Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  In Barnes & Noble's, across Fifth Avenue and down a block from Saks, Gwen found a pocket-sized book of Manhattan neighborhood maps and a small spiral-bound notebook. In the latter she began jotting notes of Corbin's random impressions while Corbin, having checked his shopping bag but still holding the thin black umbrella, wandered ahead to a section marked History. He'd noticed Gwen's switch to an umbrella more closely resembling a walking stick and at once understood the workings of her mind. He said nothing, only smiled and shook his head.

  The historical section dealing with early New York contained a dozen or more books dealing with the nineteenth century alone. Most were generously illustrated. A few consisted entirely of captioned photographs and engravings. Corbin reached for one of these. The earliest photographs, dating back to a decade or so before the Civil War, had a particularly haunting quality. They were portraits of buildings, mostly, or of wider cityscapes. Their subjects tended to be immobile objects, because the plates that were used required time exposures of many seconds. The result was eerie, because even though architectural details and advertising signs were in surprisingly sharp focus, all indications of human life were blurred and ghostly. Corbin caught his breath. On a daguerreotype of a photographer's office building, probably used as a sample of his wares, he noticed a spectral horse and carriage waiting at the curb. It was precisely like the many, the hundreds, he himself had seen, except that his did not long remain blurred. His became clear and solid and they moved and made sounds. Shod hooves clacked lazily against cobblestones and iron-rimmed wheels crunched along behind them. Drivers, all of whom seemed’ slightly hunchbacked, made clicking sounds with their mouths to urge their horses on in spite of a monotonous cadence that seldom varied. Sometimes the drivers would wave or tip their hats to familiar faces on the sidewalk. Corbin blinked rapidly and flipped a few decades forward.

  The photographs sprang suddenly to life. Now there were people. Great crowds of them in sharp focus. Details of clothing, expressions on faces as men, women, and children on city sidewalks were frozen at a precise moment of their lives. The effect on Corbin was stunning. They were real. A derbied group of idlers stared curiously at him. A child being tugged along by a woman in a ribboned hat pointed a finger at him. Corbin snapped the book shut before they could begin moving.

  “Let's get that one,” he heard Gwen Leamas say behind him. “Actually, we should buy all of these that are mostly photographs.”

  She selected a large paperback volume entitled Old New York in Early Photographs and another called New York in the Nineteenth Century. A third was the thick Columbia Historical Portrait of New York. A fourth book, entitled New York Then and Now caught her eye. This last was a collection of old New York street scenes with, on each facing page, a more recent photograph taken from the same vantage point.

  “Jonathan, look.” Gwen opened it to several pages that depicted the avenue outside, Fifth Avenue, as it had been a century before. “This really was quite a charming city once. A lot like Mayfair. Except in London we don't tear down handsome old buildings every time a megalomaniac developer feels the need to name a building alter himself.” Corbin was paying less than full attention. Something, not the book she held, was making him uncomfortable. He glanced around the bookstore.

  “For example,” she went on, “we'd never have torn down Claridges or the Savoy just to put up an unlovely phallus like the Empire State Building.” She held up two facing pages for him to see, the one on the right being the Empire State. “Imagine destroying this magnificent hotel just to give suicides a longer drop.”

  “Let me see that.” Corbin stepped closer, his fingers involuntarily reaching to touch the print on the left-hand page. There, opposite a recent photograph of the tall Art Deco building, was an infinitely more elegant structure, which once stood on that site. It could not have been more than eighteen stories high, parts of it curiously shorter, but it gave an impression of enormous mass. Its main entrance, on the Thirty-fourth Street side, was marked by a row of tall columns. Though he could not see past them in the photograph, Corbin knew that they concealed a carriage drive that burrowed well into the building at street level. He knew at once, without reading the caption, why the Waldorf-Astoria had seemed so strange to him two hours earlier. This was the way it should have looked. This was the real one. And he'd been there. He knew that if he walked through the carriage drive toward the formal entrance, a clean-shaven doorman dressed in blue would admit him to a colonnaded hall called Peacock Alley, and farther along he would find a four-sided men's bar, which as far as he knew was the only one like it in the world. And in the dining room, with its carved pilasters and Italian Renaissance exquisitry, there would be—Oscar. The same Oscar who'd delayed in stopping the brawl in that other hotel bar long enough to see the thin man beaten senseless. Oscar. He'd be older now. He'd be ...

  Corbin shuddered. An old anger flooded back, mixing with his friend Oscar in his emotions. Anger and something else. A curious nervousness, a sense of danger that stopped well short of being fear, was now nipping at the edges of Corbin’s mind. He glanced around him once more. There was no one in the sparse group of browsers who would account for the feeling. Only one elderly man who had been staring in their direction before and now was doing it again, or pretending not to.

  Corbin touched Gwen's arm. “Do you know that man over there?” He gestured with a flick of his eyes toward a gaunt man of about seventy whose attention was fixed on a display of paperback gothic romances. The man wore an expensive-looking chesterfield and a black hat of a kind that was seldom seen north of Wall Street. His collar was turned up against cheeks that had a shine to them, as if the skin had been tightly stretched to cover his skull.

