by Hilary Plum
Postcommunique Nicholas Bohac
This is one of a series of short fictions loosely about journalism/journalists/the journalistic.
I traveled all night and it was 4:30 in the morning when I arrived at the hospital. That was fast, Detective Modigliani said, I thought it would be a few more hours.
He was standing outside the main entrance, behind him the yellow light of the hospital door, which gave his skin a nice sheen, as though he were more radiant than I’d ever seen him. You look well, I said, and, not knowing whether to embrace him, extended a hand. Sure, last time I saw you, he said, we’d been living in that trailer for what, a month after the hurricane. There was no water, he said, as though satisfied to remember this detail. It smelled like burned tires all the time, I said, all the way to the horizon, caustic smoke in the air and everything wet underneath it.
No time for reminiscing, he said, and squeezed my shoulder, Come with me, and he turned toward the yellow glow, the doors sliding open before us.
We passed through a long waiting room, where one glum teenage kid sat, arm wrapped in a towel, on the TV in the corner C-SPAN rebroadcasting the senator’s resignation speech. In the halls there were orderlies, men who must have been patients, but no one greeted us, not a nod. I called you because I can trust you, Modigliani said, walking slower than I expected. It’s hard to know what inspires trust. He wasn’t familiar with my work, not really. He may have read my articles about the hurricane, his investigation, but if he had he never said. I think it was a shared quality of surprise that united us, or that we associated with one another. Together in the morgue where the highest number of flood-reclaimed bodies had been taken we’d discovered the fact of the shootings.
I can’t exaggerate our incredulity, in the smell in that room, having to realize that those two men had not died of the water that made them now unrecognizable. The water from which they’d been retrieved with such grassroots dedication and outcries of tragedy, and which even in receding seemed to leave the city the same tone as their bloated hands. Modigliani had in surprise pushed at the bullet wound in the stomach with his rubber-gloved finger, the young woman technician had cried out at him. In the last article in my series, published a year later, I had noted with appropriate scorn that the investigation, which he had headed, was still open. There had been rumors that something was in the hands of the state attorney general, but nothing came of it, and I didn’t follow up, I have never wanted to return to that city.
I’m going to tell you what you can talk about and what you can’t, Modigliani said, opening a door into what looked like a residential wing, wood paneling ceiling to floor. I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t, and I remembered that this, waiting for him to go on, was just what it had been like those months with him. The scene was now before us, at the end of this hallway, the usual sinister crowd of police and forensic workadays and photographers, yellow tape, nurses lingering on the outside, bringing coffee usually, in my experience, in order to try to tell people what to do. The rooms where the crimes had occurred were down a small corridor to the right. Modigliani lifted the tape for me to duck through, at the same time tucking my press pass between the buttons of my shirt. Five victims, he said, Four men and one woman. But he’d said that already on the phone.
The scenes I saw were more terrible than the photos that were to become infamous, so much so that those photos have always looked staged to me, somehow bowdlerized. Of course they only released the photos that were taken after the bodies had been removed, so that in every newspaper what you saw was not bodies but blood, the sheets twisted toward the floor as though clearly to signify that the sleeper had been hauled out, thrown to the wall, drops of blood tossed everywhere over the small room, then in one bright smear—bright when I saw it, darkened by the time the dailies’ photographers were permitted—what had been the body replaced by a tape sketch, almost indiscernible.
I saw too how the pages of a book had been torn out and laid across not the faces but the shoulders or breast, only some of the pages bloodied, the rest thin and delicate and still lifting and settling slightly with the movements of those of us in the room. A mass-market edition of a substantial volume, I thought, and said, It’s the Qur’an, in English. One of the forensics turned toward me and said, How did you know that? I recognize that edition, I said, I used to read it in a hotel room in nowhere, Turkey, when I was on assignment there, Black Sea oil thing—I mean, I brought it there myself, it wasn’t the hotel’s—I continued to explain, although no one was interested. Perhaps this tendency was what Modigliani trusted in me—I looked at him, but he was talking again to the coroner. They were all vets of Iraq, he said, turning back toward me and gesturing me out of the room, Three MPs, a bomb guy, and I don’t know what the other one was, in the third room, he seems to have been some sort of liaison with the local security forces, something like that, but no one has said what that means, really, except that he was mostly in Basra. In here, he said, having maneuvered us through the crowded hallway to the next open door.
Someone had pulled a sheet over the body, the woman, I learned, so that beneath the pages this time was a pale green cloth, reddened, a human form, but more peaceful, the bed beside it stripped bare. She was like that, he said. He said, If you want, I could explain to you why I’m here, I mean, why I got called in. Or I could explain a little of it.
Another time, I said.
He said, Some guy upstairs saw two men running through the intersection down this hill—he pointed out the window—in the dark, he doesn’t know when. The guy can see the traffic light at the entrance and he heard brakes, then saw two men wearing black running through the intersection, he says. It’s a long ways off. We’ll look for the driver who stopped but don’t expect much. No one else heard anything, so we’re assuming they used silencers, but the guys here are pretty drugged up at night, most of them we couldn’t even wake up enough to interview, and the nurses said we had to wait and were starting to wave clipboards around, which I’m sure you can talk to them about and they’ll invoke confidentiality.
By now we were standing in the doorway of the third room, looking right at each other so as not to have to look into it. Although in this case the body was nearly obscured from view by the open closet door and an overturned bureau. There’s this doctor here, a woman, who’s running a PTSD study, Modigliani said, these five were all hers, so far that’s the connection. You can interview her later today, she was too upset to talk to and I think she took something—I said to her, Well, at least it’s not suicides, that’s what I said. I shouldn’t have said that, he added, but we’re all human.
You can print that they all served over there, and someone shot them, but we don’t know if it was random, and we won’t discuss our leads, he said. In a few more hours you can probably just use their names. He was looking at me like he expected me to write this all down right in front of him, but whenever I’m at a scene I keep my hands in my pockets. It seems like that’s just the truth, I said. Modigliani nodded.
