The November Criminals: A Novel

by Sam Munson

  Baltimore shot out of his seat when I said this: “Come on!” Huang held up a hand. “No, no, don’t go. Someone else needs to be here for this. Another pair of eyes. All right?” He addressed me now. “Addison, tonight was supposed to be my first night off in fourteen days. That’s how my schedule works, at the moment. I don’t get normal weekends. Do you understand what I mean? I’m supposed to be, right now, having a meal with my family. With my daughter. Whom, as I’ve said, is about your age. Although she does not go to Kennedy. Which I’m beginning to think more and more is probably one of the more responsible decisions I’ve made.”

  He was looking at his knuckly hands, twisting his wedding band around his pillar-like ring finger.

  “If you have something, some kind of description of this guy, some rationale, or if you want to give me more information about your friend, the source, we can move forward. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave. We’re going to have to treat this as not worth checking out. I’ve never heard of this Lorriner guy. And you’re in fucking high school.” Baltimore nodded, giving me a bulgy, skeptical eye.

  Huang took a showy breath. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let my temper show. But Addison, you’ve got to help us here. You say you want to help us. Do you have a description? Do you have something for us?”

  My palm, wet now with the sweat of imminent failure, farted against the attaché handle.

  “No, I don’t necessarily have a description but—”

  “But? But? There’s no but here, Addison. All right? This is not some negotiation. You seem like a smart kid. But it’s time for you to go. Okay? Baltimore can’t sit here all night, and I’m not even supposed to be here, at the moment. Do you understand that? I have a family, too.”

  I gripped the handle harder. My sweat was copious, warm and tacky. Like fresh, still-drying blood. Huang looked at me with pissed-off expectancy. “Come on,” Baltimore was already drawling. I stood up, yes. But just as a delaying tactic. I had one play left. I would tell them about the death threat. That would move them, I figured. It would have to. I had a vague idea that death threats were illegal. I opened my mouth to speak. And then, ladies and gentlemen, I underwent what at the time I regarded as a major illumination. I thought of a better story. I mean, if they didn’t care about Lorriner, why would they care about his making a death threat? It was all just some game to them. So I changed my story. At the last possible second. I decided to try a more personal tone. As though I were the one suffering. I have a daughter that age, Huang told me. A point, I thought, of vulnerability. Your family makes you a hostage to circumstance, right? Baltimore clamped his magnificent hat down above his pointy ears. Huang gave me a curt wave good-bye. So I said:

  “He was a friend of mine.” My throat sort of clenched. My palms were soaked. This vacuum coursed through my innards as soon as the lie was out.

  “Who? Who are you talking about?” Huang shouted. “This alleged murderer? Who? Who do you mean?”

  “Kevin.” I’d wanted to put a throb of fake pain into my voice, but it had gone sawdusty. My statement produced a long silence from Huang. I was suddenly too miserable to take any satisfaction in it.

  “Addison,” said Huang, after several rapid blinks. “Addison, I understand why you’re here. We both do. You want to help. But this is not helping. If anything, it’s making the problem worse. Because it confuses the real issues, and it distracts us from doing our job. I know what it’s like to lose a friend. I know that you’re probably desperate for answers. I hope you never have to go through it again. But the simple fact is that the investigation is ongoing, we’re doing everything that we can, and I assure you that we will catch the people who did this. Whoever they are. Have you tried grief counseling? I can give you the card of someone who specializes in that. Okay? I think you should go. I think you should try not to think about it so much. Okay? Is there someone you’d like us to call?”

  I had no idea what to say. I’d just told, I was realizing, the single worst lie, morally speaking, the most profane lie I’d ever told in my life. You see why it’s so terrible? Why I should have stuck to the death-threat story? You see how bad it is to claim a friend posthumously? Is that even indexable on any normal scale of morality? Huang and Baltimore looked at me. With real concern. Which made everything much worse. I’d never felt so morally deformed. Or humiliated. Despite my suit and my empty briefcase, despite the stolen tie, despite my clever, useless plan, I was just some idiot kid to them, whose griefs were to be dealt with through mildness and conciliation, whose lies were to be believed. The anger at being kept from dinner had left Huang’s eyes. Baltimore said, “Come on,” almost avuncular now. “Is there someone we can call?” Huang repeated. And—out of humiliated exhaustion, or out of my heated and burgeoning sense of guilt—I croaked the digits of my father’s phone number. Baltimore took, with a gentle hand, my elbow. The interview was over. I’d been dismissed. The worst part? Walking with shame-shadowed, childish eyes past Officer Pontecorvo, as Huang and Baltimore escorted me, like two court-appointed guardians, back into the precinct house’s front area to wait for my father. She got up and stretched, arms overhead, while I was crossing the echoing room. Even through her stiff-lined, graceless uniform, I could see the astounding contours of her tits and ass. A momentous, just-discovered landscape. A reminder from God about my lowly station.

