the scene once when a Korean was shot in the neck in the middle of a robbery. The guy with him was already dead, and this guy was lying there in a lake of blood. It was pumping out of a hole in his neck with every heartbeat. Five months in the Academy didn’t exactly train anybody to deal with neck wounds of this severity, but April didn’t panic. She tried to plug up the hole, applied as much pressure as she could, and stayed with him until they got him out.
He was one of the lucky ones. Somehow the bullet missed the carotid artery. He lost his voice box, and was six months in the hospital, but he didn’t die. She did the follow-up on him, so she knew how he had to learn to talk by holding the hole closed with a flap of skin.
Being a cop wasn’t as high maybe as being a doctor, but April knew the Korean wouldn’t have lived if she hadn’t been there to get help and keep his blood from escaping out the hole in his neck while they waited for the ambulance.
She wasn’t afraid of getting hit like that. She’d pulled her gun, but she’d never used it except at the range every month, and no one had ever shot at her. What scared her was the empty, falling-down buildings, with the windows boarded up, and what happened in them. There were ghosts in the buildings, living and dead. Sometimes the windows weren’t boarded up. They were just holes. She could see the pigeons flying in and out.
What scared April was getting a call about a dead body in one of those buildings and having to go in and find it. Down an elevator shaft, or just lying on the floor in a room upstairs. She used to dream about it every night. Getting that call and having to climb the stairs looking for it, having no idea which room it was in. Or what else she might find. On the night shift when she was a rookie she confessed this to one person, and then everybody knew.
Long-ago advice from her mother: Never tell your weak place. People can break you from there. After she told about her weak place, April worried that they would get her there when that body turned up.
They didn’t, though. When she finally got the call she had known would come because she dreamed it too many times for it not to happen, her supervisor told her she didn’t have to go in. He didn’t break her in her weak place after all. He told her to wait for backup. It was on the third floor of a walk-up. Boarded up except for the front door.
April stood downstairs that day, thinking they would make her go in when they got there because you weren’t supposed to have any weak places in NYPD. If she didn’t go in when they asked her to, she wouldn’t get promoted. She’d have to stay on foot patrol in Bed-Stuy all her life. That was another scary prospect.
April knew whenever she was really frightened from deep inside it always came from something her mother told her, something Chinese that didn’t make sense in America. Her mother talked constantly, and couldn’t seem to stop. Her father hardly spoke at all. Sai Woo said she had to fill the silences her husband made or else ghosts would come in and fill them with wickedness. April said there weren’t any ghosts in America, and her father might have something to say if Sai Woo gave him a place to let his thoughts out.
This was when her mother looked at her with the greatest scorn and dropped another one of her priceless pearls that had nothing to do with anything.
“Sun rises in the East, goes down in the West,” like April was supposed to know what that meant.
Still, April did know what it meant. It meant there
As April stood outside the Bed-Stuy building waiting for backup that day, she felt old China crowding all around her. If she were a true American cop, she’d have no trouble climbing those stairs and looking at the body. So what? How bad could it be? But if she were truly Chinese under everything, she’d have to consume some little something, a hair or a piece of dust, something from the scene. If she didn’t do that, the weak place would always be there inside of her.
But something magical happened when her supervisor showed up and said, “All right, April, you stay down here and secure the area.”
“No, it’s okay. I can do it,” she had assured him.
She climbed up the three flights of stairs, not first maybe. But she was there when they found it. It had been there for months. There wasn’t even any smell anymore, nothing like a dead animal decaying behind a wall. There was just a pile of rags and hair and bone with some dried skin that looked like leather covering it. Was this what I was afraid of, she asked herself. She decided she was all American and didn’t have to consume it.
So this was what I wanted, she thought now, going up the stairs into the dorm where Ellen Roane lived. The place was gloomy and looked almost deserted. The girl would have been better off living at home. Better address downtown. But not the freedom to do as she pleased. April went inside. There was a fat guard sitting at a small table that didn’t look like it was always there.
“I’m looking for Ellen Roane,” she said.
“Well, you won’t find her here,” the guard said. He was Hispanic, not very friendly.
“How about Connie Shagan?” April said. Connie Shagan, the Roanes had told her, was Ellen’s roommate.
“Won’t find her either. Or any of them.”
“Is there a teacher, uh, a professor, who lives here I could talk to?” She hadn’t wanted to, but now she flashed her shield.
The guard looked at it and shrugged. “There’s still nobody here. It’s spring break.”
April Woo cursed herself five hundred times as she walked back to where she left the car. See what happens when you leave out one tiny question. One detail that changes the whole story. The parents didn’t bother to tell her everybody disappeared. All the students, and even the professors disappeared. And she didn’t think to ask. It wasn’t very smart.
She would talk to the parents in the morning when they came in with the girl’s picture and ask them if they really wanted to put their daughter in the system when she was probably skiing in Vermont. With the Barstollers, who had a Chinese maid. She smiled at the thought, as she took the car back.
8
Troland Grebs was up all night with bad dreams again. Monkeys were beating each other. A bull in the garden was goring somebody. He was in a cold sweat, only half drunk from a long evening of drinking. He couldn’t stop thinking about that girl in the movie. First time he saw it, he had to walk out.
At three he gave up trying to sleep and went outside for a walk. The smells of the ocean off Pacific Beach, the palm and orange trees, the smooth green grass of front lawns soothed him. He walked around, circling his neighborhood many times. Just as the light was graying and before the sun rose, he was back in his one bedroom apartment, sitting on the tiny terrace on the third floor waiting for the jogger to come by.
For months he had been waking up early to sit up there and watch her. She lived on the third floor, too, on the other side of the garden. He had heard people call her Jane, but he had never spoken to her. She kept her shades drawn. He never saw her undressed except this way, in the bicycle shorts and two tops. One stretchy thing made of a few straps over a similar thing with more straps in different places. Crisscrossed and so tight Troland wondered every day how she got them off. He knew how he would get them off. From the terrace he watched her dispassionately.
She came out of the door and stretched. He could see her raise her arms and breathe. She started jogging in place, looking up at the sky. She plugged her Walkman into her ears. She never saw him, never looked in his direction. She took off at a moderate pace and disappeared into the street. After she was gone, he went in to shower, then dressed carefully and went to work at the plant just north of Lindbergh Field.
He wasn’t talking much any more. He sat at his drafting table for hours every day, working on the intricate details of jet engine modifications, sunk deep in his own thoughts. Ever since the Persian Gulf War he’d been moving closer and closer to the insides of the cruise missiles he’d worked on all the years they hadn’t been needed, and no one believed would work. Now everybody knew that they could seek out and destroy. He felt his mark was on every hit in Iraq. It made him feel powerful. He had started seeking out and destroying, had gone back to where
