The Magician (10 page)

At the trial, Thomassy showed that the black enamel used for the desecration could have been bought at any hardware store. The same for the brush. True, when the man was picked up by the cops, his hands, which had been thoroughly washed by then, still smelled of turpentine. But you couldn’t convict a man on turpentine smells—not if Thomassy was defending him. When the three Jews testified, he tore their credibility to pieces by the use of easy law-school tactics. Everything was much too circumstantial for the judge, who let the man off with a warning to get rid of all the hate literature that had been found in his apartment. Thomassy had even objected to the warning, and the judge had withdrawn it.

Thomassy felt pretty good about that case. He surmised that the man had probably been guilty of a great deal throughout his disordered life. Something must have gone irretrievably wrong early, but you couldn’t lock people up for life just to keep them in line. Society had to take its chances, and Thomassy was the instrument for protecting people like that from vengeance.

An expression of discomfort wrinkled Urek’s features in what seemed to be the beginning of laughter.

“Listen, kid,” Thomassy stabbed a finger at Urek. “You’re in more trouble than you think. What’s so funny?”

“Nothin’,” said Urek.

“I don’t want you discussing anything that happened with anyone from now on. That goes for your father and mother, too. Just shut up. You’ve said too much already. You got to get some facts straight. Japhet’s father is a schoolteacher. That’s in his favor. Your father is a millhand and a part-time gas-station attendant.”

He wasn’t getting through. Explaining such distinctions to Urek was pointless.

“They say you smashed the windshield of Japhet’s car with a chain. If you did, that was stupid. That’s property damage of an insured item. If the insurance company went after you, you’d be licked.”

Thomassy rocked back on his heels. “Fortunately, there’s a hundred-dollar deductible, and the amount that’s over might not be enough for them to get excited about. How else did you damage the car?”

“Well,” said Urek, uneasy.

“It’s okay, you’re telling me, not the judge.”

“Well, I smashed one of the suitcases against the back fender. The other suitcase was done by one of the other guys.”

“Did you dent the fender?”

Urek shrugged. He didn’t know.

“Let’s hope you didn’t. We don’t want the insurance company in this, right? Now, bodily injury. People damage. You jumped Japhet’s kid and the girl friend.”

“I didn’t do nothing to the girl. I mean, I twisted her arm, but she didn’t get hurt.”

“That could be assault. In our society, we don’t like women to get assaulted. Fortunately for you, the only witnesses on their side are the boyfriend and the boyfriend’s father, and if she has no injuries that required medical attention… Are you listening?”

“Sure,” said Urek, twitching his nose. “What about the guy in the hospital?”

“He’s going to be the chief witness against you. He’s going to be asked to tell every detail of what he did and what you did, especially what you did to him. You damn nearly killed him.”

Whatever Thomassy said from that point on washed over Urek, who was thinking he didn’t like the idea of that Japhet superkid yakking about him on the witness stand. A few more seconds. If only he hadn’t let go when the school janitor shone his flashlight, yelling. But there was Japhet’s old man pounding his back, hurting.

“You’re not listening,” said Thomassy.

“You know somethin’, that kid’s father beat me.”

“He what?” asked Thomassy.

“I didn’t touch him. And he beat me.”

“Very interesting,” said Thomassy, making a note.

*

The woman at the hospital switchboard was very near retirement age. She had put in seven of her eight hours that Monday, and was looking forward to her relief. She mustered her strength for the last hour because she felt that in her job she could account for so many kindnesses if she handled each incoming call just right.

“Ed Japhet?” asked the caller.

“Would you spell the name, please,” said the operator, immediately sorry she had given this stock response, because the caller seemed flustered. “Is it ‘f-f or ‘p-p’?” she asked, then answered her own question, because she had just minutes before received the slip taking Japhet, Edward’s name off the intensive list.

“Hold on, please. He’s been assigned a room.”

She always kept her Rolodex up to the minute, and there the card was, not keeping the caller waiting long at all.

“Room four-oh-two,” said the switchboard operator proudly.

She was surprised that the caller did not ask to be connected. Urek, who had been released in the custody of his parents, did not even thank her before he hung up.

Dinner consisted of meatloaf and frozen corn on the cob. Urek watched his father put margarine on the corn. He could tell the old man was sore.

“What did ya get in a fight for?” he said at last.

Urek said nothing.

His father munched on the ear of corn, then wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. “Thomassy costs money. What’d ya get arrested for, are you gonna answer me?”

“Let him eat his supper,” said Mrs. Urek.

“He can rot in jail, that’s what I think.”

Urek left his dinner on the plate. He went upstairs, saying he was going to listen to some records and then go to sleep. He put the record player on a long-play with the volume not too loud so that his
father wouldn’t come barging in, then fixed the record-player arm so that the record would be replayed again and again. Then he put on a sweater and went down the drainpipe as he had on many previous occasions.

It was a long walk, and Urek was out of breath by the time he got to the hospital and entered the side door marked “Physicians Only.”

Once in the stairwell, he felt safe. He knew the room number from his phone call. Visiting hours were over, and with luck no duty nurse would see him going into the room.

Ed’s eyes widened when he saw Urek enter the room. He wanted to yell, but the great sudden breath in his lungs, with the tube going down into his stomach, came out a useless gurgle. Ed reached for the nurse’s call button, but Urek caught the wrist first in a fierce left-hand lock as his right hand fished for the knife in his pocket. He pulled the knife out, pressed the button that released the blade. Shit, thought Urek, he had to let go the wrist to grab the rubber tube so he could cut it.

The knife was just honed.

It cut through cleanly.

Urek dashed out of the room, thinking he had severed Ed Japhet’s lifeline.

