The Eighty-eighth Key Ch. 01-02

With the increased American involvement in Southeast Asia, Imogen's soul seemed to fracture along ever deeper faults, and she fell into that darkest space within the deepest chords of memory. And with Lloyd still away weeks at a time -- now sailing to Hawaii, but occasionally as far away as Japan -- she drifted on solitary seas of her own design. Lloyd assumed that -- perhaps -- these near catatonic spells had something to do with Harry being in Germany, but as she remained distant and utterly uncommunicative about these inward flights he truly had no idea where she had gone. Yet when Harry wrote long letters about the German people, about how freedom-loving they all seemed, not to mention how beautiful the towns and villages were, this only served to deepen her isolation -- and so for perhaps the second time Lloyd began to understand what was happening: Harry was bringing her past into their present, and so once again his future fell into the searing chords of Imogen's wartime experience.

And soon enough Imogen only composed for the piano when violent thunderstorms approached, and it was then that Lloyd noted a further pattern emerging in her music. As these storms approached, as the sturm and drang of thunder and lightning drew near, her music seemed to mimic the deep low-pressure waves within the air itself -- as if natures' kinetic kaleidoscopes were a crucial guide informing each new, shattering crescendo she crafted.

And soon enough he found that each new storm left her ragged and spent, leaving only the warped, fragile husk of her distorted soul standing guard. She seemed to cave inward after these floods of emotion, to turn away from the visions that constantly came to her after each new composition, but Lloyd felt these fallings-away were now somehow different. Deeper, more introspective and less predictable, he began to worry that perhaps one day she might not find her way out of the darkness.

After Harry's return from Germany, he came back to the little house for a while, but Lloyd felt that his boy was adrift, that something had deeply changed. Harry whispered that he had thought about studying music again, but one day -- while picking up supplies at the local market -- he witnessed an armed robbery at a gas station across the street. Police arrived, a minor shoot-out played-out in the street and between cars in a nearby parking lot, and after the dust settled he gave a witness statement to one of the patrolmen.

And then he asked this man what it was like "'out there'...doing the whole 'cop' thing?"

The cop was an older man, maybe 35 or so, but he'd been on the streets long enough to know the score. They talked about the life some, and then Harry rode along with the cop a couple of times over the next few weeks, picked up a feel for what his world might look like if he took that next fork in the road. Lloyd watched the budding interest and wondered where it came from; Imogen could feel the change in her son, too, only a new fear became palpable in her music when she imagined her son as a policeman.

And so, when a few weeks later Harry Callahan submitted his application to the San Francisco Police Department, she felt herself coming undone. Not quite knowing what else to do, she drove north to the city, to a synagogue, and after wandering through the tangled cobwebs of memory she at last walked inside.

She had, years ago, sworn this was the one thing she would never do again -- yet as she walked into the heavy air of the musty old temple she was overcome with lightness, as if all the burdens of the past twenty-five years had quite suddenly slipped ever so softly away. She felt a lightness of being, a certainty of soul's ease that she had never expected to find.

She saw a man in the temple, a man at once ancient and eternally young, a man who seemed to reside inside blue pools of deep wisdom. She walked towards the man, not sure what she expected, but she recognized something in the shape of his still waters, a sudden memory both vital and unexpected, and as she made her way up to him he turned and smiled at the surprise in her eyes.

Surprise turned to recognition in her eyes just as a sudden cold darkness reached up from the darkness for her, and she felt herself falling into the music once again -- as the clouds of that looming storm came for her out of the darkness.

chapter two

The violence of San Francisco came as a surprise to Harry Callahan.

Growing up in a quiet middle class neighborhood, even in an enclave nestled between the bay and the city, had left him unprepared for the reality of a San Francisco he had never really seen. Homeless men and women slept in boxes, children sold their bodies to strangers for the price of a hamburger, and predators everywhere lurked in the night -- where everything, it seemed, was available for a buck. The city was an ocean of broken dreams lapping at the shores of extraordinary material wealth, two worlds in perpetual change, and conflict came as easily as breathing; the City came at Harry Callahan without remorse, and all in a way that left him speechless.

His first homicide left him reeling.

