Long Time No See

Eight

The General Hospital at Fort Mercer was built just before the Spanish-American War. Carella was so informed by the WAC sergeant who was leading him to the room where the records were kept. He had no reason to doubt her word; the place looked turn-of-the-century, with high vaulted ceilings and thick walls, windows that rose from the floor to twice a man’s height. They had taken the elevator down from Colonel Anderson’s office and were walking through a ground-level corridor that resembled a colonnade running along one side of a cloister. Beyond the windows was a bloomless garden and a lawn that rolled in hillock after hillock to the River Harb below. In the distance, on a point of land jutting out from the shore, Carella could see the gray walls of Castleview State Penitentiary. He knew a lot of people in that prison, all of them convicted felons. They had been, so to speak, business associates.

The sergeant was an attractive blonde — in her early thirties, he guessed — wearing her olive-drab uniform with all the authority of a fashion model, low heels clicking rhythmically on the tiled floor of the corridor, hips swaying, blue eyes catching the flat November light and reflecting it.

“Makes you think they were expecting the damn war, doesn’t it?” she said. “Otherwise, why would they have built two hospitals here? You know what they call this one, don’t you?”

“Yes. General Hospital.”

“Do you know the joke?”

“No, what joke is that?”

“Is there one for the enlisted men?”

Carella looked at her.

“The enlisted men,” she said.

“Oh. General Hospital.”

“Right, you’ve got it,” she said, and laughed. Carella suddenly wondered if she was flirting. He decided she wasn't. But maybe she was. No, he decided she wasn’t.

“Here we are,” she said, and stepped swiftly to a massive wooden door on the right-hand side of the corridor, and opened it.

Carella followed her into a huge room crammed with metal filing cabinets. Again there were vaulted ceilings and tall windows streaming light. The cabinets were arranged in rows, like cemetery markers, stretching from the door to the farthest end of the room. The task of finding James Harris’ medical history in this room that echoed filing cabinets suddenly seemed overwhelming. Not five minutes ago Colonel Anderson had told him the sergeant would help him locate whatever he needed. Now Carella wondered if anything less than a full platoon could manage the job. His dismay must have showed on his face.

“Don’t let it scare you,” she said. “It’s really pretty well organized. We’ll find the file in a jiffy, and then I’ll help you wade through it. Do I call you Detective Carella or Mr. Carella, or what?”

“What do I call you?” he said.

“Janet.”

“Steve.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

They might have had trouble finding the file in the jiffy Janet had promised, if it weren’t for James Harris’ middle name. Over the years since the hospital was built, no fewer than forty-seven James Harrises had passed this way, the victims of no fewer than four wars; it had been a busy time for America. But only two of the wounded soldiers were named James Randolph Harris, and one of them was white and the other was black, so that ended the five-minute search. The folder was thicker than the search had been, if girth could be measured against minutes like apples against oranges.

Janet led Carella to another wooden door and then through it into an adjoining smaller room that seemed almost monastic — severe white walls, small windows, a simple wooden table with high-backed chairs around it. He realized all at once that many of his references today were ecclesiastical in nature: the squadroom resembling a cathedral, the corridor a cloister, and now a room he equated with a monastery cell. He all but expected a tonsured man in a brown hooded habit to come through the other door carrying a manuscript to be illuminated.

“This is my favorite place in the entire hospital,” Janet said, and pulled a chair from the table, and sat.

“How shall we work this?” he asked.

“Depends on what you’re looking for,” she said, and crossed her legs. She had good legs. He wondered again if she was flirting. And decided she wasn’t.

“I’m looking for anything that mentions the nightmares Harris was having.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s split the file. You work forward from the back, I’ll work toward the middle from the front. How does that sound?”

“Fine,” Carella said.

“Has anyone ever told you your eyes slant downward?” Janet said.

“Yes.”

“They do.”

“I know.”

“Mm,” she said, and nodded, and smiled briefly.

“Well,” he said, “let’s get to work. I really appreciate your helping me this way.”

“Orders is orders,” she said, and smiled again.

They worked in silence, sampling the file as they might have vintage wine — tasting, discarding, tasting again, cup by cup. page by page. It was Janet who came across the first mention of the nightmares.

“Here’s something,” she said.

The something was a memo from a Major Ralph Lemarre to Lieutenant Colonel Paul Konigsberg regarding a dream related to the major by Pfc. James Randolph Harris.

