The Brass Rainbow

21

The taxi dropped me in Sheridan Square. I walked with the Friday-night crowd. They were all bundled up and eager, the girls like bright teddy bears in the cold and the neon lights. Here and there a determined maverick walked bold in a thin jacket and scarf, defying the elements and the world.

I left the Square and walked down the dark side streets. I was alone in a different world. The windows of the buildings were lighted, but they were a universe away to me where I walked. Grove Street was empty, and Grove Mews was a dark tunnel. Through its archway the Mews looked like a deserted medieval courtyard.

The snow lay white and thick and almost untouched in the Mews. I climbed the stairs to the stone corridor of the fifth floor of building number Two. An icy blast of wind greeted me. I had not closed the corridor window the first time, and no one had closed it since.

A sound came to me on the wind.

A light, flat, slapping sound in a slow, steady rhythm. Flat yet resonant. The funereal beat of a distant drum. Soft, like the muffled drums behind the gun carriage at a hero’s lament. But not a normal drum: the tone was too flat, the beat too light. A weak and infinitely solitary sound on the wind.

I stepped to the door of 5-B. The door was half open, and the slow drumming came from inside. I pushed the door all the way open. The thin, pale boy whom I had last seen driving the gray coupe with Carla Devine in it sat on one of the studio couches. He didn’t seem to notice me. There was no one else in the room. I closed the door behind me.

Ben Marno, if that was who the boy was, sat with his back against the wall, his legs straight out in front of him, and the small drum between his thighs. He wore dirty chino pants much too thin for a New York winter, and an old army field jacket as thin as the pants. His shoulders were hunched as if he had been cold all his life. His wild hair hung down over his face so that all I could see was his nose, his taut mouth, and his sharp chin. He was softly beating out the slow rhythm of the drum as if he hardly knew that his hands were moving.

The explanation of the strangeness of the light, flat sound of the drum became clear to me. It was an Israeli drum, or an Arab drum-they are much the same, Israeli and Arab drums, which proves that custom and culture rise from time and place and are harder to control than politics. It was about the size of a small bongo, made of earthenware like a jar, one end covered with a laced skin, the other end smaller and open.

“Marno?” I said.

He looked up at me, without surprise or curiosity. He looked, but I was not sure he could see or cared if he saw me or not. Indifferent eyes, and his hands never stopped their slow beating of the drum.

“Where’s Carla?” I said.

His inanimate eyes, lumps of dark brown dirt, turned up to the grotesque false spider web on the ceiling, infinitely bored. Not with me alone, with it all. Flat, dead, unconcerned. Yet his hands went on and on in their soft, mourning rhythm, and there was something else in the dead eyes-shock, maybe? His hands here and alive, but all the rest of him withdrawn, gone somewhere else deep inside him.

“Where is she, Marno?”

His eyes stared at me. Then flickered, faintly, somewhere to his left. A small movement of the dark eyes. Toward the door to the next room. A reflex, involuntary, as if my voice had finally penetrated deep into wherever he was, and something had stirred momentarily.

I went into the next room. She was there.

She lay grotesquely with one thin arm and one perfect slim leg off a studio couch. She wore only a thin blue nylon robe, her child’s hard and perfect little body still beautiful in death. Her eyes were open and wide without pupils, and a thin trickle of blood from her mouth had dried on her chin. She had bitten her tongue at the instant of death, as if death had come in some great shock wave. It had. There was no pain on her madonna face, only the contortion of some powerful blow from inside her frail body. I had seen the results of a massive overdose of heroin before.

I checked her arm, but I did not have to see the tiny, bruised puncture at the vein to know. There were other puncture marks, not too many. She had not been on the junk long or too steadily. Just long enough. It could be an accident, junkies died every day from overdoses. Or it could be suicide. But I knew it was neither of these; it was murder. Only there was no way I would ever prove that.

I lifted her from the grotesque position, laid her on the couch, and covered her with the blue robe. I went back out to Ben Marno. He sat where I had left him, staring at nothing, beating out the funeral dirge on his slow drum.

“How long?” I said.

His fingers stroked the drum. He looked at me. He was back in the present, in the spider-web room, perhaps because now I also knew what only he had known a few minutes earlier.

“Who knows?” he said. His voice was hoarse and thin. “Who cares? How long, he says. Forever, mister.”

“I was here about four hours ago.”

“I wasn’t. I come back maybe an hour ago. She was here. Like you see.”

“And you just left her there?”

“Stupid. Stupid kid.”

“Like that you left her lying? A piece of meat?”

His fingers never stopped tapping their dirge. He bent his head, listened to the intricate beat, concentrated on his work.

“Lay her out, dad? Fold her hands, close her eyes, dress her in her best rags? Propaganda. She’s dead, dad, the propaganda don’t make no never mind to her no more.”

His fingers did a slow, difficult run on the drum. He nodded to himself, pleased. “Who knows, maybe she can hear? Valhalla. You think there’s a Valhalla for little tramps? Everything she wanted, and no payoff time?”

