by R.J. Ellory
‘Depends if you need to have your nerve steadied before I say what I have to say.’
‘Sounds foreboding, Ev . . . what’s going on?’
Evelyn stood with her back to him, stood looking out through the window above the sink. Almost without thought she retrieved a packet of cigarettes from her apron pocket. She lit one, turned and offered one to Harper.
Harper shook his head. ‘I’m trying to quit,’ he said.
Evelyn laughed awkwardly. ‘Trying to quit. What does that mean? You’ve either quit or you haven’t.’
Harper smiled to himself. She was as sharp-edged as ever. Evelyn Sawyer would go to her grave in a bad mood. He clenched his fists out of sight. He was no longer a child. She would not bully him.
‘So?’ he asked, his tone almost aggressive. ‘What’s so damned important it flies me all the way from Miami?’
Evelyn took a drag of her cigarette. Her hand was shaking. Harper could see her reflection in the window.
‘Ev?’
She turned. She seemed colorless, almost transparent. ‘Some things were said way back when,’ she started.
Harper opened his mouth.
Ev raised her hand. ‘Don’t say anything, John Harper. I’m going to say what I’m going to say, and if I think about it too long I’m not going to say it and then you an’ I are going to get into one helluva fight.’ She paused, took another drag of her cigarette. ‘Some things were said way back when . . . back when you were a child, and some of them were true and some of them weren’t. I told you things because I believed it was better that you figured something one way instead of another. I told you things . . . I told you things that weren’t entirely accurate, like some of the details were changed—’
She paused, closed her eyes for a second.
‘Sometimes you consider that you do something for the best, you know? You say something because you think it’s going to be less hurtful or something, but I don’t know that there can ever be a way to be sure if what you’re saying is right or wrong. I mean . . . like you mean well, you want the best thing, but somehow things get turned inside out and back to front—’
‘Evelyn. What the hell are you talking about?’
She looked dead-set at Harper. He thought there were tears in her eyes.
‘Your father,’ she said matter-of-factly.
Harper frowned.
‘Your father, John . . . about your father.’
‘What about my father? I know about my father. He left when I was . . . what? Two years old? He died, right?’
Evelyn was shaking her head.
Harper wanted a cigarette, wouldn’t have dared ask for one. Somewhere the specter of a withdrawn child attempted to surface. He wanted to know why Evelyn was shaking her head.
‘Your father is—’
Harper felt nauseous. He wanted to stand up but there was insufficient strength in his legs.
‘Your father is . . . hell, John, he’s in hospital. Someone shot him and he’s in St Vincent’s.’
‘Hospital?’ Harper asked. ‘Up on West Twelfth?’ The sick feeling seemed to radiate from his lower gut, up into his chest, his trachea, and then out through the remainder of his body. Once again he thought to stand. He pressed his hand against the surface of the table, but the sweat on his palm prevented any traction. He felt the color in his face drain away.
‘Up on West Twelfth,’ Evelyn said. ‘He’s seventy years old John . . . seventy years old and he tried to stop someone robbing a liquor store, and he got shot . . . someone shot him and they’ve got him up there right now—’
Harper felt his spirit leave; felt as if a vacuum had opened up inside him.
She lost it then, lost it much the same way she had when Garrett went for the big hereafter. She leaned back against the sink, head down, eyes swollen with tears, and though Harper’s father had never earned anything but curses in this house, though Evelyn couldn’t have uttered his name more than a dozen times in all the years Harper had lived there, she nevertheless folded quietly beneath the weight of emotion.
Harper rose to his feet. He felt the walls bending around him.
‘I don’t understand—’ he started, and then realized that there wasn’t a great deal to understand.
‘Your father . . . he’s seventy years old and he’s going to die, John.’ Evelyn lifted her hand to her face.
John Harper took the still-smouldering cigarette from her other hand. He took a drag, inhaled the smoke and held it in his chest. There were tears in his eyes also, and though he could never have explained what emotion he felt he still felt it.
