The Finder

26

His father was sleeping, and Ray studied him, feeling a stillness come over him. He had known this sensation before, had felt it when he carried out the body of a seven-year-old boy to his own father on a hillside in Kashmir, and though the boy had been dead for more than a day, the weather had been cold and the body was stiff and smelled like the stone dust it had been buried in. Ray had watched the father collapse silently to the ground, struck unconscious with grief, and while someone else ran for water and a blanket, Ray had held the boy in his arms, watching the wind lift his beautiful dark hair. It was a privilege to hold the body of boy for a man who loved his son so much, humbling, too, and Ray had known then he would hold the child as long as was needed. In such moments he had seen that everything he had ever wanted or might want was deeply insignificant, and that the secret to whatever peace might be available was to want as little as possible for yourself and as much as possible for others, especially those who wished no ill toward anyone. In such moments, and others like them-when he spent forty-six straight days carrying the tsunami dead, when he built a city of tents on a Turkish mountainside-he felt old parts of himself disappear. His religious training as a boy, never more than halfhearted, had cracked and fallen away. And one night while having sex with a young Italian nurse, a lovely girl, bouncy and true and seemingly untroubled by the grim work of the day, he had understood that he was fucking a corpse, and so was she. Worms and dust and putre faction, a terrible thing to know about yourself. Was his lust improved by the scent of death? He did not know. He did not know a lot of things anymore. He did not know, for example, whether he was an American. Of course others would identify him as such, and while he loved America, despite its ills and evils, his love was a sad thing to him, perhaps even an inescapable burden. Americans knew so little about the rest of the world. The expats whom he'd met who'd spent many years abroad admitted that their American essence had started to disappear, whether they wanted it to or not. And so too with Ray. Maybe this was why he had come home. He had come home to be with his father but also to find out if America was still his home. Or could be again.

His father groaned in his sleep, lifted his chin, eased downward again. Here lay the clever Brooklyn boy who became the beefy detective afraid of no one, who then became the near dead, the shade awaiting release. Don't be haunted, Ray told himself. He wanted to grieve but dared not, for if he began he might never stop. You cried for one, you cried for all.

Better to get going again, look for those trucks in Red Hook. He hopped on the Belt Parkway, then the Gowanus, and turned off on Hamilton Avenue. Red Hook, once a place of long wooden docks and brick warehouses, had been more or less abandoned to the disinterest of time. There were still a few old wooden structures on a block or two of cobblestone streets, sailors' and dockworkers' houses, two-story and reshingled a dozen times over the years. Except for some new stores, the urban adventurers hadn't really invaded in full force yet because there was no subway, no good parks, no decent schools. Red Hook was a place where you went if you didn't want to be in the heart of things, even in Brooklyn. One of the motorcycle gangs had a house down there, but things were quiet, very quiet.

He rolled his truck slowly along the streets, searching all the open spaces, until he came to a yard surrounded by twenty-foot galvanized fencing that was itself topped with another ten feet of razor wire. He had seen this wire in every country he'd ever been in, around military bases, police checkpoints, shipping yards, airports, relief camps. Nasty stuff. The lot held seven mobile shredding vehicles, each marked CorpServe and more than forty feet long. Big, new, well-maintained vehicles. Each a quarter million dollars a pop, anyway, and with this realization it was clear to him that CorpServe was a bigger operation than he had realized, than Jin Li had ever intimated. "Just office company," she'd said. "No big deal."

But to buy and maintain such vehicles, to pay the rent on the lot, to pay the insurance-just that portion of the business was a few million. At the end of the lot he saw a low brick building in poor repair. Something was written on the door. He pulled out his binoculars. The lettering was Chinese.

That was good enough for him. He parked and found his way to the gate. The padlock was a good one, would require industrial bolt cutters or a heavy-duty gas-powered saw, neither of which he was carrying around in his truck. He walked the perimeter of the lot, looking for an easier point of entry. There was none. A rotten old water tower stood just a foot outside the fence. He went back to his truck, retrieved an eighty-foot piece of nylon rope, a belayer's carabiner, and a long crowbar. He hung the rope around his neck and hooked the crowbar under his belt.

