by Julia Dahl
“What’s your name?” I ask.
The boy hesitates. He lifts his face toward mine and our eyes meet for the first time.
“Yakov,” he says. “Yakov Mendelssohn.”
My phone rings. It’s an “unknown” number, which means it’s probably the city desk. I smile at the boy, then turn and walk toward the beer cooler to take the call.
“It’s Rebekah,” I say.
“Hold for Mike,” says the receptionist.
I hold.
“Hey,” says Mike. “Is photo there yet?”
“Nobody’s called me.”
“Fuck. Is the M.E. there?”
“No,” I say.
“Any ID?”
“Not yet.”
“Is anybody at the scrap yard talking? Any workers?”
I haven’t asked. But I can’t say that. “I haven’t found anybody so far. They’ve got it mostly taped off.”
“Well, keep trying. See if you can talk to whoever found the body.”
“Okay,” I say. I know—and Mike knows—that whoever found the body has likely been whisked off to the neighborhood precinct for questioning. But editors in the office often suggest you do things that are essentially impossible on the off chance you get something usable. Once, after the FBI had raided a pharmacy that was selling illegal steroids to cops, I spent an entire day in Bay Ridge looking for people who would admit they’d bought steroids there.
“Look for beefy guys,” advised Mike. “Maybe hang out outside the gym.”
I took the assignment seriously for about two hours. I actually approached several men—one in a tank top with shaved calves, one exiting a tanning salon, one carrying a gym bag—and asked if they’d heard about the raid and if they knew anybody who uses steroids. Not surprisingly, no one did. I finally gave up and just started walking the streets. I struck up a conversation with some men smoking cigarettes outside a bar and told them about my assignment. They laughed and said good luck.
When I called in to report that I’d found nothing, Mike was gone and Lars, a younger editor, laughed when I told him what I’d been asked to do. “Don’t you love assignments like that?” he asked.
I tell Mike I’ll do my best and hang up. When I turn back from the cooler I see that Yakov is gone.
I approach the man behind the counter again. “Cute kid,” I say.
“He is son of owner,” says the man.
“Of the gas station?”
“No,” says the man. “The scrap yard. I watch him grow up, but he never speak to me. None of them do.”
“Them?”
“The Jews,” he says. “You must be special.”
I shrug.
“You say there is … a woman?” He points his chin toward the yard across the street.
“Someone found her this morning. I can’t believe they haven’t gotten her inside yet. Have the police been in?”
“Here? Yes.”
“Did they say anything? Did they ask you anything?”
The man shakes his head.
I drop my coffee in the trash can by the door and step outside. The cold air stings my face. I look down and aim the top of my head into the wind.
There are half a dozen police cars at the entrance to the scrap yard. I linger a few moments at the corner of the administrative trailer, watching as small groups of men—they are all men—rock on their heels, rubbing their hands together and gazing up at the long arm of the steel excavator, still motionless, with torn metal and a frozen limb hanging from its clenched fist. From this close, I can tell the victim is white. Good, I think. That’s one piece of info to give the desk. The Trib loves dead white women.
I wait beside the door to the office trailer, studying the men’s interactions to whittle down the number of people I’ll have to approach to get the information I need. A man in a hooded sweatshirt and work boots comes around the corner and I stop him.
“Excuse me,” I say, flashing a smile for a moment, then cringing as the cold sinks into my teeth as if I’d just bitten down on a Popsicle. “Sorry to bug you, but do you work here?”
The man doesn’t look me in the eye, but says, “Uh-huh.”
“Were you here when they found the body?”
“I was in the cab.”
“The cab,” I say, pulling my notebook and pen from my coat pocket. “What happened?”
The man shrugs and looks over my head. “I was just pulling up loads. That barge was supposed to be out hours ago.” He lifts his chin in the direction of the flat boat sitting on the canal, a pile of scrap in a low mound on its belly. “I was just pulling, and Markie started screaming over the radio. Shouting. I looked out the window and saw a couple guys running.”
