by Peter Manus
He meets some people, young black professionals in suits, who undoubtedly work for him. They disappear into City Hall. Wilkie never turns, never touches at the breast pocket where he tucked my number. He has other things on his mind. I stand watching the stream of people entering and leaving the building.
It will be a challenge, this kill.
Très sincèrement,
Nightingale
ELEVEN
I am Nightingale—
At Tati’s, I enter by the front and listen. She is a woman who cannot live without ruckus, so the silence of the house is a certain signal of her absence. I ascend the stairs and hurry along to the lodger’s door. I hear the whispery clatter of his trade, but he does not heed my knock, so finally I enter unbidden. It is midday, but his narrow room is dark, the blinds drawn behind his computer screen. He glances my way, unperturbed that I have invaded. The air is thick with the merged odors of human and rodent.
“Was the payment enough?” I say. “For the website. I do not know if you expected more for a job like that, a night job, and done at the last minute.”
He types for a moment. On his computer screen a photo depicts a muscular, shirtless male using an electric prod on another one, who lies hogtied with a ball-gag lodged in his throat. Straight Lads Tortured in Secret Glasgow Location! Register Now for Instant Access to Live-Action Streaming Videos! the headline reads. Perhaps he imagines that I cannot see it from my distance. Perhaps he does not care. Perhaps this is how he earns his living.
Finally he looks at me. He shrugs. "Whuddup?"
“I would like the same again,” I say. “This time simpler, though. A dummy of a real website that must match its particulars. I need to make it appear as if an article I wrote was published in an online magazine, somewhere artsy and political that has not too much of the visibility. I have the article and several choices for the online publication here in my little device. My hope is to supply someone with a web address that takes them to a dummy site that resembles the publication’s site. If they try to move elsewhere on that site after following my path, the connection should simply fail.”
He shakes his head without looking over, then goes back to whatever he was doing. “Whoever you’re scamming will know.”
“No. He will not double-check,” I say, closing the door softly behind me. “He does not care much about where I have published in the past. He is looking for an excuse to see me, you get it?” I pause to see how I am doing. His fingers whisper over his keyboard, but I can see he listens to me. “Besides,” I point out, “I do not care, ultimately, if he discovers me. It is okay for me to be the fraud. I am looking for nothing but an entry, an invitation. I want to see him, that is all, and he wants to see me equally. Is that so dumb now?”
The lodger does not look over, and his lank profile gives no message. I see a movement in the dark at his neck, and realize that what I took for a scarf is the rodent. Well, to each his own. I notice that his fingers have stopped moving on the keyboard.
“I will pay you. Cash, of course,” I say. “You will name a fair price, I trust.”
He looks over at me, just a glance, as if to scoff at the money, or maybe because it is obvious that he would expect cash for this type of transaction. He points at the gadget in my hand, beckons it with a finger.
“Lie on the bed,” he says. “Don’t talk. I’ll tell you if I need you.”
He shakes me by the arm at 5:30 a.m. I look up at his grease-lined face. He silently throws a glance at the wall. I nod and gather myself together, then huddle by the door, listening. I can hear Tati singing to herself, dashing water about in the bathroom. I hurry downstairs, flip-flops in my hand, and ease myself in my room. The singing and splashing continue at their prior level. There is little doubt that she knows where I have spent the night.
Wilkie calls me late in the afternoon. We arrange to meet the following evening, at his in-town condo near the wharf in the North End. He explains unnecessarily that he often conducts business there on weeknights. Of course, yes, I am sure I will find it quite easily, I tell him. He makes a joke, signing off, about how he hopes I leave the French quips out of his piece. Just letting me know, you see, that he has looked me up and the evening he plans is not all about my appealing qualities. He is right—the evening is not about the sex we will undoubtedly have. It is about his death.
Afterwards, I put six hundred dollars into an envelope and slip it under the door of the upstairs lodger. Later I hear him come home, but he does not stop by to thank me for either my generosity or the promptness of my payment. I would have been troubled if he had done so.
