“And then he told me he loved me. And then he was gone. That was a week ago. That was the last time I saw him.”
Romulus got up and threw the last of the wood on the fire. Sparks flying wildly. Any moment the curtains might catch. But when you lived in a cave and owned nothing and had the feeling you were not long for this world anyway, this was not an oppressive concern.
He settled back down on his blanket again. It was warm enough that he could take off his saucepan hat. Underneath it he was three-quarters bald, and he took a minute to rub the bone of his head with his knuckles. Just did that, and looked at the fire. Now why is it, he wondered, after such a tale as this, such suffering and confusion, why did his thoughts feel so light and clear and sure-footed? It was as though the world had only to own up to its share of chaos and sham, for Romulus to peacefully acknowledge his share in the world—fair exchange.
“So did you talk to the cops, Matthew?”
“They—they came around.”
“Did you tell them about all this?”
“Rom. Oh, Rom, I
couldn’t
tell them. How could I have told them?—they’d have gone right to Leppenraub. And that’d be it for me. He’d a squashed me just like he’d squash a bug—and who’d give a damn? What I
ought
to do, I ought to kill that bastard myself. But I don’t have the guts. Oh Rom, for Christ’s sake, I’m scared. I got nothing to live for, so what am I scared of? But I’m scared to death. What am I going to do, Rom?”
“I don’t know. Seems like you’re too small. Nothing you
can
do. Nor nothing I can do for you.”
They sat for a long while watching the sparks.
“Rom, you know what—one time I brought Scotty up here to meet you. It was like, back in October. I says, ‘I know this guy that’s got hisself clear of all this shit. He don’t work for nobody. Lives up in this cave, and he fends for hisself, y’know, and so what if he’s a little nuts? He keeps himself healthy, and he don’t do no drugs, he don’t even drink, and he’s not even afraid of no wolves—’ ”
“I’m not afraid of wolves, Matthew, because there are no wolves in New York. Or if there are, I’m sure they’re on
our
side.”
“Anyway, Scotty says to me, ‘This guy I gotta see.’ So I took him up here. But you weren’t around.”
“When was this?”
“October.”
“I was probably out harvesting.”
“You what?”
“I’ve got a patch of pumpkins down by the highway.”
“
Pumpkins
—that’s what I mean. See, that’s what Scotty would have loved. He wanted to live just like you, see. He wanted to be free.”
Said Romulus, “Well, he’s free now.”
“You think so? I think he’s walking around in
chains,
Rom.”
“Matthew, get that notion out of your head right now. No such thing as ghosts. Right? Doesn’t matter what kind of garbage you’re carrying around, death’s going to shake it right out of you. Just hold you up by the ankles, and shake.”
“So what are you saying? You’re saying we just forget about it? About Scotty, about what they—”
“No, I’m saying
Scotty
just forgets about it. I guess you’re not going to be so lucky. Me neither. I mean, this thing just . . . pisses me off. Toss that boy’s body at my doorstep. You know why he did that, Matthew? To show me he
dishonors
me. He dishonors me the way he dishonored that boy.”
“Wait. You
know
Leppenraub, Rom?”
“Leppenraub, shit, Leppenraub’s just a shill. I know who’s behind him. I know the man he works for, and I know what that man wants. He wants to show us how
little
we are, Matthew. How he can break us in pieces any time he feels like it. Oh shit, Matthew. Old Stuyvesant, he got to us this time, didn’t he? I mean
this
one—looks to me like we’re going to be carrying this particular nasty insult around in our heads a
long
time.”
He rubbed his head awhile.
“Pisses me off.”
L
ieutenant Detective Jack Cork stepped into the nave of the St. Veronica chapel on 207th Street. He crossed himself and felt stupid doing it, then crossed himself again because he’d felt stupid. He also felt edgy. He scanned the pews—there was no one to be seen. He shot a glance over his shoulder. Nobody behind him. He took a few steps down the aisle, into the open. Lord, if this is a setup, I’m in your hands, and please forgive me that this is the first time I’ve darkened the door of your church since . . . when—Rose’s wedding?
