Nightwork

3

Figure out my life. I had plenty of time to do it. As I drove south, down the entire East Coast of America, I was alone, unfettered, free of claims, with no distractions, plunged in that solitude that is supposed to be the essential condition of philosophic speculation. There was Pat Minot’s cause and effect to be considered; also not to be overlooked was the maxim I had been taught in English lit courses that your character was your fate, that your rewards and failures were the result of your faults and virtues. In Lord Jim, a book I must have read at least five times since I was a boy, the hero is killed eventually because of a flaw in himself that permitted him to leave a shipload of poor beggars to die. He pays for his cowardice in the end by being killed himself. I had always thought it just, fair, inevitable. At the wheel of the little Volkswagen, speeding down the great highways past Washington and Richmond and Savannah, I remembered Lord Jim. But it no longer convinced me. I certainly was not flawless, but, at least in my opinion, I had been a decent son, an honorable friend, conscientious in my profession, law-abiding, careful to avoid cruelty or spite, inciting no man to be my enemy, indifferent to power, abhorring violence. I had never seduced a woman – or cheated a shopkeeper, had not struck a fellow human being since a fight in the schoolyard at the age of ten. I had definitely never left anyone to die. Yet … Yet there had been that morning in Dr Ryan’s office.

If character was fate. Was it the character of thirty million Europeans to die in World War II, was it the character of the inhabitants of Calcutta to drop in the streets of starvation, was it the character of thousands of citizens of Pompeii to be mummified in a flood of lava?

The ruling law was simple – accident. The throw of dice, the turning of a card. From now on I would gamble and trust to luck. Maybe, I thought, it was in my character to be a gambler and fate had neatly arranged it so that I could play out my destined role. Maybe my short career as a man who traveled the Northern skies was an aberration, a detour and only now, back to earth, was I on the right path.

When I got to Florida, I spent my days at the tracks. In the beginning, all went well. I won often enough to live comfortably and not have to worry about taking a job. There was no job that anyone could offer me that I could imagine accepting. I kept by myself, making no friends, approaching no women. I found, mildly surprised, that all desire had left me. Whether this was temporary or would turn out to be permanent did not bother me. I wanted no attachments.

I turned with bitter pleasure into myself, content with the long sunny afternoons at the track and the solitary meals and the evenings spent studying the performances of thoroughbreds and the habits of trainers and jockeys. I also had time now for reading, and I indiscriminately devoured libraries of paperbacks. As Dr Ryan had assured me, the condition of my eyes did not interfere with my ability to read. Still, I found nothing in any of the books I read that either helped or harmed me.

I lived in small hotels, moving on from one to another when other guests, to whom I had become a familiar presence, attempted to approach me.

I was ahead of the game by several thousand dollars when the season ended and I drifted up to New York. I no longer went to the track. The actual running of a race now bored me. I continued betting, but with bookies. For a while I went often to the theater, to the movies, losing myself for a few hours at a time in their fantasies. New York is a good city for a man who prefers to be alone. It is the easiest city in the world to enjoy solitude.

My luck began to change in New York and with the onset of winter I knew that I would have to look for some kind of job if I wanted to continue eating. Then the night man at the St Augustine was held up for the second time.

I put the last of the 15 January bills in the file. It was now three hours into 16 January. Happy Anniversary. I got up and stretched. I was hungry and I got out my sandwich and the bottle of beer.

I was unwrapping my sandwich when I heard the sound of the door from the fire emergency stairs opening into the lobby and quick woman’s footsteps. I reached for the switch and the lobby was brightly lit. A young woman was hurrying, almost running, toward the desk. She was unnaturally tall, with those thick soles and exaggerated high heels which made women look like so many displaced Watusis. She had on a white, fake fur coat and a blonde wig that wouldn’t fool anybody. I recognized her. She was a whore who had come in just after midnight with the man in 610. I glanced at my watch. It was just after three o’clock. It had been a long session in 610 and the woman looked it. She ran to the front door, pushed futilely at the broken buzzer, then clattered over to the desk.

She knocked sharply on the glass over the desk. “Open the door, mister,” she said loudly. “I want to get out of here.”

