Wallflower j-3

by William Bayer

  Then, late in the afternoon, when the sweet fragrance of autumnal decay mingled with the saline scent of the lagoon, the heady aroma aroused their lust and drew them back to No. 13 and to her bed. Here, as the sun painted the walls gold and pink, they kissed, grew intoxicated, rolled together, and explored each other with their tongues. they made love lazily until darkness fell. Then they slept for an hour in each other's arms, showered, and went out to dine.

  Monika's husband, Franz Daskai, was thirty years older than she. A handsome, athletic man with leonine features and a full head of iron gray hair, he had been chief of psychiatry at the Hamburg hospital where she had served out her residency. One day he stopped to watch her play tennis on the staff court behind the residents' dormitory. A couple of days later he called her to his office to invite her to be his doubles partner in an informal interhospital tournament. She accepted; they battled fiercely and to everyone's amazement won the cup.

  A few months later, when she began to see patients, she asked him to be her supervising analyst. A year later they were married.

  Franz, Monika told Janek, was a wise, sane man who was an exemplar to all his students. The men worshiped him, and the women adored him, perhaps because he was one of the few people in the profession who lived the kind of rational life that is the supposed goal of psychoanalysis.

  Over their ten years together he had taught her much, but she believed his most memorable lesson was the eloquent way he defined the mission of a therapist. At some point in every patient's past, he believed, there occurs a character-distotting moment when an ernotion and an experience, normally incompatible, come together and lock. Abuse and love, she knew and pleasure-no matter how contradictory, the pieces engage so the person can survive his fear and rage. It then becomes the task of the therapist to locate this hidden lock, analyze its parts, then gently open it up to set the patient free.

  "He taught me how to be a healer," Monika said. "This was his greatest gift. When, that first evening, you spoke of crimes as wounds and your role as detective confessor-well, I thought, you and Franz would have liked each other, I think he would have understood you."

  "And that's very important to you?" he asked.

  "Yes," she said. "I believe it is."

  As Monika was due back in Hamburg the following Monday, she and Janek planned to spend their final weekend together visiting some of the famous villas of Veneto. Instead of reveling further in the marvelous stage set that is Venice, they would seek composure in the mainland in Palladio's rational geometry.

  But very early Saturday morning, even before the dawn, the phone rang in Monika's room. The call, surprisingly, was for Janek. He began to complain: Although the management no doubt knew he was sleeping in Dr. Daskai's room, it really had no right to ring him there…

  Then he stopped. A familiar voice had come on the line. Immediately he felt a portent of woe.

  "Frank, it's Kit. Tough job to track you down. But the Venice police are pretty good. Course, we had to kick some ass."

  Something was wrong. "There's trouble, isn't there?" "Yeah, Frank."

  Her tone was grave. "There is." "Please don't stall. Just tell me, okay?" "It's Jess." His goddaughter. Oh, God! "What happened?"

  "Stabbed, Frank. She was jogging in the park, and someone, we don't know who-" "She's going to be all right?" But even as he asked, he knew the answer.

  "Uh-uh, she's not. She's dead. I'm so sony to be the one to have to tell you."

  Something piercing like a silent scream burst across his brain. listening, Frank? Laura Dorance called, asked me to find you and let you know. She hopes you can come back. The funeral's tomorrow afternoon. What shall I tell her?"

  "Tell her I'll be there," Janek said. Then he set down the phone, turned from Monika, faced the window, and wept.

  "Jesus! She was just a kid! Twenty years old! A junior in college!" they were in Janek's narrow room, Monika watching from the bed as, frantic and bitter, Janek paced and ranted while throwing his clothes into his bag.

  Suddenly he stopped and turned to her.

  "I can't believe it! I can't." He sat down beside her. She hugged him. "I loved her, Monika. So much In the lobby, after he had booked his flight, Janek gulped down three cappuccinos. "Her father, Tim Foy-he and I were partners for five years.

