Читать книгу The Detective's Garden - Janyce Stefan-Cole - Страница 5

SHOOTING PEPPERS

Sunday night, June 18th, Emil Milosec sat alone in the dark. He felt secure in the leafy haven of his garden, an oasis he and Elena had created: a twenty by eighty foot hedge against the cheerless urban surround.

He hadn’t yet fired his revolver. Hadn’t yet, his former partner Detective Mike Dunn might say, gotten pissed off at God. Sitting with a glass of a full-bodied pinot noir, he innocently thought about original sin: Adam and Eve, the first fornication; a garden, Eden, no zip code. It was a topic Emil rolled over like worry beads repeatedly massaged. He had his own ideas of Eve’s shape and Adam’s manhood. He had his own ideas about everything, his wife said; everything but himself.

Even his mother had warned against his arrogant questioning. “Only God can know,” she’d say, wagging a finger in his face. “Too many ideas fill that head of yours, my Emiloshka.” She’d threatened to drill a hole on top so all the questions would pass out of him. Young Emil imagined steam, like from a kettle, whistling out of the hole in his head, forming words in the air. He began to think anyone could read his mind and for a time tried to think in code.

Was that first coupling transcendent? He would like to know. Did Adam perform—not too fast, not too slow? Did Eve respond with all she had? First times are usually a disappointment, he reflected. His was, with a whore he paid twenty-five hard-earned dollars to break him in. The Bible is prudish on details; how the first sin went off that we’re supposed to regret for all time. No, he didn’t buy it, not one single word of the Genesis story. As for regrets, he figured each and every one of us did a good job creating our own.

Emil leaned forward, hearing a rustling sound toward the rear of the garden. He thought he’d seen a possum the other day by the back wall and wondered if they were nocturnal and what they ate. Or it could be Mrs. Noily’s cat Sam nosing around. He took another sip of wine.

Why not make Eve the same way as Adam, out of dirt mixed with God’s spit? Or like the giraffes or strawberries or ice, the way they came about? Why take Eve out of Adam’s rib? That all but guaranteed a form of incest, didn’t it? Was that the snag in the story that led to the first calculated criminal, Cain? Was murder written into the DNA all that long time ago? Or was the chaos of humankind the result of a blurry law laid down in secret behind closed doors: No touching! Just to keep the demon semen in check? Then why not make the first couple neutered?

He remembered it was Father’s Day. Earlier he’d heard giggling children on the street out front. Elena hadn’t wanted kids; she’d said not every woman did. She’d joked, said breeding was too Darwinian. Emil had wanted her: her body, her sex, her. The other cops on the force had families, but his life was not the same as theirs. He inhabited two separate worlds, one colored by violent death, the other by Elena, and he thought he’d kept the two carefully apart. Elena once said, “You can be a perfectly good mother without having children.”

Emil’s meandering thoughts were cut short by the noise of drunken rummaging from next door. The clash of cheap aluminum chairs, a swear word in Spanish, a belch. Emil tensed. Some nights his neighbor Franco called out, saying what the liquor made him say.

Tonight, very drunk, he jeered, “Amigo! You there? Sí, I can smell you! Digame, how do the peppers grow, hah?” He stopped to laugh. “Still barren like your wife?” He took a breath, changed his tone: “May she rest in peace.”

“What’s with you and the peppers, Franco?” Emil called over the fence between them. Since spring, every time he saw him, Franco brought them up.

“You don’t know, hombre?”

The way Emil saw it, if his neighbor didn’t own his dump next door he’d be out on the street. He growled, “Go sleep it off, man.”

“What? You want to shoot me?” Franco called. “Pale-blooded blanco; go ahead, shoot me with your shiny pistola! If you have los cojones, amigo.” He broke out in a raucous laugh, repeating, “Los cojones.” In the morning he would have little recollection of his beer-soaked words.

Emil lingered after Franco finally retreated to his cave of a house. His mind wandered back to Adam and Eve and their short-lived joy. So what was it, one blissful go next to the silvery stream, the peaceable animals hearing Eve cry out in earthly delight? The thought of them prior to the hissing, whispering snake, a sexless, childlike pair wandering through a flawless setting for all eternity—whose idea of perfection was that?

His garden had a flaw: the bald patch Franco alluded to that once flourished with peppers and nasturtium. He hated peppers. He’d told Elena and asked her not to grow them. She laughed, said, “Peppers speak to passion.” Then the seeds stopped growing, lay barren, to use Franco’s word.

