“A white cat? No, I don’t understand.”
“How about a whole string of white cats?”
“You’ve lost me.”
“How about a line of white cats that originated in the Moscow Art Theater? How about a line of white cats that people would murder for?”
“Calm down, lady. Calm down,” he said, moving away from me a bit.
“I am calm.”
“No . . . you’re spinning your wheels. All I’m saying is that the whole deal went bad the first time you stepped into Retro.”
“Was that my fault? Was it my fault a bunch of juveniles started making catcalls?”
“You should have been prepared for it. You shouldn’t have let it bother you.”
“Well, thank you for your advice, Detective.”
We were silent for a while. But Detective Rothwax didn’t leave. And I didn’t move. I wondered where Detective Arcenaux was. I wondered if he, too, knew that I had been fired.
“And I’ll tell you something else . . .” he finally said, then paused, removed a roll of cough drops from his shirt pocket, offered me one, which I refused, and popped one into his mouth with a benevolent sigh, as if the world was now set right. “I think your theories are crazy. But I also think everything in that Retro blue book on the case is Grade A manure.”
“You mean the computer is inaccurate?”
“No . . . no . . . forget the computer. I mean I’m beginning to think that the toy-mouse connection is a scam. I don’t think there is any connection between the murders at all. Nothing . . . nada.”
For some reason, he spat the cough drop out onto the street.
“You know,” he said, “when I was a kid, I had a cat.”
“That’s nice,” I said. It came out sarcastic, but I hadn’t meant it that way. I just didn’t know how to respond. So what if he had a cat when he was a child? A lot of people do.
“But my mother made me get rid of him.”
“Why?”
“She was allergic to cats.”
“And you’ve been tormented ever since,” I teased.
“No. The cat had to go.”
“You mean like I had to go?”
“Sort of.”
“You mean I gave you people a rash?”
He got huffy. “Okay. All I wanted to say was I was sorry the way the whole stupid thing turned out.” And then he walked toward the building entrance and vanished through the swinging doors.
***
The shopping bags were so heavy that I decided to take a cab back to my apartment, and the moment I got into the cab the heavens opened and torrents of spring rain poured down. The cab crawled uptown through the rain. A block from my apartment the rain suddenly ceased, and by the time I left the cab the sun was out again.
I dragged my shopping bags up the stone steps, opened the outer door, and stepped into the vestibule, searching for my keys.
A man’s hand reached out and touched my arm! Frightened, I dropped one of the shopping bags and stepped back against the door. The hand dropped away.
I turned and stared. Then I screamed. In front of me was the most horrible face I had ever seen—crisscrossed with white stripes.
“God! Shut up, Alice. It’s me. Tony.”
I froze halfway toward the second scream. Yes, it was Tony. And those things on his face were bandages.
Chapter 14
It took us hours to get into my apartment. We crawled up the stairs. I kept on dropping the shopping bags because I had to hold on to a wavering Tony.
When we finally got into the apartment, I deposited Tony on the sofa and dropped the bags heavily to the floor.
I sat down on the floor, exhausted.
The phone started to ring. It rang and rang. I realized that I hadn’t connected the answering device. The phone stopped ringing.
Then Bushy began to act strangely. He walked back and forth with his tail high and started to make very odd sounds.
“I scare him,” Tony whispered.
Maybe he did. I didn’t know. I stared at Tony. His face was like hamburger with all kinds of absurd white patches over it, as if he had been treated by a madman. His wrists and fingers were also bandaged.
Then I rushed into the kitchen and returned with a glass of apple juice. I fed it to him like he was a baby.
“They fired me, Tony,” I said to him, talking as if he was a sick child who had to be diverted from some horrible truth.
He smiled and almost choked. It was very hard for him to swallow the liquid.
“God, Tony,” I finally blurted out, “tell me what happened.”
He nodded and pushed the juice away.
The phone started to ring again. I remained where I was. Weakly Tony raised one hand to signify that I should answer it. I let it ring. Bushy leapt up on the dining-room table, his tail still high. I stared at him. Bushy never went onto the dining-room table. Never. That was where Pancho rested from time to time.
The phone stopped again. Tony smiled weakly.
“What happened, Tony?” I persisted. His face was so strange, filled with those small white bandages.
“I rented a car. A Toyota Tercel. I started driving up to the Adirondacks . . . to Desolate Swamp.” His hand dropped the apple-juice glass and it fell onto the carpet. Bushy leapt down from the table, inspected the mess, then scooted across the room to the window ledge.
“I’m sorry, Swede.”
“What happened, Tony?”
“I reached Kingston. That’s about two hours north of here, at the turnoff for Route Twenty-Eight.”
He paused and tried to catch his breath. The phone was still ringing in my ears but it had stopped.
