In A Strange City

Chapter 2

Two days out of five, TeSS still turned in the wrong direction when she left her office at day’s end. She headed south, to her old apartment in Fells Point, instead of north, to the house where she had lived for almost a year. She did it again after the Porcine One’s visit and chided herself under her breath.

To observe she was a creature of habit was to say that Baltimore was the largest city in Maryland -factual, but nothing more. Tess loved ruts, reveled in ruts, hunkered down into her routines like a dog who had dug a hole in the backyard in order to snooze the summer day away. She sometimes worried she was just a few chapters short of becoming an Anne Tyler character, a gentle Baltimore eccentric shopping at the Giant in her bedroom slippers and pajama bottoms.

Actually, she had gone to the grocery store in her pajama bottoms, but just once, and very early in the morning. Besides, they were plaid, with a drawstring, and indistinguishable from sweatpants. And she had worn real shoes.

Moving, even if it had not been her idea, had promised a fresh start, a chance to embrace change. Now it was becoming apparent that Tess was capable only of substituting one routine for another. She had swapped her bagel breakfast at Jimmy’s for a bagel and coffee at the Daily Grind, switched her allegiance from the Egyptian pizza parlor on Broadway to the Egyptian pizza place on Belvedere. She did go to a new video store, the exquisitely stocked Video Americain. She ended up renting movies she had already seen.

The new house underscored her oddness. It was a house, a domicile, in only the loosest use of the word- it had four walls, a roof, indoor plumbing, and electricity. Tess had nicknamed this work-in-progress the Dust Bowl, and she was getting accustomed to going through life sprinkled with bits of plaster, wood, and paint. Sometimes, she found the oddest things in her bed: a latch from one of the kitchen cabinets, for example; a screwdriver; even the occasional nail on her pillow, as if a disgruntled carpenter wanted to send a warning.

She had known it needed much work and known it would take much time. Even as a first-time homeowner, she had been savvy enough to realize the estimates were only a fraction of what they would become, in both labor and material costs. But she had forgotten about God, so-called acts thereof. The weather had been gleefully uncooperative for much of the past year, sending rain whenever outside projects were planned, dropping temperatures when indoor projects involved powerful solvents that needed to be vented, whipping up a little mudslide the day the landscaper arrived.

Still, they had managed to accomplish quite a bit- and the house was still a wreck. Under her father’s watchful eye, Tess had dutifully arranged for what she thought of as the essential-but-dull improvements: roof, heating and cooling system, updated electricity, replacement windows, new plumbing, new siding. The result was a snug, energy-efficient aesthetic nightmare, with odd bits of wallpaper and the hideous taste of the former owners hanging on like ghosts, from the Pepto-Bismol-pink tile of the forties-era bath to the avocado-green appliances in the cramped kitchen.

But it was home, and it showed a handsome face to the outside, as Tess noted with satisfaction when she pulled into East Lane. Her father had been appalled at her decision to choose cedar shingles over aluminum siding, toting up the cost of maintenance over the years. Tess had been adamantly impractical on this one point. She wanted the optical illusion of a house that faded into the trees. Her boyfriend, Crow, had heightened the effect by painting the door olive green. In summertime, Tess had felt as if she were entering a treehouse when she came home, passing through the green door into a private world hung in the oaks and elms above Stony Run Park.

But now it was winter, and the house looked even smaller than it was, not unlike a wet cat. Tess loved it still. Her fingertips brushed the mezuzah her mother had foisted off on her, ignoring Tess’s protestations that she was bi-agnostic. “Home,” she said, more or less to herself. She had a home, be it ever so humble. So what if her fingernails were never really clean again, or if strands of paint appeared to be woven in her brown braid. It was worth it, just to walk through the door and say, “Honey, I’m home!”

And to hear Honey call back from the kitchen, “How was work today?”

Crow did not live with her, not officially. They had tried living together when their relationship was too new, and failed miserably. So now he kept his own apartment, although he was here six nights out of seven, coming and going with his own key and using the plural possessive about life on East Lane. It worked somehow. Tess’s mother, of all people, had fretted about the money thrown away on Crow’s unused apartment. (Her father, for his part, was capable of pretending that his thirty-one-year-old daughter hadn’t gotten around to having sex yet.) Tess had countered that $550 a month was a small price to pay for a relationship that worked.