It is shortly before Christmas.

Jimmy’s mother and father are decorating a Christmas tree. Jimmy and four other boys are sitting on the living-room floor, watching. Jimmy’s father tells the boys they must help him decorate the tree. The boys refuse. Jimmy’s mother says they don’t have to help if they’re tired. Christmas ornaments begin falling from the tree, crashing to the floor, making loud noises that startle Jimmy’s father. He loses his balance on the ladder and falls to the floor, landing on the shards of the broken Christmas tree ornaments and accidentally cut-ting himself. The carpet is green, his blood seeps into it. He bleeds to death on the carpet. Jimmy’s mother is crying. She lifts her skirt to reveal a penis.

“What do you make of it?” Janet asked.

“I can’t even figure out my own dreams,” Carella said. “Let’s see what Major Lemarre thinks.”

The major thought little or nothing at this point. This was the first time the dream had been related to him, and there was no indication in his memo that he believed it would become a recurring nightmare. His only comment related to information he had gleaned from previous interviews with Jimmy. The boy’s father had been killed in an automobile accident when Jimmy was six, and his mother had taken on the responsibility of raising the family alone. Major Lemarre speculated that the part of the dream attributing male sex organs to a female might have had something to do with Sophie Harris becoming both mother and father to young Jimmy.

“Well,” Janet said, and shrugged. It was clear that the interpretation of dreams left her cold.

Carella understood her position. He had grown up in a family where dreams were thought of as omens of events to come. If you dreamt that seven men were carrying eight bales of cotton up four steps, then you had best run to your local bookie and bet 784 for that day’s number. If you dreamt that Aunt Clara fell off the roof, it would be a good idea to contact your neighborhood mortician or at least reserve a room at the nearest hospital. Nobody in Carella’s family thought of dreams as clues to personality or behavior. It was only when he joined the police force, or more specifically when he became a detective, that he began to think of dreams in a different way. It was a police psychiatrist who told him that a recurring dream could be thought of as a dimly lighted tunnel to the past. The patient and the analyst, working together, could illuminate that tunnel, reconstruct whatever trauma was causing the persistent dream, and thereby free the patient to deal with it on a realistic level rather than a fixated one. None of which made too much sense to Carella at the time.

He was, however, the sort of man who, once presented with an idea, would not let go of it until he understood it to his satisfaction. This did not necessarily mean understanding it completely. He still didn’t know exactly how Ballistics figured out the rifling twist or the number of lands and grooves on a suspect bullet; but he had a fair working knowledge of how they went about it, and that was enough. Similarly, he thought he understood the psychoanalytic process as well as a layman might. He did not subscribe to the theory that all homicides were rooted in the distant past; he would leave such speculation to California mystery writers who seemed to believe that murder was something brewed in a pot for half a century, coming to a boil only when a private detective needed a job. The last time Carella had met a private detective investigating a homicide was never.

But this morning Sophie told him that her son had recently contacted an old Army buddy. All right, that was a link to the past, a link to a man Jimmy had not seen, literally, for the past ten years. If he was going back into his past for something — and Sophie seemed to believe it was for assistance with an illegal enterprise — then perhaps Carella should go back into the past as well. Which is why he was here today. To explore that dimly lighted tunnel, to learn whether or not anyone here at the hospital had been able to unravel the nightmares that caused Jimmy to wake up sweating and trembling in the night.

The next mention of the dream came in a report dated six days after Lemarre’s initial memo. The dream was identical in every respect. When Lemarre asked Jimmy what he thought of the fact that in the dream his mother had a penis, Jimmy answered, “Well, it’s a dream. Anything can happen in a dream.”

“Yes, but she has a penis, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you think of her as a particularly masculine person?”

“My mother? You got to be kidding.”

“Then why does she have a penis?”

“It’s a dream,” Jimmy answered.

At their next session, two days later, Lemarre asked Jimmy if it would be all right to tape-record what they talked about. Jimmy wanted to know why, and Lemarre said it would enable him to transcribe their sessions word for word later on, and study what was said, and perhaps reach some meaningful conclusions. Jimmy gave his permission. There followed in the file at least fifty closely spaced typewritten pages dealing exclusively with Jimmy’s exploration of the dream that continued to haunt him night after night. Janet lost interest after they’d waded through twenty pages of the transcript.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

“I could use a cup.”

“I think I know where I can find some,” she said, and winked. “Did you plan on going back tonight?”

