The Rules of Dreaming

by Hartman, Bruce

  It was touching, but also a little shocking, to see her in that position. I felt a thrill of sexual excitement tinged with jealousy and violence. I wanted to throw her down on the marble floor and ravish her mercilessly, but at the same time I wanted to kneel down and pray beside her, I wanted to sense her warmth and feel her murmuring breath and touch her spirit. Her promiscuous past, her flirtations with other men, the obscenities she whispered in Gottlieb’s ear—those I could deal with. But this, this excited my jealousy and lust beyond anything I’d ever felt before. She was suddenly more desirable than I could have imagined, more desirable than any woman could ever be. I knew I would do anything to have her.

  * * *

  He wouldn’t be able to come over that night. That was the message Dubin had left for Nicole on her answering machine. She panicked when she heard it, pushing the “Repeat” button again and again as if she expected the message to change if she listened to it the right number of times. He offered no explanation for not coming, and that troubled her. Obviously it was something she’d said or done the night before. Was it because she’d playfully mentioned him as a possible suspect in the killings? No, he couldn’t have taken that seriously. More likely it was because she’d unmasked him as a blackmailer. Only a blackmailer would try to argue, even hypothetically, that he was above suspicion because he couldn’t be blackmailing someone for his own crime. Obviously Dubin was a troubled man, cynical yet tormented by guilt, and she was angry with herself for scaring him away.

  Without Dubin, she sat in the dim light and followed the dark tangle of her own thoughts into the deepest part of the night. She listened to the cypresses scratching the eaves in the moaning wind, the rodents scrubbing and scrambling behind the walls, the leaky faucet tormenting the bathroom sink—and strained, amidst all this, to hear a footstep on the stairs, the slow creak of an intruder who would take her out of the web of fear and despair that encircled her. Just before dawn she imagined herself in the listening room at the library, putting a record on the turntable. The music of Schumann’s Kreisleriana rattled through the little room, then came the sudden halt, the scratched record insisting on its imperfection over and over again. Hunter fled from the listening the room and Miss Whipple burst in, frowning as she bent over to lift the needle off the record. Nicole ran out to the front desk and found Julietta sitting there, knitting a tiny blue sweater.

  Nicole jolted awake and sat thinking about her dream. It was incoherent, of course; it was a dream—all the more reason to think it had a meaning. But what about real life? Does anyone think real life must have a meaning?

  She reached for her notebook and started writing. She became more and more agitated as she wrote, as if she was on the brink of a discovery she did not want to make, a momentous and inevitable discovery, like the knowledge of good and evil, that would make the space where she lived uninhabitable. Everything that had been weighing on her mind—her dissertation, the murders, the search for Hunter, her relationships with Dubin and Dr. Hoffmann—gave way to the temptation to follow her thoughts wherever they led:

  Freud imagined a dream censor, shielding us during sleep from the unwelcome attentions of the unconscious. But instead of a dream censor, maybe what we have is a reality censor that operates while we’re awake, filtering out the essential incoherence of the world so we can survive in our dreamlike state for another day.

  She laid down her pen and cradled her head in her flat hands. Tears welled up in her eyes as she read over what she had written. “No,” she said, shaking her head. She picked up her pen and drew a giant “X” across the page, canceling what she had written while leaving it legible for future reference. Then she printed in bold letters at the bottom: “KEEP FROM GOING CRAZY.”

  When the sun rose she took a shower and put on fresh clothes. She boiled some water for tea and toasted an English muffin. When she was done eating she washed the dishes and put them away. “Follow him,” she told herself. “Find him. Don’t let him destroy himself.”

  She packed a small valise, carried it down the stairs and put it in her car. Then she came back upstairs. Before she locked the door, she poured a generous supply of dry food for the landlady’s cat and filled two bowls with fresh water. Almost as an afterthought, she wrote Dubin a little note and left it tacked to the door.

