After Dachau (7 page)

I WOKE
the next morning with the sudden, clear presentiment that I was taking on far too much with this woman. Now that I had a foot in the door, I needed to get her reconnected with her family, otherwise I was in danger of ending up as a sort of unofficial guardian, or something worse (though I wasn’t sure what that might be).

I had visions of my arriving at her condominium to find her gone, God knows where, and it would all be my fault. I’d be accused of murder, kidnapping, or running a white slavery ring. In fact, she wasn’t gone when I arrived, but the actuality wasn’t a whole lot better than the fantasy. Before she even had the door all the way open, she was screaming at me.

“I can’t stand this, I’ve got to get out of here!”

“Have you had anything to eat?”

“I’m not talking about eating, I’m talking about getting out of here!”

Still standing outside the front door, I gave her a confident, manly smile and said, “Look, Mallory, we can do both those things. Let’s get out of here and go find someplace to have breakfast, okay? You may not need sustenance, but I do.”

“All right, I’ll get a coat—but don’t come in.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll sit down or something.”

So I stood there on the stoop till she was ready. I was so flummoxed that it didn’t even occur to me that I could have waited in the car, where I would have looked and felt marginally less ridiculous.

Though she claimed
to have no appetite, she attacked a plate of eggs and bacon as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. Unfortunately, having a full stomach didn’t seem to improve her outlook a whole lot. I was beginning to wonder if Gloria MacArthur had died in childhood. It would explain Mallory’s evident lack of maturity, but I hesitated to ask, knowing how suspicious she was of every question.

It came to me that a heavy irony was at work here. For the first time ever, I’d made my way into a case early enough to safeguard the evidence, but precisely because I was so early, I couldn’t get anywhere
near
the evidence. The subject was preoccupied with more elemental matters, and it was going to be days, if not weeks, before she was ready to help me with the investigation I’d come to make.

I asked what she was thinking about her future.

“What do you mean?” she asked in reply—evasively, I felt, since she was plainly thinking about nothing else.

“Well, for example, do you plan to go back to your job at the library?”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know where to find the goddamn place, much less do the work.”

“Then how are you going to make a living?”

“There’s some money in the bank,” she told me. “Mallory was a saver.”

“That’s nice. It gives you some time to think.”

“Yeah,” she agreed sullenly.

“Your family may be able to help.”

She gave me a disgusted look. “My family’s dead.”

“Mallory has a family, and as far as they’re concerned, you’re Mallory. You’ve got to get used to that. It’s a fact that’s not going to go away.”

“It can go away as far as I’m concerned.”

“What have you got against them?”

“They’re—” she started, then caught herself.

“They’re what?”

“Weasels. Warts.”

I wanted to tell her they couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that, but I knew I’d be wasting my breath.

We were on our third postprandial cup of coffee. I had no idea what was supposed to come next, and she didn’t seem disposed to enlighten me. I considered telling her I was going back to New York City and she could get in touch when she felt like it, but I was afraid she’d think that was fine.

Finally I said, “I take it you don’t want to go back to your condominium.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

“I want to find someplace else to live.”

“What kind of place?”

On that point she was standing mute.

“Where do you want to look? Here in Oneonta?”

“What’s the point of that?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know. It’s here, it’s handy, and, like it or not, you’ve got all sorts of connections here, including a bank account and references.”

She shook her head.

I signaled to the waitress for the check. “Look, Mallory, I’m glad to help, but I can’t read your mind. We can’t just sit here drinking coffee for the rest of our lives.”

“I know,” she said, giving me an anxious look. “What would happen if we went to New York City?”

“What would happen? We’d be there instead of here.”

“Then let’s go there.”

At last it was my turn to shake my head. “Maybe someday, Mallory, but not now. Not unless you get together with your parents and let them know what’s going on. I’m not taking you outside Oneonta unless they’re in on it.”

She glared at me and said, “You’re a fink.”

“A what?”

“A fink. Don’t you know what a fink is?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

She shrugged. “I guess it’s slang of a different generation. It means you’re on the side of the big shots. You know which side your bread’s buttered on.”

“You mean because I want your parents to know where you’re going?”

“That’s right. You won’t take my side against them.”

“Why should I, for God’s sake? You shouldn’t be making enemies of them—and I certainly won’t
help
you make enemies of them.”

“All right,” she said, getting up. “I’ll stay in fucking Oneonta.”

“SO,” I SAID
, once we were back in the car, “what does staying in fucking Oneonta mean? Do you want to get a paper and look for rentals or shall I just drive up one street and down the next?”

“Let’s look around downtown,” she replied.

Oneonta is one of the ancient cities of the Northeast, proud of the fact that it has remained steadfastly small and old-fashioned. When its elderly brick buildings crumble, they aren’t so much replaced as re-created, and the locals say the venerable bandstand on Main Street has been there from the outset (though by now every stick of it has doubtless been replaced many times over).

A railroad freight line roughly parallels Main Street a few blocks to the south, and a Railroad Avenue parallels the
tracks in the eastern section of the city—and this dismal lane, faced with warehouses and factories, seemed to strike Mallory as especially promising.

