Empties

by George Zebrowski

  “You should have someone come in,” she said. “But I don’t see much dust.”

  “I just cleaned up. My vacation time. I couldn’t afford a service on what a cop makes.”

  He went out into the kitchen, filled the copper pot with water, and put it on the stove. “Hope you don’t mind instant,” he called out. “I was going to pick up some real coffee later.”

  “Instant’s fine.”

  He went back to the living room. Carla was smiling at him politely as he sat down in the chair facing the sofa.

  “What do you do?” he asked, trying hard to sound friendly.

  “I’m a medical records specialist at New York General.”

  “You’re not from New York,” he said.

  “They brought me in from St. Louis,” she said. “I learn records fast and can use the computer.”

  “Oh,” he said, “you have brains.”

  She smiled innocently. “I specialize in frauds and scams. Mostly I compare records. Something tells me when they don’t fit together for a particular patient. I’m not always right. I guess you could call me a kind of busybody.”

  “You’re a detective,” he said, “like me.”

  “Thanks,” she said, “that’s nice of you.”

  Something tells her who’s a fraud, he repeated to himself, and thought of mentioning the case of the brainless dead man to her as she spoke of a car accident victim with a history of lucrative mishaps. But she was unlikely to know anything about a brainless dead man, and he would be getting off on the wrong foot by discussing the grisly details of the hoax and then sending her off on a mental wild goose chase. He found himself wanting to make a good impression on her, then asked himself if he truly wanted to get off on the right foot with her. Sure you do, Gibney would say.

  “The hospital corporation doesn’t like it when I support the patient,” she said. “I think they’re looking to fire me someday soon.”

  “What will you do?” he asked.

  “Go back to school maybe. I’ve saved enough, and my uncle left me a bit.”

  He got up and went out to the kitchen. “Milk or sugar?” he said as he turned off the gas under the kettle.

  “Black, thanks.”

  He poured water into two mugs, stirred in the instant coffee, then returned to the living room. “Your job must pay well.”

  “Yes, but I spend it on a sick mother. My father died when she was sixty. He was nearly seventy-five. She’s in a nursing home, and the doctors don’t expect her to live much longer. There’s enough left over after I pay the bills each month.”

  As he listened to her, he felt an abyss opening up before him, and that if he listened long enough, Carla would change into someone vastly different from the woman he saw in front of him. She was living for later, when the last parent was gone and the life she had begun would resume its original probings. She was fortunate, it seemed to him, that her parents had started a family later in life. She seemed to be in her early twenties, and her mother would be gone while she was still young, sparing her the emotional burden of dealing with her decline in middle age, as he had been spared. It was a cruel fact, and he felt guilty.

  He asked, “Is this the work you want to do?”

  She took a deep breath and said, “I’m learning a lot, even if some of it is depressing, but later I’d like to teach mathematics, maybe get married. Who knows? How about you?”

  He shrugged. “A cop’s life is tough for one person, more so for two, worse for a family. I wouldn’t inflict it on a wife, or anyone, unless I had no choice.”

  “What do you mean, if you had no choice?” she asked with obvious interest, leaning back against the cushions.

  “I mean if I cared enough about someone...” He stopped. “You can’t decide that,” he added.

  “And you don’t?” she asked.

  “I guess not. There’s never any time.”

  She smiled. “Oh, I bet you’d make time if you found someone.”

  He sat back and looked away from her, feeling foolish.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m embarrassing you. But then what are neighbors for?”

  He pulled himself together and looked at her again. “You’re from a small town.”

  “Yes, where we’re all gossips and busybodies and know everybody’s business. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’m still that way, I guess. When people’s interest in each other isn’t too intrusive, keeping up an interest helps make them more responsible to each other, maybe even more honorable. I like to think so, anyway, even though it gets out of hand.”

  The thought crossed his mind that maybe Carla Selkirk was a bit naive, maybe even cracked. But he looked into her fresh, slightly freckled face more confidently now. Her green eyes looked back at him, then blinked and looked away, as if she had abruptly realized that she was far from home and that the neighbor she was talking to was really a stranger who might not understand or care much about what she was saying.

  “Thanks for the coffee, Bill.” She got up. “I’ve taken up too much of your time already.” She went to the door, opened it, and stepped out. He went after her into the hall and watched her stride toward her door, looking compact in her sweater and jeans. He felt flattered that she had come by to talk to him, but then reminded himself that she was simply acting the way a new neighbor would back home. It didn’t mean anything.

  “Oh, Carla,” he called out as she came to her door.

  She turned around, smiled, and waited.

  “I’m sorry I’m not such good company today. Could you invite me another time?”

  “Sure,” she said good-naturedly and started to open her door.

  “And if I can ever be of help,” he added, “just ask.”

  She nodded and went inside.

