Madonna of the Apes (5 page)

Chapter Ten

Wherever his sympathies might lie, Fred could not claim to be on the street, not as long as he had the place in Charlestown. It had been a derelict house in what was a rather out-of-the-way corner of Boston that he had bought with some other veterans of this and that, which gradually, as they made it livable, he had come to control more or less, although the aim was to keep the use of it fairly democratic.

Coming back to the States and slowly, with reluctance, setting up shop as he had, Fred had made a pact with himself that was almost as simple as the one they’d developed for the house in Charlestown. It included a vow of almost poverty, and the expectation of a life that, if it must be lived, would remain simple.

The world he’d left had been filled with exotic turbulence, intrigue, betrayal, danger, opulence, frightful extended periods of mortal boredom, and agony, some prolonged, some mercifully quick; some experienced and some inflicted. He’d had enough of death but that didn’t make him wish to live. It was a dreadful quandary, he’d realized, waking one morning in front of the Cambridge Public Library, where he’d spread out his bedroll in the company of some gentlemen of no fixed abode. If you’ve had enough of death, but have no appreciable desire to live, it makes you accident-prone. And if you are accident-prone, you are not dependable.

If you are not dependable, you are of no use to anyone and, being no use, have not much reason to be around.

He, and these other folks, were better than that, he’d guessed, or inferred, then argued. And in a year or two the Charlestown place was up and running. Then, once he had a place, he had begun seeing women again. But he couldn’t get past the quandary that kept him from joining the civilization that surrounded him. He wanted nothing, not in a passive, but in an active way. If he could live naked on a crag, his food brought once a day in a bowl, by pilgrims, that might suit him, except that he would despise the pilgrims and get tired of watching the birds circling and waiting for the moment when his wary eyes would close.

When he needed a jolt he would step into a shop that sold paintings or, if he was reasonably clean, into a museum, though in a museum he was obliged to suppress the knowledge that these places were prisons made for the protection of money, and for the capture of spirits that by their natures should be free. Free, that is, as a bird or fish should be. Hell, artists should get their wages, like anyone else.

Free, not innocent. A work of art had no innocence, and nothing like it. It held within it as much coiled and potentially vicious energy as does a seed. Passion went into it, and passion resided in it. Or so Fred felt. But aside from the rubbish he’d handled occasionally in the low end antique stores he wandered into, whose proprietors tended to watch him warily, he’d never had his hands on a painting that sang, or shrieked.

The door was always open at the Charlestown house. Someone was always awake at the desk in the vestibule. It was necessary to keep this sense of security. Some of the tenants were nervous, and of those, some had good reason to be. Fred took his turn at the desk, as the rest of the men did, if they were up to it. Though they did what they could to discourage people with substance problems that were beyond control, some were too far gone with demons of one kind or another to be trusted with access to the firearms that went with the post back of the desk. Eddie told him when he came in, “Floyd’s not doing so well. I guess he’s asleep, though.”

Fred nodded. Floyd was in the room next to his, and it was easy to tell when he was not doing well. He had a tendency to hallucinate, and the hallucinations were seldom of the peaceable kingdom.

“Did he look like he’d eaten?” Fred asked.

“I had a sub saved for him,” Eddie said. When Fred came in he’d put down the comic he was reading. The cover suggested well-developed women exploring outer space, perhaps in search of the garments they had misplaced. He picked the comic up again saying, “I know he likes ham. I made him eat it down here so he wouldn’t forget. I used operating funds, and left the receipt in the thing. He’s bad enough we might have to do something.”

Fred nodded. Floyd thought he was wanted, and in fact he might be wanted. If they took him to a public hospital, or to a veteran’s hospital, next thing you knew, he’d become public property. Social workers, in all due mechanical sympathy looking into his history, might next discover that he’d taken a lam from some rougher institution in Montana or Bangkok.

“We might want to vote on it,” Fred said. “But as long as he’s not hurting anybody, or threatening anyone, I’d as soon let him be.” Eddie shrugged. “It might work itself out,” Fred said. “He’s not carrying anything, is he?”

Eddie shook his head. “We checked his room while he was out. I looked through his pockets when he came in. It’s like he doesn’t mind. He’s like a child, thinking about something else. You can do anything. Try to search me, you’d better think again.”

