Night Train

by Martin Amis

  Mrs. Rolfe, the old dame on the top floor. It’s half after five and she’s half in the bag. So I don’t expect much. And I don’t get much. It’s sweet sherry she’s drinking: The biggest bang for the buck. Mr. Rolfe died many years ago and she’s quietly splashing her way through a widowhood that’s lasting longer than her marriage.

  I ask about the shots. She says she was dozing (yeah, right), and the TV was on, and there were shots on the TV also. Some cop thing, naturally. She describes the report she heard for definite as unmistakably a gunshot, but no louder than a door being slammed two or three rooms away. You can feel the weight of the building: Constructed in an age of cheap materials. Mrs. Rolfe dialed 911 at 19:40. First officer showed at 19:55. Plenty of time, theoretically, for Trader to pack up and split. The little girl wheeled her bike in “around a quarter of eight,” according to her mother. Which puts Trader on the street—when? 19:30? 19:41?

  “They fight ever?”

  “Not to my knowledge, no,” says Mrs. Rolfe.

  “How’d they seem to you?”

  “Like the dream couple.”

  But what kind of dream?

  “It’s just so awful,” she says, making a move for the sauce. “It’s shaken me up, I admit.”

  I used to be like that. Any bad news would do. Like your friend’s friend’s dog died.

  “Mrs. Rolfe, did Jennifer seem depressed ever?”

  “Jennifer? She was always cheerful. Always cheerful.”

  Trader, Jennifer, Mrs. Rolfe: They were neighborly. Jennifer ran errands for her. If she needed something heavy shifted, Trader would move it. They kept a spare key for her. She kept a spare key for them. She still had that spare key, used to gain access on the night of March fourth. I say I’ll take that key, thank you, ma’am, and log it with Evidence Control. Left her my card, in case she needed anything. I could see myself looking in on her here, as I still do for several elderly parties in the Southern. I could see myself developing an obligation.

  On the floor below: The door to Jennifer’s apartment is sashed with orange crime-scene tape. I slipped inside for a second. My first reaction, in the bedroom, was strictly police. I thought: What a beautiful crime scene. Totally undeteriorated. Not only the blood spatter on the wall but the sheets on the bed have the exact same pattern that I remember.

  I sat on the chair with my .38 on my lap, trying to imagine. But I kept thinking about Jennifer the way she used to be. As gifted as she was, in body and mind, she never glassed herself off from you. If you ran into her, at a party, say, or downtown, she wouldn’t say hi and move on. She’d always be particular with you. She’d always leave you with something.

  Jennifer would always leave you with something.

  March 12

  Today my shift was noon to eight. Sitting there smoking cigarettes and changing tapes, changing tapes—audio, visual, audiovisual. We’re casing the new hotel in Quantro, because we know the Outfit has money in it. I finally got the visual fix I was looking for: Two guys in the atrium, standing in the shadows back of the fountain. When we say the Outfit or the Mob, in this city, we don’t mean the Colombians or the Cubans, the Yakuza, the Jake posses, the El Ruks, the Crips and the Bloods. We mean Italians. So I watched these two greasers in blue suits that cost five grand, gesturing at each other, very formal. Men of honor, worthy of respect. Wise guys had long before stopped behaving that way, but then some movies came along that reminded them that their grandparents used to do that shit, with the honor, and so they started doing it, all over again.

  Incidentally: We want that hotel.

  I feel grateful for quiet workloads on days such as this, days of lethargy and faint but persistent nausea which have to do with my time of life, and my liver. More my liver than my unused womb. My only way around this is a transplant, a full organ transplant, which is possible, and expensive. But the precarious-ness—the risk of hepatic collapse—keeps me honest. If I bought a new liver, I’d just trash that one too.

  Early afternoon Colonel Tom buzzed me and asked if I’d come up to his office on the twenty-third.

  He is shrinking. His desk is big anyway but now it looks like an aircraft carrier. And his face like a little gun turret, with its two red panic buttons. He isn’t getting better.

  I told him the move I planned for Trader.

  You’ll go in hard, he said. Like I know you can.

