The Man Who Lied To Women

by Carol O’Connell

‘That wouldn’t make sense if she died of a heart attack.’

  ‘It is interesting, isn’t it? And now I expect you’ll want me to describe the police officer?’

  Mallory smiled. Yeah, right.

  ‘He was tall and thin,’ and as though Franz had read the expression on her face, he hurried on to answer her next unasked question. ‘He made long strides. He knocked into me. I remember saying to him, “What are you – blind?” I never miss an opportunity to use that line. When he knocked into me there wasn’t much bulk to him. He apologized and, judging by his accent, he was originally from Brooklyn. Oh, and he wore too much aftershave. It was a very expensive brand. And his coat was made of leather.’

  ‘You mentioned the ME investigator.’

  ‘Oh, that man was already up there in the judge’s apartment. The Hearts’ family doctor was there, too. I was sitting in the lobby waiting for a friend who was detained in traffic. All of them trooped past me.’

  The detective could only be Palanski. Palanski again. He was the closest thing NYPD had to an ambulance chaser.

  The mouse crept silendy across the kitchen floor, mindful of the giant’s blue pajama legs. Its small eyes were filled with the reflected crumbs of a golden croissant. It snatched up the bread and scurried back to its hiding place beneath the refrigerator, where it sat feeding in the dark, insanely pleased with itself.

  Charles watched the cream bubble over a blue gas flame and wondered how many days the mouse might have left in this world. Mrs Ortega had tried repeatedly to murder it with traps, to break its back with a broom, and to poison it. So far, the savvy city mouse had eluded her with supernatural skill, and gained Charles’s respect. But Mrs Ortega was also a mythic creature in her own right. However quick the mouse might be, Mrs Ortega was sure to be close behind it, broom held high.

  The mouse was as good as dead.

  The coffee dripped its rich brown juices down into the carafe. The heady aroma wafted high up to the fifteen-foot ceiling of the kitchen and beyond the appreciation of the mouse and the man.

  Charles carried his coffee into the front room and set it down beside the bulky manuscript. He cleared his mind of all but the task at hand.

  One thing became clear to him in the first twenty pages of text: if Amanda Bosch was the female character, she had no capacity for self-delusion. He ceased to speed read and slowed down to a human pace, for this was very human material – Amanda awaking from a bad dream and finding it there beside her in her bed.

  The male character of the novel seemed not to know or care about the rules between men and women when they became lovers. The woman wondered why he came back time and again. He showed so little interest in the affair once the conquest of her had been made.

  The excuses he gave to explain his infrequent need of her were insulting. Yet she did not end the affair, telling herself it was better to be touched by this cold and dispassionate man than never to be touched at all. This, she realized, must be what it was like to feel as a man did when he separated the act from the partner. She never asked about his wife, fearing that he had never felt anything for her either, nor for anyone. He could make love to a woman better than any man she had ever known, yet he did not like women.

  When they were together, in warm weather and cold, the bedding would always be soaked with sex and sweat. They went swimming in the fluid off their bodies, plunging down and rising up in the water that streamed off their flesh. He would make her come first, insisting on it, manipulating her body. And when she came, he took a technician’s pride in this job well done. There was a perverse coldness in the very heat of the act.

  He would be dressed when she came out of the bathroom, where she had been emptying out his sperm and flushing it away to the sea. She would watch his back as he walked to the door, reciting the litany of excuses, not turning to say goodbye, and never a kiss, as though to teach her not to set too much store by this attachment which was detachment.

  She would strip the wet bedding off the mattress and lay it out to dry in the air – the heat of July the first time, and the winter now. It was better than nothing, she told herself, knowing it was not.

  Charles looked away from the manuscript to a clear place on the wall beside his chair. Eidetic memory called up the photograph of Amanda Bosch which Riker had shown him only once. His vision was a perfect reproduction, even to the smudge and crease at the upper left-hand corner of the print. Her sad eyes stared at him. The expression was in the very shape of her eyes, a sadness fashioned in her mother’s womb.

