Improvisato

by David Crossman

  Reminiscent of the Lord’s presence over the Sinai desert, Frenchie’s advent was announced by a cloud of blue smoke in the distance, and the thunder of five of six cylinders that precipitated it.

  As they drove toward the schoolhouse, where the inquest was to be held, Frenchie launched into a monologue chronicling the island’s flora and fauna, the bulk of her interest centering on a bird that, as far as Albert could make out, had been a taipo, but somehow became a taiko, which means “ghost.” Something to do with evolution, he expected. Didn’t we all evolve into ghosts, eventually? Or maybe a taipo became a taiko because of a typo. He was contemplating a chuckle, but swallowed it at the appearance of Jeremy Ash and Wendell, with whom collision was only avoided by a last-second flick of Frenchie’s wrist as they rounded a corner. Whether Truck or Wendell would have emerged the worse from such a contest was consigned forever to the realm of speculation.

  “Stop!” said Albert. The command was redundant. Truck had already skidded to a standstill, cloaked in a cloud of exhaust, on the moist verge of the road. Wendell wheeled Jeremy Ash to the passenger side as Albert reached for the handle with which he would have wound down the window, had there been a handle. Or a window.

  That explained the breeze.

  “Off to the inquest?” said Jeremy Ash.

  “Yes.”

  “I think we’re just gonna hang around here. See you when you get back.”

  “All right,” said Albert reluctantly. He’d become accustomed to having Jeremy Ash handy at such times, but Angela would be there. She’d have to do. He suddenly felt dizzy. The rush of adrenaline to his heart—precipitated, most likely, by the recent near-collision—had triggered a sudden sparkling reaction in his eyes. His head seemed to rise five or six feet above the proceedings, then explode.

  “Hello, Albert.”

  Albert tried to open his eyes, but his lids, heavy as bricks wouldn’t comply. Not that they had to. He didn’t need to see the speaker to know who it was. “Miss Bjork?”

  “Melissa.”

  “Melissa,” he said.

  “Seems a long time.”

  It did. Melissa Bjork had died in his arms nearly four years ago. He shook his head, trying to loosen whatever mechanism was holding his eyelids closed. “Did I die?”

  “Do you feel yourself breathing?”

  Albert concentrated. He could feel his lungs expand and contract, felt the air at the back of his throat. “Yes.”

  “The dead don’t breathe,” she said.

  “You don’t?”

  “What are you going to do, Albert?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can die now, if you choose. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Somehow he did.

  “Or keep on until that little island in your brain erupts, like a volcano.”

  “A volcano,” Albert echoed. He stopped trying to open his eyes. He could hear her; that was enough. “That’s what happened?”

  “I’m a lawyer, Albert. Not a doctor.”

  Albert imagined his hands massaging his temple. “I think that’s what happened.”

  The next moment a shock went through him from head-to-toe as she placed a cool hand on his forehead and ran a finger along his eyebrow. His eyes flew open, and there she was looking, apart from the hole in her temple, exactly as she had that instant before she died. Her eyes were as blue; her hair as blonde; her skin, as pinkish white and, he knew, soft as a kitten’s belly.

  “Miss Bjork.”

  “Mr. Albert,” she said, smiling. She wet the tip of her finger on her tongue and, with it, flattened a few errant hairs on his eyebrow into place.

  A thousand thoughts were tumbling through Albert’s mind, but none had precedent. The best he could do was grab one as it passed. “Did you hear what I said, before . . . on the porch?”

  “You said you loved me. That you’d marry me.”

  Albert felt that if there is such a thing as a tsunami of relief, sweetened with honey and the smell of a damp forest floor in spring, that’s what swept through him now. She had heard. She hadn’t died not knowing.

  “Yes,” he sighed.

  “I was shot?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn't ask who by, or why. No comment. No complaint.

  “Where are we, Albert?”

