There was a note tucked into Caroline's door telling him she was at the tennis club. He decided that rather than wait he would go there and watch her play. He drove the short distance slowly, examining the neighborhood—industrial buildings, warehouses, auto body shops, a delicatessen, a discount rug outlet store and a Laundromat.
He parked in front of the club, wandered in, finally found her playing mixed doubles on one of the outdoor courts. She waved when she saw him. The Sunday sun was hot. He found an old aluminum-frame chair, dragged it over to one of the net posts and sat down.
She was wearing a skimpy tennis dress that exposed her glistening back. She didn't play girlish tennis, but stepped powerfully into her strokes. He liked the way she moved, economical, direct. She played without tricks, the same way she made love; there were solid thunks when her racquet met the ball.
Her partner was a lean young man with muscular arms and an athlete's vacant stare. The opponents were an exuberant bearded man with a strong squat torso and a willowy girl who uncoiled a ferocious serve. Janek was no tennis expert, but he could see that the women were the superior players. It was a serious match—rushes to the net, leaps to smash, hard backhands fired crosscourt. Tough competitive play, not social Sunday tennis. He felt a little envious, wishing he were part of it.
After the match the players met at the net, then Caroline brought them over to be introduced. They all moved to the club terrace, took a table and ordered Cokes and beers. There was talk of an upcoming autumn tournament, rackets and string jobs, an assistant pro trying to make out with someone's daughter. Listening, he felt separate, dressed differently and cool, while they sat warm and pungent, bonded by their play.
Caroline must have sensed his awkwardness. She turned to him often and smiled. When she mentioned that he was a detective there was a small stirring around the table. The bearded man, a cardiologist, announced that Janek was the first detective he had ever met.
"I met one once," the floppy girl said. "Real nice guy. Interviewed me after I was mugged."
"They get the mugger?" Caroline's partner asked.
When the girl shook her head, Janek added, "We rarely do."
Later he wondered why he'd said it; he'd sounded defensive in a way he hadn't meant. After that exchange the conversation wound down. One by one the players left for the locker rooms until finally he was left alone.
When Caroline returned he had finished a second beer. Her hair was still wet from her shower.
"Sorry about those people. They're not important. Just tennis friends." She smiled.
"Nice people. Don't apologize for them."
"Boring people. And you're right—I won't." She studied him. "Something the matter? Bad this morning with Mrs. D?"
He shook his head. "That went pretty much the way I thought."
"But something's bothering you. I can tell."
He nodded.
"Want to talk about it?"
"It wouldn't be the nicest story you ever heard."
"Why don't you tell me anyway."
He saw she was serious, waiting for him to speak. For a moment he hesitated. He'd resolved not to burden her with his case. But it was part of his life, it was gnawing at him, and now she was asking him to share. "Okay," he said, "but stop me when you've heard enough." Then he told her the saga of Switched Heads.
She listened well. He could not imagine Sarah ever listening to him so well, or Lou DiMona, or any other detective's wife. Such women cut off or turned brittle when the conversation turned to work, as if the substance of a detective's life was so awful it was best ignored. But Caroline was different, had photographed a war, had been intimate with violence, cruelty and death.
"...still got to look at that gym teacher," he said, "but I doubt there's anything there. Last night, standing behind the shower curtain, I had this feeling there were things I'd seen that hadn't registered on me yet. Things I knew but didn't understand, that kept backing out of reach. Thought about it again this morning and just now when you were changing. I keep coming back to those photographs." He glanced at her. "Ugly. Really ugly stuff."
"I've seen a lot of ugly stuff. You want me to look at them?"
"Would you?" She was marvelous; by some miraculous process she could read his mind.
"Of course. But I'm no detective."
"I wouldn't want you to be. I'd just like you to look at them as a professional photographer and tell me what you see."
She stood up. "Okay. Let's go."
"Drive into the city now?"
"Why stall around? You want me to look. Take me in, Janek. I'm ready to go to work."
As they drove into Manhattan he told her more. "I knew, soon as I got this, it wasn't going to be my kind of case. I'm good when I can see things through someone else's eyes, but this is so far from anything I can understand that I knew upfront I wasn't going to link in without pushing myself to a place I'd never been."
Her eyes glowed outside the precinct house. She sniffed the air expectantly as they walked through and then up the stairs in back. "Perfect," she said, "that crummy smell." She smiled. "Criminals and cops."
When they reached the squad room he exposed the wall where Aaron had mounted the crime-scene photographs. Then he withdrew to his swivel chair, waiting to hear what she would say.
She stood before each shot, stared at it, then moved on to the next. The room was still. He could feel her concentration, the intensity of her gaze, although he could not see her eyes. Watching her from behind, he felt moved by her posture, the proud way she stood before each awful photograph.
It was ten minutes before she spoke, a long time, time enough for a large amount of tension to build up. When she did speak finally, she didn't turn, but continued to stand with her back to him, facing the wall.
"Photography's primitive, but these are powerful pictures. Tabloid style. It's all the rage today. Some of the serious young photographers are trying to imitate it. You know—shoot like street paparazzi, pop off flashbulbs and capture the hard surface of events. Stick these shots on the wall of a trendy gallery and some critic will come along and call them art. 'As sensational, powerful and pure as a blundering crime-scene photographer's work...' But this isn't a gallery. These were taken by a real police photographer. Still, there's something self-conscious in them. A special artistry. And power."
