Concert of Ghosts Read online

  I know the feeling, Tennant thought. He saw his abandoned frame house, the hushed woods.

  “I gotta kill both of you. And the trouble is, I ain’t a killer.” Trebanzi shut his eyes and swayed a little. The big bald head seemed insubstantial, a balloon on which somebody had crayoned warped features.

  “The only thing I ever killed was Bear,” Trebanzi said.

  The remark sucked life out of the room. The air was lifeless, barely breathable.

  “Why did you kill him, Alf?” Tennant asked.

  “Don’t keep shitting me. You know what happened. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

  “Alf, you’ve got it wrong.”

  “Fuck wrong! Fuck it! Fuck both of you!” Trebanzi, enraged, fired the shotgun into the ceiling. The room, so hushed before, roared now, as if directly under the floorboards a subway had rumbled. Flakes of plaster settled like misshapen snow. Trebanzi aimed the gun directly at Tennant. “You cocksucker. You turd. Pretending you don’t know shit. Harry, Harry.”

  An odd little sense of familiarity touched Tennant; it was the vague feeling you have when somebody passes you on the street and is gone moments after you’ve registered a memory—a face, a way of walking. And it’s too late to turn around and check because crowds have already seized and devoured the person, and you’re left with a slight shiver, an emptiness. A name on the tip of the tongue. Someone recognizable, yet with the quality of a figure in a dream. He had that experience now, but he didn’t know why. He was certain he’d never seen Trebanzi before tonight. How could such a face be forgotten anyway? What was it? What was this awareness? Frustrated, he felt his eye reluctantly drawn upward again to the photograph, to the young faces whose expressions appeared reproachful now, as if their ghosts blamed him personally for the crash of all their buoyant hippie ideals. Bright young savages. His mind, so often a court jester in the past, became a prestidigitator now, pulling away one silk handkerchief after another, reds and blues, lemons and pinks, on and on, silk after silk, a sleight of hand so slickly performed that Harry, his eyes fixed to the picture, was blinded by incredulity. What the magician was showing him could not possibly be the case; another funny little connection in his brain had just come loose, that was all. Pop goes a synapse. A cow jumps over the moon. A brass band, all clash and thunder, struts past in the hollows of your cerebrum.

  Trebanzi was taking shells out of his pockets and shoving them into the shotgun. A space existed, a moment in which Tennant might have taken a chance and charged, but it dwindled into nothing. Tantalized by the wizard in his head, bewildered, he’d missed the opportunity.

  “What happens now, Alf?” Alison asked. “You shoot us?”

  “You got it.”

  “Then you run and you keep running.”

  “Running and hiding, lady. It’s what I do best.” Trebanzi turned his attention to Tennant. “One thing I’d still like to know, Harry. When did they get you to come over? When did you take their side? Or have you been with them all along?”

  Tennant, wondering what area he shared of Trebanzi’s dark world, felt yet another silk shift inside his mind; a chiffon haze lifted, pulled gently away.

  No. It just wasn’t possible.

  “I asked you a question, Tennant.”

  Tennant experienced the optical illusion that the photograph grew larger, dominated the room. The only face he saw now was that of Bear; the others faded. The big bearded head, the sweet, mellow expression; a solid, happy face. A good face. You just knew that Bear was the kind of man you could count on in a bad situation.

  Tennant heard blood rush through his head. The photograph, like a box of tricks forced open, grudgingly yielded one of its mysteries: Bear Sajac wasn’t dead.

  Hammered by the realization, his heart suddenly cold in his chest, Tennant stared at Alphonse Trebanzi. He could see the resemblance, but only vaguely; you had to look beyond the ridges of disfigurement, the wasting body, the baldness. But you could see it still. You could see it.

  “How did it happen, Bear?” he asked.

  “Bear’s dead, Harry. I told you that.”

  “Somehow you had the face rearranged. You took off the beard, lost the hair. You shed the pounds. But you’re in there somewhere.”

  “You’re outta your mind, Tennant.”

  “I don’t think so, Bear.”

  Trebanzi stood very still for a time; his expression was one of panic barely controlled.