  * * *

  The next morning I rose early and slipped down to the lobby, where I learned from a solemn but accommodating room clerk that Signora Gottlieb (that was what he called Julietta) was already at the pool. This being Italy, I did not have to make excuses to the room clerk for pursuing another man’s wife. He could probably see the desperate gleam in my eye, imprinted there since I’d seen Julietta kneeling in the Chapel of the Madonna in those black leather boots laced to her knees.

  She had come to the pool alone, decorated by a tiny blue bathing suit. I hid behind my newspaper as she swam laps with surprising gracefulness. On her lounge chair she had left her sandals, her towel and, of all things, a book. The book was Cujo, by Stephen King, and when I picked it up her room key—it was the old fashioned metal kind, not one of those plastic cards that most hotels use nowadays—jangled onto the floor. I reached for the key and thought about sticking it in my pocket. But at the last minute I slid the key back under the book and shuffled back to my room. How much trouble and anguish I could have avoided by keeping that key!

  A desperate plan began to take shape in my mind. I slipped out into the fog and made my way through a maze of narrow passageways and bridges to the train station, where I rented a car and stashed it in the parking lot. On my way back to the hotel I bought a dozen long-stemmed roses and left them for Julietta at the front desk, with a note that read, “5:00 o’clock in the bar. An admirer.”

  At five o’clock I waited in a dim corner booth. A few minutes later she sidled up to the bar and perched beside an older man who acted as if he’d been expecting her. He looked rich and charming and sinister, with a reptilian smile, a high, broad forehead and a shock of graying hair combed straight back like Count Dracula’s. The two of them flirted shamelessly as he ordered her a drink, stroked the back of her hand and lit her cigarette with a flame that he seemed to pull out of the air. I sat quietly sipping my wine as he droned on in words I couldn’t quite hear or understand, and after about twenty minutes he pulled out a necklace of glittering jewels, which he fastened lovingly around her neck. She seemed delighted with the gift but disturbed by the words that accompanied it. After a brief argument she suddenly stood up and hurried away without a backward glance. “A più tardi,” the man called after her. “Later. At the Casino!”

  What a coincidence! I thought, downing the last of my wine. The Casino was exactly where I planned to spend the evening.

  * * *

  Nicole’s sudden disappearance left Dubin feeling more guilty and depressed than ever. Two women were dead because of him and he desperately wanted to stop this nightmare before it got worse. And now it seemed as though Nicole had been swept up in it and lost to the night. It was her playing on his guilt—pretending, as if it were a joke, that he was one of the suspects in the murders—that made him angry and frightened and kept him away that night. He’d left her a noncommittal phone message and stayed home drinking by himself until he fell asleep. He wondered whether guilt could reach backwards in time, drawing in all the causes and effects that swirled around an event. If he was responsible for the deaths of Mrs. Paterson and the librarian—as he knew he was—then wasn’t he also somehow implicated in the death of Maria Morgan? Where had he been on the night she died? He couldn’t answer that question, though he could cite the date. That was the year of his breakdown and there wasn’t much he could remember. He couldn’t even be sure whether or not he’d been to Egdon before or even to the Institute. When he woke up he wanted to see Nicole. He wanted to tell her how he felt and see if she had any wacky theories that could explain it. He drank a cup of black coffee and drove over to her apartment but she was gone. All he found was her note: �
��There’s something I have to do. Back in a few days. P.S. Hunter took the record. I found it at the Institute.”

  At the bottom of the stairs Dubin came face to face with Peter Bartolli, who jumped back from the door like a rabbit and stood eyeing him warily as if he expected him to pounce.

  “Is Nicole at home?” Bartolli asked. “I wanted to see how she was doing.”

  “She’s gone away for a few days. I don’t know where.”

  “Out searching for Hunter?”

  “I don’t know,” Dubin repeated, though he’d made the same assumption.

  Bartolli stayed put, as if he expected Dubin to step aside and let him pass. Dubin stepped toward his car and Bartolli still didn’t move.

  “Did I pass the test?” Bartolli asked.

  “What test?”

  “To be able to buy the Offenbach manuscript?”

  Dubin had dreaded this moment. “I’m afraid that doesn’t matter anymore. The owner has decided to sell it to someone else.”

