Authors: Hugo Wilcken
I climbed the subway stairs on East Seventy-Seventh, already picturing the short walk to my office. Every inch of that journey was burned onto my brain, every facade and storefront, every fire hydrant. Seconds before passing a building, I would have a mental image of it, and then moments later,
compare it with the real thing. I was prepared for things to be different; it would have been normal that, in the months that had passed, a wall might have been repainted or demolished, a tree might have grown or died. But no: everything was the same.
Manne’s apartment block had been redeveloped, the Stevens Institute destroyed: I could only wonder what might have happened to the Park Avenue building. The one thing that hadn’t occurred to me was that it would be perfectly, preternaturally unchanged. The image of it, in sepulchral white stone, was a part of me, almost inside me. I walked past the entrance without stopping, but managed a quick glance at the brass nameplates lining one of the walls of the lobby. I had a sense that mine was still up there. There was a bench on the sidewalk, a couple of doors down. I’d walked past it a thousand times, but had never sat on it. No one ever did, apart from the occasional elderly man on return from his daily constitutional. But I sat down on it now, as it offered me a good view of my old building, without making it seem as if I were loitering.
I’d pretend to look elsewhere, but it was hard not to stare, watching the people as they came and went from the building, with greater frequency than I would have imagined. Many of them I didn’t know, but some I recognized. They were the wealthy residents and their servants, who lived on the upper floors, and with whom I might have exchanged the occasional nod or pleasantry in the elevator. Contact had rarely gone beyond that, but by dint of repetition their faces would be forever there, lurking in the corners of my consciousness. They too were exactly the same, but insubstantial, ghosts, with no further relevance or existence in my life. And yet they lived on.
The experience of sitting and watching was intense and
boring at the same time. I didn’t want to go into the building, for fear of being recognized. I’d returned to my former life, only to observe it from the outside in. I imagined Manne coming out from the lobby, and me watching him from my third-person perspective, as he wandered around the corner to a delicatessen, where he sometimes bought sandwiches to take to the Park. What had once been quite ordinary now transformed. All sorts of unrelated ideas came to me. I thought of the old lady who lived opposite me, whom I’d never seen or communicated with, and yet who must have taken the phone call from Dora Morel. And I thought of Dora Morel. I wondered whether I wanted to go to bed with her, as Marie had supposed. Perhaps Marie was right; perhaps I did. It was impossible to know who Dora was. When we’d met, she’d been the distraught wife of a supposed psychotic. In the magazine ad, she was the stereotypical American mother. The man at the agency implied that she was an illegal immigrant getting by on her good looks. The mask changed: it would change again should I ever meet her.
A man walked out of the lobby and stood by the curb, plainly waiting for a taxi. How many times had I done that myself? Judging from his appearance—the high polish on the shoes, the conservative, well-cut suit—he too might well be a doctor, with an office in the building, and although I vaguely recognized him, I couldn’t place him. A cab pulled up. The man took off his hat and readied himself to get in. But then he seemed to change his mind and waved the taxi on. In the brief moment I’d seen him with his hat off, I knew who he was, with absolute clarity. The man I’d known as Esterhazy. He wasn’t dead. He was there: tall, wiry, with dark eyes and that thick dark hair. He seemed to hesitate on the sidewalk, like an actor unsure of his lines. Then he set off down the avenue,
weaving his way randomly through the throng, as if he had no particular destination in mind.
He wasn’t hard to follow. The problem was to avoid overtaking him, to keep back against the flow of people, because his pace was that of a country stroll rather than a city stride. I caught him looking up to the sky at one point, but most of the time he had his hand to his chin, even while he walked, as if deep in thought. Already we were in a stretch of Park Avenue that I didn’t know, had maybe never been down, despite the fact that it was so close to where I’d spent a decade of my life. We were in that hinterland between the two worlds of Manne, that of his office and that of his apartment.