In the early part of his rookie year, riding with a grizzled old FTO, they were the first to arrive at a massive house out beyond Golden Gate Park -- and he was not prepared for the questions he felt he needed to ask...but couldn't.

A middle-aged man. White. Affluent, if the Mercedes in the driveway was any kind of indicator. The man's house palatial, like an Italian Renaissance villa, all framed by views of the Pacific and the Golden Gate. Earlier that morning, the man had been stretching, getting ready to go for an early morning run -- something that Callahan did routinely. And just then a kid, maybe ten years old, a black kid as it happened, walked by and shot the man in the face, then simply walked off into the morning. Two witnesses, same story. Homicide detectives got to the scene a half hour later and did their thing while Callahan and his training officer gathered witness statements on the sidelines.

Callahan had a hard time shaking the apparent senselessness of that murder. The man was a lawyer, had been a juvenile court judge for years before returning to private practice. By all accounts a good man, so was it simply hard luck? Or retaliation?

Did it matter why? Really, he asked himself, in the end...did it really matter?

A life meaningfully lived, snuffed out in an instant.

The kid apprehended. Nine years old, so not even prosecuted. No links to ulterior motive, so in the end just another truly senseless death. One of three that day, as it turned out.

Yet...how could such senselessness not matter? Yet even so, could you measure senselessness? Weigh senselessness on a scale? Were there, he wondered, varying degrees of senselessness? A year hence, would any besides a handful of people even remember the man with the shattered face? Like a faucet with a slow drip, could you measure the sound made by just one drop of blood? Was that, in the end, how senselessness reduced the passions and essence of one man's life? Blood -- on a sidewalk?

Yet Callahan kept hearing about something called the wall, the wall cops erected to protect their sanity while living and working in a world awash in senselessness. The whole idea of such a wall had seemed kind of preposterous at first, but not after that first year on the street, and not after looking at the lawyer's blasted ruins of a face. Yet, how could a nine-year-old kid do something like that? What did that kid's actions say about the state of their world? He had never, not once, heard of anything like that happening in Germany.

His last FTO didn't have an answer to that question, either. In fact, the old man seemed to get off work and head straight to a favored watering hole after almost every shift, and Callahan went with him more than a few times during the waning days of his "rookie" year. Cops congregated in darkened back booths and shot the shit while tossing back frosted schooners of Anchor Steam, their shaking hands full of salty peanuts, yet it was here in these barely hallowed halls that Callahan first saw that 'the wall' was palpably real...indeed, it was a vast impenetrable veil of carefree carelessness that wafted in settled swirls within all those smokey limpid eyes. Nothing got through the veil, he soon saw. Nothing. Not even senselessness. Especially not senselessness.

Until the beer and waking nightmares soaked through, that it, because then quite suddenly these old men grew wide-eyed and distant, their lips curling down into clinched fists. He watched the crumbling wall more than once those last few weeks and walked home in an early morning fog to his small apartment -- where the walls seemed to grow uncomfortably close as he thought about all those eyes -- and what they told him about the future.

He was cut loose soon after that year with all those Field Training Officers, assigned to evenings in the Tenderloin. He had his own beat then, a walking patrol on the other side of life, cutting through a tidal surge of peep-shows and streetwalkers, wading through discarded scraps of senselessness that lined the all the filthy streets. He watched marching columns of middle-aged men in worn three-piece suits who filed out of office towers at five o'clock, vacant eyes on the prowl for a cheap pop before heading home to an empty apartment and another frozen dinner. Callahan walked and worked along the fringes of lust and hormones, where predators circled in the shadows, waiting.

Within a few months Harry Callahan knew all about the wall. He looked at his eyes in passing mirrors and tried to run away, but really...there was nowhere that far away.

+++++

He'd found a room not far from Fisherman's Wharf, a so-called efficiency apartment that was furnished with a bed, a desk, and a pitifully small room off to one side that was supposed to be a kitchen of some sort. He had picked up a second-hand sofa and called the place home, though his parents rarely came by for a visit.

