Supernatural Noir (6 page)

I glanced over as I passed to make sure he wasn’t lingering in the entryway, waiting to pop out and give me the slip. As I did, a light went on, up on the third floor. I noted it and wondered if that’s where he was. Then I continued walking till I was under the train tracks. Already the streets and sidewalks were getting empty.

At the end of the next block, beyond Twelfth Avenue, was a pier with a tired-looking freighter moored, and beyond that, the river. A string of barges, each with its little captain’s shack, went by pulled by a tug.

It was growing dark and all the warmth had been in the sun. I paused and turned like I’d forgotten something. Culpepper had not come out of the apartment house.

I crossed the street then walked back to the building he’d gone in. I spotted no one watching me. The outer door was open. One side of the entry hall was lined with mailboxes, twenty-four of them. I took out my notebook and copied the names. Many times when the husband strays it’s with someone the wife already knows.

The third floor was where I’d seen a light go on. So I gave those mailboxes my special attention. Number fifteen in particular had a recently installed nameplate. Mimi White, it read. If that’s where Culpepper was, the name seemed too good to be true.

Somebody upstairs had the news on the radio. In the first floor back, the record of “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake” got played a few times.

As I finished copying the names, an old lady came in carrying an armload of groceries. Like the building itself, she looked like she’d seen better days. I held the door for her, said my name was Tracy, that I was from the National Insurance Company and was looking for a Mr. Jameson, who was listed as living at this address in apartment number fifteen.

She thought for a moment, then said number fifteen had been occupied for years by an Asian couple. They had moved out, and it had stayed empty for a while. A young lady had moved in just recently. I thanked her and noted that.

As she headed upstairs, I heard footsteps and voices coming down. I went outside, crossed the street, turned, and walked slowly back towards Tenth Avenue. I noticed the third-floor light was off.

When I paused on the corner, I saw the couple. Mr. Culpepper had left his briefcase upstairs. The lady he was with wore a short camel-hair coat, a nice black hat set on her blond hair, and high heels. She looked like her name could easily be Mimi and like you could take her places.

Culpepper glanced neither left nor right as they walked to the corner and he hailed a cab. In my experience, a guy stepping out with a good-looking woman usually wants to see who else notices. Culpepper apparently was made of sterner stuff.

Walking back across town, I was amazed at how easy this assignment was and wondered why that bothered me. I’d detected no presence of the Gentry in the last couple of hours. That probably meant the one or ones I’d felt earlier had found whoever they were looking for.

Or maybe they had discovered I was right where I was supposed to be and doing what they wanted me to. Being involved with the Fair Folk had always left me feeling like a dollar chip in a very big game.

I remembered a face, elongated and a little blurred, that I’d once seen. It was a tall elf with a smile that said, “How stupid these mortals are.”

On the A train downtown, I got a seat and thought over that first time I felt an alien presence and how close I came to dying from it.

In ’41 I did undercover work, none of it strictly official. My old regiment was the Sixty-Ninth, “The Fighting Irish,” and our colonel was Donovan—the one they called “Wild Bill.” Later he was the guy who started the OSS and became the US intelligence chief in World War II. But even before that war, he had connections in Washington and an interest in foreign espionage in New York City. He got to do something about it.

The colonel remembered me. I got called down to his office on Wall Street. Right then, my marriage was over and there was a limit to how long the wedding of the police department and me was going to last.

So I got seconded to Wild Bill along with half a dozen other chewed-up old vets on the force. Most of what we investigated turned out to be minor stuff: crazy little Krauts up in Yorkville who wore Kaiser Wilhelm helmets and sent out ham-radio reports about freighters leaving the port of New York; German bars out in New Hyde Park on Long Island where the neighbors reported the patrons said “
Sieg Heil
,” gave the Nazi salute, and had pictures of Hitler up above the bar.

Rumors and stories about mysterious strangers came in from all over the city. We went crazy trying to keep up with them. Then we stumbled on a sleeper operation out on the Brooklyn waterfront. They were accumulating operatives, waiting for the great day when we’d be at war and they could start blowing up bridges. We nabbed a couple of them. But the rest melted away.

