“Joseph Connors, to see the bishop?”
“Mr. Connors,” she stammered, embarrassed because she had visualized him as fat. “He’s in his study. I’ll show you the way.”
“I’ll give you this chronologically,” Connors said. There were no niceties, no small talk, just a pause till the door clicked, leaving them alone, and then a dive-bombing into matters at hand. “She came to New York from New London on Monday, January eighth, on a Trailways bus. She registered at the Statler Hotel opposite Penn Station. She used the name Yvonne Clouzot.”
Something nudged Mark’s memory. “I know the name.”
“It was her mother’s.” Connors flattened his palms against the attaché case that lay nestled on his knees. After a moment he popped the two latches open. Papers came out.
“In twenty-five days in New York, she stayed in eight hotels. Not crème de la crème hotels, but good upper-middling midtown hotels. Those places cost bucks. She paid cash.”
“Where’d she get that much?” Mark asked.
“Good question. Her brother controls her checking accounts; she doesn’t even sign the checks. Which left only one possibility. She had to have savings accounts, and she had to have the passbooks in her possession. I have a friend at IRS. Everyone should have a friend at IRS. I was able to get last year’s interest records on Ariana Kinsolving. She had money squirreled away in seven New York savings banks. She closed out six of those. But the seventh account—Bank for Savings—is the interesting one. She drew a cashier’s check on that account for $2,000. Twenty-four days later, the last day we know for sure she was in town, she drew a $3,800 check on the same account. Both checks were made out to the same man. I doubt you would know Barney Medina.”
“I don’t.”
“This morning Medina and I had a talk.”
There was a beat of silence, and Mark understood that more than words had been exchanged.
“Does the name Vanessa Billings mean anything to you?”
“Should it?” Mark asked.
“Billings was Kavalaris’s pupil. She made a promising start and then she bombed out bad. You might say she retired without a trace. The day after Kavalaris disappeared from New London she hired Barney Medina to locate her ex-pupil. In my opinion, $3,800 is steep for the job he did for Miss Kavalaris. He showed me the records. Looks to me like he did a lot of drinking with hookers in Philly.”
“Philadelphia?”
“At present Miss Billings makes her home in the City of Brotherly Love. She works in a piano bar called Danny’s.”
He told Nita at breakfast that he would be going to Philadelphia that day. She knew instantly it had to do with Mr. Connors and the visit.
“Mark, do you have to? Nancy and Pancho de Grandfont are expecting us and they did invite us three weeks ago.”
“I have to go today. Please apologize for me.”
He found Danny’s bar that night, a run-down dive off Allen Street. A shakily lettered poster in the window announced TONIGHT—AT THE PIANO—AVA.
Beneath the chemical sting of air-freshener his nostrils caught a stale whiff of beer. He saw a bar, some tables, some drunks crammed into a narrow strip of wasteland. Plastic banners and miniature college flags gave the place all the gaiety of a used-car lot.
At the far end, a woman was singing at the piano. He took a table where he could watch.
The spotlight picked out a blond wig, fake black eyelashes, a lot of makeup. She wore a deep-cut pink ruffled blouse. It was a cheap pink but the long lacy sleeves drew attention to her hands floating over the keyboard. She threw back her head and let out the last, long note of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
He was the only one who applauded. She turned from the keyboard and looked at him carefully, and then she riffed a key-change and sang two numbers in perfectly accented French, “Parlez-moi d’amour” and “Je t’attendrai.”
He called, “Brava!” Not an opera house brava, just a polite understated nightclub brava.
She floated him a little smile, and then she reached under the piano stool to pick up a purse that was beginning to lose its sequins. She dug out a filter-tip cigarette and crossed to his table.
“Do you have a light?”
He stood and flicked the lighter his wife had given him. The singer bent into the flame.
They sat and the waitress, unasked, brought another Scotch.
The singer lifted her glass. “Thanks for the brava.”
“I meant it. You must have studied classical music.”
