Blood Music (6 page)

Mary Ellen's embarrassment was forgotten. “But the paper already printed her name,” she said eagerly. “In the Metro edition. Didn't you hear? It was on the radio. They originally printed it but they got a lot of flack from the police and the girl's family, so they printed a Metro Extra edition. They never did that before. So only about eighty thousand copies got out with the name in them.”

Suddenly John's heart was pounding. He didn't think he could breathe.

“No, I didn't know,” he said. “Do you have that edition?”

“No, I don't get up that early. I think it's terrible they printed her name at all, don't you?” But John had gone.

He went to the newsstand in the lobby of his office building but they only had the Metro Extra edition.

“Excuse me, but do you have any copies left of this morning's Metro edition?” he asked the Middle Eastern man behind the counter.

“We have only what you see. All others are sold.”

There was an Eastern Newsstand in Grand Central, where John used to buy the French and Italian editions of Vogue for Cheryl. (“I like to see how much too fat I am for Italy,” she'd say; Cheryl was very slim but like every woman she thought she was fat.) What if Mary Ellen were wrong and it wasn't called the Metro edition? He knew about the Late City, that was the last one. There was a Sports edition maybe, or was that the
Daily News
? Did they have any more copies of the first edition? The Metro edition?

“We sold out of that this morning.”

There was another Eastern Newsstand at the other side of the building. “We don't have any more of that edition. You like later edition maybe.”

There were two newsstands on the first floor. “Only what you see there.” “We have no more of that.” They sold magazines and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble in the tunnel next to the subway. There was no
Post
at all. “I don't know, if it's not out we don't have it.”

“Are you sure?” Every place he went, “Are you sure?” Because maybe they weren't sure, maybe they just didn't want to bother and the name was there, behind the counter, carelessly folded, discarded in a corner, with a ring from a coffee cup obscuring the name of the only person who could help him.

There was a newsstand at the corner of Forty-Second and Vanderbilt. A newsstand at the corner of Forty-Second and Madison. A newsstand next to the Forty-Second Street Library on Fifth Avenue. A newsstand down in the subway, or was there? John paid his fare but couldn't find it. The city had taken out most of the subway newsstands because they were robbed so often. Cheryl had told him that the newsstands were good places to stand beside on the platform, because she felt safe there.

There was a newsstand at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. A newsstand at Sixth and Thirty-seventh. John walked in a daze. It was lunchtime. He didn't quite bump into anybody because New Yorkers have a kind of inborn radar coupled with an extreme dislike of being touched. Nobody turned to look at John when he almost bumped into them; there was nothing special in the vacant face, the thoughtless step. There was a newsstand at Thirty-fourth Street, at Thirty-second. John began to think that maybe he would not be able to stop walking, to stop asking. “Do you have—do you have—” “No.” “No.” He stopped at a street corner, not because he saw the light but because everybody else stopped. A woman standing next to him was carrying a copy of the
Post.

“Excuse me, is that the Metro edition of the paper?” he asked her.

“I don't know.” The paper was folded to the gossip on Page Six.

“May I look at it a moment?”

“I guess so, sure.” The light changed but she did not move as the crowd flowed around them. Page three, John's fingers fumbled and he stopped at the article. “—released last night from St. Vincent's Hospital.” John looked at the woman waiting for him to give back her paper. About twenty-two. Pretty. Blond.

“You shouldn't be talking to me,” he said roughly, shoving the paper into her hand. His fingers were black with ink. “I could be a murderer.” He turned his back on her shocked and frightened face.

There had been so little hope, just one woman who had seen the man's eyes, and now there was no hope at all.

T
he woman used to sing the boy songs from
The Threepenny Opera.
Her memory was prodigious, she sang from
The Threepenny Opera
and she sang “All the Pretty Little Horses” and Mother Goose rhymes and things he didn't know what to call,
la-la
-ings from the music where they sang, there was one about a butterfly lady and one about a funny word that ended in “mouse.” And she read to him from all kinds of books; his favorites were stories from Finland about fat little animals called Moomintrolls. Sometimes in Finland it was night for months at a time.

