I'm indebted to Melissa and Taz for encouragement, to Bone for helpful consultation, and most especially to Lori Goldman, for superlative editing. Many thanks.
Roots Rain
Kat Allison
As it turned out, it was just as well that an irate cook spilled hot and sour soup on my uniform at the seventeenth Thai restaurant, or I wouldn't have gotten Ray's message until much later. Not that my missing it would have made any difference in how things turned out; I merely would have ended up feeling like that much more of a fool.The case had been hopeless, hopeless from the beginning, but I'd pushed on in blithe ignorance of that fact, and knowing now that the rest of them were equally in the dark doesn't ease the sting. Egotistically, I tend to assume that I can see what the others can't, that my value as the outsider--the misfit, the freak, the man from another planet (and I know this is how they think of me)--is to notice things they might miss, blinkered as they are by familiarity. I have no right to make the same mistakes as they; but make them I do.
The cook had been angry at me for questioning his staff, and was entirely unmollified by my apologies and my assurances that the disruption of his lunch-hour rush was in the cause of catching a murderer. I'd mopped soup off myself as best I could, and finished my questions, and then started back to the consulate to change into a clean tunic before continuing to Thai restaurant number eighteen.
Chicago was in the middle of a July heat wave, and the streets were like a steam oven. I should have been thinking about the case, as I trudged along, but the temperature made logical thought difficult, and I found myself reflecting instead on how odd it felt to be working alone. I'd left Dief behind at the consulate; I knew bringing him to restaurants might make them uneasy about violating health codes, and in any event the heat disagreed with him.
Normally his absence wouldn't have mattered, because normally Ray would have been beside me, jittering while I plodded, agitating waitresses so that I could calm them down, grousing about the weather and the lack of progress and people's uncooperative attitudes, leavening the doughy tedium of the work with his own distinctive verve.
But this was not a normal case, and normal assignments were in abeyance. Prostitutes were being murdered--three, in eight days. Though the manner of the killings was more savagely efficient than sadistic, the bodies were disfigured and left displayed in a way that seemed deliberately staged to draw attention. I'm by no means a forensic psychologist, but it had seemed to me clearly the work of a sexual psychopath, an organized serial killer, and the experts had reached the same conclusion.
It hadn't remained a local case for long; even before the third killing, federal investigators had arrived at the 27th. External Relations had produced a press release filled with vague platitudes about cooperation between the CPD and the FBI in this joint investigation; meanwhile, Lieutenant Welsh had begun the labor of turning the precinct's staffing upside down to accommodate the Bureau's requirements, and informing his detectives of their new roles.
On the morning after Krystalle Hendricks' body was found, we'd sat for some time, Ray and I, amidst the hubbub that had overtaken the squadroom, waiting to be notified of our assignment, I attempting to sort out the backlog of case files strewn across his desk, Ray tipping his chair back at a hazardous angle, scowling at the dark-suited strangers and lobbing paper clips into an empty coffee cup on the floor. When the lieutenant's summons came at last, however, it was only my name that was called.
Without word or hesitation, Ray thumped his chair to the floor and followed right alongside me, closing the door to Welsh's office firmly behind us. The lieutenant looked at him, at me, back at him. "I don't recall inviting you in, detective."
Ray just stood there, weight on the balls of his feet and chin pushed forward, exuding an attitude that in anyone else would have been insubordinate but which I knew was merely impatience to get a distasteful job over with. He hated the prospect of dealing with federal agents. "There some reason why you're leaving me out of the loop on my partner's role in all this?"
Welsh sighed. "Yeah. Cause there isn't one." He aimed a look at me. "Constable, understand this is nothing personal, and if it was my say-so there's no one I'd rather have on this case. But--" He spread his hands. "It's the Bureau. You've seen 'em in action before." He caught Ray's look of consternation, and then he was back at me. "They're running this show, and believe me, they are not going to welcome any extracurricular Canadian involvement. They're not real big on the liaison concept."
"Lieutenant, c'mon." Ray's voice was filled with incredulity and outrage. "You cannot do this to Fraser, that's--it's disrespectful is what it is, and christ, this means I gotta work with one of the suits, no way am I--"
"Sir, I quite understand your position." The interruption got me a glare from Ray, and I knew I'd hear about it as soon as we were alone. "I comprehend that my role here is--anomalous, and likely to be confusing to outside authorities. While I'm disappointed not to be able to assist, what matters is that all parties focus their full attention on the investigation, rather than on extraneous personal or political wrangling over staffing issues."
"Fraser, quit doing the reasonable thing, OK? Lieutenant--"
Welsh cut in, ignoring him. "I appreciate your attitude, Constable. We'll get you back on board as soon as we can." Then he turned to Ray, and his tone sharpened. "And you, Vecchio, although I did not in fact invite you in, as long as you're here--" He rummaged out a folder and thrust it across the desk. "You're going to be working with Agent Milson, doing background checks on the victims." I edged out the door, leaving Ray and the lieutenant glaring at each other over the folder.
I'd left the station right away, stifling as inappropriate both a lingering childish sense of hurt, and a curiosity as to how Ray would hit it off with the unknown Agent Milson. Since then, per orders, I'd kept clear of the official investigation. But I'd persuaded Mort to let me examine the bodies in the morgue (feeling more sympathy than usual with Ray's struggles to maintain his composure in the face of violent death--wire-ligature strangulation leaves an unsightly corpse, to say nothing of everything else that had been done to them), and I noticed a small smear of a substance which I was certain from the smell was nam pla, Thai fish sauce, on the heel of the most recent victim's hand, bruised and torn where she'd slammed it against her assailant's mouth. Blood and saliva traces on the skin were being tested for DNA; my suggestion, routed through Ray, that the other substance be analyzed had merely resulted in a terse "organic substance, unidentified." Certainly no one involved in the official investigation seemed to feel my scent perceptions made it a lead worth pursuing.
So I'd sat down with the phone book and made a list of all the Thai restaurants in Chicago, prioritized in rank order of their proximity to the crime scenes, and obtained from Francesca duplicate photographs of known sex offenders whose previous crimes most closely matched the current ones. Then I set out on my own, reasoning with myself that my actions didn't precisely constitute interference. On the rare occasions we had a chance to talk, Ray had seemed pleased, though not surprised, that I hadn't let myself be chased off the case altogether. He gave me to understand that he'd apprised Welsh of my endeavors, and the Lieutenant was turning a blind eye to them.