  VII.

  I HAVE TO INTERRUPT to explain something. I told you my mother was dead. I don’t think about her a lot. I was young when she died, and the inexpressible pain that it caused went away over time. I know that sounds inhuman, but it’s true. She would have wanted it that way, I think: for me not to be unhappy. And even if I don’t think about her all the time, I do remember her. She was always happy, or I thought as a child she was always happy, because she was usually smiling. She was a book editor, when she died. At this small publishing house. Black Meadow Press. I never understood the name. It went out of business the year of her death, and when I was a kid I always thought the two things were related. I mean, of course she wasn’t always happy. No one is, and she and my father used to have terrible arguments, because he’s so helpless, I figured out much later.

  She was a great cook and a great baker, so that even a kid with no other experience in eating would notice. She was competent too, with her hands. She once put in a new segment of pipe under our sink. Lying on her back, half-hidden in the space under the counter where the pipes are. She let me help her, or pretend to help her. I handed her a vise grip. My father told me that they met at a gallery opening for a friend of his who later went on to become semifamous, a sculptor in wire and untreated animal skins, that they met about a year before I was born. Her family had been in D.C. for generations. Five or six. Her maiden name was Hiller: before she married, she was Katharine Hiller. I’m named after her father, like I said. She had, instead of a diamond on her engagement ring, a cloudy, glimmering stone. An opal chip. I learned the name of the stone from my father.

  You don’t give a fuck, of course. I’m only mentioning these particulars to help explain the following. When I turned seven, I had a miserable party at which the Eichman brothers, small-eyed, oval-headed twins, ganged up on me in my own backyard and battered my head with two identical white-pine dowels. That’s actually their name: Eichman. Who wouldn’t change their name, if it were Eichman? Someone who takes pride in it, right? Or someone who argues, Adolf Eichmann had TWO NS, you dirty fucking Jew, SO SHUT YOUR JEW MOUTH! The sticks they hit me with were meant for the piñata my parents had procured to liven up the party. Which failed, predictably, to open. Everyone blamed me for this, I could see by their eyes.

  A chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting. That much I remember. My mother had baked it. She stands out, like I said, as an excellent baker in my lucid, fragmentary memories from childhood. The cake was really impressive, for homemade. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ADDISON! With crisp punctuation. The message written in azure frosting. And for some reason, my head still ach
ing from the blows, instead of puffing out the candles I spit on them, to the delight and disgust of all the kids gathered around, who emitted a cheery simultaneous groan. My father, I saw when I looked up, was twiddling the bridge of his nose and staring at the floor. I realized in ninth grade that this is his I’m embarrassed for you and can’t look at you gesture. Which doesn’t make the memory any easier. But my mother was trying not to laugh. She’d tied her hair back to do the baking, and it was still up, and a freckle of flour marked her right earlobe.

  Two days after this party, I ran stumbling (as usual) through my front door from the schoolbus. As soon as I was inside, the sharp, sweet stench of human feces shot into my nose. I had no idea where it was coming from, but it frightened me. I began yelling for her—for my mother, I mean. With every call that got no response, I felt sicker and sicker, dizzier and dizzier. A sense of things being unreal. You remember how nauseating that is, when you’re a child. I ran back and forth through the house, down into the basement, out into the yard, then unoccupied by any kiln. I don’t know why it took so long for me to check my parents’ bedroom, which is on the second floor. I was choking as I ran up the steps. The concussions of my feet sounded dead, flat. When I opened the bedroom door, I saw why everything stank of shit.

