“He’s off duty now,” the desk sergeant said. “Can I help you?”
Max was staring at the intricate buttons on the sergeant’s uniform. “Call him please,” he said. “It’s important.”
In half an hour, Lieutenant Jacobs arrived at the station. Max was seated on a bench where he had watched a drunk being brought in, supported by two policemen, and then a woman accused of picking pockets on Market Street. “You got a cigarette, Honey?” she asked Max, but the officers led her off before Max could answer. Then Jacobs arrived. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “I was just about to go to sleep.”
“I can prove that I killed the girl,” Max said. “I didn’t mean to, but I did.” He took his keys out of his pocket and handed them to the detective. “In the top drawer of my bureau you’ll find a button from the girl’s dress. I tore it off when we fought.”
Jacobs tossed the key in his hand. “I don’t want to believe you,” he said.
“I know,” Max said. “I’m sorry.”
For a moment their eyes met and then they both turned away. “Go quickly,” Max said. Tears were swelling in his eyes.
The detective started walking towards the door. He was still tossing the key.
“My address is-”
“We know what your address is,” Lieutenant Jacobs told him. Then he turned to the desk sergeant and said, “Watch this man. Read him his rights,” and left the station. Max took a deep breath and moved down the bench, closer to the desk sergeant.
19
Max looked around for something to read but there was only the magazine on the sergeant’s desk and he did not dare ask for that so he occupied himself by thinking of Holtz being released. He wondered when they would let him go. Perhaps even tonight someone would unlock his cell and gently shake him until he woke up. You can go now, they would say, someone has confessed. Perhaps Holtz would come to visit him and when he saw that the man who set him free was Jewish they would shake hands and Holtz would say that he was going to quit being a Nazi.
He did not realize he was asleep until a policeman poked him with his nightstick. “No sleeping here,” the policeman said, and disappeared before Max could ask why.
It was cold in the station. Max stuffed his hands in his pockets and listened to the thin sound of a siren growing in the night outside. Then, an hour after Max had given him the keys, Lieutenant Jacobs returned, bursting into the station and coming down the corridor in long, stiff strides. Max stood up to meet him, but Jacobs, marching past, only shook his fist with the button in it and conferred with the desk sergeant.
Max took a few steps toward the desk. “Don’t move!” the sergeant yelled at him, and Max froze in the middle of the room. The sergeant called another officer who came and led Max to a cell. When the door snapped shut and the officer locked it and went away, Jacobs came and said, “We’ll see you in the morning.”
“You found the button?” Max asked.
“Yes. And we talked to your landlady. She confirms that you went to the park that night. She says when you came back you looked distraught.”
“That’s what she said, ‘distraught?’”
Jacobs looked at his notes. “Yes,” he said. “Distraught.” He stood there until Max said again, “I’m sorry,” and Jacobs grabbed the bars in his hands and said furiously, “Shut up! Don’t say another word!”
For the third time that night Max slept and in the morning he was served some oatmeal, toast and coffee and then led to an office a little larger than the one he had been in the night before. An immensely fat man with sad coweyes introduced himself as Captain Harkness. Jacobs was there too, sitting on the corner of the desk and looking as if he had not slept since Max saw him last. He held his eyes open to stay awake and they were as large as the button which sat next to him in a plastic bag on the captain’s desk. Another man was also in the room, an officer busily setting up a tape recorder. Captain Harkness leaned back in his chair and hummed to himself, Jacobs fought with his eyelids, and Max looked out the window at the gray hills of the city. Finally, the officer was ready. He put a microphone in front of Max. “Say something,” he said.
Max, his eye on the traffic winding down the steep street, said, “Can I make a phone call?”
Jacobs jerked his eyes open. He glanced at the Captain who was shaking his head and then he said to Max, “Last night you couldn’t wait to confess and now you want your lawyer?”
“No,” Max said. “I just remembered I won’t be able to go to work today. I wanted to call and tell them. I already missed most of this week.”
Jacobs turned to Captain Harkness again. The captain shook his head.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” Max said. “I guess I won’t be going back to work anymore.” He sighed and slumped a little in his chair.
“Let’s get on with it,” Jacobs said. He looked at the patrolman who had taken a position at a typewriter table in the corner. “Are you ready?” Jacobs asked. “Ready,” the patrolman answered.
Jacobs punched a button on the recorder and a spool of tape began to unwind. There was a soft hum from the machine as if it were getting ready to speak. Captain Harkness leaned over his desk. Jacobs, wrinkling his forehead to keep his eyes open, watched Max, and Max watched the machine. “Ready,” the patrolman in the corner repeated. “Go on,” the captain urged.
