“Half an hour? You should have called me, Ray.”
“Been up to me, I mighta done just that. But I wasn’t in the picture until they got inside and found the body. Then I got called an’ went over, an’ I was takin’ a good look at the late laminated when the phone rang. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, tell me another. Two calls, maybe five minutes apart. Both times I answered an’ both times the other party didn’t say a word. Don’t tell me it wasn’t you, Bern. Be a waste of time. I recognized your voice.”
“How? You just said the caller didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, an’ there’s plenty ways of not sayin’ nothin’, an’ this was you. Don’t try an’ tell me different.”
“Whatever you say, Ray.”
“I knew it was you right away. Of course, I got to admit I had you on my mind. You know where the body was layin’?”
“Of course not. I wasn’t there.”
“Well, you know the little round table, has a lamp on it looks like a bowl of flowers?”
It was a Tiffany lily lamp, almost certainly a reproduction, resting atop a drumhead table with cabriolet legs. “I don’t know it at all,” I said. “I’ve never been to his apartment. I know he was on the Upper East Side, and I’ve probably got his address written down somewhere, but I can’t recall it offhand. And I’ve certainly never been there.”
“Right,” he said. “You were never there but your case here”—he gave the surface a tap—“was. I don’t buy that for a minute, Bernie. I think you were there, and probably last night. Time you called, I didn’t know this was your case. But I already seen a receipt for five bucks an’ change sittin’ on top of that little round table. Barnegat Books, it said, an’ the date on it was the day before yesterday.”
“I told you about that, Ray. He bought a book of poems.”
“It said”—he consulted a pocket notebook—“Praed.”
“That’s the name of the poet. Winthrop Mackworth Praed.”
He waved a hand dismissively to show what he thought of anybody with a name like that. “This Praed’s dead, right?”
“Long dead.”
“Like most poets. So the hell with him. He didn’t do it, an’ much as I like yankin’ on your chain, I know you didn’t do it either. Why would you want to kill him?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “He was a customer, and I can use all the ones I’ve got. And he was a nice man. At least I think he was.”
“What do you know about him, Bernie?”
“Not much. He was a snappy dresser. Does that help?”
“It didn’t help him. He shoulda been wearing a Kevlar vest under his shirt. Maybe that woulda helped. Snappy dresser? Yeah, I guess so, but what kind of man wears a suit around the house? You get home, you want to rip off your tie, hang your jacket over the back of a chair. That’s what I always do.”
“I can believe it.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know better, I’d think that was a crack. I’ll tell you this much, Bernie. It’s a good thing for you your name ain’t Kay Fobb.”
“Well, it’s not,” I said, “and it never has been. What are you talking about?”
“Kay Fobb. Ring a bell?”
“Not even a tinkle. Who is she?”
“You figure it’s a woman? I don’t even know if I’m sayin’ it right, Bernie. Here—whyn’tcha take a squint at it yourself an’ tell me what you make of it.”
He flipped the case over and showed it to me. There, in block capitals of a rusty brown that stood out sharply against the beige Ultrasuede attaché case, someone had printed CAPHOB.
CHAPTER
Seven
In Dead End, Bogart plays Baby Face Martin, a gangster making a sentimental visit to his boyhood home on the Lower East Side. By the time it’s over, he’s been slapped by his mother, Marjorie Main, and shot dead on a fire escape by Joel McCrea. There were a lot of other good people in the movie, including Claire Trevor and Sylvia Sidney and Ward Bond, along with Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, who had evidently wandered over from the Bowery. Lillian Hellman wrote the screenplay and William Wyler directed, but my favorite credit was costumes, by someone named Omar Kiam.
During Bogie’s death scene, Ilona reached over and took my hand.
She held it through to the end of the picture, and when she came back from the ladies’ room at intermission she reached to take my hand in both of hers. “Bear-naaard,” she said.
“Ilona.”
“I was afraid you would not be here tonight. All day I was afraid.”
“What made you think that?”
“I don’t know. When I rode off in the taxi last night fear clutched at my heart. I thought, ‘I will never see him again.’”
“Well, here I am.”
“I am so glad, Bear-naard.”
I gave her hand a squeeze.
The second feature was The Left Hand of God, one of Bogart’s last films. He plays an American pilot in China during the war, working for Lee J. Cobb, who’s a Chinese warlord. Cobb’s men kill a priest, and Bogart winds up escaping in the dead priest’s clothing and holing up at a mission, where he poses as the priest’s replacement, reminding me a little of Edward G. Robinson in Brother Orchid.
It all works out in the end.
Across the street, we sipped cappuccino and split an eclair. After a long silence she said, “I was so worried, Bear-naard.”
“Were you? I knew he and the nurse were going to wind up together. I thought he might have to kill Lee J. Cobb, but that was a nice touch, having them throw dice.”
“I am not talking about the film.”
“Oh.”
“I thought I had lost you. I thought you were on your way to another woman.”
“Didn’t I tell you it was a business appointment?”
