Concert of Ghosts Read online

  He shaved, changed his shirt, then left the room. He knocked on Alison’s door. Since there was no answer, he assumed she’d already gone down to the bar. He stepped inside the elevator and felt a brief lurching of the car as it began its descent. He imagined thick cables rising and falling in the black shaft. L for lobby.

  He walked inside the bar, a brown-paneled room where an eternal dusk prevailed. Green-shaded lamps glowed on the counter and stubby little candles, imprisoned in orange glass, flickered on circular tables. Tennant so far was the only customer. No Alison. He took a table with an uncluttered view of the front door and the lobby. Rain fell on the dark streets; lamps shimmered on the sidewalks. People moved back and forward in the lobby, bellboys carried suitcases, a grinning man zoomed past in a motorized wheelchair—a sense of flurry, lives being lived.

  A waitress took Tennant’s order for Scotch and soda. From some hidden recess taped music kicked into life, a Simon and Garfunkel tune squeezed out of a synthesizer. “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.”

  Tell me about that bridge.

  He sipped his drink, waited, watched the door for Alison. He’d lost his sense of time: Had he been sitting here ten minutes or twenty or what? When he was halfway through his Scotch, he used the bar phone to call her room. No answer. He sat down again, fussed with the drink.

  Okay. Consider the possibilities. She had an unexpected errand to run. Or she is stuck in the elevator. Or locked in the bathroom. Or or or. You could sit here all night playing the disjunction game. He went back to the phone, tried again. This time the number was busy. She was calling somebody. Or somebody was calling her. He put the phone down, waited a minute, picked it up again, dialed her room. Now the line rang, but without answer. Had he called a wrong number before when he got the busy signal? Or had she finished her call, hung up, then left the room hurriedly? He set the receiver back, then ordered a fresh drink at his table where the fluttering candle threw a sickly complexion on his face.

  This is the place, he thought. This is where a mild uneasiness comes in. She will appear in a second. She will say she has been delayed somehow, and it will be perfectly plausible. End of story. What other explanation could there be anyway? Only if he attributed subterfuge to her, something beyond her desire for a story, only then might there be something sinister in the busy signal. You have to trust her, he thought. You’re like a man who needs to trust his guide to lead him through a swamp.

  He accidentally spilled his Scotch, which flooded across his paper napkin. The waitress hurried over, scolding him in a jocular way, bad boy, tossing booze around, where are your manners?

  He smiled absently. Go with the flow. Live in the moment. He breathed deeply. He was calmer now.

  The waitress brought him another drink. He took a fresh napkin and tore it into thin strips. He placed one of the strips inside the jar that held the candle, and it caught flame immediately. Then he dropped the paper in an ashtray, where it flared and died. Playing with fire. Yes indeed.

  Fire. Crackers. Had he gone once to Chinatown during a festival? Every question he asked himself led him inside a kind of tomb where the past lay locked. Without access, Tennant, you might as well be a dead man. What was personal identity if you had no fucking memory? How could you ever say with certainty who you were? How could you check the reality of the past if you couldn’t relive it? He was uneasy again; that brief calm had dissolved in a flare of panic. He finished the Scotch, burned another paper strip, watched it curl and smoke.

  “You’ll burn yourself, Harry.”

  He looked up to see the girl approach the table. She wore a short black dress and an unbuttoned black raincoat.

  She sat down beside him. “Sorry I took so long.”

  He waited. She would surely make an excuse, say she had calls to make. But she didn’t.

  “You want to get moving?” she asked.

  He had a moment of indecision. Okay, she has a private life I know nothing about, a group of friends, she has her profession, and colleagues—was it a crime to call somebody? Only if thinking made it so. And you’ve just been doing some thinking of the twisted kind, Harry. Trust her. You have to. There’s nobody else. Without this girl, you’re the loneliest man in the world.

  He got up from the table. The strip of paper napkin clung to melted wax and smouldered blackly.

