Mr. Apology Page 33

  Again. The sound of somebody moving. Something, maybe the edge of a garment, touching a wall.

  He glanced across the room at Madeleine. She was standing white-faced and silent, her eyes closed. Something tapped the door. Tapped.

  He thought, I must open the door, get this over with—

  But he didn’t move.

  The tapping came again.

  Open the door, Harry. Get it over with.

  Then he heard a voice, a familiar voice. “Harry? You awake?”

  Levy. What the hell was Levy doing here now?

  He opened the door and Rube Levy, drunk, red-faced, beret askew, stumbled inside the room. “I was passing through the neighborhood, my friend—slumming, so to speak—and I thought ah-hah, let’s see if good old Harry is still awake. So here I am. What have you got to drink? And what’s the next episode in the ongoing saga of Apology?”

  Harrison shut the door, bolted it. You could have chosen a better time, Rube, he thought. But timing was never exactly your strong point, was it?

  “Madeleine too,” Levy said. He crossed the room like a doped tightrope walker and planted a wet kiss on Madeleine’s cheek, a noisy thing. “Did I miss the kiss-and-make-up episode? I wanted to see that one. Are we all pals again?”

  “Yeah,” Harrison said.

  “And the voice on the tape? Has it ceased?”

  “No, Rube, it hasn’t ceased.”

  “Thrilling,” Levy said. “What happens next?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Rube. Sober up.” Madeleine moved away from him slightly.

  “I’ll have you know it was pretty damn costly to attain this heightened consciousness.”

  “Did you see anybody when you were coming in?” Harrison asked.

  “Not a soul. The street’s empty. The building is moribund. Why? Was I supposed to see somebody?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Harrison said. It would be a monumental task to get any sense out of Levy.

  “Ah,” Levy said. “Our homicidal caller, right? He has tracked you to your lair, Harry. Is that why there is so much tension here? We’ve gone beyond a game, Harry. Is that the situation?”

  I don’t need this, Harrison thought. I don’t need a drunken Rube Levy on my hands.

  “If he has your name and address, Harry, you aren’t safe here. And you won’t be safe at Madeleine’s place either.”

  “We’ve already covered that, Rube.”

  “Where’s the gendarmerie?”

  “They’re coming.”

  Levy tiptoed around Albert. His movements suggested some ludicrous dance. You expected him to be sowing a field, tossing seeds from a basket, first to the left and then to the right.

  “My place,” Levy said. “Why didn’t you think of my place?”

  “It didn’t occur to me.”

  “You’d be safe there, at least until this thing blows over.”

  Blows over, Harrison thought. And when will that be?

  “How do we get there?” Madeleine asked.

  “Let me devise a plan,” Levy said. “Permit me to offer you a course of salvation.”

  “You’re slurring your words, Rube,” Madeleine said.

  “Saviors do not have to be perfect,” Levy said. “I’ll go out and get a cab. I’ll have it stop straight outside the front door. You, Harry, will be strategically positioned in the window to see the cab.… When it gets here, you come down those stairs as fast as you can. Into the cah—zoom!”

  Harrison looked at Madeleine; her expression was one of uncertainty.

  “What do you think, Maddy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What the hell are friends for?” Levy asked. “I am not Apology. I am perfectly safe.”

  Harrison didn’t like it: Levy was too drunk to understand any danger. He watched Rube stumble across the room. He clutched a wall for support, then smiled in an embarrassed way.

  “Motor functions operating below normal,” he said. “The brain, however, is still alert. There are some communications difficulties, in the sense that certain messages relayed from head to limbs seem to go through channels that are off the air. I’m okay. Generally speaking.” And he went to the door, trying to walk upright, his expression concentrated. He stopped and looked at Harrison. “I like this, Harry. Don’t you understand I like it? I didn’t expect to be cast in the role of hero, and now that I am—shit, I really like it.”

  “Rube, I’m not sure …”

  “I’ll go get us a cab.” Levy turned and stared across the room at Madeleine. “Do you like parrots, Maddy? I’ve got three of them. You’ll find them cute.”

