The Search for Joseph Tully

by William H Hallahan

  He walked into the bedroom and found Tom Jones. He carried it into the kitchen and propped it up against the table lamp. Getting more like Clabber every day. Maybe they could get an apartment together and eat their evening meals alone together separately—each with his own book propped up. The thought of living in Clabber’s barracks amused him and he chuckled.

  “Just the two of us left, dearie,” he said aloud.

  He went to his attaché case and checked through the papers. He estimated an hour or two of work. He stood by the couch looking through the newspaper. When the food was heated, he discarded the paper and went into the kitchen. He withdrew the tray and peeled the foil back. Chicken? Pork maybe. Who knows? Horse or hog, maybe rat, or even people.

  He sat down with it and began to idly eat, reading Tom Jones. For a while he entered another world, following Tom to London. Then he got up and carried the book into the living room. He sat in a comfortable chair and continued reading. At elbow was a glass of port wine.

  16

  The cat! Ozzie’s cat. He’d forgotten about her.

  Richardson stood up. Walking to the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator to pull out an opened can of cat food. He carried it to the apartment door and went into the hallway. Someone had put out the hall lights again. He snapped them on as he descended. There was still a slit of light under Clabber’s door as he passed. Griselda’s door was shut. He paused. Hadn’t he left it open?

  He descended the staircase. Both the Abemathys’ and the Carsons’ apartment doors were shut. He opened the cellar door, then turned on the lights.

  Slowly he descended the steps, looking at the cat’s feeding dish and bowl of water. Yesterday’s food was untouched.

  “Psssst, psssst,” went Richardson. “Here, kitty. Here, kitty. Come on, you slope-headed cat. You’ll die if you don’t eat.” He listened and looked. The cellar was silent. The glowing eyes of the sulking cat were not visible. Where’d she get to? His eyes searched the empty bins, the shadows and the slats of light. “Psssst. Psssst.”

  Silence. Again, he had that feeling of hushed, hidden, expectant waiting in the shadows. Who?

  “Psssst. Psssst.” Richardson thought of Patty. Maybe she’d gotten the cat. He put the can of cat food on the lower step and walked tentatively down the main corridor between the bins. All the bins were empty except his. Even Clabber’s and Gou-lart’s. Had Clabber moved? Maybe that light was shining in an empty apartment. His eyes rested on the door to the storage room. He walked down to it. His feet crunched in the silence. Could the cat be shut in there by mistake? He opened it and looked in. It was solidly dark in there, like a room-sized block of coal.

  “Psssst. Kitty.”

  No cat.

  There was a light switch on the wall outside the door jamb. He flipped it and a small light went on inside the room. He stepped in and looked about. The outside exit door on the right was shut and bolted. For the first time, he noticed a door on the far wall: a metal door with large old-fashioned hinges. The door was not quite shut.

  Richardson crossed the empty room and stood at the metal door. A light. There was a light somewhere beyond the door. And a sound. He pulled the door open. Metal grated on metal with a soft squeal. He peered in. It was a corridor. There was a doorway off it to one side, glowing with light. Richardson heard a shuffling sound. He entered the corridor and walked softly toward the doorway. Softly, softly, a slow step, then another slow step.

  He reached the edge of the doorway and extended his head. He looked into the room.

  A man was sitting there in a wooden chair at a plain wooden table, with his back to the door. He was wearing a derby.

  On the desk was a tape recorder connected to several electric wires that rose to the ceiling. Richardson’s heart was throbbing in his ears. Yet he heard the click of the tape recorder as the man pushed a button. The two reels began to turn in unison. The first sound astonished him.

  The tape recorder went Whoosh! and Whoosh! again.

  Richardson stood immobile. Then his peripheral vision pulled his eyes to a drawing on the opposite wall. A cowled figure, outlined in heavy black, high and wide, a looming bulky figure.

  The cowled head moved. Richardson nearly panicked. He turned to walk rapidly toward the doorway. Abruptly a light filled the corridor, a strange light. Richardson turned. The cowled figure was now moving toward him, holding a rod or a tube or a shaft of light—seemingly a neon or fluorescent strip of light. A sword?

