by Alan Trotter
When I finally got down on the mattress I thought my dreams would be full of scrawny redheaded pickpockets I’d keep having to move and re-move, filling closets with them, building dams, finding them among the pipes beneath sinks and hidden in hollow curtain rails, and sewn into the back of chairs. But if I had any dreams no one was writing them down.
*
Bernard came to the door, with his knife-flipping boy. He told us that we had some work from Jarecki, and _____ almost danced on the spot. I could almost have joined him.
It was more debt collection. This time the debt belonged to Holcomb, and it was enough money that unless he’d inherited a movie studio or an oil well we didn’t know about, it didn’t seem likely he’d be able to pay.
That didn’t matter to us. _____ beamed at getting work, but it was nothing to how I felt. I was heated by gratitude, sweating with it. I may have patted Bernard on the back as he left, I was so excited, like a big child, like _____ on his way to a rollercoaster.
It was more than just work. It was a winning ticket, a chance to undo the conversation: the question I’d asked Holcomb about his machines and the humiliating, spiteful little non-answer he’d given me. We’d go and speak to Holcomb, and this time he’d want to speak to us. He’d turn on that mouth of his, set it running, and talk to us about anything we wanted him to talk about. Because he’d be scared. And if he didn’t, we could take a toe or cut off an ear, as we liked, until he offered some proper information.
*
By the time we crept up to the end of the line, it was dark. The lights of a phone booth and the streetlights above appeared to us out of the rain, like a boxy moon and pastripe stars.
The rain was keeping the street clear of people, although we had to walk around two kids who were holding down a third, silent and unmoving, slapping him across the face and the belly while their short-sleeved shirts soaked through. Playing at policemen, maybe. A large man on the other side of the street lowered his hat against the weather as he passed us, then was gone around a corner.
We made our way to the second floor: _____ was about to start kicking at doors and threatening households in neat order, but I had been here before, and told him so. He didn’t seem to care. I knocked at Holcomb’s door and it swung open without complaint. There was no answer as _____ announced us.
The typewriter was undressed, its dark, tank-like case on the ground. On the desk sloped, shameful, a pile of magazines. _____ threw one to me. It was a love pulp. Sure enough, Holcomb’s name was inside, though it came cross-dressed, with a new feminine forename. I dropped it back into place. I looked around for the copper ball, but it was gone. Then _____ gave a long, low whistle of appreciation. He had opened the door through to the bedroom and stood looking in. I walked over.
The house edge had got to Holcomb.
He lay on his front on the bed, his head tilted up, his chin propped on the mattress so that he looked directly at us. He looked like he had taken a beating, and that it wasn’t the only bad thing to happen to him recently. _____ lighted a cigarette and we went into the room. One of Holcomb’s eyes was swollen and purple. It bulged out from his face like a piece of fruit ready to drop off a bush. There was a dark patch in his light hair.
When we turned him over we found a neck you could have ridden a streetcar over for all the difference it would make, a neck spun into a rat tail. In his mouth he still had a few teeth. And in his left cheek, just above the line of his stubble he had the small round hole of a .32—a little mouth, caught in a surprised little ‘o’.
_____ ran his little finger around the rim of the hole. He said, ‘Where do you suppose he keeps his money?’
We looked. We checked under pillows, in pockets, behind drawers, under loose floorboards and in any likely looking books. I patted Holcomb down and pulled off his shoes. We didn’t find anything. We didn’t know if there was anything to find.
*
Outside the street was deserted. Maybe the city’s always so still just before shots are fired. Certainly no one’s ever known to see anything they didn’t want to see.
We sheltered a moment in the lobby. Rain was streaking past the only lights—the streetlights and expressionless windows—and noisily hitting the street. As we stepped forward I saw a mass of something lying on the ground at the dark phone booth. It hadn’t been there before.
I bent down and picked up a heavy rock the size of a deck of playing cards, there for a doorstop. _____ hadn’t seen the shape by the phone booth. He started to snarl at me for blocking his way. I knocked him over the threshold back into the building, then turned and heaved the rock toward the mass, and kept turning, throwing my own weight through the street door. Before I hit the cool lobby floor there was a shot, the sound of the bullet hammering into the doorframe, another, and a shattering as the rock I’d thrown found the glass of the phone booth.
As he got his legs out from under me, _____ kicked me irritably in the jaw. On the street there was nothing left to see. The mass on the ground was gone. The door on the phone booth swung jerkily shut and, as it closed, the light inside flickered on. Apart from some broken glass and two bullets in a doorframe instead of in some dumb muscle, all was as it was meant to be. The rain kept falling.
*
I was glad to have kept from getting shot. But Holcomb was dead, and I’d needed to talk to him. I’d have made him say what he knew about how we move through time. I would have made him say what was just stories and what he knew beyond what he could fit into pulp magazines. Because Holcomb knew something. I knew by now, was certain: from a living Holcomb I could have learned how to take time and shake second chances from it. Now he was dead and everything was more set and certain.
It would have been good to go and sleep, but some movement was unavoidable: we had to go and tell Fylan that he’d sent us to get money from a corpse.
