Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  The dimming and vibrations were not unfamiliar to him. They were the well-known precursors — the aura he always experienced — prior to those moments when he would begin to sense that he was fading away from himself.

  Even though he’d had such episodes for as long as he could remember (starting shortly after puberty), they never ceased to terrify him. That sensation of disintegrating, of breaking up inside himself — from the inside out — filled him with dread. Then the Ping-Pong balls would start to bounce back and forth, gradually accelerating to a frightening tempo until they became a single blurred image planted fixedly before his eyes. Then came the numbers — thousands, millions of numbers — banging and ricocheting through his head. Long, interminable series of them that he would struggle to add up but, of course, never could. All of that was beginning to happen now.

  He heard a distant wail of sirens and walked faster. The Ping-Pong balls had started to bounce in his head. Suddenly, all of the colors that had drenched the streets and shops and buildings and all the people in the street, all of the vivid shades and tones along the avenue began to fade like dye running from a fabric. Before his eyes the gorgeous palette of street colors bled from his field of vision, leaving behind a flat, dimensionless monochrome of gunmetal gray.

  Suddenly, up ahead Warren spied a slight, fair figure, moving down First Avenue. Even though the figure was nearly a full block ahead and his view of him was from the rear, he recognized the person at once. He knew that mincing, wispy gait. How well he knew it! There could be no mistake. It was Ferris Koops. The source of all his troubles. The cause of so much anguish.

  Why hadn’t he disposed of Ferris when he’d had the chance? There had been so many opportunities to rid himself of that scourge who’d taunted him so over the years, that snotty little wimp who’d always lorded it over him, treating him like some poor cousin. How he’d despised him — that hateful, whiny, ass-licking kid, whose own parents couldn’t bear to have him around. That succubus, that leech who clung to him. Try as he might, he could never escape Ferris. That exemplar, that paradigm of goodness and kindness and Christian charity. That priggish snot whom everyone loved … everyone, that is, except his own mother. Why hadn’t he killed Ferris? Smashed him like some worm when he’d had the chance?

  Ferris had always been Warren’s problem. Warren was always trying to act like Ferris. Be Ferris. Be something better than he was. Well, now that the jig was up, now that they knew everything, he would snuff out the little turd. Rid himself of the scourge forever.

  He ground his teeth and started after the rapidly receding figure. It was disappearing in waves of oncoming people. Periodically he would catch a glimpse of it, patches of it moving behind shoulders and hats. Warren dashed up the street, covering the distance in little time, only to discover that the figure was no longer there.

  He spun about several times like a person who’s momentarily lost his bearings. But in the next moment there was Ferris again, eating a frankfurter at a standup food counter across the street.

  Dodging the horn-blaring, outraged traffic, Warren darted across the avenue. Barging up to the place, he burst through the front door. People gaped at him, pausing from their hot dogs and sausages and fruit drinks. By that time he had a wild, slightly demented look.

  But there was no sign of Ferris at the stand. He must have seen Warren and fled. Back out on the street again, he saw Ferris up the block, flagging a cab. Not only was he flagging a cab, he was also approaching him from the opposite direction. And then he was standing right beside him, a faint smile of greeting playing about his lips.

  Warren’s terrified eyes swerved from the figure hailing the cab to the one standing beside him. In the next moment, several other Ferrises appeared. Two or three of them came out of a bank at one time, dressed in business suits. Another Ferris working at a vendor’s stand held up a fistful of cheap jewelry, waving it at him.

  Sunlight glinting off the facets of cheap glass sent shards of harsh glare stabbing at his eyes. A whole army of Ferris Koopses was all about him now, coming at him from everywhere.

  The color had by then bled completely from everything in the street. Once again Warren stood alone in a world he knew so well — the drab, relentless gray of a photographic negative with only ghostly white silhouettes to indicate a person, and all of those silhouettes were Ferris. He alone with Ferris.

