He passed the reception desk on his way to the elevators, blinked, and suddenly he was in the thirdfloor bathroom with the door whoozing softly shut behind him instead of in the elevator car. He had never been so afraid. Part of it was the sneakers, but most of it was knowing he had just dropped three to six seconds of consciousness. For the first time in his life his mind had simply shorted out.
He had no idea how long he might have stood there if the door hadn't suddenly opened behind him, cracking him painfully in the back. It was Paul Janning. 'Excuse me, Johnny,' he said. 'I had no idea you came in here to meditate.'
He passed Tell without waiting for a response (he wouldn't have got one in any case, Tell thought later; he was completely incapable of speech, his tongue frozen to the roof of his mouth), and headed for the stalls. Tell was able to walk over to the first urinal and unzip his fly, doing these things only because he thought Paul would really enjoy it if he freaked out. Paul had seemed to take Tell's horrified rejection in stride at the time. But times changed.
Tell flushed the urinal and zipped his fly again (he hadn't even bothered to take his penis, which felt as if it had shrunk to roughly the size of a peanut, from inside his Underwear). He started out ... then stopped. He turned around, took two steps, bent, and looked under the door of the first stall.
The sneakers were there, now surrounded by mounds of dead flies.
So were Paul Janning's Gucci loafers.
What Tell was seeing looked like a double exposure, or one of the hokey ghost effects from the Topper TV program. First he would be seeing Paul's loafers through the sneakers. then the sneakers would seem to solidify and he would be seeing them through the loafers, as if Paul were the ghost. Except, even when he was seeing through them, Paul's loafers made little shifts and movements, while the sneakers remained as immobile as always.
Tell left. For the first time in two weeks he felt calm.
The next day he did what he probably should have done at once: he took Georgie Ronkler out to lunch and asked him if he had ever heard anything strange about the building which used to be called Music City. Why he hadn't thought of doing this earlier was a puzzle to him. He only knew that what happened yesterday seemed to have cleared his mind somehow, like a brisk slap or a dashing of cold water. Georgie might not know anything, but he might; he had been working with Paul for at least seven years, and a lot of that work had been done at Music City.
'Oh, the ghost, you mean?' Georgie asked, and laughed. They were in Cartin's, a deli-restaurant on 6th Avenue, and the place was noon-noisy. He bit into his corned beef sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and sipped some of his cream soda through the two straws poked into the bottle. 'Who told you 'bout that, Johnny?'
'Some janitor,' Tell said. His voice was perfectly calm.
'You sure you didn't see him?' Georgie asked, and winked. This was as close as Georgie could get to teasing.
'Nope.' He hadn't. Not really. just some sneakers. Sneakers and dead flies.
'Yeah, well, everybody used to talk about it,' Georgie said, 'how the guy's ghost was haunting the place. He got it right up there on the third floor, you know. In the john. '
'Yes,' Tell said. 'That's what I heard. But the janitor wouldn't tell me anymore, or maybe he didn't know anymore. He just laughed and walked away.'
'It happened before I started to work with Paul. Paul was the one who told me about it.'
'He never saw the ghost himself?' Tell asked, knowing the answer. Yesterday Paul had been sitting in it. Shitting in it, to be perfectly vulgarly truthful.
'No, he used to laugh about it.' Georgie put his sandwich down. 'You know how he can be sometimes. Just a little m-mean.' If forced to say something even slightly negative about someone, Georgie developed a mild stutter.
'I know. But never mind Paul; who was this ghost? What happened to him?'
'Oh, he was just some dope pusher,' Georgie said. 'This was back in 1972 or '73, I guess. Before the Slump.'
Tell nodded. From 1975 until 1980 or so, the rock industry lay becalmed in the horse latitudes. Kids spent their money on video games instead of records. For perhaps the fiftieth time since 1955, the pundits announced the death of rock and roll. And, as on other occasions, it proved to be a lively corpse. Video games topped out; MTV checked in; a fresh wave of stars arrived from England; Bruce Springsteen suddenly became all the things the newsmagazines had said he was ten years before.
'Before the slump, record company execs used to deliver coke backstage in their briefcases before big shows,' Georgie said. 'I was concert-mixing back then, and I saw it happen. There was one guy-I don't want to say his n- name because he's dead, dead since 1978, but you'd know it-who used to get a jar of olives from his label before every gig. The jar would come wrapped up in pretty paper with bows and ribbon and everything. Only instead of water, the olives came packed in cocaine. He used to put them in his drinks. Called them b-b-blast-off martinis.'
'I bet they were, too,' Tell murmured.
'Well, back then everybody thought coke was a good clean high. It didn't hook you like heroin or f-fuck you over so you couldn't work. And this building, man, this building was a regular snowstorm. Pills and pot and hash too, but mainly it was cocaine. It was the big fashion drug. And this guy-'
'What was his name?'
Georgie shrugged and worked on his sandwich. 'I don't know. But he was like one of the deli delivery boys you see going up and down in the elevators with coffee and doughnuts and b-bagels. Only instead of delivering coffee- and, this guy delivered dope. You'd see him this is what I heard, anyway - two or three times a week, riding all the way up and then working his way down. He'd have a topcoat slung over his arm and an alligatorskin briefcase in that hand. He kept the overcoat over his arm even when it was hot. That was so people wouldn't see the cuff. But I guess sometimes they did a-a-anyway.'
'The what?'
'C-C-Cuff' Georgie said, spraying out bits of bread and corned beef and immediately going crimson. 'Gee,
