“It’s nothing.”
She shook her head.
“It is nothing.”
She rarely spoke, and though she said it softly – her word “liar” rattled him.
He came close to her, very close and only mouthed the words so the others would not hear.
“I saw something in the street – something bad, but don’t worry; it is over and it had nothing to do with us, you understand?”
Her face contorted with sadness and she held his head in her hands, kissing him on the forehead. As though what he endures is not enough, she thought angrily.
*
Comely had seen Rida six times over the short transition from winter to spring, and he was not including their first, accidental, meeting. Six was enough, for him – seven would push the boundaries of reason.
He nervously paced in his apartment before returning to his desk – large and dark wood with a navy green leather top - to survey a map of the city. He’d gone so far to mark his interests with wooden miniature replicas. In the past these little toys had been a source of amusement to him; until recently the last of the childish things he had not put away, but now, joined as they were by a growing uncontrollable feeling, they troubled him intensely. He adjusted one tiny replica that did not sit correctly within its boundaries marked on the map.
“Precision.” He said aloud – “We must have precision,” he told the empty room.
He checked the calendar and saw that it was late March. He looked again – was that possible? For as long as he could remember, and he remembered everything, he’d always known what the day and date was. He kept the desk calendar because it had been a gift from someone important, turning it each morning as a kind of homage, but only very recently actually needing to use the thing… and he was certain the last time he’d looked it was February. But he’d turned it every morning – so surely… He stopped.
Easy now.
‘You’re just bored in here’ he thought.
He paced. The party was tomorrow night and he’d not invited Rida. There could be only one reason for that; he liked her too much.
‘Why am I even throwing this party?’
He knew exactly why, though he was loathe to admit it; he had to show everyone he was on top of his game. He remembered something Frouchè had told Bonaparte after a failed assassination attempt;
“Go on as before; give the people the impression you are invulnerable”.
Good advice.
He tried to remember what had become of Fouchè in the end… Had he been executed by the Bourbons? It seemed unjust to Comely – Fouchè had simply done his duty.
Comely stared out the window and remembered Ney, and his last words;
“I have fought a hundred battles for France and none against her.”
Ney, too, did not deserve the firing squad. No one did. Comely despised murder.
‘He gave his own orders to it. ‘Aim for my heart’, he said…’
Comely stopped, and something struck him. Rumours had always persisted that Ney had escaped to the United States and become, of all things, a school teacher.
‘The wily old fox. And to think they used to say he was all courage and no brains.’
He hoped Ney had made it.
Comely returned to his desk and started to push the wooden models together in the centre of the map. He made a small circle with some, then stacked fewer atop in a smaller circle, then again, then again, then finally placing a single tiny wooden building at the very peak where it perched precariously. He looked at this cone-shaped structure with a faint smile of satisfaction.
“Now that’s precision.”
He turned his back on the desk, walked into his virtually unused kitchen and poured himself a glass of water.
‘Dehydration – that’s what is getting to me, that and cabin fever. After this I’ll go for a walk. Why am I having such banal thoughts? Why am I even asking myself this question?’
Comely shook his head as if by that simple action he could stave off the creeping obsessive compulsion - or was it some other neurosis beginning to blight the periphery of his consciousness? He walked back into the study, pulled the scotch decanter from his cabinet and walked back to the sink, poured the content out and replaced it with water. The ritual of using the decanter, he had concluded, was at least as important as the content itself.
He peered at the wall paper; once magnificent – now barely clinging to stately. He was sick of the apartment, he thought – then admitted he was, more accurately, sick of having himself for company. Comely tried to think of his genuine friends; counting them on his fingers like a child – something he had never needed to do, even as a child. He did not get past one hand… But of those he did count – one could be found easily; Greco, and so to his café Comely hurried.
Though he wanted Greco to do well – of course, he told himself, he wanted everyone he cared about to do well – Comely was glad to find no patrons at the café upon his arrival. He decided, greedily, he wanted Greco to himself – if only for a few minutes. He sat at the counter for the first time, eschewing his usual table.
“Athanasios,” he called him by his actual first name – which no one did. Even Greco’s wife called him Greco, though she called him neos Greco (young Greco). “How are you keeping?”
“Well well. And you?”
“Same as always – but let’s not be too formal, we’re old friends now.”
The silence that followed became awkward fast.
“Your children – how old are they now? The eldest – Byron, does he graduate from highschool this year?”
“He does – at the end of this year. If he keeps up the way he has been going; he’ll get a college scholarship.”
“And Arki – how is he?”
Greco looked at him with a surprised smile.
“He is twelve – you know, he won a competition at his school last week in his science class. He built a steam engine, would you believe that? And when I tried to help him, he refused! I kid you not – he built it in the basement. His mother was worried sick he’d explode himself. It’s a little thing but it works – I could barely believe it myself.”
