Lowboy (3 page)

“Why won’t she take those fucking headphones off? I want to tell her something. I’ll
sing
it to her if she wants. I want to—”

“The world will end?” the Sikh said. “Why is that?”

Lowboy stopped smiling at once. What magnetism he might have had was neatly and resourcefully sucked away. The question had been meant as a distraction, nothing more: to keep him from establishing contact. To disarm him. The girl with the backpack receded
and the Sikh slid quietly forward to take her place. He wasn’t the man that he had been before. The rest of the car went dark as though the Sikh were in a spotlight. There was no curiosity in his expression, no humanity, no love. He spoke in a completely different voice.

“Your voice has changed,” said Lowboy. “I don’t think I can hear you anymore.”

“Don’t trouble that poor girl any longer, William.” Behind his sparse discolored beard the Sikh was grinning. He raised his head and coughed and gave a wink. “Why not trouble me instead?”

It was then that Lowboy saw the danger clearly. The fact of it hit him in the middle of his chest and spread out in all directions like a cramp. “No trouble,” he said. He said it effortfully and slowly, biting his breath back after every word. “No trouble at all, Grandfather. Go away.”

The Sikh flashed his teeth again. “Grandfather?” he said at the top of his voice. He said it to the rest of the car, not to Lowboy. He was making a public announcement. He looked up and down the car, the consummate entertainer, and brought a shriveled hand to rest on Lowboy’s shoulder. “If I was
your
grandfather, boy—”

His voice was still booming up and down the car like the voice of a master of ceremonies as Lowboy slid his hands under the Sikh’s beard and pushed. The Sikh lifted out of his seat like a windtossed paper bag. Who’d have guessed he was as light as that, thought Lowboy. The Sikh arched his back as he fell and opened his mouth in a garish slackjawed parody of surprise. A standpole caught him just below the shoulder and spun him counterclockwise toward the door. The booming was coming not from the Sikh anymore but from an intercom in the middle of the ceiling. “Columbus Circle,” Lowboy shouted. “Transfer to the A, C, D, 1, and 9.” No jokes anymore, he thought, laughing. No part of this is funny. A woman halfway down
the car stood gasping in the middle of the aisle. He turned to face her and she shut her mouth.

“Boy,” the Sikh said breathlessly. He was sputtering like the intercom above him. “
Boy
—”

Lowboy got down on his knees next to the Sikh. “Sacrifice makes sense,” he said. “Would you agree with that?”

The Sikh flashed his teeth and made thin meaningless noises and brought his hands together at his throat.

“You’re worried about me,” Lowboy said. He shook his head. “Don’t worry about me, Doctor. Worry about the world.”

The Sikh slid gradually backward until his head came to rest against the graphite-colored crease between the doors. His eyes transcribed a lazy mournful circle. His turban sat next to his elbow like an ornamental basket, still immaculately wrapped and cinched and folded. So that’s how they do it, Lowboy said to himself. They put it on and take it off just like a hat.

“
Boy
,” the Sikh said again, forcing the word out with his tongue. It seemed to be the only word he knew.

Lowboy bent down and took hold of the Sikh’s jacket. He could feel the little footballs grind together under his fingers. “It’s all right, Grandfather,” he said. “I’ve got something in mind.”

D
etective Ali Lateef—born Rufus Lamarck White—enjoyed anagrams, acrostic poems, palindromic brainteasers, and any cipher that could be broken with basic algebra. When case work was slow he amused himself by inventing simple alphabets, usually of the phonogrammic type, and using them to post com promising anecdotes from the life of Lieutenant Bjornstrand, his im mediate supervisor, on the Missing Persons Progress Panel above his desk:

These notes were Lateef’s only eccentricity. In every other respect he was straightforward and obliging, and no one had ever, in that office where abuse was the only reliable sign of friendship, questioned his abilities on the job. His clothes, his race, even his lack of a wife were brought up almost daily, but his casework was never once made mention of. His case reports were passed around like
textbooks. This was a source of deep and abiding satisfaction for Lateef, though he wouldn’t have admitted it to a single living soul.

His embarrassment at his name was another thing Lateef kept to himself. No person, living or dead, had ever been made a party to it: not his colleagues, not his occasional drinking partners, and certainly not anyone in his family. His father, an MTA motorman known for most of his life as Jebby White, had rechristened all of his children on January 1, 1969, after changing his own name to Muhammad Jeroboam in front of the King’s County clerk. It had taken Rufus the better part of a year to pronounce his new name properly, and the sound of it still felt foreign in his mouth. Had he been old enough to decide for himself—had he been consulted in any way whatsoever—the change might have excited him, possibly even become a source of pride; as it was, he’d tried to come to terms with it for more than forty years.

What bothered him most was the fact that his father was the least political man he knew. When the Motormen’s Local had struck in 1976, he’d returned to work after only two days, shambling and apologetic, a week before the official strike was ended; it had been easier for him to change his surname than to demand a living wage. Lateef’s father saw no contradiction in this, but he himself couldn’t think about it without taking something in his hands—a doorknob, a paperweight, the cast epoxy butt of his pistol—and gripping it until the memory subsided. He was a churchgoing man but forgiveness came slowly to him.

