Tightrope Walker Read online

  The last letter collapsed under my eyes, the h ending in a long shaken stroke that dropped several inches below the line, as if the pen had slipped, as if a voice had been heard, or a step approaching.… I pictured this unknown Hannah trembling—as I was trembling now—folding up this paper, holding it a moment, wide-eyed as she looked around a room for a hiding-place, and then the quick move to the hurdy-gurdy with its loose back panel, and the slipping of it through the crack.

  What kind of person would own a hurdy-gurdy? The paper on which the words were written was faded but it was the kind of cheap yellow paper you can buy in any stationery store, a ream of it for two or three dollars, called “seconds.” Cheap yellow fades fast, so that didn’t mean a great deal. The handwriting looked sensible, and it was certainly legible, even if the words ran together a little toward the end. There was that paragraph, too; I didn’t think I would have bothered with a paragraph if I knew I was going to be murdered any minute. The handwriting was a little small but not cramped. What kind of person was this? I wanted to know. My wanting was so strong it astonished me.

  Sometimes when I’m in a certain mood I’ve looked at life from a great distance, like peering at it through the small end of a pair of binoculars, and I wonder about it. The whole business seems very strange to me, just one shot at threescore years and ten, and for what? I mean, there has to be a reason for being here; even no reason is a reason. One of Amman Singh’s stories is that we’re on this planet because there are gods and demons in the universe who are numb to feeling, and so they send us here to watch our antics and feel violence through us, vicariously, because it’s violence that feeds them and keeps them alive. And the only way to escape being “eaten,” as he calls it, is to study violent emotions, detach oneself from them, and so cheat the gods and demons. Well, why not? People do seem to make such a botch of living: killing and squabbling and rejecting and hating, as if life’s some kind of toy to play with or destroy. Somehow we all end up victims, and the horror of it is that we’re victims of each other.

  And now I was meeting another victim.

  What kind of paper had they wanted her to sign?

  She couldn’t still be alive. The hurdy-gurdy had been mine for several weeks and before that it had belonged to Mr. Georgerakis.

  This woman didn’t know me, and I didn’t know her, but she must have gone to her death thinking about me, taking comfort from the thought that she had left these words behind her and that someone would find them. It said so right here: “that would make Death less lonely.” She wouldn’t mean death itself, she would mean those frightening moments just before it happens, when a person feels nakedly alone and unknowing. She must have clung to the thought of me then as one last final hope, a small candle flame in her midnight.

  How had they kidded her, these people she called the clever faceless ones? Had they really managed her death so that no one knew she’d been murdered?

  Would that be possible?

  I placed the piece of yellow paper on the table and walked into the kitchen and poured water into a pan and measured instant coffee into a mug. I felt really shaken, finding a thing like that in the hurdy-gurdy. The old clock on the shelf told me that it was half-past ten. It was so quiet in these two rooms over the shop that I could hear each tick, like a heart beating, and then a truck passed on the street outside and blurred the silence. The kitchen was very plain: oilcloth tacked to the wall behind the sink, and scruffy linoleum on the floor. No counter top but a long old wooden table with knife cuts on it, scrubbed clean; an ancient gas stove, two sets of homemade wooden shelves for groceries and dishes, and a really decadent refrigerator that snored peacefully for days and then suddenly vibrated wildly until I gave it a kick and put it to sleep again. The bath was off the short passage to the living room, and very much the same.

  Coffee in hand I returned to the living room, carefully avoiding the slip of yellow paper that I could see waiting for me out of the corner of my eye. The coffee grounded me, it returned me to the present: so did Pegasus, standing guard next to my couch-bed, his head high and mane flying. I went to one of the two windows and opened it and looked out. The street was silent and empty but not dark; this was a street where other people lived over shops, too, the family across the street who ran the secondhand book store, the dressmaker next to them, the Nearly New Clothes Shop beyond, and the palmist, Madame Helen, above that. The lights were bright squares: one by one I watched them extinguished.

  I thought, “There must be some way to find out who wrote that note.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffed the contrary half of me, “it could have been written years ago. And she didn’t even give her name.”

