by Susan Daitch
Out on the street looking for a glass shoe for Cinderella, he had just turned the sharp corner where the allée des Brouillards ran into the elbow curve of avenue Junot when he saw the former Algerian, the man he usually tried to avoid. No longer wearing a haik, he had the preoccupied air of someone like Renard who woke in the late afternoon. At the same time, as he looked right and left and from side to side, he displayed the nervous vigilance of Antoine. Fabien followed him a few blocks, soon losing sight of the man as the streets became increasingly crowded. Men bumped into him, there was less and less room to walk. He wasn’t far from the street of shops on which Lazare’s was located, but the intersection was blocked off. The crowd seemed enormous; suddenly, as if planned, hundreds of people clogged the streets, and Fabien was caught in the crowd as if it were a vice. There was no room to move. The woman in yellow who worked at La Libre Parole shoved into a spot a few yards ahead of him. She grabbed a boy and turned him around to face her. It was the boy in the loud checkered vest. Unlike Fabien who had only stumbled into the crowd, they gave the impression of knowing they had come to the right place. The concierge from the expensive apartment building was also part of the mob. She stared at Fabien, but without recognition. As the pressure from the crowd grew she was lifted off her feet. Fabien watched her grab the cape of another woman’s coat until she was shaken off with a violent twist, but he couldn’t reach her to help. Faces bobbed up and down in waves of a stampede, some open mouths screaming unintelligible slogans. Put them all in glass furnaces. Men threw rocks at windows, smashed in doors. A woman shoved him and called him an idiot. A man with a club and another with a broken bottle told him to get out of their way, and he squeezed behind a kiosk.
For a few minutes he stood several feet from the mob, then the crowd swelled outward, and with a pulsing movement he was swept from behind his post, carried along like a dead fish. At a corner the pulsing stopped, and the crowd seemed to freeze. Fabien pushed against a man’s stomach or a woman’s solid legs. They didn’t react. No one gave way, and unable to see the edges of the street or the mob he panicked, but the panic had nowhere to take him. He was sandwiched in, paralyzed. There were no longer landmarks, lampposts, statues, trees, or visible storefronts, just bodies. The crowd began to move again. He strained, looking upwards at the tops of buildings, but nothing appeared familiar until he thought he saw the facade of the Musée Grevin and a theater that showed films as well as other entertainments, but he still didn’t know what he was tangled in until a man yelled a taunt that became a chant: Méliès guillotined and Star Films burned to the ground. A few people took up the chant, then their voices petered out in the chaos of jammed bodies. It was like a circus with no markers between audience and performers, and the animals ran unfettered. A woman near him tripped then disappeared, either trampled or carried away. He realized too late that he had seen her before on the train; she was the one who read La Libre Parole. She might have recognized him, but as it was, he felt oddly anonymous.
The Dreyfus film was being shown somewhere nearby. The next to the last scene was the “Battle of the Journalists.” It began with a room at the courthouse full of reporters who took opposing sides; then an argument between Le Gaulois and Fronde turned into a fight. Actors playing journalists rushed the door. He remembered the close-ups of their faces, Méliès as a reporter, papers flying. Fabien had thought it looked real, but now he saw how staged every fight or mob scene had been.
Finding a gap, Fabien tried to squeeze out of the ball of people. He imagined he would be discovered unconscious and robbed, with nothing in his pockets but a paper outline of a woman’s foot. He crumpled the foot into a wad. Bluette would presently be leaning out the window of her coach, telling her footman to whip the horses. The door wasn’t very well hinged. She might fall out of it. As he imagined the tearing of thin wood, a man punched him. I know who you are. I know who you were. The trial scene had been staged so as to appear very ordinary, dry, here’s Dreyfus, here’s the judge, here are the generals. The audience knew the verdict and knew the end of the story: Dreyfus descending the steps on his way back to prison.
