“My wife took our kids to California.”
“Why?”
I told her about Hobbs's men breaking in, what they did.
“I want you to think about something else for a little while,” Caroline said.
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We forget, I think, how quickly we come to know another human beingâif not his or her history or secrets, then at least the basic physical nature, the habits of his eyes, the way she walks, the pauses of speech. I was reminded of this as I lay in bed waiting for Caroline to emerge from her bathroom; we had spent no more than about twenty-five hours together, but already listening to her on the other side of the door, I could swear that I knew exactly when her diaphragm went inâheard the slight grunt she made, a cough almost, followed by a deep breathâknew a few minutes later when she had traveled far away from me and when she was close, riding my breath. That evening was the last time we were to have sex, and I don't think I am fooling myself to say that I knew it and that I paid what extra measure of attention was possible. Here in front of me in the shadowed gray of the bedroom were Caroline's neck, her breasts, her cunt, her belly, her eyesâshut, open, shutâand her hair, gray against her gray skin. We were comfortable enough that much of it took place at a great distance from each other; I don't recall what was said or if anything was said at all. We moved slowly, perhaps even with a sad reverence for the things that lay just beyond our perception. We were almost done, and I think she knew it, too.
“Look,” she said, a few minutes later. She flicked on a light on the side table and lay on her stomach next to it, showing me her shoulder. “All gone.”
Indeed, all that remained of her tattoo was a slight blue blurring beneath the skin.
“That last little cloud of color will disappear in a week or two.”
I rubbed my finger over the spot. “Incredible.”
She was pleased. “Yes.”
“All marks gone.”
“Just about.”
“Just about?”
“I have one that won't go away.”
I was at a loss. I'd been all over her body. “Between your toes?”
“No.”
She sat up Indian style on the bed and put her hands between her legs, brushing her pubic hair back. “I used to have a little clit ring.”
“You never told me.”
“You never asked.”
I moved the light closer.
“See?” she said, touching her finger to the musky folds of her labia, just above her clitoris. “There's a little, little scar.”
As indeed there was, more like a bump. I touched it. “You had the ring removed when you met Charlie.”
“Yes.”
I put the light back on the table. “You miss it?”
“A lot.” She got up and pulled on her panties. “Charlie wants to take a trip soon,” she said. “China and Japan.”
“A business trip?”
“Yes. But he wants me to see all the sights.”
“You should go.”
“I am.”
She got a cigarette from the kitchen and held it in front of her. “I must be crazy.”
“Why?”
“I told Charlie I'd quit.”
“Will you?”
“I hope not.” She blew a long plume of smoke. “What did you see when you saw the tape with Hobbs?”
“Literally?”
“No, I mean what did you understandâabout me, I mean.”
I thought of the way she had curled into the man's corpulent bulk, her obvious pleasure as he spoke to her. “I think I understood why you enjoyed being with him. He understood something about you that you hadn't found in other men, or much of it, and you surrendered yourself to him. It was partly about him being a lot older.”
She pulled on a T-shirt over her breasts. “It's sort of why I like you, too.”
“Why not marry an older guy?”
“They're too smart. They figure out who I am.”
“Did Hobbs?”
“In about three seconds.”
“But you saw him again.”
“Yes.”
“It must have driven Simon crazy.”
She let out a breath. “Oh yeah.” She recalled again that Hobbs had sent her a little gift, and Simon had inquired as to where it had come from.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said it was just a gift from a friend. But Simon had seen that videotape, and I guess he saw whatever you saw. That's why it makes sense that he set this thing up with Mrs. Segal. I mean, I sort of suspected it might be something like that, but I had no idea of the mechanism, you know? I didn't understand how it could be happening.” She found a pair of jeans in her closet. “Anyway, the thing about Charlie is that he's never going to hurt me. He's always going to be nice to me.”
She uttered these words without appreciable affection for Charlie, and the matter seemed to present some unspoken difficulty for her, as if it was the better of two questionable choices that she would be required to gut out. In my experience, men and women who have a kind of brutal fortitude have been made that way by a sequence of events, until the person passes beyond a point of no return. They learn that life requires the ability to coldly stand pain of one kind or another. I am not this kind of person, nor is my wife, and
would that I could be sure that my children do not become such people. But the world is full of them. You can see it in some of the little black boys on the street, not even yet eight; you can see it in the Chinese women selling pig heads downtown; you can certainly see it in the faces of many policemen. They will do what is necessary to survive; they will conceal and protect their vulnerabilities, except from those who cannot hurt them. Above all, they will press their advantage when it presents itself.
The phone rang. Caroline picked it up. “Hi, sweetie.” She listened for a moment. “Yes. Yes. Wow. Sure. I can beâI have it in my drawer. Sure. Good. Yes. Bye.” She hung up and looked at me. “I'm going to China tomorrow.”
We managed a good-bye then, and if it was going to be the last time we ever saw each other, you never would have known it, so casual was Caroline. I could see that her thoughts had already moved on to the tripâto Charlie, the clothes, her passport, the rest of the world.
