Tightrope Walker Read online

  “I will,” I said, “and thank you.”

  She walked across the street and then she turned and called after me crossly, “And try brushing your hair a hundred strokes a day; it doesn’t have to look like that, kid.”

  It was half-past twelve when I got back to the shop and opened it up again, and by that time some of my triumph and excitement had worn off. The address Daisy had given me was a New York City Park Avenue address, which meant I was going to have to venture still further out of my cocoon and leave both the shop and my city behind me. This turned my victory with Daisy a little sour. I have my own safety zones like everyone else and I found this unsettling, not having visited New York City since I was a child. At the moment it might as well have been Vladivostok or Vera Cruz. I think it was at this point—entering my familiar shop and realizing that the next stop was New York—that I came closest to giving up the idea and accepting the fact that I lacked the iron nerve and stamina for tilting at windmills.

  However, a decorator from uptown walked in soon after that, a nice ginger-haired little man who spent more than an hour poking around the shop. When he left he’d bought two of the merry-go-round horses and a bolt of pre-war emerald-green velvet that I didn’t even know I had. He said he’d be back with a repair man to look at the jukebox, and he left me his card: ENOCH INTERIORS. A link with a decorator was a pretty dazzling prospect. It also reminded me that I would soon be cleaned out of all the good stuff, leaving me with the thirty-two gaudy plates hand-stamped SOUVENIR OF TRAFTON, all those dented coffee pots and cartons of rejected wigs, the cases of violet-colored plastic flowers, and of course those hideous bathrobes of Mr. Georgerakis’. Obviously I would have to pry myself loose soon, anyway, and begin going to auctions; this placed the trip to New York on a practical basis that reduced my anxiety over it. In fact I was feeling confident again, and really quite sanguine about it all, when J. Osbourne, Graphologist, strolled into my shop just before five o’clock.

  “Hello,” he said, looking very neat and professional in a shirt and tie. “I still owe you that written report, it’s part of the deal, so I brought it over personally.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the two neatly typed sheets of paper and placing them on the cash register.

  “I thought I’d find out what progress you made this morning, too.”

  It suddenly felt like quite a bit of progress. “I have another lead,” I told him. “I have a new name.”

  “You’re awfully determined. You know,” he said, frowning, “you look about sixteen years old but you can’t be.”

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  He nodded. “I’m thirty-one. If you weren’t so thin,” he added sternly, “you’d look older. Do you eat enough?”

  “Of course I eat enough,” I told him. “I eat like a horse. I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “I was leading up to inviting you to go out with me to dinner,” he said. “I was hoping you could go. I can offer Italian or Chinese.”

  I felt a stab of panic. It was happening at last and I wasn’t ready for it, I hadn’t even had time to brush my hair one hundred strokes. I’d been planning to walk over to see Amman Singh and tell him about Hannah, but here was someone who already knew about Hannah. I looked at Joe Osbourne and he looked at me, waiting. I felt as if I were poised on the edge of a waterfall and looking over the edge. I heard myself say, truthfully enough, “I’d love to,” and making this jump I wondered if I was going to land on jagged rocks, in a quiet pond or be swept away in the rapids.

  The Chinese restaurant was full of squat, smiling little Buddhas tucked in niches, and the booths were wicker, painted Chinese red. It was very colorful, and of course it was located in his block, not mine. After he’d ordered War Tip Har, which Joe said was highly recommendable, he asked me about Daisy and I told him all about my morning.

  “I can see this is very educational for you,” he said, looking amused. “Daisy sounds like quite a girl.”

  I conceded cautiously that it could be, and that she was.

  “Have you always lived in Trafton?” he asked.

  “Yes, but on Walnut Street, out by the park.”

  “And your parents?”

  “My father died four years ago, my mother when I was eleven.”

  He winced. “I’m sorry. That must have been rough.”

  “It was, a little.” A small shrug. Very casual voice. Bright smile. I know I’m not the only person in the world to whom this has happened, I know there are people being tortured in political prisons and girls my age dying somewhere of starvation, I know this, but it sits there, a bone in my throat, an undigested pain; it happened to me, after all. “And your family?” I asked.

