Man With a Squirrel (17 page)

“Not a clue,” Fred said, leaning back.

“I've seen the woman around,” the driver said. “She stands out.”

“She does,” Fred said. “You know her?”

His driver shrugged. “I don't. But that woman looks like
she
knows who she is.” She followed her colleague's left turn at a garden shop.

“Now's where you make the choice,” she said. “Which is more important in your book, staying with them or not being seen?”

“I want to know their destination.”

There was no one else much on the series of side streets they took, wangling their way toward Putnam Avenue, where they turned left. Manny and Cover-Hoover, sitting in the backseat, were talking together, their heads in profile, Manny on the right, Cover-Hoover on the left, looking like lovers quarreling.

Fred's driver dawdled, allowing a few cars to fall in back of the one Fred wanted followed, to give them a screen. She turned onto Putnam, shaking her head.

“He doesn't, or they don't, know what they're doing,” she said. “You'd get here faster turning left on Mount Auburn, from where we started.”

Fred agreed. “I'd say he was trying to lose us, except…”

“He hasn't checked his mirror once,” the driver said.

At Putnam Circle the Cover-Hoover cab turned left and into Harvard Square again.

“If he's running up his meter he's picked a strange time and place and way to do it,” Fred's driver said.

They saw their object hesitate across the barricade that interposed between them and their starting place. Only a kiosk selling newspapers and the entrance to the Harvard T station prevented them from coming full circle.

“He'll turn left here,” Fred's driver said, herself moving into the left lane before the driver of the lead taxi made the same decision and turned left on Dunster.

“Doesn't know where he's going,” Fred's driver said. “Great, now we're on our way back to Putnam.”

The lead taxi had turned left, which was all it could do since Mount Auburn was one way. At Hay Street they turned right. The meter ticked to seven-fifty. “Back to Mem. Drive,” Fred's driver said. “I guess you could say that figures.”

The lead taxi slowed. Fred said, “Stop here. It's been a pleasure.”

He slid a ten over the driver's shoulder and got out quickly, moving into the shadow of a dormitory building and watching his taxi swing around the one where Cover-Hoover sat still in the backseat while Manny got out and climbed the steps to the porch of a small three-story house.

Manny stood on the stoop and poked with his finger at the buzzer. Cover-Hoover sat in her cab's backseat. Fred stood in his cover. Manny shook his head and came down to the sidewalk as Cover-Hoover leaned across the seat and rolled down her window. There was conversation between them. Manny climbed the stairs and tried the buzzer again, then the next one down, and then the next. The person they wanted was on the top floor, therefore. Manny waited until the door was opened, and it was clear from Manny's distant dumb-show that the question being asked was, “Do you know where he or she on the top floor is?” The door was answering, “Search me,” to which Manny replied, “Then can you tell me when he or she will return?” The door's impatient answer: “Honey, I just live here. This is not my problem.”

Manny, as the door closed, went back to the taxi, and after talking through the window he opened the door and climbed in. The taxi drove away, down to Memorial Drive, where it turned right. Turn right again on J.F.K. and go three blocks, you'd be at the Harvard Cooperative Society again. That'll be seventeen-seventy, ma'am.

Fred, after a suitable pause, ambled to the house Manny had blessed with his unsuccessful attentions. The top bell or buzzer he had first tried was labeled
BLAKE
. A woman, then, keeping her first name to herself.

Fred went back to his cover and waited for two hours. Students moved in and out of the building in whose protection he was standing. No one took notice of him. At nine-thirty a slim woman in her late twenties walked past, glancing toward him briefly. She wore a heavy tan duffel coat and a gay hat imported from an exotic land compelling free labor from its prisoners. She climbed the stairs to the building's entrance, used her key in the lock, and went in.

“Blake,” Fred said. “Unless it's the one on the second floor.”

He gave it five minutes before he pushed the top button. She clattered down the stairs. He could see, through the door's glass, that the woman Blake had taken off her hat and coat. She had long black hair to the shoulders, and a nice face—round, and still bright pink from her cold walk. She was wearing a blue denim dress, black stockings, and black sneakers. She opened the door and raised her eyebrows.

