Thirteen Phantasms (23 page)

Another of the curtains moved, pushing out away from the bed hidden behind it, and as Jimmerson watched, a man in a wrinkled suit and stubble beard rolled out from beneath the curtain and balanced precariously on the side rail of the bunk, apparently still asleep. Jimmerson braced himself, expecting him to tumble off onto the floor, but instead he tilted slowly back and forth, as if buoyed up by whatever strange currents circulated in the room. He muttered something inaudible, and the muttering dissolved into a muffled sob. And then he tilted forward again so that he seemed to cling to the bed with a knee and an elbow. There was the sudden crash of something hitting the wooden floorboards directly beneath him, and at that instant he lofted toward the ceiling like Gladstone’s dead man. But there was a tether tied to his ankle, the other end of the tether affixed to an iron ring bolted to the bed frame, and the man leveled off and floated peacefully just below the ceiling.

The object on the floor was clearly a teddy bear, or at least the replica of a teddy bear, and from where Jimmerson stood it appeared to have been contrived with uncanny verisimilitude—apparently out of rusty cast iron. It looked worn from years of handling, its nose pushed aside, one of its eyes missing, a clump of stuffing like steel wool shoving out of a tear in its leg.

Along the wall opposite stood an open cabinet divided into junk-filled cubbyholes, much of it reminiscent of the stuff in Pillbody’s shop—bric-a-brac mostly, travel souvenirs and keepsakes. Jimmerson made out what appeared to be an old letterman’s sweater, a smoking pipe, a carved seashell, a tiny abacus, a copper Jell-o mold in the shape of a child’s face, an exquisitely detailed statue of a nude woman, her face downcast, her hands crossed demurely in front of her. He saw then that there were name placards on each of the cubbyholes, hung on cup hooks as if for easy removal.

He stepped backward off his makeshift ladder, his hands trembling, and started back down the alley toward the street, although he knew straightaway that he wasn’t going anywhere. Gladstone had warned him about this, so it wasn’t any vast surprise. He had largely come to understand it, too—what Pillbody’s curiosities amounted to, what it was that Edna had sold, why she had grown more and more vacant as the months had slipped past. He thought about the odds and ends on her bedside table, the medicinal-smelling bottle with the green stain, the liqueur glass, and he wondered if one of these narrow beds had been hers, a sort of home away from home.

Retracing his steps to the pallet, he climbed back up to the lighted window and forced himself to read the names one by one, spotting Edna’s right away, the third cubbyhole from the left. He could see that there was something inside, pushed back into the shadows where it was nearly hidden from view, something that caught the light. He strained to make it out—a perfume bottle? A glass figurine? He searched his memory, but couldn’t find such an object anywhere.

The door opened at the far end of the room now, and an old woman walked in, followed by des Laumes. Her hair was a corona of white around her head, and she was wrinkled enough to be a hundred years old. The floating man had descended halfway to the floor, as if he were slowly losing buoyancy, and the old woman grabbed his shoe and a handful of his coat and steered him toward his bed again, pushing him past his curtain so that he was once again hidden from view. She bent over to pick up the thing on the floor, but des Laumes had to help her with it, as if it were incredibly heavy. Together they shoved it into a cubbyhole marked “Peterson.” She turned and left then, without a word.

Des Laumes remained behind, looking around himself as if suspicious that something was out of order. He appeared to be sniffing the air, and he held a hand up, extending his first finger as if gauging the direction of the wind. Jimmerson moved to the corner of the window, hiding himself from view. A moment later he peered carefully past the window casing again.

The Frenchman held the statue of the woman in his hand now, scrutinizing it carefully. Then he peeked inside one of the cubbyholes and retrieved a glass paperweight that appeared to Jimmerson to be packed with hundreds of tiny glass flowers. Des Laumes held it to the light, nodded heavily, and walked across to the safe, spinning the dial. He swung the door open, placed the statue and the paperweight inside, and shut the door.

•

Jimmerson climbed down again and set off up the alley. His thinking had narrowed to a tiny focus, and his hands had steadied. Within a few seconds he had the .38 out of the glove compartment. He slipped the gun into his trousers pocket, then walked straight across the street, up the flagstone path to the café. The door opened and the two girls with the bobbed hair came out, arguing heatedly now, neither one of them looking happy. Jimmerson slipped past them through the open door, face to face with des Laumes himself, who stood there playing the host now. The Frenchman reached for a menu, gestured, and moved off toward a table before realizing who Jimmerson was. He turned around halfway across the empty café, a look of theatrical surprise on his face. “What a pleasure,” he said.

