Calypso

11

Carella could not get used to thinking of Sam Grossman as Captain Sam Grossman, not after he’d been Lieutenant Sam Grossman for such a long time. High in a window in a tower to the east — or rather on the Police Laboratory floor of the new tower-like glass, steel, and stone Headquarters Building downtown on High Street — Grossman half sat upon, half leaned against a long white table bearing a row of black microscopes. He was wearing a white laboratory smock over a gray suit, and his eyeglasses reflected gray rain oozing along the window panes, gray sky stretching across a dull horizon, black pencil-line bridges sketched from the island to the distant gray reaches of the city. The effect was starkly modern, almost monochromatic — the whites, blacks, and grays broken only by the cool blue and green of the fleur-de-lis box and the hot pink of the orchid on the lab counter.

“Which do you want first?” Grossman asked. “The box or the flower?” There was in his voice a gentleness in direct contradiction to the coldness of the scientific knowledge he was expected to dispense. Listening to Grossman talk about the results of his various lab tests was rather like hearing a drawling New England turnip farmer explaining that contrary to Galilean or Newtonian concepts, time and space should be viewed as relative to moving systems or frames of reference.

“Let’s start with the box,” Carella said.

“I take it you don’t recognize the design.”

“I know it, but I don’t know it.”

“B. Renaud on Hall Avenue.”

“Right, that’s it.”

“Their standard gift box. They change the color scheme every now and then, but the fleur-de-lis pattern is always the same. You might check them on when they last changed colors.”

“I’ll do that. Anything else I should know?”

“Not a latent print on it, not a trace of anything but dust in it.”

“Anything special about the dust?”

“Not this time. Sorry, Steve.”

“How about the flower?”

“Well, it’s an orchid, as I’m sure you surmised.”

“Yes, I guessed that,” Carella said, smiling.

“Variety common to the North Temperate Zone,” Grossman said, “characterized by the pinkish flower and the slipper-shaped lip. You can buy it at any florist in the city. Just go in and ask for Calypso bulbosa.”

“You’re kidding,” Carella said.

“Am I?” Grossman said, surprised.

“Calypso bulbosa? Calypso?”

“That’s the name. Why? What’s the matter?”

Carella shook his head. “I’m sure Harding didn’t know the name of that damn flower, but it scared hell out of him anyway. Calypso bulbosa. The killer was saying ‘See the pretty flower — it means death.’ And Harding knew it instinctively.” He shook his head again.

“Meanings within meanings,” Grossman said.

“Wheels within wheels,” Carella said.

“Turning,” Grossman said.

The person Carella spoke to at B. Renaud was a woman named Betty Ungar. Her telephone voice was precise but pleasant, rather like the voice of a robot who’d been lubricated with treacle.

“Yes,” she said, “the fleur-de-lis pattern is ours exclusively. It is featured in all our newspaper and television advertisements, it is on our charge cards and our shopping bags, and of course it’s on all of our gift boxes.”

“I understand the colors change every so often.”

“Every Christmas, yes,” Miss Ungar said.

“The box I have here on my desk,” Carella said, “has a blue fleur-de-lis pattern on a green field. I wonder if you—”

“Oh, my,” Miss Ungar said.

“Is that a problem for you?”

“Blue and green. Oh, my, that’s considerably before my time, I’m afraid.”

“Are you saying the box is an old one?”

“I’ve been here for six years,” Miss Ungar said, “and I can remember every color variation we’ve used — the red on pink last Christmas, for example, the black on white the Christmas before, the brown on beige the Christmas before that—”

“Uh-huh,” Carella said. “But this blue on green...”

“Before my time.”

“Longer ago than six years, is that it?” Carella said.

“Yes.”

“Could you tell me exactly how long ago?”

“Well... is this awfully important to you?”

“It might be,” Carella said. “There’s no way of telling if a piece of new information is important, you see, until it suddenly becomes important.”

“Um,” Miss Ungar said, managing to convey in that monosyllabic grunt a sincere lack of conviction concerning the urgency of Carella’s mission, and a further suspicion of his homespun philosophy about the relative importance of clues and the theory of spontaneous celebrity. “Hold on, would you please?” she said.