I'd been grateful for that forbearance, and for the opportunity to do something. And yet, as I trudged back toward the consulate, I had to admit that I was finding the work tedious and tiring, made worse by the heat and the lack of a car and my relative unfamiliarity with Southeast Asian languages. None of which, I couldn't help thinking, would be an issue if Ray were with me. I was shocked to discover how badly I'd let myself get out of hand, the extent to which I'd allowed myself to get used to his company. Being without it felt like being put on dry-bread rations, the savor gone out of life and work
Get used to it, I reminded myself. This partnership is only a temporary and happenstance arrangement. Soon enough he'll go back to his own life, his own name, his real job, with a permanent partner.
On that comfortless thought, I arrived at the consulate, sighing in relief as I stepped out of the grilling sun and into the dark cool hallway. The moment I shut the door, Turnbull came bounding out of the main office to tell me I'd had a call from Ray.
Feeling freshly heartened, I phoned the station, and he picked up on the first ring. "Squadroom. Vecchio." The falsehood still stings just a little, every time I hear it.
"Good afternoon, Ray, I'm--"
"Fraser." Flat and hard.
"Yes, I got your message to call, and so I'm calling." You sound like Turnbull, I told myself severely.
"Come in."
"Well, actually, I am in, Ray, in the consulate, that is, I'm not sure what you--"
"Come back to the friggin' station, Fraser, what the hell do you think I mean?" The angry pain in his voice sent me hurrying out the door without even stopping to change my tunic, and I flagged a cab to the station rather than take the time to walk.
The squad room was surprisingly quiet when I arrived, not at all the anthill I'd left a few days earlier, and there was no sign of the federal agents. Francesca, phone jammed to her ear, gave me an uneasy look but waved me toward the lieutenant's office. I walked in and found Ray leaning back against the file cabinets, face set, arms crossed so tightly his circulation might be threatened, and Welsh sitting behind his desk looking more tired than I'd ever seen him.
"Constable." A flip of the hand. "Have a seat."
He'd never asked me to sit before. "Thank you kindly, sir, I believe I'll stand."
"Suit yourself." He looked down, shuffling some papers on his desktop, sighing. I could sense the near-audible hum of Ray's impatience, but he didn't move, and I set myself the discipline of not letting my eyes stray toward him, fixing my attention on Welsh, who finally spoke, without looking up at me. "You're off the restaurant detail, Constable. You will allow the Thai-food purveyors of the city to go about their business of giving people heartburn, in peace and quiet."
"Well, actually, sir, it's a misconception that all Thai food is hot, or in fact that capsaicin induces heartburn." I couldn't help it--my mind was spinning with the implications of his directive (I've done something wrong; I've erred, I've failed), and this sort of tripe is what makes its way out of my mouth in such moments. "In fact, it's been established--"
"Fraser, shut up. Just shut up." Ray's tether had abruptly snapped, and he pushed away from the wall toward me so fast he almost knocked me over. "Nobody gives a shit about Thai food, including the killer, which there isn't one of, or I mean there is but not the kind we thought. OK?"
He was right up in my face, seething, I could smell his sweat and his anger; and his nearness, after our time apart, the intensity with which he was looking at me, made it even harder than usual to disentangle his words, or to clamp down on the feelings that his proximity was causing.
"Kowalski. Cork it." This, rapped out by the lieutenant, shocked me out of my befuddlement. Though he's not a man with any stomach for pretense, he'd been scrupulous about maintaining the sham, addressing Ray always as 'Vecchio.' I wasn't sure how to take this break in the facade, but at the very least it seemed to imply that whatever was said here was non-official, off the record, Welsh to Fraser and not Lieutenant to Constable. That this was private--no ears here but our own. And, perhaps, it was meant as a way of letting me know, just once, that he was as sick of the lies as I was.
Ray stepped back, pulling away from me, gave Welsh a hard look, and then leaned back against the file cabinets, pointedly, almost noisily, silent. Welsh was silent a moment as well, taking his time before speaking again, swiveling his chair around, staring at the shelves of awards and mementoes, the plaques and photographs on the walls, tokens of an honorable career of service.
"The investigation's over," he said at last. "Not just your bit of it, the whole thing."
"You've made an arrest?" The relief I felt was audible in my voice. From the corner of my eye I could see Ray flinch.
"There's no arrest. There's not going to be an arrest."
"I'm afraid I don't understand." My brief elation shriveled, as I realized the mood in the room was, if anything, darker than before, Welsh more weary, Ray wound even tighter.
"Look. Fraser." It was Ray, staring at the floor, speaking as if every word cut him, hurt him to say. "They know who did it. How he did it, why he did it, even. And we can't touch him."
"Ray?" As plain as his words were, I couldn't take them in or make sense of them. Seeing him like this was painful. And he wouldn't look at me.
"So. That's it. Fee-nee. Kaput. All over." He still wouldn't look at me. He'd never refused to look at me before.
I stared at him for another moment, trying to will some connection, and then I turned back to Welsh. "With your permission, sir, I believe I will sit." I lowered myself into a chair, feeling an unfamiliar unsteadiness in my knees. "And though I'm not officially entitled to one, I'll make bold to ask for an explanation."
"Yeah." Welsh was playing with a paper clip, straightening it, bending it, twisting it into a pretzel. His voice was flat and tired. "You need a little background to get this, Fraser. Here's the deal. The Outfit's been taking it in the shorts these last few years--"
"The Outfit?"
"The mob, O.C., whatever you want to call them. The old guys. RICO put a dent in 'em, the fibbies put a dent in 'em. They're down. But they're not out, not yet."
Ray suddenly pushed away from the cabinets and started pacing, clearly impatient with the history lesson. I kept my eyes away from him, with effort, and nodded at Welsh to continue.