The other day Franco called to Emil. He was walking home with a bag of groceries. Franco was seated, aimless as usual, on his front steps in the afternoon warmth. Emil stopped on the sidewalk, shifted the load of groceries. “What’s it this time, Franco? Someone took your parking space again?”

“But you told me the streets are free, any car can park where it wants!”

Franco would place traffic cones, stolen from construction sites, in front of his house to reserve his space on alternate parking days. Emil told him it was illegal and Franco finally gave up the practice, but only after receiving twenty summonses.

“Good to know you’re obeying the law,” Emil said. He turned to go.

“Amigo, wait,” Franco yelled so anyone within five miles could hear. “Come see what I have.” He leaned out, looked up the street. Lowering his voice, he said, “Now that is hot chili.”

Emil turned to see where Franco pointed. Mrs. Noily’s tenant—Lorraine, no, Lori, or was it Lorene?—slowly descended her front steps. The men watched as she walked, heading in the direction of the subway, her hips swaying to a private rhythm. She was tall with long hair falling below her neck, in jeans, a size too small white T-shirt, and a red patent-leather purse slung over her shoulder. She carried a large portfolio under her left arm. The air held still until she turned the corner.

“Phew! Poca flaca but mine if she wants me,” Franco said, nodding approval. “That could be the devil with the red dress, like the song, no?”

“What is it you want, Franco?”

“No, that dress is blue; devil with the blue dress.” He looked toward a cloudless sky, nodded. “Blue, sí, mi amigo—”

“All right, I’m gone—”

“Amigo, no, come see my peppers. Venga.”

Emil went with him because he thought he’d bring up the topic of painting Franco’s scarred south wall and was surprised to see a thriving pepper patch tucked along the fence outside the kitchen door. Yellow, red, and orange nasturtium trailed alongside three robust pepper plants. The buds hung like ornaments, the leaves polished green. Emil stared dumbly at the plants, an exact replica of Elena’s.

Franco laughed, slapped him heavily on the back, and challenged, “My very own, hah? Su esposa linda, mi amigo—a very generous lady.” Grinning, he handed Emil a few seeds from his pocket and told him to try again. Back in his kitchen, Emil tossed the pepper seeds into the trash.

The garden was abundant everywhere else, a profusion of color, mingling scents and buzzing bees; dizzying on hot summer afternoons. Mornings, he’d be out early with fresh anticipation: what flowers had opened in the first pale light as he slept; the great mystery of how a flower chooses the exact moment to open. Time slipped gently by as he deadheaded roses, pulled stray weeds, and hand-squashed fat green aphids that would suck the life out of the blooms. Only the pepper patch was a sore that wouldn’t heal. He blamed himself. Elena had pickled them each autumn for condiments over the winter, relishes and spreads and spicy yellow chutney. There were still rows of neglected jars in the cellar. He’d managed to avoid the patch, to slink past it because Elena was dead and seeing the empty dirt made him know her death all over again, and the paralyzing ache of loss.

Franco’s backyard was something else he tried to ignore. Once a garden had grown but now junk littered the place. Dolls’ heads, forgotten kitchen utensils, a rotting toilet seat, a pile of bricks from some abandoned project; Franco’s sloth. The south side abutted a black cinder-block wall that was splattered with illegible graffiti. The only readable word, sprayed an angry sulfurous yellow, was “heel.” Through his bedroom window the heel greeted Emil each morning, rain or shine, winter through autumn, the shrill, indecipherable message. Whose heel? A dog? A person? He wanted to paint the blocks white, plant a vine to soften the surface. He’d tell Franco his idea and offer to pay for the paint, but would his neighbor ever sober up long enough?

Emil the cop knew Franco had every right to live as he liked; there was nothing criminal about a generally disorganized lazy man. Elena hadn’t shared Emil’s resistance, and much as he might object to it in himself, he’d been bothered that she wasn’t bothered by Franco, that she overlooked his bouts of loutish drunkenness. There had been that slip of her that eluded him, that part of her that answered to no one. She was so contained he sometimes felt he was only a complication at the edge of her world. And there was too the inevitable cop’s distrust—reasonable or not—that all was on the up-and-up between his neighbor and his wife.

Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that

the Lord had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any

tree of the garden’?”

