The Night and The Music

by Lawrence Block

  I shook my head. “I just haven’t got the heart for it,” I said. “Hassling people who don’t even speak the language, taking their goods from them because we’re stronger than they are and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

  “They can quit selling contraband, that’s what they can do.”

  “How? They don’t even know what’s contraband.”

  “Well, that’s where we come in. We’re giving them an education. How they gonna learn if nobody teaches ‘em?”

  I’d loosened my tie earlier. Now I took it off, folded it, put it in my pocket.

  He said, “Company owns a copyright, they got a right to control who uses it. Somebody else enters into a licensing agreement, pays money for the right to produce a particular item, they got a right to the exclusivity they paid for.”

  “I don’t have a problem with that.”

  “So?”

  “They don’t even speak the language,” I said.

  He stood up straight. “Then who told ‘em to come here?” he wanted to know. “Who fucking invited them? You can’t walk a block in midtown without tripping over another super-salesman from Senegal. They swarm off that Air Afrique flight from Dakar and first thing you know they got an open-air store on world-famous Fifth Avenue. They don’t pay rent, they don’t pay taxes, they just spread a blanket on the concrete and rake in the dollars.”

  “They didn’t look as though they were getting rich.”

  “They must do all right. Pay two bucks for a scarf and sell it for ten, they must come out okay. They stay at hotels like the Bryant, pack together like sardines, six or eight to the room. Sleep in shifts, cook their food on hot plates. Two, three months of that and it’s back to fucking Dakar. They drop off the money, take a few minutes to get another baby started, then they’re winging back to JFK to start all over again. You think we need that? Haven’t we got enough spades of our own can’t make a living, we got to fly in more of them?”

  I sifted through the pile on his desk, picked up a sun visor with the Joker depicted on it. I wondered why anybody would want something like that. I said, “What do you figure it adds up to, the stuff we confiscated? A couple of hundred?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know. Figure ten for a T-shirt, and we got what, thirty or forty of them? Add in the sweatshirts, the rest of the shit, I bet it comes to close to a grand. Why?”

  “I was just thinking. You paid us a hundred a man, plus whatever lunch came to.”

  “Eighty with the tip. What’s the point?”

  “You must have billed us to the client at what, fifty dollars an hour?”

  “I haven’t billed anything to anybody yet, I just walked in the door, but yes, that’s the rate.”

  “How will you figure it, four men at eight hours a man?”

  “Seven hours. We don’t bill for lunchtime.”

  Seven hours seemed ample, considering that we’d worked four and a half. I said, “Seven times fifty times four of us is what? Fourteen-hundred dollars? Plus your own time, of course, and you must bill yourself at more than regular operative’s rates. A hundred an hour?”

  “Seventy-five.”

  “For seven hours is what, five hundred?”

  “Five and a quarter,” he said evenly.

  “Plus fourteen hundred is nineteen and a quarter. Call it two thousand dollars to the client. Is that about right?”

  “What are you saying, Matt? The client pays too much or you’re not getting a big enough piece of the pie?”

  “Neither. But if he wants to load up on this garbage” — I waved a hand at the heap on the desk — “wouldn’t he be better off buying retail? Get a lot more bang for the buck, wouldn’t he?”

  He just stared at me for a long moment. Then, abruptly, his hard face cracked and he started to laugh. I was laughing, too, and it took all the tension out of the air. “Jesus, you’re right,” he said. “Guy’s paying way too much.”

  “I mean, if you wanted to handle it for him, you wouldn’t need to hire me and the other guys.”

  “I could just go around and pay cash.”

  “Right.”

  “I could even pass up the street guys altogether, go straight to the wholesaler.”

  “Save a dollar that way.”

  “I love it,” he said. “You know what it sounds like? Sounds like something the federal government would do, get cocaine off the streets by buying it straight from the Colombians. Wait a minute, didn’t they actually do something like that once?”