I’m scribbling as fast as I can, trying to maintain eye contact with the man and write something legible enough to dictate back to the desk. In my notebook, his quote becomes: pull loads, mark scream radio, look wind saw guys run. I nod, inviting him to tell me more. “Could you see her from the cab?”
“I thought it was a guy, because of the hair.”
“The hair?”
“Well, not the hair. There’s no hair. She’s bald.”
I stop writing. “Bald?”
The man nods and lifts his eyes to the crane. “Her head was … I could see it.”
“What could you see, exactly?”
“I saw her foot first, then, well, once I saw the foot and I knew, I could tell. Her color, she didn’t match the scrap.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I fucking picked this lady up. I didn’t fucking see her in the pile and I closed her in the hook and … I was thinking, I don’t know. I was thinking how cold she was.” He shivers and wipes his hand across his face.
I need more. I need him to say something like, “I couldn’t believe it—I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“Wow,” I say. “I mean, could you even believe it?”
He shrugs and shakes his head. That’ll do.
“How long have you worked here?” I ask.
“Almost a year.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
“A dead body in the pile? No.”
“Can I ask your name?”
He hesitates. “Nah, I think … I think that’s enough.”
“Are you sure?” The desk frowns on anonymous quotes. “Even just a first name?”
He shakes his head. Last ditch, I smile and lean in a little. “Are you sure? It would really help me out.”
“I think I probably helped you out already.”
“What about … Markie?” I say. “Do you think he might talk to me?”
“Maybe.”
“Could you maybe point him out for me?” I’m smiling again, cocking my head, trying to make my eyelids flutter.
He looks around, his hands deep in his pockets. He nods his head toward a group of Hasidic men and workers huddled at the wheels of the excavator.
“Don’t tell him I gave you his name.”
“How can I tell him?” I ask, trying one last time. “I don’t even know your name.”
He nods. No smile of recognition. Just a nod. I wait another moment, then say thank you and turn toward the crowd at the base of the scrap pile, which is more like a mountain range than a mountain. It spans hundreds of feet along the canal, rising and falling in peaks and valleys of broken steel. The scale of the piles is dizzying. Mack trucks parked at the base look like plastic Tonkas in their shadow. The grapple is shaped like that claw you manipulate to grab a stuffed animal in those impossible games in the lobby of Denny’s. I stuff my notebook in my coat pocket and my phone rings. It’s a 718 number.
“It’s Rebekah,” I say.
“Becky, it’s Johnny!” Johnny, the photographer from Staten Island, is the only person in the entire world who has ever referred to me as Becky more than once. “Where are you?”
“I’m at the scrap yard.”
“Where? I’m here. I’m in the Camaro.
” Johnny and I have worked a couple stories together. I turn around and see his silver Camaro parked across the street, near the air pump at the gas station. Johnny once told me that he “owns” Staten Island. On one of my first stories, he told me to follow him in my car to a subject’s house; then he slid through the end of a yellow light on Victory Boulevard. I gunned through the red, annoyed. Later, in the parking lot where we were scoping for a recently released sex offender, he leaned against my car and said I should be more careful going through reds. They got cameras, he said. Did you see a flashing light? I said maybe and he said he’d take care of it. Write down ya’ plate number for me. I’ll ask a buddy. I wrote down my number and gave it to him; he wrote “Rebecca” beside the numbers. I didn’t correct his spelling. I never got a ticket, though I doubt that had anything to do with him.
I catch his eye across the street and walk over to his car. My former car, a 1992 Honda Accord, died when winter came. It had never seen snow. I sold it to someone for two hundred dollars. On my first day working after it was towed away, I had to tell the desk when I called in before my shift that I couldn’t drive. I worried I might be out of a job. At my interview, Mike specifically asked if I had a car. A good stringer is an asset—we run around the five boroughs to crime scenes and press events, knocking on doors, bothering neighbors; we can get the information or the quote or the photo that sells the story—but a stringer with a car is considered an even bigger asset. Stringers with cars can get to Westchester to sit on big houses owned by sloppy, greedy politicians or doctors or professional athletes. Stringers with cars can knock on doors in Long Island for four hours and get back in time to get a quote from someone in Queens before the first edition deadline. But when I stopped having a car, nobody seemed to care. My guess is that Mike simply forgot I’d ever told him I had one.
