Falling Angel

by William Hjortsberg

  “Get a cop!” I yelled at the open-mouthed gentleman in the cardigan sweater as the Christ-eyed kid closed on me with a short, leather-covered sap in his bony fist. “These guys want to kill me!”

  I used the attaché case like a shield and caught the kid’s first swing on its expensive calfskin surface. I kicked at him, and he danced back away from me. The long-barreled Colt lay tantalizingly close. I couldn’t risk stooping for it. The kid saw it too and tried to cut me off, but he wasn’t fast enough. I kicked the automatic under the railing into the river.

  That left me wide open. The kid caught the side of my neck with his weighted sap. Now it was my turn to scream. The pain brought tears to my eyes as I hacked for breath. I shielded my head as best I could, but the kid was in the driver’s seat. He struck a glancing blow off my shoulder, and then I felt my left ear explode. As I went down, I saw the man in the cardigan swoop his yapping terrier in his arms and run hollering up the park steps.

  I watched his departure on hands and knees through a pink haze of pain. My head roared like an express train on fire. The kid sapped me again, and the train went into a tunnel.

  Pinpoints of light dazzled in the blackness. The rough concrete under my cheek felt slick and sticky. I might have been out as long as Rip van Winkle, but when I opened the eye that still worked I saw the kid helping the fallen coach to his feet.

  It had been a rough day for the coach. He cupped his groin with both hands. The kid tugged at his sleeve, urging him to hurry, but he took his time and hobbled over to where I was lying and kicked me square in the face. “That’s for you, prick,” I heard him say before he kicked me a second time. After that, I was no longer listening.

  I was under water. Drowning. Only it wasn’t water, it was blood. A torrent of blood swept me along, tumbling me over and over. I was drowning in it, unable to breathe. I gasped for air and swallowed sweet mouthfuls of blood.

  The bloody tide deposited me on a distant shore. I heard the roaring surf and crawled to keep from being pulled back under. My hands touched something cold and metallic. It was the curved leg of a park bench.

  Voices approached out of the fog. “There he is, officer. That’s the man. Oh my God! Look what they’ve done to him.”

  “Take it easy, fella,” another voice said. “Everything’s okay now.” Strong arms lifted me from the gory tide-pool. “Just lean back, fella. You’re gonna be okay. Can you hear what I’m saying?”

  When I tried to answer I made a noise like gargling. I clung to the park bench, a life raft in a stormy sea. The swirling red mists parted, and I saw an earnest, square face surrounded by blue. A double row of gold buttons shone like rising suns. I focused on the badge until I could almost read the numbers. When I tried to say thanks, I made the gargling noise again.

  “You just relax, fella,” the square-faced patrolman said. “We’ll get some help here in a minute.”

  I closed my eyes and heard the other voice say, “It was simply awful. They tried to shoot him.”

  The patrolman said: “Stay with him. I’m gonna find a call box and send for an ambulance.”

  The sun felt warm on my battered face. Each separate injury pulsed and throbbed as if a miniature heart worked within it. I reached up and explored my features. Nothing felt familiar. It was a stranger’s face.

  The sound of voices brought the realization that I’d been unconscious again. The patrolman thanked the man with the dog, calling him Mr. Groton. He said to come by the precinct house at his convenience to make a statement. Mr. Groton said he’d be there this afternoon. I gargled my gratitude, and the patrolman told me to take it easy. “Help is on its way, fella.”

  The ambulance crew seemed to arrived that very moment, but I knew there’d been another lapse. “Easy does it,” one of the attendants said. “Take his legs, Eddie.”

  I said I could walk, but my knees buckled when I tried to stand. I was lowered to a stretcher, lifted and carried. There didn’t seem much point in paying attention to what was going on. The inside of the ambulance smelled like vomit. Above the mounting wail of the siren, I could hear the driver and his partner laughing.

  FORTY

  The world came back into focus in the Bellevue emergency room. An intense young intern cleaned and stitched my lacerated scalp and said he’d do the best he knew how with what was left of my ear. Demerol made it all seem okay. I treated the nurse to a broken-toothed smile.

