High Crime Area (21 page)

“Harvey? What is that terrible smell? How can you stand it...”

“‘Smell'? ‘Small smell quells all'—a haiku.”

“Has something died in here? Inside a wall?”

“‘Small smell quells all—inside a wall.' No good.”

“We should open the windows, at least. We should try to find the source of the smell.”

“An experimental haiku, I meant. A classical haiku has seventeen syllables.”

Maddening Harvey! He smelled the sickening odor of course but lacked the energy, volition, desire to seek out the source.

There were only a few pieces of furniture in the living room. The easy chair in which Harvey sprawled, and several other chairs; a two-cushion sofa, of badly worn leather, upon which Leander and Tin usually sat when they came to the apartment—(Leander to the right, Tin to the left, invariably). There were scattered tables, lamps of which at least one was unplugged.

The leather sofa had been shoved oddly into a corner, since I'd left the apartment. But behind the sofa, just visible from an angle, was what appeared to be a length of rolled-up carpet.

As I approached the carpet, the smell grew stronger. It was unmistakable now—organic decay, rot.

“Harvey? What is this? Something against the wall...”

I was having difficulty breathing, the smell was so strong.

Clumsily I pushed the sofa aside. For a small piece of furniture, it was heavy; and Harvey made no offer to help.

I squatted over the rolled-up carpet. Holding my breath until my head spun. Desperately I managed to tug off a length of twine that had been securing the rug. (This was a rug that had been on the floor of Harvey's bedroom when I'd first arrived.) Boldly, recklessly I managed to tug off the other length of twine, and to unroll the carpet—and there, arms stretched above his head, flat yellowish face dull as a much-worn coin and his eyes and mouth gaping open like a fish's, was Leander's lieutenant Tin.

Tin's flaccid torso was covered in a blood-soaked, dried-bloody T-shirt. He'd been shot, perhaps—or stabbed...

He didn't look young now. Something terrible had happened to Tin's face, straining the skin to bursting.

I screamed and stumbled back. I screamed and stumbled to Harvey. With a look of profound exasperation Harvey was regarding me as one might regard a lunatic. He'd had to set down his notebook and place his pen in his shirt pocket. As a schoolboy, Harvey was never without a pen or a pencil in his shirt pocket. In a disapproving voice he said, “God damn, Lydia—I told you not to look. Whatever you've found—it's none of your concern. Just
stop.
”

“It's Tin—he's dead. It's Tin's body, rolled up in your carpet. We have to call the police...”

Harvey cursed me in a lowered voice. In moments of acute exasperation he lapsed into one of his ancient, extinct languages—might've been Aramaic, Sanskrit or Greek. He said, “I told you this was not a good idea, Lydia—living here with me. I warned you it was not a good environment for you. I said—s
tay away
. And now.”

“Harvey, my God! We have to call the p-police... Tin is dead, Tin is behind the sofa, somebody has shot Tin in our apartment...”

“There were no gunshots, that I heard. And we will not ‘call the police.' No.”

“A man has been murdered, in our apartment. We have to call the police...”

Sighing, Harvey swung himself out of the easy chair, that had sunken and shaped itself to his buttocks. It was always startling to me, that my brother had grown so
short
.

We would re-fit Tin's heavy body into the blood-soaked interior of the carpet roll exactly as it had been fitted previously. We would re-roll the carpet and secure the ends with twine. Clearly, others had addressed the logistics of this problem, or the first stage of the problem; we could not have improved upon their method, and did not try. When Harvey did not respond to my desperate words, my emotion and my tears, I fell silent—like Harvey.

Had Tin's body been in the apartment, without my knowing? Since when—the previous day? Two days? It had not seemed that he'd been murdered recently. The blood had ceased flowing, and had partially dried. Poor Tin! He'd looked at me with an expression of inarticulate longing, from time to time. Yet he'd never once uttered my name.

Now, it was too late.

“This problem would've been dealt with, Lydia, without your interference. But now you've interfered...”

