Martin Amis - Night Train

The dispatcher directs you to a large Tudor-style residence on Stanton Hill. Two tearful parents, supported by a small cast of tearful servants, lead you up the staircase. With your partner at your side (Silvera, in this case), you enter a bedroom infested with stereo and computer equipment, with CDs and PCs, with posters of babes and rock stars all over the walls, and on the bed is the corpse of some poor kid with a weak leer and an earring. His pants are down around his hightops. He is lying in a pool of skin magazines and amyl nitrate. There is also a rented adult video in the VCR and, beside the pillow, a remote smothered in latents. And he has a polyethylene bag half wrenched off his face. So you spend an hour with the folks, saying what you can, while the science crew come and go. And as soon as you’re back in the unmarked, you both give the cop shrug and one of you will start:

Well at least he died in a good cause.

Right. He didn’t give it up lightly. And you know what else?

What?

He was doing it for all of us.

He had no thought for himself up there.

He was pushing out the boundaries for all of us.

Laying his life on the line for all of us.

Greater love hath no man.

Than him who.

Lays down his life.

For a better handjob.

Well put. For a better handjob.

With TV you expect everything to measure up. Things are meant to measure up. The punishment will answer the crime. The crime will fall within the psychological profile of the malefactor. The alibi will disintegrate. The gun will smoke. The veiled woman will suddenly appear in the courthouse.

Motive, motive. “Motive”: That which moves, that which impels. But with homicide, now, we don’t care about motive. We never give it a second’s thought. We don’t care about the why. We say: Fuck the why. Motive might have been worth considering, might have been pretty reliable, might have been in okay shape half a century ago. But now it’s all up in the fucking air. With the TV.

I’ll tell you who wants a why. Jurors want a why. They want reruns of Perry Mason and The Defenders. They want Car Fifty-Four, Where Are You?

They want commercials every ten minutes or it never happened.

That’s homicide. This is suicide. And we all want a why for suicide.

And how’s it looking?

Tomorrow night I’m seeing Trader Faulkner, and something new, something more, may emerge from that. ‘But otherwise it’s pretty much made. It’s down. Isn’t it? I have followed up all the names in Jennifer’s address book. I have been through the phone records and the credit-card accounts. And there’s only one gap: No hit on the lithium. Tony Silvera has been onto Adrian Drago in Narcotics, and they gave their snitches a roust. But this isn’t a street drug we’re talking about. And I don’t build on nailing the connect.

But—hey. Jennifer Rockwell was a cleavage in a lab coat. But she wasn’t Mary Poppins. A spinning top looks still and stable until the force starts to weaken. A tremor, then it slows and slews. It wobbles and reels and clatters. Then it stops.

Answers are coming together, are they not? We got sex and drugs and rock and roll. This is more than you usually get. This is plenty. This is practically TV.

So why don’t I buy it?

I keep thinking about her body. I keep thinking about Jennifer’s body and the confidence she had in it. See her in a swimsuit and you just thought... One summer day five or six years ago the Rockwells took the whole roof pool at the Trum, for their anniversary, and when Jennifer came out of the cabana and walked toward us in her white one-piece we all fell silent for a beat, and Silvera said, “Hm. Not bad.” Then Grandma Rebka clapped her hands together and wailed, “Zugts afen mir!” It should be said about me. We should all be so lucky. The sight of her instantly had you going along with the idea that the basis of attraction is genetic. Get Jennifer, and your genes would surge forth, in a limo. Her body was kind of an embarrassment, a thrilling embarrassment, to everyone (even Trader dipped his head). But it wasn’t an embarrassment to her. The confidence with which she carried it was self-evident, self-sufficient—I guess the word I want is “consummate.” She never needed to give it a moment’s thought. And when you consider how much the rest of us think about our bodies, and what kind of thoughts these are. Yes, absolutely right. We should all be so lucky.

Something else was said that day, around the roof pool at the Trum. The two grandmas, Rebka and Rhiannon, who died within a month of each other the following year—they were a great double act. As a ten-year-old Rebka had cleaned the streets of Vienna with her father’s skullcap. And she was an angel of light. Silver-spoon Rhiannon, on the other hand, was dour, sarcastic, and mean. And Welsh. If you thought Schadenfreude was a German word, then five minutes with Rhiannon would make you think again. And the mouth on her, still with that accent. She could even shock me. In a long life of uninterrupted ease, Grandma Rhiannon had one real cause for complaint. All her children grew and flourished. But she’d had fifteen of them.

Out by the pool, that day, she said,

“I’m like a horse in the bullring. I’ve got bags of sawdust in me.”

And I said, “Is that a Welsh thing? I thought it was an Irish thing, having a ton of kids.”

“No, not reely. It was him. Billy. It was him wanted them. I only wanted two. Even after little Alan he was on at me to have more.”

“More?”

“Day and night. Just one more. I’d say, ‘Come on, Billy. Give it a rest. I’m awl awl as it is.’ “

“You’re what?”

She pronounced the two words the same. Awl awl. All hole.

That’s what I sometimes think this case is.

All hole.

Tonight’s my date with Trader.

One thing I do, before I go over there, is dig out the transcript of the interrogation I conducted downtown. My effort, there in the small interrogation room, was misdirected. But I’m impressed by its tenacity. Now I see this:

I have a witness that puts you outside the house at seven thirty-five. Looking distressed.

“Mad.” Riled-up. Sound familiar, Trader?

Yes. The time. And the mood.

I missed that earlier, and I now remind myself to pick up on it tonight. Why distressed?

Another thing I do, before I leave, is spend about an hour in the bathroom with the concealer. And the contour powder and the lip-liner. And the tweezers for Christ’s sake. Too, I’d washed my hair the night before, and had an early one. I guess a person will sometimes do this, no real reason attaching except for herself, to feel at her best around a man she likes. Another explanation may be that I have a crush on Trader. Well? So? It doesn’t mean anything. Say only this: If he wants comfort, I will give it to him. On my way out the door Tobe looked at me oddly. Tobe’s okay. He’s a gentle giant. As opposed to a violent one. As opposed to Deniss, Shawn, Jon, Duwain.

Long ago I learned that I cannot get the good guys.

I am one of the good guys, and I go out there and get the bad guys. I can get the bad guys.

But I cannot get the good guys.

I just cannot get the good guys.

It was a long evening, and it went in drifts.

Trader has moved back into the apartment. My death scene has been destroyed: It’s been redecorated. The chair in the bedroom—the same chair?—sits swathed in a white sheet. A stepladder still stands in the corner. Trader says he hasn’t yet slept in there. He ends up on the couch. Watching TV.

“Hey. A TV. You got a life at last,” I said. Innocent words were proving difficult to find. “What’s it like, being here?”