Small Town

twenty-two

He had been the hunter. Now he was the hunted.

It had changed so suddenly.

The Carpenter, they called him. At first it had been the Curry Hill Carpenter, when they had no idea who he was or what he’d done beyond the triple murder on East Twenty-eighth Street. He didn’t like the name much, but appreciated the reference to the neighborhood, because that name, Curry Hill, embodied the city’s resourcefulness in matters of nomenclature. Here was an area that didn’t really have a name, that had never been thought of as a discrete geographical entity. It was south of Murray Hill and north of Gramercy, east of Kips Bay and west of the Flatiron district, so how to refer to it if you were trying to sell or lease property there? Well, it was adjacent to Murray Hill, that section named for the Murray family, and Indo-Pak restaurants abounded, so why not Curry Hill?

Just the Carpenter, now. After that Friday night, after they’d been clever enough to see that the firebombings were his work as well, one newspaper referred to him as the Curry HillChelsea Carpenter, but that was cumbersome and not as catchy.

Since then, of course, they’d matched a fingerprint and knew about the Cauldwell Avenue fire in the Bronx. And they knew his name, and played off that in their stories and headlines, but mostly they called him the Carpenter, perhaps recognizing that his name (which he no longer used) and his address (where he no longer lived) were of far less significance than what he did.

The Carpenter. He’d disliked the name initially, irked at the way they were fixated on the physical implements he’d used on a single occasion, the hammer and the chisel. (They didn’t even know about the screwdriver.) He grew more accepting of the sobriquet as he came to see it as pointing up the workmanlike nature of his efforts. And then one day it struck him that the word was more appropriate than they could consciously realize, for wasn’t a carpenter more than a worker, more than the simple practitioner of a trade? Wasn’t he, first and foremost, a builder?

Reading the stories, one realized that they missed the point, that they saw only the destructive aspect of what he was doing. They had no way of knowing that he tore down only to rebuild, took life only to renew life. They had no understanding of sacrifice, his or anyone else’s.

And yet they must, on some unconscious level. That wasn’t why they named him the Carpenter, that was the natural result of his use of the tools, reinforced by the happy alliteration of craft and neighborhood. But perhaps that was why the name stuck, why they clung to it after they knew his name. He was a carpenter, a builder, and he was building their city, and would go on with his mission while he had breath in his body.

You’d think they’d have caught him by now.

At the beginning, he took it for granted he’d be caught, and didn’t expect it would take long. When he watched firefighters battle the blaze on Cauldwell Avenue, he’d have been unsurprised if some inspector had picked him out of the crowd, had walked right up to him and taken him into custody. All right, mister. We know you set the fire. Care to tell us why?

And he’d have told them why. They might not have understood, but he’d have made the effort.

But no one approached him, or even looked twice at him. And in the weeks that followed he realized that no one ever looked twice at him, that he might have been invisible for all the attention he received.

When he was a boy he used to like a radio program about a character named Lamont Cranston, alias the Shadow. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. The Shadow, an announcer explained each week, had the power to cloud men’s minds so they could not see him.

And didn’t he have that power?

Except he achieved it through no exercise of will. And he wondered if it might not be an effect of the losses he had sustained, the four sacrifices that had set him upon his own sacrificial mission. Could not those deaths, coming one upon another as they did, have taken away bits of his own very self? He had not felt the same since then, and knew he never would. Was it not possible that part of what he’d lost had been that quality that commanded attention from others? He was not literally invisible, like Lamont Cranston, but when people did see him he didn’t make much of an impression on their awareness. They took no notice of him and retained no memory of him.

As time passed, he came to take his invisibility for granted, to view it as a protective shield that would guarantee him invulnerability while he did his terrible work. He’d continued to take precautions, he’d made sure no one was looking when he hurled his jars of gasoline and when he wielded his razor, but he no longer expected to be captured, or even seen.

He hadn’t even thought about security cameras. Nor had he fully appreciated the nature of the manhunt that would be an immediate result of the three Chelsea bombings, or that they’d be tied almost immediately to the triple murder on Twenty-eighth Street. He should have assumed the latter, he’d deliberately constructed a pattern, choosing the three establishments because they, like the whorehouse, were cleaned every morning by the very same young man who’d discovered the body on Charles Street.

It was hard now to recall why he’d established that pattern in the first place. He’d seen and recognized the young man; following him, it seemed as if he was being specifically led to the sites of his next sacrifices. It hadn’t occurred to him to question this at the time, and now, looking back on it, he failed to see what his purpose might have been. You couldn’t say it had no rhyme or reason. It had rhyme, certainly, but the reason was less readily apparent.

