He thinks of Reinhold Messer and wonders if that, like Arne Bodinson, is a nom de guerre. It seems almost too good to be true, as Messer is the German word for knife. Messer certainly conformed to the militia–Aryan Brotherhood archetype, and if his name at birth had been, say, Cuthbert Lavender, a name change would seem inevitable.
He has looked for Messer on the Internet, but the man doesn’t have a website, and hadn’t even provided a business card. You can look for me at shows, he’d said, which suggested a life lived off the books. Not so with the man who made the other knife he owns, an owlish boy-man named Thad Jenkins, called Thaddy by his colleagues. Jenkins specialized in folding knives, finding their manufacture more of an engineering challenge. ’Sides, he’d drawled, wasn’t anybody couldn’t find a use for a pock-etknife.
From Thaddy’s array of folders, he’d selected a beauty, almost six inches long when closed, and about the same length as Messer’s bowie when open. While it was neither a gravity knife nor a switchblade, its 190
Lawrence Block
mechanism and balance were such that a simple flick of the wrist, quickly learned, would open it, whereupon the extended blade would lock securely in place.
He turns it over in his hands. The grips are a tropical hardwood of exceptional density, with a color like pecan and a very close grain. It’s as smooth as glass, and quite beautiful, and over time the oils from his hand will burnish the wood and only make it more beautiful.
Of course he may not own it long enough to see that happen. Things come in and out of his life. I came like water and like wind I go, he wrote once, on a basement wall, quoting Omar Khayyam but attributing the line to Aubrey Beardsley. And didn’t most things come like water, and go like wind? For some time he’d worn a disc of mottled pink rhodochrosite, for clarity, but he’d had to leave that behind in that very basement. But by then he’d internalized the mineral’s properties and didn’t need it anymore.
Then he’d taken to wearing an amethyst crystal, for immortality, and it too was long gone, and he couldn’t even recall what had become of it. But he’d internalized the special properties of the amethyst as well.
Would he live forever? Well, really, who was to say? But look at all the people he’s already outlived . . .
He flicks the knife and the blade leaps from its casing and locks into place. The blade is slender, half the width of the bowie’s, and the knife overall weighs no more than a third of its bulkier fellow. Do knives have gender? In a sense they’re all masculine, all sharpened phalli. But if one were to regard some as male and others as female, it’s easy to see Messer’s creation as bluntly masculine, Jenkins’s folder as graceful in its femininity.
The man, Scudder, the more difficult quarry, would fall to the sturdier weapon. It is Scudder who deprived him of the house on Seventy-fourth Street. He has long ceased to care about the house, he knows he never really wanted it in the first place, but that’s beside the point. It is Scudder, too, who made him leave New York. He’d had a thriving practice, he’d had a house full of people who loved and revered and, yes, needed him, and he’d had to stab them all dead and burn the house down around them. And yes, it was thrilling, sacrificing those men and women, but that too was beside the point, for it was Scudder who’d left him no choice but murder and flight, and Scudder who would pay for it.
All the Flowers Are Dying
191
Scudder was an ox, a brute. A bull, really, and he’d fight him as one would fight a bull, tricking him with a flourish of the cape, then dispatching him with a single thrust of the Damascus steel blade.
The folder will do for the woman.
And a far more serviceable tool it will be than the elegant bit of bronze he’d left behind on Jane Street. It had been poetic, surely, to buy from one woman what he’d used to kill the other, and it had done what he’d required of it, opening a hole to let out life as efficiently as it had ever opened an envelope. But this folding knife of Jenkins will do more, and do it with grace.
And she knows, he’s sure she knows. Not how or when, but only that he’s coming for her. Her shop, a sign in her window proclaims, is closed until further notice. Her answering machine carries the same message.
Closed until further notice.
Closed for All Time, it might better say. Closed until Grand Opening under New Management.
Her knowledge will make her wary. Thus she’ll be a more elusive quarry than her friend Monica (who was really almost too easy) but she won’t elude him forever. He’ll find a way. And he has worlds of time.
He holds the knife, so light, so graceful, so feminine in its supple elegance. He works the catch that allows the blade to close, then flicks it open. Supple indeed, elegant indeed, but sturdy. According to the man who made it, it is more than equal to the task of skinning out big game.
There’s a thought. Perhaps he’ll flay her. Skin her alive, with her eye-lids taped open and a mirror positioned so that she can watch, and her mouth taped shut to stifle her screams.
The image delights him, so much so that he can’t sit still. Before he leaves Joe Bohan’s apartment, he folds the knife shut and drops it in a pocket. It is, after all, a dangerous city. One would be well advised not to walk its streets unarmed.
24
I went first to Grogan’s, the uncompromising old Irish bar at Fiftieth and Tenth. There was nothing in its appearance to suggest that it had been the scene of a massacre a few years ago, a bomb hurled against the back bar, the room’s interior sprayed with a burst from an updated version of the tommy gun. But most of the crowd would know this, and some of them could tell you the death toll. Grogan’s had drawn a good crowd ever since it opened, as the new upscale residents of Hell’s Kitchen began to discover the place and treasure it for its old-time au-thenticity, even as their patronage eroded the very quality that pulled them in.
Gangster chic, always in good supply in this town, at least since Jimmy Walker was mayor, got a boost from The Sopranos, and young lawyers and account execs liked to be able to tell their coworkers that they’d spent the previous night drinking whiskey alongside Mick Ballou.
Tonight’s crowd wouldn’t be able to make that claim, however, because the proprietor of Grogan’s wasn’t on the premises. I learned as much from the tight-lipped bartender, the latest lad to come straight from County Antrim to Grogan’s, looking to Mick for sanctuary and a job. I suspect I wasn’t the first to inquire, and I got the same answer as everybody else—he wasn’t in, and as to whether he’d be in later, why, who was to say?
“It’s Matt Scudder who’s looking for him,” I said. I lowered my voice All the Flowers Are Dying
193
