The Hollow Girl (16 page)

The reincarnation of the Hollow Girl had, however, sparked more than a one-line mention here and there. Several online articles about Sloane Cantor/Siobhan Bracken’s comeback had appeared since 10:00
P.M.
the night before. Most were recapitulations of the original Lost Girl/Hollow Girl phenomenon and the fallout from the infamous “suicide” posting. Michael C. Dillman wasn’t going to be pleased. That was for damn sure, because there in a photo array, next to an old photo of Siobhan and the more recent headshot of her that appeared on the website, was a photo of the teenage Michael Dillman. The caption read
Michael C. Dillman, “Lionel.”
His innocent consent to let a high school friend use his photo was about to blow his world up yet again. Once, only memories kept our bad choices alive. Now cyberspace had the power to grant them eternal life.

There was also mention of Millicent McCumber’s body having been found in Siobhan Bracken’s apartment. Well, Millie might not have been able to get her own career going again, but her death had surely given a boost to the Hollow Girl’s comeback. Confidential sources had “implied” that Millie and Siobhan had been lovers and that there might be photos of orgies that had taken place in Siobhan’s apartment. Nothing like a few salacious details to get people’s attention. If those photos did exist, I had a pretty good idea of who had taken them. At least now I had a sense of what Anthony Rizzo had gotten up to. He was a complete toad, but you had to admire his entrepreneurial instincts. In the end, though, it was Siobhan who had expertly pulled off this masterful manipulation. If the numbers on YouTube could be believed, Siobhan had made a smashing success of the Hollow Girl’s rebirth, and she had done it while embarrassing her mother to potentially devastating effect. But in the new millennium, it was more difficult to keep people’s attention than it once had been. Recalling what Siobhan had done in 1999, I got a chill thinking about what the Hollow Girl might be willing to do in order to grow her audience this time around.

The house phone rang. Caller ID:
Private Number
. I let it ring until it went to the cable system’s voicemail. I didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know it was Nancy. When I got my cell phone replaced, I had no doubt there would be several messages from Nancy waiting for me. And when the current message had finished, I saw that the little red light on my cordless phone was madly blinking. I would have to talk to Nancy eventually, just not until I sorted out my own feelings about having slept with her. That was the thing about desperate, wounded sex: It may make falling into bed that much easier, but it makes the morning after that much more difficult. There was something else I knew I couldn’t do, and that was to stay where I was.

The Coney Island boardwalk at dusk could be a desolate place. Once fall opened its arms to the heartless Atlantic winds, the death of the season was at hand. When those cruel winds whistled through the salt-rusted bones of the dinosaur rides, when they picked at the flaked paint and plywood scabs of shuttered food stands, hope was exposed as folly. I suppose that deep within me I loved its desolation more than the mirage of hope that was Coney Island in summer. This, I thought, looking out over the guardrail at the empty beach and cold, blackening ocean beyond, is what lay ahead of us all. Not summer. Not crowded beaches and sun block and teenagers riding the waves wreathed in seaweed and children shrieking on rides. This.

Carmella Melendez—my second ex-wife and former business partner—once said that this was where I should be buried or where my ashes should be spread. She was right, of course. I had left it in my will for Sarah to spread my ashes here. Not in the ocean or on the beach, but on the boardwalk near the Cyclone in the fall at dusk. I wasn’t sure why it should have mattered to me as I believed in death more strongly than I ever believed in God. Dead was dead. I would be beyond caring or knowing. I’d understood why Mr. Roth had wanted his ashes spread at Auschwitz. Because although he had survived the camps and lived a long life, he had never really been set free. He’d been a prisoner there his whole life. The strange thing is, he’d never been explicit in his instructions. He’d never once mentioned Auschwitz by name. He said that when the time came, I would know where to place him. The only other thing he’d ever said on the subject was that he didn’t want to be cold in the ground. “Kaddish and ashes, Mr. Moe. Kaddish and ashes.” And so it would be for me, the mourner’s prayer optional. But Coney Island for me was not so much prison as womb.