"They had to let go some of their turf, over time. Drugs--the street gangs took most of that over a while ago. Vice Lords, the Latin Kings, the El Rukns, all of 'em and their brothers. The old guys couldn't handle those kids much better'n we could." It was the matter-of-fact tone of an old soldier, thinking back over battles lost. "But one thing the Outfit never let go of was prostitution. They always ran the hookers in this town, and they figured they always would. It was sort of the status quo."
He nodded to himself, seeming almost nostalgic for a moment. Then his voice hardened. "Until one fine day the BGDs decided they wanted a piece of that too."
"The BGDs?"
Ray jumped in, sounding as his patience was fraying again. "Black Gangster Disciples, you met some of 'em once, remember?" That got a raised eyebrow from Welsh, which Ray disregarded, speeding on. "They run--oh hell, Cabrini, Robert Taylor, Ida B. Wells, pretty much all the projects, plus most of the drug action in the city."
"That's about it." Welsh overrode him. "They've done pretty well for themselves. Good old-fashioned American success story, you know, expand, diversify, build your bottom line, whack the competition. But the day they decided to start running hookers is the day they diversified a little too far." He tossed the mangled paper clip, missed the wastebasket. "That was the day the Outfit decided there was some shit up with which they were no longer going to put."
For a moment I thought I saw where he was going with this, but it was too repugnant for me to believe. I tried to keep the disgust out of my voice, and ended up merely sounding prissy. "And this relates to the murder investigation how exactly?"
Silence in the room, except for the thump of Ray's boot heels against the floor as he paced, the arrhythmic metallic rattle as he slammed his knuckles against the file cabinets in passing. Then Welsh said, "When I was a kid ... I grew up in Cicero, which the mob pretty much ran. Everyone who did business there paid up, and they got--" He lifted a hand, let it drop. "Protection, you could call it." He was staring down at his fingers, talking quietly. "One day ... Freeman's Furniture, they'd been there for years, on Cermak, and one day some guy opened up a new furniture store right across the street from them. Undercut Freeman's prices, put some ads in the paper, had a big opening celebration. Next morning I go by, on my way to school ... the place had been broken into, and it had been trashed but good. Every stick of furniture in the store was smashed up. Paint and shit dumped on it. Looked like a tornado went through." He looked at me. "See, they could've just burned down the place, but they wanted to send a signal."
"The owner?" Ray was still pacing, but clearly he was also paying attention.
Welsh shrugged, and they exchanged a look, a knowing nod. For a moment I felt I could not be any more foreign if I were from Mars, sitting here in my naiveté and outrage.
"Lieutenant, far be it from me to disparage the value of storytelling in subtly conveying a complex message, but I'm still at a loss to understand how this relates to the murderer and his alleged invulnerability to prosecution." Under any normal circumstances Ray would have found some way to tweak me for that sentence, but he was silent again, leaving it up to Welsh to respond.
"The point is, if you'd seen that store you'd've thought a crazy man was at work, that someone'd have to be crazy to want to do that kind of damage. Just like we figured someone'd have to be a wacko to do those hookers that way. But it was ... just business. Not for kicks, nothing personal." He looked at me from bloodshot eyes.
"Sir." I took a moment to compose myself before I went on. "With all respect for your greater knowledge of the situation, I simply can't accept that the analogy's valid. Those were human beings. They were murdered. It's not like--property vandalism."
Welsh leaned back, tilting his chair, adjusting his belt. For a moment I felt a twinge of irrational dislike for him, his padded chair and his comfortable belly and his bone-deep, invulnerable cynicism. "With all respect to you, Fraser, that's exactly what it was to these guys. They don't see it like you do. Those weren't human beings to them. They were merchandise. You can trash merchandise any time you want." His voice was calm, but then he shook his head once, hard. "Look, you think I like this? I don't like thinking people operate this way. But that's the word out on the street. Just that--the Outfit couldn't let it pass. Had to let the BGDs know real clearly they'd made a bad business decision. Had to hit back, and--" He shrugged. "Smart man picks an easy target. You kill their soldiers, the other guys hit the mattress and you've got a war on your hands, maybe, which nobody needs. You burn their whores, you're just...sending a signal."
"So that's what it's called." I was struggling to keep a grip on my anger, but it twisted away from me and came out as sarcasm. "In this city, the vicious and wanton murder of three young women translates as 'sending a signal.' Interesting. I'll have to remember that."
Ray suddenly slammed a fist into the front of a filing cabinet, and the crash made me jump. He was rolling his shoulders, a belligerent, thwarted movement as if he wanted to hit something else, harder, but couldn't find the right target. Welsh watched him impassively, as if he were immune to the emotion roiling around the room, or perhaps just too weary for it.
"We done here?" Ray's voice came out raw and scratchy.
"You can leave any time, detective, I just--"
"Lieutenant." I jumped in. "What about the murderer? Ray said 'they' know who he is. The federal agents? Is that what he--" I half turned toward Ray, who was slumped against the file cabinets, not looking at me. "Is that what was meant?"
"The feds." Welsh grimaced. "Like I said before, they've had a lot of success lately getting a handle on these guys. And a big reason for that is they've got a few plants deep in the Outfit. Deep in." He shot me a glance. "Kind of like someone you know of."
I nodded.
"Here in Chicago, they got a guy--not one of theirs originally, somebody they turned. They been cultivating him for years, he's got 'em a direct line into the Andriacci branch. They've gotten to know him pretty well over the years, but I guess they didn't know before that he--" Welsh paused, seemed to have some difficulty finding words. "That he's got a taste for hurting women. Dunno if his capo knew that or not. Hell, maybe he didn't, even, till he got started. Till they gave him this job."
Ray had picked up the cords for the venetian blinds and was flipping them back and forth, open and shut, one way and then the other, with a maddening jangle.
"The point is--" Welsh came back to brass tacks, sounding almost brusque-- "no way the Bureau's going to do a damn thing to him, not till they've pumped that well dry. And nobody else touches him either. He's worth too much to them, to the big picture." He had picked up a binder clip and was clamping it onto a fingertip, frowning down at it. It must have stung. "Could be his own guys'll take care of him--he's brought a lot of heat down. Or maybe not, maybe just tell him to watch his step from now on. He's too useful to 'em to dump."
