That was all the encouragement I needed. “With pleasure, Humphrey,” I said without hesitation, taking care to speak clearly and distinctly. “There is no such thing as Magyar’s ghost. It’s all a hoax. Not only do you have no musical talent, Humphrey, but you have no psychic talent either. The whole thing was made up, invented. Let me tell you why.”
“Sam!” Bridget shrieked.
“You grew too big, Humphrey, and people stopped coming to your concerts, remember? We protected you from the truth, then. We didn’t read you all the well-deserved rotten reviews. But the reason they stopped coming was because you have no talent Sure, you can play the notes, but there’s more to it than that, something called making music, and that’s beyond you, Humphrey. When you were little and cute it didn’t matter, they came to see a freak; but when you got big they stopped coming, because they saw that you weren’t even the shadow of an excuse for a real pianist. Most parents would have given up at that point and stopped pushing you on stage, tried to give you a normal life. But not your saintly devoted mother. She couldn’t bear saying goodbye to all that lovely acclaim you’d been earning for her. So she came up with a plan. Here’s how it works, Humf … "
Of course, while I was saying all this, Bridget and Luc were hardly just standing there contemplating my choice of worlds. They were quite busy. Luc had redoubled his efforts to get Humphrey out of the room, hug ging his waist like a football tackle and trying to drag him backwards. But Humphrey stood his ground, mesmerized by my voice, swatting back at Luc as if he were an annoying insect. Bridget concentrated on me, clawing at my mouth and kicking out at my shins with her pointed high heels. Small as I was, however, I was bigger than Bridget, and I managed to keep her at arm’s length most of the time. The words continued to flow relentlessly from my mouth like a mindless unstoppable recording, impeded only by an occasional grunt or gasp of pain.
“ … First of all, I compose the Magyar pieces, Humphrey, with my own conscious brain and no supernatural assistance. Pitiful, jealous Sam, the musical failure, is the one who writes the music your fans think is so brilliant and convincing. And then we drug you, Humf, we dissolve a powerful sleeping pill in your Coke. And that knocks you out and makes you forget things. We arrange you at the desk with my music, and we slip a pen into your fat band, and that’s it. All we had to do was make a few little suggestions, and you fell for it like a cement balloon. I wasn’t sure you were simpleminded enough, but Bridget was. You’re just the fake façade, Humphrey, the front, the empty—”
Then I shrieked. Bridget was chewing on my hand with her sharp little rodent teeth. I bent over and butted her in the midriff with my head. She wilted and collapsed onto the bed. And Luc, as if his current had been cut off, staggered away from Humphrey to sag against the wall.
Humphrey and I still stood facing each other. Luc and Bridget were too busy fighting for breath to be able to speak. In the next room, someone was doing a meticulous and juicy job of blowing his nose, in G major.
“I … it’s a lie, isn’t it?” Humphrey said weakly.
“Not on your life, Humphrey,” I said.
“It’s a lie, it’s a lie, I know it is!” he shouted, turning first to Bridget, then to Luc.
Slowly Luc straightened up, making an effort to pull himself together. “Uh … certainly it’s a lie,” he said. “Don’t … pay any attention to any of that. It’s all … just lies.”
But it was such a hopelessly feeble denial that even Humphrey could only interpret it as an affirmation of everything I had said. “But why … how could …” Humphrey stammered. His face was becoming violently pink “I just don’t understand how you … It just doesn’t …”
As I watched him struggling to make sense of it all, profoundly shaken, bewildered and helpless and hurt, something shifted inside of me. I stepped toward him. “Humphrey,” I said, “don’t take it like that, please. I didn’t know what I …”
He pivoted, and faster than I had ever seen him move, he fled from the room.
Then Luc smacked me hard on the face. I was too stunned to protect myself. “You dirty rotten perverted little swine,” he snarled, forcing me back against the wall. “You loathsome stinking piece of filth.” I had never heard him so articulate. “Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any idea what effect your selfishness could have on him? Do you?” He hit me again. “Do you?”
Bridget, meanwhile, had recovered enough to drag herself off the bed and shut the door. “Stop it, Luc, someone will hear you,” she said, concerned with appearances even in the midst of calamity. “They’ve already heard too much.”
“But he has to be punished. He has to be made to understand what a terrible thing he’s done.”
“All in good time,” she said, shakily pushing her braids back into place. “He will be richly and exactingly punished, be assured of that. But first, he has one final duty to perform. He is coming back with us to convince Humphrey that everything he just said was a lie.”
“But how can he—” Luc began.
“He’ll find a way. If it is necessary to grovel on his belly and lick Humphrey’s boots, he’ll do it. Now.”
They each grabbed me by an arm and began maneuvering me toward the door. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it. Just keep your hands off,” I said, wriggling away from them. “I tell you, I’ll do it. I want to get it over with as much as you do.”
I meant it. The three of us hurried down the hall. “I must have forgotten to lock the door,” Bridget muttered inanely as we herded together into their room.
The room was empty.
“Humphrey!” Bridget wailed, for a moment actually out of control. Luc headed for the tiny closet, and I sped off down the length of the hallway. There were dirty greenish walls and lots of closed doors, but no Humphrey. The dial over the elevator indicated that it had stopped in the lobby.
