"Maybe that's not Amish," Barner said, "but it does sound religious. Mennonite is, like, a religion, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's a Christian church, though I think the Men-nonites believe in simplicity and self-abnegation, but not self-flagellation."
"I guess Thaddie doesn't have to self-flagellate," Barner said. "Not with you and Timothy Callahan around."
I decided not to try to sort that one out. Instead, I turned up the radio, which described traffic conditions-"flowing smoothly" was the overly optimistic description-as well as the weather. The forecaster said clouding up, then rain early Sunday. This was followed by another report on the abduction of the J-Bird. Little new information was offered, just the release of a statement from the Bush campaign saying the Texas governor had been shocked and saddened by "this attack on a great American," and the entire campaign was praying for Plankton's safe return to his loved ones.
I said to Barner, "There's no relief for the deity's listening posts tonight."
"The pols are keepin' the Almighty hoppin'," he muttered, and hung a right onto Union Avenue.
Chapter 18
"So how'd they get away?" Barner was asking two cops, a buxom black woman and her portly white male companion, both of whom appeared to be in their twenties.
"We think they must have come out when the Mister Softee truck stopped in front of the building," the female officer said. "There was a lot of people on the sidewalk waiting for the ice-cream wagon. And then when it stopped, it played its dumb little tune, and more people came out of the bodega across the street where we were parked."
"It was either we didn't spot them come out and walk away through the crowd," the male patrolman said, "or they remained concealed on the other side of the truck."
"This was just, like, five minutes ago," the female officer said. "Jeez, I guess we blew it."
"Jeez, I guess you did," Barner said, and shook his head. The two cops looked glum, hurt and worried.
It was the building superintendent, Ignacio Melendez, in fact, who had informed us upon our arrival that the occupants of Samuel Day's apartment had left the building just minutes earlier. Three men from the apartment had passed by the open door to the super's first-floor apartment. He knew they were under police surveillance, Melendez said, but he did not try to stop them. He assumed the police would follow them. Anyway, he said, he thought the three men might be dangerous if the cops were interested in them. One of the men, according to Melendez, was carrying a long-handled shovel with a sharp blade.
Barner asked the super to describe the men. The one he knew was Sam Day, he said, a tall, bearded man in his forties, who had been renting a second-floor apartment for the past two years. The second man was a slender, paler man of about the same age, with a patch of chin whiskers. He was the one wielding the shovel. Melendez said this man seemed to live with Day at least part of the time, and both of them kept late hours. Their companion when they left the building moments earlier was described as a blue-eyed man with big ears. That sounded like Thad.
The super was lingering in the entryway to the building, along with a number of tenants and neighborhood residents apparently curious about the police presence.
They seemed wary but not hostile. Most looked Hispanic. Barner had told me earlier that Williamsburg had become in recent years a mix of Central Americans, Hasidic Jews and hip white kids in their twenties who couldn't afford to live in the no-longer-low-rent East Village near the bars and clubs where they hung out. Most of the young crowd were farther west, though, and the business signs on Lorimer were mainly in Spanish.
Barner and I went up to the super and Lyle asked him to step inside for a moment so they could have a word. In the dingy entryway, Lyle told Melendez, "We'd l i k e to look inside Day's apartment. Have you got a key on you?"
Melendez, round and solid-looking in gray work pants and matching shirt, seemed doubtful. "I don't know. I want to help you out. But don't you got to have a warrant?"
"There's been a kidnapping," Barner said somberly, with just a hint of indignation and even menace. "A man's life may be at stake. Every minute counts. In a life-or-dcath situation, no warrant is required."
"Is that the radio guy?" Melendez asked. "Yeah, Jay Plankton."
"You think they got this Plankton guy up on two?" "Possibly. We have to check it out. If he's in there, he may be injured."
"I never heard no screams."
Barner glanced at his watch and said, "Who owns the building?"
Whoever it was, Melendez looked as if he didn't want to get his employer involved.
