The cold room

THIRTY-SIX

There was nothing to do but wait there in the dark, wait to see if the shots were reported, if uniformed officers would come knocking. Sheets of rain continued to rattle against the windows and on the roof above our heads, rain that seemed to grow louder as time passed. In the kitchen, a wall clock in the shape of a black cat ticked away, its long tail and dark eyes twitching from side to side with every tick.

‘What next?’ Hansen finally asked. He was standing before the front windows, looking up and down the street as though expecting a SWAT team to appear at any minute.

I held him off with a raised forefinger, then took out my cell phone and punched in the number for Beekman Hospital as I walked into Aslan’s bedroom. The operator I got was as nasty as she was uncooperative, even when I identified myself as a police officer. I had to demand a supervisor before I was put through to the nursing station in Adele’s unit and found a sympathetic nurse. Adele was asleep, she told me. She was doing just fine.

‘Look, detective, I know it’s none of my business, but I want to offer my condolences. It’s a hard thing to deal with, a miscarriage, but it’s not the end of the world. There’s no reason why Mrs Bentibi can’t become pregnant again.’ I looked through the doorway, at Aslan Khalid’s shattered skull. No, no reason at all, I thought. No reason at all.

Hansen was standing over Aslan’s body when I came back into the room. ‘I didn’t have any choice under the circumstances, but Sarney’s gonna go nuts,’ he announced.

‘I’m a man of conscience, Hansen. I got you into this and I’m gonna get you out.’

I walked into the kitchen and searched beneath the sink, unearthing a bucket, a scrub brush, two rolls of paper towels and a roll of duct tape. In a cabinet next to the refrigerator, I found a box of garbage bags and a bottle of floor cleaner. I gave bucket, brush, paper towels and cleaner to Linde, then proceeded to wrap Aslan in the garbage bags, to create a fitting shroud for a man of his character. It wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined — Aslan’s limp body had the consistency of an under-stuffed sausage. But I finally got it done, without contaminating myself (so far as I could tell) with Aslan’s blood.

Hansen’s job lasted a bit longer, though his goals were modest. Given the low light, a clean up that would bear the scrutiny of the Crime Scene Unit was impossible. Hansen hoped only to deceive those who didn’t know a shooting had taken place, or who didn’t care. Our story, in the event that Agent Horn couldn’t be controlled, was that Aslan had used the threat of annihilation to make good his escape. Undoubtedly, he’d meant to kill us, but clever Harry Corbin had cut the wires before the dastardly villain got clear of the building.

‘Where do you think he got them?’ I gestured to the bricks on the wall. ‘I thought we kept track of plastic explosives in this country.’

Hansen shrugged, then went back to his scrubbing. ‘Plastics are used for demolition sometimes, so they could have been stolen off a construction site. Or he might’ve made the bricks himself. That’s something a Chechen guerrilla would learn how to do. Plus, from what I know, it’s not that hard.’

By the time Hansen finished wiping the plastic taped to Aslan’s body, he’d filled a trash bag with paper towels. I didn’t know what he intended to do with it, only that it was his and Sarney’s problem, as were the explosives. By then it was one o’clock and the bar on the corner was closing. I could understand why. I’d been watching for a half hour and I hadn’t seen a customer go in or out. Across the street, almost every window was dark.

‘You got a police radio?’ I asked Linde. He seemed more rattled now than he had when Aslan was alive. Myself, I was caught in the downside of an adrenaline rush. I felt heavy and lethargic, and oddly indifferent, though I knew my night was far from over.

‘I have a radio in the car.’

‘A portable?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You think you can get it, bring it upstairs?’

Hansen looked at me for a moment, then nodded. ‘I never killed anyone before,’ he said. ‘I never even shot anyone.’

‘Well, if you feel like holding me responsible, it’s okay.’

‘Does that mean you wanted me to kill him?’

‘Yeah, I wanted him dead and I wanted you to do it.’

‘Why?’

‘I wanted him dead because he killed Adele’s baby. I wanted you to do it because now Sarney can’t blame me for the fuck up. In fact, the way it’s playing out, Bill Sarney’s gonna be in my debt for the rest of his career.’