In the hallway just outside the room Urek ran into a nurse’s aide carrying a tray of wrapped sterilized instruments which spilled, the clatter reverberating down the hall. Two or three other nurses on the floor turned in time to see Urek’s figure dashing into the back stairway. Only the nurse’s aide saw enough to be able to identify him later. Ed pushed the nurse’s call button. There was no need to. While the nurse’s aide was picking up the instruments, two nurses rushed into his room. One saw what had happened and left to summon the duty doctor.

There was no urgent need to. The tube Urek had cut was there so the doctor could check for blood in the stomach that might have come from spleen damage or some other not easily detectable internal injury. It was a safety precaution, that was all.

But Ed knew that this time Urek had intended to murder him, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why.

Chapter 11

The nurse at the desk wished the telephone in her hands was the upright phone she remembered from her childhood, the kind whose cradle you tapped up and down to get the operator’s attention. She had dialed 9 to get an outside line, and then O for Operator; it rang and rang and rang at the other end, ignoring her. Miss Murphy, as she was called by the younger nurses, saw the collapse of the modern world in such things as the increasing debility of the telephone service, as if it were an aged patient suffering from hardening of the arteries, loss of energy, the settling of cobwebs in the brain, the beginning of hopelessness.

Finally, an answer. The voice that said “Operator” was Spanish-sounding. Puerto Rican?

“Connect me with the police.”

“May I have your number, please?”

“This is Phelps Memorial. Connect me with the goddamn police!”

“I have to have your number in case you hang up.”

“ME-1-5100, hurry, it’s an emergency.”

For Miss Murphy, who was in her late fifties and nearing retirement, the world had changed too much. Everyone—meaning the people she had come into contact with forty and thirty and twenty years earlier, other nurses, telephone operators—everyone had been of Scotch or Irish or English or German descent, could be relied on to be white, not slow. She spent so much of her life just listening to patients who wanted to talk, she thought of herself as being more understanding than most people. She knew that while Latin rhythms had a lot of bounce, the rhythm of Latin life did not, and that people coming up from Spanish America walked slowly, worked slowly, but did they also think slowly even in emergencies? They were quick-tempered, the adrenaline flowed, why couldn’t they work efficiently, like the nurses she had gone to school with, the operators who used to work the telephones before the blacks and the Puerto Ricans took over in New York and its suburbs? All life was darker now, she
thought, and somehow whiteness, the color of her uniform and stiff-starched cap, the normal color of things, was graying wearily.

“Tarrytown police, Sergeant Delaney speaking.”

She tried to tell him quickly of the incident, the nose tube cut, the spilled tray of instruments, the short man rushing down the back stairs. Sergeant Delaney interrupted her, making her feel as if she were rambling. All she was giving him were the facts.

“Edward Japhet,” she said quickly. “The patient’s name is Edward Japhet.”

“Christ!” said the sergeant. “I’ll bet it’s the Urek kid again.”

She asked him what he meant by that, but the blasphemous sergeant wasn’t even listening now. “My name is Murphy,” she said.

“Got that,” said the sergeant, as if it didn’t matter, as if their common origin no longer counted.

He had hung up, leaving her holding the telephone receiver, with only her patients to attend to.

The police in Tarrytown and Ossining kept in close touch with their respective cases not only through the newspapers but through formal and informal procedures and friendships. The way that thermometer-shaker had gone on, Sergeant Delaney thought, the assailant would be too far from the hospital to be chased and caught.

When Delaney said it sounded like the Urek boy was on the loose again, the duty sergeant at Ossining called Chief Rogers at home. The chief ordered a squad car to the Urek house, then quietly thumbed through his telephone directory, found
Thomassy
bus
and
res,
dialed the second number.

“This is a friendly call,” said the chief.

“Not at this hour. What’s up?”

The chief had a lot of respect for Thomassy. He would want him to defend his son if his son ever got into trouble. He told the lawyer what had happened at the hospital.

“Couldn’t have been Urek,” said Thomassy. “I left him at home with instructions not to leave.”

“Listen,” said the chief, “I’ve got a car on the way down there now. For your sake, I hope that kid hasn’t fucked up again. If he’s not there, I hope you find him before we do.”

“I appreciate the call,” said Thomassy.

“Clifford’ll double the bail if it turns out—”

“I’ll handle Clifford. I appreciate the call,” he repeated, and hung up.

Thomassy dialed the Urek house and glanced over at the bed, where Jane Purdy had the sheet pulled up to her chin. Jane and her husband, who was a long-distance truck driver, had both been caught with pot, and Thomassy had gotten them off with a warning. Since then, Jane had regularly showed up on Tuesday evenings because her husband called home collect on Mondays and Wednesdays. The end of the week could be dangerous, and more particularly because Thomassy had another girl he saw on Fridays, he tried to get it off twice on Tuesdays, once right after she’d whip up a dinner at his place and then again after a short nap. He was just stirring a second time when the chief called.

Sex for Thomassy was the perfect form of exercise. Perhaps swimming limbered up more of the muscles, but you couldn’t swim during eight months of the year except at the crowded Y. Besides, it was the fantastic mind-releasing exercise that made sex work. You
felt
better afterward. All you had to do was organize it right. Use steadies to minimize the courtship crap. Alternate partners to prevent boredom. Do what she likes so she’ll do what you like—and remember, every woman likes something different better. Minimize the risks. Do it in safe places. Leave no grounds for revenge. Leave no evidence for revenge, in case it breaks up.

Paul Urek answered the phone. He immediately went up to check the boy’s room.

He came back to the telephone breathless.

“He’s gone.”