  “The man wearing the homburg?” Gwen shook her head. “Why do you ask?”

  “He keeps looking over here.”

  Elsewhere in the store, Raymond Lesko had settled near a dump display of hurt books under a sign that read None Over $2.99. He seldom looked at Jonathan Corbin. There was no need. Lesko had already memorized the shelf location of the books Corbin and the woman were choosing and would make a note of their titles as soon as the two of them headed for the cashier's desk. The man in the black hat was another matter. It took a conscious effort to pretend he wasn't there and to avoid letting him know that he'd been made. As a tail, Lesko had long decided, the old guy was pitiful. He wore clothing that was totally unsuited to surveillance, to subways, and even to Saturday mornings. Lesko had been studying him, a glance at a time, ever since the old man had followed them onto the Seventy-seventh Street platform for what must have been the first subway ride of his life.

  Lesko remembered him staring in bafflement at the turnstile and then at the change booth before he put the two of them together. And then on the train he couldn't bring himself to sit on the soiled plastic seats, so he stood, being jerked around like he was on roller skates until he finally seized a door handle at the far end of the car. The first thing that was clear, of course, was that this old man who seemed so much out of his element did not work for Dancer. Dancer almost certainly worked for him. And whatever was going on here was important enough to the guy pulling the strings that he had to see it for himself. Which phone call was he? Lesko wondered, recalling Dancer's two telephoned reports, which were clearly to two different levels of authority. Whichever, this one was unwilling or unable to wait for Dancer to develop the roll of film Lesko had shot. He kept straining for a clear look at Corbin's full face and yet he'd duck behind a group of standing teenagers every time Corbin raised his head. Lesko, standing at the middle door where he could watch both ends through their reflections in the glass, thought he saw a certain wildness in the old man's eyes. It was a look that went well beyond fright. Lesko remembered a drug dealer named Hamsho who shot a cop during a raid and went out a back window. Lesko was back there in the shadows. He could see on Hamsho's face that he thought he had it made until he walked right into Lesko and saw his teeth smiling over the sights of the
magnum that blew off first his balls and then his head. The old man had the same kind of look. Like a guy who'd thought he had it made, but now knew he was dead.

  From the Fifty-first Street stop, the man in the homburg followed closely behind Corbin and Gwen Leamas on their walk across town toward Saks. Always too closely. Always stopping to gaze ridiculously at the sky every time Corbin paused. He was paying scant attention to Lesko now. Back at Seventy-seventh Street, he'd seemed visibly irritated that Lesko was on the scene, which meant for sure that he was Dancer's boss, because Dancer, now that Lesko thought of it, had been under instructions to get him out of the way by sending him on that stupid burglary errand to Connecticut. But the old man pressed on, secure in the assumption that since Lesko could not know who he was, he was invisible to Lesko.

  Inside the department store, the old man, still too close, kept shifting his position, trying for the most unobstructed view of Corbin. Everything Corbin did, however artless, seemed designed to frustrate his efforts. Corbin was wearing that dumb tweed rain hat, which further concealed his features from any direction but dead-on front. Lesko watched as, again and again, the old man shook his bony fists in a sort of petulant frustration.

  His face seemed vaguely familiar. Lesko couldn't place it. A politician, maybe. Or a big-shot businessman. On the other hand, maybe it's just that he was a type. He looked like all those old men who sit in the backs of limousines behind dark windows and live in big houses that have walls around them. Insular. That was the word. The kind of guy who carries the walls around with him. More than that, he had the look of a man who almost never did anything for himself and whose actions were never questioned to his face. Old money. Power. And probably a contempt for anyone who had less money and no power. It was a combination, Lesko knew from experience, that often produced a particularly stupid kind of arrogance. People like that, he thought, can spend their whole adult lives without anyone but family having balls enough to tell them when they're being a jerk.

  The old man suddenly jumped. Corbin was moving. He'd turned with Gwen and was heading in the old man's direction on his way to the cashier. The old man quivered and blinked. He looked, Lesko thought, like he'd just been slapped. Corbin seemed to notice, too, but he kept on walking. Past him. Corbin did not see the old man stagger forward, snatching at the book rack for support and knocking several paperbacks to the floor. The man in the homburg held on there, his breath coming in swallows and his eyes staring wide, as if the image of Jonathan Corbin’ s face was still fixed on them. He was still holding on as Corbin paid for his purchases and, with a single backward glance, stepped toward the Fifth Avenue exit.

  For a long moment Lesko held back, wanting time to study the stricken old man. The fear he'd seen had deepened into shock. Lesko saw recognition in his eyes. No doubt of it. Whatever Jonathan Corbin was to him, whatever compulsion forced this old man from behind the safety of his walls, whatever need he felt to see that face up close and in person, he did know Jonathan Corbin. He saw a face that, at least to Lesko, was a nice face. Friendly. Not like his own. Maybe no Robert Redford, but a good face, crooked nose and all. Yet to one man it was a face like that of the worst devil you'd see in a bad acid trip. Is that what you see, old man? A devil face? Or am I on the wrong track? Maybe an avenging angel. And if you do see an avenging angel in Jonathan Corbin, could it possibly have to do with all those dead Corbins who kept popping up in Chicago forty years ago? Of course it could. But whatever the connection is, we won't find it by standing around Barnes & Noble's all afternoon, will we?