The room Eddie sat in, the vestibule or whatever it might be called, was as bare of decoration as a robbed motel room. They’d painted the walls white but they looked gray. The kitchen, such as it was, was not visible from here; nor were the two other downstairs rooms, one in which Floyd could be locked down if that seemed to be what he needed, and another in which the men kept the TV, a pool table, some comfortable chairs from the street, and a bookshelf with enough to read if you wanted to read.

Behind Eddie a calendar picture hung, a glossy photo, representing
Springtime in the Rockies.
It was from July of a former year. It had been left here by a former tenant, Henry, who had said it represented a place he would rather be, and whose body had been taken from the river last fall.

It was Fred’s shift at the desk tonight. They took it in eight-hour watches, with some men working more watches in lieu of contributing money to the operation. Fred owned the place, along with the bank; but he lived there and he did his shift like the others. So at ten he took over from Eddie, who went upstairs to sleep.

Eddie had left his comic book on the desk, and Fred read that until it was finished. He read it again, translating it into a Hmong dialect for practice, then once again, translating it into French. The fourth time through, struggling to recapture his acquaintance with a Tibetan tongue, he found the American concepts refusing to make the transition into the high clear regions, even though both cultures were equally comfortable with cruelty and unlikely gods.

The men came and went. It was a rule that everyone’s business be kept private. The place was to be a staging ground, not a halfway house. If people began discussing each other’s business, friendships and enmities might develop, as well as relationships that suggested mentoring, discipline, dominance and submission, or even love. It was not to be a prison, camp, or monastery, but a place where men whose training had molded them to do well by exercising anti-social skills, struggled to turn their inclinations and expectations to patterns more closely resembling those of Main Street. It was meant to be an alternative to living on the street. It was meant to be safer, if less interesting.

They got together once a week for an hour and talked through anything that needed considering. When a man didn’t show up for a week or more, unless he had made prior arrangements his room was declared vacant. He’d moved on, or been jailed, or gone back to Cincinnati, or nosed under the surface of the black river.

No one would settle down here because no one
could
settle down here. The idea was that you had to want to get out and into something better. But Fred, who had invented the system, seemed to have settled down in the room upstairs, like the abbot of a Godless monastery that boasted only two rules: No women in the rooms, and Mind your own business. Whatever might happen if a couple of men wanted to sleep together, that issue hadn’t come up. But any coupling threatened the balance in a democracy. Besides, it wasn’t really a democracy, because Fred’s name was on the mortgage, and everyone knew that. And it was Fred who must meet the payment every month, whether the guys could manage their rent or not.

Chapter Eleven

Lester wandered down at six in the morning, looking unkempt and distracted. He was too lean. The recruitment of new tenants was haphazard. Bart had brought Lester in one day after they got talking at the bus station. The guys had agreed Lester would stay while they took his measure.

Fred told him good morning. “I’m not crazy,” Lester said. “Not bonkers, crackers, missing a wheel, half-baked, half-assed, off my rocker, one sandwich short of a wedding, three sheets to the wind, or nuts.”

“Good,” Fred said.

“The other thing,” Lester said, “I am not missing a wheel. Or a two-wheeler or a three-wheeler or four wheels and I am not the fifth wheel nobody knows what it is except it’s a good thing. It helps steer. On a carriage. It’s like a gear. And I’m not three sheets short of a picnic.”

“You with the IRS?” Fred asked. “You’re working pretty hard.”

“Peanuts,” Lester said. He turned and walked out into a day that was beginning with rain. The trees outside the house had put on enough leaves to be dripping generously, letting the rain wash itself off onto the sidewalks. Lester was dressed for it, wearing a waterproof jacket from whose pocket he pulled a cap as he crossed the porch. If he was playing a part, he wasn’t going to push it far enough to get too uncomfortable.

They’d had a spy a year ago, and this might be another one. Some government agency or another might have developed an interest in the operation. It wasn’t a good part of town where you really had neighbors. Still, a neighbor might have developed curiosity about a house where single men came and went at all hours, some of whom looked like people you’d rather lived somewhere else.

Lester was a plant or a spy. Fred would bet money on it. But there was nothing to find. No secrets. Nothing interesting. Nothing to reward curiosity. Nothing to look forward to.

Nolan, ten minutes late, parked his big frame back of the desk, taking over for the day shift.

“I may sleep in town the next day or two,” Fred told him.

