The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  For a second, Lucy seemed about to withdraw from the psychologist. Then she nodded, and replied, “That would be fine.” But before exiting, she turned to Francis and Peter the Fireman and said, “I will have some other questions for you later. Or perhaps tomorrow morning. If that is acceptable?”

  Both Peter and Francis nodded in acknowledgment.

  “I’m not certain that these two can assist you all that well,” Mister Evans said, shaking his head.

  “Perhaps they can, perhaps they cannot,” Lucy Jones said. “That remains to be seen. But one thing is certain, Mister Evans.”

  “And what is that?” he asked.

  “At the moment, they are the only two people I don’t suspect.”

  Francis had difficulty falling asleep that night. The usual sounds of snoring and whimpering, which were the night chords of the dormitory, made him restless. Or, at least, that is what he thought, until he lay back in his bunk with his eyes open to the ceiling, and he realized that it wasn’t the ordinariness of the night that was disruptive, it was all that had taken place during the day. His own voices were calm, but filled with questions, and he wondered whether he would be able to do what it was that was ahead of him. He had never thought of himself as the sort of person who noted detail, who saw meaning in words and actions, the way he thought Peter did, and the way that he knew Lucy Jones did. They seemed to him to be in control of their ideas, which was something he only aspired to. His own thoughts were haphazard, squirrel-like, constantly changing direction, always flitting off one direction or the next, shunted first one way, then the next, driven by forces within him he didn’t really understand.

  Francis sighed, and half turned in his bunk. It was then that he saw that he wasn’t the only one awake. A few feet distant, Peter the Fireman was sitting up on his bed, his back pressed against the wall, knees drawn up in front, so that he could encircle them with his arms, staring out across the room. Francis saw that Peter’s eyes were fixed on the far bank of windows, staring past the cross-hatched grid of iron bars and milky glass to the dusky shafts of moonlight and ink black night beyond. Francis wanted to say something, but then he stopped himself, imagining that whatever was driving Peter from sleep that night was some crackling current far too powerful to be interrupted.

  chapter 11

  I could sense the Angel reading every word, but the quiet remained intact. When you are crazy, sometimes, quiet is like a fog, obscuring ordinary, everyday things, familiar sights and sounds, making everything a bit misshapen, mysterious. Like a road often traveled, that because of the odd way fog refracts headlights at night, seems suddenly to bend to the right, when one’s brain screams out that in truth, it tracks straight ahead. Madness is like that moment of doubt, when I wouldn’t know whether to trust my eyes or my memory, because each seemed to be capable of the same insidious errors. I could feel some sweat on my forehead, and I shook my entire body, a little like a wet dog, trying to free myself of the clammy, desperate sensation that the Angel had brought along with him into my rooms.

  “Leave me alone,” I said, any strength or confidence that I had sliding abruptly away. “Leave me alone! I fought you once!” I shouted. “I shouldn’t have to fight you again!”

  My hands were shaking and I wanted to call out for Peter the Fireman. But I knew he was too far away, and I was alone, and so I balled my hands into fists, to prevent the quivering from being too obvious.

  As I seized a deep breath, there was a sudden pounding at my front door. The pistol-like blows seemed to burst into the reverie, and I rose up, my head spinning for an instant, until I regained some equilibrium. I crossed the room in a few, quick steps, and approached the door to my apartment.

  There was another burst of knocks.

  I heard a voice: “Mister Petrel! Mister Petrel? Are you okay in there?”

  I leaned my forehead up against the wooden door. It felt cool to the touch, as if I were fevered, and it was made of ice. I slowly sorted through the catalogue of voices I knew. One of my sisters, I would have recognized instantly. I knew it wasn’t my parents because they had never come to visit me at my home.

  “Mister Petrel! Please answer! Are you okay?”

  I smiled. I heard a small H sound preceding the last word.

  My neighbor across the hallway is Ramon Santiago, who works for the city sanitation department. He has a wife, Rosalita, and a beautiful baby girl called Esperanza, who seems a most studious child, because she stares out from her perch in her mother’s arms with a college-professor’s look of attentiveness for the world around her.

