by John Lutz
What he got each time was a recording politely but acidly berating him for dialing incorrectly and suggesting that he please try again. He felt just like Beaver Cleaver being reprimanded by his TV series mother.
He kept trying, as the honey-voiced recording had urged.
On the fifth attempt he got a dial tone. He hung up the phone and jotted down the four numbers in the sequence that had accomplished this and slipped the paper into his pocket, immensely pleased with himself.
Jeanette was smiling down at him, apparently impressed at last. Nudger’s ego inflated a couple of more pounds per square inch.
“Everything’s elementary if approached in a simple-enough fashion,” she said, shrinking him once more to doltish proportions.
“That’s me,” Nudger told her, “I’m simple and I work cheap.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” Jeanette said. “Remember the model T Ford. Reliable if not swift. The favorite of millions.”
They left Jenine’s depressing apartment and Nudger drove Jeanette back to her car, parked outside his office.
His spirits perked up as he pulled to the curb in front of the building and switched off the engine; he was lucky enough to get the parking space with the broken meter. Fortune’s wheel on the upswing ?
“It smells terrific around here,” Jeanette said, as he walked with her to her very practical blue sedan.
“That’s the doughnut shop located directly below my office,” Nudger told her. “Don’t be fooled by the aroma.”
“That’s always been my philosophy,” she said, unlocking and opening her car door. Before getting behind the steering wheel she asked, “What now?”
“As I am an investigator,” Nudger said, “I will commence to investigate. I’m going to find out more about those numbers; I’m well connected at the phone company.”
She lowered her neat frame and scooted onto the seat, fishing in her oversized white vinyl purse for her keys. “You’ll call me?”
“When I have something worth saying.”
Her face was as placid and unexpressive as ever as she drove away. She could have been one of the gang on Mount Rushmore.
Nudger realized suddenly that a cool drizzle was falling on him and that it was past lunchtime. Probably he should have invited the unresponsive Jeanette to dine with him. That would have been the gentlemanly and professional thing to do, even though he didn’t want to take time for lunch.
Dodging traffic, he crossed the street, but before trudging up the narrow flight of stairs to his office, he ducked into Danny’s Donuts. He would assuage hunger and at the same time do penance for his lack of manners by eating an iced Danny’s Dunker Delite, and so kill two birds with one stone.
Chewing antacid tablets as if they were addictive, Nudger left his office and bounced across St. Louis in his dented vintage Volkswagen beetle to his appointment with Sam Fisher, a phone company programmer who made most of his income with his lucrative side business.
“So whose phone do you want bugged, Nudge?” Fisher asked, as Nudger settled into a chair in Fisher’s semi-private, glassed-in office. The place was like an aquarium.
Nudger’s stomach did a quick somersault and he glanced around nervously at the scores of employees milling about beyond the clear glass walls of the cubicle. He felt as if he and Fisher were on display. “Aren’t you, er, afraid someone might overhear?”
Fisher smiled beneath his wide graying mustache. He had the eyes of an anarchist. “I do the overhearing around here.” He waved an arm, gold wristwatch glinting. “Nobody’ll hear us in here; I took precautions.”
“Good,” Nudger said, “because I came here for information.”
Not telling Fisher why he wanted that information, Nudger explained what he needed to know. Fisher confirmed that there were such service numbers, and that it was common knowledge within the company that they were used for illegal late night conversations but that nothing was being done about it. The reasons he gave for the phone company’s inaction were the same that Jeanette had stated.
“There are five such numbers, Nudge,” Fisher said. “The caller dials, hears a tone, then waits until someone dials the corresponding number that makes the connection. The line will stay open until that happens.”
“There’s no ring?” Nudger asked.
“Not on these lines,” Fisher said. “During the day they’re kept open for installers and repairmen. At night the weirdos get on the lines and wait for a similar weirdo to make a connection. Weird talk ensues. Nobody knows exactly how these numbers become known to the public, but people have a way of finding out, especially the kinds of people who might use the lines at night.”