Actually, he didn’t think it
was
a setup. But there were many surprises in his business. If it was a setup, if some hunter was using one of the pews for a blind, he was a dead duck.
More likely, though, it was just another no-show.
There were multitudes of those in his business.
Then he smelled something. Faintly, faintly . . . He sniffed. Not a churchly fragrance. He sniffed again.
A rich, rank, bum stink.
Someone hissed at him. He looked over to the side aisle and saw the Caveman. Over by the confessionals, wagging a finger, summoning him. Well, he had figured it was probably just the Caveman. You couldn’t have known for sure over the phone, but there had been something unhinged and strangely civilized about that voice. And who else would insist on meeting in a place as unlikely as a church?
Cork went over to him. The Caveman nodded gravely, then slipped into the priest’s side of one of the confessionals. Shut the door.
Jack Cork sighed. He stepped into the penitent’s side. Shut his own door, and sat on the bench, and the little window slid open.
Said the Caveman, “Do you have any sins to confess, my child?”
“Ah, you don’t even know the lingo—but all right, yeah, I’ve got one sin to confess. It’s a whopper. I committed sacrilege. I agreed to meet an informant in your church. I’d like to say it’s ’cause I’m such a good cop and I was banking on this infinitesimal chance that I’d get something useful. But—nah, it was just an excuse to get away from my desk for a while. Anyway, it was a dumb-ass move, and if anybody catches me in here talking to this crazy man, I’m up shit’s creek, and I deeply repent it, Father.”
“You shouldn’t, my son. Stuyvesant fears religion, even bogus religion. A church offers your informant some privacy. It’s no sin, meeting here—merely prudence. Come now, have you committed no true sins?”
“Well maybe one or two, you know—but they’re private little suckers. That’s all for
you.
”
“Nothing you’ve overlooked?”
“Well, like what, for example?”
“Like covering up the murder of Andrew Scott Gates?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, I did that, but you gotta understand, Father. The guy that offed him was this big . . . I don’t know, Lord of All Evil or something, this guy Stuyvesant, and if I’d blown the whistle, they’d a boiled me alive or stuck me in some precinct in the Bronx. Anyway, there was just this smidgen of doubt in my mind that there had
been
any murder.”
“Despite the tracks?”
“What tracks?”
“The tracks the murderer left in the snow.”
“Oh,
those
tracks. Well, I guess I gotta give you a big mea culpa on that one, too. I totally missed them. Though if I might offer just . . . just a word in my defense. . . . We are talking about a park in New York fucking City, and on the day after a snowfall in any New York City park there’s about forty
billion
sets of tracks, and not one of them’s worth shit to a murder investigation. You know the real shame of it, Father? They don’t even
teach
tracking at the Academy no more. Not since Natty Bumppo died. Can I go now? I mean, I gotta get out of here.”
“Wait. Wait my son—I want to ask you a question.”
“OK, ask.”
“What if . . . suppose you found out there was a very famous person involved in this case? Suppose the victim had been held against his will by this famous person, and abused—I mean, abused, tortured—a real horror story, right?—then what would you say?”
“I’d say who’s the famous person?”
“Suppose that couldn’t be disclosed?”
“I’d say go fuck yourself, Father.”
“Well then, suppose, suppose there could be found some way . . . I don’t know,
some
way to
slip
you the name of the famous person—then what?”
“Then I’d say, Let me go back to work, Father, let me get out of here before I lose
my
marbles, too, and you work on some way to
slip
me that name without anybody knowing about it. And as soon as you’ve figured out how to
slip
me David Leppenraub’s name, you give me a call—and then I’ll tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“You
know
about Leppenraub?”
“Sure. Gates was his model. Until he quit, and came down here and went nuts on the streets of New York, which no one can hold against him. He decided that his employer had ruined his life. This you can’t hold against him either. I think the same thing about
my
employer. He started cooking up all these paranoid delusions. These do not in any way constitute what we’d call evidence of murder.”
