Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

  What was it that so nagged at me? It almost had to do with Sally Bianco and her code of honor, almost had to do with Fabian, with something wrong.

  And then the thought was displaced as the cards and the bag were ripped away from me, nearly dislocating my arm.

  Mugged!

  Scream!

  But all sound was stuck somewhere below my neck. Nothing but windy silence came out. And terror. My attacker loomed over me, enormous, monstrously so—eight feet, nine feet tall—and huge-headed. I tried to back off—but the car was behind me, blocking me, and I pressed against it, one hand on the hood where the pitiable droppings of my life lay, the other on the door handle—the locked door handle.

  He—it—had my purse, my wallet—what else?

  I looked at it again—and this time, I placed the enormous head. The silver-and-black helmet, the spikes and the feathers. I’d just seen it inside on the floor.

  I found my voice. It was hard to take a Mummer mugger, even one who’d taken my purse, altogether seriously. “Who are you?” I demanded.

  Silence.

  Fabian. Who else? Furious, as always. Recouping his losses. But I was better off, safer, if he didn’t think I’d recognized him.

  Except. I still couldn’t finish the idea. “You have what you want, now get out of my way.” Maybe I could bolt for the door and get it open and scream before he’d tackle me. If he listened to me and got out of my way.

  I studied his running shoes, trying to remember if I’d seen them before. Of course I had, on ads, a million times. This was a ridiculous waste of time, and I knew it as I was doing it. I studied the bottom lip, the semi-visible chinline below the helmet. I tried and failed to remember what color eyes Fabian had, not that I could see through the mask’s eye slits.

  Except.

  “Didn’t want to have to do this.” I didn’t recognize anything about the voice except crazed anger. He moved closer. “You should have quit.”

  Except! Never in this lifetime would Mackenzie have let Fabian out of his sight!

  My hand searched the hood of my car. Surely I had taken something out that could become a weapon. Why, this one time, didn’t I have a file or scissors or a can opener—anything!—those keys would have been my weapon, a set of brass knuckles, a gouge. Instead, my fingers touched my hairbrush with its rounded plastic-tipped bristles and I nearly wept. I moved on to the hair spray. Great. His eyes were too protected for me to try to temporarily blind him with it.

  He tossed my bag toward the building, reached behind him as if tucking in a shirttail, and brought back a gun. A bigger, nastier gun than the one that had been in my bag.

  “Help!” I shouted. Somebody had to hear, didn’t they?

  “Shut up.” He cocked the gun.

  I could hear TVs through closed windows, and I knew those people could hear nothing else.

  My searching fingers were on automatic, not giving up despite the futility of their hunt, despite my mind’s running around and around on its own track—who was this? Because I knew, at some place in me, I knew, and I had for a while.

  Except I couldn’t remember.

  I touched a loose lipstick, a few packets of artificial sweetener, then a matchbook. I squeezed it in farewell. I’d never eat there or anywhere again, and the waiters had been so quiet and polite!

  My last act on earth was going to be crying.

  But no. I was brave, I was woman. I had honor, thanks to Sally. And that was the part you couldn’t lose. That was you.

  “Did you sell it?” he demanded.

  “It?”

  “It’s not sold?” I shook my head.

  He nodded, slowly, his enormous helmet bobbing up and down. I had pleased him.

  “Where is it? In your bag?” He waved at the pavement behind him without turning his head. He gesticulated a lot, emphasizing his points, his bewildering questions with his hands, one of which, unfortunately, held a gun. I didn’t know much about firearms, but he didn’t seem in control of his. The gun could go off with any of his angry sentences. It could go off by mistake. Maybe he wanted to terrorize, not kill me. If so, he was succeeding. “Where is it?” he demanded again.

  The article. He wanted to know if I’d sold it. The freckled one had said something upstairs and I’d let it ride. “Listen, there is no article, never will be.” The sentence made me oddly sad, ridiculous given my current situation. “I have notes, that’s all. Those, there on the pavement, see them?” They looked pitiable, multicolored cards in their rubber-band halter. That’s all there was. Nothing.

  “You’re right—there isn’t ever going to be an article, because you aren’t going to be around to put us on display for laughs.”

  “I was never going to write about you!” The writing, that was it, the thing I knew I knew but couldn’t remember. The writing! Oh, God, I knew who—“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Don’t make it worse. You can—”

  “Shut up!”

  My fingers gripped the matchbook.

  And his fingers grabbed it from me. “Only that, only those cards, but it’ll never be because I’ll burn them!” He backed up a step, still aiming the gun at me, and flipped up the matchbook cover. “Burn every one of them!”

  He bent down a match and lit it with a flick of his thumb, that one-handed macho act I never conquered, even when I smoked. He held the matchbook up like a torch, while he bent to lift the index cards.

  The torch. I thought of Vincent and the torch he carried for Dolores. Her note. The writing. His mission during the parade. I thought of Vincent and school.

  School, that place where I soon wouldn’t have a job. Because of Renata. I thought of my soon-to-be-former students. Of Sally. Of Badluck Dooney Scott, the mad little scientist. By the time he recovered, I’d be gone. I hadn’t realized how much that mattered.

  Dooney, I thought. Dooney Scott. And a child shall lead you.

  I had to pay attention because one chance was all I was going to get.

  “I’m not sorry,” the masked man was saying, talking faster and faster. “He deserved it. No respect for—” The index cards were too bulky to ignite as quickly as he must have intended. “Damn!” he shouted as the match singed his finger. He blew on it and promptly lit another.

  My chance. My one chance. I grabbed the hair spray and aimed it at the match’s flame.