When he cut himself she would sing nonsense rhymes to him while she cleaned the wound and put a Band-Aid on.
Seesaw, Margery Daw, which is the way to London Town?
He couldn't bear the sight of his own blood.

The man hit the woman. He was afraid of the man. He knew he shouldn't be: he should love him. But he didn't.

When it was just him and her alone together, she sang. “Und der Haifische, der hat Zahne, un die tragt er im Gesicht.” And they danced. (Her legs were covered with blue and yellow and purple bruises, and she danced so gracefully around the linoleum floor in her bare feet.) There was a piece of music she used to put on the record player when she didn't feel like singing, he never could remember the name of it, it was harder than the Haifische even, but his mother told him it was the music the universe moved to.

She taught him the names of the notes on the staff:
E
very
G
ood
B
oy
D
oes
F
ine. And, to make him laugh, how to tune a ukelele:
M
y
D
og
H
as
F
leas. (Sometimes there was a blue or purple bruise around the delicate skin of her eye.) He could say the major scale by the time he was four years old: Whole step, whole step, half step, whole, whole, whole, half. He thought of the notes going up the steps, they were wide stone steps like the steps of a staircase in a castle, and when she played the music the universe moved to, he thought about all the beautiful frantic notes going up, up, tumbling up stone steps to the top of the universe.

The man hurt the woman. The boy wanted to grow up so he could make him stop. “When you grow up,” she said, “you can take care of me.

“When you grow up,” she said, “we'll go to London to visit the Queen.”

H
e was driving on the Long Island Expressway. It was six thirty-five in the morning; he'd just stopped at a 7-Eleven off Exit 25 and bought the papers. He had a Styrofoam cup of coffee propped up next to the shift bar; he shook it with the top on and pried a triangle out of the plastic top. Lots of sugar, that was good.

It was still night in his head. The ride last night past the old train yards on the Jersey side, the hypnotic yellow lights in the tunnel, the low ceiling. There had been another ceiling, it was the last thing she saw. For some reason he always thought of that in the tunnel. His wife was at home sleeping; he had come in at two-fifteen, just before the baby woke his wife. The baby ate at nine and again at two thirty-five. Every night, two thirty-five. He had lain beside his wife and then he had left before dawn.

After the tunnel the dark streets. Park the van on Perry, two blocks in from the water. He never planned his kills, but he was always ready. The tarp laid out in the back of the van. The hunting knife in its holster on his belt. Mud on the license plates, tape across the logo on the front doors: Wyche Electric.

Should he go to the hookers tonight? The moon was full above him as he parked the van, white through the crazy silhouette the maple branches made. The hookers were always a risk. Some of them weren't even women. That one who blew him a week ago, then it was a boy. Young—sixteen, seventeen. With a black eye and a busted cheekbone after he got through with him.

So lovely she had been, high fine cheekbones like blades; a man could slice his tongue on them. Slanted Latin eyes, rich dark hair. Blond could never put its mouth on him—a sacrilege, an obscenity. But her—heavy makeup, red red lips, slim-hipped. She was small, so small, he could have broken her back with one hand. And then, in the van, her mouth. Expert forgetfulness, mechanical—he liked that. The whores' professionalism pleased him, their lack of sentiment. Their knowledge of their place. The whores down by the Holland Tunnel would do it for five dollars; they were a sorry lot of crackheads, old by eighteen, by twenty dead and gone. The small Latin one had worked him professionally; he caressed her dark hair, held her neck, and found some surcease from pain.

And when it was over she had smiled with blotched lips and offered him horrible things. Had cupped a delicately clawed, red-fingered hand to her own crotch and outlined the bulge hidden there, and had offered things no woman can offer.

