Death Is a Lonely Business (30 page)

"Nine times, I guess. Yeah. Nine should do it."

"How," said Constance, her face pale under her tan, "does that damn first aria from
Tosca
go?"

I got out of her car in front of the tenement just at dusk. The night looked even darker just inside the waiting hall. I stared at it for a long moment. My hands trembled on the door of Constance Rattigan's roadster.

"Want old Ma to come in with you?" she said.

"Good grief, Constance."

"Sorry, kid." She patted my cheek, gave me a kiss that made my eyelids fly up like windowshades, handed me a piece of paper, and shoved. "That's my bungalow phone, listed under the name Trixie Friganza, the I-Don't-Care Girl, remember her? No? Nuts. If someone kicks your bung downstairs, yell. If you find the bastard, form a conga line and throw him off the second-floor porch. You want me to wait here?"

"Constance," I moaned.

Down the hill, she found a red light and went through it.

I came up the stairs to a hall that was dark forever. The lightbulbs had been stolen years ago. I heard someone run. It was a very light tread, like a child's. I froze, listening.

The footsteps diminished and ran down the steps at the rear of the tenement.

The wind blew down the hall and brought the smell with it. It was the scent that Henry had told me about, of clothes that had hung in an attic for a hundred years, and shirts that had been worn for a hundred days. It was like standing in a midnight alley where a pack of hounds had gone to lift their legs with mindless panting smiles.

The smell pulled me into a jumping run. I made it to Fannie's door and braked myself, heart pounding. I gagged because the smell was so strong. He had been here only a few moments ago. I should have run after, but the door itself stopped me. I put out my hand.

The door scraped softly inward on unoiled hinges.

Someone had broken the lock on Fannie's door.

Someone had wanted something.

Someone had gone in to search.

Now, it was my turn.

I stepped forward into a dark remembrance of food.

The air was pure delicatessen, a warm nest where a great, kind, strange elephant had browsed and sung and eaten for twenty years.

How long, I wondered, before the scent of dill and cold cuts and mayonnaise would blow away lost down the tenement stairwells. But now . . .

The room was a ramshackle mess.

He had come in and tumbled the shelves and closets and bureaus. Everything was flung to the linoleum floor. All of Fannie's opera scores were strewn among the broken phonograph records that had been kicked against the wall or toppled in his search.

"Jesus, Fannie," I whispered. "I'm glad you can't see this."

Everything that could have been searched and wrecked was wrecked. Even the great throne chair where Fannie had queened it for half a generation or more was tossed down on its back, as she had been tossed down to stay.

But the one place he had not looked, the last place, I looked now. Stumbling on the shambles, I grabbed the icebox door and pulled.

The cool air sighed out around my face. I stared as I had stared many nights ago, aching to see what was right there before me. What was the thing the stander in the hall, the stranger on the night train, had come to find but left behind for me?

Everything was just as it had always been. Jams, jellies, salad dressings, wilted lettuce, a rich cold shrine of colors and scents where Fannie had worshipped.

But suddenly, I sucked my breath.

I reached out and shoved the jars and bottles and cheese boxes way to the back. They had been placed all this while on a thin folded paper of some size which, until now, I had simply taken as a sheet to catch drippings.

I pulled it out and read by the icebox light,
Janus, the Green Envy Weekly.

I left the box door wide and staggered over to put Fannie's old chair upright and collapse in it, to wait for my heart to slow.

I turned the green-tinted newspaper pages. On the back were obits and personals. I ran my eye down, found nothing, ran it down again, and saw…

A small box, circled faintly with red ink.

And this was what
he
had searched for, to take away forever.

How could I know? Here were the words:

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS? MY HEART CRIES OUT, DOES YOURS? WHY DON'T YOU WRITE OR CALL? I CAN BE HAPPY IF ONLY YOU'D REMEMBER ME AS I REMEMBER YOU. WE HAD SO MUCH AND LOST IT ALL. NOW, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE TO REMEMBER, FIND YOUR WAY BACK.

CALL!

And it was signed:

SOMEONE WHO LOVED YOU, LONG AGO.

And in the margin were these words, scrawled by someone:

SOMEONE WHO LOVED YOU, WITH A FULL HEART, LONG AGO.

Jesus at midnight, Mary in the morn.

I read it six times in disbelief.

I let the paper fall, walked on it, stood in the icebox draft to cool off. Then I went back to read the damn message for a seventh time.

What a piece of work it was, what a beaut, what a come-on, what a baited trap. What a Rorschach test, what a piece of palmistry, what a numbers game that anyone could sum and win with. Men, women, old, young, dark, light, tall, thin. "Listen, look! This means YOU.

It applied to anyone who had ever loved and lost, meaning every single soul in the whole damned city, state, and universe.

Who, reading it, would not be tempted to lift a phone, dial, wait, and whisper at last, late at night:

Here I am. Please, come find me.

I stood in the middle of the linoleum floor of Fannie's apartment and tried to imagine her here, the ship's deck creaking underfoot as her weight shifted this way and that, as
Tosca
lamented from the phonograph, and the icebox door stood wide with its enshrined condiments, her eyes moving, her heart beating like a hummingbird trapped in a vast aviary.

Christ. The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse
had
to be the editor of a paper like this.

I checked all the other advertisements. The telephone number was the same in each. You had to call one number to get referrals to all the ads. And that phone number belonged to the publishers of, damn them to hell forever,
Janus, the Green Envy Weekly.

Fannie had never in her life bought a paper like this. Someone had given it to her or ... I stopped and glanced at the door.

No!

Someone had left it for her to find with the red ink circling this one ad, so she would be sure to see.

