‘Mr Parker,’ she said. ‘You mind if I ask what you’re doing out here?’
‘Did I miss an ordinance about not enjoying the view?’
He didn’t speak testily. He sounded only amused.
‘We haven’t passed that one yet, although there are some folks in town who’d like to find a way to charge for it, if they could. No, I’m simply wondering if it’s a coincidence that you’re filling your lungs steps from where, as I’m sure you know, a body was recently washed up.’
‘Do you have a name yet?’
She noticed that he hadn’t answered her question, although in a way, he just had.
‘We haven’t made an official identification, but we’ve found what we believe to be his vehicle.’
He waited. She sighed. This wasn’t the way that it was supposed to go, but, damn, the man had a way about him.
‘Bruno Perlman, forty-five. Resident of Duval County, Florida.’
‘Long way from home. Rental?’
‘No, it’s his own.’
‘He drove all the way up here from southeast Florida?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Just to throw himself in the ocean?’
‘We haven’t yet made any determination on that.’
‘You sound like you’re already practising your lines for the press.’
‘Maybe I am. We’ll be releasing the name once his family has been informed. It’s just that—’
Again, he simply waited.
‘Well,’ Bloom continued, ‘he doesn’t seem to have any close family that we can find. He appears to have been pretty much on his own.’
‘What about the state police?’
‘They have their hands full looking for that Oran Wilde kid. Same with the ME’s office: she’s got four charred corpses on her hands. They’ll all get to us when they can. They’ve been in touch, but …’
She trailed off. He finished for her.
‘It’s a car by a beach, and a body on another beach – a body, what’s more, that nobody is rushing to claim or mourn. Did you find a note?’
‘No.’
‘There’s a lot of water to throw yourself into between Florida and here, most of it a lot warmer than this.’
He gestured at the ocean with a pale hand. Bloom half expected to see an albatross appear, as though summoned before them.
‘Is there a logic to taking your own life?’ she asked.
He considered the question.
‘You know, I expect that there probably is,’ he said. ‘Would you mind if I took a look at his car?’
‘Why would you want to do that? And why are you so interested?’
‘It used to be my job,’ he said.
‘And now?’
He looked at her, and she felt the full force of his gaze.
‘Call it my vocation,’ he said. ‘I’m out of practice. Indulge me, Chief Bloom. After all, what harm can it do?’
But those last five words came back to Cory Bloom later, as it all blew up, as she felt her life draining away, and she knew that she would take them to her grave.
The car, stored in the police garage at the back of the town office, was a 2003 Honda Accord in a dull silver-gray. It had 91,000 miles on it, according to the clock, but Bloom told Parker that it had probably turned over at least once, given that the car seemed to be held together with goodwill and Bondo, and the a/c was shot. She’d draped the vehicle with a tarp to protect it from getting any more fingerprints and marks on the paint job than it had already.
She handed Parker a pair of latex gloves.
‘You can open the door and take a look inside, but try not to touch anything, even with the gloves on, okay?’
She felt ridiculous giving him the warning. After all, he’d once carried a detective’s shield. He might have been a renegade, but if so, he was one who knew the drill. He’d also annoyed her with his questions on the beach, and his wish to examine the vehicle. Bloom knew better than to make assumptions, or so she told herself, but she had to admit that she’d already mentally filed the corpse away as a probable suicide. Perhaps it was, in part, the reaction of the state police. Yes, the minds of its detectives were elsewhere – on four bodies, and the missing, possibly troubled youth who might well be responsible for their deaths – but, even so, they didn’t seem particularly troubled about the body that she currently had on ice. Right or wrong, these attitudes were contagious. Now, though, Parker’s reactions reminded her of the importance of taking nothing for granted, and she didn’t want the chain of evidence interfered with, if it turned out that Bruno Perlman had not entered the sea of his own volition.
