‘What made you choose this particular story?’ he asks.
‘I’m a crime writer,’ I answer.
‘Well, I’m a cab driver,’ he says, ‘but I don’t go to New York and drive around a lot of streets I don’t know.’
I nod. Hesitate. But why not? I cough.
‘The hero of the story — if you can call him that — was my cousin. I guess I just want somebody to tell his story.’
‘Was? You mean he passed away?’
I don’t answer.
‘You get rich writing books?’
I shake my head. ‘But enough to get by.’
‘Good for you. That something you always wanted to do, be a crime writer?’
‘No. I trained as a priest.’
‘Really? Isn’t that pretty unusual? For a priest to be writing about gruesome murders?’
‘Not as unusual as you might think. Maybe you’ve heard of Ronald Knox? He was a Catholic priest. He’s the one who laid down the ten commandments of crime fiction.’
Gabriel shakes his head. ‘As in, “thou shalt not kill”?’
I have to laugh. ‘As in, the killer has to be introduced early on in the story, but we’re not allowed access to his thoughts.’
‘And you follow that commandment?’
‘No, not at all. I let the reader follow the murderer’s thoughts as I think he must have thought them at the time. But then, I’m writing true crime, not a detective novel. And Knox’s commandments aren’t meant to be taken seriously. The fifth commandment states that there shouldn’t be a Chinaman in the story.’
‘And you’ve got a Chinaman in your story?’
I have to think about it. ‘No, not exactly.’
The light changes to green and Gabriel has to concentrate on his driving.
And it turns out he’s right, suddenly we’re there.
I recognise those low buildings, and the huge surrounding parking lots. When I came here as a boy, Southdale Mall seemed like a complete universe. Only when I was a little older did I realise that Southdale wasn’t a particularly big shopping mall, not for example when compared to West Edmonton Mall, which is bigger than the smallest country in the world. But when Southdale opened in 1956 it turned out to be the start of an urban development that would soon characterise the whole country and, in due course, the whole Western world. Victor Gruen, the architect who designed Southdale and fifty other shopping malls, fled Austria when Hitler annexed it in 1938. He arrived in New York with eight dollars, no English, a training in architecture and the idea of building small urban centres where people would live with every facility a country town could need right next to them: post offices, bakeries, police stations, schools. But as the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there’s an obvious irony in the fact that a dedicated socialist and urbanist like Gruen should be the architect responsible — in my uncle’s view — for the gradual destruction of the Minneapolis he had grown up in, a vibrant and living centre with a thriving business, cultural and social life. To him Gruen’s shopping malls were parasites that sucked the life out of the towns and left nothing behind but a dying organism choked by exhaust fumes and crime, a lack of public transport and ordinary, everyday humanity, an accretion of cold stone-and-glass castles containing offices where people worked but from which they fled as soon as the working day was over. I remember my uncle once saying to my father that shopping malls like Southdale created psychopaths, whatever that was supposed to mean. Anyway, my uncle must have been mollified to learn that Gruen repented of his sins and atoned for them by returning to Austria to live and to work on the pedestrian precincts in the centre of Vienna, and that two years before his death he publicly expressed his regret for what his shopping malls had turned into.
Me, I love shopping malls.
I don’t tell anyone, but I can still feel some of the elation of my childhood as I enter those riotously coloured jungles where everything screeches at you, everyone hunts you, and the ant-like columns of humans move up the escalators as they head for new worlds. It’s like something out of a computer game. Where my uncle and my father saw vulgar commercialism I feel the joy of sinking into a warm cacophony of sight and sound, walking through an Eden of temptations and sinful invitations, feeling how your life might have been had you owned this thing or that, the sensation and excitement of a possible Fall of biblical dimensions, even if you don’t have a krone or a dollar to spend.
We stop in the parking lot and I get out. Six women in red T-shirts carrying placards are standing under some trees at the end of the lot. I walk toward them. They’re on strike, nurses from the women’s hospital on the other side of the road, they explain. I point to the parking garage next to the hospital and ask if they can tell me anything about what happened there.
‘What did happen?’ they ask.
I explain, but they’ve never heard of the incident. Six years is a long time, they say. Before the pandemic, before Floyd, it was another time.
I say thanks and walk away. Close my eyes behind the sunglasses and breathe in deeply, maybe hoping to breathe in the air of my childhood. Open car windows with the smell of Minnesota’s sun-scorched fields and the smoke from Dad’s cigar in the driving seat. But above all, the smell of freshly baked doughnuts from Southdale Mall.
22
The Desert, October 2016
A flat light lay across the desert. A huge desert that I crossed alone. I saw no other people, there in that monotonous, desolate landscape, no sign of life at all. But of course, cars count as signs of life. And this parking lot. What if every person on earth apart from me had been whirled up into heaven just a moment ago by some generous-spirited Jehovah? That would have been fine actually, it wouldn’t have left me any more alone than I already am. That was my first thought as I woke up, and my last as I fell asleep. That I was lonely. Some days it was just fine, but at other times the loneliness and the burden of the emptiness were so great I felt they were going to crush me. But I couldn’t let it, not yet. First I had to do what I had to do. That was the only thing that kept me going now, the only thing that made it worth getting up in the morning. Worth going out. Worth eating the food on the plate in front of me. But afterward, when that was out of the way, what then? Then this eternity would end. Then we would be together again, my beloved. And rest. Eternal rest. So I carried on walking.
It was cloudy and at this time of the autumn the daylight was already noticeably less by six o’clock, which was the time he usually left work.
Suddenly I saw someone. She was standing by her car with the trunk open. She was overweight and out of breath and I could tell she’d been using that overfilled shopping cart as a walker on her way through the desert.
‘Hi,’ I said.
The big body jerked in surprise and she turned toward me. I could see the panic in her eyes. Then the relief.
‘Oh, thank God,’ she groaned.
She didn’t say it, but I knew anyway. That her first thought was that I was black. I guess Latino was a bit less threatening. Just a bit. I smiled. ‘I was wondering if you needed any help?’
‘Thanks, but that’s OK,’ she said, with a look that said help is exactly what she needed. She stared at my face, then at my hands. I walked on.
It took me a while to spot that big blue car, even though I knew where it usually stood and navigated there using the floodlight pylon in the centre of the parking lot. It was a Chevrolet Silverado High Country crew cab. I peered in at the driver’s seat. Noted that the neck support was at normal height. The seat pushed not too far forward nor too far back. I used the sleeve of my jacket to wipe away the raindrops from the windshield, took out the roll of wide white tape and tore off three strips. Taped them to the windshield on the driver’s side, directly under the roof. It formed a white square approximately three by three inches. I looked at my watch. Five thirty. That gave me half an hour.