Now You See Him (9 page)
F
OR A GOOD LONG WHILE, ACCORDING
to Mrs. Halasz, the soft singsong voice of Rob continued in the apartment above her. Suddenly, she said, his voice grew loud, as if remonstrating or arguing a point. After this, abruptly, silence fell. Soon the silence was supplanted by yet another noise—running water.
Kate was taking a shower. She’d used the bathroom, and was taking a shower. All of us later admitted this was an extraordinary move. Grimed and deranged, Rob was sitting in the sunny kitchen, a .38 in his pocket and his heart in his mouth, and Kate was standing in the needling shower water, soaping her body.
In the words of a hostage negotiator who later testified at the trial, she was doing exactly what she should have been doing under the circumstances and “gaining trust.” From the moment she’d gotten out of bed, the negotiator explained, she’d been signaling to Rob her complete
indifference to the danger, and thereby establishing “a faith axis” along which the two of them might speak. By acting as if there was no danger at all, went this logic, she might possibly replicate that calm in the wider world.
She showered for about ten minutes. Then she apparently spent a while brushing her hair. After that, strangely, she put on makeup. This detail intrigued just about everybody: base, blusher, eye shadow, eyeliner, and to finish it all off, a couple of swipes of the oxblood matte brown lipstick she liked. Painted as if for a night out—even if she rarely wore makeup, no matter the occasion—she exited the bathroom, having swapped her towel for a fluffy white bathrobe, and sat down across from Rob, who was still sitting where she’d left him.
In the face of her newly groomed beauty, her calm, her apparent availability, he was almost certainly stunned. For a minute or two he might have felt himself returned to a previous moment in time, and to be again staring at the fresh, utterly poised small-town girl with whom he was going to take literary New York by storm. Perhaps as he relaxed back into that dream he was able as well to look around himself and see the rank absurdity of his recent life—the gun, the crazed pursuit, the death by inches of his days in the room in Chinatown. It’s entirely possible that he returned wholly to himself for a brief moment and told himself that everything, incredibly, might just work out fine.
Mrs. Halasz testified that a sudden and complete silence ensued, abruptly followed by the squealing of chairs on the floor. The silence lasted several minutes, and was followed by the beginning of a new kind of sound,
one which, according to Mrs. Halasz, sent her scurrying out of the kitchen and into the bedroom to stop her ears.
They were having sex. Loudly, passionately, in their old apartment, they were having sex. “Like wolves,” Mrs. Halasz told the court, her lip curling disgustedly. Cries and shouts, she said, pursued her around the apartment as she fled from room to room, and they seemed to go on for hours.
When it was over, a postcoital lull followed. In those tangled spearmint sheets, in that moment of midmorning when New York City comes alive with a sudden rush of fury—whatever did they talk about then? Having rehearsed an act of love, even one coerced, did they pretend that the intervening months were simply a folly, a tragic parenthesis of sorts? Did Rob, always one to exalt his own feelings, speak candidly to her of what it was like to experience his mind unhitching itself from its moorings and drifting out to sea? If that were the case, then doubtless Kate listened closely, and maybe, animated by some passing whiff of charity, she gave in to the human impulse to help this person whom she had just permitted into her body, and with whom she’d once shared a dream. Perhaps she held him, calmed his fears, drew his head to her breast and stroked his hair, while talking to him about mythic love, and improbable passion under extreme circumstances. Perhaps, with brilliantly tactical tenderness, she wiped his brow and recalled him to an earlier day. And then the phone rang. Her answering machine was turned up to 10 and the phone was ringing. When the answering machine picked up, the voice began to speak.
At the trial, visibly on the edge of tears, Framkin now
took the stand. Pale and drawn, he’d lost the prosperous belly of once upon a time. After the murder, the tabloid press had feasted on him without letup and picked the bones of his reputation clean in a frenzy. Looking out at the courtroom with the ashen majesty of a deposed monarch, he said that yes, he’d placed that call, and had done so from the Taconic State Parkway—a detail he was sure of because he remembered that he’d been staring out the window at the hillsides of perfectly ranked passing trees and was struck by how that orderly processional somehow reminded him of Kate. He remembered as well the strong morning sun shining as he picked up the phone and, speaking calmly and affectionately, signed his lover’s death warrant.
“Darling girl” read his phone message, transcribed and printed up in seventy-two-point type and displayed on large easels at the trial, “I’m missing you so much right now that it’s driving me half mad. Where are you, baby? Do you want some of that bedside manner? Do you want me to come over right now and make everything all right in that special way? God, do I want you. I’ve still got your smell on me. Call when you can. ’Bye, sweet girl.”
