Bloom sighed. Ron was cooking lasagna tonight. She"d told him that she"d be home well before six, and he would have aimed to have food on the table by seven. It was long past that now. She had a vision of a blackened meal and a sulking husband.
"Go on," she said.
"Did somebody compile a list of what was found on the body and in the car?"
"You think we"re complete rubes? Yes, I had Stynes type it up and include it in the report."
"Could I have a copy?"
"No," she said, and realized as soon as she said it that she sounded snippier than she would have liked. "But I"ll let you look," she relented, "just as long as you don"t spend all night with it."
He followed her into the town office, and waited at her door. The report-in-progress on Bruno Perlman lay on her desk. She found the item list and handed it to him.
"You know," she said, "if it turns out to be murder, I may just have handed that list to a suspect."
"If I"d killed him, I"d have made sure to check the tides before I put him in the water."
She tried to figure out if he was kidding, but couldn"t. He worked his way quickly through the list, then returned it to her.
"Are you free for a cup of coffee tomorrow?"
"Only if you"re buying."
"How about Olesens, around ten?"
"Do you have shares in that place?"
Now he raised an eyebrow at her, but said nothing. Hey, she thought, what did you expect: that I wouldn"t be keeping tabs on you?
"Ten is fine," she told him.
They walked out together.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what? For letting you look at a dead man"s car?"
"For not telling me to mind my own business."
"If you do turn out to have killed him, I"m going to be real upset with you."
"If you pin it on me, I"m going to be real upset too."
Suddenly she wanted to go back to the office and look at that list again. She wanted to reexamine the car, just as he had done. She had the sense that she was missing something, something that he had spotted.
But she had a husband waiting, and a dog, and dinner. And maybe that bath too. Yes, almost certainly a bath. She did some of her best thinking in the tub. She watched him walk away and thought: What have we allowed into our town?
12.
The Hurricane Hatch stood at the end of a strip of land midway between Jacksonville and St Augustine on the Florida coast, far enough away from the real tourist traps to ensure that it retained a degree of local custom while still attracting enough business of any stripe to sustain it. A man named Skettle owned ninety percent of the Hurricane Hatch, but he rarely frequented it, preferring to leave the running of the place to its chief bartender and ten percent shareholder, Lenny Tedesco. Skettle liked to keep quiet about the fact that he had a big piece of the Hurricane Hatch. His family, from what Lenny knew of them, contained a high percentage of holy rollers, the kind who visited the Holy Land Experience down in Orlando a couple of times a year, and regarded the Goliath Burger at the theme park"s Oasis Palms Cafe as d.a.m.n fine dining, although Lenny doubted if they would have used that precise term to describe it. Lenny Tedesco had never been to the Holy Land Experience, and had zero intention of ever visiting it. He reckoned that a Christian theme park wasn"t really the place for a Jew, not even a non.o.bservant Jew like himself, and he didn"t care if it did boast a recreation of a Jerusalem street market.
Then again, the Hurricane Hatch was about as authentic in Florida bar terms as the Holy Land Experience was as an accurate reflection of the spiritual makeup of Jerusalem in the first century AD. It looked like what a cla.s.sic Florida beach b.u.m"s bar was supposed to look like wood, stuffed fish, a picture of Hemingway but had only been built at the start of the nineties, in antic.i.p.ation of a housing development named Ocean Breeze Condos which never got further than a series of architect"s plans, a hole in the ground, and a tax write-off. The Hurricane Hatch remained, though, and had somehow managed to prosper, in large part because of Lenny and his wife, Pegi, who was a good fry cook of the old school. She prepared fried oysters that could make a man weep, the secret ingredients being creole seasoning, fine yellow cornmeal, and Diamond Crystal kosher kosher salt. Neither did Skettle evince too much concern about making a large profit, just as long as the Hatch didn"t lose money. Lenny figured that Skettle, who didn"t drink alcohol and appeared to subsist primarily on chicken tenders and chocolate milk, just enjoyed secretly giving the finger to his holier-than-thou, pew-polishing relatives by owning a bar. Lenny"s wife, however, claimed that Skettle"s sister Lesley, a Praise Jesus type of the worst stripe, was not above polishing other things too, and could give a pretty accurate description of half the motel ceilings between Jacksonville and Miami, giving rise to her nickname of "Screw-Anything Skettle".