I took the key from the drawer under the desk in which the pistol was kept and went through the little room next to the office where there was a huge old safe against the wall, lined with safety-deposit boxes. The safety-deposit boxes were relics of a richer day. None was in use now. I unlocked the door and stepped out into the lobby. The woman followed me across the lobby toward the front door. She was gasping for breath. Her profession didn’t keep her in shape for running down six flights of steps in the middle of the night. She was somewhere around thirty years old, and by the look of her they hadn’t been easy years. The women who came in and out of the hotel at night made a strong argument for celibacy.

“Why didn’t you take the elevator down?” I asked.

“I was waiting for the elevator,” the woman said. “But then this crazy, naked old man popped out of the door, making all kinds of funny noises, grunting, like an animal, and waving something at me…”

“Waving wh … wh …, what?”

“Something. It looked like a club. A baseball bat. It’s dark in that hall. You bastards certainly don’t waste much money on lights in this hotel.” Her voice was whiskey-hoarse, set in city cement, praising nothing. “I didn’t wait around to see. I just took off. You want to find out, you go up to the sixth floor and see for yourself. Open the goddamn door, will you? I have to go home.”

I unlocked the big, plate-glass front door, reinforced by a heavy, cast-iron grill. For a shabby old hotel like the St Augustine, the management was nervously security-conscious. The woman pushed the door open impatiently and ran out into the dark street. I took a deep breath of the cold night air as the clatter of heels diminished in the direction of Lexington Avenue. I stood at the door another moment, looking down the street, on the chance that a prowl car might be cruising past. I would have felt better about going up to see what was happening on the sixth floor if I had a cop with me. I was not paid for solitary heroics. But the street was empty. I heard a siren in the distance, probably on Park Avenue, but that was no help. I closed the door and locked it and walked slowly back across the lobby toward the office, thinking, am I going to spend the rest of my life ushering whores to and from anonymous beds?

“Praise him with stringed instruments and organs”. In the office I took the pass-key out of the drawer, looked for a moment at the pistol. I shook my head and shut the drawer. Having the pistol there wasn’t my idea. It hadn’t helped the other night man when the two junkies came in and walked off with all the cash in the place, leaving the night man lying in his blood on the floor with a bump the size of a cantaloupe on his head.

I put my jacket on, somehow feeling that being properly dressed would give me more authority in whatever situation I would find on the sixth floor, and went out into the lobby again, locking the office door behind me. I pushed the elevator button and heard the whine of the cables and the elevator started down the shaft.

When the door creaked open, I hesitated before going in. Maybe, I thought, I just ought to go back into the office, get my overcoat and my sandwich and my beer, and walk away from here. Who needs this lousy job? But just as the door began to slide shut, I went in.

When I reached the sixth floor, I pushed the button that kept the elevator door open, and stepped out into the corridor. Light was streaming from the doorway of the room diagonally across from the elevator, number 602. On the worn carpet of the corridor, half in and half out of the light, was a naked man, lying on his face, his head and torso in shadow, old man’s wrinkled buttocks and skinny legs sharply, obscenely illuminated. The left arm was stretched out, the fingers of the hand curled, as though the man had been trying to grab at something as be fell. His right arm was under him. He lay absolutely still. Even as I bent to turn him over, I was sure that nothing I could do and nobody I could call would do any good.

The man was heavy, with a big loose paunch, that belied the thin legs and buttocks, and I grunted as I pulled the body over onto its back. Then I saw what the whore had said the man had been waving at her, that might have been a club. It wasn’t a club, but a long cardboard tube tightly wrapped in brown paper, the kind artists and architects use to carry rolled-up prints and building plans. The man’s hand was still clutching it. I didn’t blame the whore for being frightened. In the dim light of the corridor, I’d have been frightened, too, if a naked man had suddenly sprung out waving the thing menacingly at me.

I stood up, feeling a chill on my skin, nerving myself to touch the body once more. I stared down at the dead face. The eyes were open, staring up at me, the mouth in a last tortured grimace. Grunting animal sounds, the whore had said. There was no blood, no sign of a wound. I had never seen the man before, but that was not unusual with my working hours, coming in after guests had checked in for the night and leaving before they came down in the morning. It was a round, fat, old man’s face, with a big, fleshy nose and wispy gray hair on the balding skull. Even in the disarray of death, the face gave the impression of power and importance.

