The Seventh Candidate (38 page)

Lorz knew them all. Leaving at 7:00pm, Theo
had often been given batches of the posters that lined the office
walls to dump in the ash can. All that insistent harmony stuck
strictly side by side on the walls, the doors, the window, the
ceiling (everywhere except the carpeted floor) without the buffer
of the soiled white tiles as in the underground produced the worst
of chaos, a war of colors, a conflict of lines. You couldn’t go on
looking. It reminded him of the effect his mother’s room produced
with the mirrors, except here it was worse, you couldn’t sanely
reduce the myriad images to a few pieces of furniture, an overhead
light, a dozen Christs.

She was standing stricken in the middle of
the room beneath the overhead light looking about her as though
seeing them for the first time. Thunder began faintly and built up.
Now the noise was astonishingly close. It resolved into the El
train going past the opaque window. Then the real thunder came,
like inconceivable towers toppling. The rain dashed against the
pane where Helena, smiling, blocked vision. Seen from the street
below, filtered by the thickness of the pasted poster-paper, he had
taken her for another optical illusion.

Lorz looked in the bathroom and the closets.
Then he stretched out on the bed.

“I had to lie down too,” she said.

The thunder subsided to mutterings. A
quarter of an hour later he got up and they left. She locked up.
The stolen half-ton of Basic White wasn’t in the flat. It was still
another enigma to busy his mind with as they went down the stairs.
The rain was coming down too violently for them to walk to the
underground station. She flagged down a taxi. In the back seat next
to her the odor of her perfume and sweating body built up. He
cranked down the window even though rain dashed in on his arm and
lap. He felt like sticking his head outside the window in the rain
and wind. He asked her where she’d got the key to his flat. She
replied that she’d had a spare cut for him, in case he lost the
original. While she was at it she’d asked for another in case of
emergencies. Like this one.

Lorz asked if his flat had looked like that
the last time she’d been there.

She answered quickly that there’d been no
last time. The key was for emergencies. Today was the first
emergency.

When they got out of the taxi in front of
the
Ideal
building
they found Dr Silberman standing in the doorway in rubbers and a
rolled-up dripping umbrella. He was wearing a bright yellow
raincoat and a floppy rubber fisherman’s hat of the same
color.

“I thought I would finally keep that promise
to drop in some day,” he said blandly, shaking hands with them. “I
seem to have chosen the wrong day, doubly so.”

The director apologized for the rain and for
their absence: a work-emergency, he said. They went down the
staircase and entered the office. She switched the lights on.

“Yes … Yes …” said Dr Silberman looking
around at the office. “The bare essentials, I’m afraid,” said the
director. “Purely functional.” His assistant helped the doctor off
with his bright raincoat. She draped it over a chair. Little pools
gathered on the floor beneath it. The doctor wiped the raindrops
off his pince-nez. He started wandering about the office. He seemed
particularly interested in the piles of posters that lined the
walls. The director asked him if he didn’t want to sit down and
have a cup of coffee with them. Silberman didn’t seem to hear. He
went on moving about ponderously, back turned to them, looking at
the posters. He was like a visitor in a shabby art-museum
conscientiously inspecting oddly presented pictures.

“Yes,” he said again. Obviously it had no
relation to the director’s invitation. He turned about. “I believe
Mysels rang you up a few days ago concerning Teddy. We haven’t seen
him for over two weeks now.”

“So he told me,” the director replied.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Teddy?” said the director’s assistant.
“Yesterday evening at 6:30pm of course. As usual. And before that
at 12:30pm, the usual time. He’s very punctual with us.”

The doctor sat down before the director’s
desk. “I couldn’t trouble you for a cup of coffee, could I? Drive
the damp out of my bones.”

She stared insistently at her employer.
“I’ll be right back,” she assured the doctor, as though her
presence were indispensable. She almost ran into the storeroom.

“Yes, we’ve been having difficulties
contacting Teddy,” said Silberman, leaning back in his chair.

“Mr Mysels told me about that, how you
couldn’t get into his flat,” said Lorz as his assistant appeared in
the doorway, holding the jar of instant-coffee.

“Oh, there was no difficulty getting into
his flat,” said the doctor. “We have a key, of course. The
difficulty was that he was never there. And there were certain …
indications that Teddy isn’t doing too well. Not well at all.”

“Certain indications?”

“Signs, let’s say.”

Signs. Icons. Lorz wondered if Theo had
already started in on the ceiling or the window the last time
they’d let themselves in.

“You’re quite certain that Teddy has been
acting in a normal way – a reasonably normal way – with you?” Dr
Silberman asked.

“One hundred percent normal,” said the
director’s assistant from the doorway. The kettle began whistling
faintly behind her. Dr Silberman continued looking at the
director.

“
Teddy’s work and behavior with
Ideal
have been entirely
satisfactory,” said the director.

“Yes, I remember, those were the exact words
you checked on the job report. But that was months ago.” He turned
to the director’s assistant.

“Does he take his medicine regularly?” He
had to raise his voice. The whistle was shrill now.

“Regular as clock-work. 6:30pm. I make
sure.” She disappeared and came back a few seconds later with the
kettle, steam billowing from the spout.

“Yesterday evening, for instance?”

The director recalled that Theo hadn’t taken
the pills the evening before. There had been too much drama.

She placed a decorated tile on the desk and
the kettle on the tile.

“Of course, yesterday evening,” she said.
“Regularly at six-thirty when he comes back. Closer to seven,
actually.”

“
I ask because we looked for him yesterday
afternoon in
Crossroads
.”

“We?” said the director. “You and somebody
else?”

“
Not personally.
Crossroads
is hard on the feet. I avoid it whenever I can.
No, representatives of the hospital, I meant. They couldn’t find
him this time.”