“Brilliant.”
Comely went on, asking about the other four children. He learned of Constantine’s aptitude for baseball and mathematics, eight year-old Lysandra’s unwavering ambition to become a doctor, Alexandria’s love of Shakespeare and debating, George’s obsessions with botany and French history… Comely, who had always been so sure of his powers of observation – on some occasions, though seldom, bordering on cocksure – had hitherto failed to appreciate the extent to which almost everything Greco did or even thought about was connected to the wellbeing of his family. For Comely, a man with nothing even close to being called a family, it was moving – and distressing.
Greco worked alone in his café, and thus worked hard. Some people wondered but did not ask why his children did not work with him and questioned the sense of a man who laboured so long and onerously when just one more pair of hands would have made life a lot easier. While Nathra Nader’s steel-trap was clear to all who would listen and some who wouldn’t, Greco was more clever than the unobservant realised. He had sworn he would never have his children work in the café, that their time would be better spent studying and reading. Their mother, a vigorous and short Cypriot, made certain this gift of free time did not go to waste. The children would remain relentless in their pursuit of excellence long after 1939. Greco’s plan worked to perfection. Upon his death years later, the family sold the café.
That which people believed to be Greco’s life work was gone, replaced by a string of doomed enterprises and forgotten within two generations. Roughly ten years after his death the building in which the café, with its ornate plaster work, dark wood fixtures and blue and white fittings, had once thrived was demolished to make way for one of a series of buildings that would be used as the new World Trade Centre. Roughly thirty
years on that building would be demolished to make way for a new world order. But again, Greco was more clever than the unobservant realised. His children became engineers, doctors, academics, scientists; One of his grandchildren a Senator; One of their grandchildren would be President. This was his life’s work. Making coffee and making friends was a good honest living, Greco always believed, but it was not what he wanted for his descendants.
* * *
The sidewalk, wet and reflecting flickering lights, was the kind of red-black slab cut with traces of gold and green more often seen punctuated by the shadows of revellers; but here, on the outskirts of excitement and at the first frontier of desperation, the path laid bare. In the doorway, a shard of white face could be seen peering from the shadows, then obscured by a cloud of smoke, then clear again; the crescent clear like the moon, the rest completely shrouded. The woman emerged from the doorway, wandering across the red-black and catching the gold and green on those parts of her adorned. She had no mating call; too tired now, too old (at thirty) and too hoping none would come, though they must come and always would. No call, just the slow dance – simple, back and forth.
Ten years earlier, not far from the same spot, one immigrant shared with another a line from his favourite writer; If you want to drive a man mad with labour, have him move a pile of timber from one part of the field to another – then have him move it back to the same point. She laboured in the same way, from one point to another then back, catching the gold and green on those parts of her adorned. The signal was out, and it was only a matter of time.
Eleven years earlier, she’d arrived in the big city with big ideas and her only dilemma had been trying to decide which one to chase first. A start in a bank as the manager’s secretary wasn’t much but it was a start and she’d been too pretty for the patchiness of her Pittman’s shorthand to pose a problem. The next year the crash sent her first to that great teeming bull pen of desperate humanity, then the poorhouse, then the house of the rising sun.
It seemed it was the last stop, and then she decided she’d had enough of the same stretch of stone and kept walking – further out, away from the troubled heart and further out to those parts of town where the dens lack lighting and pretence. She walked until her legs ached and walked some more – with barely four dollars in her bag (she rarely needed change) – and found herself outside a high wooden wall and gate of iron bars. Inside, a man was leaning against a porch post, smoking a cigarette and talking to a dog. She stared through the gate at him and he waved.
“You always talk to your dog?”
“You always walk through the warehouse district at night?”
“I asked you first.”
“Who else would I talk to around here?”
“Well now you’re talking to me.”
“And what about my question?”
“You’re around twenty, right?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Well then, be a grown up and don’t ask questions when you don’t know the answer and don’t need to know.”
“What’s your name?”
“We’re all called something.”
Neither of them had moved. She stood by the gate watching him, he lent on the post watching her.
“It matters to me.”
“You don’t know me so well. If you did, it wouldn’t.”
“My name is Hans, for what it’s worth.”
He started to walk towards to gate.
“Hands?”
He threw his cigarette into a puddle just inside the wall and extended his right hand between the bars.
“Without the d. You’re not going to hold out on me now are you?”
She opened her mouth but Hans didn’t hear it. The dog, whose name was Olaf – for what it’s worth – bolted for the other end of the yard barking furiously and Hans motioned for her to back away from the gate with one hand while he pulled his revolver with the other.