“I want to ask you about the power of darkness,” Fred said.

The woman shrieked a thin whistle, turned sea gray, and fell.

20

Fred caught the woman's head and shoulders before she hit the ground. Keeping down, he moved around her into the hallway and closed the street door, checking the pulse in her neck. His experience, in memory, was warning him of snipers. Her pulse was strong. There was no blood. She only seemed dead. The lady had merely experienced a sudden, irresistible urge to depend upon the kindness of a stranger. She was breathing in a shallow, distant way.

I sure look like a rapist-murderer, Fred thought, standing and scratching his head. The sound of her shriek going down was still loud in his ears, but it had not raised the interest of tenants on the first or second floors. He held the woman's left hand—a narrow and bony one, sea gray as the rest of her—and watched her eyelids flutter open, and then stare and roll. “It's all right,” Fred told her, “I'm just a guy.”

Strands of pink came into her cheeks as if she had been slapped. “Don't mark me,” she pleaded.

“OK,” Fred told her.

The woman eased into the world, shaking her head from side to side. She let her eyes come into focus on Fred's. She made an apparent effort—a stage effort Fred would have said—to pull her left wrist out of Fred's grip. “Victim of Satan, child of God,” she whispered, barely moving her lips. Fred had to squat down to hear her. Her breath smelled burned. “Say it,” she commanded in a tense whisper.

“You want me to put your hand down?” Fred asked.

“Say it, unless you mean to have me here.”
Have
meaning both
possess
and
hump.

Fred said, “If it will relieve your mind. Victim of Satan, child of God.”

The woman sighed and let her eyes close. Her hand relaxed. Fred put it down. Anyone stumbling onto this scene would take her immediately for his victim.

“Take me upstairs,” Fred's victim said.

The hall floor she lay on was dull green linoleum; the walls plaster, papered before the paper was painted off-beige. The door to the downstairs apartment was closed.

“You want me to carry you?” Fred asked.

“I can't move.”

“I'll help you stand. You'll be all right. You only fainted.”

The woman glared. “I am paralyzed,” she said. “For an hour I will not move. It is how he takes me. I am in his grasp.” The woman's black hair, spilled around her face on the floor, accentuated the pallor of her face. “I'm cold. There's wind. There's wind. Carry me upstairs.”

Fred put his arms under her, shoulders and thighs, and lifted her slack weight. She had not lost control of her sphincters (thereby preserving an aspect of her beauty even in a state of unconsciousness); but she was serious about exhibiting loss of control of her voluntary locomotive muscles. There was not a helpful or compensating twitch anywhere. Even her head sagged back. He'd carried dead men who were more cooperative.

“If you want I'll call an ambulance, or rescue.”

“Upstairs,” the woman gasped through her stretched neck. Fred shifted his right arm to give her head better support. “Third floor.”

Fred took her up. The stairs creaked and smelled of disinfectant. They were inlaid with the same green linoleum, and edged with twanging metal. The apartment door on the second floor was closed. Fred's burden had left her third-floor door ajar when she came down to meet him. Fred edged inside, leading with her head, leaving the door to the hallway open.

The room was furnished with an odd assortment of old furniture worthy of being called furniture, as well as gleanings from the sidewalk. A couch looking as if it would open into a double bed, and covered with heroic Herculon in double plaid, took the woman's body after he kneed books off it—paperbacks of a pink Romance persuasion.

“My name is Fred,” Fred told her. He took a red blanket from the floor and spread it over her. She lay completely still. One end of the room gave access to a kitchenette with a table in it, and one chair, off which seemed to be a bathroom. A closed door would give entry to her bedroom, then. This room was heaped with rugs, both stretched and rolled; a desk; Victorian rosewood chairs and a love seat; a file cabinet with her coat thrown over it; and a set of gilded side chairs, four of them, next to each other along one wall under a badly foxed print of Napoleon at Waterloo. It was as grim a place as Fred had been in for some time—like a garage sale postponed indefinitely on account of rain, or war, or both.

