Burial (4 page)

‘Is that man any relation of yours?'

I shook my head. She peered back at me, and said, ‘I didn't think so. He has such piggy little eyes. He should eat less dairy produce.'

‘He's dead,' I told her.

‘Well, there you are, then. Proves my point.'

I opened the door for her and she clattered down the stairs on her stilettos. ‘I'm a little worried about Vance, to tell you the truth. He's definitely put on weight around the jowls. I don't like jowly men. They remind me of those slobbery dogs, you know the ones who leave saliva all over your velvet skirts.'

The stairs down to the street were gloomy and tilted and smelled of stale cooking-fat and Lysol. I'd been trying to persuade Mr Giotto the landlord to give the walls a lick of white paint. At the moment they were done in pustule yellow, which wasn't very uplifting for my clients.

‘Did you give me my mystic motto?' Mrs John F. Lavender asked me, pausing on the second landing.

‘Oh … no, sorry. I forgot.'

‘I do like to have my mystic motto. It always makes me feel that I have some control over my life, do you know what I mean?'

‘Yes, quite. Well … your mystic motto for this week is, unh, “Many a fish should be filleted before the sun rises.”' Mrs John F. Lavender stared at me wide-eyed. I'd been giving my clients mystic mottoes for years — almost all of them insisted on it — but there was always a tense moment when I thought that they might burst out laughing.

‘“Many a fish should be filleted before the sun rises,”' Mrs John F. Lavender whispered, reverently. ‘That's beautiful. I can almost imagine it.'

We carried on downstairs, her heels clacking loudly with every step. I had almost forgotten that there was somebody waiting for me. Mrs John F. Lavender said, ‘I don't know why life is always so goddamned
complex
. Hiding, lying, worrying if you've left your earrings somewhere you shouldn't. And the trouble is that I absolutely adore
all
of them.'

The sun was shining brightly through the grimy wired-glass panels in the building's front doors, and reflecting from the pale-green linoleum floor. The figure was silhouetted black against the reflected light, so that as I came down the last flight of stairs it was impossible for me to make out who it was.

I could see it was a woman, with a shoulder-length bob. I could see that she was very slim, and that she was wearing a simple strapless cotton dress with a red poppy print on it.

But it was only when I came right up to her, and she turned slightly towards the light, that at last I recognized her; and even then I could hardly believe it.

‘Hallo, Harry,' she said, with the faintest of smiles. ‘Very long time no see.'

‘Many a fish should be filleted …,' Mrs John F. Lavender muttered. I opened the front doors for her, and she stepped out into the street. A fire-truck roared past, honking and whooping, and a huge guy walked by with the largest ghetto-blaster on his shoulder that I had ever seen. The hot morning air literally throbbed. Mrs John F. Lavender blew me two ostentatious kisses and said, ‘You're a wonderful, wonderful man! I'll see you next week, same time!' Then — to my visitor — ‘He's a
wonderful
man, dear! I can recommend him!'

I closed the doors and the hallway was abruptly quiet. Karen was still smiling in that faint, fey way she had. She was nearly twenty years older than the last time I had seen her, and there were subtle streaks of silver in her hair. I was grey,
too, with a bald patch the size of a buckwheat pancake. I had a little more chin, too, although not so much as Aleister Crowley.

I took hold of her hands, and gently squeezed them. She was real, not an illusion.

‘You're still doing it, then?' she asked me. ‘The fortune-telling.'

‘Oh, yes, for sure. I tried motel management for a while, up at White Plains, but that didn't really pan out. I can't be unctuous twenty-four hours a day, that's my problem. Then I tried a mobile disco. Erskine's Electric Experience. I lost over nine thousand dollars on that I guess this is the only work that I've ever been cut out for.'

‘Harry,' she said, ‘something bad's happened. Not to me, but to some friends of mine. They've tried everything. Police, doctors, rabbis. But nobody really believes them. I'm not so sure I believe them myself.'

‘I see. So you came looking for the one man in the world who's wacky enough to believe anything?'

‘Don't say that,' she chided me.

