The 1st Deadly Sin (9 page)

She played strange games. One night she donned a child’s jumper, sat on his lap and called him “Daddy.” Another time—and how had she guessed
that
?—she bought him a gold chain and insisted he link it about his slim waist. She bit him. He thought her mad with love for him, but when he reached for her, she was not there.

He knew what was happening and did not care. Only she had meaning. She recited a poem to him in a language he could not identify, then licked his eyes. One night he tried to kiss her—an innocent kiss on the cheek, a kiss of greeting—and she struck his jaw with her clenched fist. The next instant she was on her knees, fumbling for him.

And her monologues never ended. She could be silent for hours, then suddenly speak to him of sin and love and evil and gods and why sex should transcend the sexual. Was she training him? He thought so, and studied.

She was gone for almost a week. He took her to dinner when she returned, but it was not a comfortable evening. She was silent and withdrawn. Only once did she look directly at him. Then she looked down, and with the middle finger of her right hand lightly touched, stroked, caressed the white tablecloth.

She took him immediately home, and he followed obediently up that cob webbed staircase. In the upstairs room, standing naked beneath the blaring orange light, she showed him the African masks.

And she told him what she wanted him to do.

6

D
ANIEL
B
LANK INCHED
his way up the chimney of Devil’s Needle. He could feel the cold of the stone against his shoulders, against his gloved palms and heavy boots. It was dark inside the cleft; the cold was damp and smelled of death.

He wormed his way carefully onto the flat top. There had been light snow flurries the day before, and he expected ice. It was there, in thin patches, and after he hauled up the rucksack he used his ice ax to chip it away, shoving splinters over the side. Then he could stand on cleated soles and search around.

It was a lowery sky, with a look of more snow to the west. Dirty clouds scummed the sun; the wind knifed steadily. This would, he knew, be his last climb until spring. The park closed on Thanksgiving; there were no ski trails, and the rocks were too dangerous in winter.

He sat on the stone, ate an onion sandwich, drank a cup of coffee that seemed to chill as it was poured. He had brought a little flask of brandy and took small sips. Warmth went through him like new blood, and he thought of Celia.

She went through him like new blood, too; a thaw he knew in heart, gut, loins. She melted him, and not only his flesh. He felt her heat in every waking thought, in his clotted dreams. His love for her had brought him aware, had made him sensible of a world that existed for others but which he had never glimpsed.

He had been an only child, raised in a large house filled with the odors of disinfectant and his mother’s gin. His father was moderately wealthy, having inherited from an aunt. He worked in a bank. His mother drank and collected Lalique glass. This was in Indiana.

It was a silent house and in later years, when Daniel tried to recall it, he had an absurd memory of the entire place being tiled: walls, floors, ceilings plated with white tile, enamel on steel, exactly like a gleaming subway tunnel that went on forever to nowhere. Perhaps it was just a remembered dream.

He had always been a loner; his mother and father never kissed him on the lips, but offered their cheeks. White tiles.

The happiest memory of his boyhood was when their colored maid gave him a birthday present; it was a display box for his rock collection. Her husband had made it from an old orange crate, carefully sanding the rough wood and lining it with sleazy black cloth. It was beautiful, just what he wanted. That year his mother gave him handkerchiefs and underwear, and his father gave him a savings bond.

He was a loner in college, too. But in his sophomore year he lost his virginity at the one whore house in the college town. In his last two years he had a comforting affair with a Jewish girl from Boston. She was ugly but had mad eyes and a body that didn’t end. All she wanted to do was screw. That was all right with him.

He found a piece of chalcedony and polished it in his rock tumbler and on the buffing wheel. It wasn’t a priceless stone, but he thought it pretty. The Jewish girl laughed when he gave it to her on graduation day. “Fucking
goy,”
she said.

His graduation present from his parents was a summer in Europe, a grand tour of a dozen countries with enough time for climbing in Switzerland and visiting archeological digs in the south of France. He was waiting for his plane in New York, in a hotel bed with the Jewish girl who had flown down from Boston for a last bang, when a lawyer called to tell him his mother and father, driving home from his graduation, had gone off the highway, had been trapped in their car, and burned to death.

