Nora Jane (33 page)

N
EW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
, September 13, 2000. The inhabitants of a building on the upper left-hand corner of 92nd Street and Park Avenue were experiencing
a disturbance of the first order. Music had begun blaring out of an apartment on the fifth floor at all hours of the night
and day. Loud, crazy music played on Mittenwald zithers, or worse, Wagner: Brunhilde, the Valkyries, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung.
The music was coming from the opened windows of the largest apartment in the building. The apartment had been empty for many
months. It had belonged once to Emily Post, then to Alice Walton, then to a diplomat from Jamaica, and finally, mistakenly
it was turning out, to a couple from London no one had ever seen. The couple’s résumé had seemed perfect. He was a London
stockbroker, she was a photographer. They had no children, no dogs, and the real estate agent told the condominium association
the couple only planned to use the apartment a few months each year. There were recommendations from people members of the
association knew, if not well, at least well enough to speak to at cocktail parties. Because the résumé had seemed so stellar,
the association voted to allow the sale without a personal interview. The buyers were in London, the association was told,
and didn’t plan on coming to New York for many months.

There were three empty apartments in the building and several more for sale. Four occupants were in arrears in their condo
fees. It was not a year in which 92nd and Park could afford to turn down a cash sale that included a year’s condo fees paid
in advance.

The sale went through, a yellow van came and stripped the apartment of the Jamaican’s possessions, painters arrived and painted
the rooms, a flooring company came in and pulled out the carpets and installed oak floors, mirrored walls were dismantled
and replaced with wallpaper. Then, nothing for six months. Before the first year was up, a check arrived to cover the condo
fees for the second year. “Apartment 17, the cash cow,” became a joke at association meetings. “Let’s get some more London
brokers here. What a deal.”

Then, suddenly, in late July of 2000, several tall, unpleasant-looking Middle Eastern men began to leave and enter the apartment
at all hours of the day and night and the music began to blare out of the open windows.
The Ring of the Nibelung
, and, even louder and worse, music played on zithers.

This activity would go on for several days, then nothing, then begin again.

A retired orthopedic surgeon named Carlton Rivers was the new president of the condominium association. He thought it was
just his luck that this situation should develop the month he took office. He had run for the unpaid job because he had it
in for the building supervisor and was planning on firing him soon. Instead, this blaring music, coupled with the sleazy-looking
Middle Eastern men. Carlton wasn’t Jewish but his college girlfriend had been, and he felt a deep empathy and connection with
Israel, to which she had disappeared the day after their college graduation. Her name was Judith and she had given Carlton
the greatest sexual experiences of his life. He had let her go, thinking he could reproduce those experiences elsewhere in
the world. It had not proved to be true. It had been his initiation into sex and it had proved unbeatable. For years after
she was gone he would drift off in the middle of an operation and remember her teeth or mouth or hair and sigh deeply for
the paradise he had lost.

When he began to make money, his main charity was a research hospital in Haifa. He thought of going there to find her but
he never did. He was busy in medical school, then as an intern, then establishing a practice. Finally he married a dark-haired
nurse who gave great blow jobs and went on with his life. There were no children of this union and Carlton was secretly glad
of that. He was not a man who could tolerate much disorder.

His wife died the year after he retired. When he recovered he threw himself into campaigning to become president of the condominium
association. He had barely had time to enjoy his success and begin his campaign to rejuvenate the place when the goddamn Arabs
started coming into the building and blaring out Wagner at all hours of the day and night.

He called the condominium lawyers and they wrote letters to the owners in London. There were no answers to the letters. Phone
calls were made to the phone numbers in the records of the condominium association and those at the real estate firm which
had handled the two-million-dollar sale. A call was placed to the brokerage firm the owner was supposedly associated with.
All these telephone calls were answered by machines. Mr. and Mrs. Alterman were out of the country and could not be reached
was the information supplied by the machines.

