Festival of Deaths(38)

“We thought you might have some kind of comment you wanted to make,” the short one said.

“Or some information you wanted to supply us.”

“Or some suggestion you might want to make.”

“Or something,” Chickie said. “I’m convinced of it. One of these days, you’re going to give us something.”

“No,” Itzaak told him. “I’m not going to give you anything. I don’t have anything to give you.”

The two policemen were on their feet. They left Itzaak sitting in his chair and walked to the door, side by side, as if they’d rehearsed it.

“Bye,” Chickie said, when he’d gotten the door open and let his partner out into the hall. “See you when you get back from your tour. You have our card if there’s anything you want to tell us.”

“You can call us any hour of the day or night,” the short one piped up from the hallway.

“If you lose the card, we’re in the phone book,” Chickie said. Then he went out into the hall, too, and closed the door after him.

Itzaak sat in the chair he had been sitting in and closed his eyes. He had to stop sweating. He had to start breathing well enough to get up and walk. He had to start thinking again and he had to do it soon, because things were worse than he’d thought they were. For a moment there, they had almost gotten close.

He got out of the chair and went to his bedroom. He picked up the phone he kept on the night table and dialed Carmencita’s number. The phone rang and rang and rang, but no one answered. Carmencita must have already left to go downtown.

Itzaak went back out to the front door and got his coat off his suitcases and put it on. He wouldn’t have a chance to talk to Carmencita in private now until they were at the hotel in Philadelphia. Since he didn’t dare talk to her in front of other people, he would simply have to wait.

In the meantime, he thought he was going to get an ulcer.





3


MOMENTS LATER—JUST AS Itzaak locked his apartment door and started for the lobby to find a cab—Maximillian Dey got off the Lexington Avenue local at Fourteenth Street in a crush of people who all seemed to be dressed up to go to a biker’s convention. The men wore fringed leather vests and no shirts—in this cold!—and ragged jeans and lace-up boots with metal-tipped spikes on the soles. The women wore torn net stockings and very short skirts and peasant blouses and high-heeled ankle boots. There was a heavy-metal club just south of here, and Max supposed they were heading there. It was a little early for that kind of thing, but in the city you never knew. Most of the men were old and most of the women were much too young and much too fat. Max could never get over just how fat Americans were, at every age. He expected it in the old, but in the young he looked for leanness. He wondered what caused it, and came to different conclusions. Diets, that was his conclusion of the month. Americans were fat because they went on so many diets. He’d watched a girlfriend of his go on a diet once, and after about three days it had made him so crazy he was ready to eat the refrigerator. Whole.

The stairway to the street was to his left. He let himself be pushed along by the crowd. It was moving faster than he wanted to. He reached the steps and started up at his usual measured rate. He was pushed first from behind and then from the side, so that he fell forward and then around and nearly broke his back. He shouted in the general direction of whoever it was might have pushed him, but he couldn’t really tell. Everyone was milling around and the light was very poor. He was still moving up the stairs. There was no way to stop himself. He faced forward so he wouldn’t stumble again and almost immediately felt an elbow in the small of his back, someone hurrying him forward. The push catapulted him upward and into the air. He stumbled on the top step and fell to his knees. The crowd would have run him over if he hadn’t braced himself against a trash can.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said to nobody in particular. “What are you trying to do to me?”

He might as well have been talking to the Ghost of Christmas Past. There was nobody there to hear him. The biker people had disappeared. The street was deserted for a block and a half in either direction. Even union   Square Park looked empty.

And then it hit him.

“Goddamn,” he said into the air, loud enough to convince anyone who might hear him that he was a certified crazy. “Goddamn.”

He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and came up empty. His wallet was gone.

He had had it when he left his apartment. He remembered checking the hundred dollars in it twice and then tucking it back there.

He had had it when he got on the subway. He remembered the side of his hand knocking against it as he looked through his other pockets for a token. He kept everything in the world that was important to him in that wallet, and now what was he going to do?