Box Nine Read online

  Lehmann says, “I’m bunking here for the duration. You run everything through me. I want to know every piece of information you trip over. I want to know what you eat for dinner.”

  Lenore knows she’s going to have problems with Lehmann.

  Lehmann continues, “Dr. Woo will be assisting us throughout because that’s what my boss wants, so include him in all your updates.”

  Miskewitz says, “Put everything on hold that you can and junk what you can’t. We’ll work our normal partners with the exception of Thomas and Zarelli. Zarelli, you tag onto Richmond and Peirce. Detective Thomas, you’re to escort Dr. Woo throughout the investigation—”

  Lenore comes straight up in her seat and repeats, “Escort?” as if she’d never heard the word.

  Miskewitz tilts his head slightly and gives an annoyed smile. “That’s right, Lenore. As of today the doctor is on leave from St. Ignatius and on loan to us—”

  “As in report—” Lenore begins, and the lieutenant holds up a hand.

  “—As in accompanies you. As in the mayor wants it this way.”

  “I can’t take this guy down the Park,” she says in disbelief.

  “Look, Thomas, we’re dealing with a new substance here. Dr. Woo is the only one to have seen its effects firsthand—”

  “I’ll take pictures for him—”

  “—There’s no more discussion, Detective. That’s what the mayor wants and that’s what I’m telling you to do.”

  Miskewitz turns back to the rest of the table. “I think it’s safe to say you’ll be putting in a big chunk of overtime, so get that straight at home.”

  Miskewitz leans back into his chair, leans his head on his shoulder, and opens his arms to his sides. It’s some weird signal that the meeting is over. Richmond is the first to get up, saying over his shoulder to Lenore, “Jesus, I got to use the can.” Shaw begins to move for the coffee urn. Zarelli and Lehmann mumble to one another with disgusted looks on their faces.

  Lenore pushes back from the table. Woo approaches her and says, “Detective,” and pauses.

  “Poor short-term memory,” she says. “Maybe you should get your hands on some Lingo.”

  “Perhaps,” he says, again trying to flash her the killer smile.

  “Thomas,” she says, “Detective Thomas.”

  “Detective Thomas,” he says, “of course. I was wondering if possibly we could meet a little later. For lunch, possibly. To discuss the investigation.”

  In her tiny office, Eva applies the last, slightest brushstroke of blush onto her cheek. She looks quickly at the smudged mirror, then closes the small black plastic case and slides it into her pocketbook inside the bottom drawer of her desk. She raises her hand to brush at her cheek and stops herself, thinking, Leave well enough alone. She doesn’t like the idea that anyone might notice that she wears makeup, but without it she thinks she has the face of a corpse, cold as ice, white as a sheet.

  She can tell already that it’s going to be a beaut of a day. The Reader’s Digests are in and she’s got two carriers out sick. She’s already called for a couple of floats from down the main branch, but nobody’s promising anything. She’ll handle it. If she has to, she’ll call Gumm and ask him to forget about taking today off. And he’ll give.

  She pulls her middle drawer open and takes out her eleven-inch clipboard and several preprinted forms which she inserts under the clip. Then she folds all the forms over the top of the board to reveal a blank yellow legal pad. She takes a just-sharpened pencil from her cup and holds it above the pad. She breathes slowly and quiets her whole body, lifts her head, and remains completely still, listening.

  Eva’s office, which had once been a storage closet, borders the locker room. Eva takes notes on everything that is said in the locker room. The conversations are always the most banal, boring exchanges, but she notes them anyway. She thinks that it’s a general rule of life that no information is so small that it can’t, at some point, maybe in the far future, be put to good use. So she keeps this private record in her files at home, an ongoing transcription of the locker room small talk, the complaining and swearing and taunting. Poor Ike Thomas, the bruising he takes.