My head had started to throb, in rhythm with the clatter of the blinds. The oblique reference to Ray Vecchio hadn't been lost on me; I couldn't help thinking This is the world my friend is moving in now, right now, at this moment, wherever he is. I couldn't help wondering if he'd return at all, and if he did--what would be left of him.
But I had to set that aside. It was difficult enough to encompass the present situation. "So you're saying--they won't prosecute."
"They can't prosecute, damn it, they lose this guy and they lose a case they've spent years building up. Another few years and they figure to take down half the Chicago Outfit. They're not going to flush that for three hookers."
"And we can't--" I stopped to correct myself. "You can't prosecute him?"
"We got nothing to go on," Welsh snapped, flinging the binder clip across the room. "We got no evidence, because surprise surprise, the feds took all the evidence. And you notice how sloppy the FBI labs have gotten with evidence lately?"
Ray abruptly turned away from the wall and was at Welsh's desk, fists resting on the scattered papers. "Lieutenant. Look. OK, I know, you can't give me a name, I got that. But just--maybe just a first name, initials, or--or neighborhood, y'know, ten-block radius, what kind of car he drives, anything. Anything. Give me something here." Halfway between a demand and a plea, and Welsh was granite against it, stronger than I could have been.
"Can't do that, detective."
"Just one thing. Anything. Give me something to work with."
"I can't do that." Ice, impervious to the bonfire of Ray in a passion.
Ray smacked his palms down on the desktop, spun away, kicked the wastebasket across the room. "Then why the fuck, why the fuck did you tell me about it in the first place? Huh? Why'd you do that to me?"
Welsh watched him, with the emotionless clarity of deep fatigue. "You want to know something, under normal circumstances I wouldn't have. Wouldn't've said a thing. But the fact of the matter is, I figured I owed him the truth about it." He tipped his head toward me. "Knew I couldn't tell him a lie. And I figured, telling him, I better tell you too. Might as well save him the trouble."
"Do you think I can't keep a secret, if need be? Even from Ray?" There was too much heat in that question, and I throttled myself down, checking my face and bearing.
Welsh transferred that unnervingly acute gaze from Ray to me. "Didn't say you couldn't. But it's not a good idea, partners having secrets from each other. Puts a big hitch in the swing of things."
That was not a topic I wanted to pursue. Ray was staring out the window, head bowed and shoulders slumped, but I needed to turn my attention away from him, back to the case. "And the public will just let all this lapse? Three murders?"
Ray swung around suddenly. "I saw the press release. They already got it out, on the noon news." His fingers framed his words in air-quotation marks, his voice filled them with contempt. "'It is believed that the killer has moved on to Texas, and may have crossed into Mexico.'" He dropped his hands. "Shit, why stop there? Bet they'll get a sighting of him in--uh, Costa Rica next, Upper Volta, whatever." I refrained from correcting his geography.
Welsh said, "People'll forget about it by the end of the week. Hookers get killed all the time. As long as they don't think the guy's moving on to real people, no one's interested."
"Except perhaps for the young women's families."
Ray gave a harsh bark of laughter. "Fraser, did you talk to the families? No, I know you didn't, I did, and trust me, nobody's holding any candlelight vigils there."
I plowed on. "And it won't be forgotten by the other women, the other prostitutes, out there. To know that their lives are so little valued."
Ray's voice went gentler. "They know that already. That's what their families taught 'em, y'know?"
I had no reply to that, and neither of them seemed to have anything more to add. For a minute we were still, the three of us. I could hear phones ringing in the squad room, the machinery of crime and justice, life and death, grinding onward.
Finally Welsh spoke, without looking at me. "Fraser. You can't--" He stopped, rubbing a thumb over his nose, and started again. "I used to get dragged to church every week, when I was a kid, and I remember--you know that line from the Bible, where it says 'Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.'" He shook his head slowly,. "No offense, I hope, but I never had much use for the Bible myself. I mean, that's a beautiful sentiment. Only problem is, it's a crock. You can hunger and thirst after righteousness all you want, but the fact is, sometimes you're just going to go hungry." He looked up and caught my eye, speaking even more deliberately than usual. "You can't win 'em all, Fraser."
I nodded, reasonable as ever, tractable, though all I felt was beaten. Welsh held my eyes for another moment, then turned back to shuffling the papers in the file, as if he were trying to sort them, but abruptly he shoved them together into a ragged stack and slammed them into his "out" basket, heedless of the ones that fluttered to the floor. I started to retrieve them, but he said, "No. Don't bother."
I stepped back, hesitantly. "Sir--"
"Constable. Thanks. For everything." He paused, as if he wanted to say more, and then only said, "The inspector's probably got plenty for you to do, back at the consulate. Probably should get on it." He looked over at Ray. "Detective. Get out of here. I don't want to see you till tomorrow. But I do expect to see you tomorrow. Bright and early."
Ray yanked open the door with a shattering crash and jangle of the venetian blinds, and was gone so fast I stumbled trying to start after him. By the time I was out of the office he'd reached the hall.
"Ray. Ray. Ray."
He stopped, not turning, head down, and I caught up with him.
"What." He sounded tired.
"Where are you going?"
He raised his head, looked at me, glanced up and down the hall, and then stared at me again, defiantly. "I'm going up to Kerrigan's, and I'm gonna get shitfaced. Anything else you need to know?"
My head automatically pivoted around to check the clock--2:34 p.m.--and then back to him. His eyes looked bruised, and there were sharp lines of tension around his mouth. "Do you think that's a good idea?"
"Good idea? Hell no, I think it's a great idea. Best damn idea I've had in weeks."
I let it pass. "And after that?"
"What do you mean, after that? After that, nothing, sooner or later the bar closes or I run out of cash, maybe I meet someone, maybe I get lucky, probably I don't, either way I pass out, I get some sleep, I wake up, I drink some coffee, and I'm back here, back at that fucking desk at 8 a.m. sharp, trying to decide which of the fourteen case files I got in my inbox I should look at first, assuming I can get my eyes open enough to look at anything."
"And ... you're going to let this drop." I tried to make it a neutral statement, a clarification, but his head snapped back, and I could see the hurt for just a moment, before it hardened over with anger.
