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Along the Dark Road

New York City, New York,

June 2011

Miriam Weitz knew better. While swimming for the surface on late-morning wakeups from long overnights, she always wondered which thrill was worse for her: drugs, or the bad men attached to them. But setting aside the philosophical scales supplied by hangover and morning breath, she knew better, had decided long ago that knowing better was the point, and still turned onto the dark road with the sleepwalker proficiency of a late-night snacker visiting a refrigerator for irresistibly cold leftovers. Knowing better wasn’t enough.

This time, a windowless bedroom lit by a red digital clock was waiting when repetitive vibrations from her cellphone pulled her to the surface. A long, sheetdraped man with a dimly-remembered name lay on the bed beside her—maybe Tex, one small tonguetwist away from the overnight copilot, X. Weitz gave him an exploratory fingerprod and found a warm body, but he didn’t move. Plainly he had no belief in the miracle properties of preflight Zoloft.

She checked the display on her cellphone, recognized the number, and cursed softly before answering. “Hello?” She added a repeat after she cleared sleep from her throat.

“Miriam Weitz?” a rough voice asked. “You remember me, right? And hopefully faster than you answer your phone. I ain’t got all day for pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey.”

“I remember,” she said. Mike Inglewood was a First Grade detective on NYPD’s Major Case squad, a tall, ill mannered, heavy-bellied man with graying ginger hair and bad feet.

“You’re gonna need some coffee?” he asked.

“I’m glad you haven’t lost your manners,” she said. “What this city does to people, I can’t explain.”

Inglewood laughed. “That mouth before breakfast makes me wish I was Jewish.”

Weitz switched on the bedside lamp and hurriedly gathered her clothes from the floor of the bedroom while Inglewood aired a complaint about David Barber, a new detective at Major Case. After she strained off a thick layer of profanity, most of his rant rendered down to ‘know-it-all pretty boy prima donna’. The young woman dropped the phone onto the bed while she dressed.

“Are you listening to me?” Inglewood demanded when she lifted the phone to her ear again.

“Stop repeating yourself.”

“I don’t like him. I was emphasizing that.”

She snorted but didn’t reward him with a laugh. Pausing at the head of the bed, she lifted enough sheet from the sleeping man to see a headful of glossy black hair, a round ear, and the corner of a jaw turning blue with overnight stubble. The smile that surfaced as she remembered his chin twisted quickly into an anxious frown.

“I need an extra set of hands to bust his balls,” Inglewood said. “Will you be up to speed before three o’clock?”

“Hold on a minute,” she said. She lifted a pair of worn blue jeans from the floor and extracted a wallet. She opened the wallet and took a trophy snapshot of the driver’s license with her phone before she studied the photo: black hair, blue eyes, and the hint of a dynamite smile had produced her usual winner. Weitz kept landing on men who looked like her ex-husband.

“Barber’s going on a date tonight,” Inglewood continued. “This is the one I’ve been waiting on, an Upper East Side princess that he’s been scrambling to bag for three months. This one’s his brass ring, get it? I want his fingers to close on a rusty nail. I’m gonna redecorate his apartment before he brings her home for the fireworks.” A brief burst of rough laughter flared from the phone. “That, or jab him with a dose of the clap—but now it’s too late for him to pass it on to the princess.”

Weitz curled into a seat on the carpeted floor, almost disappearing in the dimly-lit bedroom, and hugged her knees as she listened. She raked fingers through her short, dark hair, trying unsuccessfully to erase her bedhead. Inglewood wasn’t completely joking. The big detective looked like a pile of swelling dough, but he had a hidden axeblade edge of cruelty. The world suffered when he was angry. On the phone, his voice sounded like a disembodied replay of the nightmare moment where they first met.

#

At that first meeting, a few years before, Inglewood woke her with an off-kilter wisecrack just before he yanked her from beneath a bed by her ankle. She had dressed in a hurry while he dug through her purse and squinted at her ID. Somehow, Weitz had fit into his soft spot: Inglewood squinted, comparing the ID in his hand to her face as she wiped sleep from her eyes and pulled on clothes. “You’re Miriam Gittel Swabe?” he had demanded. “This’s an old picture?”

“Before I was married,” Weitz said. Orthodox girls cut their hair when they married. “I still had my hair.”

“You’ve lost weight,” he rumbled. Weitz remembered that he said that, but maybe something more was erased when she saw a tangle of bodies on the bed behind her, twisted into bloodsplashed sheets. Puddles of blood pooled around the legs of the bed, and around one corner of a wet, dangling sheet.