But Parker didn’t seem interested in searching the interior, not yet. He walked around the car under the bright fluorescents of the garage, his brow furrowed in the slightest of frowns. Only when he had done that did he open first the driver’s door, then the front passenger door. He took in the mess on the floor – soda bottles, chip bags, candy wrappers, a copy of the Boston Globe dated a couple of days before the body washed ashore – then leaned in and searched the glove compartment without coming upon anything that caught his attention. He checked the newspaper, and the copy of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union that lay on the back seat, flicking through the pages but finding nothing. So much for not touching stuff, thought Bloom. He used the release handle in the car to open the trunk. Inside was a single traveling bag.
‘Did you take a look in here?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s just clothes and toiletries.’
‘You mind?’
‘Sure,’ she said resignedly. ‘Go ahead.’
He unzipped the bag carefully, and went through its contents piece by piece, searching inside T-shirts, underwear, and jeans. He even examined the cans of deodorant and shaving cream. Finally, he zipped the bag, closed the trunk and the two doors, and stepped away from the car. He removed the gloves and handed them back to her.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll treasure them always. Are you done?’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘For now. Was I keeping you from something?’
‘A husband. A dog. A bath. Dinner.’
‘Nothing urgent, then.’
‘Seriously, do you have any friends?’
‘Enough. I’m not recruiting more.’
‘I wasn’t offering. Anything you want to share with me from your examination of the vehicle?’
‘Suppose I sleep on it and we talk in the morning,’ he said. ‘After all, you have a husband waiting, and a dog, and a bath, and dinner. There’s nothing here that can’t hold, and Bruno Perlman won’t be any more dead tomorrow. He’s long beyond waiting on us to figure out his final moments.’
They stepped out of the garage into the cool evening air.
‘I have one last request,’ he said.
Bloom sighed. Ron was cooking lasagna tonight. She’d told him that she’d be home well before six, and he would have aimed to have food on the table by seven. It was long past that now. She had a vision of a blackened meal and a sulking husband.
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘Did somebody compile a list of what was found on the body and in the car?’
‘You think we’re complete rubes? Yes, I had Stynes type it up and include it in the report.’
‘Could I have a copy?’
‘No,’ she said, and realized as soon as she said it that she sounded snippier than she would have liked. ‘But I’ll let you look,’ she relented, ‘just as long as you don’t spend all night with it.’
He followed her into the town office, and waited at her door. The report-in-progress on Bruno Perlman lay on her desk. She found the item list and handed it to him.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘if it turns out to be murder, I may just have handed that list to a suspect.’
‘If I’d killed him, I’d have made sure to check the tides before I put him in the water.’
She tried to figure out if he was kidding, but couldn’t. He worked his way quickly thr
ough the list, then returned it to her.
‘Are you free for a cup of coffee tomorrow?’
‘Only if you’re buying.’
‘How about Olesens, around ten?’
‘Do you have shares in that place?’
Now he raised an eyebrow at her, but said nothing. Hey, she thought, what did you expect: that I wouldn’t be keeping tabs on you?
‘Ten is fine,’ she told him.
They walked out together.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘For what? For letting you look at a dead man’s car?’
‘For not telling me to mind my own business.’
‘If you do turn out to have killed him, I’m going to be real upset with you.’
‘If you pin it on me, I’m going to be real upset too.’
Suddenly she wanted to go back to the office and look at that list again. She wanted to reexamine the car, just as he had done. She had the sense that she was missing something, something that he had spotted.
But she had a husband waiting, and a dog, and dinner. And maybe that bath too. Yes, almost certainly a bath. She did some of her best thinking in the tub. She watched him walk away and thought:
What have we allowed into our town?
