The Sleepless Read online

  Michael looked around, and then listened. The office was silent; he couldn’t hear elevators whining; he couldn’t hear footsteps.

  He waited for a moment longer, keeping his breathing slow and shallow and very quiet. He couldn’t hear anybody. With chilly sweat trickling down inside his shirt, he turned the O’BRIEN envelope over, and started to unwind the waxed thread that held its flap fast.

  He paused again, and listened. He heard somebody quickly approaching along the corridor outside, but just as quickly their footsteps Dopplered into the distance, and the office was silent again.

  He eased the glossy colour photographs out of the envelope. There were eleven in all, and he laid them out on Dr Moorpath’s desk in a fan shape. He stood and stared at them and for a moment he felt that he was going to lose his grip, and that the floor beneath his feet was going to open up like the belly of the L10-11 over Rocky Woods, and that he was going to go plunging into darkness and trees and rocks and smash, and be shattered into bones and blood.

  He saw a burned man, hunched over, a man with no legs. He saw a burned woman, her body opened up from her crotch to the top of her skull. He saw a burned man lying between the burned seats of a helicopter, a man with no head.

  He saw a man in a broken flying-helmet, what was left of a man, his face oddly and frighteningly distorted, like a gruesome Picasso, his cheekbones raw and sooty from fire.

  Jesus Jesus Jesus —

  Michael closed his eyes. He could still see the images, even with his eyes closed. Staring eyes, exposed jawbones, contorted arms and legs. He said to himself: steady, for Christ’s sake, steady.

  He examined each photograph again, one by one, comparing, frowning. His breath sounded harsh and ragged, and his hands were trembling. He could feel that dark amorphous shape rising beneath him. He could feel that huge black octopus rising out of the ocean to entwine itself around his sanity. But he stopped, and held his breath for a moment, and said to himself: keep a grip on yourself ... this is important.

  He studied the photographs with the slow, analytical care of somebody who knows what to look for. How were the bodies lying? How had they fallen into those positions? Had they been mutilated by impact or by explosion or by fire? Why was one of them hunched on the floor? How had the woman’s body been cut open so violently? What had happened to the headless man’s head?

  Michael could see at once that the burning of the bodies was far less severe than the press had obviously been led to believe. He thought: we’re not talking ‘unrecognizable’ here. We’re not talking ‘wizened black monkeys’. These are four distinct and identifiable cadavers that have been momentarily flash-flamed by the explosion of several hundred gallons of kerosene, but not totally incinerated. Anybody could have counted how many corpses there were. Those first official reports that had claimed that ‘physical trauma was so severe that full identification is still inconclusive’ – they simply hadn’t been true. Michael could easily pick out four separate bodies; and he could easily see who each of them was. Frank Coward, pilot. Dean McAllister, assistant at the Justice Department. Eva Hamilton O’Brien, wife of John O’Brien; and despite the fact that his head was missing, John O’Brien himself, Supreme Court justice-as-never-quite-was.

  To Michael, something else was glaringly obvious: these corpses must have been corpses before they were burned. The stumps of Dean McAllister’s legs had been partially cauterized by flame. Mrs O’Brien’s intestines had been shrivelled by heat, which was a clear indication that she had been disembowelled before the fire. Frank Coward’s face was scorched scarlet – but only those parts of his face which were exposed after his helmet had been crushed.

  John O’Brien was headless, yes, but only the back of his suit was burned, which was vidence that he had been sitting bent double in his seat when the wreck exploded.

  Michael lifted up one photograph after another, checking and comparing. No wonder there was so much secrecy surrounding this crash. No wonder Murray and Rolbein had been stonewalled by the police department and the coroner’s office. He had seen this kind of ‘accident’ dozens of times before, in burned-out buildings and skeletal automobiles.

  There was no question about it: Somebody had killed the O’Brien family – and somebody had killed them so gruesomely that it was almost more than Michael could take.

