Acceptable Losses (18 page)

The man grinned as he took the money. “We was supposed to come this morning because your wife said the cleaning woman would be in the apartment. I’m glad we was held up, because you don’t get drinking money from cleaning women. Here …” He took out his wallet and selected a soiled card. “If you ever need any electrical work, just call us and we’ll come right over.”

“Thank you,” Damon said. “Have a good lunch.”

The man left and Damon looked down at the card in his hand. “Acme Electrical Appliances,” he read. “P. Danusa.” Nice man, Damon thought, I should have made it five dollars. The next time P. Danusa came to the door he wouldn’t be in danger of being hit over the head with an iron poker. Damon put the poker back in its stand and then started out, but stopped because he remembered that when he had changed his clothes, he had emptied his pockets and had left the telltale notebook on the top of the dresser in the bedroom. He got it, saw that it was now dry and put it in his pocket. He had not finished his list. Besides, he couldn’t leave it lying around for Sheila to discover.

When he went out of the apartment, he locked the door with two keys, one for the old lock and the second for the new supposedly burglar-proof lock that Sheila had had installed right after her lunch with Oliver Gabrielsen. She had done it reluctantly, but she had done it. She had balked at the steel door and the lock bar, though. “I refuse to live as though we’re at war,” she had said, “just because of one crazy telephone call. If anyone gets this far,” she added, her Sicilian heritage inflaming her, “I’ll figure out a way to take care of him.”

Damon grinned as he remembered this. It was lucky for Mr. P. Danusa that it hadn’t been Sheila who had answered the knock on the door, poker in hand. Otherwise Mr. P. Danusa might very well be lying on the floor of the foyer at this moment with a broken skull.

Damon walked uptown, keeping his eyes on the pavement so that he wouldn’t recognize anybody, living or dead, young or old, in the passing crowd. He didn’t go directly to his office, but had a hasty lunch and then went on to the electronic equipment store near Fiftieth Street. The clerk recognized him and looked surprised when he asked for a telephone answering machine.

“Didn’t you buy one yesterday?” the clerk asked.

“I did.”

“Is there anything wrong with it? You can bring it back if it’s defective.”

“It’s not defective,” Damon said. “I forgot it in a bar.”

“A pity.” The clerk looked for a long moment at the strip of bandage and adhesive tape on Damon’s forehead, then brought out another machine. “That will be ninety-six dollars and eighty cents,” the clerk said.

Damon gave him a credit card and signed the slip. Danger, he thought as the clerk wrapped the box, is an expensive luxury.

This time he did not go to a bar. He was off bars and drinking, at least for the day. He went back to the office and made no explanations of his long absence to Miss Walton or Oliver, although they both looked at him questioningly.

“What’s that, Roger?” Oliver asked, tapping his own forehead.

“The bump of wisdom,” Damon said curtly, and sat down at his desk and began going through two contracts that Miss Walton had put there for him to read.

Before dinner that night he and Sheila disconnected the extension telephone in the bedroom and attached the answering machine to the telephone in the living room and Sheila recorded the necessary formula—“Mr. and Mrs. Damon are not at home at the moment. If you wish to leave a message, please wait for the beeping sound and leave your name and telephone number. You will have thirty seconds to record the message. Thank you.”

They looked at each other uneasily as Sheila pushed the button so that they could be sure the recording could be understood. Without saying so, they both knew that the machine was a further intrusion into their lives, a capitulation to reality, to the idea that a Mr. Zalovsky existed and had to be warded off.

“The wonders of the modern age,” Sheila said ironically as she ran the tape back. “How did we ever live without it? Now, let’s have dinner.”

She had prepared the meal and the table was set, but Damon said, “I feel like having dinner out. Leave the stuff for tomorrow.” What he didn’t say was that if they remained at home, they ran the chance of just sitting there staring fearfully at the answering machine most of the night.

“You’re sure you’re up to it?” Sheila asked. She had accepted his explanation of the bandage on his forehead, but had noticed that he had taken two aspirin when he arrived home. “No more headache?”