B ook of Genesis

Monday morning, June 19th, Emil’s eyes, menaced from the night, appeared darkly circled. The early light made him seem older than he was. He’d seemed older in some ways since childhood. There had been a sunless room under the roof rafters in the house in the old country. As a boy Emil hid up there and listened to the sounds of his family below, and to the coo of mourning doves under the eaves. From his mother too much talking, from his father too little, his sister recalibrating the balance between them, as if that were the purpose of her life. His memory of the old country was of darkness. Not the place itself—so full of mountain light—but something else, vague and under lit.

He’d sat in the garden too late, Franco’s taunting words circling like angry flies. He told himself, “I should shoot him with my pistola.” He finally went to bed and had a vivid dream.

In the dream he lay trapped on the bed as malignant black crows flew through the open window. They had blood-red eyes and carried Elena’s jewelry out in their beaks. Beside him a very young Elena lifted herself off the bed. She moved toward the window, her silhouette obvious through a sheer nightgown, nipples two sharp points pushing through the fabric. At her bureau she pulled out lingerie, tossed shimmering panties and dark satin bras into the opened crow beaks. Able to move again, Emil ran to the window. The garden shifted to his mother’s from the old country. Elena leaned against a wall. The crows were now clumps of black grapes hanging low above her head. Franco sat on a stone bench looking at her, his gritty laughter carrying up to Emil in the window, looking down.

Dreams disturbed him with their irrationality. Elena said they were only the unconscious puffing smoke. “Or maybe something’s hidden in there. Why not analyze the dreams?” she’d say, tapping his forehead.

But he scoffed at that idea: “What should we do, slit open an eagle’s entrails and read the blood drippings, the feathers?”

“That would be omens, I think.”

“Either way.”

Emil said that to his wife, but he did try to replay his dreams, to grasp hold of them before they dispersed like morning mists, tantalizingly, as if they wanted to be chased. But it was impossible, like holding water in a cupped hand. And if a dream troubled his sleep and he emitted soft wounded-animal sounds, Elena would tap his head, saying, “Knock, knock!” He’d mumble, half awake, “Who’s there?” “Dream a little.” “Dream a little who?” And she’d sing, “‘But in your dreams, whatever they be, dream a little dream of me.’” And he’d feel easier because of her singing.

Monday, the start of the work week, but not for an ex-cop. He’d have stayed in bed, but a morning garden was chaste; its breath sweetest, the light a gentler wash. He was no good at lounging anyway. Not like Elena who could sleep for hours on end, lie in bed like a cat. He sometimes lingered with her on weekend or holiday mornings, but a sense of expectation—or suspicion—kept him alert.

He’d forced himself up and was in the garden earlier than usual, kneeling before the tomato plants. He concentrated on tying the last of the tall stems to a notched bamboo pole. Then, as he stood, his eyes fell on the empty dirt where the peppers had grown. He hadn’t meant to look, but the dead patch was impossible to avoid now that Franco was drumming it into him. Not even weeds grew there, as if a child’s grave had planted itself on that spot. Emil shifted his weight. A cloud skittered across the sun, dimming the light. Something is wrong, he told himself. “No,” he said aloud, sloughing off a gnawing uneasiness. He no longer had to pay attention to every passing cue. But how does a guy stop being a cop?

He returned to the tomatoes, two neat rows, four tidy plants in each. Insignificant yellow flowers already hinted at the little green balls, the ripe red tomatoes to come. He touched one lightly with his long fingers; there would be a plentiful crop this year. Tomatoes were a favorite, but he preferred flowers.

Elena wanted an apple tree. It started around the time of the pepper patch, he thought. Or, no, was it before the peppers? “An apple tree,” she said, “endures.”

“You want to tempt me, is that it?” he joked. “You could hold a strip of rotten herring in my face and I’d be tempted.” She wanted the apple tree smack in the middle of the garden. It made no sense. He remembered reading somewhere that flowers captured the smile of God. He’d told Elena this, hoping to amuse her, to deflect her from the wished-for tree.

But she’d said, “Atheists are the most religious people in the world!”

Would Adam and Eve have quarreled over a tree? Wouldn’t God have made all horticultural decisions? But then what were they supposed to do all day before they fell?