“But suppose there was evidence? I mean suppose there was a witness, suppose—”
“A witness? A real witness? With a name and all?”
“Again, I’m not at liberty—”
“Then again, please go fuck yourself. Who’re we talking about anyway, that little weasely guy he lived with?”
“He—Matthew told you?”
“The Y-rays told me, Father. The Y-rays tell all.”
Silence from the priest’s side.
Jack Cork laughed. “Relax, Caveman, I’m just playing with your head here. Your daughter told me about your Y-rays.”
“You talked to my daughter about me?”
“Hey, take it easy. Girl’s got nothing but praise for you. She admires the hell out of you. She said if you could just get your little
fits
under control, why, there’s nothing you couldn’t do.”
“You stay away from my daughter.”
“She said the shrinks can’t quite get a bead on you. Paranoid, sure, but psycho? They can’t make up their minds. There’s some who think you’re kind of weirdly
healthy.
She used some shrink term . . .”
“‘ Well compensated’?”
“You got it. Like you manage to get by pretty good, in your own way, you know. She says you raise your own food.”
“In season. Winters I’m obliged to scavenge.”
“But anyway, you’re no run-of-the-mill homeless loony—”
“
I’m not homeless.
I live in a cave. I take care of it.”
“Right, what your daughter told me. She said you’re all right. She said sometimes she thinks you’re saner than anyone. Only . . .”
Cork hesitated.
“Only what?”
“Only sometimes she thinks maybe you’re a little—you know?—sometimes a little frightened.”
“Frightened?”
That stung. And Cork saw that it had stung.
“Oh shit, I shouldn’t have told you. Look, it’s better than what my kid says about
me.
Hitler’s zombie nephew, how’d you like to be called that?”
“
A little frightened?
Like I’m some schoolkid peeing in my pants? That’s what she said?”
“Forget about it, OK? She loves you. She respects you. I mean, your daughter and me, we had a nice long chat—”
“Don’t you chat with my daughter. Don’t you ever. Don’t you ever touch my daughter.”
“Touch her? You mean, carnally? Hey, no offense, but, uh, the ebony-and-ivory thing, that’s not really my bag. You know? Anyway, I got a wife and three grown kids. I’m just a good Irish daddy. All I got the hots for these days are the antique roses in my garden. Now those are some fucking sweet broads.”
Cork laughed again. “Look, Caveman, relax, will you? Your daughter and me, we are not an item. And your buddy Matthew?—he didn’t tell us nothing. He was scared out of his gourd. But he wasn’t the only one that Scotty Gates was blabbing his sob story to. A lot of guys down around Tompkins Square knew Gates had it in for David Leppenraub. So I gave Leppenraub a call. Kind of a spoiled prick, I thought, but he told me what I wanted to know. He said, yeah, Gates had tried to blackmail him, and he’d told Gates to eat shit.”
“Oh I’m sure he
told
him that.
Right.
He told him very persuasively—he killed him.”
“
Your
paranoid conclusion. Me, all I’ve got is the evidence. I been wasting a lot of time scrounging in the scum of this city for evidence, and the evidence is there ain’t any evidence. Of murder. There’s plenty of evidence that Gates was off his nut. He was running around with his shirt undone in the middle of winter, babbling about all his bad breaks.
Everybody
thought he was going to freeze to death. And I got me an ME’s report telling me that’s exactly what he did. The body was clean. Some scrapes, some bruises, maybe some rough play back in his sicko history somewhere—but no lethal blows. Just ice crystals.”
“What about AIDS?”
“HIV positive. Big deal. These days about every John Doe they wheel in there comes in positive. But the virus didn’t kill him either. Cold killed him. Hypothermia.”
“How do you know the morgue wasn’t covering up?”
“Hey, maybe they were. Or maybe they just screwed this one. Morgues don’t get our best and our brightest, you know. Maybe Gates was a pregnant eighty-year-old grandmother who died by assault from a chain saw—maybe they just missed all that. I wouldn’t put it past them. But what the witnesses say seems to suggest they got it right.”
“Then the witnesses lie.”
