The Door

They had found Taras on the tenth.

Mr Hrynko had not written it on a paper bag. He had told Tom’s mother at the counter, on the eleventh, when she went in for the eggs, and she had told Tom on the telephone that night, slowly, so that he could hear it, because he could hear the telephone now if she was slow and loud and he held it hard against his left ear. They found him, Tommy. At the airport. He was in the terminal, the Pan Am one, with the bags, in a room at the back with a coffee, like he said. They knew him by a ring. A pause. He was twenty-four.

The funeral was on the twenty-seventh, a Saturday, from the Ukrainian church on Seventh Avenue, because it had taken that long. The airline had sent a man with a form. The form had a box on it for the employer, and the man had not known what to put in it, because Taras had worked the bags for the Pan Am in a Pan Am lanyard at a Pan Am gate and been paid by somebody else, and the man had gone away to ask, and come back a week later and put the name of the other company in the box.

His mother went to the funeral, and Tom went with her. His father could not. The church was a mile, and the pews were wooden, and the service was long, the priest had told Mrs Hrynko, the old one, the whole of it, and his father’s back would not do a mile and two hours in a wooden pew and a mile back. Frank could not either. Frank was home, since the twelfth, in the room he had had since he was six, with his ribs strapped and his face going from purple to yellow to the colour of his face, and he could get down the stairs now and sit at the kitchen table, and not much else.

So his father and Frank stayed. Tom and his mother went.

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He did not understand the service. He had not expected to. It was in a language he had grown up hearing through the open door of a shop on a corner and never learned, sung, mostly, by a priest with a beard and a choir he could not see, up in a gallery at the back, and he could hear some of it now; the low voices, the men’s, came through the wall, and the high ones did not. There was a great deal of gold in the church. Gold on the screen in front of the altar, with the saints painted on it in rows, long thin saints with large sad eyes, and gold on the priest, and candles everywhere, hundreds, thin ones, brown, that the people held in their hands, and the smoke from the censer going up past the saints to the dome.

The coffin was at the front, open. He did not go up to it. His mother did, and stood, and crossed herself her way, left to right, and came back.

The Hrynkos were at the front. Mr Hrynko very straight in a black suit that was too small for him, with his big hands at his sides. Mrs Hrynko. And Mr Hrynko’s sister, Taras’s mother, a small dark woman in black with a scarf on her head, between them, held up by them, one on each arm, the way you hold up somebody who would otherwise not be standing.

There were a great many people in the church. More than he had thought there would be for a boy of twenty-four who worked the bags. Ukrainian, most of them; he could see it in the faces, the same faces he had seen in the shop on the corner all his life, the old women in scarves, the men with moustaches like brooms. But not all of them. Men in Pan Am uniforms, a row of them, in the middle, with their caps on their knees. Men in the overalls of the baggage crews, from the other company, at the back, standing, because there were not enough seats.

And on the front of the church, outside, on the notice board by the door, where the times of the services were, somebody had stuck a sheet of paper in the night with tape, and the priest had come out before the service and taken it down, and torn it in half, and in half again, and put it in his pocket, and gone back in. Tom had seen him do it from the bottom of the steps. He had not seen what was on the paper. He had seen the priest’s face.

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They walked back up Seventh Avenue at two, his mother on his arm.

She did not need his arm. She took it anyway. They walked up the avenue in the sun, past the shops, past the bakery on the corner of Sixty-Ninth that Mr Hrynko’s cousin ran, which was shut, with a black ribbon on the door. Past a newspaper stand, on the corner, outside a barber’s.

He looked at the papers on it. He could not help it. He looked at the papers on every stand he passed now. He had looked at them every day for three weeks, and every day for the last fortnight they had all had the same word on the front of them, in one form or another, in the biggest type the paper had.

It was there today. On three of the five. RUSSIA, and a question mark, on one. MOSCOW LINK: ENVOY SUMMONED, on another. On the third a photograph of a man in a grey suit coming out of a building with flags on it, and a word over him in capitals that Tom read and did not read twice.

His mother saw him looking. She looked too. She did not say anything. She held his arm a little tighter, and they walked on, and turned off the avenue onto their own street, and the street was the street, Bay Ridge on a Saturday afternoon at the end of May, the trees in full leaf now, dark, not the thin new green any more, and the brick houses behind their fences, and the Virgin Marys in the front gardens, and the Larkins’ wall with the chip out of it at the height of a boy’s arm.

And at the corner, outside Hrynko’s, a car.

