Lost (34 page)

“I'm having a hard time catching that,” said the woman. “With what firm, please?”

“Pritzke Enterprise,” said Winnie.

“I see. Just a minute, miss.” Winnie was put on hold. “I'm sorry, Mr. Comestor is out of the office indefinitely.”

“When will he be back?”

“I've no more information at present on Mr. Comestor. Please try later.”

“When will he be back? I haven't got all day to keep ringing—”

 

She called Rasia.

“Look,” said Rasia, “I know you're having a hard time of it. But
I'm beyond frantic. You frightened Tariq rather badly, do you know that? I don't want you calling and scaring him, or Navida.”

“You should let me finish, Rasia. I know it sounds goofy, but that cat is on the loose somewhere in the building. This isn't my imagination. I saw those cats it killed.”

“Cats don't kill cats,” said Rasia. She sounded as if she thought Winnie had done it. “Please don't call me for a while. I have a new account and it's taking all my spare time.”

“Just one thing: promise me if the cat comes through the wall, you'll leave, you'll clear out.”

“Come through the wall like a ghost? Like your old Christmas Past? As they say on the American sitcoms, sweetheart: Get a grip.” She rang off.

All of London seemed in collusion to do one thing: Hang up the receiver on her.
brmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

“Oh, this is like Miami Beach or something.” The building was mostly concrete, like a convention center, though it had a spun sugar application of wooden eaves and painted fretwork, a nod to Bavarian chalets. The parking lot was largely empty, even on a Saturday night. Still, choking with laughter about seeing the Sunny Clearing at night, Wendy was not prepared for how lovely the walk was. Once out of the lot, they wound about on a snowy path over which freshly cut pine boughs had been spread. Their boots crushed the needles, and each step blossomed with resin scent, expressive of Christmas. The stars leered and leaned, brighter than any in London or Boston, almost
pushpins, almost three-dimensional. John took her hand.

“A Christmas to remember,” he said.

“Nowhere near Christmas yet,” she said, legalistically.

“Yes, but as much like as to stand in for it.” He meant for the Christmas they would never share together. She nodded.

“Oh,” said Doroftei, “this is sweet goodness; all that's missing is pussy.” He smiled unapologetically at Wendy, who felt as if she were supposed to nod and agree. But she was suddenly shy.

The walkway led over a wooden bridge. Small white lights were looped around the posts and struts of the bridge. The stream below was mostly snowed over, though there was a glassy jingle as of ice bits caught in a bottleneck.

She wanted to stand in the snow, on the pines, surrounded by lights, on a nine-foot bridge, under Romanian stars, all night long, and keep it as a memory. She didn't want to move forward to where she could hear a pulsing antiquated disco beat ready to drum the atmosphere into a pulp.

“As good as Christmas,” she allowed to John.

 

She was at a loss; how often did that happen? London usually felt full and redolent of the past, so saturated with atmosphere that one could sometimes hardly breathe—now it felt airless. Should she just go back to Boston, give up on the idea of a novel about Wendy Pritzke? Why not just bolt? Shrug off any remaining responsibility
about home renovations in a property that didn't even belong to her, order a minicab, head for Heathrow, hit the bar for a glass of something with a lemon rind or a pickled onion in it.

Nothing called for her to come back to Boston, that was part of the problem. And the only thing really urging her to stay was the fey though ineffectual parasite that had seemed to infect Rudge House.

So she found herself, a few days later, back at the door of Ritzi Ostertag's place in Cowcross Street. A heavy tide of patchouli couldn't disguise a smell of roach spray. If an exorcism were needed, of any sort, Winnie deduced, either ectoplasm or vermin, Ritzi Ostertag probably wouldn't be up for the job.

Ritzi looked up from the cash register where he was writing out a receipt to a weeping young woman from the Caribbean. “Four times a day rain or shine until ze full moon,” he said, handing her a paper sack. “And zen ve'll see vhat ve'll zee.” He rolled his eyes at the sight of Winnie, but with a toss of his head he indicated:
Sit, ve vill talk
.

