Mallory's Oracle (10 page)

She made quick notes on the time his last student arrived, and then pulled her mail out of the canvas book bag. She looked at the letter she should have opened yesterday, weighing it in one hand. She knew, without opening the envelope, it was another request from Robin Duffy, lawyer and longtime friend of the small family that wasn't one anymore. She would have to do something about the house in Brooklyn, Duffy would say for the third time. She jammed the unopened letter into her pocket.

Not yet.

She wasn't ready to walk through the front door of the old house and sit down with the hard fact that there was no one home and never would there be.

In some dimension, Markowitz was continuing on, but not in any afterlife. Heaven would not do; it was beyond belief. She could believe in old radio heroes for an hour or more, but there were limits. Yet Markowitz had to be somewhere.

She had never returned to the small café down the street from the station house. She avoided walking on that block in the morning hours, when he might be eating breakfast there ... continuing on. How could she go back to the old house in Brooklyn and not see him there, if Markowitz was to continue on outside the dark hole in the cemetery lawn.

She also continued on in her own usual way, wondering what she could do to bug his eyes out and give him a new story for the Thursday night poker game, which would always begin: “Let me tell you what my kid did this time.”

 

Samantha Siddon nodded her white head at the doorman and walked slowly up the street to the next block, brandishing a silver-handled cane. She hurried along the sidewalk with a trace of a limp and the fearful memory of a bad fall which had broken one hip. The bone had taken forever to mend, and the onset of arthritis had increased her agony. She would rather be quartered by four swift horses than suffer a second fall. She never went anywhere without the cane, which bore a lion's face and lent her a little courage.

She was soon well out of the calm of Gramercy Park and into the surrounding alien atmosphere of Manhattan, taking shallow breaths, mistrusting this air. She hailed a cab and gave the driver a midtown address. Samantha was pleased and stunned to have a traditional New York cabby, a native son with a Brooklyn dialect who took risks on every block, defying death to swerve through lane changes and beat each yellow traffic light. When she stepped out of the cab on Madison Avenue, it was well ahead of the appointed hour because she had anticipated a driver who translated addresses to the wrong side of town.

With fifteen minutes to spare, she stood on a busy street corner near a public telephone and watched the parade of surefooted children of commerce marching on the avenue with the hard slaps and clicks of flat-soled shoes and high heels, eyes fixed with terrible purpose, prepared to trample old women, toddlers, anyone who impeded them on their lunch hour. Though she knew she could buy and sell any one of them with a day's interest on her capital, they terrified her. One careless shove and she might spend the rest of her days in traction or a wheelchair. The days of the walking cane were numbered as it was.

As the minutes passed by, these ideas fell away from her. When the public telephone did ring, she was ready, more than ready.

She whispered into the receiver, though the pedestrian army of that avenue was hurrying by at a heart-attack clip not conducive to eavesdropping. Her words were lost in the noise of a passing bus followed by a police car, its siren opening with a panicky scream and then switching into the nagging mode of ‘Hey, get out of my way, come on, come on, move it, move it.' And at last, she was screaming to be heard above the hustle of the throng which looked through her and moved around her, and never noticed if she had two heads or one.

Her step was quicker as she walked away from the pay phone. This small intrigue had made her young again, though the bank window threw back the crawl-paced reflection of an old woman with a hump on her back.

 

Mallory arrived at the campus theater just behind Gaynor. She stood on the top step and casually perused the playbill set in glass to one side of the entrance. Again, she read the words she knew by heart, and gave him three minutes through the door before she followed him.

She knew this building well from student days when she had attended Barnard College productions in its small theater. That had been another life, and when she thought back on it, it was almost as though it had happened to someone else. Some other girl had sat alone in the crowd while the babble went on around her in another language belonging to a different species of animals with bubbling mouths and the softer eyes of prey.

She entered the shoe-box lobby as Gaynor was disappearing through the door which led into the theater. A young woman stepped between Mallory and this door. Hands on hips, the woman tossed back her long frizz of brown hair, which might pass for long waves of rusted steel wool.

“You can't go in there,” said the woman, in the attitude of a combative poodle which had no idea how ridiculous it looked.

This woman might be all of twenty years old, and Mallory could not miss the fact that the frizzy brunette was smaller, lighter in the framework, and had no gun. She moved past her.

“One more step and I call campus security.”

Incredulous, Mallory paused and faced the poodle down. “So? You and I both know the response time for campus security is forty minutes or never.”

A snicker came from the side, and the salvo was meant for the poodle. A baby-faced boy in a denim shirt and dungarees leaned one arm on the ticket counter. He stared at Mallory as he lit a cigarette and dangled it from his lip. He tipped the wide brim of an old felt hat to her, and then lowered the brim to a rakish angle. She approved both hat and boy with the slight inclination of her head.

“We're in dress rehearsal,” said the poodle, still glaring up at Mallory. “No one but cast.” She sniffed the air, and catching the scent of the smoke, her head whipped around, followed out of sync by her body as she turned on the boy. “Put that cigarette out immediately!” Her eyebrows smashed together. “It's against the law to smoke in this building.”

“But, Boo, I don't actually mind breaking the law,” said the boy. His smile was charming, a child's smile.

“Put it out this minute!”

The boy bent down to stub his cigarette out on the worn sole of his shoe, but he continued to hold on to it. The unwillingness to waste the cigarette told Mallory this was a fellow scholarship child, here on merit and not family money.

“I'm ushering tonight,” said Mallory to the poodle who was called Boo.

“Why didn't you say so? Here,” she snapped. “You can start folding the programs.” She pulled a cardboard box from the ticket counter and thrust it into Mallory's hands. When the younger woman had made her stiff exit through the stage door, Mallory turned to the boy.

“Boo? That's a name?”