  Arched over the bed—on her knees, arms spread in mute plea—was my mother. She was wearing a towel and the inside of each thigh was stained brown. I realized I was running in place. Her hair, water-darkened, clung in a thick tendril to her upper back, and the bloody tip of her tongue quivered in the corner of her mouth. “She’s sick she’s sick,” I screamed at the 911 dispatcher, when he asked me what my emergency was. My father said that the EMTs found me clinging to her shoulders, and that I lashed one stooping paramedic’s knee with the back of my open hand, moaning, “Get away, get away.” We were sitting in the waiting room of Philip Sidney Memorial Hospital when he informed me. My mother died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of thirty-two. Brain hemorrhages can happen to anyone, at any age, at any time. For no detectable reason.

  My father did not shed a single tear over my mother. I’m not bringing this up in reproach. I don’t know what he went through, because we still haven’t talked about it. I came close once. I was eight; it had been about a year. He’d just gotten his silly job at the Cochrane Institute, as a result of which I became—with considerable pride—a part-time latchkey child. “Did you know that I’m a latchkey child?” I asked him. He knuckled my head, which was his gesture for affectionate dismissal then, and told me he was busy, and hoped I forgave him. “I don’t mind,” I sang back. We were in our yard, watching the laborers he’d hired build the kiln, laying the specially ordered ceramic bricks, then putting up the joists of a small shed. “Fuck,” one of them screamed, and trotted past us, grimacing, down to his truck at the curb. His thumb, hit with a hammer, I think, was empurpled and angry-looking.

  That’s the closest we ever came to discussing her. And I only ever asked about his involvement with his students once, in a general way, soon after he started seeing the first one: Margit. He justified it by pointing out that he’s a consulting instructor at the Cochrane. “It’s not the same thing as a professor,” he assured me. More than that I couldn’t ask. Because I never said anything to him about my mother. Which—if you look at it with strict logic—precluded me from ever criticizing him. I let his indiscretions with students pass, making zero comments. He used to bring them by, sometimes, the students I mean, Ingrid, Nadja, Fatima. They were all pretty, in a frightened, foreign way. Or maybe that was just him. He has that effect on people, putting them off without their being able to explain it. I mean, he has that effect on me, too, but I’ve been getting the suicide speech for five years at this point. Fatima he brought by more than once, six or seven times my junior year. Then a long absence over her vacation. A postcard came from her, which said, WISHING YOU WERE HERE—in all caps—and then something scrawled in cursive. It appeared to be French, which my father pretends to understand. On the front was a photograph of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Fatima was angled, taller than me. His height. With long blue-dark hair and a hawkish profile. Teeth tea-stained with nicotine. A thick open-woodwork bracelet always careening up and down her reedish forearm, hairy as a boy’s.

  Most guys my age would deny that their fathers wield any real authority over them. Or they would claim to admire them as a way of admitting defeat. Mine, however, has never applied any discipline, period. He considers himself to have more important things to do. He believed I’d arrived at an acceptable state of existence without it. That’s fair. Even complimentary to me, if you look at it right. So why would I resent him for that? It makes perfect sense on its own, and it would have worked out that way even if my mother hadn’t died. People don’t change, you always hear. Yet I can’t avoid thinking that, if she were still alive, he would lower himself to the act of disciplining me. I don’t know why I think this. It has something to do with my memory of her as a baker, a profoundly serious occupation.

  Or at least, maybe he would have better taste in neckties. The one I’d borrowed for my trip to the cops was gaggingly hideous. Three fat blue diagonal stripes on a background of chartreuse. He loves all of them, though, every ugly one. Cares about them. In fact, his first words to me in the precinct house were, “Addison, is that my tie?” Faux-jolly, hands planted on hips, delivered through bloodless lips. You know. How adults sound when they’re trying to be good sports or whatever? I was waiting near Officer Pontecorvo’s desk, and Huang was standing next to me, checking his watch. My father had arrived winded and sheened with sweat. From anxiety. Remember how I said before that he has only a few genuine qualities? Reverential fear of the police is one of them.

  “Well, Officer, I’m glad we were able to get this all cleared up. And I’m so sorry,” he cooed to Huang.

  “Why are you sorry?” Huang asked.

  “I’m just. About all this. You know.”

  “Well, there’s nothing to be sorry about, Mr. Schacht. I just wish we could have been more helpful to Addison.” My father squinted in confusion at Huang. “Are you all right, Mr. Schacht? Is there something I can do for you?” Huang’s eyes had gone stony and clear again.

