Concert of Ghosts (10 page)

And now Manhattan, where the rain created a grubby weave joining concrete and sky in a seamless leaden way. This city of hard angles, which Tennant had always found too abrasive to sustain more than a facsimile of human life, was traffic jammed, streets locked by motionless cars, drivers leaning on their horns, an angry chorus of the impatient waging war against the immutable.

The windows of the Cadillac fogged, and Tennant rubbed a spyhole for himself. He felt like a hick. How long since he'd been here? Ten years? Eleven? The Hudson, sluggish and muddy, was visible briefly between buildings; surrounded by rainy spray, a ghostly barge was laboring across the surface. Then the river was gone, and Alison had found a parking place for the Cadillac, a slot between two delivery trucks into which she maneuvered with ease.

Tennant took his bag, got out of the car. Head bent against the angle of rain, he followed Alison along the sidewalk to a small hotel in whose old-fashioned lobby a smell of wet umbrellas hung in the air. What now? Was this where her trail to Bear Sajac led? He had a sense of having cut himself adrift, of having jumped too easily into the young woman's slipstream. She steered, he followed. She persisted, he acquiesced. What was to stop him from saying
Live your own life, babe
, and turning around and going back into the street anyway? Did he think he'd be even more lost without her if he just upped and strolled away? Or was it that thing he had no heart to face again: solitude?

As he walked behind Alison to the reception desk, he resented the tiny sense of dependence he experienced. He could go where he liked, for Christ's sake. He didn't need this young woman nor any involvement in her story; he didn't need to feel like a character trapped inside her private fiction.

He saw her put a credit card on the desk. She signed a form and was handed two keys, one of which she gave to Tennant.

“Just for one night,” she said. “Adjoining rooms, if that's okay with you.”

Inside the elevator he said, “I wasn't expecting to stay in the city. I thought we'd check your lead, then get out of the state.”

“Lighten up. It's not as if I gave them your name at the desk, Harry. It's not like I said, ‘This guy's a fugitive, call the cops.' Tomorrow we're gone.”

Where? he wondered. But didn't ask. He realized he hadn't asked enough questions from the start. Destinations. Plans. He'd been made content by the relief of flying out of Flitt's range and the menace of imprisonment; he'd assured himself that details would come later. Alison would explain her leads, her dead ends, her possibilities.

On the seventh floor, before they went to their separate rooms, Alison said she'd freshen up, then meet him in the lobby bar. Tennant was agreeable.

He unlocked his room, which was long and narrow. The window overlooked an airshaft filled with damp newspapers, fast-food boxes, scraps of old linoleum cut in different shapes—the random collage of a city's wind-tossed trash. He sat on the bed for a time, canvas bag on the floor between his feet. The room was plain, an Alpine landscape on the wall, TV, bathroom; he felt, as he'd always done in hotels, an unsettling anonymity, as if he'd left his identity at the front desk.
What identity?
he wondered.

He checked the box-shaped bathroom, the old-fashioned tub, the lime deposits that had hardened around the shower nozzle. It was a good room for a suicide. It didn't welcome you nor invite you to linger. If you wanted to snuff yourself, you couldn't find a better place. And if suicide wasn't your thing, you could work up quite a claustrophobic lather here.

He moved toward the locked door that separated his room from Alison's. Was that her voice he heard? Maybe she was speaking on the telephone to somebody, an editor, a friend. Was she talking about him? About how she'd found him? He pressed his ear to the wood and listened. In an old hotel like this, where doors were thick and insulation sturdy, sounds were readily absorbed into oak and masonry. He made out no distinct words; he wasn't even certain if the voice had Alison's pitch, muffled and distant as it was. It could have come from some other source, up or down through the passageways of ancient ductwork that riddled the building. It had a mysterious quality, such as you might hear at a séance, otherworldly, bringing news and advice from beyond.

When finally the sound stopped and an impenetrable silence fell, Tennant moved away from the door. He felt as eavesdroppers often do, foolish, embarrassed, glad not to have been discovered in the ridiculous act. He stepped into the bathroom, laid out his shaving kit, ejected the old blade from the razor, and inserted a new one.

