On, Off

“The Governor likes him, which is more to the point. You don’t dismiss war heroes as incompetent idiots.”

“He must have been quite an elderly war hero.”

“He was.”

“You sound a bit sniffly, Carmine. Are you coming down with a cold?” she asked, taking another slice of pizza. Oh, it was nice to be back on good terms with him!

“After sitting in unheated cars when the mercury’s zero, we are all coming down with colds.”

“At least you didn’t have to watch me.”

“But we did, Desdemona.”

“Oh, the manpower!” she breathed, the manager in her awestruck as always. “Ninety-six people?”

“Yep.”

“Whom did you inherit?”

“That’s classified, you can’t ask. What’s going on at the Hug since Faith disappeared?”

“The Prof is still in his loony bin. When he discovers that Nur Chandra has accepted a post at Harvard, he’ll crash all over again. It’s more than losing his brightest star, it’s the fact that Nur’s contract says the monkeys go with him. I gather Nur has extended an invitation to Cecil to move to Massachusetts too – Cecil is wild with joy about it. No more ghetto living. The Chandras have bought a posh estate and Cecil is to have a lovely house on it. I’m happy for him, but very sorry for the Prof.”

“Sounds weird to me. A contract that lets you take things with you that other people paid for? That’s like a congressman taking the Remington from his office wall when he’s voted out.”

“At the time Nur came to the Hug, the Prof had every reason in the world to discount that stipulation. He knew that Nur would never find anywhere as perfect for his research as the Hug. And that was true until this beastly monster of a murderer appeared.”

“Yeah, who could have foreseen that? I’m getting so paranoid that it suggests yet another motive. There’s a Nobel Prize at stake, after all.”

“Do you know,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ve always had an odd feeling that Nur Chandra won’t win the Nobel Prize? Somehow it’s all been too easy. The only one of the monkeys that has shown any evidence of a conditioned epileptic state is Eustace, and it’s very dangerous in science to pin all your hopes on a solitary star. What if Eustace was harboring an epileptic tendency all along, and something entirely unrelated to Nur’s stimuli suddenly brought it out? Stranger things have happened.”

“You’re a lot smarter than the rest of them rolled in one,” Carmine said appreciatively.

“Smart enough to know I won’t win any Nobel Prizes!”

They moved to the big chairs. Usually Carmine sat next to Desdemona, but tonight he sat opposite her, on the premise that looking at her sane and sensible face would cheer him a little.

Yesterday he had gone to Groton to talk to Edward Bewlee, a man as sane and sensible as Desdemona. But the interview had not solved any mysteries.

“Etta was so set on being a famous rock star,” Mr. Bewlee had said. “Her voice was beautiful, and she moved well.”

And she moved well. Was that what appealed to the Ghosts?

Back to the present – to Desdemona’s sane and sensible face.

“Any other news on the Hug front?” he asked.

“Chuck Ponsonby is filling in for the Prof. He’s not one of my favorite people, but at least he comes to me with his problems, rather than to Tamara. Apparently she tried to see Keith Kyneton, and he slammed the door of his office in her face. So Hilda is definitely wearing the victory laurels. Her appearance has improved no end – a well-cut black suit, tomato-red silk blouse, Italian shoes, new hair-do and rinse, proper make-up – and, if you believe it, contact lenses instead of spectacles! She looks like a perfect wife for a prominent neurosurgeon.”

“Ready to strut her New York City stuff,” said Carmine with a smile. “Nice to think that something I said to Kyneton penetrated the fog.” He shifted in his seat. “There’s a rumor going around this building that Satsuma’s not renewing his lease on the penthouse or Eido’s apartment.”

“That could well be true. He’s dithering between offers from Stanford, Washington State and Georgia. Which probably means he will end at Columbia.”

“How did you work that one out?”