  Tennant said, “You altered yourself. You took Trebanzi’s name. You went into hiding. Why? Why, Bear?”

  “You’re whistling in the dark, pal. I should fucking kill you right now.” And Trebanzi moved with unexpected speed, striking Tennant hard in the center of the chest. Tennant, his strength knocked out of him, fell to the floor. The pain in his ribs—a sharp turbulence—spread to neck and arms, then rushed in a violent red wave to his head. Gasping, he rolled on his back and stared up at the ceiling, seeing nothing. He was vaguely aware of Alison bending over him, footsteps rushing on the floor, the sound of the door opening and closing. It took an incalculable time—thirty seconds, two minutes, he wasn’t sure, his inner timepieces raced out of control—before his breathing became easier. But he was groggy, like a man on too many Seconal.

  Alison helped him to a sitting position. Propped against a sofa, he felt a broad band of pain go through his chest. He moaned.

  “Do you think anything’s broken?” she asked.

  “It feels like just about everything.”

  “Don’t move.”

  He ignored her. He clutched the sofa and drew himself up, an imprudent act; he had no air in his lungs. He felt remote from his body. His vision was filled with fierce dark lines. “Did our man split?” His voice came out odd, like something you might hear at a fraudulent séance.

  “He split all right.”

  Tennant stumbled toward the door and out onto the landing, where he heard the sound of the outside door closing. Clutching the handrail, he understood he couldn’t move any farther, couldn’t go after the man who called himself Trebanzi, couldn’t chase. He shut his eyes. He was in some kind of bad dream. Trebanzi. Bear. Had he been mistaken? Deluded by his own urge to participate in the past, to see things that didn’t exist? He shook his head slowly from side to side, conscious of Alison standing next to him.

  “Let me get you to a doctor,” she said.

  “No doctors.”

  “Then let me get you back to the hotel.”

  He made no response. When he opened his eyes he was aware of the shadow of the scaffolding, the odd gridlike pattern it threw on the floor; a diagram without meaning and yet sinister. “Wait,” he said. “I just want to stand very still for a minute.”

  “What you said about Trebanzi—”

  “I’m not sure. I could be wrong.” Throb of pain. His heart might have been a drum on whose thin skin some evil child was thumping. “I was looking at the photograph and I just … I guess I suddenly saw this resemblance. Not much of one, sure. But there was something. The way he spoke to me—there was a familiarity in that. Goddamn.” He leaned upon the handrail. “Say Trebanzi died and Sajac took his name, then had some drastic surgery to his face. Or maybe he was in an accident. Whatever. What I don’t get is all this,” and he gestured in a puzzled manner at the house. “Hiding. Thinking we’d come to kill him. That we’d been sent by somebody. By whom? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Whoever they are, they obviously scared poor Alphonse shitless. If he’s really Sajac, he’s gone to some astonishingly elaborate lengths to conceal himself.” Alison picked up Tennant’s pistol, which lay where Trebanzi had kicked it. She turned it over in her hand and frowned. “I keep coming back to the photograph. Carlos is dead. Kat’s dead. Bear—if that was Bear—lives in fear of being killed. Maggie Silver … who knows? So the question’s this: What’s so goddamn special about the people in the picture? Did they know something that made them candidates for a violent death?”

  Tennant, in a tentativ
e gesture, touched his chest. The pain was easing, but only slightly. “Personally, I can’t think of a thing that would make anybody want to murder me. I haven’t done anything—”

  “How do you know that, Harry?”

  She had a point, a terrible point. He felt suddenly angry with himself. Twelve barren years. He said, “Okay. Assume the people in the goddamn picture knew something. What are you driving at anyway? Some fevered idea of a conspiracy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m driving at anything. I’m just tossing stuff out.”

  “I mean, look at the thing. What do you see? Five kids, all of them probably dopers. The Haight was filled with a quarter of a million just like them. Why would anybody want to silence that particular little group? It doesn’t add up for me.”

