by Dean Koontz
He swore to keep my secret, and I promised to heed his advice. With a handshake we sealed our agreement: two men of the world, generations apart yet nonetheless united by our recognition that romance was perilous and that no other sadness quite equaled the sorrow of unrequited love.
Rising to his full height, Mr. Smaller morphed from fatherly advice-giver to his more familiar role as paranoid curmudgeon. As peals of thunder rolled through the city and storm light flickered at the high basement windows, he said, “Got work to do, though it don’t make no sense to do it if we’re gonna nuke the Russians and they’re itchin’ to nuke us. War here, war there, crime everywhere, yet nobody cares about nothin’ but the Beatles and some guy who paints giant soup cans and sells them as art, this movie star, that movie star, blah-blah-blah. The world’s a nuthouse. It’s insane. It’s scary. It’s—”
“—those Bilderbergers,” I suggested.
“Ain’t truer words ever been spoken.”
23
Because I didn’t feel like making my way to the community center in the rain, I should have gone down to the second floor and rung Mrs. Lorenzo’s bell and joined her little day-care group. I wasn’t supposed to spend more than a few minutes alone in our apartment when my mother was at work. For a boy my age, I was responsible, and my mother had no reason to worry that I would do something like play with matches and burn down the building. Nevertheless, she was more of a Bledsoe than she was a Kirk, and Bledsoes didn’t leave a young child alone for extended periods of time during which he might be tempted to engage in one type of misbehavior or another.
Half a century after the fact, I better understand my potential for mischief than I did back in the day. In spite of all the trouble that found me, I wonder in retrospect why I didn’t bring even more calamity down upon myself.
I knew that my mother’s rules were not to be subjected to the creative interpretations that wily attorneys brought to the wording of laws that snared their criminal clients. She was a plainspoken woman who said what she meant. But after leaving Mr. Smaller to his grumbling in the basement, I convinced myself that the rule against being alone in our apartment for an extended period of time didn’t apply to lingering alone for hours elsewhere in the building, as if Mom would approve of me loitering in concealment for the purpose of spying on one of our neighbors.
I took the back stairs to the sixth floor. Looked through the small window in the door. No one. Imagining myself to be as stealthy as Napoleon Solo, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., which had been a hit on TV the previous year and had fired my imagination even though the stories never made sense to me, I traveled shadow-quiet along the public hallway, Apartment 6-C to my right.
On the left, between Apartments 6-A and 6-B, a door opened to a service closet. The hinges creaked but not loudly. I entered without hesitation and drew the door shut. Fiona Cassidy could be aware of my presence only if she had been standing in her vestibule, keeping watch through the fish-eye lens in her door.
After turning on the service-closet light, I pulled down on the dangling cord attached to a hinged ceiling trap, which swung toward me and brought with it a ladder that unfolded in sections to provide access to the building’s attic.
Doubt afflicted me just then. The woman had threatened me with a knife. Hiding under a bed might be smarter than trying to learn more about her. No, no, no. I’d seen her in a dream and she’d gotten into our apartment through a locked door. She was a threat like no other. I had to know who she was.
I took from my pocket the heart pendant with the captured feather, and my confidence returned at the sight of it.
I was a boy who readily believed in magic, even if I didn’t understand the source of its power or its purpose. Perhaps I was so easily enchanted because, as a Bledsoe, I had been born to music, imbued with it. Music—good music, great music—is itself magical, its mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy.
At the top of the ladder, on the frame that enclosed the trap, a switch brought sour light to bare bulbs in ceramic sockets placed at wide intervals between the overhead beams. Shadows did not flee, but merely retreated and regrouped and stood sentinel.
Clearance in the attic wasn’t such that a grown man could stand erect, but a boy like me had plenty of headroom. Water pipes for the sixth-floor units were routed through this space, as were electrical conduits and bathroom vents. Between the floor joists, the primitive insulating materials of previous decades had in recent years been replaced with rolls of pink fiberglass.
I pulled on the top tread, and the segments of the spring-loaded ladder folded up upon themselves with a faint protracted twang. The trap thumped softly as it nestled into its frame.
If I stepped wrong and missed the two-inch-wide edge of a joist, my foot would plunge through the insulation. If it also broke through the plasterboard ceiling, it would dangle in view of anyone below.
Fortunately, here and there, thick sheets of particleboard had been screwed to the joists, providing the equivalent of stepping stones. I carefully made my way north, to the flank of the building occupied by Apartment 6-C. The wide cooktop vent identified the kitchen below, and I settled there to listen.
Even as skinny as I was, I raised a few creaks and crackles from underfoot, though I doubted that those noises would trigger Fiona Cassidy’s suspicion. The driving rain upon the roof and the wind battering the walls brought forth numerous complaints from the bones of the ancient building, among which my movements couldn’t be separately discerned.
I had awakened sleeping moths, which darted now from lamp to lamp. They hovered, quivering, opening their gray robes to bare their vulnerable bodies to the light they worshipped. Between the floor joists, legions of busy silverfish no doubt lived in the layers of fiberglass insulation, on which they enjoyed dining, but only a few ventured onto the particleboard and skittered through the denim folds of my jeans. I steeled myself not to brush them noisily away.
