Concert of Ghosts (14 page)

When they emerged from the elevator, they walked along the corridor rather slowly, two people balanced on the gyroscope of the immediate future. He had the thought:
I
want her. I want her badly
. It was more than an anodyne against solitude.

He unlocked his door, fumbling the key. The girl followed him inside the room.

He was at once assailed in the darkness by an unpleasant scent he couldn't identify. He switched on the light. He heard Alison gasp.

He wished he'd let the room stay black.

The man who had called himself Alphonse Trebanzi lay on the floor. Electricity illuminated the red-purple skin. It lit the barbarous slit in the man's throat and brightened the blood that soaked his clothes. The lurid effect was of scarlet neon: blood, blood everywhere.

9

The girl kept saying “Christ” over and over as she slumped against Tennant, who held her as hard as he could, as if he might somehow eradicate the sight on the bed, conjure it away.
Seek the calm center, boyo. Don't get upset with things. Take control
. Yes, yes, whoever you are, whoever you are that speaks inside my head.
Take control. Cope. Boyo
. How? How do you cope with this? This wasn't a dead animal to be buried, however sorrowfully, in the depths of a forest. This was a man Tennant thought he had somehow known in the lost years. Who could tell? The figure that lay on the bed might have been a friend back then, someone with more than a goddamn photograph in common.

How do you reach over the divide that keeps you from yourself? You need a door to the past; but it had shut tight with the murder of Bear Sajac. He looked down at the floor. The corpse seemed by some illusion to hover in dark red light.

Somebody had brought Bear Sajac here and killed him. Somebody.

Who and why? Of whom had Sajac been so afraid?
Them. The Faceless Ones
.

Alison, her expression that of somebody struck hard in the face, said, “The poor, poor bastard.”

“Yeah, the poor bastard.” Feeling nausea, Tennant went inside the bathroom and filled the sink with cold water, then dipped his face into it. His head buzzed. He opened his eyes under water. It was good to be briefly enclosed in a wet cool place. He permitted himself the luxury of thinking he'd dreamed Sajac's body the way he must have dreamed everything else. The bust. The girl. The lost years. Any moment now he'd come wide-awake, sweating in terror, fumbling his way toward relief. Ha! A nightmare! The mind darkly frolicking. Nothing more.
My mind
. I have lost it. Completely. I have a jellyfish in my skull.

He pulled his face from the bowl of water and reached for a towel. He dried his skin and went back into the bedroom. Alison took the towel from his hand and tossed it over Sajac's features. A white flag. We've had enough. We can't go on.

He glanced at Alison, then turned to the window. His legs were heavy, not his own. The airshaft below was a great black rectangle perforated feebly here and there by lights from other rooms. The shaft itself remained finally impenetrable; it might have gone down forever, down through the city, subways, sewers, to unfathomable places. Tennant experienced the odd urge to open the window and step out into the big black space and fall between the pale lights and just keep on falling. Pull yourself together, Harry. Get a grip on this. Don't let go.

He opened the window. Fuel, wet concrete, sodden trash—these were preferable to the smell of the dead.

He thought: I could part company with the girl. I could pack my bag and split, stroll out of the girl's life, abandon her to her own pursuits. But she'd taken the edge off of his loneliness. She had touched him. He couldn't run out on her. Besides, where would he go? He had no idea. She'd taken him over; she was in charge of travel arrangements, routes, destinations.

The towel around Sajac's face had become stained with blackened blood. It seemed preposterous now, a mask, a Halloween joke. At any moment Sajac would sit up, whip the thing away, laugh, and say,
Gotcha going, huh?
But it wasn't to be like that. There was no practical joke here.

“They kill him,” Tennant said. “They dump him here. It's a warning. It's a message. It's a fucking note written in blood telling me to mind my own business. Go away, Harry. Leave the past alone.”

“It's more than a message, Harry. It's a lock. Whoever killed Sajac knows you can't go to the police.”

Tennant hadn't thought that far ahead. He hadn't considered police, the consequences, the legal ramifications. In shock you don't make plans. You don't manipulate the future.