The boardwalk was not desolate, exactly. Starting in the mid ’70s, Russian and Ukrainian Jews had resettled this area of Brooklyn. They were a hearty, stubborn bunch. They had to be. The older émigrés, the ones who had had rough lives back home, viewed New York City’s climate kind of like how they viewed American prisons.
Is nothing. Like country club.
So yeah, these days when the Atlantic winds came in with fall, there were plenty of old Russians strolling the boardwalk. There was someone else coming onto the boardwalk, too, someone I’d asked to be there.

Detective Jean Jacques Fuqua’s handsome black face was making a feeble attempt at a smile as he came up the Stillwell Avenue steps to greet me, the smell of Nathan’s Famous french fries bubbling in oil overwhelming the sea air. We shook hands, and walked to the guardrail on the beach side of the boardwalk, Fuqua rubbing his palms together, cupping them, blowing warm breath into them as he went.

“How do you cope with this weather,
ami
?” he asked, only a hint of Port-au-Prince in his voice. “I have lived here for many many years, but I find the cold unbearable.”

“Ask one of the ninety-year-old Russian ladies for a transfusion.”

“You are an amusing fellow, Moses, but most of all amusing, I think, to yourself.”

“May well be,” I said. “May well be.”

He turned away from the beach and took a long look at me. I tried not to stare him down. We’d met a few years back under very unusual circumstances. Soon after I received my cancer diagnosis and only a few weeks before Sarah’s wedding, Carmella had come to me in desperation. She asked me to look into the murder of her estranged sister, Alta, who had been stabbed to death in Gravesend. It was an ugly affair all around and Jean Jacques Fuqua was the unlucky detective who’d caught the case. We’d worked together to get to the truth of things, taking some pretty unethical risks in the process. When the smoke cleared, he’d gotten the bump to detective first. But Fuqua, a proud, up-by-the-bootstraps Haitian immigrant, had never gotten over the ethical compromises he’d made in order to solve the case. I guess I was past caring about compromises and pride. So although I’d helped get him his promotion, he regarded me with strong mixed feelings. In spite of his calling me
ami
, I knew the appellation came with reservations. Maybe that’s why I trusted him to tell me the truth.

“You are not looking so well,
ami
,
non
?”

“You are quite the charmer, Jean Jacques. You’re looking good.”

“Are you ill again, Moses?”

I laughed. “No, it’s nothing like that.”

“Then what?”

Alcohol
. I could not bring myself to say it. The shame was still there. Maybe not as strong as guilt, it was still plenty strong. “I’m just tired.”

“I do not believe you, but I am too cold to argue. Why did you call me here?”

“You worked in the 9th Precinct before you got transferred to Brooklyn South Homicide, right?”

“I did, yes.”

“Did you know Frovarp and Shulze?”

That seemed to fully get his attention. He stood erect. Only then did I remember what an imposing figure Fuqua cut. He had shoulders like a linebacker dressed in his pads and he had a body builder’s torso. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m working a case, and let’s just say I have been forced to cross paths with Frovarp and Shulze.”

“I thought you were not working cases any longer. You said you were going to enjoy your life and your grandchild.”

“I wasn’t lying when I said it.”

“You are being evasive today, Moses.”

“If it will make you feel better, think of me as doing God’s work.”

“God’s work? Have you turned in your wine stores for angel wings?”

I was getting tired of avoiding Fuqua’s questions, so I explained about the Hollow Girl and Nancy and my involvement in the case. Though much younger and way more tech savvy than myself, he hadn’t ever heard of the Hollow Girl in either her old or new incarnation. I detected a kind of revulsion in him—if not revulsion, then a cross between bewilderment and condescension. It was something like I felt about it. I was going to say as much when he beat me to it.

“It is why the world hates us,
non
? Our obsession with ourselves; the inflation of our small lives into objects of public fascination. It is not our bombs or our constant flag waving in their faces that they so much detest, I think, as our petty obsessions. The world wants our country to care about important things, but instead we care about
Dancing with the Stars
. We know the bra size of Lady Gaga and we have TV shows that sexualize little girls as beauty queens, but how many of us can name even a single country in West Africa, or know who is the president of Russia? Our lack of perspective is what makes us hated.

