by Philip Kerr
Sara shook her head. What color she had was slowly draining from her face as she replaced it with the dreadful memory of what had happened.
“I don’t know how long I lay there, but finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. So I took the gun out of the bedside drawer and got up. I went from room to room with the gun in my hand, turning on every light. I would have opened some windows except I was too scared to go near them. Anyway, it didn’t matter as the foul smell disappeared just as suddenly as it had arrived. Thinking I must have imagined it, I fetched myself a glass of water and then had a pee. I switched the lights out and went back to bed. I read for a little and then turned out the light. Almost as soon as I did, I heard a series of very loud and deliberate knocks on the window beside my pillow. Which really freaked me out. Like I said, I’m on the ninth floor. I mean there’s no one who could have been out there tapping like that.”
“Describe the knocks you heard.”
She leaned forward and demonstrated on the coffee table. “One, two, three,” she said. “Just like that. At regular intervals. It happened maybe six or seven times.” She shivered again and then leaned back into the fold of my arm. “I think I screamed the first time. Then I was angry. I pulled back the curtains, although I don’t know what I expected to see.” She shrugged. “Peter Quint? I don’t know. But there was nothing. All I could see were the lights of the city.” She paused. “I’m sorry. Peter Quint is a character in a novella by Henry James called The Turn of the Screw. It’s the story of a young governess who goes to look after two children at a remote English country house and becomes convinced that she can see the ghost of her predecessor and her employer’s dead valet: Peter Quint. He has a very nasty habit of peering in at the window.”
“I’ve read it.”
“You have?” She sounded surprised.
“Peter Ekman mentioned it in his diary. So I thought it might provide me with an insight.” I shrugged. “But it didn’t. At least not until now.”
“Anyone peering in my window would have to have been holding on to a rope.”
“Maybe they were. Is there a window cleaner’s platform?”
“Yes, but I’d certainly have seen it; or perhaps I’d have seen the cables that support the platform. It wasn’t that dark.” She shook her head firmly. “No, someone was trying to frighten me and I know that because—I heard someone laughing.”
“Where? Outside the window? Inside the apartment?”
“Outside the window.”
“I see. This happened when?”
“Friday night.”
“What happened yesterday?”
“Yesterday I went to see a friend who’s a shrink. She heard me out and then wrote me a prescription for sleeping pills and tranquilizers.”
“Which you didn’t take?”
“Is it that obvious? No.”
I drank some more of the white wine. Oddly, it tasted even more delicious now than before and, in the lamplight, it was hard to imagine how something that looked so beautiful could contain a substance as hazardous and intoxicating as alcohol. Sometimes it’s a little hard to see the danger in ordinary things. Similarly, it was difficult to decide what to do about Sara. Sending her home seemed out of the question. For one thing, she’d drunk too much wine to be safely driving a two-hundred-mile-an-hour car and, for another, she’d probably have become hysterical at the idea of being on her own. But given the threats made to my life by Nelson Van Der Velden and what had happened to me since then, was it wise to let her stay with me? Again I wondered how much to tell Sara about that, and once again I decided that it was probably best to avoid the subject altogether.
Of course, I was also troubled by what she had told me because of the way it seemed to defy any logical explanation. And not just what she had told me; if the Charles Hindemith I had met in the street outside my own front door was indeed her first husband, who was dead, then it wasn’t just Sara who needed urgently to see a psychiatrist, it was me, too. But how was I to find out more about him without alarming her further?
If all of that wasn’t enough, what was now nagging at my mind once again was the uncomfortable thought that the only rational explanation for what had happened to Sara Espinosa—and by extension to Osborne, Richardson, Ekman, Davidoff, Esther Begleiter, David Durham, and even, perhaps, me—was something irrational; that the impossible had suddenly become possible after all.
“Look, you’re very welcome to stay here with me,” I said. “But if you don’t mind, I’ll change the sheets. It’s been a while since I made up the bed.”
She started to protest. “Do you want me to sleep with you?” she asked. “Just say if you don’t.”
“Of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Not now. Why? Don’t you?”
“It’s just that some men prefer to sleep alone,” she explained. “Luis, my third husband, couldn’t bear to sleep with me after we’d had sex. I think I disgusted him.”
“Nothing about you disgusts me,” I told her. “I reserve that privilege for myself.”
“But Giles—do you mind if I call you Giles? I don’t care for ‘Gil’ very much . . .”
“Not at all. It’s my name.”
“Why do you feel like that?”
“I’m a bit OCD,” I explained. “I know it doesn’t look like it now, but sometimes I get a bit freaked out by germs and by the need to impose order on the world.” I shrugged. “I probably need to see a shrink. That’s what my boss thinks.”
“A God complex,” she said. “That’s just a normal part of the human condition. You have germs to worry about. God had Lucifer.”
“You make it sound reassuringly normal.”
“It is. There’s nothing really wrong with you, Giles. Nothing that a good woman can’t fix.”
“Are you volunteering for the job?”
She paused as if she really was considering that possibility.
“It wasn’t really a sensible question,” I said.
“Oh, but it is, my darling man. It’s an excellent question. I don’t know why, but I feel very safe with you, Giles.”
