Attending to official business in a police station in New York City can be very, very unnerving. At least that was how it made me feel when I got there and when I finally left there, an hour later. I asked at the desk for "Steve", calling him by his official title, "Captain Jenkins." The uniformed woman at the high desk took my name, then gave me an odd look, then told me to have a seat on a bench against the wall and someone would come to get me when everything was ready for me.
"You sound like you’ve been expecting me," I said to her, "but didn’t believe I’d show up."
"You got that right," she replied, emphasizing the word "that."
"What do you mean?" I asked her.
"It’s none of my business," she said, gesturing to the bench again. I nodded and went over to it and sat down. I was looking straight at her, hunched over her paperwork and her telephone. She was paying no attention to me, or to the others in this way-station space of wood and linoleum. I hadn’t brought anything with me to read and there were no magazines such as you’d find in a doctor’s waiting room. I had nothing to do but watch the people around me.
Sitting across the room, at an angle to me, was a woman who was clearly a prostitute, and not one that my family would approve of either. She was wearing net stockings and very high-heeled pumps, a short red leather skirt that, seated, barely kept the view between her legs shaded. She had on a halter-top that was too tight and too small to restrain her breasts and keep them from urging upward to that her nipples were straining against the turned hemline of the material. With a bare midriff, this halter seemed to say "one heavy breath and my tits are yours." Her hair was curly and long and more brass than bronze in color. She wore too much makeup and it was hard to determine her age, but I put it at about 25. She was chewing gum and, if I hadn’t seen her type in movies, I wouldn’t have believed that anyone could look so obvious and so trashy. She saw me staring at her and she winked at me. I looked away.
On the other side of my bench, where my eyes now strayed, there were two men, one in his late teens and the other, clearly his father, about 40. They were not looking at each other, not really noticing much of what was going on around them. They stared instead, the father at the floor and the son at the clock on the wall opposite us. As I watched them the son suddenly kicked his father in the shins, but the older man never responded. He just kept sitting and staring.
I was aware that someone had come over and sat down next to me. I turned to look, hoping it wasn’t the prostitute, and found myself staring into the eyes of my missing friend, Freddy. It took me a moment, a weird, short moment, to realize who it was, but when I did it took me even longer to react.
I wanted to instantly grab her, hold her, pull her close to me. I wanted to shout her name out, over and over. I wanted to cry and to laugh. I wanted to slap her silly. All I did was look at her. I think I may have smiled. She did not.
"Where were you?" I whispered to her, not quite the greeting I had anticipated.
"I needed time," Freddy said.
"But where were you?"
"I’ll never tell you."
"Was it something so horrible, then?"
"Yes." Her face had not altered in this tiny chat. There was nothing in her mouth’s slight turn-down, nothing in her darkening eyes that could tell me anything.
"I’ve been frantic," I told her.
"Brianna?" she asked.
"Back in England."
"That’s good."
I nodded, but didn’t really know why I nodded.
"Are you married?" I asked her, still whispering.
"What do you think?" she responded.
"It doesn’t matter what I think. Are you married to him?"
"Who?"
"Who? Who do you think I mean?"
"I’m not sure anymore. I’m not so sure about many things."
"Mikhael. There. I’ve said his name. Are you his wife?"
"No. That’s not possible."
"I beg your pardon? Not possible?"
"No."
"I don’t understand."
"Max," came the voice of Captain "Steve." It cut through me like a lead pipe would if it connected with my guts. I sat looking at the officer at the desk for a moment. Then Captain Jenkins spoke again. "Come with me, please."
I stood up and looked at him. He looked much the same as he had earlier in the day, except that here he seemed less friendly, less accusative, more professional.
"And Freddy?" I asked him, not completing the sentence.
"We still don’t have a bead on her, I’m afraid."
"But she’s...." I turned to where Freddy had been, but she wasn’t there any longer. I quickly glanced around the room, but I didn’t see her. I gulped, craned to see corners that were slightly darker, tried to spot Freddy in some other part of the waiting room, but she wasn’t there. I couldn’t have imagined her, I thought. I couldn’t have had that conversation with the air, it had to have been with Freddy.
"She’s what, Max? Have you heard from her?"
"I thought so.... I... I’m not sure," I said.
