by Hugo Wilcken
I’d been following him an hour at least. After a while the chase had become mesmerizing, my thoughts drifting off into all sorts of random tangents. We’d gone all the way down Park Avenue to Grand Central, and then the man had turned right, in what had seemed an arbitrary manner. We were in one of those anonymous midtown streets. He veered off the sidewalk, in such an abrupt fashion that I nearly lost him. He’d walked into a bar, the kind of place that was nothing special, with sawdust on the floor and a sprinkling of afternoon drinkers. Through the glass front I could see him talking to the barman, who promptly put a beer in front of him. My first thought had been to stay outside, but the reflections on the glass from the busy street made it difficult to see properly into the bar, and I was determined to get a better look at him.
Through the doors, everything felt different. After hours of people and traffic, of movement and noise, the place felt deathly still. The other patrons were for the most part immobile on their stools, staring into their drinks with a soulless determination. I frequented these kinds of bars myself, and although I was no alcoholic, I recognized the type. The unknowable men who would come in at ten in the morning, and stay there all day drinking in complete silence, only leaving when the after-work crowd eventually filtered in. Esterhazy, in his expensive suit and tie, looked wildly out of place. He’d downed his first beer quickly and had started on another. I climbed on a bar stool not far from him and ordered a whiskey. It was a reckless move, as he might easily have looked my way and recognized me. But I felt the need to scrutinize him at close quarters, to quiet the voice of doubt within me. Esterhazy paid me no heed, in any case. There was a flickering intensity to his eyes as he gazed out through the glass front into the streetscape, its somber colors more redolent of fall than the beginnings of spring after a bitter winter.
It was Esterhazy all right. I couldn’t doubt it now. He hadn’t died in my bed, as I’d been led to believe. Dr. Peters had admitted as much, in the case history I’d looked at in the library. I tried to spin out a story that would account for Esterhazy’s sudden reappearance. I cast my mind back to the day I’d seen him for the last time, lying comatose in my bedroom. I’d left him there, after Mrs. Esterhazy’s phone call. Some time later, he would have woken up. Alone, in a strange room, wearing strange clothes. His mind still hazy from the coma, he would have no recall of my visit to him at the Stevens Institute, of the taxi ride home, of my practically carrying him up the stairs to my apartment. No, instead he would have felt the bizarre shock of waking up, only to find that he was in fact someone else. Hesitatingly, he gets out of the bed and goes to the other room, to see if he recognizes anything in it. He stares out the window, to a blank wall opposite. Eventually he makes his way to the bathroom. There on the shelf, sitting next to a water glass and a toothbrush, he sees a wallet. His wallet, no doubt. He opens it and finds a driving license in the name of Dr. David Manne. Business cards too, with an address on Park Avenue. And now he walks to the front door. By the entrance is a small table, on which lies a key. His key.
Esterhazy was beside me. From the corner of my eye I watched him as he sat there wordlessly for twenty minutes or so, sipping at his beer from time to time, in a sort of reverie. But then when the bar started to fill up with the first wave of workers, the ambience changed. As abruptly as he’d entered the bar, Esterhazy now left it, slapping a dollar bill down on the bar beside his empty glass. Again he seemed to pause outside, as if uncertain which way to go, before turning left onto Sixth Avenue.
He hadn’t quickened his meandering pace, but for long moments now I lost sight of him, in the chaotic rush of people on their way home. He was heading north; his movements seemed to describe a huge circle, and I wondered whether he was returning to where he’d started. If that were the case, then what was the purpose of this long ramble? Esterhazy stopped momentarily by a phone booth, as if about to make a call, but then moved on again. The whole journey was like this, punctuated with small hesitations.
