The City When It Rains

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

CORMAN ARRIVED at Bellevue a few minutes before Sarah Rosen’s body was due to be picked up. It was a massive building, bulky, the sort that always looked overfed. The old city had built it while still reeling in the aftershock of yellow fever, and as he stood at the top of its long line of stairs, it was easy for Corman to imagine the final days of the Yellow Jack Plague, the street cries of “Bring out your dead,” the way the people had wrapped the bodies symbolically in yellow sheets before tossing them onto the open lorries that took them to the common burial pit that had been dug at Washington Square. The plague had lasted for many months, and Lazar had often spoken of it, the empty streets and deserted houses, the stricken, feverish looters who’d staggered through the countless abandoned shops, sometimes dying in them, faceup on the floor, their arms still filled with plunder. Only the illustrators of the period had truly flourished, sketching the disaster one line at a time.

Kellerman glanced up as Corman came into his office. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it,” he said.

“I’m here,” Corman answered.

“As far as I know, everything’s set,” Kellerman told him. “You ready?”

Corman nodded, his mind considering Julian’s idea once again: slow decline, incremental fall. “Has anyone else come around to see her?” he asked. “Called to ask about her, anything?”

Kellerman shook his head. “No.”

“Father, mother, anyone from her family?”

“Nope,” Kellerman repeated, then led Corman into the building, briskly escorting him down the corridor to his office.

Once behind his desk, Kellerman started in on the morning mail. “By the way,” he said, slicing open one envelope after another. “How do you want to do this? I mean, if any relatives show up, I don’t want them to be disturbed.”

“I can shoot from pretty far away,” Corman told him.

“Far enough so they wouldn’t even see you?”

“Maybe,” Corman said. “Where does the hearse pick them up?”

“Back driveway.”

“I could set up from across the lot,” Corman said. “I don’t think anybody would even know I was there.”

Kellerman looked relieved. “That sounds good. Why don’t you go ahead and get into position? If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

Corman walked down the corridor and out into the back lot of the building. An ambulance, orange-striped, with Hebrew lettering across the side, was parked not far away. He stationed himself just behind its rear doors, pulled out his camera, changed the lenses for the shoot, then panned to the right. At the far end of the building, he could see the doors of the Emergency Ward. In the old city, horse-drawn ambulances had raced up to them from China-town, bearing the dead from the Tong Wars, or later, piles of bodies, frozen together like stacks of ice cubes during the Blizzard of ’88. And later still, Lazar himself had come—stricken, his right arm clinging to Corman’s shoulder as the two of them slammed through the red double doors.

It began to rain lightly again. Corman tucked the camera beneath his coat and peeped around the edge of the ambulance.

A couple of female orderlies came out of the building. One of them was crying, and the other one was comforting her as best she could, touching her arm once in a while as she spoke. Corman drew his camera out again. Through the lens he could see their faces clearly. They both looked Filipino, something like that, and the older woman could easily have been the mother of the younger one. They had the same, slightly flattened noses and large, almond-shaped eyes. The young one kept shaking her head frantically, until the older one stopped it by drawing her face up tight against her chest. For a time, they remained locked in that position. Then a man stuck his head out the door and waved them back into the building. They followed his orders immediately, the young one dabbing her eyes as she walked back inside.

Kellerman strode out onto the loading ramp a few minutes later. He was dressed in a long white lab coat, and he was pulling a pair of rubber gloves off his hands. His head made a slow turn until he caught sight of Corman. Then he tapped the face of his wristwatch and nodded crisply.

Within seconds the hearse from the funeral chapel arrived. It was dark gray instead of black, with sleek chrome lines running front to back. It made a wide turn in the lot, moving slowly, its long black windshield wipers sliding rhythmically across the glass, stopped for a moment, then headed backwards until its rear door reached the loading ramp.

Corman lifted the camera and began shooting.

Two men got out of the hearse. They were dressed in black suits. One was tall, black, very broad-shouldered. The other one looked Hispanic. He was short and stocky, with thick legs and small feet. They walked up the short ramp to the rear doors and disappeared behind them.

Corman replaced the lens cap, drew the camera back under his coat and waited.

The doors at the back of the morgue opened suddenly a few seconds later, and Corman jerked himself back to attention and began shooting as a long stainless steel stretcher came out, pushed from behind by the black attendant. The Hispanic walked behind him until they neared the end of the ramp. Then he bolted forward quickly and opened the back of the hearse. The other man maneuvered the stretcher into place, then the two of them loaded the body and returned to their seats in the hearse.

Corman continued shooting, concentrating on the hearse, the two men whose dark outlines could be seen hazily behind the rainswept windshield. For a time they sat solemnly, then the Hispanic turned toward the other man, said something, and they both laughed.

Corman had taken ten more pictures before Kellerman finally walked through the doors, then slowly down the loading ramp. For a time, they talked through the open window of the hearse, then they shook hands and the car pulled away.

“Well, did you get what you needed?” Kellerman asked as he walked across the cement lot toward Corman.

Corman recapped the lens and tucked the camera beneath his coat. In the distance, he could see the taillights of the hearse as it disappeared around the corner of the building.

“Not much, was it?” Kellerman said. “No relatives. Nothing.”

Corman stepped out from behind the ambulance, his eyes still watching the driveway, the traffic on Second Avenue. “You know the address of the chapel they’re taking her to?”

“Sure,” Kellerman said. “We do some business. They always leave a card.” He drew the card from his pocket and read off the address: “247 East 68th Street.”

