Walk Among the Tombstones: A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “All day long the money goes back and forth over the long table they got there. I couldn’t believe how much money they handled. I was a kid, I never saw a lot of cash, and I’m looking at tons of money. See, they only make like one or two percent on a transaction, but the volume is enormous.

  “They lived in this walled compound on the edge of town. It had to be huge to accommodate all the servants. I’m a kid from Bergen Street, I grew up sharing a room with my brother, and here are these cousins of mine and they’ve got something like five servants for each member of the family. That’s including children. No exaggeration. I was uncomfortable at first, I thought it was wasteful, but it was explained to me. If you were rich you had an obligation to employ a lot of people. You were creating jobs, you were doing something for the people.

  “ ‘Stay,’ they told me. They wanted to take me into the business. If I didn’t like Togo, they had in-laws with the same kind of operation in Mali. ‘But Togo’s nicer,’ they said.”

  “Could you still go?”

  “That’s the sort of thing you do when you’re twenty years old, start a new life in a new country.”

  “What are you, thirty-two?”

  “Thirty-three. That’s a little old for an entry-level slot.”

  “You might not have to start in the mailroom.”

  He shrugged. “Funny thing is Francine and I discussed it. She had a problem with it because she was afraid of blacks. The idea of being one of a handful of white people in a black nation was frightening to her. She said, like, suppose they decide to take over? I said, honey, what’s to take over? It’s their country. They already own it. But she was not completely rational on the subject.” His voice hardened. “And look who she got in a truck with, look who killed her. White guys. All your life you fear one thing and something else sneaks up on you.” His eyes locked with mine. “It’s like they didn’t just kill her, they obliterated her. She ceased to exist. I didn’t even see a body, I saw parts, chunks. I went to my cousin’s clinic in the middle of the night and turned the chunks into ashes. She’s gone and there’s this hole in my life and I don’t know what to put in it.”

  “They say time takes time,” I said.

  “It can take some of mine. I got time I don’t know what to do with. I’m alone in the house all day and I find myself talking to myself. Out loud, I mean.”

  “People do that when they’re used to having somebody around. You’ll get over it.”

  “Well, if I don’t, so what? If I’m talking to myself who’s gonna hear me, right?” He sipped from his water glass. “Then there’s sex,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell to do about sex. I have the desire, you know? I’m a young guy, it’s natural.”

  “A minute ago you were too old to start a new life in Africa.”

  “You know what I mean. I have desires and I not only don’t know what to do about them, I don’t feel right about having them. It feels disloyal to want to go to bed with a woman whether I actually do it or not. And who would I go to bed with if I wanted to? What am I gonna do, sweet-talk some woman in a bar? Go to a massage parlor, pay some cross-eyed Korean girl to get me off? Go out on fucking dates, take some woman to a movie, make conversation with her? I try to picture myself doing that and I figure I’d rather stay home and jerk off, only I won’t do that either because even that seems like it would be disloyal.” He sat back abruptly, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to spout all this crap at you. I hadn’t planned on saying any of that. I don’t know where it came from.”

  I CALLED my art historian when I got back to the hotel. She’d had her class that night and wasn’t back yet. I left a message on her machine and wondered if she would call.

  We’d had a bad time of it a few nights before. After dinner we’d rented a movie that she wanted to see and I didn’t, and maybe I was bitter about that, I don’t know. Whatever it was, there was something wrong between us. After the movie ended she made an off-color remark and I suggested she might make an effort to sound a little less like a whore. That would have been an acceptable rejoinder under ordinary circumstances, but I said it like I meant it and she said something suitably stinging in return.

  I apologized and so did she and we agreed it was nothing, but it didn’t feel that way, and when it got to be time to go to bed we did so on opposite sides of town. When we spoke the next day we didn’t say anything about it, and

  we still hadn’t, and it hung in the air between us whenever we talked, and even when we didn’t.

  She called me back around eleven-thirty. “I just got in,” she said. “A couple of us went out for a drink after class. How was your day?”

  “All right,” I said, and we talked about it for a few minutes. Then I asked if it was too late for me to drop over.

  “Oh, gee,” she said. “I’d like to see you, too.”

  “But it’s too late.”

  “I think so, hon. I’m wiped out and I just want to take a quick shower and pass out. Is that okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Talk to you tomorrow?”

  “Uh-huh. Sleep well.”

  I hung up and said, “I love you,” speaking to the empty room, hearing the words bounce off the walls. We had become quite adept at purging the phrase from our speech when we were together, and I listened to myself saying it now and wondered if it was true.

  I felt something but couldn’t work out what it was. I took a shower and got out and dried off, and standing there looking at my face in the mirror over the bathroom sink I realized what it was I felt.

