The Howling Man (53 page)

Willie walked back to Aunt Lucy's. And when the old woman saw his face, she smiled broadly. The vise around her neck relaxed and she felt young again.

"Well, boy, you get the hate cut out of you!"

"Yes'm."

"You ain't no different from any of us, boy. It jus' come to you late, that's all. You never saw what you was, boy, that was your trouble."

Willie looked up and smiled.

Aunt Lucy hurried to fix coffee.

"You know, Willie boy, we mus' be the Lord's favorites, 'cause we got the biggest cross of all to carry. You know what I'm talkin' about, boy?"

"Do you suppose the Lord'll forgive me, Aunt Lucy?"

"I kinda think He will. He's a mighty understandin' person."

Then Willie began to laugh and the old woman laughed with him.

They laughed for a long time.

He was very small. And, he was invisible. Or almost: there and not there, existing and not existing--like a shadow just before the lights come on, or a face you see in the window of a speeding train, or birds at midnight. He lived in the corner of your eye. Turn around, quick! and stare and--he's gone, he's somewhere else.

After a while I stopped trying to find him. It made things easier. In at nine: "Good morning, Mr. Gershenson!" (a quick silent grin from the little man); out at six: "Good night!" (the same) and repeat. A few requests: Bring that set of Dickens up front, please; don't forget to dust the A secton, will you?--Nothing more.

And it seemed to work all right. Actually, it didn't. Because he was there and we worked together, eight hours a day, and it isn't very pleasant, ever, to give orders to a man who is twice your age and then watch him jump and run like a monkey set on fire. Yet so quietly.

He was always running. Even when he swept up, as though his life depended on it--Switch! Switch! with the broom down the aisles, getting the dirt off the floor, Switch! billowing it over all the books, and then off, fast, to another chore. I never saw a man work with such speed. Or so hard. Or do such a poor job--poor Martin, and he had the world's easiest. An idiot could have done it better.

The others got a big kick out of him. They called him 'Pop'--although he wasn't very old: maybe fifty, maybe sixty, no older--and they pulled fancy gags, thought out days in advance, planned in secret conclave. Once Berman called from New Books downstairs and asked for Martin and double-talked until he had the little man shaking. They laughed at him all day long.

It wasn't easy not to laugh, I suppose. He was pretty funny; right from the first, from the day Steinberg hired him. In a lot of ways: the quick-padding Mandarin's walk he had, feet barely touching the floor; the outsized mixed-up clothes he wore; and all those boxes and phials and bottles of medicine! It seemed that every time you looked, he was popping a pill into his mouth or swigging cough syrup. Which is funny to watch, although I didn't feel much like laughing, somehow. He was always so intense about it. As if he thought, if I don't take all this medicine, I'll die, almost certainly. I'll catch a horrible disease and die.

And that made you wonder--well? Why should he want to stay alive to the point of fighting death every five minutes? An old man with most of his years behind him, and what is he now? A stockboy in a bookstore, without a hope of anything better.

But he didn't frown any oftener than he smiled. He just worked. Gently and quickly and poorly and quietly--always quietly: I never heard him speak a word, then. It gave rise to the rumor that he was a mute, but I don't think anyone actually believed that.

Maybe it was his eyes that kept me wondering. It probably was, at first, because there wasn't anything else. They were so bright beneath those black-clumped John L. Lewis brows, so bright and full. While he fumbled about like the wrong machine for the wrong job, I watched his eyes, and sometimes they seemed about to fly loose from their sockets and sometimes they rested there like milk.glass marbles, looking, beyond the shelves and beyond the walls.

Of course, after a few weeks the newness wore off. We all got used to Martin's quick little movements and his silence. Business picked up over the holidays, so there wasn't much time for finding him. Gradually, pieces floated in. Not many, not enough to make a picture--but some.

For one thing--and we should certainly have guessed it--Martin had been in America only a few months. The reason he never talked was that he hadn't learned English; he could understand it, but not speak it. And the fact that he was a foreigner explained, for almost everybody, the other peculiarities.

The 'Pop' label stuck. As the days passed, he melted into a fixture, like the rest of us, as if he'd always been with the store, ever since it was built. I covered his mistakes and didn't push and he smiled good morning and good night and that was that. We had a funny little foreigner working in Used Books. He was quiet. He took medicine. He put in his hours. That's all we knew, that's all we needed to know.