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times, he said, he’d imagined what had happened as those words of his floated out upon the still air of that sunny room. What did happen, exactly, we will never know. What we do know is that five minutes later, with Kate lying calmly in her bed, a shot rang out, reverberating with terrifying volume in the spaces of the old building. Mrs. Halasz rushed out her door, but when she got into the grimy stairwell, with its gray marine light entering through pebbled old win
dows, and its floor of buckled dull tile like a heaving sea, her heart began to beat heavily in her chest, and overcome with fear, she ran back into her apartment, locked all three locks and dialed 911.
Rob meanwhile walked out of the building and into the living world. Over the next few hours his movements were simple, schematic and easily traced. He shoved a bloodstained shirt into a nearby Dumpster—later recovered. He went to the Port Authority and caught a bus for Monarch—paying for it with a credit card. And that night, at New Russian Hall, he showed up unannounced and shocked us all.
As it turned out, there were only a few of us there when the door opened and Rob walked in. I, for one, did my best to hide my astonishment. As an adult, unless he was drunk, Rob had never liked large emotions and outsize public demonstrations, and so I welcomed him back with deliberately low-key surprise, gave him a subdued high five and drew him to the bar. I noticed that his long blond hair hung lusterless; that the bones of his face had become prominent. I noticed that his hand trembled, slightly, as he reached for his stein.
But mainly I was deeply happy to see him—especially because it had been so long since any of us had glimpsed him without a girlfriend in tow or a meeting to which he had to speed.
Word of his presence spread quickly by cell phone. Within a half hour, a full barroom quorum would be reached, and the evening would blend into that typically whirling muddle of alcohol, geysers of animation and sodden wit that was the conclusion of nearly every Friday
night out. But before Mac arrived, and the others with him, there was still time to ask Rob how he was doing, and watch a small faraway smile come over his face, and the ring on his pinkie finger begin clicking against the glass of his beer, and him look up with all the patient sadness in the world and say softly, “Terrible, man, just terrible.” There was still time, before the crowds poured in, when it was easy to notice that a strange resignation hung about him like a mist, and that he looked at all of us with a faintly marveling expression, as if he were already halfway to the next world and glancing back over his shoulder to see us laboring still in fields of irrelevant human sleep.
“Nick,” he said softly, at one moment, as the cars began pulling up outside, their lights spearing through the windows, “Nick, God, it’s been a strange ride.”
“Has it, Rob?” I asked.
He looked at me a second. “You’re a gentle guy,” he said, “and you always were. Don’t lose that, you know?”
“I-I won’t,” I said, suddenly feeling frightened.
“Because you won’t know when it goes,” he said as car doors slammed outside. “It leaves no sign that it’s gone, that kindness, but once it does, it never comes back. Never ever. That’s the mistake most people make—they think it’s learned. The hell it is.” He lit a cigarette, and I saw how skinny his wrists and fingers had become; the nails were individually nibbled to the quick, the cuticles frayed. “It’s just an endowment, like blue eyes or curly hair, but with one difference. It gets used up. And what replaces it”—he looked around the bar with an eerie, haunted look coming over him that made me cold in the pit of my stomach—“ain’t nice.”
He was still shaking his head gently at me as the advance team of old friends crashed through the front door and let out a long, warlike whoop of joy.
Rob moved very little that night. He sat at the bar and received people and seemed to accept the affection extended to him without surprise. After our brief exchange, I hung near, laughing along with the jokes and raising my beer in the endless toasts, while wondering, with a small inner part of myself, what it would have been like to have been loved like that in life; to be desired and admired as an outstanding example of something. I couldn’t help but feel, looking at him without knowing I was witnessing the beginning of the end of his life, that he was a genius after all for having chosen a path that had brought such power to him, and such light and such acclaim.
The evening tilted, deepened, grew louder. Waves of admirers seemed to wash up to him, recede back into the bar, drinks in hand, and then surge forward again. And amid those social tides, he sat as fixed as a rock, nodding, smiling occasionally, but mostly saying nothing, already gone.
Certainly in the course of that evening he was asked about Kate. Almost certainly he responded in some way or another that managed to deflect the thrust of the question. But none of us remembers. Strangely enough, there seems a dearth of detailed memory among all of us as regards that night, a kind of extended blank or leachedout spot, like a videotape passed too close to a strong magnet. What we can recall is that while he was sad and abstracted, very thin and very subdued, he bore no fatal
disfiguring marks of the assassin. No fateful portents. There was nothing in him for example to indicate that a dozen or so hours earlier, crouching over the supine form of his ex-beloved, he’d carefully shot her right between her green eyes.