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But now I knew something. I knew that the key had indeed been in Caroline's apartment, just as Hobbs had said. And I remembered that the police had talked to the Korean owner of 537 East Eleventh but not to the Segals. I also knew that Simon Crowley had stopped off at Mrs. Segal home the day he disappeared. I called Mrs. Segal from a pay phone outside Caroline's building.
“I have to ask you a couple more questions,” I said.
“Let me turn the television down.”
When she came back, I asked her if she remembered the day that Simon last visited her.
“Yes, of course.”
“Did he get anything that day from you?”
“I can't rememberâ”
“A key, did he get a key?”
“He might have, yes.”
“A key to the building at 537 East Eleventh Street?”
“We had many keys.”
I tried to remember the sale date of the building. “Mrs. Segal, you had, I think, already closed the sale of that building to the new buyer, the Korean man. You would have had to give him the keys to the building. In fact, I happen to know that he was given the keys to the building.”
“Yes.”
“So why did you still have copies?”
“Oh, I don't remember, Iâheâthey were going to tear the building down, that was it.”
There was something I didn't understand. Simon had a key. to 537, but the new owners had new locks put on. Perhaps the locks hadn't been changed yet when he entered, but afterward, in the few days after he died but before his body was found.
“You told me you knew that was where they found Simon, Mrs. Segal. You knew that.”
“Iâyesâ”
“Why didn't you tell the police that you knew Simon had gotten a key to that building?”
“Mr. WrenâIâthis was a time of difficulty, we had terrible problems with moneyâ”
She stopped talking and I could hear her breathing anxiously into the phone. Now I understood. “Was it because you and the new owner of the building had cut some kind of deal, Mrs. Segal? You had sold it to him at a very low price and taken a cash kickback?”
“These things are complicated. Weâyes, terms were negotiated ⦔
I hung up. She had been scared, nothing more. The police had been unable to explain how Simon Crowley's body had appeared on the demolition lot if they assumed that he had not been in the building prior to his death. But the presence of Mrs. Segal's key blew that assumption apart. Supposing Simon had walked into the building using a key? But had the Hobbs key been found on Simon's person by the police and then returned to Caroline? No. That would have been important. I would have read about it in the detectives' report. The police would have quickly figured out that the key fit a lock
and had an explanation for the presence of the body. No, if the key left the building, it did so some other way, and it ended up in the possession of Caroline, then Hobbs's men, then Hobbs. Now me.
But then I realized that the key would
not
have gotten Simon inânot through the front door of 537 at least, for as the detectives' report had said, Jack-E Demolition had built a sidewalk shed in front and in back of the building prior to demolition. To reach the front door of 537, Simon would have needed a key to the lock chaining the shed door closed, and that Mrs. Segal did
not
have.
It was confusing. I was holding a key that may have gone to a building that no longer existed and that should not have been usable when the building last stood. The thing was driving me mad. There was something I wasn't seeing.
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My car was still abandoned in Queens, so I sat in a cab now, on my way toward Alphabet City. Off the avenue, the snowy streets were almost deserted. On Eleventh Street, I rang the bell to 535, and after a minute Mrs. Garcia answered. She let me in, through a hallway, and down the short staircase again, past the children's bicycles, through the door marked OFFICE, and there was Luis, her son-in-law, sitting at his small desk.
“Yeah?” He looked up, as from a trance.
“You know this key?” said Estrella Garcia in Spanish. She handed Luis the key, and he looked at me and then at the key, and then he tipped his thick glasses forward.
“It goes to the sidewalk doors.”
“The sidewalk?”
“The sidewalk doors that open up outside the building. Where did you get it?”
I said it had belonged to Mrs. Segal. He nodded wearily. Everyone was stupid, except for him. “Why would the Segals have a key to your building?”
“Come on. I could explain it, but you can take a look.”
He stood up and got his coat and a pair of gloves and a hat and scarf, and we went out the door and past the bicycles
and back upstairs, then out to the front of the building. He pointed at the metal sidewalk delivery doors. They had been covered with heavily drifted snow the last time I'd been there. “The guy who built these two buildings made, like, a bunch of mistakes. He built them too fast, probably. They were supposed to be just like each other. Maybe he was running out of money, I don't know. He only built one coal chute. Look.” The doors fronted the far right-hand side of 535. “This is the coal chute. Coal man only had to deliver once to both buildings. It's in front of 535, but it was for 537, too. I don't know why. This is a copy of the key that opens it up.” He bent down and slipped the key into the padlock securing the two metal doors. It popped open. He handed the lock and key to me, then pulled up on one of the doors. It creaked but opened readily. He shined his light down the steps. “So then at some time they sold off the other building and built these doors.” And indeed, the stairs went down and there were two doors, one leading left to 535 and the other leading right to 537. I stood staring.
“What happens if we open 537's door?”
“Then you're the strongest man in the whole world.”
“It's locked?”
“The lock on that door's been broken maybe, like, twenty years.”
“I don't get it.”
“That door opens
inward
.”
I understood. “And the basement is full of rubble from the demolished building.”
“Yeah.”