‘So,’ said Lindsay, leaning forward and smiling in the most enchanting and feminine way, ‘tell me more about your aunt’s apartment building, Colin.’
Colin, who was not intoxicated, instantly felt so.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s called the Conrad building, and it’s a very strange, even sinister place.’
Chapter 9
ALONE IN HIS LOFT at TriBeCa, earlier that evening, Tomas Court had also been conducting a dialogue about the Conrad building, a dialogue none the less forceful for being imagined. The two speakers were himself and his wife, and the dialogue began as soon as Thalia, Mario and Colin left.
The minute the door closed on them, it burst out in his mind, a cacophony of contradictions, interruptions and pleas, of ill-phrased assertions and ill-timed non sequiturs. Court stood quietly in the shadows of the room, outside the circle of bright light that lit the work table, and let this chaos into his mind. He was used to this form of possession; when he ceased working, a process that demanded all his energy and will-power, he always felt drained and bloodless, emptied and lightheaded; an energy vacuum had been created, and into this vacuum anything, including malevolence, might rush.
Today it was to be the Conrad. So be it, he thought, and waited, not allowing his breathing to quicken or tighten. He knew that, given time, this cacophony and havoc would resolve itself. He fixed his eyes on one feature of the room—it never mattered which feature, and in this case it happened to be the bars of the window, opposite which he stood. The bars, eight feet tall, and at least six across, formed a crucifix shape, which amused him distantly, since he was without religious belief. He looked at this cross, and was aware that outside in the street some absurd commotion was taking place; he could hear that his English location manager was giving vent to his feelings, but as far as Court was concerned he might just as well have been shouting his protests in Urdu. Lascelles’s laments were a cry from another country and Court felt an absolute lack of curiosity in anything Lascelles said.
After a while, as Lascelles’s voice died away and silence fell in the room, the dialogue with his wife quietened; her interruptions became fewer, then ceased altogether; he was left listening to his own voice. Why? said his voice. Why, why, why? Why live there? Why invite rejection? Why do this?
He felt stronger at once, the moment of mental palsy over and done with, he told himself. The why questions were familiar demons; they had been plaguing him for months. It was now safe to move, safe to begin functioning again, although he truly functioned, as he well knew, only when he worked. He picked up one of the cardboard boxes which littered the loft, and carried it across to the circle of light on his black work table.
He took no second look at the welter of coloured papers still strewn across its surface; he had not the least inclination either to re-examine them or tidy them up. Each day, embarking on work, whether here, on location, or in a studio, he would know, before he began, exactly where he aimed, and how much expenditure of spirit, energy and will-power would be necessary that day to take him there. When he reached that preordained point, he stopped, and had been known to do so in mid-sentence, or mid-take. If necessary, he would drive or drag others on with him to this stopping place; if necessary, he would manipulate, annoy, abuse, frighten, trick or charm them en route, but get there he would.
He opened the lid of the box and moved the tumble of shooting schedules to one side to make space. During the day, these papers held magic, for they were the raw materials of his art, as essential to it, in their way, as celluloid, cameras, actors and light. Now, since he was at rest, they were inert, and merely his instruments; they were without power until tomorrow at seven in the morning, when he again picked them up.
From the box he took out the material which various researchers had been gathering for him for months. Every scrap of information here concerned the Conrad building. There were old architectural journals; batches of photographs new and old; photocopies of the original plans for the building, plans which had been lying in some city hall archive for decades. Court laid them all out on the table and began to examine them minutely; it was not the first time he had done this.
He examined the, to him, grotesque façade of the Conrad, with its baroque excesses and its Gothic turrets. It seemed to him that the architect had given the building a forbidding and secretive look. He disliked the extravagance of its great gaping maw of an entrance; he disliked the oeil-de-boeuf windows which ornamented those turrets and punctuated the roof-line, and which gave the building a menacing, many-eyed look, as if it were continuously hungry, and continuously vigilant.
