Lookout Cartridge (75 page)

And this was the thought that I had indeed dreamt my lookout dream the other night, Tuesday night in this terminal October week, the night I’d last seen Jenny. The night of the afternoon I’d found her between me and Reid and found myself between her and the Frenchman.

But I saw now it might not matter if those perpendiculars had survived from sphere to flat or flat to sphere, any more than it mattered if I could sense some rendezvous between Andsworth’s armchair globe with its crackling shellac and Dagger’s facsimile Mercator hung directly across the long axis of his and Alba’s balcony workshop from the poster of Trotsky with his pointed beard and lofty brow and the young American of good-will the hapless Bob Harte—any more than it mattered that I had forgotten all about that lookout dream I’d had at last except that I’d had it.

My words go single-file, but many files which if blessed by the right angle are others’ words in other times, a future Monty phoning transatlantic Thanksgiving Day just to talk, and still seemingly sleepwalking because he had no one to sleep with, blinded by passion, or in a terribly special sense its absence, found therefore the attention to tell me in case it might somehow matter two facts he now recalled he’d had from his dear dear Claire: that the man she later learned must have been Wheeler had been accosted by a driver while shadowing apparently me on foot, had had words with the driver then passed on leaving the driver stuck in that thick traffic, had walked suddenly past me when I stopped to look through a coffee shop window, and moments later had been overtaken and cut off by the same driver.

My words go single-file, but Monty’s this Thursday before Halloween had not stopped. But in the interlude of my
shtip
no time had elapsed. Next time I might not be so lucky. With John’s housekeeper in Coventry Monty had left word that he was coming in the late afternoon; the housekeeper had said only that John would be in for dinner, not that he was leaving for the States—maybe Monty had dialed Coventry direct and she did not know he was coming from London. John was talkative and tense. He must stop in London to persuade a lady to come along to the States with him this time; he must eat; and he could not stand train food. He and Monty talked. They dined. They continued their talk in the London train. The long and the short of it was John’s fear of Cartwright, whose name he hadn’t even noted when they met on the day of that silly filming.

He was aware he had dismissed our film to my face. And after Len Incremona had fired a “ball” through the dartboard as if he’d missed his real target, and we had left, and John had pulled himself together with a third plate of Nell’s buckwheat spaghetti which the black man Chad had made the sauce for, John recalled my face bearing him as much ill will as Len’s. John did not remember what he’d said to me except who the hell would pay
us
to go make a film in Corsica. But now John had heard from Nell’s husband that Cartwright was running about with explosives on him. Nell had told Gene that Len had told her Cartwright and his friend were not to be trusted, Cartwright was trying to unload a famous shrunken heart or head, a French girl who’d tried to convert Incremona to macrobiotic food had told him this and she had it from an American whose name John said wouldn’t mean anything to Monty (which Monty did not push, though now across the table from me he said
I
of course would know who the French girl and the American were). And John said since he regarded Incremona as a dangerous opportunist (precisely because, from decathlon to radio-telescope maintenance to political adventure to, one suspected, quick and surreptitious cash killings, Incremona was not a patient
enough
opportunist) and since Incremona regarded Cartwright as dangerous, Cartwright became dangerous raised conceivably to the power of Len. The man’s anger was like nothing John had seen before except in two Hungarian Catholics who as it happened had been married to each other. Oh Incremona fell out with anyone, even one who revered him.

Nash, I said.

That’s the one, said Monty glancing away.

John-of-the-loft was off his bar stool.

Monty said no doubt I knew Nash had been beaten up by Incremona in South London two hours and more after Incremona had apparently gotten over his anger. Nash had acted independentiy, which was bad enough; but he had arranged a meeting in an Underground station with a woman supposed to know Cartwright, Paul Flint, and something important, and she never showed, but others did, and Incremona led Nash away berating him. But finally calmed down. Or so Nash had thought.

John-of-the-loft was leaving. There was no doubt of it.

I was up feeling for my trenchcoat, my eyes on Monty.