  Eva smuggles her legal pad of shorthand notes home every night, then, after a supper that’s been planned a week in advance and is a nutritionist’s dream of balance and freshness, she indulges herself. Eva’s one great treat is music and last year, after making supervisor, she went out and blew a wad on a Bang & Olufsen stereo system that she’d fantasized about for months. It cost almost ten grand and she had to take a loan from the credit union, but each evening around six-thirty, when she slides in the CD of selections from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, which was the first piece of music she bought, she knows it was the absolutely correct decision. She sits in a corner, in a swivel secretary’s chair, and types up her notes on a heavy black Underwood manual that had belonged to her mother. At times she has to take a break and sit with her head down at her knees in an anti-faint position. She thinks this is because of the incongruity caused by the banality of the words she reads in relation to the majesty and power of the music that’s entering her ears simultaneously. She always has a tall glass of orange juice next to the typewriter, ready to revive her, put her back on course.

  Eva read a biography of Wagner when she was an adolescent and for a time, during the heat of her mid-teen years, he was her fantasy lover, the guy she dreamed about at 4 A.M., bathed in a thick sweat.

  Last week she dreamed about Ike Thomas. She’s sure there’s no meaning to this, but she can’t shake loose from the fact that it happened, that somehow this strange and silent man, the brunt of the locker room’s collective stupidity, invaded her subconscious and came to her dream-mind, trudged up her front walk with a bursting-full mailbag, every letter in it addressed to Eva Barnes, her name in an ornate, calligraphied script. And he spent all night pushing the letters into her mailbox, like some circus trick, like some magic act. The letters kept fitting in, dozens, thousands, there seemed to be boundless room inside.

  She blocks out the memory, fine-tunes her hearing, waits for the first voice to come. As always, her timing is perfect. They start filing in, in the same order, every day: old Jacobi first with his ancient grey metal lunchbox that looks like it could house an entire breadloaf, then the new girl, Bromberg, in her fluorescent-red, oversized glasses and too-short skirt, then Ike Thomas, quiet, hunched over a little, his eyes on his own feet. Five minutes will go by, until the late-bell is just about to ring, and in will come Rourke and Wilson, both a mess, shirts untucked, hair sticking out everywhere, just about announcing to the whole post office that once again they’ve slept together. Eva thinks she should have bounced Wilson when she had the chance.

  The first voice comes from the new girl, Bromberg:

  BROMBERG: Hey, Thomas, I hear Stephenson is out today. Why don’t you take two routes and really kiss the bitch’s ass?

  JACOBI: Leave the boy alone, Lisa. He just loves a woman in uniform. Isn’t that right, Ike? And all this time I thought you were gay …

  BROMBERG: I think they’re both gay. The bitch and the schmuck. You should really ask her out, Thomas, you could be like fakes for each other.

  JACOBI: Fakes? What, fakes?

  THOMAS: Beards. Okay. The word is beards, Bromberg. Jees.

  JACOBI: What does she mean, fakes?

  [7 a.m. bell]

  THOMAS: She’s saying it wrong. You never heard of a beard? It’s like when someone pretends to be, you know, involved with someone else.

  ROURKE: We got donuts. Lisa, you owe two bucks to the kitty.

  BROMBERG: I paid this week. Ask Thomas, he saw me pay. I paid.

  WILSON: Is Stephenson really out again? What an asshole, I swear, that guy never works …

  BROMBERG: Stephenson and Ogden are both out. You two just made it. The bitch would’ve been on you …

  JACOBI: Billy, you ever hear of a beard, the word beard, okay, but not, like, on your face? Like anot
her meaning.

  ROURKE: What are you fucking babbling about? Jesus, it’s early.

  WILSON: Who had the cruller? Jacobi, was the cruller—

  ROURKE: Shit! Goddammit, I spilled the—

  THOMAS: I’m sorry, you should’ve—

  ROURKE: You goddamn asshole, Thomas, you’re such a shithead—

  WILSON: Here, Billy, let me …

  BROMBERG: You know, for two people in the sack so much, you two still bitch a lot.

  ROURKE: That’s gonna be five bucks to get the shirt dry-cleaned, shit-for-brains.

  THOMAS: What cleaner’s do you go to? Five bucks?

  ROURKE: Five bucks.

  THOMAS: It’s like three bucks, Billy. Three-fifty, tops.

  ROURKE: Aw, Christ, look at this, I’m a mess here. Jacobi, you got an extra shirt in your locker?

  THOMAS: I’ve got a shirt, Billy.

  JACOBI: Can’t help you.

  ROURKE: I don’t want your freakin’ shirt, you doink.

