Lowboy (4 page)

“There’s always a reason.”

He unwrapped a packet of index cards, set the cards down parallel to the folder, then arranged them into seven equal piles. “A reason you could put into words for me?”

She looked at him as though he’d just betrayed her confidence. When she spoke again her voice was as smooth and formal as a clerk’s. Her accent seemed English now, possibly Scottish. “You mentioned a letter, Detective, when you rang.”

“More of a note, really.” He pushed the drawer shut. “On hospital stationery. Folded into quarters and set on the lintel of the door to your son’s cell.” He paused a moment. “His room, that is to say. At the clinic.”

“The lintel?” she said, frowning.

“The little wooden ledge above the door. No one thought to give the room a once-over, apparently, since your son was being discharged that same morning. The note was addressed to ‘Violet.’” He
tapped the pencil end soundlessly against the desktop. “Tucked into the note were seven days’ worth of Zyprexa tablets, crushed into a powder, and five hundred milligrams of Depakote. He’d been so good about taking his meds for the past six months, and had shown so much insight into his, ah, disorder”—he was reading from the file directly now—” that the staff had cut back on their supervision.” He put the folder aside. “Their hunch is that he kept the pills under his tongue until he was able to hide them. A small amount of the medication was ingested that way, but not much.”

“He knew that he was getting out,” she said evenly. “That’s why he stopped.”

“What do you mean?”

“He took his meds to keep the doctors happy. He planned to stop taking them as soon as he could.” She smiled again, more crookedly this time. “He told me so.”

Lateef looked away from her at once, focusing on a waterstain in the ceiling’s farthest corner, then began rummaging through his casework with as much effrontery as he could muster. He let thirty seconds go by, then an entire minute. She seemed perfectly satisfied to sit mutely across from him for as long as he chose to ignore her.

“I guess this comes as no surprise to you, then,” he said finally. “Your sitting here in my office, my asking you these questions, the NYPD manhunt for your son.”

“It doesn’t.”

He almost swore at her. “Do you mind if I ask you something, ma’am? Why didn’t you just ask the state of New York to hold on to your boy for another eighteen months?”

“I did.”

He’d already taken in breath to speak, already composed his reply, so that now as he sat back in his chair the air slid out superfluously through his teeth. The room was silent for an instant, suspended in a perfect vacuum; then the everyday noises resumed. The photocopiers sputtered, Bjornstrand’s donkeylike laughter carried in through the vent, and in one of the neighboring offices a man cursed
the Department of Motor Vehicles in Yiddish. She was sitting as she’d been from the beginning, hands braced against her knees as if to keep herself upright, looking past him out the soot-encrusted window. For the second time it occurred to Lateef that he was witnessing the end of something, but this time he had no idea what it could be.

“May I see the note, Detective?”

He’d made a number of mistakes with her already: he saw that clearly as he looked at her. He’d overestimated her tiredness, extended her more sympathy than she’d expected, and she’d responded by wasting half an hour of his time. Without meaning to, without being aware of it herself, she was frustrating him at each and every turn. For a few fleeting seconds, when she’d shown signs of anger or dismay, he’d come close to feeling that he understood her; the rest of the time she’d given him nothing he could use. He resolved, for the sake of expediency, to put it down to her foreignness. They take things differently in Denmark, he decided.

“
Violet
,” he said, unfolding the note and pushing it across the desk. “Do you know anybody by that name?”

She nodded absently, spreading the paper out flat. “Will’s nickname for me. My favorite color.”

“But your given name is Yda?
Y-D-A
?”

“That’s right.”

“And Heller is your maiden name?”

Most women would have felt the need to clarify—to explain, for example, that they’d elected not to change their name, or mentioned the father, even in passing—but she did nothing of the kind. She held the note a hairsbreadth from her face and stared at it, then reached down for the cigarette and pressed it to her mouth. Again he felt that he was spying on her.

“Why did you request that your son remain at Bellavista past the date of his release?”

But the note took up the whole of her attention. “I can’t read this,” she murmured. “He’s made a scramble of it.” She held the paper at arm’s length now, shaking her head, as though it had been
given her in error. It was with something close to gratitude that he saw it quivering slightly in her fingers.