There had been an orchard at Elena’s father’s summer estate in Trieste. Emil thought she was reminiscing. He treated her wish as a friendly disagreement between them. Some mythical remnant from her girlhood, he told himself. But was he wrong? Had he dismissed her unfairly? Was he a man who could figure out a killer but not his own wife?

The snake tempted Eve first; she got to Adam, who, according to Emil, ended up looking pretty much like a sap. Couldn’t the snake just as easily have lured Adam first, in a very different narrative? Looking out, he saw there was barely room for an additional tulip bulb, never mind a tree. The garden was ripe and beautiful and almost perfect, and he was aware that he alone stood between this state of grace—a garden—and the chaos of Franco.

He walked the path over to Elena’s two robust lavender bushes. Their scent called up pleasurable memories, like sniffing postcards of forgotten places. Emil reached down to rub a branch between his palms. He felt in a lighter frame of mind. The morning gloom had lifted. It hadn’t been gloomy, only a few passing clouds and his mood, but the day was now wide open and deeply blue, and he responded to it. He was about to go back inside for another stab at the newspaper, empty the dishwasher, get some sort of day going, but he stopped again by the pepper patch. The dirt sifted through his fingers like sand. Could someone have tampered with the soil? Could there be an underground influence at work, some chemical poisoning?

He laughed at himself: Detective Emil Milosec—retired first class, cited with the department’s highest honors, and here he was thinking like an old maid. “Underground influences! Come on,” he said. If anything was wrong, that patch had been deliberately sabotaged, and the logical suspect would have to be Franco. Some plot between him and Elena to drive Emil mad. “I’m letting that bastard get to me,” he said, touching his head. “The man isn’t capable of plotting more than a can of beer.”

He brought his hands close to his face again to breathe in the soothing scent of lavender. He stood for several minutes. The bitter peppers used to grow up against the fence between his and Franco’s property. Why had he so despised their very presence? Was it Franco? He was Latino; didn’t they all like spicy food?

Back in the kitchen, he made himself a second cup of espresso and forced a look at the newspaper, but it was no good. Two years since Elena’s death, and then the peppers died. Swigging down the coffee and rinsing his cup under the tap, he dried his hands and headed for the garden door.

He marched straight to the narrow tool shed in back. Bands of gray-and-brown sparrows left off their incessant pickings, swept out of his path. The door to the shed stuck before pulling open. From within came the cold breath of the dark. Reaching in, his hand brushed against strings of spider webs. As a boy spiders had horrified him. In a recurring nightmare he’d be trapped by thousands of silver webs spun across his bedroom door. Today he ignored the sticky, sickening feel of the spider webs, pulled out a shovel, and slammed the door shut.

By the time Franco called to him from the other side of the high fence, Emil had already broken a sweat shoveling nearly two feet deep. “Amigo, that is some racket so early.”

Emil kept digging.

“Listen, man, you want a break? I’ll get us coffee, Bustelo. What do you say?” Emil shoved deeper into the earth. “Hombre, maybe you need a beer to relax yourself, huh?”

Emil kept digging, shook his head. “A beer?” he said. “At seven thirty in the morning?”

“I am being poh-lite.”

Emil stopped shoveling. “Polite? Last night you wanted me to shoot you.”

“So now you dig my grave?”

Emil went back to digging.

“It is the pepper patch, sí, amigo? That you dig? Unless you plan to visit China the slow way?” Franco laughed at his own joke. “Ayee, I have my headache this morning.” He waited. “The sound of that shovel is no help.”

“So take an aspirin, amigo.”

“You know, why do you trouble the place that won’t grow? Maybe the ground is still crying for La Señora Elena, you ever think of that?”

Emil leaned on the shovel. “Franco, don’t take this the wrong way: Screw yourself.”

“No, see, hombre, earth can cry. We don’t think so because we put buildings on top and roads; still, the earth feels; under all that shit she lives.”

Emil listened and all he could think of was Franco’s dump of a building and his trashed backyard. Elena saying he never gave Franco a chance. Sure. They used to talk through the fence, she and Franco, and sometimes out front. Once, home early, he’d seen her step out of Franco’s car.

