“You’ve brought Francine a lot of suffering by clinging to this tragedy like it was a crime,” says Fat Man. He wants his cigarettes. They are a new habit, but he can do nothing in half-measures. He wants a real big sandwich to eat while they talk at him, too, or a platter of cheeses. A tall, frosty mug.
“You know how they do an abortion?” says Mr. Rousseau. “They break the baby into chunks, and then the mother passes it out, usually into a toilet.” He gestures as if jiggling a handle.
Mr. Bruce says, “Imagine a sweet baby’s arm dangling from your bleeding snatch.”
Fat Man says maybe they should arrest the abortionist then.
Mr. Bruce raises his hand as if to strike him. But the hand rises slowly, and then it returns to the table. “We’ll deal with him. Why did you come here?”
“I wanted to start over,” says Fat Man.
“We mean here, as in now, this city.”
“I wanted work.”
“It wasn’t because of us?”
“Me and Mr. Rousseau,” says Mr. Bruce, touching himself where he keeps his heart, “we hope you weren’t fleeing any investigations.”
“It’s hard to get work with two cops following you everywhere you go.”
“Do you remember Laurel,” says Mr. Bruce, “from Paris?”
“This again?” says Fat Man.
“Do you remember Laurel?”
“I remember Laurel,” says Fat Man.
They had worked together in a Parisian bakery. She died in labor because she was so small. The child died as well. The police, on seeing Fat Man and Little Boy, assumed the hard, hateful expression of the Japanese soldiers and policemen, and then somehow connected her death to Fat Man, terrorized Little Boy in an interrogation room very much like this one, but ultimately came away empty-handed.
“We didn’t have you then,” says Mr Bruce.
“We’ve got you now.”
“How do you have me?”
“We’ve got a pattern here, developing, as we speak,” says Mr. Bruce.
“What pattern?”
“Two sweet young girls bleeding to death out their cunts,” says Mr. Rousseau. “Both times your fault.”
“I never met Albert’s girlfriend,” says Fat Man. His hands become fists on the table. “What you have are two unrelated, however terrible, events, and a ghoulish outlook on life. The only ones that see a pattern here are you.”
“The girlfriend’s name is Marie,” says Mr. Bruce. “Marie Blanc. She was someone’s wife as well.”
“I never met Mrs. Blanc.”
“Did you or did you not begin lodging with Albert on the night of the murder?”
“I did. We arrived while he was out, probably at more or less the same time he was watching Mrs. Blanc bleed out on the abortionist’s table. His wife Francine will confirm this. So you see it’s impossible for me to have been there myself, and so I couldn’t have participated in any murder, assuming there was one, which I very much doubt. He threatened me with an empty gun that night, which tells you first what sort of terms we’re on and secondly his ratio of bark to bite.”
“You said you needed work,” says Mr. Bruce. “Maybe you found it. We understand you’re lodging with Albert rent-free. He doesn’t seem the giving sort to me, does he Mr. Rousseau.”
“No he does not, Mr. Bruce.”
“What did you do for him?”
“Nothing,” says Fat Man. “His wife gave us the room.”
“How did you buy your fine new clothes?” says Mr. Rousseau.
“I wash dishes at a café.”
“You bought a new wardrobe on a week of dishwashing money?” says Mr. Bruce.
“Are you sure you weren’t there when she died? Are you sure you didn’t help?”
“I wasn’t there, and I couldn’t have helped. I am neither doctor nor abortionist.”
“He means you helped to kill her,” says Mr. Bruce.
“Based on what evidence?”
Though he knows he is innocent of the murder, and in fact believes that there has been no murder, his heart begins to burn as if the police are pouring in a boiling vegetable broth. He mops the sweat from his brow.
“The pattern,” says Mr. Bruce. “The pattern.”
“What do these two things have in common beyond vaginal bleeding?” thunders Fat Man, losing self control just long enough to regret it immediately.