“It’s been translated into code.” He took the note back reverently, touching it only with his fingertips: he was on solid ground again. The text, which apparently meant nothing to her, was as clear to him as his own handwriting. “A cipher, technically speaking.”

She was sitting forward now, staring furiously at the paper. She was suddenly much easier to make sense of. “You can understand this thing?”

“Nobody can do that, Miss Heller, without the key.” He laid the note between them on the desktop, sideways, so they both could read it:

“It’s a substitution cipher,” Lateef explained. “Each letter in the source message has been exchanged for another letter of the regular alphabet, according to a key. The key can be any word: let’s say ‘cat,’ for example. If ‘cat’ is the keyword, then the cipher alphabet—the alphabet here in the note—would start with the letters
C, A, T,
instead of
A, B, C
. The rest would follow normally.”

She hesitated, but only for an instant. “The whole alphabet gets shifted by three places?”

“In the system that your son is using, yes. Minus
C, A
, and
T
. They’d come only at the beginning.”

She ran a finger slowly down the page. “You’d still need to know what word he’s picked,” she said.

“That’s right. Both the sender and the receiver need to know the keyword for the cipher to work.” He sat back in his armchair, aware that he was pausing for effect. “Which sometimes makes it possible to guess.”

“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you.”

He felt a rush of helpless pride. “Ciphers happen to be a hobby of mine. Though I have to tell you, Miss Heller, I’ve never actually come across—”

“What’s the keyword?”

He pushed a pad of legal paper toward her. “The term of endearment your son uses for you.
Violet
.”

DEAR VIOLET. YOU HAVE THE NAME OF A FLOWER AND I DONT. I DONT HAVE THE NAME OF A FLOWER VIOLET WHY IS THAT
?

I FEEL ALL RIGHT OLD VIOLET BUT THE WORLD IS GETTING HOTTER. EVERY BODY KNOWS THIS. EVERY BODY KNOWS THIS AND PRETENDS HE/SHE DOESNT THE WAY PEOPLE DID WITH ME WHEN I WAS SICK. DO YOU REMEMBER VIOLET? GRANDDAD COUSINS TEACHERS? THE WAY THEY DID WITH ME AT THE BEGINNING
.

THE WORLD IS GETTING HOTTER EVERY DAY. WHEN PEOPLE START TO TALK ABOUT IT THE REALITY LEAVES THEIR MOUTHS. ONLY I CAN SEE THIS VIOLET POSSIBLY BECAUSE IVE BEEN SICK. POSSIBLY BECAUSE IVE BEEN AWAY SO LONG NOW THAT I COME BACK I CAN SEE IT
.

THE WORLD IS GETTING HOTTER NOT SLOW AND STEADY BUT LIKE A SNOWBALL (NOT A JOKE) OR A MUDSLIDE GETTING FASTER ALL TIME. THIS IS NOT MY OWN INVENTION VIOLET BECAUSE I READ IT AND I SAW IT ON THE NEWS
.

I WANT TO OPEN LIKE A FLOWER VIOLET. LIKE A FLOWER DOES IN POETRY. I THINK THAT MIGHT HELP AS THE WORLD IS INSIDE OF ME AND THAT WILL/ MIGHT HELP TO COOL THE WORLD. POSSIBLY. BODIES WILL HAVE TO GET COLD NOW VIOLET. MANY

BODIES. ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD YOU COULD HELP ME WITH BUT NOT WITH THIS. IM SURE YOU KNOW THAT VIOLET
.

ALSO YOU MIGHT TELL.

When she’d finished she said nothing for a time. Then all at once she sat up straight and gave a girlish laugh. “My son isn’t going to kill anybody, Detective.”

Lateef watched her carefully. “I don’t recall suggesting that he was.”

Reluctantly she glanced down at the note. “Why a code, though? He never used a code with me before.” She shook her head. “It’s really only nonsense either way.”

“He must have wanted the nonsense to stay secret.”

“But why?” She shook her head. “Because he wants to open like a flower? Is that why? What could possibly be the harm—”

“Your son does suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, Miss Heller,” Lateef said as tactfully as he could. The words left an odd taste behind, like aspirin mixed with tap water. He put the note back in his file.

