Footsteps of the Hawk

by Andrew Vachss

  "I apologize for disturbing you," I said, bowing slightly

  "It is okay," Mama said, nodding her head in acknowledgment. "Almost time to rest. Have tea, yes?"

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Thank you,"Flower said, giggling. "My hand hurts."

  "What are you working on?" I asked the child, squatting down so my face was level with hers. I could see both Immaculata and Max in her face—and I gave silent thanks that she was clearly going to favor her mother.

  "Calligraphy," Flower said gravely, pronouncing the word with all the assurance of her seven years.

  "Very important," Mama said. "First others', then your own—that is the way."

  "I don't get it," I told her.

  "We are learning haiku," Mama told me. "Very good discipline. Very important for balance. We practice the old ways, to master them,"

  "When I learn to write properly, I can write my own words," Flower said, repeating a past lesson with pride.

  "Yes," Mama said. "Haiku is search for perfection. Each person has his own. All life, you work on it. Perfection is not what you ever get…"

  "…it is what you reach for," Flower finished for her, a grin on her little face.

  "Yes!" Mama said, returning the child's smile.

  "I thought haiku was Japanese," I said to Mama.

  "Copy," Mama hissed. "Copy like they copy everything else. All root knowledge is from Chinese—they only copy."

  "I understand," I said quietly, switching off the subject before Mama got wound up. Stupid of me to forget Mama's prejudices. It took me years to understand that tribalism was stronger than racism could ever be, I learned it in Africa, but sometimes I forget. "What haiku are you doing?" I asked the child, looking over her shoulder at the meticulous characters she had drawn, surprised to see them in English.

  "I am just practicing now," Flower said gravely. "So that the pen becomes my thoughts."

  "This very old haiku," Mama said, pointing to the original from which Flower was copying. "Haiku is precise. Always five, seven, five. Syllables. In English, must be the same."

  I looked over her shoulder. The words were written on rice paper that looked older than me. Written in a sharp–edged calligraphic hand. Mama's?

  the ferret, hunting,

  eyes on the ground, never hears

  footsteps of the hawk

  "You understand?" Mama asked, watching my face.

  I stood there a long time, watching the haiku until it turned liquid in my vision. "Yes," I told her, bowing.

  Getting what I came for.

  Upstairs, we all sat at my table in the back. Mama brought tea for everyone. She knows I hate the stuff, but I sipped it anyway, not wanting Flower to learn anything bad from me. Immaculata smiled slightly, raising her eyebrows as I sipped.

  "Very good lesson today," Mama said to Immaculata.

  "Thank you, Mama," Immaculata said. "Max and I are very grateful for what you teach our daughter."

  "My daughter too," Mama said. "Granddaughter, yes?" It wasn't a question—she didn't expect an answer.

  "Max teaches you too?" I asked Flower.

  "Yes. My father is a wonderful teacher," she said, quickly glancing sideways at Mama to see if she'd accidentally offended the dragon lady—it was easy enough to do.

  "He teaches you to fight?" I asked her.

  "Everybody fights," Immaculata put in. "Max is teaching her one way to do it. Understand?"

  "Yes," I said, nodding my head. I'd never been a champ at talking to women, but three generations in one sitting was making me blunder even more than usual.

  "Flower teaches too," Immaculata said. "She taught Max some signs."

  "How could—?" I started to say.

  "When she was just a little baby," Immaculata went on as if I hadn't spoken, "when she would cry to be picked up, she would always wave her little hands. I thought it was just random movement, but, one day, she moved her hands when she wasn't crying. And Max went right over and picked her up. She knew. He did too. She has all kinds of signs now. Signs of her own. Only she and her father use them. I am very proud," Immaculata said formally, her eyes wet.

  Flower reached across and held her mother's hand—it wasn't just Max's signs she could read.

  I spent the rest of that Saturday in my office, hunting in my head. No matter how I spun it out, I came up empty.

