The Reflection (22 page)

I stood on the corner, staring after the car, long after it had swept down the dark avenue. It had been heading south, and I chewed over that fact for a minute or two, but in the end could surmise nothing in particular from it. To get out of this part of town, a vehicle could only realistically go north or south. I continued peering down the avenue, though, as if I might spot something important if only I looked hard enough. On every corner of every Manhattan street were those canyon-like vistas, where you could see forever down a straight line to a vanishing point, like a lesson in perspective.

I was in turmoil: deflated that I’d lost Esterhazy, exhilarated that I’d seen him with D’Angelo. I was invaded with the feeling that I’d already solved the Esterhazy case—not in
its particulars, but that I’d divined the essence of its structure. The connection between Esterhazy and D’Angelo I’d seen with my own eyes; I had documentary evidence of the connection between Untermeyer and the Stevens Institute. Bridging these two relationships was my own experience in the hospital, and the mysterious visit from Untermeyer. It was a structure that could generate only a limited number of stories. It almost didn’t matter which I chose.

I’d come early. Even so, I was too late. I’d wanted to be there before she arrived, but I could see Dora Morel through the glass front of the bar, dressed stylishly, sitting in the very same booth that Marie and I had shared months before. A waiter passed by and bent down toward her. She looked his way momentarily but then shook her head and said something very quickly. The waiter shrugged his shoulders and moved on. Even without hearing it I could interpret the exchange well enough. We’d made a date, but she was going to wait until I was actually there before getting a drink, in case I didn’t show and she wound up having to pay for it. I didn’t resent her for that, but I hesitated before going into the bar. For a moment the glass that separated us seemed like a screen, as if I were watching a scene from a movie that I was about to enter. It was a mirror too, projecting my own faint image back onto me. Hair combed and slicked back, wearing Stevenson’s smart dark jacket, I looked like neither Manne nor Smith, but an apparition hovering between the two.

“Miss Morel?”

“So you’re the mystery man.”

I took off my hat and sat down opposite her. As always, I felt exposed bareheaded, with nothing to pull down to hide my face when I felt the need. I was aware of her looking me up and down, but I didn’t note any particular reaction to my scar in her frank gaze—not the tiny, involuntary wince I sometimes detected in people I’d just met. No hint of recognition, either.

“What’ll you have? What do you say we get a couple of martinis?”

“Swell. You know what? Are you hungry at all? I haven’t had a thing since breakfast.”

“Sure. Let’s eat. They say the steak is good here.”

In fact I wasn’t hungry, but it might have made her uncomfortable to dine alone. I complimented her on her appearance; as we waited for the food the small talk flowed effortlessly, as if from a banal script that we’d already been over together. No mention was made of the circumstances of our meeting. We were playacting a date, when of course we both knew it wasn’t that. I imagined the Dickensian man from the agency calling her up: “Strange thing happened this afternoon. Big-shot businessman drops by the studio. Pulls out that
Look
spread you did from his pocket, asks who you are. Long story short, he’s fallen for you and wants to meet you! Good for a meal at least I’d say. That’s if you want to take the chance …”

“Tell me a bit about yourself.”

“Not much to say. Just a girl trying to make a living in the city. I do some modeling and take some acting classes. Guess I’m trying to break into the theater.”

“You’re French, right?”

“Ah … my father’s French, yeah.”

She didn’t look it or sound it. I doubted Dora Morel was her actual name anyway—it was too mellifluous to be real. There was something exaggerated about her, from the circumflex eyebrows to the provocative strapless gown that was a touch too dressy for the place. Even the way she held her cigarette seemed too self-conscious, as if she’d only just learned to smoke. I could see the look she was aiming at: a cross between a movie starlet, and the femme fatale such a starlet might play. But while her Mrs. Esterhazy had been consummate, her Dora Morel seemed less assured.

“And what about you?”

“What do you want to know? I’m in business. Been in insurance all my working life. I’ve got a young son, he’s the other love of my life. Sometimes he’s with me, sometimes he’s with his mother, across the river.”

“You’re divorced?”

