Danse Macabre

by Gerald Elias

  “There! Look, he’s stopping!” said Gundacker suddenly. He poked excitedly toward the monitor with his left index finger as if Haskell didn’t clearly see it already. “Hand it over, mister,” he said to Haskell, holding out a newly freed open palm for his five-dollar prize money.

  BTower had paused in his perambulations and was examining his own palms, which even from the distance of the camera showed red with swelling.

  “Not so fast,” said Haskell, his careful eyes intent upon the monitor. “He ain’t sat down yet, now, has he?”

  Motionless, BTower stared fixedly at his bed as the second ticked, but rather than sitting down with his head between his knees as had been his custom, he turned a hundred eighty degrees and resumed pacing.

  “Yaah!” shouted Haskell. “My man, BTower! That’ll be one Mr. Lincoln from you, Gruber Gundacker!”

  “Damn,” grumbled Gundacker. “How about I owe you? Put it on the account?”

  “Okay for now,” said Haskell. “But one of these days, your account be overdrawn.” Haskell took a leisurely bite of his pulled pork with horseradish sauce on a kaiser roll. He had another six hours in the booth. He was in no hurry.

  Gundacker, defeated yet again, got up to leave, giving the monitor one final glance.

  “Hey, get a load!” he said, his enthusiasm restored, like a child searching for his favorite marble lost in the bushes, who finds a red toy truck waiting to be discovered in its stead.

  BTower had stopped pacing and had moved to the center of his eight-by-eight cell. For a moment he stood stark still, then raised his left arm, elbow bent, so that his hand was at eye level.

  “What the hell?” said Gundacker. “He gone totally ape shit?”

  Haskell just watched.

  BTower then raised his right arm, not as high and palm down.

  “If I’m not mistaken, I’d say we’re about to get ourselves a little concert,” said Haskell.

  BTower’s face was intense, jaw taut. He began to move his right arm like a high-speed horizontal piston. The fingers of his left hand moved like lightning. Haskell and Gruber watched, fascinated. Whatever it was that BTower was silently playing on his invisible violin, they had never seen such a frenzied performance, or anything at all for that matter, move so fast.

  The pantomime concert ended as abruptly as it began.

  “They all get crazy when they get this close? What’s he got, six days?” asked Gundacker.

  “Five,” said Haskell.

  With renewed interest, Haskell and Gundacker observed BTower glare at his throbbing hands, then viciously hurl down the phantom violin. The silent melodrama continued as he stomped on it on the cement floor. He picked it up and swung it against his cell door, bringing no result other than to bruise and scrape his hands even more. Next he attempted to rip the mattress off the bed frame but soon realized that even in the heat of his frenzy it was fastened down.

  “Someone like that, angry like that, surely could be capable of killing someone,” said Haskell.

  “Should we send for the doc?” Gundacker asked Haskell.

  “Let’s give it a minute. I’m guessing he’ll calm down momentarily, but I ain’t betting on this one, Gruber Gundacker.”

  BTower, panting heavily, eyes closed, suddenly collapsed on his back onto the mattress, his hands over his face, his body shaking.

  “Show’s over,” said Gundacker.

  “Not quite, Gruber. Look.”

  BTower lifted himself into a sitting position and peered directly at them into the surveillance camera.

  “Fuck you, Jacobus!” he yelled, piercing the silence.

  SEVEN

  The Columbus Circle subway station was its usual whirlpool of activity. At the confluence of Central Park West, Broadway, and Central Park South, it served the needs of camera-toting tourists decked out in I NEW YORK T-shirts, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center concertgoers, diners heading a few blocks uptown to the boutique restaurants, exercisers jogging to the park, and the usual mass of humanity that just happened to work for a living.

  Like horses at the starting gate, the crowd bolted out of the subway, racing toward the finish line of its appointed tasks. Jacobus, hoping to avoid being trampled by the herd, tried to maintain his balance by allowing himself to be carried along in the flow. The rumble of trains, the jackhammers of construction, the relentless roar of humanity filled his ears as he sought the escalator out of the station. He was on his way to see Camille Henrique—Hennie, as most of the musical world knew her—to satisfy his curiosity why she hadn’t testified at the trial of the murderer of her longtime companion. Not that it made any difference in the end, but he thought the prosecution would have drooled to have the beautiful woman in mourning take the stand.

