hail-shower of words.

  —Elliot, meet Dandinho.

  —A pleasure, sir.

  —My pleasure, Davido.

  Elliot grasps Dandinho’s hand and doles out a big handshake. He’d make a good politician, even if he keeps getting names wrong. A sharp dresser too. Gold tiepin. Straight collar. Fine-cut cloth.

  —Elliot Mendelssohn, he says, Barner Funds.

  As if Dandinho gives a flying fig about Barner Funds, but the Brazilian pauses a moment, then reaches behind Elliot’s chair and holds it politely, scoots it in, or hardly scoots it at all, given Elliot’s proportions. Elliot shifts on the chair like it’s a dangerous horse. The table shivers a little and the silverware clangs.

  —Thank you, Davido.

  An odd look on Dandinho’s face, something rattling through his mind, a bronco, a bull, a bear. Is it possible that Dandinho speculates? One never knows. The unlikeliest of people get themselves into the market these days and who knows what sort of life goes on behind another life? Maybe Dandinho has himself a fine big mansion out there in Brooklyn somewhere, gold-plated handles, swimming pool, a Jacintha wife, the whole nine yards, the NASDAQ pulsing in neon
around his shaving mirror, stranger things have happened, even to an aging busboy.

  —A very solid firm, sir.

  —You invest there, Dandinho?

  —Oh, no, sir, not me, Mr. Mendelssohn. I just know some people.

  —Don’t we all? says Elliot.

  Dandinho nods and backs away.

  The menu-flip. The napkin unfold. The usual pleasantries. Great to see you, son. Terrible weather. Sorry I’m late. A drone of excuses, more sound than meaning—he got caught in work, was waylaid on Lexington, some business deal fouled up along the way, he’s just swamped these days, time, time, time.

  A fine wine of a man to make excuses: he gets better with age.

  —I took the liberty.

  —Thanks, Dad.

  —A Cabernet for you, sir.

  Elliot pretends not to take an eyeful as Rosita leans across him and places the wine down. She stands with her hands on the low of her stomach as she enumerates the specials. Quite a pose. That little speck of blue on her wrist: such a perfect addition, like the wrongly tied knot on a Persian carpet.

  —Thank you, Rosita.

  Salmon with dill sauce for him. A porterhouse steak, medium rare, with mango sauce for Elliot. No appetizers. Straight to the heart of the matter. She scribbles it down on a small blue pad, bats her eyelids, moves away, yes, an artist, no doubt. Salmon indeed. Watch her sway upriver, a fine expanse of flank.

  —L’chaim, says Elliot.

  So often the boy for the opportune word, there has recently been talk of Elliot running for office, a disastrous move, no doubt, even for a macher like him—they would chew him up and spit him out and freeze-dry him in the process—but who’s to fault ambition? And here we go, clinking glasses and diving into the old murky water, father and son, and how is Jacintha, and what’s happening at home, any news from Katya, all smooth with Sally, do you ever use the motorized chair, are you eating well enough, have you seen Dr. Marion?