A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  The stench of the burn ward. The patients swathed in bandages, even their eyes and ears covered. The congealed black mass of whatever skin wasn’t bandaged. The intravenous fluid tubes stuck into the odd patches that weren’t black or red or oozing. Many patients were unconscious. Of those who were conscious, not all could speak. Some charts listed only numbers, not names.

  Claire greeted the patients before she photographed them. Most didn’t respond. But she refused to photograph them as if they were living corpses. She wanted to offer comfort, although she didn’t know where to touch them, or if she was even allowed to touch them. She didn’t know what to say to them. She certainly couldn’t ask them to sign permission forms; she’d let Mack or Andrew Barnett worry about that later. So all she could say was, “Hello, Mr. Daniels,” to a patient who might lose his legs. Or, “Good morning,” to a woman, number 37 according to her chart, whose face was swaddled in bandages.

  At the hour when the dressings were changed, the moans were heartrending. The doctors and nurses wore face masks, which unfortunately muffled any words of comfort they might be offering. Claire turned her camera away from the unbandaged limbs, the mass of red and black and the white where bone shone through. She wasn’t a doctor. She wasn’t taking photos for a medical textbook. She wouldn’t take pictures that were too lurid to be printed in the magazine.

  As the hours passed, some of the patients began to call her “nurse,” those with bandaged eyes able only to sense her, not see her. “Nurse, nurse.” At first she tried to explain and then she gave up trying. How did you explain to someone who was immobilized and blinded and calling out in agony?

  Mr. Brady, Mrs. O’Toole, Miss Flynn—“Oh, Miss Flynn, you have the most beautiful red hair.” Spread across the pillow, her red hair was like a halo around her face. Miss Flynn was twenty years old. Miss Flynn’s face was covered with bandages. Her eyes were covered with bandages. Only her hair showed. Only her hair hadn’t burned. How was that possible?

  “You’re lucky, Miss Flynn,” said Nurse O’Brien, sturdy, steady, no matter what she saw, “you’ve been chosen to receive a new drug. It’s called penicillin. It will stop infections from the burns. It will save your life.”

  Penicillin will save your life, but never cure your scars, Miss Flynn, Claire thought. Never make you beautiful again. Twenty years old, Miss Flynn.

  “Nurse, nurse, I need you, nurse, water,” someone called from several beds down the row. A few sips of water through a straw, a few reassuring words from a young nurse. The soft, kind words.

  Claire didn’t know whether to pray that penicillin would save poor Miss Flynn or pray that it wouldn’t. At the other end of the ward, a young, nameless man who didn’t look more than sixteen stared at Claire but didn’t speak. When Nick examined his wounds and rebandaged them, he needed to be so very gentle that Claire had to turn away.

  Nurse O’Brien, forced to step around Claire for the third time, confronted her by the window. “Doesn’t it bother you, to be taking pictures of them and never helping them? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she asked, the lovely Irish lilt in her voice turned to anger.

  Before Claire could answer, the nurse turned away, responding to a patient crying in pain, promising and bringing him an injection of morphine. Claire thought, Was she ashamed of herself? She had to believe that she was helping these people, if only by creating empathy in those who read their stories. Maybe inspiring others to help them. If she didn’t believe this, she couldn’t go on.

  She returned to work. The next time she took a break, it was dark outside. Deep night. A day had passed. She checked her watch. Close to 2:30 AM. Too late, most likely, to find a taxi back to her hotel.

  Nurse O’Brien came to her once more. No preamble, no apology. Pushed a kit bag into her hand. “You can use the on-call room at the end of the hall.” She pointed. “There’s a bed, a chair. The door says STAFF ONLY. You can lock it from the inside.”

  “Thank you.” With the image of a bed conjured in her mind, Claire suddenly felt exhausted.

  “You can wash up in the room marked NURSES ONLY. That’s our shower. You’ll find clean robes behind the door. A toothbrush and toothpaste in the kit. A few other things. Here’s the key.”

  Nurse O’Brien thrust out a key hanging from an unpainted slab of wood.

  “Thank you. You’re very kind.”

  The nurse turned away with a sniff, mixing judgment with her charity.