Hansen turned up the collar of his jacket, then stuck his hands into his pockets. ‘Sarney told me what happened with your wife. I’m sorry, Harry.’

‘Adele’s not my wife.’

‘I’m still sorry.’ He smiled. ‘Something else Sarney told me. He said you were crazy and he was right.’

‘Not crazy, Hansen. Gifted. What you see, in Harry Corbin, is the perfect marriage of talent and vocation.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I beat you to Aslan. And a good thing for you and Agent Horn that I did.’

Hansen broke into laughter at that point. ‘What do ya call it,’ he asked, ‘when a bullshitter gets so good he can bullshit himself?’

‘Enlightenment.’

I set the radio on channel 4 when Hansen returned, to a dispatcher covering three precincts in Brooklyn North, including the Nine-Two. I was waiting for the unit working Sector A to be assigned a job, or to announce a meal break. Instead, at one thirty, Nine-Two Adam contacted Central to announce that a pair of suspects were under arrest and they were headed for the house. That would leave this little section of Williamsburg unpatrolled for the next several hours.

The rain was flowing in long, nearly horizontal lines when I came through the front door with Aslan’s body slung across my shoulder. My face and hair were instantly wet, despite the hood I’d yanked down over my eyes, and cold water was trickling down the back of my neck. Still, I was doing better than Hansen Linde. Hatless, he stood behind the car, holding the trunk open, his navy-blue suit plastered to his thick body.

I had to pull Aslan’s feet tight against his buttocks and force his head into the wheel well before Hansen was able to close the trunk. I think Hansen wanted to say something, maybe even give me a hug, but he settled for a simple nod as I got into the car. Only when I was about to pull away did his lips begin to move. I dutifully lowered the window, but whatever Hansen was going to say had already been said. He turned and walked off toward Aslan’s apartment.

I drove straight down North Third Street, to Kent Avenue, where I made a left. I saw no one, neither car nor pedestrian, and the warehouses to either side, distorted by the rain and the sweep of the wipers across the windshield, might have been the remains of some dead civilization. Every opening to every building was closed off by steel gates, every gate had been tagged with graffiti, again and again, and every brick was coated with soot.

I turned right a block before I reached the Williamsburg Bridge, onto South Fifth Street, and drove fifty yards to a mound of dirt that blocked the road. I was already switching into a higher gear as I slid to a stop. In quick succession, I shut off the headlights, pulled the trunk release and got out of the car. I could be seen here, by anybody driving along Kent Avenue. The last thing I needed was another Clyde Kelly to call the police.

The wind tore the hood of my raincoat away from my head as I forced my way to the trunk of the car, as I unfolded Aslan Khalid, as I dumped his body onto the cobblestones, as I seized him by the ankles and dragged him over the weeds covering the mound. The weeds grabbed at my legs and I lost my footing once, but Aslan came easily, sliding along on his plastic shroud like an otter on a mudslide. Mynka, I knew, would have offered a good deal more resistance. Aslan hadn’t bothered to wrap her body and her chin would have dug into the earth, as her arms would have pulled away from her sides to hook the weeds. But Aslan’s job was to butcher Mynka Chechowski. Disposal was Barsakov’s problem.

I yanked Aslan’s body through the breech in the chain-link fence and down a short incline. We were out of sight now. Just a few steps away, the East River was driving small persistent waves against the rocky shoreline. I stared out at the river for a moment, tempted to be rid of Aslan then and there, but the water was too shallow, the current too weak. A body dumped into water this shallow wouldn’t drift more than a few hundred yards before it came to the surface.

I finally turned to the long pier tucked behind the Gambrelli warehouse to the north. I’d have to lift Aslan above my head to get him on the pier and I wasn’t sure I could do it. Aslan had to weigh a hundred and seventy pounds. Even balancing him on my shoulder long enough to get him into the trunk had been difficult.

