The Prisoner of Vandam Street (17 page)

E
very story has to end and every friend has to go back to California. It was two days later, on a cold, sun-splattered morning. Much improved, I was standing in the kitchen of the loft next to Pete Myers, watching the maddeningly slow process by which he brewed his special British tea. I’d become fairly addicted to it by this time, so there was nothing to do but watch and wait. Kent Perkins was taking a much-needed nap on the couch. He was still waiting to hear from Zarah Kenter. He still believed she was going to call. As for myself, I wasn’t so sure. It was the basic difference between a dog and a cat, I thought, between a Christian and a Jew. Kent, like an intelligent, loyal dog, believed in people, believed in fairies, believed in happy Hollywood endings. He even believed that California was not a towaway zone. The cat’s eyes and my eyes were the same eyes; we’d already seen far too many things to believe in any of them.

Kent said he had done all he could do. He’d given Zarah his card before she’d left, telling her he was waiting in the full-crouch position to hear from her. It was a 1–800 number and they’d plug her right through to him twenty-four hours a day. He figured she’d call when she was ready. In the meantime, there were millions of other Zarahs out there in the cold, cruel world who might be in need of his help. Kent planned to take the red-eye back to L.A. late that night.

For my part, I’d been improving so steadily that most of the Irregulars had already gone their merry way. Piers was en route to Australia to continue a lifetime of research into the relative weight of the testicles of the magpie. The research, of course, is not without some personal risk to Piers’s person, since the Australian magpie is a very aggressive bird known to dive-bomb and attack passing schoolchildren, nature enthusiasts, and pluperfect assholes. Piers, a rather aggressive man with rather large testicles of his own, I felt sure would be a perfect match for the pesky, pernicious, pusillanimous bird.

McGovern was back at his place on Jane Street. Like all the rest of us, he was probably hearing what he wanted to hear. Despite all the tiresome shouting, enunciating, and repeating ad nauseam, however, I missed McGovern. And I missed Piers. I even missed Brennan, who was off on assignment, I believe, to an important shoot in Upper Baboon’s Asshole. Pete Myers had also announced his departure that afternoon. I would miss Pete and his cooking. Some time after he’d gone I noticed a great many tea bags that he’d thoughtfully left behind in the sands of time.

Unfortunately, I would not get the chance to miss Ratso. He wasn’t leaving, he said, until he was certain there’d be no more relapses. This was, of course, bad news for the cat, but she took it in stride. Ratso did come in handy later that night, driving Kent to the airport. For one brief, shining moment the cat and I were totally alone. Then, of course, faithful as a German train schedule, Ratso returned.

Like so many sacred stray dogs and cats, people come in and go out of your life, and the ones that are the farthest away sometimes seem to be the closest to your heart. Your home is your castle until one day, quite inexplicably, it becomes your prison. One day you see a girl who reminds you of another girl who reminds you why you’re still alone. One day your friend Ratso tells you that he’s been studying the medical literature and he has learned that a malarial relapse virtually guarantees that you will never get syphilis. And so, I tell him, something positive
has
come out of all of this after all.

Later that night, while Ratso and I were in the midst of a mildly unpleasant altercation regarding a renewed, rather deliberative dumping campaign on the part of the cat, I happened to glance out the window and notice several large cardboard boxes on the sidewalk in front of 198 Vandam Street. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Still later that night, with Ratso crashed on the couch and the cat sleeping soundly on my pillow, I got up to check the refrigerator, figuring that maybe there was a little leftover spotted dick or something.

I made myself a cold roast beef sandwich and was preparing to have a little conversation with the puppethead, when I decided to check out the window and see how the cardboard boxes were doing. They seemed to be getting along fairly well. Not too much flap. I was lighting a cigar when I saw the man known as Ben Felch come out of the building with a suitcase, hail a taxicab, and disappear into the night. It happened so suddenly it almost seemed like a dream. The man was certainly taking a lot of business trips. Three nights before, Zarah had told Kent he’d been gone on another one.

I looked up at Zarah’s window across the street. It was dark. Of course almost every window on Vandam was dark. It was three o’clock in the morning. There was nothing I could do really, and there was no reason to do it. Felch would come back. He’d beat up Zarah again. She’d probably tell people she’d fallen down the stairs. This kind of chronic domestic violence went on all over the world. It was as predictable and as unpreventable as the tides or the phases of the moon. Yet there was no moon that night. I don’t know about the tides, but I tossed and turned and I didn’t get to sleep until just before dawn.

I got up late the next morning. Ratso was having an espresso. I was having a cigar and a cup of English breakfast tea. The cat was having Carved Salmon in Gravy. I gazed down at Vandam Street and saw a homeless woman going through the two cardboard boxes. She had most of their former contents scattered out along the sidewalk. The boxes, apparently, had contained women’s clothing. There were shoes. There was lingerie. There were pants and blouses and tops. There was one nice blue dress.

I
t took the better part of a week for me to convince the cops to check apartment 412 across the street. They had a record of the 911 call and the police report of that incident and they were not eager to get burned again listening to the rantings and wild imaginings of a malaria patient. When they finally did check the apartment, an old lady named Mrs. Finkelstein was living there with her dog Sparky. She had just moved in recently, she told the cops. Other than that, she was not very friendly or forthcoming with them. The cops, in turn, were not very friendly or forthcoming with me.

