The Clairvoyant Countess

by Dorothy Gilman

  “Oh—oh yes,” said Dr. Berkowitz, and put on his coat, which was nearly as wrinkled as his suit. He looked extraordinarily tired.

  “I think you are forgetting something, Dr. Berkowitz,” Madame Karitska told him as he moved toward the door.

  He turned and looked at her blankly, his thoughts obviously elsewhere.

  “Your wife’s amulet,” she said, holding it out to him in the palm of her hand. “The stone she wore in Buchenwald.”

  He stared at the object in her hand and then he lifted his eyes to hers and nodded. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “You—brought it all back, you know. She was very dear to me, and still is. Thank you.”

  When the door had closed behind him Faber-Jones said incredulously, “Dr. Berkowitz? I thought surely Lucas Johns—”

  She shook her head. “Lucas Johns was in the recording business in San Francisco and ran into great trouble. When he gave evidence against the criminals who’d broken his life the authorities gave him a new name and new identity. No, not Lucas Johns. His was the reading I shortened, to spare his feelings.”

  “But kind, mousy, little Dr. Berkowitz?”

  Madame Karitska reached out and affectionately touched his cheek with her hand. “Oh my dear Mr. Faber-Jones,” she said, “do you really think heroes are six feet tall and swash-buckling? That man is probably the most heroic man you will ever meet.”

  “And he’ll give me a check-up on Tuesday and talk about the weather and gall bladders,” groaned Faber-Jones.

  Chapter 12

  “It’s really distressed me a great deal,” Faber-Jones said, sitting on Madame Karitska’s couch and staring into his cup of coffee. “The man seemed absolutely charming during those two hours we spent trapped in the subway, and now—”

  “He was charming,” pointed out Madame Karitska. “Always. But charm is artificially acquired, it has nothing to do with essence.”

  “I feel—I know it’s irrational but I feel somewhat responsible for his death.”

  Madame Karitska regarded him with impatience. “My dear Faber-Jones, how could you possibly know that Peter Zoehfeld was going to swallow a capsule of cyanide at the first opportunity after his arrest? Four days ago you felt dazed but really quite triumphant that a foreign agent had been uncloaked at your dinner party. Today—”

  “Today Zoehfeld’s dead, which makes a difference.”

  “On the contrary, my dear friend, death was by his own choice. What was not choice for either of you, I think, was meeting on a subway train in New York City.”

  “You really think that? You really believe these things are—arranged?” His voice was skeptical.

  “The large events, yes. We earn them, we attract them by what we are and what we have been. For the large events of our lives I believe we’re moved about like pieces on a chessboard. We assume with the utmost vanity that our thoughts and our plans for the future are entirely our own, but the mind is vacant until thoughts are placed there, is it not, and can any of us trace our thoughts to their source? A person will assume it is he alone who suddenly decides to accept a job a thousand miles away in a strange city, thereby meeting the one person important for him to know—for good or evil—at that point in his life and in his development. Or two strangers meet on a subway train, and one is brought back to Trafton where three years ago he killed two people.” She shrugged. “I believe Jung called these juxtapositions of fate ‘meaningful coincidences.’ They deeply interested him, as they should everyone. But we live in a whole network—a universe—of meaningful coincidences.”

  “I don’t see exactly how that would apply—”

  “One can sometimes see this when one looks back, through hindsight.”

  “You mean taking a major event in one’s life, I suppose, and examining all the threads that went into producing it. But that implies that the people we meet—”

  “Must be treated with infinite respect,” she said firmly, “for few of them arrive casually in our lives. Some, yes, but others—” She broke off at the sound of a knock at her door.

  Faber-Jones put down his cup and reached for his attaché case. “You have an appointment?”

  “No, but people still arrive without them.” She rose and walked to the door with him. “I’m glad you stopped in,” she said, opening the door, and then in surprise, “Lieutenant Pruden!”

  “Well, well,” cried Faber-Jones, wringing his hand. “Your first day back at work, isn’t it? I must say you’re looking fit.”

