Acceptable Losses (13 page)

“Right here.” Brown gave it to Damon and Damon wrote it on a scratch pad. “There’s a six-hour time difference, you know. I woke her. She sounded amazingly calm when I called her. English phlegm. My wife would be tearing her garments and rending her flesh in similar circumstance. Different customs, racial characteristics. Equal grief, though, I imagine.”

Damon had only known the man casually and had seen good plays and bad plays he had put on, but now he knew he liked him. He had been faced with unpleasant responsibilities and he had met them. “Let me know,” Damon said, “when the memorial is to take place. I’d like to be there.”

“Of course,” Brown said. “Well, thank you. It’s a sad day for all of us.”

Damon felt a wave of fatigue overcome him and he was narcotically drowsy. He looked longingly at the cracked leather couch along one wall of the office, which had been there since the first days of Mr. Gray’s tenure and was used only when there were two or more people in the office for conferences. What hopes had been voiced there, what failures confirmed.

“Oliver,” he said, “would you please tell Miss Walton not to buzz us? I have to lie down and try to drop off for a few minutes.”

“Of course,” Oliver said. He looked concerned. Neither of them had ever slept on the couch. “You okay, Roger?”

“Just a little sleepy. I had a bad night.” Oliver gave the message to Miss Walton and Damon stretched out on the couch. He dozed off immediately, but the sleep was not restful. He had a jumbled and terrifyingly erotic dream. In it he was in a large bed he had never lain on before, with Antoinetta Bradley, young and voluptuous, and Julia Larch, muttering obscenities, both of them making love to him with wicked abandon. Maurice Fitzgerald, clothed and looking as he had looked in the electronic supply shop the day before, stood, glass in hand, leering down at the spectacle before him, and somehow, Damon’s father, smiling and waving invitingly, was on his balustrade, bathed in his golden light.

When he opened his eyes, Damon was more tired than when he had lain down, shaken by the vision of lust, betrayal and accusation, of the concupiscent interweaving of the dead and the living his subconscious had conjured up in a few seconds of slumber.

Oliver was looking over worriedly at him from his desk. “That wasn’t much of a sleep,” he said. “You were making the most awful noises.”

“I was dreaming.” Damon sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I’ll read Freud again tonight.”

“It sounded as though you were crying …”

“I wasn’t crying,” Damon said. “Quite the opposite.” He went over to his desk. His legs felt leaden. He pushed the button on his phone as he picked it up and told Miss Walton he was taking calls again.

“A Mr. Schulter phoned a little while ago,” Miss Walton said. “I told him you were occupied. He left a number.” She gave him the number and he wrote it down. At least, he thought, Schulter wasn’t in the dream. He had been spared that. He didn’t ask Miss Walton to call the number, but dialed it himself. He didn’t want Miss Walton speculating on why he had business to discuss with a detective on the New York City police force. When a man’s voice said, “Homicide” over the phone, he knew he had been right to put the call through himself.

“Lieutenant Schulter,” he said to the man. “Mr. Damon returning the lieutenant’s call.”

“Hello, Mr. Damon,” Schulter said. His voice on the phone sounded to Damon’s ear very much like Zalovsky’s. “I have some news for you. We ran your Mr. McVane through the computer and found a McVane who lives near you on West Broadway. It’s probably the same one. He was arrested on the complaint of a kindergarten teacher at a public school in lower Manhattan who didn’t like the way he was always hanging around the kids. When he was searched, a large hunting knife was found strapped to the calf of his leg.”

“Did he go to jail?”

“Six months suspended sentence for carrying a concealed weapon,” Schulter said. “We’ll check him out. If we find the knife on him, he’ll serve the time.”

“Thanks, Lieutenant,” Damon said.

“Now,” said Schulter, “have you got any news for me? Any more calls?”

“No. I’m still waiting.”

“Have you made out those lists I asked you to make yet?”

“I’m working on it,” Damon said.

“If I was you,” said Schulter, “I wouldn’t take too long about it.”

“I’ll have them for you in a day or two.”

Schulter grunted, as though he didn’t believe Damon would have them in a day or two. “I talked to my friend in Gary. He’ll do some … uh … checking. What was the word you used?”

“Discreet.”