‘All right,' I said. ‘What about a drink?'

‘I thought you were too busy.'

‘I always say that. As a matter of fact my next client isn't due until …' I checked my Russian wristwatch ‘… Thursday.'

‘Oh, Harry! You haven't changed, have you?'

I checked my wallet to make sure that I had enough money for a drink, then opened the front door and said, ‘I've changed, Karen, believe me. Number one, I never take anything for granted any more. Number two, I never wear tasselled loafers with a business suit.'

‘Before we go,' she said, ‘lift up my hair.'

‘What?'

‘Lift up my hair … here, at the back.'

Slowly I approached her and lifted up her fine, soft hair.
On the back of her neck, running down between her shoulder blades, was a thin silvery scar about seven inches long. I ran my fingertip down it, and then let her hair fall back.

‘It
did
happen,' she said, turning around.

I nodded. ‘I know. I keep trying to convince myself that it was nothing but a weird dream. Or maybe it was something that I imagined when I was drunk. Maybe it was a movie I saw, or a book I read. That's why I never came to see you. I knew that if I saw you, I wouldn't be able to pretend that it hadn't happened.'

‘This isn't as bad, this thing that's happened to my friends.'

I smiled. ‘
Nothing
could ever be as bad as Misquamacus. Nothing.'

Karen slowly lifted her hand and pressed it against the scar. Her eyes were wide with remembered fear. ‘Don't mention that name to me again, ever.'

We sat in a booth at Maude's, on the first floor of the Summit Hotel. It was crowded and noisy with the lunchtime crowd, and we were lucky to find somewhere to wedge ourselves in. Karen had a frozen daiquiri and I had the usual: an Erskine Explosion. Maude's bar was the only bar that would make it for me. Or at least they were the only bar who knew how to make it properly. It was basically a Suffering Bastard with bourbon added. You only had to drink one and the world suddenly seemed to be a happier place. Better still, it suddenly seemed to be the
only
place. When you've glimpsed other worlds, like tarot worlds, or
worlds where invisible things go rushing down the walls, a little self-delusion can help to steady the mental boat.

I noticed a gold band on Karen's left hand.

‘You're married?' I asked her.

She shook her head. ‘I was. A college professor from Hartford. He was very kind to me. His name's Jim.'

‘So you're not Karen Tandy any more — you're Mrs Jim?'

‘Mrs van Hooven.'

‘Oh, so you changed your nationality, too. What happened?'

‘With Jim? Nothing, really. I still think the world of him. But I woke up one morning and realized that I needed more in my life than kindness.'

‘What else is there? Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll?'

‘I don't know. I'm trying to find out.'

‘“
I have known the strange nurses of Kindness,
”'I quoted. ‘“
I have seen them kiss the sick, attend the old, give candy to the mad!
”'

‘You're a strange man, Harry.'

‘No, I'm not. Strange men have strange aspirations. I dream of nothing but being normal.'

Karen said, ‘These friends of mine …'

‘The ones you're worried about?'

‘Yes. They live on East 17th Street. Their names are Michael and Naomi Greenberg. I've known Michael ever since school. They're lovely people, really lovely.'

I swallowed some of my Explosion, and gave an involuntary shudder, the same kind you give when somebody walks over your grave.

‘So, what's their problem?' I asked her. ‘This problem that nobody can bring themselves to believe, even you?'

Karen looked serious. As she spoke, she traced a pattern on the tabletop with her fingertip, around and around and around.

‘It happened five weeks ago this Friday. Michael went to
the synagogue with his brother Erwin. Naomi cooked the supper and laid the table and had everything ready for Michael and Erwin to come home. But about half an hour before they were due to come back, all the furniture in the dining room slid across the floor by itself and crowded up against the wall. Naomi tried to stop it In fact she kept moving it back to the middle of the room but it still insisted on sliding towards the wall. In the end Naomi was quite badly hurt She broke one rib and fractured two more, and her left lung was lacerated.

‘Not only that, the whole experience left her totally traumatized.'

‘You went through worse than that,' I reminded her.