T
HE LETTER ARRIVED WHILE
I
WAS AT
work, filling out grant applications. It was short, direct and typed on a piece of cheap notepaper. “
We need to talk,”
it read.
The Zen masters have a term for what they believed to be predestined togetherness. It is “Innen.” My mind has been racing since seeing you. It’s like this roaring sound in my head. But it ain’t the surf, buddy boy. I don’t wanna scatter the twigs of your little marital nest, but I simply have to see you again.
Of course, that’s just my point of view. You may have an entirely different one. If the phone rings at 310-999-3434 over the next week, and if it’s you on the other end, then I’ll know that my point of view was right after all.
B.
Quickly, without thinking about it, nudging the office door shut with a foot before I could come to my senses, I dialed the number.
A moment later her low voice said, “Nicky.”
“Hi, Belinda. You knew it was me?”
I thought I heard the rasp and hiss of a cigarette being lit. “Yeah, you’re at work, right?”
“Yes I am.”
“Poor you. How’s it going?”
“The usual, pretty boring. I wish I were somewhere else.”
“Mmm. I wish you were somewhere else too,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s mighty neighborly of you,” I said, and laughed.
There was a pause.
“I want you, Nick,” she said.
At that, the room went away; the buzzing fluorescent lights, the slab wooden desk, the framed Western prints and worn coatrack—all of it gone. From a distance, with the slightly dazed affect of one who has just, with perfect timing, detonated a stick of dynamite in his own face, I heard myself say slowly, “And me you.”
“I thought I wouldn’t, but hey, I do,” she said.
“It’s as if ever since seeing you,” I said, “even when I wasn’t thinking about you, I was.”
“There’s this way”—her voice was sinking, soft—“that life has of pushing certain people into your life so often and so freaking brilliantly that you finally say, okay, I get it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“Do you?”
“Un-huh.”
“Can we talk about your mouth?”
I felt a kick in my lower abdomen.
“Belinda,” I said.
“Can we talk about lust, that crazy human experience?”
“Sweetie.”
“Can we talk about my desire to suck your cock, Nick?”
I braced a hand on my brow, and shut my eyes.
“You look good, Nick. I want that goodness. I want to ride that kiss in the car to some old and happy place. Don’t tell me that’s selfish.”
Unbidden, a wave of sexual images flooded my brain. “It’s a little difficult right now,” I said haltingly, “at home, you know.”
“What, in the perfect marriage?” she snorted. “In that little Potemkin village you call home? Don’t tell me that rain is falling in Disneyland. That’d be too sad for words.”
“Please don’t attack my home life,” I said. “As it happens, we’re in a kind of delicate place.”
“Are you.”
“Kind of.”
“I thought you’d never been so happy.”
“Did I say that?”
“That very phrase, Nick.”
I was silent. After a moment, she went on, “I don’t mean to barge in on you in a bad moment, honey. I was surprised by how great it was to see you. But I’ll go away if you want me to. Is that what you want?”
A long, fraught sigh emptied itself out of my chest. Was that what I wanted? Lucy was everything I’d ever
desired in a woman, save one thing. And Belinda was nothing but that thing. Did I want her to go away? She was Rob Castor’s sister, after all, and all that was really left of him in the world. The two even shared the same physical traits: the sidling swagger, the proud nose and the deep-set blue eyes.
“No,” I said, “it’s not what I want.”
“Oh, frabjous day,” she said. “Well, that’s a fucking relief.”
There was a pause.
“Hey, Belinda?”
“Yeah?”
“I have to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“Are you stoned?”
She made an astonished sound. “Why would you say such a thing, Nick? And the answer is yes, of course I am. But when did that ever make a difference?”
“No,” I said, “I was just wondering if that was the reason for this phone call, is all.”
“Oh, please. You called me, remember?”
“True,” I said, “but you sent me—” I stopped myself.
“Thank you,” she said, “for not being quite that small. And by the way, please don’t do the disapproving family-man thing with me—I can’t stand that shit.”
“Sorry.”
“Or is your self-esteem so low you think I’d have to be wasted to be attracted to a guy as white as you?”
We both laughed.
“Good old Belinda.”
“Listen,” she said happily, “the deal is this. I’m heading
back to Monarch in a few weeks, and I’ll be there for a month or so, staying at a hotel in town. Yeah,” she snorted, “Hiram and I are going to stage an intervention on my mom. Isn’t that a scream?”
“It’s sad is what it is,” I said. “Poor old thing.”
“Pity,” she said, “is a luxury I can’t afford. I’ll call you when I get in, all right?”
“Great.”
“’Bye, darl.” And then, with a strange adhesive sound that I realized only later was a drunken kiss, Belinda hung up the phone.