  He seemed to have a family right out of a television sitcom: humorous lawyer father, understanding mother, two mischievous sisters.… That’s what made him so nice, I suppose, and I was realizing even before dessert how very nice he was. He called himself a casualty of the sixties—he’d personally met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he knew all the verses of “We Shall Overcome,” and had been in peace vigils and protests and marches—but, so far as I could see, the only casualty this had produced was the law career he’d planned. He had intended to be a lawyer like his father but instead he’d veered into psychology.

  I was fascinated by this glimpse into another life. “And then what?”

  “Then two years of graduate school, after which I went to Switzerland to study graphology. The Institute for Applied Psychology in Zurich. They’ve trained quite a few graphologists.”

  Switzerland, no less. A real sophisticate. And here I was, edgy about a trip to New York less than a hundred miles away.

  Over dessert—spumoni—he asked if I was going to look up Daisy’s diamond-earring boy friend.

  “Oh yes,” I said. “His name—well, I’d better not tell you that, had I—but he lives on Park Avenue, which you have to admit is a nicer neighborhood than Danson Street. I’ll try to pick up a few things for the shop, too.”

  “So when will you go?”

  I’d had time to think about this. “Probably Sunday,” I told him, “and come back late Monday. That way I can straddle both the weekend and a weekday. I mean, it’s all rather obscure, finding him at home, but this way there’ll be two possibilities. I don’t want to call him first; he might refuse to see me.”

  “Especially when he remembers to whom he gave the hurdy-gurdy.”

  “Yes.” I was realizing, thinking about auctions, that eventually I was going to have to buy a car to carry things, so we spent the rest of dinner talking about cars, and which had better mileage, because I am very energy-oriented. I think ecology is terribly important because this planet is getting so soiled, and you can’t just use a vacuum cleaner on it.

  “Do you know how to drive?”

  “Oh yes, that was one of Dr. Merivale’s projects.”

  “Dr. Merivale?”

  And so we came to Dr. Merivale, and I managed to keep that very light, but I could see the puzzled look in his eyes. I did hope he wasn’t going to be one of those people, but I thought I might as well find out early, and so I asked him. “Does it shock you about the psychiatry?”

  “God no,” he said. “It’s just that you seem—I’m glad you’ve stopped seeing him because I’d hate to see you lose the kind of quirky quality you have. I like it.”

  “Quirky?”

  He grinned. “You keep me guessing. When I asked you to dinner you looked terrified. When I met you this morning on your mission—I daresay having a mission helps, doesn’t it?—you were so confident. You strike me as very honest and direct and warm, a bit of a nut basically—different—but then you bolt. I see it happen: advance and retreat.”

  “I’m very insecure,” I told him.

  “I think that somewhere inside of you,” he said solemnly, “there is a very fat Amelia struggling to get out.”

  I laughed. He paid the bill and we walked slowly back to my shop. I unlocked the door
and we went upstairs to my apartment where I showed him the hurdy-gurdy and he played it a few times. He liked the merry-go-round horse, too. We listened to a few records, not talking much, and then he said he had to type a few reports before morning, because schools were closing and it was his last busy week before the summer’s lull. When he said good night he did a curious thing; he reached out and touched my hair, experimentally, sort of, and then he kissed me lightly on the cheek and left.

  4

  Three days later, on Sunday afternoon, I walked under the canopy of the Heathcliffe Arms on Park Avenue, smiled pleasantly at the doorman and rang the buzzer of apartment 1023, Colonel Morgan Alcourt. I was wearing my high suede boots—rather hot for a May day—and a beige corduroy skirt and jacket. I was frankly trembling in those boots, but I think there must be a little of the actress in everyone, or else when one is terrified the adrenal juices start flowing like mad. A voice rasped in my ear, “Yes, who is it?” and I said over the intercom, “Amelia Jones about a hurdy-gurdy.”

  “Jones? Hurdy-gurdy?”

