Incinerator

7

“He was tall,” Hermione Something said in the voice of one who’s been asked the same question many times. “Tall and thin and black. He looked like a big black cigarette.”

“He was black?” I asked, remembering the blond driver of the Mazda.

“Stupid,” Hermione Something said to herself. “Cops are stupid.”

“I’m not a cop,” I said. Behind me, Hammond muttered something that might or might not have been a blanket defense of cops.

“He is,” Hermione said, scratching a grimy leg. “You’re with him, aren’t you? What does that make you, a Girl Guide?”

I tried to reconcile Hermione with the vision I’d had of her when I first heard her name. At the time I’d thought of an aged lady, a distinguishedly aged lady whose contemporaries might have been called Ora or Blossom or Mayme. With a Y. Hermione was a name that conjured up screened porches and soft evenings and silk fans fluttering like cabbage moths over white wicker furniture, something from the summertimes of long ago, when the hills didn’t catch fire and the eucalyptus trees imported from Australia hadn’t taken hold to spike the California horizon. A name with mint juleps in it. All that was left of the vision was the mint juleps. The Hermione I was faced with, in a relatively comfortable cell in Parker Center, was someone whose skin was coated in the kind of dirt you couldn’t remove with steel wool, whose hair hadn’t been washed in a month, and who would probably choose a mint julep over a pint of turpentine if the choice were at hand. If not, she’d have drunk the turpentine.

“From England, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Who are you to say where I’m from?”

“Girl Guides,” I said. “Girl Guides are British.”

“Well, aren’t you the nosy parker,” Hermione said. “What difference where I’m from? I saw him, didn’t I? Am I going to get my blanket back?”

“You don’t want that blanket,” I said. “It’s all burned. We’re going to give you a new one. Was he black?”

“A new blanket?” Hermione asked cannily.

“Brand-new. Plus a hundred dollars.” Hammond sneezed discreetly behind me, but I ignored him. “Was he black?”

Hermione rubbed a rope of dirt between her right thumb and forefinger. “You can get me out of here?”

“Are you sure you want to get out? You saw him.”

“And he saw me. He couldn’t have been less interested. A right poofter, if you ask me.” She waved a limp and extremely dirty wrist in the air to indicate that any male who could resist her charms was a right poofter indeed.

“And was he black?”

“He was wrapped in black,” Hermione said. “He was as white as you and me.”

“What else?”

The wrinkles around her eyes deepened into rivulets. “Can you get me out of here?” she asked again.

“Al,” I said, since nothing else would satisfy her, “can I get her out?”

“Absolutely,” Hammond said.

“You’re out,” I said. “What do you mean, he was wrapped in black?”

“Head to toe,” she said. “All black. Wrapped up tight, like I said, like a cigarette. Light hair, he had. The color of good champagne. Do you like champagne?”

“I like beer better.”

“Another member of the dreary proletariat.” Hermione scratched familiarly at something under her left arm, probably something I’d spent most of my years trying to avoid. “Where’s the life these days?” she asked the world at large. “There used to be life.”

“It’s where it always was,” I said. “Hanging out in expensive places. What else can you tell me?”

“Very tall,” Hermione said again, running a tongue over her lips before she disclosed her secret, whatever it was she hadn’t told the cops.

“What else?” I said again.

“Walked with a tilt.” She pronounced “with” as “wiv.”

“With a tilt?” I asked.

“Wrapped all in black,” she repeated. “Walked wiv a tilt. Crippled. Clubfoot, if you ask me.” She got up. “Squeaked, too. Now where’s that blanket?”

Hammond said, “Squeaked?”

Hermione was back on the street, and I was nowhere.

I was in the precise section of nowhere where the burnings had taken place, the area Los Angeles calls Skid Row. Skidded Row would be more precise; it’s where people wind up at the end of their skid. For a few people, a statistically dismissible few in these years of Republican optimism, the trapdoor beneath their lives drops open one day, and they find themselves on a slide, a slide greased with alcohol or psychedelics or opiates or racial discrimination or just plain rotten luck, and the end of the slide dumps them out on Skidded Row. Some of them bring their children with them. The American postnuclear family.

What the hell did “squeaked” mean?

