I made it to my car as quickly as the icy sidewalk would allow, beating out a meter-reader by a good ten seconds, shoving the keys at the ignition while trying to simultaneously slam the door and eyeball my watch. Didn’t work; the keys flew out of my hand and came to rest on the floor at my feet, and then I was leaning my forehead on the steering wheel, blinking to hold back tears, praying the meter maid wouldn’t notice and haul me out of the car for a breathalyzer test.
Damn Mooney anyway. He hadn’t quizzed me about any crazed felons I’d nailed when I was a cop, any goon recently freed from prison and hungering for revenge. No, he’d gone straight for the jugular, straight for Sam Gianelli. And damn Sam for not saying a word about any work-related troubles. But how could I damn him for not telling me what I’d expressly said I didn’t want to hear?
I fumbled on the floor mat till my hand found the keys. Studied my watch in disbelief. There are times when the clock moves slowly and times when it speeds; it had sprinted for the finish line while I was closeted with Mooney. I’d be hard pressed to meet Roz at the high school. I ran a hand through my hair and promised myself time for a full-blown breakdown at a later date. The meter maid was watching, her face carefully blank. I gave her a smile that must have looked more like a grimace and gunned the engine.
Cutting behind the Museum School, speeding down Fenway to Park Drive, I tried to outrace what Mooney had said about Sam. And failed. I’d need to talk to him, mention the unmentionable. I couldn’t avoid the consequences of my actions any more than Josefina Parte could—or Marta Fuentes, for that matter. Across the BU Bridge, traffic crawled on Putnam Street. The question wasn’t whether anyone was crazy enough to take their hatred for Sam out on Paolina; people are looney enough to hijack airplanes and shoot up their local elementary schools. A line of cars waited to cross Mass. Ave. at Putnam Circle, delayed by semi-frozen pedestrians darting suicidally across the street against the light.
Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a huge concrete bunker located next to the public library, has been remodeled and restructured and redesigned so many times I never know what to expect when I walk past the metal detectors. Those, I expect. And the smell of chalk dust, unwashed bodies, wet sneakers; the smell manages to stay the same.
Quarter to three. I sucked in a deep breath. Where had the long hours gone? The bell had chimed to end the day; the kids had fled, loosed into the community. One had left a backpack and a torn blue sweater at the curb, lying in a heap like a forlorn abandoned pet. They weren’t Paolina's; her backpack is worn and red. Someone else, or maybe the same careless teen, had left a battered French horn case on the front stoop.
Roz was in the lobby, sipping from a steaming Styrofoam cup, sitting on a bench with her knees drawn up, staring at nothing while two loitering teenage boys watched her out of the corners of their eyes, trying to look up her skirt. She wore ripped black tights, high-heeled boots, a short red wool skirt, and a low-cut plum-colored top that clung to her breasts like paint. Her hair was silvery white, her lipstick deep purple. A silver stud pierced her left nostril. When she saw me, she lowered her legs, and the boys averted their gaze. Slowly she got to her feet and wandered in my direction. I kept walking. We strolled past the principal's office, turned a corner, and stopped near a deserted stairwell.
“I dunno.” She shook her head slowly, frowning. “These kids, man, like to them, I’m old. I’m not sure they’re dealing straight up with me.”
“The dudes in the lobby thought you were hot,” I said to comfort her, and the thought cheered her enough to give me what little she had. Aurelia Gutierrez, Paolina's best friend, insisted that Paolina hadn’t said word one about running away. The truant officer, recently returned to duty, was clueless, an old townie more eager to reminisce about other missing kids who’d eventually turned up than reveal anything about current cases. Paolina's homeroom teacher had treated Roz to a lecture on school overcrowding, Proposition 21/2, and local property taxes, his way of saying he had too many kids to grade, much less monitor for quality of life.
“Get back to Aurelia; go for gossip. Any point in me talking to the homeroom guy?” I was thinking maybe he hadn’t responded positively to Roz's outfit.
“You need a lecture, go right ahead.” She glanced at the back of her hand where numerals were scrawled in bright blue ink. “I got her locker number: 2336. The bastard wouldn’t open it, so I pled my case with the janitor. Read me the riot act on First Amendment rights.”
Where else but Cambridge can you find a janitor in touch with the First Amendment? “When does he go home?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You know the kind of guy, looks like he lives here. Oh, yeah, I got the flyers. Guy at Kinko's said it was his third missing-kid sheet this week.”