“I’ll tell you what they have in common,” says Mr. Rousseau. He puts his hands on John’s shoulders, as if about to begin a massage. He kneads the excess flesh. “Neither of these girls was supposed to be pregnant. You say Laurel didn’t even know she was. Well no one knew. Her parents insist she was a virgin. She wasn’t known to be involved with any men. We only know she was your friend.”
“We didn’t know each other long,” says Fat Man. “It was only a couple months, and then she was dead. I do miss her.”
“Did you fuck her?” says Mr. Bruce.
Mr. Rousseau sinks his fingers into Fat Man’s shoulders.
Fat Man shakes his head. “She was lovely, sir, but young. Imagine me rolling over onto her small frame. Then I really would have killed her.”
“Like you would be the first heavy man to prefer the woman on top,” says Mr. Rousseau—a sexual position that had not yet occurred to Fat Man in his brief life. “We think you pricked her. We think you had a hand in her death, and so do her poor, mourning parents.”
“Having murdered once,” says Mr. Bruce, “perhaps you didn’t plan to do it again. That is, until you needed work. Needed room and board and clothes to keep you warm. You met Albert. He said you could have a place to stay and some money and he would find you a job if you would help him with Mrs. Blanc. You said, ‘Shit, why not?’ You got away with the last one, after all. So you did the girl and you worked with him and the abortionist to make it look like a mistake somehow, and now here we are, about to bring you in for good.”
“Do you know if we have the death penalty in France, John?” asks Mr. Rousseau, spitting out the fat man’s name as if it is uniquely harsh, stupid, American.
“I hadn’t thought to ask,” says Fat Man. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me.”
“We’d rather let you think about it on your own,” says Mr. Bruce. “Reflect.”
“You know the problem with your theory,” says Fat Man, who is calming now, who is collecting himself, who sees his way out, “apart from the lack of any material evidence or witnesses, apart from the fact that it’s very strictly a theory and so shall remain, is if he’s got a cooperative doctor willing to help kill the girl and hide it, why in fuck does he need me?”
Mr. Bruce looks to Mr. Rousseau, and Rousseau to Bruce. They look back at Fat Man as if they hadn’t thought to ask this question, or, perhaps more charitably, as if they thought he’d never ask it.
“We’ve got you now is the important thing,” says Mr. Bruce.
“Got you in our sights,” says Mr. Rousseau, squinting at Fat Man to drive home the point that they can see him.
“Is that all you’ve got for me today? I was hoping to see the spirit medium with my nephew.”
THE ORIENTAL SPIRIT
MEDIUM SEES THE
BROTHERS
The show begins with a stage, empty but for a table draped with red velvet, gaudy jade pillars that look like stacked, scowling heads, and what seems to be a golden urn filled with bamboo stalks. Someone offstage plays a piano—tittering Orientalisms and angular, discordant cords. Chi chi chi chi chi-chi, chi chi chong, chi chi chong, chong. A gong gongs.
From both wings, men in black, red, and white kimonos run across the stage, crossing each other as they scamper. They wear wooden sandals and scowling white masks with thick black savage brushstroke eyebrows. Chi chi chi, chi chong, chong, gong, and the stage is empty.
They r
un across again, this time wielding katana-like clubs, waving them over their heads, screaming sounds that might be Japanese. They crouch as they run.
A careening glissando introduces a proud, tall man with a silken white rising sun on his black, billowing robes, stomping the stage as if he means to crack the wood, which creaks with each impact. He nods officiously at the audience, his actor’s bright, blue eyes glancingly visible through the mask’s eyeholes and their shadows. He pretends to twirl his painted mustache. His robes give the impression of a master of ceremonies.
He removes a bamboo stalk from the golden urn and holds it out to the audience between thumbs and forefingers, running his hands demonstratively over the length of it, as if to say, “This is all of one piece.”