  He hurried to the door and stepped through. The lights ahead of him were out. The cellar was dark. He was now terrified. He stumbled and shuffled through the dark room, through the other doorway, finding his way by memory, down the corridor. He groped his way up the stairs.

  He heard Goulart's cat cry.

  The lights in the vestibule were out. He mounted the hallway stairs, turning on the lights as he went, running two steps

  at a time. When he reached his door, he thrust it open and slammed it, then slid the bolt home.

  When he turned, the noise in the middle of his living room greeted him.

  Whoosh!

  17

  The copy of Tom Jones lay sprawled on the floor. Richardson’s heart was thumping rapidly and he was covered with perspiration. He looked around the room, looked at the book and realized that he was sitting on the edge of his chair.

  How had that happened? He hadn’t seated himself.

  He stepped to the door and listened, listened for the sound of a mounting footfall. It was silent outside his doorway.

  He stood there for a moment, frowning.

  Then he walked to his desk and lifted a phone book out of a drawer. Clabber. No. Not in the phone book. No phone. Damn.

  He went into the kitchen and found his broom. He got a ball of twine from his desk and a carving knife from a kitchen drawer. With the string, he fixed the knife on the end of the broomstick, bayonet-wise. Then he went to the doorway and opened it. The hall lights were on. He went to the landing and looked down.

  The stairs were empty. The vestibule in the area of the stairwell was empty. Richardson descended the first flight, then scanned the vestibule again. Griselda Vandermeer’s door was now wide open.

  He descended the flight of steps to the vestibule. No cowled figure. He looked into the cellar. The lights were on. He stepped onto the landing and crouched, looking into the cellar and its bins. He saw Goulart’s cat skulking away. He descended and stood at the foot of the steps.

  Silence. Oppressive silence. Waiting, expectant silence. He walked toward the end of the corridor. He was trembling and the broomstick shook. He was ready to thrust at anything that moved.

  He walked the length of the corridor, feeling his soles crackling on the cement. He reached the door to the empty room and paused. It was firmly shut. He stood regarding it. Then he turned and looked about the cellar, his eyes searching the bins, examining the shadows and the strips of light.

  He turned his attention to the doorknob. He looked at it unhappily. Then he reached out with one hand and turned it. It moved. He pushed the door. It opened several inches. Richardson took the broom in his two hands like a rifle, ready to thrust, then shoved the door open with his foot. The door swung inward. He stood looking into the dark room, waiting until his eyes were used to the darkness. Nothing.

  He pushed the light switch. A small light went on. He looked across the empty room to the opposite wall.

  There was no doorway there.

  Chapter The Eight

  1

  The glass of whiskey sat on the kitchen table, quietly reflecting the overhead light, patiently waiting.

  Richardson rested his head on his arm, his arm on the table before the glass of whiskey. He stared at the floor, feeling a slow anger fill him. He was sick to death of his fears and sweats and his elusive adversary. He raised his head and slammed a fist on the table. He reached out and lifted the glass. He had the whiskey down in two gulps. With the back of his hand, he wiped away the pendulous drop fr
om his lip and stood up. The first thing he was going to do was find that sound.

  From the closet by the bathroom, he pulled out a small tape recorder. He checked it, threaded the tape, put the plug in a wall socket and started it. He set it on the coffee table.

  He made a circuit of the living room. Four speakers, one in each comer, could be synchronized to broadcast a sound that would meet in the middle of the room. Speakers smaller than a thumbnail. His eyes searched the walls of his living room, slowly, section by section. Next he got on his knees and crawled around the perimeter of the baseboard, groping behind furniture, pulling back the rug.

  He stood up. “I’ll find you,” he said to the room. “You’re in here somewhere. You’re real. Real. Goulart heard you, too. I’ll find you!” He hammered the heel of his fist on the wall. “I will!”

  He took a deep breath and tried to think. Someone was planning to kill him. Why? Why?

  Who?

  The Carsons?

  The Abernathys?

  Abby Withers? He smiled at that.