Carella held on. While he held on, the store piped recorded music into the telephone. Carella listened to the music and wondered why Americans felt it necessary to fill every silence with sound of one kind or another — canned rock, canned schlock, canned schmaltz, canned pap, it was impossible to step into a taxi or an elevator or even a funeral home in America without speakers blaring, oozing, or dripping sound of one kind or another. Whatever happened to silent grassy hilltops? It seemed he could remember once going to his aunt’s farm in the state across the river, and sitting on a grassy hilltop where the world sloped away in utter silence at his feet. Occupied with such pastoral thoughts, a canned schlock-schmaltz arrangement of “Sunrise, Sunset” massaging his right ear, Carella almost fell asleep. Miss Ungar’s vaguely mechanical voice jarred him back to his senses.

“Mr. Coppola?” she said.

“Carella,” he said.

“Um,” she said, this time managing to convey doubt that Carella knew his own name. “I’ve checked with someone who’s been here longer than I,” she said, “and actually the blue on green was used the Christmas before I began my employment.”

“That would have made it Christmas seven years ago.”

“Yes,” Miss Ungar said. “If I began work here six years ago, and if the blue on green was used the Christmas before I began work, why then, yes, that would have been seven years ago.”

Carella had the feeling he’d just been called an idiot. He thanked Miss Ungar for her time, and hung up. Seven years ago, he thought. He stared at the box; all theories of police work to the contrary, the new piece of information refused to become suddenly important.

The laboratory technicians who went over Ambrose Harding’s apartment were not necessarily looking for clues that would connect his murder to those of George Chadderton and Clara Jean Hawkins. The recovered bullets — one of them found embedded in the windowsill over the sink, the other one dug out of Harding’s skull by the assistant medical examiner performing the autopsy — would tell the Ballistics Section whether or not the same pistol had been used in all three killings, and that would be connection enough. They were, instead, looking for any clue at all, anything they could pass on to the detectives in the field, anything that might move the case off the dime and into the realm of meaningful speculation.

There was already, and even before Ballistics came through with its report on the bullets, a sense of continuity bordering on serialization; one more murder and the network would surely renew for another season. In a city like this one, a single murder was nothing to attract a crowd; you could get your single garden-variety murder any day of the week, so ho-hum, what else was new? Two murders committed with the same weapon, however, or even two murders committed in the same part of the city within a relatively short period of time, or two murder victims who vaguely resembled each other in age, occupation, or hair coloring were enough to cause one or another of the city’s more creative journalists to speculate idly and out loud whether or not yet another demented assassin was loose on the streets while the police sat with their thumbs up their asses. But three murders? Three murders within the space of five days? Three murders that had in all probability been committed with the same weapon? Three murders of three blacks, one of them a denizen of, if not the underworld, then at least the soft white underbelly of the underworld, that nighttime world of whispered invitations and promises discreetly fulfilled.

There was nothing that stimulated the public’s imagination more than the murder of a prostitute. It provided the morally righteous with a sense of extreme gratification, the guilty party punished if not by the hand of God, then at least by the hand of someone who understood the dangers prostitution posed in a society where men walked around with their flies open. For many others — those men and women who had at one time or another flirted with the notion either of using the services of a prostitute or providing the services of a prostitute — the murder was proof, if any was needed, that in this city there indeed existed a large army of women ready and indeed willing to service anyone regardless of race, creed, color, gender, or persuasion. That the service in question was sometimes fraught with danger was a fact indisputably supported by the murder. The wages of sin is death, brother — but Jesus, it sounded exciting nonetheless. And for those who had in fact dallied hither and yon, here or there, in this or that shoddy hotel room, or in “X”-rated motels across the river where one could watch a porn flick while simultaneously performing in his own private real-life movie on a water bed, or in any of the massage parlors that lined the city’s thoroughfares north, south, east, and west, for those, in short, who had stepped over the line dividing simple sex for fun and enjoyment (your place or mine, baby?) from sex for profit, sex as sin, sex as the longest-running business in the history of the race (your race or mine, baby?), for those simple folk as well, there was fascination in the murder of a prostitute because they wondered (a) whether a john like themselves had killed her, or (b) whether one of those ferocious-looking pimps with their wide-brimmed pimp hats had killed her, or (c) whether the girl who’d been killed was somebody who’d maybe given them great head just the night before — they all looked the same after a while. So yes, there were all sorts of exciting possibilities to consider when a prostitute got killed. Kill your average calypso singer, kill your average calypso singer’s business manager, and nobody got too terribly excited, even if there was continuity to the murders. But kill a hooker? Blond wig on the sidewalk, for Christ’s sake! Skirt up around her ass! A bullet in her heart and two more in her head! Now that was unusual and interesting.