It was going to come to that, sticking her picture up on street signs and telephone poles, on community bulletin boards in Shaw's and Whole Foods, like a lost dog. I tried not to think about all those kids with their faces on the backs of milk cartons.
I said, “Where's the janitor now?”
“I told you, he's not gonna—”
“Find him and stay with him, come on to him, whatever. I’m gonna do her locker and I don’t want interruptions.” “Bust the lock?” she said eagerly.
“Keep him occupied.”
Locker 2336 was on the second floor down a long hallway of locker-lined walls broken by classroom doorways. The linoleum gleamed underfoot, and the low hum of a polisher buzzed along an intersecting corridor. The tubby janitor had his back toward me as he shoved the machine, heading away from my destination with a long path yet to shine. If he was the same janitor who’d given Roz the legal two-step, I hoped she’d have the brains to let him work.
I’d transferred a prybar from the car trunk to my backpack, just in case, and I was tempted to use it simply because it would have felt good, the exertion, the satisfaction of twisting metal. I hadn’t played volleyball or gone swimming at the Y, hadn’t gotten any of the physical exercise I normally get, and I could feel tension knotting my neck and shoulders. I regretted the prybar as I manipulated the lock, but there was no need for it. You’re a PI and you can’t bust a school locker without a bar, it's time to find a new racket.
My cell rang, and I grabbed it, willing Paolina's voice, hoping the janitor hadn’t heard the sound.
“Dinner?” Sam's baritone. “We could try the Harvest.”
Not Paolina. I tried not to let either disappointment or accusation seep into my response. “I don’t think I’ll have time.”
“You haven’t found her?”
“No. Sam—”
“You gotta eat—”
I might have to stuff fuel down my throat, but there was no way I could see myself sitting at a white-tablecloth restaurant poring over a menu. “This isn’t a great time to talk.” I’d follow up on Mooney's idea later; I had the locker to crack now.
“You think I oughta talk to Marta? She might—”
“Sam, no. I appreciate it, but…” He believes women confide in him. What they do—what Marta does, anyway—is flirt with him. She’d shoot the breeze all night, tell him anything he wanted to hear.
“Let me do something,” he said.
I closed my eyes and listened to the faint hum of the polishing machine. Should I ask whether some organized crime hit man might have snatched my little sister? Instead I said, “Marta's got a new guy named Gregor Maltic.” I spelled it. “You might—”
“I’ll see if anybody knows him. And you gotta sleep, right, so I’ll come by later.”
He hung up before I had time to reply. Plenty of time to ask about Mob-related complications tonight, I figured, so I stowed the phone and opened the locker as noiselessly as possible, imagining my little sister's hand, warm on the same metal, less than a week ago.
The first thing that hit me was the smell, a combination of scents, floral, citrusy, musky, overwhelming. Lined on the top shelf, a row of tiny bottles and flasks glittered: perfume, cologne, and toilet water. My little sister started collecting cosmetic-counter giveaways at the age of eight. Probably a line of girls at her locker each morning, begging to borrow the latest fragrance.
A pink sweatshirt on a hook, a brief tie-dyed tee beneath it, stuff she’d have worn in early fall when it was still warm. A plastic bag held gym clothes, navy shorts and a white shirt, wrinkled and smelly.
The hall lighting was dim. I got a flashlight from my backpack, took every item out of the lower part of the locker and placed it on the floor for further inspection, fighting against the rising conviction that there was nothing to find, that I was wasting my time, that she’d been snatched randomly off the street. I unrolled a pair of socks and shook them out. I unfolded pages of lined three-hole paper to discover rough drafts of homework assignments, reassembled a sheet that had been ripped to pieces to find a “D” on a quiz for act 2, scene 2 of Julius Caesar. Used spiral notebooks, broken pens. Where was her backpack? If she was using it as a suitcase, I’d have expected to find her textbooks abandoned somewhere. They weren’t at my house. They weren’t at the Water-town house. They weren’t here.
I aimed the flashlight beam into the back corner of the locker floor, then the rear of the high shelf behind the row of perfume vials. Something was jammed in the back corner, an envelope, maybe. I didn’t want to knock over all the scent bottles, so I took each container out, one by one, placing them on the floor in a rickety row. A few more scraps of paper, scrunched exams, discarded attempts at essays. I reached into the corner recess, touched cloth, and withdrew a small drawstring bag made of rough brown felt.