I had no idea what Harvey was saying. His voice was edgy, not so calm as he'd tried to suggest; his jaws were trembling, as with a spell of extreme cold.

When it was sufficiently night, when Grindell Park was more or less vacated of dealers and customers and only a few homeless bundles of rags slept on the benches, and wouldn't give so much as a glance to two figures struggling to drag a strangely heavy length of rolled-up carpet across the desiccated grass, we managed to transport Tin's body into the most remote corner of the park where we hid it amid debris from tree cuttings, as children might try to hide something from the eyes of their elders.

“The freezing air will impede the decay. The Trenton police won't be able to calculate when he died, or where.”

Harvey spoke shrewdly, as if this were a statement of fact he'd had occasion to pronounce in the past.

When we returned to the apartment it was nearly 4
A
.
M
. In two hours, it would be dawn. Though we were exhausted and light-headed we took time to open all the windows, in my bedroom and in Harvey's bedroom as well. Not soon, but eventually, the putrid odor would fade. Or, the putrid odor would mingle with other, near-similar odors in the old house as in the air of Trenton, New Jersey—smells of smoldering rubber, diesel exhaust from giant rigs lumbering along Camden Avenue, the toxic-sweet odors from chemical companies long extinct. And one balmy April afternoon when I was returning from ShopRite, on a crumbling Camden Avenue sidewalk there stood a brash young man with dreadlocks tumbling down his back and a Maori tattoo on half his face, a velvety-dark-skinned Leander who sighting me shot out his hand, his large thumb, to hitch a ride with me in the Mazda—(only with me, his friend Lydia, for he hadn't been hitchhiking a moment before, I was sure)—and shrewdly I thought
Oh no! not a chance
even as my car braked to a stop, yes it was too late, yes but it was an instinctive involuntary gesture and so I heard myself say as Leander in tight-fitting suede deep-purple jacket, vest, trousers opened the passenger's door and slid his long legs inside with a wide grin and an air of companionable ease—“Well, all right. I can give you a ride. But I'm not going farther than Grindell Park.”

It was a season of numerous discontents. The more acclaimed X was, the more the myriad imperfections of others offended him. The imperfections of women, particularly.

There were women who offended by making no effort to be feminine—sexually attractive. There were women who offended by making too obvious an effort. As if he, aged seventy-three, were an ordinary old fool, a would-be lecher to be galvanized into responding to female subterfuge of any kind.

X had become by degrees an elder literary celebrity of international reputation, a novelist, poet and essayist once called by the
Times Literary Supplement
the “last man of letters”—an exaggeration surely, but one which pleased. He was a perennial candidate for a Nobel Prize, a favorite of many outspoken literary commentators in England and the United States. In real life he was larger, more bulky of body than his photographs suggested; still he had a handsome head, a much-creased but lapidary face with recessed, hooded, haunted-looking eyes, thin white hair brushed back from his forehead in wings. He smiled rarely; his face had grown mask-like with thought, calculation. His manners were exquisite, though sometimes rather rude. He was, his admirers acknowledged, difficult. But a genius of course. Even before he'd become rich he'd taken care to dress expensively in custom-made suits, perfectly starched white cotton shirts, elegant neckties. His nails were manicured, his jaws always smoothly shaven, his cologne carefully chosen. There had emerged in the past several months a just-perceptible, infuriating tremor in his left hand which X controlled by gripping that hand tightly whenever possible. And sometimes, in the early morning, his eyes watered mysteriously, blurring his vision in a maddening way as if his eyes were unprepared, after the intense, private state of sleep, for contact with the air. But X had never been one to indulge weakness in himself or in others, and he gave little thought to these matters. Because he'd become famous, he was much photographed; because much photographed he became yet more famous. Often he murmured his name aloud—
X. I am he, I am X and no other
. He could not have said if he was proud of such a fate, or humble. From within, the great man may be as much in awe of his greatness as are others.
How has it happened
—I am X.
These were secrets of X's inner life of course. Never shared with another.