“What?” he said.

“To the city, I mean.”

“I guess so, yes.”

“Because with all this stuff,” she said, indicating the mountain of papers on the table, “we’re liable to be here all afternoon.”

“You know, I think I can manage the rest of it alone, if you...”

“No, no, I’m enjoying it,” she said. “Let me get the coffee, okay?”

“Sure. But seriously, if you want to go back upstairs...”

“I’m enjoying it,” she said, and her eyes met his, and he knew now that she was flirting and he didn’t know quite what to do about it.

“Well... sure,” he said. “Fine.”

“I’ll get the coffee,” she said.

“Fine.”

“And then later you can decide about going back to the city.”

“All right.”

She nodded. She turned then and went out through the door opposite the one they'd entered. He caught a brief glimpse of the corridor outside, the windows leaping with November sunlight. She closed the door behind her, and he listened to her heels clicking into the distance. He looked at his watch. The time was 3:10 p.m. He turned back to the transcript.

Exploration upon exploration.

Is the Christmas tree a Christmas tree? Is this really your father? Where does he cut himself when he falls? Are you sure your mother has a penis? Over and over again, the same questions and virtually the same answers until the nightmare took on nightmare proportions for Carella himself, making him as eager to be rid of it as had been Jimmy and Lemarre.

He looked at his watch again. It was almost 3:30, he wondered where Janet had gone for the coffee. He wondered what her last name was. Colonel Anderson had said only, “The sergeant will take you downstairs and give you a hand finding what you need.” Maybe the colonel had run into his sergeant in the hallway and demanded that she return upstairs to his office to resume her sergeantly duties.

Carella found it difficult to think of her as a sergeant. A sergeant was Sergeant Murchison who manned the muster desk at the Eight-Seven. A sergeant was any one of a dozen hairbags who rode in radio motor patrol cars checking on patrolmen. Janet Whatever-Her-Name was not a sergeant, definitely not a sergeant. He really did find it extremely difficult to think of her that way. He wondered why he was thinking of her at all, in any way, shape or form. Then he wondered how the words “shape” and “form” had crept into his mind as regarded the sergeant, and he decided he’d been reading too many psychiatric reports and was beginning to examine with undue scrutiny his own id, ego or libido, as the case might be. He sighed and turned back to the file.

The first words he saw were “major breakthrough.” These were Lemarre’s words referring to a session that had occurred a month and a half before Jimmy was released from the hospital and simultaneously discharged from the Army. The major showed no appreciation of the fact that he had inadvertently used the word “major” to describe the breakthrough. Carella smiled, and wondered what Lemarre might have thought of Janet’s little joke about the General Hospital. There was Janet again, but where was Janet again? She had undoubtedly gone to Colombia for the coffee. He delayed reading about the major breakthrough; once he solved the mystery of Jimmy’s Christmas nightmare, he would have to climb into his car and start the long drive back to the city. He delayed, he delayed, he delayed for three minutes. When he began reading the word-for-word transcript, the time was 3:35.

LEMARRE: All right, Jimmy, let’s talk about this one more time.

HARRIS: What for? I’m sick to death of talkin about that fuckin dream.

LEMARRE: So am I.

HARRIS: So let’s forget it, Doc.

LEMARRE: No, let’s not forget it If we forget it, you won't be able to forget it.

HARRIS: Shit.

LEMARRE: Tell me about the Christmas tree.

HARRIS: It’s a Christmas tree.

LEMARRE: What kind?

HARRIS: A regular Christmas tree.

LEMARRE: And your mother and father are decorating it, is that right?

HARRIS: Right, right.

LEMARRE: And you and your friends are sitting on the floor watching them.

HARRIS: Right.

LEMARRE: How many of you?

HARRIS: Five, countin me.

LEMARRE: Just sitting there, watching.

HARRIS: On the couch, yeah.

LEMARRE: You said on the floor.

HARRIS: What?

LEMARRE: You said you were all sitting on the floor.

HARRIS: The floor, the couch, what’s the difference?

LEMARRE: Well, which was it?

HARRIS: The floor.

LEMARRE: In the living room.

HARRIS: Mm.

LEMARRE: In your living room, is that right?

HARRIS: Right, right, I told you.

LEMARRE: And how old are you in the dream?

HARRIS: I don’t know. Eighteen, nineteen. Something like that.

LEMARRE: But your father died when you were six.