His wife was seeking to buy apartment three, situated on the north corner of the building, overlooking Central Park. She had already viewed this apartment several times; she had refused to allow him to accompany her—proving to be obstinate on this point.
‘Tomas,’ she had said, ‘you don’t want me to live there and you don’t believe I’m going to be allowed to live there. No. What’s the point?’
Thwarted in this desire, he had turned to this research material instead. Now, he inspected the architectural plans, drawn up by Hillyard White over eighty years before. He traced the walls of apartment three, examined its orientation, dimensions and fenestration. He could see the disposition of the rooms; the photographs and descriptions in the various books and journals gave him an idea of how this interior might look. He could half see some rich space with many closets, with rooms which led into further rooms, and with yet more rooms beyond that. The apartment was very large; he now realized for the first time that it was a duplex. Towards the rear, there was a Second storey, secreted away; this would be the site of the main bedrooms; this was where his wife would sleep. His wife I had her final meeting with the board of the Conrad, with the committee who would decide her fate, the following morning; she would be given their decision then. Suppose that decision, against all the odds, was yes? How did you reach that second storey, that bedroom?
He bent more closely to the plans, which, to a non-expert, were not easy to decipher. There was the staircase—he saw it now—but how did you reach the staircase?
He only half saw, half glimpsed, he realized. It was like looking into some marvellous lighted room from the street outside, and then, just when all its secrets were about to be revealed, some officious person came along and closed the shutters in his face.
He was suddenly seized with anger; his hands began to shake. With a furious, violent gesture, he swept the papers to the floor. Immediately, the chaos returned, and those two voices began arguing again in his head. ‘Oh, it torments me, Tomas, it torments me,’ his wife said. This time, he shouted his wife down and drowned her out, anger giving him an eloquence that, when they actually had this argument, he rarely possessed.
He spelled out to her the insanity of this plan, a misconception from the first. Why was she continuing with the shaming procedures inflicted on her by the Conrad board, who for months now had been vetting her finances and every other aspect of her life? Why had she hired, at huge expense, first a real-estate broker, then one of Manhattan’s most expensive law firms to press her suit? All this money and effort would be wasted, he shouted, raining his reasons down on her now-bowed, imagined head. Neither money nor lawyers turned the key of admission at the Conrad, and if the broker—some man called Jules McKechnie—was claiming otherwise, she was being taken for a ride. Could she not see that?
The Conrad, he reminded her, was a co-operative; its board could choose whom to refuse and whom to admit. For decades, the Conrad board had weaselled its way around the law, in particular the laws regarding discrimination on grounds of colour, race or sex. It was a bastion, and it did not raise its drawbridge to actresses, divorced women with young children, or the nouveau riche. Did she not know, had her precious broker and her over-priced lawyers not checked: no member of the acting profession, let alone a movie star of her fame, had ever lived in the Conrad, though many had sought admission. And no young children
had been brought up in the Conrad for a quarter of a century at least.
The occupants of the Conrad, he continued, were ageing, rich, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. They believed in the Social Register, since they, and everyone they cared to know, were listed in it; they believed in money, provided it was inherited, and thus disinfected of all taint; and they believed in an Episcopalian God, while failing to practise any of His teachings. They are evil, he thundered; that building is evil, and I will not allow my son to be brought up in that place.
‘Our son,’ his wife’s voice quietly corrected him, and he heard again her one attempt to justify her decision. ‘I want to live there, Tomas. I see it differently from you. I shall feel safe there. This has nothing to do with you. It’s my choice.’
That reply, which had infuriated him when she gave it, and which infuriated him now, explained nothing. It was in his wife’s nature to explain herself and her actions as little as possible, and it was this intransigency in her, this refusal ever to allow him to be sure he understood her, which bound him to her—or so he sometimes thought.