  Griselda Vandermeer?

  Clabber?

  Clabber?

  Richardson went to the living room closet and opened the door. He pulled out the driver from his golf bag and looked at it. Clabber, eh?

  He looked up at the ceiling and made a tentative swing. Ceiling too low. He stepped to the center of the room and swung the club like a baseball bat.

  Whoosh! He swung again. Whoosh!

  But that wasn’t quite it. He swung again. Close but no cigar. There couldn’t be any mistake: he’d never forget that noise as long as he lived.

  He addressed the head of the club to a tuft in the carpet. Clabber. Clabber. Clabber.

  Clabber could do it. He could put a speaker in the living room and another in Goulart’s room. He had had Goulart’s attention; he could have insinuated anything into Ozzie’s thinking. He could have built up that whole fantasy world of Goulart’s —walls and walls of forbidding figures, terrifying scenes. Monks with faces hidden in cowls. Monks pointing, indicating guilt. That would fit a warped ecclesiastical mind. He could have planted that face in a derby hat. Maybe Griselda was his helper —with nightclub magic.

  Abel Navarre? Explain Abel Navarre, a police detective dead twenty-two years. Richardson sat down, frustrated. Explain Navarre. The hell with it. Somehow it’s tied up with Navarre and that Renaissance fanatic. What’s his name? Bruno of Nola.

  Richardson went to his desk and picked up his key ring. Then he walked to the door and stopped, looking at the bolt. It reminded him of the cellar. He’d forgotten about the cellar. Carefully, he opened the door and peered out. He stepped out on the landing and looked down. He listened.

  He descended the steps to the second floor and stopped in front of Clabber’s door. He listened. He put his ear to Clabber’s door and listened again. No noise. Maybe reading in the kitchen. He stepped to Goulart’s door and put the key to the lock. He pushed the door open and snapped on the lights. Everything as it was. Cartons of books and furnishings ready to be earned off.

  Richardson squatted and opened the flaps of several cartons. He studied their contents, then lifted the flaps on several others. He reached down and lifted a book.

  Renaissance Philosopher. He arose and left the apartment, locking the door behind him.

  He mounted the stairs two at a time. Some of the answers were in the book. He was sure.

  2

  Nola is sixteen miles east of Naples.

  There Filippo Bruno was born in 1548—thirty-one years after Martin Luther had nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg to sunder the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic churches.

  Bruno of Nola was a mystic, a seer, a soaring romantic, a poetic spirit, a polemicist, an indefatigable writer and a permanent embarrassment to the Catholic Inquisition in Italy.

  At seventeen he changed his name from Filippo to Giordano and entered the Dominican monastery in Naples. There he discovered God, pantheism, Latin, theology, logic and the pagan classics. While his brain absorbed the harsh, humorless, dehumanized narrow Catholic theology of the Counter Reformation, his imagination drank from the other books: Democritus and Epicurus and Lucretius, the Moslems Avicenna and Averroes, the Jewish philosopher Avicebron. The mixture did terrible violence to his Latin mind and imagination.

  He became a priest, but his brain became a cauldron of conflicting beliefs, contradictions, of visions and mystic dreams. He was difficult to manage. He found the frigid boxes of logic packaged by Thomas Aquinas shackling. He raised questions; he challenged conclusions and ancient church authority; he dipped too deeply into pagan books. The Trinity bothered him: how could there be three persons in one? Twice he was chastised by his superiors. Aristotle’s pages of logic-chopping—major premise, minor premise, conclusion—syllogism after syllogism infuriated him. God wasn’t a problem in logic. Logic couldn’t embrace life, emotion, love, the great brotherhood of the universe. It was all too much.

  He fled.

  It was 1576. The Inquisition was a fury let loose upon the land, a fanatical homicidal effort to restore the Church to its ancient authority. It was a perilous time to raise any questions. Bruno left the monastery with little more than the cassock that flapped at his heels.

  He dropped his monk’s habit, and he moved steadily northward, a wanderer: Rome, Genoa, Savona, Turin, Venice, Padua, Brescia, Bergamo, Chambéry, Lyon, Geneva. There in Switzerland, he collided with Calvinist authority: he was summoned in doctrine and fled again, now at home with neither side in their tedious doctrinal quarrels.