  He felt that he knew Amanda Bosch so well, he might have had a dialogue with her and predicted the answers to nearly every question.

  If he only had her back to life for a minute’s work.

  But only Malakhai could have pulled off that stunning trick – to blend the device of dialogues and the illusion of a woman with uncanny, unerring faithfulness to life.

  He had often thought of Malakhai over the years, the elderly magician and his strange creation. What a mad idea.

  And yet.

  The manuscript did promise an exquisite problem in mental construction. It could be done. The manuscript’s narrative was no mere imitation of life, it was Amanda’s mind at work. With only the manuscript and the photograph, the old man could have done this. But the old magician was insane, and far from here in mind and body.

  It was a lunatic idea, and he must let it go.

  He turned back to the manuscript, but the face of Amanda would not leave him. Eidetic memory had called it up, and his mind’s eye could not send it away. It swam over the text. His thoughts ran strongly with Malakhai now, as he stared into Amanda’s eyes.

  Oh, Malakhai, how do you like your last days, old man? Are you still in love with Louisa? Still crazy? And does that dead woman share your bed tonight?

  He stared at the telephone. With one call he might have an audience with the greatest magician who ever lived. Cousin Max had said there was none better, cracked brain or no. What would he say to Malakhai? ‘Excuse me for presuming on family connections, but I have a small problem with a dead woman of my own. How do I go about becoming as mad as you are? Or am I half the way gone already?’

  He shook his head slowly from side to side. This was no kind of dabble for an amateur in the art of illusion. He must not forget what the mental construction of a succubus had cost Malakhai, who was a master. He turned back to the manuscript. It was that time of night, he supposed, when mad ideas seemed the most wonderful.

  He was an hour into his reading when a noise called his attention away from the pages. He was unaccustomed to company at this hour. He had forgotten about Nose. Now he watched the cat a scant few inches from his slippers.

  The fact that Nose was declawed had hampered the animal only slightly. A small brown mouse had wriggled free of the clawless paws only to be captured more firmly in rows of sharp white teeth. Charles silently rooted for mouse. The cat’s teeth crunched down on small bones. The mouse cried. It was not a squeak; the tiny animal was crying.

  The cat looked up at him, very Mallory in the color and the aspect of its eyes.

  He reached down with the good intention of taking the mouse away to kill it quickly. The cat emitted a low warning growl, and the tail began to switch and threaten as his hand hovered near the mouse.

  Back off, said the cat’s eyes. It’s my toy, not yours.

  Angel Kipling gathered the quilted silk of her robe closer about her person, as though the room might be cold. It was not.

  She sat before the computer, transfixed by what was written there in the personal message file. She could see her husband in the reflection of the dark screen behind the green letters. A tiny replica of Harry floated toward her from deep inside the box of glowing letters. Now she could feel the heat of him standing close behind her chair.

  ‘Angel, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Oh nothing, Harry.’ She continued to stare at the screen. At last, she said, ‘It’s a personal message. I think it must be for yo
u.’

  She rose from her chair and walked slowly in the direction of her own bedroom, where she slept alone. She turned to see him bending over the computer monitor, reading the message which filled the scrolling screen and repeated endlessly: YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR…

  He only wanted to be where the cat was not feeding on the mouse. He unlocked the door of the office across the hall from his residence, and at the touch of a button, the reception room filled with soft colored light from antique shades of stained glass. The ancient woodwork of furniture and tall arched window frames gleamed and lustered.

  He wandered into the back room which was Mallory’s office and another planet. The wall switch filled this room with harsh light, bright as day, and brought him rudely and solidly into the age of electronics. Machines gleamed and stared at him with dead gray terminal eyes. The beige metal knights of the New Order formed a row of perfect symmetry. A wall of manuals faced a wall of equipment, and no speck of dust dared alight in this place for fear of Mallory the Neat.

