Anxious People(6)
The Realtor stops grinning. She sits down clumsily, and looks first at one of the officers, then the other.
“Sorry. This is the first time I’ve been interviewed by the police. You’re not… you know… you’re not going to do that good cop, bad cop thing they do in films, are you? One of you isn’t going to go out to get more coffee while the other one assaults me with a phone book and screams ‘WHERE HAVE YOU HIDDEN THE BODY?’?”
The Realtor lets out a nervous laugh. The older police officer smiles but the younger one most definitely doesn’t, so the Realtor goes on, even more nervously: “I mean, I was joking. They don’t print phone books anymore, do they, so what would you do? Assault me with an iPhone?”
She starts waving her arms about to illustrate assault by phone, and yelling in what the two officers can only assume is the real estate agent’s imitation of their accents: “Oh, hell, no, I’ve ended up liking my ex on Instagram as well! Delete! Delete!”
The younger police officer doesn’t look at all amused, which makes the real estate agent look less amused. In the meantime the older officer leans toward the younger officer’s notes and asks, as if the Realtor weren’t actually in the room: “So what did she say about the drawing?”
“I didn’t get that far before you came in and interrupted!” the younger man snaps.
“What drawing?” the real estate agent asks.
“Well, as I was about to say before I was interrupted: we found this drawing in the stairwell, and we think the perpetrator may have dropped it. We’d like you to—,” the younger officer says, but the older officer interrupts him.
“Have you talked to her about the pistol, then?”
“Stop interfering!” the younger man hisses.
This makes the older officer throw his arms up and mutter: “Okay, okay, sorry I’m here.”
“It wasn’t real! The pistol! It was a toy!” the real estate agent says quickly.
The older officer looks at her in surprise, then at the younger officer, before whispering in a way that only men of a certain age think is a whisper: “You… you haven’t told her?”
“Told me what?” the real estate agent wonders.
The younger police officer sighs and folds the drawing, as carefully as if he were actually folding his older colleague’s face. Then he looks up at the Realtor.
“Well, I was coming to that… You see, after the perpetrator released you and the other hostages, and we’d brought you here to the station…”
The older officer interrupts helpfully: “The perpetrator, the bank robber—he shot himself!”
The younger officer clasps his hands tightly together to stop himself from strangling the older man. He says something the real estate agent doesn’t hear: her ears are already full of a monotonous buzzing sound that grows to a roar as shock takes hold of her nervous system. Long afterward she will swear that rain was pattering against the window of the room, even though the interview room had no windows. She stares at the policemen with her jaw hanging open.
“So… the pistol… it was…?” she manages to say.
“It was a real pistol,” the older officer confirms.
“I…,” the Realtor begins, but her mouth is too dry to speak.
“Here! Have some water!” the older officer offers, as if he’d just fetched it for her.
“Thanks… I… but, if the pistol was real, then we could all… we could all have died,” she whispers, then gulps at the water in a state of retroactive shock. The older officer nods authoritatively, takes the younger man’s notes from him, and starts to make his own additions with a pen.
“Perhaps we should start this interview again?” he says helpfully, which prompts the younger officer to take a short break so he can go out into the corridor and bang his head against the wall.
* * *
When the door slams shut the older man jumps. This business with words is tricky when you’re older and all you want to say to someone younger is: “I can see you’re in pain, and that causes me pain.” The younger officer’s shoes have left reddish brown marks of dried blood on the floor under his chair. The older man looks at them disconsolately. This was precisely why he didn’t want his son to become a policeman.
10
The first person who saw the man on the bridge ten years ago was a teenage boy whose dad wished he would find a new dream. Perhaps the boy could have waited for help, but would you have done that? If your mom was a priest and your dad a policeman, if you’d grown up taking it for granted that you have to help people if you can, and not abandon anyone unless you really have to?
So the teenage boy ran out onto the bridge and shouted to the man, and the man stopped. The teenage boy didn’t know what he should do, so he just started… talking. Tried to win the man’s trust. Get him to take two steps back rather than forward. The wind was tugging gently at their jackets, there was rain in the air and you could feel the start of winter on your skin, and the boy tried to find the words to say how much there must be to live for, even if it maybe didn’t feel that way right now.
The man on the bridge had two children, he told the teenage boy that. Possibly because the boy reminded him of them. The boy pleaded with him, with panic weighing down each word: “Please, don’t jump!”