“A Christmas to remember,” he said.
“Nowhere near Christmas yet,” she said, legalistically.
“Yes, but as much like as to stand in for it.” He meant for the Christmas they would never share together. She nodded.
“Oh,” said Doroftei, “this is sweet goodness; all that’s missing is pussy.” He smiled unapologetically at Wendy, who felt as if she were supposed to nod and agree. But she was suddenly shy.
The walkway led over a wooden bridge. Small white lights were looped around the posts and struts of the bridge. The stream below was mostly snowed over, though there was a glassy jingle as of ice bits caught in a bottleneck.
She wanted to stand in the snow, on the pines, surrounded by lights, on a nine-foot bridge, under Romanian stars, all night long, and keep it as a memory. She didn’t want to move forward to where she could hear a pulsing antiquated disco beat ready to drum the atmosphere into a pulp.
“As good as Christmas,” she allowed to John.
She was at a loss; how often did that happen? London usually felt full and redolent of the past, so saturated with atmosphere that one could sometimes hardly breathe—now it felt airless. Should she just go back to Boston, give up on the idea of a novel about Wendy Pritzke? Why not just bolt? Shrug off any remaining responsibility about home renovations in a property that didn’t even belong to her, order a minicab, head for Heathrow, hit the bar for a glass of something with a lemon rind or a pickled onion in it.
Nothing called for her to come back to Boston, that was part of the problem. And the only thing really urging her to stay was the fey though ineffectual parasite that had seemed to infect Rudge House.
So she found herself, a few days later, back at the door of Ritzi Ostertag’s place in Cowcross Street. A heavy tide of patchouli couldn’t disguise a smell of roach spray. If an exorcism were needed, of any sort, Winnie deduced, either ectoplasm or vermin, Ritzi Ostertag probably wouldn’t be up for the job.
Ritzi looked up from the cash register where he was writing out a receipt to a weeping young woman from the Caribbean. “Four times a day rain or shine until ze full moon,” he said, handing her a paper sack. “And zen ve’ll see vhat ve’ll zee.” He rolled his eyes at the sight of Winnie, but with a toss of his head he indicated: Sit, ve vill talk.
She tried to melt into the background, but the background was occupied by that American historian, Hausserman. She was surprised how quickly she remembered the name. He was leafing through an old dusty volume whose pages were deckled on side and bottom, and touched with gold on the top. “Oh, you,” he said. “If you’ve come to buy this early-nineteenth-century Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, you’re out of luck. Dibs. But there’s a duplicate Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age by Lecouteux as a consolation prize.”
“I’m here to have my fortune told,” she said.
“Professional research or greedy for knowledge in a Faustian sense?”
“The silence of the confessional obtains, I believe. None of your beeswax, as we used to say in Simsbury, Connecticut.”
“I understand.” He nodded with a parody of British courtesy derived from Merchant Ivory films, and turned his attention back to the page.
“What are you looking for?” She didn’t want to engage him, but she couldn’t help herself.
He gave her a wink. “Our dear Ostertag may be flighty but the boy does deliver the goods, I’ll give him that.”
Ritzi came over. “I can’t be seeink you now,” he said to Winnie, “I can’t be givink myself over to ze spirit vorld.”
“I’ll wait till you finish this sale. I can wait.”
“You’re in hurry,” said Ritzi.
“No I’m not.”
“You are, you just are not yet knowink it.”
She let out a laugh that sounded too much like a high squeal. Then she shrugged. Irv Hausserman closed the book and he negotiated a price. A number of soft pale notes changed hands and Ritzi wrote up the exchange, and wrapped the book lovingly in a length of white muslin, and again in brown paper and string.
“What a pleasant surprise to run into you again,” said Irv. “Opal, isn’t it?” He nodded his good-byes, and left whistling, shunting the book lovingly from arm to arm. She hated to see him go, but she couldn’t think of anything to say that would keep him.