  He closed his eyes for a moment. He heard sirens shrieking and chorusing in the street. Then, decisively, he shuffled the photographs back together, and carried them over to Dr Moorpath’s mock-Jacobean dresser. He opened the front of the dresser, and switched on Dr Moorpath’s NEC fax machine. Quickly, he punched out his own fax number at Plymouth. His mouth had been dry before, but it was even drier now. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking as he inserted the photograph of John O’Brien’s headless body and waited for the first transmission.

  The fax chirruped, warbled, and accepted his call. He felt the sweat gradually chilling in the small of his back. The first photograph slowly edged its way through the scanner. It seemed to take hours. He drummed his fingers on the edge of the dresser and prayed under his breath that Dr Moorpath wouldn’t come back until he had finished.

  Just as the first transmission was completed and he was taking the photograph out, the door of the office was flung open and a tall black doctor in a white coat appeared.

  ‘Dr Moorpath?’ he asked, perplexed.

  ‘Down in emergency,’ said Michael.

  The doctor looked around the office. Then he said, ‘May I ask what you’re doing here?’

  Michael nodded toward the fax. ‘Maintenance,’ he replied.

  ‘Oh ... ‘ said the doctor. ‘Okay,’ and left, closing the door behind him.

  As quickly as he could, Michael inserted a second photograph into the fax.

  It took him nearly fifteen minutes to transmit all eleven photographs, but Dr Moorpath didn’t return from emergency for almost a half-hour, and by that time he had switched off the fax and returned the photographs to their envelope.

  Dr Moorpath looked pale and distracted. ‘Everything all right?’ Michael asked him.

  ‘It’s like Viet Nam out there,’ said Dr Moorpath. He went to his liquor cabinet and poured himself another large Scotch. He drank it all in three gulps, and then coughed.

  ‘Maybe I should come back tomorrow,’ Michael suggested.

  ‘Yes, why don’t you? Make an appointment with Janice. I think I’m free after four o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Thanks for your time.’

  Michael shook Dr Moorpath’s hand; and for a split second Dr Moorpath looked him sharply in the eye, and frowned.

  ‘Something wrong, Michael?’ he asked, still tightly clasping Michael’s fingers.

  ‘Nothing at all. I’m just a little tired, that’s all. Not used to working nine-to-five.’

  Dr Moorpath kept hold of his hand for a few moments longer, and Michael sensed that he suspected something, but plainly didn’t know what.

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ he said, at last, and went over to his desk and picked up the envelopes of photographs.

  ‘Oh ... some girl came in just after you’d been called away, and left those for you.’

  Dr Moorpath checked the labels on them. ‘O’Brien,’ he said, holding up the last envelope. ‘I’ve been waiting for these.’

  ‘Are you going to let me take a look at them?’ asked Michael, boldly.

  Dr Moorpath shook his head. ‘Not yet. All in good time.’

  Michael shrugged, and left the office, closing the door very quietly behind him.

  Patrice Latomba finished his muesli and stacked the bowl on top of all the other dirty crockery in the sink. He parted the Venetian blinds with his fingers and stared out of the window for a while, at the smoke rising. There was a lull in the rioting. The police had encircled most of the neighbourhood, but the fire department had stayed away and allowed the fires to burn themselves out, and only one or two helicopters occasionally circled, unlike the swarms that had roared overhea
d yesterday for hour after hour until Patrice had begun to believe that he was going mad; and Verna had crouched behind the white vinyl sofa and screamed and screamed at the top of her voice.

  He couldn’t blame her. She had seen little Toussaint shot, right in front of her eyes. He hadn’t seen the body but he had seen the pram, a burst-open carcass with a shredded foam mattress, soaked in blood so that it looked like strawberry angel-cake. A white doctor had said something to him, so softly that he hadn’t been able to understand. But then a black male nurse had repeated the doctor’s words with awful clarity. ‘There was no way that anybody could have survived that shot. Even Mike Tyson couldn’t have survived that shot. All we can say is, he wouldn’t have known nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘No pain?’ Patrice had asked him; and the nurse had emphatically shaken his head, and that had been worst of all. Toussaint must have been catastrophically wounded for the nurse to be quite so sure. Patrice had walked out into the hospital parking lot and whooped and screamed and cried like an injured wolf.

