The City When It Rains (16 page)

“No one knows who I am,” he whispered ardently.

Fenster laughed under his breath. “Me, neither,” he said.

The prophet went back to the microphone, his voice thundering even more loudly.

Corman drew his camera from his bag and began taking pictures while Fenster stood by silently. He was on his second roll a few minutes later when two uniformed policemen suddenly brushed by him and stepped directly in front of the prophet.

“Remember me?” the taller one asked, his face only a few inches from the straggling hairs of the prophet's beard.

The prophet did not answer. He continued to shout into the microphone.

“You got a permit for sound equipment?” the other policeman asked.

Again, the prophet did not answer.

The taller policeman glanced at his partner, then grabbed the microphone from the prophet's hand. “We told you before,” he said. “If you don't have a permit for this, we can seize it.”

The prophet stepped away, pressed his back against the wall of the building and lowered his hands to his sides. His whole body appeared to grow hard, stony, but as Corman's eyes swept up and down the long, white robe, he could see that beneath it, just at the level of the knee, his legs had begun to tremble fearfully.

Fenster eased himself over to Corman. “Let's get out of here,” he whispered nervously. “Situation like this, anything can happen.”

Corman knelt down quickly, focused, snapped another picture, moved to the left, shot a second photograph, then a third, a fourth and a fifth. The trembling had become more violent, shaking the lower quarters of the robe like a small wind. Corman leaned forward, focusing closely, reaching for the minutest detail.

One of the policemen began spooling up the long electrical cable that ran from the microphone to the amplifier, while his partner boxed the speakers then swept stacks of pamphlets into a plastic bag.

Corman kept shooting. From the corner of his eye, he could see Fenster shrinking back into the crowd. He made no effort to stop him, but instead concentrated once again on the prophet, his lens sweeping up and down the long, white robe while the prophet continued to stand rigidly at the wall, his eyes straight ahead, his face impassive, his body entirely rigid, except for the trembling in his knees.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

T
HE
H
OMICIDE
D
IVISION
of Midtown North was on the second floor. It was an unsightly bull pen. Each time Corman found himself there, he took a few minutes to concentrate on its disarray, the scattered desks and bulging files, the way everything spilled across the floor so that the room itself looked as if it existed in the aftermath of something violent, the leavings of a storm. As always, it was the people who drew his attention, especially the civilians. They usually looked either miserable or inexpressibly happy, and as he'd watched them over the years, Corman had at last realized that this was because most of them had just received either the best or worst news of their lives, that they'd once again escaped or finally fallen victim to their folly.

Lang's desk was toward the back of the room. He was sitting in a swivel chair. A dirty yellow foam oozed from the cracked arms, and tiny flecks of cigar ash clung to the foam.

“What's up?” he asked as Corman stepped up to his desk.

“It's about that woman,” Corman told him, “the jumper. I was wondering if you'd found out anything?”

“Found out? Found what?”

“About her life,” Corrnan said.

Lang looked at him suspiciously. “What's in it for you, Corman?”

“I'm just curious.”

“Bullshit,” Land snapped. “What you got, a story idea, something like that?”

“I don't write.”

“Costa sold film rights, did you know that?”

“For what?”

“That killing at the Met a few years ago,” Lang said. “That opera singer. Shit, man, he got a job consulting for the movie.” He laughed. “Fucking Costa, can you believe that? Consulting on a movie?” He shook his head at the absurdity of it. “He couldn't consult on his own eating habits.” He laughed again, then stopped, his eyes staring evenly at Corman. “Pictures, then. You trying to sell some pictures?”

“I was wondering about her personal effects,” Corman replied crisply.

“You mean what was on her?” Lang asked. “Nothing. Just that old dress and her panties. No rings on her fingers, or in her ears. Nothing. She didn't have anything in her pockets.”

“What about in her place?”

“Jesus, Corman, you saw what that was like.”

“I heard there was a diploma from Columbia.”

Lang nodded. “That's right. A couple Jakes found it the next morning. Framed and everything.”

“Do you have it?”

“We gathered it up, yeah.”

“Anything else?”

“A few odds and ends,” Lang said. He continued to stare at Corman curiously. “Suppose you tell me what this is all about.”

“I can't,” Corman said truthfully.

“Because it's top secret, that it?” Lang asked mockingly.

“Because I'm not sure myself.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Lang hooted. “Let me tell you something, Corman. I've dealt with you free-lance shooters for thirty years, and I never met one that wasn't a petty fucking grifter from top to bottom. You telling me you're different?”

Corman said nothing.

Lang sat back in his seat, placed his large beefy hands behind his head and leaned back into them. “Let me tell you a little story. A few years back, a rookie got a call in the Village. Dog loose, you know?”

Corman nodded.