"Well, come with me. I have something to show you." He made a gesture in a direction away from the waiting room, and I moved off toward the door he had indicated.
He was right behind me. I could hear his heavy footfalls and smell his Lime cologne. I stopped at the closed door and waited. He reached around me, grabbed the knob and turned it. The door swung open inward and Steve said, "that’s how we open doors here at the station. Go on in, please." I did and he followed me in.
It was a spartan space, with a long table and three chairs placed on two sides. Steve indicated the solo chair to me, so I moved to it and sat down. He took one of the others, and we sat there for a few silent minutes while he watched my face and I watched his.
"What did you think of her?" he asked me suddenly.
"Her? Who?"
"The whore. Out there in the waiting room." He smiled broadly. "What did you think of her?"
"You really want to know?"
"Yes."
"Is that why you brought me down here? To get my opinion of a street-walker?"
"No. I’m just curious."
I looked at him trying to understand him and his motives, but there was nothing in his face to even give me a hint of what he was hoping to hear from me.
"Well, I thought that if my grandmother was here she would have had harsh words for that woman. Granny Elaine was pretty outspoken and she didn’t believe in the garish or the declassé. I thought if my mother were here she would ignore the woman entirely, not even acknowledge her presence. My mother, whether you believe it or not, was a woman of high principles and while she never did understand me, she would never have allowed me to consort with a woman who made her work such an obvious part of her appearance. For that matter she wouldn’t have had much to do with the uniformed lady cop either. Same reasons."
"So you thought a lot of things."
"Yeah. I guess I did."
"You’re a smart kid."
"First of all, Steve, I’m not a kid. Secondly, yes, I’m smart."
"Sorry for the first thing."
"I don’t understand. Sorry for which first thing? Sorry I’m not a kid? Sorry you called me a kid?"
"Sorry." He didn’t elucidate, and I found that fact to be more irritating than being called a kid by him, or by anyone any longer.
"Why am I here, Steve?"
"I want you to try to identify someone for us, Max."
"Well, that’s pretty straightforward."
"Yup. I just wanted to prepare you for what you’ll see."
"What? Five guys in a lineup and one of them a familiar face?"
"Oh, no. One guy on a marble slab, face-up, or what’s left of it."
"What?"
"We think we have your friend Mikhael, Max. We think so, but we’re not sure."
"Dead?"
"Oh, yes, very dead."
"Where? How?"
"Later on that. I just wanted you to know, in advance, that you’re not looking at a pretty picture here. We’re hoping you can make the match, but it may not be possible."
"What happened to him? It sounds like his face won’t be easy to recognize."
"A lot happens to people, Max, when they die. If they lay around too long, a natural process takes over and ... things happen."
"What happened to him?"
"Come on. Let’s go downstairs to the morgue and see if you can recognize this guy."
"I’m not sure..." I started to say, but I caught myself, stood up and followed him out of this private room and back into the general melee of police business. As we passed through the room, I saw that the prostitute was gone. The two men were still sitting where I’d last seen them, and Freddy was nowhere to be found. "I had to have imagined her," I thought. "I wanted to find her so badly, I created her." I turned that over and over in my mind, but couldn’t quite make myself believe it.
I followed Steve to an elevator that stood open and waiting. He punched a button and the doors closed and we started to descend. It took a while, although I found out later that we had only gone down two levels. Still, the ride seemed almost interminable. When the door finally reopened and we stepped out I was aware at once of the change in atmosphere. It was cooler here and damper as well. Lights were dimmer. Doors were unmarked except for numbers and Steve consulted a note he was carrying before he moved me toward a specific door, room numer 12. We entered and the atmosphere changed again, altered into something suspect and dangerous.
The room was basically empty except for a large marble table in the center and a wall with six large doors, about four feet square, in it. Each one had a latch and a place to insert a label. I could see that two of them had labels, one green and one pink. Steve pressed a button on the wall next to the door we had entered through and threw me an encouraging smile.
Neither of us spoke while we waited and it wasn’t long before an attendant in a white coat, with an electric-colored ID badge came in and joined us. He greeted Steve by name, nodded to me and proceeded across the room where he opened the door with the pink marker label on it. With apparent ease he pulled out a dolly on which lay a body, covered by a sheet. The dolly, supported by heavy metal rods, reached the marble table and the attendant, whose name I never heard, or read, swiveled it around so that it was stretched the length of the high table. Then he shoved the rods back into the cupboard from which they had come and reclosed the door. Nodding to Steve and me one more time, he left the room without a sound.
