Drumbeat Erica

by Stephen Marlowe

  “It’s done its good deed for today,” I said.

  Shiraz just looked at me while I put the gun away. He shrugged helplessly. Claeys was still splashing around. I looked back along the dike. While the shooting was going on someone had set up a bunch of hurdles. They were spotted along the dike every ten yards or so.

  We started walking. Every now and then I cleared a hurdle with a small, graceful leap. Shiraz really impressed me though. He could walk right through them. I tried it once and tripped.

  “That’s a pretty good trick,” I said grudgingly.

  “… third time,” Shiraz said. I realized he had been babbling for a while. “And each time you pop up. That poor slob in New York, he didn’t happen to be a friend of yours by any chance?”

  “Worked for me,” I said.

  “You could do me a favor,” Shiraz said. “You could tell me who’s trying to rub me out.”

  I didn’t tell him. He wasn’t walking any longer. He was just standing there in the rain, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. He said clinically, “Reaction setting in. I’m getting the shakes.” He wasn’t talking to me now, but to Ahmed Shiraz, Actor. “I’ve got to remember that. It takes a few minutes. You don’t feel a thing at first, then it gets to you and you know you could have been killed. That’s when you get the shakes.”

  We resumed walking. After a while the lights of sailor town swam up through the rain to meet us. All the reds and blues ran together. It was like looking at a time exposure of traffic moving through a busy street in the rain. I gawked.

  In the crowded part of Zeedijk we found a taxi rank and got into the first cab. “Where you heading?” Shiraz asked.

  “I’ll drop you off.”

  All the way to the de I’Europe he kept talking. Most of it was about how he could use that scene in a movie. The rest was asking me what I knew about his would be assassins. I gripped my attaché case hard and stared defiantly at the members of the press and said, “No comment.”

  Our taxi stopped in front of the de l’Europe. “Join me for a drink?” Shiraz asked. He was still trying.

  “I’ve got an appointment.”

  He insisted on paying for the taxi. He handed me a wad of bills and walked into the hotel.

  I gave the driver Erica’s address on the Herren Canal.

  14

  HE LET me off on the edge of a wide canal facing a tall, skinny brick building with very large windows. Pane for pane, Dutch houses have the biggest windows in the world. I wondered what that signified. Probably had some deep sociological importance, I thought. “Ask me anything,” I said in a bored voice. “I know it all. After a while it gets to be a big fat bore. You just can’t stump me.”

  I was at the top of the stoop and going thud, thud, thud to a knocker gizmo in the shape of a wrought iron ring in a lion’s mouth. The lion stuck out its tongue and licked my hand playfully. I patted its mane.

  The door opened and a small narrow old woman stood there. She looked just like a little old lady in tennis sneakers, the kind that joins way-out political groups back in the States, except that she wasn’t wearing any. Tennis sneakers, that is.

  “How come you’re not wearing any?” I asked her.

  “Please?” she said. “I am not wearing what?”

  “Do you speak English, madam?” I asked.

  She gave me a fish-eyed look. “I have been speaking English.”

  “Say, that’s right. So you have.”

  She started to shut the door.

  I got a foot in it shrewdly, like a door-to-door salesman. “Actually, I’m looking for Miss Nordstrom. Erica Nordstrom.”

  The narrow old woman ushered me into a seventeenth-century parlor that was absolutely authentic except for a Van Gogh reproduction hanging on the wall.

  “What’s that doing there?” I asked.

  The narrow old woman looked where I was looking. “Van Gogh, he is Dutch. May I have your name, please?”

  I spent a few seconds thinking of a good nom de guerre. “Erasmus,” I said suddenly. Erasmus was Dutch too.

  The narrow old woman gave me that fish-eyed stare again.

  I recited the name on my driver’s license, private eye photostat, passport and social security card. The narrow old woman went away.

  While she was gone I lit a cigarette and did some pretty deep thinking. I came pretty close to solving the unknowable secret of the universe, whatever the hell it was, because that was the way my mind was working. I started preparing my speech before the Nobel Prize committee up in Stockholm since they were sure to give it to me.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “gentlemen, there will always be—”

  “An England?” someone suggested.

