Concert of Ghosts Read online

  “Compulsive,” Tennant said.

  “And ambitious,” she said. “You don’t get to be a features writer at my age without a heavy dose of determination. Competition’s fierce. The world’s full of cutthroats.”

  Tennant thought: She chases whispers. She stalks by smell candles long blown out. What had begun as an innocent little foray into sweet nostalgia had changed for her into an affair with intriguing, even sinister, echoes.

  For his part, Tennant was anxious to get New York State behind him. He longed for the Pennsylvania line, or New Jersey, places beyond the reach of the New York highway patrol. Now and again, when he stared into a passing streak of dark greenery, he would try to force his mind back to that empty time before he’d come to the white frame house, but he might have been wrestling an eel. And sometimes, when his head ached from the effort of this, he’d think about Obe’s photograph. Taken, Alison had said, in Chinatown. What did he remember of Chinatown?

  Maybe once or twice he’d gone there to score some opium from a young Oriental head, but this was as vague as anything else. The condition of my world, he thought, is zero. Below zero. A mind in permafrost. He considered the faces of Maggie Silver and the others, but if Maggie provoked a thin response in him, the rest of the group meant nothing. Maybe he was imagining the response anyway. A lovely girl in an old photograph: He wanted to believe he’d known her. He pondered the vastness of the continent and wondered where the girl might be. Take any valley. Any mill town or large city. An obscure farmhouse. She could be anywhere. If she was alive. If she hadn’t expired inside the structure of Alison Seagrove’s “mystery.” How old would she be by now? Early forties, like himself. Probably she wasn’t even recognizable; he could pass her on the street and fail to relate her face to that in Obe’s picture.

  “Tell me something, Harry. Do you still get high?”

  He shook his head. “If you count booze.”

  “You never smoked the stuff you grew?”

  “I had to prove I could refrain. I was running a test on myself. I passed.”

  “But the old days were different.”

  “Ah. The old days. If it could be swallowed or smoked or snorted, I tried it. Blindfold me and I could have told you the difference between … hell, Rangoon Red and Mauie by touch alone. I could tell you the cut in coke just by smelling the stuff. Give me a button of peyote and I might have been able to pinpoint its place of origin from the taste. It’s the kind of knowledge that doesn’t add up to much in the end. Talent of a misspent youth. It won’t get you a lawful job. It doesn’t impress on a resume.” Once upon a time, he remembered, the drugs had been fun. Owsley’s Sunshine, Orange Wedge, amazing acid. Innocence. Then the fun darkened along the way, the colors bleached and ran. Bad dope, created in malignant laboratories by quick-buck artists or corrupt men with connections to the law, hit the streets. The free clinic in the Haight had been overwhelmed by casualties of these narcotics. Nights of bedlam, kids sobbing without knowing why, baying at the moon, screaming incomprehensibly from the horrors that had been inflicted on them. He remembered this much.

  He gazed at the outline of a rusted silo, an abandoned farmhouse. The skyline of Albany came into view. He wondered if there was an office somewhere in the bureaucratic density of the state capitol that dealt with bail jumpers; he pictured his name popping up on a computer and being sent at impossible speeds to various law enforcement agencies. But it could be days before his flight was discovered. McKay might wonder at the missed appointment; or Flitt might visit the house to ask more questions. But Harry’s absence in itself wasn’t enough to persuade anyone he was a fugitive. Gone for groceries, a long walk, anything. This understanding relaxed him a little. He’d bought time, though he didn’t know how much.

  “How hard did you look for Maggie Silver?” he asked.

  “I went to the Haight. The obvious place to start. I didn’t have an address for her. There wasn’t one in the old Cygnet files. I don’t know why. Maybe it had been removed. Lost. Who knows? All I got there was a name, nothing else. I asked around. There are still some leftovers from the sixties in the neighborhood. Nobody remembered her. Nobody could tell me anything. I tried Social Security—I have a few connections in low places. No luck. No Maggie Silver. I tried the motor vehicle people. I thought she might have a license. Another big blank. The trail was stone cold. Either she’s dead or she changed her name.”