  Over the years, Jacobus had become adept at maneuvering in crowds, instantly absorbing and analyzing and responding to all sorts of stimuli—sounds, smells, incidental physical contact, even taste, when all else failed. People said that he had a sixth sense, but in reality it was an exquisitely honed ability to assimilate his four functioning ones that enabled him to walk without a cane, Seeing Eye dog, or human assistance. Here in the suffocating underground station he felt the flow of the crosscurrents of pedestrian traffic, the sounds of which were somewhat obscured by monumental blowers magnanimously situated by the Transit Authority to create the most noise and the least relief. He was on the uptown side of the tracks, so he should get to the escalator any moment now. He sniffed for the invisible cascade of sweat, garbage, and car exhaust coming down from the street level to find it. He wasn’t being jostled quite as much now.

  “And just how would you suggest I begin my reinvestigation?” he had asked Rosenthal. “Start with a blank slate,” Rosenthal replied, with BTower as just one potential person of interest. So Jacobus decided to initiate his search with Hennie, René Allard’s longtime confidante. He had encountered Hennie on and off for many years, usually at a concert or a party, where she was always Allard’s appendage. Jacobus had first met her back in the early fifties, shortly after she arrived in New York from Paris as a nubile teenager to study violin with Allard. It had been a scandal of some notoriety when shortly thereafter she moved in with him; he was already over forty. But Hennie not only became his lover, she became his concert agent, office manager, and business partner. They had never married because, as Allard had famously put it, “That would have interfered terribly with our relationship.” Everyone laughed.

  When Jacobus had phoned her after his conversation with Rosenthal to set up the time of their meeting, he made no bones about the reason for it. Maybe that had been a mistake on his part, understanding she wouldn’t be very pleased at the prospect of reopening old wounds. On the other hand, he couldn’t think of another reason to have called her out of the blue that sounded genuine.

  As he mulled over just what he would say to Hennie, Jacobus suddenly realized that the usual sounds and smells of humanity had ebbed into the ether. No voices, no scuffling, no car horns, no sweat, no perfume, no exhaust fumes. All he could hear was an echo of dripping water, some jazzily rhythmic tapping off in the distance, and his own uneven footsteps. His arthritic hip responded like a barometer to cooler, musty, and dank atmospheric conditions. Where the hell am I? he wondered. I shouldn’t try to do two things at once, dammit. He stopped to reconnoiter, instincts momentarily befuddled. He decided to turn left.

  “Hold, Mortal, lest thou will surely perish!” declaimed a voice, followed by a drum riff on what sounded like a set of paint cans and cement.

  Jacobus stopped. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “A yawning abyss beckons ye, of which thou art presently astride.” Bdop-bah.

  “Who the hell are you?” asked Jacobus.

  “Men have called me the Drumstick Man, and honored be I to make your acquaintance. Welcome to my dark domain. ’Tis dark here, yea, but I perceive ’tis darker for you still. Thou canst not see this dormant track bed unused, lo, in the memory of man. One
more step and thine earthly coil will surely be kaput.” Bop-bop-bop, bop-bdop-baaaah.

  Jacobus turned to his right.

  “Egad! Go not that direction, neither, gentle sir.” Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-op.

  “Why the hell not? And knock off that ridiculous tapping.”

  “But ’tis my very nature to tap, sir! I tap on cans.” B-dang, b-dang, b-dang. “I tap on walls.” Knk-knk-knk. “I e’en tap ’pon my head. Ow!!

  “The man that hath no music in himself,

  Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,

  Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.

  “If thou goest right, m’lord, thou wilst ne’er return. Right is wrong. A community of Gatherers awaits ye yon.” Bp-bp-bding.

  “And what, may I asketh, gather they?” asked Jacobus.