  Pruden grinned at Madame Karitska. “Yes, and the first assignment I’ve been handed is to investigate a witch so I’m here for a little expertise.”

  “A witch!” said Madame Karitska, laughing.

  “Not really—I don’t think—but she may end up getting burned at the stake if I don’t find the answer to what’s happening.”

  “Then I’ll leave you both to your consultation on witches,” said Faber-Jones. “By the way, John Painter’s cutting his third record this afternoon,” he called over his shoulder to Madame Karitska.

  When he had gone she said, “Tell me about your witch.”

  “Do you have any appointments for the next hour?”

  Madame Karitska shook her head.

  “Then I’m hoping you’ll come with me. You see, I can’t even get in, there are four dogs roaming the yard and—”

  “Four dogs! You wish me to protect you from four dogs, to—how do you say it?—run interference for you?”

  “Now you’re laughing at me,” Pruden told her accusingly. “I’m a convalescent hero and you’re laughing at me. Actually I thought if she saw a woman with me at the gate—I’m sure I saw her face at the window; she must have seen me tangling with the dogs, which she could easily have called off if she had felt like it. She’s a recluse, you see. I might have asked for a policewoman but could a policewoman tell me, once I get inside—if I can—whether the woman’s a witch or not?”

  “You believe, then, in witches,” Madame Karitska said, her eyes dancing at him humorously.

  “I keep reading about them in the newspapers. Covens and all that. Are there such things?”

  “No comment,” she said, and picked up her purse. “Shall we go?”

  “Good. It’s not far away, it’s on Mulberry Street, off First Avenue near the river. I hope it won’t take long,” he added as he helped her into his car outside.

  “Tell me why the police have been called in,” she suggested.

  He climbed in beside her and they drove off. “Nothing’s too clear to me yet. It seems that some very odd things have been happening in the neighborhood lately. First a young boy became ill—turned wild, someone said—and then a sixteen-year-old girl came close to having convulsions on the street and rumor started that they were each under a spell. The cop on the beat picked up some of the gossip over a period of several weeks, so I began by interviewing him this morning. But the police were officially called in last night when a third person—another sixteen-year-old girl—went beserk, found her father’s pistol, and began taking pot shots at windows. She had to be placed in a strait jacket. The weird thing is that she’s quite normal this morning, they tell me, and remembers nothing about it except feeling terrible.”

  “LSD?” suggested Madame Karitska.

  “Possibly, but the man sent over last night said the girl has no history of drug-taking—none of them do—and this morning she violently denied taking any drugs.”

  “And the witch?”

  He sighed. “I’m not sure we’ve made much progress in the last two hundred years. Nobody knows who this woman is, but she lives on the street and a few of the neighbors have decided that she’s responsible for it, and that she’s bewitching the children. If it weren’t for those dogs of hers,” he said grimly, “they’d probably have stormed the house last night and lynched her. I hope not, but some investigations are overdue.”

  “Obviously,” said Madame Karitska.

  They turned off Broad Street into an area near the r
iver. It was a neighborhood that had once been elegant until, around the turn of the century, it had slipped into the worst kind of slum, and then during Trafton’s renaissance era ten years ago the neighborhood had become the target of a renewal project and was now a street of middle-class homes, all of them brownstones, some detached and some attached. They were set back from the street with small grassy plots in front of them and handsome, old-fashioned wrought-iron fences. There were only two buildings on the street that did not match the well-groomed exteriors: one was an auto-body shop in the middle of the block, a rambling frame building badly in need of paint and surrounded by weeds and skeletons of cars rusting in the yard; the other was a boarded-over brownstone almost suffocated by trees and shrubbery that grew up all around it and isolated it from the others. It was at this seemingly abandoned house that Pruden stopped.

  “According to the city tax office—I’ve had a busy morning—her name is Mrs. Eva Trumbull.”

