Half the Day Is Night (33 page)

She nodded.

“Good,” he said.

He didn't ask any questions at all.

*   *   *

Mayla stayed in her room a great deal. It was bare but still full of the fine dust that comes from concrete. The house felt as if it would never be clean. She was in her room when Jude said that the police were calling. The moment Jude said “the police” she knew it was about David Dai.

The woman calling was a uniformed officer: a blue and white with a pinched square face that made Mayla think she had grown up poor. “Ms. Ling,” she said, “we'd like you to come down and make an identification.”

“Identify who?” she said without meaning to.

“Ms. Ling,” she said, “if you do not come down voluntarily I will have to send an officer to pick you up.”

“I'll be there,” she said. She knew from the vids what it meant to identify someone, someone was dead. She would be looking at a body, not cleaned and made to appear asleep. She had never seen a body except for her grandmother and her grandmother had died in a hospital, her death only a continuation of her decline.

Domingo drove her down. There was no reason to assume it was David, but she couldn't think of anyone else it might be.

Maybe he was just arrested, was still alive. She'd have to have a lawyer then. Her lawyer wasn't a criminal lawyer. She tried to think of who she might call if David was in custody, who did she know who had any pull? Maybe her grandfather could call Enrique Chavez, but she didn't know if that would do any good. If they had David in custody a few days they would need a doctor. (Horror stories, electrical shocks, burned testicles, sometimes the old methods are best.)

If he was dead, maybe he had been killed “resisting custody.” Or maybe he had committed suicide. A lot of people committed suicide when they were interrogated. She wondered how many of them really committed suicide, if given the opportunity to stop interrogation, wouldn't some people kill themselves?

She didn't know how she felt. Nothing was real. When she saw the body, would that make it real? What would the body look like? Would she get sick? Would it change her to see a body? Would her life turn at this moment?

Rehearsing, she was always rehearsing. It would be nice to have a genuine, unselfconcious moment that didn't involve being shot at.

Domingo walked in to the station with her, which she appreciated. The sergeant told him to take a seat but he said, “I'm staying with Ms. Ling, her grandfather told me to.”

She was surprised, her grandfather had done no such thing.

The sergeant just shrugged and pointed to a set of double doors. “Room 154,” he said. Through the double doors was a wide hallway with a concrete floor. Domingo's soft-soled shoes didn't make any noise.

The hard-faced blue and white was waiting in Room 154, which turned out to be something like a reception office. “Ms. Ling,” she said, “sit down.” She looked Domingo up and down, raised an eyebrow and did not offer him a seat. “Bhagat,” she called into the next room, “get the viewer, would you? And get Ms. Ling a cup of coffee.” Then the hard-faced blue and white went back to something on her desk.

Domingo was pale. She was grateful he was here; she hadn't always been nice to him and she didn't deserve his loyalty. People went into police stations and never came out again.

Officer Bhagat brought a viewer and put it on the desk. Then he brought her a cup of coffee.

The blue and white nodded at the console ignoring the viewer. She was scanning something. “Okay, let me see the next one. No. No. No. Okay.” Mayla looked at the viewer and wondered what it would show. David with a noose around his neck, his hair in his face. Or crushed by a skid. Or drowned and bloated.

The blue and white cut the call. She picked up the viewer, flicked it on and looked in it for a moment. The she flicked it off and handed it to Mayla. The plastic case was cold and the lens was a blind reflective eye. Mayla flicked it on.

It was a body. It was a black woman.

It wasn't David Dai.

“Who is it?” the blue and white asked.

She hadn't been looking at who it was, she was looking at who it wasn't. She didn't know who it was. She didn't know the woman. And then it came to her who it must be. “Anna Eminike,” Mayla said.