Fred’s room was on the second floor, over the front door, a small room called a “borning room” in these parts, large enough for the single mattress and the chair. His clothes he kept in three cardboard boxes, all the same size, so they could be stacked. One held clean clothes, one dirty, and the third clothes that did not qualify for either of those two categories. Hooks on the back of the door did for the parka, the windbreaker, and the blazer that came in handy for visits to the bank concerning mortgage questions. A small steel box downstairs held anything else he cared about keeping.

Fred showered, considered his mattress, and rejected it. It wasn’t his business; still, his mind wouldn’t rest. “It’s tomorrow Reed said he’d go back,” Fred said. “Three P.M. It was a date but Reed didn’t mean to keep it. Did Tilley?”

It wasn’t his business.

He had laundry to do, and he might as well do it. He’d noticed a Laundromat on Charles Street, not far from Bernie’s, in the neighborhood where he’d spent the last couple of days. That would give him something to do, as well as a change of clothes if he decided to stay in the area, keep his eyes open.

The walk to Charles Street took forty minutes and was a good way to stretch the kinks out of his legs. Eight hours behind the desk was a punishing stretch. There’d been no mail but crap. The phone hadn’t rung. He was ready for something else.

There was no activity at the place on Pekham Street. Someone had taken his cardboard from the alley. He walked on uphill to the corner of Bolt Street and turned right, covering the four blocks to the garage over which Bernie had established his small but ungainly apartment. The garage was the reason Bernie had chosen the space, a garage being at a premium in this part of town. Bernie’s cars were important to him, and this garage would hold four of them, although only one was here now, and that under tarpaulins. The apartment proper, on the second floor, had to be entered through the garage, via a circular staircase in back, next to the crusty workbench that held tools from another era, designed for purposes that might or might not be related to the carriage trade.

The living space was the size of the garage below, barely large enough for the ugly couch, the single bed, the table, and a minimal kitchen. The only extravagance Bernie showed on this floor was in the elaborate sound equipment, which was too complex for Fred to worry about using, even if he had a yen to do so. Unless he had hidden them somewhere in the walls or under the floor—and he likely had—there were no signs of Bernie’s occupation. He was an international courier whose interests, Fred believed, were legal, although he did not know what they were.

Fred dropped his kit and the bag of laundry, then found a place on Charles that would sell him a reasonably straightforward hamburger and fries, and bought an apple next door to eat on his way to Mountjoy. He paused at the doorway next to the antique store’s window. Miranda? Sheila? But there were no names posted next to the bells.

It looked as if Clayton Reed must occupy his entire building. When you stood on the sidewalk the walkway, between pads of ivy, gave you a choice between mounting stairs to ring the bell at a formidable black front door that also offered a knocker, or to follow the path by which they’d carried the chest to the downstairs office space. “Tradesman’s entrance,” said Fred. He climbed the stairs to the entrance designed for the Prince of Wales, and rang.

A mockingbird sang somewhere, probably in the magnolias across the street. A shadow flickered back of the peephole set under the knocker. Fred rang again and the shadow remained, watchful. “Let’s not play games,” Fred said. Then, louder, “Clayton, it’s Fred.” He used the knocker. The door opened on a chain, allowing a view of Clay’s wild tangle of white hair, and a face pinched with alarm.

“You could be anyone.”

“That’s debatable. But it is an interesting concept.”

“Are you alone?” Clayton’s voice was tight with pressure.

“Rhetorical question,” Fred said. “You see I’m alone. I prefer a question that actually wants information. You don’t have to open the door. Then again, here I am.”

The man was struggling. His breeding wouldn’t let him ask baldly, What do you want?

“The answer to your unspoken question is, That chest I have forgotten is bothering me. I’ve been thinking about it. I’d like to see it again.”

Clay closed the door far enough to let him take it off the chain and get it open.

“I’m paralyzed,” he said. “I have to trust someone.”

“I don’t,” Fred said, strolling in. “But I won’t argue with you.”

“The chest is where we left it. I can’t move it,” Clay said. He walked down a hallway whose floor was softened with prayer rugs. Its walls were hung with Japanese paintings on unfurled scrolls: here an iris by moonlight; next to that an armored warrior unsheathing his saber; next to that a bold and extraordinarily graceful exercise in calligraphy alone. The place seemed neither a museum nor a home, and you wouldn’t call it a temple either. Open doorways led into what seemed a library on one side, and on the other a living room—what would he call it, a parlor?—dominated by a huge Hopper painting of roofs and balconies and an ominous summer sky.

Clay led the way down the spiral staircase Fred had seen before, from the other end.