Right after that, a call came in one night about activity on a pier in Red Hook. We were stretched thin. I had no backup. Maybe I was tired and that made me careless. Maybe part of me wanted to use up whatever leftover life I had. But I went out there without even a driver.

The one who’d made the call must have dreamed about someone like me showing up: a dumb asshole with plenty of information about Wild Bill and his band of veterans. The gate on the street was open. A long wooden shed stood on the pier. A dim light shone in a window. I knocked. Nothing. I tried the door and it swung open. A light shone somewhere at the end of an empty two-hundred-foot shed.

I took a step inside. Someone had me by the throat and started to choke me. I spun around. No one was behind me. I drew my .38. Something knocked me flat, and the gun fell on the floor. My arm might as well have gone with it. I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t make it move.

That long face with that amused smile flickered. It wasn’t a thing I saw with my eyes. It was inside my head. And I felt every bloody memory get sucked out of me: Colonel Donovan, the other cases I’d worked on, friends and family, the telephone number of a waitress I was seeing, my batting average when I played twilight baseball as a kid in 1914.

When the one that had me found all it wanted, my lungs stopped, my lights started going out. I wasn’t coming back and thought I was stupid enough that I probably deserved to die. But to go like this pissed me off royally.

A little later I came to and found myself in a movie. The light was dim and this woman and guy, tall and slim, who looked like the stars of this movie, crouched over me, elegant and seeming to flicker slightly around the edges.

As that came into my mind, they looked at each other and smiled. I realized they knew what I saw and thought. Her name was Bertrade and his was Darnel. I knew all that without being told. Still being mostly numb probably made everything easier to accept.

“You’ll be well,” she said. There was an accent I couldn’t place. “We have taken care of your friend.”

Bertrade turned her head, and somehow I had a glimpse of what she saw. The one who’d attacked me, a tall guy with his head shaved, sat on the floor, leaned against the wall, glassy eyed. I understood they had him under a kind of spell.

“An elf on a mission,” Darnel said, “and a mutual enemy.” I knew without them speaking that they were Fey, loyal subjects of the King beneath the Hill. They were lovers, tourists in the city. Even half in shock I knew that the first was true and the second was a cover. They were operatives.

Things weren’t good between their people and the King of Elfland. My city, my world, was a kind of buffer between the two countries. Elfland favored Germany in the war going on in Europe.

They’d been watching our elfin friend when I showed up and they nailed him as he smothered me. From thinking this was a movie, I gradually decided it was a dream, and a crazy one. I tried to push myself up.

As a kid I’d thought I was right handed. Then I broke some fingers when I was maybe twelve and learned I was better with my left. Now it was like the left arm was gone. I fell back and banged my head. “I’m useless,” I said.

They touched my memories of my short, bad war and long, lousy marriage. She frowned and shook her head at my misfortunes. “I’d want you to be in any unit where I served,” he said. First Darnel and then Bertrade touched my dead arm, quietly spoke words I didn’t understand. The two said goodbye and that we’d meet again. Then they were gone, and the elf with them.

Feeling came back, and my arm was better than new. I never told anyone else what had happened that night. Walking up Sixth Avenue to the Bigelow Building ten years later, it felt like a movie and a dream.

I let myself into my office, sat down, and called the answering service. It was night now and Gracie was off duty. The young lady who answered gave me a few messages. A call about a case that was going nowhere, one from somebody who wanted to sell me things, a couple of calls from people who wanted me to pay them: all calls that were going to wait.

Then there was a message from Anne Toomey asking me to call. I looked over my case notes, scribbled a few more details, and dialed the Toomeys’ number. I let it ring three times, and three more to be sure. They didn’t have an answering service, and I decided they could wait until tomorrow.

Instead I went out and had a bite to eat, and a drink or two, at McNulty’s, where the cops go. After that I spent some more of the Beyers’ fee at Moe’s on Third Street, where the cops and the hookers go. I finally settled in at the Cedar Tavern over on University Place, because Lacy Duveen, who tends bar there, would rather talk to me than listen to painters arguing.