  When I looked up, it was dark. I split whatever was left in the refrigerator with Pansy, smoked a cigarette to settle my stomach and lay back on the couch, eyes closed.

  There's a few light–years' distance between fantasy and replay—the distance between imagination and imagery. Doc once told me about a guy he had in the max–max loony bin Upstate. A big black guy named Norman. This Norman, he stabbed a lot of people—that was his thing. They put a half–dozen diagnoses on him, with medication to match—nothing worked. So Doc detoxed him—brought him off the chemicals slow so he wouldn't crash.

  And without the drugs, Norman was a real sweetheart—just kicked back in his cell all day long, a gentle smile on his face. It had all the shrinks puzzled. So Doc asks him, What's going on in there?

  Norman tells Doc he goes to this planet every day. Time–travels inside his head. This planet, Ludar, he called it, it's a beautiful, peaceful place. The sky is rose–colored, and the grass is white, pure white, like snow. Everybody does something on Ludar. Norman, he was a farmer—he raised gold—it grows out of the ground on Ludar. Norman has a wife there. Some kids too. It's a perfect, holy place. Nobody starves, nobody's homeless. Nobody even gets mad.

  So Norman's not really in his cell, see. He's on Ludar. He only eats twice a day. For fuel, so he can go back to where he wants to be.

  Doc told me Norman really went there. He had so much detail that it had to be real. In his head, real. Doc told me he asked Norman, it sounded so perfect, could he go there too? Norman got real sad behind that. He really liked Doc, and he wished he could have given him better news…but most people couldn't go to Ludar—that's just the way it was.

  So Doc started to trace it back, find out where Norman got his flight plan to Ludar. They had Norman when he was a kid, the same way they had so many of us. In one of the places they put him, Norman picked up a knife and started stabbing. That was to protect himself—even the guards knew that. Some of those kiddie camps, it comes down to the same two choices as prison.

  So they started him on medication then—to gentle him down, keep him quiet. But it never worked. Sooner or later, Norman would start stabbing again.

  Doc didn't bother too much with those paper–and–pencil tests—he just asked Norman flat–out: How come you stab so many people? Norman said they were keeping him from going to Ludar. They had no right to do that—he wasn't hurting anybody going there. That's when Doc put it all together. It wasn't people keeping Norman off Ludar, it was the medication. When the dose got too strong, Norman couldn't teleport himself off this lousy planet. So he started slicing and dicing. Then they'd switch his medication, and, for a while, he could go home. Doc wrote NO MEDS! on Norman's chart. And Norman, he never stabbed anyone again. He never got out of prison either, but it didn't matter. Norman was off medication. And on Ludar.

  Fantasy is something you wish would happen. Flashbacks are something you wish never had. I didn't need an imagination to be somewhere else—I'd been there. All I had to do was remember, play the images out on my own screen.

  I went there, stayed a long time. When I opened my eyes, it was early Sunday morning. I had nothing to show for my trip inside my head. And my back felt as cold as the killer's trail.

  I went out to resupply. Came back with a pint of ice cream, a bag full of warm bagels, a thick wedge of cream cheese, and a quarter–pound of Nova lox. Pansy loves the stuff. Maybe she's West Indian in her heart and Jewish in her soul…although Mama insists she's a giant Shar–Pei.

  I stepped out on the fire escape, standing well back in the building's shadow, invisible from the ground at that hour. When I finished
the last bagel, I punched Mama's number into the cellular phone.

  "It's me," I said.

  "Two calls," she answered. "One man say his name J.P. The other was that woman."

  "Either one say it was important?"

  "Both say."

  "Thanks, Mama. I'll call later."

  "Watch the sky," she said, hanging up.

  On the street, I looked around for a pay phone before I tried Belinda.

  "What's up?" I asked her when she answered on the first ring.

  "You don't know?"

  "No. I don't fucking know. You wanna tell me?"

