Shadow Dancers (21 page)

“Warren, please.”

“— drop him.”

Her jaw fell and she sat there, watching him while he resumed chewing his salad. “Warren …” She could barely get the name out.

“Drop him, Janine,” Warren repeated, the smile more angelic than ever. “Tell him it’s over now. Done. Finished. Tell him to go.”

“Warren …”

“You do as I tell you, Janine.”

“Warren …”

He started to rise.

“Warren. Wait a minute, for Chrissake.” She tried to pull him back down in his seat. “Warren. Mickey and I are engaged.”

The smile never wavered, but something like a cloud passed across his eyes. It passed quickly, but she was certain she saw there that vulnerable, hurt look she recalled so well from their stormy, wayward past; a clear echo of the same expression he bore as a seven-year-old street arab.

It was gone as quickly as it had come, and there was the smile again, beaming and replete with love. So fast had it shifted that for a moment she thought she’d merely imagined the other.

“Like I say, Janine,” he went on. “I’m not angry about any of that. I’m willing to forgive and forget.”

“Forgive?” she gasped. “Were getting married Christmas.”

“No harm done. Water under the bridge. You just get rid of him now. See?” He was still smiling at her. ” ‘Cause if you don’t, I’m gonna have to do something about it myself.”

She sat there long after he’d gone, staring at the tray of salad he’d been eating. Lettuce leaves and bits of carrots and celery were strewn all about the plate and off it, as if some small, wild creature had pastured there.

She was numb. Her mind whirled. The quiet din of people eating about her magnified to a deafening roar. None of what had happened seemed real. It had an air of something dreamlike, from which she had just awakened, confused and unsettled. Where he’d sat, some aura of that smile still persisted in midair above the place; that oddly disturbing smile she had been so fond of as a child. Now it struck her as furtive and sly, as if all kinds of nasty thoughts were going on behind it.

For a woman well into her sixth decade of life, Suki Klink retained remarkable powers of physical dexterity. When she had a mind to, she could move fast. Impelled by instinct, keen as a famished alley cat, she made straight for the little eyrie planted beneath the glass cupola at the top of the house.

Warren was away now, presumably off on one of his little “jaunts,” and the need had come urgently over her to have a look about upstairs. Periodically, she did this when he went off and was not expected back for some time. Without closely examining her motives for these periodic searches, she liked to think of them as intelligence-gathering missions. Devoted to him as she was, with a loose cannon like Warren lurching about in one’s life, it behooved her to know precisely where he was and what he was about at all times.

She moved now like a small cyclone through the little cupola room at the top of the stairs. With her multitudinous flowing skirts ballooning out behind her, she gave the appearance of being in flight, and while the frantic action of her search appeared to wreak havoc, when she’d finished ransacking a specific area, it was as if nothing, save possibly the most gentle breeze, had ever stirred there.

She tore blankets back, poked beneath mattresses, ran her stubby, grime-streaked fingers along the springs, rifled through the closets and drawers, all with the grim single-mindedness of a hungry ferret.

It was in the ceiling light fixture that she found it. She had not been looking for anything specifically. It was only an instinct, sharp and palpable as a tooth pain, that had informed her that if she looked, she would find something. Instinct in a creature of Suki’s somewhat unorthodox lifestyle was an instrument honed to the sharpness of a razor. Once again that instinct had not misled her. It was a small flannel sack you closed and opened with a drawstring. The name of a Forty-seventh Street jewelry shop had been stenciled on it in flowing white cursive.

She tugged the string, slowly pulling it open, tipping it, and letting the contents tumble out into her slightly palsied palm. Gems and pretty baubles held little place in the old lady’s scheme of things. It was only what they could be converted to on the open market that earned her true esteem.

Here were clasps and pins, an old cameo brooch rimmed in eighteen-carat gold, along with a rather good Rolex watch apparently in working condition. There was, in addition, a silver pendant with gold putti encircled with baguettes. It was an unusual piece, ornate and fussy, of Italian design. Quite distinctive in its way.

Squinting, she held the pendant up to the sunlight streaming through the cupola glass. Where it struck the baguettes, it broke into prismatic bands of color flashing behind her on the white plaster walls.