Lenny was alone in the bar. This was one of Pegi"s nights off, and Lenny had sent the replacement cook, Fran, home early, because he knew she"d have better luck selling fried oysters in an abandoned cemetery than in the Hurricane Hatch on this particular evening. Midweeks were always quiet, but lately they had been quieter than usual, and even weekend business was down from previous years. There just wasn"t as much money around as before, but the Hatch was surviving.
Lenny glanced at his watch. It was nine-thirty. He"d give it until ten, maybe ten-thirty, and then call it a night. Anyway, he was in no hurry to go home not that he didn"t love his wife, because he did, but sometimes he thought he loved the Hatch more. He was at peace there, regardless of whether it was empty or full. In fact, on evenings like this, with the wind blowing gently outside, and the boards creaking and rattling, and the sound of the waves in the distance, visible as the faintest of phosph.o.r.escent glows, and the TV on, and a soda water and lime on the bar before him, he felt that he would be quite content just to stay this way forever. The only blot on his happiness if blot was a sufficient word for it, which he very much doubted was the subject of the TV news report currently playing in front of him. He watched the footage of the two old men being transported by United States Marshals into the holding facility somewhere in New York City: Engel and Fuhrmann, with almost two centuries of life clocked up between them, Engel barely able to walk unaided, Fuhrmann stronger, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance, not even deigning to notice the men and women who surrounded him, the cameras and the lights, the protestors with their signs, as if all of this was a show being put on for another man, and the accusations leveled against him were somehow beneath his regard. The men disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by an attorney from the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, the arm of the Justice Department entrusted with investigating a.s.sorted human rights violations and, particularly, n.a.z.i war criminals. The attorney was a pretty young woman, and Lenny was surprised by the pa.s.sion with which she spoke. She didn"t have a Jewish name, or Demers didn"t sound like one. Not that this was a requirement for justice under the circ.u.mstances. Perhaps she was just an idealist, and G.o.d knew the world needed as many of those as it could find.
Engel and Fuhrmann, she said, had been fighting the US government"s decision to rescind their citizenship, but that process had now been exhausted. The delivery of the arrest warrant for Fuhrmann from the Bavarian state public prosecutor"s office in Munich a week earlier meant that his extradition could now proceed immediately, and Engel"s deportation would follow shortly after for breaches of immigration law, regardless of whether or not charges were filed against him in his native land. Soon, she said, Engel and Fuhrmann would be banished from American soil forever.
Deportation didn"t sound like much of a punishment to Lenny, whose family had lost an entire branch at Dachau. He hadn"t understood why they couldn"t be put on trial here in the United States until Bruno Perlman explained to him that the US Const.i.tution precluded criminal prosecutions committed abroad before and during World War II, and the best that the United States could do was send war criminals back to countries that did have jurisdiction, in the hope that proceedings might be taken against them there. Not that Perlman was happy about the situation either. He would tell Lenny admiringly about the activities of the TTG, the Tilhas Tizig Gesheften, a secret group within the Jewish Brigade Group of the British Army who, after the German surrender, took it upon themselves to hunt down and a.s.sa.s.sinate Wehrmacht and SS officers believed to have committed atrocities against Jews; and of the Mossad killers who trapped the Latvian n.a.z.i collaborator Herberts Cukurs, the "Butcher of Riga", in a house in Montevideo in 1965, beating him with a hammer before shooting him twice in the head and leaving his body to rot in a trunk until the Uruguayan police found him, drawn by the smell. The gleam in Perlman"s eye as he spoke of such matters disturbed Lenny, but he supposed that the end met by such foul men was no more than they deserved. Lately, though, that light in Perlman"s eyes had grown brighter, and his talk of vengeance had taken a personal turn. Lenny worried for him. Perlman had few friends. Obsessives rarely did.
"How do they even know it"s really them?" said a voice. "Old men like that, they could be anyone."
A man was seated at the far end of the bar, close to the door. Lenny had not heard him enter. Neither had he heard a car pull into the lot. The visitor"s face was turned slightly away from the television, as though he could not bear to watch it. He wore a straw fedora with a red band. The hat was too large for his head, so that it sat just above his eyes. His suit jacket was brown, worn over a yellow polo shirt. The shirt was missing two b.u.t.tons, exposing a network of thin white scars across the man"s chest, like a web spun by a spider upon his skin.
"Sorry, I didn"t hear you come in," said Lenny, ignoring the question. "What can I get you?"
The man didn"t respond. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. Lenny looked past him to the parking lot outside. He could see no vehicle.