“I remember there was an overpass and traffic suddenly slowed down. I was in the middle lane. And there was a truck tailgating me so I moved to the speed lane. Then suddenly I heard these crazy noises . . . like tiny little explosions that rang in my ear . . . and then all the glass in my windshield began to shatter and fly around.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes. He looked in pain. I moved to the sofa beside him and ran my hand through his hair.
“Someone shot at me from the overpass. With a deer rifle, the cops said. They said I was lucky to be alive. Once the glass started shattering, I turned the wheel and ran up on the center retainer. Luckily, my car stalled there, otherwise it would have gone over to the south lane, and I would have been crushed by oncoming traffic. Anyway, they took me to the emergency ward, but all I had was a lot of tiny cuts . . . hundreds of them . . . on my face and hands . . . and I lost a lot of blood.”
The phone started to ring again. This time I picked it up. The conversation was very bizarre.
“Is this Alice Nestleton? . . . My name is Tricia Lamb. Your agent gave me your name. I’m producing Sophocles’ Philoctetes in New York this coming winter.”
Silence. I stared at Tony.
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes, yes,” I replied.
“Well, I’d like to meet with you.”
“For what?”
“Concerning your appearing in the production.”
The whole conversation was confusing me. I kept staring at Tony. He seemed to be in pain. He kept trying to move on the sofa.
“Can we meet tomorrow? Around one? For lunch? There’s a nice Japanese restaurant on Forty-Sixth, just west of Fifth. It’s called Datsu.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Tricia Lamb. I assure you, this is a production that will interest you.”
And then she hung up.
“Who was it?”
“A woman named Tricia Lamb.”
I laughed out loud and then tried to explain. “She’s a producer. She wants to offer me
a role in Philoctetes.”
“In what?”
“Philoctetes. That play by Sophocles. At least I think that’s why she called.”
I sat back down beside Tony. I understood that I had made a lunch appointment with the strange caller, but it seemed to be very unreal. The caller, my cats, myself, Tony—all of us seemed to be suspended over a precipice, and beneath us, shrouded in a fog so thick we could not see, was the Desolate Swamp. All kinds of things began to pop into my head—names, places, events.
Then I buried my face in my hands and began to sob. I could not stop crying. It was like someone was inside of me and pushing the tears out.
Tony picked up my hand. “What is the matter with you? Why are you crying like that? What is wrong with you?” He kept repeating his questions over and over again.
When I had finally stopped, when I finally could keep the sobs down, I became furious at him for some reason. “Don’t you understand? I almost got you killed!” I was screaming at him. The noise sent Bushy scurrying away and brought Pancho in from some high crag in the kitchen to confront the enemy.
“Calm down, Swede, you’re getting crazy. Yes, I could have been killed. But I wasn’t. Calm down.”
“Look at your face, Tony!”
“It will heal. Believe me, Swede, it will heal.”
“I know who shot you, Tony.”
“Who?”
“That madman—Karl Bonaventura.”
“You don’t have any proof of that, Swede.”
“Proof? The man is psychotic. And I’ll tell you something else. Remember when we were in his sister’s apartment? Remember he told us about the notes? The notes she wrote her cat on the back of the bills. Well, I think he set the whole thing up. I think he wrote the notes. I think he sent us to the Desolate Swamp so he could murder one of us or both of us.”
“I don’t know what to make out of what you’re saying now, Swede. I’m very tired. Really, I’ll talk about it with you later.”
I helped him lie down on the sofa. I rushed into the hall closet and brought back pillows and blankets and tried to make him comfortable.
Then I stepped back and stared out the window. It was astonishing. There was still daylight left. I had already lost my job . . . been offered a role in a play . . . discovered that someone had tried to murder Tony—and there was still daylight left. It was hard to comprehend.
Chapter 15
I spent the next morning taking care of Tony . . . rereading Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which I had in a very beat-up old paperback, and in what was probably a very outdated translation . . . and thinking with great bitterness about Judy Mizener and Retro—about being cut off from an opportunity to help seventeen murdered souls rest in peace. It was odd, I realized, how every bit of evidence I had brought to Retro’s computer for evaluation had further alienated Retro’s staff from me. It was they who had made the original connection between all the murders—the toy mouse. But the more I confirmed their original insight, the more I showed them that the crime was indeed in some very profound sense feline, the more they had backed away.
Tony was still in a kind of shock, lying on the sofa, then walking about the apartment, then going back to the sofa. He carried on long, rather obscure conversations with Bushy, who looked upset that his usual morning siesta was constantly being interrupted by this interloper.
I was fifteen minutes late for my appointment in the Japanese restaurant with Tricia Lamb. She was not at all what I had expected. I mean, she had told me she was producing the play, so I anticipated a producer type. But she turned out to be one of those strange fringe people who keep popping up and vanishing in the theater. She wore jeans and a lovely white sweater. No makeup, no ornaments, a face so pale it looked like a piece of papyrus. She spoke in a conspiratorial hush, and her accent sounded vaguely Bostonian. It was impossible to tell her age. She could have been twenty-five. She could have been fifty.