“Now.” Ritzi Ostertag began the flourishes and flounces of his act. “A new lock on ze door so zis time ve are not beink interrupted. I am knowink you vill return. Zat cloth has got you wrapped.” Or had he said “rapt”? “I believe I tell you you are not to be brinkink it back.”
“Yes, you told me not to.”
“But you disobey Ritzi and brink it.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I am vantink to look at it more closely.” He made hurrying motions, shaking his hands. She sat down and unwrapped the thing once again.
Though he seemed determined to keep up his accent this time, Ritzi Ostertag didn’t attempt mood lighting or a medieval music soundtrack. He turned several desk lights on and sat down at a table like an Antwerp jeweler with an eyepiece studying an old diamond. “Such strong—I don’t know—associations I am gettink,” he said. “It is strange. Bitter as radish is bitter.”
“Is it haunted?” said Winnie.
“A piece of cloth? How can a fragment of cloth be haunted?”
“How could a house be haunted, or a forest, or a person’s dreams? I don’t know. Is it?”
“Not my area of specialization. I half no talent at zuch zinks. But I can zense a great—somezink. Some Schreck.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers very gently on the fabric. He was like a wine connoisseur proving his prowess over a mystery vintage. “I can tell you very little about zis, but somezink about yourself comes through. I zink zis is about you, but I can’t tell.”
“This cloth can’t be about me. I merely helped find it.”
He took long, deep breaths. “Oh, ze poor somezink. Vhatever it iz. You or it, or did I say last time it vas a she-thing? Yes, I zink it vas.”
“You think it was . . . ?”
“The shroud of a young voman.”
He opened his eyes. His hands had been roaming as if over a keyboard, and they stopped. He looked more closely, and held the cloth up. “Damn zese bad eyes,” he said, “gettink old is no fun. Vhat is zis?”
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“I can feel it. I zink I can see it. Yes, look, if you hold ze cloth so zat ze light falls against it like so—a pattern. Do you zee? A letter, perhaps, a numeral? Vhat is it?”
She could not see it at first, but then she thought she picked up a pattern of glazed threads with matted-down hairs, as distinct from the surround of coarser threads. She was hardly surprised. That same symbol, a cross with a zigzag slash through it. Four or five inches high, perhaps painted with wax, or a pigment whose color had long since faded, leaving only a residue of binder.
“What does it mean?” she said.
“Ask somevone else, not me,” he said, “but it is feelink stronger to me zan ze rest.”
“What precisely do you mean?” she said.
“As a pepper soup is heartier zan a banana soup. Don’t interrupt.” His hands moved slowly, reading like Braille, but stopped nowhere else, until, with eyes closed, his fingers roamed the cloth to its hem, reached a few inches, and touched her fingertips. She sat there, frightened and angry.
“Vhat do you vant?” he asked her, more like a doctor than a priest.
“I am not getting through, anywhere,” she said. “I am a writer whose character has left her; I don’t even know where she went. If this is a block, it’s a first time for me. I can’t get her on the page, I can’t see her in my lazy mind’s eye before I go to sleep. I can’t find my cousin, who has disappeared. I am afraid to admit that my cousin’s house is mildly haunted by whoever it was who was wrapped in this cloth. I have a mad notion that one of my ancestors was the prototype for Charles Dickens’s Ebe
nezer Scrooge, the one who suffered all those visitations by ghosts. I don’t know if he was mad, or fanciful, or psychotic; I don’t know if I am finding myself the same. Nothing is connected. Nothing makes sense. I am not getting through anywhere.”
Ritzi sighed. “I don’t know about writer’s block. Ze only kind of writer’s block I haff is in signink my name to bank checks vhen my bills come due. I can’t make myself do it. But such blank valls, zere is so little to attach. Vhat haff you done to yourself?”
“So I’ve dyed my hair,” she admitted, “only against a little gray.”
“No, not zat,” he said. “Am I gettink you or am I gettink some whiff of ze shroud-phantom?”
“If you can get a whiff of anything over your industrial-strength patchouli, I’m surprised.”
