Epitaph

SEVENTEEN

A lawyer William used to see a great deal of once said to him: Never ask a question you don't know the answer to. Not in court and not in bed either. Especially in bed.

For the rest of the day then, William felt like a lawyer. A good one too. He asked questions but he already knew the answers, and by heart. The questions differed a little, here and there they did, but the answers were always the same. It was like interrogating the same witness twelve times, or perhaps twelve different witnesses, but to the same crime. The problem was, of course, that no one had actually seen a crime.

All they'd seen were twelve old people going off to Florida-innocuous enough, because they'd seen that every day. They didn't know that they'd never-with the exception, of course, of Mr. Koppleman-arrived there, that when they'd disappeared from the White Pages, they'd disappeared from the earth. If you were headed to the dog races, the woman had said to him, you took the wrong turn. Only there were twelve wrong turns here, and at the end of the street, something waiting.

Something that had taken all of them, but spared one.

Why were you spared? Jean had asked Koppleman. Why you?

Okay, this was something Jean had known, something Florida had just affirmed for him. You find what you look for. And he had, he had.

And now, sitting in his room at the end of the day, William was trying to find something too. A beginning.

Because that's where you begin. At the beginning.

It was still raining out. The sound was almost numbing; on another day, in another life-for instance, last week's-he might have slept to its simple rhythm. Dreamed about Rachel, wrestled a few demons, sawed a few logs. But this was this week, and this week he was William the Conquerer as opposed to William the Meek, William with the emphasis on will. In that he had one, in that it had allowed him to get on a plane to Florida and do a little old-fashioned gumshoeing in Flushing. Okay, the humidity in the room felt a little like tension- yes it did. His upper lip was stained with sweat, his palms were a trifle slippery. His shoulder was crying uncle- that too. But here he was, present and accounted for.

Here he was with two lists spread out in front of him- one with the names of the unspared-the unspared and Koppleman, the other with the ambiguous numbers in Jean's file, trying like mad to make a connection.

It was Koppleman, however, that kept taking the brunt of his scrutiny. The odd man out. And it was the odd that gave you an even chance, wasn't it. Like those grade school primers where five farm animals were followed by a clock. Which one didn't belong? Which one and why? The truth was, he hadn't been very good at those kind of questions. He was too left brain, maybe-he kept thinking the clock was too easy, that there were clocks on farms, that it might be the pig or the chicken. He hadn't been good at questions like that, and he still wasn't.

If Koppleman stood out, it was hard to see why, maybe even impossible. Beside each name he'd listed all that he'd learned about that particular person. They were all old; they'd all gone to Florida; they all had either no family or none worth mentioning; they'd all disappeared. Excepting Koppleman. The similarities ended there.

Some of them were Jewish. Some of them weren't. Some were born abroad. Most weren't. Some had sent postcards. Some hadn't.

Now the postcards, here's where things got interesting. He'd been able to collect two more-one from a next- door neighbor of Mr. Waldron's, the other from Sarah Dillon's companion-a spinsterish woman of fifty-five who'd lived below Mrs. Dillon and had, for a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, cleaned, cooked, and cared for her.

At first glance the postcards were entirely ordinary. One was of Miami Beach circa 1960. Two were of Sea World- Shamu and a couple of dazed-looking sea lions. Even what was written on them was ordinary, as dull and predictable as most postcards are. But here, ladies and gentlemen, was what was extraordinary. Ready, sitting up now? What was extraordinary, extraordinarily strange- okay, a little redundant, but so what-and extraordinarily chilling, was that the dull and predictable things Arthur Shankin had written to Mr. Greely were the same dull and predictable things Joseph Waldron had written to his next-door neighbor and the very same dull and predictable things Sarah Dillon had written to her companion. Not sort of the same. Not kind of the same. The same. Exactly the same. Word for word. Period for period.

The weather's lovely. And I'm doing fine.

Times three.

And yet the handwriting was different on each card- in fact, both Mrs. Dillon's companion and Mr. Waldron's next-door neighbor had sworn the handwriting genuine. The message was the same, but the authors weren't.

What to do. Call Ripley maybe and have it put under Strangest Coincidences. Call Mr. Brickman and listen to everything he didn't want to know about Mr. Wilson's funeral. Call Elsa the She Wolf of the SS and pay homage to her tattoo. Call a good private investigator.

Call it quits.

