Box Nine Read online

  Lenore thinks that no one, not even Ike, has any idea how strange she really is. But she’s always known it. The feeling stretches back to her earliest memories. Possibly, she thinks, her father suspected it, maybe had a hunch as to some really abnormal brain activity going on in the skull of his female child. She deduces this simply from the occasional look she’d find on his face over the dinner table, a combination of curiosity and fear and confusion. Lately, she’s begun to wonder if he suspected his daughter’s weirdness only because it ran through his own thought patterns.

  Just once she’d have liked to see that look on Zarelli’s face. Anytime—sitting in his stupid Lincoln in front of some smack house down in Bangkok Park, eating the veal at Fiorello’s where everyone knows him, going at it in the motel room down Route 61—just once she’d have liked to see that he had a doubt, a vague hunch, a moment of terror regarding her, indicating the fact that he knew nothing about the way she thought or felt or why she continued to work unbelievably hard at a pathetic and ultimately useless job.

  Zarelli is a guy who’s done pretty well in the nine years with the force. He’s never been seriously hurt, never involved himself in any real, over-the-line corruption, kissed enough ass to move up to detective but still kept some camaraderie with most of the bowling team. Zarelli, she knows, is in narcotics because, oddly, it’s the department in which he can define himself and keep his compass straight. This isn’t to say there aren’t corrupting temptations in narcotics. Just the opposite: there are probably more opportunities to go bad in narc than anywhere else. But in narcotics, Zarelli can think and function like a ten-year-old. He can rely on the fact that all the importers, and dealers, and junkies he moves through every day are monsters. Evil. Dark. Bad. And since he is their opposition, he’s goodness and light incarnate. He’s the other side of the fence. Society will back him up on this. Public opinion will comply with this view absolutely.

  Lenore spends all her time as an actress. She feigns belief in this same, simple moral code. Us against them, white hats against black hats. In actuality, she’s not so much repulsed by this code, as she is incapable, even for the briefest of moments, of taking it seriously. Of even considering it. It rings so false. It falls in the realm of fantasy.

  Not even Ike knows the real reason Lenore does her job. The real reason, or at least the best symbol of the real reason, hangs at this moment inside a leather shoulder holster, from a hook on the inside of her bedroom closet door. Lenore’s weapon of choice has become, sadly, something of a cliché. She finds this annoying but not too important. Let the gangs of the Hollywood brain-dead trivialize and prostitute and unintentionally parody one of the finest examples of craftsmanship and quality she knows about. Just keep them far away from Quinsigamond and the eleven-inch length of her Smith & Wesson.

  She’s had experience with a variety of both handguns and, lately, more than ever, assault rifles. And she owns a small collection—a Parabellum automatic, a Gewehr 43, an original 1921 John T. Thompson .45 caliber submachine gun, all of which she keeps perfectly maintained and some of which get exercised at the shooting bunker. Her most recent purchase was an Uzi. But for reasons that have to do with instinct and aura, the gun she almost always takes to work is her .357 Magnum Model 27.

  She knows about her weapons with a degree of scholarship that makes her a “buff,” in the same way other people bone up obsessively on the Civil War or old Corvettes. Ask Lenore over a cup of coffee about the Magnum. She’ll nod and start to talk slowly, in a regulated voice that almost gives away its excitement just by the extent of its suppression. She’ll forget the time and infect you with her competence on the subject. She’ll start in 1935, the year the weapon was introduced, developed by a pistol specialist named Elmer Keith and supported by Major Daniel B. Wesson himself. They used a .44 target model frame, then made the barrel 222.25mm long. The caliber of .357 was used to set the gun apart from all other ordinary .38s. She’ll tell you how, at first, the gun was only available by special order, but demand forced it into general production. And how, because of World War II, production had to be suspended in 1941. By that time 5,500 had been forged. Luckily, she’ll explain, production started up again after the Axis powers had been slapped down. Her particular gun was built in ‘74. It’s got the shorter 3.5-inch barrel and weighs about two and a half pounds. It’s got a standard six-shot cylinder and a rate of fire of 12 rpm. The last statistic she’ll end on, the one she’ll let you ponder and hope that you’ll attach a vivid image to, is muzzle velocity. She might ask you to guess this factor and swig down the last of her bitter coffee. And when you admit your inability to do so, she’ll nod again, bite her bottom lip for just a second, stare into your eyes, and spill it: One thousand four hundred and fifty freaking feet per second, my friend, with a striking energy of nine hundred and seventy-two joules. It will detach an arm completely off a shoulder. And I ought to know …

  Lenore believes in this gun in the manner that others believe in an ancient dogma, or a concept of family or love.

  Lenore adores the fact that this gun is so real, so solid and fixable, locatable in a world that seems to be more transient, transparent, and decomposing every day.

  Lenore no longer believes in God. She does not believe in an afterlife. She does not believe in some fixed code of divinely transmitted morality. She does not believe in turning the other cheek. She does not believe that the meek will inherit the earth. She now believes in power and persistence. In logic and rational thought. In seizing what you need without regard to the effect of your actions upon others. She hides these beliefs out of what she feels to be wise self-preservation, out of the fact that if others knew her true convictions, it would become pretty difficult to live the way she wants.

