Concert of Ghosts (11 page)

He gazed at Alison. In her small determined features he might find an anchor to something substantial.

She pressed Trebanzi's buzzer. She looked at Tennant with such a profound expectancy that he hoped Trebanzi would not be a waste of time for her, that all kinds of information would come tumbling, by preposterous magic, out of this one man's mouth. Bear's address? Sure, no sweat. Maggie Silver? Hey, got her phone number right here. Harry Tennant's memory? No problem. Got it in my attaché case. What else can I do for you?

In dreams
, Tennant thought as Alison pressed the bell again. The tenement was weirdly quiet, as if unoccupied, every buzzer disconnected.

“Answer, come on,” Alison said, keeping her finger attached solidly to the bell. “Come on, Alphonse. Answer. Talk to me.”

A fuzzy sound came from the speaker. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Trebanzi?”

“Yeah.” The voice was distant, as if it might have traveled all the way from a high turret.

“I wonder if you could spare a few minutes to speak to me,” Alison said. “We've never met. My name's Alison Seagrove. I don't need much of your time.”

“What you want to speak about?” Trebanzi asked.

“I'm a journalist. I'm writing a piece on San Francisco, the late sixties.”

“How come you're ringing
my
goddamn buzzer, lady? What makes you think I'd know anything about San Francisco?”

“Look, it's cold and wet down here. Can we talk face-to-face? Can I come up?”

A long silence. A car passed slowly down the street. Tennant observed it, aware of two occupants who showed no apparent interest in Alison or himself.

“It's important to me,” Alison said. “I wouldn't trouble you otherwise.”

“You alone?”

“Sure.” She glanced at Tennant, who indicated with a gesture of his head that he'd follow her inside as soon as Trebanzi pressed the button to open the door. Instant complicity: Tennant liked it.

“I don't know about this,” Trebanzi said. “I lead like a real quiet life here, you unnerstand? I don't want my name in some scuzzy rag.”

“I promise. No publicity.”

“You wanna give me that in writing?”

“If you like.”

“Okay. I'm on the third floor. You got five minutes.”

The buzzer sounded, the front door opened, a hallway of closed doors stretched toward the stairs. A solitary bulb, slung high overhead, was the only source of light. Tennant stepped in quickly behind the girl and followed her toward the staircase, which rose up through tiers of darkness. He had the odd impression again of emptiness, as if the sole occupant of the house was the man called Trebanzi. Every other door led into vacant unfurnished rooms. A spooky setting, a haunted house: How appropriate to be tracking his past in such a place.

Quietly, he followed Alison to the foot of the stairs, conscious of the corrupt odor of damp wallpaper. The arrangement of the stairway made it possible to see up between the handrails to the blackened skylight at the top of the house, beneath which was a scaffolding of the sort workers erect, a short spidery arrangement of metal tubes and planks. Perhaps some form of renovation was going on.

He put a foot on the bottom step.

Which was the moment it hit him, the flash, the rolling away in his mind of thunder and thin lightning, a shift in the gears of his brain. Strength went out of his legs. This house. The smell. The clamminess that choked him. Either he'd been in this place before or it brought back to mind, with ghastly precision, a house very similar, one in which he'd been skewered, crucified. And somehow Maggie Silver was there, a lovely burning cinder in his head. Why?

He looked upward toward the skylight.

It wasn't the house. It wasn't the damp perfume.

The scaffolding.
Something to do with the scaffolding
.

“Harry, for God's sake, are you sick, what is it?”

His eyes watered as he gazed at the assortment of tubes and planks that, hardly touched by the reaches of electricity, resembled an insane sculpture, something hammered together in a nightmare.

“Are you ill? What is it?” Alison placed a hand against the side of his face. Aware of her concerned look, he caught himself and reached for the handrail. Support. Something solid.

“You're white, Harry.” And she touched his forehead, checking him for fever. She was almost nurselike in her worry. He shook his head from side to side. He heard himself say something about a dizzy spell, something to convince the girl. But it wasn't that. It was more. A dizzy spell didn't cut it. Didn't go anywhere near cutting it.

“We can go outside,” she said. “You need air.”

“I'm fine.”

“You're sure?”

“Sure.”

“You don't sound sure.”

“No. I'm fine.”

“You scared me, Harry.”

