Concert of Ghosts (28 page)

The woman, exasperated, made a long sighing sound. Alison stepped toward Tennant and tugged at his sleeve. He didn't feel the touch.

He had a memory of a bright summer day on what had once been known as Hippie Hill. A kite had fluttered through the air, a dragon in the sky; in the absence of any true wind it had fallen feebly into the trees. “You were wearing velvet pants. They had these little flowers stitched into them. The blouse you had on was dark red. I asked you your name and you said guess and you made me go through the alphabet before you told me. Remember? I went from Abigail to Linda before you stopped me.”

The woman stood in the window, her arms folded. Alison, frowning, watched her closely. The woman turned and gazed at the girl—almost as if she perceived some connection between herself and the younger woman. There might have been an invisible arc of low electricity linking them. Tennant thought:
Whatever passed between them before is happening again
. But then the woman looked away and stared through the window down into Schrader Street. Below, some piece of heavy traffic rumbled, and the window frames shook.

He said, “Believe me, Maggie. I hadn't remembered any of this stuff until a minute ago.”

“You're completely insane,” she said. “Velvet pants. Flowers. Red blouse. Where the hell do you come up with stuff like that? You've got some kind of imagination there.”

Tennant saw himself through the woman's eyes. A loony. A poor deluded madman. Somebody to be listened to quietly, and with a show of patience, because violence wasn't far away. He was unpredictable, a guy on the edge, he could go in any direction. He glanced at Alison and wondered if she were perceiving him in the same way. Poor Harry. Stop bothering this woman. Leave her the hell alone.

He fell silent, his energy run down. He was depleted. He couldn't move. Somebody might have taken a hammer to his glass heart and pounded it without mercy. The woman walked to the door and opened it and said, “Okay. Show's over.”

Alison said, “Harry. Let's go.”

He looked at the open door, the corridor beyond. In the shadows stood Maggie Silver of more than twenty years ago. She leaned against the wall, a hand on one hip.
Harry, I know where we can score some real good opium if we go to Chinatown, a guy called Lee, lives above this grocery, he's got some real nice shit
.

“Like I said. The show's over. Leave.”

And still Tennant didn't move. The ghost in the corridor was laughing.
Come on, Harry, get your ass in gear before Lee sells out of the stuff
. I remember, he thought. But what good was memory if it turned out to be a worthless prize? Here's your reward, Harry. Nothing. Tough shit, kid.

“I've met some people in this neighborhood,” the woman said. “But you, hey, you really get the blue ribbon for sheer weirdness.”

Sheer weirdness. Of course. Tennant walked slowly across the room. He had come all this way for what? To be rejected. Crushed by the density of the past, that dead iron weight. He stepped into the doorway. There he turned to the woman.

“Maggie.” He wanted to hold her face between his hands. He wanted to feel her against him. It's all over, we've come through it, he would say, we've buried it, it's gone, we're back together, they can't force us apart again. Sure, he'd say that and more. Except she didn't have any way of hearing him.

The woman looked at him warily. He was aware of incalculable loss; sadness was an infinite thing. If you had an abacus on which to estimate grief, it would consist of an immeasurable number of beads on wires that stretched to the ends of the universe.

“I'm sorry,” the woman said in an unexpectedly sympathetic way. “I hope you find whatever you're looking for, Harry. If that's your name.”

Tennant didn't say anything. He'd pretend he'd discovered nothing, he'd go away, forget what he'd learned, drift and drift. He was about to leave this room and the woman called Maggie Silver. But he knew it wasn't finished yet. It wasn't over. That was what memory did—it attached you unshakably to your life. You asked for it, Harry. You pursued it. Now you've got it. Maggie Silver. A memory of Chinatown. Now you're just about to nail it all down and you don't want to.

He stepped into the empty corridor. There were no ghosts hanging in the shadows. Everything was silent. He took a few paces, turned, saw Alison lingering in the doorway with the woman, watched how light from the room beyond created a frame around the two women. He had a moment in which he thought he saw them somehow merge together, but this was because Alison moved slightly and the strip of light that separated their bodies was eclipsed; a strange illusion—two women becoming one.