  Madeleine smiled weakly.

  Levy straightened his beret and went out. Harrison locked the door. There was an awful silence in the loft, a stillness, deep and dry and tense. Harrison looked at Madeleine. She was staring at the locked door.

  “We shouldn’t have let him do this.”

  “How could I have stopped him?” Harrison sat down on the floor, cross-legged. “I make things. That’s all I do. I paint canvases sometimes. I make figures like Albert there. It’s all I know, Madeleine. Then something else enters your life, something that involves the world out there, and you realize, Jesus Christ, you’re not very well equipped to deal with it. I’m used to peace.” He shut his eyes. He heard Madeleine come across the floor, felt her hand touch the top of his head; he reached up and put his hands around her waist and laid his head against her thighs. You could forget everything this way.

  “I love you, Harry,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  He raised his face, looking up at her. He was thinking about love—was that what it came down to in the end? Was love the collective label for anxiety, concern, caring, for the capacity to find in someone else the cool calm center of the hurricane? If that were the case, then he loved her profoundly. He stood up, held Madeleine close, kissed her forehead, ran the tips of his fingers over her body, and he thought: You want her. At the most impossible time you want her. He turned away, dropping his hands, and went to the window. He looked down into the street. Nothing. Nobody moving. Levy must have already left the building. He stared for a moment.

  “Do you see him?” Madeleine asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe he’s having trouble finding a cab.”

  “Maybe.” Something wrong, something out of place, but what?

  “I don’t like it, Harry. I don’t like the idea of going out there.”

  “It doesn’t exactly thrill me either.”

  “Do you think you should call the police again?”

  Just as she said this the telephone was ringing. Out of habit, Harrison waited for the answering machine to come on and take the call, but when the phone kept ringing he remembered he’d jerked the plug out of the wall.

  “Maybe that’s Nightingale now,” Madeleine said.

  “I hope.” Harrison went into the bedroom. He stared at the telephone. This reluctance to pick it up—what was it? What the hell did he expect to hear? He reached out, raised the receiver, didn’t lift it to his face immediately. I don’t want to hear, he thought.

  He put it to his ear, but didn’t say anything.

  Harrison sat down on the edge of the bed. Madeleine was watching him from the doorway of the bedroom.

  “I just wanted to leave a message, man.…”

  Silence.

  Harrison looked at Madeleine. Something terrible was coming. He could feel it; he could feel the air of the bedroom become hot, humid, stuffy, as if the atmosphere were suddenly charged with particles of electricity. He couldn’t take the voice, he couldn’t stand to hear it anymore.

  “Who’s that breathing? I know it can’t be you, Apology.… You just tried to leave the building, didn’t you? This message is for the lovely lady anyhow.… I want her next, that’s all.”

  Just tried to leave the building.

  What what—what did that mean—

  “This is what you call my last message and I’m just sorry y
ou won’t be around to hear it, man … but that’s what your life was all about, right? Being sorry? So I’m saying I’m sorry. Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry—

  The line was dead.

  Harrison thought quickly. Levy was the one who had tried to leave the building, Levy was the one who’d been mistaken for me—

  Jesus Christ.

  No, it couldn’t happen that way. Nothing could happen like that—

  Nothing could have happened to Rube—

  It did, whatever it was, it did and it was intended to be you and some terrible mistake had been made—

  Think quickly, keep thinking.

  The guy had been calling from outside, where was the nearest phone booth, where exactly, why can’t I remember it, why does it escape me, I saw one one time—what, a block away, two blocks, it doesn’t come back clearly now, it was pretty damn close, but maybe there was time to get out of here before the guy could make it back—

  He grabbed Madeleine quickly by the wrist and, saying nothing, pulled her towards the door, unlocked it, drew her hastily down the dark stairs, fast, faster, trying hard to avoid what he knew he was going to find on the way out.

  Madeleine screamed. A short piercing sound. Then she was slumping against Harrison.

  I could have stopped him.