  A precinct detective showed up just as they were taking me out for X rays. He walked alongside the wheelchair and asked if I knew the men who tried to rob me. I did nothing to discourage his holdup assumptions, and he left after I described the coach and the kid.

  As soon as they finished taking pictures of the inside of my head, the doc said he thought it was a good idea if I got some rest. That was okay with me, and I was put to bed in the accident ward and given another needle under the nightshirt. The next thing I remember was the nurse waking me for dinner.

  Halfway through the strained carrots, I found out they were holding me overnight for observation. The X rays revealed no fractures, but concussion was still a possibility. I felt too shitty to make much of a fuss, and after the baby-food meal, the nurse walked me to a pay phone in the corridor, and I called Epiphany to say I wasn’t coming home.

  She sounded worried at first, but I joked with her and said I’d be fine after a night’s sleep. She pretended to believe me. “Know what I did with the twenty you gave me?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Bought a load of firewood.”

  I told her I had plenty of matches. She laughed, and we said goodbye. I was falling for her. Bad luck for me. The nurse led me back to a waiting needle.

  My sleep was nearly dreamless, yet the spectre of Louis Cyphre parted the heavy curtain of drugs and mocked me. Most of it was lost on waking, but one image remained: an Aztec temple rising abruptly above a crowded plaza, the steep steps slick with blood. At the top, looking down in his flea circus soup-and-fish on the feathered nobles below, Cyphre laughed and hurled the dripping heart of his victim high into the air. The victim was me.

  Next morning, I was finishing my Cream of Wheat when Lieutenant Sterne paid a surprise visit to the ward. He was wearing the same brown mohair suit, but his blue flannel shirt and no necktie told me he was off-duty. His face was still all cop.

  “Looks like someone did a pretty good job on you,” he said.

  I showed him my smile. “Don’t you wish if d been you?”

  “If it was me, you wouldn’t be getting out for a week.”

  “You forgot the flowers,” I said.

  “I’m saving ‘em for your grave, asshole.” Sterne sat on the white chair next to the bed and stared at me like a vulture eyeing a squashed possum on the highway. “I tried to reach you yesterday evening at home, and your answering service told me you were in the hospital. This is the first they’d let me speak to you.”

  “What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?”

  “I thought you might be innerested in something we found in the Krusemark apartment, seeing as how you never knew the lady.”

  “I’m holding my breath.”

  “That’s what they do in the gas chamber,” Sterne said. “Hold their breath. It don’t do no good.”

  “What is it that they do up in Sing Sing?”

  “What I do is I hold my nose. Because they shit their pants the second the juice hits ‘em, and it smells like a wienie roast in the toilet.”

  With a nose like yours, I thought, you’d need both hands. I said: “Tell me what you found in the Krusemark apartment.”

  “It’s what I didn’t find. What I didn’t find was the page for March 16th on her desk calendar. It was the only page missing. You get so you notice things like that. I sent the page underneath to the lab, and they checked it for impressions. Guess what they found?”

  I said I had no idea.

  “The initial H, followed by the letters A-n-g.”

  “Spells hang.”
r />   “We’re gonna hang your ass, Angel. You know damn well what it spells.”

  “Coincidence and proof are two different things, Lieutenant.”

  “Where were you Wednesday afternoon around half past three?”

  “Grand Central Terminal.”

  “Waiting for a train?”

  “Eating oysters.”

  Sterne shook his big head. “No good at all.”

  “The counterman will remember. I was there a long time. Ate a lot. We joked about it. He said oysters looked like gobs of spit. I said they were good for your sex life. You can check it.”

  “You bet your ass I’ll check it.” Sterne got to his feet. “I’ll check it five ways from Sunday, and you know what? I’ll be there holding my nose when they strap you in the hot-seat.”

  Sterne reached out a blunt hand. He picked an untouched paper cup of canned grapefruit juice off my tray, downed it in a swallow, and walked out the door.

  It was nearly noon before the paperwork was done, and I was able to follow.