“All gone,” Damon said. He never took drugs at any time and they had to search all over the apartment for an old bottle of aspirin that the cleaning woman had put behind some bottles in the kitchen cabinet. “Also,” he said, “I’d like to take in a movie after dinner. I hear
Breaker Morant
is playing in the neighborhood, and everybody who’s seen it gives it the highest marks.” With the dinner, the movie, and a couple of drinks in a bar after it, they could stay out until nearly one
A.M.
Six or seven hours of respite, engaged in the problems of creatures of fiction, not in their own.

They had a good dinner and Sheila, as always when she dined out alone with Damon, was at her best, vivacious and full of bright anecdotes about the children and their mothers at the nursery school. They were in a good mood as they settled themselves in their seats just in time for the beginning of the picture.

The movie was all that he had been told about it and more, and they both watched it fascinated, like two privileged and awed children. Damon believed that they were seeing a masterpiece. It was a word he almost never spoke and rarely thought, but he could tell by the tense silence in the crowded theatre that his opinion was being shared by the rest of the audience, which broke into applause as the picture came to an end, something he had never seen or heard in the routine running of a movie in a neighborhood theatre. Sheila, whom he didn’t remember ever weeping in a theatre, was crying at the end, when the two soldiers, sitting in chairs on a wide field, outlined against the rising sun, were executed by the firing squad.

God, Damon thought, brushing at his own tears, what a glorious thing talent is and how often it is misused. Even though the movie was about the corrupt processes, the callous political purpose and the blind, omniprevalent malevolence of the race of man, which led to the inevitable deaths of the two officers, he could feel the surge of elation and gratitude in the people around him. Catharsis through pity and terror, he thought, even though perhaps only a handful of spectators in the theatre had ever heard or read the phrase.

But after the showing was over and they had gone to their local bar and were sipping their first drinks, Damon began to reflect somberly about the movie. Magnificent as it had been, he thought, it was not the night on which to see it, at least not for him. Of course the two actors who had gone calmly and courageously with disciplined soldierly dignity to their deaths must have stood up from where they were lying after the
coups de grace
and the director had called, “Cut.” They would have been laughing, joking at something someone had said, had undoubtedly gone off in high spirits to have a celebratory beer, since it was an Australian production, and prepared to learn their lines for the next day’s shooting.

What jokes was he ready to make, what were the lines he might prepare for tomorrow, what director was on hand to shout, “Cut” and stop the action?

In the past few days, he felt, he had been steeped in death and thoughts of death. Zalovsky, with his warning, Harrison Gray, whose name turned out to be George, Antoinetta and. Maurice Fitzgerald, Gregor with his neutron bomb, Melanie Deal, victim of a drunken driver. Masterpiece or no, he would have been better off if he had bought tickets for some inane musical comedy in which nobody died and which ended happily in a blare of sound as the curtain came down.

He felt the bloodstained notebook in his pocket. That was reality, not the formula for pre-Christian Greek playwrights; there was terror there in his pocket, but no pity and no catharsis.

Sheila, too, was subdued and he guessed that her thoughts were very much like his. Sensing this, he put out his hand and took hers. She squeezed his hand hard and tried to smile, and he saw that she was near tears.

When they got home, it was past one o’clock. As if by magnetic attraction, their eyes were drawn to the answering machine. “Let’s go to bed,” Sheila said. “Leave the damned thing alone until morning.”

It had been a long and tiring day, and Damon fell asleep almost immediately, cradling Sheila’s warm, naked body against his own. Sheila, shield, he murmured just before sleep overtook him.

His dreams tormented him and he struggled to awake. When he did, he was trembling. Carefully he moved away from Sheila, who was sleeping peacefully, and got out of bed. He put on a woolen robe and went barefooted into the living room. He didn’t switch on the lights, but sat himself at the desk in front of the window and looked down on the empty street below. The clock on the desk stood at four o’clock.