She tried to melt into the background, but the background was occupied by that American historian, Hausserman. She was surprised how quickly she remembered the name. He was leafing through an old dusty volume whose pages were deckled on side and bottom, and touched with gold on the top. “Oh, you,” he said. “If you've come to buy this early-nineteenth-century
Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach,
you're out of luck. Dibs. But there's a duplicate
Fantômes et revenants au Moyen Age
by Lecouteux as a consolation prize.”

“I'm here to have my fortune told,” she said.

“Professional research or greedy for knowledge in a Faustian sense?”

“The silence of the confessional obtains, I believe. None of your beeswax, as we used to say in Simsbury, Connecticut.”

“I understand.” He nodded with a parody of British courtesy derived from Merchant Ivory films, and turned his attention back to the page.

“What are you looking for?” She didn't want to engage him, but she couldn't help herself.

He gave her a wink. “Our dear Ostertag may be flighty but the boy does deliver the goods, I'll give him that.”

Ritzi came over. “I can't be seeink you now,” he said to Winnie, “I can't be givink myself over to ze spirit vorld.”

“I'll wait till you finish this sale. I can wait.”

“You're in hurry,” said Ritzi.

“No I'm not.”

“You are, you just are not yet knowink it.”

She let out a laugh that sounded too much like a high squeal. Then she shrugged. Irv Hausserman closed the book and he negotiated a price. A number of soft pale notes changed hands and Ritzi wrote up the exchange, and wrapped the book lovingly in a length of white muslin, and again in brown paper and string.

“What a pleasant surprise to run into you again,” said Irv. “Opal, isn't it?” He nodded his good-byes, and left whistling, shunting the book lovingly from arm to arm. She hated to see him go, but she couldn't think of anything to say that would keep him.

“Now.” Ritzi Ostertag began the flourishes and flounces of his act. “A new lock on ze door so zis time ve are not beink interrupted. I am knowink you vill return. Zat cloth has got you wrapped.” Or had he said “rapt”? “I believe I tell you you are not to be brinkink it back.”

“Yes, you told me not to.”

“But you disobey Ritzi and brink it.”

“Yes.”

“Good. I am vantink to look at it more closely.” He made hurrying motions, shaking his hands. She sat down and unwrapped the thing once again.

Though he seemed determined to keep up his accent this time, Ritzi Ostertag didn't attempt mood lighting or a medieval music soundtrack. He turned several desk lights on and sat down at a table like an Antwerp jeweler with an eyepiece studying an old diamond. “Such strong—I don't know—associations I am gettink,” he said. “It is strange. Bitter as radish is bitter.”

“Is it haunted?” said Winnie.

“A piece of cloth? How can a fragment of cloth be haunted?”

“How could a house be haunted, or a forest, or a person's dreams? I don't know. Is it?”

“Not my area of specialization. I half no talent at zuch zinks. But I can zense a great—somezink. Some
Schreck
.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers very gently on the fabric. He was like a wine connoisseur proving his prowess over a mystery vintage. “I can tell you very little about zis, but somezink about yourself comes through. I zink zis is about you, but I can't tell.”

“This cloth can't be about me. I merely helped find it.”

He took long, deep breaths. “Oh, ze poor somezink. Vhatever it iz. You or it, or did I say last time it vas a she-thing? Yes, I zink it vas.”

“You think it was . . . ?”

“The shroud of a young voman.”

He opened his eyes. His hands had been roaming as if over a keyboard, and they stopped. He looked more closely, and held the cloth up. “Damn zese bad eyes,” he said, “gettink old is no fun. Vhat is zis?”

“I don't see anything,” she said.

“I can feel it. I zink I can see it. Yes, look, if you hold ze cloth so
zat ze light falls against it like so—a pattern. Do you zee? A letter, perhaps, a numeral? Vhat is it?”

She could not see it at first, but then she thought she picked up a pattern of glazed threads with matted-down hairs, as distinct from the surround of coarser threads. She was hardly surprised. That same symbol, a cross with a zigzag slash through it. Four or five inches high, perhaps painted with wax, or a pigment whose color had long since faded, leaving only a residue of binder.

“What does it mean?” she said.

