Mr. Apology

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Speak to me, Harry. Say something to me. He killed some poor goddamn woman tonight—”

  She stopped. Her throat was suddenly dry, her voice hoarse. She wanted something to drink but she didn’t move.

  “He’s not going to harm you, Maddy. I wouldn’t let anybody touch you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Then prove it to me. Pull the plug from the wall. Get rid of the machine. Forget the project. Can you do that for me, Harry? Will you go that far for me?”

  She knew the answer even before he spoke. She knew exactly what he was going to say and she felt a darkness rising inside her brain. She knew.

  “I have to finish this, Maddy.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I have to finish it.” He was speaking very slowly in a determined way.

  She turned on her side away from him.

  “Have you ever looked around this loft, Maddy? Have you ever counted the number of unfinished canvases? Have you ever actually been aware of all the slats of wood and pieces of metal lying around that were supposed to be incorporated into sculptures? Have you ever really looked? Do you know what happened to me with all those unfinished things? I lost interest. I lost enthusiasm. I lost that bright moment when you first get the idea.…” He paused. “I have to finish Apology. I need to finish it.”

  “When does it end, for Christ’s sake? When will you have enough tapes, Harry? When you’ve recorded the collected sins of the city of New York?”

  “It ends when I think I’ve got enough tapes. That’s when it ends.”

  “And how the hell will you know?”

  “I’ll know.” His voice was firm. It was the kind of tone that left no space for negotiation, for barter. The thing was fixed in his mind and nothing would shake it loose. She shut her eyes. She didn’t want to but she found herself listening to the voice again, found herself hearing it over and over inside her head.

  Then I’ll twist the blade in your neck.…

  Then I’ll twist the blade …

  Then I’ll twist …

  “He’s going to find you, Harry,” she whispered. And me, she thought. Me too.

  He had risen from the bed and gone to the window; he was staring out into the darkness as if he might somehow conjure the face of the caller out of the configuration of rooftops and night clouds and faded stars.

  Okay, so you lost your enthusiasm for past projects. So you’re surrounded by your past failures, Harry. But your enthusiasm for Apology is going to kill us.

  “He’s going to find you,” she said again, still whispering.

  She drew the sheets up over her head and slid under them, like a child seeking comfort and security in a cocoon, a fragile tent of cotton. Don’t let anything harm us. Don’t let the darkness outside come in to touch us. Don’t let it slither over telephone wires and skip past electronic circuits and junction boxes to invade our lives like this. Don’t let it all be wrecked.

  Don’t let him find us.

  FIVE

  1.

  They were in an Indian restaurant on 29th Street, a dimly lit place that smelled of sandalwood. Harrison put a forkful of a hot lamb vindaloo in his mouth and looked at Madeleine across the table. The curry was making him sweat; he could feel moisture across his forehead and on the palms of his hands. Madeleine looked lovely and curiously insubstantial, as if she were a trick of the smoke that rose from the candle, a shape randomly formed. She was staring down at her food, playing with it, pushing little mounds of saffron rice around her plate. He reached across the table and touched the back of her hand. He knew what she was thinking, why she was distant, why it was he couldn’t get close to her. It was last night’s call: It was still last night’s call. She put her fork down and stared at him, rubbing her brow with her hand. He wanted to think that it wasn’t the tape, that it didn’t have anything to do with Apology, that maybe she’d had a hard day at the gallery, anything at all—but he knew otherwise.

  “I don’t feel like eating.” She pushed the plate aside.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It’s not okay. It’s not okay at all.”

  He stared across the restaurant. He didn’t want to think about Apology now; it was as if this restaurant were an oasis of calm away from the babble of the tapes—only it wasn’t working out like that. He stroked her fingers. He hated this distance between them.

  “It’s a very scary feeling, Harry. That’s what I’m trying to make you see. It’s a very scary feeling to think of somebody running around out there.…” She waved a hand in the air quickly. “Running around out there and playing some weird game …” She paused, then added: “It’s not a game. It’s more than a game.”

