*
Lenore, in a pink twinset and pearls, and a pair of faded old jeans, opened the door without a smile.
‘My God, you look dreadful,’ she said. ‘You make me feel guilty.’
Did he look dreadful, Fred wondered, or was it just that Lenore expected him to look dreadful, and therefore saw him so? He didn’t feel dreadful; what he had realized in the taxi had made him feel more at ease with himself than he could ever remember having felt in his life. In fact, when he had got out of the cab in front of the pink three-storey house in Jane Street where Lenore lived, and had cast an eye round for the freaks, the faggots, the artists and the pseudo-artists he had always believed haunted the Village exclusively, he had been almost sorry not to see anyone except for a middle-aged couple carrying bags of groceries. He would have liked to test himself; to look at those people whom he had always considered the despicable, self-conscious rag-tag of a guilty society, and feel neither threatened by them, nor fearful of them, nor superior to them. However, even though there weren’t any of them about, he had felt sure that he would have passed his test perfectly.
And while he had never felt more at ease, he had never, also, felt that he had to be more careful. Because, as he stood there, massive, in Lenore’s doorway, he had the distinct impression that this small plump girl, in her efforts to give ‘meaning’ to her life, and to remove the ‘great dark presence’ she felt standing between herself and her dead husband, would be only too glad to destroy him; to make a sacrifice of him in memory of Bob; to cast him—by way of battering her soul with pain, and getting some order and sense back into her existence—the man who had introduced her to Bob, in the role of the cop-killer.
‘Sit down,’ Lenore ordered. ‘D’you want some coffee?’
‘No,’ Fred said. ‘I can’t. I’ll have a glass of water if you like.’
As Lenore went over to the alcove where the sink and stove and refrigerator were, Fred lowered himself into a small, deep, battered, old green armchair, and looked around. No wonder, he thought, that Lenore could find no meaning in her years of cohabitation and marriage with Bob. There was no trace of him anywhere; no sign that he had ever lived in this tiny, menacing apartment, that was, as far as Fred remembered, exactly the same as it had been five years ago, when he had come here to talk to Lenore, when they had made love, and when he had asked her to marry him. There was still the same old Indian cotton cover on the divan, the same green armchair he was sitting in, the same old kitchen table covered in papers where Lenore worked, the same bookshelves overloaded with the same books—he remembered, quite distinctly, a big red book on Donatello; and there it was—the same doorless alcove into which a double bed didn’t quite fit, the same blue door leading into the bathroom, the same stuffy, slightly greasy smell, and above all, that same air of menace, as if at any moment unspeakable, unnameable monsters might creep out from under the rug on the floor, from out of the cracks in the floor-boards, and from out of the peeling, fractured walls. He always remembered that going into the damp, evil bathroom where the light didn’t work, after they had made love and while he was trying to make up his mind to ask her to marry him, had been one of the most disturbing, unaccountably frightening experiences of his life. He had never, he remembered, had such a distinct vision of chaos….
What was more, he thought, as he took the glass of water from Lenore, this apartment—unlike his apartment in Brooklyn, which he had simply neglected and never cared for—could never have been made pleasant, or even, really, habitable. What had, he wondered, Lenore and Bob done with all the money they earned? Or had most of Bob’s pay gone on meeting his share of the expenses for the apartment on Central Park West; for that ball and chain Bob wore round his ankle, and had been so loath —until the very end, when it was too late—to release himself from? No. It wasn’t possible. They still, between them, must have been earning quite enough not to have to live in this place. So—
‘Why did you and Bob never move from here?’ he said.
‘I wanted to, years ago. Bob never did. He loved it here. And I’m sort of fond of it, in spite of everything. He said it was better to buy something in the country.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yep. We signed the papers and put half the money down for an old farmhouse in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago.’
How she relished the irony of it….
Fred cleared his throat and murmured—quite gently, he heard, and without a trace of the primness that would have been in his voice a short while ago if he had said something similar—‘What can I tell you about Bob, Lenore? You know we didn’t really see that much of each other. I mean—I hardly knew him.’