Très sincèrement,
Nightingale
TWELVE
I am Nightingale—
“So you want a piece of me?” Wilkie throws out in his deep, shaggy voice as he opens the door. “That it?”
“Only a piece?” I try to bandy back. “Councilman, I am here for every last bit of you.” Holding my eyelids at half-mast so as not to see him well, I affect a wry expression as I probe past him with all my senses. I smell dead fish—we are near the harbor. I feel a draft waft past me and out into the airless public corridor. I encountered no one in the elevator, but now I hear the echo of a door opening down the hall. A man’s step approaches—light on his feet, he will come along the corridor quickly. I do not panic; this man may glimpse me but it is of no consequence, as I will be inside before the stranger can get a look at my face. From beyond Wilkie I hear music—a fey warbler from many years back, tinkling through his high notes, making beautiful harmony with a piano. The stranger passes. I hear only the metallic click of his heels against the corridor tiles before the door thuds. Wilkie has his own incentive to keep me invisible, you see.
Moving on in, I note the lighting—more of it gleaming through the floor-length windows than coming from the dimmed ceiling cans. Wilkie is a decent man, but only to a point, yes?
He puts a hand out for my shawl. My dress is a red kimono, knee-length, sleeveless with a high collar, trimmed in black piping. Ignoring Wilkie’s offer, I wrap my silky shawl tighter and walk away, its long fringe swaying against my arms and hips. He interprets this as a gesture—well, maybe he does. I tell myself that I fourrage in his head and am not just reacting to outward signs, like other women need to, but I am not certain. I am trying to use my special skills, but something is off. I know that he is assessing the chances that we will couple tonight, and his confidence is rising, but who in my position would not know this? In any event, he may be correct in his assessment, but it will only postpone the terminal event.
“So, you think you’re getting all of me tonight?” he jokes. “Sister, politics don’t allow ‘all’ of anyone to remain intact. At this moment, Charles Wilkins Morley is sliced and diced into very tiny pieces and sprinkled all around the city of Boston.”
“Such an image,” I offer over my shoulder. “You are like the crumbs for the birds.”
His laugh is rich. “More like so much cremation ash,” he jokes.
Inside, I go numb—could he be reading me?
He goes on. “What you’re looking at tonight is an empty vessel, a ghost. This talking you think you’re hearing? It’s an echo.”
“It is indeed.” I walk ahead of him, calming myself, my heels marking time gently against his wood floors. I tell myself that it is just a coincidence—he is simply flirting, following my own lead. “Did you know I collect ghosts?” I quip over my shoulder.
“Do you now?”
“I have a few floating about, back at my place. They await your company.”
He laughs some more in his comfortable basso, pretending he finds me clever. He will appreciate my little joke later, though. When it is too late.
We banter on. Some men may have telepathic instincts of their own, of course. If so, it would not surprise me if Wilkie were one of them. Under other circumstances, I would not mind the idea of having him probing in my head. But honestly, I do not need some male version of my own gif
t getting in the way of my plans. I need this kill, after my strange fiasco with Brewster Van Ness. I need it tonight.
Shying away from him, I do a slow, full circle turn. It seems as if most of the condo—living, dining, kitchen and office areas—is open space, rolled out in a sweeping crescent rimmed by a lot of glass sliders. Some of these are open, and the bronze-tinted sheers twist gently, billowing then drooping like sighing shadows. The bedroom must be overhead, where there looks to be a loft area that cannot be seen from below. The open design maximizes the view of Boston Harbor, which sparkles dully in the hazy sunset across a busy street and, beyond that, a public park overlooking a dock. I breathe in, absorbing the slick stink of low tide. I find the odor of rot soothing. Inhaling, I catch a prickly aroma as well and slice him a look under my eyelids.
“You are expecting someone for dinner?” I ask. “Or do you simply wish to display for me that, in addition to everything else, you can cook?”
