Falling Angel

by William Hjortsberg

  “Hang on to it. I might have to borrow some.”

  “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Keep the chain on the door. You’ll be fine.”

  Epiphany walked me downstairs through the imposing white marble entrance hall and out onto the broad steps leading to Fifth Avenue. She was afraid, and it made her look like a little girl. Our searing, snake-tongued kiss earned contemptuous stares from two passing businessmen and much applause and whistling from a hookey-playing urchin bootblack sitting on the base of the uptown lion.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I dropped the Chevy off at the garage and walked back to Broadway on the sunny side of 44th. I was taking my time, enjoying the weather, when I spotted Louis Cyphre coming out of the main entrance to the Astor. He wore a tan beret, tweed Norfolk coat, twill breeches, and tall, polished riding boots. In a gloved hand he carried a scuffed leather travel bag.

  I watched him wave off a doorman’s offer of a cab. He started downtown past the Paramount Building at a brisk pace. I considered catching up with him but figured he was heading for the Crossroads office and decided to save my breath. I didn’t think of it as tailing him; I was much too close. But when he reached the entrance to my building and continued on without a pause, I instinctively fell back and lingered by a shop window, curiosity at full throttle. He crossed 42nd Street and turned west. I watched from the corner, then kept pace with him, following along the opposite side of the street.

  Cyphre stood out in the crowd. Not hard to do among the pimps, hustlers, drug addicts, and runaways crowding 42nd Street when you’re dressed as if you were going to the Horse Show at the Garden. I guessed his eventual destination to be Port Authority. He surprised me mid-block and ducked into Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus.

  I dodged four lanes of two-way traffic like “Crazy Legs” Hirsch evading defensive linemen only to be brought up short by a signboard at the entrance. Glitter-edged letters announced: THE AMAZING DR. CIPHER. Eight-by-ten glossies showed my client wearing a top hat and tails like Mandrake the Magician. LIMITED ENGAGEMENT, it said.

  The main floor of Hubert’s was a penny arcade; the stage was downstairs. I went in, bought a ticket and found a place in the dark along the chest-high plywood barrier that discouraged audience participation. On the small, brightly lit stage, a buxom belly dancer gyrated to a quavering Arabic lament. I counted five other shadowy spectators besides myself.

  What the hell was the elegant Louis Cyphre doing in a low-rent place like this? Flea circus card tricks don’t keep a man in limousines and Wall Street lawyers. Maybe he got his kicks performing in public. Or else it was a setup. An act meant for me to catch.

  When the scratchy record came to an end, someone backstage picked up the needle and started it over again. The belly dancer looked bored. She stared at the ceiling. Her mind was on other things. Eight bars into the third replay the machine was switched off, and she made a beeline for the wings. No one applauded.

  The six of us stared at an empty stage without complaint until an old geezer wearing a red vest and sleeve garters appeared. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he wheezed, “it is with great awe and trepitude that I present to you the amazing, mysterious, unforgettable: Dr. Cipher. Let’s give him a nice welcome.” The old man was the only one clapping as he shuffled off.

  The lights dimmed to blackness. A muffled bumping and whispering backstage as in amateur theatricals was followed by a blinding, phosphorescent flash. The lights came immediately back on, but my eyes took a few moments to refocus. A blurred, blue-green retinal afterimage hovered about the figure on stage, obscuring his features.

  “Which one of us knows how our days shall end? Who can say if tomorrow will come?” Louis Cyphre stood alone, center stage, surrounded by wispy tendrils of smoke and the smell of burnt magnesium. He wore a black Edwardian soup-and-fish with long swallow-tails and a two-button vest. A hinged black case the size of a breadbox stood on a table to one side. “The future is an unwritten text, and he who dares read those blank pages does so at his own peril.”

  Cyphre removed his white gloves and with a trickster’s midair fingersnap, they were gone. He picked a carved ebony wand off the table and gestured toward the wings. The belly dancer made a subdued entrance, her ample body draped in a floor-length velvet cloak.

