Where the Dark Streets Go (19 page)

“The best,” Nim said.

“Then I’m glad for you—and I suppose for all his women, now that he is gone.”

“There’s only one question really, Mrs. Robinson,” Nim said. “Do you know where his paintings are?”

“I would have asked you the same thing. It’s eight years since I last saw him. His loft was as bare as the steppes of Asia, all of his canvases crated. I asked him where they were going. To the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. You do that, I said, and I’ll jump in after them. But you can jump in and out of things so easily, Andrea, he said, and I think I knew then that I would not see him any more.”

“Did you?” McMahon asked.

“Not ever. But I understand now I must have barely missed him at a gallery opening two weeks ago. Or did I see him and not recognize the beard? I have the feeling I did. And I can’t help wondering if seeing me, he didn’t duck out. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now and I’m glad. You can’t go home again. Maybe I wasn’t home to him, but I was something for a few years.” She became flippant again. “It’s like a French novel, isn’t it, mistresses comparing notes?”

A tall man came up behind her, too young to be her husband, McMahon thought. Or too young to be a trustee of a university. He kissed the back of her neck. She whirled around, welcoming the touch even before she knew whose it was. “Chet, how nice that you could come.” To Nim and McMahon she said, “Darlings, do go in. I’ll come soon and introduce you.”

She drifted from them, taking the young man whom she had not introduced with her by the hand to greet more people emerging from the elevator.

“Let’s go,” Nim said.

“No. Let’s see it through,” McMahon said.

“There isn’t anything to see through. Not that I want to look at any more. I’m not as brave as I thought I was.” She moved toward the stairs, but the newly arriving guests blocked her way.

“Nim, are you afraid we might meet Wallenstein again?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t want him to think you’re chasing after him. You don’t want to have to remind him of his promise.”

“It wasn’t a promise.”

“It’s the only kind of promise these people make, you silly girl.”

“It’s all so…decadent,” Nim said.

“Don’t you remember—that’s what you liked about his house when we were there.”

“But this is so much more. And I was hurt, her talking that way about Stu.” She looked up at McMahon. “You like it here, don’t you?”

“I like the booze,” he said. His glass was almost empty.

“It isn’t only that.”

“And I want to know.”

Nim finished her champagne and before she could find a place to put the glass a waiter came and replenished it. “I like this too,” she said, “but one shouldn’t get too fond of it.”

“You sound like Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg.”

They found a corner for themselves in the living room, a corner lined with books, leather-bound classics, uncut, McMahon suspected, and then contemplated himself for a moment, this habit of supporting his own morale by criticizing the mores of the rich.

“You’re always surprising me, the things you know,” Nim said.

“Like what?”

“The Battle of Fredericksburg.”

“I’m a kind of fraud,” he said, “making the most of bits and pieces. That I know, for example, because Lee actually said it of the Battle of Marye’s Heights where the Irish Brigade was decimated. Charge after charge—absolutely pointless. They had no hope of taking the Heights. Utter madness. That was when Lee is supposed to have said, ‘It’s fortunate that war’s so terrible. We might become too fond of it.’”

McMahon had become aware while talking of a gray-bearded man edging his way toward them away from the group he had been with. “What Lee said was—if you’ll forgive the intrusion—‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’ I’m Jacob Burke. I’m a Civil War buff and I overheard. You don’t mind?”

“No.” McMahon introduced himself and Nim.

“What do you think Meagher had in mind? I’m pretty sure it was Meagher that led the charge.”

“Thomas Francis Meagher,” McMahon said. “One of the Young Ireland émigrés of 1848. And I would think he had in mind proving that the Irish were not cowards. They’d had a rotten war record, as you know.”

“Yes, yes, and they had reason—the inequity of the draft and all that. Not quite the same today, but something to the comparison. But you see, the question I ask: was it not simply that Meagher was a bad general? Pride, of course, but a bad field officer. And then I suggest, it’s what you’ve done with history—McMahon, you say—your inverted Irish pride that takes satisfaction in that debacle. The lost cause mystique, hopeless heroism.”

“You may have something,” McMahon said. “The reason I happen to know the story: it’s a legend the old soldiers tell whenever the Sixty-Ninth Division gets together.”