Elena Morandi worked as a diplomatic translator for the Italian and Austrian Embassies. Her clothing had flair, suited to luncheons, cocktail parties, and dinners, political events where appearances mattered; fluid dresses and smart suits; a fine figure, pure class. That day he saw her was warm, her bare arms slipped through a sleeveless yellow dress with narrow brown stripes. She laughed before thanking Franco, leaning into the car. Thanked him for what? Emil was out in the garden before her key was in the downstairs lock. He pretended he’d been outside for some while, though he still wore his suit. He too dressed well and was noted for it at the precinct, for the cut of his dark suits, his tall frame filling them just so. “Emil! You’re home early,” Elena said, seeing him come in through the garden door. He stood along the frame. “You look lovely,” he said. She smiled. “A lunch?” he asked, all nonchalance, the noncommittal smile he sometimes used on suspects. “Mmm, Italian,” she answered before going upstairs to change. Emil watched her leave, loosened his tie, came inside to pour a glass of rosé from the refrigerator, and returned with it to the garden. From the other side of the fence he heard Franco whistling softly to himself. Disgusted, he threw the wine on the pepper patch. One time he urinated on it.

Franco sang songs to her, she said, and once in a while recited. “Recited what?” an incredulous Emil asked. “They’re in Spanish, poems. Very sweet,” she answered coolly.

He said through the fence, “Recite me some poetry, Franco.”

“Poetry?”

“If you can. Or sing me a song.”

“No,” he muttered. “Am I Falstaff?”

“What did you say?”

“I am no monkey act. You have the wrong man. I am going for beer, una cerveza; you want one?”

“No, wait, don’t go just yet.” Emil leaned the shovel against the fence. Franco stood silent on the other side. “Why did she grow the peppers?”

“Su esposa?” Franco shrugged. “How do I know?”

“She grew them for you, didn’t she?”

“Listen, why don’t you … try something else? Try an apple tree. Manzanas are good fruit. They keep away bad things.”

Emil’s head was beginning to tighten. When they first came to America he suffered severe headaches. His mother would place him in a shaded room and lay warm washcloths on his forehead and massage his neck with her strong fingers. He was beginning one now. The tree quarrel each spring … then the peppers; they were a recent addition, no more than two or three seasons before Elena’s death. A nerve at the base of his neck began to throb.

“Did she want an apple tree?” he asked.

“Why would I know that too?”

“Maybe you did something here, huh? For her, like poison … ”

Franco laughed. “Keep talking like that, amigo, you will be drinking beer with me soon.”

Emil shook his head, almost angry. “I don’t—”

“Sí, sí, you told me many times: no beer.”

“Did my wife drink beer with you?”

“Once or twice, to be polite.”

Adam and Eve never had a chance. If God created the snake, he also created the sin, its potential. The snake was a plant—Eve set up, Adam born to take the fall. He said, “I am going to ask you a second time, Franco, did you poison my ground?”

“A little weed killer. Not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal, huh?” Emil turned and walked into the kitchen, not fast, not slow; deliberate. He was calm, but underneath was something bitter, like chewing off his own hand, grinding the small bones and cartilage to a pulp, the crunch of tissue between molars. Only later would he understand that what he had chewed was his pride.

Inside, he pulled his backup revolver from a kitchen cabinet, lifted the gun out of its holster, and unlocked the safety. The weapon was instantly familiar in his hand, as much second nature as holding a garden trowel. He walked back outside, and the kitchen door closed hard behind him.

Franco, from his side of the fence: “Amigo?”

A helicopter passed somewhere off to the left. Emil raised his arm. His icy fury concerned more than a poisoned patch of ground, more than a drunken neighbor who may or may not have been too friendly with his wife. Focus hammer-locked, exterior steely cool, he took aim.

He’d discharged his service revolver exactly once in the line of duty and missed on purpose. The perp was a skinny fourteen-year-old running from the scene—a narrow alley—armed with a gun that was too big for him. Emil and his partner, Mike Dunn, stood safely behind a doorway. Emil stepped out and in a split second guessed the kid’s aim would be off if he fired. It was a fifty-fifty wager. He called out to drop the gun; the kid didn’t; he raised the weapon, but before the boy could get off a single round Emil fired just to his right. Feeling the breath of the bullet that nearly grazed him, the boy dropped the gun and froze.

There was only Franco on the other side of the fence when Emil squeezed the trigger and fired two rounds deep into the pepper patch: Bam! Bam! The noise cracked the air. Every tree branch emptied; birds flew off in a mad flapping of wings. The silence that followed was nearly as deafening as the shots. It was broken by a bouncy Latino song from a passing car radio that penetrated the backyards before moving on and retuning the morning to its near-dead quiet. Two craters splayed into the earth where the peppers once grew.