Corman wrote it down in his notebook and glanced back toward the avenue. He could see the little Italian restaurant where it had happened, hear Lazar’s voice rumbling through the subdued light, then the sudden halt, the look in his face, the single word he’d managed to say before the left side of his mouth had twisted downward: “Corman.”

“So, you like being a shooter?” Kellerman asked.

Corman looked at him. “What?”

“I mean, it must be a killing grind, right?” Kellerman said.

Corman started to answer, but the crackle of his police radio interrupted him. He dialed up the volume and listened. There was some sort of disturbance on Broadway at University Place. A patrol car was requested.

“I think I’ll check this out,” Corman said quickly.

“Yeah, sure,” Kellerman said. He looked faintly envious. “It must be nice once in a while,” he said. “Dealing with the live ones.”

A small crowd had already gathered at the corner of Broadway and University Place when Corman got there. It formed a kind of jagged semicircle around a taxi and a police patrol car. Two patrol-men stood next to the cab, listening silently as a well-dressed elderly man addressed them.

“I’m not interested in being treated special,” the old man declared loudly. “I have never asked for that. But by the same token, I refuse to be abused.”

A slightly overweight man leaned idly against the cab. He wore a fishnet T-shirt despite the chilly fall air, and his eyes looked slightly puffed, as if from lack of sleep. “I didn’t abuse you, pal,” he said to the old man.

The old man’s body jerked upward. “I am not addressing you, sir,” he cried. “I am not addressing you.”

“Okay, okay,” one of the patrolmen said to him. “Just tell me what happened.”

Corman readied his camera and subtly elbowed himself more deeply into the crowd, searching for a position from which he could get the whole small drama into his lens. By the time he found it, the old man was talking again, while the man in the T-shirt remained silent, his arm draped protectively over the roof of his cab.

“I know the ordinances of this city,” the old man said. “I make it my business to know them. And when this … this … I don’t know what I should call such a person.”

“Call me Dominic, pop,” the driver said with a laugh.

One of the patrolmen glanced at him irritably. “Don’t make it worse, buddy,” he said.

The taxi driver shrugged, turned away and idly picked his teeth with a matchstick while the old man continued.

“As I was saying, I know the ordinances,” the old man began again, “but that doesn’t mean that I want to be treated special. But when it rains, I’m like a great many people. I want a cab.” He brushed his nose quickly with his hand, and Corman noticed that he held a leather strap. He followed it downward to where a large seeing-eye dog sat calmly on the sidewalk, its large pink tongue hanging limply from its mouth.

“This man refused to take me,” the old man cried with a sudden, wrenching vehemence. “Refused to accept me as a passenger.”

The driver’s eyes shot over to him. “Not you, pal,” he said. “The dog. I don’t take no animals in my cab.”

“This is a trained dog,” the old man shouted. His finger wagged in the air. Corman focused on it and shot.

The driver waved at the finger dismissively. “Yeah, well a trained dog gets fleas and shit just like any other dog.”

The old man’s face lifted in offense. “This dog does not have fleas, sir,” he declared.

The driver’s face tightened. “How the fuck do you know? You couldn’t fucking see them if it did!”

The old man’s body stiffened. He seemed on the verge of lunging toward the driver. “I was blinded by the Japanese, sir,” he screamed. “On an island called Iwo Jima. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it.”

The driver laughed. “I seen the movie with John Wayne,” he said. Then he winked good-humoredly at the crowd, which only stared back at him resentfully.

“Yes, well I was not with John Wayne, sir,” the old man fired back. “I wasn’t making movies. I was protecting this country!”

“All right, all right,” one of the patrolmen said. “Let’s everybody calm down here, okay? Let’s just everybody cool it.”

The second patrolman moved closer to the driver, motioned him forward, then whispered something into his ear.

The old man drew in a deep breath. “Anyway,” he said, “I asked this gentleman …” His hand swept out, reaching for something. “This gentleman …”

A man in jogging clothes leaned his shoulder into the searching hand. “When the cabbie refused to take him, he asked me to get the cabbie’s license number,” he said to the patrolmen. “And when the cabbie saw me doing that, he started cursing me.”

The driver turned away again, his eyes moving along a line of small square windows across the street. “I used to take them in, the blind people,” he told the second patrolman, “but I always ended up with fleas all over the car. It’s like every time I picked one of these people up, it cost me twenty bucks to fumigate the fucking cab.”

His eyes turned from the patrolmen and began to search the crowd imploringly. “Can you blame me? Huh?” he asked. “What would you do in my place?” He looked directly into Corman’s camera, his eyes narrowing intently. “What would you do in my place?” he demanded. For a moment he stared fiercely at the camera. Then, suddenly, his whole body slumped back against the cab, as if defeated, and as he did so, Corman felt his sympathies shift miraculously toward him and away from the old man. It had happened in an instant, so that Corman recognized the shift must have come from some separate quarter of existence that lay beyond the teachable forms of right and wrong, a world of ancient traces, basic as the primordial ooze.

It made him think of Sarah Rosen, the way her body had been starved down to its glistening fundamentals, perhaps even in the way her mind had finally come to concentrate with a single, sacrificial intensity on the ancient devotion of her motherhood. For an instant, he could see her standing at the tenement window, her white arms wrapped around the blue-eyed doll, her eyes fixed on the unrelenting rain, her body trembling like the prophet’s robe. The air seemed to chill around him, as if a wintry blast had unexpectedly swept through the city, and he felt himself ease back into the crowd, away from Sarah and her ledge, toward a safer place, where the purest urges were seeded with protective dross, the stars were fixed, lakes had bottoms, and things fell back to earth because they had to.