Fighting down a rising feeling of nausea, I knelt on one knee and put my ear to the man’s chest. His breasts might have been those of an old woman, with just a few straggles of damp white hair and nipples that were almost green in the bare light. There was the sour, living odor of sweat, but no movement, no sound. Old man, I thought, as I stood up, why couldn’t you have done this on somebody else’s time?

I bent down again and hooked my hands under the dead man’s armpits and dragged him through the open doorway into room 602. You couldn’t just leave a naked body lying in the corridor like that. I had been working in the hotel business long enough to know that death was something you kept out of the sight of paying guests.

As I pulled the body along the floor of the little hallway that led into the room proper, the cardboard tube rolled to one side. I got the body into the room, next to the bed, which was a tangle of sheets and blankets. There was lipstick smeared all over the sheets and pillows. The lady I had let out around one o’clock, probably. I looked down with some-tiling like pity at the old body naked on the threadbare carpet, the flaccid dead flesh outlined against a faded floral pattern. One last erection. Joy and then mortality.

There was a medium-sized but expensive-looking leather suitcase open on the little desk. A worn wallet lay next to it and a gold money clip, with some bills in it. In the bag three clean shirts were to be seen, neatly folded.

Strewn on the desk were some quarters and dimes. I counted the money in the clip. Four tens and three ones. I dropped the clip back on the desk and picked up the wallet. There were ten, crisp, new, hundred-dollar bills in it. I whistled softly. Whatever else had happened that night to the old man, he had not been robbed. I put the ten bills back into the wallet and carefully placed it back on the desk. It never occurred to me to take any of the money. That was the sort of man I used to be. Thou shalt[4] not steal. Thou shalt not do a lot of things.

I glanced at the open suitcase. Along with the shirts there were two pairs of old-fashioned button shorts, a striped necktie, two pairs of socks, some blue pajamas. Whoever he was, number 602 was going to stay in New York longer than he had planned.

The corpse on the floor oppressed me, made uncertain claims on me. I took one of the blankets from the bed and threw it over the body, covering the face, the staring eyes, the mutely shouting lips. I felt warmer, death now only a geometric shape on the floor.

I went back to the corridor to get the cardboard tube. There were no labels or addresses or identification of any kind on it. As I carried it into the room, I saw that the heavy brown paper had been torn raggedly away from the top. I was about to put it on the desk, next to the dead man’s other belongings, when I caught a glimpse of green paper, partially pulled out of the opening. I drew it out. It was a hundred-dollar bill. It was not new like the bills in the wallet, but old and crumpled. I held the tube so that I could look down into it. As far as I could tell, it was crammed with bills. I remained immobile for a moment, then stuffed the bill I had taken out back in and folded the torn brown paper as neatly as I could over the top of the tube.

Holding the tube under my arm, I went to the door, switched off the light, stepped out into the corridor and turned the pass-key in the lock of room number 602. My actions were crisp, almost automatic, as though all my life I had rehearsed for this moment, as though there were no alternatives.

I took the elevator down to the lobby, went into the little windowless room next to the office, using the key. There was a shelf running along above the safe, piled with stationery, old bills, ragged magazines from other years that had been recuperated from the rooms. Pictures of extinct politicians, naked girls who by now were no longer worth photographing – the momentarily illustrious dead, the extremely desirable women, monocled assassins, movie stars, carefully posed authors – a jumble of recent and not-so-recent American miscellany. Without hesitation I reached up and rolled the tube back toward the wall. I heard it plop down onto the shelf, out of sight, behind the dog-eared testimony of scandals and delights.

Then I went into the lighted office and called for an ambulance.

After that I sat down, finished unwrapping my sandwich, opened the bottle of beer. While I ate and drank, I looked up the register. Number 602 was, or had been, named John Ferns, had booked in only the afternoon before, and had given a home address on North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

I was finishing my beer when the bell rang and I saw the two men and the ambulance outside. One of them was in a white coat and was carrying a rolled up stretcher. The other was dressed in a blue uniform and was carrying a black bag, but I knew he wasn’t a doctor. They don’t waste doctors on ambulances in Manhattan, but dress up an orderly who is something of a medical technician and good enough to give first aid and who can usually be depended upon not to kill a patient on the spot. As I was opening the door, a prowl car drove up and a policeman got out.

