Night Train

by Martin Amis

  But here’s the worst. The electric saw is circumnavigating Jennifer’s cranium. A lever is being wedged under the roof of the skull, and now you wait for the pop. And now I find that my body, so ordinary and asymmetrical, the source of so little pleasure or pride, so neglected, so parched, is suddenly starting up, acting up: It wants attention. It wants out of all this. The cranial pop is as loud as a gunshot. Or a terrible cough. No is pointing to something, and Silvera leans forward, and then the two men are backing away, in surprise.

  I watch on, thinking: Colonel Tom, I hear you. But I’m not sure how much this means.

  It appears that Jennifer Rockwell shot herself in the head three times.

  No. No, I don’t live alone, I said. I live with Deniss. And just that once I shed tears. I don’t live alone. I live with Deniss.

  As I was speaking those words, Deniss, in actual fact, was scowling through the windshield of a U-Haul, taking himself and all his belongings at high speed toward the state line.

  So I did live alone. I didn’t live with Deniss.

  Is that Tobe now, starting up the stairs? Or is it the first rumor of the night train? The building always seems to hear it coming, the night train, and braces itself as soon as it hears in the distance that desperate cry.

  I don’t live alone. I don’t live alone. I live with Tobe.

  March 9

  Just come back from my meet with Silvera.

  The first thing he said to me was: “I hate this.”

  I said you hate what?

  He said the whole damn thing.

  I said Colonel Tom thinks it plays to homicide.

  He said what does?

  I said the three shots.

  He said Rockwell never was any good. On the streets.

  I said he got shot in the line for Christ’s sake. He got shot in the fucking line.

  Silvera paused.

  “When was the last time you took one for the state?” I asked him.

  Silvera went on pausing. But that wasn’t it. He wasn’t thinking of the time, way back in company lore, that Tom Rockwell stopped one in the Southern, as a beat cop, while flushing hoodies from a drug corner. No, Silvera was just contemplating his own career curve.

  I lit a cigarette and said, “Colonel Tom has it playing to homicide.”

  He lit a cigarette and said, “Because that’s all he’s got. You shoot yourself once in the mouth. That’s life. You shoot yourself twice. Hey. Accidents happen. You shoot yourself three times. You got to really want to go.”

  We were in Hosni’s, the little gyro joint on Grainge. Popular among police for its excellent smoking section. Hosni himself isn’t a smoker. He’s a libertarian. He threw out half his tables just to skirt city law. I’m not proud of my habit, and I know that Hosni’s crusade is one we’re eventually going to lose. But all cops smoke their asses off and I figure it’s part of what we give to the state—our lungs, our hearts.

  Silvera said, “And this was a .22. A revolver.”

  “Yeah. Not a zip. Or a faggot gun. You know like a derringer or something. The old lady upstairs. She said she heard one shot?”

  “Or she’s woken by one shot and then hears the second or the third. She’s blacked out on sherry in front of the TV. What does she know.”

  “I’ll go talk to her.”

  “This case is so fucking cute,” said Silvera. “When Paulie No fluoroscoped her, suddenly we’re looking at three bullets. One’s still in her head, right? One’s in Evidence Control: The one we dug out of the wall at the scene. After the autopsy we go back. There’s only one hole in the wall. We dig out another round. Two bullets. One hole.”

  In itself this was no big deal. Police are pretty blase about ballistics. Remember the Kennedy assassination and “the magic bullet”? We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn’t be there.

  I said, “I’ve seen twice. In suicides. I can imagine three.”

  “Listen, I’ve chased guys who’ve taken three in the head.”

  The truth was we were waiting on a call. Silvera had asked Colonel Tom to let Overmars in on this. Seemed like the obvious guy, with his Quantico connections. And right now Overmars was stirring up the federal computers, looking for documented three-in-the-head suicides. I was finding it kind of a weird calculation. Five in the head? Ten? When were you sure?

