Improvisato

by David Crossman

  “I have time. We’re sitting.”

  James Simon, knew a Call when it came. Beginning with Article Six of the Statutes of the Church of England, he decanted the Good News,

  simultaneously into the fog and Albert’s ears and, at its conclusion, was unable to judge from either his expression or response upon which the telling had the greatest impact.

  Throughout the impassioned recital, the vicar felt Albert’s fixed, unblinking gaze—a sensory inquisition of his heart, testing whether the words engraved there aligned with those coming out of his mouth.

  “I see,” said Albert, when Simon concluded his testimony. He blinked, suddenly releasing Simon from the merciless innocence of those eyes, and turned his attention to the waves, now and then suggested through the thinning veil of fog that caressed and foamed on the beach below.

  “Good,” said Simon, drawing a deep breath. “That’s good.” He hesitated a moment. Though an evangelist at heart, being a product of the C of Ehe was not one by training,. He wondered what should come next. Confession, repentance, revival, and renewal was pretty much the formula as he understood it, but it wasn’t his job to force the next step, or even suggest it. That was up to the Holy Spirit and whether or not the time had come for its awakening in Albert. Inwardly, he prayed. Outwardly, he simply said, “Any questions?”

  Creation, rebellion, separation, sacrifice, payment, forgiveness, reunion, capped off by Christ’s return which, if He’s God, made perfect sense. “No.”

  “I mean—do you want to . . .?”

  “God made the world?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was perfect.”

  “Yes. Because He is perfect.”

  “But He gave us free will.”

  “Yes. He wanted us to love Him by choosing to obey Him.”

  “And they didn’t. Adam and Eve.”

  “. . . So sin entered the world. They chose to leave paradise, and innocence. So we all share in the consequence of their sin. Yes.”

  “Like cancer.”

  “That’s a good way to put it, yes. Sin is spiritual cancer.”

  Albert turned and, once more, seized Simon in his gaze. “Matter and anti-matter.”

  “Pardon?”

  Albert remembered having read that somewhere; it had been among nests of mathematical scribblings he’d once been surprised to find on the chalkboard in his classroom at The School; apparently not as much his classroom as he’d supposed. Who knew the occult practices to which it was put in his absence? Perhaps cults met there on odd months and swung dead cats at the moon, as he’d heard his mother once suggest.

  “Opposite things that need each other, but can’t coexist.” The image sprang to mind of himself and Huffy sharing a small apartment. He shuddered involuntarily.

  The statement bent Simon’s brow, but Albert didn’t notice; his attention had turned to the sea. “Silence can’t be sound. Sound can’t be silence. They would destroy each other. But together they make music. Take away either, and you can’t have music.”

  Albert’s brain was trailing along after his words, picking them up, turning them this way and that with interest and wondering where they were leading—probably to a gingerbread house, occupied by an old woman of dubious repute, deep in the forest. The words continued. “Truth and lies,” they said.

  The vicar’s mouth decided to join the conversation, even though his brain was, like the Pacific Ocean—out there somewhere—totally befogged. “Opposites, you mean. Light and darkness. Good and evil . . .” He was hoping Albert’s response would be something in which he could find a handhold.

  “Truth can’t have a lie in it,” Albert said, warming to philosophy.

  “Absolute truth,” said Simon. “Yes.”

  Was there some other kind? “Absolute,” said Albert. “Like silence— absolute silence—can’t have a sound in it. But a lie can have truth in it. Sound can have silence—the little spaces between vibrations that make sound . . . sound.” He cast a sidelong glance at Simon and, did Simon imagine it? Smiled. “Good with evil in it isn’t good. But evil with some good in it is still evil. Matter and anti-matter.”

  Simon’s mouth opened and closed once or twice, but nothing came out. What was Albert smiling about?

  “God is good. Good is matter. Sin is evil. Evil is anti-matter. It can’t exist where He is, so he made a way that it could.”

  “Christ?”

  Albert looked out to sea, smiled, then stood up and walked south along the road with his hands in his pockets.

