Before (27 page)

His mind is busy now, busy with the thought of Alison Tiner and what he needs to say to her. It is amazing that he was so fucking docile about it the first time, just walking out the door like that while she screamed. It is not too late to talk with her, to provide some intelligence, some reason; her boyfriend's flight is in by now, and perhaps Ghost-Man has about two hours before she is fucked, the man using her need of closeness and protection as an excuse to penetrate her. And she will be anxious to wrap her boyfriend in pussy! What a further opportunity to tether him! He can wait for them in
side
the apartment; he can ascertain when the boyfriend goes into the bathroom, before the fucking. Ghost-Man will try to get hold of Alison Tiner then and talk some sense to her. He knows he will need to subdue her, to keep her quiet, and then he can have his say. He has a flannel shirt in the backseat—he can cut a sleeve off for a gag, twist it tight behind her head. He imagines the cloth in Alison Tiner's teeth, stopping her insane screaming, what he should have done before, how things would have been different. If the boyfriend comes out to fight Ghost-Man will have to deal with him. But that will go quickly. If Ghost-Man is too late, and they are already fucking, he will have to deal with that. Then he has three-quarters of a tank of gasoline in a can, in the trunk, and he can finish the situation.

He would like to wash his hands. It is terrible, this stickiness, reminding him every fucking moment. The bloody knife is on the rubber mat beneath him, and before leaving Somerville he stops at an empty shopping center and tosses it down a storm drain. He drives, wiping his hands on his pants, the spaghetti place and a darkened Gary's bar going by to his left. Moving over the Cambridge line now; he will wait in Alison Tiner's darkness with those paintings, with parts of Alison Tiner redone in a million different configurations: Alison Tiner's fractured face across the canvas, fractured hands on floating chest, throat. Alison masturbating. The painted man howling into the darkness, the three women about him. There is a taste in Ghost-Man's mouth like strange copper. He turns left, hand over sticky hand, onto Trowbridge.

And here in front of Alison's apartment are two police cars, dark and shining. Ghost-Man swallows his surprise. He drives carefully by the cruisers, averting his face; he goes left onto Cambridge Avenue, pulls a wide U-turn. He parks at the curb beside Trowbridge Academy and then, the Mazda idling, looks across the school lawn at the buildings of Trowbridge Street. He is imagining scenarios, considering, but it is hard to think now because his legs and hands tremble with a constant, unquenchable need for motion.

SIXTEEN

Tika and Jesse take the clean cement steps heading down into Club Isis; the walls are cool blue, lit by hanging Moroccan antique lamps. The floor is filled with dancers, mostly college students, many of them stunning, dark Arabian women, all moving to the music of the group Bastet—a techno-pounding with female voices sailing over the rhythm. There is a smell of musk perfume and sweat and alcohol, and the bar, there in relative brightness to the left, is of beautiful blond wood, sparkling under pinholed goatskin lamps.

Jesse, with Tika in tow, searches throughout the club for Kerig and his girl, pushing through bodies to tables, and then Kerig is waving them over and, shouting, introduces them to a girl beside him named Saqqara. She has beautiful dark eyes, a white dress; she smiles up, offering a cool hand. They cannot talk over the music. Kerig shrugs and says, “Too loud,” and Jesse takes both of Tika's hands and leads her onto the dance floor, and she is laughing and protesting that she needs to put down her case, but she gives up and raises her arms, and beneath huge palm fronds that stretch over them she moves her body, watching Jesse's eyes, sometimes laughing at him because for a musician he has very little style on the dance floor.

American faces move by her, bodies graze up against her, but the most beautiful are those of the Arabian women. They wear silver rings and large hoop earrings. Their makeup is exquisitely done to bring out dark eyes; their teeth, in contrast with coffee skin, are a brilliant white. Many have the black cloth belts with silver coins that accentuate their hips, and Tika imitates the way their arms go up in the air, offering balance to their bodies. She has seen the Bastet videos in lounges at Emerson; the Egyptian girl group has a big college following, and a lot of women are wearing these belts with the silver coins now. Susan has said that there is a place on Newbury Street that sells them, and Tika tells herself that she will get one. She catches Jesse looking closely at one young woman, his mouth a little open, and slaps his chest with the back of her hand. He gives a mock protest, which she cannot hear above the music. She puts her arms up around his shoulders and draws his ear down and says, “Behave yourself, sailor, and you might just get some later,” and he holds up his hands as blinders, to block out all the Arabian women, then looks with hope at Tika, and she laughs and nods her head approvingly.