  “Time paints a portrait no man can ignore.” Cyphre waved his hand in a small circle above the dancer’s head. At this command she began to pirouette. “Which of us would peek at the finished work? It is a different thing to observe the mirror day by day; there the nuance of change goes unnoticed.”

  The dancer’s back turned toward the spectators. The luster of her flowing black hair surged in the spotlight. Cyphre thrust the ebony wand like a sword at his audience of six. “Those who would behold the future, look on me with terror!”

  The belly dancer came about full-face: a toothless, haggard crone. Lank strands of ashen hair framed her ruined features. One blind eye caught the light like glazed pottery. I hadn’t seen her slip on the mask, and the effect of her transformation was staggering. The drunk beside me gasped himself sober in the dark.

  “Flesh is mortal, my friends,” Dr. Cipher intoned. “And lust sputters and dies like a candle in the winter wind. Gentlemen, I offer you the pleasures your hot blood so recently imagined.”

  He gestured with his wand and the belly dancer opened the folds of her heavy cloak. She still wore the tasseled costume, but her wrinkled breasts sagged, deflated behind sequined pasties. A once-sumptuous belly hung slack between angular, skeletal hips. It was another woman entirely. There was no way to fake those swollen arthritic knees and emaciated thighs.

  “To what uses shall we come?” Dr. Cipher smiled like a G.P. making a house call. “Thank you, my dear; most enlightening.” He dismissed the ancient woman with a wand stroke, and she hobbled offstage. There was a smattering of applause.

  Dr. Cipher held up his hand. “Thank you, my friends.” He nodded graciously. “The tomb lies at the end of every path. Only the soul is immortal. Guard this treasure well. Your decaying husk is but a temporary vessel on an endless voyage.

  “Let me tell you a story: when I was a young man and just beginning my travels, I struck up a conversation with a retired seaman in a waterfront bar in Tangier. My nautical companion was a German, born in Silesia, but spending his last days in the Moroccan sun, wintering in Marrakech and drinking the summers away at whatever seaport suited his fancy.

  “I remarked that he had found a comfortable berth.

  ” ‘It has been smooth sailing five-and-forty years now,’ he replied.

  ” ‘You are a lucky man,’ I said, ‘not to have weathered any of life’s storms.’

  ” ‘Luck?’ the old seafarer laughed, ‘luck, you call it? Count yourself lucky, then. This year I must pass it to another.’

  “I asked him to explain. He told me the story much as I tell it to you. When he was my age and first shipping out, he encountered an old beachcomber in Samoa who gave him a bottle containing the soul of a Spanish quartermaster who once sailed with King Philip’s armada. Any illness or misfortune which might befall him was instead suffered by this tormented prisoner. How the Spaniard’s soul came to inhabit the bottle, he knew not, but at the age of seventy, he must give it away to the first young man who would accept it or suffer the consequences of taking the unfortunate conquistador’s place within.

  “Here the old German looked at me sadly. He had but a month to go before his seventy-first birthday. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘to learn what life is all about.’

  “He gave me the bottle. A handblown rum bottle, amber in color, and easily hundreds of years old. It was stoppered with a gold plug.”

  Dr. Cipher reached behind the black case on the table and produced the bottle. “Behold.” He sat it on top of the case. His description had been exact, omitting only the frenzied scuttling shadow inside.

  “I have had a long and happy life; but listen —” All six of us craned forward to hear. “Listen
…” Cyphre’s voice trailed away to a whisper. Out of the ensuing silence came a tiny, bell-chime complaint, like a chain of paperclips dragged across a crystal goblet. I strained to make out the fragile sound. It seemed to be coming from within the amber bottle.

  ”’Ay-you-da-may … ay-you-da-may …” Over and over, the same haunted, melodic phrase.

  I tried to spot Louis Cyphre’s lips moving. His smile reached out beyond the footlights. He was gloating with raw, unconcealed pleasure.

  “Mysterious fate,” he said. “Why should I spend a life free from pain while another human soul is doomed to eternal anguish within a rum bottle?” He withdrew a black velvet sack from his pocket and stuffed the bottle inside. Pulling the drawstrings tight, he placed it on top of his case. His smile reflected the footlights. Without a sound, he spun gracefully and struck the sack a sabre-stroke with the ebony wand. There was no sound of breaking glass. An empty sack was flipped into the air and deftly caught. Louis Cyphre crumpled it into a ball and shoved it into his pocket, acknowledging the applause with a curt nod.