Bernard commiserated with me, about the trouble we’d had, about the writer’s corpse lying in the bed and ours meant for the gutter, but he explained this about debt. He said that on the other side of the office door, Fylan wasn’t going to be impressed with any explanations that _____ might be giving in there. ‘You should have brought back his fillings—something,’ he said. I nodded, though if the writer had any fillings they’d already gone out the door or down the back of his throat.
That night _____ was sore from being shouted at and sore from being shot at, and the next day we went looking for Holcomb’s girl, because it was Holcomb’s girl Fylan had bestowed the debt on. After you die all the people you know would sooner put a match to all the things that matter to you than have to sign a receipt. Lawyers and landlords won’t search hard for a home for your fondest memories. The one thing that always gets inherited is debt. When your life hits that dead end, know that your debt keeps moving. And we were sent running after it.
*
We’d never known anything about a girl when he was alive, and the apartment where Holcomb had stopped bleeding for the last time hadn’t hinted at her presence. But it didn’t matter: the debt was hers now. Just like the shoes on my feet were mine and the streets belonged to whoever rode along them most expensively.
We had two addresses for her—her apartment and the dentist where she worked as an assistant. It’s easier to embarrass people at their work and smarter to hurt them at their home, so our first call was to the dentist.
The dentist was called Boken. His business was pristine. The anteroom shone, from the floors to the receptionist, while around it the building fell apart and the neighbourhood rotted. It was a birdhouse painted baby blue and set in a dead tree.
An old man perched on the edge of his chair and a young woman clutched the bag in her lap. The receptionist in spotless medical whites eyed us cautiously from behind a counter and the inch-thick glass of her spectacles. She sat in a booth of diagrams of bisected molars and slogans about flossing, and twice-life-sized replicas of beautiful teeth. There was a price list above her shoulder and she was tapping a pen against
an appointment book that lay open in front of her.
_____ lighted a cigarette and approached. He asked her civilly whether she was Evelyn Heydt. She told him no and asked if he’d take a seat. He told her no and smiled at her. She looked unnerved. Her eyes moved to his teeth. Professional interest maybe. She backed from her booth, slipping through a door in the rear. ‘Keep the sun in your smile!’ said one of the posters.
_____ sat by the girl, sunning her with his smile. She clutched her bag a notch tighter. He asked her if they knew each other, and mentioned the name of the madam who considered him a guardian of young love. She kept her eyes on the glistening floor tiles.
The old man pushed himself up on an old wooden stick the colour of tar and started shouting he wasn’t going to be kept waiting while one more someone else without an appointment went to see Boken before him.
If they were going to do much of anything for the old man they were going to have to find his teeth first. He asked us if we knew what piles were, and said that he would tell us exactly what they were. ‘Little balloons of blood, right across the verge of your rectum—imagine that, you rotten damn pair,’ he said. He asked us what we thought sitting on a waiting room chair with piles felt like, and then promised to tell us exactly what it felt like.
Conventional wisdom held that the sadness in the girl’s eyes would have been more moving if she was beautiful. _____ frowned, maybe thinking about piles, maybe not. The pile sufferer suffered.
When the receptionist returned she moved her appointment book to the side and lifted up a hinged section of the counter, then she asked if the two gentlemen would come through, which we took to be us. As we passed, she pressed herself into the wall like she was pushing herself through a grille. No one listened to the complaints of the old man sitting on his balloons of blood.
*
A man in a white smock opened the door at the end of the short hall as we reached it. He looked at us, then told us we weren’t police in a way that suggested the waiter had brought the wrong kind of soup at an inappropriate temperature. I walked him backwards into the room.
It was cramped and immaculate. No child ever had a better-dusted dollhouse. The underside of a bed made up part of a wall, but to fold it down, you’d have had to move the white chair with boughs of lights, mirrors and lenses that filled the middle of the room. And to move the chair you’d have to move the detective, Swagger, who was sitting in it, wearing the grin of a sportsman the official hasn’t spotted standing on someone’s neck. In the corner of the room, filed away like an instrument on a tray, standing on one leather shoe and one rubber hoof, was Childs.
‘No, they’re not police, are you, boys?’ Swagger said. As he spoke he crossed his raised legs, placed his hat on his chest and folded his arms behind his head.
*
Childs stepped forward and gestured for us to lift our arms so he could fan us. _____ bristled and snarled, but before anything could happen Swagger cut in. ‘Leave that out, Childs,’ he said. ‘We’re not here to knock heads or get in anyone’s way. In fact, I’d bet we’re here for exactly the same reason as these boys are.’ He made his big face into a question mark a mile high and directed it at _____.
_____ didn’t respond. He’d sunk into a brewing anger the moment Childs moved to go through him. Now Swagger might as well have been a car taking too long at the lights. ______ waited and then he told the room that we hadn’t come to have our teeth picked but to find out where Evelyn Heydt was, and that a dick licence and a cripple weren’t enough to keep us from asking what we’d come to ask. I was watching Swagger in his dentist’s chair and I saw his smile disappear before he had time to fix it back on. But when he did, Swagger just clapped his hands together like cymbals. ‘I knew it!’ he said. ‘We’ve just been asking the same thing. Our friend Mr Boken here doesn’t have too strong a fix on that.’ He looked at Boken to elaborate. Boken said that she should have been in for work two hours ago but hadn’t arrived. ‘Mr Boken,’ Swagger said, ‘says it’s not like her not to come in—in fact it’s never happened before. Isn’t that right, Mr Boken?’ Boken nodded. Boken had started to sweat: he took a sharply folded white handkerchief from a pocket and dabbed at his wet top lip with it.
