The Ways of the Dead (6 page)

Sully had this in the system and heard Melissa hoot from across the room. “Sullivan
Carter
! ‘Speculation was not on the menu.’ You’re killing me here!”

“Un-hunh,” he called back, without looking up.

The dwindling clock, the fact that half a dozen editors were looking at his copy as he was writing, that the copy desk was already composing a headline, that any mistake in spelling or a mistyped digit in an address or a failure of memory about facts would result in a credibility-dinging correction and sour faces from the brass . . .

He stopped to look up a few clips of old crime stories and did a database search for Lana and Noel. That led to a few perfunctory grafs of background about the Honorable Judge Reese and the probability of his future with the Supreme Court. Then onto Regina Blocker’s dance studio, the neighborhood demographics, what the traffic was like in that segment of Georgia on a Friday night. The keyboard strokes came in bursts:

The Park View neighborhood has fast-food chicken places and two liquor stores and a couple of corner stores and a Chinese carryout and a used-car lot. The people who live on Princeton Place and adjacent streets tend to be bus drivers and nurses and Metro mechanics and check-out clerks and employees in the city’s parks and recreation department and secretaries in other city agencies. Some people still own. Most rent. Violence, drug deals and prostitution are not unusual.

Lana Escobar, 25, was found dead in outfield grass at the Park View Recreation Center’s baseball field last July 14. She had been strangled. Her slaying remains unsolved, but police say Escobar was involved in prostitution and believe the killing was related to that trade.

Another young woman, Noel Pittman, a part-time student at Howard University, disappeared April 24 of last year. A call to the telephone number listed on a flier asking for help finding her was not returned yesterday . . .

Sully looked at the clock: 7:15. A kicker and he was home. Flipping through his notes, he remembered he hadn’t said anything else about the strip club, after mentioning it in the lede. If he came back to it now at the end, it would appear as if he’d intended that all along.

Les Samuels, who runs the strip club, said residents and neighbors were not indifferent to the Reese slaying. He was in his office in the back of the club yesterday afternoon, filling out paperwork for the array of city and law enforcement agencies that license his establishment.

“What people don’t want,” he said, “is trouble they ain’t already got. People got plenty of trouble all by themselves. A rich white girl gets killed up the street? That’s a fresh lot of trouble. That’s something you want to stay about a million miles away from.”

“Sullivan!”

He hit the send button. “Yours!”

The bathroom, a place to walk to. Water ran from the tap in a cold torrent, and lowering his face to the sink, he cupped his hands to catch it, splashing it over his face. A damp hand through the hair and he looked up to the mirror. The scars were there, like bones melted by fire, by electricity. He thought of his house and its silences, awaiting him like an entombing crypt, and he did not want to go there, did not want to be left alone with his thoughts.

Back at the desk, he read through his notes for fact-checking, checked the names to be sure, and then Melissa was waving, beckoning him. She had made a few tightening and clarification changes. She called the story up in layout, so they could see the front page and how it was displayed.

There was no one else nearby, but she lowered her voice anyway, part of that bullshit hey-I’m-doing-you-a-favor air of familiarity she liked to convey. “Fabulous work today, Sullivan. It saved us. Now. Look. Really need you at the Reese house tomorrow. They’re making some sort of statement at one.”

He blinked. She needed to whisper to hand him a lame-ass assignment like that?

“Chris—let’s let him get that,” he said. “Lemme push the investigative side, something related to the manhunt but not precisely on it.”

She looked away from the screen and at him, not pleased with the push-back. “Thanks, but cops are Chris’s beat. Jamie is working the feds. I need a real pro out there with the family. This statement, or whatever it is, isn’t going to be much, but I know you can do something with it. We’ll box it on the front.”

“A statement? You’re serious?” He was whispering back, as if they were trading stock tips. “You’re sending me out to McLean to take
dictation
? Send a shooter and an intern.”

“No,” she said firmly, holding his gaze now. “I need a scene setter. It’s a Sunday. Nothing else is going to develop on a Sunday. I need you to do just what you did today: Write the story onto the front page. The family statement, you know, pathos, the eternal grief of parents of murdered children.”