He now made a pretense of keeping me: The grub at John’s is better than here, he said. You’d expect that. John’s a gourmet, his housekeeper’s Austrian; he’s opinionated: what does macrobiosis mean anyway but longevity? he says, and only a fool measures that in mere years. He says macrobiotic food takes the spring out of the capillaries.

OK, I said, you went to Coventry. You had a meal. You heard some gossip.

I don’t know some of these people, said Monty—Len, Nell, Gene, Nash.

Graf, I said (and he put a hand to his ear), you spoke of liquid crystals, there is no question that you spoke of liquid crystals, you said from crystal set to liquid crystals, right?

John again, he said.

I turned away into the dim aromatic tinkling and a waitress’s laughter, but Monty said, Jack Flint was responsible of course.

I turned and nodded slowly, though John might be getting away.

So they investigated you, said Monty. I gather it’s been mutual.

But Graf, I said, you haven’t said why you had to see John in Coventry in the first place, nor why he passed on to you all this trivia. The truth is, you haven’t begun to talk.

Monty’s last words, against the laughing of the waitress, were a comedown from his earlier challenge about the letter left on Aut’s desk—for now he said, Take care of Claire.

A bicyclist passed on the far side of a panel truck, I saw her head. John-of-the-loft was halfway into the next block. I’d been holding my breath, a habit Andsworth says is dangerous. John stopped and half turned as if to see me, and in that very instant a bottle came out across his path, missed him, and split in the gutter. John-of-Coventry’s irked and rubicund words pursued John-of-the loft’s intention that I follow him. I had crossed the first crossing when a cab passed. And I had reached the vicinity of someone’s deep chuckling when a second cab crunched over broken glass and stopped at my curb just as the cab ahead stopped for John. The chuckler leaning back against a stoop was black, but he was not the asbestos-watcher I’d given a dollar to so long ago. I opened the cab door as John did the same ahead, and the person on the stoop said, We all part of the system, man.

I did not understand why more people didn’t drop objects out of these high buildings.

The history of Gramercy Park as in an essay by some private-school student veered away at right angles (its brownstones, its large central iron-fenced garden for residents, venerable clubs with newspaper rooms, mediocre food, and domineering darky servants), plaques outside showing say a pair of masks (tragic? comic?) and overhead two pre-Civil War black-iron entrance lanterns with curved spikes like fierce horns crowning a vacant-faced warrior. I was at the southern edge of midtown Manhattan within striking distance of Sub’s icebox and Ruby’s coloring book and a curiously imprinted amber pinch bottle I’d had my eye on and a telly glowing gray on Sub’s face and a jack-o’-lantern on the sill facing the heights of New York but directly across the way a clipped white dog watching in a window. I hadn’t seen a headline since Monday. My life was in danger, my suitcase at Monty’s, my parka likely discovered, my daughter on her own.

We turned sharply again and drove downtown, a high-slung gypsy cab able to move more than one way at once. I’d told my driver to follow the other cab. This simplified things for him but also, as he did not know, for me. It gave us both a certain illusory freedom between ourselves from the consequences of coercion. Our fields impinged in ways I knew more about than he, with his narrow hunched shoulder blades as if he did not know this city or his vehicle though his moustache was in the current younger mode of college cabbies if without Bach for background though his aerial was up. I saw the shaggy tip of his moustache aligned above the window-wiper beyond it and on my side between two signs on the steel screen dividing front and back seats (“Please do not smoke. Driver is allergic” and “This cab can be hired for trips of any distance. Ask driver for rates”). If he had sat up straight, his hair might have brushed the roof. If he was who I thought he was, what could I say to him? Which side are you on?

We were on Broadway down among the blocks of dark and comparatively low commercial buildings; we were between the East and West Village and we must soon turn if we were headed for Mercer. I could not say to him what did it feel like when Tessa on Stonehenge night said Go to hell? I could not say, What blame do you take for Jim Nielsen’s death? Was Krish correct in saying yours was the picture filmed in the Suitcase Slowly Packed? Knowing that my driver did not guess I knew him was too much for me to lose—but most of all I wanted to ask him what my last cabbie Mike had meant on Sunday night in North London when he’d said that if I went on as I was going on, the first thing “we” knew the “whole thing” would blow up again.