  Bartolli took the news calmly. “I’m sure I can change her mind. Would you like to come back out to my house to discuss it? I can make it worth your while.”

  “Too late. It’s already been sold.”

  “Nothing’s ever final, though, is it? Why don’t you stop by and we can discuss it?”

  Dubin shrugged and continued toward his car. “The manuscript has been sold.”

  “Please come anyway.” Bartolli followed him out to the street and stood behind him as he unlocked his car. “You’d enjoy seeing the rest of my collections. I’ve got a number of interesting manuscripts, including the autograph score of Boito’s Mefistofile, dozens of ritual masks from Polynesia, and of course my collection of kaleidoscopes.”

  “Kaleidoscopes?”

  “Yes. I collect kaleidoscopes from all over the world.”

  Dubin smiled for the first time and took a deep breath to keep from showing his excitement. “That’s something I am interested in,” he said evenly. “I’d like to come out and see them.”

  They arranged to have lunch the next afternoon. Bartolli hinted that there was something else, in addition to the Offenbach manuscript and his collecting interests, that he wanted to discuss with Dubin. “As you know,” he added for no apparent reason, “I’m a practicing psychiatrist.”

  Dubin climbed into his car and Bartolli smiled down at him through the open window. “I’ve often said that a psychiatrist is a kind of detective,” Bartolli said. “But a cynic might say we’re more like blackmailers than detectives.”

  Dubin felt a little chill run through him as he returned the smile. “Really? Why is that?”

  “What does a psychiatrist do? He gets you to tell him something you’re ashamed of and then makes you pay him large sums of money to keep it to yourself.”

  They both laughed. “But a psychiatrist can never tell anyone what he found out,” Dubin said.

  “Neither can a blackmailer, Mr. Dubin. As soon as a blackmailer reveals the secret, it’s not a secret anymore. So, like a psychiatrist, he makes you pay an amount you can just barely afford—not all at once, but on a regular basis—for an indefinite period of time stretching far into the future. And you pay it, hoping that someday, if you’re lucky, your tormentor will go away and you can get on with your life.”

  Dubin started the car and raced the engine, forcing Bartolli back from the window. “Then being a psychiatrist must be a dangerous profession.”

  “Oh, it is, Mr. Dubin. It’s a very dangerous profession. Almost as dangerous as being a blackmailer.”

  Chapter 26

  It was nearly ten o’clock by the time Julietta and Gottlieb, arm in arm, swayed across the terrace to board the gondola that would carry them to the Casino. They were dressed to kill, Julietta in a black evening gown, Gottlieb stuffed into his white tie and tails like a penguin on an eating binge. Together they moved in stately pomp down to the boat landing, without so much as a glance at the desolate figure huddled beneath his umbrella on the windy terrace. Having fortified myself with an entire bottle of wine, I caught the next vaporetto toward the Casino. And I wondered as I watched the boat’s lights carve their way through the fog: Did Gottlieb realize that a rival waited for him at the Casino? That in that playground of desire, where money is the soul of a soulless world, his fate would be decided?

  My reverie was interrupted by a familiar voice behind me.

  “Dr. Hoffmann! Do you know where she’s leading you?”

  I spun around and came face to face with Nicole. Beautiful, bedeviled Nicole, who in another lifetime I might have made my own. “Nicole,” I stammered. “What are you doing here?”

  “I followed you,” she said. “That day you left the Institute with your suitcase. I figured out where you were going and followed you.”

  “You should go back,” I said, trying to sound professional. “There’s no reason for you to be here. We can talk again at your next session.” I clung to the rail as the wake from another vaporetto lifted the boat and made me stagger.

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “It’s the boat.”

  “No, it’s you. You can hardly stand up.”

  We found a pair of seats across from each other near the back of the boat. Nicole pleaded with me to give up my quest for Julietta.

  “Does Dr. Gottlieb know you’re here?”

  “Not yet,” I smiled, enjoying the prospect of a confrontation at the Casino.

  “Don’t let him see you, then. You’ll lose your job if they find out you followed her here.”