  Albert wasn’t sure. Over the years, waking up in a new room, in the pitch dark, in a new hotel, in a strange city, in a strange country, night after night while on tour, Albert had often felt displaced. At such times, rather than panic, he would call out for Jeremy Ash, who usually occupied the other bed. On those rare occasions when Jeremy Ash wasn’t there, he’d force himself to think where he was. Whose face he had seen last? What he had had for dinner? Most importantly, where were his cigarettes? Where was the bathroom? Sometimes the answer to the last question was most pressing.

  The feeling was much the same now. Apart from lying in the dark, talking to Melissa Bjork, who had been dead four years and—more importantly—listening to her tell him she’d heard him say he loved her before she died, where was he?

  The first memory of recent events to fight its way to the surface of the mire in his brain was that of finding Woolie-Woolie in the ocean. That memory was just the locomotive; when it pulled into the station, so did the entire train of memories to which it was linked. He remembered everything.

  “New Zealand,” he said. “Chatham Island.”

  “And what are we doing here?”

  All at once, Albert felt unbearably tired. “I found Woolie-Woolie’s body. In the ocean. I have to go to the inquest.”

  “What then?”

  Good question. But she was a lawyer. Questions were her stock in trade. What then? He looked at the fragments of nonsense littering the floor of his consciousness: pieces from about three different puzzles. “Put the pieces together?”

  “So many pieces,” she said. “So many dead.”

  Who was dead? Woolie-Woolie and—who else? The girl on the beach wasn’t dead. At least she hadn’t been. “So many?”

  “So many.”

  The image in his imagination, of Woolie-Woolie as his hollow body was pulled from the ocean supplanted that of Miss Bjork projected on canvas of Albert’s inner-eye. He relived, as if he’d been there, the cold clamminess of the bloated body, felt the bile rising in his throat, the frigid water sucking at his fingers, hands, and arms, as if willing him back into its grip. All at once another head bobbed to the surface, then another, then another. Women. Three women. Three dead women. Their hair, matted, sodden, and stringy, concealed their faces, but he wouldn’t have recognized them anyway. He’d never seen them. Nevertheless, he knew who they were.

  The dead wives of Parliament Row.

  That’s what had been bothering him all along, those three women, all on the same street, dying the way they had, within so short a period of time. The facts didn’t settle. They kept holding up their arms at the back of the class, waving their hands and mouthing, “Teacher! Teacher! Look at me!”

  What had happened to the bodies of those women, he wondered aloud.

  “Whose bodies?”

  It wasn’t Melissa Bjork who spoke. It was Jeremy Ash. The bricks—or whatever it was that had been holding them shut—slipped from Albert’s eyelids, and he opened them to find himself looking up into a circle of concerned faces. “I thought they were open,” he said.

  “What were?”

  “My eyes.”

  “You okay?”

  “Compared to what?” Albert wondered. Miss Bjork was gone and, once again, he hadn’t had time to say good-bye. He felt as empty as Woolie-Woolie’s belly. The cover on the bottomless well in his heart—that he and time had dragged so slowly, painfully into place, was ripped away, and his soul stood staring into the pit. “Those women . . . on Parliament Row,” he said. “They were all . . . they were like Woolie-Woolie.”

  “He’s delirious,” said Dr. Chan.

  Angela ran a cool hand over his f
orehead. It wasn’t cool in the way Miss Bjork’s had been. But cool in a way that warmed him. “How much is twenty-five and ninety-eight?” she said.

  That’s an odd question to ask, out of the blue, Albert thought. Still, she must have her reasons. “I need a pencil.”

  “He’s fine,” she said. She placed her other hand behind the back of his neck and lifted him, with Dr. Chan’s help, to a sitting position. Several bits of gravel, that had become embedded in the folds of his clothing, dropped to the ground. “You fainted.”

  “Yes.”

  “Has this kind of thing happened before?” asked Chan.

  Between them, as they assisted Albert back to the Truck and drove to the Chatham Inn, Angela and Jeremy Ash explained about what had happened in England, about the tests that had revealed a curious little island in the recesses of Albert’s brain; about his decision to leave the island alone.

  “Didn’t they offer a diagnosis?”

  Angela shook her head. “They said they needed more tests. But he wouldn’t let them.”

  “Why not, Albert?” said Chan. “They might be able to find out what the problem is.”