Fabien recognized sounds of shooting and the shattering of windowpanes. Glass flew through the air, crunching underfoot, and people pressed against him so closely that he could barely move or even turn around in the panic of so many bodies. His feet were lifted from the ground for a moment, and he heard sounds that reminded him of the frog hunters. Thwack, squish, thwack, squish. He put his hands over his eyes. He tried to melt into the crowd, grasping arms and legs and body parts, perhaps rubberized like the exploding head, or waxen and warm from the molds, but as he felt himself falling, losing consciousness, he realized too late that this was impossible. The people who trampled him were real.
Every Man His Own Illumination
The end of the film contained no secrets, no murderer revealed, no scenes of riot and pandemonium. Dreyfus walks down the steps of a building, soldiers stand with their backs to him. I shut the door to an empty Alphabet and made my way home.
When I reached my building, I looked at the mail left on the hall table. Folded menus from an Indian takeout restaurant lay in a neat pile beside flyers from a district councilman and drugstore advertisements. Letters addressed to the building’s tenants who sublet, tenants whose mail didn’t always end up in their boxes, these also lay stacked too neatly. Footsteps pattered on the stairs above, and instinctively I looked up. Half a body: yellow untucked guayabera, black trousers, the white heel of a running shoe seen in a triangular mirror placed in a corner where ceiling met wall. I couldn’t be sure. The mirror was dented and covered with dust. Every person reflected in it looked like one of Munch’s screamers; every leg or object, as a corner was turned, looked like a marshmallow, stretched and melted. I stood frozen, listening, unable to finish turning the key in the mailbox, climb the stairs, or open my apartment door. I imagined drawers turned upside down; boxes of sugar, salt, coffee, and soap emptied into a heap. Pictures would be knocked off the walls, plates broken, the floor slippery from cracked eggs and an overturned bottle of olive oil. Mice, roaches, and bugs of all kinds would celebrate in the anarchic landscape. If with each step forward I expected to be met with a half nelson, then a step backward when the halls lay entirely empty meant I was a limp dishrag, easily spooked, afraid of my own shadow. Walking up my steps again I thought I saw a flicker of a yellow shirt near the banister, just past a glass door. I worked up my courage and went upstairs. No one was there.
The entrance to Jack Kews’s building was bricked up with cinder blocks, and the blocks were covered with notices from the city declaring the property to be condemned and extremely dangerous. The gas leak had not only killed a tenant, but caused an explosion, and two of the floors had been partly destroyed. All tenants had vacated, even the naked, paralyzed Lewisohn. A line of laundry still remained across a fire escape, a coffee can with paint brushes sticking out of it, and a quart of milk still sat on a ledge. I was standing, tipping my head backwards to stare at those windows when the super once again emerged from Mail Boxes Etc.
“Frances, you still looking for your boyfriend?”
“He wasn’t my boyfriend. Your building was in the news, huh?”
“It isn’t my building. Not anymore, but, yeah, this was the one.” He pointed upward. “Gas leak. Boom. I was on the news.”
“Were you here when the building exploded?”
“No. I was at my girlfriend’s, Gladys Knight, really, that’s her name. She lives on Atlantic Avenue, couple of blocks away. The cold was too intense. I couldn’t take it. Who could blame me?” Breath misting in the air, he rubbed his arms. “I called the landlord. I called the boiler company who never showed up. I did what I’m supposed to do in an emergency. My nose is clean. I knew they wouldn’t show up, by the way.”
“So you left without warning anyone?”
“Frances, Frances, I tell you what I told the police. How was I supposed to know some moron would turn on his oven for heat, and a few cr
ummy apartments would hit the sky?”
“Did you see Jack?”
“The dead guy?”
“Presumably.”
“By the time I got here the body was taken away.”
“Who identified him?”
“How should I know?” He shrugged and picked up some supermarket newspapers that had piled up near the door.
“I seen your Spanish friend here a few days before the explosion.”
“Antonya?”
“I don’t know her name, sweetie.”
“You must mean Clarice. Clarice was his girlfriend.” I tried to remember when Clarice was supposed to return to London.
“I told you I don’t know her name, but I know I’ve seen her before.”
