A Sharp Intake of Breath. Джон Миллер

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      I’ve always thought it’d be easier to be led to the gallows than to be brought handcuffed into a police station in front of your family. At least when they hanged you, they had the courtesy of putting a bag over your head.

      When they brought me in for questioning, the desk clerk sneered, as if to say he knew he’d see me eventually; all he had to do was sit back and wait for me to screw things up. Bessie sat on a bench in the corridor; on either side of her were my parents. But Lil was missing. Ma had one hand over her mouth; the other reached out. My chest tightened. The look on Bessie’s face I can only describe as wild confusion mixed with intense grief, as though trying to make sense of what was happening was causing a firestorm in her head. Though my mother was the one with the outstretched hand, I felt it was Bessie whose expression was calling out to me, more to ask for help than to give it. Pop just looked deeply sad, and shook his head almost imperceptibly as I was led past. He was sitting on his hands, his palms flat on the bench as though he had to stuff them there in order not to leap up towards me—in love or anger, I didn’t know which one it would be. Perhaps they’d told him to be still; it didn’t matter, the effect was a pupil waiting to be pulled into the principal’s office.

      I smiled weakly, hoping they’d believe that I’d be okay, even though I wasn’t sure of anything. I wondered how or why they’d managed to get my family to the station so quickly. It didn’t occur to me then that they might question them too.

      They brought me into an interrogation room and left me there for the better part of an hour. The room was claustrophobic, the air thick, and contained only a small table with a chair on either side. Finally, a plainclothes detective entered. He was tall and had a bushy moustache that hung down over his top lip, the kind I wished I could grow myself. His overcoat stank of cigar smoke. I’d never seen him before; he was the sort of man you wouldn’t spot as a police officer, either because he wasn’t in uniform or maybe because he came out of the station only to investigate crime scenes. I’d never stuck around once I’d created one.

      He paced a few times in front of me, his hands behind his back, and then he said, “All right. Now suppose you tell me how the hell you thought you were going to get away with stealing that diamond.”

      It was an odd question. I’d expected him to stick to facts, not strategy, and I was unprepared. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Adrenaline made my mind race, sharpen, and yet fog over all at once.

      “I don’t know...”

      “I guess not,” he said, and sat down across from me. He brought a cigar out of his breast pocket and lit up, puffing huge clouds in my direction. “So you stole your sister’s key, did ya?”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “Now suppose you tell me what was going through your mind when ya threw that diamond out the window.” Another strange thing to ask. What could it matter to him what I was thinking?

      “I guess I thought I could get it after I jumped.”

      “It was pitch black. The house backs on a ravine. How’d ya think ya’d find it? I’ve had three men lookin’ for it for the past two hours and they still haven’t turned it up.”

      “I dunno.”

      “You don’t know much, do ya. You slow or somethin’?”

      I paused before answering. “Ya,” I said. “Why else would I throw it?”

      He tilted his head and squinted at me, probably to see if I was bullshitting. “I think maybe because you’re a little dumb-ass shit and you thought, if I can’t have it nobody else can either.”

      “Okay. Whatever you say,” I answered, not so much because I was defeated or trying to give him any lip, but because I was still figuring out if it was better to appear stupid or spiteful, since he’d presented me with both options.

      He leaned over the table and grabbed my throat. His hand was so enormous that his fingers nearly met at the back of my neck. His cigar was bitten between his teeth, and as he spoke, he blew smoke in my face. “What I say, is that you’d better give me some straight answers, and fast, and stop playing me for a chump.”

      He stared into my eyes, and I tried to hold his gaze, but I began to tear up from the cigar. I coughed and tried to suck in air, and then all of a sudden he let me go, and we both fell into our respective chairs.

      Spiteful. For now, I decided on spiteful.

      An hour later, after he’d asked me each question in a half-dozen different ways, slapped me around a little, and choked me a few more times, I was led back into the hallway. My family was still there, but now Bessie’s eyes were puffy, and her boyfriend, Abe, had arrived. He had his arm around her. Lil was now with them too, and just before we reached their bench, the detective handed me over to a uniformed officer and said, “Miss Wolfman, please come with me.”

      As we passed in the hall, Lil searched my eyes. Not the way Bessie had, in desperation. Lil was trying to divine some clue from my expression. She wanted to know how much I’d given away. The one time in my life I’ve actually wanted to open my lips to speak, I couldn’t say a word.

      St-tropez

      My life has been long, with ups and downs that I probably deserved, each one of them. But after everything, I didn’t deserve to be warehoused somewhere waiting to die. Waiting for them to serve lunch, waiting for the damned Sabbath elevator, waiting for my cancer to come back.

      Bessie’s son, Warren, and his wife, Susan, said that moving here was for the best, but Glendale Manors was just fine. The five years I spent there after Ellen died were decent ones. I’d been alone long enough before meeting her that reacquainting myself with solitude came easily. I was independent at Glendale. I could come and go as I pleased without anyone taking notice. If I felt like having chopped liver, there were delis nearby. The Health Bread Bakery was a block away, if I felt like a nice caraway rye. The Jerusalem Restaurant was just down the street, and not far, the Holy Blossom Temple. I barely ever attended services, but when I did, I could go and then walk home afterwards. And in my lobby, every spring, they’d have a strawberry social and name one of the ladies Strawberry Queen. That was before the bout of prostate cancer, in remission now. Once that scare surfaced, investigations were done and preparations were made for the move.

      Warren designated his son Ari to help. He was back for the summer from McGill, where he was doing a PhD on the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, researching her from an angle I wasn’t sure I completely understood. Ari was a patient a sharp intake of breath · 29 child and grew up to be very well-suited to academics, to all that plodding, meticulous research and to the penetration of their nonsense lingo. Well-suited to help a nostalgic old uncle uproot his life, yet again.

      For instance, Ari’s thesis title was Emma Goldman: Character, Courage and (Con)text—An Examination of Radical Resistance and Ethical Action in Historical Perspective. He had to write it out to show me the crazy drivel with the brackets, and then he explained that it was the latest thing in the academic world—brackets in the middle of a word to give it a double, often contradictory, meaning.

      I said, “Kind of like a pun, but not as funny, right?”

      He stared at me blankly for a few seconds and said, “Yeah, I guess, kind of.”

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