A Horse’s Head

6. K

K was pale and covered with dust, K was wrapped in tattered, tom and trailing rags, K wore upon his face a haggard look of weariness, evidence of a journey from some distant purgatory, K was a spectral image standing just inside the cottage door, a terrifying poltergeist that raised its arm and pointed a long bony blue finger at Mullaney in mute accusation. Beyond the open window, Mullaney could hear the fearsome wailing of a thousand other ghosts, the clatter of bones, the clanking of chains, all the promised horrors his grandmother had conjured for him when he was but a wee turnip sitting on her knee. The stench of them rushed through that open window, stale and fetid from the grave, while standing just inside the door was another of their gruesome lot, closer, more frightening, pale and ragged and dead, oh my good sweet Jesus save me, killed in a terrible highway accident, dead, and closing the door gently now, the door squeaking on its hinges, closing the door and taking a step into the room, and raising its arm once again, the blue bony finger extended, and pointing directly at Mullaney who swayed in drunken terror near the open window where, beyond, the thousand other keening members of the union shrieked their dirges to the night.

He jumped through the open window head first, arms extended, hands together, fingers touching, as though he were going off the high board at Wilson’s Woods swimming pool, where he and Irene used to swim a lot before they were married. He hit the gravel outside hands first, absorbing the shock with his arms, rolling over into an immediate somersault, and then coming up onto his feet and breaking into a run the moment he was erect. He intended to run toward the sidewalk, out of this grisly place, away from the shrieking, melancholy voices in the cemetery, but his drunken state had been intensified by the plunge through the open window and the head-over-heels somersault he had performed with considerable style and grace, and he detected with horror that he was running not for the open gate of McReady’s Monument Works but instead for the open gate of the cemetery. He stopped himself with effort, and was turning in the opposite direction when the door of the cottage opened, and K stepped into the light with his dusty rags trailing, leaping off the doorstep and bounding across the yard toward Mullaney.

There is nothing to be afraid of, Mullaney said to himself, knowing he was lying, and turned toward the open cemetery gate again, reasoning it might be safer to face a thousand caterwauling but possibly benign specters rather than one obviously enraged and accusing demon, which K most certainly was. As he ran into the cemetery, he began to regret his decision. He tried to tell himself that his grandmother’s tales had only been fictions calculated to delight a young and excitable wee turnip like himself (“You’re a wee cowardly turnip,” she would laugh and say, after he had almost wet his pants in her lap), but whereas he was willing to exonerate old Grandma of any malicious intent, he was now beginning to think her stories had contained the unmistakable ring of truth. Yawning pits opened before his feet, gravestones moved into his path, trees extended clutching branches and roots, faces materialized on the air, laughter sounded in his ears and faded, screams permeated the night, dogs howled and bats hovered, skeletons danced and specters drifted on the wind, oh my God, he was scared out of his wits.

This is not what I bargained for when I said I’d take the gamble, he thought, beginning to sober up and becoming more and more frightened the more sober he got. I did not bargain for the mummy’s curse or the witch’s tale or the monkey’s paw. All I bargained for was a life of romantic adventure, and not K loping along behind me there wrapped in ceremonial funeral rags and shouting whatever the hell it is he’s shouting. I did not bargain for things that go bump in the night, or in the daytime either, I did not bargain for terror, I do not want terror in my life, I want peace and happiness and calm, I want it to be dawn, I want all these crawling things to go back into their holes, I want the sun to shine, “or I’ll shoot!”

He caught the words carried on the wind, words shouted in K’s unmistakable voice, and then heard the full sentence shouted again, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” and wondered why a ghost would have to shoot, and simultaneously became cold sober, and simultaneously realized that K, whatever else he was, was definitely not a ghost. He realized, too, that if anybody shot him, K or Kruger or anybody else, then nobody would ever learn where he had left the jacket, which was undoubtedly very important to all concerned, though he still couldn’t understand why, especially in its tom and tattered shape. The jacket, of course, was back in the stacks of the New York Public Library, resting on the dusty floor where he and Merilee had made love only a short time ago, and that’s where it would stay until tomorrow morning when the library opened. The trick then, he thought, as K shouted again behind him, was not to avoid getting killed by these people because he was certain they weren’t going to kill the only person who knew where the jacket...

Merilee, he thought.

Merilee also knows where the jacket is.

Well, he thought, that’s okay because Kruger only knew the money was supposed to be in the coffin, but not in the jacket. So chances are six to five he doesn’t know what else is important about the jacket, as neither do I. Besides, why shouldn’t he imagine the jacket is still on my back, which is where he saw it last, unless Merilee decides to tell him about our brief, ecstatic (for me, anyway) episode on the library floor? Well, hither thither willy nilly, let’s say he does ask her why the back of her velvet dress is covered with dust, and let’s say she does tell him what happened, which is doubtful, why should she mention the jacket at all, except to say that I had slit it open and found only cut-up newspapers in the lining? Why would she possibly mention I had left it on the floor back there, when she — no more than Kruger — has any knowledge of its importance?