  And he thought of Maggie Silver again, almost as if she were standing somewhere nearby and he could sense her presence; an instinct from the days of ruin. Then he imagined her dead, and the idea filled him with despair. If she was alive, was she living the way Bear Sajac had lived? Underground, disguised, altered? For some reason he couldn’t imagine Maggie Silver gone to earth like a mole hidden away in subterranean darkness.

  “Why didn’t he just shoot us?” he asked. “That’s all he had to do. Two blasts of the shotgun. Stuff the bodies in the basement. End of the matter.”

  “For us, sure. But not for Alphonse. He kills us. So what? It doesn’t end his nightmare. So far as he’s concerned, that would only postpone the inevitable. He’s afraid of what’s out there in the streets. The others. The people he thinks sent us. I don’t believe he had the heart for murder.”

  Murder, Tennant thought. The word seemed strange to him, a new entry in his vocabulary. He moved to the stairs. He took the gun from Alison and put it in his pocket. He ached with each step.

  “I didn’t know you carried a gun, Harry.”

  “It’s not something I do every day,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. This place spooks me.”

  “Can you make it downstairs?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

  He descended slowly, hand on the rail. The pain had receded somewhat, but was still a constant in his ribs, a series of little fires. In the hallway he stopped. He turned, looked up, saw the shadowy scaffolding. But the recollection it had inspired had given up any clarity. Now the image was formless, another element in the mystery his life had become.

  Back at the hotel he sat with Alison for a while in the crowded bar. Two Scotches eased him. A pianist was playing old standards. “I Can’t Get Started.” “Begin the Beguine.” At tables, couples talked in the animated ways of people who have just about reached the martini limits. It was all so amazingly normal he found it hard to comprehend. He had the unsettling feeling he was a tourist in a world of absurdities. Alison, who sat in pensive silence and hardly touched her vodka cocktail, looked at him every now and then with an expression he couldn’t quite read. When she asked how he felt, he said something banal about the whisky working wonders, the healing alchemy of a fine Scotch. It was surface talk under which were layers of fog neither he nor Alison were able to penetrate, as if they had stumbled haplessly into a shared illusion too complex for dissection. Ignore it, neglect it, it might simply go away.

  Impulsively, perhaps for his own reassurance that something in the world was tangible, he took her hand. She squeezed his fingers gently. A connection, an intimacy. He imagined making love to her. Through his muted pain, he wondered if being inside this lovely young woman might create—if not a logic—then a sense of reality. Affectionate sex. The thought, at first so casual, assumed a deeper resonance. He could be happy. He could give something of himself blindly. He could underline the fact that he and Alison had become, in the blackness of circumstance, partners. He could abandon any notion of recreating the past, a turbulent undertaking in any case.

  “I don’t want to think, Harry. My brain’s quit for the day.” She smiled in a rather sad way. That fine darkness in her eyes suggested strange mirrors, reflections in smoke. “I don’t have any answers. And for once in my life I don’t even have the right questions.”

  He didn’t have the right questions either. And he didn’t want to think of murders. Of paranoia. Of them, whoever they were. Besides, he was absorbed by the contact of skin. She had soft small hands; the fingers were incongruously long. It was no great act of imagination to envision them on his body. He tightened his grip on her hand. He needed this moment. This girl.

  He thought about the last time he’d had sex. In spring last year he’d gone to one of Bobby Delacroix’s parties down in Auburn, a ten-keg affair attended by aged bikers, dopers in black glasses, and superannuated hippies, leftover gurus of this kind and that, and he’d met a strung-out girl called Daphne who went with him up into the loft of Bobby’s house where an old four-poster bed, lacking a canopy, lay beneath a narrow window. He was drunk, and outside of himself, and the lovemaking had been protracted, a constant rearrangement of positions, as if perfection between two total strangers were a possibility.

  Concentrating on the dim possibility of mutual climax, Tennant worked hard and sweated hugely. Once, something made him laugh aloud, some stray drunken thought, and the sound froze Daphne. She pushed him away. Why had he laughed? What was so funny, so hilarious? She was deeply offended and too stoned to be objective. It was all so intensely fucking personal. He found her undesirable, right? She didn’t have any tits, that was it, right? She was ashamed of her small tits. People were always talking about them. Get yourself some silicone implants, why doncha?