  “Mister Petrel?”

  “I’m okay, Mister Santiago, thank you.”

  “Are you sure?” We were speaking through the closed door, and I could sense he was inches distant, right on the other side. “Please, you should open up. I just want to make sure everything is okay.”

  Mister Santiago knocked again, and this time, I reached out and turned the handle of the deadbolt lock, opening the door just a sliver. Our eyes met, and he looked closely at me.

  “We heard shouting,” he said. “It was like somebody was getting ready for a fight.”

  “No,” I replied, “I’m alone.”

  “I could hear you talking. Like you was having an argument with somebody. You sure you’re okay?”

  Ramon Santiago was a slight man, but a couple of years lifting heavy trash containers in the predawn city hours had built up his arms and shoulders. He would be a formidable opponent for anyone, and, I suspected, rarely had to resort to confrontation in order to get his opinions heard.

  “No. Thank you, but I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look so good, Mister Petrel. You feeling sick?”

  “I’ve just been a little stressed out lately. Missed a few meals.”

  “You want I should call someone? Maybe one of your sisters?”

  I shook my head. “Please, Mister Santiago, they’d be the last folks I’d want to see.”

  He smiled back at me. “I know. Relatives. Sometimes they can just drive you crazy.” As soon as that word fell from his lips, he looked stricken, as if he’d just insulted me.

  I laughed. “No, you’re right. They can. And in my case, they most certainly have. And, I’m guessing, they probably will again, some day. But I’m all right for now.”

  He continued to eye me cautiously.

  “Still, man, you got me a little worried. You taking your pills okay?”

  I shrugged. “Yes,” I lied. I could tell he didn’t believe me. He continued to look closely at me, his eyes fixed on my face, as if he was searching every wrinkle, every line, for something that he would recognize, as if the illness I carried could be identified like some rash on my skin, or jaundice. Without taking his eyes off me, he threw a couple of words back over his shoulder in Spanish, and I saw his wife and their little child, hanging in the entranceway to their apartment. Rosalita looked a little frightened, and she lifted her hand and gave me a little wave. The baby, too, returned my own smile. Then Mister Santiago switched back into English.

  “Rosie,” he said, demanding, yet not angrily, “go fix up Mister Petrel a paper plate with some of that rice and chicken we’re having for dinner. He looks like he could use a good solid meal.”

  I saw her nod, give me a shy little smile of her own, and disappear inside their apartment. “Really, Mister Santiago, that’s kind of you, but not necessary …”

  “It’s not a problem. Arroz con pollo. Where I come from, Mister Petrel, it fixes just about everything. You sick, you get rice and chicken. You get fired from your job? You get rice and chicken. You got a broken heart?”

  “… Rice and chicken,” I said, finishing the sentence for him.

  “That’s one hundred percent right.” We grinned together.

  Rosie returned a few seconds later with a paper plate piled high with steaming chicken and fluffy yellow rice. She brought it across the corridor to me and I took it from her, just grazing her hand slightly, and thinking that
it had been some time since I’d actually felt another human’s touch. “You don’t have to …,” I started again, but both the Santiagos were shaking their heads.

  “You sure you don’t want me to call somebody? If not your family, how ’bout social services? Or a friend, maybe?”

  “Don’t have too many friends anymore, Mister Santiago.”

  “Ah, Mister Petrel, you got more folks care about you than you think,” he said.

  I shook my head again.

  “Someone else then?”

  “No. Really.”

  “You sure you weren’t being bothered by somebody? I heard voices raised. Sounds to me like a fight about to be starting …”

  I smiled, because the truth was that I was being bothered by someone. They just weren’t there. I cracked open my door and let him peer inside. “All alone, I promise,” I said. But I saw his eyes leap across the room and catch a glimpse of the words I was placing on the walls. In that instant, I thought he would say something, but then he stopped. He reached out, and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “You need some help, Mister Petrel, you just knock on my door. Anytime. Day or night. You got that?”

