The manitou (5 page)

I coughed in
embarrassment.
“Just a nickname.
You know how it is.”

“Do you have
some identification, sir?”

I shuffled
through my pockets. My driver’s license was at home, and so were my credit
cards.

Eventually I
came across one of my calling cards, and showed it to her. Written across it
was:

“The Incredible Erskine.
Fortunes told, forecasts
interpreted, dreams delved.”

“I guess you
must be him all right,” she smiled, and handed over the letter.

I waited until
I reached my flat before I examined the envelope. I laid it on the table and
inspected it closely. Just the sort of handwriting you would expect from a
cultivated girl like Karen Tandy – firm, sweeping and bold. I particularly
liked the way she’d written Incredible. I found a pair of nail scissors in the
table drawer and cut along the top of the envelope. Inside were three or four
sheets of lined
paper, that
looked as though they’d
been torn from a secretary’s notepad. There was a short letter with them, in
Karen Tandy’s script: “Dear Mr. Erskine, I had the dream again last night, much
more vivid than before. I have tried to remember every detail, and two things
were very striking. The coastline had a particular shape which I have sketched
down here. I have also sketched the sailing ship, and as much of its flag as I
can remember.

The feeling of
fear was also very much stronger, and the sense of needing to escape was
extremely powerful.

As soon as I
have recovered from the operation, I will call you to see what you think.

Your friend, Karen Tandy.”

I opened up the
scraps of note paper and peered at them closely. The improvised map of the
coastline was distinctly unhelpful. It was little more than a squiggly line
that could have been anywhere in the world. But the drawing of the ship was
more interesting. It was quite detailed, and the flag was good, too. There were
bound to be books on sailing ships in the library and books of flags, as well,
so there was a chance that I could discover which ship this actually was.

If it was a
real ship at all, and wasn’t just a figment of Karen Tandy’s tumor-ridden
imagination.

I sat there for
quite a while, pondering over the strange case of “my friend, Karen Tandy.” I
was eager to go and check on the ship, but it was nearly half-past eleven, and
Mrs. Herz was due –

another
dear old lady with more money than sense. Mrs.
Herz’s special interest was in knowing whether she was going to have any
trouble with her hundreds of relations, all of whom were mentioned in her will.
After every session with me, she went to her lawyer and altered everyone’s
legacy. Her lawyer made so much money out of these codicils and amendments that
last Christmas he had sent me a crate of Black Label Johnnie Walker. After all,
he and I were in much the same kind of business.

At eleven-thirty
sharp there was a ring at the door. I hung up my jacket in the closet, took
down my long green robe, stuck my hat on top of my head, and prepared to
receive Mrs. Herz in my usual mystical manner.

“Come in, Mrs.
Herz. It’s a fine morning for everything occult.”

Mrs. Herz must
have been all of seventy-five. She was pallid and wrinkled with hands like
chicken’s claws, and spectacles that magnified her eyes like oysters swimming
in goldfish bowls.

She came
trembling in on her stick, smelling of mothballs and lavender, and she sat
herself down in my armchair with a frail, reedy sigh.

“How are you,
Mrs. Herz?” I asked her cheerily, rubbing my hands. “How are the dreams?”

She said
nothing at all, so I simply shrugged and went to collect the Tarot cards
together. As I shuffled them, I tried to find the blank card that I had turned
up last night, but there didn’t seem to be any sign of it. I could have been
mistaken of course, or overtired, but I wasn’t entirely convinced of that. In
spite of my job, I’m not given to mystical experiences. I laid the cards out on
the table, and invited Mrs. Herz to think of a question she would like to ask
them.

“It’s a long
time since we checked up on your nephew Stanley,” I reminded her.
“How about a peek at the comings and goings of that little
household?
Or how about your stepsister Agnes?”

She didn’t
answer. She didn’t even look at me. She seemed to be staring over into a corner
of the room, lost in a dream of her own.

“Mrs. Herz?” I
said, standing up. “Mrs. Herz, I’ve laid the cards out for you.”

I went over and
bent down to look in her face. She seemed all right. She was breathing, at
least.