So was sand.

What the technicians found in Ambrose Harding’s apartment was sand.

“Sand,” Grossman told Carella on the phone.

“What do you mean, sand?”

“Sand, Steve.”

“Like on a beach?”

“Yes, like on a beach.”

“I’m very happy to hear that,” Carella said, “especially since there are no beaches in Diamondback.”

“There are a few beaches in Riverhead, though,” Grossman said.

“Yes, and lots of beaches out on Sands Spit.”

“And even more beaches on the Iodine Islands.”

“How much sand did you guys find up there?” Carella asked.

“Not enough to make a beach.”

“Enough to pave a sidewalk?”

“A minuscule amount, Steve. The vacuum picked it up. It seemed unusual enough to report, however. Sand in a Diamondback apartment? I’d say that was unusual.”

“And interesting,” Carella said.

“Unusual and interesting, yes.”

“Sand,” Carella said.

A look at the map of this city showed five distinct sections, some of which were separated by waterways and joined like Siamese twins by bridges at hip or shoulder, others with common borders that nonetheless defined political and geographical entities, one an island unto itself, entirely surrounded by water and — in the minds and hearts of its inhabitants — entirely surrounded by enemies as well. This was not a city as paranoid as Naples, which holds the undisputed record for that disease, but it was a fairly suspecting city nonetheless, a city that felt every other city on the face of the earth was rooting for its fiscal downfall only because it happened to be the foremost city in the world. The damn trouble with such a crazy paranoid supposition was that it happened to be true. This was not only a city, this was the city. The way Carella looked at it, if you had to ask what a city was, then you didn’t live in one, or you only thought you lived in one. This city was the goddamnedest city in the world, and Carella shared with every one of its citizens — world traveler or apartment recluse — the certain knowledge that there was no place like it anywhere else. It was, quite simply, the one and onliest place to be.

Looking at a map of it, searching for sand in and around it, Carella studied the long finger of land that was not truly a part of the city but that nonetheless, and despite the fact that it belonged to the neighboring county, was righteously considered a backyard playground by anyone who lived in the city proper. Elsinore County, so named by an English colonist well versed in the works of his most illustrious countryman, consisted of some eight communities on the eastern seaboard, all of them buffered from erosion and occasional hurricane force winds by Sands Spit, which — and with all due understanding of the city’s chauvinist attitude — did possess some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Sands Spit ran pristinely north and south, forming a natural seawall that was protection for the mainland but not for itself or for the several smaller islands clustered around it like pilot fish around a shark. These were called the Iodines.

There were six Iodine Islands in all, two of them privately owned, a third set aside as a state park open to the public, the remaining three rather larger than their sisters and developed more or less garishly with high-rise condominiums and hotels, their fearless occupants apparently willing to brave the hurricanes that infrequently — but often enough — ravaged Sands Spit, the clustering Iodines, and sometimes the city itself. The Iodines had been peculiarly named, but then again almost everything in and around this city had been peculiarly named. It was a well-known fact, for example, that there were no rivers with their heads (or even their tails) in that section of the city called Riverhead. There was a brook there, but it was called Five Mile Pond, and it was neither five miles long nor five miles wide, nor was it five miles from any distinctive landmark or geographical feature, but it was nonetheless a brook called Five Mile Pond in a section called Riverhead where there were no rivers. In fact — and this was rarely appreciated by those citizens of Riverhead who were constantly asking, “Hey, how come there ain’t no rivers in Riverhead?” — the place had originally been called Ryerhurt’s Farms after the Dutch patroon who’d owned vast acreage away back then, and eventually came to be known simply as Ryerhurt, which in 1919 was changed to Riverhead because race memory seemed vaguely to recall that Ryerhurt was a Dutchman, and during and immediately following World War I a Dutchman meant a German and not somebody who’d come to America from his native Rotterdam. It was a peculiar city.

