Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  Rothblatt was a gloomy, talkative man. He’d lived in Flatbush all his life and driven a cab for forty years. His wife had died several years back and now he spoke ruefully of ungrateful children and rapacious relatives. But of course he had known Rudy Uliano. “Knew him for years. Sweetheart of a guy. We used to drive together for Washkowitz, that ‘cheap, chiseling kike.’ Then Rudy moved up to the Bronx and started driving for Acme. But how’d you find me?”

  “It’s a long story. Actually, I just went around to about forty garages. Finally hit one where the injury and date appeared to coincide. They gave me Uliano’s name and that led to you.”

  Harry Rothblatt chewed lettuce with a weary air of obedience. “And you say this guy was injured in Rudy’s cab?”

  “Not in his cab. Outside. But he was probably spilling a lot of blood and flagged your pal. Bled all over the back of his cab.”

  Mr. Rothblatt nodded eagerly. “Oh, sure. Now I remember.”

  Mooney leaned forward in his chair. “You do remember?”

  “How could I forget? Couple of years ago, wasn’t it? What a night. Poor Rudy. Blood all over his shoes and trousers.”

  Outwardly calm, something like a locomotive roared full speed inside of Mooney’s head. “Did Rudy tell you about it?”

  “Sure. Well, you couldn’t stop him. He come down here right afterward. I was sittin’ over there at that table.” Mr. Rothblatt pointed to a table across the caféteria, presently occupied by a pair of voluble bag ladies who kept berating each other. “He was pretty shook up. I took him right into the men’s room and we got him washed up. Then I brought him back out and gave him a cup of black coffee and he just started talking. Sure, I remember.”

  “Did he tell you how the guy happened to get the injury?”

  Mr. Rothblatt closed his eyes and thought for a moment. Then he shook his head. “Nope. I don’t think so. Least I don’t recall nothin’ about that.”

  “Did he happen to say where exactly the guy was injured?”

  “You mean where he was injured on his body or where the accident occurred?”

  “Both,” Mooney snapped, unable to suppress his impatience.

  “Lemme see.” Mr. Rothblatt’s spoon of sour cream paused midway between bowl and mouth. “It was somewhere over in the theater district. I think he said it was around Fortieth or Forty-first.”

  “Forty-first and where?”

  “It strikes me it was pretty far west. Like Ninth Avenue.”

  Mooney’s heart leaped. “You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure. We talked about it for some time that night.” Mr. Rothblatt spooned prunes into his mouth, chewed intently and let the pits slide back onto his spoon.

  “And what about the injury,” Mooney pressed on. “What about that? Like, where was it on the guy?” Mr. Rothblatt pondered a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think he said.”

  “How d’ya suppose Rudy got all that blood on him?”

  “Probably helping the guy in and out of the cab.”

  “Sure. Then if Rudy had blood on his trousers and shoes,” Mooney reflected aloud, “it stands to reason this guy’s injuries were below the belt rather than above.”

  “Could be.” Mr. Rothblatt appeared unimpressed. Mooney turned sharply back upon him. “Tell me. This is important. Did Rudy happen to say where he took the guy?”

  “I think he said some hospital on the East Side.”

  “Yes?”

  “But I can’t remember the name. That’s one of the things about getting older. You don’t remember names so well anymore. Just places.” The thought of that made him suddenly sad.

  “Was it New York University Medical Center?”

  “Nope. That wasn’t it.” Mr. Rothblatt drummed nervously on the table. “People get in my cab all the time. They ask me the names of places. I can never remember, but I know exactly how to get there.”

  “Was it Beth Israel Medical Center?”

  Mr. Rothblatt thumped the table triumphantly. “That’s it. That’s the place. Beth Israel.”

  Mooney was at the edge of his chair. “You’re sure now?”

  “Course I’m sure. I remember because poor Rudy couldn’t say it right. He kept calling it Bett Israel.” The old driver laughed nostalgically. “He was one sweetheart of a guy, that Rudy. Give you the shirt off his back. But listen, ain’t all this in the emergency report?”

  “Should be, but Rudy never filed one.” Mooney rose and took Harry Rothblatt’s punch ticket off his tray. “This one’s on the city.”