It was the same deranged perception he'd had when he made love to Alison, that she was Maggie Silver.

He heard Alison say, “Listen …”

There was a very long silence. The woman tilted her head and looked at Alison in an attitude of waiting.

“I just want to say …” and Alison faltered in an uncharacteristic manner. There was a break in her voice, a loss of words. More. A loss of language, of meaning.

The woman didn't speak. Alison reached out and touched her arm briefly, then withdrew the hand and said, “Nothing. It's nothing. I'm sorry we bothered you. Okay.”

The woman hesitated, glanced at Tennant, then shut the door. She had closed more than a door, Tennant thought.

He went down the stairs and out into the street. Alison followed in silence. The sun had gone. The sky was gray and cold. A wind blew down Schrader Street, rolling toward the Panhandle. There it would diffuse itself among the trees.

They walked toward Haight.

“They got to her,” Alison said. She was angry and sad. Her face was without color. Moisture formed in her dark eyes. “The way they got to you. I feel …” Alison hesitated. “I don't know. Hatred. Despair. I want to hurt them, Harry. That's what I really want. I want to destroy them.”

Tennant nodded bleakly. How could you hurt them? How did you begin? On the corner of Haight he looked left. The wind made him shiver. How could he leave Maggie Silver like that? With her delusions, her lapses, her own failures? On the other hand, how could he even start to bring her back? Yeah, they got to her. They did their number well. You had to hand it to them. You had to pat Lannigan on the back. Well done, boyo.

But they weren't infallible. There was a weakness in their operation. They hadn't counted on Alison Seagrove turning up and prodding Tennant toward hard answers. And he almost had the answers now. He'd go back to Chinatown and open the last door. He should have been uplifted, but he wasn't. He was hollow. Even as he glimpsed that day in Chinatown and remembered Sammy Obe hustling with his camera, orchestrating his pathetic little group of five, even as he recalled raising an arm and pointing across the street where a small crowd had gathered outside St. Mary's, even then he didn't feel any sense of achievement. He would be complete when he could see why the crowd had congregated at that place and time. But no. There would always be a void if he didn't have Maggie Silver. That was the worst understanding of all.

They moved in the direction of Golden Gate Park. The wind made trees shudder, the sky turned toward rain. He hesitated. He'd go back, make her see the sense in what he had to say. He'd lay out before her the skeleton of the past. Bone by bone he'd show her how her life was filled with mystifying gaps she couldn't fill, how she'd been transformed from flamboyant Maggie Silver into this other person, this Barbara Gill. How long would it take?

“I'm sorry, Harry. About everything.”

Tennant stared into the traffic. You're sorry, I'm sorry, let the whole fucking world be sorry, what did it matter? He kicked at the sidewalk in despair. “This is the bit I don't get. Why did they let Maggie live? I can see how my father protected
me
, but why wasn't she killed like Carlos and Kat? That's the bit that evades me.” He paused, his mouth very dry. “If I push myself I can see the kind of thinking that goes like this: They can't murder everybody in the photograph, it's too much, it's overkill, so you make one look like suicide, another an accident, and one is made to look like a total schizoid. The other two—well, they get their shutters pulled down on their windows. They get their shades well and truly drawn. Only Sajac got away. For a time.”

Bitterness in his voice. A couple of blocks away Maggie Silver lived out her life in awful ignorance of her history. What did she do with her days? Work in a public library? Sling cocktails? Whatever it was, she'd go through the motions without ever asking questions, the way he'd tended his doomed farm in New York. Ignorant, plodding, never examining the past to see what it contained because neither of them was supposed to have a past.

“It would have been simpler to have killed us both,” he said.

Alison frowned. She said nothing as they wandered through traffic to the edge of the park. Her expression was strange, regretful, and apprehensive. She was about to tell him something, except she didn't want to. It was obvious to him.

Tennant stood still. The wind blew at his coat, flapping it.

“I think I know why they didn't kill Maggie,” the girl said.

He looked at her face and thought: I don't want to hear this, whatever it is. He was balanced on a dreadful moment.

“Be patient with me,” she said. “Try to understand. Don't be angry with me.”