  Then Tim transferred to narcotics, worked undercover, was found out, and assassinated. One morning he went out to his car, parked as usual in front of his house. He turned the key, and the car blew up-twenty pounds of dynamite. Jess, who was five at the time, was watching from the kitchen window. He waved to her; she waved back; then her whole world exploded before her eyes. According to Laura, she didn't start crying for a minute, just stared, confused, at the place where Tim's car had been. Tim, you see, was something of an amateur magician. Maybe Jess thought he was playing a trick. Some trick! they never found all the pieces of him. Her tears, God! they flowed and flowed. Later we learned her hearing got damaged, too. they entered St. Mark's. The cathedral was deserted. The aroma of the incense was cloying and thick. Janek fell to his knees on the hard stones before the altar. Monika knelt beside him and held his hand as he prayed.

  Afterward they did a tour of the piazza. It would be their final walk together in Venice.

  "My wife and I never had children. So Jess was like my own daughter. When Laura was struggling, I was over at her place all the time, helping with Jess, baby-sitting, assisting with homework, telling stories. I even taught her how to play baseball in Flushing Park. That's when I realized she could be an athlete. She turned out to be a damn good one, too. She's on the Columbia University women's fencing team. Or, I should say, she was.

  Monika held tightly to his hand.

  Even after Laura Foy went to law school, met and married Stanton Dorance, and she and Jess moved into Dorance's big apartment on Park Avenue-even then Janek remained close to the girl.

  "What a waste, Monika. A fine young life like that! What a terrible waste." He paused, then spoke quietly. "I don't think I could have loved my own child more."

  He sat with Monika in the rear of the chartered speedboat, racing for the airport, knowing that now his life would be forever changed.

  "I headed up the team that went after Tim Foy's killer. today they won't let you work a case that's personal, but back then you could swing a deal or two. Anyway, it didn't take us long to find the guy who built and placed the bomb. A scrawny little character; I can't even remember his name. Anyway, we caught him, turned him, and he gave us the guy who ordered it done, a slimy, rat-faced drug dealer. He's serving a life sentence now." Janek squeezed her hand. "Sorry to make you listen to all this sordid stuff."

  "Keep talking, Frank. I don't find it sordid." She touched his face, then gently kissed his cheek. "I want to stay with you as long as possible, stay close to you before you fly off."

  "I wouldn't have had anyone to talk to if I hadn't found you."

  "Well, we found each other, didn't we?"

  Janek peered around. Venice was lost in mist behind. Ahead the lagoon was as still and flat and white as it had been the morning he arrived. The rising vapor carried the same faint sweet salt-marsh smell of decay.

  "I wonder if I'll ever be able to come back here now. That call from Kit-I think I'll always associate it with Venice. The call..

  . that broke my heart."

  He didn't turn away from her this time, didn't mind now if she saw his tears. And when she mopped his cheeks with her fine silk scarf, he kissed her hand and whispered, "Thanks…

  At the airport there was time to call Aaron Greenberg and arrange to be met in New York.

  "Aaron and I work together," he told Monika in the coffee bar on the airport roof, "He knew Jess, too. He says the tabloids are full of it. Stanton, Jess's stepfather, is a big corporation lawyer. He and Laura-I feel so sorry for them. they say the worst thing that can happen to you is to lose a child. You never get over it, they say. ….

  Monika accompanied him to the security ga
te. There he put down his bags so they could embrace.

  "This can't be good-bye. I don't want to lose you,"

  "We're not going to lose each other. Don't even think that," she said.

  "You've been the best thing to happen to me in years."

  "I feel the same. We'll stay close. Somehow we'll manage to see each other, perhaps sooner than you think."

  "I'll phone you tomorrow night."

  The final call for his flight was announced. It was time to go. He hugged her as tight as he could. Then, just before he reached down for his bags, she handed him a package. "I bought this for myself, before I met you." She smiled. "Now I want you to have it.

  Please take it, Frank."

  On the plane, somewhere between Venice and Rome, he carefully unwrapped her gift. It was a fine antique Venetian wineglass, pure Renaissance in style, nothing fancy, no spirals or wavy bands of color, just a simple graceful transparent cone set upon an octagonal base.

