Concert of Ghosts Page 9

  “Tennant,” Trebanzi said again. He spoke hoarsely. “So explain yourself. I’m listening hard. What the hell brings you here on a night like this, huh? What’s your connection with our scribbler friend—if that’s what she is.”

  Tennant glanced at Alison, but she was looking upward, hypnotized by the shotgun. He said, “I’m a research assistant,” which sounded feeble even to himself. He pondered the possibility of a more detailed fabrication—he was, say, her photographer as well, blah blah blah. But Trebanzi, in that unsettling voice of his, would have commented on the absence of a camera.

  “You’re the assistant, Tennant. The scribbler’s pal. Is that it? You carry her notebooks and sharpen her pencils with a little tool, huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  Trebanzi laughed. An odd sound, a wheeze, an old accordion. “I ain’t in a buying mood, Tennant,” he said, and turned to look at Alison. “Show me what you got, lady. Lemme see some paper.”

  Alison tossed her wallet up and Trebanzi seized it deftly; he flipped the plastic inserts, checked her ID, then let the wallet fall from his fingers.

  She caught it. “Satisfied?” she asked sharply.

  “Let’s say you’re a writer. What brings you to me?” Trebanzi asked. “What makes you think I got some association with San Francisco in the time frame you mentioned?”

  “You knew a man called Bear. Bear Sajac.”

  “Yeah?”

  “According to my information.”

  “Your information sucks, lady. I never heard of any Bear Sag … Saje … whatever you said.”

  “Sajac. He lived with you in the Haight.”

  “I never set foot in the place. I never met any Bear. You got the wrong end of the stick.”

  A silence. The big house retained sounds in a miserly way. Nothing echoed. Nothing reverberated. A dead house—and it made Tennant more curious than ever. With an impulse he couldn’t deny, he reached for the door nearest to him and pushed it open. Through uncurtained windows a street lamp cast a flat, spectral light. The room was bare. No furniture. No inhabitant. Nothing. Lifeless.

  “Asshole! What you playing at?” Trebanzi shouted.

  He fired his shotgun. Tennant, amazed by the roar, heard the air collapse around him; a black hole, an implosion in his eardrums. The shot ripped through old woodwork, and for a moment the air smelled like that of an abandoned sawmill. The cartridge had come too close, far too close; Tennant had the feeling that if mortality was a telephone line, he’d just committed the number to heart.

  “Don’t go wandering around, Tennant. Don’t think you’re an invited guest here, because you ain’t. Shut that door. Do it now.”

  Tennant didn’t move. He wondered what perversity made him disobey Trebanzi’s order. Was it the stubbornness Rayland had attributed to him? Was it—sweet Jesus—an off-center wish for death? Suddenly he resented Trebanzi and his goddamn shotgun. He hated being ordered around. He despised Trebanzi the way he despised Ralph Flitt and his threats; he begrudged the loss of his house and land, his dog, how all the safe chambers of his life had been violated and destroyed. Now this sad-looking bastard with a shotgun was menacing him, and he wanted to strike back somehow. “What’s got you running scared, Alphonse? You live here all alone, don’t you? The names outside. The buzzers. The pretense of tenants. It’s a mock-up. So what’s happening? What are you hiding?”

  “I ain’t scared, Tennant. I’m a hermit, okay?” Trebanzi said. “I like my own company in my own goddamn house. The human race is slime. You don’t take this”—and he touched his face with a gesture of contempt—“out on the streets too often. I mind my own business, asshole. This scumbucket of a house belongs to me and if I don’t want to rent rooms there ain’t a law in the land says I got to. Okay? You absorbed that?”

  Alison looked up at Trebanzi. “Listen, if you’ll turn the gun to the other side, we’ll call this a mistake and walk out of here. The end. You won’t be troubled again.”

  “Hold your horses, lady. The party’s not over.”

  “I think it is. You didn’t know Bear. We’ve got nothing to say to each other. Good night.”

  “I said hold on.” Trebanzi leaned against the handrail. “The way I see it, we got unfinished business.”

  “What would that be, Trebanzi?” Alison asked.

  “I’m interested in how come my name cropped up. I mean, how did you stumble across some connectorooni between me and this, this Bear?”

  “I did what I’m usually good at,” Alison said. “Research.”

  “Research, huh? Tell me how that works.”