The im had been taken in a morgue. Anna Eminike was nude to the waist, from there down she was covered by a sheet. Her skin was the color of clay, a strange inhuman color, but she didn't look badly used. Did bruises show up on the dead? Surely they did? Her mouth was flat, too wide, a grimace, and her chin was tucked down. Her left breast was small and whole, spread flat. Her nipple was shriveled and pointed, as if she was cold or aroused. Part of her right breast was gone and the muscle exposed was curiously pale. It was both too large and too innocuous to be a gunshot wound. There was something bluish white on her chest and Mayla peered at it for a moment and then zoomed in on it before she realized it was the exposed bone of a rib.

“Your employee, David Dai, identified her in a deposition,” the blue and white said. “She approached him in the parking on Merister St.” She meant at the bank. Mayla nodded. “Do you know where David Dai is?” the blue and white asked.

“No,” Mayla said. It sounded so rhetorical she expected the blue and white to answer: “he's in jail,” or “he fled the country.”

Instead the blue and white said flatly, disappointed, “He hasn't been in touch with you?”

Mayla shook her head.

“Please let us know if he does contact you.”

“What happened to her?” Mayla asked, lifting the viewer. Too late she thought maybe she wasn't supposed to ask.

But the officer just said blandly, “She was resisting arrest. They prefer death to arrest. It is definitely Anna Eminike, the woman your employee saw.” She tapped the console and a piece of paper printed smoothly out. “Sign this please.”

“What is it?”

“A form,” she slid it across the table. “Sign at the bottom.” The paper had Mayla's name and her grandfather's address neatly printed at the top, followed by a couple of file numbers. There were a couple of long dense paragraphs of single-spaced text and then a signature line at the bottom.

“I'd like to call my lawyer,” Mayla said.

“It's not necessary, sign the bottom please.” She tapped the signature line.

“I haven't read it yet,” Mayla snapped.

The text was a description of the shooting in the parking naming Anna Eminike as the person who had shot at her and David. “I can't sign this,” Mayla said, “I couldn't see who was in the car.”

“The woman is dead, it doesn't make any difference,” the blue and white said.

“I couldn't see anything,” Mayla said. “I was behind a pillar. It's in my statement. I'd be perjuring myself.” To her own ears she sounded oddly prim, as if this were some sort of breach of etiquette.

“Fine,” the blue and white said nastily and took the paper back. “I'm afraid there may be a few more things we'll need to ask you. You'll have to stay here.” She turned off the monitor and walked out, the door clicking behind her.

Mayla looked at Domingo. He tried to smile and shrugged.

She should have signed. Why did they want her to sign? What difference did it make? Anna Eminike was dead. If she signed they would have her perjuring herself, was that why they wanted her to sign? Or did they care if there were inconsistencies?

Mayla checked her chron, it was 7:57 p.m. Were they being monitored? Were they hoping she would discuss it with Domingo? If so they were going to be disappointed, she didn't know what she would say to Domingo. She thought about picking up the viewer and looking at the im of Anna Eminike again, but she decided it would be better not to touch anything. Better to do nothing, to wait. The blue and white would have to come back eventually.

At 8:15 the blue and white had still not come back. She thought about getting up and trying the door. But if they were being monitored, what would that look like? On the other hand, if the door were unlocked, wouldn't it be ironic if they could have just gotten up and left?

They couldn't leave, even if the door was unlocked. If they left, they might as well simply leave Caribe, because no one ever ran out on the blue and whites.

How long should she wait before she did anything? She wondered if the monitor had security on it, if it didn't require a password then she could use it to call her lawyer. Surely it had security on it. Systems at the goddamn bank had security on them.

“Do you think you should have signed?” Domingo asked.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Who is the dead person?” Domingo asked, nodding at the viewer.

“The im? Her name is Anna Eminike. She's a member of
La Mano de Diós.
She tried to recruit David Dai, my driver.”

“The one who ran away,” Domingo said.

“Right,” she said. David had run away. The blue and whites had not been able to find him, either. Maybe she could run away? But David must have known how to disappear because they hadn't found him yet. She wouldn't know how to disappear.