  Claire took a shower. The shower head was narrow, and the water pressure was strong. Instead of a soothing glide, the stream of hot water felt like tiny blades cutting her skin. Several days after her visit to the nightclub, her hair still reeked of smoke. She washed her hair twice, scrubbing with her palms, trying to get rid of the stench of smoke and burnt flesh.

  Was Dr. Keefer right? Was Jamie dead? No, it wasn’t possible. Yes, it was possible. No, it wasn’t. Yes, it was. Jamie was dead. He’d abandoned her. She felt a terrible and irrational anger against him for deserting her, for letting himself be killed. The anger consumed her.

  She had work to do in the morning, she had to sleep. She turned off the shower. She put on the clean terry cloth robe hanging behind the door. She wrapped her head in a towel to dry her hair. She came out of the shower room with her clothes in a jumble pressed against her chest.

  As she walked down the hall to her room, Nick came out of his own shower, terry cloth robe tied at the waist. His hair was wet, with the look of having been combed by fingers. He opened the door to an on-call room across the hallway from hers. She glimpsed a narrow, metal bed stand, an old-fashioned wooden bureau, a bit of rug, lace curtains too feminine for the tiny, otherwise masculine room.

  Nick looked at her. All day, he’d sensed her presence at the periphery of his vision. She was the remaining link to his dead friend. His dead friends, Jamie and Tia both. He could burst into tears in Claire’s arms.

  But that’s not the way he interacted with women. He’d tried with Tia to learn a different way, and he and Tia were friends to start with at least, so it was easier. But that was over before it had a chance to unfold. His vaunted experience was useless when it came to figuring out how he could have Claire Shipley wrap him in her arms and comfort him. He understood only one way to become physically close to a woman. He said, “Why don’t you spend the night with me.”

  It wasn’t a question or even a suggestion; it was more like an insufficiently guarded thought. He was naked beneath the robe. She, too, was naked beneath her robe. His body was lithe and firm and strong. As was hers.

  Death was all around them. Miss Flynn might have died in the time it took Claire to shower, shampoo, and comb her hair. Jamie had forsaken her. Everywhere was death. Here, overseas, the earth itself was consumed by welling streams of death. She felt desire. The desire to be close to one person, before she and everyone else was swept away. She imagined herself walking toward him. Jamie was dead, and for this one night she would grasp at being alive, fearing she might regret it but not knowing how much time she might have remaining for regrets, the smell of burning flesh lingering in her memory. She imagined the entire scene in an instant.

  And then she did it. She walked through the door. Nick followed. He closed the door behind him. He wanted something different, more meaningful, not this. But he didn’t know how to ask for it, or how to create the circumstances for it. And this must be what she wanted and expected of him. After all, she’d accepted his invitation. She’d walked through the door. She’d think he was weak if he didn’t follow through. He was supposed to be strong. His friend was dead, so he wasn’t betraying him. Just as Tia was dead when he took possession of the medication, so he wasn’t betraying her: this is what he told himself. He couldn’t understand his own life. He needed, wanted, someone, a woman, Claire Shipley; he needed to touch someone, embrace someone, be close, somehow, to someone.

  Claire switched off the light. The room was dimly illuminated by other lights, the wards across the airshaft, the lights
from the stairway windows. Jamie was dead, so he would never know. In the dark Nick could be anyone. In the dark he could be Jamie. She didn’t know Nick, didn’t understand him, didn’t recognize his smell or touch, felt no connection to him beyond the link of death. He placed his hands upon her shoulders, pulled her close. Kissed her, hard and blunt. She sensed in him and in herself an anger and despair, a quick, brutal desire.

  When she woke up, she was alone. She reached for the clock on the bedside table and shifted it until she could pick up some light from the window and see the time. 6:15 AM. Nick’s clothes were gone from the chair where he’d tossed them, the robe left in their place. He must be back at work. That’s the proper attitude, she thought. The attitude of a man. Get up and leave without a word, without offering anything of yourself apart from what happened in the semidarkness, satisfied simply with the release of passion.