  I found myself looking at Erica Nordstrom. She was very nice to look at. She was wearing aprés-ski slacks that clung to her lovely legs the way peach skin clings to a peach and an aqua blouse with a scoop neckline. No makeup except maybe around the eyes. Long blond hair loose and shining halfway down her back.

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “I never reveal my client’s identity,” I said.

  “I already know your client’s identity. I asked how you found me.”

  “You’d be surprised at my sources of information,” I said. “Why—”

  Her laughter interrupted me. “A trip,” she said. “I believe you are taking a trip.” It seemed to delight her.

  One small part of my mind was fighting the LSD, but not very successfully. It knew, for example, that I should have waited for the effects of the drug to wear off before tackling Erica. It dredged up information from somewhere and informed me that I could expect the trip to last about eight hours, an hour and a half of which had already passed. It told me, now that I was here, to be careful.

  “Been a pretty good trip so far,” I said, “all things considered.”

  “What things?”

  “Your friend Claeys for one. When last seen he was swimming in the water on the wrong side of the Zeedijk.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me. “Are you serious?”

  “Uh-uh,” I said, deciding to play it cagy. “That’s all you get out of me.”

  “Is it?” she said calmly. “Have you been to inner space yet?”

  “Inner space?”

  “Where you go on a trip. Into the depths of your own mind.” She spoke slowly. Her voice seemed to fill the room. “And if you happen to stumble on something you secretly fear in the innermost depths of your being, it can be awful. It can be a nightmare. Worse. It can send you to a mental institution, my friend. It can do permanent damage.” She said, “Think. What are you afraid of?”

  “The Penguin?” I said.

  “What are you afraid of? Try to imagine it. Try.”

  The idea intrigued me, but there was that one small part of my mind that didn’t want to try. “Forget it,” I said.

  I heard a noise behind me, a wheezing sound. I whirled toward it.

  An old man who looked vaguely familiar sat there in a wheelchair. He looked vaguely familiar because he had my face as my face might look in about fifty years, provided I lived fifty more years, which didn’t seem likely in my line of work.

  “Beat it,” I said.

  Instead he looked at me out of watery old eyes. Near the wheelchair was a table, and on the table a pack of cigarettes, a pitcher full of dry martinis and a framed photograph, in color, of a girl who looked something like Erica and something like Marianne Baker, whom I’ve been in love with on and off for years, and something like a gamin of a French girl named Dominique, whom I would have married and gone off into the sunset with if she hadn’t been shot dead in the kitchen of her father’s house with me asleep upstairs.

  The old man’s claw-like hand scrabbled across the table, trying to reach the cigarettes. It stopped short of them. Sweat popped out all over his wrinkled face. I felt a strange and terrible empathy. I was the old man. I was sitting there. Just to move my hand was a tremendous effort. I was eighty and f
eeble. I wanted a smoke but a smoke would probably kill me. I wanted a martini, dry, so cold that the glass frosted over. One sip would burn out my tired old pipes. Most of all I wanted the girl. I turned my head on its celery stalk of a neck and looked through rheumy eyes at the photograph. Marianne had gone away. Erica had gone away. It was all Dominique. I felt tears coursing down my withered cheeks. Life was over for me. I felt ineffably sorry for myself. There I was, a living dead man. I had been sit ting there that way for years. I would go on sitting there that way for years. Dominique’s photograph stared at me accusingly. “Look at me,” she said. “Look. I’m twenty-one. I will never be twenty-two. We made love, once, wonderful love, and I died. I died the same night. You are old. Old. You sit there. All the pleasures of life are lost to you forever. You will even grow to hate your memories because they tantalize you. Your life is over yet you go on living. My life hardly began.”

  The old man sat there, sobbing, the tears running down his cheeks. I was out of him again, watching him.

  “What is it, baby?” Erica said in a soothing voice. “Tell me. What is it?”

