The Night Remembers

26

In the old days, back just before the big war, this part of Third Avenue west was a kind of small melting pot unto itself. You found Italians running fruit stands, Irishmen running taverns, blacks running small auto repairs out of concrete garages that opened onto alleys, and you found the sidewalks alive with children of virtually every color and description. On Friday nights you’d put on a necktie after a long day working at the plant and go see one of the big bands downtown, and you’d find yourself surrounded by people living up somewhat to their ethnic stereotypes, particularly where my people, the Irish, and the bottle were concerned.

Now there was no evidence that any such neighborhood had ever existed. It had been uprooted and knocked down, hauled away and burned out, replanted and paved over. The neighborhood and the people and the colors and the smells and the hopes and the fears of those days when Bing Crosby had been the sentimental and Duke Ellington the dark dream — they might have been a fantasy, and inside my head only. Carlucci, my Brooklyn friend with whom I’d served in the war, said one drunken night, “You know, Walsh, when I die it all goes with me — everything. Did you ever think it didn’t exist in the first place? You ever think of stuff like that?”

And he’d been right, I thought, as I wheeled my car into the curb, deep in the heart of a neighborhood that had vanished as utterly as any lost tribe. When you die, everything goes with you because it’s all just a part of your mind anyway.

Two three-story office buildings lay behind a shifting sheet of snow, the tops of them lost in shadow and flakes so large they formed a kind of fog. They bore the same address as Conroy’s name in the phone book. I’d also written down the home address.

One lone car sat on the wide, empty asphalt lot, a new green Chevrolet even lonelier looking in the light of the mercury vapor.

I tried the front door of one of the buildings and had no luck at all. Behind the pane rose a staircase quickly lost in gloom.

I went around to the back. The wind was powerful enough to nearly knock me over at one point, so that I had to bow my head and walk into the freezing snow at an angle. My footprints on the ground made me think of being lost in the arctic someplace — the only prints that had ever disturbed the snow here.

The back door was identical to the front door, but instead of a staircase seen through the darkness, there were two small elevators, side by side, and ready to go.

I walked back fifty feet to look up at the windows. I had to shade my eyes to see through the shifting white wall.

No lights anywhere in the building.

I wondered where Conroy had gone.

Deciding to check his car, I once again headed across the empty, howling lot. There being no windbreak, I had to do the best I could.

By now, Conroy’s Chevrolet was heavily covered with wet snow. He would have to scrape off his front and back windshields before going anywhere.

I leaned over and started the process myself, wiping snow off the passenger window.

It wasn’t long before I saw him. He was sitting up very straight, as if he had the key in the ignition and was about to go someplace. At first, I had the odd notion that he might merely have been asleep. Apparently, he’d had a long day and was most likely tired.

But then as my eyes adjusted to the interior of the car, I saw the blood that soaked the side of his head, and saw the splashed particles of brain and bone dripping down the window across from him. It looked as if somebody had vomited up a particularly gruesome meal.

I started to put my hand to the door but then I stopped. This was not something I would want to be involved with anyway, and besides, whoever had killed him had undoubtedly took from his person whatever it was he or she had been looking for.

I put my hand back in my pocket.

I stood for a time letting the wind and snow cut my face. The coldness felt reassuring somehow. Conroy wouldn’t be feeling any coldness now. Or ever again. I felt lucky. Whatever else, I was alive.

I began to wonder how long it would be before the police discovered his body here. Moments later, I left.