"You got milk?" the man rasped.
"Sure."
"Brandy and milk." He rubbed his stomach. "I got a problem with my guts."
Lenny prepared the mix. The milk was cold enough to create beads of condensation on the gla.s.s, so he wrapped it in a napkin before placing it on the bar. The man exuded a sour, curdled odor, the rankness of untold brandy-and-milk combinations. He raised the gla.s.s and drank it half-empty.
"Hurts," he said. "Hurts like a motherf.u.c.ker."
He lowered the gla.s.s, raised his left hand, and removed the hat from his head. Lenny tried not to stare before deciding that it was easier just to look away entirely, but the image of the man"s visage remained branded on Lenny"s vision like a sudden flare of bright, distorted light in the dimness.
His bare skull was misshapen, as pitted with concave indentations as the surface of the moon. His brow was ma.s.sively overdeveloped, so that his eyes tiny dark things, like drops of oil in snow were lost in its shadow, and his profile was suggestive of one who had slammed his forehead into a horizontal girder as a child, with the soft skull retaining the impression of the blow as it hardened. His nose was very thin, his mouth the barest slash of color against the pallor of his skin. He breathed in and out through his lips with a faint, wet whistle.
"What"s your name?" he asked.
"Lenny."
"Lenny what?"
"Lenny Tedesco."
"This your place?"
"I got a share in it. Skettle owns the rest."
"I don"t know any Skettle. You"re a b.i.t.c.h to find. You ought to put up a sign."
"There is a sign."
"I didn"t see none."
"Which way did you come?"
The man waved a hand vaguely over his shoulder north, south, east, west: what did any of it matter? The only issue of consequence was that he was here at last.
"Tedesco," he said. "That"s a Sephardic name. Some might mistake it for Italian, but it"s not. It means "German", but you most likely had Ashken.a.z.i forbears. Am I right?"
Lenny wished that the bar had remained empty. He didn"t want to engage in this discussion. He wanted this vile man with his pungent stink to be gone.
"I don"t know," he said.
"Sure you do. I read once that the word "n.a.z.i" comes from "Ashken.a.z.i." What do you think of that?"
Lenny worked on polishing a gla.s.s that didn"t need a cloth taken to it. He rubbed so hard that the gla.s.s cracked under the pressure. He tossed it in the trash and moved on to another.
"I"ve never heard that before," he replied, and hated himself for engaging the man. "My understanding is that it refers to National Socialism."
"Ah, you"re probably right. Anything else is just the frothing of ignorant men. Holocaust deniers. Fools. I don"t give no credit to it. As though so much slaughter could be ascribed to Jew-on-Jew violence."
Lenny felt the muscles in his neck cramp. He clenched his teeth so hard that he felt something come loose at the back of his mouth. It was the way the man spoke the word "Jew."
On the television screen, the news report had moved on to a panel discussion about Engel and Fuhrmann, and the background to their cases. The volume was just low enough for the content to remain intelligible. Lenny moved to change the channel, but that same voice told him to leave it be. Lenny glanced at the gla.s.s of brandy and milk. A curl of red lay upon the surface of the remaining liquid. The man saw it at the same time as Lenny did. He dipped a finger and swirled the blood away, then drained the gla.s.s dry.
"Like I said, I got a problem with my guts. Got problems all over. I s.h.i.t nails and p.i.s.s broken gla.s.s."
"Sorry to hear that."
"Hasn"t killed me yet. I just don"t care to think about what my insides might look like."
Couldn"t be any worse than what"s outside, Lenny thought, and those dark eyes flicked toward him, as though that unspoken wisecrack had been written in the air above Lenny"s head.
"You got another of these?"
"I"m closing up."
"Won"t take you much longer to make than it"ll take me to drink."
"Nah, we"re done."
The gla.s.s slid across the bar.
"Just the milk then. You wouldn"t deny a man a gla.s.s of milk, would you?"
Oh, but Lenny wanted to. He wanted to so badly, yet still he poured three fingers of milk into the gla.s.s. He was grateful that there was no more left in the carton.
"Thank you."
Lenny said nothing, just tossed the empty container.
"I don"t want you to get me wrong," said the man. "I got no problem with Jews. When I was a boy, I had a friend who was a Jew. Jesus, it"s been a long time since I thought about him. I can hardly remember his name now."
He put the thumb and forefinger of his right hand to the bridge of his nose and squeezed hard, his eyes closed as he tried to pull the name from the pit of his memory.