“Ask somevone else, not me,” he said, “but it is feelink stronger to me zan ze rest.”

“What precisely do you mean?” she said.

“As a pepper soup is heartier zan a banana soup. Don't interrupt.” His hands moved slowly, reading like Braille, but stopped nowhere else, until, with eyes closed, his fingers roamed the cloth to its hem, reached a few inches, and touched her fingertips. She sat there, frightened and angry.

“Vhat do you vant?” he asked her, more like a doctor than a priest.

“I am not getting through, anywhere,” she said. “I am a writer whose character has left her; I don't even know where she went. If this is a block, it's a first time for me. I can't get her on the page, I can't see her in my lazy mind's eye before I go to sleep. I can't find my cousin, who has disappeared. I am afraid to admit that my cousin's house is mildly haunted by whoever it was who was wrapped in this cloth. I have a mad notion that one of my ancestors was the prototype for Charles Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge, the one who suffered all those visitations by ghosts. I don't know if he was mad, or fanciful, or psychotic; I don't know if I am finding myself the same. Nothing is connected. Nothing makes sense. I am not getting through anywhere.”

Ritzi sighed. “I don't know about writer's block. Ze only kind of writer's block I haff is in signink my name to bank checks vhen my bills come due. I can't make myself do it. But such blank valls, zere is so little to attach. Vhat haff you done to yourself?”

“So I've dyed my hair,” she admitted, “only against a little gray.”

“No, not zat,” he said. “Am I gettink you or am I gettink some whiff of ze shroud-phantom?”

“If you can get a whiff of anything over your industrial-strength patchouli, I'm surprised.”

“You hold me off, more zan you need,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked at her clinically. Once again the accent fell off. “I may be a silly old bore but I'm not a fool, you know. I can tell you've had some doings with astrology somehow. I can tell that making fun of people is your professional strength and your living grave.”

“I asked for a reading of the future, not the present,” she said.

“You keep yearning to go east, but you're either going too far or you're not going far enough,” he said. “You are not finding the right—destiny. Destination. It is not the Balkans. You're misled. Go nearer or go farther.”

“It was a character of mine who was going there. Not me.”

“Whoever this is,” he said, moving his hand back to the nearly invisible scar of marking on the edge of the cloth, “wants to go back, but like you—cannot. It is a problem of getting through. She has lost the way to get through. She needs help. Who will be her helpmeet?”

 

After dropping thirty pounds into a brass scale held by a grinning Hanuman figure, Winnie made her way downstairs to Cowcross Street, thinking: What a bravura performance that was. He took what she gave off about
herself—her intensely divided and lonely self—and made of it a story about a ghost who was equally indigent. He ought to go into fiction writing, why not? Maybe they should collaborate, and together they could find out what had happened to Wendy Pritzke.

But had she ever mentioned the Balkans to him? To Rasia? How did he know?

Irv Hausserman was waiting for her at the corner. “Sorry,” he said, “I know this seems like stalking, but by now my curiosity is piqued. Did Mr. Ostertag tell you that you would run into me again in the near future, like half an hour or so?”

She wasn't happy to be waylaid, but it was better than seeing no one, since she seemed to have ostracized herself from every figment and figure she knew, in her mind and out of it. “He said my ghost has a hard time getting home.”

“You have a ghost. A personal one? How leading edge of you. Is it lost?”

“It's all bunk, I know. Once upon a time I wrote faux horoscopes and made a healthy living at it; anyone with a semblance of an imagination can do it. But there's just enough creepiness in the whole thing to make me very sad.” She told him about the finding of the cloth in her family home, and about the pattern daubed on the edge of the cloth.

“You're sure you saw that insignia on the pantry boards? On your computer screen?”

“Oh, once something happens, who can be sure of anything? I thought I did, but I am modern enough to mistrust my senses. Clearly I'm overwrought with worry over my cousin, and pretending not to be.”

“Why bother to pretend? Why not be overwrought?”

“I can see things that aren't there,” she said. “I guard against that.”

“Like ghosts?”

“Like conspiracies. Like plots. Like narrative plots, I mean, but also like paranoia. I'm not superstitious but I am suspicious.”