Bodies in Winter

THIRTY-TWO

I spotted the tail before I’d gone two blocks, not because I was especially alert, but because it’s impossible to conduct a successful tail in a silver Jaguar. Not unless you want to be seen.

‘We have company,’ I told Adele.

Adele glanced in the outside mirror on her side of the car, then looked at me. ‘Time to throw out the garbage.’

‘What?’

‘The garbage in the trunk, Corbin. Ellen Lodge’s garbage. If you leave it where it is, the car will reek of it by tomorrow morning. And, of course, while you’re disposing of the trash, you can take a closer look.’

We were on Wyckoff Avenue, a commercial street four lanes wide. I pulled to a stop, double-parking in front of an apartment building, then added the bags of trash in the Nissan’s trunk to a mound of similar bags stacked at the curb. We’d only taken them in order to shake up Ellen and I certainly didn’t intend to sort through the coffee grinds in my apartment. The Jaguar stopped about thirty yards away. Its headlights remained on and I could feel the bass notes projected by its many speakers rumbling in my chest.

‘Anything?’ Adele said when I got back into the car.

‘Two guys in the front for sure. I couldn’t see into the rear. The headlights were too bright.’

When in doubt, confront. I led the Jaguar across Flushing Avenue, to a deserted street lined with warehouses. Halfway down the block, I slammed on the brakes, then jerked the Nissan into reverse before stomping on the gas pedal.

Brakes and tires screaming, Jaguar and Nissan came to a halt within six feet of each other. Adele was the first one out the door. Without my noticing, she’d removed her arm from the sling and now held the. 40 caliber AMT in her right hand.

‘Police,’ she shouted. ‘Police, police.’

I came up on the driver’s side of the Jaguar, my immediate goal to prevent the situation from escalating. I needn’t have bothered. The two men inside were sitting absolutely still, their expressions at the same time insolent and bored. If they even heard the rap music pouring from the Jaguar’s high-end sound system, they gave no sign.

Adele tapped on the passenger’s window and made a little rolling motion with her left hand. Slowly, as though forcing his finger through increasing resistance, the man closest to her reached out to the controls on the door and let the window down. The music exploded onto the block, bouncing off the brick walls of the surrounding warehouses until it seemed to be coming from everywhere, so loud that I barely heard the trio of shots Adele fired into the dashboard, shutting down car and sound system both.

By the time the last echo died away, all eyes were on Adele and I felt the need to attract a bit of attention, just to remind the boys that I was still hanging around. So I kicked in the window on my side of the car, splattering the front seats and the men sitting on them with tiny shards of glass.

The man closest to me began to brush the glass off his lap. A Latino in his early twenties, he wore an Avirex leather jacket zipped to his throat. His soot-black hair was drawn into a pony tail that fell to his shoulder blades. The pony tail glistened as it moved, slivers of glass reflecting the pale amber light cast by a street lamp thirty feet away. ‘Wha’ the fuck you doin’? I ain’ committed no crime.’

‘How about driving while stupid?’ Adele suggested.

‘Yeah,’ I continued, ‘tailing somebody in a sixty-thousand-dollar car? You gotta be an idiot. Or did you want us to see you? Was that it? Were you disrespecting us? Because if I thought you were disrespecting us, I’d have to cuff you, take you into one of these alleys and teach you a lesson.’

‘We wasn’t doin’ nothin’,’ the man in the passenger seat declared. ‘We was just drivin’ around.’ He was the older of the two, wearing a down coat that reached his ankles and a knit cap that clung to the contours of his narrow head. A tattooed spider’s web ran from the corner of his left eye to his temple, leaving me to wonder if the spider was hiding in his hair.

We pulled both men out of the car, cuffed them with their hands behind their backs, finally conducted a quick search of their persons and of the vehicle, finding nothing of greater interest than a stack of porno magazines under the front seat.

‘Take a message back to Paco Luna,’ I said, as if the message sent by Adele wasn’t already sufficient. ‘Tell him it’s time to cut his losses. What’s happening here is between cops. If he gets in the middle, he’s gonna be crushed.’

Only a few days before, I’d have been able to bring these scumbags into the house, to isolate them, to demand answers. As it was, I had two choices. I could drag one or the other into that convenient alleyway I’d mentioned earlier, then convince him to cooperate. Or I could let them go.

