Night-Bloom (23 page)

It had been months since he had thought about the boy, and then only at night, by himself. He didn’t like to think about it. The waste, the pity, the total uselessness of it. A strong, vital young man, totally innocent of any wrongdoing, cut down like that in the prime of life. An aspiring dancer, now a quadriplegic consigned to the prison of a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Plodding along the crowded street in that unseasonably raw evening, he raised his collar higher and retracted his neck deep within it. Then, for some unaccountable reason, he recalled having the temerity or the foolhardiness to have sent the plant around to the hospital by special messenger. A sharp detective might easily have made the connection. How many messenger services were there in the city anyway? Surely they kept records of deliveries to hospitals— but of course it was highly doubtful that they kept records of the contents of such deliveries.

Even so, it was a rash, stupid thing to have done. But he’d thought of it then as a kind of atonement. Putting himself at risk like that was a kind of self-purification. Surely the police would be monitoring all of young Archer’s mail, and particularly gifts from perfect strangers. Wouldn’t they be the first to be suspected, those who’d made offerings seeking expiation for their crimes? What could the police now make of the name A. Boyd given with no return address? Suddenly he viewed the whole exercise as cheap and theatrical—snickering up his sleeve at >how close he could entice the law while still shrewdly evading it.

He thought if he walked vigorously, exhausting himself, he would forget about the boy. Whenever he had ghosts (and it was often), he would banish them by means of strenuous physical activity. A hard, driving, self-punishing relentless walk until the heart banged and the calves ached. It had worked for him in the past. All the others: Catalonia, O’Meggins, Quigley, Soong, and Ransom. After violent exercise, the phantoms relented and would drift quietly off, as if flayed from his body. Not so Archer. The others had died, so it was easier to banish them. But Archer had survived. He lived in a hospice in Staten Island attended by Carmelite nuns who specialized in the care of quadraplegics.

He knew all about it. He’d kept abreast of young Archer by means of newsclips. Periodically, he’d even phone the rehabilitation center, identifying himself as a relative in town very briefly and merely calling to inquire how the boy was getting on.

Respectfully, even eagerly, they’d answer all his questions. No one ever challenged the authenticity of the calls, and at the Conclusion of each, invariably he’d add, “I’d rather Jeffrey didn’t know I was asking about him. I wouldn’t want him to think we were concerned.”

The nuns always respected his wishes and never attempted to penetrate his privacy. Still, try as he might, he could not eradicate the memory of Jeffrey Archer from his mind.

After Archer he vowed it would never happen again. He had always thought of his rooftop escapades as being summary and final. He had never envisioned them as leading to permanent impairment. “No more,” he proclaimed that anguished haunted day of self-loathing after the last drop when he sent the plant to Archer at the hospital. Afterward, he went to a small nearby church, fell on his knees and prayed. “This is the end of it,” he had said over and over again to himself. “This is it. No more. I swear. This time it’s really finished.”

For several months after there were the bouts of remorse, the near-biblical grieving, all of which served to buttress his resolve to quit. He thought of going to the police but the possibility of jail horrified him. He could not bear the thought of being locked away, his freedom taken from him. Then came the months of quiescence. Blessed respite from the ghosts. The fog lifting. Entering another phase. Brighter. More hopeful. Thinking he’d licked it. The awful thing would never come again. Then, only yesterday—a small, unpleasant, totally unrelated incident and suddenly it had all come rushing back.

Up ahead the gaudy lights of the street twinkled in the mist-hung night and ran together like colored paints splashed by water.

“I won’t,” he said. “This is it. This is the end of it. No more. No more.” He repeated the words in a kind of fierce litany. His face was wet, he thought, from rain. He didn’t know that he was crying.

“After the war … after having been the sole survivor of a helicopter accident during a secret mission behind enemy lines … after coming home, I worked as a safety engineer for Trans World Airlines …”

“And how long was that?”

“That was four years: 1970 through 1974. Then I became purser for Pan Am.”

“Yes … And that lasted …?”

“Two years. Then I worked as a free-lance writer.”

“A writer?”

“That’s right. For a salvage magazine. Sunken ships. Buried treasure. That sort of thing. And then I was an airplane mechanic, and then I was commissioned a commander in the Iranian navy. That was during the reign of the late shah, whom I knew quite well.”

“I see.” The eyes of the interviewer arched above the frames of heavy horn-rimmed glasses. She was a short, dark, intense woman with a light furze of hair above the upper lip. “Were you a mechanic and commander in the Iranian navy all at one time?”

The note of barely masked ridicule had not escaped Watford. “No. That was over a seven-year period.”

“That puts us into 1983, Mr. Watford. This is still only 1981.”

Watford shrugged and grinned wryly. “I guess I’m wrong, then.”

If she thought his smile impertinent, she was no doubt right. He didn’t like her any more than she liked him. The situation surrounding the interview was intolerable and he knew she hadn’t believed a word he’d said. Since she had rejected him even before reading his resume, he resolved to conduct himself as atrociously as possible. It took the sting out of the rejection and made him feel better.

This was the seventh agency he’d been to that day. He’d started eagerly at nine sharp that morning with reasonable hope, looking as he tried to explain to each interviewer, for a position with an airline. When it became apparent to him that most of the interviewers were not taking his application seriously, he became increasingly outrageous.

They were sitting now in a little three-walled glass cubicle furnished with a desk and two chairs in a one-flight-up employment agency directly off Fifth Avenue.

“I’ve been a magician, too,” he went on quite earnestly.

“You don’t say?”

“Yes, yes. You know, scarves, rope tricks, rabbits out of hats.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

“Only too well. Thank you very much, Mr. Watford.” She rose.

“I speak seven foreign languages, too.”