  It’s only in relation to her gun that she allows herself to expose and vent the certainties at the core of her brain, the ones she thinks her father had nightmares about. Lenore has killed one person—a twenty-two-year-old Colombian who fired a shotgun at Zarelli from the shattered back window of a speeding Trans Am—and wounded three others in varying degrees of severity, including blowing the full right arm off a longtime smack broker from down the projects who made the mistake of charging her with a razor in a dark stairwell. In each of those incidents, Lenore has felt a burst of emotion that she can’t put a name to, that has no definition in the heart of the average person. She approximates it every time she pulls out her weapon and draws down on a suspect without firing. It’s not the same as actually pulling the trigger, but it’s a step in the right direction and more pleasing than frustrating.

  But on those occasions when she has pulled the trigger and sent aluminum or lead barreling into the flesh and bone of some challenging, but ultimately weaker animal, Lenore feels like she’s been momentarily elevated to a state people only dream of. More than anything, she finds it ironic that she ended up a narcotics cop, since the people she’s chronically arresting are in search of a similar feeling, but stupidity or bad luck has brought them to smack rather than the gun. If they only had a clue what they could feel like being on the delivery end of a bullet flying sixteen miles a minute, the streets would be pools of blood and toppling bodies. The air would be continuously filled with duos of muzzleblast and human scream. She finds it funny and appealing to think that just five seconds in the basement shooting range down at the station is about a thousand times better than the best moment she ever had in bed with Zarelli.

  Over the past few years, maybe even going back as far as the death of her parents, Lenore has tried to find words that she could hang on her beliefs, her system of looking at the world and her place in it, her particular philosophy. She’s never read as many books as Ike—Ike’s a real reader, loves those mysteries—but she manages to dip into a dozen or more a year. She drops into the library every couple of weeks and checks something out, usually some fat book she can read chunks of, maybe an anthology of essays or something. Unlike her twin brother, she sticks with nonfiction, often philosophy and
history. She knows she’s smart enough so that, given enough time and persistence, she can get a handle on almost any line of thought.

  What she’s discovered in the course of her reading is that though many people have come close to her vision, no one’s really hit the bull’s-eye. She spent a couple of years on Nietzsche, boned up on a lot of secondary material, even for a time kept a small notebook to clarify positions and meanings. He still holds a warm, important place in her heart, but she feels like she somehow slid past him, as though some hidden factor—her sex, her language, the century she’s living in—has forced them to part like young and bittersweet lovers.

  She had a fling with Darwin that she’s happy about, but which faded more rapidly than she would have bet. She tried Hegel and got bogged down, found him a little bloodless. She went through a series of liaisons with a parade of lesser, or at least less familiar, names. Sorel, Péguy, Lagardelle. Machiavelli looked like he could be a lifetime match, but last year she came to the realization that her search for a past correlation to her own system was a pathetic one. The thing to do was simply to act purely within that system. Act was the key word. Action over thought. The justification for her life could be found in the rush of feeling that lingered for a few minutes after she walked out of the shooting bunker.

  Over a strong black coffee last week, coming home after a forty-eight-hour dead-end shift, she daydreamed that if only the technology existed, her brain could be monitored to find out exactly what happened at the moment she squeezed on the trigger of the Magnum and the bullet exploded out the barrel and into the body of some panicking importer. And that if it could be determined exactly what kind of chemical got secreted, just what synapse got fired, then the process could be synthesized so that she could make it happen at will. She smiled at the thought, thinking that there was probably no way that her body could really tolerate that kind of ongoing stimulation for any extended period, but that even if the feeling proved fatal, it would be the best of all possible ways to die.

  For a while, after she first made detective, Lenore was the only woman in the narcotics department. This was before Peirce, and long before Shaw. Because of this, she’d often be the first person inserted into a new investigation. She could play the new hooker in town so well that Zarelli used to say to her, “I don’t know, you make me wonder.” So she logged a lot of those first couple of plainclothes years, out on Goulden Avenue, jammed into imitation-leather mini-skirts, these neon-red or lime-green cheap satin halter tops, and break-your-ankles six-inch stiletto heels. Today she would say that she knows the residents and practitioners and hawkers and brokers and generally bent mothers of the Goulden Ave block, maybe better than any cop in the city.

  The area is commonly known as Bangkok Park, probably because the number of vices for sale rivals that of the memorable Asian city. Ninety percent of all the drug trade in Quinsigamond takes place in the square mile of Bangkok Park. And so in this day and age, you have to expect to find extensive, cutting-edge weaponry inside every doorway. It used to be that, just like most other medium-sized urban centers, you only had to worry about distribution and use. But you can’t beat back the tide of progress that big drug money will ignite and now there are actually good-sized production centers right here in the city. So far, the department has found two. The first was a small lab in the basement of an abandoned brownstone on the corner of Watson and West. But the second was in a bricked-off section of the old Verner Warehouse on Grassman. Richmond and Shaw found it by accident while tailing a courier back from the Zone, Quinsigamond’s try at a cut-rate East Village. The courier got wise to them at some point inside Bangkok, and managed to lose them by ducking into the labyrinth of the old Verner building. Richmond and Shaw hunted around, realized they’d blown the tail, but inadvertently stumbled onto this huge state-of-the-art setup. This was top-of-the-line, shipped-in equipment, half a million anyway, and it told Lenore just how bad things were getting.