“It’s funny, actually.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “To have to come to a police station, at eight thirty in the morning, to find out that he’s worried about the weather!”

“Can you explain what you mean, Miss Heller? I’m not sure—”

“Will’s not going to kill anybody, Detective,” she said, and laughed again. But he no longer saw any reason to believe her.

A
fter the noise of the train had faded Lowboy sat for a long time with his hands covering his eyes, the way he’d learned to do at school, and waited for the Sikh to leave his thoughts. He shut his mouth and bent his knees and braced his head against the wall behind him. The bench he sat on was heavy and unwelcoming, designed to discourage panhandlers and drunks, but he was grateful that he had a bench at all. He counted his breaths, the way Sikh warriors do on the morning of a battle, and let the counting fill his head completely. He counted from one to seven, held his breath for a moment, then counted back from seven down to one.

It was hard work and it made him very tired. Certain things the Sikh had said did not go quietly.
You’re frightening her, William
, for example. And
If I was your grandfather, boy
. And
That is not so
. They turned shrill before they left, shrill and urgent and unkind, and behind or below them was a much larger sound, a droning like that of turbines or high-tension wires that no amount of counting could dispel. Lowboy was well acquainted with the sound. It was as familiar to him as the noises of the tunnel and the trains but it had no place among them. He himself had brought it with him underground.

As always when he was frightened the image of Violet came to him, flickering on the backs of his closed eyes like light from an electric candle. Sometimes it was Violet’s ghost that visited him, sometimes only a picture, but always she was bright and full of love and terrifying. Now he saw her sitting straightbacked in a chair, smoothing out the wrinkles in her skirt the way she did when she was worried, her blond hair sticking straight up like a boy’s. She’d heard about his escape by now, been called by the police or by the school, most likely even seen the note he’d left. He wondered whether she had understood it. He hoped that she had, and that she was proud of him—secretly and defiantly, the way a mother should be of her son— but by the look of her ghost she wasn’t proud at all. Her ghost looked sad and desperate and pale.

A long time gone, almost too long to think about, there had been a gargantuan bed. His father and mother had slept in it. The bed was square and high up off the floor and patterned in rustcolored flowers. Her hippie sheets, Violet had called them. What he’d liked best was to crawl to the bottom, in the early morning when they were both still asleep, to that tight and airless hollow where their four feet came together. The cotton had been rough against his face, like the sail of a ship, and the smell of his parents had made the air turn colors. Red for the father, green for the son. Violet for Violet. She wore a nightshirt that said flatbush is for lovers across the back and his father wore madras pajamas. One time the pajamas had come undone, and his father had said something under his breath, and Violet had laughed and slid her hand inside them. When he thought of it now his tongue stuck to his mouth and he felt so much love that he had to spit part of it out. Everything had happened easily back then, in such a simple ordinary way. The world hadn’t yet even dreamed of ending.

But that had been once, and today was November 11. Today he was sitting on a bench in a subway station, counting from one up to seven, lonelier than any prophet in the desert.

The name of the station was museum of natural history. He’d passed through it times without number on his way to the park, strolling with Violet past the dog runs and the ballfields and the chainlink fence around the reservoir, his arm in her arm back at the beginning, later her arm confidingly in his. A man stood on the opposite platform now, shoulders hunched and buckled, face turned toward the corner like a dunce. He wavered and sidestepped like somebody on a train. Between the man’s head and Lowboy’s there was nothing but air and humidity and the steady clicking of the argon lights.

Lowboy looked up the platform, remembering. Set into the tiled wall—lined up in a row, like headstones in a mausoleum—were sixteen skeletons cast in matted bronze. He turned his back on them indifferently. The skeletons belonged to animals long since vanished from the world: it was plain to see that they had been mistakes. He covered his eyes and tried to forget them and after a while he succeeded. When they were finally gone he took his hand away and made sure that the Sikh’s voice had quieted. Then he looked at the platform again.