I’d considered the idea that I knew the Incinerator and dismissed it as useless. I was inclined to agree with Schultz, up to a point: He might know me, but I certainly didn’t know him. Our lives are full of people who remember us with love or loathing, and whom we’ve forgotten entirely. He’d sounded, in Hermione’s description, like a fairly memorable figure: tall, blond, walked with a limp. I’d played flash cards with my memory for hours after the meeting without coming up with anyone who fit the bill. Of course, the limp could have been faked. The hair could have been a wig. He could have been a dwarf on stilts, too.

Why hadn’t he killed her? She’d seen him. Under the circumstances, chivalry didn’t seem like an acceptable reason.

So at four on a hot Monday afternoon, I was walking aimlessly around the outskirts of Little Tokyo in downtown L.A., looking at people with neither money nor hope, feeling guilty about Annabelle Winston’s five-thousand-dollar check in my pocket, and-and doing what? Gathering impressions, I told myself. Visiting the scenes of the crimes. This was where they’d happened: This was where the Incinerator had materialized nine times, tall, black, slanting, and squeaking, over his sleeping, wine-sodden victims, poured gasoline on them, and struck a wooden kitchen match. The police had found wooden kitchen matches at all the scenes, broken matches that had failed to strike. I imagined him, frenzied, furious, desperate to light the sacred flame, flinging the defective ones aside. He must have been frantic. But he’d taken the time to stand there and strike match after match, moments that must have seemed like centuries to him.

Gathering impressions, I looked down at two men, two unimaginably filthy men, sleeping as though they were dead in the doorway of an abandoned shop. Their limbs were sprawled loosely, and one of them had thrown his arm heavily over the chest of the other. I could have been John Philip Sousa, marching band in tow, and they wouldn’t have known I’d paid them a visit.

Setting people on fire, I thought, is a labor-intensive method of murder. For one thing, it requires that the victim hold still. First you had to squirt the gasoline, four times, according to the first letter, and then you had to strike matches until one finally caught, and the victim had to cooperate by not going anywhere in the meantime, while three or four or five matches broke or sputtered out before you got the one that did the job.

Schultz came unbidden to mind-I certainly wouldn’t have consciously summoned him-and said something about it being unusual that the Incinerator struck at people at the bottom of the social ladder, such a smug phrase, and I suddenly dismissed the Incinerator’s verbiage about carrion and biological misfire, and imagined myself asking him the question: “Why the homeless?”

“They hold still,” he answered in my imagination.

Experimentally, silently asking someone for pardon, I nudged one of the sleeping men with my foot. He held still.

I went knocking on doors.

I must have knocked on forty doors, concentrating on the dreadful little apartments one story above the abandoned, urine-sodden shops, the apartments that faced the street and whose windows opened only ten or twelve feet above the sidewalk, before I hit Mrs. Gottfried. I’d been rejected in various dialects of English and Spanish before Mrs. Gottfried peered out at me through a door featuring no fewer than three slip-chains on the inside and said, “So? Nu? ”

It was a new dialect, at any rate. “I’d like to talk to you,” I said.

“I paid the water,” she said. Her face was so narrow that I could see most of it through the two inches of cracked door, and her bright black eyes regarded me with enough distrust to suggest several lifetimes of unrelieved betrayal.

“It’s not about the water,” I said, searching through my repertoire of ingenuous facial expressions to find one that would reassure her. I failed.

“So go away,” she said, trying to close the door. When she couldn’t, she looked down and saw my foot wedged between the doorjamb and the edge of the door.

“Move the foot,” she said. “You don’t move the foot, I call the cops.” The accent might have been Polish.

“Call them,” I said. “Call Lieutenant Al Hammond downtown and tell him that Simeon Grist is here. I’ll wait. I’ll even move my foot and let you close the door if you want, as long as you promise to open it and talk to me after you finish with the cops.”

“Cops I don’t like,” she said. “I seen enough kinds of cops to know they’re all the same.” Then she squinted up at me. “You’re no cop. Cops don’t say ‘cop.’”

“No, I’m not. I’m a private detective.”

“What’s it to me?”

“I’ve been hired by a woman whose father was burned to death on this street.”

“Abraham Winston,” she said. “All the papers. I can read English.”

“Weinstein,” I said. “Abraham Weinstein.”

She looked down at the gnarled fingers wrapped around the door. “Well, I figured that,” she said. “Please. Abraham? My kids changed their name, too. Now it’s Godfrey. Fitting in, huh?”

“I saw him before he died.”

“Ach, the pain,” she said, “I can imagine.”

“His daughter saw it, too.”

She kicked my shoe with a tiny black-clad foot. “So come in,” she said.