“I am a proud American, Moses, but I am also Haitian. I can see us in a way that maybe you cannot, but that your grandparents might have. Like your grandparents, who had a homeland to look back to and remember the hardships and the struggles, I can see my new country with such eyes as theirs. Haiti was destroyed by an earthquake not so long ago. There has been famine and disease. As you are aware, there has always been political turmoil. The United States has done very much to help Haiti, but is it not very difficult to reconcile Port-au-Prince in ruins and Honey Boo Boo?”

“Christ, Fuqua, the Hollow Girl is just a gimmick, the product of a talented and complicated woman, not the benchmark for the decline of Western civilization.”

“I am not so sure of that as you, but what is it that you wish of me?”

“You still have people you’re close to at the 9th, people who talk to you?”

“Naturally, I have many friends who are there.”

“Do me a favor, have those friends of yours keep an eye out for Frovarp and Shulze.”

“How so, Moses?”

I gave a shrug. “I don’t know. See if they are acting edgier than normal? Do they seem obsessed with any one case? If so, which case? Are they putting in a lot of overtime? Stuff like that.”

“I will see what can be done.”

I held out my hand to him. “
Merci beaucoup
, Jean Jacques.”

He shook it. “
De rien.
I repay my debts.”

“Forget the bump. You would have made detective first without me.”

“But not so quickly.” He was fast to react.

“Maybe not, but I am asking you to do this thing for me as a favor to a friend, not as repayment. I want to be clear on this. If you think you owe me some debt for what happened with Alta’s murder and the blackmailing, forget it. You don’t owe me anything, nor do you have to fear that I would share any details of what we had to do.”

“Very well, Moses, as you say, a favor for a friend.”

“And a case of that Bordeaux you like.”

That got a smile from him, at last. “That,
ami
, is a reason I can embrace.”

“I’ll hear from you, then?”

“Yes.” I let go of his hand and made to step away, but he would not release my hand. And his hand was far stronger than my will. He stared directly into my eyes. “As a friend, Moses, take some advice. Go away for a few days, please. You do not look well. Brooklyn will still be here when you return. I am sure of it.”

And with that he let go of me, retreating back down the Stillwell Avenue steps. I watched him get smaller and smaller as he walked toward Surf Avenue. I checked my watch and saw that I still had time to get to the phone store. I needed to get that done with, because I meant to take Jean Jacques Fuqua’s advice.

I stopped by the phone store and told the young woman to salvage the data as best she could.

“Don’t you want your new phone? It’ll only take a few minutes for us to transfer the—”

“No,” I said. “I really don’t. I’ll pick it up in a couple of days.”

It was to laugh, the expression on her face. She seemed to view the very concept of removing one’s self from the world of Angry Birds and Yelp and Google Maps as a cross between heresy and psychosis. Maybe she was right. Maybe I’d go home and make a bonfire of my Kindle, iPod, Roku box, flat screen, DVR, and computer. After that I’d move to a cave in the woods and bay at the moon.
OW-OW-OWOOOOO! OW-OW-OWOOOOO!

Untethering myself from the world that way was a small gesture, I know, barely more than a nod or a wink in the scheme of things. I’d never been a fan of the grand gesture. Those things seemed like façade and artifice, brightly colored balloons—bloated, pretty objects meant to distract, to capture your attention, but ultimately empty and quickly forgotten. In my life, it had always been the little things that stayed with me. My memory wasn’t full with fancy gold watch moments or the fanfare of trumpets. My memory was filled up with the little things. The things, good and bad, that occurred by chance, by serendipity and happenstance, not by plan. The sun filtering through Andrea Cotter’s hair on the boardwalk. Bobby Friedman’s smile. Rico Tripoli’s ’70s polyester leisure suits. The unexpected kiss. The panicked dream. The first wisps of Sarah’s red hair as she was born.

Before getting on the road, I went home to throw a few things in a bag. When the house phone rang, I almost regretted not making that bonfire. I was confident it was Nancy even before I checked caller ID. And when I noticed it was 9:55, all doubt was erased. Given that we’d slept together and that I had deposited her five thousand dollar check, I owed it to her to pick up. More than that, I owed it to myself.

“Hey.”

“Were you ever going to call?” Her voice was cracked and brittle.