  He retreated, closed and locked his door, then wandered back into the kitchen with the empty mugs. After rinsing them out, he returned to his easy chair, sat down, and after a few moments was back in his drifting state, believing that he might somehow recapture the way he had felt at fifteen, when he had liked to watch baseball games without knowing how they would end. Taping them might have been almost as good, if he had been able to keep from learning the final score before playing the tapes. After a while he had learned how to watch even when he knew the outcome. There was something restful about seeing how it had to happen, step by inevitable step. It made more sense than trying to see how it was going to happen when you didn’t have all the facts. As a kid he had been glad to be left alone, watching a game, hoping that it would end before his father came home. The suspense of the game and the uncertainty about when his father would come stumbling in became linked in his mind, and he had learned to appreciate being alone, in control, with no visitors threatening to arrive and all the games on tape, waiting for him with all the authority of settled fate. That was the way it was with fate. Inevitable, sure, dependable.

  Almost as a reproach, he asked, what was this activity of policing human life? The conceit of police work was that it compelled lawful behavior; but most people needed police only occasionally. It was the dedicated criminal, filling waiting empty niches of opportunity with his craft and professionalism, and getting a return for his effort, who needed policing. Most people did the cop’s job for him, from within. Well, he wasn’t quite sure of that; many people regularly got away with petty crimes that went unreported. But he was still sometimes surprised at the high level of civil order that existed in even the worst cities: miraculously, most people did not commit crimes. He sometimes thought that an anarchy based on the personal responsibility of one human being to another would work just as well, on a block by block basis; but the gangs in political power would never agree to it. The ancient Stoics were right in their response to life: be responsible only for what it is in your power to change, little though it might be. Every age was a transition, a dark age between the misery of what was and is, and the vision of paradises to come.r />
  Of course, it had been in Hadrian’s power to build a wall across Roman Britain to keep out the northern barbarians, but it had not stopped them, only challenged them to greater efforts.

  He still remembered his dismay when he had learned how many of his fellow policemen were on the take. The papers said a quarter of them were, but that was based on how many had been caught. Just as many would never be caught. And their own view of their actions was not implausible: they were a poorly paid occupying mercenary force patrolling a wall, entitled to spoils now and then, it seemed. Why shouldn’t the crooks pay to support the police they had made so necessary? It sounded good, except for the wrongs done during collections, and the fact that the extra “pay” did not make the cops any more effective. In fact it made them outsiders who pitied and disliked the fools they were supposed to protect.

  Way in the back of his head he had the vague idea that someone was writing down his good deeds, and that somehow he would one day benefit from them. They were adding up all the time. They had to be. If not, what could it all add up to? A little patch of order here and there, for the time being, for as long as he was here? It seemed to him sometimes, when Silvera looked at him, that his fellow detective was afraid that comrade-in-arms Benek might turn him in. He wasn’t really looking to do so, but what would he do if push came to shove and he was compelled to sit on a witness stand? He’d probably lie. So much for his good deeds.

  Compassion in a young man costs too much, his father had said, and an old man can’t give it away. Could anyone sell it and get a good price?

  Benek stood up suddenly, as if he had been struck, then went into the bedroom and lay down, searching for sleep, but found only himself, inside a hive of thoughts. If only a mind could be emptied once in a while. Sleep tried and failed.

  He began to remember small happinesses. There was the time he and his seventh-grade pal John Carulli had gone into New York by themselves, to Yankee Stadium. There were the long summer days with his books, and the time when Ray Ferguson and some other guys in his dorm at Rutgers had thrown him a twenty-first birthday party with a chocolate cake and beer. There was the evening when Helena Sternfeld, the only girl he had ever gone out with in high school, had let him kiss her goodnight. They were pathetic joys, fragile and unrepeatable, entirely his own, flotsam washed up on some strange shore deep inside him.

  He got up and undressed for sleep. It was always a surrender, a wiping away of the world from his eyes, wished for and feared but always putting him under too early, just when it seemed he might guess what it was all about.

  5

  Benek found a large, hand-addressed manila envelope, marked “personal,” on his precinct desk, along with a note taped to the outside, Captain Reddy reminding him, or his vacation replacement, to check back with the jewelry storeowner on Twenty-Seventh Street, who had called in with fresh suspicions about who had robbed him. There was another note under that one, informing him that the jewelry store owner was dead, knifed to death three days ago by person or persons unknown, and that the man’s brother had suspicions about who might have done it. A third note, from Detective Silvera, reported that the brother of the jewelry store owner had disappeared after cleaning out the safe and all of the dead man’s bank accounts.

  Benek sat down and examined the envelope, realizing that his vacation had helped him only for as long as he was away; now he was weighed down again, as if someone had thrown a switch. He was becoming someone else, a stranger taking over his body, but he did not want to push the intruder away because he was curious to learn more about him, perhaps even take him into partnership, if only to hear his thoughts. They waited for him, whether he would like their help or not, or be able to see it. Life is lived forwards, someone had written, but only understood backwards, which had to include the written words, of course. What mad genius had invented such a scheme of endless discovery and comeuppance? Why had it been written down except to suggest that we might cultivate foresight instead? Life’s striptease hurtled fools forward into an ever-emptying future. The oldest of these had learned only how to look back, when it would no longer do them any good...