Inglewood caught her attention again by yanking her ear until she was facing him. “You know Avram Swabe?” he demanded.

Weitz nodded spasmodically. “My grandfather,” she whispered.

The big detective glared at her as he pressed her purse into her hands. “I know where you live. Get out.” He jerked a thumb at the door. Another detective standing in the doorway threw up his hands in surrender when Inglewood glared at him. Weitz brushed past and fled the nightmare.

Later, she realized that catching a detective that knew her grandfather wasn’t lucky; most of NYPD’s detectives knew him. Her luck came in catching one willing to risk himself to pull a schlimazel from a mess.

#

Sitting in the dark bedroom with one arm wrapped around her knees and her phone crammed desperately against her ear, she was glad that Mike Inglewood couldn’t actually see her. She was too many steps back down the dark road she had been walking the first time they met.

“So are you with me on this, Weitz?” he demanded.

“Yo,” she said. Silently, she added, I owe you, before another wise comment popped out: “A cop’s apartment, Mike? This is a place for you to walk in beside me. Not that I need you to hold my hand.”

He rumbled laughter. “Naturally. You ain’t big enough to carry all the party favors anyway.”

Weitz slipped a business card from her overnight’s wallet to scribble the address and time. The young Jewish woman was an expert burglar. She had honed her unusual skill during a few years spent working for a private detective in Manhattan, but the skill began in the same dark past that Inglewood had interrupted.

The unrelated connection between burglary and Inglewood came accidentally. The big detective recruited her for a prank on another police officer when she still had nothing useful to share with the world around her except for a snarl. At his direction, she followed an NYPD captain around the city for three days. She sifted yellow dust onto his brand-new Audi every time he had it washed, and then shot video clips of his meltdowns each time he discovered the dirty car.

As Weitz watched the police captain, she thought, all of that for a little bit of dust. Later, that prank always silenced her own anger. The police had laughed at the video clips until they choked, but Weitz was Jewish, and she unapologetically saw such little things in shades of life and death.

But old habits of self-destruction possessed a seductive embrace, despite the new self she had laboriously built after she first met Mike Inglewood. Weitz unearthed the truth when she started over; the things she hated most were hidden inside her. She only broke the grip in moments of reaching for the impossible. She had already screwed up repeatedly in her short life. Knowing the answers didn’t seem to help; she honestly expected even more failures in the future. She had even been fired recently from the private detective job that she had climbed, like a ladder, from the sewer of the fallen world where Inglewood first found her.

All that remained was her detective’s license and a daily struggle between certainty and despair that alternated as steadily as day and night. Weitz seized the unexpected prize, a fresh purpose—even a bad one—offered by Inglewood, and ran back in the direction of her sanity. After she pulled on her riding leathers, walked out and slapped the apartment door shut, the dark road vanished.

#

“Jackson Heights? This is still the city?” Weitz muttered.

The apartment block boasted a steady stream of sidewalk traffic, mostly mothers and children in a dozen shades of Spanish and Indian marching with lower middleclass hopefulness. After parking her Ducati, Weitz had walked down to sit in Inglewood’s dirty brown Chevy watching Barber’s apartment. They waited through a few hours of afternoon for Barber to leave for his date.

“He wants to step all the way up to the city in one go. You see that, right? Straight to the Upper East.” The big detective paused to push his taped-together glasses back up his nose. He shrugged. “Then maybe you don’t.”

“You mean some suggestion with that?”

“Sure.” A sudden redfaced grin tainted with snarl exposed Inglewood’s teeth. “You don’t notice the mopes looking into the car when they pass? They ain’t looking at me. I doubt you ever paused at a curb for a taxi or stood in line yourself, so how would you know?”

“My life is easy?”

“Why not? Look at you.” He waved dismissively. “And green eyes with it.”

Weitz blushed. Even Hasidic girls from Williamsburg knew about beauty. Miriam Weitz knew she was beautiful. She had her Sephardic grandmother’s olive skin, a slim, athletic frame, and bright green eyes with a face that drew openmouthed stares even when she cropped her hair to the skull and wore jackboots and motorcycle leathers. She was the youngest of seven sisters, and she had spent ten years watching suitors fight for the prettier sisters but ignore the rest. The struggles filled her home with storms, tears, whispered curses, and long hours of frustrated silence. She understood the bitterness born from envy.

“Number Eighteen, this one?” Weitz pointed at the apartment building, hoping to shut him up. “I’ll go open the door. Give me ten minutes for a walk.”