Daniel Blank thought less than a minute. Then he told the lawyer to sell the house, settle the estate, and bury his parents. Daniel himself would be home after his trip to Europe. The Boston girl heard him say all this on the phone. By the time he hung up, she was dressed and marching out of there, carrying her Louis Vuitton bag. He never saw her again. But it was a wonderful summer.

When he returned to his hometown late in August, no one would talk to him but the lawyer—and he as little as possible. Daniel Blank couldn’t care less. He flew to New York, opened a bank account with his inheritance, then flew back to Bloomington and was finally accepted at the University of Indiana, going for an M.S. with emphasis on geology and archeology. During his second year he met Gilda, the woman he later married.

Two months before he was to get his degree, he decided it was all a lot of shit; he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life shoveling dirt. He gave the best stone in his collection (a nice piece of jade) to Gilda, donated the remaining rocks to the University, and flew to New York. He played the part of a modestly moneyed bachelor in Manhattan for about six months. Then most of the cash was gone, but he hadn’t sold off any of the stocks or bonds. He got a silly job in the circulation department of a national magazine. He found, to his amusement, that he was good at it. And he discovered he had an ambition unhampered by conscience. Gilda came to New York, and they were married.

He was not a stupid man; he knew the tiled emotions of his boyhood and youth had deadened him. And that house that smelled of CN and gin…those cheek-kisses…the Lalique glass. Other people fell in love and wept; he collected stones and scorned his parents’ funeral.

What Celia Montfort had done for him, he decided, was to peel clean what had always been in him but had never been revealed. Now he could feel, deeply, and react to her. He could love her. He could sacrifice for her. It was
passion
, as warming as brandy on a bleak November afternoon. It was a fire in the veins, a heightened awareness, a need compounded of wild hope and fearful dread. He sought it, following the same instinct that had led him to discard his rock collection, those mementos of dead history.

He started the climb down, still thinking of his love for Celia, of her naked and masked in the upstairs room, and of how quickly she had learned to slide her hand into his slitted pocket and fondle him as they walked in public.

Descending, he moved one boot too quickly. The heel hit the toe of the other boot, pressed against the opposite chimney wall. Then both legs dangled. For a long, stomach-turning moment he was suspended only by the pressure of his arms, clamped by shoulders and palms shoving against opposing walls. He forced himself to take a deep breath, eyes closed in the cold darkness. He would not think of the fast fall to the boulders below.

Slowly, smiling, he drew up one knee and planted a sole carefully against the opposite wall. His elbows were trembling with strain. He lifted the other boot into position and pressed. Now he could take the load off shoulders, arms, wrists, hands.

He looked up at the little patch of murky sky above the black hole he was in, and laughed with delight. He would descend safely. He could do anything. He had the strength to resist common sense.

Part II

1

C
APTAIN
E
DWARD
X
.
D
ELANEY,
Commanding Officer of the 251st Precinct, New York Policy Department, wearing civilian clothes, pushed open the door of the doctor’s office, removed his Homburg (stiff as wood), and gave his name to the receptionist.

He planted himself solidly into an armchair, glanced swiftly around the room, then stared down at the hat balanced precisely on his knees. It was the “Observation Game”: originally a self-imposed duty but now a diversion he had enjoyed for almost thirty years, since he had been a patrolman. If, for any reason, he was called upon to describe the patients in the waiting room…

“Left: male, Negro, dark brown, about 35, approximately 5 feet 10 inches, 160 pounds. Kinky black hair cut short; no part. Wearing plaid sports jacket, fawn-colored slacks, cordovan loafers. Necktie looped but not knotted. Heavy ring on right hand. Slight white scar on neck. Smoking cork-tip cigarette held between thumb and forefinger of left hand.

“Center: female, white, about 60-65; short, plump, motherly type. Uncontrollable tremor of right hand. Wearing black coat, soiled; elastic stockings, hole in left knee; old-fashioned hat with single cloth flower. Dark reddish hair may be wig. Approximately 5 feet 1 inch, 140 pounds. Fiddles with wen on chin.

