“But they haven’t,” said the stein. “Gone for treatment, I mean. I work on the eighth floor. Health insurance. We keep track of the treatment centres — and Napoleons have been disappearing from them, too. Every hospice, every psychiatric facility — they all report the same thing. Their Napoleons have gone missing.”
“Eerie,” said green and fizzy, and I remember thinking that, however addled the blister’s mental faculties were as a result of his drink of choice, the chap was right.
It was at this point, when I had drawn enough strength from the cask to engage in a bit of conversational give and take, that the project was rendered null and void by the sudden advent of the woman to whom, if I judged correctly from the self-satisfied aura she projected, I was now officially betrothed. She strode into the bar, making a beeline for yours truly.
“I’ve got it!” she said, advancing rapidly with a triumphant note in her voice.
“You . . . you do?”
“I do!”
I could think of no two words I liked the sound of less.
She gripped my wrist and drew me from my barstool, directing me to a corner booth tucked away from prying eyes and other sensory organs. She leaned toward me.
“You’ll never guess what I got,” she said, beaming.
“A . . . a marriage license?” I asked. And if I quailed in the asking, who can blame me?
“Never mind about that,” said Vera, shooing away my remark. When next she spoke, she spoke in a whisper. “When I was at the registrar’s desk I told them I was trying to plan a wedding. But I also told them I was short one maid of honour. I told them I had a friend who I’d met in Detroit Mercy Hospice, and that the two of us had promised to stand as maid of honour at each other’s weddings.”
All of this was news to me. I tried my best to collar the nub.
“You — you had a friend in the hospice?” I said.
“Try to keep up,” she said, and patted my head in a manner I felt offensive. “I said she and I — my friend in the hospice, I mean — became best pals during our treatment, but that I’d been discharged before her and lost track of her when I left. I told them I’d called at the hospice but they wouldn’t release her address. I knew the registrar would have access to some kind of paper trail — property tax filings, municipal fines, license applications, that sort of thing. Loads of things that could help them track people down, even people who don’t want to publicize their address. I put all of this to the registrar. Anyway, one thing led to another and this registrar person must have been a lapsed Girl Guide who hadn’t kept up with her good deeds. I hadn’t been with her five minutes when she did a bit of searching and then gave me the info that I needed. So now we have the address!”
“Which address?” I said, befogged.
“1024 Bethnel Green, Hadley Apartments.”
This failed altogether to ease my bafflement. I pressed for further details.
“Don’t be a dunce!” she said, and if I hadn’t dodged adroitly she’d have tousled my hair once more. “It’s the address for Maria Ramolino.”
The name came close to ringing a bell, but missed by a whisker. Dashed familiar, I mean to say, but not so much that it called up pictures and character sketches. My befogged state must have been evident to Vera, for she supplied additional clues.
“Maria, Rhinnick. Your friend. Lived at the hospice. I mean — you didn’t think they were all actually named Napoleon, did you?”
The mists parted. All was clear.
“Abe’s drawers!” I said, the shingles having fallen from my eyes. “You’ve managed to track down Nappy’s address!”
Chapter 13
For Rhinnick Feynman, to think is to act, and so it was without a moment’s hesitation that Vera and I settled up with the barman, bid adieu to my fellow patrons, and ditched the bar in favour of a taxi stand outside. We hailed the first cab on the spot and, quietly thanking Abe for the efficient address-supplying skills of his municipal desk attendants, slipped the relevant geographic details to our driver and proceeded in the direction of 1024 Bethnel Green.
It has often struck me that the chaps in charge of naming streets must be fans of irony or sarcasm. Take this Bethnel Green, for example. If any neighbourhood failed to live up to the name “Green” it was this one. It was one of those moody, heavily graffitied, ill-maintained urban stretches you sometimes see on life’s journey, generally after making a lengthy series of wrong turns or bad investments. The names “thug alley” or “desperation row” would have fit the place like paper on the wall, but not “Bethnel Green,” unless of course the place was named after some distinguished local personage, say, Josephine Bethnel Green, who had some historical connection to this stretch of urban blight. But for whatever reason, this place was called Bethnel Green, and we’d been assured Bethnel Green was the street where we’d find Nappy’s abode.
