The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “Hamburger,” I would say.

  The fingers were pinching and roaming through my pocket. “Any love letters in here? Any pictures of pretty girls?”

  Sometimes I saw the miserable child who had been sent to his house, a child for whom Mr. and Mrs. Stenmitz were paid to care, and the sight of that hopeless Billy or Joey made me want to run away. Something had happened to these children: they had been squeezed dry and ironed flat. They were slightly dirty, and their clothes always looked too big or too small, but what was scary about them was that they had no humanity, no light—it had been drained right out of them.

  When I saw Mr. Stenmitz’s name under the terrible headline I felt amazed and fascinated, but mainly I felt relief. I would not have to go into his shop alone anymore; and I would not have to endure the awful anxiety of going there with my parents and seeing what they saw, C. Aubrey Smith in a butcher’s apron, while also seeing the other, terrible Heinz Stenmitz winking and capering beneath the mask.

  I was glad he was dead. He couldn’t have been dead enough, to suit me.

  8

  THEN THERE WERE NO MORE of the murders. The last place someone wrote BLUE ROSE on a wall was outside Stenmitz’s Quality Meats and Home-Made Sausages. The man who wrote those mysterious words near his victims’ bodies had called it quits. His plan, whatever it was, had been fulfilled, or his rage had satisfied itself. Millhaven waited for something to happen; Millhaven wanted the second shoe to drop.

  After another month, in a great fire of publicity, the second shoe did drop. One of my clearest memories of the beginning of my year of convalescence is of the Ledger’s revelations about the secret history of the murders. The Ledger found a hidden coherence in the Blue Rose murders and was delighted, with the sort of delight that masquerades as shock, by the twist at the story’s end. I read a tremendous amount during that year, but I read nothing as avidly as I did the Ledger. It was terrible, it was tragic, but it was all such a tremendous story. It became my story, the story that most opened up the world for me.

  As each installment of William Damrosch’s story appeared in the Ledger, I cut it out and pasted it into an already bulging scrapbook. When discovered, this scrapbook caused some excitement. Mom thought that a seven-year-old so interested in awfulness must be awful himself; Dad thought the whole thing was a damn shame. It was over his head, out of his hands. He gave up on everything, including us. He lost his elevator operator job at the St. Alwyn and moved out. Even before he was fired from the St. Alwyn, he had given indications of turning into one of the winos who hung out in Dead Man’s Tunnel, and after he had been fired and moved into a tenement on Oldtown Way, he slipped among them for a time. Dad did not drink in Dead Man’s Tunnel. He carried his pint bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag to other places around the Valley and the near south side, but his clothes grew dirty and sour, he seldom shaved, he began to look old and hesitant.

  The front pages of the Ledger that I pasted into my Blue Rose scrapbook described how the homicide detective in charge of the murder investigation had been found seated at his desk in his shabby basement apartment with a bullet hole in his right temple. It was the day before Christmas. The Ledger being what it was, the blood and other matter on the wall beside the body was not unrecorded. Detective Damrosch’s service revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38 from which a single shot had been fired, was dangling from his right hand. On the desk in front of the detective was a bottle of Three Feathers bourbon, all but empty, an empty glass, a pen and a rectangular sheet of paper torn from a notebook, also on the desk. The words BLUE ROSE had been printed on the paper in block capitals. Sometime between three and five o’clock in the morning, Detective Damrosch had finished his whiskey, written two words on a sheet of notebook paper, and by committing suicide confessed to the murders he had been supposed to solve.

  Sometimes life is like a book.