  Like you know I can, Colonel Tom.

  Freestyle, Mike, he said. Flake him. I don’t care if he spills and walks. I just want to hear him say it.

  To hear him say it, Colonel Tom?

  I just want to hear him say it.

  With Silvera or Overmars, you could always tell when a case was beating them down: They started shaving every other day. That, plus the usual symptoms of being wide awake for a month. Pretty soon they’re like the guys gathered around the braziers in the stockyards sidings—ghosts of a Depression section gang, lit by the flares... Colonel Tom’s cheeks were smooth. His cheeks were smooth. But he couldn’t take a razor to the brown smears of pain beneath his eyes which were deepening and hardening like scabs.

  “Don’t buy all that Ivy League, Skull and Bones bullshit. The soft voice. The logic. Like even he thinks he’s too good to be true. There’s evil in him, Mike. He...”

  Falling silent. His head vibrated, his head actually trembled to terrible imaginings. Imaginings he wanted and needed to be true. Because any outcome, yes, any at all, rape, mutilation, dismemberment, cannibalism, marathon tortures of Chinese ingenuity, of Afghan lavishness, any outcome was better than the other thing. Which was his daughter putting the .22 in her mouth and pulling the trigger three times.

  Colonel Tom was now going to lay something on me. I could feel it coming. He roused himself. Briskly but also ditheringly, he leafed through a binder: Looked like a lab report out of the ME’s office. I wondered how Colonel Tom was monitoring and controlling the post-mortem findings as they came in piece by piece.

  “Jennifer tested positive for ejaculate, vaginal and oral,” he said—and it was costing him to go on looking my way. “Oral, Mike. You see what I’m saying?”

  I nodded. And of course I was thinking, Jesus, this really is fucked up.

  Eight days on and Jennifer Rockwell is still laid out like a banquet dish in the walk-in freezer on Battery and Jeff.

  March 13

  Time for Trader.

  My first thought was this: I’d send Oltan O’Boye and maybe Keith Booker up to Trader’s department at CSU, in a black-and-white, and have them jerk him out of a seminar. Yeah, with lights but no sirens. Have them yank him out of the lecture hall or wherever, and bring him downtown. The hitch was we’d be up against probable cause way too early. And whatever Colonel Tom thought we had, we didn’t have probable cause.

  So I just called his room on campus. At six a.m.

  “Professor Faulkner? Detective Hoolihan. Homicide. I want you downtown today at Criminal Investigations. As soon as you humanly can.”

  He said what for?

  “I’ll send the wagon. You like me to send the wagon?”

  He said what for?

  And I just said I wanted to straighten something out.

  In truth it’s perfect for me.

  Around eight in the morning, and we’re three hours into a blizzard that has upped and hurled itself down from Alaska. You got hail, sleet, snow, and spume skimmed off from the ocean, plus faceslapping gouts of iced rain. Trader will be trudging along from the subway stop or clambering out of a cab down there on Whitney. He’ll look up, for shelter, at the Lubianka of CID. Where he will find a succession of drenched and dirty linoleum corridors, a slow-climbing, heavy-breathing elevator, and, in Homicide, a forty-four-year-old police with coarse blonde hair, bruiser’s tits and broad shoulders, and pale blue eyes in her head that have seen everything.

  And Trader will find hardly anybody else. It’s Tuesday. In Homicide the zoo contains only a smattering of witnesses, suspects, malefactors and perpetrators. The weeke
nd, which for us is just a code word meaning a regular bender of citywide crime, has come and gone. And there is also the bad weather: Bad weather is the big police. For company, while he waits in the zoo, Trader will have only the husband, the father and the pimp of a bludgeoned prostitute, and a Machine executioner (presently top of the money list) called Jackie Zee who has been asked downtown to elaborate on an alibi.

  The phones are silent. The midnight shift is falling apart and the eight-to-four is limping in. Johnny Mac is reading an editorial in Penthouse. Keith Booker, big black motherfucker with scars and whole gold ingots on most of his teeth, is trying to watch a college ballgame from Florida on the faulty TV. O’Boye is painfully bent over his typewriter. These guys are kind of in on it. Only Silvera has the full picture, but these guys are kind of in on it. Trader Faulkner will be receiving no words of condolence from anybody here.

