by Trevanian
“Would it?”
“You’re not much of an audience, LaPointe. And now I don’t even remember what that story was supposed to illustrate.”
“Maybe nothing. Maybe you’re just playing for time.”
“Yes, maybe. How about another drink?”
“I still have this one.”
“I think I’ll have another.” She brings it around the bar and sits beside him. “I had the weirdest experience just now. I was crossing the park, and there was someone there, in the shadows.”
“Someone you know?”
“That’s just it. I had the feeling I knew him, but… I can’t explain it I didn’t see him, really. Just sort of a shadow. But I had this eerie feeling that he wanted to talk to me.”
“But he didn’t?”
“No.”
“Then what frightened you?”
She laughs. “Nothing. I was just scared. I warned you it was a weird experience. Am I babbling, or is it my imagination?”
“It’s not your imagination. This afternoon you said you knew me. Tell me about that.”
As she speaks, she deals with her glass, not with him. “Oh, I was just a kid. You never really noticed me. But for years, you’ve been… important in my life.” She puffs out a little laugh of self-derision. “Now that sounds heavy, doesn’t it? I don’t mean you’ve been important in the sense that I think of you often, because I don’t. But I think of you at… serious times. It must be embarrassing to have a stranger tell you that she has a rather special vision of you. Is it?”
He lifts his glass and tips his head. “Yes.”
“You think I’m drunk?”
He balances his thumb against his little finger. “A little.”
“Drunk and disorderly,” she says in a distant tone. “I charge you, young woman, with being drunk, and with having a disorderly life—a disorderly mind.”
“I doubt that. I think you have a very orderly mind. A very clever one.”
“Clever? Yes. Neatly arranged? Yes. But disorderly nevertheless. The front shelves of my mind are all neatly stacked and efficiently arranged. But back in the stacks there is a stew of disorder, chaos, and do you know what else?”
“No. What?”
“Just a pinch of self-pity.”
They both laugh.
“Now how about another drink?” She goes around the bar to refill her glass.
“No, thanks… all right. Yes. And tell me, with that self-pity you talk about, is there some hate?”
“Tons and tons, Lieutenant. But…” She points at him quickly, as though she just caught him slipping a card from his sleeve. “But not enough to kill.” She laughs drily. “You know something, sir? I have a feeling we may spend a lot of this night talking about two different things.”
“Not all of it.”
“A threat?”
He shrugs. “So, tons and tons of hate. Do you hate me for not remembering you?”
“N-n-no. No, I don’t blame or hate you. You were a central figure, a star actor on the Mam. I had an aisle seat near the back. I spent my time staring at the one actor, so naturally I remember him. You—if you ever bothered to look out at the audience—wouldn’t see them as individuals. No, not hate. Take two parts disappointment, mix in one part resentment, one part dented vanity, dilute with years of indifference, and that’s what I feel. Not hate.”
“You said your mother was a hooker on the street. What was her name?”
She laughs without anything being funny. “Her name was Dery.”
LaPointe’s memory rolls and brings up an image of twenty years ago. Yo-Yo Dery, a kind of whore you don’t see around anymore. Loud, life-embracing, fun to be with, she would sometimes go with factory workers who didn’t have much money, and for free, if they were good mecs and she liked them. Carefree and mischievous, she earned a reputation as a clown and a hellcat when, right in the middle of the dance floor of a crowded cabaret (the place where the Happy Hour Whisky a Go-Go now is), she settled a dispute with another hooker who claimed that Yo-Yo’s red hair was dyed. She lifted her skirt, dropped her drawers, and proved that her red hair was natural.
“You remember her, don’t you,” Mlle. Montjean says, seeing his eye read the past.
“Yes. I remember her.”
“But not me?”
Yes, come to think of it. Yo-Yo had a daughter. He talked to her once or twice in Yo-Yo’s flat. After Lucille’s death, when the need to make love got annoying, he went with street girls occasionally, always paying his way, although as a cop he could have got it free. Yo-Yo and he made love three or four times over the years. Yes, that’s right. Yo-Yo had a little girl. A shy little girl.
