Foul Matter (29 page)

It did not surprise her that Clive had turned up here also. That is not to say that it didn’t worry her. He must be spying on Ned, but for what reason? To see he didn’t hop a freighter to Europe? He must be watching him for Bobby Mackenzie, acting out some plan they had set in motion that must involve more than simply breaking Ned’s contract with Mackenzie-Haack.

The woman with the red hair: she was leaning against a tree, smoking. Had she been sent by Bobby, too? Was she part of the surveillance team? Sally was tempted to go over and ask her what she was doing; instead, she opened her purse and took out a sandwich she’d bought at a concession stand. It was cheese and it was dry. She ate two bites and then wrapped it back up and tossed it into one of the trash cans. Ned had been standing there for a good half hour, watching the boys play and the little girl dig.

What was he doing this for? What was he after? Sally sighed and leaned forward, her elbow resting on her knee, her chin on her fist.

If they intended to do something to Ned, here was ample opportunity for the park was nearly empty of people. Saul wondered if Ned had played here as a boy, like the ones over there kicking the ball around without any serious intention of playing a soccer game, just back and forth, killing time (they who still had time to kill).

As for Saul, he remembered books, remembered only that window seat in his home, the window where the butler’s table sat, and looking out when dusk came on at four o’clock, and snow drifted slowly past the window, illuminated by the corner street lamp, and his mother bringing cocoa.

Had it happened, or was his version his revisionist childhood? No, it had happened. Snow in winter, leaves in autumn. His mother with a tray of cocoa. As if in coming here and sharing Ned’s childhood, his own began to press upon him.

Clive felt like diving in among them and giving the ball a hell of a kick, two kicks, three, four, messing up their game just to mess it up. Kick the ball to kingdom come. Or else go over there where that child was digging in the dirt and take her pail away from her, just to watch her cry.

Where was Blaze, where was his bloody gumshoe? Oh, there she was, by that tree. It was strange how she managed to melt into the autumn colors, as if she were a drift of leaves herself. But didn’t melt nearly so much as what Clive thought was a tall figure looking around a tree—no, he supposed it must have been a branch moving in the wind. Christ, but it was cold!

Ned closed his eyes and rocked on his heels. He was watching a woman with light hair watching the little girl, who, with great care, was transferring earth from ground to pail. It was one of those childhood activities that adults can never understand because it’s pointless. But then that was its attraction—to be doing something where the point lay simply in the doing of it.

He had heard this somewhere: that by simply observing (or was it simple?) one might master a landscape. Ned was not sure what “master” implied here. He tried to let it sink in—the dry brownness of leaves and branches, the kids playing kickball (wasn’t that what they used to call it?), the pine-scented air—tried to let this settle over him like a mantle.

One had to look at the landscape from every conceivable angle. Who had said this about landscapes? Saul, probably. Or perhaps not. It was probably Tom Kidd.

“How long’s he staying?” Karl asked.

“Coupla days. Going back to NYC day after tomorrow.” Candy reached down and picked up a leaf from the path. He had gotten the last sugary taste from his gum, and he took the wad out of his mouth, delicately rolled it up in a leaf, and flicked it toward a wire trash can. It went in. “Are we takin’ this job?”

“I don’t know. What do you think, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

His hands in his pockets jiggling change, Karl settled his spine down farther on the bench and gazed around, as if the answer to Candy’s question might be written somewhere in Schenley Park. “It’s too early to decide that, C. You know, we always give it at least a week. Right?” When Candy nodded, Karl went on: “That’s why we don’t make mistakes.”

“Like that turd Robanoff. If ever anyone deserved to get whacked.” Candy removed his baseball cap, rubbed his hair back, and replaced the cap. “We’d have been—you know—derelict in our duty we hadn’t capped him. Guy like that goes after little kids.” He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.

They sat in silence for a moment or two, contemplating this.

Karl asked, “You finished your book?”

“Me? No. You?”

“No.”