  “But there’s no glass in any of the windows, only boards,” protested Madame Karitska. “Are you sure there’s someone living inside?”

  “People see her come out at night. Apparently to ride on her broomstick,” he said grimly.

  As they climbed out of the car a small boy rode up on his tricycle and stared at them. “You’re not going in there, are you?” he demanded incredulously. “She’ll give you the evil eye, she’ll turn you into a gingerbread boy.”

  “Ah—‘Hansel and Gretel,’ ” said Madame Karitska, nodding.

  “No—brainwashing,” said Pruden.

  “Unless, of course, she is a witch,” offered Madame Karitska innocently. She was looking over the gate into a jungle of green, with only a narrow tunnel leading to the house. “How do you propose we advance, singly, with me first?”

  “Of course not,” said Pruden, but he was too late; Madame Karitska had already dislodged the rope that tied the gate closed and had entered the leafy green tunnel. At once the sound of barking could be heard, and four large dogs raced down the tunnel toward them.

  “Good morning,” said Madame Karitska in a calm voice, standing very still and beginning a small conversation with them.

  Pruden, just behind her, fought back an instinct to retreat. He stood bemused as the dogs slowed, regarded Madame Karitska with suspicion, and then stopped, staring at her with curiosity. They were wild mangy-looking creatures, the last sort of dog Pruden would have cared to confront, but they stood with cocked heads, as if listening. Madame Karitska spoke to them very simply, explaining that she had no wish to trespass, they they were fine watchdogs but that she had business with their mistress and would like to visit her. Pruden, listening, thought that her voice exuded a powerfully tranquilizing sense of love. It was uncanny; he could feel his own tensions relaxing and melting away.

  “And now,” said Madame Karitska, slowly stretching out one hand to them, “we are going to walk toward the house. You will allow this?”

  One of the dogs growled, then walked to the extended hand and sniffed it. “Yes,” murmured Madame Karitska, not moving. “As you see, I am no threat at all to your mistress. You feel this? It is so.”

  And with this, her voice growing firm and commanding, she took a step forward. Meeting with no resistance she said to Pruden, “I think we can walk to the steps now. Remain calm and move slowly.”

  And so they moved toward the steps, three of the dogs accompanying them with the gravity of sentinels, the fourth frolicking along behind, with a lamentable tendency to sniff at Pruden’s heels. As Madame Karitska set foot on the porch Pruden heard the sound of numerous locks being disengaged. The door opened. A gruff voice said, “What did you do to them? Who are you?”

  “I made them my friends,” said Madame Karitska, “and we’ve come to tell you that your neighbors think you’re a witch and you may be in some danger from this.”

  The door opened wider. “Come in,” the disembodied voice said, and they entered.

  What they entered was another tunnel not unlike the garden tunnel they had just left, except that here their passage lay between stacks of magazines and newspapers piled to the ceiling. In the dim murk of this hallway stood a small, thin woman wearing what looked to Pruden like an assortment of burlap bags tied around her waist and covered by a long black coat festooned with one large safety pin. Her feet were in old white sneakers. Her hair was gray and piled high on her head; her face, indistinct in the gloom, nevertheless looked human and intelligent. Looking them over keenly she turned on her heel and said, “In here.” Pruden saw that she limped badly, one foot dragging behind her.

  She led them through tunnels of cartons and old furniture into a large room full of other maze-like tunnels until they came at last to a small cleared area facing a window that looked out upon what must have once been a rear garden. It was the only window not covered over by boards, and gave Pruden a glimpse of what this house must once have been. In this area, perhaps nine by six, stood a battered couch on which several blankets were heaped. In front of the couch stood a card table holding an electric hot plate, several plates, a tin mug, a knife, fork, and spoon, and unopened cans of food. Pruden realized that this was where Eva Trumbull lived, ate, and slept. The Department of Health, he thought, would certainly not approve of this.

  “If I’d known I was going to have guests,” the woman said with dignity, “I’d have put on my dress. I have a very good dress,” she explained to Madame Karitska and for just a second her eyes flashed.