"You mind telling me what the fuck I'm supposed to do? Go to DC and snatch one of the fibbies off the street and beat a name out of him, maybe? You heard the man. Can't win 'em all. No use thinking you can. Right?" I could see him wrapping himself up in feigned indifference, shouldering his way into that protection just as he shouldered into his leather jacket on cold days. "Shit, those girls, you know--" He looked away from me, pushing his hands around in his pockets. "Crack whores. They'd probably be dead before they hit thirty anyway."
It was like a blow to the face, and though I instantly started rationalizing--he's a police officer, he's had to become hardened as a way of protecting himself against horror, it's a defense mechanism--despite myself, I flinched, and as he looked over at me I knew that he saw, for just a moment before I recovered, that brief unconquerable moment of revulsion. He saw me pull away, and he responded with a set stare of defiance, and I could see, behind that facade, a deep, deep shame. "Hey, 's the world we're living in," he said. "Not a nice place, Chicago. You just started noticing that?"
All our ease together gone, and instead this flinty edginess, like walking barefoot on gravel, and the fault all mine. I never meant to shame him.
"You probably gonna be booking your flight back to Canada pretty soon, huh? Sorry we let you down."
"You've never let me down. Not in any respect."
"Yeah. Thought you didn't tell fibs." He looked away, pressing his lips together tightly.
"Ray--"
He spun back, abruptly. "Tell me one thing, just one thing. You're a cop, right? Same as me. So where do you get off, where the hell do you get off, being so--so fucking innocent?" He was almost spitting the words out. "Like maybe up there in Canada nobody does anything bad, like the worst thing you ever saw was ear-biting-off fake-wrestling guys or something.""You know that's not--"
"Like, just cause I deal with reality, Chicago reality, that that makes me some kind of a sell-out. Like just 'cause I got my brain around the concept cut your losses that makes me dirty. Like just cause you want the good guys to win every time, that means they're always gonna win. You know what? The good guys don't always win." He was stabbing at me with his fingers, punching out the words. "Just 'cause you're Mr. Perfect, you don't always get to have things turn out the way you want. Tattoo that one on your eyelids, Fraser."
"I'm aware of that, Ray. Believe me. I understand that."
He went on as if he hadn't heard me. "Deal with it. I do." He swung his arm around, bracelet flashing, taking in the whole station. "We do. And--you got no right to act like you come down here with a special dispensation from God Almighty and suddenly everything's supposed to go your way."
Then he stopped, took a deep breath, scrubbed his hands over his face.
"Ah, hell. It's always like this, Fraser, why is that? I mean--from the get-go, starting day one, I haven't even known you an hour and you're charging into a burning building to rescue fish while I'm sittin' out there like a moron with my thumb up my ass going What the fuck? and all I been doing since then is playing catch-up." He slumped back against the wall, rubbing his eyes. "And I never do." He was talking softly now, rough-voiced. "I'm a fucking good cop. You know? So why is it I feel like I never get caught up to--" He made a vague gesture, let his arm drop. "Wherever you are."
I wanted to tell him--I almost said--I never do either. I didn't; too weak, I suppose, to get those words over the walls. Instead I said, feebly, "That's--that's not true, Ray."
He ignored that, letting his head roll gently back and forth against the wall. "We did good work on this case. Take the feds out of the picture and we would've put it down."
"I know. I believe you."
At that, he looked at me. "But it's not gonna happen. And you can't let it get to you." It was almost a plea. "You're a cop. If there's one thing you gotta learn when you're a cop, it's how to tell when something's truly, one hundred percent, dead in the water hopeless. How to let go of it."
He pushed away from the wall, looking hard at me, speaking very seriously. "I learned that. It didn't come easy, not one inch of it. But I got there."
I wished there were some way I could tell him just how well I'd learned that myself. Instead I said, "All right. I'll accept that you and the lieutenant are correct, that there's nothing more we can do on the case for now."
"Swell. Fine. Great." He nodded at me, once, and turned to go.
"But I'm coming with you." Presumptuous of me, since no invitation was extended, but I had no intention of letting him go off on a solitary bender.
He halted with his back to me, hunched and staring at the floor, shaking his head. "No. No, Fraser, that is not a good idea. Me getting hammered is not something you need a ringside seat for, trust me."
"I don't think it's a good idea for you to be alone just now." Since he couldn't see me, I let myself look my fill, taking in the defensive cant of his shoulders, the little movements of back muscles under his tight t-shirt, the gentle incurve of the nape of his neck ... that place, right there, where close-cropped prickly hairs turn into soft down ... "People need support in difficult circumstances, in fact social support has been shown to buffer the immune system from the harmful physiological effects of stress--" I didn't know what I was saying, it was like the nonsense one uses to gentle a spooky animal. I could see the tautness in the muscles in his neck, steel cords under high tension. "I'd like to be able to help you." I could see exactly the spot where I could put my thumbs, knew how hard I would press, how slowly to stroke, to get him to relax, the sounds he would make--
He whipped around, so suddenly I took a clumsy step back. "You think I need your help?" He was glaring at me, face tight and cold. "You think I need Mr. Perfect to come charging in and rescue me? Wipe my nose and put me to bed, maybe? That's real big of you, Fraser, but--news flash. I can take care of myself. You know? I may be a sell-out but I can take care of myself."
His hands were moving fast, signaling stay back, stand clear, keep away. I locked my own hands together, hard, behind my back. "I've never doubted that, Ray, it's only that--"
"I can deal, you know what I mean? I got my ways of dealing, you got yours, and I know you think my ways of dealing might be, what, I dunno, you probably got some big word for it that boils down to fucked up, and your ways of dealing are probably what I'd call, y'know, stupid." We were getting some curious looks from passersby; I moved, slightly, angled to try to shield him from their eyes. "So go on back home, why don't you, Fraser, and--and polish the silverware, or something."
I didn't know what to say, and for once, when I didn't know what to say, I had the wit to keep my mouth shut. After a moment he looked down, away, and I could see the anger drain out of him, leaving a weary sadness. " I'm outta here." He pushed away from the wall. "See you in the--"
"Why don't you want me to come with you?"
