Where the Dark Streets Go

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  A half hour later he headed uptown again, a set of if-or-and figures in his pocket and a stiff Scotch whisky in his stomach. The whisky roused in him a feeling of kinship with every man on the street, and he went over in his mind the lines of his sermon. They were not so bad after all, he decided, with even a touch of poetry to them. Long ago the monsignor had said to him, “Remember, you’re not addressing the sacred congregation in Rome. Simple truths are the most eloquent. Sincerity, that’s the key.” Which put him in mind of politicians and brought him round full circle to the banal again. Priests and politicians. He felt as restless as the birds scratching in the gutters. His spirits fell as low. He had not yet read his office of the day. That and music and his morning Mass were his refuge. All having little to do with the world around him. It was not that the world was too much with him, but that he was too much with the world. He wondered what Muller would have thought of that distinction.

  The pawnbroker was closing the iron grill across his shop windows as McMahon approached. The grill gave the shop more distinction than the merchandise warranted, the grill and the three golden balls newly painted, and the sign, Gothic-lettered in fresh gold leaf—or so it appeared in the slanting rays of the sun: A. ROSENBERG.

  McMahon thought at once of Muller, a sign painter, but he also thought of the curiosity of the Gothic lettering of the name. He was himself familiar with the typeface from liturgical books, but ninety-nine out of a hundred would have to puzzle the letters to get the name. Ninth Avenue Gothic. He greeted the pawnbroker. They knew each other by sight, and there was a placard in the window announcing the girls’ choir concert.

  “I’m curious, Mr. Rosenberg.” He pointed to the sign. “Why in those letters?”

  Rosenberg looked up and shaded his eyes. “Beautiful, eh?”

  McMahon agreed.

  “Why not? It isn’t the phone book. The whole neighborhood knows Rosenberg. They don’t need the sign. Only Rosenberg needs it. I like it, that’s why.”

  “Was it a man named Muller who painted it?”

  “Would you believe me, Father, I don’t know his last name? A beard and beautiful hands. I always notice hands.”

  “He’s dead, you know,” the priest said.

  He had not expected the man’s reaction, the little moan of a personal pain and the mouth working under the gray mustache. Rosenberg put his hand to the grating and held onto it.

  “I’m sorry,” McMahon said, “I didn’t realize he was a friend.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.” McMahon told him the circumstances.

  “Come inside.” He made a gesture to let the gate stand open. “Leave it. I don’t have to keep union hours, thank God.” He led the way through the shop to his desk in the back and lit the green-shaded lamp above it. He pulled out the swivel chair and made the priest take it. The desk, an ancient rolltop, was littered with papers, letters in foreign handwriting, some in Yiddish, or so McMahon presumed from a glance. “Coffee? Or a glass of cognac, Father.”

  “A little cognac, thank you.”

  “He liked the cognac, too, let me tell you. But he liked also the coffee. But most of all he liked to talk.”

  “I’d have thought that,” the priest said.

  Rosenberg got his glasses from the desk drawer and put them on. “Let me show you.” He looked more like a scholar than a pawnbroker as he went to a shelf and looked up. His white hair fringed the collar of his coat. He started to take a large book from among several on the shelf, then changed his mind, and with a sweep of his hand, he abandoned them to McMahon’s own scrutiny. “They are his, Bosch, Vermeer, the Italians. He did not like the Italians except for Botticelli.”

  McMahon took down the Bosch while Rosenberg went to a cabinet and brought out the bottle and two stemmed glasses. The book was so heavy McMahon had to lay it on the desk to open it. It revealed nothing but Bosch, but that was quite a lot, the contrasts of good and evil, and as in most things, he thought, the evil figures were by far the most interesting. There was no name, no mark at all in the front pages, only the smudges of use.

  Rosenberg cleared a place on the desk, put the glasses down and poured the brandy, twice as much for the priest as he poured for himself. “Oh, yes. He liked to talk. I did not understand half of what he was talking about, but I liked to listen to him. I liked to listen,” he repeated. “And now it is one more voice not to listen to.” He lifted his glass. “To him, shalom.”