“Can more than two people use one line at the same time?”
“No. They’re not like party or conference lines. Anyone wanting to use a busy line has to wait until one of the callers has hung up.”
“Would there be any permanent record of such calls from a particular number?”
Fisher shook his head. “None.”
An impeccably groomed executive type in a three-piece pinstripe suit knocked on the glass cubicle and pointedly held up his wristwatch, apparently reminding Sam Fisher of an appointment, probably for lunch. Fisher waved and the man went away.
“What I need to know, Sam ...” Nudger said.
But Fisher was already jotting down the five phone numbers on his memo pad. He was probably hungry. He ripped off the sheet of paper and handed it to Nudger.
Nudger thanked him.
“I’ll send you a bill,” Fisher said, “just like the telephone company.”
After Nudger left phone company headquarters, he drove to a restaurant on Washington Avenue and ordered a bacon omelet and a glass of milk. His waitress was a coltish teenage girl with a hundred fiery pimples. She almost dropped or spilled everything and smiled a lot with self-conscious charm.
He sat picking at his food and staring out the grease-spotted window at the traffic on Washington, thinking about how things didn’t feel right the way they were shaping up. Nudger didn’t like danger, and in the manner of any sensible citizen did what he could to avoid it. Of course in his occupation that wasn’t always possible, not unless one tried extra hard. He tried extra hard, always, and had developed a warning sense like that of a ten-point deer during hunting season. That warning tingle at the base of his spine was fairly screaming at him that this time he had stepped into something particularly nasty. He felt like Alice after falling down the rabbit hole, only everybody was trying to keep it from him that he was in Wonderland.
Leaving half the glass of milk and most of the undercooked omelet, he paid his check and left a reasonable tip for the acnemarred teenager. He hoped she realized that someday she would be a beauty. Just as he stepped from the restaurant door onto the sidewalk, it began to rain again. This city and its come-and-go weather.
Nudger returned to his office, locked the door, and got out the army surplus cot and his sleeping bag from the closet. After checking the answering machine for phone messages and hearing about pastdue bills and a limited discount on lakeside resort property, he set his wristwatch’s alarm for midnight. Then he stretched out on his back on the cot, not bothering to get into the sleeping bag.
He laced his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, listening to the oddly comforting faint rattle and pop of steam pipes, the intermittent soft swishing sound of traffic on the rain-swept street two stories below. At least for the time being things were under his control and manageable.
He was forty-three years old. He was tired. The two facts were not unrelated. He had no trouble falling asleep.
The innocent sleep blissfully. So do the unsuspecting.
THREE
Each shrill, penetrating bleep of his wristwatch alarm was like the point of a needle probing the tissue of Nudger’s brain. Something similarly sharp had been scraped across the base of Jenine Boyington’s phone, he told himself foggily in his world of uneasy dreams.
As Nudger c
ame awake, he groped for the ridiculously tiny watch stem and switched off the alarm, then pressed another stem and saw by the glow produced that it was two minutes past midnight. His office was dimly illuminated from the street lamp on the corner. Everything was quiet; even the steam pipes were taking a rest from their cacophony of popping and hissing.
Nudger sat on the edge of the cot, his head resting in his hands. His throat was dry; his tongue was thick and seemed to be covered with that stuff used to fasten coats without buttons or zippers. It was the witching hour and cold and dark, so what was he doing still in his office? What was he doing struggling out of bed? What was he doing in this business? But he knew; he was eating regularly and sometimes paying the bills. The stuff of life.
He stood up, went into the small half-bath and splashed cold water onto his face and rinsed out his mouth. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror above the washbasin, winced, looked away, and went back into the office and sat behind his desk. His swivel chair squealed loud enough to wake the doughnuts downstairs.