“Hideki’s a city man, and New York City means he won’t need to give up his Cape Cod weekender. A longer drive, yes, but still a feasible one. He would have gone to Boston if Nur Chandra hadn’t beaten him to Massachusetts. Any other university than Harvard would have been a terrible comedown. Yet to me, Hideki’s a better bet for the Nobel Prize. The showy researchers may fascinate the scientific press, but they rarely follow through.” She hopped up nimbly. “Time for bed. Thank you for the pizza, Carmine.”

Bereft of a suitable reply, he took her two floors down to her steel door with its dead bolt and combination, made sure she was properly locked in, and returned to his own domain feeling curiously depressed. It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask her if he stood any chance of moving their relationship on to a more intimate plane, only to have the words stilled by that athletic spring to her feet, her brisk, no-nonsense departure.

The truth was that Carmine’s overtures had not been obvious enough for Desdemona to divine they so much as existed, and if her own emotions were rather hankering for him, then she didn’t dare linger in his presence once they had said all they could say about the Hug and ordinary topics of conversation. What she had dreaded was a long silence, not sure she could deal with it.

Besides, she was very tired. After heated arguments, she had won the privilege of resuming her weekend hikes – on the proviso that she was driven to her starting point in a squad car whose cop denizens made sure it was not followed, then picked up at some point she designated as her finishing line. So she had hiked up in the northwestern corner of the state Saturday and Sunday, and ached from what had become an unaccustomed exercise. The Appalachian Trail had its winter charms, but at times she had regretted not packing her snow shoes.

Thus after a long soak in a hot bath she dried off well and donned her customary sleeping attire – a pair of flannel men’s pajamas and thick, woolly bedsocks. Not for Desdemona a thermostat producing warm air! In which, had she only known it, she was very like Carmine Delmonico.

She was asleep as soon as she lay down, to dream of nothing she could afterward remember, only that some peculiar noise woke her at a moment her alarm clock said was 4 A.M. A scrape with a slight screech to it.

Sitting bolt upright, she began to think that it wasn’t the noise wakened her; some primeval sense of impending doom had done that. The bedroom door was open, displaying the small apartment’s living area, plunged into darkness. As indeed was the bedroom. No bogeys demanding night lights haunted Desdemona’s sleep. Yet a sliver of light from the hall outside flickered briefly with a shadow in its midst, man-high, man-shaped. Gone in an instant as the outside door was closed. I am not alone. He is here inside, he has come to kill me.

On a chair near the bed lay today’s “smalls” washing she had not gotten around to – panties, bra, stockings, a single pair of knitted woollen gloves. Desdemona was out of the bed without a sound, across to the chair, her fingers scrabbling for the gloves. Once found, she slid one on to each hand and forced herself to edge out of any reflected light to where the balcony sliding door sat locked and barred with a steel rod that lay in its opening track. She bent, removed the rod, undid the latch, and slid the door open just enough to get through it onto the balcony, a shelf of concrete surmounted by a four-foot-high iron affair of pickets and a rail.

Carmine was two floors up on the northeastern side of the Nutmeg Insurance building, almost exactly opposite where she was. That meant that to reach him she had to get herself two floors up with a dozen apartments between them on his or her level. Did she go up two floors first, or along her own floor’s balconies until she stood directly below his? No, up first, Desdemona! Get off this level as soon as possible. Only how?

Each floor occupied ten feet of vertical space: nine-foot ceilings inside, plus a foot of concrete representing the floor of the next storey up, with its inclusions of water and drainage pipes, electricity conduits. Too far to reach up, too far…

The wind was whistling, but once she closed her sliding door that wouldn’t penetrate the double-glazed interior. Bitterly cold, cutting through her pajamas as if they were made of tissue. Only one thing for it. She scissored her long legs and vaulted up on to the balcony rail, paused there teetering ten floors above the street as the wind tore at her, groping past the foot-thick shelf to find the bottom of the balustrade one storey up. There! Only her height and a teenaged propensity for gymnastics made it possible, but she had that height, that propensity. Both hands gripping the bottom of the balustrade upstairs, she took her feet off the rail, twisted in