HARRIS: Yeah.

LEMARRE: Yet in the dream you’re a teenager watching him decorate the tree.

HARRIS: Well, it’s a dream, right?

LEMARRE: There was a carpet on the floor, you said.

HARRIS: A green carpet.

LEMARRE: In the living room.

HARRIS: Yeah.

LEMARRE: Is it a thick carpet?

HARRIS: Yeah.

LEMARRE: But when the Christmas ornaments fall, they break, don’t they?

HARRIS: Yeah.

LEMARRE: On the thick carpet.

HARRIS: Yeah.

LEMARRE: And they make a loud noise.

HARRIS: Yeah.

LEMARRE: What kind of a noise?

HARRIS: Crashing. They’re Christmas balls crashing, that’s the noise.

LEMARRE: Uh-huh.

HARRIS: Drums. Like drums, you know.

LEMARRE: Is that what they sounded like? Drums?

HARRIS: Yeah. On the record player.

LEMARRE: What record player?

HARRIS: There was a... Somebody was playing the drums.

LEMARRE: Where?

HARRIS: On the record.

LEMARRE: What record?

HARRIS: There was a record playing.

LEMARRE: In the living room?

HARRIS: No, the...

LEMARRE: Yes.

HARRIS: The clubhouse. Oh, Jesus.

LEMARRE: What?

HARRIS: Oh, Jesus Christ.

LEMARRE: What is it, Jimmy?

HARRIS: He...

The door opened.

“Hi,” Janet said. “I got waylaid, I’m sorry.” She was carrying a cardboard container of coffee in each hand. She put them both down on the table, and then sat beside Carella and crossed her legs. “I hope you like it sweet,” she said.

“I like it sweet,” he said.

“Good. Did you find anything?”

“A major breakthrough.”

She took the lids off the coffee containers, and then moved her chair closer. “Mind if I read with you?” she asked, and her knee touched his.

“No, that’s... fine,” he said, and reached for one of the coffee containers and almost knocked it over. His hand was shaking when he picked it up. He sipped at the coffee, and then began reading again. He was very much aware of Janet sitting beside him, her head close to his, her knee brushing his under the table.

HARRIS: The clubhouse. Oh, Jesus.

LEMARRE: What?

HARRIS: Oh, Jesus Christ.

LEMARRE: What is it, Jimmy?

HARRIS: He...

LEMARRE: Go on.

HARRIS: It was Lloyd.

LEMARRE: Who’s Lloyd.

HARRIS: The president.

LEMARRE: The president of what?

HARRIS: Our club.

LEMARRE: What club?

HARRIS: The Hawks. In Diamondback. Before I got drafted.

LEMARRE: What about Lloyd?

HARRIS: He was dancing with her. In the clubhouse, down in the basement. We was sitting on the floor, the five of us. There was drums goin on the record, lots of drums, sounded like... lots of drums.

LEMARRE: Who was he dancing with?

HARRIS: His woman. Roxanne.

LEMARRE: And you and four other boys—

HARRIS: Was sittin on the couch watchin them. They was dancin fish, Lloyd turn to us, he say What you lookin at, get yo asses out of here. Roxanne say They don’t got to go if they tired. Lloyd say They got to go cause I tell them to go. She turn to us, she say You goin let him tell you what to do? The boys say Hell no, they get up off the couch and grab him.

LEMARRE: Where did he want you to go?

HARRIS: Upstairs.

LEMARRE: Why?

HARRIS: Cause we was just sittin there listenin to the drums.

LEMARRE: What did Roxanne mean? About your being tired?

HARRIS: We was tired, man. We been rumblin all the past month.

LEMARRE: Rumbling?

HARRIS: Gang-busting. With the enemy, man.

LEMARRE: When was this, Jimmy?

HARRIS: Just before I got drafted.

LEMARRE: How old were you?

HARRIS: Eighteen.

LEMARRE: And you belonged to a gang called the Hawks?

HARRIS: Yeah, a club.

LEMARRE: And you’d been fighting with another gang?

HARRIS: Started in December.

LEMARRE: And when did this happen in the clubhouse? Was this still December?

HARRIS: Just before Christmas.

LEMARRE: You’d been fighting with another gang all that month—

HARRIS: Heavy fighting, man.

LEMARRE: And now you were resting.

HARRIS: Yeah, and Lloyd told us to go on up.

LEMARRE: What did he mean by that?