  “What you get this morning?”

  “Nothing but schmaltz. What you get?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Silvera and myself had also been working the phones that morning. We’d called everybody who was likely to have an opinion about Jennifer and Trader, as a couple, and we’d both compiled the same dimestore copy about how they seemed to have been made for each other—in heaven. There was, to put it mildly, no evidence of previous gunplay. So far as anyone knew, Trader had never raised his voice, let alone his fist, to Jennifer Rockwell. It was embarrassing: Sweet nothings all the way.

  “Why was she nude, Tony? Colonel Tom said Miss Modest never even owned a bikini. Why would she want to be found that way?”

  “Nude is the least of it. She’s dead, Mike. Hell with nude.”

  We had our notebooks open on the table. There were our sketches of the scene. And Jennifer drawn as a stick figure: One line for the torso, four lines for the limbs, and a little circle for the head, at which an arrow points. A stick figure. Was that ever inadequate.

  “It says something.”

  Silvera asked me what.

  “Come on. It says I’m vulnerable. It says I’m a woman.”

  “It says get a load of this.”

  “Playmate of the Month.”

  “Playmate of the Year. But it’s not that kind of body. More of a sports body with tits.”

  “Maybe we’re coming in at the end of a sex thing here. Don’t tell me that didn’t occur to you.”

  Be a police long enough, and see everything often enough, and you will eventually be attracted to one or another human vice. Gambling or drugs or drink or sex. If you’re married, all these things point in the same direction: Divorce. Silvera’s thing is sex. Or maybe his thing is divorce. My thing, plainly, was drink. One night, near the end, a big case went down and the whole shift rolled out to dinner at Yeats’s. During the last course I noticed everybody was staring my way. Why? Because I was blowing on my dessert. To cool it. And my dessert was ice cream. I was a bad drunk, too, the worst, like seven terrible dwarves rolled into one and wedged into a leather jacket and tight black jeans: Shouty, rowdy, sloppy, sleazy, nasty, weepy, and horny. I’d enter a dive and walk up the bar staring at each face in turn. No man there knew whether I was going to grab him by the throat or by the hog. And I didn’t know either. It wasn’t much different at CID. By the time I was done, there wasn’t a cop in the entire building who, for one reason or the other, I hadn’t slammed against a toilet wall.

  Silvera is younger than me and the wheels are coming off his fourth marriage. Until he was thirty-five, he claims, he balled the wife, girlfriend, sister and mother of every last one of his arrests. And he certainly has the look of the permanent hardon. If Silvera was in Narcotics, you’d right away make him for dirty: The fashionably floppy suits, the touched-up look around the eyes, the Italian hair trained back with no part. But Silvera’s clean. There’s no money in murder. And a hell of a detective. Fuck yes. He’s just seen too many movies, like the rest of us.

  “She’s naked,” I said, “on the chair in her bedroom. In the dark. There are times when a woman will willingly open her mouth to a man.”

  “Don’t tell Colonel Tom. He couldn’t handle it.”

  “Or play this. Trader leaves at 19:30. As usual. And then her other boyfriend shows.”

  “Yeah, in a jealous rage. Listen, you know what Colonel Tom is trying to do.”

  “He wants a who. I tell you this. If it’s a suicide, I’m going to feel an awful big why.”

  Silvera lo
oked at me. Police really are like foot-soldiers in this respect at least. Ours not to reason why. Give us the how, then give us the who, we say. But fuck the why. I remembered something—something I’d been meaning to ask.

  I said you make a pass at anything that stirs, right?

  He said oh yeah?

  I said yeah. If your rash isn’t acting up. You ever try Jennifer?

  He said yeah, sure. With someone like that you got to at least try. You’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t at least try.

  I said and?

  He said she brushed me off. But nicely.

  I said so you didn’t get to call her an icebox or a dyke. Or religious. Was she religious?

  He said she was a scientist. An astronomer. Astronomers aren’t religious. Are they?