She paused, peered at the wall again as if trying to discover what she meant. "No attempt to pretty up. This isn't the German School of Artistic Cruelty. No models posing like they're dead. These women are dead. But there's something going on."
She paused again. "Maybe it's the tension. Between the artlessness of the camera work and the artistic way that everything's arranged. I don't know. Looks to me like the subject matter, the girls, their heads, the bedding, the blood—like all that's been arranged for maximum effect." She turned to him with a querying expression. "Guess that doesn't make much sense."
"We'll see if it does," he said. "What do you mean by 'arranged?'"
"Like it's been set up."
"You mean whoever did this set things up so what he'd done would get photographed in this powerful way?"
"I know that sounds crazy..."
"Why don't you show me what you mean."
She turned back to the wall. "The heads, of course. The faces and all that. But I'd go further. I'd say the wrinkles on the sheets. They're not random. Too perfect, too precise. You could spend an hour setting up shots like these, altering the bedding, creating shadows on the pillows, stringing out the hair, fluffing it out the way it's fluffed out here. It's as if killing them and switching them wasn't enough. As if he had to fuss with them afterward. Arrange things for his pleasure. You know—to please his eye."
She paused again, but he didn't cut in; he could sense she had more to say. "There's another thing. Don't quite know how to explain it. But..." She paused. "It seems to me there's something almost loving in these shots. Not loving toward the victims. I don't mean that. But I feel somehow that afterward, after he did this cruel thing, they were handled...lovingly." She turned back to Janek, perplexed.
They drove uptown in silence. He found a parking space near his building, then guided her on foot into Central Park. The sun, low in the sky, about to sink behind the apartment houses on Central Park West, cast a soft glow over the meadows and lengthened the shadows of the elms.
He placed his arm about her waist as they strolled along a bridle path. There was a scent of foliage about to decay, the sweet smell of late-summer grass. To Janek the park, so roughly trod upon through July and August, became suddenly transformed. This living room of the city, so badly used for months, became a garden of delights. Each tree seemed etched from every other. Each leaf and bush asserted itself as unique. Even the vandalized streetlamps and ruined benches looked graceful despite abuse. He was suffused by a sense of beauty, the perfect symmetry of nature, of his and Caroline's place in the scheme, and was filled with a mellow happiness.
He looked at her, could see that her thoughts were someplace else. Feeling her restlessness, he asked her gently what was wrong.
"Just wondering—am I going to end up like that?" She glanced quickly at him, then stared ahead.
"Like what?"
"Those girls. The ones in your case."
He tightened his arm around her. "How can you think a thing like that?"
She shook her head. "Just seeing those pictures, the way the girls looked. Aggression, violence—my subjects maybe because they scare me so much and I'm working with them now to try and confront my fear. I've wondered why aggression intrigues me. I think I've always had this idea I was going to end up a victim of it, bloody, broken, maybe cut up. I have a recurring fantasy of myself trapped in a smashed-up car, with frightened people peering in through the windows and others trying to drag me out of the wreckage and my life just seeping away in a steady stream of blood. I look around and notice almost casually that one of my legs is gone. 'My goodness,' I say to myself, 'I seem to have lost my leg.' And then I close my eyes and die."
She grasped him, placed her hand upon his chest so he could feel his heart beating against her palm. He wrapped her in his arms, stroked her hair and told her he would protect her from everything she feared. We all live under the threat of violence, he told her; that's what it means to live in a city—to have fear constantly in the background of our lives. So we protect ourselves by imagining the worst things that can happen, a kind of magical thinking, he explained, a sort of talisman against our fright.
It was her first visit to his apartment. Her face was rapt as he unlocked the caged outer door, led her through the short tunnel beneath the steps, unlocked the solid door and showed her in. She looked around slowly, curiously, taking in each piece of his furniture. He watched as she moved about lightly touching his refrigerator, his reading chair, his bureau, his bed, and then the inherited workbench covered with the entrails of accordions and all of his father's special tools.
She picked up a small accordion, opened it, touched several of the keys. The sound was blunt and awful. They laughed.
"Play for me, Janek," she said. "Please play for me."
He hesitated. He rarely had time to play; lately, when he touched the instruments it was only to be certain that they worked. His father's old accordions from Hungary and Austria were sentimental artifacts. But when she asked him to play for her he knew he could not refuse.
He went to a closet, hauled out his best accordion, a Depression-era model made at the Damian shop. She withdrew to his bed, sat there with her elbows on her knees while he strapped on the harness and turned his workbench chair so it faced the room.
He played some scales, warming up his fingers, then little melodies that whimpered through the pipes. He went on to melancholy carnival tunes, and when he felt limber and glanced at her and saw she was watching carefully he played Scarlatti for her, then shifted to Rimsky-Korsakov, then on to Khachaturian, playing louder and louder, fuller and fuller, playing on until the light faded from the windows and the room finally turned dark. She switched on the lamp beside his bed and he continued playing, all the music he had ever known. He played out of his love for her, played like a troubadour courting his lady, while she sat enraptured, her eyes never leaving his face, the two of them immersed in each other, enveloped by the sound.