Lenore drummed her fingers on her faded knees. Her hands were as small and plump as the rest of her, and had very long, unpainted nails. ‘Bob used to talk about you sometimes. But he used to think about you a lot more. He never said so. But I know. And I want to know why.’
‘I don’t know,’ Fred said.
‘At times I got the real feeling that you—’ she paused, and scratched her elaborate as ever hair-do as she searched for the right way of putting it—‘that you represented all the sins and sorrows of the world for him, and he felt he had to bear them on his back like Jesus with his damned cross.’
‘Bob felt that way about everyone.’
‘But why about you?’
‘Maybe,’ Fred said, ‘it was all something to do with—you know—how it all started. Maybe—you know—because of me telling Helen about—and then him marrying you and me getting divorced and—’ he threw the words out cautiously.
‘Oh for Chrissake,’ Lenore snapped. ‘Apart from anything else, you and Helen got divorced before I even met Bob.’
Fred shrugged. ‘Well, why didn’t you ever ask him?’
‘I did. He said he didn’t know.’
Fred smiled now. ‘Well, if he didn’t know, I don’t know why I should.’
Lenore leaned over to her work-table, took a cigarette from an open pack, and lit it. She blew smoke out of her nostrils like an old actress.
‘How long is this going to go on?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘This cop-killer going round. Bob told me before he died that they’ve got no idea, and now, with all the clues they have—’
‘I don’t know,’ Fred said. ‘I’ve been in bed since before Bob was killed, so I don’t know what’s going on. Besides, that’s not really my job.’
‘They’re not doing a goddam thing. Apparently the guy the killer bumped into could only say he thought he was young— but he wasn’t even sure about that. He said he thought his face was covered in some way. But he said he was too scared when he saw that there was blood on his hand to even look at who bumped into him. And then it rained all that night so there were no footprints or anything, and the prints on the knife were all smudged, and—’
‘Didn’t anyone see anything from some window. They must have done.’
‘They haven’t done in all the other cases, so I don’t see why they should now. And I guess if anyone had seen anything they’d be too scared to say. In case the maniac came calling on them.’
Fred nodded thoughtfully.
‘Anyway, that’s—’ Lenore shrugged. Then, returning suddenly to her former subject, she said scornfully, ‘You must know why Bob felt so damned sorry for you.’
Fred thought he should be offended by her tone—but he smiled again, and said, ‘Well I’m sorry, I don’t.’
Lenore stared at him, as if making mental notes about his appearance; which, Fred guessed, she was. Then he added softly, ‘Maybe Bob thought I was—I dunno—unhappy, maybe.’
‘Everyone’s unhappy.’
‘Oh,’ Fred said.
Then they sat and faced each other in silence for a while.
Finally, Lenore said, ‘You’re not gay are you? You didn’t have a thing about Bob?’
‘No,’ Fred said.
‘Lots of people did.’
T
he silence returned.
This time, Lenore broke it with: ‘You’ve changed, you know. I mean apart from the fact that you’re sick, but—’ she scratched her hair again, and laughed. ‘You’ve got sort of softer. I always used to think there was something hard and white and mad inside you. I don’t see it any more.’
‘Well thanks.’ Once again Fred smiled. ‘Perhaps that’s why Bob felt sorry for me.’
‘Why do I dream about you, for God’s sake? Why do I feel so sure you know something about Bob that I don’t, and that you could tell me.’
Fred, briefly, thought of Smith’s theory of Lenore’s erotic fantasies. He shrugged.
‘I just feel convinced that there’s some sort of clue I can’t see. Some sort of pattern, that would make everything fall into place.’
Fred, Bob, Lenore’s articles about the police, Smith, Smith’s disappearance, Lenore’s telling Bob about it, Bob’s death…. Yes. There was a pattern. But Lenore would never find it. He was sure. He got up and said, ‘I better be going. I’m sorry I couldn’t—’ he smiled, gently, for the last time.