Four men dropped down over the wooden wall, having made barely a sound scaling it. Olaf leapt at one, true to his training, and latched on to his knife-baring arm like a professional before being pistol-whipped senseless. Hans, just twenty but no rube, aimed for the one he picked for the leader (and picked right) but knew he couldn’t shoot a man without a warning and cried out for them to “get the hell out”. They did not oblige and he’d slugged the leader through the throat by the time they were within thirty yards. Ignoring the one who’d had his arm mauled Hans fired at one of the able-bodied and shattered his left femur… as he cocked his pistol a third time it was too late. Mercifully, the end came quickly, leaving Hans time enough for only one thought. It was of Mary-Jane Sziller, who he hadn’t seen since the night they’d kissed four years earlier; just before her father and family transferred to Austin.
I haven’t written back to her last letter.
The two remaining goons, for now ignoring their colleague writhing on the ground, stripped the keys from the newly minted corpse of Hans Vandort and made for the gate. Outside, four more men waited with their truck; two in the cab and two on the sideboards. With the gate open they rolled in and started to fill the back of the truck – with anything of value. They broke into the offices and stole all records, even hauling the small safe off. Hans too and his fellow deceased were loaded in and, after some rudimentary strapping, the one-legged goon joined them. Olaf, unconscious but bleeding only slightly, was left where he lay (and lived to fight another day). Some time had passed before the truck rolled out, but the shots drew no police – no crowd either from this hopeless patch of Earth, save the lone woman with her back against a wall, behind the fire escape on the other side of the road. She breathed heavily and gripped the bricks as best she could, hoping to wrap the wall around her like a blanket. And she thought of the blanket she’d shared with her sister a long time ago, wrapped by their mother a long time ago, and she wept for the life she’d lost a long time ago. And she wept for Hans too, the poor boy. And her name too, by chance, was Mary-Jane - for what it’s worth.
* * *
Comely knew within hours; and wondered why they’d only had one guard – then it struck him; it was a legitimate business. He knew then, beyond any doubt he’d hoped to hold, that the innocent would suffer with the guilty. And it made him sick, but he knew that the show must go on.
The hall was booked and bands vetted by the great man himself. He knew it was a risk, a huge risk and one he had no right to take – but Comely was nothing if not a gambler. His parties were well known but mostly by reputation – he had always kept them small but on this occasion extended the invitation to many more of his associates and employees than usual. Comely cared little for placing himself at risk, always banking on his abilities to calculate a way through any situation, but he was placing everyone at risk. ‘Who is the pawn in this gambit?’ part of him asked and the rest said ‘there is no gambit and there is no pawn’.
The visit to Greco had done him good, but he’d merely wanted to see Greco – he needed to see Rida and there was no escaping it. He had made a point of keeping the party from her, but found he was telling her more and more with every moment, word and even gesture.
‘You’ve let your guard down’, he thought, and remembered.
Guard up? You’re all guard and no man. Let that down and there’s nothing left.
He remembered those words from the giver of the calendar, the calendar he kept and turned every day for years though he had never needed it until now. He remembered why she’d lanced him with those words, and why she’d been so right.
Comely walked past the street prophet and thought the man seemed to be everywhere. It dawned on him he was mistaken; they were just both creatures of habit – this was the preacher’s parish and Comely was fond of taking this particular street. ‘I’ve become predictable’. The preacher nodded to him and he nodded back, but the sign almost made him break step.
I Know thy works, that THOU art neither Cold nor Hot.
Walking away at a pace brisk but not so fast as to appear panicked, Comely tried to consider it – considering a subject being a process far more palatable to him than obsessing over a subject; ‘No one knows my works but me,’ he thought. ‘Am I neither cold nor hot?’ Comely considered being neither cold not hot as, at his age, a positive – more than that, absolutely essential. Being cold removes one from humanity, diminishes one’s capacity to understand people – which is strategically vital in life. Being hot leads one to impulsiveness and vulnerability. To be neither was absolutely essential.
Why don’t you take the subway for a change?
I like to walk.
You can’t stand the idea of being trapped. You’re afraid.
I always walk.
So, you’re afraid of change too.
Comley laughed out loud. ‘I suppose I am afraid of being trapped. So what? Who isn’t, apart from the thousands of people who use the subway every single day?’
He laughed again, this time it was a short, nervous laugh – almost forced but not quite; certainly making the most of what little natural urge to laugh there was. Now, just out of interest – he told himself – just out of academic curiosity, Comely searched his memory for the passage in question. He’d never been a bible reader, certainly not as Aldous Comely. There were high points, of course, poetic turns of phrase, moving scenes and some good ideas – but not enough to engage him for long. He remembered.