HARRIS: I told you. Upstairs.

LEMARRE: But Roxanne said you didn’t have to go if you were tired.

HARRIS: Damn straight, man. The boys told Lloyd to shove it up his ass. Then they all grabbed him, you know, pulled him away from Roxanne where they were stand in there in the middle of the floor. Record still goin, drums loud as anything. Guy banging the drums there.

LEMARRE: Who grabbed him?

HARRIS: All of them. I was just watchin is all.

LEMARRE: Then what?

HARRIS: There’s this post in the middle of the room, you know? Like, you know, a steel post holdin up the ceiling beams. They push him up against the post. I got no idea what they fixin to do with him, he the president, they askin for trouble there. I tell them. Hey, cool it, this man here’s the president But they... they...

LEMARRE: Go on, Jimmy.

HARRIS: They don’t listen to me, man. They just... they keep holdin him up against the tree, and Roxanne’s cryin now, she’s cryin, man.

LEMARRE: The tree?

HARRIS: The post, I mean. Roxanne’s cryin. They grab her. She fightin them now, she don’t want this to happen, but they do it anyway, they stick it in her, one after the other, all of them.

LEMARRE: They raped her, is that what you’re saying?

HARRIS: I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t. They carried her outside afterward, they picked her up and took her out.

LEMARRE: Why?

HARRIS: Cause she bleeding. Cause they hurt her when they were doin it.

LEMARRE: Where did they carry her?

HARRIS: The lot.

LEMARRE: What lot?

HARRIS: In there, man.

LEMARRE: In where?

HARRIS: On the corner, there. Full of weeds. They throw her there.

LEMARRE: Then what?

HARRIS: Ain’t no... ain’t no... shit, ain’t no way to...

LEMARRE: All right, Jimmy.

HARRIS: What I’m cryin for? I didn’t hurt her, I didn’t do nothing to her.

LEMARRE: It’s all right, Jimmy. You can cry.

HARRIS: Why God take my eyes, man? Was the other four hurt her. Why God punish me?

LEMARRE: Jimmy, what happened a long time ago has nothing to do with your getting blinded.

HARRIS: It got everything to do with it, man.

That was the end of the session and the end of the transcript. Dr. Lemarre’s notes indicated that at this point Jimmy Harris broke down and began sobbing uncontrollably for the next half-hour. The doctor finally had him taken to the ward and sedated.

At their next session Jimmy refused to discuss the incident again, or to name the members of the gang who had held Lloyd against the basement post, and later raped Roxanne. It was the doctor’s opinion that the horror of the day — the irreversible set of circumstances that Jimmy had been unable to control or stop — was causing him to dream over and again of his father being killed. Lemarre couldn’t quite understand why, in the nightmare, Roxanne had become Lloyd’s father. He suspected that this was the reason a penis was attributed to the dream-mother: an attempt of the unconscious to explain the symbolism, a not unusual occurrence. But in addition, the unconscious mind was trying to tell Jimmy something else as well. It was saying, rather blatantly, that the symbolic death was in reality a rape. The woman in the dream had a penis under her skirt; in the actual event, there had indeed been penises under Roxanne’s skirt. When Lemarre asked Jimmy what had happened to Roxanne after the boys carried her to the lot, Jimmy said he didn’t know.

Did someone find her there?

I don't know. She just disappeared, man.

You never saw her again?

Never.

What happened to Lloyd?

We kicked him off the club and got ourselves a new president.

“So that’s it, huh?” Janet said.

“I guess so.”

“That explains it all, huh?”

“Mm,” Carella said. He sounded very dubious.

“And now you’ve got what you came up here for.”

“I suppose.”

“Does it help you?”

“No.”

“Total loss, huh?” Janet said.

“I guess.”

“So why don’t you take me to dinner?”

Carella looked at her.

“I’m off duty at four,” she said. “You can come back to the apartment with me, and have a drink while I change. Then we can have an early dinner, and... quien sabe? That’s Spanish,” she said, and grinned. “What do you say?”

“I say I’m married.”

“So am I, but my husband’s in Japan at the moment And your wife’s back there in the city, which means we’re here together all by our lonesomes. So what do you say?”

“I couldn’t.”

“You could, you could,” she said, and grinned again. “Just give it a try.”

“Even if I tried.”

