“Yes.”
“Not everyone with AIDS has it but a lot of them do, and most sickrooms reek of it. You must have smelled it in Bobby’s room. It’s an unholy musty smell, a smell like rotted leather. I can’t stand the smell of leather anymore. I used to love leather, but now I can’t help associating it with the stink of gay men wasting away in fetid airless rooms.
“And this whole building smells that way to me. There’s the stench of disinfectant over everything. We use tons of it, spray and liquid. The virus is surprisingly frail, it doesn’t last long outside the body, but we leave as little as possible to chance, and so the rooms and halls all smell of disinfectant. But underneath it, always, there’s the smell of the disease itself.”
He turned the pipe over in his hands. “His clothes were full of the smell. John’s. I gave everything away. But his pipes held a scent I had always associated with him, and a pipe is such a personal thing, isn’t it, with the smoker’s toothmarks in the stem.” He looked at me. His eyes were dry, his voice strong and steady. There was no grief in his tone, only in the words themselves. “Two years in November, though I swear it doesn’t seem that long, and I use one smell to keep another at bay. And, I suppose, to bridge the gap of years, to keep him a little closer to me.” He put the pipe down. “Back to cases. Will you take a careful but unofficial look at our Angel of Death?”
I said I would. He said I’d want a retainer, and opened the top drawer of his desk. I told him it wouldn’t be necessary.
“But isn’t that standard for private detectives?”
“I’m not one, not officially. I don’t have a license.”
“So you told me, but even so — “
“I’m not a lawyer, either,” I went on, “but there’s no reason why I can’t do a little pro bono work once in a while. If it takes too much of my time I’ll let you know, but for now let’s call it a donation.”
The hospice was in the Village, on Hudson Street. Rachel Bookspan lived five miles north in an Italianate brownstone on Claremont Avenue. Her husband, Paul, walked to work at Columbia University, where he was an associate professor of political science. Rachel was a free-lance copy editor, hired by several publishers to prepare manuscripts for publication. Her specialties were history and biography.
She told me all this over coffee in her book-lined living room. She talked about a manuscript she was working on, the biography of a woman who had founded a religious sect in the late nineteenth century. She talked about her children, two boys, who would be home from school in an hour or so. Finally she ran out of steam and I brought the conversation back to her brother, Arthur Fineberg, who had lived on Morton Street and worked downtown as a librarian for an investment firm. And who had died two weeks ago at the Caritas Hospice.
“How we cling to life,” she said. “Even when it’s awful. Even when we yearn for death.”
“Did your brother want to die?”
“He prayed for it. Every day the disease took a little more from him, gnawing at him like a mouse, and after months and months and months of hell it finally took his will to live. He couldn’t fight anymore. He had nothing to fight with, nothing to fight for. But he went on living all the same.”
She looked at me, then looked away. “He begged me to kill him,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“How could I refuse him? But how could I help him? First I thought it wasn’t right, but then I decided it was his life, and who had a better right to end it if he wanted to? But how could I do it? How?
“I thought of pills. We don’t have anything in the house except Midol for cramps. I went to my doctor and said I had trouble sleeping. Well, that was true enough. He gave me a prescription for a dozen Valium. I didn’t even bother getting it filled. I didn’t want to give Artie a handful of tranquilizers. I wanted to give him one of those cyanide capsules the spies always had in World War Two movies. You bite down and you’re gone. But where do you go to get something like that?”
She sat forward in her chair. “Do you remember that man in the Midwest who unhooked his kid from a respirator? The doctors wouldn’t let the boy die and the father went into the hospital with a gun and held everybody at bay until his son was dead. I think that man was a hero.”
“A lot of people thought so.”
“God, I wanted to be a hero! I had fantasies. There’s a Robinson Jeffers poem about a crippled hawk and the narrator puts it out of its misery. ‘I gave him the lead gift,’he says. Meaning a bullet, a gift of lead. I wanted to give my brother that gift. I don’t have a gun. I don’t even believe in guns. At least I never did. I don’t know what I believe in anymore.
“If I’d had a gun, could I have gone in there and shot him? I don’t see how. I have a knife, I have a kitchen full of knives, and believe me, I thought of going in there with a knife in my purse and waiting until he dozed off and then slipping the knife between his ribs and into his heart. I visualized it, I went over every aspect of it, but I didn’t do it. My God, I never even left the house with a knife in my bag.”
She asked if I wanted more coffee. I said I didn’t. I asked her if her brother had had other visitors, and if he might have made the same request of one of them.
“He had dozens of friends, men and women who loved him. And yes, he would have asked them. He told everybody he wanted to die. As hard as he fought to live, for all those months, that’s how determined he became to die. Do you think someone helped him?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“God, I hope so,” she said. “I just wish it had been me.”
“I haven’t had the test,” Aldo said. “I’m a forty-four-year-old gay man who led an active sex life since I was fifteen. I don’t have to take the test, Matthew. I assume I’m seropositive. I assume everybody is.”