No matter. It was done.

He sat at the window, watching the city.

The apartment was a comfortable one, light and airy, comfortably furnished, with two window air conditioners that kept the place almost too cool throughout an August heat wave. It was spacious as well, occupying the entire top floor of a narrow three-story frame house on Baltic Street, in the part of Brooklyn known as Boerum Hill. He remembered Baltic Street from Monopoly; it and Mediterranean were the cheapest properties on the board. This Baltic Street was nicer than that, although he imagined the neighborhood had been marginal twenty or thirty years earlier. Now, like so much of Brooklyn, it had benefited from gentrification, and was attracting middle-income New Yorkers, unable to find space they could afford in Manhattan, or in long-desirable parts of the borough like Brooklyn Heights.

Evelyn Crispin, the woman whose apartment this was, was one such person. She was fifty-one years old, and worked as a legal secretary at a Wall Street law firm. She had been married in her twenties, and a wedding picture in a frame on her dresser showed her as a young and pretty bride, standing beside a beaming groom. He’d died a few years later, killed in an automobile accident, and shortly thereafter she’d moved to New York to start a new life. It had evidently been a solitary life, and for the past fifteen years she’d led it in this Baltic Street apartment, which she shared with a cat whose name William Harbinger did not know.

The cat, nameless or not, demanded periodically to be fed. It did so now, weaving itself around his ankles, rubbing its body against him to attract his attention. He went into the kitchen, got a can of cat food from the cupboard. There were only two left on the shelf, and when they were gone he’d have to figure out what to do about the cat.

He opened the can, spooned the food into its dish, placed the dish on the floor. Watching the animal eat, he was reminded that he ought to eat something himself, and opened a can of lentil soup and another of roast beef hash, which on balance did not look all that different from what he’d just fed to the cat. He heated the soup in a saucepan and the hash in a frying pan, transferred the contents to a bowl and a plate, and sat at the kitchen table to eat his meal. When the cat hopped up onto the table to investigate, he took it by the scruff of the neck and tossed it across the room. That would do for now, but next meal it would try again; the beast was capable of learning, but not of retaining what it learned.

When he was finished eating he washed his dishes in the sink, wiped them dry with a red-and-white checkered dishtowel, and put them away. He was, he thought, the ideal tenant. He washed the dishes, made the bed, and fed the cat. He even watered the plants, although he suspected he was overwatering at least one of them.

He checked the refrigerator’s freezer compartment, and it had obligingly made ice of the water he’d put in the ice cube trays. He filled a bucket with the cubes, refilled all four trays with tap water, and dumped the bucket of ice cubes in the bathtub. Then he closed the bathroom door and returned to the front room and his chair by the window.

He missed his books, his histories, his diaries of old New Yorkers. As far as he knew, they were still in his storage locker in Chelsea, but that wasn’t a safe neighborhood for him. In a sense, no neighborhood was especially safe. His picture had been in all the papers and on all the news programs, and America’s Most Wanted had shown it to the whole country. (Let’s get this coward off the streets! had been the urgent message of the show’s intense host, and he’d found this puzzling. He didn’t expect the public to understand what he was doing for them, but in what respect could he be seen as cowardly? Evil, perhaps; he could see how they might view his actions as evil. But certainly not cowardly.)

In Chelsea, though, the residents could be expected to feel more personally connected to what he had done, and to have looked more intently at his photograph. He couldn’t expect to pass unnoticed there. Nor could he be certain that the police had not already traced the storage locker, in which case they were very likely keeping it under surveillance. He missed his books, but he didn’t need them, and didn’t care to risk walking into a trap.

The phone rang, and he let it ring. There was an answering machine, but he’d disconnected it, not wanting people leaving messages. There weren’t many calls, and this was the day’s first. There’d been a call early on from her office, and he’d returned that call the following morning, explaining that Ms. Crispin had been called out of town suddenly for a family emergency, that she’d asked him, a neighbor and friend, to notify them, and that it was impossible to say when she might return. Two days later he called them again to report that her aunt had in fact died, that Ms. Crispin was the woman’s sole heir, and would remain in Duluth. “She’s not even coming back for her things,” he said, sounding aggrieved himself. “I’m supposed to pack everything and ship it to her. She must think I don’t have anything better to do.”

So there wouldn’t be any more calls from the office.