“All right,” I said. “Mourn your own way, but…”

He silenced the drum with the flat of his hand. “Sympathy, dad? Lay it on me. I got a bad break. She was a nice little bird. Now I got to find me a new one. How’s that for a rotten break for old Ben Marno?”

He had been hurt a lot more than anyone would ever know. He had been cut open, and he was bleeding alone. And he was not bleeding for himself, but for the dead girl-child in the next room.

“Who supports me now? Man, that bird did me one big bad turn. How about that? Who buys the groceries for Ben Marno?”

He was bleeding in buckets. Maybe if he kept it up long enough, he might even begin to forget in a week or so.

I said, “Who killed her, Marno?”

“Killed? A mistake. Too much H for one small bird.”

“Killed,” I said, “and no mistake. Who?”

His fingers began the erratic lament again. “Who, who! The big owl. Yeh. We all die, dads; we all get killed. It’s a big burlesque, dads. Swatting flies.”

“You said it,” I said. “She was swatted like a fly.”

“We’re all flies, dads; we all get swatted sooner or later. So fly high, fly high!”

His voice and the beat of the drum rose, and I saw his eyes clearly for the first time. The pupils were small and tight, and the hysteria in him was not all grief. He was high on drugs, and there was something even more than drugs.

“You’re high, Marno. Is that the way you get out of it?”

He did another quick run on the drum. “Just a little high, dads; not flying. Not enough. I didn’t have enough, no. Ben Marno didn’t have enough. Down to the last drop. So now I used it, the last drop, and no little bird to get more.”

He was telling me something. I heard it. “She was out trying to get more for you? She took a big chance for you?”

“For me, for Ben Marno who had to have some more happy dust. So out she went to find a contact. She made it, dads.” He threw the drum away. He looked at me from those constricted eyes. “Who, dads? You tell me. You’re the detective.”

“If you know that, you know more,” I said.

“I know, dads, and I know nothing, right? She knew, and she knew nothing. Just enough to kill her. Very careful these men of action. My nice little friendly bird, but Paul Baron’s chick because Paul Baron had what it took. So she was there, see? She didn’t know anything, not really, but she knew that Baron was alive and kicking after this Weiss character walked out.”

“She told you Paul Baron was okay after Weiss left Wednesday night?”

His eyes were dead. “She was scared, mister. Oh, God, was she one scared little bird. But for me she went out for a score, and I let her go! She’d been warned: clam up, keep out of sight. But she had a feeling the warning wasn’t the end of it.” He looked straight at me. “Not with you around. It was you, dads. She was sure the fuzz believed her, but she was scared that with you nosing around they wouldn’t trust her. You and me, dads!”

What could I say? It was almost certainly the truth. So I said, “Tell me what she told you, Marno. All of it!”

On the studio couch he blinked at me. He drew his knees up to his chin, clasped his ankles. “What’s to tell? She didn’t know anything, but they killed her anyway! All she knew was that Baron had a squeeze on a kid named Walter Radford. She was part of the squeeze, a witness. Baron lowered the boom on the kid on Sunday. Only on Monday it all changed. Baron was all excited, and told her to cover for him for an hour. The deal was bigger, he didn’t need her in it anymore. Wednesday they had dinner. Baron was happy as a kid, it was going like silk. Later she met him at his Fifth Street pad. Weiss showed up and got paid for some stupid bet and left. Baron was laughing, she says, after Weiss walked out. He sent her home right after. She figured he was expecting someone. She saw a guy watching downstairs, but she didn’t think anything of it then. Next day this woman told her to clam up-tight. Not a word to the cops. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know that until the fuzz rousted her Thursday night when you were there.”

“Woman?” I said. “What woman warned her?”

“She never told me.”

“Think!”

He shook his head. “No luck, dads; she didn’t want me to know. Too dangerous for little Ben to know. I figure it had to be someone tight with Paul Baron. Maybe it was that Misty Dawn. She was Baron’s steady before Carla. It was the Dawn chick who started the whole play, Carla said. Seems Misty was close to some guy who knew Walter Radford, and she told Baron about the setup.”

The room was so quiet I could hear voices far off on Seventh Avenue. Someone laughed somewhere out in the snow.

“Baron made his move on Sunday?” I said. “You’re sure?”

“That’s what Carla said.”

I started for the door. “When you call the police, don’t mention me.”

“Police? Hell, dad, I’m fading away. Erase the name on the mailbox and fly. We’re all islands.”

He’d bleed a long time. Maybe even longer than Gerald Devine and his silent wife up there in their paid-off house.

I went down to the snow-covered courtyard and through the archway to Grove Street. I turned left for Seventh Avenue to find a telephone booth. I saw the car across the street and behind me as I turned toward the avenue.

A green car, its engine muffled by the snow, that eased away from the curb and started after me.