I’d quickly gotten the hang of the following game; I wasn’t going to lose Esterhazy. With the shock of seeing him receding, I found myself able to think, after a period in which my brain had gone blank. Impossible to know what Esterhazy was up to or where he was going; I’d just have to wait it out. I was struck by how different he was from the last time I’d seen him, comatose on my bed, pale, fragile, drugged. And although I was certain that it was him I was following, there was also a nagging voice in my head, reminding me that I’d only seen him a couple of times before, many months ago, in peculiar circumstances, so how could I possibly be so sure? I supposed that he would eventually stop somewhere, and at that moment, I might get a closer look.
I’d been following him an hour at least. After a while the chase had become mesmerizing, my thoughts drifting off into all sorts of random tangents. We’d gone all the way down Park Avenue to Grand Central, and then the man had turned right, in what had seemed an arbitrary manner. We were in one of those anonymous midtown streets. He veered off the sidewalk, in such an abrupt fashion that I nearly lost him. He’d walked into a bar, the kind of place that was nothing special,
with sawdust on the floor and a sprinkling of afternoon drinkers. Through the glass front I could see him talking to the barman, who promptly put a beer in front of him. My first thought had been to stay outside, but the reflections on the glass from the busy street made it difficult to see properly into the bar, and I was determined to get a better look at him.
Through the doors, everything felt different. After hours of people and traffic, of movement and noise, the place felt deathly still. The other patrons were for the most part immobile on their stools, staring into their drinks with a soulless determination. I frequented these kinds of bars myself, and although I was no alcoholic, I recognized the type. The unknowable men who would come in at ten in the morning, and stay there all day drinking in complete silence, only leaving when the after-work crowd eventually filtered in. Esterhazy, in his expensive suit and tie, looked wildly out of place. He’d downed his first beer quickly and had started on another. I climbed on a bar stool not far from him and ordered a whiskey. It was a reckless move, as he might easily have looked my way and recognized me. But I felt the need to scrutinize him at close quarters, to quiet the voice of doubt within me. Esterhazy paid me no heed, in any case. There was a flickering intensity to his eyes as he gazed out through the glass front into the streetscape, its somber colors more redolent of fall than the beginnings of spring after a bitter winter.
It was Esterhazy all right. I couldn’t doubt it now. He hadn’t died in my bed, as I’d been led to believe. Dr. Peters had admitted as much, in the case history I’d looked at in the library. I tried to spin out a story that would account for Esterhazy’s sudden reappearance. I cast my mind back to the day I’d seen him for the last time, lying comatose in my bedroom. I’d left him there, after Mrs. Esterhazy’s phone call. Some time later, he would have woken up. Alone, in a strange room, wearing
strange clothes. His mind still hazy from the coma, he would have no recall of my visit to him at the Stevens Institute, of the taxi ride home, of my practically carrying him up the stairs to my apartment. No, instead he would have felt the bizarre shock of waking up, only to find that he was in fact someone else. Hesitatingly, he gets out of the bed and goes to the other room, to see if he recognizes anything in it. He stares out the window, to a blank wall opposite. Eventually he makes his way to the bathroom. There on the shelf, sitting next to a water glass and a toothbrush, he sees a wallet. His wallet, no doubt. He opens it and finds a driving license in the name of Dr. David Manne. Business cards too, with an address on Park Avenue. And now he walks to the front door. By the entrance is a small table, on which lies a key. His key.
Esterhazy was beside me. From the corner of my eye I watched him as he sat there wordlessly for twenty minutes or so, sipping at his beer from time to time, in a sort of reverie. But then when the bar started to fill up with the first wave of workers, the ambience changed. As abruptly as he’d entered the bar, Esterhazy now left it, slapping a dollar bill down on the bar beside his empty glass. Again he seemed to pause outside, as if uncertain which way to go, before turning left onto Sixth Avenue.
He hadn’t quickened his meandering pace, but for long moments now I lost sight of him, in the chaotic rush of people on their way home. He was heading north; his movements seemed to describe a huge circle, and I wondered whether he was returning to where he’d started. If that were the case, then what was the purpose of this long ramble? Esterhazy stopped momentarily by a phone booth, as if about to make a call, but then moved on again. The whole journey was like this, punctuated with small hesitations.
