I called her that evening, met her the following afternoon at a cocktail lounge just off Washington Square. She was as described, even to the gray cape over a long gray dress. Her scarf today was canary yellow. She was drinking Perrier, and I ordered the same.
She said, “Tell me about your friend. You say he’s very ill.”
“He wants to die. He’s been begging me to kill him but I can’t do it.”
“No, of course not.”
“I was hoping you might be able to visit him.”
“If you think it might help. Tell me something about him, why don’t you.”
I don’t suppose she was more than forty-five, if that, but there was something ancient about her face. You didn’t need much of a commitment to reincarnation to believe she had lived before. Her facial features were pronounced, her eyes a graying blue. Her voice was pitched low, and along with her height it raised doubts about her sexuality. She might have been a sex change, or a drag queen. But I didn’t think so. There was an Eternal Female quality to her that didn’t feel like parody.
I said, “I can’t.”
“Because there’s no such person.”
“I’m afraid there are plenty of them, but I don’t have one in mind.” I told her in a couple of sentences why I was there. When I’d finished she let the silence stretch, then asked me if I thought she could kill anyone. I told her it was hard to know what anyone could do.
She said, “I think you should see for yourself what it is that I do.”
She stood up. I put some money on the table and followed her out to the street.
We took a cab to a four-story brick building on Twenty-second Street west of Ninth. We climbed two flights of stairs, and the door opened when she knocked on it. I could smell the disease before I was across the threshold. The young black man who opened the door was glad to see her and unsurprised by my presence. He didn’t ask my name or tell me his.
“Kevin’s so tired,” he told us both. “It breaks my heart.”
We walked through a neat, sparsely furnished living room and down a short hallway to a bedroom, where the smell was stronger. Kevin lay in a bed with its head cranked up. He looked like a famine victim, or someone liberated from Dachau. Terror filled his eyes.
She pulled a chair up to the side of his bed and sat in it. She took his hand in hers and used her free hand to stroke his forehead. “You’re safe now,” she told him. “You’re safe, you don’t have to hurt anymore, you did all the things you had to do. You can relax now, you can let go now, you can go to the light.
“You can do it,” she told him. “Close your eyes, Kevin, and go inside yourself and find the part that’s holding on. Somewhere within you there’s a part of you that’s like a clenched fist, and I want you to find that part and be with that part. And let go. Let the fist open its fingers. It’s as if the fist is holding a little bird, and if you open up the hand the bird can fly free. Just let it happen, Kevin. Just let go.”
He was straining to talk, but the best he could do was make a sort of cawing sound. She turned to the black man, who was standing in the doorway. “David,” she said, “his parents aren’t living, are they?”
“I believe they’re both gone.”
“Which one was he closest to?”
“I don’t know. I believe they’re both gone a long time now.”
“Did he have a lover? Before you, I mean.”
“Kevin and I were never lovers. I don’t even know him that well. I’m here ’cause he hasn’t got anybody else. He had a lover.”
“Did his lover die? What was his name?”
“Martin.”
“Kevin,” she said, “you’re going to be all right now. All you have to do is go to the light. Do you see the light? Your mother’s there, Kevin, and your father, and Martin—”
“Mark!” David cried. “Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m so stupid, it wasn’t Martin, it was Mark, Mark, that was his name.”
“That’s all right, David.”
“I’m so damn stupid—”
“Look into the light, Kevin,” she said. “Mark is there, and your parents, and everyone who ever loved you. Matthew, take his other hand. Kevin, you don’t have to stay here anymore, darling. You did everything you came here to do. You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to hold on. You can let go, Kevin. You can go to the light. Let go and reach out to the light—”
I don’t know how long she talked to him. Fifteen, twenty minutes, I suppose. Several times he made the cawing sound, but for the most part he was silent. Nothing seemed to be happening, and then I realized that his terror was no longer a presence. She seemed to have talked it away. She went on talking to him, stroking his brow and holding his hand, and I held his other hand. I was no longer listening to what she was saying, just letting the words wash over me while my mind played with some tangled thought like a kitten with yarn.
Then something happened. The energy in the room shifted and I looked up, knowing that he was gone.
“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, Kevin. God bless you, God give you rest. Yes.”
“Sometimes they’re stuck,” she said. “They want to go but they can’t. They’ve been hanging on so long, you see, that they don’t know how to stop.”
“So you help them.”
“If I can.”
“What if you can’t? Suppose you talk and talk and they still hold on?”
“Then they’re not ready. They’ll be ready another time. Sooner or later everybody lets go, everybody dies. With or without my help.”
“And when they’re not ready—”
“Sometimes I come back another time. And sometimes they’re ready then.”
“What about the ones who beg for help? The ones like Arthur Fineberg, who plead for death but aren’t physically close enough to it to let go?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“The thing you want to say. The thing that’s stuck in your throat, the way his own unwanted life was stuck in Kevin’s throat. You’re holding on to it.”