After all, William the Meek would be delighted by that, might even throw a party and invite the whole house in for cheese dip and Mantovani. This William the Con- querer fellow was getting annoying lately, was making him go on trips and stay in broiling hotel rooms and talk to all sorts of people he didn't like. He was making him puzzle things out, and he wasn't good at that stuff; why you had to spell things out for this guy, fling open the curtains at the Par Central Motel and say see before he even suspected his wife was employing the services of the Three Eyes Detective Agency on a regular basis. And it's not like he got around so good anymore either, he had some physical limitations here, he had pain. Maybe calling it quits was just what the doctor ordered.

But William the Conquerer would have none of that- he could tell; he'd heard the arguments but he wasn't buying. After all, he was still staring down at the lists- he hadn't put them away, they were still there. He was stymied by one, fine, but he'd gone on to the other- those numbers, which despite a modest proclivity for mathematics, were proving hard to figure.

He'd at least, okay the very least, matched a person to the names, but he'd matched the numbers to zilch, to the sorriest number there was, to zero. Even their appearance had him stumped; the names and addresses had been as neat and orderly as wedding invitations, but the numbers had been written down haphazardly, as if Jean had been jotting down the license plates of a speeding car. That, of course, had been his first guess: license plates-buzzzz, oh, we're sorry, care to try again? (They were too long for license plates.) Okay, zip codes. Buzzz. Telephone numbers. Buzzz. Social Security numbers. Buzzz. Credit card numbers. Buzzz. And they weren't passport numbers, driver's license numbers, model numbers, combination numbers, lottery numbers, prison numbers, or even Numbers numbers. He knew only that they were annoying numbers.

The phone rang.

William stared at it as if it were something strange, a meteorite perhaps, a moon rock, perhaps even a blue moon rock, for that's about as often as it rang these days-once in a blue moon. And when it did, more often than not it was a wrong number, the caller embarrassed by his mistake, William embarrassed at knowing it before even picking up the phone.

But this time, it wasn't a wrong number.

"Is this, uh… William?" the caller said.

William said that it was.

"But who's this?" he asked, thinking that it was probably someone trying to sell him a subscription, or a time share in the Poconos, or even that it was someone looking for William, but not this William. That's what he thought, that's what he would have bet on-but conforming to his track record at every track in the metropolitan area, he was wrong. In fact, he could have guessed all day, and guessed all night, and taken a slow boat to China and back and continued guessing, and he wouldn't have come close. The fact was, the person on the other end of the line was the very last person on earth he would've expected. At least, one of the twelve last people on earth. Mainly because he didn't think that person was actually still on the earth.

"This is Arthur," the caller said. "Arthur Shankin. I've heard you've been looking for me."

"Yes," William said, once he could form the words and actually get them out, "I have."

Yes. I have.

Three small words, but under the circumstances, a speech. I have been looking for you, I've been looking for you in Florida, and I've been looking for you here, and I didn't find you and I thought you were dead, you and eleven others of you. Of course, he didn't say that, or anything close to that. What he said was: "How did you get my number?" "It's in the book." "Yeah. But who-?" "What kind of inheritance?" Mr. Shankin interrupted. "A relative or something? What about it, am I rich or what?" "Mr. Shankin, is this a local call?" "That's right." "So you're not in Florida anymore?" "Not unless Florida's local." "But you were in Florida?" "Sure. Why?" "You sent a postcard to a friend. Mr. Greeman-" "Greely." "Of course, Greely, and you put a return address on it." "So?" "That address doesn't exist." "So I made a mistake. What's the difference. Do I have money coming to me or don't I…?" "How long you been back?" "Oh… six months I suppose." "Six months-and not even a hello to your old friend Mr. Greely?" "As a matter of fact, I said hello to my old friend Mr. Greely today. And old friend Mr. Greely told me about new friend William. He said you were a lawyer and that you had a nice present for me. An inheritance. So what about it, what about this inheritance…?" "There isn't any." "Come again?" "I'm not a lawyer. There isn't any inheritance." "Okay. There isn't any inheritance. You just like to tell people there's an inheritance. Why do you do that exactly?"

"It's just a story I made up. I needed to find you. I have."

"Find me. What for?"

"For the same reason Jean Goldblum wanted to find you. Did he?"

"Who's Jean Goldblum?"

"Guess not."

"Who's Jean Goldblum? And who are you? You're not a lawyer, fine. Who are you?"

"Could we meet someplace and talk about it?" He wanted to see him in the flesh; he suddenly felt a real need to do that.

"What's wrong with talking on the phone?"