“But you would say that, no? Even if it were not so.” She looked down at her hands. “I would understand if you were with another woman. I have been…distant. But I have had so much on my mind these past weeks. The only time I feel alive is when we are in the movies together. The rest of the time I can barely breathe.”
“What’s the matter, Ilona?”
She shook her head. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Sure you can.”
“Not now. Another time.” She sipped her cappuccino. “Tell me about your business appointment. Or is it a confidential matter?”
“Someone had a library for me to look at,” I said. “I usually do that sort of thing in the early evening, but we’ve been at the movies every night. I thought I would be safe scheduling it for late last night.”
“Because I have been hard to get, yes?”
“Well…”
“You have another library to look at tonight, Bear-naard?”
“No.”
“I have a few books. I do not think they are valuable, but maybe you can come and see them.” She extended her forefinger, ran it along my jawline, then touched it to my lips. “But perhaps you have another business appointment, and I will have to go home all by myself.”
It turned out she lived on Twenty-fifth Street between Second and Third avenues, in a fifth-floor walk-up over a shop called Simple Pleasures. They sold crystals and incense and tarot cards, and signs in the window advertised classes in witchcraft and bondage.
The stairs were steep, and there were lots of them. I could imagine what Captain Hoberman would have made of them.
She lived in one of the two rear apartments, just one room with a single window that looked across an airshaft to the blank wall of a much taller building on Twenty-sixth Street. She turned on the bare-bulb ceiling fixture, then switched it off as soon as she’d turned on a green-shaded brass student lamp on the little one-drawer desk, then turned that off after she’d lit the three candles that stood on top of an old-fashioned brass-bound footlocker in the far corner. The flames of the candles illuminated the artifacts of a little homemade shrine. T
here were photos, framed and unframed, an icon of a Madonna and child, another of a bearded sunken-eyed saint, and a collection of other small objects, including a quartz crystal that could have come from the shop downstairs.
Otherwise the apartment didn’t have much to make it hers. A pair of plastic milk cartons housed her books, and a bound broadloom remnant, stained and worn, covered about half of a floor that badly needed refinishing. The bed and dresser looked to have come with the apartment, or from a thrift shop. The walls were bare except for a Birds of the World calendar hanging from a nail and, Scotch-taped to the wall above the desk, a National Geographic map of Eastern Europe. It was impossible to make out much in the candlelight, but it would have been hard to miss the small jagged area outlined in red Magic Marker.
“This must be Anatruria,” I said.
She moved to stand beside me. “My country,” she said, her voice heavy with irony. “The center of the universe.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “This is the center of the universe.”
“New York?”
“This room.”
“You are so romantic.”
“You are so beautiful.”
“Oh, Bear-naard…”
And there, if you don’t mind, I’m going to be old-fashioned enough to draw a curtain. We embraced and disrobed and went to bed, but you’ll have to imagine the details for yourself. We didn’t do anything you couldn’t see on television, anyway, if you’ve got cable and stay up late enough.
“Bear-naard? Sometimes I smoke after I make love.”
“I can believe it,” I said. “Oh. You mean a cigarette.”
“Yes. Would it bother you?”
“No, of course not.”
“My cigarettes are in the drawer of the night table. Could you reach them for me?”
I passed her a half-full pack of short unfiltered Camels. She put one in her mouth and let me scratch a match and light it for her. She sucked in the smoke as if it were life-sustaining, then pursed her lips and blew it out like Bacall showing Bogart how to whistle.
“Of course a cigarette,” she said suddenly. “What else would I smoke? A herring?”
“Hardly that,” I agreed.
“It is to lessen the sadness,” she said. “Shall I tell you something? I wanted to make love with you the first night, Bear-naard. But I knew it would make me sad.”
“I guess I must not be very good at it.”
“But how can you say that? You are a wonderful lover. That is why you break my heart.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look at me, Bear-naard.”
“You’re crying.”
I reached to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. A fresh one promptly took its place.
“It is no use to wipe them away,” she said. “There are always more.” She took another deep drag on her cigarette. When she smoked, she really smoked. “It is the way I am,” she explained. “Lovemaking saddens me. The better it is, the worse I feel.”
“That’s a hell of a thing,” I said. “I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I feel terrific.”
“I have a good feeling, too.”
“Well, then—”
“But underneath it is this sadness. And so I smoke a cigarette. I don’t like to smoke cigarettes, but I do it to hold back the sadness.”
“Does it work?”
“No.” She handed me the cigarette. “Would you put it out? You can use that little dish for an ashtray. Thank you. And now would you stay with me for a little while? And hold me, Bear-naard.”
After a while she started to talk. The apartment was awful, she said, but it was all she could afford. New York was so expensive, especially for someone without a steady salary. And the location was good because she often got work in the area of the United Nations, translating or proofreading documents. She could take a bus right up First Avenue, or even walk if the weather was good and she had the time.
She knew there were things she could do to make the place nicer. She could paint the walls, she could replace the horrible rug, she could buy a TV set. Maybe she would get around to it someday. If she was still here. If she didn’t move….
