by James Siegel
His own was doing fine: pulse there if a little unsteady, ribs mending, arthritis bearable, shoulder remarkably numb. The doctor's was another matter. The town house was like the house in the Night Before Christmas. The not-a-creature-was-stirring-not-even-a-mouse house.
Okay, maybe a creature was stirring after all. A cat was stirring. Gray, mangy, and battle-scarred, it slithered past his cane and trudged up to the doorway like a hungover night prowler looking for a bed. One weak meow at the foot of the door, and the door answered, swinging open to let him in. Then it shut again, pronto.
The doctor was up. And so was William, up the front walk to the stoop where he knocked twice and waited.
The cat had gotten much quicker service, he thought after a minute or so, wondering if a good meow wasn't in order. Then, the door swung open and Dr. Morten, a large man in a blue bathrobe, peered out at him and said he already had a subscription to The Watchtower. Not that he was a Jehovah's Witness or anything, just that he had a lot of trouble saying no to people.
Which turned out to be right on the money. After all, when he realized William wasn't a Jehovah's Witness, or a political canvasser, or an encyclopedia salesman, or the man from the Water Department, he still let him in.
"The hospital sent you, you said?"
Dr. Morten had led him to the kitchen. At least, it looked like the kitchen. Underneath the food-encrusted dishes, the coffee-stained cups, and glutinous-looking silverware, he thought there was a kitchen there. Although it didn't exactly smell like a kitchen; it smelled like a cross between a lavatory and a gym.
"Yes," William said, sitting down at the kitchen table. "They told me you worked there for years."
Dr. Morten was filling up yellow bowls, one with water, one with milk, one with food, then another one with water and another one with milk and another one with food. And so on.
"Oh yes," Dr. Morten said, "years."
Now cats began to appear. Lots of cats. From under the table, from behind the refrigerator, from inside the cupboards, from underneath the radiators, it was suddenly raining cats. William, who was in the general vicinity of their food, had a sudden appreciation for what a wildebeest must go through right before the lions snap the life out of him. Or what Mr. Brickman must feel like every moment he spent outside. It wasn't fun being the prey; given a choice you'd rather be the lion.
"So," Dr. Morten said, "what can I do for you?" He sat down on the other side of the table; a black cat started playing with the belt of his robe.
William explained. Dead person, concerned parties, investigating, etc.
"Fascinating story," Dr. Morten said. "Why are you talking to me?"
"The deceased was registered in a program for Holocaust survivors after the war. Were you around for that?"
"For that and all the rest of them. World War II, Korea, Vietnam. The lot. And you know what I learned-war's war. Just the casualty figures change. And everyone's a casualty. Were you in the war?"
"No." He'd been drafted at the very end and sent to Army Supply in Fort Dix. While Jean had been smuggling Jews to Argentina, he'd been smuggling Scotch to corporals. So while he'd been in the service, he hadn't been in the war.
"What was his name?" Dr. Morten said, then, "Stop it, Clarence," to the cat, who was tugging on his bathrobe like a wife who didn't like being ignored.
"Jean," William said. "Jean Goldblum."
Something happened. A cat leapt across the table, throwing a shadow across Dr. Morten's face. A yellow bowl was knocked over, throwing its milk against the bottom of his bathrobe where it clung like paste.
"Cats…" Dr. Morten said, a little sadly. "Cats. I moved most of my files downstairs-I was going to write a few case studies when I had the chance. I'll take a look. Goldblum? I don't remember that name, but then there were so many of them. If he was in the program, he'll be there."
He left William in the kitchen; two cats began fighting, hissing like snakes, spraying each other with spit. Something had happened. A cat had leapt across the table; milk had been spilt; Dr. Morten had said I'll take a look. William rubbed his forehead, eyes closed, trying to figure it out. A cat had leapt, like a shadow…
Dr. Morten returned.
"It took a while, but I found him. He was in the program. Briefly. Jean Goldblum-that's the name, right? Nothing much there. His wife and children were exterminated in Mauthausen. That's it. If he had any other relatives, it doesn't say so. Sorry." Me too. "Anything else in the file?" "Else?" "I don't know. Anything that caught your attention maybe. Anything I could use." "No." "It's just that you become curious about a person. You start out just doing a job, but then you become curious." "About what?" "Things. Did you know he was some sort of resistance hero in the war-sure you do, it's probably all in the file. He got a lot of other Jews out." "Yes-it mentioned that." "I always wondered why he couldn't do the same for them." "Them?" "His wife and children. I mean while he was smuggling everyone else out of there, why didn't he get around to them?" "Who knows? Maybe they didn't want to leave him behind." "Sure. There's other things though." "What things?" "Well, you've got an honest-to-God hero here. Everyone else was trying to save their skin-but him, he's risking his neck to save strangers. Mother Teresa and Jean Goldblum. See-you can utter them in the same breath." "So?" "The thing is," William continued, "after the war, Jean wasn't so heroic anymore. From what I can tell-from people who knew him. He didn't help old ladies across the street anymore. He ran them over. He became a detective, and he got a reputation…"
"What kind of reputation?"
