by Alan Trotter
I imagined: knocking, the door opening, her seeing the look in my eyes, screaming maybe, backing away, almost tripping in her terror. The whole scene playing out again. She would move back, scared, and I would move toward her like she was drawing me on a string. I would menace and she would retreat. And maybe it would end as it had before, with the big detective coming from nowhere to lay a sap on me, and her swept off in his arms. And maybe it wouldn’t and no one would appear. Maybe Swagger was blind drunk in a bar with _____. Maybe he was sweeping other dames into his arms across the city, but not her. And maybe I’d scare her into giving up whatever money Holcomb had given her, or maybe I’d twist her neck and put a hole in her chin, and pull her place apart looking for it and the debt would keep moving and we’d follow after it.
I shook my head to get the rain from my hat. I put the hat under my arm. I took my raincoat off and held the hat in my hand and hung the coat across my forearm. I straightened my tie and wiped my face and neck with the handkerchief, and I tried to make the wet handkerchief a square for my breast pocket. Then again, but folded the other way. I hung the raincoat and hat on the banister and went over to the night-mirrored window. Imagine my face. I meant to do something to my hair, I raised my hands to do something but what do you do to hair? It felt wrong to beat up on it without a plan.
I turned around and Evelyn Heydt was looking at me from her open door. I was somewhere now, but without an idea of what I meant to do there.
She looked a different person than she had the day before. She wasn’t made of the same parts. I hadn’t shaved.
I tried to say something, but I wasn’t sure where the words led and I swallowed the first of them as it started to grow. She waited for me and something like concern took her. I could see it like she could see me struggling to make a word.
Before we’d waited for morning or for me to get a sentence out, she said, ‘Is it about one of the girls? One of Danskin’s girls? Is that why you’ve come?’ And I looked like however I look when I don’t know what someone means, but she opened the door to me and had me sit and sat with me.
*
We sat for a while, both waiting for me to say something. I teetered, like a child liable to fall from some small but significant height. I shook my head, no, to the question she’d asked at the door. ‘We,’ I said. ‘It’s,’ I said. I swallowed and coughed and said, my voice only slightly flooded with air, only slightly broken, ‘Hol comb. The writer.’
I told her that was why we’d come. That Holcomb died owing money.
I lighted a cigarette without dropping it. She moved some cushions around like she was stirring sugar in her tea. She had her hair tied back. Instead of the dress from the day before, she wore a white blouse tucked into a navy skirt. She said she knew him. She’d known he was in trouble but not how much. She asked if I knew him. I shook my head, no—I wanted to hear her speak, not to answer questions. She said it was sad and with a look she made it seem it.
I wanted to know how they’d met but I didn’t know how to ask it. The first way I tried it, before the first word was all the way out I realised I was asking more than I meant—as if I was asking her how long they had been together, or if she was with someone else. I caught the word but not a sort of gasping cluck, and I tried again and the same thing happened. And she looked at me and there was something like surprise or curiosity—at seeing me foolish and clucking—but also sympathy and understanding.
‘He came with a girl,’ she said, ‘the first time I met him. One of the girls from The Little Death. The girls from there know to come to us if they get in trouble. Not just from there, we’ll always try and help anyone. Dr Boken, he’s not involved, but we couldn’t do it without access to the surgery, and the drugs, and he turns a blind eye to all of that.’
She looked at me curiously again. It could have been the look people give when they don’t think you’re understanding them, when they think you’re not up to building with the bricks that they’re passing you. I know that look. This was different—she was trying to see if I would use any of this in a way to hurt her. She said, ‘If we don’t help they end up going somewhere that it’s dangerous for them. It’s better they come to us. God knows it’s not perfect, but it’s clean.’
She asked for a cigarette and I handed her one from the pack.
She reached toward me and picked my cigarette from my lips. She put its lighted end to the unlit end of her own and inhaled, pulling the air back up through my cigarette, through its flame, which growled and chewed into the end of her cigarette—and then up through it, into herself.