  “Thank you, Mister Santiago,” I said, nodding my head. “And thank you for the dinner.”

  I closed the door, and took a deep breath, filling my nostrils with the aroma of the food. It seemed suddenly as if it had been days since I’d eaten. Perhaps it had been, although I remembered grilled cheese. But when was that? I found a fork in a drawer and tore into Rosalita’s specialty. I wondered whether arroz con pollo, which was good for so many ailments of the spirit, might help my own. To my surprise, each bite seemed to energize me, and as I chewed away, I saw the progress I had made on the wall. Columns of history.

  And I realized I was alone again.

  He would be back. I had no doubt about that. He was lurking, vaporous, in some space just beyond my reach, and eluding my consciousness. Avoiding me. Avoiding the Santiago family. Avoiding the arroz con pollo. Hiding from my memory. But for the moment, to my great relief, all I had was chicken, rice, and words. I thought to myself: All that talk in Gulp-a-pill’s office about keeping things confidential had been nothing but showy emptiness.

  It did not take long for all the patients and staff to become aware of Lucy Jones’s presence in the Amherst Building. It was not merely the way she dressed, in loose dark slacks and sweater, carrying her leather briefcase with an orderliness that defied the more slovenly character of the hospital. Nor was it her height and bearing, or the distinctive scar on her face, that separated her from the regulars. It was more in the way she passed through the corridors, heels clicking on the linoleum floor, with an alertness in her eyes that made it seem as if she was inspecting everything and everyone, and searching for some telltale sign that might lead her in the direction she needed. It was an awareness that wasn’t defined by paranoia, visions, or voices. Even the Catos standing in the corners, or leaning up against the walls, or the senile elderly locked into their wheelchairs, all seemingly lost inside their own reveries, or the mentally retarded, who stared dully at almost all that happened around them, seemed to take some strange note that Lucy was driven by forces every bit as powerful as those they all struggled with, but that hers were somehow more appropriate. More connected to the world. So when she paced past them, the patients would follow her with their eyes, not interrupting their murmuring and mumbling, or the shakiness in their hands, but still watching her with an attentiveness that seemed to defy their own illnesses. Even at mealtimes, which she took in the cafeteria with the patients and staff, waiting in line like everyone else for the plates of nondescript, institutionalized food, she was someone apart. She took to sitting at a corner table, where she could look out at the other people in the room, her back to a painted lime green cinder block wall. Occasionally, someone would join her at the table, either Mister Evil, who seemed most interested in everything she was doing, or Big Black or Little Black, who immediately turned any conversation over to sports. Sometimes some of the nursing staff would sit with her, but their stark white uniforms and peaked caps set her even more apart from the regular hospital routine. And when she conversed with one of her companions, she seemed to constantly slip-slide her glance around the room, giving Francis the impression that she was a little like a field hawk soaring on wind currents above them all, looking down, trying to spot some movement in the withered brown stalks of the early New England spring and isolating her prey.

  None of the patients sat with her, including, at the start, Francis or Peter the Fireman. This had been Peter’s suggestion. He had told her that there was no sense in letting too many folks know that they were working with her, although people would figure it out for themselves before too much time had passed. So, at least for the first days, Francis and Peter ignored her in the dining hall.

  Cleo, however, did not.

  As Lucy was carrying her tray to the refuse station, the portly patient accosted her.

  “I know why you’re here!” Cleo said. She was loud, and forcefully accusatory, and had it not been for the usual dinnertime clatter of dishes, trays, and plates, her tone of voice might have grabbed everyone’s attention.

  “Do you now?” Lucy calmly replied. She stepped past Cleo and began to scrape leftovers from a sturdy white plate into a trash canister.

  “Indeed, yes,” Cleo continued with a matter-of-fact tone. “It is obvious.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” Cleo went on, filled with bluster and the peculiar bravado that madness sometimes has, where it releases all the ordinary brakes on behavior.

  “Then perhaps you should tell me what you think.”

  “Aha! Of course. You mean to take over Egypt!”

  “Egypt?”