I
scared myself
. What for Christ's sake had happened to him? Some kind of acid rerun, an image he'd brought back from an old trip through the jungles of consciousness? An enigma grounded in some very ordinary alignment of metal pipes and planks of wood—what kind of sense did that make? Where did that belong in his life? Scaffolding beneath a black skylight. It was slippage, spillage from another time. A discharge of the brain; the mind's knavery.

Maggie Silver, he thought. What did the commonplace structure above have to do with a girl he couldn't remember knowing? He wondered if he was doomed to move in the same purgatorial circle of amnesia all his days. You can't get out, Harry. Sorry. No exit.

He moved cautiously up the stairs, fearing another attack. There was a buzzsawing pain deep in his skull. He followed Alison, who kept glancing back at him as if to reassure herself that he wasn't about to lose his balance again. He had an odd sense now of treading through warm syrup, struggling as he climbed.

On the landing he stopped. The pain dissolved; a tiny liberation. Breathing hard, he again glanced up at the scaffolding. It was badly rusted. Some absentee landlord had apparently abandoned a renovation project long ago, and now the matter was forgotten. An ancient bankruptcy, a change of ownership, whatever; the construction rotted, beyond any practical use. He didn't want to look at it. He couldn't risk absorption in the sight of the thing.

Another flight of stairs. Another landing. The air was cloying. He was more acutely aware than before of the great silence of the house around him, no TV, no crying baby, nobody coughing. The only scents were those of decaying wallpaper and rotted wood—nothing of food, fried meat, boiled vegetables. What did they do, all the people whose names were inscribed under the buzzers outside? Did they never eat, sleep, make love, argue? Unsettled, he stood very still. As if she too had become conscious of the same absences, Alison stopped halfway across the landing.

This was the third floor. Trebanzi's floor. There were four doors on the landing.

“There's something bizarre about this,” Alison said. She was whispering.

“Think of it as a game show,” Tennant remarked. Keep it light. Goose feathers. “Choose the correct door, you win the three-piece living-room furniture plus—and this'll make your mouth water—the propane barbecue grill.”

Although each door had a number, none had a nameplate. If anyone lived in the rooms beyond, they worked at anonymity. Why hadn't Trebanzi come out to meet Alison anyhow? Why hadn't she been directed to a specific room number?

“Go on. Pick a door,” he said.

The voice came from overhead, from the floor where the scaffolding was located. “
Yeah. Listen to your pal, lady, and pick a door.
”

Tennant, surprised, stared up.

“Trebanzi?” Alison asked.

A shadow was visible among the struts and cylinders. “You think I'm fucking crazy, lady? You think I open my door to anybody that comes calling? ‘Ooo-eee, glad you dropped in, have a glass of boojolly with me, let's remember the good old days.' It ain't like that, sweetheart. Plus, you lied to me. You brought company when you said you was all alone.”

Tennant put his hand in the pocket that contained the gun.

Trebanzi said, “I wouldn't be thinking that way in your situation, jack.” And he came forward from the shadows of the scaffolding. He held a shotgun, the barrel of which he directed down at Tennant, who immediately lowered his hand to his side. He had no expertise in a situation like this. What was he supposed to do? Go for a quick draw? The shotgun was fat and lethal.

“You got a name?” Trebanzi asked.

“Tennant.”

“Tennant. Tennant.” Trebanzi, seeming to savor vowels and consonants as if he'd been deprived too long of speech, stepped into the light for the first time. He had a large bald head that sat in an ungainly way on a body that might once have been fleshy; skin hung loosely from his forearms. The man was either very sick or maintained himself, for reasons of vanity or psychosis, on a malnutrition diet. He moved a little way forward, and his features caught the light. The left side of his face was mauve and puckered, as if a skin graft had been attempted and failed. One eyelid was smooth and permanently shut, the upper lip locked in an oddly sad look. It was a disfigurement you could both fear and pity.

“Tennant,” Trebanzi said again. He spoke hoarsely. “So explain yourself. I'm listening hard. What the hell brings
you
here on a night like this, huh? What's your connection with our scribbler friend—if that's what she is.”

Tennant glanced at Alison, but she was looking upward, hypnotized by the shotgun. He said, “I'm a research assistant,” which sounded feeble even to himself. He pondered the possibility of a more detailed fabrication—he was, say, her photographer as well, blah blah blah. But Trebanzi, in that unsettling voice of his, would have commented on the absence of a camera.