  I could have said no to his plan of salvation—

  Why did I let him step out into the dark like that?

  Rube lay facedown. His beret was missing, his jacket was slashed and slashed again; there were black bloodstains all over him, his hair, his twisted hands, his pants; dark bloodstains all over the cracked tiles.

  It was supposed to be me. It was meant to be me lying there.

  He dragged Madeleine towards the doorway.

  A chance. If the lunatic was in the nearest phone booth, then there were some precious seconds left to them. A thin tightrope chance. A balancing act. He moaned, thinking of Levy, kicked the front door open with his foot, and then they were moving fast along the empty sidewalk.

  3.

  It was another world, a galaxy alien to him, a large long room that might have been slotted into place, just as it was, by hovering starship from quite another planet. Lights flashed, machines whined, beeped, talked back at you; kids stood hunched and transfigured over control panels and viewing screens. Even Moody hadn’t been able to resist an urge to shove a quarter inside something called Centipede, which apparently involved the endless massacre of a chain of electronic bugs. Nightingale felt a pressure inside his head, something pushing against the bones of his skull. He stared at his partner. He realized he had never quite felt so old before, so out of touch. These games, he thought, what the fuck do they mean? He stood close to Moody, who was zapping centipedes out of existence; other shapes appeared, spiders, things resembling mushrooms. The Boy Wonder was adept obviously, an initiate who understood the mechanics of what he was doing. Hundreds of crawling bugs slid down the screen. I don’t know where I am, Nightingale thought. It doesn’t make sense. A whole other culture had sprung up seemingly overnight, an awesome revolution had taken place without him understanding what was going on. He had a vision of an America whose dream was that of acquiring sufficient quantities of quarters so that electronic centipedes, alien spaceships, and great meteors might be blitzed forever out of existence. There were mazes, robots, electronic firebirds, the gunsights of tanks, racing cars—all accompanied by robotic sound effects that suggested a discordant symphony rattled off on a Moog by a madman. The atmosphere, the frenzy, the strangeness of it, all made him feel lightheaded. He looked the length of the arcade. One time, when he’d been a kid, this might have been the kind of shooting gallery where passing macho types tried to impress their girl friends. What the hell is it now—hundreds of kids forever stuffing coins into slots and manipulating weird controls. The place was dense with smoke, more tobacco than reefer; the air was heavy with scents, sweat, colognes, the sounds of kids groaning when their PacMan figure got himself haplessly trapped in a corner and was munched into nothing. Nightingale moved closer to Moody, in the manner of someone who doesn’t want to stray too far from his guide in totally foreign territory. I don’t speak this language, he thought.

  Moody had given up his struggle against the bugs. He slapped the side of the machine in a gesture of defeat. Nightingale glanced at his partner’s score: It was astronomical.

  “I remember pinball, Doug. I remember the time when pinball was like a goddamn fever.”

  “The same difference,” Moody said.

  “Yeah? I don’t get that feeling.”

  “You get used to it, Frank,” Moody said. “Little kids do best on these machines. They’re used to it. A pinball machine’s a fossil to them. They wouldn’t be seen dead working the flippers.”

  Nightingale moved away from the centipedes. Somehow it didn’t matter that Moody’s game was over, because the screen was still alive with the critters. He looked across the faces of the kids. How would you ever find anybody in this maze?

  “You see anybody who looks like our man?” he asked.

  Moody seemed embarrassed by something. He said, “I’ve never felt so much like a cop in my life, Frank. It’s as if these kids can smell you out. You know what I mean?”

  Nightingale nodded. So many faces. So many different faces. He pushed through the throng to the back, where there was a snackbar. Sweating, he asked the acne’d girl behind the counter for a Coke. She moved around as if she had just been lobotomized.

  “Want something to drink, Doug?”

  Moody shook his head. He slipped up onto a stool and swiveled around so he could watch the entrance. Nightingale popped the top of his Coke can and poured it into a paper cup. It was sweet and dreadful. But it was cold and wet. He turned around, half leaning against the counter, and looked along the lines of machines. BATTLE STAR. SPACE CASTLE. GALAXIA. MS. PACMAN. SPIDER LADY. A whole exotic compendium.

