“Weird,” said the exterminator after his inspection. “Normally you’d have rats come up from the basement to the upper floors. But this building has it upside-down.” He tilted his head. “The rats and insects are mostly on the top floor and the basement is as clean as a whistle. I’ve never seen a basement crammed with so many things and yet not have a single bug.”
The exterminator’s words were reassuring. She allowed the child to drag her down to the basement where she would be shown yet another fascinating new costume or prop—although the woman had been sure that she had examined everything in the basement by then—and make the appropriate exclamations, sharing in the child’s fun.
The older the neighborhood, the harder it is to stake your own territory. The woman experienced “turf” politics for the first time.
Someone in the night kept leaving scratch marks on their old car, a hand-me-down from her husband’s oldest brother. At first it had been a couple of marks on the driver-side door. The next night, the entire driver-side door was scratched up. A scratch so long that it wrapped around the vehicle appeared the next morning, and on the fourth night, both side mirrors were smashed. A week later, someone had slashed the rear tires.
She and her husband could guess at the perpetrator and his motive. After moving in, they parked their car on the street in front of their building as they were entitled to, but a man insisting that the space was rightfully his began to menace them. He was a young man in his early thirties who lived in an old house at the end of the alley. The third generation to live there, he bragged that his family had once owned the entire neighborhood and thus, the street-parking space at the entrance of the alley actually belonged to him—“facts” arrogantly conveyed to them in a commanding voice.
Whether the land had once been the man’s family’s or not, the situation was completely different now. The space in front of the building was prioritized for its inhabitants by law, a space the woman and her husband paid parking and zoning permission fees for. Of course, such reasonable explanations had no effect on the man who lived down the alley.
“If you’ve moved into someone else’s neighborhood, you should follow their rules!” he shouted as he jabbed a finger at them. “You can’t come in here and mess up the order of our neighborhood!”
Neither the woman nor her husband could understand how parking in the spot that was designated for them and they were paying for was “messing up the order of the neighborhood.” Her husband suggested they simply ignore him, and she agreed. And it was around three days after this confrontation when someone began to damage their car at night.
The woman had felt anxious when the very first scratches appeared on the door. Her husband had simply laughed it off, but after the side mirrors were smashed and the tires were slashed, her husband’s expression also darkened. The woman and her husband installed CCTV cameras on their building wall, right next to a streetlamp. They would need proof if they were to ever seek legal recourse.
The mere presence of the cameras would solve many of their problems, the CCTV technician was at pains to emphasize. And his words proved true at first, as nothing happened for the next few days.
But a week later, the woman picked up the phone to receive a summons from the police: someone was pressing charges against her husband.
That someone turned out to be, of course, the man who lived down the alley. The charge was assault. According to the man, he was on his way home late at night after work and passing by the car that was parked in the contested space, when the woman’s husband leaped out of the car and assaulted him. He had allegedly struck the young man with his car door, picked him up, smashed his face on the hood of the car, and slammed his fingers in the door, inflicting massive injuries. The man did have wounds all over his face along with a bandage around his head, and his right hand was in a cast.
Such violence was completely out of character for the husband, so the woman knew the accusation was false. At any rate, on the date and hour the man claimed to have been assaulted, her husband had been sleeping at home next to her and they hadn’t gone out that evening. As she and her husband denied all accusations, the man began to scream and hop up and down despite his injuries, but then came the couple’s secret weapon: the CCTV footage.
Since no incidents had happened in the past few days, the woman and her husband had simply stored the footage without bothering to review it. But the footage, which they all watched with the detective in charge of the case, revealed something very strange.