Max was remembering the time a reporter came to the Army hospital where he rested after being released from the camp. The reporter wore a suit and he brought the musky odor of cologne into the hospital with him. “What was it like in the camps?” the reporter asked, his pencil poised over his clean new notebook, and Max, ashamed to be interviewed in the pajamas the army had given him, huddled down beneath the blankets and wondered how to answer. “What was it like in the concentration camp?” the reporter asked a little louder. “Like?” Max said. “It wasn’t like anything.” The reporter made a note and then asked, “To what do you attribute your own survival?” Max thought about it for a while. Then he said: “No one survived.”
“Go on,” Captain Harkness repeated.
“Tell us about you and the Jordan girl,” Lieutenant Jacobs said. “What happened on the night of June the third?”
The tape recorder hummed and time spun back to the present. Max moved up close to the microphone and told the machine that on the night of June third he went to the park.
“Not so close,” Jacobs said, moving the microphone back an inch.
“Why did you go to the park?” Jacobs asked. Captain Harkness lit a cigarette and offered it to Max. He shook his head and Harkness offered it to Jacobs who also shook his head so the captain shrugged his shoulders and puffed contentedly at the cigarette himself. “Why did you go to the park?” Jacobs asked again.
“Why I went to the park? I guess I was lonely. I often go to the park at night when it isn’t crowded.” He stopped and watched the blue smoke reach for the ceiling.
“Then what happened?”
“Then a young girl came and sat down on the bench. She was out of breath. I guess she had been running. She sat down on the bench and I asked her if she had been running. She said she had been running and then we began to talk. The next thing I knew”
“What did you talk about?” Jacobs asked. “Do you remember?”
Max was suddenly aware that the typing had stopped. He looked at the officer in the corner, but the officer, fingers poised over the typewriter keys, did not look back. “Then I—,” Max said, and stopped to listen to the typewriter click off his words and wait patiently in mid-sentence for him to continue, but he was only testing the typist and he wanted to laugh at his little joke, but instead he swallowed and went on. “We talked about the weather. She asked me where I was from, you see she noticed my accent. I asked her name. What does it matter?”
Jacobs started to say something, but the captain waved his hand and made the cigarette between his lips dance as he said, “Go on. This isn’t very interesting so far.”
Making up a story was an effort and Max was angry with himself because he had all night to prepare a tale and he wasted his time sleeping. “She moved closer to me,” he said slowly, and then he pictured himself sitting on the bench and the girl next to him and then it was easy, he had only to describe what he saw to tell the story and join the ranks of the great authors he had studied in the university. He took a deep breath and went on confidently: “She moved closer to me and I smelled whisky on her breath. I asked her why she drank and she told me her parents did not understand her. She said her father yelled at her and made her break off going with her boyfriend and so she took a few drinks. I told her I thought girls her age should be allowed to make their own decisions and then she said she wished that I was her father.”
Jacobs and Captain Harkness both leaned forward and Max told them what he saw. First he patted her on the head because he had never had a girl of his own and the next thing he knew his arm was around her and she leaned her head against his chest. “Suddenly, she kissed me. I didn’t know what to do. You understand, it was thirty years since anyone kissed me. Then she suggested we go for a walk.” The office itself became Golden Gate Park for him, the lamp turned into a tree and the little grove was just behind the desk. “We walked a little way and she put her arm around me. I said ‘Let’s go in there,’ so we left the path and went into a little grove and I got excited and started to touch her in different places and she said I was a dirty old man. I slapped her and she kicked me. Friendly at first, you understand, joking, then harder. I was still touching her and then she kicked me here. In the groin. I shook her and we fought. That’s when the button came off her dress. I pushed her to the ground and.and made love to her. I didn’t notice that she hit her head on a bottle. When I saw the blood I got scared and went home.”
“She hit her head on the bottle?” the captain said. “Then what happened to the top part of the bottle?”
Max became confused. He turned to Harold for help. “My fingerprints were on it so I threw it away. Wasn’t that smart?” The tape recorder whirred like an insect. “I’m not such an old man as I look,” Max added.
Captain Harkness said, “Just for the record, then, you did rape her?”
“No,” Max said. He pictured the body on the ground, the skirt pulled up over the face. When he pulled the skirt down he saw Clara lying there and he bit his fist. Then he remembered what the boy had said, that no one would believe him. “The whole thing was an accident”
“A fatal accident and it was caused by you. If you didn’t rape her, how come her panties were down and there was semen in her vagina?”
“I don’t know.” He felt strangled by his own lie.
“You don’t know? If you confess to killing her but not to raping her, you could be put on trial for both.”
“All right, there was sex. I thought she consented.”
They waited another minute and then Lieutenant Jacobs leaned over and shut off the tape recorder.
The room seemed suddenly cold. Max looked to see if the window was open, but it wasn’t. The sun shattered on the windowpane and seemed to close in on him. He shaded his eyes with his hands but his hands began to shake and he squeezed them between his legs and then he was rocking back and forth the way his grandfather did when he prayed. Someone came and stood next to him and Max started to scream, but it was only the officer holding a sheet of paper and trying to hand Max a pen. Clara, lying in the grove in Golden Gate Park, her throat slashed, cried out to him, No, Max, no! His teeth were chattering and when he raised his hand it shook so violently he could not take the pen. Lieutenant Jacobs took it instead and put it on the desk on top of the typewritten page. He motioned the officer out of the room.