When the song ends she takes Jesse's hand and they go back to the table. Tika motions that she will get drinks, and Jesse leans down to Saqqara and Kerig, but they point to the drinks they still have and wave him off, saying, “Thanks.” The music is deafening again, and Tika puts her camera case on the seat next to Jesse. She goes alone to the bar. She knows that Jesse will have a Coors; she will have white wine. She leans over the shining wood to give her order, and the bartender, an Irish-looking redhead with a tired face and heavy crow's-feet, nods and turns to get the drinks, and Tika digs into her pants pocket for cash. There are suddenly men all around her, dark like the women and some with a growth of beard; they wear cotton and silk shirts, pressed slacks, leather boots. She feels them staring. One tries to speak with her, but she gestures helplessly at the music speakers; she takes the drinks back, moving through their bodies, through the staccato of their language. Their eyes watch her. The bottle and glass are cool in her fingers, and she concentrates on this until she is away from them. At the table she drinks and leans close to Jesse; smells his neck, his Jesse-ness, his Aqua Velva aftershave, like cedar. Saqqara has her thin fingers on Kerig's, stroking, and she smiles at Tika. It would be nice to be sitting at an outdoor café with this woman, watching her skin and hair in that light. This would be in the Back Bay; beside them a flower shop would have pots of white and indigo roses on the sidewalk, and Tika would hear Saqqara's voice above the sound of the sidewalk crowd, the cars going by. She would like this, learning about this woman—she must ask Kerig for her number.

Kerig is shouting something across the table about a recording machine, and Jesse is trying to make it out; close by, some Latino girls dance together, dark tube tops and fashionable jeans and heels. Then the Latino girls are separating, applauding, men applauding beside them as eight professional belly dancers come through the crowd. Above, on the wall, Isis spreads her wings; the belly dancers here form a circle. There is growing applause as the song fades and in its place comes a high-pitched instrumental, and the women draw arms from beneath sheer gowns and the audience claps now in rhythm with them, whistles. The dancers play finger cymbals; they move in practiced synchronicity to Egyptian bamboo flutes and tambourines. They dance barefoot, veiled. Tika and Jesse and Saqqara and Kerig are up and standing close, clapping in rhythm with the audience. Tika loves the practiced positions of the women's hands and arms—the mystery of lips and eyelashes that brush at the veils. The tight, choreographed circles: hips and shoulders and hands. Each circle seems to worship an invisible center. She wants to dance like that. She wants to be home in bed with Jesse, her knee pushing between his legs, opening him up. Soon, when the dancers are done and she has danced a little more with Jesse, she will ask him to go, and together they will hurtle home in the subway darkness, her fingers inside his jacket; she will breathe the smell of his neck.

The dancers spin: quick, breathtaking profiles beneath the veils, gowns sweeping. Tika watches bracelets falling on brown forearms, finely shaped hands, and fingers snapping with cymbals in precise, golden circles of light.

SEVENTEEN

At the Palace of Justice,
Nuremberg, Germany: December 21, 1948

Son of a bitch,
Jiri thinks, looking through the magnifying glass. In the SS photographs the Einsatzgruppen killer raises a heavy stick, his face one of righteous fury. He is beating a woman, perhaps in her forties, who kneels on the ground, and you can see that his anger comes from the fact that she keeps trying to get up. He is aiming toward her head; in her last moment of life she is bleeding from the mouth, weeping.

Son of a bitch.

The wind moans outside the palace; a gust hits the windows with a spray of rain. Jiri looks up, watches the glass flex slightly with the force of the storm: a bending of light. He stares again carefully through the magnifying glass at the last picture of the series—the woman now lies on the ground, the killer over her—and then shakes his head with sadness and stacks the photographs together (each stamped
Ukraine, 1942
) and slips them back into a manila file.