“The guy goes down, sees the fucking dog running along West Fourth Street. It's barking and snarling a little, and a few people are scooting into the shops to get away from it. To the rookie, it sounds bad, so he draws his service revolver, calls the goddamn dog, says, ‘Here, boy, here, boy,' and pats his fucking leg.” He took a puff on the cigar. “The dog turns, starts coming toward the Jake, still barking and snarling and shit. My guy's beginning to get a little ill at ease, but he knows he can't run from the son-of-a-bitch, not a cop, not a cop in uniform, not from a goddamn dog. So, well, worse comes to worse, and he plugs it. Puts a bullet right in its face. A patrol car shows up right away, and they hustle the rookie into the back seat. Puff, up comes a shooter. Like a genie out of a fucking bottle. He says he wants to take a picture. He says it's for his own private collection. He takes a shot of the rookie and the next day it's on the front page of the
News.
The rookie has his hands in his face. He looks fucking pitiful. The caption says, DOG TIRED.” Lang laughed edgily and leaned forward. “So what I want to know is, how you going to screw me with this angle you're working on?”

“I'm interested in the woman,” Corman said. “That's all.”

“You got a problem with anything else?”

“No.”

“You think I fucked up anything?”

“Not that I saw.”

Lang watched him a moment longer, then relaxed slightly. “Okay,” he said finally. “Who knows, maybe you can do me a favor sometime. What do you want to see?”

“Whatever you picked up in the building.”

Lang shrugged. “Well, we bagged a few items that night,” he said, “but everything else got tossed by the landlord. He had some guys come in and sweep everything out. I guess he wanted to seal it up before some other squatter set up housekeeping.”

“There was still stuff there,” Corman told him.

“Yeah?” Lang said. “How do you know?”

“I went over there.”

“You went inside?”

Corman nodded.

“Find anything?”

Corman thought a moment then decided to tell the truth. “A button.”

Lang laughed. “A button?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we did better than that,” Lang said. He stood up and waved Corman alongside him. “Come on, I'll show you.”

Corman followed him downstairs, then into the basement, and finally, through a long, dusty corridor, to a small room in the north corner of the building. The walls were unpainted gray cinder blocks, and overhead, Corman could see the exposed underbelly of the building itself, pipes, electrical cables, the large wooden crossbeams which supported everything.

“If it's not a mystery,” Lang said, “we keep everything down here, unless somebody claims it.”

“And no one has?”

Lang smiled. ‘Well, we're not exactly talking about the Queen's jewels.” He walked to a large metal filing cabinet, pulled out the drawer, and from it, a single manila envelope. “There you have it,” he said as he handed it to Corman. “Her net worth.”

Corman took the envelope over to a small wooden desk, sat down and stared at the name:
SARAH JUDITH ROSEN.
“Where's the diploma?” he asked.

“In the envelope,” Lang said. He stepped to the door. “Just be sure to turn out the lights when you're through in here,” he added as he left the room.

Corman opened the envelope and scattered its contents across the desk. They were only a few items: a rusty nail file, a compact with a cracked mirror, a pack of matches with two left in place, a small pacifier and a baby rattle shaped like a fat clown. There was an oval rubber change purse, the sort that opened up like a small toothless mouth when the ends are pressed together. Crumpled inside, Corman found a receipt from a blood bank operation on the Bowery.

The diploma was in a teakwood frame. The glass was cracked, and one corner of the frame was splintered. It had awarded Sarah Rosen a bachelor of arts degree in 1988.

Everything else had been inventoried on a police property form, then discarded. The form itself had been folded three times and inserted into the manila envelope. Item by item, it listed the rest of Rosen's worldly goods: a set of toy blocks, along with a plastic pail and shovel, a few infant sleeping suits, one dress, two pairs of jeans, one belt, three pairs of panties, a washcloth and two towels, a pair of sandals, a terry cloth robe, and three dollars and seventy-three cents in cash. There was a notation at the bottom of the list. It said officially what Lang had already told him, that sometime on Saturday the landlord had had the building swept clean of everything else.

Corman let the paper slip from his hand. It fell onto the table, one of its sharp corners piercing the center of the articles spread out around it. It had fallen into an unexpectedly dramatic position, each article at precisely the right angle to another. Corman quickly took out his camera and photographed it. With the right exposure, it would have a sad, haunting quality, perhaps end up as the final picture in Julian's book, stark, graphic, lonely, a life reduced to what it had left behind … and he hadn't had to move a single thing.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

C
ORMAN ARRIVED
at Bellevue a few minutes before Sarah Rosen's body was due to be picked up. It was a massive building, bulky, the sort that always looked overfed. The old city had built it while still reeling in the aftershock of yellow fever, and as he stood at the top of its long line of stairs, it was easy for Corman to imagine the final days of the Yellow Jack Plague, the street cries of “Bring out your dead,” the way the people had wrapped the bodies symbolically in yellow sheets before tossing them onto the open lorries that took them to the common burial pit that had been dug at Washington Square. The plague had lasted for many months, and Lazar had often spoken of it, the empty streets and deserted houses, the stricken, feverish looters who'd staggered through the countless abandoned shops, sometimes dying in them, faceup on the floor, their arms still filled with plunder. Only the illustrators of the period had truly flourished, sketching the disaster one line at a time.

Kellerman glanced up as Corman came into his office. “I wasn't sure you'd make it,” he said.

“I'm here,” Corman answered.

“As far as I know, everything's set,” Kellerman told him. “You ready?”