12
The Hurricane Hatch stood at the end of a strip of land midway between Jacksonville and St Augustine on the Florida coast, far enough away from the real tourist traps to ensure that it retained a degree of local custom while still attracting enough business of any stripe to sustain it. A man named Skettle owned ninety percent of the Hurricane Hatch, but he rarely frequented it, preferring to leave the running of the place to its chief bartender and ten percent shareholder, Lenny Tedesco. Skettle liked to keep quiet about the fact that he had a big piece of the Hurricane Hatch. His family, from what Lenny knew of them, contained a high percentage of holy rollers, the kind who visited the Holy Land Experience down in Orlando a couple of times a year, and regarded the Goliath Burger at the theme park’s Oasis Palms Café as damn fine dining, although Lenny doubted if they would have used that precise term to describe it. Lenny Tedesco had never been to the Holy Land Experience, and had zero intention of ever visiting it. He reckoned that a Christian theme park wasn’t really the place for a Jew, not even a nonobservant Jew like himself, and he didn’t care if it did boast a recreation of a Jerusalem street market.
Then again, the Hurricane Hatch was about as authentic in Florida bar terms as the Holy Land Experience was as an accurate reflection of the spiritual makeup of Jerusalem in the first century AD. It looked like what a classic Florida beach bum’s bar was supposed to look like – wood, stuffed fish, a picture of Hemingway – but had only been built at the start of the nineties, in anticipation of a housing development named Ocean Breeze Condos which never got further than a series of architect’s plans, a hole in the ground, and a tax write-off. The Hurricane Hatch remained, though, and had somehow managed to prosper, in large part because of Lenny and his wife, Pegi, who was a good fry cook of the old school. She prepared fried oysters that could make a man weep, the secret ingredients being creole seasoning, fine yellow cornmeal, and Diamond Crystal kosher – kosher – salt. Neither did Skettle evince too much concern about making a large profit, just as long as the Hatch didn’t lose money. Lenny figured that Skettle, who didn’t drink alcohol and appeared to subsist primarily on chicken tenders and chocolate milk, just enjoyed secretly giving the finger to his holier-than-thou, pew-polishing relatives by owning a bar. Lenny’s wife, however, claimed that Skettle’s sister Lesley, a Praise Jesus type of the worst stripe, was not above polishing other things too, and could give a pretty accurate description of half the motel ceilings between Jacksonville and Miami, giving rise to her nickname of ‘Screw-Anything Skettle’.
Lenny was alone in the bar. This was one of Pegi’s nights off, and Lenny had sent the replacement cook, Fran, home early, because he knew she’d have better luck selling fried oysters in an abandoned cemetery than in the Hurricane Hatch on this particular evening. Midweeks were always quiet, but lately they had been quieter than usual, and even weekend business was down from previous years. There just wasn’t as much money around as before, but the Hatch was surviving.
Lenny glanced at his watch. It was nine-thirty. He’d give it until ten, maybe ten-thirty, and then call it a night. Anyway, he was in no hurry to go home – not that he didn’t love his wife, because he did, but sometimes he thought he loved the Hatch more. He was at peace there, regardless of whether it was empty or full. In fact, on evenings like this, with the wind blowing gently outside, and the boards creaking and rattling, and the sound of the waves in the distance, visible as the faintest of phosphorescent glows, and the TV on, and a soda water and lime on the bar before him, he felt that he would be quite content just to stay this way forever. The only blot on his happiness – if blot was a sufficient word for it, which he very much doubted – was the subject of the TV news report currently playing in front of him. He watched the footage of the two old men being transported by United States Marshals into the holding facility somewhere in New York City: Engel and Fuhrmann, with almost two centuries of life clocked up between them, Engel barely able to walk unaided, Fuhrmann stronger, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance, not even deigning to notice the men and women who surrounded him, the cameras and the lights, the protestors with their signs, as if all of this was a show being put on for another man, and the accusations leveled against him were somehow beneath his regard. The men disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by an attorney from the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, the arm of the Justice Department entrusted with investigating assorted human rights violations and, particularly, Nazi war criminals. The attorney was a pretty young woman, and Lenny was surprised by the passion with which she spoke. She didn’t have a Jewish name, or Demers didn’t sound like one. Not that this was a requirement for justice under the circumstances. Perhaps she was just an idealist, and God knew the world needed as many of those as it could find.
