Lowboy Part 16

"There was a problem with the perches Emily. There were less and less new perches every day." He caught his breath and tried to talk more slowly. "Were they dying out, though? Science said not exactly." He took two steps to her one. "No f.u.c.king Emily. That was the problem. Something wrong with the water." He clapped his hands and made his courtroom face. "I'm going to ask you to guess what that thing was. Are you listening to me? What do you think it was?"

She brought her left hand up beside her right. He kept as still as a dead perch and waited. He could hardly bear to keep still but he did.

"Was it too warm?" she said finally. "Too warm in the water?" The words came out badly. She sounded like someone from Austria.

"That's what the scientists scientists thought!" He reached for her hand and caught it. "But something else was in it. Something funny." thought!" He reached for her hand and caught it. "But something else was in it. Something funny."

She moaned and pulled her hand out of his grip.

"Meds Emily. There were meds in the water. Everyone p.i.s.sing them into the toilets. The toilets go into the water Emily. The water goes into the fishes. There was one med called Traminex it made everyone happy. But it has a side effect Emily can you hear me?" Emily. There were meds in the water. Everyone p.i.s.sing them into the toilets. The toilets go into the water Emily. The water goes into the fishes. There was one med called Traminex it made everyone happy. But it has a side effect Emily can you hear me?"

She nodded and pressed herself against the brickwork.

"Same as Zyprexa Emily. Same as Depakote." He winked at her slyly. "No f.u.c.king."

He pulled her s.h.i.+rt up and bent over to kiss her belly and she kicked away from him and up the steps. His hand was on the step behind her and it tore under her heel like toilet paper. Have I gone flat again he wondered. Is it the flat time now. She'd stopped three steps above him and he lunged to catch her ankle but when he tried to lift his head he could not do it.

"You tore my fingers Emily. You f.u.c.ked them."

Take me back h.e.l.ler please take me back there I want to go out.

"Out," he said blankly. "What kind of word is that." He folded his hand like a letter and tried to get up. His head spun and dipped and his arm vanished up to the elbow. See Emily, he told himself. He saw her. She came and sat down on the step above him. He said something to her and she answered him but there was nothing in it. There's nothing in it Emily he said. She shook her head and told him something else.

"You should still be where they sent you, h.e.l.ler. I wish you were still there. I wish they'd never let you out."

He nodded at that and coughed and got up carefully. She slid away from him and pulled herself up and s.h.i.+vered uselessly against the railing. The blackness pulsed behind her like a searchlight. She seemed to want to keep going upstairs.

"Lift your hair up Emily," he said. "Come down here and sit. Take off your s.h.i.+rt."

Her body gave a jerk but nothing happened. She was talking to herself now or to him or to some hidden other. "Stop crying Emily." His father's song was playing somewhere sweetly. "Banks of the Ohio" it was called. She was climbing or staggering up the last steps. There was nothing behind her but gray sweating tilework and light. He pointed his good arm at her like a rifle or some other deadly thing.

"Pull your hair back Emily I can't see you."

She turned and ran into the bellshaped stillness. Past a lightbox and tripod burnt out since 1987. A light at each corner and a switch in the middle it looked like a badly drawn robot. Emily did the Robot, he reminded himself. She did it and she kissed me on the mouth. How is that possible. Past the robot and up to a room like a chapel. A dome toward which the keening darkness tended. A wooden booth to one side like a Victorian commode. She was crouching in the corner with her arms around her knees.

"You're frightened Emily." He slid his arms out of his sleeves.

"Don't come closer to me. Please h.e.l.ler don't come closer."

"Sit on this," he told her. "Put this under your legs."

He threw his s.h.i.+rt down to her but she shrank back from it as though it meant her harm. Something was different now he wondered what it was. Had he made some transgression. Had he made some minor error or had she. When he closed his eyes he was alone in the station but when he opened them he was less alone than ever. She was rocking forward and backward on her heels and hissing empty words at him and sobbing. Had there been a kiss behind the yellow curtain? Had she given him clothes and food and cigarettes? He looked at her. The halflight sent her features out of plumb. He took a small step toward her and undid the top flyb.u.t.ton of his jeans.