SOMEONE WHO LOVED YOU, WITH A FULL HEART, LONG AGO.

"Fannie!" I cried in dismay. "Oh, you damn, damn fool." I waded through broken shards of
La Boheme
and
Butterfly,
then remembered and stumbled back to slam the icebox door.

Things were no better on the third floor. Henry's door was wide open. I had never seen it open before. Henry believed in shut doors. He didn't want anyone having a sighted advantage on him. But now . . .

"Henry?"

I stepped through, and the small apartment was neat, incredibly neat and clean and filed, everything in place, everything fresh, but empty.

"Henry?"

His cane lay in the middle of the floor, and by it a dark string, a black twine with knots in it.

It all looked scattered and impromptu, as if Henry had lost these in a fight, or left behind when he ran . . .

Where?

"Henry?"

I handled the twine, and looked at the knots. In a line, two knots, a space, three knots, a long space, then a series of three, six, four, and nine knots.

"Henry!" Louder.

I ran to knock on Mrs. Gutierrez's door.

When she opened it and saw me, she welled over. Tears dropped from her eyes as she saw my face. She put her tortilla-scented hand out to touch my cheeks. "Aw, poor, poor. Come in, oh, poor, sit down. Sit. You wanta eat? I bring something. Sit, no, no, sit. Coffee, yes?" She brought me coffee and wiped her eyes. "Poor Fannie. Poor
man.
What?"

I unfolded the newspaper and held it out for her to see.

"No read
inglese,
" she said, backing off.

"Don't have to read," I said. "Did Fannie ever come up to phone and bring this paper with her?"

"No, no!" Her face changed color with memory.
"Estupido! Si.
She came. But I don't know who she call."

"Did she talk a long while, a long time?"

"Long time?" She had to translate my words for a few seconds, then she nodded vigorously. "Si. Long. Long she laugh. Oh, how she laugh and talk, talk and laugh."

While she was inviting Mr. Night and Time and Eternity to come over, I thought.

"And she had this paper with her?"

Mrs. Gutierrez turned the paper over like it was a Chinese puzzle. "Maybe
si,
maybe
no.
This one, some other. I dunno. Fannie is with God."

I turned, weighing 380 pounds, and leaned toward the door, the folded newspaper in my hands.

"I wish I were," I said. "Please, may I use your phone?"

On a hunch I did not dial the
Green Envy
number. Instead, counting the knots, I dialed the numbers of blind Henry's twine.

"Janus Publications," said a nasal voice.
"Green Envy.
Hold."

The phone was dropped to the floor. I heard heavy feet shuffling through wintry mounds of crumpled paper.

"It fits!" I yelled, and scared Mrs. Gutierrez, who jumped back. "The number fits." I yelled at the
Green Envy
paper in my hand. For some reason Henry had knotted the Janus publication's number onto his remembrance twine.

"Hello, hello!" I shouted.

Far off in the
Green Envy
office I could hear some maniac shrieking because he was trapped and electrocuted by a bin of wildly berserk guitars. A rhinoceros and two hippos were dancing a fandango in the latrine to rebut the music. Someone typed during the cataclysm. Someone else was playing a harmonica to a different drummer.

I waited four minutes, then jammed the phone down and stormed out of Mrs. Gutierrez's, raving.

"Mister," said Mrs. Gutierrez, "why you so upset?"

"Upset, upset, who's upset!" I cried. "Christ, people don't come back to phones, I got no money to get out to that damn place, wherever it is in Hollywood, and there's no use calling back, the damn phone's off the hook, and time's running out, and where the hell is Henry. He's dead, damn it!"

Not dead, Mrs. Gutierrez should have said, merely sleeping.

But she didn’t say and I thanked her for her silence and stormed down the hallway, not knowing what to do. I didn't even have money for the stupid red trolley car to Hollywood. I ...

"Henry!" I shouted down the stairwell.

"Yes?" said a voice behind me.

I whirled around. I yelled. There was nothing but darkness there.

"Henry. Is that…?"

"Me," said Henry, and stepped out into what little light there was. "When Henry decides to hide, he truly hides. Holy Moses Armpits was here. I think he knows that we know what he knows about this mess. I just skedaddled out my apartment door when I heard him prowl the porch outside my view window, I just dropped and jumped. Left stuff, I don't care, on the floor. You find it?"

"Yes. Your cane. And the string with knots for numbers."

"You want to know about them knots, that number?"

"Yes."

"I heard crying in the hall, day before Fannie's gone forever. There she is, at my door. I open it to let all that sadness in. Not often I see her upstairs, it kills her to climb. I shouldn't've done it, no, shouldn't have done it, she says, all my fault she says, over and over. Watch this junk, Henry, take this junk, here, what a fool I am she says, and she gave me some old phonograph records and some newspapers, special, she said, and I thanked her and thought what the hell and she went down the hall crying for herself being a fool and I just put the old newspapers by and the records and didn't think a long while till after Fannie was tributed and sung after and gone, and then this morning I ran my hand over those fool papers and thought, what is this? And I called Mrs. Gutierrez and said, "What?" and in Mexican and English she looked over the paper and saw the words, you see 'em, circled in ink, the same words in five different issues of the paper and the same number, and I got to thinking, why was Fannie crying so hard, and what's this number, so I knotted the knots and called. You call?"

"Yes, Henry," I said. "I found the same paper in Fannie's place now. Why didn't you tell me you had them?"

"What for? Sounded foolish. Woman stuff. I mean, did you read it? Mrs. Gutierrez read it, bad, but read it out loud. I laughed. God, I thought, that's trash, real trash. Only now, I think different. Who would read and believe junk like that?"