by Aaron Elkins
So where was he?
And the darker, less articulate thought: Where was Simeon?
I sat without moving, trying to will away the wooziness, to will the strength back into my legs. The shop was absolutely still. Aside from the traffic on Washington Street, the only sound was the slow, peaceful ticking away of old clocks on the shelves. After a few seconds I pulled myself painfully to my feet. The queasiness welled up again. I closed my eyes and leaned on the counter.
"Hoo," I said softly.
And took another whack in the face.
Now I may not be the fastest learner in the world, but given enough time the message generally gets through, and when I get clouted in the head twice inside of thirty seconds I take that as a sign to start paying serious attention.
This time, with no door handy, he’d used his fist; a sloppy, mauling blow that caught me on the nose and upper lip, not cleanly enough to do any real damage, but bringing a spurt of blood from my nose and sending me reeling back off-balance. The punch had come as a complete surprise, but what had happened was clear enough. The guy had thrust the door open with so much force that he’d pitched down the steps right behind me, but whereas I, traveling in a higher trajectory, had arched gracefully over the counter, he had landed in a heap behind it, at the base of the steps. Like me, he’d stayed on the floor, possibly stunned, possibly figuring out what to do next, possibly listening to see if I was moving around. Then, when I’d leaned on the counter directly above him, with my eyes conveniently closed, he’d seized the opportunity and reached up to slug me.
So now we were both standing up, mutely glaring at each other over the counter. I know him, I thought dazedly, but from where? He was my height but about a foot wider, all right angles and thick limbs, built roughly along the lines of a stand-alone freezer. He was wearing a 1960's skinny tie and a dark, poorly cut suit that hung slackly around his thighs and was overly tight in the chest (but then where would you go to buy a freezer-shaped suit?), making him look all the more massive. I had the definite impression that this kind of situation wasn’t that unfamiliar, or even that unpleasant, to him. Speaking for myself, I was wildly out of my element. As far as I could remember, this was the first time in my adult life that I’d been involved in a physical altercation. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t have sounded stupid, so I just watched him and waited.
He made a rough motion with one heavy forearm, warning me back and out of his way. The grimace that accompanied it showed me a mouthful of badly-cared-for teeth, brown and crooked, with one of the bottom ones in front missing. His dark hair was stiff and close-cropped; poorly cut, as if it had been done with the help of a soup bowl. Where had I seen him before?
I shook my head. "No," I said between clenched jaws. Not only that, but I moved forward, to block his path to the front door.
Don’t ask me what I had in mind. I didn’t feel brave, I can tell you that. My knees were shaking, my mouth so dry that I couldn’t have swallowed if I’d wanted to. All I knew was that I couldn’t simply step meekly out of his way and let him walk out. I mean, how could I?
He stared at me for a second with nothing much going on in his eyes, then took from the shelf beside him a flat, black, evil-looking prybar; the two-foot-long kind that an enthusiastic carpenter can bring down a two-story house with. He held it in his right hand, slapping it heavily against the palm of his left, eyeing me all the while, giving me a chance to reconsider just how much how much I really wanted to try and keep him from leaving.
But whatever plane I was operating on, it didn’t allow for reconsideration any more than it had for consideration in the first place. Without letting myself think, and without taking my eyes off him, I reached behind me, scrabbling for a weapon of my own. Unfortunately, whereas he seemed to be in the construction-workers’ section of the shop, I was still in housewares, and what I came away with was a medium-weight Teflon-coated skillet. Still, I brandished it at him to show I meant business.
For some reason he wasn’t intimidated. He stepped carefully but confidently out from around the counter so that we faced each other from three or four feet apart, then made a prodding, grimacing feint with the prybar. I flinched but stood my ground. I had my eye on the shelf of tools at his side, among which was a pipe wrench that looked a hell of a lot more formidable than my frying pan, which made me feel like an irate housewife in the Sunday comics.