In a sudden rage with her and with himself, he slammed out of the apartment, wearing only a jacket and unprepared for the cold of the streets. He had a car available to him, and a discreet, reliable driver whom he could have called upon, but he disliked others knowing his movements as much as he disliked them knowing his thoughts, so he flagged down a cab, knowing he should go back for a coat, but refusing to do so. He had to be careful of cold air, of course, just as he had to be careful of dust, pollen, pollution, smoke and a thousand other hidden substances in the air; this disability he loathed and resented. His anger deepening, he told the cab driver to take him uptown to the Carlyle, where his son would be waiting for him. Then, changing his mind, and knowing he needed something else, he told him to go to the Minskoff theatre, where his wife would be on stage, and that night’s performance of Estella would now be taking place.
Why? Why? Why? This question pursued him uptown in the cab; it pursued him across the noisy, crowded space of Times Square, where he abandoned the cab, and it pursued him to the theatre, where he paused, looking at the lights that spelled out his wife’s name on the theatre front.
Why live there, and why exclude him in this way, when he was sure she still loved him and wished for a reconciliation as much as he did? Why, when she was eager to work with him, did she still refuse to live with him? Did her continuing fear of Joseph King explain this decision—or was there some other, hidden reason? He glanced over his shoulder, having, as he often did, the sensation that he was being watched. No-one appeared to be watching him, so he turned down the small alleyway leading to the stage door and entered the theatre, feeling as he had done on many occasions that he would find the answers to all his questions here, that they lay very close, within reach.
He was known at the stage door, and no-one detained him there, for these visitations of his were frequent. He went first to Natasha’s dressing-room, where his way was blocked, first by the strange androgynous creature Natasha insisted on having as her dresser, and then by one of the bodyguards—the favourite bodyguard, the Texan.
Court was a tall man himself, but the Texan was even taller. Court looked coldly at his blond, muscled good looks. He looked like an overgrown child, and was possibly more intelligent than he appeared.
‘I don’t see that you can offer my wife much protection if she’s on stage, and you’re here by her dressing-room,’ he said.
‘I agree. But Ms Lawrence insists.’
‘Give my wife a message, would you? Tell her I need to talk to her. I’m going up to the Carlyle now to see my son. I’ll wait there until she gets back after the show.’
An expression of doubt passed across the man’s face. ‘I’m afraid she’s going out after the show, sir. She’s having dinner with her property broker, Jules McKechnie. I think it was mentioned…’
‘Ah, so it was. Then tell her I’ll call her tomorrow.’
‘I surely will.’ He paused. Tomas Court felt his blue eyes, eyes which appeared as innocent as a summer’s sky, rest on his face. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr Court?’
‘No, there is not.’
Court turned away. He went into the backstage maze at the Minskoff, along corridors, through fire doors, up flight after flight of stone stairs. He paused on one of the upper landings, a warning constriction beginning to tighten around his chest. Then he went on, up more stairs, until, right at the top of the building, he came to the place where he had to be next.
He opened a series of doors and stepped into the lighting box, high at the back of the auditorium, above its top-most tier seats. This dark, boxed-in coffin of a room, glass-fronted, sound-proofed, jutted forward over the heads of the audience and gave him an eagle’s eye view of the stage. The two technicians there, used to these unannounced visits of his, looked up, nodded, then returned their attention to the winking lights of their computer consoles. One silently passed him a pair of headphones, and Court stood there, holding them, watching the console, watching their hands moving back and forth among the switches and slides and myriad tiny green and red cue lights. He had a confused sense of being piloted, of being in flight; they were taking off, banking, gaining height. He felt that at any minute, all the answers to his questions would be there in his mind, and he would understand his wife.
He took a step towards the glass wall, felt a second’s vertiginous fear of falling as he saw the deep, dark declivity of the auditorium open out beneath; then moved again, and saw across the gulf of the audience, infinitely distant, silent and gesticulating, the figure of Estella, the figure of his wife.
