by Peter Straub
Tom said, “I know he didn’t tell you anything. But I know where he went.”
Natchez was already on his feet, and Tom stood up. “Don’t bother packing any more of his clothes, Kingsley.”
The old man wobbled out into the hall, and Tom and the detective followed him. “We’ll let ourselves out,” Tom said.
Kingsley turned away as if he had already forgotten they were in the bungalow.
Tom and Natchez went down the hallway and walked outside into the heat and light on the other side of the courtyard.
“All right,” Natchez said. “Where did the old bastard go?”
“Eastern Shore Road,” Tom said. They went quickly down the steps to the black car. Natchez looked questioningly at Tom as he walked around the front of the car, and Tom grinned at him as he got into the baking interior. Natchez let himself in behind the wheel. “The other Eastern Shore Road,” Tom said.
“His sister?” Natchez said. “I didn’t even know he had a sister.”
Past the St. Alwyn Hotel they drove, past the pawnshop and The Home Plate.
“Carmen Bishop is the reason my grandfather singled out Fulton Bishop—Barbara Deane told me about her one night when we were having dinner at her house. She used to be a nurse’s aide, back when Shady Mount first opened. She was about seventeen or eighteen, and my grandfather used to take her out. He did the same thing with Barbara Deane. Both of them must have been very pretty, but they didn’t have anything else in common.”
“Your grandfather was in his thirties—his late thirties—and he had affairs with teenage girls?”
“No, that’s the point. He didn’t have affairs with them. He just took them out. He wanted to be seen with them. I don’t think he had any interest in affairs. He was using them in another way.”
“Which was?” On the detective’s face was a look both interested and skeptical, as if he were asking just to hear what Tom would come up with by way of an answer: as if the whole thing were now no more than a story in which he need take no more than a spectator’s share. It doesn’t come down to only this, his expression said, Fulton Bishop’s sister. And Tom knew without saying it that it did not: it came down to something else—something Buzz Laing had discovered in Boney Milton’s records.
“To make him look normal,” he said, remembering his mother’s dull, thudding screams in the middle of the night. “Better than normal. He did favors for them, and they made him look like a stud. He was around the hospital a lot in those days, and he met a lot of young girls. When he came across Carmen Bishop, he found a perfect match. Barbara Deane said that in the end, he had to learn to respect her. She did what he wanted in the hospital, and went out with him in public, and in return he helped her brother.”
“ ‘She did what he wanted in the hospital,’ ” Natchez said. “Does that mean what I think it does?”
“Barbara Deane’s reputation got ruined when it looked like she caused the death of a patient who was injured in a gun battle with the police.”
“At Shady Mount,” Natchez said. “With Bonaventure Milton running the show.”
“I don’t suppose they built it to be a way of getting rid of inconvenient people, but once it was there—”
“—once it was the most respectable hospital on the island—”
“—someone like Carmen Bishop could be a kind of court of last resort,” Tom said. “I bet Buzz Laing survived the attack on him because he went to St. Mary Nieves.”
“I thought you said von Heilitz never had the time to work on the Blue Rose case.”
“He didn’t—I’m just thinking about something Dr. Laing told me this morning.”
They drove between the can factory and the refinery and dipped down into Weasel Hollow. Tom said, “Have you ever been to the Third Court?”
Natchez shook his head, and in the way he did not look at Tom but idly out at the weedy lots where people lived inside houses that were only blankets wrapped around leaning poles, the boy saw that he had never been inside Elysian Courts at all.
They went through an intersection, and Tom looked up a garbage-strewn street at the rusted, burnt-out hull of a sports car that now rested flat on a sheet of plywood. A sheet of canvas had been rigged to slant over its top, and the back of a chair stuck up where the passenger seat had been. Friedrich Hasselgard’s Corvette had been recycled into a one-bedroom apartment. Natchez turned up the hill toward the island’s near west end.
