City of the Dead

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“Hah?”

“Janos.”

“Hah?”

“Janos Klejewski.”

“Your son—Janos,” Frank Haggard barks at an ancient, doll-like figure stooping on the other side of a chained door. He is standing in a dimly lit hallway redolent of boiled cabbage and cauliflower.

“Oooh?” she asks, craning her hag’s neck up at him, blinking through the narrow open space.

“Janos,” Haggard nearly bellows. “Janos.”

“Oh—Janos.” She blinks into the shadows, peering at the badge he holds in his hand.

“Your son,” Haggard barks again, leaning toward her cocked ear, extending the badge through the opening. “May I have a word with you?”

“Hah?”

“I said may I have a word with—”

The door starts to squeal closed and he just barely snatches his hand out of the narrow space before the door slams. “It’ll only be a minute, Mrs. Klejewski,” he shouts through the closed door, thinking she’s locked it on him. But in the next moment he can hear the chain scraping through the brass slide and several locks being turned. He can see the knob rotate and in the next moment the door creaks open. Standing there before him in the half-light is a stooped, wizened creature with bright little gimlet eyes and white frizzed hair, some of which has fallen out in great unseemly clots, revealing the pale, blotchy scalp beneath.

This then is what has brought the detective here on a tip from Wershba. This sticklike little crone in black bombazine, with a voice like a scraping violin. She is the mother of Janos Klejewski, confidant and first lieutenant to Wally Meacham. The detective has come to this shabby block of huddled, crumbling structures across the river in Astoria, Queens, another one of those old-world neighborhoods forged out of the 1900’s when countless immigrants, fleeing hardship and persecution, flocked to these shores as a haven of hope.

Then it was a neighborhood made up of working-class people—Irish, Germans, Poles, Jews—hardworking, brawling, pious, stolid people who managed somehow to reconcile differences and live in peace. They had no time to prey upon one another. Hardship and struggle were their common enemies, occupied all of their waking moments. Now suddenly that same neighborhood, like so many others throughout the city, has had to undergo the upheaval of a whole new wave of integration, that of the blacks and the Hispanics, as well as a flood of addictive drugs. And now change has come swiftly to this neighborhood, change often attended by violence.

Where once there was O’Malley’s corner saloon, now one finds the fried chicken kiosk and the bodega with the odors of burned gizzards and cuchifritos drying in the window. The German pork butcher’s is now an all-night check-cashing establishment. And the kosher delicatessen has become a storefront Pentecostal iglesia with a crude, almost childlike, crucifix limned on its windows.

The building that Janos Klejewski had grown up in is of a fairly common 1910 vintage. Six stories, red brick, fire escapes running up and down its rear face above an alleyway where wash flutters disconsolately in the balmy evening breeze. Its residents used to pride themselves on its solidity and safety. Also its eminent respectability. Now, entering the murky, dimly lit shadows of the hallway, with its peeling plaster and its single naked light bulb glowing eerily up ahead, one must be wary. Very wary indeed.

The elevator that Haggard rode up in, after having to strike a match and search out the apartment number on the ’mailboxes, once a handsome thing of brass and mahogany, was now in ruins. A shambles. Into every square inch of its wood, kids have gouged their initials, along with a rich intaglio of obscenities and pictoglyphs of sexual organs. Most of its brass has been stripped for resale at local junk shops, and the small space reeks of urine.

“I’m looking for your boy,” Haggard says, stooping as he enters and removing his hat.

“Hah?”

“Your boy—Janos. Janos—do you know where he is?”

“Hah?”

“Janos,” he cries at her over the noise of a small television, volume turned up to maximum, where a game-show master of ceremonies bounces and careens about like a buffoon.

The tiny, wizened figure hobbles on a cane to a rocking chair and with a great effort sits. While Haggard’s eyes tunnel through the shadows of the place a fat old calico cat rubs up against the detective’s leg and purrs.

“Police?”

“That’s right.” Haggard nods.

“I no see Janos for long time,” the little widow lady says, her head shaking with a mild palsy.

“For how long?”

“Hah?”

“Would you mind turning that TV down a bit?”

“Hah?”

“I say, how long since you’ve seen him?” the detective bawls at her ear.