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He saw it from the end of the street.

A car, at the kerb, outside the shop, with its doors open, three of them, and its engine running; he could see the exhaust. A dark car, not new. And on the pavement in front of the shop, three men.

And glass.

The pavement in front of Hrynko’s was covered in glass. He saw it shine. The window, the big front window with the tins and the jars and the pyramid of oranges and the sign for the Thursday eggs, was not there. It was on the pavement. The oranges were on the pavement too, rolling, some of them, into the gutter, bright, and a tin, and the hand-drawn sign for the eggs, face down.

He looked up at the sign over the door.

HRYNKO’S. GROCERIES. NEWSPAPERS. EST. 1971. In red letters on white that Mr Hrynko repainted every spring. And under it, smaller, the line in the other alphabet that Tom had never been able to read and had known the shape of all his life.

It was not there. Somebody had painted over it. A stripe of black paint, from a can, sprayed, the whole length of the line, wet still, running in drips down onto the white below it; and over the black, in white, sprayed, a word.

He read it. He did not read it twice.

His mother had stopped. Her hand was on his arm, very hard.

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The three men were shouting.

He could hear them. That was the thing. He could hear them; they were thirty yards away and they were shouting as loud as men can shout, and it came through the wall to him, flat and far off and blurred at the edges, but it came, the first thing in three weeks he had heard from further away than the length of a room. He heard the shape of their voices, high and hard. He heard the word. They were shouting the same word that was on the sign. Over and over. At the door of the shop.

He did not know them. Young, twenty-five, thirty. Ordinary. Jeans, T-shirts, one in a baseball cap. They could have been anybody. They could have been on any train. They were standing on the pavement in the glass in front of the door of Hrynko’s, the three of them, shouting at the door.

There was somebody in the door.

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His father was standing in it.

He did not understand it for a second. He stood at the end of the street with his mother’s hand on his arm and looked at the door of the shop on the corner, the door that Mr Hrynko propped open with a brick every morning, and there was a man standing in it, in the doorway, filling it, with his back to the shop and his face to the street and the three men, very straight.

Very straight. The way he sat when it was bad. Both feet flat on the step. His hands at his sides, open. In his cardigan, the old brown one with the leather buttons, and his slippers. He had come out of his own front door in his slippers, four houses, and along the pavement through the glass, and stood in another man’s door.

He was not saying anything.

Tom could see that from the end of the street. The three men on the pavement were shouting, their mouths wide, the cords in their necks, the one in the baseball cap pointing past his father into the shop, at the shelves, at the dark inside where the lamp was off; and his father was standing in the door and was not saying anything. Not one word. His long brown face was very calm. His pale blue eyes were on the man in the baseball cap. He stood in the doorway of Hrynko’s with his back like a post, and he was not going to move, and the three men could see that he was not going to move, and they did not know what to do about it.

Frank was on their own stoop.

Four houses up. On the top step of the stoop of the house with the green door, holding the rail, bent a little, with one arm across his ribs, in a T-shirt, with his face yellow and purple down one side. He had come out after their father, as far as the stoop, and could not come further, and was standing there holding the rail, looking at the corner.

Tom let go of his mother’s arm.

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He did not run. He walked. He walked fast, down the middle of the street, the way you walked on the job, as if you were not hurrying, and his mother came behind him, and he did not tell her not to.

The man in the baseball cap saw him first.

He saw a man of twenty-six in a dark suit and a black tie, from a funeral, coming down the middle of the street with a dressing on his neck, and he did not know what he was seeing; and then he did. Tom saw it go into his face. He did not know how; it was the walk, maybe, or the way Tom’s hands were, or his face. But the man knew.

Tom took his warrant card out of his inside pocket, and held it up, open, as he came, without stopping, so the City’s crest on it caught the sun.

He said it. He did not know how loud. He said it the way the academy had taught him and he had said it ten thousand times on a concourse, and he said it as loud as he had ever said anything.

“City police. Stay where you are.”

They did not stay where they were.

The man in the baseball cap said something to the other two, short, and they went. Not running; that was the thing; walking, fast, the way Tom had come, as if they were not hurrying, across the glass to the car with its doors open and its engine running, and in, and the doors shut, he felt them shut more than heard them, and the car pulled away from the kerb, hard, so that the back of it slewed on the oranges in the gutter, and went down the street to the avenue and round the corner and was gone.

He had the plate. He said it to himself, three times, the letters and the numbers, the way you said a plate, so that it would stay.

