Invisible City (3 page)

“Becky! Get in.”

I go around the Camaro and sink into the passenger seat. The car smells like home. There is a coconut-scented palm tree hanging from the rearview mirror. Johnny’s got the heat blowing high, and I put my hands up close to the vents in the dashboard.

“Warm up, girl,” says Johnny. Johnny is a flirt, and though he’s always overfamiliar, I never feel like he’s actually leering at me. I don’t think I’m his type. Johnny likes big hair and tight sweaters and big blue moons of eye shadow. In Staten Island, he does well. Or so he says.

“Have you talked to the desk?” I ask.

“Dead lady in the pile,” he says.

I lean toward the windshield and point. “Look, you can see her. Right there. In the crane.”

Johnny looks and points. “There? That…” He’s stuck for what to call what he sees, which is a leg. “Jesus!” He twists around and grabs his camera from the backseat. “Watch the car. I’ll be back.” He throws open the long door and slams it shut behind him. As he trots across the street in his cropped red leather jacket, Johnny is adjusting his lens, snapping a photo, and then checking the image in his viewfinder. He gets to the edge of the yellow police tape and snaps away. Click click twist twist look. Click twist look. After a couple minutes, I can see the cold start to slow him. He stomps his feet and rubs his hands together. More clicking. He kneels down, maybe getting the tape in the shot, and jogs toward the trailer where the worker I spoke to is standing, smoking, staring at the crane.

I can’t imagine why they haven’t brought the poor woman down yet, though I’m sure Johnny is thrilled he got here in time to get his shot. In the time I’ve been working for the
Tribune,
I don’t think they’ve ever actually published a photograph of a dead body. I worked a scene out in Queens in September where a kid had tried to ride his bike
Back to the Future
–style behind a delivery truck and ended up with his head spread open on the pavement. The photographer took dozens of shots of the lump beneath the white sheet in the middle of the road, and the blood-dark pavement around it, but we published a picture of the truck, and the driver sitting on the sidewalk with his head in his hands. They also didn’t use the quote I got from a witness who described the sound the boy’s head made when it hit the blacktop. But photographers, like reporters, know they have to get every angle, every detail—just in case. In case their editor is in a particularly perverse mood; in case the
Ledger
has the image or the detail and we need to match it.

Johnny seems to be trying to talk to my worker and his friend, but neither’s lips are moving much in response to his questions. My guy points to where he pointed me, to the group of men beneath the crane: workers, Hasids, police. Johnny jogs over, staying just on this side of the yellow tape. An officer in his star-brimmed hat stands guard, and I watch Johnny show his badge and try to sweet-talk him into letting him get closer for a shot. The officer listens without engaging. His eyes dart around him. Johnny is persistent. He’s pointing and gesticulating as if this stranger was an old friend to whom he was recounting some wild encounter.

My phone rings. It’s the desk.

“I need whatever you’ve got for first edition,” says Mike. I read him the quotes from my construction worker. “Still no ID?”

“No,” I say, about to explain that the poor woman is still dangling forty feet above the canal, when suddenly everyone begins running: the crane is moving.

“I gotta go,” I say, opening the car door. “They’re bringing her down.”

Outside, Johnny is frantically changing his lens. “This shot is gonna be shit. Shit!”

I leave him be and get as close as I can to the excavator, pressing against the police tape. The cage is swaying, and as the long yellow arm guides it slowly toward the ground it makes a low, rattling moan. The workers and police step back, forming a circle around the base of the cage. The two Hasidic men from the bodega, now joined by several other men dressed just like them, stand to the side. Everyone is watching the leg. The thigh, the knee, the bare foot. And as it gets closer to the ground there is more. Her skin has color, bluish white, like skim milk. When the cage gets within a couple feet of the ground, it stops abruptly. A policeman shouts something I can’t understand to the crane operator, and the operator shouts something back. The metal arm shudders, pulling the cage up. More shouting. Now the officers all have their hands up, they’re shuffling back and forth, looking like circus clowns scrambling to catch a trapeze artist. Finally, the bottom tip of the cage touches the frozen ground. The new slack shifts its contents, pressing down on the body. There is more shouting, and the officers move in, touching the cage, touching the metal scraps, not touching the woman. It’s hard to imagine how they’re going to get her body out without crushing her.