  “Shalom,” McMahon said. Peace.

  He took a sip of the brandy and then put the book back on the shelf. He took down another volume and looked at the flyleaves: nothing. “How long have you had these, Mr. Rosenberg?” What he really wanted to ask at the moment was how much it would cost him to buy them if they were not redeemed.

  “He brought in the Bosch maybe three weeks ago. The others in between. I have no claim on them, Father. It was a matter of some place to keep them for the time being. ‘I don’t like possessions,’ he said. ‘Why do people collect things? Because they cannot bear to be alone, alone with themselves.’ Something like that. He was always saying things like that.”

  McMahon examined the books one by one while the pawnbroker was talking. Not one gave any clue to its ownership.

  “He came in that first day and said, ‘I am a one-man crusade to clean up the store fronts on Ninth Avenue. You clean the windows and I will paint.’ ‘How much?’ I said. ‘For a half day’s work, what it costs me to live for a day.’ He did not look as though he lived extravagantly. I paid him ten dollars and the paint, and it was to me a valuable investment to meet the man. He was a kind of salesman like that, you know? I was the first customer he worked it on, I found out afterwards. Next he went to the drugstore on the corner. That was a disgrace. He showed me as a model. A half dozen shops in all maybe. Until now. But I am thinking, where did he come from? Could it be there are little islands like this all over New York? Fresh paint and clean windows? How long would he have stayed? And why did he have to leave…that way.” Rosenberg fell silent. He sipped the brandy, smacked his lips and nodded at his own thoughts.

  McMahon returned to the chair. The brandy seared its way down his throat and seemed to grab at his stomach. He was reminded of the hour of the day. He had been late for lunch. Miss Lalor would be in a temper if he was late for dinner also. Then he thought how truly unimportant were Miss Lalor’s tempers.

  Rosenberg looked at him. “He was sitting here where I am one day, and I was there at the desk and he said to me: ‘Rembrandt would have liked you. Right as you are, the light, the junk, the cupboards, everything. He would have made of you one of his famous Jews.’ And I said to him, on the chance it would bring him out, you know: ‘Rembrandt is already dead and I am not yet a famous Jew.’ I looked him in the eye when I said it, but he only laughed and shook his head. All the same, Father, I think he was a painter of more than signs and store fronts.”

  “I think so too,” McMahon said.

  After a moment Rosenberg said, “You will tell the police you were here?”

  “I shall have to.”

  “What can I tell them, a man I knew only by the name of Gus? Gust. He liked the ‘t’ on the end of it. I do not like to think they will take his books away. I like to think he will come back for them.”

  “He won’t.”

  “Or somebody then to talk to the way we talked.”

  “I will not tell them about the books. That is up to you,” McMahon said. He would have to examine his own conscience on his moment of covetousness of them. Long ago he had wanted to be a painter even more than he had wanted to be a musician, but even less than he had wanted to be a priest. “Did he ever talk about himself?” He knew the answer before asking it. If he had, Rosenberg would have said so.

  The pawnbroker shook his head.

  “Not even where he lived, where he was bringing the books from? Or why?”

  “No, not a word personal. Oblique: it was a word he liked, but he was talking about light, the
light of a painter.”

  “If the police are told about them, they will want to check if they were stolen.”

  “He did not steal them,” Rosenberg said vehemently.

  “You are judging by our values, my friend,” McMahon said. “And you and I both know now he was a very unconventional man.”

  “That is true, but even looking at it from a practical point of view, Father, it would be easier to steal a hippopotamus than Hieronymus Bosch.”

  McMahon laughed and finished his brandy. He held up his hand to stay the pawnbroker from pouring more. “I must go. If there is no family claim on his body, there will probably be a service at Ferguson and Kelly’s.”

  “When?”