Something changed in his eyes. The next time he used that thing, I knew, it wasn’t going to be a feint. Still operating on automatic pilot, I gulped a breath, heaved the pan at his head, and dived for the wrench. The skillet clanged off the middle of his forehead with a sound like a mallet hitting a gong, but if it bothered him he didn’t let on. Almost casually, he swung the bar backhanded, catching me in the ribs with the hooked end. It doubled me over instantly, so that I lurched against the wall, paralyzed by the astounding pain. More pans clanged onto the floor. I’d gotten my fingers on the wrench, but hadn’t been able to hang on. And if I had, it sure wouldn’t have made any difference at this point.
"Enough?" he asked.
I couldn’t speak. It took everything I had to try to get my breath going again. He lifted the bar as if to take another crack at me, but when I couldn’t even wince he uttered a grunt, tossed the prybar contemptuously to the floor, and strode out past me.
I could no more move than fly. My eyes were streaming with tears, my left arm was clamped rigidly to my side. I leaned my head back against the wall, eyes closed, until I got my breathing under control again, or if not quite under control, then at least going alternately in and out. But anything beyond a shallow breath resulted in a sharp, wincing stab of pain to my right side. I would have let myself slip to a sitting position on the floor but I was worried about getting up again.
It took me a long time to realize that someone was standing in the doorway and had been for a while. "Hey, man?" he asked hesitantly. "Hey, man, you okay?"
I turned to look at him. If I hadn’t already known it, his drop-jawed expression would have told me that I looked like something out of Nightmare on Elm Street.
"You want me to call the cops, man?" It was a Hispanic kid with a skateboard under one arm.
"Yes," I said, not too intelligibly, but the kid disappeared, and in a couple of seconds I heard the skateboard clatter to the sidewalk and go into action.
I went back to leaning my head against the wall with my eyes closed. My side was beginning to go numb now, so that the pain, which had shut out everything else in the world for a few agonized minutes, blessedly retreated, and it was possible to concentrate on something else.
Simeon.
It was unthinkable that he had gone away somewhere and left the place wide open. It was also unthinkable that he would have remained quietly in the back, had he been able to come out, while we made a noisy shambles of the shop. That left several other possibilities, all of them thinkable, all of them bad.
The back door, half-ajar, was about fifteen feet from me, a long way in my condition. I pushed myself away from the wall and tried a tentative couple of steps. If I hugged my side, breathed gingerly, and slid my feet carefully over the floor, I found that I could walk, if not in comfort, then at least without coming apart. So, groaning and bent like a man of 110, I slowly shuffled to the door at the back of the shop, using one hand to prop myself on anything that came to hand. The two wooden steps were a problem, but I managed to climb them by going up sideways—left leg first, then drag the right after it—and then, with a stopped-up throat and a sick, sinking sensation squeezing my heart, I pushed the door open.
"Oh, Simeon, no," I whispered.
He was crumpled on the floor, partly on his right side, partly on his back, sprawled across the threshold between the foyer and his bedroom with his eyes closed, his head against the base of the safe. There was a smear of blood at his mouth, and another dark, thick blob of it in his left ear. His glasses lay a few feet away, unbroken. His face seemed to have collap
sed in on itself; his entire body seemed caved-in and shrunken, like a mummy’s. So much so that a shock shot across my shoulder blades when his eyelids opened and his mild, dark eyes immediately took me in and watched me, moving as I moved.
"Simeon!"
I knelt quickly beside him, almost passing out when I forgot to allow for my own damaged ribs.
One of his hands lay open and jerking on the worn carpet. I took it gently in my own. "Don’t try to move; I’ll have an ambulance here in a few minutes. You’re going to be all right . . ."
But as I spoke I could see that he wasn’t really seeing me, or anything else either; that while his eyes continued to watch me, there was no awareness, no comprehension behind them. He began to tremble now, and I could hear his breath coming in quick, panting little hiccups—ech . . . ech . . . ech . . . —as if he were only breathing in, not out. His eyes continued to observe me with calm, impartial, utterly empty interest.