“It’s the badge and the gun. Makes me look like Gary Cooper.” I grinned. “Do not forsake me, oh my darling. Here, I’ll show you up to the room.”
I led the way up the creaking stairs and opened a linen cupboard in the corner. On each shelf was a set of beautifully ironed sheets from when Father Dyer had employed a housekeeper, and on top of each set of sheets were a small bar of scented soap and a label indicating the particular bed they fitted. I picked out a set and she helped me to make up the bed in my room.
“What was he like? Your first husband?”
“Charles? Very handsome in a mature sort of way. His hair was like platinum. I used to love running my hands through it. He was witty, arrogant, opinionated, and, on occasion, the most infuriating man I ever met. A typical upper-crust New Yorker. Like Gore Vidal with a bad smell under his nose.”
It was also an excellent description of the man I had met in the street.
“There’s a bathroom next door,” I said, handing her a clean towel and trying to contain my growing sense of disquiet. “And you’ll find a new toothbrush in the cabinet.”
“For a man who hasn’t had any guests since he moved in, you seem very well set up for visitors.”
“Not me,” I said. “Father Dyer. And you’re quite safe here. If you hear any tapping on the window, it will only be branches of the tree in the wind.” I certainly hoped that was true. “Can’t seem to find any tree surgeons here in Galveston. Like everyone else, they all seem to have moved out.”
She looked only partly reassured by this information.
I held out my hand. “Give me your car keys and I’ll put the top up on your Bentley.”
She glanced out of the window—the last light was gone and even the moon was covered with clouds�
��and then blankly at me.
“In case it rains,” I added. “Unless you’d prefer to do it yourself.”
She shook her head silently. She didn’t need to say so, but I could tell that she was obviously afraid of the dark.
It was a good thing I wasn’t.
“I might be outside for a while,” I lied. “I have to check my own car.”
It sounded plausible enough, I thought.
“All right,” she said. “But don’t be too long.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Really. Nothing’s going to happen to you here. Why don’t you take a bath? There’s plenty of water. We’ve got lots of water in Galveston.”
TWENTY-TWO
It was absurd, of course, and I was beginning to suspect that I might be as mad as my poor uncle Bill. They do say that madness runs in families and I was now facing up to the possibility that in mine it was sprinting toward total insanity.
I was walking up a deserted Galveston street to visit the eccentric Mr. Hindemith; I wanted to satisfy myself that when I’d met him the previous day I hadn’t been talking with the dead man who was Sara Espinosa’s first husband. Could anything have been more ridiculous than that? No. But I knew that I faced a sleepless night unless I was able to prove to myself what the remaining rational part of my mind told me was obvious: that there are no such things as ghosts and very probably I would find some ordinary and sensible explanation for all that was crowding into my unruly mind.
Everything in the moonlight looked black-and-white, like an old movie, and I half expected to see a desperate-looking Jimmy Stewart rush out of a house that a well-meaning angel had conveniently arranged to empty of all traces of his ever having lived there. I felt a little like George Bailey myself, wide-eyed, a little scared, not sure of anything, hardly knowing what to believe in and what to doubt, a fish out of water.
It was true, the coincidences seemed uncomfortable, to say the least: the name of Charles Hindemith; the description Sara had given of the man and his tastes; the bare feet of both Mr. Hindemith and the figure Sara imagined she had seen outside her apartment door; the way the man had refused to shake hands with me as if—well, as if such a simple action as that might not have been physically possible. And yet the coincidences also seemed unreasonable: the barefoot Mr. Hindemith I had met would hardly have haunted the apartment of his former wife in Austin while also haunting a house close to me, two hundred miles away in Galveston. And why come and introduce himself? Most of this made even less sense than my late-night visit to the man’s house.
“You really are a crazy fucking bastard, Gil Martins,” I muttered out loud. “Gisela got that right. You should have seen the Head Fed when you had the chance.”
Besides, it was no longer the ideal night to do anything except stay at home. The dry breeze that had stirred Sara’s hair outside the diocesan house had turned into a mild gale. It whistled along the desolate street, banging the gates and doors and broken shutters of the dilapidated empty houses and shifting the tall weeds in their small front gardens. At times the wind lifted in pitch so that it sounded like something that had once been human but was not human anymore. Even a deaf man would have been happier without that wind. It seemed to hurry me along as if it were anxious that I should I find out the truth, especially if that truth turned out to be an uncomfortable one. Curiously, there were a couple of moments when the pressure of the wind was so strong it felt almost as if someone had pushed me and I actually turned, half expecting to see the person who had stumbled into me, or even Hindemith himself.
The shadow of something large passed low overhead. It was probably a pelican, a spoonbill, or even an ibis: Galveston’s birds were about the only living things to have profited from the exodus of humanity from the city. I actually felt the air from the bird’s wings flapping up and down.
As I neared the large and rambling wooden house’s exterior, I now rehearsed—so that I might not seem as peculiar as Hindemith himself—an explanation for why I was calling on him at such a late hour.
