Night Film

101

By the time I made it back to Perry Street, it was after four.

I was looking forward to seeing Nora, filling her in about Sharon, showing her the blackened spike I’d just had extracted from my hand. And we could get back to work. But the moment I entered my apartment, I heard an odd banging upstairs.

Racing into Sam’s room, it looked as if Moe Gulazar’s closet — maybe Moe himself — had exploded all over the carpet. Sequined gold leggings, a mink stole (suffering from mange), silk blouses, and striped neckties were draped everywhere. Nora, in a pair of black jodhpurs and a tuxedo shirt, sleeves rolled up, was packing up the clothes. I noticed Jesus and Judy Garland were no longer taped to the wall.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

She glanced at me over her shoulder and then turned away, folding a pair of purple hot pants and shoving them into one of the Duane Reade bags.

“I’m moving out.”

“What?”

“I’m moving out. I found an amazing sublet.”

“When?”

“Just now. I’m finished with the case.”

“Okay. First of all, you don’t find amazing sublets just now in New York City. It takes months. Years, sometimes.”

“Not for me.”

“And where did this amazing sublet come from? Angel Gabriel?”

“Craigslist.”

“Okay. Let me explain something. People who use Craigslist tend to be hookers, homicidal maniacs, and massage therapists who give happy endings.”

“I already checked it out.”

“When?”

“This morning. It’s a huge room in the side of a townhouse in the East Village with a bay window. Tons of light. All I have to pay is five hundred a month and share a bathroom with this really cool old hippie.”

I took a deep breath. “Let me tell you about cool old hippies in the East Village. They’re nuts. They study tarot cards and eat soy. Sometimes they eat tarot cards and study soy. Most haven’t left this island since Nixon was president and have identifiable plant life growing under their toenails. Trust me on this one.”

“We just had lunch. She’s super-nice.”

“Super-nice?”

She nodded. “She grows organic tomatoes.”

“Fertilized with the carcasses of her thirty cats.”

“She was a photographer’s assistant for Avedon for years.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“She had an affair with Axl Rose. He wrote a song about her.”

“It was probably ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’ ”

“I don’t know why you’re freaking out. It’ll be cool.”

It’ll be cool. I felt as if a rug were being yanked out from under me when I’d been standing on hardwood floors in bare feet.

“This is because of last night,” I said.

She only raised her chin, grabbing her Harmony High School yearbook, frowning dramatically as she paged through it.

“You’re angry because I was a gentleman? Respected the boundaries of our working relationship?”

She snapped the book closed, sticking it inside the bag. “No.”

“No?”

“No, it’s because of Hamlette auditions at the Flea Theater.”

“Hamlette auditions at the Flea Theater.”

She nodded triumphantly. “They’re reversing the genders of all the roles, so there are finally good parts for females. I’m going to try for Hamlette, so I have to practice my monologues night and day. It’d drive you crazy because you hate my acting.”

“That’s not true. I’ve grown quite fond of your acting.”

She was folding an old gray cardigan with a sequin flying bird pin on the shoulder and a massive gaping hole in the left elbow that resembled a silently screaming mouth.

“You yourself said last night that I have to go hurling forward into space and you’ll be my cheerleader on the sidelines. So that’s what I’m doing.”

“Why would you take my advice?”

“I said it was temporary. That it was until we found out about Ashley. And we did. And I have money now.”

I’d paid Nora before we’d gone to The Peak, including a very sizable bonus that I was now sort of regretting.

“Plus, you’re going to be busy publicizing everything and making money off of Ashley for your own benefit, just like Hopper said.”

I let that remark sail past me like a grenade blowing up inches from my face. She wouldn’t stop zipping around the room like some insect with ten thousand eyes, folding, tucking, packing it all away.

“The investigation is not over,” I said. “You’re quitting in the end zone, fourth quarter, five seconds left, three downs.”

She glared at me. “You still don’t get it.”

“What don’t I get? I’d be fascinated to find out.”