As soon as his eyes came open he regretted it. The objects around him flickered for an instant before coming clear, as though he’d caught them by surprise, and their outlines began to twitch and run together. Oh no, he thought. The argon lights were stuttering like pigeons. There was some kind of intelligence behind them. He tried to convince himself that what he saw made no difference, that it was none of his business, but it was too late to convince himself of anything. He clutched at the bench, breathing in little sucks, and forced himself to look things in the eye. The bench was smooth, the wall
was bright, the skeletons were as dull and dead as ever. Everything was as it should have been, inanimate and still. Even the people waiting for the train seemed perfectly assembled and composed; but that was wrong again. It was as though he’d caught a glimpse behind the curtain in a theater, behind the canvas backdrop and the props, and though the play was a good one he couldn’t forget about the ropes and pulleys. You should have expected this to happen, he said to himself. You did expect it. But the truth was that he hadn’t expected it so soon, not yet, and he felt hollow and incapable and sick.

A cigarette wrapper skittered up the platform, dancing past the bench coquettishly: a bashful totem. A harbinger. He pressed his face against his legs and panted.

To keep himself calm he considered his coming surrender. There were moments when he doubted that he’d be able, in the end, to answer his calling, when the thought of a naked body was enough to make him retch, and there were other moments when there was nothing else he wanted. Who will I find? he thought, touching his skull to his knees. Who will I find around here? He thought of the girl on the train with the Sikh, the music lover, and remembered the way she’d turned to him and smiled. Her long bangs, her distracted-ness, her beautiful nailbitten fingers. He stared out between his legs toward the dark neglected terminus of the platform, where the dunce had been standing, and wondered whether it could happen there. If I found somebody crazy, he thought, and nearly laughed out loud. If I found somebody crazy enough it could.

Already he felt the wave of doubt receding. Sometimes it passed through him hurriedly, haughty and careless, as if to show how little he was worth. Other times it capsized him completely. Not today however. His eyes followed the tracks into the dark. The empty water-lecked channel where only the trains resided. The acidic yellow of the safety stripe. Behind the third rail a rat was lying splayed on its belly, twitching contentedly, drinking coffee out of a battered paper cup.

“Here’s to a wonderful night together,” Lowboy said, raising an imaginary glass.

As he sat there with his head tipped low, watching the rat watching him, sounds carried diffusely up the platform. Two pairs of footsteps or one pair reflected. Voices rushed in behind: silvery voices with no feeling in them. Voices like static on an old TV set.

“Smells like bodies down here.”

“Smells like people, actually. Maybe you’ve never met any.”

“Do me a favor.” A loose drawn-out sigh. “Next time I talk you out of a cab, just set me on fire and walk away. Will you do that?”

No sound after that but the chirping of the automatic turnstiles. The footsteps had stopped a few feet from his bench. He wouldn’t have raised his head for anything in the world. The voices sounded just like Skull & Bones.

“How was London, by the way? I’ve never been.”

“London was fine. We went to this one place. You know the place.” A pause. “The
Tower
.” Another pause, more lazy than the first. “There really are a lot of people there.”

Lowboy made disgusted faces at the floor. Skull & Bones had never been to London: he knew that for a fact. He became aware of a muffled hacking sound, like a kitten gagging on a burl of fur. The voices had dimmed now, turned soft and discreet, as though they were discussing matters of the heart.

“
Indians
in London, am I right?”

“Indians and Pakistanis. But it’s cleaner, believe it or not. Less panhandlers.”

“Panhandlers.” Another pause. “They think this city
belongs
to them.”

“I’d always thought it did.”

“It doesn’t, actually. It belongs to me.”

I’ll hop the tracks, thought Lowboy, biting down on the knuckle of his thumb. If they don’t shut up I’ll hop them. I’ll go now.

Just then the uptown B arrived and saved him. Its ghost blew into the station first, a tunnelshaped clot of air the exact length of the train behind it, hot from its own great compression and speed, whipping the litter up into a cloud. He opened his mouth to taste it on the air. The cigarette wrapper spiraled upward, fluttering like a startled bird, and for the first time he noticed the zebra-striped sign mounted over his bench. He knew what the sign was for and he said its name proudly:
the indication board
. His voice was clear in his ears now, serene and assured, because he knew what was going to happen next.

