Thirteen Ways of Looking

by Colum McCann

  They are halfway through their wine when Elliot’s phone rings.

  —Excuse me.

  A woman’s voice from the sound of things. Elliot is quick and curt. Yes, no, I can’t talk right now, absolutely not, she doesn’t have a case, forget it, I said I can’t talk right now.

  He shuts the phone and says: Jesus H.

  And why in the world is the H always thrown in there? Our Father, who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name. Eileen once said: Why not A for Art? Our Father, who is Art in Heaven. Or sling them both together? Jesus H. A. Christ.

  Elliot presses the phone down on the table, fingers some buttons, a piano player, even with his big meaty hands, a Richter of the keyboard.

  —You’re a busy man, Elliot.

  —Just work stuff, sorry. It never stops.

  —Lady problems?

  —Aren’t they all?

  He deserves a good clip on the ear for that one. Good thing Eileen’s not around, she’d whip him silly, march him into the bathroom and soap his mouth out.

  —My secretary.

  —I see.

  —Had to fire her.

  —Sorry to hear that.

  —She’s trying to sue me.

  —That’s not good.

  —Give them an inch, they take a mile. Bitcharita.

  A sting of a word. A shot of Patrón. Salt on the wound. Bitcharita. An immigrant to the language. Beyond the blonde wives, Elliot always had a bit of an eye for the Latin girls.

  —Sounds complicated.

  Elliot flicks a look off into the distance. A little tremble of his eyelid and a twist of the mouth. Impossible to forget that he was once six years old, out on the beach in Long Island, blue shorts, a patch of dry sand on his shoulder, leaning against his mother’s shoulder, a sandwich in his hand, Eileen’s arm around his waist, the waves rolling up to shore, when he was the boy he seemed destined to be.

  And there it is again, shimmying and shaking, vibrating on the table, what is this, Candid Camera?

  —Sorry, Dad.

  —Oh, that’s okay, go ahead, take it, really, it’s okay.

  Though it’s not okay, it’s far from okay, it’s light years from okay—just do the right thing and turn the phone off, would you, please, son, keep Allen Funt locked in the kitchen, smile, you’re the star of the show, oh, the mind is a trampoline today, it was Allen Funt, wasn’t it? They were good years, uncomplicated, or so they seemed anyway, we gathered around the television together for the nightly shows, a long thin Elliot sprawled out on the carpet, Katya curled into her beanbag, he and Eileen in matching armchairs, the room was cozy, the fire was lit, there were belted ashtrays that hung around the arm of the chairs, and he smoked a pipe then, I haven’t touched a pipe in I don’t know how long, haven’t even smelled a cigarette for years.

  A strong insistent whisper this time: I told you, I’m having lunch, don’t call me with this bullshit again.

  Then a dip towards his wineglass: Sorry, Dad.

  —Do you remember when they used to allow you to smoke in restaurants?

  —Excuse me?

  —I was just thinking about how everyone used to smoke. I still have the pipe, you know. In the bedroom.

  —Nobody smokes pipes anymore, Dad.

  —You can still smell the smoke in the bowl. If you put it to your nose. It lingers.

  Elliot glances down at the phone again. And what is it that lingers anymore? Really what I want to talk to you about is those old days with your mother, when we were all together, and life rolled along, slow enough, day to day, and why is it that we complicate the past, is it simply just pipesmoke? But here we are, listening to you prattle about the bitcharita and yet another excuse for being late, and surely there’s something else, son? Should I have another try at my memoirs? Should I give Sally James a raise? Would you like another glass of Cabernet? How in the world are you going to fill that five-car garage? Could a man even poison himself with carbon monoxide in a place that big? No, no, tell me this and tell me no more: Do you miss your mother, son? Or tell me this: Do you recall the days we spent at the beach in Oyster Bay? Or tell me this: Do you ever return to the thought of her with the hint of a sigh?

  And there it is again, the goddamn phone bronco-bucking on the table. From across the room come a few darting looks. He’s not mine, I promise you, he’s an alien—they make them big and blue-eyed and American now. A tut-tut from one of the Ladies Who Lunch, and a sympathetic tilt of the head from the waitress.

  Rosita, Maid Marion, come rescue me, cart my son out into the snow, deposit him there, bring your bow and arrow, take careful aim, and shoot the fucking Apple off his head like Robin Hood, or indeed William Burroughs.

  Elliot leans across and with the charm of which he is sometimes capable says: Do you mind, Father? I really have to take this one.