  “Jones, hurdy-gurdy.” I kept it terse, thinking this might be mystifying enough to get me through the door; if I was asked to elaborate I knew I’d be sunk.

  “Get Alphonse,” barked the voice. “Doorman.”

  I fetched the doorman and he took over. “A young woman, sir, looks very pleasant,” he said, looking me over objectively. “What? Oh no, Colonel, wearing a proper little suit”—he winked at me–“and those high boots the ladies wear now. Something about one of those musical instruments you collect.”

  So the colonel collected hurdy-gurdies; no wonder the word hadn’t thrown him. “Yes, sir, I’ll send her up,” he said, and he winked at me again. “The colonel’s very fussy.”

  “Well,” I said earnestly, wondering what the doorman had thought of Daisy, “you can’t be too careful these days.” On this note I strolled inside, and the elevator soon lifted me silently toward the penthouse.

  When the doors of the elevator slid open I stepped out into a lobby—he had a whole lobby to himself—and a man in a white jacket was waiting for me. Not the colonel: this chap was Asian and looked very remote, very shuttered, as if he’d wiped away every hint of personality along with the lint on the glassware. “This way, miss,” he said; he turned and led me over thick carpeting through a short hallway and into a huge, uncluttered room with a breathtaking view of the city.

  And there was the colonel.

  He wasn’t at all what I’d imagined. He stood about five feet four inches high and the huge room made him look even smaller, a little lost, even pathetic. He stood very erect, but aside from his posture there was nothing at all commanding about him. As I walked toward him I thought he must be shy because he looked at me and then away, then back, then away again and down, as if I’d brought too much light in with me and it blinded him. But when I drew closer I realized that it wasn’t shyness: there was something terribly naked about his eyes, a hurt, pleading look, a begging. If anyone ought to be wearing dark glasses, I thought, it should be the colonel, and suddenly I found it as painful to look at him as he did me.

  “But I don’t know you,” he said in surprise, sounding aggrieved. His voice was well modulated but there was a hint of petulance in it. I was terribly glad he had money, because in some unaccountable way he looked completely defenseless. Or perhaps when you have a great deal of money you don’t accumulate defenses.

  “No,” I said in my best, most reassuring and ladylike voice, “and I’m ever so grateful to you for seeing me, I’m from the Ebbtide Curio and Antique Shop in Trafton. Amelia Jones.” I put out my hand, which he reluctantly accepted, and it was like grasping a damp towel.

  “Mmmm … I see,” he murmured, dropping my hand.

  “I’m tracing a hurdy-gurdy,” I told him, very businesslike and trying to ignore the fact that his eyes had dropped now to my bosom, which he was regarding speculatively. When his eyes remained fixed on my bosom and then ran down to my hips I decided not to be so reassuring. “A Miss Doris Tucci gave me your name.”

  That brought his eyes up in a hurry. He looked astonished, frightened, and then angry, and suddenly he didn’t seem pathetic any more: the anger was quick and nasty. I said hastily, “A Mr. Georgerakis owned the hurdy-gurdy and bought it from a Mr. Oliver Keene, who bought it from Miss Tucci, and Miss Tucci has said she purchased it”—I lingered over that word—“from you sometime within the year. Although she couldn’t recall just how, or where, she did recall your name.”

  I felt I’d now preserved Daisy’s future for her, although my blood ran cold at the thought of her with this man, and I added, “I’m tracing the hurdy-gurdy, it’s terribly important.”

  “Miss Tucci,” he repeated, blinking.

  “I have a snapshot of the hurdy-gurdy,” I said. I’d bought a Polaroid for the occasion and had shot it from several angles; I brought the photo from my shoulder bag.

  “Ah yes … mmmmm,” he murmured, staring at it. “Miss Tucci. Yes, I do believe … I think I met her at a cocktail party, yes.” The anger had been extinguished and he darted a sly, sideways glance at me, perhaps to see if there was irony in my gaze. “But really, you know, this instrument is of very little value except as a conversation piece, I don’t understand your interest. You say you’re tracing it?”