The street numbers advanced from the twenties into the thirties. They drove past a big peaceful church in a swarm of bicycles, and turned into 35th Street to go past the zoo, then past the perpetual cricket match ticking away in the field at the south end of the park, past the twisted cypresses, and downhill into Maxwell’s Heaven.
The buildings blocked out the sun. OLD CLOATHES CHEAP, HUMIN HAIR BOUGHT AND SOLD. Far down past the leaning tenements lay the dump in coruscating light, and Mr. Rembrandt hung in a gilded frame on Hattie Bascombe’s wall. Tom pointed to a nearly invisible cobblestone path between a dark archway, and said, “Go in there.”
Natchez drove down past peeling walls and windows hung with dirty net until he came to the bottom of the well, a cobbled court surrounded by crossbarred doors and iron bars. “What happens to the car down here?” Natchez said.
“Percy takes care of it,” Tom said, and a door creaked open, and a bearded mountain in a leather apron lumbered out, squinting into the dirty light.
Tom led David Natchez through the arched passageway into the First Court, saying, “I came here to see a nurse named Nancy Vetiver, who got suspended for taking care of Mike Mendenhall too well to please Dr. Milton. He was afraid of what Mendenhall would say, and he said a lot—that’s how I really learned about you.”
“Don’t go so fast,” Natchez said in the musty darkness.
They came out into the visual chaos of bars and lodging houses around the First Court. Cold moisture and a faint smell of sewage tainted the air, and a hum of voices came from the passages that led deeper into Maxwell’s Heaven, FREDO’S sign flickered on and off. “Fulton Bishop and his sister grew up in the Third Court. My grandfather built this place—it was his first big project. He’d know it was a perfect place to hide.”
“Do you remember how to get to the Second Court?” Natchez wandered out into the center of the court and looked down at the brass plaque that named Glendenning Upshaw and Maxwell Redwing.
“I think so.” Tom looked doubtfully around the square. Half a dozen crooked lanes led away into a sprawl of half-visible streets. The same laundry seemed to droop on lines between windows above them, and the same ragged men passed a different bottle back and forth in front of a lighted doorway. Flies clustered over a muddy stain a few feet from the plaque. Tom turned toward a narrow brick opening beneath an overhanging wooden room, and walked toward it until he saw the white lettering in the brick: Edgewater Trail. “This is it.”
They came out into a cobbled lane between black wooden walls that he remembered. A woman huddled against the wall when she saw them, and a child ran past screaming. The stench of excrement grew stronger. Tom pointed to a wooden flight of steps on the other side of the sluggish stream that ran down the middle of the lane. He went up to the edge of the stream and jumped across. Natchez followed him up the stairs and through echoing darkness until they emerged at the top of the matching steps that led down into the Second Court.
Wooden balconies lay across the front of the buildings on all sides, and at every corner steps went downward into arcades and intersecting narrow streets. “When I was here,” Tom said, the atmosphere of the place making him whisper, “I saw Bishop pass through. He came down these steps and went straight across the Court to that corner.”
Natchez and Tom descended the stairs and walked across the court. A few men eased out of the shadows on the walkways and watched them go. Tom paused at the top of the steps at the corner of the building where Nancy Vetiver had grown up, and went down.
He came out on a flat con
crete bridge over a muddy stream. To his left, the bridge ended in steps leading down to a row of hunched brick buildings built along the low banks of the stream. An enormous black rat darted up out of a hole in the concrete and slithered over the top of the bank to disappear between two of the buildings. At the right end of the bridge, the concrete flooring became the beginning of a lane that twisted past a wooden tenement. Footsteps sounded behind them. Tom turned right.
The buildings huddled closer together. The lane divided, and Tom took the left-hand fork because the right sloped downward into a dead end where murky lodging houses loomed over an empty yard.
They walked past a barred and empty shop on the ground floor of a tenement. Women leaned out of windows and watched them pass beneath. Tom had the feeling they were circling around beneath the Second Court, and only the occasional glimpse of sky above the leaning buildings let him know that they were instead following the slope of the hill down toward the old slave quarter.