I didn’t know if he could understand anything, but I patted his hand one more time. "I’m calling an ambulance now. I’m not going away, I’ll be right here. You’re going to be okay, Simeon."
I struggled down the steps to the counter, dialed 911, and turned to smile reassuringly at Simeon, the receiver to my ear. "It’s going to be all right," I said, practically choking on the words.
"Nine-one-one, emergency," came matter-of-factly over the telephone. "Is this fire, police, or medical?"
I cupped my hand over the speaker. "It’s medical," I said, and gave her what details I could, although when it came time to tell her the address and the nearest cross street, I went blank. "It’s a block or two east of Lenox," I said. "Pawlovsky’s Loans. Please tell them to hurry."
When I turned around to look at Simeon again, his eyes were still open but no longer following me. That last false light in them had glazed over and gone out.
"Oh, God, " I murmured and leaned over the counter, resting my head on my forearms.
Chapter 4
"We could tape your ribs up for you, if you like," the emergency room physician at Boston Medical Center Hospital offered. Dr. Kavrakos, his name tag said; a balding, abstracted, no-longer-young man with a bemused philosophical bent. Or else he’d been on duty too long and was maybe just the least little bit punch-drunk as a result.
I was pretty punch-drunk myself, having been given an injection of painkiller and sedative twenty minutes earlier.
"Will taping them up help?" I asked. I was slumped on the edge of an examining table dressed in nothing but a pair of blue socks and one of those paper tutus that tie at the back, and feeling appropriately ridiculous about it.
"Not really, no," said Dr. Kavrakos.
"Then why do it?"
He looked at me thoughtfully. "Good question."
"Let’s skip it then."
I was hoping for more in the way of medical advice but he just stood there, lost in contemplation, blowing his thinning, longish hair out of his eyes by sticking out his lower lip and puffing upward. It made him look like a philosophical chimp.
"Uh, do you suppose I could get dressed and get out of here now?" I asked.
He considered the question. "Do you have somebody to keep an eye on you at home?"
"Sure." A lie, of course, but, like most people, I find that a little bit of hospital goes a long way. I just wanted to go home.
"I suppose I don’t see why not, then. No driving, though. That’s a pretty powerful shot you’ve had."
"If the cop I gave my statement to is still around, he said he’d get me home. If not, I’ll take a taxi." The whereabouts of my car were a bit fuzzy anyway.
He scribbled out a prescription and tore it off the pad. "Every four hours as needed. It’s codeine, so I’m afraid trapeze-swinging and bungee-jumping are out for a while."
"Gee, that's going to wreck my plans. Anything else I need to do—or not do?"
As usual, he took his time answering. "Don’t do anything that hurts."
That, I thought, wincing as I got down from the table, wasn’t going to leave a whole hell of a lot. "Is there anything else I need to worry about besides the broken ribs?"
He shrugged. "The rest of it’s inconsequential."
"To you, maybe," I said.
Even after the painkiller I felt like one big ache. My cheek had swelled up so much that I couldn’t see out of my left eye, my hip felt has if it had been shattered with a hammer, and my head was pounding so hard I could feel it shudder with every throb. Those—aside from my ribs—were the major sources of discomfort, but there were plenty of minor ones too.
"I mean," he explained, "in the great scheme of things."
"Ah, the great scheme of things," I said, beginning to fall into his rhythm. "Doctor, you’re sure right about that."
However, the stuff he’d pumped into me had me good and mellow by now, and I wasn’t about to dwell on the great scheme of things. Time enough for that tomorrow. For the moment, all I could think about was going to bed.
* * *
But twenty minutes later, when the bored but solicitous young cop was helping me into the elevator in my building, another thought broke through the walking doze I had fallen into. I made some kind of noise and stopped in my tracks.
He gave me an anxious look. "Sorry, did I hurt you?"
"Ey vwawn buy vwiolyin," I said.
"Come again?"
I repeated it more distinctly. "Ey . . . vwawn . . . buy . . . vwiolyin. For nyephew."