As she hopped from the Caprice, Inglewood said, “I get that same shit with Barber. You don’t mean nothing by it either, do you?”

Weitz pulled on her red wraparounds and then jogged across the street. Sidewalk traffic swirled around her before the apartment swallowed her. Three gray-haired Colombian women sat watching in a lobby full of cooking smells and the excited chatter of children. She walked upstairs and patrolled the hallways, listening to snatches of music and television commercials.

Seventeen and Eighteen faced each other across the stub of hallway past the fire stairs at the end of the tenement’s bisecting hallway. Weitz knocked vigorously on Eighteen, then listened at the frame of Seventeen—silence. She stepped back to lean against Barber’s door and picked three locks in forty seconds, then called Inglewood after she went inside and closed the door. The big detective offered a terse acknowledgement and disconnected.

The apartment was snug but uncluttered, a Zen masterpiece beyond the power of ordinary bachelors. David Barber stared from pictures, a handsome darkhaired man with blue eyes and a hint of smile. Weitz found a battered copy of Twain’s Letters from the Earth that fit naturally in the curve of her hand like a well broken catcher’s mitt. She came to a sudden conclusion that she liked Barber, maybe more than she liked Inglewood. The big gingerhaired detective lived alone in a rat’s nest full of carry-out litter, disassembled machinery, and misplaced tools, an amplified reflection of his ill-fitting clothes, broken glasses, and bouts of body odor. If Barber likewise matched his apartment, he was a winner.

#

A week after Weitz ran from the bloodsoaked bedroom on the Upper West Side, her grandfather had appeared in the East Village tenement where she lived with a handful of other Williamsburg outcasts. The old man was as large as a door—literally and absolutely. Abraham Swabe was a towering thunderstorm that hovered over her childhood. The men in Williamsburg spoke in hushed tones of his incredible strength, his determination, and his wisdom. As a child, he survived the concentration camps in the butchery of 1944, while the Germans swept together the Jews of Hungary and combed the corners of Europe for strays.

“So you would rather live with these shaigetz?” he rumbled. “Come back to Williamsburg. My house is empty now.” He tucked her meager possessions into a bag hidden beneath his long black caftan and scooped her from the floor like a lost kitten.

“You could have done worse,” he told her late that same night, as they drank hot chocolate in his kitchen. “Mike Inglewood could be the smartest detective NYPD has right now. Not without his problems, but he’s in the right place.”

“I could have done worse?” she asked.

“You owe him now—you know this?” Swabe set his cup carefully back into the saucer, and spread his wide hand onto the tabletop. His dark eyes burned as he stared down at her. “You are a Jew, Mireleh. Maybe you know less about this than you should. Girls should study Torah. That was Joel Teitelbaum’s narishkeit. Women somehow bleed and die less than men? I know fewer of their names?”

Her heart had beat suddenly like a heavy hammer. A vast storm crowded into the kitchen. Hasidic Jewishness was the center of the world where Weitz grew up—the same world she fled later, after it betrayed her. Her grandfather was one man who openly argued with the rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum, but never diminished. He even shaved his face every day, a violation of the mitzvot that no one dared mention to his face, because he was still Jewish to the bones. But his name—Swabe—wasn’t Jewish. Swabe was a made-up name, given to him to replace the name driven from his mind by the camps. He knew all the names of those he had left behind. His name wasn’t among those.

“You are a Jew, Mireleh. If you close your eyes and hold still, you will feel Hashem’s breath on your ear. A Jew. A Jew pays his debts. If a Jew owes the devil, he pays him every cent.” Swabe tapped the tabletop with a heavy finger each time he repeated Jew. “You could have done worse than this fat, slobbish goy with a mind like a steel trap.”

#

The big detective startled Weitz when he burst through the door of the apartment and swung three bulging bags down from his shoulder. Cardboard tubes jutted from them like artillery barrels. He kicked the door closed and wheezed a curse.

“Are you crazy?” Weitz blurted. “You carried all this past the old women in the lobby?”

“Relax. Fortune’s smile was for the freaks. Some kid ran into a wall and bloodied his nose, his older sister punched the kid that was chasing him, and then it was all screams, spankings, and tears. I could’ve been a Martian and it didn’t matter.” Inglewood came to a sudden stop and fixed her with a glare. “What’s the problem?”

“Nothing,” she said. She studied the bags.

He glanced around the neat apartment, then said, “I need the number for this cleaning service. This guy—“ He shuffled through the apartment, grumbling.