A sickening, a tightening in the belly, sharp disgust. Screaming, DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? not seeing anything, a fist slamming into the soft eye socket, the sharp deceptive bone in the cheek. He had not sliced his fist on that bone; he had heard the bone break.

He had not gone back there for a long time after that, until last night when he had heard the call of the shadowed loading docks. He always wanted the hookers dark. Dark, black hair and dark, dark eyes. Dark for inconsequential pleasure. But last night he had wanted light.

After he parked the van he walked and waited. Not far, if it was meant to be she would walk right up to him. Sometimes he couldn't wait, last night he'd relieved himself right on the street, facing an old brownstone wall.

When he saw her he knew she was meant to be his. The papers said every full moon, but he didn't really think so. There were nights and nights when no blond woman passed by.

This one was walking alone, north, on Washington Street. Eleven-twenty. There was a passage—hardly a passage, an intimation—in Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the Pastorale, just before the thunderstorm starts, a three-note intimation. He found himself humming it now,
da-da-de,
as the girl walked toward him up the block, now in shadow, now her hair lit yellow under the yellow light from the street lamps. Just before the full fury of the thunderstorm hit: what had Beethoven waited for that made him able to write that phrase?

She was close now, just two houses away. He couldn't see her face. Only the blond hair stirred him. He could remember this much: the knife falling through the air had looked enormous.

Just one house away now. He waited, perfectly coiled, unaware that he was smiling. He wished women had never started wearing sneakers everywhere they went, he missed the romantic echo of high heels on cement. He would have liked to hear that lonely, fragile clack along the sidewalk. But she made no sound.
Da-da-de.

As she passed him he rose, silent, inexorable, and in two steps he was upon her, one hand over her mouth, the other around her waist, lifting her back and down to the shelter of the basement enclosure.

They almost never tried to scream. His wife had told him a story once, about how when she was eleven she went into the bathroom at the neighborhood library. The bathroom was down a flight of stairs at the end of a long corridor in the basement. As she went down the steps she saw a man standing by the front door—a big man, dirty, with construction boots. She slipped past him down the steps.

When she was in the stall she heard footsteps coming down the hallway. She was not surprised when they came into the ladies' room, not surprised that they headed toward her stall, not surprised to see a pair of construction boots stop underneath the stall door. A large, veiny hand came over the top of the stall, shook it, disappeared. The boots did not move. She scrambled in her little eleven-year-old's pocketbook for a weapon. A nail file. If he tries to go under the stall I can poke his eyes, she thought. If he tries to go over I can poke his hands first, then his eyes. The big hand came back over the top of the stall door. The door shook, held, shook and held. After a long time the hand disappeared, the boots disappeared, and the boots' heavy tread receded away along the corridor.

She had not thought of screaming. She had had the presence of mind to arm herself, to form a plan of defense. But she had not thought of screaming. Even when she opened the stall door and instantly found herself running full-tilt up the stairs to the lobby (having lost forever the time it took her to leave the ladies' room and run down the hall), she didn't think of screaming. And she told no one. Every woman had a story about terror. It was part of them.

He had pulled the woman down the steps and wrapped his hands around her throat. As always he loved the smoothness of a woman's neck. A woman's skin was always softer than his memory of skin.

She had lost consciousness so quickly, and he had been seduced by her motionlessness. He had forgotten her.

She kicked him. Just before the moment of ecstasy, just before the knife. She rolled away and flung her leg like a javelin; she brought her knee up and butted his stomach. In his shock the knife had hung lifeless in his hand. He had not thought she would act. She had kicked him then, hard, between the legs, and pain as exquisite as an orgasm had rocketed from his groin to his brain.

He could not imagine how she'd gotten away. To have broken the tableau, to have moved out of step—his head hurt and he thought of the same thing over and over. His uncle, who had raised him after his parents died, slapping his face again and again and saying, “Lazy, stupid, lazy, stupid,” again and again, and his own head turning with comic jerks, like the head of a marionette.