  Do I what? Of course I mind. Here we are, breaking bread, and all you want to do is jabber on endlessly. There was once a time when you’d sit in the kitchen alcove, and we’d lean together over mathematics, quadrangles, quadratics, as close as any two could get, multiplied by one another. How long has it been since we actually looked at each other, tell me that, son. I’m a sentimental old fool, I’m dripping with nostalgia, but cynics bore me, and I might as well wear my heart on my sleeve, I’d like to talk to you without interruption, can you give me at least that?

  —No problem, Elliot.

  —Thanks, Dad.

  He turns sideways in the chair, cups his hand over the phone, his big gold wedding ring shining. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. A silver bracelet on his wrist. To keep the vampires away. Didn’t work with Jacintha, that’s for sure. There is something afoot with Elliot, he can hear bits and pieces coming in his direction, a male voice this time, he jigsaws them both together, she was fired, fair and square, that’s extortion, there’s just no way, I’ll sue her, how dare she, who does she think she is, she’s a goddamn secretary, I don’t give a fuck what she calls it, look, Dave, I’m in a restaurant with my father, she just can’t, can you give me an hour, it was fair and square—goddammit, just take care of it, would you?—that’s what I pay you for, she wants a lawsuit she’ll get a lawsuit, executive assistant my ass, bring it on.

  More to it always than meets the eye. How many women have slung accusations Elliot’s way? Hi, Barner Funds, Elliot Mendelssohn’s office, how can I help you? Save me a place in the unemployment line please, my boss just called me a bitcharita.

  —Sorry, Dad, he says again, rolling his eyes at the phone and leaning across the table to take some bread from the basket.

  No worries, son, I’ll just sit here awaiting my salmon with dill sauce and let the lazy day drift away.

  —I’ll be right with you, I promise.

  And there he goes with the finger again, and a shake of his jowls—he looks farm-caught himself, open-mouthed—and he is scooting back his chair, half the restaurant looking at him, hook, line, sinker.

  Where in the world did I go wrong, did I ruin his childhood, did I neglect him, did I not read the right books to him, did I drop him on the crown of his early bald head? He came through the teenage years with flying colors, never caused too many problems. A good-looking kid, came home with his lacrosse trophies, debate certificates, chess medals. No late-night phone calls. No suspensions. No arrests. Amherst, then Harvard, got himself to Wall Street, hunkered down for a couple of years, played the money game, rolled the ball, made it round, but just look at him now, walking past the empty tables, towards the restrooms, watched by Dandinho all the way. An odd look on Dandinho’s face. Surely he’s seen many a customer chatting on the phone, cheating on the phone even? Maybe there’s a house rule against it, cheating and chatting?

  I could do with another glass of Sancerre, where’s my medium-medium blonde, come to me, what is your name again, Rosita, Rosita, my stem, my petal, my thorn.

  IX

  When the blackbird flew out of sight,

  It marked the edge

  Of
one of many circles.

  If only real life could have the logic of the written word: characters with conscious actions, hidden causes becoming plain, all things moving toward a singular point, the universe revealing itself as inexorably stable, everything boiled down to a static image, controlled, ordered, logical. In a simple world it should have been a straightforward Jewish funeral, but Mendelssohn was an atheist, or so it was said anyway, agnostic at least, though he certainly had a touch of tradition to him, and he wasn’t averse to playing whatever card suited him. He had married a Catholic woman, and the children were raised between religions, and Mendelssohn himself had confessed to being Jewish when he wanted to be, and Lithuanian most of the time, but Polish if he needed to be, a touch of Russian if so charged, an American in most respects, an occasional European, even Irish every once in a while by virtue of his wife. A mongrel really, a true New Yorker, in a city where people never knew how to die. Cremation. Exhalation. Annihilation. A proper Jewish ceremony would have seen him buried as soon as possible, but then there was the issue of an autopsy and the delay of Mendelssohn’s daughter all the way from Tel Aviv, and the political aspirations of the son, and where his wife, Eileen, was buried, and whether his ashes should be scattered or not, and what he might have written in his will, and who might have had access to his very last wishes.

