LONDONGRAD: Chapter 2

If I had gone straight to Brooklyn from Tolya’s, if I had not stopped at home to grab a bathing suit and call Valentina, maybe I could have avoided the whole damn thing, maybe I would have avoided the little kid in the street in Brooklyn, yelling and waving, mouth open in an O with a howl coming out. By the time I saw her, as she darted into the street, I was a second away from running her down, from killing her. Sweat covered my face, ran down the back of my neck. The bag on the seat next to me fell on the floor, books tumbled out, the books I was taking to the old lady for Tolya.

I slammed on the brakes. I got out of my car in the middle of the street. It was Sunday morning and there wasn’t much traffic, but a few cars were honking now, and I yelled at them and grabbed her up, the kid who was yelling and sat her down on the curb. It was a warm dry day, gust of wind coming off the water half a mile a way. Balls of newspaper and dust rolled along the nearly empty street. It was a holiday. July 4.

On the broken sidewalk out here at the edge of Brooklyn, somewhere beyond Canarsie, where it butts up against Queens, I put my arm around the kid in the dirty pink t-shirt and tried to get her to talk to me.

After a while, she calmed down some, and started talking in a tiny voice and I realized she was a Russian kid. I asked her her name. Dina, she mumbled, and pulled at me, and I followed her across the street, which was lined with ramshackle houses, some of the windows broken and covered with plywood and plastic. In one of the yards weeds had grown up over the skeleton of an old Mercedes. There was garbage everywhere. The wind blew it across the sidewalk. A desolate place, fifteen miles from the middle of Manhattan.

Dina ducked under some rough bushes. In front of us was a gate to an old playground surrounded by chain link fencing. There was a padlock on the gate. A piece of the fence was missing and Dina got on her belly and crawled under it. I followed her into a wasteland of overgrown weeds and grass, used needles, empty bottles. It was silent, a thick, dead silence, except for something creaking, a low raw sound I couldn’t identify.

The jungle gym was broken. The sandbox was empty, no sand to play in. Dina was silent now, too, she had stopped babbling, stopped talking. Then she lifted one skinny arm and pointed and I followed her gaze and saw it, a figure on a swing moving from its own weight, or because of the wind.  It was the source of the noise, the raw creak, the metal chains grinding against the poles where the swing hung.

Wrapped in silver duct tape that glinted dully in the morning light, attached with rope to the swing, the harsh wind moving her back and forth, or maybe her own weight propelled her, but she went to and fro, back and forth, on the swing in the deserted playground in Brooklyn. “When did you find this,” I said in Russian as softly as I could, though there was nobody else here.

“Is she dead? She is dead?” said Dina, and then suddenly broke away from me, and ran out of the playground, head down, butting the wind, too fast for me to catch her, a blurr of skinny legs and arms and pink shirt.

I called it in, and then I waited.

The girl on the swing, I couldn’t get it out of my head, it stayed with me like floaters that stick in your eye, float on the surface of your brain, clog your vision. She was dead. I looked closer. The body wrapped in silver duct tape was tied with rope, the body to the seat, the arms up as if holding the chains. And swinging. Like a child, but bigger.

Maybe it was the stiff breeze, maybe the weight of the thing itself that kept it swinging back and forth, to and fro. Over and over, rhythmic, making me dizzy.

I caught it and held it still. It was heavy. It seemed to lean against me. I stumbled and tripped and felt on my knees. A broken bottle cut me and blood stained my ankle.

Touching the greasy duct tape dank from humidity, made me want to gag. I could feel this was flesh under the tape, that this had been a person, a woman from the shape of it.

I’ve been a cop a long time, twenty years, more, but this was so surreal, for a second I thought I was hallucinating. I didn’t know what to do, not when the body against me appeared to breath in and out of its own accord.

Was she still alive?

From above came the sound of a solitary plane on a beautiful day, piercing the blue sky over the city, headed over to the Jamaica Wetlands and JFK.  From somewhere came the faint sound of somebody singing spirituals.

I had to know what was under the tape.

Holding the body still with one arm, I lifted a small section of tape off the face. The tape rasped against the skin. It had been crudely done. The tape came away easily. I touched the skin near the nose lightly, and I saw one of her eyes and thought I felt it flutter, as if it might suddenly open.

She was dead. I’m not an expert on physical death but she had been on the swing a long time, far as I could tell.

Wrapped up first? Dead first?

I wanted to beat it, get out, go back on vacation, but I had to wait for help. I didn’t want some other kid like Dina stumbling in here and seeing this.

Listening for sirens. Wishing I had a cigarette. Sweating in the hot sun, all I could do now was wait.

I didn’t know what else to do so I sat on the swing next to her. Together, the dead woman and me, we swung back and forth, to and fro, like kids early in the morning with nobody else to see them.

Behind me was the sound of sirens, of voices, of footsteps. I got up off the swing, turned and saw them coming, a small army trooping onto the playground.

Somebody removed the gate so the ambulance people could get through. Uniforms, detectives, forensics people

So many people were in the playground know, it was like a tribal ceremony, the woman wrapped in silver tape on the ground now, everyone else moving around her in a ritual dance. I spotted Bobo Leven, a young detective I knew who’s Russian born and I told him about the kid, and started out of the playground.

 “Good luck with the case,” I said and started out of the playground. A couple of photographers from forensics brushed past me to take more pictures of the corpse like the paparazzi of the dead.