Apartments rent fast in New York. Your apartment can be rented before you even know you’re dead. But not everything in New York moves as fast as an apartment. Though I was convinced that a crime had occurred, the cops weren’t buying any. They refused to seriously consider getting a search warrant to search the apartment or the building. It was all circumstantial, they said. All a malarial fantasy. People move out of the city every day, leaving old clothes behind for homeless people to pore over on the sidewalk. Forget about it, they said. There’s not enough there to do anything with.

But they were wrong. There was a lot there. Trouble was, it was all in my head and in my heart. And as many months went by, that was where it stayed. Maybe it was because Zarah had been about the same age as Kacey when I’d first seen her long ago across a crowded room. Maybe it was because malaria had helped me see reality, and reality, I believed, was that Ben Felch had murdered Zarah and gotten away with it. Maybe it was just personal and professional pride; I hadn’t come this far to be just another guest voice on
The Simpsons.
Whatever it was I believed, however, nobody wanted to hear it. Even Kent Perkins wasn’t sure. A lot of things could’ve happened, he told me one night on the phone. That’s true, I said, but only one of them did. The only reason the girl never called you is because she’s dead, I told him. We don’t know that, he said. One of us does, I told him.

Kent told me not to let it get me down. Cases go unresolved like this all the time, he said. He reminded me of the club I once belonged to many years ago when I was living in L.A. There were only two members in the club: myself and the great musician and composer Van Dyke Parks. Both of us had been doing a fairly adult portion of Peruvian marching powder for some time and we both, quite naturally, were rather depressed. The club was called The Undepressables. Van Dyke and I made a pact that hence forward nothing would ever depress us again. Friends could get sick, go broke, get fired, get divorced, die, kill themselves, kill everybody else, not invite us to their dinner parties—it didn’t matter. The club’s one rule was that although Van Dyke and I were permitted to depress others, we would not permit anyone or anything to depress us. Finally, we got so undepressed that things started getting depressing so we had to disband the club.

I thought now that I probably hadn’t been this depressed since before Van Dyke and I formed The Undepressables. And, of course, I always remembered my father’s wise words: “Cheer up, sonny boy. It only gets worse.” Yet somehow, the cat, the puppethead, and I still managed to navigate the deep waters of life and the shallow ones, the rough ones and the lonely ones.

It must have been about a year after all this shit had happened that McGovern came into the loft one day with the puppethead squeezed in one large hand and a newspaper clipping in the other. I placed the puppethead back on top of the mantel and then walked over and looked at the clipping McGovern had placed on my desk. It was a small story from the back pages of the
Daily News.
I laughed bitterly when I read it.

The skeletal remains, or skel-e′-tal remains, as Piers Akerman would say, of an unidentified young woman had been found by workmen in a trunk in the basement of a building at 198 Vandam Street. There was no way to accurately determine who the victim was or how long she’d been there. Well, she’s not doing so bad, I thought blackly. The rest of us don’t know who we are either, or how long we’ve been here.

But it was bad enough. Bad enough to haunt your dreams. Bad enough to make you wander aimlessly through the streets of the Village. Bad enough to make you wish you could never want to forget. So I told myself a little story that my old friend, Dr. Jim Bone, had once told me. I told it to myself as if I was telling it to a small child. But really, I suppose, I was only reminding myself that the grief, guilt, and rage would surely destroy me if I didn’t let this go.

The story goes like this. There were two monks in the old country who once took vows of chastity and silence. Sometime later, a big flood came to the land and the monks happened upon a weeping woman trapped by the raging river. One monk unhesitatingly picked up the woman and carried her across a narrow footbridge to safety. She said, “Thank you, kind sir,” and the monk answered, “God bless you.”

Many years passed and the monks were old men and the order relaxed the vows a bit for monks who grew very old. So one day one monk said to the other, “I still remember that day you broke both your vows. You vowed not to speak and not to touch a woman, yet you picked that weeping woman up and carried her across the bridge. I can’t believe you carried her across that bridge.”

“I can’t believe,” said the other monk, “that you’re still carrying her.”

Every time I think of Zarah, I think of this story. Sometimes it works.

I’d like to thank my editor, Chuck Adams. He’s a fine editor, a true author’s editor who works in the trenches with writers and manuscripts. He’s been with Simon & Schuster for fourteen years, ten of which I’ve had the privilege of working with him. Without a talented, loyal, experienced, dedicated editor like Chuck, no publishing house can hope to grow or be great. Because that’s where it all really starts, an editor finding a manuscript he believes in, shaping it, developing it, and guiding it through the often torturous publishing process.

Over the years Chuck has edited scores of notable authors including Joseph Heller, Mary Higgins Clark, Joe McGinniss, Sandra Brown, Barbara Delinsky, Susan Cheever, and James Lee Burke to name only a few.

Last December, in a supposed “corporate downsizing” move, the powers that be, perhaps in some distant boardroom, let Chuck Adams go, along with his gifted assistant Cheryl Weinstein. Many authors, editors, and agents seemed shocked and angry at this sudden turn of events, but it’s really not all that surprising. Corporate thinkers rarely have a notion of who made them what they are or how they got there in the first place. Geniuses like these put Mozart in the gutter, Van Gogh in the cornfield, and Rosa Parks in the back of the bus. Down through history they’ve turned their backs on everybody from Peter Rabbit to Jesus Christ. Why should anyone be surprised that they fired one of their very best?

Thank you, Chuck. I’m a better writer because of you.