  James Simon watched after Albert as thick wraiths of mist embraced him, obscuring him from view. Immediately, the strong impression settled upon him that the interview had been with a phantom. Certainly that was the best that could be said of the thoughts that roiled in its wake. His eyes, having nothing better to do, slowly swept the fog, probing it for any tangible sign of reality, and sketched the dim outline of Snake’s motorcycle.

  “Albert!” he called. But Albert was gone. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he said, stroking Medusa’s leather seat, and it wasn’t until he heard the words that he realized he wasn’t talking about the bike.

  The theology Albert had come by that afternoon would not have gone over well at a convention of apologists, but at whatever level he needed it to be, it was profound and, even if it wasn’t simple, it could be stated simply. There is choice because there is love; there is sin because there is choice. That explained evil. It explained what happened to Woolie-Woolie, and the girl on the beach, and Harvest Lossberg—painter of cows—and Welf the Potter’s son, and Judge Antrim, and Tewksbury, and World War Two, and stolen lunch boxes.

  And Melissa Bjork dying in his arms.

  Evil was death’s midwife. “And sin, when it is born, gives birth to death.” Simon’s words rang in Albert’s ears as he walked through fog that, however thick, was unable to penetrate the sun-drenched landscape of his soul. Because there was choice, evil made perfect sense. Armed with this knowledge, he could—rather than perpetually standing before its abominations numbed with disbelief—name it and, having named it, stand against it.

  An hour or so later, the inn loomed in the mist and, as he turned into the driveway, he suddenly felt as if he’d forgotten something. He’d have to ask Jeremy Ash.

  “So, you made it back in one piece,” said Angela, who was playing War with Jeremy Ash and Wendell when Albert came in. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Yes.”

  “At the church?”

  “He met me on the road.” Albert sat down and looked at Angela’s empty coffee cup and thought it would be nice to have a cup of coffee. A full one.

  “He? He who?”

  “James Simon,” said Albert, looking around to see if Milly was anywhere to be seen.

  “Simon?” said Angela, and she’d have spilt coffee all over herself if she’d been drinking any. Thankfully, her cup was empty. “James Simon?! Our James Simon?!”

  “The fog must be playing tricks on you, A,” said Jeremy Ash, worriedly. “Simon’s ten thousand miles away. In England.”

  Albert explained about the ad in the newspaper, but the coincidence was still beyond belief. “Impossible,” said Angela. Not that she’d mind if the vicar had—by some twist in the time-space continuum, or whatever principle it was that tore holes in impossibilities—washed up on the island.

  “You met Vicar Simon, then?” said Frenchie who had been somewhere doing something.

  Angela took the older woman by the arm as she sat down beside her. “The James Simon—from England?”

  “As to the James Simon, I couldn’t say,” said Frenchie, lighting a cigarette. “Country could be plagued with vicars by that name, for all I know. But in any case, they’re less by one. Yes, his name’s James Simon, and yes, he’s from England.”

  Angela let her expression, as her eyes floated from one to the other around the coffee table, illustrate her incredulity. “Well, pinch me,” she said.


  “Hope he’s not paid by the head,” said Frenchie. “Slim pickins, I’m afraid. Last vicar said God hadn’t visited Chatham since He made it.”

  Albert smiled at the floor. He knew otherwise. Evil was in Chatham; he’d seen it first-hand. “Ergo . . .” he said aloud.

  “Did you say something, A?”

  “Yes.”

  The others waited . . . in vain. Albert had forgotten about coffee. He stood up, went to the piano, and played. He played like he’d never played before, and when the music stopped running through him, about an hour later, he went to bed.

  Angela, Jeremy Ash, Wendell, Frenchie and, by that time, Milly and Snake, sat watching after him as the musical tsunami subsided around them, leaving them drenched with emanations from another dimension that none had the capacity to express.

  “Sounds like he’s got a lot of fingers,” Wendell said at last.

  Snake had forgotten what he’d come for, which was to find out where his bike was, and wandered out into the night without kissing Milly good-bye. Frenchie, whose dentures had, during the recital, worked free of their adhesive, dabbed the little stream of spittle from the corner of her mouth with her sleeve, and sucked them back into place.

