Night of the Toads

Chapter Nineteen

East Eighty-third Street, as far east as 422 is Yorkville-the big German section. Famous for sauerbraten and beer halls where you can dance cheap, the Bund was popular here just before the war, and a lot of the local citizenry still think we fought the wrong enemy in that war. (Not that right-wing Germans are the only ones who think that in this country.) There are sub-minorities, too, mostly Czech and Hungarian.

Number 422 was another old-law tenement with the fire escape in front, but built of grimy grey-stone without even the terra-cotta decoration. Instead of a bodega, the grocery store on the street level had a sign in Magyar. I paid off my cabbie and climbed the steps to the vestibule. There was no Emory Foster listed on the corroded mailboxes, but there was an Emory Foxx. The name was on an engraved business card, yellow with age, in the box for 4-B. A telephone number had been crossed out-a Los Angeles number, Hollywood.

The ‘B’ apartments on each floor were just at the top of the stairs to the left. I rang at 4-B. I waited. I was looking forward to the look on Emory Foster’s, or Emory Foxx’s face when he saw me. I was disappointed. At my second ring there was a shuffling inside, and the door opened on a thin, grey-haired woman in an old black dress. She wore jewellery everywhere-costume jewellery in gold and silver and stones of every colour. Her eyes were glazed, and her feet were in ragged slippers. She just stood.

‘Mrs Foxx?’ I asked. ‘Is Emory home?’

She looked at me.

‘Is Emory a heavy man, maybe fifty, has a tweed jacket with elbow patches? He’s a writer?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m looking for him. About Ricardo Vega.’

She nodded. ‘Emory should be back soon.’

She shuffled back into the apartment. I went in. It was a railroad flat, with those same thick-painted walls from the generations of painting by tenants who didn’t have the energy to strip the old paint before they put on the new. Paint, instead of scrubbing, to cover dirt. The furniture was like Emory Foster, or Foxx himself-good, but old, and out of place where it was. It was in Spanish style, heavy and velvet and had probably once graced more spacious rooms. The living room itself was a hothouse, with two electric heaters going. Plants hung and stood everywhere. There were bowls of goldfish by the dozens.

‘Emory knew Vega in Hollywood?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer. She had sat down in a plum velvet armchair, picked up a tumbler of thick, brown liquid that had to be sherry, and gone back to what she had been doing-reading a thick historical novel with voluptuous cover of a raunchy cavalier in padded tights, and a costumed lady with bursting breasts.

‘How long has he known Vega?’ I asked.

‘Too long.’

She didn’t look up. I didn’t really exist. Nothing did. Just her tumbler of sherry, and the broad-shouldered cavaliers, and perfumed breasts, of centuries ago.

‘Why does he want to pin murder on Vega?’

She looked up but not at me. ‘I hope Rey Vega dies in jail. Just dies. That much, at least. Dead and buried.’

She thought about that for a moment, then went back to her book. It was all unreal, like seeing a mental patient sitting alone in some sanitarium room, reading an imaginary book.

‘Dead and buried,’ I said, prompted.

Her eyes up again, still looking at something only in mind. ‘He buried us, but he forgot to kill us first. We’re dead, but we can’t lie down.’

‘How long, Mrs Foxx? Why?’

Back to her book. I wondered if she even knew when Foxx would be home? The hothouse room was making me sweat, or maybe it wasn’t the heat. I had to get out. Emory Fox, if he was framing Ricardo Vega, wasn’t doing it all alone. Boone Terrell had to be part of it, maybe Sarah Wiggen. Mrs Foxx didn’t even notice me leave, lost in the reality of Louis the Fourteenth.

In the hall it was like returning from the past, and going down the steps in the sun was like coming back to life. The apartment upstairs made me think of that tiny room in The Bronx where Leon Trotsky had sat alone and dreamed of murdering the Czar and living in the halls of the Kremlin. Trotsky had done it.

Once out, I crossed the street and headed for the avenue and the nearest subway to Queens. I saw the messenger out of the corner of my eye. In a messenger’s uniform, but there was something familiar despite the number 422. Another man went into the building behind the messenger. Together? I couldn’t tell. Two women went up the steps at almost the same time, all mixed together.