The last thing
I wanted was an old lady giving up the ghost when I was in the middle of
telling her fortune. The publicity would be ruinous. Or then again, maybe it
wouldn’t.

I took her old,
reptilian hands in mine and said gently: “Mrs. Herz? Are you feeling all right?
Can I get you a glass of brandy?”

Her eyes
floated eerily around in her Coke-bottle glasses. She seemed to be looking in
my direction, but at the same time she didn’t focus on me at all. It was almost
as though she were looking through me, or behind me. I couldn’t help turning
around to see if there was somebody else in the room.

“Mrs. Herz,” I
said again. “Do you want one of your pills, Mrs. Herz? Can you hear me,
Mrs.

Herz?”

A thin,
sibilant whisper dribbled out from between her withered lips. I had the feeling
she was trying to say something, but I couldn’t work it out at all. The oil
lamp started flickering and guttering, and it was hard to make out whether the
moving shadows across her face were strange expressions or not.

“Booooo...” she
said faintly.

“Mrs. Herz,” I
snapped. “If this is some kind of game, you’d better stop. You’ve got me
worried here. Mrs. Herz, if you don’t get yourself together at once I’m going
to call an ambulance. Do you understand me, Mrs. Herz?”

“Boooo...” she
whispered again. Her hands started shaking, and her large emerald ring vibrated
against the arm of the chair. Her eyes were rolling around, and her jaw seemed
to be stuck wide open. I could see her pale slimy tongue, and her $4,000
bridgework.

“Okay,” I said.
“That’s it. I’m calling an ambulance, Mrs. Herz. Look, here I am going to the
telephone. I’m dialing the number, Mrs. Herz. It’s ringing.”

Suddenly the
old lady stood up. She grabbed for her stick, missed it, and it clattered on to
the floor. She stood swaying and shuffling on the carpet, as though she were
dancing in time to some song that I couldn’t hear. The operator said: “Yes, can
I help you?” but I put the phone down and went across to my hopping, waltzing
old client.

I tried to put
my arm around her, but she flapped me away with one of her scaly paws. She
jogged and danced, muttering and mumbling all the time, and I just didn’t know
what the hell to do with her. She must be having some kind of fit, but I’d
never seen a fit where the sufferer does a one-woman conga round the floor.

“Booo...” she
whispered again.

I danced around
her, trying to keep up with her scuffly little waltz. “What do you mean,
‘boo’?” I asked her. “Mrs. Herz, will you please sit down and relax, and tell
me what the hell’s going on?”

As abruptly as
she had started to dance, she stopped. The energy seemed to fall out of her
like an elevator sinking to floor-level, foyer and street. She reached out for
something to support her, and I had to grab her arm to stop her from pitching
over. I gently laid her stiff old body back into the armchair, and knelt down
beside her.

“Mrs. Herz, I
don’t like to bully my clients, but I do think you ought to have some medical
attention. Now, don’t you agree that would be sensible?”

She stared at
me blindly, and her mouth stretched open again. I admit I had to look away. The
outsides of old ladies are okay, but I’m really not too keen on their insides.

“Boot,” she
whispered.
“Boot.”

“Boot?”
I asked her. “What the hell have boots got to do
with anything?”

“Boot,” she
quavered, much more shrilly now.
“Boot!
BOOOTTTT!!”

“My God,” I
said. “Mrs. Herz, just you calm down and I’ll fetch an ambulance straight away.

Now, don’t
move, Mrs. Herz, it’s perfectly all right. You’re going to be fine, just fine.”

I got up and
went over to the telephone and dialed the emergency service. Mrs. Herz was
shaking and trembling and rabbiting on about “boot, boot” and they seemed to
take half an hour to answer.

“Can I help
you?” said the operator, at last.

“You certainly
can. Look, I need an ambulance straight away. I have an old lady here who’s
having some kind of a fit. She’s as rich as they come, so tell the ambulance
crew they don’t have to make any detours through the Bronx before they get
here. Please hurry. I think she’s going to die or something.”

I gave my
address and telephone number, and then turned back to Mrs. Herz. She seemed to
have stopped twitching for the moment, and she was sitting there quiet and
strange as though she were thinking.

“Mrs. Herz...”
I said.