  When he looked up again, Ferris was still standing there beside him, smiling, his arms outstretched. “I’m here, Warren,” Ferris said. “It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’m here.”

  The moment he spoke, Warren’s eyes flooded with tears. A surge of relief swept over him, as soothing as the foaming ocean surf on a blistering hot day.

  Warren’s arms opened wide to accept him and they embraced like brothers. Hot tears coursed down his cheeks, his whole body racked with sobs.

  “It’s all right, Warren. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right now.”

  People passing the sobbing, demented figure whirling on the street gave him a wide berth as they hurried on.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “YOU UP?”

  “Of course. We’re always awake in this house at two A.M. Isn’t everyone? Where the hell are you?”

  “Bridge Street.”

  “Bridge Street?” There was a pause as Pickering’s still drowsy head tried to sort out information. “Wait a minute. Lemme go into the other room. Rachel’s waking up.” Pickering staggered out of bed, struggled into a robe, and lurched out through darkness to the kitchen phone. “You still there, Frank?”

  “Where the hell would I be?” came the annoyed reply. “Have you seen the papers yet?”

  “Sure. Koops’s puss was plastered all over it. They had him on the six o’clock news, too. Sylvestri was giving interviews all over the place. He’s a movie star now.”

  “He was down here all afternoon with a special squad.”

  “Then he must’ve been on to McConkey.”

  “He was. Right after we left Koops’s place.”

  “She probably told him everything.”

  “Depends on what he asked her,” Mooney snapped. “Anyway, they were down here five hours this afternoon. Tore the place apart.”

  “They find anything?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How come?”

  “Just the way Sylvestri looked when he came back out. He had a real sour puss on him.”

  “That’s his natural expression.”

  “When he left, he took the old lady with him.”

  “Interrogation?”

  “That, and I figure they’re looking to press charges.”

  “For what? Accessory?”

  “And harboring. I don’t think they got a chance on that. Number one, all they got is the girl’s word he lived down there with the old dame. Number two, they didn’t find a thing of his in the place, and they tore it apart stem to stern.”

  “Funny.” Pickering yawned. “You’d think they’d have found something.”

  “If you ask me, the old lady probably cleaned the place out days ago.”

  “They might still get her on fencing goods,” Pickering offered hopefully.

  “I’m telling you, they found nothing. Mulvaney hinted they might have found some pot.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt that for a minute.”

  “So what? How long can you hold someone on chicken feed like that? And, living with a nut case is no crime.”

  “Sure,” Pickering conceded sleepily. “Half the people in this town do. How long you figure you’re gonna be down there?”

  “When they quit yesterday, Sylvestri left a surveillance team behind. There’s a camera unit in the warehouse across the way. They’ll be watching the joint round the clock.”

  “And you’re watching the watchers.” Pickering laughed softly into the phone. “You figure Koops is coming back to the house.”

  “I don’t figure he really ever left it.”

  There was a paus
e as Pickering tried to absorb that. “If they been through the place stem to stern, where do you figure he is?”

  “I don’t know,” Mooney sighed wearily. “But he’s got no place to go. Not with his puss all over the papers and TV.”

  Pickering stirred uneasily in his chair. “So I figure this call means you got something lousy you want me to do.”

  “What was your first clue, Rollo?”

  “I usually don’t have the pleasure of phone calls from you at two A.M. What’s on your mind?”

  “The Bureau of Deeds down at City Hall opens at nine A.M.,” Mooney rattled on, breathlessly. “You be there when the doors open. Go directly to the archives. Ask the person in charge if they’ve got a set of blueprints on the Bridge Street place.”

  “That house is nearly two hundred years old, Frank. They don’t keep anything goes back that far.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Give it a shot, anyway. If they come up with something, make a couple of copies and bring ‘em to me.”

  “Okay.” Pickering sighed. “You better go home, get some sleep.”

  “I can’t. I’m on my way to Poughkeepsie.”

  “Poughkeepsie? What the hell for?”