The driver deposited us in the vicinity of our destination, accepted payment and tip, and tootled off with a friendly yodel. Vera and self mounted a set of concrete stairs which led to the door marked 1024. And the first thing that struck us, apart I suppose from the dismal, grey, soul-dampening drabness of the place, was the fact that the door was slightly ajar and showing signs of having been jimmied, if jimmying refers to what I think it does.
I held Vera back with a bracing arm and assured her that, so long as the pair of us were sliding into parts unknown where thugs wielding truncheons might lie in wait, the first person across the threshold was going to be Feynman, R. Say what you will about we Feynmen, but we do not shield ourselves behind companions when tiptoeing into peril. Unless of course the companion is Tonto or Zeus, who provide their own shielding and are a dashed sight better equipped than self to deal with life’s marauders.
I prodded the door gingerly with the tip of my umbrella. It squeaked just loudly enough to add a sense of menace and alert any lurking ne’er-do-wells that a pair of juicy targets were approaching. I quietly cursed the landlord for not keeping the hinges oiled.
We stepped through. The sight that met us didn’t so much resemble a cozy apartment suitable for a single Napoleonic pipsqueak, but rather a frat house after a cataclysmic blowout or a garage sale that had been staged during an earthquake. Chairs and couches were overturned, drawers were pulled from their parent shelves with contents strewn wherever gravity might take them, and framed photographs lay smashed on the floor alongside piles of assorted detritus of domestic life. The word “ransacked” sums it up nicely. But on the credit side of the ledger there was one notable entry, viz, whoever had done the ransacking showed no sign of having stuck around. Vera and self appeared to be alone, if you can call it being alone when there are two of you.
“Halloo?” I called, just in case.
“I don’t think anyone’s here,” whispered Vera.
“Apart from us, you mean,” I said.
“What do you suppose has happened?”
It seemed to me that there were two possibilities. Either Nappy’s condition was more complicated than she had hitherto let on, and she’d developed a habit of pillaging her own home, or the place had been disarranged by someone else — possibly someone looking for Nappy. I put these possibilities to Vera.
“It looks to me like whoever did this was searching for something,” said Vera. “They’ve pulled the cushions from all the furniture, they’ve rifled through all the drawers. They’ve been through everything.”
“Well one thing’s certain,” I said, rummaging through a nearby pile of Nappy’s worldly possessions, “the motive wasn’t robbery.”
“How do you know?” said Vera.
“Intact piggybank,” I said, withdrawing the named object from the pile. It was large, pink, unbroken, and — as I determined through the administration of a few well-executed shakes — still full of a largish quantity of coins.
“I haven’t seen one of those in ages,�
� said Vera. “Not since I was newly manifested.”
“Another retrieved memory?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” said Vera. “More of a vision of myself re—”
“Yes, yes, I understand,” I said, dismissing her pedantic straw-splitting with a gesture. “You can’t retrieve your old memories because your memory has been wiped. But you can have new visions of past events, which essentially amount to the same thing. Six of one, half dozen of the other, what?”
“I suppose,” said Vera. “But these visions aren’t exactly like memories. They’re more accurate. They’re not distorted by time. I see them as clearly as I can see you right now.”
“And are you seeing anything that might prove more useful than the piggybanks of your youth?” I asked, placing the object on a shelf. “Say, a vision of who may have done all this? A bit of soothsaying to point us in the direction of Nappy’s current locale?”
“Sorry, no. But I’ll bet it wasn’t Nappy who made this mess. Her pictures are smashed. All of her stuff has been treated like garbage.”
“A fair point. But if not Nappy, then who?”