  Albert’s thoughts on the matter could be neatly framed in a few words: “They’d want to do something about it.” He suspected that if he allowed the doctors to embark on a voyage of discovery to that little island in his brain, he might not like what they found when they got there. Best leave some things undiscovered.

  “Thank the good B-jesus you didn’t pass out when you were on Snake’s bike,” said Frenchie, herding everyone with the instincts of a border collie, to the circle of chairs by the fireplace.

  Wendell made the sound of a motorcycle skidding across gravel and careening off a cliff—a fairly high cliff, it would seem—and into the ocean, illustrating the scenario, for the benefit of the hard of hearing, with graphic hand-motions that culminated in an explosive splaying of the fingers with attendant sound effects.

  Albert was about to ask who B-jesus was but, sensing theological implications, decided to raise the question with James Simon at a later date. Now, other questions weighed on his mind. He snared Sergeant Jeffreys with his eyes. “The women on Parliament Row, the ones who died. What happened to them?”

  “Happened?” said Jeffreys. “I don’t follow. They died.”

  “What happened to their bodies?”

  “Bodies?” the sergeant echoed again. “Buried, I should imagine. I mean, they’d have to be, wouldn’t they?”

  “Can you call someone to find out?”

  “Call someone? Who? Find out what?”

  “The hospital? The undertaker? Find out if they were buried.”

  “Albert,” said Angela, still running her palm across his forehead. “When people die, they’re buried.”

  Albert thought of his mother being buried, and winced at what Abigail Grace would have to say next time they met about his not having stayed around for that. “We need to find out if they were all buried.”

  “I’m sure they were. Like she said,” said Jeffreys, nudging the air in Angela’s direction with his elbow. “Everyone’s buried when they die.”

  “I mean all of them,” said Albert, wrestling his tongue for words that would make his meaning clear. “All of each of them.”

  The semi-circle of faces surrounding him exchanged looks of profound perplexity, all but Wendell. “He means were they all together, or were parts missing. Like with Woolie-Woolie.”

  “Yes,” said Albert, with relief. “Yes.”

  “How should I know?” said Jeffreys, at whom Albert had been looking when he voiced the question.

  The answer was obvious to Jeremy Ash. “You call.” He formed a phone with his hand and rattled it at the policeman.

  “Well, yes. But . . .”

  “No ‘Yes, but,’” said Jeremy Ash peremptorily. “Just go call.”

  “But . . .”

  “We’ll wait.”

  “And ask if they’ve found the girl,” Angela called after the sergeant as he went reluctantly about his errand. She turned to Albert. “Now, what’s all this about? You think that when those women died, someone harvested their bodies for . . .”

  “I think they were . . . killed on purpose,” said Albert.

  “Murdered!” said Dr. Chan. “Oh, now really. This is too much! This is New Zealand, Maestro. Not New York City. We don’t go around murdering each other in this part of the world.”

  “Tell it to Woolie-Woolie,” said Jeremy Ash, speaking the thought even as it formed in Albert’s brain.

  “Yes, well,” Chan mumbled. “An aberration. The exception that proves the rule, you might say. Whatever prompted such a notion?”

  Albert, who didn’t intuit much, nonetheless intuited that if he mentioned that the thought had been born of this conversation with Melissa Bjork, certain questions might follow, to which the answers would not be warmly received. “Can you make a call, too?”

  “I suppose? To whom, and why?”

  “To find out the names of those women’s doctors.”

  “The women on Parliament Row?”

  “Yes.”

  “And, when asked why I want them, I should say . . .?”

  Albert held that truth to be self-evident. “That you want to know.”

  “Just use your imagination,” said Jeremy Ash, who, Albert knew, could reel off a litany of plausible reasons, excuses, extenuating circumstances or alternate realities without drawing breath.

  For Jeremy Ash deception, dissembling, equivocating, and fabricatingwere nourishment, sanctuary, and entertainment, all rolled into one, for Chan, they were a heap of ashes on his tongue, and it was not with a light heart that he arrived at the phone, just as the sergeant replaced the receiver.