  “Got a call in the office last night about nine P.M. Guy called Armstead. Runs a fancy boarding school somewhere up there.”

  “Ain’t this a little late in life to matriculate?”

  Mooney ignored the quip. “He saw Koops’s picture on the news last night and called the number they flashed on the screen. Seems our boy was one of his students there around fifteen years ago. He wants to talk to someone about it.”

  “And you’re the one?”

  “Sylvestri wasn’t around so they switched him to me. I’m going home first and have a shower and a shave. Fritzi’s fit to be tied. I haven’t been home for two days.”

  Pickering started to laugh. “Haven’t seen you put in overtime in ten years. Sylvestri’s had a beneficial effect on you.”

  “You betcha,” Mooney growled. “There is some shit I will not eat. He asked for this. Now he’s got a real horse race on his hands.”

  New York Route 55 is a narrow, winding ribbon of road that curves its way east and west through the southern Berkshire foothills. The road was pot-holed and puddled from the unseasonal melt-off of snow still visible in broad patches through the trees. At certain points the melted snow on the hills came coursing down in gushing rivulets to the road below and swept across it to the other side. Through the still unleafed trees blanketing the hills, Mooney could see clearly the humped and solemn configuration of the mountains.

  Though a sharp bite was in the air and blasts of wind buffeted the hood of the old Buick, there came with that a distinct hint of spring, still three months off. The light in the sky at ten A. M. was a pale yellow, as opposed to the clear icy blue one typically sees on a late December morning, and there was in the general muddy mess of things a sense of the ice breaking up and the earth thawing.

  Branley House was a compound of several buildings, grim and gabled Victorian gingerbread, painted in improbable pastels to lighten some of the unrelieved gloom of the architecture.

  Mooney turned into a graveled driveway running between two stone stanchions. In the large field behind the main house, packs of young boys streamed up and down a soccer field, kicking a ball and chasing it avidly, their high, shrill cries ringing out across the sunlit countryside.

  Mr. Harley Armstead was a spry, elfin figure of some seventy years, with ruddy cheeks and vivid blue eyes that twinkled out at you from behind a pair of rimless spectacles. About him was that air of amiable incompetence, characteristically marked by a great deal of bustling about to no apparent purpose. He fussed with odds and ends on his desk which was covered with unattended papers and bills and all of the sooty paraphernalia of pipe smoking. As he spoke he kept tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with a large, flat thumb, the nail of which had turned a cobalt blue, no doubt from some inadvertent hurt he’d managed to inflict upon it himself.

  “I knew it was him the moment I saw him,” Mr. Armstead proclaimed when they’d settled into a pair of commodious wing chairs. “That picture flashed on the television and I turned to Mrs. Armstead right then and there and said, ‘Martha, that’s Ferris.’ They kept calling him Warren — Warren something or other …”

  “Mars,” Mooney offered.

  “That’s right, Mars. But I knew it was Ferris soon as I saw him. And then I knew I just had to talk to someone.”

  A drab, grayish lady in a white matron’s gown tottered in and set down a tray of coffee before them. While she served, Armstead continued to strike matches, intending to light his pipe but invariably failing to do so. Mooney had started a game of watching the match burn down until it reached the old man’s thumb, at which point he would blow it out with a quick nervous huff.

  “Must be a good sixteen, seventeen years since he was here,” Armstead continued when the woman had left. “He was about seven when he matriculated. We didn’t learn much from the parents. All we had was a doctor’s report that claimed he was in sound health, but hinted at some evidence of mental retardation. I tell you, I never thought much of that report. I didn’t think he was retarded. Not one bit. Possibly a bit muddled. A little vacant and remote. In his own little world, you know. Frightened and confused, maybe. But not retarded. I know retarded. I’ve dealt with it all my professional life. That boy wasn’t retarded. Upset, yes. Frightened and confused, yes. And why wouldn’t he be?” Armstead waved his pipe at Mooney as though it were a conductor’s baton. “He’d lost a father and a mother in the space of a few months. As I understand it, the father was a fairly prominent financier who’d made a series of bad investments and more or less died from the shame of it. The mother …” Armstead paused and smiled slyly. “Well, I met her once. A handsome lady. Socialite. Glamorous, you know. Came up here to see me about Ferris and look the place over. Stayed about twenty minutes. She remarried in what folks of my vintage like to call ‘indecent haste.’ Three months later, I guess it was, to an older man. A widower. Well-off with his own children grown and out of the house, but still young enough for his head to be turned by an attractive, well-connected woman. Too old, though, to want to start raising a child again.