It was twilight, the enigmatic hour, so often lost in the New York rush. We’d reached the end of the Avenue, and Central Park stretched out before us like an ocean. But Esterhazy didn’t too venture too far in, settling for a bench overlooking the Pond on the south side. We were away from the sidewalk crowds now, and relatively few people were in the Park this late in the day. I watched the geese gliding effortlessly across the water and felt my muscles relax: I couldn’t lose him here. I found my own bench a good fifty yards from his, so that I could just see his dark head, and I’d be alerted easily enough when he moved off. What was the meaning of his long meander? Throughout this whole affair, I’d always assumed that he was the principal victim. That he’d been drugged, then committed under false pretenses. And that what had happened to me was simply part of that wider picture. Now, I wasn’t sure of that at all.
I gazed up into the graying skies, pulling my eyes away from Esterhazy for the first time since the bar. Great dark clouds of birds swooped and wheeled high above. At one point they appeared to be moving backward en masse, no doubt an optical illusion. It was ominously beautiful, and illustrated something a patient had once pronounced out of the blue: “We come from a place where the birds fly backward.” I’d paid no heed at the time, but the words spooked me now. For a few minutes, ever-greater concentrations of birds filled the sky, swirling around until in one seemingly synchronized movement, they headed south and out of sight.
Esterhazy was up again. He’d only been on the bench for ten minutes or so, and I guessed he’d wanted to move on before it became too dark. I trailed him as he headed east out of the Park, then crossed Fifth and Madison. I’d been right, he was going back to the starting point. We were on Park Avenue, a block or so from the building, when Esterhazy suddenly spun around. Instinctively I threw myself into a doorway. I waited out an excruciating ten seconds. When I poked my head around the corner, the fedora pushed down almost to my eyes, I caught Esterhazy just as he was turning back. He’d clearly stood there a good moment before deciding to walk on. Had he seen me? In any case he’d had an intuition that he was being followed. It shook me up and I hung back a bit until I saw him finally ducking into the building, giving a quick nod to the doorman, as if at least they were acquainted with each other. I sat down again at the bench near the entrance.
It was quite dark now, cold too. I wouldn’t actually be able to sit it out for too long, I realized; I’d freeze to death. I felt a crushing tiredness from the long walk, the whiskey, the lack of anything to eat. But I was also in a febrile state of mind, buzzing from the events of the day. I put my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. I could feel the piece of paper I’d shoved deep into one of them, the one with Dora Morel’s number. Over the long afternoon of tailing Esterhazy, I’d put his “wife” out of my mind. I cast my eyes down the avenue in search of a phone booth, but there wasn’t one. It was Friday evening, in any case. Dora Morel was an attractive young woman; she was probably out somewhere. I had her image in my mind now, her neat figure, and I was wondering what it would be like to see her naked, to feel her body, to go to bed with her. I swung around, my heart pumping. I, too, had suddenly had the unnerving feeling that someone was stalking me. I strained to make out anything in the blackness.
An elderly woman in a heavy fur coat emerged from the lobby. Just behind her was Esterhazy. He could barely have had time enough to go up in the elevator and come down again. Someone was accompanying him, a man in a uniform wearing a cap, probably a police officer but it was hard to see in the dark. The two were in conversation, and the way they were interacting suggested that no coercion was involved, that it was a relationship of equals. With a thrill I realized that they were heading my way, were going to walk straight past where I was sitting. “We’ll be outta there in a half hour, forty minutes, then you’re free,” the police officer was saying. I recognized the voice, but I didn’t dare look up until they passed. I recognized the loping gait as well; it was exactly the same as when we’d been teenagers together, out o
n Long Island. Esterhazy was with D’Angelo. It was a moment of extraordinary intensity. They rounded the corner, and I jumped up from the bench. Although I hardly wanted to draw attention to myself, I couldn’t help racing toward them. Esterhazy was climbing into the passenger seat of a police car, the two of them still in conversation. I had the impression that he’d glanced my way, just for a tiny moment, as if in an obscure acknowledgement of something. Before I had time to understand what was happening, the car roared off and disappeared into the traffic, fluid at that hour. Within seconds I’d lost sight of it. I’d been trailing Esterhazy the entire afternoon, and he was gone in an instant.