  7

  “This guy calls himself Alphonse Trebanzi,” Alison said. She drove the Cadillac through the streets of the lower West Side where a few delicatessens and bars glimmered in the rain. “Bear Sajac had given Trebanzi’s apartment in the Haight as his address in 1968. It was probably nothing more than a crash pad. Trebanzi, naturally, has moved around since then—a dozen times at least. His trail kept running very cold. Nothing on Social Security. Motor vehicles, zip. Sometimes I have a flash of inspiration. I figured drugs. He was probably into them years ago—maybe he hadn’t changed. So I checked with hundreds of drug rehab centers. I got a break. He’d undergone some drug rehab in New Jersey about four years ago. What I have here, after mucho research, is his last known address. It’s a shot in the dark, I admit. But I don’t have another link to Bear. I don’t know if Trebanzi’s dead, alive, what.”

  Tennant considered the complexity of connections, the accidents of place and time that joined people across years. Two decades ago John “Bear” Sajac shared a pad in the Haight with somebody called Trebanzi; by a fluke of the gravity—destiny, absurdity, whatever—that alters our tides, Bear had appeared in a photograph with Tennant and Maggie Silver and two other kids. Accidents, whimsical crosscurrents. Now, years later, Bear was a possible connection to Alison’s riddle of missing people and dead kids and a deranged photographer. And maybe a link to Maggie Silver.

  If Bear had survived. If Maggie had survived.

  Tennant had a disjointed and slightly unpleasant awareness of traveling into his own mute history, a passageway where here and there a fluted whisper might be heard or a fragment of song—and it was alien to him, a journey that could take him places he had no desire to go. What persisted as he stared out at the black streets of lower Manhattan was a weight of anxiety, something leaden in his heart. His past had become a country for which he might no longer have a visa. Perhaps, like some miserable Third World republic, rotted by humidity, filled with the screech of mysterious birds, it was the kind of place for which no visa was needed anyway because no tourist ever went there—a shantytown of the mind, leprous little shacks wherein people died young and weary to the bone.

  He gazed at storefronts; a drunk, oblivious to weather, shuffling along, a bag lady pushing a trolley filled with the sad stuff of her life, two cops lingering in a doorway, one slackly slapping his nightstick against his thigh.

  Tennant had the Taurus in the pocket of his raincoat. Its weight made him uncomfortable, and he really wasn’t sure still why he’d brought the thing; at best you could say the presence of the gun consoled him in a way it had never done during his years of crop cultivation. He put his hand inside the pocket and touched the weapon as Alison swung the Cadillac along a darkened street.

  Tenements, here and there an unvandalized lamp, a crone of a tree: It wasn’t a street that suggested a community, a neighborhood. You couldn’t imagine block parties being held here—only the surly passage of people who lived in close proximity to one another without benefit of friendship. Tennant had the thought that the men and women who endured in this place collected welfare, food stamps, government handouts—dehumanizing rituals; ah, how the bureaucracy, the Sturmbannführers of the Republic, imposed humiliation on impoverished souls.

  The pall of the neighborhood depressed him. He had absolutely no desire to get out of the car when Alison parked, but he did so anyway. They climbed a short flight of steps to the doorway of a tenement, where a sequence of buzzers were located; each had a name attached, many illegible, faded, altered. Residents came and went here, and they left nothing in their wake. It was a good street for fugitives, men who’d fallen behind in child su
pport, small-time hoods, failed con artists, drunks.

  Alison struck a match and held it to the buzzers. She studied the little cards. “Alphonse Trebanzi. Where are you? Where the hell are you?”

  Tennant looked along the street. Windows reflected the subterranean blue of TV screens. Sometimes a figure would pass in front of the box and eclipse the room. An upraised voice might now and then be heard; a small act of verbal domestic violence. A place like this bludgeoned the spirit, he thought.

  “Gold!” Alison said. The match burnt her fingers and she dropped it, but struck another one immediately. The flame illuminated the name Trebanzi. Even as Alison exclaimed her delight, Tennant continued to look the length of the street, watching, expecting God knows what, but he had his hand in the pocket that contained the gun. Nobody moved in the rain. His anxiety created faces out of the light that struck the few trees. He was a mere step away from hearing rain make leaves whisper in understandable phrases, or discovering a Morse code in the noise of water falling on plastic trash bags along the sidewalk. Random sounds—but if you were in a precarious state of mind they could be made to yield meanings; statements, propositions, anything you liked.