“What’s wrong?” the policeman asked. He was a heavy-set, dark-jowled[5] man, with unhealthy rings under his eyes.

“An old man croaked upstairs,” I said.

“I’ll go along with them, Dave,” the policeman said to his partner at the wheel. I could hear the car radio chattering, dispatching officers to accidents, cases of wife beating, suicides, to streets where suspicious-looking men had been reported entering buildings.

Calmly, I led the group through the lobby. The technician was young and kept yawning as though he hadn’t slept in weeks. People who work at night all look as though they are being punished for some nameless sin. The policeman’s shoes on the bare floor of the lobby sounded as though they had lead soles. Going up in the elevator nobody spoke. I volunteered no information. A medicinal smell filled the elevator. They carry the hospital with them, I thought. I would have preferred it if the prowl car hadn’t happened along.

When we got out on the sixth floor, I opened the door to 602 and led the way into the room. The technician ripped the blanket off the dead man, went over him, and put his stethoscope to the man’s chest. The policeman stood at the foot of the bed, his eyes taking in the lipstick-smeared sheets, the bag on the desk, the wallet and money clip lying next to it. “Who’re you. Jack?” he asked me.

“I’m the night clerk.”

“What’s your name?” The way he asked was full of accusation, as though he was sure whatever name I gave would be a false one. What would he have done if I had answered, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings”? Probably taken out his black book and written, “Witness asserts name is Ozymandias. Probably an alias.” He was a real night-time cop, doomed to roam a dark city teeming with enemies, ambushes everywhere.

“My name is Grimes.” I said.

“Where’s the lady who was here with him?”

“I have no idea. I let a lady out around one o’clock. It might have been this one.” I was surprised that I wasn’t stuttering.

The technician stood up, taking the stethoscope plugs out of his ears. “DOA.” he said flatly.

Dead on arrival. I could have told that without calling for an ambulance. I was discovering that there is a lot of waste motion about death in a big city.

“What was it?” the cop asked. “Any wounds?”

“No. Coronary, probably.”

“Anything to be done?”

“Not really,” me technician said. “Go through the motions.” He bent down again, rolled back the dead man’s eyelids and peered into the rheumy eyes. Then he felt around the throat for a pulse, his hands gentle and expert.

“You seem to know what you’re doing, friend,” I laid. “You must get a lot of practice.”

“I’m in my second year in medical school,” he said. “I only do this to eat.”

The policeman went over to the desk and picked up the money clip. “Forty-three bucks,” he said. “And in the wallet—” His thick eyebrows went up as he inspected it. He took out the bills and riffled them. counting. “An even grand,” he said.

“Holy man!” I said. It was a good try, but from the way the cop looked at me, I wasn’t fooling him.

“How much was there in it when you found him?” he asked. He was not a friendly neighborhood cop. Maybe he was a different man when he was on the day shift.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said. Not stuttering was a triumph.

“You mean to say you didn’t look?” – “I didn’t look.”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Why what?” This was a good time to look boyish.

“Why didn’t you look?”

“It didn’t occur to me.”

“Yeah,” the cop said again, but let it go at that. He rimed the bills again. “All in hundreds. You’d think a guy with that much dough on him would pick a better place to knock it off than a creep joint like this.” He put the bills back into the wallet. “I guess I better take this into the station,” he said. “Anybody want to count?”

“We trust you. Officer,” the technician said. There was the faintest echo of irony in his voice. He was young, but already an expert at death and despoliation.

The policeman looked through the wallet compartments. He had thick hairy fingers, like small clubs. “That’s funny,” he said.

“What’s funny?” the technician asked.

“There’s no credit cards or business cards or driver’s license. A man with more than a thousand bucks in cash on him.” He shook his head and pushed his cap back. “You wouldn’t call that normal, would you?” He looked aggrieved, as though the dead man had not behaved the way a decent American citizen who expected to be protected in death as in life by his country’s police should have behaved. “You know who he is?” he asked me.