“You're the assistant, Tennant. The scribbler's pal. Is that it? You carry her notebooks and sharpen her pencils with a little tool, huh?”

“Something like that.”

Trebanzi laughed. An odd sound, a wheeze, an old accordion. “I ain't in a buying mood, Tennant,” he said, and turned to look at Alison. “Show me what you got, lady. Lemme see some paper.”

Alison tossed her wallet up and Trebanzi seized it deftly; he flipped the plastic inserts, checked her ID, then let the wallet fall from his fingers.

She caught it. “Satisfied?” she asked sharply.

“Let's say you're a writer. What brings you to me?” Trebanzi asked. “What makes you think I got some association with San Francisco in the time frame you mentioned?”

“You knew a man called Bear. Bear Sajac.”

“Yeah?”

“According to my information.”

“Your information sucks, lady. I never heard of any Bear Sag … Saje … whatever you said.”

“Sajac. He lived with you in the Haight.”

“I never set foot in the place. I never met any Bear. You got the wrong end of the stick.”

A silence. The big house retained sounds in a miserly way. Nothing echoed. Nothing reverberated. A dead house—and it made Tennant more curious than ever. With an impulse he couldn't deny, he reached for the door nearest to him and pushed it open. Through uncurtained windows a street lamp cast a flat, spectral light. The room was bare. No furniture. No inhabitant. Nothing. Lifeless.

“
Asshole! What you playing at?
” Trebanzi shouted.

He fired his shotgun. Tennant, amazed by the roar, heard the air collapse around him; a black hole, an implosion in his eardrums. The shot ripped through old woodwork, and for a moment the air smelled like that of an abandoned sawmill. The cartridge had come too close, far too close; Tennant had the feeling that if mortality was a telephone line, he'd just committed the number to heart.

“Don't go wandering around, Tennant. Don't think you're an invited guest here, because you ain't. Shut that door. Do it now.”

Tennant didn't move. He wondered what perversity made him disobey Trebanzi's order. Was it the stubbornness Rayland had attributed to him? Was it—sweet Jesus—an off-center wish for death? Suddenly he resented Trebanzi and his goddamn shotgun. He hated being ordered around. He despised Trebanzi the way he despised Ralph Flitt and his threats; he begrudged the loss of his house and land, his dog, how all the safe chambers of his life had been violated and destroyed. Now this sad-looking bastard with a shotgun was menacing him, and he wanted to strike back somehow. “What's got you running scared, Alphonse? You live here all alone, don't you? The names outside. The buzzers. The pretense of tenants. It's a mock-up. So what's happening? What are you hiding?”

“I ain't scared, Tennant. I'm a hermit, okay?” Trebanzi said. “I like my own company in my own goddamn house. The human race is slime. You don't take this”—and he touched his face with a gesture of contempt—“out on the streets too often. I mind my own business, asshole. This scumbucket of a house belongs to me and if I don't want to rent rooms there ain't a law in the land says I got to. Okay? You
absorbed
that?”

Alison looked up at Trebanzi. “Listen, if you'll turn the gun to the other side, we'll call this a mistake and walk out of here. The end. You won't be troubled again.”

“Hold your horses, lady. The party's not over.”

“I think it is. You didn't know Bear. We've got nothing to say to each other. Good night.”

“I said hold on.” Trebanzi leaned against the handrail. “The way I see it, we got unfinished business.”

“What would that be, Trebanzi?” Alison asked.

“I'm interested in how come my name cropped up. I mean, how did you stumble across some connectorooni between me and this, this
Bear?
”

“I did what I'm usually good at,” Alison said. “Research.”

“Research, huh? Tell me how that works.”

“There's always a trail, Trebanzi. You leave signs behind no matter how fast you keep moving. You left yours in a drug rehab facility in Atlantic Beach.” Alison had a small confident smile on her face, as if she sensed that, despite the shotgun, she had the upper hand with Trebanzi. She sighed and added, “Clearly, though, I made a mistake in your case. Unlikely as it seems, there's got to be another Alphonse Trebanzi walking around, and I got confused. I took a wrong turn in my research. No biggie. I'll get out of your hair and start again.”