Carlton was going ballistic when, as suddenly as it began, the music stopped and did not start up again. No one entered or
left the apartment. There was no mail. The apartment phones rang but were not even answered by machines.

Three weeks of silence went by. Then, on September 13, there was a meeting of the association and the first order of business
was what was going on in 17 and what should they do about it, if anything.

“Apartment seventeen,” Carlton began. “We allowed the sale to a couple we had never met. That’s done. They never set foot
in the building. Nothing wrong there. Wealthy people buy things they never use. Then, suddenly, there are Middle Easterners
coming and going at all hours and music waking up eighteen, nineteen, twenty, fifteen, and the people on the fifth floor of
988. Our lawyers write the owners and get no reply. We call all the numbers left by the owners with us, the Realtor who sold
the place and the brokerage firm where he supposedly worked at the time of the purchase, but they say he is no longer with
them. So what are we to make of this? And what should we do?”

“Nothing,” Mrs. Bloodworth answered. She was the vice president of the association and still had her nose out of joint because
Carlton had been chosen over her for first in command. She was a stout matron with iron gray hair who wore old-fashioned suits
made by a tailor on the Upper West Side. She had taught chemistry at Harvard and never let anyone forget it. “We called this
meeting to talk about raising the condo fee three hundred dollars a month to make up for the shortfall of unpaid dues on empty
apartments. That, coupled with the seven-hundred-dollar raise in insurance premiums, has put many owners in distress. The
last thing we want to do at this point is create a problem with seventeen. Seventeen is paid in advance for the next fourteen
months. The problem has ceased. We should forget it and get on with the business of finding someone to work on the eaves and
roof.”

“You’re prejudiced against Middle Easterners, Carlton,” a man named Herman put in. “You wouldn’t vote for that nice Saudi
woman two years ago. She was an internist.”

“With a degree from a medical school in Guadalajara, Herman. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand. It was on the basis
of her so-called education that I voted against her.”

“And now that apartment’s empty too. You can afford to pay these ever-higher fees but some of us can’t….”

“Please, ladies and gentlemen.” Mrs. Bloodworth stood up. “Please. Order in the room. Order.”

“They were advance men for a decorating firm,” Herman said. “One of them told the supervisor that. I don’t understand this
constant prejudice we encounter in this group at every step.”

“Bleeding hearts,” Carlton snapped. “I’d have an easier time believing they were making a nuclear device. The music was to
cover up conversation. That’s what people do when they don’t want to take a chance on being taped. High decibels render even
very sophisticated listening devices mute. I saw that on
20/20
last year.”

“Oh, please,” Mrs. Bloodworth said. “Let’s move on, may we?”

The meeting broke up after a vote on raising the condo fees to cover the cost of the roofing problems, and everyone went back
to their apartments muttering about ineptness and the cost of life in the city.

That night Carlton decided to take matters into his own hands. He had a key to the back door of 17 that one of the former
tenants had left in his care. He could have used the keys the maintenance crew kept in the basement, but those had to be checked
out. After dinner he drank a couple of brandies, found a flashlight, and went up the back stairs to 17. The key worked. No
one had bothered to change that lock. He let himself in and, using only his flashlight, began to search.

After an hour of poking around in empty drawers and closets he found the first piece of handwriting he had come across in
the whole apartment. It was in the drawer of a bedside table near a phone. It was a list of names.

Frederick Sydney Harwood, Berkeley, California

Joseph Leister, Madison, Wisconsin

Holly Knight, Eureka Springs, Arkansas

Carlton copied down the names and carefully replaced the paper in the drawer. He wrote down the serial numbers of the expensive
Bose CD player and the television set. Then he left and went back down to his apartment and called a private detective he
knew named Lynn Fadiman and asked to have someone come and get fingerprints from the doorknobs and glass surfaces. “Possible,”
his friend answered. “But very expensive.”

“I’m rich,” Carlton said. “Do it tomorrow night. In the meantime, if I give you the names of three people can you get dossiers
on them and tell me what they have in common?”

