Unspeakable

by Graham Masterton

  "Any more news about Daniel Joseph?" he asked her. He looked tired.

  "I called the hospital this morning. He's stable but still critical. They're going to operate on his eye tomorrow, if he's well enough."

  George checked his watch. "Shit, I'm running late again."

  "Another committee meeting?"

  "This month's update on anti-Indian prejudice in the Portland Public Schools."

  "Uh-huh."

  George checked his watch yet again. "These damn elevators. By the way, somebody was asking me about you."

  "Oh, yes?"

  "An attorney from Mayfield & Letterman, I think it was. He was interested to know who you were."

  "Did he say why?"

  George shrugged. "I don't think it was anything to do with any particular case. He asked me if you were married, which I thought was kind of strange. And then he asked me where you lived. I didn't tell him, of course."

  "What was he like, this attorney?"

  "Young, thirtyish. Black hair, smart suit. Quarter Hispanic, maybe. Red and yellow necktie, silk."

  "And he didn't give you his name?"

  "Not that I recall."

  The elevator arrived at last, but they still had to wait while a janitor maneuvered his cleaning cart out of it, all dangling mops and disinfectant sprays and brushes.

  "Are you in town for the weekend?" asked George as they descended to the lobby.

  "No I'm going to Mirror Lake with Katie and Doug."

  "Oh, that's a pity. The National Indian Child Welfare Association is holding a traditional Wallowa cookout Sunday afternoon at Henry High Elk's house. Face decoration, carving displays, rain dancing. I was hoping that you could have come."

  "Maybe some other time, George," she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. "Sorry."

  She left the building and walked out into the breezy street. She still had half an hour before she was due to meet Mickey, so she crossed over to Schnadel's German-Style Bakery and bought two of the frosted apple strudels that Daisy liked so much.

  "You want the extra whipped cream, Ms. Summers?" asked Mr. Schnadel. There were so many mirrors behind his counter that it looked as if there were twenty Mr. Schnadels, all fat-bottomed, with white aprons and white paper hats. "A few hundred calories- what harm did that ever do? Just look at me: I always have the extra whipped cream, and did you ever meet anybody as happy as me?"

  Holly smiled. "Happiness? It's that easy? A little extra whipped cream?"

  "Sure. The secret about happiness is, don't expect too much from it. It's like luck. People always say, 'I never have good luck.' But they're alive, right? And they have their own teeth. What more good luck do you want than that?"

  "What aboutbadluck?"

  "Oh,no." Mr. Schnadel noisily licked his fingers. "Bad luck is something different."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Bad luck, itfollowsyou. Bad luck is like one of those sniffing dogs, like they use for chasing criminals. Once bad luck picks up your smell, it keeps on coming after you, day after day.Sniff-sniff-sniff. Never lets up. Never lets you alone."

  "So how can a person shake it off?"

  Mr. Schnadel tied a neat bow on top of the cake box and curled the ribbon with his scissor blades. "Shake it off? You can't. You can only hope that one day it's going to grow bored of you and go sniffing after some other unfortunate soul."

  Holly stepped out of Schnadel's onto the sidewalk, into the wind. Before she crossed the street, she turned back to see Mr. Schnadel talking to another customer. She felt oddly disturbed by what he had said to her. What did a man who baked cream cakes for a living know about bad luck, and how it came panting after you, and never gave you peace?

  She was halfway across the road when her eye was caught by a quick, flickering movement in front of the office building. At first it looked like somebody running across the entrance to the parking levels in the basement. A panel van sped in front of her, blocking her view for an instant. By the time the van had passed, the figure was already running down the parking ramp. It wasdancing,maybe, rather than running, and it was more like a shadow than a real person: black, and distorted, and very tall, with ragged arms and legs. She saw it dance against the concrete wall at the back of the ramp, and then it was gone.

  She took a step forward and it was then that a bicycle hit her and she was thrown sideways into the road, jarring her shoulder against the asphalt. Her ribbon-tied box of apple strudel flew across the road and a car drove over it and emphatically squashed it. At first she didn't understand what had happened to her. She saw sky asphalt and somebody leaning over her, a man with a gingery mustache. He was saying something to her but she couldn't tell what it was.

  The man with the gingery mustache took her by the elbow and helped her onto her feet. He smelled of cigarettes and cheap aftershave. She wasn't badly hurt, but all the breath had been knocked out of her. The bike rider was sitting only a few feet away, a young hawk-nosed man in a shocking-pink space-age cycling helmet and tight black cycling shorts. He was frantically spinning his front wheel, around and around, and saying, "Oh God. Oh God. Don't tell me the spokes are out of alignment."

  Holly turned around to the man with the gingery mustache and said, "Thanks. Thank you." He lifted his cap with old-fashioned courtesy and said something in reply, but again she couldn't quite catch it. She went over to the bike rider and smacked him on the shoulder. He looked up at her irritably and said, "What?"

  "You hit me," she said. "You ran me down, you maniac."

  "Hey, I rang my fucking bell, didn't I? I shouted, 'Look out!'-didn't I? What are you, deaf?"