  He gazed at Alison. In her small determined features he might find an anchor to something substantial.

  She pressed Trebanzi’s buzzer. She looked at Tennant with such a profound expectancy that he hoped Trebanzi would not be a waste of time for her, that all kinds of information would come tumbling, by preposterous magic, out of this one man’s mouth. Bear’s address? Sure, no sweat. Maggie Silver? Hey, got her phone number right here. Harry Tennant’s memory? No problem. Got it in my attaché case. What else can I do for you?

  In dreams, Tennant thought as Alison pressed the bell again. The tenement was weirdly quiet, as if unoccupied, every buzzer disconnected.

  “Answer, come on,” Alison said, keeping her finger attached solidly to the bell. “Come on, Alphonse. Answer. Talk to me.”

  A fuzzy sound came from the speaker. “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Trebanzi?”

  “Yeah.” The voice was distant, as if it might have traveled all the way from a high turret.

  “I wonder if you could spare a few minutes to speak to me,” Alison said. “We’ve never met. My name’s Alison Seagrove. I don’t need much of your time.”

  “What you want to speak about?” Trebanzi asked.

  “I’m a journalist. I’m writing a piece on San Francisco, the late sixties.”

  “How come you’re ringing my goddamn buzzer, lady? What makes you think I’d know anything about San Francisco?”

  “Look, it’s cold and wet down here. Can we talk face-to-face? Can I come up?”

  A long silence. A car passed slowly down the street. Tennant observed it, aware of two occupants who showed no apparent interest in Alison or himself.

  “It’s important to me,” Alison said. “I wouldn’t trouble you otherwise.”

  “You alone?”

  “Sure.” She glanced at Tennant, who indicated with a gesture of his head that he’d follow her inside as soon as Trebanzi pressed the button to open the door. Instant complicity: Tennant liked it.

  “I don’t know about this,” Trebanzi said. “I lead like a real quiet life here, you unnerstand? I don’t want my name in some scuzzy rag.”

  “I promise. No publicity.”

  “You wanna give me that in writing?”

  “If you like.”

  “Okay. I’m on the third floor. You got five minutes.”

  The buzzer sounded, the front door opened, a hallway of closed doors stretched toward the stairs. A solitary bulb, slung high overhead, was the only source of light. Tennant stepped in quickly behind the girl and followed her toward the staircase, which rose up through tiers of darkness. He had the odd impression again of emptiness, as if the sole occupant of the house was the man called Trebanzi. Every other door led into vacant unfurnished rooms. A spooky setting, a haunted house: How appropriate to be tracking his past in such a place.

  Quietly, he followed Alison to the foot of the stairs, conscious of the corrupt odor of damp wallpaper. The arrangement of the stairway made it possible to see up between the handrails to the blackened skylight at the top of the house, beneath which was a scaffolding of the sort workers erect, a short spidery arrangement of metal tubes and planks. Perhaps some form of renovation was going on.

  He put a foot on the bottom step.

  Which was the moment it hit him, the flash, the rolling away in his mind of thunder and thin lightning, a shift in the gears of his brain. Strength went out of his legs. This house. The smell. The clamminess that choked him. Either he’d been in this place before or it brought back to mind, with ghastly precision, a house very similar, one in which he’d been skewered, crucified. And somehow Maggie Silver was there, a lovely burning cinder in his head. Why?

  He looked upward toward the skylight.

  It wasn’t the house. It wasn’t the damp perfume.

  The scaffolding. Something to do with the scaffolding.

  “Harry, for God’s sake, are you sick, what is it?”

  His eyes watered as he gazed at the assortment of tubes and planks that, hardly touched by the reaches of electricity, resembled an insane sculpture, something hammered together in a nightmare.

  “Are you ill? What is it?” Alison placed a hand against the side of his face. Aware of her concerned look, he caught himself and reached for the handrail. Support. Something solid.

  “You’re white, Harry.” And she touched his forehead, checking him for fever. She was almost nurselike in her worry. He shook his head from side to side. He heard himself say something about a dizzy spell, something to convince the girl. But it wasn’t that. It was more. A dizzy spell didn’t cut it. Didn’t go anywhere near cutting it.

