Warm puffs breathe out. Door after door the intimate, particular heat of a family flushes my cold face. I am made bashful. Apartment smells: personal as a broken slipper heel under the bed. “Open up. Police.” Men stand in undershorts, hunched against a jamb, one hand fig-leafing placket; women efface their curlers. The children make a low entrance past nightgown scrims. “Have you seen the little girl, Daisy? Seven years old. Lives across the street. Missing since this afternoon.” I get a diagonal glimpse into living rooms. The South Bronx, a superstar ghetto, but making it without the press-agentry of Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant. I see capitulation in the living rooms; yet, here and there, resistance. I remember one ceiling that is knitted, warp/woof, a thousand-thousand strings, each colored, each painstakingly interwoven: a mesh size so small it excludes defeat.
Up the stairs: five apartments per floor, six floors. I ask Detective Muller, “Just like being a patrolman again?” Muller shakes his head. “A patrolman would know everyone in the neighborhood. We specialize too much.” A tenyear-old Spanish boy has been deputized: up past his bedtime, inflated with this semi-official business. He knocks heavily, a sudden KGB man. Name, address, useless remarks that gain a specious something in translation. We need the boy. Muller knows Spanish, but it doesn’t help much. Speak a few words and they presume great fluency, become garrulous, incomprehensible. A sound truck lectures the street. We cross a darkened roof. Acrophobia doubles me over: I duck-walk, recentering my center of gravity. Down another six floors, five apartments per floor. We lance the stinking basement with flashlights. Muck takes off the shoes; chthonic steam sounds hush us. I suppose pre-teen corpses in each slump of old newspapers. Nothing. And the search spirals out from its headquarters in Daisy’s apartment, out with no limit like some windless anticyclone through the Bronx.
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