“It’s a great pity there are old soldiers left to perpetuate such legends,” Burke said. “That’s how they make young soldiers.” And with that he nodded formally and went back to his own group.

“Now him I dig,” Nim said.

“I’m sure there are others if we just charge in,” McMahon said.

“Remember the Irish at Marye’s Heights.”

If he got a little drunk it would be very easy, McMahon thought. But he did not want to do that. He wanted to know more about their hostess because the fact had emerged that she was the first person they had come on from Muller-Chase’s past who might have seen him within a week of his death. He thought about Rosenberg’s note on the Tchelitchew affair, Muller’s: a man should not run from the devil. He should open his arms.

“Nim, can you see your friend Stu in this room?”

“You’re psychic—or intuitive maybe. Something. That’s what I was trying to do right now. He’d be going around, his hands behind his back, making faces at all the portraits on the wall. Then he’d go off through the house looking for young people. There aren’t any.”

“We haven’t looked through the house,” McMahon said.

“I suppose we could,” Nim said tentatively.

“Wait till I get a refill.” There was a circular bar in the middle of the room.

When he returned, Nim said, “What are we looking for?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“She could have seen him at the opening. Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Did she go to it to look for him? I might have, you know. Sometimes I think I wanted to, but I was too proud to look for him. She’d have known his hangup on Tchelitchew.”

“Let’s just look and listen,” McMahon said.

“Stop, look and listen,” Nim said. “Or maybe just look, listen and stop. Maybe that’s best.”

McMahon said, “When I was going to high school I used to race a train to the crossing every morning. If I didn’t make it ahead of the train I was late for first class.”

“If you hadn’t made it, I should think you’d’ve been late for the last class also,” she said.

McMahon laughed.

“Did you always want to be a priest?”

“No. Just most of the time.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Upstate—near Albany.”

“Family?”

“Father and mother, both dead now. Two sisters—one in Boston married to a doctor. One a nun.”

“What did your father do?”

“He worked on the New York Central, a conductor.”

“Working class. I like that,” Nim said.

“I think you’ve said that before—working class and the filthy rich.”

“So today I have the best of two worlds.”

On the steps they met Mrs. Robinson. “You’re not going so soon? We haven’t really talked at all.”

What she meant, McMahon felt, was that she intended them to go now. He sensed a subtle imperative. He chanced then a gambit that implied an intimate knowledge of her circle. “I thought maybe Mr. Wallenstein might be here.”

“I thought so too. Not even an RSVP, which isn’t like him. But it is really. Everything bores him.”

“Except Tchelitchew,” McMahon said.

Did she tense a little at the name? He could not be sure. “He must bore him too now, for Wally to sell off the drawings.”

“Did Wallenstein know Chase?”

This time her reaction was direct: “Are you a policeman, Mr. McMahon?”

“Good God, no. But I’d better watch that. I sound like one, don’t I? I’m a musician.” He had said too much and carried the whole thing off badly and he knew it.

“I don’t mind the police,” Mrs. Robinson said, “but I do like to see their identification.” She gathered the folds of her silken trousers. “It’s been so nice meeting you both.” She swept past them.

“Let’s go,” Nim said.

“I guess we’d better after that.”

At the foot of the stairs they met someone McMahon had not expected to meet, Brogan, and another detective, giving their hats to the maid. Brogan arched his eyebrows and looked from McMahon to Nim and then back at the priest again. “It’s a small world.”

“Isn’t it?” McMahon murmured.

“Do you know Father McMahon? Detective Tomasino.” Brogan contracted his introduction.

McMahon had no choice but to introduce Nim to them both.

“Miss Lavery,” Brogan said. “Mrs. Robinson told me on the phone that you’d be here. It’s just Father McMahon I didn’t expect.”

It had had to come sooner or later, McMahon realized. So did Nim, for she said: “It was I who went to Father McMahon. I thought the man he found might have been someone I’d known.”

“Father was a good one to go to,” Brogan said easily, “if you weren’t going to come to the police.” He intercepted the maid and asked her if there was a place they could talk by themselves.

She led them to a room beneath the staircase, the library. “Will I bring you cocktails, sir?”

“That’d be grand,” Brogan said, having caught the lilt in her voice. “Bourbon for me and my partner. Scotch for Father, and the young lady?”