“Reese and I have a certain history—”

“Which nobody cares about,” she said. “You two are both professionals. Surely a tiff several years ago will not affect either of you when it comes to the murder of his child.”

“A
tiff
?” It burst out of him, loud and hot, before he could stifle it. “He tried to get me fucking
fired
. He leaked me intel and then tried to say it—”

“So you always said,” she shot back.

“Screw you,” he said, standing up. “Just fuck that—”

“Sullivan,” Edward Winters cut in, looking like he was pulling the leash on a poorly trained dog. Starched striped shirt, tie, hair swept back in a perfect coif, he seemed to materalize at the right of the copyediting desk, prim lips pursed. Sully walked over, this little summoning to the principal’s office. Copy editors, leaning back in their chairs, trying to glance over without looking like they were glancing over.

“What’s it about?” Edward’s voice a harsh whisper, the blue eyes hard, that whole Princeton and Martha’s Vineyard thing. In his sixties, lifetime of privilege. Twits like this running things, nothing you could do.

“Reese. The Judge Foy thing. You remember. You suspended me a week.”

“What’s that got to do with this?”

“Melissa wants me to babysit his presser tomorrow in his front yard.”

“So do it.”

“It’s wasting my time,” and here was where he should play his ace. “I’m working something, Eddie. The three suspects? They’re not connected. It’s a wrong turn.”

“How do you know that?”

“From a source. It’s developing. I need—”

“No, what
you
need?
You
need to realize you’re not still working in a war zone.
You
cover that presser at one. This is the next Supreme Court justice we’re talking about. We
need
to own this story, and you—you
need
to get over your beef with Reese. You fucked up. There were repercussions. End of story.”

Sully held his gaze for a beat, then two.

“Sure thing, boss.”

He went back over to Melissa, who was running with it now. She was leaning forward, elbows on the desk, eyebrows pulling down and together.

“Let’s get this straight,” she said. “I am. Your boss. I. Am. Your. Boss’s. Boss. You pop off like that to me again? I’ll slap a memo to HR. You’ll be covering high school soccer until you quit. That bit Eddie just told you about the war being over, that’s exactly—”

“What war are we talking about? I remember about six. Depending on your definition of open conflict.”

“Then all of them, Sullivan. You’re back home. Look at a map. The rules are different here.”

He kept his face flat, but felt the fury boiling from his throat into his head, the humiliation. Times like this, since the shell, maybe before, his mental wires crossed. The doctors, they had talked to him about the rage and how to contain it, and all that was washed away in a flood.

“Just you try busting me,” he said, leaning closer to her, whispering back, smiling, pure malice now. “Go the fuck ahead. Walk into
your
boss’s office, good old Eddie back there, and explain assigning your best reporter to babysit a presser ’cause you thought it brilliant to have a twenty-seven-year-old newbie on the cop beat get bitchslapped by the
New York Times
.”

She broke her gaze and leaned back, to defuse at least the appearance of a scene. “Okay, Sully. Look, it’s late. Everybody’s tired. Let’s just cool off and—”

“You’ll get your presser,” he cut in, his voice ragged. “And in the next twenty-four to forty-eight? You’ll be eating this. Be a sweetheart when you do.”

He managed to make his feet turn and walk, the walls seemed to vibrate, and the thundering in his ears was so loud that he had to blink it back.

When he got to the hallway and reached for the elevator button, his thumb was trembling.

When he blew
in the door, Dusty had called, and that was just fucking great. He listened to the voice mail—
Call me, it’s been too long, what’s the deal?
—and decided to ignore it. The blackness, the bile—she wouldn’t understand and he couldn’t explain. He poured Basil’s over ice, skipped the splash, and opened the Dutch door to the backyard, sitting on the steps.

He blinked and looked at the cherry tree, trying to slow his breathing the way the doctors had taught him: Focus, focus on something small. The tree, the tree. It would be shedding leaves in a matter of weeks. The chill in the air would stay. The ghosts in his head would leave. Winter would descend. He listened to the traffic passing on Constitution and his chest slowed. He held out his hand. The tremors were almost gone.