Esskay made a beeline for Crow’s voice, Tess right behind her. Alas, Crow was preparing wood, not dinner, stripping paint from the kitchen cabinets while a boom box provided him with his own private Mardi Gras, courtesy of Professor Longhair’s version of “Big Chief.” Or maybe it was Dr. John.

“Why didn’t you call?” Tess asked plaintively, leaning against the doorjamb-or where the doorjamb would be, eventually. “I would have brought takeout.”

“Lost track of the time,” Crow said abstractedly, examining the one cabinet that was almost done. Her father had wanted to yank out everything in the kitchen and start over, replacing the original cabinets with modular units from Ikea. But Crow had a hunch that maple lurked somewhere beneath the layers of paint, past bile green, past egg-yolk yellow, past mud brown, past no-longer-glossy white. The kitchen cabinets were a veritable history of bad American taste, circa 1930-1975. It was taking forever, but now the wood was in sight. He stroked the exposed patch softly. “It’s going to be beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful,” she said, meaning it as a joke, not quite able to carry it off. His face was streaked with dirt, his hair stood up in strange tufts, he had on elbow-high rubber gloves and protective eyewear. And yet he was beautiful to her. He was growing up so nicely, her six-years-younger man, his face thinning out, his body filling out. He had begun lifting weights with her this past year, just to be companionable, and now all sorts of interesting changes were taking place. Friends who had once teased her about him now wanted one too, as if he were a Fendi baguette or a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes. But Crow was no accessory, and no knock-off version of him would do.

Esskay sniffed the air and stalked off, angry that she couldn’t detect any food smells beneath the paint remover. Crow thumbed through the take-out menus that formed the spine of their diet these days. Tess had intended to start cooking once she had her own house, but it hadn’t worked out that way.

“Thai? Chinese? Pizza?”

Slumping already, she drooped a little more with each suggestion. No menu ever seemed right for the cold bright days of January, when the mind argued for abstemious balance and the body yearned for the rich treats of the recent holidays.

“What then?”

She didn’t know what she wanted. The more she had in life, the more complicated this question seemed. She had always thought it would be the other way around. “Honestly?”

“Always. That’s our one rule.”

“Let me run over to Eddie’s before they close, pick up cheese, crackers, a box of brownie mix, and a bottle of red wine.”

Crow, usually so agreeable to her whims, frowned. “Can we at least bake the brownies this time, or are you going to eat them out of the bowl raw?” he asked, removing his gloves. “I worry about you and salmonella.”

“We’ll bake them, I promise. I just happen to think brownies and wine go well together. But, Crow-”

“Yes?”

“Maybe you could keep those glasses on. I mean- for later. They really do something for you.”

A rubber glove hit her head as she ran toward the door.

Later arrived sooner than usual. Within an hour, they were in bed, bodies spent but glasses not yet empty, the pan of brownies cooling on the top of the old-fashioned gas stove. Giggling and relaxed, Tess began to tell Crow about the Porcine One, thinking it nothing more than a good story. Her work did yield good conversational fodder at day’s end, although not as often as one might think. And the rules of confidentiality made it tricky. She sometimes thought about “hiring” Crow and paying him the princely sum of, say, one dollar a year, so she could tell him everything. Luckily, the Porcine One wasn’t a client, so she could gossip about him freely-and meanly.

But Crow was not as amused as Tess was by the tale of John P. Kennedy.

“Jesus, Tess, it would be awful if he found someone who was willing to do it. The Visitor might never come back.”

“He won’t find anyone. He only has a day left, and he made a point of telling me he couldn’t get an appointment with anyone else-everyone else being so much more in demand, apparently.”

“So he said.”

“Why would he lie?” The greyhound had sneaked into the room and draped herself at their feet like a heavy, furry quilt. Tess nudged her with her toes, only to have the greyhound sigh and expand, taking up that much more of the bed. Esskay subscribed to the Manifest Destiny theory of sleeping space, and the headboard was her horizon.

“Maybe he wants you to feel confident that no one’s going to take him up on his nasty little assignment. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re the first detective he visited.”

“You mean, of all the private detective agencies in the world, he just happened to walk into mine?”

“You been in the paper lately?”

“Not for a year, thank God. I’ve been a good little citizen, limiting myself to insurance work as much as possible, a few missing-persons no-brainers. Not even a matrimonial in the past two months.”