The water tower was probably condemned; the service ladder up one side looked rusted and weak, but it had to hold him for only a moment or two, he figured. He shimmied up the iron leg beneath the tower, caught the bottom rung of the service ladder, long since frozen in place, pulled himself up, and climbed another twenty feet. The catwalk around the circumference of the tower was rotted out and he jumped over the holes. You fell through, you broke both legs easy. The catwalk on the far side of the water tank rested above and just inside the concertina fence, and he set up a belay on a piece of iron that looked like it would hold and lowered himself down to the fence, where he kicked the concertina wire away from himself as he dropped past it. The rope reached the ground, and he left it hanging there, because that was his way out.

He walked slowly along the fence until he came to the red brick building. The front door was locked and he didn't want to go in that way. He checked the windows for alarm contacts but saw none. The glass itself had embedded chicken wire. Not impossible to get through but certainly a hassle. He found the electric meter on the outside of the building. The service was rated for a thousand amps, a considerable amount of power. Maybe they'd done light manufacturing in there at one point. The meter wheel itself was barely moving. Not much happening inside, from an electrical point of view. The windows on the back of the building were barred and the back door was padlocked from the outside, which, he happened to know, was a violation of New York City fire department regulations. He took the long crowbar and slowly pried the lock fixture out of the metal door. He pushed on the door. Locked from the inside too. But with the long bar he was able to get the door open enough to squeeze through. Not a pretty job, he thought, slipping inside.

The building was dark. He pulled out his flashlight and came upon a rolling bin full of paper. He found a light switch. The building was in fact filled with shredded paper, some in rolling bins, some bagged in huge seventy-five-gallon waste bags. The blue bags were tagged, he noticed. The identifying information was in Chinese. At the end of the building, underneath a large clock, stood a desk and lamps and some kind of schedule, all written in Chinese.

CorpServe appeared to have been set up atop a previously abandoned operation: there were yellow lines painted on the floor, which, again, suggested some kind of light manufacturing process-back when America still made things that people in the rest of the world wanted-and these lines showed a parallel series of operations, probably conveyor belts that arrived at the back of the building where the loading dock was.

On the wall, under bright lights, hung a large white marker board, showing about thirty midtown locations and gridded by date for vehicle, staff levels, time, in, time out, supervisor name, and net weight received. Another large board was gridded for vehicles by date, load weight, driver, time in and out, service requirements, and start and finish mileage. Quite an operation, Jin Li, he thought, why didn't you tell me?

He noticed an office, its door locked. Maybe this was the nerve center. He took the crowbar and made quick work of the door, broke it down. One large desk, with huge file cabinets. Each was devoted to a company in midtown. There was a lot of confidential information, he saw, sales reports, office memos, legal reports, all kinds of stuff. What was it doing here?

He continued to paw through the paper on the desktop. He looked quickly at every piece. Nothing much here-except, wait, a faxed form letter from a Norma Powell that said, "Your previous tenant, NAME: Jin Li, has applied to be a tenant in my building, and listed you as her previous landlord. Kindly confirm that-"

He checked the date. Sent just a few days earlier. An address? Yes, in Harlem. The street address was just off Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. Jin Li was in Harlem? Okay, he said to himself, I'm coming. Maybe she'd already moved in. It was the best lead he had. He took the paper with him, so that no one else would find it, and hurried through the building, not worrying about turning off the lights, and wedged himself back through the broken door.

He hauled himself up the rope to the water tower, arm over arm, kicking away at the fence again, found the catwalk, and threw the rope and tools down to the ground, then he lowered himself down the rusty ladder and dropped heavily on the other side.

A moment later he was back in his truck, speeding toward Harlem, barely noticing the old Chinese man on a bicycle who had witnessed Ray's impressive penetration of the lot by way of the water tower. The man had spent a few minutes inspecting the truck, too. Seeing Ray's hurry, he wondered whether to pull out the phone in his pocket. Jin Li had told him to call her, so he would.