Night-Bloom

by Herbert Lieberman

  There was an elevator but he had taken the precaution of walking up the seven flights to the roof so as to preclude the possibility of encountering anyone. Once up there he pushed the badly scored metal door open and stepped out onto the tar. Having lugged the forty pounds of mortar up with him, he was winded, but at the same time he experienced that keen exhilaration he invariably felt at such moments, not unlike the sort of itchy anticipatory excitement one associates with making love.

  It had grown somewhat cooler. A gusty wind barreled in off the river, making the sheets and undergarments rise and fall eerily on the washlines.

  He stood for a time with his back to the brick wall beside the roof door. Propping the shopping bag against his leg, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Off to the east, the glowing sky above the theater district had darkened to a pale cinnabar, like dying ingots. At this elevation the distant rumble of traffic moving up and down Eighth Avenue sounded strangely like the sea. Just ahead of him and coming from beyond the low concrete coping, voices wafted upward from the street. There were laughter and people emerging from restaurants. A taxi horn blared. The sounds carried upward with a vivid, ringing clarity.

  He stood there awhile longer, the weight of the shopping bag leaning against his leg like something living and sentient. He waited, as if for some special signal certifying that conditions were precisely right.

  The wind gusting in off the river smelled of fish and carried with it a faint hint of sewerage. Closing his eyes, it made him think of Holland, his beloved Terschelling. Across the spate of years he could see the little Frisian village where he was born, the green, foam-marbled sea rolling up the long, pebbled strand, the windmills like tall sentinels staring silently out toward the gray horizon. Inhaling deeply, gulping air, he sensed his respiration quicken, and when he reached down to grasp the handles of the shopping bag, it occurred to him that he was transcendentally happy.

  He had not even been aware of it when he’d taken the first few steps, pushed off as it were from the secure anchorage of the wall behind him. It was as if something infinitely benevolent had transported him these first few critical steps of his journey. Some twenty yards ahead, the white concrete coping that ran along the top of the parapet gave off a faint luminescence. Just forward of him and to the right an incinerator shaft rose some fifteen feet into the air. In the darkness it had the squat primitive look of something ancient, around which dark rites had once been celebrated. Sparks and cinders crackled upward out of its mouth, indicating that it had recently been fired. Even at forty feet he could feel the heat of its scorched breath on his cheek and feel in his stomach its deep chthonic rumble.

  Moving toward the strangely glowing white line of coping, the weight of the sack pulled his shoulder down so that he appeared to walk slightly hunched and off-kilter. But his head was light and he was suffused with a growing sense of imminent, almost transfiguring, joy. The shaft, however, as he came closer to it, gave him pause. The rumble from deep within it grew louder and a haze of some indefinable stench encircled it. It made him think of a large animal that had just fed.

  As he approached the shaft, moving on that undeviating path toward the parapet, something appeared to detach itself from the shaft. It was as if a part of its dark silhouette had suddenly broken off, rolled out of the shadows directly into his path and stood there awaiting him. It was a man. Or at least it seemed to be a man. He couldn’t be certain, but the appearance of it stopped him dead in his tracks. The figure stood just on the perimeter of the shadow of the shaft, the only illumination the sparks rocketing sporadically above it.

  He was not in the least frightened. But the unwelcome sudden appearance of this impediment annoyed him. Why was it there now? Why did it block his way?

  “What do you want? What are you doing here?” he demanded, as if the person were an intruder on the roof while he himself had every right to be there.

  The figure remained silent.

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  The figure never moved. They stood there, the two of them regarding each other. He could hear the faint high whisper of the person breathing in the shadows.

  The sack in his hand grew heavy. The heat and ashen stench from the mouth of the shaft became increasingly unpleasant. “Who are you? What are you doing up here?”