"Come on," he said, and led us up a narrow stairwell and along a dim hallway to the rear of the building.
Melendez inserted a key from his jingling ring into the lock at 2R, and then a second key into a second lock. The wooden door swung open to reveal not a kidnapper's torture chamber but merely a messy small apartment. As we edged into the living room, where a table lamp was lit, I could hear Timothy Callahan's voice in the far distance:
"Surely gay people don't live here."
A daybed in the living room was unmade, and clothes had been tossed over a nearby chair. They looked like Thad's. There were a couple of easy chairs and a coffee table against the wall with an old Zenith TV set atop it with wire-coat-hanger rabbit ears.
I stuck my head into the small kitchen. The dishes in the drying rack were clean, and there was a smell of rice-beans-meat takeout coming from the garbage can under the sink.
"That's the bedroom in there," Melendez said.
"Just one?" Barner asked.
"The back apartments, they just got one bedroom."
"Police!" Barner said loudly, and went through the open door. These theatrics were unnecessary, for no one was in the room. The double bed was unmade and more clothes were stacked on makeshift shelves. Barner checked the closet; the clothes inside were neater, hung on hangers above two pieces of luggage. A rear window with a sliding screen stretched into it was open to the warm night air. Outside was a small yard with a single scraggly tree of an unidentifiable type twenty feet below.
Barner opened the suitcases in the closet-empty; no dismembered J-Bird body parts-and checked for name tags, but there weren't any. I went back to the living room. There were magazines and newspapers scattered around- the New York Press, the Village Voice, the Nation, the New York Review of Books -and a shelf packed with mostly softcover books. It was an assortment of fairly literate stuff, fiction and nonfiction, with an emphasis on naturalist writing: Peter Matthiessen, Bill McKibben, Roger Tory Peterson. There were gardening books too and tomes on agriculture around the world. You could never be sure ("Katie, they just seemed like the nicest young men until the body parts started showing up in my gladiola bed"), but this looked like the reading material of rational people, not political-radical kidnappers.
When Barner came out of the bedroom, I said, "Maybe they had a shovel because they're farmers. They've got all these books on growing things."
"Not in Brooklyn," Barner said.
"Didn't Walt Whitman grow things here?"
"Not lately."
"Anyway, I think his rural life was farther out on Long Island."
Barner said, "Maybe Day's is, too. There's still some farmland left way east in Suffolk County. 'I'hey may have gone out there in Diefendorfer's truck." 'I'he female officer had gone off to check on Thad's pickup truck, which she said had been parked on the street two blocks away.
I said, "Midnight, Saturday, however, seems like an odd time for farmwork."
"I thought of that," Barner said. " I t could be they brought the shovel along for something else. Some bad purpose besides agriculture."
"Could be."
Barner looked through some papers stacked on the back of the kitchen table that was against one wall of the living room, and I watched. "No FFF stuff," I said. "No drafts of ransom notes."
"No."
"It doesn't look like anybody's been held captive here, either."
"Uh-uh."
"This all looks unpromising, Lyle."
"They could still be involved. They could have Plankton out on the Island somewhere. Anyway, Strachey, have you got any better ideas?"
"No, I don't. But so what? You had me a little worried there for a while, Lyle, but there is absolutely nothing in this apartment to suggest that Day or Diefendorfer or the other guy are involved in the kidnapping, or the neo-FFF-anything-else of a criminal nature. And that stuff Leo Moyle said about his captors calling him a sinner and an unrighteous man-maybe it's some Jerry Falwell type we should be looking for. Anyway, my guess at this point is that there's an innocent explanation for Thad meeting up with his old FFF boyfriend and not telling me about it. But it's late, and I'm not about to hang around here and find out tonight. Thad has the number of where I 'l l be staying, at a friend's place on West Seventy-seventh Street, and I'll leave a note here asking him to call me in the morning. Then we'll know."
Barner gave me a look that I guessed was meant to be incredulous, but it looked forced. He was letting his biases fill the void of no evidence, and I guessed he knew it.