The apartment was tiny and dim, crowded with dark, heavy furniture. There were carpets everywhere, and a smell of cooking in the air. Mrs. Gottfried was thinner than a lost hope. She gestured me toward the chunky sofa.

“So sit,” she said. “Hungry?”

“No,” I said.

“Me, too,” she said. “I cook for the smell. Smell is the sense closest to memory, do you know that? That was Freud, hah? I cook to remember. When it’s finished cooking, I give it to them.” She pointed at the window, in the general direction of the homeless. “I been hungry, I know what it’s like.”

“Have the cops asked you questions?”

“No.” She sat beside me, slowly and experimentally, as though she wasn’t sure her body was up to it. “They tried. I looked out through the little hole I had somebody put in the door, I saw the uniforms. I hate uniforms, so I went away and let them knock.”

“That was why you wouldn’t talk to them? Because of the uniforms?”

She looked at me as though I were the youngest and most innocent human being on earth. Then she stretched out her right arm and showed me the number tattooed on it. There was something formal about the gesture, like a lady at the Viennese Opera demonstrating the quality of her full-length silk gloves.

“371332,” she said without looking at it. “It’s a big number. They all wore uniforms. How neat their uniforms were, and how dirty we were. That was part of what was so terrible. When I got brought to New York, when it was all over, I couldn’t take the bus. The man in the uniform scared me. I couldn’t even walk, because how could I ask a cop for directions if I got lost? The uniform, huh? So I stayed home. A car backfiring in the street made me cry. I was crying a lot then.” She peered up at me, proving that her eyes were dry.

“Who brought you to New York?”

“My children. A boy and a girl, the boy older. When we saw how it was at the beginning, my husband and me, may God rest his soul, we packed them up and got them out. We sent them to my sister in New York. But we still didn’t believe all of it, so we stayed. There was the business.” She smoothed back her graying hair. Her knuckles were swollen, knobby, and arthritic; they looked like the joints at the end of a drumstick. She could have removed her rings only with wire clippers. “The business,” she said. “My husband was in fur. We sold to the top monsters. We protected their wives and their fancy women against the cold. ‘People will always need fur,’ he said to me. We wrapped ourselves in fur against the Holocaust. Are you sure you’re not hungry?”

I’d never been less hungry in my life. I shook my head.

“We should have known better,” she said. “Fur burns.” She closed her eyes. “Scheiss,” she added. She wasn’t Polish. She was German.

“And your husband?”

“He burned, too,” she said dispassionately. She opened her eyes and looked at nothing. For her it was an old story.

“Where are your children now?”

“East. New York. I told you already. The big hepple.” She waved the arm with the tattoo to indicate the walls, lined with photographs of heavy men with beards wearing dark suits. Assembled around them were impossibly large families, huge broods of smiling adults and children, now lost, scattered, annihilated, incinerated. “We had to sneak the pictures in their bags after the children slept,” she said. “Old pictures don’t mean anything except to old people.”

“So you sent them out with the children.”

“If I hadn’t,” she said, “I wouldn’t have any past. Any happy past, I mean. Nothing left but the fires and the curses. What’s my life, huh? These pictures.”

“And the soup,” I said.

She gave the idea of the soup a one-handed gesture that could have sent it all the way to Latvia. “I do it for the smell,” she said again. “It makes the pictures move.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s the only reason you make the soup.”

She tossed a bright, dry, sparrowlike glance at me. “So it’s more than that,” she said. “That’s a federal case? They’re hungry, right? Like I said, I been hungry.”

“How did your children let you escape from them?” I asked.

“Oh, well,” she said, placing her hands in her lap. Her fingers folded over each other like the leaves of a prized manuscript, yellow and faded and hard to read. I thought of Hermione’s palm. “I embarrassed them. I couldn’t go nowhere. Anywhere, I mean. I couldn’t sleep. I was cold all the time. I lost weight in Treblinka, you know? Thirty pounds, no less. I never got it back.”

She held up a parchment arm. “Look at me, skin and bones. The New York winters drove spikes through my skin. I felt-what’s the word? — impaled, like I was nailed to my bed by icicles. So I woke up in the mornings, on the nights I went to sleep I mean, and I made problems. When I slept, my dreams were all people dead or dying, so I stopped dreaming. Skinny, no English, crying in the middle of parties, scared by loud noises. My grandchildren laughed at me. I embarrassed everybody. It wasn’t their fault.” She blinked, heavy as a tortoise. “It’s a terrible thing to stop dreaming.”