  He thought again of the strangeness that had come into his city, and imagined that he was lying injured somewhere, dreaming a mad dream on his way down to death... and that maybe that was all that life had ever been... a strange wandering before a waiting oblivion...

  Were there companions, or love, along the way?

  As he tore open the envelope, Reddy stuck his head through the door and said, “There’s a disturbance of some kind at the Saint Stanislaw Church on East Fifth Street. We’ve got two cars there, but no one seems to be able to tell us what happened. It may not be much. Go see.”

  Benek nodded and put down the envelope and looked directly at his superior.

  The chief of detectives saw his hesitation and said, “I could send Silvera or Abrams,” surprising Benek with this better than business as usual concern. Was there a glance of compassion in his eyes? Had something overtaken him in his personal life?

  “I’ll go,” Benek said as he stood up, grateful that he wouldn’t have to sit at the desk and enter old case updates onto a crowded hard disk that had nowhere to overflow because the department hadn’t authorized new data storage purchases.

  “Thanks,” Reddy said with intended sincerity. Maybe it had always been there; but in any case, if Reddy was giving, Benek made a note to give some back.

  Benek and the uniformed cop on the beat pushed their way through the crowd on the street outside the church, went up the stairs, and hurried through the big doors to salvation, open at the posted schedule.

  It was hot inside. The pews were all empty. Benek looked up and saw the body of a priest bent over double on the rail of the pulpit, looking as still as any of the statues at the Stations of the Cross circling the pews. A police sergeant stood guard below the pulpit. He might have been one of the saints at either side of the altar.

  “As we can make it out,” the heavy-set, ruddy-faced cop with Benek said as they went up the center aisle, “he just fell over during his sermon as if he’d been shot. The congregation fled when they saw him collapse, thinking there was a shooter in the church somewhere.”

  They stopped under the pulpit, and Benek saw a few drops of blood below the priest’s head.

  “Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph,” the cop said softly, but his words echoed with a hiss in the empty church.

  “Look at this!” the sergeant called from halfway along the altar railing.

  Benek hurried over to him. His stomach twitched as he knelt down next to the sergeant to examine a bloody mass of flesh lying just inside the communion rail.

  “How... could anything like this have happened?” a voice asked behind him.

  Benek turned around on one knee and saw a balding, overweight priest gazing down at them. “I’m Father Nowak,” the priest said, shaking as they both stood up.

  “Did you see what happened, Father?” Benek asked, turning away from the sight, but the smell stayed with him.

  “Why—I suspect Father Tolek saw this mess during his sermon and collapsed from the shock. Or was he shot?”

  Benek glanced at the sergeant and asked, “Did anyone see who dumped this in here?”

  The sergeant said, “There’s a butcher store nearby. They might know something. Cow brains, looks to me, I’d say.”

  “Over here,” another cop called out from the tenth row of pews.

  Benek went down the aisle and looked to where the patrolman was pointing. A woman lay on her back in the pew. “Probably passed out from the excitement,” the cop said. “I’ll call an ambulance.” He hurried away.

  Benek looked closer and recognized the porcelain landlady from the Tenth Street Apartments. He reached down and checked her pulse. It was slow but not abnormal. She opened her eyes and pulled her hand away, staring directly at him.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You only fainted.”

  She swallowed hard, then nodded, l
ooking vulnerable.

  “How do you feel?” he asked. “There’s an ambulance on the way.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said, sitting up. Some color showed in her pale complexion.

  “You may remember me. I’m Detective Benek.”

  “Yes,” she said as if angry with herself, then smoothed the skirt of her suit, sat back and took a deep breath. “No ambulance, please. I can get home by myself.”

  “Are you sure?” Benek asked, glad to see her again.

  “Certainly. Thank you.”

  “You saw what happened?”

  She shrugged. “He fell over...”

  “Did you see who dumped that bloody mess by the altar?”

  “No... I heard it hit before I saw it.”

  “And then you fainted?”

  “Yes.” She stood up and said, “I’ll be going now,” then slipped past him and started down the aisle, her low heels clicking on the hard floor. He looked after her, impressed again by the vitality that seemed to exist beneath her composure. He would not have taken her for a churchgoer.

  The morgue team was at the big doors. The woman stepped aside and let them pass with their stretcher, then went out and down the steps. Benek turned away and watched as the body was photographed, then went up into the pulpit and looked at the dead man. There was no sign of a bullet hole. He leaned closer and saw that the priest had a drop of blood on the end of his nose, and his eyes were wide open.

  “Can we have him, Detective?” one of the medics asked.

  Benek came down from the altar and watched the body being carried down from the pulpit. It reminded him of paintings of Christ being taken down from the cross, except that the Jesus figure’s eyes were always closed and the peaceful expression on his face suggested that he was glad it was all over. The priest’s face, now that he saw it upright, was set in surprise, as if he had been frightened to death.

  The cop Benek had come in with was handing him something. “It was under the pew,” he said. Benek nodded as he took the woman’s purse, surprised at how pleased he was by the opportunity. “I’ll return it myself,” he said.