Crow rolled from the bed and walked over to the room’s French doors. In her old place, Tess had a terrace that afforded a view of the harbor and the city’s Domino Sugars sign. In the boom times of the late nineties, it had become an expensive view, and a day had come when she could no longer afford it. Here, the little cottage had porches on three sides, and they could gaze out at the woods and Stony Run Creek. It was much darker, away from the haze of downtown. Tess actually found it a little scarier, full of unexpected sounds and shadows, but she hadn’t confessed this to anyone, even Crow.

“The sky is awfully clear tonight,” he observed. “Didn’t the weather forecast call for snow?”

“No, apparently the chance for snow wasn’t pronounced enough for the television weatherheads to justify throwing themselves into a frenzy and panicking the entire city. Just cold and clear.”

“You ever been? I mean, you have lived here all your life.”

“Where?” she asked, a beat behind. “No. I mean- January at midnight, the corner of Greene and Fayette? I love the idea, but I’ve never been able to drag my body out of bed.”

“I’ll get you up. I’m still a night owl at heart.”

“Why?” she asked, deciding to skip the argument, which she had already lost, and proceed straight to the heart of the matter.

“Because life’s so short, and then you die. Molière said that, or something close. It’s pathetic, really, how people have to hand you reasons to do things you should be doing. Easy things, right-in-front-of-you things. It’s like waiting for guests to visit before you go see any of the things that are special in your hometown. Your would-be client has bluffed us into doing something we should have done already. You have to do it once, at least, so why not tomorrow night?”

“It seems to me you made the same argument last Halloween, when that local theater group was performing ”The Masque of the Red Death‘ on Rollerblades.“

“And weren’t you glad you went?”

“Only because I dined out on the story for weeks. I’ll go a long way for an anecdote.”

“Then why not go to the graveyard tomorrow night?”

“I’d already said I’d go. Hey-aren’t you cold?”

He got back into bed, and it wasn’t long before the greyhound fled for the living room sofa, playing the part of the offended grande dame. Tess and Crow knew each other so well, or were beginning to. The gurus of modern relationships say couples are to speak honestly, eschew codes, always state directly and plainly what they want. But there are codes, and there are languages. Tess and Crow had their own language. Tess was never going to be an “I want” kind of person, no matter how much Crow encouraged her. So he did his best to read between the lines of her epigrams, translating at will. “Are you cold?” could have meant many things, from “Please get the brownies as long as you’re up” to “I’m cold, come warm me up.” Actually, it had meant both things, but Tess was happy to settle for the latter. It was a small price to pay for being obscure. She could have a brownie after.

Now Crow, on the other hand, knew what he wanted, said what it was, and almost always got it as a result. What a concept, Tess thought. And then she stopped thinking for a while, which was Crow’s great gift to her. He was the only person who could make her mind shut down.

The old church and its graveyard stood on the western edge of downtown Baltimore, in a neighborhood overtaken by the University of Maryland ’s various graduate schools. In fact, the university now owned Westminster Chapel, which had been turned into a performance hall, and a new law school was under construction behind the graveyard. This had been undeniably good for a once-blighted area, and it was probably safer than it had been in years, but it was still pretty darn lonely at midnight.

Not to mention cold. Two cars were parked on Fayette Street, engines running, and Tess envied them. How cozy it would be, waiting in the car with the heater on, listening to the tape player or the radio. She saw a few other people at the front gate, standing close together to generate warmth yet clearly not connected to each other. She found this creepy. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the story of someone who came, alone, to watch the Visitor make his January nineteenth pilgrimage.

Besides, not one of them resembled the Porcine One. He had a silhouette not soon forgotten.

“Don’t you think it’s better if we wait in the car?” she asked Crow. “I mean, suppose we have to chase someone down?”

They were on the side street, Greene, but standing on the opposite side from the graveyard gates, near the bright lights of University Hospital. Crow had come earlier in the day and walked around, noting all the graveyard’s entrances and exits. Tess had assumed the Visitor just strolled through the front gates, the crowd parting to make way. But Crow thought he might take advantage of the construction and scale the low wall behind Westminster Hall.

“The Visitor arrives on foot, not in a Nissan,” Crow said. “Besides, being outside seems to be part of the experience, don’t you think?”

“The Poe folks stay inside,” she said, pointing with her chin toward the old church where the regulars, the curator of the Poe museum and his invited guests, kept vigil every year. He was the gatekeeper, allowing only those he trusted inside the church. He would never permit anyone to interfere with the visit.

“Well, if you start coming every year, you could stay inside too.”

“Fat chance. You know, Life magazine photographed this one year. But it was understood they would never unmask him.”