“This time?” she asked.

“
A few days before, a … representative of
the hospital did find him in
Crossroads
, working very hard, apparently. He tried to convince him
to come back with him to the hospital for a check-up. Teddy was
very very reluctant to, it seems. Yesterday the two of them
couldn’t find him anywhere. He’s easy enough to recognize, though.
But if you say you picked him up at 6:30 …”

Silberman broke off and looked at the jar of
instant coffee.

She smote her forehead theatrically and
rushed back in the storeroom, all the while insulting her brains
loudly so that, the director guessed, nothing would be said during
her absence. She came back with the cups and saucers, the sugar and
biscuits and served them. They drank in silence. Silberman placed
his empty cup in the saucer.

“I asked about his medicine because his
prescription has to be renewed. If he’s been taking the medicine
regularly as you say he has, there’s enough for just two more days.
It would be dangerous for him not to continue.” Dr Silberman got
up, went over to the chair and the puddle. He struggled into his
raincoat.

“I imagine one of you will be here in the
office tomorrow at six,” he said, smiling. He tugged down the brim
of the floppy fisherman’s hat to the pince-nez. “We’ll come then,
if you agree. Teddy comes back at about seven, I believe you said.
There’ll be no problem.”

The director didn’t have to ask who the “we”
were this time. He knew one of them already: the dead doctor’s
squat detached shadow. Accompanying the doctor to the door, Lorz
asked in the most casual of voices: “Am I wrong? I had the idea
that Teddy’s medicine was the same as mine.”

“It is. But the dosage is much stronger.
Your cases can’t be compared.” He opened the door and then turned
about. “You do take yours regularly, I hope. It would be unwise to
interrupt the treatment.”

“Oh I see that he does,” said his assistant.
“As long as I’m around there’s no reason to worry.”

***

11

The director stood before the underground map
with the red pins stuck in major stations. His back was turned to
his assistant. She was at her desk, crouched over a file, turning
over paper after paper, as though hunting for something. Not a word
had been exchanged between them since Silberman left five minutes
before. They hadn’t even commented on what they’d seen in the flat.
There’d just been the director’s two questions in the taxi on
secondary matters and her prompt replies.

There was another minor mystery to occupy
his mind. Why hadn’t the two hospital “representatives” come across
Theo in
Crossroads
?
Still staring at the map the director saw the black dot of
the
May
23
station on Line 9,
one of the spokes radiating out of
Crossroads
, and remembered the boy locally scratching away
at the poster with a knife before he was whisked away and replaced
by the blackness of the tunnel. He thought he understood now. Not
for the first time, Theo had left his
Crossroads
base to foray in satellite stations and with great
luck must have returned to the giant station after the
“representatives” had given up their hunt.

But Theo wouldn’t be systematically
returning to
Crossroads
anymore. The director felt certain that the boy was now
taking on the total challenge of the underground network. He was
operating haphazardly, unpredictably. At any given moment he could
be in any one of the capital’s sixty-three stations. Which made it
almost impossible to locate him.

And he had to be located. Every minute of
his obsessive activity censoring the posters held the menace of
arrest. Arrest, routine investigation, transfer to the hospital for
the briefest of time and then transfer to nowhere. Theo had to be
found.

Where? How?

Lorz imagined hunting for him in the
stations. The tangle of the thirteen lines before his eyes was like
a fishing net, the dots of the stations floaters. He, the
(compassionate) hunter, would be entangled in that net. It would be
worse, far worse, than that long-ago search for him in the endless
corridors of the hospital-complex when the boy was still his
candidate. He saw himself getting out at every stop, scrutinizing
the posters, trudging up Himalayas of stairways, trying to breast
the peak hour flood of passengers, standing perplexed before
bifurcations of corridors, choosing a line at random, and then
shooting off in the wrong direction while at the other end of the
net, somewhere, the boy obliterated and obliterated.

A whole lifetime wouldn’t be long enough.
And if by miracle Lorz found Theo, what words could convince him to
flee?

Flee where?

The solution to this last problem (but not
to the first two) came to him suddenly. The refuge existed, of
course. It offered more than security. The boy’s psychic needs
could be satisfied. Not of course by letting him do to the
director’s flat what he’d done to his own with the jarring poster
patchwork but by diverting obsession into safe channels, getting
him to do what he’d done to the
Ideal
office months ago. The rest of the apartment was almost as
dingy as the locked room with the broken furniture, now the boy’s
shining refuge, had been.

Theo would paint the whole vast flat white
(acrylic white), three coats. The job would take weeks. The expense
and inconvenience would be great. But that was nothing compared to
what the contact between the director and his employee would bring
about. He saw it as a symbiosis, reciprocal benefit. The boy’s
alarming symptoms of obsessive censorship would wear off. His own
burning punishment would stop with this disinterested turn, at long
last, to another human being.

His assistant asked where he was going as he
reached the door. He couldn’t disclose the totality of his project
to her, of course.

Crossroads
first of all, he said. If he was there,
give him his pills and try to reason with him. That wouldn’t work,
of course. But tell him to keep clear of
Crossroads
. And tell him not to come back to his flat or the
office.

“You said he wouldn’t be coming back here
before a year and a half.”

“His reactions aren’t always predictable. He
might be coming back to see you, for instance.”

“Finish off the job he started on my desk,
you mean?”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything like
that.”

“That’s what you practically said a few
hours ago.”

“I doubt that he’ll be coming back
here.”

“They’re sure to pick him up then. He can’t
stay down there destroying posters. Where else can he go,
though?”

“No idea,” he said although he had the
clearest idea about that. How could he tell her that? He opened the
door on the corridor.