Specimen Days
Michael Cunningham
“I didn’t know.”
“What didn’t you know?”
“I thought he was just going to put the bomb somewhere and run.”
“Can you tell me about the bomb?”
“Did you tell him not to do it?”
“Who’s your brother? What do you think he did?”
“I shouldn’t have called. I’m just scared. Sorry.”
“Won’t you tell me what you’re afraid of? Won’t you let me help you?”
“That’s nice of you. But you can’t.”
“Yes. I can.”
“Are you happy?”
What the fuck? No one had ever asked her that particular question.
Cat said, “I think you’re unhappy. Is somebody making you do something you don’t want to do?”
“You’d do the same thing. Wouldn’t you?”
“What is it you think you and I would do?”
“We’re all the same person. We all want the same things.”
“Can you let me come meet you? Don’t you think we should talk in person?”
“Nobody really dies. We go on in the grass. We go on in the trees.”
He was spinning out. Cat kept her voice calm.
“Why do you think that?”
“Every atom of mine belongs to you, too.”
Click.
She paused a moment, to be absolutely sure he was gone. By the time she’d risen from her chair, Pete was in her cubicle.
“Fucking A,” he said.
“What the hell? Brothers?”
“He was on a pay phone. Way the hell up in Washington Heights.”
“Are they there yet?”
“On their way.”
“Mm.”
“There’s that line again. ‘We’re in the family.’ ”
“Is it from some rock band?”
“Not that we can find. We’re still on it.”
“They’re checking movies, TV shows?”
“They are, Cat. They’re good at this.”
“Right.”
“What was that he said at the end?”
“I’m not quite sure. I think it was from Whitman.”
“Say what?”
“I think it was a line from Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass.”
“Poetry?”
“That would be poetry, yes.”
“Fuck me. I’ll check in with you later,” he said.
“Right.”
Pete barreled off. Cat had to stay put in case of a callback. No other calls for her unless she was specifically asked for.
Thirty minutes passed. This was part of what she hadn’t expected—the downtime, the hanging around. When she went into police work she’d seen herself careening around in unmarked cars or touching down in helicopters. She hadn’t anticipated so much waiting by the phone. She hadn’t pictured a life that would so closely resemble working for a corporation, dutifully performing her little piece of it all.
Every atom of mine belongs to you, too. That wasn’t quite right, but it was close enough. A kid who quoted Whitman? Cat was probably the only department member who’d recognize it; she was without question the only one on the premises who’d read Winnicott and Klein, Whitman and Dostoyevsky. For all the difference it made.
Did you talk to my brother? Jesus fucking Christ. One kid self-detonates and his little brother calls to check up on him. A picture was emerging—there was that, at least. A missing kid with a younger brother—assuming it was true, and who knew?—would be much easier to track down. Were they the sons of cultists? That was more of a rural thing, messianics who raised children deep in the woods, taught them to hate the sinful world, and congratulated themselves for doing God’s work. It was more Idaho or Montana, these righteously murderous families who’d gone off the grid. But the five boroughs had their share, too. Hadn’t they just arrested a guy who’d been keeping an adult tiger and a full-grown alligator in his one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn? They were everywhere.
She could have kissed Pete when he finally returned.
“What’s up?” she said.
“Phone’s on the corner of St. Nicholas and 176th. Out of the way. No kid on the scene, no witnesses yet.”
“Shit.”
“You’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll check back again soon.”
“Thanks.”
She was sequestered now. She was bound to her cubicle, on the off chance of a callback. Momma is waiting. Call her. She’ll never leave you alone.
The morning passed. Cat did some filing, caught up on her e-mails. She had one caller, at eleven forty-five, asking for Cat Martin, and her short hairs stood up, but it was just Greta, her only female regular, calling to tell her that the explosion had been caused by the unquiet spirit of a slave girl who’d been murdered on the site in 1803 and that the only way to appease her was to go there immediately and perform the rite of extreme unction. Greta lived on Orchard Street, had been a seamstress for more than fifty years, had eight grandchildren, was probably a nice person.
We all want the same things. She kept hearing the kid’s high-pitched, tentative voice, his strange courtliness. There was—how to put it—an innocence about him. Subject matter aside, he had sounded for all the world like a decent, ordinary kid. That was probably drugs, though. Or dissociation.
Pete stopped by periodically, bless him, to tell her they hadn’t found anything, and at twelve-thirty to bring her a pizza from Two Boots.
“Seems like a good day to say ‘screw the diet,’ ” he said.
Pepperoni and mushrooms. He knew what she liked. She offered him a slice, which he accepted.
“How serious you think this is?” he said.
“Not sure. What’s your gut telling you?”
“That it’s small but looks big.”
Cat folded the tip of her pizza slice, took a big voluptuous bite. Was there anything, really, as delicious, as entirely satisfying, as a slice of pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza?