  WILSON: Here, honey, let me wipe it. It’ll be fine.

  BROMBERG: Jacobi, you got the school today?

  JACOBI: Haven’t seen the schedule. I think Stephenson was due.

  BROMBERG: You ever notice how Thomas never gets the school? Never.

  THOMAS: I’ve taken that route plenty of times. I used to get the school and the library. And the elderly towers on Sapir.

  JACOBI: I hate those towers. You ever notice how every one of those old people gets TV Guide? Every goddamn one.

  BROMBERG: What I’m saying is, Thomas never gets the school. I swear.

  THOMAS: I get the school. God.

  BROMBERG: I’m saying there’s got to be something between him and the bitch.

  THOMAS: For God’s sake …

  JACOBI: That right? Hey, Ike? You all over the woman or what?

  [Locker door slams]

  ROURKE: Shithead getting pissed?

  THOMAS: Look, I’m sorry about the coffee, okay? Can we just get to work?

  JACOBI: Every bone in me says this is going to be a mother of a day. Billy, you going to the Bach Room after?

  WILSON: Oh yeah, let’s have a few, Billy, huh?

  ROURKE: What’s the word, shithead, you going to the Bach Room? Maybe taking the bitch with you?

  [Silence]

  THOMAS: What’s she ever done to you, Rourke, huh?

  ROURKE: Do you hear this? Did you hear this? This is unbelievable. I’m screwing around and he is all hot for the bitch. Do you believe this? Jacobi, did you hear this guy?

  [Whistle, general catcalls]

  THOMAS: No, I’m just asking, what did she ever do to you? Really, answer me. And while you’re at it, what did I ever do to you?

  [Much laughter]

  THOMAS: What’s wrong, Billy, can’t you speak? Is there something wrong with your goddamn mouth?

  [Laughter ends]

  ROURKE: What a ballsy little bastard, defending the bitch like this. Listen, schmuckhead, it’s nothing you or she did, okay? All right? It’s what you are. All right, what you are. You see the difference there. You are a shithead. She is a bitch.

  [Laughter

  [Door swings open, closed. I assume Thomas leaves]

  Eva puts her pencil back into her cup. Without reviewing her shorthand, she pulls all the forms back down over the yellow sheet. She pushes back from her desk and stares up at a glossy poster of a recent stamp issue, the William Faulkner stamp. She stares at the face depicted in a green line drawing. The man looks so wise, distinguished, the small features, the pipe in the mouth. Eva wishes she could consult with him, ask some advice on what he’d do about the infighting among her people. When the stamp was issued, she’d looked Faulkner up in her old Britannica at home and was pleased and surprised to see he’d worked in a post office in Mississippi. Now she wishes he worked here and was out in the front lobby, reloading the self-serve stamp machines, or maybe tacking up new Wanted posters. She’d ask him what to do about all the hostility in the locker room. And she’d ask him what he thought about Ike Thomas, and if he was really defending the bitch, hot for the bitch.

  Eva gets up out of her chair and straightens her skirt. She’s wearing her navy-blue suit with a white blouse, and she wishes she’d worn something else, something a little less plain. It’s difficult. When she went from carrier to supervisor she had to stop wearing a uniform. She liked the uniform. It identified her. Anywhere in the country, people just taking a quick look at her would know she worked for the U.S. Postal Service. But there’s a statute that says supervisors aren’t to wear the uniform. Eva guesses they want the supervisors set apart, differentiated from the carriers and clerks so that they’re seen clearly as the boss, the authority figure. But there are other ways of signifying their increased status without sacrificing the uniform. There are always other options. Now every morning means a decision about what to wear, about how to look professional and serious without looking boring or dowdy or masculine.

  She hears a last locker slam shut next door and knows they’re all at their cages. She starts to write quickly on her scheduling forms and walks out into the workroom. Jacobi is the only one talking, and he’s just muttering to no one in particular. She walks into the center of the room, equidistant from each of them seated atop their metal stools, stacks of banded mail in their hands.

  “Okay,” she says, trying instantly to find the right modulation for her voice. “As you probably guessed by now, Stephenson and Ogden are both out sick …”

  “Yeah, right,” says Rourke. He didn’t shave the past two days and Eva thinks she’s going to have to mention it. He looks more like a Bangkok derelict than a carrier.