Things were getting terribly complicated, and besides K was once again shouting “Stop or I’ll shoot!” which Mullaney knew very well he would not do.

A shot rang out.

The shot, carried on the wind, broke into a hundred echoing fragments of sound, put to rout the screaming banshees of the night, rushed away on the crest of its own cordite stench, and left behind it a stillness more appropriate to cemetery surroundings. Mullaney knew the shot had been intended only to frighten, but he was now impervious to fear because of his knowledge of the jacket’s whereabouts. Besides, he was beginning to realize something he had suspected all along, that his grandmother was simply full of shit, there were no ghosts, in or out of cemeteries. And since there were no ghosts to worry about, and since K could not harm him without eliminating the sole source of information about the jacket, he decided to play the same trick he had used to such marvelous advantage on Forty-second Street. He decided to reverse his field and charge K, knock him head over teacups and then run out of the cemetery and vanish until tomorrow morning. The wind was blowing fiercely as he turned, billowing into his jasmine shirt, causing the fabric to balloon out from his body. K stopped some twenty feet away from him and extended his arm again, the blued revolver in his hand pointing like an accusing finger. You can’t scare me, pal, Mullaney thought, and permitted himself a grin as he rushed toward K. An orange spark flared in the night, there was the sound of the gun going off and then nothing, and then a whistling tearing rush of air, and Mullaney was surprised to see a neat little bullet hole appear in his jasmine shirt where it ballooned out not three inches from his heart. He was surprised to see the bullet hole because if K was trying to frighten him, he was carrying things just a trifle too far. Didn’t K realize Mullaney was the source? Didn’t K realize Mullaney knew where the jacket was?

A third shot sounded on the air, and this time the bullet whistled past Mullaney’s left ear in terrifying proximity. He decided he had better knock K down before K did something he would be terribly sorry for later, like maybe killing Mullaney and therefore never finding out where the jacket was. Mullaney stepped to the left in a broken-field tactic he had learned from the encyclopedia, FA-FO, just as K fired again. Then he threw a block he had learned from the same volume, shoulder low, legs piston-bent, shoving up and back, catching K in the ribs and sending him tumbling over, the gun going off wildly in his hand for the fifth time, more than enough for an empty revolver if the gun was any one of a half-dozen or so in the Smith & Wesson line, but leaving yet another shot or more if the gun was one of the other Smith & Wessons, or a Colt, or a Ruger, or — oh boy there were too damn many of them, volume PA-PL, see also Handguns, Revolvers, Weapons and Warfare.

Mullaney ran.

He ran with uncontrollable glee, cavorting between the gravestones, laughing to the night, delighted to have learned that his grandmother was full of shit, delighted to have knocked K on his ass, and delighted to be the only person in the entire world who knew the jacket was important and who also knew where it was — which was to say, delighted to be himself, Andrew Mullaney.

It was funny the way Mullaney got to be a fugitive from the law within the next ten minutes. Oh, not funny the way Feinstein’s death had been, but funny in a fateful sort of way that caused him to reflect later upon the vagaries of chance and the odds against drawing to an inside straight.

He had come perhaps six blocks from the monument works when he realized that an automobile was following him. Glancing rapidly over his shoulder, he saw only the car’s headlights on the dark street, about half a block behind him. He quickened his pace, but the car maintained its distance, rolling along slowly beside the curb. He was in a suburban area of two-family houses that spread out in monotonous sameness from the cemetery’s boundaries, and whereas there were lights on in many of the houses, the thought of knocking on one of those doors and telling someone he was being followed by a car possibly containing people who wanted to know where he had left the jacket he’d been wearing when they placed him in the coffin — the thought was ludicrous. Besides, as the car passed under a street lamp, Mullaney noticed that it had a distinctive green-and-white color combination and that it also sported a dome light, and it occurred to him just as the dome light came on and began revolving in a Martian manner, that the car was a police car.

“Hey you!” a voice behind him shouted, and he recognized the voice as belonging to one of the cops who had picked him up at the approach to the Queensboro Bridge. “You with the funeral story!” the voice continued, as if Mullaney needed further proof that these were his old friends Freddie and Lou, returning to correct their oversight of an hour before. The oversight, as Mullaney saw it, was that they had neglected to arrest him. They had undoubtedly taken a coffee break after dropping him off at McReady’s friendly establishment, and had discussed the fellow in the jasmine shirt over their steaming cups of brew, coming to the conclusion that he had looked highly suspicious and dangerous and was undoubtedly armed and wanted for any number of crimes in California and some of the border states. They had then finished their prune and cheese Danishes and had come back to Queens to track him down, checking McReady’s spooky courtyard first, and then cruising the streets where, worse luck, it had been comparatively simple to spot a man in a jasmine shirt.