  Still the figure did not move. He made a move toward it, then heard suddenly a kind of deep, muffled groan from the shadows. It was then that some of his elation began to pall. A burst of laughter and departing voices wafted upward over the parapet. Car doors slammed. He started to withdraw, moving backward toward the roof door. It was then that the figure also began to move, as if tethered to him on a line, following him slowly out of the shadows.

  “What do you want? You want money?” He took his wallet from inside his jacket and tossed it at the figure. It glanced off him and fell to the floor with a dull thud. But the figure didn’t stop to pick it up. Still he could not see the person, only the outline of someone quite large.

  Moving backward toward the door, he nearly stumbled but quickly regained his balance. It all had an air of something preordained—as if the figure stalking him had been doing so for years and now at last their paths had finally intersected. The burlap sack in his hand grew heavier, but he would not put it down. He intended to use it as a weapon for defense, if need be. Still, he was not frightened.

  “Look, I don’t want trouble. But if you come near me, I’m going to start shouting. The police will be up here in a minute.”

  It all sounded a bit hollow, even to him. If, indeed, he did shout and the police were to come and find him up there with the shopping bag and the cinder block, what then? Shouting for help was simply out of the question.

  In the next moment he turned and bolted for the door. A scuffle of steps grated over the tar top behind him. Something like a wind brushed past and ahead of him, then placed itself squarely between himself and the door. His heart pounded wildly and for the first time that evening he had a premonition that something awful was about to happen to him.

  Light streamed onto the roof from several apartments across the way. In the thin shaft of one he saw the topmost fire escape from the apartment just below the coping and lunged for that. The moment he did, the feet came scurrying behind him, chasing him with a sound not like human feet, but rather like something padded, swift and strangely feral.

  He wheeled sharply and hefted the shopping bag above his head. Threatening his assailant, once again he started back toward the illuminated area where the fire escape still offered a way out.

  “Leave me alone,” he snarled. He kept inching backward toward the white line of coping, not daring to take his eyes off the figure moving inexorably closer. “Leave me alone. Do you hear? What do you want? You want money? I have a wristwatch. Here.” He yanked the sterling silver expansion band off his wrist and flung the watch hard at the man. It glanced off his chest and fell to the tar with a dull chink. Still he kept coming.

  He was within five feet of the roofs edge when the figure suddenly entered a pale crescent of light cast from one of the nearby apartments. A cat squealed from somewhere and scurried off. Then he saw him, or it, or whatever it was, for he never actually saw the face of his assailant. All he could make out was a tall, rangy figure, its rippling muscularity emphasized by a black, skintight rubber surfing suit. The costume was finished off with white sneakers and a white baseball cap. Incomprehensibly, the face was covered with a vintage World War II gas mask, giving the appearance in that pale blue half-light of a skull. The mask still had its nasal hose and canister attached. The large cellophane lenses in the eyeholes regarded him with a blank, pitiless expression. In his hand the figure carried a pike, easily six feet, at the end of which the blade of a bayonet or large machete glinted in the dark.

  A sort of muffled grunt, like nothing human, issued from behind the mask, and suddenly he felt a cold sting where the blade had flashed up and nicked his cheek. He staggered backwar
d toward the parapet, dabbing incredulously at the warm trickle of blood that had started to flow from the area below his eye.

  The head tilted at an odd angle, the blank expressionless face of the mask appeared to regard him inquisitively. Then the pike flashed upward and the figure lunged again. The blade glanced with a loud ping off the shopping bag which he held up before him like a shield.

  The figure lunged again, driving him closer to the edge. In an effort to avoid the low coping, he wheeled sharply and bolted. The figure sprinted after him with a loping, almost balletic, grace, all the while goading him back toward the edge with the pike.

  Again the blade caught him, this time on the wrist, then in rapid-fire succession, opening a thin gash on the other cheek. A quick, cold flick like an adder’s tongue, and at once he felt something wet and warm leak into his collar.