“Hombre? What did you do?”

Emil, calm as still waters: “You know, amigo, you should paint that scrawled-over warehouse wall of yours white. I think it’s filled with tears.”

Franco pealed out his rasping laugh. He seemed to eventually find everything funny. “She said so too, La Señora.”

“And you refused?”

Franco sighed. “I did not truly refuse, I more neglected. Then maybe I forgot.”

Emil looked up at Franco’s ugly wall. The sulfurous heel was there, defiant as ever.

Franco spoke in a low voice: “I will tell you a secret, amigo.”

Emil clenched his jaw. “What’s that?”

“I never told her. I don’t like peppers.” Emil didn’t react. “Also, she did not like peppers too.”

Emil looked up at the sky, then down at the ground. “Did she ask you to poison the peppers?”

“No, that part was my idea. But to help her.”

Emil let out his breath. “And planting peppers in your yard?”

“For her, that she asked me. It is probably a good thing you just now shot where they grew, because now the apples can grow there.”

“What else did my wife ask you to do?”

“Why do you say this?” Emil was quiet, the pistol limp in his hand. Franco said, “Tell me, amigo, where is that weapon pointed now?”

Emil studied the gun, held it sideways in the palm of his hand. He pressed the thumb piece, pushed open the cylinder and dislodged the empty casings, letting them fall into the pepper-patch hole. He relocked the safety.

“I’m going to make you a deal,” he said. He kicked at the dirt with his right foot. “I plant an apple tree; you paint that black wall white. For her, see?”

Franco laughed but quickly suppressed it. “A big job painting that wall, señor. But okay, okay. Maybe.” He yawned.

“No maybes.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Okay, but no more bullets.”

Emil was quiet again on his side of the fence. Some minutes passed. He said, “That’s that.”

“That is what, amigo?”

“The pepper patch is dead.”

Franco couldn’t help his laughter. “Sí, muerte.” He laughed again. Then, almost reverently, repeated, “La muerte. Maybe now we can have some little quiet peace around here?”

Emil walked away, closed and locked his kitchen door, shutting the garden out. He placed the revolver back in the cabinet and went upstairs, where he dropped onto the bed in his clothes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. He awoke three hours later; ate lunch, then emptied the cylinder and cleaned the gun with Hoppe’s solution. He returned the four rounds, adding two more, and replaced the revolver in the cabinet. Then he walked down the basement stairs.

In the basement he methodically dumped all the jars of pickled peppers into a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag. The cellar was immaculate but he poked around for whatever else needed throwing out. In a corner he found a few things that had belonged to his sister and his mother. He found the army citation for his father, who died in the war. He threw it into the bag. His mother’s old teapot went in with a loud cracking of pottery against broken pickle jar. Terra-cotta pots, stacked neatly on a shelf, went in, smashing on top of the other breakables.

He stopped when he came to a postcard of Slovenia he’d sent to his sister, postmarked 1956. He lifted the card to his face half expecting to smell the fresh mountain air of Lake Bled pictured on the other side. He turned the card over and studied the photo of that long-ago lake with the storybook castle nestled on an island in the middle. Upstairs in a drawer he kept a tiny plastic replica of the castle. He stared at the postcard for a long time, finally throwing it in with the other fragments.

He tied the bag closed—tight—and dragged it upstairs. Out front he shoved the bag into the garbage can, to be collected in the morning.

The rest of the day drifted into what Elena called the unavoidable debris of life. He cleaned the not-very-dirty stove then went up to his office on the third floor to look into bills and other paperwork; things she normally saw to that he’d still not gotten the hang of handling himself. He’d rather clean the stove. But he’d noted some depletion in a mutual fund Elena had set up. Those accounts went up and down, she’d explained. But, looking more closely, he decided market fluctuations didn’t explain it, that a little too much money was missing. He wasn’t certain and had no idea how to find out whether he was right or not. He spent some time looking over the forms but gave up. He’d study the case more closely another time.

Anybody else would have grown furious suspecting a loss of funds. Emil grew restless having to think about the question at all. If it were up to him they’d have placed the money she’d invested under the mattress, where, Elena would have pointed out, it would earn nothing. He didn’t care. Having known great poverty did not translate into his having a love of money. They had a good life together he’d say whenever Elena spoke of improvements, of things they needed.