After switching on his yellow-shaded desk lamp, Nudger reached for the phone and dragged it to him. He tried the number from the base of Jenine’s phone and got a busy signal. Then he tried all the numbers Fisher had given him and was surprised to keep getting busy signals. He decided to try only the number from Jenine’s apartment and sat punching it out every half minute until he got a dial tone.
Within seconds there was a loud click in the receiver. A male voice said, “Are you there, sweet thing?”
“I’m here,” Nudger said. “How sweet I am is debatable.”
“What’s not debatable,” the man said, “is that you’re not my kind of sweet. That is, unless you’ve got an awfully deep voice to match perfect thirty-six C-cup lung power.”
“I wear a forty-four-long suitcoat,” Nudger said, “sometimes triple-knit, usually a bit frayed at the cuffs and elbows. Still interested ?”
The man laughed. “Sure, but not in you, pal. I got a feeling we’re looking for the same thing.” He hung up.
Very possible, Nudger thought, staying on the line.
Another click.
“I’m a Nordic-type music lover in my early thirties, and I prefer the muscular Mediterranean macho type,” a man said, sounding like one of those classified ads in the personal column of the National Enquirer. “I can be sheep or wolf, if anyone is listening. Also I’m into rubber. Hello, hello, are you there, lover? Are you assimilating my red-hot vibes?”
“I’m assimilating them,” Nudger said, “but I’m not quite on the same wave length. I’m into chocolate frosting.”
“Sounds divine.”
“That’s what Betty Crocker says.”
“You jest?”
“I jest.”
“Ciao, then.” Click.
There was something more than a little sad in all of this, Nudger thought, as he shifted position in his chair. It reminded him of forced gaiety on New Year’s Eve, when everybody realized that time was slipping away from them, but wore funny hats and tooted horns and then riotously sang “Auld Lang Syne,” essentially a sad song.
As if from a great distance, a woman’s gentle voice inquired, “Is anyone there? Anyone? Please?”
“I’m here,” Nudger told her, pressing the receiver tighter to his ear.
“I’m lonely and I’m going to kill myself,” the woman said. She said it as if she meant it.
Nudger sat up straight. What the French call a frisson raised the hair on the nape of his neck. “Don’t do that, please.”
“It’s closing in on me,” the woman said. “Everything’s closing in on me. I don’t think there’s any other way to stop it.”
“I understand how you feel,” Nudger told her, “really I do.”
“You don’t. You can’t. It’s asinine of you to say you understand.”
“Maybe I can’t know for sure whether I understand,” Nudger conceded, “but I’ve had the feeling you just described, where it seems that every available move will lose the game.”
“What do you do?”
“I move, I lose, I start over.”
She laughed. It was a sad laugh, a manifestation of hopelessness.
“I’ve had some experience with suicides,” Nudger said. “None of the people you leave behind will feel sorry for you. Oh, maybe they will at first, but within a short time they’ll be angry about what you did. They’ll stay angry for a long while, maybe the rest of their lives.”
“What possible difference will that make to me when I’m dead?”
There was sound logic in that, all right, Nudger admitted to himself.
“When life becomes unbearable,” the woman said, “why should we continue to suffer?” More logic. Damn!
“Because we only think life is unbearable. If we hang on a while, the situation usually eases up, or maybe it gets worse in a way that might be a little more interesting.”
The woman laughed again, not quite so hopelessly this time.
“Maybe you ought to try seeing a doctor,” Nudger suggested, “a professional who can help you in some way you can’t imagine.”
“I’ve been to a psychiatrist. He listened to me, just like you, only he took notes. Are you taking notes?”
“No, but I would if I thought it would stop you from taking your life. Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you. It might help you if you share your misery.”
“Do you believe in hell?”
“Not.”
“I do. I’m in it.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Nudger said. “You’ve got nothing to compare it with.”
“Do you really think there is something to compare?”
“I think death is nothingness,” Nudger told her. “It scares me.”