  The corkboard which lined the rear wall was an even more ruthless departure from his own world of antiques and all things civilized. If murder be Mallory’s religion, the ghastly collage of this wall was a shrine to Amanda Bosch, a Madonna without a child.

  When had Mallory accomplished all of this? Did she never sleep?

  There were photographs of Amanda’s apartment, her person, and samples of her handwriting. Mallory’s precision in the neat placement of every item was overridden by the softer personality of Amanda. The shot to his heart was the picture of the old wooden cradle Amanda had purchased for her unborn child.

  He looked at the autopsy photos and looked away. The crime site photos were more palatable. But every artifact of the death had become intensely personal, for now he knew this woman as few people could have known her in life.

  The best of the death photos was centered on the board. The damage to the skin of her face he overlaid with a memory of the photo Riker had shown him when she posed as a living model. He superimposed the rosy live flesh over the white and the dead. When the living image lay over the death mask, it had the unsettling effect of the photographic woman suddenly opening her eyes.

  His mind did a little dance and jog away from reality and then came back to it with caution, tripping all the way, falling now as the wound to the side of her head bled through the double image. He winced at the living expression juxtaposed with the clotted blood. The brown blazer she died in bore the drippings of the wound in a great bloody stain draped over one shoulder.

  She was smiling. That bothered him. He found he could alter the smile to a more appropriate expression and still be true to the likeness. Now her facial arrangement seemed only friendly and slightly inquisitive. ‘What now?’ it asked. He held this new image of her for too long – so long that it would remain in memory for years.

  He scanned the items of the apartment inventory and found a bottle of her perfume on the list. He found it again in the photograph of her bathroom counter. She wore the scent of roses. The perfume bottle bore the logo of an old and prestigious house. He remembered seeing a bottle of that scent among the sequined costumes and the make-up boxes in the cellar where the illusions of Maximillian Candle were stored.

  Her husband was staring at the computer screen when she walked into the room.

  Pansy Heart came up behind him softly. Noise of any kind irritated him. Over his shoulder she read the words, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR. The words filled out the entire screen. She looked up to the slot at the top of the screen, which labeled this file as a personal message.

  He turned on her. His face was red with anger.

  ‘Don’t you ever sneak up behind me again!’

  She backed away quickly, stilling the hand that rose almost of its own accord when it sensed an oncoming blow. But he only turned his face back to the screen. He pounded on the console and sent the books and papers flying. She knelt on the carpet and began to crawl on all fours, retrieving every fallen thing.

  ‘Get out of here!’ he yelled. ‘Get out!’

  She backed away from him, still on her knees, then stumbling to a stand, now scurrying off down the hall. As she entered the bedroom, she was met by her own reflection hurrying toward her. She stopped before the full-length mirror and fit her fist into her mouth to keep from crying out loud.

  When had she dropped so much weight?

  With her hair pulled back the way he insisted she wear it, and with the new thinness of her body, and now that expression of a hunted animal, she had come to be a living likeness of Judge Emery Heart’s dead mother.

  The braille printer scrolled out the message, filling sheet after sheet with two damning words.

  Eric Franz sat very still, eyes fixed on a scene inside his head, a horror movie that never ended. A bright snowfall cascaded by the wide front window, large flakes illuminated by the building’s exterior lights. He turned from the window and ripped the scrolling sheets from the printer.

  And now it snowed outside and inside as he created his own small storm of white flakes of paper being torn into ever smaller bits. He worked in the dark.

  His hands were full when he returned to the front room of his apartment. Charles unloaded his small cache on the coffee table. Of the ingredients for making a woman, Riker’s contribution had been half a pack of cigarettes left behind this afternoon. According to the medical examiner’s report on Mallory’s wall, Amanda had been a smoker. There were no cigarettes on Mallory’s meticulous inventory. Amanda might have given up the habit when she knew she was pregnant, but her manuscript was filled with imagery of smoke, matches struck in the dark when she woke alone to hug her knees and rock her body and hold herself in her own arms through the long night into a morning of filled ashtrays and dust motes swirling in the blue smoke and the gray light.