Abruptly the lane widened, and the concrete turned to brick cobbles. A broken cart leaned against a wall, which leaned against a leaning building. Two men who had been talking beside the cart vanished into a doorway. “That’s what happens when they see a cop in a place like this,” Natchez said. “I guess this must be the Third Court.”
It was a combination of the first two: wooden walkways and exterior staircases clung to the sides of the four-story tenements. Straw and broken bottles lay across the concrete before them. A peaked wooden roof covered the entire court, intensifying the gloom and the thudding of rock and roll from a basement bar with a hand-painted sign in a window at ground level that read BEER-WHISKEY. Footsteps coming toward them from the concrete lane slowed, then stopped. Natchez backed under a walkway, stood against the wall of the rear tenement, took out a pistol with a long barrel, and peered around the side of the building. Then he shook his head and shoved the pistol back into his holster. “I just want to point out,” he said in a quiet voice, “that we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble by walking around to the other side of this place.”
“How?” Tom asked.
“Because that’s where we are.” He nodded at an arched passageway like a tunnel that ran down the side of the building across from them. On the other end of the tunnel, diminished as if by a telescope looked through backwards, a car rolled downhill in bright unreal daylight. Tom sagged against the tenement wall.
They were standing far back in the shadow of one of the walkways. Both of them looked up at the bleak dark walls on the opposite side of the court. The smells of sewage and stale beer, of unwashed skin and blocked toilets, mingled with the low sounds of voices and clashing radios. In one room a girl cried out; from another Joe Ruddler bawled baseball scores. Tom felt the blood beating in his temples. His eyes stung.
“Well, you have any brilliant ideas?” Tom asked.
“I don’t exactly feel like knocking on a hundred doors,” Natchez said. “We want something that will get him out of her rooms, if that’s where he is.”
“Oh, he’s here. He’s up there somewhere, hating every second he has to be in this place.” And this, he felt with an overwhelming certainty, was true: a kind of inspiration had caused Tom to make David Natchez bring him to this place, but now that he was here, he knew that there was no other place on the island where Glendenning Upshaw would have gone. He flew by the seat of his pants, and he relied on women to solve his leftover problems. He had no friends, only people who owed him services. Tom thought that maybe Carmen Bishop was the only person in all of his grandfather’s life who had understood him.
“So let’s get him out,” Natchez said.
“Right,” Tom said. “If we just stand here shouting his name, he’ll never move. What we want is something that only my grandfather will respond to—something that wouldn’t mean anything special to everybody else up there, but that’ll make him feel like he’s being stung by a thousand bees.”
Natchez frowned and turned to Tom in the darkness beneath the walkway.
Tom smiled, though it was almost too dark for Natchez to see it. “Two thousand bees,” he said.
“Well?”
“He had von Heilitz killed because he thought nobody else could have sent him copies of Jeanine Thielman’s notes. They meant that von Heilitz had finally worked out what really happened to her.”
He felt more than saw Natchez nodding.
“So let’s convince him that someone else knew about those notes. He might recognize my voice, but he wouldn’t know yours. How do you feel about stepping out there and shouting ‘This has gone on too long’?”
Natchez said, “I’ll try anything once.” He moved out from beneath the dark shadow on the walkway, cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “THIS HAS GONE ON TOO LONG!” He moved back—the radios still bleated and chattered, but all other voices had fallen silent. “Well, they heard me,” Natchez whispered.
Tom told him what to say next, and Natchez came out from under the walkway and yelled, “YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR SIN!”
Someone pushed up a window, but the only other sounds were of radios, suddenly louder in the quiet. Jeanine Thielman’s words bounced off the wooden roof and echoed on the tenement walls. Tom imagined the words rolling through all of Maxwell’s Heaven, freezing the rats in their holes and waking babies, stopping the bottles in their passage from hand to hand.