Steve walked around to the other side of the slab-table that now supported the dead and covered body.
"Here’s the way this works, Max," he said. "I’ll leave the room and when you’re ready you pull back the sheet and take as long as you need to look at this man and see if you can identify him. When you’re ready...when you’re quite finished, you can cover him over again, or not - it’s your choice - and just come on out into the hallway. I’ll be there, waiting."
I didn’t answer him. I just stared at him.
"I can’t be here with you. It’s not allowed."
Again I just stared at him.
"Are you okay?" he asked me.
"I didn’t even have to do this for my parents, you know," I told him.
"Someone did."
"It wasn’t me."
"Are you going to be okay?"
I nodded, although I wasn’t too sure about that. Steve nodded back at me, walked around the table and pressed my shoulder with his hand as he went on by. I heard him behind me open and then shut the door. I was alone.
There was a light fixture over the table, just the way there often is with a pool table. It shed a fairly bright, though not very bright, light on the still figure of the dead man before me. Most of the rest of the room was shrouded in a dim glow. All concentration was on the body.
I put my hand on the cloth and realized I was trembling a bit. I could see it before I felt it, but my hand was definitely shaking. I steeled myself for whatever it was I was about to look upon and touched the cloth. It had a clammy sense to it, a little bit damp, a little bit cool. I gripped it with my thumb and first finger and slowly moved it downward, across the face and neck and upper chest of the dead man.
There was something very wrong with this man. His face was not immediately apparent. The skin had grown blotchy, discolered with grey and purple spots, almost like the pattern in military pants meant to disguise the wearer in a jungle. I couldn’t find his eyes, but I could see the shape of the nose beneath them. His lips were purple and swollen and I couldn’t be certain of much. There was no way I could identify this man from his face. No way at all.
The hairline looked like Mikhael’s and the hair had gone colorless, a dull gray with flecks of brown. It could have been his hair, but it was messy and dissheveled, a look I’d never seen on him. The brow, as discolored as the rest of his face, gave no clue. I felt like crying, but there was something so awful about this man’s missing features that I didn’t let go and express any grief. In fact, the longer I stood there, the less human this figure became, and certainly the more distant from my life.
I remembered something about Mikhael I had long forgotten, a scar he had on his belly from an accident with his stilts when he was young. I wondered about pulling the cloth down to expose that area of his body, but I was also reluctant. I had seen these identification scenes in movies and no one ever looked at anything other than the face. Still, the face here gave me nothing. There were no distinguishing features or marks that could help me. I decided to go for it. I pulled the cloth off the body in one quick stroke.
It was there. I couldn’t have any more doubts about the identity of this man. The long scar across his abdomen, its crazy shape, zigging downward to his pubic hair and back up to his belly button was unmistakeable. And there was his penis, stiff now in death, but so very much his "princely member." I reached out my hand to touch it, but couldn’t do it. Instead, still without a tear shed, I turned away and walked out of the room. Steve was there, waiting, as he said he would be.
"Well?"
"It’s him."
"You’re absolutely sure?"
"Oh, yes. He has a scar on his belly that is unmistakable. I looked for it. It’s there."
"You really did know him well."
Without pause I said "Very well. Intimately." I thought Steve flinched once when I said that, but I didn’t care.
"We still need to find his wife."
"She’s not his wife. I know that for certain."
"How would you know that?"
"I saw her today. She told me."
"You saw her? Where?"
"Here. In the station waiting room. Just before you came to get me."
"Why didn’t you say something?"
"I just did."
"We need to question her."
"Why? She seemed all right. He’s dead and can’t hurt her anymore. It’s over, Steve."
"And it ain’t over till the field is plowed, Max. That friend of yours, her husband he claimed in that letter, was murdered. We need to talk to her."
I hadn’t even asked about his death. I hadn’t thought enough to ask and now I knew that there was something so very wrong about all this that I might even be caught up in the middle of his suspicions. I looked at him, heard the sounds of footsteps behind me and I fainted.