Improvisato

by David Crossman

  Albert was struck by a thought. “When did your wife die?”

  “Susan?” Sweetman reflected a moment. “Goodness. Never thought I’d lose track of . . . Let me see—two years ago? December 15th. Twenty-six months? Can it have been that long?”

  Albert looked for the date on the newspaper. “This was October. Four months ago.”

  “Just so,” said Sweetman. “Just so.”

  “Just two months after his wife died.”

  “Thereabouts. Yes.”

  “About six months ago,” said Jeremy Ash, “Isobella dies, then, two months later, Tanny, then . . .”

  “Then, two months ago, Mrs. Rivens,” said Angela. She tapped four fingers on Jeremy Ash’s shoulder. “Four deaths.”

  Sweetman started. “Four? That’s only three, surely.”

  “I’m including your wife, Mr. Sweetman.”

  “Oh, no! Not Sue. She doesn’t figure into this at all. Natural causes, in her case. Well, natural as terminal illness can be. No. These other three, quite apart from hers. Unexpected. Unnatural.”

  Albert wasn’t listening. “Twenty-six months ago, six months ago, four months ago, and two months ago.” If the observation was supposed to suggest an idea, it didn’t, except that the last three were all two months apart. But it was curious: four women dying on Parliament Row in space of a little over two years. And within two hundred feet of one another. He turned to Sweetman. “Your wife had an illness?”

  “Yes, poor thing. Brain cancer.” He hung his head. “No hope.” He raised his head and wiped away a tear with the heel of his hand. “God’s grace she went early, before it took her in bits and pieces. That’s what she feared most. Going slowly like that.”

  “Nothing they could do?” said Angela, more out of compassion than curiosity. Then answered her own question. “No. No, of course not.”

  “Best they could do was keep her comfortable. Her doctor, Marcos—Indonesian or Filipino or some such—amazing fellow. Made house calls, if you can believe it, in this day and age. The nurse, too. Patty, her name was. Same as my little sister; that’s why I remember it. Spent hours with Suzie. Well beyond the call of . . . Saw to all the arrangements and things, after she passed. I couldn’t have done without them. Useless as a third shoe, I was.

  “She was dull with morphine that last week or so. Couldn’t tell if she knew me from Adam. Still . . .”

  He raised his head and looked away at nothing in particular. “Yes. Well, she didn’t suffer. That’s the thing.” He sniffed, took out his kerchief, blew his nose and added, with whisper, “Left that to me, didn’t you, old girl?”

  “Were any of the other women sick?” Albert asked though, if pressed, he wouldn’t have been able to say why.

  “That’s another thing,” said Sweetman. “Yes. Bella had a tumor at the base of her neck, so Marcos said. He was her doctor, too. Inoperable. Of course, that's why she. . . Mrs. Rivens had early onset dementia. Our own little shop of horrors along the Row. One damn thing after another.”

  “Tanny?”

  “No. Not as far as I know. Healthy lass, by all appearances. Strapping, you might say.”

  For reasons he couldn’t define, Albert just needed to wrap his brain around all these niggling little facts. Once there, he’d leave them to sort themselves out.

  “Five weeks,” Albert mused aloud. He’d been doing math in his head. He looked at Sweetman. “Tanny had been working at the Dona’s for one week when Mrs. Dona died.”

  Sweetman scanned the paper. “So she did. Amazing coincidence.”

  “Coincidence,” said Albert. It was neither a question not a statement. Just an echo. If asked, he would, not long ago, have given it as his understanding that the word meant— “two things that happen at the same time by accident.” Now he began to feel—in light of recent events—a better definition might be “something obvious for which an explanation is missing.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Nasty whack, there, Senior Sergeant” said Jeffreys, entering the office of his superior.

  Hawkes’ hand went instinctively to his head. Mrs. Hawkes’ ministrations, however lavishly dispensed, had evidently not been sufficient to conceal the wound. “Don’t ever let them tell you angels aren’t solid substance,” he said, enigmatically. “Now, what’s so important that you dragged me down here at this time of night?”