  “That will depend on the police, I suppose. The autopsy. I will see that the newspapers get a notice.”

  “What kind of a service?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? It’s the people in the building where he lived who want it.”

  “Funerals are always for the living,” Rosenberg said, getting to his feet with the priest. “I think he would have agreed to that.”

  “I will play some Bach on the organ,” McMahon said.

  “And Mahler. He liked Mahler.”

  McMahon said, “Gustave Muller, Gustav Mahler.” The association had crossed his mind the first time he heard the complete name. He and Rosenberg looked at each other. “So it is possible we don’t even know his real name.”

  “I am thinking, Father, what I am going to do: I am going to sit down and try to write the things I remember we talked about. It will not sound very much, the way I write it. I have tried to write before, and my mind it becomes a moth just trying to get at the light. But I will try and I will give it to you. Who knows? Maybe you and I can talk also.”

  “I would like that,” the priest said.

  At the door of the shop they shook hands. McMahon remembered that it was Friday. “Good shabbos,” he said.

  “Gut shabbos.” Rosenberg squinted up at the sky. “It will be a fine sunset.”

  5

  IT HAD BEEN MCMAHON’S intention to go directly home. But then that had been his intention when he had left the precinct station house well over an hour earlier. He found himself walking toward the sunset. Scotch and brandy and Gustave Muller. Benediction and rosary at eight, a sermon to be got into his head, Muller out. He paused at the parapet beneath which lay the railroad tracks and beyond which the West Side Highway arched against the sky. Every approaching car caught an instant of sunset in its windshield, passed, and seemed no more than a beetle on a rampart. He turned and walked back on the street where Muller had died. The rush of suburb-going traffic was over, the street again a silent wilderness, bulldozers and cranes the dinosaurs of the era. The one lone building stood, its walls raw brick where the walls it once met had been shorn away. At the very top, the windows shone like golden eyes.

  He paused where the uniformed policeman stood by the basement grill and exchanged a few words with him. “Love Power” had been all but wiped out with the shuffle of many feet. At the top of the steps the double doorway was open. “Mind if I go up, officer?”

  “I guess it’d be all right, Father. They’re all through up there. Just stay away from the basement.”

  “Believe me, I will.”

  A house without doors, he noticed, climbing one flight of dusty stairs after the other. To have stolen the doorknobs Muller would have needed to be around for a while. And he was, of course. Carlos had said that, the man coming down when he called him. The turn-of-the-century gas fixtures were still in the hallways, and there were patches of a floral-patterned wallpaper where the paint had chipped away. On every landing he noticed a clutter of tinfoil and burnt-out photography bulbs. The police had gone over the building well. The roof hatch had been tilted to let in air. When he reached the fifth and final floor the room to the west was suffused with light, the blearing X’s had been removed from the windows. There were spatters of paint on the floor, and squares of raw wood where bits of the surface had been cut out, he suspected for laboratory study. So the police too would now presume him to have been an easel painter as well as the painter of Mrs. Phelan’s walls. Northern light was painters’ light, and in the mornings here Muller would have had the best of it. Now, with the sun having gone down, the sky was changing fast, holding briefly the red and yellow tints, then almost palpably letting them go, yielding to the darker strokes of night. The room was utterly bare. Silence and peace: he could feel it. He found it himself only at the altar when he was no longer himself, at the moment of the transubstantiation. His conscience told him that he must go, but the wish to wait for night was very strong.

  “Father McMahon?” The voice halloed up the stairwell.

  He thought it would be Brogan and went to the top of the stairs.

  “Stay there. I’m coming up.”

  McMahon went to the west window and waited. Torn wisps of cloud held the last pinks and lemon of the sunset.

  “Some spot he found for himself, wouldn’t you say, Father?”

  “How did he find it?”