“My name is Fred,” Fred repeated. He discarded the idea of using one of the gilt chairs, which he'd likely shatter, and went to the kitchen instead for the one at the table there, which he brought back and sat in, at the head end of the apartment's occupant.

“Sandy,” she said.

“Sandy Blake?” She nodded.

“Sandy, you took a dive when I mentioned the Satan business.”

“They won't let go of me. I'm afraid. They will kill me. He will kill me. He will win. I can't get free.”

Fred said, “I'm taking off my coat and hat.” He tossed them onto the file cabinet, to join Sandy's duffel coat. It was hot in the apartment. He asked, “Do you want me to call someone for you?”

“I don't have a phone. They use it to find you.”

Sandy Blake felt about telephones as Clayton Reed did about answering machines. “It is Satanists you are afraid of?” Fred asked.

Sandy struggled to shudder. Fred scratched his face, worried. The woman in front of him was in trouble and needed help and/or a good kick.

“What do they have against you?” Fred asked.

“Because I left them,” Sandy said. “She put me on the road of loving-caring. And I ran away. No one knows where I am.”

Fred volunteered, “I saw a jar of instant coffee in your kitchen. You mind if I make us some?”

He went into the kitchen and got busy. The place smelled derelict and damp, almost unused. He puttered angrily, rinsing out a couple of mugs and checking the staleness of the milk in the fridge in case she wanted some. If she did she was out of luck.

Fred heard a gasp and turned to see Sandy standing in the kitchen doorway. She had forty minutes left of her promised hour of paralysis. “What are you doing in my apartment?” Sandy Blake demanded. “Who are you? How did you get in? Get out. I'm cold.”

Fred told her, “I carried you upstairs.”

“Out of my apartment,” Sandy Blake said fiercely.

“You got it,” Fred said. He turned off the gas and moved toward her. She swayed in the doorway so that he had to push past her. Blundering in a disoriented fashion, failing to notice the door he'd left open into the hallway, he opened the other door into a bedroom filled with rancid clothing festooned over boxes, trunks, and heaped furniture and silver. The bed was isolated, single, narrow, and empty as a nun's. Otherwise the room was full of things, giving an impression of captured wealth hoarded by barbarians who could think of no way to use it, or which way up it went.

“If you must take me, do not mark me,” Sandy Blake said behind him. She stood in the room's doorway giving a good imitation of a sleepwalker who has got herself into a corner.

“I don't take people,” Fred said.

“He takes me in the air,” Sandy Blake said, speaking in a little voice, almost in baby talk. “He spits me like a little bird and flies with me. I am ruined. I am ruined.”

Fred said, “Sandy, none of this convinces me. I don't buy it. You're working too hard.”

“Tell me how you found me,” Sandy Blake demanded. She pushed past him into her bedroom. There was a narrow passage between chests and upended escritoires, all festering with clothing that seemed to cling to life in symbiotic relation with the junked wealth. She sat on her bed facing him, her knees together, her denim dress in order, looking like Saint Theresa, the Little Flower, arriving early for a scheduled vision.

Fred said, “You know a man named Manny?”

Sandy Blake trembled and bit the ends of her fingers. “No,” she said. “Her and Manny. I figured it out. They're fucking.”

Fred said, “Tell me about Cover-Hoover's operation.”

“You are Satan coming to take me again,” Sandy said. She used a new voice, a rich one, full and operatic. “Because I left the loving-caring.”

“That's horse shit. Satan never took you anywhere. It's none of my business, but get a life.”

Sandy Blake stood, angry. “I will show you his mark,” she threatened.

“That's OK,” Fred said. He had moved somewhat toward her, following her into the room, attracted as to an accident victim it is equally dangerous to help as to abandon by the road.

“You raped me,” Sandy Blake said.

The woman was pure trouble, the loosest of loose cannons. He'd seen as much as he wanted, and turned to go.

“I'll tell them how you raped me,” Sandy Blake warned, behind him. He heard what sounded like a woman's clothes being removed or disarranged. But he stood fixed in his own paralysis, transfixed by what met him when he turned. It was the head: the head he wanted. He stared. It was pinned to the wall next to the door—a loose oblong of canvas with a raw lower edge.