  I told her. I was afraid of senility and the living death of staying alive too long. Life was for the living. I wanted to ski and skin-dive, to climb high mountains and prowl sinister alleys, to gamble and gambol, to fish and fornicate. I wanted a quick end while I still had all of it. But not yet. Never quite yet. I wanted Dominique alive. She would be twenty-four now. She—

  “Tell me what happened tonight, baby. Tell me what happened with Claeys,” Erica said. “If you do, what is troubling you will go away. I promise.”

  Quickly, tersely, I told her. Then I turned savagely on the old man. He was gone.

  I felt weak and drained. The small narrow woman who wasn’t wearing tennis sneakers could knock me over with a casual back-handed swipe. But the drug’s hold on me had diminished. Erica had what she wanted, but I’d gained something too.

  Erica said: “I should be angry. Except for you it all would be over tonight.”

  “Why’s it so important to you? Whether Shiraz dies or goes on living for a while.”

  The question seemed to surprise her. “I took on the assignment. I hate losing. I detest it. To lose, to be defeated, is to die a little. At any rate, I still have three days. The more difficult the game, the more complete the victory. You don’t seriously believe Shiraz will be alive at the end of those three days, do you? You haven’t forgotten our little bet?”

  “Not three days,” I said. “All you have is a few minutes. There a phone here?”

  “A phone?”

  “Sure. To call Littlejohn.”

  “I don’t want to call Littlejohn.”

  “We’re going to.”

  She made a quick pass at my face with her hand. “Go away,” she said. She waited a few seconds and stared right through me. She began to walk toward the door.

  “I’m still here,” I called.

  She turned. “Damn you. You are. You are.”

  “Well, well, well,” I said. “Look who else is taking a trip. You sure did manage to hide it.”

  “I’m more used to it than you. It’s wearing off anyway. Just a small dose. I was all tense waiting. It relaxes me.” Now that I knew she was traveling she seemed eager to talk about it. “It relaxes me,” she said again, and added, “Except when I get the crawlies.”

  “What kind of crawlies do you get?”

  Her eyes widened. I saw then how dilated the pupils were. “Never mind,” she said.

  “No. Give.”

  “Just never mind.”

  I shrugged. “This game of yours. It’s no game if you change the rules as you go along. Stick to the rules and I’ll play with you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Littlejohn. He has the right to call you off.”

  Erica was watching me warily. “I’m listening.”

  “We phone him. Right now. If he says he’s changed his mind that’s the end of it.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “If he doesn’t, I’ll play your game.”

  “All the way including the—penalty for defeat?”

  Under other circumstances it would have been a ridiculous conversation, but with both of us hopped on LSD it didn’t seem ridiculous at all. “Okay,” I said. “All the way. Deal?”

  She stared at me and then nodded. “Deal.”

  I followed her upstairs to her room. It was a large studio on the fourth floor, just under the eaves of the roof. Erica stood at the big window looking down at the canal while I put the call through. It had finally stopped raining.

  The overseas operator said there would be a delay of a few minutes. They would call me.

  “We will be wonderful together,” Erica said.

  “Sure, stand Europe on its ear and all that.”

  “You think it’s funny?”

  “I think it’s not going to happen that way.” The idea of getting through to Littlejohn had driven everything else from my mind. But something was troubling me. I couldn’t pin it down. The LSD, I thought. It was doing a fine job of blocking—

  Blocking what?

  The phone rang.

  I remembered. Amos Littlejohn was in coma.

  “Mr. Drum? This is the overseas operator, sir. We have your call. Go ahead.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Littlejohn residence,” Janice’s voice said. Erica was watching me.

  “This is Chet Drum,” I told Janice. “Can you get me through to Mr. Littlejohn? It’s a matter of life and death. Is he conscious?”

  Janice began to cry. I listened to the sad and despairing sound, three thousand miles away. I knew what was coming. She sobbed: “Mr. Littlejohn, he died about an hour ago.”