It stopped him, and I went on, as quietly as I could. "Is it--do you think I'm that weak? That I can't handle anything that's not perfect? That's I'm so brittle I can't take a few--a few dents, without shattering?"
"Weak." He stared at me. It was as if he'd never heard the word before. "No, that--believe me, that is not what I was thinking, it's just that--" His eyes, tracking toward the floor again, stopped; then he reached out and, to my astonishment, gently touched his fingertips to the dark soup-stain on my tunic. Let them rest there a moment. "I just don't want to get any more shit on your shoes. OK? You don't deserve it." He shook his head and laughed, a soft unhappy laugh. Then his fingers straightened and he pushed away from me, turning, starting off down the hall.
"Ray." I struggled for something more to say, something that would get through, but my words had finally deserted me. All I had was his name. "Ray. Ray."
He didn't even pause, only made a sudden flailing motion with his arm, oddly graceless, not at all like an actual wave, the motion of a man pushing something away, and called back over his shoulder, "Go home, Fraser." And then he was gone.
I stood, staring down the hall, wanting nothing more than to follow him--telling myself my only concern was for his safety, that if he got drunk he'd need someone to watch out for him, make sure he didn't drive, make sure he got home safely. But I knew that was rank hypocrisy. It was no friendly fraternal concern for his safety that was urging me after him, and that awareness kept me from following. He didn't need me. He'd laid down the terms. He didn't want me with him; he'd made that abundantly clear. He didn't want me.
I stood there for some time, feeling the men and women of the station moving around me, feeling their eyes on me. Finally I started moving, stiffly, and walked out the door. Walking just to be moving, with no destination in mind.
I head down the street, feeling the sun burn down on my back. I'd had some thought of finding a phone book, looking up the address for Kerrigan's, hailing a cab. But I find myself not doing any of those things--just walking blindly through the smothering heat, refusing to look at street signs, trying my hardest, despite the unrelenting compass in my head, to lose myself in the city's chaos.
Chicago is dirty year-round--I've seen a fresh snowfall turn grey within hours--but the filth is especially striking in midsummer, the green slime trickling in the gutter outside the grocer's, fast food wrappers sticky with grease swirling in the hot exhaust of buses, fresh graffiti on every surface. I can smell pollutants in the air, and the stink of decaying things, and my own stench--sweat, and the reek of sour soup mixed with hot wool.
At one intersection, somewhere near the river, is an enormous cement planter filled with annuals that have withered in the heat, slumped over onto the baked soil. The crowds surge past, oblivious; I stare at the dying flowers, trying to think of who, which office, what authority in this vast mechanism is responsible for the homely task of watering plants. Public works, parks and recreation, street maintenance? I start casting about for a pay phone, always a challenge in this city, but when I finally find one three blocks away it's broken, vandalized, and I realize that I don't have pocket change in any event, even if I knew whom to call. I stand for a moment looking at the tangle of shredded wires, and then I give up, and walk on.
Sounds of the city, diesel engines, jackhammers, airplanes, auto horns, pounding music from car windows and boomboxes, none of it loud enough to drown out Ray's parting words to me, echoing in my head--
Go home, Fraser.
I'd like to believe--I do believe--that in his pain and shame he simply spoke impulsively, without thinking. I know he wouldn't deliberately be that cruel.
My home is two thousand five hundred miles from here. There's no place in this city that isn't exile for me.
All of it, asphalt, crowds, cars, cement, steel, exhaust, glass, buses, glare, sweat, noise...
...even the green and quiet park, where, after hours of roaming without plan or forethought, my feet eventually take me--this, too, is foreign soil, this artful, heartless simulation of nature.
I wander off the main path, leaving behind the joggers and rollerbladers, find a shaded spot and settle on the grass. It's less bad here. Quiet, or at least relatively so, though the roar of the city is an endless trouble in the background. A little cooler, the earth soft and damp under the thick grass, which tells me the park employees must have watered today. Probably there are sprinklers embedded in the soil, a maze of subterranean pipes and valves, all engineered to make a pretty pleasure-grounds for the people who live in glass and cement.
I brush my hand over the mown plush of grass. It's pretty here, yes, soft and restful. Verdant. Pleasant, certainly. And about as homelike, for me, as the rainforests of Borneo. The tundra is a desert, after all, as dry as it is cold, and the only trees that survive on the permafrost are stunted whippy shrubs, dwarf birch and willow, or the stingy spikes of jackpine, black against the snow.
In my grandmother's makeshift library, back in Tuktoyaktuk, there was a picture hanging over the encyclopedias that used to frighten me, as a child. I know now it was a cheap print of a painting by Henri Rousseau, a jungle scene, showing two dark-skinned men on horseback being attacked by a tiger. I wasn't afraid of the tiger--its eyes, though hotter, were no fiercer than those of wolves, and I was already more than half in love with the beautiful danger of wild animals. No, what terrified me was the surreal vegetation: the giant smothering leaves, the phalanx of sword-like grasses, the ominous palm trees reaching out like huge many-fingered hands. Every time my eyes came to rest on the picture, I had to turn and look out the window, to reassure myself with the comforting sight of barren ice and snowfields.
I believe that print is what gave me my childhood nightmares of being lost in the jungle, suffocated by undergrowth and strangled with creeping vines. Remembering that, I feel the familiar self-disgust (to be frightened by a picture!), but at the same time ...remembering, recalling the tender child that I once was, thinking of that child lost in the jungle ... and the women, girls really, hardly out of childhood themselves, gone astray in this concrete wilderness, brought down by the predators.... The trees hang heavy over my head, leaves glittering in the breeze like razors, and under the ripe odor of greenery I can smell decay. There's a humming in my head, and I can feel words, words rising and taking form in my mind.
Carefully, feeling almost furtive, I pull out the little notebook I always carry with me. Its ostensible purpose, of course, is utilitarian--making notes at crime scenes, recording information, always in the clear smooth script I learned from my grandmother. Those entries start at the front of the notebook and proceed onward in orderly chronological sequence.
But there are other jottings that start in the back of the book, made in an entirely different handwriting, backslanted, knotted, a gnarled scribble I came up with long ago to thwart my grandmother's failing eyes. Though by no means an impenetrable code, it's difficult to decipher, and I find myself still using it when I want privacy. As I do now.
