Unknown - The Genius

“You wouldn’t happen to have a photograph of him, would you?”

“No.”

Samantha said, “Could you describe him?”

“Oh, let’s see. He was small, about five-foot-four and on the thin side.

He sometimes grew a little moustache. Always he wore the same coat, no matter how hot or cold it was. That coat had seen better days. You’re probably not old enough to remember—how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight,” she said.

“Well, then you’re definitely not old enough, but I’ll tell you that he looked a bit like Howard Hughes.”

“Was he unwell?”

“He didn’t seem especially healthy. He often had a cough. I could always tell he was there, because I’d hear it coming from the back pews.”

I said, “Did he have any obvious psychological problems?”

He hesitated. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than I have. My office forbids it.”

In the car, Samantha said, “That’s a start.”

“He said he was small. Doesn’t that rule him out?”

“Not really. Footprinting isn’t an exact science. A photo would be more helpful, so we could ask around the neighborhood. What about that cough? He might have gotten treated for it.”

“It sounds more like he wasn’t treated at all.”

“But if he was, then there’s a record of him somewhere. Based on what you’ve told me, the picture I’m getting, people like him, they fall through the cracks. They don’t have a regular doctor. They show up at the emergency room.”

“Then let’s call the local emergency rooms.”

“I’ll work on it. You’d be surprised how hard it is in this state to get medical records. Did he have a job?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“He had to pay for things. He paid his rent.”

“The building manager told me he paid in cash. His apartment was rent-controlled from back in the sixties. He was paying a hundred dollars a month.”

She whistled in admiration, and for a moment she wasn’t the arm of the law but just another New Yorker envying someone else’s lease. “Still, that’s a hundred dollars he had to come up with every thirty days. Maybe he panhandled.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But how does that help us? There isn’t a panhandlers’ union we can call.”

“You know what else,” she said, her gaze wandering toward the sky— and away from me. I sometimes got the impression that when we were talking she paid attention to me only long enough to start thinking on her own. In this she differed from her father, who had taken—or seemed to take—a real interest in my opinion. I have to give her credit for her honesty. From the outset, she never pretended she was doing this for anyone other than him. Certainly not for me.

“The paper,” she said. “He had to buy lots of it; you’d think he’d be on good terms with whoever sold it to him. And food. Why don’t you tackle that. I’m going to keep chasing down the witnesses in the old cases and see what I can come up with. Here. I pulled some of the old mug shots from those cases and made copies for you so you can show them around. Don’t worry. We’ll get something.”

“You think so?”

“Not a chance.”

I WENT BACK TO MULLER COURTS, starting at one of the two bodegas. Once the countermen got through staring at Isaac, they confirmed my description of Victor. They knew who he was—”Weird dude”—but, other than a preference for a certain brand of wheat bread and Oscar Mayer ham, could provide no information. I asked about paper, and they handed me a notepad with greenish, lined pages.

“What about white,” I said. “Plain white.”

“We don’t got that.”

Thinking of the food journal, I asked what kind of apples he bought.

“He didn’t buy apples.”

“He must’ve bought apples,” I said.

“Did you see him buy apples?”

“I didn’t see him buy no apples.”

“No, he didn’t buy no apples.”

In an effort to be helpful, one of them suggested that he had bought, rather, pears.

I said, “What about cheese?”

“No cheese.”

“He didn’t buy no cheese.”

“No cheese.”

I went to the other bodega. This time I had Isaac wait outside, which he did happily, on condition that he could run across the street and get a meatball hero. I gave him ten bucks and he bounded off like a little kid.

The girl behind the register, a pretty Latina with red plastic glasses, put down her poetry magazine when I approached. She, too, recognized Victor by my description.

“I called him ‘sir,’ ” she told me.

“Why’s that.”

“He looked like the kind of person who you call sir.”

“How often did he come in here?”

“Twice a week when I was here. I don’t work on Friday or Saturday, though.”

I asked what he would usually buy.

She went to the rattling dairy case and handed me a package of inexpensive presliced Swiss cheese. “Same thing every time. Once I think I asked, ‘Sir, maybe you want to try something else?’ “

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He never said anything to me.”

“Can you remember if he ever talked about—”

“He never said anything.”

She was equally firm in her conviction that he had purchased neither apples nor paper.

“We don’t sell paper,” she said. “There’s a Staples on Queens Boulevard.”

Ten months prior I would have resisted the idea that Victor’s life extended beyond the confines of Muller Courts—that he’d gone anywhere without my imagination giving him permission to do so. Now I found myself obeying him. I spent several chilly November afternoons walking in and out of

local markets, canvassing the neighborhood in widening concentric circles: a one-block radius, two blocks, three … until I reached the triangular plaza at Junction Boulevard and a fruit stand run by a middle-aged Sikh.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “My friend.”

He held up a small mesh bag of Granny Smiths.

The vendor, whose name was Jogindar, said that he and Victor would talk for at least a few minutes every day.

“The weather,” he said. “Always the weather.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, a long time. Perhaps a year and a half. Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m looking for him. Did he sound okay to you?”

“He had a terrible cough,” said Jogindar. “I told him he must go to the hospital.”

“Did he?”

He shrugged. “I hope so.”

“Was he ever with anyone else?”

“No, never.”

“Let me ask you this: was there anything strange about the way he behaved?”

Jogindar smiled. Wordlessly he gestured all around us, at the steam-breathing pensioners slouched on park benches; at Queens Boulevard, its lumbering parade, its tangle of wind-whipped powerlines. The whole honking throb of the metropolis, ethnic markets and 99-cent stores and CHECKS CASHED and pawnshops and nail salons and dialysis centers and a wigmaker that sold hair by the pound. He gestured to Isaac, standing ten feet off; to an ancient-looking lady making her way through the intersection, heedless of the red light and the horns exploding at her. She kept shuffling, shuffling, until she made it to the other side. Then everyone drove on.

I understood what he was saying. He was saying It’s all crazy.

He breathed into his hands. “When he stopped coming I thought it was a sign.”

“Of what.”

“I don’t know. But after so many years he became very comforting to me. I am thinking of finding a different job.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Since I came here. Eighteen years.” He smiled. “That is a kind of friendship.”

For the heck of it, I bought a bag of Victor’s favorite apples. On my way back to Manhattan, I bit into one. It was unusually sour.