He was a plump teddy bear of a man, with curly black hair and a face as permanently buoyant as a smile button. We were sharing a small table at a coffeehouse on Bleecker, just two doors from the shop where he sold comic books and baseball cards to collectors.
“I may not develop the disease,” he said. “I may die a perfectly respectable death due to overindulgence in food and drink. I may get hit by a bus or struck down by a mugger. If I do get sick I’ll wait until it gets really bad, because I love this life, Matthew, I really do. But when the time comes I don’t want to make local stops. I’m gonna catch an express train out of here.”
“You sound like a man with his bags packed.”
“No luggage. Travelin’light. You remember the song?”
“Of course.”
He hummed a few bars of it, his foot tapping out the rhythm, our little marble-topped table shaking with the motion. He said, “I have pills enough to do the job. I also have a loaded handgun. And I think I have the nerve to do what I have to do, when I have to do it.” He frowned, an uncharacteristic expression for him. “The danger lies in waiting too long. Winding up in a hospital bed too weak to do anything, too addled by brain fever to remember what it was you were supposed to do. Wanting to die but unable to manage it.”
“I’ve heard there are people who’ll help.”
“You’ve heard that, have you?”
“One woman in particular.”
“What are you after, Matthew?”
“You were a friend of Grayson Lewes. And of Arthur Fineberg. There’s a woman who helps people who want to die. She may have helped them.”
“And?”
“And you know how to get in touch with her.”
“Who says?”
“I forget, Aldo.”
The smile was back. “You’re discreet, huh?”
“Very.”
“I don’t want to make trouble for her.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then why not leave her alone?”
“There’s a hospice administrator who’s afraid she’s murdering people. He called me in rather than start an official police inquiry. But if I don’t get anywhere — “
“He calls the cops.” He found his address book, copied out a number for me. “Please don’t make trouble for her,” he said. “I might need her myself.”
I called her that evening, met her the following afternoon at a cocktail lounge just off Washington Square. She was as described, even to the gray cape over a long gray dress. Her scarf today was canary yellow. She was drinking Perrier, and I ordered the same.
She said, “Tell me about your friend. You say he’s very ill.”
“He wants to die. He’s been begging me to kill him but I can’t do it.”
“No, of course not.”
“I was hoping you might be able to visit him.”
“If you think it might help. Tell me something about him, why don’t you.”
I don’t suppose she was more than forty-five, if that, but there was something ancient about her face. You didn’t need much of a commitment to reincarnation to believe she had lived before. Her facial features were pronounced, her eyes a graying blue. Her voice was pitched low, and along with her height it raised doubts about her sexuality. She might have been a sex change, or a drag queen. But I didn’t think so. There was an Eternal Female quality to her that didn’t feel like parody.
I said, “I can’t.”
“Because there’s no such person.”
“I’m afraid there are plenty of them, but I don’t have one in mind.” I told her in a couple of sentences why I was there. When I’d finished she let the silence stretch, then asked me if I thought she could kill anyone. I told her it was hard to know what anyone could do.
She said, “I think you should see for yourself what it is that I do.”
She stood up. I put some money on the table and followed her out to the street.
We took a cab to a four-story brick building on Twenty-second Street west of Ninth. We climbed two flights of stairs, and the door opened when she knocked on it. I could smell the disease before I was across the threshold. The young black man who opened the door was glad to see her and unsurprised by my presence. He didn’t ask my name or tell me his.
“Kevin’s so tired,” he told us both. “It breaks my heart.”
We walked through a neat, sparsely furnished living room and down a short hallway to a bedroom, where the smell was stronger. Kevin lay in a bed with its head cranked up. He looked like a famine victim, or someone liberated from Dachau. Terror filled his eyes.
She pulled a chair up to the side of his bed and sat in it. She took his hand in hers and used her free hand to stroke his forehead. “You’re safe now,” she told him. “You’re safe, you don’t have to hurt anymore, you did all the things you had to do. You can relax now, you can let go now, you can go to the light.
“You can do it,” she told him. “Close your eyes, Kevin, and go inside yourself and find the part that’s holding on. Somewhere within you there’s a part of you that’s like a clenched fist, and I want you to find that part and be with that part. And let go. Let the fist open its fingers. It’s as if the fist is holding a little bird, and if you open up the hand the bird can fly free. Just let it happen, Kevin. Just let go.”
He was straining to talk, but the best he could do was make a sort of cawing sound. She turned to the black man, who was standing in the doorway. “David,” she said, “his parents aren’t living, are they?”
“I believe they’re both gone.”
“Which one was he closest to?”
“I don’t know. I believe they’re both gone a long time now.”
“Did he have a lover? Before you, I mean.”
“Kevin and I were never lovers. I don’t even know him that well. I’m here ‘cause he hasn’t got anybody else. He had a lover.”
“Did his lover die? What was his name?”
“Martin.”
“Kevin,” she said, “you’re going to be all right now. All you have to do is go to the light. Do you see the light? Your mother’s there, Kevin, and your father, and Martin — “
“Mark!” David cried. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m so stupid, it wasn’t Martin, it was Mark, Mark, that was his name.”
