Madeleine's Ghost

by Robert Girardi

  At this, she turns away. The Gypsies wheel her over to the front door and help her down the stairs. A graffiti-scrawled van, fitted with a hydraulic lift, rumbles at the curb.

  “Loser!” Jillian hisses as she passes with the rest.

  The street door is shut in my face, and I am left alone in the quiet foyer, the eyes of the dead Gypsies in suits staring down at me from behind their panes of glass, quiet, accusatory, and still as memory itself.

  10

  I AM DRAINED of life; I am cold, shivering in the air-conditioning of the subway. The car is full of poor wretches who live without this amenity in New York. For them the subway is the only place they can come to get cool on hundred-degree days that blast this city like a blowtorch. They are easily recognized. Old men who live in back-alley tenements with a single window open on the airshaft where no wind stirs. Here on the F, they sit in their shorts and sandals, reading the paper, jolting sideways, loose as puppets when the train comes to a stop and when it starts up again. They are going nowhere. To Coney Island and back in the dull yellow glare.

  When I exit the long tunnel at Knox in the grainy twilight, I know there is something wrong. I am being followed.

  They are two black youths, about fifteen, dressed in full-blown gangsta style: Jeans ten sizes too big droop around skinny thighs to balloon over unlaced two-hundred-dollar sneaker-boots; matching gold dollar signs dangle from necklaces of thick gold rope; the plastic straps of X hats, worn backward, sweat into their foreheads. They’ve got that low-balanced street walk, the loping swagger of someone who has just been released from the joint. They’re hooting and hollering back there; they don’t care who hears them in this neighborhood. There’s no one around, no place to run. They’re looking for trouble, and I know the trouble is me.

  I got a good look at them earlier on the platform at Broadway and Lafayette. With each stop, they made their way back through the cars, entering mine at Delancey. By East Broadway they came to sit across from me, and as the train gathered speed for the long run under the East River, they were making loud comments designed to instill fear into the average commuter. But I am not the average commuter, and I have a secret weapon for such moments.

  I removed my weapon carefully from the back pocket of my khakis, made a great show of bending it out, smoothing the crinkled pages. Then I began to read. It is an old orange-and-black Penguin copy of Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile, curved to the shape of my ass, and dogeared from much use, which I carry with me wherever I go in New York. This fading text gives me the courage I need to walk the streets of the city, to board subway and bus heedless of the dangers, to order an egg salad sandwich from the angry Ashanti behind the counter at the Kwanzaa Deli on Montague Street and ask, steel-eyed, for extra onion.

  The book narrates the British exploration of Central Africa in the nineteenth century and is full of the brave and foolish exploits of men who overcame incredible odds, surmounted many dangers, and mostly returned to good old England to tell about it: There is Mungo Park, determined to find the source of the river Niger, who had himself deposited on the shores of an unknown continent wearing a top hat and carrying a valise; Burton and Speke, who discovered the source of the Nile; Baker and Stanley and Livingstone, who traipsed across Africa wearing flannel suits; and the great General Gordon, who met his end at the hands of the Mahdi’s dervishes at Khartoum in the Sudan.

  Whenever I am feeling particularly outnumbered, I turn to the general’s sad story. Surrounded by a fanatical enemy, he held out for months in the Citadel at Khartoum, praying for a relief column that came three days too late. Food gone, water low, no hope left, as out in the fragrant desert night a hundred thousand dark faces waited for the final assault. The Mahdi sent a message at the last minute under a flag of truce. Gordon would be allowed to leave with his personal possessions if he abandoned the city to the slaughter. Otherwise he would suffer the unspeakable fate of all unbelievers. Leave and Allah will spare you! The Mahdi made this generous offer in his capacity as the right hand of that inscrutable deity.

  But Gordon did not hesitate. The offer was rejected without a second thought. “When God was passing out fear in the world,” Gordon told the messenger, “He came to Gordon and there was no fear left. Tell the Mahdi this! When God created Gordon, He created him without fear.” O brave General Gordon! How many of us will muster such composure at the end? For the tiniest breath of that courage now!

