Mallory's Oracle (31 page)

He lifted his bottle to the light and stared at it. If he put the mouth of it to his ear like a conch shell, would he hear Markowitz laughing at him?

 

Edith was making the kitchen noises of preparing lunch for Charles. He stood at the center of the carpet, turning slowly, sensing that something was out of place but not knowing what it might be. The further back he had to reach into the archives of his photographic memory, the more flaws he was likely to find.

The address had changed since he was a child, but not the character of the rooms. Edith and Max had re-created the interior architecture of the old house in Gramercy Park. The windows had been redone and the walls covered with matching wood panels and wallpaper. Upon his first and final childhood visit to this SoHo address, at the age of nine, he had helped them to match the lesser details of each room with the photographs of his remarkable memory. They had given him this game to play during the week he had lived with them while his parents were at the other end of the world attending a conference. He had not stopped until each piece of antique furniture, each bit of bric-a-brac, photograph, and painting was set in its accustomed place.

Ten years had passed between that visit and the next. As a boy of nineteen, he had noticed one change immediately. She had taken the portrait of Max off the wall of the front room and replaced it with a good hunting print. But for that one change, Edith had kept to the original integrity of the rooms. The same museum-worthy figurines, silver dishes and ashtrays appeared on table surfaces. The same clutter of photographs and candles sat on the mantelpiece. Doilies graced the tables, and antimacassars protected the brocade of the chairs. The telephone was circa 1910. The late twentieth century was hidden away in a back room where Edith kept her computer.

He walked down the hall and entered the room which, in smaller proportions, replicated the library of the Gramercy Park house. He had not had occasion to be in this room since he was a small boy. Later visits with Edith, in his adult years, had always been confined to tea and sandwiches in the front room. But this library was the room he had loved best. The shelves were filled with tomes on magic. Most of the volumes were collector's items, some dating back two centuries. The fireplace with the ornate mantelpiece held the memories of Max's repertoire of ghost stories told on chill nights with marshmallows to toast on the fire, making white stringy goo on long sticks while Max terrified him and then made him laugh.

Charles stared at the mantelpiece. Something did not square with the child's memory. He picked up a photograph and admired the ornate silver frame. It was a good match to the other two frames which kept it company. None of them had been here when he was a boy. And now he realized another oddity. The only picture of Cousin Max in the entire apartment was this newsprint photo which accompanied his obituary. No, on closer inspection, it was not an obituary. It was an article on Edith Candle, the famed medium who had predicted her husband's death.

This must be the same article Mallory had seen. According to the text, neighbors had confirmed the death prediction from the appearance of writing scrawled on the walls of the couple's SoHo apartment.

The next newsprint photo, encased in a similar frame, was a portrait of a destroyed child. Large eyes, desolate and bewildered, peered out of a face not quite sixteen years old. This was the account of a boy's suicide. Edith's name appeared throughout the text. In the third companion frame was the posed and professionally photographed engagement portrait of a happy young woman. According to the article below the photograph, she had died in violence on the eve of her wedding.

“Charles?”

Edith was standing in the doorway, holding on to a tray of teapot and cups, condiments, sandwiches and silverware.

He took the heavy tray from her hands. “Let's have lunch in here, shall we? You know, I haven't been in this room since I was a boy. Has Kathleen ever been back here?” He set the tray down on the octagonal game table surrounded by leather armchairs.

“Yes, I believe I gave her a complete tour of the apartment.”

He noted the slight distraction in her eyes and an agitation to her movements as she sat down at the table and began to pour out the tea.

“What's troubling you, Edith?”

“It's Kathy. I'm very worried about that child.”

“She's no child, and she's frighteningly capable.”

“I don't believe she understands what she's up against. I can feel the evil, Charles. I can put out my fingers and feel it.”

He looked to the photographs on the mantel. “I expect you've had these feelings before.”

“I have. And the sad thing is, I was never able to avert tragedy. Perhaps it's true that destiny is writ and cannot be undone.”

He walked over to the mantel and picked up the photo of the young suicide. “A case in point?”

She looked up to see what he was holding, eyes refocusing through the thick lenses, and then she looked quickly away, back to the business of pouring, a task she took exaggerated pains with. Finally done with the ritual of one lump or two, she said, “That boy's been on my conscience for years. It was a terrible tragedy. Max and I were doing a head act then. We were on the tent-show circuit in the Midwest. Oh, that was a time. A different town every night, pitching the tent in hay fields and empty lots.”

She reached out for the silver frame, and Charles put it into her hand.

“It was this boy who brought out my true gift. I had the sense of him close by, I could feel him. That night I took off my blindfold and looked hard at the boy. I foresaw his death. He was unkempt, he hung his head, hiding something. ‘You must tell the police what you have done,' I told him. I thought if he confessed, he might be spared. The boy ran out. Later, a missing girl was found in a shallow grave in the lot behind his shack. Later still, the boy was found hanged in his jail cell.”

“Was there any warning about the boy's death? Automatic writing? Anything like that?”

“No, that came later, much later.”

“And it's happened again? Recently? What did Martin see written on the walls?”

She wouldn't meet his eyes. Her gnarled hands worked in her lap as she examined a lace doily with keen interest. “I didn't want him to see it. You know how sensitive Martin is. I was trying to clean it off when he walked into the kitchen. I hadn't even heard the front door open.”

He could only imagine what patience it must have taken for her to build a relationship with Martin.

“The writing, what did it say?”

“It said, ‘Blood on the walls and in the halls, rivers and oceans of blood.' ”

 

The thrift store clerk was working alone. His co-workers were having an affair on the lunch hour, and he was being a good sport. Pity they weren't here now, because John and Peter would never believe this. He hardly believed it himself. The learning-disabled shoplifter had covertly deposited a load of silverware in the box for utensils.