I waited across the street in front of a corset shop, its small signs in both German and Czech. I didn’t have to wait long, and I had my answer when my wait ended. Maybe five minutes. The second man, not the messenger, came out of number 422, and stood for a moment on the steps: George Lehman, the business manager of Ricardo Vega. The messenger had been Sean McBride. Lehman stood on the steps in a topcoat with a velvet collar, and looked up and down the street. Then he came down and started across the street to my side. I turned to study the display of corsets in the window. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lehman take up a position in front of a German bookstore. He continued to look alertly in both directions. I saw his instant shock when he saw me. He stook rigid as if trying to decide whether I had seen him or not. I concentrated on the corsets. When I looked again, Lehman had crossed the street again, and was already half a block away.

I went after him. Ahead he went around the corner onto the avenue. When I reached the corner in a sprint, he was invisible among the throng of afternoon people. A taxi pulled away from the curb. He could have been in it, but it had green lights all the way. I went back to number 422. I went in, and climbed up to the fourth floor. I slowed, stepped softly as I reached the top of… lifted and flung like a feather…

… an illusion-the door of 4-B bent out like a bow, flying past to crash into the opposite wall…

… a giant hand crushed at my chest, lifted me, hurled me in midair backwards and flailing in empty space…

… Crump!.. Wooooosshh…

… wall of air… smoke… debris… burning Bang!.. ear-splitting…

… halfway down the stairs, bounced… rolled like a giant pinwheel

… smashed a wall on the floor down…

I knew an explosion when one hit me. How many times at sea in the war? Exploding, the whole ship and out into black water…

A thing, smoking and burning. At the top of the stairs. A man?… One arm, half a face, half of one leg, smoking cloth hanging in pieces, strips… a ‘thing’ falling… one enormous eye with a look that wasn’t pain or hate or anger or…

… Oh… the pain… Oh…

There were dreams.

A burning man with half a face and one eye with a mild look, reproachful. ‘Now what did you want to go and do that to me for, world? It’s not fair, you know?’ Did I know that half-face?

A heavy face, florid, and thick shoulders bent over to look into my eyes. ‘Fortune… Fortune… What…’

Something blue… dark blue… something white… wail of sirens… black slickers…

Dreams-and my mind clear the instant I opened my eyes.

Clear, crystal sharp.

I had been bombed. Yes. I was in a hospital room. Yes. I had been blown up. Yes.

Marty sat reading a book in the dim light. I watched her. Awake, my mind clear. Clear in terror. I whimpered.

‘Dan?’ Marty put down her book.

I said, ‘Tell me.’

‘What darling! Tell you what, Dan?’

She stood beside the bed, touched my right shoulder. Why? Why not hold my… hand?

‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘My… my…’

‘It’s all right!’ She understood. ‘It’s all right, Dan.’ I felt her fingers on my hand. ‘Your arm is fine, Dan.’

It was there. My arm. My one arm. My one-and-only-thank-God-arm! Sweat poured into my eyes. I giggled. I shook. I laughed. Someone called for a nurse…

The second time I woke up sunlight blinded me.

‘Close that damned shade.’

Sunlight cut off. Orange juice, and my face and throat seemed to be all there. I wondered what hospital it was? I didn’t really give a damn.

‘Drink it all now, that’s a good boy.’

The juice went. I lay back and closed my eyes. I thought of all the hospitals I’d been in. How nice it was to lie and think of the other men out on the cold seas with storms, and submarines, and mines, and sharks, and weary work. I dozed. I felt peaceful.

There were two doctors and three nurses.

‘Well, how do you feel?’ one doctor said.

‘Pleasant,’ I said. I decided to spend my life in bed.

‘Don’t you want to know what day it is?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘They always want to know that first,’ the doctor said.

‘Okay. What day is it?’

‘Friday afternoon. Two days, but you’re okay now.’

I don’t know when they left. I was thinking how nice it was to doze and not have to do anything, think of anything.

On Saturday I ate breakfast and lunch and saw the city outside. Time came back. It always does.

‘What’s the report, Doc?’ I asked.

‘A concussion, no fracture. A wound on your head. Two broken ribs, torn ligaments and muscles in your left leg. Bruises all over. Some wood splinters. All-in-all, lucky. You should go home on Monday or Tuesday.’

‘Have I had visitors besides Miss Adair?’

A nurse said, ‘A Captain Gazzo, and a Joe Harris.’

‘Who was killed by the bomb?’

‘Two people, I think,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m not sure.’

I dozed. I’m one of those people who bring books to a hospital, but never read. I go over in my mind all the places I’ve been in my life, places that are always alive for me. Maybe because in a hospital death has to be kept away.

But death, like time, comes back, and with it all the busy, important schemes and tactics and drives of life.

That bomb had not been meant for me.