“Souvenirs he’s got for himself,” she murmured while her crooked fingers lifted the pendant and rotated it slowly in the shaft of sunlight, making it flash and sparkle like some living thing. “Souvenirs of all his merry pranks.” She laughed softly to herself, but even a creature such as Suki, so inured to the darker side of things, experienced a vague shudder of distaste, thinking of the fate of the former owners of all those glittering little bits of glass fanned out in her palm.

Squeamishness of that sort was generally not long-lived in Suki. She could always rationalize crime, even brutal crime, in terms of some vague, retributive social theory. Everyone had to live, didn’t they? What she couldn’t dispel quite so easily was the unpleasant awareness, growing stronger each day, that Warren was holding out on her, that he was gathering riches all the time, cadging it away and not counting her in for her share. If he had a little sack here, why not in other places as well?

In the past she had only asked her fair share of things. That had been roughly fifty percent. When Warren was a small child and just starting out, it was more like a hundred percent. But that was when he was a mere acolyte, serving his internship at her feet. Then he was still small enough to push around. As he grew older, more wily and adept, and the takes grew more sizable, she’d naturally expected her percentage to drop as the value of his booty increased.

But now it had become increasingly clear that Warren had been cultivating his own garden, picking up riches here and there and storing them like a squirrel preparing for a shift in seasons. What was Warren’s shift of seasons to be? Her tawny cat’s eyes narrowed to thin slits that sank into the quivering roses in her knobby cheeks. It, made her appear like a gypsy before her crystal ball, attempting to pierce the veil of the future.

What she saw there was disquieting. All of his recent talk about “clearing out” she’d rashly discounted. But now with tangible evidence glittering in her palm suggesting that he might be piling up wealth against just such a day, she was forced to reconsider the situation.

He’d been strange over the past several months. There was no denying that. He was not his usual self. Restlessness and dissatisfaction were his daily moods. There was about him the sense of a chapter coming to a close while he waited for another to begin. She knew exactly where she’d figured in the former chapter but had no idea where she fit in the one to come. The possibility that she might not fit in at all had not occurred to her.

Suki had grown so accustomed to Warren’s presence over the years that life without him seemed too unlikely a thought to even entertain. They were all the family either of them had. Whatever their life together was, they were at least a unit — a symbiosis of need and circumstance, each nourishing the other. Despite all of Warren’s tantrums and threats, she could never permit that to change.

She chuckled softly to herself, replacing the little sack of jewelry in the ceiling fixture. Setting the room back in perfect order, she assured herself that nothing would change. Nothing could ever alter the condition of their lives together, she told herself. But still, far away at the distant rim of her consciousness, something stirred, some faint alteration of light, a hint of something unwanted and unsavory approaching them with no total shape as yet to define it.

When she left the small room in the attic that morning and locked the door behind her, she was a bit unnerved.

“Don’t tell me you’re getting up again.”

“I am.”

“Jesus. You’ve been up and down five times in the last hour.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Are you sick?”

“I’m fine.”

She listened to him lying there in the dark for a while, quiet, as if he’d exhausted their talk. Shortly, he grunted, rolled over, and proceeded to snore.

“Well, I’m not fine,” she said. She waited for him to respond. When nothing came, she said it again, but this time louder. “I’m not fine.”

He rolled back over, sat halfway up, and peered at her in the dark.

“I’m not fine, Mickey. I’m sick. I’m sick to my stomach.”

“Must’ve been the sausage in the linguini,” he murmured drowsily. “Wait a minute. I’ll get you an Alka-Seltzer.”

He started out of bed but she pulled him back. “I don’t need no Alka-Seltzer, Mickey. It’s not my stomach. My stomach’s fine. It’s something else.”

She said it with just the right note of portentousness. She felt him turn again in the dark and peer at her. Then the light switched on.

“It’s him,” she said, looking directly at him.

“It’s who?”

“It’s him. Warren. The one I told you about.”

“Oh, the creep. What about him?”

Her mouth was dry. She felt her jaws moving ponderously, unanchored and uncontrolled, lifting up and down with no sound coming from them. Then came the tears bursting from her eyes, coursing down her cheeks, followed next by the sobs — deep, inconsolable rales that conveyed a sense of profound distress.