"I'm hoping I'll know what the story is well before morning," Barner said. "I'm going to wait around here until they come back. If they do."
"Good luck."
"You can take the train back to Manhattan. You can get the L at the Lorimer Street station."
"Fine."
The female cop came into the apartment and said, "The pickup's still there. They didn't take it."
Barner screwed up his face, as if this news might indicate something treacherous.
"Keep the truck under surveillance," he said. "I'm going to look around here some more."
Melendez the super was in the doorway and stood aside as the young cop went out.
He said to Barner, "You gonna stay in the apartment?"
"Yeah. I'll take responsibility."
Melendez looked doubtful. "The radio guy isn't up here."
"Not at the moment," Barner said, making clear with his look that that was the end of that discussion.
The super stood for a moment longer, then turned and went out.
I said, "Isn't what you're doing illegal, Lyle? There's no life-or-death question now."
"You don't know that. You don't know that at all. Plankton is being held by some very rough people who have vowed to hurt him. So, is there a life-or-death issue? I'd say there is."
"In Sam Day's apartment? Where's the evidence?"
Barner closed his eyes, then opened them. "Strachey, do I have to explain this to you, of all people? You know, when you've been doing this as long as I have, you get a feel for these things."
"You're full of it, Lyle," I said, "and you know it, too." I gave him the number of where I'd be staying, wrote out a note asking Thad to call me no matter what time it was, and left Barner fiddling around with a bookshelf, as if it might slide away revealing a secret passageway.
I went out into the wet night air. It was after midnight, and yet the Brooklyn streets were teeming: couples of all ages, mostly straight; young Spanish guys in threes; club kids just heading out; entire large Latino extended families ambling home after some get-together in a restaurant or a relative's apartment. It occurred to me that this echt-urban scene was at least superficially the antithesis of Lancaster County Amish life, and I wondered what Thad and Sam Day, or Dazenfeffer, made of it.
On the platform of the Lorimer L-train station, I waited with a mostly young crowd that was sparse at first, then seemed to grow exponentially. When the Manhattan-bound train finally pulled in four or five minutes later, a Tokyo-sized mob stuffed itself into the six or eight cars. I boarded the final car, where it felt like a party was already under way. The guys were cool in their tight pants and shirts, and the young women were simultaneously glammed up and glammed down in their makeup and party dresses and gray sneakers. It was Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth headed for Giro's and the Mocambo in sensible shoes. It was no life I had ever known-I had gone almost directly from New Brunswick to Saigon-and it all felt vaguely alien. Yet the unostentatious ease with which these happy kids cast off for a night of partying in the center of the known universe- i.e., the slice of Manhattan bordered by Fourteenth Street on the north and Canal Street on the south-made them seem neither unduly privileged nor in any way depraved. They seemed both wholesome and lucky to be living in America at the pinnacle of its most recent age of innocence.
I was relaxing for a moment and enjoying watching the kids on the party car when my attention was suddenly riveted on the platform across the way. A Canarsie-bound train had just pulled out ahead of ours, and as our train to Manhattan lurched and picked up speed, I was amazed to see a familiar figure hurrying toward the stairs of the Lorimer Street exit. What was Charm Stankewitz doing in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, in old-FFFer Sam Day's neighborhood?
Reminding myself that Brooklyn was a big place and a lot of people went there for many reasons, I nonetheless exited the train at Bedford Avenue, crossed to the opposite platform, and boarded the next train back to Lorimer. Making my way quickly back to Sam Day's apartment, I watched for Charm on the busy streets, but I didn't spot her. In the subway station, she had been wearing an orange tank top and a red skirt.
Slight as she was, I was sure she would stand out in a crowd in that getup. But ten or twelve minutes had gone by, and Charm was nowhere to be seen on Lorimer Street.
The chubby young male cop was standing in the doorway to Sam Day's building. "Is Detective Barner still up there?" I asked.
"Yeah, go on up."