  And it worked. Dooney’s experiment worked. Those warnings on cans were true. They were indeed dangerous near flame. The entire arc of hair spray ignited, and I stood like a long-distance welder, my flamethrower burning all the way from me to him. Bless you, Dooney. I aimed for the headpiece.

  The man in the mask screamed.

  As well he might because he was on fire—the lowest feather of his headpiece catching a spark and flaring, lighting the cardboard inner support of the sequined masterpiece. A lethal halo formed around him.

  He screamed again, louder, and dropped the gun, which went off with a shockingly loud sound. The noise made me scream, too, and when I turned, I saw the right front tire of my car exhale and deflate.

  The kids had told me that Dooney’s can exploded in his hand after he released pressure on the nozzle. The flame had been sucked back inside. Let that be a lesson. I couldn’t let go of my nozzle.

  Not let go and hold on, that was. “Sorry!” I screamed as I tossed the flaming canister in the direction of his feet.

  It exploded with fiery noise and light.

  The man screamed even more and while he was so occupied, I ran to the gun, stepped on it, then carefully bent to retrieve it, fighting my revulsion at touching such a thing.

  My attacker danced, shrieked incoherently, and pulled at his headpiece, now a circle of flaming feathers. I knew he’d get it off—he’d gotten it on quickly enough, hadn’t he? “If you’d calm down,” I said. “Calm down!”

  He didn’t.

  I pointed the gun at him, waiting.

  And the door to the club opened and men poured out, all of them making whazzis noises, s
houting at the sight of me with the gun, then even more at the sight of the man in the helmet. They seemed hordes, filling up the sidewalk, much more than the dozen who’d been up there. The eleven who would have been left.

  And Mackenzie at the front of them, rushing to me. “You all right?” he shouted before he was even near me. “Heard a shot, an explosion—what the—”

  “I got him,” I said. “This is who killed Jimmy Pat.”

  “No,” Mackenzie said. “It’s—”

  With a last yank, the man pulled free of his flaming helmet and dropped it to the pavement, gasped, and doubled over.

  “He was trying to burn my note cards,” I said. And inadvertently, was about to succeed, as what was left of the headpiece landed directly on them.

  To my amazement, Mackenzie ran over and stomped the little pyre, then gingerly lifted it. The cards looked charred around the edges, but mostly intact.

  Front doors opened up and down the street. People, women pulling on sweaters, came down their front steps.

  “Ruined the headpiece,” somebody murmured sadly.

  “For the love of—” Mackenzie’s mouth hung open. “You?”

  Stephen Grassi, gasping and pale, stood upright with difficulty. His eyes seemed wild and inflamed, either from the smoke of his fuming headpiece, or from the sight of me.

  I looked away. It felt an intrusion to look directly at him. At the far corner of the street, I saw a willowy woman in black, a fringed shawl pulled around her. I was sure it was Emily. There was a figure next to her, tall and silver-topped. So she had, at least for now, met her prince. Or, more accurately, king. Nice.

  I looked from her to Stephen Grassi, and then back at Mackenzie. “You were right. They were connected.”

  “What?” Mackenzie asked. “Are you talking about the mob?”

  “The murders. You were right. And wrong. And so was I.”

  We’d talk it through later. But I knew what I meant. The two murders were connected, but not in any way we’d thought of. Jimmy Pat killed Ted Serfi and because of that, because Emily was then able to blackmail him into breaking his engagement, Jimmy Pat was killed by a man convinced that the broken engagement shamed his sister and besmirched his family name. He’d said it often enough, to enough people. I, who’d been grappling with questions of respect and integrity and honor all along, who’d heard gentle Sally say she wanted to kill Renata for shaming her, should have realized those values, no matter how interpreted, were also other people’s issues. All of us feel naked, exposed, and shamed when the mask we want the world to see is removed. The difference is, some of us handle it without bullets.

  Vincent Devaney looked like a man under a spell. He moved toward Stephen Grassi. “You sent me the card, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. That’s what I had realized earlier. The shaky almost-familiar writing on the Christmas card. The easily forged D in a heart. Stephen telling Vincent that Dolores was going through a bad time. Dolores’s absolute ignorance of Vincent’s whereabouts during the parade. Dolores had never contacted Vincent. It was Stephen, always Stephen, obsessed and driven.

  “You wanted me to leave the parade,” Vincent said, “so you could take my place.” With each word he advanced a step, and all of us watched, as if equally bewitched. “So you could kill Jimmy and make it look like I did it.”

  “Stop!” I shouted. “Vincent!” Another disaster would happen if he reached the man who’d set him up.

  His friends, fellow club members, shook themselves out of their trances and grabbed hold of him. His shoulders slumped and he looked near tears.

  And at the far end of the block, Emily and the King of sausages faded back into the night, to live, I hoped, happily ever after.

  *

  I didn’t get fired. That would have been too assertive and definite an act for Havermeyer. And the Fields, double-dared, turned out to be cowardly playground bullies under their masks. It probably also mattered that their lawyer told them theirs was a frivolous case that would last, if the courts didn’t throw it out altogether, until Renata was long past college age. They did, however, pull Renata out to seek greener, less demanding pastures. I can’t imagine where.

  Nonetheless, that’s what I call a good way to begin a new year. And without her calls, and with my packet of broiled three-by-fives, I had the time to write my article. Its scope had expanded. I wanted to build it around Jimmy Pat’s murder at the parade and end with its solution at his club.

  “I think I’ll start it off with the night my mother called,” I told Mackenzie. “The night she said we’d catch our deaths.”

  It struck him as a good idea, too.