  Jeffreys debated the wisdom of reminding the senior sergeant that it was he who had recommended meeting at his office. For himself, he’d have been perfectly happy to meet at the Hawkes’ home. In fact, given that the senior sergeant’s wife was dominant in that domain, and likely to insist that her husband give his subordinate a hearing and a cup of tea without his customary mocking and ridiculing every other sentence, he’d have preferred it.

  Nevertheless, here they were, and he was committed, come what may, to bring to the senior sergeant’s attention what Bindy had said. He told the story in two breaths and, with another, fortified himself against the fusillade of abuse he knew would be forthcoming.

  It didn’t forthcome.

  “She got this from him, did she? The piano player?”

  “Yes, sir.” This, thought Jeffreys, was going to be worse that he thought. Hawkes was taking time to gather steam.

  “Whom I told you to have no truck with . . .”

  Jeffreys had been girding his loins for this. He inflated a hasty barrage balloon and, together with a prayer, sent it aloft. “But I didn’t talk to him, it was . . .”

  “The maid. Yes. So you said.” The look in Hawkes’ eyes could have popped rivets, but, for whatever reason, he proceeded calmly. “That’s being disingenuous, Sergeant. But never mind that.”

  He’d been standing. Now he sat and began filling his pipe from a cut glass tobacco jar on his desk. “Sit, Jeffreys.”

  Jeffreys sat, making a mental note to look up “disingenuous” next time he was in the neighborhood of a dictionary.

  The senior sergeant’s gaze ceased burning holes in his subordinate and drifted to the window—against which a light rain was falling—and the view without. The street was dark and, having gone one in the morning, without traffic. “What do you know about him?” he said.

  “The piano player?”

  “Mm.”

  “Well, he’s, he’s. , . Nothing, really, I mean. He’s . . .”

  “As of even date, he’s the most famous pianist in the world,” said Hawkes matter-of-factly, dropping a narrow sheaf of papers on the desk in front of Jeffreys. “Take a gander.”

  The senior sergeant’s tobacco, Jeffreys always thought, smelled like burning soap. Not unpleasant, exactly, but . . . well, not tobacco-ish, either. With its tendrils weaving their way up his nose and seeping into his brain, he read, and Hawkes let him, and when he had read, he knew things about Albert that Albert would never imagined of himself.

  He swallowed deeply. “So, that’s who he is.”

  “That’s who he is.”

  “He seems . . . well, he seems. I mean, you wouldn’t think to look at him . . . to talk to him . . . that he’s . . .”

  “Hops around the world solving murders in his spare time, apparently,” said Hawkes, twiddling the edge of the manila folder formerly holding the sheaf of papers. “Past, present, and future. Saving damsels in distress, escaping arrest, fleeing fires, flummoxing the professional constabulary, getting pummeled occasionally.

  “About as simple as a straw broom, according to official accounts, yet, as one . . .” He selected a document from the sheaf of papers, turned it toward himself, and read: “Inspector Naples from Ashburn, Massachusetts—that’s in the United States, Jeffreys.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Naples concluded his report on a murder case he and this fellow had been involved in this way: ‘The Professor . . .’ He’s a university professor, as well, you see?” said Hawkes in an aside. “That’s what his people call him.” He tapped the paper with the stem of his pipe. He resumed reading. “‘The Professor doesn�
�t see the world the same way most people do. I don’t claim to understand his perspective, but it allows him to observe things that may not be obvious to the rest of us. He’s not conditioned to interpret evidence in the same way we are, so his intuition—I can’t think of anything else to call it—is often right.

  “‘I don’t expect, given the circles the professor travels in, that crime will play much of a role in his life in the future, but I’m glad to have had his perspective in the Tewksbury case and those that evolved from it.’”

  “That was written four years ago,” said Hawkes, sticking the paper back in the pile. “Since then our piano-playing friend has been a one-man musical vortex of murder and mayhem. Follows him wherever he goes. Massachusetts, North Carolina, England . . .”

  Jeffreys considered this. “And now . . .”