“You'll be the prime suspect. It's your room. And there's a dead man in it. The fuzz will take you downtown, pop your name in the computer. Bingo. Out comes the drug bust. You're a criminal, Harry. Worse, a fugitive. A front-running candidate for a murder rap. You know how cops think. They see one crime and immediately assume you're capable of another.”

“Okay, I don't call the police.”

“More than that. You
can't
call them.”

Tennant sat on the edge of the bed. A lock. Shackles.
They
had him straitjacketed. “How did they find me?” he asked. “How did they know I was here in this hotel?”

“There's only one answer. We're being followed. All the way from upstate, we're being tracked.”

“Tracked. Yeah. By whom?”

Alison sat alongside him. For a moment he entertained a suspicion he didn't need: This little girl had somehow left a trail for the Faceless Ones to follow. Inadvertently or otherwise. But he didn't like the otherwise. It was that question of trust again. It was busy signals on a phone line, disembodied voices droning through ductwork, whispers behind walls.

“I know what you're thinking, Harry,” she said. “You're wondering about me. You're saying to yourself—first the drug bust, then I show up, and maybe there's a connection between the two. Take it a step further—am I on the level? Am I manipulating you for strange reasons of my own?”

He made a gesture of dispute. “You're wrong—”

“I don't think so. It's perfectly natural. After all, I just blow into your life.” She touched the back of his hand. “You want to see my credentials? My Writer's Guild membership? My driver's license? You want me to show my plastic, Harry?”

He shook his head. He was uncomfortable. She'd divined his misgivings and her insight embarrassed him. He felt as if he'd been caught in an act of infidelity.

She said, “When it comes to me, what you see is what you get.”

What you see is what you get. He wondered what it was he saw. He got up from the bed. The room stifled him. It brutalized him. He had to get away from this place. He considered the corridor beyond the door. Was it empty? Or was the killer of Sajac somewhere nearby? Killer, killers, singular, plural. He realized he was thinking exactly the way Bear Sajac had done.
How many others are with you? You got friends in the street?
He wondered if he was destined to spend the rest of his life the way Bear had tried—a demented recluse. Go underground, create a disguise, live a life of fear.

“Okay. Maybe it
is
my goddamn fault,” Alison said. “If I hadn't come into your life, you wouldn't be here, would you? And maybe Sajac would still be alive, for Christ's sake. Maybe I am responsible for his death, Harry—”

“You can't think like that—”

“Why not? Why can't I think like that? I was the one who dug out the guy's address, I was the one who went looking for him, it was me that came up with the bright idea of doing a story on that goddamn photograph.” She had tears in her eyes, and her small hands were clenched tightly.

“Quit,” Tennant said. He drew her toward him and tried to calm her. “You can't blame yourself for any of this.”

She clung to him for a time in silence. He stroked the back of her head gently. When she stepped back from him, she rubbed her eyes against her sleeve. She was working at being composed again. “Yeah. I'm fine. I'm a hundred percent now. I can't hang this shit on myself. You're right.”

“I know I'm right,” he said.

“Okay.” She ran a hand through her short hair in a determined manner. “Okay. Let's get practical here. First thing, we move. We can't stay in this place.”

The idea of movement was attractive. Do something. Walk, run, anything. Besides, this room wasn't his anymore. It belonged to the dead, who had that habit of disenfranchising the living.

“How far are we going to get before Sajac's devils catch up with us?” he asked.

“I don't think that's the question. They've already caught up with us. The real question is why they don't put a stop to us right now. Why let us go any further?” She glanced at the corpse. “If they don't want us to dig, why not do a disposal job and get it over with?”

Tennant had no answers. He began to stuff his few possessions into his canvas bag. He thought of the darkness outside; it had changed now, populated as it was by phantoms who had his private number. He took the gun from his coat and dropped it inside the bag, where it fell heavily among his clothes. He gazed at the weapon—half-concealed by the sleeve of a shirt—and he thought of Rayland Tennant.

He said, “My father knew where I'd been living. He knew my address for years. He's got a nose for keeping track.”