“Can I have a word with you somewhere private?” Jimmerson spoke to him in the tone of an old and indebted friend.

“It’s very private here,” the man said to him. “How can I help you?” His face was bloated and veined, as if corrupted from years of unnameable abuse, and he reeked of cologne, which only half hid a ghastly odor reminiscent of the stink in Pillbody’s “parlor room.”

“
Help
me?” Jimmerson asked, hauling the gun out of his pocket and pointing it at the Frenchman’s chest. “Better to help yourself. I’ll follow you into the back.” He gestured with the gun.

“I’ve been shot before,” des Laumes told him, shrugging with indifference, and Jimmerson pulled the trigger, aiming high, blowing the hell out of a brass wall sconce with a glass shade. The sound of the gun was crashingly loud, and startled horror passed across des Laumes’s face as he threw his hands up.

Someone peered out of the kitchen—the chef apparently—and Jimmerson waved the pistol at him. “Get the hell out of here,” he shouted, and the man ducked back into the kitchen. There was the sound of a woman’s voice then, and running feet. A door slammed, and the kitchen was silent. “Let’s go,” Jimmerson said, aiming the gun with both hands at the Frenchman’s stomach now. The man turned and headed back through the café, past the kitchen door, down a hallway and into the room with the beds. Keeping the pistol aimed at des Laumes, Jimmerson reached into Edna’s cubbyhole and pulled out the trinket inside—a glass replica of what appeared to be the old Pontiac.

He hesitated for a moment before slipping it into his pocket, steeling himself for the disorienting shift into the past, into the realm of Edna’s memory. Probably he would lose des Laumes in the process. The Frenchman would simply take the pistol away from him, maybe shoot him right then and there

But nothing happened. He might as well have dropped his car keys into his pocket. “The safe,” Jimmerson said.

Des Laumes shrugged again. “What is it that you want?” he asked, turning his palms up. “Surely …”

“What I want is to shoot you to pieces,” Jimmerson told him. “I don’t know what you are—some kind of damn vampire I guess. But I don’t have one damn thing to lose by blowing the living hell out of you right now. You should know that, you … stinking overblown bearded twit.” He stepped forward, closing in with the pistol as if he would shove it up the Frenchman’s nose. The man fell back a step, putting up his hands again and shaking his head. “Now open the safe,” Jimmerson told him.

The Frenchman spun the dial and opened the safe door, then stepped aside and waved at it as if he were introducing a circus act. “Clean it out,” Jimmerson told him. “Put everything into the boxes.” He picked up a packing crate and set it on the floor in front of the safe, and des Laumes took objects out one by one and laid them in, packing the excelsior around them.

“This is common theft,” the Frenchman said, shaking his head sadly.

“That’s right,” Jimmerson told him. “And it’ll be a common hole in the head for the good Pierre if he doesn’t hurry the hell up. That’s it, monsieur, the statue, too. Now the stuff in the cabinet. Fill those boxes.” He thought about the chef, the rest of them that had fled through the back door. Would they go to the police? He made up his mind right there on the spot: if he heard sirens, if the door flew open and des Laumes was saved, Jimmerson would shoot the man dead before he handed over the gun.

Des Laumes filled a second packing crate and then a third, until every last piece of bric-a-brac lay in the crates. Except for the glass automobile, Jimmerson hadn’t recognized any of it as Edna’s. And even if des Laumes knew the source of the things in the safe, he wouldn’t tell Jimmerson the truth about them. The man was an end-to-end lie, with nothing at all to recommend him but his idiotic beard like a runover tar brush. Jimmerson was heartily sick of the sight of it, and with the .38 he motioned des Laumes against the wall, away from the sleeping people on the beds. He easily pictured killing the man, shooting the hell out of him, leaving him dead and bloody on the ground.

But somehow the taste of it was like dust in his mouth. How would there be any satisfaction in it? He could as easily picture Gladstone shaking his, head sadly, and the idea filled him with shame. More trouble, more pain—anger like a drug, like alcohol, like lunacy, having its way with him again.

There were no sirens yet, no need to hurry.