She handed back the cigarette. We sat and smoked without saying anything. She seemed relaxed now. To sit with her was something.
‘He was crazy, it turned out,’ she said, with a smile. ‘He was a writer, and I asked him about it once so he gave me a story he’d written. But when I told him I’d liked it, I must have said something wrong, because he started waving his hands around, and shouting. I had to watch him have a tantrum. It turned out he believed a lot of the nonsense he was writing. He kept shouting and flapping his arms, so I threw him out. Someone being crazy is one thing, but I’m not having a man come here to shout his craziness at me. I’ve had enough of shouting, I think.’
She flattened her cigarette in an ashtray. ‘That would have been the last time I saw him, so I don’t know what I can do for you,’ she said. ‘I don’t have his money—I don’t have much money of my own.’
*
I was going to ask about Swagger, how she had met him, and what she’d been doing missing work yesterday, and why she’d been all dressed up, why she’d been scared. But she stood and offered me coffee and I told her I’d like a glass of water and she left the room.
*
As soon as I was alone I got the feeling of being drawn forward, like sitting still was impossible, and I started to sweat. Money wasn’t what this was about, but then I wasn’t sure what it was about. I’d made it to Evelyn Heydt’s on my own, but now I didn’t know what I was doing there and there was no one to tell me. From her direction came the sound of a running tap, and hearing it tore a strip straight out of me. I jumped on a pencil and a magazine she had lying there. On the back cover was an advertisement: ‘The road to pleasure is thronged with smokers who have discovered this better cigarette.’ I wrote a note over the top of it. Next time I’d bring _____ along to get the money and things wouldn’t go astray, then. Only things were already going astray, I looked at what I’d written and the two had slipped together—the advert and the note—so it read: ‘The road to what pleasure is thronged with Holcomb owed smokers who have you owe discovered this better cigarette.’
I dropped sweat all the way out the door, I pushed the magazine into my pocket, I got out of there.
In the street I left my hat off so the rain could cool my face.
*
_____ wasn’t around when I got back to my mattress. He was out drinking or he was out rolling in the hay, whatever it was. I couldn’t sleep. I just kept walking in circles like I was flattening the grass, thinking about Evelyn Heydt, and her knee almost close enough to touch mine. Evelyn Heydt taking my cigarette and pulling my breath back through it.
I went to Lydia’s door, hoping there would be a light coming from it and I could talk to her. I’d missed talking to her, with the apartment manager still no one knew where, and her dirty jokes and everything lively in her gone with him.
There was no light, and I imagined her on the other side of the door, shrinking, shrinking smaller and further into her sheets until she was wrinkled and pale and more bedsheet than she was person. I went to knock anyway—I couldn’t imagine that she was asleep, because I couldn’t imagine her sleeping, not the Lydia that she’d shrunk into, like I couldn’t imagine her singing, or flying, or awake, so I didn’t think I’d be disturbing her to knock. But then I didn’t know what we could say to each other if she answered, so I didn’t knock. I went and lay down.
I fell asleep, I must
have, because _____ woke me: the noise of him pissing so loud it sounded like it was striking the mattress beside my head.
And I fell asleep again, because it was morning and Swagger shaking our door almost to parts woke the two of us.
I pulled on a shirt and went to the door while _____ tried to cough himself awake, rattling phlegm from his cage. Swagger talked clear around me to _____, preferring to speak to the man coughing in another room than the man who’d opened the door to him. He said loudly, ‘There’s another job for you. Another strange bird to find, name of Cansel.’
_____ called back that Lowden was dead.
Swagger took that as an invitation to come in. ‘Don’t worry about Lowden,’ he said. ‘Not many people are going to miss him. You did exactly what you were meant to do.’
*
We dressed and he walked with us to the Ambassador Hotel. ‘You’re going to wait in the lobby,’ he said to _____. ‘Wait there until you see me come and give you the nod, then you go up to Cansel’s room. He’s in room 222. Room …’ He stopped walking as his voice tailed off. He turned to _____.
