Agnes Among the Gargoyles (37 page)

Without color beyond a gray tinge, without shape, eaten away by the salt waters, chewed by the gulls and fish, the remains of the Frenchman sit on a table for Bezel and Spock's viewing pleasure. They make the identification. The tattoos, oddly, are still visible: the scales (for the Frenchman was a Libra), the crossed anchor and rose. Other than that, the pile of flesh does not resemble a human being.

   The pathologist covers the body. "I'm convinced that the waters of New York Harbor are the most corrosive in the world," he says. He shifts a wad of gum around in his mouth without actually chewing it. "And I've worked all over. I've done bodies fished out of the Ganges and the Thames and the Zuider Zee. Forget about it. This stuff of like battery acid. Outboard motors don't do any better than your friend."

   A detective glances at the Frenchman's remains before the pathologist slides them back into their compartment. "We're calling it an accidental drowning. There's a bunch of old piers at the base of John Street. He was tangled up in those. There's a contractor doing work there, reinforcing the piers for a new restaurant."

   Bezel shakes his head sadly. "He hated what they'd done there. Hated the restaurants. He said there was no honest place left for a wharf rat to get a drink."

   "There's evidence of trauma to the left side of the forehead," says the pathologist. He rubs his own head to demonstrate the location—right where Bezel coshed the poor fucker. "Maybe somebody hit him. Maybe he had a snootful and fell."

   "What happens now?" says Spock.

   The detective is startled by his electronic voice. "Our investigation will continue, of course."

   "I mean what happens to him?"

   "Well, if we can't find the sister Mr. Bezel told us about, then he goes to Potter's Field."

   "It's not right," says Bezel. "He deserves better."

   "We could release the body to you," says the detective hopefully.

   "I have no money," says Bezel. "I can't bury anyone. I'll finish in Potter's Field myself. At least we'll be together."

   The detective walks them out. "Missing Persons is a tough detail," he tells them. "It's frustrating. You've got all these bodies turning up, and all these people reported missing, and you very seldom get a match. In this town, those that are gone never turn up, and those they turn up nobody claims."

   Bezel and Spock buy a quart of beer from a Korean. They split it while sharing a bench beside the East River Drive.

   "So what happened to the Frenchman?" says the kid.

   "Beats the hell out of me."

   "Maybe he did fall in. He used to bob and weave while he walked."

   "The better to hook wallets."

   They look at the water. It is a fitting place to say farewell to the Frenchman. Spock unwraps a candy bar. A fireboat suddenly unleashes a stream of water into the air. A thousand startled birds flee the garbage scow on whose cargo they have been feeding.

   Spock picks the nuts out of his candy bar. "For a while I thought you killed him. I don't think that anymore. You were pretty choked up in there."

   "He was my friend."

   "A poor sort of friend," says the kid. "Well, not that it really matters, but I'm sorry I thought that about you."

   Bezel chokes with emotion. He feels nothing for the Frenchman, who deserved to die a thousand times. What moves him is Spock's apology. When was the last time anyone apologized to Bezel? Gary at Barnett's said he was sorry when he shitcanned him, but that hardly counts. He gets an occasional, hurried "S'r'y!" when someone squashes his foot in the subway, but that doesn't count either. Cass said she was sorry when she got knocked up, but Cass would apologize for a rainy day.

   "Thanks, kid," says Bezel. "I forgive you."

   "I can get money, you know. If you want to bury him the right way."

   "I think they already are."

On a warm evening in June, Agnes attends the final performance of
Scenes
From Shakespeare
as staged by the players of the St. Basil School for the Blind. The auditorium is packed. Agnes sees old-money bankers and their wives dressed as for the opera; the women wear earrings like chandeliers and necklaces set in tiers and Agnes even spots a lorgnette encrusted with diamonds.

   Father Clarence moves through the audience, shaking hands and checking seat numbers on ticket stubs. Father Chris, a pace or two behind, feeds him names and nuggets of personal data. Father Chris carries a small grease-stained paper bag that turns out to contain some sticks of beef jerky, which Father Clarence presents to a dowager in a green floor-length number. The dowager's name is the same as a famous brand of flour. Father Clarence knows the importance placed by persons of enormous resources on the small economy. His six-dollar trip to the butcher may pay off ten thousand fold.