  The service takes place on Amsterdam Avenue in the late morning, five days after the assault. The snow has turned to slush and there are deep puddles by the curbsides where the cars pull in. A sad splash of wheels in the potholes. It is a high, wide angle, but a good grade of footage: every funeral home in the city has its own series of hidden surveillance cameras. The detectives have, over the years, become watchers of funerals. It often surprises them that there are not more services on reality TV: there is something so compulsively informative about them. The way life gets played out in death. The manner in which the widow falls to her knees. Or not. The way in which the son shoulders the weight of the coffin. Or not. The way the father becomes the sole proprietor of the daughter’s death. Or not. The enigmatic notes arriving with the flowers. Or not. The subtle dig put in the eulogy by the rabbi, the priest, the imam, the vicar, the monk. Funerals as indicators of a life, how it was lived, the amount of tears shed, the keening and the rending of clothes, the sheer volume of mourners who choose to show up, the length of time people hang around afterward, the very nature of the way they hold their bodies. It has even struck them at times that they can tell some of the sexual predilections of the deceased just by looking at the clothes the mourners wear: the higher the hemline, the more ambitious the life. Hardly a mathematical formula, but then again so many things are unexplainable, and how is it that we know a life, except that we know our own, and it is brought into focus by the death of those around us.

  Elliot is the first of the family to arrive. He steps out from his dark limousine and, interestingly enough, does not go to the other side of the car to help his wife emerge. Rather, he stands in the middle of the pavement and gazes up at the name of the funeral home as if he wants to read some deep significance into it. No outward sign of sorrow, though he still wears a torn black ribbon over his heart, a gesture at least to ancient tradition. His wife is a pile-up of peroxide. She stands alongside him, both together and apart. She has three children from previous marriages, and they step out from the car as if part of a moon landing, teenage boys, all gangle and long hair, looking as if they are already bored with their own patented slouch.

  Elliot nods at them, checks his watch, consults his cell phone, a man distracted.

  The daughter arrives ten minutes after Elliot. Katya Atkinson. Dark-eyed with grief and travel. She looks younger: early fifties maybe. She wears a dark skirt and a matching jacket. There is something fierce and intelligent about her. A streak of gray in her hair. She steps her agile way over the curbside puddle, toward her brother. Elliot leans down to give her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.

  Together, brother and sister step toward the funeral home and are soon engulfed by others who have arrived almost simultaneously in a polite wave: judges, office workers, neighbors. The super and the doormen, including Tony DiSalvo. Sally James. At least one hundred people. Among them, too, the restaurant manager, Christopher Eagleton, and the busboy, Dandinho, who, upon his appearance, is marked as a person of significant suspicion: why in the world would the busboy arrive at the funeral?

  The detectives return again to the restaurant footage, but Dandinho never leaves the building, not once, he simply has his animated conversation with Pedro Jiménez by the dishwashing station, and he is most certainly located on the footage by the bar when the punch is thrown outside the restaurant. Dandinho is, in fact, one of the first to go to Mendelssohn’s aid when he falls. He is calm and controlled when questioned, not a hint of guilt about him, keen to point out that Mendelssohn was one of his favorite customers, that he always took home his leftovers for his housekeeper, tipped well, was old-world, polite, a hint of a twinkle still in his eye. He did not witness the actual punch, although he heard the thump of the old man’s head on the pavement, he thought at first that maybe Mendelssohn had just slipped on the ice, but he knew immediately that he was dead, an awful thing, he felt very sorry for him, a terrible way to go, he went to the funeral to pay his respects, it was the Christian thing to do.

  Although still a person of interest, the detectives rule Dandinho out. Same, too, with Eagleton.

  They comb the funeral footage, looking for any other face or body language that might strike them as needing attention—they push in, push out, brush forward, rewind, bookmark what they find interesting, but there is nothing more compelling than the appearance of the middle-aged busboy.