“Right: male, white, about 50, 6 feet 2 inches. Extremely thin and emaciated. Loose collar and suit jacket show recent weight loss. Sallow complexion. Fidgety. Right eye may be glass. Nicotine-stained fingers indicate heavy smoker. Gnaws on lower lip. Blinks frequently.”

He raised his eyes, inspected them again. He was close. The Negro’s ring was on the left hand. The old woman’s hair (or wig) was more brown than reddish. The thin man wasn’t quite as tall as he had estimated. But Captain Delaney could provide a reasonably accurate description and/or identify these strangers in a line-up or courtroom if needed.

He was not, he acknowledged, as exact as some men in his judgment of physical characteristics. There was, for instance, a detective second grade attached to the 251st Precinct who could glance at a man for a few seconds and estimate his height within an inch and his weight within five pounds. That was a special gift.

But Captain Delaney also had an eye. That was for the Negro’s necktie that was looped but not knotted, the old woman’s wen, the thin man’s continual blinking. Small things. Significant things.

He saw and remembered habits, tastes, the way a man dressed, moved, grimaced, walked, spoke, lighted a cigarette or spat into the gutter. Most important, Captain Delaney—the cop—was interested in what a man did when he was alone, or thought he was alone. Did he masturbate, pick his nose, listen to recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan, shuffle pornographic photos, work out chess problems? Or did he read Nietzsche?

There was a case—Delaney remembered it well; he had been a detective in the Chelsea precinct where it happened—three young girls raped and murdered within a period of 18 months, all on the roofs of tenements. The police thought they had their man. They carefully charted his daily movements. They brought him in for questioning and got nowhere. Then they established very close surveillance. Detective Delaney watched the suspect through binoculars from an apartment across the courtyard. Delaney saw this man, who had never been known to go to church, this man who thought he was alone and unobserved, this man went each night onto his knees and prayed before a reproduction of the face of Jesus Christ—one of those monstrous prints in which the eyes seem to open, close, or wink, depending upon the angle of view.

So they took the suspect in again, but this time, on Delaney’s urging, they brought in a priest to talk to him. Within an hour they had a complete confession. Well…that was what one man did when he thought he was alone and unobserved.

It was the spastic twitch, the uncontrollable tic that Captain Delaney had an eye for. He wanted to know what tunes the suspect whistled, the foods he ate, how his home was decorated. Was he married, unmarried, thrice-married? Did he beat his dog or beat his wife? All these things told. And, of course, what he did when he thought he was alone.

The “big things” Captain Delaney told his men—things like a man’s job, religion, politics, and the way he talked at cocktail parties—these were a facade he created to hold back a hostile world. Hidden were the vital things. The duty of the cop, when necessary, was to peek around the front at the secret urges and driven acts.

“Doctor will see you now,” the receptionist smiled at him.

Delaney nodded, gripped his hat, marched into the doctor’s office. He ignored the hostile stares of the patients who had, obviously, been waiting longer than he.

Dr. Louis Bernardi rose from behind his desk, holding out a plump, ringed hand.

“Captain,” he said. “Always a pleasure.”

“Doctor,” Delaney said. “Good to see you again. You’re looking well.”

Bernardi caressed the bulged grey flannel waistcoat, straining at its tarnished silver buttons which, Barbara Delaney had told her husband, the doctor had revealed to her were antique Roman coins.

“It’s my wife’s cooking,” Bernardi shrugged, smiling. “What can I do? He-he! Sit down, sit down. Mrs. Delaney is dressing. She will be ready to leave soon. But we shall have time for a little chat.”

A chat? Delaney assumed men had a talk or a discussion. That “chat” was Bernardi. The Captain consulted a police surgeon; Bernardi was his wife’s physician, had been for thirty years. He had seen her through two successful pregnancies, nursed her through a bad bout of hepatitis, and had recommended and seen to her recovery from a hysterectomy only two months previously.

He was a round man, beautifully shaved. He was soft and, if not unctuous, he was at least a smooth article. The black silk suit put forth a sheen; the shoes bore a dulled gleam. He was not perfumed, but he exuded an odor of self-satisfaction.