   Jo Bailey grabs Agnes. There is an emergency—one of the techies has the flu. Would Agnes mind helping out? Not at all, she answers, grateful for something to do besides watching Shakespeare.

   "You're a lifesaver," says Jo.

   She hastily coaches Agnes. Agnes will run the tape with the music to be played between scenes. Jo gives her a copy of the script with the cues marked.

   The scenes from
Much Ado About Nothing
and
Hamlet
and
The Merchant of
Venice
proceed smoothly. Agnes, her eyes glued to the script, misses none of the cues.

   The sequence from
Macbeth
climaxes the first act of the show. The set, the heath, looks fantastic, a chilling purple landscape with twisted trees and a malevolent moon. The three witches surround their cauldron. They wear phosphorescent yellow make-up.

   Jo Bailey beats a drum in the wings. Boomboomboom. Boomboomboom.

   The luminous witches play their brief scene to the hilt. Doreen has developed a gargly delivery; she is best. Perri phones it in. Smoke rises from the pots and the witches vanish beneath the stage via an elevator.

   Now that's impressive, thinks Agnes. It's nice to have a big budget. The staging is Broadway-caliber and the actors can't even see what's happening. In the plays mounted by St. Mary-Star-Of-The-Sea, Agnes's alma mater, if it couldn't be done with oaktag then it simply wasn't done.

   The lighting turns neutral for the next scene, featuring Duncan, Malcolm and the bleeding Sergeant. The movements of the actors are limited but smooth; their blindness is not apparent. Then the witches rise up again. Boomboomboom. Macbeth and Banquo stand beside Agnes, waiting to enter. Much of the witches' dialogue is obscure. Agnes reads from the script, trying to make sense of the references to swine and sailors' wives, chestnuts and a pilot's thumb. Boomboomboom. The witches join hands for an invocation. Macbeth and Banquo step onstage. Agnes notices that a line has been drawn through Macbeth's first line: "So foul and fair a day I have not seen." Macbeth skips the line. It has been cut, obviously because of the cast's blindness.

    The edit seems over-sensitive and prissy. Would the audience have sniggered at the irony? Then Agnes remembers the account of Barbara's complaining about lines being cut.
Have the sisters been cast yet?
The woman at the temp agency heard Barbara ask. Agnes turns to the front of her script, to the
dramatis perso
nae.
The three old hags on the heath aren't listed as Witches at all. They are the Weird Sisters.

    Boomboomboom.

    Barbara was at St. Basil's, and Agnes would have known it earlier if she had a better education. Agnes could just shoot herself. If she'd gone to a better school she would have made the connection immediately. She would have known that the word "weird" comes from the Saxon "wyrd" meaning fate; she would have known that original single goddess, Wyrd, evolved into the trinity of She-whowas, She-who-is, and She-who-will-be; she would have seen the links between the Weird Sisters and the Scandinavian Norns, the Greek Moerae, and the Roman Fortuna.

    Agnes looked at the Sisters and their cauldron and saw black cats and warts and pointy hats. She saw a Halloween display at Woolworth's.

   A cold hand rests on her shoulder. She turns with a start.

   "Hello there," says Father Chris.

   He could kill her where she stands. He could squeeze the life right out of her.

   "Father, you startled me."

   The priest scratches his knobby head. "This
Teaspoon
part always gives me the willies. Have you seen Miss Bailey?"

   "She was banging a drum a few minutes ago. I don't know where she went."

   He hands Agnes a paper bag. "I brought the extra stage blood she asked me for. Tell that since it's the last night she should use it all up. It doesn't keep."

   Cassock rustling, Father Chris mounts a ladder and vanishes into the flies.

    Agnes opens the paper bag carefully. No, he wasn't lying—Stein's Stage Blood #6, Guaranteed Not To Fade and Featuring A Heat-Activated Coagulant For Super-Authenticity! The imp on the bottle says, "So realistic, ya better have it screened!"