  “I think so, but I don’t think it was cocaine.”

  “No, it was opium. It was some years ago, they bought the entire Turkish opium crop because it was supposed to be the cheapest way to keep it out of the country. Bought it and burned it, and that, boys and girls, that was the end of heroin addiction in America.”

  “Worked like a charm, didn’t it?”

  “Nothing works,” he said. “First principle of modern law enforcement. Nothing ever works. Funny thing is, in this case the client’s not getting a bad deal. You own a copyright or a trademark, you got to defend it. Otherwise you risk losing it. You got to be able to say on such-and-such a date you paid so many dollars to defend your interests, and investigators acting as your agents confiscated so many items from so many merchants. And it’s worth what you budget for it. Believe me, these big companies, they wouldn’t spend the money year in and year out if they didn’t figure it was worth it.”

  “I believe it,” I said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t lose a whole lot of sleep over the client getting screwed a little.”

  “You just don’t like the work.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t blame you. It’s chickenshit. But Jesus, Matt, most P.I. work is chickenshit. Was it that different in the department? Or on any police force? Most of what we did was chickenshit.”

  “And paperwork.”

  “And paperwork, you’re absolutely right. Do some chickenshit and then write it up. And make copies.”

  “I can put up with a certain amount of chickenshit,” I said. “But I honestly don’t have the heart for what we did today. I felt like a bully.”

  “Listen, I’d rather be kicking in doors, taking down bad guys. That what you want?”

  “Not really.”

  “Be Batman, tooling around Gotham City, righting wrongs. Do the whole thing not even carrying a gun. You know what they didn’t have in the movie?”

  “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “Robin, they didn’t have Robin. Robin the Boy Wonder. He’s not in the comic book anymore, either. Somebody told me they took a poll, had their readers call a nine-hundred number and vote, should they keep Robin or should they kill him. Like in ancient Rome, those fights, what do you call them?”

  “Gladiators.”

  “Right. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and Robin got thumbs-down, so they killed him. Can you believe that?”

  “I can believe anything.”

  “Yeah, you and me both. I always thought they were fags.” I looked at him. “Batman and Robin, I mean. His ward, for Christ’s sake. Playing dress-up, flying around, costumes, I figured it’s gotta be some kind of fag S-and-M thing. Isn’t that what you figured?”

  “I never thought about it.”

  “Well, I never stayed up nights over it myself, but what else would it be? Anyway, he’s dead now, Robin is. Died of AIDS, I suppose, but the family’s denying it, like What’shisname. You know who I mean.”

  I didn’t, but I nodded.

  “You gotta make a living, you know. Gotta turn a buck, whether it’s hassling Africans or squatting out there on a blanket your own self, selling tapes and scarves. Fi’ dollah, ten dollah.” He looked at me. “No good, huh?”

  “I don’t think so, Wally.”

  “Don’t want to be one of Batman’s helpers. Well, you can’t do what you can’t do. What the fuck do I know about it, anyway? You don’t drink. I don’t have a problem with it, myself. But if I couldn’t put my feet up a
t the end of the day, have a few pops, who knows? Maybe I couldn’t do it either. Matt, you’re a good man. If you change your mind — ”

  “I know. Thanks, Wally.”

  “Hey,” he said. “Don’t mention it. We gotta look out for each other, you know what I mean? Here in Gotham City.”

  “People come here to die, Mr. Scudder. They check out of hospitals, give up their apartments, and come to Caritas. Because they know we’ll keep them comfortable here. And they know we’ll let them die.”

  Carl Orcott was long and lean, with a long sharp nose and a matching chin. Some gray showed in his fair hair and his strawberry-blond mustache. His facial skin was stretched tight over his skull, and there were hollows in his cheeks. He might have been naturally spare of flesh, or worn down by the demands of his job. Because he was a gay man in the last decade of a terrible century, another possibility suggested itself. That he was HIV-positive. That his immune system was compromised. That the virus that would one day kill him was already within him, waiting.

