Me and the Devil: A Novel (29 page)

When I woke again, the soft spring morning light was full. I was making coffee when the buzzer rang. I took my false teeth from the plastic cup in which they bathed, rinsed them under warm tap water, and stuck them in my mouth.

It was a couple of cops in cheap suits. The old cop looked like he was about ready for the glue factory. The young cop looked too young to not be wearing a uniform. He must’ve made detective the day before yesterday, I figured. Either that or he was on his way home from a wake. The young one asked me if I was who I am, and I said yeah. He nodded in a slow, dull way, as if to say, well, that’s good, we’re making progress here. I invited them in, leading them to the kitchen.

I looked from one to the other inquisitively. As I did so, I studied their faces briefly to see if I knew either of them from the bar on Reade Street, or from anywhere. The old cop looked somehow vaguely familiar but, no, I didn’t know either of them. Coffee dripped down into the bit of half-and-half that was in the cup.

“We’re talking to everybody who was at Circa Tabac at the time of the incident last night.”

Again it was the young cop who spoke. He had his back to me. He was looking at the calendar on the wall. It was a calendar from Our Lady of Pompeii. Year after year, hanging from the same masonry nail, there was a calendar from the same church. A round-cornered rectangular window was die-cut at the centerfold of every month, so that, no matter what the pretty picture was for that month—right now it was Bartolomeo Schedoni,
The Three Marys at the Tomb
—the same ad for the Perazzo Funeral Home showed prominently through the window under it. I thought for a second about the time, years ago, when the old building where the Nucciarone Funeral Home was, on Sullivan Street, collapsed and Nucciarone and Perazzo merged. A lot of racketeers had been laid out in Nucciarone, and the joke was that whoever was laid out that day must’ve been really bad. Then I thought of how odd it was that this cop was standing there staring at a calendar on my kitchen wall. I turned to the old guy with an expression that asked what was with the young guy.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said. It was the first he had spoken since they arrived. “I know this guy. He’s all right.”

He knew me? Why couldn’t I place him?

“What time did you get there?” the young cop asked, his back still to me.

“I don’t know.”

I probably should have asked if they wanted coffee, but I didn’t. They might’ve said yes.

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t know. I went out to dinner, then decided to drop in on my way home.”

“Where’d you eat dinner?”

The old guy shook his head with slow, tired impatience.

“The Minetta Tavern,” I said.

“Who with?”

“A friend.”

“And what time did you leave Circa Tabac? Don’t tell me. You don’t know.”

“Come on, Charlie,” the old one said. “Let’s go fight crime or something.”

I didn’t say anything. I just sipped my coffee and watched numb-nuts stare at my fucking calendar.

“Nice place,” the old guy said.

“Thanks,” I said.

Numb-nuts finally turned around. He seemed taken aback to see the two of us old guys leaning lackadaisically against the counter opposite him.

“You got the list?” my leaning-mate said to him. “Come on, check him off and let’s get a move on.”

I walked them to the door.

“Have a nice Good Friday,” I said.

I could hear them exchanging words awhile in the hall outside my door. Then they were gone.

After finishing my coffee and a smoke, I was struck by a curious appetite. I poured a glass of buttermilk, added two raw eggs to it, and drank it down. I realized then how good I felt.

What remained of the morning was spent writing. The words came more easily, more naturally than I remembered them ever coming. It was usually a torturous process, and had grown more so, not less so, through the years.

“The past is a very bad place,” I wrote. “It is not good to go there. Not alone. Not like this.”

What these words meant was clear to me, and at the same
time unclear. Which part of the past? I wondered as I followed their inner sound, their call to me to come forth and be put down. Or should I have asked: which past, or which pasts?

The words that pursued these words did not speak to any of my questions, nor did they make anything more clear or less clear. I knew only that they sang to me, that their song was mine, and that they must be given form, metered to and arranged on the page in a way that captured and conveyed the sound and colors of their spell.

For the first time in my life, I felt that I had written the truth, without the artifice of veil or illusion to conceal and protect me, the writer, from the reader. Was this because I knew that I would not have these words go beyond me? Because I was the reader, the only reader, as well as the writer? Because there was no need to conceal or protect myself from the truth of myself? But did I know and understand the truth of myself so well? Could anyone know himself so well as to separate the veils and phantoms of a lifetime from the hidden truths they obscured? Maybe I should repeat only that
I felt
that I had written the truth. That I felt as if the distance among the three of us—me, the writer, and the reader—had been closed, if only because I was all three.

These thoughts brought to mind the old cop, who, though he was here not two hours ago, seemed now to be of the remote past. “I know this guy,” he had said. “He’s all right.” But I did not know him; he seemed only vaguely familiar, or not at all. What had he meant? Did he really think he knew me, and that I was all right? Was the distance among the four of us—me, the writer, the reader, and the old cop—one and the same, and ultimately unknowable? Were we all just our own old cops? Was I thinking of innumerable distances, ever in flux, as if they were a single shared and common distance?

That much had not changed. The words loosened some of the old knots in my mind while tying new ones.

If I wanted to eat on Easter, I had better shop now. The way they crowded the stores, you would think these rich creeps ate only on holidays. Melissa was on her way to Minnesota for the school break, to visit her parents. Maybe Lorna didn’t want to be alone. Maybe she’d be in the mood to come by for some high holy pig meat. In any case, I would go shopping today. But first a glass of cold milk and a Valium.