  She showered once more, trying to wash off Nick’s smell along with the stench of the dead and dying. Returning to her own room, she got dressed. She put on yesterday’s clothes. They felt heavy with sweat and grime. She needed to return to the hotel, where she’d bathe yet again and change into a suit: This morning at ten, she was covering the official hearing into the cause of the Cocoanut Grove fire.

  When she left her room, camera bags over her shoulders, the cleaning staff was changing the bed linens in Nick’s room.

  A bed made clean in the early morning, the occupants having vanished without a trace.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  On a gray afternoon just before Christmas, Detective Marcus Kreindler got himself assigned to a new case. A double homicide, in Chinatown. He decided to walk to Chinatown. Get a little exercise, God knew he needed it. Since he was already at police headquarters, on Centre Street between Grand and Broome, the distance wasn’t all that impressive.

  When he crossed Grand Street, he turned to look back at the headquarters building, a gigantic stone palace in the style of something called French Baroque, his department secretary, of all people, had once explained to him. He never got tired of it, the gaudy decoration, the magnificent central cupola. He loved the contrast between the glitzy outside and what actually went on in the inside, criminals paraded through lineups, interviews going on, the whole business. There were contrasts outside, too, between the French palace and the surrounding dives where reporters hung out, waiting for hot tips.

  He might have a hot tip for the reporters later. Had to get to work, though, to find out. Quickening his steps, he walked east on Grand to Mott Street. At Mott, he turned south. Walking through Little Italy, he felt completely at ease. Maybe on his way back he’d stop for a cup of coffee at Ferrara, have a piece of sfogliatella. He loved the flaky pastry with its sweet cheese. Now that he thought of it, he’d have one in the shop and two for the road, so that he could share with Agnes tonight. She’d like that, and like even more that he was thinking of her.

  The Christmas decorations in this part of town were really something. In fact he’d noticed this year that everywhere he went, the decorations were extravagant, as if they were designed in inverse proportion to how tough everybody’s lives had gotten. Fuck you, Krauts and Japs, was what the decorations seemed to say. (In Little Italy everybody conveniently forgot that Italy itself was part of the Axis.) Kreindler realized something: bombing cities to smithereens was supposed to break people’s will, but instead, it made their will to resist stronger.

  He crossed Canal Street, trying not to get run over in the multiple lanes of traffic. He entered the narrow, teeming streets of Chinatown. Right away, he was in a foreign country. He was glad he’d decided to walk, as the roads were clogged. In the gutters, accumulated muck reeked even in the December cold. Urine (human, canine, feline) mixed with chicken bones, feces, motor oil, gasoline, and maybe a few fetid egg salad sandwiches to top it off. At sidewalk markets, whole fish, their silvery skin mottled and shiny, were arranged on outdoor tables that abutted battered metal garbage cans overflowing with a week’s refuse. The windows of the vegetable markets displayed produce he didn’t recognize, big-leafed and pale green.

  Newspaper offices posted war bulletins in their windows and on adjoining walls, Chinese characters printed in red on orange paper. Crowds of men gathered to read. Walking at a slow but steady pace, Kreindler looked the men over. They wore their suits and hats, and their wool topcoats, with a studied formality, as if they’d decided this was what they were supposed to look like in New York City, although they didn’t exactly understand why, or what or where it was going to get them. Maybe they just thought the suits and ties would make the cops look the other way, and probably they were right.

  A huckster placed himself next to Kreindler and matched his stride step by step. “Girls. I’ve got girls for you,” he whispered. “All clean. Doctors look at them every day. Beautiful girls, any kind you want. White, black, oriental. Big tits. Biggest you ever saw.”

  Kreindler walked on, pretending not to notice. Prostitution wasn’t his beat.

  He crossed Bayard. When he reached Pell Street, he saw his destination: down the block, three squad cars were parked at a tenement at the corner of Pell and Doyers. An ambulance brought up the end of the line.

  Doyers Street. Fifty years ago, it was famous for gang wars. Back then, it was a street flowing with blood, or so the legend went. The only place Kreindler ever saw a street flowing with blood was in a village in France, during the last war.

