Night Film

59

“Hopper promised to be here,” said Nora, squinting down the empty block. “Posting the fliers was his idea.”

It was 9:00 A.M., and we were back at 83 Henry Street armed with a hundred missing-person fliers. We decided to split up: I covered the blocks west of the Manhattan Bridge up to East Broadway and the Bowery, while Nora handled everything east of the bridge.

The neighborhood was predominantly Chinese, so I doubted our English-language flier would get us very far. Posting leaflets, as if Ashley were a lost cat, wasn’t exactly my style, but it couldn’t hurt. With Theo Cordova following us, I could no longer hope to keep the investigation quiet. So why not go in the opposite direction, brazenly carpet-bombing the neighborhood with Ashley’s picture, and see where that got us?

I taped the flier to lampposts and phone booths, mailboxes, Learning Annex stands. A Chinese woman on a bike, orange shopping bags swinging from the handlebars, braked to see what I was doing, scowled at me, and rode on. Quite a few men in bodegas refused to let me post the missing poster after they saw what it was, shaking their heads, shooing me out of the store.

When this happened for the sixth time, I wondered if they were worried a missing Caucasian woman would bring them bad luck — or if they’d seen something in Ashley’s photo they didn’t like. Or perhaps there was an even more disturbing reason: I looked like I worked for Immigration and Customs.

It was the opposite reaction at Hao Hair Salon on Madison Street. The teenage receptionist, the female manager, two stylists, and a client (pink robe, hair in tinfoil) surrounded me, smiling, and speaking in excited Cantonese. They took great care taping Ashley’s flier to the window beside a faded poster for eyebrow threading, and when I left, they waved as if I were a beloved relative they wouldn’t see for forty years.

And yet the longer I walked the streets, past Chinese restaurants, gift stores, unisex hair salons, orange and white koi drifting in pet store windows, I had the sense I was being watched. But every time I checked behind me — once, even popping into a Laundromat and looking out — I noticed nothing suspicious.

I wondered if the feeling came from the strength of Ashley’s stare, so alive and insistent, gazing out from the white page. All “missing” fliers were unsettling, the lost person smiling out from some candid photo taken at a birthday party or happy hour, so ignorant of their fate. Yet Ashley, alone on that picnic table at Briarwood, had a gravity, an understanding even, as if she knew what awaited her within weeks.

As I walked on, however, I realized I was absolutely right. I was being watched—by the entire neighborhood. Hopper’s idea to post these fliers wasn’t so simplistic, because if I stood out this much, attracted this many hostile looks and slow drive-bys — once I looked up at an old walk-up and saw an old woman had pulled aside her lace curtains to stare down at me — Ashley was noticed, too.

They all must have seen her, watched her, wondered about her as she wandered their sidewalks in her red coat.

Now all we needed was one of them having the courage to call.