Late afternoon dissolved into evening spent in Elena’s day room across the hall from his office. The garden door remained locked.

Tuesday morning, June 20th, the graffiti heel on Franco’s wall was there to greet Emil when he opened the bedroom shade. Ahead of sky or tree or another person’s face, each morning his eyes fell on that misdemeanor mischief scrawled on a wall. As he stood in front of the window, his left hand on the frame, a dream from the night came back to him.

In this dream he was a cop again and he was trying to tell the other detectives something important. He began to shout until his voice grew hoarse, but the other detectives only stared blankly as he ran from one to the other until he was bellowing into their faces about a crime he could not name. He woke up breathing hard and lay awake, sweating, eyes locked on the ceiling until sleep again overtook him and the dream left him, until just now. In real life Emil had never raised his voice with the other cops. The dream made no sense; only the feature of him yelling came back, whatever crime he had been so anxious to report vanished like an overheard whisper.

As he washed up he thought about the apple tree he’d agreed to plant. He’d already decided on a miniature crabapple, imagined the branches draping over Franco’s side of the fence once the tree grew tall enough, and the spray of tiny white flowers in spring. A crab was a Malus same as any other apple tree. But he knew way down in the rigidly scrupulous part of his brain that he was cheating, that Elena wanted a real apple tree, the kind that yields pies and tarts and sauce.

First he’d have to dig out and bag the dirt, toxic from whatever the hell it was Franco did to the ground, cart it out to the curb, and then haul in new dirt. A tree couldn’t safely be planted until October, so the question was what to do with the hole in the meantime? He skipped over the question of how he had come to agree to plant the tree Elena had so long desired. Elena … she knew how to lie beneath the green trees. The thought that Franco’s wall might actually be painted and planted filled him with a kind of dumb elation.

His face in the bathroom mirror looked tired, but at fifty-eight, Emil Milosec was not without appeal; he’d be lying if he tried to say otherwise. The black hair, lightly peppered with gray, was not thin or receding; he’d have a full head to the end. As he lathered his cheeks, a bit of cream stopped up his left nostril. He blew it out with a sharp exhalation. Elena sometimes waited until he said something disagreeable at the breakfast table before informing him that a dab of shaving foam clung to the hairs inside his ear. He in turn would wait a minute or two before wiping it off. A silly game; she would stick out her tongue then resume reading the newspaper. Her smart small face and pointed tongue, the full lips. As he leaned up against the sink, razor in hand, he felt his penis erecting itself and he looked down at his shorts. She would spread herself on the green, green ground. Corridors of green.

He usually ate breakfast in the kitchen, but today Emil went outside with his coffee and newspaper, as he and Elena had done on summer weekends. Sometimes they fucked after a breakfast of crêpes Suzettes, their fingers sticky with apricot jam.

The morning that greeted him was dull; the afternoon promised to be brutal. The late-night news had warned of a heat wave. A hazy bowl of foul air was already coagulating over the city, a thick, gauzy film. Rain would be a godsend, heavy clouds to feed a thirsty earth, but no rain would fall this day. The past few summers had been dry; by August nearly all the Eastern seaboard was toughing out some degree of drought. This year looked to be more of the same.

Emil sat down at the round marble table and took a bite of toast. The New York Times lay in front of him. He opened the Metro section first; the dummy blotter he called it, filled with snapshots of local foul play. He’d read the section regularly when he’d been with the force. “A cop could learn a lot from what goes on in here,” he’d told Elena on so many mornings, though it was Elena who’d gotten him hooked on reading the papers in the first place. His toast sat hardening on the plate as he read about a man who walked into his father’s hospital room, slashed the old man’s throat, then whacked the eighty-year-old in the next bed with a hammer and, while he was at it, sliced his sister’s throat. And why did he do that? This is what the police would want to know; what sort of motive lay behind such savage behavior? There was always a reason. Knock, knock: Emil, why did you fire your revolver?

“We do this,” he once told Elena. “We take this wonder of tissue and bone and blood and brain, this fragile body, and we beat and violate and torture and destroy it in our unending hatreds; we find ways to justify murder. …”

She stared at him. “Of course we do.”

“Why do you look at me that way?”

She lowered her eyes. “It’s as you say; we find a way so we can go on.”

“I didn’t mean us—you and I.”