He picks up another file marked
East Prussia, Baltic Sea, June 17, 1942
. Here are women, perhaps one hundred strong, being marched to a knoll, a white sky beyond. The Einsatzgruppen seem to be everywhere, herding, pushing with submachine guns and rifles. Jiri imagines the fast, drunken voices of the soldiers shouting,
Eile! Move it!
The women are ordered to strip: Jiri, staring through his glass, can almost hear the female voices, like a flock of helpless birds—
So what, these drunken brutes will rape us now?
—and the angry German through a bullhorn,
Stille! Stille! We will burn your filthy clothes and give you new ones and then we will bring you to a containment camp!
Undressed, the women clutch arms about their bodies. Near the camera, one woman has blood matting the inside of her thighs and an Einsatzgruppen guard looks at her bloody flesh with disgust. Jiri pores over the women's faces with his glass: faces of terror, many profiles, a number of them turned away so that he cannot see their features. He does not see his sister or mother.

The women are ordered onto the knoll, facedown. Then, in the chronological run of images, the Nazis are dark figures, intruding, some with guns fixed on the women, some holding gasoline cans. And the women realize that they will be killed and they are starting to get up and run, but most are shot as they rise. Some make it a few steps. At the top of the hill, two women are frantic silhouettes; one has her arm protectively over the other, and then the one being protected is shot and falling. Staring through his glass, Jiri sees that the forearm of the falling woman seems slightly disjointed, a streak of black there moving away from the form of the arm. Is it a bullet passing through the arm, breaking the bone? A flaw in the negative? A diving gull on the horizon beyond?

Wind hits the palace window again, hard. The shuddering is so loud it seems the glass will tear from the framing. Jiri, startled, gets up and walks there, where clouds, lit by the city, rush at him. Rain pounds on the glass, but the window remains intact. On the street below, a prostitute and her client huddle and walk quickly beneath an umbrella.

Trowbridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts:

September 11, 2001, 1:50
A.M.

Anna and Jiri have dressed in jackets before coming out, and Jiri holds Anna close and taps with his cane as they walk. Now the harsh, revolving police lights outside Alison Tiner's doorway seem to completely alter reality: Jiri sees faces lit by white, falling into blackness, white again. Here are Monica Wood, and Heather Stolz, both with expressions of concern, staring at the door. There are some neighbors whose names he does not know. Alison's van is idling, with Ralph Topalka at the wheel, the curve of his neck and shoulder there, and Jiri hears Ralph speaking to a police officer. The white washes over the number on Alison's door, 37, and there are dark shapes and shadows of bushes and sunflowers, bright, then black. Jiri feels the closeness of the neighbors, the tightening of them as more arrive, the murmur of their voices,
Someone got in Alison's house, we heard her screaming. She was just coming back with groceries. She's all right, but really shook up. She's inside with Vivian.

The door opens now, and Alison Tiner comes out, a cotton shawl held over her shoulders by Vivian Topalka. The image blinks, the two women black against a white background: Vivian holding Alison's shoulders. And in that moment, Jiri remembers the women on the knoll, struggling to run; he remembers his photograph of Jana and Helena in Lidice, his mother's arm over Helena. And he knows, with an intake of breath, why he wrote so much this night, went back in his memory to those SS photographs: that strange, small dash moving out from the forearm that had puzzled him—had it been a broken bone? A blemish on the negative, a seagull behind?

Or a bracelet.

The SS image comes back to him with startling clarity: the woman doing the protecting, the specific tilt of shoulders, of head. The slighter woman beneath her arm. These were Jana and Helena; he is suddenly sure of it. A fierce wind on the Nuremberg Palace windows had taken him from this truth, but now, watching Alison get into the back of a police cruiser with Vivian, now he remembers and knows.

He stands there, full of this light and horror. Imagining Jana grasp Helena's hand to run at the sounds of rifles being cocked, women's voices around them a burst of hysterics. Explosions of vicious sound and blood and flesh flaying about and Jana and Helena up and Jana throwing an arm around Helena and bullets biting into Helena's neck and head and torso and Jana screaming
Nay nay nay
and then wasps of fire at Jana's jaw, her forehead, her throat.