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