He waited. The collar of his coat blew against his cheek. A spot of rain hung in the air. Alison took a creased piece of paper from her purse.

“Here.”

“I don't want it,” he said.

“Take it. Look at it.”

He reached for it with great reluctance. He read the words typed on it, but they didn't mean anything to him.

“What is this?” he asked.

“A birth certificate.”

He looked at it again. Words had a way of escaping before your eyes. You stared at one word long enough and it shed the skin of its meaning. It lost all relevance. “My birth certificate, Harry.”

He gazed into her face and wondered why he'd been too dense, too blind, to perceive it before. He might have felt it in some uncertain way, but now, dear God, it was obvious. From a certain angle, with the light touching her in exactly the right way, she looked like Maggie.

18

Bewildered, head down against the squall that had begun to shift through the trees, Tennant walked quickly. There has to be a way of dealing with this and all its implications, something nice and easy. An opiate against comprehension, a prophylactic to prevent understanding. When he raised his face, rain blew into his eyes and against his lips. With his canvas bag thumping against his leg, he stepped under a tree for shelter, seeing across the grassland the entrance to the Conservatory of Flowers. It was an elaborate structure of glass whose panes were wet and glossy. A group of tourists stood outside, huddled under bright umbrellas. A birth certificate, he thought. She gives me a birth certificate with her mother's name typed in the appropriate column.

And zero under
Father
.

He saw her hurrying to catch up with him. He didn't want to hear explanations, excuses, he wanted nothing more than to stand beneath this goddamn tree and listen to the way rain beat on leaves and branches. A tree house, that was what he needed now, his old tree house—he'd climb up into it and hide and keep the world away. He recalled Rayland perspiring in the upper branches, his hammer driving nails into planks of wood, the occasional yelp of pain when Rayland struck his hand with the head of the hammer. Harry's Place. Where was Harry's Place now? Rotted, slats weathered, nails rusted and loose, a shell overgrown with foliage.

The girl stepped under the branches. “Harry, listen to me.”

“You lied to me.” It's more than a lie, but you don't want to confront it.

“I didn't lie.”

“What would you call it, Alison?” He moved, heading quickly toward the conservatory. At the entrance desk he paid his fee and stepped inside, where the atmosphere was humid and the air smelled of green things growing in damp soil. His last time here he'd been out of his mind on acid, and the place was filled with monstrous menace. Now he was sober and straight and wished he wasn't. He passed under a giant overhanging philodendron that looked as old as the planet itself.

The girl was still tracking him. He walked away, deeper into the conservatory, the tangled vines, roots, mosses, flying fronds. A jungle, steamy and ill-lit, trapped under vast panes of glass, a controlled experiment in growth, temperature, and humidity neatly maintained. He was sweating hard, moisture running across his face. When he found a bench he sat down, exhausted by the lack of air.

“Harry, please listen to me.”

The girl approached him slowly. He turned away, seeing two men in raincoats study the tangled roots of an enormous philodendron that resembled more a mutated prehistoric bird than a plant. Two men in raincoats, he thought. But they weren't looking at him.

The girl sat alongside him. “Listen. Maggie had me adopted at birth. Something I only learned about eighteen months ago. I spent most of the last year looking for her. I didn't have an address. I only had Obe's photograph, Harry, and the names in Cygnet's files. I went after them. You know what I found. And then I came across you.”

“And I led you to her.”

Alison drummed her fingertips on her thighs and sighed. Tennant undid the buttons of his coat. His jeans were damp, clinging to skin. “The story's all bullshit,” he said. “There's no magazine assignment.”

“Yes and no.”

“I don't like that kind of ambiguity.”

“I work for the magazine, sure—”

“But not on this.”

She shook her head. “Not on this.”

He stood up. The humidity was smothering him. “This is what you'd call more
personal
, right?” He remembered the chalet, the room, her thin body pressed against him, the moment of intimacy that had broken down under the weight of Maggie Silver's intrusion. He felt remote from himself all at once. The birth certificate, no father's name. I don't want to think. But there had been undeniable feelings, there had been caring, even—God help him—some naive consideration of a future in which this girl might have played a part. How sightless he'd been. How goddamn
unseeing
.