  Passing the shaken old man in a wide circle, Lesko paused at the display of historical books where Corbin and Gweni Leamas had made their selections. He made shorthand notes of their probable titles based on the spaces that were left, chose the one of them that would most easily fold into his pocket, and walked to the desk bearing the Cash Only sign. Come on, old man, he muttered inwardly. Get it in gear. Corbin would have no more than a half-block head start as long as he and the woman stayed on foot. If the old man would get moving, Lesko could keep them all in sight. Not that it mattered much now. Catch Corbin or lose him, it was all the same, because Lesko knew where he lived and would find him again tomorrow. Today, he would stick with Corbin only as long as the old man plodded along in the same direction. Lesko would go on letting him think he was invisible as long as that belief gave him peace. But before this day was finished, Lesko intended to know the location of the walls that protected this old man from the ghosts of Corbins past. He would know the name of the man who was willing to pay fifteen thousand dollars to be sure that this latest Corbin joined them. He would be a large step closer to knowing why. And he would be a giant step closer to knowing how many more thousands the corpse of Jonathan Corbin might be worth.

  As Lesko had hoped, and although not wholly by choice, Corbin and Gwen Leamas were still on foot. Even by mid-afternoon there were few cabs to be seen on Fifth Avenue. Plows had cleared the major midtown arteries, but many of the crosstown streets remained blocked to vehicular traffic. Corbin didn't mind walking. The sun had broken through and the city never looked so clean as it did under a bright sky that follows a snowfall, its grime and sorrows hidden, its hard edges softened.

  “It's really quite glorious, isn't it.” Gwen entwined her free arm into Corbin’s. In her other hand she insisted on carrying the single heavy shopping bag that held their accumulated purchases. This would leave Corbin's right hand free to swing his walking stick-umbrella.

  “Quite,” he agreed.

  She was watching him, he realized, for any sign of renewed discomfort or disorientation as they crunched northward toward Rockefeller Center. But there was nothing. If anything, he felt refreshed. Whether it was Gwen's company, the bright sky, the high atmospheric pressure that cleared it, or the memory of similar walks in Chicago, Corbin felt the way a man should while taking a healthy walk with a woman who loved him. The umbrella flicked forward.

  Except for one thing, perhaps. That man in the store who kept sneaking glances in their direction. Not that it was unusual for men, even men that age, to stare at Gwen when he was with her. But Corbin didn't think admiration was what he saw under the brim of that homburg. He wasn't sure what it was. The crazy thing was that Corbin had felt an absurd impulse to walk over and knock that old man flat on his ass. There it was. The old man had presented no threat, no real offense of any kind, nor did he evoke any association in Corbin’s mind that might explain the curious sense of loathing he felt. Corbin simply didn't like the son of a bitch. He tightened his grip on his walking stick.

  Gwen tugged at his arm and steered him into a left turn at Fifty-second Street. Corbin shook the old man from his mind and, resisting an urge to look behind him, returned to enjoying the look of the city.

  “Well?” she asked. “What do you feel?”

  They'd stood for several minutes on the raised plaza of the Burlington Building between two frozen fountains that were shaped like dandelions.

  “Not a thing.” He shrugged. “Everything's really pretty.” Some of the buildings, especially the older ones up toward the park, had begun to look like birthday cakes dripping with frosting. The tops of street lamps were like the necks of swans.

  “What about the elevated railway?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The Sixth Avenue Elevated.” She had a picture book open in her hands. “It did exist and it was right here. You said you saw it taking shape yesterday when we were running for the subway. And the terminus you passed under while you were chasing your... that woman began just up there at Fifty-eighth Street.”

  Corbin's lips moved involuntarily. Forming a word. A name. Damn! More names, each blurring the other, and a sudden whirlwind of memories and emotions whipped through his mind.

  “Say it out loud, Jonathan. Did you feel something?”

  ”I think I almost had her name. I'm not sure.”

  “What did it sound like? Your impressions, Jonathan. Trust your impressions.” />
  ”A short name. A vowel sound. Like Anna. Emma. Something like that.”

  ”Ava?Ula?”

  “It's gone, sweetheart.”

  “You clenched your fists just then. Does she make you angry even thinking about her?”

  Corbin squinted, trying to recall and sort out all the tiny glimpses that had buzzed past him. There was the woman, certainly. And thoughts of the man in the bar came back and they were entwined together like lovers. That notion seemed right to Corbin. That they were lovers. He must have been an avenging husband when he beat the man as he did, but that realization didn't seem to evoke any particular rage. There was something else, much greater in scope, behind his fury that evening and, if he trusted his impressions as Gwen suggested, he'd find himself believing that it had something to do with the Sixth Avenue Elevated Railroad. Not just the part that ran past here but the whole thing, and that was a trail he couldn't begin to know how to follow. Corbin shook his head.