Another secret, X could not keep from sharing with certain others: his several wives, and those women with whom, over the decades, he'd become intimate. This was his asthmatic condition, which he'd endured through more than six decades. The attacks varied widely in intensity, having been very severe in childhood, intermittently so in adulthood and now more or less controlled by medication developed in the last twenty years. Yet sometimes in the middle of the night X woke choking for breath, thrashing about in terror that breath would be denied him—his life would be denied him! He'd badly frightened his most recent wife, shortly before leaving on an ambitious European tour to promote his newest book, when he'd wakened from a seemingly dreamless sleep convinced he was choking, suffocating. The woman sharing his bed, whom he had not immediately recognized as his wife, had cried, panicked, “What is it? Oh, what is it?”—but even after he'd recovered from the attack, X didn't tell her his secret since childhood.
I'm fighting for my life.

Strange, how he took an instant, visceral dislike to the girl. Her incessant, nervous smile in his presence. Her fleshy lips that were too pale, without lipstick. A plain scrubbed-looking face devoid of makeup. How like a schoolgirl in manner, shy, eager to please, yet her khaki-colored clothes, a loose-fitting jacket and matching trousers, her lean, boyish body itself seemed to him brazenly unappealing. This girl was of any age between twenty and thirty, he supposed; it offended him, that his French publisher had chosen her to translate his latest book of essays. In the publisher's office he'd barely nodded at her when they were introduced, and had not heard her last name; it was unclear by his manner whether in fact he understood she was his translator; there was that way about X, an aristocratic hauteur even as he smiled, uttered witticisms, spoke at length and always compellingly, as if his words were prose and not merely words. At the luncheon in his honor, in an elegant four-star Parisian restaurant, he'd avoided sitting anywhere near the unattractive girl in khaki, and had not once glanced at her during the course of the meal; yet he heard himself saying coldly, in response to some praise of his new book made by one of the journalists at the table, “Really! But the translation leaves something to be desired, I think? I open the book at random, and I read—” And in his beautifully modulated voice, clear enough to be heard virtually everywhere in the restaurant, X read a passage with seeming spontaneity and subtle, almost playful mockery, in the translator's French; then shut his eyes and recited his own prose, in English. Around the table, his audience of twelve people sat very still, listening in amazement. What a performance! How it would be spoken of, for years afterward! Not once did X glance at the girl-translator who, stricken with chagrin, sat hunched gracelessly forward, elbows on the table and both hands pressed against her mouth. X was a gentleman yet could not mitigate his scorn. “There is no excuse, I think we can agree, for such slovenliness,” he said, and shut the book with a snap.

In the embarrassed silence, the girl-translator murmured something dazed and unintelligible, whether in English or in French X could not have said, and stumbled away from the table.

X's publisher began to apologize profusely, of course. As did others at the firm. It would require many minutes, and a fresh bottle of 1962 Bordeaux, to bring the distinguished man of letters around to his usual equanimity.

You won't readily forget X, will you, my girl?
Alone in his luxurious hotel suite, mellow with the afterglow of exquisite wine, X felt a belated tinge of guilt. Seeing again the girl-translator's plain, pale face, the fading smile and that look of slow-dawning incredulity and hurt in her eyes. Though it had seemed dramatically spontaneous, X's gesture had been rehearsed; in fact he'd had to search for some minutes before the luncheon, to find a passage from the French edition of his book that might seem to diverge slightly in tone from the original English. (X wondered if perhaps he'd done something like this before, in another language, during an earlier European tour? His performance seemed to him vaguely familiar, like the startled expressions on the faces of his rapt listeners.) He smiled uneasily, thinking of how the tale would be told, and retold, in literary Paris. Swiftly it would make its way to London, and New York. X's French publisher had promised that, in future editions of X's book, the offensive passage would be modified; the several journalists at the luncheon, attached to major Parisian publications, would respectfully report X's penchant for perfectionism. Almost, X felt sorry for the girl-translator. She was young, inexperienced, ignorant. It hadn't been entirely her fault, perhaps.

For after all X had a reputation to uphold.
The last man
of
letters.