"I don't need to. Did a young woman go in who was wearing a red skirt and skimpy orange top?"
"No, nobody went in."
"Did you notice a young woman fitting that description stop here at all, or just go by?"
The cop thought about this. "Not that I noticed."
"Thanks."
I walked to the end of the block, peered around, then backtracked to the subway. I waited for a time at the top of the station stairs on Lorimer, hoping I might spot Charm, or Thad and his companions. Or-though I could make no sense of this one-all of them together. But I saw no familiar faces at all, and after several minutes I descended into the overheated tunnel and rejoined the Manhattan-bound stream of party-goers.
During the ride, I struggled to recall Kurt Zinsser's boyfriend Darren's description of Charm's Brooklyn friends that Darren said she visited once a week. There had been no last names given, just one first name, a second first name-Sharon?-and, more memorably, somebody referred to as Strawberry Swirl. I figured I could find a phone book, but it seemed unlikely that I would come upon a listing for "Swirl, S." and a Brooklyn street address.
My ears popped as the train hurtled westward under the East River, and I thought of Leo Moyle's underground transits, one going and one coming back, during his twenty-four hours of captivity. His ears had popped too, he had told Barner, indicating transit via tunnel to Brooklyn, Queens, or New Jersey. Who among all the people I knew with FFF connections were bridge-and-tunnel people? Just Sam Day, plus Charm's Brooklyn friends. Simple coincidence? Could be. Lots of Manhattan-loving nonrich young people actually lived in the once hopelessly unfashionable outer boroughs now. And no connections between any of the assorted known FFF cast of characters made any sense I could begin to imagine. I was missing something, or just way off the beam. Beam me up, Thaddie, I thought-if, unlikely as it seemed, Thad really did know more than he was telling me-Thaddie, beam me up.
I got off the train at the Fourteenth Street-Seventh Avenue station and made my way along the pedestrian tunnel to the platform for the 1 and 9 trains heading up the West Side. This Manhattan station was even hotter than the Brooklyn stations, and it stank of something, too- something pungent that was both off-putting and at the same time had vaguely pleasant associations.
What was it? Not diesel fumes. Years earlier, when I quit smoking, I had loved standing behind buses as they pulled away and sucking up the carbon monoxide fumes they belch
ed into city streets. It was both sickening and at the same time the source of a swell little high of a type I had lost forever.
The stench on the 1 and 9 platform was like that, but both sharper and more indoorsy. What was it? It smelled somewhat medicinal, a bit like cleaning fluid. Oven cleaner? This was Timmy's household-chore-cum-martyrdom, and I knew the smell only from distant corners of our Albany house.
I turned to the bench that was behind me against the station's old worn tile wall, and the odor was even stronger back there. I noticed a small pool of fluid on the wooden bench and an open vial on its side. A popper, that's what it was, that must have fallen out of someone's pocket or backpack. Amyl nitrite-heart medicine originally, and in recent decades a drug inhaled by some gay men, like Lyle Barner's friend Dave and his buddies, to heighten sexual excitement. It hit me that poppers smelled not just hospitallike but also a lot like-where had I just heard someone complaining about the smell?-nail polish.
Chapter 19
It was almost 1:30 by the time I climbed the stairs to Broadway and Seventy-ninth into a steady warm rain shower. It hadn't been raining in Brooklyn, but meteorologically New York was a vast continent, and I had moved underground from the Cote d'lvoire to Ethiopia.
Rainwear or an umbrella would have been nice, but haste was going to have to do.
Where were the Bumber-shoot people when you needed them most? Whenever Timmy and I had visited European cities in warm weather-Amsterdam, Paris, Florence-we had marveled at the way in which, whenever rain began to fall, tall Africans suddenly materialized selling umbrellas. We had concluded that the umbrella merchants were all members of a West African tribe called the Bumbershoot people. But either the Bumbershoots had not yet made it to New York, or Giuliani had had them all rounded up and shipped back to Europe.
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