Silent Screams (17 page)

The park was empty, just the way Willow liked it. His only companions this morning were the Canada geese who had stopped to rest on their early migration back north after their annual Florida vacation. That’s how he thought of it: a Florida vacation. His mother had gone to Florida, but she had never come back. He imagined her flying overhead, honking at him, her voice harsh as the cry of the speckled geese waddling around the boat pond. He sat on his bench and watched the geese pecking at the lumpy brown earth, tattered from the snow and ice of winter.

Rubbing his hands together, Willow looked around the park in satisfaction. Today was a good day. The voices hadn’t come at him yet, with their whispering and taunting, driving him to wander and fidget and talk to himself, just as they drove other people away from him.

In his more lucid moments, he knew how he must appear to them, and why they shunned him. He might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. In fact, his mother once told him he had an IQ of 150.
Near genius level
, she had said.
Near genius level
…well, fat lot of good it had done him. His meds—when he remembered to take them—couldn’t entirely block out the voices that reminded him who was after him. The CIA, the FBI, and occasionally aliens who posed as joggers or young mothers—or sometimes even their kids.

Paranoid schizophrenia
, that’s what they called it. They could call it whatever they wanted—they could call it a pig in a poke, for all he cared.

Christ, he needed a cigarette. He rummaged in his pockets, but all he found were bits of string and fast-food wrappers. Chicken McNuggets, his favorite. He liked to keep things in his pockets because it helped to keep him warm.

He rubbed his hands together again and looked up to see a man approaching him.

“Hey, got a cigarette?” he called out.

The man smiled.

“In my backpack—but I left it in the woods.”

That struck Willow as odd, but he shrugged.

“Shouldn’t leave it there. Someone might take it.”

“Come with me, and I’ll give you one.”

“Okay.” Suspicious, Willow frowned. “Hey—you don’t work for the FBI, do you?”

The man looked surprised. “Good heavens, no—in fact, they’re after me. Don’t tell them you saw me, okay?”

Willow winked at him. “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.”

“I knew I could count on you. Now, how about that cigarette?”

Willow got up and followed the man toward the thicket of woods on the other side of the jogging path.

Behind them, the geese continued their search for scraps to eat along the banks of the pond. When the sound of strangled gasps came from the wooded area, they didn’t even look up.

Straining at the seams like a dowager in an overstuffed dress, Chinatown had for years been expanding into adjacent districts, encroaching on the border of Little Italy to the north and the court district to the south. It was perhaps the most vibrant—and most chaotic—of all Manhattan neighborhoods. When Kathy Azarian called Lee to say she was in town for the evening, and suggested they meet, it was the first place he thought of.

They met at Chatham Square and wandered the crooked, narrow streets until dusk. Chinatown lay in a jumble all around them, spread out like a web woven by a drunken spider. There were no right angles—everything was twists and turns, streets as crooked as the orderly grid of Midtown was straight. There was mystery around every corner, behind the opaque steamed windows of noodle houses, squeezed through the narrow doorways of dim sum parlors, with their platters of succulent, sticky dumplings visible through grimy picture windows. Lee had always loved the dimly lit doorways of the curio shops, the pharmacies and herbariums, with their imponderable supply of green tea cures, shark fin soup, and musty boxes of rare, unpronounceable herbs. Chinatown wasn’t just another neighborhood—it was a separate universe.

Lee had gone down there in the early days after September eleventh, and felt as though he were wandering onto the set of a disaster film. It was all unreal, the once-familiar streets now a scene of unbelievable devastation. Below Canal Street, three out of every four people were in uniform: the National Guard, with their military camouflage gear, looking ready for combat; state troopers, tidy and crisp in blue and gray, with their Smokey the Bear hats; and of course New York City cops, everywhere. They roamed the streets in their starched blue uniforms and heavy black shoes, wary but full of purpose.

And of course there were the firemen, worn and weary but lit from within, caught in the incandescent glow of heroism, trudging to and from the scene of horror in their thick rubber boots and coats, courageous faces smeared with sweat and grime.