“Becky! Get in.”
I go around the Camaro and sink into the passenger seat. The car smells like home. There is a coconut-scented palm tree hanging from the rearview mirror. Johnny’s got the heat blowing high, and I put my hands up close to the vents in the dashboard.
“Warm up, girl,” says Johnny. Johnny is a flirt, and though he’s always overfamiliar, I never feel like he’s actually leering at me. I don’t think I’m his type. Johnny likes big hair and tight sweaters and big blue moons of eye shadow. In Staten Island, he does well. Or so he says.
“Have you talked to the desk?” I ask.
“Dead lady in the pile,” he says.
I lean toward the windshield and point. “Look, you can see her. Right there. In the crane.”
Johnny looks and points. “There? That …” He’s stuck for what to call what he sees, which is a leg. “Jesus!” He twists around and grabs his camera from the backseat. “Watch the car. I’ll be back.” He throws open the long door and slams it shut behind him. As he trots across the street in his cropped red leather jacket, Johnny is adjusting his lens, snapping a photo, and then checking the image in his viewfinder. He gets to the edge of the yellow police tape and snaps away. Click click twist twist look. Click twist look. After a couple minutes, I can see the cold start to slow him. He stomps his feet and rubs his hands together. More clicking. He kneels down, maybe getting the tape in the shot, and jogs toward the trailer where the worker I spoke to is standing, smoking, staring at the crane.
I can’t imagine why they haven’t brought the poor woman down yet, though I’m sure Johnny is thrilled he got here in time to get his shot. In the time I’ve been working for the Tribune, I don’t think they’ve ever actually published a photograph of a dead body. I worked a scene out in Queens in September where a kid had tried to ride his bike Back to the Future–style behind a delivery truck and ended up with his head spread open on the pavement. The photographer took dozens of shots of the lump beneath the white sheet in the middle of the road, and the blood-dark pavement around it, but we published a picture of the truck, and the driver sitting on the sidewalk with his head in his hands. They also didn’t use the quote I got from a witness who described the sound the boy’s head made when it hit the blacktop. But photographers, like reporters, know they have to get every angle, every detail—just in case. In case their editor is in a particularly perverse mood; in case the Ledger has the image or the detail and we need to match it.
Johnny seems to be trying to talk to my worker and his friend, but neither’s lips are moving much in response to his questions. My guy points to where he pointed me, to the group of men beneath the crane: workers, Hasids, police. Johnny jogs over, staying just on this side of the yellow tape. An officer in his star-brimmed hat stands guard, and I watch Johnny show his badge and try to sweet-talk him into letting him get closer for a shot. The officer listens without engaging. His eyes dart around him. Johnny is persistent. He’s pointing and gesticulating as if this stranger was an old friend to whom he was recounting some wild encounter.
My phone rings. It’s the desk.
“I need whatever you’ve got for first edition,” says Mike. I read him the quotes from my construction worker. “Still no ID?”
“No,” I say, about to explain that the poor woman is still dangling forty feet above the canal, when suddenly everyone begins running: the crane is moving.
“I gotta go,” I say, opening the car door. “They’re bringing her down.”
Outside, Johnny is frantically changing his lens. “This shot is gonna be shit. Shit!”
