Dante's Numbers nc-7

by David Hewson

  Then she opened her eyes, knowing what she’d see. John Ferguson, whoever he was, sat opposite, his arms leaning easily on a chair back, watching her squirm as she tried to force herself upright on the stiff mattress. It took one look at herself to confirm what she suspected. She was now wearing the strange green dress and nothing else. He must have stripped her while she was unconscious, then put on the old silk garment.

  She tried to move but something stopped her and it hurt. Rough brown rope, the kind construction people used, gripped both her wrists. He’d tied her to the iron bed-head, loose enough to let her move a little, but not much. Not enough to get off the bed entirely.

  He had an expression on his face that suggested he knew the panic that was running through her head, and a part of him liked it. But there was some uncertainty there, too.

  “I told you it was a nice dress.” He reached for a packet of cigarettes tucked into the sleeve of his T-shirt, took one out, the last one, lit it, scrunched up the pack, and threw it on the floor. The smoke rose into the blades of a rotating ceiling fan performing lazy turns above them.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Where the hell am I?”

  “You had an engagement. Don’t you remember? Booze and boyfriends getting to the old grey cells now?”

  “There’ll be people here soon. Just let me go now and I’ll forget this ever happened.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment as if he despaired of her.

  “That’s what I love about movie people. You’re all so damned wrapped up in yourselves you never check stuff out, do you? Someone calls and says”—he put on a high-pitched girl’s voice, like Shirley Temple on drugs—“ ‘Miss Flavier. Oh, Miss Flavier. We love you so much you just got to come open our little noir festival in some flea-pit movie theatre you wouldn’t normally’ ”—the real voice came back—“ ‘ deign to set foot inside.’ And you don’t even think to check it out.”

  He flicked a finger at the face of his watch.

  “Why I say, I say …” She recognised the new voice. It was a cartoon character, fake Southern gentleman Foghorn Leghorn. “… I say, boy … festival folk don’t turn up till four in the afternoon. Till then ain’t nobody here but us chickens.”

  He leaned forward. “I hope you enjoy my voices, Maggie. I’ve been working on them for a while. All my life, if I’m being candid.”

  She hitched herself up on the bed, knees together beneath the sheets, taking the rope as far as it could go before the harsh hemp began to bite into her skin, and said, “Your voices are very good.”

  “We have scarcely scratched the surface, dahling …” he groaned lasciviously.

  She recognised this new look. It was one she’d known since she was a pretty little teenager. He was staring at her as if she were meat.

  “Here’s a question,” he continued. “You wake up stark naked except for that dress and you realise some guy you don’t even know put it on you. At least there is a dress. Not like Madeleine, huh? There she was all … bare … in Scottie’s apartment … nice apartment by the way, play your cards right and one day maybe you get to see it. Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Why didn’t Madeleine scream? Some complete stranger takes her home, puts her in his bed, takes her clothes off …”

  She didn’t rise to the bait. This flustered him.

  “I mean he must have looked, didn’t he? Maybe more than just looked. How would you know? If you were out cold like that?” A pink flush briefly stained his cheeks. “How would you know … If … if … he’d d-d-done the real thing. All the way. You must know, right? You’d feel something. I guess.”

  She still didn’t say anything.

  “But what about if he just kind of … fiddled around?” He sniggered. “Got some touchy feely in there.” He shook his head, laughing out loud now. “You ever think of that? Jimmy Stewart perving all over Kim Novak while she was out like a light and him all hot fingers, runny, runny …” He was licking his hands, slobbering all over them. “… runny … runny. And she never even knows.”

  He stiffened up on the chair and stopped laughing.

  “Or does she?”

  John Ferguson, which was, she now recalled, the real name of the character Jimmy Stewart played, leaned forward and screamed at her, “Does she?”

  “They were actors. None of it was real.”

  His face, which had seemed so ordinary, wrinkled with hate and disgust.

  “Now who’s being naive, Miss Flavier? You of all people. Telling me a little of the story never makes its way into real life. Truly, I am shocked.” It was a new voice, that of a doctor or a prim schoolteacher.

  Beside the bed there was some kind of storage cabinet. On it stood film cans lined up like books next to a small office desk with a phone on it, a cheap chair, and not much else. A dusty window almost opaque with cobwebs. A door opposite that led … she had no idea where. They had to be in the movie theatre. But even so, she could only picture one part of it in her head: the big white bell tower looming over Chestnut.

  If she could just get to the door, fight him off long enough …

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  He shook his head as if that was a way of changing something, whichever character possessed him.

  The voice altered again.

  “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talking … you talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

  Taxi Driver.

  “I don’t know who I’m talking to, but I don’t think it’s John Ferguson,” she said quietly. “Or Travis Bickle.”

  His head went from side to side in that crazy fashion again. He blubbed his fingers against his lips and made a stupid, childlike noise.

  “Yeah. That’s the problem. You don’t know, Maggie. And you should. Because knowing means you get to answer the conundrum.”

  “The conundrum?”

  “You know. The conundrum.”

  She stared at him, baffled. He sighed as if she were a stupid child.

  “The fuck-you-kill-you conundrum,” he said, wearily.