  “And now, the day after he gets off the plane, the body of a young woman washes up on the beach, and he finds it! You’d think she’d been floating around out there waiting for him to put in an appearance!”

  “Well, not a body, exactly,” said Jeffreys. “She’s still alive, I mean.”

  Hawkes skewered Jeffreys with the glare he’d patented as a retort to superfluous comments. Jeffreys sat up a little straighter. “Yes, sir. I see what you mean.”

  “And is that an end of it?” Hawkes continued. “Why no. He’s just begun! He just happens to take rooms on Parliament Row, of all places!”

  Jeffreys cleared his throat and said, “Curious, that,” because he felt he was supposed to say something.

  “Curious?” Hawkes’ pipe had a tendency to go out if neglected for more than two minutes. He relit it. “Downright supernatural, I’d say.” He sucked. “When was the last time we had a bona fide, premeditated murder in Auckland, Sergeant?”

  Jeffreys didn’t remember, but felt he was about to learn.

  “June 14, 1966.”

  “That long ago,” said Jeffreys. “Good on us. Still, sir, there’s been no murder . . .”

  Hawkes looked up sharply. “Hasn’t there? If this pirate story of yours—of his—has any roots in fact, we may be dealing, at least, with an attempted murder.”

  Jeffreys nodded slowly.

  “And, in light of all this,” he tapped the stack of papers again, “I can’t help but entertain the suspicion that perhaps the string of deaths on Parliament Row isn’t as coincidental as we credit them.”

  “You think one of those women was murdered?!”

  Hawkes shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to be Lastrade to his Holmes. If he has any opinion on the matter, I want you to find out what it is. In fact, I want you to know what it is, before he knows what it is.”

  “Then, I’ll have to go to . . .” He paused.

  “I wouldn’t leave that statement dangling, if I were you, Jeffreys,” said Hawkes, the corner of his lips drawn back slightly in what might, with a liberal interpretation, be a grin. “You go make yourself at home there. Court this maid of yours, if it’ll help, but I want to know what this fellow,” he tapped his desk in the neighborhood of the papers in emphasis, “is up to. Get inside his head and if he leads us to solutions, well, we’ll take ’em any way we can get ’em. If not, nothing ventured.”

  The thought uppermost on Jeffreys’ mental list as he stepped into the cool night air, wasthat he wasstill alive, an observtation which drew two others in traina) he was still employed; and, b) had just been ordered, more or less, to spend as much time as possible being intimate with Bindy. Each was a pleasing outcome, and far from what he’d anticipated.

  He decided to buy a nice cigar on his way home. Unfortunately, at that time of night, with no shops open, the only thing going up in smoke would be that expectation.

  Wendell had assumed the role of Jeremy Ash’s pusher without anyone making the suggestion. In fact, the migration of the job to him from Albert, on a permanent basis, had been as natural and seamless as the transition from spring to summer. So it was with Wendell at the handles of the wheelchair and Albert merely strolling along a step or two behind when they went for a walk after dinner.

  Jeremy Ash, never one to leave a perfectly good silence unmolested, had been singing a song he’d heard on the radio. Well, not singing, exactly. The only words he could remember was the refrain, “you oughta be in love,” which he would sing energetically whenever the humming brought him to that point.

  Albert was troubled. Not by the humming, or by the song. In fact, he was enjoying the walk and the company—not least because Wendell had the gift of not speaking for long periods of time, which he exercised liberally. Albert was troubled because he had bristling instincts.

  In the not-too-distant past, it would have been said about Albert, by those who knew him best and love him most, that he had no instinct for anything apart from music. Events of the last few years, however, had tripped the latch on some cage deep in his subconscious and released a beast that wandered his brain picking up Albert’s observational curiosities as if they were shiny objects and, not content to let them lie, as his conscious advised, turning them this way and that, occasionally blowing smoke into them to see where it came out.

  The creature was nudging him and telling him “something’s not right,” and he was trying to ignore it. But he couldn’t. Something wasn’t right. What was troubling him was that he didn’t know what wasn’t right, or why.

  The cord on his plug wasn’t long enough to reach the socket.