“I can cook, matter of fact,” he agrees, gesturing for me to sit where I like. “Used to cook at a little Vietnamese joint in J.P. Dangerous place to eat for anyone but an FOB, and I couldn’t understand a word anyone would say, but somehow I learned a couple of tricks you can get on with a mess of crayfish. Now I cook once, twice a month.”
I ignore the invitation to pry into his family issues. “What do you have on now?”
“This one’s a bouillabaisse,” he says, then adds, “And, yes, I do make my own rouille, if that was the next question.”
I smile as if he's read my mind.
“This batch I froze last week and am just thawing out, but that’s only between you and me, y’hear? Believe me, I’d never serve a reheated bouillabaisse to a guest.”
“Ça arrache la gueule?” I ask, just to check.
“Yes, indeed. Spice is my signature,” he answers.
“Vous êtes coulants dans le français?”
“I’m not fluent by any means, but there’s plenty of Creole in the hood where I grew up, so I can catch the gist of the simpler stuff,” he says. “Wine?”
“Ah, you speak my language now,” I say.
So he understands French—or does he simply read my mind? Either way, I am relieved to hear that he does not expect me to eat with him. Apparently he plans to dine after popping me in a cab, still dewy between the legs. It is a shame, this—he is a man who likes to eat, and I would not have begrudged him a final meal if I could have thought of a way to convince him to eat without me.
“Have a seat, please.” He walks off to where he keeps the wine.
The decor is sleek—walls grey, canvases unframed, furniture low and set about in a geometric fashion. The kitchen area is designed to look sterile as a laboratory. I seat myself on one of the slabby sofas, wondering fleetingly if Wilkie seduced the decorator or vice versa.
Arriving at his wine cabinet, he flicks on the overheads, and the scene alters. His shirt is a mass of creases, dark stains spreading from the armpits. An unwashed plastic container sits next to the sink while a pot bubbles on a burner, gently splattering the tiles. The seating area is out of kilter, as if the maid bumps around with the vacuum and does not realign things. Off by the glass wall, the desk is massed in papers. It is a tired working pad, and Wilkie just a professional guy, stuck in town on a weeknight, hungry, happy to jawbone about himself with some fawning amateur because his wife and kids are out at the house, and he is not the type who dwells comfortably in silence. But now I hear the wine pouring just as the singer’s voice swells from the hidden speakers, and so I must reconsider once again. He keeps me vacillating, this one. He is pure and good, hardworking and inspirational. He is predatory and lascivious. Ah, well.
Wilkie brings me my wine. He has got something red for himself, which he has poured into a different kind of glass.
“I looked you up. I like to know my interviewers.” He seats himself.
“Of course,” I shrug. “So you know I am divorced quite recently and have only just returned to this area. Well, it is sad enough, but not a secret.”
He laughs. “I did not know that, in fact. Found very little on you. Just a few articles. Apparently you came to writing fairly recently. Before that, seems to be a gap.” As if he does not know my story from my supposed “slice of life” articles. As if.
I laugh. “A suitable way to describe my marriage—the gap in the résumé.”
“I didn’t mean to be flippant,” he says immediately.
“It is quite okay,” I assure him. “In truth, I like it. When we met you asked about a French background. It is true, yes, but an odd fact is that I met my ex-husband, who is French, here in the States. So back I went, and spoke little English for almost eight years. We lived in a rural town not so far from Fontainebleau. Each and every house walled in. Outside the walls, nothing but drunken rabbit hunters and old women hatching chickens in incubators. Endless mud and rain, my husband traveling far more than he was home, and of course, the three miscarriages. Ah, but the bread, eh?”
“Eight years. That’s a serious stretch of time.”
I shrug and swallow some wine. “You know, I did not mind so much the idea of a husband who sees other women from time to time—you cannot change the French—but I believe that he owes his wife the courtesy of being discreet. Do you not agree?”
“I do.” Wilkie is comfortable. “You kept his name, though.”
“I did, in fact,” I say, meeting his eye. “I took it when I married him, and it is mine to keep or discard as I wish, not his to reclaim. I like this name. It is, as you pointed out, the name of a beautiful and daring actress. One of the finest in French cinema history.”