“I know what you are,” Tom whispered, so softly he might have been talking to himself.
Natchez ducked out again. “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!”
Someone above them threw down an empty bottle of Pforzheimer beer, and it exploded against the brick cobbles. “Go away!” yelled a fuzzy male voice, and another suggested that they fuck themselves.
“You must be stopped,” Tom whispered.
“YOU MUST BE STOPPED!”
Another bottle smashed against the bricks, sending glass shrapnel across the court. More windows went up. A door slammed, and heavy footsteps came out on a wooden walkway two or three floors up in the tenement to their right. The wood creaked beneath his grandfather’s weight. Tom’s heart caught in his throat as his grandfather took another step forward: he imagined him leaning on the railing and scowling down into the grimy court, twilit in the middle of the day. His grandfather’s voice floated down: “I can’t see you. Walk out into the court, whoever you are.”
“Well, well,” Natchez whispered.
“I’m curious,” came Tom’s grandfather’s voice. “Did you come here to make a deal?”
With the random irrelevance of an orchestra tuning itself, all the other voices started speaking again. Glendenning Upshaw stepped back from the railing and began walking toward the staircase at the opposite end of the tenement. The wood creaked with every step he took. When he reached the stairs, he thumped down toward the next level. Tom counted each step, and at ten Upshaw reached the next walkway and moved to the railing again. “You won’t disappoint me, will you? After going to the trouble of finding out so much about me?” He waited. “Say something. Speak!” His voice was that of an enraged man almost succeeding in concealing his rage.
Natchez pulled Tom into the concrete passage by which they had entered the Third Court.
“Then wait for me,” Upshaw said, and began to work his way down the next flight of steps. Tom counted to six, and heard his grandfather’s slightly bowed black legs carrying his massive body down to the fifth tread of the near staircase, one flight up, of the tenement to the right of the passage where he and David Natchez stood waiting. “Still there?”
Natchez rapped his knuckles against one of the supports for the walkway above their heads.
“There was once a ridiculous man on this island.” Upshaw came down another step.
“He came into the possession of certain papers of sentimental interest to me.” Down another step.
“I have no quarrel with you, whoever you are.” Upshaw stepped on another creaking tread.
“I’m sure that we can come to an arra
ngement.” He came down the last two steps, and reached the walkway immediately above them. The wood groaned as he stepped forward on the walkway and looked down. “The original papers were written in 1925. The matter they referred to is no longer of any importance.” Tom heard him panting from exertion—it had been a long time since his grandfather had had to cope with stairs. He chuckled. “In fact, it was not of much importance at the time. Are you going to come out and let me see your face?”
Natchez tapped Tom’s shoulder and pointed to the topmost walkway of the tenement on the other side of the court. Deep in the shadow, a pale shape that might have been a man in a white shirt and a pair of tan trousers moved with foglike slowness toward the nearest staircase.
“You’re being foolish,” Upshaw said. “You cannot frighten me—you just came here to sell what you have.”
Tom and Natchez waited in the passage. The man in the white shirt reached the staircase and began noiselessly to move down.
“All right, I’ll do it your way,” Upshaw said. He turned away from them and stumped along the walkway to the staircase at the opposite end. “How much do you think those notes are worth? A thousand dollars apiece?” He chuckled, and reached the stairs on the other side of the next tenement and began coming down. Tom saw his white hand sliding along the railing. The vague shape of his shoulder, his white hair, came into view. He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned around. “If so, you’re sadly mistaken. They aren’t worth a hundred each to me.”
He stepped forward, and moved under the walkway. His body lost definition in the darkness and became only a black shape coming down the front of the tenement toward the passage. Tom glanced across the court and saw that the man in the white shirt had stopped on the next walkway down.
“Send the other man away,” Natchez said.
“If you like.” Upshaw stopped moving and called across the court, “Go out and wait on the street.”