Then he recalls how Yo-Yo died. She killed herself. She sent the kid to stay with a neighbor, and she killed herself. It astonished everybody on the Main. Yo-Yo Dery? The one who’s always laughing? No! The one who proved she was a redhead? Suicide? But why?
LaPointe made the break-in. Rags stuffed in the crack under the door. He had to shatter a window with a beer bottle. Yo-Yo had slipped sideways onto the kitchen floor, her cheek resting on the bristles of a broom. There were cards laid out on the table. She had turned on the gas, and started playing solitaire.
Funny how details come back. There was a black queen on a black king. She had been cheating.
But what became of the kid? Vaguely, he recalls something about a neighbor keeping the girl until the social workers came around.
“Do you remember why they called her Yo-Yo?” Mlle. Montjean asks, almost dreamily.
He remembers. Like a Yo-Yo, up and down, up and down.
Mlle. Montjean turns the stem of her tulip glass, revolving it between her thumb and finger. “She was good to me, you know that? Presents. Clothes. We went to the park every Sunday when it wasn’t too cold. She really tried to be good to me.”
“That would be like her.”
“Oh, sure. The good-hearted whore. A real Robert Service type. In a way, I always knew what she did for a living, even when I was four or five. That is… there were always men around the flat, and they left money. What I didn’t know at that age was that it wasn’t the same in everyone else’s house. But when I was old enough to go to school, the other kids straightened me out soon enough. They used to chant at me: ‘Redhead, Redhead’—I can still hear those two singsong notes, like a French ambulance. I didn’t understand why they chanted that, and why they giggled. My hair has always been brown. You see. I didn’t know about Yo-Yo’s epic proof in the dance hall. But all the other kids did.”
This is not what LaPointe came here to listen to, and he doesn’t want the burden of problems he did not cause and cannot help. “Oh, well,” he says, making a gesture toward the expensive apartment, “you’ve come a long way from all that.”
She looks at him sideways through her shoulder-length, rolled-under hair. “You sound like my analyst,” she accuses.
“The one you take to bed?”
“The one I screw,” she corrects. “What is it? Why are you shaking your head?”
“It must be the fashion to use the ugliest words for making love. I met a girl just recently who found the nicer words funny, and couldn’t help laughing at them.”
“I say screw because I mean screw. It’s the mot juste. When I’m with a man, we don’t ‘go to bed,’ and we certainly don’t ‘make love.’ We screw. And what’s more, they don’t screw me. I screw them.”
“As in, Screw you, mister!”
Mlle. Montjean laughs. “Now you really sound like my analyst. How about another Armagnac?”
“No, thanks.”
She carries her glass to the divan before the fireplace, where she sits staring silently for a short time before beginning to speak, more to herself than to him. “It’s funny, but I never despised the men Yo-Yo brought home—mostly good mecs, laughing, a little drunk, clumsy. Yo-Yo used to come in to tuck me in and kiss me good night. Then she’d close the door slowly because the hinges creaked. She had a way of wav
ing to me with her fingertips, just before the door closed. I remember the light on the wall, a big trapezoid of yellow getting narrower until the door clicked shut, and there was only a thin line of light from the crack. Her bedroom was next to mine. I could hear her laughing. And I could hear the men. The squeak of the bedsprings. And the men grunting. They always seemed to grunt when they came.” She looks over at LaPointe out of the corner of her eye and she half smiles. “You never grunted, Lieutenant. I’ll say that much for you.”
He lifts his empty glass in acceptance of the compliment, and immediately feels the stupidity of the gesture. “And you didn’t resent me?”
“Because you screwed Yo-Yo? Hey, notice the difference? Men screwed Yo-Yo; I screw men. Deep significance there. Or maybe shallow. Or maybe none at all. No, I didn’t resent you, Lieutenant! Goodness gracious, no! I could hardly have resented you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were my father,” she says atonally. Then, “Hey, want another drink?”