‘222,’ said _____.
We started walking again. ‘Room 222,’ said Swagger. ‘Jean Cansel will be out, but he’s travelling with a large trunk, and it’s the trunk we’re interested in. You go up to the room, but take the stairs, not the elevator, and you say nothing to anybody about why you’re there. Once you’re in, check the trunk for a package. You ever seen a baby wrapped up so tight it looks like it just came in the mail? This is going to be that size, but a lot more precious.’
We’d reached the Ambassador. Swagger lighted another cigar. ‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ he said. ‘No need to open it, just take it and leave the same way you came. Go take a seat, boys.’ As we went into the hotel he called out, ‘Room 222, boys.’
*
We sat in the elegantly crumpled seats in the lobby. They were this kind of seat: you sank into them for a long time, like you were a grand old ocean liner, and they smelled so good I could hardly bear it.
An old man—crumpled, but not so elegantly—sat nearby, busily attending to not watching us with the aid of a newspaper. This was the house peeper. His shoulder rig and his hairline were both too high. We watched him. We watched him without the subterfuge with which he watched us. We watched him and he boiled under it. In less than the time it took for the band on the radio to change song, his bottom lip was slick with sweat.
Whether Swagger appeared and gave his nod or not, we would get to sit watching this old house peeper, with a well-combed moustache and a holster that had never been separated from its gun, and it felt good. We watched him for as long as it took _____ to smoke three cigarettes. We watched him for so long he had, finally, to do something about it.
He folded his newspaper and walked over to us tapping it against his leg. He coughed. He asked us if we were waiting for somebody or maybe we were just keeping out of the rain. His moustache twitched like a car veering into oncoming traffic. He knew he’d waited a long time before asking us and the cowardliness bothered him.
_____ grinned and extinguished his current cigarette in the ash stand by his seat.
I stood and the peeper took a half-step back and I matched him. He said something that turned into a burst of tuts and gasps, like his tongue was tumbling down the back of his throat, and shuffled like he was thinking of reaching for his gun.
I grabbed onto his jacket with my left hand, and the holster and the gun with it, wadding it all in place.
The peeper’s fingers slipped wetly around mine. He tried to take another step back and I held him where he was. He didn’t swing at me or look me in the eye or give any clue that he thought I had anything to do with why he couldn’t get a hold of his gun, why he wasn’t getting to act like a man ought to act, why he couldn’t keep charge of his own hotel lobby.
_____ was at my side. While the peeper shivered in my grip, he began unfolding his knife from his pocket and its handle. He did it slowly, while the peeper’s eyes darted from it to me—anxious, pleading—and to his fumbling hands on the wad of suit where the gun was fixed.
*
Then there was Swagger, inserting himself between me and the peeper like he was cutting in to take the next dance.
‘You’re looking a little rattled, Glenn,’ Swagger said. ‘You holding it together? A hotel dick’s got to look the part or people start to talk.’ And like that I’d been eased off—a piece of meat peeled from the griddle. _____ tipped his knife into itself and returned it to its pocket, and Swagger moved the peeper back to arm’s length, and we stood like a group of friends well on the way to becoming good acquaintances.
The hotel dick wiped his brow and his chin with his pocket square and tried to climb his tongue back up into his mouth using the other detective’s name for steps. ‘Mike, Mike,’ he said, ‘it’s good to see you, Mike.’
‘Always good to see you, Glenn, and to visit a high-class establishment like this, where I’ve never seen so much as a lick of trouble and never expect to neither. And these two boys,’ Swagger said, turning to us, laying his arm around the wilted hotel detective, ‘do you know these two boys?’
‘N-no, Mike,’ said the peeper, finally with the courage to look at us angrily, a couple of heels, lousing up his lobby.
‘Well, they look like they’ve probably got some business to attend to, don’t you, boys?’ Swagger leaned forward. He loomed. He was meaningful. ‘Don’t you have some business to attend to, boys?’