Nim shook her head.

Brogan tried hard to play the comfortable host. “Sit down, sit down. That set the Irish lass back a bit, me calling you Father.”

“If she’s never set back more,” McMahon said, “she’ll bear up under the shock.”

“Why didn’t you come to the police, miss?”

“I had nothing to tell you.”

“You could’ve told us his name.”

“I didn’t know his real name either. Not then.”

Brogan turned to the priest. “Father, you don’t mind me asking, what are you doing here?”

“We were trying to find out if Chase left any paintings. Just trying to find out.”

“Did you?”

“It begins to look as though he destroyed them all.”

“If there ever were any. I have a feeling we’d know it by now after that piece in yesterday’s paper. I’m no great authority, but it seems to me if somebody paints a picture, he wants people to see it. For Christ’s sake, when I was a kid I took home every chimney I ever made smoke come out of. My mother’s still got one of them hanging in the kitchen.”

Nim laughed. So did McMahon. Brogan was human again. To McMahon he said: “Is this the girl—the name you mentioned in your statement?”

“Nim,” McMahon said.

“What I’d like you to do, miss, come into the station house tomorrow morning and give us a statement—where you met him, where you saw him last, just the facts. That way, you’re checked out, and Tommy here and I have done our job. It’s not like we spend all our time on this case, you know. We’ve had four more homicides in the precinct since. And I’ve still got the notion we know where our man is.”

“Phelan?”

“I’m not saying a thing, Father.”

“Sorry.”

“No offense taken. But I ought to tell you, we know you were at Columbia University yesterday too. Just don’t try to do our work for us. Now here come the drinks, so let’s relax and enjoy them.” Before the maid left he asked her to send Mrs. Robinson in.

Nim and McMahon exchanged glances. “I don’t want to see her again,” Nim said, not minding that the detectives heard it.

“It will take her a while with that crowd,” Brogan said. “Let Father have his drink. You must have gone over that gallery list pretty close to wind up here.”

“No. We came by way of the university. Miss Lavery knew a professor there who had known both Chase and Mrs. Robinson.” McMahon was aware of what he was doing: trying to give their hostess her own back for having mentioned Nim to the police.

Brogan took out his notebook and pencil. “The professor’s name?”

Nim spelled the name for him.

“You one-upped us there, Father. We came dead-end in a housing development on Amsterdam Avenue. Any other leads you can give us?”

“No. We’re not looking for leads,” McMahon said.

“We’re trying to get hold of your friend Wallenstein again, by the way. But he’s gone off to some island in Maine. Drummond Island. Ever hear of it, Miss Lavery?”

Nim shook her head. “Could we go now?”

McMahon drank down most of the drink.

Brogan went to the door with them. “Keep in touch,” he said to the priest, and then to Nim: “Don’t forget tomorrow morning, Miss Lavery.”

When they reached the street Nim said, “Why did you tell her you were a musician?”

McMahon buttoned his jacket. A wind was rising. And he did not want to give her the answer which he gave nonetheless: “I guess I had in mind to avoid scandal.”

“That’s how I figured it.” She turned one way and then the other to get her bearings. “I think I’ll take the Lexington subway. Thank you for coming here with me—for the concert—everything.”

“We’ll both take the Lexington subway,” McMahon said. “I want to see that piano in its natural habitat.”

Nim was able to smile again. “To hell with Mrs. Robinson. Right?”

“Right.”

There was a feeling of exquisite pain to that subway ride: it was for McMahon like going forward and backward in time at once, fragments of memory and ploys into the unknown which yet was deeply known, felt, instinctual knowing…his mother’s wake, his sister’s vows, Nim at the sacristy door, that moment among the Orthodox icons, his own prostration, the anointing of his fingers, the first trembling elevation of the Host and the terror that he would drop it…as though Christ had not fallen thrice himself on the road to Calvary. Whatever else drink did for him, it clarified his images and made him tell himself the truth: conscience and longing, Joseph, the spirit and the flesh. He and Nim did not talk: just awareness, and to him, every face in that subway car was marked with the condition of mortality: choices made for peace or for the promise of peace or for the abandonment of peace in the abandonment of promise.