A Horse’s Head

5. McReady

A cold wind blew in off the cemetery, keening relentlessly over gravestone and urn, eddying against the black iron fence, rising to a vivid scream that dropped again in moaning obbligato, a tortured cry of unknown horror and graveside lament.

Mullaney was cold and he was frightened.

A light was burning in the stonecutter’s cottage. He crept around the side of the house, the gravel crunching underfoot, the wind billowing into his jasmine shirt. There were ghosts in the adjacent cemetery, he knew, tall apparitions in soiled winding sheets, eyesockets staring, skeletal fingers grasping. Bony women cackled on the wind, withered lips pulled back over toothless gums, their voices echoing on the fitful air. As Mullaney approached the lighted window, a shutter banged, and banged again, and his heart thumped, and he almost ran. A tree in new April leaf suddenly whipped its branches across the sullen night, rattling fresh leaves. Somewhere a cat shrieked in terror and was still again.

Teeth chattering, Mullaney peered into the cottage.

McReady the stonecutter was sitting at a small table. He was eating a sandwich and pouring schnapps from a brown bottle. Mullaney watched as the old man bit into the sandwich. It was a deliciously monstrous concoction, a huge wedge of French bread stuffed with what seemed to be at least fourteen different kinds of meats and cheeses. Mullaney, remembering again how hungry he was, watched enviously as the old man clamped his teeth into the crisp brown bread. Savagely, McReady tore loose an enormous bite, chewed it with obscene enthusiasm, and then washed it down with a huge swallow of whiskey. Smacking his lips, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and then brought the sandwich into biting position again.

Mullaney’s eyes narrowed.

He was hungry, and frightened, and cold, and whereas he philosophically reasoned that most cruel acts in this world were perpetrated by people who were either hungry, frightened, or cold, the knowledge did not prevent him from devising a cruel little act of his own.

He had already relegated blame for the switched money to McReady, arguing that he would now be in possession of half a million dollars had McReady not performed his sleight-of-hand. But worse than the money swap was the solitary and selfish indulgence taking place inside this cottage on the edge of the cemetery. McReady’s feast was assuming the dimensions of an onanistic orgy. Relentlessly, he chewed and swallowed, poured and drank, licked his lips and belched in contentment. What I’m going to do to you, Mullaney thought in rising anger and greed, is scare you out of your wits, old man. I am going to rap on the window here and pretend I’m one of the ghosts howling out there in the cemetery, come to get you for your many many sins among which are substituting paper scraps for money and making a pig of yourself swilling good food and liquor before the very eyes of a starving horseplayer.

The anger with which he had conceived his malicious plan gave way to the sheer enjoyment of contemplating its execution. Chuckling, he hunched down below the window, his eyes level with the sill, so that he could watch McReady’s reaction unobserved. Oh boy, he thought, this is going to be good, and he raised his knuckles toward the pane, giggled, and rapped sharply on the glass.

McReady looked up.

The expression on his face was similar to the one that had been on Henry’s when Mullaney yelled “Boo!” from the coffin. He nodded. Then he took another bite of his sandwich. Then he put the sandwich down on its plate. Then he rose. Chewing, he walked leisurely to the door and opened it. Around a mouthful of food, he asked, “Who is it?”

“It’s me!” Mullaney bellowed, and stepped into the light streaming through the open door.

“Oh, hello there,” McReady said, “come in.” He backed away from the door. “It certainly is a brisk night, isn’t it?” he said. Mullaney entered the cottage. McReady closed the door behind him and walked back to the table. “Sit down,” he said. “Sit down. I was just having a little snack, helps the long night to pass.” He picked up the remainder of his sandwich and devoured it in two enormous gulps. Pouring more whiskey into his glass, he asked Mullaney, “A little schnapps?”

“Thank you,” Mullaney said.

The stonecutter rose and walked to a small cabinet set on the wall. Mullaney noticed that the wall was covered with posters advertising marble and granite. A calendar near the cabinet was printed with the words “Elegant... Exotic... Eternal,” and a photograph of what appeared to be the tomb of Tutankhamen. McReady came back to the table with a plastic water tumbler. He poured it almost full to the brim, raised his own glass, and said, “L’chaim.” The men drank.