“I know a great little restaurant near the hospital, candlelight and wine, violins and gypsy music, romantic as hell. Don’t you yearn for a little romance in your life? Jesus, I yearn for a little romance in mine. Let me go home and put on a red dress and then we’ll...”

“Janet, I can’t.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Janet...”

“No, that’s okay, really.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “Come on, really, it’s okay.”

He thought of her on the long drive back to the city.

According to a magazine survey he’d recently read, fifty percent of all American women between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine were currently involved in extramarital affairs. That was a whopping huge percentage, considering the fact that back when Kinsey did his survey, the figure was only thirty-eight percent He did not know whether the figure applied by extension to the women of France, Germany and Italy, belonging as they all did to the Common Market, but he suspected in his heart of Dickensian hearts that it certainly did not apply to the ladies of the British Empire — never, no never. In any event, and on any given day of the week, one out of two American women either were on their way to some gentleman’s bed or else had just come from some gentleman’s bed, the fellow in question not being related by marriage to the peripatetic lady. If one could reasonably assume, in the absence of any supportive slick-magazine evidence, that fifty percent of all men between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine were similarly occupied, then fifty percent of the whole damn country was fooling around with somebody who wasn’t his wife or her husband or vice versa as the case might be.

The thought was staggering.

What made it even more staggering was the fact that a percentage-woman who was fooling around had chanced upon a percentage-man who wasn't fooling around. Such odds, Carella surmised, were insurmountable — so to speak. But there they’d been, Sergeant Janet Somebody and Detective Steve Carella, in a room that reminded him of a monastery cell, heads bent as if in prayer, knees touching, and damned if he hadn’t behaved like a man who’d sworn vows of celibacy and near-silence. “Sorry, Janet,” mumbled, mumble, “Really awfully sorry,” mumble, finger the beads, say the vespers, drive back to the city wondering what had been missed beneath that olive-drab skirt, wondering what her lips, her breasts—

Cut it out, Carella thought.

He turned his mind instead to Lemarre’s report, and found the doctor’s conclusions as frustrating as had been the brief encounter with Janet. As a working cop, Carella would have felt compelled to examine more closely the criminal aspects of Jimmy’s traumatic memory, but perhaps psychiatrists didn’t work that way, perhaps they were only mildly curious about a bleeding rape victim dropped in an empty lot—

Did someone find her there?

I don't know. She just disappear, man.

You never saw her again?

Never.

And that had been that, except for the incidental information that Lloyd had later been replaced by a new president. The basement rape would have happened twelve years ago, when Jimmy was eighteen. Simple enough to check with Sophie Harris to learn where they were living at the time, then check with the precinct, whichever precinct it was, for whatever they had on a street gang named the Hawks, a deposed president named Lloyd, and a rape victim named Roxanne. He’d do that when he got back to the city. Yes, he’d have to do that. Maybe Lemarre had cared only about getting to the root of the nightmares — if indeed he’d done that — but Carella was interested in knowing whether the perpetrators of a Class B Felony had ever been apprehended.

He kept his foot on the accelerator, maintaining a steady sixty miles an hour, the limit on the Thruway. At a quarter to five he was still forty miles from the city, and it was beginning to get dark.

The woman who tapped her way along the sidewalk had lived in a world of darkness from the moment she was born. She was sixty-three years old, and lived alone in a building just off Delaware. Two dozen porn movie theaters and as many massage parlors were crowded into the square half-mile that defined her neighborhood. The flesh castles were storefront operations, sidewalk plate-glass windows painted out black or bilious green, hand-lettered signs advertising complete satisfaction at ten bucks a throw, No Rip-Offs. The skin-flick houses showed movies that never made it to the posher dream palaces on the city’s South Side, where ladies shopping for the afternoon stopped to rest their weary feet and simultaneously tickle their fancies with films artfully photographed and calculated to arouse.

The woman wore an accordion around her neck. She made her living playing the accordion. She did not think of herself as a beggar, and perhaps she wasn’t. She was a blind musician. She played on street comers, played tunes by ear on the instrument that had belonged to her father before his death. He had died forty years ago, when she was twenty-three. She had begun taking care of herself then, and was proud of the fact that she was able to manage. She did not know that the neighborhood in which she lived had become a cesspool over the past four years.