  It was touching, as Nicole almost always is. She was caring, persuasive and absolutely right, as I must have known even then. But she was, after all, a mental patient. I wasn’t about to have her directing my life.

  The Casino was a gloomy, fantastic structure overhanging the canal. When our boat stopped I jumped off without looking back to see if Nicole was behind me and hurried through a series of narrow alleyways to the entrance. A large crowd stood milling on a terrace that extended over the Grand Canal. “Richard Wagner died in this palazzo in 1883,” I heard a man telling his wife. And it was as if Wagner’s worst nightmares had been left behind as guests of the Casino—overstuffed blondes who looked like they might be named Brünnhilde, crazed Dutchmen, vixens and valkyries, even a dwarf, all dressed like characters in a 1930s musical. They circulated around the foyer and the terrace and up the stairs to the gaming rooms, ignoring each other in a dozen languages.

  At the top of the stairs I was greeted by Julietta’s sinister admirer, who held out his spindly hand and welcomed me as if he owned the palazzo. “Dr. Hoffmann,” he crooned in his syrupy voice. “Very pleased that you could be here tonight.”

  I must have shown my alarm. “How did you know my name?”

  “Oh, I know all Julietta’s friends,” he replied, smiling his lizard smile.

  I walked away without asking his name and sidled over to the bar, where I ordered a double scotch. My eyes ranged over the crowd, hoping for a glimpse of Gottlieb. I was done playing hide and seek.

  Suddenly Julietta appeared at my side. “Hi, Ned!”

  “Julietta!” I bolted down my scotch. “Funny meeting you here.”

  She giggled. “You came all the way to Venice to see me. I kind of like that.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I turned and met her dark glistening eyes. “I’m crazy about you,” I murmured.

  Her smile was as bright as the jewels on her necklace. “You’ve got to help me get rid of Gottlieb,” she said. “He won’t leave me alone.”

  I slammed my glass down on the bar and lurched into the crowd like the drunk that I was. “Where is that swine?” I bellowed. “He’d better stay the hell away from you!”

  “No, it’s not that simple,” she frowned, pulling me back. “He’s got the key to my room. They only gave us one. He’s got it dangling on a chain around his fat neck. It’s like a symbol of his power. He thinks he owns me.”

  “I’ll get it
back for you.”

  She leaned forward and whispered in my ear. “Whoever has that key, that’s who I’ll be spending the night with.”

  I plunged into the crowd and into the gaming room. There was a tug on my sleeve and I turned to find Nicole dogging my steps. “Don’t go in there,” she pleaded. “Please don’t go in there!”

  I shook her off and ran my eyes over the crowd to a long bar with an enormous mirror behind it that multiplied the room and everything in it. I quickly found Gottlieb, hunched over the craps table with a fevered look on his face. The harsh light streaming down from overhead seemed to pass through him without casting a shadow on the table.

  “Gottlieb!” I called out.

  “What the hell?”

  “I want that key.”

  He stopped playing and stared at me incredulously. “Hoffmann, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here but as you can see I’m busy with something. So chill out until I’m done here and I’ll talk to you later.”

  “No. I want that key now.”

  “What key?”

  “The key to Julietta’s room.”

  “That’s my room. Are you crazy?”

  Two security guards had swooped in when we raised our voices and shoved their way between us. “Gentlemen,” one of them said, “we must ask you to come with us, please.”

  “Come on!” Gottlieb protested. “I’m in the middle of a game here.”

  One of the guards grabbed his arm and marched him across the room and down the stairs. The other one glared at me and I followed without resisting. They took us to what must have been a side door, away from both the main entrance and the Grand Canal, and shoved us out into a narrow, dimly-lit alleyway.

  Gottlieb lurched toward me with his fists raised. “Hoffmann, this really pisses me off! You really piss me off!”

  “I want that key!” I jumped on his neck like a pit bull and tore his collar open as he staggered backwards. There was a gold chain around his neck and I tried to get my fingers around it. He pushed me away and ran into the shadows trying to escape, but I caught up with him at the edge of a small canal. The place was deserted except for a boy of about twelve who sat on a balcony playing the mandolin.