“That’s it. I just told him to ask around quiet like, not to make a federal case out of it. He says he’s seen the man, Larch, his being a football coach and all. He says he’s well-liked, he’s had three winning seasons in a row.”

“That makes me feel a lot better,” Damon said, then knew it was a mistake, because Schulter grunted again, more loudly than before. He was not a man, Damon realized, to be amused by irony when it came to the exercise of his profession.

“By the way,” Schulter said, “did you get that electronic stuff I told you to buy?”

For the first time, Damon remembered that he had left the package on the bar the afternoon before. “Yes,” he said, “I bought an answering machine.” He didn’t think it advisable to tell the detective that a few hours after he had bought it he had forgotten it in a crowded saloon.

“What the hell good is that?” Schulter said disgustedly. “You think Mr. Zalovsky is going to leave a message that he intends to blackmail you or shoot you through the head?”

“The clerk said the only machines he had to tape conversations off a phone give off a beeping tone to warn anybody calling that they’re being taped. What’s the good of that?”

“One thing I’m glad of, Mr. Damon,” Schulter said, “is that you’re not serving under me in homicide. All right, attach the goddamn machine and we’ll see what happens. When you got those lists, call me.”

There was an extra-loud click on the phone, as though Schulter had slammed down the phone. Damon looked thoughtfully at the couch, then stood up. “I’ve got to go out for a few minutes,” he said to Oliver. “I forgot something in a bar yesterday and I just remembered it.”

Once in the open air he was glad the errand was taking him out of the office, away from the morbid temptation of the couch and from the curious, wondering glances Oliver kept sneaking at him when he thought Damon wasn’t noticing.

It was only eleven o’clock, but the bar already had a morning population of the devoted drinkers of the neighborhood. The barman was the same one who had served him the day before. When Damon asked him if anybody had turned in a package he had forgotten and left on the bar the day before, the barman looked blank. “Hey, Eddie,” he called to the barman who was taking care of the clients at the front end of the saloon, “we find a package yesterday? This gentleman says he left it here—What time about, Mister?”

“Four, five, something like that,” Damon said.

“Four, five o’clock, he thinks, Eddie.”

The second barman shook his head. “Not that I heard,” he said.

“Not that he heard,” the barman said, as though he thought Damon was deaf. “Sorry. You drinking today?”

“It sounds like a reasonable idea,” Damon said.

“What’s your pleasure, Sir?” Now that he saw that Damon had turned into a customer, he became professionally courteous.

His pleasure, Damon thought, would be to leave this bar, leave this city, go to a distant foreign land where the people who died were all unknown to him, and lie on a beach and listen to the waves whisper in from thousands of miles of untraveled ocean. “A Scotch and soda,” he said.

The dead arranged themselves beside him at the quiet morning bar.
What is your pleasure, ladies and gentlemen?
A slug of Jack Daniel’s with a touch of water from the fountain at Lourdes? Antoinetta, a beaker of sea water, flavored with rue? Maurice, old Shakespeare spouter, some cakes and ale? Mr. Gray, another Cognac spiked with nepenthe to forget your merchant son? Mrs. Larch, although alive and kicking in Gary, Indiana, trespassing in dreams among the tombs, how about a goblet of nectar for a carnal morning on East Thirty-ninth Street or a glass of champagne on Sixth Avenue to celebrate a birthday?

Damon shook his head, annoyed at the fantasy. Back to the land of the living; McVane with his knife; Sheila pouring coffee at the breakfast table; Elaine, her face lifted, her hair dyed magenta, with her new boy friend; Mrs. Dolger, the royalties coming in, standing over her oven baking pies; Lieutenant Schulter among the murdered Jews, demanding lists of men or women in this real and corporeal world who might conceivably walk into the bar, gun in hand, at any moment, intent on murder.

Mr. Damon, another Scotch?

A reasonable idea, Mr. Damon, at this time and place and under these circumstances. Another Scotch, please.