  That night, he had run long-legged and hysterically inexhaustible through the streets of the Combat Zone, smashing automobile windshields with an aluminum baseball bat, tossing bricks and chunks of kerbstone, helping the wild whooping crowds to turn over trucks. Helicopter searchlights had criss-crossed the streets, and at one stage, shortly after midnight, Seaver Street had been flooded with tear gas. Patrice, choking, had found it exhilarating, a huge natural high. Terminator! Universal Soldier! New Jack City! Rifles had crackled in the darkness, bullets had ricocheted everywhere. Music had throbbed and pounded from every apartment, warcry music; this is it, brother, this is the revolution! Store windows had smashed, and panes of plate glass had rung out like peals of discordant bells. Young boys had gone running off into the smoke and the darkness, toting video recorders and Adidas shoes and food mixers and stacks of CDs and all the leather jackets they could carry. Grim-faced brothers with crowbars had torn away the security bars that covered the windows of liquor stores, and then rampaged among the shelves, stealing everything they could and smashing what they couldn’t. Whisky had coursed across the sidewalks and vodka had gurgled down the gutters. They broke into the Seaver Square Launderette and tore the washing-machines from their mountings, and hurled them into the street. In their joyful and uncontrollable rage, they even set fire to their own apartment buildings, and their own automobiles, and broke thousands and thousands of windows.

  On television this morning, the mayor had said, ‘I fail to understand the mentality of people who express their sense of social injustice by destroying their own neighbourhood.’

  But Patrice understood. Patrice knew that they had wanted to tear down everything that their history in America had forced them to be. Patrice knew how constricted they felt, how poor they felt, how powerless and threadbare they felt, living out their lives in this impoverished suburb of a white man’s prosperous city. Patrice knew that they wanted to go naked again, and free, that they needed to breathe, that they needed to dance. Patrice knew that they wanted to build up their own civilization, from scratch if need be. They had destroyed the neighbourhood, yes – but they weren’t destroying their own neighbourhood. They were destroying the neighbourhood that white people thought was good for them.

  Patrice was thirty-three, a former boxer with a hard, lithe build that was just beginning to soften with age and lack of constant training. His hair was shaved short, a flat-top with closely-razored sides, but his face was handsome enough and strong enough to carry it. His nose had been broken twice but it was still straight, and although his eyebrows were swollen from constant punches, they didn’t conceal the brightness and the dark intensity of his eyes. His boxing had made him a neighbourhood hero (in 1986 he had knocked out Lightning Gary Montana in five rounds, in hosepipe sprays of blood and sweat, and had appeared on television, and thought to himself: this is it – fame, fortune). But then he had discovered the writing of Matthew Monyatta, Black Identity, and it had turned him overnight into an active revolutionary, a streetfighter, a black man with an attitude so ferocious that even The National’s reporters had refused to talk to him without bodyguard. At Madison Square Garden, after knocking out Lenny Fassbinder in two devastating rounds, he had pummelled both his fists at the TV cameras and screamed at them, ‘One down, the rest of you ghosts to go!’ He had been banned from professional boxing for life – but this had almost sanctified him on Seaver Street; and from then on he had lived his life as a political leader, and father-figure, and eccentric, and lover, and (as far as the Globe was concerned) a useful source of extremist black quotes.

  Today he wore black, a simple black shirt, a black bandana, and jeans, and a mojo round his neck of spices and herbs and the ashes of his brother Aaron. He was in mourning for little Toussaint, seventy-eight days old, who hadn’t had a chance when Detective Ralph Brossard’s .44 bullet had hit his baby-carriage, and who was now in heaven, singing with all the other dead babies, sweet and plain.

  Verna wore black, too, a simple black ankle-length dress, and her hair brushed back, and fastened with an ebony comb. She was very thin and very beautiful, and grief made her look more beautiful still.

  ‘You going to eat?’ Patrice asked her.

  She shrugged, her shoulder rising sharp and angular like Picasso’s painting of a woman ironing.