  “Everything, kind sir. Everything . . . But fear not! For I will lead you from these things of darkness and this precipice, just as stout Edgar did lead the orbless Gloucester. Follow me. Perchance my tapping will please you now. Dawdle not! It be not far.”

  “You live down here?” asked Jacobus, following Drumstick Man’s tapping.

  “Verily. Long has it been since the light of day has crossed my path. Passageways without number abound within these dank, dark depths. Forsooth ’tis a world unto itself. Aha, here is the end of the line for me.

  “Walk now thou straight and true,

  and the world above ’twill be there for you.”

  Within moments Jacobus began to hear the familiar sounds of civilization within easy distance.

  “How much do I owe you?” he asked, putting his hand into his pocket.

  “Never a beggar nor chooser be! Now get thee to a bunnerie. I am awaaaay!”

  Jacobus heard the tapping nimbly recede into the distance. Now again with the type of humanity to which he was accustomed, in short order he was shoved up the escalator toward what was—for everyone else but him—the light at the end of the tunnel.

  Walking the few short blocks from the station to the Bonderman Building, jostled by people in too much of a hurry to slow their pace even for a blind man, Jacobus contemplated the nature of insanity. On the one hand was this individual he just encountered who lived underground, talked funny, and liked to bang on things. That person had undoubtedly saved his life out of the goodness of his curiously perverse heart. On the other hand was a society that killed people, occasionally the wrong ones, as punishment for killing other people. BTower and Allard, for example. Jacobus wasn’t sure which side of the sanity fence he was on. He had little need for creature comforts, and since the world was black to him anyway—in more ways than one—the prospect of living a peaceful subterranean existence, like Ziggy’s, far away from all the things that daily annoyed him, didn’t seem all that unreasonable. That’s one reason he had never given up his hovel in the Berkshires. No one bothered him except for those he desired to bother him, like Nathaniel and his dwindling cache of students.

  Jacobus entered the Bonderman Building for the first time since the night of Allard’s murder, and buzzed the elevator. When the doors opened, he stumbled as he stepped inside and had to grab on to the door’s metal grate in order to regain his balance. He said, “Jesus, Lon! Fourth floor. Where’s Ziggy?”

  “Mr. Jacobus! How the hell did you know Ziggy isn’t here? And how did you know it was me? You haven’t been here for a couple years at least.”

  “First of all, the elevator floor was a good inch above the lobby floor. Ziggy would never have permitted that. His elevator perfectionism is known far and wide. Kind of sick that way. He also would never have countenanced General Tso’s chicken, whose garlicky aroma is infesting the air, on his sacred premises. And I knew it was you because if they got rid of Ziggy, even temporarily, they’d have you fill in because elevator boys are a thing of the past.”

  “Well, you got that right too,” said Fuente. “Ziggy, he moved out to Salt Lake City, of all places.”

  “Salt Lake City? They have elevators out there?”

  “Was going to live with his sister, he said. The elevator here, it finally gave up the ghost and the owners decided they’d had enough. They let him go about a year ago. He cried real tears, let me tell you, even though they gave him a nice Timex.”

  “But the elevator’s still here, ain’t it?”

  “Barely. They started the process for a new one, because the whole hydraulic system has been shot to hell ever since Ziggy left. They’ve sealed off what used to be Basement Two, where Ziggy used to live, to reinforce the floor to support a new elevator. Hold on a second.”

  The elevator came to a jolting halt at the third floor to let in a passenger. Jacobus’s knees buckled and he almost lost his balance. “Going down,” the passenger requested. “Sorry, goin’ up,” said Fuente. “Whatever,” said the passenger as the doors closed.

  “Then they just jimmy-rigged this old trap until the new one is ready,” Fuente continued. “Supposed to be aerodynamic or thermonuclear or something like that. All automated, state of the art, high speed. You wouldn’t think it would take a year, though. Unions, probably. But definitely no more elevator boy. That’s why they had to get rid of Ziggy. No job, no apartment. Gonzo.”

  “Who said life’s fair?” said Jacobus. “You just move on.”

  “Here’s your floor, Mr. Jacobus.” Fuente opened the sliding safety door. Jacobus already had his left hand on it in order to keep his balance, but when the brass lattice contracted, his finger got stuck in it.