"Yeah? No kidding. Come on, let's get you on up—"
"I'm telling you," I said, wondering crossly at his lack of comprehension, "that I just remembered why he looked familiar."
"'He' being. . . ?"
"The guy in the shop," I said. "The sonofabitch that killed Simeon."
Chapter 5
The thing that gets you down about broken ribs, I was finding out, is not so much the pain, but the tortoise-like slowness with which you have to do everything in order to avoid the pain. When you forget and do something reckless—like turning over in bed without first devising a plan for the sequence of bodily realignments necessary—you are promptly zinged with a reminder of the need for prudence. As a result, you soon start moving like a deep-sea diver on the floor of the ocean. Everything—getting out of your chair, brushing your teeth, going to the bathroom—takes five times as much time as it ought to and demands a meticulously drawn-up battle plan besides. But at least it can be done. You think you can’t learn to hiccup or sneeze in non-jarring slow motion? I assure you, you can.
However, I hadn’t yet gotten to that stage when the telephone beside my bed rang the next morning at a little after nine, dragging me out of a deep, drugged, eleven-hour sleep. Naturally enough, I reached for it without thinking. And naturally enough, under the circumstances, I promptly yelped at the teeth-grinding, spine-jarring jolt and fell rigidly back. After the fourth ring, the answering machine in the study clicked on but it was too far away for me to hear the message, and anyway, I had lost all interest in it. All I wanted to do was lie there, motionless and if possible mindless, until my nerve-endings stopped gasping and flopping around.
After four or five minutes I was able to (very, very slowly) reach for the plastic vial of codeine tablets that I had somehow thought to leave on the bedside table before falling into bed in my clothes. I was able to get the cap off in a mere ten seconds (no childproofing, thank God) and pop a couple of pills. There was no water to help them down but I wasn’t about to get up and go to the kitchen. In a few minutes the codeine kicked in and let me relax my muscles. For another minute or so I felt as if I was in heaven. And then, like a stifling, black cloud filling the room, came that awful first-thing-in-the-morning feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong, and that in another moment I’d remember what it was.
And in another moment I did. I remembered the day before. I remembered why I needed the codeine in the first place. I remembered Simeon.
It’s funny how the mind tries to get around facts it doe
sn’t want to accept, and how it doesn’t necessarily do it logically. He can’t be dead, I told myself, how could he be dead? I’d been right there in the shop, chatting with him, listening to his gentle, ironic jokes at four o’clock yesterday afternoon. How could he have been so wholly alive then, so wonderfully excited about the painting, and then be dead an hour-and-a-half later? Impossible. And yet, of course that’s the way it was, how else? You didn’t get dead gradually, over time. There wasn’t any in-between; one minute you were living, the next minute you weren’t. And for Simeon, that last, critical millisecond had come while I was calling 911. I’d practically seen the switch turn off and the light go out.
Remembering it now, I felt suddenly feeble and hollow, as if a spigot had been opened somewhere in my belly and my insides had drained out. He was dead because of me. It was the first time that particular thought had hit home. There was no way around it; I should have stood my ground, shouldn’t have let him talk me into leaving the picture in his shop. I had known better, known it was a stupid thing to do. How much effort would it have taken to convince him to let me put it someplace secure? Not a whole hell of a lot. But I’d shrugged my shoulders and hadn’t pursued it, and now that decent old man, my friend, was dead.
I must have dozed off, because the next time the telephone rang it woke me up again. This time I was smarter; I let it finish chirping away, then carefully felt my way for the first time through the elaborate process that was to be my getting-out-of-bed routine for the next several weeks: turn from lying on my back (the only position I could sleep in without pain) to my left side; worm my way to the edge of the bed by getting my fingers over the side of the mattress and tugging; hold on to the bedpost with my left hand while I slid both feet sideways to the floor; pause to regroup; slide my legs with infinite care down to the floor so that I was kneeling on the bedside rug, still hanging on to the bedpost; pull myself up, section by section—right leg, left leg, knees, hips, head—and voilà—an upright (more or less), bipedal human being!