The Iodine Islands had not a trace of iodine on them — no saltpeter beds or seaweed ash or oil-well salt brine — and happily so since the discovery there of that halogen might have led to pillage and rape from all sorts of companies engaged in manufacturing pharmaceuticals, dyes, or photographic supplies. As it was, the Iodines were virtually virginal. No one was quite positive how they had been named; they had certainly never been privately owned by a Dutchman named Iodine, or even an Englishman named Iodine, which was probably a more likely possibility since there was historical evidence, written and physical, of a British fort having once occupied a key position on the largest of the islands, facing the ocean approach to the then quite wealthy Elsinore County farmlands crouching behind Sands Spit. The smallest of the islands was once owned by a robber baron who’d taken his new bride there in the year 1904. It had since changed hands a dozen times. The other privately owned island had but a single house on it. The house was gray and weathered. Sitting starkly on the horizon, it resembled nothing so much as a prison.

He heard the motor launch coming back, that was one of the few sounds that penetrated the double doors, the high whining roar of the double engines, the changing sounds as she maneuvered it into the dock. She drove that thing the way normal people drove a car or rode a bike, she was really terrific at it. That first day she took him out here, this was after they’d spent the night at the hotel, she drove him way the hell out on Sands Spit someplace, he’d only been there to go to the beach before then, terrific beach at Smithy’s Cove, used to go there with his brother and with Irene, he wondered how his brother was, wondered whether he and Irene had any kids now, wondered if—

Drove him out there, she had a Jaguar, terrific little white car, he wondered what she drove now. Left the car at the dock, had herself this Chris-Craft tied up there at the dock, looked too damn big for a woman to handle, even a woman like her who drove that car like she was in a race on some French track, terrific, she was exciting as hell then, back then. Same boat, it must’ve been. He caught a glimpse of it when he almost escaped that time, almost made it, almost escaped. He never thought of escaping anymore. All he thought of was dying.

She’d left him enough food this time, he wasn’t worried about starving to death, not this time. She’d come in before she left for the city, told him she had something to take care of, little errand to run, that strange smile on her face. Had a little box in her hands, asked him if he remembered the box. Expected him to remember every damn thing, every little gift she ever gave him. Told him the cologne had come in that box, didn’t he remember the cologne? Her first Christmas gift to him, seven years ago? He told her yeah, he remembered the cologne, but he didn’t remember the fuckin cologne at all. Brought him enough food to last a whole damn week though. He wondered how long she planned on being gone this time, but he didn’t ask her. She had a habit, when you asked her for something, she made you pay for it later. Simplest thing. Like the clock. Just asking her for the clock. Things she made him do before she gave him the fuckin clock. Things she made him do even after he got the clock. He’d learned not to ask her for anything anymore. Just kept quiet most of the time. Did whatever she wanted. Anything she wanted. Knew she could drug his food whenever she felt like it, had to eat whatever she brought him or else starve to death. Knew she could knock him unconscious for days, if she felt like it, and then do whatever she wanted with him when he was unconscious. The time she did that with the... with the needles. He trembled even now, just thinking of the needles. Woke up with all those needles in him. Fiercest pain he’d ever known in his life, a dozen needles, he’d... he’d seen the needles and almost fainted just seeing them. She told him the needles were punishment. That night, she drugged him again. There was a period there when he was drugged more often than he was conscious. When he came to the next day, she’d taken all the needles out. Told him he’d heal in a while, and when he was better she expected him to perform again. That was a word she used a lot. “Perform.” As if he was still a musician, playing for her amusement, performing the way he’d performed that night long ago, dancing with her when the other band was playing, close up against her, smooth white gown, naked flesh above, held her close, held her very close, the pain of the needles in his cock.