  “There’s always a trail, Trebanzi. You leave signs behind no matter how fast you keep moving. You left yours in a drug rehab facility in Atlantic Beach.” Alison had a small confident smile on her face, as if she sensed that, despite the shotgun, she had the upper hand with Trebanzi. She sighed and added, “Clearly, though, I made a mistake in your case. Unlikely as it seems, there’s got to be another Alphonse Trebanzi walking around, and I got confused. I took a wrong turn in my research. No biggie. I’ll get out of your hair and start again.”

  “Too easy,” Trebanzi said.

  “What’s too easy?”

  “You. Your friend Tennant. You can’t walk.”

  “I’m good at it,” Alison said. “One foot before the other. Like so. Been doing it for years, Alf.”

  “Funny lady. Unnerstand this: I lost my sense of humor some time back. So just don’t fucking move. Both of you stay right where you are. You got a gun, Tennant, take it out and put it on the floor where I can see it.”

  Tennant pulled the weapon from his pocket and laid it down reluctantly.

  “Good,” Trebanzi said. “I’m coming down now. Just remember I can watch you through the rail. And keep in mind I got this mean-tempered baby in my hands.”

  Trebanzi descended, trailing the barrel of the shotgun over the handrail. He wore an old green-red plaid shirt and blue jeans about two sizes too big for him. He was somewhere in his forties, and taller than Tennant had thought. His jowls hung like empty sacs; if he was sick, it was with some ungodly wasting disease. The one good eye was dull, a dark space inside which light, when it entered unawares, was trapped. A dead eye, a dead house. Trebanzi had a quality of stagnancy; if Tennant had believed in auras, he might have found Trebanzi’s a gray, lackluster mist.

  When he came to the landing, Trebanzi pointed the shotgun at Tennant. “Okay. I got one question. Who sent you?”

  “Nobody sent us,” Alison said. “I told you. I’m writing a story. You’re not the guy I’m looking for. Sorry. Beg pardon. Adios,” and she turned away, but Trebanzi prodded her in the spine with the shotgun.

  “Hey.” Alison stared at him angrily. “Watch where you put that thing, Trebanzi.”

  “I’ll ask again. Who sent you?”

  “What makes you think somebody sent us?” Tennant asked.

  Trebanzi said nothing. He gazed past Tennant toward the staircase; a thin shadow of the scaffolding fell across his face, distorted where it touched the ridged surface of his skin. Fear, Tennant thought. The man lives in terror. The facade of this house, the pretense of inhabitants, the shotgun, the aggression. This was way beyond your common dread of New York City; this was another level, a fresh dimension. He had a memory of dread from the drug days: He knew how it created its own momentum, how it spawned itself in the hours of darkness, whispering. You sat up waiting for dawn, your brain rattling, you imagined daylight had the power to dissolve all the monsters. Did Trebanzi, his mind sprinting in terror, his senses assaulted by half-seen shadows and phantom feet on floorboards, sit in one of these rooms with the shotgun on his lap and long for the sun to come up over the tenements?

  “I’d like to know what you’re afraid of, Trebanzi.”

  “Shit! I already answered that, man. I asked a question of my own so don’t keep me waiting for a fucking answer. Don’t sidestep me, Tennant. No fancy footwork. This lizard”—and he indicated the shotg
un—“will explode in your face.”

  Alison said, “My magazine sent me. Does that ring your bell, Alf?”

  Trebanzi smiled. The inflexibility of his upper lip made the expression ambivalent; you couldn’t say if there was mirth in the look, or something beyond interpretation. The face was a book written in an obscure foreign language. “Magazine’s don’t mean that to me. I need something specific. A name. Names.”

  “The features editor is called Hewson. The editor’s Burford Blackburn. But they didn’t exactly send me, Alf. It doesn’t work that way. I sent myself.”

  Trebanzi looked incredulous. “You expect me to believe that, lady? What about your boyfriend here? How come he tagged along? And don’t feed me any guff about how he’s your assistant. You came here to get me, right? You came here to take me away. All the rest is crap.”

  Listening to how Trebanzi’s voice rose, watching the stressed cords in his neck, Tennant had the thought that Alphonse was a candidate for Straitjacket Hall. The man lived in a state of siege. There were devils congregating in his dark corners.