  “We can go outside,” she said. “You need air.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t sound sure.”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  “You scared me, Harry.”

  I scared myself. What for Christ’s sake had happened to him? Some kind of acid rerun, an image he’d brought back from an old trip through the jungles of consciousness? An enigma grounded in some very ordinary alignment of metal pipes and planks of wood—what kind of sense did that make? Where did that belong in his life? Scaffolding beneath a black skylight. It was slippage, spillage from another time. A discharge of the brain; the mind’s knavery.

  Maggie Silver, he thought. What did the commonplace structure above have to do with a girl he couldn’t remember knowing? He wondered if he was doomed to move in the same purgatorial circle of amnesia all his days. You can’t get out, Harry. Sorry. No exit.

  He moved cautiously up the stairs, fearing another attack. There was a buzzsawing pain deep in his skull. He followed Alison, who kept glancing back at him as if to reassure herself that he wasn’t about to lose his balance again. He had an odd sense now of treading through warm syrup, struggling as he climbed.

  On the landing he stopped. The pain dissolved; a tiny liberation. Breathing hard, he again glanced up at the scaffolding. It was badly rusted. Some absentee landlord had apparently abandoned a renovation project long ago, and now the matter was forgotten. An ancient bankruptcy, a change of ownership, whatever; the construction rotted, beyond any practical use. He didn’t want to look at it. He couldn’t risk absorption in the sight of the thing.

  Another flight of stairs. Another landing. The air was cloying. He was more acutely aware than before of the great silence of the house around him, no TV, no crying baby, nobody coughing. The only scents were those of decaying wallpaper and rotted wood—nothing of food, fried meat, boiled vegetables. What did they do, all the people whose names were inscribed under the buzzers outside? Did they never eat, sleep, make love, argue? Unsettled, he stood very still. As if she too had become conscious of the same absences, Alison stopped halfway across the landing.

/>   This was the third floor. Trebanzi’s floor. There were four doors on the landing.

  “There’s something bizarre about this,” Alison said. She was whispering.

  “Think of it as a game show,” Tennant remarked. Keep it light. Goose feathers. “Choose the correct door, you win the three-piece living-room furniture plus—and this’ll make your mouth water—the propane barbecue grill.”

  Although each door had a number, none had a nameplate. If anyone lived in the rooms beyond, they worked at anonymity. Why hadn’t Trebanzi come out to meet Alison anyhow? Why hadn’t she been directed to a specific room number?

  “Go on. Pick a door,” he said.

  The voice came from overhead, from the floor where the scaffolding was located. “Yeah. Listen to your pal, lady, and pick a door.”

  Tennant, surprised, stared up.

  “Trebanzi?” Alison asked.

  A shadow was visible among the struts and cylinders. “You think I’m fucking crazy, lady? You think I open my door to anybody that comes calling? ‘Ooo-eee, glad you dropped in, have a glass of boojolly with me, let’s remember the good old days.’ It ain’t like that, sweetheart. Plus, you lied to me. You brought company when you said you was all alone.”

  Tennant put his hand in the pocket that contained the gun.

  Trebanzi said, “I wouldn’t be thinking that way in your situation, jack.” And he came forward from the shadows of the scaffolding. He held a shotgun, the barrel of which he directed down at Tennant, who immediately lowered his hand to his side. He had no expertise in a situation like this. What was he supposed to do? Go for a quick draw? The shotgun was fat and lethal.

  “You got a name?” Trebanzi asked.

  “Tennant.”

  “Tennant. Tennant.” Trebanzi, seeming to savor vowels and consonants as if he’d been deprived too long of speech, stepped into the light for the first time. He had a large bald head that sat in an ungainly way on a body that might once have been fleshy; skin hung loosely from his forearms. The man was either very sick or maintained himself, for reasons of vanity or psychosis, on a malnutrition diet. He moved a little way forward, and his features caught the light. The left side of his face was mauve and puckered, as if a skin graft had been attempted and failed. One eyelid was smooth and permanently shut, the upper lip locked in an oddly sad look. It was a disfigurement you could both fear and pity.