streets were almost entirely deserted. The restaurants and cafeterias were tightly closed, and some had already taken the added precaution of boarding up their windows. Even the brilliant chandeliers of the Tutweiler Hotel appeared somehow dim and exhausted in the fully fallen darkness. The streetlamps swung ponderously in the heavy summer air, and the light that swept down from them seemed to fall to earth in thick blue drops. Uniformed policemen patrolled the empty sidewalks two abreast, their holsters already unsnapped, their fingers playing at the handles of their revolvers. In front of Pizitz, black sanitation men were gathering together stacks of broken placards and tossing them into the grinding steel jaws of the compactors, and a little further down, only a few blocks from the park, another crew was hosing waves of accumulated litter into the cement gutters.
The park itself was green and lush, and Ben knew that within only a few hours it would be shimmering brightly in the early morning dew. Far in the distance, he could see the outline of its empty playground. The swings were moving languidly in the air, and under the tall gray lantern, the slide took on a ghostly silver.
To the left, and barely visible through a wall of trees, he could make out the high wire fence of the softball field, and it instantly reminded him of the goalpost off Twenty-third Street. He made a hard left at the end of the park and headed out toward the distant perimeters of Bearmatch.
There were no streetlamps in the ballfield, and so, when he reached it, he could see only a spot of dry ground beneath the covering darkness. No line of benches, no mound of freshly turned earth, no goalpost. Only a wall of impenetrable black which seemed to rise at the very edge of the broken, weedy sidewalk and then extend outward forever. For a while he sat in his car and smoked a cigarette while he stared out into the dark field. From time to time, people would casually approach the car, moving steadily down the sidewalk until they were close enough to notice that the man behind the wheel was white. Then they’d suddenly freeze, as if they’d just stumbled upon a rattlesnake in the brush, eye him cautiously for an instant, then hurry away toward the other side of the street. It happened first one time, then another and another, until Ben grew tired of seeing it, hit the ignition and drove away.
SIX
On his way to work the next morning, Ben parked at almost the same spot on Twenty-third Street where he’d stopped the night before. But by seven o’clock, when he finally pulled over to the curb, the streets were already busy. Small knots of people strolled briskly up and down the sidewalks and across the ballfield. Children sped past on their rusting bicycles, and the traffic along the street and the adjoining avenues was quick and noisy. It was as if the whole neighborhood had been resurrected with the morning light, and now, when people approached his car, they didn’t hesitate or step aside, but simply continued forward without so much as a break in stride. The bright sunlight seemed to serve them as a kind of shield against the dangers which inevitably returned with the night, and under its brief protection, they strode openly to the bus stops, talking quietly as they walked.
For a while Ben sat behind the wheel and watched, just as he had the night before. But this time, he knew that he had only a few minutes to linger at the edge of the ballfield before the inevitable voice from the radio ordered him to headquarters. By now the detectives on the morning shift would be trudging up the cement stairs to receive what they had lately come to call their ‘combat orders,’ assignments which shifted by the minute, but which generally had to do with handling the crowds, paperwork and jailhouse overflow caused by the demonstrations. It was as if everything else had stopped, all the burglaries, assaults and domestic quarrels, and that now there was only this single, dreadful preoccupation with the streets, a great black pit into which everything else, the whole varied texture of daily life, had fallen.
And yet, as Ben continued to sit in his car, his eyes slowly moving from one corner to the next, he could see that much of the general flow of life continued. Bearmatch went on with its routine, and from behind the wheel, he could sit quietly and take in its pace, its odors, the broad tone of its common life. He could see how the maids in their white uniforms gathered in little knots at the bus stops, how the laborers in their gray worksuits or shirtless beneath their tattered bib-overalls moved like a slow, silent army toward the railroad yards and sweltering steel mills. He could hear the morning shift-horns as they sounded loudly through the alleyways and over the sloping shanties, and he remembered that in his youth, they had sounded over his house too. He could smell the bacon grease, redeye gravy and warm half-risen biscuits, and for an instant they seemed to come from his mother’s kitchen, and he could recall how, in the morning, after breakfast, his own father and mother had moved out onto the street like the people who now flowed around him, taking him first to school, and then trudging on down the avenue to board the old electrical trolleys that crisscrossed the city on a grid of wire and steel.
For a long time, his parents had been mostly ghosts to him, his father brought down by a slow disease, his mother simply dead for a reason no one at Hillman Hospital had ever bothered to explain. In the summer, as he remembered now, they’d sometimes fallen asleep in their swing while he remained inside, listening to the radio. Later he would find them slouched to one side, the old man’s face buried in his wife’s large, fallen breasts, the old woman’s head dropping so far down toward her husband’s that it looked half-severed, and both of them snoring wheezily while the lightning bugs twinkled in the humid air. But now they suddenly returned to him as more than bodies floating silently in a little wrought-iron swing, and for a moment he found himself wondering about what their lives had really been, what they had thought about as they sat together, listening to the crickets and katydids, the slicing sound the traffic made after a fierce summer rain, the tinkling bells of the trolleys, what they would think about even now if they were alive, what they would think about the uproar in the city, about the nameless little girl beneath the goalpost, what they, knowing about all this, would tell hi in he should do.
The clack of the radio sounded suddenly, and after it, the dispatcher’s voice. ‘Headquarters calling Car 17.’
Ben picked up the microphone. ‘Car 17.’
‘That you, Ben?’
‘Yeah. What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing much,’ the dispatcher said. ‘Patterson, at the Coroner’s Office, he wants you to give him a call when you get a chance.’
‘Is he at Hillman?’
‘I guess so.’
‘I’m not too far away,’ Ben said. I’ll drive over. Everything okay at headquarters?’
‘About the same.’
‘I’ll come over as soon as I leave Hillman,’ Ben said.
He snapped the radio back into its cradle, then paused a moment, staring out once again into the field. Perhaps a hundred yards away, he could see groups of children gathering under the goalpost. They looked as if they were dressed in their Sunday best, the girls in clean white dresses, the boys in dark trousers and plain white shirts. For a moment, Ben thought it might be some kind of memorial service for the murdered girl, some strange Bearmatch rite which no outsiders knew about. Then, suddenly, a tall young man in a dark blue suit stepped from their midst and shouted something. Instantly a smattering of placards shot into the air. They were made of white poster-paper tacked to spindly wooden slats, and they were the sort Ben had seen a great many of since the demonstrations had begun. The thick, black lettering conveyed the same protests and demands, and as the children filed silently off the littered field, two abreast, holding hands, smiling with what seemed to him an odd and unknowable happiness, Ben wondered if, under different circumstances, the murdered girl might have been among them, her hand in someone else’s, her buckled shoes skipping lightly across the parched ground, her face emboldened with the same bright smile.
Patterson was going through a stack of files in the outer office when Ben arrived.
‘Well, they got to you pretty fast,’ he said.
‘What do you have?’ Ben asked.
‘I wish I had more, to tell you the truth,’ Patterson told him. ‘You find out who the girl was yet?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I probably can’t help you much with that,’ Patterson said. ‘But I did find something you might want to see.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Especially since the front office is so hot for the Coroner’s Office to work this case.’ He pushed himself back from the desk slightly and opened the top drawer. ‘I vacuumed her dress, and while I was doing that, I found something.’ He drew a plastic bag from the desk drawer and handed it to Ben. ‘It was in one of her pockets. I’m surprised you guys didn’t find it when you dug her up.’
Ben lifted the bag up to the light. He could see a metal ring. The plated imitation gold was already turning
