A Moment of Doubt (9 page)

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This dirty wink was much more obscene than anything going on in the movie. I fled the theater.

The street was horribly bright. I donned my shades. People drifted past me slowly. A small old woman, with swollen stockinged feet that twisted out of her sandals, and a tattered kerchief tied round her head, smiled at the young man exiting the pornographic theater. Her face was brown as a walnut and wrinkled as dried fruit.

“Ja get off” she croaked, and pointed a crooked finger at the doors through which I had just exited. Her head
did not come as high as my chest, and there wasn't a tooth in it. She laughed. I recoiled and hurried down the street.

Several doors from the theater there is a bar, a relic of the old neighborhood, called the Shoe Inn. Narrow and dark, it has none of the glossy blond oak appeal of the newer places up and down the street, and serves no Perrier, but you can get a beer and a shot for a dollar sixty. Martin Windrow drinks there, when he's in the neighborhood.

I hadn't had time to think yet. Even as I downed and chased a shot,
This World Leaks Blood
, broken into tiny virtually undetectable files scattered about the deepest recesses of the Crow Mignon computer, waited for the opportunity to piggyback another job, to sneak into the computers of Pre-eminent Printing, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There to lie in wait for similar opportunities to publish and distribute itself. Good. A 50,000 copy first edition of so-called quality trade paperbacks @ $4.95. I'd make at least $500. Sell them all, it's more like twenty grand. Wonderful. But it's not published yet. This operation had started to mean serious money for everybody, whether they knew they were involved or not. Were my nerves going? Larceny ceases to be a misdemeanor and becomes felonious after the first $500, does it not? What would I get? Eight years? Five? Ten? Would I, like Jean Genet before me, be content to manufacture sabots by day, and cover my head with my blanket, at night, to savour the puissance of my own digestive tract? Cast amorous glances over the iron-pumping denizens of Death Row, during the fifteen minutes of mandatory daily recreation? No. I'd go berserk and perm my hair within a week.

So this was the Moral Imperative. Nasty.

The bar was nearly empty, but two or three of the regulars were there. I'd never spent enough time in the
place to achieve this dubious status, and in fact preferred my anonymity. The catbird seat, hard by the front door, was empty and I took it. Next to me sat a woman who had lost her larynx and half her tongue to cancer, yet insisted on continuing to smoke unfiltered Chesterfields. Her vocal chords had been replaced by a marvelous mechanical device strapped across her throat that enabled her to talk by making a buzzing that modulated in pitch just enough to make her intelligible to people who were used to it. Further down the bar sat a red-faced Irishman nursing a screwdriver. He was the bartender due to begin his shift at four o'clock. Beyond him a tall man stood, hard by a glass of whiskey. The current bartender also had a drink, which he kept out of sight beneath the bar.

I hadn't yet had time to think.

In a way, to write a detective novel is an academic nihilism. It is to admit that while the only way to change anything is to change everything, to act is to change nothing. To signal complicity in this is to reiterate that only what has gone before will come after. No one is capable of understanding anything else—they don't want to. To comprehend these few simple axioms—which, like 2+2, or indivisibility by zero, are as inexplicable as they are irrefutable—and to deliberately violate them, is to domino your efforts into another universe, wherein you discover that you, like everyone else there, must hold a second job. It is on this second job that you, like everyone else, will devote all your efforts to the proposition that 2+2=4. If you demonstrate this complicity all week, every week, they will give you money. If you do not, they will make your life . . . difficult.

As this familiar canon recurred to me, I had been about to remove my sunglasses. I kept them on, but muttered aloud, agreeing with myself.

“Really,” I nodded, turning my glass in the pool of beer at its base, “really . . . .”

The tall man at the other end of the bar had been staring at me. Now he said, “You're one of them,” and turned to the others and said, “He's one of them.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Do
you
think 2+2=4?”

“Who says 2+2=4?” the woman with half a tongue buzzed.

“The IRS, for one,” the tall man said.

“Sonofabitch,” the woman said, “they're always right.”

The man in the middle raised a pedagogical index finger and said, “One is truly free when one has learned to respect the rights of others.”

I raised my glass. “Semper fiduciary.”

Everyone took a drink in silence, followed by a resentful pause.

“So,” said the thin Irishman, setting down his glass on the end of the bar while eying the woman, but addressing me. Though his hand shook noticeably, his tone was conversational. “You're one of these Romans we been hearing about?”

“Cancer,” the mechanical larynx buzzed, tapping the back of my hand with her forefinger, “although lately here they've taken to calling ‘em Moon Children.”

“That must about explain it,” said the bartender, replacing his drink under the counter.

“Not really . . . ,” the woman rasped. It seemed that any sentiment she wished to express required her voice to mount a certain threshold of energy in order to suffciently vibrate the mechanical device installed in her neck. This made wistfulness a violent act. Her second disability caused her to spill vodka on her blouse. The bartender gave her a white napkin with a red motto printed on it.
If you can read this, you drank it all
. She dabbed it at her chin and chest.

The tall man at the other end of the bar shifted the stare to me. “What do you do?” he said.

“Leave him alone,” said the woman.

The tall man shrugged and held his glass to his lips. “I just thought maybe he left his seeing-eye dog outside.”

“Would he want some water?” asked the bartender, solicitously.

“A round for the house,” the tall man said.

The barman smiled. “Of water?” This got a laugh.

The Irishman turned his head away from the tall man and alternately patted and smoothed the bald spot on the back of it with the palm of a shaky hand. “Sure and always catchin the wave of his mind,” he said demurely, “is me Jimmy.”