“So you came to California,” I said for lack of anything else.

“I was brought here,” she said. “My children talked about it and brought me out here. I had friends here then. They’re all gone now. I got here, it was clean, there were orange trees, you could smell the ocean. Not like now. And it was warm.”

“They write you?”

“Oh, sure. Letters every month. They come some, too. My son is very successful now, very busy. When they come, they stay in a hotel.”

“No room here,” I suggested.

“You,” she said, smiling, and I caught a glimpse of the girl she must have been. “More flies with sugar than with vinegar.” Unexpectedly, she laughed, a low, rhythmic chortle that summoned up the sound of a tropical lizard on the wall. “You look like my grandson, Eli. That’s why you got in the door. You don’t need all the sugar.”

“You’re not a fly,” I said.

“No,” she said, tapping me on the knee. “But you’re not Eli, either. And you didn’t come here to pass time making spiel with some old lady. You want to know did I see something.”

Without realizing what I was doing, I crossed my fingers. “Did you?”

“Yes,” she said. She reached down and uncrossed my fingers, laughing again, and then sat back triumphantly and glowed at me.

“Will you tell me about it?”

“What, I’ll tell you my whole life story and I wouldn’t tell you that? This man, he burns people. I testified,” she said proudly. “I testified at Nuremburg. I did that, and I wouldn’t testify for you?”

“What did you see?” I asked.

“First was hearing. I was sitting here, right where I am now. I still don’t sleep so good. First thing, I heard somebody laugh.” She rubbed one forearm as though she’d broken out in goose bumps. “I never heard a laugh like that, and I’ve heard every noise a human being can make. This laugh wasn’t nothing-anything-human. Then the screaming started, and I went to the window.”

The window was four good strides from the couch. “I had to get the shades out of the way,” she said. “The screaming kept up the whole time. When I had the shades up, I opened the window and leaned out and looked.”

“And,” I said.

“And he was on fire, the old man, and the little old lady-I seen her before, I gave her soup a couple of times-she was trying to get the blanket on him. And then I seen-saw-him.”

“Saw him? Saw him where?”

“Coming up the street toward me. The streetlights are good here. Not much else, but the streetlights. He had a bottle, some kind of bottle, in his hand, and he tilted to one side like he was broken. ‘Hey,’ I yelled, ‘Schiesskopf.’ And he looked up at me.”

“He saw you?” I could barely breathe.

“Saw me? He smiled at me. The old man was on fire, and he was still screaming, and this one smiled at me and waved with the hand that didn’t have the bottle in it. It had something else in it, though.”

“What?”

“Something square, only not square, you know?”

“Rectangular,” I said. “A box of wooden matches.”

She nodded. “Could be. And then he said something to me.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Hey, Granny, got anything you want to cook?’ And then he waved at me again and ran away. Except he didn’t really run, it was like one foot weighed a lot more than the other one.”

“Mrs. Gottfried,” I said, “what did he look like?”

“Like a Nazi general,” she said as though she’d been waiting for the question.

My stomach sank. I had the feeling that a lot of people looked like a Nazi general to Mrs. Gottfried.

“In what way,” I asked, “did he look like a Nazi general?”

She lifted her chin and regarded me with the black eyes. “You think I’m making it up,” she said accusingly.

“No,” I said. “I already know he limps. I believe you saw him. I just want to get a good description.”

“I gave you a good description,” she said stubbornly. “He looked like a Nazi general, but younger.”

“Please, Mrs. Gottfried, I don’t know what a Nazi general looked like.”

“Blond,” she said.

“Why a general?”

“His coat,” she said. “How could you not know what a Nazi general looked like? You should know. How could people forget?”

“Tell me about his coat.”

“It was a, a what do you call it, what Humphrey Bogart always wore.”

“A trench coat,” I said.

“That’s it,” she said, “a trench coat. It went all the way from his shoulders to his feet. And it was black.”

“Was it canvas?” I asked. She shook her head. “Leather?”

“No,” she said. She gave me the sparrow’s glance again. “It squeaked.”

I thought for a moment. It got me nowhere. It hadn’t gotten me anywhere when Hermione said it, either.

“Squeaked?” I asked at last.

“Rubber,” Mrs. Gottfried said, sitting back again. She smoothed her skirt with her arthritic hands. “His coat was rubber.”

“Mrs. Gottfried,” I said, “could I have some soup?”