“Someone looking for Napoleons. I mean, it stands to reason. All these Napoleons disappearing, and Nappy out on her own . . . whoever was gathering up Napoleons must have wanted Nappy, too. They must have come here to find her. And if she wasn’t here, they may have trashed the place trying to figure out where she’d gone.”
“Determined blighters,” I said. “Not to mention dashed untidy. It wouldn’t have hurt them to have spruced the place up a bit once they’d found Nappy had gone.”
“They must have left in a hurry. Either that or they didn’t care if they were found out.”
“Shall we dust for prints?” I asked.
“Dust for prints?”
“I read about it in one of those mystery novels.”
“Do you know how to dust for prints?”
“The police do it. How hard can it be?”
“Who knows?” said Vera. “It might be easy as pie. But as I’ve no idea how to do it, or how to do anything with any prints we find—”
“I imagine the procedure calls for dust,” I suggested. “Plenty of that on hand.”
“Maybe you’d like to sweep for DNA, while you’re at it. Look, the best we can do is search every room for any sign of what’s happened to Nappy. You take the bedroom, and I’ll start in the bathroom.”
“Surely not!” I said. “I mean to say, you can’t expect me to poke about in a woman’s private bedroom. It wouldn’t be seemly.”
She appeared to be on the precipice of arguing this point when something seemed to catch her eye. She bent over, pushed aside a midsized pile of clothing, and picked up a mechanical clock.
“Is that the time?” she said.
I reached into my jacket pocket, scratched Fenny behind his ear, and withdrew my pocket watch.
“It is,” I said. “5:25 pm.”
“I have to call Dr. Peericks!” she announced. “There’s a payphone out on the street. I’ll go out and let him know we’ll be late. He’ll be expecting me back by now.”
And without further preamble, she tottered off, leaving me alone to decide whether the more prudent, gentlemanly, and seemly course was for me to search through a single woman’s bedroom or to conduct an investigation of what Nappy probably called her salle de bain. Not much in it either way, so far as I could tell. I flipped a coin and it came up heads. Seeing this as a cosmic indication that the loo was the room picked by fate, I dropped the coin in Nappy’s piggybank, rolled up a metaphorical sleeve or two, and got down to business.
The first thing that struck me as I entered was how dashed undisturbed it was. The living room, or parlour, or whatever you choose to call the room that I’d just left, looked like it had been rearranged by a long succession of Class 5 tornadoes, while the bathroom looked as though it had just been cleaned. The medicine cabinet remained steadfastly fastened to the wall, the cupboard drawers were tucked away and good as new, and the shower curtain — an opaque plastic number featuring blue and yellow fish displaying unrealistic smiles — remained securely attached to the rod, doing its noble work of hiding the tub and shower-bath from view. I started my search in the medicine cabinet, as one always does whenever one finds oneself alone in another’s home.
My initial investigation unveiled nothing probative. I mean to say, there was the usual assortment of ointments, creams, unguents, and bathroom whatnots you’d expect to spot, but nothing out of the ordinary. Lacking any immediate leads, I was leaning in to examine the use-by dates and SPF levels on a couple of bottles of sunscreen, when the project was cut short by the sudden rending of the shower curtain behind me. I spun round just in time to see a crazed-looking Napoleonic chap emerging from behind the curtain and waving a knife. He clambered clumsily out of the tub, cursed a bit in his Napoleonic lingo while extricating his arm from the curtain with which it had been entwined, secured his footing, and positioned himself between the undersigned and the bathroom door.
I stood there gaping all the while. It’s what Churchill would have done.
I knew at a g. that this knife-waving chap was no ordinary Napoleon. Nor was it Nappy, the friendly, female Napoleon in whose bathroom I now stood. No, I was able to ID this fiend in human shape as Napoleon Number Three, a former hospice resident of my acquaintance, and one who’d taken to calling himself by a number of loony pseudonyms including “Bonaparte” and “Jack.”