Weitz knelt and opened the abandoned bags. They vomited a collection of pornographic posters, a bundle of women’s clothes—mostly underwear, a shelfload of sextoys, dark satin sheets and pillows, and an air compressor, wide paintbrushes, lights. She looked up, unfinished, when he drifted back to the front of the apartment and loomed above her.

“I screwed this up,” he said. “I didn’t think it through enough. This here ain’t a high school prank. You got to help me fix this.”

“You think?”

“Watch it.” After losing his glare, Inglewood dropped onto the couch and settled glumly. “I had a lot of laughs buying the crap, I guess, but mostly I was thinking what his face would look like when he found it. You know, that big dildo was going on the satin pillow like some mint at a fancy hotel—“

“The pink one?”

“Pink? I was planning to use the red see-through job. The pink one was for floating in the bathtub—“

“Mike, you’re a jerk.” She stood up and dusted her hands like they were dirty.

“You don’t know how this asshole treats me.”

“So tell me.”

“You? You wouldn’t understand. Can’t no cat understand a dog.”

Weitz answered with a glare.

Inglewood stared up at the young woman for long moments, as if he was seeing, for the first time, something more than a pretty face. The marks of a night wasted cast only a faint shadow across her beauty, but darkness showed above the surface of its shallow grave; the bones of sadness, disappointment, and hopelessness driving Weitz to reach for destruction wore a soft pall of black riding leathers and jackboots for protection against the future.

“Okay, he wants my job. No, he wants to be me. But he’s stupid. He can’t manage it. None of them can do it. But will you look at me!” He grinned nastily. “They don’t want this in front of a camera no more. The mayor, the commissioner, the politicians, they don’t want no more of my face—“ He jabbed roughly at his face with thick fingers.

“They want you to do the work, then push him in front of the camera,” she said.

“They want to put his name on the fucking citations!”

“And he’s good with that,” she said softly.

“Damn right he’s good with that.”

Weitz looked down into the bags again. They were heavy with the money that was worthless to buy the respect that would cover the big detective’s pain. A long sigh of defeat escaped Inglewood before she looked back up.

“No, this is it,” she whispered. “Overdone, sure, and less funny than horrific. He’ll piss himself, and then spend hours cleaning up.”

A weak smile lifted Inglewood’s face. “Where do we start?”

Weitz glanced at the room. “We keep between the lines. Say he comes first through the door…nothing can catch his eye or he could back right out. The front has to look normal. After they walk inside, the fun begins.”

“You’re good at this.”

She grinned. The room sparkled after the lightningbolt was gone. “I’m a Jew. I have people I hate,” she said. She poked a finger into one of the bags. “What’s the air-compressor for?”

Inglewood shrugged. “The blowup dolls. I didn’t figure I’d have enough breath for all three without passing out.”

After deciding that Barber would park his date in the living room for a good look at the carefully chosen knickknacks before going for music and drinks, Weitz planned quickly. She wedged the red dildo into the couch, jutting like a mostly submerged tusk from behind a screening throw pillow. She shuffled some pornographic magazines into the spread on the coffee table, and tucked a pair of lace panties under the chair facing the couch.

“Put the ‘gotcha’ in the refrigerator,” she said.

“Some tipoff that the night’s going to hell—a bottle of flavored KY?”

“Why not?”

He rummaged a bottle of lotion from one of the bags. “This just occurred to me: What if the date is into freak stuff?”

“Then just maybe you paid to kickstart his new relationship.”

He sighed. “I should’ve dosed him with the clap,” he muttered.

They crammed blowup dolls, high heeled pumps, and lingerie into the closets, covered the bed with burgundy satin sheets, and added hanging cuffs, blacklights, and wedge pillows. Weitz practiced her Sharpie-calligraphy on an empty box before labeling ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ buttplugs for the vanity. The heavy bags emptied in a long frenzy, finished by cementing a deluxe collector’s set of stop-action Rocco Siffredi posters to the bedroom walls. Inglewood was happily exhausted after an hour of vandalism.

“Okay, this could work. His night just went to hell.” He walked back into the bathroom and pushed the pink dildo around the bathtub while he made motorboat noises. “That’s classic.”

“The apartment is too much,” Weitz said. “You can’t claim it. You’ll end up in jail for destruction. You need a setup, Mike. It just ends in this horrorshow.”

She watched as a sudden realization that maybe, just maybe, he had gone across a wide line that separated acceptable from criminal flashed through the big detective. He looked around the bedroom, started to warm up a denial, then scowled and asked, “What’s that gonna be?”