He shouts something from his gut and tosses the bamboo in the air. One of the samurai sprints across the stage, raises his sword to touch the falling bamboo, and then he is gone. The referee catches the bamboo—one half in each hand. He shows the audience the clean cut, then discards both measures, tossing them back into the golden urn. When he turns away from them the audience can see the red ribbons that tie the mask to his face, and the bald, crumpled skin of his head. Someone strikes the gong.
He takes two more stalks and throws them up. Two samurai run screaming across the stage. They slash at one another—one low, one high—and seem to miss. When neither can be seen, both bamboo stalks split in two, fall to the ground. The referee will not deign to bend and lift them. Someone strikes the gong.
Fat Man looks to Little Boy, and sees he is amazed, or feigning amazement. The child nearly shakes from pleasure. Beside him Francine touches her chin. Albert might be sleeping, his face is turned down.
Now the referee throws into the air stalk after stalk. A continuous parade of samurai runs across the stage, leaping to cut the bamboo, flipping over each other, sliding on their silk-sheathed knees, swords whispering past one another, never touching. They grunt and shout. The unseen piano player pumps his left hand like a bellows, his right hand like pistons. The keys shriek. Gong gongs.
Everyone is here. The policemen, Messieurs Bruce and Rousseau, sit toward the back of the auditorium, hands ready on their truncheons. They watch the stage as if they anticipate a crime, their chins upturned and eyes narrowed. Jacques is here, and so are his regulars, and so are the waiters. So is every woman Fat Man has dreamed about since they came to town—the brunette with her hair done up in a tight bundle, the teenage girl with a handkerchief holding her red curls in place, the blonde with eyelashes like hummingbird wings.
Having only seen Mr. Blanc in passing, and from a great distance, Fat Man can still discern him now. He recognizes Blanc by the pumpkin-like shape of his head, the way his eyes never fully open, owing to the prodigious fat of his cheeks; he recognizes Blanc by the quizzical weight of his brow, nearly one continuous arch, and by the way he sits with his hands at rest on his gut, all his fingertips touching their opposite palms. He recognizes Blanc by the slump of his widower’s figure. If they were shaking hands, he is sure Blanc’s face would be transformed by proximity, by unseen moles or lines or other features, such that he would not recognize Blanc, or suspect that they had ever known of one another.
In the time it takes for Fat Man’s gaze to return to the stage, the samurai are gone and so is their bamboo. He missed the roar of applause that followed their finale. Now, the Oriental spirit medium approaches.
She is a tall, slender figure in robes shot through with brilliant color like thick veins of quartz. The robes trail her like the train of a wedding gown, though they are black and bright purple and jelly red and silver and gold and forest green and tiger orange and sun yellow. Her robes are open at the shoulders, revealing the kind slope of her collarbone, the fairness of her skin. There are no sleeves apart from knots tied just beneath those exposed shoulders. She wears a large silver necklace hung with obsidian and pearls. Her black hair is piled atop her head in a tight, thick knot. One long strand falls down her back, mingling with jade beads and bits of precious metal that dangle from a comb.
She walks to the velvet-draped table. She sets down a small, featureless wooden box—about eight inches long on each side. There is, on closer inspection, a wooden slat on the top of the box with which it could be pulled open. From the ease with which she carries it and the softness of its landing on the table, Fat Man thinks it must be very light—perhaps empty.
The medium bristles with peacock feathers. Or rather, they seem to be feathers but Fat Man sees that they are long, silver needles done up with plumes like peacock tails. There are needles in her arms and shoulders, which must puncture her perhaps an inch deep. They stand wholly erect. As she breathes, the needle-feathers flex and sway. There is one between her eyes and like a quail’s headfeather it droops forward.
The medium folds her hands. She breathes through her nose and mouth together. Deep, deep.
The invisible piano player fingers a mystic mood.
The medium unfolds her arms and gestures violently offstage. She shouts—her voice resounding, deep as the afterlife, deep as a fortune-teller’s should be—“I told you not to play that shit once I came out! I won’t have it!”