  Several times he attempted to maneuver himself away from the edge, but each time the blade at the end of the pike flashed and his cheek or hand were laid open at another point. He tried vainly to evade each thrust, but the cinder block he held up before him had grown excruciatingly heavy and the person wielding the pike was far too agile. In a matter of moments, while the two of them moved round each other in that fatal dance, his hands and cheeks were quickly scored with blood.

  Shortly, the weight of the block and the effort to fend off the pike had taken its toll. He was being remorselessly worn down. Slowly, methodically, the masked figure maneuvered him toward the brink of the parapet. Jousting, locked in fatal combat like a pair of pugilists, no word passed between them. Only the grunts and panting beneath the sooty, indifferent sky.

  The back of his calves grazed the coping. He stumbled and suddenly sat, kicking out, catching the dark figure on the shin. Something like a yelp issued from behind the mask and the figure faltered, went down on one knee. For the space of a moment the path to the roof door was open. But he was far too spent to rebound. Instantly the figure was up again, moving back at him with a slurred, ponderous strike, like a person trying to wade fast through high water.

  He struggled to his feet. In a single leap the figure bounded at him close enough for him to see the eyes, not like anything recognizably human, behind the plastic lenses. The blade flashed, and he whimpered as it caught his throat, then sliced down through the collar of his shirt. His legs buckled momentarily. He leaned forward, grasping the shaft of the pike with his one free hand, pushing it against the chest of his assailant. Locked hard against each other, he could hear those strangely muffled grunts from behind the mask. At one point their faces were so close that he could feel the warm, meaty breath of the man against his cheek.

  Exhausted, he fell backward, watching warily the pike inscribe a wide swooping arc as it descended like a bird through the half-moon of illumination at the roof s edge. The blade, however, made no contact. It only served to drive him back farther against the coping. The mask peering at him appeared to reflect, for a fraction of a second, an odd pity, as if the individual behind it had no more love for the task it was there to perform than the victim upon whom it was to be inflicted. The figure, lithe and pantherine, came on remorselessly, forcing him ever backward toward the edge.

  The weight of the cinder block in his arms grew agonizing. Intending to smash it down on the man’s head, he stepped backward and up onto the coping for maximum purchase. Wobbling unsteadily, he caught a quick glimpse of the yellow roof of a parked cab and then the dimly lit abyss of Forty-eighth Street looming up from below.

  Suddenly the skull-like face of the mask was very close.

  “I’m sorry,” he addressed it directly, unaccountably apologetic. “I never meant …” The pike flashed. He felt himself goaded ever so gently as he stepped over into the air, watching the bright yellow roof of the cab racing upward toward him.

  80

  Mooney was there moments later. Searching frantically up and down back streets in the area, he’d heard the sirens of patrol cars rushing to the site where already a small, hushed knot of spectators had gathered.

  Even before he’d gotten close enough to verify the fact, he knew perfectly well what the humped and twisted thing lying in the mound on the pavement was. What he finally saw was quite badly mangled. The roof of the cab where he’d struck it and bounced off onto the street was crumpled. If Mooney himself had not seen Quintius shortly before, leaving his town house, hailing a cab and dressed in the same gray pinstripe and sea-green tie, there would have been no chance that he could ever make an identification from what remained of the face. Where the parietal quadrant of the skull had been shattered, that part of the face directly beneath had collapsed inward. A bubble of gray, quivering cortical matter extruded itself through the rupture, while the lower half of the face was splashed with clots of gore. There was an irony, Mooney thought, in such an impeccable man terminating in such an untidy fashion.

  Incomprehensibly, the cinder block, still in the burlap shopping bag, lay canted up against the right side of Quintius’s head. Though it seemed inconceivable, it appeared that his head had been smashed beneath one of his own concrete bombs. Since Mooney himself had seen him carry the very same shopping bag out of the town house, there was little doubt he’d taken it up onto the roof with him. The question remained, How had it landed on his head? Had he himself either jumped or accidentally fallen from the roof while still holding the package? In either case he’d held onto it all the way down. The other possibility was that someone had thrown it down after Quintius had bounced from the roof of the cab and miraculously scored a direct hit. The latter explanation Mooney discounted as highly improbable.