Lacy got his nickname for working over Tiger Shaughnessy’s face with the laces of his gloves after Tiger hit him in the groin during a preliminary bout at the Garden. He and I go back to when we played pickup ball games on the East River as kids.

We talked about the time he was catching, and all the way from deep center I tossed out a skinny Italian guy at home plate. It was twilight baseball. The light was fading, and the other guy claimed I hadn’t thrown anything, and that Lacy had pulled a ball out of his pocket. In fact I’d thrown a perfect left-handed strike right over the plate. Naturally, it ended in a fight, which we won.

——

Next morning I woke up in my room with that throw on my mind. I’ve awakened in worse shape, and there was still a bit of the morning left. I’d had a dream of Bertrade that got away from me as I grabbed for it.

Out the window I saw it was a chilly, drizzling day on Cornelia Street. When I had washed and shaved and dressed, I put on my trench coat and wide-brimmed fedora.

When I came downstairs, Mrs. Palatino, the landlady, had her door on the first floor open and her television on as usual. She liked to show off that TV. Some guy in a chef’s hat was chopping celery and talking in a French accent.

Mrs. Palatino knew my late mother from church, and that’s why she rented to me, even though I’m not Italian. She sat on the couch in her robe and slippers and looked at me long and hard. This was a woman who thought the worst of everyone and never saw anything that made her doubt her judgment.

“You decided to dress like a detective today,” she said, like she couldn’t decide why this was wrong. I nodded and tipped my hat. Mr. Palatino had died. Some years ago. I pegged him as a coward who took the easy way out.

On the way to my office I thought about Bertrade and the dream and how in it she had told me some things I couldn’t quite remember.

For some years after that encounter in Red Hook in ’41, I didn’t see Bertrade. When she reappeared, she was still beautiful and young despite being a couple of decades older than me. But she looked maybe frayed, and Darnel wasn’t with her.

They had both served in something called the War of the Elf King’s Daughter—fairies versus elves. At one time, the idea would have made me laugh. But not after Bertrade let me see a bit of what she’d gone through.

Her war occurred at about the same time as World War II and looked in some ways just as bad. Spells and magic, getting tortured to the point of suicide by hideous nightmares, seeing friends—minds invaded by the enemy—tearing out their own throats. Darnel hadn’t come back. He wasn’t dead, because the Fair Folk never die. “Lost to this world,” was how she put it, and I knew it made her sad.

For other guys, maybe it was Garbo or Hayworth they thought about. For me, ever since that first encounter, it had been Bertrade. And whenever she came back here and wanted to be with me, it was like a daydream became real.

She knew more, had seen more, than anybody I’d ever met. Something she once showed me, which I thought about as I walked to work that day, was a whole unit of trolls, ordinary soldiers like I had been, if you ignored how they looked, caught by tall elves. Rifles fell from their hands as their minds were seized and twisted by the Gentry. They fell dead, wiped out without a sound made or a shot fired.

Weapons were beneath the Fair Folk, she told me. You could walk up to one, pull out a gun, and shoot him, provided you could somehow keep all thought of what you were about to do out of your mind.

At the Bigelow Building I went into the big pharmacy on the first floor, got a few black coffees to go, and took those upstairs, drinking one on the elevator. It was still just short of noon. My energy and purpose amazed me.

The mail had already been delivered: a couple of bills, a few fliers, and a report on the whereabouts of a bum who had skipped out on the alimony and child support he owed a client of mine. All but the last got tossed in the wastebasket. I’d had nothing from Bertrade except maybe that foggy dream.

I called Up to the Minute and got Gracie. “You have six calls, including four so far this morning from Anne Toomey.” She paused. “Mr. Grant, this is none of my business. But a couple of times a man—I think it was her husband—was yelling at her. It sounded bad.”

“Thanks.” This time Jim must really have jumped the rails.

I hung up and made the call. Anne answered halfway through the first ring. She spoke softly, like she didn’t want someone to overhear. “Sam, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you.” She did sound very sorry. “And I’m going to have to ask if you’ll do it again today. I promise I’ll get—”