“That’s all right, David.”
“I’m so damn stupid — “
“Look into the light, Kevin,” she said. “Mark is there, and your parents, and everyone who ever loved you. Matthew, take his other hand. Kevin, you don’t have to stay here anymore, darling. You did everything you came here to do. You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to hold on. You can let go, Kevin. You can go to the light. Let go and reach out to the light — “
I don’t know how long she talked to him. Fifteen, twenty minutes, I suppose. Several times he made the cawing sound, but for the most part he was silent. Nothing seemed to be happening, and then I realized that his terror was no longer a presence. She seemed to have talked it away. She went on talking to him, stroking his brow and holding his hand, and I held his other hand. I was no longer listening to what she was saying, just letting the words wash over me while my mind played with some tangled thought like a kitten with yarn.
Then something happened. The energy in the room shifted and I looked up, knowing that he was gone.
“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, Kevin. God bless you, God give you rest. Yes.”
“Sometimes they’re stuck,” she said. “They want to go but they can’t. They’ve been hanging on so long, you see, that they don’t know how to stop.”
“So you help them.”
“If I can.”
“What if you can’t? Suppose you talk and talk and they still hold on?”
“Then they’re not ready. They’ll be ready another time. Sooner or later everybody lets go, everybody dies. With or without my help.”
“And when they’re not ready — “
“Sometimes I come back another time. And sometimes they’re ready then.”
“What about the ones who beg for help? The ones like Arthur Fineberg, who plead for death but aren’t physically close enough to it to let go?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“The thing you want to say. The thing that’s stuck in your throat, the way his own unwanted life was stuck in Kevin’s throat. You’re holding on to it.”
“Just let it go, eh?”
“If you want.”
We were walking somewhere in Chelsea, and we walked a full block now without either of us saying a word. Then she said, “I think there’s a world of difference between assisting someone verbally and doing anything physical to hasten death.”
“So do I.”
“And that’s where I draw the line. But sometimes, having drawn that line — “
“You step over it.”
“Yes. The first time I swear I acted without conscious intent. I used a pillow, I held it over his face and — “ She breathed deeply. “I swore it would never happen again. But then there was someone else, and he just needed help, you know, and — “
“And you helped him.”
“Yes. Was I wrong?”
“I don’t know what’s right or wrong.”
“Suffering is wrong,” she said, “unless it’s part of His plan, and how can I presume to decide if it is or not? Maybe people can’t let go because there’s one more lesson they have to learn before they move on. Who the hell am I to decide it’s time for somebody’s life to end? How dare I interfere?”
“And yet you do.”
“Just once in a while, when I just don’t see a way around it. Then I do what I have to do. I’m sure I must have a choice in the matter, but I swear it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel as though I have any choice at all.” She stopped walking, turned to look at me. She said, “Now what happens?”
“Well, she’s the Merciful Angel of Death,” I told Carl Orcott. “She visits the sick and dying, almost always at somebody’s invitation. A friend contacts her, or a relative.”
“Do they pay her?”
“Sometimes they try to. She won’t take any money. She even pays for the flowers herself.??
? She’d taken Dutch iris to Kevin’s apartment on Twenty-second Street. Blue, with yellow centers that matched her scarf.
“She does it pro bono,” he said.
“And she talks to them. You heard what Bobby said. I got to see her in action. She talked the poor son of a bitch straight out of this world and into the next one. I suppose you could argue that what she does comes perilously close to hypnosis, that she hypnotizes people and convinces them to kill themselves psychically, but I can’t imagine anybody trying to sell that to a jury.”
“She just talks to them.”
“Uh-huh. ‘Let go, go to the light.’“
” ‘And have a nice day.’“
“That’s the idea.”
“She’s not killing people?”
“Nope. Just letting them die.”
He picked up a pipe. “Well, hell,” he said, “that’s what we do. Maybe I ought to put her on staff.” He sniffed the pipe bowl. “You have my thanks, Matthew. Are you sure you don’t want some of our money to go with it? Just because Mercy works pro bono doesn’t mean you should have to.”
“That’s all right.”
“You’re certain?”
I said, “You asked me the first day if I knew what AIDS smelled like.”
“And you said you’d smelled it before. Oh.”
I nodded. “I’ve lost friends to it. I’ll lose more before it’s over. In the meantime I’m grateful when I get the chance to do you a favor. Because I’m glad this place is here, so people have a place to come to.”
Even I was glad she was around, the woman in gray, the Merciful Angel of Death. To hold the door for them, and show them the light on the other side. And, if they really needed it, to give them the least little push through it.
We left halfway through the curtain calls, threading our way up the aisle and across the lobby. Inside it had been winter in Paris, with La Bohème’s lovers shivering and starving; outside it was New York, with spring turning into summer.
We held hands and walked across the great courtyard, past the fountain shimmering under the lights, past Avery Fisher Hall. Our apartment is in the Parc Vendome, at Fifty-seventh and Ninth, and we headed in that direction and walked a block or so in silence.