  33

  Mooney’s day had been a binge, a procession from one excess to the next. Having saturated himself at the Belmore Cafeteria, he wanted to go directly down to Beth Israel. It was only a matter of ten minutes by car. But it was Sunday night and, of course, the administrative offices would be closed. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

  Still logy from gluttony, he could not bear the thought of facing Fritzi. Actually, the image of her silent reproach made him decidedly uneasy. One glance at him and she’d know all. On the way home he drove up Lexington Avenue past the gay Victorian gaslights outside the Balloon. Inside, the lights glowed—warm and festive. He felt more desolate than ever.

  It was no doubt that feeling which drove Mooney up onto the roof of his apartment house that evening, seeking the solitude of the nighttime sky and the cold, nonjudgmental indifference of the stars. That, of course, plus the uneasy fact that the solstice was near at hand. No more than a week or ten days off, and from the point of view of his own theories, the calendar was rapidly approaching the most critical phase for the Bombardier.

  34

  “FILARIA.” He rolled the word round several times on his tongue, “FILARIASIS—a diseased state due to the presence of nematode worms called FILARIAE within the body. BANCROFT’S infection of the lymphatic system with the adult form of WUCHERERIA BANCROFTI.” He repeated the last two words, striving to achieve an easy fluency. He wanted the words to roll off his tongue as if he’d uttered them every day of his life. Then, too, Watford wished to give his intonation that special ring of the highly informed. After a period of constant repetition, the words took on a magic for him. They became incantatory. “Helminthic diseases. Nematodes. Insect vector, mosquitoes. Geographic range: Tropical Africa, North Africa, borders of Asia and Queensland, the West Indies and northern tier of South America.

  “ETIOLOGY: caused by filarial worm. Lymphangitis with fibrosis. Insect vector, mosquitoes. Transfers to host. More than a year after infection microfilariae appear in the peripheral blood.”

  Watford reread the last sentence. He made some rapid computation in his mind, then scribbled the essence of it onto a pad. A point he carefully noted was that one of the loci of the disease were the borders of the Asian subcontinent.

  “SYMPTOMATOLOGY: reactive hyperplasia seen in the lymph nodes along with small granulomas. Lymphatic obstruction becomes more extensive. Chronic edema develops in the infected areas affecting especially the lower limbs and scrotum. Eventually the giant limbs of elephantiasis are produced.”

  Watford had a sudden vision of himself, a boy fourteen years of age on a class excursion to Washington. The Smithsonian Institution. The medical wing. Corridors of glass cases behind which resided in large transparent tubs of Formalin, three-headed fetuses and torsos from which multiple arms grew; sometimes merely hands with three or four fingers. Monstrosity following monstrosity. But for Watford, the most riveting and ghastly was an exhibition devoted to the effects of elephantiasis.

  In a bath of Formalin the amputated grayish-yellow leg of an elephantiasis victim stood straight up, balanced on its foot. It was enormous, the calf matching the circumference of a fifty-year-old oak. Beside that was the photograph of a man sitting in a jungle clearing. His scrotum had swelled so from the disease that he was able to sit upon it as if it were a large ottoman. It was then that young Charles Watford grew sick and had to be whisked out of the hall by one of the teachers.

  The night
in the hotel where the group stayed, he dreamed of limbs—limbs of gargantuan size and genitals that were horrific.

  “CLINICAL MANIFESTATIONS,” he read further, devouring the ghastly symptoms enumerated on the page, unable to avert his eye from the color photographs.

  When at last he lay the book down it was past 11:00 P.M. He would have to be up early tomorrow and out at the agencies. His funds were perilously low. He had incurred debts in the several weeks he’d been home and it was imperative that he make a connection soon.

  In bed, lying weary yet sleepless, his mind twitched with visions of gross pathology, disfigurations, pernicious cellular infiltration of bacteria and viruses.

  He tried to lay out a plan of attack for the following day. First thing in the morning he would buy a Times and search the classified pages. He would go to every agency. Seek work. But what exactly was his line of work? He liked to think, of course, it was the airline industry. High mobility. Rapid transit. New faces. New places. The cheap, quickly fabricated glamour of flight. He enjoyed that sort of thing and, of course, one of its special dividends was that one was never obliged to stay any one place too long.