Her breathing changed and I decided she was sleeping. My own eyes had closed by that time, and I could feel myself drifting. But “Would you stay with me for a little while?” wasn’t exactly an invitation to bed down for the night, nor was her bed wide enough for two people to sleep in. It was okay for presleep activity, as long as you didn’t get overly athletic, but when it came time to make a long string of zzzz’s, it was a tad crowded.
I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake her, picked out and put on the pieces of hastily discarded clothing that were mine. Before extinguishing the candles I went to the door and unlocked the locks so I wouldn’t have to fumble with them in the dark.
Then I went to put out the candles and found myself drawn to her little shrine. There was a family portrait in a drugstore frame, a stiffly posed snapshot of a father, a mother, and a daughter that must have been Ilona at age six or seven. Her hair was lighter and her features undefined, but it seemed to me that her eyes already held their characteristic expression of ironic self-amusement.
You’re falling in love, I thought, with a little ironic self-amusement all my own.
I picked up the crystal, felt its weight in my palm, put it back. I looked at the icons and decided they were authentic old ones, although probably not of great value. I fingered a military or ecclesiastical decoration, a bronze medallion with a portrait of a mitered bishop and an inscription in Cyrillic lettering, hanging from a ribbon of gold and scarlet. There was a Maria Theresa thaler, and a white-metal medallion with the bust of some king I couldn’t recognize, reposing in the bottom half of its original velvet-lined presentation box.
Family treasures, no doubt. And there was a tiny menagerie, including a cast-iron dog and cat (hand-painted, the paint gone in spots), another dog of hand-painted china, a trio of china penguins (one missing the tip of one wing), and a very well-carved if stolid wooden camel. Childhood souvenirs, as no doubt were the miniature cup and saucer, the probable sole survivors of a dollhouse tea set.
Another photo caught my eye as I set about snuffing the candles. It stood in an easel-backed frame and showed a man and woman about my age. She had really big hair; it was piled high on her head, and reminded me of the fur hat on the Ludomir vodka label. She was wearing a tailored jacket, and around her shoulders she’d draped a silver fox stole. He wore a belted Norfolk jacket and a flowing silk scarf, and he had one arm around the woman’s waist and was raising the other hand in greeting, and aiming a blinding smile at the camera.
He reminded me of somebody I knew, but I couldn’t think who.
I was still working on it when I pinched out the third and final candle, at which time I could no longer see his smiling face. So I found other things to think about, like where the door could have been the last time I’d seen it. Very little light came in through Ilona’s window; it was almost as dark as the apartment at the Boccaccio had been, and this time I didn’t have my flashlight along. There was a narrow band of light from the hallway showing at the bottom of the door, and I managed to walk to it without bumping into anything along the way.
I stepped out into the hallway and drew the door shut, then tried it to make sure the snaplock had engaged. I hated to leave her with only a snaplock between her and the big bad world, but I hadn’t brought my tools with me. If I had I could have locked up properly, but maybe it was just as well. It would have been hard to explain.
It had threatened to rain late that afternoon, but the evening turned out clear and mild and it was nice out now. I was a fifteen-minute walk from the bookstore, but if I went there now I’d be nine hours early for work.
The lovemaking that had saddened Ilona had left me edgy, which made the two of us a hell of an advertisement for great sex. I felt as though I could walk clear to St. Louis and punch somebody in the mouth when I got there. I walke
d eight or ten blocks and flagged a cab. As I scrunched up my legs to get them into the backseat, the first thought that came to me was to take a run up to the Wexford Castle and see if Ludomir was as bad as I remembered. The second thought was to recognize the first thought for the idiocy it was, and I told the driver to take me home.
CHAPTER
Eight
Around ten-thirty the next morning I was reading Hop To It, a slender volume on how to train your pet rabbit. I’d rescued it from my own bargain table, and was taking a break from Will Durant before reshelving it under Pets & Natural History. The photos of the bunnies were endearing, but the text made it clear they were much given to chewing things, like books and electrical wiring. “Don’t worry,” I told Raffles. “We’re not getting one. Your job is safe.”
He gave me a look that suggested the issue had never been in doubt, and I crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it for him to chase. He was in mid-pounce when Carolyn came in. “Hi, Raffles,” she said. “How’s the training coming?”
“He’s doing fine,” I said. “This is just a tune-up session, to keep his mousing skills from getting rusty. You’re two hours early, incidentally.”
“I’m not early,” she said. “I’m instead of. I can’t do lunch today, I’ve got a dentist appointment.”
“You didn’t mention it.”
“I didn’t have it to mention,” she said, “until about an hour ago. I lost a filling during dinner last night. I think I must have swallowed it. The worst part is I can’t keep from checking it out, poking my tongue into the hole to make sure it’s still there. Would you look at it for me, Bern?”
“What for?”
“Tell me it’s not as huge as I think it is. I swear the hole’s bigger than most teeth. You could park cars in there, Bern. You could house the homeless.”
She came over and stuck her face into mine, gaping and pointing at a molar. “Erg-awrghghm,” she said.