“Imagine, a journalist with ethics,” he said mildly. Crow, who liked almost everyone, was willing to make an exception for those in her former profession.

It was 3 a.m., and they had been out for three hours. Tess had brought a thermos of coffee, but she took only tiny sips on infrequent breaks inside Crow’s Volvo, worried that her bladder wouldn’t make it through the night. According to Crow, the Visitor sometimes arrived as late as 6 a.m., which was still dark on January nineteenth. They had played Password, they had played Botticelli, they had played Geography, but their efforts to make time pass only made them more aware how slowly it was moving.

A blast of wind shot down Greene Street, and then the night fell still, as if it knew its part in this drama. A figure had come around the corner and was approaching the Greene Street gate. It was a man-well, maybe not, come to think of it-but definitely a person, wrapped in a cloak, an old fedora pulled down to his eyebrows, hands held up as if to shield the lower part of his face. From their vantage point, Tess and Crow had a clear view, but the spectators on Fayette Street were blocked and oblivious. She thought she saw a white flash in one of the church windows, a face appearing and reappearing, but it happened too quickly for her to be sure. The sounds of the city seemed to fade into the distance, and although she was aware of traffic on the nearby streets, it might as well have been a hundred miles-or a hundred years-away.

The figure entered the graveyard. Tess felt a strange excitement almost in spite of herself. She knew it was just a man, going through a ritual someone else had started, but it still felt magical. The past was suddenly accessible; she felt linked to a time she had never known, to a person who had never been particularly important to her. Through this one odd figure, she could travel to the past and back again. Her mind scrambled for the fragments of facts she had accumulated about Poe over her lifetime. He invented the detective story. He married his young cousin. He had been found, wandering in a state of confusion, on Election Day, wearing strange clothes. He had died in a hospital in East Baltimore within a few days- Church Home Hospital, she thought, although it may have had a different name then. Crow would know; she would have to ask him later.

She reached for Crow’s hand and they ran across Greene Street on tiptoe, finding a shadowy place where they could watch the man approach the grave. The night was bright: the moon almost full, the streetlamps on, the blue glow of Baltimore ’s Bromo-Seltzer tower adding a suitably surreal cast to what they could see.

“Tess-”

“Shhhh.” She didn’t want to talk, not now.

Crow pulled at her elbow, turning her so she was looking toward another spot in the graveyard. Another man stood there, near the entrance to the catacombs that ran beneath the church. Taller, swathed in a grander cloak, carrying the same tribute of roses and cognac. Two visitors? How could that be? Too tall, she told herself, and too slender to be John P. Kennedy, her porcine pal.

The first figure was already at the grave-not at the Poe monument, which dominated the front of the graveyard, but the plain tombstone in the back, where he was originally buried. Tess wanted to run after them, to see what happened when they met, but she couldn’t move. She told herself it was out of respect, but she was frightened in a way that only a nonbeliever can be when facing something that cannot be explained. Certainly, one of those figures could not be human. Poe had come back to meet his most constant friend.

The first man backed away from the grave as the second man put down his tribute. Was it Tess’s imagination, or was one trying to keep his distance from the other? The first man made a strange high-stepping movement-there must be a low fence around the grave itself-and stumbled. The other man caught him by the arm, then embraced him. The first man submitted to it, arms at his sides, his body cringing as if expecting a blow.

They parted, moving in different directions. The wind kicked up with a sudden burst, lifting the capes of both men. The taller one, heading east, seemed to be moving quickly, while the other moved at the same stately, measured pace he had used to approach. As he reached the southern wall of the cemetery, he turned back as if to take one last look at his doppelgänger. Tess was no longer sure who was who, which man had come through the gate and which man had come from the catacombs.

And then there was one.

A gunshot is startling any time, any place. It’s a sound people assume they know, and then they hear one and realize they never knew it at all. No diet of movies and television can prepare one for the way a gun cuts the air, the way it leaves all who hear it breathless with dread. Some run, others freeze in place. Whatever choice is made, the other always seems wiser.

Tess knew the sound well, too well, which only made it more terrifying when it shattered this strange tableau. As the spectators at the front gate screamed, she experienced a sickeningly familiar sensation-a sense that the world stopped for a second and then speeded up to get back on schedule. Her mind and body lurched forward, and without realizing what she was doing, she found herself following Crow to the spot in the graveyard where a man was now dead, the voluminous folds of his cape billowing around him like a makeshift shroud.