Downtown in the days that followed, the night air was yellow with soot and tiny particles from the explosion, and the streets and sidewalks were covered with a dusting of light gray debris. As he biked through it, Lee was reminded of films he had seen about nuclear devastation. The whiteness felt like a nuclear winter. Dismounting, he had wheeled his bike down as far as the intersection of Liberty and Nassau. He was surprised they allowed him to get so close—he had a clear view of Ground Zero. Once again, he was reminded of a movie set. Huge mercury lights threw their yellow glare onto the remains of the doomed buildings, writhing metal that looked like the weathered ruins of ancient castles, twisting up from the earth as though they had stood there for centuries.

Everywhere, workers came and went. Relief workers in their dusty overalls, grimy kerchiefs tied around their heads, leaned against office buildings or sat on the steps, their white dust masks hanging around their necks. Young cops gathered on street corners, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, poking at piles of debris with their billy clubs. The air was suffused with a golden mist that you could smell and taste, and it was incongruously, cruelly beautiful.

Now back in Chinatown again, this time with Kathy beside him, dusk deepening into twilight, Lee still felt the terrible sadness, but this time it was mixed with a new emotion: hope. They walked in silence for the most part, stopping occasionally to admire a piece of ornate carving in a shop window, or inhale the aroma of roasted duck coming from a noodle shop. He tried to keep his mind off his current case, but the newspaper headlines kept running through his head.

Slasher Continues to Terrorize City
Police Baffled

The sight of Kathy, standing in the neon light coming from the window of a Vietnamese restaurant, made his heart give a little leap. Her curly black hair had captured the light in a faint halo, and a single lock fell onto her forehead. He stared at her, mesmerized by the power of a few stray strands of hair.

“Do you want to go in here?” she asked, looking back at him.

“Sure, this is fine. I’ve never been here, but it looks good.”

They walked down the steep, cracked steps and into a steam-filled foyer, moisture condensing on the glass door of the restaurant. A middle-aged Asian woman conducted them to a table in the corner by the window and handed them large menus covered in red plastic. The woman was impersonal and businesslike as they settled into their seats.

As she handed them the menus, Kathy said, “Thank you. Do you have Saigon beer?”

The woman’s face broadened into a smile. She looked at Lee.

“Two?”

“Sure, why not?”

As the woman left, he turned to Kathy. “You made her happy.”

“I think it’s because I asked for Vietnamese beer instead of Chinese.”

“And you even knew the brand name.”

“Well, they do have Vietnamese restaurants in Philadelphia, you know.”

Lee laughed, surprised at how easily the sound left his body. He hadn’t laughed much lately. “Let’s not get an intercity rivalry going this soon.”

“Okay. Just figured I’d establish my territory early.” She bent her head to look at the menu, and the same lock of dark hair fell onto her forehead. Lee’s stomach lurched again. He looked down at the menu, but he wasn’t very hungry tonight.

It was a quiet Sunday night, and there were only a few other customers in the place, all of them Asian. Nelson always told him that was a good sign in Chinatown, and meant the food was decent, or at least authentic.

Kathy looked up from the menu. In the lamplight, her eyes were the color of the Hudson River on a cloudy day. “What do you think of chicken with lemongrass and chili?”

“Sounds good to me.” The truth was, it could have been sawdust, and he would have said the same thing.

“Okay, let’s get that. And how about this mushroom appetizer? Does that sound good?”

“Sure.”

In the end they settled on another entrée, something involving noodles.

“So,” she said, putting her elbows on the table and leaning toward him, “how do you like what you do?”

“It can be very frustrating, but it feels like what I should be doing—right now, at least.” He thought about telling her about the Internal Affairs investigation, but didn’t want to spoil the evening.

“I know what you mean,” Kathy said. “That’s the main thing—not that work is easy, but that it feels right for you, somehow.”

“You know, a lot of people think what I do is ‘soft science.’ They don’t respect it much.”

She gazed into her teacup as if seeking her answer in the dark liquid within.

“And what do you think?”

Lee smiled. “You sound like Dr. Williams.”

