Anatomy of Fear

23

I shuttled crosstown from Times Square to Grand Central, then and waited on the subway platform for the number 6 train. It seemed to be taking forever. I kept looking down the tunnel, impatient, highlights of Mickey Rauder’s conversation reverberating in my head.

You look like your old man…He was so damn proud of you…

When the train finally pulled into the station I was so lost in reflection, it startled me.

I gripped an overhead bar and stared at an ad for whiter, brighter, teeth without seeing it, the drawing of Carolyn Spivack shimmering in my brain.

What I was thinking did not seem possible, but I was going to check it out.

My grandmother was waiting at her front door as I came out of the fifth-floor stairwell. I was puffing for breath.

“The elevator, está roto?”

I shook my head, took a few deep breaths. “No, I, uh, just wanted the exercise.”

She gave me a look. “¿Qué te pasa?”

“Nada, uela. Everything’s fine.”

“Estás mintiendo. I see it in your eyes.”

My grandmother read faces better than I did.

“I just need to see something.” I leaned down to kiss her cheek.

She laid her hand on my arm. “¿Cuál es el problema?”

“There’s no trouble, uela. I just need to get my drawing pad.”

She planted her hands firmly on her hips. “You don’t have another at home?”

“I just want to see something, is that okay with you, officer?”

“Oye, chacho.” She waved a hand. “You are such a mentiroso.”

She headed to the small hallway closet where I kept my pad and pencils, but I beat her to it, grabbed my pad, and hugged it to my chest. I wanted to look in private.

She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes.

“You will have something to eat.” It was not a question.

I went into the living room and sat down on the couch. My hands were shaking as I opened the pad to the last drawing I had made, the one of my grandmother’s vision.

I took out the copy of the sketch found at Carolyn Spivack’s crime scene and an enlargement of the symbol on her belt that I’d made after I’d seen it projected on the briefing room wall.

I had not been wrong. But how was it possible? It had to be some totally weird coincidence-the same symbol in the CS drawing and in my grandmother’s vision.

My grandmother called out from the kitchen: “¿Quieres algo de tomar, cerveza?”

I knew she just wanted to see what I was up to, but I said yes.

A minute later she was handing me a Corona.

She leaned over the couch. “What is so importante about this drawing pad?”

I had already closed it and hidden the copies of the crime scene drawings.

“I just wanted to check something.”

“¿Qué?”

“Since when are you a detective?”

“Siempre.”

“Always is right.” I had to smile. “Okay.” I opened the pad.

She looked at the drawing and crossed herself. “I told you, the ashe in that room is no good.”

“Yeah, I remember that. But what does the symbol mean?”

“Yo no sé. It just appeared to me.” She sat down beside me. “¿Por qué?”

I could never hide my feelings from her. I wasn’t sure I wanted to put too much stock in her visions, but this was undeniable.

I was suddenly thinking back to the day before my father died. I’d been up on the roof of the building, Julio and I smoking a joint, listening to salsa music coming from open windows. When we came back into the apartment, there were lit candles everywhere and glasses filled with water at the bóveda. When I asked my grandmother why, she had waved me off.

I didn’t want to stir up old grief, but had to ask. “The day before papi died you lit candles and filled the bóveda glasses. Why?”

“Hace mucho tiempo.”

“Sí, it’s a long time ago, uela, but I need to know.”

“Why you want to know now?”

I looked at her and waited.

She took a deep breath. “I had a vision,” she said. “The night before…before it happen.” She described the vision, and I saw it.

It was all I needed to bring me back to that night twenty years ago.

I had begged Julio to come home with me, even kidded him. “Yo, mira, you’re supposed to be my bodyguard, mi pana, right? But he wouldn’t do it.

When I got out of the subway at Twenty-third and Eighth, the streets were deserted; no music in the air, no hydrants spraying diamonds into the gutter. Just a drunk collapsed in front of a deli, and steam rising off the pavement.

I headed up the two short blocks to Penn South. There were only a few windows lit, and I didn’t have to count the floors to know that it was my apartment, my parents waiting up for me. My mother had been at work when the shit had gone down between me and my father. By now, she had to know.