“You hold me off, more zan you need,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked at her clinically. Once again the accent fell off. “I may be a silly old bore but I’m not a fool, you know. I can tell you’ve had some doings with astrology somehow. I can tell that making fun of people is your professional strength and your living grave.”
“I asked for a reading of the future, not the present,” she said.
“You keep yearning to go east, but you’re either going too far or you’re not going far enough,” he said. “You are not finding the right—destiny. Destination. It is not the Balkans. You’re misled. Go nearer or go farther.”
“It was a character of mine who was going there. Not me.”
“Whoever this is,” he said, moving his hand back to the nearly invisible scar of marking on the edge of the cloth, “wants to go back, but like you—cannot. It is a problem of getting through. She has lost the way to get through. She needs help. Who will be her helpmeet?”
After dropping thirty pounds into a brass scale held by a grinning Hanuman figure, Winnie made her way downstairs to Cowcross Street, thinking: What a bravura performance that was. He took what she gave off about herself—her intensely divided and lonely self—and made of it a story about a ghost who was equally indigent. He ought to go into fiction writing, why not? Maybe they should collaborate, and together they could find out what had happened to Wendy Pritzke.
But had she ever mentioned the Balkans to him? To Rasia? How did he know?
Irv Hausserman was waiting for her at the corner. “Sorry,” he said, “I know this seems like stalking, but by now my curiosity is piqued. Did Mr. Ostertag tell you that you would run into me again in the near future, like half an hour or so?”
She wasn’t happy to be waylaid, but it was better than seeing no one, since she seemed to have ostracized herself from every figment and figure she knew, in her mind and out of it. “He said my ghost has a hard time getting home.”
“You have a ghost. A personal one? How leading edge of you. Is it lost?”
“It’s all bunk, I know. Once upon a time I wrote faux horoscopes and made a healthy living at it; anyone with a semblance of an imagination can do it. But there’s just enough creepiness in the whole thing to make me very sad.” She told him about the finding of the cloth in her family home, and about the pattern daubed on the edge of the cloth.
“You’re sure you saw that insignia on the pantry boards? On your computer screen?”
“Oh, once something happens, who can be sure of anything? I thought I did, but I am modern enough to mistrust my senses. Clearly I’m overwrought with worry over my cousin, and pretending not to be.”
“Why bother to pretend? Why not be overwrought?”
“I can see things that aren’t there,” she said. “I guard against that.”
“Like ghosts?”
“Like conspiracies. Like plots. Like narrative plots, I mean, but also like paranoia. I’m not superstitious but I am suspicious.”
“Give me an example.”
“Can’t. I don’t know you well enough; you might cut me off entirely. There, that’s suspicion for you, see? And I—” She did not say, I like you, nor, worse, I need you, or someone.
“Oh, go ahead. There are only so many sentences you can stop in midstride before you yourself stop in midstride.”
She tried to smile wanly at that, but it was too true to ignore. “All right. Let’s leave aside all the business of a haunting. The ghost of Jack the Ripper, the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge, the ghost of Ozias Rudge, the ghost of some poor murdered housemaid from the early nineteenth century.” He had heard none of this before; he bravely refrained from flinching. She rushed on. “I’m a hack and I’m slightly haunted by my own professional skills—it’s an occupational hazard. I accept that. I can’t get through to my main character and so my novel is stalled. I accept that. I accept that I’m driving the neighbors crazy. Even the dotty old bat on the ground floor has begun to avoid me. Fair enough. But why do I get the feeling that my cousin’s disappearance is a conspiracy against me?”
“So that’s really what you’re overwrought about.”
“Overwrought implies hysteria. I’m not overwrought, I’m just wrought. I feel as if his office is hiding something from me. The whole thing makes me feel paranoid, and then the world is all—oh—a shrill lemon color, a place without comforting shadows, or without clear lights. I can’t think of the metaphor. Music has no charm to soothe this wild beast.”
“Sounds like depression to me.”
“Yes, doesn’t it?”
“But could you be right? That there is a conspiracy?”