McReady smacked his lips and said, “I’m very happy you stopped by to see me. I was wondering what happened to you.”

“I’ll bet you were,” Mullaney said.

“When I heard about the accident on the radio...”

“Was it on the radio?”

“Yes, a terrible accident.”

“Are they dead?”

“It would appear so.”

“I know who killed them,” Mullaney said.

“Ahhh.”

“A man named Kruger.”

“Ahhh.”

“And two people who work for him. Henry and George.”

“Ahhh.”

“Do you know them?” Mullaney asked.

“Have a little more schnapps,” McReady said, and poured the plastic water tumbler to the brim again. The men lifted their glasses. “L’chaim,” McReady said. They drank. The whiskey was good, and it was very cozy inside the cottage. Outside, the wind howled and the cemetery demons tossed restlessly. But within the cottage, there was the smell of cheese and good whiskey, the aroma of McReady’s tobacco as he lighted his pipe and exhaled a cloud of smoke. Mullaney felt himself relaxing. It had been a long day, and the possibility existed that it might be an even longer night, but for now there was whiskey and cheese and—

“Is there more cheese?” he asked.

“Why certainly,” McReady said, “are you hungry, you poor man?”

“I’m famished,” Mullaney said.

McReady rose and went to a small refrigerator, set under what appeared to be a door serving as a desk, one end of which was supported by the refrigerator, the other end by a green filing cabinet. He stooped, took from the refrigerator a wedge of cheese and a long salami, opened the filing cabinet to remove a knife, and came back to the table. Mullaney fell upon the feast without ceremony.

“I like to see a man eat,” McReady said.

“Yes,” Mullaney agreed, eating.

“Would you perhaps know what happened to the jacket?” McReady asked.

“Yes.”

“What happened to it?”

Mullaney swallowed more of the whiskey, washing down his food. “There was only The New York Times in it,” he said.

“Ahhh,” McReady said.

“Which I’m sure you knew, anyway,” Mullaney said.

“Ahhh?”

“Yes.”

“Paper scraps, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Cut into the size of bills?”

“Yes.”

“Sewn into the jacket?”

“Yes.”

“I knew nothing about it,” McReady said.

“You were the one who gave the jacket to me.”

“That’s true.”

“There was supposed to be half a million dollars in it,” Mullaney said.

“You’ve learned a lot since the accident,” McReady said, and his eyes narrowed. He had, until that moment, seemed like only a pleasant-looking old pipe smoker, his head partially bald, a fringe of white hair curling about each ear, his nose exhibiting the rosy tint of the habitual drinker, leisurely puffing on his pipe, puff, puff, and gulping his whiskey, a nice pleasant stonecutter of a man feeding a starving horseplayer and making pleasant chitchat in the night while the wind howled outside and the cemetery horrors moaned. Until he narrowed his eyes. When he narrowed his eyes, Mullaney suddenly wondered what a nice guy like McReady was doing in a place like this, cutting stones for corpses and substituting paper scraps for money. I’ll bet this whiskey has been poisoned, he thought, or drugged, but he took another swallow of it nonetheless.

“Half a million dollars,” he repeated.

“Give or take a few thousand,” McReady said, and puffed on his pipe with his eyes still narrowed. “Who told you all this?”

“Kruger.”

“Ahhh,” McReady said.

“You still haven’t said whether or not you know him,” Mullaney said.

“I know him.”

“He wants that money,” Mullaney said. “So do I.”

“What gives you any claim to it?” McReady asked reasonably.

“I almost became a corpse for it.”

“You may still become one,” McReady said, again reasonably. He seemed like a very reasonable fellow, except for the way he kept his eyes squinched up so narrow, never taking his gaze from Mullaney’s face. The cottage was still. Outside, the cemetery ghouls groaned into the wind. Mullaney took another swallow of whiskey.

“Would you like to hear my theory?” he asked.

“Yes, certainly,” McReady said.