He watched her lips move, her mouth open and close, and her throat pulse. He watched her tenderly as, beautiful in her young girl’s first-act white dress, she moved centre stage. He savoured her silence, then, with a slow reluctance, he put on the headphones. The music hit him in a wave; soaring up through the currents of the song came the sound of Estella’s voice.
They had reached the fourth scene of the first act; he was hearing the duet between that cruel child, Estella, and poor, humiliated, confused, besotted Pip. Court had no liking for musicals, most of which he despised, and scant admiration for the composer of this one. He had advised Natasha against taking this part, and had had forebodings of failure for her when she did. None of those factors was relevant now.
This particular song, one of the great hits of the show, was not even a song he liked. He could see that technically it was difficult, and that melodically it was intricate—it interwove major and minor keys in a haunting way—but he had always found its bittersweetness not to his taste. Even so, it left him defenceless. To his anger and incomprehension, the power of his wife’s song bypassed his mind and sent a shock to his heart, just as—no matter how he resisted—it always did.
Again he felt that warning constriction in his chest; he heard himself make some strange wounded sound; he removed the headphones and fumbled his way out of the darkness of the box. He descended the stone staircases without seeing them, still hearing the voice of his wife, both on the Tannoy system and in his head. Halfway down the stairs, he took a wrong turn and found himself lost in that labyrinth of backstage passageways. He turned, leaned against a wall, retraced his steps, descended again, and found himself, at last, at the stage door. He ignored the man on duty there, who, on seeing him, rose with an exclamation of concern. Pushing his way through the doors, he fought to control his breathing and fought to control the anxiety which always made these paroxysms worse. Finding himself in that dimly lit alleyway, he blessed its darkness; he moved away from the door, away from prying eyes, and slumped back against a wall, now gasping for breath.
It was a bad asthma attack and the pain was acute. He listened to the sirens of this city, to the incessant growl of automobiles pumping out their poisons, as he fumbled for the inhaler he always carried. He tilted his head back and depressed the plunger once, then again, sucking hard. At the thi
rd attempt the beta-adrenoceptor stimulants at last took effect. They soothed his breathing, if not his mind, and that fist which had been squeezing his lungs slackened its grip.
He waited, breathing quietly and shallowly. Two women entered the stage door; one man came out. No-one took the least notice of him and perhaps no-one saw him; Court, who hated others to witness these attacks, was grateful for this.
He watched the man, the unremarkable man, walk down the alleyway, turn into the street beyond and disappear. It came to him, in the clear but distanced way that ideas often did after an attack such as this, that the man could be Joseph King, who—as he had informed his wife—could be alive or dead. That man could be King, and so could any other man he encountered today, tomorrow, any day of the week.
King could be driving his taxi-cab, or taking his order in a restaurant; King could be the man he sat next to in a screening-room, or met briefly at some movie festival. King might have worked for him, or with Natasha in the past—this last suspicion, that King was connected with the movie industry in some way, having deepened recently, for King’s knowledge of movies, he had come to see, was as deep and as intimate as his knowledge of Tomas Court’s wife.
King was no-one, and could be almost anyone; indeed, when Court slept badly and had nightmares, as he often did, it was in Court’s own mirror that he often manifested himself. And King, who had administered his poison so well, pouring the substance into his ear drop by drop, was not a man who was easily killed off. Court thought of him as immortal and invisible; even if he were dead—and Court never felt he was—he lived on in the minds of those he persecuted. In this capacity lay his peculiar evil and his peculiar strength.
Tall, short, dark, fair, old, young? After five years he still could answer none of these questions. He leaned back against the wall, waiting for his heart-rate to slow and his breathing to relax. When it had done so, he moved away from the protection of the wall and began to walk slowly up the alley. He stationed himself at the kerb in the street beyond, averting his eyes from the flash of his wife’s name on the theatre front. He watched the flow of traffic, waiting for the one cab with its light lit which would take him out of this cold foul city air and uptown to his son. Cab after cab, all occupied, and he could sense that although the pain was subduing, his disquiet was not.
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