Harry normally got off work 'round midnight, but by the time he finished his shift's reports and changed into street clothes, it was usually closer to one. He'd hop one of the last cable cars of the night and get home a few minutes later, then shower and crawl between the sheets, hoping that the wall would wait until he was asleep before it came crashing down.

There was an old bar down the street, a jazz bar, and musicians usually kept at it 'til three or four in the morning. Tourists from the glitzier places down by the wharf would wander by during these foggy pre-dawn interludes, and a few would take note of the music and drift inside. And quite often Callahan would watch the action if he couldn't sleep, watch the predators in the shadows as they sized up the passing prey.

One night he watched an older platinum-blond woman coming down the walk, her steps tentative, not quite a full-blown drunk, and he quickly sized up the opposition: two kids lurking in the darkness just off an intercepting alley.

"Goddammit," he sighed as he grabbed his .357 and made for the street.

He made it to the intercept in time to hear the woman scream once, because by then the inevitable struggle was well underway. By the time he found them, the boys had ripped most of the woman's clothes off and one was attempting penetration while the other held their terrified victim down on the grimy asphalt, a gloved hand over her powdered face.

"Looks like you're having a little bit of trouble," Callahan said to no one in particular as he walked up on the scene. Both boys looked up, startled at first, then angry.

"Get the fuck out of here," the kid on top snarled, "or else..."

"Or else, what?" Callahan replied casually.

"Or else I'll cut your fuckin' face off," the other kid said, standing now and pulling out switch-blade.

Then he stepped towards Harry Callahan...

...who pulled the Smith & Wesson from inside his windbreaker and leveled it at the kids face...

...and then the kid rushed at Callahan, knife drawn...

Callahan fired once, the semi-jacketed hollow point striking the boys face just under the left eye. The result was immediate and catastrophic.

The kid fell to the ground while the other would-be rapist stood up and started to turn and run.

"Don't do it, punk," Callahan growled. "You can't outrun a three fifty seven."

"You a pig?" the kid sighed, eyeing Callahan warily but now clearly resigned to his new reality.

"Yup."

A small crowd soon gathered at the entrance to the alley, and Callahan asked someone to call the police department. A few minutes later the first squad car arrived.

The pool of blood at Callahan's feet was massive. People stared at the scene, then at the pistol in the cop's hand before scattering into the night.

+++++

The interrogation room used by Internal Affairs was wired for sound, the room dimly lit and physically uncomfortable. Two detectives and a watch commander questioned Callahan about the sequence of events for the third time, trying to uncover inconsistencies in Callahan's statement, but by midday they broke for lunch and told Harry not to come back.

"Should I report for my shift tonight?" he asked.

"Take the night off," the watch commander said. "Unless you hear different, come in tomorrow."

"Yessir." Callahan turned and started to walk off.

"Callahan?" Lieutenant Neil Briggs growled.

Harry stopped and turned, looked at the lieutenant. "Yessir?"

"Good job." The lieutenant said, looking Callahan in the eye before he turned and walked towards the division commander's office.

Callahan nodded his head and walked out of the building, wondering what had just gone down. Why did he feel like he was being measured? There was something wrong in the lieutenant's eyes, something almost menacing yet the feeling was beyond words, too.

He hopped on the cable car and sat in the rear, watched the city rumble by as another sodden breeze filled in, as always coming straight through the Golden Gate. He drifted on echos of the night before, reliving each instant again and again, the cable car's clanging bell the only thing holding him to the present, and to Briggs' menacing gaze. He was almost two blocks past his stop before he realized it had passed, but he hopped off and began walking back up the hill to his street.

And he wasn't so surprised when he found his father sitting on the steps outside his building. The look in his old man's eyes was something else entirely.

+++++

He'd never seen such a troubled look on his father's face. But troubled wasn't exactly the right word, was it? No, lost was the word -- he thought as a walked up to his old man. Yes, lost was more like it.

"Dad?" Callahan said. "You okay?"

"Oh, hi Harry."

"Dad?"

"Can we go upstairs? We need to talk."

"I've got coffee, juice and water," Harry said as he closed the door behind them.

"Nothing right now."

"What's wrong?" Callahan asked, his voice suddenly uncertain. "Is it Mom?"

"She left last night."