Yes, what was wrong with talking on the phone? People talked on the phone every day, all sorts of things got done on the phone. And it was raining cats and dogs outside, that too. It's just that he'd been out chasing phantoms in places called Magnolia Drive and Coral Avenue and Beaumont Street, and now he wanted to press some flesh.

"It's a little complicated, Mr. Shankin. I've got a lot of questions."

"Oh yeah?" A drawn-in breath, a slight grunt, William could almost hear his fingers drumming on an armrest. "Okay-but you'll have to come here-I've got a bum leg. You want to talk to me about something, you've got to come here."

"Sure. Where are you?"

"Ten-thirty-two Cherry Avenue in Whitestone. Know where that is? The house at the end of the block. You know where Whitestone is?"

"Yeah, I'll find it. In an hour?"

"Okay, in an hour. Why not?"

Yeah, why not.

William put away his lists and tucked away his theories, each and every one of them, from the half-baked ones to the seriously delusional ones. Perhaps he wouldn't need to search for a beginning after all. Perhaps he was being given the ending. Maybe he'd been on the proverbial wild- goose chase and perhaps everyone had known it but him. Arthur Shankin was alive and well and living in White- stone. Maybe they all were-maybe they all were alive and well and living somewhere-in Whitestone or Florida or Pango Pango. Maybe Jean had just been an old man telling tales and he'd just been an old man listening to them. The truth was, he felt foolish, as foolish as old fools are supposed to feel he guessed, which is very foolish. Maybe it was time to put an end to it, to order the cheese and crackers and lay on the Mantovani. So let's.

He called a cab company; he was becoming quite the spendthrift these days, plane rides and taxis and all in the same week. Then again, it wasn't every day someone came back from the dead-the last time it happened they'd gone and started a religion about it. Besides, from the sound of it, the rain had gotten nastier-not just cats and dogs anymore, but alley cats and rottweilers maybe.

He heard the beep of the Dial-A-Cab just as he was leaving his room. Mr. Leonati opened his door and peered out at him.

"Off again?" he whispered.

"Just for an hour."

"It's raining," he said.

"Yeah?"

"Where's your umbrella?"

Good question. Where was his umbrella? Better yet, did he actually have an umbrella, or did he just used to have one but not any longer?

"Take mine," Mr. Leonati said, ever generous with his suitcases, travel tips, and now umbrellas. "Five bucks from a guy on the corner."

"Thanks."

When William finally arrived downstairs, then finally opened and closed his five-dollar umbrella, and finally crawled into the backseat of the taxi, it looked very much like William was finally going to become the victim of urban angst. One of those unfortunate people who happen to get on the nerves or get on the bad side of or just get in the way of a seriously pissed-off member of a service industry. The taxi driver was upset with him, with him or with his day or his job or with all of the above. He glared at William and cursed at him in an unfamiliar language, Turkish maybe or Russian or Romanian-something, anyway, that was Greek to him. You couldn't mistake the tone though: The tone said if I had a gun I would shoot you with it. It made William wonder if they put those bulletproof dividers in taxis to protect the drivers from the passengers or vice versa. He was glad, anyway, that it was there.

He told him the address, which seemed to calm him down a little, or at least shut him up. The rain swept across the windshield like runoff from a flood, bubbling up against the back window like seltzer. The cab didn't so much as drive its way there as slosh its way there, through knee-high puddles black as oil. And the humidity seemed to have followed him from Florida; it felt like he was pasted to the seat.

"Cherry Avenue," the driver said after fifteen minutes or so, or actually Cherkavy or Sherrynue or something anyway that sounded enough like Cherry Avenue for William to think that it actually was. William paid him, making sure to leave a healthy tip, so that he might stay that way too. He got out.

Right into a puddle. It was up to his ankles and surprisingly cold. He dodged the cab's ensuing wake, for that was the only word to describe it, and opened up Mr. Leonati's umbrella again.

Ten-thirty-two Cherry Avenue was at the end of the block. It was too dark to make out much of it, but the address was clearly decipherable on the tin mailbox by the garden gate.

William walked into the garden-arborvitaes and aza- leas-and up to the front door. He knocked.

"Come in," he heard Mr. Shankin say.

William opened the door onto pitch blackness.

"Let me turn the light on," Mr. Shankin said. "Come on in."

William stepped in, and then remembered, just a bit embarrassed now, that he'd forgotten to close Mr. Leonati's umbrella. Which, as it turned out, might have been bad manners but wasn't too bad a thing. After all, according to those who would later piece it together, it saved his life.