She was moving quickly to the door with her empty towel, and then, as though she had just remembered something, she spun around on her heel and returned to the box. She picked up a knife and polished it with her towel, and then another, and another. Now she was lifting the box and setting it on the floor. She sat down beside it and spilled all the utensils out on the threadbare carpet.

A middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and the attitude of an amateur social worker was standing over the girl, speaking to her in soft words that did not carry across the room. The girl in the dirty and torn red dress only stared at the knife in front of her eyes, blind and deaf to everything else, concentrating on her work, polishing each piece of silverware. No, he realized now, it was not each piece. The girl seemed to favor the knives. She began to hum to herself as she polished them with her dirty towel.

The iron-gray woman walked up to his counter, and together in tense but companionable silence, they watched the girl working away at each blade, polishing and polishing.

The woman turned to him with fire alarms in her eyes and in her voice. “Shouldn't you call someone?”

“No reason. She's not violent.”

“Seriously, you don't think that's crazy?”

“This is New York City, lady. Crazy isn't good enough. If she wants a room in Bellevue Hospital, she's gotta kill somebody to get it.”

 

Charles set the photograph back on the mantelpiece. In the time it took to cross the small room, he had come to a few alarming conclusions about these photographs, and now he turned his mind back to the main event.

Redwing had strong powers by Edith's estimation, and she was also dangerous, reeking of Santeria, that mix of Catholic rites and voodoo, sympathetic magic and animal sacrifice. Now he multiplied the dangers to Mallory.

“Actually, Martin saw the second writ,” Edith was saying on the periphery of his hearing. “Herbert saw the first one. Well, the first prediction in years, and I don't remember making it. The words that Herbert saw were ‘Death is close by time and space.' ”

“Have you spoken to Herbert recently?”

“Not for a few days, no. He was quite concerned about poor Martin.”

“Poor Martin?”

“Well, Martin is a bit touched, isn't he.” It was not a question. She made the spinning motion of finger to temple to indicate that Martin's mind might have stripped a few gears. And he found that odd, because Martin was not the least bit insane. Henrietta, a practicing psychiatrist, had never used that word. Sensitive, she called him, and fragile, but not insane.

Martin had designed a life to complement his art. True, he had organized his private world within extraordinary parameters. Like Henry Cathery, he had opted for simplicity, even striking the noise of color from his surroundings, keeping to the hush of white, the better to listen. Martin would be sensitive to every nuance against the pure white background of his life.

Charles suspected Henrietta kept a protective watch on Martin for a reason other than impending breakdown. Might Henrietta be watching over Martin in the way a miner kept one eye to the canary's cage suspended from the rafters at the lower levels of the earth? When the fragile canary gasped and fluttered and struck its weak wings against the bars of its cage, the miner would know the air had gone foul, and Henrietta would know that Edith was active again.

Edith's gifts did not extend to following the rush of an intellect that worked in microseconds. And as he picked her brains for the critical details, she mistook it all for polite conversation. Leaving his sandwich and tea untouched, he bid her goodbye and took his hurried leave.

 

Mallory cut the ignition and her lights while the car was still in motion. She pulled silently to the curb. “This is the building Redwing calls home this week.” Leaning across Riker, she looked out the passenger-side window. “Keep an eye on the television screen in that first-floor apartment.”

Riker stared into the lighted rectangle of the tenement building and the interior poverty which made a burglar gate on the window a bad investment. An old black-and-white television set was sitting on a card table. The wall behind it was a mosaic of cracks and peeling paint. A battered-tostuffings easy chair sat to one side of the television, and all that showed above the chair's back was a balding head and tufts of dingy white hair.

Mallory was lifting her laptop computer out of its case. “Tell me when the TV picture breaks up.”

Riker noted that Mallory had added a few new toys to her car. The antenna on the front fender was not made for ordinary radio reception. And he now recognized the black phone set in her left hand as telephone company equipment. “No you don't, kid. You're not doing a phone tap without a warrant.”

“No, I'm not. I won't hear one human voice. I'm going to pull an electronic scramble out of the air and reassemble it on my computer. Cite me the federal code for that one.”

Riker turned back to the apartment window, the better to avoid witnessing. “So what happens when the TV picture breaks up?”

“The old man sitting in front of the set will get up and start banging on it.”

Riker nudged her arm. The set's screen was gone to zigzags and lost vertical hold. The old man got up from his easy chair and began pounding on the set. There was no anger in the pounder's face, but Riker thought the old man might be crying.

The screen on Mallory's laptop came to life.

“We're in. The wiring in this building is the pits. Redwing doesn't know her computer busts up the old man's reception, and the old man doesn't know what a computer is. Look at the set.”

Riker turned back to the window. The television reception had returned to normal. The old man walked back to his chair.

“There,” said Mallory. “Now you got me on unlicensed TV repair.”

How many times had she done this trick?

“I want you to promise me you won't come back here again. You can't just go into surveillance work without training.” How could he explain to Mallory that she could never do covert surveillance, even with the training, because she had glorious blond hair and a face that tended to linger in memory, for years or a lifetime. “You never put in the time wet-nursing sources—pimps and junkies, thieves and dealers, prostitutes—all the eyes and ears you need on the street just to get through a day on the job. A beat cop has more to work with than you do.”

“Yeah, right. What about all the SEC documents from Markowitz's side of the bulletin board? All the background checks? He got that from me, not from any of your damn street people. And who gave you the seance connection? I didn't have to pressure a pimp or roll a sick junkie to get any of it.”