“I studied a lot of things. What’s your name?”
“I’m Mark.”
“What brings you to Danny’s, Mark—the pretty tunes?”
“I’m looking for someone. Her name’s Vanessa Billings.”
She finished her Scotch and stood. “So long, Mark.”
“That was quick.”
“I have to change and catch my bus. Thanks for the drink.” She turned and disappeared through the kitchen door.
He paid for the drinks and asked the hatcheck woman when Ava sang her last set.
“You just heard it.”
He went outside. It was raining.
Danny’s had a front entrance and a back door down an alley by the garbage cans. A little after two the alley door opened. For an instant raindrops flashed like a handful of tossed diamonds. A woman in a slicker and a pulled-down rain hat stepped out.
It was the singer. He followed her.
At the corner she hailed a taxi. It didn’t stop.
She turned up a side street and zigzagged through a neighborhood of saloons and boarded-up storefronts and room-to-let signs.
The rain made a sound like buckets of pennies being tossed.
He turned a corner and suddenly she wasn’t there. Through the darkness he could make out a dimly lighted archway and a passage beyond. The passageway led to a courtyard. There was a lighted window at the corner of the top story. He counted five flights and knew she couldn’t have gotten there that fast.
The light on the top story went out. He blew on his hands and bent to rub his legs. Suddenly there was a reflection on the wet cobblestones. On the third story a light filtered through slatted blinds like an eerie blue flame. He counted windows up and windows across, making sure he had the exact location.
A silhouette moved across the blinds and suddenly there was a distant voice. He listened and his heart tightened.
Through the splattering rain, barely audible above the drumming of water on drainpipes, Ariana Kavalaris was singing “Casta Diva.”
“That window there.” Mark pointed.
The janitor shielded his face against the morning sun. “Oh, yeah. The nightbird.”
Mark gave the janitor ten dollars. “What’s her name?”
“Ness.” The old man pulled a crumpled pack of Luckies from his workshirt. He offered Mark one and then lit a match on his blackened thumbnail. “Who are you, collection agency?”
“No, I’m just looking for a friend of Miss Ness’s.”
“You mean the woman that’s living with her?”
“Who’s that?”
The janitor’s bobsled nose crinkled. “Gray-haired. Old. Sick-looking. Don’t know her name. She never gets mail. Plays records when the other one’s out. Plays the piano too. There’s an old spinet up there. They sing. A lot of la-la-la stuff—classical. The neighbors complain. Doesn’t bother me, though. Live and let live, I say. Long as they’re not burning the place down.”
Late that evening Mark returned to Danny’s. He knew Ava Ness’s escape route and he took the table by the kitchen door. It was Friday, and that meant more of a crowd, more spilled beer, more talk during the numbers.
She sang Irving Berlin: “Always,” “Blue Skies,” songs of memory and promise that had been over the hill before she was born. After the set she smiled to a spattering of applause. The spotlight clicked off. Her face immediately reverted to a sullen blankness, and she went to sit with a man at a front table.
So
mething was exchanged. Mark couldn’t see whether it was a piece of paper or a matchbook or money—just something small that slid from the man’s hand to hers, and then she was coming through the tables toward the kitchen.
Mark rose. “Good evening, Miss Ness. Won’t you join me for a minute?”
He signaled for two Scotches. The bartender was watching and that seemed to affect her decision. She sat.
“My janitor says you’ve been asking about me,” she said.
“Your janitor tells me you’re living with a sick woman.”
“Why don’t you leave me alone?”
“How long has she been vomiting, Miss Ness? How much weight does she lose each day? How much strength?”
“There’s nothing happening that I can’t handle.”
“There’s nothing happening that you can handle. Look at you. You have a God-given voice. You belong in a concert hall or on an opera stage and here you are wandering the belly of the city.”
“That’s my business,” she said in a flat voice that exactly matched her eyes.