“No, we call her that to jerk her chain. Bending Boo out of shape is an art form around here. You weren't half bad yourself.” He relit his cigarette and smiled. “So, since when do ushers attend dress rehearsals?”

“I'm the overzealous type.”

“Or crazy for punishment. I wouldn't go through it again if I wasn't in the cast.” He sat down on the wooden bench and motioned her to join him. “Is it me, or does it seem a little nuts to use radio scripts in a visual medium? Does this work for you?”

“Well, it won't work for the ‘Shadow' script. You can only see the Shadow on the radio.” She settled the box on her lap and checked her watch. “Did I see Professor Gaynor go in there?”

“Yeah, a few minutes ago.”

“What's he doing here?” She already knew. His name was on the playbill which had been posted on the cork wall in her den.

“Old Boo snagged him for the role of the radio announcer.”

Mallory set the box of programs to one side and stared at the double doors on the opposite wall. This, as she remembered, was the route to the balcony. There should be a staircase beyond those doors. During the daylight hours, she had never lost track of Gaynor for more than ten minutes, and she was bordering on that now. How many exits were there?

Boo came back to the lobby. She was in a foul mood by the ugly line of her mouth. When her eyes lit on the hapless smoking boy, she was reborn.

“You put that cigarette out this minute!”

Boo turned on Mallory, who slowly picked up one program and folded it in half with great concentration.

“Here.” Boo held a roll of red tickets entirely too close to Mallory's face. “You can number the comp tickets, too.”

The red roll and Boo's hand hung in the air, ignored by Mallory, who showed no enthusiasm for numbering tickets. Boo opened her mouth to say something as Mallory looked up at her with narrowed eyes. Boo shut her mouth quickly, as though she had been told to do it, and sat down on the far end of the bench and began to number the tickets herself. Always better to do it yourself if there's even the remote possibility of having your authority challenged. Or possibly she had just remembered that she was only twenty and had no authority.

Mallory checked the pocket watch again. He'd been out of her sight for ten minutes, hardly time enough to kill an old lady and make it back for the dress rehearsal, but she didn't like it.

The boy took the tickets from Boo's hand. “I'll do it.”

The boy was relighting his very battered cigarette as Boo was passing through the lobby door to the theater. Mallory stood up quickly and crossed the room toward the double doors on the other side of the lobby, missing the expression on the boy's face as he looked up suddenly in the belief that she had vanished by magic.

She ran up the wide staircase, long legs spanning three steps at a time. She had only gone this way once before. As she recalled, it was tricky without a flashlight. The stairs wound up and around for two flights, and then a small passage led her down five steps of total blackness and into the second-tier balcony. She settled into the covering dark while Boo was commanding the lights from center stage down below. Two young women were seated in the front row, ten feet from the stage, consulting over a clipboard. They were dressed like Boo in the Barnard uniform of jeans and cowboy boots. A very un-Barnard redhead was standing stage left in a dress that hemmed midcalf above stiletto heels. A young man with slicked-back hair and a forties-period suit sat on the edge of the stage, dangling his out-of-period running shoes. Boo, legs akimbo, hands on hips, screamed for the light cues, and with each call a different part of the stage was illuminated until number twenty-two blew the fuse and the theater went black.

 

Samantha Siddon consulted her wristwatch. In one hand she grasped the silver lion's head of her cane. She was aware of the person behind her before she heard the footfalls. All this day, she had had the sense of something momentous looming, an invisible behemoth. Now it was approaching, the moment was almost here. It was enormous in the felt wake of its coming. It was death.

The pain of her arthritis made her slow to turn around, and she was even slower to focus through the thick lenses of her glasses. Confusion added to the obscuring clouds in her faded brown eyes.

“So it's you,” she said. “How odd, how very odd.” She stared at the knife. It occurred to her to scream, but it was a listless thought, and she had no real heart for it. Her cane was rising to feebly block the first strike, and she had a bit of time to realize this was only the reflex of life itself, which was stubborn even when its vessel was not so set on its continuing.

 

Boo strode onto the stage with a toss of her frizzy mane, which would not toss nicely but only lumped to one side.

“Where's the lighting tech?” she called into the dark of the theater, shading her eyes with one hand and lifting her face to the second-tier balcony above Mallory's head. “It's getting late!”

And where was Gaynor? Mallory wondered. Another two minutes had passed. She'd give him two more to come out from backstage, and then she would go hunting.

Boo strutted back and forth, ordering more light cues, one through twenty this time. The lights went on and off, up and down. She screamed, “Jonathan! Where the hell are you?”

Yes, where? Mallory wondered, going on nineteen minutes, where are you, you son of a—

Gaynor ran onto the stage. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat. His tie was loose, and he had garters on the sleeves of his shirt. And something else was radically changed. There were no jerky thrusts to his elbows, and his feet agreed to carry him in the same direction without the usual starts and stops. He made a low bow and kissed Boo's hand, neatly pulling off that gesture without looking the fool. He suddenly had style, thought Mallory. This must be what they called acting.

With the easy grace of dance steps, Gaynor quickly climbed the platform's rickety stairs which were begging for an accident, so poor was the knocked-together construction. He sat down in a straight-back chair before a desk. At the center of the desk was an old-time microphone with radio call letters crowning the top. The platform had a built-in sag toward stage right.

Boo screamed for the next cue and the houselights went down. “Where the hell is the Shadow?”

The lobby doors flew open, banging against the walls to either side. The actors onstage turned to stare as a young man strode into the theater and stood for a moment in the semidarkness. He had wild curls of dark hair, darker eyes and full lips. Just as Mallory was deciding that this was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen, he keeled over dead drunk, making a perfect three-point landing on the back of his head, his ass and one elbow. And this, she reasoned, must be the Shadow. The look of horror on Boo's face confirmed it.