  Maggie Flavier’s mind closed in on itself, refused to function.

  “You do know what that is, don’t you?” he said.

  “Tell me,” she said softly.

  “Fuck you then kill you? Fuck you or kill you.” He placed a finger on his lips, hamming a pensive pose. “Kill you then fuck you, even?” He giggled. “Though if I’m honest, the fuck-you part is a little moot. Let’s face it: whatever way things work out, that’s gonna happen.”

  He leaned forward, looked very sincere, and added, “I’ve been waiting a very long time for that, Maggie. Keeping myself … pure. While you got banged by anything that grabbed your fancy.”

  There had to be a weapon somewhere. Or something she could use. A kitchen knife. A ballpoint pen. Anything she could stab him with when he came close.

  “Who …” she asked, very slowly, “… are … you?”

  “Like you want to know.”

  “I do.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  He shrugged, got up, walked over to the little desk, rudely swept away a pile of papers from the surface, and then scrabbled around until he found what he wanted. Then he came back, sat down again, eyed her once more. Maybe not quite so hungrily. Not quite.

  “My name … my real name,” he said quietly, “is”—the voice became liltingly Irish now—“Michael Fitzwilliam. ‘Fitz’ in the Gaelic sense, meaning bastard, sans père for you froggies, illegitimate, mongrel, wrong side of the blanket, born out of wedlock, or even love child, if you happen to be of a humorous or gullible disposition.”

  She found it hard to breathe. She was remembering something from a very long time ago.

  “Sure and the name has jogged a little memory now, I’m thinking.”

  It was a terrible Irish accent and meant to be.

 
He had something in his hand. She didn’t want to see it. But there was nowhere to run, and she felt hot and tired and weak beneath the old dress that was tight in the wrong places.

  Michael Fitzwilliam — Mickey, hadn’t they called him that? — threw a piece of fabric on the bed and she couldn’t not look at it, couldn’t take her eyes away.

  Notre Dame des Victoires was on Pine Street, four blocks from the Brocklebank Apartments, though that wasn’t why her mother chose the school. It was the only one in the city that offered daily classes in French conversation and writing.

  She stared at the school badge, faded with age, pinched between his fingers. A white fleur-de-lis inside an oval shield with a red and blue crown at the centre. She thought of the name Mickey Fitzwilliam again. Now the memory had a face attached to it, that of a sad, lonely, unexceptional child, one who bragged constantly of his famous father yet always refused to name him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  His head lolled around his shoulders, his eyes rolled in their sockets, a bad comic actor’s “come again?” routine.

  “Is that it? ‘I’m so sorry.’ Me, the poor little bastard you all laughed at, teased, and fucked with. No dad. No money. Just a drunk for a mom and a …”

  She could hear it before he even spoke, rattling around her head from across the years.

  “… a st-st-st-st-st-stutter …”

  Mickey Fitzwilliam, who so wanted to be the same as the rest of them and never could. She’d made sure of that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “You will be. You’ve got to be. Really sorry, Maggie. Not acting sorry. I know the difference. I had a director for an old man, and in between times when he was pretending I didn’t exist, I got to watch him and learn. Got to know how he worked. Got to learn your tricks over the years. Can’t fool Roberto Tonti’s kid now, can you? Not some two-bit actress who got where she is by handing out a quick fuck on the casting couch to any wrinkled old producer who demanded one.”

  “That is not true!” she screamed.

  He sat there, smiling, unmoved. “No. It’s not true. So what really got you where you are, Maggie? Do you remember?”

  She’d heard that question a million times, from a million different showbiz hacks.

  “A little luck,” she said automatically. “A little bit of talent.”

  Mickey Fitzwilliam gazed at her, then shook his head. “You’ve got to remember better than that, Maggie.”

  He reached down beneath the foot of the bed and his hands came back up with a knife in them. The blade was long and clean and shiny.

  “It’s what the fuck-you-kill-you conundrum hangs on.”

  6

  It was Saturday morning, shoppers’ hell. The traffic started bad and got worse. He was still ten minutes from the theatre when it finally ground to a halt. Up ahead, through the snarl of cars, he heard the wail of a siren and his heart fell. Then a couple of very shiny red fire engines battled their way into the angry mass of stalled machines blocking the breadth of Chestnut. Costa pulled the Dodge over to the side of the road and climbed out.

  People were coming out of stores and offices to stand in the street to gawk. There was a cop there, in uniform, looking bored.

  Costa caught his attention.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Fire down at Fort Mason. Stupid contractors lousing up or something. Or maybe the insurance. That place always was bad news.”

  A fire. Not an emergency call to the little theatre further down the road on Chestnut. Maybe he had still had time.

  “Is the street going to be blocked for long?”

  The cop grimaced. “Sadly, my psychic powers just fail me there, sir. You can’t dump your vehicle like that, by the way. You’ll have to wait for this train wreck to clear just like everyone else.”

  He’d put on Gerald Kelly’s leather shoulder holster. The black handgun sat snug against his chest. If this cop had been any good, he’d have seen it already.

  “Thank you, Officer,” Costa said meekly, and went back to sit behind the wheel of the Dodge.