Within moments of each other, two vans pull up. One has blue and gold Hebrew lettering on the side. The other says K
INGS
C
OUNTY
M
EDICAL
E
XAMINER.
A uniformed officer lifts up the yellow tape and lets both vans enter the yard. Out of one jump Orthodox men in broad-brimmed black hats, with neon green vests over their coats and white strings hanging from their hips. Out of the other jump men in blue jumpsuits. They all run toward the body.

With the crowd beside her swelled, my stomach begins to hurt. Why can’t they get her
out
of there? My intestines get all fucked up when I get upset. I learned from a therapist many years ago that it’s called anxiety. I’m always afraid of stuff. Weird stuff, though. Not monsters or murderers or even airplanes. It’s more ephemeral than that. I feel fear when I feel insecure. When I feel alone or rejected. And when I feel powerless—like I do looking at this poor woman’s skin, torn by metal, bare beneath the sun on the coldest day of the year. Get her out, I think. Get her warm.

Johnny appears next to me.

“This is seriously fucked up,” he says, winded, excited.

“Who the fuck
are
all these people?” I say. “Get her inside and sort it out there.”

Johnny chuckles. “If only it were so easy, Beck.”

“What?” I say.

“The Jews are here,” he says, as if that explains something.

“And?”

“And, the Jews take their own bodies.”

I do not understand.

“You’ve never seen them before? They were at that murder-suicide around Thanksgiving on the Upper East Side. Remember? Woman who owned the apartment is having dinner with a guy, her ex barges in and kills everybody. She was Jewish, so they came to collect the body. They cut up the rug, too. Took the sofa cushions.”

“They did not.”

“They did. Almost came to blows with a couple cops, too. Turf shit. In the Jewish religion, they’re supposed to bury you with everything, every drop of blood and hair and stuff.”

“They let them do that? Just take the body? Just take evidence?”

“In this case, they knew who did it,” says Johnny. “But, yeah. I think so.”

This seems very implausible to me. I doubt the NYPD just lets people run off with their crime scene evidence. But it’s not really worth the conversation with Johnny. He calls black people “niggers.”

Finally, some decision is made. The Jews run back to their van and emerge with a stretcher, which they unfold, wheeled legs dropping to the ground. A black bag—a body bag—lies thin atop it. They push the stretcher to the cage and consult with the officers. Everyone stands still for several more minutes, holding themselves against the cold, peering at the leg. Johnny is snapping away, ducking beneath the yellow tape and being yelled at to “get back.” Calloway and Gretchen and Drew come running.

I’m trying to make eye contact with one of the Hasidic men from the gas station. The taller man is stony faced, but the shorter one is clearly distraught, and very often distraught people talk. He looks my way and I raise my eyebrow and open my mouth expectantly. I put up a gloved hand and wave. He sees me—and then he looks away.

The metal arm groans again and lifts up a few feet. Two policemen spread a tarp beneath the cage, and then the tip creeps open, dropping scrap and, finally, the woman. She falls like the rest of the material, turgid and graceless. But as soon as she’s down, the operator swings the cage back, keeping the rest of the scrap from crushing her. A couple pieces come loose, though, and the police scramble to protect her. Johnny is snapping and I’m just staring. I can see her belly and her breasts and a mound of black pubic hair. I shiver again. It’s so fucking cold. Cover her, I think.

“Look,” says Johnny, showing me his viewfinder, pressing buttons to zoom in on her face. Her lips are blue and she has a completely shaved head.

“See,” he says. “She’s a Jew.” I look at him and he looks toward the Hasids. “They make their women shave their heads.”

“No, they don’t,” I say, but I don’t actually know whether he’s wrong.

“Yeah, they do,” he insists. “Haven’t you ever noticed all those women wear wigs?”

I stare at the woman’s image in the camera. Her mouth is open slightly and the corners of her mouth seem to be pulled back in what I can’t help but picture as a scream. White, bloodless cracks run down her lips. One of her front teeth is chipped, and her left eye is swollen shut. It looks like a giant pink and purple gumball.

“Fucking dead Hasid,” says Johnny. “You better try to talk to those dudes now. They’re gonna close up tight as a pussy soon as this gets out.”