  At 08:20 the Associate Professor checks in downstairs and is shunted up to the fourteenth. I watch him step out. In his right hand he is holding his briefcase, in his left the pink card issued him by building security at the front desk. The rim of his fedora, which has lost its definition in the rain, is starting to droop over his darkened face, and his overcoat gives off a faint vapor under the tube lighting. His gait is deliberate and kind of wide at the knees. His inturned shoes are squelching toward me.

  He says, “It’s Mike, isn’t it. Good to see you again.”

  And I say, “You’re late.”

  Johnny Mac gives him a leer, and Detective Booker does a good job of chewing gum in his direction, as Trader is led into the zoo. I point to a chair. And walk away. If he likes, Trader can talk philosophy with Jackie Zee. A half-hour later I return. In response to a wag of my head Trader gets to his feet and I reescort him back past the elevators.

  At this point, as arranged, Silvera strolls out of the door marked Sex Crimes and says hey Mike, what we got?

  And I say something like: We got the dead hooker that was turning ten-dollar dates in AllRight Parking. We got that murdering asshole Jackie Zee. And we got this.

  Silvera looks Trader up and down and says need any input?

  And I say nah. And I mean it. This will be the sum total of Silvera’s participation. None of that good cop-bad cop bullshit, which doesn’t work anyway. It’s not just that Joe Perp is on to it, having seen good cop-bad cop a million times on reruns of Hawaii Five-O. The fact is that since the Escobedo ruling, which was thirty years ago, bad cop has lost all his moves. The only time bad cop was any good was in the old days, when he used to come into the interrogation room every ten minutes and smash your suspect over the head with the Yellow Pages. And besides: I had to do this alone and in my own way. It’s how I’ve always worked.

  I turned, and preceded Trader Faulkner to the small interrogation room, pausing only to slide the key off its nail.

  Overdoing it slightly, maybe, I locked him up alone in there for two and a half hours. I did say he could bang on the door if he wanted anything. But he never stirred.

  Every twenty minutes I go and take a look at him through the mesh window, which of course is a oneway. All he sees is a scratched and filmy mirror. What I see is a guy of around thirty-five in a tweed jacket with leather patches sewn on to his elbows.

  Axiom:

  Left alone in an interrogation room, some men will look as though they’re well into their last ten seconds before throwing up. And they’ll look that way for hours. They sweat like they just climbed out of the swimming pool. They eat and swallow air. I mean these guys are really going through it. You come in and tip a light in their face. And they’re bug-eyed—the orbs both big and red, and faceted also. Little raised soft-cornered squares, wired with rust.

  These are the innocent.

  The guilty go to sleep. Especially the veteran guilty. They know that this is just the dead time that’s part of the deal. They pull the chair up against the wall and settle themselves in the corner there, with many a grunt and self-satisfied cluck. They crash out.

  Trader wasn’t sleeping. And he wasn’t twitching and gulping and scratching his hair. Trader was working. He had a thick typescript out on the table beside the tin ashtray and he was writing in corrections with a ballpoint, his head bent, his eyeglasses milky under the bare forty-watt. An hour of this, then two hours, then more.

  I go in and lock the door behind me. This trips the tape recorder housed beneath the table where Trader sits. I feel a third party in the room: It’s like Colonel Tom is already listening in. Trader’s looking up at me with patient neutrality. From under my arm I take the case folder and toss it down in front of him. Clipped to its cover is a five-by-eight of Jennifer dead. Beside it I place a sheet headed Explanation of Rights. I begin.

  Okay. Trader. I want you to answer some background questions. That’s fine by you, right?

  I guess so.

  You and Jennifer were together for how long?

  Now he keeps me waiting. He takes off his glasses and measures up his gaze to mine. Then he turns away. His upper teeth are slowly bared. When he answers my question he seems to have to move past an impediment. But not an impediment of speech.