“Just let it go, eh?”
“If you want.”
We were walking somewhere in Chelsea, and we walked a full block now without either of us saying a word. Then she said, “I think there’s a world of difference between assisting someone verbally and doing anything physical to hasten death.”
“So do I.”
“And that’s where I draw the line. But sometimes, having drawn that line—”
“You step over it.”
“Yes. The first time I swear I acted without conscious intent. I used a pillow, I held it over his face and—” She breathed deeply. “I swore it would never happen again. But then there was someone else, and he just needed help, you know, and—”
“And you helped him.”
“Yes. Was I wrong?”
“I don’t know what’s right or wrong.”
“Suffering is wrong,” she said, “unless it’s part of His plan, and how can I presume to decide if it is or not? Maybe people can’t let go because there’s one more lesson they have to learn before they move on. Who the hell am I to decide it’s time for somebody’s life to end? How dare I interfere?”
“And yet you do.”
“Just once in a while, when I just don’t see a way around it. Then I do what I have to do. I’m sure I must have a choice in the matter, but I swear it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel as though I have any choice at all.” She stopped walking, turned to look at me. She said, “Now what happens?”
“Well, she’s the Merciful Angel of Death,” I told Carl Orcott. “She visits the sick and dying, almost always at somebody’s invitation. A friend contacts her, or a relative.”
“Do they pay her?”
“Sometimes they try to. She won’t take any money. She even pays for the flowers herself.” She’d taken Dutch iris to Kevin’s apartment on Twenty-second Street. Blue, with yellow centers that matched her scarf.
“She does it pro bono,” he said.
“And she talks to them. You heard what Bobby said. I got to see her in action. She talked the poor son of a bitch straight out of this world and into the next one. I suppose you could argue that what she does comes perilously close to hypnosis, that she hypnotizes people and convinces them to kill themselves psychically, but I can’t imagine anybody trying to sell that to a jury.”
“She just talks to them.”
“Uh-huh. ‘Let go, go to the light.’ “
“ ‘And have a nice day.’ “
“That’s the idea.”
“She’s not killing people?”
“Nope. Just letting them die.”
He picked up a pipe. “Well, hell,” he said, “that’s what we do. Maybe I ought to put her on staff.” He sniffed the pipe bowl. “You have my thanks, Matthew. Are you sure you don’t want some of our money to go with it? Just because Mercy works pro bono doesn’t mean you should have to.”
“That’s all right.”
“You’re certain?”
I said, “You asked me the first day if I knew what AIDS smelled like.”
“And you said you’d smelled it before. Oh.”
I nodded. “I’ve lost friends to it. I’ll lose more before it’s over. In the meantime I’m grateful when I get the chance to do you a favor. Because I’m glad this place is here, so people have a place to come to.”
Even I was glad she was around, the woman in gray, the Merciful Angel of Death. To hold the door for them, and show them the light on the other side. And, if they really needed it, to give them the least little push through it.
The Night and the Music
We left halfway through the curtain calls, threading our way up the aisle and across the lobby. Inside it had been winter in Paris, with La Bohème’s lovers shivering and starving; outside it was New York, with spring turning into summer.
We held hands and walked across the great courtyard, past the fountain shimmering under the lights, past Avery Fisher Hall. Our apartment is in the Parc Vendome, at Fifty-seventh and Ninth, and we headed in that direction and walked a block or so in silence.
Then Elaine said, “I don’t want to go home.”
“All right.”
“I want to hear music. Can we do that?”
“We just did that.”
“Different music. Not another opera.”
“Good,” I said, “because one a night is my limit.”
“You old bear. One a night is one over your limit.”
I shrugged. “I’m learning to like it.”
“Well, one a night’s my limit. You know something? I’m in a mood.”
“Somehow I sensed as much.”
“She always dies,” she said.
“Mimi.”
“Uh-huh. How many times do you suppose I’ve seen La Bohème? Six, seven times?”
“If you say so.”
“At least. You know what? I could see it a hundred times and it’s not going to change. She’ll die every fucking time.”
“Odds are.”
“So I want to hear something different,” she said, “before we call it a night.”
“Something happy,” I suggested.
“No, sad is fine. I don’t mind sad. As a matter of fact I prefer it.”
“But you want them all alive at the end.”
“That’s it,” she said. “Sad as can be, so long as nobody dies.”
We caught a cab to a new place I’d heard about on the ground floor of a high-rise on Amsterdam in the Nineties. The crowd was salt and pepper, white college kids and black strivers, blonde fashion models and black players. The group was mixed, too; the tenor man and the bass player were white, the pianist and the drummer black. The maître d’ thought he recognized me and put us at a table near the bandstand. They were a few bars into “Satin Doll” when we sat down and they followed it with a tune I recognized but couldn’t name. I think it was a Thelonious Monk composition, but that’s just a guess. I can hardly ever name the tune unless there’s a lyric to it that sticks in my mind.