She said, “You think it’s only these two kids.”
“Yeah. Think Menendez brothers.”
“A truly whacked-out fourteen-year-old, no longer with us, and his impressionable younger brother.”
“Our first copycat.”
She nodded. Since 9/11, they’d all been puzzling over the dearth of follow-ups. Not Al Qaeda—that was the concern of other departments. Cat and Pete and the rest of deterrence had been wondering why more ordinary American citizens hadn’t used it as inspiration. It had been the terrorists’ gift to the violently deranged. You could blow up a garbage can now—you could yell “Fire!” in a goddamned theater—and cost the city of New York another billion or so in lost tourist revenue.
She said, “Receiving their instructions from?”
“A higher power. You know.”
She knew. Nine times out of ten, the ones who followed through were obeying someone or something. They were servants to a cause.
“First one said people have got to be stopped,” she said.
“My guess? Dick Harte was having sex with both of them.”
“There are no reports of missing kids from anywhere near Great Neck.”
“He’s got wheels. There are kids everywhere.”
Cat said, “I don’t quite figure Dick Harte as somebody who drives around looking for little boys to have sex with.”
“Happens all the time.”
“I know. I’m talking about a feeling, that’s all.”
“Okay,” Pete said. “Dick Harte is a God-fearing family man who’s never touched anybody but his two wives. Why does the kid pick him?”
“I’m just throwing this out. I predict that sooner or later we’ll track a missing and find a father who’s been torturing his boys all their lives. Older one gets to an age and decides it’s got to stop, somebody’s got to pay. But he can’t bring himself to kill his father. He picks some guy who looks like his father. Same age and weight.”
“Possible.”
“Which happens all the time,” Pete said.
“Absolutely. But something in these kids’ voices, especially the second one…I don’t picture them hanging around a park, waiting for some guy to pull up in an expensive car and suck their dicks for ten dollars. It doesn’t click for me.”
“Hey, you’re the one with the pee-aitch-dee.”
“For all the good it’s done me.”
“So you think the guy they really want to kill is their father.”
“Don’t hold me to it.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
“I predict we’ll find a citizen who’s so stressed about his oldest boy running away he’s been torturing the younger one double. The kid’ll turn out to have been privy to the plan, he’ll be taken from his fucked-up home to a differently fucked-up home, where he’ll live and get treatment until he’s old enough to go out and get a job and have a family and start torturing his own sons.”
“You take a dim view,” he said.
“And you don’t?”
“Why would a kid like that quote poetry?”
“Good question. Are they checking Whitman for that ‘in the family’ shit?”
“All done. It’s not from Whitman.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah.”
She spent the day waiting for a call that never came. It was funny—she usually felt grotesquely popular here on the job. She was sought-after. Today she just sat by the phone, begging it to ring, like a high school girl in love.
She tracked down a Whitman scholar at NYU, one Rita Dunn, and made an appointment for tomorrow morning. Otherwise, she killed time. Filed a few more things. Got to some old reports that had been languishing in a bottom drawer.
She stayed an extra hour, then packed it in. She had her cell, of course—if the kid called back, they could patch him straight through to her wherever she was. She walked home through the dusk of another perfect June day among citizens who refused to shed their habits of looking suspicious to her. The guy nervously unloading boxes from a bakery truck, the jogger in Princeton sweats, even the blind man tapping along with his cane—they all seemed like potentials. They were, in fact, all potentials. Everyone was. The trick was to keep living with the conviction that almost everyone was actually harmless. It was the job’s central irony. If you weren’t careful, you could get as paranoid as the people you dealt with.
We’re all the same person. We all want the same things.
Her apartment felt particularly small. It had a way of expanding or contracting, depending on how the day went. Today it struck her as ludicrous, these little rooms in which she, an expensively educated thirty-eight-year-old woman, found herself living. Remember: it’s a prize. In today’s market, a dinky one-bedroom on Fifth Street cost a grand and a half, minimum. Be grateful for your rent-controlled life. Embrace the fact that you live above the poverty line.
She went to pour herself a vodka, decided against it. Better stay stone-cold sober, in case the kid should call. She made herself a cup of tea instead, took her Whitman down from the shelf, and curled up on the love seat with it.
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Whitman, Walt. She hadn’t thought about him, really, since college. Yes, she was an avid reader, but she wasn’t the kind of person who sat home at night and read poetry for pleasure. She knew the basics: America’s great visionary poet, alive sometime in the 1800s, produced in his long life this one enormous book, which he kept revising and expanding the way another man might endlessly remodel and add onto his house. Big, white Santa Claus beard, floppy hat. Liked boys.
He liked boys, didn’t he? Was that true? She paged through the book.
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly,
Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.
Right. What else?
