Blood Innocents

18

Toward dawn the walls of Reardon’s apartment seemed to be closing in on him. He had smoked three packs of cigarettes since eight o’clock, and the room floated before him in a haze of smoke. He crushed out the last cigarette of the third pack and walked down to the street.

Outside the early-morning delivery trucks lined the streets and avenues. The veins of the city were receiving their daily injections of food and drink and produce. The delivery men hustled from their trucks to the stores and back to the trucks again. It seemed to Reardon that they purposely made as much noise as possible, banging their carts on the curb or letting their packages drop from shoulder height to the sidewalk.

At 86th Street he took the Lexington Avenue express uptown toward the Bronx, something he often did when he felt the need for escape. Soon the train came out of the subway tunnel’s grimy darkness, and he was in open air again. From the tracks he could see the streets below him, but the sounds of the city were distant, less threatening, muffled by the whirr of the train. From the el the world seemed small and salvageable. The complexities of the city, its sprawling, unmanageable life, were reduced to a miniature version of itself. All its problems, and all of his, appeared less colossal from the vantage point of the train.

For years it had been Reardon’s final escape. It took him above everything, above the bickerings of family life, the rigors of work, the austerities of religion. It was the place where he regained himself, calmed himself, somehow took on the armor of endurance.

Between the Burnside Avenue and 183rd Street stations the train suddenly stopped. After a few moments the conductor announced over the public address system that there was a train out of service up ahead and that there would be a short delay. Reardon took the delay as a gift, a moment simply to rest, suspended between the city and the sky.

His eyes patrolled the windows that faced him on the other side of the tracks, probably only fifty feet away. The building was old and weather-beaten, but the apartment windows were large and full. Curtains or Venetian blinds covered most of them, so Reardon’s eyes fastened onto the one window open to his view. He could see a man pacing in a circle around a small boy. The man was dressed in work clothes and was very animated, throwing his arms in the air as he circled the child. Then he hit him, hard, with his open hand, and the child fell back into a chair.

Reardon stood up, astonished, and bolted across the center aisle to the subway window.

The man was shouting, but Reardon could not hear what he was saying. The man picked up a large vase and threw it across the room. The child darted behind the chair and squatted, and Reardon could see that he was covering his head with his tiny arms. Instantly the man wrenched the child from behind the chair and lifted him into the air above his head.

Reardon frantically tried to get the subway window open, but the latches were corroded shut.

The man threw the boy into the back of the chair, toppling it so that it spilled the child onto the floor.

Reardon began hitting the window with his fists again and again. “Stop it! Stop it!” he shouted. The other passengers in the train turned to look at him, and then at the scene in the apartment. But their attention returned to him, as if he were the greater threat.

The man picked the boy up again and slapped him across the room. Then he caught him by the collar and threw him across the legs of the toppled chair. The boy jumped to his feet and ran to a corner of the room, out of Reardon’s sight. The man began to walk slowly toward the corner.

Reardon’s knuckles were stiff and reddened; he stopped hitting the glass and stood trembling by the window.

The train jerked forward. Reardon’s eyes burned into the apartment window, but he could see nothing except the legs of the overturned chair, the jagged glass dotting the floor and the blank wall that stood behind it all, featureless and resolute, like a pitiless, refusing hand.

When the train reached 183rd Street, Reardon got off and called the local precinct to report what he had seen. He did not expect much action to be taken. He could not be that specific as to the location of the building, and he was unable to give a close, detailed description of either the man or the child.

“Thank you, Detective Reardon,” the desk sergeant at the precinct house said. “We’ll look into it.”

“I hope so,” Reardon replied, but he knew that the incident would not get a high priority. He had not even been asked to accompany a patrol car to find the building where he had seen the child beaten.

He took the same track back to Manhattan, but it passed the window so fast that he could not see anything in the room. The light was still on; that was all that he could tell.

He got off the train at 86th Street and walked to his apartment. The city was coming to life. Some people, Reardon knew, would not be around to see it. Some would be stuffed in car trunks. Others would be hanging in closets. Still others would be floating in bathtubs filled with blood and torn flesh. Mathesson had once referred to such a scene as “Manhattan clam chowder.”

Reardon wondered about the boy he had seen through the window. He thought of the tiny arms folded around the head. Perhaps, Reardon thought, that was the only appropriate posture for this world. In Catholicism, Reardon knew, there were two unforgivable sins: one of them was despair. Standing on the sidewalk amid the early-morning jostling of pedestrians, his shoulders hunched and combative, his face locked in an animal grimace, Reardon suspected that he might be edging toward the unforgivable.