Gone Tomorrow

maybe she was descended from Robert E.
    She said, “Can you tell me exactly what happened?”
    She spoke softly, with raised eyebrows and in a breathy voice brimming with care and consideration, like her primary concern was my own post-traumatic stress. Can you tell me? Can you? Like, can you bear to relive it? I smiled, briefly. Midtown South was down to low single-digit homicides per year, and even if she had dealt with all of them by herself since the first day she came on the job, I had still seen many more corpses than she had. By a big multiple. The woman on the train hadn’t been the most pleasant of them, but she had been a very long way from the worst.
    So I told her exactly what had happened, all the way up from Bleecker Street, all the way through the eleven-point list, my tentative approach, the fractured conversation, the gun, the suicide.
    Theresa Lee wanted to talk about the list.
    “We have a copy,” she said. “It’s supposed to be confidential.”
    “It’s been out in the world for twenty years,” I said. “Everyone has a copy. It’s hardly confidential.”
    “Where did you see it?”
    “In Israel,” I said. “Just after it was written.”
    “How?”
    So I ran through my résumé for her. The abridged version. The U.S. Army, thirteen years a military policeman, the elite 110th investigative unit, service all over the world, plus detached duty here and there, as and when ordered. Then the Soviet collapse, the peace dividend, the smaller defense budget, suddenly getting cut loose.
    “Officer or enlisted man?” she asked.
    “Final rank of major,” I said.
    “And now?”
    “I’m retired.”
    “You’re young to be retired.”
    “I figured I should enjoy it while I can.”
    “And are you?”
    “Never better.”
    “What were you doing tonight? Down there in the Village?”
    “Music,” I said. “Those blues clubs on Bleecker.”
    “And where were you headed on the 6 train?”
    “I was going to get a room somewhere or head over to the Port Authority to get a bus.”
    “To where?”
    “Wherever.”
    “Short visit?”
    “The best kind.”
    “Where do you live?”
    “Nowhere. My year is one short visit after another.”
    “Where’s your luggage?”
    “I don’t have any.”
    Most people ask follow-up questions after that, but Theresa Lee didn’t. Instead her eyes changed focus again and she said, “I’m not happy that the list was wrong. I thought it was supposed to be definitive.” She spoke inclusively, cop to cop, as if my old job made a difference to her.
    “It was only half-wrong,” I said. “The suicide part was right.”
    “I suppose so,” she said. “The signs would be the same, I guess. But it was still a false positive.”
    “Better than a false negative.”
    “I suppose so,” she said again.
    I asked, “Do we know who she was?”
    “Not yet. But we’ll find out. They tell me they found keys and a wallet at the scene. They’ll probably be definitive. But what was up with the winter jacket?”
    I said, “I have no idea.”
    She went quiet, like she was profoundly disappointed. I said, “These things are always works in progress. Personally I think we should add a twelfth point to the women’s list, too. If a woman bomber takes off her head scarf, there’s going to be a suntan clue, the same as the men.”
    “Good point,” she said.
    “And I read a book that figured the part about the virgins is a mistranslation. The word is ambiguous. It comes in a passage full of food imagery. Milk and honey. It probably means raisins. Plump, and possibly candied or sugared.”
    “They kill themselves for raisins?”
    “I’d love to see their faces.”
    “Are you a linguist?”
    “I speak English,” I said. “And French. And why would a woman bomber want virgins anyway? A lot of sacred texts are mistranslated. Especially where virgins are concerned. Even the New Testament, probably. Some people say Mary was a first-time mother, that’s all. From the Hebrew word. Not a virgin. The original writers would laugh, seeing what we made of it all.”
    Theresa Lee didn’t comment on that. Instead she asked, “Are you OK?”
    I took it to be an inquiry as to whether I was shaken up. As to whether I should be offered counseling. Maybe because she took me for a taciturn man who was talking too much. But I was wrong. I said, “I’m fine,” and she looked a little surprised and said, “I would be regretting the approach, myself. On the train. I think