I looked through the surface of what I had written. It was good stuff. But was it fact or was it fiction? Or had it not yet settled on either, and did that yet remain to be established? Or was it neither, but a tone poem whose key I alone possessed, to turn and unlock in words to come? Had I misplaced the key, or was it still not mine to turn? Did I even know where in these words the keyhole was? Or was it not in them at all, but in words to follow?

When I began writing a book—and I felt no doubt that this was to be a book—I habitually returned, as if by instinct, to read in one of the same three works: Flaubert’s final
Three Tales,
Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master,” or Beckett’s “The End.” Through the years I had come to view the first of these as deeply flawed, but I returned to it nonetheless as often as I returned to either of the others. Maybe this was because it served as a warning sign for the hidden hazards that lay ahead, on ground that, no matter how well traveled, remained ever treacherous. But this time I felt myself drawn to none of these works; not for warning, not for reinforcement, not for encouragement. Instead, looking for
The Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius but not finding it, I drew down a Bible. Sticking from its pages as a bookmark was on old hundred-dollar bill, from the years before the fur was censored from Ben Franklin’s collar. I moved the bill to the opening pages of the book of Ecclesiastes, and I placed the Bible by my bed.

Later that afternoon, after returning from shopping, I brewed a hot dandelion-root drink, put on the second movement of
Respighi’s
The Pines of Rome,
and relaxed. A certain feeling of unease came over me as the music played.

The shadows of early evening fell. I threw on my jacket and walked north, to Circa Tabac.

There was Lee. We were almost alone in the place.

“Nicky,” he said.

“Lee,” I said.

“What’s up?” he said.

“I had visitors this morning,” I said.

“The cops?”

“Yeah, thanks to you.”

“Christ, that was something, huh?”

“What was something? What was this ‘incident’ they were talking about?”

“You didn’t hear? Those chicks. Right around the corner from here.”

“What chicks?”

“Those two chicks you were talking to. You left, and they left about ten minutes later. You didn’t hear? They found them with their throats slashed. Right around the corner here.”

He gestured in the general direction of Thompson Street. I was looking at him, but my mind was on what I was feeling in the inner right breast pocket of my jacket as I leaned to the back of the barstool beside him. Last night I had found myself thinking of my little ebony-handled knife, wishing it were with me, feeling for the first time that it should be with me. It was with me last night, I now knew, as it had been with me on the previous several nights when I had ventured out. The only thing different last night was that I had carried it in my right rather than my left breast pocket. Not sensing it where it had been, I had felt that I was without it.

I went into the men’s room and locked the latch. I pulled the
thin sharp blade from its narrow snakewood scabbard and looked at what I knew I would see. The blood had been dry for some time and was like a black crust over the blade. I remembered now: standing in the darkened doorway, taking the air, when they happened by. I heard the steps of the younger one first, in her high heels. She was a stepper, all right. Then I heard the voice of Sandrine, and she said it again:

“Are you all right?”

I would have to destroy the sheath as well as the knife. There was probably as much identifiable dried blood in it as there was on the knife. I hated to see this lovely little knife and its lovely little scabbard go. I felt that I was not alone in the men’s room. I knew that there was no camera. Then I remembered.
Why is the weight of the mere head of this serpent that has turned to stone so much heavier than the whole of this identical serpent that has turned to stone?
I put the knife back in my pocket and noticed then that there was dried blood on my jacket as well. Had I walked home with blood on my face? Had I made my way across the bright Canal Street crossing like that? Had my jacket been draped like this, with the bloodstained knife in its pocket, on the same chair in the kitchen this morning, while those two cops stood near to it? I shook my head.

“I keep thinking about that hamburger you told me about,” Lee said.

“I tell you, it was good.”

He lit a cigarette. I lit a cigarette. I asked him if he had talked to the same two cops, young numb-nuts and glue factory. He laughed a little.

“I’m sorry about that. I was just trying to do the right thing. I mean, those poor fucking girls. Jesus.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Those poor girls.”

He asked me if I wanted a drink. I took a club soda with a piece of lemon.

“You working on another book?”

“How’d you know?”

“You’re not drinking.”

What about my saliva? What about my DNA? No. They wouldn’t check the cut marks for that. They’d check elsewhere, if at all.

“Both dead, huh, just like that?”

“Yeah. One of them was dead when they found them. The other hung on awhile. She was in shock. Then she went. Yeah, just like that.”

I felt bad for Sandrine and the other kid. A part of me felt detached and different from whoever it was, whatever it was, that had taken their lives. Maybe that was why I could not clearly remember it. Because it was not me, not really. But it was to me that Sandrine had come. It was to me that Sandrine, who had given me my first taste of blood, had given her last.

In bed that night, I read slowly the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem: “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

As I drifted off, I felt that I was about to leave a part of myself behind. Which part was it? The part of me that seemed detached and different? The good part? The bad part? The old part? The new part? Were the pieces of myself that easily divisible? The days and the nights would tell. Yes, I thought, the days and the nights would tell. I sensed a smile on my face, and I did not question it, but merely took it, as with any smile, to be a good sign. I did not consider that I might not sense this same smile again. I did not consider that it might be a smile of parting.

E
ASTER PASSED.
I
NEGLECTED TO CALL
L
ORNA, AND
I
WAS
relieved that Melissa was away. I wanted to be alone, to enjoy my pork roast in quiet solitary peace.