I knew this bar as a good place for Windrow to be drinking in, and in fact had used it several times already. But so distracted was I that at first a rather unsettling thought had not occurred to me. This was that, in fact, in using this place I had made up several characters for the detective to talk to. One of them had been a woman. It had been a long time ago, perhaps as far back as
Ulysses's Dog
, or
So Long, Pockface
. Eight or ten books, each sufficiently indistinguishable from the other that details get mixed up and forgotten, recycled and confused. A problem with forgettable books. But this woman, had she not hennaed her hair, suffered from cancer, smoked Chesterfield cigarettes?

My new beer and shot arrived. “Thanks,” I said, and toasted the tall man. He returned the gesture silently and sipped his new drink, a whiskey and soda. The Irishman received a new screwdriver, as did the barman, and the woman next to me soon had a second vodka rocks to back up her unfinished first one. Vodka rocks was what the woman drank in . . .
Squeam with a Skew
?

“My name's Jas,” I suggested to her, and held out my hand.

“Myra,” she rejoined immediately.

My hand went dead in hers. The name recalled the fictional incident to me. Windrow met a woman called Myra in this very bar in
Cable Car to Hell
, after he found the hanged sailor in the Seaman's Chapel at Fisherman's Wharf. The sailor had been the single thread to tie a nefarious pederast real estate magnate to a series of bath house murders being kept under wraps by the police for fear of a panic in the gay community, and had been wearing women's underwear under his sailor suit. So far so normal. I strained to recall what I could of the conversation ensuing in the bar. At the time of the writing, I'd only visited this bar a few times, and never actually seen a woman in the place, let alone a woman called Myra, with hennaed hair, and drinking vodka on the rocks. Then I remembered another detail. In the course of their conversation, Windrow had asked Myra why she was throwing down so much vodka at ten o'clock in the morning.

“Body's got cancer oughta keep a heat on,” she had replied.

But she had no half tongue, no mechanical larynx.

And, as with the fictional Myra, the real Myra now volunteered some information.

“Cancer,” she said, touching a disk of scar tissue on her throat the size of a silver dollar. I must have been staring. She opened her mouth and an angular appendage darted awkwardly out, a quarter of it missing. It looked like a cutaway illustration in an anatomy textbook. “Got my tongue, too,” she buzzed, rather helpfully, holding out a Chesterfield. “Got a light?” The bartender reached between us and flicked a lighter before I could mutter that I didn't smoke, adding, as if diffidently, nor was I thinking of taking it up.

The other patrons stared silently at the bottles behind the bar and thought their own thoughts.

“You still smoke?” I blurted incredulously. “Didn't, I mean, don't cigarettes have something to do with . . . cancer? Aren't they, ahm, related?”

“So they say,” the woman buzzed, exhaling smoke. “Don't much matter to me, though. Nobody's keepin me warm nights.”

“Now Myra,” the bartender began.

“You shut up, Joe,” she buzzed sharply. “Why should I quit? I lived a good life.”

“That's true,” said the tall man at the end of the bar, with a queer look in his eyes. “That's true . . .”

“But Myra,” Joe began, “it ain't like it's over . . . .”

The woman smiled and I glimpsed a handsomeness in her features that I hadn't noticed before. She sipped her drink. “It was a good one, wasn't it Mike,” she buzzed.

“Aye,” agreed the tall man, “that it was.”

“Don't ye be gettin Irish on me now,” said the Irishman between them with a wink over his drink at me. I smiled weakly, in an attempt not to betray the vertigo flirting with the contents of my stomach. For I was beginning to suspect that I had
made up
the woman sitting next to me. At the time I had endowed her with the ridiculous but catchy detail of being an inveterate chain-smoker who wouldn't quit smoking in spite of the fact that she had cancer. Now, several years later, here she was, apparently quite real, in an acute state of decrepitude well advanced from that in which I'd abandoned her, the moment Martin Windrow had walked out of this bar. But that had been
in a novel
. Not
in a bar
.

I experienced no sense of panic or despair or fear, such as I might have expected. Quite the contrary. A warm sense of community pervaded the bar. The sun
came in the window at my back. The waterfall on the Olympia sign continued to cascade silently. A fly tentatively inspected the edge of the pool of beer widening around the base of my glass. All in all, there seemed to be a warmth about the place that I could only compare to the one I experienced when browsing deep within . . . within . . .

Within the memory banks of the huge Crow Mignon computer.

Things slowed down inside the Shoe Inn, as if my circuits, beginning to recognize the inevitability of a collision, had filled my veins with noradrenalin. A certain ocheroid tinge suffused the air. This was not altogether inconsistent with the normal atmosphere of the place. On the contrary, it made me feel as if I fit in there less awkwardly.

I looked curiously at the tall man. And who was this fellow who seemed to have shared tender moments with Myra, ostensible figment of my imagination? Had I conjured him up too, only to have forgotten? I could not place him. What a brutal godling I must have been, to have discarded these characters only moments after breathing life into them! To have abandoned them to the cruel courses of the utilitarian devices only whimsically and momentarily installed, for the purposes of getting Windrow from one page to another, from the last murder to the next, from the lousy neglected shelf one level up from the floor to the tacky evanescent glory of a dump near the cash register!
Heart of Mercury
indeed!

“Dear Mike . . . ,” the woman buzzed sentimentally, and a tear gleamed in the tall man's eye. “You were such a fool in 1955.”

“Don't despair, Myra,” smiled the bartender. “Some things never change.”

I hastily threw a five on the counter and hurried out of the bar. Two blocks east I entered the newsstand and found four Martin Windrow books among the pornography and romance titles in the back.
Cable Car to Hell
was one of them. Sure enough, inside was a sequence I barely remembered having written.