“You think so?”
“Not a chance.”
I WENT BACK TO MULLER COURTS, starting at one of the two bodegas. Once the countermen got through staring at Isaac, they confirmed my description of Victor. They knew who he was”Weird dude”but, other than a preference for a certain brand of wheat bread and Oscar Mayer ham, could provide no information. I asked about paper, and they handed me a notepad with greenish, lined pages.
“What about white,” I said. “Plain white.”
“We don’t got that.”
Thinking of the food journal, I asked what kind of apples he bought.
“He didn’t buy apples.”
“He must’ve bought apples,” I said.
“Did you see him buy apples?”
“I didn’t see him buy no apples.”
“No, he didn’t buy no apples.”
In an effort to be helpful, one of them suggested that he had bought, rather, pears.
I said, “What about cheese?”
“No cheese.”
“He didn’t buy no cheese.”
“No cheese.”
I went to the other bodega. This time I had Isaac wait outside, which he did happily, on condition that he could run across the street and get a meatball hero. I gave him ten bucks and he bounded off like a little kid.
The girl behind the register, a pretty Latina with red plastic glasses, put down her poetry magazine when I approached. She, too, recognized Victor by my description.
“I called him ‘sir,’ ” she told me.
“Why’s that.”
“He looked like the kind of person who you call sir.”
“How often did he come in here?”
“Twice a week when I was here. I don’t work on Friday or Saturday, though.”
I asked what he would usually buy.
She went to the rattling dairy case and handed me a package of inexpensive presliced Swiss cheese. “Same thing every time. Once I think I asked, ‘Sir, maybe you want to try something else?’ “
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything. He never said anything to me.”
“Can you remember if he ever talked about”
“He never said anything.”
She was equally firm in her conviction that he had purchased neither apples nor paper.
“We don’t sell paper,” she said. “There’s a Staples on Queens Boulevard.”
Ten months prior I would have resisted the idea that Victor’s life extended beyond the confines of Muller Courtsthat he’d gone anywhere without my imagination giving him permission to do so. Now I found myself obeying him. I spent several chilly November afternoons walking in and out of
local markets, canvassing the neighborhood in widening concentric circles: a one-block radius, two blocks, three … until I reached the triangular plaza at Junction Boulevard and a fruit stand run by a middle-aged Sikh.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “My friend.”
He held up a small mesh bag of Granny Smiths.
The vendor, whose name was Jogindar, said that he and Victor would talk for at least a few minutes every day.
“The weather,” he said. “Always the weather.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Oh, a long time. Perhaps a year and a half. Is he okay?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m looking for him. Did he sound okay to you?”
“He had a terrible cough,” said Jogindar. “I told him he must go to the hospital.”
“Did he?”
He shrugged. “I hope so.”
“Was he ever with anyone else?”
“No, never.”
“Let me ask you this: was there anything strange about the way he behaved?”
Jogindar smiled. Wordlessly he gestured all around us, at the steam-breathing pensioners slouched on park benches; at Queens Boulevard, its lumbering parade, its tangle of wind-whipped powerlines. The whole honking throb of the metropolis, ethnic markets and 99-cent stores and CHECKS CASHED and pawnshops and nail salons and dialysis centers and a wigmaker that sold hair by the pound. He gestured to Isaac, standing ten feet off; to an ancient-looking lady making her way through the intersection, heedless of the red light and the horns exploding at her. She kept shuffling, shuffling, until she made it to the other side. Then everyone drove on.
I understood what he was saying. He was saying It’s all crazy.
He breathed into his hands. “When he stopped coming I thought it was a sign.”
“Of what.”
“I don’t know. But after so many years he became very comforting to me. I am thinking of finding a different job.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Since I came here. Eighteen years.” He smiled. “That is a kind of friendship.”
For the heck of it, I bought a bag of Victor’s favorite apples. On my way back to Manhattan, I bit into one. It was unusually sour.
THE BRANCH MANAGER ofthe local Staples had no idea what I was talking about; nor did any of the cashiers, although most of them seemed to have started on the job that very morning. They did offer to sell me paper, though.
When Samantha and I next conferred, she pointed out Victor’s tendency to routinize. “Think about the picture of him that we’re getting so far. He gets his bread from one place. He gets his cheese someplace else, his apples. He does this every day for God knows how long. How long has that Staples been there, five years? That’s not our man. That’s not where he’s going to go for something as important as his paper.”
I called around until I found the oldest place in the neighborhood, a stationer’s a half-mile due west of the Courts, open Tuesday through Thursday, from eleven to three thirty. I had to leave work especially earlyearlier than I’d been leaving, which was already beyond self-indulgentto get out there on time.
My first impression of Zatuchny’s was that it could have been managed by Victor himself, so clogged was it with junk. I walked into a cloud of that same woody smell I’d first encountered in Victor’s apartment, only several orders of magnitude more powerful. It made me wonder how customers could shop without keeling over.
More to the point, I had a hard time believing that the store had customers at all. From the outside the place looked closed, windows plastered over with curling fliers, neon sign extinguished. I stood at the counter and dinged the bell a couple times.
“Shaddap shaddap shaddap. Shaaaddap.”
An old man appeared, his cheeks flecked with tomato sauce. He paused briefly to stare at me, paused longer to stare at Isaac, and then, frowning, he snatched the bell off the counter and tossed it in a drawer. “It ain’t a toy,” he said.
If I hadn’t known any better, I might have taken him for Victor Cracke. Moustachioed, disheveled, he fit with my preconceived notion quite nicely. So did the disorder of the surroundings … and the smell …
A crazy thought occurred to me: he was Victor.
I must have been staring a bit too intensely, because he sneered and said, “I didn’t interrupt my afternoon repast so you could ogle my titties. Whad-daya want.”
I said, “I’m looking for someone.”
“Yeah, whossat.”
I showed him the mug shots.
“Ugly bastards,” he commented as he leafed through them.
I said, “Do you mind if I ask your name?”
“Do I mind, sure I do.”
“Well, can you tell me anyway?”
“Leonard,” he said.
“I’m Ethan.”
“You a cop, Ethan?”
“I work for the District Attorney,” I said, which wasn’t totally untrue.
“What about you, fatso,” he said to Isaac, who remained unmoved behind his sunglasses. “Whassis problem. Can’t he speak?”
“He’s more of the strong silent type,” I said.
“He looks more like the big fucking fatso type. What do you feed him, whole sheep?” He handed me back the photos. “I don’t know these sons of bitches.”
I couldn’t bring myself to come out and ask about Victor, scared as I was that he would turn out to be Victor, and that my questions would send him scurrying out the back door. In trying to dance around the central point, I allowed my questioning to get more and more convoluted, until, eyeing the Band-Aids on my face, he said to Isaac, “You must be the brains of the operation.”