  In the light from the window Pruden saw that she was younger than he’d thought at first, and proud. Very proud, he thought, noticing the way she held her head, the way she ignored any impressions the room might have on them, refusing to explain or to apologize but looking at them fiercely and squarely, almost defiantly. She was tough as a nut, and proud. It was probably the reality of her helplessness that had made her tough; the helpless didn’t survive for long.

  “A witch indeed,” she was saying to Madame Karitska with a sniff. “I’m not a witch, and I’m not a pauper either, no matter what you may be thinking.”

  She ignored Pruden, speaking to Madame Karitska alone, and Pruden admitted he couldn’t have handled the interrogation half as well. She said that she owned the house free and clear and that it had been her home long before the accident. It had been a car accident, she said, and her husband and only child had been killed and she’d been left crippled. She didn’t want charity, and she couldn’t help it if the neighbors thought her unfriendly, but nobody had ever come to see her, and she couldn’t get around or out much. “Except at night,” she said.

  “And what do you do at night?” asked Madame Karitska.

  “Collect junk,” she said. “I take my son’s wagon and bring home junk. I sell it, it’s my income.”

  “This isn’t a very safe way for you to live,” said Pruden. “All these newspapers and magazines—”

  “Well, I’m not much of a housekeeper,” she said bluntly. “Doesn’t seem any reason to be, if you know what I mean. And two of the dogs sleep inside every night—”

  Pruden had already guessed this from the smell.

  “—and two stand guard outside. They take turns. Very intelligent dogs,” she added, and her face lighted up at this.

  Madame Karitska nodded and rose. “Thank you for talking to us, I think we’ll be going now but we’ll be back. I will at least,” she said with a quick glance at Pruden. “We appreciate your letting us in.”

  “My dogs liked you,” the woman said, her face softening. “The children on the block—oh, I hear what they say sometimes. If it weren’t for my dogs—”

  She left the rest unspoken, escorted them back through the tunnels of junk to the door, and opened it for them.

  Once outside Madame Karitska said, “I hope you’re not going to report this.”

  “I really should,” he told her in a troubled voice.

  “It isn’t as if she were eighty years old. She seems quite healthy.”

  “What did you think
of her?”

  “Very lonely,” said Madame Karitska briskly, “but not at all sorry for herself. She has, I think, made her peace with life. She’s narrowed it down to what she can manage and closed out the rest. In her way she is probably happier than anyone on this street.”

  “How can you say that?” asked Pruden, startled.

  “Because she’s stripped her life to the essentials,” pointed out Madame Karitska. “Quite Tao, actually. There is a line in one of the translations of The Way that goes—” She stopped at the gate, closing her eyes for a moment. “ ‘In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.’ ”

  “You think her a middle-aged hippie then?” said Pruden, amused.

  She regarded him with exasperation. “When I was young, my dear Lieutenant, the eccentrics were what gave life flavor and excitement. They no longer seem to be tolerated in America now, which seems a great pity. Your Thoreau was an eccentric, and your Emerson was no conformist. Can you wonder that your young people court eccentricity and individuality when so many adults are predictable and bland? She is eccentric but she is not a witch.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Pruden said, opening the door of his car. “I’ll take you home. I’ve got to interview the girl who shot out windows last night.”

  “Is there,” asked Madame Karitska, “any reason I cannot accompany you?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly regulations but I certainly don’t want to be accused of being predictable and bland,” he said grinning. “It’s only across the street, let’s go.”

  The steps of number 813 were occupied by a very pretty young girl of fifteen or sixteen, and two boys somewhat older. Madame Karitska looked them over casually, one by one: her impression of the girl was one of long tanned legs, long blond hair, and a sense of self-importance. The boy on her right closely resembled her, his hair very blond, his face healthily flushed with sun tan, but he looked hostile, his eyes like splinters of glass. The boy on the left was dark and intense, his eyes admiring as they rested on the girl.