He was about to splash water on his face when his telephone rang. He went to the bedside table and picked up the receiver. It was Alison to say she'd meet him in the bar in five or ten minutes. After he hung up he realized he hadn't answered a telephone in years. Once, in the bad old drug days, phone connections had sometimes meant terror, dark electric absences in which nobody spoke and the only sound was that of something sighing in deep space, a weird connection between Tennant's mind and a monstrous phantasm whimpering in another reality.

He shaved, changed his shirt, then left the room. He knocked on Alison's door. Since there was no answer, he assumed she'd already gone down to the bar. He stepped inside the elevator and felt a brief lurching of the car as it began its descent. He imagined thick cables rising and falling in the black shaft.
L
for lobby.

He walked inside the bar, a brown-paneled room where an eternal dusk prevailed. Green-shaded lamps glowed on the counter and stubby little candles, imprisoned in orange glass, flickered on circular tables. Tennant so far was the only customer. No Alison. He took a table with an uncluttered view of the front door and the lobby. Rain fell on the dark streets; lamps shimmered on the sidewalks. People moved back and forward in the lobby, bellboys carried suitcases, a grinning man zoomed past in a motorized wheelchair—a sense of flurry, lives being lived.

A waitress took Tennant's order for Scotch and soda. From some hidden recess taped music kicked into life, a Simon and Garfunkel tune squeezed out of a synthesizer. “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.”

Tell me about that bridge.

He sipped his drink, waited, watched the door for Alison. He'd lost his sense of time: Had he been sitting here ten minutes or twenty or what? When he was halfway through his Scotch, he used the bar phone to call her room. No answer. He sat down again, fussed with the drink.

Okay. Consider the possibilities. She had an unexpected errand to run. Or she is stuck in the elevator. Or locked in the bathroom. Or or or. You could sit here all night playing the disjunction game. He went back to the phone, tried again. This time the number was busy. She was calling somebody. Or somebody was calling her. He put the phone down, waited a minute, picked it up again, dialed her room. Now the line rang, but without answer. Had he called a wrong number before when he got the busy signal? Or had she finished her call, hung up, then left the room hurriedly? He set the receiver back, then ordered a fresh drink at his table where the fluttering candle threw a sickly complexion on his face.

This is the place, he thought. This is where a mild uneasiness comes in. She will appear in a second. She will say she has been delayed somehow, and it will be perfectly plausible. End of story. What other explanation could there be anyway? Only if he attributed subterfuge to her, something beyond her desire for a story, only then might there be something sinister in the busy signal. You have to trust her, he thought. You're like a man who needs to trust his guide to lead him through a swamp.

He accidentally spilled his Scotch, which flooded across his paper napkin. The waitress hurried over, scolding him in a jocular way, bad boy, tossing booze around, where are your manners?

He smiled absently. Go with the flow. Live in the moment. He breathed deeply. He was calmer now.

The waitress brought him another drink. He took a fresh napkin and tore it into thin strips. He placed one of the strips inside the jar that held the candle, and it caught flame immediately. Then he dropped the paper in an ashtray, where it flared and died. Playing with fire. Yes indeed.

Fire. Crackers. Had he gone once to Chinatown during a festival? Every question he asked himself led him inside a kind of tomb where the past lay locked. Without access, Tennant, you might as well be a dead man. What was personal identity if you had no fucking memory? How could you ever say with certainty who you were? How could you check the reality of the past if you couldn't relive it? He was uneasy again; that brief calm had dissolved in a flare of panic. He finished the Scotch, burned another paper strip, watched it curl and smoke.

“You'll burn yourself, Harry.”

He looked up to see the girl approach the table. She wore a short black dress and an unbuttoned black raincoat.

She sat down beside him. “Sorry I took so long.”

He waited. She would surely make an excuse, say she had calls to make. But she didn't.

“You want to get moving?” she asked.

He had a moment of indecision. Okay, she has a private life I know nothing about, a group of friends, she has her profession, and colleagues—was it a crime to call somebody?
Only if thinking made it so
. And you've just been doing some thinking of the twisted kind, Harry. Trust her. You have to. There's nobody else. Without this girl, you're the loneliest man in the world.

He got up from the table. The strip of paper napkin clung to melted wax and smouldered blackly.