  The two youths follow me down Knox, past the corrugated graffiti-scarred fence that conceals a big empty hole in the ground. They slouch about twenty paces behind, trading loud motha-fuckas back and forth. I start to sweat. In a second my shirt is stuck to my back. I hear the sound of a bottle smashed, and another bottle, but I do not turn around. It is like the surface tension that keeps water poured a little too high from overflowing the glass. Look at it wrong, and the stuff spills over the sides.

  Shadows deepen along the warehouses now. From somewhere comes the plaintive cry of a car alarm. At this, they quicken the pace, unlaced sneaker-boots flopping like clown shoes against the glass-strewn pavement. Then the talk stops all at once. Their silence is worse. On the warehouse just ahead a rusty sign from the fifties announces the manufacture of men’s and boys’ hats. The sky is all blue shadow and beautiful, with just a hint of moon. This is the moment that all New Yorkers dread, the moment they wait for all their lives. What will you do?

  A moment later one of the youths is at my side, and an almost friendly arm crooks around my neck. I look up, my nose a half inch from his nose. His breath has the sweet reek of cheap malt liquor, and his eyes are wild. He smiles. We could be two old friends passing each other on the street.

  “Hey!” I say.

  “What you looking at?” the youth says, hostility in his voice.

  “You, I guess,” I say, and duck out from under his arm and begin to run, but the other one is already crouched like a fullback between the Dumpsters of the Damascus Bakery and the head of Tide Street. I try to dodge around him; he leans into it and catches me up with his sneaker-booted foot, and I go sprawling across the cobbles. It is that simple. Before I can get up, I hear an unmistakable ratcheting sound.

  “Freeze!” one says, and the other one comes around and pulls the wallet out of my back pocket. They find nothing, just a cash card, driver’s license, and a few sentimental odds and ends: a bit of old ribbon from an ex-girlfriend’s hair, a couple of hopeful fortune cookie fortunes, a four-leaf clover sealed in clear tape that my father plucked once from among more mundane clovers in the front yard of our suburban bungalow just outside of Washington, D.C.

  “What is this shit, Dano?” one says, dropping the contents of my wallet to the ground.

  “Looks like shit to me, McGarrett,” the other says. “Better get this cracker-ass on his feet.” They are playing a game; they are characters from Hawaii Five-0.

  Dano reaches down, pulls me up by the scruff of the neck, and twists me around. I am facing the business end of a Garibaldi nine millimeter pointed between my eyes. This gun is made by the Italians from a carbon compound and designed to pass undetected through metal detectors at airports. I hold my breath and hope they cannot hear my heart beating against the inside of my ribs. They look me up and down for a moment, eyes narrow with power. They are at that dangerous age. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they cannot imagine their own mortality.

  “What do you think?” Dano says. “Should we shoot the guy? What do you think, guy?” he says to me, emphasizing the word.

  “Definitely not,” I say. “Wo Fat wouldn’t like it.”

  “Think you funny?” McGarrett says, tapping the gun against my forehead.

  “No,” I say.

  “Then gimme your money! We know you got money!” the other one shouts, and I jump and go fumbling in my pocket for my change purse, which contains three dollars and some change. Dano empties it out into his hand and stares at the wadded bills and pennies with disbelief, and it is then I remember something Geof
f told me: Always carry fifty dollars in your pocket for the muggers. Anything less, and they’re likely to kill you.

  “O.K.,” I say. “Let me tell you a story. It’s about Gordon of Khartoum. Do you know Khartoum? It’s in the Sudan, a straight shot down the river from Cairo. Do you know about Gordon? He was governor-general of the Sudan and tried to stop the slave trade there.” I am talking fast, in a voice all quivery around the edges.

  “Huh?” McGarrett says.

  Dano looks up from the pittance in his hand. “What you saying?”

  “Listen, when he knew there was no hope left, when the dervishes were climbing over the palace wall, Gordon retired to his chambers and put on his dress uniform, the white one covered with gold braid, and he put on his fez, and he buckled on his sword and walked out to the top of the stairs to face them. They crowded into the courtyard, thousands of them, their bloody spears poised, half afraid to come up, because he had the reputation of being a man who talked with gods and devils. There was a moment of silence. There often is at such times. Gordon just stared down at them with his blue eyes. He had these blue eves, you see, ice-cold steel. He had been known to stop riots in dusty desert towns with just one look. Then he made a gesture like this”—I give them an ambivalent movement of wrist and elbow—“some say a gesture of contempt, others say resignation—who knows, does it matter? And you know what happened then?”