She had a bookcase full of books, mostly paperback novels, but one illustrated volume called Lost Brooklyn, filled with photographs of buildings, many of them quite magnificent, which had fallen to the wrecking ball. He liked looking at the pictures and pondering the transitory nature of all things, even buildings. But he couldn’t get transported by pictures as he could by text.

He had plenty of money. Before they’d identified him, before they put his picture in the paper, he’d realized that his days of anonymity were over. Accordingly he’d used the ATM, drawing the $800 daily maximum for three days in succession. His expenses were lower now, too, since he couldn’t go to a hotel, or eat in a restaurant. The $2,400 he’d drawn would last him for the time that remained to him.

Before he found the Baltic Street apartment, he’d had to be resourceful. He didn’t dare sleep on park benches, fearing he’d wake up to a patrolman tapping the soles of his shoes with his nightstick, then taking a good look at him when he sat up and opened his eyes. He didn’t need much sleep, though, and got what he required an hour or two at a time in air-conditioned movie theaters. He rode the G train to Greenpoint and bought shirts and socks and underwear at a bargain store on Manhattan Avenue, which seemed safer to him than Fourteenth Street, and ate in ethnic enclaves in Queens, where the residents were more caught up in tensions over Kashmir and civil war in Colombia than the doings of white people in gay bars in Manhattan.

Then he found Evelyn Crispin’s apartment, and his life became less of a struggle. She had a cupboard and refrigerator full of food, and a soft bed for him to sleep in, and a comfortable chair and a television set with cable reception. She had neighbors, too, but he never saw them. He left the apartment after two A.M. and returned before five, and never encountered anyone.

Every day that he stayed out of sight, the likelihood of their capturing him diminished. The hunt would go on indefinitely, but the public, with its eight million pairs of eyes, had a notoriously short attention span. Look how quickly they’d forgotten all about the man who’d sent anthrax through the mails. Other stories were already competing for their notice, and the Carpenter’s facial features, not that sharply delineated in their photo to begin with, would blur and soften and recede from the forefront of their collective memory.

Before long he would be invisible again.

Someone was ringing the doorbell, knocking on the door.

He’d been drifting, lost in reverie, not asleep but not entirely awake, either, and now he sprang from his chair and turned toward the door. Someone had a key in it and was turning the lock. They couldn’t get in, he’d thrown the bolt, but he had to do something.

He picked up a knife in the kitchen, then went to the door, called, “Yes? Who is it?”

“It’s Carlos,” a voice said. “Come to check on Miz Crispin. You want to open the door?”

“I can’t,” he said. “I was in the shower and I heard you banging on the door. You’ve upset the cat terribly.”

“I don’t want to upset nobody,” Carlos said. “Where’s the lady? Been days now and nobody’s seen her.”

“She’s out of town,” he said. “Didn’t you get the note she left?”

“What note?”

“She’s in Duluth,” he said. “Her aunt passed away, she had to go there. Are you sure you didn’t get the note?”

A woman’s voice said, “Duluth?”

“In Minnesota. I’m a friend of hers, I’m taking care of her cat until she comes back. She asked if I’d stop in and feed the cat and water the plants, and I said I’d move right in, because my air conditioner died and just try to get them to come in the middle of a heat wave.”

“I know she’s from Minnesota,” the woman said.

“I just wanted to make sure she was all right,” Carlos said.

“She’s fine,” he said. “I had a postcard from her the other day. Come around tomorrow and I’ll show it to you.”

“No, I don’t have to see no postcard. I just...”

“Listen,” he said, “the water’s still running in the shower. You’re good to be concerned. She’s fortunate to have such good neighbors.”

“I’m the super. This building and three others on the block. I’m sort of responsible, you know what I mean?”

“I do,” he said, “and I appreciate it.”

He stood there, gripping the knife, until he heard their footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs.

He was going to have to decide about fingerprints.

To leave them or to wipe them away? There were persuasive arguments on both sides. If they found his fingerprints, and thus knew he’d taken refuge here on Baltic Street, he’d be catapulted back into the headlines. Of late there’d been little about him, some of it speculation that he might have left the city, might be in Mexico or Brazil or seeking refuge in some Arab nation (with his terrorist brothers, one columnist suggested), or that he might even be dead. His fingerprints would end such speculation, and would lead authorities to widen their search from Manhattan to the outer boroughs. The invisibility he’d begun to regain would afford less protection.