  “I’m waiting for the word from the main office on my request for two subs. I think we can only count on one, and I’m not giving the towers to a sub. They’ll never finish and we’ll hear about it all day tomorrow.”

  She sees them all tense up, waiting to see who’ll get hung with Stephenson’s awful route.

  She hugs the clipboard up to her chest and drums on the back of it with her fingers.

  “Thomas,” she says, “you do Stephenson’s. Wilson and Jacobi, you split up Ike’s route between you.”

  She pauses, looks around, then says, “Okay, let’s hit it,” and turns to head back to her office. She hears Rourke say something under his breath that sounds like “heartbreaker,” and she surprises herself by stopping and wheeling back around to face them.

  It’s like a vacuum has rushed into the space between all the cages and sucked the air and noise away. Eva fills it with the question, “What was that, Rourke?”

  He hesitates, then says, “Nothing, I was talking to Ike …”

  She cuts him off, saying, “Did we lose our razor, Rourke?”

  He starts to say, “What, you mean …”

  And she cuts him off again, saying, “Okay, there’s a change in scheduling. You’ve got Stephenson’s route, Rourke. Thomas, you’re here for the day. At the window and sorting. I’ll get the second sub from downtown.”

  Rourke is stunned, shaking his head, stammering, saying, “Oh, c’mon, what the hell, I didn’t say a thing …”

  But Eva has already started walking back to her office. When her door closes, everyone stays still, like a jumpy terrorist has a gun swaying over their heads. Finally Rourke turns to Wilson and says, “What the fuck was that all about?”

  No one answers.

  • • •

  If someone were to ask Ike which he liked better, being out on the route, delivering, or being inside at the cage, sorting, he’d have trouble giving a definitive answer. The truth is he enjoys both activities and he’d have a real problem trying to elevate one above the other. They’re different. On the route, you’re outside, meeting people, saying hello, getting some exercise. Inside, sorting the mail, you don’t move or talk, your brain listens to the radio and kind of goes on remote control, sliding envelopes into the appropriate slots, tossing packages into the right baskets. But both activities
have a definite procedure to follow, an order, a schedule, a continuous line of behavior. And though Ike wouldn’t admit it to anyone, that’s really what he likes about his job. So either way he can’t lose. Inside or out, it’s all the same to him.

  For instance, in the manual they even have illustrations for how you should position yourself on the sorting stool. Ike follows the official example. Your feet, in regulation steel-toed work boots, are flat on the work floor, taking sixty percent of the weight of your body. Your buttocks are to rest not more than two inches on the edge or lip of the work stool, so that you’re actually in more of a modified-leaning, rather than sitting, position. Though it isn’t explained in the manual, Ike has guessed that some engineer may have figured out the most efficient way of going through an average-sized sorting load, coming up with the illustrated position that probably finds a perfect balance between speed and conservation of energy.

  A day inside, like this, is a nice break every now and then. Ike thinks of it like the sick days he’d sometimes take in grammar school, a rare treat, a change of pace. He knows he’ll appreciate the route even more tomorrow, approach it with renewed effort. Besides, there are no pit bulls inside the Sapir Street Station. He’s never been attacked by Mrs. Vachek’s pet, but there have been a couple of close calls. Last November, he was sliding her Social Security check through the slot in her front door and Milos, silent, waiting, cocked, tore the check from his hand in an explosion of noise and saliva and snapping fangs. Ike actually felt the wet, rubbery flap of the dog’s mouth as he wrenched back and pulled his hand to safety. There was a pain in his chest for the balance of the day.

  Then six months later, the Vachek door was left just slightly open, the slip bolt pressed against the jamb, just an eighth of an inch from its slot. When Ike began to push some pulpy religious monthly through the brass-rimmed mail slot, the door swung open enough to reveal Milos witnessing the opportunity of a lifetime. He lunged and Ike fell backward in the doorway, just managing to shield his throat with the mailbag. Milos caught an incisor on Ike’s sleeve and shredded the whole arm, but missed any skin. By the grace of God, Mrs. Vachek appeared out of nowhere with some silent whisde in her mouth, her cheeks puffed out to bursting, blowing an inaudible command that Milos grudgingly obeyed.