The Boy Detective (12 page)

We named our tunnel the Peanut Gallery, after the kids' section of the live audience of the
Howdy Doody Show.
But our Peanut Gallery had no laughter of delight. It was a place where forbidden things happened. Exchanges of contraband, toy guns, were transacted there. And bullying. And the lighting of Chinese firecrackers. Photos of naked women were given scrupulous examination. In the Peanut Gallery, girls showed you theirs if you showed them yours.

All well and good, or not so good, but here's the thing, as Detective Monk is wont to say: At any time of my life, had you asked me where the Peanut Gallery was, I would have told you unhesitatingly that it was located to the left of the back door of 36. To the left, without a doubt, about twenty feet in. A few years ago, I happened to be in the old neighborhood, and I was moved to walk through the gilded lobby of the building, straight to the back and out the door, into the courtyard. I looked to my left, and saw only the wall. I looked to my right, and there the entrance to the Peanut Gallery yawned like a black cave. To my right. Now, tell me why, all these years, did I get it wrong. Was I so afraid or ashamed of the sinful hole that my mind hid it from itself? Or was I thinking of another place entirely, even darker and more dreadful, that I had obliterated into forgetfulness?

Sometimes I wondered, whenever I crawled through that dark place alone, what would happen if the roof of the little tunnel collapsed and I was imprisoned in the airshaft and buried in the ruins. Did I have the strength and skill to shimmy up the drainpipe that ran along the side of the shaft to the roof of the building? Could I climb twelve stories, and then stand on the roof and look down upon the world of crimes?

 

W
E GET THIS
every so often: a disaster story about the collapse of a coal mine in Wales or Kentucky, men trapped in the shaft. Or people caught under the rubble after an earthquake, or a tornado or an avalanche. No sound emits from the survivors. And then there comes what the newspeople call a “miracle.” Someone stuck beneath the piles of rocks or the debris of a house makes a little signal to announce “I'm alive!” And the earthmovers go into action, and the forklifts. And the rescue workers paw frantically at the floorboards and at the boulders to get to the source of the sound. “It was pure luck that I happened to hear it,” they say. The clink of a spoon against a wall, the sound so faint it is hard to know what inspires it. Could be desperation. Could be impatience. A tapping from the ruins.

The thing about ruins is that they are enjoyed both for what they are and for what they were. The former engages an appreciation of the present, the latter of an imagined past. The evidence of both lies in chipped noses and decayed arms and legs, pillars sprawled like white logs in a cleared wood. We can picture the stages of disintegration of the Roman theater, or of Nineveh or Babylon, each place once a confident paradise before it fell gradually into sand and dust. Columns standing without the roofs of temples. Gods with human heads. The claws of beasts, winged lions, bulls, blank-staring kings in Syria, South America, Cambodia. The world in ruins, each pile a monument to art and power. Greek cities taken by Croesus, then Cyrus, then Darius, glorified by Ptolemies, destroyed by Seleucids, swallowed up by Rome, ravaged by Turks, and then the Crusaders, and then the Turks again.

Everyone buries someone or something. Evidence lies in bones. Ricardo Montalban starred in
Mystery Street
as a dogged policeman who partners with a forensic expert. They begin with the discovery of a woman's skeleton, no clues as to her identity, and end catching the blackguard who killed her. The movie was based on a true case, in a small town in Massachusetts. The waste remains, as William Empson says in “Missing Dates.” And what is left is as significant as what originally was intact. Rome. Nineveh. Babylon. The gaping holes, like mouths. The places where walls were. All the plundered haunts, a shrine to lizards and a plaza for owls.

Give thanks for the owls. Give thanks for the ghosts. For the paper and the clay jars. For the golden stripes of the sun. Give thanks for the pain. For the faint music playing in the stranger's house. I pass by it now, on Fifteenth Street between First and Second, with the deep purple curtains drawn like a mood and the heavy black door with the brass knocker and the chipped paint. Give thanks for the chipped paint, and for all that is broken and missing. For the dark geometry of the streets, and the ornamental streetlamps, and the dead trees. And for the ruins. By all means, for the ruins.