_____ looked at Swagger, then at the dentist, then he turned on his heel and we started to walk out the room.
‘Let me buy you boys a drink,’ the big shamus said behind us. We kept walking.
Even as we walked out of the reception he was behind us. ‘Let me buy you boys a drink,’ he said. ‘Don’t you want a chance to talk?’
*
We’d reached the home of Evelyn Heydt when _____ put his hand across my chest and stopped me where I was. I followed his gaze up to a window of the building. There was a girl framed there, backlit and beautiful, brushing her hair. A dagger-thin split between her blood-red lips, her hair following in brown folds down onto her shoulders and slipping like fingers onto the straps of her dress.
We’d hustled to get there like we were being tugged along on a string, but now we stopped and watched while Evelyn Heydt—because who else could it be?—finished brushing every lock of her hair, and who knows how long it took. Finally she laid down her brush, walked to the window like a movie star accepting an award and lowered the curtain on the whole scene, and right then, dead on cue, out from the wings a delivery boy: a kid escorting a stack of groceries almost his size. We intercepted him at the door. _____ reassured the kid that Miss Heydt would get her groceries—they were hers of course—and that besides he’d have other things to worry about if he didn’t beat it. I felt bad about it, if only because you could see from the kid’s face that delivering groceries to Evelyn Heydt was the best thing his weeks had to offer.
I carried the groceries, and _____ knocked sharp on her door and covered the peephole with his palm. A voice, unclouded and bright as a summer day in better places: ‘Who is it?’
_____ said it was her groceries and she opened up.
A flood of desire came at us through the door, this charged moment of seeing the beautiful face from the window again, but now also the dress, and the quieted, deafening body beneath it. But something else must have pushed back in the other direction from us. She stepped away like she was chased and we had to move after her, we were after it now—we were pulled forward, we were awake.
_____ laid the delivery crate down on a chair and took a quart of gin from it and cracked that open. The apartment smelled like Evelyn Heydt, her deep driven scent. She stood scared in this rich beautiful space that was completely hers, standing as straight and unnatural as a nail that had just been pounded into it. Her eyes big as spotlights. Her lips fell redly apart. ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘What do you want?’
_____ finished drinking from the gin and laid it down, and he took his little butterfly knife from his pocket and slowly unfolded it. As Evelyn Heydt was retreating into herself, diminishing into a small and solitary part of the room, we were expanding, growing out, it was our stage now and it was beginning to feel good to stand on it, and have her eyes on us, fearful, quivering. _____ took his knife and I thought about taking some rope, or a sheet. We could blindfold her and carry her out, bundle her into the boot of a car, or we could keep her here until she understood exactly what was required of her. But first we stalked her across the room, and again she asked us what we wanted. Every angle and curve from the nape of her neck to her calves and her ankles formed like a letter in a perfect sentence on the surface of my tongue, my mouth full of words. _____ swung his knife lazily before himself, and said, ‘Why don’t you tell her what we came for, Box.’
She was into the window, her legs bending as her hips pressed back onto the sill, her back pressing against the glass. My mouth turned over the new sibilant curves in the new folds of her dress, the coiled vowels of distress behind her mouth. Now, it was now: I opened my mouth. ‘Holcomb’s dead,’ I told her, ‘and you’re—’
—and then _____ was struck and _____ struck the ground. I start
ed to turn but a knock to the back of my neck and another to my legs, and I was on one knee, and there was a small metallic snicker. Trying to move forward tipped me painfully sideways. My left wrist was handcuffed to my right ankle.
With my cheek against the carpet I saw Mike Swagger, private detective, stagily kick _____’s knife away across the room, and his feet sidle around us. The love interest flung her arms around him, ‘Oh thank God, Mike, thank God you made it here just in time!’
It was a tough scene to watch.
‘Don’t worry kid, but let’s get out of here,’ said the shamus. ‘You two so much as wag your tails too hard and there’s lead coming back through this door for you to fetch.’ And then with the love interest pressed behind him, he circled us, his gun carefully fixing the unconscious _____ and the immobile me, and they made their exit.
*
I tried to move and the same pain that had tipped me on my side dug into me, so I stopped trying. I didn’t want to wait too long for _____ to come round so I used my free hand to slap and shake his face. Eventually his eyes opened and simultaneously he spat at me, a thin rope of spit that slicked across my eye and cheek. Once he was awake, he went to the dressing table and recovered his little knife from under it. He took a couple of hairpins from a drawer, and used them to relieve me of my cuffs. I wiped away his spit, which hung like spun sugar about my eyelashes.
It didn’t bear to stick around, not when the cops seemed bound to be on their way, expecting to find us trussed and waiting. So we blew.