He heard the lock turning on the inner door. He could never hear the lock on the outside door, the wood was too thick, he only heard the inside lock, and then the door opened, as it was opening now, and she stood there with the dog’s leash in one hand, smiling.

“Good evening,” she said.

“Hello,” he said.

The dog looked at him. He began to shake every time he saw the dog. She told him once that if he misbehaved again, if he did anything to displease her, she would drug him and then let the dog do something to him while he was unconscious. She did not say what she would let the dog do. He... he kept remembering the needles. He kept thinking she might have the dog bite him while he was unconscious. Have the dog hurt him, wake up later to find himself chewed... chewed to pieces or something. The dog frightened him. But she frightened him more than the dog did.

“Miss me?” she asked.

He did not answer.

“I see you haven’t finished your food,” she said.

“There was a lot of it.”

“Yes, but I knew I’d be gone overnight. That’s why I left you enough food. Would you have preferred less?”

“No, no, it’s just...”

“Then why didn’t you eat what I left you?”

“I’ll eat it all now, if you like.”

“Yes, I think I’d like that. I’d like you to eat all your food. I go to all the trouble of making sure you’re properly fed...”

“If you let me go, you wouldn’t have to feed me anymore.”

“No,” she said, “I’m not letting you go.”

“Why do you want me here?”

“I enjoy you here. Eat your food. You said you were going to eat all your food.”

He went to the couch, sat, and began picking at the food on his tray. He was not hungry, he had really eaten enough. But she was watching him.

“Would you like to know why I’ve been going to the city so often?” she asked.

He watched her warily. Too often, she set traps for him, and he was sorry later.

“Would you like to know?” she asked again.

“If you’d like to tell me,” he said cautiously, and poked his fork at the food.

“To protect you,” she said.

“Protect me how?”

“To save your life,” she said.

“Sure,” he said, “to save my life.”

“Eat your food, Santo.”

“I’m eating it.”

“Or don’t you like what I prepared for you?”

“I like it fine.”

“You don’t seem to like it.”

“I’ll eat it. I said I’ll eat it, and I will.”

“Now,” she said. “While I’m here.”

“All right, while you’re here.”

“I don’t want you flushing it down the toilet, the way you did with the liver that time.”

“I don’t like liver.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that when I prepared—”

“You knew it. I told you I didn’t like liver. You made it on purpose. You made it because—”

“If I did, then it was because you displeased me somehow.”

“I always seem to displease you somehow.”

“No, that isn’t true. You please me enormously. Why would I keep you here if you didn’t please me?”

“To torture me, that’s why.”

“Have I ever tortured you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lie, Santo.”

“The needles...”

“That was punishment. And you were asleep, remember.”

“They were in me when I woke up!”

“Yes, to strengthen you.”

“How did you expect them to...?”

“I don’t like to talk about sex,” she said.

“You’re a fuckin sex fiend, but you don’t like to talk about it.”

“I certainly don’t like to talk about what was becoming your inability to—”

“My inability, shit! You beat me, you torture me, you drug me, and then you expect me to get a hard on every time you walk in the room.”

“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “That is what I expect, that’s true. Eat your food, Santo.”

“I don’t want any more,” he said, and pushed the tray away from him. “I’m full.”

“All right,” she said.

Her voice was oddly mild, it frightened him. He watched her. She was standing just inside the door, one hand in the dog’s leash. She was dressed in black from head to toe, black slacks, a black silk blouse, black boots.

“I’ll give it to the dog instead, would that please you, Santo? Giving your food to Clarence?”

“If I’m not hungry—”

“Tomorrow I’ll prepare food for the dog instead. I’ll prepare your food for Clarence, would you like that, Santo?”

“Look, I really enjoyed what I ate, I really did. But I’m not hungry anymore, you can’t expect me to—”

“Yes, I can, Santo. I can expect you to.”

She dropped the dog’s leash and walked to the coffee table. She picked up the tray, carried it back to the door, and put it down before the dog. He sniffed at the tray but did not touch the food until she said, “All right, Clarence,” and then he began eating.