 

S
PEAKING OF MEMORY
—were we speaking of memory?—you may be wondering if I invented the Norwegians. Me, too. I refer to that summer when I was six in Weston, Connecticut. On one of my bike excursions one morning, I came upon a family from Norway, sitting on a lawn. A mother with a smiling face. A father with jet-black hair and a jaw like a plow. A son, a few years older than I, named Arvid. All three were very nice to me. The parents were about to send a birthday card to their daughter back in Norway. “How do you say ‘happy birthday' in your language?” I asked them.
“Yertlig Helslinger,”
they said, and they proceeded to compose their note, which read,
“Yertlig Helslinger, de mama, papa, uck Arvid.”

For some sixty years, I held that phrase in my head—
“Yertlig Helslinger”
—hoping that someone would ask me how to say “happy birthday” in Norwegian or, even better, that I might meet a Norwegian on his or her birthday. It's just as well that neither occasion presented itself, because recently, having learned at last to Google, I decided to confirm my memory of the phrase. In case you're interested, pal, it turns out that “happy birthday” in Norwegian is
“Gratulerer med dagen.”
From this, one may reasonably conclude that I invented the Norwegians. Who knows? In any case, I wish you and yours a very
Yertlig Helslinger.

 

I
FEEL MORE
assured offering you two rules from what is called the Golden Age of detective fiction (1920–1939). The first is that the private eye cannot know anything the reader does not know. He cannot cheat or manipulate the reader by coming up with an ending that depends on information we did not have all along. Even in the inverted-plot stories where we are shown the criminal and the crime at the outset, as in Graham Greene's
Brighton Rock
or in the
Columbo
TV series, where we watch the detective piece everything together so that he arrives at the place known to us from the start—even then, the detective cannot learn what we have not already learned. It must be proven that we were able to anticipate the ending, even if we were unaware that we could do it. The second rule (sorry) is that the detective cannot commit the crime. Keep that in mind as we move along.

 

T
HUMBS-UP FOR THAT
one there, who inspects his reflection in the window of Glatt's Kosher on Thirteenth Street off First. Yes, that one. If his presentation goes well this morning, I mean really well, with no glitches like last week, when he dropped the box of pencils, and made forced jokes about dropping the ball; if he didn't drop the ball this time, and everyone, and I mean everyone, including Charles himself, gave him the thumbs-up; if he wasn't all thumbs this time, and the account, THE ACCOUNT, was his; and then he could run to his cubicle and tweet Sarah, who looked so much like Naomi Watts you would swear she
was
Naomi Watts, but who has been looking elsewhere lately, maybe more bored than elsewhere, but in any case, clearly (inasmuch as anything between two people can be clear) wants to drop him like a box of pencils and go back to her bar-hopping days, when she would allow herself to be picked up by the nearest douche bag in a grin, suit, and tie; if he could tell her about THE ACCOUNT and the thumbs, so that she could see that he would amount to something, after all—which his mother, Grace, always said about him, even if his dad, Warren, said he didn't have a Chinaman's chance, which coincidentally was what his Chinese professor at Bucknell (Was that the best school you could get into? Sarah had asked on their second date at Olive Garden), had told him, at least as far as learning Chinese was concerned, though the Bucknell Chinese professor did not say he didn't have the chance of a Caucasian, ha-ha—I mean, if that is the issue, and not the fact that at age thirty-two, he cannot get it up for more than two minutes at a time, which condition makes him so nervous that he wonders about the difference between Cialis and Viagra, and droops like a wet pennant long before climbing into bed with Sarah, who by this time could not care less, and in fact he is getting it up right now as he inspects his reflection in the window of Glatt's Kosher, experiencing the first real hard-on he's had in months, brought on by the anticipation of a successful presentation this morning, not to mention THE ACCOUNT, after which Charles will give him the thumbs-up; and see? He's got it up at last, everything up—well then, if that all happens, well then, everything, and I mean everything is going to be, in PI lingo, jake.