  ‘You have to eat, Verna,’ he told her.

  ‘I will,’ she promised. ‘But not yet.’

  ‘You want me to call the doctor?’

  ‘The doctor won’t come. Nobody won’t come, not till they stop the fighting.’

  ‘They’re fighting for little Toussaint, honey. They’re fighting in memory of our baby. Every gunshot you hear, that’s one more brother saying, no more children killed, no more children killed.’

  She looked up. Her eyes were liquid. ‘Little Toussaint wouldn’t have wanted fighting, would he? He wouldn’t have wanted all this burning, and killing, and looting.’

  ‘They murdered my baby, Verna. They set up an ambush in a goddamned suburban street, where women and children were bound to walk, and they murdered him. No two ways about it.’

  Verna lowered her head. Her finger traced a pattern on the red formica-topped table, around and around, the same pattern over and over.

  ‘It doesn’t make no difference, does it?’ she asked. ‘He’s dead now, and nothing aint never going to bring him back, never.’

  Patrice stood with his hands resting on his hips, looking around the kitchen. It wasn’t much to show for all of the training and all of the fighting and all of the years of political struggle. It was poky and dark and painted sunflower yellow in an attempt to cheer it up, but somehow the yellow made it seem all the gloomier, and all the more depressing. Polaroid prints of little Toussaint were thumbtacked onto the cheap orange-formica cabinets, and his elephant teething ring lay beside the icebox. Patrice shivered, as if Toussaint’s little spirit had passed momentarily through the kitchen, touching his father and mother one more time, before leaving them for ever.

  ‘Maybe you should stay with your momma for a while,’ Patrice suggested.

  Verna shook her head, distractedly. ‘I couldn’t do that, sweetheart. That would be just like leaving him. I mean, supposing he looked down from wherever he was ... and saw that I wasn’t even home no more?’

  Patrice laid his hand on her shoulder. He understood what she meant.

  ‘Can’t we just stop all of this fighting?’ she said. ‘Toussaint would never have wanted fighting.’

  ‘ “The black American can never stop fighting,” ‘ Patrice replied, in a flat voice, quoting from Black Identity. ‘ “The black American has to fight and fight and fight, every day of his life, just to keep what he already has; let alone win anything more.” ‘

  ‘But not now, Patrice!’ Verna begged him, her eyes sticky with tears. ‘Not now, and not like this, and not because of little Toussaint!’

  Patrice shook his head, quick and negative, like a dog s
haking away a wasp. Outside, he heard tyres squealing, and – in the distance – the heavy, deliberate cracking of a high-powered rifle, three shots altogether. He hated the whites more than he could ever articulate. He hated the ones who scowled and he hated the ones who looked right through him and he hated the ones who smiled and tried to make friends.

  If Boston burned from end to end, he would show the white man once and for all that his days of supremacy were numbered, and he would be gleeful, and glad.

  ‘Patrice,’ Verna begged, ‘this isn’t the way! We want justice, don’t we, not revenge!’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Whose justice? Their justice?’

  ‘Patrice, for my sake. This isn’t going to solve anything at all. Patrice, please ... for little Toussaint, even if not for me.’

  He knew, logically, that she was right. Looting and rioting would only make things worse. The cause of Black Identity had already lost what little public sympathy it ever had. And after days of burning and shooting and vandalizing property, where would they find a jury who would be willing to find Detective Brossard guilty of anything more than negligence? If Detective Brossard was ever brought to court at all. More likely the police commissioner would give him a bawling-out, and then buy him a drink at the Brendan Behan Club and crack jokes about exploding black babies.

  ‘I don’t know ... ‘ he told Verna. ‘I got to think about it.’

  At that moment their doorbell rang. They glanced at each other questioningly, but then Patrice said, ‘That’ll be Bertrand. He wants me to meet some brother from LA. Apparently he helped to spark off that Rodney King thing.’

  ‘Patrice,’ Verna repeated. ‘No more fighting. I’m begging you, on our dead child’s broken heart.’