It was twilight, the enigmatic hour, so often lost in the New
York rush. We’d reached the end of the Avenue, and Central Park stretched out before us like an ocean. But Esterhazy didn’t too venture too far in, settling for a bench overlooking the Pond on the south side. We were away from the sidewalk crowds now, and relatively few people were in the Park this late in the day. I watched the geese gliding effortlessly across the water and felt my muscles relax: I couldn’t lose him here. I found my own bench a good fifty yards from his, so that I could just see his dark head, and I’d be alerted easily enough when he moved off. What was the meaning of his long meander? Throughout this whole affair, I’d always assumed that he was the principal victim. That he’d been drugged, then committed under false pretenses. And that what had happened to me was simply part of that wider picture. Now, I wasn’t sure of that at all.
I gazed up into the graying skies, pulling my eyes away from Esterhazy for the first time since the bar. Great dark clouds of birds swooped and wheeled high above. At one point they appeared to be moving backward en masse, no doubt an optical illusion. It was ominously beautiful, and illustrated something a patient had once pronounced out of the blue: “We come from a place where the birds fly backward.” I’d paid no heed at the time, but the words spooked me now. For a few minutes, ever-greater concentrations of birds filled the sky, swirling around until in one seemingly synchronized movement, they headed south and out of sight.
Esterhazy was up again. He’d only been on the bench for ten minutes or so, and I guessed he’d wanted to move on before it became too dark. I trailed him as he headed east out of the Park, then crossed Fifth and Madison. I’d been right, he was going back to the starting point. We were on Park Avenue, a block or so from the building, when Esterhazy suddenly spun around. Instinctively I threw myself into a
doorway. I waited out an excruciating ten seconds. When I poked my head around the corner, the fedora pushed down almost to my eyes, I caught Esterhazy just as he was turning back. He’d clearly stood there a good moment before deciding to walk on. Had he seen me? In any case he’d had an intuition that he was being followed. It shook me up and I hung back a bit until I saw him finally ducking into the building, giving a quick nod to the doorman, as if at least they were acquainted with each other. I sat down again at the bench near the entrance.
It was quite dark now, cold too. I wouldn’t actually be able to sit it out for too long, I realized; I’d freeze to death. I felt a crushing tiredness from the long walk, the whiskey, the lack of anything to eat. But I was also in a febrile state of mind, buzzing from the events of the day. I put my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. I could feel the piece of paper I’d shoved deep into one of them, the one with Dora Morel’s number. Over the long afternoon of tailing Esterhazy, I’d put his “wife” out of my mind. I cast my eyes down the avenue in search of a phone booth, but there wasn’t one. It was Friday evening, in any case. Dora Morel was an attractive young woman; she was probably out somewhere. I had her image in my mind now, her neat figure, and I was wondering what it would be like to see her naked, to feel her body, to go to bed with her. I swung around, my heart pumping. I, too, had suddenly had the unnerving feeling that someone was stalking me. I strained to make out anything in the blackness.
An elderly woman in a heavy fur coat emerged from the lobby. Just behind her was Esterhazy. He could barely have had time enough to go up in the elevator and come down again. Someone was accompanying him, a man in a uniform wearing a cap, probably a police officer but it was hard to see in the dark. The two were in conversation, and the way they
were interacting suggested that no coercion was involved, that it was a relationship of equals. With a thrill I realized that they were heading my way, were going to walk straight past where I was sitting. “We’ll be outta there in a half hour, forty minutes, then you’re free,” the police officer was saying. I recognized the voice, but I didn’t dare look up until they passed. I recognized the loping gait as well; it was exactly the same as when we’d been teenagers together, out on Long Island. Esterhazy was with D’Angelo. It was a moment of extraordinary intensity. They rounded the corner, and I jumped up from the bench. Although I hardly wanted to draw attention to myself, I couldn’t help racing toward them. Esterhazy was climbing into the passenger seat of a police car, the two of them still in conversation. I had the impression that he’d glanced my way, just for a tiny moment, as if in an obscure acknowledgement of something. Before I had time to understand what was happening, the car roared off and disappeared into the traffic, fluid at that hour. Within seconds I’d lost sight of it. I’d been trailing Esterhazy the entire afternoon, and he was gone in an instant.