by Howard Engel
That killed conversation for a while. The sound of chopsticks and ceramic spoons was heard in the land. The waiters came and went whispering of the weather in Tashkent. I held the wine under my nose for a few seconds before drinking down the contents. I let the waiter fill the glass again.
The conversation started again, as though we had all been sharing our silent thoughts, like our minds were partaking of the same thoughtful stew. Chester Ranken was the first to speak.
“All this within the walls of the Central Prison. The locals, you know, call it ‘the meat safe.’ I’ve seen some rough lock-ups in my day. This is one of the toughest.”
“So there’s no accountability? People go missing? People disappear?”
“Happens all the time,” our host replied. “Life is cheap in Takot, dear boy.”
“I say, you didn’t expect to read about that sort of thing in your guidebook, did you, Vicar?” Savitt’s eyes opened wide when he heard his own words. “Saving your reverence, Father.”
“Ego te absolvo, old chap.”
“You must do your best to stay out of jail, Mr Cooperman.” This was the policeman’s first comment on what the priest had said. “You must avoid taking unnecessary chances.”
That was the second clear warning to keep my nose clean. Fiona had warned me off earlier. People were so accommodating! I didn’t know what to say, so I said: “Please call me Ben.”
I looked down as though from a great height. My glass was empty again. I let the waiter replenish it. I watched the wine bubble and change colors as it filled the glass. I tried to catch up to the conversation, but as soon as I found a new starting place, I lost it again. I think it was politics. Someone said something very short and neat about beautiful women. Something about cleaning the palate. I tried to make the phrase come true in the agreeable face sitting nearby. She didn’t catch my eye or return my look. The wineglass was empty again. Having had the last drop of green tea (laced with God knows what) near me, I took a sip of my other drink, some sort of fortified wine, I think. One sip led to another. The wine was excellent. All of them said it was. (I don’t ask you to take my word for it—my taste in fine wines stops at Manischewitz Passover wine.) In my head I could hear the others going on and on about food and politics and politics and food until the leftover sauces were lying cold and congealed in their serving dishes. And I could feel myself growing relaxed and affable. Comfortable in this company. “We few, we happy few, we band of …” These were my kind of people. I heard laughter. Even the policeman was laughing. I was becoming witty. I was telling them about the old canal town I came from, about the football team and how they lost the cup. I told the story of how Jake’s last-minute touchdown was declared illegal because there were too many men on the field. I was funny, informed, and the words came easily.
At the time, I didn’t feel its evil influence. I didn’t hear it banging away at my brain pan. The more I drank, the looser my tongue became, until I heard myself saying: “Jake was the best football player we ever had at Grantham Collegiate. And Vicky as cheerleader was an extra treat. Did any of you know Vicky and Jake well? Does anyone know why they disappeared?” The table had become very quiet suddenly. My own voice drifted off into the silence I never should have abandoned. My mother had told me years ago that the only person who might drink on the job was a politician.
“I knew them when they first came out here. They—” Here Father O’Mahannay broke off, and for a moment you could hear the rain out in the street and the blast of wind on the awnings. I had made a bad mistake, and everybody could see that I’d made it. I tried to recapture lost ground by saying that I’d heard a lot about the couple on the boat out to the reef. But Beverley knew this was not so and so did everybody else. I remembered the other old adage: never retreat, never apologize, never explain. I kept on talking, probably about the wonders I saw on the reef or in the bazaar. I’m not exactly sure of what I said because I’d stopped listening. I had heard about trouble all my life. I’d been in trouble from time to time at home. But not like this. This was trouble with no out card, trouble that would end up with a “Freight Paid” sticker on the box to be returned to my grieving parents.
BOOK THREE
EIGHTEEN
I UNFASTENED MY BOW TIE as I stood looking out the window. The palms were blowing sadly in the warm offshore breeze, illuminated by the blinking hotel sign. Weather-beaten and dog-eared silhouettes against the night sky. From somewhere out there, a long way off, I heard the throb of a motor, a small plane of some sort. Two engines and a small crew, I thought. “The night plane to Lisbon,” a voice inside me said. After that, I flung myself across the bed and tried to straighten up in my mind exactly who I was and who I wasn’t. Maybe the wine at dinner had taken root in the pink capillaries of my head. Maybe I was stuck in the outtakes from a favorite movie for the rest of my life.
I guess if I had read more Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, I would have been less at a disadvantage than where I found myself. My familiarity with foreign parts was underdeveloped. I should have read the books or seen more of the movies. To me, they were the bead-curtain movies—movies with pretty women singing torch songs in the only decent bar in town, and men just off a boat and down to their last dollar in a dead-end port with no escape.
That was the fantasy. It was becoming my reality, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t found a dive as low as the ones on film or a girl down on her luck running away from a bad marriage or a teaching job in Missoula, Montana.
I got so worked up about the evening and my stupidity that I fell into a deep sleep. That would have been about 1 A.M. The dream was about swimming underwater along the mossy coral wall with Beverley and Fiona while the manta rays watched from fissures in the reef. When the grinning sharks arrived to break up my gang, I woke up, sweaty, uncomfortable, and hungry. No! Not hungry! Still en smoking, as they say. A good shower would have revived me. I’d even have settled for a bout in the tile cubicle with its bucket. Unfortunately the phone rang between the thought and the deed.