  “What were you planning to use? A needle? Maybe you were just gonna shoot me right here,” and Trebanzi kicked Tennant’s gun across the landing. “Yeah. Why not? Kill me in my own goddamn house. Assholes. Assholes. My own goddamn house.” Curiously, a tear formed in his eye and slid over his cheek; it was the last thing Tennant expected, and it was upsetting in its own strange way. A one-eyed tear.

  “Nobody’s going to kill you,” Alison said. “I told you the truth, Alf. I’m following a story. That’s it. If somebody’s after you, maybe we can help.”

  Trebanzi seemed not to hear her. “Christ, I was safe here. I really thought I was safe here. Now I gotta make plans. I gotta throw some stuff together and split. Then there’s the problem of you pair. I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to hurt anybody. But you gotta unnerstand, it’s you or me. And I’m so goddamn tired. Jeez, am I tired.” Trebanzi wiped the tear with his cuff. “Now they know where I’m located. They know. I gotta move. I gotta move on.” And he paced the landing in a restless, confused way.

  “Who are they?” Tennant asked.

  “Don’t fuck with me. How long you been on their side, man? From the git-go? Maybe that explains why you’re still walking. I gotta think fast. I gotta figure this.”

  Tennant took a step toward Trebanzi and spoke patiently. “You’re not coming through loud and clear, Alphonse. You better clarify this for me.”

  “Clarify.” Trebanzi repeated the word as if it were unfamiliar to him. Waving the shotgun, he herded Tennant and Alison across the landing to the other side. “What’s to clarify, Tennant? You know what’s going on. Don’t play mind games with me. That door at your back. Open it.”

  Tennant, seized by an urge to disobey, didn’t move. He stood directly under the scaffolding, whose shadow seemed darker and heavier to him now, and threatening, as though it were about to collapse, to fall through space and crush him. He thought he could smell the rust of pipes. From somewhere he had a memory of clutching a rotted metal cylinder and then looking at how rust adhered like flakes of old blood to his hand.

  “Open the door,” Trebanzi said again.

  Absorbed by the scaffolding, Tennant felt his mind drift to a recollection of the room on Schrader Street. Che and Bobby Kennedy pictures and psychedelic Fillmore posters and tiny hash pipes and roach clips and an elaborate glass bong—these scraps scurried around without substance, conjured up seemingly from nothing.

  “Somebody open the door, for Christ’s sake,” Trebanzi said.

  This time Alison responded. The room beyond was clearly Alphonse’s lair, a big stuffy space cluttered with crummy furniture, the floor strewn with newspapers and magazines. Blackout blinds had been drawn across the windows. On the old-fashioned oak mantelpiece, impossibly ornate with hand-carved cherubim and bunches of grapes, sat two pistols. A couple of beat-up sofas were covered with battered cushions among which a scraggy cat slept. Burnt-down candles had left bizarre patterns of wax on the floorboards. Ashtrays were stuffed with cigarette ends and the blackened, oily remains of joints. A two-gram bottle on the table was half-filled with cocaine. Alphonse, even in his retreat, obviously had a shopping list and a supplier.

  “I gotta think fast,” Trebanzi said. Shotgun under his arm, he strolled to the window, slid back the blind a little way, gazed down into the street. Then he turned to look at Tennant—who had become abruptly chill and was no longer thinking about the room on Schrader, nor the sudden image of hippies erecting a precarious scaffold against a house and painting a cheerful mural of pink suns and Day-Glo mushrooms and marijuana leaves; he wasn’t scavenging the contents of this abrupt memory because all that was vague to him still, and his recall was shot through with sick impurities—

  No. His attention was magnetized elsewhere now.

  Shocked into the present, he was looking at the large black-and-white photograph on the wall above Trebanzi’s mantelpiece: Obe’s picture of five hippies in Chinatown in 1968. Maggie Silver, locked solid in time, gazed out at him. Her look said: I got a secret, Harry, baby. And I’m not telling.

  8

  Disturbed by Tennant’s sudden move toward the fireplace, the cat bounded from the sofa in one sinuous, gingery leap. The picture, blown-up, glossy, unframed, was held in place by thumbtacks. Faces, the inalienable property of the past, were sealed inside the wretched prism of eternal youth. Carlos Carlos, Bear, Kat, himself; and Maggie Silver in the dead center. Alison stretched one hand up to touch the surface of the picture, as if she suspected it might be unreal.