“Oh. Is she…?”

“My shrink—yes.”

Again she lowered her eyes, as if it wasn’t proper to say the words.

“That’s one of the things I like about bones,” she said. “There’s nothing ‘soft’ about them. They’re so clean, so smooth—the last thing to surrender to the decay process. You know that properly preserved, they can last indefinitely? They’re kind of heroic.”

“I never thought about it that way.”

“A lot of times bodies are found when only the bones are left, as the last physical reminder that this once was a human being. If it weren’t for bones, even more crimes would go unsolved.”

Somewhere, deep in the woods perhaps, Laura’s bones were waiting for him—for someone—to discover them.

The woman came back with two beers and poured them into tall thin glasses, all the while smiling at Kathy.

“You’ve made a friend,” Lee said after the woman had gone.

She looked around the restaurant. “It’s different here now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “There was this feeling, in the weeks afterward, that’s hard to describe exactly, but it was a kind of camaraderie—a feeling that we were all in this together.”

“I know what you mean. It was sort of like that in Philly, too.”

“And we all thought that there might be more attacks coming too—we didn’t know what to expect. Where were you when it happened?” he asked.

“I’m ashamed to say. I was in the Caribbean.”

“Why be ashamed?”

“I was snorkeling in St. Thomas when we heard the news. I guess I wanted to be back here—to help in some way, you know. And instead there I was, forced to stay an extra week at Crystal Beach. Poor me—another week of fried conch, Tecate beer, and palm trees.”

“What was it like there? How did people react?”

“Disbelief, at first, and then shock. Just total, utter shock. I remember sitting around the bar that night. There was no television, but someone had brought out a radio, and we were all huddled around it, listening.”

She looked at the raindrops gathering on the windowpane. “It’s ironic, actually. One of the main selling points of this resort was that you could ‘get away from it all’—you know, no TV, no phones in the rooms. We were all there because we wanted to be cut off from the rest of the world. And then this terrible thing happens, and we sit there together in the bar—I guess there were a dozen or so guests and about half that many staff—and we just sat and listened to that damn radio all night. By morning we were all on a first-name basis with each other. It was like instant bonding, you know? Like in wartime—our country had been attacked.”

“So you were all Americans?”

“One couple was Canadian, and there were two elderly English ladies traveling together. We all thought they were lovers, but they were very ‘discreet’ about their relationship. We called them Gertrude and Alice when they weren’t around.”

“As in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas?”

“Right.”

The waitress brought steaming plates of food and set them down on the table. Kathy poured hot sauce on her chicken—a lot of hot sauce. Lee was amazed when she took a bite and swallowed it as though it were nothing.

“Up until that night everyone had been drinking piña coladas, margaritas—frozen drinks with fresh fruit and little paper umbrellas—but that night we all ordered scotch and whiskey and gin, straight up. People weren’t drinking to have fun anymore; they were drinking to calm down. It was kind of surreal. All we could pick up on this little radio was this local station that was getting a feed from the BBC. The announcer sounded really upset. It was startling to hear this very formal, stiff-upper-lip-type Englishman almost lose it on the air.”

She took a long drink of her beer and motioned to the woman for another one.

“But at least we were spared the pictures that night. Thank God for that. No one slept very much, but at least we were spared the pictures.”

“Who were you traveling with?” Lee asked, feeling an unwelcome flicker of jealousy.

“My dad. We both love to snorkel. I’m an only child, and since Mom’s been gone, I guess we sort of depend on each other, you know?”

She looked at him, her eyes serious. “Do you think that’s weird?”

“No, I think it’s sweet.”

She reached for the noodle dish, almost knocking over her beer. She was a bit of a loose cannon, he thought. In spite of her scientific training and precise manner in professional settings, away from her work she had an open, childlike demeanor. When she talked there was a force behind the words, a passion for the minutia of life that made him want to drink up her words.

A thought flashed into his head, unbidden:
In the midst of death, there is life
.

He couldn’t remember where he had heard it, but as he looked at Kathy Azarian’s glistening, eager face, he understood what it meant.