“I’m sorry. I have nothing for a linguist today.” She stood there stiffly, trying to leave, but not quite brazen enough to turn her back upon him and walk out. She was also a bit frightened.

He knew he had talked too much but by now he was no longer able to stop himself. “German, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Croatian, Gaelic …”

“Thank you. I’m afraid we have nothing.”

“And Russian, of course. I can start tomorrow, if you’d like.”

He rose, nearly tipping his chair, watching her back out of the cubicle, her eyes suddenly filled with panic. In the next moment she turned and fled.

As he walked across the gray littered floor on his way out, he had a sudden ghastly prospect of aisles and rows of cubicles. They were all furnished in precisely the same rudimentary way as the one he’d just left. Even more disheartening was a glimpse he had of the occupants in each. Bathed blue under harsh fluorescent lights, applicant as well as interviewer, barely distinguishable, all uniformly shabby, mean and defeated; each hating the other; the barest pretense of civility between them.

Halfway across the floor he started to laugh. It had begun with a small, barely audible snicker, then mounted into gales of howling, scornful laughter.

People looked up. Several came out of the cubicles to see what was going on. But Watford kept right on walking, booming laughter into the stale, smoky air. For all of the hilarity, he was faintly sick. He had never before encountered so much rejection, and the thought that his money was fast running out, along with his Demerol and prescription pad, made his mouth dry and his throat constrict.

“Try to recall, Mrs. Uliano. I know it’s tough.”

“Aaah?”

“I say, I know it’s tough.”

“Aaah?”

“Difficult, difficult.” Mooney was reduced to shouting into her ear, his problem compounded by t he fact that not only did the wizened little Italian lady have a hearing deficit, but her English was virtually nonexistent.

“Rudy …”

“Si, si.” Her eyes lit. “Rudy. Aaah?”

“Rudy. Cab. One night. Last year.” He waved a linger in the air and gestured frantically as if he were playing charades. “Capeesh?”

“Si. Si. Rudy. Cab. Tax, aah? Si, si.” She stood I here before him, a hag mantled in mourning black, leaning on a stick. He suspected that she was not as old as she appeared. That impression arose from her black funereal clothing which he guessed she had not changed since the death of her husband nearly a year before. Mooney lowered his voice and tried to affect sorrow. He was certain she thought he was a lunatic.

“In Rudy’s cab one night. Blood. Molto blood. Hombre. Mucho hurt. Remember?”

A stream of Italian spewed from her.

He gestured wildly and retreated next to a kind of lingua franca of the eyes and body.

“Ah,” she said, a glint of seeming comprehension in her gaze. “Blood. Blood. Si.”

“Si. Blood. Si.” His head nodded frantically at her while hers nodded back in the identical rhythm. “Man hurt. Blood. Remember?”

She cocked her head sideways, like a small sparrow, and stared up at him. “Aaah?”

“Oh, shit.”

“Aaah?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

He thought wistfully of Fritzi at the track and icy-minted bourbons, fresh March breezes buffeting out of the west, the roar of crowds and the good smell of leather and horseflesh. Afterward, lobsters, or maybe soft-shelled crabs somewhere out on the Island.

Mrs. Uliano’s little parlor room with the linoleum floors was steeped in the odors of provolone cheese and decades of marinara sauce.

Just as he thought all of his linguistic ingenuity had been exhausted, he heard the click of a key in the outside door.

It swung open and a young man in jeans and Wind-breaker stood there peering inward from the threshold.

“Dominick.” The old lady waved her cane at him and rattled something in Italian.

Mooney watched the young man start falteringly forward. When he came within reach of the old lady, she snatched his sleeve and tugged him closer. “My boy. Dominick.”

“Ah, your son.” Mooney felt relief surge through him. He turned to the young man whom he judged to be about thirty. From his rough dress and dusty leather brogues, Mooney assumed that he was in some kind of construction work.

“You speak English, Dominick?”

“Sure.”

“Aaah.” Mrs. Uliano beamed satisfaction.

“My name is Mooney. I’m a detective.” He flashed his badge and noted the frown that crossed the young man’s face. Dominick Uliano fired off something in Italian. At once the old lady turned and vanished noiselessly into the gloom of a darkened kitchen beyond. She did not reappear.

“I don’t know nothin’ about that,” Dominick Uliano said after Mooney had explained to him the reason for his visit. “My father never talked much about his work. When would this have been?”

“Two years ago.”

“How do you know it was my father’s cab?”

“I don’t. All I know is your father probably had a badly injured guy in the backseat of his cab somewhere around the night of April 30, 1979.” Mooney noted the look of distrust in the young man’s eyes. “Your father’s not accused of any wrongdoing, Dominick. It may just be that he holds the key to this whole series of so-called ‘accidental deaths’ around the theater district.”

The young man continued to watch him warily. “You say this guy bled a lot in the backseat?”

“Like a stuck pig. Your father probably took him to a hospital and left him there. Did your father ever mention anything like that to you?”

Dominick Uliano’s eyes bristled with that innate distrust of the lower classes for the police. “If he had, I would’ve remembered,” he snapped.

“He didn’t break no law, I want you to understand. Normally, cabdrivers are supposed to report any emergencies like that.”

“You mean fill out a form?”

“Right.” Mooney watched him uneasily. “But I want you to know, as far as we’re concerned, your old man is clean. He did nothin’ illegal.”

“So?”

“So, I’m tryin’ to find out where he might have taken that injured passenger.”

“Oh.”

Mooney could see the young man struggling to think quickly, but terrified of saying the wrong thing. “No. He never said nothin’ like that to me.”

“You didn’t talk much with your old man?”

“Nope. Not too much.”

“You know anyone who did?”

A faint flash glowed momentarily in the young man’s eye, then sputtered and went out. “Nope.”