He went back inside, got the bottle and went upstairs. The shelf in the closet held the box, the kind of storage box law firms used to use for case files. He took it to the bed, unwrapped the silk drawstrings, turned it upside down, shaking it out onto the top of the sheets.

Pictures, old passports, documents in foreign languages, wrinkled currencies in faint shades of blue. Nadia’s scarf. He climbed on the bed, propping the bourbon against a pillow. There were several sets of pictures from Bosnia, bound together with a green rubber band, and he sorted through them until he found the packet he was looking for. He pulled the rubber band off and the pictures spilled out. They were taken at the school and they were poorly lit and Nadia wasn’t the subject of most of them because he did not know her then.

The story had been about an elementary school that was functioning in the basement of an apartment building during that first winter of the war, populated by children of parents who’d stayed behind by choice or necessity now that the routes into and out of Sarajevo were blocked. The siege had a surreal quality to it. The drudgery of the war, the intermittent shelling, the bread lines, the snipers, gasoline at a hundred dollars per gallon, twenty-five dollars for a bar of chocolate, had not yet settled in.

The school was composed of fifty-six children from six grades, being taught—if that was the verb—by three teachers. It seemed to Sully more like a lesson in crowd control. The children were aggressive, loud, anxious. They stood when they were supposed to sit, they ran when they were supposed to walk, they threw things. They were wildly energized by a foreign reporter dropping in, and this gave cause for more noise and frenzy. Children had never done much for him, and Sully had been of a mind to pop them upside the head and tell them to pipe down. His old man hadn’t been wrong about everything.

The two other teachers were older, maybe early forties, and Nadia, a decade younger, was the quiet one who didn’t say much. She taught the youngest children. He had been struck, immediately, by her genuineness and warmth (well, her eyes, too, a deep, honeyed shade of brown) and, after a few minutes of conversation, the sly wit, the rough voice (she smoked).

That first day, snow had just fallen. Where were the pictures . . . ? Here. Here she was, blue cable-knit sweater, jeans, boots. Black hair, loose, free. The kids surrounded her, excited by the camera, mugging. A kid named Sasha put his head on her shoulder as she sat at her desk. Here she was in teaching mode, writing on a whiteboard, one arm drawn across her chest to keep her coat close in the near freezing air.

A month passed before he saw her again. He took her a copy of the story, a version that had been picked up and run on the front page of the
International Herald Tribune
. By then four kids in her class were dead and they had moved the classroom twice. He saw her in the Merkale Market, too, just long enough to say hello. Two weeks later, he saw her there again. She lingered, standing outside next to a table scattered with anemic vegetables, a pale winter sun barely over the mountains, her skin white as parchment, a cigarette in her left hand. His voice nervous, he couldn’t help it he said hi and hello and then just did it.

—So maybe could I take you to dinner or something sometime? I could—

—Nobody goes to dinner. Only foreign
novinari
and UNPROFOR.

—Okay. I wasn’t trying to—

—You can come over if you want pasta.

—’m sorry?

—Pasta. Do you eat it?

—Yes, yes, but—

—Is English one of your languages?

—Yes.

—So you know, come over, eat pasta.

Teasing him in that Balkan accent, that world-weary Euro air, looking at him now, those eyes.

—Yes. I can. I can come over. I got two bottles of red from duty-free.

And so it had proceeded in the speeded-up hyperreality of war. Before the calendar turned to February, they were making love, on her bed, on the couch, on the carpet in front of the couch. He put her on her knees in front of the couch and neither of them lasted long like that. Pillow talk:

—You like Yugoslav girls?

—I don’t know that I’ve sampled the lot. But this one, touching the tip of her nose with his index finger, yeah, I like this one. But I thought you guys were Bosnian now.

—I was Yugoslav when I was born. Tito said we were all Yugoslavs.

—Tito’s dead. Yugoslavia’s dead.

—It does not change what I am. You, you’re American. From the south part?

—Louisiana.

—What do they do in Louisiana?
Loo-ee-see-anna
.

—Fight. Fuck. Play football. Fish.