  The two youths look at each other, then look back at me.

  “What happened?” Dano says.

  “Well,” I say, frowning, “one of the dervishes shouted, ‘Mala oun el yom yomeck!’ which means ‘Accursed one, thy time has come!’ in Sudanese, and then they, um, hacked him to pieces and threw the pieces down a well.”

  “Say what?” McGarrett says.

  “What the hell kind of story is that?” Dano says.

  “It’s history,” I say.

  “Fuck history,” McGarrett says. “Enough of this shit.”

  “Right. This all you got, Mr. Gordon of Cartoon?” Dano says, pushing the crumpled bills under my nose.

  I nod miserably.

  “Then we got to do it to you; it’s one of the rules,” McGarrett says.

  “Do what?” I say.

  “Fuck you up, that’s what,” Dano says.

  “You don’t got enough money,” McGarrett says, shrugging in an affable way, “you get fucked up. Just business.”

  “Yeah,” Dano says. “It’s the nature of the beast. Especially these days when people walk around with too much plastic. People these days got cards to take a shit, you know? We need to put the word out you don’t carry enough cash money on you, you going to get fucked up.”

  “Think of it as a sort of street tax,” McGarrett says. “The IRS in this case being us.”

  “Really, you—”

  I don’t have the chance to say anything more. In another second the blunt carbon side of the Garibaldi is slammed hard against my head, and I catch a last oily whiff of it before I sink, blank, to the cobbles.

  11

  THE STREET at eye level is like a gray moon landscape, all peaks and valleys and thick with dust in the cracks between the cobbles. Overhead the streetlight flickers green, an orbiting eye, the moon’s moon. My head is stuck to the pavement with dried blood. I unstick myself with some effort and much pain and gather my scraps and stumble back to the apartment.

  In the bathroom I am afraid to look in the mirror. Is there an eyeball hanging out? No, just the face of a man scared half to death, a purple knot swelling three inches to the north-northwest of his ear. I wash the wounded area delicately with a blue facecloth, administer iodine to the cut, then run a hot bath and soak for an hour and try to consider myself lucky. But the truth will not be soaked out of me: My life hangs by a thread. Only the thinnest of possibilities separates me from disaster. It’s this city, yes. But is it different elsewhere? Is there a corner of America safe from this murderous nonsense, the dance of the haves and the have-nots? O Arcadia! Then I think of Chase and her watery doom, and I am sad and scared.

  An hour later I am lying on the couch, watching the news, when the phone rings. I let it ring. Then it stops ringing and rings again a few seconds later, and I pick it up even though I don’t feel like talking to anybody.

  “Hello?”

  “Ned?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My God, you sound awful!”

  I’m not sure for a moment about the identity of the woman on the other end of the line. Then it hits me with a little jolt.

  “Hello, Antoinette,” I say in a flat voice. I haven’t spoken to her in six months, but tonight my head hurts, and I can’t work up any enthusiasm. Somehow, I can’t even imagine her face.

  “Are you all right?” she says.

  On the news right now they are pulling three bodies wrapped in sodden bedsheets out of the East River. The newslady, a spunky, attractive Korean girl named Kim Sung, is on the scene, trying to suppress her glee over covering such a great gruesome story. It’s amazing how cheery tragedy makes us, as long as it happens to someone else.

  “As we speak, they’re pulling a couple of bodies out of the river on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge,” I tell Antoinette in the same flat tone. “I’m watching it on the TV. The newslady says that some underwater cables kept the bodies from drifting into the harbor. The bedsheets they were wrapped in got tangled up in the cables. They’ve been floating there for three days with holes in their heads, like seaweed, like fucking kelp. Two kids and a woman. They suspect the husband, who is wanted for questioning. This is happening as we speak.”