‘I have to go out,’ he said, and his voice was strained and unnatural. He sounded like someone else. Sounded like someone lost. ‘I have to go out for a little while Ev, okay? I just have to go out and take a walk . . . just take a walk around the block, you know? Just take a walk around and get some fresh air . . .’ He started to shake his head. ‘I don’t think I understand what’s happening here, Ev. I don’t understand . . .’ His voice trailed away into nothing.
Evelyn didn’t speak. She was silent, her shoulders moving as she fought whatever was inside herself. She raised her hand and waved him away.
Harper felt like he should reach out, take her hand, pull her close, rest her head against his shoulder. He couldn’t, wasn’t able to. He took a step towards the kitchen door, hesitated, and then went through and down the hallway. He struggled to get his shoes on, leaning against the wall, dizzy, disoriented, and then he looked back towards the lighted kitchen, at the lower risers of the stairwell, remembered what he’d felt that night when the thing had happened with Garrett. He shuddered. He couldn’t believe what was taking place in his mind. He opened the front door and went down into the street. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk. He looked down at the cigarette in his hand and then flicked it out into the road. He looked right, and then turned one hundred and eighty degrees. The tears in his eyes were now large enough to break their own surface tension and roll lazily down his cheeks.
John Michael Harper started walking; didn’t look back at all for a while. Eventually he glanced over his shoulder and, try as he might, he couldn’t stop that awful Wednesday coming right back at him like a tidal wave.
That December evening in Greenwich Village, in and amongst its sights and sounds, its rhythms and recollections, John Harper paused at the junction of Carmine Street, no more than thirty yards from the steps of Evelyn Sawyer’s house. The house where he’d spent all of twelve years of his life, the house where Evelyn had wrenched every godforsaken bitter, twisted, awkward emotion out of herself and shared it with him. Where she had told him of his father, a man believed to be dead for the last thirty years or more. His mind felt like a balloon at bursting point.
All of it was here; here in this place.
Home is where the heart is.
‘Go,’ Walt Freiberg said.
Cathy Hollander reached forward, turned on the ignition.
‘He’ll walk to the hospital,’ Freiberg said. ‘Follow him . . . don’t get too close. Let him walk there and we’ll go in after him.’
Cathy Hollander nodded, pulled the car away from the edge of the sidewalk and started down the street.
FOUR
Early evening Manhattan, south-west of Greenwich Village.
Sky like washed-out watercolor smoke. Traffic still swollen and gridlocked, everyone pushing west along Beach and Vestry and Watts, trucks and taxicabs choking up the Holland Tunnel, leaning on their horns like such a thing would make a difference, like New Jersey was all-of-a-sudden the Promised Land and the gates closed at seven. Make it through the Turnpike and you’re free forever boys!
Sixth Avenue – Avenue of the Americas – east corner of Tribeca; narrow-fronted, blink-and-miss-it restaurant: Cantonese, a little exclusive. Ambience within – warm, like a wood-burning Newfoundland fireplace; anachronistic, like this place should have been five blocks the other side of Broadway, down there in Chinatown between Columbus
Park and Chatham Square.
A dozen or so customers, mostly in pairs: one or two illicit rendezvous – people there when they were believed to be somewhere else, hushed words, repressed emotions, hidden agendas, ankles out-of-sight and touching beneath the table; middle-aged married couple, obvious even as she orders for him ’cause she knows what agrees with him and what doesn’t, possessing that comfortable blanket of familiarity that has soundlessly replaced what they once possessed, the awkward rush of desire and discovery that marked the early years of their confederacy.
Back in the right-hand corner, a table against the wall. Two men seated, their meal almost finished. Late thirties, early forties perhaps, one of them smart in dark suit, tie, spit-shine shoes, the other less so: a heavy cotton suit that has seen better days, and a face marked and lined and patterned and crossed with a hundred years of living. A worn face; a face with a story, a narrative, a journey around it; a face like a suitcase that has travelled the world; shoulders hunched as he leans forward, listening, hands folded together, fingers interwoven; fair-haired, eyes blue-grey-greenish, like a smudge of unnameable color at the edge of a palette.