His anger and his reticence made Lateef a man of solitary pleasures. His tastes ran to 78-rpm records, statesmen’s autobiographies, and single malt Scotch, preferably from the Highlands; the women he knew referred to him, sometimes dismissively, sometimes wistfully, as Old Professor White. He lived in a roomy but charmless walkup on the affordable side of Prospect Park, across from the stucco ramparts of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. His father and mother were both still living—improbably enough, with each other—on the opposite side of his block; when they left their windows open he
could hear their threadbare squabbles word for word. Like his coworkers, his parents virtually never made reference to his work: he might have been a hit man, from the elaborate care they took, or a soldier in some unmentionable jihad. He might have been making people disappear instead of finding them.

“Special Category Missing” was Lateef’s area of expertise. It wasn’t a coveted field, as such: usually the SCM was found dead, in which case Homicide stepped in, or wasn’t found at all, and after a demoralizing, fruitless search the bureaucrats in Cold Case took it over. Seventy percent of SCMs went either terminal or cold, but for reasons obscure even to himself Lateef took comfort of a kind in that statistic. He liked the invisibility of Missing work: the invisibility of the SCM, the invisibility of the crime, even the invisibility, to a certain degree, of the investigator himself. If a file went cold—receding silently to a place where, in all probability, its invisibility would become permanent—he never failed to feel a touch of vertigo. The fact that he enjoyed this sensation was something he thought about on certain evenings, sipping Scotch in his patent-leather armchair in the dark. But not very often.

From his first SCM, Lateef had shown a talent for the work— Bjornstrand liked to call it “disappearance envy”—and over the years his talent had been distilled into a kind of virtuosity. Even the dreaded Notification Call played to his strengths: patience, politeness, and a slight but unmistakable distance from the present moment. At such times he was able to think of himself, without the slightest embarrassment, as a perfectly fashioned instrument of God’s will. Even his own name seemed to represent him.

The morning of the eleventh could easily have been such a time. Lateef sat straightbacked at his desk, humming to himself unmusically, thumbing briskly through a stack of photocopies. From time to time he closed his eyes, raised a sheet to his face, and basked in the aroma of fresh toner. There were days when he hated the smell, when he scrubbed his hands and shirtsleeves to get rid of it, but that
morning it acted on him like a drug. An SCM had come in that promised not to bore him, depress him, or make him feel like a proxy for Homicide. It was unusual in that it was structured, in that it had a clearly defined and symmetrical shape; it was unusual in that its shape had not been given to it after the fact, by the investigating officer, but before the fact, by the SCM himself. And it was unusual in that it involved a cipher.

It would have been a perfect morning, one of the best of his career, if the mother had been willing to sit down. There was always a mother, of course, or a boyfriend or a roommate or a wife: typically they either sulked or panicked. But this particular mother had been stationed outside his office for the last three quarters of an hour, ignoring the no smoking posters, talking to herself in a steady unembarrassed monotone and blocking both the elevator and the stairs. Lateef went stealthily to his door, parted the black-, red-, and green-striped Venetian blinds—a Kwanzaa present from his father—and looked out at her.

It was obvious that she came from another country. She stood with her feet pointed inward, like a peasant in a painting by some old master, and let her ash drop innocently to the floor. She had none of the defensiveness of the other complainants, none of their deference, none of their incredulity or shame. When they brushed past her she looked at them with a kind of affectionate surprise, smiling and blinking, then back down at her orthopedic-looking shoes. The kind of shoes a nurse would wear, Lateef said to himself. But the woman outside his office door could never have been a nurse. The shoes had been chosen to make her look less graceful—they must have been— but somehow they had the opposite effect. There was something involuntary, even feral, about the way she held herself. The beautiful woman’s indifference to everything around her. She seemed to have no idea of the inconvenience she was causing. She held her cigarette between her thumb and ring finger, a little distastefully, like a twig that she’d just pulled out of her hair.

Lateef pushed his door open—ignoring Bjornstrand, who was leering at the woman and fluttering his eyelids—and waited for her
to acknowledge him. “We don’t smoke in the waiting area, Mrs. Heller. You can smoke inside my office if you want.”

If he hadn’t already known she was the mother, he’d have known it from the look she gave him then. “Not in the waiting area,” she repeated, as though reciting a lesson. She glanced around her calmly, apparently for an ashtray, then stepped past him with the cigarette still lit. By the time he’d gotten to his desk she’d stubbed it out—On what? he wondered—and was watching him without the slightest sign of interest.

“Please sit down, Mrs. Heller.”

She stayed as she was. “Don’t worry, Detective,” she said pleasantly. “My son will not be breaking any laws.”

“He already has,” said Lateef. “He’s stopped taking his medication, condition one of his release. And he’s assaulted a passenger on the uptown B.”

Her arm moved toward the stool but never reached it. Her face had the same chalkish, spiritless blankness now that each of them came to wear without exception. Her cropped blond hair seemed indecorous somehow, out of keeping with her grief. It ought to be dyed black, Lateef found himself thinking. Either that or shorn off altogether.