I chewed a piece of Dentyne to mask the booze and dope.

The apartment complex was quiet, the lobby empty. When I got off the elevator I could see light under the apartment door.

I knew I was in for it. I took a couple of deep breaths and opened the door.

There were two men standing there, detectives who worked with my father. The minute my mother saw me she started crying.

At first I thought the cops had come looking for me, but that wasn’t it. She asked them to tell me. She couldn’t speak.

Your father’s been shot, said one of the cops.

Looks like a drug bust gone bad, said the other.

Must have happened spontaneously, something going down that he tried to stop. The cop laid his hand on my shoulder and said my father was a brave man.

I had to ask. And they told me.

Two shots in the chest. One in the head.

But only I knew what had happened-that it had been my fault.

I never told my mother. How do you tell your mother that you killed your father, her husband?

I forced the memory out of my head and listened to my grandmother.

She said that after she had the vision she’d sought out the gods. She should have warned him, but knew that her son, a nonbeliever, would have scoffed at the warning.

“Still,” she said, “I should have tried. Es un arrepentimiento.” There were tears in her dark eyes.

I wanted to tell her that it had been my fault, not hers, but couldn’t find the words.

She patted my hand and started talking about the egun, the dead, and how they interact with the living. We all have a specific number of days on earth, she told me, and those who are killed before that allotted time hang around as ghosts until their time is up, until their souls, their ori, can rest.

I wondered if my father’s ori was looking for me.

She tapped my drawing and her face grew dark. “There is something in that room, algo malo.” She looked up at me. “And now you are here to see it again. Por qué?”

“It’s nothing, uela, like I said.”

“Nato, por favor, do not lie to your abuela.”

“It has to do with a case at the police station, that’s all. It doesn’t concern me, not personally.”

My grandmother’s face showed me I was wrong. “You must stay away from this case, Nato. Es muy peligroso para tí.”

“Sí, it is dangerous, uela, but not for me.”

She shook her head. “I see you, Nato, in that room.”

Now I was listening. “What else do you see?”

She leaned back into the couch and closed her eyes. “I see you in that room with a man.”

“What sort of man?”

“No lo veo. It has been too long since I had the vision, but I still…feel him. Entiendes?”

I told her I understood, and to relax, and her shoulders sloped a little, the muscles in her face eased. After a minute she said, “Las llamas, the flames, remember? In the room?”

I turned back to the sketch I had made.

“What about the man?” I asked.

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I see a dark face. Un hombre en máscara.”

A man in a mask. I shivered.

“There are-¿cómo se dice?-holes for his eyes and nose, his mouth too.” She was pointing out the features on her face with her eyes closed. “I can see the eyes, light eyes, con una mirada fria.”

I found the sketch I’d made and asked her to look at it.

“Madre mía.” She crossed herself and mumbled something under her breath about Chango.

“Is there anything else?” I asked, feeling like I was in some paranormal thriller like The

Omen, things I had always claimed I did not believe in but were now impossible to deny.

“The eyes,” she said, describing them while I made another drawing.

I showed her what I’d drawn.

She took a deep breath and crossed herself again. “Sí, those are the eyes.”

But how could my grandmother, up in Spanish Harlem, have any idea about the man we were hunting?

She suddenly grasped my wrist. “Nato, ten cuidado.”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course. I’m a careful guy, a born coward, a cobarde.” I tacked on a fake smile.

“Don’t be a wise man,” she said, meaning a wise guy, which made me smile, and she shook a finger at me. “Do not make fun, chacho. I have seen you in that room. I do not know what it means, but…” She got up and crossed the room to the bóveda.

I looked back at the symbol my grandmother had described, which I had drawn from her vision, the almost identical symbol on Carolyn Spivack’s belt, and it gave me another chill.

My grandmother scooped up seashells from the bóveda. She was humming to herself while she moved the shells from hand to hand, “Ten Cuidado con el Corazón…” That favorite song of hers, a love song that came with a warning: Be careful.