  “You see anybody like Sylvester?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Moody said. He was gazing at one of Eddie Fodor’s photographs, which he held concealed in his hand like a magician’s card. “I’m not sure I’d know anyhow.”

  Nightingale smoked a cigarette and coughed. You need a mask in here, he thought. You need something to keep the electronic virus at bay. You catch the space-age disease and it gets out of control and you stand drooling at those machines that make change for a buck. Moody moved away from the counter and vanished in the thicket of devices. Alone, Nightingale felt a slight panic. What if Moody disappeared off the face of the earth, sucked into one of those machines? Could you ever find your way out of here again? Moody emerged again, approaching Nightingale sideways as he brushed through the throng of bodies.

  “Well?” Nightingale asked.

  “It’s hard to say, Frank. But there’s a guy over there who might be the guy in this photograph. You want to take a look?”

  “Sure.” Nightingale crumpled his paper cup and followed his partner into the madness.

  “I’m not saying it’s the same one. It could be, that’s all. Those peasants in Narcotics ought to invest in some good new camera equipment. What do they use, Frank? Box Brownies?”

  Nightingale pushed through. Obstinate kids, he thought. They wouldn’t budge for you. They just wouldn’t step aside, they were so goddamn hypnotized by their games. Moody stopped somewhere ahead, nodding slightly. Nightingale looked in the direction of his partner’s gesture—a slim young guy with a full-length black overcoat, boots with furry tops, a heavy beard, a beret with some kind of badge pinned on it. The photograph, he thought. How could you be sure of this guy? He went closer while Moody moved around the side of the Space Invaders game the guy was playing. It was always an edgy moment coming up on somebody like this, because if there was cocaine involved then there was a pretty fair chance the guy was paranoid or leaning in that direction—which meant he’d want to split before you had a chance to ask him questions. The casual approach, Nightingale thought. Hey, I was just pa
ssing, thought I’d drop in and ask you about one of your acquaintances, what do you think? He stopped just behind the guy. He put out his hand and laid it flat against the screen of the game, just as Moody’s face appeared around the side of the machine. The guy stopped playing at once and stepped back as if he expected to be frisked. He isn’t worried about losing his quarter, Nightingale thought.

  “My friend,” Nightingale said.

  The guy stroked his beard, looked as if he were considering the chances of slipping away quickly, then became aware of Moody.

  “I don’t know you,” he said to Nightingale.

  “You’re about to.”

  “What’s this anyhow? Like a police state, man? Hey, I got rights and one of them rights says it’s a free country and a guy can go around playing Space Invaders if he likes.”

  “I read that in the Constitution,” Moody said. “The Space Invaders Amendment, right?”

  “Funny mother,” the guy said.

  Nightingale put one hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Listen, this is going to be painless, my friend. If you want to cooperate with me and my partner here, you can go home smiling at your good luck. You understand me? I don’t want a scene and I don’t want to drag you down for interrogation, okay? A nice little talk is all.”

  “Is this a bust?”

  “Now why would we be busting you, Sylvester?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Sylvester Garincha,” Moody said. “How’s business these days?”

  “What business, man?”

  “The deviated septum scam,” Moody said.

  “That’s double dutch, guy.”

  “What goes up your nose and clogs your mucous membranes?” Nightingale said.

  “Is this like a fucking riddle?”

  “Look, Sylvester, there’s a whole lot of people in here and I want to play this all as quiet as I can, okay?” Nightingale tightened his grip on the guy’s shoulder. It was like turning a screw ever so slightly. “Now we’ll all take a walk outside, okay. You, me, and my friend here. We’ll go out quietly. No guns, nothing stupid like that. We’ll hit the sidewalk and we’ll talk a few minutes, then when I’m happy with what you’ve got to say, and Moody here is happy with it too, well, shit, you’re as free as the Constitution says you got a right to be. Do we understand each other, Sylvester?”