Each morning she said hello in passing to the tailor on the comer of Delaware and Pierce, and he returned her greeting while two doors down men entered a place called Heavenly Bodies, and across the street a theater marquee advertised a movie titled Upside Down Cake. She knew that drunks sprawled in doorways on the route from her building to the subway, but this was the city and drunks were expected, drunks had always been there. She did most of her shopping at the big supermarket four blocks from the apartment, and did not know that it was flanked by a pair of massage parlors respectively if not respectfully called The Joint and The Body Shop. Once a hawker for one of the rubdown emporiums handed her a leaflet upon which was depicted a flash of naked young ladies and a pate of bald-headed men enjoying communal saunas and whirlpools and whatnots. The leaflet was wasted on the woman with the accordion. Her sightless world was serene; she truly saw no evil. But behind her, as she threw the leaflet away, she heard laughter dark and mysterious.

Moving along the sidewalk now, her long white cane extended and undulating as though blown by a gentle breeze, right to left, back again, touching the sidewalk, touching the air, she turned the corner onto Pierce and began walking toward her building in the middle of the block. The tailor shop was closed; it closed at six and it was now seven-thirty. She ran her cane along the wrought-iron railing that defined the basement area of the brownstone north of the tailor shop, here now came the open space where the steps led down to where the garbage cans were stacked, she could smell them on the cold November air, there the post on the other side of the steps, and now the front stoop of the building, and the railing on the other side, abruptly turning back in a right angle toward the brick face of the big apartment building two doors down from her own building.

She wondered how much money she had earned today. It was difficult to play once the cold weather set in. She wore woolen gloves with the fingers cut off at the knuckle joints, and though she tried to keep her fingers moving constantly, they invariably got stiff and she was forced to stop playing and put them into the pockets of her black cloth coat until they were warm again. She wore a long muffler, purple the shopgirl had told her, people were so kind. Here now the garbage cans outside 1142 Pierce, super of the building never took them in till midnight, probably sitting in his basement room drunk as a coot, remembered to take in the cans only when it was almost time to put them out again, stunk up the whole neighborhood.

She wouldn’t mind a little nip herself just now, nothing like a little nip when there was a little nip in the air. Smiling at her own pun, she entered her building and felt along the wall for the third mailbox in the row, which was her box and which she always checked, even though the last time she’d received a letter from anyone but her niece was from the city advising her that she was being called for jury duty. The tailor had read it to her, and she had burst out laughing when he finished. She wrote back on her typewriter, telling the Commissioner of Jurors that she would be delighted to serve since she was as blind as justice, but that unfortunately she had to get out on the street every day to earn a living. The Commissioner of Jurors did not answer her letter, but neither did she report for duty, and nobody ever bothered her again.

She took the small mailbox key from her handbag now, and felt for the keyway on the box, and inserted the key — the lock had been broken and fixed again seventeen times since she lived in this building, and was now, thank God, in a state of good repair — and unlocked the box and felt inside it. Nothing. No surprises any more. She could hardly remember the last time she’d been surprised. Well, yes, she could remember; it had been on her sixtieth birthday when Jerry Epstein across the hall gave her a party. Invited everybody in the building and also the tailor up the street, whose name she learned was Athanasios Parasekvopoulos, but she still referred to him as the tailor because she simply could not pronounce his name, not even in her mind. That had been a marvelous surprise, that party, with plenty of good food and whiskey — she really did need a little nip, she was chilled to the bone. But that was the last surprise she could remember. It was sort of sad, she guessed. She guessed there wasn’t much joy in life if there weren’t any surprises.

She put the mailbox key back into her purse, and the purse back into her handbag, and then she opened the lobby door and walked without needing the cane to where the inside steps began, taking the banister in her left hand, holding the cane in her right, the accordion heavy around her neck. She would be glad to take it off, pour herself a glass of whiskey, sit down to count the money. Someone had put a folded bill into the cup, she didn’t know what denomination it was, she’d have to ask Jerry later tonight, if he was home. Or else ask at the tailor shop in the morning. No, he’d be closed on Sunday. Her hand glided along the banister.

She was crossing the first-floor landing when she heard the inner-lobby door opening and closing below. She listened. The stairs creaked; someone was climbing to the first floor. The banister enclosed the stairwell here, running level for the length of the landing, and then beginning to angle upward again toward the floor above. The footsteps were closer now. She reached the post where the stairs began again, felt the polished wooden ball defining the top of it. Hand on the banister, she was climbing again when someone grabbed her from behind. There was not even time to scream. The last surprise of her life was the blade that viciously sliced across her throat, opening it from ear to ear.