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His father had not moved.

He was still in the door. Very straight, in his cardigan and his slippers, with his hands at his sides, looking at the place on the pavement where the man in the baseball cap had been. There was glass all round his slippers on the step. There was an orange at his feet.

Tom came up the step and stood in front of him.

His father looked at him. The pale blue eyes in the long brown face, very calm, the calm the old men said he had had on the steel with a beam swinging. He looked at his son for a moment, in his suit and his black tie and his warrant card in his hand, and then he looked past him, over his shoulder, down the street, at the corner where the car had gone.

He did not say anything.

He did not get out of the door, either.

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Tom rang it in from the telephone on the counter, the cream one with the dial that he and Mr Hrynko had sat beside and watched for two hours on the night of the first of May. It rang a long time. The local house. He held it hard against his left ear, and when the desk answered he said who he was, and his number, and the address, and the plate, and what had happened, slowly, and asked for a car, and then he listened.

He heard some of it. A man’s voice, tired, a desk voice. …vandalism… And a number. …fourth on that block since Thursday… And something else, and then: …car’ll come when it can, Constable, we’ve got…

He did not hear what they had got. He said thank you, and put the telephone down.

The fourth.

He stood behind the counter of the shop with his hand on the telephone and looked at the shelves, the tins and the jars and the cigarettes and the lottery tickets and the cat clock with its eyes going from side to side, and at the empty window, open to the street now, with the glass gone out of it and the sun coming straight in onto the floor, onto the pyramid of oranges, which had come down, and the street outside, and his father standing in the door with his back to all of it.

He thought of Inspector Garvey on the first of May, reading from the sheet of paper that was more ink than type. If a man falls down the stairs at Grand Central on the first of May he is no less a man who has fallen down the stairs.

He thought of the big man on the kerb at Bleecker Street with the glass in his hand. Who else.

He thought of the King, on the back of a parking appeal, in a clerk’s slanting hand, in capitals, underlined. DO NOT LOOK FOR THE MURDERERS AMONG YOUR NEIGHBOURS.

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The Hrynkos came home at four.

Up the street from the avenue, from the cemetery, in two cars, slowly, the family in black. Tom saw them come from the shop, where he had been sweeping the glass off the floor and the pavement into a pile with Mr Hrynko’s broom, and his mother picking up the oranges one at a time and putting them back in their box, and Frank, who had come down off the stoop at last, holding his ribs, sitting on the kerb with his feet in the gutter because it was as far as he could get.

His father was still in the door.

He had not moved in two hours. Tom had brought him a chair from the back room, Mrs Hrynko’s chair, the one she did the books in, and put it behind him in the doorway, and his father had looked at it and not sat in it. He had stood. Very straight, with his back like a post, in his cardigan and his slippers, in the doorway of the shop on the corner, with the black stripe and the white word drying on the sign over his head, for two hours, and said nothing, to anybody, at all.

The cars stopped. The family got out. Mr Hrynko got out of the first car in his black suit that was too small for him, and turned, and saw.

He saw the window. He saw the glass in its pile on the pavement and the oranges in their box. He looked up and saw the sign, and stood there in the street looking at it for a long time, and his big face with the moustache like a broom did not do anything, nothing, the way Tom’s father’s face did not do anything when his back was bad.

Then he looked down from the sign to the door.

At the man standing in it.

He came across the pavement, slowly, through the place where the glass had been, and up onto the step, and stood in front of Jim Keane, who had bought the same paper from him every morning for thirty-five years and said, in all that time, perhaps a hundred words to him, and most of them about the weather.

The two of them stood there. Neither of them said anything. Mr Hrynko looked at Jim Keane, and Jim Keane looked at Mr Hrynko, and they were two old men on a step in the sun at the end of May, one in a black suit from his nephew’s grave and one in his slippers, and Tom could hear the street round them now, a little, a car somewhere, a bird, a radio in a window, and between the two of them there was no sound at all.

Then Mr Hrynko put out his big hand, the hand like a loaf, and took Jim Keane’s hand, the long brown one with the knuckles standing up, and held it.

He held it for a long time.

Then he let go, and Jim Keane stepped down out of the door, slowly, onto the pavement, in his slippers, very straight, and stood aside, and Mr Hrynko went in past him into his own shop, and Jim Keane turned round and walked back up the street, four houses, one hand on the fences, past Frank on the kerb and Tom with the broom and his wife with the box of oranges, to the green door, and in.

He did not look back. He did not say anything.

He had not needed to.