  The Other Side of Luck

  When she walked into the Compass Hotel, Mickey was almost too sympathetic.

  "Hey, what the hell happened to you?" he said, putting his arm around her.

  She winced and pointed to her shoulder. "I had an argument with a cyclist and the cyclist won."

  Mickey stopped and turned back toward the street, his neck as taut as a Doberman's. "Where? Where is he? I'll break his fucking legs."

  "He'sgone,Mickey, and in any case it was my fault for crossing the road without looking."

  "What did he look like? Give me a description and I'll have him pulled in."

  "Forget it, will you? I'm okay. All I need to do is tidy myself up."

  Holly went to the hotel restroom. She took off her coat and pulled up her pale green sweater to check her shoulder. Her skin was reddened and slightly grazed, even though her coat and her sweater hadn't been torn. She dabbed it with a wet towel. It looked as if she was going to have an attractive multicolored bruise on her back when she went up to Mirror Lake that weekend, a map of Alaska in varying shades of purple.

  She leaned on the basin and stared at herself in the mirror. She didn'tlookshaken, even though she was- and badly. It wasn't just being knocked over that had upset her: It was the feeling that the world around her had suddenly been altered, and that she had lost her sense of certainty. It was at times like these that her deafness frustrated her to the point of screaming, even though she wouldn't have been able to hear herself. She felt as if she were sitting alone in the next room while the rest of the human race giggled and whispered and conspired together. Why did everybody rush out and buy a pop song one particular week? Holly would never know, because she couldn't hear it, and she didn't know why it had caught everybody's mood. Not only that, she would never have a favorite love song.

  You're feeling sorry for yourself,she told her reflection in the mirror.

  No, I'm not,her reflection replied.I'm afraid, but I don't exactly know why.

  She brushed her hair, fixed her lipstick, and then rejoined Mickey in the glossy black-marble foyer. He was talking on his cell phone. "They found a shoe? Where? Well, I'm coming back to headquarters later; I'll take a look at it."

  He snapped his phone shut and said, "Sarah Hargitay. They think they found one of her shoes up near Bridal Veil."

  "All the way up the valley? What w
as she doing there?"

  "Hobbling, I expect."

  They walked through to the Sternwheeler Bar. Mickey guided her off to the left, into a semicircular booth upholstered in chestnut-brown leather with a brass-bound mahogany table. The bar was decorated to resemble the saloon of an old-style riverboat, with gilded pillars and railings and paintings of voluptuous nudes stretched out on divans, and there were huge mirrors on every wall. A pianist in a green eyeshade was playing Scott Joplin melodies as if he were more used to chopping up spare ribs. Through the panoramic windows on the right-hand side of the bar, Holly could see the whole of the Portland waterfront, with white yachts dipping and bobbing at anchor and a large oceangoing timber ship slowly gliding past, its flanks streaked with rust.

  "Krauss is sitting behind that plant on the far side of the piano. He knows what he's doing. The CCTV can't cover him from there, and the piano's too loud for us to pick him up clearly with a directional mike."

  Holly stood up and looked airily around the bar as if she were expecting somebody. She could just see Merlin Krauss sitting at a table by the window, wearing a loud yellow coat. On one side he was flanked by a hard-faced young Chinese in an expensive light-gray suit, on the other by a huge man in a tight black T-shirt, with a flattop and a broken nose.

  "All human life is there," Mickey remarked as Holly sat down again. "The Chink on the left is Danny Hee, who's into anything from crack cocaine to fake Rolexes. The big ape on the right is Vernon Pulitzer, who used to be a boxer but is actually gay. You going to be okay with this? You want a drink?"

  "Just a coffee, thanks."

  Mickey said, "You see that table for two, right opposite Krauss? You can sit there and pretend that you've been stood up, or that you're a lonely spinster or something. You can sit facing the mirror, with your back to him, so it won't be so obvious that you're watching him. You'll also be well out of earshot, so hopefully he won't be inhibited about talking business. Maybe, with any luck, he'll talk about this hit he's arranging too."

  "Do you believe in luck?"

  "Luck? For sure. I wouldn't spend so much of my salary at Portland Meadows if I didn't."

  "What aboutbadluck? Do you believe in that?"

  He caught something in the tone of her voice and narrowed his eyes. "Is something worrying you?"

  "I don't know. I never believed in bad luck before. I couldn't, could I, after losing my hearing? The only way to deal with it was to count my blessings and try to think that God had made me deaf for a very good reason."

  "But now?"

  "Now I'm not so sure. I feel like everything's changed but I don't quite know how. It's like walking into a room and somebody's moved all the furniture and the pictures but you can't remember how they were before, except that you find it disturbing."

  "You're giving me the creeps, you know that?"

  The waitress came over to take their order. After she had gone, Mickey leaned forward and said, "I used to know a detective called Frank Fraser who always carried this two-headed quarter as a lucky charm. We were going into a warehouse on the waterfront once, me and Frank. Somebody had tipped us off that it was full of contraband booze and cigarettes. We climbed up onto the building next door so that we could jump across onto the roof.