  Harrison put his fork down and picked up his glass of beer, sipping it slowly. It tasted heavy to him, clouded. Beyond Madeleine’s face he could see the window that faced the street, dark doorways opposite, dense shadows.

  “When I went to the gallery today I couldn’t stop watching the street, Harry. I couldn’t stop imagining that somebody was going to come through the door, the bell would ring, a guy would come in … only he wouldn’t be interested in looking at paintings. When I went to your loft tonight I couldn’t help feeling there were footsteps immediately behind me. I don’t like these feelings. I can live perfectly well without them. I hate tension. I hate nerves. I like my life to be peaceful.” She smiled at him in a weak way. “Maybe it’s this city. Maybe it gets too heavy after a while. Sometimes I think about going someplace where I can breath clean air and close my eyes and listen to noises that aren’t traffic noises and just recharge the old batteries.”

  He tightened his fingers around her hand. “I love you,” he said. The perennial balm. The age-old lozenge to soothe pain away. Why did it sound so damn feeble to him just then?

  “I love you too, Harry. I just don’t like the idea of either of us getting hurt by this maniac.…” Her voice faded away.

  “Nobody’s going to get hurt,” he said. He could hear a slight quiver of doubt in his own words, then he was remembering last night’s call and how it had seemed closer in some way, physically nearer. The message had been more immediate, more menacing, less vague than any of the previous ones. The call had shaken him at the time, shaken him enough for him to want to prevent Maddy from hearing the tape—but in the hours that had passed since then the threat seemed to have diminished, whittled away by the passage of daylight.

  “How can you just sit there and say something like that? He talked about killing some poor woman. He described it in detail. He enjoyed talking about it. How could that escape you? How could you fail to notice that this creep means everything he says, Harry?”

  She closed her eyes, biting on her lower lip. He hated to see her this unnerved. He set his beer glass down and tilted his chair back against the wall. He said, “Listen, if he killed anybody the way he described, how come we didn’t see it in the papers? And what about this other murder he mentioned? The guy with all the pictures of dancers inside his apartment. Did you see anything like that in the papers, Maddy?”

  She shook her head, didn’t open her eyes. “He said something about the woman living alone. Something like that. If she did live on her own, maybe nobody’s found the body.”

  “Okay, so what about the dancer business?”

  “I don’t know.” She was working her hands together, gazing at him now. “All I know is that you won’t let go of this project. You won’t put it aside. I don’t know what’s happening to you, Harry.”

  “Nothing’s happening.”

  “I’ve watched you listen to your precious tapes. I’ve seen the expression on your face.”

  “What expression?”

  “I can’t describe it. It’s like you’re so completely wrapped up in listening you don’t seem to really hear. Those voices aren’t musical notes, and this isn’t some sonata you’re composing. Those voices are saying things, words that have meanings, Harry.”

  “I know what they
’re saying.”

  She dropped her napkin on the table, picked up her fork, set it down again. “You’re lost inside the project. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. You’re lost inside it and it’s like a maze, Harry. It’s like you’re trapped inside something and you can’t find your way out again.”

  “I’m not lost. I’m not trapped,” he said. “The project interests me. It intrigues me. I feel good about it. There’s a whole world of difference.”

  She shook her head. “It’s going out of your control. Can’t you see that?”

  “It’s not going out of control—”

  She held one hand up to stop him. “I’m going to say something you won’t like. I’m going to tell you that you should turn the tapes with his voice over to the police.”

  He felt a slight edge of anger, irritation. “I can’t do that.”

  “Look, I know what you feel. I understand your commitment. I’ve been with you all the way—but this time I think you’ve got something the cops need to hear.”

  “It’s out of the question. I don’t even want to talk about it.”

  “It needs to be talked about.”