“You think we should switch? You know, I read the second half of yours, you read the second half of mine, and then we tell each other what’s in it?”

Karl thought about this, shook his head. “That’s another thing: why this Giverney guy wants our guy out of the way.” He nodded in Ned’s direction. “I think we ought to know.”

“Yeah, except Bobby Mackenzie and old Clive over there—they don’t know, or say they don’t.”

“So the only one does know is Giverney himself,” said Karl.

“You think we need to go around, have a little talk with him?”

“No, not a chance. We don’t need one more witness. But, I think, maybe old Clive there knows something we don’t. I mean, why in hell is he here? Not only him, why the fuck is Ned’s buddy over there”—Karl gestured toward Saul, standing a distance away, nearly hidden in the low branches of one of the trees—“Mr. Charcoal-gray-cashmere-coat, why hasn’t he tried to talk to him? Matter of fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t tried to talk to us, seeing as how we were all hanging out in Swill’s.”

“Okay, maybe when we get back to the hotel, have a drink—hey, our boy’s leavin’.”

They watched Ned turn and walk back down the path, in the direction from which he had entered the park.

Ned stopped for a moment, thinking that the light-haired woman sitting over there on that bench looked somehow familiar. Then he realized who she reminded him of: Nathalie. Why? Nathalie had dark hair. He shook his head.

For one crazy moment he thought he saw Saul, at least the back of him, disappearing down the path through the trees. It was probably only because of the cashmere coat.

Ned remembered Shadyside.

This was the part of Pittsburgh where he’d lived. There should be landmarks, places where he’d gone as a boy and whose names, seen now, would spring a lock in his mind and memories sluice from a mental reservoir.

He knew if he looked long enough, he would find an Isaly’s, and here it was in Shadyside, as if no time at all had passed between his sledding self and his grown-up self, his writing self. Time lapses. Why couldn’t there be these errant stops in what we thought was a continuum?

Ned looked at the plate-glass window with the name written in white paint and the little tents of snow shuddering down from the trees. It had stopped falling from the sky. Ned liked to think it was an ice cream cone, melting as one watched.

He didn’t know if this was the Isaly’s his dad had taken him to when he was small or, later, if it was one that he’d worked at. He had worked at several, he thought. But his memory was terrible, so probably it was not.

Inside he was glad to find a few customers besides himself. That made it clear that this Isaly’s wasn’t some ghostly visitation he had conjured up because he wanted it still to be here—an ice cream parlor materializing out of the snowy afternoon.

Two adults were looking over the ice cream, probably the parents of the little girl who peered at him from under the lattice of her pale gold, windblown hair, as she held on to the man’s leg. She treated the leg as if it were a tree trunk she could peek around or hide behind, in case she didn’t like what she saw, or else engage who she saw in a game.

Ned could have smiled one of those concocted smiles grown-ups reserve for children, but he didn’t. She responded to him by clutching her father’s trouser leg with small fingers Ned bet could nip like pincers.

He was not sentimental about children. It wasn’t that he disliked them, for he usually found their rascally ways to be rather charming. He felt a pang of remorse that they would have to change or be forced to change into something else, something more socially acceptable. The child with the tangled golden hair would still be looking through its strands, but the look would be coquettish, tartish even. A thirteen-year-old tart. Then the twenty-year-old sorority girl. Then the thirty-year-old mother with just such a child as this one, the one trying to get Ned’s attention.

Her father put a chocolate cone into her hands and she jumped once, twice for joy.

Ned was almost jealous. To be back at a time in your life when all it had taken to make you happy was an ice cream cone.
His
ice cream, he wanted to tell her. Isaly’s! He ran his eyes over the tubs and when the kid behind the counter (which could have been him) had finished up with the family of three, Ned asked for pistachio. He asked if they still had the cone-shaped ice cream dippers, and the boy said, yes, sure, and reached round to a counter behind him and got it. It’s kind of an Isaly trademark, Ned told him. Then he took his cone-shaped pistachio ice cream and paid and left.