  For Angela, the music was at once a whip—stinging her conscience with the memory of Heather Antrim’s cries as her car plummeted off the cliff in Devon—and the hope of forgiveness. She was sobbing, shaking.

  Jeremy looked to see if his legs had grown back.

  Snake had walked nearly a mile, in the fog, in the wrong direction, when he discerned the dim outline of an English country cleric wheeling his bike toward him in the fog. “Ah! Snake! Good to see you!” For the briefest moment, as the words left his lips, James Simon wondered if Eve hadn’t said very much the same thing. “You’ll have to teach me how to drive this . . . contraption . . . if you’re going to loan it to folks who go leaving it lying about the countryside.”

  Snake took custody of the bike without responding. “You ever heard him play,” he said, “that Albert fella? You ever heard him play the piano?”

  “Not in person, no. Worse luck. Though I’ve got all his records. Not quite . . . not . . .”

  “That’s what I’m thinkin’,” Snake agreed. He lapsed into a deliberate silence upon which Simon had the sensitivity not to intrude. “I shear sheep in season, Vicar. You know that. And I fish about six months out of the year. Fillet ’em.”

  The vicar, having just emerged, after a long struggle, from his recent rabbit-hole encounter with Albert, felt he was about to fall back in. He threw out a slender rope in hopes Snake would grab it and pull him back to solid ground. “Yes?”

  “That’s what I am,” said Snake, throwing his leg over the saddle. He turned the key, and the headlight shot a bolt into the mist. “Sheared and filleted.” He stamped on the starter, and Medusa responded with a growl of rebuke for having left her in the hands of someone who didn’t know how to ride and, together, the duo roared into the teeth of the fog which swallowed them greedily.

  “Sheared and filleted,” Simon echoed. He knew the feeling.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The following morning, by the time Albert came down for breakfast, Jeremy Ash and Wendell, whom Milly had dubbed Fatman and Robin, had already eaten and, through the sea-brined southwest facing window, could be seen making their way to parts unknown. Angela, Dr. Chan, and Sergeant Jeffreys huddled over the detritus of their breakfast in animated conversation. Their hostess hovered with tea, or coffee, or juice, or butter, or yogurt or whatever other comestible came within reach with which she could legitimize her eavesdropping.

  “Well, it’s Rip van Winkle!” said Angela, her deep green eyes warm with welcome. Albert, having no wish to intrude on what was obviously an intimate conversation, had been about to take a seat at a table by himself. “What are you doing? Come over here and listen to the latest.” There was an empty chair pushed under the table beside her. She pulled it out and patted the seat with the flat of her hand. “Come by me.”

  “I was just . . .”

  “You were just about to make me cross with you. Come sit here.”

  Albert did as he was told.

  “Wait ’til you hear what Sergeant Jeffreys discovered,” Angela said. “Go ahead, Sergeant.”

  Jeffreys cleared his throat. “Well, I called my cousin, Edna, who works with the Ministry of Transport. She’s got more connections than . . . .” He had hoped to come up with something clever to say by the time he got to this point. Nothing came. “Anyone she doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.”

  “Taken as read,” said Angela. “Go on.”

  “Yes. Well, she’s got this friend who knows the phlebotomist at Auckland City Hospital.” Jeffreys who had learned the art of reading faces, could see that Albert wasn’t getting something. “A phlebotomist is a kind of medical person who takes blood. Anyway, she remembers Woolie-Woolie’s blood because it was B-negative—one shared by about two percent of the general population.”

  Albert brought this information on board. “Rare, then.”

  “Extremely.”

  “So that’s why he was killed. Someone needed a part of him. Someone with that blood.”

  “That’s the consensus,” said Dr. Chan. “And while they were about it, they harvested whatever else might be useful.”

  Albert, mindlessly helping himself to a fried potato from Angela’s plate, said, “That means there’s a network, like Jeremy Ash said.”

  “How so?” said Jeffreys.