But Adele was already removing her man’s cuffs and I quickly followed suit. In fact, neither man had committed any crime greater than contempt of cop, for which they’d been adequately punished. As I drove off, I watched them in the rear-view mirror. They were circling the crippled vehicle, their hands in their pockets. Wondering, perhaps, how they were going to explain why they hadn’t gone down with the car.

‘Tell me something, partner,’ I finally said as we drove back to Manhattan. ‘Do you think it’s possible that you overreacted? I mean by discharging your weapon into a defenseless automobile.’

‘No,’ she said after a moment, ‘I don’t. No more than I think either of those men would hesitate to kill me. Or you, for that matter.’

I drove down Flushing Avenue, then along Broadway under the El, and finally onto the Williamsburg Bridge. The moon was up and nearly full; I watched it flicker between the bridge’s intersecting girders, winking on and off, lurid as a Delancey Street whore. On the Manhattan side of the river, the midtown office towers, so enticing from Woodward Avenue in Ridgewood, projected raw power from every lit window. I’d made this ride a thousand times, at sunrise and sunset, in every season, in every weather. I’d watched the twin towers burn and collapse from the center of the bridge, attempting to clear the traffic impeding a river of fire trucks, ambulances and police vehicles hurrying to the scene.

‘Are you feeling better, Corbin?’

Adele’s eyes were shadowed now, her fatigue evident. Without thinking about it, I reached out to stroke the side of her face, the backs of my fingers trailing along her cheek just beyond the dressings. Her eyes widened momentarily, then she smiled one of those unreadable female smiles that men dread.

‘Are you thinking about Mel?’ I asked.

‘I am not, Corbin, thinking about Mel.’

‘Then what?’

Her face sobered and she turned to look out through the windshield. ‘I won’t live a trivial life, Corbin,’ she declared. ‘I won’t.’

Back in my apartment, I made a pot of coffee and got to work. I began with a detailed report of my interview with Ellen Lodge, which I emailed to Conrad Stehle. Then I opened my own emails, even the spam, but found nothing out of the ordinary. Vaguely disappointed, I shut the computer down, then punched Conrad’s number into my new cell phone. When he answered on the second ring, I gave him my new number, explaining that I no longer trusted any phones listed in my name. Then I got down to business.

‘Did you get my emails?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I did, Harry. And I say to you that they are very interesting.’

In his late sixties, Conrad had come to the United States from Germany shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, his Marxist parents escaping hours ahead of a brown-shirt purge. Dieter and Loise Stehle never recovered from the experience, or so Conrad told me on more than one occasion. They pronounced themselves cowards for running; they convicted themselves of treason, of deserting the Fatherland in its moment of greatest peril. No matter that all of their comrades perished, and millions more besides. No matter that in saving themselves, they’d saved their two-year-old child. As far as Dieter and Loise were concerned, there were no mitigating circumstances. And no one left alive to forgive them.

The Stehles compensated, to a certain extent, by maintaining a strictly Germanic household. When Conrad walked into public school at age seven, he’d yet to speak a word of English. Sixty years later, he still retained a trace of his parent’s tongue, not only in the sound of the words as he pronounced them, but also in his slightly stilted phrasing. The diffident tone, on the other hand, was pure affectation.

‘Look, Conrad, anything happens to me, I want you to print two copies of my notes. Send one to a New York Times reporter named Albert Gruber. Send the other to Reverend Azuriah Donaldson at the Bedford Avenue Baptist Church. Then delete the original emails.’

After a slight hesitation, Conrad said, ‘Don’t allow your anger to cloud your judgment. Anger doesn’t work here, any more than it worked in the pool.’

‘I’m just being prudent.’

‘Your request is prudent, yes. But you are still very angry. I can hear it in your voice. Your chest is tight and your esophagus constricted. If you were competing now, you would give out in the first hundred meters.’

The advice was well meant, but off-target. Conrad wasn’t sensing anger, but keen anticipation. On one level, the trail we’d uncovered in Bushwick was no less than the stink of our enemy’s fear. The sort of odor that might be given off by a rabbit inches away from the oncoming talons of a hawk.