I leave him be and get as close as I can to the excavator, pressing against the police tape. The cage is swaying, and as the long yellow arm guides it slowly toward the ground it makes a low, rattling moan. The workers and police step back, forming a circle around the base of the cage. The two Hasidic men from the bodega, now joined by several other men dressed just like them, stand to the side. Everyone is watching the leg. The thigh, the knee, the bare foot. And as it gets closer to the ground there is more. Her skin has color, bluish white, like skim milk. When the cage gets within a couple feet of the ground, it stops abruptly. A policeman shouts something I can’t understand to the crane operator, and the operator shouts something back. The metal arm shudders, pulling the cage up. More shouting. Now the officers all have their hands up, they’re shuffling back and forth, looking like circus clowns scrambling to catch a trapeze artist. Finally, the bottom tip of the cage touches the frozen ground. The new slack shifts its contents, pressing down on the body. There is more shouting, and the officers move in, touching the cage, touching the metal scraps, not touching the woman. It’s hard to imagine how they’re going to get her body out without crushing her.
Within moments of each other, two vans pull up. One has blue and gold Hebrew lettering on the side. The other says KINGS COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER. A uniformed officer lifts up the yellow tape and lets both vans enter the yard. Out of one jump Orthodox men in broad-brimmed black hats, with neon green vests over their coats and white strings hanging from their hips. Out of the other jump men in blue jumpsuits. They all run toward the body.
With the crowd beside her swelled, my stomach begins to hurt. Why can’t they get her out of there? My intestines get all fucked up when I get upset. I learned from a therapist many years ago that it’s called anxiety. I’m always afraid of stuff. Weird stuff, though. Not monsters or murderers or even airplanes. It’s more ephemeral than that. I feel fear when I feel insecure. When I feel alone or rejected. And when I feel powerless—like I do looking at this poor woman’s skin, torn by metal, bare beneath the sun on the coldest day of the year. Get her out, I think. Get her warm.
Johnny appears next to me.
“This is seriously fucked up,” he says, winded, excited.
“Who the fuck are all these people?” I say. “Get her inside and sort it out there.”
Johnny chuckles. “If only it were so easy, Beck.”
“What?” I say.
“The Jews are here,” he says, as if that explains something.
“And?”
“And, the Jews take their own bodies.”
>
I do not understand.
“You’ve never seen them before? They were at that murder-suicide around Thanksgiving on the Upper East Side. Remember? Woman who owned the apartment is having dinner with a guy, her ex barges in and kills everybody. She was Jewish, so they came to collect the body. They cut up the rug, too. Took the sofa cushions.”
“They did not.”
“They did. Almost came to blows with a couple cops, too. Turf shit. In the Jewish religion, they’re supposed to bury you with everything, every drop of blood and hair and stuff.”
“They let them do that? Just take the body? Just take evidence?”
“In this case, they knew who did it,” says Johnny. “But, yeah. I think so.”
This seems very implausible to me. I doubt the NYPD just lets people run off with their crime scene evidence. But it’s not really worth the conversation with Johnny. He calls black people “niggers.”
Finally, some decision is made. The Jews run back to their van and emerge with a stretcher, which they unfold, wheeled legs dropping to the ground. A black bag—a body bag—lies thin atop it. They push the stretcher to the cage and consult with the officers. Everyone stands still for several more minutes, holding themselves against the cold, peering at the leg. Johnny is snapping away, ducking beneath the yellow tape and being yelled at to “get back.” Calloway and Gretchen and Drew come running.
I’m trying to make eye contact with one of the Hasidic men from the gas station. The taller man is stony faced, but the shorter one is clearly distraught, and very often distraught people talk. He looks my way and I raise my eyebrow and open my mouth expectantly. I put up a gloved hand and wave. He sees me—and then he looks away.
The metal arm groans again and lifts up a few feet. Two policemen spread a tarp beneath the cage, and then the tip creeps open, dropping scrap and, finally, the woman. She falls like the rest of the material, turgid and graceless. But as soon as she’s down, the operator swings the cage back, keeping the rest of the scrap from crushing her. A couple pieces come loose, though, and the police scramble to protect her. Johnny is snapping and I’m just staring. I can see her belly and her breasts and a mound of black pubic hair. I shiver again. It’s so fucking cold. Cover her, I think.