"Lie down Emily," he said. "Put your feet apart."

She stared past him and did as she was told. The s.h.i.+rt still lay untouched at her right heel. Her eyes had gone soft. He looked down at her and remembered the magazine he'd found in the briefcase and compared what he saw with the pictures he remembered. She was nothing like those women with their sunburned skin and makeup but something in her face was just the same.

"What's the matter?" he asked her. "Do you need a doctor?" He frowned and slid his jeans down to his knees.

She sat up at once without saying a word and raked a copper key across his chest. She held the key sideways between her clenched fingers and clawed downward with it like a panicked kitten. He laughed at the thought and began falling backward but at the same time he knew that he was cut across the middle and that she was on her feet and running for the platform. Emily he called out but he couldn't even hear the words himself. His clothes were heaped against the concrete and his pants were bunched up like a s.h.i.+tting baby's. Blood was dripping onto them like water from a tap. He got up and called her name again and dropped back to his knees. The air and tiles and cracked rosettes exulted in his pain. She was running in frantic circles at the bottom of the stairs. Her footfalls resounded off the chandeliers and the vaultwork and the bowed walls of that glittering pitiless temple. She was searching for a piece of gla.s.s to push into his eyes.

In no way was the apartment what Lateef had expected. It was long and pitched and nearly lightless, as hushed and airless as an attic, and its walls were painted a dusty Christmas red. No sound carried in from the street or the other apartments. She asked him in a cautious voice to take off his shoes, as if someone inside were asleep, and he obeyed at once. The separateness of the place was overwhelming. An opium den came to mind, and also a bordello, but no bordello was ever so intimate or so still. The redness and the airlessness and the glow of the black lacquered furniture combined to relieve him of his last sense of purpose. The walls were hung with pictures torn from magazines and books: a greenhouse, an obelisk, a naked arm, a railway tunnel somewhere in the tropics. Yellowed newsprint photographs in cheap unbeveled frames. He drifted from room to room in his unmatched socks, hands clasped behind him like an art collector or a suitor or anyone else out of his depth, waiting to have his role explained to him. The sadness of the rooms was unmistakable, as tangible as the pillows and the sc.r.a.ps of paper littering the floor. It was impossible to imagine them ever containing a child.

"How long have you been here?" Lateef said at last. She was making Turkish coffee in the kitchen. "Did you live here with Will?"

"I've been here for seventeen years, if you can believe it." Her voice lilted slightly, as though she were teasing him. "I could never afford this place now. Do you want milk?"

"Please. And sugar."

He heard what might have been a laugh. "I thought New York's Proudest always drank it black."

"New York's Finest, Miss h.e.l.ler. We're not necessarily that proud."

She laughed again. "I don't believe that for a minute."

He stood by himself in the living room and listened to the clatter of saucers and cups, everyday domestic noises, exotic as birdsong in that halflight. She hummed to herself contentedly, disregarding him the way a woman can who has you at her mercy. But how can she know that, Lateef asked himself. How can she be contented. The memory of the schoolgirls in their tartan uniforms returned to him, and of Violet in the middle of them, stoop-shouldered and bleeding, whispering to him to take her home. An answer came to him a moment later: She can feel contented now because I've failed. The burden of uncertainty is lifted. She no longer expects a single thing from me.

It was obvious enough, listening to her in the kitchen, that she'd driven the past half hour from her mind. Never had he been more aware of the disadvantage her foreignness put him at than at that moment, waiting in her cave of an apartment for a cup of coffee he felt no desire for. If not for her foreignness he might have gotten her talking, have complimented the coffee or her self-control or her taste in furniture, confident that he was circling her secret. He'd have been certain, at least, that there remained a secret to find. But if the past three hours had educated him on any point it was that her character refused to hold still, refused to fall into a pattern, not out of resentment or contrariness but for some reason as yet unknown to him. There was nothing disingenuous about her, nothing studied, and that in and of itself was baffling. There might be nothing more to her than what he'd seen.