“Nothing,” I announced, coming back into the room. “He’s not out there.”
“But this … it’s impossible,” Luc said. “He’s never done anything like this before.”
“He’s never been maimed like this before,” Bridget said, grabbing a cigarette. “If this mess has any serious effect on him, Sam, I promise you you’ll regret it to your dying day.”
“If you’d stop making threats and start thinking, we might be able to find him,” I said.
“But this is just so unlike him,” Luc said uselessly.
“We’re wasting time,” I said. “We should be combing the place. There’s a chance he’s still somewhere inside the hotel.”
“Inside the hotel!” Luc moaned, wringing his hands. “You don’t think he could have run away?”
“How the hell do I know what he did?” I was shouting now. “We have to start looking!”
There was a knock on the door.
“Oh, there he is, thank God!” cried Bridget, pushing me out of the way. “I thought you said he wasn’t out there, Sam,” she shot back at me. “Great eyes you have.” She pulled open the door.
“You dinner, pliz?” said the decrepit waiter, and he wheeled the trembling little white-covered table into the room. “Yes? This right room?” he asked, looking around at us, when we didn’t say anything.
“Uh, sure,” I said.
It was the same waiter who had brought us food several times before. “Yes, that what I think.” He nodded. “Only but on my way up I see other young man go out, and I wonder if—”
“The other young man? You saw him? Where?” Bridget demanded, darting forward to grab the waiter’s upper arm.
“Oh, yes, sure and in such hurry,” the waiter said, smiling. “Out lift door zoom, like cannon. I think maybe he late for concert, and maybe you no want food. But you want, yes?”
In a flash, Bridget had rallied in that uncanny way of hers. Brisk and businesslike, she thrust a bill into the waiter’s hand and hustled him to the door. “Thank you, thank you very much,” she said and pushed him out of the room. Then she swung back to face me.
“What
are we waiting for?” I said. “We’ve got to get out there and find him!”
“We do, Sam, but not you.”
“Don’t be stupid! The more people looking, the better our chances are.”
“Others will help, but not you. You are not to be trusted. You are never to be trusted again.”
“But … "
“Get your coat, Luc!” she barked. He rushed to the door.
“But you’re crazy!” I said. “You can’t stop me from looking!”
She held up the key. “It can be locked from the outside,” she reminded me. “You are staying safe and sound in this room, where you can’t do any more damage, until we find him and bring him back. And if you get bored, you can while away the time trying to imagine what I am going to do to you when I return. Goodbye, Sam.”
Then they were outside, and I heard the key turning in the lock. I threw myself against the door, but it was too late. “You can’t do this!” I screamed and pounded on the door. It didn’t budge. I buried my head in my hands and sank slowly to the linoleum.
It was unbearable to be locked away like a naughty child, forced to do nothing when the situation was so desperate. Humphrey was alone in a foreign city, for the first time in his life. It was night. It had never occurred to him to look at a map; he would be lost a block away from the hotel. He had no money. He knew nothing of the language. He had no experience in any language in asking directions or help from passersby. He was hopelessly gullible and naive, as fragile and defenseless as a baby.
To make it worse, he was entering this situation in a state of mindless, hysterical panic. The most important things in his life had just been brutally torn away from him. He would probably run blindly until he was exhausted and not realize until then that he had cut himself off from everything he knew, from anyone who could help him. How would he feel then? What would he do? What might be done to him? The possibilities were unlimited:
The final touch, the frosting on the cake, was the pill he had been slipped, which at any minute would begin taking effect.
When that little detail hit me, I groaned aloud. It didn’t bear thinking about; it was too terrible to be real. My mind curled and shrivelled away from the thought like cellophane dropped into a fire.
Indeed, something inside me had changed. It had begun as soon as I had spewed out my last revelation at Humphrey. My sadistic truth-telling had been the key, the catalyst that had set off this startling internal reaction. Perhaps there might have been a less destructive way to unleash the transformation, perhaps this was the only way, I didn’t know. What I did know was that suddenly, and for the first time, I was aware of how much I loved him.
I loved Humphrey. He was probably the only person in the world I did love. Tenderness I hadn’t known was possible welled up in me. Yet I had just hurt him so terribly that there was a good chance he might not survive it.
And where was I now, when he needed me more than he ever had? I was locked up in a crummy hotel room with four stinking platters of szelekey gulyas.
10
THERE HAD to be a way to get out.
There was little floor space in the small dreary room, but I managed to pace, wrangling feverishly over the limited possibilities. The making-a-rope-out-of-bedsheets gambit occurred to me, but when I peeped out of the sixth story window I discarded it. Swashbuckling was hardly my style. I considered shrieking and banging on the door until someone came with a key to make me shut up. But that tactic would draw unwanted public attention to our sordid situation. What about picking the lock? Bridget had plenty of large hairpins and nail files. For a time I crouched by the door, poking bits of metal into the crack and the keyhole with clumsy, sweating fingers. But when one of the hairpins broke off in the space between the door and the wall I stopped. If something got wedged into the keyhole, they’d have to remove the entire door to get me out, and it would probably be days before they got around to doing that. I resumed pacing. The ugly furniture crowded around me. I looked out the window again. I kicked the door a couple of times. I paced.