But I was the one who worked with him. I was the one who saw his eyes. And 'that' couldn't be exactly that, with me.

I went back on the hook when I first heard his music. It was near closing time and we were alone. He was pulling books from the F section, I was pricing some Americana. I could see his short little monkey's body scrambling up and down the ladder, and in the dusty murk between aisles, the whiteness of his skin was like white wax. Especially then, climbing, he reminded me of a newsreel I'd once seen of some man who had lived in a cave for a year, without any of the civilized comforts, and who had then been brought before the cameras, shaved and bathed, hair combed but not yet cut, cheeks scrubbed--nervous and unnatural, a little terrified and colorless as a slug.

It was very quiet and still that afternoon.

Then, suddenly, Martin began to hum. It surprised me, I don't know why exactly, but it was as if he had just ripped off his shirt and turned around and showed me his wings; or an extra pair of arms. I was careful not to look up: I knew there wasn't anybody else upstairs.

The melody swam through the heat and dust. But it wasn't ordinary humming, not at all. Each note was hit accurately and the piece was continued from its beginning to its end. When the notes got too high, or too low, he simply switched octaves. And it sent a shiver through me, because what he hummed was Beethoven's
Pat hetique Sonata
. Right straight through, transposed beautifully.

After a pause it began again, this time the fugue from Bloch's
Concerto Grosso
. And then some Bach I couldn't recognize.

This little man, who couldn't even put a book on a shelf right, who ran around like a half-killed chicken, like a scared mouse, singing to himself now, his eyes lost completely--they couldn't
actually
belong to the sad bundle of wet sticks and white skin!--this little man, singing and humming, so powerfully, so lovingly, that you forgot about him and you heard the music as it was written, the pianos, the violins, the flutes; and you heard every note, every note.

I never let him know that I heard, of course. I just listened, and whenever there were no customers, he would start. Today,
In the Hall of the Mountain King
; tomorrow,
Adoramus Te Christe
; the next day,
Liebestod
. Giant music and small music, Beethoven and Chopin, Moussorgsky and Jannequin and Mozart and Mendelssohn.

Finally, I couldn't take it any longer. I wormed a lunch out of Steinberg, the boss, and I pumped him, discreetly. It was disappointing, in a way . . . I'd hoped for more. In another way, it was not so disappointing.

Steinberg told me about how Martin Gershenson had once been the leading music critic for a newspaper in Germany.

About how he had once been married and how, one day, he and his family had been carried from their home and put into different concentration camps; and how Martin had escaped and learned, much later, that his wife and his two children had been executed.

How he had wandered the cities of the earth, afterwards . . .

From music critic to stockboy. I began trying to find him again, and once I tried whistling, something by Rachmaninoff. I got half-way through. He didn't pause for a moment. But he stopped singing.

Dust carefully, Martin! Go unload that shipment of Rand McNalley's, please, Martin! Don't forget to turn out the lights!

A smile, a jump, a running.

And a little reproachful look in those eyes, asking me why, why did I have to take his music away from him?

Gently and quietly--maybe once or twice a murmured, "Schnell? Oh, ja ja!" Gently and quietly, as quaint and funny as Gepetto, a funny character out of the comic pages, always rushing, taking the jokes of others, and smiling only at the children who came up with their mothers.

When he learned a little English, we tried him on a few customers. But he got red and frightened and nervous, and the cash register terrified him--he wouldn't touch it--so we had to take him off the job. He didn't complain.

And I kept wondering, why? With eyes like those, why was he so beaten and so frightened, so willing to fit any mold like hot lead?

"Don't
worry
," they used to say to me. "Forget it--he's happy. Leave him alone."

So I did.

Until I heard his music again. Something by Bloch, slow and full of sadness. He twisted each note and squeezed it and wrung out its sadness.

Outside, the rain washed over our thin roof like gravel. I was listening to the rain and to Martin's music, and thinking, when I heard the heavy footsteps on the stairs. At the same instant, Martin Gershenson quieted, and there was only the sound of those footsteps, slow and heavy.

The man wasn't unfamiliar to me: he'd been in a couple of times before, I remembered dimly. Now he wore a thick checkered overcoat, soggy with rain, and a wet gray hat.

"Yes, sir," I said to him. "Can we help you?"

