It was Good Friday, the day Christ was nailed to the cross. Also the first day of April—April Fool’s Day. Hanson had put another week behind him on the way to getting his POST certificate and leaving the OPD.
The hot wind had been blowing a night and a day. It had followed Hanson home the night before, and woke him up in the morning. It rose and fell and then got worse as he drove across East Oakland, lifting whirlwinds in alleyways, throwing trash cans into parked cars, dust devils funneling down East 14th Street, sucking up bits of newspaper, yellow cheeseburger wrappers, parking tickets, bus transfers, liquor store receipts, and last year’s posters of runaway children who were never found, their images so weathered now that they all looked alike. The wind made people irritable, touchy, more likely to argue and resist arrest. The fire department was busy with Dumpster fires and arson.
He’d pulled to the curb way out in District Five and was thumbing through his Thomas Guide, looking for the address Radio had given him, an Unknown Problem called in by someone who had refused to give a name. Radio had been holding the call since earlier in the day, and now he couldn’t find the address. An Unknown Problem from an anonymous caller at an address he couldn’t find.
The wind was blowing out of the past, shifting, gusting, full of voices, rocking the patrol car. He looked up and saw a kid on his bike coasting down from the next block, leaning to one side against the wind, trying to see through the windshield of the patrol car. It was Weegee, fluid and muscular from powering his bike, Hanson thought, every day, with no days off, across the bleak and dangerous districts of East Oakland. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before Weegee got his first 9mm, working as a lookout for some dope dealer in one of the projects, then got his own corner to deal from, when he’d be able to afford an Uzi. He was a good kid who’d work hard and probably die before his twentieth birthday. Maybe he’d make it to management or distribution or enforcement before he died. Hanson gave him a little salute through the windshield.
Weegee grinned, straightened up, and began to pedal, tucked into the wind now and building speed until Hanson thought he would pass the patrol car in a blur. At the last possible moment he braked, twisted the handlebars, and skidded sideways to a perfect stop, facing Hanson through the driver’s window of the patrol car.
“Hey,” he said, barely winded, “Officer Hanson. I thought it was you.”
“We all look alike in our uniforms,” Hanson said, not able to keep from grinning back at him. “How you doin’, Weegee?”
“Doin’ good.”
“You live around here?”
“I get around. You know. What’s up, Officer?”
“Lost again in East Oakland,” Hanson said. “Maybe you can help me out.” He picked up the Thomas Guide. “It’s right here.” He tapped a folded-back page of the ring-bound book of street maps. “Somewhere close, but I can’t find it. Street called Bleeker Court.”
Weegee looked over his shoulder, down the street, then back at Hanson. “You sure?”
“Yes, sir. Bleeker Court. Radio sent me.”
“Why you gotta go…?” The wind slammed a trash can into an abandoned car across the street. “Why you gotta go there?”
Gotta Go…Marching cadence was gusting in from jump school years before. Hanson heard his own voice and the voices of people he hadn’t thought about for a long time, most of them long dead. Gotta Go, Gotta Be, Airborne, Infantry…
“‘Unknown Problem,’” he said.
“They want the po-lice there?”
“Somebody does.”
Weegee looked down the street again. “This a funny part of town,” he said, tilting his head slightly, as if he was listening to something.
“What…?” Hanson asked him.
“Oh, nothin’, just…” He smiled. “Sound like somebody calling me, you know. ‘Weegee…Weeee-geee.’” He laughed. “Jus’ that wind is all. I can take you,” he said, pivoting his bike on the front wheel. “It’s this way.”
Hanson followed him in the patrol car down alleys and through open gates in chain-link fences across vacant lots, places he’d never seen before—streets with DEAD END signs that weren’t dead ends, some kind of hobo jungle where fifty-five-gallon trash burners glowed red-hot and filled the air with sparks, down a sort of corridor walled off with stacked-up Dumpsters, past a junkyard where he saw three dog-sized pigs running stiff-legged, their short, twisted tails straight up, chasing each other through the blowing dust, squealing as they trotted over wrecked cars, refrigerators, and stoves laid out like coffins.
“Just dogs,” Hanson told himself.
Weegee stopped at a real dead end, where a thicket of wrist-thick bamboo twenty feet high blocked the way. Hanson pulled up next to him, his tires crunching on the gravel turnaround.
“It’s back there,” Weegee said, pointing into the bamboo. “I can’t find it sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“Hard to explain,” he said. “Buncha old ladies livin’ there. All of ’em white too.” He spun his bike around. “You see those three pigs?” He laughed. “I gotta go.”
Weegee hopped on his bike, looked back at Hanson as if he was going to say something, but changed his mind and pedaled off. Hanson watched him ride away, then turned off the ignition and got out. He pulled out his survival compass, but the arrow wouldn’t settle down. It just twitched back and forth. The bamboo rattled and whispered above him, and when he looked up a flock of orange-billed starlings tumbled and spun out from the leaves, then more of them, their speckled feathers iridescent green-black, squabbling and screeching, daakdaakdaak, then they were gone. Hanson tipped his head, listening, then parted the curtain of segmented glossy bamboo, followed a brick path through the thicket.