  I looked at Erica. She saw it on my face.

  “Three days,” she said.

  15

  TAKE A color.

  Any color will do. Take red, say. A vibrant crimson or maybe red going to purple like a good Burgundy wine in sunlight. All your life you see the color and you call it crimson or burgundy. Pretty nice. Be kind of dull living. in a black and white world.

  Now take the same color and add some acid. Any old acid won’t do. Add a dose of LSD.

  The color changes. It is more. If it is crimson you can feel it coursing through your veins like blood. If it is burgundy you can taste it in your mouth like a rare glass of Romanée Conti ’49.’

  LSD heightens and alters sensation. Vision sings. Sound flashes. A humdrum everyday object becomes indescribably beautiful.

  There was a chair in my room at the Krasnapolsky. It had a wicker back, a plastic-covered seat and four legs. I stood there looking at ft. The lines were just right. The wicker back became a delicate lattice-work screen half-hiding a tropical glade on some nameless and remote island. I could smell salt spray. Palm fronds rustled in an unfelt breeze. Bare-breasted dusky maidens, all of them beautiful, fetched delectable tidbits for me to eat. They held a lottery: short straw lucky. Only one of them would get to sleep with me that night. I knew it was all hallucination, but it was also more real than the world that had a habit of knocking you down and stomping with heavy heels on your gut. I undressed and crawled into bed. The lucky winner crawled in with me. She was silky smooth and took delight in me. She wasn’t so bad herself.

  After a while we went to the window and looked across the great dark cobbled expanse of the Dam Square at the old Royal Palace. The dusky maiden and all her friends went away. There was a multitude in the square. I put on a robe and opened the French window and looked down on them. Here and there torches glowed. Everybody was in Reniassance costume. A great shout of joy went up as I poked my head out. They had been waiting for me all night. I was king of the universe. I waved.

  I went back to bed with a smile on my face. It was sort of nice to be revered.

  Came the dawn. Or what passed for the dawn. The LSD had worn off. Colors seemed flatter, paler. The day was flat gray. The chair was just a chair, stolidl
y, uncompromisingly Dutch. I went to the window. A gray drizzle was falling. A couple of guys in raincoats walked across the Dam Square. A gray girl on a gray bicycle pedaled by. Her bike bell tinkled, a flat little lost sound. I lit a cigarette. It tasted like straw. I took a shower. I couldn’t get the water hot enough. Then it was too hot. I was hungry. I phoned down for breakfast. It came on a tray. Cheese, bread, jam, boiled eggs and coffee. None of it tasted any good.

  There is nothing worse than an LSD hangover. You want to go somewhere in a dark corner and quietly strangle yourself.

  The phone rang.

  “Yeah?” I said dully.

  “Fontein here. What happened last night. I tried to call you. Several times.”

  Vaguely I remembered that the phone had rung on a few occasions last night while I was happily hallucinating. It had sounded like beautiful music. I had let it ring.

  “I was out pretty late,” I said.

  “What’s the matter? You sound disappointed.”

  “I took a trip,” I said.

  “Following Shiraz you mean?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “And?”

  “And Claeys and a guy named Jeremy Budd, part owner of a joint on Zeedijk called the Brooklyn Bridge—”

  “Yes,” Fontein reminded me. “I know who Jeremy Budd is. What happened?”

  “They tried to kill Shiraz. I stopped them.”

  “Can you prove they tried?”

  “I don’t see how. I doubt that Shiraz ever got a good look at them. Just my word against theirs. They’d probably be pretty good guys with an alibi.”

  “I understand,” he said. It was his turn to sound disappointed, but he brightened suddenly. “Today is Shiraz’s last day in Amsterdam. He leaves tomorrow for Switzerland. After that it is your problem, but I can make today perfectly safe for him.”

  “How?”

  “My friends with the police. A problem of Mynheer Budd’s cabaret license perhaps. Something else for Claeys. It can be arranged.”

  I told him to go ahead and arrange it. I picked at what was left of my breakfast. The phone rang again.