"Asher," he said at last. "Asher Cherney. That was his name. d.a.m.n, that was hard. I called him Ash. I don"t know what anyone else called him, because no one else palled around with him much. Anyway, I"d hang out with Ash when none of the other boys were there to see. You had to be careful. The people I grew up with, they didn"t care much for Jews. n.i.g.g.e.rs neither. f.u.c.k, we didn"t even like Catholics. We stuck with our own, and it wasn"t good to be seen making friends outside your own circle. And Ash, you see, he had a deformity, which made it worse for him. You listen to Kiss?"
Lenny, who had somehow been drawn into the tale despite himself, was puzzled. Following the man"s thought processes was like trying to keep track of a ricochet in a steel room.
"What, the band?"
"Yeah, the band. They"re s.h.i.t, but you got to have heard of them."
"I know them," said Lenny.
"Right. Well, their singer has the same thing that Ash had. They call it microtia. It"s a deformity of the ear. The cartilage doesn"t grow right, so you have a kind of stump. Makes you deaf too. They say it usually occurs in the right ear, but Ash, he had it in his left, so he was strange even among other people like him. Now they can do all kinds of grafts or implants, but back then you just had to live with it. Ash would grow his hair long to try to hide it, but everybody knew. If his life didn"t suck already, being a Jew in a town that didn"t care much for anyone who wasn"t in some whitebread church, he had to deal with the ignorance and bile of kids who spent their lives just looking for some physical defect to hone in on.
"So I felt sorry for Ash, though I couldn"t show it, not in public. But if I was alone, and I saw Ash, and he was alone, then I"d talk to him, or walk with him, maybe skim stones by the river if the mood took us. He was okay, Ash. You never would have known he was a Jew, unless he told you his name. That microtia, you think it"s a Jew thing?"
Lenny said that he didn"t know. He felt as though he were watching some terrible accident unfold, a catastrophic collision of bodies that could only result in injury and death, yet was unable to tear his eyes away from it. He was hypnotized by this man"s awfulness, the depth of his corruption only slowly revealing itself by word and intonation.
"Because," the man went on, "there are diseases that Jews are more likely to carry than other races. You, being Ashken.a.z.i from way back, are more likely to get cystic fibrosis. I mean, there are others, but that"s the one that sticks in my mind. Cystic fibrosis is a b.i.t.c.h. You don"t want to get that. Anyhow, I don"t know if this microtia thing is like it. Could be. Doesn"t matter, I suppose. Unless you have it, and don"t want to pa.s.s it on to your kids. You got kids?"
"No."
"Well, if you"re thinking about having them, you ought to get checked out. You don"t want to be transmitting s.h.i.t to your kids. Where was I? Oh yeah: Ash. Ash and his f.u.c.ked-up ear. So, me and Ash would do stuff together, and we"d talk, and I got to like him. Then, one day, this kid, a degenerate named Eddie Tyson, he saw us together, and next thing you know they were saying I was queer for Ash, and me and Ash were doing things under bridges and in his mom"s car, and Eddie Tyson and a bunch of his buddies caught me alone on my way home and beat the living s.h.i.t out of me, all on account of how Ash Cherney was my friend.
"So you know what I did?"
Lenny could barely speak, but he found the strength to say the word "No."
"I went around to Ash"s house, and I asked if he wanted to go down to the river with me. I told him what had happened, because I looked like h.e.l.l after what they"d done to me. So me and Ash went down to the river, and I got a stone, and I hit Ash with it. I hit him so hard in the face that I was sure I"d knocked his nose into his brain. I thought I"d killed him, but somehow he stayed conscious. Then I threw the stone away and used my fists and feet on him, and I left him by the river in a pool of his own blood, spitting teeth, and I never heard from him again, because he never came back to school, and his parents moved away not long after."
He sipped his milk.
"I guess me and Ash weren"t such good friends after all, huh?"
The television was showing black-and-white footage of emaciated men and women standing behind wire fences, and holes filled with bones.
"You ever wonder what would make men do such things?"
He wasn"t looking at the screen, so Lenny didn"t know if he was still speaking of what he had done to Ash Cherney, or about the evidence of atrocities committed decades before. Lenny was cold. His fingertips and toes hurt. He figured that it didn"t matter what the man was referring to. It was all part of one great ma.s.s of viciousness, a cesspit of black, human evil.
"No," said Lenny.