  The headlines that followed traced out Detective William Damrosch’s extraordinary background. His real name was Carlos Rosario, not William Damrosch, and he had been not so much born as propelled into the world on a freezing January wind—some anonymous citizen had seen the half-dead child on the frozen bank of the Millhaven River. The citizen called the police from the telephone booth in the Green Woman Taproom. When the police scrambled down from the bridge to rescue the baby, they found his mother, Carmen Rosario, stabbed to death beneath the bridge. The crime was never solved: Carmen Rosario was an illegal immigrant from Santo Domingo and a prostitute, and the police made only perfunctory efforts to find her killer. The nameless child, who was called Billy by the social worker who had taken him from the police, was placed into a series of foster homes. He grew up to be a violent, sexually uncertain teenager whose intelligence served mainly to get him into trouble. Given the choice of prison or the army, he chose the army; and his life changed. By now he was Billy Damrosch, having taken the name of his last foster father, and Billy Damrosch could use his intelligence to save his life. He came out of the army with a box full of medals, a scattering of scars, and the intention of becoming a policeman in Millhaven. Now, with the prescience of hindsight, I think he wanted to come back to Millhaven to find out who had killed his mother.

  According to the police, he could not have killed April, because Bill Damrosch only killed people he knew.

  Monty Leland, who had been killed in front of the Idle Hour, was a small-time criminal, one of Damrosch’s informants. Early in his career, before his transfer from the vice squad, Damrosch had many times arrested Arlette Monaghan, the prostitute slashed to death behind the St. Alwyn, a tenuous link considering that other vice squad officers past and present had arrested her as often. It was assumed that James Treadwell, the piano player in Glenroy Breakstone’s band, had been murdered because he had seen Damrosch kill Arlette.

  The most telling connections between Detective Damrosch and the people he murdered entered with the remaining two victims.

  Five years before the murders began, Buzz Laing had lived for a year with William Damrosch. This information came from a housekeeper Dr. Laing had fired. They was more than friends, the housekeeper declared, because I never had to change more than one set of sheets, and I can tell you they fought like cats and dogs. Or dogs and dogs. Millhaven is a conservative place, and Buzz Laing lost half of his patients. Fortunately, he had private money—the same money that had paid for the disgruntled housekeeper and the big house on the lake—and after a while, most of his patients came back to him. For the record, Laing always insisted that it was not William Damrosch who had tried to kill him. He had been attacked from behind in the dark, and he had passed out before he was able to turn around, but he was certain that his attacker had been larger than himself. Buzz Laing was six feet two, and Damrosch was some three inches shorter.

  But it was the detective’s relationship with the last victim of the Blue Rose murderer that spoke loudest. You will already have guessed that Billy Damrosch was one of the wretched boys who passed through the ungentle hands of Heinz Stenmitz. By now, Stenmitz was a disgraced man. He had been sent to the state penitentiary for child molestation after a suspicious social worker named Dorothy Greenglass had finally discovered what he had been doing to the children in his care. During his year in jail, his wife continued to work in the butcher shop while broadcasting her grievances—her husband, a God-fearing hardworking Christian man, had been railroaded by liars and cheats. Some of her customers believed her. After Stenmitz came home, he went back behind the counter as if nothing had happened. Other people remembered the testimony of the social worker and the few grown boys who had agreed to speak for the prosecution.

  It was what you would expect—one of those tormented boys had come back to exact justice. He had wanted to forget what he had done—he hated the kind of man Stenmitz had turned him into. It was tragic. Decent people would put all this behind them and go back to normal life.

  But I turned the pages of my scrapbook over and over, trying to find a phrase, a look in the eye, a curl of the m
outh, that would tell me if William Damrosch was the man I had seen in the tunnel with my sister.

  When I tried to think about it, I heard great wings beating in my head.

  I thought of April sailing on before me into that world of annihilating light, the world no living person is supposed to know. William Damrosch had killed Heinz Stenmitz, but I did not know if he had killed my sister. And that meant that April was sailing forever into that realm I had glimpsed.