  I said how the hell would I know?

  “Would you put that cigarette out, please, sir?”

  I turned.

  Guy says, “Excuse me. Ma’am. Would you put that cigarette out, please, ma’am?”

  This is happening to me more and more often: The sir thing. If I introduce myself over the phone it never occurs to anybody that I’m not a man. I’m going to have to carry around a little pack of nitrogen or whatever—the stuff that makes you sound like Tweetie Bird.

  Silvera lit a cigarette and said, “Why would she want to put her cigarette out?”

  Guy’s standing there, looking around for a sign. Big guy, fat, puzzled.

  “See that booth behind the glass door,” said Silvera, “with all those old files heaped up in it?”

  Guy turns and peers.

  “That’s the no-smoking section. If what you’re interested in is having people put their cigarettes out, you might find more play in there.”

  Guy slopes off. We’re sitting around, smoking, and drinking the cowboy coffee, and I said hey. In the old days. Did I ever throw a pass at you? Silvera thought about it. He said as far as he remembered, I just slapped him around a few times.

  “March fourth,” I said. “It was O’Boye notified Trader, right?”

  On the night of the death, Detective Oltan O’Boye drives out to CSU to inform Professor Trader Faulkner. The deal is, Trader and Jennifer cohabit, but every Sunday night he takes to his cot in his office on campus. O’Boye is banging on his door around 23:15. Trader is already in pajamas, robe, slippers. Notified of his loss, he expresses hostile disbelief. There’s O’Boye, six feet two and three hundred pounds of raw meat and station-house dough fat in a polyester sport coat, with an alligator complexion and a Magnum on his hip. And there’s the Associate Professor, in his slippers, calling him a fucking liar and getting ready to swing his fists.

  “O’Boye brought him downtown,” said Silvera. “Mike, I’ve seen some bad guys in my time, but this one’s a fucking beauty. His eyeglasses are as thick as the telescope at Mount Lee. And get this. He had leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. And there he sits on a bench in the corridor, bold as day, crying into his hands. Son of a bitch.”

  I said he see the body?

  He said yeah. They let him see her.

  I said and?

  He said he kind of leaned over it. Thought he was going to hold her but he didn’t.

  I said he say anything?

  He said he said Jennifer...Oh, Jennifer, what have you done?

  “Detective Silvera?”

  Hosni. And Overmars’s call. Silvera rose, and I started gathering our stuff. Then I gave him a minute before joining him by the phone.

  “Okay,” I said. “How many three-in-the-heads we got?”

  “It’s great. Seven in the last twenty years. No problem. We got a four-shot too.”

  On our way to the door we took a glance at the no-smoking section. The guy was in there, alone, unattended, unserved, looking vigilant and strained.

  “He’s like Colonel Tom,” said Silvera. “He’s in the wrong section. Oh and guess what. Five of them were women. It’s like we say. Men kill other people. It’s a guy thing. Women kill themselves. Suicide’s a babe thing, Mike.”

  March 10

  Saturday. In the morning, just for the hell of it, really, I do a half-block canvass on Whitman Avenue. It’s a nice neighborhood now. A middle-class enclave on the frontier of the Twenty-Seven: You got the old University Library over on Volstead, and the Business School on York. American cities like to fix it so that their seats of learning are surrounded by war zones (this is reality, pal), and it used to be that way around here. Ten years ago, Volstead Street was like the Battle of Stalingrad. Now it’s all nailed up and scorched-looking—vacated or plain abandoned, with hardly a hoody in sight. It’s tough to say who made this happen. The economy did it.

  So as I move from door to door, under the elms, the residents are very, very cooperative. It wasn’t like doing a rowhouse block in Oxville or a project in Destry. Nobody told me to go suck cocks in hell. But nobody saw anything either. Or heard anything, on March fourth.