 

I
N CONTRAST, PLEASE
turn your attention to cool dude who sits at the wheel of his Escalade, texting. He is stopped at a light now. But he will be texting later as well, on the FDR Drive, where he is heading at Twentieth Street and the river, during which texting he will die, taking a few others with him. His text will begin,
BTW, WHERE R U
?
OMG
. . .” and proceed no further. For the moment, though, he is safe at the light. Approaching that corner on foot is a young man of business, in a light gray suit and no topcoat. Another cool dude. His stride is cool. As is that of the girls in the red satin jackets of their high school volleyball team. The jackets are cool as well. The cop directing traffic also looks cool in his dark blue uniform, hard as a frozen roast. He notices me. I would try to look cool myself, but I am not cool.

I think too weirdly to be cool. To wit: What if I were to toss a stone into the middle of this pond? Would the ripples touch the cop and the volleyball team, and then, widening, would they touch the young man of business? And finally, would the ripples reach the man texting in his Escalade? Before, I mean. Before he steps on the gas, and dies, taking a few others with him.

 

L
ET ME TAKE
that back, what I said earlier about dreams, or partly back. Wordsworth wrote, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Hard to tell what the poet wishes us—to awaken into a dream state and call it life? Sha-boom? Well, I'll give him this: life does feel like a dream much of the time. But that's a long way from actually being one. And the safe distance from events that you can manufacture, or will, in a dream, that doesn't happen when you're awake. Life does not create protections from itself. There is a reality, you know. And,
pace,
Bill Wordsworth, it does not exist in the before-life. How hopeful they were, those Romantic boys. Coleridge snatching a baby out of its pram, to the horror of the child's mother, and beseeching it to “Tell me about heaven!” Still, the idea has legs—“heaven lies about us in our infancy.” Sha-boom.

What it depends on is our intuition of an immortal existence, Frankenstein minus the panic—a remembrance of things past, which things are only pure and joyful. If nothing else, such intimations suggest that we are better creatures than we appear, nobler than the ones who act in our name. I do love these poets. Yet, I cannot help but wonder what terrible sadness drove them to see the life about them as not really happening. With sadness as the impetus, the yearning for dreams makes sense. Then, immortal intimations may be seen not as philosophy, but rather as a consolation for living in a world that is sometimes harsh and often pitiless. You are standing beside the one you love, on a gray glacier, in the airless center of the moon, just after reality has clobbered you. Sha-boom. What would you say? Life is but a dream, sweetheart?

 

B
EFORE THE DREAM
turned into a state of enlightenment, I shone my industrial-strength flashlight into the last dark closet on the right, and was inclined to remain. But, as it always does, the waking world insisted on itself, and I sat up in bed. Call that reality? Nero was reality. He had a statue of himself erected in one of his several palaces. One hundred and fifty feet high. When it was done, he gazed upon it and said, “At last I am beginning to live like a human being.”

 

C
AUGHT IN THE
tangled yarn of the wind, the rich old dear plows on like the Russian army. I track his every step. He is loveless, without love. He holds himself to blame, yet wonders how it is that his life has come to this. Will love ever watch over him again? For no reason he can come up with, he thinks the lyrics of “I've Been Working on the Railroad,” following the entire song through its wandering narrative. Near the end, his partner Max, though a skeptic in all things, took up spiritualism and astrology, and announced that he'd be back. It has been sixteen years without a signal. Without a word. Just like Max. Are the servants in tonight? he asks himself, as he approaches his gingerbread apartment house on Thirty-third and Park. He surveys the landscape of his building and sees a light in a window like unpolished silverware. Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah.

 

S
OME FULL OF
VINEGAR.
Some full of sorrow. Some quick to anger. Some slow to burn. Some apologize. Some never apologize and walk with a stutter step. Some speak Spanish. Some do not. Some forget to mail a love letter that took three weeks to compose, and, to date, has taken three weeks to mail. Some are precancerous. Some are postmodern. Some consider the many. Some consider only themselves and are, nonetheless, quite charming, and make a good first impression. Some recall Achilles, and some never heard of Achilles, who, for his part, never heard of them.