“He is a member of
La Mano de Diós,
” Domingo said.

“No,” she said, “he's French.”

“Oh,” Domingo nodded, as if this explained everything.

Everybody thought David was part of
La Mano de Diós,
maybe he really was. Like the old saying, when three people tell you you're drunk, lie down.

Nothing to do but wait. She couldn't leave, she couldn't call her attorney. Oh Christ.

So they waited, curiously silent, as if talking would get them in trouble. Maybe it would, anything they said could be taped and then edited, made to say anything the blue and whites wanted said. But the blue and whites could make up anything they wanted, nobody would say anything. So the fact that they were being made to wait meant that the blue and whites didn't want to just throw her in a cell, didn't it?

At least she was wearing comfortable clothes. Imagine if they decided to keep her overnight and she'd been wearing a suit. Imagine if she had still been working at the bank.

The body in the im didn't look like that much had happened to it, there wasn't so much damage, but Anna Eminike was dead. It occurred to her that Anna Eminike had been shot from the front, so she knew she was going to die. What was that like, to die? To know you are going to die in this mean place and that no one cares and that is that? But anyplace anyone dies is finally a mean place and death matters most to the person dying, right?

She didn't want to die, but at least if she died it would be over. And everybody died, and in a hundred years, no one would know what awful things had happened. Did anyone care that in what was now eastern Europe they turned the Moslem invaders by, among other things, impaling thousands of captured men on poles, standing the spears in rows like armies? It didn't really matter to anyone but the two of them that Domingo was brave enough to be here.

*   *   *

“Ms. Ling,” said the blue and white, a different one this time, “will you come with me?”

“Where are we going?” she asked. It was after ten. Domingo stood up cautiously, and she felt stiff in the knees and hips.

“Just Ms. Ling,” said the blue and white.

Domingo looked at her, not volunteering this time, hoping that she wouldn't make him go with her. She wanted him to stay, didn't want to be alone. “Go on home,” she said, moved by what impulse she couldn't say. After she said it she realized that if he left he could call someone, do something. It made her feel a little better.

The blue and white didn't seem to care if Domingo went home or not.

At the door Domingo looked back over his shoulder, as if he wasn't certain of the propriety of what he was doing, but he went. The blue and white jerked his head for her to follow and they went into the hall after Domingo. Domingo glanced over his shoulder again, his fine silhouette floating ahead of her. I won't forget, she thought, I won't forget that people can be like this, that people can walk into the police station with you even when they are afraid.

The blue and white took her left, she saw Domingo stutter step when he realized that they were no longer following, and she leaned back watching for as long as she could until the corridor cut off her view. She could hear Domingo's shoes, hesitant, and then she thought a little faster but she was too far to hear the squeak, and this corridor was meaner than the one they had come in, the walls yellowed as if by body oils, stained from hip to shoulder height as if people had rubbed along it as they walked. They went through a door with wire in a tiny window and the moment the blue and white opened it she could hear voices, crashing and echoing off of concrete floors and block walls. Creole and Spanish. There was the strong smell of vomit and beer and her stomach lurched. The left side of the room was holding pens full of people in street clothes, mostly men but two of them with women in them: patient women, in divers' vests with goosebumps on their arms—prostitutes coming off of their pyroxin—or women just dressed like anyone on the street. One with a cut down the side of her head, and her hair matted back away from her face as if lacquered with hairgel instead of blood.

The blue and white walked Mayla across the room towards a door on the other side.

The men were calling her “pollo,” chicken, and laughing.
“Polito,”
someone said and for a moment she thought he was from Polito Navarro, that it was some sort of code that she was not alone, that the Uncles were here watching her, help—but then she knew again that the Uncles weren't on her side. But she had jerked her head around, staring into the brown face of a man in a Guatemalan vest. He looked like a fish jock, with his bare arms. He had a big bruise on his cheek.
“Politico,”
he said again. Politician, a political prisoner.