  “Somewhere, someone was looking for someone with that blood type. They found Woolie-Woolie because he had pneumonia. They knew.”

  “Question is,” said Angela, “who knew?”

  “The person who diagnosed the blood, of course,” said Chan. “That wouldn’t be hard to find out.”

  “Who else?”

  “Well, Mettie Patuwai obviously. She was the one who submitted the sample.”

  “I should think anyone at the lab,” said Angela.

  Chan shook his head. “They’re a pretty meticulous group,” he said. “I’ve worked with them for years. Dr. Alamadu, the phlebotomist Jeffreys mention, is head of the department. Straightest stick in the wicket factory. Runs a tight ship and is, if anything, a tad overzealous about the corpuscles in his care. All smock coats and face masks, that lot.”

  “How many are there?” Albert wanted to know.

  “At the lab?” Chan reeled of a short list of names, raising a finger with each. “Three, including himself. Chellie, this one,” he said, wiggling his second finger before laying it down, “is his daughter—the proverbial apple who didn’t fall far from the tree. She’s set her cap for this one,” he wiggled the adjacent digit. “Clay Pigeon.”

  Angela chuckled. “You people are nickname crazy!”

  Chan smiled. “True enough. Except in that case, it’s what his parents thought fit to name him. Children of the Sixties, you know.”

  “Child abuse, I should’ve thought,” said Angela. “Poor kid.”

  “Family business,” Jeffreys observed.

  “Anyway, he’s the fly in the ointment, if you ask me,” said Chan. “Good man as far as his profession goes. Very meticulous, and both Chellie and Alamadu think he hung the stars. But between us and the lamp post, well, he’s not one to put too tight a reign on certain proclivities, if you take my meaning.”

  “Women?” said Angela.

  “Not that I know of. However, if you were to say “ gambling,” well . . . .”

  “Any kind in particular?” asked Jeffreys.

  “Every kind in particular,” said Chan. “Mind you, I’m talking off the record. I have no personal first-hand knowledge. This is all scuttlebutt.”

  “However . . .” said Angela.

  Chan responded with a quick lift of a shoulder and tilt of the head. “However.”

  “Is he a good gambler?” said Albert.

  “How do you mean?”

  Albert thought the question fairly sel
f-evident. “Does he win or lose?”

  “Oh,” said Chan. “I couldn’t say, really. Scuttlebutt doesn’t extend that far, I’m afraid. At least not as I’ve heard.

  “That’s something you should find out,” said Albert, turning to Jeffreys.

  Jeffreys squirmed a bit. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “If he’s a bad gambler, he needs money,” said Albert, “to keep gambling.”

  The sun rose for Chan. “You think he’s the one passing the information along? For money to support his habit?”

  “I don’t know,” said Albert. “Maybe.”

  “More than maybe, I’d say,” said Chan. “Makes perfect sense. Can’t think why it never occurred to me. Comes from not having a suspicious nature, I suppose.”

  Meaning Albert had a suspicious nature? He’d never thought about that. But, if that were true, late experience had certainly confirmed those suspicions.

  “I’ll look into it,” said Jeffreys. “I know most of the bookies in Auckland. If he’s into any of them for a packet, I’ll have it out of them.”

  “Are you releasing Woolie-Woolie’s body to his family now?” asked Angela, turning to Chan.

  “I’ll sign off on it, unless something startling turns up at the inquest this morning. It’ll be up to the local magistrate to authorize it.”

  “Speaking of inquest,” said Angela, rising from the table and shooing muffin crumbs from her skirt. She tapped her wrist. “Quarter ’til ten. We’d best be on the way.” She snared Milly with a glance. “Could someone drive us, Mrs. Mittlebirch?”

  “Milly, please! Mrs. Mittlebirch is my Mum, dead fourteen years now,” she said, adding enigmatically, “and best not called back. I’ll give Frenchie a call, assuming your insurance is paid up and you’re in good with the Man Upstairs.”

  Albert glanced at the stairs—he hadn’t seen a man up there—and wondered how many other guests had escaped his notice. He’d have to double his efforts to be more observant.