  "I went first, but I landed badly and my shoe came off. Frank came after me, and he was laughing at me while I was hopping around on one leg, trying to get my shoe back on. He opened the door that led down into the warehouse andbang!I'll never forget it as long as I live. His head blew up like a bunch of red roses.

  "So what was that? Bad luck for Frank but good luck for me." He reached into his pocket and took out a coin. "This is it: This is Frank's two-headed quarter. I carried it ever since, to remind me that every situation has two sides to it, and that one day it might be me who opens the door first. Bad luck, good luck. Who knows which is which?"

  Merlin Talks Business

  Holly went over to the table opposite Merlin Krauss and the waitress brought her a tiny cup of espresso and a small plateful of almond madeleines. Merlin was drinking Full Sail ale and eating handfuls of nuts as if he needed them to stay alive. Danny Hee was complaining about something, while Vernon Pulitzer was staring into the middle distance and solemnly concentrating on picking his left nostril.

  She couldn't pick up everything that Merlin was saying, particularly since he kept clapping his hand in front of his mouth to fill it with nuts, and lipreading in a mirror was always slightly more problematic than lipreading full-face. Nobody's mouth was perfectly symmetrical, as Holly used to demonstrate by challenging people to curl their lips like Elvis onbothsides of their face.

  "No-I never guaranteed no specific date," Merlin insisted, chewing nuts and shaking his head from side to side. "I guaranteed a delivery, yes, but I never guaranteed no specific date."

  "What good is it saying you're going to deliver when you can't saywhenyou're going to deliver?"

  "I'mgoingto deliver. Iguaranteedto deliver. But I never guaranteed no specific date."

  "So when? Tomorrow?"

  "I don't know, Danny. Do I look like some kind of fucking clairvoyant? I mean, do you see any crystal balls around here?"

  "Where's the stuff now?"

  "It'scoming,Danny. Trust me. It's on its way."

  "So when?"

  "I told you. You'll get your delivery. You've paid for it, you'll get it. Did I ever let you down before?"

  "No, but when? Next week? I have to have it by the end of next week or else I'm fucked."

  "Listen-I'm not going to let you pin me down to some specific date because I never guaranteed no specific date. Who do you have on your back anyhow, it's all got to be so fucking urgent? Not that Sung asshole?"

  Danny Hee said nothing.

  "It's Sung, isn't it, that asshole? What an asshole. Thinks he's in a Jackie Chan movie. Well, you can tell him from me that he'll get what's coming when it comes. Asshole."

  Holly was used to the repetitive monotony of criminals' conversation. It was tedious, but it made it easier to fill in the words that she inevitably missed. It was never like a Quentin Tarantino movie, no witty observations about what Big Macs were called in Paris. It was all "a deal's a deal, right? Understand what I mean? Like, when I say it's a deal, it's a deal." And "my son's playing basketball tonight, he's doing great, he's really doing great." "Yeah?" "Yeah, he's really doing great." "Yeah? Great."

  Even when they were discussing acts of extreme violence or bizarre sexual practices, criminals were invariably boring and matter-of-fact. She had once lip-read the conversation between two men who were going to take their revenge on a friend for sleeping with one of their wives. They had talked about cutting off his penis and stuffing it in his mouth as if they were discussing a trip to Freddy's supermarket.

  "So we'll cut it off, okay, and you can open his mouth and I can push it down his throat."

  "You could choke him, doing that."

  She sat there for nearly an hour and a half, drinking two more cups of coffee and irritably checking her watch as if she were waiting for a friend to show up. Two or three times Mickey appeared in the background and raised his eyebrows to ask her if Merlin had said anything in relation to the hit. Each time she had to shake her head.

  Danny Hee eventually left, still complaining about his delivery. Merlin sat eating nuts and saying nothing for almost ten minutes, while Vernon Pulitzer transferred his attention to excavating his ears. It was well past six o'clock now and Holly had to be home by seven to give Daisy something to eat and to pack her weekend case. She was just about to leave when Merlin picked up his cell phone.

  "Yeah? What? Oh, it's you, Mr Rossabi. Yeah, fine. You don't have to worry. Everything's under control. Four o'clock Tuesday afternoon, just like you said, right outside the Richard Herrera Hair Salon, Southwest Main. Richard Herr-era."

  He paused, listening, and then he said, "What did I tell you? Not a trace."

  Another pause, then, "Like I said before, it's better that you
don't know. I wouldn't tell you over the phone even if I would tell you, which I won't. Okay? I'm sorry, you're going to have to be happy with that. Yeah. No. That's right. You won't know she even existed."

  A very much longer pause, and then, "Let me put it this way, Mr. Rossabi. I have a friend in the wood-pulping business. She's going to make the front page ofThe Oregonian. Literally."

  Holly waited for three or four more minutes, and then she got up to leave. As she passed Merlin's table, he said, "Never showed, then, the sap?"

  "What?"

  "Your date, he never showed. What a sap. Lovely-looking woman like yourself, if you don't mind my saying so."