Mallory's Oracle (6 page)

Now the cabby launched into a screaming match with this woman who had crossed his palm with too few dollars. He was an Arab, not too long in the country by the barely comprehensible English and the inability to deal with American women without going ballistic. He was making fisted hand gestures to go with the inarticulate screams. All Mallory could understand of the bad hollered English was, “You don't rob me, you bitch!”

He looked up at her from his height of one foot smaller. Looming over the driver, the woman seemed less the fat lady and more a regal presence. She leaned down, put her face in his face, and spoke in tones that did not carry.

The cabby nearly ripped the door off the hinges in his haste to open it. He jumped into the cab and laid a squealing strip of burning rubber all the way out of the square.

Mallory nodded in rare approval of the giantess.

Charles Butler tapped his toes and willed the elevator to move faster. He would be ten minutes late if he was lucky, if the elevator made no more stops. He looked down at his shorter fellow passengers, who had conspired to slow his descent by stopping the elevator on every other floor.

Of course, Mallory would be on time for their appointment sixty blocks south and as many flights down. She would be knocking on the door of his empty office on the hour, not a second before or after. She was as compulsive about time as she was about neatness.

And now he remembered he had two things to be anxious about. His new office, a recently vacated apartment across the hall from his residence, would be best described as an Escher maze of tall stacks of paperwork and books, an unholy gathering of spiders and dust.

The elevator stopped again, and he glared at the boarding passenger. He was taking every stop quite personally now. These people had had all morning to ride the elevator up and down as much as they liked. However, on the upside of slowing down, Mallory might decide not to wait around. There might be a reprieve long enough to give the office a proper cleaning.

This morning, he had made a stab at straightening up, but correspondence still littered every surface. Quarterly tax forms, state and federal, bulged out of desk drawers and cardboard boxes, all waiting on a day when he was in the filing mode. And then there was all the added paperwork that went along with owning an apartment building. The hundred-odd books and a few years' worth of journals were only in proximity to the new bookshelves.

How would she react to the mess? She might assume he'd been vandalized. He could walk in behind her and feign shock.

Mrs. Ortega, his cleaning woman, had arrived while he was scrambling around on the floor, trying desperately to clear a few square feet of the carpet. Putting his head out the office door as she was turning her key in the lock of his apartment, he had smiled at her, his eyes filled with hope. Her own eyes had turned hard. ‘Fat chance I'm going in there,' said the back of her as she had disappeared into his residence, which was her territory and all that she might be held accountable for.

He knew Mrs. Ortega believed him to be a visitor from somewhere else—perhaps some point straight up, miles out, but nowhere on the surface of her own earth, which was square, shaped by the streets of a Latino neighborhood in Brooklyn.

And he supposed he was a bit out of the mainstream. He had grown up in the sheltered community of academia and then transferred to the closer-knit community of a research institute without stopping off in real life until very recently. A year ago, when he had given Mrs. Ortega the new address, she never asked why he would leave the luxurious boulevards of the Upper East Side for the narrower, dirty streets of SoHo. She had always known the ways of outworlders were not the ways of Brooklynites.

In the last few minutes before he'd had to leave off the cleaning up and straightening up to keep his uptown appointment sixty stories in the sky, he had considered reaming the office out with a blowtorch.

Now his stomach was rising, independent of the rest of him, as the elevator stopped again. A woman and a child got on. As the doors were closing, the child reached out and pushed ten buttons.

 

Mrs. Ortega's mother was Irish and had the same green eyes and red-gold hair as this stranger at the door. But Ma had not been a cop. Mrs. Ortega smelled cop when the woman ordered her to open the door of Mr. Butler's office across the hall. There was never a question of cop, or not a cop.

She turned the key in the lock and opened the door on a room in hell for cleaning women who had been sinners while they lived. She didn't like having the key to the office. Mr. Butler might get the idea that she would one day clean here, too. No way, not Shannon Ortega. She knew her rights. He couldn't make her clean it, not this mess.

She had been happy enough when he took this apartment over for his office, sweeping the whole nasty mess of papers and books across the hall. And it gave him another place to be, not underfoot while she was vacuuming and scrubbing. But no way was she going to deal with this pit, this mother of all dust collectors. All that she approved of were the freshly painted walls. The windows were at least a bucket of ammonia's worth of grime on each pane, and in the spaces between the tall stacks of paper, spiders were spinning elaborate webs with a confident sense of permanence. She had never ventured into the other rooms to see what he had done with them. She had a bum heart.

Oh, kiss a dead rat if the cop wasn't smiling. And it was not a friendly smile or a happy smile. A cat's smile it was, a cat with a live mouse in its teeth.

 

In the black of the stopped elevator, suspended fifteen floors above the ground, the passengers were speculating on what to do when the elevator fell. One passenger had read somewhere that it was a good idea to jump up and down. That way, the man explained to his captive audience, you had a fifty-fifty chance of being in the air when the elevator crashed.

“And breaking your legs,” added Charles. “You're still falling at the same rate of speed as the elevator.”

Oddly enough, the eleven-year-old boy was the only one to grasp the principle of free-fall and gravity. The other passengers were now jumping up and down in the dark.

On the other side of the jammed doors, a fire marshal was urging them to remain calm via a loudspeaker. “Knock that crap off, you idiots!”

 

Mrs. Ortega was backing up to the wall. The cop had neatly cut off her escape route to the door.

“No English,” she said, when, in fact, she did not speak any Spanish. She was fourth-generation American born and spoke only New-yorkese.

 

After much repetition of street names, Charles and the non-English-speaking cabdriver were finally in agreement. Once under way, the driver was disappointingly law-abiding, and not at all competitive with his fellow drivers, never changing lanes once in forty-three blocks, actually slowing down for yellow lights, and carefully looking to the left and right before proceeding across the intersection on a green light.