  FORTY-ONE

  Outside Bellevue, First Avenue was all torn up, but no one was working on a Saturday. Wooden sawhorse barricades emblazoned DIG WE MUST surrounded the project, corralling dirt piles and stacked cobblestones. Only a thin skin of tar covered the old paving in this part of town. Random patches of cobbled surface remained from a century ago. Cast iron bishop’s crook lampposts and occasional slabs of bluestone sidewalk were other survivors of a forgotten past.

  I expected a tail but spotted none as I walked to a cab stand outside the airline terminal building on 38th Street. The weather was still warm but had clouded over. The weight of my .38 bumped against me in my jacket pocket at every step.

  My first stop was the dentist. I called him from the hospital, and he agreed to open his office in the Graybar Building long enough to fit me with temporary caps. We talked about fishing. He said it was a shame he wasn’t out dunking bloodworms into Sheepshead Bay.

  Numb with painkiller, I hurried to make a one o’clock appointment in the lobby of the Chrysler Building. I was ten minutes late, but Howard Nussbaum patiently waited for me at the Lexington Avenue entrance.

  “This is blackmail, Harry, pure and simple,” he said as he shook my hand. He was a small, worried-looking man in a brown suit.

  “I don’t deny it, Howard. Be thankful I’m not after your money.”

  “The wife and I planned an early start for Connecticut. She’s got relatives in New Canaan. So what’s a few hours, I said. Soon as I got your call I told Isobel we’d have to be a little late.”

  Howard Nussbaum was in charge of key control for a company that handled security in a number of big midtown office buildings. He owed his job to me, or rather to the fact that I omitted his name from a report I once filed for his firm tracing a grand master that had turned up in the purse of a teenage prostitute. “Did you bring it?” I asked.

  “Would I come and not bring it?” He reached inside his jacket and handed me a small unsealed brown envelope. I slid a brand-new key out onto the palm of my hand. It looked exactly like any other key.

  “This a master?”

  “I should trust you with a master key to the Chrysler Building?” Howard Nussbaum’s frown deepened. “It’s a submaster for the forty-fifth floor. There’s not a lock on the floor it won’t fit. Mind telling me who you’re going after?”

  “Ask me no questions, Howard. That way you’re not an accessory.”

  “I’m an accessory all right,” he said. “I’ve been an accessory all my life.”

  “Have fun in Connecticut.”

  I rode up in the elevator, studying the little brown envelope and picking my nose so that the operator looked away. The envelope was stamped and preaddressed. Howard’s instructions were to seal the key inside when I was done and drop it in the nearest mailbox. There was an off-chance that somewhere among my half-G set of twirls I had one that would work the same trick. But skeleton keys require locks with mechanisms worn through the use of duplicates, and Howard Nussbaum’s firm will replace a lock rather than save money on third-generation keys.

  The lights were dim behind the frosted doors of Krusemark Maritime, Inc. At the other end of the corridor a distant typewriter tapped erratically. I pulled on my surgeon’s gloves and slipped the submaster into the first of many locks. It was a door-opening charm on a par with Margaret Krusemark’s mummified hand of glory.

  I checked out the entire office, moving through rooms of shrouded typewriters and silent telephones. No over-ambitious junior executives giving up their golf games this Saturday. Even the Teletype machines had the weekend off.

  I set up the Minox and the copying easel on the L-shaped desk and turned on the fluorescent lights. My penknife and a bent paperclip were all it took to pop the locked filing cabinets and desk drawers. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but Krusemark had something he wanted to hide bad enough to send the goon squad after me.

  The afternoon dragged on. I thumbed through hundreds of files, photographing anything that looked promising. Several altered manifests and one letter referring to a congressman open to bribery were the best I could do in the way of criminal activity. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there. There’s always a little crime under the corporate rug if you know where to look.

  I shot fifteen rolls of film. Every major deal Krusemark Maritime had a finger in passed under my copying easel. Somewhere, lurking behind all the statistics, was enough crime to keep the D.A.’s office hopping for months.