She shrugged, trying to make light of it. ‘I wasn't alone, like Naomi. Besides, I didn't even realize what was happening to me, most of the time. How can I put it? I wasn't myself.'

I leaned back in my chair. A young business type sitting close to me was laughing so loudly that I thought he was going to burst my eardrum.

‘So, what's the problem? The Greenbergs' furniture moved by itself. There must be plenty of people who wish their furniture would move by itself.'

‘Well, there's more to it than that.'

‘Let's think about the moving furniture first. We have to consider the possibility that Naomi broke her rib in a different way — in a way that she didn't want Michael to know about — and so she moved the furniture herself and concocted this story that it moved by itself.'

‘She would never do a thing like that! And, anyway, how on earth do you break a rib in a way that you don't want your husband to know about?'

‘Who knows? Maybe your friend has a violent lover. Maybe she had an automobile accident someplace where she didn't want her husband to know that she'd been.'

Karen said, ‘No, Harry. Naomi's not like that. I can tell you that sure-and-for-certain.'

‘You can never be sure-and-for-certain about anybody. You know that.'

‘Am I hearing you right? After everything that happened at the Sisters of Jerusalem — after all of that terrible struggle — you don't believe that this could be supernatural, too?'

I finished my drink. ‘Karen, think about it. It's a question of scale. What happened at the Sisters of Jerusalem was virtually war — one people against another. One set of spiritual beliefs against another. At the very worst, what happened at your friends' apartment sounds like nothing much more than a minor outbreak of weird science. Maybe Naomi
is
faithful. Maybe there are such things as poltergeists. Personally, I think you have to ask the non-supernatural questions first.'

Karen was upset, and the last thing I had wanted to do was upset her. But twenty years ago, in the Sisters of Jerusalem Hospital, Karen had given birth to that grotesque and stunted creature that most of us had believed to be the reincarnation of the seventeenth-century Wampanaug medicine-man, Misquamacus. It had been a devastating experience. People had died. The appearance of Misquamacus had stretched my faith and my credibility to their utmost limits, and beyond. I had been there, yes, at the Sisters of Jerusalem. I had witnessed what had happened for myself. But these days I preferred to think that Karen's unique condition had somehow been the epicentre of an extraordinary outbreak of mass suggestion. How, or why, I couldn't imagine. But I just preferred to think of it that way. Better to be nuts than have to admit that something like Misquamacus could actually exist.

Karen said, ‘A professor came all the way from Seattle Pacific University to check out the Greenbergs' apartment for himself. He was some kind of expert in poltergeists and
people who can move things with their mind, things like that. He said that it wasn't poltergeists. At least, it wasn't like any poltergeist behaviour that
he'd
ever seen. Poltergeists are much more erratic, much more mischievous. All that happened at the Greenbergs was that the furniture all slid over to one side of the room and stayed there.'

‘But if it wasn't poltergeists, what did this professor think it was?'

Karen shrugged. ‘He didn't know. He couldn't account for it. Just like everybody else. The police saw it and they couldn't account for it. The rabbi saw it and he couldn't account for it. Naomi's shrink came to see it and he couldn't account for it. So now they've all decided that it probably never happened — or, like you, that Naomi's making it up.'

I laid my hands on top of Karen's. ‘Karen, I wish there was something I could do. But this is way out of my field of expertise. Not that I really have any expertise, or ever will. I'm sorry.'

Karen said, ‘You fought Misquamacus.' I knew how difficult it was for her to say that name. ‘You fought him, and you won!'

‘I don't know. Maybe it all happened a lot different from the way we remember it'

Karen's eyes glittered with tears. ‘Harry — Michael and Naomi are two of my very best friends. They're both going crazy. This whole thing has practically destroyed their lives. It might seem trivial to you, but to them it's the end of their marriage, the end of their sanity almost I promised them —'

I glanced up. I had one hand raised for the waiter, to bring us two more drinks. I paused.

‘You promised them what?'

‘I promised them the best psychic expert in New York. In fact, the best psychic expert in America.'