  “I want to show you something else,” he said. “But before I do, I must emphasize that I am not an animal trainer, merely a collector of exotics.”

  He tapped the black case with his wand. “I bought the contents of this box in Zurich from an Egyptian merchant I had known years before in Alexandria. He claimed what you are about to see were souls originally enchanted at the court of Pope Leo X. An amusement for his Medici imagination. This seems an impossible claim, does it not?”

  Dr. Cipher unsnapped the metal fasteners securing the case and opened it to form a triptych. A miniature theatre unfolded, with scenery and background tableaux painted in the meticulous perspective of the Italian Renaissance. The stage was peopled with white mice, all costumed in tiny silks and brocade as characters from commedia dell’arte. There was Punchinello and Columbina, Scaramouche and Harlequin. Each walked on its hind legs in an elaborate pantomime. The silvery tinkle of a music box accompanied the elaborate acrobatics.

  “The Egyptian claimed they would never die,” Cyphre said. “An extravagant boast, perhaps. I can only say that I have not lost any in six years’ time.”

  The diminutive performers walked on tightropes and brightly colored balls, brandished matchstick swords and parasols, tumbled and took pratfalls with clockwork precision.

  “Presumably, enchanted subjects should require no sustenance.” Dr. Cipher leaned over the top of the case and observed the performance with delight. “I provide them with food and water daily. They have incredible appetites, I might add.”

  “Toys,” the man next to me muttered in the dark. “They gotta be toys.”

  As if on cue, Cyphre reached down and Harlequin scampered up his coat sleeve and perched, sniffing the air, on his shoulder. The spell was broken. It was only a rodent wearing a tiny diamond-patterned outfit. Cyphre pinched the pink tail and lowered a splay-legged Harlequin back to the stage, where it paraded around on its front paws in a totally unmouselike manner.

  “As you see, I have no need for television.” Dr. Cipher folded the sides of the miniature stage closed and secured the fasteners. There was a handle on top, and he lifted it off the table like a suitcase. “Whenever the box is opened, they perform. Even show business has its Purgatory.”

  Cyphre tucked the wand under his arm and dropped something on the table. There was a flash of white light, and I was blind in its momentary brilliance. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. The stage was bare. A plain wooden table stood alone and naked in the spotlight.

  Cyphre’s amplified, disembodied voice issued from an unseen speaker: “Zero, the point intermediate between positive and negative, is a portal through which every man must eventually pass.”

  The old party in sleeve garters shuffled out and carried the table into the wings as a worn recording of “Night Train” bleated from the hidden loudspeaker. The belly dancer reappeared, plump and pink, and began a bump-and-grind as mechanical as the piston-driven music. I groped my way up the sagging stairs. The prickling dread I felt in the French restaurant had returned. My client was toying with me, playing tricks with my mind like a three-card monte dealer fleecing the suckers.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Out front, a fat young man wearing a pink shirt, khaki pants, and dirty white bucks removed the glossy photos from the glass-covered signboard. A nervous pill-popper in an army fatigue jacket and tennis shoes looked on.

  “Great show,” I said to the fat kid. “That Dr. Cipher is a marvel.”

  “Weird,” he said.

  “This the last performance?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’d like to congratulate him. Is there some way to get backstage?”

  “You just missed him.” He freed a picture of my client from the signboard and slipped it in a manila envelope. “He doesn’t like to stick around after a show.”

  “Missed him? That’s impossible.”

  “He uses a tape recorder at the end of the act. Gives him a head start. Doesn’t take off his costume or anything.”

  “Was he carrying a leather bag?”

  “Yeah, and his big black case.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “How should I know?” The fat young man blinked at me. “Are you a cop or something?”

  “Me? No, nothing like that. Just wanted to tell him he’s made a new fan.”