  “FILARIASIS,” he whispered the word into the gloomy shadows of his room, as if conjuring a god. “DIETHYLCARBAMAZINE. LYMPHANGITIS, QUANGDUC 1972. The rainy season. Monsoons. Slogging through the sodden, dripping, insect-ridden forest. The shriek of monkeys. Foot patrols. Sappers. Hostile forces. Sent back to base hospital, FILARIASIS. My head. My head hurts, Doctor.”

  35

  There were couples strolling up and down West Forty-eighth Street. Children at play, running and shrieking in the gutters. Elderly folk sitting out on stoops before the huddled tenements. The din of traffic rumbling up Ninth Avenue. Gas fumes mingling with the sweetish fetor of uncollected trash set out in plastic bags before the buildings.

  In front of 436 West Forty-eighth Street, a shabby derelict of a building, with most of its windows punched out, a group of Puerto Rican men drank beer and played dominoes on a wobbly bridge table. The tiles clicked rapidly over the tabletop, punctuated by hoots of laughter and the hiss of beer cans uncapping.

  The women sat on the stoop, apart from the men, chattering among themselves. Above it all hovered the improbable scent of heliotrope growing rampantly outside in a window box.

  At the corner, the lights of a little bodega twinkled like a Christmas tree. Squealing children rushed in and out of the shop with precious hoarded nickels and dimes, purchasing orangeade and colored frozen ice sticks. Despite the grimness of the surroundings there was an air of gaiety in the streets, a sense of the miraculous at having gotten through another day.

  Across from 436, a man stood by himself in the shadows of the building opposite. About him was the indefinable air of something furtive, possibly even sinister. He appeared to be observing the dominoes players. From time to time his eyes ranged up and down the street, then swept upward over the facade of the building to the rooftops. In his right hand he carried a large paper bag, tied carefully with string.

  The man watched the dominoes players. He enjoyed the sight of them sitting in shirt-sleeves in the glow from the bodega lights, gruff, hearty, boisterous, the reek of sweat in their soiled clothing, at their board games, laughing, gossiping, drinking wine and beer. They could carouse late into the night, shout and drink wine, tell ribald tales and rise the next morning to drag their bodies off to mean, futile jobs. They retained their toughness and their hope.

  The man watched them. Their tough, weedy durability caused in him a kind of envy. In his mind at that moment he contemplated nothing. He had no specific plan, other than the bag he carried with the concrete cinder block inside, scavenged from one of the many construction sites round the city.

  He had not the slightest idea of how he’d got there, and no recollection of having picked up the cinder block or carrying it to that place. The thought of it was appalling, but even more so was the total amnesia surrounding the incident.

  Perversely, the thought persisted. Just walking in. Climbing up some narrow reeking stairway, several flights, dim corridors, defaced doorways, littered floors. Then, stepping out onto the rooftop … dangling the bag out over the ledge, directly above that point where the dominoes players laughed and drank below.

  He tried to recall what thoughts had gone through his head on those other occasions. What feelings? Joy? Sorrow? Rage? Nothing. There had been nothing in any of the other incidents to distinguish one from the other. No clear, distinct reason to account for the awful compulsion. Why then would he choose to injure these men or their families? They were so decent. So obviously pleasant. Why? To what purpose? And that boy. That poor, poor boy. I promised you, Jeffrey. I swore. Never again. Not ever.

  “Lookin’ for someone?”

  The man glanced up. He was staring into the pasty round face of an Irish policeman.

  The patrolman looked at him curiously. His eye swept rapidly over him, taking in a multitude of detail.

  “Anything I can help you with, Mac?”

  “No, thank you,” the man replied. “I’ve been waiting for someone, but I guess they’re not coming.”

  “Yeah—that happens.” The patrolman sounded sympathetic, but there was something distinctly wary in his eyes.

  The dominoes players across the way had stopped to watch.

  “I guess I’ll be on my way,” the man remarked.

  The officer’s eyes narrowed. “I guess you oughta. Ain’t the best place to linger long.”

  36

  “What did you say the name was?”