On the other hand, he’d be far from Boerum Hill, far from all of Brooklyn, by the time they even saw the need to look for fingerprints. Safety aside, might it not be advantageous to let the city know that the Carpenter was alive and well, and still devoted to his work? Fear was a powerful emotion, and had already served him well.

He could picture Carlos on Live at Five, interviewed by a vacuous reporter on the steps of the Baltic Street house. He hadn’t seen Carlos, hadn’t even tried to look through the peephole at him, but he was sure he knew what he looked like — short, stocky, a full head of curly black hair, pockmarks on his cheeks. “I go and check on her, you know? And he tells me he’s her friend, she went home on account of her aunt died, he’s staying there to feed her cat. And it sounds okay to me, you know?”

Yes, let them find his prints. Let them dread the Carpenter. It wouldn’t make things that much more dangerous for him, and he didn’t have to stay away from them for that much longer.

It was already well into August.

In the morning, he thought, Carlos would start to wonder. Perhaps he should meet Evelyn Crispin’s friend face to face, instead of having to talk with him through a door.

Time to be going.

He undressed, and put all of his clothes in her washing machine, sitting patiently at the window until it was time to switch them to the dryer. When they were dry he laid out the clothes he would put on when he awoke, packed the rest into a navy-blue backpack he’d found in one of the closets.

One of the small drawers in the kitchen held hardware — pliers, regular and Phillips-head screwdrivers, a hammer, a tape measure, a jar full of assorted nails and screws. He took out the hammer, and went through the jar to select the largest nail. It was a formidable thing, three inches long, and thick. He put the hammer and nail on the kitchen counter and closed the drawer.

The freezer had done its work, and the ice cubes had hardened. He collected the cubes in a bucket, refilled the trays, dumped the bucket in the bathtub. He wet a washcloth and gave himself a sponge bath, then got into her bed. The air conditioner, running full blast, had the room like an icebox, and he used both blankets.

He awoke at a quarter after two, dressed in the clothes he’d laid out, moving quietly to avoid disturbing the neighbor a flight below. The cat, whom he’d locked out of the bedroom, was busy rubbing against his ankles, signaling its hunger. He glanced down at the cat, then over at the hammer he’d left handy on the kitchen counter.

He opened a can of cat food, fed the animal, and had a look at the ice cube trays, but the thin skin of ice yielded to his fingertip when he tested a cube.

He watered the plants, except for the one that showed signs of overwatering, and freshened the water in the cat’s bowl. Then he picked up the hammer and the nail and went into the bathroom, where Evelyn Crispin lay faceup in a tub of water in which some ice cubes, still not entirely melted, lay floating. He’d started with bags of ice from a bodega on Nevins Street, supplemented with his own ice cubes as fast as the freezer could make them, and, with both air conditioners running night and day, it had worked well enough. But it was a holding action at best, and he sniffed the air and knew it would have been time to leave whether or not Carlos had come knocking at the door.

There were bruises on Evelyn Crispin’s cheek and temple, where he had struck her, and marks on her neck, where he had strangled her. He gazed down at her and felt something for her, but he couldn’t say exactly what it was. Pity? Perhaps.

He knelt at the side of the tub, and his lip curled in distaste for what he was about to do. He took no joy in the act, but, like everything he did, it was not without purpose.

He pounded the nail into the very center of her forehead.

Shortly after three, he donned the backpack and slipped out the door, careful not to let the cat follow him out. He locked the door behind him, and made his way silently down the two flights of stairs. No light was visible under the doors of his neighbors on the lower two floors. He guessed they were sleeping soundly, and was careful not to interrupt their sleep.

Baltic Street was quiet and deserted when he let himself out the front door. He walked to Smith Street. There was a subway entrance three blocks to his right, at Bergen Street, and another at Carroll Street, six blocks in the other direction.

It was a nice night for a walk, and he was in no hurry. He turned left, and walked at a brisk but unhurried pace through the summer night. The backpack, he decided, was better than a suitcase, better than a tote bag or shopping bag. It left his hands free, and seemed less a burden altogether. He was glad he’d noticed it in the closet, glad he’d decided to put it to use.

Just a few more weeks, he thought.

Waiting on the deserted subway platform, he tried to think what he would do — not right away, but when it was time. The Carpenter’s final action, the triumphant event in which he was part of the sacrifice, was his bid for greatness, and he couldn’t think what it might be. He knew when it would happen, but not what form it would take.

But it wasn’t something you could think of, was it? He had a seat on a bench, folded his hands in his lap, and, waiting for his train, he waited, too, for the answer to be revealed to him.