Engel and Fuhrmann, she said, had been fighting the US government’s decision to rescind their citizenship, but that process had now been exhausted. The delivery of the arrest warrant for Fuhrmann from the Bavarian state public prosecutor’s office in Munich a week earlier meant that his extradition could now proceed immediately, and Engel’s deportation would follow shortly after for breaches of immigration law, regardless of whether or not charges were filed against him in his native land. Soon, she said, Engel and Fuhrmann would be banished from American soil forever.
Deportation didn’t sound like much of a punishment to Lenny, whose family had lost an entire branch at Dachau. He hadn’t understood why they couldn’t be put on trial here in the United States until Bruno Perlman explained to him that the US Constitution precluded criminal prosecutions committed abroad before and during World War II, and the best that the United States could do was send war criminals back to countries that did have jurisdiction, in the hope that proceedings might be taken against them there. Not that Perlman was happy about the situation either. He would tell Lenny admiringly about the activities of the TTG, the Tilhas Tizig Gesheften, a secret group within the Jewish Brigade Group of the British Army who, after the German surrender, took it upon themselves to hunt down and assassinate Wehrmacht and SS officers believed to have committed atrocities against Jews; and of the Mossad killers who trapped the Latvian Nazi collaborator Herberts Cukurs, the ‘Butcher of Riga’, in a house in Montevideo in 1965, beating him with a hammer before shooting him twice in the head and leaving his body to rot in a trunk until the Uruguayan police found him, drawn by the smell. The gleam in Perlman’s eye as he spoke of such matters disturbed Lenny, but he supposed that the end met by such foul men was no more than they deserved. Lately, though, that light in Perlman’s eyes had grown brighter, and his talk of vengeance had taken a personal turn. Lenny worried for him. Perlman had few friends. Obsessives rarely did.
‘How do they even know it’s reall
y them?’ said a voice. ‘Old men like that, they could be anyone.’
A man was seated at the far end of the bar, close to the door. Lenny had not heard him enter. Neither had he heard a car pull into the lot. The visitor’s face was turned slightly away from the television, as though he could not bear to watch it. He wore a straw fedora with a red band. The hat was too large for his head, so that it sat just above his eyes. His suit jacket was brown, worn over a yellow polo shirt. The shirt was missing two buttons, exposing a network of thin white scars across the man’s chest, like a web spun by a spider upon his skin.
‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in,’ said Lenny, ignoring the question. ‘What can I get you?’
The man didn’t respond. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. Lenny looked past him to the parking lot outside. He could see no vehicle.
‘You got milk?’ the man rasped.
‘Sure.’
‘Brandy and milk.’ He rubbed his stomach. ‘I got a problem with my guts.’
Lenny prepared the mix. The milk was cold enough to create beads of condensation on the glass, so he wrapped it in a napkin before placing it on the bar. The man exuded a sour, curdled odor, the rankness of untold brandy-and-milk combinations. He raised the glass and drank it half-empty.
‘Hurts,’ he said. ‘Hurts like a motherfucker.’
He lowered the glass, raised his left hand, and removed the hat from his head. Lenny tried not to stare before deciding that it was easier just to look away entirely, but the image of the man’s visage remained branded on Lenny’s vision like a sudden flare of bright, distorted light in the dimness.
His bare skull was misshapen, as pitted with concave indentations as the surface of the moon. His brow was massively overdeveloped, so that his eyes – tiny dark things, like drops of oil in snow – were lost in its shadow, and his profile was suggestive of one who had slammed his forehead into a horizontal girder as a child, with the soft skull retaining the impression of the blow as it hardened. His nose was very thin, his mouth the barest slash of color against the pallor of his skin. He breathed in and out through his lips with a faint, wet whistle.