Recognizing that it may have been some time since you last perused the archives, I expect you’ll need a refresher on the biography of this particular lump of wasted flesh. He was, as I mentioned a moment ago, one of a handful of Napoleons with whom I’d hobnobbed at the hospice, he being designated Napoleon Number Three. When last we’d met this blot on the landscape he’d been trying his best to thwart my aims and objects by preventing self and assorted hangers-on from going awol from the hospice. He’d gone so far as taking me hostage, holding yours truly at knifepoint while threatening to carry out a bit of amateur surgery with a view to determining the colour of my insides. I remember thinking at the time that his motives seemed unclear — he’d babbled somethingorother in my ear about destiny, following orders, and acting at the behest of some person named “Alice” but had never fully explained why his destiny called for me to be held at the business end of a knife while he screamed threats at my friends and colleagues, just ruining our day. It all worked out in the end, of course. My best pal Zeus took a good deal of umbrage at seeing his chum in a spot of peril, and leapt into the fray without delay, thus reducing this Napoleon, if that’s what you’d like to call him, or Bonaparte if you prefer to the level of a fifth-rate power. After seeing that this Napoleon was, in the wake of Zeus’s beating, little more than a spot of grease on the hospice lawn, we’d flicked the dust from our metaphorical sleeves and gotten on with our lives. And as we’d moved off from the wreckage, I imagined this was the last we’d see of this particular pustule on the backside of Detroit.
Leaping back to the present, I didn’t celebrate my reunion with this blighter by leaping into a series of fond reminiscences. Instead, I merely stood my ground and shouted, “Bonaparte!”
This seemed to nettle the blighter. He pointed his knife at me in a marked manner.
“Call me Jack!” he shouted, his jaw muscles moving freely.
“Or ‘Jack,’ if you prefer,” I said, cordially. “We needn’t quibble about details. But the issue arising now, and one which raises numerous points of interest and could use some threshing out, is this: what the dickens are you doing here?”
“Vat are you doing ’ere?” he said. And I remember thinking that he rather had me there. I mean to say, it’s not that I had any particular right to be in Nappy’s apartment, and I was — if one was to take a strictly legalistic view of the thing — a mere trespasser in her home. I decided it was best to give a
n account of my presence on the scene, and was emboldened in this conviction because, as I might have mentioned before, the chap inquiring about my presence was holding a knife.
“I’m looking for Nappy,” I said.
“I am looking for Nappy,” he riposted, rather warmly.
“She isn’t here,” I said, shrugging a shoulder and gesturing broadly. “Biffed off, it seems.”
“I came ’ere to see eef she was safe,” said Jack, if that’s what you’d like to call him, and it struck me right away that this failed to square up with my sense of the blighter’s modus operandi. I mean to say, here was an unscrupulous dreg of humanity who threatened people with knives, hid behind shower curtains, held fellow hospice patients hostage, and generally came across as one of the landmines hiding in life’s lawn. He wasn’t exactly a man to whom the motto “safety first” would apply.
“Let’s thresh this out like gentlemen,” I suggested, giving diplomacy a go. “Why not put down the knife, and you and I can—”
That sentence, had it been permitted to come to fruition, would have ended with the words “put our heads together and sort out what might have happened to Nappy.” But those words never crossed my lips. For on the cue “put down the knife,” Jack’s eyes had widened to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible, seeming to burn with what I believe is called a “baleful light,” and he interrupted me with a low, threatening voice, which reminded me of the growl a tiger might unleash before chowing down on its daily villager.
“Zees is Alice!” he growled, brandishing the knife in a most uncordial fashion. And I could see, when he brandished it, that its hilt was carved in the shape of a ballerina, only adding to the overall air of brow-furrowing mystery that surrounded this little excrescence.
“Hallo, Alice,” I said, my voice quavering more than I might have hoped. “Now, Jack, there’s no need for Alice to get involved in our discussion. Perhaps if we just — I don’t know — chatted further about what brought us here, maybe some productive course of action might emerge.”
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