“Hello, Benny?” It was Beverley Taylor. And earlier, as I remembered. The sky beyond my venetian blinds was without stars.
“Hi! What’s up?” I should sit down and prepare opening lines. I’m always caught off base and have to settle for something banal if to the point. “What happened after I left the party?” It wasn’t all that clear in my head how the evening had ended. This I couldn’t blame on any acquired mental impairment because the trauma I was feeling in my brain was all selfinduced, self-inflicted.
“I was driven home by three of the men. They were charming, of course, and there is safety in numbers.” For a moment I thought we were going to move on to the weather and the state of the Swiss franc, then she stopped herself abruptly. “Can I see you?”
“What? Now? It’s still dark out!”
“It’s important!” She had a catch in her voice. It didn’t sound like she was faking it. I took a deep breath.
“Sure. Can you tell me what you want to talk about?”
“What you said at dinner …”
“Yeah, I really stopped the show. Even the orchestra stopped playing. Or so it seemed. Was there an orchestra?”
“Hardly. But I think I know something that you should know.”
“Like what?”
“Meet me in an hour at the Trois Magots.”
“Will it be open? You’re talking about early, Beverley! It’s the middle of the night.”
“The Trois Magots never closes.”
“Beverley! Don’t do this to yourself!”
“What do you mean, to myself?”
I explained to her the way things work in books and movies. She had a good laugh, but left the line before I could talk her into telling me over the phone. In movies, half the homicides occur to people who won’t do their business on the phone.
I looked at my laundry, spread out and drying on the end table. I figured I didn’t have enough time to shower. Instead of changing, I rea
ttached my black tie and straightened it in the mirror. I was sweating. It wasn’t all from the heat.
On the walls of the Trois Magots, there were photographs of the Deux Magots, the Paris bistro. Whether the original owner knew it or not, the present owner was playing up the connection with the Paris version. The Deux Magots is a legend in Paris. The Trois Magots has become one in Takot.
The place looked different at night. I picked a table near the back, but with a clear view of the front door. There were fewer people about, and they leaned toward one another with serious intensity. Or maybe I was still half-asleep. A double door opened into the kitchen just behind me: I didn’t check whether it led outside. If I got myself shot to death next to a shortorder stove, it would be all my fault. I watched the door, taking my eyes off it only long enough to check my watch.
It had been a little short of half an hour from when I hung up the phone to the time I walked into the café. I waited for a total of an hour. A teacher from my last year in high school had told the class that if a date hasn’t arrived within an hour of the appointed time, forget it. This advice has always stood up well. But in the case of Beverley Taylor, who was so funny about arranging plates and cutlery at the table—a sign of what? I wondered—I gave her another half-hour.
Now I was really worried. When clichés begin coming true, it’s time to do something. Then that part of my mind that is always picking at scabs began to question my reasoning. Things are clichés not because they are uncommon but because they happen all the time. I tried to shut out this harangue in my head to clear my brain for more useful work.
Finally, I made a pile of coins on the table to cover my drinks and left the café by making my way through the kitchen. Don’t ask me why I left. Or why I left through the kitchen. I couldn’t give myself an answer. I’d had a feeling and acted on it. Maybe it was a feeling that one of those movie clichés was about to come true. Anyway, I found a door that let out on an alley. Here two men in dirty whites were playing backgammon on an empty case of beer. They didn’t look up. The dark lane was a playground for night critters of all sorts. Just like home. At the first well-lighted intersection, a drunk with his hands deep in his pockets came toward me, but he vanished down an alley before he got to me. Faces from movie posters looked out at me from the shadows. Some of them were peeling from the walls, some were real. An occasional burst of music came from a nightclub down the block as the door opened and closed. When it was quiet, the alley was very still. A long, skinny cat skirted the outer walls of the stores along the street, then disappeared into what might have been either a hole in the wall or a narrow alley.
I had walked around the block the Trois Magots occupied, coming out almost where I’d started. Only when I set out, there wasn’t a dark BMW parked in front of the café with its motor running and lights off. I could see the bright ends of two cigarettes in the back seat and two in the front. I drifted back into shadows. Any way I looked at it, they were bad news.
I had to get back to the hotel. It was “home free” in these latitudes. Wait a minute! There was no “home free.” My cover was exploded, vanished, gone. I was fair game.
I opened the door of a nightclub and pushed past the doorman, hoping I looked American enough to be allowed into a clip joint like this. Gray-haired executives with pink faces were being played up to by Eurasian beauties with sparkle-dust on their faces and bare shoulders. When a waiter came running with a tiny table for one over his shoulder, I told him I needed to find a taxi and gave him an American fivedollar bill. He disappeared with my money, I hoped to some purpose.
A small combo was grinding its way through a medley of American show tunes. I recognized “My Funny Valentine” and “Foggy Day.” They looked Chinese, except for the black musician playing the alto saxophone. When the set ended and there was still no sign of my taxi, I asked the sax player if there was a back exit to this place.