  “Since an easy death is our whole reason for being,” he was saying, “it seems a bit much to complain when it occurs. Death is not the enemy here. Death is a friend. Our people are in very bad shape by the time they come to us. You don’t run to a hospice when you get the initial results from a blood test, or when the first purple K-S lesions show up. First you try everything, including denial, and everything works for a while, and finally nothing works, not the AZT, not the pentamidine, not the Louise Hay tapes, not the crystal healing. Not even the denial. When you’re ready for it to be over, you come here and we see you out.” He smiled thinly. “We hold the door for you. We don’t boot you through it.”

  “But now you think — ”

  “I don’t know what I think.” He selected a briar pipe from a walnut stand that held eight of them, examined it, sniffed its bowl. “Grayson Lewes shouldn’t have died,” he said. “Not when he did. He was doing very well, relatively speaking. He was in agony, he had a CMV infection that was blinding him, but he was still strong. Of course he was dying, they’re all dying, everybody’s dying, but death certainly didn’t appear to be imminent.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died.”

  “What killed him?”

  “I don’t know.” He breathed in the smell of the unlit pipe. “Someone went in and found him dead. There was no autopsy. There generally isn’t. What would be the point? Doctors would just as soon not cut up AIDS patients anyway, not wanting the added risk of infection. Of course, most of our general staff are seropositive, but even so you try to avoid unnecessary additional exposure. Quantity could make a difference, and there could be multiple strains. The virus mutates, you see.” He shook his head. “There’s such a great deal we still don’t know.”

  “There was no autopsy.”

  “No. I thought about ordering one.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “The same thing that keeps people from getting the antibody test. Fear of what I might find.”

  “You think someone killed Lewes.”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “Because he died abruptly. But people do that, don’t they? Even if they’re not sick to begin with. They have strokes or heart attacks.”

  “That’s true.”

  “This happened before, didn’t it? Lewes wasn’t the first.”

  He smiled ruefully. “You’re good at this.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  “Yes.” His fingers were busy with the pipe. “There have been a few unexpected deaths. But there would be, as you’ve said. So there was no real cause for suspicion. There still isn’t.”

  “But you’re suspicious.”

  “Am I? I guess I am.”

  “Tell me the rest of it, Carl.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m making you drag it out of me, aren’t I? Grayson Lewes had a visitor. She was in his room for twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour. She was the last person to see him alive. She may have been the first person to see him dead.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know. She’s been coming here for months. She always brings flowers, something cheerful. She brought yellow freesias the last time. Nothing fancy, just a five-dollar bunch from the Korean on the corner, but they do brighten a room.”

  “Had she visited Lewes before?”

  He shook his head. “Other people. Every week or so she would turn up, always asking for one of our residents by name. It’s often the sickest of the sick that she comes to see.”

  “And then they die?”

  “Not always. But often enough so that it’s been remarked upon. Still, I never let myself think that she played a causative role. I thought she had some instinct that drew her to your side when you were circling the drain.” He looked off to the side. “When she visited Lewes, someone joked that we’d probably have his room available soon. When you’re on staff here, you become quite irreverent in private. Otherwise you’d go crazy.”

  “It was the same way on the police force.”

  “I’m not surprised. When one of us would cough or sneeze, another might say, ‘Uh-oh, you might be in line for a visit from Mercy.’“

  “Is that her name?”

  “Nobody knows her name. It’s what we call her among ourselves. The Merciful Angel of Death. Mercy, for short.”

  A man named Bobby sat up in bed in his fourth-floor room. He had short gray hair and a gray brush mustache and a gray complexion bruised purple here and there by Kaposi’s Sarcoma. For all of the ravages of the disease, he had a heartbreakingly youthful face. He was a ruined cherub, the oldest boy in the world.

  “She was here yesterday,” he said.

  “She visited you twice,” Carl said.