  “She gave half of it.”

  “You think she gave half of it. It could just as easily have been written by a man named Hannahsburg or some such.”

  “But the note was written, it doesn’t matter by whom.”

  “Yes, and the person who wrote it is probably walking around alive and sound at this very minute. Don’t be a fool.”

  “If she’s alive, then why didn’t she recover the note and tear it up?”

  “Too much trouble, of course. The nightmare was over.”

  “I’m familiar with nightmares,” I pointed out dryly, “and they are not ended so easily. She wouldn’t have forgotten that note.”

  “Then if you believe she’s dead, what’s the point of trying to find out anything about her?”

  “It’s a responsibility.”

  “Don’t be a fool. Dr. Merivale said you’re much too imaginative, and don’t forget that streak of the morbid in you. Next you’ll be saying it’s a hand reaching out to you from the grave.”

  “There’s nothing gravelike about that letter,” I argued. “I think she valued life, and I admire that. And she addressed the note to me. She wrote it to whoever found it and I found it, didn’t I? And there’s no one else to care.”

  “Then you just might tell me what you think you can do.”

  And of course I hadn’t the slightest idea.

  I turned from the window and looked at the room behind me. In this room I’d affected my environment, as Dr. Merivale would phrase it; he was always urging me to affect my environment. I’d sanded the bumpy old plaster walls and painted them off-white, and a man had come in with a machine to refinish the hardwood floor. It was a room that pleased me very much: there was Pegasus rearing up beside the couch, a Buffet print on the wall, a yellow beanbag chair, a thick rug in primary colors, a number of plants hanging from the ceiling in rope bags—and of course the hurdy-gurdy against the wall beside my banjo. This room was my cocoon now, its shining white walls and bright colors were what gave my downstairs life in the shop a lovely dimension. I didn’t want to lose the sensuous delight of creating more of this—I hadn’t even begun on the kitchen. I didn’t want to turn my attention elsewhere, which I would have to do if I went plunging out into the world to look for a woman who had written that she was going to be murdered, and who was probably dead now, anyway. Where would a person begin if they decided to look?

  I filled my garden sprayer with water and walked around absent-mindedly spraying my plants for the second time that day. After that I placed Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto on the phonograph and lay on the floor and listened to it, and when that ended it was midnight and I fooled around a little with the banjo, plunking out “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” and “Little Maggie.” Attention is a funny thing: when I meditate I can concentrate on an imaginary candle flame and reach a point where I see all kinds of lovely flashing lights on the periphery. That’s what I was doing now, concentrating on the banjo and hoping I’d find something off on the side.

  But already in the pit of my stomach I knew that I was going to do something. I had to, don’t ask me why.

  At two o’clock I turned off the light and climbed into bed and lay down, and then I got up and turned on the light again, and looked up two addresses in the phone book, one of
them in the yellow pages. Feeling better, I set the alarm clock and returned to bed. I had expected to toss and turn, and frankly I’d expected a nightmare or two—at the very least that hand reaching up to me from the grave—but I slept soundly and serenely until the alarm woke me at seven.

  2

  Mr. Georgerakis met me with a scowl at the door of his apartment. He was wearing one of the Indian blanket bathrobes from the shop which he must have bought in volume years ago because there were still a dozen left, and the price changes on their tags were as long as a grocery receipt, moving from $12.99 to $2.00, all with artistic slashes. I can’t say that the garish colors did much for Mr. Georgerakis’ figure, which was shaped like a Chianti bottle, his considerable weight having dropped between his hips like a woman in the last month of pregnancy, leaving him a thin man at the top and a plump one at the bottom: it made for an interesting line.

  He gave me a baleful stare. “I warned you business was slow, you can’t tell me I deceived you.”

  I hurried to explain that I hadn’t come to complain but to ask about the hurdy-gurdy, and by the time I’d finished explaining I realized I’d taken him much too seriously: he was looking amused, a twinkle in his eyes, as if he found me very funny. “Come in and sit,” he said. “Sit and have a cup of coffee. You took the stairs too fast, you’re too young for a fifth floor walkup. Only old men like me can manage such a climb.”