Twelve California bungalows, six of them on either side of a courtyard where a single tall date palm creaked in the wind, dead fronds rattling. Plants Hanson had never seen before in Oakland—or anywhere—grew rampant. Cat’s-claw vines with yellow flowers and clawlike tendrils, prickly pear cactus with purple pads. Passion vines all but covered the little bungalows and helped hold what was left of them together. Probably built after the 1906 earthquake, Hanson thought, when a lot of people who had lost their homes over in San Francisco moved to Oakland. A time long before the World War II influx of blacks to work in the shipyards, canneries, and automobile factories.
Old women, all of them white, living way out in the far southeast corner of East Oakland, their faded skirts and blouses and dresses too tight at the shoulders and hips, going in and out through the open door of unit 5. They would have all been young women, Hanson thought, when the place was new, the ferries, blazing with light on the foggy bay, making regular trips back and forth from San Francisco. He heard faraway dance music in the wind and saw them young again, with bobbed hair and beaded flapper dresses, iridescent like the starlings, dancing all night on the ferry, one of those glitter balls orbiting above them on the dance floor, dappling the walls with light.
He walked across the courtyard. High overhead the cloud of starlings swarmed into the shape of a snake, a shark, a pulsing jellyfish, then exploded and spun away to nothing. The wind whispered and sighed.
“Ladies,” Hanson said as he took the sagging steps onto the porch of unit 5. “Good afternoon.”
They ignored him as if he was somebody selling religion, coming out the door with magazines tucked beneath their arms, canned goods and paper towels and books cradled against their breasts, carrying shopping bags from stores that had long gone out of business.
“Ladies, excuse me.”
An old woman pushed past him from behind and went on into the house, giving him a single angry glance, impatient. He had to step aside at the doorway for an old woman carrying a table lamp with a dented shade and another behind her with a cardboard box full of green and red ribbon, glitter stick-on bows, and already-used Christmas wrapping paper, the wind lifting some of it from the box before she could get her hand over it, bright paper flapping across the courtyard.
Inside, bundled newspapers, yellowed and flaking, were stacked up waist-high along the walls of the front room, on top of the furniture and the huge oak console TV set, a narrow walkway through the papers to the sofa, on past the dining nook, which was filled with Oakland Tribunes, chest high, up past the windowsills, years and decades of old bad news. The house smelled of burned food layered over with air freshener, and a faint rotten sweetness, like the breath of a drunk driver who tells you he hasn’t been drinking.
“Who called the police?”
A loose window screen chattered in the wind.
In the kitchen an old woman in a bathrobe and a motel shower cap, barefoot, opened and slammed shut, one after another, already emptied kitchen cabinets.
“Ladies?”
They were looting the house.
Another old woman, her hair so thin her scalp showed, wearing only a dingy, flesh-beige slip, struggled to open a stuck kitchen drawer. As Hanson watched, it gave way and came completely out, the old woman stumbling backward into the far wall, a shoulder strap slipping off, exposing her breast. Cheap flatware clattered onto the buckling linoleum floor along with rubber-banded bundles of the plastic spoons and forks and knives that come with takeout food. She glanced at him and pulled the strap back up.
Lumpy black garbage bags were piled up at the far end of the kitchen, crushed cardboard wine-in-a-box containers spilling out. He closed the open refrigerator door as he walked past, through the door into what had once been a dining room, where a stocky woman in a flowered housecoat, her dead-looking brown hair gathered with a rubber band, nylon stockings rolled down beneath her knees, was rifling the drawers of a dark wood buffet. Her thin lips were lipsticked blood red and her eyebrows had been plucked, then penciled in as angry arcs.
A crash from the next room spun him around, and two more women hurried past as he walked into a bedroom, where the curtains were pulled shut and the overhead light was as subtle as a bus station, hundred-watt bulbs in the cheap ceiling fixture. Nobody had stolen them yet. Shards of a broken mirror that had fallen off the wall onto a dressing table splintered beneath his boots on the orange-and-blue shag rug—costume jewelry and face powder, coats and blouses and shoes, empty pint and quart vodka bottles. He looked at the body on the bed.
No wounds or signs of trauma that he could see, but he wasn’t going to roll her over to check for exit wounds. It could have been anything—poison, suffocation, an ice pick through the ear—but she’d probably died, finally, of old age. She was on her back, naked, her knees up and apart, pushed open by gravity and death. One arm across her body, the other extended, palm up, her face was turned toward Hanson, eyes almost closed. Black blood had pooled in her buttocks and feet. The bedsheets, which had once been ivory, were shiny graphite black from years of being slept on, drunk, passed-out on, and never washed. Her dead face was not so much old now as ancient. Death had smoothed out all the laugh lines, frown lines, and worry lines, tightened the skin across her cheekbones and nose. She was ancient and anonymous, a death mask of any-woman. Aristocratic, ageless. He walked closer and stood over her, the sweet-rot smell of death would, he knew, stay in his hair and wool uniform tonight. Outside, the wind whined and chattered and snapped like gunshots.