  “Twice?”

  “Once last week and once three or four days ago.”

  “I thought it was one time. And I thought it was yesterday.” He frowned. “It all seems like yesterday.”

  “What does, Bobby?”

  “Everything. Camp Arrowhead. I Love Lucy. The moon shot. One enormous yesterday with everything crammed into it, like his closet. I don’t remember his name but he was famous for his closet.”

  “Fibber McGee,” Carl said.

  “I don’t know why I can’t remember his name,” Bobby said languidly. “It’ll come to me. I’ll think of it yesterday.”

  I said, “When she came to see you — “

  “She was beautiful. Tall, slim, gorgeous eyes. A flowing dove-gray robe, a blood-red scarf at her throat. I wasn’t sure if she was real or not. I thought she might be a vision.”

  “Did she tell you her name?”

  “I don’t remember. She said she was there to be with me. And mostly she just sat there, where Carl’s sitting. She held my hand.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “That I was safe. That no one could hurt me anymore. She said — “

  “Yes?”

  “That I was innocent,” he said, and he sobbed and let his tears flow.

  He wept freely for a few moments, then reached for a Kleenex. When he spoke again his voice was matter-of-fact, even detached. “She was here twice,” he said. “I remember now. The second time I got snotty, I really had the rag on, and I told her she didn’t have to hang around if she didn’t want to. And she said I didn’t have to hang around if I didn’t want to.

  “And I said, right, I can go tap-dancing down Broadway with a rose in my teeth. And she said, no, all I have to do is let go and my spirit will soar free. And I looked at her, and I knew what she meant.”

  “And?”

  “She told me to let go, to give it all up, to just let go and go to the light. And I said — this is strange, you know?”

  “What did you say, Bobby?”

  “I said I couldn’t see the light and I wasn’t ready to go to it. And she said that was all right, that when I was ready the light would be there to guide me. She said I would know how to do it when the time came.
And she talked about how to do it.”

  “How?”

  “By letting go. By going to the light. I don’t remember everything she said. I don’t even know for sure if all of it happened, or if I dreamed part of it. I never know anymore. Sometimes I have dreams and later they feel like part of my personal history. And sometimes I look back at my life and most of it has a veil over it, as if I never lived it at all, as if it were nothing but a dream.”

  Back in his office Carl picked up another pipe and brought its blackened bowl to his nose. He said, “You asked why I called you instead of the police. Can you imagine putting Bobby through an official interrogation?”

  “He seems to go in and out of lucidity.”

  He nodded. “The virus penetrates the blood-brain barrier. If you survive the K-S and the opportunistic infections, the reward is dementia. Bobby is mostly clear, but some of his mental circuits are beginning to burn out. Or rust out, or clog up, or whatever it is that they do.”

  “There are cops who know how to take testimony from people like that.”

  “Even so. Can you see the tabloid headlines? MERCY KILLER STRIKES AIDS HOSPICE. We have a hard enough time getting by as it is. You know, whenever the press happens to mention how many dogs and cats the SPCA puts to sleep, donations drop to a trickle. Imagine what would happen to us.”

  “Some people would give you more.”

  He laughed. “ ‘Here’s a thousand dollars — kill ten of ‘em for me.’You could be right.”

  He sniffed at the pipe again. I said, “You know, as far as I’m concerned you can go ahead and smoke that thing.”

  He stared at me, then at the pipe, as if surprised to find it in his hand. “There’s no smoking anywhere in the building,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t smoke.”

  “The pipes came with the office?”

  He colored. “They were John’s,” he said. “We lived together. He died . . . God, it’ll be two years in November. It doesn’t seem that long.”

  “I’m sorry, Carl.”

  “I used to smoke cigarettes, Marlboros, but I quit ages ago. But I never minded his pipe smoke, though. I always liked the aroma. And now I’d rather smell one of his pipes than the AIDS smell. Do you know the smell I mean?”