No: even more, I wanted to ask Paul Flint—for even if the moustache and the shoulder-blades that were hunched as if they’d been jammed into a vise have not told you what you would have known all too soon in a film for having already glimpsed him in Tessa’s grip framed by a Stone Age trilothon, you have me and my ordinary probabilities and you might hence have guessed this to
be
Paul Flint, though as for me (between blind coghood and that sinister hint of godhead or godbody in me issuing from my place in a field of multiple impingements) I was amazed but could not ask—What did you mean when from the darkness behind a Stonehenge stone and echoing the bank clerk’s claim that Stonehenge meant simply the distance and the work in moving those stones, you said, it comes to that and that alone.

But my life was in danger. I was hungry. If my parka with Chad’s gun and Krish’s ten-inch blade had been found under the bed in Monty’s basement, no telling where the red jaguar was by now. Or the three sound-track tapes I had taken from Dagger’s cabinet.

We ran a light to keep up with John’s cab.

Ahead at our next fight, cars were crossing and we would have to stop. I could not stop. I’d said to Mary in the
Son des Guitares
(but not in the diary pages Jenny typed), Suppose I’ve got the Montrose heart, what would it go for? And Mike heard me, and our last morning at the école (bowls of café-au-lait, a dish of apricot jam, three big American girls in yellow curlers and cut-off jean shorts) he was confirmed in his contempt and suspicion when Marie appeared and took him outside the dining hall and must have told him Incremona had said I was dangerous and Mike mentioned the famous heart spirited into the moving hand of an American merchant-adventurer named Cartwright, and Marie relayed this to Len urging him quite possibly in the same breath not to order coffee and croissants at the port café but to eat some local yogurt laced with the granola she’d brought from London or an orange she produced from her bag which instead made him think of the open market at the bottom of the Cours Napoléon with slabs of tuna dark almost as whale flesh, though in reality there at the port café Len was staring across the hot cobbles to the
plongeur
van and its entrepreneur the tough brown bawdy half-naked Neptune as bald as Incremona but a happy man, a Paris watchmaker half the year, the other half down here in Corsica on his own southern time with his dials strapped to his wrists and his yellow air-tank on his back taking the tourists diving where weightless they could move in any direction at will, sighting an ashtray’s glint below or the endless translucent green cushion far above.

Information theory? I had none. Only these circuits of addition two by two—Marie and Mike—Nash and Incremona—false labor or no, had Alba truly phoned Dagger in Ajaccio that last morning? And now Jack Flint’s investigation: how could it turn up me and liquid crystals without Red Whitehead’s help?

Information, and the prospect of more dragged me toward some final grid no grander than this one here and stuck to it the regular driver’s two signs declaring a man’s cab is his cab and he would move it any distance for a price: a final grid like this protective mesh that had changed the New York taxi not to a London cab’s class-comforted hackney carriage but to a squad car’s compartmented coop: the wipers now slowly swinging against a film of rain.

Monty Graf never learned about those Tuesday right angles; he moved one track at a time, by the numbers:
which
Frenchman? (And was I trailing Jenny or Jan? Did Reid have a key to the house in King Street?) Yet there was no time to broach with him the Other—the rule of cartographic deformation, and which way those two right angles had survived—from sphere to flat map, or from flat to sphere—and I would have liked to broach this with him, for Monty is a humane man, not just out for a buck or a slow killing, and apart from the loud mechanics of a mysterious action that seemed to have shifted to New York, Monty and I might have emptied many a dram and had a good long talk between these two imagined poles of globe and map, family and fortune, the friendly chill of London rain and the coordinates of American danger; he might even have known why Incremona and the Frenchman had called at the florist’s Wednesday morning.

The
shtip
of my Māyā proverb might have to be its own reward. It seemed to have less than nothing to do with macrobiotic diets ordained by Andsworth for his community in South London or urged by Marie upon Incremona.

Why not find Jenny and take her back to Highgate to Will and to Lorna even if I found Lorna with that young second tenor? But what if Jenny would not go? She believed Reid had followed her to King Street because he needed her.