  Cousin Max’s contribution had been the bottle of rose scent from the old wardrobe box in the basement. Old Malakhai’s Louisa had gone everywhere in the scent of gardenias. Amanda Bosch had gone about in roses.

  He called up Amanda’s face on a patch of wall, the eidetic images of life over death, which were fixed in memory.

  Now what was Malakhai’s recipe!

  He should have started with a massive head injury like the one Malakhai had sustained in the Korean conflict. Such a wound was definitely concomitant with all the most bizarre aberrations, such as the stigmata.

  Well, if he had no physical trauma, he certainly had his own injuries to the heart and the mind. And perhaps this was Mallory’s contribution to the unholy stew.

  Next on the list would be the years of Malakhai’s solitary confinement in a Korean prison cell, the terrible isolation he had suffered, emerging finally from that cell with a phantom Louisa.

  Charles reflected on his own years of isolation. A sprawling university campus was as close to the six-foot square cell as he could come. He thought of his years of being the freak child among the tall students ten years his senior. And then came the years of isolation in the sheltering womb of Effrim Wilde’s think tank before making his escape into real life and his own consulting firm.

  For most of his life, he had been a thing apart, an alien in a culture of socially adept people. All of this would nearly approximate Malakhai’s isolation from the world. But he needn’t go back so far in time. There was the ache of loneliness each time Mallory quit a room.

  Another contribution, thank you, Mallory.

  If anything should happen to Mallory, she could never be reconstructed as Malakhai had done for Louisa, as he would attempt to do for Amanda Bosch. No one had access to Mallory’s thoughts and feelings. Nothing must ever happen to her.

  Oh, fool.

  He had forgotten the music. The concerto had been a prime ingredient in Malakhai’s creation of Louisa. In childhood, it had been the trigger of his own imagination. His copy of the concerto had been worn to shreds. But the music was so much a part of him he had never thought to replace the recording. Th
ere was an old 78 vinyl record in the basement somewhere, as well as the old turntable for that period of technology.

  Ah, but wait. If Amanda Bosch was to be a mental construct, perhaps he should practice first with the music. He had only heard the piece a thousand times in his life.

  Now he had all the ingredients of Malakhai’s madness. The music, the scent, and the loneliness.

  Yes, he could manage it.

  He lit one of Riker’s cigarettes and set it to smoking in the ashtray. He concentrated on Amanda’s face, recreating the image he had composed in Mallory’s office, the pictures of life imposed on death. And now the eyes of Amanda Bosch stared into his own. Photographic memory assisted him with every detail of those sad eyes. She had only the flatness of any photograph he could call up, for he was no Malakhai. But even in this poor translation, she was compelling. The eyes communicated much of her, even in the poverty of only two dimensions. Mystery was there, and profound loss.

  And now with an inner ear, he searched for the notes of Louisa’s Concerto.

  He had been a child of seven the first time he heard the work performed as the overture to Malakhai’s performance of magic and the madness of dead Louisa. Cousin Max had taken him to the show as a treat for his birthday.

  He could find many of his own features in his adult cousin, but Max had been a handsome translation: a nose not so great, and eyes with a more normal proportion of white to the colored bits.

  He and Cousin Max had found the way to their seats by the glow of flickering candle footlights. The conductor’s baton was rising as they settled down to the red velvet chairs in the concert hall.

  There had been no gentle beginning to Louisa’s Concerto. The instruments had welled up and rocked him with an explosion of opening chords, and the music rolled over him, powerful and eerie, then calmer, subsiding into echoes of music within the movement, metaphors of empty corridors. The music rose again to crash down upon him with a passion. And then, at the most unexpected moment, there was a lull, bleeding into an empty silence that caused angst among all the listeners. It was a vacant space which the ear strained to fill with echoes from the refrain – echoes that were not heard, except in the mind. It was a true vacuum, and the imagination of every independent listener had rushed to fill it with phantom notes to end the terrible, unbearable silence.