For a time, I simply stood where I was, looking down at the body next to my feet, no longer moved by any sense of urgency, any need to get it done and get away. I felt at that moment as though Aslan and I were the only two human beings on the planet; that we’d built ourselves a space inaccessible to ordinary human beings, a space they could not enter, a space they could not even detect. Above me, the lights of the bridge rose in the fog, gradually becoming more and more faint, and the skyline of Manhattan across the river was reduced to a faint glow more imaginary than real. I listened to the great moan of a foghorn that seemed to come from everywhere at once, though I couldn’t find the lights of any vessel on the black waters of the river.

I tried it the easy way first. I lifted Aslan to my shoulders and attempted to move with my arms alone. But I couldn’t raise him more than a few inches. His weight kept rolling away from me and the wet plastic wasn’t helping either. I would have to squat down, to use my legs to gain momentum, to toss Aslan onto the pier with one quick push.

My first attempt landed me on my ass with Aslan sprawled across my lap. At another time, I would have found the situation grisly, or even humorous, but I wasn’t feeling much of anything. There was the river and the pier and Aslan’s body. There was a ritual to be performed that involved all three, performed as written before, and I had no energy, physical or emotional, to spare.

I took more care on my next attempt. Once I got Aslan over my shoulder, I tested his weight, eventually sliding my right hand, palm up, from his waist to his sternum. Then I wrapped my left hand in the plastic surrounding his thighs and squatted down, making a conscious effort to center my spine between my ankles. When I was sure I had it right, I pushed up as hard as I could, barely aware of my closed eyes and the scream that issued from my lips, a scream that was lost on the wind before it reached my ears.

Aslan’s head and back went up and over the pier, but I had to get under his legs to keep him from sliding back down. We hung there for a moment, my arms wrapped around his thighs, my head pressed into his groin, until I finally inched his hips past the tipping point and the pier took his weight. A moment later, I was standing beside him, his ankles in my hands.

Splinters of wood tore at the trash bags enclosing Aslan’s body as I dragged him the length of the pier. I assumed they were also tearing into his flesh, and that he was leaving traces of himself behind, but I no longer had the energy to lift him. On the river, the darkness was near absolute and the running waters of the outgoing tide might have been the heaving back of some prehistoric beast.

For reasons I couldn’t know, and for a time I couldn’t begin to measure, I stood where I was, staring out at the rain and the river. I was soaked, now, every article of clothing, every inch of my flesh. Water streamed from my hair into my eyes and down the back of my neck. As far as I could tell, I offered no resistance, my body a mere conduit for an element seeking nothing more than its own level.

I kept thinking that I should feel something, anger, maybe, or satisfaction. But when I finally squatted next to Aslan’s body and rolled him over the edge of the pier, I felt nothing at all. I handled him like he was so much trash.

Aslan hit the water head first and his body went completely under. I expected him to pop back up, figuring there was enough air trapped in his shroud to keep him afloat, at least initially. But the East River claimed Aslan as utterly as the whale claimed Jonah. Perhaps, somewhere down the line, Aslan would be disgorged. Or maybe the ocean would fully digest him. It didn’t really matter that much to me, one way or the other. The prison doors had opened and my thoughts were already turning back to the living. I was done now. I could go home. I could try to pick up the pieces.

Aslan hit the water head first and his body went completely under. I expected him to pop back up, figuring there was enough air trapped in his shroud to keep him afloat, at least initially. But the East River claimed Aslan as utterly as the whale claimed Jonah. Perhaps, somewhere down the line, Aslan would be disgorged. Or maybe the ocean would fully digest him. It didn’t really matter that much to me, one way or the other. The prison doors had opened and my thoughts were already turning back to the living. I was done now. I could go home. I could try to pick up the pieces.

Aslan hit the water head first and his body went completely under. I expected him to pop back up, figuring there was enough air trapped in his shroud to keep him afloat, at least initially. But the East River claimed Aslan as utterly as the whale claimed Jonah. Perhaps, somewhere down the line, Aslan would be disgorged. Or maybe the ocean would fully digest him. It didn’t really matter that much to me, one way or the other. The prison doors had opened and my thoughts were already turning back to the living. I was done now. I could go home. I could try to pick up the pieces.