“Using this app, with just one tap on the keyboard you can record conversations on your phone without the other person knowing. It’s unbelievable what sound technicians are able to get out of the voice and the background sounds on such a recording.”
“You don’t say?” said Lunde. He looked down skeptically at his phone.
“Anyway, the option is there, if you want it,” said Bob. “And thanks, thanks for letting me hang out here.”
It had stopped raining by the time Lunde locked the store door behind him, but heavy clouds the color of exhaust fumes stillcoated the sky. The sidewalks were beginning to dry. Bob breathed in the air. Remembered childhood, and how sharp every sensory impression was, how even the most insignificant of them could seem almost overwhelming, like the special smell, the humid taste of rain-wet pavement. Now it smelled and tasted of nothing. He thought about eyes. How it’s the eyes that are the problem.
21
Southdale Center, September 2022
We’re waiting for a red light in Edina, which is technically speaking another town. The cabdriver, whose name I have discovered is Gabriel, tells me that he thinks the mayor of Edina is of Norwegian descent. I’m more preoccupied by the fact that I don’t recognize my surroundings. What’s happened to my Southdale Center? Gabriel explains that my shopping mall is hidden from view now behind all the new buildings, that it is actually still there, just behind them. He looks at me in the mirror.
“What made you choose this particular story?” he asks.
“I’m a crime writer,” I answer.
“Well, I’m a cabdriver,” he says, “but I don’t go to New York and drive around a lot of streets I don’t know.”
I nod. Hesitate. But why not? I cough.
“The hero of the story—if you can call him that—was my cousin. I guess I just want somebody to tell his story.”
“Was? You mean he passed away?”
I don’t answer.
“You get rich writing books?”
I shake my head. “But enough to get by.”
“Good for you. That something you always wanted to do, be a crime writer?”
“No. I trained as a priest.”
“Really? Isn’t that pretty unusual? For a priest to be writing about gruesome murders?”
“Not as unusual as you might think. Maybe you’ve heard of Ronald Knox? He was a Catholic priest. He’s the one who laid down the ten commandments of crime fiction.”
Gabriel shakes his head. “As in, ‘thou shalt not kill’?”
I have to laugh. “As in, the killer has to be introduced early on in the story, but we’re not allowed access to his thoughts.”
“And you follow that commandment?”
“No, not at all. I let the reader follow the murderer’s thoughts as I think he must have thought them at the time. But then, I’m writing true crime, not a detective novel. And Knox’s commandments aren’t meant to be taken seriously. The fifth commandment states that there shouldn’t be a Chinaman in the story.”
“And you’ve got a Chinaman in your story?”
I have to think about it. “No, not exactly.”
The light changes to green and Gabriel has to concentrate on his driving.
And it turns out he’s right, suddenly we’re there.
I recognize those low buildings, and the huge surrounding parking lots. When I came here as a boy, Southdale Center seemed like a complete universe. Only when I was a little older did I realize that Southdale wasn’t a particularly big shopping mall, not for example when compared to West Edmonton Mall, which is bigger than the smallest country in the world. But when Southdale opened in 1956 it turned out to be the start of an urbandevelopment that would soon characterize the whole country and, in due course, the whole Western world. Victor Gruen, the architect who designed Southdale and fifty other shopping malls, fled the country when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. He arrived in New York with eight dollars, no English, an architecture degree and the idea of building small urban centers where people would live with every facility a town could need right next to them; post offices, bakeries, police stations, schools. But as the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there’s an obvious irony in the fact that a dedicated socialist and urbanist like Gruen should be the architect responsible—in my uncle’s view—for the gradual destruction of the Minneapolis he had grown up in, a vibrant and living center with a thriving business, cultural and social life. To him Gruen’s shopping malls were parasites that sucked the life out of the towns and left nothing behind but a dying organism choked by exhaust fumes and crime, a lack of public transportation and ordinary, everyday humanity, an accretion of cold stone-and-glass castles containing offices where people worked but from which they fled as soon as the working day was over. I remember my uncle once saying to my father that shopping malls like Southdale created psychopaths, whatever that was supposed to mean. Anyway, my uncle must have been mollified to learn that Gruen repented of his sins and atoned for them by returning to Austria to live and to work on the pedestrian precincts in the center of Vienna, and that two years before his death he publicly expressed his regret for what his shopping malls had turned into.
Me, I love shopping malls.
