Within moments of each other, two vans pull up. One has blue and gold Hebrew lettering on the side. The other says KINGS COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER. A uniformed officer lifts up the yellow tape and lets both vans enter the yard. Out of one jump Orthodox men in broad-brimmed black hats, with neon green vests over their coats and white strings hanging from their hips. Out of the other jump men in blue jumpsuits. They all run toward the body.
With the crowd beside her swelled, my stomach begins to hurt. Why can’t they get her out of there? My intestines get all fucked up when I get upset. I learned from a therapist many years ago that it’s called anxiety. I’m always afraid of stuff. Weird stuff, though. Not monsters or murderers or even airplanes. It’s more ephemeral than that. I feel fear when I feel insecure. When I feel alone or rejected. And when I feel powerless-like I do looking at this poor woman’s skin, torn by metal, bare beneath the sun on the coldest day of the year. Get her out, I think. Get her warm.
Johnny appears next to me.
“This is seriously fucked up,” he says, winded, excited.
“Who the fuck are all these people?” I say. “Get her inside and sort it out there.”
Johnny chuckles. “If only it were so easy, Beck.”
“What?” I say.
“The Jews are here,” he says, as if that explains something.
“And?”
“And, the Jews take their own bodies.”
I do not understand.
“You’ve never seen them before? They were at that murder-suicide around Thanksgiving on the Upper East Side. Remember? Woman who owned the apartment is having dinner with a guy, her ex barges in and kills everybody. She was Jewish, so they came to collect the body. They cut up the rug, too. Took the sofa cushions.”
“They did not.”
“They did. Almost came to blows with a couple cops, too. Turf shit. In the Jewish religion, they’re supposed to bury you with everything, every drop of blood and hair and stuff.”
“They let them do that? Just take the body? Just take evidence?”
“In this case, they knew who did it,” says Johnny. “But, yeah. I think so.”
This seems very implausible to me. I doubt the NYPD just lets people run off with their crime scene evidence. But it’s not really worth the conversation with Johnny. He calls black people “niggers.”
Finally, some decision is made. The Jews run back to their van and emerge with a stretcher, which they unfold, wheeled legs dropping to the ground. A black bag-a body bag-lies thin atop it. They push the stretcher to the cage and consult with the officers. Everyone stands still for several more minutes, holding themselves against the cold, peering at the leg. Johnny is snapping away, ducking beneath the yellow tape and being yelled at to “get back.” Calloway and Gretchen and Drew come running.
I’m trying to make eye contact with one of the Hasidic men from the gas station. The taller man is stony faced, but the shorter one is clearly distraught, and very often distraught people talk. He looks my way and I raise my eyebrow and open my mouth expectantly. I put up a gloved hand and wave. He sees me-and then he looks away.
The metal arm groans again and lifts up a few feet. Two policemen spread a tarp beneath the cage, and then the tip creeps open, dropping scrap and, finally, the woman. She falls like the rest of the material, turgid and graceless. But as soon as she’s down, the operator swings the cage back, keeping the rest of the scrap from crushing her. A couple pieces come loose, though, and the police scramble to protect her. Johnny is snapping and I’m just staring. I can see her belly and her breasts and a mound of black pubic hair. I shiver again. It’s so fucking cold. Cover her, I think.
“Look,” says Johnny, showing me his viewfinder, pressing buttons to zoom in on her face. Her lips are blue and she has a completely shaved head.
“See,” he says. “She’s a Jew.” I look at him and he looks toward the Hasids. “They make their women shave their heads.”
“No, they don’t,” I say, but I don’t actually know whether he’s wrong.
“Yeah, they do,” he insists. “Haven’t you ever noticed all those women wear wigs?”
I stare at the woman’s image in the camera. Her mouth is open slightly and the corners of her mouth seem to be pulled back in what I can’t help but picture as a scream. White, bloodless cracks run down her lips. One of her front teeth is chipped, and her left eye is swollen shut. It looks like a giant pink and purple gumball.
“Fucking dead Hasid,” says Johnny. “You better try to talk to those dudes now. They’re gonna close up tight as a pussy soon as this gets out.”
He’s probably right, but I stay put. I’m straining to get one last glance at the woman as the men lift her up and set her into the black bag. One long zip and she’s gone.
CHAPTER TWO
Iris is smoking a cigarette outside the bar when I get there.
“Rebekah!” She’s begun drinking already.
“You got off early,” I say. It’s barely five. DCPI said definitively they weren’t going to have an ID for hours, so Mike said I could take off.
“I snuck out,” she says. Brice, the highlighted honey, is beside her, and just like DCPI, he’s in a wool coat and no hat, gloves, or scarf. He smiles, displaying teeth so straight and white and square, I would have said they were dentures on anyone over fifty. Iris drops her cigarette to the sidewalk and smears it with the round toe of her knee-high boot. “Let’s go back in.”
I follow the two of them inside, through the seasonal plastic and canvas vestibule and past the velvet curtain that keeps the cold out. Frau Flannery’s is packed. There’s a mountain of coats in one corner and, because there is about a sixty-degree difference between the air outside and inside the bar, the big front window is steamed up like a Caddy at a drive-in.
Tony is behind the bar, interacting with the cash register. Iris drags Brice to the bar, where two girls from our class are sitting. Hannah is a legal secretary; Jenny fact-checks at one of the food magazines.
“Hi, ladies,” I say, scooting up into the bar stool.
“Hey,” says Hannah, putting one arm around me in a half hug. “Did you just get here?” I nod.
Jenny raises her pint glass. “I’ve been here since three.”
“Jenny got laid off.”
“Fuck,” I say.
Jenny raises her eyebrows and gulps from her beer. “No work tomorrow.”
“What happened?”
Jenny is still drinking, so Hannah answers. “The magazine is folding.”
“Folding?”
Jenny finishes her beer and sets it down on the bar a little harder than she probably meant to. “Yup. The EIC called us into her office right after lunch. She was crying. She was like, I never thought I’d see the day.”
“Was circ down that much?”
Jenny shrugs. “Probably. I mean, it’s totally their fault. Instead of making the magazine better, they fucking spend zillions on this fucking consulting firm from Wall Street-because they so have their shit together-to tell them where to trim the fat. Apparently, we’re fat.”
“The whole magazine?”
“Fat.”
I shake my head and Iris and I exchange a look. None of this is surprising in the least. We all know what’s happening to the fancy New York City publishing world we dreamed of in college.
“And, of course, I get nothing. No severance, no two weeks paid. Fucking nothing.”
“You’re still freelance?” She gives me a look, like, duh. We’re all freelance. My insecure job at the Trib is probably more secure than any of the jobs my friends have. Magazines die, but tabloids always need people willing to run around the city picking up quotes. I could probably keep this gig until I’m forty. And anyway, insecurity is something I’m used to. My dad was always there, and his wife, Maria, has been my stepmom since I was five, but you don’t grow up knowing your very existence sent your mother packing without developing a sense that the bottom can always drop out and you should probably be prepared.