Alphabet was locked and shuttered, only packing boxes visible through the glass doors. It was the middle of the day, I wasn’t sure where to find Antonya but tried her cousin at Burrito Fresca. The restaurant was jammed full of lunchtime customers. Luis was yelling at a cook who had screwed up orders. I stood around reading the illuminated menu above the counter, waiting for a lull in the argument, getting pushed and shoved by customers pressed for time.
“Where’s Antonya?” I shouted when Luis finally left the cook alone.
“Next door getting her nails done, but that was an hour ago. She might be on her way home by now. You know I asked you not to come in when it’s busy like this.”
“I’m not here for a free lunch, Luis.”
I walked out of the restaurant and slowly approached Hollywood Nails two doors down, not knowing exactly how I would confront her. The idea of a collusion between the phantom, Jack, and Antonya made no sense. If she were in complicity with him, they really had made a fool of me, but I didn’t understand why they would bother. Neither appeared to be spiteful people who would construct an elaborate tease of letters and clues, goading me to try to find Kews only to fail at it. Hollywood Nails was busy, but she sat in the back chatting with another customer seated nearby while a woman with peppermint-striped pigtails bent over her hand.
“Frances, I’m over here.” Antonya gestured with a drying hand.
I threaded my way past small tables cluttered with bottles of polish, files, and scissors, inhaling the sweet chemical smell. As I got to within a couple of feet from Antonya’s table I could see the nails on one of her hands had been painted half sky blue, half sand. The manicurist was painstakingly affixing palm-tree decals to the horizon line where the two colors met.
“How can you have your nails done and still do martial arts?” I really wanted to know.
“I get them done a lot, that’s all.”
“So, tell me about Jack.” I didn’t know how else to begin and sat down on a stool beside the manicurist who pretended to be deaf.
“Jack is a nobody.”
“I know he’s a nobody. He’s dead. Why did you find him and not tell me?”
“I never met Jack. Forget about him already.”
“Antonya, I’m like someone who’s so late for dinner that by the time I arrive the meal is almost over, but I will sit down and try to catch up anyway. In other words, I may be slow, but I’m trying to understand. The super said he saw you in the building with him.”
“Late for dinner? What is this? Late for meeting a man is what you’re talking about, isn’t it? Listen, ding dong, it’s like this. For your information I didn’t go looking for Jack, he wanted me.” Antonya studied her palm trees while the manicurist began work on the other hand. “He called me to let him into the studio at night so he could view The Dreyfus Affair himself. You know that — no surprise. You weren’t very cooperative on this point. You did your job, you preserved that hockey puck of a movie, if you could even call it a movie. He didn’t believe there was nothing at the end of the film like you told him, and he paid me, which is more than Julius’s dreaming ass is going to do.”
“Why didn’t he want me to see him? Why did he go to you?”
“Am I such a dummy? Why shouldn’t he ask me? I worked there too.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t think it mattered. What do I care about these rotting films? I needed the money, and you’re going to need money, and like I said, your Jack paid me cash. When you have two children you got to feed then you can talk to me about some guy who’s stuck on a murder that may or may not have happened so many years ago nobody in their right mind gives a shit.
“Look, I’m sorry, Frances, but listen, I never saw the guy. Honestly. An envelope with my name on it and cash inside was slid under the door. It was waiting for me, but Jack Kews never showed up. Get yourself a real human, not a ghost. I couldn’t find the can anyway. That film is gone from the studio, no question about it. It’s not in your editing room. It’s not packed up with the other films waiting to be shipped. He paid me anyway. I’ll take you out to lunch.”
“No, I’ll take you.”
One copy of the film was in my apartment, but the other was in someone else’s pocket now. Several people had access to the office, not only the staff of Alphabet, but even the renters, those who, for unknown reasons, watched Godard films and Felix the Cat. But only Julius, Antonya, and I had the key to my editing room.