And all the time I was thinking of Humphrey, passed out in a gutter with rats, stripped of his American clothes by starving derelicts, dying of pneumonia in a garbage-strewn alley. I thought of the misery he must be feeling, the devastation so bottomless it could hardly be imagined. What reason did he really have to try to find his way back? What was there to prevent him from throwing himself off a bridge into the murk? Not only had I deprived him of all self-respect, I had also taken his family away from him. He would see himself as utterly betrayed by the only people he cared about, a spiritual orphan. Why would he want to go on living at all?
I puffed furiously at one of Bridget’s cigarettes, but it only made me feel sick. I stomped around the little portable table. The sight of those piles of cold sour meat, swimming in thickly congealed fat, intensified my nausea. If someone didn’t get them out of here soon, I would puke. Without thinking, I picked up the phone to call room service.
Only then did the simple, obvious solution hit me. I had been too upset to see straight. How much time had I already wasted?
I dialed the desk. The phone buzzed and buzzed in my ear in F sharp. No one answered. I let it go on ringing, studying the minute hand on my watch. It was now 10:15. How long ago had Humphrey run away? I had no idea. I brutally ground my teeth, tapped my foot, cracked my knuckles. The phone continued to buzz futilely. Had everyone in the hotel taken the night off?
Then at last the meaningless guttural syllables came bleating out of the earpiece.
“Please, do you speak English?” I demanded.
“Uh … no … uh.”
“Hurry, find someone, please!” I screamed. “This is an emergency.”
Mutterings and thumps, thumps and mutterings. Hadn’t the dope noticed the urgency in my voice? I looked at my watch. It was already 10:25.
“Yes. What you want?”
“Listen, please, this is an emergency,” I said, as slowly and distinctly as I could manage. “I have accidentally been locked in my parents’ room. I have no key. I must get out. Could you please send someone up as quickly as possible to unlock the door. It’s room 1056.”
“What is you say?” The voice was bored. “I no understand.”
“I am locked in room 1056,” I repeated, my knuckles whitening as I gripped the receiver. “Someone must come to let me out”
“Locked in room? I no understand. How is that happen?”
“That doesn’t matter! It was an accident. I must get out quickly. Please send someone up as fast as possible. The number is 1056.”
“Yes, but all very busy now.” The voice was maddeningly calm. “I do not know when someone may come.”
“But this is an emergency. Don’t you understand? You must come right away, because … uh, I am sick,” I improvised. “I am very sick, get it? I must use the toilet. If ‘I stay here, I will make a big mess. I will be sick all over the room. It will be very dirty, very smelly and dirty.”
“What is room number?” he said, prodded to action at last by the thought of vomit stains on the linoleum.
“1056. And hurry.” I gagged throatily at him and hung up.
Apparently Bridget had not left instructions at the desk to keep me locked up. At another time she might well have come up with a convincing explanation for such an unusual request. Tonight she must have been too rushed to be sufficiently inventive—and knew that that instruction would only stir up more curiosity. She had probably been hoping I would be too stupid to think of the obvious, and she had almost been right.
I waited. The minutes limped along. By the time someone did knock on the door, a quarter of an hour later, it certainly would have been too late to protect the linoleum.
“Is someone?” came a cracked voice.
“Yes, right here!” I called, pounding on the door in response. “Please let me out.”
I heard heavy breathing and keys jangling sluggishly. Then my rescuer began to hum, a miserable wavering drone
that slipped gradually from one key to another, remaining always noxiously out of tune. The barely discernible melody almost sounded like my own composition, “Yeller Gal,” but of course that was ridiculous. “You’ve got to hurry,” I pleaded and banged on the door again to try to shut him up. But the humming went obliviously on, as though the situation were merely routine, as though people in Vienna were always locking one another up in hotel rooms, and it was one of his nightly duties to go around setting them free.
“Oh, I feel so sick,” I loudly moaned. “In a minute I’ll be sick over the floor.”
And in a minute I nearly was. For when the door opened at last, standing there with a bunch of keys and a big grin was my familiar friend, the little old man.
11
I STAGGERED backwards away from him as if he had pushed me. Delicate sounds came out of my mouth. Then my rear end made contact with the room service cart.
I spun around to see it careen into the bedside table. The plates made a lot of noise piling up at the far end, and one of them threatened to tip off onto the bed. I grabbed for it, protecting the bed but bathing my hand in fatty sauce. The closest thing to a towel that I could see was the white tablecloth. As I hastily made use of it I kept looking back at the little old man, blushing. I felt so foolish that I almost forgot how frightened I was. “What are you doing here?” I said, shaking my head.
He tottered closer, bending forward at the waist and cupping an ear with his hand. “Please, I not hear you,” he said, his accent so thick that “hear” sounded almost like “cheer.”
I couldn’t seem to get the grease off my fingers, perhaps because the tablecloth was already so greasy. “Who are you, anyway?” I muttered.
Fingers Page 11