"Here you are, Detective. Strong and sweet. If you're not used to Turkish coffee it might knock you for a spin."

"For a loop, you mean," he managed to reply. She was standing in the doorway with a tiny cup on an enamel tray, smiling at him in a way that he was completely unprepared for. He took the cup from her hurriedly and drank.

"Watch out," she said, balancing the tray on the tips of her fingers like a waitress. "It's hot."

"It's delicious." He took another sip, then another. "Jesus Christ."

"It is good, isn't it. The Turks laid siege to Vienna for almost a year; we learned how to make coffee from them." She set the tray down and ran a finger absentmindedly through her hair. "I'm not so sure what they got out of it."

"You should try to get some sleep," Lateef said sometime later. They were sitting together on a shapeless rattan couch, cradling their cups with both hands like children at a birthday party. "This might end up being a long night."

"Who needs sleep, Detective? We've got Turkish coffee. Let's talk instead. Ask me a question."

"All right, Miss h.e.l.ler." He considered her for a moment. "Why did you leave Vienna?"

Her smile tightened slightly. "Why do you think, Detective? I fell in love."

"With Will's father?"

She'd been sitting up attentively, a lady-in-waiting, but now she let herself sink back into the cus.h.i.+ons. In the light from the Chinese lamp she could have pa.s.sed for seventeen. "Will's father was a musician, Detective. A vibraphone player. I'm not sure if I told you that."

"You didn't." He sat with his cup balanced on his right knee, looking at her over his shoulder. For some reason he couldn't manage to recline.

"Well, he was. Jazz might be second to polka as the deadest music in America-"

"Jazz isn't dead music."

She brought a hand up to her mouth. "I think you've just revealed your age to me, Detective."

"Please go on."

She sighed. "Alive or dead, in Vienna in the eighties it was an exciting thing to us." He felt the couch move under him as she s.h.i.+fted her weight. "To some of us, at least. Compared to Johann Strauss, Miles Davis still seemed relatively young."

He laughed at that. "How did you meet Will's father?"

"I met Alex while I was still at the university. I was working three nights a week at a jazz club called Porgy and Bess. My English was good, and I knew a few things about jazz, so I usually made lots of money. And I had a soft point for American players."

He cleared his throat primly. "Spot, I think you mean. A soft spot."

"You like to correct me, don't you."

He avoided her look. "h.e.l.ler was your husband's name?"

"We weren't married, Detective. I thought you knew that."

"You'd be amazed by all the things I don't know, Miss h.e.l.ler. Especially today. I apologize if-"

"No need for that, Detective. We were unmarried by choice." She shrugged. "His name was Alexander Whitham."

Lateef couldn't help but give a start. "I know Alex Whitham," he said.

She seemed unsurprised. "Is that right?"

"Of course. He played with Ornette Coleman for a while."

"Now you've definitely shown your age."

He set the cup down carefully, turning its handle toward him, giving himself time to find a place for this new fact in his conception of her. Everyone knew Alex Whitham. One of the greats without question. He might have doubted the story if not for her beauty and for the small indifferent voice she used to tell it.

"You met Mr. Whitham at the club where you worked?"

She took in a slow breath and nodded. "I'll never forget the first time I saw Alex. He was the only white player on a bill full of legends- Ornette, Anthony Braxton, Ed Blackwell, Don Cherry-and he dressed to the nines to make up for it. The boys used to call him Vanilla the Pimp." She smiled to herself. "He walked into the club wearing a three-piece madras suit and silver sneakers. I thought he was the bestdressed man I'd ever seen." She slid her hand between the cus.h.i.+ons and brought out a flattened pack of cigarettes. "A year and a half later I moved into this apartment."