Just five short days before, he had been a reasonably happy man, in robust health, content in his marriage, comfortable in his home, respected in his profession, fearlessly walking the streets of New York in all weathers and at all times of the day and night, never having spoken to a policeman for anything more than to ask directions, the memory of his dead mellowed by time and the realization that the generations followed each other in inevitable and eternal rhythms. Then a man whom as far as he knew he had never met put a dime in a slot and dialed a number and graves opened. Now he accosted phantoms in broad daylight, learned that a woman he had loved had lain at the bottom of the sea for ten years, her fate unknown to him. He had met a friend who once called him brother, had been reminded of one of the most painful moments of his life, had shaken the friend’s hand in grateful reconciliation, had invited him to a dinner which was never served because the friend had fallen dead between one course and another in a fashionable restaurant minutes after the handshake.

“Miss Otis Regrets.” Popular song.
She cannot come to tea.
Did he dare shake any man’s hand again? Could he demand that all slots be abolished, all dimes taken out of circulation? Could he walk the streets blindfolded so that he would not recognize in the flesh men who had long since turned into bare bones? Could he command himself to censor his dreams? Was he not only an agent for books, plays, stories, mild and harmless fictions, in which when one mourned as characters died all that was necessary was to turn the page, or was he a secret and dreadful agent of some unknown client, a go-between who dealt in death and whose touch, either real or imaginary, made him the prophet and unconscious recorder of dissolution, past and in the future?

He had become a psychic sonar, plumbing the depths of dreams for deadly prowlers, finding the shapes of old ship-wrecks, listening to derisive and delusive echoes that might be whales, schools of minnows, the songs of dolphins, the voices of mermaids, speaking in an unlearned language, but all saying, “Beware.”

He was not Hamlet; the ghost of his father did not rebuke him or spur him on to revenge from the gray battlements of sleep, but stood silent in that midsummer noon sunlight, a childhood toy in his hand, beckoning him. He was not an antique Greek, he had not sailed with Ulysses; the shades of comrades-in-arms and parents who had been deprived of their proper funeral games had no claims on him from their last home in the underworld.

He was a man of today, rational, convinced he was, like his contemporaries who had probed the utmost limits of the universe, a descendent of lizards and apes, a man not favored or disfavored by primitive gods or goddesses, a scientific explainer of phenomena, a man who believed in what he could touch, see, smell or deduce from known quantities, and he felt himself drifting into an Arctic, fog-shrouded sea of necromancy.

He remembered the conversation in Gregor’s studio. “Do you believe in precognition?”

“I believe in anything that cannot be proven.”

Was he merely a signpost on the road to some supernatural Auschwitz where a final solution was being carried out for people whom he had loved or who had loved him or whose lives had barely touched his in their separate passages or was he being punished or the instrument of punishment? And if he was either or both, for what reason? Breach of trust, a few hours of casual fornication, the begetting of bastards? Self-satisfaction, the egoistic neglect of the suffering of humanity across every continent on the planet? As the twentieth century after the death of Christ drew to its close, who made the rules and what were they?

What was the message for him in all this? Who could tell him, what wife or comrade or priest or rabbi or gypsy could reveal it to him? Was there a detective in homicide who could decode it for him into rough, everyday English to tell him what it was? Did he really want to know? Did he, like the dead Jewish diamond merchants, carry on his back the sign,
Come and get me?

CHAPTER

TEN

T
HE BARTENDER PUT ANOTHER
glass down on the bar in front of him. He did not remember ordering it, but was pleased with the man’s solicitude. He sipped at the drink, thinking, I must have a list of some kind for Lieutenant Schulter. Where to begin? It was necessary to be orderly. He took out his notebook, wrote on the left page
Possible enemies—professional,
then on the facing right page,
Possible enemies—personal.
Now, he thought with satisfaction, I am advancing, organization is all, I have made categories, as Gregor would put it.

He took another sip at his drink. Who had ever overtly threatened him? Step number one. He congratulated himself on the clarity and logic of his thinking. Candidate number one. Damon closed his eyes, remembering a courtroom. He had been summoned to testify as a witness in a libel case. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. God, Himself had been libeled for millennia. The name of the man was Machendorf. He had been a client, a moody, gaunt dark youngish man, his face set against the world.

Damon had handled Machendorf’s first two novels and they had been published. They had been crude and full of violence, but the writing had a certain rough honesty that was not to be ignored, and Damon felt that Machendorf’s report on the hateful underside of American life had the right to be heard. The man had acted correctly, although without gratitude, and Damon could not bring himself to like him. But if he represented only people he liked, he would have had to close the office in six months.