  I was ready for him. I said crisply, “Yes, it’s become both an insurance and a police matter. I really can’t be more specific except that it’s important—very important—to us to find its original owner in the United States.”

  “Mmmmm … I see, yes,” he said, blinking. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t tell you who the original owner was. For myself, I bought it from Robert Lamandale here in New York. The actor, you know.”

  I didn’t know, but I was glad he remembered. I whipped out my notebook. “Could you repeat that name, please?”

  “Lamandale,” he said, and spelled it out for me. “Don’t know where he’s living now but he’s in town somewhere. Very fine old family. Acts in plays.”

  Having watched me write down the name he suddenly relaxed and turned arch. “But I must clear up one detail, my dear young lady,” he said, giving me a glance that could only be described as coy. “That,” he said, pointing at the snapshot, “is not a hurdy-gurdy.”

  “Oh?”

  “Come, I must educate you,” he said, and grasped my arm. He must have decided that if I was unexpected I was at least harmless and could provide him with an audience, although his arm pulled me closer to him than I appreciated. I fell into step with him, and walking practically thigh to thigh we passed through a pair of mahogany doors and into a room that looked like something borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum. Skylights bathed the walls with a luminous, clear pale light, glass-covered exhibits marched down the center of the room, and the walls were hung with all kinds of exotic objects.

  “Now here are your real hurdy-gurdies,” he said, mercifully releasing me. “What you are tracing, my dear, is a hand organ, a mere street instrument, and a complete corruption of the true hurdy-gurdy. Quite different.”

  His lips curled contemptuously, showing small rabbit-like teeth. Obviously he was a purist but I could see his point: there was a difference. The instruments he was pointing out looked like bulky, foreshortened violins or lutes, and aside from the fact that they appeared to have handles at one end there was no resemblance at all to my hurdy-gurdy. Or hand organ.

  “An incredibly old instrument, the hurdy-gurdy,” he said, very much the authority now, “but for most of its life it was called an organistrum. It’s history is so long that I can tell you that Odo of Cluny wrote a treatise on the organistrum in the ninth century. It wasn’t called a hurdy-gurdy until the eighteenth century.”

  “I see,” I murmured, trying to strike the right note of interest.

  “Take a look at this one,” he said, pointing.

  “Good heavens, it’s long!”

  “Isn’t it?” he said, beaming at me. “It measures five
feet in length. Thirteenth century. Two people had to work it, they sat in chairs with the instrument across their laps and one worked the wheel, the other the key rods and tangents.

  “But you can see the growing sophistication as time went on,” he added, darting from one glass cage to another and beckoning me to follow him. “That thirteenth-century hurdy-gurdy had only three strings. By the sixteenth century—see this one?—there were four strings, and over here you see a seventeenth-century organistrum with five strings. In the eighteenth century the instruments were considerably refined. They were given six strings with a melody compass of two octaves.”

  “Amazing,” I said, feeling that I was learning somewhat more about hurdy-gurdies than I needed to know. “What’s that beauty over there?”

  “A vielle à roue—rebuilt lute,” he said eagerly. “The one next to it’s a vielle organisée, with a miniature organ in the body. That’s eighteenth century.”

  “Really lovely,” I said, and they were. They were made of fantastic woods, and carved beautifully by hand. Some had ivory inlays and others were brightly painted. He opened up the cage and brought one out for me to hold.

  “My collection,” he said, watching me, “is considered finer than the one at the Victoria and Albert Museum in England.”

  “But when did they turn into hand organs?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said forgivingly, “they enjoyed a very real upsurge of popularity in France in the eighteenth century until the French revolution came along. That’s when they were called hurdy-gurdies. They were probably corrupted in the next century—the nineteenth—by the Italian street boy who strolled through town with it and in due course discarded it for a form of organ to which he could add a strap and a stick for mobility.”

  “I see.”

  We had reached the end of the room and were face to face with some rather appalling objects hung on the wall. He gave me a sly glance and said, “Interested in torture, Miss Jones?”