  Here’s what happened early this morning on Doyers Street: the neighbors reported a mutt whining, growling, pawing at the outside entrance to the basement of that particular tenement. Dogs could smell blood a mile away, Kreindler swore. One thing led to another, the cops got called in, and what did they find? Two guys shot dead with one bullet each to the back of the head, very efficient. Done by someone who knew what he, or she, was doing. Since the victims were Chinese, this was no big deal at headquarters. It didn’t even make the late editions of the English-language newspapers. But the story was all over the Chinese papers, according to an acquaintance of Kreindler’s in the community, a contact cultivated over long years of dim sum (or whatever the hell they called it), just as he’d cultivated Fritz uptown.

  Apparently the Chinese papers went into a lot of detail about the basement being full of green mold growing in milk bottles. The Chinese reporters seemed to think this was a little strange. The first cops at the scene were willing to ignore the green stuff—after all, just a couple of Chinks, doing what Chinks do and getting killed for it, as the first detective assigned to the case so aptly described the situation to Kreindler.

  But when Kreindler heard about the mold in milk bottles, everything started making sense to him. He pulled seniority and got himself assigned to the case. He telephoned his contact, who went by the name “Sam” because Kreindler couldn’t pronounce his real name. The Chinese language sounded like gibberish to him, a fact that didn’t make Kreindler proud, but there it was. Anyway, Kreindler asked Sam if there were any other deaths that morning. Twenty minutes later, Sam called back and reported the death of a woman, wife of a local big shot. Sick with some kind of female complaint that sounded to Kreindler like the clap, doubtless caught from her husband. Gave herself a shot of yellow medicine and dropped dead.

  Before he left the office, Kreindler made a long-distance call on the police department nickel to Washington, to let Andrew Barnett in on the story. Turned out Barnett was in New York anyway for some kind of science meeting at the University Club; only the best places for Dr. Andrew Barnett. Kreindler tracked him down there. Barnett was now on his way to Chinatown to take a look at the basement in question. Kreindler wanted to pass some news on to Barnett, too. After months of questioning, Sergei Oretsky had finally revealed some useful information relating to the death of Lucretia Stanton.

  Outside the tenement, a half-dozen officers and ambulance attendants lounged against the cars, smoking and awaiting Kreindler’s instructions. The medical and forensic reports had already been taken care o
f, organized by the previous detective. These fellows were ready to wrap up here. A rookie stood guard at the entrance to the basement. The kid was thin, with bad skin. Kreindler introduced himself, nodded to the senior guys lounging against the cars. He recognized most of them.

  A black dog was tied to an iron railing at the top of the steep staircase that led down to the basement. It was a short-haired mutt, touch of white under the chin. Its ribs were showing. The dog pulled at the leash. A stray, by the look of him. The dog pressed its nose against Kreindler’s trousers, no doubt hoping for a rescuer.

  “Untie the dog,” Kreindler said. The rookie obeyed. Kreindler wasn’t about to call the dogcatcher and condemn the creature to death. Kreindler had already seen enough death to last a lifetime. The dog looked up at Kreindler hopefully. “Not today, boy,” Kreindler said. Just as if the dog understood English, it took off into the crowd. Anybody watching would have thought it had someplace to go.

  Kreindler added his own half-smoked cigarette to the gutter muck and went down the stairs. The basement was dank, moisture seeping through the walls. It smelled like sewage, or like some long-forgotten underground stream. It also smelled like blood, and like dead bodies lying around too long. A bare bulb dangled from a wire stretched across the ceiling. The wattage was weak. Twenty-dollar bills were scattered across the floor. The remains of more than one meal filled the garbage bucket next to the sink. Pieces of sandwich wrapping paper with holes eaten through and strips of leftover lettuce had been pulled to the floor—rats, unmistakably. Shelves of stoppered milk bottles lined the walls. In the corner was a contraption of tubes that reminded him of a device he’d seen at Lucretia Stanton’s laboratory. The table in the middle was covered with scientific stuff, vials, test tubes, petri dishes, syringes.

  Two contorted shapes, covered with tarps, lay next to the chairs. Only the shoes, sticking out from the end of the tarps, showed that the shapes were humans. Blood puddled on the floor, still sticky and coagulating.