At night the statue of Hermes, lit from below, looks menacing, as if warning intruders. Although the Mayflower Building mostly shuts down at night there is a doorman/guard because a few offices employ a graveyard shift. Murray greeted me with raised eyebrows. The building was under new management, and he was to be replaced by a younger, handsome, more pumped guard who would be paid far less. Mirrored panels in the elevator had already replaced the dented metal siding, scratched with telephone numbers and names, and the framed inspection certificate had been removed because, I guess, it clashed with the decor.
Alphabet didn’t look different or unusual, at least not from down the hall with the sound of a vacuum cleaner in the distance. I had expected it to be dark and locked, but I hadn’t expected that my key wouldn’t work in the door. The lock had been changed. Through glass panels I could see scattered packing boxes; the office was in complete disarray. On the floor close to the entrance lay the picture of Julius and Montgomery Clift, cracked as if someone had thrown it against a wall. I sat on the pink carpeting outside with my back against the doors, my hand inert on a salmon-colored leaf pattern.
What I was afraid I’d lost was something I didn’t even know if I’d had to begin with. Through the glass I could see that the Méliès films had been crated up and labeled but had not yet been returned to London or Los Angeles or wherever they were supposed to go. If someone wanted to hide and preserve footage that depicted scenes of a murder they might splice it onto a badly eroded film, one not likely to be examined too closely. Some of the films had degenerated so badly, they were not destined to be viewed often, if at all. As far as I knew, only one other person had the skill to splice ancient film.
I returned to the lobby, called information, and got the number of the super from Jack’s building. Fortunately, I remembered his girlfriend’s name, since he was at her apartment, having no place else to go. Also, I had guessed correctly; among his handyman skills he would, for fifty dollars, happily pick the lock I required. I didn’t think a licensed locksmith would agree to break into Alphabet for me. A recessed light flickered out, and the guard briefly looked up in my direction. The pay phone was only a few feet from his station. I whispered into the receiver, break in, but Murray paid no attention to me, focusing on a tiny television and talking to himself.
It was after midnight by the time Gladys Knight’s boyfriend was through picking what he said was a piece-of-cake lock. He carried all kinds of wirelike tools and keys with him in a red toolbox.
“The case of a Hell’s Kitchen Houdini,” he said, referring to his place of origin.
At the moment the door gave I remembered one of the first things Julius had told me about the Méliès job. In 1907 fifty negatives were stolen from the New York office of Star Films. Looking aro
und me I felt like a thief who wasn’t sure what was of value in a sea of papers and detritus, but who had gone to a lot of trouble to achieve the break in. The former super picked up the Montgomery Clift photograph and put it in his toolbox when he thought I wasn’t looking. He poked his nose through some doors, but could see nothing of interest in the wreckage.
“Fifty dollars is a low rate for this kind of work. I made the trip in the middle of a freezing-cold night. I might have to charge you more.”
I emptied my pockets, anxious to get to work.
“Thank you for thinking of me. Please call again should the need arise.”
Then he disappeared into the elevator. I waited until the doors closed behind him, just to be sure he was on his way out. Two minutes later I was making my way past emptied drawers, overturned wastebaskets, chairs placed on top of desks. My office was still fairly untouched. I moved the boxes of Méliès films from the entrance, unpacked them, threaded up the first film and began to consider what lay in scenes I might have overlooked. The footage of each film seemed to match the length of time stated on the box. Fugitive Apparitions came and went. Extraordinary Illusions, The Infernal Cauldron, The Melomaniac, all consisted of exactly what their labels declared.
Finally A Miracle Under the Inquisition. I remembered this film. It looked much longer than two minutes, ten seconds. I threaded it up. In a gothic prison, very different from Dreyfus’s bare cell, a woman is tortured and finally burned at the stake. An angel appears, and phoenixlike, the woman rises from the ashes. Not only is she brought back to life, but the sleeping jailer replaces her on the pyre. Accompanied by the angel she disappears through the wall as two monks enter. In the last scene the monks run out of the frame in horror, but there was, just as I thought, more film to watch. The monks ran into a courtroom, the courtroom at Rennes. It was the Dreyfus trial. What had Julius done? Perhaps by copying, drawing, and splicing many bits together, somehow he’d created the ending he desired.