  "Oh Jesus. Not on the phone. Can you meet me—?"

  "I don't have a car anymore," I told her.

  "That's all right," she said. "I have one. You know…Wait! Are you on a safe phone?"

  "In the street," I said.

  "Yeah…okay. You know Benson Street? The alley behind the—?"

  "I know it," I told her. "What time?"

  "Midnight, okay?"

  "Okay."

  I rode the underground to Midtown, got off a few blocks from Hauser's office. I tried a pay phone on him too.

  "It's me."

  "Where the hell have you been?" he barked, an urgent undertone in his voice. "Can you meet me—?"

  "Say where and when."

  "My office," he replied. "ASAP."

  The door to his office was slightly ajar. I pushed it open the rest of the way and crossed the threshold, rapping gently on the door at the same time. Hauser's eyes were on some papers on his desk—he jerked his head up sharply. "What'd you do, fly?" he asked.

  "I was in the neighborhood," I told him. "What have you got?"

  "Sit down," Hauser said, standing up himself. "This could take a while."

  I took the seat he offered, lit a smoke, settled in. Hauser was pacing back and forth behind his desk. "Go," I told him.

  "Those psych reports—the ones on this cop, Morales. You read them carefully?"

  "Carefully as I could," I said, wary now.

  "He's a Catholic. Did you see that?"

  "Yeah, So what? There's all kinds of Catholics."

  "Hispanic Catholics, they generally don't stray as far from the church as others."

  "Nobody generally slaughters women either," I said. "Is that your idea of a connection?"

  "You see where he doesn't have any kids?" Hauser went on like I hadn't spoken.

  "Yeah. And if you're gonna tell me maybe he's gay and can't deal with it, I'm already on that trail."

  "He's not gay," Hauser said, a dead certainty in his voice. "Did you look at the cross–references on the report?"

  "There weren't any," I told him flatly. "I gave you everything she gave me."

  "Yeah, there were," he said. "Look at the bottom of the last page."

  I ran my eyes over the paper. All I could see was a small box outlined in black, like an obit:

  VS = 1

  LOD79–I = 2

  HOSP80–Dx81–Rx = 3

  "What's all that supposed to mean?" I asked him.

  "The first reference is to vital statistics. Date of birth, parents' names, like that. Next is line–of–duty injuries. The last one is all hospitalizations, communicable diseases—any inpatient stays, including the E–Ward."

  "Yeah, okay. But what good's that do us? Belinda never gave us—"

  "She probably never had it," Hauser interrupted. "But there's more than one way to get documents out of One Police Plaza. Here, take a look for yourself." He handed over a long printout on thermal paper, like a continuous feed from a fax machine.

  I ran my eyes over it, still coming up empty–handed. "Okay, so he was born in 1956 in Camden, New Jersey. And he had an operation to fix a hernia once."

  "In the same place," Hauser said.

  "In Camden? So what? Maybe he just likes the home–town doctors."

  "I don't think so," Hauser said quietly. "I went down there myself. The next morning, after the fight. It wasn't a hernia operation he had in that hospital—it was a vasectomy."

  "Okay. So?"

  "So it was in 1982. After he was out of the Army—did you know he was an MP there?—and while he was on the cops. If it was an old hernia, the VA would have paid for it. And the cops damn sure would have—NYPD's got the best health–insurance plan in the world. So why would he go all the way down there?"

  "Just to keep it a secret?" I asked him, puzzled. "What's the big deal about a vasectomy? I had one myself. It only takes a few—"

  "He's a Catholic, Burke," Hauser said again, impatience showing around the edges of his voice. "A practicing Catholic. A vasectomy, that's birth control big–time. Permanent. Probably a Mortal fucking Sin, for all I know."

  "So he's playing hide–and–seek with the church," I said. "How does that connect to what we—?"