  “No, no. I wouldn’t want to impose. I worry that Addison has. I mean, it’s sort of shameful. If you think about it. Wasting your time. It’s just.” He can end sentences that way, no problem. All aquiver with some subhuman emotion.

  “I dunno,” Huang began, grinding his palms into his eyes. “Everybody makes mistakes.” He lowered his hands. With his gaze unobstructed, Huang looked mortified now, sorry for my father. And sort of creeped out.

  “But still,” my father gasped.

  “Mr. Shacht, I don’t really see a need to discuss it.” Huang’s voice had slackened. So my father jumped back in with, “Well, I’m sure we’ll all feel better about it in the morning.” A slave’s grin splitting his face. I worried he might give Huang a bro punch, on the shoulder. “Oh-kaaaay,” said Huang. With real caution. His eyes showed a slight gleam of obvious discomfort at my father’s bootlicking. I couldn’t blame him. I mean, wouldn’t you be deeply uncomfortable if some stranger came and started kowtowing to you? For no apparent reason? Luckily, my father had run out of apologetic things to say. So he pawed at Huang’s hand and dropped his brow in … fucking deference? Amazing, right?

  “Addison, you can’t just go around talking to the police like that,” he admonished me in his car. Our progress through the lot and untrafficked streets had been silent, and we didn’t speak until the fourth stoplight.

  “It’s dangerous, for everyone. Why were you there?” he asked, and tousled my hair. “Is everything all right?”

  I’d never actually wanted to hit him before. Does that make me unusual? I could not believe he had tousled my hair. Or that he was talking to me this way. Although this is how he always acts when he’s trying to show concern, which is not often. Using gestures that seem completely fake, and talking the way parents t
alk in the videos they make you watch in health class, about condoms and drugs and whatnot. I know you’re not interested in these details. They can’t be meaningful to someone who doesn’t know him. I was suddenly so furious that I could barely speak. And he was looking at me in this way he has, quizzical and presumptuous at the same time. Like we’re good friends, or something.

  He makes that face when he’s undergoing a spasm of fatherly sentiment.

  “And what did Huang mean when he said he thought what you were doing was good? Are you doing something? Can’t you tell me what it is that you’re doing?”

  Who talks like this? Who? I’d just stood there in numb obedience while he gushed to Huang, fingering my purloined tie, instead of screaming at him. Why all this muteness in life? And the thing is, despite his fumbling gestures, he didn’t even care, really, what had been going on. Because it asked for no public involvement on his part. Other than a little obsequiousness to calm the imaginary anger of the police. So I mumbled out a response, my voice sluggish and muddy. If he’d actually given a shit, he would have heard that it was a lie.

  “It’s for school. I’m just doing a project. Oral history. Okay? It’s just a project. About Kevin. I like already told you, before. Remember? Last week? Digger told you. When you were—” I almost said drunk. “When you came back from class.”

  “Oh, yes. Right. Right!” That fucking specious assent. He clearly had no idea what I was talking about. Do you see why he’s so impossible to deal with? “I see, I see, I see, I see, I see. Well, you should have asked me anyway. It’s better not to get too involved with the police. Right? With these things? You see why I’m right? It can be dangerous.”

  I didn’t say anything, and we drove on into the mild darkness. Counterfactuals are useless. About my mother, about neckties, about whatever. I called Digger as soon as we’d gotten home. I had to exchange a terrified hello with her mother, but when Digger came on the line I just started explaining. I left out some irrelevant details, of course, such as my complete and utter sense of humiliation and moral idiocy. I just gave her the basics: they had refused to talk to me; they hadn’t gone for my plan. She didn’t sound pissed. Just sort of amused. Which made it all right, somehow. You were expecting the opposite. That if she laughed it would make me feel dickless or something. But I’m not much of an egotist. At least, not in that way. My father was singing in the shower as we spoke. Up and down, bubbling arpeggios. Weird, right? But hey—what’s a son for, if not to listen? I listened to him hum and gargle his way through some aria, with one ear. Digger’s deep voice vibrated in the other. A sudden vertiginous sense of release flowed through me, giddiness, maybe, from having nothing at all to do. I’d tried. And failed. And if the thought of my lies to the cops still nauseated me, it was nothing some weed and an afternoon in bed with Digger would not banish from my mind. You see how easy it is, ladies and gentlemen?