“Amicably. She’s over in Park Slope. I’m in Sutton Place …”

The date patter came to me easily enough. It wasn’t strained, the way Manne would have done it, to ratchet up the intensity. It was more in Smith’s style, if Smith had been a career professional, more smoothly urbane, more practiced at putting the other person at ease. As I conjured up the details of Stevenson’s life for her, they took on a subjective reality—believing in my own performance was somehow necessary to it being a good one. No doubt that was true for Dora Morel as well. And perhaps her act was more subtle than I’d first given her credit for. In fact, she wasn’t playing a femme fatale badly. Rather, she was doing a fine job playing a would-be actress playing a femme fatale badly. A young woman, sitting alone nearby, got up and left. As she swept past our table, I thought I caught fleeting eye contact between her and Dora Morel. Probably a friend Dora had gotten to keep an eye on her: “Got a blind date with this guy. May turn out weird. If you can be
there when he comes, then I’ll give you a signal when I know it’s all right.”

I’d been talking about Stevenson’s lakeside home upstate, about the canoeing there in midsummer. We’d finished the steaks; Dora had ordered a desert. There was a tiny break in the conversation, a moment of perfect balance. We could be nearing the end of the evening. In the next twenty minutes, I could be paying the check, helping her with her coat, walking her home or finding her a taxi …

“There’s a movie theater just around the corner, on Broadway. If you like, we could probably make the nine o’clock session …”

“That’s a great idea,” she replied.

I watched her as she ate her chocolate cake. The fact that I hadn’t ordered a desert, and that she’d gone ahead anyway, underlined the relationship. She’d played it close to her chest. She’d talked enough about herself, and yet there was almost nothing to hold onto. An hour in her company, and I still didn’t know where she’d come from, where she lived, any particular detail that would have individualized her, distinguished her from the thousands of other pretty young women one saw every day on the streets of Manhattan. In fact, this very lack of particularity distinguished her. The one constant, from Mrs. Esterhazy to Dora Morel, was her accent, which seemed to come from nowhere.

It was only a five-minute walk to the theater. On the way there, as we crossed the street, I touched Dora’s lower arm in a way that was an invitation for her to seek out my hand, and when she did, I instantly knew that she meant to sleep with me that night. I got tickets and we found seats up at the back, just as the newsreel began to roll. Something was up with it, but it took me and the rest of the audience a few minutes to realize that. The wrong newsreel had been put on. This one
was years out of date. There were stock shots of Nazis, and Berlin prior to its destruction, bustling with crowds. Eventually people in the movie theater began to laugh, then boo when images of Stalin, backed with friendly commentary, came on. The lights went up, the reel was stopped and replaced. I’d bought tickets to the latest Hitchcock, but there were a couple of movies screening. We must have accidently walked into the wrong one, because what we ended up seeing was a mediocre weepie, about a showgirl who falls in love with a returned war veteran. A date picture, in other words. As the characters flickered across the screen, Dora rested her head on my shoulder and I put my arm around her. I wanted her, or perhaps Stevenson wanted her. Because Smith was surely after something else.

We didn’t talk afterward; we wandered dreamily through streets that were fairly empty even on a Saturday night, this being a quiet corner of the Upper West Side. We passed by a cheap hotel I’d once taken Marie to. I asked Dora if she wanted a last drink in the bar downstairs, and she nodded. But once we were inside, a jazz band started up, making conversation pretty much impossible.

“Let’s rent a room for an hour and get the drinks sent up.”

We signed in and made our way upstairs. The room was clean enough but simple and functional, just a bed, a couple of chairs and table, a single print on the wall by way of concession to decoration. Minutes later a bellhop arrived with a couple of glasses and some whiskey. I wondered whether Dora would think it strange, going to this slightly seedy hotel, when I was a wealthy, divorced insurance executive with my own apartment. Of course, she’d never have believed that story in the first place. I wasn’t divorced. My wife was probably waiting for me in the Sutton Place apartment. And we couldn’t go anywhere more salubrious, in case I was recognized.

She’d gotten out of her dress and was in her underwear, drinking whiskey. I put my arms around her and we kissed for a while, but it wasn’t working. We stopped for a moment, sat down on the bed together and drank more whiskey. I wasn’t sure what was bothering me. I hadn’t drawn the curtains and through the window I could see into another hotel room opposite. It, too, was occupied by a man and a woman, in all likelihood about to go to bed together, the woman also in her underwear.

“Do you like your work? Do you enjoy modeling?”