‘I’m sorry I dragged you all the way from Brooklyn for nothing.’
‘That’s okay,’ Fred murmured. ‘I understand.’
Lenore’s eyes, just for a second, glittered with tears. Then she drew in hard on her cigarette, went over to the door, and opened it. ‘There’s only one reason—one real reason—I can think of why Bob should have felt like he did about you,’ she said. ‘And that’s because—’ she hesitated. Then, looking up defiantly at Fred— how very small she was—she ended, ‘you’re not the cop-killer, are you Fred?’
Fred gazed at her for a while before replying, and now he didn’t smile. ‘Why,’ he said at last, ‘are you always so fucking rude Lenore?’ Then, by way of an afterthought, he added, ‘but no. I’m not.’
CHAPTER NINE
‘You went to see her, didn’t you?’ Smith said. ‘I know you did. And now she knows everything.’
‘No she doesn’t.’
‘Well she will soon. Jesus you’re a fool.’
More than ever feeling like a small child being chastised by a strict parent, Fred stood in the long dim corridor of the apartment, and lowered his eyes in front of the now not quite shaven-headed boy. ‘There was a letter from her in Brooklyn, asking me to go see her. I went. She’s very unhappy.’
‘Everyone’s unhappy.’
‘That’s what she said.’
Smith laughed.
‘But it’s not true,’ Fred said earnestly. ‘I’m not.’
Smith stared at him, and just for a second there was, as there hadn’t been for some time now, fear in his eyes. Then he laughed again, and said, ‘That’s ’cause you’re mad.’
Fred nodded.
‘What have you got there?’
Fred looked at the brown paper bags in his arms. ‘Provisions,’ he said. ‘And a new bread-knife.’
Smith raised his eyebrows. Then, with a coy, sarcastic smile, he said, ‘What do you need a bread-knife for, when you always buy sliced bread?’
He could, Fred thought, and perhaps would have, once, made a joke. But he didn’t want to now, and especially not with Smith. He said, ‘Not always.’ And then: ‘I must go and put this stuff in the ice-box.’
*
He had wished, in the taxi on his way to Lenore’s, that Smith would simply go away; that he would get tired, and go back to his grandmother’s, or just vanish in a puff of smoke. And now, as day followed day, this feeling grew stronger and stronger in him. Because, he thought, now that he had changed, Smith was sort of an anomaly. He was like an old relation who had come to stay for some reason one couldn’t quite remember, one didn’t know quite what to do with, but one couldn’t send away. The boy’s presence, the fact that they were both more or less prisoners, the apartment itself—rather than irritating Fred now, or disturbing him, or worrying him, merely bored him. They had become superfluous, out of place, irrelevant.
He suggested one day—five days after his visit to Lenore—that Smith stay on in the apartment for as long as he liked, but that he go up to Brooklyn, stay up there, and go back to work. But Smith, as he guessed he would, as he feared he would, said no.
‘I’m not going to stay here by myself all day. I can’t,’ the boy drawled. ‘I’d go out of my mind, and end up calling the police and giving myself up. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?’
‘No,’ Fred murmured; and then said, ‘but why don’t you go back to your grandmother? I told you what Lenore said—the man you bumped into didn’t even look at you, and they have no clues at all.’
‘That’s what she said I don’t believe it. As soon as I got off the train in Providence they’d be waiting for me. And then they’d beat me up and I wouldn’t be able to stop myself telling them where I’d been all this time, and what I’d been doing. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?’ he repeated.
‘No,’ Fred murmured; and left the room. There was no point in discussing the matter further. The boy obviously wanted to stay for reasons of his own, and since he held the whip-hand—there was nothing he could do about it.