  Dead. He shut his eyes, listened to the rhythm of the big car’s engine. He thought about the window of the room on Schrader Street and how he’d watched traffic roll toward the Panhandle. He had an intuition that the room—even if the details of the place were out of his reach—was something more permanent than a bed or a floor where he’d crashed one night. How could he feel that? Was his amnesia like a gray lifeless pool on the surface of which there appeared, every now and then, a ripple from a bottom far below? He thought of wreckage lying inert under opaque water. Twelve years of wreckage—perhaps even more. Pretend you’re whole, you’re complete, you’re just cruising the night with a pretty young woman.

  “Tell me about the lawyer in my father’s office,” he said. “Did you sleep with him to get my file?”

  “That’s privileged information.” She concentrated on the road.

  Harry said, “He wouldn’t give you my address for nothing. Attorneys aren’t famous for freebies.”

  “We had dinner a few times,” she said.

  “And then?”

  “Piss off, Harry.”

  “You’ve been digging into my life. Tit for tat.”

  “I don’t remember any reciprocal agreement.”

  “You ask all the questions, I try to answer. Is that the rule?”

  “I find your particular question objectionable.”

  “One rule for you, one for me. Very democratic.”

  “I never said I was democratic. When it comes to my work I can be a dictator. If you don’t like that, I’ll turn the car around and take you back.”

  “I don’t think so,” Harry said, a little amused by the discovery that Alison Seagrove could be piqued.

  She drove off the freeway to a roadhouse surrounded by ugly gas stations and fast-food joints. As she parked she said she needed a drink, something to eat. She walked ahead of Harry inside the building, a busy place decorated with license plates from all the states of the Union. A Mexican plate from Sonora was the only incongruity. A jukebox played Merle Haggard; the cornball riff of a fiddle rose in the air then died. I’m always on a mountain when I fall.…

  Alison took a booth at the window. Harry sat facing her over the menu, a ketchup-stained sheet of paper contained in plastic.

  She said, “I didn’t have to screw him, Harry. He was too busy drooling over the possibility to realize he was being … let’s say quietly used.”

  “Am I being quietly used too?” he asked.

  “You’re different. I consider our relationship mutually beneficial.”

  “I’m relieved.” Conversation, chitchat, surfaces. You could make believe an ordinary life. If you worked at it.

  He looked at the menu. He had no appetite. A teenage waitress wearing an outsized crucifix and a badge reading JACKI came for their order. Alison wanted a cheeseburger and a Bloody Mary, Harry asked only for a beer. When the waitress left, Alison leaned across the table.

  “Well, Harry? Anything to report from Brain HQ?”

  So we’re being lighthearted, Tennant thought. He needed that, even if it was an effort. “Everyone in head office is on strike,” he remarked. “Unsanitary working conditions. Poor pay. A real industrial dispute.”

  “Ungrateful bunch,” she said. “I would have figured the short working hours might have been compensation.”

  “Apparently not.” He wondered how long you could keep that shuttlecock of levity in the air. The waitress came back and set down the food and drinks. Tennant raised his glass but didn’t drink at once. He turned the glass around in his hand, studied the tiny bubbles that bro
ke on the surface. “I’m sitting here and I’m thinking I don’t know the first thing about you. Background. Education. What got you into journalism.”

  “What’s to know?”

  “A brief bio might help.”

  She was quiet for a while, as if she were considering how much to tell him. Was she editing material in her head? “I was raised in Tonawanda. You ever heard of the place?”

  “It’s a suburb of Buffalo,” he said. “You were born there?”