It was maybe three inches by four, with a thin brown cord gathered tightly at the top, and pinked edges. The bottom of the pouch felt lumpy. I tugged at the top edges to spread the cord, held the sack in my right hand, and spilled the contents into my left. Something tumbled out, wrapped tightly in white tissue paper.
Pills, I thought, powder, but the shape was stiff and unyielding. I put my back to a neighboring locker, bent my knees, and slid to the floor, catching the pouch in my lap while my hands fumbled with the tissue.
Ornamental, some kind of jewelry, a pin, maybe, but no—I turned it over with careful fingertips—there was no clasp on the back of the small gold shape. It was an odd shape, whimsical, unusual.
It was gold, or gold-colored, but not the kind of gold usually seen in jewelry. More of a red-gold, an assertive gold. Not much shine to it, but depth. For its size, it felt heavy. It was the form of a man or, possibly, the more I gazed at it, a bird. The tiny body had two rows of raised ornamental ridges. The outspread arms, or wings, were arched. The head was triangular and a beak-like nose protruded beneath bulbous eyes. The areas that weren’t raised were smooth. The figure was symmetrical, but not perfectly so, as though it had been made by hand, possibly hammered. The back side looked less finished than the front, the beak-like nose a hollow void.
Face up, the protruding eyes looked blind. The face belonged to something not quite human and not quite animal. I was still peering at it, running my fingers over the metal when Roz interrupted with news that, with the janitor safely drinking coffee at a nearby store counter, she’d raised Aurelia on the phone: the gossip thing hadn’t panned out, what now?
I displayed the little birdman.
“Hey, cool.” She whistled softly and held out a scarlet-taloned hand. I was reluctant to part with the figure, but she didn’t seem to sense my hesitation, and grabbed it eagerly. Staring at it closely, nose to beak, she traced the ornamental ridges with a fingertip. “Looks pre-Columbian. Not Mayan, though. Definitely not Mayan.”
Roz calls herself a post-punk artist, and from the acrylic oddities she paints, you can’t really tell she's educated in the arts. Slowly, over the years, the truth has emerged: She's studied at some very classy places, the MFA School and Pratt included. Never hung around long enough to get a degree.
I said, “Colombian.” I guess I gave it the Spanish long o pronunciation. That's what I was thinking: Colombia, the country, Paolina's birthplace.
“Pre-Columbian,” Roz corrected. “That's before Columbus hit America. With the u, not the o. But they got plenty of pre-Columbian stuff in Colombia, shit that was there before the Europeans invaded. Most pre-Columbian gold is South American.”
“This is gold?”
She stroked it with her small fingers. “I think so. Some kind of blend of copper and gold. I knew about it when I made jewelry; it’ll come to me.”
I stuck my hand out. She ignored it.
“Can I have it back?”
She glared at me frostily. “I wasn’t gonna steal it.” But her hands seemed as reluctant as mine had been to give it up. “Where’d you get it? Is it Paolina's?”
I bit my lip. I’m not sure how long I sat like that, the little birdman warm in my palm.
“We going to the Pit or what?” Roz was staring at me oddly. “Aren’t we supposed to go there next, hand out flyers?”
When they extended the Red Line and redesigned the Harvard Square MBTA station, someone had the bright idea of making the entry-way inviting, with a circular plaza surrounded by stone benches. If the powers that be had foreseen the actual use the plaza would be put to, the architect would have been drawn and quartered; I doubt the City Council wanted to attract the homeless, the druggies, the unemployed and unemployable, seeking to get high. Teens converge there, townies mainly, but a sprinkling of college kids, the ones who don’t quite fit in or can’t afford the freight at the trendy cafes. You can buy just about anything at the Pit. The older men come out late at night, especially when it's cold, because after midnight the barter gets serious, shelter for food and sex. Runaways throng there.
I looked into the birdman's blank eyes and shook my head. “Help me repack the locker. Then you can handle the Pit on your own.” She’d do fine solo, distributing the flyers, questioning the misfits.
Normally Roz would have pounced on any change of plans, demanding to know why I’d changed my mind. She's gotten interested in the investigation racket and thinks she might try it on her own someday. Something in my eyes must have stopped her. She quickly gathered perfume vials and dirty clothes and dumped them back in the locker.
I wrapped the gold birdman in the wrinkled tissue and stowed him in his felt pouch, thinking pre-Columbian, South American, Colombian. Thinking goddamn Marta didn’t say a word about this. Thinking she’d be at work by the time I got there.