So now they were behind him with their dome light revolving and their spotlight suddenly in action, bathing him in its glare as if he were trying to jump the wall at Sing Sing, and shouting, “You! You with the cockamamie story! Stop or we’ll shoot!” which everyone seemed to be yelling at Mullaney lately, and which left him no choice but to cut around the comer toward the cemetery fence again, and leap the fence, and start running once again among the gravestones, though this time neither with fear nor jubilation. This time he ran with all the experience of a graveyard veteran, all the concentration of a steeplechase racer, dodging in and out of the stones, ducking, weaving, bobbing, running for a distant fence beyond which he could see a row of lighted apartment buildings. He had no idea where Freddie and Lou were, whether they had abandoned the squad car and were chasing him on foot, or whether they were simply cruising the cemetery’s boundaries waiting for him to emerge again. That was a chance he would have to take. He felt certain that they were here to arrest him, and felt more than certain they would do exactly that the moment they saw the bullet hole K had put in his nice shirt. So he ran without fear and without joy, simply doing what had to be done, trying not to knock over any of the older, smaller gravestones, but concentrating on getting out of the cemetery and away from Freddie and Lou because tomorrow morning he hoped to get back to the New York Public Library to retrieve the jacket and wring from it its secret. The trick was to stay alive and out of sight until tomorrow morning at nine or ten or whenever the hell it was the library opened (he would get there at eight, to make sure) and that meant staying away from K’s fellows and also Kruger’s fellows, and now the Police Commissioner’s fellows because he did not want to be arrested as a vagrant and have to spend however many days on Riker’s Island. A fellow was a vagrant only if he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, and Mullaney knew exactly what he wanted to do — or at least thought he did.

So he ran until he was out of breath, and then he rested behind one of the larger tombs (though not as large as Feinstein’s) and then began running again toward that distant fence beyond which the apartment lights beckoned. When he reached the fence, he paused again, crouching behind a large marble slab, listening. He could hear nothing but the sound of a solitary cricket. Across the street, the apartment houses rose in illuminated majesty, and beyond them was the entire borough of Queens, which was certainly a large enough place in which to hide. Cautiously, quietly, he climbed the fence and dropped to his knees. He crouched a moment longer, still listening. Then he rose.

The spotlight came on the moment he stood erect.

“There he is!” Lou shouted.

“Shoot him!” Freddie said.

Mullaney broke into a run as the spotlight picked him up, beginning to feel the same indignation he had felt when Hijo threw him down the poolhall steps, wanting to turn and tell these fellows they were civil-service employees who were supposed to protect citizens like himself, not go turning spotlights on him, and not — for God’s sake, they were shooting! They were both of them shooting at him, one of them standing outside the car and resting his revolver on his bent arm, and the other one manipulating the spotlight and getting off a shot every now and then, though neither of them were as good shots as K had been, neither of them came anywhere near putting a bullet in him or even his shirt. Out of breath, angry, indignant though unafraid, Mullaney ran across the street and into the nearest apartment building, saw the open and waiting elevator and was about to enter it when the doors closed. He looked up at the indicator, saw it marking the elevator’s slow rise, calculated immediately that Freddie and Lou would assume he was in the elevator, and decided to take the steps up instead. He found the service stairway, opened the door (A sign warned #keep this door closed for protection against fire, but it said nothing about protection against police) and ran up the steps to the third floor. On the third floor, he opened another fire door and stepped into the corridor.

He had no idea what he would do next.

He heard music coming from the end of the corridor, voices, laughter. A party, he thought, and he decided to crash it, and then decided he could not take the chance because suppose they called the police and said somebody was trying to crash their party? He would then have not only Freddie and Lou chasing him but the whole damn Queens police force, and besides he wasn’t in a party mood. In fact, it made him even more angry and indignant to realize that these happy Queens residents could be enjoying themselves at a party, drinking and laughing and dancing and having a grand old time while he, Andrew Mullaney, was being chased all over the city by gunmen of every persuasion. He had never been able to successfully crash a party in his life, but his anger now provided him with exactly the motivation he needed. He thought, as he marched angrily and indignantly to the apartment at the end of the hall, how marvelous it was that human beings could always find motivation whenever or wherever they needed it. Still marveling, he raised his fist, certain that he knew exactly how to crash the party. He banged on the door and waited. He heard the sounds of music within, and laughter, and then the clattering approach of high heels, and the chain being drawn back, and the door being unlocked.

The door opened.

“I live in the apartment downstairs,” Mullaney said angrily and indignantly. “You’re making too much noise, and I can’t fall asleep.”

“Well then come on in, honey, and have a drink,” the girl said.