“I never saw him before,” I said. “His name is Ferns and he lived in Chicago. I’ll show you the register.”

The policeman put the wallet into his pocket, went quickly through the shirts and underwear and socks in the bag, then opened the closet door and searched the pockets of the single dark suit and overcoat that were hanging there. “Nothing,” he said. “No letters, no address book. Nothing. A guy with a bad heart. Some people got no more sense than a horse. Look, I got to make a inventory. In the presence of witnesses.” He took out his pad and moved around the room, listing the few possessions, now no longer possessed, of the body on the floor. It didn’t take long. “Here,” he said to me, “you have to sign this.” I glanced at the list. “One hundred and forty-three dollars. One suitcase, brown, unlocked, one suit and overcoat, gray, one hat…” I signed, under the patrolman’s name. The cop put his thick black pad into a back pocket. “Who put the blanket over him?” he asked.

“I did,” I said.

“You find him there on the floor?”

“No. He was out in the corridor.”

“Starkers – like that?”

“Starkers. I dragged him in.”

“What did you want to do that for?” The policeman sounded plaintive now, faced with a complication.

“This is a hotel,” I said. “You have to keep up appearances.”

The policeman glowered at me. “What are you – trying to be smart?” he said.

“No, Officer, I’m not trying to be smart. If I’d left him out where I found him and somebody had come along and seen him, I’d have had my ass chewed down to the bone by the manager.”

“Next time you see a body laying anyplace,” the policeman said, “you just let it lay until the law arrives. Just remember that, see?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You alone in this hotel all night?”

“Yes.”

“You work in the office au by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you happen to come up here? He telephone down or something?”

“No. A lady was leaving the building and she said there was a crazy old naked man up on the sixth floor who was making advances toward her.” Objectively, almost as though I were listening to myself on a tape, I noted that I hadn’t stuttered once.

“Sexual advances?”

“She implied that.”

“A lady? What sort of lady?”

“I would think she was a whore,” I said.

“You ever see her before?”

“No.”

“You get a lot of lady traffic in this hotel, don’t you?”

“Average, I would say.”

The policeman stared down at the contorted bluish face on the floor. “How long you think he’s been dead. Bud?”

“Hard to tell. Anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour,” the technician said. He looked up at me. “Did you call the hospital as soon as you saw him? The call came in at three-fifteen.”

“Well,” I said, “first I listened to see it I could get a heartbeat, then I pulled him in here and covered him and then I had to go down to the office and phone.”

“Did you try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

“No.”

“Why not?” The technician wasn’t being inquisitive; it was too late at night and he was too tired for that; he was just going through a routine.

“It didn’t occur to me,” I said.

“A lot of things didn’t occur to you, mister,” the policeman said darkly. Like the technician he was going through a routine. Suspicion was his routine. But his heart wasn’t in it and he sounded bored already.

“Okay,” the technician said, “let’s take him away. No sense wasting any time. When you find out what the family wants to do with the body,” he said, addressing me, “call the morgue.”

“I’ll send a telegram to Chicago right away,” I said.

The two ambulance men lifted the body onto the stretcher. “He’s a heavy old sonofabitch[6], isn’t he?” the driver said, as he let the cadaver down. “I bet he ate good, the old goat. Sexual advances. With a droopy old cock like that.” He draped a sheet over the body and strapped the ankles to the foot of the stretcher while the technician buckled a strap across the chest. The elevator was too small to handle the body lying flat and they would have to stand the stretcher up to fit it in. They took the stretcher out into the hall, followed by the policeman. I took a last look around the room and put out the light before closing the door.

“Had a busy night?” I asked the technician pleasantly, as the elevator started down. Be matter-of-fact, normal, I told myself. Obviously it was perfectly normal for all three of these men to carry dead men out of hotels in the middle of the night, and I tried to fit into their standards of behavior.

“This is my fourth call since I came on,” he said. “I’ll trade jobs with you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll still be sitting here all night working an adding machine while you’re raking in the loot year after year.” Now, I thought, why did I use the word loot? “I read the papers,” I said quickly; “doctors make more than anybody else in the country.”