“It’s my theory that you substituted the paper scraps for the money.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“No,” McReady said.

“It’s my theory that you have that five hundred thousand dollars.”

“No,” McReady said, and shook his head for emphasis, and puffed on his pipe again, and again said, “No.”

“I went to a lot of trouble finding you,” Mullaney said, and swallowed more whiskey, emptying the glass. McReady poured it full to the brim again. Mullaney lifted it, and said, “By the way, that was a nice job of chiseling on Martin Callahan’s stone.”

“Thank you,” McReady said.

Mullaney drank. “So?” he said.

“So what?”

“If you didn’t put those paper scraps in the jacket, who did?”

“Let us say that where there is cheese, there is also sometimes a rat,” McReady said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean that half a million dollars can be a very tempting sum.”

“Very tempting indeed,” Mullaney said. “If I had it, I would take it to Monte Carlo and play seventeen red.”

“Black,” McReady said.

“What?”

“Seventeen is black.”

“Then that’s what I would play,” Mullaney said. “If I had the money.”

“Unfortunately, you don’t have it.”

“Do you?”

“Not yet,” McReady said.

“What does that mean?”

“Ahhh,” McReady said, and puffed on his pipe.

“Why were you sending it to Rome?” Mullaney asked.

“Ahhh,” McReady said.

“This is a big international gang, isn’t it?” Mullaney said shrewdly. “This is an enormous criminal cartel, isn’t it? This is a big heroin operation, right? Or white slavery, right, am I right, McReady?”

“You are wrong,” McReady said.

“Then what is it?” he asked, and suddenly realized he was drunk.

“It is none of your business,” McReady said, “that is what it is.”

“It’s my business because you made it my business.”

McReady put down his pipe. Mullaney saw that his hand was very close to the knife on the table, which was a very large and sharp-looking kitchen knife, something he had not noticed while he was slicing the salami. McReady’s eyes were still narrowed. Mullaney was beginning to think he was simply nearsighted.

“I would like to ask you some questions,” McReady said.

“Oh, would you now?” Mullaney said, feeling suddenly very exuberant, feeling again the way he had felt when he’d stood up to Kruger back on Sixty-first Street, somewhat like a hero, albeit a drunken one.

“Yes, and I would like you to answer them.”

“Well now, maybe I’ll answer them, and maybe I won’t,” Mullaney said.

“We shall see,” McReady said, and Mullaney was positive now that he was a member of an international crime cartel because all the members thus far had the same corny way of sounding terribly menacing when they talked to you, as if they had all learned to threaten in the same exclusive school run by Fagin or somebody, Three six nine a bottle of wine, Mullaney thought, I can lick you any old time. But McReady’s hand was on the knife.

“Did you open the jacket?” McReady asked.

“I did.”

“And found the paper scraps?”

“I did.”

“Where?”

“Inside the jacket. Sewn into the jacket.”

“I meant... where did you make this discovery?”

“Oh, I get it,” Mullaney said. “I get it now, pal. Go ahead, torture me, I’ll never tell you where I left those heroin-impregnated scraps of paper. Or is it LSD? Huh? Is that what The New York Times was soaked in? LSD? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“You have a vivid imagination,” McReady said.

“Where’d you learn to talk that way?” Mullaney said. “Did Fagin teach you to talk that way at his international crime school, all menacing like that?”

“Mr. Mullaney...”

“Oh, so you know my name, huh?”

“Yes, we got it from your driver’s license.”

“We is it, huh? Big criminal organization, huh? Go ahead, torture me, I can take torture of any kind, Irene and I once lived in an apartment that had ten thousand cockroaches, you think I’m afraid of torture? I’ll never tell you where I left those paper scraps!”

“I don’t care where you left the paper scraps,” McReady said. “All I want to know is where you left the jacket.”

“So that’s it, huh?” Mullaney said. “It’s the jacket that’s important, huh? Go ahead, torture me.”

“Have some more schnapps,” McReady said quickly.