“Your friend belongs in a hospital, but you’ve got her tucked in a slum. Maybe you think that’s your business too. I suggest you get it through your head, Miss Billings—”
“You had it right the first time. Ness. The name’s Ness.”
“Can’t you understand I’m trying to help that woman?”
“A lot of people said that. It took a lot of help to get her where she is now.”
“And maybe with a different sort of help we can get her out of where she is now.”
“What’s so different about your help?”
“I care about her.”
“Oh, Jesus. Now you care.”
“Now is all she’s got left, Miss Ness. And maybe—with the right treatment—a tomorrow or two.”
“She’s not too interested in those tomorrows.”
“You still haven’t any right to take them from her.”
Miss Ness’s mouth narrowed into a grimace of determination. “I’m not taking anything from anyone—least of all crap from you.”
“She’s dying. And you’re as good as killing her, keeping her in that rattrap.”
“Screw you, Charley.”
“This is my card—don’t rip that card, Miss Ness. That’s my name, that’s my job. My real name, my real job. You can ask your friend about me. Tell her I’m here. Tell her I’m here to help. And then phone me. I’m at the Hilton.”
“That figures. In a suite?”
“I have a single bedroom, Miss Ness. The same as you.”
He knew from her eyes he’d said just enough.
“Goodnight, Miss Ness.” He rose and turned and then he was gone.
At 2:30 in the morning the phone jangled by the bedside and a thin, urgent voice said Miss Billings was in the hotel lobby.
“Send her up.” Mark dressed quickly.
There was a knock at the door. Little dark pearls of rain still clung to the raincoat of the woman who had called herself Ava Ness. She gave him a look and he saw terror in it.
“Ariana’s vomiting blood,” she said. “She’s delirious.”
A knot formed in his stomach. He went to the phone. “This is Bishop Mark Rutherford. Room 711. I need the hotel doctor right away.”
“We’ll have to wake him, Bishop.”
“Then please do. This is an emergency.”
They waited, listening to the rain pulse against the window. It was almost forty minutes before the doctor arrived, a bald man with a dripping umbrella in one hand and a pigskin satchel in the other.
“Okay, which one of you two’s dying?”
“The sick woman’s across town,” Mark said. “We’ll take a taxi, unless you have a car.”
The doctor’s eyes narrowed in disbelief, and Mark noticed a half-inch of pajama top peeking out the back of his shirt collar.
“Now hold it a minute. I only treat hotel guests and my private patients.”
Mark had taken the measure of a great many doctors. He knew the profession and he knew its ethic. He pulled a $100 bill from his wallet. He tucked it into the doctor’s breast pocket.
The doctor glanced down at his blazer. “The insurance companies give me that much for letting a patient sit in my waiting room.”
Mark held out a second hundred. “This is untaxed money, doctor. In your bracket it’s worth $400. Four hundred for one house call.”
The doctor took the money. “My car’s downstairs.”
They rushed up the stairs, their shadows rippling beside them over the peeling walls. Vanessa let them into an airless room with a single shuttered window.
To the right was a tiny battered spinet piano, to the left a table with a phonograph. Between these two dark shapes was the dim light of a lowered lamp. On the small bed in the corner a bony figure was stretched, motionless, wrapped in a blanket.
Mark saw with a shock that it was an old woman. She was lying on her back, her head with its gray face, set like stone, flung back on the pillow. Even unconscious, she was making a hacking attempt to breathe.
He stared and took a step forward. “Ariana,” he said.
His eyes misted. He remembered a glowing little girl in a frilled white skirt, her black hair hanging to her shoulders.
A spasm racked the body, followed by a convulsive cough. A thin dribble of blood broke at the side of the mouth.
The doctor drew back the sweat-soaked sheet. The abdomen was swollen. He gently tapped the rib cage. There was a sound like a hollow drum being beaten. His lips set in a grim line. He took the wrist between his fingers, delicately, as though it were a brittle stick of candy, and counted the pulse against the second hand of his wristwatch.