“This is a confession,” Lieutenant Jacobs said. “It’s a copy of what you just said. Sign it when you are able to. You can read it first.”
Max picked up the paper, but he could not read it for the tears in his eyes. Everything looked dim and slightly magnified as if they were all in a fishbowl, or perhaps only he was in the bowl looking out, and he wondered if that was the way things look to a fish. When he felt he could control his hand he took up the pen and signed the confession without reading it and then his eyes could no longer hold the tears and he cried.
They left him alone for a little while and then a patrolman came and he thought they would lock him up, but he was led first to a brightly lit room where they took his picture with a number hung around his chest. Another number, he thought, and before they could take it from him he turned the number around so he could see it and compare it to the number on his arm. They took his fingerprints too and then, at last, they led him to a cell.
20
You plan and you plan and when you look at your life it is a mess of loose ends. Max counted them out on the bars of his cell. There was Clara who would soon wonder why he did not call. There was the agency. What would they do when he did not show up and did not call to say he was sick? Perhaps they would send Shmuel to see what was wrong. And what would Shmuel do? He would soon have someone new to talk to. Max could see Shmuel explaining the system to the new man, introducing him to Mr. Goldman and Mrs. Kipnis. There was his apartment with his books and clothes and dishes what would happen to them? The Thompsons would watch for him on television. Perhaps if they put him on television he could say something to the Thompsons. The old man would like that. He put his fingers on another bar. Sarah! Does she approve? He looked up. Well, Sarah, what do you say? Are you proud of me? Am I a mensch?
Across the way was another cell and in it a man sat on the edge of the bed and studied the floor. Max pressed his face to the bars. The man across the way was dressed in a blue business suit and Max wondered how long he had been there and what, if anything, he had done. “Hello,” he called. The man looked up briefly and then turned back to the floor. Max put his finger on the last bar. And me? What am I doing here? He wondered if he were insane and he quickly took stock of himself, even running his hands up and down his body, but everything seemed to be in place. I don’t feel insane, he thought, but how does a maniac feel? He had no desire to scream or to bang his head against the bars. Only he felt cold. In fact he was shivering just a bit, but perhaps the jail itself was cold. He wanted to ask the man in the blue suit if he was cold too, but just then an officer came to the cell across the aisle and led him away. Watching him was like watching himself and Max followed the stranger as far as he could see, wondering where he was being taken and whether they were going to take away his blue suit and give him one of stripes.
After lunch a detective came and told Max to get ready; he was going to go before a magistrate for a preliminary hearing. Max didn’t know how he was supposed to get ready. “I already confessed,” he said, but the detective just stood there so Max tucked in his shirt and said “I’m ready.” On the way they stopped at the men’s room. The detective handed Max a razor and suggested he shave and comb his hair. “There are some photographers waiting,” he said. “You’ll want to look pretty.”
“Photographers?” Max took the razor. As he shaved he saw his face reflected not in the mirror but in the front page of the newspaper. Like a criminal, he thought.
In the press room reporters swarmed around him. Flash bulbs stung his eyes and he tried to look away, though he noticed the detective was standing very close to him and smiling. When the cameras stopped the questions began. Microphones sprouted from some of the hands before him and were held up to his face; other hands held pads and pencils. “Is it true you have confessed?” someone shouted. And then the questions came all at once. “How did you meet the Jordan girl?” “Is it true you were in a concentration camp?” “Did you know Holtz?” Max answered yes or no, trying to sort out the questions, until he realized there was really no need for him to answer at all since the reporters went on asking and writing whether he answered or not. He started to explain that to the detective when he heard a woman’s voice ask: “What made you give yourself up?”
“Why di
d I give myself up?” he repeated. He thought he knew the answer to that when he went to Clara’s house. At least, he told himself while trotting along Geary Boulevard, he would know the answer when he needed it. Then at night, while he slept in Lieutenant Sloane’s office, he thought he had it, but he lost it when he woke up thinking he was home. And in his cell in the morning he decided not even to think about it because he was afraid if he thought about it too much he might change his mind. Now he needed an answer and he did not have one. “It’s none of your business,” he said, more irritated at himself than at her. Only as he heard his answer did he realize that the room had been still for several seconds. The detective took his arm. “That’s enough, guys,” he said, and led Max away. One photographer ran after them shouting, “Roll up your sleeve. Just one more picture. Will you roll up your sleeve?”
“I didn’t mean that,” Max shouted, looking back over his shoulder. He wanted to return to the woman reporter and apologize but the detective pushed him through a doorway and hustled him down the back way to the court.
The Kiss of the Prison Dancer Page 15