“God bless America,” the technician said as the elevator came to a stop and the door opened. He and the driver picked up the stretcher and I led the way across the lobby. I opened the door for them with my key and watched as they put the body into the ambulance. The policeman at the wheel of the car was asleep, snoring softly, his cap off and his head lolling back.

The technician got into the ambulance with the corpse, and the driver slammed the door shut. He went around to the front and started the motor, revving it loudly. He had the siren going while he was still in first gear.

“What the hell is his hurry?” said the policeman standing on the sidewalk with me. “They’re not going anywhere.”

“Aren’t you going to wake your pal up?” I asked.

“Nah. He wakes up if a call comes for us. He’s got the instinct of a animal. Might as well let him get his beauty rest. I wish I had his nerves.” He sighed, weighed down by cares which his own nerves were not strong enough to support. “Let’s get a look at the register, mister.” He followed me back into the hotel, his tread heavy, the law weighty.

I unlocked the office door. I didn’t look up at the shelf over the safe, where the cardboard tube lay hidden behind the boxes of stationery and the piles of old magazines. “I have a bottle of bourbon in here, if you’d like a slug,” I said, as we went into the front office. Even as I spoke I admired the absolutely matter-of-fact way in which I was behaving. I was running on computers; all the cards were correctly punched. Data input. But it had been an effort not to look up at the shelf.

“Well, I’m on duty, you know,” the policeman said. “But one small slug…”

I opened the register and pointed out the entry for room 602. The policeman slowly copied it out into his black book. The history of the city of New York, faithfully recorded in twenty thousand handwritten pages by the graduates of the Police academy. An interesting archaeological discovery.

I got out the bottle and uncorked it. “Sorry, I don’t have a glass,” I said.

“I drunk out of bottles before this,” the policeman said. He raised the bottle. “Well, L’chaim,” he said, and took a long swig.

“You Jewish?” I asked as the policeman gave me the bottle.

“Nah. My partner. I caught it from him.”

L’chaim. To life, I remembered from the song in Fiddler on the Roof. “I think I’ll join you.” I said, raising the bottle. “I can use it. A night like this can leave a man a little shaky.”

“This is nothing,” the cop said. “You oughta see some of the things we run into.”

“I can imagine,” I said. I drank.

“Well,” the policeman said, “I gotta be going. There’ll be an inspector around in the morning. Just keep that room locked until he gets here, understand?”

“I’ll pass the word on to the day man.”

“Night work,” the policeman said. “Do you sleep good during the day?”

“Fair.”

“Not me.” The policeman shook his head mournfully. “Look at the rings under my eyes.”

I looked at the rings under the policeman’s eyes. “You could use a good night’s sleep,” I said.

“You ain’t kidding.” The man dug a knuckle into his eyes, viciously. If the eye offend thee … “Well, at least there ain’t been no crime committed. Be thankful for small mercies,” he said surprisingly. Unsuspected depths, a vocabulary that included the word mercy.

I accompanied him to the front door, opened it politely.

“Have a good day,” the policeman said.

“Thanks. You too.”

“Hah,” he said.

I watched the heavy, slow-moving man climb into the prowl car and wake up his partner. The car went slowly down the silent street. I locked the door and went back to the office. I picked up the telephone and dialed. I had to wait for at least ten rings before the connection came through. This country is in full decay, I thought, waiting. Nobody moves.

“Western Union,” the voice said.

“I want to send a telegram to Chicago,” I said. I gave the name and address, spelling out Ferns slowly and clearly. “Like wheel.” I said.

“What’s that?” The voice of Western Union was irritated.

“Fen-is wheel,” I said. “Amusement parks.”

“What is the message, please?”

“Regret to inform you that John Ferris, of your address,” I said, “died this morning at three-fifteen am. Please get in touch with me immediately for instructions. Signed, H. M. Drusack, Manager, Hotel St Augustine, Manhattan.” By the time the reply came in, Drusack would be on duty and I would be somewhere else, safely out of the way. There was no need for the family in Chicago to know my name. “Charges. please.”

The operator gave me the charges. I noted them on a sheet of paper. Good old Drusack would put them on Ferris’ bill. I knew Drusack.

I took another slug of bourbon, then settled down in the swivel chair and picked up the Bible. I figured I could get well into Proverbs before the day man came on to relieve me.