  “Boyd. Mr. Anthony Boyd.”

  “That’s o-y-d?” Defasio mouth-lipped the word as he spelled it out in his pad in large capital letters. “You’re sure now?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Am I not reading it right here before my eyes in the emergency patient intake for April 30, 1979? Mr. Anthony Boyd admitted 11:22 P.M. 4/30/79. Doesn’t that sound like your man? Emergency surgery to close a severed femoral artery.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  Ms. Sophie Solomon, administrative clerk of Beth Israel Hospital, squinted at Defasio through thick, pinkish lenses. She was a petulant spinster lady of sixty-seven who resented any form of intrusion into her daily routine, let alone her record books, which were sacrosanct. She guarded them like a gorgon, and was not intimidated by anyone, least of all the police.

  Glaring up at Defasio, she put him in mind of a wasp about to sting. “That severed thing you mentioned,” said Defasio.

  “You mean, I take it, the femoral artery?”

  The patronizing snarl in her voice made him more deferential. “Yeah. Right. The femoral artery.”

  “That’s an artery in the leg.”

  “Where exactly in the leg?”

  “In the thigh exactly. The whole length of the thigh, to be exact.”

  Defasio looked at her warily. She had her way of putting things and he wasn’t certain if the solecisms were natural or merely a way of amusing herself at his expense. She went on enunciating through yellow dentures. “It says here on my card that he was in surgery for little over one hour. It took twenty stitches and suturing to close the wound.”

  Defasio felt the wariness melting into cautious optimism. “Does it say anything there about how this Boyd fellow got the wound?”

  Ms. Solomon’s squinting gaze flowed up and down the wide, red-ruled ledgers of her intake book. “It says here the injury was incurred as a result of stumbling into an open manhole, and don’t try and peer over my shoulder, sonny. I see what you’re doing. That’s privileged information on this page.”

  “Sorry.” Defasio flushed and stepped quickly backwards. “Did anyone bother to verify the time and place of the injury?”

  “That’s not our job here,” croaked Ms. Solomon. “We’re not the police. We’re a healing institution. The only thing we report are bullet wounds. A man comes in here having lost a couple quarts of blood, we don’t start interrogations. You understand, Officer?”
>
  “Sure,” Defasio nodded enthusiastically. “Sure . what about an address for this Mr. Boyd? You got some kind of an address?”

  Once again Ms. Solomon’s eyes swept over the ledger. Her lips mumbled as she went. “The only address I got here is A. Boyd, Import-Export, 3143 Crown Drive, Wilmette, Illinois.”

  “That’s a business address. You got a residence?”

  “I am telling you, Officer,” Ms. Solomon’s enunciation grew increasingly clipped, “the only address I have is the one I’ve already given you.”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t get angry.”

  “Who’s angry?” Ms. Solomon snarled. “I’m busy here. I’m way behind on my billing, but I am delighted to take valuable time out of my lunch hour and talk to you. It gives me genuine pleasure.” Defasio ground his teeth. “The only thing I’m saying, you understand, is that it does seem a little peculiar that an emergency patient should give his business address rather than his home address.”

  “Peculiar, but not unheard of. Particularly if the patient’s major medical is taken out in his firm’s name.”

  “Oh?” Once again she had him buffaloed. “How was the hospital bill paid?”

  “By the insurance company, of course.”

  “Then they’d have Mr. Boyd’s home address, wouldn’t they?”

  “I’d say you could more or less count on it, sonny.” Defasio made a valiant effort to ignore her. “What was the insurance company?”

  Ms. Solomon tilted her ear in his direction. “What?”

  He was certain she’d heard him.

  “The insurance company? Which one was it?”

  “The policy underwriter, I take it you mean?”

  “That’s it, the policy underwriter.”

  Ms. Solomon squinted down at her records. “That would be Hartford Trust and Traveler. Insurance number 683-914-2108.”

  A few minutes later Michael Defasio was outside in a reeking public phone booth the tattered walls of which had become a palimpsest of graffiti and ballpoint pornography. He was shouting over a bad wire to the records chief of Hartford Trust and Traveler. Standing there for several minutes, he’d been tossing in additional coins while waiting for the records chief to come back on the line.