“You’re not going to find any housing down here,” I told her.

“I’m not looking for housing.”

“Then what? Are you planning to open a paper mill?”

She withered me with a scornful look.

After taking down the numbers of several agents with property in the area, we were heading off to find a phone when we accidently stumbled on a building that satisfied her heart’s desire. Unlike most of its neighbors, it was a single-story structure, concrete block, with tall lattice windows, advertised to be twenty-four hundred square feet. If the peeling sign on the facade was to believed, it had once been home to Wilson Mackie Wire Products.

“You can’t seriously think of
living
there, Mallory. It won’t have anything like a kitchen or a bath.”

“I know how to live without a kitchen or a bath,” she said darkly.

It wouldn’t be exactly true to say that that was that. The real estate agent was happy enough to show us the building, which was surprisingly clean inside, but balked at giving her a lease. He wanted either six months’ rent in advance or a cosigner—“a grownup,” as he undiplomatically put it.

“Not me,” I said, when I saw her gaze swivel in my direction. “Not a chance.”

She thought a moment, then reached for her checkbook.

“You shouldn’t do that,” I told her. “Contact your parents. Let them cosign with you.”

She hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second, then wrote him out a check for six months’ rent.

It was a strange development, but it had its points. On the lease, Mallory had acknowledged having a residence (her condominium), her parents (as references), and a place of employment (the library). Despite her habit of denial, she was willy-nilly beginning to forge some links to the present.

Mallory had
different ways of being silent, depending on whether she was furious, just wanted to be left alone, was self-absorbed, or was uneasy about how her next move was going to be received. The silence that swallowed us up as we headed back to the condominium was of the last type, I sensed, and she confirmed it when we arrived.

She no longer needed my services. She was ready to take up life on her own. She wanted to be left alone, at least for the time being.

“It’s going to take a lot of work to make that wire factory livable,” I told her. “I’ll be glad to help, and it’ll go a lot faster with two pairs of hands.”

She shook her head. “You’re always dragging me back, always telling me what I’ve got to do and what I can’t do. Every single thing you think I should do is something I don’t want to do, and every single thing I want to do is something you think I shouldn’t do.”

I had to admit she had a point.

“You just wear me down,” she went on.

“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it.

“You’ve got to—” Mallory paused, blinked, and made a sign with her right hand. “I can’t think of the word, the expression.” She made the sign a couple more times, watching as if the hand itself might reveal the word she wanted. “It
means, like, you’re paddling the boat north and I’m paddling it south. All we’re doing is wearing each other out.”

“I understand what you’re saying, and I agree to a certain extent, but I don’t think you’re being fair. You wanted to get out of the hospital, and I helped you with that, didn’t I?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“You wanted to redecorate your apartment, and I helped you with that, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“You wanted a new place to live, and I helped you with that too. Everything you’ve gotten done in the past two days is something I helped with.”

“Yeah, all right,” she said, disgusted. “But this is what I want to do next. I want to put together my own pad. I suppose that’s dated too—‘my pad.’ ”

“It is, but I understand what you mean, from the context.”

“Will you help me do that?”

“Do what?”

“I said I want to put together my own pad. Will you help me do that?”

“Yes.”

“Then go away for a week. This is something I’ve got to do by myself. I
want
to do it by myself. Can’t you dig that?”

I smiled, feeling oddly flattered to be initiated in this way into the secret code of her antiquated slang.

“I can dig it completely,” I said, feeling a bit idiotic.

She giggled, and I guess my heart gave a little surge of delight. “You don’t dig something
completely
,” she explained. “You either dig it or you don’t.”

“I dig it,” I said—and felt a boyish flush burn across my cheeks.

IN THIS WAY
was I banished from the one place on earth I really wanted to be. I wasn’t in a mood to go home and start making explanations to my parents, and I certainly wasn’t going to hang around Oneonta like a spurned lover. The only other place I belonged was with Reggie and Marcia Fenshaw in Tunis, so I went there. The moment I began to be enfolded in their grubby, nicotine-saturated cheeriness, I realized that Mallory (or rather Gloria MacArthur) would undoubtedly be much more at ease with them than she was with me.

Even when they finally understood that I wasn’t bringing back barrels of evidence and testimony, the Fenshaws insisted that my return was a signal for celebration. A vacation from “work” was announced, though I knew that, for them,
this would be more a penance than a holiday. After two days of fairly nonstop revelry, they began to fidget, and, pleading exhaustion, I retired to my apartment near the ruins of Carthage.

Tunis has never outgrown its exotic reputation, and visitors expect to be able to hear the muezzin’s soulful cries on the morning air or to wander in a spicy old
madina
on a sultry afternoon. They’re disappointed to find themselves in a rather commonplace French city that nowadays would seem perfectly at ease on the other side of the Mediterranean looking out on the Golfe du Lion. In fact, this explains its attraction to the Fenshaws, who belong to that special breed of very, very British types who are much more at home among the French than anywhere else.