*
He wasn’t entirely a prisoner of course; Smith did let him go out sometimes to buy food, to go to the bank, to buy him some clothes—underclothes, two pairs of dark trousers, five white shirts, some ties, a dark blue blazer and some shoes—to buy a couple of portable beds, to buy—and he no longer had the strength or the power to argue now—a radio, and finally to buy a television. But apart from that—
Fred bought nothing for himself, and only bothered to shave and wash and change his own clothes because it gave him something to do. For the rest of the time he simply cooked, cleaned, and generally waited on the smartly dressed Smith, who stayed in the living room all day, watching old films on the television, and occasionally calling out and asking Fred to bring him something.
He waited on the boy, and he wondered how long this situation would go on, and how it would end; and he thought, sometimes, about Lenore, and wondered how she was getting on in her attempt to give meaning to her late married life. Badly, he reckoned; after all, how could she, unless she knew—unless he told her—what she wanted to know?
Poor Lenore …
It had, he supposed, all started with her. Or at least, the crack-up. If she hadn’t come to interview him, he would never have made love with her, would never have told Helen, would never have got divorced. He would probably have passed his whole life being a prim, formal, married man, who happened to be a corrupt cop, and who happened to have a secret apartment, but whose own little madnesses did no—or little—harm to anyone. And if she hadn’t written her articles and Smith hadn’t read them, maybe his particular form of madness would have taken another turning. Maybe—the spoilt rich boy eager for experience—he would have been content simply to be whipped and beaten and be, as his grandmother had so blandly put it, a masochist. As it was—
The thought of snappy little Lenore’s hopeless quest to put her life in order, to find the pattern that she knew existed, worried him more and more; just as, before he had gone to see her, the thought of why Bob had felt sorry for him had worried him. Why did he care about her, he asked himself. He had never —apart from right at the beginning, maybe, and even then it was doubtful—liked her, and he didn’t think, however much he had changed, he ever would. And yet—if it hadn’t been for him, and his absurd idea of revenging himself on her and Bob, they would never have married. And she would probably—as she should have done—married some bright young man, and Bob would have married someone else, and probably—no, certainly— would still be alive now. Because everything was linked, and interconnected, and interdependent. And it was as, he decided finally, everything was so linked, so intertwined, that he cared about Lenore; and had, more and more, the feeling that until her puzzle, as it were, were solved, her search successful, then his own situation could never be resolved. He would never be released from Smith, until Lenore knew
—what?
Oh, but that was the problem.
*
A week after his first visit to her, he called her—when he was out buying food—and asked if he could see her again. She sounded surprised, but not very; as if she had imagined that he might call again, but had thought it unlikely.
He arranged to meet her that evening at six, at her apartment; at five, he dressed in his good suit—his other clothes needed to be pressed, he mentioned to Smith—and told the boy that he had forgotten to buy some milk that morning—which he had, on purpose—and was going out to fetch some.
Smith, watching the news on the television, gave him permission with a wave of his hand.
*
When he arrived at the menacing little apartment on Jane Street, Lenore gave him a glass of sherry—which he accepted and started drinking before he remembered that, with hepatitis, he shouldn’t be touching alcohol—and asked if he minded listening to a record of Prokofieff. It was the only thing that soothed her, she said. After a few minutes of the thin, spiky music, Fred thought he knew why.
But apart from this thought, which he kept to himself, he felt more sympathetic towards Lenore than he ever had. He didn’t like her any more—just felt more sympathetic towards her. But that was a start; and was, in a way, so unexpected, that he felt he was drinking sherry with someone he had never met before. It made him feel shy, and awkward.
And Lenore, too, seemed strangely shy—or at least, ill at ease. She apologized—only just making a joke of it—that she had nothing else to offer him but sherry. She complimented him on his suit. She asked if he was feeling better, and told him that he certainly looked it. She asked him when he was going back to work, and if he enjoyed his work. And finally, and without a trace of suspicion, she asked him if he should be drinking. Fred told her, quite honestly, that he had forgotten he shouldn’t.
‘D’you want some more?’
The Order of Death Page 16