“Her heart is giving out. I can’t help her here. We have to call an ambulance and get her to a hospital. Is there a phone?”
“There’s a pay phone downstairs,” Vanessa said. “The dime slot’s stuck. It only takes nickels.” She went to the table and tipped two nickels from a cracked teacup into her palm. She handed them to the doctor. He made a face, as though walking those two flights again were the grimmest affront yet, and left the room quickly.
Ariana was making a gasping sound. Vanessa leaned over her, took up her limp hand, rubbed it rapidly.
Ariana’s eyes opened slowly. She stared at the figure seated on the bed beside her, lit by a thin flow of light from the door.
“Vanessa?” Her voice was a hacking whisper. “I was afraid you’d left me.
“Don’t tire yourself trying to talk. We’ve gotten a doctor. You’re going to the hospital.”
Ariana shook her head. “It’s too late.” There was a quick urgency to her movements as she tried to unclasp the locket from her neck. “Help me,” she said weakly. “The voice. Quickly. It must not die with me.”
Following her teacher’s gestured instructions, Vanessa undid the catch and lifted the locket free.
“This locket,” Ariana said, “is my voice. I bequeath it to you. Do you accept?”
Vanessa, too startled even to think, nodded.
Her teacher’s voice, barely audible now, went on. “You must take a student. Train her in your repertory. Once you have taught her a role you must never perform that role again. Within twenty-five years you must turn your entire repertory over to your pupil.”
The locket hung a moment between them, swinging slowly from its golden chain.
“Before you renounce your last role—you may choose the moment—give this locket to your pupil. Make her promise as I now make you promise.”
Ariana’s fingers dug into Vanessa’s arm with such surprising force that the younger woman had to beat back an instinctive impulse to pull free.
“Swear. Keep the promise I left unkept. Finish the life I left unfinished.”
Vanessa was certain her teacher had entered the final delirium. She threw a panicked glance behind her, looking for the doctor.
The fingers tugged at her. “Swear before I die.”
“You’
re not going to die.”
“Swear!”
Vanessa saw unmistakable terror in those failing eyes. What was the harm in swearing, she wondered, if it would bring peace to a suffering woman’s last hour?
Her glance met Mark’s, and it seemed to her that he nodded.
“I swear,” she said.
The locket, its gold and its rubies and amethysts unaged, unflawed, passed from the old woman’s hands, wrinkled and spotted with the years, to the graceful smooth hands of the young woman.
“Put it on,” Ariana whispered. “Let me see it on you.”
Vanessa fastened the locket around her neck.
Ariana smiled. “Yes. That’s where it—” She sighed and fell back suddenly against the pillow.
The doctor came hurrying breathlessly through the door. “An ambulance is on its way.”
Ariana rolled her head sideways on the pillow, squinting beyond the circle of lamplight. For the first time she seemed to be aware of the man who had been standing there silently watching.
“Who’s that?”
The doctor stepped forward. “I’m Dr.—”
Weakly, Ariana waved him aside. “No—there’s someone else.”
Mark came to her and bent down and put his hand to her hair. She placed her hand on his. Lifting her head with effort, she gazed at him.
His temples had grayed and his skin was lined, but in the dim shadowed light of the sickroom his face for an instant seemed to be that of a young man.
Then in her memory she saw sunlight streaming through a window from a garden, and walking through the gate, back from his studies, a young seminarian with glowing eyes and ruddy cheeks. She heard his steps bounding up the stairs, and the door hinges squeaked the two notes of “Amazing Grace” that meant he was home.
“Mark?” Her voice was strange and wondering. Suddenly her colorless lips parted and a shudder passed through her: her head lifted up from the pillow and a sound almost of pain ripped out of her: “Mark!”
She seized his hand. He bowed his head to her bosom, and he could hear the life racing out of her.
Her voice was scarcely audible now. “Mark. Oh my darling…”
Her hand explored him, feeling the thick gray hair at the back of his neck.
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