“You could probably do it on the Internet. Have you tried?”

“I don’t have a computer. I’m a Luddite.”

“Okay. Tell them to me.”

Fifteen minutes later Lynn Fadiman called Carlton back. “I’ve got data on all three. Easy. You do have a fax machine, don’t
you?”

“No. But there’s one at the all-night drugstore down the street. Here’s the number. 212-555-2345. You got it?”

“They’re booksellers.”

“What?”

“The three names. They sell books. All three of them are big shots in the Independent Booksellers Association.”

“My God!”

“Maybe your music man was a budding author.”

“I don’t think so. Can you get the prints tomorrow night?”

“I told you I would. You’re sure I won’t be caught?”

“I’ll go down and talk to the night watchman while you’re in there. He loves to talk. I’ll pretend I’m having a fight with
one of the tenants. I am having a fight with one. I’ll stay with him. He’s the only person who might go in.”

At nine the next morning Lynn called Carlton on his cell phone. “Go to a pay phone and call me now. I don’t like this. Call
me now.”

Carlton put on a coat and shoes and went out of the building and over to the drugstore where he had collected the facsimiles
the night before. He called Lynn Fadiman. The phone rang once.

“Holly Knight died last night in an accident on a remote highway. She was alone in a car and the car went off the road and
into a lake. She was a fifty-seven-year-old woman who never went anywhere at night and at eleven at night she drove a Pontiac
off a bridge into Beaver Lake near Rogers, Arkansas. It’s a hit list, Carlton, and it’s time to take this to the police.”

A
FIVE POINT TWO AT TEN
A
.
M
. in the locker room. Nora Jane Harwood was in the ladies’ locker room of the Berkeley Athletic Club trying to get Little
Freddy to put on his new swimming trunks when the earthquake moved beneath San Francisco. It began in the sea and roiled its
way inland, moving and shaking and being mean. Moved by forces beyond our control, Freddy Harwood was always saying for a
joke and it sure fit earthquakes. If the metaphor fits, wear it, was a private joke between his twin daughters.

“He’s going metaphor,” Tammili would say.

“He’s close. He’s almost there,” Lydia would answer.

“It itches me,” Little Freddy was complaining as Nora Jane tried to get him to put his fat legs into the denim bathing suit
Lydia had ordered him from Lands’ End. Little Freddy wanted to wear his old red trunks with the torn inner lining and the
small, thick elephant sewn on the side. He was immune to arguments that the red trunks were too small. He want-ed to take
the elephant into the water, where it wanted to be. He was fascinated by two things in the waning months of his third year
on the planet Earth. Elephants and
The Wizard of Oz. Elephants of the World was his favorite book. Horton Hears a Who! and Horton Hatches the Egg
were his second favorite books, and his favorite garment was his red bathing suit with the elephant on the side and he wanted
to take it into the water and let it swim. Besides, it kept him from getting drowned.

Little Freddy hated his swimming class and the big, bossy girl who was always making him put his head under the water or wait
his turn to practice on the kickboard. The longer he put off stepping into the new denim trunks the longer it was going to
be before Nora Jane took him out to the pool.

“If you just wear it this one time we’ll go out to the mall and get you another one like the red one,” she was saying. “The
red one is too tight for you. It pinches your little tally-wacker.”

“Tally-wacker,” Little Freddy replied, moving away from her and climbing up on a bench where a woman the age of his grandmother
was putting on her running shoes. “Me don’t have any tally-wacker.” He paused, while his mother recovered and the older woman
began to giggle. “If you gimme that PowerBar, I’ll put them on.”

The older woman was really laughing now. Her name was Sylvia Kullman and she was in charge of fund-raising for Marin County
Planned Parenthood. Nora Jane had seen her on television and admired her brilliance in debate and her fabulous designer clothes.
All the famous designers liked to dress Sylvia for her debates. She was always at the athletic club. She worked out four days
a week and it showed. She was past seventy years old and still as trim and supple as a girl.