Smart-suit is talking, animated, smiling, cheeks reddened with beer and sake, saying, ‘So it’s . . . I don’t know, ’74, maybe ’75, and he’s down in Vegas for whatever reason. Elvis is down in Vegas—’
Suitcase-face interrupts. ‘He pretty much lived down there . . . don’t think he sang anywhere else during the last years of his life.’
Smart-suit nods, waves aside the interjection. The reason that Elvis was in Vegas is irrelevant, a distraction. ‘So he’s down in Vegas . . . down there in Vegas, and he hears about some Elvis impersonation contest—’
‘An Elvis impersonation contest.’
‘Yes, sure . . . you know the kind of thing? Whole bunch of fat saddos all dressed in this sequinned cabaret shit, big sideburns, three cans of hairspray to fix their hair, right?’
‘Right.’
‘You know the deal, yeah?’
‘I know the deal.’
‘So, like I was saying, the King . . . he hears about this contest, and just for the hell of it he figures he’s going to enter this thing—’
‘Elvis? Like the real Elvis Presley . . . he’s going to enter an Elvis impersonator contest?’
‘Right,’ Smart-suit says, and he’s starting to laugh, like one of those times when the teller knows the punch-line, and maybe he’s told it a hundred times before, but there’s still something godawful funny about this story and there’s nothing that can be done about it. ‘So he figures he’s going to enter this contest.’
‘And he does?’
Smart-suit nods. ‘He enters it. He comes along all dressed up in the real deal costume, all the sequins and rhinestone, the heavyweight boxing belt, the cape, the whole charabanc, you know? He gets up there, he belts out a classic, gives it his best freakin’ shot just to see what will happen.’
Suitcase-face is smiling, nodding, like he knows what’s coming, and if you asked him he would’ve sat there ’til Tuesday and never figured it out, but there’s a quiet tension to how the story goes that gives it a certain magic.
‘And you never guess what happens?’
‘What? What happens?’
‘He comes fourth.’ And Smart-suit loses it, and he starts laughing, and Suitcase-face sits there for a moment, and then he starts laughing too, and the pair of them just come apart at the seams, and heads are turning, and those with uptight repressions and guilt complexes, the kind of things you share with a two-hundred-bucks-an-hour shrink, feel awkward and embarrassed and a little on-edge, and those with adulterous thoughts behind their eyes feel somehow illuminated by the harsh sound of humor, and they know they could never really laugh like that, not here, not now, because they’re living a lie. And despite all else the two men at the wall table are breaking up like there’s no tomorrow and all the laughing has to be used up good and proper before everything comes to an end . . .
Like that. Just like that. A true and simple story.
‘You’re shittin’ me?’ Suitcase-face asks, and then he starts laughing again.
‘As God is my witness. . . as God is my fucking witness it’s the truth—’ and then he starts up again, starts up like a fire siren, and if there was anyone upstairs trying to get some sleep they wouldn’t have done, at least not for a while, and perhaps if they’d heard the story they wouldn’t have cared.
Later – a handful and a half of minutes – and things are back to battery.
‘So where do we go from here? You up for hitting a bar or somethin’?’ Smart-suit asks.
The guy with the well-travelled face – his name is Frank, Frank Duchaunak, and people spend their time asking him what kind of name that is, and he spends his time shrugging and shaking his head and saying, ‘Well hell, I don’t know . . . as good a name as any other I suppose.’ Stands in queues sometimes, like for a passport or in a waiting room, and receptionists and officials double-take and squint, sometimes frowning, and then call out ‘Dutch-nark’ or ‘Doosh-nak’, and he smiles to himself and walks towards them, and then explains how you say it.
‘De-show-nak,’ he enunciates quietly, and they smile and nod, and invariably ask, ‘What kind of a name is that?’
‘Just a name,’ he replies. ‘As good as any other name you care to mention.’
Frank winds up his laughing, and the Smart-suit guy – whose name is Don Faulkner – reminds him ‘As God is my fucking witness that’s the truth, Frank . . .’, and then repeats his question: ‘So where are we going from here?’
Frank shrugs, and then a phone rings, and both of them instinctively reach into coat pockets for cells, and Frank remembers he turned his off when he came in from the street.