  “Some things you don’t throw away,” Trebanzi said, looking at the photograph. “Even if you know they’re gonna come back and fuck you one day, Harry.”

  Harry, Tennant thought. He couldn’t remember now if he’d mentioned his first name to Alphonse. He had a sense of surfaces shifting and changing. The photograph. The first name. This weird house, this sham. There had to be some form of key to his history here, if he could find it. He tried to formulate a question that might force an explanation from Trebanzi, but it was Alison—with the inquisitorial habit of her occupation—who spoke first.

  “I suppose you just happen to have this, Alf,” she said. “I daresay this is sheer blow-me-away coincidence.”

  Trebanzi peered from the blackout blind again, then let it drop. He ignored Alison. “How many others are with you?” he asked. “You got friends in the street, Harry? I mean, if I was to make a run for it, I’d be iced down there?”

  What was this man talking about? Tennant shook his head. “Nobody’s out there.”

  Trebanzi crossed the room, gazed at the photograph, then looked glumly at Tennant. “I expected more than two, I guess. I thought they’d send four, half a dozen. Maybe it don’t work like that. Maybe they only send two. Economy, huh? What the hell, I hear we’re in a recession,” and he laughed. “Gotta cut back when times is hard.”

  Expected more than two, I guess. Tennant wondered about the bleak nature of Trebanzi’s expectations, and how they dissolved into puzzles. He glanced at the five faces Obe had captured and thought it strange that if he were to meet his former self on the street, there would be no recognition. Harry Tennant now, Harry Tennant then: More than age separated the two. The fretful question of personal identity again.

  “You ready to talk about the photo yet, Alf?” Alison asked, impatient with any further detour down the culverts of Trebanzi’s dementia. She liked straight lines, arrows to the heart of a matter. Her hands were clenched determinedly; her dark eyes had taken on a formidable look. She wasn’t going to be fobbed off by Trebanzi and his evasions.

  “It’s a souvenir, lady. What else?” Alphonse scoured the room, frantically moving papers and magazines around. He found what he was looking for, a bottle of vodka. Tucking the weapon under one arm, he drank carelessly, quickly. Liquid spilled over his chin.

  “A souvenir of what?” Tennant asked. “If you never knew Bear, why do you have h
is picture on the wall?”

  “Bear,” Trebanzi said, his tone scornful. “Bear’s dead.”

  “Dead? How? When?” Tennant asked.

  Trebanzi set the vodka down on a pile of books; the bottle fell on its side. Booze trickled over the paperback covers. Alphonse paid it no attention. He was elsewhere now, wandering. “You already know all that shit.”

  “We don’t know anything, Alf,” Alison said. “Enlighten us.”

  Trebanzi strolled close to her; in the one good eye was a harsh light of rage. “I got your number, lady. Games. You like games. I ain’t playing. Sorry.” He turned, gazing up at the picture, consumed all at once. His expression became one of—what?—dejection? hopelessness? His hairless head, a smooth pink dome of skin that rose up from the purple wasteland of the face, seemed to belong to somebody else, as if a surgical miscalculation had occurred; opposites had been joined by scalpel and stitch in the hands of an apprentice butcher. Tennant followed the line of Trebanzi’s vision: What did Alphonse see in that accursed photograph anyhow? Why did he have it? Some things you don’t throw away, Harry. Meaning what? Briefly he considered the dangerous notion of rushing Alphonse for the weapon, but Trebanzi still held it menacingly.

  Alison was cross, flustered. “Okay. We’ve established you don’t like games. Forgive me for being obtuse, Alf, but I’m not exactly sure about the rules here. We can’t all be as bright and insightful as you, can we?”

  “Touchy little number, ain’t we.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Trebanzi.” She looked and sounded fierce.

  “Yeah yeah. You one of them modern chicks?” He made a flicking gesture, like a man scornfully brushing a fly away. The rage was still in his eye, and contempt too. For a moment Tennant thought that he was going to turn the shotgun on Alison and pull the trigger. Harry had the urge to step between Alison and Trebanzi, to protect her. But then Trebanzi subsided and looked almost composed. He leaned against the fireplace directly under the photograph. “Why the hell did you ever have to find me in the first fucking place? I had a life. It wasn’t exactly fantastic, but I’d learned how to maintain.”