“Can I ask you something, Caveman?”
“Sure.”
“What the fuck do you care?”
For some time, just church-silence. Then Cork asked, “I mean, you sure
you
never knew Gates?”
“No. Never.”
“Because it strikes me kind of curious what the hell he was doing way up here in this neighborhood. I mean, he buys it right in front of your cave—now why? Seems to me maybe he was looking for
you.
”
“He’d heard of me. Matthew says he told him all about me. They even came up to see me once, but I wasn’t around.”
“So OK, maybe he thought you were the kind he could tell his delusions to. Maybe that’s why he came up here. But before he could get a load of your sage advice, he froze to death.”
Romulus said, “Sounds reasonable.”
“Yeah, it does, don’t it?”
“Sounds very reasonable. Except that when he was tossed at my doorstep, he was already
dead.
He was
murdered.
He wasn’t thinking
shit,
you fucking snake. You think you can snake this one over on me? But see, I know you! I know you! You’re Stuyvesant’s ass licker! You call
me
frightened? YOU LICK HIS SLIMY ASSHOLE, AND YOU CALL ME FRIGHTENED? OH, I KNOW YOU! I KNOW THE KIND OF
SLIME—
”
“Good-bye, Father.”
Cork got up and cracked the door and peeked out, and thank God there was still nobody there, and he moved out quickly, and as he got to the big front door the Caveman was still going at it, the empty chapel trembling from his sermon, and Cork crossed himself in a flash and got the hell away from there.
B
y that evening the bitter cold had broken. It was a misty, spring-thaw evening, and Romulus was down in the East Village.
He looked both ways, up and down Fourth Street. Nobody coming, so he stepped up quickly onto the milk crate by the window-hole. The window had once been sealed shut with concrete blocks, but somebody had taken a sledgehammer to them. Now there was a jagged gap, and Romulus scrunched down and clambered through it. Straightened himself and stood in a dark forlorn parlor, swatting at his coat to get off the masonry dust.
The light would have been dismal in here even without the cloud of dust. He peered. No furniture in this room. Up near the high ceiling, though, was a fine and delicate molding. The pride of some immigrant who was now spinning in his grave at 400 RPM because someone had written across the length of one molding-board—from wall to wall:
NOBODY HERE BUT US INSURRECTIONARY CHICKENS
He heard voices from above.
Then he spied a door, and passed through it. Pitch black. He went through his pockets and found matches—lit one. Haunted corridor. The floor groaning as he walked. Prodigious stench on the right: what had once been a bathroom. There was a bucket of water, and the toilet lid was in pieces all over the floor—and from the toilet bowl itself came a slow, sulfurous burbling.
His fingers started to scorch. He shook the match out, lit another.
At the end of the corridor, a staircase. The balustrade was gone, the steps sagged. A warning had been painted on the risers:
KEEP RIGHT OR
—then a skull and crossbones.
Romulus kept right, hugging the wall as he went up.
The voices grew louder. A baby whimpering. Echoes everywhere. Echoes pushing past you on their way down the stairs, or on their way back up. Echoes flirting with the shadows in the corners. A feeble light at the top of the stairs, and the voices were thundering now:
“Tell me not to
look
! What the fuck!”
“You’re always sliding your eyes all over me!”
“Put padlocks on my
eyeballs,
bitch? ’Cause you’re Miss Scarlett and I’m just the field nigger, is
that
it, bitch?”
“I think bitch is inappropriate, P.J.”
“She’s a BITCH!”
“You might find a less inflammatory term—”
“It’s P.J.’s mode, George. His verbal mode—”
“Yeah, what you doing stifling my mode!”
“He’s not staring at
your
tits, Rachel.”
“Shut up, bitch!”
“I agree with Anne, Rachel. She feels demeaned—”
“P.J. doesn’t
mean
to demean. It’s his
mode.
”
“MY MODE!”
“USE ANY MODE YOU WANT! JUST STOP STARING AT MY TITS!”
A child started howling. Another joined in. Romulus grinned in the dark. How his divinity did harmonize with such passionate discord!