    During intermission, Jo Bailey asks Agnes to take the Weird Sisters and some of the other players upstairs to the dressing rooms so they can begin changing out of their costumes. Agnes leads Perri, Doreen and Grace and a half-dozen others up the four flights of stairs. She helps them locate their things. She goes out into the hallway to retrieve a dropped doublet and sees that the dressing rooms are right next to Father Chris's office.

    The kids rattle on noisily about the show, criticizing the audience, tossing barbs at each other. Agnes is dying for a peek inside that office. She knocks at the door and gets no answer. She knocks again. There is not even a rustling within.

    Suddenly, she feels imbued with the spirit of the great detectives, Dupin and Poirot, Marple and Drew.

    She slips into the girls' dressing room. She tiptoes over to the French windows, which open onto a balcony. She opens the windows a crack. The sounds of the city enter the room, and the actors, with their acute hearing, freeze.

    "Is it warm in here?" says Agnes. "Maybe not."

   She closes the window and tries to get everyone to hustle a little bit. After an eternity, the boys and girls are dressed. She brings them downstairs to Jo's office. Hoping that no one will miss her, she tiptoes back upstairs to the dressing room. She opens the French doors and steps out onto the balcony.

   The floodlit buildings glow around her. For the first time she can see, in a single vista, the towers of One Grand Central and its westerly counterpart, One Times Square. One Grand Central, site of the Great Man's shooting, is penile. One Times Square, so identified with Madelaine, is crowned with a postmodern conch shell affair—unmistakably vulvoid., Madelaine and Wegeman are fucking in the skyline.

   Agnes climbs over the balcony railing onto a ledge about a foot wide. She must navigate that, then climb onto another balcony, the one outside Father Chris's office window.

   Father Chris's office is littered with the same sort of school-related junk as his boss's. The violent misogynist psychopath is also a slob; on the desk sit two unwashed bowls of hardened gruel leavings. Also scattered about are some band instruments. Agnes picks up a glockenspiel. The bars of a glockenspiel are laid out like piano keys; on this particular instrument, what would be the shortest, uppermost "black key" is missing.

   That's what they found in the turtle tank.

   Agnes almost has to laugh. "Don't drop it," said Tommy to Agnes repeatedly. Oh, he's a crack detective, all right. His police instincts were never sharper. If she had dropped it (perhaps on a tile floor) they might have figured out what the damn thing was.

   Agnes hears the faint roaring of applause downstairs. Intermission is over.

   She searches the office rapidly. Father Chris's desk drawers haven't been cleaned in years. One double drawer is stuffed full of mimeograph stencils. The smell of ink is intoxicating. Some serial killers fortify themselves with drugs before each attack; Agnes imagines Father Chris with crumpled, inky stencils pressed to his face, inhaling orgasmically.

   At the bottom of the double drawer she finds the tissue of lies that is Barbara Foucault's resume.

   "Fuck me," she says. Her heart is hammering. She's never been so frightened.

   She can't believe that she is actually holding the artifact in her hands. There are the classroom one-acts, the church basement showcases, her runs in the tiny off-off Broadway theatres of the wholesale flower district. She has listed all her special skills: Westphalian and East London dialects, light horsemanship, fencing, tumbling, embroidery, manual transmission, stage dining.

   Agnes places the resume on the desk. She tries to replace everything in the drawer. She is shaking terribly. She keeps dropping things. Stencils and papers and manila folders tumble to the floor. As though in a bad dream, the more organized she tries to be, the more things seem to go flying all over the place, apparently possessed of a life of their own. A fagot of pencils strapped together with rubber bands hurtles under the desk. Agnes gets down on all fours to retrieve the bundle. She experiences a curious tingling on one side of her face and a rushing in her ears.
Cincin nadam?
No, hyperventilation, which apparently never afflicted Poirot and Drew and the rest of them.

   Father Chris approaches the office singing "Close To You."

   With a groan of despair Agnes shuts up the desk and sprints on tiptoe back to the balcony. She pulls the French windows shut behind her.