Ray told me once that he was, beneath the surface, a poet. I kept a straight face, moved by the knowledge that he was alluding, not to any skill at the art of catching feeling in words, but rather to his sensitivity. His vulnerability. I knew that was something he usually strove to conceal, and that I was being honored in having it unmasked, even so glancingly and guardedly. He trusted, rightly, that I wouldn't laugh at him.
I'm sure he believes that beneath my own surface lies the soul of ... a regulations manual, perhaps, or a text of prescriptive grammar. I seriously doubt that he could keep a straight face if he read the things I write in here.
Poetry. Or bits of poetry, to be more accurate. Random phrases and lines, an image that pleased me once, a scrap of talk overheard on the bus that rang in my head. Fragments, actually. Disconnected shards that never build to a whole thing. Nothing carried to completion.
I test the pen in the margin, trying to put Ray out of my mind, trying to be still, waiting for the phrases to connect. Lost in the jungle, I write, to be writing something. Deciduous, serrated, foliate, smother, razor, shimmering, blade, suffocate--the isolated words are still buzzing softly around in my head, like drowsy bees, but when I reach to touch them they scatter, drifting off into silence. When I grope after them, clutching, they lie limp and flat in my clumsy hands. Gone. Strangled, broken, no clues left behind. Only silence, the silence of death. My failure, yet again.
I bite down on the pen so hard that I feel the plastic casing start to crack under my teeth, before I make myself unclench, let it go, and wipe it off on my sleeve. Empty, brittle and broken. Nothing will be salvaged from the wreck of this day. I'm too tired to fight off the only words I can find, the old, old, hateful ones: It goes nowhere, it means nothing. Not good enough. Never will be. The words are a lead vest, shielding me from the lethal peril of hope; crushing the air out of me.
When at length I get my breath back and shove the blurry wetness from my eyes, I look up and find a young couple has flopped down on the grass not far from me, a boy and girl, wrestling and squirming together. The girl starts shrieking as the boy holds her down, and I'm actually up on one knee and poised to charge before I catch myself, tell myself to sit down, that the hand moving on her belly holds no knife, that he's merely tickling her, or caressing her, that the gurgling sounds she's making are just giggles, not the sound of someone choking on blood. But I can't look at her without seeing Latisha Robinson, Krystalle Hendricks, Bethany Paulus, laid out on Mort's slab, disassembled.
I wonder where the killer is right now. Dining, perhaps; I picture him in an air-conditioned restaurant, filling his belly with a steak--rare, I imagine, resting in a puddle of blood. A bottle of wine at hand, or a beer possibly. Planning, as he eats, how to get his other hungers filled this evening.
The young couple is kissing now, joyously ardent, bodies pressed against each other on the green turf. I look away quickly, down at the notebook that's still open on my knee. Smoothing out the blank page, I pick up the pen again, and suddenly my hand is moving, words forming on the page in knotted furtive cryptogram. Not my words, to be sure--no creation of mine, but lines etched on my memory long ago, that spill out now, whole, without effort:
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contendI pause only long enough to shake out my fingers, cramping from the tiny script. The words crowd at me:
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners' ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,A sudden breeze flutters the page, bringing me the green rank smell of mown grass. I flatten the paper out with my hand, and write on:
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause.See, banks and brakesI stop a moment, looking at the flea-scratch scribble, illegible to anyone but me; and then write the last line, slowly, in my clearest, most open script:
Now, leaved how thick! laced they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.I stare at the page for a long time. Hopkins. Not my words, his. Words I'd tried to forget but couldn't erase from my soul.Words can save a life; I knew that even before Fortitude Pass, I learned it my last year at home, before I left my grandparents' house forever, when I could almost feel myself being torn apart inside by forces I couldn't control. When I'd felt Duty piercing me, as a beetle being mounted on a specimen board must feel the pin driving through its thorax, leaving me to flail impotently, transfixed.
I hadn't read poetry in my boyhood, scorning it as soppy drivel, but that year, devouring my way through the library in desperation, I found the thin volume--Selected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins--and a brief biography of him, guarded and formal, drawing lines I didn't yet know how to read between.
I don't know why I latched on to him to instantly; god knows I didn't yet understand much of his work. Perhaps I sensed a fellow spirit, under the convoluted and dazzling words. All I know is that the words themselves became a lifeline for me.
And so, when I encountered those words years later, in Victoria's beautiful voice, coming from that beautiful mouth--to find that she knew him, knew and loved his lines--that was what convinced me, more than anything else, that I'd known her across a thousand lifetimes, that we were bound together, and that if his words had saved me, they could save her too, soul as well as body.
I wanted so badly to believe that. I know now that I saw in her what I wanted to see. I know now how fallible my judgment is, under the influence of passion and hope. And I've read the research on the unreliability of human memory; I know how inaccurate our recollections are, even in the most mundane situations. As it was--trapped in a blizzard, starving, freezing, with death at one hand, and at the other, passion, a bond such as I'd never known....
How can I trust anything I remember from that time? I know what I think is the truth, but I wanted, then, to believe one thing; I wanted later, urgently, to believe the opposite. I ended up funking both, and taking a coward's way out.
I couldn't make out what she said. I never heard the words. A pathetic, feeble lie--god knows, whatever other defects I may have, there's certainly nothing wrong with my hearing. Such a feeble lie that I'm sure Ray Vecchio would have seen through it, had he been awake to hear it. But the only person I'd really been trying to convince was myself. All I'm convinced of now is that I'll never know for sure. And that it no longer matters.
Some memories I'll never be sure of, and others I can't seem to lose. Thinking of Hopkins, I find myself, against my will, recalling the class in English poetry I took in that mutinous year before I'd entered cadet training, when I still thought a different path was possible for me, that I could force my life into some direction other than the one that seemed preordained for it. The professor had been a disappointment--an aging Anglophile with a pretentious mid-Atlantic accent, who clearly was embittered at ending his career in St. George, BC, and who curried cheap favor with his students by regaling them with racy gossip about the intimate details of the poets' lives, rather than discussing their work.