  “Tell his agent.” He handed me an 8 by 10 photo. Louis Cyphre’s perfect smile shone brighter than the glossy surface. I flipped the photo over and read what was rubber-stamped on the back:

  WARREN WAGNER ASSOCIATES

  WY.9-3500.

  The jittery pill-popper turned his attentions to a pin-ball machine inside the entrance. I gave the fat young man back his picture. “Thanks,” I said, and melted into the crowd.

  I caught an uptown cab which dropped me off on Broadway in front of the Rivoli Theatre, across from the Brill Building. The tramp in the army coat was off duty. I took the elevator to the eighth floor. The peroxided receptionist had silver fingernails today. She didn’t remember me.

  I showed her my card. “Mr. Wagner in his office?”

  “He’s busy right now.”

  “Thanks.” I stepped around her desk and jerked open the door marked PRIVATE.

  “Hey!” She was right behind me, clawing like a harpy. “You can’t go in the —”

  I closed the door in her face.

  “… three percent of the gross is an insult,” piped a midget wearing a red turtleneck sweater. He sat on the ratty couch, his little feet sticking straight out like a doll’s.

  Warren Wagner, Jr. glowered at me from behind his burn-branded desk. “What the hell do you mean barging in like this?”

  I said: “I need you to answer two questions and don’t have the time to wait.”

  “Do you know this man?” asked the midget in his whisky falsetto. I recognized him from the Saturday matinees of my childhood. He was in all the “Hell’s Kitchen Kid” comedies, and his ancient, wrinkled features were the same when he was young, but the spiky black crewcut was now as white as a detergent commercial.

  “Never saw him before in my life,” Warren Jr. snarled. “Take a powder, creep, before I call a cop.”

  “You saw me on Monday,” I said, keeping the edge out of my voice. “I was working undercover.” I got out my wallet and let him look at the photostat.

  “So, you’re a shamus. Big deal. That doesn’t give you the right to come crashing into a private meeting.”

  “Why not save the adrenaline and tell me what I need to know. I’ll be out of your hair in thirty seconds.”

  “Johnny Favorite means less than nothing to me,” he said. “I was only a kid then.”

  “Forget about Johnny Favorite. Tell me about a client of your who calls himself Dr. Cipher.”

  “What about him? I just signed him last week.”

  “What’s his real name?”

  “Louie Seafur. You’ll have to get my secret
ary to spell it for you.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Janice can tell you that,” he said. “Janice!”

  Silver-nails opened the door and peeked timidly in. “Yes, Mr. Wagner?” she squeaked.

  “Give Mr. Angel here the information he requires, please.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “Next time, knock.”

  Silver-nailed Janice didn’t give me the benefit of her jiggling, gum-chewer’s smile, but she did look up Louis Cyphre’s address in her circular file. She even wrote it out. “You belong in a zoo yourself,” she said as she handed me the memo. She’d been saving that one all week.

  The 1-2-3 Hotel was on 46th between Broadway and Sixth, name and address all in the same package: 123 West 46th. Elaborate finials, gables, and dormers crowned an otherwise unpretentious brick building. I went in and gave the desk clerk my business card, wrapped in a ten-spot. “I want the room number of a man named Louis Cyphre,” I said, spelling it for him. “And you don’t need to say anything to the house dick.”

  “I remember him. Had a white beard and black hair.”

  “That’s the party.”

  “Checked out over a week ago.”

  “Any forwarding address?”

  “Not a one.”

  “What about his room? Rented it yet?”

  “Wouldn’t do you any good; been cleaned top to bottom.”

  I stepped back into the sunshine and headed toward Broadway. It was a beautiful day for walking. A Salvation Army trio, tuba, accordion, and tambourine, serenaded a chestnut vendor under the Loew’s State marquee where new “Lounger Seats” were promised for the grand reopening Easter Sunday. I savored the sounds and smells, trying to remember the real world of a week ago when there was no such thing as magic.

  I used a different approach with the desk clerk in the Astor. “Excuse me, I wonder if you might help me out. I was supposed to meet my uncle in the coffee shop twenty minutes ago. I’d like to phone him, but I don’t know the room number.”