“Sit down,” he said, and des Laumes, his face white now, slumped obediently against the wall. Holding the gun on him, Jimmerson removed one of the liqueur-filled decanters from its niche in the shelf above an empty bed. “Drink it like a good boy,” he said, handing it to him, and he held the pistol against the man’s ear. De Laumes stared at him, as if he were making up his mind. He shook his head feebly and started to speak. And then, as if suddenly changing his mind, he heaved a long sigh, shrugged, and drank off the contents of the decanter.

“That’s it,” Jimmerson said. “Down the hatch.” He fetched out another decanter, and forced him to drink that one, too, and then a third and a fourth. All in all there must have been two quarts of the stuff, and the room reeked with the camphor and weeds smell of it.

Des Laumes’s face had rapidly taken on a green pallor, and he looked around himself now, a growing bewilderment and horror in his eyes. He clutched his expanding stomach and slowly began to rock forward and backward, his head bouncing with increasing force off the wall behind, his eyes jerking upward in their sockets, a green scum at the corners of his mouth. Jimmerson backed away in case the man got sick, watching as the rocking intensified and des Laumes began to jackknife at the waist like a mad contortionist, his forehead driving impossibly against the floorboards, a piglike grunting issuing from somewhere deep inside him.

Jimmerson awakened the four sleepers, two women and two men—the old cutlet eater and poor Peterson. The women, both of whom still clutched their handbags, were surprisingly young and bedraggled, and they looked out from their beds, blinking their eyes, growing slowly aware of des Laumes’s thrashing on the floor. One by one Jimmerson helped them down, untethering them from the beds, unbolting the back door and letting them out into the alley. Mr. Peterson walked like a man on the moon, high-stepping through the puddle, and it occurred to Jimmerson to offer him back his cast-iron teddy bear for ballast, but he saw that it wouldn’t be a kindness to him. Soon enough he’d be heavy again.

When the four of them had reached the street, Jimmerson hauled the packing crates out into the night and then headed around the café to where the Mercury was parked. He climbed
inside,
fired it up, and swung around the corner into the alley, letting the engine idle while he loaded the crates into the rear of the car along with his own boxes of junk.

There was a noise from inside the café like rocks hitting the walls, and Jimmerson looked in through the door, which was partly blocked by des Laumes himself. The Frenchman had levitated a couple of feet off the floor, and his body spasmed in midair like a pupating insect in a cocoon. The room roundabout him was strewn with unidentifiable junk—rusty iron and dirty glass and earthy ceramic objects, misshapen and stinking. Jimmerson pulled the door shut and climbed into the Mercury, slamming the car door against the sounds of knocking and grunting and moaning, and backed away down the alley, swinging out into the street and accelerating toward home as the rain began to fall again. He reached into his pocket and took out the glass Pontiac, which he set carefully on the top of the dashboard so that it caught the rainy glow of passing headlights, and it was then that it dawned on him that he should have left des Laumes a penny.

•

He had needed every cubic inch of the big rental truck in order to clean out Pillbody’s shop. The dwarf had made him sign a release, and had talked obscurely about Jimmerson’s “aim being true.” “On the up and up,” he had said. “
Solid
copper wiring.
No
imperfections.” But he had taken the thousands of pennies happily enough, although he had refused to drop them into the brass fish until Jimmerson had packed up what he wanted and driven away. Jimmerson had wanted it all, and Pillbody had worked alongside him, running wheelbarrows full of curiosities out the back and across the courtyard to where Jimmerson had backed the truck up to the circular brick doorway of the courtyard.

The truck crept east along Maple Street now, the engine laboring, the overload springs jammed flat, the tires mashed against the rims, the truck bed heaving ominously from side to side. Jimmerson sat hunched in the driver’s seat, which sagged beneath his weight, and he fought to see the road in front of him as bits and pieces of arcane and exotic imagery stuttered through his mind like subliminal messages, almost too rapidly to comprehend. His skin twitched and jerked with competing emotions: dark fears rising into euphoric happiness, dropping away again into canyons of sadness, soaring to heights of lunatic glee. Somewhere in the depths of his mind he heard the clatter of pennies cascading and was dimly aware of the howling of the truck engine and the smell of hot oil and burning rubber. There was the sound of a hose bursting, and a wild cloud of steam poured out from under the hood, and in the swirling vapors a startling array of, faces appeared and disappeared. Edna’s face came and went, and he recognized the face of the bearded man with the bloody neck, and felt a stab of vicious and shameless satisfaction for the duration of a blink of an eye, and then one face was replaced by another and another and another, a dozen at a time, a hundred—a tide of shifting visages soaking away into the sands of his ponderous and overloaded memory.