A hole had been cut in the kitchen ceiling to accommodate the sheet-metal duct that vented smoke and odors from the cooktop all the way to the roof. The hole was more than a quarter of an inch wider on each side than the ductwork, and the gap had not been caulked. Through that narrow space, rather than by way of the duct itself, I might be able to hear activity in the room below.
Having learned patience during the months that Tilton thwarted my desire to take piano lessons, I waited without fidgeting. After about fifteen minutes, I heard muffled voices, and I was surprised when an up-flow of light came through the gap and sheathed the metal ductwork at which I listened.
If they had been looking up just before the kitchen light had been switched on, they might have seen the dim attic lampglow through these same gaps, might have realized that someone lurked above them.
I assumed that the woman’s voice was that of Fiona Cassidy, although it was too muffled and distorted by intervening structures for me to identify it with certainty. I thought I caught the words little shit and snoop, but I could just as easily have imagined them. The woman did most of the talking and seemed to be the dominant one. The man spoke softly—deferentially, I thought—and for all I could tell, he might have been speaking in a foreign language.
After about ten minutes, the man left. A door closed. The woman remained, humming a tune that I didn’t recognize. Soon I smelled coffee brewing. Spoon and china clinked as she stirred. She didn’t switch the light off when she left the kitchen.
Moving slowly and cautiously from one island of particleboard to the next, I sought Fiona Cassidy. Eventually, through the white noise of the rain on the roof and the wind blustering around the building, I heard her singing “Paint It Black,” which had been a hit for the Rolling Stones that summer. As a singer, she was no threat to my mother
—or to anyone. Just as my mother never washed her dirty laundry in public, this woman should never sing outside of her apartment—if even there.
Eventually I was driven out of the attic not by her singing but by boredom. Spying on her, I expected to learn some deep and terrible secret. But life isn’t as predictable as the movies. In life, deep and terrible secrets are usually revealed not when you’re searching for them, but when you least expect them and are unprepared.
And if I’m going to be truthful, I have to admit, after a while, I began to suspect this strange woman knew that I was in the attic, that she was listening to me as I listened to her. When she started singing a painful version of “Hang On Sloopy,” I was pretty sure she changed the word to Snoopy.
24
In spite of the rain, I went to the community center, after all, and spent the afternoon at the piano. The storm faded as I came home shortly before five o’clock. The gutters no longer overflowed, and the streets were washed clean. The windshield wipers on all the cars were set at slow speed, and as if exhausted by the storm, motorists were not pounding their horns. The city seemed to be winding down.
In the foyer, I found Mr. Yoshioka wiping his umbrella dry with a white cloth. He had already taken off his galoshes and wiped them, as well. He nodded, sort of bowed a little, and said, “Good afternoon to you, Jonah Kirk.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Yoshioka.”
“Is it very wet enough for you?”
His smile told me that he thought this was an amusing question, and I smiled in return. “It’s a good day for ducks.”
“Is it?” he said. “Yes, I suppose it must be. Though I have not seen one. Have you?”
“No, sir.”
Crouching to wipe up the water that he had tracked into the foyer, he said, “Perhaps even on days for ducks, they stay to the parks that have ponds.”
Because the foyer featured a tile floor and because Mr. Smaller mopped it regularly on bad-weather days, I had never thought to clean up after myself like this. In fact, neither had anyone else in the building except Mr. Yoshioka.
He picked up his galoshes and his furled umbrella, half bowed to me again, and said, “Let us hope tomorrow is a day for songbirds.”
“Let us hope.” I sort of bowed to him and immediately wished I hadn’t, afraid that he might think I was mocking him, which I wasn’t.
He climbed the stairs toward the fifth floor. Because I was embarrassed to leave a puddle of rainwater on the floor, I didn’t move until he was at least four flights ahead of me.
In our apartment, I put the wet umbrella in a pot that stood beside the door for that purpose, and I set my galoshes to dry on a rubber mat beside the pot.
By then I had realized that Mr. Yoshioka lived in 5-C, the apartment directly beneath that in which Fiona Cassidy—aka Eve Adams—was a temporary resident. The possibility that he might be enlisted as an ally in my investigation of the woman began to intrigue me.
My mother had not yet returned from Woolworth’s because she’d had some other task after work. She didn’t expect to be home until six o’clock, which would leave her little time to change and be off to Slinky’s.
The previous day, she had made peanut-butter cookies according to Grandma Anita’s recipe. Unlike most cookies of that type, they were not oily or chewy, but crisp and crunchy. After she took them from the oven, as they cooled, she shredded dark chocolate on top, which melted and then solidified into a thin crust.
The cookies were stored in a deep, round tin. Too pleased by my cunning, I put half a dozen of the treats on a paper plate, covered them tightly with Saran Wrap, and carried them up to the fifth floor, to present them to Mr. Yoshioka, less as a neighborly gift than as an inducement to conspiracy. My motives were not entirely deplorable. I did in fact like the tailor and felt sorry for him if, as everyone suspected, he had a tragic past.
