She had come to New York at the request of her husband, who had been a dishwasher in a restaurant on Forty-second Street. He had preceded her to the mainland by a year, living with some cousins of his and saving enough money finally to rent his own apartment and to send for his wife and his son. She had joined him reluctantly. For whereas she knew that New York was a city of opportunities, she was very fond of Puerto Rico and dreaded leaving familiar safe surroundings. Six months after she arrived in the city, her husband took up with another woman, leaving her and the boy to find their own way in the city.
Now, at thirty-seven — two years older than Hank’s wife Karin — Violeta Morrez looked like a woman of sixty. Her body was thin and her face was gaunt, only a slight hint of beauty lingering about the eyes and the mouth. She wore no make-up. Her black hair was pulled back severely into a tight bun.
They sat in the “parlor” of her fourth-floor walk-up, and there was a stillness to the room as they faced each other. Her eyes, wide and brown in the hollow face, stared at Hank with a frankness that made him uneasy. It was like looking into the eyes of immense sorrow, he realized, a sorrow too great for empathy, a sorrow that demanded solitude and resented solicitude.
“What can you do?” she asked. “What can you possibly do?”
She spoke English well, with only a trace of an accent. She had told Hank earlier that she’d studied the language for a year before joining her husband in New York. She had gone to school at night in Puerto Rico.
“I can see that justice is done, Mrs. Morrez,” Hank said.
“Justice? In this city? Do not make me laugh. There is justice here only if you are born here. For the others, there is nothing but hatred.” He listened to her voice, and he thought, There is no bitterness in her words, even though the words themselves are bitter. There is only an unutterable sadness, a despair, a surrender to sorrow.
“This is a city of hatred, señor. There is hatred in this city’s heart, and it is a bad thing to feel.”
“I’m here to help your son’s case, Mrs. Morrez. Anything you can tell me about—”
“To help his case, yes. But to help him, no. You can never help Rafael again. It is too late to help him. My son is dead, and the ones who killed him are still alive. And if they continue to stay alive, there will be more killings because these are not human beings, these are animals. These are animals full of hatred.” She paused. Her eyes held his. Like a child asking her father why the sky was blue, she said, “Why does this city hate, señor?”
“Mrs. Morrez, I...”
“I was taught love,” she said, and suddenly her voice was wistful, a tenderness creeping into it, a gentleness which for a moment overwhelmed the sorrow. “I was taught that to love is the best thing. I was taught this in Puerto Rico where I was born. It is easy to love there. It is warm there, and slow, and the people say hello to you on the street, the people know who you are, they know you are Violeta Morrez, they say, ‘Hello, Violeta, how are you today, have you heard from Juan? How is your son?’ It is important to be somebody, don’t you think? It is important to know that you are Violeta Morrez and that the people in the street know you.” She paused. “Here, it is different. Here it is cold, and here everyone rushes, and here there is no one to say, ‘Hello, Violeta,’ or to wonder how you are feeling today. There is no time for love in this city. There is only hatred. And hatred has robbed me of my son.”
“Your son will have justice, Mrs. Morrez. I’m here to see to that.”
“Justice? There is only one justice, señor. And that is to kill the murderers the way they killed him. It would be justice to put out their eyes and then come at them with knives, the way they came at my Rafael in his darkness. This is the only justice for animals. And they are animals, señor, make no mistake. If you do not send these murderers to the electric chair, there will be no safety any more. I tell you this from my heart. There will be only fear. Fear and hatred, and they will together rule this city, and decent people will hide in hallways and pray to God.
“My Rafael was a good boy. He never did a wrong thing in his life. There was the spirit of gentleness about him. His eyes were dead, señor, but there was great life in his heart. It is easy to feel, you know, that a blind person needs to be watched always. It is a mistake we make. I made this same mistake. I watched him, I cared for him, always, always. Until we came here. And then his father left, and I had to take a job. One must eat. And so Rafael went on the street while I worked. And it was on the street that he was killed. A good boy. Dead.”
“Mrs. Morrez—”
“There is only one thing you can do for me and for my Rafael. Only one thing, señor.”
“What’s that, Mrs. Morrez?”
“In this city of hatred, you can add my hatred,” she said, and there was still no bitterness in her voice, only an emptiness, a haunting preoccupation with cold facts too complex to grasp. “You can add this hatred I shall feel as long as I live. And you can kill the boys who killed my Rafael. You can kill them and rid the streets of animals. This is what you can do for me, señor.
“God forgive me, you can kill them.”
Karin was in the living room, talking on the phone, when he arrived home that evening. He went directly to the bar, poured a Martini from the waiting pitcher, kissed her briefly on the cheek, and then listened to her end of the conversation.
“Yes, Phyllis, of course I understand,” she said. “Well, babysitters are always difficult to come by, and I know I did give you rather short notice. We did so hope you could come, though. We wanted you to meet— Yes, I see. Well, there’ll be other times. Certainly. Thanks for calling. And give my regards to Mike, will you? ’Bye.”
She hung up and then went to Hank, putting her arms around his neck and giving him a real kiss. “There,” she said. “How’d the day go? May I have one of those?”
He poured a drink for her, sighed and said, “The plot sickens. I go into Harlem, and I feel as if I’m dipping my hands into a quagmire. I can’t see the bottom of it, Karin. All I can do is feel around with my hands and hope I don’t hit any sharp rocks or broken bottles. I talked with one of the girls who was with Morrez on the night he was stabbed. Do you know what it was he pulled out of his pocket? The thing the defense claims was a knife?”
“What?”
“A harmonica. How about that?”
“They’ll still claim their clients mistook it for a knife.”
“And well they might have.” He paused. “This Tower Reardon is shaping up as a real prize package, if I can believe his enemies.” He paused again. “Karin, I don’t think you’d believe the situation in Harlem unless you actually saw it. It’s almost too goddamn illogical. These kids are like armies massed to attack, with war counselors and armories — and the same blind enemy hatred. Their uniforms are their jackets and their cause is as meaningless as the causes that motivate most wars. They don’t even have an over-all theme to hold over their heads as a banner, no ‘Make the world safe for democracy,’ or ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ or any of the tried-and-true slogans used to inflame good patriots into anger. Their wars are just a way of life. It’s the only way they know. I mean, Harlem was a rotten place when I was a kid, but it’s more rotten now because something’s been added to the rottenness that comes with slums and poverty. It’s as if these kids, forced to live in a prison, have further subdivided their big prison into a lot of little prisons, creating arbitrary boundary lines, this is my turf, this is yours, you walk here and I’ll kill you, I walk there and I’m dead. It’s as if it wasn’t quite hard enough for them to begin with, they’ve had to make it harder by imposing a gridwork of minute ghettos upon the larger ghetto they were forced into. Do you know something, Karin? I think I could question them until I’m blue in the face, trying to find out why they fight. And I think they would tell me it’s because they have to protect their turf, or their girls, or their pride, or their national honor, or whatever the hell. And I think they really won’t know the answer themselves.”