Several men exchange words offstage. The piano player stops, though not without striking the keys one more time.
“Unlike everything you have just seen,” says the medium, in perfect French, “unlike everything else on this stage, and unlike what they tell you in church services or funerals—unlike all of these things, I am real. What I do is real.” She strokes the wooden box. Her nails are long, elegant, and speckled all the colors of her robes.
“Tonight I will speak to you of the dead, and the dead will speak to you through me. If you don’t like what you hear, this is not my fault, and I don’t wish to hear of it. If you do like what you hear, I am happy for you, but you cannot expect me to speak to you of them again—or to speak to you otherwise, for that matter. Is this understood?”
Fat Man nods. He feels and hears most of the audience do the same. His eyes are fixed on her. There is a prickling all over his skin, and inside it, an itch, like he too is hedgehogged with peacock needles.
The medium says, “Now I’m going to begin. I’m sorry I won’t be able to help all of you. Time and my own limitations allowing, I’ll do what I can.”
She places one hand on the box and with the other points out at the audience, as if extending an antenna for the dead. All her feathers shiver. She says, “I’ve got something. You, there. The one who brought a dog.”
An old woman in the back says, “Me?”
The medium nods and says, “Why do you bring that dog everywhere?”
“He reminds me of my husband,” says the old woman. “Are dogs not allowed? No one told me.”
“Do you believe the dog is your husband, madame?”
“The thought has occurred to me. He’s always so attentive, as if he means to make up for some slight he has done me in the past. A past life, maybe. They share the same sad little eyes.”
“The dog is not your husband. He tells me that he is your former grocer.”
The old woman gasps. “Who?”
“He says you never learned his name, but describes himself for me now. He says he was a middle-aged man, and that when he was not at work he wore a white felt hat around town. His hair was red, and his mustache streaked with blond, and his shirts were always stained with the pulp of squashed fruits. He wants you to know he didn’t choose to be your dog, but he did love you in life, and now he’s happy to be yours.”
There rises over the audience a heavy, steady panting—the dog. He yaps once.
“Well that doesn’t make any sense,” says the old woman. “Why should some infatuated grocer be my dog? Why should he look so much like my husband?”
The medium ignores her. “I have a message for Rosie Cummings, from your father. He says you should go back to America.
Forget about your fool hotel. He says it’s too soon for you to give up on children.”
A tall American woman in a blue frock and curly red hair stands up several rows in front of Fat Man and company.
“Can you tell him I’m barren?” she says, in a flat, Midwestern accent that comes through her nose as much as her mouth.
“He says that’s your imagination. He says the women in your family have always taken to childbirth very naturally.”
“Forget him. Can you hear my husband? Does he have anything to say for himself?”
“No, ma’am. I can’t hear him,” says the medium.
“It figures,” says the American, and she sits down.
“Now I—”
“Wait,” interrupts Rosie, standing up again. “I’m sorry, but concerning America and my hotel and what my father said, is it your experience that the dead are, on the whole, more wise than the living?”
“Not at all,” says the medium.
“Okay, thank you,” says Rosie, and she sits down again. Her chair makes a sound like a hinge.
The medium stands and paces the front of the stage, eyeing the audience. When her gaze passes over Fat Man the prickles in his skin intensify, and when she has moved on he sees that he is holding hands with Little Boy, who looks up at him in amazement, and some kind of guarded tenderness, which suggests to Fat Man that he’s the one who reached for his brother.
“Barbara?” says the medium. She holds out open hands. The quills hang from her upturned arms as worms will hang from silk. “Barbara Trudeau, can you stand for me now?”
A stout woman with a kind face stands before the audience as she looks at the medium with something like love or acceptance.
“Your daughter wishes to speak to you.”
“My daughters are with me,” says Barbara. “Perhaps you mean someone else.”
“Your other daughter,” squeaks the medium. “The one you had before your marriage. The one you strangled.”
Fat Man and Little Boy Page 11