Aside from ordering drinks, we didn’t say a word until the set ended. We sipped our cranberry juice and soda and listened to the music. She watched the musicians and I watched her watch them. When they took a break she reached for my hand. “Thanks,” she said.
“You okay?”
“I was always okay. I do feel better now, though. You know what I was thinking?”
“The night we met.”
Her eyes widened. “How’d you know that?”
“Well, it was in a room that looked and felt a lot like this one. You were at Danny Boy’s table, and this is his kind of place.”
“God, I was young. We were both so goddamned young.”
“Youth is one of those things time cures.”
“You were a cop and I was a hooker. But you’d been on the force longer than I’d been on the game.”
“I already had a gold shield.”
“And I was new enough to think the life was glamorous. Well, it was glamorous. Look at the places I went and the people I got to meet.”
“Married cops.”
“That’s right, you were married then.”
“I’m married now.”
“To me. Jesus, the way things turn out, huh?”
“A club like this,” I said, “and the same kind of music playing.”
“Sad enough to break your heart, but nobody dies.”
“You were the most beautiful woman in the room that night,” I said. “And you still are.”
“Ah, Pinocchio,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “Lie to me.”
We closed the place. Outside on the street she said, “God, I’m impossible. I don’t want the night to end.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“In the old days,” she said, “you knew all the after-hours joints. Remember when Condon’s would stay open late for musicians, and they’d jam until dawn?”
“I remember Eddie Condon’s hangover cure,” I said. “ ‘Take the juice of two quarts of whiskey . . .’ I forget what came after that.”
“Oblivion?”
“You’d think so. Say, I know where we can go.”
I flagged a cab and we rode down to Sheridan Square, where there’s a basement joint with the same name as a long-gone Harlem jazz club. They start around midnight and stay open past dawn, and it’s legal because they don’t serve alcohol. I used to go to late joints for the booze, and I learned to like the music because I heard so much of it there, and because you could just about taste the alcohol in every flatted fifth. Nowadays I go for the music, and what I hear in the blue notes is not so much the booze as all the feelings the drink used to mask.
That night there were a lot of different musicians sitting in with what I guess was the house rhythm section. There was a tenor player who sounded a little like Johnny Griffin and a piano player who reminded me of Lennie Tristano. And as always there was a lot of music I barely heard, background music for my own unfocused thoughts.
The sky was light by the time we dragged ourselves out of there. “Look at that,” Elaine said. “It’s bright as day.”
“And well it might be. It’s morning.”
“What a New York night, huh? You know, I loved our trip to Europe, and other places we’ve gone together, but when you come right down to it—”
“You’re a New York kind of gal.”
“You bet your ass. And what we heard tonight was New York music. I know all about the music coming up the river from New Orleans, all that crap, and I don’t care. That was New York music.”
“You’re right.”
“And nobody died,” she said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Nobody died.”
Looking for David
Elaine said, “You never stop working, do you?”
I looked at her. We were in Florence, sitting at a little tile-topped table in the Piazza di San Marco, sipping cappuccino every bit as good as the stuff they served at the Peacock on
Greenwich Avenue. It was a bright day but the air was cool and crisp, the city bathed in October light. Elaine was wearing khakis and a tailored safari jacket, and looked like a glamorous foreign correspondent, or perhaps a spy. I was wearing khakis, too, and a polo shirt, and the blue blazer she called my Old Reliable.
We’d had five days in Venice. This was the second of five days in Florence, and then we’d have six days in Rome before Alitalia took us back home again.
I said, “Nice work if you can get it.”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “I caught you. You were scanning the area the way you always do.”
“I was a cop for a lot of years.”
“I know, and I guess it’s a habit a person doesn’t outgrow. And not a bad one, either. I have some New York street smarts myself, but I can’t send my eyes around a room and pick up what you can. And you don’t even think about it. You do it automatically.”
“I guess. But I wouldn’t call it working.”
“When we’re supposed to be basking in the beauties of Florence,” she said, “and exclaiming over the classic beauty of the sculpture in the piazza, and instead you’re staring at an old queen in a white linen jacket five tables over, trying to guess if he’s got a yellow sheet and just what’s written on it—wouldn’t you call that working?”
“There’s no guesswork required,” I said. “I know what it says on his yellow sheet.”
“You do?”
“His name is Horton Pollard,” I said. “If it’s the same man, and if I’ve been sending a lot of looks his way it’s to make sure he’s the man I think he is. It’s well over twenty years since I’ve seen him. Probably more like twenty-five.” I glanced over and watched the white-haired gentleman saying something to the waiter. He raised an eyebrow in a manner that was at once arrogant and apologetic. It was as good as a fingerprint. “It’s him,” I said. “Horton Pollard. I’m positive.”
“Why don’t you go over and say hello?”
“He might not want that.”
“Twenty-five years ago you were still on the job. What did you do, arrest him?”
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