"Perhaps," he said. There seemed to be a slight accent; that, or his English was too perfect. "I am looking for a nice set--I mean in good condition--of Eliot. George Eliot. Do you have that?"

He was a large person, thick-handed and rough-fleshed. Chinless, the neck fat drooled over his collar and swung loosely. His lips were dry and white and seemed joined by membrane when closed. But I think it was his nose that made me dislike him. Crooked, set at an angle on his face as if not quite tight on a pivot, the bridge broken and mashed against the white fat of upper cheeks. His eyes were merely eyes, soft as eggs. Perhaps a trifle small.

"I'll see," I said. Then I called, "Martin! Would you please see if we have a mint set of Eliot?" By this time the little man could understand English quite well.

"Ja--" His feet padded quickly over the floor, stopped, turned, were still.

The man was smiling. "Personally," he said, "I think the old lady is very funny, but there is a friend of mine that fancies her. A woman friend, of course. You know?"

Martin came running. Halfway across the room, he stopped. He appeared to stare, for a moment.

"We do not have this in stock," he said to me.

"No Eliot at all?" I asked.

"No," he said, paused another second, staring, and then went rushing back down the aisle into the back.

The big man was chuckling. "Well," he said, "perhaps no Eliot at all is the better present to my friend!" He thumbed through one of our special hand-tooled copies of Tristram Shandy.

"I'm sorry, sir," I said. "We're usually not so low in stock. But if you'd care to leave your name and address, we'll let you know when it--"

"It's all right," the man said, not lifting his eyes from the book. "I will come in again some time."

"If there's anything else we can do for you -

"Sangorsky," he said. "Good leather." His fat hands rubbed the red morocco binding.

"Yes. As you can see, we have the book marked at a considerable reduction--"

"You don't have this Eliot that I want, do you?"

"No sir. But, I tell you what. We can order it and it would only take a few days. Why don't you let us have your name and address and we'll contact you?"

He walked about examining the books. Then he lit a cigarette.

"Pencil," he said.

I gave him a pencil and he wrote down his name--John S. Parker--and his address.

"Yes, sir, we'll let you know the minute--"

"All right. You let me know." He pulled down a large Skira volume, glanced at it, put it back. He rubbed his nose. "It is wet out," he said.

"It sure is. Not bookstore weather."

"You let me know, young man."

He turned and went down the stairs.

It was soon very quiet again, except for the rain.

Martin was padding about in the back. Slowly; not fast, like always before.

I thought about the look on his face when he had caught sight of the new customer, about the man's strangeness, his accent; I thought about concentration camps.

Then, suddenly, I knew. I knew beyond all doubt.

Martin had found what he was looking for.

Later, at home, I built the story in my mind. I dressed it up, gave it plot and structure.

I even wrote the newspaper headline:

MAN BRUTALLY SLAIN IN APARTMENT!

And the picture, not a good one, but clear enough to make out the fat face and the crooked nose.

I composed the story with a sick feeling, the feeling you get when you hear of the death of someone you know--not necessarily a friend--just anyone you've ever seen or spoken with.

A man identified as John S. Parker was found dead in his apartment at 734 No. Sweetzer early yesterday evening by his landlady. Parker was the victim of a brutal attack by an unknown assailant. According to the police report, he was hacked fifty-three times with an axe about the face, neck and chest. There were evidences of other atrocities: cigarette burns about the legs and armpits, deep bruises in the abdominal region. No motive for the crime known . . .

Later reports--it was Sunday: I had plenty of time to construct the drama-- revealed further information. The murdered man's name was not John Parker. It was Carl Haber. And he was in America illegally. Hiding. Because he had once been Colonel Carl Haber, and he had once run the show at one of the smaller concentration camps in Germany--one of the missing cogs in that well-oiled machine, the Third Reich. Missing until now.

The papers had the full story for their evening editions.

Haber, nee Parker, had slipped into the country by the kind offices of a friend in Venezuela. He had some money. He loved books. He had taken an apartment, a small bachelor's, and lived the quiet life of a retired businessman, a widower, perhaps.

And this man with the crooked nose and the fat neck had waited, for the world to forget about the millions of human beings he had helped consign to the lime kilns and the brick ovens and the shower rooms with hot-and-cold running carbon monoxide.

But somebody hadn't forgotten.

One of the city's sensational sheets got a hold of a picture of Haber's body. You couldn't look at it for long.