“What I mean to say, Detective, is that there’s no cause for alarm. No need to get out the cutlery.”

He raised his eyebrows at this, anticipating a smile, but her expression stayed fixed. “To call out the cavalry, I think you mean,” he said finally.

She blushed very subtly and Lateef watched her blushing. It was at that moment, waiting for her to recover her composure, that he had the day’s first unprofessional thought. He brought his fingertips together and suppressed it.

“You’ll find him today,” she said. “Tonight at the latest. He’ll come along without making any trouble.”

“What if we don’t find him till tomorrow, Mrs. Heller?” He glanced down at the stack of photocopies. “What if we don’t find him until Thursday?”

Again she avoided his question. “How long will it take to catch him, do you think? How many hours?”

“If he stays on the subway, then we ought to find him soon. If, on the other hand, he decides to head up to the street—”

“He’ll stay on the subway. He’ll stay there until he gets caught.”

There was a quality to her voice now that could almost have passed for pride. Lateef squinted at her. “Mrs. Heller—”

“
Miss
Heller,” she said. There was nothing flirtatious about her. She was still standing next to the seat she’d been offered. She seemed to want nothing to do with it.

“Your son is in serious trouble, Miss Heller. He’s run away from his escorts, not only causing the staff at Bellavista Clinic distress, but also requiring both the NYPD and the MTA to mount a difficult, hazardous, and potentially very expensive search. He’s threatened a number of passengers, behaved recklessly on the platform at Rockefeller Center, and already committed one assault that we know of.” Lateef heaved the sigh—professional, regretful, boundlessly patient—that he kept in reserve for complainants of a certain category. “All of this in the first hour after his release.” He let that hang between them in the air. “The first
hour
, Miss Heller.”

Now she sat down. “I’m sorry that he’s done that.”

“So are we.” He said nothing for nearly a minute, watching as she considered her position. He passed the time by trying to place her accent. European: he was certain of that much. A northern country. Denmark, possibly.

“Can we continue, Miss Heller?”

“Of course we can.” Her accent was harsher, more foreignsounding than before. “Why couldn’t we?”

“No reason at all. Let’s make a list, together, of any reasons your son might have had—”

“Have you ever taken Clozapine, Detective?”

He coughed and passed a hand over his face. “I can’t say I have,” he said. “I can’t say that I’ve ever felt the need.”

“My son says it’s like being pressed under glass.”

“Under glass. All right.”

“Having been told that, and having seen what it does to him, I can understand …” She hesitated. “I can’t
understand
, maybe, but I can certainly appreciate—”

“What can you appreciate, Miss Heller?” Lateef said, raising his eyebrows. What he was going to say next was uncharitable, even cruel, but he made no attempt to temper it. “Is there a better drug for your son than Clozapine? A more effective one, maybe, with fewer side effects? Something you haven’t yet had the chance to try?”

She stared back at him dully, folding and unfolding her arms. It was a long while before she gave him an answer.

“There is nothing, Detective, that we haven’t tried. Not a thing. I have no doubt that it says so in your file.”

“I’m not interested in my file just now, Miss Heller. It’s important to me that we get this clear.” He slid the photocopies to one side and returned her dull-eyed look. “Was your son right to do what he did this morning?”

Her mouth opened slightly but no sound came out of it. An argument of some kind had started out in the hall—Bjornstrand and a voice he couldn’t place—and he listened to it absentmindedly. When she finally spoke her voice was so inflectionless, so slight, that it was hard to understand her. But he’d known from the beginning what she’d say.

“No, Detective. I don’t believe my son was right.”

She said no more than that, only sat with her head slightly bowed, keeping her palms pressed flat against her knees. There was no sense of urgency about her, no hostility, no alarm. She seemed in no great hurry to recover her son. She wasn’t bewildered by what had happened, or in shock: shock was more immediate, less controlled. As Lateef took her measure, trying—as he often did during questioning—to picture her on an uneventful day, he came to understand that he was witnessing the end of a long and unbroken arc of daily suffering. Not its beginning but its end.

“Miss Heller,” he said.

She surprised him by sitting up at once. There was color to her
face now, even a kind of sharpness. He found himself oddly flustered by her look. As though I’ve been caught eavesdropping, he thought.

“How are you going to find my son, Detective?”

His eyes fell automatically to the file. “Most kids who run, Miss Heller, run to get away from something. They’ll take off in whatever direction’s easiest, and nine times out of ten they don’t get far. But your son seems to have a definite goal in mind.” He waited for her nod before he continued. “I want to learn as much as I can about his reasons for running. Then, hopefully, you and I can make a guess— an educated guess—as to what his goal might be.”

She sat back and gave him a tentative smile. “People don’t often look for reasons when it comes to Will.”

“I have a way of working, Miss Heller, that I like. I think of things in terms of cause and effect.”

She nodded at him, still smiling. “Thank you for that.”

He pulled a drawer open and took out a short yellow pencil, the sort that banks and public libraries keep at their counters, and tested its point with his thumb. “Is there a reason for what your son did today?”