  “Right from the start, you understood the principle behind this thing. You understood the tapes had nothing to do with the cops. You helped me write the handbill. How can you expect me to go back on that?”

  “Don’t get angry.”

  “I am not getting angry.”

  “Harry. I know what you’re thinking. I get these phrases floating into my brain. Betrayal of trust. Treachery. Things like that. But what’s more important to you? Your personal safety? Mine? Or some unlikely bond you think you’ve made with a city full of goddamn strangers? Huh? What’s more important to you, Harry?”

  “Look, your safety’s more important than anything else, Maddy. You didn’t even have to ask that question. You knew what my answer would be. And if I thought you were really in any danger, I’d dismantle the whole thing myself and take all the tapes to the nearest cop.”

  She stared at him. “Would you? You honestly think you’d do that? I’m not so sure anymore, Harry.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He reached for his beer, drained it, put the glass down. Last night he told her he loved her. Why weren’t they celebrating this realization, this change in the structure of their lives, instead of arguing about disembodied voices on a tape recorder? He felt suddenly very weary. He looked at her face, the signs of concern, anxiety, the shadows under her eyes. He wished he could just reach out and touch with her some kind of magic that would transform everything. You have that magic potential, Harry, he thought. You only need to pull a certain plug from a certain wall outlet and the whole world will undergo a transformation.

  “I can’t get through to you,” she said. “What do I have to do to get my point across?”

  “I understand your point—” He stopped. She had risen suddenly and was removing her coat from the back of the chair where she’d draped it. “Where are you going?”

  “I need some air,” she said.

  He watched her go quickly towards the door.

  It was chilly and rainy outside and she walked hurriedly. There was a newsstand just ahead. A long stretch of dark sidewalk, a tiny island of light. She plunged her hands into the pockets of her coat, reached the newsstand, paused. A gust of abrupt wind came along the street; she felt her coat flap against her legs. She looked at the damp covers of magazines. Cavalier. Oui. Screw. The shrill weekly tabloids. “WAS JESUS FROM ANOTHER PLANET?” The foreign papers and magazines. The Guardian. La Monde. Osservatore Romano. She saw a stack of copies of New York and read about Harry on the front cover, small print tucked beneath a slogan that read: “The Survival Skills of Mayor Koch.” She bought six copies of the magazine, then turned away from the vendor, a small man with rheumy eyes; you want to buy a newspaper, she thought. You want to buy a newspaper and go through it page by page until you find what you’re looking for.

  She moved to the edge of the sidewalk, stared at the magazine cover, glanced back the way she had come. She could see pale light fall from the window of the Indian restaurant.

  A newspaper.

  The mention of a killing.

  Maybe two killings.

  She felt the rain wash across her face. You still want to believe there’s nothing wrong. There’s no substance to the calls. You still want to believe, the way Harry seems to believe, that it’s just some loony out there talking about his murderous fantasies.

  She moved back towards the newsstand. She bought a newspaper. She went to the streetlight and stood under it. Drops of dirty rain fell over the headlines, soaked through the paper. I won’t find anything, she thought. Nothing has ever happened. It’s all one bad dream.

  Skip the pages quickly.

  She heard footsteps along the sidewalk, raised her face, saw Harry come towards her. She looked back at the newspaper again.

  Flipping pages. Scanning. Searching.

  The headlines raged, screamed, teased. She wasn’t seeing the words, understanding the meanings, she was just turning the pages quickly as if she had been programmed to find only one article, one item of news. Photographs went past like pictures of so many dead people pasted in an album.

  She was conscious, without looking, of Harry standing alongside her now.

  Then something caught her eye. She read the piece, folded the newspaper over, leaned against the lamppost, and stared upwards into the light and the rain falling through. It was like discovering that what you thought had been a dream was in fact something that had taken place. It was like checking out your dream against reality and finding the experiences matched in every detail.

  She felt strangely empty, hollow, as if something essential had collapsed inside her.