“Oh, mebbe two year. He run from the prison. You find him?”

“No—I’m trying to.”

“Hah?”

“I say, I’m trying to find him. He never calls you? Writes? Nothing?”

“Writes?”

“Yes. Letter? Postcard? Anything?”

“No, no.” The old lady shakes her head, smiling sorrowfully. “He no write. Call. Nothing. He no good, Janos. Other brothers, sisters. All good. Work hard. Janos stupid. No good. Always trouble. School. Girls. Police. Always trouble. He in trouble now?”

As the old lady cranes her neck and squints at him, there is something strangely reptilian about her, something prehistoric, elemental; a lizard slowly switching its tail in a Pre-Cambrian twilight. Her toothless jaws move endlessly, gumming nothing.

“I don’t know,” Haggard ’says, his eyes swiveling all about the room. “He may be in a lot of trouble.”

“Hah?”

“Lot of trouble,” the detective bawls. “Lot of trouble.”

“Yah, yah.” The old lady nods. “Lot of trouble.”

“You haven’t seen him?”

“No—I no see him mebbe two, three year.”

“Now it’s three years?”

“Hah?”

“Nothing.” Haggard smiles. “Never mind. Okay if I look around?”

“Look around?” The 9M lady, head shaking unceasingly, gapes up at him.

“Yeah—look. Look around the place.”

“Look?”

“Yeah. Look.” Haggard gestures toward the shadowy rear of the apartment.

“Sure. Sure. Look. Look.” She waves abruptly, as if dismissing him.

The detective turns, leaving the gnomish little creature to the game show with its oafish noises and its gray flickering images of idiocy.

Toward the back of the apartment there is a little bathroom, vile and pestilential, with a lot of sodden pinkish-gray old lady’s underthings hanging on a dryer in the tub. Then a kitchen, the floor of which is strewn with saucers of milk and pet food, and liberally scored with cat stools in varying degrees of desiccation.

Farther back is the bedroom. This is a large, shadowy place furnished with heavy, garishly carved oak pieces. There is a big unmade bed with an immense headboard of carved scrollwork. Above that hangs a crucifix. In the corner stands a huge, clumsy chifforobe propped up with books where one of its legs is missing. Beside that is a cheval glass, its mirror cracked. There is one window in the room, curtainless and with a shade hanging askew.

Above all this hovers the smell of old age, that mixture of camphor and medicaments that Haggard associates somehow with approaching death. From somewhere far below in the street comes the squeal and shriek of children playing, then a burst of rapid-fire Spanish hailing down upon them from a window above.

The detective’s eyes sweep quickly through the place. Then in the next moment he crosses to the closet and yanks open the door.

Nothing there but old-lady clothes—black dresses, a couple of hatboxes, a flannel robe, a tatty fur-collared coat with the little, beady fox heads still intact. Nothing there. Nothing out of the ordinary, he feels, starting to turn. But then, there on the floor, along with several pairs of old lady’s black shoes, each pair indistinguishable from all the rest, is a pair of men’s shoes. They too are black, rather formal, and not old. Not the shoes, for instance, of a dead husband, or a married son long gone from the house. No, these are quite new, and with the stubbed toe and greatly elevated heel so modish among the young.

Haggard stoops slowly and lifts the shoes out of the closet, standing there a while and studying them in the shadows. Then, in the next moment, taking the shoes, he strides back out into the living room where the old lady, seated in her rocker and hunched over her cane, watches the game show. The master of ceremonies is now embracing some screaming, mildly hysterical housewife who’s apparently just won a garbage-disposal unit.

“Whose shoes?” He holds them out before her.

“Hah?”

“Whose shoes?” He gestures elaborately at them.

“Hah?” The old lady gapes up at him blankly, her jaws moving unceasingly. But for a fraction of a second he is certain he has seen cognition register in the sharp little gimlet eyes, and something like fear as well.

In the next moment, smiling, he leans down as if about to speak directly into her ear. But he doesn’t. Instead, with the shoes tucked under his arm, he claps his hands briskly beside her ear. One sharp resounding crack. Instantly, her eyes widen, flutter, and she winces.

Still smiling, Haggard places the shoes gently on her lap, straightens up and waves at her. “Okay, Mama—you win.”