Martin Amis - Night Train

This isn’t me, I thought. This isn’t me, sitting here. I’m not around.

“Trader?”

“Trader. He was there, Mike. He was the last to see. I’m not saying he... But it’s Trader. Trader owns her. It’s Trader.”

“Why?”

“Who else?”

I sat back, away from this. But then he went on, saying in his tethered voice,

“Correct me if I’m wrong. Did you ever meet anybody happier than Jennifer? Did you ever hear about anybody happier than Jennifer? More stable? She was, she was sunny.”

“No you’re not wrong, Colonel Tom. But the minute you really go into someone. You and I both know that there’s always enough pain.”

“There wasn’t any—”

Here his voice gave a kind of hiccup of fright. And I thought he must be imagining her last moments. It took him a few swallows, and then he continued:

“Pain. Why was she naked, Mike? Jennifer. Miss Modest. Who never even owned a bikini. With her figure.”

“Excuse me, sir, is the case being worked? Is Silvera on it? What?”

“I stetted it, Mike. It’s pending. Because I’m going to ask you to do something for me.”

TV, etcetera, has had a terrible effect on perpetrators. It has given them style. And TV has ruined American juries for ever. And American lawyers. But TV has also fucked up us police. No profession has been so massively fictionalized. I had a bunch of great lines ready. Like: I was quit when you came in here. I’m twice as quit now. But this was Colonel Tom I was talking to. So I spoke the plain truth.

“You saved my life. I’d do anything for you. You know that.”

He reached down for his briefcase. From it he removed a folder. Jennifer Rockwell. H97143. He held it out toward me, saying, “Bring me something I can live with. Because I can’t live with this.”

Now he let me look at him. The panic had left his eyes. As for what remained, well, I’ve seen it a thousand times. The skin is matte, containing not a watt of light. The stare goes nowhere into the world. It cannot penetrate. Seated on the other side of the desk, I was already way out of range.

“It’s a little fucked up, ain’t it, Colonel Tom?”

“Yeah, it’s a little fucked up. But it’s the way we’re going to do this.”

I leaned back and said experimentally, “I keep trying to think it through. You’re sitting there kind of idling around with it—with the weapon. Cleaning it. Toying with it. Then a perverse thought. An infantile thought.” I mean, that’s how an intelligent infant finds out about something: It puts it in its mouth. “You put it in your mouth. You—”

“It wasn’t an accident, Mike,” he said, standing. “That’s precluded by the evidence. Expect a package this time tomorrow.”

He nodded at me. This package, his nod seemed to say, was going to straighten me out.

“What is it, Colonel Tom?”

“Something for your VCR.”

And I thought, Oh, Jesus. Don’t tell me. The young lovers in their designer dungeon. I could just see it. The young lovers, in their customized correctional facility—Trader in his Batman suit, and Jennifer shackled to her rack, wearing nothing but feathers and tar.

But Colonel Tom soon put my mind at rest.

“It’s the autopsy,” he said.

What with AA, golf, the Discuss Group on Mondays, and the night class on Thursdays at Pete (together with countless and endless correspondence courses), plus the Tuesday nightshift, and Saturdays, when I tend to hang with my bunkies in the Forty-Four—what with all this, my boyfriend says I don’t have time for a boyfriend and maybe my boyfriend is right. But I do have a boyfriend: Tobe. He’s a dear guy and I value him and I need him. One thing about Tobe—he sure knows how to make a woman feel slim. Tobe’s totally enormous. He fills the room. When he comes in late, he’s worse than the night train: Every beam in the building wakes up and moans. I find love difficult. Love finds me difficult. I learned that with Deniss, the hard way. And Deniss learned it too. It’s this simple: Love destabilizes me, and I can’t afford to be destabilized. So Tobe here suits me right down to the ground. His strategy, I suspect, is to stick around and grow on me. And it’s working. But so slowly that I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see if it all panned out.

Tobe is no choirboy, obviously: He rooms with Detective Mike Hoolihan. But when I told him what was going to be on TV that night he took himself off to Fretnick’s for a couple of cold ones. We keep booze in the apartment and somehow I like to know it’s there even though it will kill me if I touch it. I cooked him an early dinner. And around seven he finished mopping up his pork chop and sloped out the door.

Right now I want to say something about myself and Colonel Tom. One morning toward the very end of my career in Homicide I came in for the eight to four—late, drunk, with a face made of orange sand, and carrying my liver on my hip like a flight bag. Colonel Tom got me into his office and said, Mike, you can kill yourself if that’s what you want. But don’t expect me to watch you doing it. He took me by the arm and led me to the second tier of the headquarters garage. He drove me straight to Lex General. The admissions doc looked me over and the first thing he said was, You live alone, right? And I said, Mo. No, I don’t live alone. I live with Deniss...After they dried me out I convalesced at the Rockwells’ residence—this was when they lived way out in Whitefield. For a week I lay in a little bedroom at the back of the ground floor. The distant traffic was music and people who weren’t people—as well as people who were—came and stood at the foot of my bed. Uncle Tom, Miriam, the family physician. And then the others. And Jennifer Rockwell, who was nineteen years old, would come and read to me in the evenings. I lay there trying to listen to her clear young voice, wondering if Jennifer was real or just another of the ghosts who occasionally stopped by, cool, self-sufficient, unreproachful figures, their faces carved and blue.

I never felt judged by her. She had her troubles too, back then. And she was the daughter of a police. She didn’t judge.

First I recheck the case folder, where you’re going to find every last bit of boring shit, like the odometer reading on the unmarked that Johnny Mac and myself drove that night—the night of March fourth. But I want all the chapter and verse. I want to shore up a sequence in my mind.

19:30. Trader Faulkner is the last to see. Trader has stated that he took his leave of her at that time, as he always did on a Sunday night. Jennifer’s apparent mood is described here as “cheerful” and “normal.”

19:40. The old lady in the attic apartment, dozing in front of her TV, is woken by a shot. She calls 911.

19:55. Beat cop shows. The old lady, Mrs. Rolfe, keeps a set of spare keys to Jennifer’s apartment. Beat cop gains access and finds body.

20:05. Tony Silvera takes the call in the squad-room. The dispatcher gives the name of the victim.

20:15. I am summoned by Detective Sergeant John Macatitch.

20:55. Jennifer Rockwell is pronounced.

And twelve hours later she is cut.

taceant colloquia, it says on the wall. effugiat risus.

HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE.

Let talking cease. Let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights to help the living.

Die suspiciously, die violently, die unusually—in fact, die pretty much anywhere outside an intensive-care unit or a hospice—and you will be cut. Die unattended, and you will be cut. If you die in this American city, the paramedics will bring you down to the ME’s office on Battery and Jefferson. When it’s time to get around to you there, you will be trolleyed out of the walk-in freezer, weighed, and rolled onto a zinc gurney under an overhead camera. It used to be a microphone, and you’d take Polaroids. Now it’s a camera. Now it’s TV. At this stage your clothes will be examined, removed, bagged, and sent to Evidence Control. But Jennifer is wearing nothing but a toe-tag. And it begins.