I stood on the corner, staring after the car, long after it had swept down the dark avenue. It had been heading south, and I chewed over that fact for a minute or two, but in the end could surmise nothing in particular from it. To get out of this part of town, a vehicle could only realistically go north or south. I continued peering down the avenue, though, as if I might spot something important if only I looked hard enough. On every corner of every Manhattan street were those canyon-like vistas, where you could see forever down a straight line to a vanishing point, like a lesson in perspective.
I was in turmoil: deflated that I’d lost Esterhazy, exhilarated that I’d seen him with D’Angelo. I was invaded with the feeling that I’d already solved the Esterhazy case—not in its particulars, but that I’d divined the essence of its structure. The connection between Esterhazy and D’Angelo I’d seen with my own eyes; I had documentary evidence of the connection between Untermeyer and the Stevens Institute. Bridging these two relationships was my own experience in the hospital, and the mysterious visit from Untermeyer. It was a structure that could generate only a limited number of stories. It almost didn’t matter which I chose.
10
I’d come early. Even so, I was too late. I’d wanted to be there before she arrived, but I could see Dora Morel through the glass front of the bar, dressed stylishly, sitting in the very same booth that Marie and I had shared months before. A waiter passed by and bent down toward her. She looked his way momentarily but then shook her head and said something very quickly. The waiter shrugged his shoulders and moved on. Even without hearing it I could interpret the exchange well enough. We’d made a date, but she was going to wait until I was actually there before getting a drink, in case I didn’t show and she wound up having to pay for it. I didn’t resent her for that, but I hesitated before going into the bar. For a moment the glass that separated us seemed like a screen, as if I were watching a scene from a movie that I was about to enter. It was a mirror too, projecting my own faint image back onto me. Hair combed and slicked back, wearing Stevenson’s smart dark jacket, I looked like neither Manne nor Smith, but an apparition hovering between the two.
“Miss Morel?”
“So you’re the mystery man.”
I took off my hat and sat down opposite her. As always, I felt exposed bareheaded, with nothing to pull down to hide my face when I felt the need. I was aware of her looking me up and down, but I didn’t note any particular reaction to my scar in her frank gaze—not the tiny, involuntary wince I sometimes detected in people I’d just met. No hint of recognition, either.
“What’ll you have? What do you say we get a couple of martinis?”
“Swell. You know what? Are you hungry at all? I haven’t had a thing since breakfast.”
“Sure. Let’s eat. They say the steak is good here.”
In fact I wasn’t hungry, but it might have made her uncomfortable to dine alone. I complimented her on her appearance; as we waited for the food the small talk flowed effortlessly, as if from a banal script that we’d already been over together. No mention was made of the circumstances of our meeting. We were playacting a date, when of course we both knew it wasn’t that. I imagined the Dickensian man from the agency calling her up: “Strange thing happened this afternoon. Big-shot businessman drops by the studio. Pulls out that Look spread you did from his pocket, asks who you are. Long story short, he’s fallen for you and wants to meet you! Good for a meal at least I’d say. That’s if you want to take the chance …”
“Tell me a bit about yourself.”
“Not much to say. Just a girl trying to make a living in the city. I do some modeling and take some acting classes. Guess I’m trying to break into the theater.”
“You’re French, right?”
“Ah … my father’s French, yeah.”
She didn’t look it or sound it. I doubted Dora Morel was her actual name anyway—it was too mellifluous to be real. There was something exaggerated about her, from the circumflex eyebrows to the provocative strapless gown that was a touch too dressy for the place. Even the way she held her cigarette seemed too self-conscious, as if she’d only just learned to smoke. I could see the look she was aiming at: a cross between a movie starlet, and the femme fatale such a starlet might play. But while her Mrs. Esterhazy had been consummate, her Dora Morel seemed less assured.
“And what about you?”
“What do you want to know? I’m in business. Been in insurance all my working life. I’ve got a young son, he’s the other love of my life. Sometimes he’s with me, sometimes he’s with his mother, across the river.”
“You’re divorced?”