  There are two midnight meetings every night. The closest one was on West Forty-sixth Street and I got there just as they were beginning the meeting. I helped myself to a cup of coffee and sat down, and minutes later I was hearing a voice I recognized say, “My name is Peter and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.” Good, I thought. “And I have one day back,” he said.

  Not so good. Tuesday he’d had two days, today he had one. I thought about how difficult it must be, trying to get back in the lifeboat and not being able to get a grip on it. And then I stopped thinking about Peter Khoury because I was there for my own benefit, not for his.

  I listened intently to the qualification, although I couldn’t tell you what I heard, and when the speaker finished up and opened the meeting I got my hand up right away. I got called on and said, “My name’s Matt and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober a couple of years and I’ve come a long way since I walked in the door and sometimes I forget that I’m still pretty fucked up. I’m going through a difficult phase in my relationship and I didn’t even realize it until a little while ago. Before I came over here I felt uncomfortable and I had to stand under a shower for five minutes to dope out what it was I felt. And then I saw that it was fear, that I was afraid.

  “I don’t even know what I’m afraid of. I have a feeling if I let myself go I’ll find out I’m afraid of every goddamned thing in the world. I’m afraid to be in a relationship and I’m afraid to be out of it. I’m afraid I’ll wake up one of these days and look in the mirror and see an old man staring back at me. That I’ll die alone in that room some day and nobody’ll find me until the smell starts coming through the walls.

  “So I got dressed and came over here because I don’t want to drink and I don’t want to feel like this, and after all these years I still don’t know why it helps to run off at the mouth like this, but it does. Thank you.”

  I figured I probably sounded like an emotional basket case, but you learn not to give a rat’s ass what you sound like, and I didn’t. It was particularly easy to spew it all in that room because I didn’t know anybody there other than Peter Khoury, and if he only had a day he probably couldn’t track complete sentences yet, let alone remember them five minutes later.

  And maybe I didn’t sound that bad after all. At the end we stood and said the Serenity Prayer, and afterward a man two rows in front of me came up to me and asked for my phone number. I gave him one of my
cards. “I’m out a lot,” I said, “but you can leave a message.”

  We chatted for a minute, and then I went looking for Peter Khoury, but he was gone. I didn’t know if he’d left before the meeting ended or ducked out immediately after, but either way he was gone.

  I had a hunch he didn’t want to see me, and I could understand that. I remembered the difficulties I’d had at the beginning, putting a few days together, then drinking, then starting all over again. He had the added disadvantage of having been sober for a stretch, and the humiliation of having lost what he’d had. With all of that going for him, it would probably take a while before he could work his way up to low self-esteem.

  In the meantime he was sober. He only had a day, but in a sense that’s all you’ve ever got.

  * * *

  SATURDAY afternoon I took a break from TV sports and called a telephone operator. I told her I’d lost the card telling me how to engage and disengage Call Forwarding. I envisioned her checking the records, determining that I’d never signed up for the service, and calling 911 to order the hotel ringed by squad cars. “Put that phone down, Scudder, and come out with your hands up!”

  Before I could even finish the thought she had cued a recording, and a computer-generated voice was explaining what I had to do. I couldn’t write it all down as fast as it came at me, so I had to call a second time and repeat the procedure.

  Just before I left the house to go over to Elaine’s, I followed the directions, arranging things so that any calls to my phone would be automatically transferred to her line. Or at least that was the theory. I didn’t have a great deal of faith in the process.

  She’d bought tickets to a play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, a murky and moody play by a Yugoslavian playwright. I had the feeling that some of it was lost in translation, but what came over the footlights still retained a lot of brooding intensity. It took me through dark passages in the self without troubling to turn the lights on.

  The experience was even more of an ordeal than it might otherwise have been because they staged it without an intermission. That got us out of there by a quarter of ten, which was not a moment too soon, but it put us through the wringer in the process. The actors took their curtain calls, the house lights came up, and we shuffled out of there like zombies.

  “Strong medicine,” I said.

  “Or strong poison. I’m sorry, I’ve been picking a lot of winners lately, haven’t I? That movie that you hated and now this.”

  “I didn’t hate this,” I said. “I just feel as though I went ten rounds with it, and I got hit in the face a lot.”

  “What do you figure the message was?”

  “It probably comes through best in Serbo-Croatian. The message? I don’t know. That the world’s a rotten place, I guess.”

  “You don’t need to go to a play for that,” she said. “You can just read the paper.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Maybe it’s different in Yugoslavia.”

  We had dinner near the theater, and the mood of the play cloaked us. Halfway through I said, “I want to say something. I want to apologize for the other night.”

  “That’s over, honey.”

  “I don’t know if it is. I’ve been in a strange mood lately. Some of it has to be this case. We had a couple breaks, I felt as though I was making progress, and now everything’s stuck again and I feel stuck myself. But I don’t want it to affect us. You’re important to me, our relationship is important to me.”

  “To me, too.”