The dreams came back to him. He was dressing for a funeral and was putting on his dark blue serge suit for it. There was a button loose at the end of the sleeve, and he tugged at it to take it off so that he wouldn’t lose it. The button didn’t come off, but the whole sleeve came away in his hands from the middle of the forearm down. In the dream, he remembered being slightly amused at it, but waking he was not amused. Rending garments, he remembered the producer, Nathan Brown, saying over the phone when they were talking about Maurice Fitzgerald and the reaction of the woman who had answered the phone in his flat in London.

Damon shivered. Sleep was not as Shakespeare had described it, knitting the raveled sleeve of care.

Another dream, which had come to him immediately after that one, like a quick dissolve in a film, had been more puzzling. It had started, he remembered, ordinarily enough—he had lost his wallet and had searched all over for it in a large house he did not recognize. He had met his father coming down the stairs. His father was a young, hearty man and he, himself, was his present age, but that had seemed of no moment in the dream. With his father, there had been his dead brother, Davey, but not as he was, aged ten at the time of his death, but a grown man who unaccountably had turned into Lieutenant Schulter, overcoat, blue jaw, ridiculous small hat and all.

He had explained that he had lost his wallet and that there were some things he had to buy and he needed some money. His father had laughed and had continued walking down the stairs, carelessly saying, over his shoulder to Lieutenant Schulter, “Davey, give the kid some dough.” Schulter had taken a little plastic gadget out of his pocket and handed it to Damon. “There’s some change in there,” he said and followed the father. Damon looked down at the peculiar change dispenser, but could find no slot or lever to get whatever coins out that were in it. He had run after his father and Schulter, crying that there couldn’t be enough money in the machine for him to do the shopping he needed to do and anyway, there was no way to reach in and get it. His father and Schulter were climbing up a snowbank piled up to the side of a road and neither of them looked back as Damon tried to get to them, as he kept slipping back off the icy embankment, his voice ringing desperately in his own ears.

He had almost awakened then, but sleep had seized him again, just as he had felt he was swimming up from the depths of some element with which he was not familiar to a light far above him on the surface, and he sank once more.

He must have slept calmly for quite some time after that, because the dream that followed was not linked as the other two had been. He couldn’t remember how the dream had begun but suddenly he was conscious that he was bleeding, not from any one wound but from almost every pore of his body, his forehead, chest, belly, penis, his knees, ankles and the soles of his feet. The dream had been so vivid that when he awoke, he immediately ran his hands all over his head and body to steam the wild flow of blood. His hands had come away dry. He had lain stiffly in bed for a few moments, listening to the sound of Sheila’s placid breathing, wondering how with the turmoil taking place so close to her she could still continue to sleep.

Do you believe in precognition?
Precognition of what?

Then he had gotten silently out of bed because he knew there was no more sleep for him that night.

He was still sitting like that at seven in the morning when the alarm went off on the table next to Sheila’s side of the bed and he had heard her go to the bathroom and the sound of running water. Then Sheila had appeared, yawning, in her blue bathrobe, and had come over to him, kissed the top of his head and said, “Good morning. Have you been up long?”

“Just a few minutes,” he lied.

“Did you sleep well?”

“Like a top,” he said.

They both looked at the answering machine attached to the phone on the desk. “Well,” Sheila said, “we might as well find out if anybody called.” She looked at him anxiously, and he knew that she wanted him to say it could wait until later.

“Might as well,” he said as casually as he could.

Sheila switched on the machine. It played back her voice, then they heard the beep and after that a man’s voice, one that Damon had only heard once but knew that he would always be able to recognize, came on. “This is Zalovsky, Mrs. Damon,” the voice said. “The message is, tell your husband I am on his tail.”

Sheila turned the machine off. “Marvelous invention,” she said, “isn’t it? Bacon and eggs?”

“Bacon and eggs it is,” Damon said.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

“I
’M CALLING YOU EARLY
so I could reach you before you left for the office,” Sheila said on the phone to Oliver Gabrielsen. It was more than a week since they had had lunch together. “Is your wife there?”

“She went out to get some fresh rolls for breakfast,” Oliver said, “thank God. I have to talk to you, too. I was going to call you at the school.”