  “How do you manage it?” I asked.

  “Slowly, like a climb up the Matterhorn. Sugar? Cream?”

  “Black,” I told him, “and thank you very much, Mr. Georgerakis.”

  He peered at me from under his heavy gray brows. “You’re a very polite young woman, Miss Jones. Loosen up a little, you’ll live longer.”

  “I’m trying,” I told him.

  “Try harder. Now what’s this about the hurdy-gurdy?”

  I’d worked out what I felt was a convincing little story. If politeness was my severest affliction at that time it was also, I’d found, a very good smokescreen for telling a lie. Nobody doubts anyone who’s polite; it implies a tremendous respect for authority. I told him that a customer was very interested in buying the hurdy-gurdy but first wanted to learn its history from the original owner. “I’m hoping you can remember who you bought it from so I can trace it,” I told him.

  “Remember, no,” he said.

  Damn, I thought, and suddenly realized how much this had begun to mean to me.

  “But look it up I can,” he said, blowing into his cup of steaming coffee.

  “Look it up?” I said dazedly. “You mean you have records ?”

  He gave me a reproachful glance. “These I offered to you at the lawyers’ office. You should yourself keep records, because of the police. Sometimes things that people sell are hot, stolen, illegal.”

  I vaguely remembered his saying something about this. At the time it had seemed unlikely that anything in the shop was worth more of a fuss than the bathrobes marked down from $12.99 to $2.00, but I had been grateful for the names of the auction houses at which he’d found the merry-go-round horses, and had let it go at that. “Then do you mean there really is a possibility—?” My hopes, which had nose-dived, crawled up one rung of the ladder and hung there, waiting for his reply.

  He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Maybe yes, maybe no.” Getting to his feet he opened a door in the passageway to the front door and went into another room. I heard the murmur of a woman’s voice, which surprised me because at the time I bought the shop from him he was definitely not married. Maybe he still wasn’t; it gave Mr. Georgerakis a new and interesting facet.

  A minute later he padded back, closing the door behind him and carrying a black notebook. “It was six, maybe eight months ago,” he said, thumbing through the pages, and nodded. “You’re in luck, sometimes a customer gets huffy about leaving a name, but this one I knew. One hurdy-gurdy, a hundred dollars, November nine … Oliver Keene—he’s been in before, usually to sell me paintings when he’s broke. Painter chap. Buys old costumes for his models, too, when he’s in the chips. I don’t know where he lives.”

  “Oliver Keene,” I repeated. I took out the small spiral notebook I’d bought on the way and copied down the name, my heart beating faster at this triumph. I really felt pleased; I couldn’t forget the horrified feeling that had struck me when I thought for that moment that Mr. Georgerakis couldn’t help me. I said, “This is wonderful—I really appreciate it.” Putting away my notebook I asked innocently, “You live alone here, Mr. Georgerakis?” After all, the hurdy-gurdy had been in his possession for six months and I wasn’t taking any chances.

  He rolled his eyes heavenward. “If I lived alone would I sell you my business? Of course not. For ten years I climb these five flights courting Katina. With twelve thousand dollars she marries me.” His twinkle was back; he was really a funny man now that I understood his deadpan humor.

  “That’s very nice,” I said, walking to the door with him. “I hope you and Mrs. Georgerakis will be very happy.”

  I thanked him again and left, heading at once for the telephone kiosk at the corner, where I looked through the K’s. There was an Oliver Keene living on Danson Street, and I copied down the address. After that I went to the post office and Xeroxed two copies of Hannah’s note, and carried them to the park where I sat down on a bench. I’d brought scissors with me; I took one of the Xerox copies and cut out parts of two sentences: I was so tired and hungry but this morning I know … and then, should anyone ever find this my name is Hannah.… After doing this I walked back to Fleet Street. It was just nine o’clock, and there were no customers waiting for the shop to open. I hung a BACK AT NOON sign on the door and walked south to find 901 Fleet Street, the address I’d looked up in the yellow pages the night before. I would never have thought of consulting a graphologist if I hadn’t passed the sign innumerable times on my way to Amman Singh’s. I’d noticed it months before, and out of curiosity I’d looked up the word in the dictionary, just to be sure: the study of handwriting, it said, for the purpose of character analysis. In the yellow pages the man sounded professional: Joseph Osbourne, followed by the word ACCREDITED, whatever that meant—or by whom—and CONSULTANT. I was hoping he could tell me something about the person who’d written the note.