  Back to Lyon he went. Then to Toulouse. He became a lecturer on that sententious Aristotle, barely masking his scorn, but he stuck at it for eighteen months. Then he moved again. To Paris. He became a teacher to the King of France, Henry III, to whom he taught ancient secrets for developing a good memory. Henry made him a full professor of the Collège de France. He stayed for two years, then wrote a comedy, The Torch-bearer. It combined humor with a moralistic fury that descended on the sconces of monks and professors, pedants and rogues, lovers of gold, misers and cutpurses, virile women and effeminate men. It was time to move again.

  He went to England and joined the household of the French ambassador to London, Michel de Castelnau, a practical man who wasted no time on silly metaphysical quarrels. Bruno stayed his usual course—two years. He met all the intellectuals of Elizabethan England, including the Queen, whom he praised, much to the fury of the watching Italian Inquisition. At Oxford he taught the astronomical discovery of Copernicus, heretical matter to the Inquisition.

  He returned to Paris, to the Sorbonne, to teach and attack Aristotle. Thence to German universities, even at Luther's university at Wittenberg—the usual two years. Then to Frankfurt and Zürich and back to Frankfurt. Two years of labor to publish his works in Latin—and thereby hand the Inquisition enough material to bum a thousand—ten thousand—Brunos. Volume after volume appeared. He was yearning for Italy.

  He went to Venice—a city notorious for its protection of heretics sought by the Inquisition. He stayed a short time, then planned to return to Frankfurt. His host, one Mocenigo, appalled at his thundering heresies, denounced him to the Inquisition. Before he could cross the canals to the mainland, he was a prisoner. After sixteen years, the irrepressible, questioning, wandering Neapolitan bird was finally caged.

  It was May 23,1592.

  He remained caged for eight years. He was periodically questioned, occasionally tortured, poorly fed, and as difficult to handle as ever. Statements taken from his books were shown to him, clear evidence of his heresy. Principal heresy was his earliest nemesis: the Trinity. For eight years he fought an army of scribes and researchers—fought with rebuttals, sharp exchanges, expressions of fidelity and devotion to the Pope. He lost.

  On February 19, 1600, he was led, naked, to the Piazza Campo de' Fiori in Rome. There, his tongue was tied and his body bound to an iron stake on a pyre. Denied the merciful and customary re
lease of strangling prior to burning, he was exposed to the flames alive. His body was consumed to a white ash, and the ashes were scattered to prevent future martyrdom.

  More a mystic than a systematic philosopher, he contradicted himself many times in his various volumes. He expressed opinions—usually unorthodox, often heretical—on every possible subject, from the Trinity to incarnation, virgin birth to Hebrew history, and the dimensions of infinity. He was particularly interested in the transmigration of souls.

  Reincarnation.

  Richardson shut the book and pushed it onto the table in disgust. Only a rag-and-bone-shop brain like Clabber’s could root through the many volumes of a sixteenth-century Dominican to locate fine, long-dead, doctrinal quarrels and espouse them four centuries later. Incarnation.

  It’s too many for me, sa! d Buck Finn.

  The memory of that black cobbled road leading over a sere brown countryside returned, and Richardson considered it. White buildings, orange-tiled roofs. Where was that place?

  Whoosh!

  He leaped from the chair.

  He was awake. He’d heard it. Right in the middle of the room. Every light in the apartment was on. The living room was in full view before his eyes. No mistake. He knelt quickly before the tape recorder. It was still running.

  He spun it back a few feet, then put it on speaker.

  It turned slowly, broadcasting the silence of the room. There was a slight bump—when he’d put the book on the coffee table. Then silence and the rhythmical turning of the two reels. Then-

  Whoosh!

  His tape recorder had captured the sound.

  4

  There was a speaker in his living room, a hidden speaker. Had to be. The only rational explanation. Had he really seen a man in a derby in the cellar working on a tape recorder—or had he dreamed it?