  “Egypt,” Cleo said, waving her hand to indicate the entire room, motioning in a slightly exasperated fashion at the clarity of it all, which had initially eluded Lucy Jones. “My Egypt. Followed pretty damn fast by seducing Marc Anthony and Caesar, as well, I wouldn’t doubt.”

  Cleo harumphed loudly, crossed her arms for a moment, blocklike in Lucy’s path, and then added, as was her usual response to just about everything, “The bastards. The damn bastards.”

  Lucy Jones looked quizzically at her, then shook her head. “No, in that, you are decidedly mistaken. Egypt is safe in your hands. I would never presume to rival anyone for such a crown, nor for the loves of their life.”

  Cleo lowered her hands to her hips and stared at Lucy. “Why should I believe you?” she demanded.

  “You will need to take my word on this.”

  The large woman hesitated, then scratched at the twisted mangle of hair she wore on top of her head. “Are you a person of honesty and integrity?” she asked abruptly.

  “I am told that I am,” Lucy replied.

  “Gulp-a-pill and Mister Evil would say the same, but I do not trust them.”

  “Nor do I,” Lucy said quietly, leaning forward slightly. “On that count, we can certainly agree.”

  “Then, if you do not mean to conquer Egypt, why are you here?” Cleo asked, putting her hands back on her hips, and resuming an aggressively intuitive tone.

  “I think there is a traitor in your kingdom,” Lucy said slowly.

  “What sort of traitor?”

  “The worst sort.”

  Cleo nodded. “This has to do with Lanky’s arrest and Short Blond’s murder, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Lucy replied.

  “I saw him,” Cleo said. “Not well, but I saw him. That night.”

  “Who? Who did you see?” Lucy asked, suddenly alert, leaning forward.

  Cleo smiled catlike, knowingly, then she shrugged. “If you need my help,” she said, a sudden portrait of haughtiness, her voice dripping with entitlement, “then you should apply for it in an appropriate fashion, at the correct time, at a proper place.”

  With that, Cleo stepped back, and after taking a moment to light a cigarette with a flourish,
she spun away, a look of satisfaction on her face. Lucy appeared a little confused, and took a step after her, only to be intercepted by Peter the Fireman, who had carried his tray up to the refuse counter at that moment, although Francis could see that he had barely touched any of his food. He began to scrape his plate, and thrust the utensils through an opening into the cleaning station. As he did this, Francis heard him say to Lucy, “It’s true. She saw the Angel that night. She told us that he entered the women’s dormitory, stood there for a moment, then exited, locking the door behind him.”

  Lucy Jones nodded. “Curious behavior,” she said, although even she realized that this particular observation was somewhat useless inside a mental hospital where all the behavior was, at best, curious, and at worse, something truly awful. She looked over at Francis, who had risen and now stood next to them. “C-Bird, tell me why would someone who has just committed a violent crime, taken the extraordinary trouble to cover up his tracks and worked hard to see that someone else is blamed for the crime and should by all rights want to disappear and hide, enter into a room filled with women who, if any one of them happened to awaken, might remember him?”

  Francis shook his head. He wondered to himself: Could they remember him? He could hear several of his voices vying within him to answer that question, but he ignored them and instead fixed on Lucy’s eyes. She shrugged.

  “A riddle,” Lucy said. “But an answer I’ll need sooner or later. Do you think you could get me that answer, Francis?”

  He nodded.

  She laughed a bit. “C-Bird has confidence. Good thing,” she said.

  And then she led them out into the corridor.

  She started to say another thing, but Peter held up his hand. “C-Bird, don’t let anyone else know what Cleo saw.” Then he turned to Lucy Jones. “When Francis first spoke with her, and she first mentioned that the man we’re seeking entered the women’s dormitory, she was unable to really provide any sort of coherent description of the Angel. Everyone was pretty upset. Perhaps, now that she has had a little more time to reflect on that night, she might have noticed something important. She likes Francis. I think it might be wise if he went and spoke with her again about the events that night. This would have the added advantage of not drawing any attention to her, because as soon as you start questioning her, people will understand she might have some connection to all this.”