He’s probably right, but I stay put. I’m straining to get one last glance at the woman as the men lift her up and set her into the black bag. One long zip and she’s gone.

CHAPTER TWO

Iris is smoking a cigarette outside the bar when I get there.

“Rebekah!” She’s begun drinking already.

“You got off early,” I say. It’s barely five. DCPI said definitively they weren’t going to have an ID for hours, so Mike said I could take off.

“I snuck out,” she says. Brice, the highlighted honey, is beside her, and just like DCPI, he’s in a wool coat and no hat, gloves, or scarf. He smiles, displaying teeth so straight and white and square, I would have said they were dentures on anyone over fifty. Iris drops her cigarette to the sidewalk and smears it with the round toe of her knee-high boot. “Let’s go back in.”

I follow the two of them inside, through the seasonal plastic and canvas vestibule and past the velvet curtain that keeps the cold out. Frau Flannery’s is packed. There’s a mountain of coats in one corner and, because there is about a sixty-degree difference between the air outside and inside the bar, the big front window is steamed up like a Caddy at a drive-in.

Tony is behind the bar, interacting with the cash register. Iris drags Brice to the bar, where two girls from our class are sitting. Hannah is a legal secretary; Jenny fact-checks at one of the food magazines.

“Hi, ladies,” I say, scooting up into the bar stool.

“Hey,” says Hannah, putting one arm around me in a half hug. “Did you just get here?” I nod.

Jenny raises her pint glass. “I’ve been here since three.”

“Jenny got laid off.”

“Fuck,” I say.

Jenny raises her eyebrows and gulps from her beer. “No work tomorrow.”

“What happened?”

Jenny is still drinking, so Hannah answers. “The magazine is folding.”

“Folding?”

Jenny finishes her beer and sets it down on the bar a little harder than she probably meant to. “Yup. The EIC called us into her office right after lunch. She was
crying.
She was like, I never thought I’d see the day.”

“Was circ down that much?”

Jenny shrugs. “Probably. I mean, it’s totally their fault. Instead of making the magazine
better,
they fucking spend zillions on this fucking consulting firm from Wall Street—because they so have their shit together—to tell them where to trim the fat. Apparently, we’re fat.”

“The whole magazine?”

“Fat.”

I shake my head and Iris and I exchange a look. None of this is surprising in the least. We all know what’s happening to the fancy New York City publishing world we dreamed of in college.

“And, of course, I get nothing. No severance, no two weeks paid. Fucking nothing.”

“You’re still freelance?” She gives me a look, like, duh. We’re all freelance. My insecure job at the
Trib
is probably more secure than any of the jobs my friends have. Magazines die, but tabloids always need people willing to run around the city picking up quotes. I could probably keep this gig until I’m forty. And anyway, insecurity is something I’m used to. My dad was always there, and his wife, Maria, has been my stepmom since I was five, but you don’t grow up knowing your very existence sent your mother packing without developing a sense that the bottom can always drop out and you should probably be prepared.

The hole my mother left in me never healed. It’s like the space my wisdom teeth left in the days after I had them pulled: a raw gap, tender and prone to infection. The woman in the metal cage—her open mouth and exposed breasts and bare head, her stark, cruel anonymity—poked at it. I’ve had countless fantasies about my mom’s life the last twenty years: I’ve imagined her married, beaten by her husband, dying in childbirth, turning mute with the shame of abandoning me, committing suicide and leaving a note addressed to me; in my mind she’s come to Orlando and watched my school play from the back row, then ducked out when the curtain fell; she’s fled again, and is trying to contact Oprah to reunite us. She could be doing anything right now. She could have been in that cage.

Hannah and Jenny go to the bathroom. Tony is no longer behind the bar, so Iris and I order beers from a woman with frizzy hair and blue eyeliner. She takes our order and fills it without ever really looking at us. I assume Tony knows I’m coming here tonight—Friday night is UCF night—but I’ve given him the brush-off since our last date. I’ve been processing a conversation we had over dinner at a brick-oven pizza place on Flatbush a little over a week ago, and I’m still not sure how I feel. We’d just ordered wine and were talking about our days. I told him about being sent to cover a fire in a housing project in the Bronx the day before.