On the day we were to finish up the Victorians, he had arrived late, and then spent much of the session on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's relationship with her father and the ins and outs of the Swinburne-Rossetti circle. Hopkins was last on the syllabus, and as the minutes ticked on I'd grown more and more apprehensive, feeling oddly as if a friend were waiting for a public humiliation.
With five minutes left to the bell, when my classmates were beginning to fold up their notebooks, he had intoned, "And last we come ... to the eccentric and unfortunate Gerard Manley Hopkins." I'd folded my hands on the desk, staring down at them. "A most peculiar poet, unpublished during his lifetime, little read for years after that, and even now admired from a distance more often than truly understood." He blew his nose, cleared his throat, glanced at the clock and went on.
"God knows what he might have written if the Jesuits hadn't gotten their claws into him at Oxford--but he became, not just a priest, but a parish priest." The honking voice insinuated an amused contempt. "Subsequently exiled to various low and brutish urban slums, where he suffered under the belief that the wretched lives and miserable deaths of his drunken, impoverished, illiterate parishioners were somehow of greater moment than his poetry. Why, he even believed that he had some obligation, and even a capacity, to be of help to them, when apparently they mostly found him, though oddly endearing, to also be more than slightly bizarre, unnerving in his zealotry, and in many respects an alien and inhuman presence."
Another glance at the clock; four minutes left. "The poems themselves--" a dismissive waggle of the fingers-- "though usually religious in theme, are notably sensual, in language and imagery. Likely they were the poor chap's only sensual outlet, deeply repressed as he was, and when they dried up, under the onslaught of his trivial clerical duties... well, one can only hope that his parishioners' squalid sins gave him some sort of vicarious thrill; although it's clear he harbored--unnatural inclinations--" A suggestive twitch of the eyebrows, and much snickering from the louts in the back row-- "it also seems evident that he died ... at the age of 44 ... a virgin." That had sent the back row into spasms of guffawing, while I sat with my eyes locked on my balled fists, certain that my own shameful secrets were blazing over my head like hellfire.
Years later, older now, better armored, I sit on the grass and contemplate that phrase. Unnatural inclinations. I'm no longer a virgin, to be sure, but what intimacy I've had is hardly worthy of the word, more a confused collision in the dark than any true joining. Lord knows if anything in my life has felt unnatural, it has been those moments, when I felt myself helpless the grip of something I couldn't control, something that I craved without ever entirely willing or wanting it.
Knowing, as I know now, what I do most truly want--the most natural inclination I've ever felt in my life--and knowing I can't have it, that it's not welcomed, that I'm not wanted ...
I look back down at the notebook and fold it away, hiding it behind my stained tunic. Suddenly I feel like a fool, sitting here scribbling verse as if I were a lovesick boy. Indulging myself in poetic pretense, when it's clear the words inside me will never come to anything. Certainly no one will ever see them; the only one I ever showed my nonsense to was Victoria, and that's the kind of mistake I won't make again.
I stare out over the park, trying to bring myself back to present reality, and I realize the lawn is empty, the young couple has gone away. I can hear in my mind's ear Ray's muttered Get a room!--his typical response to public displays of affection--and perhaps they have indeed gotten a room. Perhaps Ray himself has--I can't keep my mind on track--perhaps he himself has, how did he put it, gotten lucky, perhaps he's found a room and someone to share it with him, and immediately I picture--because I can't stop myself--a room, an anonymous room somewhere, and a woman, a faceless anonymous woman, soft, pliant, accommodating, and Ray with her, all that steel-taut tension slowly unwinding, uncoiling, as he holds her, opens her, slides into her...
Mentally, I take a knife and excise that image, slicing a wide swath to make sure it's cut away clean. Cut clean and it won't hurt, I think, and without giving hurt any time to be felt I move on, to other disciplines I learned long ago. I think pear, picture the word in my mind written in graceful italic type, and then I let my brain fill with the image of a pear, a red Anjou, curving and rosy, and then with the smell of it, the flavor, thick and winy, the faint graininess of its flesh against molars, the softness beneath the resilient skin, letting there be no room in my mind for anything else, and then I let it fade. It leaves me peaceful, in an empty calm.
Calm, until I idly wonder why I'm still sitting here, loitering in this park. My brain, handed the question, industriously digs for an answer, which turns out, idiotically, pathetically, to be--that I'm waiting for Ray to come find me. At the same moment I realize that, stroking the soft bristle of grass, caressing it, I'm imagining that that's how Ray's hair would feel under my hand, and I know in that moment how utterly hopeless I am, how badly lost. How badly I've lost.
You can't win 'em all, Fraser.
Welsh is a compassionate man, behind the cynicism, and a perceptive one; I wonder at times how much he sees. Sometimes you're just going to go hungry.
I know he thinks--they all think--that I'm a naive innocent, that I live in a black and white dream world. And I may be a dreamer in some ways, but I comprehend reality in all its harshness. I know some dreams are by their nature doomed. The world we live in is awash in cruelty, brutality, injustice, and all my life's hard work at times seems no more than a child's sand-fortress against the tide.
I can live with that because I have no choice. The hunger for justice, the thirst for righteousness--I learned long ago that those can never really be sated or slaked. Knowing the goal is inhuman, unattainable, in no way excuses me from giving my life to its pursuit.
But ... if not justice and righteousness, can I at least not have--the justness, the rightness, of joining with the one soul that matches mine, that completes me? To have that simple human hunger filled--is it wanting too much to want that, just once, before I die?
Send my roots rain. I lie on my back, staring into the sky for a long time, but never a cloud crosses it, never a drop falls from it. Bland, barren blue, the blue of the Virgin's cloak in a Renaissance painting; but I know the comforting color is just an illusion, the scattering of light waves by air molecules, and that what I'm really staring into is the black emptiness of space. Hopkins at least had his faith--the certainty that there was a presence up there, a divinity that gave meaning to his life, that justified his sacrifice. I know better than that. The heavens are empty, and we are all alone.
I lie on the grass until the shadows grow long and the blue turns to violet and navy, and in all the time I lie there no one comes near to me. At last I sit up, get to my feet, and start walking again, out of the park, through the dirty and violent streets, into the thickening darkness, back to my solitary cell at the consulate.
kat@katallison.com