  Until my last call. Yeah. Wouldn’t you know. A little girl, too, in pink ribbons and bobby socks. Silvera’s right: This case is so fucking cute. But it’s not pure ketchup, because kids do notice things, with their new eyes. The rest of us just looking out there and seeing the same old shit.

  I’m winding it up with the mom, who suddenly says, “Ask Sophie. Sophie! Sophie was out riding her new bike up and down the street. I don’t let her leave the street on it.” Sophie comes into the kitchen and I hunker down on her.

  Now, honey, this could be important.

  “Number 43. Yeah. The one with the cherry tree.”

  Think carefully, sweetheart.

  “My chain came loose? I was trying to fix the chain?”

  Go on, honey.

  “And a man came out?”

  What did he look like, sweetheart?

  “Poor.”

  Poor? Honey, what do you mean? Like shabby?

  “He had patches on his clothes.”

  It took me a second. He had patches on his elbows. Poor. That’s right: Don’t they say the darnedest things?

  Sweetheart. How’d he seem?

  “He looked mad. I wanted to ask him to help me but I didn’t.”

  And soon I’m saying, “Thanks, honey. Thanks, ma’am.”

  When I badge my way from door to door like this, and the women see me coming up the path—I don’t know what they think. There I am in my parka, my black jeans. They think I’m a diesel. Or a truck driver from the Soviet Union. But the men know at once what I am. Because I give them the eyeball—absolutely direct. As a patrol cop, on the street, that’s the first thing you have to train yourself to do: Stare at men. In the eyes. And then when I was plainclothes, and undercover, I had to train myself out of it, all over again. Because no other kind of woman on earth, not a movie star, not a brain surgeon, not a head of state, will stare at a man the way a police stares.

  Back home I field the usual ten messages from Colonel Tom. He veers around, racking his brains for shit on Trader. A prior record of instability and temper-loss that amounts to a few family disagreements and a scuffle in a bar five years ago. Examples of impatience, of less than perfect gallantry, around Jennifer. Times he let her walk by a puddle without dunking his coat in it.

  Colonel Tom is losing the story line. I wish he could hear how he sounds. Some of his beefs are so smallprint, they make me think of diss murders. Diss murders: When someone gets blown in half for a breach of form that would have slipped by Emily Post.

  “What’s the game plan, Mike?”

  I told him. Jesus... Anyway, he seemed broadly satisfied.

  If the jury is still out on women police, then the jury is still out on Tobe. Still out, after all these months, and still hollering for transcripts of the judge’s opening address.

  Right now the guy is next door watching a taped quiz show where the contestants have been instructed beforehand to jump up and down and scream and whoop and french each other every time they get an answer right. The multiple-choice questions do not deal in
matters of fact. They deal in hearsay. The contestants respond, not with what they think, but with what they think everybody else thinks.

  I just went through and sat on the great couch of Tobe’s lap for five minutes and watched them doing it. Grown adults acting like five-year-olds at a birthday party, with this routine: What do Americans think is America’s favorite breakfast? Cereal. Boing. Only 23 percent. Coffee and toast? Wheel All right.

  What do Americans think is America’s choice suicide method. Sleeping pills. Yeah! Ow!

  Where do Americans think France is? In Canada. Get down!

  March 11

  There’s an obit in this morning’s Sunday Times. In its blandness and brevity you can feel the exertion of all Tom Rockwell’s heft.

  Just a resume, plus manner of death (“as yet undetermined”). And a photograph. This must have been taken, what, about five years ago? She is smiling with childish lack of restraint. Like you’d just told her something wonderful. If you skimmed over this photograph—the smile, the delighted eyes, the short hair emphasizing the long neck, the clean jaw—you’d think that here was someone who was about to get married kind of early. Not someone who had suddenly died.

  Dr. Jennifer Rockwell. And her dates.

  The little girl on Whitman, with her pink ribbons and bobby socks? She didn’t hear anything, on March fourth. Today, however, I went to see someone who did.