He pulled her roughly to him, smothering her face in the coarse cotton of his pajama top. “Hey, what is this? If that guy’s done anything …”

“I don’t want you to do nothing, Mickey.” Her fingers fluttered nervously at the buttonholes of his pajama top. “It’s nothing he did, see. It’s more like what he said.” Then it all came out, bursting from her as though she were regurgitating something. It came in fragments and snatches, seemingly incoherent and disconnected. Meaning only emerged from it toward the very end.

“Hey, wait. Now wait. Just a minute.” With his hands he tried physically to slow her tirade. “You’re telling me he said you gotta leave me.”

The jaws worked fitfully. “That’s right.” The words emerged at last, followed by another volley of sobs.

“Shhh,” he tried to subdue the awful spasms, placing a hand over her mouth. “For Chrissake — shhh. The neighbors’ll think I’m whaling the hell out of you.”

“Mickey — I’m scared.”

“Where is this Warren guy? Tell me. I’ll cream him.” She tried to push him back into bed. “No, no. I don’t want you going near him. He’s crazy.”

“I know he’s crazy. That’s why I’m gonna twist his head off. He didn’t touch you, did he?”

“No. I told you he didn’t.”

“Where does he live?”

She flung her hands up in the air. “I don’t know.” Another high, keening wail, the sound of pure fright, tore from her. “Somewhere way downtown. I don’t know. He lives with this old lady.”

“His mother? He lives with his mother?”

“No. Some old bag lady. She raised him. She’s crazy, too. The both of them are loons. Right around the bend. I met her once in Grand Central Station. You can’t believe what she is.”

“You ever been to her place?”

“Never.” She was annoyed by the implication. “She doesn’t like him to bring anyone around. Particularly girls. So he doesn’t. I think he’s ashamed to bring friends anyway. I’m telling you, it’s crazy.”

He thought about it while she watched him, sniffling and fretting. At last he spoke: “I tell you what we re gonna do.”

Cold terror stamped her face. “I’m not going to the police, Mickey. I’m not gonna start with that.”

“Who said anything about the police?”

“He’s crazy. If he ever heard I went to the police …”

“Forget about the police,” he snapped angrily. “This guy is just blowing hard.”

“No, no. This is no bluff. Believe me. When he says —”

“From now on you don’t leave or return here alone. I’m gonna take you to work in the morning and I’m gonna bring you back home at night. I’m gonna meet you for lunch at noon. We’ll see about this Warren. We’ll see if he takes a hint. ‘Cause if he don’t, I’m gonna cream him.”

He brought his palm down flat on the night table with a sharp crack. She lay trembling against him, whimpering into his pajama top.

“Mickey, promise me you won’t go near him. You don’t know him the way I know him. He’s not like anyone else you know. He’s nuts. He believes in demons and devils. He reads all kind of crazy stuff on things like magic and numbers. He believes he can tell the future by numbers. He’s done stuff…” She jammed the knuckle of her fist into her mouth and bit down hard to keep from starting to sob again. “He’s done stuff… I mean, all kinds of stuff. Stuff you wouldn’t believe. I can’t tell you. Just don’t you go near him, Mickey. Now, I’m telling you. He’s dangerous. And he’s watching us. He knows this house and where I work. He knows my telephone number at work. He’s already called me there.”

“He called you there?”

“I’m telling you.”

“How did he get the number?”

“I don’t know,” she moaned. “I don’t know. Probably just followed me to the office one morning. Watched me get on the elevator. He knows you, too, Mickey. He knew your name. Don’t ask me how. He snoops around. He has his way of finding things out.”

“When he calls you, what does he say?”

“Nothing. I just hear him breathing over the phone. I know it’s him. He does it to scare me.”

“To scare you?” A shrewd smile creased the young man’s features. He reached up and turned off the light. “Okay, Janine. You can forget about Warren now. Leave Warren to me.”

She was up again at once, pleading with him in the darkness. The lights from the street below pierced through the louvered blinds of the tiny bedroom, throwing bars of vivid white against the walls.

“Mickey, you promised me. You promised.”