  When I finished the filing cabinets, I let myself into Krusemark’s private office with the submaster and bought myself a drink at the mirrored bar. I carried the crystal balloon snifter with me as I went over the wall paneling and looked behind all the paintings. There was no sign of a safe or any tricky carpentry.

  Other than the couch, the bar, and the marble-slab desk, the room was bare; no files, no drawers or shelves. I sat my empty glass on the center of the gleaming desk. No papers or letters, not even a pen-and-pencil set disfigured the polished surface. The bronze statuette of Neptune stood far at the other end, poised above his perfect reflection.

  I looked under the marble slab. You couldn’t see it from above, but a shallow recessed steel drawer was cleverly concealed underneath. It wasn’t locked. A small lever alongside released a catch and hidden springs sent it gliding open like a drawer in a cash register. Inside were several expensive fountain pens, a photograph of Margaret Krusemark in an oval silver frame, an eight-inch dirk with a gold-mounted ivory grip, and a scattering of letters.

  I picked up a familiar envelope and removed the card. An inverted pentagram was embossed at the top. The Latin words were no longer a problem. Ethan Krusemark had his own invitation to the Black Mass.

  FORTY-TWO

  I put everything back the way I found it and packed my camera away. Before leaving, I rinsed the snifter in the executive washroom and set it carefully in line on a glass shelf above the bar. I had planned on leaving it on Krusemark’s desk so he’d have something to think about Monday morning, but it no longer seemed like such a cute idea.

  When I hit the street it was raining. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees. I turned up my jacket collar and dodged across Lexington Avenue to Grand Central, calling Epiphany from the first empty phone booth. I asked how long it would take her to get ready. She said she’d been ready for hours.

  “Sounds inviting, sweetheart,” I said, “but I’m talking about business. Take a cab. Meet me at my office in half an hour. We’ll have dinner and then go uptown to hear a lecture.”

  “What lecture?”

  “Maybe it’s a sermon.”

  “Sermon?”

  “Bring my raincoat in the front closet and don’t be late.”

  Before heading for the subway, I found a newsstand with a key cutter and had a copy made of Howard Nussbaum’s submaster. The original I sealed in the little preaddressed envelope and dropped in a mailbox by a row of pay lockers.

 
I took the shuttle over to Times Square. It was still raining when I left the subway, and the reflections of neon signs and traffic lights writhed on the wet pavement like fire snakes. I dodged from doorway to doorway trying to keep dry. The pimps and pushers and teenage hookers huddled in the juice bars and penny arcades, forlorn as rain-soaked cats. I bought a pocketful of cigars at the store on the corner and glanced up through the drizzle at the headlines moving across Times Tower … TIBETANS BATTLE CHINESE IN LHASA …

  When I got to my office at ten past six, Epiphany was waiting in the Naugahyde chair. She was all dressed up in her plum-colored suit and looked fantastic. She felt and tasted even better.

  “Missed you,” she whispered. Her fingers lightly traced the bandage covering my left ear and hovered over the spot where my scalp was shaved. “Oh, Harry, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Maybe not so pretty anymore.”

  “The way the side of your head is stitched makes you look like Frankenstein.”

  “I’ve been avoiding mirrors.”

  “And your poor, poor mouth.”

  “How’s the nose?”

  “About the same, only a little more so.”

  We ate at Lindy’s. I told Epiphany if anyone stared at us, the other customers would think we were celebrities. No one stared.

  “Did that Lieutenant come and see you?” She dunked a shrimp into a bowl of cocktail sauce packed in crushed ice.

  “He brightened my breakfast hour. Smart of you to say you were the answering service.”

  “I’m a smart girl.”

  “You’re a good actress,” I said. “You fooled Sterne twice the same day.”

  “I am not one woman, but many. Just as you are more than one man.”

  “Is that voodoo?”

  “That’s common sense.”

  By eight o’clock we were driving uptown through the park. As we passed the Meer, I asked Epiphany why she and her group were out sacrificing under the stars that night, instead of at home in the humfo. She said something about tree loa.

  “Loa?”