He picked the bedspread up off the floor, empty vodka bottles clacking as they rolled off, and covered her. The scene had already been trampled and looted. He’d say he found her covered. When he walked back out into the kitchen no one was there. The house was empty, shuddering in the wind. A screen door somewhere squealed and slammed relentlessly. He closed and locked the back door, checked to see that all the windows in the house were locked, then went back to the bedroom and stood in the doorway for a moment.
“You’ll be fine,” he said, nodding at the corpse. “Everything’s secured. You’ll be okay now.” Wind rattled the windows, trying to get in. “Okay,” he said and went outside.
Out on the porch he took his PAC-set off his belt, keyed the mike, and gave his call sign. Static cut him off. The wind was blowing one direction up at a thousand feet and sheering off in another direction below that, ripping clouds apart. The wind was singing up there.
Radio told him: Wait one.
The cloud of starlings had corkscrewed itself into a glittering green-black funnel and was turning slowly overhead toward the San Leandro border.
Radio came back and told him to stand by.
He walked to the next bungalow, up the steps, and knocked on the door. He thought he heard someone talking inside, or maybe it was the TV, or just the wind muttering. He rapped on the door with his short wood, watching the birds, listening to the palm tree creak in the wind like a giant oar in an oarlock. No one came to the door, but the talking stopped.
Darkness rose from the trees like smoke, lifting with the wind and spreading into the clouds. Screen doors slammed and slammed through the blocks, and dogs howled at the sky.
5Tac51.
“5Tac51,” Hanson repeated.
Uh, 5Tac51, disregard that assignment. You’ll be 908.
“There’s a dead body at this location.”
5Tac51, do you copy, disregard. That location is not in our jurisdiction. You’ll be 908.
“5Tac51, I’m going to need—”
5Tac51, it will be assigned to the county. I have an Alameda County case number for your records. Are you ready to copy?
Hanson copied the number into his notebook and put the PAC-set back on his belt. He looked back at unit 5. He began walking to his patrol car.
The black rabbit was almost hidden beneath the porch of unit 2. It looked like a shadow down there, a break in the concrete foundation. Hanson ignored it as he walked past the unit, wondering how he was going to find his way back to the district. It was getting dark, and he saw lightning shuddering on the horizon. The wind was bad enough without another fucking black rabbit. There were probably hundreds of black rabbits in East Oakland, breeding every night in the dark, famous all across the country, and he’d just never heard about them. An urban prey base for all the feral dogs. It was scuffling along behind him now, following him like a dog. He stopped, turned, and looked down at the rabbit. The wind ruffled its glossy fur into little black cowlicks, and its floppy ears twitched as it looked up at him. A jagged streak of white fur ran from beneath one eye and down alongside its nose. It was the rabbit from the Temple, yes. The Temple was miles away, mostly uphill, on the other side of two freeways. Same rabbit. It wasn’t going to leave him alone.
“What?” Hanson said. The rabbit tipped its head and ate a few blades of grass, still looking up at Hanson with one eye.
Hanson shooed him with his hands, palms out, like he was splashing waist-high water. “Go on. Go on, now,” but the rabbit didn’t move and Hanson walked around it.
“Hey, Officer Hanson.” It was Weegee, working his way toward him through the bamboo.
“Weegee. I’m glad to see you, young man. Whoa. I didn’t know if I could find my way out of here. It really is a strange place.”
“Yeah,” Weegee said, looking at Hanson, then looking away and down. Shy, somehow, or maybe embarrassed that Hanson, a cop, kept getting lost. “I was thinking about that. An’ I decided I should come back here and check.”
It took a moment. Hanson understood that Weegee was afraid of the place himself, but he’d shown him how to get there, then come back. He bit his lip and looked up at the sky, but the sky was gone. Nothing now but black and gray clouds. “Let’s dee-dee outta here, young man. If I can get through the fuckin’ bamboo.”
“What’s that ‘dee’ stuff?”
“Dee-dee mau. Vietnamese. Means ‘Let’s get outta here.’”
Hanson put Weegee’s bike in the trunk of the patrol car and drove away with Weegee. Weegee was excited to tell him about some local politician or drug dealer who was like Robin Hood. Hanson smiled and nodded but didn’t really hear what he was saying, ignoring Radio too, listening to what the wind said. He took Weegee to the Junkyard Dog for a Gangsta Burger, then offered to drop him off at his house, but Weegee said he’d just ride his bike home, it wasn’t far.
Later, Hanson looked at his beat map and saw that a tiny corner of Oakland, including Bleeker Court, was crosshatched out of the city limits.