  When the stocky blue uniform crossed the road, wending his way through the choked cars and buses, he climbed out again, looked down the street, past the idle bystanders clustered on the sidewalk. In the distance, crowds of shoppers milled on the sidewalk outside the stores, wandering into the road, darting in between stalled cars the way Romans did in the Corso on a Saturday afternoon.

  He took one look at them, saw the cop was returning, looking angrily at Catherine Bianchi’s abandoned Dodge, and then began to move, falling into a steady pace as he wound through the growing throng of bodies, on into the Marina.

  7

  She did remember. It was all there. Just hidden, waiting to be let out into the light of day like an old poltergeist freed from the basement.

  It must have been September. She could still feel the heat. Seventh-grade boys and girls, out on a trip to Crissy Field, doing the things schoolkids did. Working a little. Playing a little. Teasing …

  Maggie Flavier could still picture herself on that bright distant morning, thin as a rake but tall for her age and with a look about her that turned men’s heads. She tried not to notice. She felt alone and a little unhappy in San Francisco. This was her mother’s idea, not hers. To flee Paris and an estranged father, to try to find some new life halfway across the world in a city where they knew no one, and had, as far as the young Maggie could see, no clear idea of what the future might bring.

  She’d danced at the stage school in France, and men looked then. Her mother had watched and taken note.

  They were so kind in the church school on Pine Street. They smiled a lot and listened to her. They didn’t mind she hated trigonometry and algebra and preferred to dress up and play on the stage instead, always inventing something, stories, characters, voices, situations, imaginary people she created to fill the void inside.

  These small and seemingly useless talents mattered, her mother told her. Because of the auditions. She spoke the word as if it possessed some magical power. As if it could save them. The young Maggie had no idea how. All she understood was that she possessed a burning, unquenchable need to be noticed, to be applauded. By her peers. By her mother, more than anything.

  The notes had been coming for weeks, always unsigned, always written in a crude childish hand on cheap school notebook paper. They were, young Maggie thought, beautiful in a simple, babyish way. Flowery language. Sometimes bad French. Sometimes, she thought, better Italian, which she recognised from lessons in Paris. They were never coarse or dirty, like some she’d received, and some the other girls sent from time to time. All they spoke of, carefully, indirectly, was love. As if there were an emotion somewhere waiting for her to discover it, like a hidden Easter egg, a secret buried in the ground. Something ethereal, something holy, distinct from the hard, cold physical reality of the life she knew. She didn’t really understand the words or the poetry, some of it so old she found the verses unreadable. So she threw them away mostly, until the last.

  Had this unseen admirer written, simply, Margot Flavier, je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime, then, perhaps, she would have tried to understand. But nothing was that clear and sometimes the language was so florid, so odd, she thought it was a joke. Sometimes it scared her a little. She was young, she was exiled in a foreign land, with a strange and unhappy mother who wished to push her into a career about which she felt unsure, not that her doubts mattered for one moment.

  Naturally, she told the girls. Barbara Ronson. Louise Gostelow. Susan Shanks. The trio who ran the class.

  Naturally, when the final note arrived, they had an idea.

  That last message came the day after she’d gone to the first successful audition of her life, taking time off school for the short flight to L.A. with her mother, spending hours reading the scripts, trying to make her fast-improving English bad again for a group of men and women who seemed to demand that. Afterwar
ds, when they waited at LAX for the flight home, her mother had made a call on a public phone. When she returned, her face glowed with a happiness Maggie had never seen there before. Maggie had the part. Françoise in L’Amour L.A. A life mapped out in a single day, not that she knew that then, not that she felt anything much at all, except pleasure that this had produced joy in her mother.

  Maggie had been surprised. She thought she’d fluffed her lines and failed the audition.

  The next morning, she came into school and found the note tucked into the seam of her locker. It read, Tomorrow at Crissy Field I will reveal my love.

  Barbara and Louise and Susan had gawped at the scrawled, nervous handwriting, giggling, and then concocted the plan.

  Out on the hot, dusty sand dunes of the Marina the following day, they’d played it out. While the rest of them walked with Miss Piper, making notes about the grass and the lizards and the birds, Maggie had detached herself, looking distracted, knowing full well what would happen.

  Finally the teacher headed for the public washrooms, ordering them to wait. Maggie walked to one of the small huts owned by the park service and stood in its shadow, out of the burning sun. It took only a minute. Then he was there, staring at her, his plain face getting redder and redder, voice tripping over itself, his eyes, which were not unattractive, skittering over the pale, drifting sand, avoiding hers.

  “Maggie …”

  At that moment she didn’t even remember his name. He was just that boy. The one with the stutter and the cheap clothes, the one whose father was something big and famous, not that anyone was allowed to know his name.

  “Oui?” she’d asked.

  He bowed his head, held out his hands, and tried to speak.

  All that came out was “I lu … lu … lu … lu …”

  It happened so swiftly she didn’t have a chance to intervene, even if she’d possessed the courage. The three girls burst out from their hiding place and formed a ring round him, hands locked, eyes wild with glee, chanting, mocking.