  As Janek held it to the window so the wondrous light of the Italian sky could play upon it and fill it up, he knew, by the way it reminded him of the clear, yearning beauty of Monika's eyes, that it was the choicest piece of glass he had seen in Venice.

  3

  Conversation with Mama "Can you hear me, dear?" "I can hear you, Mama." "It's getting to be time again." "Yes, Mama." "Remember, it's not enough to feel the pain and then the fury. You've got to do something about it. Got to fix them good." "I understand, Mama." "He deserves it. Doesn't ie.

  "Oh, he deserves it! He surely does deserve it!" "So?" "I'll use Tool again." "What will you do to him?" "The same as to the others."

  "Let's hear you say it." "Fix him. Shut him up forever." "Why, child?" "Because of what he did." "And what was that?" "Must I, Mama?

  Please!" "You must! You know you must! Now tell me what he did." "He was unkind."

  "Forever." "Ha!

  "Very unkind!" "Say it again."

  "Don't make me laugh." "Kill him and fix him and shut him up forever.

  "Well, he was," "There, that's the ticket. You got it, child. Yeah, you got it now." "Of course, he was, you goose. But what did he do?

  Tell me!"

  "Insulted me."

  "Is that all?" "Hurt me."

  "Is that really all he did? Come on, child. Spill your guts."

  "He hartned me."

  "Can't say it, can you?"

  "I can say it, Mama. I can say it all right. It hurts me to say it. But I can."

  "Then say it, for God's sakes. Say it!" "He-" "Wlwt?"

  "Humiliated me."

  "Don't whimper, child. Say it loud."

  "He humiliated me!"

  "Yep, that's what he did. So what're you going to do about it?"

  "Pay him back." "How?"

  "Use Tool."

  "Use Tool to do what?" "Kill him."

  "And?"

  "Fix him!" "And?"

  "Shut him up!"

  "For how long?"

  4

  Jess On the Van Wyck Expressway, peering out of Aaron Greenberg's beaten-up Chevrolet, Janek felt malice in the air. Traffic was heavy. People sat rigid and angry in their cars. Cold rain pelted the asphalt through noxious yellow fog, while all around he could hear the biting sound of horns and, in the distance, competing sirens, perhaps a fire truck and an ambulance at odds.

  He touched the window. Ice-cold. The wiper slapped back and forth. The city ahead, toward which they were moving at such erratic speed, could not yet be seen, but Janek could feel it, could feel its nasty breath, its rancor.

  He turned back to Aaron, who sat straight in his seat, concentrating on the road. A short, taut, wiry man with weather-beaten skin, his eyes and smile were sweet. My partner and best friend, Janek thought. Kit would gladly have sent her car, but only Aaron, he knew, would come out to Kennedy Airport on such a day to meet him and bring him in. "New York's got no gender." Aaron peered ahead curiously.

  "What?" "Venice is a 'she.' New York's an 'it,"' Janek said. "Well, what do you expect, Frank? I mean, Venice is pretty. New York's not supposed to be."

  Janek glanced at him. "You haven't told me anything."

  Aaron continued to stare ahead. "Been waiting for you to ask."

  "How bad was it?" He held his breath as he waited for the reply.

  Aaron exhaled. "I don't know how to put it quite."

  "Try." The floor pads in the car smelled wet and old.

  "Worse than you think, Frank. Worse than you think." they rode in silence for a time; then Janek asked Aaron to give it to him straight. Never mind the niceties. Just straight, like they were starting out on a case and Aaron was filling him in.

  "All I got so far is what I heard around. The detective in charge didn't get back to me yet."

  "What's his name?"

  "Ray Boyce."

  "Never heard of him."

  "Neither have I."

  "Well…?"

  Aaron winced. "She was done with an ice pick in Riverside Park, not far from her dorm room at Columbia. It was early evening. She went out jogging alone. That wasn't approved; but she did it a lot, and she wasn't the only one. Plenty of other kids run alone in the dark. I don't know where they think they're living. Nicetown, USA? Anyway, it was about seven. No witnesses. Nobody saw nothing. She never returned to her room. She didn't have a roommate, so she wasn't missed. In fact, well I don't know if I ought-" "Don't try and spare me, Aaron." Aaron nodded. "Understand, Frank, this is just what I heard. Seems she spent a lot of nights away. She had boyfriends. Again, she wasn't the only one. Other kids-"

  "Okay, I get the picture. Go on."