  “As I understand it, they argued about it until it became the sticking point of the arrangement. Almost queered the deal for a time. There were no relatives with which to place the child. Either she gave the boy up for adoption or placed it in a foster home, or no deal. The old boy made it abundantly clear. To make a long story short, she capitulated, and, in the end, they settled on Branley. People call us a warehouse for well-to-do kids with families comfortable enough to pay a large annual tuition for the privilege of depositing unwanted, problem kids and forgetting about them with a clear conscience. Well, I suppose there’s some truth to that. I don’t pretend that we’re a first-rate preparatory school. But we are home to these kids. The only home they have. Mrs. Armstead and myself are mother and father to them. We love each and every one of them just as if they were our own. We feel no shame about what we do here. We teach them. Right up to the limits of their ability. You ask them, if you think not.”

  Armstead sighed and gazed with sudden unaccountable sadness out the window through which was clearly visible the sight of the young boys racing up and down the soccer field. “Anyway, we were talking about Mrs. Koops.”

  He struck another match and inhaled fiercely, his veined cheeks inflating and deflating like a bellows until at last a cloud of blackened smoke straggled listlessly from the bowl. But no sooner had he lit it than he forgot about it, distracted by the image of Mrs. Koops drifting back at him across the span of years. “She sent him toys and candy for birthdays and Christmas. Never failed. But she never came to visit him.”

  “How long was he here?” Mooney asked.

  “I’m coming to that.” Armstead waved the pipe at him impatiently. “Ferris was peculiar. I don’t deny that. Kept to himself. Didn’t ge
t on with the other kids. They recognized there was something funny about him and were perceptive enough to let him be. He couldn’t concentrate in class. He was hyperactive, but unlike most hyperactive kids, he wasn’t a discipline problem. The house psychiatrist here at the time diagnosed him as borderline autistic, with decided aspects of genius. He had phenomenal powers of memory. He could recall whole series of numbers made up of a dozen digits, glance at three, four of them, then after a moment recite them back to you by heart without a mistake.”

  Mr. Armstead shook his head, and, for a moment, his eyes appeared to mist behind the rimless lenses. “A sad, morose child, I’d say, who preferred to keep to himself. The only relationships he could handle were with small animals — pet mice, birds, cats, to which he was invariably kind.” Armstead looked up, suddenly recalling Mooney. “Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten your question. I’m coming to it.”

  The twinkle had reappeared in his eyes and he chuckled to himself. “After Ferris had been here about three months, we noticed a change in him. From a child who, to all outward appearances, was relatively placid, he suddenly became subject to fits of violence. One moment he’d be working quietly by himself on a jigsaw puzzle or an airplane model, and the next he’d be up on his feet, shouting, running, bouncing off the furniture, flinging everything within reach about the room. Eventually, those episodes increased in frequency and intensity. They became destructive. Frighteningly so. And the destruction was always aimed at himself. He’d been abandoned by his parents, and, as he saw it, he was responsible for that abandonment. There was something not quite right with him, he figured, and he believed that it was because of this that his father died and his mother remarried and left him. To his way of thinking, it was all his fault.

  “One morning, after he’d been here, roughly, I’d say, five months, he didn’t show up at breakfast. I sent someone back to his room to check. All of his belongings were there, but there was no sign of him. We made a search of the campus and the surrounding woods. Not a trace of him about. We notified the mother first, and then the state police.”