“We agree on that,” he assures me. “So what are your own people called?”
I hesitate. “Oh, I see. You need to continue your background check on me. No, no—there is no need to protest. It is fine, and I will in fact provide all the pertinent information for you quite soon. My original name was…”—my voice catches in my throat for just that moment, and I know he hears it, but I must risk it anyway—“…I was called Nightingale.”
He looks across at me, eyes narrowing. Ah, yes, he has made me, finally! But of course he would have been alert during the trial. Unlike some of his fellow defendants—Terence D’Amante and Rocco Petrianni and Bruno Myeroff—Wilkie would have read the papers and would have known what people were saying, even about the peripheral characters, as his personal nightmare played out. I sit there on his flat, modern sofa, heart thudding. The wine in my glass trembles. I like him, you see, but I fear anything that may derail my plan.
“Julie Nightingale,” he says. “Lovely name. Poetic. You should repossess that one. When you’re ready, of course.”
“I will do so,” I say. “But only when I am ready, as you say.”
He holds out his glass and we toast—to me, I suppose. And so he knows who I am, or so he thinks. He needs no further reassurance. I am bound for home.
He brings the conversation around to the piece I am supposedly hoping to write about him. I chatter defensively about how a sheltered white woman may write with conviction about a black man who hails from the streets. He pretends to buy my argument. All the while I am trying to sort out my confusion over how difficult he is for me to fourrage. He is not like these other men, who were so simple. Yes, he too has the male vanity—the relentless throb of the libido and the competitive ambition and the rather mono-dimensional perspective on his place in the world—all of this. But it is obscured by his heightened sense of others, his innate ability to probe the minds of those around him. He is a successful politician and thus of course a gifted manipulator. But also he has the emotion, the empathy. He loves. Not his wife—or not her in any complicating way, I sense—but perhaps he loves his little girls enough to awaken in him an intuition that clouds my fourrage and frightens me away from trying to suggère in his head. He has loved others as well. Relative strangers. Even an elderly neighbor who took an interest in him as a boy.
“I plan to
start the piece with Oleander Tidwell,” I say.
It is like water dashed in his face. So I am, in fact, able to fourrage him, if only in the vague fragments.
“I see,” he says. “You’ve done a bit of homework.” Then he seems to recover. “Or are you speaking about that day in Dorchester—Oleander as the hit-and-run victim?”
I sip the fancy wine, then slide a smile over the edge of my glass. “The article is to be about you, not about the Dorchester Five. We will not hide from it, but there will be little if any sensationalism in this piece. Is it not time for this?”
He agrees, but I’ve aroused his suspicions. “You know, my personal history was never discussed in open court,” he says. “I saw to that. My attorney attempted to use my prior connection with Oleander during the trial, but I shut that shit down, and I know that there is no publically available transcript of the testimony that contains that stretch of questioning. I know it because I saw to it. This leaves me wondering how you would have learned of any dealings I might have had with Oleander Tidwell prior to her being killed on the street that day?”
He studies me. He is right that some cub reporter wistfully scratching around the cold news files would not have come up with a connection between him and Oleander. Only someone who had sat through the trial, listening every day, would know about it, unless she was very lucky, and I do not strike him as a true nose-for-news kind of gal. But after he did not make me upon hearing that I am Nightingale, I am confident that he does not and will not recognize me. The persona I have taken on for him, even more so than the last two, is simply too far removed from the silent, expressionless drone with the colorless shingle-cut hair, through the weeks of testimony, never wavering, never raising an eyebrow, seeming perhaps not quite present enough to follow the proceedings even if she had wanted to, and not curious enough to try. Slouching my way in every morning. Slouching out, for breaks and at the end of the day. Standing at the “all rise” with the rest of them, although perhaps I could have escaped complying with that imperious command due to my particular role in the trial. The occasional tissue to the nose or lips. A sip through a straw. Little else, really. Still, it will not do for me to remind him in any way of that brooding, persistent presence.