  "Every morning, early, the Columbia men's crew goes running as a group. they found her and called her in. Apparently nothing was taken, not that she was carrying much. But she had a watch and a Walkman. If it was a mugger, that's what you'd expect him to take."

  "So it wasn't a mugger?"

  "Doesn't look like it."

  "Who was it then? Pack of animals on a wilding, like the ones smashed up that stockbroker a couple years back?"

  "Doesn't look like that either."

  "What does it look like?"

  "Take it easy, Frank. You're closing in too fast. I don't know what it looks like. Like I said, Boyce didn't get back to me yet."

  "Check him out?" Aaron nodded. "He's okay." "So-so's what you mean." Aaron shrugged. "they can't all be stars, Frank. Boyce got the call. So it's his."

  Aaron was right, that's the way it worked, and it was a stinking system, too, because a good 20 percent of the detective force was barely so-so, and when it came to Janek's goddaughter, so-so wasn't going to be good enough.

  He turned to the back of the car. Aaron had spread the tabloids across the rear seat. Janek's eyes flew across them. The headlines shrieked.

  "If it wasn't a mugger or a pack on a rampage, who the hell was it?"

  "Could have been a mugger," Aaron said. "He could have gotten spooked."

  "Mugger with an ice pick? Where did they find it anyway?"

  "What?"

  "The pick."

  "It was left embedded."

  "Oh, Christ!" Janek moaned. Just hearing that made him hurt.

  "You know how I felt about her, Aaron."

  Aaron nodded, then paused a moment before he spoke.

  "Tell you what I think, Frank, just based on what I heard. There wasn't any reason. It was just, you know, one of those lousy goddamn things. We get them all the time. You know-"

  "Yeah. – -." Janek knew all right. He knew all about them, though they weren't the kinds of cases he ever worked. A unique phenomenon of American cities, of which New York, on account of its population, had a greater share than anyplace else, they were the homicides that were rarely solved because there was nothing about them to solve. they had no point. they were the meaningless murders committed by madmen stalking people alone at night in public parks.

  There was a TV news unit with a transmitting device on its roof parked across the street from the James O'
Hara Funeral Home. Aaron stopped the car; Janek ducked out into the rain, then wound his way between the waiting limos, past the cameras at the door, and into the lobby. A stand on the far wall was stuffed with wet umbrellas. A dour man in a cutaway stepped forward and asked if he was there for the Wentworth funeral. "The Foy," Janek said.

  The man looked him over carefully. "You're the godfather?" Janek nodded. "they waited long as they could. They're about halfway through it now. West Chapel, up the stairs, second door on the right."

  When he got there, Janek stood in the back and listened. An intense, frizzy-haired young man in ecclesiastical garments was speaking with bitter scorn of the horrors of New York. this Cultural Paradise, once so gracious, now choked with the downtrodden and the homeless. This Imperial City, once so elegant, now ridden with rape and murder. Just this past week a grandmother was dragged to her death by a purse snatcher at midday on Madison Avenue. And a brilliant young intern, with a great future before him, was shot at dusk outside New York Hospital because he refused to hand over his coat. And now our dear Jessica, beloved daughter of Laura, beloved stepdaughter of Stanton, and goddaughter of Frank, has been struck down… and we ask: What madness has been set loose in our city? Why must such a tragedy happen? For what reason? What cause? How can we allow it? What can we say? What can we do? And our voices are mute, for we have no answers…"

  It was a long, narrow, overheated room, crowded mostly with younger people. Janek recognized a few: Jess's friends from high school and college, her cousins on Laura's side, and Stanton Dorance's two older sons, children from an earlier marriage. He also saw Tim Foy's mother, a thin veiled Irish woman in her sixties who now had lost both son and granddaughter to violence.