  "How could he be gay?" Hauser asked, a tight urgency to his voice. "If he's not having sex with women, why would he worry about pregnancy? A vasectomy would stop him from making babies—it wouldn't have anything to do with protecting yourself against AIDS. There's no other reason to have one, right?"

  Okay, so much for that brilliant theory, I thought to myself. "That's real interesting," I said out loud. "But I don't…"

  "There was no DNA in the bodies of the murdered women, right?" Hauser said, excited now, his volume knob cranked up toward the high end. "And we figured, Piersall probably wore a condom…for the one on University Place. But the others, while he was in jail, there was no sperm in any of them either. A vasectomy would do that."

  "You mean…?"

  "DNA only works on nucleated material," Hauser said. "I checked it out. Blood, sperm, skin tissue—that'd all do it. But there's no DNA in seminal fluid, understand? Even with a vasectomy, you still discharge, don't you?"

  "Sure," I said. "You just shoot blanks."

  "And they can't get DNA from that. So…it could be she's right. It could be that Morales is our guy."

  "Our guy for the other murders?"

  "Our guy for this one," Hauser said, tossing a copy of the Sunday News at me. I looked down at the headline he'd circled in red:

  The headline said something about a "Society Murder" but I didn't linger on it, just flashed down to the facts. Loretta Barclay, wife of shipping magnate Robert Barclay, was found in the pool house of her Scarsdale mansion by the maintenance man early Saturday morning. She'd been killed sometime late the night before, while her husband was in Bermuda, finalizing some international deal. She'd been stabbed repeatedly, well past what it would have taken to kill her. There were "signs consistent with a sexual assault," according to the cop they quoted. Nothing of value had been taken from the house or grounds. The police had no suspects.

  "What makes you think Morales—"

  "I got a friend up there in Westchester. A friend, not a source, understand? A state trooper. They think it was someone from the woman's past…something about another identity. But that's a blind alley, I think. There's something they found—something that didn't make the papers."

  He stepped closer to me, dropping his voice almost to a whisper. "They found a red ribbon," he said. "Inside the body."

  Iran back to my cave, double–backing twice, making certain–sure I wasn't followed. Pansy could tell something was wrong. I spent a few minutes gentling her down—I wanted to work in quiet.

  I should have figured it—Hauser is notorious for persistence. I know he ran a marathon once—no training, just did it. Took him almost five hours to finish, and a hell of a lot more time before the chiropractor was finished with him …but he did it. I had the right horse for the course, but my hand wasn't holding the reins—Hauser was going to run wherever he wanted. And as fast.

  That's what I needed to do too—run. No matter how strong your backup, true surviving is always a do–it–yourself project.

  I did the same thing I used to do when I was a locked–up kid—ran away in my mind. Not to Ludar—I was never that crazy—but to a place where they couldn't hurt me.
I would look at a spot on the wall until it was all I could see. It would get bigger and bigger, then it would go deep, like it was three–dimensional. The first bunch of times I did that, it was like diving into a clear, deep pool, but one I could breathe in. As long as I stayed down, they couldn't hurt me. After a while, I realized I could do things down there. Think–things, mostly I could hold a question in my hands before I dived into the pool. Sometimes, when I came up, I had the answer.

  Morales couldn't have done the murder up in Westchester County. He was watching the fights in Atlantic City. Watching me. He said he was my alibi—that he had watched the wrong man. So he must be thinking I was in on it, somehow. Maybe my job was to draw him away…get him off the scent?

  No, that was stupid—I didn't know he was following me. And I damn sure couldn't rely on it.

  So maybe Morales was telling me I was off the hook. He knew I couldn't have done the killing—he was right there with me—the timing couldn't work.

  Was he doing me a favor, warning me off?

  Why would he?

  It didn't make sense—didn't add up.

  Unless…?

  I sat in front of a mirror, looking into the red circle I'd painted on it years ago. The spot widened, got deeper. I took that Unless in my hands and dived in.

  The answer came—so fast and hard that it knocked me right back to the surface.