Giggling, brushing her hair back from her face, propping her head on her elbow, the muslin-thin moonlight streaming across the room behind her. There were the hills in the distance, a deeper dark than the sky above it. He could see them behind her. She was a shadow, a shape, and she possibly had the most beautiful voice he had ever heard.

—Only things that start with the ‘F’?

—Okay, okay. They cook. They speak English funny. They go to church, a lot of them, anyway, Catholics and Baptists, not Orthodox. They teach you to shoot before they teach you to drive. Manners. Most of them have manners, unless you’re being an asshole, and then they don’t. Then they really don’t.

—And your parents?

—They’re dead. Like Tito.

—They were Louisiana?

—Yeah.

—So you would stop being Louisiana if they called it something else?

By summer, they had progressed to the point where he’d stay with her when he was in the city. They talked of him hiring her as his interpreter and trying for a visa, issued by UN forces that were running the airport, to come with him past the siege lines. But they both knew that would not work, and the idea sank into the gloom of the apartment in the late evenings. There was nothing but candlelight and books and their conversation filling the long hours. She read Bulgakov, reread Gogol, she got him to read Ivo Andric. She read Günter Grass, she read the García Márquez and the Faulkner he’d bring. She read an Elmore Leonard book in a single evening, trying out the slang, working on her accent.

She read like this, and made love to him, he believed, because she knew she would never get out of the city as long as the war lasted. She was a Serb living with Muslims and Croats, a living anachronism, a relic of the days of Tito. She knew and he knew she would be detained on the far side of any checkpoint. The Serbs, identifying her as a traitor for staying behind in Sarajevo, would tell her they could not guarantee her safety if she proceeded into Serb territory, which was the nice way of saying they would shoot her in the back of the head if she took another fucking step.

So she stayed, parentless, without family, like him, and they talked of their lives before and maybe after. The war progressed into the next summer and the following winter.

—It won’t end until we are all dead.

—Yes, it will. It will end before then.

—Your Americans, the NATO, is never coming to help us.

—Eventually they will. I think they will.

They were in a pizzeria on the eastern side of town on an August afternoon, a small stucco place in the middle of a block on a narrow street. The location was shielded from snipers and a shell would have to whizz-bang straight down to hit it from the Serb-held hills, an angle that was beyond the laws of physics. There was moderately cold beer. It cost seventeen dollars per bottle. She had eaten two slices and half of another and was still too thin, the stress, the diet pasta and almost no vegetables, her skin breaking out across her forehead.

—We will be in Paris in a couple of years, he said, and then this will only be the way it used to be.

—I don’t like Paris.

—Okay. New York. We’ll go to New York.

—I don’t like New York.

—You’ve never been.

—I wouldn’t like it.

—Tell me then. Tell me where.

She thought, looking at him.

—Santorini.

—Greece?

—I like olives.

—To live?

—Why not?

—It’s a tiny little island. What will we do there?

—Olives. We will raise the olives. And goats. And kids.

—Baby goats are kids. You call them kids.

—We will make baby goats, she laughed, finally, her mood swinging back the other way, and she slapped the table, tipping her beer back, laughing harder. Sully and Nadia, they fuck and make the baby goats!

Sully pulled her scarf, the only thing of hers he had left, over his lap. He did not smell it anymore because he knew the scent of her had long since faded.

In the late winter of the third year of the war, when spring was still just an idea, he flew into the city on an aid flight. He was unable to get to her apartment because of the late hour, the curfew, and the falling snow. He spent the night in the hack hotel, the Holiday Inn, and went by the hospital the next morning to talk to a doctor he knew for a story he was working on about surgeons operating without electricity or anesthesia or running water. He stopped in the morgue on his way out because the only way to count the dead in a city with no phones was to go there and count noses. There were several bodies on stretchers on the freezing concrete floor and there was Nadia, eyes closed and half her head gone, heaved in twain by shrapnel from a mortar. The rest of her body, when he had pulled back the sheet, was completely untouched.

The photograph of her in the cable-knit sweater was in his hand now but he was hearing her voice, that husky Balkan accent that would say his last name in the dark, two syllables,
Car-ter, Car-ter,
like a chant, like a prayer, when they made love, as if it were carried by the breeze that would blow in from her balcony window.