The train came in as hard as the ghost train before it, knocking the wind flat and paving it over with sound. First the hissing of the current, then the shrieking of the wheelheads, then the champing of the brakepads in their sockets. There was no hearing anything else. If objects on the platform were trembling now it was with the force of the slackening cars, not because of the falseness of the world. Lowboy bent forward to watch for the conductor’s booth, still clutching at the bench with all his fingers. He saw the conductor from a long way off, a heavyset man with a longsuffering face, goggles flickering like strobelights as he came. His booth eased to a stop across from Lowboy’s bench with all the symmetry of prophecy fulfilled. He glanced at Lowboy obliquely, pressing the goggles to his face, then rolled his dim eyes up to check the board. When he’d satisfied himself that all was in alignment, he made a small grudging movement with his elbow and the doors came open. They stayed open for ten seconds, the prescribed minimum. The conductor’s lips flapped slackly as he counted. Lowboy watched his every move, enraptured.

“Getting on?” said the conductor.

Lowboy shook his head shyly. “I’m waiting for the C.”

“See that posting?” The conductor’s face jerked toward the wall. “C’s not running right today. Best be getting on with me.”

“That’s all right,” said Lowboy, shivering with pleasure. “I don’t mind.”

“You hearing me, son? I just told you the C—”

“Your ten seconds are up,” said Lowboy. “Shut the doors.”

The conductor lifted his goggles and pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment and replaced them with exaggerated care. Other than that he gave no evidence of surprise. He let the C# and A ring out, ticked his head from right to left, then shot back into his cubby like a cockroach. Lowboy closed his eyes and waited for the signal— two long buzzes, close together—that gave the motorman the go-ahead. When he opened them the train was long gone, the platform was empty, and the cigarette wrapper lay nestled in his lap. Only then did he remember about the voices. He looked around him circumspectly, careful not to draw attention, but Skull & Bones had disappeared without a trace. The rat was still there but the cup was missing. No one else on either platform. An arm’s length from the bench, halfway to the nearest column, lay a crisply folded twenty-dollar bill.

Lowboy stared down at the money and tried to explain it. An accident, he decided. Out of somebody’s pocket. The explanation was plausible and clean, an educated guess, the kind that they approved of at the school. A Clozaril-flavored answer, he said to himself. Clozaril with Thorazine on top.

He braced his head against the wall and did nothing. It was hard to imagine getting up from the bench and putting the twenty into his pocket. He hadn’t touched money in a year and a half, not since getting enrolled, and the tunnel was no place for accidents. On the other hand he was starting to get hungry. There was nothing in his pockets, not even a napkin or a matchbook or a pencil. Not even a pill. “On the other hand,” he said out loud, listening for the echo off
the tiles. Accidents will happen, he reminded himself. Accidents will happen all the time.

The face on the bill, of a thin schoolteacherly man with pistachio-colored hair, reminded him of someone that he knew. His father possibly. But he knew the name of the schoolteacher well enough. “Jackson,” he said, pointing down at the money. “Andrew Jackson, Indian killer.”

Jackson smiled up at him with green patrician lips. I’d gladly trade you, Lowboy thought, for a Swiss cheese omelet and a side of fries.

“That’s right, little boss!
Intimidate
the money. Don’t just put it in your pocket like a fool.”

Lowboy raised his head slowly. The woman who’d spoken was straightbacked and enormous and stood with her feet wide apart, like a boxer or a circus acrobat. She could have been any race in the world, from Sikh to Sudanese to Cherokee. She could even have been white. She wore plastic shopping bags inside her sneakers and frowned at him as though he was hard to see.

“It’s counterfeit,” said Lowboy. “It’s not right.”

“Counterfeit,” said the woman. “Is that so.” She pinched her chin between two yellowed knuckles. “What if I was to pick it up any-ways, and put it into my portmanteau?”

“In your what?”

“‘Portmanteau,’” the woman said, lowering her voice, “is a word from the French. Meaning wallet.”

“I know that,” said Lowboy. He thought for a moment. “You could do that,” he said finally. “That might work.”