  We talked a little and things seemed to lighten up, although the play’s mood was not easily set aside. Then we went back to her place and she checked her messages while I used the bathroom. When I came out she had a curious expression on her face.

  She said, “Who’s Walter?”

  “Walter.”

  “Just calling to say hello, nothing important, wanted to let you know he was alive, and he’ll probably give you a call later.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Fellow I met at a meeting the night before last. He’s fairly newly sober.”

  “And you gave him this number?”

  “No,” I said. “Why would I do that?”

  “That’s what I was wondering.”

  “Oh,” I said, as it dawned on me. “Well, I guess it works.”

  “You guess what works?”

  “Call Forwarding. I told you the Kongs gave me Call Forwarding when they were playing games with the phone company. I put it on this afternoon.”

  “So your calls would come here.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t have a lot of faith that it would work, but evidently it does. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. Do you want to hear the message? I can play it back again.”

  “Not if that’s all it said.”

  “It’s all right to erase it, then?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She did, then said, “I wonder what he thought when he dialed your number and there was an answering machine with a woman’s voice.”

  “Well, he evidently didn’t think he had the wrong number, or he wouldn’t have left a message.”

  “I wonder who he thinks I am.”

  “A mysterious woman with a sexy voice.”

  “He probably thinks we’re living together. Unless he knows you live alone.”

  “All he knows about me is I’m sober and crazy.”

  “Why crazy?”

  “Because I was dumping a lot of garbage at the meeting I met him at. For all he knows I’m a priest and you’re the housekeeper at the rectory.”

  “That’s a game we haven’t tried. Priest and housekeeper. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have been a very naughty girl and I probably need a good spanking.’ ”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  She grinned, and I reached for her, and the phone picked that moment to ring. “You answer it,” she said. “It’s probably Walter.”

  I picked up the phone and a man with a deep voice asked to speak to Miss Mardell. I handed her the receiver without a word and walked into the other room. I stood at the window and looked at the lights on the other side of the East River. After a couple of minutes she came and stood beside me. She didn’t allude to the call, nor did I. Then ten minutes later the phone rang again and she answered it and it was for me. It was Walter, just using the phone a lot the way they encourage newcomers to do. I didn’t stay on with him long, and when I got off I said, “I’m sorry. It was a bad idea.”

  “Well, you’re here a lot. People ought to be able to reach you.” A few minutes later she said, “Take it off the hook. Nobody has to reach either of us tonight.”

  IN the morning I dropped in on Joe Durkin and wound up going out for lunch with him and two friends of his from the Major Crimes Squad. I went back to my hotel and stopped at the desk for my messages, but there weren’t any. I went upstairs and picked up a book, and at twenty after three the phone rang.

  Elaine said, “You forgot to take off Call Forwarding.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “No wonder there weren’t any messages. I just got home, I was out all morning, it slipped my mind completely. I was going to come straight home and fix it and I forgot. It must have been driving you crazy all day.”

  “No, but—”

  “But how did you get through? Wouldn’t it just bounce your call back and give you a busy signal if you called here?”

  “It did the first time I tried. I called the desk downstairs and they patched the call through.”

  “Oh.”

  “Evidently it doesn’t forward calls through the switchboard downstairs.”

  “Evidently not.”

  “TJ called earlier. But that’s not important. Matt, Kenan Khoury just called. You have to call him right away. He said it’s really urgent.”

  “He did?”

  “He said life or death, and probably death. I don’t know what that means, but he sounded serious.�
�

  I called right away, and Kenan said, “Matt, thank God. Don’t go nowhere, I got my brother on the other line. You’re at home, right? Okay, stay on the line, I’ll be with you in a second.” There was a click, and then a minute or so later there was another click and he was back. “He’s on his way,” he said. “He’s coming over to your hotel, he’ll be right out in front.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “With Petey? Nothing, he’s fine. He’s gonna bring you out to Brighton Beach. Nobody’s got time to dick around with the subway today.”

  “What’s in Brighton Beach?”

  “A whole lot of Russians,” he said. “How do I put this? One of ’em just called to say he’s going through business difficulties similar to what I went through.”

  That could only mean one thing, but I wanted to make sure.

  “His wife?”

  “Worse. I gotta go, I’ll meet you there.”

  Chapter 18

  Late in September Elaine and I had spent an idyllic afternoon in Brighton Beach. We rode the Q train to the end of the line and walked along Brighton Beach Avenue, browsing in the produce markets, window-shopping, then exploring the side streets with their modest frame houses and a network of back streets, little walks and alleys and paths and ways. The bulk of the population consisted of Russian Jews, many of them very recent arrivals, and the neighborhood had felt extremely foreign while remaining quintessentially New York. We ate at a Georgian restaurant, then walked on the boardwalk clear to Coney Island, watching people hardier than ourselves bobbing in the ocean. Then we spent an hour at the Aquarium, and then we went home.