She laid out a black mini dress from the bundle of clothes and considered. She added a shiny blond pageboy wig and black sandals. “I’m glad you brought the shoes,” she said. “Really, this wants black sunglasses, but mine will work.” She dropped her red wraparound visor on the bed.

“What are you gonna do with that?” Inglewood demanded.

“You know which restaurant they’re eating at, right? Trust me.”

#

Weitz took a long detour on the ride to Carroll Gardens. Inglewood drove directly crosstown to hipster Brooklyn, but the young woman needed rushing wind and wild chances to scrape away the bad luck that would grow from the raw malice of destroying Barber’s apartment. Her Ducati, a red Monster, made the city vanish in an insane swooping rush of acceleration calculated against traffic, corners, lights, wind resistance, and gravel. Only ghosts could keep the daredevil pace.

The youngest of seven Hasidic sisters, Weitz’s world from the beginning meant following in their clear footsteps. Years passed before she realized that she had no mother—not even a faint memory of a smeared face that wasn’t something she had seen in a photograph. She had a changeling, a stepmother that concealed her distaste for her stepdaughters with a smile. Even her next-youngest sister remembered their real mother, a tall, slim woman who filled the house with singing and dancing when the men were gone. In the darkness of the bedroom the sisters shared, a whispered answer silenced her questions: “You killed her.”

That was the first time Weitz tried to run, but in Williamsburg nothing waited, for a girl, outside the smooth, swift path to marriage. Her grandfather’s brownstone off Lee Avenue was her shelter. He kept the marks of nightmares cuffed in his sleeve; he read books and told stories about a world full of hope and far away from Williamsburg, but no other stone on earth was more unyielding than Abraham Swabe.

On a bright, early afternoon in the June Weitz turned fourteen, she burst into his kitchen with another sullen complaint about her life, layered with wishes for any elsewhere. Saying nothing, not even looking up from his book, Swabe pushed her to the floor and settled his heavy foot on her back. He read his book until nightfall without moving his foot or even speaking. Cries, begging, scratching her nails bloody on the spotless floor, nothing moved him. She slept in despair and woke to find him still reading. Weitz felt numb and empty when he pulled her to her feet; she couldn’t remember why she had been so unhappy when she came into his kitchen.

Her father was furious when he saw her soiled clothes. Swabe answered his shouted accusations with quiet words: “She is a Jew. Do you remember what is a Jew, Elias?”

For years, Weitz thought that Swabe meant that being Jewish meant doing what was expected. Being Hasidic in Williamsburg meant just that. But after she killed her own daughter, after a surgeon cut her guts out, after her sudden divorce, then she thought that she was no longer a woman, no longer a Jew, and not even human. She ran. She woke in the small hours of her nights on the dark road that followed and wept while she cursed the unforgiving world that Hashem had made. Then she knew. When she was lifted from the floor again, Miriam Weitz stood.

#

The young woman whipped her Ducati nose-to-curb into the same space with Inglewood’s brown Caprice on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens. She slipped from her leathers before she climbed into the passenger seat beside him. Inglewood scowled.

“I thought you were gonna change,” he said, then shook his head and looked out the driver-side window as she stripped from her boots, blue jeans, and t-shirt. “You’re a disgrace. I’m glad I ain’t had no kids.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. The words had less venom than she thought, but he still gave her a startled glance.

“Okay, I got you.”

Weitz slid into the mini dress, noticed disgustedly that white cotton showed through the black material, and took off her underwear. She tugged on the sandals. “I’m decent,” she said.

Inglewood watched her settle the blond wig, then slide her red wraparounds onto her face. “You look cheap,” he said roughly.

“You think?”

The big detective’s face caved in around sudden regret. “You know what—“ he said as he reached to catch her arm.

Weitz fended his hand with a flip of her wrist. “Remember how he treats you, Mike.”

“Not bad enough to dress you like that.”

“I’m a Jew. Do you know what a Jew is?”

Inglewood frowned. “One time Avram told me a joke that sounded like that. He said diamonds are so hard that they can cut anything, right? But Jews cut diamonds. A Jew is the hardest thing in the world.”

Weitz smiled. The lightningbolt erased cheap. “Close. That’s close. When I walk in there, I’ll wind around Barber’s ankles and purr. Maybe I’ll drop some hints that I want some more of the drugs he gave me the last time I saw him. I’ll make a nice recording for the boys to laugh about—“

“And I play stupid on the rest,” Inglewood said. “You’re a pal. You even left me the part I’m good at.”

Weitz gave him another smile before she climbed from the Caprice. Night had fallen but the dark road was gone.

End

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