  It was only after the radio officer from the 33rd Precinct had thrown an old rubber slicker over the body that Mooney noted the hands. They stuck out from beneath the edge of the slicker, palms open, facing upward, arms extended wide like an ancient icon in a gesture of supplication.

  Both hands were smeared and running with blood. As one might expect from the massiveness of the head injuries, there was a great deal of blood splashed liberally about. To the casual observer, bloodied hands might not have signified anything in particular. But it was the pattern of bleeding on the hands that had caught Mooney’s eye—not splashed randomly as is generally the case, but striated— long, even streaks as if the hands had been clawed. When the forensic people arrived, Mooney asked pointedly to have those streaks checked out during the autopsy. He also gave instructions that the lower torso of the cadaver be examined for recent surgical scars.

  Later, when the body had gone off in the morgue van, Mooney went up to the roof with several of the men from the 33rd. They found the wallet immediately and the wristwatch shortly after. The wallet lay open, several hundred dollars and all credit cards still intact.

  Mooney scoured the area directly above the point where Quintius’s body had been found. On the white coping it was easy to see the fresh spatterings of blood. So he was bleeding before he hit the earth and that appeared to suggest that the cuts on Quintius’s hands were self-inflicted. But after a search of one hour, they were unable to find the knife or weapon with which the wounds had been made. There was no sign of foul play. Quintius’s wristwatch and wallet, with all valuables intact discounted the possibility of robbery.

  To Mooney’s facile detective mentality, it seemed almost too clear that Quintius’s death added up to suicide. Despondent over the death of his son, haunted by guilt and the knowledge that he was now a prime suspect in the rooftop slayings, had given the man to that desperate act. Jumping with one of his own “bombs,” making it the instrument of his own destruction, Mooney reasoned, was Quintius’s twisted way of seeking some kind of poetic retribution.

  Leaving the roof with the first gray streaks of dawn, Mooney cast his eyes round once more for a final look at the scene. After nearly six years, the case of the Phantom Bombardier appeared to be at an end. Still, Mooney was filled with a troubled sense of incompletion, of questions unanswered.

  Across the way a sheet on one of the laundry
lines rose gently and billowed outward. The sparks from the incinerator shaft had ceased to fly upward and its sooty brick walls had cooled now in the fresh morning breeze.

  Epilogue

  The content of our dreams is mostly a by-product of our unremarkable daily struggles transformed by night and electrochemicals into the terrifying shape of nightmares. In fretful sleep Mooney dreamed often of Watford, seeing the sad, puzzled boyish smile behind which lurked the treacherous schemer.

  Now he was dead, having expired peacefully in a Bowery flophouse euphemistically called the Ritz. With no family or any next of kin willing to claim the body, it was sent directly to the morgue. Aside from the usual mortuary staff and the drab city functionaries hovering like crows above the open grave in potter’s field, Mooney was the only person to attend the last rites who’d actually known him.

  He’d been identified from photographs sent pro forma from the morgue to all city police precincts, along with the requisite set of prints for purposes of identification. Mooney recognized him the moment he saw him even though the eyes in the photo were closed and the face covered with a heavy beard. The name given on the circular was Walter Denton. Having lived virtually all his life as someone else, running true to form right up to the end, Watford chose to die that way. He clearly found the promise and hope of a different identity—any identity—preferable to his own. Camouflage and masquerade were perhaps his truest colors.

  In waking life, however, Mooney thought a great deal about Quintius, whose violent ending had posed more questions for him than it had resolved. A puzzle within a puzzle.

  Responding to his query regarding the curious pattern of slashes he’d observed on Quintius’s hands, the medical examiner not only verified the slashes during autopsy, but at the same time also discovered at least sixteen additional such wounds in the area of the face and throat.