  “It’s because I feel like I should be doing something,” said Albert, voicing the thought as it came to him.

  “What’s because?” said Jeremy Ash.

  “What?” Albert was surprised that Jeremy Ash had been tuning in on his thoughts.

  “You said you felt like you should be doing something.”

  “That’s what I was thinking!” said Albert. Funny thing, coincidence. You never knew when it was going to happen. “That girl, on the beach, she was wearing, wearing . . .”

  “She was dressed up,” said Jeremy Ash.

  Wendell grunted agreement.

  “Dressed up,” said Albert. “Yes. But she came from that ship, the Venice . . .”

  “Regent,” said Jeremy. “You think.”

  That’s just it, Albert thought, he didn’t think. He knew. But how or why he knew, he didn’t know. That’s what made it hard to explain things to people. “Dressed up,” he said again. “In the middle of the day.”

  It was Wendell’s turn to express a notion. “What if she fell off the ship at night?”

  Albert stopped walking so he could consider this. “No,” he said, and resumed walking. “She would have been dead by the time we found her.”

  “Or sharks would have got her,” said Wendell, arguing against himself. “Too right.”

  “She jumped from that ship.”

  The story of her discovery had been all over the news, but no one had come forward to say they knew her. So, where had the ship come from? It had been traveling east to west when it went aground. What was east of New Zealand?

  Albert knew his geography.

  Or did he? What was east of New Zealand, assuming the ship hadn’t come from South America.

  Fiji? Tahiti? Those were more north than east. Still, possible, but a long ways away. Besides which, the news would have reached those places,, too.

  He scanned the mental image of the many maps he’d studied—hour after hour—in his white room at the top of the dark stairs in his mother’s home in Maine. He arrived at a landmass directly east of New Zealand’s North Island. “Chatham Island,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Wharekauri,” said Wendell. “That’s what we call it. Islands. About 600 kilometers.” He pointed into the night, but unerringly east.

  Jeremy Ash accepted this piece of information as something that might, one day, be useful on quiz night in some cozy pub, like those he and Albert had frequented when last in England. “Okay. So, what?”

  “Not what,” s
aid Albert. “Where? What if the Venice Regent came from there?”

  “Not bloody likely,” said Wendell with a trace of amusement. “Ships that size don’t call in Wharekauri. No point. Too small. Few hundred people. Sheep. Fish. That’s all. No girls in fancy dresses!”

  He laughed a fleshy laugh. “Moriori live there. We used to eat them.”

  “What’s that, some kind of fish?” said Jeremy Ash, still directing his gaze more or less in the direction Wendell had ceased pointing.

  “Not fish,” said Wendell. “People.”

  “People!?”

  “The Maori ate people,” said Wendell matter-of-factly. “Mostly in war. Sometimes to celebrate.”

  “You were cannibals?”

  “Connoisseurs,” said Wendell, placing a large hand on Jeremy Ash’s shoulder and squeezing it gently. “Puha and pakeha. Mmm.”

  A tingle stitched Jeremy Ash’s vertebrae. Suddenly the mountain of flesh pushing his wheelchair was no long a teddy bear, but a slathering cyclops.

  Albert wasn’t as much interested in the gustatory appeal of the Chatham Island natives as their location. If, for the sake of argument, it could be accepted that the Venice Regent had called there, for what reason would it have done so? His knowledge of the island embraced Wendell’s assertions. Apart from the supply ship from New Zealand that landed there every three months, ships of her size would have no business there.

  Why would anyone go to a place where no one goes?

  Because no one goes there.

  “That’s where pirates would go,” Albert said.

  “Okay,” said Jeremy Ash, twisting himself in his chair, the better to keep Wendell in the corner of his eye. “Let’s follow that. You’re a pirate. You take over the Venice Regent. Why? You sail her to this whatdyacallit island . . .”

  “Chatham Island,” said Albert.

  “Wharekauri,” said Wendell.

  “Whatever,” said Jeremy Ash. “The question is why? And you kidnap a girl in a fancy dress. Why? From where? And why do you come to New Zealand?”

  “I want to go there,” said Albert.