This was outrageous.

Charles tightly clasped his hands in his lap, lest they act as independent culprits. There was really no need to kill the driver, not on his very first day as a cabby. The next passenger would certainly do that.

 

Charles met Mrs. Ortega in the hall. She passed him by with her head lowered, not seeing anything but the carpet, determined that nothing would halt her steady progress down the corridor to the elevator, to freedom, muttering “Damn cops” in return for his cheerful “Goodbye. See you next week.”

The office door was open. He walked through the foyer and into a perfect world of order. The windows glistened, the carpet was clear of the paper avalanche that had buried it on the very day it was put down, and the naked desk was dark wood, just as he remembered it from the Sotheby's auction of five weeks ago. Neat file holders with price tags on them were stacked on top of the antique mahogany filing cabinet. Other file holders, sans tags, were being put in their proper drawers by hands with long red nails. Twelve years of trade journals and a small library of books now filled the shelves of one wall.

Mallory strained to close the door of the filing cabinet and then turned on him. “You have to go to computers, Charles. This is just too much.”

“Hello, Kathleen.” He kissed her cheek and found a comfortable chair he had forgotten buying. “Sorry, I'm not usually half a day late. Oh, this is amazing.” He was admiring the room, its antique furniture, its Tiffany lamps. He was not visualizing a computer or any other mechanical device in it, not even a typewriter or a pencil sharpener. “Simply amazing,” he said, altogether skirting the issue of computers.

Over the two years he had known her, they'd had this conversation many times. She could never understand his resistance to the technology when he was so adept at computers and had even published an important paper on computer-mode giftedness. She had been the inspiration for that paper. Via the keyboard, she could dip her fingers into the stuffing of any software made and make it into a new animal that could sit up and bark at the moon if she wished.

“We could outfit this place with a state-of-the-art computer system,” she said.

“I'd rather do it the old-fashioned way.” He silently noted her use of the word we and wondered what to make of it.

The door buzzer went off. Charles walked across the room and out of the concept of high technology. That was it. No computers. They did not go well with his beloved antiques and the Persian carpet which fit the room so well. The carpet's weaver, a hundred years dead by now, must have envisioned this space with a mystic inner eye.

The buzzer was nagging. Most people only tapped it once. The short burst of noise was sufficiently loud and annoying. This continuation of noise, this leaning on the button, was the buzzer style of Herbert Mandrel, the tenant in 4A.

He opened the door to a small, wiry man with a fugitive face, eyes darting everywhere at once, suspecting every object of ill intentions. Nervous energy rose off the man in waves of contagion.

“You got a minute?” he asked, slipping uninvited through the narrow space between Charles and the doorframe. Herbert came up short in front of Mallory, who barred the foyer and showed no signs of standing aside.

The little man cocked his head to one side and fixed her with the intense, unwavering glare of one eye, and he did this with all the zeal of turning a cross on a vampire. Mallory, taller by six inches, looked down on Herbert with the same distaste she might show for a messy roadkill.

“Actually, I don't have a minute, Herbert,” said Charles, forgetting that it had not been a question but Herbert's version of hello.

Herbert was saying, “It's getting dangerous. Everyone has guns.”

“Everyone?”

“Henrietta on the third floor. She has a gun.”

“Well, she's had it for quite a while, hasn't she? Seven years, she says.”

“I didn't know that. If I'd known that, I would've acted sooner.” Though Herbert's feet were planted on the carpet, the rest of him was in constant motion, eyebrows colliding with each other, head jerking from side to side, one pointy finger stabbing the air as he spoke. “Do you know that a bullet can travel through four floors and kill an innocent person? You get rid of that gun or I take immediate action.”

“And what sort of action might that be?” Foolish question. Herbert had only one solution to every problem from a leaking faucet to a burnt-out bulb in the hall.

“I'm calling a rent strike. All the tenants will back me on this. I want that gun out of this building. Now!” His finger was nearly touching Charles's face.

Mallory advanced a step, and Charles warned her off with a wave. He pulled the door open wider, as though that might help, as though Herbert picked up on cues less subtle than ‘GET OUT!' He didn't.

“Henrietta belongs to a gun club. The gun is properly licensed and registered. There's nothing you or I can do about it.”

“Yeah? You think so? Suppose I get my own gun?”

“Let's see if I'm following your logic. In the event that Henrietta accidentally discharges her gun, you plan to deflect the bullet by firing on it as it rips up through the floorboards. Have I got it right?”

“I'm gonna get a gun.”

Mallory reached out and tapped him on the shoulder, smiling as she made him jump. She put one hand on her hip, drawing the side of her jacket open and exposing the .357 Smith & Wesson in her shoulder holster. It was a very big gun, and Herbert's eyes were very wide.

“Not a good idea, pal.” As her voice was silking along, she walked toward him, and step for step, he backed up to the door. “If I see you with a gun, if I hear a rumor that you've got a gun, it better have all the legal paperwork. You got that?” For emphasis, she reached out and touched his chest with one long red fingernail.

Charles watched in awe as the little man paled and turned smartly on one heel. Remarkably, Herbert was leaving of his own accord, and so quickly, too, not even shutting the door behind him.

Charles stared at the blessedly empty spot on the carpet where Herbert had been standing. “It's my recurring nightmare—him with a gun.”

“He'll never get clearance to buy one. I'll tag his name with a psycho profile.”

“You'll what?”

“I left a coded back door in the department computer. I can go in whenever I like. Nothing to it.”

“Kathleen, I wish you wouldn't tell me things like that.”

“You're beginning to sound like Markowitz.” She turned her back on him and walked over to the century-old desk. She ran one hand across the polished surface and then sat down in the chair behind the desk as though trying it on for size.