  “Shit, you nitwit!” hollered Jacobus. “What do you want to do, end my moribund career prematurely?”

  “Sorry, sir. Are you okay? I just never’ve gotten the hang of this thing.”

  “Just remind me to take the stairs next time.”

  Fuente told him how far down the hall 4B was. Jacobus found the door, slid his hand along the frame, found the buzzer, and pressed it. It was immediately opened.

  “Mr. Jacobus,” said a no-nonsense female voice.

  “Uch! Two lawyers in one day! You must have a really important meeting. Don’t mean to keep you, honey.”

  “My name is Phoebe Swallow, Mr. Jacobus, and I do represent Ms. Henrique. And how, may I ask, do you know I’m her attorney and I have another appointment?”

  “If you were just a friend, Hennie would have answered the door herself. And then there’s the stick-up-the-ass officious tone of voice. Not a housekeeper kind of voice, wouldn’t you agree? And you were standing right by the door when I knocked. Why would you be doing that unless you were in a hurry to get somewhere, and with the perfume you’re wearing even my eyes are watering so it’s gotta be you’re going somewhere where you need to impress someone.”

  “Be that as it may, Mr. Jacobus, Ms. Henrique has decided to decline your request for an interview.”

  “Interview? What am I, a job applicant? I’ve known Hennie for forty years. It’s no interview. It’s what my ancestors called a conversation. Who was it made this ‘decision,’ Hennie or you?”

  “Ms. Henrique has no further comment,” said Swallow, and closed the door in his face.

  “Shit,” muttered Jacobus. He started back for the elevator and then decided he really would rather take the stairs, using the corridor’s runner to stay in a straight line. Old apartment buildings were a piece of cake.

  “Psst!” someone hissed. “Psst!”

  “Yeah?” asked Jacobus, turning his head away from the sound in order to hear better.

  “You wanted to see Hennie?” whispered the voice.

  “That was the idea.”

  “I’m Mabel Bidwell. I’m in 4C. Come on in.” He felt a small bony hand grab his own and yank him into an apartment.

  Mabel Bidwell! thought Jacobus, recalling the eyewitness who discovered BTower looming over the body of René Allard. Maybe this was the way he would skin the cat.

  Speaking of cats, Jacobus sniffed and perceived that even an overabundance of flowery air freshener did not successfully disguise
the distinct background aroma of cat box. The dulcet tones of Mantovani added to the unpleasantly saccharine surroundings.

  “You sit right here,” Mabel said, pushing Jacobus down into a couch whose bottomless cushions threatened to suffocate him.

  “Cocktail?” asked Mabel.

  “Maybe I’ll wait ’til breakfast, if you don’t mind,” said Jacobus.

  “Well, I’m having one,” said Mabel. “Now you stay right there!”

  Moments later Jacobus heard a clinking glass approach and felt the thwuff of Mabel’s body as she plopped herself into the cushions next to him.

  “Now tell me your name again?” asked Mabel. “I remember you from the trial. I remember everything.”

  “Jacobus. And it’s not again.”

  “Well, tell me, Jacobus. What do you want to know? I’ve been in 4C for forty-six years! And I’ve seen it all, if you know what I mean, and that Phoebe Swallow, she doesn’t let anyone see Hennie anymore. We used to be like this—I’m holding up two fingers in front of your face, Jacobus—but now I can’t even call her.”

  “I’d like to find out if there was anyone who would have wanted to harm Hennie or René Allard.”

  “Why, of course I know that!”

  “Really! Who would that be, Mrs. Bidwell?”

  “Why, that BTower! I’m the one who saw him kill René! I reported him to that Detective Malachi, who between you and me I didn’t think was a very nice person.”

  “Did you actually see him kill Allard?”

  “Well, just as good! He was standing there looking crazy and all, with blood just dripping and oozing on his hands, paralyzed like, and then he looks around, crazy, like I said, and runs away. And I was the one that saw it—I had opened the door just a crack and was looking through the crack and reported it to—”

  “Yes, thank you, Mabel. Anyone else?”