He hesitated. "You moved in alone?"

"Sometimes Alex lived here." She found a lighter, tested it, lit a cigarette with it, and set it aside. "Sometimes not."

"Why the wait? Did you need time to finish your studies?"

The cigarette hissed. "I never finished my studies, Detective."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

She nodded. "I was studying to be a neurochemist."

The irony was too self-evident to acknowledge. "Couldn't you have gone to school here?" he said finally. "Transferred your credits, done your exams over, that sort of thing?"

"I did that, actually. My parents had some money put aside- retirement money, not very much-and they sent it over as a kind of punishment. I was in the graduate program at Rockefeller for almost seven months."

"What happened then?"

"What you see is what you get, Detective. I paint eyes and lips on mannequins for stores that I could never afford to shop in. Apparently I've got a talent for it."

"I hope you don't mind my saying-"

"Drink your coffee, please. It's no good cold."

He took an obedient sip. "I'm sorry for prying, Miss h.e.l.ler. It's a habit with me when I'm working." He replaced the cup on its chipped and mismatched saucer. "Even when I'm not, to tell the truth. I'm not so good at regular conversation."

"Why the formality, Detective? A few minutes ago you were calling me Violet. Do we have to start again from the beginning?"

He finished the coffee and pa.s.sed her his cup and through a great effort of will managed to meet her gaze and hold it. She regarded him steadily, without the least trace of amus.e.m.e.nt, bracing both her hands against the cus.h.i.+ons. He tried and failed to guess at her intention. The directness of her stare was a thing he'd seen only in men about to a.s.sault him or in women who expected to be kissed. How laughable, he thought. How pathetic. I can't seem to think of any other reason.

"I thought I might have been presuming," he said finally, mortified by the thickness in his voice.

"You remind me of Elvin Jones," she said, refilling his cup. "Both of you seem too gentle for the kind of work you do. You ought to have been professors of something." She smiled and let her left arm brush his side. "Philosophy, maybe, or ethnomusicology. Something gentlemanly."

He returned her smile weakly. "It's not every day I get compared to a jazz virtuoso."

She said nothing to that.

"Why did you invite me here, Miss h.e.l.ler?"

"I didn't invite you here, Detective. I asked you to drive me home in your little soybean-eating car." She seemed less fond of him suddenly. "I wanted to take a pill to calm me down, since you ask. That and maybe fix myself a drink."

That accounts for the change in her, he thought. That explains all of this. "I didn't notice you taking anything," he said, keeping his voice as dispa.s.sionate as he could. "Did you do it under cover of making me coffee?"

"I made coffee coffee under cover of making you coffee, Detective." She closed her eyes. "I haven't taken my pick-me-up. Not yet." under cover of making you coffee, Detective." She closed her eyes. "I haven't taken my pick-me-up. Not yet."

"What were you thinking of taking?"

She fell back with a sigh and held out her crossed wrists. "Goofb.a.l.l.s, Detective. Ya-ya pills. Lock me up and throw away the key."

He laughed in spite of himself. "You've spent too much time in jazz clubs, Miss h.e.l.ler. What the h.e.l.l are ya-ya pills?"

"Want to split one with me and find out?"

He watched her a moment. "Mind if I take a look at the bottle?"

"I'd have to see a warrant first, Detective."

"I'm not going to arrest you, Miss h.e.l.ler. If you'd rather-"

"I'd rather show you this." She rose from the couch and glided with perfect economy of movement across the narrow room and out of sight. A moment later she was back beside him, hands tucked girlishly beneath her, watching him leaf through a battered photo alb.u.m. Her breath drew past his right ear, unnaturally cool and even, as though he'd put his head to a screen door. She smelled of unwashed hair and cigarettes.

"I don't know what kind of picture of Will you have in that folder of yours, but if it came from the Post Post-"