"Left? Where'd she go?"

His father walked over to the same window Harry had looked out the night before, and he even looked in the same general direction where the rape had gone down.

"Strange, fucked up world," Lloyd Callahan sighed as he sized up this shape-shifting world.

"Dad? Where'd she go?"

And his father turned, not knowing what to say, or even where to begin. "Israel, Harry. I think she went to Israel."

+++++

They talked through the rest of the afternoon, and long into the night. Lloyd told his son about his mother's wartime experience: being among a group a Danish physicists forced to Peenemunde to work on Nazi weapons projects; her eventual refusal to be complicit in the results of the program; and her forced relocation to the Theresienstadt ghetto in late 1944.

Harry listened in astonished silence, this part of his mother's vast journey a complete and total surprise. He grew confused, then angry, at both his parents for their silence, yet Harry saw his father wasn't having any of it...

"When you graduated, went off to Germany...well, she came undone, Harry. The letters you wrote describing Germans as freedom loving..."

"But they are, Dad. That's a fact..."

His father shrugged his shoulders like a tired, old boxer; he looked down at his hands as he steepled his fingers, cradling another forgotten memory. "Maybe. Maybe not, but that really doesn't matter, son. To your mother, there will always be something wrong with Germans."

"But, that's so -- unfair," Harry sighed.

"Of who, son? Based on her experience, who's being the most unfair here?"

Harry looked away, shook his head, sighed before whispering: "I can't even imagine..."

"I followed her up here a few weeks ago, on a Monday. To a synagogue. She returned the last two Mondays, disappeared inside. I followed her up again, a few days ago, waited and waited." The old man sighed, seemed to turn inward on himself. "She never came out, and yesterday this came in the mail..."

Harry looked at the envelope in his father's trembling hand, willed himself to reach out and take it; he took out the letter and began reading. Soon his hands were shaking too.

"This came for you at the house," his father added, holding a second pale yellow envelope in the fading light.

The letter was from the Department of Defense, he saw, and he tore it open then stared at the words on the paper.

"Harry? What is it?" his father asked, and not knowing what to say Harry passed the notice to his father.

"Vietnam?" his father whispered, his hands starting to shake. "My God, what will your mother say?"

+++++

28 January, 1968

Callahan had been "in-country" for almost a week and he still had no idea what was going on, or where he was supposed to be. No one did, or so it seemed, but Saigon was an interesting island of relative peace in this swamp-ridden country, the bar at the Caravelle even more so. Lots of "round eyes" in the bar, for the most part old men in straw fedoras, and Callahan quickly picked up that things in this bar were not always what they seemed. Not on the surface, anyway. Too many hushed whispers and sidelong glances, not enough hookers and too many men hiding behind newspapers.

A harried-looking kid in muddy fatigues came in and took a seat at the table next to Callahan's; he saw splattered blood and vague bits of errant tissue on the back of the stranger's neck and so looked him over a little more closely. Blood on his boots, on the tops of both hands, a medical corps insignia on his lapel, the look on the guys face was topped by a twitching eye and a vacant stare.

"Hey man, you okay?" Callahan asked as the man sat.

"I'm tactical," the man said, waving a waitress over. When the elven angel drifted by and hovered overhead the man ordered a double Scotch -- neat -- then turned to Callahan: "Need anything?"

"Another Budweiser," Callahan said to the waitress, now clearly mesmerized by the woman's exotic beauty. She floated away, and Callahan noted the man hadn't even looked at the girl.

"Who are you?" the stranger asked.

"Callahan," Harry replied, taking the strangers hand. "You?"

"Parish."

"Looks like you've a fun day," Callahan added.

"Fun...? Yeah, fun. That's the very fuckin' word I was lookin' for. Fun. What a good fuckin' word. I like it..." he said as he took his first cocktail from the waitress, who he still ignored. "Let's drink to fun," he said before he tossed down the drink. He finished, his watering eyes now focused on some faraway place deep beyond the cracked paint on the ceiling.

The waitress shook her head as she took the empty glass and walked off to the bar, and while Callahan took a long pull on his Bud, Parish seemed to recoil from something or someone hiding in distant shadows.