“It’s easy money. I don’t want to do it forever.”

“What about acting?”

“I like it better. It’s what I want to do.”

“Did you ever get asked to do something out of the ordinary?”

“Like what?”

“Like, maybe impersonate someone.”

“Don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“I mean, get paid to pretend you’re someone else, to fool someone.”

“Um, no I don’t think so.”

“You’re sure about that? You never worked for the police? You never …”

“Entrapment? No. I don’t know why you’re asking me all these questions. Is this some game?”

I could see the change in her face, from one moment to the next. I could see her decide that she was a whole lot less sure of me after all. In fact she was eyeing her dress on the floor, transparently wondering whether she could reach down for it and put it back on without upsetting me.

I’d played it all wrong. There’d been no hurry, and yet I’d hurried into it. We could have finished the evening pleasantly; we could have dated over several more evenings; we could have
settled into a comfortable pattern, until I was sure she trusted me. But there was no way I could reel it all back in now.

“Esterhazy. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“Ester-what? I don’t know. Tell me exactly what you want from me.”

The atmosphere had turned chilly. I could feel another Dora coming through, another mask. There’d been the case—it had been all over the papers—of the so-called “hotel killer,” a charmer who had asked out girls, took them to cheap hotels, then strangled them and made off down the fire escape. Perhaps Dora had read about it. I was tempted to say something about it, to reassure her, but then I realized it would only make things worse. I pressed on.

“A man named Esterhazy. Lying on a mattress, probably drugged. You were playing his wife. In an apartment, somewhere downtown, Lower East Side. The police were there. I was there. You must remember it.”

“I don’t do entrapments. I don’t do drug busts. I don’t do the wayward husband stuff. Or anything like it.”

“I don’t know what story they fed you. I was there, and we talked, don’t you remember?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You must. Last year, you must remember, think about it, think, think,
think!
”

She was staring at me wide-eyed. In my agitation I’d stood up, but then immediately realized that it could be taken for a menacing gesture, and so I sat down again without moving from the spot. It must have looked like a bizarre thing to do, and if it didn’t break the tension, it somehow changed the power dynamic. In any case, it emboldened Dora to get up and retrieve her dress. As she pulled on her clothes she started gabbling, the words spilling over each other. Her hands were barely trembling, but they were trembling nonetheless.

“I don’t know. Who knows? I may have done something like that. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you the details, I don’t remember. I have no recall. People ask me to do all kinds of crazy things. There you go. But I gotta go. Thanks for the great evening. Thank you. Now I gotta go.”

“Wait. Wait!”

I could have physically stopped her. I could have frightened her enough for her to have told me whatever I wanted. Her footsteps echoed up from the stairwell and I looked around the hotel room. The impression of her body on the bed was still apparent; a twisted, lipsticked butt was smoking in the ashtray. I looked out the window to the hotel room opposite, but its light was now out.

Sunday morning. I lay in bed an hour longer that usual, feeling neither tired nor well rested. As I stared at the picture of Doral Morel pinned to the wall, the events of the previous night came back with a hallucinatory intensity. There was a gnawing feeling that I wouldn’t be here in this apartment much longer, a few days at the most. I imagined the landlord from the agency banging on the door and then forcibly entering, after he hadn’t received the month’s rent. Magazines stacked about the place, dirty clothes in a basket, a half-empty tin of coffee, a business card, a book opened on a certain page. Why were things as they were? Why had I kept this and not that? I cast about for anything of Marie’s, any evidence that she’d stayed here, but could find none.

It was a cold, crisp, bright day. The sun seemed directly above the city, its light allowing no shadows. I went out onto the street without any particular destination in mind. Lately I’d been doing this a lot, spending my days wandering the city, restlessly seeking some sort of stillness in motion. Images
from the night before continued to replay in my mind. The shots of wartime Berlin from the wrong newsreel superimposed themselves on the streets before me. That city was gone, it no longer existed—I’d seen the photos of Berlin’s ruin, mile upon mile of rubble. Cities seemed solid, dependable things, their landmarks fixed points on the landscape. In reality, they were as transient as the wind. I passed a blind man with his white stick. He wasn’t wearing the normal dark glasses and I could see his dead eyes, completely white, as if they’d entirely swiveled around and were staring inward.