  So of course I saw her ghost sometimes. When I was eight I turned around on a bus seat and saw April four rows back, her pale face turned toward the window. Unable to breathe, I faced forward again. When I turned back around, she was gone. When I was eleven I saw her standing on the lower deck of the double-decker ferry that was taking my mother and myself across Lake Michigan. I saw her carrying a single loaf of French bread to a car in the parking lot of a Berkeley grocery store. She appeared among a truckful of army nurses at Camp Crandall in Vietnam—a nine-year-old blond girl in the midst of the uniformed nurses, looking at me with an unsmiling face. I have seen her twice, riding by in passing taxis, in New York City. Last year, I was flying to London on British Airways, and I turned around in my seat to look for the stewardess and saw April seated in the last seat of the last row in first class, looking out of the window with her chin on her fist. I faced forward and held my breath. When I looked around again, the seat was empty.

  9

  THIS IS WHERE I DIP MY BUCKETS, where I fill my pen.

  10

  MY FIRST BOOK, A Beast in View, was about a false identity, and it turned out that The Divided Man was also about a mistaken identity. I was haunted by William Damrosch, a true child of the night, who intrigued me because he seemed to be both a decent man and a murderer. Along with Millhaven, I assumed that he was guilty. Koko was essentially about a mistaken identity and Mystery was about the greatest mistake ever made by Lamont von Heilitz, Millhaven’s famous private detective. He thought he had identified a murderer, and that the murderer had then committed suicide. These books are about the way the known story is not the right or the real story. I saw April because I missed her and wanted to see her, also because she wanted me to know that the real story had been abandoned with the past. Which is to say that part of me had been waiting for John Ransom’s phone call ever since I read and reread the Ledger’s description of William Damrosch’s body seated dead before his desk. The empty bottle and the empty glass, the dangling gun, the words printed on the piece of notebook paper. The block letters.

  The man I killed face to face jumped up in front of me on a trail called Striker Tiger. He wore glasses and had a round, pleasant face momentarily rigid with amazement. He was a bad soldier, worse even than me. He was carrying a long wooden rifle that looked like an antique. I shot him and he fell straight down, like a puppet, and disappeared into the tall grass. My heart banged. I stepped forward to look at him and imagined him raising a knife or lifting that antique rifle where he lay hidden in the grass. Yet I had seen him fall the way dead birds fall out of the sky, and I knew he was not lifting that rifle. Behind me a soldier named Linklater was whooping, “Did you see that? Did you see Underdown nail that gook?” Automatically I said, “Underhill.” Conor Linklater had some minor mental disorder that caused him to jumble words and phrases. He once said, “The truth is in the pudding.” Here is the pudding. I felt a strange, violent sense of triumph, of having won, like a blood-soaked gladiator in an arena. I went forward through the grass and saw a leg in the black trousers, then another leg opened beside it, then his narrow chest and outflung arms, finally his head. The bullet had entered his throat and torn out the back of his neck. He was like the mirror image of Andrew T. Majors, over whose corpse I had become a pearl diver for the body squad. “You got him, boy,” said Conor Linklater. “You got him real good.” The savage sense of victory was gone. I felt empty. Below his thin ankles, his feet were as bony as fish. From the chin up he looked as if he were working out one of those algebra problems about where two trains would meet if they were traveling at different speeds. It was clear to me that this man had a mother, a father, a sister, a girlfriend. I thought of putting the barrel of my M-16 in the wound in his throat and shooting him all over again. People who would never know my name, whose names I would never know, would hate me. (This thought came later.) “Hey, it’s okay,” Conor said. “It’s okay, Tim.” The lieutenant told him to button his lip, and we moved ahead on Striker Tiger. While knowing I would not, I almost expected to hear the man I had killed crawling away through the grass.

  11

  ON THE MORNING OF THE DAY that John Ransom called me, I shuddered awake all at once. A terrible dream clung to me. I jumped out of bed to shake it off, and as soon as I was on my feet I realized that I had only been dreaming. It was just past six. Early June light burned around the edges of the curtain near my bed. I looked down from my platform over the loft and saw the books stacked on my coffee table, the couches with their rumpled covers, the stack of papers that was one-third of the first draft of a novel on my desk, the blank screen and keyboard of the computer, the laser printer on its stand. Three empty Perrier bottles stood on the desk. My kingdom was in order, but I needed more Perrier. And I was still shaken by the dream.