“Sure, but it's quite a leap from that fact to the idea he might somehow be responsible for …” She gestured vaguely, as if she didn't know what she truly meant. “For us being followed. Why would he set people on our trail? And here's another biggie for you, Harry. If he
did
send spies, were they the same people that committed murder? If so, why?”

Around and around, Tennant thought. The carousel of problems. The teasers and the twisters. Around and around. You took a seat and you couldn't get off because the machine never stopped. When he thought of his father, he inevitably brought Colonel Harker to mind. It was all so undeniably clear, so reachable. Harker's bullet head, the military haircut, the absence of sideburns that gave him a sharp, terrifying, well-defined look, as if his face were constantly lit by an invisible lamp. Tennant remembered the implacable way the man had conducted himself in a court of law. Schooled and prompted by Rayland, Harker had hidden behind the veneer of duty. He was a soldier and X was the enemy and his function was to eliminate X and that was it. End of the ballgame. Tennant recalled, with biting clarity, a TV news report that pictured Rayland and the colonel strolling shoulder to shoulder from the court after the verdict had come down. Two self-satisfied men with blood on their hands. Absent from their expressions were any feelings for the dead women and babies Harker had left behind in Vietnam. Nothing of regret. Just graves. Just charred remains.

Another perfect memory. Something preserved. If he had amnesia, it was a selective sickness. It chose its moments. Now and then the clouds rolled off the horizon and you saw something: the prize of vision. The razor of insight.

He zipped his bag. He felt curiously callous: How could he walk away and leave the corpse in this room? Alison was already moving toward the door. “I only need to toss some stuff together,” she said.

They went out into the corridor. Small pear-shaped lights lining the walls threw a dismal light that seemed sinister to him, as if the wattage had been reduced for a malignant purpose. Emptiness was spooky. He longed for crowded places, bright lights, clamor, all the things he'd spent the last nine years of his life avoiding. The strange lights diminished in shadows as the corridor stretched away. Ceiling and floor created parallel lines that seemingly met in infinity.

Alison went into her room and came back seconds later hurriedly thrusting things into a small leather overnight bag: tights, toothpaste, a red plastic hairbrush.

Tennant pushed the elevator button, then decided he didn't want to wait. He drew Alison toward the stairs. What lay in the streets? He felt he was rushing into blindness, into a deeper fugitive condition than he'd known before. Flight was a way of life, something to which you adapted quickly. If you didn't, you perished.

They encountered nobody on the way down. In the lobby there was only a night clerk and a uniformed doorman who eyed them in the way of doormen everywhere, assessing them for their tip potential. The man lost interest and turned away, coughing into a white-gloved hand. Outside it was raining, a soft drizzling rain that billowed down through the street lamps like strands of a broken silvery web.

The street was quiet. Alison's car, parked half a block away, was bright and conspicuous under the lamps. A red Cadillac convertible—why didn't she own something utterly nondescript, a Ford, a Dodge? When they reached the car, Tennant told her to drive—anywhere, it didn't matter for the moment.

Alison drove to the end of the street, where she made a left turn into one-way traffic. “Now what?”

“Out of this city for starters.”

He watched the street, yellow cabs speeding down through their own violent spray, trucks clattering wildly. Traffic obeyed its own laws of gravity. The Hudson appeared, shivering, trapping fragments of light and dispersing them like glittering, distended fish. The random slipstream of things: Tennant had a sense of being caught up in an arbitrary universe. The bridge over the river seemed insubstantial to him, fragile as nylon, and yet it somehow supported the mass of traffic flowing over it. Like everything else, it could snap.

He needed space, quiet, a time in which he could collect himself. Speech was suddenly impossible. Words formed in his head, coagulated, fell apart in nonsense. He imagined he heard bells ringing in his head, and then the sound of demonic gulls screeching—and there was an uneasy familiarity in these noises, as if he'd heard them a long time ago.

Alison pulled the Cadillac over into the forecourt of a gas station, turned off the motor, sat for a time in the kind of silence that suggests frustration.