7

“This guy calls himself Alphonse Trebanzi,” Alison said. She drove the Cadillac through the streets of the lower West Side where a few delicatessens and bars glimmered in the rain. “Bear Sajac had given Trebanzi's apartment in the Haight as his address in 1968. It was probably nothing more than a crash pad. Trebanzi, naturally, has moved around since then—a dozen times at least. His trail kept running very cold. Nothing on Social Security. Motor vehicles, zip. Sometimes I have a flash of inspiration. I figured drugs. He was probably into them years ago—maybe he hadn't changed. So I checked with hundreds of drug rehab centers. I got a break. He'd undergone some drug rehab in New Jersey about four years ago. What I have here, after mucho research, is his last known address. It's a shot in the dark, I admit. But I don't have another link to Bear. I don't know if Trebanzi's dead, alive, what.”

Tennant considered the complexity of connections, the accidents of place and time that joined people across years. Two decades ago John “Bear” Sajac shared a pad in the Haight with somebody called Trebanzi; by a fluke of the gravity—destiny, absurdity, whatever—that alters our tides, Bear had appeared in a photograph with Tennant and Maggie Silver and two other kids. Accidents, whimsical crosscurrents. Now, years later, Bear was a possible connection to Alison's riddle of missing people and dead kids and a deranged photographer. And maybe a link to Maggie Silver.

If Bear had survived. If
Maggie
had survived.

Tennant had a disjointed and slightly unpleasant awareness of traveling into his own mute history, a passageway where here and there a fluted whisper might be heard or a fragment of song—and it was alien to him, a journey that could take him places he had no desire to go. What persisted as he stared out at the black streets of lower Manhattan was a weight of anxiety, something leaden in his heart. His past had become a country for which he might no longer have a visa. Perhaps, like some miserable Third World republic, rotted by humidity, filled with the screech of mysterious birds, it was the kind of place for which no visa was needed anyway because no tourist ever went there—a shantytown of the mind, leprous little shacks wherein people died young and weary to the bone.

He gazed at storefronts; a drunk, oblivious to weather, shuffling along, a bag lady pushing a trolley filled with the sad stuff of her life, two cops lingering in a doorway, one slackly slapping his nightstick against his thigh.

Tennant had the Taurus in the pocket of his raincoat. Its weight made him uncomfortable, and he really wasn't sure still why he'd brought the thing; at best you could say the presence of the gun consoled him in a way it had never done during his years of crop cultivation. He put his hand inside the pocket and touched the weapon as Alison swung the Cadillac along a darkened street.

Tenements, here and there an unvandalized lamp, a crone of a tree: It wasn't a street that suggested a community, a neighborhood. You couldn't imagine block parties being held here—only the surly passage of people who lived in close proximity to one another without benefit of friendship. Tennant had the thought that the men and women who endured in this place collected welfare, food stamps, government handouts—dehumanizing rituals; ah, how the bureaucracy, the
Sturmbannführers
of the Republic, imposed humiliation on impoverished souls.

The pall of the neighborhood depressed him. He had absolutely no desire to get out of the car when Alison parked, but he did so anyway. They climbed a short flight of steps to the doorway of a tenement, where a sequence of buzzers were located; each had a name attached, many illegible, faded, altered. Residents came and went here, and they left nothing in their wake. It was a good street for fugitives, men who'd fallen behind in child support, small-time hoods, failed con artists, drunks.

Alison struck a match and held it to the buzzers. She studied the little cards. “Alphonse Trebanzi. Where are you? Where the hell are you?”

Tennant looked along the street. Windows reflected the subterranean blue of TV screens. Sometimes a figure would pass in front of the box and eclipse the room. An upraised voice might now and then be heard; a small act of verbal domestic violence. A place like this bludgeoned the spirit, he thought.

“Gold!” Alison said. The match burnt her fingers and she dropped it, but struck another one immediately. The flame illuminated the name Trebanzi. Even as Alison exclaimed her delight, Tennant continued to look the length of the street, watching, expecting God knows what, but he had his hand in the pocket that contained the gun. Nobody moved in the rain. His anxiety created faces out of the light that struck the few trees. He was a mere step away from hearing rain make leaves whisper in understandable phrases, or discovering a Morse code in the noise of water falling on plastic trash bags along the sidewalk. Random sounds—but if you were in a precarious state of mind they could be made to yield meanings; statements, propositions, anything you liked.