  I was seated in a clean, high-tech restaurant very different from Saigon, the Vietnamese restaurant two floors beneath my loft on Grand Street. (Two friends, Maggie Lah and Michael Poole, live in the loft between my place and the restaurant.) Bare white walls instead of painted palm fronds, pink linen tablecloths with laundry creases. The waiter handed me a long stiff folded white menu printed with the restaurant’s name, L’Imprime. I opened the menu and saw Human Hand listed among Les Viandes. Human hand, I thought, that’ll be interesting, and when the waiter returned, I ordered it. It came almost immediately, two large, red, neatly severed hands covered with what looked more like the rind of a ham than skin. Nothing else was on the white disc of the plate. I cut a section from the base of the left hand’s thumb and put it in my mouth. It seemed a little undercooked. Then the sickening realization that I was chewing a piece of a hand struck me, and I gagged and spat it out into my pink napkin. I shoved the plate across the table and hoped that the waiter would not notice that I did not have the stomach for this meal. At that moment I woke up shuddering and jumped out of bed.

  From the light that gathered and burned around the edge of the curtain, I knew that the day would be hot. We were going to have one of those unbearable New York summers when the dog shit steams like dumplings on the sidewalks. By August the entire city would be wrapped in a hot wet towel. I lay back down on the bed and tried to stop shaking. Outside, in the sunny space between buildings, I heard the cooing of a bird and thought it was a white dove. The dove made a morning sound, and my mind stalled for a moment on the question of whether the bird was a morning or a mourning dove. It had a soft, questioning cry, and when the sound came again, I heard what the cry was. Oh, it drew in its breath, who? Oh (indrawn breath), who, who? Oh, who? It seemed a question I had been hearing all my life.

  I got up and took a shower. In the way that some people sing, I said, Oh, who? After I dried myself I remembered the two red hands on the white plate, and wrote this memory down in a notebook. The dream was a message, and even if I was never able to decode it, I might be able to use it in a book. Then I wrote down what the dove had said, thinking that the question must be related to the dream.

  My work went slowly, as it had for four or five mornings in a row. I had reached an impasse in my book—I had to solve a problem my story had given me. I wrote a few delaying sentences, made a few notes, and decided to take a long walk. Walking gives the mind a clean white page. I got up, put a pen in my shirt pocket and my notebook in the back pocket of my trousers, and let myself out of the loft.

  When I walk I cover great distances, both distracted and lulled by what happens on the street. In theory, the buckets go down into the well and bring up messages for my notebook while my attention is
elsewhere. I don’t get in my own way; I think about other things. The blocks go by, and words and sentences begin to fill the clean white page. But the page stayed empty through Soho, and by the time I was halfway across Washington Square, I still had not taken my notebook out of my pocket. I watched a teenage boy twirl a skateboard past the drug dealers with their knapsacks and briefcases and saw a motorboat clipping over blue water. One of my characters was steering it. He was squinting into the sun, and now and then he raised his hand to shield his eyes. It was very early morning, just past sunrise, and he was speeding across a lake. He was wearing a gray suit. I knew where he was going, and took out my notebook and wrote: Charlie—speedboat—suit—sunrise—docks at Lily’s house—hides boat in reeds. I saw fine drops of mist on the lapels of Charlie’s nice gray suit.

  So that was what Charlie Carpenter was up to.

  I began walking up Fifth Avenue, looking at all the people going to work, and saw Charlie concealing his motorboat behind the tall reeds at the edge of Lily Sheehan’s property. He jumped out onto damp ground, letting the boat drift back out into the lake. He moved through the reeds and wiped his face and hands with his handkerchief. Then he dabbed at the damp places on his suit. He stopped a moment to comb his hair and straighten his necktie. No lights showed in Lily’s windows. He moved quickly across the long lawn toward her porch.