  Antoinette is silent on the other end. I can hear the distance crackling between us, the long miles of countryside, the wide sweep of the continent down past New Orleans to the Gulf.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong, Ned?” Antoinette says at last. She sounds concerned.

  “All right,” I say, “here it is in random order—last week my friend Chase committed suicide by jumping off the Manhattan Bridge, I can’t seem to finish the thesis for my Ph.D. which just might get me a real job, I haven’t slept with anyone I care about in years, I have no money to speak of and no health insurance, I live like a pig in a crummy apartment in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in New York, and this evening, coming home from the subway, I got mugged.” For some reason I don’t tell her about the ghost.

  There is another silence as Antoinette absorbs all of this. My forehead is hot. I find I am clutching the receiver so hard my hand hurts.

  “Listen to me, Ned,” Antoinette says now. “Did they hurt you? Are you hurt?” Practical girl that she is, she seizes on the most immediate of my sorrows.

  “Pistol-whipped, I think that’s the word,” I say. “Two hooligans with a gun. A big gun. My head hurts, maybe a mild case of shock. But I’m O.K., I guess.”

  “Ned, you need—”

  “Yeah,” I interrupt. “I need a million bucks; I need a house in the country; I need a vacation. But all I’ve got are a couple of shirts, a few battered books, and a lot of squalor.” I regret this self-pity immediately. It doesn’t do to whine to Antoinette, who always maintained a cheery distance, even when we were sleeping together, but there it is. Suddenly she clicks into place like a slide in a slide show, and I feel an unwelcome tug at my heart. She is sitting in her slip on the old yellow Victorian fainting couch in her apartment in the Faubourg Marigny, cigarette in hand, comfortable mess strewn around her, the aquarium full of shoes, the piles of clothes on the floor waiting for the maid, and out the window the St. Roche shrine a dark silhouette against the green sky.

  “Ned, I think I can help you,” she says quietly now.

  “Forget about it, Antoinette,” I say. “Didn’t mean to go off like that.”

  “Shut up and listen to me. Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t do anything about the million bucks; things haven’t been real good with the store lately. But I can help you with the vacation and the h
ouse in the country.”

  What is she saying? The miles fizz and pop between us. From the power plant across the street there is the loud echoing scrape of metal expanding against metal.

  12

  IT IS almost impossible for someone to disappear completely from history. Even the least fortunate leave some scrap behind, a faded letter, a line or two in a police blotter, a few bones in a desiccated pine box buried in the ground beside other pine boxes, each corresponding to a number in a ledger on the dusty shelf of a rectory library. Not so for Sister Januarius, whom Father Rose wishes to declare a saint before the Congregation of Rites in Rome. This woman has left nothing, not a crumb, not a postcard or a dentist’s bill. Catholics are usually very good record keepers, especially when it comes to their own. Think of the Venerable Bede, of the chroniclers and the ecclesiastical historians, of those monks who for centuries copied books by hand and candlelight, and the parish priests who, with a weary flourish of pen, recorded deaths and births and baptisms. This nun lived and died a bare hundred years ago, but her life seems as distant and obscure as Ptolemy’s.

  I have begun to have my suspicions. Perhaps Sister Januarius is a figment of Father Rose’s imagination. Still, excepting the obsession with golf, he strikes me as a sane man. It seems more plausible that someone went through the records and destroyed every document pertaining to the woman. But what about her bones? Catholic dogma is explicit on the subject. Catholic bones must be interred in Catholic ground!

  I leave the crypt and the contents of box number twenty-two—bundle after bundle of 1920s-era business correspondence half eaten by termites—mount the stone stairs and follow the passage that leads beneath the rectory to the parish house. This Gothic stone building was once the site of St. Basil’s School before the Irish families who formerly inhabited this section of Brooklyn departed for the suburbs. The narrow, locker-lined corridors still smell of chalk and the unwashed flesh of children. At one end of the main hall, behind a mesh screen, a life-size plaster polychromed Jesus suffers in detail on the cross. The screen was put up, Father Rose once explained, to keep schoolchildren from sticking their gum to the bottom of Christ’s feet. The Savior’s elongated toes hang about thirty inches off the floor, just elbow level for a nine- or ten-year-old.