We walked as if to leave. Behind the reception a skinny, fair-skinned boy—open-mouthed, with an Adam’s apple like a doorknob—watched us, had been watching the whole thing without ever having a thought to do anything but watch. Swagger whistled a note and called him over by name and the kid trotted past us in his direction. Swagger had already sat his friend Glenn with his back to us, so with the kid gone, we just kept walking past the exit and up the stairs.
*
_____ popped the lock of room 222 with his knife.
We saw Cansel immediately. He was in the bed, covered with a sheet.
Immediately we knew it—before we even saw the bloody stain, we knew. It wasn’t, I guess, hard to know by then. I closed the door. _____ pressed his hands to his eyes. He cursed joylessly. We were getting the corpse tour of the city: come and see it, lifeless worthless death. Let the bodies pile up: Holcomb, Lowden, Cansel. Everywhere we walked our path was already flat and dead, and I was sick of walking it.
Cansel’s body made a long, low mound in the bedsheet. The sheet was pulled up past the top of his head, pulled up so far that feet in expensive shoes stuck from the bottom end. The blood made an oval like a red rug that hung off one side of him, stuck to his gut by two darker red pits the size of ashtrays.
We walked toward him.
_____ stood at one corner of the bed and I stood at another and between us were Cansel’s feet, sticking from their shroud. _____ positioned a cigarette in his fingers by tapping it against the closer shoe.
The mound coughed and there was a crack like an explosion from the bed that clapped across my ears and knocked all sense out of me.
*
The bed was on fire. The bloody mound was on fire—it had coughed and now it was on fire. One part of the sheet, the part that was on fire, was waving around, was a long arm, waving, it held a gun. The explosion, the shot, had rung a gong in my head, rung an impossibly high note, insistent and central. The arm was flailing—it held the fire, though the fire was spreading. We had both crouched as though we had thought for an instant to run. The high note drilled at me from inside but it was fading. Cansel’s body was trying to shake loose the burning sheet, but he was caught in it and screaming. He rolled and his arm shook, and the sheet moved down his face, just far enough that we could see his eyes, which were wide and angry. We stood up from our crouch and watched him flail. The flapping arm, lengthened by the gun, was like a wing made of a flame that grew with every beat. Cansel’s body screamed
and rolled from side to side, but he was still caught, and a lot of the bed was burning, covered in flapping flames. _____ put the cigarette in his mouth and lifted a match to light it. There was a second explosion from the long arm, again we had our hands to our ears, we crouched like we might run, and the shot knocked apart some of a bed post. _____ was quick. He screamed at the screaming Cansel, and made for him. He had dropped his cigarette and his knife was out. He stabbed it into the mound, his arm dashing into the flame, punching with the little blade. He put one hand over the wide eyes and with the other drove the knife into the sheet and the covered head.
Cansel’s screams became louder and filled with water and then stopped as _____ stabbed at the head and neck through the pattern of slits, the red mouths he’d already cut. I had moved closer, to stop him or to help, and I put a hand out toward him. The sleeve of _____’s jacket caught the fire and he reeled, his knife slicing my palm. He got the jacket off and beat it against the still, heavy mound that had been Cansel until there was no more fire anywhere.
There wasn’t much smoke, but it carried the smell of Cansel’s burning.
The blood spread and soaked round the cuts in the head and neck of the shroud, and the sheet clung closer until we could make out features—the angle of Cansel’s cheekbone, the rise of his nostrils, the long coastline of his open mouth—all cast in rich red.
There was no trunk, no package like a tightly wrapped baby.
*
A knock came from the wall by the head of Cansel’s bed, at about the place of the open-mouthed red mask that lay there, as if they were rapping on his skull to wake him. And then three more knocks. Someone shouted, indistinctly. They hadn’t shouted before, unless they had been shouting while Cansel was screaming and the gong’s high tone was vibrating through our heads. _____ yelled back, cursed at the voice, indistinctly too, and there was another knock, this one from the door.