“I take it back; you’re not like the psychiatrist.”
“Do you like gorilla jokes?” Nudger asked.
Again the laugh, briefer but brighter. “What a mundane thing to ask a potential suicide.”
“Death is mundane. There is nothing more mundane. Talk to me tomorrow and I’ll tell you some gorilla jokes.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Nudger thought she might not still be on the line. Then she said, “I don’t want to hear the one about where they sleep.”
“My gorilla jokes are much more sophisticated than that. Talk to me tomorrow night. Promise me.” He sensed that he almost had her.
Another pause. “Are gorilla jokes worth staying alive for?”
“Mine are. Anything is worth staying alive for. Talk to me tomorrow on this line. You’ll see. Everyone likes good gorilla jokes. They’re a positive force in this world.”
“All right,” she said. “But I don’t promise. I can’t.”
“Sure,” Nudger told her. “Same time?”
“Same time,” she said, and abruptly hung up.
Nudger replaced his own receiver. He realized that the woman had somehow become more than just a disembodied voice in the night, more than a stranger; their conversation had been piercingly intimate, and he felt as if he knew her, cared about her. Was that what Sam Fisher would describe as weird? Was it so bad? She had been reaching out for human contact, talking and not killing herself.
The office was quiet, the air motionless and thick, almost like liquid. Nudger’s right hand still rested on the flesh-warm receiver. He was clenching his free fist hard enough for his fingernails to indent his palm, and he was perspiring heavily. There was more electricity on the nighttime service lines than was supplied by the phone company.
Nudger usually spared his intestines the rigors of coping with alcohol, but now he got up and walked to the file cabinet where he kept a bottle of Johnny Walker red label for special occasions and his very best clients. He poured himself a generous slug of the amber stuff in a rinsed-out coffee cup, drank it down and felt its warm bite. He went to the window and stood looking down at the street, at the faint greenish neon glow from the Danny’s Donuts sign directly below. He wished the shop
were open with doleful Danny down there behind the counter, grayish towel tucked in his belt, packing his greasy merchandise in fold-up cardboard boxes for carry-out orders for the workers in the surrounding shops and office buildings. It would be nice to talk with someone face-to-face. To read expressions.
Instead, Nudger set the empty cup on the windowsill and returned to his desk and the telephone.
He made several more contacts, had more lengthy conversations, before sitting back and considering it a night’s work. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see that it was almost 5 A.M. Nudger had wanted to acquire a feel for what went over the lines and he’d gotten it. It had sobered him.
He stretched his arms and back, exhaling loudly. Then he made one more phone call, to the Third District, and left a message for Lieutenant Jack Hammersmith, who didn’t come on duty until seven o’clock. When he had hung up, he reset his alarm and lay down again on the sagging cot, this time unable to sleep.
Around him the city gradually awakened, and the nighttime lines were claimed by the daylight hours and became once more the province of telephone company employees conducting routine business.
But a piece of the night had claimed Nudger, with its accompanying very real but indecipherable apprehensions. Like a child, he was afraid of the dark. And he was trapped in it.
FOUR
Hammersmith sat behind his desk in his Third District office and gazed at Nudger through a greenish haze of smoke emitted by one of his incredibly foul-smelling cigars. He was a corpulent Buddha of a man now, so unlike the sleekly handsome officer who had charmed and cajoled the ladies when he and Nudger were partners a decade ago in a two-man patrol car. Time did that sort of thing to people, Nudger mused, sitting down in the hard oak chair before Hammersmith’s desk. He wondered fleetingly what time was doing to him, then promptly forced such depressing speculation from his consciousness. Why stick pins in oneself?
“What are you on to now, Nudge?” Hammersmith asked.
“I need to know about the Jenine Boyington murder,” Nudger said, breathing shallowly to inhale as little secondhand smoke as possible. He understood why the Geneva Convention had outlawed chemical warfare.