LaPointe takes the shot in silence and doesn’t speak until she has crossed to the bar and is refilling her glass. “That was cute. That ‘want another drink?’ part was particularly cute.”
“Yeah, but kind of hokey.”
“Of course you know that I was not…”
“Don’t panic, Lieutenant. I know perfectly well that I don’t owe the Gift of Life to any squirt from you—grunted or ungrunted. My father was Anonymous.” She has a bit of trouble saying the word; the drink is beginning to close down on her. “You know the famous poet, Anonymous. He’s in all the collections—mostly toward the front. Hey? Aren’t you just dying to know how come you’re my father?”
She stands behind the bar, leaning over her glass, the ball of colored light tinting her hair, her face in the shadow. LaPointe is unable to see the expression in her unlit eyes. At a certain point, he turns away and watches the fire dwindle.
She uses a clowning, melodramatic style behind which she can hide, and occasionally her voice broadly italicizes words to prove she isn’t taken in by the sentimentality that hurts.
“You see, children, it all began when I was very, very young and suffering from a case of innocence. I overheard Yo-Yo talking to some hooker she had up to the apartment for drinks. The subject was one Officer LaPointe, our beat cop, blue of uniform and blue of eye. Some yahoo had given Yo-Yo trouble, and the brave LaPointe had duly bashed him. You remember the incident?”
He shakes his head. In those days, that was not so uncommon an event that he would be likely to remember it.
“Well, bash you did, sir. You Protected My Mother. And the next Sunday, when she was taking me for a walk in the park, she pointed your apartment out to me. This Was the House of the Man Who Protected My Mother. And there were other times when she had good things to say about you. I didn’t know then that she was praising you for paying for your nookie when, as a cop, you didn’t have to.
“Well, sir, it was about that time that I went off to school and discovered that other kids had daddies. Before that, I had never thought about it. Living alone with Yo-Yo was simply how one lived. I neither had a daddy nor lacked one. Then the teasing about being a redhead began. And little boys wanted me to go behind the bushes and pull down my pants to show them my red hair. I couldn’t understand. You see, I didn’t have any hair, let alone red.
“So life went along, and went along, and went along. Then when I was about ten or eleven, the Great Myth began. One day after school, I was crying with anger and frustration and there was a ring of kids around me, chanting ‘Redhead, wet to bed… Redhead, wet to bed!’ And I screamed at them to cut it out, or else! Or else what, one of them asked, logically enough. And another asked why I didn’t run home and tell my father on them. And everyone laughed—we have to save the children, Lieutenant; they’re our hope for the future—so I suddenly blurted out that I would too tell my father, if they didn’t leave me alone! And they said I didn’t have a father. And I said that I did too! Sergeant LaPointe was my father! And he would bash any son of a bitch who gave me trouble!”
There is a thud and a tinkle of glass, then silence.
“Oops. I have knocked over my glass in my efforts to decorate my fable with… whatever. How graceless of me.”
LaPointe keeps his eyes on the fire. It would be unfair to look at her just then. He hears her walking behind the bar, the crisp crunch of glass under her shoes. He hears the squeak of the cork in the Armagnac bottle. When she speaks again, she has assumed a gruff, comic tone.
“Well, sir, that was the winter when I had a father… or, to be more exact, a daddy. You screwed Yo-Yo two times that winter, and both times I was awake when you came to the flat, and you chatted nonsense with me before she put me to bed. Your uniform smelled like wool, which wasn’t so strange, considering the fact that it was made of wool. But it smelled good to me… like my blanket. Like the blanket I pressed against my nose when I sucked my thumb. At ten, I still sucked my thumb. But I’ve given that up in favor of cigarettes. Thumb-sucking causes lung cancer.
“And every day that winter, on my way home from school, I made a big loop out of my way so I could pass your apartment on Esplanade. I used to stand there, sometimes in the snow—grab the image of a little girl standing in the snow! Doesn’t it just rip you up?—and I would look up at the windows of your apartment on the third floor. By the way, your apartment is on the third floor, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he lies.