  It was after the Verner discovery that she started thinking about the Uzi.

  While everyone else in the department thinks of the job as little more than a futile effort that brings them a paycheck, Lenore pretends she’s something of a zealot. She’s got everyone convinced that she defines each day as a nonstop conflict between darkness and light, and this is why she’s never been hesitant to draw her piece and fire away. Her fake attitude creates a problem for Zarelli, especially since the night she told him to dig some Lifesavers out of her purse and he saw the vial filled with speed. Now, every once in a while, he throws the speed in her face like it was some moral paradox that she’s not clear on. In those instances, she grabs control of the argument by letting fly a derisive, condescending laugh and explaining, with a show of really strained patience, that there’s no paradox whatsoever, since the issue is one of dominance. She completely dominates the drug and if she ever sees, in the briefest of moments, an erosion of her control, she’ll kick and be as clean as day one. Lenore feels this is the core of truth in her act. She monitors herself. She’d like to do without the drug, but life is so goddamn crazy right now. The hours are unreal, and everyone has their limit.

  She puts down the weight, leans forward, turns up the volume of the set. A voice yelps, Get on your knees and give me your money. She turns off the set, gets up, and moves to the bedroom wall. She presses her ear against it. She can hear the radio next door. Ike is up, probably putting the coffee on.

  Ike opens the door with that annoying isn’t-it-a-great-day smile on his face. Lenore walks in nodding and saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, just tell me the coffee’s ready.”

  She sits down at his butcherblock table and grabs the front section of the newspaper and says, “I don’t have much time. Jesus, did you burn the toast again?”

  She doesn’t expect an answer and he doesn’t offer one. Instead he slides a brimming mug of jet-black and steaming hot coffee in front of her. The mug is green and says in bold, black letters: Don’t Speak to Me till This Mug Is Empty. Lenore scans the headlines and mutters, “God, these Muslims are really stepping over the line.”

  Ike sits down opposite her, stays silent but drums his fingers on the table in a way he knows upsets her. Lenore knows he knows and so looks up from the paper, head cocked and smiling.

  • • •

  Yesterday, all day long, Ike had this crazy idea that mushroomed. He’d been thinking about a dinner he’d had with Lenore, American chop suey and garlic bread. And like most of the dinners they shared together, Lenore’s plate had gone cold while she told Ike the details of a recent bust. Lenore could tell a tremendous story. She started slowly and built a solid, well-defined foundation. She gave you a quick rundown on all the key players and, though brief, her descriptions were always so unique you never had any trouble keeping characters straight. She used an impressive array of cop jargon without sounding forced or clichéd, without sounding like some 1970s TV show. She gave you a basic idea of the history of the particular dealers she was after, the cities they were out of, the families they did their bartering with, the prisons they’d done their time in. And then she’d start hitting you with the procedural stuff, how they built a case, who’d gone undercover, who’d applied pressure to whom, who was tailed and who was bugged, and who was roughed up.

  But, without a doubt, Lenore’s forte, her real, natural talent, was given full play when she narrated the actual arrest, when her voice would kick into that low, machine-gun rhythm and she’d manage to detail every angle of the climax, the broken-down doors, the screaming in many languages, the drawn weapons and flushing toilets, the cursing and face slapping and biting, and, of course, as dependable as Jack Webb, the reading of the Miranda card, the recitation of civil rights due all in the process of arrest.

  Ike loves Lenore’s stories. He could listen for hours. He wishes he had that ability, to create a clear and fluid picture of confusing events. He wishes he had the energy and intelligence and, maybe, confidence to make it exciting but plausible, well paced but d
etailed.

  And then, yesterday, while breaking down a basket of flats by zip code, the thought hit him in one quick burst: he could record Lenore’s voice. He could get her stories down on tape. And, even better, he could transcribe the tapes onto paper, type them up at night. If the stories enthrall him, he’s sure they would grab others. He and Lenore could turn a good buck on them. He ached for the day to go by so he could hit her with the idea and see how she felt. He’d stress that she wouldn’t have to do a thing, just sit and eat and talk like always. He’d take care of the rest. He assured himself that even if she were hesitant for some reason, he’d stress the possibility of big, fast income and the things it could buy: that Porsche she mentions every week, the Soloflex machine she keeps reading about.

  • • •

  “So,” Ike says.

  Lenore raises her eyebrows.

  “Well?” he tries.

  She shrugs.

  “Just tell me. Did you break it off or not?”

  She sighs, drops the paper to the table, sinks back into the chair, lets her mouth drop open slightly. They stare at each other until she gives in and says, “Look, Ike, what do you want? I worked eighteen hours straight, okay? There were other people around us most of that time. I couldn’t …”