"The kind that gets you clients who pay in cash."
"What's your point?"
"I'm curious why that happens."
"Why?"
"Yeah. I'm curious why someone turns. I'm interested in the process."
"Are you asking hypothetically? Because that's the only way I can answer you. Mr. Goldblum was a client of the hospital. There are laws about that."
"Sure. Hypothetically. Hypothetically why someone who's up for the Nobel Prize ends up blackmailing queers."
"Hypothetically, you've got someone who grew up by the Golden Rules. Someone who, hypothetically, believed in them. Someone who was confronted with a horrible situation. Someone who still believed in them. Someone who acted on them. Someone who got sent to Mauthausen for acting on them. And the worst part-some- one who lost everything he loved for acting on them. Hypothetically, you've got someone who isn't so fond of the Golden Rules anymore. Someone who, hypothetically speaking, can't wait to get rid of them."
"Okay, that makes sense."
"And this kind of person wouldn't exactly be enamored with himself either."
"Why?" William said, remembering those pictures shot from boot high.
"He survived. They didn't."
They being one wife and two little tow-headed children.
"We coined a phrase," Dr. Morten said. "Survivor's guilt. We couldn't do much about it-but we gave it a name."
"Why couldn't you do much about it?"
"Why? Imagine yourself strapped in an airplane with your whole family. I mean everyone. Cousins, grandmothers, uncles and aunts, your wife and children. And then you crash. You don't just crash-you know you're crashing for a good ten or fifteen minutes. You feel the ground rushing up to meet you. You have to listen to everyone's cries and prayers and whimpers. You have to look into your children's eyes and see the future that'll never happen. And then, when the moment finally comes, when you finally crash, after you've said your goodbyes and wrapped your arms around your wife and children for the last time-surprise. You don't die. They do-all of them, while you watch them go one by one unable to stop it. But you-you're still there. Now," Dr. Morten said, "what do I tell you to make you feel better? What do I tell you to make you stop wishing you'd joined them?"
Yeah, William thought, remembering that little girl, okay, not quite the same thing. But still…
"We started our survivors program armed with good intentions. But they spoke a differen
t language. We spoke a different language. They'd witnessed the inconceivable. Everything we said to them sounded like gibberish. We didn't have a prayer. And neither did they. The program was an unqualified failure. We cut it in thirds, then gave it up completely."
"And Jean. He was a failure too?"
"Sounds like it, doesn't it. Then again, he didn't shoot himself or throw himself off a bridge, so maybe not."
Maybe not. Only maybe he did throw himself off a bridge, only maybe it took him fifty-five years to hit the water. But at the very end of his swan dive, this close to oblivion, someone had reached out a hand and said salvation. But who?
"What will you do now?" Dr. Morten asked him. Other than leave my house-which he didn't say but which he didn't have to.
"Poke around a little more. You never know."
They both sat up, one just a little ahead of the other, though it was hard to say who was first and who was second. Call it a photo finish. Dr. Morten showed him halfway out, pointing the rest of the way like a waiter indicating the direction of the lavatory. William nimbly dodged cats, as nimbly as he could with a cane and arthritis-ravaged legs, which means he stepped on only two or three of them. Dr. Morten wasn't happy about that, and the screaming cats weren't exactly thrilled about it either. All the residents of the town house were pretty happy when he made it out the door.
Then this is what happened.
He walked, okay, limped a block or two. He passed two hot dog vendors who were just setting up.
He passed a black transvestite who asked him if he wanted a date.