“You don’t see that if Cordova had ever done something that’d hurt anyone, Ashley wouldn’t have allowed it. I trust her. And so does Hopper. You obviously don’t trust anyone. Here’s your coat back.” She’d brutally yanked Cynthia’s black coat off a closet hanger and chucked it over the bed. It sagged onto the floor. I’d given it to her weeks ago, so she’d have something without feathers to wear to Olivia Endicott’s. She’d loved it, announcing with unabashed joy that it made her feel like a French person, whatever that meant.

“I gave it to you,” I said.

She put on the coat, stepped in front of Sam’s Big Bird mirror, and took a very long time fixing a bright green scarf around her neck. She then grabbed a black fedora off the bedpost, setting it delicately atop her head like a lost queen crowning herself. I followed her downstairs in a sort of daze. She set down her bags, heading into my office. She’d picked up Septimus from the kennel. She crouched beside his cage.

“When Grandma Eli gave me Septimus, she gave me the directions that went with him,” she said. “You have to give him away to someone who needs him. That’s part of his magic. You’re supposed to know the right time to give him away, and it’s when it hurts the most. I want you to have him.”

“I don’t want a bird.”

“But you need a bird.”

She unlatched the door, and the blue parakeet fluttered into her palm. She whispered something into his invisible ear, returned him to his swing, and then she was moving again, slipping past me down the hall. She didn’t stop until we were outside on my stoop.

“I’ll go with you. Interview the hippie. Make sure this person wasn’t part of the Symbionese Liberation Army—”

“No. I’m handling it.”

“So that’s it? I’ll never see you again?”

She wrinkled her nose as if I’d said something idiotic. “’course you’re going to see me again.” She reached up onto her tiptoes and hugged me. The girl gave the most premium of hugs — skinny arms clamped around your neck like zip ties, bony knees bumping yours. It was like she was trying to get an indelible impression of you to take away with her forever.

She grabbed her bags and took off down the steps.

I waited until she rounded the corner, then took off after her. I knew she’d kill me if she saw me, but thankfully the sidewalks were mobbed with shoppers, so I was able to stay out of sight, tailing her all the way into the subway, where she hopped on a 1 train, transferred to the L and then the 6, finally exiting at Astor Place.

Emerging from the packed station, I lost sight of her. I looked everywhere, even began to panic, worried that was it, I’d never know what happened to her, if she was safe — Bernstein, the precious gold coin slipping out of my fumbling hands, disappearing into New York’s millions.

But then I spotted her. She’d crossed Saint Marks Place, was walking with her usual corkscrew gait past the pizza parlor, the racks of magazines. I followed her down East Ninth, coming to a small triangular garden where the street intersected Tenth. She skipped up the steps of a shabby brownstone. I held back, slipping into a doorway.

Nora set down her bags and rang the bell.

As I’d tailed her, I’d mapped the various rescue scenarios — barging in the front door, kicking aside the nine cats, the raccoon, four decades’ worth of Village Voices, racing past the stoners making out on the couch and the psychedelic poster for the Human Be-In, all the way upstairs to Nora’s room: rat-friendly, stench of old sponge. Nora, perched on the edge of a futon, would spring to her feet, throwing her arms around my neck.

Woodward? I made a huge mistake.

And yet. Though the building was certainly dodgy — rusty air conditioners, window boxes with dead plants — I noticed on the first and second floors there were not one but two bay windows, and they did appear to get tons of light.

But no one had answered the door. Nora rang the buzzer a second time.

Let no one be home. Let the super-nice hippie have had a family emergency back in Woodstock. Or if someone answered, let it be a half-naked singer-songwriter with a tattoo on his chest that read WELCOME TO THE RAINBOW. Let me just rescue her one more time.

The door opened, and a plump woman with frizzy gray hair appeared, wearing a striped apron streaked with dirt from a flower bed or clay from a potter’s wheel. She was unquestionably into tarot cards and soy, though I might have been wrong about everything else. Nora said something, and the woman smiled, taking a Duane Reade bag as they disappeared inside, the door closing.

I waited for something — music turning on, a light. But there was nothing, nothing for me, not anymore, only a soft breeze coursing down the block, pushing the stray yellow leaves and the bits of trash caught along the curb.

I walked home.