  And so, like the snow, or the latter point in a poem, the theories drift across the screen, opposition and conflict, so many possibilities available to the detectives, all of them intersecting in various ways, a Venn diagram of intent, the real world presenting itself with all its mystery—is it a murder of inheritance, a murder of jealousy, a murder of retribution, a murder of bitterness, or a murder simply tied to the random? They cannot discount the notion that it could be tied to an old case of Mendelssohn’s, a resurfacing on an anniversary, or a con just out of prison after serving a long sentence, or a specific grudge that has been left many years in abeyance, even though Mendelssohn has been retired from Kings County for six years and the detectives are unable to pinpoint any obvious cases likely to have left him with such a long-term enemy. A few gangland murders. The Screaming Phantoms, the Driggs Boys of Justice, the Tikwando Brothers, the Dirty Ones, the Vanguards, the Black Hands. Several minor Mafia figures and an early encounter with Roy DeMeo but no conviction. Some corruption cases. Break-ins. Carjackings. A high-profile city discrimination case in the late 1980s. Thousands of minor cases over the years. He was well liked in the corridors of Adams Street. He was known to spar verbally with the lawyers, but had a reputation as a relatively soft judge, a man of light sentence. No significant anniversaries. No candidates recently released from prison. Who would wait over a decade to extract revenge? Could it be that Sally James gave someone the nod along Madison Avenue and pointed him out? After all, Elliot Mendelssohn had installed cameras in the apartment to watch her, and he was aware that Sally had been given a generous stipend in the will to look after her nephew’s education. Or could it be that Elliot himself wanted to hurry up the inheritance? Perhaps he has some financial problems? When they question him about his restaurant phone calls he admits to having had a dalliance with his secretary, Maria Casillias, having recently fired her. Perhaps he was upset at something his father said to him? It is not beyond possibility that the anger built up inside him and he snapped. Or that he hired someone to snap on his behalf. Or perhaps there could be a tie-in with Katya, someone keen to wreck the final tatters of the Mideast peace process? But why would they do that in New York rather than Israel, and why would they go after her father rather than her? Could it be something that Mendelssohn sa
id on his way out of the restaurant, just a glancing comment that elicited anger from a passerby? But there have been no other incidents along the street, on Park or Fifth or even down Lexington, and when they check the subway cameras they cannot locate anyone at all in a puffy jacket or a Boston College hat: it is as if the attacker has disappeared into thin air.

  They play it again in their minds, in light of everything they already know. It is their hope that each moment, when ground down and sifted through, examined and prodded, read and reread, will yield a little more of the killer and the world he, or she, has created. They go forward metrically, and then break time again. They return, judge, reconfigure. They weigh it up and take stock, sift through, over and over. The breakthrough is there somewhere in the rhythmic disjunctions, in the small resuscitations of language, in the fractured framework.

  The closest they have come to the killer is still in the footage just outside the restaurant where he steps into the frame for a quarter second in his jacket and hat, a man, most likely, bending over the body of Mendelssohn, maybe to check if he is alive, maybe to whisper some obscenity. The attacker pulls back and out of the frame and there is nothing more they can tell about him. He is, in essence, just a hat and a shadow. Moments later it is Dandinho bending over the old man, then the restaurant manager, Eagleton, followed by the waitress and the coat-check girl, and within minutes Mendelssohn is surrounded by dozens of passersby, the blood rivering from him, his hat fallen sideways, the bag of leftovers on the ground, a leak of dill sauce into the snow.

  They rewind and freeze the attacker in his B.C. hat. Strange that, to come all the way from Boston. Or at least to showcase it in a rival city. And it is then that it hits them—one of those odd moments, when the truth comes in a sharp little slice, opening the echo chambers, releasing the synapses—that they may have been thinking in the wrong direction for quite a while now, and they have been flummoxed by their own preconceptions, like archaeologists, or critics, or literary scholars, and that it is so much more simple than they want it to be, and much of it lies in the attacker’s hat, the most available piece of evidence, but perhaps it is not a Boston College hat at all, but it could have any number of meanings, British Columbia, or a rock band, or the comic strip, an endless litany of B.C.’s, maybe even personal initials, but it could also possibly be the Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor-league team, yes, but a staple of the New York imagination, and this is the moment when the smallest of things becomes the linchpin, when the pit in the stomach grows, so that when the detectives google the Brooklyn Cyclones, they realize that the hats do have a similar texture to Boston College, the C braided into the B, they could easily be mistaken for one another, almost identical, especially in the off-color of the video images, the only difference being that the Boston College hat nearly always has an eagle braided into the brim, and how come they overlooked such a simple notion is beyond them, yes, of course, it must be the Cyclones, given that it’s closer to home, and perhaps then the killer is from Brooklyn, and wasn’t there somewhere along the course of the investigation that they saw a Brooklyn Cyclones reference, someone wearing a T-shirt, or something along those lines, a poster perhaps, yes, a poster, didn’t it creep along their sightlines, didn’t they make a vague note of it earlier when they were casting around? Or is it one of the recipients of Mendelssohn’s justice in Brooklyn long ago, a grudge revisited, did the Cyclones somehow creep into his litany of cases? Or is it just their imaginations and have the Cyclones never been mentioned at all?