  She stirred her Bloody Mary and looked pensive. She didn’t answer his question. “It’s the kind of place you want to get away from. My parents are decent people. Dad’s in banking. Mother once had ambitions to go onstage. An old story. All the will in the world but no talent.” She paused, looking as if she intended to say more about her mother, but she didn’t. “We lived in a ranch-style house on a street of homes that looked exactly alike. People flew flags on their lawns on the appropriate patriotic days. You could always smell barbecues in summer. I always had this weird feeling like, I don’t know, I didn’t belong there. I was from outer space or somewhere.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “Three, four years ago. I did some journalism courses in high school. Then a year in college.” She drew the celery stick from her drink and bit into it. “College wasn’t the real world for me. I wanted action, Harry. I wanted the smell of ink on my fingers and a phone that wouldn’t quit ringing and deadlines you had to bust your ass to make. I got lucky in New York. Two months in the typing pool before I turned in a story about a large quantity of cocaine that had somehow mysteriously disappeared while in the possession of the NYPD. I got rescued from the typing pool after that one.” She put the celery aside. “Like I say, I had some good luck. And an editor who believes in giving his writers as much freedom as they need. He’s the old-fashioned sort.”

  “You keep in touch with your parents?”

  She shrugged. Something in the gesture suggested to Tennant a shadow in her history; perhaps, like himself, she’d distanced herself from family. Perhaps there had been disagreements, arguments about her career choice—who could say what ghosts rattled behind the walls of respectable ranch-style houses in Tonawanda? He watched her sip the Bloody Mary.

  “I haven’t been home in a while,” she said.

  “And that’s all you want to say?”

  “That’s all I’m going to say, Harry.”

  “You don’t get along with your parents, is that it?”

  “Harry. Enough.”

  The bare bones of a life, Tennant thought. Small evasions that kept the skeleton unfleshed. He wanted to know more. “Is there a man?”

  “You ask too many questions.”

  “Then we’ve got something in common, don’t we?”

  She flashed a smile at him. “I’ve had my moments of the heart, let’s say.”

  “Is there a current man?”

  “Christ, Harry. Gimme a break.”

  “I read that as a no,” he said.

  “Read it how you like. I’m about to eat this burger and you’re going to leave me in peace, right?”

  “For the moment.”

  He slid out of the booth and went in search of the men’s room, which was located near the entrance. He stepped inside, urinated, washed his hands. In the mirror his reflection was pale. He needed a shave. The face that had been gaunt in Obe’s photograph had fleshed out and creased; lines made small grooves around the corners of the eyes and across the forehead. The dark hair showed few signs of either graying or thinning. The eyes were brown and somber and, Tennant thought, older than the face in which they were set. If he’d seen himself on the street, he might have thought: That guy looks burdened, he should joke more.

  He tugged at some paper towels and dried his hands. An overweight man in dark glasses and a fiery red baseball cap stepped into the room, glanced coldly at Tennant, then walked inside one of the cubicles where he issued a damp farting sound.

  Tennant wondered what he’d done to merit the chilly look. Wait. Hold on. Was that a fugitive’s thought? From now on would he attribute hidden purpose to the casual expressions of everyone? Faces, even the most innocent—were they to conceal jeopardy? A man in the men’s room, a stranger in a motel lobby, a driver in the car behind: It was a hell of a way to live.

  He thought: It isn’t too late to go back to the wreck of my house, the possibility of jail.

  But it is. It’s far too late. All that is over.

  He moved toward the table where Alison, her head tilted to the window, was gazing out. Something in the pose, in the angle of chin, caused him to stand still. He couldn’t say why, but he had an edgy sensation, a hot wire around his heart, as if some cruel revelation were about to occur, a correspondence he couldn’t take. The air became heavy, barely breathable, a sudden vacuum. An odd suffocating moment, disconnected from the thick flylike buzz of diners all around him; but then it passed and Alison turned toward him and smiled, and whatever had fallen out of sequence so briefly clicked back in place, like a lock closing on the door of a secret room.

  And now Manhattan, where the rain created a grubby weave joining concrete and sky in a seamless leaden way. This city of hard angles, which Tennant had always found too abrasive to sustain more than a facsimile of human life, was traffic jammed, streets locked by motionless cars, drivers leaning on their horns, an angry chorus of the impatient waging war against the immutable.

  The windows of the Cadillac fogged, and Tennant rubbed a spyhole for himself. He felt like a hick. How long since he’d been here? Ten years? Eleven? The Hudson, sluggish and muddy, was visible briefly between buildings; surrounded by rainy spray, a ghostly barge was laboring across the surface. Then the river was gone, and Alison had found a parking place for the Cadillac, a slot between two delivery trucks into which she maneuvered with ease.