  A distance of six blocks in a city can make as much difference as Dante walking in or out of his Inferno. My block on Fleet Street was a bazaar full of secondhand this and thats, uncertain whether collapse or renewal lay ahead for it, surprisingly prim in its values, still relatively crime-free but hanging on by the skin of its teeth. On sunny days the block looked picturesque, on rainy days forlorn; it trod a very narrow line.

  The 900-block had an uncanny resemblance to the 600-block except that it had been shored up, laundered, dipped in paint until it sparkled, and I could guess that its rents were triple that of mine. It even had a few trees, not very old yet, planted among the cobbles. Joseph P. Osbourne, Graphologist, was on the second floor of 901, over a doctor’s office that occupied the first floor. I walked up steps that grew progressively shabbier and dustier until by the time I reached the second floor I felt quite at home. On the landing I was met by three doors, all wide open: one to a lavatory, another to an office with desk and chairs, the third a sunny back room that to my practiced eye was obviously J. Osbourne’s living quarters. Since the office was empty, I knocked on the open door in the middle and peered inside.

  A muffled voice said, “Who is it?”

  The voice seemed to come from a sort of tent occupying the middle of the room; at least I couldn’t think what else it could be since it was about five feet high, came to a point like a teepee, and had a sheet loosely thrown over it. It was at this moment that I felt a prescient stab of terror at what I was getting into. It simply hadn’t occurred to me, it really hadn’t, that this quixotic search of mine was going to mean knocking on strange doors and meeting people, in this case someone under a sheet. I remembered Dr. Merivale’s speeches on Affecting
My Environment, and Amman Singh’s gentle fables about Letting Go, and their words felt like balloon captions over my head that came together and exploded. I wondered if the man under the tent had heard the explosion. I stopped trembling and said crisply, “Amelia Jones, needing information, please.”

  The sheet stirred, one corner was lifted, and J. Osbourne crawled out and stood up. “It’s early,” he said accusingly. “You shouldn’t just walk in.”

  “I knocked,” I reminded him.

  He wasn’t much older than I was, and I wasn’t sure he was J. Osbourne. He was wearing blue jeans and no shoes and a wrinkled denim shirt. He had a nice open boyish face, with the skin very taut over its bones, which were arranged into interesting angles. He had dark hair and blue eyes and a thin, intense look about him. He stood there running one hand through his hair and frowning at me. “I work by appointment,” he said, “and you’ve no appointment.”

  “You’re Mr. Osbourne then? I thought you’d be older.”

  “I am older sometimes,” he said.

  I didn’t find that surprising; it seemed a very sensible remark to make. I said, being curious, “Do you sleep under a tent?”

  “It’s not a tent, it’s a pyramid. I was sitting under it meditating.” He grasped the tent’s apex with one hand and lifted it; it collapsed into vertical rods which he leaned against the wall, sheet and all. “It’s a port able one, made to an exact scale of the Cheops one in Egypt.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You’ve heard about pyramid power, of course?”

  “Of course,” I lied. “It just looked like a tent from where I’m standing.”

  “Well, you might as well stop standing,” he said grudgingly, “and explain your popping in like this. I hope you don’t mind if I scramble an egg, I’ve not had breakfast yet.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t an emergency.”

  He moved to the stove, cracked an egg into a frying pan, stirred it with a fork and turned on the heat under it. I looked around me. With the tent—the pyramid, that is—removed, it was possible to see the room itself, and I liked it. There was a wicker rocking chair painted canary yellow and upholstered in blue oilcloth. There was a mahogany church pew with a denim cushion, and a desk made out of file cabinets and plywood. One wall was covered with oil paintings, framed sketches, maps, and books. It was a bright, cheerful room, just disorderly enough to prevent pangs of inadequacy in me.