  “We’ve been asking the same question. The building belongs to an old crank who wouldn’t sell it to the developers. They went ahead without him, starting the wreckers next door. They wouldn’t give him the ground to shore up his walls. The city condemned. The building’s going but he still won’t sell the land. It’s in the courts and it’s been in the papers, but he never heard of Gustave Muller.”

  “But the abandoned building could have been what attracted Muller to the neighborhood,” McMahon said. “What did you find in this room?”

  “An old army cot and three more doorknobs.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “A few spatters of paint. He could have decorated the kid’s doorknobs up here.”

  “He’d have needed a brush and paint,” McMahon said.

  “It wasn’t here.”

  “And nothing like that where he lived?”

  Brogan shook his head. “No Phelan yet either.”

  “And no weapon,” McMahon said after a moment.

  “It was a square-edged blade. Maybe a narrow chisel.”

  Or a palette knife, McMahon thought, but he did not say so.

  “He cleaned up a few store fronts on Ninth Avenue,” Brogan said. “A real eccentric, like they say.”

  McMahon felt relieved of having to tell him of his conversation with Rosenberg. But to compensate—his own conscience, he thought afterward—he reminded the detective of Muller’s last words.

  “I was going over your statement again, Father. That’s some pretty fancy talk between you and him. What do you think he meant when he said he’d taken the knife from his killer?”

  “I suppose I took it to mean that the man was not dangerous to anyone else.”

  “That’s the way I read it, and that’s pure crap, Father. Unless he killed himself and got somebody to get rid of the weapon for him.”

  “Who?”

  Brogan shrugged. “And why? Nobody who had any sense would touch it. That leaves the kid.”

  “Carlos? I’m sure he ran all the way from here to the rectory.”

  “So am I. I think he told it the way it was.”

  McMahon could hardly read the dial hand on his watch. “I’ve got to get home.”

  “We’ve canvassed all the big art galleries, Father, on the chance he painted something besides balls and walls. But maybe they wouldn’t know him under that name. His Social Security number’s fake. He was on the run from something. We’ll find out.”

  McMahon remembered his earlier mission that evening. “How long will you keep the body?”

  “We’ve got the facilities. Till somebody claims it.”

  “The tenants of 987 would like a funeral service.”

  “A wake?”

  “I suppose you could call it that. I’ve inquired about the costs at Ferguson and Kelly.”

  “So you need the mortal remains. I’ll speak to Traynor. It
’s something the newspapers would pick up. The publicity might help us.”

  “I want to think about it first,” McMahon said. “Hold off speaking to Traynor.” The whole idea now became repugnant to him.

  At the top of the stairs Brogan said, “You’re right, Father. Somebody would be on our necks for it, some organization for the rights of corpses.” A few steps down, he paused. “Hah! I remember a song my grandfather used to sing when he’d get a few drinks in him…‘If this wake goes on a minute, sure the corpse he must be in it. You’ll have to get me drunk to keep me dead.’ That’s the end of it. I forget the beginning.”

  How fortunate, McMahon thought.

  On the Street Brogan asked: “Are you off duty now, Father?”

  “No. I’ve taken French leave.”

  “What does that mean?”

  McMahon rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess it means AWOL. It’s Irish. I don’t remember ever saying it before myself.”

  “I check out in a half hour. I was going to suggest, if you’re free, have a meal and a couple of drinks with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Downtown. The Village maybe.”

  “He wasn’t the Village type,” the priest said, although God knew, he said it on shallow grounds.

  “Maybe he wasn’t, Father, but I was thinking about his killer. And I could use a good excuse for a few hours on the town. What do you say?”

  “If you don’t mind starting with Benediction and rosary. I’ll be free after that.”

  “In mufti, Father.”

  “The best mufti I have,” McMahon said.

  6

  IT WAS ONLY AFTER McMahon had resisted the temptation to take the steak bone in his fingers that he remembered, “Holy God,” he said, “it’s Friday.”

  “Well, it’s not a sin any more, is it?” Brogan wiped his fingers in his napkin. He had not been inhibited about taking the bone in hand.