“Oh no you don’t!” Mullaney snapped. “Trying to get me drunk, huh, so I’ll spill everything I know, huh? No you don’t,” but he poured himself another drink and raised his glass and said, “Skoal, buddy, I could have won a fortune at Aqueduct today if you louses hadn’t come along and spoiled it. You happen to know who won the fourth race?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Jawbone, right?”

“I have no idea.”

“I thought so,” Mullaney said. “Jawbone, huh? I knew it.”

“Where did you leave the jacket?”

“Ha ha,” Mullaney said, and shoved back his chair defiantly and exuberantly, and then almost fell flat on his face. He staggered back from the table, suddenly ashamed of himself, not because he was drunk but only because he had become drunk in the presence of someone he did not like. There are many many ways to get drunk, he thought, and one way is as good as any other way; the only thing that can be bad about getting drunk is the company you’re in while you’re doing it. He did not like McReady any more than he had liked K or Gouda or Kruger or any of the other members of this vast cartel, perhaps two cartels (so the jacket is important, huh? he thought, never tell a book by its jacket), and yet he had allowed himself to get drunk in the man’s presence, which was a mean and despicable thing to do.

The most fabulous drunk in his life, the only one he could really distinguish from every other drunk in his life, small or large, was the one he had thrown with Irene in their apartment the day she discovered the Cache. She only discovered the Cache because they were at that time waging war against the ten thousand cockroaches who shared their place on East Sixteenth Street, which meant they were opening cabinet doors and dispensing roach powder, lifting dishes and pots and pans, and spraying sharp poofing puffs of poison into dark comers and niches, watching the cockroaches flee in disorganized retreat. The Cache consisted of four ten-dollar bills which she had hidden in a casserole against a rainy day, and then completely forgotten. She had tilted the casserole so that he could get a better shot at the nest of little scurrying bastards hidden in the corner, and suddenly the money had fallen out of it, payment for mercenaries, and it began raining. They had by now sprayed everything in sight or out of it, and since it had begun raining, and since the money had been put aside for a rainy day, Mullaney suggested that they spend the afternoon (it was Saturday) getting delightfully crocked, which suggestion Irene thought was capital, repulsed as she was by the hordes of insects breeding in their closets. They had taken a taxicab up to Zabar’s on Eightieth and Broadway, where they bought a tin of Beluga caviar, and then had come back downtown and bought two fifths of Polish vodka and a box of crackers, and had spent the rest of the afternoon and evening eating caviar and drinking the vodka neat. It had been a marvelous drunk. They tried to make love several times during the afternoon and evening, but neither could manage it because they were positively squiffed, laughing and reeling all over the apartment, drinking to the cockroaches and also to the Beatles (who were fairly new at the time) and drinking to Queen Elizabeth (“Up the Irish!” Irene shouted) and also to Khrushchev (Mullaney took off his shoe and banged it on the counter top, less in imitation of the Russian premier than in an attempt to squash a poison-drunk cockroach who was making his dizzy way toward the sink — and missing) and they drank to J. D. Salinger for having listed all the ingredients in Zooey’s or Franny’s or somebody’s medicine cabinet, without which literary feat American fiction that past year might have been barren and bleak, and oh, it had been a marvelous drunk.

This drunk was a lousy one because it was taking place in the presence of McReady, a joyless staggering dumb intoxication. Its only saving grace was that in talking to the hopeless drunk who was Mullaney, the pipe-smoking McReady had inadvertently revealed the fact that the jacket was important, the jacket, though Mullaney could not for the life of him see how.

“I need air!” he shouted, suddenly desiring to be sober, and staggered across the room to the window and threw it open. A gust of cemetery wind rushed into the room, a blast of chilling tombtop air that smelled of rot and decomposition. Behind him, the front door of the cottage was suddenly blown open by the gust of air that rushed through the window, though it seemed to Mullaney that such a gust would have blown the door closed rather than open. Drunkenly, he turned to see how such a remarkable tiling could have occurred contrary to all the laws of physics, and realized at once that the door had been thrown not blown open and realized in the next drunken shuddering horrible moment it had been thrown open by a ghost.