“I had the sudden idea that you were not well, Mr. Hindemith,” I muttered out loud, which is another sign that you’re losing it, of course. “Perhaps it’s just the sudden change in the weather. But I thought it was only neighborly to come and see that you were all right. Especially as neighbors are in short supply around here.”
It sounded lame, but it didn’t sound as bad as “I just came around to check out that you’re not a fucking ghost.”
I’d brought my Glock, which I’d reloaded; I’d also clipped a little tactical flashlight on the muzzle, because all of the houses were dark and there were no streetlights. When the clouds made a black fist around the moon, it was hard to see very much at all. But as I neared Hindemith’s front door, I saw there was a very faint light in a turret room on the third floor, as if a single candle had been burning there instead of an electric light. That wouldn’t have surprised me. If anyone looked like the kind of person to light a room with a candle, it was Mr. Hindemith.
I walked up the steps onto the porch where a wheel-back rocking chair stood moving gently in the wind; whenever I had driven past the house, this was where I had usually seen Hindemith, and it was tempting to imagine that only a few seconds before he had stood up and gone inside the house. A set of Corinthian bells and chimes hung like a miniature church organ from the porch ceiling immediately above the chair as if designed to catch the dreams of the chair’s occupant, and they seemed to resonate continuously, adding a surreal, angelic touch to the night. I searched for a doorbell and, not finding one, moved a screen so that I could knock on the door. It was wide open, so I shouted into the hallway several times and then stepped inside onto a bare wooden floor that creaked like an old galleon.
Right away I encountered a feeling of strong foreboding. I took out the gun and switched on the flashlight. Then I looked around for the electric light, but like many of the houses in that part of Galveston, the electricity wasn’t working; probably it hadn’t worked in that house since the hurricane, thus the candle I thought I’d seen upstairs.
My footsteps seemed to arouse something on the garbage-strewn floor that scurried off into the darkness. An enormous leaning tower of pizza boxes stood in one corner of the room as if someone had eaten a pizza next to it every day for five years. The place smelled like an open grave.
“I should have brought a fucking Domino’s,” I said.
In spite of that, it was hard to imagine anyone living in such a curious place. Everything else was under dust sheets except for a cobweb-strewn glass-bowl light that hung over my head, which seemed to be full of dead insects. There was a long dirty mark along the wall that showed the high point of the floodwater and reminded me of just how devastating Ike had been in Galveston. A large but empty fireplace occupied the center of the wall with enough white marble in it to have kept Michelangelo supplied for a lifetime. Below the floodwater line, the marble was as green as if it were covered with seaweed.
“Hello,” I called. “Mr. Hindemith? It’s Gil Martins from down the street. I saw the door was open and I stopped by to check you were okay, sir.”
I walked toward the stairs and mounted the first steps, which were wider than the rest and led up to a short mezzanine floor that gave onto a large and dirty window; on the dusty glass someone had very skillfully drawn an ascending, ethereal staircase that reminded me of the biblical story of Jacob, although, as things turned out, there were not nearly enough of them to have been useful.
As I approached the center of the mezzanine, the clouds cleared from the moon to light up the dust drawing on the window and I felt my heart stop for a moment as I saw a human figure—a naked man who appeared to be standing on the stairs of this almost heavenly ladder; and it was another second before I realized that the naked man was actually standing outside in the backyard, although it was more like a small park; the next moment the man glanced my way and moved quickly i
n the opposite direction.
“Mr. Hindemith,” I exclaimed, although I wasn’t exactly sure it was him. The figure had silver hair like Hindemith’s but was, I thought, more muscular than the man I had met; then again, that man had been wearing clothes. “Wait a minute, please. I need to talk to you, sir.”
Thinking I must have scared him out of his bed and out of the big house—it was hardly the kind of place that anyone visited, least of all late at night—I realized I’d have done better to have waited until the morning. Now all I could think of was the need to apologize to the old man for having disturbed his sleep and perhaps tell him that I would fetch him safely back to his bed before he injured himself.
I saw a dilapidated set of French windows and went through them into the back garden, immediately regretting it. I found my face covered in a large cobweb that made me think no one had been through there in a long time and that there must have been some other way out I hadn’t seen. Something crawled on the back of my neck and I clutched at it several times before I was able to cure myself of the sensation that I had a large spider underneath my shirt collar. At the same time I caught a glimpse of the same naked white figure running down to the bottom of an unkempt lawn before it disappeared into a thick grove of trees.
“Hey, Mr. Hindemith,” I shouted. “Don’t be afraid. It’s me. Gil Martins. Come back, sir.”
I ran after him across the overgrown lawn and was swiftly among the trees; I could still hear him running ahead of me and it surprised me that the old man should be so quick on his toes and that his bare skin should be so apparently careless of the branches and bushes that pulled and tugged at my clothes. His footsteps were hardly light; the noise of his naked feet on the ground was like the sound of galloping hooves, which was enough to convince me not only that the old man was made of solid flesh and blood but that he was younger and more vigorous than I’d thought. This fact alone left me feeling a little reassured that the man I was pursuing was real and could therefore have nothing to do with Sara’s ex-husband. Clearly I was on a wild-goose chase after all.