“You met me at a professional clairvoyant’s,” she reminded him. “Doesn’t that suggest I’m a bit fringy? You’re there buying your tools for academic research, I’m there getting a seer’s evaluation of a horse blanket? Why shouldn’t I be delusional too?”
They had walked out of Cowcross Street and meandered along, aimlessly heading deeper into the City. Finally, she repeated, “I’ll prove it to you, if you like,” as they paused on a street corner, unsure whether they were continuing together, but not ready to press on, nor to break off.
There was a phone box on the corner. “I could call and be put off. You could see that. If you need proof.”
“Well, if you think it’s a conspiracy against you,” he said, testing her, “I could call. Let me. Shall I?”
“Why not? What is there to lose?”
What was there to lose?
He had coins and dropped them in. She told him the number by heart. The connection took a little while to make. She stood, struggling with all manner of perturbations.
Was there anything in the literature that ascertained for certain that Jack the Ripper was male? Could the Ripper have been a woman? Why would a woman kill other women? And if Jack the Ripper was a woman, could this shroud have been hers?
“Yes, I’ll wait,” said Irv Hausserman. He leaned against the Plexiglas edge of what passed for a phone box—a boxless phone box, these days—obscuring the advertisements of hookers and lady companions and their phone numbers and special talents. The edge of Ripper territory, still served by prostitutes all these decades later.
She didn’t want to appear too eager. She looked at a full-color advertisement of a dominatrix, a card about four by six, affixed to the glass with gum tack. The woman was laced into a corset of black leather. Her color was high and her eyes were hidden by a bar of black ink put in by the printer’s studio. On either side of the photo her services were listed. Psychological Manipulation. Strict Discipline. Inescapable Bondage. Fetish Enhancement. Intense Torment Scenarios. She carried a riding crop like a cowgirl about to enter a bullpen. The typeface was Ye Olde Gothick.
What if this were Jenkins’s daughter, her eyes hidden behind that privacy-protection device? What if Jenkins stopped to use this phone and saw her? Would he recognize her? Would he dare to call the number?
“So what’s the deal?” she said belligerently, poking Hausserman in the shoulder.
“They said to hold the line,” he answered, “they’re putting me through.”
STAVE FOUR
As Dante in the
Purgatorio
hears the voice of his Beatrice before he sees her—by a good few lines, if Winnie remembered rightly—she heard the voice of John Comestor before she laid eyes on him. She didn’t hear what he was saying, just his voice, his real living voice, around the iron pillar of a glossily overrestored late-Victorian pub off Fleet Street. She called out to him, “John,” before she saw him.
The room full of lunching account execs—lunching on pints, that is—and he there, no fuller or realer than ever, banter to the bartender on his lips—then he was turning to Winnie. Apology and defense and, was it, a sort of mock inquisitiveness in his features. Cataloging these emotional stances helped her ignore things like the diverting color of his eyes, the killer-lover haircut, et cetera. “Who could
ever have guessed all this,” he said to her, and leaned forward. She was impatient with relief and anger, and so full of contradictions that her embrace in return felt like a kind of whiplash. She stiffened and yielded simultaneously.
“It’s far too noisy here,” she said. “Since when have pubs become so upmarket?”
“The rah-rah nineties. Have a quick bottoms-up and we’ll find someplace else.”
“I don’t know that I care to.” But she accepted a pint of Murphy’s. They settled in the ambiguous light of frosted glass. “Cheers,” she said, as if daring him to feel cheerful in the presence of her well-regulated fury.
Up to the challenge, he. “Here’s to us.”
“And,” she added, “you have a lot of explaining to do.”
“Not as much as all that. If you give it a think.”
“I’ll have a word with you. And the word is: why?”
A door opened in the wall; on a tray, out came jacket potatoes steaming and starchy, both moist and dry. A reek of Branston pickle. On an abandoned napkin that the busboy had overlooked lay an old hunk of cheese cracked like the glaze in an heirloom plate. She could harvest any moment and stuff her senses with nonsense, and that was what nonsense was: a kind of antimatter, a sexy sleight of hand that deflected attention from the urgent world.