“Amicably. She’s over in Park Slope. I’m in Sutton Place …”
The date patter came to me easily enough. It wasn’t strained, the way Manne would have done it, to ratchet up the intensity. It was more in Smith’s style, if Smith had been a career professional, more smoothly urbane, more practiced at putting the other person at ease. As I conjured up the details of Stevenson’s life for her, they took on a subjective reality—believing in my own performance was somehow necessary to it being a good one. No doubt that was true for Dora Morel as well. And perhaps her act was more subtle than I’d first given her credit for. In fact, she wasn’t playing a femme fatale badly. Rather, she was doing a fine job playing a would-be actress playing a femme fatale badly. A young woman, sitting alone nearby, got up and left. As she swept past our table, I thought I caught fleeting eye contact between her and Dora Morel. Probably a friend Dora had gotten to keep an eye on her: “Got a blind date with this guy. May turn out weird. If you can be there when he comes, then I’ll give you a signal when I know it’s all right.”
I’d been talking about Stevenson’s lakeside home upstate, about the canoeing there in midsummer. We’d finished the steaks; Dora had ordered a desert. There was a tiny break in the conversation, a moment of perfect balance. We could be nearing the end of the evening. In the next twenty minutes, I could be paying the check, helping her with her coat, walking her home or finding her a taxi …
“There’s a movie theater just around the corner, on Broadway. If you like, we could probably make the nine o’clock session …”
“That’s a great idea,” she replied.
I watched her as she ate her chocolate cake. The fact that I hadn’t ordered a desert, and that she’d gone ahead anyway, underlined the relationship. She’d played it close to her chest. She’d talked enough about herself, and yet there was almost nothing to hold onto. An hour in her company, and I still didn’t know where she’d come from, where she lived, any particular detail that would have individualized her, distinguished her from the thousands of other pretty young women one saw every day on the streets of Manhattan. In fact, this very lack of particularity distinguished her. The one constant, from Mrs. Esterhazy to Dora Morel, was her accent, which seemed to come from nowhere.
It was only a five-minute walk to the theater. On the way there, as we crossed the street, I touched Dora’s lower arm in a way that was an invitation for her to seek out my hand, and when she did, I instantly knew that she meant to sleep with me that night. I got tickets and we found seats up at the back, just as the newsreel began to roll. Something was up with it, but it took me and the rest of the audience a few minutes to realize that. The wrong newsreel had been put on. This one was years out of da
te. There were stock shots of Nazis, and Berlin prior to its destruction, bustling with crowds. Eventually people in the movie theater began to laugh, then boo when images of Stalin, backed with friendly commentary, came on. The lights went up, the reel was stopped and replaced. I’d bought tickets to the latest Hitchcock, but there were a couple of movies screening. We must have accidently walked into the wrong one, because what we ended up seeing was a mediocre weepie, about a showgirl who falls in love with a returned war veteran. A date picture, in other words. As the characters flickered across the screen, Dora rested her head on my shoulder and I put my arm around her. I wanted her, or perhaps Stevenson wanted her. Because Smith was surely after something else.
We didn’t talk afterward; we wandered dreamily through streets that were fairly empty even on a Saturday night, this being a quiet corner of the Upper West Side. We passed by a cheap hotel I’d once taken Marie to. I asked Dora if she wanted a last drink in the bar downstairs, and she nodded. But once we were inside, a jazz band started up, making conversation pretty much impossible.
“Let’s rent a room for an hour and get the drinks sent up.”
We signed in and made our way upstairs. The room was clean enough but simple and functional, just a bed, a couple of chairs and table, a single print on the wall by way of concession to decoration. Minutes later a bellhop arrived with a couple of glasses and some whiskey. I wondered whether Dora would think it strange, going to this slightly seedy hotel, when I was a wealthy, divorced insurance executive with my own apartment. Of course, she’d never have believed that story in the first place. I wasn’t divorced. My wife was probably waiting for me in the Sutton Place apartment. And we couldn’t go anywhere more salubrious, in case I was recognized.