A Lexus honked at him as he trudged across a crosswalk, then gunned the engine as he passed, belching out a cloud of rotten egg exhaust. William coughed, limped, coughed, limped. An acorn dropped on his head. A homeless man defecated in front of him. This is what happened. A news truck heaved a bundle of papers to the sidewalk, missing him by inches. Another vagrant yelled at him, cursing him with unbearable rage. A girl with tall bare legs walked right past him without seeing him. He figured out what had happened in Dr. Morten's house. He passed a stray German shepherd, then his limp slowed, became a shuffle, turned into a slight bobbing, eased into stillness. The shepherd barked. This is what happened. What was his name? Dr. Morten had asked him. Jean. Jean Goldblum. And then a cat had leapt across the table, throwing a shadow across Dr. Morten's face. And that was the problem-right there-that shadow. That was the problem. For he could picture it now: the leaping cat, the yellow bowl hurling milk, that shadow-like a still-life now, but one where everything's just off, the perspectives forced, the spatial relationships askew. The problem here was which had come first-the cat's shadow or the cat- and every time he looked at the picture it seemed to be the shadow when it should have been the cat. That was a problem all right, you couldn't account for it, or rather, you could account for it, but in only one way. And that way wasn't the way he was going, he was not going that way. For the only way you could account for that was this: that the shadow didn't belong to the cat at all, but belonged instead to Dr. Morten. That he may have gone to the file, but that he hadn't needed to. That the minute he'd heard that name, he'd known right off who it belonged to, known it so strongly and so immediately that darkness had touched his face like grief.
William had been looking the wrong way. But no longer. The way was that way, the way back.
Santini said every case Jean took was the same case and that the case was his own.
And that case was down in the files.
Now all he had to do was get a look at them.
TWENTY-TWO
Black bag jobs, hit-and-runs, in-and-outs. Santini had been the acknowledged master, Jean the unacknowledged one, and William the class virgin. After all, you didn't have to break in on adulterers when you could peek in on them. Which was just as well, since William, of course, played by the rules, and the rules said private investigators had no more rights than a private citizen and therefore couldn't go breaking into other people's houses. Santini and Jean treated this rule like they treated other people's houses, that is, they broke it, then broke into other people's houses. Santini even had enough time left over to break into other people's wives as well, which means he may have been the real master of the surreptitious entry after all.
William, then, was at a disadvantage. He'd picked up a flashlight at a local hardware store, as well as some black electrical tape, though he would have been at a loss to tell anyone why.
I don't know, Officer, he'd have to say, and unlike the other twenty thousand would-be burglars they'd pick up this week, he'd really mean it.
He whiled away the hours at a Burger King, a street- side flea market, and finally at a movie which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, and which only one hour later he couldn't remember a single word from. Okay, he remembered a few words-the part where they explained native Alabamian Jean-Claude's accent as a residue from his attending summer camp in Switzerland. Drawp your weepon-he said, and this bunch of rednecks refused to, but only because they didn't understand what he'd said. That was William's guess, although they might have been just getting him mad so that Jean-Claude could do his stuff and litter their junkyard with their thoroughly beaten up bodies. William left the theater wishing he knew the martial arts, so he could simply drop-kick his way into Dr. Morten's rose-brick town house.
Which was now precisely one half block from him, and growing increasingly redder as the day faded into evening. Which suddenly reminded him of a certain white dress, that day in East Brooklyn again, her dress, which had turned scarlet before his eyes as he did nothing but watch. Just like that other night outside the Par Central Motel, when he did nothing but watch either. Which meant that when you toted things up, he'd spent a lot of time watching-unlike Jean-Claude, say, who was nothing if not a man of action.
The light was failing quickly and taking whole sections of the street with it. The rose brick turned to brown, then gray, and staining darker by the minute reached a sort of poor man's indigo. If it had been winter, it would have been time, but being summer, the street was still throbbing with urban congestion. People stood around- against cars, on stoops, and on street curbs as if waiting for something to happen. And nothing did, so they sat around some more waiting for something else. Which didn't happen either. In fact, the only thing that actually happened was that William's leg began to ache something fierce, and everyone, but everyone, began to notice him. It might have been his occasional groans of pain that did it-yes, he would say that definitely got people's atten- tion-or it could have been the fact that he was leaning on a cane for hours on end without either sitting down or falling over. Maybe it wasn't hours-but to any casual observer, it would appear that way. Think about it. When they asked-Did anyone notice anyone unusual-everyone would have. It'd be unanimous.
Then, suddenly, deliverance. An ice cream truck rounded the corner a block away, belching out this monotonous jingle which seemed to hypnotize half the crowd into going after it. The other half-the woman in rollers, the two men playing chess across a lopsided bridge table, the man with three dogs-seemed perplexed by this sudden loss of community, and rather than wait for it to reappear, decided to forgo the night air altogether and withdraw en masse. And in the rose-brick town house-now as black and indistinct as rain clouds in a fog, the single light that had been shining brightly from an upstairs window went out abruptly as if snuffed.
Okay, Jean-Claude would definitely take this as the moment to act.
There were two basement windows set beneath the front steps. William had noticed them before; a large tabby had been licking its paws in one of them, staring out with a lazy indifference.