  He’d forgotten the reason for his inappropriate laughter.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Alison said. “What about you?”

  “Sure.” Why linger here alone?

  She rose, moved away from their table. Harry followed. When they reached the lobby she stopped, turning to him, putting her arms round him. Her need to hold was as great as his own. They stood motionless, clasped together, as if isolated from everything around them—people in the lobby, the thin sound of the piano, the elevator bell. A moment of fragile intimacy: Tennant was aroused by the girl’s touch.

  “I don’t want to be on my own,” she said. “Not tonight.”

  Loneliness. He too had had enough of absences.

  They stepped inside the elevator. Tennant, his arm around Alison’s shoulders, saw himself in the mirror. The girl was tiny beside him. Her face, pressed against his chest, had assumed a quiet vulnerability he hadn’t seen before, another side of her. He kissed the top of her head softly, and she raised her face, smiling at him in a rather wistful way. It was as if she were saying, Protect me, Harry. Keep me from harm.

  When they emerged from the elevator, they walked along the corridor rather slowly, two people balanced on the gyroscope of the immediate future. He had the thought: I want her. I want her badly. It was more than an anodyne against solitude.

  He unlocked his door, fumbling the key. The girl followed him inside the room.

  He was at once assailed in the darkness by an unpleasant scent he couldn’t identify. He switched on the light. He heard Alison gasp.

  He wished he’d let the room stay black.

  The man who had called himself Alphonse Trebanzi lay on the floor. Electricity illuminated the red-purple skin. It lit the barbarous slit in the man’s throat and brightened the blood that soaked his clothes. The lurid effect was of scarlet neon: blood, blood everywhere.

  9

  The girl kept saying “Christ” over and over as she slumped against Tennant, who held her as hard as he could, as if he might somehow eradicate the sight on the bed, conjure it away. Seek the calm center, boyo. Don’t get upset with things. Take control. Yes, yes, whoever you are, whoever you are that speaks inside my head. Take control. Cope. Boyo. How? How do you cope with this? This wasn’t a dead animal to be buried, however sorrowfully, in the depths of a forest. This was a man Tennant thought he had somehow known in the lost years. Who could tell? The figur
e that lay on the bed might have been a friend back then, someone with more than a goddamn photograph in common.

  How do you reach over the divide that keeps you from yourself? You need a door to the past; but it had shut tight with the murder of Bear Sajac. He looked down at the floor. The corpse seemed by some illusion to hover in dark red light.

  Somebody had brought Bear Sajac here and killed him. Somebody.

  Who and why? Of whom had Sajac been so afraid? Them. The Faceless Ones.

  Alison, her expression that of somebody struck hard in the face, said, “The poor, poor bastard.”

  “Yeah, the poor bastard.” Feeling nausea, Tennant went inside the bathroom and filled the sink with cold water, then dipped his face into it. His head buzzed. He opened his eyes under water. It was good to be briefly enclosed in a wet cool place. He permitted himself the luxury of thinking he’d dreamed Sajac’s body the way he must have dreamed everything else. The bust. The girl. The lost years. Any moment now he’d come wide-awake, sweating in terror, fumbling his way toward relief. Ha! A nightmare! The mind darkly frolicking. Nothing more. My mind. I have lost it. Completely. I have a jellyfish in my skull.

  He pulled his face from the bowl of water and reached for a towel. He dried his skin and went back into the bedroom. Alison took the towel from his hand and tossed it over Sajac’s features. A white flag. We’ve had enough. We can’t go on.

  He glanced at Alison, then turned to the window. His legs were heavy, not his own. The airshaft below was a great black rectangle perforated feebly here and there by lights from other rooms. The shaft itself remained finally impenetrable; it might have gone down forever, down through the city, subways, sewers, to unfathomable places. Tennant experienced the odd urge to open the window and step out into the big black space and fall between the pale lights and just keep on falling. Pull yourself together, Harry. Get a grip on this. Don’t let go.