  “Well, who’d’ve believed it,” Jeffreys mumbled into the atmosphere.

  “Believed what, Sergeant? You look troubled?”

  The observation jostled Jeffreys from his private thoughts. “Pardon?”

  Chan reached for the phone, still swaddled by the warmth of Jeffreys’ hand and breath. “You said I wouldn’t believe something.”

  “It was just . . . How could he know that?”

  “You’re being a bit ambiguous, Sergeant. How could who know what?”

  Jeffreys recalled himself from a nearby dimension. “Huh? Oh, hi, Doc. What I mean is, how could the Professor have known about the women on Parliament Row?”

  “Known what about them?”

  Jeffreys sat down on the chair that resided within easy reach of the phone, its back straight enough to discourage prolonged conversation. “The senior sergeant—last time I saw him before we came out here—said he had the niggling feeling that those deaths weren’t as cut-and-dry as we’d supposed. Those women. He had Mrs. Dona exhumed.”

  The pause that followed was prolonged beyond Chan’s patience. “And?”

  “You’d never believe it.”

  “Let me guess,” said Chan with rising anxiety. “Something was wrong.”

  Jeffreys locked his eyes on the doctor. “Harvested. Just like Woolie–Woolie.

  “Harvested.”

  Chan shuddered involuntarily. “I’m assuming he had the others brought up as well?”

  “After that, yes. Mrs. Rivens.”

  “And?”

  “Same. All the interior bits gone. Eyes, too.”

  Dr. Chan looked at the phone in his hand as if it had appeared there of its own volition. Then he remembered he was supposed to call someone about something, but couldn’t remember who, or why. It would come to him, once he recovered his wits. “I know your senior sergeant,” he said pensively. “We belong to the same golf club. He’s never struck me as an original thinker, between the two of us. I’m surprised he’d have taken the initiative to pursue an exhumation.”

  “Comes of following up some calls he made to America—about the Professor,” said Jeffreys. “I’m not sure who he talked to, or what they said, but well, initiative followed by the bushel.

&nbs
p; “What I don’t get,” the sergeant continued, “is how he,” this with a nod in Albert’s direction, “came to suspect something amiss about those women’s deaths.”

  Chan raised an empathetic eyebrow at the pianist then, recalling his assignment, held the phone to his ear and began dialing.

  “Something tells me,” said Jeffreys over his shoulder as he returned to the group, “we’re poking our little sticks in a hornet’s nest.”

  The small party knotted around the table in the lounge were considering the implications of Jeffreys’ discovery when Chan, who had only gotten the answer to his question after wrangling his way through a maze of bureaucratic obfuscation for twenty minutes, returned to his chair. His eyes, as he spoke, looked as if they refused to believe what his lips were saying: “They all had the same doctor. Geraldo Marcos.”

  The phone rang in the distance.

  “And,” said Chan, “he was the attending physician of our missing girl.”

  “There’s your man!” said Jeremy Ash, preparing to unite all the loose strands of evidence in a rope strong enough to drop around the neck of the accused.

  Chan’s next remark dropped a match on that rope: “He was found dead, day-before-yesterday. Car wreck.”

  “Oh, come on!” Angela objected. “This is just too much!”

  “Then I wonder what you’ll make of this: his nurse, one Patricia Hogan, has gone missing.”

  “At this rate, there won’t be enough people left in Auckland to look for the lost,” said Jeremy Ash.

  “And,” said Chan, with a puckish grin, “there’s another shoe to drop. Shall I?”

  Angela threw her arms wide, and splayed her fingers. “Drop away, Mr. Shoemaker! It can’t get much more absurd than it already is!”

  “Good nurse Hogan was, until a few weeks ago, when she apparently dropped him suddenly, the intended of one Clay Pigeon.”

  “For whom Chellie Almadu carries the proverbial torch,” said Angela. “Wheels within wheels.”

  “Knots within knots,” said Albert, who would have been happier with wheels..

  Milly appeared, carrying the phone in her hand, its long cord wrapped around her arm. “For you, Sergeant,” she said, handing him the instrument. “Woman. Says she’s your cousin.”