  Tennant took his bag, got out of the car. Head bent against the angle of rain, he followed Alison along the sidewalk to a small hotel in whose old-fashioned lobby a smell of wet umbrellas hung in the air. What now? Was this where her trail to Bear Sajac led? He had a sense of having cut himself adrift, of having jumped too easily into the young woman’s slipstream. She steered, he followed. She persisted, he acquiesced. What was to stop him from saying Live your own life, babe, and turning around and going back into the street anyway? Did he think he’d be even more lost without her if he just upped and strolled away? Or was it that thing he had no heart to face again: solitude?

  As he walked behind Alison to the reception desk, he resented the tiny sense of dependence he experienced. He could go where he liked, for Christ’s sake. He didn’t need this young woman nor any involvement in her story; he didn’t need to feel like a character trapped inside her private fiction.

  He saw her put a credit card on the desk. She signed a form and was handed two keys, one of which she gave to Tennant.

  “Just for one night,” she said. “Adjoining rooms, if that’s okay with you.”

  Inside the elevator he said, “I wasn’t expecting to stay in the city. I thought we’d check your lead, then get out of the state.”

  “Lighten up. It’s not as if I gave them your name at the desk, Harry. It’s not like I said, ‘This guy’s a fugitive, call the cops.’ Tomorrow we’re gone.”

  Where? he wondered. But didn’t ask. He realized he hadn’t asked enough questions from the start. Destinations. Plans. He’d been made content by the relief of flying out of Flitt’s range and the menace of imprisonment; he’d assured himself that details would come later. Alison would explain her leads, her dead ends, her possibilities.

  On the seventh floor, before they went to their separate rooms, Alison said she’d freshen up, then meet him in the lobby bar. Tennant was agreeable.

  He unlocked his room, which was long and narrow. The window overlooked an airshaft filled with damp newspapers, fast-food boxes, scraps of old linoleum cut in different shapes—the random collage of a city’s wind-tossed trash. He sat on the bed
for a time, canvas bag on the floor between his feet. The room was plain, an Alpine landscape on the wall, TV, bathroom; he felt, as he’d always done in hotels, an unsettling anonymity, as if he’d left his identity at the front desk. What identity? he wondered.

  He checked the box-shaped bathroom, the old-fashioned tub, the lime deposits that had hardened around the shower nozzle. It was a good room for a suicide. It didn’t welcome you nor invite you to linger. If you wanted to snuff yourself, you couldn’t find a better place. And if suicide wasn’t your thing, you could work up quite a claustrophobic lather here.

  He moved toward the locked door that separated his room from Alison’s. Was that her voice he heard? Maybe she was speaking on the telephone to somebody, an editor, a friend. Was she talking about him? About how she’d found him? He pressed his ear to the wood and listened. In an old hotel like this, where doors were thick and insulation sturdy, sounds were readily absorbed into oak and masonry. He made out no distinct words; he wasn’t even certain if the voice had Alison’s pitch, muffled and distant as it was. It could have come from some other source, up or down through the passageways of ancient ductwork that riddled the building. It had a mysterious quality, such as you might hear at a séance, otherworldly, bringing news and advice from beyond.

  When finally the sound stopped and an impenetrable silence fell, Tennant moved away from the door. He felt as eavesdroppers often do, foolish, embarrassed, glad not to have been discovered in the ridiculous act. He stepped into the bathroom, laid out his shaving kit, ejected the old blade from the razor, and inserted a new one.

  He was about to splash water on his face when his telephone rang. He went to the bedside table and picked up the receiver. It was Alison to say she’d meet him in the bar in five or ten minutes. After he hung up he realized he hadn’t answered a telephone in years. Once, in the bad old drug days, phone connections had sometimes meant terror, dark electric absences in which nobody spoke and the only sound was that of something sighing in deep space, a weird connection between Tennant’s mind and a monstrous phantasm whimpering in another reality.