In our lives, we come to moments of great significance that we fail to recognize, the meaning of which sometimes does not occur to us for many years. Each of us has his agenda and focuses on it, and therefore we are often blind to what is before our eyes.
On the fifth floor, when Mr. Yoshioka answered his doorbell, all I saw was a neighbor, a shy man, who was still dressed for work. He hadn’t taken off his suit coat, hadn’t loosened his tie.
I held out the plate. “My mom made these. You’ll like them.”
He appeared to be uncertain, not sure that I meant to give him the cookies. “These are the product of your mother’s labor?”
“She baked them. Peanut butter. They’re delicious with milk. Or without. You don’t have to have milk to eat them. I mean, if maybe you don’t like milk or it makes you sick, or something.”
“I am making tea.”
“They might go with tea. Milk or coffee, absolutely.”
Tentatively, he took the plate of cookies. “Would you like to join me for tea, Jonah Kirk?”
“Yeah, that would be great. Thank you.”
His dress shoes were on a mat beside the door. He still wore socks, but the shoes had been replaced by white slippers.
“It is not necessary for you to take off your shoes,” he said.
“No, I want to. I want to do what you do in your own place.”
“I do not keep all traditions of Japan. You should not be worried we will sit on the floor to eat. I do not.”
“Neither do we,” I said, as he closed the door. “We never did. My people, I mean. Unless maybe back when they were slaves, maybe they weren’t given furniture, though I think they were. Not fancy furniture, of course, not from Macy’s, just crudely made stuff.”
He smiled and nodded. “I assure you also that I do not subscribe to the ancient tradition of seppuku.” When I stared blankly at him, he said, “That is the polite word for hara-kiri.”
I’d seen some old war movies. I knew what hara-kiri was. Suicide by sword. Disembowelment.
“Relax in the living room, Jonah Kirk. I will return with tea.”
I wondered if I had gotten myself in trouble and, if so, just what kind of trouble it might be.
25
After I removed my shoes, I went into the living room in my stocking feet.
First I noticed how clean Mr. Yoshioka kept his apartment. Mom was obsessive about cleaning, but our place didn’t gleam like this.
The room seemed immaculate partly because it didn’t contain much; there was no possibility of clutter. The lines of the slat-back walnut couch were stark, with box cushions covered in a gold fabric. The matching chairs had black cushions. Two simple side tables held black-ceramic lamps with gold shades.
The wood floor had been sanded smooth and finished in a high gloss. I figured Mr. Yoshioka must have done the work himself. Mr. Smaller performed only the most necessary repairs, not décor changes.
Large six-panel Japanese screens of pale-gold silk faced each other from opposite walls. On the one to the left, a single tiger was lying at rest, though its eyes were wide and watchful. To the right were two tigers at play, their power and grace so convincingly portrayed that I almost expected them to move upon the silk.
Mr. Yoshioka returned with a lacquered tray on which were two white porcelain plates, one bearing my mother’s cookies, the other holding an assortment of inch-square cakes with pastel icing in a variety of colors. There were also smaller plates and cloth napkins.
As he transferred the items on the tray to the coffee table, Mr. Yoshioka said, “You admire the screens.”
“They’re really cool.”
“These are copies of those by the Meiji master Takeuchi Seiho. I commissioned these. Faithful reproductions. But the originals were more powerful. My family once owned them. Then they were lost.”
“Wow. How do you lose something so big?” I asked.
“Not easily.”
“Where were they lost?”
“California,” said Mr. Yoshioka, and he returned to the kitchen with the empty tray.
The only other work of art stood on
a pedestal between two windows that were covered by rice-paper shades the color of weak tea. This was an ivory sculpture of unusual size, about two feet high and two wide and a foot deep: a pretty Japanese lady in an elaborate kimono, carved with great realism.
When Mr. Yoshioka returned, carrying a tray laden with a teapot and two delicate cups, he said, “That is a Meiji original by the unequaled Asahi Gyokuzan. It is dated 1898. In 1901, he unveiled a larger, even more splendid version that was acquired by the emperor.”
As Mr. Yoshioka poured tea, I stood transfixed by the ivory carving. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“She is a court lady. Her ceremonial kimono has nineteen layers, the folds of each expressed by the sculptor in minute relief.”
The statue was so sensuous, I wanted to touch it, but I knew that I shouldn’t.
“My family once owned it but then lost it. Years later, I found and purchased it. That was a most happy day. I have poured the tea.”
He sat on the sofa, and I took a chair. I sipped the tea, which was hot, almost colorless, nearly tasteless, and somewhat bitter.
Watching me, Mr. Yoshioka seemed amused. “I thought you would feel that way,” he said, though I hadn’t complained. He indicated a miniature porcelain pitcher the size of a man’s thumb. “Orange-blossom honey will sweeten it.”
I added honey to the cup and was grateful for it. My host took his brew unsweetened.
When I sampled one of the tiny cakes, it was subtly flavored, perhaps with almond extract, and only slightly sweet, but edible.
He tried one of the cookies and was delighted, which didn’t surprise me if those little pastel cakes were his idea of a treat. A whole new world must have opened to him when he took his first bite of one of my mother’s peanut-butter cookies.