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
Would the kid have read that? Maybe, maybe not. He’d quoted from the opening stanza, nothing more. A smart kid picked up all kinds of things.
Still, there was something sexual about this. A boy embraces an older man and blows them both up.
We’re all the same person. We all want the same things.
She kept hearing his voice in her head. Giving a kidlike perfor-mance, she thought. A child who was doing his best to act like a child.
Yet she didn’t feel the murder in him. The kid was, of course, crazy by definition. But still, she prided herself on a certain ability to suss out the truly dangerous. She couldn’t name the specifics, though there were plenty of well-documented signs. This was something else. A flavor, a whiff. A buzz—that was the best term she had for it. As if she could hear the tiny sound being made by a bad connection, the particular bit of faulty wiring that made murder more than just a fantasy.
It was complicated by the fact that every now and then, some of them were right. The tobacco companies had discovered a secret ingredient to make cigarettes more addictive. The North Koreans had been kidnapping Japanese tourists to educate their spies about the particulars of Japanese customs. Those noises coming from the apartment next door were in fact being made by a full-grown tiger.
She heard a noise in the hallway, right outside her door. A scraping. Something. Like a heel dragging across the tile. It was probably Arthur next door, pausing for an emphysemic breath before stumbling on, but she knew the sounds Arthur made; she knew all the ordinary sounds the tenants produced in the hallways. This one wasn’t familiar.
She raised her head from the book. She listened.
There it was again. A furtive, scrabbling sound. If this were the country, it might have been an opossum, scratching at the shingles.
The country—teeth out there in the dark?
She got up, went and stood by the door. Nothing now. Still, she was shaky. A little shaky. Given the times. She didn’t have a gun, being deterrence. Had never wanted one. Now she wondered.
She said “Hello?” and was embarrassed by the girlish fear in her voice. Fuck that. Fuck them if they wanted her meek. She opened the door.
No one. Just the ordinary drear of the corridor, its brackish aquarium light, its tiles the color of decayed teeth. She stepped out and took a proper look. Empty. The sound had probably been coming from the street or through the wall from the other next-door apartment (where the druggy, dreamy young couple in residence were always engaged in some mysterious project that involved endless little tappings and draggings). There was no one and nothing.
It took her another moment to see what was on the wall opposite her door. In white chalk, in perfect if slightly labored grade-school cursive, someone had written, TO DIE IS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT ANY ONE SUPPOSES, AND LUCKIER.
Neither Pete nor the FBI boys could offer much. They questioned the neighbors, of course, and of course nobody knew anything, had seen anyone untoward, or etcetera. As every tenant knew, it was semichallenging but not impossible to get into the labyrinth of alleys and dumping grounds behind the building and slip in through the broken back door. The building’s denizens had recently observed the fifth anniversary of their ongoing attempts to get the landlord to fix it.
Pete stood in Cat’s living room, sweating majestically, sipping the espresso she’d made for him.
“How’s the coffee?” she asked.
“Strong.”
“Only way I know how to make it.”
“I’m frankly at a loss about how this asshole fig
ured out where you live.”
“There are about a dozen ways.”
“Right.”
This was one of the surprises—there were no elaborate systems for keeping cops anonymous. That was movie stuff. Matter of fact, the systems that did exist, for the higher-level grunts, didn’t work all that well. Just about anybody with true determination and a computer could track down a cop or an FBI agent or an auditor with the IRS, knock on the door one night, and deliver a lethal message. Only the biggest bosses had protection.
Pete said, “You want one of the guys to stay with you tonight? Or would you rather go to a hotel?”
“I can spend the night at Simon’s.”
“If they’ve got your address here, they may know about him, too.”
“Simon’s building is probably safer than FBI headquarters. Some exiled king lives in one of the penthouses, plus a few very kidnappable CEOs.”
“Have you called him?”
“I was just about to. He should be done with his client by now.”
“Call him. I want to get you settled somewhere.”
She dialed Simon on her cell. She told him the story.
“My God,” he said.
“I am, in fact, a little rattled,” she told him.
“Come right over.”
“I will.”
Pete took her. They left the FBI boys lifting the ten thousand fingerprints from every inch of the premises. Who knew? Maybe they’d come up with something.
Pete walked her into the lobby of Simon’s building on Franklin. He whistled softly over the maple paneling, the silent explosion of pink lilies on the concierge’s desk.
“Fat,” he said under his breath.
She announced herself to Joseph, the supremely capable Korean doorman.
“ ’Night,” she said to Pete.
“Must be nice,” he said.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” she answered curtly. She was in no mood right now.
“Right. See you in the morning.”
Simon was waiting for her upstairs. He held her. She was surprised to realize that she might start weeping, not so much from exhaustion or nerves but from the sheer joy of having someone to go to.
“Unbelievable,” he whispered.
“Unbelievable,” she said.