“No … but something …”

“What?”

“No, it isn’t important right now.”

That was all she would say, nothing else. Her private mysteries were like restless phantoms.

His father had cancer, the son told the cops, and he took it upon himself to end the misery. It was obvious. The roommate had been abusive, he added. Oh, an eighty-year-old? They can be cranky, but to end up in some deranged man’s idea of justice, snuffed because he maybe said something disagreeable about the hospital food?

Looking up through breaks in the grapevine growing along the pergola, Emil glimpsed an unnatural greenish-white sky. He was already warm in his shirt. And the murderer’s sister? The brother disapproved of her lifestyle; unmarried and living at home with her kid while he was out driving a cab. Cabby, tough job, thought Emil, underappreciated. He disliked taking cabs himself. And the sister’s child, now orphaned; had the killer—the child’s uncle—thought of that?

The guy snapping wasn’t much of a surprise, but it bewildered Emil even though to a lawman those sorts of goings-on were as common as skin. What about all the other frayed citizens who didn’t snap? The parents, say, of a four-year-old with leukemia whose health insurance had dried up. You couldn’t tell them the insurance guys were anything other than legitimized crooks. Or the woman hurrying home from work to fix her kids’ supper when a guy slips out of the stairwell, forcing her to her knees at knifepoint for a quick sodomy before taking her cash. Why didn’t they snap? Why only pockets of snappers and not the other way round? For all the years Emil had been a criminal investigator the question never left him: why the citizenry was mostly docile.

His shirt, which was loose, felt close. The heat nagged, forced its way up to his verbal brain so he had to fight from stating the obvious, from declaring out loud, “Jesus, it’s hot!” He’d have to get the sprinkler going. He preferred to hand-water; it took forever but what kind of hurry was he in? Besides, hand-watering showed up problems: eaters, wilts, a million fungi looking to have their way. A heat wave, like a plague, requires vigilance. Emil was calm as he thought of watering and droughts, heat and smog.

For now his thoughts steered nicely clear of the day before, of having fired the two rounds into the pepper patch. He’d thought in the night that the shots could have attracted attention—locking the stable door after the horse is out—but nothing had come of it so far, and twenty-four hours had now gone by. His cleaning the revolver was good training; a cop’s automatic response to having fired his weapon. That he had no business discharging the weapon in the first place was not yet a sore he was ready to rub. Worse, he did not know why he fired. Had he intended, for even a flicker of a second, to shoot his neighbor?

Emil sometimes imagined what his former partner, Detective John Michael Dunn, might have to say. They’d spent enough time sharing crime scenes and car-seat lunches, had talked over plenty. Mike might say Emil was shooting at God.

God was in the dirt, was he, Mike?

Not precisely. But the God who made your wife sick deserved a bullet, right?

So I was mad at God, shot the dirt instead? That’s the idea?

Grief’s not a tidy package, Milosec, much as you might like it to be.

“Neither is your God,” Emil said aloud to the empty garden.

But a temporary calm disallowed any real analysis. Instead, Emil behaved like a dazed man who has just walked away from a car crash, ignorant for the time being and numb as to what has befallen him, of his reasons for having fired two bullets into his garden on a Brooklyn morning in June 1995—two years after the death of his lovely wife.

He crossed his legs, picked up what was left of the now rock-hard toast, smeared jam on it, and moved on to the Science pages. The impossible certainty of the scientists amused him. Let them explain the criminal mind. What, genetics, upbringing? Given time, would science get to the bottom of the whole loving show? Birth to death, and all the issues in between?

Lately he’d been wading into articles on the universe. There was the idea of nothingness and possibility: the cosmological constant energy and its opposite twin, dark matter, in an expanding universe—if that made any sense. Some of it knotted his brain. Like the theory of the shrinking universe. But where did that leave the expanding one? He figured it couldn’t do both. He didn’t mind the idea of nothingness as much as he minded searching for false comfort. Nothingness, according to Emil, was preferable to a fabricated faith filling in the void, a distraction papered with promises of heaven and hell. Chaos made more sense; laws of physics and this and that randomly coming to be. When he read about things like string theory, he pictured the cat’s cradle game his sister used to play on his outstretched fingers.

The headline of today’s Science section read, “Beginning a Bargain Basement Invasion of Mars.” Emil raised his head, looked out onto his glorious garden, and smiled