He shuffled over there now. Reaching the bottom of the town house steps, he turned left and stealthily slipped behind them. Translation: He made it there without tripping over his cane. It was cooler here than on the street, danker too, and he could feel moss in the spaces between the bricks. Suddenly, a large grotesque shape appeared in the window. He was this close to scramming, this clos
e, when he realized the large grotesque shape was actually small grotesque him. Or rather, his reflection, staring him down like someone intent on doing him harm. And maybe he was-intent on doing him harm.
Now the reflection wasn't exactly grotesque anymore; more like pathetic. What was he doing? Even his state- of-the-art flashlight couldn't brighten his chances of success. He was out of his element, he was out of his mind. Seventy-year-old man kills self while breaking and entering-another headline for Mr. Brickman's collection. Old men enter houses the old-fashioned way-they wait to be asked in. He went back up the front stoop and knocked.
Dr. Morten didn't look particularly surprised. He didn't look particularly happy either. What he looked like was particularly resigned.
"You knew him," William said. "When I said his name, you knew him."
And Dr. Morten said yes. Yes. Oh yes. Yes he had. it it it
Fair was fair. Dr. Morten had a point. They'd both told stories to each other. Now it was time to tell other stories to each other. True ones.
First Dr. Morten asked him if Jean was really dead.
Yeah. Dead all right.
Dr. Morten sighed, the way you sigh at the end of a movie that's moved you to tears. Hard to believe it's over, but it is.
Then Dr. Morten said you go first. You're not here to settle the Goldblum estate, that's for sure.
So he did. He took a deep breath and jumped right in, and after a while he found the water wasn't too uncomfortable after all.
"I used to work with him," he began, the way he'd begun with Rodriguez and the hooker. "We were the Three Eyes Detective Agency. We were moderately successful, but Jean was the star. Definitely. When it broke up, we all went our separate ways. It wasn't like we had bowling nights when we did work together. So no one kept up with no one. We got old and I started reading the obituaries. I had death on the brain. One day I saw his obituary. I went to the funeral because I thought it was the least I could do. It would've been. Except I forgot to say rest in peace. I started learning things. Like the fact that he wasn't retired. Ready to join the shuf- fleboard league and he wasn't retired. I think that pissed me off. I was actually mad at him. I found out he'd been selling runaway kids back to their parents. Picture it- fourteen-year-old Minnesota kids stepping off the bus and there's Jean fighting the pimps and Covenant House priests for them. I imagine Jean played the sympathetic grandfatherly type-let me buy you a milk shake and you can tell old Jean all about it. Sure, I understand why you'd leave a home like that. Absolutely. Why don't you just give me your parents' number and I'll make it all right for you. Some of them did give him their parents' numbers. And then he'd get on the phone and play the concerned detective. I've found your daughter. Your son. Yes I have. Now if you just send me a money order to cover expenses I'll send them right back to… what, you don't want to pay expenses? Haven't hired me, you say? Low on cash? Click. Jean would give them the old fongul. Beat it, kid, he'd say. By the next week, they'd be out turning tricks. That was Jean. That was the Jean I knew and loved back in the good old days. So, big deal right? Go back to your apartment and pick up the obits again. Except I learned something else. That Jean had stopped selling kids. Honest. Given it up for a real case. Something, anyway, that was real to him. Real big. Real important. I don't know if I believed it. I didn't believe it. Not at first. I don't know why I bothered to find out if I should. Maybe because I'd retired a long time ago and he hadn't. Maybe because I got spit on on the way to his funeral and it felt like just another day at the office. Maybe I had survivor's guilt. Who knows-you're the psychiatrist. Okay, maybe I'm lying. Maybe it was the case. Unfinished- and cases are meant to be finished. After a while, I think it was that, the case, all these missing people I was turning up. So I thought I'd finish it for him. Why not-do the same for me, wouldn't he? And then somebody threw me down a deep dark hole. Tried to kill me-just like that. Came close to doing it too. So I thought, okay, maybe Jean wouldn't do the same for me. Maybe reading the obits isn't so dull after all. Maybe I'll re-retire. No such luck. Now I had this case on the brain. I found out other things. That Jean had this case on the brain too. That it had relieved him of something. That it had somehow balanced the books. He went and had his Mauthausen tattoo burnt off with acid because he said he'd earned it. Now what does that mean? Eighty years old and he's undergoing cosmetic surgery. Now here's what I start to think. I was following this case and everyone was saying he went that-a-way. Remember the old westerns? When they said that-a-way it always turned out to be the other way. The smart sheriffs knew that. So maybe I finally got smart. This case is about what was. It goes back. I don't think a client came out of the woodwork to give Jean a case. I think Jean was his own client. I think this was his own case. I think Jean was spanking himself for a long time, and that he was suddenly shown a way out. That-a-way. I think he saved his best case for last."