“He’s better trained than you are,” she said.

“I’m not an animal,” Santo said.

“I should let you die,” she said. “Instead of going to all this trouble.”

“What trouble?”

“In the city,” she said vaguely. “Here. All this trouble trying to save you.” She watched the dog eating. “How do you feel about C.J. not coming here anymore?” she asked.

“I like C.J.,” he said.

“Oh, yes, how you like C.J.,” she said, and chuckled.

“Why isn’t she coming anymore?”

“Perhaps she doesn’t want to.”

“I thought...”

“Yes, she seemed to be enjoying herself, didn’t she? But perhaps she was getting a bit tired of your behavior. Not everyone has my patience, you know.”

“My behavior? You were the one who—”

“Anyway, I don’t want to talk about sex. You know I hate talking about sex. I thought I could trust C.J. Are you finished?” she asked the dog. “Are you finished, darling?”

“What do you mean? Why can’t you trust her?”

“She was very young, too young, in fact. Young people don’t seem to realize—”

“Was young? What do you mean was young?”

“I’m going to explain something to you, Santo. Come here, come undress me.”

“No, I don’t want to. Not now.”

“Yes, now. Do as I say.”

“I just finished eating, I don’t feel like—”

“No, you didn’t finish eating, Clarence finished eating for you, didn’t you, darling? And I’m sure you don’t want to annoy Clarence further by not doing what I’m asking you to do. I would hate to have Clarence...”

“All right,” he said. “All right, goddamnit!”

“Especially since you seem so very sensitive about scars and bruises on your glorious body.”

“Yes, very sensitive.”

“Even when they’re for your own good.”

“Yes, my own good, sure.”

“Unbutton my blouse,” she said. “Yes, your own good.”

“The cigarette burns...”

“Slowly, Santo. Button by button. Yes, that’s it.”

“—were for my own good.”

“Yes, to teach you to quit smoking. Do you like me without a bra, Santo?”

“I enjoyed smoking.”

“Yes, but cigarettes were bad for you. Do you like my breasts, Santo? Kiss my breasts. Kiss my nipples.”

“Burned me all over my body.”

“Yes.”

“Drugged me, and then—”

“Isn’t it better that you’ve quit smoking? Let’s not talk about things that had to be done to make you a better person, Santo. You’re a better person since you stopped smoking. You’re healthier, you’re—”

“You didn’t have to burn me with those fuckin cigarettes! I’m your prisoner here, all you had to do...”

“No, no.”

“...was quit bringin me cigarettes, that’s all you had to do! Look at these scars all over me! You burned me all over my body! All over me.”

“No, not all over you,” she said, and smiled. “Finish undressing me, Santo. I want you very badly.”

“When don’t you want me?”

“Hush, now. Carry me to the bed.”

“Fuckin sex fiend,” he said.

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s what you are. A fuckin female rapist.”

“No,” she whispered, “no, I’m not, really. I want you to do what C.J. loved to do.”

“C.J. loves to do nothing. She’s a whore who gets paid for whatever she does.”

“Yes, she was nothing but a whore. She didn’t understand, Santo. If she’d understood, she wouldn’t have told.”

“Told? Told what?”

“In the beginning, no one knew. Not even the man who changed the locks on the doors. I told him I wanted to lock my dog in here. I told him I had a vicious dog.”

“You do have a vicious dog.”

“Gently, Santo, you do enjoy it, don’t you? Tell me you enjoy it.”

“What’d she tell? What’d C.J. tell?”

“About us, I’m sure. Her experiences, she said. Can you imagine? Told me in the boat going back last Thursday. A whore’s experiences. Mmm, yes, Santo, that’s very good. I’m not even sure about the man who changed the locks, anymore. Do you think he suspects? Do you think he’ll tell the way she did? I just don’t know, Santo, oh, God, that’s delicious. I don’t want anyone else to know about you, ever again. I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

“Who’d C.J. tell?”

“Someone who isn’t going to bother us anymore.”

“Who?”

“Do it to me, Santo, do it.”

“Who?”

“Yes, that’s it, yes. Oh, Jesus, yes.”