  “Look.” Her voice was flat.

  He took the newspaper from her, read the piece she indicated, then passed it back to her in silence. She slanted it towards the streetlamp and stared at the item again, hoping it might have vanished.

  Henry Falcon, a retired ballet dancer, was found strangled yesterday in his apartment. The assailant apparently used a pair of Falcon’s tights to strangle the dancer, 64, who had once danced for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in the United States.

  She turned and stared at his face. By the shallow light of the overhead lamp he appeared sunken, his eyes nothing more than hollows filled with darkness, great shadows under his jawbones. He opened his mouth.

  “Don’t say anything, Harry,” she said. “I want to go back to the loft. I want to go back there and bolt the door and go to bed.”

  He nodded. She felt his hand on her elbow. A man is killed. A former dancer. Strangled. An anonymous voice comes over an answering machine. Two sets of facts inexorably connected, intertwined, cause and effect. Two devastating sets of facts.

  “I want to feel safe, Harry,” she said.

  Safe.

  Safe.

  She wondered what that word meant. All at once it had the ring of a word uttered in an obsolete language.

  She let the paper slip from her hands, watched it slither towards the gutter, saw the wind tug the pages and scatter them all the way down the rainy street.

  2.

  Imagine you wake up one morning and the telephone rings and you’re feeling pretty godawful, because it’s a Monday morning and you really don’t feel like going to work at the meat market and it’s one of those miserable rainy days in the Bronx—but this is a whole different morning, because it’s the one when your life changes completely and you go, in one great swoop, from poverty to wealth, because this is the day your number came up on the state lottery.…

  Jamey Hausermann switched off her electric typewriter and got up from her desk, wandering to the window of the apartment. She looked down into the street and watched the early-evening traffic flow past. It was almost seven o’clock; she checked the time on her wristwatch and wondered why Walt hadn’t come home yet. Then she remembered he had a meeting to attend downto
wn someplace and he wouldn’t get back until ten or so. She folded her arms, leaned against the wall, wondered how she’d feel if she woke up, just like old Joe Slattery over in the Bronx, and found out she’d won enough money for the rest of her life. Would some kind of apathy set in? Would you just want to buy yourself a house upstate someplace and raise cattle? She closed her eyes and put her forehead against the glass and thought about Madeleine’s guy, Harry Harrison, and what he might do if he’d been as lucky as Joe Slattery. He’d go out and buy himself a state-of-the-art answering machine, probably, one of those that computed the number of calls as they came in, one that even found time at the end of the day to work out your household expenses and income tax. What a kooky project, she thought. Maybe he had the kind of mentality of a failed priest—no, he’d been likable enough, and it was obvious that Maddy was devoted to him. What was it about that whole project that made her feel kinda shivery? She wandered around the living room, touching objects as she passed them—the long slivers of peacock feathers that rose like elegant flowers from a Chinese vase, the edge of a rattan sofa, the wood margins of a large Chinese screen. These oriental doodads were Walt’s; for herself she preferred a more spartan environment, something more bare—your basic desk, chair, coffeepot, carton of cigarettes.

  But Walt liked all the Chinese attachments. He had a set of gold-plated acupuncture needles (a souvenir from some trip he’d made to Peking years ago), a couple of woks, wall fans, chopsticks, and a library of oriental cookbooks. She sat down on the sofa, listening to the creak of wicker, and swung her legs up. It was a pain always working to some goddamn deadline or other. One day she would like the luxury of being able to spend months on a project instead of this constant hurry hurry hurry. Now just how does it feel to win the state lottery? The trouble with Joe Slattery, she thought, is that he isn’t very bright. Maybe they should have IQ tests or something to discern your right to purchase tickets—nobody under 118 IQ need apply. She rubbed her eyelids and rose when she heard the telephone ring. She reached out for it, spoke her name, then found herself listening to silence: no click, no hangup, just a long silence. A breather, she thought. A panter. A creep.