qualified myself. “Jeremy asked me to come and see you. I have no idea why. He thought I should.”
“I guess you better come in.” The sound of her voice scared me. It was a low-pitched monotone at the best of times, which made it impossible to read her emotions, but now there was something else lurking there.
She slouched toward the living room and I followed her. The air in the house was close and fuggy and the curtains were drawn. She slumped into an armchair, narrowed her eyes at me and blew a smoke ring. “So Jeremy wanted you to see me, eh?”
“He sent me a letter. He must have sent it just before he…uh.”
“Bit the big one?”
“Yes. Did you know he was going to do what he did?”
“Not exactly. But I had a feeling it was coming. He was sick. They didn’t give him much more than a few months. He was feeling really bad.”
“Why didn’t you tell us he was sick? Why didn’t he tell us?”
“He said he didn’t want to see that look in people’s eyes. He didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him.”
I wanted to be able to blame her. I wanted to hear that Connie had talked him into it, that she was somehow responsible, but I could see that it wasn’t the case. Still, I was mad, and when the “Jesus” came out of my mouth she was quick to answer.
She said, “You don’t like me, do you? None of your family does. You all think I’m trash.”
My mouth opened like a fish’s and then shut again. I didn’t know what to say.
She went on, “I didn’t choose Jeremy. He chose me. If he hadn’t, I’d have been dead in a ditch a long time ago, I can tell you.” She squinted at me again. There was a long silence and then her voice was so low, she was nearly whispering. “Jeremy got me off junk, you know. He got me off the street, got me out of the life I was leading. I don’t know why he picked me, why he thought I had anything special. But I can tell you, after a few months with him, I thought I was worth saving, too. Now I’m not so sure.” She started to look even greener than before. She muttered, “Oh, Christ,” shot up out of the chair and ran down the hall. I heard a groan and the sound of a toilet flushing. Connie came shuffling back down the hallway and just as it was dawning on me as to why she looked so chunky, she plopped herself back in the chair and said, “Damn him. He wouldn’t let me get rid of it and now it’s too late.”
I was early for my date at the Rain Room. Mostly because I wanted to see if Paul Bleeker was serious and had booked ahead. The Rain Room was the kind of place where you practically had to have reservations just to look inside. It was on the top floor of a very tall high-rise overlooking the harbor. It had a central courtyard full of trees and the walls were of molded glass. On the outside, rivulets and cascades flowed down the contours. It was like being under a waterfall or at the center of a rainstorm. At night it was lit with thousands of tiny white lights and the whole place glittered. The background music was watery, too. I recognized Saint-Saens’s “Aquarium.”
Sure enough, Paul Bleeker had booked a table for two. I lingered in the doorway for a minute. I had decided to go in and sit down when I saw it. Across the Rain Room, outside in the courtyard, Dirk, still dressed as Superman, stood completely still, looking important. He then took one step forward and pressed his face against the glass. Water splashed onto his head and flowed down his body but he was oblivious to it. I bolted.
As the elevator descended with me in it, I wondered what Paul Bleeker would think of the way I’d stood him up. In that moment, I didn’t care. Until my brother had been dealt with, I wanted to crawl under a rock. I hailed a cab, got in and looked over my shoulder the whole way home. No one was following me. I paid the driver with the last of my spare change, raced through my front door and double locked it once I was inside.
I went into the bedroom and took off my all-purpose little black cocktail dress. I could hear the Viking in the other room. Without knocking, she opened my door and handed me an envelope. “This for you,” she told me.
“Who left it?” I asked. There was no stamp on it. She just shook her head in linguistic bewilderment and walked away.
I ripped it open. Scrawled on a tattered piece of paper were the words “I’M SENDING YOU TO THE PHANTOM ZONE.”
I ran to the phone and dialed the first number on my list. I was expecting another answering machine but a real voice said, “Sam Trelawny here.”
“It’s Lucy Madison. Am I glad to get you,” I said, “I think I just got a threat.” I told him about Dirk’s note.
“The guy moves fast,” he said. “Listen, just hang on. Don’t panic. I know, easy to say when you’re not there. There’ve been more reports. It seems Dirk is making his presence felt all over town. He was hanging around eating people’s leftovers at a restaurant in the West End this afternoon. We’re going to have him picked up as soon as we can locate him. You hear anything more from him, call me straightaway. Here, I’ll give you my private cell-phone number. And, Lucy?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll have him looking and behaving like Clark Kent at his desk in the Daily Planet in no time.”
I began to wonder what kind of face went with Sam Trelawny’s plummy reassuring voice.
4
The next morning, I left for work at six-thirty, hoping the semidarkness would give me cover. I snuck out of my apartment dressed like an escapee from a black-and-white British movie. One of those dowdy sixties flicks. Georgy Girl. The Carry On gang. My hair was squashed under the kind of head scarf that you tie under your chin, a silk souvenir covered with sketches of the Eiffel Tower and Parisian urchin children. I wore a huge wooly coat with sloping shoulders, a pair of black gumboots and dark glasses. I had hoped to look a little like Jackie Kennedy sneaking past the paparazzi incognito, but in fact I looked more like Jackie Kennedy’s cleaning lady. Taking these precautions was exhausting, but I counted on the fact that Dirk could sometimes be thrown by small things.
Along with the Superman disguise, Dirk had a few other personas in his manic closet. One was a tatty spy. During one endless spring, Dirk had introduced himself as “Bond, James Bond,” then waved the plastic pistol in everyone’s face and told them he was off to squash Goldfinger. For this Bond personality, Dirk had a very grotty white tuxedo, a garment he’d acquired from a bum in California, who’d claimed he’d got it from Our Man in Havana. The suit was several inches too short in the pants and jacket cuffs, covered with stains whose origins I preferred not to think about, and so creased you knew he and a dozen other people had slept in it.
He also had several sporting personas. Sometimes he pretended he was Tiger Woods, roaming around with an old golfing iron, swinging dangerously in all directions. I’d mistakenly tried to reason with Dirk, telling him that he was the wrong color to start with, would always be the wrong color, and how he lacked the discipline to be a golfing champion. This enraged him. I still hadn’t learned that you can’t reason with a man who’s down on his lithium. I always hoped that I’d get through that thick, sick hide of his, get through to that other Dirk who had to be in there somewhere.
Maybe I was overestimating him. After all, Dirk had been no great shakes as a child either. He’d terrorized me when I was small by opening up The Wizard of Oz to the Wicked Witch of the West