Don Faulkner – without thinking perhaps, or perhaps thinking in slow-motion through alcohol and good humor – holds up the phone and frowns. ‘The precinct,’ he says. ‘You want to know what it is, or do we have them find someone else?’
‘Fuck ’em,’ Duchaunak says.
The phone keeps on ringing. Faulkner looks at it. It hums and buzzes on the table. It edges excitedly towards a plate of gelatinous lemon-honey chicken pieces.
‘Fuck,’ he says quietly, so quietly Duchaunak barely hears it, and then Faulkner lifts the phone, pushes the button, answers up.
‘Faulkner,’ he says, like he’s confessing to a misdemeanor. He nods. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘He’s here with me.’ And then the caller is saying other things, and Faulkner’s face is changing as he listens, and Duchaunak is creasing his brow with a frown, and feels like he wants to take the phone away from his partner and hear whatever’s being said.
‘You’re shitting me,’ Faulkner says, and then he looks at Duchaunak and his eyes are wide – surprised, kind of amazed.
What? Duchaunak mouths, and Faulkner does that irritating thing of shaking his head and half-raising his hand.
‘What the fuck is it?’ Duchaunak says.
‘Okay,’ Faulkner says. ‘Okay, yes . . . on our way.’ He hangs up. He holds the phone in his hand, holds it like he’s fixing on hitting someone with it. He looks away towards the front of the restaurant, and then back at Duchaunak.
‘What? Tell me what the fuck is going on?’
‘Lenny,’ Faulkner says. ‘Lenny is up in St Vincent’s—’
‘What the fuck’s he doing there?’ Duchaunak says, and he’s rising from his chair.
‘Sit down a minute will you?’ Faulkner says.
Duchaunak stands awkwardly for a moment, and then sits down heavily. Looks, just for a moment, like a short man who needs a long drink.
‘He was shot last night, early evening . . . some liquor store up near Washington Square Park.’
‘Shot?’
Faulkner nods. ‘Chest wound . . . pretty bad they say. He’s in intensive care, hooked up to everything they’ve got and then some. Not sure he’ll make it, his age an’ all, you know?’
‘Jesus,’ Duchaunak
sighs. ‘What happened? Was it Marcus? Did Ben Marcus do this?’
Faulkner sort of half smiles, like he feels awkward relaying what he’s been told. He shrugs. ‘Well, no . . .’
‘Well, no what?’ Duchaunak asks.
‘What they said was that he tried to stop someone robbing a liquor store—’
Duchaunak starts to laugh, a nervous sound, the sound of someone told something they cannot quite comprehend, or perhaps something that so obviously contradicts what they know to be the truth. Was this what it would come to? After all this time, was this how it would end? ‘He tried to stop someone robbing a liquor store?’ he asks, and though it sounds like a question it’s one of those questions that isn’t really a question at all; still he sounds like a nervous man, a man unsettled by something profound and significant.
‘’S what I was told,’ Faulkner says. ‘You want to go see him?’
Duchaunak is nodding his head, rising from the chair again. ‘Of course I want to go see him . . . just to make sure he dies for real this time.’
Faulkner smiles. ‘You have issues, Frank Duchaunak . . . maybe your daddy didn’t hug you enough when you were a kid.’
Duchaunak doesn’t reply. He’s walking towards the door.
Faulkner shakes his head and sighs. He goes to the counter to pay for the meal. It is his birthday. Duchaunak had been the one to suggest the meal. Duchaunak had promised to pay. Such is the way of the world, Faulkner thinks, and then wonders if that really was the case, if it really was the way of the world, or if he was on the rough end of something awkward with little chance of reprieve.
Ten minutes later Frank Duchaunak pulls the car out onto Varick, doubles back towards West Broadway, and takes a route towards St Vincent’s that would avoid the gridlock on Sixth and Seventh. At some point he mumbles something.
‘You what?’ Faulkner asks.
Duchaunak shakes his head.
‘What did you say?’
‘I said that I take back what I said earlier.’
‘About what?’
‘About going to make sure Lenny dies for real this time.’