“I knew it. Infallible instinct. I knew you would live on the top floor, looking out over the world. Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if all those afternoons I had been looking up at the wrong apartment? Wouldn’t that be an ironic blast?”
He nods.
After a silence, she puffs out a sigh. “Thank God that’s out of me! Pal, you have no idea what a zonker it was when you walked in here this afternoon. Talk about ghosts! I didn’t really have an appointment tonight. I was walking up on the Main—the first time in years. I dropped in at a bar or two and had Armagnac, because that was your drink. And I walked around the old streets, over past your apartment, trying to decide if I should unload all this crap on you. And finally I decided that I wouldn’t. I decided to keep it to myself. Sic transit all claims to being mistress of my fate.”
LaPointe has nothing to say.
“Well!” She brings him an Armagnac he doesn’t want and sits on the divan beside him. “Presumably you didn’t come here to hear all this psychological vomit. What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”
It isn’t an easy change to make, and LaPointe sips his drink slowly before he begins. “There have been three men killed… probably by the same person.”
“And a neurotic man-hater seems a likely suspect?”
He ignores this. “Two of them trace to you. When was the last time you saw Antonio Verdini?”
“I checked that little fact in my diary. I thought you might ask. By the way, I’ll let you read my diary if you want. I suppose you’ll want the names of the men I’ve screwed. In case the killer was one of them. Maybe jealousy, or something like that. Although I can’t imagine why any of them would be jealous. After all, my door’s been open to just about anyone who knocked. I view my body as something of a public convenience.”
LaPointe doesn’t want to get mired again in her self-pity; he holds to the line of questioning. “When was the last time you and Verdini made love?”
“A week ago tonight. He didn’t leave until about midnight. It was a longish number. He was showing off his endurance, which, by the way, was something—”
“All right.” LaPointe cuts her off. He doesn’t care about that. “That checks. He was killed that night, shortly after he left here.”
“Hey… maybe I can put you on to something. He might have been just boasting, but he said he had to leave early because he was going to screw some dancer… no. No, a dancer’s kid. That was it.”
“I know about that. He never got there.”
“Too bad for the ki
d. He was a good plumber.”
LaPointe regards her flatly. “Why don’t we just stick to the questions and answers, Mlle. Montjean?”
“My hearty attitude toward sex doesn’t impress you, Lieutenant?”
“It impresses me. But it doesn’t convince me.”
“Hey! Wow! The wisdom of the streets! Mind if I take a note on that?”
“Do you want your ass spanked?”
“Whatever turns you on, Daddy!” she snaps back. She’s an experienced emotional in-fighter.
He settles his patient, fatigued eyes on her for a moment before continuing. “All right. Now, this professor at McGill. Tell me about him.”
She chuckles. “You hold your cool pretty well, LaPointe. Of course, you’ve got the advantage of being sober. And you’ve got another edge. Indifference is a mighty weapon.”
“Let’s just hear about the McGill professor.”
“Mike Pearson? He was in charge of the Language Learning Center. That’s where I got my idea of setting up this school. The high-saturation methods we use here were developed by Pearson. I took my M.A. under him… literally.”
“Meaning that you and he—”
“Whenever we got a chance. Even while I was a student. The first time was on his desk. He got semen on papers he was grading. Do you know the root of the word ‘seminar’? He was my first conquest. Think of it, Lieutenant! I was a virgin until I was twenty-four. A technical virgin, that is. Before that, I was what you might call manually self-sufficient. My analyst has given me some textbook crap about protracted virginity being common in cases of sexually traumatic events in childhood. He went on to say that it was typical that the first man should be a teacher—a father figure, an authority figure. Like a cop, I guess. That anus of an analyst always plays doctor after we’ve screwed. It’s his way of taking an ethical shower. Think of it! A virgin at twenty-four! But I’ve made up for it since.”