  Almost ten years.

  You two met how?

  At CSU.

  She’s what? Seven years younger?

  She was a sophomore. I was a postdoc.

  You were teaching her? She was your student?

  No. She was math and physics, I was philosophy.

  Explain it to me. You do philosophy of science, right?

  I do now. I switched. Back then I was doing linguistics.

  Language? Philosophy of language?

  That’s right. Conditionals, actually. I spent all my time thinking about the difference between “if it was” and “if it were.”

  And what do you spend all your time thinking about now, friend?

  ... Many worlds.

  Excuse me? You mean other planets?

  Many worlds, many minds. The interpretation of relative states. Popularly known as “parallel universes,” Detective.

  Sometimes I have the look of a grave child trying not to cry. I have it now, I know. As with the child, staying dry-eyed while enduring sympathy, it’s more like defiance than self-pity. When I don’t understand something, it makes me feel defiant. I feel: I will not be excluded from this. But of course you are excluded, all the time. You just have to let it go.

  So it wasn’t an academic connection. You met how?

  ... Socially.

  And you moved in together when?

  When she graduated. About eighteen months later.

  How would you characterize your relationship?

  Trader pauses. I light a cigarette with the butt of its predecessor. As usual, and of set purpose, I am turning the interrogation room into a gas chamber. For-hire executioners, bludgeoners of prostitutes they seldom object to this (though you’d be surprised). A professor of philosophy, I reckoned, might have lower tolerance. That’s sometimes all you’re left with in here: The full ashtray. Buts and butts, we call it. You’re left with the full ashtray, and the rising levels in your lungs.

  Could I take one of those?

  Go ahead.

  Thanks. I quit. When I moved in with Jennifer, actually. We both quit. But I seem to have started again. How would I characterize our relationship? Happy. Happy.

  But it was winding down.

  No.

  There were problems.

  No.

  Okay. So everything was great. Well leave it like that for a minute.

  Excuse me?

  You guys were building for the future.

  Such was my understanding.

  Get married. Kids.

  Such was my understanding.

  You two talked about it... I asked if you talked about it...Okay. Kids. You wanted kids? You yourself?

  ... Sure. I’m thirty-five. You begin to want to see a fresh face.

  She want them?

  She was a woman. Women want children.

&nbs
p; He looks at me, my town flesh, my eyes. And he’s thinking: Yeah. All women except this woman.

  You’re saying women want children in a different way? Jennifer wanted children in a different way?

  Women want children physically. They want them with their bodies.

  They do, huh? But you don’t.

  No, I just think that if you’re going to live life...

  To the full...

  No, if you’re going to live it at all. Then the whole deal, please. Could I... ?

  Go ahead.

  I now had to purge myself of the last traces of affability. Not a big job, some would say. Tobe might say it, for instance. A police works a suspicion into a conviction: That’s the external process. But it’s the internal process also. It is for me. It’s the only way I can do it. I have to work suspicion into conviction. Basically I have to get married to the idea that the guy did it. Here, I have to become Colonel Tom. I have to buy it. I have to want it. I have to know the guy did it. I know. I know.

  Trader, I want you to take me through the events of March fourth. This is what I’m doing, Trader. I want to see if what you give me measures up to what we have.

  To what you have?

  Yes. Our physical evidence from the crime scene, Trader.

  From the crime scene.

  Trader, you and myself live in a bureaucracy. We have some bullshit to get through here.

  You’re going to read me my rights.

  Yes, Trader. I’m going to read you your rights.

  Am I under arrest?

  This amuses you. No, you’re not under arrest. You want to be?

  Am I a suspect?

  We’ll see how you do. This sheet—

  Wait. Detective Hoolihan, I can end this, can’t I. I don’t have to tell you anything. I can just call a lawyer, right?

  You feel like you need a lawyer? You feel like you need a lawyer, hey, we can whistle one up. Then that’s it. This case binder goes to the assistant state’s attorney and I can’t do a damn thing for you. You feel like you need a lawyer? Or you want to sit here with me and straighten this whole thing out.