I had a bottle of Japanese beer. She ordered and drank three vodka martinis before I ordered broiled eel on a bed of rice. I like eel. She ordered only a cup of clam soup and an endive salad.
We made small talk until the food came. Then she said, “I saw your performance in Montreal—the Portabello production of Romeo and Juliet. You were spectacular.”
“Thank you.”
“I think what we’re doing will intrigue you. Do you know the play?”
“I’ve read it. I never saw a production.”
She smiled almost maliciously and leaned forward over the table. Her eyes were glinting amber. “I’ve been obsessed with this play a long time. A very long time.”
It was not the kind of statement one could respond to. I started to pick at the eel and rice.
“Do you have a theater?” I asked.
“No theater . . . a loft on Leonard Street . . . downtown.”
For most actresses, the word “loft” signals death—an amateur production . . . not worthy of professionalism. But not for me. I have been alive long enough to know that nothing good happens in New York theater unless it is in a loft . . . the grimier the better.
“Who is directing?”
“Me,” she said in a violent whisper. “I’m producing and directing and funding, and my translation of the play is the one being used.”
That was strange. “Did you study Greek?”
“I studied everything.”
She drank her soup fastidiously, down to the last drop. Then she prepared to eat the salad. But she put the fork down.
“The play is not what it seems,” she said. “It seems to be about a Greek archer on his way to Troy. He is bitten by a snake, and the wound becomes infected and painful. The stench from the wound and the man’s cries are too much for his comrades to bear . . . so they abandon him on a deserted island. He survives there but his wound will not heal. Meanwhile, his comrades cannot capture Troy. An oracle is given to them. Troy will be conquered only if Philoctetes is rescued from his island and brought to Troy. But Philoctetes refuses to be rescued if it means going to Troy, for his hatred of his comrades is too strong. He wants them to be defeated.”
She smiled, picked up one piece of salad, and let it drop back into the plate. Then she continued.
“Only when the demigod Heracles is sent down to the island does Philoctetes agree to go. Scholars say the play is about the conflict between the individual and the state . . . or how one must sacrifice one’s own feelings—either likes or dislikes—for the good of the many . . . in this case the need for the Greeks to conquer Troy.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think that’s nonsense. I think the play is about the wound.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s about a wound that will not heal . . . a wound that becomes increasingly loathsome. It’s about existence.”
I understood vaguely what she was talking about and I sympathized. But while she was speaking, all I could think of was Karl Bonaventura. About his wound. About the festering memory of a dead sister that seemed to have pushed him into attempted murder.
“You see, Alice, in my translation of the play, the wound is in the groin, not in the foot. The wound is castration. The wound is impotence. And all the roles, except for the lead, except for the hero with the wound, are played by women.”
That was unexpected. I snapped out of my Bonaventura musing and paid Tricia Lamb more attention. I had thought, when she originally contacted me, that I would be merely passing myself off as a man in a man’s role. After all, many actresses have played Hamlet in drag. Just as many men have played women’s roles. But Tricia Lamb was literally changing the sex of the protagonists, except for Philoctetes.
“Yes,” she affirmed, noticing my surprise, “an all-female cast, playing women, even the chorus—except for Philoctetes.”
�
�Have you altered the script to make that more logical?” I asked.
“I have done a lot of things with the script, but I have more or less kept the framework of the play intact—at least in terms of dialogue.”
The waiter took away our plates. She had not finished her salad. I had eaten every scrap of the eel and most of the rice. I ordered ice cream for dessert.
“I think the role of Odysseus would be perfect for you. I truly do.”
“Odysseus?”
“Yes.”
I ate my ice cream slowly. Tricia Lamb was now staring past me . . . as if she was envisioning opening night.
“Don’t you want any dessert?” I asked her.
“No,” she replied. “Actually, I don’t like Japanese food. The only reason I go to Japanese restaurants for lunch is I like the plain wooden tables they always use.” She ran her hand over the polished wood grain.
“When do you need an answer?”
“Well, there’s plenty of time. I hope we’ll start previews sometime next February or March. And rehearsal in early December. Actually, there’s going to be a kind of workshop first before we get into the script.”
“What kind of workshop?”
“Just a kind of study session so everyone involved knows where I’m coming from . . . so they know what I see is going on . . . so they can deal with their wound.” She looked at me slyly and grinned.
“I’ll think it over very carefully,” I said to her.
“Good! I want you very much in the role. I love your work!”
“Well, thank you.”
“I know that I haven’t been too precise . . . that I have been talking in vague concepts a lot. But I’ll send you my translation in a couple of weeks. Don’t make any decision until you read it.”
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