She turned
toward me. Her face was old and fixed and rigid. Her watery eyes stared right
into mine.

“De boot,
mijnheer,” she said gruffly.
“De boot.”

“Mrs. Herz,
look, please, you don’t have to worry. The ambulance is on its way. Just sit
there and keep calm.”

Mrs. Herz
gripped the arm of the chair and got to her feet. She had trouble standing
straight, as though she were walking on ice. But then she pulled herself erect,
and stood there with her arms hanging down by her side, taller and firmer than
I’d ever seen her stand before.

“Mrs. Herz, I
think you’d better...”

But she ignored
me, and started to glide across the carpet. I’d never seen anybody walk that
way before. Her feet seemed to skate silently over the floor as if she wasn’t
really touching it at all.

She slid
quietly over to the door, and opened it.

“It really
would be better if you waited,” I said lamely. To tell you the truth, I was
getting the creeps with all this, and I didn’t know what to say to her at all.
She didn’t seem to hear me, or if she did, she wasn’t taking any notice.

“De boot,” she
said again, in a harsh voice. And then she glided out of the door and into the
corridor.

Of course, I
went after her. But what I saw next was so sudden and weird that I almost
wished I hadn’t. One second she was just outside the door, and I was reaching
out my hand to take her arm, and then she was sliding away down the long bright
corridor, as quickly as if she was running. But she wasn’t running at all. She
was rushing away from me without even moving her legs.

“Mrs. Herz!” I
called, but my voice went strangled and strange. I felt a huge dark surge of
fright inside me, like seeing a white face at the window in the middle of the
night.

She turned,
once, at the end of the corridor. She was standing at the head of the stairs.
She seemed to be trying to beckon, or lift her arm – more as if she were
fighting something off than trying to call me to help her. Then she disappeared
down the stairs, and I heard her stiff old body falling and bumping from step
to step.

I pelted down
to the end of the corridor. Doors were opening all the way
along,
and anxious and curious faces were peering out.

I looked down
the stairs. Mrs. Herz was lying there, all twisted up, with her legs at
peculiar angles. I rushed down and knelt beside her and felt her stick-like
wrist.
Nothing, no pulse at all.
I lifted her head,
and a long slide of glutinous blood came pouring out of her mouth.

“Is she okay?”
said one of my neighbors, from the top of the stairs. “What happened?”

“She fell,” I
told him. “She’s seventy-five. She’s not too good on her feet. I think she’s
dead. I called an ambulance already.”

“Oh, God,” said
a woman. “I can’t stand anything dead.”

I stood up,
tearing my long green gown. I just couldn’t believe any of this, and I felt as
if I’d wake up in a moment, and it would still be early morning, and I’d be
lying in bed in my turquoise silk pajamas. I looked down at Mrs. Herz, wrinkled
and old and extinct, like a pale balloon that’s leaked itself to death, and the
sick started rising in my throat.

Lieutenant
Marino of the Homicide Squad was most understanding. It turned out that Mrs.
Herz had left me something in her will, but it wasn’t enough for me to have
pushed her down the stairs.

The detective
sat upright in my armchair, in his stiff black
raincoat,
with his black brush-cut hair sticking up at all angles, trying to read from a
grubby scrap of paper.

“It says here
that you’re entitled to a pair of Victorian vases,” he sniffed. “We’re having
someone check on the value right now, but you don’t look the kind of guy who’d
knock an old lady off for a vase.”

I shrugged.
“Old ladies like her are my bread and butter. You don’t go pushing your bread
and butter down the stairs.”

Lieutenant
Marino looked up. He had a wide, squashed face, like an opera singer who’s
fallen on hard times. He scratched his spiky hair thoughtfully and cast his
eyes around the room.

“Some kind of
fortune-teller, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.
Tarot cards, tea leaves, that kind of stuff. Most of my clients are elderly
ladies like Mrs. Herz.”

He bit his lip
and nodded. “Sure. You say she was acting unwell the whole time she was here?”

“Yes, I mean I
thought there was something wrong from the moment she came in. She’s pretty old
and infirm, but she usually manages to chat for a while, and tell me how she’s
getting on. But this time she came in and sat down and never said a word.”