“Sure, man, there’s one back of the kitchen. Comes out behind the temple with the green dome.” He didn’t ask me whether I was in trouble. He could read it in my face. “You cuttin’ out before the next set?”
“I’m concerned for my health.”
“They follow you here?”
“Who?” I asked with some surprise. Thinking about being followed was one thing; having a witness to it was something else.
“The folks parked down the block. I saw them before the last set. They on your tail?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
The musician took off the cord that had been dangling from his neck and said a few words to another of the players. When he turned back to me he said: “C’mon, let’s get out of this. My old lady tol’ me to stay away from low dives like this. But do I listen?” He laughed at his joke and grabbed my sleeve. “Fine threads, man. Follow me.” I glanced down at my new tuxedo without immediate recognition. It took about ten seconds to bring me up to speed.
With his instrument case in his hand, he led the way through a kitchen I hope never to see again to an alley, where he unlocked the door of a well-preserved Morgan. “Hop in,” he said as I tried to organize my fingers around the door handle. I was not functioning at a productive level, as my guidance teacher used to say.
“I like the car,” I said, trying to make one true statement. He stowed his instrument in the tiny back compartment.
“Groovy,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he backed out of the alley and into the street. It was beginning to get light and the air held that pre-dawn chill I try to leave out of my life.
“What’s your name?” I asked. He was now driving downhill, toward the water.
“Clay Fisher of Clay Fisher and the Rhythm Kings. You miss the sign out front?”
“Sorry.”
“You got a name?”
I told him, and he let me in on a biography that began in Cleveland and continued through Harlem, Chicago, Paris, Ibiza, Tokyo, and Singapore. “We’re not always the Rhythm Kings. You ever hear of the Chocolate Drops?”
I admitted that I consisted of four corners and that they were all right angles. But, of course, he could see that for himself.
“Who you runnin’ from, Ben?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You were out drinkin’ all night?”
“I was at a banquet. Then I went to bed. The phone rang, in the middle of the night, I guess. I forgot to put on my watch, so don’t ask me about time.”
“Losin’ track of time in the middle of the night often ends up in a back alley. Are you loaded?”
“A little of the local stuff, but most of what I’ve got is in traveler’s checks.” After I’d said it, and watching him shake his head, I realized that he might have meant was I drunk or was I armed.
Clay Fisher was nearly six feet tall, and as narrow through the shoulders and hips as a limbo dancer. His long sideburns were touched with gray, but he couldn’t have been much older than forty. A fairly light-skinned man, with darker freckles on his cheeks, he had laugh-wrinkles well etched at the corners of his eyes.
He wanted to know where I was from and I told him I was Canadian.
“That’s so neat,” he said. “You got a lot of great people up there. Now, where you want me to go?” I gave him Beverley’s address, thinking that that was a stop I couldn’t escape. I told him that she had sent me an SOS. I didn’t add the details, but he seemed interested in the ones I supplied.
It took less time than I had estimated to get across town to Beverley’s apartment. There was no answer when I rang her bell. Nor was there anything inside the apartment to tell me where she might be, after I’d ruined a perfectly good credit card on the lock of her door. Bev’s gold dress lay across the bed with some earrings and other jewelry on top of it. The bed hadn’t been slept in. All of this Clay watched with his arms folded. “What now?” he asked. “Shoplifting? Check-kiting?”
“Let me think.”
We slowly walked back to the car. As we both opened our doors, he asked: “And what do you think?
You want to go home now and let your brain settle some?”
“Bad idea.” I shook my head as I settled myself into the bucket seat. “There’s the other girl! She might know something. She lives near the drum.” I fished out the note she’d given me a few hours earlier and handed it to Clay. He started the Morgan and drove. Neither of us talked. Long before we got there, I could see the silhouette of the tower that raised the drum high above the public square near the aluminum Iron Gates.
The pressure of my finger on the doorbell brought Fiona’s shining face out of bed. She came to the door wrapped in a patterned kimono. She looked like an extra from The Mikado standing in the doorway. Fiona backed away from the door, inviting us to follow. Her hands were buried in the sleeves of her wrapper. The walls of the apartment were decorated with marine photographs and blue charts of island-strewn waters. Before I could explain why I was there, she told me that she’d had a call from Beverley. She was as worried as I was. I told her about my call. I remembered my manners as I finished and introduced my new friend. I could tell that she was curious. Fiona said that she had heard him play.
“I know the head waiter, Michel. Is he still there?” she began, in an excited voice.
I interrupted their conversation about Clay the musician in order to get back to Beverley the missing woman. I was a little sorry to discover that Clay had a past I knew nothing about.
“She left her flat last night after the fancy dinner,” I said. “Her jewelry was on her bed.”
“That’s rare for Beverley. She was the tidy one when we shared an apartment for a while. She’s more of a stay-at-home than I am too. Is she in some sort of trouble?” As I sketched in the details for her, she made us instant coffee and tea for herself. I’d smelled tea like that before.
